Anna-Louise Milne - The Extreme In-Between: Jean Paulhans Place in the Twentieth Century

THE EXTREME IN-BETWEEN JEAN PAULHAN'S PLACE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

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Jean Paulhans Place in the Twentieth Century

AnnaLouise Milne

First published 2006

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LEGENDA is an imprint of the Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge

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Modern Humanities Research Association and Taylor & Francis 2006

ISBN 13: 978-1-904350-52-1 (hbk)

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Copy-Editor: Polly Fallows

Paulhan wanted to change his reader, and I am undoubtedly changed by the process of reading and writing about him, but also by the sustained and the more glancing encounters that have accompanied this project. For the help and support they have brought to it, I would like to thank first Claire and Jacqueline Paulhan, and also Bernard Baillaud, whose willing interest and instructive assistance have made working on Paulhan much more congenial than it would otherwise have been. Also the Department of French and Romance Philology at Columbia University, and most particularly Antoine Compagnon and Marina Van Zuylen, who have provided invaluable support and advice in different ways at different times. I would also like to thank the people who gave me opportunities to work through some of the ideas in this book in other forms and forums: Martyn Cornick, Carol Murphy, Karen K. Butler, Silvio Yeshua in particular. In this context, however, my most heartfelt thanks go to Michael Syrotinski, whose intellectual generosity has contributed more than any other to both the shape of this book and the quality of the experience of writing it. No other encounter has convinced me more that meaning resides in the effort made to understand one another. I hope I have understood enough. Other people have been prepared to meet me, recently and more distantly, in the sometimes painful, sometimes thrilling process of trying to make sense. My thanks to Fiona Robb, Pauline McNish, Dominique Amnion, Melissa Thackway, Pete Hallward, Adrienne Berman, Rosie Sarah Reiss, Mike Sadler, Flora McEvedy, Brigitte Rollet, Geoff Gilbert, Liza Dimbleby, Dara Asken, David Milne, and especially Rosemary Milne, but above all, for all the quiet between us, Mark Gore.

Thanks also to the team at Legenda, and particularly Graham Nelson and Paulne Fallows, who have made the final stages of this project so smooth.

I am very grateful to the University of London Institute in Paris, to Robert Lethbridge, Lucy Mitchell and particularly David Horner, for their institutional support over the past two years.

An earlier version of appeared in Yale French Studies 106 (2004), 'The Power of Rhetoric, the Rhetoric of Power', edited by Michael Syrotinski. My thanks to the editors for allowing me to re-explore some of that material here.

Anna-Louise Milne
Paris, December 2005

All translations, except where indicated, are my own. The majority of the quotations from Jean Paulhan are given in the original French in the endnotes to each chapter, with occasional indications of the original French expressions in brackets in the translations.

The quotations from Paulhan's texts are referenced to the edition of his collected works currently available, with the notable exceptions of Les Fleurs de Tarbes and Braque le patron, both more easily available in paperback editions.