Dead Leaves in Rain: The Uncanny Testimonies of Jean Paulhan
Jean Paulhan, born in 1884 in Nîmes, France, cultivated a literary life that remains curiously marginal in the English-speaking world, though central to the French avant-garde and the philosophical exegesis of language and power. A literary critic, editor, resistance fighter, and quiet kingmaker of letters, Paulhan held dominion over “La Nouvelle Revue Française” (NRF) for decades, guiding voices like Camus, Sartre, and Blanchot. Still, his own writings often escaped the glare of canonical inclusion, as though woven of some finer, whispering substance — a fabric unsuited for the louder threads of literary fame.
Despite his modest reception outside France, Paulhan’s body of work is uncanny in its percipience and its reserved epistemological daring. His essays and fragmentary aphorisms glance more often at the boundaries of linguistics and war than at the ornament of storytelling. In “Les Fleurs de Tarbes” (1941), he delves into the crisis of literature itself, dissecting the way language submits to concepts like clarity, sincerity, and ultimately — to violence itself. “Il n’y a pas de littérature innocente,” he writes. “Le langage est pour nous ce que l’eau est au poisson : un élément parfois si familier qu’on ne le connaît plus.” (There is no innocent literature. Language is to us what water is to the fish: an element so familiar we no longer know it.)* This sentence, which pulses with both anthropological realism and metaphysical concern, is a keystone in approaching Paulhan’s oeuvre.
Paulhan’s life was no less philosophical than his writings. During the Second World War, he joined the French Resistance, playing an instrumental role in publishing underground pamphlets. He communicated in codes, reviewed literary manuscripts by day and distributed anti-fascist messages by night. This duality — the man who revered clarity and camouflaged subtext in equal measure — speaks to the wider dialectic that underpins all his work: one between terror and rhetoric, sincerity and artifice.
His war-time collection, “Lettre aux Directeurs de la Résistance” (Letter to the Leaders of the Resistance), reads not only as a strategic essay but as a metaphysical treatise against cruelty veiled in logic. “On se bat contre l’ennemi et l’ennemi nous force à devenir ce que nous haïssons le plus,” he writes. “Et la langue, dans tout cela, suit — docile ou complice.” (We fight the enemy and the enemy forces us to become that which we hate most. And language, through all of it, follows — docile or complicit.)† One begins to realize that Paulhan never trusted language. He merely made it his home, like a soldier who sleeps in caves not because he loves caves, but because the open sky is too violent.
There resides, at the core of Jean Paulhan’s writing, a silent scream concerning the human condition. Unlike didactic modernists — Marxists or moralists — Paulhan never forces the reader to agree or revolt. Instead, he orbits the reader in quiet provocation. His fascination with the idea of “terror” — both as political tyranny and literary absolutism — exposes the bones of modern ideology. This concept he developed most fully in “The Flowers of Tarbes,” where he critiques the literary obsession with clarity and spontaneity. The modern writer, Paulhan insists, believes sincerity to be the measure of truth — and thus abandons rhetorical tradition, like a hermit rejecting civilization. But sincerity, he argues, is another mask. “The fearsome thing is not rhetoric. It is the hatred of rhetoric.”‡
If Paulhan resists the literary impulse toward catharsis, it is perhaps because he knows too well the betrayal within every explanation. In this, he shares kinship with thinkers like Simone Weil, who considered affliction (“malheur”) as untranslatable, not due to weakness of language, but because language is implicated in carrying that very affliction. In a similarly cryptic passage from his diary, Paulhan writes, “Toute phrase est un piège. Le piège n’est pas d’y tomber, mais d’en vouloir sortir.” (Every sentence is a trap. The trap is not falling into it, but wanting to escape.)§
I recall this sentence one autumn while walking alone beside an empty canal outside Marseille. On the rows of trees hung the last orange leaves, shimmering like blunted embers. The notion haunted me: in composing language to capture experience, we often dismantle the profoundest integrity of experience itself. Every poem, every sentence — a betrayal by design. And yet, there is no silence noble enough to redeem refusal. So we shackle ourselves to syntax, lighting candles to symbols, kneeling before our own constructions.
It is perhaps here, in this ontological cul-de-sac, that Paulhan’s true contribution emerges. Not as the author of definitive theorems, but as a kind of Taoist of Western intellect — skeptical of authority, allergic to resolutions, yet deeply attached to presence. In an age roaring with authenticity and algorithm, his whispered disavowals shimmer like silverfish in old paper. That is to say, not decorative — but residual, tenacious, alive.
Jean Paulhan does not ask us to renounce language. He dares us to inhabit it more truthfully. To perceive not only the meaning, but the shadow of coercion behind every verb. To write not to say “this is what I mean,” but to say “this is how meanings govern me.”
Writers and intellectuals might benefit, however archaic their medium now seems, from revisiting Jean Paulhan’s peculiar embrace of ambiguity. Here lies a man who loved words not as tools but as territories. For him, writing was neither therapy nor performance. It was an ethnographic return to that haunted clearing where thought first donned sound. The encounter was perilous then. It remains so now.
To read Paulhan today is to be reminded that clarity is not always a virtue, and obscurity not always a crime. Sometimes, the forest is darker because it is more honest. Sometimes, the thing not said — and beautifully not said — redeems us more than any confession ever could.
By Martijn Benders – Notebook Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
language, proto-idealism, metaphysics, footnotes, heresy, phenomenology, resistance
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* Paulhan, Jean. Les Fleurs de Tarbes. Gallimard, 1941, p. 14.
† Paulhan, Jean. Lettre aux Directeurs de la Résistance. Gallimard, 1946, p. 28.
‡ Ibid., p. 60.
§ Paulhan, Jean. Le Clair et l’Obscur. NRF Essays, 1950, p. 103.