Paul Valéry's "Crusoe"
Apr. 11th, 2011 11:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eccentric_hatI mentioned this lyric essay, which I read for class last semester, in a comment on one of ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
olivia_circe's poetry posts. Then I went poking around the Internet and was surprised at how little information on this piece I was able to find. I believe it is called "Robinson" in the original French (don't ask me why that would be changed to "Crusoe" in the translation) and was included in Histoires brisées, a volume that seems to have been published in 1950 although Valéry died in 1945 and that may or may not be included in the second volume of his Collected Works in English. I call it a lyric essay but I don't know what Valéry called it, as that term doesn't seem to have gained any currency until the late 1990's. It is too long to be a prose poem, and I don't feel right calling it a short story. Any of the other above information might also be incorrect.
The piece is, in short, sufficiently obscure, and it is also sufficiently beautiful, and also my computer's ability to extract the text from the rather low-quality PDF I got from my teacher is sufficiently impressive, that I am posting the whole thing here.
Crusoe Idle, Pensive, Well Set Up
Crusoe had provided all the necessaries and was more or less at leisure in his isle.
He had a good roof over his head; he had made clothes of leaves and feathers, soft shoes, a large light hat. He had led pure water close, right into the shadow of his hut where it prattled like a bird; he was less lonely with this song for companion. Fire served him; he awoke it when he would. From the cabin's rafters hung a multitude of dried smoked fishes; and his great plaited baskets bulged with fat ship biscuits, so hard that they would last forever.
Crusoe forgot his first nakedness and the bitter beginnings of being alone. The time when he went unclothed and had to chase all day after his dinner seemed to him already dim, historical. The era before the shipwreck had become a dream.
He was even surprised now at his own handiwork. The sight of all that he had done amazed him. This happy Crusoe felt himself the heir of a line of beggarly laboring Crusoes rather than the sole strong-willed architect and executant of his own prosperity. It was with the utmost difficulty that he could conceive himself the author of all this that surrounded him, pleasing him and yet dominating him too--for what indeed is odder to a creator than the end product of his work? He has known nothing of it beyond his sketches for parts, fragments, steps to be taken, and his impression of what he has done is quite other than that of the whole and accomplished thing; he has known nothing of its perfection but only of trials, attempts.
A well-found home, stores in plenty, all necessary safeguards taken, inevitably bring leisure. Crusoe amidst his worldly goods became a man again, that is to say a creature of indecision, a being not to be defined in terms of its circumstances alone.
His breathing grew distracted. He hesitated between chimeras: which to pursue? He was threatened with having to invent literature and the arts. The sun seemed needlessly beautiful and it made him sad. He would practically have invented love, had he been less wise and indeed less thoroughly alone.
*
Surveying his mounds of unperishable food, he saw hours of redundancy and of labors saved. A chest of biscuits is a whole month of idleness and life. Those crocks of potted meat, those fiber hampers stuffed with nuts and grain, are a treasury of hoarded repose; a whole easy winter is wafted in their very smell.
In the rank heady odors of the lockers and caskets of his pantry Crusoe snuffed up both the drudgery of his past and the security of his future. It seemed to him that this great heap of his material wealth gave off an odor of indolence, that from it transpired some essence of continuity, as from certain metals a kind of natural heat.
*
The greatest triumph over matter of man (and of some other species) is to have found out how to carry over to tomorrow the effects and fruits of the labors of today. Only slowly has mankind raised itself upon the platform of what endures. Prevision, provision, little by little they have freed us from the rigors of our animal requirements, from the interminable hand-to-mouth of our needs. We have learned to look around us, away from our natural selves deep-rooted in physical circumstance. Indeed nature itself prompted it, for we carry in ourselves small natural protections against decline. The fat on our limbs permits us to sit out lean times till the good days come again. Memory heaping and building in the dusk of our souls holds itself ever ready to restore to us what the universal flux withdraws from us instant by instant.
Crusoe had propped against his hearth an old book of logarithms which he had saved from the waters and of which either the flames or hard usage were beginning to devour the pages. These leaves all smothered in tiny figures, so that one would have sworn them marched upon by echelons of ants, affirmed in their simple decimal tongue that our busy species has discovered how to bank truths and to bequeath legacies of the achieved. The long pains of someone, his wakeful nights, lay hoarded in these ingenious cypherings: the application and the talents of the few supply the want of them in all the rest.
*
He thought how the Egyptians and others had pushed the instinct to preserve the perishable to the point of claiming to arrest the decomposition of the dead.
*
Tides of slumber, spring or neap.
God mislaid, regained.
Himself bright, dull; and at his least remembering himself to have once
been more.
A monologue, of course.
Crusoe makes an audit of his whole estate. His situation. A balance
sheet. His memories, powers.
Complete works of Crusoe.
*
Crusoe.
Solitude,
The creation of leisure. Capital of reserves.
Vacant time. Decorating this.
Danger of losing his head, of losing his tongue.
Conflict. Tragedy. Memory. Crusoe's prayer.
He calls up crowds, streets, theaters.
Temptation. The thirst for London Bridge.
He writes to imaginary persons, embraces trees, talks to himself. Gusts of laughter. Little by little ceasing to be himself.
There comes upon him an invincible horror of the sky, sea, nature.
Forest murmurs.
A naked foot.
Crusoe's psalms.
Isolating set pieces, contrasting, working out.
*
Forest murmurs.
Crusoe among the birds, parakeets, etc. He fancies he understands their language.
All these birds speak proverbs. They iterate them.
Some original.
Others repeat truths which become false by the mere act of repetition.
*
Crusoe pensive.
(The Castaway's Handbook.)
God and Crusoe--(new Adam)--
Crusoe's temptation.
The footprint in the sand, he believes it is a woman's.
He imagines Another. Man or woman?
Crusoe divided--poem.
Sunset--Sea.
*
"Crusoe pensive" --closed system.
--the moment of reflection.
--the utilization of dreams.
Theory of the exact model. The 3 axes of reference.
Memory.
But from all that he once knew he has retained only what was agreeable
to his substance.
*
Crusoe
(1) reconstructs what he has read.
(2) rejects it.
*
Without books, without writing, Crusoe re-creates his intellectual life. All the music that he has heard comes back to him-pieces he never knew he knew ever. His need, his solitude, the emptiness, develop the organ of memory; and it alone sustains him. He wins back books he has read; he notes what he is able, or not able, to regain. His results are highly surprising.
And eventually behold him developing upon all this, creating in his turn.
*
This Crusoe must contemplate human affairs and consider them "sub specie intellectus."
Literary squabbles, for example-his method will be explication, the teasing out of the implicit; what has to be done to bring about such and such an effect. .
Sample: the angry, wounded, riled, jealous, who (to such as will listen) cry out upon the object of their hate or envy, "You will pass, you will be blotted out, because it has to be I, because it has to be I, who will take the place which now you hold in the opinions of those whose opinions, for that matter, I take to be the vaporings of ghosts"; and such-like follies.
These things are projected upon the screen of Crusoe's solitude.
*
Charming and intelligent men of all nations, beings made for mutual understanding, for the free exchange of thoughts, you are slaves and victims of the most brutal of men, the greediest, the stupidest, the most gullible, of those indeed who neither know nor wish to know the true enemies of humanity (being of their party), and want what beasts want, neither more nor less.
You obey them, you consider them, etc., they give you a guilty conscience. Yet all their strength is simply your own weakness; your sorrows are the fruits of your own credulity.
*
The mind is attached to the body in rather the same way as a man is to the planet.
The planet turns and is part of him, and he is unaware of it.
He knows only his surroundings and immediate possibilities. He is quite unable either to imagine or to perceive relationships and connections far away.
Of the body the mind sees nothing but the body, but knows it not in time. The mystery of memory.
The Earth (weight, mass, light, rotation) maintains existence only within a system (time, action).
The mind has only the most restricted, the incompletest, notion of the body's system, and of that to which the body belongs. An endless system of dependences.
*
From collections, recollections, he reconstructs his library--and finally creates his art.
Discouragement.
Wishes to end himself, but bethinks himself that it is traditional, too like ... and cannot even do that.
Friday.
*
The notion that death should be the chief subject of reflection of the living, and their chief care, was born with luxury--with the acquisition of abundance.
Whence this odd question: Among the choice of useless things, which do we give our minds to?
*
Crusoe ends by having created his own island.
I counter every tedium, want, irritation, by the vision of a condition in which they could not touch me: hence the image of a golden island where nothing could reach me (nothing of remembrance above all) except what would please.
Or rather, I should begin by shutting the whole thing off at once, my island.
But later I see inconveniences in this insular perfection; and I allow in, but only on certain days, at certain hours, some news, friends, books...
It is memory that has furnished my island-malleable memory, pliable to the moment's needs.
Against my boredom I have constructed its precise negation. Then I have added to this negation certain positives, things actively desired: the sea, the south, etc.
From such denying, such desiring, a sort of riddle or enigma has been formed, whose solution is an image that is exact.
I could draw this island on the sea.
Observe that this island where you would be, you imagine it seen from afar, conical, gilt, pale ....
What a mixture!
"Why should a chimera of this sort answer these requirements?"
Requirements? The word is a trifle narrow. Because--I have another response to such peace, plenitude--an image of bad moments, gloomy forebodings, a hideous chaos...
So there he is, Crusoe, on his cubic island.
Evening falls. The tenderest blue is on the glass
Of the high windows.
Coffee and Tobacco
People the shadows and the Palate.
Tyrannous labor recedes before the dying day
And what she, the other, thinks is a faraway
Intimate murmur which is not the city's.
Alone, Not Alone: Crusoe.
*
Crusoe
"Leisure," said Crusoe, "Leisure, daughter of salt, of cooking, of dressings that arrest the proper fates of perishable foods; daughter of smokings, of preservative fumes, of aromatics, spices, of logarithms even-what shall I do with you? What will you do with me? No longer do my desires and hungers color and portion out my days. I dream no more of action, I see no more mirages of roasted prey, and I am free. Is that not to be without form? When we fancy we at last possess ourselves, in fact we fall under the domination of the pettiest things about us. The infinite variety of inessential objects hides from us our own powers. My only law is now my indifference. My mobility paralyzes me. My lightness weighs me down. My security does not fail to trouble me. What am I to do with this wealth of time that I have put by?"
Paul Valéry (1871-1945), translated from the French by H. Corke
olivia_circe's poetry posts. Then I went poking around the Internet and was surprised at how little information on this piece I was able to find. I believe it is called "Robinson" in the original French (don't ask me why that would be changed to "Crusoe" in the translation) and was included in Histoires brisées, a volume that seems to have been published in 1950 although Valéry died in 1945 and that may or may not be included in the second volume of his Collected Works in English. I call it a lyric essay but I don't know what Valéry called it, as that term doesn't seem to have gained any currency until the late 1990's. It is too long to be a prose poem, and I don't feel right calling it a short story. Any of the other above information might also be incorrect.The piece is, in short, sufficiently obscure, and it is also sufficiently beautiful, and also my computer's ability to extract the text from the rather low-quality PDF I got from my teacher is sufficiently impressive, that I am posting the whole thing here.
Crusoe Idle, Pensive, Well Set Up
Crusoe had provided all the necessaries and was more or less at leisure in his isle.
He had a good roof over his head; he had made clothes of leaves and feathers, soft shoes, a large light hat. He had led pure water close, right into the shadow of his hut where it prattled like a bird; he was less lonely with this song for companion. Fire served him; he awoke it when he would. From the cabin's rafters hung a multitude of dried smoked fishes; and his great plaited baskets bulged with fat ship biscuits, so hard that they would last forever.
Crusoe forgot his first nakedness and the bitter beginnings of being alone. The time when he went unclothed and had to chase all day after his dinner seemed to him already dim, historical. The era before the shipwreck had become a dream.
He was even surprised now at his own handiwork. The sight of all that he had done amazed him. This happy Crusoe felt himself the heir of a line of beggarly laboring Crusoes rather than the sole strong-willed architect and executant of his own prosperity. It was with the utmost difficulty that he could conceive himself the author of all this that surrounded him, pleasing him and yet dominating him too--for what indeed is odder to a creator than the end product of his work? He has known nothing of it beyond his sketches for parts, fragments, steps to be taken, and his impression of what he has done is quite other than that of the whole and accomplished thing; he has known nothing of its perfection but only of trials, attempts.
A well-found home, stores in plenty, all necessary safeguards taken, inevitably bring leisure. Crusoe amidst his worldly goods became a man again, that is to say a creature of indecision, a being not to be defined in terms of its circumstances alone.
His breathing grew distracted. He hesitated between chimeras: which to pursue? He was threatened with having to invent literature and the arts. The sun seemed needlessly beautiful and it made him sad. He would practically have invented love, had he been less wise and indeed less thoroughly alone.
*
Surveying his mounds of unperishable food, he saw hours of redundancy and of labors saved. A chest of biscuits is a whole month of idleness and life. Those crocks of potted meat, those fiber hampers stuffed with nuts and grain, are a treasury of hoarded repose; a whole easy winter is wafted in their very smell.
In the rank heady odors of the lockers and caskets of his pantry Crusoe snuffed up both the drudgery of his past and the security of his future. It seemed to him that this great heap of his material wealth gave off an odor of indolence, that from it transpired some essence of continuity, as from certain metals a kind of natural heat.
*
The greatest triumph over matter of man (and of some other species) is to have found out how to carry over to tomorrow the effects and fruits of the labors of today. Only slowly has mankind raised itself upon the platform of what endures. Prevision, provision, little by little they have freed us from the rigors of our animal requirements, from the interminable hand-to-mouth of our needs. We have learned to look around us, away from our natural selves deep-rooted in physical circumstance. Indeed nature itself prompted it, for we carry in ourselves small natural protections against decline. The fat on our limbs permits us to sit out lean times till the good days come again. Memory heaping and building in the dusk of our souls holds itself ever ready to restore to us what the universal flux withdraws from us instant by instant.
Crusoe had propped against his hearth an old book of logarithms which he had saved from the waters and of which either the flames or hard usage were beginning to devour the pages. These leaves all smothered in tiny figures, so that one would have sworn them marched upon by echelons of ants, affirmed in their simple decimal tongue that our busy species has discovered how to bank truths and to bequeath legacies of the achieved. The long pains of someone, his wakeful nights, lay hoarded in these ingenious cypherings: the application and the talents of the few supply the want of them in all the rest.
*
He thought how the Egyptians and others had pushed the instinct to preserve the perishable to the point of claiming to arrest the decomposition of the dead.
*
Tides of slumber, spring or neap.
God mislaid, regained.
Himself bright, dull; and at his least remembering himself to have once
been more.
A monologue, of course.
Crusoe makes an audit of his whole estate. His situation. A balance
sheet. His memories, powers.
Complete works of Crusoe.
*
Crusoe.
Solitude,
The creation of leisure. Capital of reserves.
Vacant time. Decorating this.
Danger of losing his head, of losing his tongue.
Conflict. Tragedy. Memory. Crusoe's prayer.
He calls up crowds, streets, theaters.
Temptation. The thirst for London Bridge.
He writes to imaginary persons, embraces trees, talks to himself. Gusts of laughter. Little by little ceasing to be himself.
There comes upon him an invincible horror of the sky, sea, nature.
Forest murmurs.
A naked foot.
Crusoe's psalms.
Isolating set pieces, contrasting, working out.
*
Forest murmurs.
Crusoe among the birds, parakeets, etc. He fancies he understands their language.
All these birds speak proverbs. They iterate them.
Some original.
Others repeat truths which become false by the mere act of repetition.
*
Crusoe pensive.
(The Castaway's Handbook.)
God and Crusoe--(new Adam)--
Crusoe's temptation.
The footprint in the sand, he believes it is a woman's.
He imagines Another. Man or woman?
Crusoe divided--poem.
Sunset--Sea.
*
"Crusoe pensive" --closed system.
--the moment of reflection.
--the utilization of dreams.
Theory of the exact model. The 3 axes of reference.
Memory.
But from all that he once knew he has retained only what was agreeable
to his substance.
*
Crusoe
(1) reconstructs what he has read.
(2) rejects it.
*
Without books, without writing, Crusoe re-creates his intellectual life. All the music that he has heard comes back to him-pieces he never knew he knew ever. His need, his solitude, the emptiness, develop the organ of memory; and it alone sustains him. He wins back books he has read; he notes what he is able, or not able, to regain. His results are highly surprising.
And eventually behold him developing upon all this, creating in his turn.
*
This Crusoe must contemplate human affairs and consider them "sub specie intellectus."
Literary squabbles, for example-his method will be explication, the teasing out of the implicit; what has to be done to bring about such and such an effect. .
Sample: the angry, wounded, riled, jealous, who (to such as will listen) cry out upon the object of their hate or envy, "You will pass, you will be blotted out, because it has to be I, because it has to be I, who will take the place which now you hold in the opinions of those whose opinions, for that matter, I take to be the vaporings of ghosts"; and such-like follies.
These things are projected upon the screen of Crusoe's solitude.
*
Charming and intelligent men of all nations, beings made for mutual understanding, for the free exchange of thoughts, you are slaves and victims of the most brutal of men, the greediest, the stupidest, the most gullible, of those indeed who neither know nor wish to know the true enemies of humanity (being of their party), and want what beasts want, neither more nor less.
You obey them, you consider them, etc., they give you a guilty conscience. Yet all their strength is simply your own weakness; your sorrows are the fruits of your own credulity.
*
The mind is attached to the body in rather the same way as a man is to the planet.
The planet turns and is part of him, and he is unaware of it.
He knows only his surroundings and immediate possibilities. He is quite unable either to imagine or to perceive relationships and connections far away.
Of the body the mind sees nothing but the body, but knows it not in time. The mystery of memory.
The Earth (weight, mass, light, rotation) maintains existence only within a system (time, action).
The mind has only the most restricted, the incompletest, notion of the body's system, and of that to which the body belongs. An endless system of dependences.
*
From collections, recollections, he reconstructs his library--and finally creates his art.
Discouragement.
Wishes to end himself, but bethinks himself that it is traditional, too like ... and cannot even do that.
Friday.
*
The notion that death should be the chief subject of reflection of the living, and their chief care, was born with luxury--with the acquisition of abundance.
Whence this odd question: Among the choice of useless things, which do we give our minds to?
*
Crusoe ends by having created his own island.
I counter every tedium, want, irritation, by the vision of a condition in which they could not touch me: hence the image of a golden island where nothing could reach me (nothing of remembrance above all) except what would please.
Or rather, I should begin by shutting the whole thing off at once, my island.
But later I see inconveniences in this insular perfection; and I allow in, but only on certain days, at certain hours, some news, friends, books...
It is memory that has furnished my island-malleable memory, pliable to the moment's needs.
Against my boredom I have constructed its precise negation. Then I have added to this negation certain positives, things actively desired: the sea, the south, etc.
From such denying, such desiring, a sort of riddle or enigma has been formed, whose solution is an image that is exact.
I could draw this island on the sea.
Observe that this island where you would be, you imagine it seen from afar, conical, gilt, pale ....
What a mixture!
"Why should a chimera of this sort answer these requirements?"
Requirements? The word is a trifle narrow. Because--I have another response to such peace, plenitude--an image of bad moments, gloomy forebodings, a hideous chaos...
So there he is, Crusoe, on his cubic island.
Evening falls. The tenderest blue is on the glass
Of the high windows.
Coffee and Tobacco
People the shadows and the Palate.
Tyrannous labor recedes before the dying day
And what she, the other, thinks is a faraway
Intimate murmur which is not the city's.
Alone, Not Alone: Crusoe.
*
Crusoe
"Leisure," said Crusoe, "Leisure, daughter of salt, of cooking, of dressings that arrest the proper fates of perishable foods; daughter of smokings, of preservative fumes, of aromatics, spices, of logarithms even-what shall I do with you? What will you do with me? No longer do my desires and hungers color and portion out my days. I dream no more of action, I see no more mirages of roasted prey, and I am free. Is that not to be without form? When we fancy we at last possess ourselves, in fact we fall under the domination of the pettiest things about us. The infinite variety of inessential objects hides from us our own powers. My only law is now my indifference. My mobility paralyzes me. My lightness weighs me down. My security does not fail to trouble me. What am I to do with this wealth of time that I have put by?"
Paul Valéry (1871-1945), translated from the French by H. Corke
