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Originally published in 1969.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691621708 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/08/2015 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #1936 |
| Pages: | 284 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.60(d) |
Read an Excerpt
The Language of French Symbolism
By James R. Lawler
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1969 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06167-2
CHAPTER 1
Mallarmé and the "Monstre d'or"
More clearly perhaps than any other writer, Mallarmé has long divided the ranks of literary criticism in France into two uneasy groups. The first, predominantly academic in origin, concerns itself with the exegesis of the most hermetic of the great French poets. The second, on the other hand, is apt to ignore such attempts and, instead of a meaning, to seek to define the obscure experience of the author as found, as it were, beyond the sense, in his work seen primarily as a sign and not an object complete in itself, as an act and not an expression. We pass, then, abruptly from one critical language to another, from the subtleties of textual analysis to the often tendentious, but no doubt more exciting discourse of psychological description as practiced notably by Blanchot and Poulet. A recent publication is the highest achievement of this latter approach; indeed, by dedicating L'Univers imaginaire de Mallarmé to Georges Poulet, Jean-Pierre Richard underlines for us his own critical parentage. In a thesis whose thought is as brilliant as its style, he studies the phenomenology of the poet's perception, scrutinizes the mirrors, fires, foam of Mallarmé's language, the fountains, ballet dancers, diamonds, and fans, with the skill of an admirable literary psychoanalyst: "Car l'objet décrit l'esprit qui le possède ..." It follows, however, that the individual poems hardly interest Richard as such and are treated less as works of art than as documents that record a vital pursuit, an "existential project," an inner drama.
The observer, faced with this apparent "dialogue de sourds," may suspect that there is some intrinsic dichotomy in Mallarmé's attitude and work; but it may well be that in reality he is an ideal example of the meeting of a poetic system and a fundamental stance in life and art, which was both intuitively attained and consciously developed. If his poems most certainly present an ornamental beauty, and the precious charm of a language whose delight is self-sufficient, they also coincide with deeper layers of meaning that Mallarmé had lucidly considered. A single form, we suggest, can be the epitome of abstract reason and the imagination, like the essential pattern of a reflective mind. (We recall that a phrase from the essay on Wagner gives a striking definition of Mallarmé's concept of the poetic: "strictement imaginatif et abstrait, done poétique"). In the hope of pointing to a pervasive symbolism of this kind, I would like to examine a motif that is found in one of his best-known poems and, by a review of parallel texts, to make some tentative observations about his language and thought as a whole. This motif we shall call the "monstre d'or."
The phrase we have chosen is taken from "Toast funèbre," the poem written in 1873 as an homage to Théophile Gautier, who had recently died. The dead poet is paradoxically a symbol, as necessary as fate, of men's happiness, of the glorious triumph of poetry; and Mallarmé offers him a toast that itself is poetry, the demential act that we yet know to be our salvation.
O de notre bonheur, toi, le fatal emblème!
Salut de la démence et libation blême,
Ne crois pas qu'au magique espoir du corridor
J'offre ma coupe vide où souffre un monstre d'or!
His toast, Mallarmé proclaims, is no attempt to recall Gautier in some magical hope of a spiritualistic reappearance. It is not for this that he raises his glass — "J'offre ma coupe vide où souffre un monstre d'or!" This last verse is harmonious in movement, ample in its evocation, and mysterious. How, we may ask, are we to interpret it? Suggestions are not lacking in the numerous articles that have been written on the poem, and I shall return to them in a moment. But first we may like to refer to an anecdote that seems to bear the stamp of truth and that brings into question Mallarmé's own reaction to this particular line; here it is, as recounted by a friend of the poet and a highly competent sonneteer in his own right, José-Maria de Heredia:
L'autre jour, dès l'aurore, j'ai vu accourir notre énigmatique Mallarmé. Sans préambule, il me dit: "Je viens de faire une pièce superbe, mais je n'en comprends pas bien le sens et je viens vous trouver pour que vous me l'expliquiez." Il me lut sa pièce. Il y avait entre autres mystérieux alexandrins celui-ci:
J'offre ma coupe vide où souffre un monstre d'or.
Cela rimait avec un sombre corridor. Pour répondre à sa confiance en mes facultés de devin, je lui donnai l'explication que voici: "C'est très clair; il s'agit d'une coupe ancienne où un artiste, Benvenuto Cellini, si vous voulez, a gravé dans l'or massif un monstre d'or qui se tord, avec une expression de souffrance." Stéphane, en m'écoutant, a bondi et s'est écrié: "Que c'est beau! Que c'est émouvant!" et il m'a quitté rayonnant et reconnaissant, en me disant: "J'ai monté dans ma propre estime, et vous, mon cher, du même coup!"
If we take this anecdote to be substantially true, are we to assume that Mallarmé was trying out on a fellow poet a new system of expression; that, having an ulterior aim in view such as might concern the structural integration of his language, he rejoiced to see that his image retained also for a sensitive reader an immediate and satisfying impact? It is impossible for us to judge with any sureness. What we must note, however, is that the majority of the exegetical critics have themselves adopted by and large Heredia's reading, even though his tone as reproduced in these lines appears to be far from serious. Thus Madame Noulet, in 1948, wrote in her commentary on the poem: "allusion, soit à une ciselure que présente la coupe que le poète tient en mains, soit, et l'on préfère ceci, au reflet concave et mouvant du fond de la coupe." Two years later, Gardner Davies came down on the side of the former of these alternatives, which was Heredia's choice also: "il est peut-être préférable cette fois-ci de prendre Mallarmé au mot et de croire à une coupe portant réellement un monstre gravé et doré." Later still, Guy Delfel, in his annotated Pages choisies of Mallarmé, agreed that "la coupe est ornée de quelque motif baroque"; while in Mallarmé et la morte qui parle, published in 1959, Léon Cellier reverted to Madame Noulet's second conjecture and surmised that the monster was a reflection: "Dans la coupe vide grimace, en ce jour funeste, le reflet du soleil."
Now, the assumption behind all these interpretations is that Mallarmé's image is basically a plastic one; that, as an ornamental poet, he is describing with intricate art an ideal glass, an elegant decorative design, which might be compared to the fans and bracelets, the mirrors and diadems of his other poems. It seems impossible to deny that this reading is valid, backed as it is by some of the most perceptive of Mallarméan scholars, and, indeed, despite the variations of detail, beautiful as such. Yet it may well be that to interpret the image exclusively in this way is to form too limited an idea of the poetic vision of Mallarmé, who confessed that he had never been able to compose a poem of isolated lines of verse or isolated metaphors. It is perhaps a tenable hypothesis that his line may signify more than critics have proposed, and have an organic role in the poem's inner development. Several things tend to support this view as we pursue our analysis of "Toast funèbre," and I shall discuss them later; but particularly important seems to me a trait that is sure to strike the reader on reflection. For is it not true that the magnificent glass the poet is offering in a gesture of libation is nothing but the tributary poem we are reading? Indeed, the very ambiguity of the word "coupe" already evokes both its ordinary sense, as champagne glass, and its technical use in poetry. I shall therefore venture to submit that the "monstre d'or" may well be taken not merely as a plastic image but, more especially, as a symbol of poetry itself; and that, if we admit this point of view, our reading will be greatly enriched, and the whole idea of art as Mallarmé conceived it will be brought into the focus of the poem.
One possible symbolic reading will no doubt immediately suggest itself to the reader of Mallarmé. This glass that is both empty and not empty, both inanimate and writhing, both funereal and crowned with gold, is the symbol of the poet's memory. Mallarmé recalls to the vacant sphere of thought the resplendent image of Gautier's career. To write a threnody is in a sense to destroy the present and discover the true sign of the past as a glorious form. Memory, Mallarmé says, is agony and desire, the "désir et mal de mes vertèbres" as we read in one of his most moving sonnets, the "affres du passé nécessaires" of another, these "maux, dragons qu'il a choyés." In a letter of 1867 we come upon a similar, but more explicit statement concerning the process of remembering: "Toute naissance est une destruction, et toute vie dun moment l'agonie dans laquelle on ressuscite ce qu'on a perdu, on l'ignorait avant." It seems, then, most significant that Mallarmé constantly develops the curious polarity of suffering and desire, birth and destruction, when he evokes poetic memory. The finest handling of this theme in his work is to be found in "L'Après-midi d'un faune," in which he composed the myth of the poet's act of recollection. Just as in the "coupe vide" of "Toast funèbre," so in the poem, and so in the empty grapeskins, the faun finds his remembered source of exultation:
Ainsi, quand des raisins, j'ai sucé la clarté,
Pour bannir un regret par ma feinte écarté,
Rieur, j'élève au ciel d'été la grappe vide
Et, soufflant dans ses peaux lumineuses, avide
D'ivresse, jusqu'au soir je regarde au travers.
In the same way, the faun's breast is untouched, empty of proof ("vierge de preuve"), and yet it bears unmistakable witness, like the golden monster, to the strange and noble suffering that his dream has left and that the poetic imagination contains.
Mon sein, vierge de preuve, atteste une morsure
Mystérieuse, due à quelque auguste dent.
But, as we know, the drama of the faun is that memory for him is not enough, since he seeks to transform the past into the present, image into reality, sign into human flesh; to separate twin forms, even to violate the goddess of imagination. The mythical eclogue shows that the forms we desire cannot be extracted from the ideal past in which they must live and dwell, the "grappe vide" and "sein vierge" of the faun, the "coupe vide" of "Toast funèbre." As Mallarmé himself prescribes in his essay on Villiers de l'Isle-Adam: "Un à un, chacun de nos orgueils, les susciter, dans leur antérioriié et voir."
Yet if he finds that poetic recollection conforms to the pattern of suffering and desire, empty glass and golden monster, it is also true that he sees a similar tension in the rhetoric of the ideal poem itself, in the verbal action of the poetic form. The role of language, as he sees it, becomes itself a drama, for it is by interaction of the individual words that a series of tensions (or, as he says, torsions) is built up which presents to us, before and beyond any precise sense, a particular figure, a pattern. Once again, in remarkable fashion, we find that Mallarmé's formal imagination is fertile in describing the inner structure of the ideal poem; and once again it is important for us to observe that he has recourse to the image of the golden monster whose writhing is circumscribed by a pure line: "Quelle agonie [...] qu'agite la Chimère versant par ses blessures d'or l'évidence de tout l'être pareil, nulle torsion vaincue ne fausse ni ne transgresse l'omniprésente Ligne espacée de tout point à tout autre pour instituer l'idée." We may well ask ourselves what Mallarmé means. Is it not, prosaically speaking, that no image in the unity of the poem can be allowed to exist in its own right but, by the interplay of symmetry, complementarity, and contrast, must be modified, transformed until it undergoes a kind of alchemical change? In one letter to a friend, Mallarmé translates this same notion into less metaphorical language; yet, as we can see, the image of the monster suffering, gnawed at, is even here implicit. "Tout le mystère," he writes, "est là: établir les identités secrètes par un deux à deux qui ronge et use les objets au nom d'une centrale pureté." Similarly, in one of his most delicate octosyllabic sonnets, he speaks of the act of composition as a kind of murder by which a cry is stifled; as a woman's head of hair, superbly sensuous, radiant like some constellation ("la considérable touffe"), that becomes by language a finely wrought diamond.
Non! La bouche ne sera sûre
De rien goûter à a sa morsure,
S'il ne fait, ton princier amant,
Dans la considérable touffe
Expirer, comme un diamant,
Le cri des Gloires qu'il étouffe.
It would not be difficult to add to these examples by quoting other passages in which language is conceived as a glorious death, both agony and triumph. Thus, in the homage to Wagner, the consecration of the dead composer consists of his musical scores themselves, whose dark signs, like so many sobs, are at the same time a golden affirmation spread out on the manuscripts ("Trompettes tout haut d'or pâmé sur les vélins"). But it is in "Ses purs ongles ...," a sonnet of 1868, that we discover one of the most brilliant illustrations of the pattern we are discussing. It will be recalled that, in a letter to Cazalis, Mallarmé described his poem as being taken from a study on language: "J'extrais ce sonnet, auquel j'avais une fois songé, d'une étude projetée sur la Parole"; but he significantly entitled the first version "Sonnet allégorique de moi-même." This allegory, then, which links the self and poetic language, composes for us, by the negation of all presences, all objects in the nocturnal room, a singular agony of creation. The poem is written, as it were, without the intrusion of any individual emotion, by means of internal consonance and a system of reflection. Yet in this closed room of night and negation where all things are sacrificed to absolute purity, a positive image suddenly imposes itself: a golden form is in the throes of suffering, and the development will show that it possesses cosmic dimensions.
Mais proche la croisée au nord vacante, un or
Agonise selon peut-être le décor
Des licornes ruant du feu contre une nixe,
Elle, défunte nue en le miroir, encor
Que, dans l'oubli formé par le cadre, se fixe
De scintillations sitôt le septuor.
The poem has no message, and the object chosen as its theme is not important; but beauty is created out of the interplay and mutual destruction of a system of images. The world is denied, and no word has a simple referential value; but from this apparent act of negation the form will compose and contain a pure ideal, like the golden monster in the empty glass.
There is also, I suggest, a third important plane on which we find the same pattern reproduced. Mallarmé declared on many occasions that it is by his own agony and ultimate death that the poet himself achieves beauty. In this sense his life is a kind of ascesis which is destined to display the triadic rhythm — suffering, passion, redemption — of Christian martyrdom. "Pour moi, le cas dun poète, en cette société qui ne lui permet pas de vivre, c'est le cas d'un homme qui s'isole pour sculpter son propre tombeau." He thus creates his own tomb, which, by a mystic oxymoron, will also be his substantial immortality, the eternity of his art: "un fond de grotte précieuse demeurée le beau sépulcre pour y vivre avec une enchanteresse idée." This concept furnishes the argument of Un Coup de dés; it also finds an admirable expression in the opening poem of Mallarmé's collected verse, "Salut." The ternary rhythm of the first line ("Rien, cette écume, vierge vers") is echoed by the three words of the last tercet ("Solitude, récif, étoile"); while the drowning of the sirens in the nothingness that is the glass of champagne ("Telle loin se noie une troupe/ De sirènes mainte à l'envers") adumbrates and justifies in advance the poet's solitary sacrifice, which is crowned with glory. We also remember that another octosyllabic sonnet, in very much the same way, compares the long journey of the poet in search of a new world to Vasco da Gama's rounding of the Cape. He follows unswervingly a bird announcing the presence of a land which is not rich in gold but useless — "un inutile gisement" — for the beauty that poets must ever seek offers no treasures, no mines to exploit. What he pursues is his own death, under the triadic sign of his guiding faith: night, agony, and the consolation of artistic achievement — "Nuit, désespoir, pierrerie."
But it is in Igitur that Mallarmé achieved the most remarkable mythical expression of the theme of self-immolation. As its title implies, this prose-poem is a demonstration of the logic that controls the poet's experience, the logic of poetic madness. An absolute moment of consciousness is evoked, in which Igitur at midnight descends the staircase of the human mind, meditates, discovers his own necessity in time and space. He then lies down in the tomb of his ancestors and, it would seem, commits suicide; but what he has created by his genius will remain as "le château de la pureté," where in the empty room the monsters that decorate the furniture have suffered their last agonies: "jusqu'à ce qu'enfin les meubles, leurs monstres ayant succombé avec leurs anneaux convulsifs, fussent morts dans une attitude isolée et sévère, projetant leurs lignes dures dans l'absence d'atmosphère, les monstres figés dans leur effort dernier, et que les rideaux cessant d'être inquiets tombassent, avec une attitude qu'ils devaient conserver à jamais." Such was the dream of Igitur, which required that he should wholly sacrifice himself in the dark room of his mind so as to attain the pure idea of the world, which is poetry; like the golden monster, or like the swan that, undergoing its icy martyrdom, yet triumphs over past, present, and future, transcends its "blanche agonie" in the eternal form of Cycnus:
Fantôme qu'à ce lieu son pur éclat assigne,
Il s'immobilise au songe froid de mépris
Que vêt parmi l'exil inutile le Cygne.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Language of French Symbolism by James R. Lawler. Copyright © 1969 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- Frontmatter, pg. i
- Preface, pg. vii
- Contents, pg. xi
- Chapter I. Mallarme and the “Monstre d’or″, pg. 1
- Chapter II. Verlaine’s “Naiveté″, pg. 21
- Chapter III. Rimbaud As Rhetorician, pg. 71
- Chapter IV. “Magic″ and “Movement″ in Claudel and Valéry, pg. 112
- Chapter V. Claudel’s Art of Composition, pg. 146
- Chapter VI. Valery’s “Purete″, pg. 185
- Chapter VII. Music in Apollinaire, pg. 218
- Index, pg. 263