Paul Valéry Would Prefer Not To | The New Yorker

newyorker.com · 3,289 words · saved by 1 readers

In his early prose narrative, “Monsieur Teste,” the great French poet created an alter ego even more aloof and elusive than he was.

Save this story Save this story One way of being a modernist writer is to pay attention to the most saliently modern objects and experiences. So it is that Proust recounts the arresting novelty of a telephone call or an airplane sighting. For T. S. Eliot, the products of industrial capitalism can appear either literally (“a record on the gramophone” in “The Waste Land”) or as a metaphor for inner states, as when he describes the hour of dusk at which “the human engine waits / Like a taxi throbbing waiting.” Sometimes newfangled technology seems to enter into the nature of the writing itself. J

Paul Valéry Would Prefer Not To | The New Yorker

related reading