Introduction

Summary

The present volume brings together leading researchers from many countries in a concerted attempt, so far lacking in Valéry criticism, to view as a unitary whole a writer normally perceived as supremely diverse and fragmentary. On this novel basis, it is hoped to redraw the contours of recognition of Paul Valéry and to re-evaluate his standing some fifty years after his death.

This primary task implies two further objectives, which relate even more directly to the singular case of Valéry. It imposes on the one hand the need to re-examine and substantially re-present a major writer, since, for reasons which will appear, the vision of Valéry entertained by research specialists is markedly out of phase with perceptions current in the wider constituency of French Studies. No less significant, on the other hand, is the task of refracting the broader claims of Valéry, as now understood, to an audience outside the traditional field of French literature altogether, in the exact sciences, in parallel arts disciplines and in the social sciences.

Few would doubt that Valéry stands as one of the very greatest representative figures of French culture in the first half of the 20th century. His state funeral, decreed by General de Gauile in the newly liberated Paris of 1945, may indeed be appropriately taken to symbolise the culmination and the end of an entire epoch of French cultural tradition; it marks, as nearly as one can date such large-scale phase-changes, the closing of an era of rationalistic anthropocentric European humanism, some four centuries old.