Paul Valéry and Poetic Literacy

ABSTRACT

My article proposes a reading of Valéry's essay, “Avenir de la littérature” (1928), which foresaw literature becoming a dead language. This fate of literature is due not just to future readers’ lack of interpretive effort, but also their lack of effortlessness in reading. To contextualize this point, my essay draws on earlier speculations, made by some of Valéry's contemporaries, about orthographic reform and the potential scission of French into separate languages. These speculations invite an analogy between basic literacy (effortless recognition of written words) and advanced literacy (effortless comprehension of verse conventions). Without readers accustomed to comprehending poems with some degree of facility, the reasoning goes, poetry is no longer a living language.

KEYWORDS:

• Valéry
• poetry
• literacy
• orthography
• dead languages

Notes

1. According to William Marx, Teste is a stand-in for Rimbaud (29).

2. French poets supposedly benefited from learning to versify in Latin because of habituation to its syntactic flexibility (Latin was called a “synthetic” language), as opposed to the syntactic rigidity of French (an “analytic” language). See Henri Mazel (304).

3. Scott glosses Pierre Guiraud's position, “that the reader has the right to expect verse to maintain the contract which makes verse easy to recognize and read (i.e. metrical principles are facilitators of the reading process) […]” (76-77). In the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries writers were still assimilating the end of this “contract.” That is one specific feature of the period, though of course predictions of the “death of literature” have continued, and twentieth- and twenty-first-century France has continued to rehearse similar debates about orthography and the role of Greek and Latin.

4. See also Valéry's description of a centuries-old, informal tradition according to which, prior to the vers libre, French poets transmitted methods of composition to their successors (Réflexions 63).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Benjamin Williams

Benjamin Williams is a visiting assistant professor of French at Connecticut College. He specializes in the petites revues of the 1880s and 1890s. His most recent article, on polemics surrounding French symbolist aesthetic theories, is forthcoming with Forum for Modern Language Studies.