Dramato-Poetic Structure of Voice in Paul Valéry’s La jeune Parque

Abstract

Abstract: In 1917, Paul Valéry broke his twenty five-year long poetic silence with the publication of his seminal work, La Jeune Parque. In the poem, Valéry’s debt to Symbolism and Stéphane Mallarmé is evident with the exploration of emotion and sound through the lyric voice. Yet La Jeune Parque breaks away from its Symbolist heritage primarily through its rootedness in the classical alexandrine form. By conceiving the poem’s 512 alexandrines after Racine’s classicist model, Valéry develops self-reflection in La Jeune Parque through a nuanced exploration of poetic emotion in direct relation to poetic form. It is precisely by elaborating the link between language and form that Valéry opens up the self-reflective voce in La Jeune Parque to multiplication which ultimately results in a multiplicity of speaking identities. Valéry gives a post-symbolist yet neo-classical structure of the poem that construes the voiced self in La Jeune Parque as the site of a collectivity of distinct selfhoods. By combining distinct poetic traditions of symbolism and classicism, the poem La Jeune Parque emphasizes the process of the creation within the lyric, resulting in the creation of a dramato-poetic voice. Keywords: Paul Valéry; lyricism; poetics of construction; voice; La Jeune Parque.