The Young Fate by Paul Valéry
"The Young Fate" by Paul Valéry, also known as "The Youngest of the Fates" or "The Eternal Virgin," is a significant literary work that marked Valéry's ascent in the French literary sphere. Composed between 1912 and 1917 and dedicated to André Gide, this poem reflects Valéry's exploration of identity and form, a journey that he had begun in his earlier notebooks. The poem consists of 512 lines of Alexandrine verse, where Valéry employs musical qualities through alliteration and inner assonance, distinguishing his style from both the Surrealist and Symbolist movements of his time.
Valéry's ambition was to illustrate a concept he referred to as "modulation," which seeks to blend poetry and music into a cohesive dramatic experience. The poem is structured into sixteen sections, portraying the psychological evolution of its central character, a young woman named Fate, who grapples with the complexities of love and death. The narrative begins with her awakening and the confusion stemming from her desires, symbolized by a serpent representing sexual longing. As the story unfolds, parallels are drawn with the classical tale of Cupid and Psyche, ultimately leading to a resolution where Fate embraces life as the dawn breaks. Through this abstract yet poignant narrative, Valéry delves into the nuances of human consciousness and emotional experience.
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The Young Fate by Paul Valéry
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of World Literature, Revised Edition
First published:La Jeune Parque, 1917 (English translation, 1947)
Type of work: Poem
The Work
The Young Fate, also translated as The Youngest of the Fates and The Eternal Virgin, is the work that catapulted Valéry to the forefront of the French literary scene. Dedicated to André Gide, the person to whom Valéry credits his renewed motivation to write poetry, the poem was written over the period from 1912 to 1917. During the struggle with the composition of The Young Fate, Valéry wrote approximately thirty other short works published in the collection Charmes: Ou, Poèmes in 1922.
The poet himself agreed that The Young Fate was his most obscure poem. The two main reasons that he undertook the poem were to continue the quest for identity already begun in his notebooks during these years and to indulge his preoccupation with form. He desired to create a literary means to show the kind of evolution from form to content that he termed “modulation” in music. He studied the operatic recitatives of Christoph Gluck’s Alceste (1767), whose purpose was to merge the poetry and the music into a dramatic whole. Valéry observed that the structure of the language and musical form in the speechlike passages functioned to immerse and carry the listener along in the intended mood of the work, unifying structure and feeling.
The poem is composed of 512 lines of Alexandrine verse. Keeping within strict twelve-syllable form, Valéry uses alliteration and inner assonance to give lines a musical quality exhibiting the balanced effects of rhythm and rhyme. This way of handling language not only sets him apart from the emerging Surrealist movement, in which writers attempted to reveal the subconscious mind, but also distances him from the Symbolist poets, whose work had once served as his model.
Some analysts have separated the poem into sixteen sections, making up two acts with introductory and transitional material. The sections represent evolutions in psychological thought that are represented in the experiences of the poem’s main character.
The subject matter is decidedly abstract—thought conscious of itself. Valéry attempts to depict the changes of consciousness or psychological stages as they evolve over the passage of a night. The poem emerged in fragments too abstract to be understood alone, causing Valéry to introduce a secondary subject, providing a more concrete framework for the abstract ideas. The secondary subject is the story of a young woman, Fate, faced with the problems of love and death. The inner voice of the young Fate is the inner voice to whom Valéry felt all people listen. The poem begins with the troubled cries of an awakening young woman who, having been bitten by the Serpent (symbolizing sexual desire), is in a state of confusion between a desire for love and a desire for death. The story has been compared to the classic legend of Cupid and Psyche in which the pull of life’s sensuality triumphs; as the sun rises, the young Fate accepts life.
Bibliography
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Davy, Charles. Words in the Mind; Exploring Some Effects of Poetry, English and French. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965.
Gifford, Paul, ed. Reading Paul Valéry: Universe in Mind. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
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