Monsieur Teste

Penned over a 50-year span, modernist poet Valéry’s sundry brief writings about his alter ego Édouard Teste are gathered in an accessible new translation by Mandell. An epitome of detached ratiocination, Teste has deliberately winnowed his mind of the dross of convention, habit, opinion, stories, and ideas, purifying his thought until he has become “a man of attention,” responding to life as it unfolds with rare plasticity and reserve. Speaking softly and rapidly without niceties or gesticulations, Teste has effectively “killed the marionette,” becoming that “chimera of intellectual mythology,” an un-self-conscious self. Readers circle Teste from the standpoint of the author himself, disconcerted and fascinated in a manner akin to Bartleby’s coworkers, and then from that of Teste’s adoring and often awestruck wife Emilie, before obtaining direct access to his own enigmatic observations. No mere thought experiment, Teste embodies Valéry’s own lifelong interrogation of the nature of consciousness, drawing him toward an existential mysticism that anticipates the writing of Fernando Pessoa and Samuel Beckett.