Valery: the poetics and phenomenology of night.(Paul Valery)(Critical essay)

Publication: The Modern Language Review

Publication Date: 01-JUL-07

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The thematic of night engages many of Valery's mythical poetic figurations, such as Teste, the Parque, and Narcissus. This article examines the nocturnal experience, focusing particularly on the poetico-ontological and phenomenological dimension in the context of Valery's private writings in the Cahiers. Tracing the genesis of this thematic from the early poetic work and the philosophical essays, it sheds new light on the perception of night that filters through from the scientific and epistemological investigations that underpin Valery's system of self-science in the Cahiers.

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Valery, the poet traditionally associated with dawn and the archetypal Mediterranean landscape of 'Midi le juste' (1) does not automatically spring to mind in the context of nocturnal experience and sensibility. Night, the solar, psychological, and imaginary antipode of high noon, which appears in the writer's celebrated verse poetry and engages several of his essential mythic figurations, such as Teste, Narcissus, and the Parque, is a thematic to which he devoted very considerable reflection. Valeryan criticism has to date viewed the nocturnal function from a poetic and metaphysical perspective, focusing primarily on the mysticism and symbolism of darkness. (2) One important dimension that has been largely overlooked, however, is the phenomenological perception and consciousness of night and darkness, coupled with their strong poetico-ontological overtones, which Valery expressed alternately in prose texts and scientifically oriented reflections across the Cahiers. (3) It is by delving into the vast corpus of these private notebooks, ritually kept every morning for over fifty years from 1894 to 1945, that the interrelation between published and unpublished perspectives can be equitably and comprehensively ascertained. (4) Using a comparative approach, this article intends to give a more complete picture of this thematic by revisiting previously examined dimensions and revealing how the private empirical and perceptual basis underpins and indeed informs its poetic articulation.

It is important first of all to recall the early period in which the thematic of night has its genesis. The physical and material writing context, in conjunction with the themes of waiting, perception, and self-observation in the dark or dimly lit room, so commonly evoked in the Cahiers, can be traced back to Valery's earliest poetry. As a precursor to some of these major themes, numerous texts in the collection of poems Une chambre conjecturale, (5) such as 'Je regarde souvent la nuit constellee' or 'Minuit', detail the poetics of night, ranging from consciousness of contiguous space around the writer to the external nocturnal realm. This thematic also significantly pre-dates the illuminative and mythically remembered 'Nuit de Genes' of 1892 (6) (later referred to as the 'Nuit glacee, archi-pure' (C, VII, 575)) that had a decisive impact on the twenty-one-year-old Valery, notably initiating the Cahiers and the famous 'System' that he devised in the hope of finding a unitary and scientifically expressed paradigm ('la Geometrie du Tout' (C, X, 106)) of mental functioning.

Before Valery embarked on this veritable ascesis of pure thought, pursued through a rigorous regime of analysis and writing, the sensibility of the young aesthete of the late 1880s and early 1890s was profoundly influenced by a mythical and mystico-religious poetic that placed him very much in continuity with the Symbolist tradition, particularly with his predecessor Mallarme, whose work he discovered in 1889 and whom he came to admire above all writers. (7) While both poets gravitated towards opposite ends of the solar cycle, (8) it is not surprising that the Mallarmean metaphysical symbolism of night left its mark on much of Valery's earliest prose: the posthumously published Conte vraisemblable (OC, II, 1417-21), the verse poetry of the Album de vers anciens, (9) Douze poemes (such as 'Odelette nocturne' GEC, 1, 1699-70)), and a whole host of poems written between 1887 and 1890. (10)

Mallarme's Coup de des, which Valery was the first person to see, immediately comes to mind as a representation of the celestial universe by way of what Valery called a 'spectacle ideographique' (OC, 1, 627) or the typographical disposition of writing on the white page that he endeavoured to elevate to the 'puissance du ciel etoile' (OC, 1, 626). (11) Henceforth, the sight of the night sky is inextricably linked to Mallarme's celebrated poems, as the late text 'Station sur la terrasse' from the Cahiers clearly illustrates: 'Et scintillent dans le ciel de nuit poetique les constellations, seulement soumises aux lois de l'Univers du Langage, qui se levent, se couchent, reparaitront ... La, Herodiade, l'Apes-midi, le Tombeau de Gautier' (C, XXV, 618). During a visit to Mallarme's residence at Valvins in the summer of 1897 (the last time the two poets met), Valery recalls with great affection their nocturnal walk under the canopy of the constellations ('l'innombrable ciel de juillet enfermant toutes choses dans un groupa etincelant d'autres mondes' (OC, 1, 625)) in which the Symbolist poet saw not a Kantian 'Loi Morale' but 'l'Imperatif d'une poesie: une Poetique': 'nous marchions, fumeurs obscurs, au milieu du Serpent, du Cygne, de l'Aigle, de la Lyre--il me semblait maintenant d'etre pris dans le texte meme de l'univers silencieux' (OC, 1, 626).

To comprehend fully the psycho-poetic and phenomenological dimension of night, it is instructive to place it in the broader philosophical context to which it is inherently linked. In this respect, one cannot overlook the impact of the youthful reading of the lyrical cosmogony in Edgar Allen Poe's Eureka that Valery discovered around 1891-92. Through his epistemological theory and system of 'Consistency', (12) the American poet pursued an ambitious study of the origin and development of the physical and metaphysical universe. However, Valery rejected not only Poe's grandiose cosmogonic vision, according to which the universe formed by the explosion of the primordial particle (remarkably prophetic of Big Bang theory), but also the notion of the terrifying cosmic space-time to which he refers in the essay 'Au sujet d'Eureka' ('l'idee d'un neant est neant [...] c'est une feinte de l'esprit qui se donne une comedie de silence et de tenebres parfaites' (OC, 1, 863)). What is interesting is the distinction made further on in this essay between the perception of the immediate visual world of sensation ('premier Univers' (OC, 1, 865)) and that of the invisible system of the 'univers total' that the senses reveal, which is defined as 'un immense systeme cache [qui] supporte, penetre, alimente et resorbe chaque element actuel et sensible de ma duree, le presse d'etre et de se resoudre' (OC, 1, p. 865). Valery posits that the 'primary' form of the universe is that of the sensibility, perceived as a variable and instantaneous presence--termed 'une sphere de simultaneite' (OC, 1, 865)--constantly linked to the movement of self as centre. In this respect, Valery's interrogation of sensation and perception has certainly much more in common with the phenomenology later conceived by Merleau-Ponty than it does with the philosophy of Kant and Pascal, to whom he regularly refers. (13)

After Valery abandoned the irrationality of Symbolist poetics in favour of a heuristic method and practice of self-science, the mind-cosmos analogy would later be transposed into different intellectual contexts. The poetico-philosophical motif of the starry night was to reverberate long after, emerging not only in the poetic imagination that gave it voice in many of the Poemes et PPA, (14) the prelude of La Feune Parque, the uncompleted finale of 'Fragments du Narcisse', various poems of Charmes, and the third act of the melodrama Semiramis, but also in the 1923 essay on Pascal, entitled 'Variation sur une pensee', and in the Cahiers. Part of Valery's lifelong polemic with Pascal essentially lay with the troubling metaphysical questioning that he perceived in the Pensees. If, as Judith Robinson demonstrated in her celebrated essay 'Valery, Pascal et la censure de la metaphysique', the sight of the...

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