Paul Valery and the Dark Night of the Soul

Abstract

Most readers of Paul Valéry would probably agree in finding him one of the least mystical of writers. This is certainly the impression that is conveyed by the prose works. The early compositions describing Monsieur Teste, that embodiment of abstract reason and logic; those devoted to Leonardo da Vinci and his triumphs in the domain of the practical; the later dialogues: Eupalinos, L'Ame et la Danse, Arbres, with their aura of Platonic dialectic; the various published collections of thoughts and impressions: all these writings seem to reflect a sceptical, outward-directed mind, a mind whose central tendencies are apparently most clearly represented by the essay attacking Pascal and by those in praise of Descartes. The same thing may be said of the Cahiers, the notebooks in which, from 1894 until his death, over eighteen of the twenty years of his "period of silence" and the fourteen years of his return to poetry, Valéry recorded day by day the vicissitudes of his intellectual life: the method here is abstract-critical; the vast majority of the notations consist of often highly mathematical attempts at analysis of the modes of conscious thought—"J'aime la pensée véritable comme d'autres aiment le nu, qu'ils dessineraient toute leur vie," he tells us—a smaller number deal with literary matters, mostly with the technical and theoretical aspects of poetic composition; relatively few of the entries reflect anything of a subjective-emotional, much less of a mystical tendency. Under these circumstances it is surprising that more curiosity has not been aroused by the unexpected interest that Valéry evinced in the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic, Saint John of the Cross.