Paul Val[acute{e}]ry: Literature as Such - Critical Essay

Style, Fall, 1999 by Gerard Genette

G[acute{e}]rard Genette

We read in Paul Val[acute{e}]ry's Tel Quel: "Literature is thronged with people who don't really know what to say but feel a compelling urge to write" ("Odds and Ends" 130).

A sentence stating a rather harsh, but not exclusively negative, truth, since the "urge to write without knowing what" is presented for what it is: a power. An empty power, but one that, paradoxically, contributes to and perhaps suffices to "fill" literature. And Val[acute{e}]ry will say about some of the most beautiful verses that they work on us without telling us very much, or that tell us, perhaps, that they have "nothing to tell us" ("Poetry and Abstract Thought" 74-75). Such is literature, "reduced to the essentials of its active principle" ("Odds and Ends" 97).

This need to write is not Val[acute{e}]ry's. Writing inspired in him only one feeling, many times expressed by him, and that we might say, took the place for him of a goad or a compensation: boredom. A deep feeling, deeply connected with the practice and the truth of literature, although a taboo of propriety ordinarily forbids its recognition. Val[acute{e}]ry had the power (since this too is a power) to experience it more intensely than anyone else, and took it as the point of departure for his reflections on Letters. This 'what's the use?', this disgust with writing that seizes Rimbaud after composing his oeuvre, happens to Val[acute{e}]ry beforehand, so to speak, and never ceases to accompany him and in some sense to inspire him. If every modern work is somehow haunted by the possibility of its own silence, Val[acute{e}]ry was, and apparently remains, the only writer who did not experience this possibility as a threat, a temptation weighing on the future, but as an anterior, preliminary, perhaps propitiat ory experience. With the exception of Vers anciens, the Introduction [grave{a}] L[acute{e}]onard, and Monsieur Teste, the major portion of his work follows, as if by a perpetual breach, from a very serious and definitive decision not to write any more. It is literally a post-scriptum, a long codicil, wholly enlightened by a feeling of its complete uselessness, and even its total nonexistence as anything other than a pure exercise. Val[acute{e}]ry strongly suspected many pages of literature of having this for their whole significance: 'I am a page of literature'; we often find in him, implicitly or insistently, this inverse affirmation: 'I have nothing more to do with literature: here is proof of it.'

His literary destiny was therefore this rather rare experience, one perhaps rich in its apparent sterility: to live in literature as in a foreign country, to inhabit writing as if on a visit or in exile, and to fix upon it a gaze simultaneously interior and remote. It is easy to exalt literature, easier still to demolish it; each of these positions involves an element of truth. The truth that exists at their narrow and difficult junction it happened to Val[acute{e}]ry to experience as the exact place of his residence, on the chance of arranging for himself a comfort, and a career in this difficulty, as others in revolt or despair.

"It is not a question of abusing literature," writes Maurice Blanchot, "but rather of trying to understand it and to see why we can only understand it by disparaging it" (302). This salutary disparagement, or devaluation was one of Val[acute{e}]ry's constant theses, and it would be hard to measure all that the modern awareness and practice of literature owes to this reductive effort.

What repels him in literature is, as he often explains it, the feeling of arbitrariness: "what I can change easily offends me in myself, and bores me in others. Hence many antiliterary, and singularly antihistorical consequences" (Oeuvres 2:1502). Or again:

As for history and novels, my interest is sometimes held, and I can admire them as stimulants, pastimes, and works of art; but if they lay claim to "truth" and hope to be taken seriously, their arbitrary quality and unconscious conventions at once become apparent, and I am seized with a perverse mania for trying possible substitutions.

("Memoirs" 103)

It is obviously this mania, which he further qualifies as a "detestable practice" and that he confesses "spoils pleasure," which makes the art of narrative, and the novelistic genre, entirely inconceivable to him. An utterance like 'The Marquise went out at five o'clock' immediately seems to him like a contingent aggregation of entirely substitutable units: 'The Marquise (or any other subject) went out (or any other verb) at five o'clock (or any other complement).' [1] The narrator is unable to halt this vertigo of possibilities except by an arbitrary decision, that is, by a convention. But this convention is unconscious, or at least unconfessed: every literary imposture lies in this dissimulation. And Val[acute{e}]ry dreams of a book that, in an exemplary way, would expose convention by exposing at each articulation the list of sacrificed virtualities:

Perhaps it would be interesting, just once, to write a work which at each juncture would show the diversity of solutions that can present themselves to the mind and from which it chooses the unique sequel to be found in the text. To do this would be to substitute for the illusion of a unique scheme which imitates reality that of the possible-at-each-moment, which I think more truthful. It has sometimes happened that I have published different versions of the same poem: some of them have been contradictory, and there has been no lack of criticism on this score. But no one has told me why I should refrain from such variations. ("Memoirs" 104)