World Within The Word

by William H. Gass

  Well, we are safe from it, since it is difficult to imagine a work more out of step with modern consciousness, not simply because its sexual revelations are tame, its social preoccupations fairly innocent and out of date, its politics impossibly square, but because the rich and thoughtful musical approach Proust takes, the deep analytical poetry he writes, is both duller and quieter than silence is among the loud impatient honks and heartfelt belches which these days pass for books. “Inconceivable boredom,” James said, “associated with the most extreme ecstasy which it is possible to imagine.”

  Carry it? This style? How? Proust writes a careless self-indulgent prose, doesn’t he? Developing trivialities endlessly, as if he were in terror that anything should be thought trivial. Oh, he would sanctify if he could, his every wink, pang, or sniffle. My god, how he fawns over the asparagus, “stippled in mauve and azure.” Does he plan to make a mayonnaise with his effusions? And note how he flatters the lilacs. Epithet follows epithet like tea cakes in flutes of paper. You’d suppose every bloom were a baron. Indeed, botanical metaphors are plentiful as plants, and the growth of the action is like theirs—imperceptible, steady, continuous—yes, and it’s the same for the revelation of character; it’s the same for the course of his thought; thus he slows things to permit the fullest flight of his fancy, the tireless play of his sensibilities, the utmost smother of his love. He slows, then stops; and then his scenes are like those cell cross-sections cut by the microtome and stained till they glow like glass.

  It is a style that endangers the identity of the self in its reckless expression of it.

  Proust has always had his Proustians, which seems inevitable, though a pity, for they have tended to admire everything in him but his art; they fatten on content; but this work, like all truly great ones, spits life out of time like the pit from a fruit. Out of the architecture of the word, the great work rises, but its reading requires a similar commitment, a similar elevation of the soul above mere living, mere mortal concerns. One hundred years—and we remember him. And perhaps one day soon we shall find ourselves pleasantly immobilized, comfortably hammocked or mildly ill (whatever it takes to make us one of the happy few); one day when the guns are gone and the looters are out of the suburbs; when all the threats have been withdrawn, and time lies as empty in our hands as an office present, then perhaps—I won’t say we shall read Proust again (cowards and nincompoops abound and many may not wish to run the risk of the same transformation which made a saint from a sinner)—but then, perhaps, like a shoeless pilgrim, we may make a start.

  Paul Valéry

  The August evening in Geneva in 1892 which Paul Valéry chose to mislead us by calling his night of crisis, his “turning point,” was shot like a scene from a stupid movie. In the spiritual background there was a distantly worshipful and wholly one-sided love affair with an unapproachable married woman, an affair of barely smothered sighs and secret languishments whose very disappointments were romantically necessary. There was, in addition, Valéry’s deepening discouragement with his own work as a poet—after all, Mallarmé had already surpassed the possible—and in consequence, as a protection to pride, there had appeared in him an increasing tendency to disparage both poetry and the language from which it was made, just as someone who’s cleaned a collar by cutting it off entirely is required to imagine that in this fashion he’s better dressed. Nearly a year before, he had written this desperate la-de-da to Gide: “Please don’t call me Poet anymore … I am not a poet, but the gentleman who is bored.”

  Inevitably there was, as well, a willingness to find insufficient superiority even in the supreme. “The most original of our great men—Wagner, Mallarmé—stoop,” he announced to the same correspondent in the smug tones of the youthfully aggrieved. They imitate, he reported, feeling the triumph and the shock of one who, for the first time, has seen the great chef sneeze into the soup. He had “analyzed, alas!” their expressive means and encountered everywhere, even among the most wonderful writers (he mentions specifically Poe, Rimbaud, and again, Mallarmé), the loveliest illusions concerning the genesis and production of their poetry. Pledged to a profession that obliged them constantly to surpass themselves, they failed to remember who they were; they (it was such a snob’s word)… they stooped; yet Valéry did not feel himself ready to fall in just that way just yet.

  We know none of the details, and can only darkly guess the cause, but if the background of the scene of crisis contained the characteristic Sturm und Drang of an ambitious, gifted, randy youth of twenty-one, the foreground was filled with simple, bolt-upright sleeplessness and fright: in his head he heard the badly bowed music of his nerves, the familiar theme of sic et non, while, outside, this interior cacophony was accompanied the night through by a vulgarly obvious but appropriately violent thunderstorm.

  Absurdly set and conventionally shot (“his whole fate played out in his head”), Valéry had his trial and his illumination in the desert, nonetheless, and came back a brave. Deciding, as Descartes did, to put his trust solely in himself (or rather in one part of himself—that part which was prepared to flee to pure awareness where it could be, he said, “an unmoved observer”), he became a stubborn student of his own mind, of his mental acts and processes, and of the structures and subtle modulations of consciousness.

  For Valéry poetry had been, on principle and from inclination, an escape from the world (“By ‘world’ I mean the whole complex of incidents, demands, compulsions, solicitations, of every kind and degree of urgency,” he wrote, “which overtake the mind without offering it any inner illumination …”). But now the world blew through him like a wind—poetry was no shutter to it. He felt insecure in its care. Somehow the independence of the self was threatened, and despite his “intellectualized” view of poetry, the poetry he wrote was predominately erotic.

  In addition to the predictable appearance of Venus, Orpheus, Helen and their friends, the use of films and gauze, the dreary azures, lilies, fountains, fruit, hair, swans and roses of conventional symbolist poetry, the moon and the murmurous wood, the ritual expostulations (hollow ohs and fatuous ahs), the early poems are stuffed, as though for Christmas, with images of images: tree, leaf and sun shadows, dream and fire flicker, countless kinds of reflection. Here the footprint has more substance than the foot; the face finds its resemblance in another medium, floats in fountain water like a flower, trembles independently of its owner as if it had its own sorrows, looks back from the language of its own description like a lover or an accusation. The Narcissus theme has already been introduced: “I can love nothing now but the bewitching water.”

  He also writes a poem called “Caesar,” and admires in the figure he portrays there (“all things beneath his foot”) the same quality he finds the young Napoleon showing in his critical hour.1 It is a characteristic he discusses with some shrewdness and more detachment in his essays on dictatorship: the burning concentration of will, mastery, the instant disposal of means. It is not Descartes’s system, but Descartes’s self he makes us a present of, and although his interpretation is so oddly perverse that only a psychological need can account for it, there is no question that Valéry thinks of the philosopher’s famous moment of illumination, the moment in which analytic geometry is conceived, and the poet’s own sheet-chewing night of crisis, as importantly alike, for in such moments, Valéry writes: “… a whole life is suddenly clarified, and every act will henceforth be subordinated to the task which is its goal. A straight line has been staked out.” Napoleon had to conquer his dominions, but “Descartes created his Revolution and Empire at a single stroke.” Valéry chose a world where he could be, as he repeatedly said, master in his own house: his head. It was a world of wait and watch.

  Order, clarity, precision, shape: these properties seem so often an enemy of powerful feelings that, although they may usefully employ them the way steam is put to work by the piston, to invoke them is the same as calling the police. Anything—the starry heavens which so terrified Pascal (the one au
thor for whom Valéry exhibits contempt)—can be scientifically observed, but the man of science, Valéry believed, “switches off the whole emotive system of his personality. He tries to turn himself into a kind of machine which, after recording observations, sets about formulating definitions and laws, finally replacing phenomena by their expression in terms of conscious, deliberate, and definite potentials.”

  Valéry’s error here, and one he makes repeatedly, is the conflation of method with mind. He supposes that if the scientist or mathematician employs an objective method and pursues disinterested ends, that the mind so engaged must become objective and disinterested too. This is clearly not the case. One must play by the rules, but passionately by them; someone whose emotive system is switched off will hardly be able to think creatively.

  Nevertheless, the strategy of withdrawal was shrewd. Let the poet continue to compose; let the man, Valéry, love if he needed to; let him entertain confused ideas—marry, work, worry; he, the other Paul, would observe carefully, allowing the value of each enterprise to detach itself from its original aim and fasten instead to the successive acts which the undertaking may have required and then finally to reach for something principled and abstract which, if it were mastered, would render writing unnecessary: namely, the method of composition itself. To have the power, yet withhold its use; to be divine, and not create, is to possess a double strength. It is to say: I could if I would, and I can, so I won’t. It is also the ultimate in fastidious disdain.

  Just as someone in training may run, not to win, to defeat time, or eventually to cool off in the sweet breeze of applause, but to improve his wind and strengthen his muscles, so the mind may come to problems interested mainly in the results on itself of the exercise (I was told this myself, by liars, about Latin, and it is frequently said of crosswords and chess). So Valéry looked for the chief rewards of his thinking and “poetizing,” and found them in their effect upon himself.

  The difficulty is that one may strengthen one’s muscles or thicken one’s head as well by losing as winning; it is hard to become intrigued by the successive acts of a hack’s composition; quality dominates and determines everything; and it will not do to excuse yourself from that lonely, unromantic, even grubby struggle with the worst and weakest of yourself for the strength and excellence of the best of yourself by pretending, as Valéry invariably did, that he wasn’t a poet; that he came to poetry by accident and might, just as well, have done something else with his mind; that he regarded poetry’s arbitrary and useless forms as a few absurd hurdles to be leaped as gracefully as possible or altogether ignored; that, in any case, his works were merely exercises; that they were never finished; that it was the sheerest happenstance that they were published when they were and in the form they had, and that, in fact, the same was true of his plays, dialogues, and essays.

  They were simply called forth by occasions, he claimed, and composed upon command; they were on any old subject and tailored always for a special audience; furthermore they often had to meet some extremely silly requirements in order to come into existence at all—for example, the philosophical dialogue, “Eupalinos,” which had to be, for the purposes of an elegant book’s regimental design, exactly 115,800 letters long. Consequently nothing he did could be regarded as really polished, finished, or perfect—didn’t he say so all the time? Thus it wouldn’t do to be intense, serious, or terribly puffed, and Valéry seldom was. He was eloquent, graceful, jocular, always personal, easily distracted, disarmingly indirect (this amateur at everything), and he regarded the too solemnly ambitious with a certain scorn (tragic subjects? dear me, what bore!). No, he was merely, he maintained, a modest man of mind, a student of consciousness during, particularly, its early fumbling moments; he took a few notes … oh, he kept his notebooks the way some people keep cows—perhaps there would be a little milk.

  It would not do, except that it did do very well. These cavalier “English” attitudes soon outgrew pose and became fixed traits of character. After passing his critical night, Valéry did not give up poetry at once, nor did he leave for Aden or Abyssinia to run guns as Rimbaud had. Relieved of the burden of having to measure up to Mallarmé or, for that matter, to the very sensual, highly romantic poet in himself, and imagining that now his life was to follow a dedicated straight line as he felt Descartes’s had (even though, at this distance, we can see that it was to transcribe two great curves across the axes of poetry and prose: away, then toward, then away from poetry again); and taking as his model another omnivorous mind, Leonardo, who—he conveniently believed—had the same interest in method, the same drive toward perfection that resulted in similarly unfinished and fragmentary works, Valéry began keeping notebooks in earnest, rising at dawn every day like a priest at his observances to record the onset of consciousness, and devoting several hours then to the minutest study of his own mind.

  This scrutiny was as disciplined and severe, he often bragged, as the practice of poetry. It was coldly impersonal … wasn’t the calculus? And it began to soak up all his energies. Soon he would be silent. But in the eight years between the night of crisis and 1900, and before ceasing to publish for about a dozen years, Valéry wrote two important prose works: “Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci,” and “An Evening with Monsieur Teste,” the first expressing the theoretical aims of his new labors, the second revealing their psychological value.

  Odd, mannered, doctrinaire, yet exquisitely wrought, “Monsieur Teste,” from its famous opening line (“Stupidity is not my strong suit”), has seemed to its critics to show Valéry at his most arrogant and exasperating. Scarcely a fiction, it is scarcely anything else. Certainly it contains one of the more curious, though forthrightly named, characters in … in … what shall we say? fictosophy? “Mr. Head?” is that the right address? No, the wrong resonances. “Mr. Headstrong?” No, that’s out of balance. Taken from an old French form of tête (shell, pot, head), teste also means “will/witness/testament,” and thus combines, with only a little distortion, three qualities Valéry valued most at the time. In addition, teste refers to the testes cerebri, the optic lobes, which are called the testicles of the brain.

  Although Valéry treats him with characteristically amused and skeptical reservations, Monsieur Teste nevertheless represents the ideal man of mind. He is a monster, and is meant to be—an awesome, wholly individualized machine—yet in a sense he is also the sort of inhuman being Valéry aimed to become himself: a Narcissus of the best kind, a scientific observer of consciousness, a man untroubled by inroads of worldly trivia (remember Villier de Lisle-Adam’s symbolist slogan, “as for living, our servants will do that for us”?), who vacations in his head the way a Platonist finds his Florida in the realm of Forms. Like the good analytic philosopher he also resembles, Monsieur Teste complains constantly about the treacheries of words and the salad-forked tongue wagged so loosely by language (while his own name, perversely, is an excellent example of ambiguity well used). Teste has become almost pure potentiality, and a man in whom knowledge has finally made unnecessary the necessity to act.

  Watching himself, then, Valéry grew as comfortable with contradiction as the best Hegelian. He noticed that in time attitudes would turn themselves inside out like gloves, go from bug to butterfly. He could deprecate his labors, but he would also increasingly insist upon their worth: the notebooks were his great work and he would be remembered, if at all, because of them. He sought absolute clarity, he said, and in those thoughts which, like Monsieur Teste, he felt no need to record, he pursued his thinking through ruthlessly to the end. It is curious that many of those which he did put down, and indeed published later, pursue nothing through to the end, but reveal, instead, when they don’t read like diary entries or blotter jottings, that same love of aphorism, apothegm, and smart remark that is such a frequent failing of the French mind.

  It’s not that the notebooks aren’t fascinating or important (they have yet to be translated in their entirety, but portions of them are printed as
addenda to several volumes of the Bollingen Collected Works), it is simply that they do not come anywhere near making any methodological discovery. There are notes on love, life, literature, morals; on books read, people met, thoughts exchanged. In the actual notebooks, not the translated bits, there are cryptic lists, algebraic dithers and geometric doodles, maplike mental layouts, and occasionally a watercolor sketch: boats, windows, costumes, rooms.

  A poet of the utmost formality, an admirer of ceremony, of the rigors and several clarities of mathematics; in fact, in the early thirties, in the political sphere, a little too impressed by order, though at one time, too, one of the few not a philosopher or logician who understood how much the architecture of a thought—its form—is really in the richest sense the thought itself (as this is wholly the case in poetry and the other arts); Valéry was nevertheless suspicious of systems.

  He dismisses Descartes’s philosophy with the suggestion (which he could have borrowed from Nietzsche) that a thinker’s effort to make his ideas acceptable may lead him, inadvertently, to disguise his central thought and conceal from others the actual insecurities and confusions of his mind. Systems are like forms for writing letters: they insure that any content will be harmonious, temperate, and polite. It will be “professional.” It will be correct. Thus Valéry refused to regiment his thinking (which is the ego’s way of saying it is unable to), and even his essays are organized, mainly, on esthetic lines. His further reluctance to express what cannot be expressed gracefully leads him to seem to tease the reader, rather than, as Valéry desired, to be exceptionally honest with him.