Abstract
Valéry represents a certain idea of literature, one that follows other historical phases that contributed to the emergence of the literary " champ " (Bourdieu). In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the belles-lettres regime made literary production part of a social game played out in forums that were relatively autonomous from the Prince's gaze (salons), and publicized the debates it gave rise to (academies). In this way, the question of the specificity of art and its effects gradually emerged (the aesthetics of Lessing, Kant and Du Bos).
The mid-18th century saw the emergence of the question of sensibility ; at the same time, the notion of literature appeared, which would take off with German Romanticism. At that time, literature was the expression of both the individual (the intimate) and the group (the nation).
In the nineteenth century, the success and value of literature were defined by those involved in the art and no longer by the Prince, so that all the conditions were in place for the concept of form to assert itself. Literary production no longer depends on a criterion of sincerity, but aims to elicit certain effects, calculated by the author, that are fully distinct from his or her work : thus the manufacture of melancholic emotion through the word machine that is Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven . The lineaments of this literary evolution are traced by Valéry in the fundamental text of his " Avant-propos à Connaissance de la déesse " (1920).
Music became the ideal of poetry, particularly with Symbolism, to the detriment of the visual arts, which had served as a model until then. Now emancipated from the idea of representing the world, this " poésie à l'état pur ", as Valéry put it, is first and foremost a form. It attempts to achieve purity with a fundamentally impure material: language. The poem does not seek to convey dogma, theory or philosophy, but rather a nervous state, outside the world, that is, emotion, not knowledge or power. Poetry and emotion are thus radically distinguished from philosophy and ideas.
As early as 1920, in this " Avant-propos ", Valéry anticipated what Jakobson would call " poetic function of language " (as opposed to the utilitarian character of language). This reflection takes place at a time when the generation of the 1880s and 1890s has been decimated by the First World War. Slightly older than these sacrificed generations, who form a kind of void, he now situates his work of literary reflection in the gap he occupies between the Symbolist era and the contemporary period.
