Jean Paulhan
Paulhan, Jean (1884-1968). French critic and essayist. Born into a Protestant family in Nîmes, Paulhan was brought up in a free-thinking atmosphere which was to mark his own attitudes and commitments throughout his life. He never shirked involvement, political or cultural, and the five volumes of his collected works, and volumes of letters, attest to the wide range of his writing, criticism, and friendships.
A teaching post in Madagascar in 1907 awakened his interest in its language and culture, resulting in Les Hain-teny merinas: poésies populaires malgaches recueillies et traduites par Jean Paulhan (1913). The experiences of World War I started him on his long and varied career as a writer and critic interested in language, especially semantics—Le Guerrier appliqué (1917) was a contender for the Prix Goncourt. His immediate literary success brought him into contact with Gide and Rivière, and was the beginning of a long association with the Nouvelle Revue Française.
Paulhan had always been attracted to fringe, innovative groups, including Russian anarchists, so it is not surprising to see him involved with the Dadaists and especially the Surrealists— Breton, Aragon, Soupault, and Éluard, a group alien to the tastes of the NRF. Paulhan was not fixed in his tastes, but was continually renewing himself, revising his positions and looking for fresh ideas; consequently, a public quarrel with Breton was inevitable.
After Rivière's death in 1925 Paulhan took over as chief editor of the NRF, bringing new vigour to literary criticism in the 1930s and 1940s, launching new publishing ventures, and encouraging fresh, unconventional writers—a brilliant group including Artaud, Caillois, Jean Grenier, Leiris, Michaux, Ponge, Queneau, and Supervielle, together with the well-established Rilke—writers who were to change the subject-range, form, and perceptions of literature. Paulhan contributed to the renewal with his own critical works, Les Fleurs de Tarbes (1941) and Clef de la poésie, Traité des figures ou la Rhétorique décryptée (1944), which treat what he called ‘les incertitudes du langage’.
The Occupation made his position within the NRF ambiguous; he left it, and threw himself into Resistance activity, founding, with Jacques Decour, the clandestine newspaper Les Lettres françaises. The post-war period was marked by a great interest in modern painting, especially Cubism, and the painters Braque and Dubuffet. It was a period of feverish activity and output, including De la paille et du grain (1949) and Lettre au médecin (1959), but was soured by an embittered controversy with the Comité National des Écrivains, culminating in Lettre aux directeurs de la Résistance (1952). In 1953 he became editor of the renamed NRF, the NNRF, and his contribution to the cultural and literary life of France was recognized when he was elected to the Académie Française in 1963.
[Ethel Tolansky]
Bibliography
- R. Judrin, La Vocation transparente de Jean Paulhan (1984)
- A. d'Hôtel, Jean Paulhan (1987)
