A note on Valéry

 "Of all the poets, in any language, of the last thirty years," said T. S. Eliot recently, ". . . it is he who will remain for posterity the representative poet, the symbol of the poet, of the first half of the twentieth century — not Yeats, not Rilke, not anyone else."

Valéry saw everything from the point of view of the intelligence: tout par rapport à l'intelligence. The mind, so often said to be his subject, might better be called the controlling metaphor of his work, for like all great subjects this one led into the whole world. If Valéry's preoccupation was the pursuit of consciousness, no one knew better than he that the pursuit began in himself, and led through man, the world, and history. "How long will it take us," says Léon-Paul Fargue, "to see that Valéry spoke of just those things men own in common, the least fragile of things: the sky, the sea, beauty, change and the moveless, the taste for solving enigmas, and the great art of being wary of what is called the new." Yet, whatever Valéry was discussing, whether it was Greek geometry, Europe, myth, Descartes, or poetry, his deep concern was always with some maneuver, some possibility, method, or situation (often tragic) of the mind, he looked at seashells, studied mathematical physics, went to a ballet, read Poe, or waked early in the morning, all to the same end, to get the light from these diverse angles, times, and objects upon his obsessive center: the conscious mind.

Consciousness is naturally dramatic, since it is always embodied, embedded, in its opposite. It is just that quality which cannot be isolated or known. That elusive humanity in us, our Self, is unknowable, said Valéry, because it is "that which knows," it is that generalized awareness which includes, comprehends, all we know. It is the irreducible active voice of man. Like the wind, it can be seen only in other things. The circle of consciousness closes around its universe of events; all things are subordinate to "that pure universality, that insurmountable generality consciousness feels itself to be."

In a beautiful passage of his Note and Digression on Leonardo, Valéry turned the dramatic nature of consciousness into this extended figure: Consciousness, he says, is like "anaudience, invisible in the darkness of a theater. A presence that can never see itself, condemned to watch the opposite spectacle on the stage; and yet it knows it fills all that breathing, unalterably oriented night. Complete, impenetrable night, absolute night; but numbered, most avid, and secretly organized night, structured of organisms that limit and press on each other; night compacted of a darkness alive with organs that can applaud or hiss, or be excited, each keeping its place and function, according to its nature. And opposite, facing this intense and mysterious audience, shining, moving in a closed frame, are all Sensible, all Intelligible, all Possible Things. Nothing can be born, die, or be at all, or occupy a moment of time, a place, a meaning, an image — except on this limited stage, circumscribed by destiny, lifted from some primordial chaos as light was separated from darkness on the first day, set off and forever subject to the condition of  BEINGSEEN. . . ."

It is this point of view of the intelligence that determines the structure of Valéry's work. It has been said that his Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci is rather an introduction to his own method; for what he did, instead of analyzing the works of Leonardo, was to imagine at length the structure and operation of a mind so complete, so universal, that all the sciences, all the arts, were its tools. Then, he said, if such a figure ever actually existed, it was certainly Leonardo. Likewise, in La Jeune Parque, whatever may be the difficulties or obscurities of that major poem, whatever its beauties or philosophical import, its subject, as Valéry liked to tease his critics by remarking, was simply the thoughts of a young girl one night. Even in his essays on contemporary affairs, it was the plight of the mind faced with the facts of modern history that interested Valéry. The mind as it works, loves, knows, suffers in man, lives in science, myth, the arts, or becomes Europe, "brain of the earth's body"; consciousness as it ranges from the lower limits of bodily death or sleep through stages of waking and knowing to the extreme limits of judgment; every gesture, every intermediate throe, spark, or step of the mind as it rises from the rich muck of the unconscious to the complex structures of the artistic or mathematical imagination; the human and historical condition of consciousness, the drama of consciousness, that is the subject of all Valéry's work. He called it the Intellectual Comedy. It was no doubt impossible, in 1894, to feel the full weight of his plain, emphatic announcement: Intérieurement Il y a un drame.Monsieur Teste [Old form of French tête, meaning "head"; also from Latin testis, meaning "witness," "spectator," and "testicle."] is, in a sense, Valéry's novel. Teste himself, on the one hand, is an ordinary fictional character, someone anyone might know, the lonely figure of modern city life, a problem in everyday human relations. On the other, he is a mind behaving as a man, or, to put it the other way, "a man regulated by his own powers of thought." Monsieur Teste is the story of consciousness and its effort to push being off the stage, to use it up. "The character of man," said Valéry, "is consciousness; and the character of consciousness is to consume, perpetually, . . . the man of mind must, finally reduce himself knowingly to an endless refusal to be anything whatever." But is it possible for man to be all mind? Is M. Teste possible? If not, why is he impossible? That question, Valéry says, is the soul of M. Teste. He is impossible because , . . (shall I presume to answer, in straight prose?) because consciousness cannot entirely consume being and still continue to exist. It depends on being. Sensibility is its home, knowledge is its profession; that is why Valéry had to invent Mme Teste (all soul and sensibility) and Teste's friend (his knowledge of the world).

The pieces that make up the present volume, then, are the occasional results of a lifetime of meditation on the question: How would a complete mind behave as an everyday man? It is amazing how much we see of Teste in so few pages; in each part, a different view of him: his author's, his wife's, his young friend's, his own. We see him at the café, the theater, at home, even in bed; we watch him think, make love, sleep, stroll in the park; we witness a vivid re-creation of his milieu, the Paris that contained him; and in his logbook, "the sacrifice of his thought."

Some readers find the logbook an anticlimax. Led to expect so much of this extraordinary man, it is natural that they should find his actual thought not so extraordinary after all. If this little book were to be held strictly to laws of fiction this would have to be counted one of its flaws; but actually, anticlimax is here calculated and necessary, for it reinforces just that impression of the ordinary, the everyday, which is a large part of Valéry's theme: the mind's involvement in daily modes of existence. In the end, the effect makes one of his main points, that it is always "a sacrifice of thought" to write it down; the very act of writing stops thought by making it dependent on words for its expression. M. Teste's logbook is no exception.

The legend identifying M. Teste with Valéry himself has naturally grown up, and has already made perhaps too much of the autobiographical aspects of the work. This is a very personal book indeed, but Valéry was probably no more M. Teste than he was Leonardo, Mallarmé, or Descartes; he was all of these in his own way. Teste is simply the most persistent image of that unknown man, his author's consciousness. He remains, said Valéry toward the end of his life, "the most satisfactory being I have met. . . the only person who endures in my mind."

This note has not aimed to "explain" Monsieur Teste. It has served if it shows the way to the text. Valéry in his own preface warns us that his work is not for the lazy reader. His mind was so intense it could not move without saying something; he demands close reading. If you grant him that, his text lights up at once, and you find a style extremely simple and clear. The wonderful resources of rhetoric he manages to draw from such homely clarity make the quality of his style (and make it no doubt impossible to render justly in translation). Yet, Valéry's meaning is never off somewhere in vague spaces of spoofing or speculation, it is in his words. Whatever else he may mean, he always means what he says.

JACKSON MATHEWS

Monsieur Teste

PAUL VALÉRY

translated from the French and with a note on Valéry by JACKSON MATHEWS