MARCEL JEAN, AND ARPAD MEZEI, GENÈSE DE LA PENSÉE MODERNE DANS LA LITTÉRATURE FRANÇAISE

par Emmanuel Rubio

Marcel Jean (1900-1993) is known above all for his plastic work. The Bibliothèque Mélusine, at L'Age d'Homme editions, reissues Genèse de la pensée moderne dans la littérature française, written in collaboration with Arpad Mezei, Hungarian psychoanalyst passionate about esotericism, and initially published in 1950. With Maldoror, published the same year, the two men had devoted their study to Lautréamont alone. They here widen the angle of their compass, to approach those who appear as the seven founding figures of modernity: Sade, Lautréamont, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Jarry, Apollinaire and Roussel. Studies are devoted to each of them; from the ensemble nevertheless emerges, through the interweaving of themes as through the relationship of concepts, the profound unity of the septet, true poetic pole of modern consciousness.

The stake is illuminated by a brief journey through European history, of Hegelian appearance, and which underlines for each period the work of the negative: the systematization of the objective, exterior world, proper to Greek thought, is undermined by infinite human subjectivity; the individual works the Roman social world, objective substitute for the natural world; finally, great historical synthesis: that which the Catholic Church proposes, uniting the finite and the infinite, Aristotle and the Gospel in the sum of Saint Thomas. This synthesis is nevertheless constructed only through a transcendence, which monopolizes the infinite de facto, and leaves to the empirical, finite world, particularity and irrational subjectivity. Modern thought, born from the scientific revolutions of the Renaissance, then takes as its task the elaboration of a new synthesis, opposed to that of the Church, and reintegrating the infinite and subjectivity in the immanence of the real.

Sade opens the series, and our authors, to approach him, make use of the theses that make him the precursor of Krafft-Ebbing. Exploring with all rigor the most extreme regions of human subjectivity, sounding this disorder that his contemporaries do not want to see, Sade finally categorizes perversions, and restores to the real, to human subjectivity, an order reserved before him to transcendence alone. The approach to Lautréamont goes in the same direction: the Chants de Maldoror, true climax of romanticism, bring to light the phantasmatic and repressed world proper to the human personality; the Poésies, to which the longest study is attached, appear as the conscious overcoming of instinctual virtualities. The analyses continue thus, even if the chapters concerning Rimbaud, Mallarmé or Apollinaire are rather short, toward the ultimate synthesis of dialectical contraries, the supreme point or the modern philosophical stone, which finds in Roussel its ultimate alchemist.

In these particular analyses, which trace the inexorable chain of modern conciliation, the Hegelian perspective is doubled by two competing approaches: esotericism and psychoanalysis. One can appreciate with moderation the sometimes literal recourse to the first (calculation of eras), sometimes a bit hasty (symbolism of the spiral on Père Ubu's gidouille). Lautréamont is reread through the Kabbalah, like Roussel (following the intuitions of Jean Ferry, taken up by Breton); Mallarmé is for his part brought closer to Buddhism. Let us salute in any case the facsimile printing, which allows the restoration of the blazons embellishing the chapter heads. The second orientation, whatever the refinements that psychocriticism may have known subsequently, retains a historical value (we are only in 1950) and obviously benefits from Mezei's insights. The analysis, moreover, more than through its methodological rigor, interests through its intuitions, gives food for thought more than it resolves. Thus the relationship of Isidore Ducasse to the mother, which undergoes a double approach, since the authors return to the affirmations of Maldoror, and which will be compared to its Rimbaldian equivalent; the reading of Apollinaire through "infantile orality." In another domain, one will note again, and without exclusivity, the interest for the "signal" in Sade which, implicitly, links Nadja and Sadean correspondence; the comparisons between Lautréamont and Proudhon, using the Ducassean reversal; or the study of the integration of chance in Rousselian writing, brought closer to Mallarmé's problematics.

Let us underline a point: one will have recognized in the choice of the modern constellation as in its modes of exploration (psychoanalysis, esotericism) the imprint of surrealism, and this all the better since Marcel Jean was then a member of the group. The work has nothing however of an orthodox repetition of Bretonian concepts. No "objective chance," no "reversal of the sign," but a singular word which, returning to the poetic as well as theoretical sources of surrealism, often approaches them with originality. The question thus constantly arises: critical work, surrealist text? The hesitation, which creates a sort of reading with two foci, persists in fact between interest in the works evoked, and that for the surrealist testimony that the work certainly represents. The analyses on the homosexual motif in Jarry's work integrate in a pertinent manner into Jarryian criticism. They are nonetheless interesting in the framework of surrealism, approaching frontally, for Jarry as for Lautréamont, perspectives on which Breton for example preferred not to dwell. The affirmation, by Jean and Mezei, of a link between homosexuality and modernity is all the more notable as it is moreover connected to that of feminine emancipation.

The reading of Lautréamont's Poésies, which completes the Maldoror, finally finds a quite particular historical interest in the accent placed by the authors on "the most conscious banality, systematically practiced," to which they return several times and which they present as the watchword of Ducassean writing. One knows well enough indeed what posterity this "banality" had. In 1951, it headed an article by Camus whose title, in Breton's eyes, "would appear by itself as a challenge": "Lautréamont et la banalité" (see L'Homme révolté). The "banality" of Jean and Mezei could not, it is true, be associated with Camusian renunciation, insofar as it dialectically includes the revolt that preceded it. It nonetheless appears as one of the possible relays of this particularly anti-surrealist approach to Isidore Ducasse. Significant fact: Breton, in his Entretiens, cites the Maldoror for the links between poetry and esotericism; in his polemic with Camus he prefers to summon Maurice Blanchot (Lautréamont et Sade) to underline the ambiguity of the text as well as its subversive value.

Looking more closely, this curious posterity thus highlights what can pass for one of the major lacks of the work: the minimization of humor (only a few lines for Jarry, for example). Barely noted, the intuitions of the Anthologie de l'humour noir are not truly integrated into the reasoning, and the "white humor" that the authors want to promote could not substitute for the subjective aggressiveness of the first. Haunted by the necessity of a synthesis, of a taking in hand of the repressed, the authors come, paradoxically, to veil the part of refusal, of ferocious negativity that these works keep in themselves, and which certainly makes a great part of their modernity. The poetic constellation perhaps loses one of its fires, and not the least.