Jian Paolu Han

Jean Paulhan appears in Sartre’s discussion of language as a thinker whose account helps shift attention from words and ready-made sentences to the acts in which they are used. His role is not presented through biography or narrative action; rather, his argument supplies a crucial distinction between the speaker’s free production of meaning and the listener’s interpretation of speech.

Meaning Made in Use

Paulhan’s Fleurs de Tarbes supports the claim that neither isolated words nor whole sentences exist in advance as fixed verbal units awaiting use. A commonplace may look banal to a reader who encounters it from the outside, reconstructing a paragraph sentence by sentence. From the author’s perspective, however, the sentence can be an act of designation or re-creation: the author attends first to what most urgently needs expression rather than pausing to assemble pre-existing verbal pieces.

This account places the meaningful sentence before the word as an abstract unit. Words gain a real function as designations within discourse; outside that active context, they remain virtual and can be grouped under a single label despite having disparate meanings. Sentence-making is therefore constructive, not the mechanical joining of ready-made components. It surpasses what is given toward an end, and the situation and the speaker’s purposes help determine what the words mean.

Speaker, Listener, and Linguistic Law

Paulhan’s answer to the question of whom linguistic laws serve is the listener. The speaker chooses a meaning and grasps the ordering of words in making it; the relations that speaker apprehends are those established in the act of speaking. Grammar, on this account, does not stand ready as an external law that produces each utterance. The free project of a sentence is what allows grammatical relations to arise in the first place.

The distinction does not mean speech lacks structure. Words can connect, resist, or take on relations only within a synthesis that unifies them. Remove that synthesis and speech falls apart: each word returns to isolation and loses its unity, scattering among meanings that cannot be communicated as one. Freedom is thus presented not as the cancellation of linguistic necessity but as its foundation. The utterance creates the organized whole in which its constraints become operative.

The Listener and Multiple Meanings

Because the listener encounters speech from outside the speaker’s act, a meaningful arrangement of words can disclose more than one relation and more than one possible meaning. Sartre calls this surplus the “Devil’s share.” It becomes perceptible when the words have first been brought together in a meaningful arrangement and that synthesis is then examined by another person, who can decipher its possible meanings.

The speaker’s expressly intended meaning can overshadow or subordinate these alternatives without erasing them. Language therefore has a different aspect for each position: for the speaker, speech is a free project of meaning; for the listener, its organized form carries relations and ambiguities that can be discovered through interpretation. Paulhan’s account helps explain how a sentence can be both an act directed toward an end and a structure open to meanings beyond the one its speaker wills.