The Frontiers of Theory
The Frontiers of Theory
Series Editor: Martin McQuillan, Kingston University
This series brings together internationally respected figures to comment on and
re-describe the state of theory in the twenty-first century.
Paul de Man
Edited by Martin McQuillan
‘De Man’s readings of Mallarmé, Yeats, and George in the 1950s demonstrate how a reflection
on an authentically poetic vocation cannot help but produce a concomitant reflection on
what constitutes a genuinely literary criticism and theory. It is fascinating to see how de
Man’s pushing of a Hegelian phenomenological “method” to its limits engenders what we
now call “de Manian” rhetorical or “deconstructive” reading. The Post-Romantic Predicament
is essential reading for anyone concerned with the question of “the literary”.’
Andrzej Warminski, University of California, Irvine
First publication of a collection of critical texts from Paul de Man’s Harvard University years
From 1955–1961 Paul de Man was a Junior Fellow at Harvard University where he wrote a
doctoral thesis entitled ‘The Post-Romantic Predicament: a study in the poetry of Mallarmé
and Yeats’. These texts from this period include de Man’s extended considerations of
Stéphane Mallarmé and W. B. Yeats as well as essays on Hölderlin, Keats and Stefan George.
This writing reflects recognisable concerns for de Man: the figurative dimension of language,
the borders between philosophy and literature, the ideological obfuscations of Romanticism,
and the difficulties of the North American heritage of New Criticism. These essays, brought
together from the Paul de Man papers at the University of California (Irvine), make a
significant contribution to the cultural history of deconstruction, and to the present state of
literary theory.
Martin McQuillan is Professor of Literary Theory and Cultural Analysis and Dean of the
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Kingston University, London. His recent publications
include Deconstruction After 9/11 and Roland Barthes, or, The Profession of Cultural Studies.
ISBN 978 0 7486 4105 5
Jacket image: Beach at Heist Georges Lemmen,
1891-92 © akg-images / Erich Lessing
Jacket design: Michael Chatfield
Edited by Martin McQuillan
ISBN 978–0–7486–4105–5
Edinburgh
Edinburgh University Press
22 George Square
Edinburgh EH8 9LF
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Paul de Man
Paul de Man
Paul de Man (1919–1983) was the Sterling Professor of French and Comparative Literature at
Yale University. He is the author of some of the most important works of literary theory and
deconstruction including Blindness and Insight, Allegories of Reading, The Rhetoric of
Romanticism and Aesthetic Ideology.
The Post-Romantic Predicament
The Post-Romantic Predicament
The
Post-Romantic
Predicament
Approx. Pantone colour 365 - spine 668
The Post-Romantic Predicament
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The Frontiers of Theory
Series Editor: Martin McQuillan
The Poetics of Singularity: The Counter-Culturalist Turn in Heidegger,
Derrida, Blanchot and the later Gadamer
Timothy Clark
Dream I Tell You
Hélène Cixous
Scandalous Knowledge: Science, Truth, and the Human
Barbara Herrnstein Smith
Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius
Jacques Derrida
Insister of Jacques Derrida
Hélène Cixous
Not Half No End: Militantly Melancholic Essays in Memory of
Jacques Derrida
Geoffrey Bennington
Death-Drive: Freudian Hauntings in Literature and Art
Robert Rowland Smith
Of Jews and Animals
Andrew Benjamin
Reading and Responsibility: Deconstruction’s Traces
Derek Attridge
To Follow: The Wake of Jacques Derrida
Peggy Kamuf
Volleys of Humanity: Essays 1972–2009
Hélène Cixous
Veering: A Theory of Literature
Nicholas Royle
The Post-Romantic Predicament
Paul de Man
Poetry in Painting: Writings on Contemporary Arts and Aesthetics
Hélène Cixous, ed. Marta Segarra and Joana Masó
The Paul de Man Notebooks
Paul de Man
Visit the Frontiers of Theory website at www.euppublishing.com/series/tfot
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The Post-Romantic
Predicament
Paul de Man
Edited by Martin McQuillan
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© The Estate of Paul de Man, 2012
© Editorial Matter, Martin McQuillan, 2012
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF
www.euppublishing.com
Typeset in 10.5/13 pt Sabon
by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and
printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7486 4105 5 (hardback)
ISBN 978 0 7486 5623 3 (webready PDF)
ISBN 978 0 7486 5625 7 (epub)
ISBN 978 0 7486 5624 0 (Amazon ebook)
The right of Paul de Man
to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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Contents
Series Editor’s Preface
Acknowledgement
Editor’s Note
‘No Country for Old Men’: Paul de Man and the Post-Romantic
Predicament
Martin McQuillan
vi
viii
ix
1
Paul de Man: Essays
1. Introduction to ‘The Post-Romantic Predicament’ (1960)
2. Mallarmé (1960)
Part I ‘Hérodiade’
Part II ‘Igitur’
Part III ‘Un coup de dés’
3. Drama and History in Yeats (1960)
4. Mallarmé, George and Yeats (c.1959)
5. Stefan George and Stéphane Mallarmé (1952)
6. Stefan George and Friedrich Hölderlin (1954)
33
36
36
59
84
124
166
182
196
Appendix: Dissertation Fragment on Stefan George (c.1955)
De Man’s Bibliography to Chapter 2
Index
215
227
231
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Series Editor’s Preface
Since its inception Theory has been concerned with its own limits, ends
and after-life. It would be an illusion to imagine that the academy is no
longer resistant to Theory but a significant consensus has been established and it can be said that Theory has now entered the mainstream
of the humanities. Reaction against Theory is now a minority view and
new generations of scholars have grown up with Theory. This leaves
so-called Theory in an interesting position which its own procedures
of auto-critique need to consider: what is the nature of this mainstream
Theory and what is the relation of Theory to philosophy and the other
disciplines which inform it? What is the history of its construction and
what processes of amnesia and the repression of difference have taken
place to establish this thing called Theory? Is Theory still the site of a
more-than-critical affirmation of a negotiation with thought, which
thinks thought’s own limits?
‘Theory’ is a name that traps by an aberrant nominal effect the transformative critique which seeks to reinscribe the conditions of thought in
an inaugural founding gesture that is without ground or precedent: as a
‘name’, a word and a concept, Theory arrests or misprisions such thinking. To imagine the frontiers of Theory is not to dismiss or to abandon
Theory (on the contrary one must always insist on the it-is-necessary of
Theory even if one has given up belief in theories of all kinds). Rather,
this series is concerned with the presentation of work which challenges
complacency and continues the transformative work of critical thinking.
It seeks to offer the very best of contemporary theoretical practice in
the humanities, work which continues to push ever further the frontiers
of what is accepted, including the name of Theory. In particular, it is
interested in that work which involves the necessary endeavour of crossing disciplinary frontiers without dissolving the specificity of disciplines.
Published by Edinburgh University Press, in the city of Enlightenment,
this series promotes a certain closeness to that spirit: the continued
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Series Editor’s Preface
vii
exercise of critical thought as an attitude of inquiry which counters
modes of closed or conservative opinion. In this respect the series aims
to make thinking think at the frontiers of theory.
Martin McQuillan
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Acknowledgements
The essays included in this volume are copyright Patsy de Man; I am
extremely grateful for her permission to reproduce them here and for
her unfailing support. ‘The Post-Romantic Predicament’ is reproduced
courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, University of California,
Irvine Libraries. Paul de Man papers. MS-C004. Box 1: Folders 19–24.
I am indebted to Michelle Light, Andrew Jones and Stephen MacLeod
for their assistance in co-producing this manuscript. I would also like
to thank Jackie Dooley, J. Hillis Miller, Andrzej Warminski, Ellen Burt,
Stephen Barker, Steve Mailloux, David Theo Goldberg, Rei Terada,
Catherine Lui, Peter Krapp, Mark Currie, Robert Eaglestone, Simon
Morgan Wortham and Linda Corcoran for their invaluable contributions to the production of this book.
This book was made possible by grants from the Arts and Humanities
Research Council and the British Academy.
I would like to thank Erin Obodiac who worked with me on the
AHRC funded project. I am also grateful for travel allowances, which
enabled this work, from both the University of Leeds and Kingston
University, London.
My thanks as ever go to Jackie Jones. This book is for Oscar and
Felix, my odd couple.
Martin McQuillan
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Editor’s Note on The Post-Romantic
Predicament
The texts that form this collection are held in the Special Collections
and Archives at the University of California, Irvine. I have taken the
decision not to attempt to revise de Man’s text in light of subsequent
publications or attempt to amend it to correspond with contemporary
editorial norms. These texts were written in a specific context and at a
particular time. The reasons for presenting them here are connected to
their historical relation to our own theoretical scene. I am sure that no
one would thank me for attempting to prettify de Man’s graduate texts:
to present them in such a way that did not take account of their place
within the history of de Man’s own writing, or, present them as the
‘finished article’ approved for publication by de Man. The texts from
1960 were submitted by de Man for assessment as part of his PhD, the
other texts either take the form of class work or abandoned sections of
the doctoral thesis. In the case of the Appendix dissertation fragment,
the text is often little more than a sketch towards further thought and
writing. I believe that justice is best done to these texts and to de Man’s
longer writing career by allowing them to retain their institutional and
embryonic identity. This may occasionally result in a degree of inconsistency in the referencing but not one that I believe will detract from
understanding or appreciation of the text.
Square brackets frequently appear in the text by way of expansion
and explanation. These brackets are the work of de Man himself, unless
otherwise stated in the text. I am extremely grateful to Tim Clark of
Edinburgh University Press for his forensic attention to the quality of
this manuscript. Any errors contained within it are my own.
Martin McQuillan
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‘No Country For Old Men’: Paul de
Man and the Post-Romantic
Predicament
Martin McQuillan
‘The resulting predicament is linguistic rather than ontological
or hermeneutic.’
Paul de Man1
1. Thesis Defence
The essays collected in this book were written by Paul de Man during the
period 1952–1959 when he was a Junior Fellow at Harvard University
and writing a PhD entitled ‘The Post-Romantic Predicament: A Study in
the Poetry of Mallarmé and Yeats’. This book is not de Man’s thesis, a
sizeable part of which has already been published as ‘Image and Emblem
in Yeats’s in The Rhetoric of Romanticism.2 The present collection contains parts of his submitted thesis as well as preparatory doctoral work
and abandoned sections of the thesis on the German poet Stefan George
– all drawn from the Paul de Man papers held in the Critical Theory
Archive at the University of California, Irvine. De Man completed and
submitted his dissertation at the age of forty, older and wiser than the
author of the essays that make up the first third of the Lindsay Waters
edited collection of Critical Writings.3 The work of the Harvard years
in no way represents something like de Manian ‘juvenilia’. Rather, for
a mature individual on the cusp of middle age ‘The Post-Romantic
Predicament’ represents a sustained period of work in which de Man
opens up a series of concerns that will occupy him for the rest of his
academic career.
De Man’s thesis and the other writing that accompanies it here constitute a collection that concerns itself with the figurative dimension of
language, the borders between philosophy and literature, the ideological
obfuscations of Romanticism, and the difficulties of the North American
heritage of New Criticism. In terms of understanding the oeuvre of de
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The Post-Romantic Predicament
Man, the archival work of this collection represents the reclamation of
an important missing piece of the jigsaw that relates his post-war emergence in America to his publishing career as a tenured academic from
Cornell onwards. For de Man scholars the benefits of the presentation
of this material will be obvious. What is less obvious is why the general
theoretical reader should concern themselves with de Man’s doctoral
work from the 1950s in an age when the theoretical scene is occupied by
other idols reading according to a different philosophical and political
axis. In an epoch of intermedialities, post-humanisms, climate changing
globalisations and genre-defying transdisciplinary theorisations, why
should we read Paul de Man on Stéphane Mallarmé?
The first response one might make to this direct and salient question
is that it is precisely the difference of de Man’s work on literature in the
1950s that makes it valuable to us today. De Man’s work at Harvard
was not a matter of swimming with the tide of popular or fashionable
opinion at the time. On the contrary, Mallarmé was a more neglected
writer in the English speaking world when de Man proposed his topic
for comparative study, and although seminal studies had been made by
Robert Greer Cohen, scholars continued to work with inaccurate and
incomplete French editions up until the 1980s (these include the 1945
Pléiade edition and the curiously entitled Deman edition of 1899). The
central topic of de Man’s doctoral work was outré from the beginning,
while Stefan George remains a generally unexamined poet even within
German departments today. The choice of George as a potential bedfellow for Mallarmé and Yeats is striking. However, more significantly,
the writing in this collection represents a formative articulation of de
Man’s uneasiness with the mode of New Criticism dominant within
the American academy at this time, notably at Harvard. For the de
Man of this collection, as for the de Man of Blindness and Insight
and the Aesthetic Ideology, a direct line can be drawn from the philosophical principles of eighteenth-century Romantic poetry to the critical
vocabulary and the untested theoretical assumptions of American New
Criticism.4 The latter, while reading the former, leans heavily on it for its
authority, its tropes and its demonstration, weaving Romantic ideology
into its very fabric and so collapsing the executive, the legislative and the
judiciary of criticism into one. For de Man the ‘post-Romantic predicament’ is as much a struggle to find a critical idiom beyond New Criticism
as it is a study of poetry’s attempts to escape the totalising insistence of
the Romantic inheritance. In this sense, it is de Man’s gesture of swimming against the tide of received theoretical wisdom that commands
our attention today. Certainly, it should be recognised that he offers
this gesture within the confines of the institutional prescriptions of class
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‘No Country For Old Men’
3
work and an examined dissertation in a doctoral programme at an institution like Harvard in the 1950s – this collection does not itself take an
avant-garde form. However, today, when a certain group of dominant
contemporary thinkers seems inescapable to some young critics, theorists and philosophers, de Man’s gesture should be recalled and reinitiated. During the course of this introduction we will have occasion to
pass de Man’s doctoral reading of Mallarmé past two figures of our own
contemporary scene, Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou, for purposes
of critical comparison in order to appreciate the ideological and theoretical assumptions which might be obscured in our own present age.
This then is not a thesis, but it might be taken for one if we are not
careful. De Man might be said to have a singular relation to doctoral
study, given that his legacy is as much determined by the extraordinary
number of graduate students he supervised and who now occupy chairs
in the North American academy – from Gayatri Spivak and Samuel
Weber to Cynthia Chase and Andrzej Warminski (and everyone in
between). In other words, as a scholar with an impeccable institutional
pedigree (Harvard, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Zurich, Yale), de Man
understood the occult power of the thesis: its positional logic as well
as the limits of its authority and legitimacy. The name and idea of the
university depends upon this transmission of competence and authority through the rights of the doctoral thesis. This is how disciplinary
genealogies are established and authority concentrated in the name of
an institution. It is perhaps something that should be challenged in every
possible way at a theoretical level but something whose purpose and
history is almost immovable even in those enlightened institutions set
up to disrupt the accumulation of privilege through socially elite (as well
as academically elite) universities, when the new comer quickly sediments its own counter-genealogy. A deconstruction of the accrediting
rights of the thesis may involve a profound transformation of university
institutions but it would not involve a substitution of nonlegitimacy
and incompetence. In the address that accompanied his own belated
submission of his doctorat d’état, ‘Punctuations: The Time of a Thesis’,
Derrida calls attention to ‘the indestructibility of the ordered procedures
of legitimation, of the production of titles and diplomas, and of the
authorization of competence’.5 No doubt the role of the university in
the accreditation of authority and competence is a historically specific
one, and the place of Harvard, for example, within that history is a
fairly recent phenomenon. However, as the history of philosophy since
Plato demonstrates, there is a clear and binding link between the idea
of the academy and the logocentric-rhetorical-metaphysical system that
the likes of both de Man and Derrida have taught us to recognise. One
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The Post-Romantic Predicament
might say that the ‘success’ of deconstruction in America – as it coalesced around de Man and Derrida as both a stimulation for academic
work and what Hillis Miller calls an ‘allergen’6 within the academy
– happened not despite the positions occupied by de Man in ‘elite’
institutions but precisely because of them. In this regard Derrida’s own
appointments in the US were only ever the result of invitations to ‘visit’
American institutions, first by de Man and latterly by Miller. The rights
and thematics of the ‘Visiting Professor’, one who professes but who is
only visiting, only ever a guest, whose ‘chair’ sits elsewhere, might well
be the topic of another essay on another occasion (perhaps we might go
so far as to say that in America theory is for European visitors, so that
‘reading’ can remain the preserve of locals). However, let us note here
that from the Harvard thesis onwards both de Man and ‘deconstruction
in America’ had a form of legitimacy and authority that both allowed
its dissemination across the networks of the academy and initiated the
feedback loops of resentment and misunderstanding that it attracted
from the very metaphysical onto-encyclopaedic culture its work undermined. This in itself is a good enough reason for us to attend to de
Man’s doctoral work today at a time when the academy is undergoing
a profound organisational and conceptual transformation, in which we
are at once witnessing a transfer of authority from one idea of the university to another and from one set of institutions to another, from one
continent to another, and at the same time the most obdurate attempt to
retain and strengthen the powerful inertial roots of the world’s old elite
universities, of which Harvard is only one example.
In the in Preface to The Rhetoric of Romanticism, the last book
assembled by de Man himself before his untimely death in 1983, he
comments on the inclusion of the first of two chapters on Yeats from his
Harvard thesis:
I saw no reason to resurrect other parts of the thesis, dealing with Mallarmé
and other, more purely thematic, aspects of Yeats. They all now appear dated
and left behind by more recent work on these authors. The Yeats chapter
entitled ‘Image and Emblem’, however, as its title suggests, was already a
rhetorical analysis of figural language avant la lettre anticipating a mode that
would later predominant for me.7
At this point de Man might have been thinking of Derrida’s text ‘The
Double Session’, which first appeared in French in Tel Quel in 1970 and
in English translation in 1981 by Barbara Johnson (one of de Man’s
former Yale graduate students, Johnson’s own thesis on Baudelaire and
Mallarmé was published in French in 19798). In a footnote to an essay
on Blanchot from 1966, which we will attend to shortly, de Man singles
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‘No Country For Old Men’
5
out Derrida’s work on Mallarmé, as well as that of Phillipe Sollers and
Robert Greer Cohen, as worthy of particular praise.9 One can understand the reluctance of the mature de Man at the height of his powers
as the Sterling Professor at Yale to reassemble the work of his doctoral
thesis on Mallarmé in the wake of Derrida’s decisive intervention on this
poet. However, the editorial decision that de Man faced in 1983, when
he was already aware of his impending mortality, is not the same decision that an editor faces today. To suggest that much water has flowed
under the bridge of de Man studies since 1983 would be to venture
something of an understatement. Not only have Waters, Burt, Newmark
and Warminski assembled other volumes of more or less ‘accredited’
de Man manuscripts (based on notes or instructions left by de Man),
but we have also experienced the event of other un-accredited and discreditable publications from the de Man archive: the true juvenilia of
his wartime journalism. It is a truism that any editor will recognise that
the self-report of the author is not always the most reliable guide as to
what should be valued and published. Self-editing is only the first step
in the complicated paths that lead texts to publication and dissemination. One might venture that self-editing is no editing; ‘I edit myself’ is
neither the interiorisation of editing nor the deconstruction of editing,
rather it is a process of editing that is more problematic than editing
as such because there are parts of one’s own work that cannot be recognised or read by the author. This is why publishing houses seldom
rely on authorial self-report in the selection of manuscripts: an other is
always involved in editing. In 1983 it was not at all clear that anyone
other than de Man and his committee had read the Harvard thesis and
it was certainly not possible to determine its relation to the rest of the de
Manian corpus and the development of deconstruction in America. Selfediting is both the limit case of editing, an impossible uncorroborated
editing, and the moment of inauguration that sets the editorial process
in chain, a process that must in essence be open to the unpredictable
trace of the other who edits me. Of course, self-editing or self-censoring
is always a negotiation with the trace of an absent other within the mewho-is-not-me who edits the self. However, there are few reasons to
be satisfied with the notoriously unreliable self-report of authors. The
apparatus of peer review is one of the immutable processes by which the
university lays down its avenues towards the rights to competence and
legitimacy. It is as true of the defence of a thesis as it is of the distribution of research funding or the publication of academic papers. In the
end, everyone who professes must sooner or latter, willingly or unwillingly, submit themselves to the eyes of the other. It is at this moment that
all the unrecognisable, unreadable and uneditable aspects of our own
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The Post-Romantic Predicament
work are brought into dialogue with the other. This is not to say that
the task of editing is straightforward, on the contrary, like Benjamin’s
translator, the editor is always bound to fail and his or her own editing
should be subject to external scrutiny. This is why the definitive edition
is an illusion and why publishing houses continue to produce new editions despite the best efforts of past editors to settle matters once and
for all. The dynamics of editing (all of the unsaturable ethical, political,
aesthetic, economic considerations that are concentrated in an ‘editorial
decision’) are complex but should not be reduced to a decisive injunction
dictated by authorial intention. This may be the case ‘legally’ in other
realms of textual jurisdiction – had de Man wanted to he could have left
a legally binding will and testament with instructions that there should
be no posthumous publications. However, had Max Brod followed
Kafka’s instructions and destroyed the manuscripts in his possession the
world would surely be a poorer place. We are not dealing on this occasion with the distribution of an estate and the rights of legitimate heirs
over property and the propriety of proper names (although Paul and
Patricia de Man’s daughter, Patsy, has granted her supportive permission for this publication). Rather, we are in the problematic realm of
writing; a writing about literature and a writing that has its place in the
unconditional sphere of ideas and critical inquiry. There is something
about writing that disturbs all of the questions of intention, legitimacy
and legacy that usually pertain in the land of the posthumous. The question of who owns writing would have no easy answer. Rather, writing
would ask us to think these questions otherwise and to push at the limits
of the negotiation between the avenues of communal accreditation and
the absent other who reads me before I read myself.
These are issues that would have been familiar to de Man as he
started his doctoral studies at Harvard in 1952: a Belgian immigrant
to the United States and ostensibly a book editor. In 1943, after his
time at Le Soir, he had worked at Agence Dechenne with Georges
Lambrichs, where they were both sacked for arranging the publication
of an edition of the subversive Messages: Cahiers de la poésie française,
which ‘had defended new currents in French literature’;10 after the war
de Man set up his own publishing house, Éditions Hermès, specialising in art monographs. De Man went on to edit editions of Madame
Bovary and the poetry of John Keats, as well as devoting much time to
an uncompleted Portable Rousseau for Viking Press.11 The question of
de Man the editor and translator would certainly take up a study in its
own right. The rationale for ‘resurrecting’, to use de Man’s own term,
his mid-career writing on Mallarmé is perhaps of a different order, but
the text on Mallarmé itself is very close to questions of what counts as
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‘No Country For Old Men’
7
legitimate writing. After all we now know of de Man’s personal history
and of his proximity to Hölderlin and Heidegger (about which I have
spoken elsewhere12), the choice of George as a possible dissertation topic
ought to command our attention. As with Hölderlin and Heidegger it is
not a question of imagining that de Man shared a secret link through the
poet to George’s own proximity to National Socialism. Rather, I would
suggest that de Man is a critical reader of George who in holding George
close as an object of study, retains within his own writing a space that
connects his theoretical project of the disarticulation of totalising ideologies to a history of Europe and a history of European ideas. De Man’s
German writers, from Rilke to Benjamin, would be another topic for a
doctoral study in its own right. Relative to, say, the work on Rousseau
or Proust, de Man’s Germanic library is under explored and remains as
a pocket of thought withheld within de Man’s writing from a greater
inspection that might invert the pocket to engulf the whole. However,
the more pressing question here concerning de Man’s doctoral work is
in fact his choice of Mallarmé as an object of study. For it is here that
we will find de Man beginning to take on the difficulties of writing and
what takes place between philosophy and literature, to the extent that,
in sharp contrast to the institutional models available to him at the time
in New Criticism, de Man turns to Mallarmé and Blanchot to ask the
subterranean question in his doctoral work: what is literature?
2. Other Mallarmés
Mallarmé is one of those writers that the tradition of theoretical modernism feels compelled to pass through almost as a rite of passage for
those who wish to be taken seriously as commentators on ‘writing’ or
‘literature’. Valéry and Ponge pick up on the Mallarméan project as
the master-narrative for experimental poetry; it is Blanchot, however,
who sets the post-war template for reading Mallarmé in The Space of
Literature (1955), working through ‘Hérodiade’, ‘Igitur’ and onto ‘Un
coup de dés’, while Sartre makes a special case of Mallarmé as The Poet
of Nothingness (part published in 1953, collected, after several mishaps
to the manuscript, in 1979). Both Kristeva and Sollers take a pass at
Mallarmé in texts from their time at Tel Quel, which Derrida might
have been thinking of in producing ‘The Double Session’. Foucault
offers a commentary on Mallarmé in The Order of Things; Cixous is
less sanguine in ‘Sorties’ about the sadness of Mallarmé’s flesh that complains ‘I’ve read every book’. Barthes holds Mallarmé up as an author on
the way to the death of the author itself. Leo Bersani takes things a step
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The Post-Romantic Predicament
further in his own The Death of Stéphane Mallarmé (1982). Mallarmé
has not fallen out of fashion, with Alain Badiou repeatedly turning to
him, notably in Book IV of Being and Event, while Jacques Rancière has
more recently published his entry in the Mallarmé stakes, ‘The Politics
of the Siren’. Into this crowded field de Man’s doctoral work of the
1950s now makes a belated entry for a general readership.13 From this
constellation of texts it might be said that Mallarmé is the theorist’s poet
of choice or at least the poet whose works several theorists think poetry
ought to look like. It may be productive to pick at this line of inquiry for
a moment in order to situate de Man’s work of the late 1950s.
If we were to supply the research question for de Man’s thesis, it
might be this: how, after Romanticism, does symbolism attempt to open
up questions about literature that have been seemingly closed off by
the combination of poetic form and aesthetic ideology in verse during
the long eighteenth century? In particular, how do poets in this ‘postRomantic predicament’ respond to this urgency at the level of style?
In addressing such questions, de Man proposes a comparative study
between Mallarmé, Yeats and George, although he abandons the latter
in the final submitted thesis, perhaps for lack of space, but also perhaps
because he realised that George’s response to the Romantic inheritance is
of a different order to that of Mallarmé and Yeats. These two sit on the
cusp of a literary modernism that will explicitly turn its attention to the
ontological question of literature itself, as a literature that interrogates
its own being. George in contrast seems more readily recuperable back
into Romantic poetic strategies and an idea of European Romanticism
that he may in fact have never wished to evade. As a herald of literary modernism, Mallarmé’s poetic career sets out a template for the
inquiry and consciousness of the twentieth century of which the likes
of Blanchot, Barthes and Derrida were undoubtedly an ongoing part.
It is no accident that almost all of Derrida’s preferred literary examples
come from a particular period of a French high-modernist aesthetic. In
fact, it should be noted in passing that in this ‘early’ work by de Man he
tackles some of the ‘latest’ authors he addresses during the course of his
critical career. It is almost as if having considered the problematic hinge
that connects modernism to Romanticism, and being dissatisfied with
the unacknowledged and indelible marks of Romantic ideology he finds
there and in modernism itself, he retreats further back into the Romantic
period in order to trace the problem to its source, first through Rousseau
but latterly through Hegel and Kant. It is also notable that he never quite
returns to the question of poetic style with the intensity he affords it in
his long reading of Mallarmé, nor does he ever approach an avant-garde
object of study like Mallarmé again in such a concentrated way.
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In this sense it might be suggested that de Man’s thesis concerning ‘the
Post-Romantic predicament’ allows him to conclude that certain forms
of textual production, modernist poetry say, may be no more ‘radical’ or
‘deconstructive’ (if we can use that term anachronistically here) than
other more ‘traditional’ forms of representation. According to the logic
of de Man’s later deconstruction, every text is always already in deconstruction (‘deconstructing itself’) and no text is more innately deconstructive than any other: in fact, for the de Man of Allegories, every text
would follow a similar strategy of disarticulation. Accordingly, something like ‘post-Romanticism’ as the disarticulation of Romanticism
might be the primal scene of Romanticism that remains to be read in
every Romantic text. The interest of Mallarmé and Yeats for de Man is
that their writing puts this problematic on display in a concentrated
way. Language, says de Man, ‘resists strongly any attempt to be made
into an object, and this is why the labour of poetry consists of forcing
language to behave as if it were a material thing. Hence that Mallarmé
comes to “Igitur” by ways of the Parnasse, by a refinement of poetic
techniques’ (see this volume p. 65). At this stage de Man still entertains
the possibility that figures can be utilised to further thought and that
style in itself will open up new frames of intelligibility. De Man’s own
critical retreat from modernism further into Romanticism might be
taken as a recognition on his part that such an understanding of the
rhetorical is a dead-end. In this way, his reading of Mallarmé both
presents itself as some kind of failure and a fall that leads de Man to a
more robust appreciation of the figurative.
While de Man’s thesis leans on Blanchot’s account of Mallarmé in The
Space of Literature, in ways that are more or less necessarily referential
for a submitted thesis (to the extent of explicitly adopting the tripartite
structure that Blanchot constructs around Mallarmé’s longer work), de
Man offers a concentrated account of his relation to Blanchot in the
essay ‘Impersonality in the Criticism of Maurice Blanchot’, published
in Blindness and Insight (1971) but originally from a special edition
of Critique on Blanchot in June 1966 (only five years after the award
of de Man’s Harvard doctorate). De Man’s reading of Mallarmé is as
much a reading of Blanchot, not just of Blanchot’s account of Mallarmé
but also of Blanchot’s own literary modernism itself. In this sense, we
might equally say that at this stage de Man is beginning to open up his
own subterranean channels to what will come to be known as poststructuralism, but which at this point in the 1950s we might identify
discursively as the question of philosophy and literature. In the essay on
‘Impersonality in Blanchot’ de Man revisits many of the concerns of his
doctoral work, which had occupied him only a handful of years earlier.
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The whole question of ‘impersonality’ is derived from Blanchot’s own
appraisal of Mallarmé as the poet who successfully retreats from his own
poetry, making writing and its interpretation a matter of engaging with
the symbolic rather than with the psychology or biography of an author.
Mallarmé is the writer who returns writing to writing, allowing the question ‘what is writing?’ to be asked without the clutter of the invested
poetical self. This is why his work (or in truth the tripartite division of
his work adopted by Blanchot) has proved so durable with a generation
of theorists, philosophers and writers intent on considering ‘writing’ in
its widest sense while equally determined to understand the retreat of the
self in their own work. It is perhaps not surprising that de Man should
choose Mallarmé to accompany him on the solitary journey of writing a
thesis. If de Man, reinventing himself and reinventing American thought,
feels close to Mallarmé at this point in the 1950s and ’60s perhaps it is
because the poet offers him a model for the disappearance of the self
from the page, which resides in isolation and at a distance from his published work. We might say of Mallarmé that he was, more than others,
other. He was alone and in solitude, like Blanchot and, each in their own
ways, Barthes and Derrida.14 The promised chapter in Sartre’s The Poet
of Nothingness on ‘Mallarmé’s Commitment’ was said to be destroyed
when his apartment was bombed by the OAS in the early ’60s.15 It would
have made provocative reading I am sure.
For the de Man of the ‘Impersonality’ essay, Blanchot represents
another figure in the tradition which links practice to theory (he also
cites the nouveau roman and structuralism, as well as existentialism
and the fiction of Sartre and Camus). However, he suggests, Blanchot’s
praxis more readily resembles that of Mallarmé who also provides
a philosophical guide to questions of literature that sit alongside his
poetic output. De Man’s particular issue with Blanchot in this essay
has significance for us here, given all that has been said above regarding the multiple self-editing of his own thesis by the late de Man. He
reads Blanchot’s account of Mallarmé as a study in the impossibility
of self-reading, despite the rigorous self-reflection that both Mallarmé
and Blanchot make on their own work and position. De Man quotes
Blanchot as suggesting that an act of reading, that would reveal the
authentic dimensions of a work, can never be undertaken by an author
on their own writing:
The writer can never read his own work. It is, for him, strictly inaccessible,
a secret which he does not wish to confront . . . The impossibility of selfreading coincides with the discovery that, from now on, there is no longer
room for an added creation in the space opened up by the work and that,
consequently, the only possibility is that of forever writing the same work
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over again . . . The particular loneliness of the writer . . . stems from the fact
that, in the work, he belongs to what always precedes the work.16
For Blanchot, says de Man, the writer must draw upon ‘a kind of antimemory at the very source of literary creation’ as an injunction against
self-reading (‘noli me legere’), which would otherwise bring creative
progress to a grinding halt. The author is then firstly alienated within
their own text and secondly absent from its presentation. It is not hard
to see why Mallarmé might be considered both the initiator of this
epoch of modern literary self-negation and the outstanding exemplar
of it by those who later formalise it as a philosophical reflection on
literature. De Man’s reading, in the ‘Impersonality’ essay, of Blanchot
reading Mallarmé worries through how rigorously Blanchot can uphold
this injunction with regards to both his own work and his reading of
Mallarmé. The impossibility of self-reading comes to be a dominant
strand in Blanchot’s writing and so demands to be read, resulting in
‘a circular movement [that] seems to take the writer, at first alienated
in the work, back to himself, by means of an act of self-interpretation
. . . the circular pattern that can be found in all acts of literary invention’.17 However, says de Man, Blanchot insists like no previous critic
of Mallarmé that the poet’s impersonality is not the result of a conflict
within his own personality, not something biographical or psychological, but something ontological. It is Mallarmé’s strained relation to language, or more precisely his poetry’s relation to language, that alienates
him from the world, both forever separated from the world by language
and bound by language as a material thing in itself productive of consciousness. Mallarmé’s partial reading of Hegel has been well recorded,
and both Blanchot and the de Man of the Harvard thesis and the
‘Impersonality’ essay make reference to the ways in which Mallarmé’s
Hegel – in particular his own understanding of the dialectic as a failure
of inauthentic experience – is a construct unique to him, which has been
used to map the progress from death to suicide to sinking beneath the
waves from ‘Hérodiade’ to ‘Igitur’ and ‘Un coup de dés’. This dialectical
growth towards universal consciousness and the progressive temporality
that attends it is for Blanchot’s Mallarmé a delusion that has obscured
the capture of consciousness in a movement that transcends its own
powers. Until Mallarmé realises the inevitable failure of the dialectic as
the basis of his poetic project and accordingly the pointlessness of the linguistic strategies he adopts to ‘hide an irrevocable fall’, he cannot reach
the conclusion of ‘Un coup de dés’ that ‘consciousness as well as natural
objects are threatened by a power that exists on a more fundamental
level than either of them’.18 However, even as the self is destroyed, the
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The Post-Romantic Predicament
work remains, with the final poem escaping the shipwreck that everything else has succumbed to, floating on top of the water as the record
of its own demise.
There is a distinction to be made for Blanchot and de Man between the
annihilation of the self in the poetry, and the death of the poet. Fiction
intervenes in the cognitive effort of understanding history but does not
change the outcome of that history, just as the roll of the dice can never
abolish chance. The question that arises in reading Mallarmé’s introduction of a circularity of consciousness into poetry is what this ultimately
means for poetry? Or, to put it another way, how does the verse career
of Mallarmé respond to the post-Romantic predicament? As de Man
points out, philosophy is well acquainted with a circularity of consciousness that questions its own mode of being, which, though it complicates
the task of the philosopher, ‘does not spell the end of philosophical
understanding’.19 Nor should it mean the end of the possibility of literature, and in fact the de Man of the post-doctoral ‘Impersonality’ essay
comes in an unstated way to extend his inquiry into the post-Romantic
predicament to Blanchot himself, who might be said to be carrying on
where Mallarmé left off: ‘Blanchot is very close here to a philosophical
trend which tries to rethink the notion of growth and development no
longer in organic but in hermeneutic terms by reflecting on the temporality of the act of understanding.’20 Blanchot’s reading of Mallarmé starts
out as an ontological study that turns back into questioning the temporal self and history. ‘The Post-Romantic predicament’ is conceived here
by de Man as an historical epoch and his research project as an essentially historical one. So, if there is no future extension of the dialectic
that would lead to pure ontological self-negation, but only a circularity
of consciousness that returns us to a contemplation of the imperfect
nature of things through language, then the writer must concern themselves with themselves as historically situated persons, albeit freed from
empirical concerns. This then must be an act of self-reading. Blanchot,
de Man points out, comes to this very conclusion regarding Mallarmé
later in Le Livre à venir (1959):
The book needs a mediator. The act of reading performs the mediation. But
not just any reader will do . . . Mallarmé himself will have to be the voice of
this essential reading. He has been abolished and has vanished as the dramatic centre of his work, but this very annihilation has put him into contact
with the reappearing and disappearing essence of the Book, with the ceaseless
oscillation which is the main statement of the work.21
For de Man in 1966, self-reading or self-interpretation reappears in
Mallarmé at the moment when the poet’s development allows him ‘to
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name the general structure of all literary consciousness’.22 For de Man,
Blanchot is in much deeper water than ‘Un coup de dés’ because while he
allows the necessity of self-reading for Mallarmé he does not repeat the
gesture for himself, preferring to classify such self-reading as precisely
the reified remains of an everyday experience that the writer must ignore
in order to produce the autonomous text as ‘a consciousness without a
subject’, in which the act of self-interpretation is reserved for the text
not the author.
In the text of his doctoral thesis de Man retains a respectful proximity
to Blanchot’s reading of Mallarmé as the most contemporaneous source
close to his own project. However, the significant difference between de
Man’s reading and Blanchot’s is that the latter derives his theoretical
account of the ontological in literature in almost complete absence of
quotation and analysis of Mallarmé’s poetic output. Mallarmé is one
example, and perhaps only a sample, slotted into the extended argument of The Space of Literature; an example which recurs in Blanchot’s
continued extrapolation of the ontological question through the rest
of his writing up until Le Livre à venir. Blanchot no doubt feels close
to Mallarmé but he fails to measure the distance of that proximity
through any sort of close reading. De Man on the other hand is fulfilling
the institutional requirements for a PhD in comparative literature in a
university system dominated by a New Criticism that prides itself on a
kind of forensic close reading. This point is I think significant, because
the history of Mallarmé criticism or theorising-around-Mallarmé tends
towards the example of Blanchot rather than that of de Man, such are
the possibilities in a poetry where the clutter of immediate biographical
or social reference has retreated to leave behind a hermetic poetry of
ontological abstraction. It is no accident that Mallarmé is the theorists’
poet of choice not Wordsworth, nor is it an accident that Mallarmé
becomes a much less prominent figure in de Man’s later work while
Wordsworth and Hölderlin come to the fore.
A good example of how to do things with Mallarmé can be found in
two more recent accounts of the poet by, respectively, Jacques Rancière
and Alain Badiou. Both philosophers have rather a slender line in literary and cultural examples that they use to support their more systematic
writing, although Rancière has frequently devoted essays and indeed
whole books to texts he never, to my mind, gets very close to.23 At this
stage I am not necessarily interested in arguing over the merits of Badiou
or Rancière as philosophers or commentators on literature, just as I
will have to suspend the question of how close a reading needs to be in
order to qualify as a ‘reading’ (new criticism, explication du texte, and
so on all have their institutional histories and theoretical assumptions
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The Post-Romantic Predicament
that need to be addressed in a theoretical way). Rather, I would merely
like to point out the ways in which the blank canvas left by Mallarmé’s
ontological disappearing act (in which the name and idea of Mallarmé
most forcefully presents itself in the supposed retreat of Mallarmé the
poet) can be quickly filled by a theorising that attaches itself to the orbit
of Mallarmé’s porous and suggestive texts.
Badiou’s use of Mallarmé in Being and Event comes in Meditation 19
at the end of Part IV of Volume 1. Being and Event is not a work that
takes an unnecessarily close interest in literature; in fact the word itself
is never used in the book except to designate the authority of the ‘literature’ on mathematics. Mallarmé is one of few poets to be referenced
in the entire work and only one of three ‘writers’ outside of philosophy
– the others, interestingly enough, being Hölderlin and Rousseau – to
be the object of an extended commentary by Badiou.24 So, the entry
of Mallarmé into Badiou’s long account of Being is both singular and
worthy of our attention. Here Badiou reads ‘Un coup de dés’ as an allegory of an ‘aleatory event’ – one that is to be interpreted on the basis
of the traces it leaves behind.25 Badiou attempts to piece together the
fragmented images of the poem as clues to be interpreted by a detective.
He suggests that the casting of dice is ‘an absolute symbol of the event’
given that it makes ‘an event out of the thought of the event’, and he
reads what Eliot would call ‘a heap of broken images’ (a feather, a sail,
waving arms, a cameo by Hamlet and so on) as a ‘series of metaphorical translations around the theme of the undecidable’.26 As he ties a set
of ambiguous images to aspects of his own theory of the event Badiou
concludes that ‘the poem realizes the essence of the event itself, which is
precisely that of being . . . incalculable’.27 Such a reading might superficially appear close to the Mallarmé of a Blanchot or any other member
of that modernist theoretical tradition. However, we should note the
position of this utilisation of Mallarmé in the structure of Badiou’s argument, coming as it does to close off a section of thought in an exemplary
way (just as Hölderlin will do in Part V) that demonstrates the truth of
the philosophy that has preceded it. My concern at this precise moment
is not with the truth or otherwise of that philosophy but with the way in
which the opacity and undecidability of the Mallarmé poem lends itself
to this sort of use by philosophy. Badiou finds in Mallarmé something
of thematic interest: ‘undecidability as a rational attribute of the event,
and the salvatory guarantee of its non-being’.28 However, the same
might be said of the game of ‘liar’s dice’ in Pirates of the Caribbean
2. In other words, Badiou does not really read Mallarmé as if there
might be some doubt or undecidability itself in the event of reading.
Rather, the reading has been programmed in advance by the truth of
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the preceding philosophical exposition. ‘Un coup de dés’ serves only as
a good example for Badiou, like an obedient dog that will do the philosopher’s will and perform its trick as part of a greater performance of
philosophical mastery. In this sense, Badiou, without stating it, buys into
the tripartite structuring of Mallarmé’s poetic career that Blanchot initiates and de Man follows, by assuming that his final poem is the ultimate
expression and perfect realisation of his poetic consciousness rather than
one contradictory articulation among many that has been subject to post
hoc rationalisation by editors and critics.
What lies behind Badiou’s philosophical use of Mallarmé, then, is an
unacknowledged literary history, in the most conventional sense, and
a model of thematic reading that is rendered problematic by the text
of Mallarmé and Badiou’s own philosophy itself. If one were to accept
that given their non-being the ‘undecidable’ and the ‘event’ cannot in
themselves be mastered as themes or meanings (such would seem to be
Badiou’s argument), then Badiou’s own encounter with ‘Un coup de
dés’ points to the limits of thematic criticism or the utilitarian use of
poetry by philosophy. A critique of thematised readings of Mallarmé
forms an important strand of Derrida’s account in ‘The Double Session’,
firstly because such criticism would be part of the history of ‘metaphysical mimetologism’29 that the text of Mallarmé would seem to both
extend and discredit (there will be more to say on this shortly), and
secondly because thematic-critical-philosophical-exemplarism ignores
the ‘formal, phonic, or graphic’ materiality of the signifier30 that so
interests a poet like Mallarmé. One might say that the singular interests
of a thematic reading ironically ignore the singularity of the poem. De
Man in the Harvard thesis talks openly of the ‘theme of hasard’ in ‘Un
coup de dés’ and through the residual effect of the vocabulary of New
Criticism seeks to relate the poem to ‘Mallarmé’s principal themes’ in
‘Igitur’ and ‘Hérodiade’. However, the general sweep of de Man’s thesis
is away from Mallarmé as a comparative example of stylistic modernism towards a consideration of the figural dimension of language
as an important first move in dismantling the powerful inertia of the
thematic-mimetic model that if not abandoned risks turning even the
consideration of figures themselves into a theme. Such a step would be
a necessary, if not sufficient, gesture for any criticism or philosophical
reading that was itself meaningfully ‘post-Romantic’, i.e. not reliant on
an eighteenth-century model of aesthetic organicism that de Man later
finds in Schiller and Kant.
Rancière’s engagement with Mallarmé is more substantial than that
offered by Badiou, but as a text on literature it suffers from the same
sorts of problems. The first half of Rancière’s text retreads the themes of
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The Post-Romantic Predicament
alienation and self-negation familiar to us from Blanchot and de Man’s
work in the 1950s, although he makes his way through another set of
lyrics than ‘Hérodiade’ and ‘Igitur’, notably in his introduction ‘Une
dentelle s’abolit’, an important poem for de Man that will be addressed
at greater length in the next section of this introduction. At this stage
Rancière retains a certain closeness to the text of Mallarmé with a
display of due diligence in quoting and glossing the poet. However, we
learn little new about either Mallarmé or Rancière through the pages
of this fidelity, as Rancière like Badiou attempts to pick out a series
of images (foam, the siren, dreams, flowers) from these lyrics in order
to draw the sort of thematic thread through Mallarmé that Derrida
describes in ‘The Double Session’ of 1970. At this point Rancière would
say that he was following a line of symbol through a symbolist poet.
However, it is more a case of reading metaphors as themes rather than
understanding the metaphor of theme itself. Rancière’s essay (for it
is really little more than an extended essay, although it is longer than
Blanchot’s commentary in The Space of Literature) begins to become
philosophically interesting when in keeping with the orthodoxy of
Mallarméan criticism Rancière’s argument reaches its furthest extension
with a final roll of the dice. However, even by the start of the second
section of Rancière’s short text he has all but abandoned any proximity to the text of Mallarmé in preference to a general argument about
literature and religion and the artist as worker. Here Rancière’s real
interest in the symbol as the sacramental emblem becomes clear, so that
by the closing pages of section three, ‘The Duty of the Book’, which have
passed by Derrida and Valéry on mimetism, Rancière can conclude that
the radicality of Mallarmé
is because, more than any other, he wants to stick to a twofold demand: he
makes the poem into the religion of the future; but he refuses at the same time
any incarnation in the religion and any body that guarantees the poem, the
body of the subject that it represents or of the community that it animates.31
Now much will depend here upon how one is disposed towards
Rancière’s reanimation of the religious as a communal form, but by
this stage his reading of Mallarmé is not straightforwardly exemplary
in the manner of Badiou. Rather, Rancière’s reading of Mallarmé is
inaugural of a theoretical argument that reads the poetic text anew and
which attends to the idea of the singularity of the text: ‘the poem must
contain, solely in the materiality of its arrangement, the incorporation
which guarantees it. Its form must be at one and the same time, the
body and the idea of its idea.’32 However, this is a reading that makes
of that singularity the theme of singularity, drifting away from a close
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inspection of ‘Un coup de dés’ towards using the poem once again as an
exemplar of a general thesis, this time concerning the sacramental nature
of the symbol and of all poetry. One might find this wafer-thin text of
Mallarmé-Rancière a bit hard to swallow, but Rancière’s understanding
of aesthetic regime-change is much closer in spirit to de Man than it is to
Badiou. Rancière is also reading Mallarmé as poet of the post-Romantic
predicament, whose poetry negotiates the grey terrain of aristocratic
exceptionalism and the refusal to be an ‘organiser of the new worship of
a community celebrating “the divinity it knows how to be” ’.33
Rancière’s invocation of Mallarmé as an example of triumphant
democracy expressing the equality of all subjects might look as attenuated as Sartre’s lost chapter on commitment, but what is interesting
here is the way in which both Rancière and Sartre manage to make
of Mallarmé respectively a Rancière and a Sartre, just as Badiou and
Derrida both find in the poet reflections of their own philosophical complexity. It seems as if the blank spaces of Mallarmé’s text act as drains
for all the philosophical outpourings of any given time. The absence of
a model in Mallarmé leads theorist after theorist to impose their own
on his white pages. On this score, de Man is no better or worse than his
peers, finding in Mallarmé an object of study that creates the opening
that will allow him initial steps in the process of rearranging his thinking
from the phenomenological to the figurative or proto-deconstructive.
De Man spends time with Mallarmé in order to begin reading towards
another way of reading. In accounting here for de Man’s ‘post-Romantic
predicament’ one should not only be concerned with appreciating what
de Man offers us in this text but also with what, as a result of that
offering, gives itself to be thought. Rather than pre-programme the
reader’s understanding of de Man’s text I would like in what follows to
concentrate on the question of the model or lack of it in Mallarmé and
what this might tell us about de Man’s thesis and the theoretical use of
Mallarmé in general.
3. Lit
In a long footnote (14) to Part I of ‘The Double Session’ Derrida tells
us that it will not be possible for him in the space of a note to examine
the complex system of Plato’s mimesis before doing just that by launching a threefold schema that he will take up elsewhere in his account of
Mallarmé’s text Mimique. He gestures towards another occasion for
that analysis, a text entitled ‘Between Two Throws of the Dice’, which
was to remain unwritten. In the extensive note he goes on to propose a
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The Post-Romantic Predicament
reconstitution of the network and logic of Platonic mimesis around three
focal points, the third of which is the ‘guilt’ or otherwise of mimesis,
by which Derrida wishes to distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ versions of mimesis in the text of Plato. He goes on to develop six possible
options for mimesis in Plato:
Here is an outline of this ‘logic’: 1. Mimesis produces a thing’s double. If
the double is faithful and perfectly like, no qualitative difference separates
it from the model. Three consequences of this: (a) The double – the imitator
– is nothing, is worth nothing in itself. (b) Since the imitator’s value comes
only from its model, the imitator is good when the model is good, and bad
when the model is bad. In itself it is neutral and transparent. (c) If mimesis is
nothing and is worth nothing in itself, then it is nothing in value and being
– it is in itself negative. Therefore it is an evil: to imitate is bad in itself and
not just when what is imitated is bad. 2. Whether like or unlike, the imitator
is something, since mimesis and likeness do exist. Therefore this nonbeing
does ‘exist’ in some way (The Sophist). Hence: (a) in adding to the model, the
imitator comes as a supplement and ceases to be nothing or a nonvalue. (b) In
adding to the ‘existing’ model, the imitator is not the same thing, and even if
the resemblance were absolute, the resemblance is never absolute (Cratylus).
And hence never absolutely true. (c) As a supplement that can take the
model’s place but never be its equal, the imitator is in essence inferior even at
the moment it replaces the model and is this promoted.34
These six operations of mimesis in Plato (‘two propositions and six possible consequences’) form, says, Derrida, ‘a kind of logical machine: it
programmes the prototypes of all the propositions inscribed in Plato’s
discourse as well as those of the whole tradition. According to a complex
but implacable law the machine deals out all of the clichés of criticism to
come.’35 The clichés and misunderstandings of philosophy and criticism
around literature and art, as Derrida establishes earlier on in his essay,
all derive from the problematic translation of mimesis from the Greek in
Latin (and by extension the Romance languages of English and French).
The varying unsatisfactory translations and reconceptualisations, and
their rejection, of mimesis as ‘representation, imitation, expression,
production’, etc., are already hardwired into the network of the Platonic
text and generated out of their translation into a Latinised thought. The
problems of the imitator do not occur by chance but are preprogrammed
in advance by the problem of imitation itself. The attentive reader of
Mallarmé who has persisted with this footnote will not imagine that
the hexadic structure of Platonic mimesis in Derrida emerges by chance
either. Derrida’s reading of Mallarmé, like that of Blanchot and de Man
before him and Badiou and Rancière after him, is rolling towards an
encounter with Mallarmé’s final poem, ‘Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira
le hasard’. At first appearance the title of the poem is counter-intuitive.
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One may well imagine that a roll of a dice is precisely the introduction
of the random into a given event. How can the roll of a dice ever have
hoped to abolish chance? Or, why should the poet be so emphatic that
despite its efforts it never will be able to abolish chance? In the closing
lines of Derrida’s text, in which he has spent the last few pages discussing the poem, he draws upon the reserve of footnote 14 from Part 1 of
the essay when he proposes that literature as a privileged instance of
mimesis is suspended in the moment of the throw of the dice,
in which each of the six sides still has a chance although the outcome is predetermined and recognised after the fact as such. It is a game of chance that
follows the genetic programme. The die is limited to surfaces. Abandoning
all depth, each of the surfaces is also, once the die is cast [après coup], the
whole of it. The crisis of literature takes place when nothing takes place but
the place, in the instance where no one is there to know.36
Literature exists on a liminal plane awaiting the roll of the dice as a
suspension of meaning; the roll of the dice like the six possibilities of
mimesis is programmed in advance (there can only be one of six possible
outcomes, each of which are knowable in advance and thus amounts to
an abolition of pure random chance). Whatever it is that happens when
a text is inscribed in literature happens at this threshold of suspended
reference not when the dice has stopped rolling and its number is up.
This is why, in Derrida’s reading of Mallarmé’s enigmatic poem, the roll
of a dice is never able truly to abolish pure chance by programming six
possible outcomes, because the chance of literature, if it is ever to have a
chance, lies elsewhere, a priori to the après coup.
In the closing lines of a doubled text, folding itself back onto a footnote to a suspended text that never was, Derrida offers us a complex
model (complex because it outlines the complexity of all models and is
not in itself fundamentally a model) of representation, reproduction and
imitation that might present something of a challenge to the representatives and imitators of the present scene. There is a built in ‘distinerrance’ that deflects any mimetic model from the beginning. It is not just
that such failures are possible but that they are inescapably necessary
in order for the mimetic to have a chance. However, the significance of
the event of mimesis does not lie in the outcome that awaits us but in
the threshold where no one knows, the place in which there is no one
to know, which at once lies elsewhere and is the condition of possibility of chance. This is what happens to everyone whether we know it
or not, whether we want it or not, every time we write a thesis, elect a
government, provide a curriculum in a university, attempt an aesthetic
education, engage in identity politics, raise children, sign a contract,
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order from a menu, critique imperfect human beings, construct theories
of society and history, shop from a catalogue, attend a conference, read
philosophy, or found a new college for the humanities. As Derrida tells
us in The Post Card, the Platonic tradition has already placed us in
debt to it before we have the chance to choose it.37 The complexity of
Mimesis, or the question of the model, is the route through which that
debt must be paid.
The 1955 essay ‘Poetic Nothingness: On a Hermetic Sonnet by
Mallarmé’ is described by Lindsay Waters, the editor of Paul de Man’s
Critical Writings, as ‘a précis of the part of the dissertation that deals
with Mallarmé’.38 However, as Rei Terada (the most persuasive reader
of the Harvard writing to date) describes it, the essay is a ‘preview’
of the work that de Man would undertake in his doctoral studies but
which the dissertation goes on to correct and rewrite. The essay ‘Poetic
Nothingness’ treats the Mallarmé poem ‘Une dentelle s’abolit’ as a concentration of the Mallarméan problematic of the poetic consequence
of a retreat of the material world. Terada, like Kevin Newmark and
Barbara Johnson before her,39 alights upon the significance of the word
‘lit’ in this sonnet:
Une dentelle s’abolit
Dans le doute du Jeu suprême
A n’entr’ouvrir comme un blaspheme
Qu’absence éternelle de lit.
A lace vanishes utterly
In doubt of the last game, to spread
Out only like a blasphemy
Eternal absence of a bed.
In Terada’s reading, de Man the author of ‘The Post-Romantic
Predicament’ scripts ‘for Mallarmé a struggle between the negative
power of poetic consciousness – its capacity to show how the recognition of objects depends on the possibility of their absence – and a “feminine” “direct maternal” “world of spontaneous contact with things” ’.40
Much is then made in Terada’s reading of de Man’s defeminisation of
Mallarmé and in fact his de-eroticisation of the sonnet and accordingly
Mallarmé’s work in general. However, the issue of the ‘lit’ in this poem
is not just the question of an unmade bed but appears also in the selfannihilation of ‘s’abolit’ and in the buried meaning of the final line of
the second stanza:
Cet unanime blanc conflit
D’une guirlande avec la même,
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Enfui contre la vitre blême
Flotte plus qu’il n’ensevelit.
This unanimous white affray
Fought by the garland with the same,
Fled to the pallid window-frame,
Rather floats than buries away.
A deconstructive readership has chosen to pull on the thread of this
lace in order to unravel the meaning of this poem, and the thread like
that spun by Ariadne inevitably leads them to Plato and to mimesis.
However, de Man and Terada are only bed hopping, as it were, and do
not spend any significant time with Plato before returning to the main
object of their affections, Mallarmé. It is noticeable, I think, that both
Terada and de Man pick up on the ‘lit’ that puts stanza two to bed in
‘ensevelit’ but do not mention the odder bedfellow in the first line of
stanza two: ‘conflit’. ‘Conflit’ is also the title of Mallarmé’s longest
prose poem which immediately precedes ‘Un coup de dés’ in his own
self-collected version of Poésies in which the poet remarks ‘Longtemps,
voici du temps – je croyais – que s’exempta mon idée d’aucun accident
meme vrai; préférant aux hasards, puiser, dans son principe, jaillissement’ (‘For a long time, for some time now – so I believed – my thought
abstained from any accidents, even true ones; preferring to draw from
the fountain of its own essence, instead of chance’41) before narrating
an event which forces him to change his mind. The slippage between
‘conflit’ in the sonnet and the title of the prose poem may be a matter
of chance, like the string of images in Badiou and Rancière’s readings
of ‘Un coup de dés’; but equally, if we are to take Mallarmé’s own
injunction regarding chance seriously, we should note the economic
relation between the random and detailed precision, or the conflict
between ‘hasard’ and embedding. Terada goes on to acknowledge de
Man’s rereading of Mallarmé in the submitted version of ‘The PostRomantic Predicament’ in which a few years later the doctoral candidate
recognises the autoerotic charge of a poem he once considered purely
mental. The ‘Poetic Nothingness’ essay suggests that we might read the
‘Hérodiade’ in the same way as ‘Une dentelle . . .’, while the dissertation
suggests that the ‘Hérodiade’ is a dramatisation of a false rejection of
eroticism that, in Terada’s words, ‘merely re-eroticizes language in a no
less sexualised way’,42 which by implication requires us to reread ‘Une
dentelle’ as well. And for Terada, when de Man suggests in ‘the PostRomantic Predicament’ that the poet has:
‘Discovered that he has sung and praised language, not as a depository of
absolute truth, but as if it were a part of the warm, natural, sexual realm
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symbolized by “lit” ’ (PRP, 32), de Man sounds as though he were describing his discovery of his own mistake in ‘Poetic Nothingness’. It is strange
to believe one could overcome poetic pleasure by writing Parnassian verse,
it seems as to [sic] believe one could overcome eroticism by pursuing autoeroticism. According to de Man, the recognition that pleasure is interminable
marks a strong break in Mallarmé’s poetic project, which ‘will now have to
realize that it always and necessarily brings about its own destruction’ (PRP,
34).43
Throughout her reading Terada has, problematically to my mind, drawn
a thread between suicide as a poetic trope in Mallarmé and familial
suicide as a frequent occurrence in the biography of Paul de Man. I
would rather suggest that the self-destruction that de Man is thinking of
here not only refers to the suicidal tendencies of Mallarmé’s ‘Igitur’ but
also the restless bed of ‘s’abolit’.
Perhaps we need to take this ‘lit’ in a literal sense. Compared to the
‘Poetic Nothingness’ essay there are only three mentions of ‘Un dentelle
s’abolit’ in ‘The Post-Romantic Predicament’ and they are all curiously
embedded in footnotes, the most significant of which forms the basis of
Terada’s discussion of the term. It would seem that between the 1955
essay and the submitted dissertation de Man has put the question of
Mallarmé’s eroticism to bed in favour of a wider consideration of the
predicament of the post-Romantic poet. The Poet without romance of
course is in no need of a bed; he does, however, require both models
and reading. Curiously Terada does not consider the significance of
the signifier ‘lit’ as the third person tense of the verb ‘lire’ to read. It
is a declension for both feminine and masculine (il/elle lit). De Man
and Terada are both reading, both making their ‘lit’, which must also
be the eternal absence of a ‘lit’, like the event in Badiou, or at least
the absence of a reading that closed the conversation in which Terada
enacts her own blasphemy [‘comme un blaspheme’] on the text of de
Man by calling him to account for the assumptions asleep in his account
of Mallarmé. Terada’s suggestive reading goes on to ‘call-out’ de Man
for his ‘hideous’ reading of Yeats in ‘The Post-Romantic Predicament’
around the poem ‘Her Vision in the Woods’ in which she reckons de
Man too easily connives with the violence of the Yeats poem. However,
while the violence against women is noticeable here Terada ultimately
pulls a punch and ties de Man’s reading back to his unconscious concern
with familial suicide. The sensitive reader of the institutional history
of deconstruction may well wonder here about Terada’s reluctance
to drag a corpse into the light by her failure to confront directly ‘the
Family’ with a gendered reading of de Man’s 1950s doctoral work. It is
a powerful critical force through out her account of ‘The Post-Romantic
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Predicament’ but ultimately, I think, she fails to nail her colours to the
bedstead by making familial suicide rather than sexism the issue in de
Man’s reading.
In part, Terada’s reluctance to pursue a decisive reading of de Man on
this point might arise from her conviction that we are in grey territory
here. The ‘lit’ of Mallarmé and de Man is also the ‘lit’ of ‘literature’: this
strange thing that we in universities call ‘Lit’. In particular, de Man’s
thesis is an example of what we call ‘Comp Lit’, not comprehensive lit
but comparative lit. Lit that is in an economic relation of comparison,
exchange and translation. Comp Lit can never be literal, it must always
in a sense be ‘en conflit’ with nowhere to rest, an economic transaction
between reader and text in a textual intercourse, which is both an unrestricted economy and determined by a series of debts that must be paid.
The question of ‘lit’, of who reads or who ‘litters’, is always the question of the model. A text is inscribed in literature (usually – though there
are exceptions) before it is ever written. Lit is a model by which the chaos
of reference is made sense of by funnelling it into the category of the chaos
of reference in which truth and falsehood are simultaneously presented
as the necessary condition of literature. The reader of literature, the one
who has made his or her bed with literature, is comfortable with conflict
as their companion. They are also habituated to the love of mimesis,
an affair with a limited number of outcomes from which all discursive
clichés follow. The buried (‘ensevelit’) question for Terada is the guilt or
otherwise of de Man. What lies behind this question is to my mind the
relative guilt or otherwise of Comp Lit as a model for reading for de Man,
deconstruction as a model for Terada, and Mallarmé as a model for the
concerns of so-called post-structuralism. At every turn we are faced with
one of the six faces of the dice that mimesis rolls out for us. My reading
of Terada reading de Man reading Mallarmé is a fourth roll of the dice in
which the trace of the model persists as a genetic structure: the model of
an idea of deconstruction, the model of comparison and evaluation that
guides the practice of Comparative Literature, and a certain model of
reading, close reading at that, which sits at the heart of the New Criticism
which never totally abolishes itself within the work of de Man, and the
model of Mallarmé as a model for literature and theory that runs through
the post-war philosophical discussion of the problem of literature from
Blanchot and Sartre to Rancière and Badiou whose own mimetic readings
are all possible outcomes of the roll of this particular dice.
Derrida would also be part of this history. ‘The Double Session’ is a
double bed and a double read for Plato and Mallarmé. In keeping with
the theoretical tradition’s use of Mallarmé, Derrida uses the poet as an
exemplary case of a theoretical truth concerning literature. However,
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that truth concerns the truth about truth and the difficulty of the
example. In the text immediately following the insertion of footnote
14, discussed above, Derrida writes of Mallarmé, ‘the kind of poetry
whose case is thus being heard cannot, of course, be simply identified
with what we call ‘literature’.44 While literature is the result of a certain
transformation within the diverse possibilities of the logic of mimesis,
at the same time the very question of how truth is to be understood
becomes tied to the issue of mimesis as imitation. Writing imitates the
Logos, which retains the value of truth against which imitation should
be assessed. Accordingly, as Derrida suggests in the opening paragraphs
of ‘The Double Session’, the question of the interpretation of mimesis
defines not only the history of the relation between literature and truth
but also the whole system of truth and the whole of history.45 On first
appearance what I am offering here might look like a strong reading
of what Derrida seems to be proposing concerning the dominance of
a certain interpretation of mimesis in the Western tradition. However,
this becomes clearer when Derrida introduces the order of the three beds
in the Republic X (596a ff) – the painter’s, the carpenter’s and God’s
– what Derrida will refer to through out ‘The Double Session’ as ‘the
clinical paradigm of mimesis’, meaning the most well-known and most
frequently (mis)read/(mis)used version of mimesis in Plato, although it is
really only one example, or sample, from the greater network of mimesis
Derrida outlines in footnote 14. The precedence granted to the order of
imitation in the clinical paradigm has never been challenged within the
metaphysical system, says Derrida, before commenting:
It is at bottom this order of appearance, the precedence (pré-séance) of the
imitated, that governs the philosophical or critical interpretation of ‘literature’, if not the operation of literary writing. This order of appearance is the
order of all appearance, the very process of appearing in general. It is the
order of truth.46
In this sense, Heidegger’s distinction between alethia and adequatio
depends entirely upon an existing idea of representation and resemblance, and the question of mimesis always frames itself as the question
of truth. At this point the significance of Mallarmé in the history of the
interpretation of mimesis becomes something that overspills the boundaries of literature into the literal. Literature is born of this historical
presentation but equally ‘the very concept of history has lived only upon
the possibility of meaning [given its mimetic relation to truth], upon
the past, present, or promised presence of meaning and of truth’.47 To
found history outside of this network of relations would be to imagine
an entirely different idea of history.
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‘The Double Session’ does not miss the ‘double entendre’ in ‘lit’ or its
importance as a thread to be pulled upon in Mallarmé. In a short, standalone paragraph Derrida writes: ‘The whole of this dehiscence, finally, is
repeated and partially opens up in a certain “lit” [“bed”, “reads”] which
Mimique has painstakingly set up. Towards the end of the text, the
syntagm “le lit” reproduces the stratagem of the hymen.’48 The important interruption of the Platonic schema comes with the inauguration of
reading by Mallarmé in Mimique, ‘Mallarmé lit’, Mallarmé reads, ‘La
question du texte est – pour qui lit’ . . . ‘The question of the text is for
the one who reads it (or him)’ and ‘The question of the text is: whom is
the bed for?’
The syntax of Mimique imprints a movement of (non-Platonic) simulacrum
in which the function of ‘le lit’ [‘the bed’, ‘reads it’, ‘reads him’] complicates
itself to the point of admitting a multitude of subjects among whom you
yourself are not necessarily included. Plato’s clinical paradigm is no longer
operative.49
In the second half of ‘The Double Session’ Derrida gets further into bed
with Mallarmé. It is no surprise that once again the ambiguity of ‘lit’
sets up productive chains of reference for Derrida, curiously enough
confined to the footnotes of this half, as in the long footnote on the significance of ‘Or’ in Mallarmé (note 62) in which the sun shines on all of
Mallarmé’s beds, or in the citation of the sonnet ‘Une dentelle s’abolit’
in footnote 77 and the gloss on ‘abolit’ in note 65: ‘The word abolit
means “abolishes”. A homonym would be à beau lit (“with/to a beautiful bed”). A related expression would be (il) a beau lire (“he reads in
vain”). Again a certain obliteration marks the bed and the page, sleeping
and reading, copulation and interpretation.’50 For Derrida the signifier
‘lit’ is decisive in relation to his own reading of Mallarmé, asserting that
‘the syntagm “le lit” reproduces the stratagem of the hymen’. However,
given all that has been said concerning what is supplementary to the
model in imitation, surely ‘the hymen’ as a trope in Derrida reproduces
a strategy that we find already embedded in Mallarmé as he reads (reads
himself, s’abolit) and is read by the tradition of which Blanchot and de
Man would be merely examples.
The de Man of the Harvard years has his own understanding of how
one should treat the question of symbolic changes in Mallarmé (his own
reading is full of them – dance and drama would be good examples as
they overspill into his reading of Yeats). On the one hand, he suggests,
the Mallarméan oeuvre is unique, setting itself up as a network of relations between chance and detailed precision: ‘since the poems are clearly
links in a continuous chain, exegesis is only possible within the context of
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the general development’ (see this volume p. 37). He takes ‘Hérodiade’,
‘Igitur’ and ‘Un coup de dés’ to be the decisive posts marking out this
development and hence his own thesis. On the other hand, and more
suggestively, he comments on the constellation of relationships and
analogies between poets and philosophers that he draws on in the thesis,
that ‘the traditional notion of “source” is too crude to cover such problems’. Rather, such connections involve ‘entirely different conceptions
of language’ in which juxtapositions are ‘more tenuous’ when we have
no ‘assurance’ (p. 59). Ultimately, this is how we might read ‘The PostRomantic Predicament’ today, not as a model to be copied or judged for
its theoretical innovation, but as a text that makes a belated entry into
a constellation of connections between Mallarmé and the theoretical
tradition. If we read it in this way, as if it were a source without assurances, then we will be able to glean from it all the riches of this sustained
period of writing by de Man. Here we will find in a singular theoreticalbiographical concentration all of the references and tropes that are so
important to de Man: Heidegger, Hegel and Hölderlin; Pascal, Blanchot
and the New Critics; grammar, metaphor and parabasis; Yeats, George
and European nationalism. Unless we wish to read these essays in a
strictly historical sense, the late appearance of ‘The Post-Romantic
Predicament’ requires us to suspend the models of reading that we have
inherited from the mimetic tradition. The point would not be to judge
whether Blanchot’s, Derrida’s, Badiou’s, Rancière’s or de Man’s reading
of Mallarmé was more accurate than any other. Rather, another logic
should pertain here. One in which the diverse connections to be made
between de Man’s work of the 1950s and the rest of the theoretical
tradition which both follows it and precede it (as publications) complicate both de Man’s writing and the tradition to the point of recognising
a multitude of subjects and references among whom there may be no
straightforward original or assured point of orientation. In this way
we might also do justice to the poetic project of Mallarmé, because a
certain form of mimetology and idea of the model would no longer be
operative. The landscape of the theoretical country today may yet have
room for an old man like de Man. A return to a rigorous literary theory
is long overdue if the idea of Literature is to have a future and the scene
of literary study is not to be abandoned as the preserve of biographers,
textual editors, creative writers and unquestioned literary histories. The
essays here are also significant historical exemplars in both the history
of ideas and the critical biography of Paul de Man: they are simultaneously required to be read in this way by the scholar with competence
and legitimacy to read them back against the rest of de Man’s corpus.
Such is the economic relation that reading negotiates between chance
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and precision, or, between invention and the model. A negotiation and
a paradox that a Harvard thesis knows well and which Mallarmé makes
prominent when he reminds us that at any time a throw of a dice, such
as the publishing of these essays, never will abolish chance.
Notes
1. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau,
Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 1979), p. 300.
2. Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1984), pp. 145–239.
3. Paul de Man, Critical Writings 1953–1978, ed. Lindsay Waters
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).
4. Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary
Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, second edition,
revised, 1983 [1971]); Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej
Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
5. Jacques Derrida, ‘Punctuations: The Time of a Thesis’, trans. Kathleen
McLaughlin, in Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2 (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 121.
6. J. Hillis Miller, ‘De Man as Allergen’, in Material Events: Paul de Man and
the Afterlife of Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
7. De Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism, p. viii.
8. Barbara Johnson, Défigurations du langage poétique (Paris: Flammarion,
1979).
9. See de Man, Blindness and Insight, p. 71, n. 9.
10. Reported in the May edition of Poésie ’43. For a synopsis of this period in
de Man’s life see my Paul de Man (London: Routledge, 2001).
11. See Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, ed. Paul de Man (New York:
Norton, 1965), and Selected Poetry of John Keats, ed. Paul de Man (New
York: Signet, 1966). See also the text of The Portable Rousseau available at
<http://ucispace.lib.uci.edu/handle/10575/1093> (accessed 29 November
2011)
12. See Martin McQuillan, ‘The Secrets of Paul de Man’, Theory, Culture and
Society (2011), and Derrida’s treatment of Heidegger and Hölderlin in de
Man in ‘Mnemosyne’, trans. Avital Ronnell, in Memoirs for Paul de Man
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).
13. Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1989); Jean-Paul Sartre, Mallarmé, or the
Poet of Nothingness, trans. Ernest Sturm (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1991); Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language,
trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984);
Phillipe Sollers, ‘Literature and Totality’, in Writing and the Experience of
Limits, trans. D. Hayman and P. Barnard (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1983); Jacques Derrida, ‘The Double Session’, in Dissemination,
trans. Barbara Johnson (London: Athlone Press, 1981); Michael Foucault,
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14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
The Post-Romantic Predicament
The Order of Things (London: Routledge, 1970); Hélène Cixous and
Cathèrine Clement, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Roland Barthes, ‘The
Death of the Author’, trans. Stephen Heath, in Image, Music, Text (New
York: Hill and Wang, 1977); Leo Bersani, The Death of Stéphane Mallarmé
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); Alain Badiou, Being and
Event, Vol. 1, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005); Jacques
Rancière, Mallarmé: The Politics of the Siren, trans. Steven Corcoran
(London: Continuum, 2011).
Lindsay Waters refers to this situation as ‘inwardness’ and cites de Man’s
1955 essay ‘The Inward Generation’ as a touchstone. I prefer to think in
terms of the aporias of a commitment to writing and politics which I have
called elsewhere ‘textual activism’. See my Deconstruction After 9/11 (New
York: Routledge, 2008) or my Roland Barthes: Or the Profession of
Cultural Studies (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2011).
Charles D. Minahen, ‘Poetry’s Polite Terrorist: Reading Sartre Reading
Mallarmé’, in Michael Temple, ed., Meetings with Mallarmé in
Contemporary French Culture (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1998), p.
47. The OAS were the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète, a Nationalist
French terror group during the Algerian war of independence.
Maurice Blanchot, L’espace littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), p. 14 and p.
209; de Man’s translation to be found in Blindness and Insight, p. 65.
De Man, Blindness and Insight, p. 67.
Ibid., p. 73.
Ibid., p. 75.
Ibid., p. 76.
Maurice Blanchot, Le Livre à venir (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), p. 294; de
Man, Blindness and Insight, p. 77.
De Man, Blindness and Insight, p. 76.
See my ‘Paul de Man and Art History I’, in Paul Bowman and Richard
Stamp, eds, Reading Rancière (London: Continuum, 2011).
Badiou also treats Mallarmé in Theory of the Subject, trans. Bruno Bosteels
(London: Continuum, 2009).
Badiou, Being and Event, p. 191.
Ibid., p. 194.
Ibid., p. 197.
Ibid., p. 198.
Derrida, Dissemination, p. 245.
Ibid., p. 255.
Rancière, Mallarmé: The Politics of the Siren, p. 58.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 59.
Derrida, Dissemination, p. 186.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 285.
See Jacques Derrida, ‘Envois, 10 September 1977’, The Post Card: From
Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, second edition, 1987).
Waters, in de Man, Critical Writings, p. xiii.
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39. Kevin Newmark, ‘Beneath the Lace: Mallarmé, the State, and the
Foundation of Letters’, Yale French Studies, 77, 1990; Barbara Johnson,
‘Allegory’s Strip-Tease: The White Waterlily’, in The Critical Difference:
Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1980).
40. De Man, Critical Writings, p. 23, cited in Rei Terada, ‘De Man and
Mallarmé “Between the Two Deaths” ’, in Temple, ed., Meetings with
Mallarmé, p. 112.
41. Stéphane Mallarmé, Collected Poems and Other Verse, trans. E.H. and
A.M. Blackmore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 125.
42. De Man, Critical Writings, p. 23.
43. Terada, ‘De Man and Mallarmé “Between the Two Deaths” ’, p. 115.
44. Derrida, Dissemination, pp. 186–7.
45. Ibid., p. 183.
46. Ibid., p. 192.
47. Ibid., p. 184.
48. Ibid., p. 222.
49. Ibid., p. 224.
50. Ibid., p. 267.
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Paul de Man: Essays
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Chapter 1
Introduction to ‘The Post-Romantic
Predicament’ (1960)
The title and the subject matter of this study are perhaps in need of
some explanation. Why should an essay, devoted primarily to the exegesis of a group of difficult texts, be given a title (‘The Post-Romantic
Predicament’) that carries historical overtones? And why should the
‘predicament’ to which the title alludes be best described by the poets
that have been selected?
The answer to the first question is bound to be tentative. Although this
essay is written as an analysis of poets who already belong to the past, my
concern throughout has been with the inherent difficulty that challenges
poetry in our present day. For a long time, poetry seems to have been persistently confronted with the necessity of justifying its own existence, and
instead of becoming easier, this task seems to become increasingly more
difficult. Yeats’s complaint about his generation – ‘we are but critics, or
but half create . . .’ – is certainly more than ever true at present.
The difficulties encountered by poetry today are not essentially different from those that faced poets like Mallarmé or Yeats. The complexity and the inconclusiveness of their work has much to teach us. If we
cannot go to them for answers, they at least provide us with a decisive
formulation of our questions. More clearly perhaps than is the case with
their successors, the predicament of contemporary poetry finds expression in their work, unencumbered by obfuscating side issues.
One should even extend the perspective further and go back to 1800
when problems that tormented Mallarmé and Yeats began to emerge
in the foreground of the poetic consciousness. Hence the term ‘postRomantic’; I use it without more proof than a few passing allusions to
a persistence of certain themes and images extending from the romantics to later, so-called symbolist poets. The nature of this continuity,
however, demands another study and I can merely state it a priori here;
the title, then, points towards future inquiries rather than summarising
the results of the present one.
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The Post-Romantic Predicament
By using the historical term ‘Romanticism’, I also want to suggest
that the predicament of poetry since Romanticism is historical in the
broader sense of the term. The problem of poetry is made historical to
the extent that the poets themselves regard it as a predicament which
varies in time. They assume that it can be changed by present and future
decisions, including their own poetic decisions. The ordering of human
experience within successive time is a conscious theme of their work.
They see themselves acting dramatically, as poets, within a historical
context. It seems natural, therefore, to approach them within such a
perspective.
When a period is as self-consciously ‘historical’ as is Romanticism and
its heritage, one has to go beyond history in order to account for this.
Especially in the case of poets who appear late in the Romantic tradition, such as Mallarmé and Yeats, the original historicism grows more
complex; it can, as in Mallarmé, become such a fundamental category
of the poetic consciousness that it moves far beyond the facts of empirical history; or, as in Yeats, historicism itself can be called into question
from a deliberately non-historical or even anti-historical point of view
[that grows out of his historical concerns]. In both cases, the predicament of the poet has to be called metaphysical. The experience of poets
like Mallarmé or Yeats takes place on such a fundamental level that the
language of metaphysics seems the best suited to paraphrase their intent.
This now implies an equation of poetic with metaphysical language, or
still less, a subordination of the former to the latter. The description of
poetic language can only focus on stylistic dimensions. However, if we
want to ask about the intent that prompted a certain kind of style, then
we are necessarily brought back to a metaphysics of style, to an interpretation of its intentional structure. If there is to be a synthesis between
historical and stylistic approaches to literary problems, or between classifications in terms of ‘theme’ and ‘idea’, the concept of stylistic intent
provides a helpful common ground. I have tried to experiment with this
concept by treating Mallarmé’s thematic development in close parallel
to that of a philosophical idea (Hegel’s conception of a ‘becoming consciousness’), and Yeats’s stylistic development in terms of an intentional
theory of the poetic image. The test for the validity of such an approach
depends on its exegetic value as applied to particular poetic texts, especially texts which refused to yield to other methods of critical analysis.
As for the choice of poets here examined, it is, of course, not more
than a representative selection. The existence of an actual historical
contact between Mallarmé and the work of Yeats (and, in the completed version of this book, between Mallarmé and Stefan George) is by
no means decisive. The actual ‘influence’ of Mallarmé on Yeats is very
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35
slight, almost negligible; more considerable in the case of George, it is,
even there, only one among many, often more important influences. The
point of grouping those particular poets together consists rather in the
extreme character of their respective enterprises. Unlike, perhaps, Rilke,
Valéry or Claudel, it cannot be said of Mallarmé and Yeats that they fell
back on previous aesthetic or religious positions without having pushed
their language to the extreme limit of what it could endure and accomplish. This is not necessarily admirable; it suggests something over-tense,
dangerous, possibly destructive, which is undoubtedly present in their
work. But, for our specific purpose, it makes them into particularly
appropriate cases in point, exemplary illustrations of the situation we
are trying to understand.
Because of this interest in the extreme aspects, the stress throughout
falls on the experimental and speculative elements in the works. This
is bound to result in a somewhat lopsided image; in neither case do
I attempt to present a balanced picture of the poet as a whole. In an
exhaustive monograph on Mallarmé or on Yeats, the interpretation
would have to be tempered by qualifications with which I had to dispense for fear of blurring the set of questions, the problématique, that
concerns me. This problématique is necessarily something of an abstraction, but it persistently tries to avoid becoming a distortion.
From a stylistic point of view, the exegeses lead to general considerations on the structure and the use of the natural image as a stylistic
device. Some of the theoretical groundwork for this analysis appears
in the section on Mallarmé and is developed in the part on Yeats. The
work of Stefan George can be seen, in its totality, as a dramatisation of
the problem of the image, carried to its most extreme consequences. The
third part will, therefore, itself serve as the conclusion to this aspect of
our study.
From a historical point of view, the poetry of Mallarmé, Yeats and
George bears witness to the assertive power of poetry within an age of
nihilism. Precisely because their poetry reflects so many of the symptoms
of nihilism, its very existence has a particularly strong affirmative value.
The fewer compromises we find in our poets and the fewer immediate
hopes they hold out for us, the more miraculous the existence of their
work appears, almost in spite of what it has to say. Throughout, my
main disagreement with the existing critical interpretations has been
with commentators who impose too positive a view, when such positive
attitudes are not to be found in the work. If we are to consider those
poets as possible Masters, it is important that we do not underestimate
the difficulty of their lesson. They can only be of help to us if we do not
recoil from the full lucidity of their insight.
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Chapter 2
Mallarmé (1960)
I ‘Hérodiade’
Mallarmé is the poet of his own development rather than a matter of
individual poems. Although he justified his entire enterprise in the name
of the ultimate Work, ‘le Livre . . . l’explication orphique de la Terre’,1
he left little behind that resembles the usual conception of what a literary work ought to be. His own candid self-evaluation, in a public letter
otherwise totally devoid of false modesty, has to be taken at face-value;
speaking of his published poems, he writes to Verlaine: ‘All this had no
other momentary value for me than to keep me in shape (‘m’entretenir la
main’); and no matter how successful some of those poems may be, taken
together they hardly make up an album, not a book.’2 Fragmentary and
difficult as it is, Mallarmé’s work, considered as a gradual development
towards an ideal Poem that never came into being, provides us with the
clearest possible image of a poetic consciousness in growth.
In tracing the outline of his development, we are at some advantage
compared to the poet himself, since we know him ‘tel qu’en lui-même
enfin l’éternité le change’ and can see the work as one finite unit. We are
in the privileged position – and the reference is by no means far-fetched
– of the fictional ‘philosopher’ in Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit,
who can know and understand all the steps in his own growth, because
he has gained the wisdom towards which this growth is directed.
Mallarmé’s poetry offers us this wisdom in the form of the experience
of its own genesis. We receive the experience in the mediated form of a
highly conscious language, but this does not mean that we can confine
ourselves to the final statement, without considering the development
that led up to it. ‘Un coup de dés’ is meaningless without ‘Igitur’, not
only for the external reason that it contains some of the same imagery,
but because the author of ‘Un coup de dés’ assumes that one has gone
through the experience described in ‘Igitur’ before coming upon the later
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work. In the same manner, ‘Igitur’ depends on ‘Hérodiade’ which, in
turn, cannot be separated from the earlier poems.
Critical studies of Mallarmé which, in the last years, have become
more and more abundant and exhaustive, have not taken full advantage
of the exegetic possibilities inherent in a description of the development.
Somewhat surprisingly, the main emphasis has fallen on sources and
on biography,3 both slightly irrelevant in the case of a poet who, even
before writing ‘Hérodiade’, when he was less than twenty-five years old,
had deliberately achieved a high degree of impersonality, and whose
frequent and quite obvious borrowings from others are much more
revealing by the manner in which sources are used than by the content of
the source itself. Attempts at close explication, as in the books by Emilie
Noulet and Gardner Davies,4 are certainly more to the point. It can be
argued, however, that since the poems are clearly links in a continuous
chain, exegesis is only possible within the context of the general development. The reason why this development has not received more attention
is because it hinges, unfortunately enough, on the three texts which are
also the most difficult: ‘Hérodiade’, ‘Igitur’ and ‘Un coup de dés’.
By a coincidence which is only partly a result of chance, the interpretation of ‘Hérodiade’ and ‘Igitur’ is made more difficult still by the absence
of a reliable edition. Originally conceived as a drama for the theatrical
performance, ‘Hérodiade’ now consists of three disjointed fragments;
the date of the last of these fragments, ‘Cantique de Saint-Jean’ is not
known, and the text of the very important ‘Ouverture ancienne’, posthumously published by Mallarmé’s daughter and son-in-law, is far from
authoritative.5 The case of ‘Igitur’ is even more puzzling. The text which
now appears in the Pléiade edition was edited by Mallarmé’s son-in-law
Bonniot, a physician without philological training; it was done with
care and devotion, but the resulting product differs considerably from
the original manuscript.6 Until a complete critical edition of ‘Igitur’ can
be published, we can only conjecture as to what passages Mallarmé had
considered sufficiently completed to read to Villiers and Mendès7 and
in what order he presented them to his friends. As for ‘Un coup de dés’,
which appeared during the author’s lifetime and under his supervision,
no textual uncertainties interfere with the interpretation, but this most
hermetic of Mallarmé’s experiments poses many other problems.
Yet, regardless of those obstacles, the attempt to interpret Mallarmé
primarily in terms of ‘Hérodiade’, ‘Igitur’ and ‘Un coup de dés’ (rather
than in terms of more finished and ‘successful’ works such as ‘L’aprèsmidi d’un faune’, or ‘Prose pour des Esseintes’ or ‘Toast funèbre’) is necessary and rewarding. They are the works that meant the most to him
and in which he tried to live up to the fantastically high claims he made
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The Post-Romantic Predicament
for literary creation. One fails to do Mallarmé full justice by not giving
those three texts at least the place they occupied among his own concerns. On the basis of the completed and published poems alone, as they
appear, for instance, in Mallarmé’s own edition of his works brought
out in 1893,8 it is possible to consider him as an attractive, but somewhat eccentric figure, a poet who perversely manipulated his language
and syntax in order to hide rather recondite statements and slightly
morbid personal obsessions under the deliberate obscurity of a hermetic
diction.9 Posthumous texts such as ‘Igitur’ or the ‘Ouverture ancienne’
to ‘Hérodiade’, as well as the correspondence, ‘Un coup de dés’ and the
critical prose of the later Divagations, make this reassuringly patronising attitude towards the more extreme aspects of Mallarmé’s undertaking untenable. One is confronted here with a direct challenge to the very
existence of poetic language as we habitually conceive of it. Mallarmé
is, in fact, the poet in whose mind the problems of the post-romantic
sensibility are reflected with exemplary clarity and who faced them
without the slightest attempt at evasion – and if it may seem surprising
to associate ‘clarity’ with ‘Mallarmé l’obscur’, it should be remembered
that a difficult poet is not necessarily an obscure one.
[1]
The publication, by Henri Mondor, of Mallarmé’s juvenilia10 has
revealed the existence of a fifteen-year-old aspiring poet who, following in the footsteps of Victor Hugo – at that time his venerated master
– began his career as a naïve pantheist. Whoever enjoys the spectacle
of a truly complete cycle of development will have been pleased by a
youthful effort such as ‘Pan’ (pp. 181–5). Not only does this poem reveal
how long a distance Mallarmé had to travel before reaching the formal
perfection of his later work (he had nothing of Rimbaud’s precocity),
but it allows us to survey the full span of his metamorphosis; a pantheistic unity between nature and man, stated at first with much rhetorical
fervour as if it were an actual reality, will grow into a more and more
distant ideal – while remaining, nevertheless, as the dominating intent
behind the entire enterprise.11
Mallarmé’s poetic development thus begins at the very source of the
movement to which he belongs, with the symbol of the ‘book of nature’,
the belief in a unity between mind and nature, which is one of the main
romantic themes – if perhaps not, in France, since Rousseau, then at
least certainly since Chateaubriand. In 1859, when Mallarmé begins to
write, this theme is inherited as poetic commonplace and the great hope
and torment of the romantics appears, with the assistance of Hugo, as a
stilted, artificial rhetoric:12
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39
Venez où dés l’aurore épand ses harmonies
L’oiseau pur, cette voix qu’aux arbres Dieu donna!
Voilà l’ostensoir d’or; . . . il se lève sublime! . . .
A genoux, à genoux, entonnez l’hosanna
Qu’aux mers chante l’alcyon, l’aigle fauve à sa cime!
Puisqu’un flot le murmure et qu’il parle d’amour! . . .
Gravis ce mont neigeux: jette ton œil autour:
Voie le ciel! vois la terre! Homme c’est là ta bible.
(‘Pan’, p. 185)
Less than four years – from July 1859 to May 1863 – separate those
early attempts from the main number of poems published in the
Parnasse contemporain, the poems on which, for years to come,
Mallarmé’s reputation was to be founded. In this relatively short period
of time, a considerable change has taken place. The early naiveté has
been replaced by an unsettling complexity. The unity of ‘Pan’ has been
thoroughly destroyed; in a poem like ‘Les fenêtres’ (May 1863), the
world is split in two parts, separated by the insuperable screen of the
window. Whatever exists on the near side of the screen, in the world
of immediately accessible reality, has become repulsive and unbearable.
The window, however, is a strangely ambiguous symbol: on the one
hand, it represents, in a rather conventional manner, the hope or even
the assurance that a better world exists elsewhere, beyond reality – but,
on the other hand, it also acts as the obstacle that keeps us separated
from this ideal world. Moreover, the window, which is identified with
true religious feeling – authentic ‘mysticité’ in contrast to the conventional Catholicism of Mallarmé’s pious youth – is also said to represent
art; art thus becomes the means of access to a recovered unity as well as
the activity which caused the separation. And the manner in which the
reconciliation takes places is now a complicated process:
Je me mire et me vois ange! et je meurs, et j’aime
— Que la vitre soit l’art, soit la mysticité —
A renaitre, portant mon rêve en diadème,
Au ciel antérieur où fleurit la Beauté!
(‘Les fenêtres’, p. 32)
The window becomes a mirror, the symbol for poetic language as it
reflects our own image. Because of this reflective quality, the window is
able to separate the material, mortal part of our being from the spiritual,
angelical part, and thus it rescues us from the torture of reality. It opens
upon a form of spiritualised self-knowledge (the line originally read ‘. . .
et je songe, et j’aime . . .’13), but the gaining of this knowledge involves
an act which, from the point of view of the person who remains within
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The Post-Romantic Predicament
reality, appears so negative that it can only be called a ‘death’ (‘. . . et je
meurs, et j’aime . . .’). A link is established between poetic creation, selfreflection and death but the nature of this link is still vague and obscure;
all we know is that the power of poetry to restore us to a condition of
unity seems to depend on it.
The content of the ideal, the specific nature of the experience on the
far side of the ‘window’, is less remarkable than the process that leads
towards it. In this early poem, the transfigured world (which the poet
never claims to reach) remains vague and general. Echoing Baudelaire,
it is described in terms of a ‘coucher de soleil romantique’ with strong
emphasis on the fact that it is a world of the past, existing only:
Dans un grand nonchaloir chargé de souvenirs
Rebirth in this ideal world can only be stated in the form of a temporal
paradox (‘renaitre au ciel antérieur . . .’), as a future which is primarily
a return to the past, but never able to exist in the present. It can only be
reached by way of the very act of self-reflection that separated us from it.
The ideal is sometimes called childhood, or virginity,14 but it can never
be expressed as if it were an immediate experience. Although it has never
actually been known, the original paradise never ceases to haunt us and
its absence is unbearable. One begins to understand what Mallarmé may
have meant when, in a letter to Villiers,15 he complained about the difficulty of having to carry on at the point where Baudelaire left off.16 More
than a set of images, he inherits from Baudelaire his difficult experience
of the ideal as an eternal intent which can never become a presence.
Hence the ambiguous nature of the ideal, and the double attitude
which very soon becomes manifest. In ‘Les fenêtres’, the unity from
which one is separated is desperately longed for, but in ‘L’azur’
Mallarmé turns away from it in horror. Art now appears as a substance
which one tries to interpose between the unbearable brightness of the
sunlight and the divided soul of the poet; in stanzas 3 and 4 of ‘L’azur’,
one sees it become a thickening fog, stop the rays of the sun and lead
to the ‘nuit hagarde’ which is already a foreboding of the ‘nuit’ from
‘Igitur’:
. . . Où fuir? Et quelle nuit hagarde
Jeter, lambeaux, jeter sur ce mépris navrant?
Brouillards, montez! Verses vos cendres monotones
Avec de longs haillons de brume dans les cieux
Qui noiera le marais livide des automnes
Et bâtissez un grand plafond silencieux!
(‘L’azur’, pp. 37–8)
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Art and poetry – for the poem explicitly refers to the predicament of the
poet, not of every man (‘Le poëte impuissant qui maudit son genie’) – are
opposed here to the blue of the sky. Juxtaposing the two poems, ‘Les
fenêtres’ and ‘L’azur’, it becomes apparent that they are antithetical;
the same elements appear in both, but with contrary value-emphasis.
Memory in ‘Les fenêtres’, for instance, is an essential attribute of the
ideal world:
Dans un grand nonchaloir chargé de souvenirs
but in ‘L’azur’, man instead protects himself from the temptation of the
ideal by means of an act of memory; the expression ‘sortir des étangs
léthéens’ is an elaborate periphrase, describing the act of remembering
as an escape from the power of Lethe:
Et toi, sors des etangs léthéens et ramasse,
Et t’en venant la vase et les pâles roseaux,
Cher Ennui, pour boucher d’une main jamais lasse
Les grands trous bleus que font méchamment les oiseaux.
Natural, animal entities, the ‘birds’ which are one of Mallarmé’s most
persistent symbols, awake the temptation for the kind of physical wellbeing suggested by a state of harmony between man and nature; the
warmth, the serenity of the blue sky; but this temptation is founded on
such false hopes and expectations that, to a lucid mind, it becomes a
cause of torment. The poet prays for a mental act – in this case, an act
of memory – which will protect him from this temptation. The entire
process is represented as a visual, dramatic scene which has a kind of
objective consistency: ‘ennui’ will rise from the pond as clouds rise from
the sea, and become a fog so dense that even the birds will no longer
be able to pierce it. A scene, involving natural objects and their mutual
relationships, without distorting any of the laws of reality, is made to
state the desire to turn away from nature. With numberless refinements
and elaborations, this statement and this technique will remain constant
throughout the work.
The two poems describe a movement that takes place between the
same poles, but that is aimed in opposite directions, like the thesis
and antithesis of a dialectical development. Very soon, this dialectical opposition will become the principle of dramatic organisation of
all Mallarmé’s poems, but at this early date, the two attitudes are still
embodied in two distinct poems which, however opposed they may be in
statement, are certainly altogether alike in tone. It is a tone of plaintive
lamentation rather than rebellion, the tone that predominates in most
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The Post-Romantic Predicament
of the poems published by Mallarmé in the Parnasse contemporain. In
the later poems of this series, however, a tonal change begins to become
apparent. ‘Las de l’amer repos . . .’, for instance, written about a year
after ‘Les fenêtres’, strikes a note of stoical resignation which has, of
course, many literary antecedents among the Parnassians, but which
is absent from Mallarmé’s earliest work. As a mere statement, ‘Las de
l’amer repos . . .’ is not less desperate than any of its predecessors: the
poetic act is presented in the most negative of terms, as the deliberate
destroyer of an earthly paradise associated, in the best romantic tradition, with childhood and nature:
Las de l’amer repos où ma parasses offense
Une gloire pour qui jadis j’ai fui l’enfance
Adorable des bois de roses sous l’azur
Naturel . . .
(‘Las de l’amer repos . . .’, p. 35)
In the early part of the poem, the act of writing can only be described in
terms directly, almost naturalistically, associated with death; the image
is that of a man digging like a gravedigger in his own mind:
. . . et plus las sept fois du pacte dur
De creuser par veillée une fosse nouvelle
Dans le terrain avare et froid de ma cervelle,
Fossoyeur sans pitié pour la stérilité . . .
The dramatic development of the poem suggests, however, that this
desperate predicament can be overcome by writing a different kind of
poetry, described in the final part as:
Imiter le Chinois au Coeur limpide et fin
De qui l’extase pure est de peindre la fin
Sur ses tasses de neige à la lune ravie
D’une bizarre fleur qui parfume sa vie . . .
This refined detachment and impassibility is a late, Goncourt-like version
of Parnassian aesthetics. ‘Peindre la fin . . . d’une bizarre fleur’ has the
undeniable ring of a fin-de-siècle decadence, but the term ‘decadence’
(against which Mallarmé protested)17 can only be used if one specifies
that, when decadence becomes itself a conscious theme, it is by the same
token negated and, to some extent, transcended. A poetry of decadence
is not a decadent poetry and certainly not a frivolous one; Mallarmé
achieves the momentary serenity of the ‘Chinois au coeur limpide et fin’
with the tragic knowledge that it involves a certain form of death. In ‘Les
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fenêtres’ as well as in ‘Las de l’amer repos . . .’ appears the same memory
of a past unity which awakens the desire to recapture it. As long as this
hope subsists, the poems are like prayers; art is equated with religious
faith (‘Que la vitre soit l’art soit la mysticité’) and the tone is that of
religious supplication. As soon, however, as hope has been abandoned,
one can no longer pray but paint (‘peindre la fin . . .’), and instead of
describing the lost paradise (‘l’azur naturel perdu’), it is the end of its
presence which becomes the main theme. Maturity appears as a resigned
acceptance of death and separation. Language becomes a purely formal
entity, the tangible sign that remains of an intent which fails to succeed,
but leaves behind this trace of its desire. Since the failure is known, the
reflective act (‘Je me mire et me vois ange . . .’) which, at first, tried to use
language as a tool in order to recapture a harmony lying outside of the
realm of language, now returns to language as the entity which contains
the two experiences that constituted the poetic act – the desire for unity
and the failure of this desire. Poetry becomes formal and gratuitous, a
useless but structurally ordered object, like a precious stone. The mind
enjoys the freedom and the precision of handling language, the agent
of consciousness, as if it were a thing; this activity enables it to subsist
beyond the painful failure to establish itself as an immediate presence.
The enjoyment will soon enough be exhausted by the monotony of
its repetition, but when it is first discovered, when the poetry changes
from a prayer into a picture, it accompanies an important moment in
the development of poetic language; the moment when this language
states its own failure while at the same time fulfilling itself completely
as a formal entity. The presence of this moment within the growth of a
poet gives depth to a formalism that could otherwise be merely trivial.
Parnassian poetics appear as a necessity when seen in their proper place
within the development of a poetic mind. In Mallarmé, this phase occurs
between early poems like ‘Les fenêtres’ and the impersonal rigour of
‘Igitur’. The transition to what could be called conscious Parnassian
poetry begins in poems such as ‘Las de l’amer repos . . .’ and reaches its
climax in ‘Hérodiade’.
[2]
The theatre scene from ‘Hérodiade’, written in the form of a dialogue
between Hérodiade and her nurse (pp. 44–8), is one of Mallarmé’s
best known anthology pieces, whereas the ‘Ouverture ancienne’ that
precedes it (pp. 41–3) has received less attention, although it has been
known since 1926. Mallarmé himself attached a great deal of importance to it, more so, perhaps, than to any other of his works. ‘I spent
three months labouring over Hérodiade’, he writes, ‘my lamp knows it
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well; I have written the musical Overture, still almost an outline, but
I can say without presumption that it will be supremely effective, and
that the dramatic scene you know, in comparison to this poem, is like
a vulgar popular print (“une vulgaire image d’Epinal”) compared with
a painting by Leonardo da Vinci.’18 Mallarmé kept returning to this
fragment; in a projected bibliography written shortly before his death,
he states: ‘The dialogue [from ‘Hérodiade’] was preceded by an overture which I now replace by a new one in the same style . . .’ (p. 426).
This late version, of which fragments have been published,19 reveals an
obvious connection with the earlier ‘Ouverture’, which dates from 1866.
Since this is one of Mallarmé’s last poetic attempts, after ‘Un coup de
dés’ and a few months before his death, one realises how much this text
must have meant to him. The often quoted phrase ‘en creusant le vers a
ce point, j’ai recontré . . . le Néant . . .’ undoubtedly refers primarily to
this poem.
The musical overture to ‘Hérodiade’, however, was never finished
and, as in the case of ‘Igitur’, one has to cope with the difficult circumstance that the most revealing texts exist only as developed sketches. It
would be unwise, therefore, to ‘evaluate’ the overture to ‘Hérodiade’ as
one evaluates a finished poem such as ‘L’après-midi d’un faune’ or ‘Un
coup de dés’. Posterity does not commit the indiscretion of revealing
notes which a poet had deliberately hidden in order to indicate their
inadequacy, but with the hope of shedding light on the difficulties of
the work as a whole. The unfinished texts are those that aimed highest,
which accounts for their major importance as well as for their fragmentary condition.
Like ‘L’après-midi d’un faune’, ‘Hérodiade’ seems to have started as
an exercise; it is significant that the two works are obviously indebted
to a source, in the usual sense given to this term in literary history.
Mallarmé openly and deliberately uses a theme, a situation and even
a vocabulary taken from a contemporary work, not because he lacks
inventive imagination, but because this method of composition corresponds exactly to the purpose of poetry as he conceives of it at that
time; a formal elaboration on a given theme, taken as the objective point
of departure for a personal diction and symbolism. As Henri Mondor
has shown, Banville’s heroic comedy Diane au bois provided much
of the general argument for ‘L’après-midi d’un faune’20 and the close
resemblance between the subject matter of ‘Hérodiade’ and Flaubert’s
Salammbô has also been pointed out by Mondor.21 The connection is
more specific still than has been indicated and it deserves closer study,
not only because it clarifies certain details which, in the hermetic language of ‘Hérodiade’, seem highly mysterious, but because it provides
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a useful illustration of the manner in which Mallarmé makes use of
sources. He exploits them in the same manner as certain neutral données
of his immediate surroundings; a familiar piece of furniture, a fleeting
perception, a linguistic discovery hit upon by chance. The models are
not chosen because they inspire him with strong feelings of admiration;
Mallarmé has little to say about Flaubert; he liked Banville a great deal
and his later style contains many echoes from the Odes funambulesques;
but he certainly considered neither of them as masters [whom] he was
trying to emulate – like Baudelaire or Poe. Banville’s or Flaubert’s texts
are for him not unlike natural things, devoid in themselves of deeper
symbolical meaning, but which lend themselves to being the starting
point for his own invention. A given entity, met perhaps by chance,
can thus be transformed into symbolic action of almost universal significance, and this process constitutes for Mallarmé the creative act par
excellence. Far from being a passive transfer from one poet to another,
the ‘sources’ appear as the starting point, the raw material of Mallarmé’s
invention.
In ‘Hérodiade’, it is specifically chapter ten from Salammbô (‘Le
serpent’) which provides the setting and the dramatic situation for the
‘Scène’ and also, to some extent, for the ‘Ouverture ancienne’. Flaubert
is describing Salammbô assisted by Taanah, her nurse, as she dresses
before leaving to meet her lover Mathô:
Salammbô, assise dans une chaise à montant d’ivoire, s’abandonnait aux
soins de l’esclave. Maise ces attouchements, l’odeur des aromates et les jeûnes
qu’elle avait subis, l’énervaient. Elle devint si pale que Taanah s’arrêta . . .
– Tu ne seras pas plus belle le jour de tes noces!
– Mes noces! répéta Salammbô; elle rêvait, le coude appuyé sur la chaise
d’ivoire.
Mais Taanah dressa devant elle un miroir de cuivre si large et si haut
qu’elle s’y aperÇut toute entière. Alors elle se leva, et d’un coup de doigt léger,
remonta une boucle de ses cheveux qui descendait trop bas.
Ils étaient couverts de poudre d’or, crépus sur le front et par derrière, ils
pendaient dans le dos, en longues torsades que terminèrent des perles. Les
Clartés des candelabras avivaient le fard de ses joues, l’or de ses vêtements, le
blancheur desa peau; elle avait autour de la taille, sur les bras, sur les mains et
aux doigts de piede, une telle abondance de pierreries que le miroir, comme
un soleil, lui renvoyait des rayons; – et Salammbô, debout a côté de Taanah,
se penchait pour la voie, souriait dans cet éblouissement.
Puis elle se promena de long en large, embarassée du temps qui loui restait.
Tout à coup, le chant du coq retentit . . .22
The scene is almost entirely taken over in the dialogue between
Hérodiade and the nurse in the ‘Scène’. Aside from the general situation,
several details recur; the time of day (dawn), the lighting by candles,
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the three gestures of the nurse; offering perfume, setting up the mirror,
straightening Hérodiade’s hair (in Flaubert, it is Salammbô herself who
makes this last gesture). The hair ‘couvert(s) de poudre d’or’ (Flaubert)
becomes ‘mes cheveux qui ne sont pas des fleurs . . . / Mais de l’or . . .’
(Mallarmé); the nurse’s statement ‘Tu ne seras pas plus belle le jour
de tes noces . . .’ has been transferred to Hérodiade: ‘Nourrice, suis-je
belle?’ and the answer evokes Flaubert’s sun: ‘Un astre, en vérité. . .’.
Even the somewhat unexpected question which, in Mallarmé, comes as
a surprise: ‘Madam, allez-vouz donc mourir?’ has its equivalent in the
forebodings of death which cause Taanah’s despair in the last paragraph
of Flaubert’s chapter.
Other details are less obviously apparent. The ‘Ouverture’ begins with
a passage on the dawn rising behind the tower (Salammbô inhabits a
tower in Carthage):
Lourde tombe qu’a fuie un bel oiseau . . .
On a purely narrative level, one may well wonder what bird this is;
the following passage in Flaubert, which takes place the day before
Salammbô’s departure, is helpful:
C’était l’époque où les colombes de Carthage émigraient en Sicile, dans la
montagne d’Eryx, autour du temple de Vénus. Avant leur départ, durant
plusieurs jours, elles se cherchaient, s’appelaient pour se réunir; enfin elles
s’envolèrent un soir; le vent les poussait, et cette grosse nuée blanche glissait
dans le ciel au-dessus de la mer, très haut.
This passage must have struck Mallarmé, for whom birds were a
very personal and important symbol, to the point of serving him,
together with many other elements, for the very complex opening of
the ‘Ouverture’. The identification between Hérodiade and the ‘bird’ is
linked to a Baudelairian passage from the ‘Scène’ that goes back to the
same text from Salammbô:
Des ondes
Se bercent et, là-bas, sais-tu pas un pays
Où le sinistre ciel ait les regards hais
De Venus qui, le soir brule dans le feuillage:
J’y partirais . . .
(p. 48, 11. 122 ff.)
Whereas Flaubert’s ‘colombes’ are clearly a symbolical preparation for
Salammbô’s own decision in favour of Venus, Hérodiade considers the
same voyage the utmost calamity; for all their kinship, Hérodiade is very
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different from Flaubert’s heroine, almost her opposite. An extremely
obscure passage from the ‘Ouverture’ closely connected with this theme
is equally rich in details taken from Salammbô:
Une d’elles, avec un passé de ramages,
Sur ma robe blanchie en l’ivoire ferme
Au ciel d’oiseaux parmi l’argent noir parsemé.
Semble, de vols partir costumée et fantôme
Un arôme qui porte, o roses! Un arôme,
Loin du lit vide qu’un cierge soufflé cachait,
Un arôme d’ors froids rôdant sur le sachet . . .
(p. 42, 11. 26 ff.)
It is useful to know that Flaubert has Salammbô sleep on ‘un sachet
d’aromates mixtionné par des pontifes’23 to give her some relief from
her amorous obsessions, and that many of the details are taken from the
description of Salammbô’s dress: she is wearing ‘une tunique brodée en
plumes d’oiseaux’, ‘étoilée d’argent’24 and sitting on an ivory chair.
One of the weakest lines in the ‘Scène’25 stems from Salammbô.
Hérodiade tells her nurse:
Si tu me vois les yeux perdus au paradis
C’est quand je me souviens de ton lait bu jadis
(a passage which is echoed in the ‘Ouverture’:
Depuis longtemps la gorge ancienne est tarie)
In Salammbô, the nurse laments a similar loss in equally realistic language: ‘. . . je te faisais rire avec la pointe de mes mamolles: tu les a
taries, Maîtresse. . .’26.
Borrowings from Flaubert’s vocabulary appear in the puzzling line:
Tel, inutile et si claustral, n’est pas le lin
(p. 42, 1. 60)
Salammbô, on the way to her sacrificial execution, wears a linen belt, the
priests wear linen robes.27 Or, in the equally hermetic line:
Et quand le soir méchant a coupé les grenades!
(p. 43 1. 67)
the allusion is possibly to Persephone, but one should also remember
that Mathô wanted Salammbô to put a pomegranate in her mouth and
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that elsewhere her mouth is described by Flaubert as ‘rose comme une
grenade entr’ouverte’.28
One may well connect the passing remark in Flaubert ‘Salammbô . . .
se faisait horreur à elle-même . . .’29 with the striking exclamation:
J’aime l’horreur d’être vierge . . .;
and when, in the ‘Ouverture’ the nurse asks, alluding to Hérodiade’s
father:
Reviendra-t-il un jour des pays cisalpins:
Assez tôt? . . .
one should remember that Salammbô will be condemned to a marriage
she abhors in case Hamilcar would not return in time.30 Finally, one
should mention the priest Schahabarim, a castrate whose physiological sterility points towards one of Mallarmé’s recurrent obsessions and
who, in an unlikely synthesis, seems to have been fused with the figure
of the nurse to pronounce the incantation of the ‘Ouverture’.
Aside from narrative elements, Mallarmé also uses the dominant
symbols of Salammbô, adjusting them, however, to the meaning which
those symbols already possessed in his own poetry. An allegorical theme
opposes the forces of the sun to the forces of the moon in the somewhat
confused mind of Salammbô and her instructor;31 she begins by worshipping the lunar goddess, but gives in when Schahabarim starts praising the
virtues of the sun. The latter’s pleas become quite transparent when, later
in the book, one hears that in the embrace of the fiery Matho, Salammbô
is ‘caught in the power of the sun’.32 In ‘Hérodiade’ also, the antithesis
between sun and moon, night and day, plays an important part, but the
symbolical interplay of those terms is much less obvious; [as] in Flaubert,
the symbols of sun and moon have strong erotic overtones, but within a
much more intricate framework of values and conflicts.
The name of Hérodiade is first mentioned by Mallarmé as an erotic
symbol in ‘Les fleurs’, an early poem more complicated in theme and
diction than most of the other poems from the Parnasse contemporain.33 Like so many of Mallarmé’s poems, ‘Les fleurs’ describes the
act of poetic creation by analogy with divine, cosmic creation. The
flowers, some of which have easily recognisable emblematic associations
(Apollo’s laurel in stanza 2, the traditional pair of rose and lily, love
and death, in stanzas 3 and 4),34 are created by a divine power (‘Notre
Dame’) out of the original antithesis of day and night, heat and cold, sun
and stars, like Platonic ideas out of Chaos:
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Des avalanches d’or du vieil azur, au jour
Premier et de la neige éternelle des astres
Jadis tu détaches les grands calices pour
La terre jeune encore et vierge de désastres
(p. 33)
Hérodiade, the erotic rose, appears in the catalogue of flowers, together
with the emblem of poetic glory (‘ce divin laurier des ames exilées’),
among forces which are opposed to the harmony and unity that existed
at the beginning of things (‘la terre jeune encore et vierge de désastres’).
The intellectualised, artificial flowers introduce negative, corrupting elements in the innocence of an earthly paradise, a Garden of Eden which,
like the garden in Hawthorne’s story ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’, becomes
a Garden of Death. The deadly power of the flowers, suggested in the
stanza on ‘la blancheur sanglotante des lys’, becomes quite explicit in
the line:
Calices balançant la future fiole
‘La future fiole’, here also called ‘la balsamique Mort’ is a recurrent
Mallarméan symbol for suicide by poison.35 In a blasphemous ironic
twist, when we are led to expect an equation of poetic with divine creation, we are given instead a pseudo-hymn to the Virgin as a creator of
death:
O Mère qui créas en ton sein juste et fort
Calices balançant la future fiole,
De grandes fleurs avec la balsamique mort . . .
The kind of erotic experience associated with Hérodiade is thus linked,
from the start, with poetic creation, death and self-reflection.36 The
‘Scène’ from ‘Hérodiade’ refines and dramatises this early conception of
Mallarmé’s heroine. Two types of erotic feeling are involved here, the
one natural and maternal, associated with Venus and the sun; the other
artificial, self-reflective, associated with the moon. Hérodiade deliberately chooses the latter over the former and her choice, in a typical
example of a Mallarméan technique, is represented by the metamorphosis of one symbolical object into another; in this case, Hérodiade’s hair,
at first wild and supple enough to be called ‘crinière’, becomes hard and
metallic to the point of reflecting like a mirror:
Je veux que mes cheveux qui ne sont pas des fleurs
A répandre l’oubli des humaines douleurs,
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Mais de l’or, à jamais vierge des aromates,
Dans leurs éclairs cruels et dans leurs pâleurs mates,
Observent le froideur stérile du métal,
Vous ayant réflétés, joyaux du mur natal,
Armes, vases depuis votre solitaire enfance.
(11. 35–41)
The auto-erotic love that alienates and reflects, already implicitly associated with the Hérodiade of ‘Les fleurs’, is now much more clearly set off
against a different, natural passion. There is no doubt that Mallarmé, in
a sense, approves of the choice made by his heroine and that, contrary
to suggestions which have frequently been made, he does not think of
her as hesitant or misguided. The real depth of ‘Hérodiade’, however,
would be missed if one does not realise that there now exists a much
more profound awareness of the values that are being negated, and a
mature estimation of the cost involved in the sacrifice. The last two lines
in the passage above, for instance, (‘Vous ayant réflétés, joyaux du mur
natal / Armes, vases depuis ma solitaire enfance’) take leave forever from
the illusion of a blissful childhood-paradise which still appears in several
of Mallarmé’s early poems. Whatever memory of unity we possess does
not stem from actual experience, but from an imagined ideal; division
and self-reflection existed in childhood as well, and have never ceased
to exist.
With the growing maturity of the poet and the man, the theme of a
lost innocence takes on a much more specific meaning, quite different
from the somewhat conventional image of an earthly paradise in the
early poems. Mallarmé now associates it with the eternal feminine,
a mood of warm, maternal love which finds expression in ‘Don du
poëme’, this most personal of Mallarmé’s poems, in which he contrasts
his actual newborn child with his artificial offspring ‘Hérodiade’ and
laments his divided loyalties:
O la berceuse, avec ta fille et l’innocence
De vos pieds froids, accueille une horrible naissance . . .
(p. 40)
The theme could be traced back to the change which Mallarmé made
in the first version of ‘Les fleurs’; when the poem appeared in 1866, the
second line of the fifth stanza read:
Notre Père, hosannah du jardin de nos limbes . . .
(p. 1422)
Later, Mallarmé changed this to:
Notre Dame, hosannah du jardin de nos limbes . . .
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and the entire poem is centred on the mother:
O Mère qui créas en ton sein juste et fort . . .
This change adds a world of meaning (of which psychoanalytical criticism has eagerly and all too literally taken advantage)37 and it is in the
‘Scène’ from ‘Hérodiade’ that this element of natural, maternal affection
is most strongly felt, as the antithesis to Hérodiade’s own commitment.
The heroine rejects it with all the determination of one who knows its
seductiveness, but as in a true dialectic, the negation of the experience
is by no means equivalent to its downright condemnation. The eternal
feminine remains present in the ‘Scène’ from ‘Hérodiade’, in a parenthetical and cryptic aside which nevertheless reveals that Mallarmé knows
the full significance of what he renounces:
. . . le tiède azur d’été
Vers lui nativement la femme se dévoile
(p. 47, 11. 100–1)
It is precisely this ‘woman’ which Hérodiade refuses to be, implying that
she is preferring a certain kind of death over a natural, human existence.
The nurse seems to know this, for to Hérodiade’s exalted monologue
in which she reveals her full purpose (11. 86–117) she replies with the
question:
Madame, allez-vous donc mourir?
Unexpected as it may seem, the question has been prepared by several
previous associations linking Hérodiade with death.38 Her reassuring
negative reply: ‘Non, pauvre aieule . . .’ therefore seems hardly convincing and when, 22 lines later, after the nurse has left, Hérodiade says
‘Vous mentez, o fleur nue / De mes lèvres . . .’, it seems dramatically most
consistent to make the ‘lie’ refer to the denial of her imminent death in
1. 118. The ‘chose inconnue’ which she then mentions (‘J’attends une
chose inconnue’) is not the kind of sexual fulfilment Salammbô found
with Mathô, but the death that lies beyond it. Hérodiade is determined
to die and she knows it; she is exalted by the tragic grandeur of her own
decision. But this does not mean that she knows death itself, which is
bound to remain for her ‘une chose inconnue’.
By choosing not to give in to any hope of natural fulfilment,
Hérodiade knows that she is left to face a deliberate death. Her decision
is a tragic one, but we see her in the ‘Scène’ at the very moment when
she is able to dominate her pain and transform it in the poetic language
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inspired by her suffering. With a stoicism similar to that already found
in ‘Las de l’amer repos . . .’, Hérodiade dominates the mere experience
of her tragedy to such an extent that she cannot represent it as reflected,
detached form. The ‘tears’ of her sacrifice undergo a metamorphosis
into ‘jewels’ – a perfect symbolisation of the change that separates
Mallarmé’s Parnassian poetry from his earlier verse:
Ou peut-être, ignorant le mystère et vos cris
Jetes-vous les sanglots suprêmes et meurtris
D’une enfance sentant parmi les rêveries
Se séparer enfin ses froides pierreries.39
(11. 132–6)
The statement is not put in the form of a categorical affirmation. It
seems as if the poem that reaches full consciousness of Parnassian formalism already contains doubts about this attitude. At the moment
when it seemed ready to achieve stability in the mastery of form and in
the contemplation of its own virtuosity, Mallarmé’s poetry starts at once
to move towards new uncertainties. The poetic ‘values’ which seemed to
be conquered in the ‘Scène’ will be negated in the ‘Ouverture ancienne’
to Hérodiade.
[3]
In spite of many negative implications (the refusal of an immediate
natural sensuality, the premonition of death, etc.) the Hérodiade of the
‘Scène’ is still, in a sense, a creature of hope, turned towards a possible
future, about to create a new style out of sufferings which she has surmounted. As such she can be called a dawn (‘aurore’), a new beginning.
From Mallarmé’s own point of view, she represents the hope that, by
recording her dramatic history, the poet will overcome the creative sterility by which he has been plagued up till then.
She appears in a very different light, however, to the personage who
pronounces the incantation of the ‘Ouverture ancienne’. This is a new
character in the drama; Mallarmé still calls it the ‘nurse’, but it is a very
different voice from that of the simple creature who is used as a foil
for Hérodiade’s monologues in the ‘Scène’. The ‘nurse’ who speaks the
‘Ouverture’ knows more about Hérodiade than Hérodiade herself; it is
not her function to advise or to tempt, but to prophesy, to put into poetic
language the knowledge she has gained of Hérodiade’s real destiny.40
Hers is the voice that speaks in the third part of the ‘Ouverture’:
Une voix, du passé longue évocation
Est-ce la mienne prête à l’invocation?
(11. 39–40)
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Reflecting on Hérodiade, she also reflects on herself and challenges
Hérodiade’s decision, as well as her own ability to find a language suitable to express this decision. Her doubts reflect Mallarmé’s concern
about the validity of the poetic attitude he has adopted and of which
‘Hérodiade’, his most ambitious poetic project at this date, was to be the
triumphant result.
His high expectations seem to have been of short duration; by the
time he is writing the ‘Ouverture’, he has given up all hope of carrying
out the original project. This failure is stated from the very outset of the
poem. As a new beginning, Hérodiade could be personified as a ‘dawn’,
but this dawn, in a visual cloud effect of which many instances occur in
Mallarmé, is likened in the first lines of the ‘Ouverture’ to the wind of a
dying bird:
Abolie, et son aile affreuse dans les larmes
Du bassin, aboli, qui mire les alarmes
...
Une Aurore a, plumage héraldique, choisi
Notre tour cinéraire et sacrificatrice,
Lourde tombe qu’a fuie un bel ouiseau . . .
(11. 1–6)
The poet is left with nothing but a ‘lourde tombe’; the ‘chose inconnue’
from the ‘Scène’, instead of being the heroic renunciation out of which a
new work was to be born, turns out to be merely Hérodiade’s physical
death. Instead of a promise of future serenity, the beginning of the new
day becomes a sombre ending; by the end of the fragment, we no longer
know whether it was the moment of dawn or the return of the night:
De crépuscule, non, mais de rouge lever
Lever du jour dernier qui vient toutachever
Si trist se débat, que l’on ne sait plus l’heure . . .
(11. 87–9)
In itself, Hérodiade’s death is not a surprise or a reason for despair; the
many allusions to death in the ‘Scène’ have certainly prepared her for
this fate. Her newly gained maturity consisted precisely in her ability to
face her destiny stoically, without fear. It was her hope, however, that
her reflection in the mirror, her knowledge of this destiny, would survive
her own personal death and thus overcome the destructive power
of time. The knowledge she has gained and which is recorded in the
poetic work would survive as she accepts to go to her death. But in the
‘Ouverture’ the death of the dawn (‘l’aurore abolie’), the dying hope of
a possible future, is explicitly linked to the accompanying ‘death’ of the
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corresponding image, the reflection of the dawn’s death in the water of
the pond. Hence the double ‘aboli’ in the first two lines, one (in the feminine) referring to the dawn, the other (in the masculine) referring to the
pond which reflects the drama of the dying dawn (‘les alarmes’). Again,
an exact visual scene (the red of the dawn mirrored in a still pond)
conveys an intricate intellectual experience and symbolises Mallarmé’s
reasons for not continuing with the work of which he expected so much:
Abolie, et son aile affreuse dans les larmes
Du bassin, aboli, qui mire les alarmes . . .
...
Une Aurore a . . .
One may well wonder what has caused a mood of such hopeless despair.
The last poems from the Parnasse contemporain announced a refined
and resigned formalism, far from joyous no doubt, but not entirely
devoid of serenity:
Et, la mort telle avec le seul rêve du sage
Serein, je vais choisir un jeune paysage
Que je peindrais encore sur les tasses, distrait . . .
(‘Las de l’amer repos . . .’, p. 36)
Even if the action of ‘painting’ is still said to involve death (‘la mort telle
. . .’), it seems to have overcome all outward manifestations of tragedy.
After this tranquil promise, the ‘Scène’ from ‘Hérodiade’ is already
much more tense and exalted. However, in spite of increased doubts and
anxieties, the predominant tone of the ‘Scène’ is still one of taut, almost
defiant expectation. The ‘Ouverture’, however, is one of the darkest
poems in the language, entirely devoid of the redeeming moments that
counterbalance the negativity of ‘Igitur’ or of ‘Un coup de dés’.
The despair which the heroine of the ‘Ouverture’ provokes in her
creator stems from Mallarmé’s growing awareness of the true nature
of Parnassian formalism. This awareness develops on a double plane:
as a full understanding, adumbrated but not yet entirely realised in the
‘Scène’, of the truly tragic destiny to which the stoic attitude is bound
to lead; and, in the second place as a revelation of the inexorable law
that binds the poetic experience itself to this failure; the undoing of the
heroine necessarily implies the undoing of the work that deals with her
destiny. The main cause for the unusual difficulty and complexity of the
‘Ouverture’ stems from the fact that it must express the consciousness of
the protagonist as well as that of the poet who describes her, while also
describing the dramatic relationship that develops between both; hence
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the persistent multiple structure, from the echoing ‘aboli’ in the first lines
till the final identification between the two participants, Hérodiade and
the poet (11. 91 ff.).
In ‘Las de l’amer repos . . .’, the genesis of a stoical attitude – using
the term in the general sense given to it by Hegel in the Phenomenology
of the Spirit – as well as its connection with a formalist type of art
had become apparent. The poet knows that he cannot live within the
plenitude of a natural unity of being; he also knows that his language is
powerless to recapture this unity, since it is itself the main cause of the
separation. But he surmounts his despair at this discovery by objectifying his negative knowledge, and making it into a form which has this
knowledge for its content. In so doing, the poet hopes to safeguard the
future possibility of his work by substituting the contemplation of his
failure to a useless quest for unity. The personage of Hérodiade personifies this attitude; she dramatises the experience of stoicism by rejecting
all immediate spontaneity and making herself, so to speak, into a pure
form. In the ‘Scène’, some doubts about the validity of this strategy are
already apparent, but the ‘Ouverture’ announces its necessary failure.
The speaker of the ‘Ouverture’ recognises Hérodiade’s stoicism for
what it is: pure subjectivity and narcissistic self-adoration. She is
described as being ‘Comme un cygne cachant en sa plume ses yeux’ (1.
92);41 she may think that she is looking outside, towards the form which
she has become, but, in truth, she has remained caught within her own
inward predicament. She assumes that she has achieved the permanence
and the stability of a pure form when she has merely withdrawn into
herself, become ‘éxilé en son coeur précieux’ (1. 91). Her spirit remains
bound to the destiny of her personal and intimate self and subjected,
therefore, to the death conveying power of time, unable to engender
an entity that would survive her. Hérodiade’s existence is merely being
eroded by time and death finds her depleted of everything, with no legacy
to leave behind since she has never been able to move outside of herself:
Délaissée elle erre, et sur son ombre pas
Un ange accompagnant son indicible pas!
(11. 71–2)
Finally, nothing of her remains as she becomes ‘(une) étoile mourante et
qui ne brille plus’.
For the poet who conceived the dramatic character Hérodiade, this
defeat means the impossibility [for] his work to come into being; in
that sense, it could be said that the ‘Ouverture’ is like an elegy on the
death of the work that was to follow. The title ‘Ouverture ancienne’ is
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ironic, since the poem claims to be the prelude to a work that does not
exist. Mallarmé had originally conceived of ‘Hérodiade’ as an extended
drama; he discovers instead that the ‘death’ of his heroine also implies
the ‘death’ of the work. In the lines ‘L’eau morne se résigne / Que ne
visite plus la plume ni le cygne’ (11. 9–10) the ‘water’ also represents the
inkpot in which Mallarmé no longer dips his pen in order to continue
‘Hérodiade’. Poetic sterility seems to be the direct consequence of a formalist aesthetic.
What then is the error, the miscalculation inherent in the stoical
attitude? The most obscure passage of the ‘Ouverture’ (11. 380–63)
suggests a tentative answer. Mallarmé rejects the aesthetic conception
on which ‘Hérodiade’ is founded in the crucial and opaque passage on
which the interpretation of the ‘Ouverture’ hinges:
Elle a chanté, parfois incohérente, signe
Lamentable!
Le lit aux pages de velin,
Tel, inutile et si claustral, n’est pas le lin!
Qui des rêves par plis n’a plus le cher grimoire . . .42
(11. 58–61)
It was the poet’s hope to give his language the permanence and the stability of truth and to write the book that would contain a wisdom powerful
enough to overcome time and mortality; Mallarmé expected nothing less
from ‘Hérodiade’. Instead, he discovers that he has sung and praised language, not as a depositary of absolute truth, but as if it were a part of the
warm, natural, sexual realm symbolised by ‘lit’.43 This realm has been
forcefully rejected, already in the early poems that precede ‘Hérodiade’,
and most categorically of all in Hérodiade’s defiant speech in the ‘Scène’
(11. 86 ff.). By rejecting all the temptations that emanate from ‘le tiède
azur d’été’, the poet hopes to have achieved an attitude of utter detachment, in which nothing beyond his own poetic language still concerns
him. He now realises, however, that he has in fact merely substituted the
sensuous enjoyment of a linguistic form for the sensuous enjoyment of
nature which he was trying to transcend. But the claim for the permanence of his language was precisely founded on the fact that it was no
longer a natural, but a spiritual entity, no longer subject to the action
of time and change. If this turns out to be a delusion, then the language
loses all power to conquer time and becomes as mortal as the poet who
uses it, or as mortal as Hérodiade, the personification of Mallarmé’s
style at the height of his Parnassian period.
Hérodiade base[s] her claim to a certain kind of immortality on a
confusion between pain and death. She has indeed overcome all human
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suffering; no threat of pain can disturb her (she can tame lions by merely
looking at them), but she remains imprisoned within the destiny of
her own finitude, at the mercy of death. If this is so, then her power is
worthless, for the purpose of her renunciation was to escape from the
grip of the negative powers that reside in Being. The ultimate purpose of
stoicism is not to defeat pain in its particular manifestations, but in its
[existential44] form, namely death.
In a movement that parallels Hérodiade’s own destiny, the poet who
has been writing about Hérodiade discovers that he has acquired all
powers except the one that really matters. He can now master and dominate language as never before; the formal control of the ‘Ouverture’, the
way in which it uses the resources of French prosody, is far superior to
anything Mallarmé had written earlier. Compared to the ‘Ouverture’,
the ‘Scène’ is indeed a mere ‘image d’Epinal’. But at the very moment
when the poet discovers he can do anything he wishes, he finds that, by
the same token, there remains nothing for him to say. He is facing the
spectacle of his heroine’s death, but since she is herself the form of his
own poetic creativity, her death also implies his own silence. By treating her death as if it were a dramatic action that takes place outside of
him, he cuts himself off from the intent that created his fictional heroine.
From then on, she leaves him indifferent and the brilliant formal exercises become automatic repetition, without meaning or substance; as
soon as they are invented, they fall back into the past, for they have lost
their ties with the true necessities of the poetic spirit:
Tout renter également en l’ancien passé
Fatidique, vaincu, monotone, lassé
Comme l’eau des bassins anciens se résigne.
Poetic formalism, the aestheticism of the Parnasse, is now entirely
understood for what it is: it treats the agent of consciousness, namely
language, as if it were a natural object that can be apprehended immediately, without having to be negated. In truth, Hérodiade has lived her
lunar, wintry and intellectual love as if it had the warmth of the blue
sky [that] she pretends to hate, and the poet has written with the same
duplicity; instead of celebrating the power of the mind, he has ‘chanté
. . . le lit’. His delusion is now unmasked: it is clear that the ‘lit’ does not
contain true wisdom (‘le lit . . . qui n’a plus le cher grimoire’).45 No valid
work has come into existence and the pages have remained as if they
were white. Their whiteness, however, is not the chaste whiteness of true
innocence; such purity is associated with the vestal whiteness of ‘lin’, but
the intellectual, mental blankness of sterility has none of its virtues:
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Tel, inutile et si claustral, n’est pas le lin!
The entire passage amounts to a categorical rejection of all the work that
has been accomplished up to this point. It is accompanied, however, by a
very lucid premonition of what a future poetic work, continuing beyond
‘Hérodiade’, would have to be. The future poetry must accept to know
and to submit to death as it really is, without this time attempting a halfconscious ruse to escape from its power; it must be, in the full sense of
the term, a poetry of death. It will give up none of the formal disciplines
demanded by Parnassian poetry, for if those disciplines have lost their
efficacy, they nevertheless remain minimally indispensable. The poetry
will now have to realise that it always and necessarily brings about its
own destruction. Therefore, Mallarmé refers to his future poetic language as a ‘shroud’ (‘suaire’):
Par les trous anciens et les plis raidis
Percés selon le rythme et les dentelles pures
Du suaire laissant par ses belles guipures
Désespéré monter le vieil éclat voile . . .
(11. 44–7)
This takes one back to the letter to Cazalis: ‘en creusant le vers à ce
point, j’ai recontré . . . le Néant’. ‘Hérodiade’ has led to the full discovery of ‘Néant’, not as an abstract concept, but as a necessary experience
which precedes its problematic conversion into consciousness. Mallarmé
seems to have no doubt that the poetic spirit will have the courage to call
its own existence into question, and from the depth of total negation in
‘Hérodiade’, he does not hesitate to think already beyond the experience
of death. The possibility of a poetry of death must remain a suspended
question, however, for no one can tell in advance whether this experience can be translated into language. The ‘solitaire bond’, as Mallarmé
elsewhere calls death,46 occurs in a void, with eyes closed; hence the
anxious question directed towards the future:
Le vieil éclat voilé du vermeil insolite
De la voix languissant, nulle, sans acolyte,
Jettera-t-il son or par dernières splendeurs,
Elle, encore, l’antienne aux versets demandeurs,
A l’heur d’agonie et de luttes funèbres!
(11. 48–52)
This passage makes the link between the ‘Ouverture’ to ‘Hérodiade’
and ‘Igitur’, the next major step in Mallarmé’s poetic development.47
In ‘Igitur’ Mallarmé will face the problem of total negation, a problem
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which the Parnassian poet of ‘Hérodiade’ encountered, but was unable
to resolve.
II ‘Igitur’
No sources comparable to Banville’s Diane au Bois or Flaubert’s
Salammbô can be brought in to clarify ‘Igitur’, the most difficult of
Mallarmé’s texts. Not that ‘Igitur’ does not owe many of its details to
the usual models: it has been repeatedly pointed out that the setting of
the story has much in common with Poe, and this impression is still
strengthened by the analogy in language between ‘Igitur’ and Mallarmé’s
translation of the ‘The Raven’. The presence of Baudelaire and of Villiers
de l’Isle Adam is felt throughout, but in a manner which is too specific
in detail and too diffuse in general to be helpful. One uncommon and
non-literary source has repeatedly been mentioned: many readers have
been struck by an analogy between the intellectual progression described
here and the thought of Hegel. In his survey of the problems that remain
unsolved in the exegesis of Mallarmé, Guy Michaud states: ‘it is to be
hoped, if progress has to be made in the knowledge of Mallarmé, that
the exegesis (of “Igitur”) [be] at last undertaken with rigour, in the light
of the philosophy of Hegel in particular (or at least in the light of what
Mallarmé may have known of this philosophy) and of the esoteric traditions’.48 Several critical studies, from Camille Mauclair (1894) to the
recent works of Jacques Gengoux, Antoine Adam and Gardner Davies49
have alluded to Hegel as a possible source.
Relationships and analogies between poets and philosophers are a
delicate matter, involving as they do, two entirely different conceptions of language. The traditional notion of ‘source’ is too crude to
cover such problems as, for instance, Schiller’s relationship to Kant,
or Dante’s to Saint Thomas Aquinas, or, to take an instance where
the influence works in the opposite direction, Hölderlin’s influence on
Hegel and later on Heidegger. These are instances where there can be
no doubt that the influence existed; but the matter is more tenuous
still when, like in the case of ‘Igitur’, we have no such assurance. The
problem of the relationship between this text and Hegel is a highly
relevant one, and Hegel indeed appears as a most enlightening reference in the interpretation of Mallarmé. There can be no question,
however, of imitation or of illustration in the sense in which Sir Philip
Sidney speaks of the poet as ‘(yielding) to the powers of the mind,
an image of that whereof the Philosopher bestoweth but a woordish description’. Any references to sources, and especially to Hegel, is
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better postponed, in this case, till after a reading of the text in its own
right.50
[1]
In dramatic terms, ‘Igitur’ is the story of a man who looks at himself
in a mirror. The mirror is the central symbol of Mallarmé’s work; it
represents the fundamental intuition which characterises his sensibility
and from which his entire development ensues. We may have the illusion
that we perceive other things and other human beings directly, without
mediation, but we can perceive ourselves only by interposing this alien
surface, the mirror of self-reflection. We need reflection, for we are
not immediately certain of our own existence. An essential alienation
separates us from all things; we have no immediate assurance that we
are a part of the world that surrounds us, and since we have no other
certainty of being than that which stems from objects, we do not know
for certain that we exist: ‘J’avoue du reste . . . que j’ai encore besoin, tant
ont été grandes les avanies de mon triomphe, de me regarder dans cette
glace pour penser et que si elle n’était pas devant la table où je t’écris
cette lettre, je redeviendrais le Néant’;51 ‘ce jeu insensé d’écrire (est)
. . . quelque devoir de tout recréer, avec des réminiscences, pour avérer
qu’on est bien là où l’on doit être (parce que, permettez-moi d’exprimer
cette appréhension, demeure une incertitude)’;52 ‘Agir . . . signifi(e) . . .
produire sur beaucoup un mouvement qui te donne en retour l’émoi que
tu en fus le principe, donc existes: dont aucun ne se croit, au préalable,
sûr.’53
This fundamental alienation makes man into a totally solitary creature. It forces him to reject the given, natural world as an opaque
substance on which his consciousness has no hold. But it also keeps
him exiled from the realm of pure consciousness, since consciousness,
though unable to cross the screen that keeps it separated from reality,
is nevertheless possessed by such a nostalgia for the ontological stability of natural objects that it cannot possibly find its rest. Still, although
consciousness foresees its own failure, it never ceases to move, by selfreflection, towards its ultimate stabilisation. It is this movement that is
being described in ‘Igitur’, first in section III, entitled ‘Vie d’Igitur’.
Reflection implies inwardness, the turning inward of whatever exists
outside of us: ‘j’étais oblige pour ne pas douter de moi de m’asseoir
en face de cette glace’ and ‘comme’ (because) this is so ‘j’ai épaissi les
rideaux’ (III. 2);54 because of his alienation, man turns inward. In terms
of temporal experience, alienation appears in the form of our despair
before the ceaseless flow of time which keeps us from achieving the
steadfastness of things; the present can never be, but always falls back
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again into the past as soon as one becomes conscious of it as present. The
flow can only be stopped by stabilising at all cost the present in memory:
‘tout fai(re) pour que le temps . . . restât présent dans la chambre, et
devint pour moi la pâture et la vie’ (III, 2): ‘recueilli(r) précieusement les
moindres atomes du temps dans des étoffes sans cesse épaissies’ (III, 2).
This way of living, allowing oneself to be passively carried by the power
of memory, may create the illusion that the original alienation has been
overcome: ‘L’horloge m’a fait souvent grand bien’ (III, 2).
‘Memory’ is not only to be understood in the personal sense, as the
memory of one’s own existence; Mallarmé makes it clear that it refers
to the collective, historical past of the human species, ‘le passé compris
de sa race’ (III, 3), the historical memory of mankind. This considerable
extension of the concept of ‘memory’ to include history causes the crisis
in Igitur: the awareness that his fate is not only a personal one, but is
shared by history as a whole, disrupts the illusion of serenity which he
had achieved and kindles his unrest: ‘Igitur a été projeté hors du temps
par sa race’ (III, 2).
Mallarmé designates this restlessness by the Baudelairian term ‘ennui’,
a word which frequently appeared in the poems from the Parnasse
contemporain. When the term returns in ‘Igitur’, it has considerably
grown in scope and complexity. It was originally an intimate, individual
feeling, but now it results from the pressure of the entire historical past:
‘le passé compris de sa race’. ‘Ennui’ now tortures a Mallarmé who has
become, as he puts it, ‘impersonnel’ and who has to ‘relive the history
of mankind since its infancy’: ‘Le passé compris de sa race . . . pèse sur
lui en la sensation de fini . . .’ (III, 3). The past teaches us that all human
enterprises and civilisations have been a vain attempt to overcome the
same original alienation; history is a series of predictable repetitions,
with no possibility for change. It becomes unbearable, therefore, to
wait passively for the mere recurrence of identical failures. ‘L’attente de
l’accomplissement du futur’ (III, 3) becomes sheer ‘ennui’, for there is no
reason that the present isolation, which one knows to be eternal, could
ever be overcome in a different future. Historical memory congeals time
and suspends the flow of the evanescent present, but it seals ‘ennui’
itself into this petrified form. And since ‘ennui’ always implies a void
which has to be filled, a desire for change necessarily oriented towards
the future, a ‘maladie d’idéalité’, it is strong enough to disturb time, to
make it unstable and to return Igitur to his original anxiety. Igitur is torn
between, on the one hand, a stable but unbearable form of memory and,
on the other hand, a desire for an impossible future which keeps him
suspended outside of his present reality.
Having reached this state of paralysis, Mallarmé describes two
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possible attitudes. The first is that of a person who, in spite of this
awareness remains locked within his own self, ‘tous les meubles fermés
et pleins de leur secret’ (III, 3). He lives within a frozen time that now
contains his original alienation; he is bound, therefore, to observe it
as he contemplates his own reflection, ‘la glace devenue ennui’. He is
now master of a past and of a future that are both equally unbearable,
‘comme menace du supplice d’être éternel’. Being in a state of total stability, he is now like a thing, but an eternity that fills one with fear is
more like death than like the stable serenity of nature. The idea of ‘thing’
and that of ‘death’ are linked in the image of the furniture frozen in the
immobility and the horror of death. Memory can no longer rescue a man
grown conscious of the historical destiny of the species; for him, past,
present and future are identical and immobile: ‘le temps ne trouve plus
à se mêler aux tentures saturées et alourdies’ (III, 3). There only remains
the slow agony of things and of the spirit which has become like a thing
when it ceases to move.
The gradual depersonalisation of the spirit as it reaches this point of
stagnation is represented in the image of a vague figure, no longer clearly
to be distinguished from the furniture that surrounds it. The death of
the object corresponds to the passage from the naïve, unmediated consciousness, for which objects seem to contain the very fullness of Being,
to the consciousness which takes itself for its own object. Separation
from the ‘otherness’ of things is created in us by the very reflection
whose purpose it was to suspend this separation. This failure is intensely
painful: ‘Tout ce que mon être a souffert, pendant cette longue agonie,
est inénarrable. . .’.55 Suffering spurs on the attempt to terminate the
isolation, but any such attempt results in increased consciousness of the
self, and takes us a step closer to negation and death. The man whose
consciousness grows in this manner can be said to ‘kill’ the things he
comes to know, and to ‘kill’ himself to the extent that he has become
one of them. This purely intellectual process is visually dramatised in the
final paragraph of the ‘Vie d’Igitur’: ‘je voyais le personnage d’horreur,
le fantôme de l’horreur absorber peu à peu ce qui restait de sentiment
et de douleur dans la glace, nourrir son horreur des suprêmes frissons
des chimères et de l’instabilité des tentures, . . . jusqu’à ce qu’enfin les
meubles . . . fussent morts dans une attitude isolée et sévère . . .’ (III, 4).56
Does not another way exist, a happier and simpler way, which accepts
the world as a natural environment for life? The possibility is briefly
considered in the section [that] precedes the one on which we have been
commenting (III, 3). Man can open himself to the world, emerge from
his inwardness and, instead of thinking of objects in terms of their ‘otherness’, he can engage them in the daily round of activities which we call
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life, and in which the question of Being and its alienation does not arise.
‘Il ouvre les meubles’ and empties them of what opposes them to us:
‘leur mystère, l’inconnu, leur mémoire, leur silence’. Their entire secret
content is made into ‘human faculties and impressions’. Such is indeed
the normal and healthy relationship between man and his world, a daily
existence in which things serve and adjust to our faculties and needs.
But this norm cannot prevail; life can never be a substitute for ‘ennui’.
It is inherent in our being (and not a matter of chance or pathological
anomaly) to become conscious of things as objects instead of merely
using them, and, consequently to become conscious of ourselves by way
of the ‘other’, of what is not ourselves. Thought begins in the experience
of separation; it can continue beyond this experience, but it can never
return to the condition which existed prior to the separation, just as one
can never return to childhood except in the form of a dead memory. We
interpose fragments of life between our hours of reflection, but those
fragments are bound to lead nowhere whether they belong to our own
personal lives or to human history in general. ‘Life’ always takes us back
to the same point, and this is why the passage ends as it started: ‘il fixe
de son âme l’horloge dont l’heure disparait par la glace, ou va s’enfouir
dans les rideaux, en trop-plein’. By trying to remain within life, one condemns oneself to total stagnation; by refusing ‘ennui’ one loses all hope.
The man so completely taken by life that he has literally no time left
to be conscious of himself, this man is truly lost. He cannot recapture
restlessness, even when it comes to seem to him a desirable dream. Like
‘azur’ and ‘mort’ and so many other of Mallarmé’s key words, ‘ennui’
now has a double and contradictory value connotation: it is feared as
the cause of suffering and isolation, but prayed for as the power which
keeps us from being caught in the immediacy of life. The ‘impuissant
de l’ennui’ with whom the paragraph closes is not the man made sterile
by ‘ennui’; ‘ennui’ is not the cause of sterility: to the contrary, the one
unable to know ‘ennui’ must be called sterile.
Except for one sentence: ‘Il se sépare du temps indéfini et il est!’ (III,
4), section III describes the existence of Igitur in the most negative terms,
without any suggestion of hope. The development in paragraph 4 which
follows the unexpected sentence of hope repeats the preceding fragment,
without mentioning the possibility of an outward natural life, a possibility which has been rejected at the end of paragraph 3. This time,
however, the entire description is written in the past tense. It describes a
situation which no longer exists since Igitur ‘has separated himself from
indefinite time’. Igitur was like this before a certain act took place which
completely changed the situation. Section III does not tell us what this
act may have been, but it is clear that this moment which stands out
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from the flux of time is the ‘Midnight’ described in the section entitled
‘Le minuit’. This section (I), probably the most obscure of the text,
becomes somewhat less opaque if one considers it in relation to the ‘Vie
d’Igitur’. One must know that ‘Midnight’ is the act by means of which
the apparently hopeless process of reflection can be, to some extent,
rescued from total paralysis. By accomplishing this act, Igitur will finally
be able to declare that he is – or, at least, gain the illusion that, at some
future time, he may be able to achieve the stability of his existence. The
‘Minuit’ section can only be understood as the attempt to bypass the
apparently hopeless predicament described in ‘Vie d’Igitur’.
[2]
In the reading of this particularly difficult passage, some assistance
may be gained from a brief fragment that appeared in Les lettres.57 The
fragment corresponds to the three first paragraphs (I, 1, 2 and 3) of the
Pléiade text. ‘Vie d’Igitur’ concluded that no kind of existence, whether
purely inward or directed towards outward activity, could overcome an
original alienation which equates the experience of consciousness with
that of death. Existence consists of a mere succession of such ‘deaths’,
and it seems impossible to interrupt the meaningless repetition of identical failures. The ‘Minuit’ section, however, starts with the triumphant
announcement: ‘Certainement subsiste une présence de Minuit.’ The
object that remains differs completely from other objects that surround
Igitur, all of which have been annihilated by the power of his consciousness. Mallarmé calls it ‘joyau’, ‘orfèvrerie’; he is naming the clock, an
object that stands out as unique among the other pieces of furniture. By
the end of the section, it is explicitly designated by name: ‘le feu pur du
diamant de l’horloge’ (I, 6). What is it that gives the clock this capacity
to escape, unlike all other objects, from the destructive power of consciousness?
In the stifling eternity that reigns at the end of ‘Vie d’Igitur’, only
the shapeless flow of an empty time remains. Time, the foundation of
‘ennui’, lies beyond the reach of any consciousness: ‘Heures vides, purement negatives’ (III, 2) ‘maintenant une atmosphère d’absence’ (Frg.).
This indestructible temporality is made present to us in the object which
records and reveals it. The clock is the visible trace, the sign through
which time manifests itself. Unlike other ‘things’, the clock remains,
though only in order to reveal a shapeless flux, ‘le hasard infini’ on
which consciousness can gain no hold. The relationship of the clock to
the totality of all beings, as the sign of their common foundation (namely
time), is identical to the relationship between language and consciousness. Beyond the meaningless flight of successive states of consciousness,
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negating and destroying each other, only language remains as the sign of
whatever permanence they possess. We see, in ‘Igitur’, the clock’s metamorphosis into language: soon, the sound of its ticking and ringing will
become the poetic word58 and it will grow to be a book. It is through the
entity ‘clock / language’ that the self will at last find stability; language
mediates between things and the consciousness of things.
Ordinary language is merely an articulate but empty noise that falls
back into nothingness like a thing that has been used up. Similarly, the
clocks ordinarily record only the passing and meaningless encounters
between natural objects (here symbolised as the sea) and states of consciousness (symbolised as stars); the events of life and of history consist
of random encounters. The clock ‘indique, sur (sa) complication stellaire et marine les occurences externes du jeu des mondes’ (Frg.): ‘sur sa
complexité marine et stellaire . . . se lisait le hasard infini des conjonctions’ (I, 1). But, under unique circumstances language can do more than
this. Instead of merely mentioning any random conjunction it can state
the encounter, the ‘minute d’une aussi magnifique concordance’ (Frg.)
which is Truth.
The purpose of Truth is to end the alienation which makes things
‘absent’ and makes one doubt ‘that one is indeed where one ought to
be’. It establishes instead things as absolutely present: ‘le présent absolu
des choses’ (I, 2). Such presence cannot take place outside of consciousness, ‘en l’extériorité’ (I, 2); objects must have become inward, to some
extent, if truth is to be the union (‘l’heure unie’) of ‘the constellations
and the sea’, consciousness and objects united within one common
entity which must contain their respective essence as well as their latent
opposition. When language appears as an object, when it possesses
sound, texture, rhythm, permanence, and, on the other hand, remains
pure consciousness to the extent that it is made by us, then it will truly
achieve mediation, as an entity that contains an ontological opposition without being split apart. It is the poetic task – the impossible task
which Baudelaire calls ‘gageure’ and Mallarmé ‘hyperbole’ – to invent
this language, ‘laisser l’essence (des constellations et de la mer) faire
le présent absolu des choses’. By such language, man can become the
bearer of truth, ‘révélateur de minuit’ (I, 2). The difficulty is not to maintain language as an agent of consciousness, for in the common usage
we make of it, it serves our conscious desires and consumes the objects
it names. Language, however, resists strongly any attempt to be made
into an object, and this is why the labour of poetry consists of forcing
language to behave as if it were a material thing. Hence Mallarmé comes
to ‘Igitur’ by way of the Parnasse, by a refinement of poetic techniques,
‘en creusant le vers’.
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If poetic langue is able to reach truth, how then shall we recognise it
as such? How are we to know that ‘tu n’as fait une minute d’une aussi
magnifique concordance’?59 The fragment published in Les lettres states
that this must be accomplished by way of a deliberate comparison with
similar revelations, as they occurred in the course of the development of
previous minds which were tending towards the same goal. The experience of consciousness expands to include ‘les jeux multiples et combinés
de la multiplicité de la pensée universelle’ (Frg.). Man thinks in solitude,
but not in isolation; his thought takes its place within the historical
development of the human spirit.
History, which first appeared in ‘Vie d’Igitur’ as a cause of ‘ennui’,
now takes on the same ambivalent value we have observed in all of
Mallarmé’s important concepts. It must be used as a standard of reference to evaluate the validity of an individually discovered truth.
Absolute truth always appears under the guise of a relative truth in an
historical context, and we become aware of it as absolute only by comparison with the road that was travelled by the mind of others.60
When it has thus been recognised, truth succeeds in establishing the
absolute presence of objects. The moment of truth gives the self its foundation: ‘Ma pensée est donc recrée, mais moi le suis-je? Oui . . .’ (Frg.).
The fragment goes on to give a striking description of the stabilised self:
‘je me vois semblable à l’onde d’un narcotique tranquille dont les cercles
vibratoires, venant et s’en allant, font une limite infinie qui n’atteint pas
le calme du milieu’: it is a state of vision somewhat similar to the hallucinations described by Baudelaire in ‘Du vin et du haschisch’ (doubtless
one of the sources of ‘Igitur’), but seen like the movement of expanding
waves around a stone thrown in a still pond. In the text published by
Bonniot, the image becomes clearer, though even more complex. The
passage superimposes a temporal meaning on the spatial image of the
rippling waves. The waves appear as the motion of the mind travelling
from the self to the object and then returning towards the self, having
incorporated, so to speak, the ‘otherness’ of the object within itself.
From the point of view of the self which is trying to find stability, the
objects are used to support consciousness while it learns to know them
as objects; they function as the goal and the organising centre of our
thought and mark the limit where it changes direction: after having travelled from the self to the object, thought returns to the self in the form
of a stabilised consciousness. It is in that sense that Mallarmé can say
that ‘the furniture stops (arrête)’ and that it is the ‘lumineuse brisure du
retour des ondes et de leur élargissement premier’ (I, 3). This alternating
motion between the self and the object, through the mediating substance
of language, gives presence to objects.
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The word ‘present’ must be understood in the temporal as well as in
the spatial sense, for it is by the superposition of those two meanings
that the self is given stability. The spatial meaning indicates that the
infinitely distant otherness has become proximity and that, in this way,
the object has been rescued from the annihilating power of consciousness. The temporal meaning (‘chamber de temps’ I, 2) indicates that
consciousness, too, is saved from the flux of time and that, in establishing its junction with the object, it is no longer separated from it by the
void which memory was unable to fill. This time, memory reaches its
goal, the ‘recherche du temps perdu’ succeeds in rendering the past truly
present in the instant of truth, in a manner which seems both stable and
definitive: ‘la place antérieure de la chute de l’heure s’immobilise’ (I, 2).
Spatial presence gives stability to objects; temporal presence gives stability to consciousness by constructing this cell of truth in which time is
preserved as an appeased inwardness. Since this temporal presence takes
place within us, it remains a reflection, and what is reflected is our own
self, our consciousness of self. Reflection has gone outside itself only to
return within; our vision of the outside world is only a way of seeing
ourselves of reflecting ourselves in this world. Our ‘eyes’ are similar to
the ‘mirror’ and are used to observe our reflection in a confrontation of
mirroring surfaces; the mirror and the eyes. Our outlook on the world is
not that of someone who tries to possess it, but of someone who tries to
absorb it into himself, such as to make himself ‘dénué de toute signification que de présence’ (II, 3).61
Such, then, is the moment of truth, the act accomplished at Midnight.
It represents only the positive part of the poetic act, however, for the
future remains unconquered. The moment of the present has no duration; how could it be preserved and made to remain? If language contained truth directly, without mediation (as Mallarmé believed at the
time of the ‘Scène’ from ‘Hérodiade’), then it would suffice to abandon
oneself to language and listen to it passively, in order to remain forever
in an eternal present. But, for Mallarmé, the relationship between language and truth can never be an unmediated contact. Truth is the union
of objects with consciousness in a stable present which includes us, but
this union is not equivalent to absolute Unity. Language is not truth,
but a mediation between two modes of being which remain in essence
opposed. It does not bring about a reconciliation, but it is true to the
extent that it now states a distinction between the object and consciousness and knows the otherness of things for what it is. Any mediation
implies the awareness of an original severance and the only way in
which the language of truth can remain true is by admitting forever, by
never forgetting, the given duality. This is why, after having said in the
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first paragraph that Midnight remains (‘subsiste’), Mallarmé tells us in
paragraph 4 that it is also ‘en soi disparu’. The persisting alienation can
only mean that, for us, objects are bound to remain forever distant. The
subsisting ‘presence of Midnight’, then, can never be like the presence
of a thing, in which we could house ourselves as if it were a permanent
possession. The future contains no promise of permanent presence. And
since presence exists in the form of a language of truth or of the poetic
work (both are identical for Mallarmé), it follows that the poet can
have no assurance that his future work will come into being and that he
remains condemned to the sterility which has always been his greatest
torment: ‘un Minuit . . . résume sa stérilité sur la pâleur d’un livre ouvert
que présente la table: page et décor ordinaire de la Nuit . . .’ (I, 4).62
It may seem, then, that the moment of Midnight has changed nothing.
This is not altogether the case: the future is no longer entirely empty.
It contains the potential possibility of repeating the moment of truth
and, more important even, of recognising this repeated moment when it
occurs: ‘la clarté reconnue, qui seule demeure’. Mere repetition would
reserve nothing at all; it would be a mere succession of meaningless failures, like in the ‘Ouverture’ to ‘Hérodiade’. As soon, however, as one
grows conscious of this repletion, it becomes possible to conceive and
to isolate the uniform intent that underlies an apparently absurd string.
In the last analysis, what remains of the language of truth is merely
the statement of this intent, the proclamation of a ‘(pure) dream of
Midnight’: ‘Subsiste encore le silence d’une antique parole proférée par
lui, en lequel, revenu, ce Minuit évoque son ombre finie et nulle par ces
mots: J’étais l’heure qui doit me rendre pur’ (I, 4). Originally, Mallarmé
had written: ‘Je suis l’heure qui doit me rendre pur’ but he deleted ‘suis’
and wrote ‘étais’ instead. ‘Je suis’ would indicate the possible success of
the intent in the present, and this is known to be impossible; the grammatical anomaly of the past tense implies the failure of the attempt and
thus achieves the status of truth.
Consciousness of repetition or ‘recognised’ repetition corresponds
indeed to the consciousness of historical development: the discovery of a
constant intentional structure which underlies the diversity of actions in
time. The work describes the discontinuous movement of history unified
by a steadfast ontological intent. Since this intent is known to lead to
failure, it could never become an appeased act. The act of maintaining
or preserving our fundamental intent is bound to be an act of tragic
combat; the preservation of truth implies the preservation of the failure
of truth and of the suffering that results from this failure. Thought never
brings peace; peace can only be found in the surrender to nature or to
forgetfulness, and Mallarmé rarely consents to this:
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Sans plus il faut dormir en l’oubli du blasphème
Sur le sable altéré gisant et comme j’aime
Ouvrir ma bouche à l’astre efficace des vins!
(‘L’après-midi d’un faun’, p. 53)
Aside from solitude and sterility, the failure also means death; the
‘ancestral idea’ is said to be ‘long since death’. Like ‘ennui’ and history,
death takes on a double value. It was originally, in the ‘Vie d’Igitur’,
the horror felt upon being confronted with a changeless eternity (see p.
62). The moment of Midnight has changed the notion of death, to the
extent that it is now understood to be the necessary and central law of
our own growth. The struggle of poetic creation first seemed to be, in its
semi-naïve form, the struggle against death [that] defeated Hérodiade,
based on the false hope that language could act as a substitute for
natural objects. But if we realise that truth can only exist as an intent
that fails, then poetic consciousness will be aware of this impossibility
and it will establish itself by reflecting on the impossibility of its own
existence. This implies death, in a double sense: death of the immediate and natural life (as in ‘Hérodiade’) as well as death of the successful consciousness of the self which exists at Midnight, but only for an
instant.
The failure of truth thus generates a light which reveals a higher and
more difficult kind of truth: ‘Depuis longtemps morte, une antique idée
se mire telle à la clarté de la chimère en laquelle a agonisé son rêve, et
se reconnait à l’immémorial geste vacant avec lequel elle s’invite . . . à se
rendre . . . au Chaos de l’ombre avorté . . .’ (I, 5). This higher truth contains all the tensions and irresolutions that preceded its discovery, and
nothing, in fact, has changed the original setting; we return to it in the
concluding paragraph of ‘Le minuit’ (I, 6): ‘de l’ameublement accompli
qui se tassera en ténèbres comme les tentures, déjà alourdies en une
forme permanente de toujours . . .’ One thing, however, has been added:
the light of the clock, ‘le feu pur du diamant de l’horloge’, the poetic
language of truth which remains conscious even in failure, and which,
by its death, may lead to the transcendence of death: ‘ton sépulcre . . .
qui, l’ombre survivante, se métamorphosera en Eternité’ (I, 5).
The section of ‘Igitur’ entitled ‘le Minuit’ describes a reflective consciousness as it moves towards truth. It describes it as the experience of
this movement appears to the person who performs it. Consequently, we
remain within the limits of a personal experience, that of the individual
poet; Mallarmé repeatedly announces the extension of this experience
to a more universal real, but he merely claims the necessity for this
extension without describing how it is to take place. Since, as we have
seen, the experience leads to its own repetition in the future, the sequel
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of ‘le Minuit’ will deal with the repetition. It is the story of Mallarmé
‘grown impersonal and having to relive the history of mankind since
its infancy’. The ‘panels opened by his act at Midnight’ give access to
a corridor or staircase, of which the steps are the repetition of his act.
The consciousness which will be able to enter this ‘staircase’ will be the
universal consciousness which survives the failure of truth. In the section
that follows, we ascend from the moment of truth to the destiny of the
spirit in history.
[3]
Section II of ‘Igitur’ exists in different versions; Dr Bonniot has grouped
three of them among the Scolies under the general title of ‘Plusieurs
ebauches de la sortie de la chambre’ (C, D, E, pp. 445–50). By combining the four available texts, it becomes possible to shed some light on
the section as a whole.
The transition from an individual to a universal, historical consciousness starts from the experience of truth as it occurs in an individual
mind. In the first paragraph (II, 1) we remain within the limits of such
a mind, uncertain whether it can expect to find a future beyond what
seems to be its death. The destiny of thought as it moves beyond the
‘panels of the ebony night’ (‘les panneaux de la nuit ébénéenne’ this is
correct) (C, 1) is a movement towards a problematic future, a ‘future
darkness’ (D, 1).
Section II describes the dialectical movement of a consciousness progressing towards self-knowledge in the most general and abstract terms
possible. The self tries to acquire stability by becoming conscious of the
‘other’, and the most general form in which otherness can be encountered
is as time. The self can come to know its antithesis only by negation, and
the negation of the ‘other’ (the double negation which was to found the
self) destroys any possibility of a future. By becoming conscious of time,
we are able, to some extent, to know it: ‘time begins to have a certain
perception of itself’ (D, 1): by this very fact, the non-determination of
the future, which pertains to the essence of time, is suspended, for to
‘know’ time means to ‘know’ the future. Time seems to be on the verge
of stopping: ‘the swinging (of the pendulum) hesitates and is about to
stop’ (D, 1). However, in becoming conscious of time, we become conscious of ourselves: ‘(l’ombre) [what remains of Igitur after the ‘death’
of Midnight] s’aperçut que c’était en elle que la lueur de sa perception
s’enfonçait comme étouffée – et elle rentrait en elle-même’ (D, 1).63 The
knowledge of time which causes time to stop is in fact the knowledge of
our own finiteness. Consciousness discovers that self-knowledge is the
knowledge of its own death. The dialectic of temporality leads directly
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to the dialectic of death: ‘le balancier expirant alors qu’il commence à
avoir la sensation de lui’ (D, 1). Such is the conclusion that can be drawn
from the experience of truth as it appears in the ‘Minuit’ section. This
conclusion is totally negative: the truth of a consciousness of self is the
knowledge of its necessary death.
The moment is repeated; it is a rhythmical beat, similar to the ticking
of the clock, marking a succession of deaths, an eternal reaffirmation
that no future can exist. The monotonous flux falls in the past as pure
nothingness, out of reach of memory: ‘le bruit total tomba à jamais dans
le passé (sur l’oubli)’ (E, 1). Since this, at least, is an absolute certainty,
Mallarmé can say that ‘doubt had vanished’ (D, 2), that ‘all ambiguity
had ceased’ (E and II, 2). There is nothing consoling about this assurance; the ‘state of conscious anxiety’ (D, 2) which it engenders causes a
certain movement to persist beyond the total stagnation which seems to
have been reached.
The central question of ‘Igitur’, which is also the question from ‘Toast
funèbre’:
Est-il de ce destin rien qui demeure, non?
will nevertheless receive a partially affirmative answer: ‘the idea of
motion persists’ (E, 2), ‘the reminiscence of noise appeared’ (D, 2). How
can there be memory and duration when all seems to be annihilated and
the gates of the grave forever closed?
Version E, at this point, is the least obscure. What persists, in its most
abstract form, is the idea of motion (‘l’idée de motion’). It consists of
the positive predictability of finitude: we are indeed certain of ‘la chute
unique des portes du tombeau sur lui-même et sans retour’ (II, 2) such
as it has to happen (‘tel qu’il doit avoir lieu’) (E, 2). Consequently, this
statement at least is true, and since it is in the essence of truth to transcend the finite, the fact that we can state this truth and inscribe it in the
poetic word marks a passage from the finite to the infinite. The statement that all consciousness is absolutely finite, is itself the affirmation of
a universal truth. This affirmation allows us to cast doubt on the principle of finitude: ‘le doute né de la certitude même (de la chute unique
des portes du tombeau)’ (E, 2). The doubt suspends the character of
absolute irrevocability associated with death; the death-image becomes
more animated: the panels are ‘at once open and closed’, their ‘closing
(is) suspended’.
The definitive and static act of death has thus been forced into motion.
The panels are now turning in a movement that repeatedly crosses the
line that separates life from death, but without ever stopping at this line:
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‘dans une vertigineuse immobilité [les panneaux ont] tourné longuement
sur eux-mêmes’ (C). The image of the panels turning ‘upon themselves’
takes us back to the idea of a reflected consciousness. Consciousness, it
now appears, is a continued passage from life to death, an ever recurring succession of deaths. This movement is not a mere circle: the successive deaths are not identical to one another, for each carries within
itself the knowledge gained by its predecessor. Neither is it a sinusoidal
vibration, for the movement takes place around a fixed, axial point: the
original self, more and more remote, but which never ceases to remain
at the centre. The geometrical figure, the visual analogy of the life of
consciousness is represented by Mallarmé as ‘la spirale vertigineuse conséquente’ (II, 2).
The spiral represents the development of consciousness which we are
able to reach by ourselves, without going beyond the limits of our own
individual experience. It expresses the law which governs the formation
of all knowledge. It does not follow, however, that by understanding this
movement we can know our future. We can never be cognisant of the
consciousness that will follow after our next ‘death’: we can be certain
that a certain movement will continue beyond this ‘death’ and we know
that, in this new state, our consciousness will be more acute than it is
now – but we can never know the future consciousness until it has been
experienced. Death means precisely this: the knowledge of a necessary
movement towards an unknown future. To be conscious of death is to
be conscious of the self as becoming, to know that it moves towards an
unknown; it is a knowledge of a not-knowing: ‘le poids graduel de ce
dont on ne se rendait pas compte, malgré que ce fût expliqué en somme’
(II, 2).
Individual consciousness can and must reach the point where it comes
to know the law of its own growth. When it reaches this point, it stops
growing and dies; Mallarmé calls this ‘la cessation (de la spirale)’ (II,
2). If this self-destruction of knowledge did not take place, individual
consciousness could continue to grow forever, beyond its successive
‘deaths’: ‘et la spirale devait être infiniment fuyante, si une oppression
progressive, poids graduel de ce dont on ne se rendait pas compte, n’en
eût impliqué . . . la cessation’ (II, 2). We thus reach a more generalised
form of ‘death’, which transcends the earlier individual ‘deaths’ and
immediately precedes the transition to a universal consciousness. For
the moment, this transition still appears as entirely negative; it occurs
‘lorsqu’expira le heurt et que (les portes du tombeau) se confondirent’.
Beyond this silence a mysterious motion persists, appearing in the form
of an impenetrable symbol. All we know is that it is animated by a
familiar movement, ‘une certaine animation reconnue’ (C), similar to
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the pulsating rhythm which marks the growth of consciousness. We
perceive it only by this rhythmical noise, which suggests the flight of a
bird: ‘quelque hôte effrayé de la nuit heurté dans son lourd sommeil par
la clarté et prolongeant sa fuite indéfinie’ (II, 2).
The remaining part of the ‘Escalier’ section attempts to discover the
identity of this ‘hôte effrayé de la nuit’,64 to find out what survives the
negative action of a finite reflective consciousness. This question can
receive a direct and obvious answer, so obvious that one may well overlook its existence – as one may well read the remaining part of ‘Igitur’
without noticing that it consists of a deliberate rejection of this answer.
Common sense dictates the answer: Nature survives knowledge; no
matter how near reflective thought may come to death, it remains nevertheless true that, in the biological sense of the term, the species survives.
Animal procreation continues, regardless of spiritual and aesthetic sterility. If the spirit is to survive, it can derive its notion of permanence only
from the example of nature; spiritual permanence must contain some
of nature’s generative power. This is why it first appears in the animal
form of a ‘bird’, ‘l’oiseau qu’on n’ouït jamais’ of a later poem (p. 66)
which, no matter how ethereal it may become, always retains some of
the warmth of the nest in which it was born. For the same reason, the
temptation arises to be satisfied with this reassuring statement and to
rest on the stability of natural existence. This reassuring attitude leads
to faith in an afterlife, in which the relationship between consciousness and objects would be similar to the relationship that exists on this
earth; the separation between both would prevail, though no longer
be painful. This is the naïve form of the desire for the eternity, before
it has been subjected to reflection. ‘Igitur’ proclaims the necessity [for]
transcend[ing] this attitude, and this implies, as is known to be the case
from Mallarmé’s own statement,65 that the text is the project of a religious crisis.
Afterlife is not like the ‘bird’ whose presence had been suggested by
the rhythmical pulsation. It must be a realm where nothing outside
ourselves can remain alien to our consciousness, where everything that
escapes the grip of consciousness, such as nature, or the animal or, for
that matter, a transcendental God, is mere ‘chimère’ (D, 3). Moreover,
since we now have reached an extreme point in the development of consciousness, and know our own selves through and through, no ‘ultimate
self-doubt’ remains which would allow us to ruse with death – as when,
in Pascal’s wager, it is the doubt about the afterlife which determines the
choice. This is one of the ‘croyances sombres’66 which Mallarmé wants
us to forget.67
On the other hand, a consciousness which has come to know its own
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finite and negative nature discovers that the consciousness of others has
come to the same knowledge by following a similar path. By the same
token, it discovers that it can transcend, to some extent, the finite nature
of the present, by understanding the universal nature of its own becoming. It does not overcome alienation, but sees it now as a constitutive
part of the universal history of the human spirit; history is the mediating substance in which alienation now appears as a distinct structure,
susceptible of being put into language. What remains after the death
of the individual is the universal spirit as it comes to know itself in
the history of its own development. The true permanence of mankind
appears in the works of the spirit and not in the natural survival of the
species.
This passage (II, 3) constitutes a very important step in Mallarmé’s
thought. It describes the ascent to universal consciousness from the
point of view of the individual who accedes to it, not yet as the cosmic,
entirely impersonal event which it will become after ‘Igitur’. It considers the thought of others as a means to reach a universal form of truth:
‘maint et maint génie fut soigneux de recueillir toute sa poussière séculaire en son sépulcre pour se mirer en un soi propre, pour que l’ombre
dernière se mirât en son propre soi’ (II, 3). Universal consciousness
is established when we realise that our own development is identical
with the development recorded in the works of others: the universal
part of the self that survives after death ‘se reconnût en la foule de ses
apparitions comprises à l’étoile nacrée de leur nébuleuse science . . . et a
l’étincelle d’or du fermoir héraldique de leur volume’ (II, 3).68
The ‘architecture of darkness’ (‘l’architecture des ténèbres’) (D) thus
appears as a succession of moments of truth, universal in structure,
though not in content. The universal essence of all these ‘nights’ resides
in their finite nature; the passage from each to the next is not continuous, but necessitates the sudden leap of a negation, implying a necessary ‘death’. The ‘walls (parois)’ which delimit each of them stand ‘in
opposition’ to each other, as being is opposed to not-being; they always
represent the negation of the preceding state of consciousness: ‘deux
trouées d’ombre massive qui devaient être nécessairement l’inverse de
ces ombres . . . ombre négative d’eux-mêmes’ (D, 1). It will henceforth
be possible to generalise finitude from a personal experience into a law
of the spirit, and to know the future as being a recognised repetition of
a failure to reach truth. This allows Mallarmé to state that ‘time has
ceased’ and that ‘parvenue au pinacle du moi, l’ombre pure domine parfaitement du passé et de l’avenir’ (II, 5). Universal consciousness remains
above the flux of time and heralds ‘the end of time which brought about
the end of darkness’ (II, 7).
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Three times before, in the ‘Vie d’Igitur’, at the beginning of section I
and at the beginning of section II, similar moments of apparent success
had been reached and each time they were followed by failure, for identical reasons. The ascent to a universal consciousness does not prevent
the recurrence of this failure. It is restated in terms very similar to those
which were used earlier (see pp. 62 and 71). The new ‘knowledge’ of
the future also tends to arrest the movement of the spirit and to lead
to total stagnation. Since the spirit is driven by the desire to fight finitude, it loses all dynamic impulse as soon as it knows its failure to be
unavoidable. The stabilised future no longer contains any promise;
hope for the future and the nostalgia of remembrance have become
one and the same ‘laquelle des deux ouvertures prendre, puisqu’il n’y a
plus de futur représenté par l’une d’elles?’ (II, 7). We have fallen back
in ‘a heavy, massive sleep . . .’ (II, 5), the passivity of a desperate certainty.
A very ambiguous symbol, the ‘heart’, rescues us from this new form
of paralysis; the natural and animal desire for survival reappears in the
form of anxiety before death. This death, however, is no longer our own
individual death, but also the death of the species; our heart is also the
‘heart of the race’ with which we have been identified. We know this
to be the case, for we recognise our own death in the experience which
other minds have recorded in their language. Our natural fear keeps
animating our renewed efforts to overcome death, but by understanding the universal nature of this anxiety and its function, we understand
it to be the principle of human growth: ‘mon effroi qui avait pris les
devants sous la forme d’un oiseau est bien loin: n’a-t’il pas été remplacé
par l’apparition de ce que j’avais été’ (II, 8). Henceforth, we can resign
ourselves to the law of finitude, or rather, we can resign ourselves to the
absurdity of an intent which persists in rebelling against it, although it
realises that its revolt can never succeed. Our resignation is not stoical,
but purely rational. It leads to the conscious contemplation of repeatedly failing human creations. Our entire existence will be devoted to a
meditation on this spectacle: ‘que j’aime a réfléchir maintenant afin de
dégager mon rêve de ce costume’ (II, 8).
The passage ends with a summary of the movement, a backward
glance over the state of consciousness preceding that reached by the poet
at the end of ‘Igitur’. As a natural experience, this previous consciousness is indeed dead; we are ‘forever separated’ from it. It takes its place,
however, within the historical growth of the human spirit (as opposed to
the physical survival of the species): ‘ce n’est pas un hôte inférieur de moi
. . . mais le buste de velours d’une race supérieure’ (II, 9), or more explicitly still, ‘ce n’est non la marche circulaire d’une . . . bête, mais la marche
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régulière debout sur les deux pieds de la race . . .’ (D, 3). This knowledge
is recorded in the poetic work, the ‘fraise arachnéenne’ which, in Igitur’s
mirrored image, separates the head from the body like the scythe which
decapitates Saint John in the final section of ‘Hérodiade’. Similarly, the
early poetry is now forever separated from the mature work that will
follow ‘Igitur’. All the themes that had been subjectively experienced
will now be represented objectively and dramatically. For the poet,
the ‘death’ which ‘Igitur’ describes involves a fundamental change in
manner, throwing back the previous work into the past and opening up
new possibilities of free experimentation.
The entire movement begins again, not like Yeats’s ‘Primum mobile
. . . that / Has made the very owls in circles move’, but as a new cycle in
the ‘spirale vertigineuse conséquente’. In so doing, by a law that remains
unchanged, the new cycle transforms its predecessor into a object and
‘kills’ this object as it grows in self-awareness. The work that has just
been conceived ‘fiole de verre, pureté, qui renferme la substance du
Néant’ becomes, in its turn, the container of a death-agony. Death reappears at the end of ‘Igitur’ as it presided over its beginning.
[4]
There can be no better commentary on ‘Igitur’ than the following
passage from Hegel’s introduction to the Phenomenology of the Spirit:
Purpose is as necessary to knowledge as the succession of forms that marks
its development is determined. The goal is reached where knowledge no
longer has to transcend itself, where it discovers its own self and where the
concept corresponds to the object, the object to the concept. The progression
towards this goal can, therefore, not possibly be halted and it cannot find
rest at any previous station. What is confined to a natural life does not have
within itself the power to go beyond its immediate existence; it is, however,
driven beyond it by another power, and the motion by which it is being torn
outside itself is death.69
To which we can append the commentary of Jean Hyppolite:
the death of a natural being is merely the abstract negation of an entity,
which merely is what it is, but the death of a consciousness is a necessary
moment by means of which consciousness survives on a higher plan. Such a
death is the beginning of a new life for consciousness. Since consciousness is
to itself its own concept, it constantly transcends itself, and the death of what
it considered to be true marks the apparition of a new truth.70
Those two quotations would suffice to indicate a fundamental
analogy between the thought of ‘Igitur’ and Hegel. One could add to it
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other points of common insight. The conception of death as the destruction of a natural consciousness by a higher form of self-awareness is
certainly to be found in Hegel. The same is true of the idea of becoming as the fundamental principle of the movement of consciousness, or
of the notion that we develop by dominating our natural anxiety and
alienation and by transforming it in the awareness and the knowledge
of otherness. The conviction that this knowledge enters the individual
mind by the interiorisation of nature, which one penetrates by the
observation of its temporal and spatial dimensions, can be found in
Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature. The exact place where this experience
occurs within the larger scheme of growth towards the Spirit – between
the anxiety resulting from a known alienation (which corresponds to
Hegel’s ‘unhappy consciousness’) and the passage to universal form of
consciousness – corresponds exactly to the place assigned to it by Hegel
(fragment Aa of the chapter ‘Vernunft’ – ‘A Beobachtende Vernunft’ in
the Phenomenology of the Spirit). The manner, finally, in which the historical consciousness is conceived, as the mediation between otherness
and universality through the medium of history, is a central intuition of
Hegel’s philosophy; as the same is true of the concept of negation which
leads to that of finitude. The identification of the natural with the animal
world as representative of unmediated being, and the ambiguous function of unmediated being, which acts as a goal and a dynamic principle,
but nevertheless constitutes the substance which must constantly be
negated – all these are familiar themes to the readers of Hegel and his
commentators.
Shall we conclude, then, that Mallarmé was directly influenced by
Hegel? In the conventional sense of the term, this is not the case. The
examination of the circumstances under which Mallarmé was able to
come into contact with Hegel’s work bears this out.
A letter from Villiers of September 1866 reveals that Mallarmé
had some direct acquaintance of Hegel’s work; Villiers writes: ‘As for
Hegel, I am truly very happy that you have given some attention to his
miraculous genius, this unequalled procreator, who rebuilt the universe
on his own terms.’71 What could have been, at that time, the extent of
Mallarmé’s first-hand knowledge?
We must, in all likelihood, dismiss the possibility that Mallarmé read
Hegel in the original. Not that he entirely ignored the German language.
He never went to Germany, but his wife was German and, in studying
English, he [might] have learned the rudiments of German. He took it
up again later when, after having finished ‘Igitur’, he considered taking
his Licence ès-lettres. One of the few letters to Eugène Lefébure, of 20
March 1870, alludes to it: ‘I was to prepare an examination for the
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Licence ès-lettres and to consider the possibility of a doctoral dissertation . . . I chose a topic in linguistics . . . Finally, all that remains of it is
a little German, with the help of which I must begin at Easter the study
of a comparative grammar (not translated) of indo-germanic languages
. . .’ (Lefébure, p. 356).72 Later, in Les mots anglais (1877), etymological
references in German are correctly spelled, which indicates at least some
familiarity with the language on the part of an amateur philologist. It is
quite a step, however, from here to the reading of Hegel in the original.
When Lefébure asks for the translation of a technical article – in the
field of Egyptology – it is clear that he is addressing himself to Madam
Mallarmé, and not to Stéphane. Whatever one’s opinion of Hegel’s
style may be, it is generally agreed that he is very hard to understand
if one does not know German very well. We have had to wait until
1939 to have a truly reliable French translation of a complete work by
Hegel, namely Hyppolite’s translation of the Phenomenology.73 It is
hard to imagine Mallarmé faced with the task of reading such works in
German.74
So, if Mallarmé read Hegel, it must have been in translation. Now, in
1869, the date of ‘Igitur’, the only existing translations are La logique
subjective, translated by Slowan and Wallon in 1854, the Logique,
translated by Véra in 1859 (this is the first part of the Encylopedia,
better known as Kleine Logik), the Philosophy of Nature (the second
part of the Encyclopedia), translated by Véra in 1859. The translations of the Philosophy of the Spirit (by Véra) and of the Aesthetics (by
Charles Bernard) date from 1869, too late for Mallarmé to have known
it while he was writing ‘Igitur’.75 It follows that Mallarmé could only
have consulted the Logic and the Philosophy of Nature, both highly
technical works. They must certainly have appeared arid to a mind as
visual as Mallarmé’s, who always tends to see his ideas in the form of
dramatic interplays between personages or objects. The Logic used to
give a dreadful headache to Hyppolite Taine,76 who was himself not
adverse to abstraction; the headache may in part have been due to the
waverings in Véra’s translation, of which it has been said, without
undue severity, that it was ‘enthusiastic rather than competent’.77 Even
if one admits Mallarmé’s extreme lucidity, as well as the fact that he was
perhaps a more studious mind than he is generally assumed to be, it is
difficult to imagine him involved in a systematic study of Hegel’s most
technical books.
Moreover, if we are struck nowadays by the Hegelianism of Mallarmé,
it is partly because our conception of Hegel has changed a great deal
since the middle of the nineteenth century. The contemporary image
is very different from that which prevailed at that time, in France and
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elsewhere. Since then, more and more attention has been paid to Hegel’s
earlier work and especially to the Phenomenology of the Spirit which
many now consider as more important than the later, more systematic,
treatises. This is a highly debatable point, but it seems at least to be
agreed that the Encyclopedia may lead to certain errors of interpretation if one is not aware of the methodological premises contained
in the Phenomenology. What has been called the ‘pan-logicism’ (the
word was first coined by von Hartmann) of the later Hegel acquires
a different meaning if it is seen in the ‘pan-tragic’ perspective of the
Phenomenology. The overpowering claim at total rationality there
appears as the result, not the starting point, of an inquiry guided by
subjective, lived experiences. This change in emphasis has clarified an
important aspect of Hegel’s thought: that the truth it contains cannot
be transmitted as if it were an abstract entity, but that it results from
an individual development, that tends towards reason by force of its
own growth. The subjective process of this growth, however, is indispensable, and it is not the philosopher’s function to make it superfluous. If the final truth is to be really understood, it must have been the
subject of experience (Erfahrung); one knows that the original title of
the Phenomenology of the Spirit was to be Wissenschaft der Erfahrung
des Bewusstseins (Science of the Experience of Consciousness). One
could say that the philosophy of Hegel cannot merely be learned. Hegel
reproached Fichte’s idealism for considering itself an absolute, rather
than a mere phenomenon, a step in the history of the spirit;78 yet panlogical Hegelianism is guilty of the same error with regard to Hegel
himself. Certain contemporary trends started in reaction against this
conception; Dilthey, who was among the first to draw attention to the
theological writings of Hegel’s youth, was perhaps the main initiator of
this reaction. It is of great importance for our subject that this school
of thought puts Hegel back within the general current of romanticism,
a movement of which the Phenomenology constitutes the philosophical Summa. This takes us back to poetry, and it is not surprising to
see the same Dilthey [as] one of the first to re-discover Hölderlin, who
was almost entirely forgotten during the nineteenth century, and whose
thought is closely related to that of his schoolfriend Hegel. This same
conjunction between a ‘romantic’ Hegel and Hölderlin crops up in
Jean Wahl’s book on the unhappy consciousness in the philosophy of
Hegel.79 The trend reaches its most extreme point in Heidegger, who
devotes a large part of his work to Hölderlin, and openly states that
Hegel regressed intellectually from the last part of the Phenomenology
of the Spirit on.80
The tone of ‘Igitur’ as well as of the letters written around that time
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reveals a Mallarmé caught in a highly subjective and often pathetic
spiritual crisis, not engaged in the formal study of an abstract philosophy. If, therefore, a certain resemblance between the development of
Mallarmé’s and Hegel’s thought can be indicated, it is by pointing out a
parallelism between the roads they have travelled, and not by comparing
systematic conclusions which Mallarmé, of course, never formulated.
Both minds are related by the similarity of their trajectory and, without
knowing the Phenomenology of the Spirit, it would have been radically
impossible for Mallarmé to reconstruct this itinerary on the basis of the
Logic and the Philosophy of Nature alone. Before concluding, however,
that Mallarmé’s ‘Hegelianism’ was entirely intuitive, we must examine
briefly the possibility of an influence through intermediaries. It often
happens, at a certain period of intellectual history, that a philosophical
system passes directly in the oral tradition, not without considerable
distortion and simplification, but preserving, nevertheless, much of its
original power. This is all the more likely to happen when it stems from
a foreign tradition, and from a difficult writer. The French reaction to
German philosophy of existence is a recent example of a philosophical theory acting with the power of a myth, although the works which
make up the theory are known only by a few specialists. Some hundred
years ago, a similar climate was created in France by the name of Hegel.
In literary and academic circles there persists, around 1860, a slightly
sensational interest in his philosophy, due, no doubt, to the irrational,
‘romantic’ elements of German idealism which were bound to attract
and to seduce during a period when the emphasis fell on positivism.81
Hegel’s name was in the air and a fleeting image of his philosophy was
part of the intellectual landscape of the times.
Mallarmé probably read the clear, but superficial article on Hegel,
typical of the conventional positivistic view, published by Edmond
Scherer in the Revue des deux Mondes,82 but personal conversations
were doubtlessly much more important. Guy Michaud and L.J. Austin
have suggested that Mallarmé’s friend Eugene Lefébure was his main
initiator to the philosophy of Hegel.83 On the basis of a letter from
Lefébure of 3 May 1868 (which, somewhat surprisingly, does not
appear in Mondor’s monograph on Lefébure), Guy Michaud goes so
far as to date exactly the moment of this initiation: during Mallarmé’s
stay at Cannes in early April 1866. However, Henri Mondor’s very
useful book on Lefébure entirely fails to confirm this supposition. In
Lefébure’s letters to Mallarmé, frequent mention is made of Baudelaire,
Poe, Hugo and even Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, but when Hegel is
named, it is in connection with Villiers and with negative implications.84
It is most unlikely that, if Hegel would have meant so much to Mallarmé
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– it would be the key to his most important work – the correspondence
would practically never mention his name.
This is an even more serious objection: when the gentle and elegiac
Lefébure allows himself to expound his own metaphysical views, they
show not the slightest trace of Hegelianism. He expresses the fear
than an excess of self-awareness might lead, historically, to decadence.
Precisely because Mallarmé is more conscious than other poets – he
mostly mentions Hugo and Marceline Desbordes-Valmore – he sees
him them? as the beginning of the future decadence.85 This is doubtlessly a very sensible view, shared by many – one thinks, for instance, of
Tolstoi, who makes Mallarmé into the prototype of the decadent poet
in What is Art? – but it is as distant as can be from Hegel, since it rejects
the central intent of his philosophy as harmful. By expressing this idea,
Lefébure places himself at the antipodes of Hegel’s thought. He does so
spontaneously, without any reference to Hegel, merely seeming to reply
to the arguments and inclinations of his friend. The very small trace of
Hegelian concerns that one might detect in Lefébure thus would seem to
stem from Mallarmé himself. This is very different from the possibility
suggested by Michaud.86
Much rather than Lefébure, or Scherer or Véra, it is clearly Villiers
who acted indirectly as an intermediary between Mallarmé and Hegel.
The Hegelian elements in ‘Igitur’ stem not from a reading of Hegel,
but from the conversation and the world of Villiers. The association
between ‘Igitur’ and Villiers is very close; the idea of a personage like
Igitur, whose identity is rooted in the historical past of his race (an
entirely new element, at this time, in Mallarmé’s work), is directly
derived from Villiers’s own character and situation. Twenty years after
‘Igitur’ on the occasion of Villiers’s death, Mallarmé returns to the
symbolism used in ‘Igitur’ to express what the encounter with Villiers
meant to him: ‘Nul . . . ne connut à ce moment de la jeunesse dans
lequel fulgure le destin entier, non le sien, mais celui de l’Homme! La
scintillation mentale qui désigne le buste à jamais du diamant d’un ordre
solitaire, ne serait-ce qu’en raison du regard abdiqué par la conscience
des autres . . .’ (‘Conférence sur Villiers’, p. 489). Villiers is to him the
dramatic embodiment of the historical consciousness which plays such
an important part in ‘Igitur’; he is the last representative of a ‘race immémoriale, dont le temps qui pesait est tombé excessif, dans le passé, et qui
pleine de hasard n’a vécu, alors, que de son future’ (‘Igitur’, IV).
At the moment of their encounter until the period of ‘Igitur’,
Mallarmé’s admiration for Villiers knew no bounds. In a letter to
Lefébure written in 1865, he lavishes extravagant praise on Elën, by
‘mon ami Villiers de l’Isle Adam’: ‘La conception est aussi grandiose que
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l’eût rêvee Goethe . . . Vous y trouverez des scènes inouïes . . . Quant aux
dernières elles égalent la scène du cimetière d’Hamlet . . . Vous sentirez
une sensation à chacun des mots, comme en lisant Baudelaire. . .’.87
It is well known that at that time of his life, Villiers declared himself
an ardent disciple of Hegel (whom he later irreverently claims to have
‘planté la’.) Isis and especially Claire Lenoir contain numerous passages
inspired by Hegel, which give one an idea of what Villiers’s conversation
on this subject may have been like. Villiers’s dramatised Hegelianism,
as one might expect, is not exactly orthodox, nor is he all too faithful to the detailed instructions of his master; this ‘singulier lecteur’ as
Mallarmé calls him, must have perused his volumes rather distractedly.
One should not underestimate, however, the quickness of Villiers’s
mind. Some of his quotations in pseudo-Hegelian jargon are well nigh
devoid of meaning, but others are singularly apt, such as, for instance,
this sentence from Claire Lenoir: ‘Par l’idée médiatrice de l’Extériorité,
qui est comme la trame que laquelle se brode l’éternal devenir du
Cosmos, l’Idée se nie elle-même, pour se prouver son être, sous la forme
de Nature, et je pourrais reconstruire le fait en employant la dialectique
hegelienne. L’idée ne croît qu’en se retrouvant en sa negation’.88 And
the following sentence takes us to the very centre of ‘Igitur’: ‘Ce que
nous appelons la Mort n’est que le moyen term ou, si vous préférez, la
négation nécessaire, posée par l’Idée pour se déveloper jusqu’à l’Esprit, à
travers la pensée’.89 Such quotations would suffice to give Villiers credit
for understanding certain aspects of Hegel’s thought better than some of
his much more learned contemporaries. They explain how his enthusiasm could act as a catalyst on a mind which was ready to recognise itself
even in a veiled mirror.
The encounter with Villiers as well as with the vaguely Hegelian
theories which he expounded, helped to raise Mallarmé to a new level
of consciousness. Everything was ready for him to react in this way and,
as always, the accidental event afterwards appears as ineluctable. One
could go so far as to say that ‘Igitur’ is the story of Mallarmé’s encounter with Villiers. But one should not conclude that Villiers influenced
Mallarmé directly, or that Hegel influenced him through the more or
less conscious intervention of Villiers. Contacts between minds are more
subterranean. When Hegel speaks of a universal consciousness, one
should at least grant him that it is by virtue of its universality that such
a consciousness can be transmitted, not as one imposes an opinion, but
as a truth revealed. The analogy between Mallarmé and Hegel does not
indicate that the poet is dependent on the philosopher, his elder by more
than twenty years. It merely indicates that Hegel’s ‘experience’, which
he declares to be absolutely universal, is at least sufficiently so for two
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different minds, born in very different national traditions, to share some
of its elements. The experience is not that of Hegel alone; it would be
the most damaging of all criticism to define as a personal anomaly a
system of thought that aims at transcending the singularity of individual
convictions. The system certainly does not express absolute Truth, but it
indicates one of the roads that is to lead towards it. Mallarmé chose this
road with the freedom which constitutes the distinctive prerogative of a
true dialectic.
[5]
‘Igitur’, such as we know it, is primarily a document; it cannot be said
that it constitutes a poetic work. Mallarmé would have been the first to
admit it, since he kept his manuscript hidden and refrained from presenting it to the public. After the scene, described by Mondor, in which
Villiers himself was unable to respond to the reading of a text which
concerned him in such a direct and essential way, Mallarmé apparently
never returned to ‘Igitur’. For all its obvious shortcomings – if we make
the mistake, that is, of approaching it as a ‘finished’ work – ‘Igitur’ is in
some respects Mallarmé’s most important attempt at writing a poetry
that would be totally conscious, without giving up the more immediate seductions of poetic language; at times, in certain passages of the
‘Minuit’ section especially, one catches glimpses of poetic possibilities,
unequalled in any of his other experiments. From the purely technical
point of view of explication, ‘Igitur’ has considerable exegetic value.
Many themes that previous or later poems treat separately appear here
together, in the full complexity of their mutual relationships and in their
exact hierarchal order. Several of the key images and key terms receive
their meaning and definition in ‘Igitur’; this is the case for the antithetical couple ‘sea–stars’ which predominates in ‘Un coup de dés’, for terms
such as ‘minuit’, ‘Chimère’, ‘ombre’ or even ‘mort’ which frequently
reappear later, and for such concepts as ‘abolir’ and ‘hasard’ of which
the full significance begins to come into view in this text.
The considerable effort of ‘Igitur’ made it possible for Mallarmé
to plan the outline of his future work, though not to carry it out as
he intended. ‘Un coup de dés’, which could not have existed without
‘Igitur’, is the only one of the later texts comparable in scope to what
‘Igitur’ tried to achieve. The poems that were written during the period
between ‘Igitur’ (1869) and ‘Un coup de dés’ (1897) repeat, with significant changes in style and tone, several of the themes that make up
‘Igitur’; they remain however, in Mallarmé’s own words, ‘mere exercises’.
After ‘Igitur’, the entire work becomes experimental and preparatory.
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The ‘Conte’ itself constitutes an attempt sacrificed to the poetry which
it was to render possible, but which never came into being. We can
understand and evaluate this failure only if we take full account of the
demands made on poetic language as a result of the insight gained in
‘Igitur’: ‘Un coup de dés’, as well as the speculations in prose contained
in the Divagations, reveal what Mallarmé henceforth took upon himself
to accomplish: ‘le Livre . . . l’explication orphique de la terre . . . Je réussirai peut-être; non pas à faire cet ouvrage dans son ensemble (il faudrait
être je ne sais qui pour cela!) mais à en montrer un fragment d’éxécuté
. . . Prouver par les portions faites que ce livre existe, et que j’ai connu ce
que je n’ai pu accomplir’ (‘Autobiographie’. p. 663).
III ‘Un coup de dés’
The parallel between Hegel’s and Mallarmé’s development can still help
us in understanding the evolution of Mallarmé’s work after ‘Igitur’.
After he had finished the Phenomenology of the Spirit, Hegel’s work
career became predominantly didactic; that is to say, he directed towards
others what he had learned from the observation of his own self. This
development follows from the very nature of the knowledge gained in
the Phenomenology. Since the work reaches the conclusion that ‘consciousness of self has to divide in two to become Spirit’ (Phen. II, g), it
is necessary for the mind, when it has come to know itself entirely, to
turn towards others. It is in the essence of truth to be accessible to all
others, and true consciousness necessarily implies the knowledge of its
universality. Because it creates what claims to be a language of truth, the
work that follows the Phenomenology, the Encyclopedia (Enzyklopëdie
der philosophischen Wissenschaften in Grundrisse, 1817), is necessarily
didactic; it contains communication as a constitutive element. In claiming to describe the whole of reality from the point of view of absolute
knowledge, the Encyclopedia also states all one has to known in order
to understand the system.
Significantly, the first part of the Encyclopedia consists of a system of
logic (‘Die Wissenschaft der Logik’); by ascending from the individual
consciousness to the universal realm of the Spirit, one does not move
outside of the realm of language. The absolute Spirit is not only, as it is
in itself, the total content of temporal history, but it leads to the logos
which names and describes this history. This logos re-states, in its terms,
the problem which originally resided in the experience of an individual
consciousness (Phen. I), then in a universal historical consciousness
(Phen. II) and it now understands this problem to be insoluble; hence
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the tension, often referred to by commentators of Hegel, which persists
between the three parts of the Encyclopedia. It is important for our
subject that a language which has reached what it considers to be its
ultimate point of perfection and become universal, nevertheless still has
to express the failure of the intent that presided over its development.
The poetic development of a poet like Mallarmé is not essentially
different from that of Hegel, except for the fact that it encounters the
problem of language in a different way. Philosophical language is the
decantation of the experience it describes, but this experience is not necessarily a linguistic one; it can be a phenomenon such as perception, for
instance, which precedes language. In Hegel’s philosophy, language first
appears as one among other entities susceptible of achieving a mediation between opposites. Later, it is true, it becomes the last link in a long
chain of mediations leading up to the absolute Spirit. It reaches this final
stage, however, in the form of a science of reflective language, or logic.
This logic is detached from its previous history, from the successive
approximations and errors which led to its ultimate perfection. Up to
the final moment, language follows the experience in which it does not
directly participate, exactly as a chronicler follows battles; finally, when
it becomes manifest that it is the only preserver of past facts and events,
it naturally becomes the supreme mediator. The transfer of mediation
into the sphere of language appears as the ultimate goal of a philosophical development. It is the starting point, however, of a poetic consciousness.
A poet may pass through a series of experiences very similar to
those of the philosopher, but he will always encounter them within the
medium of language. The degree of development of a poetic mind is
determined, at all times, by the conception and the form of its language.
For a poet, there exists in fact only one experience, that of language, and
he encounters it in a multiplicity of forms, whereas for a philosopher like
Hegel, a multiplicity of significant experiences are contained within the
single language of his Logic. In the last analysis, he is the author of one
single and definitive work that makes all his other works superfluous –
and it could be said that, presupposing an ideal reader, the Encyclopedia
is indeed Hegel’s only book. Nothing quite comparable exists for poets;
their work appears as a series of attempts to make a certain form of
language express a certain degree of consciousness; the failure appears
when no adequate form can be found. The attempt to escape from the
ensuing predicament can become a step in a dialectic, in which a new
form originates from the negation of its predecessor, always in the hope
of ‘defeating’, as Mallarmé puts it, ‘the old monster of sterility’. The
work as a whole appears as a series of experimentations on particular
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forms of language. When the poet judges that he has covered the full
range of the possibilities contained in his language, he reaches a point
similar to that reached by Hegel in the Encyclopedia; he can re-state
his original problem with a maximum of precision and completeness.
The ultimate work corresponds to the discovery of an ultimate form;
since, however, negation can never be overcome, the ultimate form must
contain its negation, concretely inscribed into the form itself.
‘Igitur’ had not reached this point, since it was still a work of self-discovery, that preceded the attempt to create a universal language. After
‘Igitur’, however, Mallarmé begins to meditate on the kind of literary
form that could be called truly universal. It has to state, in poetic terms,
the absolute truth of the Spirit as well as the negation of this truth, and
it has to represent this in a language which allows for the active participation of the reader or the audience. Hence the somewhat bewildering
mixture, in the late Mallarmé, of abstract metaphysical speculation
with very practical considerations on the relative merits of the existing
art-forms. His last published work, ‘Un coup de dés’, contains traces of
both concerns; we must, therefore, briefly retrace their respective development during the years that preceded Mallarmé’s final text.
[1]
Shortly after he finished ‘Igitur’, Mallarmé considered for a while the
possibility of writing a purely philosophical treatise on language; the
title, ‘Traité du verbe’, as well as some notes have been preserved and are
included in the edition of the complete works (pp. 851 ff.). This attempt
was, in part, prompted by Mallarmé’s desire to complete his academic
requirements and to improve his financial situation. The outline which
has reached us, however, reveals a project of such magnitude that it was
bound to involve deeper concerns. These attempts are of interest at this
point, because they are connected with a change in Mallarmé’s poetic
vocabulary leading, in turn, to the main theme of ‘Un coup de dés’. [The
main outline of this theme had already been stated in ‘Igitur’. The sections of this text that we have not yet examined, especially Part IV of the
Bonniot edition, contain a passage which is undoubtedly a first version
of ‘Un coup de dés’ and which establishes a firm link between the two
works].
‘Igitur’ described the growth of consciousness as it passes from the
direct experience of finitude – individual death – to the general concept
of negation. The new consciousness gained at the end of the tale is contained in a language which expresses the universal intent of our historical development. Consequently, the problem of man’s alienation from
himself and from the natural world, which remains the burden of the
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poetic enterprise, is transposed on a level of pure temporality. Whereas,
in ‘Hérodiade’ and before, the ideal of perfect harmony and unity was
always thought of in spatial or plastic terms, from ‘Igitur’ on a temporal
structure is juxtaposed upon the spatial form. As a result, the problem
of alienation takes on a different aspect; from the individual experience
of finitude it becomes that of the indetermination of the future. Since historical consciousness is precisely what remains beyond individual death,
this consciousness is, in a sense, eternal. As a part of the life and growth
of consciousness, death becomes an event that repeats itself in time and,
therefore, no longer possesses the characteristic property of being an
absolute end which makes it both terrifying and tempting.
The awareness of a possible future eternity causes a reversal of the
movement in time; instead of finding, as in the early part of ‘Igitur’,
a foothold in the recollection of the past, consciousness will now be
entirely oriented towards the future. The contents of the past are fully
understood; the past is that from which we are forever separated and it
is entirely dead for us. By ascending to the level of universal consciousness, man becomes truly, in relation to his past, ‘Tel qu’en lui-même
enfin l’éternité le change’, ‘race immémoriale, dont le temps qui pesait
est tombé, excessif, dans le passé . . .’ (‘Igitur’ IV, 4). From the total
interiorsation of history, only the general concept of ‘becoming’ remains
as the awareness of a repeated failure to reconcile human existence
with the existence of natural objects in general. This concept points
towards the future, as a universal principle which transcends the death
of the individual. But since it appears in the form of a negation, it can
never be a concrete knowledge, for the knowledge of a failure can never
have a positive content. By assuming a temporal nature, the problem of
ontological alienation has changed without being resolved; it becomes
that of a consciousness totally oriented towards the future, but which
remains separated from it by the knowledge that it will never be able
to determine the content of the future. The painful desire for unity of
the first poems, which grows into a desire for serenity in the ‘Scène’
from ‘Hérodiade’, then into a desire for death and nothingness in the
‘Ouverture’, has now become a purely intellectual desire for determination. A new term, ‘le hasard’, takes the place of earlier existential experiences such as ennui, horreur and mort. Each of these terms refers to
the same initial anxiety, but the progress of consciousness can be read
in their succession. They indicate increasingly rigorous approaches to
an identical problem. The main burden, the crucial torment of thought,
now consists of this irrevocable link between future time and chance:
‘Race immémoriale, dont le temps qui pesait est tombé, excessif, dans
le passé, et qui pleine de hasard n’a vécu, alors, que de son futur’ (IV,
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4). Elsewhere, in a theoretical text, chance is merely defined as ‘the
negation of all principle’ (‘Notes’, p. 854), but the word acquires its full
meaning only if one is aware of the long development that stands behind
it. Chance, ‘le hasard, cet antique ennemi que me divis en ténèbres et en
temps’ (II, 7) points to the opposition between the temporal nature of
human consciousness, oriented towards a knowledge of the future, and
the fundamental indetermination of all natural substance.
Mallarmé has no illusions about the possibility of ending this indetermination. Ever since negation has been recognised as being the universal
principle of our development, there can be no more question of a determined foresight. At the end of ‘Igitur’, his only concern is the creation
of a poetic language which will be able to discover ‘hasard’ under all
appearances of certainty, and thus to transcend it by asserting its universal presence.
Because this attempt takes place on the level of pure abstraction, it can
be said that it is a science, or rather, that it will become a science when
it has reached its final goal. For Mallarmé, whose experience is primarily poetic, this ‘science of the experience of consciousness’ takes on the
form of a science of the experience of language, the projected ‘Traité du
verbe’.
These notes are an extension, in the realm of theory, of the knowledge
gained in ‘Igitur’; they were written in 1869, just after ‘Igitur’. The growth
of consciousness described in the take reappears here as it is reflected in
all language in general, no longer in poetic language alone. The universal
consciousness of the absolute Spirit will express itself in what Mallarmé
calls the Word (le Verbe), language having reached the extreme point of
logical perfection. This Word, ‘ultimate principle, capable of expressing
Time and the Idea . . .’ (‘Notes’ p. 854), does not come to us as an immediate revelation, in completed form, but appears as the limit of a long
temporal development which constitutes the history of the Word; ‘the
written word (one of the forms which language can adopt), by indicating
the gestures of the Idea . . . (preserves) them for the future, as the annals
of the successive efforts made by language . . .’ (p. 854). Mallarmé calls
this developing verbal entity Language (le Language), and he warns that
one should ‘never confuse Language with the Word’ (p. 853); to confuse
them would be to mistake the concrete content of a history with a universal historical consciousness. An exhaustive science of language, written
from the point of view of the Word, will study language in all its manifestations – as the science of consciousness studies history in all its manifestations – starting from the most humble [conversation], but ordering
them in accordance with their ultimate aim, which is the Word, and in
accordance with the principle of their development, which is negation,
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or chance: ‘The Word is a principle which grows by the negation of all
principle, i.e chance, like the Idea . . .’ (p. 854). Poetic language is one
among those languages, but at the limit, there will only be one absolutely beautiful and absolutely true Logos. None of the particular languages (philosophical, scientific, poetic, etc. . . .) could become the Word
without moving through the totality of their respective histories. As long
as it remains within history, the poetic language only appears as a series
of ‘visées’, attempts directed towards a distant goal, which necessarily
fall short of the ultimate intent; only when it has exhausted all its internal
possibilities can it draw nearer to its final destination.90 When they have
become Verbe, poetry and philosophy, which have travelled different
roads, will no longer be distinct; in the Work, the two disciplines will
have lost all possibility of existing separately. One can understand why,
as he was nearing his goal, Mallarmé may have from time to time used a
language of abstraction towards which he was originally not inclined; on
this level, the distinction between poetry and metaphysical speculation
becomes smaller and smaller.
A completed ‘Igitur’, as well as the planned Treatise on Language,
would have expressed the power of ‘le hasard’, the final form in which
the separation between consciousness and natural objects is revealed
to us. It would have tried to become totally conscious of ‘hasard’ and
thus, by its negation, reached a consciousness that survives beyond the
knowledge of its invincible power. This task is perceived from the end of
‘Igitur’ on, and stated for the first time in the fourth section of the tale
(IV). At that moment, a certain act takes place; ‘L’acte qui s’accomplit’
(IV, 3) is not Igitur committing suicide in order to defy his finite nature
by asserting his freedom (an interpretation suggested by Maurice
Blanchot, but not confirmed by the text);91 it is rather the decision of a
consciousness to keep asserting itself after the absurdity of all thought
has been revealed. Igitur experiences the supreme negations: ‘il a enlevé
à l’Absolu sa pureté, pour l’être . . .’ (IV, 5), and his thought, confronted
with the impossibility of defeating chance, remains in existence by meditating on this impossibility. It is condemned to live on the verge of its
own destruction and to reflect on its inevitable downfall. The drama of
this downfall is universal in scope, for the totality of human consciousness is being threatened by the overpowering presence of ‘hasard’: ‘La
pensée . . .’ (‘Igitur’, Scene IV). The failure of universal consciousness is
equivalent to the death of the Spirit, a cosmic event for which a language
has to be found. The act of throwing the dice, the symbolic action of the
‘coup de dés which is introduced in the world at this moment (Scene 1),
represents the creation of this language, knowing that it can only state
its failure:
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Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard
Everything seems prepared, at the end of ‘Igitur’, for this statement to
be made. In fact, almost thirty years will elapse before Mallarmé, in ‘Un
coup de dés’, returns explicitly to the theme of ‘hasard’. One may well
wonder what kept him so long separated from his main concern. The
question takes us back to the other line of thought that leads to ‘Un coup
de dés’: the considerations on various forms of artistic expression which
make up the largest part of the Divagations.
[2]
Except for the mention, near the end, of a ‘Scène de théâtre’, nothing in
‘Igitur’ announces the change in literary form which is bound to follow
such a radical change in Mallarmé’s conception of poetic language. He
is intensely aware, however, of the necessity for such a change. To a
universal poetic consciousness must correspond a universal poetic genre,
that transcends the limitations of the particular and the individual. As
long as the possibility of inventing such a genre has not been thoroughly
explored, one could not rightfully speak of a failure of the language, a
triumph of ‘hasard’. The poetry must exhaust all the possibilities resulting from its ascent to the level of the universal; it must make the full
rounds of its newly conquered domain in order to discover the strategy
best able to serve its purpose. Only after this exploration has been completed can Mallarmé legitimately write the sentence which, in ‘Igitur’,
is still premature: ‘dans un acte où le hasard est en jeu, c’est toujours le
hasard qui accomplit sa propre Idée ens’affirmant ou se niant. Devant
son existence, la négation et l’affirmation viennent échouer’ (IV, 1). The
same conviction is re-stated, but now at its proper time, in ‘Un coup de
dés’:
Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard
From 1873, the date of ‘Toast funèbre’, to 1897, the date of ‘Un coup de
dés’, Mallarmé’s work, in prose and in verse, undertakes to explore the
possibility of a radically new type of literary art. Theoretical speculations
on the requisites for a universal poetry alternate with specific experiments on poetic form, testing modes of expression that might possibly
lead to a greater universality. Some of those experiments remain within
the traditional boundaries of French lyric poetry, while inaugurating a
kind of hermeticism which, despite appearances to the contrary, tends
to increase the dramatic participation of the reader. At the same time, in
his prose-texts, Mallarmé pursues highly unconventional meditations on
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collective and ritualistic art-forms, in which the audience joins with the
author in the very experience of universality – the theatre, the Mass, the
ballet, and a kind of synthesis of the arts which is not altogether unusual
in this Wagnerian era. This entire period is of the greatest importance
in the interpretation of Mallarmé. It covers nearly thirty years of his full
maturity during which, sparse as it is, his literary production reaches
extreme points of audacity in thought and execution. If, at present,
Mallarmé continues to be the starting point of essential inquiries in[to]
the nature of poetry, as well as a presence which, like Baudelaire and
Rimbaud, no French poet can ignore, it is primarily because of the quasiextravagant speculation that originated during this period.
The poetry written at that time hides its explosive possibilities under
a reassuringly conventional appearance. Reading it with the prose of
the Divagations in mind, one realises that Mallarmé’s use of traditional
verse is an ironic tribute to a convention in which he no longer believes.
Traditional verse is no longer the only road for poetry, but a type of
diction which, next to others, will become a part of the new, superior
form and disappear as a particular technique. The ‘crise de vers’ (the title
of one of the Divagations) is not merely a crisis of growth, but a deadly
crisis; free verse, far from being an extension or a renovation of classical verse, marks the signal of its agony. The various formal meditations
coalesce in Mallarmé’s latest experiments, of which ‘Un coup de dés’ is
the only one to have reached completion. This text can be better understood if one perceives the common purpose of the later poems and of the
theoretical prose from Divagations.
[a]
The hermeticism of ‘Hérodiade’ is still private and personal; symbols
result from intuitive correspondences, intellectual rather than materials
which remain a subjective product of the poetic imagination. In order
to understand them, it suffices to listen passively to the echoes which
words such as ‘oiseau’, ‘lit’, ‘azur’, ‘lin’, ‘chevelure’, etc., awaken in
all memories. Those images exist by themselves, without requiring the
active participation of the reader’s reflection. But, already in this text,
a new kind of language is at times apparent. We mentioned in passing
apparently trivial puns, as in the line:
Que ne visite plus la plume ni le cygne
where the word ‘plume’ refers to the bird as well as to the pen used by
the poet, and ‘cygne’ can be read ‘signe’. The pun actually establishes a
crucial meaning: the correspondence between the stoicism of Hérodiade,
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and the poetic sterility of the poet. This connection, although it is of
great, even tragic importance for Mallarmé, is suggested by means of a
childish pun. A verbal and arbitrary link acts as the superficial sign of a
deep coherence between two symbols which, up till then, had remained
separate. This kind of algebra of symbols is most remarkable by the
manner in which it involves the reader’s active participation. The pun, or
some other trick of language (such as onomatopoeia or rime richissime)
necessarily involves, by a surprise-effect, the reader’s reflection on the
language; it is a way of provoking and controlling his thought with great
precision. The reader who discovers a relationship like the one suggested
by the equation of ‘signe’ with ‘cygne’, follows a pattern of thought
rigorously defined by the author’s use of language. A mental shape is
created in his consciousness which the poet can balance and control
at will; if this figure also reveals a truth, the language will achieve an
inter-subjective and, ultimately, a universal way of constructing a form
of truth. Far from reserving access to the work to a handful of initiates
who are in the possession of a private code, this type of hermeticism is
a deliberate attempt to provoke the participation of all readers. In the
dramatic relationship between reader and poet which is thus created,
the author can observe his truth reflected under his control in the mind
of another person. This technique has the advantage of lending itself
to the use of established poetic forms, as Mallarmé found them in his
tradition. From his experience as a Parnassian poet and his appreciation
of Banville’s linguistic virtuosity, Mallarmé retained a considerable skill
at exploiting the formal resources of traditional verse-forms. This skill
now provides him with devices for his hermetic diction. Plays on words
mingle, in a controlled ambiguity, with plays on sound. The syntax is
always exact, but hidden like an unknown quantity in a complicated
algebraic equation. The themes are those of ‘Hérodiade’ and ‘Igitur’,
expressed in always more condensed patterns of repeated symbols,
which organise themselves in the reader’s mind as a sequence of verbal,
visual, and finally intellectual discoveries. The study of this poetry is
not our purpose here; we merely want to stress that the technique aims
towards participation, and not towards exclusion, of the reader.
‘Le mystère dans les lettres’, one of Mallarmé’s latest prose-texts,
reveals just how deliberate this technique was meant to be. After having
vigorously dismissed as ‘abstruse’ and ‘occult’ those who accuse him
of being deliberately obscure, Mallarmé describes some of his poetic
devices. The supreme aim is always clarity, but clarity can never be given
a priori; it must come as the reward for a discovery: ‘(la clarté) ne tire
(que) d’interruptions le caractère momentané, de déliverance’ (p. 384,
paragraph 17); it gradually comes into view, as one makes one’s way
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in this ‘labyrinthe illuminé par des fleurs’ (15) which the artificer-poet
constructs. The artificial ‘veils’ of hermeticism (Mallarmé refers to them
as ‘voiles feints’) are often very obvious and sometimes mimetic devices
‘discovered in the repertory of nature and of the skies’ (23). He suggests
two opposed ways to begin a poem: ‘en éclat triomphal trop brusque
pour durer : invitant que se group en retards, libéré par l’écho, la surprise’;92 or else, the oppose effect: ‘l’inverse . . . en un reploiement noir
soucieux d’attester l’état d’esprit . . . pour que sorte une splendeur définitive simple’ (22).93 Even from a purely technical point of view, the intense
complication of the surface often hides an almost conventional structure;
the syntax must always be correct (29–30), and the poet should use customary verse-forms (‘la disposition habituelle’),94 mainly the sonnet.
The stylistic devices that make up the hermeticism of the late
Mallarmé amount, in fact, to an ironic use of the formal attributes of
language. He pretends to treat language as a rhythmical and sonorous
object that possesses shape, timbre and texture, ‘la chute des sons nus’
(26), but he does so in a playful, deliberately frivolous manner, very
different from the solemn commitment to form which we found, for
instance, in ‘Hérodiade’. He likes to play on the discrepancies between
the material and the semantic qualities of a word, as in speculations on
the ‘dark’ sound of the word ‘jour’, and the ‘light’ sound of ‘nuit’ (‘Crise
de Vers’, p. 364). This entire attitude relates Mallarmé’s hermetic language to a certain conception of music,95 and we indeed find him referring to his poetic method by that term (‘Le mystère dans les letters’, 18).
The mention of ‘music’ indicates the merits as well as the limitations of
the instrument he has created.
The merits of this style are primarily negative; compared to what it is
expected to accomplish, the invention of a universal art-form,96 it is still
pathetically inadequate. Mallarmé accepts the [af]filiation between his
experiments and the free verse of poets such as Gustave Kahn, Moréas
or Vielé-Griffin, while carefully distinguishing his position from that of
Verlaine; Verlaine is the precursor and initiator of free verse, while he
considers himself merely a ‘witness’ (‘Crise de Vers’, p. 361, 7–8).97
The association with minor symbolists, is founded on the common
aim ‘d’achever la transposition, au Livre, de la symphonie ou uniment de
reprendre notre bien’ (38). This transposition refers to a conviction long
since firmly rooted in Mallarmé’s mind and expressed in his work: the
impossibility, in poetry, of reproducing reality by direct imitation. Well
before ‘Hérodiade’, he had already lost all hope ‘to include in the subtle
paper of the book anything but, for instance, the horror of the forest,
or the silent thunder of the leaves; not the dense and concrete wood of
the trees’ (30). Mallarmé now see this solitary conviction grown into
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a collective programme, the literary doctrine of a group from which
he would not want to dissociate himself. It is thus in a polemical spirit
against a certain kind of naturalism98 that he reaffirms this conviction,
speaking as the representative of a group of younger poets who consider him as their master. He rightly considers that the ‘high freedom’
won by the rejection of traditional verse indicates a trend towards the
greater universality of musical expression. Some of the formal resources
of language are freed from conventional constraints; they have again
to be invented instead of being taken for granted. Unlike his disciples,
however, Mallarmé has no illusions about the future of free verse; it does
not serve the principal requirement of form, namely ‘structure’ (‘Crise
de Vers’, 34). As a nostalgic symptom of a dying past (‘la réminiscence
du vers strict hante ces jeux’ (16)), free verse characterises a period of
rest and transition (‘de repos et d’interrègne’) before the advent of a new
literary form which will be even more demanding than traditional verse:
‘une régularité durera parce que l’acte poétique consiste à voir soudain
qu’une idée se fractionne en un nombre de motifs égaux par valeur et à
les grouper . . .’ (24). We are still a long distance away from this supreme
form, ‘l’ensemble des rapports existent dans tout’. By accepting to be
associated with the poets who advocate free verse – an attempt which
Mallarmé takes seriously as a symptom, but not as a poetic device of
style – he indicates how remote his own lyric poetry remains from his
final objective. A more universal type of literature could not derive from
lyric poetry alone; it is not surprising, therefore, to see Mallarmé turn to
dramatic forms in order to further his inquiries.
[b]
Mallarmé’s interest in drama, at the time of the Divagations, is far from
new. ‘Hérodiade’ as well as ‘L’après-midi d’un faune’ were originally
written for the theatre; when the experiment failed, they became lyric
poems or lyric fragments. Even ‘Igitur’, as the sketch for a ‘Scène de
théatre’ shows, was to be, at least in part, a dramatic work. Later, it
may seem as if Mallarmé were moving further and further away from
the theatre; nothing seems less suited for any kind of public performance than the linguistic refinement and the ambiguous irony of the later
poetry. Still, the numerous prose-texts written after 1885 reveal that, far
from diminishing, his interest in the drama steadily increased. The final,
universal Work towards which his speculations were directed, while
being totally poetical, was also to be totally dramatic.
How this synthesis between lyric poetry and drama was to be carried
out in practice remains a matter of pure conjecture. Even the recent
publication of Mallarmé’s notes towards his supreme Work99 shed little
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light on this point. It is confirmed that the work would indeed have
been a theatrical performance; Mallarmé had been much preoccupied
with such practical details as the seating arrangements of the spectators,
the price of tickets, etc. But as far as the text is concerned, one can only
guess. The theoretical considerations, however, that led to the choice of
a dramatic medium, are amply and clearly developed in the prose.100
The essence of drama, according to Mallarmé, resides in the fact that
it necessarily implies a public performance and thus tends, [by] definition, towards universality, towards a communion of minds confronted
with a shared spectacle. This spectacle, as we know from ‘Igitur’, has a
specific and determined content: it shows the growth of consciousness
as it moves towards universality, but it reveals the failure of this attempt
as well. Consciousness fails in its persistent attempt to overcome the
power of time; the successive stages in its development never acquire the
permanence and stability for which they are striving. It can only achieve
some[thing] equivalent [to] permanence by seeing the same failure
reflected in the minds of others; it can, therefore, achieve universality
only by provoking in others an experience akin to its own. In order to do
so, it must create a chosen space, a kind of platform on which the drama
of consciousness can be displayed to an audience which is to share in its
undoing: ‘un Lieu se présente, scène, majoration devant tous du spectacle de Soi’ (‘L’action restreinte’, p. 370, 13). Consciousness acts out the
tragic history of its difficult growth and thus becomes what Mallarmé
calls ‘le spirtuel histrion’ (‘L’action restreinte’, 12). The Theatre is, in
essence, a superior genre,101 because it makes it possible to achieve the
only kind of universality to which consciousness can lay claim; it transforms the tragic history of the defeated spirit into an objective entity that
can be perceived by others. No poet could refuse the challenge of such
a powerful potentiality of language, reaching far beyond anything lyric
poetry could hope to fulfil: ‘Nul poète ne peut à une telle objectivité des
jeux de l’âme se croire étranger . . .’ (‘Le genre ou des modernes’, p. 312,
4).
The fundamental predicament of the dramatic hero is summed up
in the figure of Hamlet hesitating before the necessary act of his death;
he is called ‘le seigneur latent qui ne peut devenir’. By reference to
Igitur’s symbolical pseudo-suicide, we can understand in what sense this
moment of suspense before Hamlet’s decision represents, for Mallarmé,
the typical situation of human existence in general. More revealing still
is the link he establishes between this situation and the actual, concrete
machinery of stagecraft. The stage, the scenery, the floodlights and
all the paraphernalia that make up the setting of a dramatic performance do not exist in order to make the representation possible; on
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the contrary, Hamlet exists in order to allow for the creation of the
artificial, but determined and controlled organisation of space which
exists only on the stage. Hamlet, ‘solitaire drame . . . semble le spectacle
même pourquoi existent la rampe ainsi que l’espace doré quasi moral
qu’elle defénd’ (‘Hamlet’, p. 300, 3) – ‘the play’s the thing’ and not the
predicament of the protagonist. ‘Igitur’ mentions a ‘chambre de temps’
where time is truly present as if it were a part of space; the ideal stage, in
Mallarmé’s poetics, is a chamber of this kind.
Significantly, it is also in connection with the problem of a public theatrical performance that Mallarmé defines his relationship towards the
historical epoch in which he lives. Hamlet is called a ‘solitary drama’,
but placed against the background of a much wider historical context.
Hamlet’s inability to grow is exactly reflected in the inadequacy of
the times, devoid of a sense of historical greatness. Like Hamlet, the
times are unable to ‘become’: they follow a greater past that is gone
and precede a new future that has not yet come into being. Mallarmé’s
historical eschatologism should be stressed, since it is so often wrongly
assumed that this very historical-minded poet thinks of himself as
completely out of history.102 The condemnation of his own period as
‘plus et pas encore l’époque extraordinaire’ (‘Hamlet’, 3) takes place
within a perspective which is purely historical: ‘un tunnel – l’ époque
– celui, long le dernier, rampant sous la cité avant la gare toute puissante du virginal palais central, qui couronne’. (‘L’action restreinte’,
21)103
Statements of this kind always appear in essays that have to do with
the theatre. A true theatre, worthy of the high calling of a universal
genre, cannot find an audience in the nineteenth century. Mallarmé
considers this a very disturbing symptom; this very tolerant and polite
judge of contemporary fellow-poets can find biting phrases to denounce
the prevailing mediocrity of the ‘realistic’ theatre. The spirit of the times
is fully revealed in its attitude towards the drama, which reflects, in
fact, its attitude towards its own consciousness. As an aspiring dramatic
poet, Mallarmé has to evaluate his times in full lucidity at the moment
when he is about to reveal his inner drama to the multitude. However,
the staggering difficulty of the task, the incomprehension which he has
to expect from an audience that likes only the worst, can never be by
itself a sufficient cause to abandon his search for a dramatic medium; the
resistance which the public opposes to his efforts reflects the resistance
which his own consciousness opposes to its development.104 His lack of
success reveals a shortcoming in himself and in his audience, but not in
the medium itself: ‘décréter abject un milieu de sublime nature, parce
que l’époque nous le montre dégradé: non, je m’y sentirais trop riche en
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regrets de ce dont il ne restait point sacrilège de simplement suggérer la
splendeur’ (‘Le genre ou des modernes’, p. 313, 6).
Mallarmé’s reflections on the naturalistic theatre of Daudet, Becque,
Sardeu, Ponsard and others, confirm his radical rejection of a drama
that would not be poetical – one of the points on which he would have
been in full agreement with the W.B. Yeats of Plays and Controversies;
the articles Mallarmé wrote for the Revue Indépendante around 1886
and those Yeats published in the Abbey Theatre organ Samhain between
1901 and 1908, are among the most powerful manifestos for the poetic
theatre written at that time. On the modern stage, the Mystery Play of
the Middle Ages has become a ‘vaudeville’ (‘Le genre ou des modernes’,
6) in which the characters on the stage merely try to duplicate the inanity
of the spectators in the theatre. What is even worse, this pseudo-realism
is used as a device to eliminate poetry: ‘Avec l’impudence du faits-divers
en trompe-l’oeil emplir le théâtre et exclure la Poésie . . .’ (‘Solennité’,
p. 330). It acts as a crude and vulgar trick in order to establish a direct
contact between the author and his audience, when this communion
should come only as a reward for the long, ascetic and inward discipline
of poetry. The universal Work, although it has to be dramatic, must also
contain the splendours inherent in ‘le vieux génie du vers’ (‘Solennité’,
p. 322, 4). It must evoke the ideal moment of poetic truth which can
only be, in Mallarmé’s terms, ‘fictif et momentané’ (‘Crayonné au
théâtre’, p. 296) – the moment described in the following passage from
‘Solennité’: ‘l’instant qu’ (y) brillent et meurent dans une fleur rapide,
sur quelque transparence comme d’éther les mille éléments de beauté
pressés d’accourir et de s’ordonner dans leur valeur essentielle’ (6). The
drama is a succession of such moments, and if one eliminates them from
the theatrical work, only the hollow façade of a ‘false temple’ remains
(Solennité’, p. 331, 2).
Mallarmé’s ideal poetic theatre will be a kind of collective ritual
which has nothing in common with what is called drama on the modern
stage. As for the dramatic forms worthy of the name that existed in the
past – the Greek tragedy, the Mass or the Passion Plays of the Middle
Ages – they come to us stripped of the essential element that made their
performance into the lived experience of universality: the active participation of the audience. This experience, however, is a passing and
fleeting moment which cannot be recaptured; once the audience has
disappeared into the past or, after the curtain has fallen, into the night,
only the written, poetic text remains. This indicates the intrinsic failure
of the genre, not as before, because of transient historical circumstances,
but for reasons at all times inherent in the dramatic medium. Drama
creates the universal, but it does so directly, without mediation; the joy
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felt by the author and the spectators united in a common poetic experience expresses the unmediated enjoyment of the universal. The catharsis
has no real duration; we can only conceive of it in the temporal form of
a memory which one wishes to recapture and to repeat. The theatre of
the future can only be imagined by means of a nostalgic meditation on
past greatness; Mallarmé can suggest it only by reference to the Greek
and Medieval antecedents of the tragedy and the Mass (‘Catholicisme’,
p. 393). Instead of being itself the ideal the theatre is only the history of
an ideal, a sequence of moments tending in vain towards an ideal which
they fail to reach. We can observe its shortcoming in the simple fact that
it can dispense, if necessary, with stage and performance altogether: ‘A
la rigueur un papier suffit pour évoquer toute pièce: aidé de sa personnalité multiple chacun parvient à le jouer en dedans . . .’ (‘Le genre ou
des modernes’, p. 315). The remark may seem innocuous enough, but
if one remembers what the stage itself means for Mallarmé, it attacks
the very foundation of the dramatic genre – for the purpose of drama
consists primarily in the creation of this place (‘lieu’) where a universal consciousness could reside and remain out of reach of time. If the
stage is missing, the all important impersonality of the author becomes
merely an illusion; all that remains of his effort is the poetic text, a
purely inward creation which originates and exists without the need
for an audience. The drama remains confined within the limits of lyric
poetry. As long as it can be ‘played inwardly’, it could never become the
language of a universal consciousness; therefore, Mallarmé dismisses it
as a necessary, but inadequate ingredient of the Work: ‘J’imagine que
les causes de s’assembler, dorénavant, en vue de fêtes inscrites au programme humain, ne sera pas le théâtre . . .’ (‘Solennité’, p. 345, 11). This
failure of the highest of genres – ‘le théâtre est d’essence supérieure’ – is
the formal equivalence of the negation of the universal, or ‘hasard’.
The Parisian spectacles will provide Mallarmé with the right symbol
for the impossible union between poetry and dramatic action towards
which he strives; this symbol is the Dance. The silhouette of the ballerina
– so appropriately called, in conformity with Mallarmé’s stellar symbolism,105 the ‘star’ – becomes the symbolical equivalence of a Work bound
to remain forever unreachable. The Dance accomplishes what the drama
attempts in vain; unlike the playwright, the dancer could never dispense
with a stage: ‘seule, du fait de ses évolutions, avec le mime . . . (elle)
paraît nécessiter un espace réel, ou la scène’ (‘Le genre ou des modernes’,
p. 315). Mallarmé’s most convincing descriptions of the impersonality of art occur in his meditations on the ballet: ‘Telle, un réciprocité,
dont résulte l’in – individuel106 chez la coryphée et dans l’ensemble, de
l’être dansant, jamais qu’emblème point quelqu’un’ (‘Ballets’, p. 304):
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‘A déduire le point philosophique auquel est situé l’impersonalité de la
danseuse . . .’ (‘Crayonné au théâtre’, p. 296) ‘qui n’est pas une femme
et . . . ne danse pas’ (‘Ballets’, p. 304). Moreover, the dance contains the
moment of poetic truth as in a flash of lightning, and succeeds in being a
pure poem, ‘poème dégagé de tout appareil du scribe’ (‘Ballets’, p. 304).
The ballet is called ‘la forme théatrale de poésie par excellence’ (‘Les
fonds dans le ballet’, p. 307). Are we to conclude that the ultimate synthesis between drama and poetry is successfully carried out in the dance?
It would be an error to take Mallarmé literally on this point. The intense
irony of calling the ballet ‘la forme théatrale de poésie par excellence’
appears only if one remembers the depth of his commitment to the literary work at the expense of all other, and so many statements repeating,
in various forms, that ‘Tout, au monde, existe pour aboutir à un livre’.107
That the ballerina is referred to as ‘illiterate’ (‘la ballerine illéttrée’) indicates his real feeling; she symbolises what the writer ought to do with
his language, but could never achieve. She is the ironic symbol of the
ideal which a universal poetry can barely approximate. Poetry supposes
an almost fanatical commitment to the written word and to an extreme
consciousness of the self, two elements which are obviously lacking in
the dancer. In fact the ideal achievement of the dancer is not of her own
doing; it has been bestowed on her by the poet who, in a dialectical act of
self-immolation, destroys himself by transferring his own consciousness
into an entity which is his exact antithesis. He pretends to worship an artform which, lacking entirely in consciousness, is the most alien to his own
endeavour. Mallarmé’s dancer is the supreme and ironic symbol of poetic
failure. The poet worships a conception of language which, like the dancer,
would be a negation of language. Similarly, consciousness tries desperately
to reach the naked form of reality, but always remains separated from it by
the ‘veil’ of mediation, caused by its own, necessary presence.
Oui, celle-là – la ballerine illéttrée – (serais-tu perdu en une sale, spectateur
très étranger, Ami) pour peu que tu déposes avec soumission à ses pieds
d’inconsciente révélatrice ainsi que les roses qu’enlève et jette en la visibilité
de regions supérieures un jeu de ses chaussons de satin pâle et vertigineux,
la Fleur d’abord de ton poétique instinct, n’attendant de rien d’autre la mise
en evidence et sous le vrai jour des mille imaginations latentes: alors, par un
commerce dont paraît ton sourire marquer le secret, sans tarder elle te livre
à travers le voile dernier qui toujours reste, la nudité de tes concepts et silencieusement écrira ta vision à la facon d’un Signe, qu’elle est. (‘Ballets’, p. 307)
[3]
Even before the publication of Mallarmé’s posthumous papers settled
the matter once and forever,108 there would have been little reason to
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follow the interpreters of Mallarmé109 who claimed that ‘Un coup de
dés’ was, in fact, the ultimate Work to which Mallarmé kept alluding
during his later years. At least one text exists in which the form of that
ideal work is described as something quite different from ‘Un coup de
dés’:
J’imagine que la cause de s’assembler dorénavant, en vue de fêtes inscrites au
programme humain, ne sera pas le theâtre, borné et incapable de répondre
tout seul à de très subtils instincts, ni la musique du reste trop fuyante pour ne
pas décevoir la foule; mais àn soi fondant ce que les deux isolent de vague et
de brutal, l’Ode, dramatisée ou coupée savamment; ces scènes héroiques une
ode à plusieurs voix. (‘Solennité’, p. 335, 11)
‘Un coup de dés’ is not scenic or musical enough to answer to this definition. It does not really contain startling formal innovations, but uses
the hyper-condensed hermeticism that appears throughout the later
poetry; it may go further in stretching syntax to the utmost limits of
coherence, but the technique remains essentially the same as in the later
poems and in the Divagations. The striking innovation stems, of course,
from the typographical disposition, but this experiment is perhaps less
unusual than it may appear. It corresponds to the passage in the above
quotation where Mallarmé describes the Ode as ‘coupée savamment’.
The blank spaces which, as Gardner Davies has very correctly pointed
out,110 are merely an extension of a typographical device that Mallarmé
had frequently used before, fulfil the function of the traditional coupe
in prosody; they organise the rhythmical dimensions of the language
and guide the response of the reader. ‘Un coup de dés’ takes its place
among the other experiments with poetic form that are being discussed
in the Divagations. Mallarmé did not conceive of it as a culminating
achievement, but as a tentative experiment that was to take him somewhat closer to his final goal. The preface which accompanies the first
edition of the work is quite explicit on this point; it merely contains
remarks on poetic form and makes no allusion whatever to the supreme
Work. ‘Un coup de dés’ appears then as a less ambitious undertaking
than, for instance, ‘Igitur’ or ‘Hérodiade’ – although it is, of course,
more advanced in thought and in technique. A complete exegesis would
extend far beyond the limits of this study; we will use the text in order to
summarise the development of Mallarmé’s principal themes.
[a]
‘Igitur’ dealt with the genesis of the Spirit,111 as the experience of individual death becomes incorporated in the growth of the conscious mind:
‘Un coup de dés’ takes place at the moment when the Sprit is forced to
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capitulate to the power of chance. The work dramatises the ‘death’ of
the Spirit and asks what may survive after this event has taken place.
This ‘death’ not only concerns individual man, but involves the totality of things in existence, the entire cosmos. Indeed, it is only when the
Spirit has come to include all things without exception that it earns the
dignity of its name. In its movement towards self-knowledge, consciousness aims at all forms of exteriority without exception; it seizes upon
whatever exists outside and, in so doing, it gradually reduces the entire
universe to its own mode of existence. It thus creates the ‘eternal circumstances’112 in which the Sprit has the best opportunity to succeed.
All things must be changed from alien and distant natural objects into
entities whose mode of existence is similar to that of our own creations.
Mallarmé assumes that his thought will, in a sense, be able to reach
this point, although he knows that the mind will be submerged and
destroyed at the precise moment when it reaches the status of truth.
The moment of fulfilment is also the moment of annihilation; hence
the apparently absurd linkage of two contradictory situations which
challenges the reader from the very beginning of ‘Un coup de dés’: on
page II, the ‘circonstances éternelles’ under which the Spirit seems able
to triumph even over time are also located ‘au fond d’un naufrage’.
Man’s spiritual quest ends up as a ‘naufrage’ just when it seems about to
succeed. The first full page (III) of ‘Un coup de dés’ evokes this sequence
by means of a dramatic interplay of images; in a technique which goes
back at least as far as ‘Hérodiade’, a metamorphosis of objects crates an
analogous process in the mind of the reader, duplicating the movement
that Mallarmé wants to suggest.
Page III of ‘Un coup de dés’ describes the eternal circumstances under
which the triumph as well as the failure of the universal mind take place.
Mallarmé’s thought has immensely widened in scope since ‘Hérodiade’
and even since ‘Igitur’, from the experience of an individual consciousness to the cosmic dimensions of ‘Un coup de dés’. As consciousness
expands, the entity against which the dialectical growth takes place
expands in the same proportion. In ‘Hérodiade’, a stoical consciousness
asserted itself against the values of a natural, spontaneous existence, the
feminine and maternal world of the ‘bel azur’: in ‘Igitur’, a universal
consciousness defines itself in opposition to the forms of natural life
in their most general aspect, against the biological, animal perennity
of the species. In ‘Un coup de dés’, Mallarmé invents a new symbol to
designate the opponent which the Spirit fights in vain; he calls it by the
Baudelairian world ‘Abîme’. As is usually the case in Mallarmé’s borrowings from Baudelaire, the word carries more abstract connotations
and grows more distant from the actual, physical experience from which
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it derives. ‘L’abîme’ designates here whatever, by its very nature, escapes
all conceptualisation or differentiation, whatever cannot be named or
translated into language. It refers to the ineffable, unmediated being of
reality, which fills time and space with an opaque ubiquity. ‘L’abîme’
precedes and survives all events and all things; it has always been in
existence and it will always remain; all substances originate from it and
return there after death. We can only come to know it by changing its
essence; the illusion of movement which we pretend to perceive in it is,
in reality, the indifferent and meaningless agitation of Chaos. Mallarmé
uses the image of a tempestuous sea (‘blanchi / étale / furieux’) to convey
his feeling of a shapeless chaos, utterly devoid of structure, content or
limit, a realm that generates life but destroys whoever tries to inhabit it.
‘Abîme’ is visually represented as the sea, but it is also called ‘aile’ (III),
a ‘wing’ born from and belonging to the abyss, to which it is emphatically
connected by the pronoun ‘la sienne’.113 One remembers the wing as a
Mallarméan key symbol that recurs at the most important moments; at
the beginning of the ‘Ouverture’ to ‘Hérodiade’ and at the ‘dénouement’
of ‘Igitur’. ‘Une Aurore, plumage héraldique . . .’ (‘Hérodiade’) or ‘ce
hôte ailé de la nuit’ (‘Igitur’) becomes, in ‘Un coup de dés’ ‘l’aile . . . par
avance retombée d’un mal à dresser le vol’. The wing represents an eternally frustrated desire to inhabit, so to speak, the abyss – as only winged
creatures, freed from gravity, can have the illusion of doing. It symbolises
the attraction which the ubiquity of ‘l’Abîme’ never ceases to exercise on
us, even when we know that, by giving in to this attraction, we will be
falling to our death. The ‘wing’ of the ‘abyss’ designates the ambiguous
relationship between consciousness and its objects; they are the cause and
the aim of consciousness, but also its torment and its death.
Mallarmé’s thought will thus assert itself against this entity ‘Abîme
/ aile’ and try to transform it into something accessible to the human
mind. In the visual logic of the picture, this implies that the ‘abyss’, or
the sea, must become the object that ‘negates’ the sea, namely a ship –
an image which is completed by the metamorphosis of the ‘wing’ into a
sail. When a universal consciousness has succeeded in penetrating into
the innermost recesses of ‘l’Abîme’, it will transform the unknowable
ocean into the miraculous object that allows us to walk on the waves.
Consciousness trying to assimilate its very opposite is visually represented by the metamorphosis of the sea itself into a ship:
L’Aîme . . .
très à l’intérieur résume
l’ombre enfouie dans la profondeur par cette voile alternative
jusqu’adapter
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à l’envergure
sa béante profondeur en tant que la coque
d’un bâtiment114
The ultimate shipwreck will occur when this new entity, the ‘abyss’ of
the sea changed into a ship by the action of consciousness will, in its
turn, disappear in the waves.
Page III consists exclusively of objects, but, on the top of page IV, the
poet, ‘le Maâtre’, appears on the scene, as the man who has reached the
level of a universal consciousness. His chosen and specific task consists
of changing the unmediated being115 of the ‘Abîme’ into a conscious and
mediate entity. If he refuses this challenge and accepts instead to submit
passively to the immediate attraction of the Mallarméan ‘Abîme’ (if, in
the language of ‘Un coup de dés’, he chooses to ‘jouer . . . la partie / au
nom des flots’) his defeat is no less certain. To accept the abyss without
opposition is, in fact, a devious way to give in to the attraction of nonbeing. As opposed to the gloriously absurd act of ‘Un coup de dés’, this
would be a shameful ‘naufrage . . . sans nef’, a sign of senility:
Naufrage cela
direct de l’homme
sans nef
n’importe
Où vaine
Instead, the poet chooses the road of consciousness, in full awareness of
the danger this road involves. Indeed, it is by becoming fully aware of the
danger of its predicament that the mind reaches the highest point of development. At the moment of ultimate crisis, it can no longer maintain any
illusions as to the outcome of the struggle; consequently, its purpose no
longer consists of coming to terms, as it were, with the abyss, of piloting
skilfully the ship it has constructed and leading it safely to its destination.
‘Jadis, il empoignait la barre’ (IV), but now that he knows he is about
to be annihilated, the poet can only count on the finality of this very
knowledge as a means to transcend his finite condition; the statement of
his desperate condition is the only determining prediction he can make:
(Faerie Queene, Bk III, canto VI)
Le Maâtre
inférant
de cette conflagration à ses pieds
Que se prepare
L’unique Nombre qui ne peut pas être un autre . . .
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This supreme effort of the mind is not prompted, as Maurice Blanchot
seems to think,116 by the desire to demonstrate the mind’s freedom in
making its own decision to die at the moment of its choice. The illusion
of a ‘free’ death has disappeared ever since, in ‘Igitur’, personal and
individual death has become part of a larger movement. Moreover, it is
equally impossible at this level of consciousness to resort to the ‘trick’
of stoicism and to console oneself from finitude with the formal knowledge of one’s mortality. The ‘Master’ who appears in ‘Un coup de dés’
is not Hérodiade grown to cosmic dimensions. The positive act of the
Spirit, the symbolic throw of the dice, guarantees neither freedom of
the will, nor the survival of consciousness; one may well wonder what
differentiates it from the resigned acceptance of a finite existence, which
Mallarmé so scornfully rejects: ‘Naufrage cele, direct de l’homme . . .’
The answer to this question is suggested on page V of ‘Un coup de
dés’ and developed in the sections that follow. By making his decision
in favour of thought and of the poetic work, man creates for himself an
extremely tenuous entity: the unreal and fragile time of the poetic fiction.
The poet, or thinker, is a creature in a suspended state, whose downfall
is no longer immediate – in the temporal as well as in the philosophical
sense of the term – since the language of his thought stands between him
and the fulfilment of his destiny. The act of thought does not simply
postpone his death to a future point in time; in the realm of the mind,
a determined future is already a present and, consequently, a delay of
this kind would be of no avail. Rather, thought as Mallarmé conceives
of it engenders time as the mediating entity between consciousness and
the chaos of immediate reality. The language of thought contains time
as a substance in which consciousness can remain suspended. Within
this temporal substance can take place the ‘lege à quelqu’un’ which,
already in ‘Igitur’, characterise the historicity of a universal consciousness. Those ‘legacies’, repeated and ‘immemorial’ acts, create the possibility of a future by allowing for the existence of a future ‘inheritor’
(‘l’ultérieur démon immémorial’), capable of receiving the legacy.
From page V of ‘Un coup de dés’ on, Mallarmé’s metaphors suggest
this ‘rythmique suspens du sinistre’ which constitutes his final conception of poetic thought. The final determination (‘le Nombre’) becomes,
in a sense, less important than the period of time that separates the decision to throw the dice from the act itself. Two key words introduce us
in this area of suspended time: ‘hésite’ (on p. IV) and ‘Fiançailles’ (on p.
V), both referring to transitory stages that precede decisive and irrevocable actions. Although Mallarmé uses the terms with great precision, the
passage requires a particularly careful reading, all the more since this is
a point on which the commentators are in total disagreement.
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The sentence under discussion, stripped of all subordinate developments, reads as follows: ‘le Maître . . . / hésite . . . / plutôt que de jouer
la partie au nom des flots . . . / ancestralement à n’ouvrir pas la main’
(pp. IV-V). The choice, or the hesitation before choosing, does not
occur (as most commentators seem to think) between the alternatives:
‘jouer la partie au nom des flots’ or ‘ouvrir la main’.117 The possibility
of yielding passively to the power of ‘l’Abîme’ (‘jouer la partie au nom
des flots’) has been discarded without any trace of hesitation on page IV,
reaffirming an attitude which Mallarmé has consistently adopted since
‘Hérodiade’. It appears here only as a parenthesis, destined to set off, by
contrast, the heroic attitude of the Master against the weakness of the
‘barbe soumise’ (IV). The syntax is unambiguous: rather than to side
with the waters of the sea, the Master chooses to hesitate; he hesitates
not to open his hand (‘il hésite . . . à n’ouvrir pas la main’) which can
only mean that he does indeed open his hand and throws the dice.118 No
doubt exists that the hero will make this choice, and Mallarmé could
have written, without changing the meaning: ‘le Maître . . . / plutôt que
de jouer la partie au nom des flots . . . / ouvre la main’. This, however,
would have conferred upon the verb ‘ouvrir’ the function of an immediate action without temporal content, whereas the distinctive virtue of
the act of thought stems from the fact that it engenders time. The ‘suspended’ quality of thought is expressed by a phrase such as ‘hésite . . . à
ne pas’. Suspended movement characterises the entire text; it consists of
nothing but suspended sentences that qualify, by constant appositions,
one single main suspended sentence stretching over nine pages: ‘Un coup
de dés . . . jamais . . . n’abolira . . . le hasard.’
As long as it exists in this suspended state, the mind is promised to
(‘fiançailles’) the ultimate destruction which takes place on page IX:
‘Choit / la plume. . .’. Meanwhile, it can gamble against this destiny and
attempt, as a ‘chance oiseuse’, the act of thought. The battle is hopeless,
for the dice have been loaded from the start; the mind tries to reduce
to its own, distinctive mode of existence an entity (l’Abîme) which, per
definition, contains all things, including the powers that try to negate
and to overcome it. Consequently, when the mind chooses to fight the
abyss, it cannot even be certain of the freedom of its own decision. The
nature of the agent who undertakes the battle remains ambiguous, to
such an extent that we cannot know who is acting: man (‘le Maître’, or
‘l’aïeul’) in his own right, or the abyss itself, the sea, through man:
La mer par l’aieul tentant ou l’aïeul contre la mer
une chance oiseuse
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At any rate, to us, the action of throwing the dice appears as a free act
aimed against the ‘sea’. Language and thought arise from the resistance
we meet within this struggle. The immediate reality of ‘l’Abîme’ itself,
however, meets with no resistance, for all things are contained within it;
the Master (‘l’aïeul’) acts against, (‘contre’) the sea by means of (‘par’).
Language, thought and poetry all partake of the order of the ‘against’;
therefore, they appear, by intent if not in fact, as the freest of all possible acts. Nevertheless, the ‘Abîme’, which possesses and dominates all
things, also dominates the mind: ‘Nous savons, captifs d’une formule
absolue, que certes n’est que ce qui est’ (‘La musique et les lettres’, p.
647). Thought can only exist within an illusionary, mediate kind of
freedom; it has to give up the absolute freedom of chaos by the very fact
that it chooses to act against that by means of which it exists. This inherent paradox makes human thought into the most fragile of acts. In spite
of this inner weakness, it has to keep asserting itself, for any concession
to the supremacy of the ‘Abîme’ could only be a contemptible defeat, in
contrast to the heroic death of the Spirit (‘passer fier’).
Beyond this heroic effort, the human mind must succumb to the
power of ‘ce qui est’ by which it is held captive. The final union of the
Spirit with the object, the consummation of the ‘Fiançailles’, also marks
the final defeat of the mind – but this defeat can now be referred to in
the future tense, as an act which is still to come: ‘Fiançailles . . . dont /
le voile . . . / chancellera / s’affalera . . .’ (V). As a final instance of an
ambivalence which prevails throughout Mallarmé’s poetry, a word
with desirable associations (‘fiançailles’) designates an event which will
elsewhere be called a catastrophe (‘sinistre’, on p. IX). And the biblical
allusion to the ‘Veil of the Temple’119 strengthens the impression of a
catastrophe that would also be a promise – with this ironic difference
that, in the case of ‘Un coup de dés’, it is rather a promise that turns out
to be a catastrophe. The negative connotations of the verbs ‘chanceler’,
‘s’affaler’, emphasised even more by the word ‘folie’ in apposition,
should leave little doubt as to the general drift of this passage. The end
of the ‘fiançailles’ do not refer to a recovered unity, a reconciliation;
nothing has happened, since the early poems of the Parnasse contemporain, that would enable Mallarmé to refer to Unity of Being in anything
but the most negative terms. The final union between matter and spirit is
a return to a shapeless chaos which the mind cannot conceive of without
losing its balance.
[b]
To a consciousness grown universal, thought appears as a desire for
complete determination, achieved by means of language. It acts as if
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(‘comme si . . .’) it were to reach and maintain a state of full consciousness that extends to all objects. On the other hand, the man who is
supposed to have reached this level of awareness, also knows that he
is merely suspended in the expectation of a destiny about which he has
no illusions, and that his pretended action is mere fiction. The development in ‘Un coup de dés’, introduced by the locution ‘comme si . . .’
re-states in a highly condensed form the considerations on various types
of artistic expression gathered in the Divagations. Mallarmé carefully
introduces the poetic fiction (‘comme si . . .’) into the dramatic action of
the poem only after the frailty and ineffectiveness of poetic thought have
been well established; the main sentence has already stated ‘Un coup de
dés . . . jamais . . . n’abolira’, and the catastrophic consequences of the
decision have been clearly announced. The passage in italics (from p.
VI to p. IX) covers the period of suspended motion during which poetic
invention takes place. It corresponds to the search for a language rigorous enough to abolish the chaotic indetermination of reality. When, on
page IX, the negative statement is completed:
Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard
the ‘state of fiction’ comes abruptly to a halt.120
The word choice on page VI indicates that the action now takes place
in the realm of language: ‘insinuation’, ‘silence’, ‘hurle’ all have connotations with speech or, at least, with sound. The passage refers to the
synthesis between poetry and music. ‘Une insinuation simple / au silence
enroulée avec ironie’ constitutes a perfect description of the indirect and
hermetic style of Mallarmé’s later poetry, the utmost refinement his literary style was able to reach. Since those experiments tend to equal the universality of music, we can assume that ‘le mystère / précipité / hurlé / dans
quelque proche tourbillon d’hilarité et d’horreur’ represents, in contrast
to the ‘silence’ of poetry, the sound of music – or rather, more specifically,
Wagner’s attempt to achieve a synthesis between music and poetry.121 If
this synthesis were accomplished, not by subordinating, as in Wagner, the
poetic language to music, but by incorporating the universality of musical
language into poetry, then it would become possible to ‘forget the old
distinction between Music and Literature’ and to consider them both
as ‘la face alternative . . . d’un phénomène, le seul, je l’appellerai l’Idée’
(‘La musique et les lettres’, p. 649). As a result of this synthesis between
poetic and musical language, the violent motion on page V (‘chanceler,
s’affaler’) is changed into the momentary safety of ‘voltiger’. Instead of
sinking into the depths (‘s’ensevelir aux écumes originelles’, p. IX), the
poetic fiction now remains suspended over the threatening abyss:
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Voltage autour du gouffre
sans le joncher
ni fuir
Like the poetic act in the ‘Minuit’ section of ‘Igitur’, Mallarmé’s synthesis between lyric poetry and music is able to suspend, for a moment,
the imminent downfall of consciousness. But language cannot remain
isolated and private; it must grow to reach a higher degree of universality. Being essentially ‘solitary’ – ‘plume solitaire éperdue’ – lyric poetry is
unable to accomplish by itself this transition towards a greater universality; this requires a more dramatic form of poetry. Only sounds and purely
linguistic actions appeared on page VI, but on the next page (which represents drama), the symbolic objects are arranged in a dramatic patern.
They combine and react in the midst of changing situations; a human
protagonist appears: the ‘prince amer de l’écueil’, identified by most exegetes as Hamlet, but who also resembles Villiers and most of all Igitur.
By becoming more objective and more dramatic, the poetic language has
widened in scope; it now contains the history of its own development
in a well ordered and controlled form. This transformation is visually
represented by the metamorphosis of the sea in the velvet of Igitur’s hat
(‘toque de minuit’) (p. VII).122 The union of the feather (or pen) (‘plume’)
with the sea (or hat) symbolises the successful accomplishment of the
supreme Work that would combine the virtues of lyric poetry, music and
drama. However, by reaching so closely to its final aim, the mind has also
come dangerously close to its destruction. The poetic work is now said to
be ‘en opposition au ciel / trop / pour ne pas marquer . . . / quiconque . . .
/ s’en coiffe . . . / en foudre’. The visual image is that of a feather on a hat
that attracts lightning like the mast of a ship, by standing out too boldly
against the sky ‘trop . . . en opposition au ciel’).123 As long as it remained
solitary and private, the poetic consciousness could remain suspended
above its destiny, but when, by the sheer power of reflection, it draws
near to its goal, it freezes into immobility (‘la plume . . . que la rencontre
. . . immobilise . . .’) and is caught again in the power of gravity. The
annihilating power of the ‘Abîme’, momentarily suspended by the action
of poetic fiction, instantaneously destroys it, as in a flash of lightning.
In the flash of its downfall, however, the Work reveals a glimpse
(‘scintillement de l’aigrette . . .’, p. VIII) of what it could have been. The
Book, symbolised as a rock on page VIII, would, unlike the abyss of the
ocean, have constituted a foundation on which the Spirit could have
erected its dwelling place. Instead, it is merely a ‘faux manoir / tout de
suite / évaporé en brumes’. There only appears the ironic, taunting image
of the ballerina:
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Une statue mignonne ténébreuse debout
en sa torsion de sirène
Like the dancer symbolising the impossible union between drama and
poetry (see p. 98), the ‘statue mignone ténébruese’ announces the ultimate defeat of poetic fiction. Her appearance is followed by the destruction of all consciousness:
Choit
la plume . . .
s’ensevelir
aux écumes originelles
Everything returns to the ‘neutralité identique du gouffre’ where no distinctive forms of thought or of language can survive.
[c]
τοˋ μηˋ δũνοˋν ποτε πω̃ς αʼˊν τις λαˊθοι;
(Heraklites, Fragment 16)
Page XI of ‘Un coup de dés’ begins with the word ‘excepté’, a sudden
transition which has been accurately compared to similar movements
in other poems by Mallarmé when, in spite of the total negativity of
what goes before, a certain hope nevertheless seems to assert itself. In
‘Un coup de dés’, also, something ‘endures that the poets create’, but
this ‘something’ is very different from Mallarmé’s original intent. The
‘ship’ (‘bâtiment’) and the ‘rock’ have vanished; only the constellation
remains, ‘froide d’oubli et de désuétude’, but in a realm so remote that
it is even more alien than the sea. Like the sea, it is located beyond the
reach of mediating distinctions, ‘aussi loin que l’endroit fusionne avec
l’au delà’. Like the ocean, the heavens are an abyss where the poet
cannot hope to build or to dwell.
Still, because nothing else survives and endures beyond the failure of
his enterprise, the constellation of his work has to be the sole justification
for the poet’s ceaseless striving. ‘Un coup de dés’ is finished, in fact, on
page IX, and we can only wonder whose voice survives and pronounces
the kind of prophetic chorus that follows the dramatic action. This
question, perhaps, is precisely what should remain, as the essence of all
questions. In the description of the constellation as ‘veillant / doutant
/ roulant / brilliant / et méditant’ doubt is certainly the most important word. We have seen Mallarmé’s poetry and his thought progress
step by step, relentlessly, always undermining the apparent certainties
they have reached, accepting no truth but their own. ‘The progress (of
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consciousness) towards (its) aim . . . knows no rest, and it will not pause
at any previous stopping place’;124 Mallarmé’s works seem to be possessed by this unhalting motion; even the most rigorous and hard-earned
convictions are always again put in doubt. Here, on the last page of ‘Un
coup de dés’, doubt appears in its purest form, in a region of the mind so
advanced that we can no longer conceive of the entity to be called into
question. The persistent dissatisfaction of the mind opens always new
spirals in the growth of consciousness. Poetic language endures forever,
as the eternal calling into question of Being, of τοˋ μηˋ δũνοˋν ποτε.
Notes
1. S. Mallarmé, ‘Letter to Verlaine’, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. H. Mondor
and G. Jean-Aubrey, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1945),
p. 663. All page numbers for quotations from Mallarmé given in the text
and notes refer to this edition, unless otherwise specified.
2. Ibid.
3. This is still true of such recent books as Leon Cellier’s Mallarmé et la
morte qui parle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959), itself
founded in part on the books of Charles Mauron, Introduction à la psychanalyse de Mallarmé (Neuchâtel, 1950) and A. Ayda, Le drame
intérieur de Stéphane Mallarmé (Istanbul, 1955). All those books contain
interesting information but remain quite remote from the work.
4. E. Noulet, L’oeuvre poétique de Stéphane Mallarmé (Paris: Droz, 1950),
Gardner Davies, Les tombeaux de Mallarmé (Paris: J. Corti, 1950), Vers
un explication rationelle du ‘Coup De Dés’ (Paris: J. Corti, 1953),
Mallarmé et le mythe solaire (Paris: J Corti, 1959).
5. In La nouvelle revue francaise (November 1926). For examples of doubtful passages see p. 56.
6. See p. 59 for more details on this point.
7. See Henri Mondor, Vie de Mallarmé (Paris: Gallimard, 1941), p. 301.
8. S. Mallarmé, Vers et prose (Paris: Librairie Académique Perrin et Cie.,
1893), described in Oeuvres, p. 1338.
9. The tendency to ‘debunk’ Mallarmé in this fashion has played a not negligible part in recent Mallarmé criticism. A book by Charles Chassé, Les
clés de Mallarmé (Paris: Aubier, 1954), claims that Mallarmé’s poems are
merely erotic or scatological scenes, written in a hermetic jargon to which
the key can be found in the use he made of Littré. In spite of its obvious
vulgarity, the book stirred up a lively controversy, in which no one seems
to have sufficiently stressed that Mallarmé’s use of double entente goes
back to a long tradition in French medieval and Renaissance poetry, and
that the presence of a trivial, ‘realistic’ element in a poem does not dispense [from] one of looking for another, more elevated statement, as well
as for a possibly deliberate tension between both levels of meaning.
10. Henri Mondor, Mallarmé lycéen (Paris: Gallimard, 1954).
11. Mallarmé remembers the theme as late as in 1895, when he writes: ‘La
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12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
111
première en date, la nature, Idée tangible pour intimer quelque réalité aux
sens frustes et, par compensation directe, communiquait à ma jeunesse
une ferveur que je dis passion comme, son bûcher, les jours évaporés an
majestueux suspens, elle allume avec le virginal espoir d’en défendre
l’interprétation au lecteur d’horizons . . .’ (‘Bucolique’, p. 402).
The same vocabulary will soon reappear in a very different context, for
instance ‘ostensoir’ and ‘hosanna’ in ‘Les fleurs’.
In the early 1863 version: a perceptive commentary by Georges Poulet on
this variant appears in La distance intérieure (Paris: Plon, 1952), pp. 306
ff.
As in ‘Les fleurs’: ‘La terre jeune encore et vierge de désastres . . .’ or in
‘Las de l’amer repos . . . l’enfance / Adorable des bois de roses sous l’azur
/ Naturel. . .’.
Now most easily found in S. Mallarmé, Correspondance 1862–1871, ed.
Henri Mondor with the assistance of J. P. Richard (Paris: Gallimard,
1959), Letter CXXIX, p. 258.
‘Vraiment, j’ai bein peur de commencer . . . par oû notre pauvre et sacré
Baudelaire a fini’ (ibid., p. 259).
‘[Q]uel titre abominable que la Décadence, et comme il serait temps de
renoncer à tout ce qui y ressemble!’ This statement, however, is from
1886, in a letter to Leo d’Orfer (p. 1442).
Letter to Cazalis from April 1866, Correspondance, 1. CIV, p. 207.
In Oeuvres, p. 1445, also in Les lettres, numéro special sur Mallarmé
(Paris: Librairie des Lettres, 1948), p. 18.
Henri Mondor, Histoire d’un faune (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), pp. 86 ff.
Oeuvres, p. 1439.
G. Flaubert, Salammbô, ed. E Maynial (Paris: Garnier), pp. 210–12.
Ibid., p. 201.
Ibid., p. 211.
Except, possibly, for the extraordinarily flat ‘Temps bizarre, en effet . . .’
(p. 46, 1. 62) which stands out almost comically among such condensed
diction.
Flaubert, Salammbô, p. 211.
Ibid., pp. 208, 55, 323, 347.
Ibid., pp. 226, 12.
Ibid., p. 200.
Ibid., p. 51.
‘Elle prenait ses conceptions pour des réalités; elle acceptait comme vrais
en eux-mêmes de purs symbols et jusqu’á des manières de langage, distinction qui n’était pas non plus toujours bien nette pour le prêtre’. This
passage, in which Flaubert is mocking his heroine, contains a perfect definition of Mallarmé’s poetic method: ‘accepter comme vrais en eux-mêmes
de purs symbols et jusqu’à des manières de langage’.
Ibid., p. 226.
The definitive version of ‘Le pître chatié’ is much later, possibly 1887.
Similar flowers, associated with love and death, appear frequently, of
course, in Poe (see ‘Stance à Hélène’, ‘A Hélène’, ‘Pour Annie’, etc. in
Mallarmé’s translation).
‘Fiole’ has this meaning, for instance, in ‘Igitur’ (p. 439): ‘le Rêve a
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agonisé en cette fiole de verre, pureté, qui renferme la substance du
Néant’; also in ‘Evantail (à Mery Laurent)’ (p. 58):
Voilà comme bon eventail
Te conviens mieux qu’une fiole
36. ‘The reflective pattern appears in the line ‘Extase des regards, scintillement
des nimbes’ where the interplay between earth and heaven (out of which
the poetic work originates), is represented by the reflection of the setting
sun in the eyes of man, the inhabitant of the earth (‘le jardin de nos
limbes’). The image comes from Baudelaire’s ‘La vie antérieure’ (‘Aux
couleurs du couchant réflété par mes yeux’), and it reappears in ‘Toast
funêbre’:
Par le carreau qu’allume un soir fier d’y descendre
Retourne vers les feux du pur soleil natal!
37. As, for instance, in Mauron, Introduction à la psychanalyse de Mallarmé.
38. Such as the very first line of the ‘Scène’, expressing doubt as to whether
Hérodiade is dead or alive: ‘Tuv vis! ou vois-je ici l’ombre d’une princesse?’; or lines 7–8 ‘O femme, un baiser me turait / Si la beauté n’était la
mort. . .’. The metal symbols in 11. 87 ff. use images of buried treasures
reminiscent of the lines in ‘Las de l’amer repos . . .’: ‘creuser par veillée une
fosse nouvelle / Dans le terrain avare et froid de ma cervelle / Fossoyeur
sans pitié. . .’.
39. Valéry remembers this tear in La Jeune Parque, a poem which derives
from ‘Hérodiade’ but reacts against it to the point of taking the exact
counterpart. Whereas Mallarmé’s heroine freezes from a fluid ‘tear’ into a
crystalline ‘jewel’, it is the humidity of a tear which dissolves the frustration of the Jeune Parque and takes her back to life.
40. The figure is doubtlessly closely related to Schahabarim, the priest in
Salammbô, whose superior knowledge enables him to use Salammbô at
his discretion, in order to carry out abstract projects born from the
demands of his own thought.
41. Mallarmé steadily plays on the pun ‘cygne’ (swan) / ‘signe’ (language)
which stems from Villiers’s motte to Tribulat Bonhommet (‘Les cygnes
comprennent les signes’ attributed to Victor Hugo) as well as on ‘plume’
(feather) / ‘plume’ (pen). So, for instance, in the line: ‘elle (la voix) a chanté
. . . signe / Lamentable. . .’. ‘Cygne’ is the common symbol for Hérodiade
and the poet himself. The ‘vieux cygnet’ (1. 93) is Mallarmé who hid his
eyes ‘en sa plume (pen)’ in order to see ‘les diamants élus / D’une étoile
mourante, et qui ne brille plus’, that is to say, who wrote ‘Hérodiade’.
This is a good example of a technique which will become quite frequent
later on; the use of a trivial bad pun to state an insight which can be highly
serious, as tragic as death itself.
42. This is a point where one would welcome a description of the original
manuscript. The blank space after ‘Lamentable!. . .’ could be either of two
things It might merely indicate that line 59 is unfinished, and that
Mallarmé was planning to fill in the space between ‘lamentable’ and ‘le
lit’; blanks of that kind occur in the outline for a late version of the
‘Ouverture’ (see p. 1446). In that case, we can no longer assume that we
are dealing with one single sentence. If, however, as is most likely, the
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blank space is the typographical device that Mallarmé uses rather frequently (cf. ‘L’après-midi d’un faune’, 11. 1, 3, 8, 32, 104; ‘Sonnet’ p. 60
1.1; ‘Hommage (a Puvis de Chavanne)’, p. 72, 1.11) then ‘chante’ is the
transitive verb and ‘lit’ the object of the sentence: ‘Elle a chanté . . . le lit’.
43. A similar use of the symbol ‘lit’ occurs in the later sonnet ‘Une dentelle
s’abolit . . .’:
A n’entr’ouvrir comme un blasphème
Qu’absence éternelle de lit. (p. 74)
44. Here de Man crosses through ‘ontological’ in his original manuscript and
substitutes ‘existential’ – Ed.
45. The syntax of lines 60 and 61 (‘Tel, inutile et si claustral n’est pas le lin /
Qui des rêves par plis n’a plus le cher grimoire’) is particularly difficult,
and again, in the absence of a correct knowledge of the state of completion of the manuscript, one can only conjecture. The most convincing
hypothesis is to read the verb ‘a’ in ‘Qui des rêves par plis n’a plus le cher
grimoire’ as meaning: to posses, to contain: the bed no longer ‘contains’
the book. ‘Des rêves par plis’ should be read as ‘parmi les plis des rêves’;
‘les plis’, in a frequent Mallarméan use of synecdoche, refers to the folded
pages of the book which the poet plans to write, but which he has not
been able to produce; it has remained a dream that failed to appear on the
pages of the book; consequently, the pages have remained a virginal
white. The sentence ‘Tel, inutile et si claustral, n’est pas le lin!’ constitutes
a parenthesis and could be separated from the line that precedes and from
the line that follows by being placed between dashes.
46. In ‘Tombeau (de Verlaine)’, p. 71.
47. ‘L’après-midi d’un faune’, written at approximately the same time as
‘Hérodiade’, is probably Mallarmé’s masterpiece, a poem which is complete, wonderfully complex and intricate without showing, like ‘Hérodiade’
and ‘Igitur’, the strains of a difficult, experimental creation. If one wanted
to give a balanced picture of Mallarmé’s work as a whole, for the purpose
of reaching a qualified aesthetic judgement, then ‘L’après-midi d’un faune’
would have to take a predominant place among his works. Since my
purpose, however, is to trace the development of his poetic consciousness,
the emphasis has to fall on the works that constitute the articulations, the
links in the general scheme of his growth. Precisely because they fall short,
aesthetically speaking, of the poet’s high demands, texts like ‘Hérodiade’
or ‘Igitur’ reveal the mechanics of Mallarmé’s strategy much more openly
than other, more controlled poems. ‘L’après-midi d’un faune’, however,
contains nothing in style or in statement that sets it off against ‘Hérodiade’
as an alternative possibility, a different conception of poetic language. It
is as difficult and as nihilistic a poem as ‘Hérodiade’. The fact that it
makes an ironic use of a literary convention – the pastoral – in order to
state the necessity to renounce the temptations associated with this convention, makes it into a less clearly demonstrative text than ‘Hérodiade’
– though a much more aesthetically satisfying one. What has been said
about ‘Hérodiade’ as a document that illustrates Mallarmé’s attempt to
move beyond the aesthetic conceptions of the Parnasse would have to be
repeated in connection with ‘L’après-midi d’un faune’ – but the exegesis
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48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
The Post-Romantic Predicament
would have to be more involved and, like the text, more oblique. Besides,
it is perhaps less objectionable to ‘murder to dissect’ a text like the
‘Ouverture ancienne’ or ‘Igitur’, which have something of a laboratory
specimen about them anyway, rather than as delicate an organism as
‘L’après-midi d’un faune’.
Guy Michaud, Mallarmé, l’homme et l’oeuvre (Paris: Hatier Boivin,
1953), p. 84.
Jacques Gengoux, Le symbolisme de Mallarmé (Paris: Nizet, 1950), p. 16.
Antoine Adam, ‘Premieres etapes d’un itinéraire’, in Les lettres, numero
special sur Mallarmé, pp. 127 ff.; Davies, Vers une explication rationelle
du ‘Coup de dés’.
The textual difficulty was mentioned earlier. Thanks to the kindness of
Professor Henri Mondor and Mm. Vve Bonniot, who guards over most of
Mallarmé’s manuscripts in the very house in Valvins where the poet died,
I have been able to consult the original manuscript used by Dr Bonniot to
establish the version which now appears in the Pléiade edition. The aspect
of the manuscript is quite different from the printed text; it is very clearly
still a working copy, far from finished, with numerous corrections and
tentative readings. Many deleted passages remain clearly readable and
help towards the understanding of several details. Among the Scolies
Bonniot has inserted some of the deleted passages, but he has suppressed
others. Moreover, the sequence and subdivisions which he has suggested
are by no means imperative; section III, for instance, entitled ‘Vie d’Igitur’,
seems to belong at the beginning rather than where it now appears. A
truly detailed exegesis of ‘Igitur’ is impossible as long as no reliable critical
edition is available. For a general commentary, however, the present
edition, with some reservations and additions, can be used, and the
unpublished parts do not alter the interpretation which we suggest.
Letter to Cazalis from 14 May 1867, Correspondance, p. 242.
‘Conference sur Villiers’, p. 481.
‘L’action restreinte’, p. 369.
Roman numerals refer to the corresponding sections in the Pléiade edition
of the Oeuvres (pp. 433–43); arabic numerals refer to paragraphs in each
section.
Letter to Cazalis, Correspondance, p. 240.
The passage can be read in conjunction with a letter to Villiers, first published by Henri Mondor in La table ronde (August, 1952), pp. 9–15 (now
in Correspondance, p. 259), where the following lines appear: ‘vous serez
horrifie d’apprendre que je suis arrivé à l’Idée de l’Univers par la seule
sensation (et que, par exemple, pour garder une notion ineffaceable du
néant pur, j’ai du inspirer à mon cerveau la sensation du vide absolu). Le
miroir qui m’a réfléchi l’Être a été le plus souvent l’Horreur, et vous
devinez si j’expire cruellement le Diamant des Nuits insomniées. . .’. See,
on this letter, an interesting article by Alan W. Raitt, ‘Autour d’une letter
de Mallarmé’, Revue des Sciences humaines (Université de Lille), numéro
special: Autour du Symbolisme, I, 1955, pp. 141–56.
The fragment from Les lettres, p. 24, is actually a passage from the original manuscript deleted by Mallarmé. The exegetic value of this text is a
good example of the wealth of information still available in the manu-
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script of ‘Igitur’. Quotations from the fragment are indicated as (Frg.).
58. One may well remember the line from Baudelaire: ‘Mon gosier de métal
parle toutes les langues’ (l’Horloge).
59. The passage seems to correspond to the particularly obscure sentence ‘il
n’a jamais alors indiqué pareille conjoncture’ (I, 2), which then would
mean: he has never before revealed an encounter of such unique
quality. . . .
60. This important development does not appear at this moment in the
Pléiade version of ‘Igitur’, where it finds its place under section II
(‘L’escalier’). Mallarmé repeats it in various places; the following two
formulations are perhaps less often quoted: ‘le rapport (dans l’histoire)
consiste en ceci que les deux états auront existé séparément pour une confrontation par l’esprit’ (‘Catholicisme’, p. 394); ‘il est impossible qu’un
artiste, qui a mis une main aussi personelle sur toute l’antériorité, et ce
doit être l’acte premier de quiconque est fort, ne crêe à son tour que des
matériaux’ (Letter to E. Joubert of 30 June 1893, in S. Mallarmé, Lettres
et autographes, présentés par B. Dujardin (Bruxelles: ed. L’Acran du
Monde, 1952).
61. In apposition to the word ‘frémissement’ Mallarmé introduces two qualifications leading towards secondary themes with which we do not have to
concern ourselves here. By saying that thought which makes the past
present in memory is ‘softened (amortie) in memory’ he seems to indicate
that our ability to forget selectively preserves only those elements of the
past that are necessary to us, as if the pressure of memory had to be softened to remain effective. The comparison of the ‘frémissement de la
pensée’ to a woman’s hair (‘chevelure languisanté’) introduces an erotic
symbol and points to a link between ‘Igitur’ and ‘Hérodiade’. The combination oubli / chevelure refers to a passage in ‘Hérodiade’ where the two
are associated in their proper dialectic: the erotic as natural, spontaneous
forgetting opposed to the erotic as reflection and memory, the metamorphosis of Hérodiade’s hair into ametallic surface (see p. 49):
Je veux que mes cheveux qui ne sont pas des fleurs
A répandre l’oubli des humaines douleurs
Mais de l’or, à jamais vierge des aromates
Dans leurs éclats cruels et dans leurs pâleurs mates,
Observent la froideur stérile du metal,
Vous ayant réflétés, joyaux du mur natal,
Armes, vases depuis ma solitaire enface.
The erotic theme is much less apparent in ‘Igitur’ than in ‘Hérodiade’,
although it is always present, later included in the symbol of the bird (see
p. 73).
62. One the sheaf of papers of the manuscript, Mallarmé has written the two
words: stérilité / insomnie.
63. The reflected return of the knowledge of the non-self within ourselves is
expressed by stating that consciousness sees itself by the light of the
knowledge it has gained of the external object (time); this light, however,
is not a stable light like that of the stars, for it vanishes before the progress
of knowledge, which proceeds by repeated negation. Consciousness
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64.
65.
66.
67.
68.
69.
70.
71.
72.
73.
The Post-Romantic Predicament
discovers itself in the experience of this vanishing clarity: ‘mais à ce qui
luit et va, expirant en soi, s’éteindre, elle se voit qui le port encore. . .’ (II,
1).
The original manuscript carries here the deleted sentence: ‘Que pouvait-il
être?’
‘. . . ma lutte terrible avec ce vieux et méchant plumage, térrassé, heureusement, Dieu’. Letter to Cazalis, Correspondance, p. 241.
‘Toast funêbre’, p. 55.
The possibility of this attitude, which Mallarmé associates with religious
belief, is probably suggested by the obscure image of the spider web (‘le fil
arachnéen’) (II, 3): a ‘pattern (trame)’ (C. 1) which represents the shape of
doubt, leading to the suspicion that a certain form of individual afterlife
might be possible. The symbols is too little developed to be truly intelligible and meaningful, but it nevertheless has many characteristics of
Mallarmé’s most successful symbols. It fits visually within the setting that
is being described, and it works on the metaphysical as well as on the
familiar, trivial level of meaning. Since the purpose of the image is to
evoke the almost sterile cleanliness of absolute truth, the cobweb, the
unmistakable sign of poor housekeeping, indicates the opposite. Similarly,
the next sentence speaks of ‘La poussière qu’on receuille pour obtenir un
soi propre’, ‘propre’ being used in the trivial sense, which then becomes
the ‘propre soi’ of the reflective consciousness. Finally, the spider web is
also an example of a subtle and complex structure which is, however, of
natural and animal origin, as opposed to the human-made ruff which
symbolises the work of art and decorates the bust at the end of the passage
(II, 9; C, 2; D, 3).
The end of II, 3 describes future existence as the repetition of the moments
of truth which mark the itinerary of the spirit in growth (the ‘nights’, ‘les
nuits successives’). Although they are ‘similar’ in structure, the nights are
not ‘known’ as a particular consciousness knows its object. They are
therefore described as ‘similar nights . . . layers forever separated (from
those nights) and probably not known by them’. Every partial consciousness ignores the contents of its successor. The image of the ‘heraldic lock’
is one of the references which has sent many commentators looking for
occult sources in Mallarmé (see Gengoux, Le symbolisme de Mallarmé,
and Chassé, Les clés de Mallarmé, a.o.). It is our contention that the
passage refers to Villiers rather than to the hermetic tradition; if a philosophical label applied to Mallarmé, he should be called a rational idealist,
opposed to any form of occult wisdom. On this matter, the prose-text
‘Magie’ is quite explicit (p. 399).
G.W.F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, herausgegeben von J.
Hoffmeister (Hamburg, 1952), Einleitung, 8, p. 69.
Jean Hyppolite, Genèse et structure de la phénomenologie de l’esprit de
Hegel (Paris: Aubier, 1946), p. 23.
Quoted by Mondor in Vie de Mallarmé, p. 222.
Henri Mondor, Eugène Lefébure (Paris: Gallimard, 1951).
Not taking into account translations of fragments, such as those made by
Jean Wahl in his book La conscience malheureuse dans la philosophie de
Hegel, which dates from 1923.
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74. In what remains of Mallarmé’s library, which we were able to consult
briefly in Valvins, no books by or on Hegel can be found, but many books
were lost during the last war. If he tried to read Augusto Véra’s
Introduction à la philosophie de Hegel (Paris, 1855), he could not have
found very much there, and certainly none of the themes that appear in
‘Igitur’.
75. See A. Koyré, ‘Rapport sur l’état des etudes Hegeliennes en France’, in
Verhandlungen des ersten Hegelkongress vom 22 bis 25 April im Haag
(Haarlem, 1931).
76. See M. Rosca, L’Influence de Hegel sur Taine (Paris, 1928).
77. Koyré, ‘Rapport sur l’état des etudes Hegeliennes en France’, p. 81.
78. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, V, Idealismus, pp. 177 ff.
79. Wahl, La conscience malheureuse dans la philosophie de Hegel, p. 66.
80. ‘Hegel ist so wenig wie vor ihm Kant und nach ihm der späte Schelling der
seit langem verfestigten Macht der didaktischen Systematik der
Schulmetaphysik Herr geworden’. Martin Heidegger, ‘Hegels Begriff
der Erfahrung’, in Holzwege (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1951),
pp. 184 ff.
81. See Koyré, ‘Rapport sur l’état des etudes Hegeliennes en France’.
82. Revue des deux Mondes, XXXI, 15 February 1861, pp. 812–56.
83. Guy Michaud, Mallarmé, l’homme et l’oeuvre, p. 55. The same suggestion
is made by Antoine Adam, ‘Premieres étapes d’un itinéraire’, p. 127. the
most detailed study of Mallarmé’s Hegelian sources can be found in a well
documented article by L.J. Austin, ‘Mallarmé et le rêve du livre’, in
Mercure de France, CCCXVII, January-April 1953, pp. 81–108. This
study reaches conclusions different from ours, since the author insists on
the determining role of Lefébure and of the E. Scherer article from the
Revue des deux Mondes. From a purely historical point of view, the main
shortcoming of the article is that it seems to be unaware of the Hegelian
elements in the work of Villiers de l’Isle Adam, when the analogies in
vocabulary and thought are much more striking in the case of Villiers than
of Scherer – regardless even of the much greater weight which Villiers’s
opinion would carry for Mallarmé. As for the part played by Lefébure at
Cannes, the two friends discussed metaphysics in very general terms.
Attention should also have been directed to the elements which could be
called ‘Hegelian’ in Mallarmé’s early poetry, when he did not even know
the philosopher’s name. On a more general plane, the study suffers from
an over-literal conception of what a ‘source’ can be, since it goes from the
source to the work instead of doing what is necessary in this case, and go
from the work to the source. A rather conventional image of Hegel’s philosophy, too rapidly equated with a certain kind of idealism of which it is,
in fact, a critique, interferes with a correct interpretation of the real filiations which the article reveals.
84. Mondor, Eugène Lefébure, pp. 197, 223 implicitly.
85. Ibid., pp. 247 and 251 ff.
86. There appears in the Lefébure correspondence a curious passage which
must take its place among the sources of ‘Igitur’. In a letter dated 23
February 1867 (pp. 240 ff.), Lefébure half-jokingly inquires after his
friend’s progress: ‘les mystérieux cartons en qui gît votre essence distillée
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ont-ils enfin repris la place d’honneur dans le sanctuaire du bahut sculpté?
Et vous a-t-il été donné de voir reparaitre, dans l’obscur miroir qu’étend
la surface de votre table de chêne, noire et torse, la magnificence empouruée d’Hérodiade? Votre chambre devait être terminée pour le ler Janvier,
je cois; cette chère couveuse de votre poésie . . . Je l’entrevois haute, palais
aérien, suspendue sur la forêt des toits, astrologue en effet des magnifiques
étoiles de la poésis, il est assis dans le cuir de Cordoue du grand fauteuil,
les plis de sa robe de chambre imitent les lunes ou des asterisms, et sur sa
tête pointent de vagues élans de long bonnet tandis que, allumant d’une
bougie fatidique le soleil concentre de la lampe, il inaugure, calme, des
nuits grasses de merveilles. A l’entour des cloches qui ont tous une montre
au haut de leur queue sonnent avec ensemble des heures, les demi-heures,
les quart d’heures et les minutes. Dans les chambres environnantes, les
coucous, les pendules, les cartels, les réveille-matin répondent, déclarant
avec emphase le temps, qui grésille encore dans des multitudes de petites
boîtes rondes, pendues au mur, et toutes semblables à celle que Minnet
porte au bout d’un moignon . . .’ (p. 242). Is it not obvious that this
passage reproduces exactly the concrete situation, the arrangement of
objects described ‘Igitur’? All Mallarmé’s poems, from this time on,
describe a group of familiar objects, companions of the semi-hallucinated
sleepless nights of the poet, which become the material representation of
the inward drama acted out by their relationships and inter-reactions.
(See, for instance, ‘Sainte Cecile’ [1865], later called ‘Sainte’; ‘sonnet
allégorique de lui-même’ [1868], later ‘Se purs ongles . . .’; ‘De l’Orient
passé des temps . . .’ [1868], later ‘Quelle soie aux baumes. . .’. If one
admits Michaud’s likely suggestion that there existed as early as 1866, a
first version of the three sonnets ‘Tout orgeuil . . .’, ‘Surgi de la croupe . . .’
and ‘Une dentelle s’abolit . . .’, that would make for three more excellent
examples.)
‘Igitur’ is no exception to this rule and, as always with Mallarmé, comprehension is helped by an exact visualisation of the setting. It would be a
serious error, of course, to consider this visualisation as an exegesis.
Charles Chassé commits this error in Les clés de Mallarmé where, for fear
of being taken in, he falls a prey to the worse of naiveties, and mistakes
subtlety for mere mystification. The difficulty begins precisely beyond the
visualisation, which constitutes the starting-point – but only the startingpoint – of an explication. The scene described by Lefébure contains most
of the elements of ‘Igitur’, the mirror, the candle, draperies, the astronomical symbolism, the night and, most of all, the omnipresence of time
which resounds in the noise of the clocks. Did Mallarmé use Lefébure’s
humorous description as the dramatic setting for his philosophical tale? It
is perhaps more probable that Lefébure is elaborating, in a tone of affectionate parody, on a passage of a previous and missing letter from
Mallarmé (or on a conversation) in which the letter had revealed the plan
for ‘Igitur’. Many themes and images familiar to Mallarmé keep appearing in these letters, sometimes mentioned by Lefébure, sometimes by
Mallarmé. Besides, the two extraordinary letters of that period written by
Mallarmé, one probably dating from 1865, the other from 1 May 1867
(p. 347), the only ones to have been preserved, indicate that Mallarmé
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87.
88.
89.
90.
91.
92.
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would confide in Lefébure with total candour, revealing all his projects
and his most intimate concerns. He rightly considered Lefébure much
more able to understand him than his two other main correspondents of
this period, Aubanel and Cazalis. To judge by the few specimens that have
survived, the letters to Lefébure written between 1865 and 1870 (the tone
becomes much more superficial later) would have exceptional exegetic
value. At any rate, the passage which we have quoted, whether it be an
echo from Mallarmé or Lefébure’s own invention, can be used as the
visual image from which an explication of ‘Igitur’ is to start.
Letter to Lefébure, p. 340; see also Raitt, ‘Autour d’une letter de
Mallarmé’. Later an equally friendly but much more perceptive Mallarmé
will evaluate Villiers with a rigour subtly hidden in a highly charitable
text: ‘Le démon litteraire qui inspira Villiers de l’Isle Adam à ce point fut-il
conscient? Par éclairs peut-être ne voulant effrayer, avec un deploiement
de ses suprêmes consequences qu’il marque, tout de suite . . .’ (‘Conférence
sur Villiers’, p. 481).
Oeuvres, ed. Drouzard, III, p. 117.
Ibid., p. 190. On Villiers’s Hegelianism, see E. Drouzard, ‘L’érudition de
Villiers de l’Isle Adam’, Mercure de France, CCXV, 1 October 1929, pp.
98 ff. Mr Drouzard proves that the Introduction à la philosophie de Hegel
by Véra was one of Villiers’s main sources of information. However, the
previous quotations from ‘Claire Lenoir’ do not come from Véra and this
would indicate that Villiers also had access to other, and better sources.
One can also consult a conscientious thesis by Chr J. C. Van der Meulen,
L’idéalisme de l’Isle Adam (Amsterdam, 1925) which summarises the
extent and the nature of Villiers’s indebtedness, although the author has
only a second-hand knowledge of Hegel. An unpublished Sorbonne thesis
by Harry Goldgar, Villiers and Yeats, re-states this information without
throwing new light on this particular matter.
‘Dans le Langage poétique – ne montrer que la visée du Langage à devenir
beau, et non à exprimer mieux que tout, le Beau . . . et non du Verbe à
exprimer le Beau ce qui est réservé au Traité’ (p. 853). Mallarmé conceived of his work as consisting of introductory books in which he would
study languages as they appear in history; there probably would have been
three books: Conversation, Language and Poetic Language, followed by a
general Treatise, which would in fact have been a Logic.
Maurice Blanchot, L’espace littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), p. 114.
As instances of such beginnings, one could point to:
Tel qu’en lui-même enfin l’éternité le change . . .
Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui . . .
Victorieusement fui le suicide beau . . .
93. Examples of such muted beginnings are, among others,
Le temple enseveili divulgue par la bouche . . . (Le tombeau de
Baudelaire)
Une dentelle s’abolit . . .
A la nue accablante tu . . .
And, to some extent, ‘Un coup de dés’ itself.
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94. This directive does not apply, of course, to ‘Un coup de dés’.
95. Although this is certainly not the place to develop the theme, one should
note how different this conception of music is from the kind of wordmusic generally associated with the symbolist school, especially with
Verlaine’s famous ‘De la musque avant toute chose. . .’. Far from yielding
passively to the immediate seduction of language, as if it were a natural
sound, Mallarmé’s ‘music’ is a conscious strategy using language with
irony and artifice, to increase one’s distance from it.
96. Among many definitions of this undertaking, the following is taken from
‘Crise de Vers’: ‘quelque éclair absolu . . . que, plus ou moins, tous les
livres, contiennent la fusion de quelques redites comptées: même il n’en
serait qu’un – au monde, sa loi – comme la simulent des nations. La différence, d’un ouvrage à l’autre, offrant autant de lecons proposées dans un
immense concours pour le texte véridique, entre les âges dits civilises ou
– letters.’
97. See also ‘Sur l’evolution littéraire, enquête de Julies Huret’ (p. 870), and
‘Sur Verlaine’ (p. 874).
98. The attack is primarily directed against the naturalistic theatre. Mallarmé
had nothing but praise for Zola (see ‘Enquête de Julies Huret’, p. 871) and
the correspondence between Zola and Mallarmé reveals considerable
mutual esteem.
99. J. Scherer, Le ‘Livre’ de Mallarmé (Paris: Gallimard, 1957).
100. See, for instance, ‘Crayonné au théâtre’, ‘Hamlet’, ‘Le genre ou des
moderns’, ‘Planches et feuillets’, ‘Solennité’ and also ‘L’action restreinte’,
‘Catholicisme’, etc.
101. ‘Le théâtre est d’essence supérieure’ (‘Le genre ou des modernes’, p. 312,
2).
102. W. B. Yeats echoes the conventional view when he writes to Dorothy
Wellesley after reading Sturge Moore’s translation of a Mallarmé sonnet:
‘I find it exciting as it shows me the road I and others of my time went for
certain furlongs. It is not the way I go now, but one of the legitimate
roads. He escapes from history, you [Dorothy Wellesley] and I are in
history, the history of the mind’ (Letters on Poetry from W. B. Yeats to
Dorothy Wellesley [Oxford University Press, 1940], p. 149).
103. The image is, in all likelihood inspired by the construction of the Paris
Metro; this adds a very Mallarméan touch of irony, all the more damaging
to contemporary ears – especially if one happens to think of the Moscow
subway.
104. Thus confronted with his times the writer can legitimately ask whether his
effort should not be primarily directed towards the times rather than
towards the work, whether political action should not take precedence
over poetic speculation. In our own age, this has become the very familiar
problem of ‘littérature engagée’ – a problem which should indeed be considered in relation to dramatic media rather than, as in Sartre’s What is
Literature?, in relation to the novel, itself a confusingly ambiguous genre.
Contrary to what is often assumed to be the case, Mallarme was very seriously concerned with this choice. He had the advantage of facing the
problem when he had reached a considerable degree of intellectual maturity. This made it possible for him to avoid the mistake committed by
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many in our own, political half-century, who have recourse to collective,
historical aspects of reality as a means to dodge the problems of their own,
individual consciousness. (I am not thinking so much of Marxist or
pseudo-Marxist attitudes as in Sartre or Lukács – for there, occasional
and obvious bad faith is often merely strategic and, hence, philosophically
harmless – but rather of the veiled exploitation of existential historicism
in Jaspers and Heidegger.) Mallarmé’s attitude on this point is admirably
uncompromising: the way to be present to one’s time begins in total
inwardness, certainly not out of indifference towards history, but because
the urgency of one’s concern demands a lucid self-insight; action will
follow from itself, when this insight has been gained:
‘Ainsi, garde-toi et sois là
La poésie, sacre qui essaie, en de chastes crises isolément, pendant
l’autre gestation en train’ (‘L’action restreinte’, pp. 23–4)
105. Of, for instance, the star-symbolism at the end of the sonnet ‘Se spur
ongles très haut dediant leur onyx . . .’, the use of ‘astre’ in ‘Hérodiade’
and in the sonnet ‘Quand l’ombre menaca de la fatale loi . . .’ the ‘constellation’ in ‘Igitur’ (I, 2) and, of course, at the end of ‘Un coup de dés’.
106. Mallarmé’s own emphasis.
107. ‘Enquête sur l’évolution littéraire’, p. 872.
108. Scherer, Le ‘Livre’ de Mallarmé.
109. Such as Robert Greer Cohn, Mallarmé’s ‘Un coup de dés’: An Exigesis
(New Haven: Yale French Studies, 1949).
110. Davies, Vers une explication rationelle du ‘Coup de dés’, p. 196.
111. The word is used throughout in the sense of Hegel’s ‘Geist’, which is also
how Mallarmé conceives of it in ‘Igitur’: a consciousness which has
become universal by the full knowledge of its own law of development.
The word ‘Esprit’ appears, a.o. on page IV of ‘Un coup de dés’. (The
Roman numerals designate the double pages that form a unit; for instance,
pp. 460 and 461 of the Pléiade edition are numbered III, pp. 462 and 463
IV, etc.)
112.
‘Quand bien même lancé dans des
Circonstances éternelles . . .’ (Un coup de dés, II)
113. The visualisation of the pair ‘Abîme-aile’ is difficult, but the image suggested by Gardner Davies helps (Vers une explication rationelle du ‘Coup
de dés’, pp. 85 ff.). He sees the ‘wing’ as ‘the heavy clouds that press
against the water’, as in the sonnet ‘A la nue accablante tu. . .’. Another
commentator, R.G. Cohn, who generally shows very little concern for the
exact visual pictures on which Mallarmé’s symbolism is based, objects
that this image is poetically impossible; his arguments on this point are
however not convincing (see The Romantic Review, XLVI, 2, Spring
1955, pp. 141–3). As in many other obscure passages of the poem, the
syntactical and pictorial reading suggested by Davies seems convincing
and reasonable – which does not prevent his more general interpretation
from being vague and trivial, or even downright wrong. The same two
commentators also disagree on the previous line ‘plane désespérément’
which Davies reads as an adjectival locution modifying ‘inclinaison’ (de
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l’aile), while Cohn reads ‘plane’ as a verb whose subject would be l’Abîme:
‘l’Abîme / . . . plane désespérément / et couvrant les jaillissements . . . / très
à l’intérieur résume’. While it is certainly more than legitimate to admit
the existence of deliberate grammatical ambiguities, it must be granted
that, here also, Davies’s reading is the better of the two and that the other
can only exist as a remote possibility. Since the page, as the ideogram
clearly indicates, is supposed to show a boat on the verge of capsizing, this
wing (or sail) all too near to a horizontal position (bien trop plan, plane
désespérément) is a foreboding of catastrophe – as anyone who ever
piloted a yawl will testify. It is altogether relevant to ‘Un coup de dés’ that,
at the time he was writing the poem, Mallarmé’s favourite pastime consisted of the sailing of the ‘yole à jamais littéraire’ celebrated by Valéry in
his early poem ‘Valvins’.
Numerous differences appear between the interpretation suggested here
and that of exegetes of ‘Un coup de dés’. Except for a few specific
instances, there is no need to discuss the differences in detail, for they
often stem from discrepancies in method and approach rather than from
the objective aspects of the text.
114. In this passage, the word ‘ombre’ has the same meaning as in ‘Igitur’,
where it designates what remains of Igitur after his death as an individual
person. In the section ‘L’Escalier’ (III, A, C, E) Igitur is always referred to
as ‘l’ombre’. The verb ‘résume’, which also appears in ‘Igitur’, can be correctly translated as ‘containing the essence of’. The ambiguity of ‘voile’
(wing or sail), which is both desire and obstacle, is suggested by the word
‘alternative’. ‘Envergure’ in the etymological sense of the word, refers to
the sails (cf. also Davies, Vers une explication rationelle du ‘Coup de dés’,
p. 91).
115. Perhaps we can console ourselves from the unfelicitous expression ‘unmediated being’ with Spenser’s version, in the language of neo-Platonism, of
Mallarmé’s ‘Abîme’:
For in the wide womb of the world there lyes,
In hateful darkness and in deepe horrore,
An huge enternall Chaos, which supplyes
The substances of natures fruitful progenyes.
All things from thence doe their first being fetch,
And borrow matter whereof they are made;
Which, when as forme and future it does ketch,
Becomes a body, and doth thus invade
The state of life out of the griesly shade.
One could also refer, for a similar intuition, to a passage from Yeats: ‘all
things are [driven] towards the encompassing impersonality of the
opaque, whether it be the blue of heaven or the clay under our feet, and
the opaque is on all sides of us, though ruling with exclusive dominion in
the nadir’ (The Works of William Blake, ed. W.B. Yeats and E.J. Ellis,
‘The Symbolic System’, I, p. 265).
116. Blanchot, L’espace littéraire, pp. 118 ff.
117. The exegeses of Davies (Vers une explication rationelle du ‘Coup de dés’)
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118.
119.
120.
121.
122.
123.
123
and Charles Mauron (in Introduction à la psychanalyse de Mallarmé, pp.
135–62) are founded on this interpretation which is not in accordance
with the textual statement.
If one said, for instance, ‘J’hésite à vous dire la vérité’, it would mean: ‘I
do not (as yet) tell you the truth’; the negative form of the same sentence,
‘J’hésite à ne pas vous dire la vérité’ can only mean ‘I tell you the truth’
and could be replaced by the proposition ‘Je vous dis la vérité’.
Mallarmé used the same allusion in a slightly different sense in ‘Crise de
Vers’ (p. 360, 5); Yeats took the title for a section of his Autobiographies,
‘The Trembling of the Veil’, from Arthur Symons’s translation of this
prose-text.
Grammatically, the locutions, ‘comme si . . .’ (pp. VI and VIII) must refer
to the verb ‘abolira’ (p. V), and state in what manner the abolition of
chance can hope to take place. Davies (Vers une explication rationelle du
‘Coup de dés’, p. 119) relates ‘comme si . . .’ to the verbs ‘chancellera’ and
‘s’affalera’ on p. V, which leads to a less coherent interpretation. This
reading would reduce the key verb ‘abolira’, given such a central position
on p. V, to a mere fill-in, whereas Mallarmé clearly wants the elements of
the main sentence to play as prominent a part as possible. Since ‘comme si
. . .’ immediately follows the verb ‘abolira’, it seems natural to refer it to
this verb; otherwise, Mallarmé would have located the verb elsewhere, on
p. II, for instance.
This synthesis between music and poetry is discussed in several of the
prose-texts that immediately precede ‘Un coup de dés’, often with the
same emphasis on the contrast between their respective sound-volume,
silent poetry being opposed to the loudness of music. So, for instance, in
this passage from ‘La musique et les letters’: ‘Je réclame la restitution au
silence impartial pour que l’esprit essaie de se rapatrier de tout – chocs,
glissements, les trajectories illimités et surs, tel état opulent aussitôt évasif,
une incapacité délicieuse à finir, ce raccourci, ce trait – l’appareil; moins le
tumulte des sonorités, transfusibles, encore, en du songe’ (p. 649).
The symbol of the ‘toque . . . de velours’, highly obscure in itself, refers to
the ‘buste de velours’ in ‘Igitur’ (see p. 76).
‘marquer . . . en foudre’ can mean ‘foudroyer’. ‘Crise de vers’, which, in its
own right, is also something of an apocalyptic text, is placed against the
background of a thunderstorm representing, by analogy, the danger of
disturbing the classical forms of French prosody. The image goes back as
far as the early poem ‘Brise marine’:
Et, peut-être, les mats invitant les orages
Sont-ils de ceux qu’un vent penche sur les naufrages . . .
124. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, Introduction, G.
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Chapter 3
Drama and History in Yeats (1960)
The stylistic as well as the thematic development of Yeats’s work is
determined by the tension between image and emblem. It remains to be
shown that other dimensions of style and theme do not run counter to the
pattern that emerges as a result of this conflict. Leaving aside the problems
of prosody and sound,1 the increasingly dramatic structure of the later
poems as compared to the earlier demands comment and interpretation
– all the more since the increased drama seems to coincide with the introduction of themes related to history. Is this growth in dramatic intensity
and in historical content to be considered a counterforce which opposes
the constant pressure of the emblem towards other-wordliness? Or does
Yeats’s approach to drama and to history reveal an ambiguity similar to
his double-edged treatment of nature and of the body?
We traditionally think of ‘dramatic’ in contrast to ‘lyrical’, but one
cannot separate the early from the late Yeats in terms of his distinction.
In the previously quoted letter to George Russell (Letters, 434), Yeats
himself characterises his new manner by reference to what he calls the
will ‘out of which epic and dramatic poetry comes’ in contrast to ‘pure
energy of the spirit’: this indicates a significant and conscious association
of the later manner with a dramatic medium. The distinction between
‘will’ and ‘spirit’ however does not necessarily correspond to the classical distinction between lyrical and dramatic poetry.
Writing in the wake of the German romantic tradition, and within the
framework of the aesthetics of Hegel – more specifically of the Hegelian
aesthetician Th. Visscher – Emil Staiger defines the lyrical in opposition
to the dramatic as ‘the lack of distance between subject and object’.2
Grounded in the same tradition, Croce dismisses the very concept of
genre in favour of pure spirit which, like Hegel’s Geist, expresses a
state of perfect correspondence between consciousness and its object;
works that do not partake of this Spirit do not qualify as true poetry.3
In both authors, the opposition implies a value-judgement that states the
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intrinsic superiority of the lyrical over dramatic genres. Such distinctions
and value-judegments are consistent with the intentional structure of
Western literature as a whole, which is founded on the dialectic between
mind and matter and driven by the impulse to achieve reconciliation
between them. In this perspective, the lyrical move appears indeed as
the fulfilment of the dramatic quest. Drama begins in separation and it
describes the succession, in time, of acts leading from the original severance to its resolution. This resolution is not necessarily definitive and
it may demand, along the way, such tragic sacrifices and destructions
as to make the cost seem too high; the burden of the drama consists in
making the new situation, at the end of the play, a transition to a new
beginning on a higher level of consciousness. We saw how Mallarmé’s
work, in every individual poem as well as in the total shape of its
development, remains always essentially dramatic; in ‘Un coup de dés’,
although the act of creating poetic language is presented in conjunction with a cosmic tragedy, this act, by its very existence, engenders the
time within which it is allowed to take place (see p. 104 of Mallarmé
section). The impossibility of the lyrical, the failure to attain a ‘lack of
distance between subject and object’, is taken for granted, and poetry
can be nothing but dramatic – its drama being, precisely, that the purely
lyrical is unattainable. From the moment language expresses consciousness it becomes dramatic, for consciousness acknowledges separation as
well as the intent to overcome it – and when, like Mallarmé’s language,
it also expresses knowledge of the self as conscious, it can only state
the failure of this intent. Experienced directly, immediately, the failure
appears as tragic, but the mediated expression of the knowledge of this
failure is likely to be stated in terms of irony, because it is written from
a perspective beyond tragedy. Oedipus Rex is tragic from Oedipus’
point of view, though Sophocles knows the irony of his hero’s insistence
on a truth which will prove to be his undoing; in Oedipus at Colonus,
Oedipus himself knows the irony of a situation in which his death, the
only thing left to him, gives him power over kings and cities; hence that
he can ‘play’ at will with the destiny of other men. In the same manner,
the act of thought in ‘Un coup de dés’ can be described by Mallarmé as a
game with destiny, which keeps destiny at bay as long as the game goes
on; although the final outcome is never in doubt, the moment at which
it will take place as well as the particular content of every move remain
free and undetermined. This ‘play’ occurs on a public stage, not because
it needs an audience but because the audience wants to watch the spectacle of its own destiny: it states the experience of human consciousness
as such and must therefore of need be universal. The hero wears a mask
not in order to set himself apart from other men, but in order to hide the
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over-individual features that would keep him from being representative
of every man’s experience.
Mallarmé’s drama engenders a free and self-willed time within a
destiny against which it chooses to rebel and to play its part; it creates
always new situations and proceeds from change to change, the forthcoming action remaining unpredictable and suspended, ‘rythmique
suspens du sinister’. The ‘suspense’ continues after the curtain has fallen,
leaving the spectator faced with the indetermination of a new predicament. Drama is essentially temporal (made of, and engendering time)
and open, aimed towards a new and still undetermined future; it is the
conscious genre, par excellence.
The lyrical, to the contrary, belongs to the realm of unmediated experience and to the naïve, material imagination. Although it is often said to be
ineffable, several contemporary writers on poetry, inspired no doubt by
their own nostalgia, describe it at length and often very well.4 The highly
reflective language of criticism is apparently able to deal with the type
of poetic expression most removed from its own kind, just as so many
romantic and post-romantic poems are in fact reflective mediations on
the lyrical rather than lyrical poems. The lyrical moment is one of acquiescence, when will and destiny coincide and, as in the moment of unity
described in ‘Igitur’, the temporal and the spatial meaning of the ‘present’
are no longer in conflict (see Mallarmé’s section p. 66).
Even among the poems written before 1900, very few instances of
pure lyricism occur in Yeats. The earliest books come the closest to it,
although they consist mostly of poems of longing and rebellion, describing actions that are to take one towards a state of harmony or flights
away from it. Rather than dramatic conflict, there prevails in them a
mood of indecision, as if the poet were waiting for exhortations from
above. At times, this mood itself finds what could be called immediate,
lyrical expression, but more often it is stated by means of distance and
opposition. In evoking his ideal realm, Yeats frequently has recourse to
antithesis, and instead of expressing the torment of restlessness or the
serenity of quiet, he describes the conscious process that takes him from
the one state to the other. ‘The Indian to his Love’, for instance, starts
with a scene that seems to be pure vision. But from the second stanza
on, the mood becomes one of self-exhortation, a plea for the superiority
of this state over the ordinary world of reality, and the poem uses a dramatic rhetoric that deliberately involves the reader in a choice, a conflict:
Here we will moor our lonely ships
And wander ever with woven hands,
Murmuring softly lip to lip,
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Along the grass, along the sands,
Murmuring how far away are the unquiet lands:
How we alone of mortals are
Hid under quiet boughs apart,
While our love grows an Indian star, . . .
(Var., 78)
The experience of the poem is no longer that of quiet, a mere state of
being which could lend itself to lyrical expression, nor is it even that of a
longing for quiet, which could still be like a spontaneous outcry; instead,
it presents us with a dramatic situation in which someone is trying to
persuade someone else to make a certain choice. It can therefore no
longer be called lyrical in the meaningful sense of the term.
Or consider a slightly later and successful poem like ‘Who goes with
Fergus?’ (Var., 125). Here also, the opening lines, taken out of context,
possess purely lyrical qualities; the question, echoing the question of the
title, does not seem rhetorical but expressive of a spontaneous urgency.
Who will go drive with Fergus now,
And pierce the deep wood’s woven shade
And dance upon the level shore?
The passage combines the directness of an observation unclouded by
reflection with considerable accuracy of physical detail: the ‘woven’
shade, the ‘level’ shore, the dynamic strength of ‘pierce’. As the poem
develops, an antithesis is created and a dramatic situation arises: the
young man and his beloved have to tear themselves away from their
own entanglements in order to join Fergus. Yet, this situation is not
introduced dramatically or rhetorically, by a deliberate break which
separates the first three lines from the rest; instead, the tone remains so
constantly one of urgent summoning that the lyrical unit is preserved;
we never question the two young people’s decision, because the poet has
not been concerned with proving to them or to us that they act rightly,
but merely expressing his own uncritical and urgent desire:
Who will go drive with Fergus now
And pierce the deep wood’s woven shade
And dance upon the level shore?
Young man, lift up your russet brow,
And lift your tender eyelids, maid,
And brood on hopes and fears no more.
And no more turn aside and brood
Upon love’s bitter mystery: . . .
Grammatically, the unity is achieved by the quick succession of
imperative verbs (lift, lift, brood, turn aside, brood): they extend their
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imperative power to the first three lines, making the question into an
even more categorical command. Up to this point, the poem is the unmediated statement of an imperative mood in which the actual content of
what is being ordered remains entirely subordinate to the mood itself.
The concluding lines, however, break this unity:
For Fergus rules the brazen cars,
And rules the shadows of the wood,
And the white breast of the dim sea
And all dishevelled wandering stars.
The break comes with the argumentative ‘for’, the most un-lyrical of
conjunctions. Urgency gives way to argument, and argument implies the
possibility of disagreement, the need to reflect, to criticise and to discriminate. The poem becomes a plea for Fergus’s cause (whatever that
cause may be) and the effect of the first lines is modified by the echo of
the last: if the poet has to convince himself that Fergus’s cause is indeed
the strongest, then the question in the opening lines becomes rhetorical,
a verbal trick to win over the reader by simulating desire where there
may in truth have been reluctance. The lyrical immediacy of an exhortation has been replaced by a plea for the merits of a cause in preference
to another.5 This supposes a distance and a conscious conflict incompatible with true lyricism. No value-judgement is necessarily implied6
– although in the case of ‘Who drives with Fergus?’ one may well regret
the last four lines and the ‘dishevelled’ stars; what deserves notice is that
even Yeats’s earliest poetry consists mainly of dramatic elements. Since
this poetry has very few illusions about the possibility of a natural unity
(‘The woods of Arcady are dead . . .’) and appears anything but naïve
and spontaneous, the presence of drama is neither surprising nor out of
tone. From the moment, however, that emblems more and more replace
natural images, the situation changes.
Yeats’s emblematic poetry is not lyrical; it does not express a natural
unity between object and subject, nor does it posses the frailty, the
tenous and fleeting balances of the lyric. It does not issue from a
momentary reconciliation with nature but tries to speak with the voice
of a divine being that reveals itself outside of nature. Neither is his
emblematic poetry in essence dramatic. It may well portray gestures or
events that seem like actions and take on the form of a narrative, but
those actions are predetermined and exclude any free intervention of
the will. They are the product of that ‘pure energy of the spirit’ which
Yeats mentions to AE, the intervention of divine ‘spirit’ not the human
spirit of idealist philosophy. Oedipus, for instance, is a dramatic hero,
because his freedom is involved in all he does; he may act in ignorance
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and in blind self-assurance, but his acts are his own, self-inflicted like his
punishment. As a believer in supernatural emblems, Yeats had to make
the Oedipus plays into a religious, ritualistic ceremony, stressing heavily
such elements as the sacred wood, the burial rites, etc., at the expense of
all dramatic tension, while in his play Calvary he dismisses the Passion
altogether as useless, wasted on a humanity which is searching for revelation, nor for incarnation. Because of its ambiguous emphasis on blood,
the Crucifixion is too ‘natural’ an act to be used as an emblem, precisely
because it tends to affect as a tragedy rather than a rite. It makes the fate
of Christ into a universal, exemplary representation of human destiny
and, as such, it becomes an open, temporal act that engenders the historical time during which men will be at liberty to imitate or to reject the
behaviour of their exemplar.
A true emblem, as Yeats conceives of it, would never affect us in
this manner. It does not appear as a change, a new awareness that
opens up unexplored possibilities or solicits different forms of freedom.
The emblem does not describe or resolve a predicament of the human
consciousness engaged in the world, but reveals large systems of order
and similarity that stand behind and above the world and human consciousness alike, allowing for neither freedom nor rebellion. It thrives
on the discovery of similarities and repetitions, as when Yeats delights
in the recurrence of identical emblems in different cultures: Porphyry’s
honey and the honeycomb of the Scriptures, the myth of Adonis and
the black pig of Celtic heathendom, the mirror-like correspondence
between the death of Christ and that of Oedipus, etc. (A Vision, pp.
27 ff.). The function of the emblem is anti-dramatic, for it reveals that
an action assumed to be new, open and time-engendering is in fact the
mere repetition of a set pattern. Denying the ability of the human spirit
to move by any impulse other than that of a divine will and intellect, it
destroys the speculative faculty by means of which the mind invents its
own future. The emblematic ‘mind’ discovers (unveils) and its form of
truth is the Greek aletheia (découverture); while drama is the product of
a constitutive consciousness. The movement of drama is like that of an
expanding spiral, while the emblem is a closed circle in which movement
is suspended in the stasis of eternity:
Mind moved yet seemed to stop
As ’t were a spinning-top.
(‘The Double Vision of Michael Robartes’, Var., 384)
The Wind Among the Reeds, Yeats’s most purely emblematic work,
should normally contain the best instances of the power of the emblem
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to surpass drama. Actually, the failure of the emblem to replace natural
imagery, which is responsible for the hybrid and inconclusive style of the
work, has its equivalence in the inability of the poems to dispense with
a dramatic element alien to their real intent. Drama enters in several
ways. The poems often contain rhetorical elements, similar to those
which interfere with the lyrical purity of the earliest work. The use of
imaginary spokesmen (Aedh, Mongan, Hanrahan, Robartes, etc.), later
suppressed but essential to an understanding of the work, serves to set
up little dramatic scenes in which ‘characters’ address each other in an
attempt to convince or to deride. Even the intervention of the gods is
always handled dramatically, in the form of exhortations addressed to
the poet, an encounter between two independent, free wills reacting
upon each other:
And Niamh calling Away, come away:
Empty your heart of its mortal dream.
(‘The Hosting of the Sidhe’, Var., 140)
or the opposite situation, the poet pleading with the gods
O sweet everlasting Voices, be still
Go to the guards of the heavenly fold . . .
(‘The Everlasting Voices’, Var., 141)
Like in the early lyrics, the predominant verbal mode is imperative, the
mood of the will, not that of revelation which states how things are,
rather than how they ought to be.
Dramatic tension is apparent, moreover, in the genuine terror that
pervades the book, very different from the conventional fin-de-siècle
pseudo-apocalyptic mood. The atmosphere of the emblem should be
one of appeasement or, at least, resignation, the quiet that comes with
the contemplation of eternal order and divine might. This order asserts
itself with unquestionable authority in The Wind Among the Reeds,
but it remains uncertain whether it is a bringer of quiet or itself the
cause of unrest. In a poem like ‘Maid Quiet’ (Var., 171), originally
entitled ‘Hanrahan laments because of his Wanderings’, it is not clear
whether Quiet has departed because of the threatening destruction or
if the destruction will bring it back, not clear whether the prayer is for
apocalyptic annihilation or for the end of its menacing presence. The
first version of the poem, when it appears in a story from The Secret
Rose (‘The Twisting of the Rope and Hanrahan the Red’) shows peace
destroyed by the oncoming ordeal:
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I never have seen Maid Quiet
Nodding her russet hood,
For the winds that wakened the stars
Are blowing through my blood
I have never seen Maid Quiet,
Nodding alone and apart
For the words that called up the lightning
Are calling through my heart
(The Secret Rose, 1897)
The version that appeared in the original edition of The Wind Among
the Reeds adds a promise of appeasement or, at least, a longing for such
a promise; the ‘end of all things’, represented by one of its usual emblems
(the death-pale deer of ‘night and shadow’, Var., 171) will bring back
the serenity which was lost in anticipation of its arrival:
O where is our Mother of Peace
Nodding her purple hood?
For the winds that awakened the stars
Are blowing through my blood.
I would that the death-pale deer
Had come from the mountain-side
And trampled the mountain away
And drunk up the murmuring tide;
For the winds . . .
(The Wind Among the Reeds7 (1900), p. 51)
From the point of view of drama, an important difference separates
the two versions. If the ideal of Quiet lies indeed beyond the destruction of this world, then the longing for peace so frequently expressed
throughout the book is like the impatience that precedes fulfilment: man
is altogether willing to submit to the gods and wishes them to appear
as soon as possible, using whatever means he can find to hasten their
arrival.8 There is no conflict between human and divine power, and the
tension is merely that of expectation. The only possible dramatic conflict
would have to take place between the initiated, who know the need for
destruction, and the ignorant – but this theme, frequently in evidence
in the prose and in the plays, does not appear in The Wind Among the
Reeds. If, however, quiet existed before the threat and was destroyed by
it, then a truly dramatic situation arises in which man has to defend his
own order against the invasion of irrational forces; his genuine terror
now stems from the fear of losing what he values most. In theory, Yeats
would no doubt have agreed with A.P. Sinnett, one of the leading lights
of the Dublin theosophical cénacle, that it is heresy to consider divine
fulfilment in terms of life and death:
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It would be ludicrous . . . to turn to the various discussions which have been
carried out by students of exoteric Buddism as to whether Nirwâna does
or does not mean annihilation. Worldly similes fall short of indicating the
feeling with which the graduates of esoteric science regard such a question.
Does the last penalty of the law mean the highest honor of the peerage?9
Nevertheless, most of the poems in The Wind Among the Reeds describe
the arrival of the gods in a language of terror, a terror which can only
be overcome by total submission10 or by what seems like a flight away
from this destiny into human forms of love.11 In either case, it allows
Yeats to construct the poem as a dramatic progression, leading from
terror to appeasement. The true initiate may well realise that the drama
is illusory and the appeasement superfluous: since there no longer are
supposed to be any worldly attachments, no true renunciation takes
place; as for human love, it is only another pathway towards the same
kind of divine ecstasy. Such insight, however, would make The Wind
Among the Reeds well-nigh completely meaningless, for there is hardly
a poem in it that does not rely heavily for its existence on the drama
stemming from irresolution and terror. Having deprived himself to some
extent of natural images, Yeats has only drama to fall back on, and he
makes his book into a dramatic arrangement of decorative, allegorical
emblems – something very different from what it set out to be. Later,
when he rationalises his need for drama into a theory of conflicting
antitheses – exactly as he rationalises the need for natural imagery into
his theory of the ‘body’ – he will look back with apparent contempt on
the quietism and dramatic ineffectiveness of his poetry before 1900.12
Such statements (counterbalanced, often enough, by declarations aimed
in the opposite direction)13 should not blind one to the fact that Yeats’s
early poetry was already dramatic in spite of himself – and that, consequently, the much more conspicuous dramatisation that appears from In
the Seven Woods on, may well have been his way of making the best of
a necessary evil. At any rate, the predominance of drama in The Wind
Among the Reeds indicates Yeats’s inability to carry out the poetics of
the emblem to which he is somewhat desperately committed.
2
On Baile’s Strand, the play that inaugurates Yeats’s middle period,
differs from The Shadowy Waters in that it is built on sharply clashing antitheses: the fool fights the blind man, Cuchullain opposes
Conchubar, old age battles against youth and wisdom against passion.
Another play, written at approximately the same time, expounds the
shift in Yeats’s personal theology that corresponds to this gain in dramatic intensity:
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Heaven is not what we have believed it to be. It is not quiet, it is not singing
and making music, and all strife at an end. I have seen it, I have been there.
The lover still loves, but with a great passion, and the rider still rides, but the
horse goes like the wind and leaps the ridges, and the battle goes on always,
always. That is the joy of Heaven, continual battle. I thought the battle was
here, and that the joy was to be found here on earth, that all one had to do
was to bring again the old wild earth of the stories – but no, it is not here; we
shall not come to that joy, that battle, till we have put out the senses, everything that can be seen and handled . . .14
In the light of Yeats’s previous experience with The Wind Among the
Reeds, it is easy to see what new stylistic practice this theory sanctions.
Up till now, the emblem appeared as a messenger of reconciliation;
consequently, all strife and drama was relegated to the worldly, human
realm that precedes divine revelation and should, in pure theory, no
longer be the concern of a truly emblematic poet. Drama and emblem
exclude each other, hence the failure of The Wind Among the Reeds, ill
at ease with either. From the moment, however, that the possibility of
conflict is extended into the era of the divine and the music of Paradise
‘made of the continual clashing of swords’ (Plays, 377), it should
become possible to write a poetry that is dramatic and emblematic at the
same time. The battles among the gods, which can only be described by
means of emblems, appear as an infinitely heightened but nevertheless
continuous extension of earthly drama.
The play from which the above quotation is taken, The Unicorn from
the Stars, is itself a good illustration of the difficulties inherent in this
‘solution’. Mediocre as it is, it nevertheless possesses some dramatic
interest: the contrast between the hero and the followers who mistake
his warlike exhortations for patriotic service; the pathos of his heroic
death; the distress of the practical man unable to rescue the divinely
inspired poet from his violent fate. All those dramatic episodes stem
from the same central tragedy: the frightful price the gods demand from
those who choose to follow them instead of accepting a worldly calling.
The theme is still that of renunciation, the drama still that of Villiers de
l’Isle Adam’s Axel, which Yeats himself describes as a fourfold renunciation, culminating in the wisdom that ‘the infinite alone is worth attaining, and the infinite is in the possession of the dead’.15 As in Axel, the
dramatic effect does not stem from the assertion of this wisdom, but
from the unflinching assurance with which the hero pursues his course,
regardless of cost. The hero of The Unicorn from the Stars is equally
determined: he wants to ‘put out the senses, everything that can be seen
and handled . . . We must put out the whole world . . . We must put out
the light of the stars and the light of the sun and the light of the moon
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. . . till we have brought everything to nothing once again. Where there is
nothing . . . – there is God!’ (Plays, 381–2). As far as the dramatic structure of the play is concerned, it matters little that somewhere beyond this
‘nothing’ we are promised an infinitely richer renewal of earthly joys:
the drama has nothing to do with the content of this future experience.
It focuses instead entirely upon the conflict between human and divine
will: the hero is a god, or at least an angel, among men, and the drama
is that of his martyrdom, his crucifixion. The action of the play does not
deal with a conflict among gods but with the age-old conflict between
man and the gods. The presence of various emblems (the grapes, the centaurs, the gild coach, etc.) as well as the kind of knowledge they express,
is almost incidental; Yeats goes back to the traditional themes of rebellion, hubris and atonement to instill dramatic interest into his play.
The Unicorn from the Stars is an early and relatively crude example,
in an avowedly minor work, but it reveals what will be much more
effectively concealed later. The poetry remains in need of a dramatic
structure, for it is powerless to find structural coherence in its true,
emblematic intent; it succeeds masterfully in developing a dramatic style
which is one of the most attractive features of the later poems.16 And
it goes very far in creating the impression that the drama takes place
between two contrasted forms of wisdom, which are both of divine
origin. A highly intricate network of emblems unites the poems (as well
as the plays and some of the prose) into one vast antithetical system, in
which two symmetrically opposed families of emblems face each other
in eternal combat. But the individual poems do not gain their dramatic
intensity from their participation in this battle; instead, under the guise
of expressing a battle among divine categories of Being, they express the
pathos of man’s fate. Yeats guards himself carefully against the assumption that a free human will could exist, but he does so in pseudohermetic
statements which are easily ignored or misinterpreted. The strategy is
similar to the ambiguous manner in which natural images were made to
function as emblems: the poems solicit our assent and acquire dramatic
interest by appealing to a freedom which they deny; drama is made to
express the divine, eternal order of which it is the negation.
Yeats’s attempt, in A Vision and elsewhere, to found a cosmogony on
a set of antitheses reveals his effort to elaborate a poetic system which
would be dramatic without ceasing to be exclusively inspired by divine
wisdom. ‘I had never read Hegel’, he writes in A Vision:
but my mind had been full of Blake from boyhood up and I saw the world
as a conflict – Spectre and Emanation – and could distinguish between a contrary and a negation. ‘Contraries are positive’, wrote Blake, ‘a negation is not
a contrary’ . . . I had never put the conflict in logical form, never thought with
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Hegel that the two ends of the see-saw are one another’s negation, nor that
the spring vegetables were refuted when over. (A Vision, p. 73)17
The passage is revealing in that it makes explicit that Yeats’s battle
among the gods actually represents the cyclical, eternally recurrent
movement of being, the Primum Mobile ‘which makes the very owls in
circles move’, gives the birds their innate skill at nest-building and girls
their innate skill at seducing boys. The best analogy for this process
has indeed to be taken from the world of vegetation: the passage of the
seasons, the transient ‘spring vegetables’. Hegel’s point is precisely that
this world differs essentially from that of human consciousness in that it
leaves no room for negation, only for succession. As such it is ‘merely’
the world of Being, of no interest to the language of man, which originates in the very act of questioning the immediacy of being. Such cycles
may stand above human language, but they necessarily lack drama. The
return of the spring vegetable may be a spectacle that confirms the stability of divine order, and a certain kind of poetry may be able to express
the majesty of this order; it is likely that this poetry would be to some
extent emblematic but certain that it would not be dramatic. It stands
outside of time and denies the freedom of an open future; contraries that
follow each other as day follows night can never create drama.
As it is so often the case in Yeats, the more or less mechanical system
of opposites that recur throughout the work does not reveal the real
tension that shapes the style. Such a system undoubtedly exists; the
casual, improvisatory tone of some of the poems may conceal it, but a
fairly consistent set of emblems provides links, analogies and oppositions between poems and plays written as much as thirty years apart. A
family of emblems, divided into two symmetrical, opposite halves, runs
through the entire work.18 But the problematic themes are distributed
more or less evenly on both sides, so that the battle which the poetry
is waging does not correspond to the conflict of antinomies as Yeats
describes it in his theoretical texts or in some of his semi-didactic poems.
Specifically, the drama that serves as such an indispensable structural
element throughout the later work is not the drama of the conflict
between what A Vision calls primary and antithetical forces or values.
The primary as well as the antithetical realm contain dramatic conflicts
and these conflicts cut across the borderline that separates the two areas.
The antinomies of the system can be traced without too much difficulty, although the tracks are often oddly twisted. One can pick up
the thread almost at random and follow it as it winds its way, by means
of repetition and analogy, from work to work. In the play Calvary, for
instance, Yeats introduces the scriptural emblem of the tunic of Christ,
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gambled away among four Roman centurions; the significance of this
emblem, quite obscure in the context of the play, is hinted at by an allusion to Ephesus (the soldiers are gambling with ‘dice carved / Out of an
old sheep’s thigh at Ephesus’, Plays, 455). Ephesus is doubly meaningful
to Yeats: as a centre of the surviving cult of Artemis, up to a later date,
it is a fountainhead of true esoteric wisdom, unpolluted by the dubious,
‘incarnated’ elements of Christianity.19 The association of Ephesus with
non-incarnate (emblematic) wisdom is strengthened by the historical
coincidence that is also the seat of the Council of Ephesus where the
so-called Nestorian heresy was debated, the theological problem of
whether the Virgin Mary could be called the mother of God or whether
Christ was self-begotten by the Father. From ‘Supernatural Songs’
(‘Ribh denounces Patrick’) as well as from ‘A Stick of Incense’
Whence did all the fury come?
From empty tomb or virgin womb? . . .
(Var., 619)
Yeats’s strong interest in this matter is evident, as well as his heretical
preference for Nestorian, Eastern forms of Christianity. In Calvary,
Christ’s tunic becomes the emblem for the true wisdom which refuses to
acknowledge the human nature of Christ, but which the divine Christ
paradoxically reveals and transmits at his most human moment, when
he dies a bodily death on the Cross; Yeats considers it to be the most
valuable part of the Christian revelation.
The emblem of the tunic had been used in a somewhat similar situation in the earlier Cuchullain drama On Baile’s Strand. Cuchullain,
too, is the possessor of a coat of divine origin which he intends to pass
on to his posterity. After his death Cuchullain returns to the sewing of
this same coat (‘Cuchullain comforted’, Var., 634, 11. 13–18); a poem
from The Wind Among the Reeds refers to it as ‘The Cloth of Heaven’
(‘He wishes for the Cloth of Heaven’, Var., 176) and it reappears in A
Vision as the Divine Cloak.20 The link between the tunic of Christ and
Cuchullain’s coat indicates that, at least after his capitulation to the
older Conchubar, Cuchullain is a Christ-figure and, in the language of A
Vision, a primary and solar hero; his solar origin is much stressed in On
Baile’s Strand. He is similar to Christ in being the possessor of revealed,
divine wisdom which he betrays by the ‘error’ of his incarnation or commitment to the world. His opponent Conchubar is identified with the
blind man; those two pairs, Cuchullain – the fool, and Conchubar – the
blind man, are links in a long chain of symmetrically opposed emblems.
The blind man, for instance, who is clever and astute though in some
ways despicable, is related to two other famous blind men: Homer, who
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has a desire for ‘civil order’ (A Vision, p. 269)21 and Oedipus, the latter
‘an image from Homer’s age’ (p. 28). Oedipus, who ‘solved the riddle
of the Sphynx-Nature’ (p. 202) is the epitome of Hellenic greatness,
founded on human intellect brought to quasi-divine perfection: ‘He
[Oedipus] knew nothing but his mind, and yet because he spoke that
mind fate possessed it and kingdoms changed according to his blessing
and his curiosity’ (p. 28);
And yonder in the gymnasts’ garden thrives
The self-sown, self-begotten shape that gives
Athenian intellect its mastery,
Even the grey-leaved olive-tree
Miracle-bred out of the living stone;
Nor accident of peace nor war
Shall wither that old marvel, for
The great grey-eyed Athene stares thereon.22
(Var., p. 446)
Oedipus and the Sphynx had previously been mentioned, with the same
connotation of intellectual triumph over nature, in ‘The Double Vision
of Michael Robartes’:
One lashed her tail; her eyes lit by the moon
Gazed upon all things known, all things unknown,
In triumph of intellect
With motionless head erect
(Var., p. 383)
The high period of Athens also suggests Green sculpture and Phidias, so
it is not altogether surprising that the modern equivalence of Oedipus
turns out to be Michel Angelo (A Vision, p. 29) himself associated
with Shakespeare (p. 294), as representative of the true spirit of the
Renaissance. Michel Angelo is associated with the fictional Michael
Robartes, another link in the chain. This entire family of minds
(Conchubar – Homer – Oedipus – Michel Angelo – Michael Robartes,
etc.) represents the ‘introspective knowledge of the mind’s self-begotten
unit, an intellectual excitement’ (p. 207) and it stands under the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn; the reconciliation of the Titans, it seems,
leads to the ‘vivification of old intellect’ (p. 208), a flowering which
Yeats designated by the picturesque term of ‘mummy wheat’
If Jupiter and Saturn meet
What a crop of mummy wheat!
(Var., 562)
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As Conchubar is opposed to Cuchullain, the blind man to the fool, so
does Oedipus oppose to Christ, Robartes to Aherne, the age of Phidias
and the Renaissance (which are said to move ‘towards intellect’) to
Byzantium (which ‘moved from it’ ibid., p. 282), Michel Angelo to the
mystical Saint Catherine of Genoa (ibid., 29)23 and also, though with
qualifications, West to East. It seems as if all drama were on the antithetical side, where worldly involvements, profane artistic values and
intellectual excitement prevail – while the other camp seems to consist
of pure contemplation. The astrological emblems, however, correct this
impression: whereas the antithetical stands under the signs of Jupiter and
Saturn, the primary stands under the signs of Venus and Mars, love and
war.24 The death of Christ marks the culmination of the discord between
god and man, although it is also a manifestation of the highest divine
love. Christ acted ‘In pity for man’s darkening thought’, driven by a love
altogether different from the ‘intellectual analysis’ (A Vision, p. 275)
which took the place of love in Robartes or in Oedipus (who ‘lacked
compassion’, p. 28) – but He also appears as a turbulent, passionate man,
who creates drama around him. His dramatic nature is best observed in
Cuchullain, torn between a Christian, human love for Emir and a divine
love for Aoife, and who prefers war to Conchubar’s rational government.
Love and war combine, in a dramatic synthesis on the Cross:
The sword’s a cross; thereon He died
On breast of Mars the Goddess signed
The goddess is Venus and the couplet celebrates the ‘breaking out of
new life’ (ibid., 208) at a ‘primary’ revelation.
It thus becomes manifest that the same category, the ‘primary’ as
well as the ‘antithetical’, can encompass elements as alien to life as, say,
Byzantium or Saint Catherine of Genoa, but also the sword of war and
Christian love, forces which belong to life and its drama. The antithetical, on the other hand, contains such obviously dramatic emblems as
Oedipus or Shakespeare, but stresses with equal insistence purely intellectual contemplation. Yeats emphasises the profane elements in the
primary, Christian world and the divine elements in the antithetical,
pagan world. Profane and divine periods do not conflict but alternate in
succession similar to that of the seasons. What seems profane to us, near
the end of the Christian era, will become divine under the new dispensation. The system of A Vision, which describes the battle among the gods
as it affects human destiny, is founded on divine will alone and leaves no
room for human freedom or rebellion: it could never form the basis for
a truly dramatic action.
Particular poems, on the other hand, are often strikingly dramatic in
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effect. ‘Vacillation’, for instance, appears as a complete drama on a very
familiar theme: the conflict between the religious and the profane, between
Christian and Hellenic wisdom, resolved in favour of the latter. Without
having to go outside of the English tradition, the theme is a frequent one
among Yeats’s predecessors: one thinks of Pater, of course, but also of
Hopkins’s tortured effort to adapt a neo-Hellenic sensitivity to Christian
dogma, or of Arnold’s elegiac treatment of Greek and pagan vigour.
When the first poem of the group entitled ‘Vacillation’ mentions
antinomies –
Between extremities
Man runs his course
A brand, or flaming breath,
Comes to destroy
All those antinomies
Of day and night . . .
(Var., 499–500)
– one naturally takes them to refer to the opposition between the heroic,
earth-bound and sensuous world of Homer and the ascetic, contemplative, moralistic world of Christianity. In the second poem, a possible
resolution of the conflict is suggested by the mythological allusion to
Attis, a pagan vegetation god, who acts as a symbol for poetry:
And he that Attis’ image hangs between
That staring fury and the blind lush leaf
May know not what he knows, but knows not grief.
(Var., 500)
This seems to prepare for the choice in favour of Homer at the end of
‘Vacillation’.
Homer is my example and his unchristened heart The conflict reaches
its climax in Part VIII, the dialogue between ‘Soul’ and ‘Heart’, where
the commitment to poetic and aesthetic values is most in evidence.
Christian wisdom can give salvation and bring us into proximity with
God, but this occurs at the cost of poetic language
The Soul. Look on that fire, salvation walks within . . . . . .
The Heart. What, be a singer born and lack a theme?
(Var., 502)
In the best tradition of symbolist aestheticism, the poet is cast in the
heroic role of the man so devoted to his calling that he is willing to
jeopardise his eternal salvation for the sake of his art. His decision is not
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made to seem easy; the Christian attitude is treated with a great deal of
deference: ‘salvation walks within’, it ‘seems most welcome in the tomb’,
it is even granted that the Hellenic and the Christian world are ‘much
alike’ and have several points of doctrine in common. But the craft of the
Greek poet is essentially human and belongs to life; Homer, poet of generation (‘What theme had Homer but original sin?’) wrote, as a somewhat earlier poem states, ‘out of life’s own self-delight’ (‘Meditations in
Time of Civil War’, I, Var., 417). ‘Vacillation’ is clearly built on the traditional dramatic pattern of a conflict between human and divine norms,
with the scales heavily weighed in favour of the human: the reader is
bound to be seduced by the poet’s heroic stance, by the boldness with
which he dares to defy the might of Christian orthodoxy and by the
attractive notion that poetry will again deal primarily with original sin.
‘Vacillation’ could not exist without this dramatic structure.
Such a reading, however, is by no means in accordance with the
cosmogony of A Vision or with the interpretation of Yeats as a poet
committed to the values and the poetics of an emblematic style. A closer
reading of ‘Vacillation’ proves the visible dramatic structure to be only a
framework that supports statements which, in fact, destroy it; the actual
drama – if drama there is – leads to anything but the attractive reconciliation which the drift of the development seems to suggest. In spite of its
resolute tone, the concluding poem – Part VIII – is far from unambiguous. It begins by listing the aspects of Christian dogma of which Yeats
can approve, the totally irrational, supernatural aspects of belief with
which most of Von Hügel’s The Mystical Element of Religion is concerned:
Must we part, Von Hügel, though much alike, for we
Accept the miracles of the saints and honour sanctity?
The body of Saint Teresa lies undecayed in tomb,
Bathed in miraculous oil, sweet odours from it come,
Healing from its lettered slab. Those self-same hands perchance
Eternalised the body of a modern saint that once
Had scooped out Pharoah’s mummy.
(Var., 503)
The allusion to a continuity of tradition from Egyptian burial-rites to
Christian sainthood takes one back to Ribh’s non-incarnate variety of
Christianity which is said to stem from Egypt. This is the kind of faith to
which Yeats considered himself truly committed. It is not the faith
of Homer, the poet of original sin who praises the generated world of
water instead of the supernatural realm of fire. Neither is it the faith of
orthodox Christianity which, as Samson’s riddle of the lion and the
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honeycomb shows (‘The lion and the honeycomb, what has Scripture
said?’), also praises the ‘honey of generation’, natural love between man
and woman. Christianity stands under the conjunction Mars-Venus,
war and love, the lion and the honeycomb. The emblem ‘honey’ establishes the link between Homeric and Christian beliefs, and indicates that
the common theme which gives its distinctive unit of culture to the West
consists in the positive value-attitude towards the very ‘generation’ that
the Byzantine, Ribh-like, emblematic Yeats so forcefully rejects. If Von
Hügel is so peremptorily dismissed at the end of the poem by someone
who apparently has the power to extend blessings (‘So get you gone,
Von Hügel, though with blessings on your head’), it is not because he is
opposed to Homer but because, as an orthodox Roman Catholic, he too
allows for and implicitly praises original sin. It matters little whether one
chooses the Christian or the Hellenic way: both share the same delusion
in ‘life’s self-delight’ and both avoid the real problem of the soul. The
choice in favour of Homer is not dictated by preference, but by the
necessity of a historical determinism which, at a moment when the two
thousand years allotted by Yeats to a primary dispensation are drawing
to a close, forces the initiate to prophesise a new dispensation that will
be antithetical, like the Greek. Siding with Homer, Yeats merely accomplishes, passively, his destiny within a historical time from which he is
trying to escape; as this poem very clearly puts it, he merely ‘plays a
predestined part’, removed from what he considers to be reality, by no
means a rebel against divine order but reluctantly submissive to an all
too human fate.
Several passages in the previous parts of ‘Vacillation’ prepare for
this reading, although they are often disguised as innocuous descriptive
details. The ‘vacillation’ takes place between the two conflicting realms
of the primary sun and the antithetical moon, and no synthesis can be
achieved between them; the fate of man, torn between incompatibles,
can only be resolved by an act of absolute and radical severance from
his human condition. The third part develops this theme in a tone of
homely, practical wisdom:
Get all the gold and silver that you can,
Satisfy ambition, animate
The trivial days and ram them with the sun,
And yet upon these maxims meditate:
All women dote upon an idle man
Although their children need a rich estate;
No man has lived that had enough
Of children’s gratitude or women’s love.
(Var., 500)
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Aside from their literal meaning, gold and silver are emblematic for sun
and moon:25 the lunar way satisfies the ambition of the man capable
of ‘founding’,26 within history, the kind of continuity on which culture
depends; it corresponds to the heroic, active and war-like rise of a civilisation in which an aristocratic order establishes itself by the strength
of its accomplishments;27 the solar way is that of the ‘sweetness’ that
follows upon the violence of action, the honeycomb in the lion’s mouth,
the idle and refined atmosphere of ‘a rich man’s flowering lawns’
where love thrives and decadence sets in. Both love and wealth, the idle
Cuchullain and the prudent Conchubar are indispensable, but they do
not complete each other; instead, they are mutually exclusive. The solar
road of love brings about the end of personal happiness or historical
greatness, the lunar road of power excludes the sweetness out of which
Western art is born. In ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’, ‘Nineteen
hundred and Nineteen’ and especially in the play Purgatory, the tragedy
of this unresolvable conflict, here stated as a casual aphorism, is in full
evidence. The extent of the tragedy – the destruction of all that is beautiful, the end of civilisation, the decay of Ireland – explains the presence of the second stanza of the poem, introduced without noticeable
transition:
No longer in Lethean foliage caught
Begin the preparation for your death
And from the fortieth winter by that thought
Test every work of intellect and faith,
And everything that your own hands have wrought,
And call those words extravagance of breath
That are not suited for such men as come
Proud, open-eyed and laughing to the tomb.
(Var., 501)
One is tempted to read this (as one reads Yeats’s famous epitaph ‘Cast
a cold eye / On life, on death . . .’) as a statement of stoical bravado, a
version of Montaigne’s Senecan essay ‘Que philosopher c’est apprendre
à mourir’. Here again, the dramatic effect is deliberately aimed towards
that very kind of heroism, but the actual meaning is different. The men
coming ‘to the tomb’ are not proud, open-eyed and laughing because
they are determined to enjoy life in spite of its brevity; they are joyous at
the prospect of escaping from the grip of a life which the opening part of
the poem has just described as self-destructive and absurd; their eyes are
open, at last, to the light of divine vision that is drawing near.28 The late
work does not celebrate life in spite of death, but celebrates death as the
only means of escape from an unbearable life.
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A related theme is conveyed in Part IV of ‘Vacillation’ by the equally
inconspicuous emblem of the cup:
My fiftieth year had come and gone
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop
On the marble table-top
While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.
(Var., 501)
Together with the conclusion of the preceding part (‘And he who Attis’
image hangs between / May know not what he knows, but knows
not grief’) this provides a reply to the question asked at the end of the
opening poem:
The body calls it death,
The heart remorse.
But if these be right
What is joy?
Within the dramatic sequence of the whole poem, this answer is the
key to the ultimate glorification of Homer as the poet of original sin.
The cup, a familiar Yeatsian emblem related indeed to Homer, is the
container for the ‘honey of generation’ which makes us forget our divine
status and prompts the descent into matter; the empty cup represents the
end of sexual potency at the approach of old age and death: the emblem
is used in exactly this manner in a poem from ‘A Man Young and Old’
entitled ‘The Empty Cup’ (Var., p. 454). Far from stating that joy could
be equated with ‘pleasure of generation’ and original sin, the passage
stresses that happiness becomes possible only when this kind of pleasure
ceases. The use of the castration myth of Attis suggests this same conclusion even more forcefully.
After stating the vanity of all conquests or new beginnings, in nature
(Part VI, stanza one) as well as in history (Part VI, stanza two), the final
stanza of the sixth poem contrasts the wisdom of the poetic statement
when it is aware of the transient, ephemeral nature of reality, with the
‘gaudiness’ of a mind that invests hopes in man’s earthly enterprise:
From man’s blood-sodden heart are sprung
Those branches of the night and day
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Where the gaudy moon is hung
What’s the meaning of all song?
Let all things pass away!
(Var., 502)
When immediately thereafter the ‘Heart’ claims the life-giving act of
generation for its theme (Part VII), it is clear from all that precedes that
it is deeply in error. In the concluding poem, the all-knowing soul holds
up the Christian attitude as better capable of appeasing the ‘heart’s’
anxieties; this suggests that the heart has been arguing out of fear and
despair rather than out of insight, and in ignorance of its own needs:
I, – though heart might find relief
Did I become a Christian man and chose for my belief
What is most welcome in the tomb . . .
(‘Vacillation’, Part VIII)
No suggestion is made, however, that the wisdom of the poem is
about to enlighten the ‘heart’ as to its true destiny. No matter how
certain the knowledge of life’s ‘gaudiness’, the heart nevertheless keeps
clinging to an existence which is neither a source of joy, nor of valid
art. The poem ‘Vacillation’ – and this is typical of all the main later
poems – has a threefold significance: on the first level, it appears as a
dramatic sequence, founded on a humanistic notion of human freedom
and autonomy; on the second level, it is a semi-didactic esoteric poem,
stating the very opposite of what is suggested by the dramatic structure;
finally, on the third level, it regains a tragic dimension, altogether different from the surface drama, not so necessary to the stylistic success
of the poem, nor so deliberately willed by Yeats, but forced upon him,
it seems, by the difficulty of his actual predicament. Like in ‘Her Vision
in the Woods’, tragedy comes with the failure of the emblem, in the
pathos of the absurd claims made by the heart. The three readings,
though not compatible, are equally necessary to the poem’s existence:
the first determines its structure, the second its meaning and the third
its truth.
At times, Yeats’s dramatic rhetoric is so convincing that drama and
statement seem to coincide to perfection. A poem closely related to
‘Vacillation’ entitled ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’ is a case in point.
This sounds like the most conventionally ‘romantic’ of Yeats’s poems;
one could compare it to such commonplaces of romantic optimism as
Faust’s ‘Wer immer strebend sich bemüht / Den können wir erlösen’ or
Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’. It praises life in spite of its failures and its utter
lack of rewards:
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I am content to live it all again
And yet again, if it be life to pitch
Into the frog-spawn of a blind man’s ditch . . .
Nowhere in Yeats does the dramatic appeal of human rebellion, in the
face of the superior but insipid wisdom expressed by the Soul, receive
fuller expression. The same associations as in ‘Vacillation’ strengthen
the cause of the self: the recurrent mention of blindness evokes Homer
and Oedipus; the soul being ‘struck dumb’ (‘But when I think of that my
tongue’s a stone’, Var., 478, 1.40) suggests that poetry can only exist in
an earth-bound realm; the use of Sato’s sword as ‘emblematical of love
and war’29 (Var., 477, 1.19) seems to put all positive, dramatic elements
on the side of the self.
This most human-sounding of Yeats’s poems conceals, under the
drama of its surface, one of the most esoteric aspects of his thought;
aside from being a poem about life, it is also a poem about the afterlife.
A first indication occurs when during the enumeration of the hardships
encountered in the past, a passage full of autobiographical allusions
oddly emphasises the importance of physical ‘shape’:
The unfinished man and his pain
Brought face to face with his own clumsiness;
The finished man among his enemies? –
How in the name of Heaven can he escape
That defiling and disfigured shape
The mirror of malicious eyes
Casts upon his eyes until at last
He thinks this shape must be his shape?
(Var., 479)
The concern with shape points to frequent passages in Yeats’s later work
that deal with the physical form a man will take on after his death; one
thinks of the story told in A Vision of an actor who was afraid to play
Hamlet, for if he died playing the part he would be Hamlet after death
(A Vision, 222), or of the end of The Herne’s Egg where Congall is
reborn in the shape of a donkey (Plays, pp. 677 ff.) – with the inescapable implication that he has been all too asinine during life. Man is reborn
Men and their business took
The soul’s unchanging look . . .
(Var., 421)
The change in the allegiance of the sword from ‘Meditations . . .’ to ‘A
Dialogue . . .’ possibly suggests a comment on what happens to Eastern
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wisdom when it is transmitted to Western hands and corrupted by
making it serve temporal ends. So it happened, for instance, that the
West corrupted the Eastern wisdom of Christ by the dogma of incarnation. In another example of emblematic reversal between the two poems,
the image of the fountain, illustrative in ‘Meditations . . .’ of ‘life’s selfdelight’, is associated in ‘A Dialogue . . .’ with the life-despising soul. In
the shape of his main obsession and Yeats’s self-confession suggests that
his quarrels were intense enough to stamp his future incarnations in the
shape attributed to him by his enemies: ‘If there has been great animal
egotism, heightened by some moment of tragedy, the Husk may persist
for centuries, recalled into a sort of life, and united to its Spirit, at some
anniversary, or by some unusually susceptible person or persons connected with its past life’ (A Vision, p. 224). The thought of being thus
suspended between heaven and earth is more unbearable than any suffering endured during life, hence the urgency of the question stressed by
the solemn invocation to God:
How in the name of God can he escape
That defiling and disfigures shape? . . .
The only possible escape from this ordeal is described in the elaborate
theory of the afterlife. The body and the soul go through Purgatory, a
slow ascent through various stages towards the final ‘Marriage’ with
God. This supposes several future existences of which some may be
incarnate lives. In the second section of the poem, the Self, already
struck blind by supernatural insight (though not as yet struck dumb)
knows that is can only be released after the full cycle of its future reincarnations has run its course. It is in that sense that it can say ‘I am
content to live it all again / And yet again . . .’ or ‘I am content to follow
its source / Every event in action or in thought. . .’.30 This is not spoken
in defiance, as if to assert the determination to go through the same
experiences again if given the opportunity, regardless of danger or cost;
instead, it expresses the passive submission to the process of purgation,
the only way of losing the earthly shape to which Yeats has been condemned. As a reward for his willingness to accept the ordeal of rebirth,
he can anticipate the end of remorse, at some distant point far beyond
death (‘Only the dead can be forgiven. . .’).
In his particular case, this reward is likely to be particularly remote in
time:
I am content to follow to its source
Every event in action or in thought;
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Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!
When such as I cast out remorse
So great a sweetness flows into the breast . . .
(Var., 479)
‘Such as I’ are those guilty of Yeats’s sin: they have transgressed not only
on others but upon themselves, and those guilty of crimes against their
own soul have to face more difficult and longer ordeals:
The souls in Purgatory that come back
To habitations and familiar spots
. . . Re-live
Their transgressions, and that not once
But many times; they know at last
The consequence of those transgressions
Whether upon others or upon themselves;
Upon others, others may bring help
For when the consequence is at an end
The dream must end; if upon themselves,
There is no help but in themselves
And in the mercy of God.
(Purgatory, in Plays, 682)
Yeats’s crime is similar to the crime committed by the Self in the first
part of the poem when he ‘claims as by a soldier’s right / A charter to
commit the crime once more’: in his life as well as in his work, he has
betrayed divine for earthly love. The allusion to ‘A proud women not
kindred to his soul’ (479, 1. 64) links ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’ to
such earlier poems of contrition as ‘He mourns for the Change that has
come upon Him . . .’ from The Wind Among the Reeds, or to the play
On Baile’s Strand and, most of all, to the somewhat later ‘The Cold
Heaven’ in which the entire purgatorial theme is anticipated and related
to the same biographical events:
And I took all the blame out of all sense and reason
Until, I cried and trembled and rocked to and fro,
Riddled with light. Ah! When the ghost begins to quicken,
Confusion of the death-bed over, is it sent
Out naked on the roads, as the books say, and stricken
By the injustice of the skies for punishment?
(Var., 316)
A threefold reading again becomes apparent: on a dramatic level, ‘A
Dialogue of Self and Soul’ praises a heroic life over the seclusion of contemplative divine wisdom; as an esoteric theory of the afterlife, it
describes life as the painful ordeal of an incarnation made necessary by
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the urgent desire to escape from life; as a tragic, unresolved poem, it is a
confession of Yeats’s betrayal of the sacred cause of the soul. None of
these readings can be said to be right or wrong by itself, exclusive of the
others. In a sense, ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’ is also the poem of
romantic optimism which it appears to be at the surface – in the same
sense that Yeats’s poetry can be said to be also a poetry of drama and of
natural images. Yeats combines, within one coherent unit of language, a
structure contradicted by its meaning, while this meaning, in turn, is
destroyed by the truth it conveys. His poetry denies the essence of the
dramatic, but cannot dispense with it, and this paradox becomes itself
the tragic theme of a work that tries in vain to eschew tragedy.
3
In the definitive edition of the Collected Plays, the two Oedipus tragedies are placed between two plays that deal with the death and the
resurrection of Christ. The contrasts and parallels suggested by this
arrangement summarise the concept of history which, from the volume
The Tower (1928) on, plays a prominent part in Yeats’s work. One must
distinguish between purely national and historical themes; patriotic or
topical national poems occur at all periods, but it is only at a later date
that the two themes are combined or juxtaposed.31 In the early work, no
real history is present.
The connection between drama, as a dimension of the style, and
history reaches well beyond an outward analogy of dramatic action.
In the later poetry, history becomes in essence theatrical and, in a very
literal sense, it can be equated with a dramatic performance. One of the
best places to observe Yeats’s sense of the historical, is in the chorus of
the play The Resurrection:
I saw a staring virgin stand
Where holy Dionysus died
And tear the heart out of his side,
And lay the heart upon her hand
And bear that beating heart away;
And then did all the Muses sing
Of Magnus Annus at the spring,
As though God’s death were but a play.
The last line – ‘As though God’s death were but a play’ – carries different
meanings for the various characters in the play, each of which allegorically represents one of the main periods of Western culture; a Greek is
made to expound the Hellenic viewpoint against the conception of a
Hebrew. To the Greek, the death of Christ is not to be taken seriously
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(it is ‘but a play’) because, not being a physical but a purely mental,
intellectual body, he cannot be destroyed by crude physical means such
as crucifixion: ‘they thought they were nailing the hands of a living man
upon the Cross, and all the time there was nothing there but a phantom’
(Plays, 583). This phantom, however, is not a supernatural ghost, an
irrational spirit beyond human reach and understanding, but rather the
kind of wisdom that Yeats associates with Greece and that triumphs in
Oedipus. The goddess of this wisdom is Athena, ‘intellectual beauty’,
who guards over the eternal glory of Greece:
Nor accident of peace nor war
Shall wither that old marvel, for
The great grey-eyed Athene stares thereon.
(Var., 447)
Athenian culture cannot believe in a full incarnation of the divine into
flesh and blood: ‘To say that a god can be born of a woman, carried in
her womb, fed upon her breast, washed as children are washed, is the
most terrible blasphemy’ (‘Wheels and Butterflies’). It believes, however,
in divine spirit as incarnate in human intellect and credits the mind with
the power to create art and civilisations sanctioned by the gods. In its
creative actions, the human mind ‘copies [the] gestures and [the] acts’ of
the gods. This conception of Hellenism differs from the romantic
Hellenism of the German as well as the English tradition, where the
emphasis tends to fall on pantheism and on the Greek proximity to
natural things. Under the influence of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy,
Yeats insists on intellect rather than on the object. Still, Greek wisdom
remains for him also a humanistic historicism, founded on a belief in a
relationship of continuity between human and divine order and equating
the accomplishments of the human mind with the will of God. The sacrifice of the semi-divine Oedipus leads to the founding and the flowering
of cities, and the Greek in The Resurrection can exalt human knowledge
as ‘the knowledge that keeps the road from here to Persia free from
robbers, that has built the beautiful humane cities, that has made the
modern world that stands between us and the barbarian’ (Plays, 591).
The Greek mind can conceive of certain aspects of the supernatural such
as the ‘phantom’ of the mind or Plato’s ‘spume / That plays upon a
ghostly paradigm of things’, but not of the truly irrational.32 It cannot
conceive, for instance, that the gods may desecrate themselves to the
point of invading the part of man furthest removed from divine order.
Yeats often calls this part of man the ‘heart’; this heart, however, is not
the ‘heart’ by means of which Pascal could hope to know his God, but
the heart as the seat of ‘blood’, the physical essence of man which makes
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him into a creature of the earth and keeps standing between him and his
salvation. Out of an excessive pride in his intellectual achievements, the
Greek errs by his failure to realise that the animal part of man stands, in
a sense, closer to the divine than the intellect, because the gods choose to
possess and to conquer man in the heart and in the body rather than in
the mind:
Why must those holy, haughty feet descend
From emblematic niches, and what hand
Ran that delicate raddle through their white?
My heart is broken, yet must understand.
What do they seek for? Why must they descend?
For desecration and the lover’s night.
(‘A Full Moon in March’, Plays, p. 629)
The appearance of a God fallen to the animal level of man33 brings the
Greek world to its downfall; the miraculous heartbeat of the resurrected
Christ (‘The heart of a phantom is beating!’, Plays, p. 593) disrupts his
faith entirely. He does not bow before the nobility of Christ’s motives in
taking on human weakness as well as human shape (Oedipus has no
respect for pity or for human love), but the utter absurdity of a God
made of flesh and blood marks for him the breakdown of all reason.34
The Hebrew’s reasons for seeing God’s death as a mere play are
the opposite of the Greek’s. He has no difficulty whatever believing
in the human nature of Christ, but he cannot conceive of the resurrection. Christ has nothing supernatural in him, but is merely the extreme
expression of human caritas.
He was nothing more than a man, the best man who ever lived. Nobody
before him had so pitied human misery. He preached the coming of the
Messiah because he thought the Messiah would take it all upon himself. Then
some day when he was very tired, after a long journey perhaps, he thought
that he himself was the Messiah. He thought it because of all destinies it
seemed the most terrible. (Plays, 583).
His death may be a personal tragedy, but it nevertheless remains a play,
the deceptive performance of a man who acts as if he were God. The
Hebrew can console himself with the assurance that Christ was merely
wearing the mask of God: ‘I am glad that he was not the Messiah; we
might all have been deceived to our lives’ end, or learnt the truth too
late’ (Plays, 585). When it becomes clear that he has actually witnessed a
miracle, his terror even surpasses that of the others; what seemed like the
collapse of reason to the Greek becomes for him the implacable necessity
for the destruction of the body, the renunciation of the earthly joys by
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which he has lived.35 Both the Greek and the Hebrew are deceived and
their errors, however different, have a common root: their humanistic
belief that man is capable of achieving, within his generated existence,
the ethical perfection of the soul or the intellectual perfection of the
mind. Both have reconciled themselves, in a way, to the ‘betrayal’ of
generation and therefore the appearance of the true nature of God fills
them with terror and destroys their historical world.
Yeats’s own conception of the Resurrection, as opposed to his version
of the Hellenic and the Judeo-Christian attitude, is revealed in his treatment of the traditional parallel between Christ and Dionysos – the
beginning of Christian faith coinciding with the last convulsions of a
Dionysos cult which appears in the play. This could lead to a positive
reading of the line ‘As though God’s death were but a play’. When the
decadence of Greek pantheism seemed on the verge of destroying all
divine reverence, the miracle of Christ’s resurrection restored faith in
God. God’s (Dionysos’) death is ‘but a play’ because a new god has
arisen to take his place. In the syncretism of such cyclical views – one
thinks of Gérard de Nerval’s poem ‘Delfica’,36 also based on Virgil’s
Fourth Eclogue – the performance of divine presence on earth is safely
established. The prophetic promise of the Golden Age becomes again
possible as the main poetic theme and history can resume its cyclical
course. We may have feared for a moment that God died, but history
itself, in its analogy with the great cycles of nature, confirms that it was
‘but a play’.
If this is the intended reading, the problem remains why, in the rest
of the poem, the miraculous events of the Passion are represented as
destructive. Not only do they mark the end of a favourably shown
Greek civilisation but, in a deeper sense, they emphasise the vanity of all
human enterprise. ‘Magnus Annus at the spring’ suggests the beginning
of great historical achievements, the exhilaration of new discoveries –
but the next stanza ironically stifles this enthusiasm with a near-parody
of Virgil’s Eclogue and of Shelley’s optimistic ‘Hellas’; it treats the most
sublime events of Western history, which have inspired the masterworks
of our literature from the Iliad on, as artificial, trivial and gaudy:
Another Troy must rise and set
Another lineage feed the crow,
Another Argo’s painted prow
Drive to a flashier bauble yet . . .37
There are other, extrinsic reasons which complicate the poem and add
density to the line ‘As though God’s death were but a play’: Dionysos and
the death of God, in combination with an eternally recurrent, cyclical
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view of history, irresistibly suggest Nietzsche. The Birth of Tragedy,
a text which Yeats knew and had admired since 1902,38 contains a
passage on the reality of the Dionysian chorus as opposed to the artifice
of the dramatic action: ‘Wir sind jetzt zu der Einsicht gekommen, dasz
die Scene samt der Aktion in Grunde und ursprünglich nur als Vision
gedacht wurde, dasz die einzige “Realităt” eben der Chor ist. . .’.39 In
the chorus, the presence of the God and the spectacle of his tragic death
are ‘real’, but the action, which takes on more and more importance as
time goes on, treats this death as a mere abstraction, a mere spectacle,
‘but a play’.
Yeats transposes this conception to all history: moments of reality,
when the gods act directly upon man, are out of time as they are out
of nature, and history appears as the long stretches between those
moments of divine presence, when human action is empty and hollow
because it is cut off from its godlike roots. History is like the long and
gradual decadence described by Nietzsche as tragedy grows more and
more apart from its divine origin. The Western tradition, Greek or
Christian, is not aware of the ephemeral nature of historical artifice; it
sings blithely of ‘Magnus Annus at the spring’, not realising that God’s
death marks the moment when it has to give up reality for the artifice of
history. The archetypal identity between Christ and Dionysos is founded
on the fact that both were ‘incarnated’ Gods who, as such, influenced
the historical destiny of man. Both, with the assistance of the eternally
feminine principle that originally attracted them to earth, returned to
their original abode, leaving mankind hopelessly trapped in historical
time.40
We can see, then, that Yeats is deeply anti-historical. His assumed
‘rejection’ of the Western tradition as a whole, apparent in his ambiguous treatment of figures such as Homer and Shakespeare, singles out
historicism as the bane and the weakness of the Western mind. Because
we are vain enough to believe that our temporal actions copy a godlike
design, we have splintered divine Unity into fragmentary personalities
fighting out their battles on the stage of history. Instead of the unified
work of art that echoes the word of God, the highest achievements of
Western art are ‘but play(s)’. Our art is dramatic to the same extent and
for the same reason that it is historical.
In late poems such as ‘The Statues’, ‘Lapis Lazuli’, ‘Under Ben
Bulben’, etc., the frequent and sweeping excursions through the history
of Western art contain numerous references to Shakespeare, the prototype of Western dramatic poetry.41 The existence of an alternate
possibility is suggested by the description of an Eastern art which is
non-dramatic, non-historical and as long lived as our art is transient.
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The authentic ‘gaiety’ of Eastern wisdom, dominating the tragic scene
of history, is compared to the forced, artificial gaiety of Western man,
caught in his ‘tragic play’ and not allowed to ‘break up [his] lines to
weep’ (‘Lapis Lazuli’, Var., 565). Nothing is more ‘historical’, of course,
than this attempt to transcend history from the inside – just as nothing in
Yeats is more successfully dramatic than the last poems in which drama
is in fact being rejected as an art-form. We have by now come to expect
such paradoxes as the fundamental characteristic of Yeats’s work.
4
One would not expect to find in Yeats’s treatment of the national
theme attitudes at variance with his ambiguous relationship towards
drama and image. Most of the time, his use of national symbols, taken
from Celtic mythology as well as from the contemporary Irish scene,
fits very well in the pattern that emerges from our description so far.
After a brief period during his youth when Yeats writes unabashed
propaganda in verse,42 it becomes increasingly evident that the Irish
heroic past is equated in his mind with an occult divinity of very slight
earthly reality. The author of Ideas of Good and Evil finds no apparent
difficulty in reconciling Celtic myths with occult symbolism; both are
common emanations from the same ‘emblematic’ tradition. Because
both feed on this tradition, Yeats can claim that no poetry is closer to
truly popular poetry than modern French symbolism, an idea which
later receives an amazing illustration in the confrontation between an
Aran Island fisherman and Gustave Moreau’s Jason (Au., p. 321).43
Critics who have derided Yeats for not writing more like the anonymous
authors of the Celtic epic tradition44 have missed the point. Nothing is
more openly ‘sentimental’ and avowedly nostalgic than such a thorough
un-naïve sample of romantic, elegiac nationalism as The Wanderings
of Oisin. With this important difference, however, that the image of a
lost national Eden no longer appears in the form of a purely pastoral
symbol, but carries distinct other-worldly overtones that foreshadow
‘Byzantium’.
Yeats himself was steadily aware that this equation of the national
with the divine constituted, in fact, a dangerous confusion of irreducible
categories. In case he would have forgotten, his compatriots were always
there to remind him. Long before Yeats was born, in an essay on ‘Ballad
Poetry in Ireland’, Thomas Davis had already dismissed as fantastic any
national ideal derived from ‘a Celtic kingdom with the old names and
the old language, without the old quarrels . . .’, as it was suggested by
‘some, dazzled by visions of pagan splendour, and the pretensions of
pedigree, and won by the passions and romance of the older races’.45
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Throughout his life, Yeats is on the defensive when he tries to defend
his poetic identity against an Irish nationalism which he never wanted
to relinquish. A tension, very similar to the stylistic conflict between
natural and emblematic imagery, develops between the nationally and
the divinely committed poet, between ‘race’ and ‘soul’. And this tension,
which remains unresolved, is dealt with by means of a strategy altogether similar to the ambiguous balance achieved in the style. When, in
a late poem like ‘The Statues’, Yeats ends with the splendid lines
We Irish, born into that ancient sect
But thrown upon this filthy modern tide
And by its formless spawning fury wrecked,
Climb to our proper dark, that we may trace
The lineaments of a plummet-measured face.
(Var., 611)
we are bound to feel that this is meant to be a tribute to the eternally
resurgent spirit of the nation. We should know, however, from a careful
reading of what comes before in the poem, that precisely the tracing ‘of
a plummet-measured face’ is the fatal error which forces Western man
to merely ‘crawl to Buddha’s emptiness’ instead of celebrating Nirwâna
in a properly noble style. The irony of the poem stems from the fact
that the glorious Irish heroes, so eloquently celebrated at the end of the
poem, are about to commit the same mistake as their predecessors and
are moving towards a rather ignoble extinction. No wonder that Yeats’s
political position in Ireland was always that of a subversive; one can
understand all too well why ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ is not considered
compulsory reading in the schoolrooms of the Irish Republic.
At rare intervals, however, an altogether different tone of description
makes its appearance in Yeats’s poetry. In the poem ‘The Fisherman’,
for instance, the following lines appear:
Maybe a twelvemonth since
Suddenly I began
In scorn of this audience,
Imagining a man,
And his sun-freckled face,
And grey Connemara cloth,
Climbing up to a place
Where stone is dark under froth,
And the down-turn in the wrist,
When flies drop in the stream;
A man who does not exist,
A man who is but a dream . . .
(Var., 348)
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And, in ‘Easter 1916’ we come upon the following description:
The horse that comes from the road,
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse splashed within it;
The long-legged moor-hens drive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone’s in the middle of all.
(Var., 393)
If we compare such lines to the famous nature-passages that have been
discussed earlier, such as the refrain from ‘Meditations in Time of Civil
War’: ‘O honey-bees / Come build in the empty house of the stare’, or
the end of ‘Among School Children’: ‘O chestnut-tree, great-rooted
blossomer . . .’, an essential difference becomes apparent. In both kinds
of description, esoteric ‘emblematic’ readings are possible and necessary.
But, in the case of the ‘chestnut-tree’ and the ‘honey-bees’, the poem
appeals to an elegiac longing for intrinsically beautiful objects in nature,
from which the poet has been separated. As we have seen, this desire
stands in direct contradiction to the ‘emblematic’ reading; the latter
demands from us that we renounce all nostalgias of this kind. In the
case of the two landscapes from ‘The Fisherman’ and ‘Easter 1916’, no
such seduction is brought into play. The natural objects are not beautiful or tempting, they are merely present. No sweetness, no blossoming
is suggested; neither do we feel any nostalgia towards objects brought
so casually before our eye. No conflict exists, therefore, between an
‘emblematic’ reading, hinted at by the presence of so many ‘birds and
beasts’, and the almost indifferent observation of a scene which does not
invite our emotional participation.
If nevertheless those ‘neutral’ landscapes are particularly memorable,
it is because they are so intrinsically Irish, because they capture the very
presence, the distinctive light of Ireland. This, too, is a national element
in the poetry, but an essentially different one from the national ‘theme’
which belongs, with the chestnut-tree and the honey-bees, to the world
of nostalgia. It is striking that the poems from which those landscapes
are taken speak without irony or undercutting about a possible new
beginning, ‘cold / And passionate as the dawn’. This highly fragile
and tentative resolution is only allowed to take place when natural
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things seem to have lost the nostalgic appeal that makes words want to
originate ‘like flowers originate’. Another category, that one might call
‘national identity’, seems to have taken the place of the natural object
as the entity towards which language directs its aim. The things in the
landscape are not meaningful because they are things but because they
are Irish.
One hesitates to use a word as dangerous as ‘national’ to designate
something so different from what we normally associate with the
concept. Hölderlin used the term ‘Vaterländischer Umkehr’ to designate
what he considered to be a revolutionary decision in the use of poetic language. By ceasing to strive for natural things that are forever inaccessible
to us, Hölderlin thought that the poetry of the West could fulfil itself and
acquire a ‘national’ identity as specific and distinct as the ‘national’ identity of Greek art at its height. Since 1800, the word ‘national’ has more
and more meant the opposite of what Hölderlin intended it to signify,
and it has been the most alien word used by modern man. If I had to
point to explicit positive elements in the poetry of Yeats, I would look
for them in poems like ‘The Fisherman’ and ‘Easter 1916’. The remote
possibility of a poetry which dares to say what it really is, which dares to
be truly ‘national’, is perhaps being ‘born’ here, though it be in the guise
of a ‘terrible beauty’.
Addenda
The actual facts of Yeats’s relations with the French symbolists have
been dealt with by his various biographers, but since a certain amount
of inaccuracies of detail are still widely circulating, a brief summary may
be useful. These relations should be seen against the background of close
Anglo-French contacts during the last quarter of the century. The current
flowed in both directions: one thinks of Verlaine’s and Mallarmé’s visits
to Oxford and Cambridge, their contributions to English reviews, their
interest in Tennyson and Swinburne. French symbolism was almost as
Anglophile as English poetry of the period was turned towards France.
As a young poet, Yeats was bound to share in this exchange. His
knowledge of the originals was to remain slight, although there is some
exaggeration in a later statement of his that ‘of the French symbolists I
have never had any detailed or accurate knowledge’.46 His first initiation must have come from two friends of his father’s: York Powell and
Edward Dowden. York Powell, don of Christ Church, Oxford, was
a constant visitor at Bedford Park. Although his field at Oxford was
history and Scandinavian languages, he had a keen interest in French
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symbolist poetry and translated some poems by Paul Fort. He will
go down in history as the man to have translated Mallarmé’s Oxford
lecture ‘la Musique et les Lettres’, ‘d’un jet . . . en plusieurs heures de
nuit’,47 a task before which many a lesser man might have recoiled; this
translation is reported to be in existence still and it may some day be
rediscovered. He is also said to have acted as interpreter at a meeting
between Mallarmé and Pater in Oxford, where an English specialist in
French culture was too shy to speak French, and a French teacher of
English too embarrassed to speak English; Powell handled the assignment with great gusto, although his French was far from perfect and his
Welsh accent overpowering. As for Edward Dowden, of Trinity College,
Dublin, who encouraged Yeats’s first poetical efforts, he too was well
informed on the subject of French symbolism. He published an article
in Frank Harris’s Fortnightly Review of November 1891, giving an
amusing and quite complete summary of an important symbolist document, Jules Huret’s Enquête sur l’Evolution littéraire; in the replies of
Maeterlinck and Mallarmé, Yeats must have found views close to his
own.
All those who knew Yeats agree that he was a very poor student of
languages. But he worked rather consistently at his French, even as late
as in 1909,48 and he spent a lot of time in France, though more concerned with Maud Gonne than with symbolism. We know that, during
his first stay in Paris in the Spring of 1894, he was given an introduction
to Mallarmé’s Tuesday evenings, but almost certainly made no use of it.
Being by no means secretive about his encounters with famous men (and
Mallarmé was famous in his circle), he would certainly have said so if he
had gone; he was probably too shy and too bored at the prospect of an
all-French evening of conversation. He did go to see Verlaine, however,
in the company of Arthur Symons and, much more important still, saw a
representation of Villiers de l’Isle Adam’s Axel in the company of Maud
Gonne; both occasions led to articles published in The Bookman and
the Savoy respectively.49 During this period, from 1893 to 1900, Yeats’s
prose contains frequent references to French symbolism; his unpublished
autobiographical novel The Speckled Bird was partly set in Paris and
he had himself acknowledged, and perhaps exaggerated, the influence
of Mallarmé and Villiers on the poems of The Wind Among the Reeds,
the prose of The Secret Rose (1897) and the first version of the play The
Shadowy Waters (1900).50
Although Yeats thus undeniably had some direct contact with French
symbolist poetry, his relationship to France was much more casual than
that of the three main intermediaries between England and France:
George Moore, Edmund Gosse and Arthur Symons. He had known both
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Moore and Gosse before 1895, but only slightly.51 Even if he had associated with them as closely as he would do at a later date, it is doubtful
that he could have derived from them more than an altogether superficial knowledge of symbolist poetry, as a somewhat mysterious, picturesque and eccentric movement about which it was fashionable, for a free
spirit, to tell anecdotes. Moore’s main contribution is on Rimbaud, and
it points to Etiemble rather than to an understanding of symbolism: he
gives an amazing version of the Rimbaud-Verlaine incident and tell us
that ‘Rimbaud . . . left Europe to immure himself forever in a Christian
convent on the shores of the Red Sea; and where it stands on a rocky
promontory, he has been seen digging the soil for the grace of God.’52
Gosse’s article on Mallarmé is hardly more helpful; he gives a rather
sketchy paraphrase of ‘L’après-midi d’un faune’, laments the obscurity
of the Sonnet on Poe (which he quotes in French) and concludes, with
more caution than insight: ‘something of Mr. Mallarmé will, however,
always be turned back to with respect and perhaps with enthusiasm, for
he is a true man of letters’.53
The main influence, as is well known, was Arthur Symons, deservedly
considered to be the main authority on French poetry among the members
of the Rymers Club. Yeats and Symons shared rooms in Fountain Court
for some eight months in 1895–6 and out of their conversations came
The Symbolist Movement in Literature, a book which still constitutes
a very readable introduction to the subject. Symons, who was much
attacked during his early career, has been treated generously by historians
of literature, and A.J. Farmer,54 for instance, considers him as one of the
leading figures of the period. This judgement needs some correction in
our context, because one might derive from it the impression that Symons
had a profound understanding of symbolism which he would have communicated to Yeats. The truth is somewhat different. Not only in his
poetry but also in his criticism, Symons is a highly derivative figure. Yeats
has praised his ability to adjust to the minds and souls of others, but this
undeniable sensitivity is not coupled with any truly inventive powers of
imagination or judgement. It has been claimed that, in The Symbolist
Movement, he showed himself capable of rising above the obvious limitations of a merely ‘decadent’ aesthetic; but it is clearly under the influence
of Yeats that he changed, at the last minute, the title of his book from
The Decadent to The Symbolist Movement and, in the preface, defended
views which Yeats had held well before, most explicitly in his editorial
comments on Blake. Yeats himself expressed a negative critical opinion
on Symons’s book and, although we must allow for the fact that this
happens in a letter to Lady Gregory, who disapproved greatly of Symons,
his opinion is a legitimate one.55 The French poet with whom Symons has
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a real affinity is Verlaine, undoubtedly the least symbolical of the symbolists, and the furthest removed from Yeats’s highly deliberate use of
traditional emblems. Symons, however, is a man of considerable flair and
a good translator; both qualities are in evidence in his essay on Mallarmé,
whose work he understood as well as he could – which is a great deal
better than most of his contemporaries in England and, for that matter, in
France. His translation of ‘Hérodiade’, which impressed Yeats considerably, is on the whole faithful and occasionally felicitous; moreover (and
in this Symons was well ahead of his time), he included extracts from
the late prose of Divagations in the Mallarmé article published in the
Fortnightly Review of November 1898, aside from the generally admired
earlier prose poems, all very ‘decadent’ in spirit (‘J’ai aimé tout ce qui se
resumait en ce mot: chute’).56 Yeats made use of these texts which, but for
Symons, would certainly never have reached him.
It appears then that, apart from a certain amount of anecdotes, we
know for certain of two major works which Yeats knew well: Villiers’
Axel and Mallarmé’s ‘Hérodiade’. He also read some Maeterlinck (at
any rate an English translation of Les Aveugles), and this had an undeniable formal influence on his theatre, most apparent in The Shadowy
Waters. He did, however, dismiss Maeterlinck as a poet, seeing through
his essential vagueness with an insight sharpened no doubt by some
jealousy.57 Since, on the other hand, the best in Maeterlinck’s theatre
derives from Villiers, Axel and ‘Hérodiade’ are the two works to be
taken as a starting-point for a comparison between French symbolism
and the early poetry of W.B. Yeats.
Notes
1. One’s intuitive awareness of Yeats’s metrical evolution seems to fit the
pattern from an artificially incantory poetry to a dissonantly concrete one,
but the task of translating this impression into an objective description of
Yeats’s prosody lies far beyond the scope of this study. Except for passing
remarks, very little work has been done on the subject; F.A.C. Wilson mentions a thesis from the University of Wisconsin, The Versification of W.B.
Yeats by Marilyn Denton, to which I had no access.
2. Emil Staiger, Grundbegriffe der Poetik (Bern, 1946), p. 67.
3. Bendetto Croce, La Poesia (Bari, 1936).
4. See, for instance, Staiger, Grundbegriffe der Poetik. Gaston Bachelard’s
studies in what he calls the ‘material imagination’ are in fact a kind of lyricism of the object, and his books are a phenomenology of the lyrical
imagination. Some of his disciples or some kindred spirits can therefore
describe Baudelaire, for instance, as the poet of the ‘relation heureuse’
between man and object (see, among others, J.P. Richard, Poésie et
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5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
The Post-Romantic Predicament
Profondeur, pp. 11 and 159 ff. and Yves Bonnefoy, L’improbable, p. 165).
In The Unmediated Vision (New Haven, 1955), G. Hartmann reveals great
insight into the spatial, plastic nature of pure lyricism, although he is compelled to end up describing his poets (Wordsworth, Hopkins, Rilke and
Valery) as being definitely dramatic in spite of themselves. Heidegger’s
Erlaüterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung (Frankfurt am Main, 1951) are
founded on an ontology of the poetic that is essentially lyrical, as in Staiger
or Croce’s reconciled world.
Fergus, the poet-king who renounces his throne, is a symbol of renunciation of earthly pleasures, love as well as wordly power, like Villiers’s Axel,
or Forgael in The Shadowy Waters.
Some of the early poems sustain a lyrical mood throughout without therefore being superior to the others; ‘A Cradle Song’ (Var., 118) is a case in
point, and, it could be argued, ‘The Stolen Child’ (Var., 86) as well.
In an interesting example of Yeatsian perversity, the final version of this
poem as it now appears in the Collected Poems, contains a passage (‘O how
could I be so calm / When she rose up to depart?’) which is quite incomprehensible if one does not know the circumstance in which the poem is sung in
the original story. This story, however, was practically written out of existence by Yeats himself, in the revised versions of the Hanrahan stories written
with the dubious assistance of Lady Gregory. The original 1897 version of
the Hanrahan stories is practically unfindable, except in specialised libraries.
As in the play Where There Is Nothing (1903) later rewritten and entitled
The Unicorn From the Stars (1908) where the hero uses war and rebellion
to hasten the eschatology.
A.P. Sinnett, Esoteric Buddism (London, 1883), p. 163.
As in ‘The Valley of the Black Pig’ (Var., 161).
As in ‘He bids his Beloved be at Peace’ (Var., 154).
As in the above quoted letter to AE (Letters, p. 434).
As when, in a late text, working to evoke one of his most important and
persistent themes, he refers back to The Wind Among the Reeds for examples where this theme is best expressed. W.B. Yeats, Pages from a 1930
Diary (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1934), p. 18.
The Unicorn from the Stars, in Plays, 381. The play is a later version of
Where There is Nothing.
‘A Symbolical Drama in Paris’, The Bookman, April 1894, London edition.
Yeats sees Axel as a fourfold renunciation: renunciation of the cloister
(Sara, Act I), of the active life of the world (commander), of the labouring
of the intellect (Janus), of the passionate life of love (Sara and Axel in Act
IV).
But which is never quite successful in the plays, partly perhaps because
Yeats’s drama is most often rhetorical, acted out between himself and the
reader rather than between several fictional characters; the dialogue always
takes place between the actor and the audience, rarely between the parts
themselves.
Yeats is clearly very pleased with this argument, and he repeats it on other
occasions, such as his commentary on the poem ‘A Parnellite at Parnell’s
Funeral’ (Var., 835).
I do not mean to suggest that Yeats works as on a pre-arranged canvas,
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19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
161
systematically filling in the blanks that connect pre-determined emblems.
The poems exist and, for all we know, originated independently of this
system and possess a unit of their own; the recurrence of images and
emblems results from an inner necessity which does not interfere with the
spontaneity of invention. An analysis a posteriori, however, cannot avoid
stressing the frequent recurrence of fixed emblems and is entitled to use
such recurrences, though with caution and awareness of context, as an
indispensable means of exegesis and interpretation.
It is in this sense, presumably, that Ephesus is used in ‘On a Picture of a
Black Centaur by Edmund Dulac’, although several other emblematic associations are superimposed (bread and wine, Saturn and Jupiter, sun and
moon – not to mention parrots, centaurs, woods, etc.).
‘The Celestial Body is the Divine Cloak lent to all, it falls away at the
consummation [of the mystical Marriage] and Christ is revealed’ (A Vision,
p. 232).
‘. . . the tragedy began / With Homer that was a blind man’ (‘The Tower’,
Var., 411).
The tree alludes to the Mount of Olives and the advent of Christianity.
Saint Catherine, studied at length by Von Hügel (The Mystical Element of
Religion, I, p. 223 ff.), is a virgin martyr who escaped from the wheel to be
beheaded; her emblems include a sword and a crown.
There is a possible allusion to the war of Troy, where Venus (Troy) opposes
Athena (Greece); Homer is clearly on the side of the Greeks. This puts Troy
on the side of Christ (which ties in with the Aeneid and Virgil’s Fifth
Eclogue as a prophetic Christian poem). Troy fought for love, Greece for
intellectual, lawful order (‘Athena takes Achilles by the hair’). Shakespeare’s
Ulysses, in Troilus and Cressida is a typically antithetical man.
25.
I carry the sun in a golden cup
The moon in a silver bag
(‘Those Dancing Days are gone’, Var., 525)
26. See, in ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’, ‘Two men have founded here
. . .’ (Var., 420)
27.
Some violent bitter man, some powerful man
Called architect and artists in, that they,
Bitter and violent men, might rear in stone
The sweetness that all longed for night and day . . .
(Var., 418)
28. Cf.
. . . these eyes
By water, herb and solitary prayer
Made acquiline, are open to that light . . .
(‘Supernatural Song’,Var., 555)
29. Sato’s sword has the opposite connotation in ‘Meditations in Time of Civil
War’ where, as an emblem of the East, it is made to serve the love and the
wars of the soul (which are aimed away from life, towards the divine) and
not those of the self:
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Our learned men have urged
That when and where ’t was forged
A marvellous accomplishment
In painting or in pottery, went
From father unto son
And through the centuries ran
And seemed unchanging like the sword.
Soul’s beauty being most adored
30. Cf. from the play Purgatory:
The souls in Purgatory that come back
To habitations and familiar spots
. . . Re-live
Their transgressions, and that not once
But many times; they know at last
The consequence of their transgressions
Whether upon others or upon themselves; . . .
(Plays, 682)
31. The two can be related or juxtaposed, as in ‘The Statues’, ‘Nineteen Hundred
and Nineteen’, ‘Parnell’s Funeral’ and several other instances, but this is not
necessarily the case. The Wanderings of Oisin or The Countess Kathleen, as
well as poems like ‘No second Troy’ or ‘September 1913’, are national
poems, but can hardly be called historical in the broader sense of the word.
32. See Nietzsche’s Geburt der Tragödie for the characterisation of Socrates as
the Apollonian Greek, with emphasis on the intellect and on the inability to
understand the irrational (F. Nietzsche, Werke, K. Schlechta ed. I, 78).
33.
Odour of blood when Christ was slain
Made all Platonic tolerance vain
And vain all Doric discipline
34. One should distinguish between Yeats’s version of the Greek as compared
to the Byzantine denial of incarnation. The Greek denies the Christian
concept of transubstantiation and cannot conceive of the bodily nature of
Christ, but his God is incarnate in his own way, in human intellect. For the
Eastern wisdom of Byzantium, there is no incarnation whatever, neither in
body nor in mind; only his art – and not the Western art of Greece and of
Christianity – can be called truly emblematic.
35. F.A.C. Wilson, who gives very relevant information on the sources and the
use of the Dionysos myth in the play, misrepresents the part of the Hebrew
when he quotes him as saying: ‘One had to give up all worldly knowledge,
all ambition, do nothing of one’s own will. Only the divine could have any
reality. God had to take complete possession.’ In the context, the Hebrew
is not saying that we should do this, but saying how glad he is that we do
not have to, how terrifying it would be if Christ had really been the Messiah
and renunciation become necessary. The distinction matters greatly in an
interpretation of the play as a whole.
36.
Ils reviendront, ces Dieux que tu pleures toujours!
Le temps va ramener l’ordre des anciens jours;
La terre a tressailli d’un soufflé prophetique . . .
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37. One remembers the very similar passage from ‘Vacillation’:
From man’s blood-sodden heart are sprung
Those branches of the night and day
Where the gaudy moon is hung . . . (‘Vacillation’, VI)
38. See Letter to Lady Gregory of 26 September 1902 (Letters, 379); in a letter
to John Quinn (15 May 1903, Letters, 402) Yeats says that Quinn introduced him to Nietzsche. Nietzsche was much discussed at that time; almost
all the literary reviews of the period print articles on him.
39. Nietzsche, Geburt der Tragödie, Schlechta ed. I, 53.
40. The manner in which Yeats uses Nietzsche is even more revealing in its differences than in its similarities. Nietzsche interprets the Dionysos myth as
the cycle leading from the destruction of original unity between man and
nature (Individuation), to reconciliation and recovered unity achieved by
means of art – especially music: ‘wobei angedeuted wird dasz das eigentliche dionysische Leiden einer Umwandlung in Luft, Wasser, Erde und Feuer
sein, dasz wir also den Zustand der Individuation als den Quell und Urgund
alles Leidens, als etwas an sich Verwerfliches, zu betrachten hătten . . . Die
Hoffnung der Epopten ging aber auf einer Wiedargeburt des Dionysos, die
wir jetzt als das Ende der Individuation ahnungsvoll zu begreifen haben . . .
In den angeführten Anschauungen haben wir bereits alle Bestandteile einer
tiefsinnigen und pessimistischen Weltbetrachtung und zugleich damit die
Mysterienlehre der Tragödie zusammen: die Grunderkenntnis von der
Einheit alles Vorhandenen, die Betrachtung der Individuation als des
Urgrundes des Ŭbels, die Kunst als die freudige Hoffnung dasz der Bann der
Individuation zu zerbrechen sei, als die Ahnung einer wiederhergestellten
Einheit’ (Geburt der Tragödie, Schlechta ed. I, 62). ‘Unity of all things’
(Einheit alles Vorhandenen’) is conceived by Nietzsche, at least in this early
text, as the pantheistic oneness between man and nature in which ‘man sees
himself magically transformed into a nature-spirit’ (‘er sieht sich zum Satyr
verzaubert’). Nietzsche differs here only by a heightened intensity of tone
from Schiller or the early Hölderlin, and remains within the traditionally
romantic conception of art as a restorer of natural unity.
With some assistance from English classical anthropology (itself indebted
to Nietzsche), Yeats makes his version of the Dionysos myth fall within the
framework of his own convictions. He treats Dionysos as a vegetation
myth, relating to the same archetype as the Attis and Adonis myths.
Dionysos’ destruction by the Titans is not the passage from natural unity to
division, but the descent into matter, the division caused by falling from a
state of unity that is out of nature into the world of generation: Yeats’s
version is the opposite of pantheistic. Elsewhere in his work, God’s descent
into matter is represented by the emblem of the falling star, which as it is
being hit by the arrow, appears also to be the heart of God. The significance
of the divine ‘heart’, in the first stanza of the chorus, cannot be separated
from the myth of Sagittarius to which Yeats alludes in the Autobiographies
(p. 578) and in his commentaries to the poem ‘Parnell’s Funeral’ (Var.,
834). The godlike principle can be attracted into matter by the erotic power
of nature, represented by the beauty of the woman who shot the arrow; the
gods, at times, are willing to have their ‘heart’ touched by this beauty, and
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to indulge in the ‘desecration’ of the ‘lover’s night’. The rape of Leda as well
as the Annunciation of the Holy Spirit to the Virgin Mary are instances of
such divine actions which generate the gyres of history.
Yeats’s own statement also appears in the connection he establishes
between the myth of Sagittarius (God’s descent into matter in response to
Cybele) and the myth of the resurrection of Dionysos as well as Christ (on
the identification Christ-Dionysos, or rather Dionysos-St. John, see F.A.C.
Wilson, p. 66). The resurrection is accomplished by Athena but Yeats,
using Julien as an authority (see ibid., p. 70) identifies Cybele with Athena
and the Christian Virgin (‘I saw a staring Virgin stand. . .’). The same feminine, erotic Earth-goddess who is responsible for the divine sacrifice
(Dionysos torn to pieces by the Titans, the incarnation and crucifixion of
Christ, and also, apparently, the martyr-death of Parnell, the victim of an
Earth-goddess conveniently called O’Shea and thus a true woman of the
Sidhe) is also the feminine principle that rescues the fallen God and presides
over his ascent to Heaven.
We wandering women
Wives for all that come,
Tried to draw him home:
And every wandering woman
Beat upon a drum
...
But the wandering Titans
Where the woods grow dim
Stood and waited him.
The great hands of those Titans
Tore limb from limb.
(Plays, 587)
The ‘home’ to which the peripatetic harlots (‘wandering women’) are about
to take God is located in Heaven, far from the wood of matter in which he
has been momentarily trapped. In the chorus from The Resurrection, the
return to Heaven is represented by the tearing out of the heart, thus
strongly linking together the two myths of descent and ascent: the ‘heart’ of
the star shot down is also the ‘heart’ of Dionysos watched over by Athena,
and returned to Heaven.
41. For instance, in ‘Lapis Lazuli’ aa.9 ff. (Var., 565) or in ‘The Statues’, 1. 19
(Var., 610), the allusions are primarily to Hamlet and King Lear. In A
Vision (p. 294) an interesting passage describes Shakespeare as the writer in
whom ‘human personality . . . burst like a shell’; the continuity between
Hellenic and Christian art is kept by suggesting that ‘had the total works of
Sophocles survived’ he would have been an even greater playwright of
Shakespeare’s type.
42. Examples of Yeats’s atrocious early patriotic poems can now be found in
Var; for instance ‘How Ferencz Renyi kept silent’ (p. 709), ‘The Two
Titans’ (p. 687) or ‘Mourne – and then Onward’ (p. 737). The essays of
that period contain similarly orthodox statements, using the very arguments that will soon be used against him; see for instance, the essay article
on Ferguson (in Dublin University Review, No. 1886, pp. 923–41), or an
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43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
165
attack on the decadence of French and English writers in United Ireland, 15
October 1892 (also quoted by Jeffares, p. 91). This entire early period has
been well studied by Ellmann in his two books, by Jeffares and by
MacNeice .
For Yeats’s relationship with the French symbolists, see Addenda on
p. 156.
Such as, for instance, Dorothy M. Hoare in The Works of Morris and Yeats
in Relation to Early Saga Literature (Cambridge, 1937).
Thomas Davis, Essays (T. Rolleston /edition), p. 192.
Letter to E. Boyd, February 1915, in The Letters of W.B. Yeats, ed. Allen
Wade (London, 1954), p. 592.
Mallarmé, Oeuvres, p. 642. On York Powell, see Oliver Elton, F.Y. Powell,
Life and Letters, 2 vols.
Letter to J.B. Yeats, 17 January 1909, in Letters, p. 515.
‘Verlaine in 1894’, The Savoy, 2, April 1896, p. 118; ‘A Symbolical Drama
in Paris’, The Bookman, April 1894.
‘The Tragic Generation’, Autobiographies (London, 1955), p. 320.
See Letters, p. 271 on Moore, and Letter to Gosse, p. 258. Later, Gosse was
something of an official protector of Yeats in England, where he got him a
much debated pension from the Crown; the turbulent vicissitudes of the
Yeats–Moore relations are well known.
George Moore, Impressions and Opinions (London, 1891).
Edmund Gosse, Questions at Issue (London, 1893).
A. J. Farmer, p. 357.
I recently had the opportunity to go through a large amount of unpublished
Symons material, mostly letters dating from 1902 to 1908, up to and even
during the mental breakdown which occurred in Italy in October in 1908.
By then, Symons is no longer under Yeats’s influence; Yeats is hardly ever
mentioned in this correspondence and, except for what Wade had published, no letters exchanged between Yeats and Symons are known at
present. When he is on his own, Symons tends to go back to the attitudes of
his early years, in a somewhat painstaking effort at decadence which,
however literary it remained in tone, nevertheless led him to his pathetic
end.
Mallarmé, ‘Plainte d’Automne’, p. 270.
Letter to Olivia Shakespear, 7 April 1895, in Letters, p. 255. In an unpublished letter from Coole Park of 19 August 1900 to the American editor
Fitts, Yeats writes: ‘[The Shadowy Waters] is what people call
Maeterlinckian, though certainly it owes nothing to him. The subject is old
Irish. . . .’
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Chapter 4
Mallarmé, George and Yeats
(c.1959)
The organisation of this essay indicates that it is not a comparative
study, in the historical sense of the term. No particular emphasis on
comparative data, used as sources or means of exegesis, appears in the
general description of Mallarmé’s, George’s and Yeats’s work which
constitutes the first part. Mallarmé is a common denominator for
George and Yeats, but not much is to be gained by focusing the study of
their poetry on its relationship or indebtedness to French symbolism.1
If this were our aim, it would be a definite mistake to limit ourselves to
Mallarmé, who in so many respects stands aside from and above the
movement now generally referred to, somewhat ambiguously, as French
symbolism.2 Both George and Yeats, each in a different way, were influenced by French symbolism, though perhaps more as by a general poetic
mood than by specific works or authors. Mallarmé was one among its
constituent elements, important as a myth, as the symbol of a certain
exalted poetic vocation, but as a specific influence, he is less important
to Yeats than Villiers, and less to George than Baudelaire. In the case of
Yeats, it is safe to assume that his knowledge of Mallarmé’s work was
very limited and altogether second-hand. He did not know French and
the true Mallarmé, for whom syntax is perhaps the most essential formal
dimension, vanishes almost entirely in translation. What remains of him
is highly bewildering, and we see Yeats being amply and legitimately
bewildered when he reads, in 1928, Sturge Moore’s translation of ‘Le
vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui . . .’, a sonnet which appears to him
as a ‘devilish mixture’.3 His comment to Dorothy Wellesley on reading,
in 1937, the translations of some Mallarmé poems by Roger Fry,
clearly indicates the limits of his comprehension.4 What Yeats got from
Mallarmé, passing through the rather conventional interpretation of
Arthur Symons, he could as well have received from any other ‘symboliste’. And, in the truly ‘devilish mixture’ of sources which acted upon his
extremely receptive, but entirely independent mind, French symbolism
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as a whole, let alone Mallarmé, occupies a position well behind many
other elements which we shall have to mention. This study owes it to its
title to explore this specific part, but it may be well to state at the outset
that this is a very minor part of its overall purpose.
In the case of George, the influence of French symbolism is, of course,
much more distinct. For a long time, French was almost the first language of a man who felt himself to belong much more to the valleys
of Rhine, Meuse and Seine than to austere Prussia (which he hated) or
gemütlich Bavaria and Austria (which he despised). Baudelaire, whose
poetry he translated almost entirely, is a key influence which subsists
throughout the work. And it is the Baudelairian element in Mallarmé –
the Mallarmé of ‘Brise marine’ – that he knew, understood and admired.
In Germany he was something of a pioneer in his discovery of this poetry
and although he remained on the fringes of the group, associating with
such second-rate figures as Albert Saint-Paul, his insight was well ahead
of that of many critics of his time – ahead, for instance, of that of Arthur
Symonds. This happened partly, no doubt, because he received the
shock of French symbolism at a moment when his mind had not been
touched by any other live influence. It had a determining effect on his
work and his personality.
But still, even this genuine exchange occupies a lateral part in this
study. First of all, the subject of George’s relationship to French symbolism has been quite adequately treated in at least three published books
and in numerous articles.5 Even though my conclusions may differ with
some of these authors, the subject has been sufficiently covered to make
an additional examination redundant. Moreover, George undoubtedly
moved away from this original influence; the mature George, from Das
Jahr der Seele on, is engaged in an enterprise which is entirely his own
and in which French symbolism becomes only an episode. From then on,
although his feelings towards his Parisian masters remained friendly and
grateful enough,6 he considers himself like Yeats, as walking different
and more challenging roads. And this too may indicate that however
perceptive and profound his knowledge of his French contemporaries
may have been, he could not see Mallarmé in the light in which we tend
to see him today. He failed indeed, to grasp the full power of a mind
of which the curve had run well beyond any point that George himself
would ever reach. It could hardly have been otherwise. After all, even
George only new a part of Mallarmé’s work; ‘Igitur’ was unknown, he
almost certainly never saw ‘Un coup de dés’ or any of the prose; and
Mallarmé read in isolated poems looks very different from the Mallarmé
who emerges from the complete critical edition established by Mondor
and Jean-Aubry. We are now probably only beginning to understand
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this work in all its implications, partly with the help of insight gained
from comparison with other poets. Which leads us then, to the central
purpose of this essay.
The first part of this study attempts to describe, primarily by textual
analysis, the curve of the development of each poet, without more comparative considerations than mere elucidation requires. The second part
is more general. Using the overall image arrived at in the first section,
it defines by comparison a certain type of poetic démarche, a general
scheme of poetic intent, which the analogies as well as the contrasts
between the three poets should help to bring out. Since this definition
is based on the thematic material and on the poets’ attitudes towards
their themes, it is not primarily a formal or historical scrutiny. For this
reason, it may require some preliminary justification, although the final
justifications can only be based on the conclusions of this analysis itself.
The lack of historical emphasis is primarily the result of practical considerations: it would obviously be impossible to treat in detail the entire
problem of biographical, literary and extra-literary sources of three
authors with different national backgrounds, provided even that one
could make the claim of being capable to handle such an assignment.
The existing bibliography, however, makes this at least partly unnecessary. Many of the purely historical problems relating to the three poets
have been exhaustively treated.
Mallarmé being the oldest poet, the historical bibliography is naturally the most extensive and clearly separated from essays of interpretation and exegesis. Henri Mondor’s biography,7 although it devotes
too much space to minor figures and events, is accurate and complete
enough to be called definitive. Combined with the reports of witnesses,
such as Mauclair, Valéry, Dujardin, Faure, etc., it gives a very coherent
picture of Mallarmé’s personality and milieu, corroborated, in general,
by the tone and content of the correspondence, in so far as it is available.
Neither does the problem of Mallarmé’s sources lead into particular
difficulties, with the possible exception of three matters on which some
additional explanations are necessary: the influence of the Kabbalah on
his thought and imagery, his indebtedness to Edgar Allen Poe, and his
hypothetical acquaintance with German idealist philosophy, particularly Hegel.
The problem with George is more complicated. His controversial
personality and the particular phenomenon of the Kreis – the circle of
ardent and devoted disciples gathered in Socratic hero-worship around
the Master – have obscured the objective reporting of biographical facts.
George’s secluded and highly ritualised existence makes it difficult for
anyone not directly associated with him to know his life; and all direct
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associates write either in blind veneration or, in the case of Klages, in
blind hatred. For that reason, the standard George biographies should
be read with considerable caution, separating carefully what is fact
from what is hagiography. This is particularly true of Friedrich Wolters’
Stefan George und die Blätter für die Kunst, a book that is otherwise
indispensable.8 Younger disciples, particularly Robert Boehringer and
Edgar Salin have contributed first-hand data about the later years, and
they write with a certain naiveté which makes it easier to separate the
truth from the dithyrambics. It remains that the entire earlier part of
George’s life, the all important formative years in which he was a lonely
and obscure young man, can receive no biographical treatment, except
for what George himself told Wolters and the little that Boehringer succeeded in finding out. Wolters himself only met George in 1913 and the
entire first part of his study, as far as George’s own person is concerned,
must be considered as autobiographical rather than biographical. Less
directly involved reports of people who knew George, such as Albert
Verwey, Sabine Lepsius, George Bondi, Herbert Steiner, help to form
an overall picture; these sympathetic portrayals can then be balanced
by the savage personal attack by Ludwig Klages in his Introduction to
the edition of Alfred Schuler’s papers.9 But if the biography is rather
obscure and sketchy, the intellectual and poetic sources can easily be
traced, partly on the basis of George’s own statements, in his poems
and in his few prose contributions to the Blätter für die Kunst. Goethe,
Dante, Plato, Jean Paul, Hölderlin, Nietzsche are the key names; I have
mentioned the obvious importance of French symbolism, to which must
be added the explosive encounter, in 1905, with the Kosmiker Group in
Münich (Wolfskehl, Schüler, Klages and Derleth), an episode that left a
deep mark on George’s main work and that requires a more thorough
examination than I will be able to devote to it.
W.B. Yeats is another problem again. Being so much closer to us,
and also something of a public figure, biographical information suffers
from over abundance rather than scarcity. With many personal associates and friends still alive, it keeps constantly increasing. The books by
Hone and Jeffares,10 and, of course, the published autobiographies and
letters, contain a great amount of useful information, which only suffers
from being too recent and, therefore, often hasty and diffuse. As can be
expected of a dear contemporary,11 interpretation and biography tend to
overlap and sometimes get in each other’s way; this confuses the books of
Henn and Ellmann.12 But, unlike in the case of Mallarmé, who has been
very well edited by Mondor and Jean-Aubry, or George who acted as his
own editor, Yeats’s texts and innumerable alterations are scattered over
many editions, many of which are inaccessible. The announced critical
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edition by Alspach and G.D.P. Allt is certainly urgently needed. This
complication however, is almost trifling compared to the complexity of
Yeats’s sources. Limited to the strict minimum, a comprehensive survey
of Yeats’s intellectual and literary influences should include: his father
and family milieu; the special Irish political and intellectual plight; some
elements from Celtic mythology; a large group of esoteric doctrines
ranging from Madame Blavatsky to Hindu philosophy; Blake Shelley
and the Pre-Raphaelite movement; French symbolism as seen through
the eyes of Arthur Symons; a group of philosophers including Plato and
Plotinus, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche, Vico, Croce and Gentile,
etc.; the general climate of philosophical polemics in England during the
1920s, centred around Bertrand Russell, Whitehead and G.E. Moore;
Ezra Pound; influences from the plastic arts; to all of which must be
added the special problem of his own text, A Vision, which functions,
to some extent, as a source for part of his own poetry. This fantastic
diversity makes it clear that this entire matter enters under one general
heading: Yeats’s highly personal and particular use of sources and influences, and especially the general motivation which lies behind such a
staggering restlessness of mind. Any general conclusions on this subject
have to be based on the detailed study of each item; there is, no doubt,
some impulse which governs the choice of these varied interests, but it
would be dangerous to generalise too soon: the reasons that attracted
Yeats to esoteric disciplines are not necessarily the same as those which
prompted his interests in certain political problems, or governed the
selection of the philosophers he read. Some of these items have been
studied in detail by Yeats’s biographers, others only partially or not at
all. Within the purpose of this study, I shall have to restrict myself to
a very few of the problems mentioned, namely (1) the importance of
French symbolism; (2) some aspects of the tradition of Irish nationalism which acted upon Yeats and (3) his motivations in his philosophical
readings, particularly in relation to Plotinus, Berkeley and Hegel. This
leaves considerable gaps, to a degree which may make questionable
whether it is legitimate to deal with Yeats at all before some more of
the groundwork has been covered. In this instance, however, one may
perhaps take a chance on the possibility that excessive attention to the
sources may distract from a necessary spontaneity in the response to the
work itself; some of the publications on Yeats suggest that this is a real
danger.
If the historical incompleteness of this book may be explained on the
basis of reasons of expediency, the fact that its primary emphasis is not
on formal examination is much more fundamental. For in this age of
formalist criticism we have come to expect, with good enough reason,
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that a critical study of a poetic text should take as its point of departure
the accurate perception of the form of the work: the metrical and grammatical patterns, the imagery and the texture. This assumes that exegesis
is actually a form of perception, and that the critical evaluation of a text
coincides, at the limit, with the unveiling of all its objective formal constituents. It implies that the statement of the work is, in fact, the form;
if there is some contradiction between the statement and the form, it is
the burden of the critics to expose this discrepancy and to offer the real
reading, actually expressed by the poet. Which means that the poem is
entirely contained within the dimensions of its form and that the being
of the poem coincides with the totality of these dimensions, seen as one
formal unit.
The objection that such an approach is over analytical and that it
deals atomistically with what, per definition, is Gestalt, is often but
not necessarily always justified. The difficulty is purely linguistic and
does not involve deeper aesthetic issues. It is directed against a critical
language that systematically separates the different elements and claims
that the complete treatment of each of them adds up to a total perception. Since it is precisely the totality of simultaneous perception which
characterises aesthetic contemplation, such a description necessarily
distorts the object with which it deals. However, one can conceive that
a particular descriptive vocabulary could be invented in each case which
would be organic and synthetic, and which would do full justice to the
particular work under consideration; attempts like the ‘organic’ language of Leo Spitzer would be examples of a formalist vocabulary that is
not analytical. And every critic who has poetic sensitivity will naturally
tend towards such a solution, merely by relying on the inspiration which
springs from his own sympathetic response. This may imply, by the way,
that the distance between good formalist and impressionistic criticism is
not as large as one may assume and that often, as in Rémy de Gourmont,
both go together.
Aesthetic theory can oppose a much stronger objection to formalist
criticism by pointing out that it does not distinguish sufficiently between
the aesthetic perception of a natural object and that of a work of art.
The aesthetic contemplation of a tree coincides indeed with the total
formal content of this perception, but when we are dealing with a work
of art, the very term of ‘perception’ no longer applies For we are not
dealing with an object, but with an intentional system of material relations; we do not observe a grouping of objective dimensions, but reflect,
in fact, upon a subjective intention of formal organisation of which
the work is merely the sign. To describe this sign as if it were a thing is
like describing objectively the shape of a written word: we can give as
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accurate a picture as can be desired, by disregarding the intent behind
this pseudo-object (namely the fact that it designates something else)
nothing we say will be meaningful. In the case of the work of art, the
matter is made much more complex by the fact that the purpose behind
the sign is precisely the objectivation of pure intent into form. Hence
the temptation to speak about it as if it had totally fulfilled itself, and
become objective form, in which case it would cease to be a work of art
(as if we were to meet a sculpture and assume it to be a natural rock);
hence also the nagging ambiguity of all critical language, which has to
speak about an act as if it were a thing and thus ignore all motivation
and forego all judgement, or speak about it as if it were pure intent and
fail to record its tangible materiality. This burden, as could be expected,
is the discursive equivalence of the poetic task itself.
Granting no more than that the poetic work is a sign which refers
to an intentional act suffices to mark the inadequacy of a static formal
description. On the other hand, it puts an increased emphasis upon the
need to follow the dynamic curve of formal and thematic development. It
eliminates, in fact, the distinction which common speech tends to make
between form and idea, by putting them in common subordination to
an overall intent which transcends either of them. For the evolution of
the statement serves a similar, though not necessarily simultaneous function as the evolution of the form. Both are concerted moves, strategies,
devices aiming towards the same accomplishment and, as such, both are
identical in essence, though not necessarily joined in their manifestations. The statement is as ‘formal’ as the form is thematic, in that both
are subordinated to a will for formalisation which has its own structure
and causal coherence. Both have lost all independent and objective
meaning by entering into the particular dynamics of an act which uses
and transcends them. For instance, to take examples from our subject,
the gradual complication of Mallarmé’s syntax up to the highly involved
grammatical polyphony of ‘Un coup de dés’, and his objectified anxiety
before the essential impossibility of a conscious poetic effort; the tightening of Yeats’s texture in the middle of his career and the emergence of
a more or less systematic theory of history; the increasingly deliberate
control achieved by George, in ‘Der Stern des Bundes’, over contrast
effects of texture by accumulated effects of alliteration, assonance and
rhyme patterns, and the proclamation of a second Epiphany as a fulfilled
certitude; all these phenomena, some formal and some thematic (pertaining to statement), exist on the same plane and are equivalent phases
of the same difficult act. Both have to be seen within the sequence of the
strategy which the poet constantly improvises (regardless of whether
he is aware of it or not), and this strategy cannot be understood if the
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direction of the main movement has not been observed. It is, therefore,
quite indifferent whether one enters into the movement of a work by
means of a formal or a thematic element, as long, of course, as the
element is adequately chosen. Neither form nor statement are to be
taken at face value, but the thematic approach offers the advantage of
staying clear of methodological uncertainties proper to formalist procedures. The fact that these three poets – or, certainly, Mallarmé and
George – were themselves ‘formalist’ poets, that their effort at linguistic
organisation was conscious and deliberate, does not invalidate such
an approach, to the contrary. It intensifies rather than decreases the
emphasis to be put on the form as the primordial intent, and it confers
upon it all the transparence and freedom of a willed act. An attempt like
that of J.M.M. Aler,13 the gageure of trying to explain ‘Der Stern des
Bundes’ purely in function of the formal invention, without concern for
statement or for the other works, seems like completely gratuitous virtuosity, even if one admitted (which is always doubtful) that the method
of formal analysis is entirely foolproof.14 Static formal analysis is only
meaningful when it serves to bring out a shift in strategy, or the lack of
one; that is, when it takes place within a dynamic context. But, in itself,
it is never exhaustive and it cannot be separated from the thematic statement, as little as a musical analysis can separate theme from rhythm:
both are tied together on the same plane of intentional action.
The description of this poetic intent falls outside of the realm of
empirical literary criticism; it belongs to the sphere of theoretical aesthetics and, ultimately, of metaphysics. But criticism can be of powerful assistance to the philosophical disciplines by giving descriptions of
concrete individual cases. And it can start a first ascent in the direction
of generalisation, by grouping these individual strategies under more
comprehensive headings, families of poets whose poetic actions, even
by different temperaments and under different situations, reveal some
general unity. Such groupings are, of course, arbitrary and their merit
must be evaluated by the degree of relevance and generality of the
synthesis to which they lead. Being mere wilful sections made in the
history of literature, they have no absolute value whatever, and they
do not constitute a thesis in themselves; the demonstration of an existing similarity of contrast is unimportant and accidental: what matters
is that its formulation be of sufficient aesthetic interest to warrant the
additional complexity of treating comparatively what could be handled
individually. But it can happen that a configuration of poets makes a
certain poetic pattern stand out in clearer relief, precisely because the
generalisation of comparison helps to eliminate what is ephemeral and
inessential. Comparative studies of this type, based on parallels and not
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on historical facts alone, are only justified if they serve this purpose. The
second part of this book will have to be the test of whether the particular
combination of Mallarmé, George and Yeats fulfils this condition. From
a purely historical point of view, it has at least the advantage of being
obvious rather than far-fetched, since it treats three major figures out of
the three main European literatures, each belonging to a literary trend
– symbolism – which was distinct enough to be named and became, like
romanticism or neo-classicism, a general European concept. The seniority of Mallarmé may well illustrate that the original impulse of this trend
and perhaps its fullest expression are to be found in France, thus reversing a perspective which, in the first decades of the nineteenth century
was the very opposite: French romanticism (not pre-romanticism) now
seems pale indeed compared to its English and German equivalents.
One is not supposed to see Yeats go back to Blake and Shelley, George
to Jean Paul and Hölderlin, while Mallarmé’s relationship to Hugo is
strictly antithetical, to the point that he has been placed in the French
classical rather than in the romantic tradition.15
Neither is the critical evaluation of the three poets such as to establish
a discrepancy between them which would make comparison difficult.
The stature of Mallarmé and of Yeats makes all further justification
superfluous, but one cannot be so certain of George. A definite monotony and a certain automatism in the monumental aspects of his poetry
date a great amount of his work, somewhat in the same way that much
post-Wagnerian music, like that of Richard Strauss15 (who appeared
daringly ‘modern’ to Claude Debussy), now seems hopelessly dated. But
most of all, he suffers from being read too exclusively as the man who
exercised a considerable influence upon a certain segment of the German
intelligentsia. He is the author with whom an aristocrat elite sustained
and justified itself during the First World War, the poet of ‘Geheimes
Deutschland’, which Berthold von Staffenberg, a younger member of
the George Kreis, is said to have quoted when marching to his death,
after the failure of his attempt to kill Hitler in July 1944. This is to say
that his influence ties up with ideological forces which are still intensely
alive in Germany and which are bound to provoke highly emotional
reactions. Moreover, this influence is not confined to the political world,
but has penetrated deeply into the German academic institutions, where
men such as Gundolf, Wolters, Bertram, Max Kommerell – who separated himself from the Kreis, but was nevertheless deeply influenced by
George – exercised a profound and, to some extent, self-perpetuating
action. This entire aspect of George’s activity is very difficult to evaluate
because it involves a considerable number of contradictory factors and a
variety of personalities placed in an extreme situation of historical crisis.
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All in all, it forms a fascinating chapter in the history of the modern
European elites, but a chapter which I deliberately prefer to ignore
here, not out of lack of interest, but lack of relevance. The only book
of George’s that is directly connected with some of these matters is his
last, Das Neue Reich, which is certainly the least integrated and the least
inspired of his seven volumes of poetry. When George’s extra-literary
influence reached its highest point, he had ceased to write. For the understanding and evaluation of his poetic work, the explicit ideology of the
George Circle is of lesser importance than, for instance, the Irish political situation is for the work of Yeats. We read Yeats quite independently
of the opinion one might have of the ‘sixty year old smiling public man’
and senator, and we readily admit that Dublin is perhaps not the place
where one will find the most objective judgement of his poetry. A similar
detachment would seem desirable in the case of Stefan George, although
it is certainly much easier for a non-German to suggest this than for
someone who, in his own milieu, has had to face the choice of accepting
or rejecting his influence. Not that the idea of the Kreis and even part of
its history can be eliminated from the description of his work. But there
is an obvious difference between the Kreis as a poetic theme and the
evaluation of the George Circle as an ideological and political reality; as
there is an obvious difference between some of George’s values which
appear throughout his work and with which we will have to deal, and
what became of these values when they were institutionalised into what
Wolters calls a ‘State’. It is another aspect of George which this study
wishes to bring out – that of a man very solitarily and inwardly faced
with his own poetic problem, sensitive enough to experience the internal
contradictions which make poetry into the most difficult and fragile
of human undertakings, but also courageous enough to maintain it
as a supreme value, to the limit of his intellectual, and almost beyond
the limit of his creative capacities. For all its somewhat tedious monumental assurance, this poetry constantly reflects the extreme tension to
which this kind of poetic absolutism subjects its author, a tension which
reveals, with sometimes terrifying clarity, the anxiety which underlies any human act of total commitment. Unprotected by Mallarmé’s
irony, or by the kind of voracious intellectual stamina which always
kept Yeats going, George gives the image of a poetic consciousness that
runs to its extreme point and exhausts all possibilities to secure its selfcreated untenable position. Although George’s poetry, particularly if
one considers it by isolated poems, remains inferior to many of Rilke’s
and of Hofmannsthal’s, here his choice is justified, not because he fits
better within the design of this study, but because the true purity of his
poetic vocation warrants his greatness. Even his most severe critics do
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not dispute his importance in the history of modern German literature.
This importance, however, is not just a matter of circumstance and
propaganda, but a sign that George was really in the centre of a deeply
significant current of modern sensitivity, at a point where true invention
was taking place. If this study could contribute somewhat to bringing
George out of the isolated position in which he put himself, and where
he has to look either totally sublime or blackly diabolic (often ending up
by looking slightly ridiculous), it would serve a useful purpose.
Because of its extreme and systematic nature, George’s work is
perhaps the best suited to provide us with the thematic framework by
means of which the intended parallel can be carried out. It reveals clearly
how a certain awareness and valorisation of the poetic – which, despite
different attitudes towards this awareness, forms the basis of what the
three poets have in common – is bound to lead towards concerns that
seem to lie out of the realm of poetry. But they are, in fact, only the
reflection of what the main categories of reality become when apprehended by this specific kind of poetic consciousness. We see George
being obsessed by certain conceptions of history and of the divine; a
group of ideas clusters around these two poles and forms the supporting thematic continuity of his enterprise. More diffusely but, from a
poetic point of view, more effectively, a similar knot of problems is met
by Yeats in a different manner, while Mallarmé moves in a congruent
pattern, ending up with an awareness which should clarify that of the
two other poets by contrast rather than by similarity. These three interrelated and inter-subordinated themes: the poetic, the historical and the
divine, provide us with the viewpoint that takes in the widest range of
common terrain. The three categories must, however, be considered in
their interaction, as what becomes of history and of God in the eyes of
this kind of poetic consciousness and, inversely, to what pressures and
tensions history and God subject the idea which this consciousness has
of itself.
Such a degree of generality undoubtedly exposes one to the danger
of sacrificing the specific qualities of each poet to an ideal network, too
crude to capture the delicate individuality of each. To avoid this danger
and at the risk of being redundant, both within the limits of this study
and more still within the existing bibliography, I prefer to start out
with the description, in exegetic form, of each poet separately. With
the same consideration in mind, this exegesis is kept as textual as possible. Here too, the differences in the structure of the respective works
require a distinct organisation in every case. The extreme condensation
and homogeneity of Mallarmé’s poetry would make it possible to trace
his itinerary on the basis of every single later poem – provided the entire
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work were brought in as a frame of reference. Somewhat arbitrarily, I
have chosen to group this description around the four most extensive
texts, in this order (which is not chronological): ‘Igitur’, ‘Hérodiade’,
‘L’après-midi d’un faune’, ‘Un coup de dés’. Extensive explications
de texte of Mallarmé are in existence, many of them outstanding, by
Thibaudet, Emilie Noulet, Bausire, Charles Mauron, Soua, Gengoux,
Scherer, Chassé, Stuart Daves, Robert Greer Cohn, Orliac, etc.16 A
critical reading of all these commentators leaves one with a reasonably
objective understanding of the text; as is usually the case, each of them
carries a certain line of interpretation too far, but since Mallarmé is
deliberately pluralistic and since most of these methods have some relevance, the final picture ends up by being rather well balanced. Many
contradictions and obscurities remain, but in order not to extend the
length of this work beyond a reasonable size, it seemed preferable not to
enter into the detailed discussion of several points in dispute. By confining oneself to the exegesis of these four major texts, and exegesis based,
to a large extent, on internal evidence derived from the rest of the work
(poetry, prose and correspondence), one should be able to give a general
image of Mallarmé’s work.
Stefan George cannot be treated by isolated poems, since he always
tried, using Baudelaire and even Dante as a model, to organise his lyrical
poems into larger architectural units; every volume is assumed to constitute a constructed whole. Actually, only ‘Der Stern des Bundes’ really
offers such a plan; others contain parts that are integrated (such as the
Vorspiel of ‘Der Teppich des Lebens’) but also many others that are not.
Also, since the early work has received much more extensive treatment
that the later,17 I prefer to devote more space to the later poetry. The
clearest approach seems to be to divide George’s work into three great
phases: (1) the purely ‘symbolist’ or ‘aesthetic’ phase, best exemplified in
‘Algabal’ and ‘Das Jahr der Seele’, (2) the ‘moral’ phase, where the experience begins to turn into a value system, going roughly from ‘Der Teppich
des Lebens’ to the first half of ‘Der Siebente Ring’ and (3) the ‘religious’ or
‘cosmic’ phase of the entire Maximin Cycle: second half of ‘Der Siebente
Ring’ and ‘Der Stern des Bundes’ as a whole. The last volume, ‘Das Neue
Reich’, adds little to what the preceding book achieves and expresses
primarily the official pose which George wishes to take on in the eyes of
posterity; as such, it is less important for our purpose.
Yeats is a different matter again. Although the two other poets may
appear more hermetic, linguistically speaking, he is undoubtedly the
most difficult to survey in a comprehensive manner. His growth and
development is constant and continues to the very last, but one could say
just as well that the whole of Yeats is already contained in the first poems.
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No poem, or play, or volume of poetry, can be isolated and treated as
a definite step in a coherent evolution; Yeats is constantly re-stating, so
that he is always present in all his complexity. But then, certain modifications of tone and attitude make these re-statements themselves into
elements that carry the work forwards. Like all deliberately subjective
minds, he defies all discursive paraphrase or systematisation; to describe
him is like trying to capture the sinuous line of Montaigne’s Essays into
some logical sequence. Perhaps the simplest way to deal with him is to
follow up, through the work, that which interested him most persistently throughout his life. And here, one can take a hint from Dorothy
Wellesley when she confesses, a little reluctantly, that Yeats was most
interested in sex and esoteric systems,18 to which one should add, more
obviously still, two other main concerns of his: Ireland and his own
poetry. But one can promise no neat subdivisions or clear cut solutions.
These four elements constantly overlap and the imagery that refers to
them is not consistent. To take two of the best known and most often
quoted of his poems: ‘No Second Troy’ and ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ are
as much about love as they are about Ireland, about a certain kind of
poetry and about the afterlife, all this by being very much about William
Butler Yeats. Most commentators seem to have turned the difficulty by
organising their work simply in function of the biographical sequence of
events or, like Virginia Moore,19 by taking some of the main sources in
chronological order.20 But it always seems that somehow, both the personality and the work get too broken up by handling it in this manner.
One ends up with a great amount of useful detail, with often penetrating insights into some of the works, but not with the awareness of an
almost overwhelmingly personal presence which emanates so strongly
from the poetry and gives it its unmistakeable unity. One cannot emphasise sufficiently the altogether tentative nature of such a picture as can
be presented here. It is perhaps the main object of this study better to
situate, by means of comparison, the poet who is probably the greatest
of the three. His is the richest and most spontaneous power of linguistic invention, completely devoid, in his later poetry, of George’s stilted
decorativeness and of the slight thinness of verbal imagination which
gives a certain pallor even to Mallarmé’s most perfect achievements.21
Much more erratic than the subtly precise Mallarmé, much more dishevelled than George, who controls his pulses by a stern and strict decorum,
Yeats has a power of direct expression which does not prevent him from
being as conscious and as dedicated as his two fellow poets. The challenge of his elusive genius constitutes the main burden and the central
preoccupation of this study.
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Notes
1. No direct contact whatever existed between the two contemporaries W.B.
Yeats (1865–1939) and Stefan George (1868–1933). There is no reason to
suppose that George ever saw Yeats’s work, all the more since the older
George seems to have had little interest in contemporary poetry outside of
his own limited circle, let alone outside of his country. Recently, some of
the remaining disciples of the George Kreis have discovered Yeats and
expressed their delighted amazement at the analogy with their Master (see
Castrum Peregrini, IX, 1952, L.81). We know that Yeats read Rilke, who
was always much better known in England than George, but the only evidence that he knew so much as George’s name is from a reported conversation, at the very end of his life, with Arthur Schnabel, during which the
pianist is said to have spoken to him of Stefan George (Letters on Poetry
from W. B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley [New York, 1940], p. 211) and
from Mary Colum, who reports Yeats’s interest in George at the end of
his life (1938) (Mary Colum, Life and the Dream, New York, 1947, p.
923).
2. The term is used here in the general sense which it has, for instance, in C.
M. Bowra’s title The Heritage of Symbolism. It then refers to the broad
current which, to keep matters as simple as possible, starts in France with
Baudelaire and culminates in Verlaine, Rimbaud and Mallarmé. This trend,
however, is purely an a posteriori invention for the convenience of historians. Actual ‘symbolisme’ begins as late as 1886, most accurately with
Moréas’ Manifeste du Symbolisme, published on 18 September 1886. This
movement, which includes poets such as Moreas, René Ghil, Saint-Pol
Roux, Gustave Kahn, Vielé-Griffin, Henri de Regnier, and others, is only
the minor and final phase of what is now called the symbolist tradition. For
those poets, Mallarmé is a forerunner whom they did not always understand and often imitated in a superficial way.
3. W.B. Yeats and T. Stirge Moore (London, 1953), p. 132.
4. His remark, that Mallarmé’s work differs from his because it is non-historical (Letters to Wellesley, p. 149), echoes the conventional view, which has
long been current, that Mallarmé tries ‘to escape from history’ (Richard
Ellmann, The Identity of Yeats [London, 1945], p. 190). This raises a very
complex problem which does not concern us at this moment, but it indicates, at any rate, that Yeats saw Mallarmé as a subtle Parnassian, and
nothing more.
5. See Bibliography for the books of Duthie, Sior and Freda Heybohm also
Curt von Faber du Faur, ‘Stefan George et le Symbolisme Français’, Comp.
Lit. V, 2, Spring 1953, with a bibliography of some of the articles on the
subject.
6. See the poem ‘Franken’ (Ring, 16).
7. Henri Mondor, Vie de Mallarmé (Paris, 1941).
8. Friedrich Wolters, Stefan George und die Blätter für die Kunst (Berlin,
1930). The books by two other members of the Kreis, Gundolf and
Morwitz (see Bibe), are purely exegetic, not historical. The most complete
and objective work on George’s history is a recent French thesis by Claude
David, Stefan George, son ouvre poétique (Lyon-Paris, 1952).
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9. Alfred Schüler, Fragmente und Vortrage aus dem Nachlass, ed. Ludwig
Klages (Leipzig, 1940).
10. Joseph Hone, W.B. Yeats, 1865–1939 (London, 1942); A. Norman
Jeffares, W.B. Yeats, Man and Poet (London, 1949).
11. Yeats is in fact three years older than George, but George stopped writing
in 1918, which makes him appear much older.
12. T.R. Henn, The Lonely Tower (London, 1952); Richard Ellmann, Yeats:
The Man and the Masks (London, 1949).
13. J.M.M. Aler, Im Spiegel der Form (Stilkritische Wege zum Deutung von
Stefan Georges Maximindichtung) (Amsterdam, 1947).
14. In contrast, the grammatical analysis of Mallarmé undertaken by Jacques
Scherer (L’Expression littéraire dans l’Oeuvre de Stéphane Mallarmé,
Paris: 1947), is altogether legitimate, since the author emphasises that it is
a preliminary clarification: ‘Ce genre d’explication est évidemment insuffisant. Il ne tient pas lieu d’une interpretation du sens . . . Mais on peut
penser qu’il en est le préliminaire indispensable. La compréhension de la
structure d’un texte et des relations qui peuvent s’établir entre ses elements
précède logiquement les hypothèses qu’on peut former sur le sens des
termes, et par suite sur celui de l’ensemble . . . C’est faute d’observer ces
règles que certaines interprétations paraissent si fragiles’ (p. 252). In the
case of Mallarmé, when a definite problem of syntactical clarity exists, this
is obviously true. The danger is always to mistake syntactical elucidation
for exegesis, or to assume, because the poet’s main inventive effort in concentrated on the linguistic form, that the statement becomes secondary.
Scherer commits this mistake when he writes: ‘Mais il n’a pas écrit ses
poèmes, ni même, dans une certaine mesure, sa prose pour exprimer (ses)
idées . . . Nouse ne devons pas oublier que ce sens, s’il contribute parfois à
leur beauté, a été volontairement relégué par l’auteur au rang de composant
du poème, et qu’il n’en est certainement pas le composant le plus important’ (p. 262). This goes against the main premise of Mallarme’s own
poetry: that the dichotomy thus established between composant and
compose is itself meaningless. Clearly, the considerable consciouness of
form and the concentrated attention which Mallarmé devotes to its elaboration, indicate that the will for form is itself the central Idea. And we will
try to show that the other ‘ideas’ or statements, instead of being mere pretexts for formal expression, are actually the development of this initial
postulate.
15. See Scherer, L’Expression littéraire, p. 42. For Mallarmé’s mature judgement on Hugo see ‘Crise de Vers’, Oeuvres, p. 360.
16. See Bibliography for complete references.
17. See Aler, Stand der Forschung.
18. Yeats and Wellesley, p. 191. ‘Sex, Philosophy, and the Occult preoccupy
him. He strangely intermingles the three.’
19. Virginia Moore, The Unicorn (New York, 1954).
20. Mr Ellmann’s second book on Yeats, The Identity of Yeats (London,
1945), is the first attempt to give a complete and unified view of the work.
The organisation remains chronological rather than thematic or stylistic
and, despite much useful information and many excellent insights, it fails,
in general, to reveal the unity which it rightly postulates.
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21. The very fact that formal studies having the appearance of being exhaustive
can be made of George and Mallarmé – like those of Aler and Scherer –
indicates that the linguistic devices used by these poets are limited and systematic to the point of lapsing into automatism. It is doubtful if a similar
network of determined syntactical and grammatical relationships, or of
prosodic devices, could be worked out in the case of Yeats, and made to
include the totality of the work: prose, poetry and drama. Attempts in that
direction, as suggested by Delmore Schwartz, would certainly be of great
interest, but they would have to cope with the considerable intricacy and
erraticism resulting from Yeats’s greater poetic inventiveness.
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Chapter 5
Stefan George and Stéphane
Mallarmé (1952)
Villiers sich hoch genug für einen thron
Verlaine in fall und busse fromm und kindlich
Und für sein denkbild blutend: Mallarmé.
Coming after the accurate, but well nigh conventional description of
the Villiers and Verlaine, the definition of Mallarmé in terms of suffering seems almost far-fetched. Villiers is imperial, no doubt, Verlaine
naïve and devout, but Mallarmé is far from being an obvious sufferer. A
serene and tranquil man, living in the solitary light of his clearly burning
spirit – who could be more removed from a bleeding martyr? But George
insists. In his translation of ‘Brise marine’ he has, for the Baudelairian
term ‘Ennui’, found the daring and profound equivalence: ‘ein Leid’. For
as deliberate a chooser of words as George, such interpretations are not
a matter of chance. They are insights in deeper motivations, awareness
of a hidden kinship that cuts across all flagrant differences. One can
only perceive the suffering of those whole agony one shares, and this
is certainly true when it is hidden under such opaque veils of modesty
and irony as in Mallarmé’s case. George’s awareness is the clue to the
discovery of a common burden; there can be no better point from which
to survey their parallel enterprise.
George out of pride, Mallarmé out of modesty, both tended to repress
a suffering that will so conspicuously assert itself in contemporaries like
Rilke or Verlaine. But it has never ceased to feed their thought; it stood
by them as an inseparable companion. To understand it is essential to
the comprehension of their poetry.
One thing we can be sure of from the start: whatever the nature of
this suffering may be, it originated in the poetic act itself. Extra aesthetic or sentimental perturbations were of no concern to them. Both
men have always been exclusively devoted to poetic creation. Nothing
will ever distract them from this choice and they will find their joys and
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their sorrows in the exhilaration and failure of this activity only. Hardly
any exterior or personal event ever seems to penetrate into the strict
formal organisation of Mallarmé’s world; the events which ‘occur’ in the
course of George’s development – Maximin’s death and the World War
– become immediately parts of the poetic undertaking and lose their
actual reality. Their suffering, therefore must reflect an inherent flaw
of the poetic endeavour to which they are committed. For it is not their
solitude, which would still be a contingent circumstance, that weighs
upon them. Both were solitary in this respect, that their central problems
pertain to a realm well beyond the area in which man’s relation to others
is the main concern. But they carried this solitude willingly and joyfully,
and they take it so much for granted that they will hardly ever refer to
it. As for recognition, both had plenty of it, not coming from a crowd
which they despised, but from the group of faithful disciples, known
to them or hidden in anonymity, which followed them with devotion.
In that respect, Rilke is infinitely less fortunate and precisely because
to him, solitude is both unavoidable and unbearable, it became such
a major theme in his work, while it was a matter of trivial moment in
theirs.
Suffering, negativity, self-destruction – those dominant themes which
George recognised as the essence of Mallarmé’s poetry can only be properly understood within the general intent of the poetic act; they coincide
with the failure of this act to achieve, or to maintain, what it sets out to
accomplish. In such highly conscious, self-reflexive poets as Mallarmé
and George, this process is often described with a clarity and strength
which no discursive speech can ever hope to match. Stefan George’s
work, in particular, can well be considered as one complete and coherent statement of the entire gestation, the upsurge and the tragic failure
of the poetic as such. With perfect consistency, the succession of books
follows the different stages of the enterprise, each carrying it further into
its deepest implications, hewing out the unsayable with never failing
word power and an obstinate courage which, though completely aware
of the daily risks and pains of the undertaking, will never even consider the possibility of faltering. This admirable consistency of George,
together with the fact that we can follow his development in succession,
make him into an easier to follow, if not more accessible poet than
Mallarmé. All the phases which stand more or less apart in George are
always simultaneously present in Mallarmé; the concentration is not
only horizontally, but also vertically extremely intense, and sometimes
beyond the power of even as skilled a word organiser as he is. A more
dialectical mind than George, Mallarmé’s constant oscillation between
several points in his movement brings out perhaps more relationships,
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but verges on the impossible. The actual movement however, is very
similar to the one that appears more spread out, over the whole of
George’s work; it can be found, concentrated, in each of Mallarmé’s
poems. This deep similarity of purpose between two such different temperaments, the one supple, ironic, feminine, the other almost fanatically
grave and hard, must reveal the essence of this purpose with considerable strength.
The key word of George’s poetry is the term ‘Bild’, which means for
him self-created form (as distinct from natural form), self-created by
means of the (poetic) word – the word being, of course, a purely formal
agent which has been washed clean of all social associations:
Erfant er für die dinge eigne namen
(Jahr der Seele, p. 52)
and:
Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu
(Tombeau d’Edgar Poe, p. 70)
George’s Bild is present throughout the entire work, from the very first
poem . . .
Der weiten flug verliert die alten namen
Und raum und dasein bleiben nur im bilde
(Weihe, Hymnen, p. 13)
till the later work:
Das Bild erhebt im licht sich frei und nackt.
(Steen des Bundes, p. 47)
We find it described as:
Ich wollte sie aus kühlem eisen
Und wie ein glatter fester streif
(Pilgerfahrten, p. 87)
This concept of form is one of rigidly determined, strongly willed
relationships, of a strictly self-enclosed, crystalline organisation. It is a
perfect summary of George’s formal world in which words are used as
separate, rock-like units, all of them rigorously equal to the others in
importance, each being a complete Gestalt in itself. That George was
able, at the very beginning of his work, to fix so accurately the formal
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principle from which he will never depart, is proof of his extreme
dedication, of his intense will for form – the driving power of his entire
task. Mallarmé’s form never takes on this self-enclosed completeness,
although he has gone further in this direction than any other French
poet. Some of his lines almost succeed in breaking up the legato which
is inherent to the French language and gives it a necessarily melodious,
harmonic structure. He achieves this by stretching his syntax to the
utmost limit of intelligibility and by a highly refined use of inversion and
apposition. As his work progresses, these stylistic devices become more
and more frequent and effective. A systematic survey of this trend in
Mallarmé would lead far beyond the scope of this paper, but the general
movement appears clearly enough. From an early poem such as:
Mais, ô mon coeur, entends le chant des matelots!
(Brise marine, p. 38)
. . . to the contrapunctual juxtaposition of isolated words and word
groups in ‘Un coup de dés’, the development can be seen. What was
originally a continuous, infinite line which carried itself melodiously
forward (‘Une sonore, vaine et monotone ligne’, ‘L’Après-midi d’un
Faune’, p. 51) has been transformed into the self-enclosed architecture
of the final edifice. If Mallarmé’s thematic material is always more condensed, more simultaneously stated than George’s, his style, however,
undergoes a gradual change towards the crystalline rigidity which characterised George from the start. Between the earlier Mallarmé poems
and those of George, there is a considerable difference of shape. But
throughout the work, there is deep identity of intent. The similarity
between the apparition of the Bild in each of them bears this out. The
most dramatic apparition in George is perhaps in Der Teppich:
Da eines abends wird das werk lebendig.
Da regen schauernd sich die toten aste
Die wesen eng von strich und kreis umspannet
Und treten klar von die geknüpften quäte
Die lösung bringend über die ihr sannet!
(Der Teppich, p. 40)
Form stands out, strictly distinct from what it is not, from the amorphous background in which:
. . . teil um teil ist wirr und gegenwendig
(Der Teppich, p. 40)
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As for Mallarmé’s form, here referred to as ‘fleurs’:
Toute fleur s’étalait plus large . . .
Telles, immenses, que chacune
Ordinairement se para
D’un lucide contour, lacune,
Qui des jardins la sépara
(Prose pour des Esseintes, p. 56)
or:
Que . . . le regard diaphane
Resté là sur ces fleurs don’t nulle ne se fane
Isole parmi l’heure et le rayon du jour!
For both poets, form is a process of re-creation. Instead of being passively received, nature is wilfully and artificially constructed. Instead of
simply taking in the given, they set themselves up as direct rivals of the
existing world. They have discovered the principle of form in whatever
is not their own self and they wish to bring forth the same organised
spectacle, this time determined by themselves and made out of their own
substance:
Sie wandten
Stoffes gestze und schufen
Neuen raum in den raum.
(Das Neue Reich, p. 61)
Poetic form is, therefore, something entirely separated, distinct, and, to
some extent, opposed to natural form. It has to stand out, to be isolated
from it by a free act of the mind, similar to an act of knowledge: contour
lucide or lösung. It is essentially a paradoxical form, resulting from a
self-contradictory need: on the one hand, a need for relationships, laws,
order, as only the external world, outside of subjective experience,
offers; a hatred of whatever is chaotic, amorphous, like the shapeless
flow of perceptions and images that floats through our consciousness (‘le
hasard’, in Mallarmé’s term) – on the other hand, the proud necessity
of asserting the power of the word, the human object par excellence, as
capable of building an equally lawful object out of purely human substance. The relationship to Nature (the given) becomes, therefore, essentially ambiguous: first, it is one of strong rejection, of almost jealous
rebellion and independence, but also, in so far as the poet knows himself
to be an object of nature, one of complete submission to its recurring
law of order.
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The first pole of this dialectical vibration, the rejection of the natural,
is clearly apparent in both poets, explicitly in George, strangely intertwined with its antithesis in Mallarmé. Baudelaire, undeniably one of
the poetic ancestors of both, had already stated:
La Nature est un temple . . .
(that is, a manmade object) and had devoted his existence to throwing
himself against the natural. Something of his ‘dandyism’ passed into
George’s concern for himself as a self-created being, whose face and
appearance were entirely within the grip of his own free will. More
deeply, the world of Algabal is this word of the self-willed unnatural:
Den meister lockt nicht die landschaft am strand
(Algabal, p. 90)
Wo ausser dem seinen kein wille schaltet
Und wo er dem licht und dem wetter gebeut
(Algabal, p. 91)
It is the same mood as in ‘Igitur’, the artificial, enclosed space which the
poet has made for himself and within which his desperate quest takes
place, a room heavy with curtains and rugs in which no breeze or sunshine ever enters.
But it seems impossible to remain there. Algabal ends with a sudden
burst of fresh air – ‘in dem winde kalt und klar’ – in the cyclical season
poem: ‘Vogelschau’. After the oppressive mood of the metallic, lockedin space in which we have been sealed, this may appear as a welcome
relief. But, more than a relief, it is the destruction of the experience
which preceded it and had been so proudly and heroically announced at
the start. If this atmosphere has been unbearable to the point that it can
no longer maintained, if the natural has to have its revenge against the
one who tried to emulate it – then the entire search for self-created form,
the entire poetic act, collapses in total capitulation. Already, towards the
end of the Pilgerfahrten, this possibility had been mentioned:
. . . mir eucht
Ich soll auch am stamm
Meine leier zerschellen
(Pilgerfahrten, p. 71)
George has always been aware of this alternative. But in the first half
of his work, up to the ‘Leider von Traum und Tod’, he still seems to be
carried by the expectancy that this enterprise may succeed. The Angel
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of the ‘Teppich’ is an angel of certitude; he shows the way to the actual
achievement of the poetic dream. A magnificent hope rushes through
the entire ‘Prologue’, culminating in the final ‘Lösung’ of the ‘Teppich’
poem. If the attempt had not succeeded before, it was perhaps because
he had not gone deep enough. Instead of re-creating only human achievements and the static objects of nature, the poet should perhaps re-create
nature’s darkest life, include the movement itself that triumphed at the
end of ‘Algabal’, prefer the seasonal rhythm of the Nordic Rhine to the
static artifice of Venice:
Du findest das geheimnis ewiger runen . . .
Nicht nur in mauermeeres zauberdunst . . .
‘Schon lockt nicht mehr des Wunder der lagunen . . .
Wie deine wogen – lebengrüner Strom!’
(Teppich des Lebens, p. 18)
Slowly and triumphantly, in one of the most impressive gradations in
George’s work, we see this hope affirm itself and grow. But it ebbs back
in the subsequent ‘Traum und Tod’ cycle. Still pitted against the given
which he has tried to master in its most ineffable being, in its movement,
the poet is finally overtaken and destroyed by the ultimate dissolution
of all forms into the shapeless grip of death. His effort must fail and he
becomes:
Wie ein brand
Der verraucht
Wei ein sang
Der verklingt
(Traum und Tod; Nacht Gesang, p. 88)
His hopes have risen till the point where:
. . . ein ruf weit hinab uns verstösst
Uns so klein vor dem tod so entblösst
(Traum und Tod, p. 91)
and death, the undoer of all forms, has the last word.
This poem, ‘Traum und Tod’, is central in George’s work. After this
turning point, he can have no more illusions about the necessary failure
of what he has set out to do. Fittingly, it stands in the very middle of
his construction. From that moment on, he belongs to that small group
of men who have to live with the almost unbearable knowledge of the
essential absurdity of their enterprise. He has gone as far as it is possible
to go in the attempt to invent this form, the Bild, for which he craves.
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Unlike Rilke, who always, except perhaps in the ‘Sonette an Orpheus’ –
seems to hesitate on the brink of the poetic vocation as if he knew, but
feared what it will do to him, he has committed himself entirely and
without reservation to his calling. The discovery that it leads him into
an impasse would have silenced a less heroic nature. But he takes on
the attitude which, though the most difficult, is the most consistent: if
it is impossible to transcend oneself to the point of becoming a creator
of formal worlds, then the spectacle of his failure to do so will become
the poetic theme, the carrying of this burden the only valid experience, worthy of being sung. The knowledge of his own destruction has
become the supreme privilege of the poet. He will never be a renege to
his driving power; instead of turning against the will for form, he will
cherish it all the more and pledge himself more ardently than ever to its
achievement. But he will do it from now on in a world without hope, in
the anxious certitude that his quest will never be rewarded:
Wer adel hat erfüllt sich nur im bild
Ja zahlt dafür mit seinem untergang
(Stern des Bundes, p. 40)
From ‘Der Siebente Ring’ on, the poet is this deeply tragic figure, crucified on the ambiguity of his undertaking. He is both Rose and Kreuz,
and will never be referred to except in the awed and solemn tone which
befits the bearer of a severe and dark secret. We will have to mention
the transmutation of this doomed figure into a heroic example. But, for
the moment, it is essential to see the final step in George’s development,
the final paradox of transcending the poetic failure (which is essentially
a failure to transcend) by giving it poetic dignity.
Mallarmé has lived with the same difficult knowledge, but unlike
George, he has known it all the time. There is no hopeful period in his
work. From the beginning, he is:
. . . ô Moi qui connais l’amertume . . .
(Les fenêtres, p. 32)
and his ennui, his lassitude is that of the man whose clear spirit has
perceived the vanity of his effort from the very start. But the failure
does not appear in the same dramatic way. His mind, more complex
than George’s, is always at the point of extreme tension between the
two poles of the duality which, in vain, he attempts to bridge. George
is speaking either on the side of the poet, or on the side of the objective
world which he is trying to reach and to oppose. Characteristically, his
faun (nature) opposes the poet in an aggressive argument in which he
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has the last word – as it is fitting (‘Der Mensch und der Drud’, in Das
Neue Reich, p. 71). The opposition between himself and the world is
preferably symbolised in terms of combat, of destruction:
So kann nur einer der sie stets befocht
Und zwang und nie verfuhr nach ihrem rechte . . .
(Der Siebente Ring, p. 53)
(in which ‘sie is Nature, die gross Nährerin’).
In Mallarmé, this very same world, aimed at with equal intent of rivalry,
never appears in such hostile aspects. It will be the nymphs of the
‘L’après-midi d’un faune’, the friendly female companion . . .
(Nous fûmes deux, je le maintiens)
of the ‘Prose pour des Esseintes’
. . . cette soeur sensée et tender . . .
which are the fair faced carriers of the message of failure. Their actual
function is exactly as destructive and annihilating as George’s sinister
looking faun. The attempt to penetrate into the given
. . . avoir divisé la touffe échevelée
. . . que les dieux gardaient si being mêlée
(L’après-midi d’un faune, p. 52)
is nothing less than a crime (Mon crime. . .). Form is equally elusive,
equally unwilling to be fixed, to be made perpetual by wilful intervention
Cette proie, à jamais ingrate se deliver
Sans pitié du sanglot don’t j’étais encore ivre
and self-destruction is equally unavoidable and painful:
Ô sur châtiment . . .
(L’après-midi d’un faune, p. 52)
In the ‘Prose pour des Esseintes’, it is the same nymph (woman, companion) who with her quiet and knowing smile makes the poet realise the
absurdity of his task and admit that an enigmatic fate has chosen him as
the perpetuator of this Sisyphean task.
This symbolic function of the woman as the destroyer of the poetic
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enterprise is a well-known theme; Baudelaire had made her into his
main target, as the incarnation of the truly natural which he had to hate
and to which he had to succumb. The contrast between George’s and
Mallarmé’s treatment of this theme is the best illustration of their deep
similarity of intent and their utter difference of temperament. George’s
scorn for the eternal feminine is so fierce that it is practically banned
from the entire work, in which it appears only to be immediately cast
out:
. . . der geist
Der immer mann ist . . .
(Der Siebente Ring, p. 96)
Mit den frauen fremder ordnung
Sollt ihr nicht den leib beflecken
(Der Siebente Ring, p. 86)
‘Ich bin gekommen
Des weibes werke aufzulösen’
(Der Siebente Ring, p. 96)
In both poets, the woman fulfils exactly the same role: she is the permanent power of the world in itself, whose cycles, movements and shapes
occur outside of us, and which can only be seized by a consciousness
which recognises them as alien to itself. For both men, whose purpose is
nothing less than the re-creation of space and time on their own terms,
she is the cause of their need and also of its irrevocable frustration. She
has created them and thus made them into a part of this nature, subject,
as it is, to the laws of time, of change, of death. How could they become
cause of being when they have themselves been engendered by it? Moved
as they are by the same proud impulse, there can indeed be no hope of
fulfilment for either of them.
But what in George is felt as violence and gloom or, at its mildest, as
a stern protest, is to Mallarmé an ironic embrace, a quiet despair which
absolves itself in a mood of half-erotic, half-metaphysical frustration.
He will devote himself, serenely and knowingly, to the presence of the
women who have so firmly clipped his wings.
. . . comme à l’entendre
J’occupe mon antique soin.
(Prose, p. 56)
On this plane, the most absolute destroyer of the female principle, less
perverted but more pitiless than Baudelaire, stands side by side as the
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spiritual kin of the man who directed a fashion magazine and wrote his
most perfect poems on the fans of his daughter, his wife and his mistress.
Transcended by irony or by grim courage though it may be, this essential failure will never become an easy knowledge. The later George from
Der Siebente Ring on, and the most meditative Mallarmé, of ‘Igitur’ and
‘Un coup de dés’, live on an extreme point of awareness with which the
mind can hardly cope.
This tension is easily enough spoken about; to live it is another matter.
It is the inevitable weakness of all expository writing to turn into dispassionate, mental affirmations what is experienced in burning torture.
We cannot simply make entities like absurdity, failure, anxiety, etc.,
into concepts and handle them as we handle purely cognitive terms,
tear them, as it were, out of their existential context. When George
says Leid and Mallarmé speaks of folie, no matter how objectified by
aesthetic distance those terms may appear, both men are totally serious.
For the apparently balanced Mallarmé, madness is no idle game, but an
ever threatening presence; the knowledge of absurdity is a gaping abyss
for the clearest of all minds. And who can tell the weight of George’s
sacrifice in refusing any action that would be more comforting, more
appeasing than his arid march along treacherously steep paths? Hostile
commentators have an easy game accusing him of not letting himself
float on the instinctive forces of his being, of refusing the simple joy
of obedience to the voice of nature. To present this refusal as if it were
some concession on his part, some weakness in which he indulged as in
a perverse vice is entirely preposterous. One what basis can we deny in
George the existence of everyman’s needs and ignore the heroism of his
discipline in going beyond them?
The least we can do, even if we refuse to share it, is to leave intact the
seriousness of their common suffering. And if we want to understand it
we must see it from within, through their work, and relive it with them.
We will then see that there is no difference between them and the supposedly ‘natural’ poets other than a deeper insight which carries them,
well in spite of themselves, beyond certain illusions of safety. Their pain
is that of men who have seen more, cared more and done more than
others.
It remained for George to make this suffering into value, to erect the
figure of the Dichter-Heiland and to confront this hero with his times.
Mallarmé’s natural timidity and his lack of interest in history (which
must always have seemed a little too simple for him) made him somewhat unfit for this task. He performs it ‘par personne interposé’, in the
glorification of other poets – and preferably when death has given them
a dimension out of history. In a typically Mallarméan trick, it is not even
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so much their actual work he lauds as the future work which, because
of their death, they will never write – thus addressing his praise, well
beyond the personalities of the individual poets, to the poetical essence
which they have in common and which, in their unwritten work, we can
think of as unblemished by any impurity. This poet essence, the collective ghost which survives as the unfulfilled potentialities of his contemporaries, is exactly Mallarmé’s Maximin.
George is more ethically, and consequently more historically, inclined.
Also, living some thirty years later than Mallarmé, he belongs to a generation whose encounter with history was much more violent and in
which the figure of the poet, as they conceived of it, was being much
more severely tested and challenged. Mallarmé’s glorification of the
poetic occurs principally from within, without comparing the enterprise
to other activities. It takes place, it is true, within the background of a
crowd that does not have the slightest understanding of his problem and
that occasionally becomes hostile:
Eux, comme un vil sursaut d’hydre . . .
(‘Tombeau d’Edgar Poe’, p. 70)
L’ère d’autorité se trouble . . .
(Prose, p. 56)
Gette foule haggard! Elle annonce: Nouse sommes
La triste opacité de nos spectres futurs.
(‘Toast funèbre’, p. 54)
But at least there is no immediate intrusion and the poet can still afford a
disdainfully distant scorn for the crude forces which are emerging in his
era. By the time George has reached his full development – ‘Der Siebente
Ring’ is from 1907 – a whole set of values has come to the foreground of
history which are totally opposed to poetic values, in the broadest sense
of the term. It becomes imperative to affirm the validity of the aesthetic
impulse, to warn that the oppression of this need is bound to explode
into catastrophes. From then on, the poet is no longer in an isolated
position. He must assess his task in terms of values, in comparison to
other behaviours, and no longer just from within its own intent. He has
to take a strategic, militant attitude and his function, in life and work,
will be the concrete defence of his vocation. For this purpose, he has
to count his allies, to discover his kin and join hands with them: thus
arises the ‘Kreis’, a spontaneous grouping around the central figure, the
purest incarnation of the value that has to be preserved. This happened,
quite freely, around the unobtrusive Mallarmé, more wilfully and more
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sternly around George – a later, somewhat caricaturised version of the
same phenomenon took place among the French surrealists grouped
around André Breton.
This defensive attitude turns naturally into its counterpart. Having
represented the most despised values in the bygone era, the poet, in
struggling against his own destruction, becomes the prophet of different future times, the symbol of a brilliant beginning rather than a
lone survival. To condemn this attitude by calling it aestheticism is
a common but vicious aberration. Certainly, in a culture which can
crudely be defined as honouring acquisitive over ritualistic (that is
formal and religious) needs, to speak of aestheticism as a threat is
almost ludicrous. The poet’s concern with the safeguard of aesthetic
values is, at first, legitimate self-preservation. And beyond that, it is
awareness of an ethical mission: he rescues the integrity of the human
person when, under the pressure of the prevailing system, needs and
behaviours similar in pattern to his own are being crushed to death. It
is a historical coincidence, characteristic of our times, that this ethical
function falls, in part, to the poet. As a consequence, it is quite normal
that he would then be both over-glorified (as George and Mallarmé
were no doubt, by some of their not so near disciples) and bitterly
attacked.
George found the confirmation of his anxieties in the First World
War, the concrete materialisation of a threat which, up till then, had
only been symbolic. In the works immediately preceding and coinciding with this event, nothing of the poetic enterprise as he had learned
to know it has been abandoned. More than ever, the driving power is
dedication to the same Bild:
. . . sie schaffen
Neuen raum in den raum . . .
(Das Neue Reich, p. 61)
The illusion of aesthetic fulfilment remains completely banned from the
creation which now knows itself in all its self-destructive absurdity. But
this is never an obstacle to the passionate persistence in the task:
Zehntausend muss der heilige wahnsinn schlagen
Zehntausend muss die heilige seuche raffen
Zehntausend der heilge krieg
(Stern des Bundes, p. 31)
The mission is now accomplished by the numbers of those who share the
same calling. They no longer limit themselves to their poetic enterprise
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alone, they are no longer just ‘Herr der Insell’, but they have become the
defenders of a sacred trust ‘Huter des Vorhofs’:
Der Sänger aber sorgt in trauer-laüften
Dass nicht das mark verfault der keim erstickt
(Das Neue Reich, p. 38)
and finally, by his supreme example, he rescues humanity which:
Hat seines daseins oberstes gesetz
Hat was ihm den bestand verbürgt vergessen.
(Das Neue Reich, p. 38)
He thus becomes the Saviour, the Chastiser of the Old Order and the
bearer of the Good News:
. . . geisselt die verlaufnen heim
Ins ewige recht wo grosses wiederum gross ist
...
Er führt durch sturm und grausige signale
Des frührots seiner treuen schar zum werk.
(Das Neue Reich, p. 39)
The final fraction of George’s poetry could indeed have had no equivalence in Mallarmé. However stirring it may be it should be read strictly
in relation to the preceding work: those prophetic announcements
would be almost suspiciously violent if we did not known in the name
of what values they are being made. The comparison with Mallarmé has
no other aim than to bring out George’s conception of the poetic act, the
root and reason of his final statements. This conception, and the stubborn conviction with which he carried it to its ultimate consequences,
make him one of the focal symbols of our future recovery.
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Chapter 6
Stefan George and Friedrich
Hölderlin (1954)
The relationship between Stefan George and Hölderlin leads, in fact,
into three different problems. It is, first of all, a matter of factual literary
history: one must consider the contribution of George and of the George
Kreis to the discovery and re-evaluation of Hölderlin’s later work. In the
second place, it is a problem of sources and influence in the exegesis of
George’s own poetry. And finally, there are enough apparent analogies
between Hölderlin’s and George’s poetic themes to warrant a deeper
parallel. In spite of a superficial resemblance in their poetic themes, both
poets are extremely different in texture. George is hard, monumental,
decorative and angular, while Hölderlin’s sinuous line has an inherent
and complex musicality that defies description. The intricate system of
tensions results in a dense juxtaposition of motions, but his form always
remains open, like a man walking or the flow of a stream; it constantly
keeps searching its winding path among the accidents of the terrain on
which the thought is moving, and it is much too charged with ceaseless invention ever to stop long enough to strike a monumental pose.
In contrast, George stands heavily within his monumental temple, built
with his closed and blocked-off leitmotivs; one could think of Wagner in
contrast to Bach. Regardless of all problems of comparative evaluation,
regardless of their respective situation in the history of German literature, such a strong formal contrast between two poets whose themes
seem to have something in common can throw light on their fundamental thought. This possibility is certainly of sufficient interest to justify a
very brief treatment of the two first aspects of our topic, as compared to
the third – which is inexhaustible.
The best and the worst features of the George Kreis come to light
in the reaction of the group to Norbert von Hellingrath’s discovery of
Hölderlin’s Pindar translations, a discovery which was to lead to the
first complete edition of Hölderlin’s work and to the, by now, generally accepted emphasis on the later hymns. The credit for this immense
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contribution belongs, without dispute, to von Hellingrath, and the high
poetic standards of the Kreis are reflected in the fact that they were
immediately aware of the importance of this work, that they formed
the group within which a man like Hellingrath would find enthusiastic
interest and sympathy, and that the Blätter für die Kunst was the normal
place for him to publish some of his findings.1
The petty side of the same circle appears in their attempt to prove
that, without the existence of George, all this somehow would not have
come about. The facts are that von Hellingrath’s interest in Hölderlin
existed well before he had contact with the Kreis, and was motivated by
his own admiration for this poet. He was participating in an increased
interest in Hölderlin which is apparent in Dilthey’s chapter in Der
Erlebnis und die Dichtung or in Petzold’s exegesis of the late hymn ‘Brot
un Wein’.2 George had apparently been rather unaware of this trend; in
the series of anthologies which he and Wolfshehl brought out under the
general title Deutsche Dichtung, Jean Paul had been given a complete
volume next to Goethe, but Hölderlin appears in the third volume, Das
Jahrhundert Goethes, as one poet among twelve others.3 It was Friedrich
von der Leyen, at the University of Munich, who oriented Hellingrath
towards Hölderlin’s translations from the Greek, as Hellingrath himself
acknowledges at the head of his dissertation.4 And it is typical of the
Kreis at its worst that a Georgianer like Edgar Salin would not mention
this, but make it appear instead as if ‘das Erscheinen von Georges ‘Der
Siebente Ring’, den Hellingrath in den Tagen der Jahreswende 1908/9
zum erste Male las, die volle Wendung brachte’.5 Von Hellingrath’s
later lectures on Hölderlin were read in 1915 in Munich, before a small
group which included Rilke;6 they make no mention of George and their
very tactful, prudent and humble interpretation is far removed from the
rather glowing utterances that were by then pouring from the Kreis. As
we know from Salin,7 Boehringer8 and even from George’s own short
poem ‘Norbert’ in Das Neue Reich (p. 117)9 (‘Du spätling schienst zu
müd zum wilden tanze’), Hellingrath never considered himself as really
‘belonging’ to George’s coterie. He had enough true depth to see the
great merits and the dangerous limitations of the Kreis and to prefer
being reproved for shy aloofness, rather than to get involved in entanglements for which he had no need.10
In short, Hellingrath’s work cannot be included among the contributions of the Kreis to German scholarship; in this matter, George’s
role is limited to one of rather remote stimulation. But Hölderlin afterwards took on an increasing importance for George and for his Circle,
an importance which is only surpassed by the attention devoted to
Goethe. The leading personalities of the group expressed themselves
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on the subject, Gundolf in his lecture on ‘Der Archipelagus’,11 Wolters
in a lecture ‘Hölderlin und das Vaterland’,12 Robert Boehringer in two
poems on Hölderlin first published in the tenth series of the Blätter für
die Kunst (1914).13 All these studies are more important as documents
on the respective authors than as contributions to the interpretation of
Hölderlin; they illustrate their own comprehension of George’s values
but, unlike von Hellingrath’s texts, they now seem rather bizarre compared to the abundant literature which has since appeared on Hölderlin.
More still than in the case of Goethe, the deep differences between their
Master and their subject blinds and distorts their vision, in their attempt
to show Hölderlin as a forerunner of George who did not quite have
the courage to go as far as he did. The attitude is nicely summarised in
Wolters’ slightly derogatory allusion to ‘die keusche Seele des frühen
Schwabens’.14
Finally, in 1914, George himself included the trilogy Hyperion (now
in Das Neue Reich, p. 14) in the tenth issue of the Blätter, and in 1919,
he wrote one of his rare prose fragments on Hölderlin, first published
in the eleventh and twelfth numbers of the Blätter (now in ‘Tage und
Taten’, p. 68). The short text honours Hölderlin as ‘der Rufer des
Neuen Gottes’ and is particularly noteworthy by the series of quotations
that precede it. George takes from the later hymns all the passages in
which Hölderlin forcefully announces the arrival of a new Saviour in
the midst of a time of distress. These passages are taken out of contexts
that exclude all literal interpretation as an actual prophesy. But George
wants us to take them as literally as possible: he is, or Maximin is – and
by 1919 the distinction between George and Maximin has faded to
almost nothing – the new God saluting the clairvoyant prophet who
announced the second coming. This has little to do with Hölderlin; it
serves no other purpose than to emphasise George’s official attitude, the
pose in which he wishes to be seen by his disciples, the kind of official
self-portrait which, in so much of his later work, completely hides the
face of the true poet. It always becomes most insistently apparent when
he is situating other great German poets in relation to himself.15 The
group of three poems Hyperion almost belongs to the same public attitude, but they contain ingredients that reach deeper contrasts. Together
with ‘Goesthes letzte Nacht in Italien’ and ‘Die Kinder des Meeres’,
they are the closest George comes to writing hymns in free strophes, not
exactly under Hölderlin’s influence but undoubtedly with his example
in mind. They might well be the starting point then for a less superficial
examination of the relationship between both poets.
One wishes that techniques were in existence by means of which
such a parallel could be conducted entirely in function of the formal
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structures, ‘im Spiegel der Form’, to borrow a good phrase from a recent
book on Stefan George.16 Or rather, one wishes one could be certain of
the fact that such techniques could be devised. Quite advanced formal
analyses of George and Hölderlin are available, such as the just mentioned thesis on George, or Lachmann’s metrical studies of the hymns.17
But in trying to use such findings for a more general treatment, one
becomes increasingly aware how very undeveloped our philosophy of
literary forms still remains, and how remote we are from any empirical
application. These methods necessarily have to break down poetic form
into analytical components and, regardless of the difficulty of stating
these components exactly and completely, the essential contradiction
of having to deal analytically with what, per definition, is Gestalt never
seem to be overcome. Assuming even that one could describe a poet’s
form completely and accurately, could one then compare it to that of
another poet, as if they existed within an identical and objective system
of reference? These questions are merely stated to defend an approach
which, at least in comparative studies, confines itself to the poetic statement rather than to the poetic form, and strives for a description of the
intent behind the form rather than of its objective dimensions.
The three hymns in question, and particularly the central one,
‘Hyperion’, state George’s thought on his historical destiny and on his
beliefs. The movement that emerges appears to have sufficient similarity with Hölderlin’s, such that a book approaching George from this
point of view could arrive at the conclusion that both poets are very
close indeed.18 As a poem it is not one of George’s most successful, but
it can well be taken as typical of his later work. The first part states a
situation of unbearable isolation, a deep separation between the poet’s
inner self and the world in which he lives. The second evokes an image
of past grandeur, which in this case is Greece; a historical example of an
age which achieved true greatness. And the third part states, in religious
terms, a rejuvenation by a new faith which is a synthesis of past accomplishment with the present, achieved by an act of love. The general
movement, then, is from a torn self to a new harmony, with a passage
through history. The arrival of the new God ends this original tearing:
Der die uns aus der qual der zweihiet löstest . . .
(Stern, p. 9)
What is in George, this ‘qual der zweiheit’? This poem, ‘Hyperion’,
gives us some idea: it is primarily the fact that the poet’s relationship
to his fellow men, and by extension, to his historical age, is no longer
tolerable. Nothing remains in common between his tasks and those in
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which his age has engaged its energies; he has become an exile among
his people:
Wo an entlegnem gestade
Muss ich vor alters entstammt sein
Brűder des volkes?
Dass ich mit euch wohl geniessend
Wein und getreid unsres landes
Fremdling euch bleibe?
(Reich, p. 14)
This alienation is a very sincere and persistent element in George’s
reality; it has been there from the very first poems on. But perhaps the
older he gets, the more it takes on the aspect of an intellectual quarrel
with opinions and ideologies which he dislikes, and particularly with
literary and artistic movements. One must not forget that George is a
very literary man, a chef d’école and editor of an avant-garde review.
The most intense fight of his life, the battle with Klages, centres around
matters of publication of manuscripts; the intrigues of literary gossip are
very much in the forefront of his preoccupations. He hates the two main
currents in German writing that oppose and rival his own aesthetics:
naturalism and expressionism. In this poem, stylistic literary polemic is
clearly apparent in the lines ‘ihr die in tönen verströmten’, which sets the
tone for reading ‘welchen wassern’ and ‘welchen weiden’ as being literary heresies. And although the last lines ‘Ihr auch zu zweien allein: / Ihr
mit dem spiegel’ are ambiguous, they can perhaps most convincingly be
read as depicting the sterile, mechanical reproduction of psychological
realism.
Of course, behind these stylistic attacks, it is a whole Weltanschauung
which is under fire: the grey, utilitarian materialism and hollow sentimentality of the Wilhelminian period, leading to the kind of rebellion
against social ugliness and bareness which stood behind the aestheticism of the English Pre-Raphaelites and the Parnassians in France. The
point is not that this reaction is either trivial or artificial, but that it is
a historical, intra-human, subjective feeling, resulting from the particular situation of a man within his age, much rather than a metaphysical
problem. On the basis of the much quoted line in ‘Brot und Wein’: ‘und
wozus Dichter in dürftige Zeit’ and of the violent diatribe on Germany
at the end of his Hyperion, one could assume a similar starting point
in Hölderlin, which certainly the biographical fact of his total isolation
would bear out. Hölderlin, too, knows the barrenness of his age, the
decadence of his nation; it is part of his image of ‘Nacht’, which runs all
through the work:
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Abert weh! es wandelt in Nacht, es wohnt, wie im Orkus,
Ohne Göttliches unser Geschlecht. Ans eigene Treiben
Sind sie geschmiedet allein, und sich in der tösenden Wekstatt
Höret jeglicher nur und viel arbeiten die Wilden
Mit gewaltigem Arm, rastlos, doch immer und immer
Unfrüchtbar, wie die Fűrien, bleibt die Mühe der Armen.
(Der Archipelagus, pp. 114–15)19
The image is not one of passing error but of a doomed, Sisyphus-like
absurdity, contemplated with the agony of a rising pity. Later, this
anxiety becomes an obsessive weight; its contemplation can no longer
remain mere description. It has to change into the dynamic pressure of
a continued question:
Denn kaum geboren, warum breitetet
Ihr mir schon über die Augen eine Nacht
Dasz ich die Erde nicht sah und mühsam
Euch atmen muszt, ihr himmlischen Lüfte?
(Versöhnender, der du nimmerglaubt . . ., pp. 134–5)
Or the same question with numberless complexities added, and the tense
weight of enumeration pressing it into tragic evidence:
Wenn abert stirbt alsdenn,
An dem am meisten
Die Schönheit hing, dasz an der Gestalt
Ein Wunder war und die Himmlischen gedeutet
Auf ihn, und wenn, ein Rätsel ewig füreinander,
Sie sich nicht fassen können
Einander, die zusammenlebten
Im Gedächtnis, und nicht den Sand nur oder
Die Weiden es hingwegnimmt und die Tempel
Ergreift, wenn die Ehre
Des Halbgotts und der Seinen
Verweht und selber sein Angesicht
Der Höchste wendet
Darob, dasz nirgend ein
Unsterbliches mehr am Himmel zu sehn ist oder
Auf grüner Erde, was ist dies?
(Patmos, 177–8)
This is a terrifying language, a movement in which everything: beauty,
love, world and God, are annihilated. It leaves man in utter and total
solitude, with only one power left: the power of questioning. A question
supposes the existence of an ‘other’, it is the essence of conversation
which assumes, not merely the existence of a being, polar to the threatened self, but also the possibility of an exchange of energies between
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both poles. And we know that an answer can come, however unsatisfactory, however renewedly difficult:
Es ist der Würf des Säemanns . . .
an answer which does not resolve, but continues the dialectic on another
plane where it will renew itself with gained lucidity, but with added
resistance to overcome.
This ‘Zweiheit’ is truly tragic, in that it accepts an essential polarity of
being, caused by a power which is not ours and which is not necessarily
concerned with us. What defines the gods as different beings is that they
are capable, at times, of indifference and neglect towards us . . .
Zwar leben die Götter
Aber über dem Haupt droben in anderer Welt.
Endlos wirken sie da und scheinens wenig zu achten,
Ob wire leben, so sehr schonen die Himmlischen uns.
(Brot und Wein, p. 98)
while we, unable to see them, suffer in their absence. And this Zweiheit
is heroic in that man faces up to it, questions the gods in the hope of
resuming with them the conversation which, during the ages of night,
threatened to die out. Starting from what may have been a personal,
accidental isolation, Hölderlin ends up with a metaphysical insight
into the essential duality of existence and with a dialectical relationship between both poles which, from the point of view of man, requires
heroic determination.
As for George’s generalisation of his initial solitude, perhaps the best
place to observe it is in the poems 11 to 20 of the first part of Der Stern
des Bundes, which deal with his rebellion against his times. The dominating mood is one of sombre, threatening contempt:
Aus purpurgluten sprach des himmels zorn:
Mein blick ist abgewandt von diesem volk . . .
Siech ist der giest! tot ist die tat!
(Stern, p. 28)
This poet knows his God so well that he can speak with his voice;
whereas Hölderlin’s entire search is to find the right language by which
to name and to speak to the gods, George can without effort borrow his
word, in order to chastise an erring world. This God chastises, which
means that he speaks to us, forcefully, violently, but altogether one of
us, as close as an irate father. Hölderlin’s gods move smilingly, mysteriously, in unreachable realms; the thought that they might ever be close
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enough to reprove us would warrant immense joy. Contempt, reproach,
threat, are relationships between humans; they are, in George, attitudes
of the humanly right towards the humanly wrong. This polarity is a
polarity of situation and not of essences; it is an opposition between
two different developments of the same self, not between two kinds of
being that are ontologically distinct. Such a vision is, in fact, much more
reassuring: where the gods are merely displeased, but fundamentally
on our side, there is no true tragedy. Which does not mean that there
is no tragedy in George himself; there is none in his literal statement,
but the purpose behind this statement is to circumvent a tragedy well
enough perceived. His monumental assurance serves to reassure a helpless and vulnerable man who will do whatever lies in his power not
to have to face up to an isolation which he dreads. The wrath and the
thunder of his God serves the purpose of subjectifying him; it brings
him down to our dimensions and makes ‘qual der zweiheit’ into a local
and temporary error. And since, within this all subjectified view, there
is no actual polarity, there never is a dialectical development, no real
questions and answers, but merely forceful statement. The fundamental difference resides here, and the further contrast between both poets
always returns to it. For Hölderlin, the duality between self and nonself is known, and his thought moves on from beyond the burden of
this insight. While George, originally struck by the same awareness, is
motivated by the construction of a series of defences, behind which he
can protect himself against the invasion of forces over which he has no
free control.
One of these defences is his concept of history. For George, history
is primarily a catalogue in which he finds examples to prove that the
strategy he has evolved to fight his own problem can be successful.
From Algabal to the ü figure of the Hyperion poem, he evokes a series
of historical tableaux which all represent typifications of the Georgian
attitude, unless they offer a counterproof by revealing the terrible defeat
of those who took a different course. Like all the dimensions of George’s
world, the theme becomes systematic from the moment when the overall
attitude has been crystallised in the Maximin symbol; but it had been
diffusely constant throughout, and the ‘history’ of Algabal is not essentially different from that of ‘Der Stern des Bundes’. At first, up to the first
half of ‘Der Siebente Ring’, the purpose of the historic vision is to offer
reassurance about the transient nature of the sterile and hostile present.
The reaction is a familiar one in modern thought; again and again,
thinkers and poets who seem themselves in deep opposition against
the reality and the trends of their age have evolved cyclical theories of
history, which provide them, by analogy, with a protensive image of a
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better future. Nietzsche is the obvious example, but as the case of W.B.
Yeats shows, the trend is not confined to Germany. This motivation of
George’s approach to history is most explicitly stated in the first part of
Der Siebente Ring:
Ich sah die nun jahrtausendalten augen
Der könige aus stein von unsren traümen
Von unsren tränen schwer . . . sie wie wir wussten:
Mit wüsten wechseln gärten . . . fzost mit glut.
Nacht kommt für helle – busse für das glück.
Und schlingt das dunkel uns und unsre trauer:
Eins das von je war (keener kennt es) wahret
Und blum und jugend lacht und sang erklingt.
(Ring, p. 33)
This view suspends, in fact, the indetermination of the future by reducing history to a repetition of eternally identical phenomena; the tension
of temporality, which is one aspect of the polar tension between subject
and object, is thus resolved by telescoping time into one single dimension, which is eternity as well as the eternal present. The future is closed
and, as such, necessarily safe. Old and new coincide in the eternal
moment which transcends both. This assurance becomes all the stronger
when the attitude has hardened to the point of calling itself the ‘solution’
of the Maximin revelation. The moment of solution becomes then the
eternal present and history disappears in the final triumph of the Kairos.
The suffering resulting from the rise and fall of nations is overcome in
the assured stability of eternal harmony:
Vor dem glanz der stetigen, sterne
Wandelt tag und nacht der völker
...
Uns bedrückt nicht solchen wissen
Unser jahr ist uns die grenze
Unser licht die glut im ringe
Und ihr dinst uns ziel und glück.
(Stern, p. 90)
Because of the intellectual values formalised in the Maximin figure and
also, no doubt, under the direct influence of a superficially similar movement in Hölderlin, Greece becomes more and more, for George, such a
fixed point of eternal repetition. The epiphany is also the beginning of ‘das
zweite Alter’. In the poem ‘Hyperion’, this image of Greece is the theme of
the second part, and it is very revealing of the static, exemplary historical
awareness of the poet. Sophocles, Pericles, Plato, Aristotle and Alexander
appear as a neatly arranged row of figures, completely enclosed within
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the outer mask of their fulfilled historical destiny, and their world is suddenly broken off in the Nietzschian idea of an erring Christianity:
Weh! auf des Syrers gebot
Stürzte die lichtwelt in nacht.
(Reich, p. 16)
In passing from here to the strophe in which Hölderlin evokes the same
era of Athen’s might . . .
Aber der Muttererd und dem Gott der Woge zu Ehren
Blühet die Stadt itzt auf, ein herrlich Gebild, dem Gestirn gleich . . .
Brunnen steign empor und über die Hügel in reinen
Bahnen gelenkt, ereilt der Quell das glänzende Becken;
Und umher an ihnen erglänzt, gleich festlichen Helden
Am gemeinsamen Kelch, die Reihe der Wohnungen, hoch ragt
Der Prytanen Gemach, es stehn Gymnasien offen,
Göttertempel entstehn, ein heiligkühner Gedanke
Steigt, Unsterblichen nah, das Olympion auf in den Aether . . .
(Der Archipelagus, p. 133)
. . . one has a shock comparable to that of passing from a well-ordered,
rectangular garden to the complexity and unfathomable harmony of an
Alpine landscape. The historical consciousness of these two poets must
have very different inner motivations to offer such a divergent form.
The intricacy of Hölderlin’s poetry is here a true reflection of the complexity of his thought. His vision of history is an essential dimension of
his work, but a very difficult one. It determines the general structure of all
the great hymns and, throughout the entire later work, it remains a constant theme of meditation. The earlier text ‘Das Weden im Vergehen’20
which is contemporary with the Empedokles fragments can give some
help in the comprehension of his outlook; it contains a philosophical
summary of the process of which the later hymns ‘Brot und Wein’ and
‘Patmos’ are the poetic extension. This process starts from the conviction
that historical thought arises from a feeling of anxiety before the indetermination of the future. This occurs particularly in periods which are
felt to be eras of transition, where all existing order – that is, an accepted
relationship between the self of man and the world around him – is
dying out; Hölderlin calls it ‘der Untergang des Vaterlandes’. Historical
thought is the attempt to transform this fear into a creative, hopeful
counterpart, without which history could not continue. The fear must
be overcome, made from an anxiety before the unknown into a desire
for the new. In order to achieve this, the new must be placed within a
framework of reference that allows for its definition in parallel with or in
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contrast to the past; it will then become possible to develop it, instead of
remaining paralysed by the terror of what appears as mere negation. This
is only possible if the past is ‘remembered’, not just in a mood of pained
loss, but within a lucid awareness that relates it to a possible future.
This framework of reference does not exist in objective reality, which
is all mystery, beyond our control and comprehension, infinite and
undetermined. But it can be created by us, by a subjective, poetic act,
which moves reversedly from present to past and by means of which we
recreate the bygone era. The only way, however, to have any hold on the
past is by seeing it as a temporal slice, which has a beginning and an end
and which, in between these limits, goes through a process of rise and
fall. In other terms, we postulate as necessary that a given order has to
have an end, and that it is the defined movement from its beginning to
this end which the poetic vision recreates as a finite form. This unit can
be form, since it is limited, continuous, divinely ordered – not altogether
unlike George’s ‘history’. But here the main difference occurs: this closed
formal unit (which, within itself, however, is in continuous motion) is
then used within a process that is entirely open. Once invented, it does
not remain standing on the page as an image we can look at when we
are in need of encouragement. The poet never ceased to know that it is
dream and irreality, and that it is bound to collide with the objective
world. He knows that he has to return, as it were, to his homeland, his
here and now, carrying within himself the ideal vision of this ordered
past. The ensuing dialectic history; always open, always aimed at the
future, made alive by its indetermination, but given some shape by the
inward formalisation that precedes the encounter. This history can have
no solution, but consists of a series of partial syntheses between the real
and the ideal, always again washed away by the objective temporal flux.
Hölderlin will not think of Greece as an achievement which can be
used as an example towards a new more beautiful life, George’s ‘schönes
Leben’. But he thinks of it as being the clearest case of fallen greatness
in Western civilisation. Greece is always as in ‘Der Archipelagus’, a
rising and falling movement that ends up, by itself, in the dissolution
of complete night and darkness. By thus seeing Greece as a whole, we
can ‘remember’ it and, armed with this memory, return to our present;
the future then can become a brighter vision than the total chaos from
which we started, although we know that the burden of developing this
image remains entirely within the mind and has to be carried out against
the weight of reality. The characteristic blend, in Hölderlin, of the
elegiac with the prophetic reflects this movement between the present
and a fallen past which helps to order the future.
From a historical point of view, the poetic act is the ideal reconstruction
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of the life of nations, but with the avowed purpose of putting this vision
into contact with a different stream of being, which lies outside of
consciousness. George’s history performs the first part of this process
perhaps, but in real or feigned ignorance of the second. He obeys a different strategy: the attempt to force an ideal concept, which is his own
creation, upon reality and thus to end the eternal conflict that is history.
The resulting temporal and formal structure will then be altogether
different. In Hölderlin, the temporality is a complex polyphonic construction, in which the poetic theme first moves from present into past,
modulates from the heroic into the elegiac, then reverses itself to flow far
into the future and back to hymnal joy, while the temporal continuity
of the objective world, which is irreversible, remains as an underlying
base, but participates in the overall form by its antithetical relationship
to the voices that lie above. In contrast, George’s temporality disappears
in the monotone of the eternally present affirmation – at least in the later
poetry, to which Hyperion belongs.
The value systems that arise in those two so different worlds will
further characterise this contrast. Since George’s fundamental intent is
the total subjectivation of reality, his supreme values are precisely instruments which perform this action. In Hyperion we find the summary of
this value system in the middle of the third poem:
Mit diesen kommt das zweite alter. Liebe
Gebar die Welt. Liebe gebiert sie neu.
Ich sprach den spruch der zirkel ist gezogen . . .
‘Liebe’, stated here as the highest value, has been the source of most
aberrations in the interpretation of George. It has, within his later work,
taken on the meaning of what his disciples have since religiously referred
to as the Eros, forgetting apparently that this concept does not necessarily have the value emphasis which it receives in George’s mature poetry.
In continuity with the overall attitude, one should see the Eros as the
final tactical move in George’s defensive battle against the ‘other’. The
earlier poetry, up to ‘Der Teppich des Lebens’ has always contained the
narration of a relationship with an unnamed other, and this relationship
has always ended in failure. When the difference in being is still at its
strongest (as in a polarity male-female) the rejection is violent and brutal.
Und zweifelnd ob das neue glück mir werde
Erfand ich nur den quell der neuen qual . . .
Ich sandte sie zurück zu ihrem herde.
Sie hatte wie die anderen ein mal.
(Algabal, p. 118)
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The ‘Mal’ is the ‘otherness’ of the woman, who had first been selected
among the crowd because of her similarity with the master:
IHR auge blieb gelassen streng und tief.
In Das Jahr der Seele, where the other is already much closer . . .
Mit frohem grauen haben wir im späten
Mondabend oft denselben weg begonnen . . .
(Jahr, p. 26)
the separation is much more difficult, the discovery of the difference
much more painful, leading to the autumnal and depressed mood of the
Traurige Tänze:
Ich trat vor dich mit einem segenspruche
Am abend wo für dich die kerzen brannten . . .
Due aber weisst nichts von dem opferbrauche . . .
Und nichts von wünschen die auf untern sprossen
Des festlichen altars vernehmlich wimmern . . .
(Jahr, p. 28)
A considerable change in tone occurs from the beginning of ‘Der
Teppich des Lebens’:
Und dinge rollten dumpf und ungewiss –
Da trat ein nackter engel durch die pforte . . .
(Teppich, p. 12)
By now the distance between self and other has disappeared altogether;
the other has been replaced by a subjective double, the aborted dialogue
by an inner monologue. ‘Freilich / Ist keiner der dir bleibt nur du und
ich’. If one accepts that the ‘du’ is a mode of appearance of the ‘ich’
(which is almost admitted to be the case: ‘Und seine stimme fast der
meine glich . . .’, p. 12), then this states the complete elimination of the
‘other’, at least in human terms.
The same process takes on a much wider, cosmic significance in the
later work. In ‘Der Teppich des Lebens’, the poet’s monologue still takes
place within a surrounding world in which forces of life and death, of
past and future, have some reality. Relationships from man to man have
been made inward, but the world remains in existence. It is this world
which actually leads to the destruction of the initial assurance, dissolved in the lulling chant of the final ‘Traum und Tod’ poem – the most
un-Georgian, in the ‘official’ sense of the term, in the entire work. But
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Maximin, aside from being in part the same figure as the Angel, becomes
a God in that he contains within himself the whole of objective reality.
This act, by which a man encloses within himself the totality of the
world, by which he equates infinite reality with his finite self, is called by
George ‘Liebe’; the disciples, more accurately, call it Eros, but George
prefers ‘love’, no doubt in order to indicate to what extent Caritas has
been entirely conquered by Eros. The Eros is ‘der Gott verleiben’, which
is the first and final step in George’s system: Maximin is God, and he
is made materially present in human flesh; the Pan becomes ego, since
‘due’ and ‘ich’, ever since ‘Der Teppich des Lebens’, have been equated.
The subsequent movement ‘das Leib vergotten’ – which is in Nietzsche’s
Wille zur Macht – becomes, in George, the natural correlative of the first:
since Leib is revealed in the concrete figure of Maximin, who is God, the
fact of giving it divine worship is merely recognising it for what it is.
The entire emphasis falls on the first process – den Gott verleiben – the
replacement of objective being by the subjective impression which this
being makes upon consciousness. In philosophical terms, it is equivalent
to the total idealism which claims that the being of a stone is the (subjective) impression of hardness and density which its contact creates, and
stating, consequently, that the causal control which we exercise over our
impression of an object (our freedom to touch or not to touch the stone)
is also the control we have over objects themselves Similarly, the Eros
replaces the recognition of the other as a distinct being, by the subjective
feeling which he, as a body, can arouse in us.
With this in mind, one can understand the imagery which, in ‘Der
Stern des Bundes’, speaks of the Epiphany in almost obstetrical terms:
‘dass wir vorm leibe knieten. In dem geburt des gottes sich vollzog’ (p. 9).
The same thought appears in George’s ‘Hyperion’ poem: ‘Liebe Gebar
die Welt’. Reality as a whole is an expansion of the original being. The
essential polarities of existence are all resolved in this oneness: male and
female coincide in the androgynous body of the Ur-self, past and present
in the a-temporal present. The image is one of a totally self-enclosed,
centred unit – geometrically the circle, which is George’s recurrent
symbol: ‘der zirkel ist gezogen’ and returns in all the key images: Ring,
Kreis, Reigen dance, etc.21 This world is the very opposite of ‘open’; it
can only claim openness (άλήθεια) as it can claim love, by exact reversion
of these key concepts.
This aspect of George’s thought is put into better perspective if one
remembers that these are ideas which he, to some extent, received from
others and then used in his own poetic enterprise. He passed them on
to younger disciples, who took them perhaps somewhat more at face
value than did their master. The entire Maximin concept is primarily
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an attempt to fuse the two main intellectual influences to which George
was subjected and which were congenial to his own mind: French symbolism and the esoteric subjectivism of the so-called Kosmiker group in
Munich. From the first, he received confirmation of the poetic creative
act as a supreme value, transcending the pure aestheticism of Art for
Art’s sake into a larger metaphysical framework; Mallarmé is, of course,
the central figure here. By the second, he was introduced to an entire
system of thought and values which continues what can roughly be
called a post-Nietzschian development, and within which the aesthetic,
as such, occupies a minor part. This element in George’s background
has perhaps not been sufficiently explored, and this is certainly not the
place to do it. But one passage from Alfred Schuler, who perhaps more
than Wolfskehl is the main agent of influence, will suffice to indicate the
similarity with the later George. Here is Schüler’s definition of what he
calls, with the same twist as in George, the ‘open’ life, his main value:
Kennzeichen des geöffneten Lebens sind: Gefühl der Erfüllung, der Sättigung,
Teletae, Passivität, Verweilen im Augenblick, Verewigung des Augenblicks.
Stillstand der Zeit, Gefül des absoluten Seins. Im offenen Leben wird der
Einzelne von den inneren Strömen ergriffen und gleichsam umgedreht, sodasz
er nach innen blickt, in die religiöse Kraftzentrale . . . Inden er sich mit dieser
eint, schwindet das Auszerhalb; alles wird Innenleben, alles symbolisiert
Innenleben. Das ausgeglichene Leben stellt ein harmonisches Ganze dar, in
welchem die enzelnen Glieder wie in einem rhythmischen Reigen verschlungen sind. Für die Menschen untereinander sind Schränken undenkbar. Jeder
sieht im anderen sein Inneres, seinen Zustand. Die Epoche erscheint in einem
Rausche schrankenlosen Glückes . . .22
George ends this attitude, of which the Dionysiac wildness is to some
extent repulsive to him,23 with his idea of Bild as a stratifying factor,
by which the ‘Rausch’, the moment, is made permanent in a concrete
form, stabilised in the monumental poetic construction. ‘Der Stern des
Bundes’, his most integrated work, is in fact a statement of the Kosmiker
doctrine in a poetic language of intense formal complication, using, as
Aler’s study well shows,24 the architectural resources of meter, sound
and texture with great skill and deliberation. This disciplined statement
of a subjective ecstasy, a Dionysiac exaltation expressed in Apollonian
decorum, is the main characteristic of George’s Maximin cycle, and it
summarises his aesthetic and ethical value system.
It is an understatement to admit, with Edgar Salin, that if Hölderlin
had lived in George’s time ‘er wahre wohl kaum einer der unsern
gewesen’.25 Little can be said here on the vast subject of Hölderlin’s
thought in relation to the problem of polarity of being, two poles
which he refers to, in an earlier text, as nature and art (‘Grund zum
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Empedokles’),26 later generally as God and man, both transcended by
a renewed concept of ‘nature’ that stands above either of them. Only a
superficial reading could lead to the conclusion that a similarity exists
between this world and George’s. For Hölderlin, reality is precisely the
essential ‘otherness’ of a man and the gods. Human and poetic destiny
accomplish themselves within the conscious and accepted dialectic of
this antithesis. Within the course of this dialectic, both poles can come
so close to each other, in their persistent exchange, that it may seem as
if unity existed; the quest for this unity is described in Hölderlin’s novel
Hyperion. But from the Homburg period on, Hölderlin knows that the
essence of the process is not unity, not even as intent, but the opposition itself. This was already stated in the ‘Grund zum Empedokles’:
‘Aber die Individualität dieses Moments (der Versöhnung) ist nur ein
Erzeugniss des Streits, seine Allgemeinheit nur ein Erzeugniss des höchsten Streits. . .’.27 However much this insight still deepens later, the fundamental polarity remains; it exists for man as well as for the gods, and
it is what allows for the polar ‘conversation’ between man and the gods
which is our reality:
Viel hat erfahren der Mensch
Der Himmlischen viele genannt
Seit ein Gespräch wir sind
Und hören können von einander.
(Versöhnender, der du nimmergeglaubt . . ., p. 143)
This mutual limitation of man and of the gods ever to attain complete
unity of being (‘das Unmittelbare’) defines their being and becomes, as
such, the highest value:
Das Unmittelbare streng genommen, ist für die Sterblichen unmöglich, wie
für die Unsterblichen; der Gott muss verscheidene Welten unterscheiden,
seiner Natur gemäss, weil himmlische Güte, ihret selber wegen, heilig seyn
muss, unvermischet. Der Mensch, als Erkennendes, muss auch verschiedene
Welten unterscheiden, weil Erkenntniss nur durch Entgegensetzung mölich
ist. Deswegen ist das Unmittelbare, streng genommen, für die Sterblichen
unmöglich, wie für die Unsterblichen.
Die strenge Mittelbarkeit ist aber das Gesez.
(Das Höchste, Hellingrath Ausgabe, v.2, p. 276)
It is ironic that the hymn which is said to have been the favourite
Hölderlin poem of the George Circle is precisely that in which his
enterprise is most explicitly condemned, stated to be in direct opposition to the real poetic task. In ‘Wie wenn am Feiertage . . .’ (Beissner, p.
122), those who want to change their relationship with the gods from
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complete opposition to sense perception (Verleibung), are said to meet
the fate of Semele, butned to ash through her desire to see Zeus in his
full glory.
So fiel, wie Dichter sagen, da sie sichtbar
Den Gott zu sehen begehrte, sein Bliz auf Semeles Haus
Und Asche tödlich getroffene gebahr
Die Frücht des Gewitters, den heiligen Bacchus.28
This fate is mentioned in contrast to the true poet of whom
Der Gesang, damit er beiden zeuge, glückt.
in which ‘beiden’ refers to ‘der Götter und Menschen werk’.
In this word, love is not unity achieved by subjectivation, but is itself
a consequence of accepted polarity. In Heidegger’s words: ‘Nur so dasz
die Götter Götter und die Menschen Menschen sein műssen und dabei
doch nie ohne einander sein können, ist die Liebe zwischen ihnen.’ There
is more than opposition between this essential law of Hölderlin’s belief
and that of a poet for whom God is a mirror of himself, ‘der die uns aus
der qual der zweiheit löstest’.
This general contrast only implies a critical judgement of Stefan
George in so far as he made the claim to have gone beyond Hölderlin
in the same direction – a claim which is even today still repeated by his
disciples and which is typical of the obstacles that stand in the way of
a balanced judgement of his own work. Comparative studies should be
exegetic rather than evaluative, certainly when they are carried out with
a figure of the stature of Hölderlin. This comparison should primarily
throw some light, by contrast, on the relationship between George’s
poetic statement and his intent. In a totally candid, open, lucid poet
like Hölderlin, the poet’s own being is entirely contained within his
word – to a degree which, perhaps, no one has reached as completely.
But in a vulnerable and haunted man like George, who tries to undo
part of reality by the power of his word, the poetry and the thought are
essentially a mask, in the sense in which Yeats uses the term: anti-self,
a defensive armour behind which the true man is hidden. It is George’s
particular pathos that, unlike Yeats, he never wants to admit this. This
would have turned his strategy into a positive act, legitimately and universally human, and thus a significant poetic subject; one certainly does
not expect Hölderlin’s blinding light to emanate from every great poet.
Instead, George has devoted his entire life’s work to the desperate undertaking of strengthening himself against what can never be vanquished.
This may well be why it requires much sympathy and something
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resembling compassion – though one would prefer the nobler German
word Mit-leid – to see his poetry in its true light.
Notes
1. Neunte Folge, 1914.
2. Emil Petzold, Hölderlins ‘Brot und Wein’, ein exegetischer Versuch
(Sambor, 1896).
3. The title Das Jahr der Seele is taken from the last line of Hölderlin’s elegy
‘Menons Klage um Diotima’, but in such a different mood and context that
it almost seems to be a coincidence.
4. Norbert von Hellingrath, Pindarübersezungen von Hölderlin (Jena, 1911),
p. v.
5. Edar Salin, Hölderlin im George Kreis (Godesberg, 1950), p. 10; see also
Um Stefan George (Godesberg, 1948) about the attempts to keep
Hellingrath within the strict orthodoxy of the Kreis (pp. 137 ff.).
6. Norberg von Hellingrath, Zwei Vortrage (Munchen, 1921) and Rilke,
Briefe aus dem Jahren 1914–1921, pp. 38–42.
7. Salin, Um Stefan George, p. 167, for instance.
8. Robert Boehringer, Mein Bild von Stefan George (Godesberg, 1951), p.
141.
9. All quotations from George are from Gesamt-Ausgabe der Werke,
Endgültige Fassung (Berlin, 1928).
10. For a brief but informative biography of Hellingrath, see Helmut Woche,
Zwei früh-Vollendete: Bernhard von der Marwitz, Norbert von Hellingrath
(Hameln, 1949).
11. Now in Dichter un Helden (Heidelberg, 1921).
12. Now in Friedrich Wolters, Vier Reden über das Vasterland (Breslau, 1927).
13. Now in Robert Boehringer, Gesang der Jahre (Godesberg, 1944). The later
studies of Max Kommerell on Hölderlin have only a remote relation to
George and cannot properly be included among the products of the Kreis.
14. Friedrich Wolters, Stefan George und die Blätter für die Kunst (Berlin:
1930), p. 415.
15. Something similar occurs in the case of Goethe, as I tried to show in a paper
on Faust criticism in the George circle.
16. J.M.M. Aler, Im Spiegel der Form (Stilkritische Wege zur Deutung von
Stefan Georges Maximindichtung) (Amsterdam, 1947).
17. E. Lachmann, Hölderlins Hymnen in freien Strophen; eine metrische
Untersuchung (Frankfurt am Main, 1937).
18. Wolfgang Heybey, Glaube und Geschichte im Werk Stefan Georges
(Stuttgart, 1935), p. 150, among others.
19. Quotations from Hölderlin are from Stuttgarter Hölderlin-Ausgabe, herausgegeben von Friedrich Beissner, Kleine Ausgabe, Zweiter Band (Gedichte
nach 1800), unless otherwise specified.
20. In Sämtliche Werke, ed. Norbert von Hellingrath (Berlin, 1943), III, pp.
309–16.
21. For a cross-index of the Reigen dance image in George, see F.W. L’Ormeau,
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22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
The Post-Romantic Predicament
‘Die Christologie Stefan Georges’, Castrum Peregrini, XV, 1953, pp.
85–124.
Alfred Schuler, Fragmente und Vortrage aus dem Nachlass, ed. Ludwig
Klages (Leipzig, 1940), p. 273.
Klages reports George’s reaction to Schüler at his most intense, in an anecdote which has a ring of authenticity and which does George credit: ‘Das ist
Wahnsinn! . . . führen Sie mich in ein Wiztshaus wo ganz gewöhnliche
Menschen Zigarren rauchen und Bier trinken! Ich ertrage es nicht!’
(Schuler, Fragmente und Vortrage, p. 37).
Aler, Im Spiegel der Form.
Salin, Hölderlin im George Kreis, p. 28.
Hellingrath Ausgabe, III, p. 321.
Ibid., p. 323.
This reading, which the entire logic of the hymn bears out, is taken from
Martin Heidegger, Erlaüterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung (Frankfurt,
1951), p. 67, which also contains the preceding quotation ‘Das Höchste’. In
this interpretation, Bacchus has no symbolic value at this point, but merely
serves to narrate and to situate the myth.
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Appendix: Dissertation Fragment on
Stefan George (c.1955)
‘Die Hüter des Vorhofs’ occupies a central position in Gestalten.
Gestalten is itself central to the three poem cycles which announce, in
‘Der Siebente Ring’, the incarnation of the Divine-Maximin. It is ultimately to such a poem as ‘Die Huter’, then, that we must look for the
authority for George’s assertion of the Divine.
We are aware of our Befrates – Die Huter; we are aware of our
Gefrates – ‘What authority etc. resides in the poem’? but do we know
our Erfragtes? And if we do not, what elements shall we seek out in the
poem? How valuable for the Erfragtes will be the conclusions which we
draw from them?
So much is clear: the assertion that Being has revealed itself to the poet
is authoritative only in so far as his poem itself reveals that Being. Only
Being can create Being. The search for absolute authority thus becomes
an ontological critique of the poem, not as assertion, but as entity.
It is evident that the entity that the poem is, is uniquely constituted
by its language. We shall therefore attend to its language as constituting
and not as asserting. What its language constitutes must be a proximate
disclosure of Being.
Assertion remains a constitutive element of the poem. Even Hälfte des
Lebens names ‘Winter’ in disclosing ‘l’absent de tous hivers’. ‘Die Hüter
des Vorhofs’ makes many assertions, finally of a disclosure of the Divine:
– nie bei euch vermindert
Erinnerung wie ihr von göttern stammet.
In effect then, this poem will disclose its Authority by the authority with
which it constitutes what it merely asserts. Stanza VII asserts what die
Hüter are: that kind which remembers that its stems from gods. The poem
will thus be authoritative if it can disclose a memory of Being. When this
race of Hüter first descended, the manner of their descent, the condition
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still of fusion with the gods; these are neither asserted nor disclosed. The
poem begins after birth, ‘In hiesigtage’, at the moment when the Erziehung
begins. The Divine is present only as a memory ‘towards which’ the
Erziehung is directed. The authority with which this ‘towards which’ is
realised within the poem is the authority with which the Divine is present
in it. Being, alone, directs the movement towards its own manifestation
as memory. The Erziehung must create a remembering of Being (not a
‘Seinesvergessenheit’). The poem, in a word, must be the education it asserts.
We shall see how the poem strives to realise this ideal structure
moving from ‘Seinesvergessenheit’ to ‘Seineserinnerung’, from ‘fallingness’ to authenticity. But we shall ask too, if its ‘Erziehung’ of ‘Dasein’ is
constituted with true regard for the primordial constituents of Existenz.
Or is its motion ‘towards Being’ only illusory – infinitely rapid precisely
because the poem never begins in Being – a rehearsal of merely linguistic
possibilities, whose invocation of the Divine is finally a fiction?
Then the hermeneutic circle is, for this poem, a Zirkelschluss from
which Being is excluded; then the poem constitutes itself merely as assertion: it has a purely linguistic existence. For it, the Logos is merely a
thing; and everything it touches, it turns to a thing merely . . .
The poem begins by creating, artificially, a condition like the fallingness of ‘Dasein’, which it then strategically names in natural language.
Ich liess euch erst erziehn auf magrer scholle.
The condition of Auf-magrer-scholle-sein is already enclosed within the
will of das Ich: it is named as the first element within a controlled suite
of conditions which shall constitute ideal education ‘Ich liess euch . . .’:
the future Huter are not naturally found ‘auf magrer scholle’ but are set
there. That they can be ‘Brought up’ is already implicit in their having
been wilfully set there: they are not merely in Existenz geworfen, they
are placed. The ‘there’ is available from nature, but it is in no sense a
place until designated by das Ich. The use of natural, figurative language
to describe what is d’emblée negated reveals a bias (and a problematic
as well) constitutive of George’s poetic universe.
The abrupt descent from the gods completed, no immediate trace, presumably, is left in the memory. The memory of the divine must instead
be recreated as the goal towards which artificially bred ‘Sehnsucht’
tends. Where the divinely descended lands, then, is of no importance;
‘magre scholle’ becomes his first memory. George is thus seen rigorously
extirpating the ‘Tendenz’ of ‘Algabal’ and of his (misleading) translation
of the ‘Scène’ from ‘Hérodiade’, in which the early memories theme is
treated with erotic pathos. These Hüter will never dream of returning to
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Appendix: Dissertation Fragment on Stefan George
217
their ‘Blumenalter’ they grew as children: it was of ‘magre scholle’ that
offers no charm. Memory inspired by Sehnsucht and turned towards its
sources will strive instead to remember its first dwelling place:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.1
The problematic of using natural language also to describe a universe
that negates, or should negate, the natural emerges immediately.
In suchen Fiebernde in leid Vergrabne
offers us, in the two substantive participles, the powerful connotations of natural language. Now, there cannot be any doubt that these
phrases are negative. Those ‘in leid Vegrabne’ are the very opposite
of the Templer who bear the cross: ‘der stolz ertragnen leiden kunst’.
‘Erziehen’ (‘to bring up, to rear’) is vertical in its implications: its end
product is ‘Erhabne’. ‘Vergrabne’, on the contrary, are base. (The stanza
genuinely constitutes this verticality.) ‘Fiebernde’ too are patently the
opposite of those poets who create in ‘kühler würde’; they are as yet
untouched by the Angel:
In diesen einfachen gefilden lern
Den hauch der den zu kühlen fruhling lindert.
It seems correct to understand the condition of these children2 as a consequence of their having been set on ‘magre scholle’, the merely natural
‘negated’ by the act of placement. But if the natural is negated how can
the result of this negation be the natural once again, indeed intensified?
The poet, like das Ich of ‘Nach der Lese’, is ‘gardening’ with lean soil:
how can his plants therefore grow ‘vergraben, fiebernd’, when he chose
that soil for them? The direction of the language runs opposite to its
assertion.
This ambiguity about the relation of will and nature is additionally
complicated by the indefinite character of ‘suchen’ and ‘leid’. Are they
natural, or are they spiritual? The poem does not tell us how to understand them.
Does, for example, das ‘leid’, as essentially bodily, produce necessarily
the natural condition of Vergrabensein; is ‘suchen’ essentially ‘Sucht’? It
is, in the first poem, in the Eingang to dSdB.
Are on the other hand, ‘suchen’, ‘leid’, spiritual movements towards
which these children have but an incorrect attitude [Fieberndsein] and
whose aspiration they thus corrupt? Cf. Mahnung.
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Or are they finally, spiritual movements engendering the natural or
engendered by the natural?
In fact, figurative language is used unrigorously throughout the
whole of stanza I and permits of only general commentary. Words
that are purely natural ‘adern’, ‘reift’, mingle (with deliberation, yet
undialectical deliberation on the part of the poet) with words that are
not natural: ‘sehnsucht’, ‘Erhabne’. The process generally described is
Erhabenwerden, sublimation; the effect generally communicated is of
the interfusion of ‘Leib’ and ‘Geist’.
(S)ehnsucht euch durch alle adern rolle (nd)
evokes that condition of ‘undissociated sensibility’ which Eliot (à propos
of Donne) describes thus:
A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility.
But still it is a considerable distance from ‘sensibility’ to ‘adern’; George
simply asserts a body which accommodates ‘sehnsucht’ which can ‘roll’
through veins without loss to consciousness. The assertion seems easier
to make poetically than critically. Eliot too is notably far less critical
in his assertion (of an interfusion of spirit and flesh) in ‘Whispers of
Immortality’:
Donne, I suppose, was such another
Who found no substitute for sense,
To seize and clutch and penetrate;
Expert beyond experience,
He knew the anguish of the marrow
The ague of the skeleton;
No contact possible to flesh
Allayed the fever of the bone.
Here, at least, the assertion is partly realised through its tragic mode:
no experience apprehended by sense ever allays ‘the fever of the bone’,
ultimately not natural. George however, foresees a successful end to the
fever in Erhabenheit and has the audacity to assert its mode of happening as ‘reifen’. The use of ‘reifen’ – in itself the supreme metaphor for the
natural – makes clear the non-dialectical character of George’s world.
The spiritual outcome is dictated by a will that ordains it according to an
undisclosed conception of organic process we have called sublimation
– a bringing together of erotic (bodily) and spiritual elements and a
consequent refining and concentrating of each by each. The motifs of
nature and spirit that are presented in the beginning as ‘magre scholle’
and willed ‘Erziehung’ are presented in carefully purified sequences:
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1.1
1.2
1.3
1.4
Natural
Magre scholle
↓
Fiebernde, Vergrabne
↓
durch-adern-rolln
↓
reife kinder
219
Spiritual
euch-erziehn lassen
↓
suchen, leid
↓
sehnsucht
↓
Fromme, Erhabne
The connection asserted between these terms is progressively more
‘organic’:
1.1
1.2
1.3
1.4
Euch-erziehn lassen auf
(prepositional, static)
↓
Fiebernde, Vergrabne in
↓
sehnsucht rollen durch
(verb-al organic)
↓
reife kinder reifen in
magrer scholle
suchen, leid
adern
Fromme, Erhabne
It is perhaps most correct to conclude that ‘Ich’ here substitutes its will
for the universal order – Being. That will, at once supernatural (it can
compel ‘die Nährerin’) and dependent for its outcome upon natural
process, is itself beyond process. Consequently it projects itself as process
(Erziehung) non-dialectically, asserting now its aspect as nature, now its
aspect as spirit. Essential only is that each of these elements be pure,
and that they be revealed in ultimate connection. An earlier illustration
of a universal will asserting itself through process in a universe now of
nature, now of spirit – process which presupposed the harmony of these
universes between themselves and between man – is ‘Ein Angelico’. The
will is first Angelico’s:
Er nahm . . .;
his art is obtained by a simple aggrandisement at the expense of a
natural world that cooperates. The will is next des Herrn, from who
hand ‘Die braut . . . empfängt . . . die erste Krone’. A complex but
explicable sequence of transmissions of authority from dem Herrn
to the poor creature who washes at the brook is present. But what
determines the harmony is again the will of the poet which here,
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doubtless successful, makes a trial of its power in reproducing the
Angelico.
Being, however, is merely asserted and not disclosed when Being is
asserted to be the Will that makes the assertion; nor does any amount of
genuine disclosure of Will bring Being closer to disclosure.
II.3 The interfusion of nature and spirit needs no longer to be insisted
on: it is disclosed in images of perfect ‘natural’ harmony – harmony that
exceeds that of natural experience. The pledge of this harmony is the will
of das Ich which continues to manifest: ‘Dann gab ich . . .’, yet, within
its happy creation, ‘ein sonnenland’, Will no longer need manifest.
‘Rosen’ as in ‘Vorspiel’ to ‘Der Teppich des Lebens’ and in poems from
‘Pilgerfahrten’ onward (unlike the ‘lorbeer tee und aloe’ of ‘Strand’)
stands for a personal and poetic fulfilment, for balanced and harmonious Being. In it are joined ‘Helle’ and ‘Rausch’, poetry and paradise,
Germanic will and Hellenic deified flesh. Now the poet names harmony –
‘Rosen’ – where once he could not, except with the reservation of a thorn:
Am rand der garten riss mich eine nadel
Teerose gelbe rose!
‘Ein uppig sonnenland’ ‘voll rosen und voll reben’ is a sacred place
which gods inhabit – paradise, forever the object of the poets’ longings.
Im haine lodern die altare
Bekranzt mit rosen . . .
But from it he had found himself excluded:
Die wahren auen wurden mir verboten
and was dissatisfied with the merely meridional.
Der ost wie der sud
Ein tauscher ihm war.
The obstacle to the ‘wahren auen’ was not trivial, but essential. It was
the abdication of a will to legislate the natural, to constitute Being again.
It was, in short, the willingness not to be a poet. Thus, if the ‘wahren
auen’ are natural, then it is the poets’ will consciously to negate the
natural that bars him from them. And if the ‘wahren auen’ are poetic,
then it is the impossibility of his remaining content with any single poetic
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221
creation that bars the poet from them. Essential to education, however,
is the overcoming of this obstacle, which for example, Nietzsche failed
to achieve:
Hast due der sehnsucht land nie lacheln sehn?
Erschufst du gotter nur um sie zu sturzen?
Now George offers paradise to his disciples. How does he ‘have’ it to
give? Through the deification of the absent and infinite Du of all poems
– angel whom he then identifies with himself and in his poetry names,
overcomes, creates, celebrates and possesses – he becomes himself a
god: Being and consciousness, creation and legislator. It is as if George
inherited the Mallarméan dualism of poetic consciousness and ‘l’Azur/
le Neant – l’absent de tous poems’. Then he identifies himself no longer
with that finite consciousness, but with l’Absolu, draws the poetic consciousness into it, fills it with new Being (viz. ‘Eingang: Der Bund des
Sternes’); then, as god, inhabits it and ordains. And now he can exercise
his will in a mode which does not exclude the experience of paradise, but
rather controls that experience. He can, at will, like Eden’s god, ‘garden’
with paradise for the cultivation of human ‘Sprossen’. He is beyond the
problematic, haunting Das Jahr der Seele, of the ‘totgesagten park’ and
the absent Du – of the impossibility of the poet qua poet inhabiting his
own poetic universe.
Again, if the poem is non-natural (viz. Algabal), then in it the Logos is
dead. If it is natural, then it contains only a part of the Logos, which
remains beyond it – the absent and infinite Du. If the poet and the Du
are one, then the poem is the Logos:
Schon wurdest due eins
Mit dem Worth das von oben uns sprach.
Now George creates paradise as a poem, then offers it to his Kreis, receptive according to the will of its centre. Yet Being, for George, is ideally
dynamic (cf. ‘Temper’); thus no ‘sonnenland’ is given except for ‘kurzer
leihe’. It is for das Ich – perpetual transpositeur of Being – forever about
to be replaced with a new land – as it itself replaced ‘magre scholle’. For
the disciple, the absence in this parade of a possibility for will and deed
is dangerous. The one content to stay would be revealed as weak; the
one doomed to stay would be tormented.
This ‘sonnenland’ is the ‘wahre auen’ of gods who are perceptible
through the emblems of their body, viz:
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Du warst der spender unverwelkter rosen (Maxim)
Wir schmuckten dich mit palmen und mit rosen (Eingang: dStd)
through their habitation (‘himmel’) and the pattern they impose upon
the day (‘hochstes weben / In heisiger tage glanzumwobner reihe’). The
paradise for the disciples includes consciousness, ‘damit ihr himmel
saht’. The experience is successful (the seeing is accomplished), and
miraculously in the present (‘In hiesiger tage’); the divine patt is intelligible, no indecipherable grimoire.
The paradise is fully George’s, but only partially the disciples’ for they
are not yet grown to it. They still need the exercise of will, of striving,
self-making, to approach, themselves, the divine. Similarly, no one, save
the poet who knows Being, ever knows his poem. Momentary habitation even, is possible only in the faux manoir of the frail Master.
With what authority does George offer non-natural experience, the
experience of ‘himmel’, paradise? The assertion of his own divinity
permits him to traffic in the wholly unveiled. Where is the experience
of Being to be had? In the will, set in motion by longing. Of him who
wants Being most strongly: we call him Master. Zirkelschluss. Will, in
the absence of Being, must contest itself, grown stronger than ‘l’Absent’,
must annihilate itself, then leave behind the primordial ‘Sehnsucht’.
But George brought his will to the void, no further, and there achieved
his bizarre god, to whom he gave his will. Then he named Sehnsucht
‘Sucht’. His will was not the strongest, he could not wait. In this poem
the poet’s will still lingers.
II. The disciples are alienated (‘entfernt’) from any Being not their
own. From ‘magre scholle’ they fled through ‘erziehn’; from ‘ein üppig
sonnenland’ they were removed, before the experience became wholly
satisfying or tormenting. But the brief glimpse of paradise affords, along
with the knowledge of their remoteness from their ‘wahre auen’, the
dignified idea of a paradise.
Dasein aware of its separation from Sein gains the dignity of selfknowledge and the dream of a return.
Their sense of ‘remoteness’ – a spatial metaphor – is expressed as a
‘waiting’, a remoteness from present time. Stanza VI: 3–4 connects
the disciples as ‘Wachen’ (who wait and watch) with their true time –
Eternity.
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223
‘Tasten’ is that base and deluded kind of perception practiced by men
like objects between themselves and objects, ignorant that to be human,
yet as an object, is still not to bridge ‘Entfernung’ and obtain ‘mana’ viz.
‘Goethe-Tag’:
Noch wenig student: der geweihte raum
Erknirscht: sie die betasten um zu glauben.
‘Niedre gabe’ is intercourse with women; cf. ‘Hymnen: Gespräch’:
Wenn königlich du deinen leib verbietest
Den niedren mägden die ihn driest ergehren.
The concentration, through chastity, of erotic strength (‘Glut’)
breeds ardour, purity and delicacy. Cf. ‘Templer’:
Wie wir gediehn im schoosse fremder amme:
Ist unser nachwuchs nie aus unsrem stamme –
Nie alternd nie entrkräftet nie versprengt
Da ungeborne glut in ihm sich mengt.
‘Glut’ itself sheds the light in which ‘das wahre bild’ makes itself known.
It is an interesting word and is frequent in George: it has the connotations at once of ‘Rausch’ and ‘Helle’. A passage from the angels’ address
in Vorspiel: VI mediates ‘Glut’ and ‘Rausch’:
du . . .
Und nur durch mich der gluten kelch empfängst
Der dich berauschen wird solang du leibst.
‘Glut’ as ‘Helle’ is developed in stanza IV of this poem, q.v. ‘Glut’ is
literally godliness:
In dieser frist seines vollen erglühens durften
wir ihm den hintergrund bereiten. (Vorrede zu Maximin);
as ‘kerne’, true life:
So drang durch unser brüstiges beschwören
Der wehe schrei nach dem lebendigen kerne.
‘Glut’ is given by the god,
Der dies glühen in mir fachte
Dass ich ihm mich nur bequeme:
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and strives to know the god:
Zerspaltne feuer all verschmolzen
Im streben nach vergöttlichung.
It belongs to a language that is at once natural and transcendental and
thus takes the pseudo-dialectic of stanza I to a new synthesis. ‘Bild’ is an
articulation of Dasein:
Der zeiten flug verliert die alten namen
Und raum und dasein bleiben nur im bilde (Weihe).
‘Das wahre bild’ is divinity, the articulation of Sein:
Unzertrennbar sich gebäre
Bild aus dir und mir im trauma.
‘Fassen’ contrasts with ‘tasten’ as vivid apprehension, with mere fumbling. It means both ‘seize’ and ‘contain’: it thus describes in two ways
the ‘towards which’ of Dasein → Sein which the education creates. More
exactly: it names ‘to seize’ only to transcend that term. The movement
it describes is from a mere laying of hands on the god towards the interiorising of him as ‘memory’ which concludes the poem. The movement
from laying hands on to containing is the movement, too, of George’s
own situation vis-à-vis the god. As early as Weihe, George is forcing ‘die
herrin’
Den finger stützend deiner lippe nah.
In Einverleibung the god, the ‘glut’, is well within:
Ich geschöpf nun eignen sohnes.
‘Glut’ as erotic tends to make erotic the act of apprehension of ‘das
wahre bild’ whether as seizing or containing. In place of intercourse with
‘neidre gabe’ the disciples have inward intercourse of consciousness with
‘das wahre bild’, an act by which they concentrate and preserve their
thus ‘ungeborne glut’ – ‘nie versprengt’.
The alienation of the disciples from any Being save the divine, for which
reason they cannot stoop to sexuality, intensifies in them their own
being, in whose light they are thus able to apprehend the divine.
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That concentrated being, rather than dispersed being, is indeed the issue
of a ‘bred’ Entfernung, we have the manifestation of das Ich – ‘so mehrt
ich eure glut . . .’ – to assure. Das Ich – pure will remains the ground of
Being; and the assurance too, that there shall ever be ‘das wahre bild’ to
manifest, stems from the Ich who is thus itself tantamount to ‘das wahre
bild’. Doubtless the god of the will of das Ich is no ‘deus absconditus’:
he is manifest; his authority as will is unquestionable.
III. The same luminous and unshattered Being (‘volle’ – not ‘vielspältige’ or ‘verästelte’) concentrated in itself by its conscious intercourse
with the divine, brings light to the things of the world, light by which
they are apprehended as newly articulated (cf. Vorrede zu Maximin, p.
523). This verklären is a bringing-to-full-articulation, a perfecting of the
things of the world, expressed on the physical dimension, in stanza V,
as an actual healing of an ‘aufgeklaffte erde’. The activity of ‘verklären’
is a poesis. The objects of the ‘Verklärung’ are, significantly, not found
in the natural state but are already once verklärt: ‘die stirn’ ‘gehöht’,
‘der wegrand blitzend’, ‘die ahren demant’, ‘das alte tal angerötet’. They
thus suggest themes already poetically rendered (‘transposed’) – they
suggest poetry! And as poetry, they would require ‘volle helle’ in order
to be transfigured, i.e, that a new poetry, based on a viable poetic tradition, could be made from them. These poetic motifs might thus be
paraphrased: ‘Die stirn die ihr mit wein und lorbeer hötet’: the theme of
poetry itself, the fusion in the word of ‘Rausch und Helle’; ‘Den wegrand
blitzend von demanten ähren’: nature landscape, fully crystallised as
word, viz. the landscape in Weihe; ‘Das alte tal vom zauber angerötet’:
the theme of childhood poetised by memory.
We see now that III:4,
Dass irh das wahre bild am reinsten fasstet
was the first ‘Tat’ named for the disciples, that now they will be very
active, that all their possibility for right action issued for the perception
of ‘das wahre bild’, for which they had first to be educated. The will of
das Ich, which determined that education, will now no longer be named.
It is absorbed in the positive action of the disciples.
V. The interesting descent of the vision of the disciples from ‘himmel’,
to ‘das wahre bild’ (which quite possibly still continues like ‘die herring’
of ‘Weihe, zu schweben’ – to be undecided – in the middle distance,
neither of heaven nor of earth), then to poetry, now rests upon the earth
before plunging in VI: 1 into the Sea. George’s immediate perception
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of the ‘earth’ is not given by nature (he is, at this point, uninterested
in nature except as material for poetic transposition); it is given by the
body politic. The language of the first part of this stanza is familiar from
the ‘Zeitgedichte’ and from the ‘Vorrede zu Maximin’, viz.
Ihr meiner zeit genossen . . .
Als ihr in lärm und wüster gier des lebens
Mit plumpem tritt und rohen finger ranntet
(Das Zeitgedicht)
Wire gingen einer entstellten und erkalteten menschheit entgegen die
sich mit ihren vielspältigen errungenschaften und verästelten empfindungen brüstete . . . unreine hände wühlten in einem haufen von flitterstücken worein die wahren edelsteine wahllos geworfen wurden . . .
jezt aber schien uns eine seuche zu wüten vor der kein mittel hälfe . . .
Notes
1. Wordsworth, ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early
Childhood’. The glory of childhood memories are in Wordsworth given a
transcendental explanation. Earlier, George (in ‘Algaban’ and ‘Pilgerfahrten’)
affirmed the first half of this proposition and rejected the second; now, truer
to Wordsworth’s thought, he rejects the first but affirms the second.
2. Children, not youths, viz. ‘Goethe-Tag’:
schon im kinde leiden
Das an dem wall geht . . .
3. There is no section ‘I’ marked in de Man’s original script – Ed.
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De Man’s Bibliography to Chapter 2
General works, not specifically related to Mallarmé referred to in the text are
not listed again in the bibliography. De Man’s bibliography for Yeats appears in
The Rhetoric of Romanticism.
Bibliographie des auteurs moderns de la littérature française (1801–1956) by H.
Talvart and J. Place is up to date on Mallarmé until 1956.
1. Primary sources
The authoritative critical edition of Mallarmé, in spite of weaknesses, is Oeuvres
complètes, edited by Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry, Bibliothèque de la
Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1945). Contains a descriptive bibliography of
Mallarmé’s publications until 1943 (pp. 1325 ff.) and a selective bibliography
of secondary works on Mallarmé until 1945.
Since the publication of this edition, the following primary texts are important:
Mallarmé, Stéphane. Les noces d’Hérodiade, edited with an introduction by
Gardner Davies (Paris: Gallimard, 1959); sketches for the later version of
‘Hérodiade’.
Mondor, Henri. Mallarmé lycéen (Paris: Gallimard, 1954); juvenilia.
Scherer, Jacques. Le ‘Livre’ de Mallarmé (Paris: Gallimard, 1957); sketches for
the final ‘Work’.
2. Selective list of secondary works and articles relevant to this
study
Adam, Antoine. ‘Quelques gloses des poésies de Mallarmé’, in Mélanges d’hislittéraire offerts a D. Mornet (Paris: Nizet, 1951).
––. ‘Premières etapes d’un itinéraire’, in Les lettres, numéro special sur Mallarmé
(Paris: Librarie les lettres, 1948), pp. 125–34.
Aish, Deborah. La métaphore dans l’oeuvre de Stéphane Mallarmé (Paris: Droz,
1938).
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Aubry, G. Jean-. Une amitié exemplaire: Villiers del’Isle Adam et Mallarmé
(Paris: Mercure de France, 1942).
Austin, L.J. ‘Mallarmé et le rêve du livre’, Mercure de France, vol. CCCXVIII,
January-April 1953, pp. 81–108.
Ayda, A. Le drame intérieur de Stéphane Mallarmé (Istanbul, 1955).
Beausire, Pierre. Essai sur la poèsie et la poétique de Stéphane Mallarmé
(Lausanne: Roth, 1951).
Bernard, S. ‘“Le coup de dés” dans la perspective historique’, Revue d’histoire
littéraire de la France, April–June 1951, pp. 181–95.
––. Mallarmé et la musique (Paris: Nizet, 1959).
Blanchot, Maurice. Faux pas (Paris: Gallimard, 1942).
––. L’espace littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1955).
Bo, Carlo. Mallarmé (Milan: Rosa and Ballo, 1945).
Cellier, Léon. Mallarmé et la morte qui parle (Paris: Presses universitaires de
France, 1959).
Chassé, Charles. Lueurs sur Mallarmé (Paris: Editions de la nouvelle revue critique, n.d.).
––. Les clés de Mallarmé (Paris: Aubier, 1954).
Chiari, J. Symbolism from Poe to Mallarmé: The Growth of a Myth (London:
Rockliff, 1956).
Chisholm, A.R. Towards ‘Hérodiade’ (Melbourne University Press, 1934).
Claudel, Paul. ‘La catastrophe d’Igitur’, Nouvelle revue française, November
1926.
Cohn, Robert Greer. Mallarmé’s ‘Un Coup de Dés’: An Exegesis (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1949).
––. L’oeuvre de Mallarmé. Un coup de dés (Paris: Librairie Les lettres, 1952), a
revised and extended translation of the foregoing.
Cooperman, Hayse. The Aesthetic (sic) of Stéphane Mallarmé (New York: The
Koffern Press, 1933).
Davies, Gardner. Les ‘Tombeaux’ de Mallarmé (Paris: Corti, 1950).
––. Vers une explication rationelle du Coup de Dés (Paris: Corti, 1953).
––. Mallarmé et le mythe solaire (Paris: Corti, 1959).
––. ‘Stéphane Mallarmé. Fifty Years of Research’, French Studies, vol. Z,
January 1947.
Delfel, Guy. L’esthétique de Stéphane Mallarmé (Paris: Flammarion, 1951).
De Reneville, Rolland. L’expérience poétique (Paris: Gallimard, 1938)
Fiser, Emeric. Le symbole littéraire. Essai sur la signification du symbole chez
Wagner, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Bergson et Proust (Paris: Corti, 1941).
Fowlie, Wallace. Mallarmé as Hamlet: A Study of ‘Igitur’ (Yonkers, NY: Alicat
Bookshop Press, 1949).
––. Mallarmé (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1953).
Gengoux, Jacques. Le symbolisme de Mallarmé (Paris: Nizet, 1957).
Goffin, Robert. Mallarmé vivant (Paris: Nizet, 1956).
Gourmont, Remy de. Livre des masques (‘Stéphane Mallarmé’, pp. 57–61).
––. La culture des idées (‘Stéphane Mallarmé et l’idée de decadence’, pp.
107–30) (Paris: Mercure de France, 1900).
––. Promendades littéraires, 5e série (‘L’exégèse de Mallarmé’) (Paris: Mercure
de France, 1913).
Mallarmé, Stéphane. Correspondance, 1862–1871, ed. Henri Mondor with the
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229
assistance of J.P. Richard (Paris: Gallimard, 1959). Contains many of the
letters previously scattered in various periodicals.
––. Dix-neuf lettres de Stéphane Mallarmé à Emile Zola (Paris: J. Bernard,
1929).
Mauron, Charles. Mallarmé l’obscur (Paris: Denoel, 1941).
––. Introduction à la psychoanalyse de Mallarmé (Neuchâtel: A la Baconniere,
1950).
Michaud, Guy. Message poétique du symbolisme (3 vols) (Paris: Nizet, 1947).
––. Mallarmé l’homme et l’oeuvre (Paris: Hatier-Boivin, 1953).
Mondor, Henri. Vie de Mallarmé (2 vols) (Paris: Gallimard, 1941–42).
––. L’amitié de Verlaine et de Mallarmé (Paris: Gallimard, 1940).
––. Histoire d’un faune (Paris: Gallimard, 1948).
––. Eugène Lefébure: sa vie, ses lettres à Mallarmé (Paris: Gallimard, 1951).
Naumann, W. Der Sprachgebrauch Mallarmés (Marburg [Lahn]: H. Bauer,
1936).
––. ‘Mallarmés “Un Coup de Dés” in Romanische Forschungen’ (1938, pp.
123–65).
Nelli, René. ‘Igitur ou l’argument ontologique retourné’, in Les lettres, numéro
special sur Mallarmé (Paris: Librarie les lettres, 1948), pp. 147–65.
Nobiling, F.J. ‘Mallarmés Prose pour des Esseintes’, Zeitschrift für
Neufranzösische Sprache und Literatur, vol. LI, 1928, pp. 419–36.
––. ‘Die erste Fassung der Hérodiade’, Deutsche-Französische Rundschau
(Berlin), vol. II, 1929, pp. 91–103.
––. ‘Die Hérodiade Mallarmés’, ZfNSul, vol. LIII, 1930, pp. 218–42.
Noulet, Emilie. L’oeuvre poétique de Mallarmé (Paris: Droz, 1940).
––. Dix poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé (Geneva: Droz, 1948).
––. ‘Mallarmé y su Hérodiade’, Cuadernos Americanos, vol. XV, no. 3, May
1944, pp. 198–215.
Poggioli, Renato. ‘Pagine da un comment a Mallarmé’, Letteratura, SeptemberDecember, 1954.
Poulet, Georges. La distance intéreure, Vol. II of Etudes sur le temps humain
(Paris: Plon, 1952), pp. 298–355.
Raitt, Alan W. ‘Autour d’une letter de Mallarmé’, Revue des Sciences humaines
(Université de Lille), numéro special: ‘Autour du symbolisme’, I, 1955, pp.
141–56.
Roulet, C. Elucidation du poème de Stéphane Mallarmé ‘Un coup de dés jamais
n’abolira le hasard’ (Neuchâtel: Ides et Calendes, 1943).
–––. Elements de poétique mallarméene d’après le poème ‘Un coup de des . . .’
(Neuchâtel: ed. Du Griffon, 1949).
Royère, Jean. Mallarmé (Paris: Albert Messein).
Soula, Camille. La poésie et la pensée de Stéphane Mallarmé: Un coup de dés
(Paris: H. Champion, 1931).
––. La poésie et la pensée de Stéphane Mallarmé: essai sur le symbole de la
chevelure (Paris: H. Champion, 1926).
––. Gloses sur Mallarmé (Paris: ed. Diderot, 1945).
Symons, Arthur. The Symbolist Movement in Literature (London: Heinemann,
1899).
Thibaudet, Albert. La poésie de Stéphane Mallarmé (Paris: NRF, 1912) (new
edition Paris: Gallimard, 1931).
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Valéry, Paul. Ecrits divers sur Stéphane Mallarmé (Paris: Gallimard, 1950).
Wais, Kurt. Mallarmé: Dichtung, Weisheit, Haltung (second extended edition)
(Munich: Beck, 1952).
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Absolute 14, 18, 21, 56, 65–7, 71, 79,
82–9, 106, 116, 141, 173, 191,
210, 215
Accident 8, 13, 21, 82, 137, 149, 173,
196, 202
Aesthetics 2, 6, 8, 15 17, 19, 35, 42,
56–7, 73, 78, 113, 124, 139, 158,
171, 173, 177, 194, 200, 210
America 1–5, 10, 165
Animals 41, 73, 75, 77, 101, 116, 146,
150
Annihilation 12, 20, 64, 67, 71, 101,
103, 108, 130, 132, 190, 201, 222
Antithesis 41, 48, 51, 70, 99, 126–7,
187, 211
Anxiety 61, 71, 75, 77, 87, 172, 175,
192, 201, 205
Aquinas, Thomas 59
Architecture 74, 161, 177, 185, 210
Autobiography 84, 123, 145, 157, 163,
165, 169
Avant garde 3, 8, 200
Badiou, Alain 3, 8, 13–18, 21–3, 26
Ballet 91, 98–9
Barthes, Roland 7–8, 10
Baudelaire, Charles 4, 40, 45, 59, 65–6,
80, 82, 91, 101, 111–12, 115, 119,
159, 166–7, 177, 179, 187, 191,
228
Benjamin, Walter 6–7
Bersani, Leo 7
Biography 10, 22, 26, 37, 168–9, 213
Blake, William 134, 158, 170, 174
Blanchot, Maurice 4, 7–16, 18, 23,
25–6, 89, 104
Blindness 2, 9, 129, 132, 136–9, 145–6,
161, 169, 198, 212
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Breton, André 194
Brod, Max 6
Burt, Ellen 5
Byzantium 138, 141, 153–4, 162, 178
Camus, Albert 10
Catholicism 39, 98, 115, 120, 141
Chase, Cynthia 3
Chateaubriand, François-René de 8
Childhood 19, 40, 42, 50, 63, 92, 141,
149, 160, 217, 225–6
Christianity 129, 135–6, 138–41, 144,
146, 148, 150–2, 156, 158, 161–2,
164, 205, 214
Cixous, Hélène 7
Cohen, Robert Greer 2, 5, 121n109,
177
Comparative Literature 2, 8, 13, 23, 78,
166, 173, 196, 199, 202
Consciousness 8, 11–13, 15, 20, 33–4,
43, 52, 54, 57–8, 60, 62, 64–77,
79, 81–2, 84–90, 92, 95–6, 98–9,
101–4, 106, 108–10, 113, 115–16,
121, 124–5, 129, 145, 176, 186,
191, 205, 207, 209, 218, 221–2,
224
Cornell 2–3
Criticism 9, 13, 15–16, 18, 83, 126,
158, 170–1, 173
Croce, Bendetto 124, 170
Dante Alighieri 59, 169, 177
Death 4, 7–8, 11–12, 28–9, 40, 42–4,
46, 48–9, 51–8, 62, 64, 69–77, 81,
86–7, 89, 95, 100–2, 104, 106,
111–12, 122, 125, 129, 131, 133,
136, 138, 142–3, 145–8, 150–2,
164, 174, 183, 188, 191–4, 208
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Deconstruction 3–5, 9, 17, 21–3
Derrida, Jacques 3–5, 7–8, 10, 15–20,
23–6
Desire 41, 43, 61, 65, 73, 75, 86–7,
102, 104, 106, 122, 127–8, 137,
148, 155, 172, 205, 212
Dialectic 11–12, 41, 51, 70–1, 83,
85, 99, 101, 115, 125, 183, 187,
202–3, 206, 211, 218–19, 224
Dionysus 148, 151–2, 162–4, 210
Dissertation 1, 3, 7, 20–2, 197
Divinity 17, 153, 222, 224
Donne, John 218
Drama 21, 25, 34–5, 37, 41–2, 44–5,
49, 51–2, 54–7, 60, 62, 76, 78,
81–2, 89, 90, 92, 94–101, 107–9,
118, 120, 124–45, 147–9, 151–3,
155, 157, 158, 160, 161, 163, 165,
181, 185, 189
Economy 6, 21, 23, 26
Education 19, 216, 221, 224–5
Egyptology 78, 140
Eighteenth Century 2, 8, 15
Emblem 1, 4, 16, 48–9, 124, 128–36,
138, 140–6, 150, 153–5, 159,
161–3, 221
Ennui 41, 61–4, 66, 69, 87, 182, 189
Eros 207, 209, 220
Eroticism 20–2, 48–50, 110, 115,
163–4, 191, 216, 218, 223–4
Eschatology 96, 160
Esoterica 59, 132, 136, 144–5, 147,
155, 160, 170, 178, 210
Europe 4, 7–8, 26, 158, 174–5
Fiction 10, 12, 36, 57, 104, 107–9, 137,
160, 216
Figurative language 1, 9, 17, 173, 216,
218
Fin-de-siècle 42, 130
Finitude 57, 71, 74–5, 77, 86–7,
104
Flaubert, Gustave 44–8, 59, 111n31
Foucault, Michel 7
Geometry 72, 209
George, Stefan 1–2, 6–8, 26, 34–5,
166–9, 171–85, 187–219, 221–5
Gestalt 171, 184, 199, 201, 215
Ghosts 147, 149, 193
God 24, 48, 73, 130–6, 138–9, 146–52,
158, 162–4, 176, 198–9, 201–3,
209, 211–13, 215–17, 220–5
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Goethe, Johann Wolfgang de 82, 169,
197–8, 213, 223
Gonne, Maud 157
Hamlet (character) 14, 82, 95–6, 108,
120, 145, 164
Harvard 1–6, 9, 11, 15, 20, 25, 27
Hasard 15, 18, 21, 64–5, 81, 83, 87–90,
98, 105, 107, 186
Hawthorne, Nathaniel 49
Hegel, G.W.F. 8, 11, 26, 34, 36, 55, 59,
76–86, 124, 134–5, 168, 170
Heidegger, Martin 7, 24, 26–7, 59, 79,
117, 121, 160, 212, 214
Hellenic culture 137, 139–41, 148, 151,
164, 220
Hellingrath, Norbert von 196–8, 211,
213–14
History 3, 7, 12–13, 15, 20, 22–4, 26,
28, 34, 44, 52, 61, 63, 65, 66, 68,
69–70, 74, 77, 79–80, 84–5, 87–9,
95–6, 98, 108, 119–21, 124–5,
127, 129, 131, 133, 135, 137, 139,
141–3, 145, 147–9, 151–3, 155–7,
159, 161, 163, 164–5, 172–3,
175–6, 179, 192–3, 196, 199,
203–7
Hölderlin, Friedrich 7, 13–14, 26,
59, 79, 156, 160, 163, 169, 174,
196–214
Homer 137, 139–41, 143, 145, 152,
161
Hopkins, Gerald Manley 139,
160n4
Horror 40, 62, 69, 93, 122
Hyppolite, Jean 76, 78
Ideology 1–3, 7–8, 27, 174–5, 175,
200
Image 1, 4, 14, 16, 21, 28, 33–6, 39–40,
42, 44, 50, 54, 57, 59, 62, 66,
71–2, 76, 78, 80, 83, 91, 101–2,
108, 116–21, 123–4, 128, 130,
132, 134, 137, 139, 143, 146, 148,
153–4, 161, 168, 171, 175, 177–8,
186, 199–201, 203–4, 206, 209,
213, 220
Impersonality 9–12, 37, 98, 122
Irony 94, 99, 120, 125, 154–5, 175,
182, 192
Johns Hopkins (university) 3
Johnson, Barbara 4, 20
Journalism 5
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Kabbalah 168
Kafka, Franz 6
Kant, Immanuel 8, 15, 59, 117n80,
170
Keats, John 6
Knowledge 8, 15, 21, 39, 42, 52–3,
55, 59, 70–7, 84, 87–9, 101, 103,
112–13, 115–16, 119, 121, 125,
134, 136–7, 144, 149, 156–8, 162,
166, 167, 186, 188, 192, 197, 222
Kristeva, Julia 7
Lambrichs, Georges 6
Literature 1–2, 6–11, 13–16, 18–19,
23–4, 26–7, 94, 107, 120, 125,
151, 158, 165, 173–4, 176, 198
Logos 3, 24, 84, 89, 101, 216, 221
Love 23, 45, 48, 50, 57, 111, 126–7,
132–3, 138, 141–2, 145, 147, 150,
160–1, 164, 178, 199, 201, 212
Lyric 16, 90, 94–5, 98, 108, 124–8,
130, 159, 160, 177
Mallarmé, Stéphane (poems by)
Divagations 38, 84, 90–1, 94, 100,
107, 159
‘Hérodiade’ 7, 11, 15–16, 21, 26,
36–8, 43–59, 67, 76, 87, 91–4,
100–2, 104–5, 112–13, 115,
118, 121, 159, 177, 216
‘Igitur’ 7, 9, 11, 15–16, 22, 26, 36–8,
40, 43–4, 54, 58–66, 69–71,
73–9, 81–4, 86–90, 92, 94–6,
100–2, 104, 108, 111, 113–15,
117–19, 121–3, 126, 167, 177,
187, 192
‘L’après-midi d’un faune’ 37, 44, 94,
111, 113–14, 158, 177, 185, 190
‘Las de l’amer repos…’ 42–3, 52,
54–5, 94, 111
‘Toast funèbre’ 37, 58, 71, 90, 193
‘Un coup de dés’ 7, 11, 13–15, 17–19,
21, 26, 36–8, 44–5, 47, 54,
60, 83–4, 86, 89, 90–1, 100–7,
109–10, 119–23, 125, 138, 158,
167, 185, 192
‘Une dentelle s’abolit’ 16, 20–2, 25,
58, 113, 118–19
Materialism 15–16, 172, 194, 200
Mediation 12, 60, 65, 67, 77, 85, 97,
99, 126
Memory 11, 41, 43, 50, 61–3, 67, 71,
98, 115, 206, 215–17, 224–5
Metaphor 14, 16, 26, 104, 218, 222
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Metaphysics 3–4, 14, 16, 24, 26, 34,
81, 86, 89, 104, 116–17, 172, 191,
200, 202, 210, 218, 222
Miller, J. Hillis 4
Model 18–20, 22–3, 25–7, 45, 59, 177
Modernism 8–9
Modernity 8–9, 11, 14, 95, 97–8, 120,
137, 140, 149, 153–4, 156, 174–6,
203
Montaigne, Michel de 142, 178
Music 44, 93–4, 100, 107–8, 120, 123,
133, 163, 173–4, 196
National Socialism 7
Nationalism 26, 83, 148, 153–6, 162,
168, 170
Negation 11–12, 16, 51, 58, 62, 70,
74, 76–7, 82, 85–90, 98–9, 116,
134–5, 206, 217
Nerval, Gérard de 151
New Criticism 1–2, 7, 13, 15, 23
Nietzsche, Friedrich 27, 149, 152,
162–3, 169–70, 204, 209, 221
Nostalgia 60, 75, 126, 155
Oedipus 125, 128–9, 137–8, 145,
148–50
Onomatopoeia 92
Pantheism 38, 149, 151, 163
Pathos 133–4, 144, 212, 216
Plato 3, 17–18, 20–1, 23–5, 48, 122,
149, 162, 169, 170, 204
Phenomenology 36, 55, 76–80, 84, 116,
159
Philosophy 1–3, 7, 9–18, 20, 23–4,
26–7, 34, 36, 59, 77–82, 84–6, 89,
99, 104, 116–19, 121, 128, 142,
168, 170, 173, 199
Poetics 8–11, 13, 15–16, 20–2, 26–7,
33–4, 36, 38–40, 42–4, 48–9,
51–4, 56–8, 65–9, 71, 76, 83–94,
96–100, 104, 107–13, 119, 120–1,
125–6, 132, 134, 139–40, 143,
151, 154, 156–7, 160, 166, 168–9,
171–3, 175–6, 181–4, 186–90,
193–9, 205–7, 209–12, 218,
220–1, 225–6
Polyphony 172, 207
Ponge, Francis 7
Post-Structuralism 9–10, 23
Pound, Ezra 170
Prayer 43, 130, 161
Pre-Raphaelites 170, 200
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Prose poems 21, 37–8, 84, 90–2, 94–5,
131, 134, 157, 159, 167, 169, 177,
180, 181, 186, 190
Psychoanalysis 51
Rancière, Jacques 3, 8, 13, 15–18, 21,
23, 26
Random 19, 21, 65, 135
Reading 2–4, 7, 8–26, 60, 64, 78, 81,
83, 91, 104, 114, 120–3, 140–1,
144, 147–8, 151, 154–5, 166,
170–1, 177, 200, 211, 214
Religion 16, 35, 39, 43, 116, 129, 139,
140, 161, 177, 194, 199, 207
Representation 9, 18–19, 24, 95, 118,
129, 157
Rhetoric 1, 3–4, 9, 38, 120, 126–8, 144,
160, 227
Rhythm 58, 104, 126
Rilke, Rainer Maria 7, 35, 160, 175,
179, 182–3, 189, 197
Rimbaud, Arthur 38, 91, 158, 179
Romance 18, 22, 153
Romanticism 1–2, 4, 8–9, 12, 15, 17,
20–2, 26, 33–4, 38, 42, 44, 79–80,
124, 126, 144, 148–9, 153, 163,
174
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 6–8, 14,
38
Russell, Bertrand 124, 170
Sacrifice 47, 50, 52–3, 84, 125, 164,
176, 192
Sartre, Jean-Paul 7, 10, 17, 23,
120n104
Schiller, Friedrich 15, 59, 163
Science 74, 79, 81, 85, 88, 132
Sexuality 21, 51, 56, 143, 224
Shakespeare, William 137–8, 152, 161,
164
Shelley, Percy Bysshe 151, 170, 174
Sollers, Phillipe 5, 7
Sophocles 125, 164, 204
Spirit 46, 39, 55–8, 62, 66, 70, 73–80,
84–6, 88–9, 94–6, 100–1, 104,
106, 108, 116, 124, 128–9, 137,
146, 149, 154, 158–9, 163–4, 182,
189, 192, 217–20
Spivak, Gayatri 3
Style 8–9, 34, 44–5, 52, 56, 78, 83,
93–4, 107, 113, 124, 130, 134–5,
140, 148, 154, 185
Subjectivity 55, 210
Sublime 39, 96, 151, 176
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Sydney, Philip 59
Syntax 25, 38, 92–3, 100, 105, 113,
166, 172, 185
Synthesis 34, 48, 91, 107, 123, 138, 141
173, 199, 224
Temporality 11–12, 40, 60, 64, 66–7,
70, 77, 84, 87–8, 98, 104–5, 126,
146, 152, 204, 206
Terada, Rei 20–3
Theatre 43, 90, 91, 94–100, 120, 159
Thematics 14–16, 33–4, 48, 42–4,
47–8, 50, 76–7, 83, 86, 90, 92,
100, 110, 115, 117–18, 120,
124, 131, 133–5, 139–41, 143–4,
147–8, 151, 153, 155, 160, 168,
173, 175–6, 183, 189, 191, 196,
201–5, 207, 216, 225
Tel Quel 4, 7
Tragedy 42, 51–2, 54, 68, 79, 92, 95,
97–8, 112, 125, 129, 133, 142,
144, 146, 148–50, 152–3, 161,
165, 183, 189, 201–3, 218
Truth 10, 14, 21, 23–4, 55–7, 65–71,
74, 76, 79, 82–4, 86, 92, 97, 99,
101, 109, 116, 123, 125, 128–9,
144, 148, 150, 158, 169
Valéry, Paul 7, 16, 35, 112n39, 168
Verlaine, Paul 36, 93, 120n95, 156–9,
165, 179, 182
Wahl, Jean 79, 116n73
Warminski, Andrzej 3, 5
Waters, Lindsay 1, 20, 28n14
Weber, Samuel 3
Wordsworth, William 13, 160, 226
Writing 20, 22, 24, 26–9, 37, 42, 54,
57, 78, 83, 86, 122, 124, 153, 180,
192, 198, 200
Yeats W.B. (works by)
‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’ 139,
144–8
‘A Full Moon in March’ 150
‘Among School Children’ 145
A Vision 134–8, 140, 145–6
Calvary 129, 135–6
‘Easter 1916’ 155–6
‘Her Vision in the Woods’ 22, 128,
144
In the Seven Woods 132
‘Lapis Lazuli’ 152, 164n41
On Baile’s Strand 132, 136, 147
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‘Meditations in the Time of Civil
War’ 140, 142, 145–6, 155
Purgatory 142, 146–7, 162n30
‘Sailing to Byzantium’ 154, 178
‘The Double Vision of Michael
Robartes’ 129–30, 137–8
‘The Empty Cup’ 143
‘The Everlasting Voices’ 130
‘The Fisherman’ 154–6
The Herne’s Egg 145
‘The Hosting of the Sidhe’ 130,
174
‘The Indian to his Love’ 126
‘The Maid Quiet’ 130–1
The Resurrection 148–9
‘The Secret Rose’ 130–1, 157, 189
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The Shadowy Waters 132, 157, 159,
160, 165
The Speckled Bird 157
‘The Statues’ 152, 154, 162n31,
164n41
‘The Tower 148
‘The Twisting of the Rope and
Hanrahan the Red’ 130
‘The Unicorn from the Stars 133–4,
160, 180
The Wanderings of Oisin 153, 162
‘The Wind Among the Reeds’
129–33, 136, 147, 157, 160
‘Under Ben Bulben’ 142
Vacillation’ 139–41, 143–5, 163
‘Who drives Fergus?’ 126–8
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