"PENSER 'CETTE CHAMBRE' OU PENSER 'UNIVERS' ": VALERY AND THE UNIVERSE OF THE ROOM.

"Je veux decrire cette chambre ou je suis" (C, IV, 264)

One of Valery's earliest poems, written around 1888 as a seventeen-year old student in Montpellier and bearing the name of the collection of prose poems, Une chambre conjecturale, evokes the writer's room and the impressions of the perceiving mind therein. The room is conceived with the visual approach of a painter depicting the interchanging impressions of light and colour as the eye moves within the confines of the room while taking in the vista of outside space: "choisis une couleur sympathique mais tenue pres du tres clair ou du tres fonce [ ... ] Tres vaste ou exigue avec le portrait reel d'une fenetre ouverte."1 Several of the poems in the collection, such as "Jour," adopt this strong internal focus from the sedentary position of the writer at his table observing space and time in this enclave: "les desordres sur la table [ ...) l'ecoulement du temps sur les vitres, les couleurs rapprochees, l'homme qui est assis [ ... ] le jour pense, la chambre continue, l'espace central se defait."2 Not only is this internal representation with its symbolist overtones interesting but it also heralds an artistic approach that was later in the Cahiers to evolve into a pictorialist poetics, consisting of a textual and visual concomitance pertaining particularly to the room.3

Yet, the interest in the room as principal universe of the writer is not uniquely confined to Valery's early poetry but it is strongly reflective of the later years as well. In fact, the Cahiers make repeated reference to this self-contained and autonomous realm for the writing self, as in this text from May 1929 that typifies the relationship between the mind, the eye and the immediate contiguous space surrounding the writer: " 'Univers' - ensemble des choses qui sont dans une chambre + le regard 'circulaire' qui les parcourt plus vite qu'elles ne changent sensiblement" (C, XIII, 752).

As Robert Pickering points out in the conclusion of his article " 'Mener un discours de maniere qu'il s'acheve': enjeux et pratique de l'ecriture dans les derniers cahiers de Paul Valery": "L'ecriture et la biographie s'imbriquent ainsi en jeu conjugue, dont il importerait un jour d'etudier la complexite de relations" (Romanic Review, 88:3 (1997), 425-441, p. 440). The writer's room, as an obvious starting place, is where the imbrication between the material circumstances of writing and self might be best explored. In Valery's case, such a conjunction inevitably entails not only a strong biographical dimension but also very much an ontological one given the efforts to accommodate the necessary and tedious repetition of existence and writing with the quest for a novel definition of self. This tension is markedly intensified in the experience of writing in the room, as the combined contribution of Valery's correspondence and Cahiers amply bear out.

Thus, it is primarily Valery's preoccupation with the room and its intricacy of connections, a largely uncharted dimension of his personal writing realm, which this article proposes to explore, principally from the internal perspective of the Cahiers. Indeed, far from being an isolated and inconsequential feature of Valery's personal writing, the room, when put in the context of the Cahiers, emerges as a highly interesting framework that has a direct relationship with thought, the dynamics of poetic genesis and the self-observing self. Moreover, this article will also reveal a range of phenomena of a physical and perceptual nature, regularly detailed during the morning routine of writing and inherently connected to the intimate experience of this space.

l'univers n'est qu'un tableau pendu au mur d'une chambre

(C, VI, 280).

In the exchange of letters with Gide, notably from 1892 after his first short visit to Paris, Valery expresses his imperative desire to move from Montpellier to the capital and, as he says, "chercher un trou ou gratter un papier officiel ... Vivre selon l'absurde."4 His involvement in the literary circles and the salons in which they met is acutely counterbalanced by his intensely solitary and ascetic nature as a writer. Henceforth, what begins to emerge from among the various strands of the correspondence is the desire for a regular, intimate writing space that was subsequently to become a permanent feature of his self-analysis as a writer and reflect the introspective nature of the very Cahiers themselves. Letters exchanged with Gide the following year, while Valery is still only intermittently in Paris, underscore the already apparent pattern of spending long solitary hours writing in the room despite the constant displacements. Gide echoes this in a letter from late August 1893: "Ou te trouvera cette lettre? Auras-tu vu la mer, ou si tu languiras encore dans les chambres?"5

The obvious question, thus, is what is at the origin of this fascination with the workplace of other artists and writers and in what way do these descriptions reflect Valery's own practices as a writer? Even though the answer lies primarily in the Cahiers, the published essays on other writers and painters already give us strong initial indications as to what occasioned such extensive treatment. Many of Valery's essays make reference not only to the salons and cafes on the banks of the Seine, but to other interiors like rooms and garrets of artists of the time. More significantly perhaps, these essays, in tandem with the correspondence, bear the mark of an inchoate consciousness of the physical circumstances of the artist and writer. This most certainly had a bearing on the intense personal sympathy with this dimension of Valery's symbolist predecessors and contemporaries. One pre-eminent source of reference in this regard is Mallarme. In fact, if one were to go by the reminiscence in Valery essays, it would seem that the room constitutes the backdrop to some of the most memorable meetings between both writers and frames the very relationship itself. In this regard, Mallarme's writing quarters always seem worthy of inclusion, be they the "chambre de la rue de Rome" (, I, 623)6 in Paris, inextricably linked in Valery's memory to the finished manuscript of the Coup de des, or the visit in July of 1898 to the "cabinet de travail" (631) at Valvins, recalled in the essay Derniere visite a Mallarme: "Quatre pas de long, deux de large ; la fenetre ouverte a la Seine et a la foret au travers d'un feuillage tout dechire de lumiere" (, I, 631).7