Valéry—Modernist Myths and (Anti) Modernist States of Mind

In a short text entitled "Questions de Poesie," preface to the Anthologie des Poetes de la NRF and published in the review in 1935, Valery mocks those who waste their time on terms such as Classicism, Romanticism, and Symbolism. These are terms "faits pour ... donner pretexte a des dissentiments infinis," since no one can agree upon their meaning. They are classifications, Valery concludes, that "n'enseignent ni a lire, ni a ecrire ... detournent et dispensent l'esprit des problemes reels de l'art; cependant qu'elles permettent a bien des aveugles de discourir de la couleur." (1) It is hard not to feel like a blind person holding forth about color when it comes to the question of modernism in the context of the NRF. For the NRF discusses Classicism, Romanticism, and Symbolism at length over the years as it positions itself strategically with respect to the contemporary world of letters and the horizon of modern art. Its analyses clearly reveal that these apparently meaningless terms are freighted with political values, and that the valences that attach to them shift over time, taking on different colorations according to the ideological forces at play in their deployment. Valery, however, will have none of this. In "Questions de Poesie" he moves resolutely on to what he calls the real problems of art: questions of language, or, as he puts it, "variation[s] de la langue qui la rend [ent] insensiblement tout autre." (2) What sensations is the poeta designed to produce? What operations of language enable it to do so? In other words, one must direct one's attention to questions of form, "L'unite et la consistence de la forme," (3) where form is construed in terms of specific operations of language. (4) What is a sentence? What is verse? What is a consonant? These are the pertinent questions, not what is Classicism, or Romanticism, or Symbolism? For the only difference that really counts, the difference between poetry and prose, depends upon them. The irony, of course, is that this essay that mocks conventional literary historical and esthetic categories, establishes the conventions of yet another category: Modernism. Valery's poetics becomes explicitly and canonically modernist thanks, in part, to the commentary of that preeminently modernist poet, T.S. Eliot. In "From Poe to Valery" (5) Eliot presents a now familiar genealogy of French modernist poetry that places Valery at the culmination of this development. Eliot traces French modernism back to a latent force in the writing of E.A. Poe, one indiscernible to Anglo American readers, but progressively revealed to, and by, three generations of French poets represented by Baudelaire, Mallarme and, above all, Valery. He identifies French modernism with poesie pure, the conviction that a poeta "does not say something--it is something," (6) a formula that rephrases the fundamental discontinuity Valery insists on between poetry and prose. Prose says something, whereas poetry just is something. Eliot identifies two principal features of modernist poetics that refer us to issues of form: self-consciousness (or self-referentiality) and autonomy (or awareness and concern for language). Eliot affirms that both are championed by Valery, "the most self-conscious of ali poets." (7) For Eliot, Valery not only epitomizes the modernist poet, be represents the culmination of modernism. From Eliot's point of view Valery took modernist poetics as far as it could go. The death of Valery in 1945 marks the demise of modernism itself. "I do not believe that this esthetic can be any help to later poets," (8) be affirms. From his perspective this poetic self-consciousness, this extreme awareness of, and concern for, language "must ultimately break down." (9) There will inevitably be an "irresistible revulsion of humanity," he argues, unwilling to "carry any longer the burden of modern civilization." (10) Eliot's myth of modernism (and its drama) is compatible with other important modernist myths, most notably those of Adorno and Clement Greenberg, both of which define Modernism against Romanticism, on the one hand, and against Realism (or the project of representation) on the other. …