Valéry’s Meta-formalism

Valéry’s Meta-formalism Steven Winspur T HERE IS a WIDESPREAD BELIEF that Paul Valéry’s poems and essays epitomize formalism’s major weakness—to remain cut off from what we sometimes call “ the real world.” 1 “ La vraie malédiction en ce monde,” declares Yves Bonnefoy in an essay on Valéry’s poetry, “ est d’y être réduit au jeu.” 2Valéry, it would seem, is one of the main players in this game. To show just how wrong such a view is—not only for an understanding of Valéry but of formalists in general—I shall discuss in turn three propositions that underpin the stan­ dard interpretation of Valéry’s formalism. The first of these contends that poetic language, unlike everyday speech, does not have the function of telling bits of information. It is “ intransitive,” as Valéry called it—which is why the standard form of the novel, modelled on such openings as “ La marquise sortit à cinq heures. . . seemed so worthless to him. Literary language becomes effective only when it gives up any transitive or representational role. Or, as he wrote in his volume Tel Quel, “ Tandis que l’intérêt des écrits en prose est comme hors d’eux-mêmes et naît de la consommation du texte —l’intérêt des poèmes ne les quitte pas ni ne peut s’en éloigner.” 3 The second commonplace culled from Valéry maintains that the necessity of a poem is purely internal to the poem itself, with the result that the poem seems to be cut off from any “ world” beyond its confines. To support this point one might quote Valéry’s dictum that “ Un beau vers renaît indéfiniment de ses cendres, il redevient—comme l’effet de son effet—cause harmonique de soi-même” (O I, 1510), or else his com­ ment on Mallarmé’s poetry that “ le ‘fond’ n’est plus cause de la forme: il en est l’un des effets” (O I, 710). The third, and final, commonplace is this: whereas Valéry does believe in such a thing as poetic necessity, it is in fact very limited in scope, since poetry is essentially an exercise built upon arbitrary rules: “ Les trois meilleurs exercices,” wrote the poet in his Cahiers, “—les seuls peut-être pour une intelligence sont: de faire des vers; de cultiver les mathématiques; le dessin. Ces trois activités,” he continued, “ sont par excellence exercices—c’est-à-dire des actes non nécessaires à conditions imposées, arbitraires, et rigoureuses.” 4 Vol. XXXI, No. 2 39 L ’E spr it C réa te u r I. If we start with the first of these propositions, namely that there is a fundamental opposition between poetic and prosaic language, we find that on closer inspection Valéry is establishing a much more subtle dis­ tinction. While it may be true that prose exhausts itself in its pragmatic goal (i.e., the transitive communication of its message: e.g., “ Pass me the salt!” ), it is not the case that poetry is cut off from pragmatic goals. For as most readers of Valéry have pointed out, the term “ Charmes,” which the poet used as a title for his second volume of poems, designates precisely this sort of pragmatic effect on the reader—it is the enchant­ ment produced by poetry itself. Indeed his 1942 re-edition of the volume made the necessary connection between poetry and its goal quite explicit —“ Charmes: c’est-à-dire Poèmes.” The enchantment cannot be sepa­ rated from the poem that produces it; the goal of the text cannot be cut off from the text itself, and vice versa, so that poetry becomes defined by its effects. Here we find the true difference between prose and poetry, since as Valéry wrote in Tel Quel, “ Est prose l’écrit qui a un but exprima­ ble par un autre écrit” (O II, 555), whereas the goal of a poem cannot be separated from the poem itself and translated into another form. I repeat the quotation I gave earlier: “ Tandis que l’intérêt...