Valéry and Rhetoric
For two years (1964–65 and 1965–66), Roland Barthes devoted his seminar at the École Pratique des Hautes Études to rhetoric.189 That seminar responds to a theoretical and genealogical inquiry beginning with literary structuralism and a return, from within that framework, to old questions posed to discourse through all types of rhetoric.190 But it also responds perhaps to the very first steps taken by Barthes as early as 1946, a bit before “Le Degré zéro de l’écriture,” in his first text “L’Avenir de la rhétorique,” unpublished and reproduced here.191 Georges Perec, Severo Sarduy, Gérard Genette, Tzvetan Todorov, Phillippe Sollers, Michel Butor, and others attended or played a part in these seminars. In 1970, Barthes published a major text, “L’Ancienne rhétorique: Aide-mémoire,” in the review Communications.192 This work on Valéry and rhetoric appears to be a significant supplement to it.
Session of the “Rhetoric Today” Seminar, 1965–66
What writer today, except without a good dose of provocation, would call upon the support of a rhetorical art?
We are only familiar with a degraded, narrow, strongly pejorative sense of the word Rhetoric: pompous, cold, conventional, ornate writing. Nevertheless for almost two centuries, rhetoric had a much vaster scope; from the sophists to the Renaissance, by way of Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, and the arts of the Middle Ages, Rhetoric was both a philosophy and a technique of language, the subject of incessant, profound, original thinking, the truth of which we are now beginning to rediscover with astonished admiration.
Nevertheless, before it collapsed in the nineteenth century, this very old empire saw itself seriously weakened as early as the seventeenth century by the assaults of the modern mind. It had two formidable enemies with very different styles, Descartes and Pascal, one in the name of mathematical reason, the other in the name of the truth of the heart, which had to impose its living order on discourse. That last name ought to make us prick up our ears. As an enemy of rhetoric, Pascal is also an enemy of Valéry and what comes between Pascal and Valéry is, in the final analysis, precisely a certain usage of language, that is to say, Rhetoric. Here is how Valéry attacks Pascal, using as the occasion one of his most famous Pensées: The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.
I cannot help but think that there is some system and some work in this perfectly sad attitude and in this absolute disgust. A well-tuned sentence excludes total renunciation.
Well-written distress is not so complete that it cannot save from the shipwreck some freedom of mind, some feeling of number, some logic, and some symbolism that contradict what they say.…
Moreover, even though the intentions may be pure, the concern for writing alone and the care brought to it have the same natural effect as an afterthought. Inevitably, what was moderate is rendered extreme; and what was rare, dense; and more complete what was partial; and emotional what was only animated.… Blind windows take shape. The artist can hardly help but increase the intensity of his observed impression, and he makes symmetrical the developments of his first idea, a bit like the nervous system does when it generalizes and extends to an entire being some local modification. That is not an objection against the artist, but a warning never to confuse the true man who made the work with the man that the work makes us imagine.c
We can see that Valéry is reproaching Pascal for not knowing—or rather for pretending not to know—what I will call the fatal theater of language. Language is a theater to which man is condemned. Rhetoric is the discipline that transforms that condemnation into freedom. It is a technique of responsibility. And it is not nothing.
Thus Valéry’s conception of Rhetoric is profound, serious. It is not a simple pastiche of classical conceptions, even if it does not have their scope, because Valéry completely despised the Rhetoric of the dispositio. This conception rests on three principles:
I. The first affirms—and endlessly reaffirms—the verbal condition of literature: literature is language; there is a universe of words.
“Literature is and can be nothing other than a kind of extension and application of certain properties of Language.”d The equation literature = language is so strong in the eyes of Paul Valéry that he sees through a very striking sort of paradox a veritable circularity between literature and language. Literature is language but language itself is literature: “Moreover, in considering quite elevated things, can we not consider Language itself as the masterpiece of literary masterpieces, since every creation of this order is reduced to a combination of the powers of a given vocabulary, according to forms established once and for all?”e That may seem trite today, but we must not forget that Valéry was still very close to Mallarmé, even to Hugo, to Flaubert, who established in our Literature an empire of language.
In Racine, perpetual ornament seems drawn from discourse, and that is the means and the secret of his prodigious continuity, whereas, among the moderns, ornament breaks discourse.”
Racine’s discourse comes out of the mouth of a living, although always quite pompous, person.
The same is true of La Fontaine, but the person is familiar, and sometimes quite neglected.
On the contrary, with Hugo, Mallarmé, and a few others, there seems to be a kind of tendency to form nonhuman, and in some way absolute, discourse, discourse that suggests some sort of being independent of any person—a divinity of language—illuminated by the All-Powerful of the Ensemble of Words. It is this faculty of speaking that speaks and, in speaking, gets drunk and, drunk, dances.f
Nor must we forget that the total identification of literature with language, however banal, is still hotly contested by all those, traditionalists and realists alike, who see form simply as the garb of content, which remains, they believe, the principal matter of literary art (Valéry, by the way, hotly contested the content/form opposition, following Flaubert and Mallarmé). Finally, we must not forget that the verbal nature of literature has still not been exploited by criticism. If literature is a language, then it is, in some way, a matter for linguistics, and from this perspective, we are only at the very beginning of inquiries and explanations in which Valéry is already considered a predecessor. Haven’t some of his texts on the sign just been taken up again in the review of pure linguistics, Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure?
II. The second principle underlying Valéry’s Rhetoric is in some way an explanation of the first. If literature is a language, it is because in fact the very function of the language inevitably divides in two. There is a practical language, meant to transform reality and thereby be abolished as soon as it achieves its goal. This is basically the language of prose that Valéry always vigorously distinguished from poetry—too vigorously for our tastes because there is, of course, very literary prose, Valery’s itself. And then there is poetic language (let us say more generally, literary language), which is essentially speculation on palpable properties of language; there is an opacity and an independence from the form. Literature is a second language.
Poetry is an art of language. Language, however, is a practical creation. Let us note first of all that all communication between humans only has some certainty in practice, and through the verification that practice offers us. I ask you for a light. You give me a light: you have understood me.
But, in asking me for a light, you were able to utter a few unimportant words in a certain timbre and tone of voice—with a certain inflection and with a certain slowness or haste that I was able to notice. I understood your words since, without even thinking about it, I offered you what you were asking for, this little bit of fire. And yet the business is not over. A strange thing: the sound, and something like the figure of your little sentence comes back to me, repeats in me, as if it took pleasure in me; and as for me, I like hearing myself repeat it, that little sentence that has almost lost its meaning, that has ceased to be useful, and that wants to live on all the same, but in a whole other life. It has taken on value, and it has taken it at the expense of its finite signification. It
has created the need to still be heard.… Here we are on the very edge of the state of poetry. This tiny experiment will be enough for us to discover more than one truth.
It has shown us that language can produce two entirely different kinds of effects. One kind has the tendency to provoke what is necessary to nullify entirely the language itself. I speak to you, and if you understand my words, those very words are abolished. If you have understood, that means that those words have disappeared from your mind, they are replaced by a counterpart, by images, relations, impulses. And you will then possess what retransmits those ideas and images into a language that can be very different from the one you received. To understand consists of the more or less rapid replacement of a system of sonorities, durations, and signs by something entirely different, which is basically an internal modification or reorganization by the person to whom one is speaking. And here is the counterproof of this proposition: the person who has not understood repeats or has repeated to him the words.
Consequently, the perfection of discourse whose single object is comprehension obviously inheres in the ease with which the words that constitute it are transformed into something else entirely, and the language, first, into nonlanguage and then, if we wish, into a form of language different from the primitive form.
In other words, in practical or abstract uses of language, the form, that is to say, the physical, the palpable, the very act of discourse, is not retained. It does not survive comprehension; it is dissolved into clarity. It has acted, it has done its job, it has been understood: it has lived.
But on the contrary, as soon as that palpable form takes on an importance through its own effect, so that it asserts itself, somehow demands respect, and not only notice and respect, but desire, and thus repetition—then something new declares itself. We are imperceptibly transformed, and available to live, to breathe, to think according to a regime and under laws that are no longer of a practical order—that is to say that nothing of what happens in this state will be resolved, finished, abolished by a predetermined act. We will enter into the poetic universe.g
A very important view since it justifies on the part of the writer a certain right to obscurity (he does not write solely to communicate but also to speculate). A very modern view since it allies literature with a secondary language. Like all social institutions (sociology emphasizes this more and more), language has return effects (feedback, boomerang effect); literature in some way is the development field for language turning back on itself. Finally, quite a pessimistic view. Valérian theory assigns the writer a nonpractical activity, refused any sanction from reality. The writer is the technician of a useless language.
The occupation of intellectuals is to move all things around beneath their signs, names, or symbols, without the counterweight of real acts. As a result, their words are astonishing, their politics dangerous, their pleasures superficial.
These are social stimulants with the advantages and the dangers of stimulants in general.h
We might ask, then what purpose does the writer serve? Valéry would answer: to make of the language of a nation a few perfect applications. Sociologically, the writer would be essentially a puppeteer of language, and it is as such that society would consume him.
III. The third principle advances even further into the literature-language theory because it offers it both a psychological and a moral foundation. This principle answers the question: Why attribute some glorious value to the work of form? Valéry responds, in short, like this: the form has preeminent value because the content does not.
For Valéry, the content is Ideas (always plural because Valérian atomistic psychology sees the Self essentially as divided, any unity only fleeting). Ideas: not only intellectual sparks, brainwaves, but also sensations, images, dreams: mental flux in its anarchic succession of states. This is not the signified; it is before meaning (inventio).
The mode of production of Ideas (fundamental in Valérian theory) is irresponsible. Ideas come to humans for no reason. In short, [their] mode of production is Chance; one has ideas by chance (let us stress the paradox of this for an intellectualist). Chance is the great provider of ideas; and since, for Valéry, Nature is all that is given, we could say that, for him, Ideas are natural—but therefore ambiguous: cherished emotionally because they are the first contact humans have with the world (upon awakening, for example); discredited intellectually because man cannot claim his freedom in this. In a word, Ideas are accidents (a very Valérian word).
Form is precisely the labor that transforms the chance of an idea into a resistant work; the work is an accident redeemed, circumstance transformed into intention. In short, form is the deferred action of the idea.
I enter an office where some business calls me. I must write and I am given a pen, ink, paper, which are marvelously well suited. I write easily some trivial thing. My handwriting pleases me. It leaves me with a desire to write. I go out. I leave. I bring with me the excitement to write that is searching for something to write. Words come, a rhythm, lines, and this will result in a poem for which the motive, the music, the charms, all of it will proceed from the material incident of which they will retain no trace. What criticism would suspect that origin? Is criticism possible? I mean criticism that would serve ourselves, and would make us imagine a bit how we do what we do.i
In modern terms, we could say that form, the labor of form, consists of giving meaning to the insignificant, thought to the futile; form consists of thinking. It is the field exclusive to humans where they wrest free their ideas from nature. Everything that amplifies that wrenching (the Rules, for example, of Poetry, of style …) is Form. It is what justifies writing:
Writing was for me already an operation entirely distinct from the instantaneous expression of some “idea” through immediately stimulated language. Ideas count for nothing, no more than facts or sensations. The ones that seem the most precious, the images, analogies, words, and rhythms that arise in us, are more or less frequent accidents in our inventive existence. Humans do hardly anything but invent. But the one who becomes aware of the ease, fragility, and incoherence of that generation opposes to it the effort of the mind. This results in the marvelous consequence that the most powerful “creations,” the most august monuments of thought, have been obtained through the thoughtful use of voluntary means of resistance to our immediate and continual “creation” of words, relations, and impulses that are unconditionally replaced. Completely spontaneous production very easily accommodates, for example, contradictions and “vicious circles”; logic obstructs them. Logic is the best known and the most important of all the explicit, formal conventions against which the mind rebels. Methods, well-defined poetics, norms and proportions, rules of harmony, precepts of composition, fixed forms: these are not (as is commonly believed) formulas for restricted creation. Their deep purpose is to call upon the complete, organized man, the being made to act, and whose very action in turn perfects, to assert himself in the mind’s productions.j
Let us summarize again: form is the freedom that content lacks.
I do mean that Mallarmé is obscure, sterile, and precious; but if at the cost of those faults—and even by means of all those faults, by means of the efforts that they imply in the author and that they require from the reader—they make me imagine and locate beyond all the works the conscious possession of the function of language and the feeling of a higher freedom of expression compared to which all thought is only an incident, a particular event, then that consequence that I have drawn from my reading and meditation on his writings remains for me an incomparable good and a greater one than any easy, transparent work has offered me.k
Conclusion
This is a theory that makes Valéry’s place very ambiguous. On the one hand, insofar as Art for him is essentially counterchance, counterinspiration, Valéry is a classicist; but to the extent that he recognizes chance’s role as a provider of ideas (and thus creator of content), he is a romantic (to adopt a convenient mythica
l opposition). That ambiguity is expressed very well in Valéry’s conception of dream: dream is the touchstone of modern literature, ever since Romanticism. Contrary to what one might imagine of an intellectualist writer, Valéry often spoke of Dream—and he described several dreams in a very beautiful way, like this one for example:
Tale (jotted down upon waking in the residue of a dream)
The treasure is guarded by a dragon (or by some other kind of monster) at the First Door.
If you manage to infuriate it, it will be at your mercy,
It will reveal its heart and you will pierce it.
The Second Door is guarded by perfectly beautiful woman, a magician.
If you manage to charm her, she will be at your mercy. She will open her arms to you and you will bind her in chains.
The Third Threshold is guarded by a small, sad child. If you manage to make him smile …
Here the tale stopped and I felt very distinctly that to continue would be to invent it.l
But Valéry cannot remain with Dream, not because of reason, but because humans are condemned to speak of dream in the waking state: “The very one who wants to write his dream must be infinitely awake.”m In other words, writing is a fatal counterdream. We come back to the contradiction denounced in Pascal: to write is to renounce the dream inasmuch as it is to use it. Waking, the privileged moment of the Valérian dietetic, is precisely that fragile friction between the dream and writing, the passage from Dream-adherence to Writing-separation: “In the dream, thought is not distinguished from living and does not slow down for it. It adheres to living; it adheres entirely to the simplicity of living.”n