Anathemas and Admirations Page 9

  To create a work that rivals the worlds that is not its reflection but its double — this notion Mallarmé derived not so much from the alchemists as from Hegel, that Hegel whom he knew only indirectly, from Villiers, who had read the philosopher just enough to be able to quote him on occasion and to call him, pompously, “the reconstruct tor of the Universe,” a formula that must have struck Mallarmé, since The Book specifically intends the reconstruction of the Universe. But this notion could also have been inspired by his frequentation of music, by the theories of the period derived from Schopenhauer and propagated by the Wagnerians, who made music the one art capable of translating the essence of the world. Moreover, Wagner’s enterprise itself could suggest great dreams and lead to megalomania quite as easily as alchemy or Hegelianism. A musician — especially a fecund one — can aspire to the role of demiurge; but how could a poet — and a poet delicate to the point of sterility — undertake such a thing without absurdity or madness? All of which partakes of divagation, to use a word Mallarmé was fond of. And it was precisely in this aspect that he beguiled, that he convinced. Valéry imitates and extends him when he speaks of that Commedia of the intellect he intended to write some day. The dream of excess leads to absolute illusion. When, on November 3, 1897, Mallarmé showed Valéry the corrected proofs of Un Coup-de dés and asked him, “Don’t you find this an act of madness?” The madman was not Mallarmé but the Valéry who, in a fit of sublimity, would write that in the strange typography of that poem the author had attempted “to raise a page to the power of the starry heavens.” To assign oneself a task impossible to realize and even to define, to crave vigor when one is corroded by the subtlest of anemias — in all this there is a touch of theater a desire to deceive oneself, to live intellectually beyond one’s means, a will to legend and to defeat, for at a certain level the man of failure is incomparably more captivating than the one who has merely achieved success.

  We are increasingly interested not in what an author says but in what he may have meant, not in his actions but in his projects, less in his actual work than in the work he dreamed of. If Mallarmé intrigues us, it is because he fulfills the conditions of the writer who is unrealized in relation to the disproportionate ideal he has assigned himself, an ideal so disproportionate that we are sometimes inclined to call a man naive or insincere who in reality is merely hallucinated — obsessed. We are adepts of the work that is aborted, abandoned halfway through, impossible to complete, undermined by its very requirements. The strange thing in this case is that the work was not even begun, for of The Book, that rival of the Universe, there remains virtually no revealing clue; it is doubtful that its structure was outlined in the notes Mallarmé destroyed, those that have survived being unworthy of our attention. Mallarmé: an impulse of thought, a thought that was never actualized, that snagged itself on the potential, on the unreal disengaged from all actions, superior to all objects, even to all concepts — an expectation of thought. And what he, enemy of the vague, ultimately expressed is just that expectation which is nothing but vagueness itself. Yet such vagueness, the space of excess, affords a positive aspect: it permits imagining big. It was by dreaming of The Book that Mallarmé achieved the unique: had he been more reasonable, he would have left us a mediocre body of work. We can say as much of Valéry, who is the result of his almost mythological vision of his faculties, of what he might have extracted from them if he had had the chance or the time to put them to actual use. Are not his Cahiers the bric-a-brac of The Book that he, too, wanted to write? He went further than Mallarmé but realized no better than he a scheme that requires persistence and a great invulnerability to boredom, to that wound which, by his own admission, continually tormented him. Yet such boredom is discontinuity itself, impatience with any sustained, grounded reasoning, a pulverized obsession, the horror of system (The Book could only have been a system, a total system), horror of an idea’s insistence, of its duration; boredom is also the non sequitur, the fragment, the note, the cahier — in other words, dilettantism consequent upon a lack of vitality, and also upon a fear of being or of seeming deep. Valéry’s attack on Pascal might be explained by a reaction of modesty: is it not indecent to display one’s secrets, one’s lacerations, one’s abysses? Let us not forget that for a Mediterranean such as Valéry the senses mattered, and that for him the basic categories were not what is and what is not, but what is not at all and what might exist, Nothingness and the Apparent; being as such lacked dimension in his eyes, and even significance.

  Neither Mallarmé nor Valéry was equipped to confront The Book. Before them, Poe would have been able both to conceive such a project and to undertake it, indeed, he did undertake it. Eureka being a kind of limit-work, an extremity, an end, a colossal and realized dream. “I have solved the secret of the Universe”; “I no longer desire to live, since I have written Eureka”— these are exclamations Mallarmé would have loved to utter; he had no right to do so, not even after that magnificent impasse, Un Coup de des. Baudelaire had called Poe a “hero” of letters; Mallarmé went further and called him “the absolute literary case.” No one today would assent to such a judgment, but that is of no consequence, for each individual (like each epoch) possesses reality only by his exaggerations, by his capacity to overestimate — by his gods. The sequence of philosophical or literary fashions testifies to an irresistible need to worship: who has not put in time as a hagiographer? A skeptic will always manage to venerate someone more skeptical than himself. Even in the eighteenth century, when disparagement became an institution, the “decadence of admiration” was not to be so general as Montesquieu had supposed.

  For Valéry, the theme treated in Eureka resulted in literature: “Cosmogony is a literary genre of a remarkable persistence and of an amazing variety, one of the oldest genres there is.” He believed as much of history and even of philosophy, “a special literary genre characterized by certain subjects and by the frequency of certain terms and certain forms,” It may be said that with the exception of the positive sciences, everything came down to literature for him, to something dubious if not contemptible. But where are we to find someone more literary than he, someone in whom attention to the word, idolatry of utterance, is more intensely sustained? A Narcissus turned against himself, he disdained the only activity in accord with his nature: predestined to the Word, he was essentially a litterateur, and it was this litterateur he wanted to smother, to destroy; unable to do so, he took his revenge on the literature he so maligned. Such would be the psychological schema of his relations with it.

  Eureka did not affect Valéry’s development. On the other hand, The Philosophy of Composition was a major event, a crucial encounter. Everything he was subsequently to believe about the mechanism of the poetic act is there. We can imagine the delight with which he must have read that the composition of “The Raven” could in no way be attributed to chance or to intuition, and that the poem had been conceived with “the precision and the rigorous logic of a mathematical problem.” Another of Poe’s declarations, this time from Marginalia (CXVIII), must have gratified him no less: “It is the curse of a certain order of mind, that it can never rest satisfied with the consciousness of its ability to do a thing. Still less is it content with doing it. It must both know and show how it was done.”

  The Philosophy of Composition was, on Poe’s part, a mere hoax; all Valéry comes out of a . . . naive reading, the idolatry of a text in which a poet dupes his credulous readers. Such youthful enthusiasm for so basically anti-poetic a demonstration proves that initially, in his depths, Valéry was no poet, for his whole being should have bridled in protest at this cold and pitiless dismantling of rapture, this indictment of the most elementary poetic reflex, of poetry’s very raison d’être; but no doubt he needed such cunning incrimination, such a rebuke to any spontaneous creation, in order to justify, to excuse, his own lack of spontaneity. What could be more reassuring than this studious exposition of devices! Here was a catechism not for poets but for versifiers, an
d one that would necessarily flatter in Valéry that virtuoso aspect, that yen for one-upmanship in reflection, for art to the second degree, for the art within art, that religion of taking pains, along with that will to be, at every moment, outside of what one creates, outside of any intoxication, poetic or otherwise. Only a maniac of lucidity could savor this cynical reversion to the sources of the poem contradicting all the laws of literary production, this infinitely meticulous premeditation, these outrageous acrobatics from which Valéry drew the first article of his poetic credo. He erected into a theory and proposed as a model his very incapacity to be a poet naturally; he bound himself to a technique in order to conceal his congenital lacunae; he set — an inexpiable offense! — poetics above poetry. We can legitimately suppose that all his theses would be quite different had he been capable of producing a less elaborated oeuvre. He promoted the Difficult out of impotence: all his requirements are those of an artist and not of a poet. What in Poe was merely a game is in Valéry a dogma, a literary dogma — that is, an accepted fiction. As a good technician, he attempted to rehabilitate method and métier at the expense of talent. From any and every theory — it is art I am speaking of — he was concerned to extract the least poetic conclusion, and it is to that conclusion he would cling, beguiled as he was (to the point of obnubilation) by praxis, by invention stripped of fatality, of the ineluctable, of destiny. He always believed one might be other than one is, and always wanted to be other than he was, as is evidenced by that gnawing regret of his at not being a scientist, a regret that inspired him to a good many extravagances, especially in aesthetics; it was also this regret that inspired his condescension toward literature — as if he debased himself by speaking of it, and merely deigned to trifle with verses. As a matter of fact, he did not trifle with them, he practiced them, as he specifically said so many times. At least the non-poet in him, keeping him from mingling poetry and prose, from trying to create, like the Symbolists, poetry at all costs and on all occasions, saved him from that scourge: any prose that is too ostensibly poetic. When we approach a mind as subtle as Valéry’s, we experience a rare pleasure in discovering its illusions and its flaws, which, if they are not obvious, are no less real, absolute lucidity being incompatible with existence, with the exercise of breathing. And we must admit, a disabused mind, whatever its degree of emancipation from the world, lives more or less within the un-breathable.

  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 torm
ents 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.