Monsieur Teste

Imaginary intellectual figure in the ‘Cycle Teste’ by Valéry, a series of pieces from different periods of his life, the first and best-known of which, written in 1894 shortly after his youthful mental crisis, is La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste (1896). Preferring potentiality or inner mental power to actual creation or the communication of his talents, Teste is in fact a monstrous high priest of the intellect (Mr ‘Head’, from an old form of Tête), whose aim is total self-mastery by knowing his limits as a physical organism (‘Que peut un homme?’). Introduced by an already highly self-aware narrator (‘I cannot abide stupidity’ was the opening line of the first English translation), he is seen, for example, not only minimizing the outer circumstances of his life as much as possible, but examining the sensation of physical pain. (We also see him at the opera, characteristically observing himself observe the audience of which he himself forms part.)

Teste for Valéry was a literary experiment (one of his many comments in the Pléiade edition of his collected works) in extracting the most intense moments of a mind observing its own operations and composing from them a whole way of life. In other pieces we are given extracts from Teste's Log-Book or, in the often comical Lettre de Madame Émilie Teste (1924), a view of this ‘mystique sans Dieu’ as seen by his conveniently complementary wife. Representing a certain direction of Valéry's own mind taken to parodic extreme, Teste himself was partly modelled on Poe's Dupin, as well as on Degas and on Descartes, with whom Valéry associated the autobiographical element absent from modern philosophy; Teste in turn is thus associated with the ‘roman moderne’. This was Valéry's only venture into novelistic form.

[Christine Crow]