Re-Presenting Paul Valery's Monsieur Teste

Valery’s Gedanken Experiment

Monsieur Teste, Valéry’s character famous for his social withdrawal and rigorous intellectual life, made his first appearance in the world in 1896 in an analytical near-narrative called La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste. ¹ Published in the second issue of Le Centaure, a “Recueil trimestriel de Littérature et d’Art” under the direction of André Gide and others, this Cartesian meditation was Valéry’s youthful reach for an intriguing, uncompromising ideal. Since the journal itself survived only two trimesters, one could say that in the death of the ephemeral Centaure the mythological hero of thought was born.

Over the next fifty years, Valéry returned again and again to Teste, trying to understand, explain, and give new births to the figure that had happened upon him in his youth. He made new editions and supplementary texts—we now speak of the Teste cycle—and masses of notes, but no definitive inscription; at the time of his death in 1945, he was once again gathering material for another incarnation. Monsieur Teste as he left it is a difficult, heterogeneous mixture of literary description, narrative, poetry, letters, testimonials, notes, and philosophical fragments. Although Poe and Huysmans are clear intellectual precursors, the assortment is unassimilable to any clear-cut literary tradition. A kind of inverse or anti-Candide, it represents, not so much a work of fiction as an arguably unsuccessful but unarguably tenacious intellectual attempt to grasp and portray the activities of a consciousness unlike any other.

Valéry tried indefatigably and from many angles to imagine what it must be like to live with unimaginably powerful abilities to think and perceive. Many of his notes are quick, concerned, hypothetical, revelatory, hopeful, or diagnostic, like a doctor’s or a scientist’s, while others are ideological, precise, and conclusive, like a confident positivist’s. The definitive-sounding notes are destabilized by the speculative ones, however, and ultimately the difficult philosophico-literary task to which they all belong led to the paradox Valéry noted in his 1925 introduction to the second English edition: Teste’s realistic yet fictive existence depended on the fact that he could never actually come into being. A “character [type] of this kind,” he wrote, “could not survive in reality for more than a few quarters of an hour” (5). ²

Teste’s de jure impossibility piques our interest and his banal surroundings heighten the effect. He goes to the theater, speaks French, eats in the rue Vivienne, has a job, friends, a wife . . . but of course, wink, he could never exist. He is not a character but a conundrum or Gedanken experiment: “I say that the problem of that existence and its duration is enough to give it a sort of life” (5). Maurice Blanchot states the paradox this way:

Monsieur Teste is not impossible because he comprises more abilities than is possible for a man, but because these abilities suppose the reality of the world where they are realized with all their consequences, and the distancing of the world to which they want to remain foreign.

(275)

Virtual and fantastic, Teste is a dragon in a Zola novel. But what is essential, and what accidental, in the “impossibility” he represents? Is he a Billy Budd, this time intellectual rather than moral, unfit to inhabit a world for which he is too pure? If so, then the text could function romantically as an allegory of how reason has been shackled, enslaved, or rendered ineffective by the bourgeois, the technological, the capitalist, or some other variation on the modern age. I will put aside such theses—they have been well treated by Lucien Goldmann and others—because in my view Teste is neither a voluntary nor an involuntary exile from a world he neither rejects nor is rejected by. His withdrawal, such as it is, cannot be understood as a problem of society vs. the self, because the problem of his being in the world at all is a theoretically primary question which was (is) never resolved by Valéry or the text.

Counterexamples to...