ILLUSIONS OF PUR ;E CQNSCIOUSN;ESS
discharges more elaborate acts without needing to
be
conscious of its
own process in the performance. Consciousness, in its highest flights, may
well be impatient of its own processes, since self-consciousness only
divides our energies.
Teste, seeking the purity of consciousness, refines himself out of
existence. What would be his profession? He earns his living-a modest
one-by small speculations on the stock-exchange. His life is outwardly
banal, systematically bare. He would have to be a writer really to
interest us. But he believes that language betrays thought, that con–
sciousness surrenders itself when it exists in relation to others. Mr.
Mathews remarks that Teste's "Logbook"-the written fragments of
his thought-is disappointing: we expect something more astounding
from this hero of pure thought. But how could it be otherwise? To
produce a more interesting logbook, Teste would have to betray Teste
for discourse addressed to others. Slogan for an
Anti-Teste:
no ideas
without communication; what we call an "idea" is only a fleeting glimpse
of some actual or possible vehicle of communication.
We may think of the genesis of
Monsieur Teste
in this way: the
marriage of Mallarme and Descartes. Valery had derived from Mal–
larme the taste for certain absolute states of mind, and from Descartes,
and the Cartesian tradition in French thought, the interest in clear
ideas and the phenomenology of consciousness. An incompatible union,
from the point of view of philosophy, but persisted in, like many an
unhappy marriage, it was an authentic existence for Valery the writer.
Of course, Valery himself realized the impossibility of his creature,
and thirty years later wrote in a preface to a 1925 edition:
Why is M. Teste
impo~sible?
This question is the soul of him.... In this
strange head, where philosophy has little credit, where language is always on
trial, there is scarcely a thought that is not accompanied by the feeling that it
is tentative; there exists hardly more than the anticipation and execution of
definite operations. The short, intense life of this brain is spent in supervising the
mechanism by which the relations of the known and the unknown are established
and organized. It even uses its obscure and transcendent powers in ·the obstinate
pretense that it is an isolated system in which the infinite has no part.
But he never altogether escaped being haunted by this "obstinate pre–
tense" of his creature, and the themes of
Teste
persist in nearly all the
later essays. Valery has been called "the poet of the intelligence," but
it is questionable whether he was really interested in something else,
something much more obscure, certainly not in the intelligence for what
it is. In his critical essays we do not find him really exploring his sub–
jects so much as elaborating certain incidental themes of his own, often
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