Jean Paulhan Research Articles

French Modernisms: Perspectives on Art before, during, and after Vichy

Introduction: art, nationality and national tradition: the case of France from 1937 to 1968 1. Collaboration foretold: French art of the present in Hitler's Berlin 2. Decadence and renewal in the decorative arts under Vichy 3. Vampires, viruses, and Lucien Rebatet: antisemitic art criticism during Vichy 4. Tricolor painting in Vichy France 5. Jean Paulhan and his artist friends 6. The Picasso album: a 1943 landmark of artistic resistance 7. Wartime guilt: French furniture of the 1940s 8. The mature Richier, the young Cesar: expressionist confluences in French postwar sculpture 9. Pierre restany, the French fifties and the Americanization of the everyday Epilogue Hitler equals de Gaulle in a May '68 poster.

Memory and Fiction in the Novels of Catherine Colomb

Born in 1892, the French Swiss writer Catherine Colomb spent her first years at Saint-Prex on Lake Geneva near Lausanne. After her mother died in childbirth in 1897, Colomb was raised by her maternal grandmother. She went to school in Lausanne, and made extended stays in Weimar, Potsdam, and England. She received a B.A. in literature from the University of Lausanne in 1916, and worked on an unfinished doctoral thesis entitled Beat-Louis de Muralt. Voyageur et fanatique. In 1921, she married the distinguished lawyer, Jean Reymond; they had two sons, Claude and Dominique. In Yverdon, she secretly began to writefiction and published a first novel, Pile ou face, in 1934. Her reputation is based on a trilogy of novels that followed it: Chateaux en enfance (1945), admired by Jean Paulhan, Les Esprits de la terre (1953), and Le Temps des anges (1962). She received the Prix du livre vaudois and the Prix Rambert. Catherine Colomb died in 1965.

Placing the Commonplace: Translation according to Jean Paulhan

Cet article met en rapport les principaux ecrits de Jean Paulhan sur la traduction et sa theorie du lieu commun. Il montre ensuite Comment la duplicite du lieu commun - sa capacite d'etre a la fois rebattu et plein de sens - exige une approche libre a la traduction, et donne comme illustration de cette approche deux traductions du poeme de T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”, la premiere contemporaine avec l'œuvre de Paulhan et publiee sous sa responsabilite editoriale, la deuxieme plus recente. D'autres exemples sont tires du poeme de Geoffrey Hill, “Ovid in the Third Reich”, et d'un article de magazine recent.

Reconciling France: Jean Paulhan and the "Nouvelle Revue Francaise," 1953

Almost ten years after it had closed down in 1943, the prestigious review La Nouvelle Revue Frangaise reappeared on 1 January 1953. Superficially, the only change was in the additional adjective fixed to its title, La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue Frangaise (hereafter designated as Nouvelle NRF). This was a literary and cultural event of great significance, since it was covered by a wide range of French, British, and other foreign newspapers and periodicals. Although its editors-Jean Paulhan and Marcel Arland-had hoped to resurrect their review without attracting controversy, news of its impending appearance triggered a bitter polemical attack from Frangois Mauriac, who, as director of the competitor-review La Table Ronde, viewed the resurrection as a threat and a scandal. What was so scandalous in 1953 was that the NRF-the review which had closed down in 1943 under the direction of Pierre Drieu la Rochelle-had been a leading cultural organ of the Collaboration. This had come about because in late 1940, after the Occupation began, the NRF had been considered such an important institution that Otto Abetz, Hitler's ambassador in Paris, insisted that it should start up again. Indeed, the Germans bestowed greater cultural preponderance upon the NRF than upon the venerable and pro-P6tain Revue des Deux Mondes. In 1953, therefore, the reappearance of the NRF was thought on the one hand to present an uncomfortable reminder of French intellectual collaboration with the occupier. On the other hand, Jean Paulhan and Marcel Arland believed that they were rendering a service by restoring an important pillar to the battered edifice of French cultural identity. Drawing on published and unpublished sources from the archives of Jean Paulhan, this article will retrace the major phases of the appearance of the Nouvelle NRF, and explain why this was so important in the national cultural context of the time.2

Defying gravity: Jean Paulhan's interventions in twentieth-century French intellectual history

Defying gravity: Jean Paulhan's interventions in twentieth-century French intellectual history

Jean Paulhan and the tenacity of image

Abstract Jean Paulhan, man ofletters, linguist, author, and friend of many writers and artists, was born in Nîmes, France in 1884. His intellectual training was as a philosopher; he obtained a degree in philosophy from the Sorbonne. He then spent some °three years in Madagascar where he taught all subjects in the lycée, prospected for gold and learnt the Malagasy language (which he subsequently taught for a short period at the Ecole des Langues Orientales in Paris). War service in the 1914–18 war, and brief imprisonment as a Resistant in the Second World War were the main intrusions of turmoil into a life otherwise entirely devoted to literature, both as editor and as writer.

Jean Paulhan's Allegories of Translation

Although it has become something of a commonplace in translation theory nowadays to dignify the activity of translation by defining it as an act of critical intervention upon a given text written in a source-language,1 this analogy still remains to be 'translated' itself into academic practice. Translation is still all too often considered secondary or derivative with respect both to the creative originality of a given source text, and to socalled 'original' scholarship, and the emergence of Translation Studies as a valid autonomous field of teaching and research has, if anything, further contributed to the segregation, even ghettoization, of translation. There seems to be at work a subterranean, yet powerful, set of pressures forcing translation to the sidelines. Translators continue to be undervalued and underpaid, and usually misunderstood, but at the same time translation is something most of us involved in literary studies today do all the time to a lesser or greater extent, and which is often simply taken for granted. As someone who has published a number of translations, while also being engaged in scholarly research, I consider translation to be an integral part of my work, not only in that it is helping to make writers in whom I have a vested interest, such as Jean Paulhan, more accessible to a wider readership (though this would be reason enough), nor a fortiori because it is an activity that is so intimately bound up with the very creative processes involved in reading and writing. The problem of translation crops up continually within my own literary research, and it surfaces specifically within the texts of Paulhan at a number of significant moments. I would like in this article to look at a number of what I would call 'scenes' of translation, both from Paulhan's texts, and from a translation by Christine Laennec and myself of some of Paulhan's recits,2 as a way of deliberately blurring a number of lines of demarcation that normally separate literary translation from literary criticism, and from translation as a mode of language teaching, so as to question certain presuppositions about the place of translation in literature and language studies, and to offer several suggestions about how these implications might be followed up in the teaching of literature and language.

Resisting delusion: Jean Paulhan and the beginnings of intellectual resistance in theNouvelle Revue françaiseduring the drift to war, 1938–1940

(1993). Resisting delusion: Jean Paulhan and the beginnings of intellectual resistance in the Nouvelle Revue francaise during the drift to war, 1938–1940. Modern & Contemporary France: Vol. 1, No. 3, pp. 265-276.

Agonies of the intellectual: commitment, subjectivity, and the performative in the twentieth-century French tradition

The term intellectual first came into use at the turn of the century as a reproach to a group of writers who defended Dreyfus against the military and government of France. The role and status of the intellectual has been closely scrutinized and fiercely disputed ever since--and not only in France. Intellectual movements emanating from Paris have repeatedly crossed the Atlantic in great waves.In of the Intellectual Allan Stoekl sorts out the theoretical foundations of the French intellectual from Emile Durkheim, a founder of modern sociology, through the interbellum communists, the postwar ex-istentialists, and the recent structuralists, deconstructionists, and postmodernists. He treats the works of Paul Nizan, Drieu la Rochelle, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Paulhan, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Michel Foucault, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, and Jean Baudrillard. Taking as his starting point Durkheim's thesis that modern intellectuals are secular clerics, Stoekl differentiates them from the older traditions of priests, philosophes, and academics. His concern is the very real crisis of duty felt by intellectuals who have demonstrated their agony not only in print but also in confrontation, wartime resistance, or collaboration. They have agonized about their powers, their responsibilities, and their relations to other people. Agonies of the Intellectual looks hard at the difficult intersection of thought and act: decision.

Some Wheat and Some Chaff: Jean Paulhan and the Postwar Literary Purge in France

A somewhat overlooked figure of French literary history, Jean Paulhan has resurfaced in the polemic surrounding the wartime activities of many respected intellectuals, most prominently Blanchot, Heidegger and de Man. Commentators on Paulhan's role in the intellectual history of the period have tended to avoid reading his texts closely. Paulhan—one of the "heroes" of the literary Resistance in France during the Second World War—took the extremely unpopular and controversial stance after the Liberation of criticizing the National Committee of Writers' proposed purge of suspected collaborationist writers. This essay demonstrates the rigorous consistency of Paulhan's position in the context of his other works, and argues for the necessity of taking into account the internal logic and rhetoric, as well as the explicit argument, of his texts. A careful reading of De la paille et du grain (On the Wheat and the Chaff) reveals an unusually forceful and original insight into the relationship between language, literature and political commitment, which has many resonances for current debates on this question.

From Duality to Triplicity: The Multidimensional Undertaking of Jean Paulhan

De la dualite langage/pensee a la triplicite signifiant/signifie/referent dans l'entreprise de demystification rhetorique de Paulhan. La relation interdisciplinaire dans Lalie entre reflexion theorique et creation poetique

Those Oldies but Goodies: Les Temps Modernes Revisited

Review Essay Those Oldies but Goodies: Les Temps Modernes Revisited1 Lawrence D. Kritzman P ONDERING OVER THE MANY INTERVIEWS that Sartre gave in the last twenty years of his life, I am struck by a sense of nostal­ gia emanating, in part, from the painful consciousness of the pass­ ing of that now prehistoric creature known as the politically committed French intellectual. To want to change one’s social condition and the conception one has of oneself can only be read in the present context of postmodernist thought as an anachronistic form of romantic idealiza­ tion. Writers like Jean-Franfois Lyotard and Richard Rorty have made us aware that epistemic and political legitimation can no longer reside in the Sartrean myth of the concrete universal and man’s ability to “ make history.” In this context, philosophy cannot be appropriated as a viable method for political action and social criticism; and with this dilemma, intellectual choices can no longer constitute the matter of exemplary lives. But the spirit dominating the intellectual climate in postwar France was entirely different. Immediately following the Liberation, Sartre and a group that consisted of Raymond Aron, Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Leiris, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Albert Ollivier, and Jean Paulhan founded the journal Les Temps Modernes, a forum that would redefine the institution of the intellectual in post-war France through an engage­ ment with the political struggles of the time.2 The new intellectual, as conceptualized by the existentialist avant garde, would be conceived as a crusader, an engagé who militates in favor of freedom through an active commitment to the world. Sartre had indeed sought to transform his earlier notion of individual responsibility and privileged subjectivity from a critical abstraction into concrete socio-political activity. In effect, the problem of the writer’s moral integrity was at stake and this could only be realized if the intellectual would choose to become the conscience of his time—in much the same way that Gide had explored the political implications of colonialism and fascist ideologies—and finds a new way of writing in history. Accordingly, Sartre’s introduction to the inaugural VOL. XXIX, NO. 4 97 L ’E spr it C réa te u r issue of Les Temps Modernes questions the idealistic mystification of the human condition (the myth of total freedom) in order fully to come to terms with man as a being-in-the-world. L’écrivain est en situation dans son époque. Chaque parole a des retentissements. Chaque silence aussi. Je tiens Flaubert et Goncourt pour responsables de la répression qui suivit la Commune,,parce qu’ils n’ont pas écrit une ligne pour l’empêcher. Ce n’était pas leur affaire, dira-t-on. Mais le procès Calas, était-ce l’affaire de Voltaire? La condamnation de Dreyfus, était-ce l’affaire de Zola? L’administration du Congo était-ce l’affaire de Gide?3 In short, as the title was meant to indicate, the commitment of Les Temps Modernes was to the present. Henceforth the writer would be obliged to measure his responsibility in terms of the historical circum­ stances in which he was enmeshed. Basing itself on the wish to transform the social conditions of man and the ontological parameters of the human subject, the review devoted itself to both political and philo­ sophical issues. With the passing of Sartre and Beauvoir in the decade of the 1980s, the time seemed right to examine the terms of their intellectual legacy and the impact of existentialism’s institutionalization centered around Les Temps Modernes. The two books that I will examine briefly here—by Howard Davies and Anna Boschetti—inscribe the political history of the existentialist enterprise in a context derived from recent theoretical debates in anthropology and sociology. Rather than studying Les Temps Modernes in terms of the relation­ ship between comment and event or as the simple vehicle of an ideo­ logical programme, Davies’ methodological perspective centers on Sartre’s “ synthetic anthropology.” He uses this notion to refer to the transdisciplinary qualities of an intellectual enterprise that combines the philosophical rigor of phenomenological ontology with the demands of revolutionary praxis. As he claims, Davies’ venture is...

Artaud and the Balinese Theatre

When Antonin Artaud saw the Balinese actor-dancers at the Exposition Coloniale held in the Bois de Vincennes late in July 1931 , he was electrified by their perfonnance. Almost instantly, they became one of the major inspirations for his writings on the theatre, and provided him with the central idea for his Theatre de la Cruaute. In the months that followed , Artaud wrote feverishly to Jean Paulhan and others of what he had seen and of the significance of this experience for Western theatre as a whole. The Balinese in one perfonnance revealed what he had been dimly seeking in the Japanese Noh drama, in the Eastern and medieval Jewish mystics, in his work with the Theatre Alfred Jarry. Here at last was a living drama of movement and gesture, stylized but at the same time capable of expressing strong basic emotions; a drama both concrete and abstract that springs from ancient religious and tribal sources, and a time when man was still in direct contact with the natural world and with the ebb and flow of the cosmos; a drama in which music and costume form an integral part of the spectacle, suggesting a wealth of interrelated significances and symbols, both visible and invisible.

Paulhan Before Blanchot: From Terror to Letters Between the Wars

Readers of Blanchot's writings make up at least three generations which, in turn, point to the relevance of locating his practices of modernity in relation to literary and social history. An initial inquiry sets Blanchot's early writings against those of Jean Paulhan in the 1936 period of the Popular Front, rather than in the early part of the Second World War, as is commonly supposed. By pushing the early writings back to the period between the wars, we can better understand the place of political concerns in Blanchot's subsequent narratives and essays.

Poet's Playground: The Collected Plays of Paavo Haavikko

Paris), his fierce patriotism, aloof cordiality (only on rare occasions did he unbend and call his secretary Claude), his political acumen and petulant pride (the threat to step down was a favorite ploy, because he considered himself irreplaceable). After the General unexpectedly resigned as head of state in 1946, young Mauriac continued to serve his former chief. While waiting in the wings of history to be recalled to center stage, De Gaulle never lost his belief that his country's destiny was intertwined with his own. Mauriac asked one day if he would ever consider membership in the French Academy. General retorted, with superb disdain : The king of France did not belong to the Academy, and neither did Napoleon (775, 303). In his own opinion and in that of his disciples, De Gaulle was the living incarnation of France. Mauriac's firsthand account helps us understand why. In this lengthy Temps immobile the incidents of a personal life are enmeshed with the events of history. Authenticity is guaranteed by the author's candor and sincerity. Mauriac does not pose for posterity or disguise his insecurities, failures, anxieties and self-criticisms. H igo ously abides by the decision never to rewrite an original text, however inconvenient or awkward this may b . Although his book affords uncommon close-ups of men like Andre Gide, Francois Mauriac, Paul Valery, George Duhamel, Jean Paulhan, Henri Troyat, Jean Cocteau, Jean Genet, Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre, Giorgio Di Chirico, Georges Pompidou, Charles de Gaulle and many others, what is chiefly endearing is the personality of the writer humble, modest, self-effacing, sentimental, passionate in his devotions, ironbound in his principles, loathing violence, longing to emerge from his father's shadow and accom lish his own life's work. Although he claims that he has tried to obliterate his presence as much as possible, to step aside and allow others to speak, to serve primarily as a sounding board and register, it is Claude Mauriac who appears in the end as his own central character, suffusing his book with his sensitivity and quiet strength. South Orange, NJ.