object:Valery as Symbol
class:Essay
class:chapter
author class:Jorge Luis Borges
Valéry as Symbol
B
ringing together the names of Whitman and Paul Valéry is, at first
glance, an arbitrary and (what is worse) inept operation. Valéry is a
symbol of infinite dexterities but, at the same time, of infinite scruples;
Whitman, of an almost incoherent but titanic vocation of felicity; Valéry
illustriously personifies the labyrinths of the mind; Whitman, the
interjections of the body. Valéry is a symbol of Europe and of its delicate
twilight; Whitman, of the morning in America. The whole realm of literature
would not seem to admit two more antagonistic applications of the word
"poet." One fact, however, links them: the work of both is less valuable as
poetry than it is as the sign of an exemplary poet created by that work. Thus,
the English poet Lascelles Abercrombie could praise Whitman for having
created "from the richness of his noble experience that vivid and personal
figure which is one of the few really great things of the poetry of our time:
the figure of himself." The dictum is vague and superlative, but it has the
singular virtue of not identifying Whitman, the man of letters and devote of
Tennyson, with Whitman, the semidivine hero of Leaves of Grass. The
distinction is valid; Whitman wrote his rhapsodies in terms of an imaginary
identity, formed partly of himself, partly of each of his readers. Hence the
discrepancies that have exasperated the critics; hence the custom of dating
his poems in places where he had never been; hence the fact that, on one
page of his work, he was born in the Southern states, and on another (and
also in reality) on Long Island.
One of the purposes of Whitman's compositions is to define a possible
man—Walt Whitman—of unlimited and negligent felicity; no less
hyperbolic, no less illusory, is the man defined by Valéry's compositions.
The latter does not magnify, as does the former, the human faculties of
philanthropy, fervor and joy; he magnifies the virtues of the mind. Valéry
created Edmond Teste; this character would be one of the myths of our time
if intimately we did not all judge him to be a mere Doppelgänger of Valéry.
For us, Valéry is Edmond Teste. In other words, Valéry is a derivation of
Poe's Chevalier Dupin and the inconceivable God of the theologians. Which
fact, plausibly enough, is not true.
Yeats, Rilke and Eliot have written verses more memorable than those
of Valéry; Joyce and Stefan George have effected more profound
188modifications in their instrument (perhaps French is less modifiable than
English and German); but behind the work of these eminent artificers there
is no personality comparable to Valéry's. The circumstance that that
personality is, in some way, a projection of the work does not diminish this
fact. To propose lucidity to men in a lowly romantic era, in the melancholy
era of Nazism and dialectical materialism, of the augurs of Freudianism and
the merchants of surréalisms, such is the noble mission Valéry fulfilled (and
continues to fulfill).
Paul Valéry leaves us at his death the symbol of a man infinitely
sensitive to every phenomenon and for whom every phenomenon is a
stimulus capable of provoking an infinite series of thoughts. Of a man who
transcends the differential traits of the self and of whom we can say, as
William Hazlitt did of Shakespeare, "he is nothing in himself." Of a man
whose admirable texts do not exhaust, do not even define, their all-
embracing possibilities. Of a man who, in an age that worships the chaotic
idols of blood, earth and passion, preferred always the lucid pleasures of
thought and the secret adventures of order.
Translated by J.E.I.
book class:Labyrinths
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