Genealogies of the Text

First series, Poetry. Valéry, during World War I, undertakes, at Gide's suggestion, to consolidate his farewell to poetry by preparing an edition of the vers anciens of his youth, the remains of a vocation he had abandoned during his crisis of 1892 as ultimately deleterious to mind. That farewell, in one of the hoariest episodes of modern literary history, turned into a paradoxical return. Valéry soon found himself embarked in spite of himself on his major poem, “La Jeune Parque,” the “involuntary Aeneid” he completed in 1917. A virgin awakens to find her virginity threatened by the tear she can no longer quite remember having shed during a dream: who indeed could be crying, she asks, beside(s) herself (“Mais qui pleure, / Si proche de moi-même au moment de pleurer?”) (Oeuvres, p. 96). As the tear writes (or “marks”) its way through the Parque's body, provoking its host to flight, it comes to figure the poem itself, the apparently unwanted issue of Valéry's reawakening to poetry. For the subsequent volume Charmes, I have attempted to demonstrate elsewhere, is readable as a transformation of the complex “tear-work” of “La Jeune Parque.”