Mallarm

Also available from Continuum:

After Finitude, Quentin Meillassoux

Art and Fear, Paul Virilio
Being and Event, Alain Badiou
Chronicles of Consensual Times, Jacques Rancire
Conditions, Alain Badiou
Dissensus, Jacques Rancire
Infinite Thought, Alain Badiou
Logics of Worlds, Alain Badiou
Negative Horizon, Paul Virilio
Politics of Aesthetics, Jacques Rancire
Seeing the Invisible, Michel Henry
The Five Senses, Michel Serres
Theoretical Writings, Alain Badiou
Theory of the Subject, Alain Badiou
Time for Revolution, Antonio Negri

Forthcoming:

Althussers Lesson, Jacques Rancire

Mallarm
The Politics of the Siren

Jacques Rancire

Translated by Steven Corcoran

Continuum International Publishing Group
The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane
11 York Road Suite 704
London SE1 7NX New York, NY 10038

Originally published in French as Mallarm: La politique de la sirne Hachette Littratures,

1996

This English translation Continuum, 2011

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or
any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the
publishers.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-4411-4182-8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rancire, Jacques.
[Mallarm. English]
Mallarm : the politics of the siren / Jacques Rancire ; translated by Steven Corcoran.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-8264-3840-9
1. Mallarm, Stphane, 18421898--Criticism and interpretation. I. Corcoran, Steven.
II. Title.

PQ2344.Z5R3413 2011
841.8--dc22
2011002463

Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

 Table of contents

Notes on the translation ix

Foreword  xiii

The foam of the poem 1

The white concern4

The poetics of mystery 9

The terms of mystery10
Scene of the dream13
From nothingness to the nothing16
The method of fiction21
The fan of the poem23

The hymn of spiritual hearts 27

The religion of the century27
Two theses on divinity29
The poet and the worker31
Musical religion35
The god Wagner: poem, music and politics38

The duty of the book 43

The poem as thought: a secular history45
Music, dance, poem: the circle of mimesis48
The authentic page54

v
 mallarm

Appendix: selected texts 61

Notes87
Index93

vi
This book is supported by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as part of the
Burgess programme run by the Cultural Department of the French Embassy in
London.

vii
 Notes on the translation

Mallarms poetic enterprise, Rancire claims, must be understood as

something that stands or falls insofar as its light as well as its night
comes from itself. This singularity, then, if it stands, cannot reside in the
particular philosophical notions it might seek to convey, as if, at bottom,
his poetry was no more than an aestheticized philosophy. And yet, it does,
to be sure, entertain a singular relationship to philosophy (which is, as
Mallarm says, included and latent in it). This relationship, which implies
a certain discussion between philosophy and poetry, is then redoubled in
a specific way by Rancires treatment of the Mallarman oeuvre. Taking
poetry as a form of thought on a par with philosophy, Rancire brings
a set of operations to bear on Mallarms texts so as to enact a leveling
out of philosophy and poetry. In this way philosophy could be described
as the creation of a language that works to translate between forms of
discourse without seeking to institute a hierarchy of one over the other;
it would form an interval between philosophy (traditionally understood)
and poetry.
In so doing, Rancire seeks to uncover a Mallarm that is delivered of
the metaphysical mystifications and banalizing psychologizations, to say
nothing of the uncomprehending condemnations that plague interpreta-
tions of his work, to give us a more straightforward reading of his specific
difficulty. But he makes sure not to adopt any of the various positions of
philosophical mastery that would subjugate the text to a meaning; and
while setting Mallarms work in its socio-political context, and showing
us the specific links that the Mallarman poetic undertaking forged
between poetry, thought and the politico-historical moment, care is taken
ix
 mallarm

to avoid falling into the trap of historicism. Instead, Rancire shows, in a

way that is fully consistent with Mallarman aesthetics, that an encounter
between poetry and philosophy can emerge only through a fictional
reconstruction, one in which discourses and genres are set free from the
hierarchical moorings which overdetermine their conclusions.
Uniquely situated as an interval between discourses, this book provides
a scholarly reactivation of the historical sediments of the times, but insists
on the irreducibility of the poetic dispositif. It constitutes a philosophical
intervention into the discourse on Mallarm in particular, and poetry in
general, but one that deconstructs the pretences of philosophy and the
figures of the poet it must necessarily construct for itself. It sheds light
on Mallarms specific difficulty, but also furthers Rancires own ideas
about the politics of the poem or the politics of aesthetics.
This poetico-philosophical work, in its fictional revelation of the light
and the night of Mallarman aesthetics and poetry, thus presents singular
challenges for the translator to find a similar light and night in English.
Indeed, even on its own, Mallarms poetic ambitions, exacting syntax
and novel linguistic relationships beset any translation of this work
with myriad intricacies which push beyond the resources of the English
language. There exists no adequately resonant English language into
which to translate this discursive hybrid of the nineteenth-century poet
and the twentieth-century philosopher.
Concerning Mallarm in English, I have learnt much from the many
admirable translations of his work, and have tried to use their multiplicity
as productively as possible, notably insofar as they variously draw out
the key linguistic relationships and syntax that are central to Rancires
argument. And of course I have not omitted to include the original French
for readers who wish to explore a little further. (As an aside, one could
think that it would be exceptionally fruitful one day to have a compre-
hensive retranslation of these texts, done in the wake of Rancires
workas the changing views of Mallarm scholarship must necessarily
have an influence upon our translations).
For the English translations of Mallarms poems, I have mostly had
recourse to two books: Stphane Mallarm: Collected Poems and other verse,
translated by E.H. and A.M. Blackmore, and with an introduction by
Elizabeth McCombie, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006; and Stphane
Mallarm: Collected Poems, translated and with a commentary by Henry
Weinfield, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. The English
translation of his prose is taken from Stphane Mallarm: Divagations,
x
 Notes on the translation

translated by Barbara Johnson, Cambridge: Harvard University Press,

2007; and his correspondence from: Selected Letters of Stphane Mallarm,
edited and translated by Rosemary Lloyd, Chicago and London: University
of Chicago Press, 1988. Finally, for Mallarms writings in La Dernire
Mode, guidance was taken from Mallarm on Fashion, translated with a
commentary by P.N. Furbank and A.M. Cain, Oxford: Berg, 2004.
My own efforts at understanding Mallarms texts would have been
considerably less precise (and certainly much less enjoyable) without
having had the privilege of Aurlie Maurins literary verve and abiding
friendship. Lastly, my warm thanks go to Jacques Rancire for his friendly
support and encouragement.

xi
 Foreword

Some names project a shadow that devours them. This is true of the
name poet, buried under clouds of reverie, feathers of celestial birds and
storms of passion. And some poets names seem to thicken this darkness
even further. The name Mallarm is obstinately associated with a twofold
image: that of a poetry that is carried to the quintessence of something
akin to the silence of infinite spaces; and that of an obscurity close to the
impenetrable night. Mallarm symbolizes the poet of obscurity par excel-
lence. His poems, and even his prose pieces, have a tight-knit network
whose mesh counters the eye habituated to reading a line ahead trying
to grasp the meaning of the following sentence. Matching the obscurity
of the text is the figure of poet, insomniac and sterile, grappling with the
virgin sheet of paper and the nothingness encountered in hollowing out
verse. From the letters that Mallarm wrote as a young man, in which
he confessed his mad ambition and radical deadlock, to his last will as a
poet, in which he recommended burning the vain pile of notes destined
for the grand oeuvre of the Book, it is easy to trace a line straight to some
confrontation with the night of the absolute, of which his posthumously
published booklet of obscure poems is said to reveal the debris.
The following pages would like to help shed light on this night, to extricate
both the poets words from the shadow cast, and Mallarms specific diffi-
culty from obscurity. In order to grasp this difficulty, it has to be separated
from notions that travesty it, and, first of all, from that of secret. The idea of
secret presupposes that the truth is hidden somewhere beneath the surface
apprehended by the eye and the mind. The revelation of that truth is then
performed according to two inverse and complementary logics: discovering
xiii
 mallarm

the extraordinary beneath the ordinary or the ordinary beneath the

extraordinary, which is to say, the spiritual message dissembled by the
visible intention of images or, conversely, the intimate secret of a sexed
body hidden beneath the pomp of thoughts and words. By these means,
a double key to Mallarm is yielded. The first key attributes his oeuvres
difficulty to the hermetic intention to say and hide simultaneously the
secrets of some gnosis or Cabbala, in keeping with the spirit of times that
were avid for great initiatory secrets. The advantage of the hermetic expla-
nation is to evade all proof. Gnosis, by definition, conceals from the curious
the paths by which it wends its way. So, if a body of doctrine is nowhere
to be found, interpreters will still always find it possible to invoke the
testimony bequeathed from his father of the story of long and mysterious
nocturnal conversations with the poet of the night.1 The converse expla-
nation has the symmetrical advantage or drawback: it is not wanting in
material. And tienne Mallarm, referred to as Stphane, was indeed a
rather anxious man, an insomniac who was born into a complicated family
situation and had his problems with women. He also liked to be facetious
and certainly took delight in the ambiguity of those of his poems in which
the reader, as he pleases, can read either a metaphysical allegory or the
story of an extra-conjugal escapade.2 Still, millions of people have had such
problems and not left behind any verse, or not the same as Mallarms.
What remains, above all, is the fundamental rule of Mallarman poetry:
that the poem is only of worth on condition that its light as well as its night
comes from itself. Doubtless it was not by chance that Mallarm set out this
rule just above two deliberately ambiguous poems.

Une dentelle sabolit Lace sweeps itself aside

Dans le doute du Jeu suprme In the doubt of the ultimate Game
nentrouvrir comme un blasphme Only to expose profanely
Quabsence ternelle de lit. Eternal absence of bed. 3

The poetic game or blasphemy, the way in which the verses lace
manifests and subtracts its object, denies all secrets, sublime or naughty.
We are told this in the poems continuation: from the belly of the mandolin
alone might one filial have been born. The poem and its difficulty
emerge from the poetic arrangement and from it alone. Setting within
the same lines the virtuality of several more or less trivial or allegorical
readings is the act of a poetics that the point is to understand. Mallarm is
not a hermetic author; he is a difficult author. A difficult author is one the
xiv
 Foreword

wording of whose thought is done such that it breaks with the ordinary
circle of the banal and the hidden, a circle that constitutes what Mallarm
calls universal reporting. In this sense, all interesting authors are difficult,
in accordance with different modalities.
Accessing Mallarms difficulty presupposes that you traverse yet another
way of thinking through his night. Beyond the banality of the secret, this
other way is identified with a radical experience of language and thought.
It was Maurice Blanchot who ennobled this interpretation, wherein the
writer becomes the hero of a spiritual adventure.4 In the night of writing,
the intention of the work reaches the point at which it is experienced
as identical to its contrary, the pure passivity of language. Did Mallarm
not record, in his tale of Igitur, the equivalence of the two experiences of
writing and of suicide? The paradox of suicide is to want one death and to
meet with another: the indefinite anonymous death, without relation to
anyone, which abolishes all power and all will, and, for starters, even that
of being done with. The authenticity of writing is thus to take account
of the parallel experience of an activity of language which is only possible
from the very point where it encounters pure passivity, of a language
which no longer says anything but is content to be. Mallarm is held to be
a privileged witness of this experience of writing, to this meaningless game
which aims to turn impotence into a power, the essential passivity which
dissolves every power in advance. Privileged and deceptive simultaneously,
he seeks to exit from the night to turn his tale of suicide and night into the
homeopathic remedy to cure the impotence to write.
However, conceiving the poems night in this way is in fact to imply,
in Mallarm, the existence of a singular dilemma between the testimony
of veridical impotence and the deceptiveness of writing that is unfaithful
to its nocturnal source. This, again, turns the writer into a witness and
reduces the difficulty of his writing to the authenticity of an experience of
impotence and shadows. Mallarm, for his part, made a clear separation
between writing and testimony. He wrote the tale of Igitur precisely in
order to cure himself and to be able to become a pure and simple
writer of literature again.5 Perhaps saying that he wrote it goes too far,
since it was left unfinished and none of it was ever proposed for publi-
cation. It is time to stop reading Mallarm through the testimonies of
his dreams and failures over the course of twenty-five years, or through
the shattered project of the Book. The time has come to free him from
that from which he strove to free himself. Mallarm is not the silent and
nocturnal thinker of the poem that is too pure ever to be written. He is
xv
 mallarm

not the artist living in the aesthetes ivory tower, short of rare essences
and of unheard-of words. His friend Huysmans can himself take pleasure
in the poor trinketry with which he decorates the interior of his hero, Des
Esseintes. His pages as an esthete are rather drab by comparison with the
dazzling pages that Mallarm devoted to describing objects of furniture,
dresses or frivolous festivals for the female readers of La Dernire Mode.
To the transcription of the great drama of the absolute, Mallarm visibly
preferred the attentive gaze grasping the splendour of a decorative object,
of a rustling robe or a fairground attraction. He enjoyed the dietary task
of reporting on World Expositions as he also did the spectacle of panto-
mimes and fireworks, or the dream of revamping popular melodrama.
He was a reader of Zola, in turn dazzled by the power of the novelist a
resolute opponent of naturalist poetry and admiring of his civic courage
in defending Dreyfus. He was the contemporary of a Republic which was
celebrating its centenary and seeking forms of civic worship to replace
the pomp of religions and kings. He heard and sought to understand the
noise of anarchist bombs. He was an enthusiastic listener of the Lamoreux
and Colonne concerts, designed, among other things, to broaden the
education of the masses and to promote musicality among the people;
and he was an attentive witness of the Wagnerian revolution and the
way that it linked an idea of community to an idea of music and theatre.
Concerning the sense of earthly association, and of the relations
forged in his time between politics, the economy, art and religion,
Mallarm was thus a witness and analyst whose lucidity found scarcely
an equal among the professionals of thought. If Mallarms writing is
difficult, it is because it obeys a demanding poetics, one which responds
to an acute awareness of the complexity of a historical moment and the
way in which, in this moment, the crisis of verse was linked to a crisis
of the ideal and of the social. By no means did he write absent-mindedly
the following: namely, that the social relationship and its momentary
measure, tightened or lengthened, in view of governing, was a fiction,
belonging to the domain of Letters.6 If he condensed a proposition into
a word or, conversely, multiplied the clauses attaching its connections to
an idea and its diverse analogies to an image, it is because the poem, too,
had to tighten up or lengthen in order to play, in the complexity of the
time, the role that fell to it. On this basis, it is possible to understand the
displacements, abbreviations and detours that Mallarm believed were
necessary to work into the common use of language possible, in short,
to enter into the simple difficulty of his oeuvre.
xvi
 The foam of the poem

In what do the alleged unintelligibility and the effective intelligence of the

Mallarman poem consist? Lets start with a poem specifically accused of
obscurity. In 1897, Tolstoy, in What is Art?, cites the following sonnet as an
example of incomprehensible, decadent poetry:

A la nue accablante tu Hushed to the crushing cloud

Basse de basalte et de laves Basalt and lava its form
A mme les chos esclaves Even to echoes subdued
Par une trompe sans vertu By an ineffectual horn

Quel spulcral naufrage (tu What shipwreck sepulchral has bowed

Le sait, cume, mais y baves) (You know this, foam, but slobber on)
Suprme une entre les paves The mast supreme in a crowd
Abolit le mt dvtu Of flotsam and jetsam though torn

Ou cela que furibond faute Or will that which in fury defaulted

De quelque perdition haute From some perdition exalted
Tout labme vain ploy The vain abyss outspread

Dans le si blanc cheveu qui trane Have stingily drowned in the swirl
Avarement aura noy Of a white hairs trailing thread
Le flanc enfant dune sirne. The flank of a young siren girl.7

What are we to make of these fourteen octosyllables, which unfold in

a single phrase devoid of any punctuation apart from that which, in the
parenthesis, singles out a sole word: cume (foam)? From which angle are

1
 mallarm

we to take this fugitive object, not to mention the siren that brings it off
and seems to initial it? Against an immediate understanding of the lines
spread out before the gaze, Mallarm in fact placed a singular rampart: not
the great wall of hermetic words, but, on the contrary, the supple line of
the phrase which slips from grasp. Music and Letters states the law of this
mobile line, which links together the figures appearing, suddenly, at the
intersections of the poem: The total arabesque, which ties them together,
has dizzying leaps into known fears.8 The arabesque works to dispel the
illusion that the poem is about describing to enable the recognition of a
person or a story, an object or a feeling. It distinguishes the arrangement of
its lines from that characterizing the newspaper: the open page receiving
a cast of ink, meant to be a strict reporting of facts such as they can be
observed by all and communicated to others in the way that a coin with
constant value could be passed into their hands. The arabesque subtracts
the poem from this circulation, but on a strict condition. The mystery that
it sets up is not some vagueness into which all meaning would dissolve.
The Mallarman line is not vague; the poem is neither the translation
of an indefinable state of mind nor a polysemic game with language.
The arabesque has its own number and logic. Hypothesis is the name of
that which replaces narrative in Mallarm. He provided the following
indication to the reader of A Dice Throw, of which our sonnet is like a
summary and to which the indication thus applies a fortiori: Everything
happens, by shortcut, through hypothesis.9 Reading the poem reconsti-
tutes not history, but the virtuality of history, or the choice between the
hypotheses it proposes to us.
What is this play of hypotheses? The rarefaction of poetic language,
reduced to its essential rhythm, gives us not the keys to the enigma,
but the syntactical articulations of the problem. The poems single phrase
turns, in effect, on a double syntactical pivot: the unique commas that
isolate the word cume (foam) and the or else, which weighs the two
terms of an alternative against one another. A pivot of the preserved
intelligibility of the poem, the foam alone knows what it conceals. First
hypothesis: it is the witness of a major drama, the trace of a sepulchral
shipwreck which swallowed up a ship to its last its supreme one bit of
wreckage, the mast. Or else second hypothesis its agitation attests only
to the frolics of a fictional sea being, a siren. But this opposition between
great drama and lightweight pantomime is doubled by another alternative
as to the relationship between the event and its effect in its site. First
hypothesis: the great drama went unnoticed; it remained silent (tu), its
2
 The foam of the poem

call its trumpet lacked the virtue to disturb the indifference of the site
in which it occurred: a site of dark clouds like basalt and enslaved echoes,
an environment naturally improper to the visibility and the hearing of
the drama. Second hypothesis: the great spectacular drama (the high
perdition) is, on the contrary, that which the surrounding world (vain
chasm of billows) awaited but was denied. As in many tales, the mythical
being here, the siren leaves behind, for the amateur of adventures,
only an ironic trace of its ephemeral and deceptive appearing: a white
piece of fairy hair, which we can therefore identify with the white line of
the foam.
The alternative can be clarified in this manner. But what light does this
shed? Manifestly, the poem does not describe the uncertain impressions
of some observer, his telescope aimed at the tumult of waves. Mallarm
took no particular interest in scenes and stories of the sea. Naturally, he
grew up in admiration of the Victor Hugo of Oceano Nox and the Vigny of
The Bottle at Sea, and if this is forgotten, Hushed to the crushing cloud, and
less still A Dice Throw, can scarcely be understood. He was most assuredly
also a fervent disciple of Baudelaire, the poet of Voyage and The Beacons.
And he was the contemporary of Hrdia, that champion of gold seekers,
bent over the front of white caravels. The constellation that the dice throw
caused to sparkle on the vacant and superior surface is also reminiscent
of the new stars that these navigators would see rise from the Oceans
depths. Mallarm did what poets usually do at least those who know
what to do with the old moons of inspiration: he reworked the poems
of his elders in his own way. However, the very opposition between the
games of the siren and the sepulchral shipwreck tells us that he was of
another era, and his art another cosmology, than theirs. He was no longer
contemporary with painters of battles and shipwrecks. He was a contem-
porary of Monet and Renoir, their very subject: a boater for whom the
beating of the paddle on the river surface and the light flickering in the
trace of the oar replaces the glory of the sun on the violet sea and the
great dramas of confrontation between intrepid man and raging nature.
He said as much in an illustrious text: Nature has taken place, it cant
be added to.10 And to the far too few subscribers of La Dernire Mode,
he gave the proof: the modern image of natures insufficiency for us is
attested by the very way in which vacationers cross it, full steam ahead,
to go, at the end of the line, and simply sit down in front of the ocean
and look what there is beyond our abode, that is to say, the infinite and
nothing.11 The time of nature and its poets is finished. And the dandies
3
 mallarm

who, from the master Baudelaire to the friend Huysmans, cultivate in its
place the flowers of anti-nature, remain halfway. Beyond nature there are
railways. At the end of railways is that which succeeds nature as object of
thought and writing, the line by which the sea becomes disjoint, properly
speaking, from nature12: a simple line of horizon, which is the infinite and
nothing, the infinite or nothing. The foam of the poem speaks to us of this
very same: the thin line of junction and disjunction between the infinite
and nothing.

The white concern

So that we can hear this, Mallarm gave us another clue. The book of
verse, as he understood it, has to eliminate chance and omit the author. It
is not an album gathering the secrets and impressions of the poet. Instead,
it has an architecture in which the motifs, equilibrated at a distance, must
balance each other out, and combine to bring about the total rhythm:
Any subject is fated to imply, among the fragments brought together, a
strange certainty about its appropriate place in the volume.13 Accordingly,
in the meticulously prepared edition of his Posies, Mallarm placed our
poem second last, just before that which declares the book closed again, at
the price of a pun (My old tomes closed again upon the name Paphos).
There is thus every chance that our poem is an initial curtain call which
finds its match in the initial curtain raiser: a similarly octosyllabic sonnet,
much more immediately intelligible, which tells of another story of foam,
navigation and sirens, and bears the title Salut (Toast):

Rien, cette cume, vierge vers Nothing, this foam, virgin verse
A ne dsigner que la coupe Only to designate the cup:
Telle loin se noie une troupe Thus, far off, drowns a siren troop
De sirnes mainte lenvers. Many, upended, are immersed.

Nous naviguons, mes divers We navigate, O my diverse

Amis, moi dj sur la poupe Friends, myself already on the poop,
Vous lavant fastueux qui coupe You the sumptuous prow to cut
Le flot de foudres et dhivers ; Through winter wave and lightning burst;

Une ivresse belle mengage A lovely drunkenness enlists

Sans craindre mme son tangage Me to raise, though the vessel lists
De porter debout ce salut This toast on high and without fear

4
 The foam of the poem

Solitude, rcif, toile Solitude, rocky shoal, bright star

A nimporte ce qui valut To whatsoever may be worth
Le blanc souci de notre toile. Our sheets white care in setting forth.14

Nothing here leads to puzzlement. The poem, initially called Toast,

was first composed for a banquet of the Revue indpendante. As such,
there is a tendency to classify it as one of the Occasional verses and
carefully separate it from the grand oeuvre. But Mallarm considered
that he should place it first in his Posies, thus unafraid of exposing, on
the works frontispiece, the indiscreet padding of those diverse friends
[divers amis] who rhyme, for whatever its worth, with winter wave
and lightning burst [dhivers]. Without fuss, the poet raises his glass to
the adventure of the journal gathering together symbolist and decadent
poets. To the point, he compares their enterprise to the course of a ship
leading new Argonauts to their treasure, the Golden Fleece or hair of a
siren. In the metaphor of a single white sail, he condenses three things:
the page of writing, the surface of a tableau and a boats sail. And, with
this amicable toast of circumstance, he supplies the opening of the book
which gathers together poems written over a thirty-year period, raising
the same toast to whatsoever may be worth: an apparently nonchalant
whatsoever, but one that is actually perfectly determined, since it sums
up the solitary crossing which turns from the ordinary commerce of
words, the shipwrecking reef, and the star that the shipwreck survivor
manages to inscribe on the vacant and superior surface.
In a sense, then, this Toast makes explicit the stake of the obscure affair
of clouds, sepulchral shipwreck and childs flank that we are concerned
with. At the end of the book, the final question responds to the initial
affirmation. The ship that has perhaps been engulfed is the one whose
sumptuous prow was launched across winter wave and lightning burst.
The siren that has perhaps disappeared, alone in the vain chasm, is
sister with the siren troop that was toasted at the beginning. At stake,
here as there, is the poetic act. That is, the poetic act and its chances of
accomplishment in the present environment, comprising winter wave
and lightning burst, low cloud of basalt and lava, enslaved echoes, vain
chasm. All these metaphors crop up often in Mallarm and designate the
space and time in which the restricted action of the poem is carried out:
the winter or tunnel of an era of transition, or interregnum, when the
poet is unable to make himself heard to a crowd still to come; the low
cloud or basaltic veil of the banal15 by which the commonplace of the
5
 mallarm

newspaper, or the spectacle, is filled with mediocre elements, drawn

from an economic notion of the public; and the vain chasm or abyss of
vain hunger which hollows out this same public, a public that is obscurely
aware of the latent and avid greatness of whatever can nurture, be it with
substitutes, the opening of the maw of a Chimera that is misrecognized
and carefully frustrated by the current social system.16
We can therefore reformulate the initial hypotheses in terms of the
books balance sheet. First hypothesis: perhaps the overproud poetic ship
in pursuit of golden sound, or of its chimerical star, foundered on the reef
of its own ambition, on the sea of indifference of the times, with its public,
a great shipwreck that the servile echoes of the gazettes ignored. Second
hypothesis: perhaps the part played out differently. The vain chasm of
the times and the public was by no means indifferent to the greatness of
high perditions. Frustrated by the mediocrities of the social arrangement,
it yearned for these perditions of the golden chimera the chimera of a
reign still to come that would take over from the simple monetary reign
of gold used for the exchanging of commodities. It devoured these perdi-
tions wherever it found them: refined individuals in attendance at the
spectacle of the twilight of the gods as played in the Wagnerian temple;
the bourgeois, at Ponsards ancient-style tragedies; and the plebs attending
the commonness of the melodrama. The fury for greatness of the jealous
hurricane17 or famished riot18 can only work to bury the frail siren of the
new poem inside its voracious stomach. But there are two opposite ways
to understand this burying. It can consist in the monsters assimilating and
travestying the new poem, for it is out to adorn itself even with that which
refuses it. Conversely, it can consist in the evasion by which the siren of
the new poem dissimulates itself in the very stomach of the monster. The
Mallarman poem is like the Platonic living logos. It matters to it to choose
those to whom it should or should not speak. It and by no means the
ocean is avaricious, out to reserve a future wealth for all. There are two
reasons why the siren was not drowned in the abyss, each of which is
sufficient: first, because sirens, in contrast to boats, do not drown in water.
On the contrary, they dive down in its depths to escape danger. Second,
and more radically, because sirens do not exist, except in the writings of
poets. In Homer, they were fictional beings, deceptive powers whose songs
would draw navigators into the abyss if they did not avail themselves
of means to avoid hearing them. Mallarm transforms them into the
emblems of the poem as such, powers of a song which can simultaneously
make itself heard and transform itself into silence. The siren is no longer
6
 The foam of the poem

a deceptive being of fiction; it is the act, the suspension itself of fiction.

It is the transformation of the narrative into a vanishing hypothesis. And
it is this transformation which scans the poem. The play of hypotheses is
also an operation of substitution. The mast stripped bare is at once that
to which Ulysses had himself tied in order to resist the siren song and that
to which he clung in the storm to reach the shore of the Phaeacians.
The poem escapes from the abyss awaiting it because it has modified
the mode of fiction itself, has substituted for the great Odyssean epic
the song of a vanishing siren. So what the siren metaphorizes, what the
poem carries out, is very specifically the event and calculated risk of the
poem in times and a mental milieu which are not yet ready to welcome
it. The argument of this poem is very strictly prescribed by the question
concluding Restricted Action. To the friend who wants to act, the poet
asks whether it would not be better, rather than betting on, at the very
least, an incomplete context around you, to risk certain conclusions of
extreme art [...] to play them, even through a triumphal reversal, with
the tacit injunction that nothing, palpitating in the unconscious flank
of the hour, shown clear and evident to the pages, will find the hour
ready.19 The movement of our sonnet thus sums up the adventure of
the new poem, its internal transformation, but also its play in the site in
which it is produced. In short, our sonnet is something like a fable with
a moral, one which transposes the old fable of the overproud, storm-
vanquished willow and the frail reed with the art to escape the storms
fury.

7
 The poetics of mystery

Shall we say, then, that the crushing cloud of the involuted arabesque
succeeds the rather dull light of the ordinary metaphor, turning the poem
into a skiff floating on the vast sea of ages, or a siren apt to reveal to the
senses, and dissemble from the intelligence, the turns of its seduction? The
Mallarman poem undoubtedly exploits a finite bundle of poetic images
and metaphors, more than one of which has been lost to the night of
time: the risk and solitude of the work launched among the fortune of
billows, celestial choirs and swans with captive wings, rose and setting
dawns congealed in crimson and blood, nights hesitating between the
cold of empty rooms, the paleness of a lamp and the uncertain shine of
stars. The material is old, by and large, as is the way in which it serves as a
symbol. It remains only to know what is meant by material and in what
exactly the act of symbolizing consists. We marked out a translation of the
poems initial hypotheses. But what exactly did we do? Say what the poem
means? However, the singularity of the enterprise which has associated
the generic name of symbolism with the proper name Mallarm plays
out in the very idea of what it is to mean. No more than in describing
them, Mallarm had no interest in using marine impressions to commu-
nicate general thoughts about human destiny. So what is poetry for him?
In response to a pressing questioner, bruised, he once stammered the
following definition: Poetry is the expression through human language
restored to its essential rhythm of the mysterious meaning of the aspects of
existence.20 The definition, here again, does not lead to puzzlement. Only
to misinterpretation. Nothing is vaguer, at first glance, than this myste-
rious meaning of the aspects of existence in short, the foam to whose
expression the rhythm of the Mallarman poem is dedicated. Conversely,

9
 mallarm

the whole problem in Mallarm lies in seeing that all these notions are
perfectly articulated.

The terms of mystery

What is this mystery then? First lets define its place, which is very
precisely that which takes place beyond nature. Beyond nature
Mallarms century cried it out repeatedly there is the mind, or spirit.
The trouble with that response is that it is tautological; spirit has no other
content than the beyond of nature where each individual lodges his god
in the way he pleases. So, in order to determine it an idea of nature is also
necessary. What exactly is nature? Behind its usual common definition
of foliage, which renders its idea tangible, nature can be summed up by
the absolute expression according to which only what is, is.21 What
takes place, then, beyond the necessity of that which is? Logically, it is
that which can not be. Only this takes two figures: it can be the illusion or
the misfortune of that which has no reason to be; or, conversely, it can be
the glory of that which turns this contingency into an unheard-of power
of affirmation. Anticipating some philosophers of the century to follow,
Mallarm summed up that beyond of being in two words: existence and
abode. As such, the definition of poetry is extended into a task: it confers,
in this way, our abode with authenticity and constitutes the only spiritual
task there is.22
We shall call spirit, in the first analysis, that which consecrates the site
of existence, in its immanence, as world or abode of man. We shall call
mystery the system of relations between the aspects of existence proper to
that consecration. The poetic task is the highest spiritual task because it
fixes the system of aspects which consecrate an abode.
What, now, is an aspect? Lets start by saying what it is not, namely a
model. In the times of nature and its representation, models were imitated
in order to provide the spectator or reader with the pleasure of recog-
nition. But there are two sorts of models: there are characters that we
recognize similar to the experience we have of who we are and of those
who are close to us; and there are archetypes, the essential forms, which
are not at all such and such a courageous warrior, man of duty or beautiful
woman, but the type that sums up each of these virtues or excellences.
These models, in turn, have a single venerable model: the idea or form,
the Platonic eidos, that which provided every human reality justice of the
city or carpenters bed, beauty or a louse with the divine model that it
10
 The poetics of mystery

tried imperfectly to imitate. Above these Ideas stands, according to Plato,

the Idea of the Good, the light that illuminates the intelligible world in the
way that the sun lights up the sensible world.
This is what has disappeared. The anecdotic crisis of the venerable
Alexandrine refers back to the more serious blackout of the sky of Ideas.
There is no longer some supreme mould for something that doesnt exist,
no more divine denominator of our apotheosis. The poet no longer has
a model, celestial or human, to imitate. Henceforth, it is by the mere
dialectic of verse that he will be able to revivify the seal of the idea, by
forging together, according to an essential rhythm, many scattered veins
of ore, unknown and floating.23 Instead of the pulverized idea, there
is, precisely, its dust: hair of foam, clown sequins, golden fringe of light
on a stage curtain, and womans hair as flight of flame. In the place of
models to copy, there are, scattered in this dust, aspects to grasp; that is,
not the forms of things, but events, the snapshot of world events, which
are present in every ordinary spectacle on the condition of noticing them.
Mallarm was a contemporary not only of Monet, but also of Etienne
Marey and his chronophotographical gun, a device which made it possible
to see the invisible moments of the successive times into which a birds
flight or horses gallop breaks down. Mallarm expressed this in his own
way: once Nature takes place, the one available act, forever and alone,
is to understand the relations, in the meantime, few or many.24 But his
problem was obviously not to break natural phenomena down in order
to understand or depict them better. It was to raise them to the power of
the artifice. Aspects are not to be compiled to form the recomposed unity
of a known scene. They are reordered differently configured and set in
rhythm in the mystery of the Idea.
There is nothing mysterious about this mystery. It lies precisely in this
act of reordering. The idea assembles scattered aspects to turn them into
viewpoints onto another world present-absent in the ordinary spectacle
a world of virtualities of correspondence between human acts and the
forms of their abode. We will call the products of this work types. The
Mallarman type differs from what is usually understood by this name. It
is neither a model nor a character but an essential aspect: not the copy
of an essence but, on the contrary, the exemplary tracing of an ideality
without model. It is an essential aspect, or rather synthesis of aspects, that
assembles separate elements into figures, or cuts out a completely new
figure from a sensory datum. To understand this, there is no need to get
lost in metaphysical depths. The new idea is a wholly superficial thing.
11
 mallarm

Above all, it is momentary. It consists entirely in the vanishing tracing

of a precarious ideality. We encounter it with the most self-evidence
in the most ephemeral indeed, most working-class forms of art; we
encounter it, that is, on the condition of being placed at the philosophical
point where the mystery of its appearing takes shape in the exact interval
between a human movement and a suggested figure. Accordingly, the
dancer does not present a woman dancing any more than the story
written on the booklet. The dancer is not a woman, either recognized as
such, or one through whom we recognize something, but a metaphor
summing up one of the elementary aspects of our form: knife, goblet,
flower, etc.25 This is what is absent from all bouquets: not the ideal
flower or the idea of the flower, but the tracing of that entrechat, floating
between the woman and the flower, to outline the form, immediately
dissipated, of a calyx-chalice26: schema or matrix of all flowers, but also of
all unions between the opening of a flower and the gesture of a hand that
lifts the cup of friendship and celebration.
The metaphor and the symbol are not first of all concrete images repre-
senting abstract ideas or ways of associating them together. The metaphor
is above all displacement; symbol means, etymologically, accord or sign
of alliance. The symbolist metaphor is the gesture of a displacement that
puts together, in the form of a virtual flower, a way of combining steps and
a schema of the world. The metaphor, or symbol, pertaining to the era of
representation owed its virtue to its fixity: sun and glory, lion and courage,
eagle and majesty, serpent and ruse... In his The Poetic Art, Horace fixed,
once and for all, the absolute evil: it was the incoherent metaphor, the
beautiful body of a woman that ends in the tail of a fish. Desinit in piscem.
What the end of our poem translates, in its own way, is this Latin of the
Petit Larousses pink pages:

[...]
Avariciously will have drowned
The childs flank of a siren.

The siren is the emblem of the new beauty, the beautiful power of
artifice that stands in contrast to the beautiful boy whose model the
Plato of the Phaedrus bequeathed to Aristotle, Aristotle to Horace, Horace
to Boileau, and Boileau to everybody else. But the siren does not stand
opposed to the classical canon as some monster, as some impossible alloy
of incompatible bodies or properties. The siren is not the combination of
12
 The poetics of mystery

woman and fish; it is the random and momentary alliance of a womans

movement the dancers entrechat but also furl of hair or unfolding fan
and a form of world. Between the biological individual and the physical
world, the metaphor unfolds and refolds the accord between a vanishing
tracing and any bit of golden dust, qua substitute for the vanished
sun. It is the movement that unites or symbolizes two theatres in
a single presentation. Suggestion and allusion two Mallarman
master words are to be understood in this sense. Allusion, according
to its etymology, is play both theatre performance and wager on a dice
throw. Suggestion is the movement of this play which carries towards a
spectator perhaps absent from the encounter the emblem traced by the
dancer, an emblem of no virtue or property, but of accord in general, of
the accord traced and immediately effaced by the steps moving between
the theatre of our spirit and the theatre or rather theatralization of
the world. This is the mystery. Its theatre does not lose itself in any
vagueness. On the contrary, it involves real accuracy and instantaneity.
Simply, this instantaneity, in order not to dissolve into nothingness,
requires a spectator on the spot to discover in it and make explicit the
other theatre that is present in the everyday. In Mallarman terms: a man
used to dreaming.

Scene of the dream

The word dream is used very precisely. Not by chance did Mallarm talk
of his indubitable wing,27 the inner fold of the vanished heaven of ideas,
that which makes it possible to grasp its golden dust in many scattered
veins of ore. Dream designates not the cloud in which the sentimental
soul looses himself but the capacity to compare aspects and count their
number as it touches our intelligence;28 it is the gap remarked by the
attentive spectator in what is, discerning in it the disappearing appearing
of that which can or can not be. Hence, on an evening like any other, in a
working-class theatre into which no aesthete ordinarily strays, a sequined
clown led the exhibition of a tamed bear. But all of a sudden the spectacle
spun out of control. After a skilful movement from the clown, the bears
two front paws were made to settle on his shoulders. It was the sublime
spectacle of the animal adopting a human posture to ask this maker of
illusions the secret of his power. The bear trained into a question mark is
here tantamount to his homonym, the celestial constellation of the Ursa
Major, which appears at the end instead of A Dice Throw or the Sonnet
13
 mallarm

in yx. In this absolute place there lives one of the dramas that astral
history could elect to take place in this modest theatre. The crowd here
disappeared in the emblem of its spiritual situation, and magnified the
stage.29
The dream consists in the power of catching this other performance
with the gaze and marking with it speech, a performance that is clear and
larger than the stage.30 This is the point of view which elects an aspect.
Or rather, the aspect itself is a point of view: a point from which is
defined, as is said in another poem, also reputed to be incomprehensible,
a place charged with sight instead of visions:

Oui, dans une le que lair charge Yes, in an isle that the air had charged
De vue et non de visions not with mere visions but with sight
Toute fleur stalait plus large every flower spread out enlarged
Sans que nous en devisions. at no word that we could recite

Telles, immenses, que chacune And so immense they were, that

Ordinairement se para each was usually garlanded
Dun lucide contour, lacune with a clear contour, and this breach
Qui des jardins la spara.31 parted it from the garden bed.

The hermetic poem does not say any more than the narrative of this
evening full of surprises. The lucid contour that, like a golden halo,
surrounds the flowers and separates them out from gardens is the essential
aspect, the point of view which separates out this clear spectacle from
ordinary trestles. The trained bear, turned into the emblem of the crowd
convoked to the spectacle of its greatness, is identical to the hundred irises
summoned in the poem to arise to this new duty of being, not only to
productions of nature or ornamental flowers, but also to the new figure
of the Idea itself no longer the celestial form but the type, the sensory
flower that is turned into the allegory of itself and the emblem of the
ideality of the sensory: a calyx-chalice identical to the halo surrounding it,
a flower akin to its name, iris, the limpid power of the gaze, just like Iris,
a messenger of the gods and substitute of the flown gods.
Of course, in the spectacle, another way of seeing was possible: that of
the clown, of the director. These figures broke all the charm. Brusquely
arose the interval of dcor pertaining to another emblem, which is that
of reality par excellence: a piece of raw meat was offered to the bear
as bait to get him to give up the living prey that he held between his
14
 The poetics of mystery

paws. Indeed, the theatre staff only saw in this sublime scene something
terrifying. Obedient to exhibition and common reward, the bear dropped
back down onto all fours and all of a sudden the curtain fell with its
advertised prices and banalities. This is the natural way of seeing. Yet the
dreamers way of seeing, of electing aspects the bears acts and ordering
them in mystery is superior, and maybe even the true one.32 Poetry is the
pursuit of this truth, of this exact interruption.
The dream is this power of grasping the virtuality, present in every
fairground stall, of a completely new sky, the power of equalling the
type that takes shape, precariously, on a happenstance stage in the inner
theatre; it is a summary of types and accords that anyone who has
really looked at nature bears in himself.33 This is what the poem writes.
Attesting this is the character that simultaneously symbolizes dream,
theatre and the poems greatness: Hamlet. What exactly does this dreamer
par excellence show? Hegel, and a few others, turned him into the proto-
typical Romantic character, he who cannot decide, or do anything, since
he is the exemplary son of Christian times, the hero who, in a world
deserted by the Resurrected, is no longer able to find any action worthy of
himself. None of these exegetes apparently noticed the following strange
fact: all the plays characters die by the hand or the deed of this character
who does nothing. This is because Hamlet embodies the very trouble
with appearing, the shadow faced with which all characters perish. There
is nothing psychological or Christian in this. On the contrary, Hamlet thus
announces the future of a type of poetry freed from the care of having
to make characters recognized: he is the latent lord who cannot become,
the juvenile shadow of us all.34 He is the power to be or not to be, the
power to be without reason, to be by artifice. He is, in short, the symbol
of the poetical symbolization which brings to be the ideality of types in
place of the idealism of models or the realism of characters. Hamlet is the
supreme type; he organizes the play of the other types in the manner of
a Coryphaeus: leader of the Greek chorus. The doubt or the dream that
he embodies is the power of the latent, of the virtual that returns all
characters to the rank of extras or tapestry figures, that is to say, of ideal
aspects. Hamlet is hardly yesterdays shadow, but instead the shadow
tomorrows promise of the new theatre of the Idea, come to dethrone
the theatre of characters and the recognition of models. The Idea is the
symbol, that is, the agreement, sealed in the sole momentary act of a
performance, between aspects of types limited to their appearing alone.
This, in a nutshell, is what is expressed by Hamlets monologue: to be or
15
 mallarm

not to be to be the shadow that projects a beyond onto being, a beyond

which is the pure power not to be.
With Mallarm, therefore, the symbol is not an image, no more
than the idea is a form of object or the metaphor a means of commu-
nicating feelings. Symbol and metaphor do not express the idea, they
bring it to be. They are the act of its production, the institution of its
ritual. Lets look again at our Toast: it is not the case that, on the one
hand, there is the occasion of the poem the common gesture of the
raised glass at a banquet, which is maybe a banquet of poets but could
also be one of industrialists and, on the other, the ocean metaphor
comprising the poems content. The real gesture of the hand raising
the cup and the crossing of writing which carries the poetic troop are
woven in the same cloth. They belong to the same ritual of consecration
of the human abode. From one to the other, continuity is assured by
the equivalence between the fictional siren and the cup of elevation: the
goblet, metaphor of our form, and the flowers calyx detached on the first
day from golden avalanches of the old azure and the eternal snow of
stars;35 the white water lily of a purely ideal encounter between a Ulysses
of calm river and a Nausicaa summed up in furtive steps;36 and finally the
chalice of a new Eucharist, a purely human transformation of the human
abode:

Le pur vase daucun breuvage Pure vase of no brew

Que linexhaustible veuvage. Save inexhaustible widowhood.37

From nothingness to the nothing

Best to say nothing.38 He who wanted for the poem to vanquish chance,
word by word, obviously did not by chance make this nothing the first
word of the book that would serve as his testament. But neither did he
employ it randomly. The French word rien, like aucun, belongs to the
singular family of those negative pronouns which employed by themselves
can, at the liking of the speaker, conserve the shadow of the negative that
ordinarily accompanies them or, conversely, take on their positive value:
rien, rem, something, a thing held perpetually, like Hamlet, between being
and non-being.
Non-being, nothingness we are rather all too aware today that
this is one of the two abysses that the young poet encountered while
hollowing out verse back in the days of Herodias: days when he was
16
 The poetics of mystery

seeking the pure work, produced by a pure consciousness, separated from

every self by the spidery ruff of Igitur, indeed by the knife that deposits
the head of Saint John the Baptist on a silver plate. Commentators
have unceasingly inquired into this point: was it thanks to Villiers de
lIsle Adam or Lefbure that he came across Hegel, the Absolute Subject
and the original identity of void, being and indeterminate nothingness?
Was it through the Revue des deux Mondes or some other journal that he
discovered Schopenhauer? The important point lies elsewhere: it lies
not in the way in which he encountered the absolute and nothingness
which were lingering just about everywhere in his time but in the
way that he regulated this encounter, and escaped from this illness.
Ever since Kant, our escape from both dogmatic slumber and the
insomnia of the absolute has taken place through critical thought: the
type of thought able to discern the field of its exercise and the limits of
its power. Mallarm followed suit at the end of the great crises of the
year 1865. He reorganized, on his own behalf, the system of the spirit.
He converted, in a critical way, the Medusas head of the Spirit the
Absolute and Nothingness, the Absolute as Nothingness into a new
duality, one that is accessible to the gaze, controllable by the quill. This
is very precisely the one that we have already encountered: linfini et
rien, the infinite immanent to the nothing, the vanishing difference of
everything to itself, akin to the thin and pale azure line that the limpid-
souled refined Chinese paints on his cups made of moon-ravished snow
as does whoever, in his image, has left behind the voracious Art of the
Cruel country of the Absolute.39
The Posies enable us to see this conversion. In this work, the poems are
arranged by Mallarm on the basis of a dramaturgy that is detached from
their chronology. This dramaturgy sets out from the poems of the Ideal,
those first sought in the heights of celestial azure. With Herodias, it closes
its shutters on this beautiful azure and enters into the cold lunar night
in which the poet, inheritor of the flown sun, must become impersonal
in order to make gleam the pure beauty of the new poem of pure Ideas,
dreaming like his heroine of the bed of vellum sheets, which are more
cloistral still than the robes of monks or shroud of the dead. With Faun,
its two vanished nymphs and its flute instrument of flights it bids
farewell to the hoard of old night and to the cold lunar scintillation
of the pure Ideas pale clarity. It contrasts them with the pure power
of artifice of the the great twin reed played under the azure and which
knows
17
 mallarm

[...] faire aussi haut que lamour [...] and dreams of, high as love
se module itself can modulate
vanouir du songe ordinaire de evacuating from the commonplace
dos illusion
Ou de flanc pur suivis avec of some pure loin or rear that my
mes regards clos, shut eyes create
Une sonore, vaine et monotone A sonorous, monotonous and empty
ligne. line.40

Beyond this line of division, the distribution of tombs and fans, of airs
and sonnets, institutes so many scenes wherein the drama of the flown
sun and the descent into nothingness are transformed into the mystery of
an evanescent presence:

[...] [...]
Une agitation solennelle par lair a solemn stir of words stays alive in
the air
De paroles, pourpre ivre et a huge clear bloom, a purple ecstasy,
grand calice clair
Que, pluie et diamant, le regard which his diaphanous gaze
diaphane remaining there,
Reste l sur ces fleurs dont nulle rain and diamond, on these flowers
ne se fane, that never fade away
Isole parmi lheure et le rayon isolates in the hour and radiance
du jour! of day! 41

However nothing better encapsulates the transformation from

nothingness into nothing than these Several sonnets42, which Mallarm
set out into four seasons and four nights: an initial autumn night of a
flown sun and a godless sky, and a funereal room which is also a hall of
sacrament in which is lit the festive star of poetic genius, put in charge of
looking after the heritage of the Idea-sun; a winter night of the poet-swan,
immobilized, with his inaccessible model, Herodias, in the frigid dream
of scorn of the pure Idea, as cloistral as the space, unaltered [espace,
soi pareil]; a spring night in which the poet flees the beautiful suicide of
suns of yesteryear, summoned like the hundred irises to the new duty of
figuring, like some child-empresss war-morion, an aspect of the new Idea;
and a summer night emptied of every funereal material as of every object,
and reduced to the status of abolished bauble of inane sonority. Just like
18
 The poetics of mystery

the ideal iris of every bouquet, the ptyx here, devoid of all furnishing, is
properly the power of the almost-nothing that blocks the brutality of being
and the anxiety of nothingness, the power by which, between the crossing
and the mirror, the space of the poem substitutes its light the septet of its
scintillations for the extinct fires of the sky.
Hence, the nothings or almost-nothings traced by the poets brush
are to nothingness what aspects are to the ancient model, what the
infinite is to the absolute. In other words, the substitutes for the Idea-sun
are identical to the almost-nothings that conjure away nothingness. The
golden dust of the pulverized Idea is equal to the foam of nothingness,
banished, identical to the footlights which, for the duration of a spectacle,
combine the nave fold of the curtain with the gold of a fringe.43
At this point, a distinction still has to be made if we want to separate
Mallarms brush from that of Francois Coppe, and his aesthetics from
that of Des Esseintes. The connection between the infinite and nothing
can be understood severally. In Hegels time, this connection generated
the works of bad infinity, that is, those sentimental and humoristic
novels of the style of Jean-Paul. In Mallarms time, its most complete
expression came about in the Flaubertian novel. The aesthetics of
Flauberts novels are animated by one leading idea, namely that anything
at all can be beautiful, on condition that it gives rise to the presence of the
infinite, that is, of its own nothingness. In any nothing, in any null story
caf conversations, discourses of agricultural associations or provincial
adultery at stake is to open the attic windows through which to see
the black hole of the infinite: the indifferent flux swirling atoms about
eternally, by chance reuniting, in this farm room, the awkward health
officer smelling the iris and the young woman whose nails were at first
all that the officer had noticed. Line upon line, Flauberts art consists in
bursting open the pegs of conjunctions and explanations, by introducing
into the description of all these random places with their meaningless
scenes the void of the infinite, the void in which its infinite is encap-
sulated: that of the great sun above the desert of the Orient, and the
characters who resemble it the hollow-sounding heads of noble bearing
and the ragged lice-eaten persons clothed only in jewels. Nothing is
apparently closer to Madame Bovary than the aesthetic of The Fairground
Declaration, in which, without any accessory story or ornament, the
poets companion exhibits, in exchange for the single cent required from
the visitors who have flocked there en masse, nothing except her own
stature and her hair flight of a flame.
19
 mallarm

[...] [...]
Rien qu simplifier avec gloire Whose dazzling head is the only
la femme means
Accomplit par son chef By which woman simplified with
fulgurants lexploit glory conspires

De semer de rubis le doute To sow with rubies the doubt she

quelle corche would scorch
Ainsi quune joyeuse et In the manner of a joyous and
tutlaire torche tutelary torch44

The expression sow with rubies the doubt that is the almost-nothing
that separates any mediocrity whatever from itself seems apt to sum up
the Flaubertian enterprise. However, simplification, exploit and glory instil
distance. This almost nothing, which deepens the void of the infinite in the
void of stupidity, is too similar to that which it denies. The style is extraor-
dinarily beautiful, noted Mallarm propos of Bouvard et Pcuchet, but at
times it is rendered null, by dint of the sumptuous bareness. The subject
seems to imply an aberration, which is strange with such a powerful
artist.45 With the return of Bouvard and Pcuchet to their writing case,
the great void of the infinite settles for the ordinary void of stupidity.
The imperceptible difference of the infinite which ran right throughout
the lines is cancelled out, and ultimately restored as nothing. The lesson
to be drawn from this: the almost-nothing that infinitizes anything
whatsoever cannot consist in that great void-making machine, referred
to by Proust as the trottoir roulant [rolling footpath] of style. The infinite
must be numbered, its aspects selected, figured, ordered. The twofold
task simplification and glory is something for which the novel, with
the brutal constraint of its anecdotes about husbands and wives and the
absence of constraint of its measureless time, will always be inappropriate.
It can be achieved by the poem that fixes an exact time not to stories but
to aspects: possibilities of history, or, as it were, of historicity, of essential
types of the human abode as accord between the theatre of the spirit and
that of the world. The res, the nothing, will not simply be anything at all;
it has to be a metaphor of our form. Its foam is perhaps unable to be
separated from an exploit, or act of elevation.

20
 The poetics of mystery

The method of fiction

In short, in order to authenticate the relation between the infinite and
nothing, the very status of fiction itself has to be changed. Returning to
an earlier point in the poem, an agreement seems to emerge between
Mallarm and Flaubert:

Une nudit de hros tendre The tender nudity of heroes

diffame demeans
Celle qui ne mouvant astre ni The one on whose fingers no stars
feux au doigt wave or fires
Rien qu simplifier avec gloire Whose dazzling head is the only
la femme means
Accomplit par son chef By which woman simplified with
fulgurante lexploit glory conspires

The tender naked hero who is conjured up would defame both the
heads and the poems nudity. In that exhibition of the woman who,
at the extreme west of desires, unfolds only the hairs flight of flame
which itself stands metonymically for the pulverized sun as well as the
bodys subtraction from display there is nothing indecent. The hero,
who would be malapropos here, is the same one that in another sonnet is
introduced into the story of the woman-peacock, unfurling her locks of
hair as an evening chariot of the sun. But the heros tender nudity is also
that of Ulysses disembarking on the shores of Nausicaa; it is the nudity of
the anecdote, of the story in general, which will be interposed between
the kindling of the fire ever within and its manifestation, the vivid golden
cloud of the unfurled locks of hair. This head of hair is a diadem the
emblem of woman and coronation of the human abode in its virtual
magnificence insofar as no story either defames it, or compromises its
glory with sentimental anecdotes.
Here is situated the division between two ideas of fiction. Ever since
Aristotle, fiction had been defined as the imitation of acting men, as a
chain of actions bringing characters into play. But, in thus defining it,
fiction was burdened with loads of flesh, precisely so that its scope could
be more effectively reduced to banal operations of recognition. New
fictions will no longer consist in the chains of actions used to establish
characters. They will consist in tracings of schemas, or the virtuality of
events and figures that define a play of correspondences. This is not,

21
 mallarm

however, a mere matter of abstracting from fiction. The point is to give

fiction a much more radical meaning. Fiction may well be a game. But
this game is higher in essence. It is the very procedure of the human
spirit. Let us understand: of the human spirit insofar as it is human; that
is, the human spirit insofar as no god guarantees it any truth in short,
the Cartesian method insofar as it does not encounter any veracious god.
Sometimes referred to as hyperbolic doubt, it is this procedure of the
first Meditations which has to be radicalized. Poetry is meditation, doubt
transformed into hyperbole, and that which projects, to a great forbidden
and thunderous height, our conscious lack of what, up there, gleams.46
One can say that this projection is a deception [superchrie] or forgery.47
But the forgery is also the work done by a goldsmith in sowing doubt
with rubies. The superior attraction like a void is that which we draw
to detach, for ourselves, things from their solidity. The forgery endows
them with splendour, through vacant space, for as many solitary festivals
as we wish.48 Instead of some sky of Ideas, fiction institutes the condi-
tions of human experience in general, of the consecration of the human
abode. It institutes them in the incertitude of the game and the glory of
elevation. The combined effect of the game of forgery and the work of the
goldsmith is called consecration. But this consecration always plays out
in the instantaneousness of a vanished tracing. Fiction can by no means
simply con-sist. Of course, having been written, the poem is conserved for
whoever wants to read it. But this letter is dead if it is missing the exact
ritual by which the reader is instituted strictly as the new theatre where
the poem replays its choreography. The game of fiction always boils down
to the movement of the fan that delicately pushes the horizon back, that
interposes the rustling of its feigned landscape between every spectator
and every reality, of foliage or sea waters. The poem is the movement
of the fan, which is the infinite unfolded and folded anew into a strict
number of folds that reduce to a single one.

Vertige ! Voici que frisonne Vertigo! see how space

Lespace comme un grand baiser Shimmers in one vast kiss
Qui, fou de natre pour personne, That, born for no one, hence
deranged,
Ne peut jaillir ni sapaiser. Cannot gush forth or be assuaged.

Sens-tu le paradis farouche Do you sense how a primal Eden

Ainsi quun rire enseveli Like laughter barely hidden
22
 The poetics of mystery

Se couler du coin de ta bouche From the corner of your mouth has

flowed
Au fond de lunanime pli! To the depths of the unanimous fold!

Le sceptre des rivages roses The sceptre of rosy shores

Stagnants sur les soirs dor, ce lest, Stagnant on golden twilight hours
Ce blanc vol ferm que tu poses Is this white closed-up wing you set
Contre le feu dun bracelet. Against the fire of a bracelet.49

The fan of the poem

The fan is thus the elementary emblem of the work of fiction in general: it
is the magnificence of the pure movement of appearing and disappearing,
the golden foam of verse that pushes back every line of horizon, setting
in its place the glorious name of the infinite and nothing. Appearing and
disappearing: that is, to raise the fleetingness of appearing to the glory
of the vanished sun, as reflected in the panes of a window; to reduce
the drama of disappearance to the fineness of a white hair of foam; and
to unfold and refold the movement of correspondences which render
equivalent the sceptre of rosy shores /Stagnant on the golden twilight
with the fire of a bracelet on the hand holding the fan, the smile of
lips with the unanimous fold which re-bends space to turn it into a world.
If the golden headdress is the exact metonymy of the vanished sun, the
fan is the exact metaphor of the poem, the artifact that imitates, in the
fluttering of its folds, this movement of appearing and disappearing, which
is the initial fold or the lining of things that makes of them a world.
Gardner Davies pursued what he saw as the traces of a single solar
drama in Mallarms work.50 His undertaking is valid, on condition
of specifying whether the issue is one of traces or of dust. The solar
drama, according to the anthropologist George W. Cox and his
translator, Mallarm, is the key to ancient mythology; the great tragedy
of nature, born again with each dawn from the darkness in which it
dies each evening.51 As with nature, this tragedy has had its time, which
is that of the first autumn. The poet who does not bear this in mind is
like the swan, its captive wing stuck in the ice-sheets of winter. The old
tragedy of nature is strictly replaced by the mystery of natures beyond.
This mystery is the organization of the dream its aspects noted down
and rhymed into a glorious artifact. It therefore has nothing more
mysterious about it than a fans fluttering which, in its vivacity, unfolds
23
 mallarm

the folds of its emblem, giving rise to a question from the observer: is it
the foam from a sunken ship or the hair of a siren? Lets imagine now that
the poem, like the fan, has two faces: on the side of the quatrains is the
whirlpool of a shipwreck; on the side of the tercets the spray of a sirens
undulation.
Here we return to our initial poem, and perhaps now we can under-
stand why our question about its meaning was out of place. The poem
does not mean anything; it says. It emblematizes the gesture of saying
as the scansion of appearing and disappearing. It emblematizes the doubt
itself about the nature of that scansion, from which the play of aspects take
its power of ideality. What appears? What disappears? The movement of
the fan does not say; it plays on it, it suggests. Let us not understand this
to mean that the poem is polysemous, or that each person can under-
stand it as he will. It means that in the flapping of the fan, the swan and
the oar, several forms of appearing and disappearing can discover they are
analogous. This is the mystery that succeeds tragedy: the great metaphor of
the Idea-sun, buried in sea waters and darkness, is shattered into a multi-
plicity of schemas of disappearing that respond to, substitute or combine
with one another. One disappearing contains many others within it. We
are able, therefore, if we labour the point, to discern many meanings
in the fable of the ship and the siren the meanings of mystery, as so
many splinters of the great pulverized sun. The first meaning: the poem,
in general, is a process of disappearance and substitution. It transforms
every solid and preponderant reality (for example, a ship on sea waters
in a tempest, a kings daughter or a flower in a vase) into an inconsistent
and glorious simulacrum (the siren, the white water lily or that which is
absent from every bouquet). Second meaning: the new poem replaces the
stories and dramas of yesteryear (adventures, shipwrecks, solitude, reefs,
stars) with a play of vanishing aspects. Third meaning: the ship of the
poem must forge its way through the hostile cloud of a world in which
the poet has no place. But the poet is like the crafty siren. He thwarts the
appetites of the publics vain outspread chasm and leaves the famished
ogre only a trace, a sirens white hair, of the trick that he played on it.
None of these meanings are unjustified and, in combining them, we
will have a pretty good idea of what Mallarm might have thought.52 It
remains that if there is a thought of the poem, it is in the fluttering which
draws all these possibles into the same fold, that fold of somber lace which
retains the infinite, which encapsulates them in one and the same act and
turns this act of doubt and hyperbole into a ritual and the very emblem
24
 The poetics of mystery

pertaining to the consecration of human play. The poem is the supreme

consecration because it is the supreme artifice, replete with the ability to
elevate the traces of writing on a white page to the heights of the starry
sky, the fan which identifies the movement of its folds with this doubling
of the sensory, this play of appearing and disappearing which turns silent
eternity into the space of a world.

25
 The hymn of spiritual hearts

In short, none of this has any more to do with art for arts sake than it
does with sinking into some night of language. Aestheticism is not the
issue. At stake, instead, is an aesthetics, by no means in the sense of a
theory of art, but as a thinking of the sensory configuration able to
establish a community. The Mallarman grimoire is also a book of the
future:

Car jinstalle, par la science, For I inaugurate through science

Lhymne des curs spirituels The hymn of all hearts spiritual
En loeuvre de ma patience In the labour of my patience,
Atlas, herbiers et rituels. Atlas, herbariums and rituals.53

The successor of bygone antiphonies, the Mallarman grimoire is not a

simple game for solitary celebrations. It is the book which psalmodizes
the greatness of a crowd to come. The movement of poetic hyperbole
is the very method of science, and it is inscribed in its books: altas,
herbariums and rituals, that is the maps of skies of fans, books of emblems
of flowers/chalices which profile the new figure of the Idea, and rituals of
consecration of the common greatness.

The religion of the century

Mallarm was a man of his century. A century, as a measure of time,
has no more reality than the line of a horizon. A century is an idea of
a century. And the nineteenth century consisted in the deployment of
an idea that can be stated in two ways: the first is to be done with the

27
 mallarm

preceding century, that of the Enlightenment and the Revolution. To be

done with can mean very many things, all of which are situated between
two opposing poles: for some, at issue is the liquidation of the century
of unbelief and dereliction; for others, it is to bring to completion the
work that could not be undertaken, the work of those who had time
enough only to destroy the old order. All things considered, this contrast
may come together in a common thought, which is encapsulated in the
second way of thinking the centurys idea or task: that the bonds of the
new community must be built out of the ruins of the old order. And
for this to happen, the laws that fix inter-individual relations and the
regulatory constitutions governing the game of representative institutions
will never be enough. The representative regime misleads with promises
of citizens emancipation like the reign of gold misleads with promises of
the emancipation of mans industrial powers. The two are joined in one
and the same regime of egoism, in one and the same destruction of the
community bond. The community lacks its idea. The idea of community
is the idea of a bond. In the Latin of Romantic philosophy, bond is
expressed as religio. To complete the revolution, the community needs
a new religion. At the centurys dawn, Hegel, Hlderlin and Schelling
committed this idea to paper in a rough draft. It was to be the first
systematic programme of German Idealism: that is, the creation of a new
religion and a new mythology for the people, on the very basis of that new
philosophy which internalizes and radicalizes the political revolution. The
idea was left abandoned in draft form but not forgotten within the very
rigours of speculative philosophy. And, before Marx, Feuerbach drew its
consequences: beyond the speculative lie, the task of a new religion of
humanity was to be carried out, a religion that renders the bread and wine
of everyday alienated existence of human powers into divine attributes.
But already, as Hegel was dying from cholera, the Saint Simonians were
raising differently sonorous trumpets to their lips, announcing the new
centurys spirit and task: the new Christianity, the religion of rehabili-
tated matter, of the spirit made flesh, made flesh in the scientific precision
of railway lines establishing communication between people better than
any speech; in the spiritual community reuniting the army of work under
the hierarchy of science and love; in the religious organization of industry
replacing state hierarchies and revolutionary whirlwinds; and in the new
temple of the theatres replacing the old church. Industry made religious;
religion made industrial in order to establish the new hymn and theatre
and replace the representative political machine.
28
 The hymn of spiritual hearts

Ever since the Saint Simonians, the century almost never ceased to
oscillate between sometimes opposing, sometimes combining two ideas
of the earthly future of religion. There were those who wanted man to
adopt Gods attributes and make them the bread and the wine of a new
life delivered from super-terrestrial illusion. There were those who wanted
new choirs to sing the worship of industry and progress, to accompany the
new communications of electricity and rail. At the junction of both ideas,
cities have dreamt of civic religions and erected great edifices of glass and
steel hosting industrial Expos and promising the spectacle yet to come of
a self-transparent humanity. It is impossible to understand Mallarman
aesthetics and its poem outside of this secular game. But we should also
determine its precise part in it: that is, the motives and forms of its dice
throw, of its wager on the religious future of the community.

Two theses on divinity

Two essential theses sum up the Mallarman idea of religion: one about
mythology and another about Christianity. Linking both theses together
a history of the spirit is formed whose third phase it is poetrys task to
write. Concerning mythology, Mallarm took up, adapting it to his own
views, the anthropology of religion expressed in the work whose French
translation he carried out a work of dietary drudgery, so he claimed
namely, The Ancient Gods by George W. Cox. The thesis is simple and easily
seems simplistic: the gods and myths of the Greek Pantheon are living
personifications of natural phenomena. The proper names of the gods of
Mount Olympus and the heroes of the founding myths both derive from
the common names of even older languages, languages that had become
unintelligible. With the aid of these ancient names, peoples of days gone
by recounted merely what they saw, that is, the twists and turns of the
tragedy of nature: the twin evolution, daily and yearly, of the sun, its
death and its rebirth. The names of the gods bespoke the dawn and the
dew, the power of the star of fire at its zenith, but above all its perpetual
descent in the kingdom of darkness and the miracle of its perpetual
resurrection.
Is this not merely some newfangled anthropology of the time, where
linguistics is brought to lend rash reinforcement to the rationalizations
of the Enlightenment? Even so, two of its essential propositions may be
retained. The first proposition: the gods do not emerge in the astonishment
and fear generated by the dangers of natural phenomena; they emerge
29
 mallarm

through the language which recounts the latter. Hence, it happens that
that the true end of religion is the restitution to language of its powers.
The second, correlative proposition is that the immediate object of religion
is less terrifying thunder, distressing drought or the refreshing rain which
makes life fertile than the very movement of appearing and disappearing
of light. Man thereby directly names not beneficial or harmful powers to
the daily bread, but the glorious powers of the human abode. In a nutshell,
what mythology teaches us is that the religious function is first that of the
language which glorifies.
But ancient divinity like beauty underwent a deepening in revolu-
tionary form. The flight of the ancient gods is the radicalization of the
glory celebrated by language. Church pomp, the gold of ciboriums and
monstrances, push back the horizon of rising and setting suns. They lend
themselves to the glory of its true content: absence. The greatness of the
Christian religion was that it consecrated the real presence of absence, the
power of the chimera. The Christian ritual, by screening, with the shadows of
its churches and the gold of its ciboria, the gold of the sun and the old tragedy
of nature, revealed the specific nature of the human animal. The human
animal is a chimerical animal. Our race has the honour of lending guts to
the fear of itself felt by the metaphysical and cloistral eternity and of baying
out the abyss throughout the ages.54 The chimerical condition is this chance-
ridden fold of absence that without reason affects cloistral eternity, that
space, unaltered, if it grow or deny itself. Christianity reveals, in its purity,
this properly human task of glorification of absence, that task which institutes
our communion or sharing of one in all and all in one. Or rather it would
reveal it in its purity if it did not compromise it with the barbaric feast of the
body and blood of the Saviour, designated by the Eucharistic Sacrament.55
Mallarms humanizing of religion thus runs counter to the dominant
tendency of the century. As encapsulated by Feuerbachian anthropology,
this tendency demanded the restoration of honours to the daily bread and
wine of the family and community that the illusory ceremony of elevation
projected into the chimerical sky of religion. Quite to the contrary, Mallarm
aimed to restore to the human abode the sole act of elevating the chimera,
the chalice emptied of blood, whether mans or gods; not at all the bread-
body, but the only thing that sheds light on life devoted to its acquisition,
the perfect opening salvo [gerbe just initiale de lpi]: namely, the elevation
of golden dust dedicated to the false.56 It is not the religion of the nourishing
earth or of industrial groups that must succeed Christianity. Instead, it is the
religion of artifice: the institution of artifacts and rituals that transfer to the
30
 The hymn of spiritual hearts

community, subjected to the gold of sheenless metal and the obscurity of the
ballot box, the pulverized gold of setting suns and agonizing natures, purified
by the religion that, through its golds, celebrates the real presence of absence,
that is, the mystery. The crowd sees this religion of artifice prefigured in the
fireworks whose multiple and illuminating spray [gerbe] consecrates the
annual cycle of its works in public festivities.57 But this religion also presides
over intimate celebrations: the celebrations of the furnished abode of the
tangible chimera bibelots, cloths, books or bouquets which transpose the
delicacies or violences of the solar cycle; and even more the intimate celebra-
tions of the book, enclosing the play of the world in the fold of its leaves.

The poet and the worker

At this point enter Mallarms politics, very close to and yet the exact
converse of the great Saint-Simonian dream of industrial religion. One
Sunday in June 1832, as the Republican riot was brewing in Paris, some
apostles, gathered in their community at Mnilmontant, provided the
workers who came to visit them on Sundays with the spectacle of a
remarkable ceremony: the opening works on the Temple of the new
religion. To the strains of the work-kings new choirs, bourgeois apostles
and workers of Paris, lined up in half-squadrons of diggers and wheel-
barrowers, solemnly shifted the earth, making holes designed for the
foundation of the Temple.58 It was a perfect illustration of the new Book
which is no longer written on paper in volatile words and empty declara-
tions, but is inscribed in the very arrangement of bodies which transform
thought into reality at ground level. It matters little whether Mallarm
knew the story of that utopian Sunday. The essential thing is that in two
of his prose pieces he provided a precise retort to it. What Conflict59 and
Confrontation60 stage is the same scene of relation between the man of
the book and the man with the mattock: the same scene, except that this
one shatters all the ceremonials of new Christianity, all the ceremonials
of religious consecration of mattock work made spiritual by men of the
book made wheelbarrowers. Ruthlessly, ones walking is blocked by
work: early morning discontent arises in the idle walker at his appearing
on his hillock alongside the worker risen well before him and already, by
means of his nearby mattock, buried in his hole; midday hostility wells
up between the man of culture on holiday who has protected his retreat
with a gate and the worker used to crossing this same mans garden to go
from the canteen to work; and evening malaise ensues as the dreamers
31
 mallarm

horizon, this Sunday evening, is barred by a swath of workers bearing

flails that is, the sundowners slumped in the middle of the field, drowsy
from the libations celebrating the end of work. There is no direct way
out of this confrontation, above all not in the form of hymns to work,
consecrations of bread or transformations of men of the book into manual
workers or eulogists of glorious work. Work is not and never will be
glorious. The hole into which the worker sinks is not and will never be
but the vain work of taking earth from here to place it over there, even if
it then means taking it back again: a worthless task whose only price is the
universal equivalent, the everyday gold that is exchanged for bread. This
is the ordinary cycle of daily descent into a tomb, from which, for simple
survival, one is reborn each day. It is the cycle of production and repro-
duction, of births lapsing into anonymity, into a repetition aping a simple
eternity, without fold [repli]; in short, everything that is encapsulated,
in the very name proletarian, and that strikes with derision any rituals
designed for the consecration of work.
So, the consecration can only be added on the side [ne peut tre qu ct].
It must be conceived from within the very difference of Sundays libations,
the intoxications of which disturb the ordinary course of the working day
and the restorative night. Its on the basis of this other gap [trou], hollowed
out in the commonness of a destiny [destin], that the consecration of human
generations is possible. In contrast to the more fortunate who possibly
claim to be poets and fiddle joyfully about with their quills the daily bread
pulled from the pit is not enough for these workers. In these little glasses
of the day after payday they honourably reserve [...] the dimension of the
sacred in existence by a work stoppage, an awaiting, and the momentary
suicide. And no doubt they do so unaware of this honour, without saying
what it is or elucidating this ceremony.61 They fail to see symbolized the
chimera which supplements work, nourishment and reproduction, to see
it magnified close to them by the gold of the setting sun in a stand of tall
trees.
At the hour the constellations light up, above the sleeping gravediggers,
the task of the poet-Hamlet thus becomes clear: it is to fix the points of
clarity which give to the slumped honour of the herd the chimerical glory it
seeks instinctively. This programme contains no populism. Mallarm could
lend the support of his daughter and his verse to the makeshift theatre that
his young cousins, Paul and Victor Margueritte, put on in a barn at Valvins,
but he was unable to share in the unanimist illusions of the theatre of the
people. And, in advance, he also poured scorn on what was to become
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 The hymn of spiritual hearts

the programme of the following centurys various futurisms and avant-

gardisms: lighten, through dilution into the colour of electricity and of the
people, the archaic elsewhere of skies.62 So, there is here neither populist
indulgence, nor futurist anticipation. Any relation to come between the
poet and the people passes, presently, by a decision of separation which
subtracts the task of the poet from the normal cycle of day and night, from
the ordinary exchange of work and gold. Plato separated out the race
of those on whom god had conferred the gold of thought from the men
doomed to the work of iron. By giving the former the symbolic gold and
the command of the city, he forbade them from taking in their hand the
material gold of possessed goods and remunerated work. The separation
of the man with the mattock from the poet effectuates the same type of
division as that between real gold and symbolic gold. Mallarm, however,
marks an essential difference here. For him, nobody, in the composition
of his soul, has been conferred gold or iron from the divinity. Revolutions
were made for precisely this reason: so that whoever is elected can simply
be anyone at all, the first or the last to arrive and devote himself to working
on that other gold, the symbolic gold, whose brilliance equalling the fires
of the vanished sun in the honour of the chimerical race will illuminate
the celebrations of the future. But this nondescript elected representative
fixes a strict division of tasks and metals. In preparing the hymn of spiritual
hearts, the poet must set his own task apart from that of making deals,
whether this is for commercial profit or for social position. So it is not that,
like the Platonic guardians or the monks of the English universities, he
ought to be remunerated by the work done by the men of iron. He must,
like Mallarm, earn his own salary, winning, through his daily job, the gold
of everyday survival in order to devote his nights freely to his task of being
a servant, in advance, of rhythms.63
The poets solitude and the cloud with which he surrounds his verses
must be understood on this basis. Their scope will be misread if they
are likened to the nihilistic will to constitute the oeuvre in a column of
silence, rejecting the democratic and public sphere.64 It would be much
fairer to compare Mallarman restricted action with the Marxist notion
of a necessary maturation of revolutionary conditions. The poets isolation
is strictly linked to the absence of present. We ought to understand the
politics of the dice throw and the ultimate meaning of the fable of the
boat and the siren as follows: the conditions do not yet exist for the
union of poet and crowd in the hymn of spiritual hearts. The extraor-
dinary hour has not arrived, nor has the prodigious auditorium, which
33
 mallarm

is identical to the stage. For the poem and community alike, it is madness
to wager immediately on the replacement of the reign of material gold by
that of symbolic gold: now gold strikes the race directly. The moment has
not arrived to celebrate the splendour of its sunset, that sumptuousness
like a sinking ship, which will not give up, and celebrates sea and sky
as it burns.65 By taking the crash of Panama or any old bank collapse
as the revolutionary dawn, and making himself its hasty eulogist, the
poet himself will be behaving like a risky financier, dragging the gold of
the future into the mediocrity of ordinary bankruptcy. To celebrate the
splendour of the great shipwreck in anticipation will mean that the ship
of the Argonauts of the poem sinks into the abyss. So it is pointless to try
to cut short the tunnel of the times and alight, today already, at some
central station, whose glass dome would become identified with the
community palace in which the hymn of spiritual hearts would ring out.
This is what the small marine fable tells us: the hour is hardly ripe for
some great and glorious shipwreck. It is the hour of the discrete siren who
refuses in advance to disseminate and cause to vanish truths that are still
only in the state of scales or chords played in prelude to a concert.66 It is
better to try these scales and chords while the other crisis is in gestation.
So, it is necessary to understand properly the injunction to solitude
pertaining to the artist and the work. It is precisely due to his solidarity
with the worker, who daily sinks into and is reborn from the common pit
of work, that the poet must isolate himself and sculpt his own tomb,67
deepening the suicide parodied in Saturday night libations. The assertion
according to which the book does not demand a reader, that it takes place
all by itself, ought not to be understood in a contrary sense. It does not
mean that the writer writes only for himself. It means that the book in the
sole material reality of the solitary volume whose leaves simultaneously
conceal and offer their treasure is already the institution of a place. It is not
at all, then, to satisfy the elitism of an aesthete that the book argues against
the brutalities of space, a refolded infinite and intimate delicacy of being in
itself.68 This reserved delicacy is the fold [repli] which turns the cloistral
eternity of space into a world inhabitable for the human community. And
by no means is nihilistic ceremony the reason why its buried meaning
moves and arranges, into a chorus, the pages.69 The tomb of the book, as
sculpted by the suicide of the poet, is what separates the human destiny of
the common grave from the production and reproduction of life. Burial in
the chorus book of the future puts an end to the Saint-Simonian illusion of
the new book. The act of writing has as its place on the paper alone. But,
34
 The hymn of spiritual hearts

moreover, the book preserves the rhythms of the hymn for celebrations of
the future, the innumerable Thousand and One Nights; at which a suddenly
invented reading majority will marvel.70

Musical religion
For a redoubtable game is played around this hymn. The new religion
already has its own temples, its theory and its divinity. The new religion
that henceforth claims to assume the secession of Christianity bears a
name which concentrates the Mallarman problem in its entirety. It
is music. Three texts Sacred Pleasure, Catholicism and The Same,
gathered by Mallarm under the title Services71, have the same well-
defined objective: namely, to understand how what seemed merely to
be one art among others came to play a wholly other role, the role of
being the last plenary human religion.72 The response can be deduced
from two fundamental theses of the Mallarman theory of religion: if the
gods come from language and must return to it, then a purified language
is best able to lay claim to being the last religion. Now, music presents
itself as this language par excellence. And if the essential content of the
Christian religion is the very gesture of elevation, which ranks presence
alongside absence, the baton of the orchestra conductor represents the
final purification of this ritual, which Christian sacrifice compromises
with simulacra of the barbaric feast. Music presents the form of writing
and ritual that is most abstracted from corporeality and figuration. Indeed,
its abstraction is precisely what makes its language the most immediately
accessible. Music explodes the screen of the image and representation.
The abstract shivers that the writing of notes and intervals confides to the
timbre of instruments can thus immediately be transformed into shivers
of emotion. It is this abstraction that transforms aesthetics into the last
religion and enables music to establish, by the most direct paths, the most
perceptible communion between men, in recognition of their chimerical
greatness. We can put this differently: music appears par excellence as that
which, beyond nature, welcomes the sacredness lost by nature in the
age of industry. Nature was the first form, the tangible form of the Idea,
still primitive and caught in the solidity of matter; while music is the last
sacred state, the spiritualized form of the Idea, pulverizing all matter and
image, in a volatile reduction [dpouillement] into corresponding features,
now nearing thought.73
Now, the note that sounds the time to return to the capital is given
35
 mallarm

by the opening of a new season of concerts.74 This apparently frivolous

remark is, for Mallarm, laden with meaning. First of all, the capital is
the place par excellence of consecration of the human abode. Second, the
return of autumn symbolizes the very transmission of the glory of nature
in celebrations of community. Last, the new sacredness of the concert
signifies that glorious form par excellence, the theatre. And yet the theat-
rical place, par excellence, was the opening of the chimeras golden maw,
the temple of popular communion whose little glasses of the evening
after payday contained the derisory promise. The stage is the obvious
focus of pleasures taken in common and the majestic opening to the
mystery whose grandeur one is in the world to envisage.75 The place of
theatre is the human place par excellence, the night which invents its light
and its luxury. But the theatre of the late nineteenth century proves unable
to respond to the promise of magnificence of its golds, velvet and glassware.
The promised glory of the chandeliers brilliance and the curtains fringe
of light is brutally belied by the stage, on which ordinary ladies and
gentlemen see only other ordinary ladies and gentlemen. Those who ask
of art to spellbind them are met by the theatre of representation with the
degree zero of fiction, that is, with simple convention, which, by raising
the curtains to sets depicting everyday banalities, straightaway proclaims:
Suppose that this is really taking place and that you are there!76 The
naturalist convention of modern theatre thus transforms the magnificent
hole of the golden chimera into the simple nothingness of banality looking
at itself in the mirror.
Whence emerges the conquering force of the symphonic deluge.
The baton of the orchestra conductor empties the theatrical space of
those tiresome individuals whose dull stature and coarse anecdotes had
obstructed ideal space, that space of mystery where the greatness hidden in
the scient flank of the public is confronted with the greatness of the stage.

Le miracle de la musique est cette pntration, en rciprocit, du mythe

et de la salle, par quoi se comble jusqu tinceler des arabesques et
dors en traant larrt la bote sonore, lespace vacant, face la
scne : absence daucun, o scarte lassistance et que ne franchit le
personnage.

Lorchestre flotte, remplit et laction, en cours, ne sisole trangre et

nous de demeurons des tmoins : mais, de chaque place, travers les
affres et lclat, tour tour, sommes circulairement le hros [...]
36
 The hymn of spiritual hearts

The miracle of music is this penetration, in reciprocity, of the myth and

the house, topped by the sparkling of arabesques and golds, which trace
the blockage of the pit, the vacant space, facing the stage, the absence
of anyone, where the audience parts and which characters cant cross.

The orchestra floats and fills in, and the action in progress does not seem
isolated or foreign to the spectator, who is no longer just a witness: but,
from each seat, through tortures or gleams, one is each by turns, circu-
larly, the hero [...]77

By destroying the games of representation and recognition, through

its wordless and imageless language, musical action can be identified
with the ritual of consecration of place. And this consecration of place
is also tantamount to the publics celebrating the cult whose hero it is.
However, the celebration at issue can only be a distant one. Mystery
means distance, indeed a twofold distance: the people of the musical
temple no longer look at themselves in the mirror of banality. But neither
do they incorporate any formerly divine greatness. The conductor of the
orchestra, like the priest, better than the priest, pushes back the common
glory that he exhibits. The chimerical animal only ever appropriates its
greatness through an empty space. It comes to it only via the arabesques
which, for the time of a performance, link, across this vacant space, the
orchestral shivers in the golds of the hall with the folds in the dresses
of female spectators. The aesthetic distance of the mystery is also a
political distance. Mallarms difference stands out here from the poetico-
political programme that continued from Romanticism via symbolism and
futurism. In this programme, the poem has the forms of chant and myth
as its essential content: that is, the narrative by which the community
can recognize its principle and, in choirs, sing what it is that makes it a
community. The poem, in short, is symbolic in essence. The Romantic
age contrasted the cold classical allegory with the heat of the symbol that
bears the seal hidden inside itself but susceptible to becoming manifest
again in its sensory truth of community alliance. It takes up on its own
behalf the Platonic dream of the choral city, enchanting itself incessantly
by playing and singing in unison its proper law, itself internalized as the
sensory rhythm of the life of each and all. Mallarm also adopted the
language of the symbol and the idea of a generalized music. But his symbol
bears the property of the allegory. It remains at a distance. The cup is
empty of any brew. Nobody consumes the divine bread and wine. And
37
 mallarm

the musical ceremony is not a choral ceremony. It is an orchestral perfor-

mance in which the crowd participates only silently in the mystery of its
own greatness. The orchestra conductors movement retains the mystery
in its place and warns the crowd about adoring itself in the new temple.
Or rather, it ought to do so. But the privilege accorded to musical silence
has its downside. Music is unable to control its effects, is unable to be reduced
to its own principle. Hegel, in his Aesthetics, already noted this downside of
musical privilege. Music is the art of interiority par excellence, the one in
which mathematical intervals and sonorities of wood, strings and brass have
the power to create, directly, a milieu of ideality enveloping the listener. But
this beautiful interiority is an empty one. Pure musical language is doomed
either to retain its instrumental purity, and therefore not to say anything
bearing meaning; or else to borrow meanings from speech and drama to
express, and thus to find itself, by the same token, the servant of another art.
Mallarm recognized this dilemma. Music is a language whose sublimity is
somewhat suspect, a poem all the more comprehensible for being stilled,
where the composer has the possibility of suspending even the temptation
to explain himself.78 This language without words boasts of its having elimi-
nated the banality of universal reportage. But this ascension of the silent
multitude, crossing literary distances in a single blow and finding itself
directly face to face with the Unutterable and the Pure, poetry without the
words, is perhaps merely a case of enormous and superior reportage.79
Musical language can be self-sufficient only at the price of substituting the
banalities of theatrical recognition for the mystification of the Unutterable.

The god Wagner: poem, music and politics

Is this to say, following Hegel, that music is doomed to turn itself into the
servant of poetry? This would mean forgetting the coup de force which,
since Hegel, has occurred in the relations between music and the poem,
the coup de force of a musician who read Hegel through two of his great
critics, Feuerbach and Schopenhauer: namely, Richard Wagner. Wagner,
in his own way, had already announced the decline of the old theatre of
representation. To the anecdote of opera and its choirs, he contrasted the
new poem specific to the times of peoples and revolutions, that is, the
musical drama, the synthesis of both arts. He thus inverted the second
term of the alternative. The opposite of pure music is not music as
servant of the poem, but as queenly and commanding, relegating the
poetic grimoire to the scrapheap:
38
 The hymn of spiritual hearts

Notre si vieil bat triomphal du grimoire The old gay triumphs of our magic scrawl,
Hiroglyphes dont sexalte le millier Hieroglyphs by the thousand scurrying
A propager de laile un frisson familier To spread familiar flutters with their wing!
Enfouissez-le-moi plutt dans une armoire. Bury them in a cupboard after all.80

Not only does Wagners enterprise not represent unfair competition,

using the brilliancy of voices and instruments against the poems line of
foam; it represents the very absorption of the poem and its politics into
music. Wagner unites the abstraction of musical language its volatile
simplicity [dpouillement], proper to creating a site of communion with
its contrary: the theatre of representation, its fable and its substantial
characters. In this resides the essence of the following famous leitmotiv: the
identification of colours and lines of a character with musical timbres and
themes.81 Wagner, in actual fact, presented this marriage as his revolution,
in opposition to the conventions and vocalises of old opera. And he regis-
tered it within the perspective of a new thought of the poem, one that also
comprises a specific idea about the poems function of community: the
total work of art. Now Mallarm sought precisely to denounce this fusion.
Fraudulently, what Wagner effectuated was a marriage between two
principles and two eras: nature and music, representation and mystery,
the gods of myth and the god of absence, Greek theatre and the Christian
mass. He is the artist who took fright at the novelty of his own art, who was
unable to wait for the hour of the crowd and the celebrations of tomorrow.
As such, he reconciled the tradition of theatre, itself on the verge of
obsolescence, with the virginal, occult energy surging up from his scores.
He brought about a synthesis between the legend of the flown gods and
the power of the absent god: the distant hero, Siegfried, that man of myth
and origins. This hero walks on the mist as one walks on earth. To the
audience he simultaneously offers the stupor of myths and the intimacy
of a familiar appearance by a human individual, even injecting, as a
surplus for the refined, some familiarity into these myths for the people
with a few chance symbols. The upshot of thus leading symbolist mystery
astray, in celebration of myth, is political as well as poetic:

Avec une pit antrieure, un public pour la seconde fois depuis les
temps, hellnique dabord, maintenant germain, considre le secret,
reprsent, dorigines. Quelque singulier bonheur, neuf et barbare,
lasseoit: devant le voile mouvant la subtilit de lorchestration, une
magnificence qui dcore sa gense.

39
 mallarm

The public, with a piety that belongs to former times, first Hellenic, now
Germanic, considers the secret, represented, of origins. Some singular
happiness new and barbarous seats it down: before the moving veil
the subtlety of the orchestration, at a magnificence which decorates its
genesis.82

The fraudulent compromise between music and representation effects

a redoubtable political confusion. It turns the abstract poetic type into a
national hero; it transforms communion through the vacant space into
the peoples real presence to itself, invited to the celebration of community
origin. From then on, the orchestra conductors baton no longer contains
any mystery. Wagner, precisely, interred the orchestra, leaving the public
alone with the hero in person, distant and hazy, but present, the hero in
whom it must recognize the secret of its origin and its community power.
Music, then, is consecrated as the religion of the people, the Eucharist of
the real presence to self of a people defined as a community of origins, of
a people called itself to become the total work of art.
Here Mallarms rupture with Wagnerian fascination asserts itself. As
indignant as Mallarm was towards those who, out of nationalism, wanted
Lohengrin banned from playing in Paris, he all the same sought to oppose
the Wagnerian project to a French spirit, stamped by a specific poetics
and politics: that is, a Cartesian poetics of imaginative abstraction that
refuses the enchantments of legend; and a revolutionary politics of justice
that cuts into the course of history, decapitates kings and refuses, in their
place, to have the people celebrate as a real body. The scenic act, like the
modern political act, has a duty to be strictly allegorical, withdrawn from all
embodiment of anonymous power. The century and country that dissolved
the myths of both origin and sovereignty were unable to acquiesce to their
restoration. Rather, to the myth that offers a community its own living
image, it is necessary to oppose the type without prior designation, a pure
combination of aspects and the power of acts able, by their abstraction, to
encapsulate our dreams of places or paradises without embodying them.
The play of symbols needs only the imaginary space of origins. It needs
only the fictive focal point of the eyes of a crowd. Moreover, opposed to
the collective narrative amplified by the orchestral deluge stands the fable,
virgin of anything: place, time or known characters, and alone apt to
express the anonymous greatness of the crowd, the sense which is latent
in everyones striving, and which allows for Man and his authentic earthly
abode to exchange a reciprocity of proofs.83
40
 The hymn of spiritual hearts

At stake, then, is something altogether different from some sort of unfair

competition between the arts. At stake is the status of fiction, and the
relation between the status of fiction and the communitys way of being.
In view of the concordance between the occult power of the abyss of
musical execution and the vain hunger of that furious chasm the crowd
and its epoch carefully frustrated by the social arrangement the cause
of the small poetic siren is also the cause of justice, whose flap of wing
has to dust off the domes of glass designed for the celebrations of the
future. We have already seen that fiction is much more than the arranging
of fables or filling the imaginary with delights, that it is the very method of
the human spirit, by which it separates itself from myth to project its own
light. The way in which music, which ought to consecrate this separation,
was, on the contrary, able to restore myth is exemplary. And it also reveals
the political stakes of the purification of fiction, of its return to the purified
power of the verb.
The programme is thus clearly laid down. The fascinating and disastrous
hymen of the musical storm and poetical ship must be contrasted with
fictions return to the power of the verb purified by musical abstraction.
The revolution that music operates, in relation to the newspaper and to the
representative status of theatre, is too serious a thing to be left to the blind
impatience of musicians. It is up to the language of words to retranslate
the revolution that the language of instrumental rendings introduces into
both the poem and human ritual,

[...] car, ce nest pas de sonorits lmentaires par les cuivres les cordes,
les bois, indniablement, mais de lintellectuelle parole son apoge
que doit avec plnitude et vidence rsulter, en tant que lensemble des
rapports existants dans tout, la Musique.

[...] for it is not through the elementary sounds of brasses, strings

or woods, but undeniably through the intellectual word at its height
that there should result, with plenitude and obviousness, as the totality
of relations existing in everything, the system otherwise known as
Music.84

This is the fundamental stake of the crisis of verse, which Verlaines

impair verse inaugurated, free verse pursued, and contemporary dreams
of verbal instrumentation wanted to settle. By breaking up classical
literary rhythms and dispersing them into articulated shivers close to
41
 mallarm

instrumentation, what is in gestation is the art of achieving the trans

position, into the Book, of the symphony, the reconquest by poetry of its
own good, which is also the procedure itself of the human spirit.

42
 The duty of the book

Here is where Mallarms difficulty begins, and it must be well defined.

The difficulty lies not in understanding what Mallarm says in his poems.
The difficulty lies in the task that he set himself as a poet. This difficulty, in
its turn, must be distinguished from general psychological considerations
about anxiety, faced with the white page. Mallarms specific problem is
not that of the schoolchild or the obsessive individual wondering how he
will blacken his page. Mallarms problem is linked to the fact that the
page is not only the material support of the poem, or the allegory of its
obligation. It belongs to the very movement and texture of the poem. The
surface of writing is the place of a taking-place. The poems concluding
white marks the return of the poem to the silence whence it emerged,
but no longer is it the same white or the same silence. It is a deter-
minate silence where the happenstance of some leaf of paper has been
vanquished. And this victory is not the simple exercise of a specific virtu-
osity. It belongs to the movement by which man appropriates a humanity
that is a match for the game of the world. To the luminous splendour of
the alphabet of stars placed against a dark background, responds the
movement of writing: man pursues black on white.
Put another way, the problem stems not from the fact of writing, but from
the mission attributed to the poem and the constraints that this imposes on
its writing. Let us recapitulate: the poem is not only a work of art. Fiction
is not simply the work of the imagination. It is properly speaking that which
must take up the succession from religion qua elevation of the human to
its greatness and the principle of a community keyed to that greatness. The
task involved in succeeding from religion consists neither in some prosaic
demystification of its celestial content, nor in the reappropriation of its

43
 mallarm

sacredness on behalf of humanity. Poetry, in short, must not constitute a

new religion, not even that of humankind. It must, reaching further back
than the religion of music, return us to the origin of all religion as such,
to the poems immanent to humanity in its original form.85 But these,
humanitys original poems, are not myths buried in the collective uncon-
scious; they are forms-of-world that are to be resuscitated by the ordering
of words. The poem geared to serving this function is itself subject to a strict
set of conditions. It can no longer recount stories in the old style or describe
what nature suffices to produce, nor by any means replace the description
of characters, feeling and objects with the enunciation of philosophical
messages. The young Valry summed this up as follows: the poems high
symphony liberates the poet from the banal rescue of banal philosophies,
false tenderness and lifeless descriptions. But, by turning away from repre-
sentation as from dissertation, the poem is unable to abdicate the privilege
of speech and thought for the ineffability of song. And if it has the
instantaneousness of a vanishing act, it is nevertheless not to be identified
with the pure happening of the living artwork, with the effusion of the
community presenting itself to itself. Poes opinion was the one Mallarm
revered: no vestige of any philosophy ought to appear in the work. He
was quick to add, however, that philosophy must be included and latent.
What is a latent philosophy? To be sure, not without ruining the stated
postulates can it consist in a philosophical meaning to be discovered in
the fable of the poem. If philosophy is present, it must therefore be in the
specific way in which thought takes place, in which the Idea is inscribed
in the form of a poem, on this side of the ordinary forms of discursive
thought. Mallarms text gives a twofold figure to this first inscription: the
burst of song, on this side of the concept, and the inscription of its power of
thought, on this side of words, in the white which separates and surrounds
the lines of the chant:

Le chant jaillit de source inne: antrieure un concept, si purement

que reflter, au-dehors, mille rythmes dimages. [] Larmature intellec-
tuelle du pome se dissimule et tient a lieu dans lespace qui isole les
strophes et parmi le blanc du papier.

Song breaks forth from an innate source: prior to a concept, as purely as

reflecting, outside, a thousand rhythms of images. [...] The intellectual
armoury of the poem is dissimulated and holds takes place in the
space which isolates the stanzas and among the white of the paper.86
44
 The duty of the book

The poem as thought: a secular history

How are we to understand the relation of this innate breaking forth
and this invisible architecture as the latent and effective philosophy
of the poem? For this, we must reset the Mallarman project within a
discussion of the poems capacities of thought, a discussion that was also
a century old. In the times when Hegel, Schelling and Hlderlin jotted
down on a bit of paper their project for a poetry-religion for the people,
the Schlegel brothers elaborated the idea of a poetry-thought, of a type
of poetry in furtherance of thought and capable of reflecting, by itself,
on the infinite. In this era, young German thinkers were proposing to
prolong Frances frozen Revolution by elaborating what it had lacked: a
spiritual revolution. And, with this idea of spiritual revolution, all sorts of
discoveries and rediscoveries came to swirl around together: the chemical
decomposition of bodies, the Kantian chemistry of the faculties of mind,
the dissolving powers of irony and the revolutionary dissolution of old
orders; electric energy, Leibnizian dynamism and the transcendent fantasy
of Don Quichotte retranslated; the Spinozist natura naturans, the rediscovered
power of myth and of ancient epos and animal magnetism; the science of
hieroglyphic decipherment, that which penetrates the living meaning of
symbols and reads the age and the law of constitution of minerals; the
power of nature manifested in its formations, the power of images and the
educational novel of the artistic soul, who in Wilhelm Meister had found his
bible. The progressive universal poetry thus named by Friedrich Schlegel
combined, within this whirlwind, two leading images. On the one hand,
the theory of wit defined an electric form of poetry, constituting, between
hackneyed words and significations, the differences of potential that
generate the lightning flash to bring them to life and establish new and
indefinitely renewable potentialities of meaning. On the other, the theory
of the symbol registered that power of electrifying within a natural history
of poeticity; the history of a poetic power of nature and of life, constantly
creating new forms and being written in more and more elaborate and
significant figures on these forms. The poetic games of Witz thus crowned
this movement, marking a poeticity already inscribed within the structure
of the collective poem formed by language itself, summoned to always
higher forms of self-symbolization. The poems power of thought simulta-
neously consisted in the power of mind to deny finite determination and
fossilized meaning, and the power of life that through its self-reflection
never ceases to elevate itself to new forms.

45
 mallarm

In his Lessons on Aesthetics, an old Hegel set this extravagance of thought

in order. He shattered the idea of the poem of the poem, of the poem as
self reflection, in which the two brothers had generously identified the
active power of thought, qua that which knows itself in the inert virtue of
the image-returning mirror. To the power of the poems self knowledge
he contrasted the clear division of two modes of existence of thought.
On the one hand, there was thought outside of itself, thought having
become the spirit of the painting, the smile of the god of stone, the image
and rhythm of the poem; a thought entirely bound up in the material it
animates and raises to ideality: stone, wood, colour, sound or language.
On the other, there was thought in its proper element, no longer having to
concern itself with materials, other than a language of signs that is indif-
ferent to what it signifies. This division fixed the powers of poetry and its
limits. In poetry, as in all art, the mind manifested itself only as the power
of organization and interiority of a sensory weave. And doubtless the art of
poetry was that where the matter was finest. It had the most ideal of
contents, namely the very representations of mind; and the most ideal
of materials, namely language. Through poetrys power to whip words
into images, more than through any other art, prosaic consciousness
would find it was clearer, and the mind would pave the way toward its
own clarification. This is why it was the general art. But this power had
its strict complement. In manifesting thought, other arts came up against
the resistance of the stone, the wood or the colour applied to a surface.
Poetry, though, concerned itself only with the purest form, that supreme
form of opacity which resists the mind: that is, the minds opacity to itself
and languages resistance to becoming the simple instrument of thought.
Poetrys power of thought is that of a spirit which does not yet know itself
except in the figure and rhythm of a language that itself is still caught in
the figurativeness of images and the temporal thickness of its materiality.
More than in any other art form, it was in poetry that the following
general law would appear: art only arises wherever thought does not think
itself, wherever thought is separated from itself.
We can put this differently and say that the mind can express itself in
three material aspects: first, there is plastic form, in which it expresses
adequately what it knows about itself in a resistant material and, by the
same token, what it ignores about itself; second, there is the language of
signs, the language which functions as a simple medium of communi-
cation, common to the modern prose of the world of interests and laws
and to the expression of thought in itself; and then there is the third
46
 The duty of the book

mode: that of the symbol. The romantic theory of the poem privileged this
mode, wherein meaning was not enclosed within the solitude of words,
but inscribed in the very texture of the sensory, a witness to the power of
a mind that creates living forms, that already bears, even obscurely, signi-
fications to be deciphered by a superior form of poem. Here is the point on
which Hegels surgical operation bears. This double nature of the symbol,
for him, is a sign not of force but of weakness. The symbol is that bat-like
creature that simultaneously takes after both form and sign. It is the form
that tells us: do not be deceived, I am more than form, I am the writing
of a thought. It delineates and has us recognize a lion, but simultaneously
wants us to recognize in it a force, a majesty or a king. The symbol builds
a pyramid of stone and wants us to read in it the mystery of death and
the beyond. Conversely, however, it is the form of writing which pretends
to be more than writing, and already to be presenting the sensible form
of what it names. Wanting to cumulate the powers of form and thought,
it lacks both of them. Thus form talks only when it is limited to its own
power. In this way, the Greek statue, in its plastic perfection, expressed
the idea still very material but well determined that the Greek people
entertained of divinity. It passed on wholly to the stone a thought that
it would fall to a subsequent discourse to translate into the language of
words and into the history of the mind. The symbol, as for it, wants to pull
ahead, to inscribe the meaning that it fails to master in the matter that it
fails to give form to. It lets us see the work of an intention which strives,
though without managing it, to place an idea in a material, which seeks
to define the idea of courage and finds merely a lion, an outline deprived
of the spiritual power of form, itself reduced to the role of substituting
a thought. Symbolism, then, is not only the first age of art, but more
generally thoughts failure to give itself body, the cloud that floats on the
border between two modes of thought and that menaces the thinking that
claims to unite them in one.
This is precisely the menace that weighs on poetrys pretension to be
thought by itself, of itself. The supreme form of art, poetry purified simul-
taneously the representations of the mind and the material of language.
It brought them to the point at which the mind, clear to itself, could be
uttered in an exact language and be recognized in the forms in which it
was externalized. This is as much to say that, in coming to know itself,
the mind no longer needs poetry, but also that the very matter of poetry
escapes it. For poetry thrived on a twofold opacity: the opacity of language,
its resistance to the traversal of meaning; but also the spirits opacity to
47
 mallarm

itself, its distance to itself, which constrained it to go looking for itself in the
materiality of the figure. Wherever this twofold opacity is missing, poetry
loses its unconscious finality of form. It thus seeks to make up for what it
loses in formal power by jumping across to the other side of the barrier, by
attributing to itself the power of thought which knows itself. But it thereby
ceases to be poetry, nevertheless without becoming philosophy. It loses
itself in the fogs of humour and feeling, in the border cloud of the symbol
enclosing those who aim to occupy both sides at once. Thought must be
either on one side or the other, in the interiority of thought or in the exteri-
ority of the sensory. The work claiming to unite these two modes of thought
misses them both. The poem of the poem is simply the poem that wants
to turn the desertion of its form into the proof of its character of thought.

Music, dance, poem: the circle of mimesis

Mallarm seems to have known Hegelian thought only through inter-
mediary persons. His notion of the poetic symbol is nevertheless defined
by the frame of division traced by Hegels thought. This notion rises,
in its own way, to the Hegelian challenge, or confronts its prohibition.
Doubtless Mallarms thinking was far removed from the Romantic
theory of generalized symbolism. The French theory of fiction rejects
this presence of meaning at the power of formation of things. It strictly
maintains the division between nature, which simply is, and its beyond. It
lays claim, on the other hand, to the power that Hegel denied the poem:
that of a thinking which is the immediate identity of thought and form,
in the element of thought itself; and that of an abstract language which
simultaneously writes, in the traces of signs, the power of thought which
gave rise to it. The poem nears the Idea, says Mallarm. But how are we
to conceive this proximity? In its immediate context, the poem contrasts
the signifying structure of the poetic verb with the claims of instrumental
music and its language, conveniently exempt from explaining itself.
However, if poetry nears the Idea, it is because it is music par excellence,
the true music of which the other is only an imitation; in short, it is
because the mode of supreme manifestation of the Idea is a pure music, of
which strings and woodwind instruments give a mere imitation. However,
here is woven a singularly complex relationship between model and copy.
Poetry is more musical than music, for two reasons that are presented as
equivalent: first, because it is the art of the verb, of thought expressed,
which contrasts with the orchestras mutism; and second, because it is
48
 The duty of the book

the art of silence, of the tacit concert or of the tacit flight of abstraction,
which contrasts with its clamour it is the same thing as the orchestra,
except literarily or silently.87
How are we to understand the relationship between this mutism and
this silence? Music presented the paradigm of a language which, more
radically than conceptual abstraction, dismissed the brutality of desig-
nation; of a sensory language of the number, apt both to replace things
with the relations connecting them and to have the harmony of these
relations communicate directly, in a determinate time and place, with
the types and the accords of our inner theatre as with the unconscious
greatness of the gathered crowd. In musical presentation, it is no longer
things that are mimed, but the idea itself. Musical fiction draws the idea
in the form of a rhythm. It draws it in its new status: the unity in act
of scattered fragments of beauty, awakening through the distribution of
voices, motifs and differences of intensity, the slumbering poeticity at
the core of any multiplicity whatever. Music purifies fiction, separates
it from the figure in order to commit it to the intellectual power of the
rhythm. It recovers, in short, its Greek meaning and its Platonic function:
the transcription of mathematical harmony which creates a kosmos, the
power to elicit in the soul of the individual and of the city the virtuality of
a harmony that imitates the harmony of divine beings or, in Mallarman
terms, the play written in the folio of the sky. Use Music in the Greek
sense, meaning, basically, idea or the rhythm between connections;88 this
is the idea of music that the orchestra imitates and that it simultaneously
betrays with the noisy and industrial mutism of gut strings and pistons.
The orchestra is thus like the silent and noisy letter that knows not
whereof it speaks. But here the old Platonic theme takes on a paradoxical
figure. This is because for Mallarm, contrary to Plato, living discourse is
called writing. It is the writing, or the word, of the spirit as opposed to
the gossipy mutism of voices: that is, to the orchestras clamour but also
to the discourse of the concept, which itself fails to go beyond the power of
the most beautiful speeches to come out of some mouth. Thoughts mode
of expression as rhythm is anterior to and higher than its discursive mode.
It delineates not at all the result of a thought, but the movement itself of
its flight. The dialectic of the verse:

ressuscite au degr glorieux ce qui, tout sr, philosophique, imaginatif

et clatant que ce ft, [] ne resterait, son dfaut que les plus beaux
discours mans de quelque bouche. A travers un nouvel tat, sublime,
49
 mallarm

il y a recommencement des conditions ainsi que des matriaux de la

pense sis naturellement pour un devoir de prose: comme des vocables,
eux-mmes, aprs cette diffrence et lessor au-del, atteignant leur vertu.

resuscitates, to the degree that it, glorious and philosophical and imagi-
native, revives a celestial vision of humanity ! without it there is just
beautiful discourse out of some mouth. In this new sublime state, there
is a fresh beginning of the conditions and materials of thought, laid
down naturally for a prose study: the vocables, by themselves, after this
difference and the experience of the beyond, find their virtue.89

The dialectic of the verse is introduced at the price of a remarkable

reversal. The music of the orchestra dismissed the coarseness of the
imitative figure and the theatre of representation. The primary music
of the poem purifies the coarseness of the orchestral tumult. But it is
in a new theatre that thought lays its wings blow the figures of its
movement open to view, that the spirit shows itself as theatre. Only this
theatralization renders to words their primary virtue prior to discourse.
What, in fact, is this original virtue of words? It can only be understood
in two ways. First, there is the old and ineradicable idea scoffed at by
Plato in the Cratylus: that the sounds of words are similar to what they
say. Doubtless Mallarm, in Les Mots anglais, makes more than one pledge
toward a neo-Cratylism, when, in the chapter on sibilants, he becomes
intoxicated with the rapidity and the exaggeration of sw, the stability and
frankness of st, the good sentiments of sm and the rampant perversity of
sn. But this science of sounds announces straightaway the colour of the
chimera, and in Crisis of verse its principle is fixed once and for all: it is
because words do not resemble things that verse receives its function as
higher currency and as a new word, closer to thought. If the flight of verse
gives words their virtue, it is not by moving them closer to their origin;
on the contrary, it is by the oblique movement which draws them outside
of themselves and enables them to light up through reciprocal reflections
like a virtual swooping of fire across precious stones.90
We find ourselves, then, before the Hegelian core of the problem: what
are we to do so that this silent pyrotechnics of words can become more
than simply the most beautiful metaphor illustrating a purely empty
intention? Where are we to find the paradigm enabling us to think the
poem of the pure spirit, meaning by this not at all one which, as in Vigny,
celebrates the purity of the spirit, but instead one which presents us its
50
 The duty of the book

effective theatre? To this question, we can give a response that is at first

glance surprising. The theatre of the pure spirit that the page of writing
must institute has a privileged model: ballet, that minor art forgotten
by Hegel. The silent music of the spirit, its bare writing, is illustrated
nowhere better than in the figures traced by the illiterate ballerina with
her steps, or even, like Loe Fuller, with the movement of her skirt. Better
than music, more precisely than it, dance institutes the pure place of an
ideality. Never, by its lone act, will a step be able to represent or to suggest
any object, story or feeling. But, clearly, an arts pure capacity for fiction
stands in inverse ratio to that offered by the ordinary games of recognition.
Of the scattered general beauty, flower, waves, cloud and jewel, the
dancers flighted form will never give us the representation nor even the
impression. What it draws is the pure trajectory between a virtual aspect
and a mind able to divine it and recognize it as analogue to the types and
accords of its inner theatre. The dancers flighted form thereby carries
out the programme that is proposed for the new poem: To institute an
exact relation between images, and let detach there a third, blendable and
clear aspect, presented for divination.91 And it lends its exact model to the
elocutionary disappearance of the poet, by its vanishing as individuality
in the pure writing of steps which cause any anecdote to disappear:

The judgement or axiom to be affirmed in the case of ballet!

Namely, that the dancer is not a woman dancing, for these juxtaposed
reasons: that she is not a woman, but a metaphor summing up one of the
elementary aspects of our form: knife, goblet, flower, etc., and that she
is not dancing, but suggesting, through the miracle of bends and leaps, a
kind of corporeal writing, what it would take pages of prose, dialogue
and description to express, if it were transcribed: a poem independent
of any scribal apparatus.92

Similarly, the appeal to the fractioning of equal motifs and to the

reciprocity of fires between the words of the poem finds its strict model in the
following choreographic law: that the first subject, unclassifiable, of dance,
in its ceaseless ubiquity, is a moving synthesis of the attitudes of each group;
just as each group is only a fraction, detailing the whole, of the infinite.93 It is
this pure relationship of reciprocity between types and the synthesis of their
attitudes that is lost in the loquacious vacuity of the theatre, as illustrated
on stage at the Thtre Franais, where the members who play Laertes or
51
 mallarm

Polonius want to impose their character, instead of being merely walk-ons,

that is, tapestry motifs typified by their juvenile shadow, that latent lord who
cannot become, Hamlet. The real writing of the mind can be seen in the pure
plastic figure that is illustrated in the silent discourse of the dancer, in which
is encapsulated the few summary equations of all fantasy.94
The poem of the pure spirit is, then, drawn into a singular spiral.
The silent language of music freed it from the coarseness of figuration
and representation. But it had to avow the emptiness of this wordless
language, concealed by the clamour of bare sounds. It admitted to being
a copy or caricature of the true, silent music of the poem. Of this silent
music the ballerina, then, provided the model: the writing of truth,
writing without words. The exteriority of the figure thus returns as the
mode of the manifestation of the idea. However, it is still in the mode of a
simulacrum that this rather unconscious revealer proposes a realization
of it, as she simulates with the movements of her dress an impatience of
plumes toward the idea. Only the gaze of the poet used to dreaming is
able to recognize in it the choreography of the mind which is misrecog-
nized by the choreographers of the stage. Ballet seemed to furnish the
poem with its model. Yet it remains no more than its caricature. The silent
writing of the dancer copies, vainly and unconsciously, the true choreog-
raphy of the idea, which is that of the words of the poem. Always, the book
of verse springs forth as the true theatre of the mind, the theatre which
imitates only the Idea and of which every other art is a simple imitation.
But Mallarm never managed to conceive this first model, except as the
imitation of its imitations. In this infinite recourse, Jacques Derrida not
long ago lauded Mallarms subversion of the Platonic system of the idea-
model and the copy.95 But two things have to be distinguished. Mallarm
dismissed the art of representation of the idea-model, but maintained
a mimetic status for the poem: the poem imitates no model, but traces
perceptibly the movement of the Idea, the idea as the movement of its
own breaking forth. That the idea is only fiction does not prevent there
from being a first copy of its movement, one that is to be found, mimed in
the writing of timbres and of steps and is to be repatriated to the book in
its anteriority. The supreme artifice must be a veridical copy of the written
piece in the folio of the sky. The first copy cannot show its model. It must
no less be masterfully authenticated, in order to show, through the last
full stop which consecrates it and the silence that closes it, that it really
is the first copy. It must present the nuptial proofs of the Idea, the ritual
or the first sacrament of which the others repeat the symbol.
52
 The duty of the book

The problems of the white of the page, and infinite dream and detachment
[recul] of the book, have to be grasped in this logic. They do not pertain to an
anxiety that the psychoanalyst would have to explain to us or to the reprisal
of a millenary esoteric dream to which the Cabbalist specialists would
alone have the key. The orphic explanation of the earth, whose intention
Mallarm follows, is not the business of the Cabbalists and the books
detachment hardly the result of the heavy secrets that he would have to
transmit to us of some long tradition. Orpheus task does not suppose long
vigils over old grimoires, only a short to-and-fro to the land of the dead, to
return the dead woman to the surface without turning back towards her,
without constituting her as an object of the gaze. Likewise, to the orphic
poet it is enough, for every cosmogony, to inscribe the premier rite of the
idea, projecting onto that which is only the light of what has disappeared,
to show, in its authenticity, a leaf of a book authenticating our abode. It has
only to be shown that this leaf is really and truly authentic, that it actually
imitates the idea, that music of relations between everything, whose
authentic imitation can only be perceived in the copies which falsify it.
The circle of mimesis: the poet who is satisfied by no fruits here, and
refuses to mime banal philosophies, false tenderness and lifeless descrip-
tions, is no less strictly held to attest is that what he has placed in his poem
really is the relish of their learned lack, the perfume of what is absent
from all bouquets. Words only can attest to this, but they are also insuf-
ficient to do so, unless the arabesque linking them in a phrase happens
to match some originary mould of syntax, and to show the adequation of
its structure to the primitive rumbles of logic96; unless their disposition
on the page of writing sets between them a distance equal to that which
separates the flashes of the mind that the idea summons up. For want
of such writing, ever since Plato another type of writing has always had
to stand in for it; one that is both less than written, similar to the breath
of the spirit, and more than written, either as it is averred in the body
of one who fulfils speech, or etched into the very texture of things. The
Mallarman theory of fiction rejects the figures of carnal incorporation and
immaterial breath. It is necessary, then, that these two figures of another
type of writing merge in the sole materiality of the book. This materiality
is more than written: it is the casting of the idea, the light of the spirit
materially reproduced in the declivity of words on the page. And it is less
than written: the power of the word must be held in the mere white which
provides the poem with its invisible architecture. The true choreography of
the idea is the paper which must attest it in the arrangement, on the white
53
 mallarm

of the open page, of unequal lines of characters borrowed from diverse

fonts, apt to reproduce the topography of the theatre of the spirit, in the
authenticity which rivals it with the folio of the sky.

The authentic page

Such, we know, is the arrangement of A Dice Throw. There is no great diffi-
culty in understanding what this poem means either. There is no need
to discover in it, as this or that interpreter, the seven days of the creation
of the world. It is hardly the Spirit of God that breathes on its waters. The
setting it depicts is one with which we are already familiar: the course of
the poetic ship on the seas of the times. In Vignys era, one threw bottles
onto the seas, in alexandrines, bottles of poetic messages intended for
posterity, charged with the task that is identical to all of posterity: hosting
the heritage of the ideal that was misrecognized in its time. In Mallarms
epoch, one had forgotten the manoeuvre, lost with the ancient bar of the
alexandrine, which had been sabotaged by the adept of uneven verse and
then that of free verse, before being carried to its tomb by the Hugolian
ogre. But this loss of traditional knowledge is linked to a more exact
knowledge of the ocean of the times that must transmit the legacy of the
present to the future. The Ocean no longer metaphorizes the passage from
the tribulations of the times to the triumphs of the future. It is the chasm
of vain hunger, the opening of the Chimeras maw, apt to consume that
future in advance, and to adapt its gaping depth to any ships hull. The
crisis of verse is itself part of the crisis of the ideal, itself the complement
of the social crisis. The crisis of the ideal is the absence of ideal gold proper
to founding popular worship: the thousand-fold joyous amplification of
the sky-instinct in each of us.97 Correlatively, the crisis is also the insatiable
hunger of the chimera of the crowd frustrated by the social arrangement,
the surge of the crowd, jubilating so little that it notices the coarse imagery
of its divinity.98 This conflagration of the unanimous horizon encourages
the decisive movement, illuminating the gold of the vessel that sinks the
celebrations of the future. But this casting can no longer be that of the
message entrusted to time, enclosed in its bottle. What the unanimous
horizon contains of mixed promises and threats prohibits the ancient game
of the bottle at sea, the game played in the name of ocean waves. The
forgetting of the ancient manoeuvre and the change of accessories means
the following: that the spirit is no longer that which one throws to sea, a
message to enclose in a watertight container. It is the pure power to project
54
 The duty of the book

oneself, to trace a drawing of oneself on a specific space. With his two die,
the spirit must, upon the place which denies it, institute its place, create its
theatre: great shipwreck or waveform of the siren? Is it a mystery, hurled,
howled or a simple insinuation inrolled in silence with irony? The
unique occasion is also an absolute risk. The number must be transmitted
and not betrayed. It must be transmitted perfectly, proceeding victoriously,
word by word, over chance in its threefold form: the authors personality,
the subjects triviality, and languages irreducibility. But this vanquished
chance, accomplished rite of the Idea, will only ever be a throw of the dice
a hyperbolical affirmation of pure contingency. And this game of denying
and reaffirming chance must itself be passed on, without becoming lost in
it, to another chance, that of the outspread chasm ready to engulf it. That
is why it is necessary to include in the game the hesitation to play it, to plot
in the cast of the poem, in its victory over its own chance, the risky game
it plays with the chasm. It is necessary, for the celebrations of the future,
to unfold that recommencement of conditions as well as of materials of
thought, and to hide it from the present pit of vain hunger. At this cost,
the vanishing trace of the Idea is not a zero-sum game, a simple equality of
hypotheses carried on, carried off by the writing of lines as by that of steps;
rather, it operates that triumphal reversal spoken of in Restricted Action,
the projection of radical doubt into celestial hyperbole, and the fixation of
swirling fiction in a fixed point where the constellation inscribed on some
vacant and superior surface avers the number of its stars as the exact rite
of the Idea, and authentic fragment of the Book: the successive shock/in
the way of stars/of a total account in the making/keeping vigil/doubting/
rolling/shining and meditating/before coming to a halt/at some terminus
that sanctifies it.99
What, in a sense, the poem says, we know from the siren of Hushed to
the crushing cloud, the septet of the Sonnet in yx, the dilemma staged
by the prose of About the Book and the meditations accompanying the
chronicles of Scribbled at the Theatre. But what the poem says about the
poem is one thing and what the poem effectuates as poem is another. There
is what the poem effectuates in its particularity as a singular elevation of
the chalice-calyx, and there is the primary sacrament that this elevation
repeats. The Dice Throw has been lost if all it announces is either the ideal
or the metaphor of poetic work. It has to be the foremost sacrament by
which every effectuation, and the siren in particular, are consecrated.
What the Book must do what it must spread across the double page and
conceal in the fold [repli] of the volume is to fix and authenticate the
55
 mallarm

first rite. Without this authentification, the singular poem proceeds in the
manner of the dancer, pricking an object and unrolling our convictions
in a writing of pirouettes extended towards another motif [...] without
any moments having any reality, and what happens is, finally, nothing at
all.100 There is most certainly nothing pejorative in this nothing, which
opposes, gloriously, pure fiction to the banalities of representation. Yet its
linkage with the infinite as far as a place merges with the beyond must
still be assured.101 The Book, or its page witness, assures this linkage. But
it assures it on condition of presenting the figure that resembles materially
what it says and what the poem does in general. The game of the ship and
the Ocean, of the hand which retains and casts, of the rolling dice and the
sidereal count ending at the point of sacredness, must be proven for every
poem to come, for every firework display illuminating the celebrations of
the future. It is here that the anti-mimetic mimetism of the Idea reaches its
point of paradox. Only typographical mimesis can attest that it really is the
primary game of the spirit which is inscribed here. However, it is only able
to attest to it at the price of simply miming, on the double page, the ships
listing or the constellations tracing. We know the famous pages in which
Paul Valry summed up the felt effect of seeing the storm of thought thus
projected black on white: It seemed to me I had seen the figure of a thought
for the first time placed in our space [...] Here, veritably, extension spoke,
dreamt, gave birth to temporal forms. Expectation, doubt, concentration
were visible things. My view was engaged with silences which would have
taken shape [...] there, on the very paper, I know not what scintillation of
last stars trembled infinitely pure in the same interconscious void where,
like a matter of new species, distributed in clusters, in trails, in systems,
co-existed Speech! He had tried, I thought, at last to raise a page to the power of
the starry sky.102 But the condition of this pure mimesis of pure thought is
given by Mallarm unequivocally. The poem that has refused to include on
the subtle paper the palace stone and the forest wood must strictly imitate
the history which is its metaphor:

La constellation y affectera daprs des lois exactes, et autant quil est

permis un texte imprim, fatalement, une allure de constellation. Le
vaisseau y donne de la bande, du haut dune page lautre, etc. : car
[...] le rythme dune phrase au sujet dun acte ou mme dun objet na
de sens que sil les imite et, figur sur le papier, repris par les Lettres
lestampe originelle, en doit rendre, malgr tout quelque chose [...]. La
littrature fait ainsi sa preuve: pas dautre raison dcrire sur du papier.
56
 The duty of the book

In this poem the constellation will, fatally, assume, according to precise

laws and insofar as it is possible in a printed text, the form of a constel-
lation. The ship will list from the top of one page to the bottom of the
next, etc: for [...] the rhythm of a sentence about an act or even an
object has meaning only if it imitates them and, enacted on paper,
when the Letters have taken over from the original etching must convey
something despite it all [....]. Literature thus makes its proof: there is no
other reason to write on paper.103

Literature must prove itself. In the times of mimesis and Belles Lettres, of
genres and the poetic arts, it was enough for each poem to present the fable
and style appropriate to the rules and usages of the genre that it illustrated.
To this formal proof was added or substituted, depending on the case
the proof by effects: the pleasure or emotion felt by people of taste. In the
last instance, the nature of what was represented prescribed the forms
of its representation: tragedy for kings, comedy for the bourgeois, and
pastoral for the shepherds, with the metres and the figures suitable to each.
The word literature primarily means that what is represented prescribes
neither genre nor style. No writing can designate the rule or the public
that testifies for it. It must, each time, prove that it really is literature, a
singular effectuation of that power without norm which is verified alone
by its act. This obligation leads to a first paradox, which can be called the
Flaubert paradox: the less that literature owes to what it represents, the
more it proves that this power really is its own. It constitutes, line by
line, the proof of its minute and decisive difference. This also means that
it is, with each line, at the edge of cancellation, which, in any case, will
triumph in the white following the last word. To refuse that headlong rush
that takes the name of prose requires that literature inscribe in itself not
only the rhythm separating the verse from the newspaper, but also the
initial movement which consecrates it, the real presence of its idea.
Literature, then, rediscovers the circle of the Christian proof of Scripture.
The Book had to prove that it indeed was the voice of God; it proved this
through the incarnation of the Word, the consecration of bread and wine,
and the suffering body on the cross, dead and raised from the dead. It was
further necessary to prove through the Book that the one who had trans-
formed the Book in truth was indeed the same one that the Book itself had
announced, that each episode of the Passion, whereby body was given to
the speech of the prophets, was well proven by its conformity with what
was said in figures in their writings. The Book and the Body have to confirm
57
 mallarm

each other indefinitely. And the inheritors of the Book were obliged to carry
endlessly on with confirming it: by the infinite return of the Book on itself,
by the sacrament which is overloaded with symbols in order to confirm the
identity of the text and the body or, conversely, by the sacrifice which goes to
the extreme of dispossession so as to expose a body to the verification of the
letter. By abandoning the codes and hierarchies of representation, literature
rediscovers the circle of the incarnation which avers the text and the text
which avers the incarnation. This repeated dramaturgy then met up with
the great dream of the century: that of the true community, embodying,
beyond any disposition of rights and interests, the living spirit of the human
collective, or the celebration wherein a people attests to its transfiguration
into Truth.104 If the question of the book achieves its greatest radicality
in Mallarm, it is because, more than any other, he wanted to uphold a
twofold requirement: to make the poem into the religion of the future, and
simultaneously to refuse all incarnation for this religion or a body of any sort
to guarantee the poem, whether that of the subject it represents or of the
community that it animates. The poem must be the hymn, harmony, joy, a
pure cluster grouped together in some shining circumstance, tying together
the relations among everything. But the man charged with seeing divinely,
because of the willed limipidity of the links, has only, before his gaze, the
parallelism of pages as model.105 The proof of literature thus achieves its
radicality in the paradox of Mallarm, which can be stated as follows: the
poem must contain, uniquely in the materiality of its arrangement, the
incorporation which guarantees it. Its form must simultaneously be the
body and the idea of its idea. But this last point of the consecration returns
it, perhaps, in accordance with Hegels prediction, to the deadlock of the
symbol: the ship whose form vanishes to assure us that it is not that of a
vulgar ship, but the pure trace of the idea; and the idea which, conversely,
overwhelms the page with its arabesques to make itself into the sinking
vessel of the times and the scintillation of the future that its sunset lights up.
The shadow of the old Hegel convoked here can help us to under-
stand the following: the specificity of Mallarms enterprise, that which
it accomplishes or misses under the name of literature, owes nothing to
the decision of intransitivity; that is, the text that is closed in on itself,
enclosing its meaning or its absence of meaning in the closure of its words,
in opposition to the instrumental language of communication. The works
modern status does not reside in intransitivity. Such, on the contrary, is
its lost paradise, the Greek statue that enclosed, without remainder, the
idea of its god within its form. Literature begins when this unity of matter
58
 The duty of the book

and of what it says is lost, when it must be recreated and submitted to the
test. It begins, for example, with Flauberts paradoxical project: to remake
intentionally the work of these poet-worlds who knew not what they
were doing. The new work, the book about nothing, must be entirely
calculated so as to be identified with the pure mirror in which is reflected
the unconscious relation of the whole to itself. Literatures specificity is
the duty to say more about itself than it does say, more than any discourse
to issue from some mouth is able to say about it. Flauberts genius or
his forgery [supercherie] is to identify this more with a less, to set on a
par with the elocutionary disappearance of the poet, and the supplement
of writing, that passage of the void the infinite which separates,
imperceptibly, the syntactical arrangement of the phrase from its usual
powers of signification. By identifying the realization of the idea with this
imperceptible vibration at the surface of signs, Flaubert could merge it
with the realization of form. This poetic arrangement, moreover, is also
the way in which the political relation is negotiated between the works
and the writers aristocratic exceptionality and the triumphant democracy
expressed by the equality of every subject with every other one and the
scattering of novels to the four winds.
Mallarm refused both arrangements. He was thus obliged to inscribe
in the text the supplement of writing correlative to the poets subtraction,
to make it appear as the unity of conscious intention and unconscious
matter, of vanquished chance and irreducible chance, which forms the
proof of literature. But he also confronted the political paradox. The poem
has to be aristocratic, not simply in spite of the fact that its author is a
good democrat, but because he works for the celebrations to come of a
crowd that the present social arrangement holds, between the pit of work
and the ballot box, far from its glory. This is why he had to identify his
public function with a subtraction from every specific audience. Mixed
with the horror that is provoked by the sentiment of the books required
qualities for averring the chimera is another fear: not the banal fear of
the artist afraid of being met with incomprehension and rejection but the
inverse fear of being too well received by the open maw of the monster,
too quickly understood in his role as bard of the hymn, as organizer of
the new worship of a community celebrating the divinity it knows how
to be. And in fact, regardless of the dull old refrain of the accursed poet,
the century was to understand the promise of the new poem only too
well; this century knew only too well how, before killing them, it could
use poets to chant for the war of right or might, for New Man or the
59
 mallarm

people rendered to its identity, for the glory of the machine and that of
the community: dilution into the colour of electricity and of the people,
the archaic elsewhere of skies.106
Grey on grey, Hegel painted the spirits movement in achieving the
reconciliation of its powers: self-consciousness recognizing its substantial
will in the state, its ideal essentiality in religion, and its unity with both
in science.107 Mallarm, seeing that this beautiful reconciliation lay far
from us, simultaneously painted and effaced, in the grey-blue-rose of
the symbol, the gold of mornings to come. He knew that, to enable their
dawn, the etching of the poem has to say simultaneously more than it says
and less than it says. This twofold constraint is perhaps enough to render
speech rare and the poem difficult.

60
 Appendix: selected texts

N.B. The page references refer to the edition of Oeuvres Compltes (O.C.)
in the collection Bibliothque de la Pliade, Gallimard, 1992, (1st edition,
1945).

Hritage I/Heritage I
Tout Orgueil fume-t-il du soir, Does Pride at evening always fume,
Torche dans un branle touffe Torch snuffed out by a sudden stirring
Sans que limmortelle bouffe Without the immortal gust deferring
Ne puisse labandon surseoir! The abandonment about to come

La chambre ancienne de lhoir The heir apparents ancient room,

De maint riche mais chu trophe Rich though fallen trophies bearing,
Ne serait pas mme chauffe Would still be cold if he came faring
Sil survenait par le couloir. Through passageways back through
the gloom.

Affres du pass ncessaires Inevitable death throes of the past

Agrippant comme avec des serres As with talons gripping fast
Le spulcre de dsaveu, Disavowals sepulchre:

Sous un marbre lourd quelle isole Beneath the marble it isolates

Ne sallume pas dautre feu No other fire fulminates
Que la fulgurante console. Than the console glittering there.
(Posies, O.C., p. 73.) (trans. Henry Weinfield, p. 78).

61
 mallarm

Au-del de la Nature I/Beyond Nature I

[...] Le double adjuvant aux Lettres, extriorit et moyen ont, envers
un, dans lordre absolu, gradu leur influence.
La Nature
La Musique
Termes en leur acception courante de feuillage et de sons.
Repuiser, simplement, au destin.

La premire en date, la nature, Ide tangible pour intimer quelque

ralit aux sens frustes et, par compensation, directe, communiquait
ma jeunesse une ferveur que je dis passion comme, son bcher, les
jours vapors en majestueux suspens, elle lallume avec le virginal
espoir den dfendre lintrpretation au lecteur dhorizons. Toute clair-
voyance, que, dans ce suicide, le secret ne reste pas incompatible avec
lhomme, loigne les vapeurs de la dsutude, lexistence, la rue. Aussi,
quand men par je comprends quel instinct, un soir dge, la musique,
irrsistiblement au foyer subtil, je reconnus, sans douter, larrire mais
renaissante flamme, o se sacrifirent les bosquets et les cieux ; l,
en public, vente par le manque du rve quelle consume, pour en
pandre les tnbres comme plafond de temple.

Esthtiquement la succession de deux tats sacrs, ainsi minvitrent-

ils primitif, lun ou foncier, dense des matriaux encore (nul scandale
que lindustrie len monde ou le purifie) : lautre, ardent, volatil
dpouillement en traits qui se correspondent, maintenant proches la
pense, en plus que labolition de texte, lui soustrayant limage. La
merveille, selon une chronologie, davoir tag la concordance; et que,
si cest soi, un tel, poursuivi aux forts, pars, jusqu une source, un
concert aussi dinstrument nexclue la notion: ce fantme, tout de suite,
avec rpercussion de clarts, le mme, au cours de la transformation
naturelle en musicale identifi.
(Bucolique, O.C., p. 4023.)

[...] The double stimulant added to Letters, exteriority and means,

has, in my case, in absolute order, graduated its influence.
Nature
Music
Terms to be taken in their common definition of foliage and sounds.
Lets dig around again, simply, in destiny.
62
 Appendix: selected texts

The first in terms of date nature, the Idea that is tangible, so as to

intimate to the uncultivated senses some reality, and direct imparted
to my youth a fervour I call passion, while its funeral pyre transforms
the days that have evaporated into majestic suspense; it was lighted with
the virginal hope of being able to defend its interpretation to the reader
of horizons. Any clairvoyance that, in this suicide, sees that its secret
is not incompatible with man clears away the vapours of desuetude,
existence, the street. Thus, while being led by a well-known instinct,
one evening of agedness, towards music, irresistibly into the subtle
origin of all, I recognized, without doubt, the backgrounded but reviving
flame, where woods and skies are sacrificed in public; there, fanned by
the lack of dream it consumes, it spreads shadows around like the roof
of a temple.

Aesthetically, the succession of two sacred states thus invited me

the one, primitive or fundamental, still with the density of materials
(its no scandal that industry either shapes it or purifies it): the other,
more volatile, a reduction into corresponding features, now nearing
pure thought, along with a textual abolition if the image is forbidden.
The marvel, chronologically, is to have layered their concordance; and
that if it was oneself, So-and-so, pursued to the woods, scattered, all the
way to a water source, another concert, this one instrumental, doesnt
exclude the notion: this phantom, right away, with echoing clarities,
the same, in the course of his transformation from natural to musical, is
identified.
(Bucolic, Divagations, pp. 2678.)

Au-del de la Nature II/Beyond Nature II

[.
.
.] Mille secrets (histoire volage dune soire) se dtachant du
brouhaha fashionable, trouveront ici, avant de se confondre dans
lclat de lorchestre, un cho; listes de danseurs perdues avec les fleurs
effeuilles, programme du concert ou carte des diners, composent,
certes, une littrature particulire, ayant en soi limmortalit dune
semaine ou de deux. Rien nest ngliger de lexistence dune poque:
tout y appartient tous. Un sourire! mais il circule dj, peine form,
dans les salles aux lourdes portires, attendu, dtest, bni, remerci,
jalous; extasiant, crispant ou apaisant les mes; et cest en vain que
lventail, qui crut dabord le cacher, perdu maintenant, tente de le
63
 mallarm

ressaisir ou de dissiper son vol. Pardon ! cet panouissement de vos

deux lvres, jen noterai la grce, laquelle dautres lvres, suivant
tout bas cette lecture, dj sessaient. Ainsi les choses, et justement :
le monde na-t-il pas comme un droit de reprise sur la manifestation
la plus profonde de nos instincts ? il la provoque, il laffine. Tout
sapprend sur le vif, mme la beaut, et le port de tte, on le tient de
quelquun, cest--dire de chacun, comme le port dune robe. Fuir ce
monde ? on en est ; pour la nature ? comme on la traverse toute
vapeur, dans sa ralit extrieure, avec ses paysages, ses lieues, pour
arriver autre part : moderne image de son insuffisance pour nous !
Oui, si les plaisirs connus sous les lambris ayant cd leur saison
des jeux du grand air: courses au bois et rgates sur le fleuve, vous
quittez encore le bois et le fleuve, avides de reposer tout fait vos yeux
dans loubli caus par un horizon vaste et nu ; nest-ce pas, certes,
pour trouver une nouveaut de regard habile goter le paradoxe
de toilettes ingnues et savantes, que lOcan, au bas, brode de son
cume ? Sans le moindre de remords, apparu dans cette saison de
vacance comme son heure exacte dapparatre, ce Journal sinterpose
entre votre songerie et le double azur maritime et cleste: le temps de
le feuilleter, et probablement de ny point lire la Prsentation de Votre
Serviteur.
(La Dernire Mode, O.C., p. 7189.)

[...] A thousand secrets (an evenings banter) overheard amid the

fashionable hubbub, will here find an echo, before drowning the next
moment in the clat of the orchestra: discarded lists of dancers with
depetalled flowers, concert programmes or dinner menus certainly do
make for a peculiar literature, in itself possessing the immortality of a
week or two. Disregard nothing of the times: everything in it belongs
to everyone. A smile! barely formed, already moves about, in audito-
riums with their heavy portires: expected, loathed, blessed, received
with thanks or with jealousy; sending souls into ecstasy, irritating or
soothing them; and it is in vain for the fan, thought at first to have
hidden it, now frantic, to hope to retrieve it or to dissipate its flight.
Forgive me! That blooming of your two lips, I mean to catch its grace,
which other lips, reading this deep down, will already be trying on.
That is how the world works and properly so: has not this world a right
to repossess the deepest manifestations of our instincts? It provokes
and refines them. Everything, even beauty and the holding of ones
64
 Appendix: selected texts

head, is learnt on the go, is borrowed from someone, from anyone,

just like the wearing of a dress. Get out of this world? of which one
is part; for nature? Full steam ahead, one crosses it, in its external
reality, its leagues, to arrive elsewhere such is the modern image
of its insufficiency for us! Yes, though the season of pleasures taken
beneath the stucco has yielded to open-air games the woodland
chase and the river regatta you quit even the woodland and the
river, seeking complete rest for your eyes in the oblivion brought about
by a vast and bare horizon; is this not, indeed, to get a fresh outlook
on things, one with a taste for the paradox of the toilettes, ingenuous
yet subtle, that the Ocean embroiders with its foam? This Journal,
choosing, without the least remorse, to appear in the holiday season,
as the right and proper moment, intervenes between your dreaming
and the double azure, maritime and celestial: long enough for you to
leaf through it, and probably not to read in it the Presentation of your
Servant.*
*Mallarm on Fashion: A translation of the Fashion Magazine La Dernire Mode,
translated by P.N. Furbank and Alex Cain, Oxford: Berg, 2004 (translation
modified).

Labsente/The Absentee
Javais beaucoup ram, dun grand geste net assoupi, les yeux
au-dedans fixs sur lentier oubli daller, comme le rire de lheure
coulait alentour. Tant dimmobilit paressait que frl dun bruit inerte
o fila jusqu moiti la yole, je ne vrifiai larrt qu ltincellement
stable dinitiales sur les avirons mis nu, ce qui me rappela mon
identit mondaine.
Quarrivait-il, o tais-je?
Il fallut, pour voir clair en laventure, me remmorer mon dpart tt,
ce juillet de flamme, sur lintervalle vif entre ses vgtations dormantes
dun toujours troit et distrait ruisseau, en qute des floraisons deau et
avec un dessein de reconnatre lemplacement occup par la proprit
de laime dune amie, qui je devais improviser un bonjour. Sans que
le ruban daucune herbe me retnt devant un paysage plus que lautre
chass avec son reflet en londe par le mme impartial coup de rame,
je venais chouer dans quelque touffe de roseaux, terme mystrieux de
ma course, au milieu de la rivire : o tout de suite largie en fluvial

65
 mallarm

bosquet, elle tale un nonchaloir dtang pliss des hsitations partir

qua une source.

Linspection dtaille mapprit que cet obstacle de verdure en pointe

sur le courant, masquait larche unique dun pont prolong, terre,
dici et de l, par une haie clturant des pelouses. Je me rendis compte.
Simplement le parc de Madame, linconnue saluer.

[...]

Courb dans la sportive attitude o me maintenait de la curiosit,

comme sous le silence spacieux de ce que sannonait ltrangre,
je souris au commencement desclavage dgag par une possibilit
fminine: que ne signifiaient pas mal les courroies attachant le soulier
du rameur au bois de lembarcation, comme on ne fait quun avec
linstrument de ses sortilges.
Aussi bien une quelconque allais-je terminer.
Quand un imperceptible bruit me fit douter si lhabitante du bord
hantait mon loisir, ou inesprment le bassin.
Le pas cessa, pourquoi?
[...]
Connat-elle un motif sa station, elle-mme la promeneuse : et
nest-ce, moi, tendre trop haut la tte, pour ces joncs ne dpasser et
toute la mentale somnolence o se voile ma lucidit, que dinterroger
jusque-l le mystre.
A quel types sajustent vos traits, je sens leur prcision, Madame,
interrompre chose installe ici par le bruissement dune venue, oui! ce
charme instinctif den dessous que ne dfend pas contre lexplorateur
la plus authentiquement noues, avec une boucle en diamant, des
ceintures. Si vague concept se suffit : et ne transgressera le dlice
empreinte de gnralit qui permet et ordonne dexclure tous visages,
au point que la rvlation dun (nallez point le pencher, avr, sur le
furtif seuil o je rgne) chasserait mon trouble, avec lequel il na que
faire.
Ma prsentation, en cette tenue de maraudeur aquatique, je la peux
tenter, avec lexcuse du hasard.
Spars, on est ensemble: je mimmisce de se confuse intimit, dans
ce suspens sur leau o mon songe attarde lindcise, mieux que visite,
suivie dautre, lautorisera. Que de discours oiseux en comparaison de
66
 Appendix: selected texts

celui que je tins pour ntre pas entendu, faudra-t-il, avant de retrouver
aussi intuitif accord que maintenant, loue au ras de lacajou vers le
sable entier qui sest tu!
La pause se mesure au temps de ma dtermination.
Conseille, mon rve, que faire?
Rsumer dun regard la vierge absence parse en cette solitude
et, comme on cueille, en mmoire dun site, lun de ces magiques
nnuphars clos qui y surgissent tout coup, enveloppant de leur creuse
blancheur un rien, fait de songes intacts, du bonheur qui naura pas lieu
et de mon souffle ici retenu dans la peur dune apparition, partir avec:
tacitement, en dramant peu peu sans du heurt briser lillusion ni que
le clapotis de le bulle visible dcume enroule ma fuite ne jette aux
pieds survenus de personne la ressemblance transparents du rapt de
mon idale fleur.
Si, attire par un sentiment dinsolite, elle a paru, la Mditative ou
la Hautiane, la Farouche, la Gaie, tant pis pour cette indicible mine
que jignore jamais ! car jaccomplis selon les rgles la manuvre :
me dgageai, virai et je contournais dj une ondulation du ruisseau,
emportant comme un noble uf de cygne, tel que nen jaillira le vol,
mon imaginaire trophe, qui ne se gonfle dautre chose sinon de la
vacance exquise de soi quaime, lt, poursuivre, dans les alles de
son parc, toute dame, arrte parfois et longtemps, comme au bord
dune source franchir ou de quelque pice deau.
(Le Nnuphar blanc, O.C., p. 2836.)

I had rowed for a long time, with a clean, sweeping, drowsy motion,
my eyes turned inward in utter forgetfulness of the passage, as the
laughter of the hour flowed round about. So much motionless idled
away the time that, brushed by a dull sound into which my boat half
slid, I was only able to determine that it had come to a halt by the
steady glittering of initials on the bared oars, which recalled me to my
worldly identity.
What was happening? Where was I?
To see clearly into my adventure, I had to call to mind my early
departure, on this flaming July day, through the lively opening,
banked by dormant foliage, of an always narrow and meandering
stream, in search of water flowers and with the intention of recon-
noitring an estate belonging to the friend of a friend, to whom I
might pay my respects on the spur of the moment. Without having
67
 mallarm

been detained by any strip of grass before one landscape more than
another, each being borne away with its reflection in the water by
the same impartial movement of the oars, I had just run aground in
a clump of reeds, the mysterious end of my voyage, in the middle of
the river where, suddenly widened to a fluvial grove, it displays the
indifference of a pool rippling with the hesitations of a well spring
about to depart.
A detailed inspection revealed that this obstacle of tapering verdure
in the current masked the single arch of a bridge that was extended
on land, on both sides, by a hedge enclosing a series of lawns. Then I
understood: this was simply the estate of Madame... the unknown lady
I was to greet.

[...]

Leaning forward in the agile posture in which curiosity held me, as if

beneath the spacious silence in which the stranger would announce
herself, I smiled at this commencement of a bondage released by a
feminine possibility: which the thongs attaching the rowers shoes to the
wood of the boat symbolized quite adequately, for we are always at one
with the instruments of our magic spells.

Probably just anyone... I was about to conclude.

When an imperceptible noise made me question whether the inhab-

itant of the shore was haunting my leisure, or, unexpectedly, the
pond.

The footsteps stopped: why?

[...]

Has she a motive, then, for standing still, she herself, the stroller: and I,
am I not holding up my head too high if, to interrogate the mystery, I
raise it up beyond those reeds and all the mental somnolence in which
lucidity is veiled.

To whatever pattern your features correspond, I sense their precision,

Madame, interrupting something established here by the rustling of
68
 Appendix: selected texts

an arrival, yes! this instinctive charm of something underneath, which

the most authentically fastened sash, with a buckle of diamonds,
does not defend against the explorer. So vague a concept suffices and
will not transgress against the delight imprinted by a generality that
permits and ordains the exclusion of all faces, to the point at which
the revelation of one (oh, do not incline it, confirmed, on the secret
threshold where I reign) would drive away my turmoil, with which it
has nothing to do.

I can try to present myself in this pirates outfit, with the excuse that I
came here by chance.

Separated, we are together: I inveigle myself in her obscure intimacy,

in this moment suspended over the water in which my dream delays
the undecided one, better than any visit, followed by others, will enable
me to do. How many trifling conversations there would have to be, in
comparison with this one which I held in order not to be heard, before
we could recover as intuitive an understanding as we now have, my
ear flat against the mahogany toward the sand which has now fallen
entirely silent!

The pause measures itself by the time of my decision.

Counsel me, O my dream: what shall I do?

Sum up with a glance this virginal absence dispersed in this solitude

and, as one gathers, in memory of a site, one of those magical, closed
water lilies which spring up suddenly, enveloping nothingness with their
hollow whiteness, formed from untouched dreams, from a happiness
that will never take place, and from the breath that I am now holding in
fear of an apparition, depart with it: steal silently away, rowing little by
little, so as not to break the illusion with a shock and so that the rippling
of the visible bubble of foam unwinding from my flight does not throw
at the feet of the lady who has arrived a transparent resemblance to my
ravished ideal flower.

If, drawn by an unprecedented feeling, she happened to appear she,

the Meditative or Haughty, the Cruel or Gay so much the worse for
that ineffable face which I shall never know! for I accomplished the
69
 mallarm

manoeuvre according to the rules: disentangled myself, put about, and

was already skirting a river wave, bearing away, like a noble swans egg,
such as will never burst into flight, my imaginary trophy, which swells
with nothing but the exquisite vacancy of self that many a lady loves to
pursue in summer, along the paths of her park, as she stops sometimes
and lingers, perhaps on the edge of a spring that must be crossed, or of
some other body of water.
(The white water lily, trans. Henry Weinfield, pp.1103.)

Les Importuns/The intruders

Vritablement, aujourdhui, quy a-t-il?

Lescouade du labeur gt au rendez-vous mais vaincue. Ils ont

trouv, lun aprs lautre qui la forment, ici affale en lherbe, llan
peine, chancelant tous comme sous un projectile, darriver et tomber
cet troit champ de bataille: quel sommeil de corps contre la motte
sourde.

Ainsi vais-je librement admirer et songer.

Non, ma vue ne peut, de louverture o je maccoude, schapper

dans la direction de lhorizon, sans que quelque chose de moi
nenjambe, indment, avec manque dgard et de convenance mon
tour, cette jonche de flau; dont, en ma qualit, je dois comprendre
le mystre et juger le devoir : car, contrairement la majorit et
beaucoup de plus fortuns, le pain ne lui a pas suffi ils ont pein une
partie notable de la semaine, pour lobtenir, dabord; et, maintenant,
la voici, demain, ils ne savent pas, rampent par le vague et piochent
sans mouvement qui fait en son sort, un trou gal celui creus,
jusquici, tous les jours, dans la ralit des terrains (fondation, certes,
de temple). Ils rservent, honorablement, sans tmoigner de ce que
cest ni que sclaire cette fte, la part du sacr dans lexistence, par
un arrt, lattente et le momentan suicide. La connaissance qui
resplendirait dun orgueil inclus louvrage journalier, rsister,
simplement et se montrer debout alentour magnifie par une
colonnade de futaie ; quelque instinct la chercha dans un nombre
considrable, pour les djeter ainsi, de petits verres et ils en sont, avec
labsolu dun accomplissement rituel, moins officiant que victimes,
70
 Appendix: selected texts

figurer, au soir, lhbtement de tches si lobservance relve de la

fatalit plus que dun vouloir.

Les constellations sinitient briller : comme je voudrai que parmi

lobscurit qui court sur laveugle troupeau, aussi des points de clart,
telle pense tout lheure, se fixassent, malgr ces yeux scells ne les
distinguant pas pour le fait, pour lexactitude, pour quil soit dit. Je
penserai, donc, uniquement, eux, les importuns, qui me ferment,
par leur abandon, le lointain vespral ; plus que, nagures, par leur
tumulte. Ces artisans de tches lmentaires, il mest loisible, les
veillant, ct dun fleuve limpide continu, dy regarder le peuple
une intelligence robuste de la condition humaine leur courbe lchine
journellement pour tirer, sans lintermdiaire du bl, le miracle de vie
qui assure la prsence : dautres ont fait les dfrichements passs et
des aqueducs ou liveront un terre-plein telle machine, les mmes,
Louis-Pierre, Martin, Poitou et le Normand, quand ils ne dorment pas,
ainsi sinvoquent-ils selon les mres ou la province ; mais plutt des
naissances sombrrent en lanonymat et limmense sommeil loue
la gnratrice, les prostrant, cette fois, subit un accablement et un
largissement de tous les sicles et, autant cela possible rduite aux
proportions sociales, dternit.
(Conflit, O.C., p. 35860.)

What is happening, today, really?

The labour squad has come to the meeting place, but lies defeated. One
after the other, they have fallen on the grass, barely completing their
first effort, scattered as if bombed by a projectile, the body as if asleep
with the unfeeling clod.

And so I walk by them, freely admiring and dreaming.

No, my view cant, from the window Im leaning out from, go all
the way towards the horizon, without part of me stepping over the
window sill, awkward and lacking in social graces in my turn, to
become part of the swath of workers: whose mystery and duty I
should understand, unlike that majority, and a lots of those more
fortunate. Bread hasnt sufficed for them! first, they may have toiled
most of the week to obtain it, and now, maybe tomorrow, they dont
71
 mallarm

know, they crawl around in vagueness and dig without movement

which makes, in their fate, a hollow equal to the one they have been
digging every day in the reality of the roadbed (but of course, it might
be the foundation of a temple). Without saying what it is or eluci-
dating this ceremony, they honourably reserve the dimension of the
sacred in their existence by a work stoppage, an awaiting, a suicide.
Out of the pride inherent in daily work, simply to resist and stand
tall, comes knowledge, magnified by the pillars of a stand of tall trees;
some instinct seeks it in a large number, soon to be thrown away, of
little glasses; the workers are, with the absoluteness of a ritual gesture,
less its officiants than its victims, if one takes into consideration the
evening stupor of the tasks and if the ritual observances come more
from fate than from will.

Constellations begin to shine: I wish that, in the darkness that

covers the blind herd, there could also be points of light, eternal-
izing a thought, despite the sealed eyes that never understood it
for the fact, for exactitude, for it to be said. I will thus think
exclusively about them, about those whose abandon blocks my
access to the vesperal distance more than their daily commotion
ever did. Keeping watch over these artisans of elementary tasks,
I have occasion, beside a limpid, continuous river, to meditate on
these symbols of the People some robust intelligence bends their
spines every day in order to extract, without the intermediary of
wheat, the miracle of life which grounds presence: others in the
past have built aqueducts or cleared fields for some implement,
wielded by the same Louis-Pierre, Martin, Poitou or the Norman.
When they are not asleep, they thus invoke one another according
to their mothers or their provinces. But in fact their births fall into
anonymity, and their mothers into the deep sleep that prostrates
them, while the weight of centuries presses down on them, eternity
reduced to social proportions.
(Conflict, Divagations, pp. 456.)

Lanimal chimrique/The Chimerical animal

Une race, la ntre, qui cet honneur de prter des entrailles la peur
qua delle-mme, autrement que comme conscience humaine, la
mtaphysique et claustrale ternit, chut, puis dexpirer le gouffre
72
 Appendix: selected texts

en quelque ferme aboi dans les ges, serait, non, jen ris, malgr ce
traitement cleste, comme si de rien, ordinaire, indemne, vague; parce
quil de reste trace, une minute de postrit quand ne fleurit mme
pas la vie reconquise et native.

Tout au moins, pareil effacement sans que la volont du dbut, aprs

les temps, appelt, intimement comme elle frappe une solitude, lesprit
rsumer la sombre merveille

Lequel prfre, en ddain des synthses, garer une rechercher

vide sil ne convient que lahurie, la banale et vaste place publique
cde, aussi, des injonctions de salut. Les plus directes peut-tre ayant
visit linconscience, les plus lmentaires: sommairement il sagit, la
Divinit, qui jamais nest que Soi, o montrent avec lignorance de
secret prcieuse pour en mesurer larc, des lans abattus de prires au
ras, de la reprendre, en tant que point de dpart, humbles fondations
de la cit, foi en chacun. Ce trac par assises et une hauteur comme
de trottoir, y descend la lueur, porte, quotidienne du rverbre.
(Catholicisme, O.C., p. 391.)

A race, our own, which has the honour of lending guts to the fear
of itself felt by the metaphysical and monastic eternity, appeared,
then bayed out the abyss throughout the ages, and would be, no, I
laugh, despite this celestial treatment, as if none of this had happened,
ordinary, immune, vague; since there remains no trace, to a minute of
posterity when not even reconquered, native life flourished.

At the very least, such effacement, without the will of the beginning,
after long periods, calling, intimately as it strikes a solitude, to the spirit
to sum up again the sombre marvel

But the spirit, disdaining syntheses, prefers to lead research astray

empty in any case if it doesnt agree that the astonished, the banal, and
the vast public masses are also capable of answering the call to salvation.
The most direct, perhaps, having visited unconsciousness; the most
elementary, summarily of course, Divinity, which is never anything
but Oneself, to which prayers have risen, in ignorance of their precious
secret, in order to measure how far they have travelled, prayers leaping
upward and being knocked down to our level, and taken up again, as
73
 mallarm

a starting point, humble foundations of the city; faith in everyone. This

trajectory from layers of earth to sidewalk level is illuminated, every
night, within reach, by the circle of an ordinary streetlight.
(Catholicism, Divagations, p. 2434.)

Hritage II/Heritage II
Je ne crois, du tout, rver

Une parit, des rminiscences liturgiques exclusivement notre bien

propre ou originel, inscrites au seuil et de certains apparats, profanes,
avous, simpose: cependant nallez mal, conformment une erreur
chez des prdicants, laver en je sais quelle dilution couleur lectricit
et peuple, larchaque outremer de ciels. Tout sinterrompt, effectif,
dans lhistoire, peu de transfusion: ou le rapport consiste en ceci que
les deux tats auront exist, sparment, pour une confrontation par
lesprit. Lternel, ce qui le parut, ne rajeunit, enfonce aux cavernes
et se tasse: ni rien dornavant, neuf, ne natra que de source.

Oublions

Une magnificence se dploiera, quelconque, analogue lOmbre de

jadis.

Alors sen apercevra-t-on ou, du moins, y gardera-t-on la sympathie,

qui mangoisse: peut-tre, pas; et jai voulu, dici, quand ce nest prt,
accouder le Songe lautel contre le tombeau retrouv pieux ses
pieds de la cendre. Le nuage autour exprs: que prciser.. Plus, serait
entonner le rituel et trahir, avec rutilance, le lever du soleil dune chape
dofficiant, en place que le desservant enguirlande dencens, pour la
masquer, une nudit de lieu.
(Catholicisme, O.C., p. 3945.)

I dont believe at all that Im dreaming

A certain parity with liturgical reminiscences, exclusively our own

avowedly original reminiscences, inscribed at the threshold of certain
profane apparatuses, imposes itself: but dont go and make the same
mistake some preachers do, and lighten, through I dont know what
74
 Appendix: selected texts

dilution into the colour of electricity and of the people, the archaic
elsewhere of skies. Everything effective in history is interrupted, theres
little transfusion; or the relation consists in the fact that the two states
existed, separately, to be brought together by the spirit. The Eternal, or
what appeared to be the Eternal, doesnt get younger, crawl into caves,
and hibernate: nor will anything new henceforth be born, unless its
comes from the source.

Let us forget

Someday a magnificence will unfold, seeming like nothing, analogous

to the Shadow of long ago.

Then people will notice, or, at least, will retain some sympathy,
which upsets me: but maybe not; all Ive wanted to do here, seeing
that the time isnt ripe, is to push Dream against the altar found next
to the tomb its feet are pious with respect to ashes. The fog around
it was purposeful: it would be a mistake to be too precise. To do
more would be to intone the ritual and to substitute a false glow for
a dazzling sunrise covered by an officiating priests vestments, while
the server should fill the altar with incense, to mask a nakedness of
place.
(Catholicism, Divagations, pp. 75.)

Un droit mconnu/A misrecognized right

Notre seule magnificence, la scne, qui le concours darts divers
scells par la posie attribue selon moi quelque caractre religieux ou
officiel, si lun de ces mots a un sens, je constate que le sicle finissant
nen a cure, ainsi comprise; et que cet assemblage miraculeux de tout ce
quil faut pour faconner de la divinit, sauf la clairvoyance de lhomme,
sera pour rien.

[...]

La scne est le foyer vident des plaisirs pris en commun, aussi et tout
bien rflchi, la majestueuse ouverture sur le mystre dont en est au
monde pour envisager la grandeur, cela mme que le citoyen, qui en
aura ide, fonde le droit de rclamer un tat, comme compensation de
75
 mallarm

lamoindrissement social. Se figure-t-on lentit gouvernante autrement

que gne (eux, les royaux pantins du pass, leur insu rpondaient
par le muet boniment de ce qui crevait de rire en leur personnage
enrubann ; mais de simples gnraux maintenant) devant une
prtention de malappris, la pompe, au resplendissement, quelque
solennisation auguste de Dieu quil sait tre ! Aprs un coup dil
regagne le chemin qui tamena dans la cit mdiocre et sans compter
ta dception ni ten prendre personne, fais-toi, hte prsomptueux
de lheure, reverser par le train dans quelque coin de rverie insolite;
ou bien reste, nulle part ne seras-tu plus loin quici: puis commence
toi seul, selon la somme amasse dattente et de songes, ta ncessaire
reprsentation. Satisfait dtre arriv dans un temps o le devoir qui
lie laction multiplie des hommes, existe mais ton exclusion (ce pacte
dchir parce quil nexhiba point de sceau).
(Le genre ou des modernes, O.C., p. 3134.)

The stage, our only magnificence, to which the participation of

diverse arts sealed by poetry contributes, according to me, a religious or
official character, if one of these words has a meaning, I note that the
century now ending couldnt care less about them, thus understood ;
that miraculous assembly of everything needed for the divine, except
for human clairvoyance, will end up being for nothing.

[...]

The stage is the obvious focus of pleasures taken in common, so,

all things considered, it is also the majestic opening to the mystery
whose grandeur one is in the world to envisage, the same thing that a
citizen, having an inkling of it, expects from the State: to compensate
him for his social diminishment. Can one imagine the governing entity
(from the royal puppets responding, with a mute come-on, to what
was laughable in their beribboned persons to the simple generals of
today) being anything but disturbed before an ignoramus pretension
to the pomp, the splendour, the worship of the god he knows himself
to be! After looking around, go back along the path that brought you
to the mediocre city and, without tallying up your disappointments
or blaming them on anyone, take the train back, presumptuous guest
of the hour, to your little corner of un-heard-of reverie; or else stay;
youll never be as far away as here; then begin, all alone, according to
76
 Appendix: selected texts

the sum of expectations and dreams built up, your necessary spectacle.
Satisfied to have arrived in a time when duty links the multiple actions
of men, but at your exclusion (that pact torn up because it didnt
exhibit a seal).
(Of Genre and the Moderns, Divagations, pp. 1434.)

La traverse du tunnel/The tunnel crossing

Extrieurement, comme le cri de ltendue, le voyageur percoit la
dtresse du sifflet. Sans doute il se convainc: on traverse un tunnel
lpoque celui, long le dernier, rampant sous la cit avant la gare
toute puissante du virginal palais central, qui couronne. Le souterrain
durera, impatient, ton recueillement prparer ldifice de haut verre
essuy dun vol de la Justice.

Le suicide ou abstention, ne rien faire, pourquoi? Unique fois au

monde, parce quen raison dun vnement toujours jexpliquerai, il
nest pas de Prsent, non un prsent nexiste pas. Faute que se dclare
la Foule, faute de tout. Mal inform celui qui se crierait son propre
contemporain, dsertant, usurpant, avec impudence gale, quand du
pass cessa et que tarde un futur ou que les deux se remmlent
perplexement en vue de masquer lcart. Hors des premier-Paris chargs
de divulguer une foi en le quotidien nant et inexperts si le flau mesure
sa priode un fragment, important ou pas, de sicle.

Aussi garde-toi et sois l.

La posie, sacre; qui essaie, en de chastes crises isolment, pendant

lautre gestation en train.

Publie.

Le Livre, o vit lesprit satisfait, en cas de malentendu, un oblig par

quelque puret dbat secouer le gros du moment. Impersonnifi, le
volume, autant quon sen spare comme auteur, ne rclame approche
de lecteur. Tel, sache, entre les accessoires humains, il a lieu tout seul:
fait, tant. Le sens enseveli se meut et dispose, en chur, des feuillets.

Loin, la superbe de mettre en interdit, mme quant aux fastes,

77
 mallarm

linstant: on constate quun hasard y dnie les matriaux de confron-

tation quelque rves; ou aide une attitude spciale.

Toi, Ami, quil ne faut frustrer dannes cause que parallles au

sourd labeur gnral, le cas est trange: je te demande, sans jugement,
par manque de considrants soudains, que tu traites mon indication
comme une folie je ne le dfends, rare. Cependant la tempre dj
cette sagesse, ou discernement, sil ne vaut pas mieux que de risquer
sur un tat tout le moins incomplet environnant, certaines conclu-
sions dart extrmes qui peuvent clater, diamantairement, dans ce
temps jamais, en lintgrit du Livre les jouer, mais et par un
triomphal renversement, avec linjonction tacite que rien, palpitant
en le flanc scient de lheure, aux pages montr, clair, vident, ne la
trouve prte; encore que nen soit peut-tre une autre o ce doive
illuminer.
(Laction restrainte O.C., p. 3713.)

Externally, like a cry of distance, the traveller hears the wail of a

whistle. No doubt, he says to himself, were going through a tunnel
our time that runs for a long way beneath the city before getting to
the all-powerful station of the virginal central palace, which crowns
it all. The underground will last as long, O impatient one, as your
concentration in preparing to build the crystal palace swiped by a wing
of Justice.

Suicide or abstention, why would you choose to do nothing? This is

your only time on earth, and because of an event Ill explain, theres
no Present, no a present does not exist... For lack of the Crowds
declaring itself, for lack of everything. Uninformed is he who would
proclaim himself his own contemporary, deserting or usurping with
equal imprudence, when the past seems to cease and the future to stall,
in view of masking the gap. Outside of those All-Paris occasions whose
job is to propagate faith in the quotidian nothingness, and inexpert if the
plague measures its period to a fragment, important or not, of a century.

Therefore, keep yourself, and be there.

Poetry is sacred; some people attempt hidden chaste crises in isolation,

while the other gestation takes place.
78
 Appendix: selected texts

Publish.

The Book, where the spirit lives satisified, in cases of misunder-

standing, one feels an obligation towards some sort of purity of delight
to shake off the dregs of the moments. Impersonified, the volume, to the
extent that one separates from it as author, does not demand a reader,
either. As such, please note, among human accessories, it takes place all
by itself: finished, it exists. Its buried meaning moves and arranges, into
a chorus, the pages.

Afar, it dares to forbid, even at celebrations, the present: one notes

that chance denies to certain dreams the materials of confrontation; or
a special attitude helps them.

You, Friend, whom its unnecessary to frustrate for years just because
theres a parallel with voiceless general labour, will find the case strange:
I ask you, without judgment, without sudden factors, to treat my advice
as, I admit, as a rare kind of folly. Nevertheless, it is tempered by this
wisdom, or discernment: that it might be better (than to bet on, at the
very least, an incomplete context around you) to risk certain conclu-
sions of extreme art that might burst out, glittering like a cut diamond,
now or forever, within the integrity of the Book to play them, even
through a triumphal reversal, with the tacit injunction that nothing,
palpitating in the unconscious flank of the hour, shown clear and
evident to the pages, will find the hour ready; while nevertheless it may
be in another time that it will cast illumination.
(Restricted Action, Divagations, pp. 2189.)

Le rite de lIde/The rite of the Idea

Le ballet ne donne que peu: cest le genre imaginatif. Quand sisole
pour le regard un signe de lparse beaut gnrale, fleur, onde, nue
et bijou, etc., si, chez nous, le moyen exclusif de le savoir consiste
en juxtaposer laspect notre nudit spirituelle afin quelle le sente
analogue et se ladapte dans quelque confusion exquise delle avec
cette forme envole rien quau travers du rite, l, nonc de lIde,
est-ce que ne parat pas la danseuse demi llment en cause, demi
humanit apte sy confondre, dans la flottaison de rverie? Lopration,
ou posie, par excellence et le thtre. Immdiatement le ballet rsulte
79
 mallarm

allgorique : il enlacera autant quanimera, pour en marquer chaque

rythme, toute corrlations ou Musique, dabord latentes, entre ses
attitudes et maint caractre, tellement que la reprsentation figurative
des accessoires terrestres par la Danse contient une exprience relative
leur degr esthtique, un sacre sy effectue en tant que la preuve
de nos trsors. A dduire le point philosophique auquel est situe
limpersonnalit de la danseuse, entre sa fminine apparence et un objet
mim, pour quel hymen: elle le pique dune sre pointe, le pose; puis
droule notre conviction en le chiffre de pirouettes prolong vers un
autre motif, attendu que tout, dans lvolution par o elle illustre le sens
de nos extases et triomphes entonns lorchestre, est, comme le veut
lart mme, au thtre, fictif ou momentan.
(Crayonn au thtre, O.C., p. 2956.)

The ballet gives but little: its an imaginative genre. When a sign of
scattered beauty is isolated for the eye flower, wave, cloud, jewel, etc.
if our only way of knowing it is to juxtapose it with our spiritual nudity so
we can feel that it is analogous, and adapt it in some exquisite confusion
of ourselves with this fluttering form even if its through a rite, the
utterance of the Idea. Doesnt the dancer seem to be half the element
in question, half humanity eager to melt into it, floating in the reverie?
The operation, or poetry, par excellence, and theatre. Immediately, ballet
becomes allegorical: it will bring together as well as animate, to mark
out each rhythm, all the correlations or Music, latent at first, between its
attitudes and such-and-such a character, so much so that the figurative
representation of earthly props by Dance contains a test of their aesthetic
merit, and a consecration results, which is the proof of our treasures. We
have to deduce the philosophical point where the dancers impersonality
is located, between her female appearance and a mimed object, destined
for what Hymen: she sews it with her unerring points, and puts it in
place; then unrolls our convictions in a writing of pirouettes extended
towards another motif, it being understood that everything, in the
whirling through which she illustrates the meaning of our ecstasies and
triumphs, also being played in the rumblings of the orchestra, is, as art
itself would want it, in the theatre, fictional or outside time.
(Scribbled at the Theatre, Divagations, p. 120.)

80
 Appendix: selected texts

Thorie du vers I/Theory of verse I

[...] avant le heurt daile brusque et lemportement, on a pu, cela
est mme loccupation de chaque jour, possder et tablir une notion
du concept traiter, mais indniablement pour loublier dans sa faon
ordinaire et se livrer ensuite la seule dialectique du Vers. Lui en rival
jaloux, auquel le songeur cde la matrise, il ressuscite au degr glorieux
ce qui, tout sr, philosophique, imaginatif et clatant que ce ft, comme
dans le cas prsent, une vision cleste de lhumanit ! ne resterait,
son dfaut que les plus beaux discours mans de quelque bouche. A
travers un nouvel tat, sublime, il y a recommencement des conditions
ainsi que des matriaux de la pense sis naturellement pour un devoir
de prose : comme des vocables, eux-mmes, aprs cette diffrence et
lessor au-del, atteignant leur vertu.

[...]

Ainsi lanc de soi le principe qui nest que le Vers ! attire non
moins que dgage pour son panouissement (linstant quils y brillent
et meurent dans une fleur rapide, sur quelque transparence comme
dther) les milles lments de beaut presss daccourir et de sordonner
dans leur valeur essentielle. Signe! au gouffre central dune spirituelle
impossibilit que rien soit exclusivement tout, le numrateur divin de
notre apothose, quelque suprme moule nayant pas lieu en tant que
daucun objet qui existe: mais il emprunte, pour y aviver un sceau tous
gisements pars, ignors et flottants selon quelque richesses, et les forger.

Voil, constatation quoi je glisse, comment, dans notre langue,

les vers ne vont que par deux ou plusieurs, en raison de leur accord
final, soit la loi mystrieuse de la Rime, qui se rvle avec la fonction
de gardienne et dempcher quentre tous, un usurpe, ou ne demeure
premptoirement: en quelle pense fabriqu celui-l! peu mimporte,
attendu que sa matire discutable aussitt, gratuite, ne produirait de
preuve se tenir dans un quilibre momentan et double la faon du
vol, identit de deux fragments constitutifs remmore extrieurement
par une parit dans la consonance.
(Solennit, O.C., p. 3323.)

[...] before the sudden wing beat that carries you off you might

81
 mallarm

once, and thats even every days occupation, have had an idea of the
concept to treat, but undeniably in order to forget it in its ordinary
sense, and to give yourself wholly to the dialectic of Verse. As a jealous
rival, to whom the dreamer yields mastery, it resuscitates, to the degree
that it, glorious and philosophical and imaginative, revives a celestial
vision of humanity! without it, there is just beautiful discourse out of
some mouth. In this new sublime state, there is a fresh beginning
of the conditions and materials of thought, laid down naturally for a
prose study: the vocables, by themselves, after this differences and the
experience of the beyond, find their virtue.

[...]

Thus emerges from itself the principle that is nothing other than
Verse! It attracts as well as sheds for its unfolding (the time it takes for
it to shine and then die like a rapid flower, on something transparent
like the ether) the thousands of elements of beauty crowding together
and ordering themselves according to their real, essential value. A Sign!
In the central abyss of a spiritual impossibility that says that nothing
can belong exclusively to everything, the divine denominator of our
apotheosis, some supreme mould for something that doesnt exist in the
same sense as other objects: from which it borrows, in order to revivify a
seal, many scattered veins of ore, unknown and floating like unclaimed
riches, and forges them together.

This I slide into an observation is why, in our language, lines of

verse go by twos or more, by reason of their terminal accord, that is,
the mysterious law of Rhyme, which reveals itself with the function of
guardian, and prevents any one of them from dominating, or peremp-
torily staying: in what thought was this made! Who cares? given that
as soon as its material is debated, its becomes debatable, gratuitious ;
momentary and double like flight, the identity of the two halves being
stamped by their parity in sound.
(Solemnity, Divagations, p. 1667.)

Thorie du vers II/Theory of verseII

Une dentelle sabolit Lace sweeps itself aside
Dans le doute du Jeu suprme In the doubt of the ultimate Game
82
 Appendix: selected texts

A nentrouvrir comme un Only to expose profanely

blasphme
Quabsence ternelle de lit. Eternal absence of bed.

Cet unanime blanc conflit This white and undivided

Dune guirlande avec la mme, garlands struggle with the same
Enfui contre la vitre blme Blown against the holy pane
Flotte plus quil nensevelit. Floats more than it would hide.

Mais, chez qui du rve se dore But where the dream would shine
within
Tristement dort une mandore Sadly sleeps a mandolin,
Au creux nant musicien The hollow cores musician

Telle que vers quelque fentre Such that towards some window, one
Selon nul ventre que le sien, Through no belly but its own,
Filial on aurait pu natre. Filial, might have been born.

(Posies, O.C., p. 74.) (trans. Henry Weinfield, p. 80.)

Thorie du Livre/Theory of the Book

Tout, la polyphonie magnifique instrumentale, le vivant geste ou
les voix des personnages et de dieux, au surplus un excs apport la
dcoration matrielle, nous le considrons, dans le triomphe du gnie,
avec Wagner, blouis par une telle cohsion, ou un art, qui aujourdhui
devient la posie: or va-t-il se faire que le traditionnel crivain de vers,
celui qui sen tient aux artifices humbles et sacrs de la parole, tente,
selon sa ressource unique subtilement lue, de rivaliser ! Oui, en tant
quun opra sans accompagnement ni chant, mais parl ; maintenant
le livre essaiera de suffire, pour entrouvrir la scne intrieure et en
chuchoter les chos. Un ensemble versifi convie une idale reprsen-
tation : des motifs dexaltation ou de songe sy nouent entre eux et
se dtachent, par une ordonnance et leur individualit. Telle portion
incline dans un rythme ou mouvement de pense, quoi soppose tel
contradictoire dessin: lun et lautre, pour aboutir et cessant, o intervi-
endrait plus qu demi comme sirnes confondues par la croupe avec le
feuillage et les rinceaux dune arabesque, la figure, que demeure lide.
Un thtre, inhrent lesprit, quiconque dun il certain regarda la
83
 mallarm

nature le porte avec soi, rsum de types et daccords ; ainsi que les
confronte le volume ouvrant des pages parallles. Le prcaire recueil
dinspiration diverse, cen est fait : ou du hasard, qui ne doit, et pour
sous-entendre le parti pris, jamais qutre simul. Symtrie, comme
elle rgne en tout difice, le plus vaporeux, de vision et de songes. La
jouissance vaine cherche par feu le Rveur-roi de Bavire dans une
solitaire prsence aux dploiements scniques, la voici, lcart de la
foule baroque moins que sa vacance aux gradins, atteinte par le moyen
ou restaurer le texte, nu, du spectacle. Avec deux pages et les vers, je
supple, puis laccompagnement de tout moi-mme, au monde! ou jy
perois, discret, le drame.
(Planches et feuillets, O.C., p. 328.)

Everything the magnificent instrumental polyphony, the lively

gestures of dance or the voices of men or gods, the excess attention paid
to the material sumptuousness of the decoration we consider, with
Wagner, blinded by such cohesion or a whole artform, in the triumph
of genius, what poetry has become today. Does this mean that the
traditional writer of verse, he who works with the humble and sacred
artifices of language alone, will try, crowned somehow by those very
constraints, to compete? Yes, like an opera without orchestra or son,
just spoken; at present now the book will try to suffice to open up the
inner stage and whisper echoes into it. A versified collection summons
one to an ideal representation: motifs of exaltation or dream are
linked together or detach themselves, according to the design or their
individuality. One portion sways in a rhythm or movement of thought,
another opposes it: both of them swirl around, where there intervenes,
emerging like a mermaid whose tail is taken for foliage or the curlicues
of an arabesque, a figure, which the idea remains. Anyone who has
really looked at nature contains inside himself a theatre inherent to the
mind, a summary of types and correspondences; just as any volume
confronts them, opening up its parallel pages. The haphazard collection,
and there are indeed such, the present volume not excepted, where
chance, and the authors obsessions should be understood here, should
never be anything but simulated. There is a certain symmetry, like that
which reigns in every edifice, even the most vaporous, of vision and
dream. The pleasure vainly sought by the late Dreamer-King of Bavaria
in solitary attendance at the unfolding of scenery, is found, in retreat
from the baroque crowd rather than in its absence from the bleachers,
84
 Appendix: selected texts

achieved by restoring the text, in its nakedness, to the spectacle. With

two pages and their lines of verse, and the accompaniment of my whole
self, I supply the world! Or at least I perceive, discreetly, its drama.
(Stages and Pages, Divagations, pp. 1601)

Adieu Adieu
Mes bouquins referms sur le My old tomes closed upon the name
nom de Paphos, Paphos
Il mamuse dlire avec le seul I take delight in summoning by pure
gnie genius
Une ruine, par mille cumes a ruin blessed with myriad ocean
bnie sprays
Sous lhyacinthe, au loin, de ses Beneath the distant hyacinth of its
jours triomphaux. triumphal days

Coure le froid avec ses silences Let the cold with its scythe-like
de faux, silence run,
Je ny huluerai pas de vide nnie I shall not howl out any void
lament, not one
Si ce trs blanc bat au ras du if this so white frolic on earths bare
sol dnie face
A tout site lhonneur du paysage denies the honour of some feigned
faux. vista to any place

Ma faim qui daucuns fruits ici Satisfied by no fruits here, my

ne se rgale starvation
Trouve en leur docte manque finds equal savour in their learned
une saveur gale: deprivation:
Quun clate de chair humain let one burth forth in fragant
et parfumant! human flesh!

Le pied sur quelque guivre o My foot on some wyvern where

notre amour tisonne, our love flames afresh
Je pense plus longtemps peut- I ponder longer, perhaps desperate,
tre perdment on
A lautre, au sein brl dune the other, the seared breast of an
antique amazone. ancient Amazon.
(Posies, O.C., p. 76.) (trans. E.H. & A.M. Blackmore, p 81.)

85
 Notes

1. See, Charles Chass, Les Clefs de Mallarm, Paris: Aubier, 1954.

2. See, Victorieusement fui le suicide beau, uvres compltes (=O.C.),
Gallimard, coll. Bibli. de la Pliade, 1945; most recent edition, 1992.
(The beautiful suicide victoriously fled, trans. Henry Weinfield, p. 68.)
3. Une dentelle sabolit O.C., p. 74. (Lace sweeps itself aside, trans. Henry
Weinfeld, p. 80.)
4. Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, translated and introduced by Ann
Smock, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1982 [French
original, 1955].
5. Letter to Cazalis, 3 March 1871, Correspondance, Gallimard, 1959, t. I,p. 342
(Selected Letters, p. 99.)
6. Sauveguard, O.C., p. 420. (Safeguard, Divagations, p. 290.)
7. A la nue accablante tu, O.C., p. 76. (Hushed to the crushing cloud, trans.
Henry Weinfield, p. 83.)
8. La Musique et les Lettres, O.C., p. 648. (Music and Letters, Divagations,
p. 188.)
9. Preface to Un coup de ds jamais nabolira le hasard, O.C., p. 455 (Preface
to A dice throw will never abolish chance, trans. Henry Weinfield, p. 121,
translation modified.)
10. La Musique et les Lettres, O.C., p. 647. (Music and Letters, Divagations,
p. 187.)
11. La Dernire Mode, O.C., p. 719 and 732. (Mallarm On Fashion, p. 33 and 56,
translation modified.)
12. Bucolique, O.C., p. 403. (Bucolic, Divagations, p. 269.)
13. Crise de vers, O.C., p. 366. (Crisis of verse, Divagations, p. 208.)
14. Salut, O.C., p. 27. (Toast, trans. E.H. and A.M. Blackmore, p.3.)

87
 mallarm

15. Crayonn au thtre, O.C., p. 298. (Scribbled at the Theatre, Divagations,

p. 118.)
16. Ibid., p. 294. (Ibid., p. 123.)
17. See, Le Mystre dans les Lettres, O.C., p. 383. (The Mystery in Letters,
Divagations, p. 232.)
18. La Cour, O.C., p. 414. (The Court, Divagations, p. 283.)
19. Laction restreinte, O.C., p. 373. (Restricted Action, Divagations, p. 219.)
20. Letter to Lo dOrfer of 27 June, 1884. (Selected Letters, p. 138.)
21. Cf. Bucolique, p. 404 (Bucolic, Divagations, p. 267); and La Musique et
les Lettres, p. 647. (Music and Letters, Divagations, p. 187.)
22. Letter to Lo dOrfer of 27 June 1884. (Selected Letters, p. 138, translation
modified.)
23. Solennit, O.C., p. 647. (Solemnity, Divagations, p. 167.)
24. La Musique et les Lettres, O.C., p. 647. (Music and Letters, Divagations,
p. 187.)
25. Ballets, O.C., p. 302. (Ballets, Divagations, p. 130.)
26. Translators note: The French word calice means both chalice and calyx
and both senses are important in understanding Mallarms use of the
word. The word recurs many times throughout this book and I have trans-
lated it one way or the other depending on the context, but the reader
should always bear both senses in mind.
27. Quand lombre menaa de la fatale loi / Tel vieux Rve, dsir et mal de
mes vertbres, / Afflig de prir sous des plafonds funbres / Il a ploy son
aile indubitable en moi, O.C. p. 67. (When the shadow menaced with its
fatal law / That old Dream, desire and pain of my spine, / Grieved at being
swallowed in nights black maw / If folded within me its indubitable wing,
(trans. Henry Weinfield, p. 66.)
28. La Musique et les Lettres, O.C., p. 647. (Music and Letters, Divagations,
p. 187.)
29. Un spectacle interrompu, O.C. p. 277. (An Interrupted performance,
Divagations, p. 25.)
30. Ibid. (Ibid., p. 24, translation modified.)
31. Prose (pour des Esseintes), O.C., p. 56. (Prose (for des Esseintes), trans.
Henry Weinfield, p. 46.)
32. Un spectacle interrompu, O.C., p. 278. (An interrupted Performance,
Divagations, p. 25, translation modified.)
33. Planches et feuillets, O.C., p. 328. (Stages and Pages, Divagations, p. 161.)
34. Hamlet, O.C., p. 300. (Hamlet, Divagations, p. 125.)
35. Les Fleurs, O.C., p. 33. (The Flowers, trans. Henry Weinfield, p. 13.)

88
 Notes

36. Le nnuphar blanc, O.C., p. 283286. (The White Waterlily, trans. Henry
Weinfield, p. 110.)
37. Surgi sur la croupe, O.C., p. 74. (Sprung from the croup, trans. Henry
Weinfield, p. 79.)
38. Mallarm is playing on the usual French expression Autant ne rien dire,
or, in English, best not to say anything, where, by lifting the ne, rien,
as Rancire makes clear in the following lines, takes on a positive value as
that which is to be said.
39. Las de lamer repos, O.C., p. 356. (Weary of bitter sleep, trans. Henry
Weinfield, p. 16.)
40. Laprs-midi dun Faune, O.C., p. 51. (A Faun in the Afternoon, trans.
E.H. and A.M. Blackmore, p. 43.)
41. Toast funbre, O.C., p. 55. (Funerary Toast, trans. E.H. and A.M
Blackmore, p. 51.)
42. Plusieurs sonnets, O.C., p. 679. (Several sonnets, trans. Henry Weinfield,
pp. 66-9.)
43. Sonnet dinauguration du thtre de Valvins, O.C., p. 182.
44. La dclaration foraine, O.C., p. 282. (The Fairground Declaration, trans.
Weinfield, p. 107.)
45. Letter to Gustave Kahn of 13 January 1881. (Selected Letters, p. 130, trans-
lation modified.)
46. La musique et les Lettres, O.C., p. 647. (Music and Letters, Divagations,
p. 187.)
47. [Translators note: the English word forgery is used by Mallarm himself
in the original text.]
48. La Musique et les Lettres, O.C., p. 647. (Music and Letters, Divagations,
p. 187.)
49. Autre ventail, O.C., p. 58. (Another fan, trans. Henry Weinfield, p. 50.)
50. Mallarm et le Drame Solaire, Jos Corti, 1959.
51. See, Les Dieux Antiques, O.C., p. 11591280.
52. The proposed reading of this poem clearly takes into consideration,
however without following or seeking specifically to contradict, the
philosophical interpretation put forward by Alain Badiou on the basis of
Gardner Davies exegesis (see the bibliography).
53. Prose, O.C., p. 56. (Prose, trans. Henry Weinfield, p. 46.)
54. Catholicisme, O.C., p. 391. (Catholicism, Divagations, p. 243.)
55. Ibid., p. 394. (Ibid., p. 246.)
56. La Cour, O.C., p. 414. (The Court, Divagations, p. 283); and Villiers de
lIsle Adam, O.C., p. 499.
57. Villiers de lIsle Adam, O.C., p. 499500.

89
 mallarm

58. See. Jacques Rancire, The Nights of Labour: The Workers Dream in Nineteenth-
Century France, translated by John Drury, introduction by Donald Reid,
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989 [French original, 1981].
59. Conflict, O.C., p. 35560. (Conflict, Divagations, pp. 41-6.)
60. Confrontation, O.C., p. 40912. (Confrontation, Divagations, pp. 276-80.)
61. Conflit O.C., p. 359. (Conflict, Divagations, p. 46.)
62. Catholicisme, O.C., p. 394. (Catholicism, Divagations, p. 247.)
63. Bucolique, O.C., p. 401. (Bucolic, Divagations, p. 266.)
64. See, Jean-Paul Sartre, Mallarm, or the Poet of Nothingness, trans. Ernest
Sturm, Pennyslvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991 [1986].
65. Or, O.C., p. 398. (Gold, Divagations, p. 255.)
66. Solitude, O.C., p. 408. (Solitude, Divagations, p. 275, translation modified.)
67. Sur lvolution littraire, O.C., p. 869.
68. Le genre ou Des modernes, O.C., p. 318. (Of Genre and the Moderns,
Divagations, p. 148, translation modified.)
69. Laction restreinte, O.C., p. 372. (Restricted Action, Divagations, p. 219.)
70. talages, O.C., p. 376. (Displays, Divagations, p. 224.)
71. Services, O.C., p. 38897. (Services, Divagations, p. 239-52.)
72. Plaisir sacr, O.C., p. 388. (Sacred Pleasure, Divagations, p. 239.)
73. Bucolique, O.C., p. 403. (Bucolic, Divagations, p. 268.)
74. Plaisir sacr, O.C., p. 388. (Sacred Pleasure, Divagations, p. 239.)
75. Le genre ou les modernes, O.C., p. 314. (Of Genre and the Moderns,
Divagations, p. 145.)
76. Richard Wagner. Rverie dun pote franais, O.C., p. 542. (The Reverie
of a French Poet, Divagations, p. 108.)
77. Catholicisme, O.C., p. 393. (Catholicism, Divagations, p. 2456.)
78. Crise de vers, O.C., 367. (Crisis of Verse, Divagations, p. 209.)
79. Plaisir sacr, O.C., 389. (Sacred Pleasure, Divagations, p. 240.)
80. Hommage, O.C., p. 71. (Homage, trans. E.H. and A.M. Blackmore,
p. 73.)
81. Richard Wagner. Rverie dun pote franais, O.C., p. 543. (Richard
Wagner: The Reverie of a French Poet, Divagations, p. 110.)
82. Ibid., p. 544. (Ibid. p. 111.)
83. Ibid., p. 545. (Ibid., p. 1112.)
84. Crise de vers, O.C., p. 3678. (Crisis of Verse, Divagations, p. 210.)
85. Ibid., 367. (Ibid., p. 209.)
86. Sur Poe, O.C., p. 872.
87. Letter to Edmund Gosse, 10 January 1893. (Selected Letters, p. 190, trans-
lation modified.)
88. Ibid.

90
 Notes

89. Solennit, O.C., p. 332. (Solemnity, Divagations, p. 166.)

90. Crise de vers, O.C., p. 366. (Crisis of Verse, Divagations, p. 208.)
91. Ibid., p. 365. (Ibid., p. 207.)
92. Ballets, O.C., p. 304. (Ballets, Divagations, p. 130.)
93. Ibid., p. 304. (Ibid., p. 130.)
94. Ibid., p. 306. (Ibid., p. 133.)
95. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, translated and introduced by Barbara
Johnson, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983 [French original,
1972].
96. Le Mystre dans les Lettres, O.C., p. 654. (The Mystery in Letters,
Divagations, p. 235.)
97. La Musique et les Lettres, O.C., p. 654. (Music and Letters, Divagations,
p. 195.)
98. Crayonn au thtre, O.C., p. 298. (Scribbled at the theater, Divagations,
p. 123.)
99. Un coup de ds jamais nabolira le hasard, O.C., p. 477. (See, A Throw of
the Dice, trans. Henry Weinfield, p.144.)
100. Crayonn au thtre, O.C., p. 296. (Scribbled at the Theater, Divagations,
p. 1201.)
101. Un coup de ds jamais nabolira le hasard, O.C., p. 477. (See, A Throw of
the Dice, trans. Henry Weinfield, p. 144.)
102. Varit II, Gallimard, 1930, p. 1949.
103. Letters to Andr Gide, 14 May 1897 (Selected Letters, p. 223.); and Camille
Mauclair, 8 October 1897.
104. Laction restrainte, O.C., p. 371. (Restricted Action, Divagations, p. 217.)
105. Le Livre, instrument spirituel, O.C., p. 378. (The Book as Spiritual
Instrument, Divagations, p. 226.)
106. Catholicisme, O.C., p. 394. (Catholicism, Divagations, p. 247.)
107. See, Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 359.

91
 Index

Aristotle 12, 21 Horace 12

The Poetic Art 12
Baudelaire, Charles 3 Hugo, Victor 3
Phare 3 Oceano Nox 3
Voyage 3
Blanchot, Maurice xv Kant, Immanuel 17
Boileau, Nicolas 12
Mallarm, Stphane (poems and prose)
Coppe, Franois 19 A la nue accablante tu (Hushed to
Cox, George W. 23, 29 the crushing cloud) 14, 12
Autre ventail (Another fan)
Davies, Gardner 23 223
Derrida, Jacques 52 Ballets (Ballets) 12, 512
Descartes, Ren 22 Bucolique (Bucolic) 4, 10, 33, 35
Catholicisme (Catholicism) 30, 33,
Feuerbach, Ludwig 28, 30, 38 35, 37, 5960
Flaubert, Gustave 1921. 57. 59 Conflit (Conflict) 312
Bouvard and Pcuchet 20 Confrontation (Confrontation) 31
Madame Bovary 19 Crayonn au thtre (Scribbled at
the theatre) 6, 54
Hamlet 1516, 52 Crise de vers (Crisis of verse) 4,
Hegel, G.W.F. 15, 17, 19, 28, 38, 4551, 38, 41, 512
58, 60 talages (Displays) 35
Lessons on Aesthetics 46 Hamlet 15
Hlderlin, Friedrich 28, 45 Hommage (Homage) 39
Homer 6 Igitur (Igitur) 17

93
 index
Mallarm, Stphane (poems and
prose) continued
Laction restrainte (Restricted
action) 7, 34, 558
La cour (The Court) 6, 30
La Dclaration foraine (Fairground
declaration) 1921
La Dernire Mode xii, 3
La Mme (The Same) 35
La Musiques et les Lettres (Music
and Letters) 2, 3, 11, 13, 22, 54
Las de lamer repos (Weary of
bitter sleep) 17
Le genre ou des modernes (Of
genre and the Moderns) 34, 36
Le Livre, instrument spirituel (The
Book as spiritual instrument) 58
Le Mystre dans les Lettres (The
Mystery in Letters) 53
Les fleurs (The flowers) 16
Les mots anglais 50
Or (Gold) 34
Plaisir sacr (Sacred Pleasure)
356, 38
Planches et feuillets (Stages and
pages) 15
Prlude laprs-midi dun Faune Tolstoy, Leo 1
(A Faun in the afternoon) 18
Prose (pour des Esseintes) ((Prose
(for des Esseintes)) xvi, 14, 27
Richard Wagner 36, 3941,
Salut (Toast) 45, 16
Sauveguard (Safeguard) xvi
Services (Services) 35
Solennit (Solemnity) 11, 4950 Wagner, Richard 3840
Solitude (Solitude) 34
94
Sur Poe (Sur Poe) 445
Surgi de la croupe (Sprung from
the croup) 88
Toast funbre (Funerary toast)
18
Un coup de ds (A dice throw) 2,
3, 13, 556
Un spectacle interrompu (An
interrupted spectacle) 145
Villiers de lIsle Adam 17
Marx, Karl 28
Plato 1012, 50, 53
and eidos 1011
Cratylus 50
Phraedrus 12
Proust, Marcel 20
Romanticism 37
Saint Simonians 289, 31
Schelling, Friedrich 28, 45
Schlegel, Friedrich 45
Schopenhauer, Arthur 17, 38
Symbolism 478
Valry, Paul 44, 56
Verlaine, Paul 41
Vigny, Alfred de 3, 50, 54
La bouteille la mer (The bottle at
sea) 3
Lohengrin 40