ABSTRACT
According to Jean-Paul Sartre, 1925 represented a watershed in cultural inauthenticity: global capitalism had destroyed the fabric of traditional societies, yet class consciousness was not yet sufficiently established in France to define the way beyond the alienation of the modern world. The narrator's attempts to analyse the mechanisms of these practices, however, immediately lead him into difficulties. He relates a series of occasions when his response or question following a proverb produces a complete interruption in the conversation. The attempt to investigate the meaning of proverbs is implicitly abandoned in favour of the more pragmatic consideration of what proverbs do. The text next embarks on another attempt at circumscribing the phenomenon of proverbs, an attempt that seems almost to want to compensate for the untidiness of the reasoning that has gone before. Whatever his awareness of the potential silliness of his exhortations, it seems clear that Paulhan never fully suppressed them.
