Val�ry’s Notebooks
Thanks to The Literary Saloon for linking to Joseph Epstein�s essay on Paul Val�ry, in the otherwise smelly New Criterion. (One imagines John Gross has shat himself he stinks so badly). When I was at university, I was fascinated with the library’s collection of twelve phonebook-sized volumes of Val�ry’s Cahiers, bound in grey, prickly cloth (click on the link to Cahiers to see one - damned Frames site!). They were facsimiles of his notebooks. Epstein tells us he worked on them between five and six in the morning; he got through the time using coffee and cigarettes. He considered this his important work, yet they were never published in his lifetime; perhaps he never intended them to be. Now, anyway, they’re available in English. Maybe one day I’ll get to read them. Maybe too, I’ll discover why I was so fascinated.
Meanwhile, it gratifies me to learn of Val�ry�s long bouts of poetic silence. He became a great and famous author anyway. It reminds me of Blanchot’s essay on the late 18th Century writer Joseph Joubert (in The Book to Come, my current reading). It is subtitled: “Author Without a Book, Writer Without Writing”. Joubert never wrote a book. He didn’t publish anything. Yet he did write abstract fragments. Blanchot makes the case that Joubert was right not to have completed a Work. Or rather, it was inevitable; necessary.
“He was thus one of the first entirely modern writers, preferring the centre over the sphere, sacrificing results for the discovery of their conditions, not writing in order to add one book to another, but to make himself master of the point whence all books seemed to come, which, once found, would exempt him from writing them.”
When one reads that word “modern” one realises its time has passed. We are no longer modern. Writers are commanded, more strongly than ever, to “add one book to another”. In this week�s TLS (not online), the young fogey DJ Taylor makes fun of Graham Swift for taking so long between novels. What makes Blanchot unique, and worth reading above those at present given several thousand words in major literary journals, is the way he presents this demand as a means of avoiding literature, of destroying the conditions in which it might live. I don’t want to pr�cis the essay because, to be honest, I don’t feel able. Yet perhaps this is also what Blanchot � and Val�ry � teaches us; that the great work is not necessarily an 800-page novel, but an animated space (”a mere nothing” Blanchot calls it) between life and the silence unique to literature � that is, between uncertainty and mastery: “it is by Joubert’s fascination to remind us .. . how essential, but difficult, it is always to maintain firmly this nothing that divides thought.” Perhaps today Joubert would write a blog.
Other Splinters posts of interest:
- The Book to Come
- Charlotte Mandell
- The Book Now Come
- The Sirens’ Song Lars Iyer�s latest essay Blanc…
- Lily of the galley
