Reading Order
Cahiers (Valéry)Cahiers Reading Order
Cahiers (Notebooks, 1894-1945) by Paul Valéry are the twenty-nine volumes of daily notebooks that Valéry kept for over fifty years — rising before dawn to write in them for two to four hours before his ordinary intellectual work, then setting them aside. Published posthumously in a facsimile edition (29 volumes, 1957-61) and later in a selected printed edition (Pléiade, 2 volumes), the Cahiers are unlike any other literary work: they are not a diary (Valéry was uninterested in events), not an essay collection (the entries are fragments rather than arguments), not a commonplace book (the observations are original, not collected), but something more like a fifty-year laboratory of consciousness — a record of one mind's observations about its own operations, about mathematics, about poetry, about the sea, about language, about time, about the body, about sleep and dreams. The Cahiers contain some of the most beautiful and precise writing in French, and also some of the most abstruse and unresolved — they are the record of a mind in motion, not of conclusions reached. They constitute the largest 'work' of Valéry's career, far exceeding in volume the published verse and prose, and are increasingly recognized as the central document of his thought.
Where to start
Begin with the selected Pléiade edition (2 volumes, edited by Judith Robinson) rather than the full 29-volume facsimile — the selection gives the best of the Cahiers in a manageable form. Within the selection, the entries on poetry, consciousness, sleep, mathematics, and the body are the most accessible and the most extraordinary. The entry 'Moi' (Self) is a good place to start: Valéry's decades-long attempt to understand what 'I' refers to and whether there is a stable self beneath the flux of consciousness.
Complete Cahiers (Valéry) Book List
- 1Buy
Cahiers (2 vols., Pléiade selection)
Paul Valéry·1974·The Judith Robinson-Valéry selection (Gallimard Pléiade, 1974) — the best entry point into the Cahiers, selecting the most important entries across five decades. - 2Buy
Cahiers (facsimile, 29 vols.)
Paul Valéry·1957·The complete facsimile edition of the original manuscripts (CNRS, 1957-61) — for serious scholars; reproduces Valéry's handwriting with his drawings and diagrams. - 3Buy
La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste (1896)
Paul Valéry·1896·The fictional portrait of the intellectual program that the Cahiers enact — Monsieur Teste is the character who does what Valéry actually does in the notebooks. - 4Buy
La Jeune Parque (1917)
Paul Valéry·1917·The poem that emerged from twenty years of Cahiers-like self-observation — reading the Cahiers gives the intellectual background to understand what the poem is attempting. - 5Buy
Variété I-V (1924-1944)
Paul Valéry·1924·The five-volume essay collection — the Cahiers' refined output, where observations that had been developing for decades are worked into finished critical essays. The most accessible Valéry prose.
Cahiers (Valéry) — Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Valéry keep the Cahiers for fifty years?
Valéry began the Cahiers in 1894, two years after the 'Nuit de Gênes' crisis, as the practical implementation of his decision to observe his own mind's operations rather than to produce conventional literary work. He kept them for the rest of his life — fifty-one years — because they were the place where his real intellectual work happened: the attempt to understand consciousness, to develop a 'pure method' for mastering any domain of thought, and to observe the mind at its most immediate and unmediated. The published prose and poetry were in a sense by-products of the Cahiers — the Cahiers were the real practice.
What time did Valéry write the Cahiers?
Valéry typically woke at dawn (around 5 or 6 a.m.) and wrote in the Cahiers for two to four hours before his ordinary daily work — before breakfast, before seeing anyone. He described this early-morning time as the period when consciousness is closest to its own operations, before the social and practical demands of the day impose their distortions. The habit of the pre-dawn Cahier session was maintained for fifty years, with some interruptions during the First World War period.
Are the Cahiers available in English?
Selections are available in English: The Notebooks: A Selection, translated by Rachel Killick (Oxford University Press, 2000) offers a substantial selection in English. There are also thematic selections: Paul Valéry: An Anthology, edited by James Lawler (Princeton, 1977), includes translations of Cahiers passages alongside the published work. The full 29-volume facsimile is in French only; the 2-volume Pléiade selection is also in French only. The difficulty of translating the Cahiers (the entries are often aphoristic, linguistically precise, and syntactically unusual) means that no English translation fully conveys the experience of the French.
What subjects does Valéry address most frequently in the Cahiers?
The recurring subjects over fifty years are: consciousness (the central theme — what is the self? what is the 'I'? what happens in the moment of observation?); sleep and dreams (the border between conscious and unconscious); mathematics (Valéry was deeply interested in mathematical method as a model for intellectual precision); poetry and language (the problem of how language works, what makes a verse line beautiful, what the difference is between poetry and prose); the body (the experience of physical sensation, fatigue, disease — especially during Valéry's illnesses in his last years); the sea (a recurring figure for the unlimited, the 'absurd' — the sea appears throughout the Cahiers as a counterpoint to the mind's ordering operations).
How do the Cahiers compare to other great writers' notebooks?
The Cahiers are unusual in their scale (over 26,000 pages in the facsimile edition) and in their subject matter: unlike Kafka's diaries (personal, literary, anguished), Flaubert's letters (literary-critical, social), or Thoreau's journals (natural-observational), the Cahiers are primarily philosophical and mathematical — the record of a mind trying to understand its own operations rather than to record external experience. The closest parallel is probably Lichtenberg's Waste Books (eighteenth-century German scientific aphorisms and self-observations) or the notebooks of Wittgenstein — intellectual notebooks in which the form of the observation is itself the subject.
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