essays

According to the introduction of Jackson Mathews, translator, Valery saw everything from the point of view of intellect. He was preoccupied with the pursuit of consciousness. The conscious mind was his obsessive center. Valery reports he had a reckless desire to understand. He says that writing requires a sacrifice of the intellect. In the novel MONSIEUR TESTE it is stated that a superior man is a man who has deceived himself. The character tries to seek out inner masterpieces amid the brilliance of published discoveries.

My introduction to this work occurred years ago when I was a college student. I half understood the French in which the class was conducted. I struggled. I surmised the work was brilliant through the lecturer's description. I now ratify that judgment. The work MONSIEUR TESTE is filled with arresting ideas. The narrator in the story seeks to know Monsieur Teste, to copy him. He is careful not to classify him among the mad.

Monsieur Teste says that he is at home in himself. In his room there is not a book in sight. There is a strong impression of the ordinary. Valery portrays a great refusal similar to my mind of that undertaken by Marcel Duchamp who in the latter years of his life refused to practice his art and only played chess. In fact there is a reference to chess in this work. Valery's work dates from 1896, predating, of course, the shape of the artistic career pursued by Marcel Duchamp.

Madame Teste describes her husband's moods as uncertain. She reports that their priest has compassion for Monsieur Teste, for a man so isolated. He says the Monsieur Teste's faces are innumerable. He believes that Monsieur Teste is cut off from both good and evil.

In his log book Monsieur Teste notes that he is not made for novels or plays. His goal seems to be an individual regulated by his own powers of thought. It is observed that in Paris the French have stored all of their ideas in one enclosure. In Paris there is a great concentration of literature, the sciences, the arts and politics. The chaos of a multitude of minds is tiring. "[S]uperiority is merely a solitude situated at the present limit of a species." Monsieur Teste is the man who thinks continually.

Up until a rather mature age Monsieur Teste is not aware of the singularity of his mind. He states he is not turned toward the world. His face is to the wall. An intellectual's end is a funeral march of thought. A snap shot from the notebooks yields the notion that admiration for genius is due to attributing to it the power of working miracles without fatigue. Another thought set out is that of trying to describe a man camped in his life.

It is asserted that there is no perfect correspondence between feelings and the verbal-conceptual system. Monsieur Teste thinks his mind is partly instinctive, partly scientific. His quickness of thought is in accord with absention from action he observes. Intelligence is the power of substitution. The mind moves by images. Images and change are inseparable. Education leads to including onself with others.

The most agonizing punishment to be imposed on anyone is to treat him with rigorous objectivity. The brain, too much occupied internally, deals brutally with external things. Monsieur Teste is a mystic and a physicist of self-awareness. The statement that the isolated eye amuses itself gives a flavor of the book. Notes are found at the back of the book.

This book gives us what paul Valery thinks, and what he thinks is the forgotten basis of many thoughts

This book contains some of the most inspiring prose written in this century, in a truly incomparable translation. it doesn't get much better than this. READ IT