Paul Valéry and the Poetics of Attention by Daniel Richard
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Paul Valéry and the Poetics of Attention By Daniel Richard Hoffmann A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in French in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Suzanne Guerlac, Chair Professor Debarati Sanyal Professor Harsha Ram Spring 2016 Abstract Paul Valéry and the Poetics of Attention by Daniel Richard Hoffmann Doctor of Philosophy in French University of California, Berkeley Professor Suzanne Guerlac, Chair This dissertation is about how we pay attention to poetry. Paul Valéry’s work in particular is famous for asking us as readers to attend to a kind of language that isn’t always resolvable into any one idea, any one meaning. His poems speak, though that speaking doesn’t always give way to a something-said. In this project, I ask— if poetry falls shy of what it stands to say, what does it mean to hear it? What is this listening that falls so beautifully shy of what we stand to hear, and meaningfully so? Over four central chapters, I explore what it looks like to attend to what we cannot resolve: be it the purely possible, the liminal, or the ever-emergent. Attention, I argue, takes many shapes: waiting, listening, weariness, even sleep. I show that these forms of attention constitute the experiential flipside of Valéry’s purely formal poetic language. Indeed by entering his poetics from the standpoint of embodied experience, we realize that the unresolvedness of his work is not synonymous with the difficulty of its less- than-representational language. As a whole, then, this project countervails the widespread tendency to see Valéry’s work as a mere harbinger of the 20th-century’s preoccupation with the procedures of language, an approach that so often elides the specificity of the poet’s relationship to the sensual world of lived experience. 1 For my parents i LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 1. Examples of hodographs. 11 2. Gustave Courbet. La fileuse endormie. 1853. 54 3. Gustave Courbet. La fileuse endormie (detail). 1853. 55 4. James McNeill Whistler. Nocturne: Grey and Silver. 1873. 71 5. Étienne-Jules Marey. Locomotion. 1891. 81 ii I Introduction “… as a prelude holds and holds.” - Wallace Stevens Anguish Valéry’s Idée fixe (1932) opens onto a narrator beleaguered by anguish. “J’étais en proie à de grands tourments,” it begins.1 How strange that something as immaterial as our thoughts should be capable of afflicting us somatically, he thinks. They’re just ideas, and yet he finds himself unable to escape their uncompromising somatic reality. The trouble with vanquishing these thoughts shares something with the trouble of ideas in general. The irony of the title—Idée fixe—is that the narrator doesn’t believe there’s any such thing as a fixed, or stable idea. “Idée fixe!” the narrator declares, “j’ai horreur de ce terme. Quelle qu’elle soit, une pensée qui se fixe prend les caractères d’une hypnose et devient, dans le langage logique, une idole.” 2 Contrary to what we conventionally understand by the term, for Valéry, ideas are not stable conceptual entities, but a mode of change. Think of them as a form of movement, he tells us, the very motion of a transformation—they’re an event, “une idée-événement.”3 When we arrest this motion, or event of the mind into a fixed “idea,” we falsify it. We become hypnotized, as though by an ‘idol,’ for anything that can be circumscribed with such fixity is no idea at all. The idol is always false.4 The narrator’s idée fixe, then, is the fact that there is no such thing as an idée fixe. He’s transfixed (obsessed, and therefore anguished) by what fundamentally isn’t fixed. He’s gripped, in other words, by something that he can’t seem to grasp.5 How is the narrator meant to relate to his anguish, then? If thoughts are a form of motion, we might reason, how are we said to have them? What is this strange verb of possession that links us experientially to what we can’t quite define? Woefully the narrator makes several attempts to escape this conundrum altogether. He undertakes elaborate and difficult mental exercises, hoping that by immersing himself in his research, by pushing deeper into speculation, that his anguish would simply go unnoticed. “Approfondi[r] pour ne pas voir,” he says, an attempt to hide 1 Œuvres II. Paris: Gallimard, 1957. p. 196. 2 Ibid., p. 207. 3 Ibid. 4 Indeed it’s not the luster of the golden calf that captivates; it’s the radiant fixity of its embodiment—that the boundless godhead should know so miraculously finite a form. 5 What interests Valéry in this dialogue, as well as in so much of his work, is the fugaciousness of thought, its movements, its emergence as such. We should note that this interest aligns with the larger preoccupations of his intellectual life—not what the mind produces, but the intricacies of its procedures, the sheer range and force of its possibilities. iii the forest in the trees.6 Work does little to relieve his mind, however; “la substitution ne se faisait pas.”7 He decides to take a more conventional approach to the problem, to move about, to meander through the city, and by so doing, perhaps to flee his anguish on foot. And yet, like work, walking allows him neither to relate to his anguish nor to truly escape it. If anything, he discovers, walking lends it a rhythm, and in turn, an added reality to its already troublingly somatic existence. “La loi des pas égaux se plie à tous les délires,” he laments.8 Eventually, and here we arrive at both the heart of Idée fixe and the point of entry into the present study, the narrator follows a road that leads to the sea. Along the coast, there in the distance, is a patch of uneven rocks that parallels the line of the horizon. With a quickened step, and with his eyes turned upward into the moving blooms of color, unfolding in the sky, he descends into what he describes as the perfect disorder of those rocks, “le désordre parfait de leurs formes de rupture et de leurs bizarres équilibres.”9 The disordered angles and dispositions of the landscape seem at first merely an extension of his state of mind, as if arriving at respite from his affliction meant finding an image of its disorder in the world around him.10 What the rocks provide by way of relief, however, exceeds a strangely sympathetic image of his own condition. In ways that work and movement on flat ground could not, the rocks allow him to attend to his affliction in all its unresolvability, to come to rest within its very inconstancy. The rocks upset any attempt to lay out those movements in advance. They disrupt walking as a measured equilibration of one’s steps with the fixed and therefore predictable surface of the ground, providing the narrator with a way of inhabiting a physical position within the landscape that is also (and at the same time) endlessly “éventuel,” that is, endlessly emergent. By way of the rocky surface, he enters into a figurative while material relationship to the abstract mental anguish that afflicts him: a relationship which (as though in chiaroscuro) allows the materiality of the world to blend seamlessly into the endlessly forthcoming nature of thought. Here, ideas are delivered from the inhospitality attendant on the immaterial flux that paradoxically defines them, and his anguish, in turn, proves not merely a passive state of affliction, but a form of emergence—a mode of change—he can truly inhabit, even as it eludes his grasp. The band of rocks that he traverses, in its perfect disorder, is the argument that there’s a place to be found, even in the “éventuel.” Finding Place As it turns out, this has everything to do with poetry. The American poet Billy Collins once wrote about his experience of teaching poetry to his students: “All they want to do / 6 Ibid., p. 197. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., p. 198. 9 Ibid., p. 1174. 10 By finding our troubles reflected back at us, often we can relate to them with understanding, rather than feeling them afflict us, unseen and unresolved, from within. iv Is tie the poem to a chair with rope / And torture a confession out of it,” he jokes (ll. 12- 14).11 I imagine the image would have appealed to someone like Valéry, to someone for whom ideas, be they poetic or otherwise, simply won’t sit still. Along with Collins, we can hear Valéry despairing of the impulse to compress, or bind our ideas into tidy units of meaning, as if when properly tied down, an idea (or a poem) would speak plainly, confessing its meaning to the reader. In his poem, Collins is reminding his students that there are other ways of relating to poetry, ways more in keeping with poetry itself. We can hold it up to the light “like a color slide,” or “press an ear against its hive,” he says (ll. 8; 10). It may behave like something we feel inclined to tie down and sweat into confession, but there’s little use in trying to get it to confess something it doesn’t really know. Collins is talking about finding a way to be with the poem, rather than raging against it. In his own way, and with the context of poetry, he speaks to the condition and challenge of Valéry’s narrator who, having conceded to the inconstant and ever- emergent nature of thought (to its definitional lack of fixity), discovers a way not of resolving this flux into something stable, but a way of attending to it in and as it escapes his attention.