Anathemas and Admirations (25 page)

Poe and Mallarmé
exist
for Valéry; Leonardo, evidently, is but a pretext, a name and nothing more, a figure entirely constructed, a monster who possesses all the powers one lacks and longs for. He answers that need to see oneself fulfilled, realized in some imagined person who represents the ideal epitome of all the illusions one has created about oneself: a hero who has conquered one’s own impossibilities, who has delivered one from one’s limits, transcending them
in one’s place
. . . .

The
Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci
, which dates from 1894, proves that Valéry, in his initial phases, was perfect — that is, perfectly ripe — as a writer: the chore of self-improvement, of making progress, he was spared from the start. His case is not without analogies to that of his compatriot who could declare at Saint-Helena, “War is a singular art: I can assure you I have waged sixty battles, and I have learned no more than I already knew after the first.” Valéry, at the end of his career, could maintain that he, too,
knew
everything, from his very first efforts, and that with regard to demands upon himself and his work, he was no more advanced at sixty than at twenty. At an age when everyone gropes and apes everyone else, he had found his manner, his style, his form of thought. He would still admire, no doubt, but
as a master
. Like all perfect minds, his was
limited
— that is, confined within certain themes from which he could not escape. It was perhaps in reaction against himself, against his evident frontiers, that he was so intrigued by the phenomenon of a universal mind, by the scarcely conceivable possibility of a multiplicity of talents that flourish without harming each other, that cohabit without canceling each other out. He could not fail to
encounter
Leonardo; yet Leibnitz made a deeper impression. No doubt. But to confront Leibnitz required not only the scientific competence and knowledge that he lacked, but an impersonal curiosity of which he was incapable. With Leonardo, symbol of a civilization, a universe, or whatever, the arbitrary and the casual were much more comfortable. If one quoted him now and then, it was only in order to talk more readily about oneself, about one’s own tastes and distastes, to settle accounts with the philosophers by invoking a name that, all by itself, summed up faculties none of them ever combined. For Valéry, the problems philosophy approached and the way it expressed them came down to “abuses of language,” to false problems, fruitless and interchangeable, lacking all rigor, verbal or intrinsic. To him it seemed that an idea was denatured as soon as the philosophers got hold of it; even that thought itself was vitiated upon contact with them. His horror of philosophic jargon is so convincing, so contagious, that one shares it forever after, so that one can no longer read a
serious
philosopher except with suspicion or distaste, henceforth rejecting any falsely mysterious or learned term. Most philosophy boils down to a crime of
lèse-langage
, a crime against the Word, Any professional expression — any expression of the
schools
— must be proscribed and identified with a misdemeanor. Anyone who, in order to settle a difficulty or solve a problem, invents a high-sounding, “pretentious word, indeed a word at all, is unconsciously dishonest. In a letter to F. Brunot, Valéry once wrote, “It takes more intelligence to do without a word than to introduce one.” If we were to translate the philosophers’ lucubrations into
normal
language, what would be left of them? The enterprise would be ruinous for the vast majority. But we must immediately add that it would also be ruinous for most writers, singularly so for a Valéry: if we stripped his prose of its luster, reduced one or another of his thoughts to skeletal contours, what would it still be worth? He too was the dupe of language, of
another
language, one more real, more
existent,
it is true. He did not invent words, of course, but he lived in a quasi-absolute fashion within his own language, so that his superiority over the philosophers was precisely that he participated in less of an unreality than they. By criticizing them so severely he showed that he, too — ordinarily so disabused — could be carried away, could be deluded. A total disenchantment, moreover, had stifled in him not only “the man of thought.” as he sometimes called himself, but — a more serious loss — the
jongleur
, the histrion of syllables. Fortunately he did not achieve that “imperturbable clairvoyance” he dreamed of; otherwise his “silence” might have lasted until his death.

Considered further, his aversion to the philosophers has something impure about it; as a matter of fact, he was
obsessed
with them, could not be indifferent to them, pursued them with an irony bordering on dyspepsia. All his life he forswore any attempt to build a system; yet he nourished — as with regard to science — a more or less conscious regret for the system he could not build. The hatred of philosophy is always suspect: as if one does not forgive oneself for not having been a philosopher, and, in order to mask that regret, or that incapacity, mistreats those who, less scrupulous or more gifted, had the luck to construct that improbable little universe, a well-articulated philosophical doctrine. That a “thinker” should regret the philosopher he might have been is understandable; less so, that this regret should still encumber a poet: we are reminded once again of Mallarmé, since The Book could only be the work of a philosopher Glamour of rigor, of thought
without charm!
If the poets are so sensitive to it, it is out of a sort of mortification at living quite shamelessly as parasites of the Improbable.

Academic philosophy is one thing; metaphysics is another. We might have expected Valéry to show a certain indulgence toward the latter; nothing of the kind. He denounces it quite insidiously and comes close to treating it — as does the logical positivism to which he is in many respects so close — as a “disease of language,” He even made it a point of honor to ridicule all metaphysical anxiety; the torments of a Pascal inspire him to the reflections of an engineer: “No revelations for Leonardo. No abyss opens at his side. For him, an abyss suggests a bridge. An abyss might be useful for experiments involving some huge mechanical bird.” When we read remarks so unforgivably casual, we can have only one reaction: to
avenge
Pascal on the spot. What was the sense of blaming him for abandoning the sciences, when that abandonment was the result of a spiritual
awakening
much more important than the scientific discoveries he might have made subsequently? In the scale of the absolute, the Pascalian perplexities on the confines of prayer weigh more heavily than any secret wrested from the external world. Any
objective
conquest presupposes an interior retreat. When man has achieved the goal he has assigned himself — to enslave Creation — then he will be completely empty: god and ghost. Scientism, that great illusion of modern times, Valéry espoused without reservations, without second thoughts. Is it a mere accident that in his youth in Montpellier, he occupied the bedroom lived in, years before, by Auguste Comte, theoretician and prophet of all scientism?

Of all the superstitions, the least original is that of science. No doubt we can engage in scientific activity, but enthusiasm for it,
when we are not on the team
, is embarrassing, to say the least. Valéry himself created his poet-mathematician legend. And everyone accepted it, though he himself acknowledged that he was merely “an unhappy lover of the loveliest of the sciences,” and once declared to Frédéric Lefèvre that as a young man he had failed to become a navel cadet because of an “absolute incomprehension of the mathematical sciences. I didn’t understand one iota. For me it was the strangest, most impenetrable, most dismaying thing in the world. No one has ever understood less of the existence and virtually the possibility of even the simplest mathematics than myself in those days.” That subsequently he acquired a taste for mathematics is undeniable, but to acquire a taste and to achieve mastery are two very different things. He became interested, either to create for himself a peerless intellectual status (to make himself the hero of a drama at the limit of the mind’s powers), or to enter a realm where one is not constantly encountering oneself. “There are no words to express the delight of realizing that a world exists from which the Self is entirely absent.” Did Valéry know Sophie Kowalevsky’s remark about mathematics? Perhaps an analogous need led him toward a discipline so remote from any form of narcissism. But if we question the existence of this profound necessity for him, his relations with the sciences will suggest the infatuation of those Enlightenment ladies whom he mentions in his preface to the
Persian Letters
and who haunted the laboratories and became fanatics of anatomy or astronomy. We must admit (and praise him for it) that in his way of delivering himself upon the sciences we recognize the tone of a man of the world of the
grande époque,
the last echo of those bygone salons. We might also detect, in his pursuit of the unapproachable, a touch of masochism: to worship, in order to torment oneself, what one will never achieve; to punish oneself for being, in the realm of Knowledge, a mere amateur.

The only problems he confronted as a connoisseur, as an initiate, were those of form or, to be more precise, of writing. “A syntactic genius,” Claudel’s description of Mallarmé, applies even better to Valéry, who himself attributes to Mallarmé the faculty of “conceiving and placing above
all works
the conscious possession of the function of language and the sentiment of a superior freedom of expression in regard to which any thought is merely an incident, a particular event,” Valéry’s cult of rigor goes no further than correctness of terms and a conscious effort toward an
abstract
brilliance of phrase. Rigor of form, and not of substance.
La Jeune Parque
required more than a hundred drafts: the author prided himself upon them, and in them discerned the very symbol of a rigorous enterprise. To leave nothing to the powers of improvisation or inspiration (accursed synonyms in his eyes), to scrutinize words, to weigh them, never to forget that language is the sole, the unique, reality — such is this will-to-expression, carried so far that it turns into a fanaticism about trifles, an exhausting search for infinitesimal precision. Valéry: the galley slave of Nuance.

He went to the extremity of language, where the latter, aerial, dangerously subtle, is no more than a lacy
essence
, a last stage
before
unreality. We cannot conceive of a discourse more refined than his, more marvelously bloodless. Why deny that in many places it is finicky or distinctly precious? He himself held preciosity in high esteem, as this significant avowal testifies: “Who knows if Molière has not cost us a Shakespeare, in casting such ridicule upon
les précieux?”
The trouble with preciosity is that it makes a writer too conscious, too imbued with his superiority over his instrument: by wielding it with such virtuosity, he dispossesses language of all mystery and all vigor. Now, language must
resist;
if it yields, it capitulates utterly to the whims of a prestidigitator, resolved into a series of pirouettes and
trouvailles
in which it constantly triumphs over and divides against itself, to the point of annihilation. Preciosity is the writing of writing: a style that doubles itself and becomes the object of its own quest. It would be abusive to regard Valéry as a
précieux
, but it is just to say that he had
fits and starts
of preciosity — quite natural in someone who perceived nothing
behind
language, no substratum or residue of reality. Only words preserve us from nothingness: such seems to be the
content
of his thought, though
content
is a term he rejected in both its metaphysical and its aesthetic acceptation. The fact remains that he emphatically banked on words and thereby proved he still believed in something. Only if he had finally become detached from them could we have called him a nihilist. In any case, he was too sensitive to the urgency of the life-lie for nihilism, “One would lose courage if one were not sustained by false ideas,” said Fontanelle, the writer whom, in the grace he could lend to the slightest idea, Valéry most resembles.

Poetry is
threatened
when poets take too lively a theoretical interest in language and make it into a constant subject of meditation, when they confer upon it an exceptional status that derives less from aesthetics than from theology. The obsession with language, always intense in France, has never been so virulent, and so sterilizing, as it is today: we are not far from promoting the means, the intermediary, of thought into the sole object of thought, even into a substitute for the absolute, not to say for God. There is no vital, fecund thought that encroaches on reality if the word is brutally substituted for the idea, if the vehicle counts more than the load it transports, if the instrument of thought is identified with thought itself. If we are truly to think, thought must
adhere
to the mind; if it becomes independent of the mind, exterior to it, the mind is shackled from the start, idles, and has but one resource left — itself — instead of relying on the world for its substance or its pretexts. The writer must guard against reflecting excessively upon language, must avoid making it the substance of his obsessions, must never forget that the important works have been created
despite
language. A Dante was obsessed by what he had to say, not by the saying of it. For a long time — indeed forever, one is tempted to say — French literature seems to have succumbed to the enchantment, and to the despotism, of the Word, hence its tenuity, its fragility, its extreme delicacy, and also it mannerism. Mallarmé and Valéry crown a tradition and prefigure an exhaustion; both are terminal symptoms of a
grammarian
nation. One linguist could even declare that Mallarmé treated French like a dead language and that “he might never have heard it spoken.” To which we may add that there was a touch of the poseur in him, of the “ironic and tricky Parisian” Claudel had observed, a suspicion of “charlatanism” (though of the highest order), the lassitude of a man who has seen through everything — features we shall recognize, to a somewhat more marked degree, in the Valéry of “the indefinite refusal to be anything in particular” key formula of his intellectual enterprise, leading principle, rale, and motto of his mind. And in effect Valéry will never be
entire
, will not identify himself with beings or with things, will be
off to one side
, marginal to everything, and this not because of some malaise of a metaphysical order but out of an excess of reflection on the operations, on the functioning, of consciousness. The ruling idea, the idea that gives meaning to all his efforts, circles that distance which consciousness takes with regard to itself, that
consciousness of consciousness
, as it chiefly appears in the
Note and Digression
of 1919, his “philosophic” masterpiece, in which, seeking some
constant
amid our sensations and our judgments, he finds it not in our changing personality but in the pure ego, “universal pronoun,” “appellation of
that
which has no relation to a face,” “which has no name,” “which has no history,” and which is in short merely a phenomenon of exacerbated consciousness, merely a limit-existence, quasi-fictive, stripped of any fixed content and without any relation to the psychological subject. This sterile ego, a summa of refusals, quintessence of nothing, conscious void (not consciousness of the void but a void that knows itself and rejects the accidents and vicissitudes of the contingent subject), this ego, last stage of lucidity, of a lucidity decanted and purified of any complicity with objects or events, is located at the antipodes of the Ego — infinite productivity, cosmogonic force — as German Romanticism had conceived it.