Monsieur Teste

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Monsieur Teste is acharacter inventedby Paul Valéry who first appeared in his 1896 fragment of the novel La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste ("The evening with Mr. Test"). This fragment was published together with three other fragments that had previously been published and a foreword in 1926 as an essay - like five-part prose cycle under the title M. Teste , and further fragments were added in 1946. The figure appears in other texts and in the critical edition of Valérys Cahiers 1894–1914 . Teste is a symbolic figure of occidental rationality (almost) without emotions, personal attitudes and lifeworld, so to speak a "person without qualities" reduced to thinking and thinking of thinking, who - right down to the color of his eyes - bears and imagined Valéry's autobiographical traits Conversation partner also reflects Valéry's untapped potential.

Emergence

The fragment from 1896 is the result of the young Paul Valéry's decisive turning away from the previously preferred poetry, the “vague” and “impure” things and the external relationships of people that arouse him disgust, and his turn to clear thinking “in voluntary loneliness ”. He was now "afflicted by the acute suffering of precision". Valéry is influenced by Edgar Allan Poe's essay The Philosophy of Composition (1842), in which Poe takes the view that the process of good writing is methodical, analytical and precise, but not spontaneous or intuitive. He was also preoccupied with the phenomenon of split personality , the relationship between internal and external voices (the social pressure to adapt). However, Valéry's fragment is also a result of his exploration of positivism , although he always remained pessimistic about the possibility of objective knowledge. Valéry allegedly lived in Montpellier in the same house (and also lets his fictional character Monsieur Teste live in it) in which Auguste Comte is said to have lived. After almost 30 years, Valéry took up this thread again and expanded the text. These texts, added in 1926, include Lettre d'un ami (“Letter from a friend”, first published individually in 1924), Lettre de Madame Émilie Teste (“Letter from Mrs. Émilie Teste”, 1924), Extraits du Log-Book de Monsieur Teste ( "Excerpts from Mr. Teste's logbook " with reflections, aphorisms and poems, 1925) and Préface ("Foreword", 1925, originally intended for the English edition). The "Letter of a Friend" appeared in 1926 in a German translation by Max Rychner and in 1927 together with the other texts.

In 1945 a bibliophile edition was published with ten drawings by the author. The posthumously last French edition from 1946 was supplemented by five further fragmentary texts. Three of them come from the Cahiers ; there the author speaks as Monsieur Teste. Further French editions appeared in 1960 ( oeuvres vol. 2) and 1978 by Gallimard and in 2020 (under the title Le Cycle de Monsieur Teste ). In addition, the German edition in Inselverlag (1992) was expanded to include the short text La Vengeance de Monsieur Teste (“The Revenge of Monsieur Teste”) from Valéry's own reflections in the Cahiers of 1894.

content

The text contains a minimum of external action, but many observations and reflections. Monsieur Teste is difficult to grasp for the author who describes an encounter with him in the first text from 1896. Teste, around 40 years old, has not had any books for 20 years and is into numbers. His furniture is sparse and impersonal, his love life poor. He cannot cope with physical pain. For the sake of the pure spirit, he haughtily separates himself from cultivated society and its passive devotion to beauty. Everything personal for him only embodies “stupidity”, they are trivialities. The famous opening sentence to La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste reads: “La bêtise n'est pas mon fort” (“Stupidity is not my strength.”) In “A friend's letter”, the author's voice can hardly be distinguished from that of Monsieur Teste ; Whether the letter is really addressed to Teste remains unclear. The struggles of the Parisian intellectuals, which only revolve around words, move for Teste (and apparently also for the author) in an illusory world; they are determined by selfishness, a thirst for originality and megalomania. He stands out from it through his ascetic will to be self-sufficient. The letter from the troubled wife - the author wonders when he learns that Monsieur Teste even married - regards her husband from the perspective of the mentally inferior as a “godless mystic” who eludes both evil and good.

The voice of Monsieur Teste himself can only be heard in the "logbook". Everything individual stands in the way of generalization for him, all expressions of emotions are accidental and without value. The “illusions of the artist and author” are to be “eradicated”. Only radical self-criticism and the merciless knowledge of one's own weaknesses led to the truth. In the “Dialog” fragment, Teste criticizes the enthusiasm, which as such is not subject to logic. Humanity and justice are unreflected conventions. In the fragment “For a portrait of Monsieur Teste”, Monsieur Teste cannot be portrayed: there is no reliable portrait of him. It is a psychological aberration , "a kind of overflowing internal energy". In "Some Thoughts of Monsieur Teste" his belligerent and warlike side is emphasized. He is at war with anything that is emotional, but this hostility only strengthens his ability to be self-critical. Testes radical mentality sees humans as machines or animals. He only showed emotions once, and that was vengeance. In the final part, “End of Monsieur Teste”, death goes from “zero to zero” - it is extinguished. Life is returning from the unconscious and insensitive to the unconscious and insensitive.

interpretation

The name of Monsieur Teste is composed of testis (Latin: witness) and tête (French for head). The head man Teste is an anti-hero who, beyond all subjective clouding, embodies pure vision and pure thinking and defines himself through demarcation and denial. He is hostile to life and misanthropic, because life only limits his possibilities, in the extreme potential of thinking, which he continually tries to increase. As a representative of intellectual asceticism, he has anti-social-arrogant as well as wise (Socratic) and self-ironic traits. Since thinking and thinking of thinking are never finished and only pass into nothing through death, the structure of the work is in principle never finished. The loose shape allows almost any insertions; the aesthetic and philosophical content of the text can reveal itself differently to each reader.

The text refers to the “advancing type of human being the rational technician”, who is itself the result and prerequisite of modern anti-metaphysical technical civilization; he anticipates the “ man without qualities ” of the modern novel, who considers emotions to be human construction flaws and rejects any social responsibility. "Testes intellect remains a private one, and that is the melancholy secret of Mr. Teste". Michel Tournier sees the essay as a follow-up to Cartesian thinking, which must be lived methodically . Just as Robinson Crusoe's logbook describes the work on his island, the author describes the work on the essay in Monsieur Testes logbook. For Peter Buerger , too , Valéry is the "absolute modernist who complements the Cartesian project of subjugating the world to the subject with a practice of self-submission and who even surpasses Descartes' exploitation of the passions". Daniel Simond sees him as an embodiment of Friedrich Nietzsche's superman . For Karl Löwith , the figure of Monsieur Teste reveals the fragility of the world of conventions and the conflict between the spirit and the animality and simplicity of elementary life.

With his universal skepticism and absurd excesses, Monsieur Teste also testifies to the “tendency to self-destruction”, to the “salvation of destructiveness in a world that rattles about constructive values ​​and ideals”, states Bernhard Böschenstein .

reception

Rainer Maria Rilke praised the book as an extremely concentrated “essence” of a novel. Walter Benjamin and Ernst Robert Curtius also tried to make Valéry known in Germany. However, due to the language barrier and political tensions, there was no broad reception in the 1920s and 1930s and only began at the end of the 1950s, after French existentialism had been accepted. Since then, Monsieur Teste has been interpreted as a prototype of modernity; he is often counted among the ancestors of structuralism . However, Valéry's reputation as a symbolist poet also made it difficult to receive the book. Valéry's relationship to poststructuralism has hardly been discussed, although the disappearance of the subject is an explicit theme of the book.

literature

  • Walter Pabst : The modern French novel. Berlin 1968, pp. 52-76.
  • [P. Mon .:] Paul Valéry: La soirée avec Monsieur Teste. In: Kindlers Neues Literatur-Lexikon, Vol. 16: St-Va, Munich 1996, pp. 1025 f.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Paul Valéry: Foreword to Monsieur Teste . Translated from the French by Max Rychner, Achim Russer and Bernd Schwibs. Suhrkamp, ​​2nd edition Frankfurt 2016, p. 7 f. This individual edition is based on volume 1 (1992) of the Frankfurt edition of the works Valéray in seven volumes, edited by Jürgen Schmidt-Radefeldt, Insel Verlag, 1989 ff.
  2. ↑ See Paul Gifford: Paul Valéry: Le dialogue des choses divines. Paris 1989.
  3. ^ Frank Edmund Sutcliffe: La pensée de Paul Valéry. Paris 1955, p. 188.
  4. ↑ ISBN 978-3-9678-7435-8 .
  5. ↑ Notes from the editors of the island edition on: Paul Valéry: Monsieur Teste. Translated from the French by Max Rychner, Achim Russer and Bernd Schwibs. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 2nd edition 2016, p. 79 f.
  6. ↑ Suhrkamp edition 2016, p. 12.
  7. ↑ Suhrkamp edition 2016, p. 45.
  8. ↑ Suhrkamp edition 2016, p. 69.
  9. ↑ Suhrkamp edition 2016, p. 65.
  10. ↑ Suhrkamp edition 2016, p. 77.
  11. ↑ P. Mo. 1996, p. 1026.
  12. ↑ Olav Krämer: Telling Thinking. Representations of the intellect with Robert Musil and Paul Valéry. spectrum Literary Studies Vol. 20, De Gruyter 2009.
  13. ↑ Walter Benjamin , quoted in after P. Mo. 1996, p. 1026.
  14. ↑ Lynn Salkin Spiroli: Learning and Unlearning: Tournier, Defoe, Voltaire. In: Michael Worton: Michel Tournier. Routledge, 2014, p. 111.
  15. ↑ Peter Buerger (Peter Bürger): What use is all my mind to me? in: zeit.de, July 14, 2015.
  16. ↑ Daniel Simond: Circonstances. Lausanne 1932.
  17. ^ Wiebrecht Ries: Karl Löwith. Metzler Collection, Vol. 264, Springer, 2017, p. 126.
  18. ^ Bernhard Böschenstein: Epilogue to the Suhrkamp edition 2016, p. 93.
  19. ↑ John Twardella: The emergence of structuralism from the crisis of the poet: an introduction to psychological and poetological conceptions Paul Valéry. Tectum Verlag, 2000, p. 11.
  20. ↑ Peter Buerger: What use is all of my mind to me? in: zeit.de, July 14, 1995.