Georges Blin (1917-2015)
It's not easy for me to eulogize Georges Blin, who passed away on April 14, 2015 in his ninety-eighth year. Georges Blin was, in my view, the greatest French literary critic of the twentieth century, at once an impeccable philologist, familiar with the most rigorous contemporary philosophies, a penetrating analyst who interpreted texts as a psychologist of their deeper intentions, and undoubtedly a poet in the making. His two books on Baudelaire in the 1940s and his two books on Stendhal in the 1950s represent the best that has been written on these two capital writers of modernity. My generation's admiration for Georges Blin was extreme, which is to say that he inspired both awe and respect.
Georges Blin held the Chair of Modern French Literature at the Collège de France from 1965 to 1988. Preparing my candidacy for this position in 2005, I had wanted to take up the simple title of his chair: Littérature française moderne, but some professors pointed out that, for historians, the modern era ended with the Revolution. The Collège de France was more liberated in the days when Georges Blin proposed lectures on "modern French literature, taken in the sense of the last two centuries", as he stated in his project.
Georges Blin published immense works of literary criticism between 1939 and 1958, from the age of twenty to forty, but he was also an extraordinary personality, truly gifted, and a tortured being as excessively penetrating intelligences can become. This perfectionist published little or nothing from the 1960s onwards, particularly during his stay here. In my youth, I was reminded of a phrase he used to say: "All publication is a sham", in other words, a second-best solution, a betrayal of the truth, a failure to live up to the ideal. With that kind of conviction, it's hard to put the finishing touches to a manuscript; you keep putting it back to the drawing board, polishing it endlessly, which often obscures it.
Georges Blin was not only a model, but also a formidable boss and a secretive man. When I sent him my titles and works in 2005, the brochure came back to me with this note written on the envelope by the courier staff: "Professor deceased". He must have lived for more than ten more years, but it had been so long since we had seen him here that we had forgotten the existence of this irreplaceable master.
Georges Blin's critical career began surprisingly early. A native of the Midi, son of a journalist with Le Radical de Marseille, he entered the École normale supérieure in 1937, and published his first book in 1939, Baudelaire, with Éditions Gallimard. At the age of 22, it was his diploma of advanced studies, as the master's degree was called, a reflection inspired by existential phenomenology, opening with this warning: "The reader will not be surprised that we have given our study a philosophical approach and sometimes a philosophical vocabulary. The subject wanted it, and so did the author Georges Blin explored the abysses of the poet's consciousness, the complications and contradictions of his imagination. By this time, Georges Blin had already published translations of Chrysippus and Philo in Mesures, the marvelous journal that Jean Paulhan edited from 1935 alongside La Nouvelle Revue française.
Subsequently, Georges Blin stubbornly opposed the republication of his first book on the grounds that it should have been brought up to date in terms of typographical usage, for example by removing the acute accent from Swedenborgian. In 2011, however, Robert Kopp, a professor at the University of Basel and one of his faithful visitors in his rue Royer-Collard retreat, managed to convince him to let his Baudelaire reappear, followed by the summaries of his lectures on the poet at the Collège de France between 1965 and 1977. Robert Kopp also reissued his 1948 "Introduction aux Petits Poèmes en prose " at the head of the edition of Le Spleen de Paris in the "Poésie/Gallimard" collection (2006). As a result, Georges Blin regretted his consent, and never saw Robert Kopp again. At least, these major texts are once again available.
After passing the agrégation des lettres in 1941, Georges Blin made the wise decision to leave Vichy France for Morocco, where he taught at the Rabat and Tangiers lycées between 1942 and 1945. In North Africa, he immediately became involved with the honorable Fontaine magazine, which had been founded by Max-Pol Fouchet in Algiers in 1939 and became the forum for literary and intellectual resistance during the war. Georges Blin contributed extensively, almost to every issue, working with Georges Bernanos, Louis Aragon, Paul Éluard, Pierre Emmanuel, Pierre Jean Jouve, Georges-Emmanuel Clancier and René Char, among others. He even became the magazine's general secretary in 1945, until it was discontinued in 1947. His articles in Fontaine include those that formed the core of his second book on Baudelaire, Le Sadisme de Baudelaire, published by José Corti in 1948, in which he opposed Sartre's recent Baudelaire. In Fontaine, we still find under his signature remarkable articles on Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Søren Kierkegaard and Jean Paulhan, as well as "Essais de morale et de psychologie", as he called them when he applied for the Collège de France, in particular a penetrating text, D'un certain consentement à la douleur (Algiers, 1944), which we'd like to see published again.
During these years, Georges Blin's activity was prodigious, as he published, in collaboration with Jacques Crépet, a voluminous critical edition of Les Fleurs du Mal (José Corti, 1942, 1950), followed by an inaugural edition of Baudelaire's Journaux intimes , Fusées and Mon cœur mis à nu (José Corti, 1949), scholarly editions barely surpassed by those of his disciple and successor in his chair at Basel University, Claude Pichois (with whom he also fell out), for the "Bibliothèque de la Pléiade" in the 1970s.
In 1946, just after the war, Georges Blin was appointed Professor of French Literature at the University of Basel, and it was during his stay in Basel that, momentarily abandoning Baudelaire, he wrote his two truly masterly works on Stendhal, Stendhal et les problèmes du roman (José Corti, 1953), his complementary thesis, and Stendhal et les problèmes de la personnalité (José Corti, 1958), his main thesis presented as the first volume of a trilogy ("Se connaître dans ce qu'on est"), the second volume of which ("Se connaître dans ce qu'on veut" and "Se connaître sur ce qu'on fait") never saw the light of day. His supplementary thesis was by no means incidental: in fact, through an analysis of the novelistic techniques employed by the author of Le Rouge et le Noir, it lays the foundations for the discipline that would later spread under the name of "narratology".
In 1959, Georges Blin left Basel to become a lecturer, then Professor of French Language and Literature at the Sorbonne, and from 1961, Director of the Jacques-Doucet Literary Library. He was close to René Char at the time, and in 1964 wrote a preface to the selection of poems that Char published under the title Commune présence (Gallimard).
In his teaching project at the Collège, then in his opening lecture of January 1966, La Cribleuse de blé (José Corti, 1968), a title borrowed from Courbet's painting to represent the mission of criticism, which is to sort out the wheat, Georges Blin called his method "intentional criticism" and defined it as "the duty to seek the meaning of a work at the confluence of the purposes that administer it and those that seem to demand it". It was a question of linking the work to its project, because "you can't cut the work off from the moment or the state of an existence", or from "the slope of man", as he called it. At a time of intense debate and even unpleasant polemics in literary studies, Georges Blin set himself the goal of rediscovering, through historical erudition, philosophical recognition and psychological empathy, the creative impulse that had animated the work. That's why he was particularly interested in writers who, like Stendhal and Baudelaire, had left diaries and correspondence, material that enabled us to penetrate the secrets of a being.
No one has summed up his style better than Jean Starobinski, whom I quote: "In the critical work of Georges Blin, we will not only emphasize the exemplary breadth of information, the strength of a singularly differentiated descriptive and analytical language: we will above all love the attention paid to the finality of the work, and to the links that tie the facts of expression to the writer's 'fundamental project'. In this sense, Georges Blin's studies fully realize Sartre's idea of an existential psychoanalysis, but without denying works (as Sartre does) the right to aesthetic autonomy. [The work can only be understood as the development of a personality that transcends and transmutes the primitive data of lived experience into literary structure
Georges Blin was indeed the heir to Jean Pommier, his teacher and the great historian of literature whom he succeeded at the Collège de France and whose La Mystique de Baudelaire (1932) he quoted with admiration in his 1939 Baudelaire, as well as to Paul Valéry, who had occupied this chair under the title of Poétique, before Jean Pommier.
Once at the Collège, Georges Blin became increasingly scrupulous, demanding and meticulous. His meticulously prepared lectures were devoted not only to his two favorite authors, but also to Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Lautréamont, Valéry, Saint-John Perse, Michaux and Char. From then on, he published little, making Baudelaire's terrible maxim his own: "Only perfection is admissible [1] ", and his prose became increasingly tight, dense, even hermetic. René Char, whose poetry was difficult, was concerned that his future prefaceist would make it too impenetrable, if we are to believe Blin's handwritten notes after a conversation with the poet in December 1962 : "I indicate to him the axis of the study I'm planning. A little apprehensive at the idea of my insisting on his obscurity, Char tells me: each of my poems has a meaning that I can give you, particularly (sic) down to the details."
On the other hand, his readings became more and more inexhaustible. When I was a student, his lecture was never-ending. He'd arrive very late, get carried away little by little, and continue well past the hour, while the audience reluctantly slipped away and the usher, unsuccessfully, pulled him by the sleeve, later Odile Bombarde, his attentive assistant. Once carried away, he found it impossible to curb his volubility. Telephone conversations with him lasted at least an hour and a half, so much so that Odile Bombarde sometimes fainted in the booth from which she called him every morning.
Georges Blin would have liked to bring René Char to the Collège de France as a professor of poetry, but this never came to fruition. In 1947, Char had published Le Poème pulvérisé, a magnificent collection haunted by the memory of the war, with Éditions de la revue Fontaine when Blin was its general secretary. Rumor has it that Blin, a returned poet who sanctified the poetic word even more than Char, had a hand in it. Perhaps we'll know more when Georges Blin's manuscripts, which are likely to go to the Jacques-Doucet library, become available.
However, after the death of Roland Barthes, he was to introduce Yves Bonnefoy to the chair of Études comparées de la fonction poétique in 1981. Here's how the presentation went, as Yves Bonnefoy recounted it to me. We'd just had dinner at La Méditerranée, a little after my election here, and were waiting for a cab on the Place de l'Odéon, but it was the evening of a soccer match, the boulevard was overrun, no cabs were coming, and Yves Bonnefoy had plenty of time to tell me how Georges Blin had tortured him, for it wasn't for nothing that he'd been interested in "Baudelaire's sadism" and "consent to pain". First, Georges Blin, after asking him for notes to prepare his presentation, made him redo his copy ten times, as if he were a bad student. Then, on the morning of the assembly, he called him on the phone to tell him that he wasn't satisfied with his text, which still needed work, and that he wouldn't be coming to the Collège that afternoon to read it. Bonnefoy panicked. All that effort for nothing, all those visits. He called André Chastel, who called him to his home and, with Bonnefoy's help, put together a presentation in no time. In the afternoon, in the absence of Georges Blin, the administrator - Yves Laporte - gave the floor to André Chastel. As he spoke, the door opened and in walked Georges Blin, to whom Yves Laporte turned after André Chastel's succinct and sufficient introduction. Blin, as is his wont, took the floor and went on and on, so much so that the administrator would have said: "Dear colleagues, we are going to vote while Mr. Blin finishes his presentation." At least, that's what Yves Bonnefoy told me. Perhaps Alain Connes will correct it.
If I had time, but I don't want this tribute to drag on, I'd describe how campaign visits to rue Royer-Collard went. The candidate would stand in the street, pushing the intercom button for several hours, not daring to interrupt for fear of losing a voice. Then Blin thanked him for the visit. The visit from Gérard Genette, Yves Bonnefoy's competitor in 1981, took place in a phone booth and was a prolonged torture.
Georges Blin was a gifted artist who produced magnificently between 1938 and 1958. His work on Baudelaire and Stendhal remains unsurpassed and indispensable. Later, his rigor and intransigence became excessive. Without pity, he judged all the books and articles he received to be unworthy, and he placed such a high value on the act of writing and publishing that he sometimes even gave away the abstracts of his lectures. There was genius in him; he harbored a heautontimoroumenos that made him an accomplice of poets, their ecstasies and their pain. Excessive intelligence can become a curse. Meditating on Georges Blin's greatness and suffering, we tell ourselves that it's good to have average faculties, to be content with little, and to confine oneself toaurea mediocritas.
Antoine Compagne, November 29, 2015.
