Anathemas and Admirations Read online

  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.

  Consciousness intervenes in our actions only to frustrate their execution; consciousness is a perpetual interrogation of life, it is perhaps the ruin of life. Bewusstsein als Verhängnis (Consciousness as Fatality) is the title of a book published in Germany between the two world wars, whose author, drawing the consequences of his vision of the world, committed suicide. There is, as far as we can see, in the phenomenon of consciousness a dramatic and deadly dimension that did not escape Valéry (we need merely recall the “murderous lucidity” of Dance and the Soul), but he could not emphasize it too much without contradicting his usual theories about the beneficent role of consciousness in literary creation, as opposed to the suspect character of trace. His entire poetics, what is it but the apotheosis of consciousness? If he had lingered too long over the tension between the Vital and the Conscious, he would have had to reverse the scale of values that he had set up and that he remained faithful to throughout his career.

  The effort to define oneself, to bear down upon one’s own mental operations, Valéry took for true knowledge. But to know oneself is not to know, or rather is only a variety of knowing, Valéry always confused knowledge and clear-sightedness. Indeed the will to be clear-sighted, to be inhumanly disabused, is accompanied for him by an ill-concealed pride: he knows himself and admires himself for knowing himself. Let us be fair: he does not admire his mind, he admires himself as Mind. His narcissism, inseparable from what he called “emotions” and the “pathos” of the intellect, is not a narcissism of journaux intimes, it is not the attachment to the self as a unique aberration, nor is it the ego of those who like to hear themselves, psychologically speaking; no, it is an abstract ego, far from the complacencies of introspection or the impurities of psychoanalysis. Note that the flaw of Narcissus was not consubstantial with him: how else explain that the sole realm in which posterity has str
ikingly vindicated Valéry is that of political considerations and prophecies? History, an idol he was concerned to demolish, is largely what ensures that he will last, that he will continue to be present. For it is his observations concerning History that are quoted most frequently — an irony he would perhaps have enjoyed. Doubts are cast on his poems, his poetics are rejected, but increasingly we set store by the moralist and the analyst attentive to events. This lover of himself had the stuff of an extrovert. Appearances, one feels, did not displease him; nothing in him assumed a morbid, profound, supremely intimate aspect; even the Nothingness he inherited from. Mallarmé was merely a fascination exempt from vertigo, and never opened out onto horror or ecstasy. In one of the Upanishads, it is said that “the essence of man is speech, the essence of speech is the hymn,” Valéry would have assented to the first assertion and denied the second. It is in this assent and this denial that we must seek the key to his accomplishments and to his limits.

  1970

  5

  The Lure of Disillusion

  IT IS NEVER ideas we should speak of, only sensations and visions — for ideas do not proceed from our entrails; ideas are never truly ours.

  Glum sky: my mind masquerading as the firmament.

  Ravaged by boredom, that cyclone in slow motion.

  There exists, I grant you, a clinical depression, upon which certain remedies occasionally have an effect; but there exists another kind, a melancholy underlying our very outbursts of gaiety and accompanying us everywhere, without leaving us alone for a single moment. And there is nothing that can rid us of this lethal omnipresence: the self forever confronting itself.

  I assure this foreign poet, who after hesitating among several capitals has decided on ours, that he has chosen well, that here he will find, among other advantages, that of starving to death without troubling a single soul. To encourage him further, I explain that here failure is so normal that it is a kind of Open Sesame. This detail provided the finishing touchy judging from the gleam I detected in his eyes.

  “The very fact that you have reached the age you have proves that life has a meaning,” I was told by a friend I hadn’t seen in over thirty years. This remark often comes back to me, more striking each time, though it was made by someone who has always found a meaning in everything.

  For Mallarmé, who claimed he was doomed to permanent insomnia, sleep was not a “real need” but a “favor.” Only a great poet could allow himself the luxury of such an insanity.

  Insomnia appears to spare the animals. If we kept them from sleeping for a few weeks, a radical change would occur in their nature and their behavior. They would experience hitherto unknown sensations, the kind that seemed to be specifically human. Let us wreck the animal kingdom, if we want it to overtake and replace us.

  In each letter I send to a Japanese friend, I have got into the habit of recommending one or another work by Brahms, She has just written that she is leaving a Tokyo clinic where she was taken by ambulance for having excessively sacrificed to my idol, I wonder which trio, which sonata was responsible. It doesn’t matter. Whatever induces collapse is thereby deserving of being listened to.

  There is no speculation about Knowledge, no Erkenntnistheorie in which so many philosophers, German or otherwise, revel that offers the slightest homage to Fatigue as such — the state likeliest to lead us to the heart of the matter. This neglect or this ingratitude definitively discredits our philosophy.

  A stroll through Montparnasse Cemetery. All, young or old, made plans. They make no more. Strengthened by their example, I swear as a good pupil, returning, never to make any myself — ever. Undeniably beneficial outing.

  I ponder C., for whom drinking in a café was the sole reason to exist. One day when I was eloquently vaunting Buddhism to him, he replied, “Well, yes, nirvana, all right, but not without a café.” We all have some mania or other that keeps us from unconditionally accepting supreme happiness.

  Reading Madame Périer’s testimony — specifically, the passage in which she tells how her brother Pascal, from the age of eighteen, by his own admission never spent a single day without suffering — I was so astounded that I stuffed my fist into my mouth to keep from crying out. This was in a public library. I was, it is worth noting, eighteen myself. What a presentiment, but also what madness, and what presumption!

  To rid oneself of life is to deprive oneself of the pleasure of deriding it. (The one possible answer to someone who informs you of his intention to be done with it all.)

  “Being never disappoints,” declares a philosopher. Then what does? Certainly not nonbeing, by definition incapable of disappointing. This advantage, so irritating to our philosopher, must have led him to promulgate so flagrant a countertruth.

  The interesting thing about friendship is that it is — almost as much as love — an inexhaustible source of disappointment and outrage, thereby of fruitful surprises it would be madness to try to do without.

  The surest means of not losing your mind on the spot: remembering that everything is unreal, and will remain so . . .

  He offers me an unconscious hand. I ask him many questions and lose my courage in the face of his outrageously laconic replies. Not a single one of those useless words so necessary to dialogue. Dialogue indeed! Speech is a sign of life, and that is why the chattering lunatic is closer to us than the tongue-tied half-wit.

  No possible defense against a flatterer. You cannot agree with him without absurdity; nor can you contradict him and turn your back. You act as if he were telling the truth, you let yourself be sent up because you don’t know how to react. He of course believes you are taken in, that he has you where he wants you, and enjoys his triumph without your being able to open his eyes. Generally he is a future enemy who will take his revenge for having prostrated himself before you — a disguised aggressor who ponders his blows while he pours out his hyperboles.

  The most effective method for making loyal friends is to congratulate them upon their failures.

  This thinker has taken refuge in prolixity as others do in stupor.

  When you have circled around a subject for a certain amount of time, you can immediately offer a judgment on any work that relates to it. I have just opened a book on the gnostics, and I immediately perceived that it was quite unreliable. Yet I read only one sentence and am only a dilettante, an incompetent in such matters.

  Now imagine an absolute specialist, a monster — God, for example: whatever we do must to Him seem botched, even our inimitable successes, even those that ought to humiliate and embarrass Him.

  Between Genesis and Apocalypse imposture reigns. It is important to know this, for once assimilated, such dizzying evidence renders all formulas for wisdom superfluous.

  If you have had the weakness to write a book, you will not fail to admire that Hasidic rabbi who abandoned the project of writing one since he was not sure he could do so exclusively for the pleasure of his Creator.

  If the Hour of Disappointment were to sound for everyone at the same time, we should see an entirely new version, either of paradise or of hell.

  Impossible to enter into a dialogue with physical pain.

  To withdraw indefinitely into oneself, like God after the six days. Let us imitate Him, on this point at least.

  The light of dawn is the true, primordial light. Each time I observe it, I bless my sleepless nights, which afford me an occasion to witness the spectacle of the Beginning. Yeats calls it “sensuous” — a fine discovery, and anything but obvious.

  Learning that he was going to marry soon, I decided to conceal my amazement by a generality: “Everything is compatible with everything.” To which he replied, “You’re right, since man is compatible with woman,”

  A flame traverses the blood. To go over to the other side, circumventing death.

  That favorable look one assumes on the occasion of a blow of fate. . . .

  At the climax of a performance superfluous to specify, one longs to exclaim “Consummatum est.” The cli
chés of the Gospels, and singularly of the Passion, are always good to have at hand for those moments when you might imagine you could do without them.