J E A N P A U L H A N
___________________________________JACOB COW THE PIRATE
OR IF WORDS ARE SIGNS
Translated by Maria Jolas
It is obvious that the reader who gradually obtains five kilos for nothing, is the purchaser by the copy, who has subscribed, in order to take advantage of this change. The subscriber can well spend eleven francs if he wants some sugar, whereas the most faithful buyer by the copy will receive nothing.
Now, all three should try to come together under the word reader: what is the demonstration about: it receives its real value and actual meaning only on condition that it seems to say at first a little more than it really contains.
-- We shall probably think: someone wanted to play a joke on us, that's all.
-- The demonstration would not be an advertisement, if everybody could get rid of it so easily. By observing it without malice, we shall sense its virtue: which is, that our first mistake, on the one hand, compromises us, and then it incites us to so act that any reader (the one, for instance, whom we have at our disposition, namely ourselves) shall obtain for nothing . . . .: and so it invites us to make it real.
Everything happens as if words were not signs by nature: we must help them. Only an error which is an obstacle to this help, (and because its demands are too great, is capable of repelling it), unveils our assistance in this case.Ruse of Marcus Aurelius.
I have often asked myself with astonishment, writes Marcus Aurelius, why everyone of us loves himself more than others, and yet attaches less importance to his own judgment about himself than to that of others. It is certain that if a God or a wise master were to give us the order never to conceive anything, never to think inside ourselves without at once expressing it outside, without shouting it aloud, even, we would not stand for it a single day. It is therefore true that we fear the opinion of our neighbor about ourselves more than our own.
We sense the difficult passage, the difficult spot in this argument. We have to admit, otherwise the rest goes to pieces, that it is on the same thought that others express themselves, and also we ourselves, and therefore, that this thought can turn itself inside out, or inversely, at will; the words leave no mark on it, these words are as if they were not there.
(I suppose that an idea as pointed as this one, and which was threatened continually, was the principal preoccupation of Marcus Aurelius. Only he wanted to dismiss it by proposing a pleasing paradox to our attention.)
Common judgments about the lie or sincerity, presuppose the same basis: we have to know if the thought is spoken directly, without intermediaries, rather than with words, the enchantment and manipulation of which, according to variegated laws, might give us a thousand astonishing combinations.
Out of this come a few curious sensations: among others, that of the duplicity of the liar who, at the same moment, presupposes ethics, thinks the truth and says what is false. But it suffices that we be somewhat accustomed to the lie, for us to recognize here a miserable illusion.
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This essay is reprinted from transition no 21, edited by Eugene Jolas, published in 1932.
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To Paul Valéry
I.
IF WORDS ARE SIGNS
or
Five kilos of sugar for nothing.
I have come to ask myself if words are not the thing
least intended for speaking.
The P Botzarro op VIII B 225
It is difficult to speak detachedly about words, the way a painter describes the mixing of colors, for instance; they blend so closely with our desire to make them serve us that we never distinguish very well where this desire begins and the word ends.
Yet there is no perceptible difference or gulf between the word and the phrase, between the phrase and the narrative. Philosophers have noted that we comb our hair and lace our shoes according to our conception of the world; the writer, who is also a language-maker, projects and formulates himself by imitating his first opinion about the play on words.
Whence comes the gravity of this opinion and the importance of every error it contains; we do not help people who make bad books by telling them over and over again that they are bunglers; we must help them invent two or three accurate ideas about language.
If words are signs.
We readily assume that people use words to express themselves. Words, by nature, are signs of thoughts; and along with them those junctions or threads which serve to unite thoughts, even in their slightest variation: the imperfect of the verb, the grammar tells us expresses . . . .
Such an idea of the sign is not so precise but that it can present a dual aspect: mistrust with regard to separate words. For words do not suffice, and the thought we discover beneath them, is the only reason for their existence and the only source of their meaning. Deprived of this thought, they can deceive us: "Those are only words," we say . . ., or: "Think twice before you speak";
and nevertheless, an aspect of confidence, as soon as we have united the thought with the word again. Then it seems as though each word were able to illuminate itself with this thought (none is irreducible: thus we find it hard to imagine a phrase that would mean nothing at all); or else, reversely, that each thought possesses its word: "Look for the right word," is the advice of the grammarians, and: "Everything can be said."
This manner of seeing things results in a certain obscurity: it gets to be a delicate thing to explain that the idea sometimes follows the word, emerges from it, translates it. Cilia, who tries to explain the sickness for her little girl is suffering from to a doctor, discovers her real fear when she speaks, and she wonders at herself. When Atys has finally been able to say to Chryse: "So you lied," each of them recomposes his real thought, beginning with the word. Here an idea is the sign of this word and it shares this idea, albeit a word be far from the idea. Of such and such a poet we also know that he is thrown among words, that he urges them on, listens to them, waits for them.Five Kilos of sugar for nothing.
Opinion, like criticism, may go beyond itself. It is here that we seize upon the spontaneous usage of words, the vulgar usage, without reservations.
We have seen the following:
Five kilos of sugar
to every reader of
"L'AVENIR"
Demonstration.
All readers who buy by the copy spend per year, 365 copies at 0. fr. 10,
that is, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36.50
A year's subscription in Paris costs . . . . . . . . 25. 00
and carries with it the right to the purchase of
5 kilos of sugar at 2 fr. 20 the kilo . . . . . . . . . 11.40
in other words . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
Thus each reader
of "L'Avenir"
can obtain 5 kilos of sugar
for nothing