Mallarmé, Our Contemporary
M’introduire dans ton histoire
Insinuating myself into the story of you
in the guise of a hero spooked
by his bare heel’s imprint
in an expanse of grass
and laying siege to a glacier
I’ll never know which of my naïve
trespasses won’t — only thanks
to you — have had the last laugh
tell me you don’t think I’m overjoyed
to see this air pierced by the flames
of kingdoms scattered broadcast
whose dying empurples the wheels
their hubs decked in thunder and rubies
of my only-ever twilit limo ride
À la nue accablante tu
Struck dumb by a sky that weighs
like a floor of lava and basalt
same as the echoes enslaved
by a useless trumpet
what sepulchral disaster (foam
you know, no more than spittle)
supreme among wreckage
abolished the mast stripped bare
or that exasperated for lack of some
high-toned perdition unfurled
the whole vain abyss trailing
a single headhair of utter whiteness
will have ungenerously drowned
the infantine flesh of a siren
Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hui
The virginal the vivid the lovely today
will it tear us away with the drunken flap of a wing
from this hard lake forgotten under frost
that haunts the transparent glacier of flights unfled!
A swan of other times remembers he’s the one
who magnificent and hopeless struggles free
never having sung a place in which to live
when boredom came shining through sterile winter.
His whole neck will shake off the blank swan song
inflicting by space on the bird that denies it
but not the horror of the ground where its plumage has fallen.
Phantom whose pure brilliance has assigned it this place
come to a standstill in this cold dream of contempt
worn throughout its unserviceable exile by the Swan.
Translated from the French by Barry Schwabsky
“Within avant-garde artistic circles, from the birth of Cubism to the diffusion of Dada” writes Trevor Stark, “Mallarmé became the subject of intense identifications, rapidly proliferating readings and misreadings, and acrimonious internecine debate.” [1] Stark’s project in his recent book Total Expansion of the Letter: Avant-Garde Art and Language after Mallarmé (MIT Press, 2020) is to trace these identifications, readings, and debates, with particular attention to the works of Pablo Picasso, Tristan Tzara, and Marcel Duchamp. A very tight focus, then, considering how ubiquitous the resonances of Mallarmé’s thought can seem. Jacques Rancière, for instance, has pointed out some of the other salient cases: “the word sonata and collages of Schwitters, or Magritte’s rebus-paintings,” not to mention “Apollinairean calligrammes, paintings as musical scores in the style of Ciurlionis or Klee, Rodchenko’s typography, the poem-objects of surrealism, etc.” [2] I could add any number of other names. Cy Twombly, who distilled painting from the decomposition of writing, and Ian Wallace, who has acknowledged taking inspiration from “Mallarmé’s simultaneous reference to the materiality of the page and the performative element of literary symbolism . . . in a self-referential scenography,” are only among the first who come to mind. [3]
Ian Wallace, In the Studio (Le Livre), 1994. Mutual Art.
Evidently, that “etc.” of Rancière’s covers a lot of territory — even though he, like Stark, is really speaking very specifically of the impact of the poet’s last work, Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard, with its graphic configuration of the text within the space of the page (or, rather, pages, since the basic unit is the spread). That poem’s unprecedented “spatial form” was responsible for its affinity with painting, sculpture, and graphic arts, as well as literary and paraliterary endeavors from Futurist parole in libertà to Brazilian concretismo and beyond (but usually produced, as in those two cases, in evident propinquity to movements in the so-called visual arts). But even Joseph Frank, the first literary critic to systematically explore the idea of spatial form, though recognizing that Eliot’s Waste Land and Pound’s Cantos — to cite only the most obvious cases — might have been unthinkable without the example of Mallarmé’s poem, was able to see it merely as “a fascinating historical curiosity,” since the extreme degree to which it “dislocated the temporality of language . . . showed that this ambition of modern poetry has a necessary limit.” [4] And beyond that limit? Hic sunt leones. In literary circles, anything resembling Mallarmean spatial form remains suspect of being a gimmick — although, as Sianne Ngai says, “our experience of the gimmick underscores the surprisingly dynamic formalism — the formalizing activity — of aesthetic judgement overall.” [5]
And what if literary circles are not entirely wrong? Maybe not that avant-garde (or even, in their wake, pseudo-avant-garde) gestures toward spatial form in writing can really never be anything but gimmicks, but rather that they only have lasting power when they emerge from the work of a writer reaching the limit of his or her powers — or desires. To a great extent, the art world’s reception of Mallarmé has been based solely on Un coup de dés as a quasi-visual manifestation, in relative indifference to the considerable amount of writing that preceded it: Mallarmé’s poems and the prose he collected under the title Divagations, all difficult enough to access, not to mention the nearly incomprehensible notations he made for the vast project he called, simply, Le Livre, “The Book”; but also those frothy vers de circonstance that are usually held at a distance from his more “serious” and imposing poetic efforts, and are moreover ignored by translators for the good reason that their quicksilver wit and elaborate politesse are strictly speaking untranslatable — but some of them really should be taken up as, at least retroactively, works of visual art: I mean the ones that were inscribed on objects, “curious hybrids of word and thing,” as one of the few critics to stop and attend to them has put it; for what is a text written on a fan or an Easter egg, in our understanding, if not an artwork? [6] And all the more so if that text is transitive, relational, performative, as Mallarmé’s circumstantial messages are. As Richard Cándida Smith writes, “that poetry was the score for the performance of a physical response was the bedrock of Mallarmé’s aesthetic.” [7]
Stéphane Mallarmé, Autre éventail de Mademoiselle Mallarmé (“Another of Mademoiselle Mallarmé’s Fans”), autograph poem on a fan, 1884. Cabinet Magazine.
To read only Un coup de dés, ignoring all this, is hardly to read Un coup de dés at all. It would be to turn the poem through a purely external and formal reading into what Marcel Broodthaers turned it into by way of the printing press when, in 1969, he published his own “image” of the poem, in which the lines of the appropriated poem were represented by black bars of corresponding size (and even representing italics by bars with tilted edges). This substitution has been admired as one that “radicalizes the liberation of word from text and content toward a simultaneous view of the spread, intended by Mallarmé.” [8] A pyrrhic liberation: a thought that rolls blank dice. What does the subtraction of Mallarmé’s text from the realm of reading to freeze it within the domain of looking do? It disables (while pretending to intensify) the peculiar alienation effect that the text puts into action (and then seduces certain readers into attempting to overcome): what Charles Mauron called “that curious feeling of exclusion which put them, in the face of a text written with their words . . . suddenly outside their own language, deprived of their rights in a common speech.” [9] The black bars, by pretending to exclude the viewer (no longer “reader”) from language altogether, leaves one’s position with regard to words utterly untouched.
Marcel Broodthaers, Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard (“A throw of the dice will never abolish chance”), 1969. MoMA.
I hasten to add that Stark does not offer this kind of redacted reading of Mallarmé. But based, it would appear, on Stark’s doctoral dissertation, his book still suffers somewhat from some of the debilities inherent to the genre. In particular, much barren ink is spilled confronting and parsing minor differences with and among previous commentators when Stark’s own probing, attentive readings of works would emerge more perspicuously without all that scholastic wrangling. He knows that what Un coup de dés meant to any given literary or artistic descendant — its use value for any of them — was not necessarily congruent with the poet’s aspirations. Not that he would have been surprised. To have had an effect was something he viewed with bemusement as productive mainly of a false conceit in an illusory self, that is (as he put it in the most crucial, for us, of the Divagations, “L’action restreinte” or “Restricted Action”), “to produce on many a movement that gives you the impression that you originated it, and therefore exist: something that no one is sure of.” [10]
The question has to do with the nature of efficacy. “What was the point of Mallarmé’s typographical experimentation,” Stark asks, “if he sought neither to produce an image in words nor to unleash the forces of poetic liberty?” [11] The answer, as he sums it up: “the hope of transmitting thought across the aleatory gaps of space and time, ‘accomplished in view of each null, human result.’” [12] In other words, to find and activate, in a world wholly material, disenchanted, and, as Stark says, aleatory, the potential for meanings felt in common across time and space and, ultimately, in the face of death. (All this in contradiction, of course, to the stereotype still being purveyed by standard cultural histories according to which Mallarmé spearheaded a spiritualist movement in opposition to naturalism and therefore “to materialist and evolutionary understandings of the human condition.” [13]) Cándida Smith, in an important and wide-ranging study of Mallarmé’s significance for twentieth-century culture apparently overlooked by Stark, explains it clearly:
Mallarmé himself had no doubt that the soul was a function of the body and vanished at death. Language, however, did not. It passed from mouth to mouth across generations. Only in that transpiration could be found the intangible yet real world of spiritual life, which would persist as long as words were exchanged and repeated . . . Language’s dual nature guaranteed that expression went beyond utilitarian purposes and, simultaneously, that no representation could ever adequately exhaust the symbolic potential of a phenomenon. [14]
The dice are always being thrown again, and the space of poetry is always being plunged back into time. In that sense, even if any particular subsequent reprise of Mallarmé’s venture toward the outer limits of poetry may appear narrow, as an ensemble those efforts suggest its continuing pluripotentiality. Both Stark and Cándida Smith detect a deep understanding of Mallarmé’s lesson in the work of Duchamp, who like the poet believed the place for art to be underground, biding its time. Stark investigates in particular “the peculiar relation between chance, labor, and money for Duchamp” as he made work (and non-work) out of the confounding pragmatic issue of how to earn a living. [15] Survival counts, but Cándida Smith sees more broadly in Duchamp “an ongoing interest in the intertwined processes of value inscription and recognition” where it emerges that “work as the most human expression of eros is the site of the most intense libidinal pleasures for those whose social position is defined by their productive capacity.” [16] But it’s a non-purposive work, achievable only (as Donald Barthelme once put it) through “the silencing of an existing rhetoric,” and whose product is a kind of gap. It has nothing to do with a self-congratulatory avant-gardism. [17] As Stark puts it, “Mallarmé’s lesson was to make ‘failure’ over into a principle of productivity through which to create in spite of the present.” [18] Stark is correct in putting “failure” between quotation marks, since it is a matter of appearance, and of timing: If Mallarmé seems too cautious for anyone who demands an immediate and visible effectivity of the artwork, of the poem, we should remember his confidence that its underground workings will later — in “parallel with voiceless general labor” — “burst out.” [19] If there has ever been a present to work in spite of, it is ours, but how different was that of the late nineteenth century? Or rather, is there a present? No such thing, thought Mallarmé — just a gap that the news tries to paper over. “Uninformed is he who would proclaim himself his own contemporary,” he slyly suggested, “when the past seems to cease and the future to stall.” [20] We’re still there. More than 120 years after his death, Mallarmé is as much of a contemporary as we can find. //
Paul Gauguin, Portrait of Stéphane Mallarmé, 1891. Met.
Cy Twombly, Poems To The Sea I-IV, 1959. Arthur.io.
NOTES
1. Trevor Stark, Total Expansion of the Letter: Avant-Garde Art and Language after Mallarmé (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020), p. 4.
2. Jacques Rancière, “The Space of Words: From Mallarmé to Broodthaers,” translated by Malcolm Phillips, in Un Coup de Dés: Bild gewordene Schrift. Ein ABC der nachdenklichen Sprache/Writing Turned Image. An Alphabet of Pensive Language, edited by Sabine Folie (Vienna: Generali Foundation/Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2008), p. 204.
3. Ian Wallace, “Notes on Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés and Image/Text, 1979,” in Un Coup de Dés: Bild gewordene Schrift, p. 86.
4. Joseph Frank, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” The Idea of Spatial Form (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991), p. 15.
5. Sianne Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020), pp. 2-3.
6. Charles D. Minahen, “From ‘vers de circonstance’ to ‘circonstance de vers’: Intimations of a Mallarmé Fan,” Dalhousie French Studies, Fall-Winter 1993, Vol. 25, Mallarmé, Theorist of Our Times (Fall-Winter 1993), pp. 27-33.
7. Richard Cándida Smith, Mallarmé’s Children: Symbolism and the Renewal of Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 25.
8. Gabriele Mackert, “Marcel Broodthaers: Un coup de dès jamais n’abolira le hazard. Image, 1969,” translated by Gerrit Jackson, in Un Coup de Dés: Bild gewordene Schrift, p. 66.
9. Charles Mauron, quoted by Donald Barthelme, “Not-Knowing,” Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews, edited by Kim Herzinger (New York: Random House, 1997), p. 16.
10. Stéphane Mallarmé, “Restricted Action,” Divagations, translated by Barbara Johnson (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 215.
11. Stark, p. 27.
12. Stark, pp. 27-28.
13. Alex Ross, Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), p. 97.
14. Cándida Smith, pp. 14-15.
15. Stark, p. 261.
16. Cándida Smith, pp. 233-35.
17. Barthelme, p. 16.
18. Stark, p. 341.
19. Mallarmé, “Restricted Action,” p. 219.
20. Mallarmé, “Restricted Action,” p. 218.
