Les 'Cahiers 1894–1914' de Paul Valéry en édition intégrale: historique, enjeux, avenir (review)

As its subtitle indicates, the triple objective of this slim volume of essays is to take stock of the publication of the first twenty years of Valéry's Cahiers, to shed light on the principal questions and issues encountered therein, and to chart the future course of the project. The timing of this critical text is opportune given that it has been twenty years since the inception of the scholarly typographical version of the Cahiers, a research venture which has to date produced ten volumes in the 'collection blanche' by Gallimard, with two more to appear to complete the present series. The challenge of the future lies essentially in the vertiginous scale of Valéry's Cahiers: the publication of the first twenty years will only cover four of the twenty-nine volumes (27,000 pages in all) comprising the CNRS edition. The following thirty-one years (to the year of Valéry's death in 1945) fill the remaining twenty-five volumes; the series may one day be completed in digital form. This informative book is the summation of the long-standing work of the most eminent international Valéry specialists at the Institut des Textes et Manuscrits Modernes — they themselves being the subject of one of the eight critical studies. This collection can be divided into two principal strands of investigation. The first four essays are of an explanatory nature outlining the accomplishments hitherto and attending to pragmatic concerns. The opening essay by Nicole Celeyrette-Pietri, who has been at the helm of the research enterprise since the 1980s, gives an illuminative synthetic review of the publication endeavour and of Valéry's intellectual universe that encompassed the full range of human sciences. The following studies include an overview of the international and trans-disciplinary dimension of the research team, an account of the website and a synopsis by Pickering (co-director of the Valéry group) of the critical reception of the series (accompanied by an annexe of sixteen extracts). The second set of essays centres on the mode of writing in the Cahierswhere the apparent disorder of the reservoir of thoughts and ideas that constitute the Cahiersbelies a principle of coherence and order. Valéry's epistemological science was occasionally transposed into the poetry, as the analysis of the mathematical substratum that lies beneath the poem 'L'Abeille' demonstrates. Two key essays examine the hermeneutics of the emergence of the poet between 1910 and 1913, and the increasing poetic fermentation at work in the Cahiers. The years just before the outbreak of the Great War significantly witness the first stirrings of the poetic voice that gave rise to the genesis of Valéry's great poem, La Jeune Parque. What this text achieves remarkably well is to effectively debunk the myth of Valéry's twenty-year 'grand silence' and expose this pivotal period of ascetic withdrawal that was devoted to his 'System' in the private space of the Cahiers. This work constitutes an indispensable academic tool for a reader wishing to get an insight into the research spanning the early period of Valéry's Cahiersin all their multifaceted intellectual complexity and diversity.