Impersonality and identity

 

Proust’s idea for a contre-Sainte Beuve criticism was part of a larger movement, within modernism, to escape from the criticism of the portrait, or the biography, and to approach the linguistic object with a certain formalism.

Paul Valery, in 1937, wrote an essay with a very old fashioned, Saint-Beuvian title: Villon and Verlaine. But the first thing he wants to establish is his formalist cred, in rather Nietzschian terms:

« Even in the most favorable cases, it is not in being humans that gives authors their value and endurance, it is in what they have that is a little more than human [Même dans les cas les plus favorables, ce n’est pas ce en quoi les auteurs sont hommes qui leur donne valeur et durée, c’est ce en quoi ils sont un peu plus qu’hommes.] And if I say that biographical curiosity can be harmful, it is because it too often procures an occasion, pretext or means to not confront the precise and organic study of poetry.”

In my time, the whole formalist-modernist apparatus of impersonality has been overthrown by an identity ethos. One used to learn that, precisely, we approach the poem as the thing in itself, or at least the classroom thing in itself. Yet, that was always a game based on a fundamentally contradictory position, for we learned the poem as Shelley’s poem, or Eliot’s – X’s. To attach a name to a poem or novel or essay was already to organize the work, behind the classroom’s back, according to a historic fact, namely, the fact of the author. If, for instance, we attributed The Wasteland to Dostoevsky, we would, frankly, not understand it at all. Biography can be thrown out the window, but it creeps back in through the keyhole.

Hence it is that Valery honors the Contre Saint-Beuve principle in the breach. Somehow, it is necessary, to read Villon, to know something of the life of Villon. In fact, Marcel Schwob, who did a lot of research on the historical facts around Villon, was one of Valery’s friends. In fact, Schwob was an inveterate portrait maker, even though he was not centered, as Sainte Beuve was, on the, as it were, royal family of French writers, the classics – he was more interested in the crazies, the marginals – in this, taking his cues from Nerval, who, crazy himself, insisted on the Illuminés who preceded him.

Villon is a liminal case. He is a royal, in as much as French poetry can’t really be understood, historically, without him. But he was a user of argot, a thief, swindler and perhaps a murderer. And not the good kind of murderer who, under orders as a soldier, butchers for the state. Eventually, it seems, Villon was hung.

On the other hand, Villon’s biography – which Valery sees in parallel with Verlaine, a man who also knew jail and bedbugs – does point to the more than human in the human life. By a certain paradox, what the identity ethos liquidates is the particular, the all too human and the more than human in the poet.

I love this bit about Verlaine. Valery, whose master was Mallarme and certainly not Rimbaud, still pays hommage:

“Verlaine !… How many times I saw him pass by my door, furious, laughing, swearing, striking the ground with his great sickman’s cane – or that of a threatening vagabond! How could one ever imagine that this beaten tramp, sometimes so brutal looking, sordid in word, at the same time anxiety making and inspiring compassion, was however the author of poetic music of the most delicate kind, verbal melodies that are some of the most touching and novel in our language? All the possible vices respected, perhaps seeded, or developed in him that power of suave invention, that expression of sweetness, of fervour, of tender welcome that noone gave like him, for nobody else knew how to dissimulate it like him or could forge the like power of consummate artistry, breaking with all the subtleties of the most skilled poets, in works that appear easy, with a naïve tone, almost childlike.”

This is how I think of the great pop musician-songwriters: the children of Villon and Verlaine.