La Terreur á l’œuvre: Théorie, poétique et éthique chez Jean Paulhan (review)

Author of difficult, often obtuse texts of multifarious form Jean Paulhan is frequently perceived as having played a more important role in the history of twentieth-century literature in bringing on and editing others’ work than in the elaboration of his own œuvre. Inconsequential, perverse, even disappointing: his texts can seem to come apart in one’s hands, and many critics have been happy to leave them there. Éric Trudel, however, takes up the challenge of their slippery, apparently slight substance and offers a magisterial reading of certain key texts that reveals hidden, secretive volumes. This is a delicate enterprise for, as befits a scrupulous reader of Paulhan, and also of Derrida and Blanchot, Trudel takes very seriously the danger of wanting to propose a conclusive analysis. Not only are Paulhan’s texts resistant to our reading, but also Trudel here is determined to play with that resistance without claiming to exhaust it. What results is a hugely accomplished, almost balletic corps à corps with the text where slow unfolding of dense passages suddenly gives way to insightful, even dazzling pirouettes, leaving us facing back the same way but fully aware that we have been led through the sort of ‘renversement’ that so fascinated Paulhan. Trudel reads with consummate care, lighting on apparently ‘innocent’ words, which are examined and followed through their capacity to agitate and disrupt the oeuvre. The effect is to amplify Paulhan, not only through the marking out of particular textual gestures, but also in a mimetic fashion when Trudel’s own deft and invigorating style takes on distinctly Paulhanian twists. Moving from texts on rhetoric and literary style (particularly the bewildering Clef de la poésie) through brilliantly attentive readings of the post-war essays on painting (Braque le patron and Fautrier l’enragé) as well as the late Clair et l’obscur, with incisive excursions via a range of shorter texts and some of Francis Ponge’s poems, Trudel presents an ever-vigilant Paulhan, bearer of a key to literature that he is only going to hand over to those whose patience is equal to the freedom of their imagination. The obscurities and perplexities of Paulhan’s work take on a productive force that implies both a more cohesive and accomplished project than is initially evident and at the same time a relinquishing of the programmatic objectives that apparently set the tone for some of the major texts, including Les Fleurs de Tarbes. In both respects, Paulhan emerges as a contemporary who demands our attention by his own unremitting attention to the difficulties of being in truth, or of making language adequate to our experience. Considerably less austere than Paulhan’s ‘key’, Trudel’s reading eases us into the machinery of these texts, enables us to move more freely and profitably between them, and yet still leaves us with the invaluable sense that they move in ways we have yet to measure fully.