Abstract
In the first year of the last decade of his life, Paul Valéry contributed a three-page preface to an unusual collection of essays. The slim brochure, commissioned and published by Source Perrier, aimed to extol the virtues of the famous mineral water, chronicling the history of the spring itself, its therapeutic benefits and the precise rituals that should accompany its consumption.1 Eschewing such commerciality, and without favouring any particular source or origin, Valéry’s ‘Louanges de l’eau’ (‘In Praise of Water’) is a celebratory treatise on the wider cultural and metaphorical significance of water. Applauding the ‘divine lucidité’ (divine clarity’) of this ‘merveilleux agent de la vie’ (‘magnificent agent of life’), his text offers a fascinating account of the mythological status that water has assumed in the Western tradition.2
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Notes
Jean Hytier, ‘Notes’, in Paul Valéry, Œuvres, ed. by Jean Hytier, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1957–1960), I, p. 1710. Unless otherwise indicated, translations are my own. My thanks are due to Rachel McGahern for her benign influence on the final version of this article.
Valéry, Œuvres, I, p. 202. With its examination of images of water and dependent notions of clarity, depth, reflection and purity, Gaston Bachelard’s L’Eau et les rêves, essai sur l’imagination de la matière (Paris: Corti, 1942) goes some way towards demystifying this tradition. For Derrida’s treatment of Bachelard on metaphor (and additional comments on metaphors of growth, irrigation and circulation in Plato, Condillac and Rousseau), see ‘La Mythologie blanche: la métaphore dans le texte philosophique’, in Marges — de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972), pp. 247–324. It is not accidental, as Harold Bloom notes in The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 2nd edn (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), that our current concept of influence is derived from an image of astral in-flux: ‘the flowing from the stars upon our fates and our personalities’ (p. xii). Bloom alludes to this etymology when he argues that ‘precursors flood us, and our imaginations can die by drowning in them, but no imaginative life is possible if such inundation is wholly evaded’ (p. 154).
Jacques Derrida, Mal d’archive: une impression freudienne (Paris: Galilée, 1995); translated by Eric Prenowitz as Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
Chris Baldick’s Oxford Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) furnishes us with a concrete example of this critical anxiety. Although the dictionary, which ‘defines over 1,000 literary terms from absurd to zeugma’, contains at least 54 instances of the word ‘influence’, an entry devoted to the term itself is conspicuously absent. This testifies to a Derridean double bind at the heart of every critical treatment of influence relationships: the concept of influence inevitably provokes our suspicion, if not our scepticism, but as critics we remain ‘bound to illuminate the relation of writer to writer, and writer to tradition’;
Ihab H. Hassan, ‘The Problem of Influence in Literary History: Notes towards a Definition’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 14.1 (September 1955), 66–76 (p. 66).
John Sutherland, ‘Introduction’, in Anthony Trollope, He Knew He Was Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. xiv.
These controversies are detailed in J. M. Masson’s The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985)
and Janet Malcolm’s In the Freud Archives (London: Macmillan, 1997).
Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991).
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated under the general editorship of James Strachey, 24 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1991), XVIII, p. 60. Further references to Freud’s work are to this edition.
Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco, De quoi demain…Dialogue (Paris: Flammarion, 2001), p. 285; translated by Jeff Fort as For What Tomorrow …: A Dialogue (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 175.
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Earlie, P. (2013). Figuring Influence: Some Influential Metaphors in Derrida, Valéry and Freud. In: Baldwin, T., Fowler, J., de Medeiros, A. (eds) Questions of Influence in Modern French Literature. Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137309143_10
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