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In the 1920s, adolescents, emerging from childhood, copied out ‘La Jeune Parque’, a poem by Paul Valéry which had just appeared in a very limited edition. They identified passionately with this frighteningly lucid, pure and exacting intellectual who was at the same time so obscure to them.
A disciple of Baudouin, Mme Aigrisse is a practising analytical psychologist. She shows how, at that precise moment, at fifty years of age, a new Paul Valéry emerged. For seventeen years he had not published or written any poetry and had led a retired, introverted life. (He was to leave fifty cahiers, comments on his wide reading including mathematics, physics, and the mystics; dreams, events of his daily life, and ideas passing through his mind.) With this poem, he started to work towards a new adaptation which eventually made him the public figure he became during the inter-war years. ‘Everything was in “La Jeune Parque”’, he was to say before he died. The author analyses this poem and others that followed, as well as essays, letters, and notes, to illustrate a developmental process which was also a recapitulation of the past. Through the analysis of the images and symbols, she demonstrates the interlocking of inner and outer events. Especially convincing is the part played by water in the life of the poet and its connection with the themes of birth and death.
Mme Aigrisse establishes the poet's psychological type by quoting side by side excerpts from Jung and the description of M. Teste's character by his wife in an essay bearing that name. M. Teste is the incarnation of Valéry at his most intellectual and withdrawn. Descriptions and quotations are strikingly similar. Valéry, the typical French intellectual of the period, comes out as an introverted sensation-feeling type.
One is carried away by the enthusiasm of the author, sometimes overpowered, particularly by the wealth of detail. But she never forgets Valéry was an artist, never reduces the work of art to something less than