Cahiers/Notebooks (review)

While largely consecrated by the publication of La Jeune Parque in 1917, Valéry’s notoriety in his own day and beyond was as much intellectual as poetic, sustained as it was by the legendary but invisible mass of the Cahiers, only fragments of which appeared in his lifetime. So, in 1952, Canguilhem quotes one of these in support of his non-mechanistic theory of ‘le vivant’: ‘Si la vie avait un but, elle ne serait plus la vie’ (La Connaissance de la vie (Paris: Vrin, 1993), p. 150). So, rather later, Deleuze, in Logique du sens: ‘Paul Valéry eut un mot profond: le plus profond, c’est la peau’ (Paris: Minuit, 1969, p. 20). So Calvino, for whom Valéry’s ‘intelligence’, not only of poetry but also of science and philosophy, represents an ideal state for literature at the end of the last millennium, one that ‘has absorbed the taste for mental orderliness and exactitude’ (Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 118). But the reality of the thinking to which such fragments relate proves to be more challenging to grasp than deceptively vatic statements like these might suggest. The paradox of the Cahiers is that anything approaching the full disclosure of their scale, range, and multiplicity shows that, however exemplary an intellectual model Valéry is, he remains a strange and sometimes intractable one.

The Cahiers, as is well known, resulted from fifty years of very singular labour, undertaken in the early hours of practically every morning. On his deathbed, Valéry acknowledged just how exclusive was the outcome, if not the project: ‘I know ... 1.mymind sufficiently [. . .] 2. I know, too, my heart’(I, 420). And while he was sure of the value of what he had discovered, this would not, he conceded, be ‘easy to decipher’ (adding a characteristic devaluation of any idea of a work as the issue of thought: ‘Never mind’ (ibid.)).

Soon after Valéry’s death, steps were taken to preserve the notebooks. A microfilm was made, with a view to securing the agreement of Gallimard to publish a complete edition. This project was soon abandoned, and the Cahiers were then published in facsimile by the CNRS between 1957 and 1961 in twenty-nine volumes. A critical edition, devoted to the first twenty years of the notebooks, was begun in 1987 (see French Studies [FS], 43 (1989), 226–27) and is now near completion. The CNRS facsimile remains the sole near-complete resource available to scholars, and all subsequent editions, including this one, include cross-references to it. And even now, after fifty years of editorial work, the manuscript continues to offer the possibility, however daunting, of a direct engagement with Valéry’s thinking, as substantial parts of it are being made available in Gallica, with a searchable online database linked again to the CNRS edition also being mooted.

The present translation is based on the selected Pléiade edition published in the 1970s by Judith Robinson-Valéry (see FS, 28 (1974), 104–06, and 34 (1980), 214–15), which followed one of Valéry’s own classifications of the accumulated notes. Presented in five rather than two volumes, it differs from the Pléiade in its arrangement of the categories that Valéry developed from 1921, using carefully elaborated headings and subheadings. So, the first volume focuses on Valéry’s self-examination (including ‘Ego’, ‘Eros’, among other rubrics); the second is creative and literary in focus; the third deals with the analysis of mind (under such headings as ‘Psychology’, ‘Attention’, ‘Memory’, ‘Dream’); the fourth assembles material largely on scientific themes; the fifth, finally, is the most theoretical in orientation, drawing on Valéry’s sustained efforts to elaborate a System — to quote one of his own many formulations: ‘I am looking for the most consistent and most convenient way of expressing the constant transformations of consciousness’ (V, 41). In other ways too, this new edition...