Anathemas and Admirations (24 page)

To be capable of dismantling the mechanism of everything, since everything is mechanism, a sum of contraptions, artifices, or, to use a more honorable word, operations; to deal with the springs and ratchets, to become a watchmaker, to see
inside
, to cease to be duped — that is what counts in his eyes. Man, as Valéry conceives him, is valued only for the degree of lucidity he may attain, his capacity for non-consent. This demand for lucidity suggests the level of
awakening
that any mental experience supposes and that is determined by the answer to the crucial question, “How far have you gone in the perception of unreality?”

We might trace in some detail the parallel between a quest for lucidity deliberately
this side
of the absolute, as we find it in Valéry, and a quest for awakening with a view to the absolute, which is, strictly speaking, the mystic way. In both procedures, what is involved is an exacerbated consciousness eager to shake off the illusions trailing after it. Any pitiless analyst, any betrayer of appearances, a fortiori any “nihilist,” is merely a
blocked
mystic, and this only because he is reluctant to grant a content to his lucidity, to inflect it toward salvation by associating it with an enterprise transcending it. Valéry was too contaminated by positivism to conceive any cult but that of lucidity
for its own sake
.

“I confess I have made my mind into an idol, but I have found nothing else that would serve.” Valéry would never get over the amazement produced in him by the spectacle of that mind. He admired only men who deified theirs, and whose aspirations were so excessive that they could only fascinate or dismay. What seduced him in Mallarmé was the
madman
, the fanatic who had written to Verlaine, in 1885, “I have always imagined and attempted
something else
, with an alchemist’s patience, ready to sacrifice all vanity and all satisfaction the way such men once burned up their own furniture and the very rafters of their house in order to feed the furnace of the Great Work. Which is what? It is hard to say: a book, quite simply, in many volumes, a book that really is a book, architectural and premeditated, and not a collection of chance inspirations, however marvelous. . . . I shall go further and say The Book, convinced after all that there is only one.” As early as 1867 he had formulated, in a letter to Cazalis, the same grandiose and insane aspiration: “. . . it would cause me a real pang to enter into the supreme Disappearance without having completed my work, which is The Work, the Great Work, as the alchemists, our ancestors, used to call it.”

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, and 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.