“In the beginning was the Fable” Elements of a Valéryan poetics of the tale

The Valeryian practice of storytelling subverts the laws and functions of the genre, blends types, blurs the distinction between reality and fiction, to try to produce an ambitious poetic work, complex composition and scholarly, which would be like an allegory of a totalizing artistic creation, the only one capable of grasping the variations of a consciousness in perpetual motion and of a self that works indefinitely on its own mythogenesis.