Of course, it is profitable to assess the affinities of these three poets with the literary movements that were, with the exception of Verlaine, to succeed the period of their poetic output (impressionism, symbolism, decadence, modernism), and to measure their innovations in aesthetics and verse-art/prose-art. But there is a danger that such an approach will unbalance our reading, and that our satisfactions will lie in identifying or confirming what the preoccupations of literary history dictate. The encounter with a poet is primarily a textual one, a palpation of configurations of expression and of a linguistic metabolism, an adventure in perceptual adjustment, transformation, gamble, risk. And this is the more so here, since these three poets are part of that broad modernist change of focus from subject (content) to perceiving consciousness, from unified consciousness to dispersed or multiplied consciousness, from stable moral position to temperamental variability.
NOTES
1. Baudelaire’s most direct account of “spleen” is found in a letter to his mother of December 30, 1857: “Is it the ailing body that undermines the spirit and the will, or is it spiritual cowardice that exhausts the body, I have no idea. But what I do feel is an immense discouragement, an intolerable sense of isolation, a perpetual fear of some vague misfortune, a complete lack of trust in my own powers, a total absence of desire, the impossibility of finding any amusement whatsoever. … That is the true spirit of spleen.”
2. This is not “the supernatural” in the standard sense, as Baudelaire’s own definition makes clear: “The surnaturel includes general color and accent, that is, intensity, sonority, clarity, vibrativity, depth and reverberation in space and time. There are moments in life when time and space are deeper, and the feeling of existence hugely increased” (Fusées [Rockets]).
3. Note: The notation “//” denotes the caesura, or prosodic juncture, which occurs in the middle of the regular twelve-syllable alexandrine; the numerals denote the number of syllables in each rhythmic measure
4. Note: Once again, the notation “//” indicates the caesura, a feature of all lines longer than the octosyllable. The tabulated numerals are the numbers of syllables in each rhythmic measure. In the third line, the impair does indeed demonstrate its capacity to “dissolve” the line’s structure, erasing the caesura.
WORKS CITED AND RECOMMENDED FURTHER READING
Note: All translations of passages quoted in this chapter are my own. The standard editions of Baudelaire’s works and correspondence are the two-volume Œuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1975–76); and Correspondance, ed. Claude Pichois with Jean Ziegler, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1973). There are many available translations of Les fleurs du mal, and to get some idea of the historical range, one can consult Baudelaire in English, ed. Carol Clark and Robert Sykes (London: Penguin, 1997); but among current translations, distinguished versions are provided by James McGowan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) and Walter Martin (Manchester: Carcanet, 1997). Baudelaire’s critical writing on art and literature is well served by P. E. Charvet, trans., Charles Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Literature (London: Penguin, 1992). For consideration of theoretical and contextual issues relating to the translation of Baudelaire, see Clive Scott, Translating Baudelaire (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000); and Rosemary Lloyd, Baudelaire’s World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002). Lloyd is also the author of a concise and suggestive biography, Baudelaire (London: Reaktion Books, 2008), which can be usefully paired with Pichois and Ziegler’s more detailed and larger-scale Baudelaire, trans. Graham Robb (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1989). Richard Burton, Baudelaire and the Second Republic: Writing and Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) examines links between the poems and the sociopolitical context of 1848–51. A recent investigation into the architecture of both Les fleurs du mal and the prose poems is provided by Randolph Paul Runyon, Intratextual Baudelaire: The Sequential Fabric of the “Fleurs du mal” and “Spleen de Paris” (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010). Le spleen de Paris, available in translations by Louise Varèse (New York: New Directions, 1970) and Lloyd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), has attracted searching studies by, among others, Sonya Stephens, Baudelaire’s Prose Poems: The Practice and Politics of Irony (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Maria C. Scott, Baudelaire’s “Le spleen de Paris”: Shifting Perspectives (Farnham: Ashgate, 2005). For discussion of Baudelaire’s art criticism, see J. A. Hiddleston, Baudelaire and the Art of Memory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999). Larger literary and artistic contextualizations of Baudelaire’s work are explored in Patricia A. Ward, ed., Baudelaire and the Poetics of Modernity (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2001); and Robert Calasso, La folie Baudelaire, trans. Alastair McEwen (London: Allen Lane, 2012).
Jacques Borel is the editor of the standard editions of Verlaine’s poetry and prose work: Verlaine: Œuvres poétiques complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), with Yves-Gérard Le Dantec; and Œuvres en prose complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1972). Less well-served than Baudelaire, Verlaine’s poetry has, nonetheless, attracted a fine body of translators, among whom one might mention Norman Shapiro (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), Martin Sorrell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), and Donald Revell (Oakland, CA: Omnidawn, 2013). Verlaine’s life is explored by A. E. Carter, Verlaine: A Study in Parallels (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969); and his place in the decadent context is assessed by Philip Stephan, Paul Verlaine and the Decadence 1882–90 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1974). As a study of Verlaine’s creative sensibility, Jean-Pierre Richard’s essay “Fadeur de Verlaine,” in Poésie et profondeur (Paris: Seuil, 1955) remains indispensable. The poet’s relationship with Rimbaud is the subject of Christopher Hampton’s play Total Eclipse (London: Faber, 1969, 1981), which became a film directed by Agnieszka Holland in 1995.
André Guyaux is the editor of the most recent edition of Rimbaud’s work, Rimbaud: Œuvres complètes, with Aurélia Cervoni (Paris: Gallimard, 2009), which includes Rimbaud’s correspondence, but given the importance of manuscript versions, it is a good idea to consult Steve Murphy, ed., Arthur Rimbaud: Œuvres complètes IV: Fac-similés (Paris: Champion, 2002). Among translators of the complete Rimbaud, one might make particular mention of Sorrell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), the unusually comprehensive Wyatt Mason (New York: Scribner, 2003), and Oliver Bernard (London: Anvil, 2012). On the problems and opportunities of translating Rimbaud’s prose poetry, see Clive Scott, Translating Rimbaud’s “Illuminations” (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2006). To be recommended among biographies of Rimbaud are Robb, Rimbaud (London: Picador, 2000); and Jean-Luc Steinmetz, Arthur Rimbaud: Presence of an Enigma, trans. Jon Graham (New York: Welcome Rain, 2001); and, among general literary-critical studies, Yves Bonnefoy, Rimbaud, trans. Paul Schmidt (New York: Harper and Row, 1973); Edward J. Ahearn, Rimbaud: Visions and Habitations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); and James Lawler, Rimbaud’s Theatre of the Self (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
Mallarmé and Poetry
Stitching the Random
ROGER PEARSON
Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.
—HENRY JAMES, PREFACE TO Roderick Hudson (1875–76)
Stéphane Mallarmé’s A Throw of the Dice Never Shall Abolish Chance (1897) is arguably the most radically innovative poem in the history of French literature. At first glance it looks like a haphazard jumble of words flung higgledy-piggledy—and unversified—across a white and empty space. And yet the fact that it is indeed a poem is proclaimed loudly on its title page, where “POÈME” is accorded the largest font size and stands in bold roman type, as though indisputable, above the remaining information: “Un coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard par STÉPHANE MALLARMÉ.” In 1887, Mallarmé had chosen the simple title of Poésie
s for his first published collection of verse, and he planned to retain it for the revised and expanded collection he was preparing shortly before his untimely death in September 1898 (at the age of fifty-six). Characteristically mindful of etymology, he was presenting his poems as simple “fashionings” or “fabrications” (from the Greek poieein, “to make”), figments of language, like pieces of embroidery in which seemingly random threads spun from sound and sense are sewn into suggestive patterns. “POÈME,” on the other hand, suggested something grander, more ambitious. And how! For this poem numbering 664 words was intended to be published as a book.
The 1897 version of Un coup de dés appeared on May 4 in the Paris edition of the short-lived international review Cosmopolis (1896–98), alongside a poem by Rudyard Kipling and some previously unpublished letters by Turgenev and Nietzsche. This version was to be no more than a foretaste—a “progress report” Mallarmé called it in his short preface. He had already received an advance for a fine art edition of the poem with a print run of two hundred copies at 50 francs per copy (today maybe $200), and his artist friend Odilon Redon (1840–1916) had been commissioned to provide four illustrations. In the event, Mallarmé died before seeing his poem published as a book, and the contract was not fulfilled. And so, by the chance of death, we are left with a tantalizingly incomplete work. Nevertheless we can know from the extant final proofs almost—but not quite—how Mallarmé envisaged his POÈME.
As befits a poem about throwing dice, the text was designed as a cube. It was to consist of six sheets of paper, folded, presenting twelve separate “pages,” each with its own recto and verso, or twenty-four sides (pages in our normal view of the matter). Pages 2, 4, and 24 were to be blank, and might have accommodated the three illustrations that Redon actually produced for the work. After the title page, the title phrase itself is dispersed in large bold capitals over pages 3 (“UN COUP DE DÉS”), 5 (“JAMAIS”), 11 (“N’ABOLIRA”) and 19 (“LE HASARD”) and is then followed on pages 20–23 by another statement in smaller capitals: “RIEN N’AURA EU LIEU QUE LE LIEU EXCEPTÉ PEUT-ÊTRE UNE CONSTELLATION” (nothing will have taken place but the place except perhaps a constellation). The remainder of the verbal text is “thrown,” also unpunctuated, across the intervening pages: phrases, clauses, sentences, all grammatically correct but distributed seemingly at random on the page and displayed in differing cases (upper and lower), styles (roman and italic), and font sizes—like black constellations in a white sky.
As the pages are turned, the reader’s eye is led by the text from top left to bottom right and must decide—if it can or ever quite does—whether to read across or down the single page, across or down the double-page, pausing to take in clusters of smaller print here and there that have the look of a qualification or an afterthought. From time to time pictorial shapes beckon from the paginal disposition of the words, not quite precise calligrams but suggestive nevertheless of the story of shipwreck that the poem begins verbally to sketch on page 5: a ship listing to starboard, righting itself, keeling over; the sails on either side of a central mast dipping now to the right, now to the left; a ship’s elderly master, fist clenched above his head, gradually disappearing beneath the waves; a whirlpool or whirlwind; the solitary feather of a bird floating down toward the sea; rocks amid the foam; wreckage; and lastly a double glimpse of the Big Dipper, or of Ursa Major and Ursa Minor—“avant de s’arrêter / à quelque dernier point qui le sacre / Toute Pensée émet un Coup de Dés” (before stopping / at some last point that consecrates it / Every Thought emits a Throw of the Dice).
“Toute Pensée émet un Coup de Dés”: these are the last words of the poem, taking us back to its beginning—on the title page, and on page 3 (“UN COUP DE DÉS”). For indeed, as we have just witnessed, every big thought—such as “A throw of the dice never shall abolish chance”—has need of language for its expression, and yet in that linguistic act the “masterly” intentions of the speaker may be shipwrecked by all the other random things that the words are saying. From the moment we speak (or write a poem), the die is cast: it seems that we can but watch and hear the words tumble across space in patterns of their own making. Take the word dé, for instance, which in French means both a single die and the thimble used in sewing. From the Latin datum, dés is the equivalent of “data,” what is given—as it might be, the givens of language as well as the given numbers on some dice. But from the Latin digitus, dé also suggests a finger on the hand with which we write, and specifically denotes a cylindrical means of protection for that finger when it seeks to sew, to produce “text” or a linguistic “fabric.” So from one tiny word springs the whole “memorable crisis,” as the poem calls itself. “Crisis,” from the Greek verb for “to decide,” is here that critical, life-or-death moment in which the language-user, the poet, tries to stitch the random, to bring seemingly endless proliferations of meaning under some sort of control, into some sort of pattern—or constellation. If the poet succeeds, the poem will be the memory of a crisis.
Not only is Un coup de dés a cube, then, but also a cylinder: a scroll as well as a book, a long roll as well as a codex, a combination of two of the principal physical forms in which language—and particularly sacred language—has been preserved or “remembered” throughout the ages. In this way Un coup de dés seeks to be a Book of Books: the cube of the Holy Bible is combined with the scrolls of the Torah that are to be found in every synagogue. This scrolling nature of the text is evoked explicitly on the centerfold (pages 12–13), which is framed—top left, bottom right—by the words “COMME SI,” meaning “as if.” Within this frame, and spread across the double-page we read, as though of the text itself: “Une insinuation simple / au silence enroulée avec ironie” (A simple insinuation / in[to] the silence rolled up with irony). The sinuous, twisting lines of print have wormed their way into the silence and into the blank space of the page, rolled up with “irony” (etymologically deriving from the Greek word for “ignorance,” and particularly for “simulated ignorance”) in the apparently contingent and meaningless muddle of this text. And the poem now describes itself also as a mystery (etymologically, that about which lips must remain closed and silent) that has been cast into “quelque proche tourbillon d’hilarité et d’horreur” (some nearby whirlpool / whirlwind of hilarity and horror) where it “voltige autour du gouffre” (flutters around the gulf). Each of these last two phrases crosses over the chasm or “gulf” that divides the double-page so that we are led to envisage the pages themselves as the concentric rings of a whirlpool and as storm-stirred waves. And the pages are also lips, simultaneously pressed together at the center as though joined in silence and yet opening up wide to either side of the impenetrable “gulf” in gaping expression of both laughter and terror.
Here we are at the “dead” center of the text, the eye of the textual storm, the hollow center of a scroll, and so we are invited by implication to envisage the surrounding pages of the text as concentric circles—as in a rolled-up magazine, say. The inner circle of the repeated “as if” mirrors the outer circle of the repeated “A Throw of the Dice” on pages 3 and 23, as we realize when we have read the whole poem, and then we may retrospectively note that each intervening roll of text presents similarly circular and reflexive patterns. When we see, for example, that the double-page 14–15 broadly reproduces the layout of 10–11 upside down and back to front, we are led to consider also the reflexivity of the verbal texts: how pages 14–15 evoke the descent of a solitary feather onto a “toque,” a cylindrical hat resembling a dice-box or a thimble, and how this recalls the scenario described on pages 10–11, in which the old man who is the ship’s master hesitates not to throw the dice just before he sinks beneath the waves, “having been induced toward this supreme conjunction with probability.” As it might be, the poet-master dies and becomes a quill pen, descending toward the black liquid of an inkwell.
In this way, by attending to the visual and verbal information set before us, we may come to read this mult
ilayered text as a performance in which chaos and order compete for the upper hand. At one level, the poem depicts the experience of an old man who is “ancestrally” obliged to throw the dice; who, in doing so, loses control of the situation and becomes “heir” to the consequences unleashed by his throw—that is, to the number, already present within his fist, that the dice will eventually total: “l’unique Nombre qui ne peut pas être un autre” (the unique Number that cannot be another). When the dice finally cease to roll (and as the tumbling italics give way once more to the steady, upright roman script with which the poem began), the old man is reborn as a prince—as the heir to a new authority. In his encounter with chance he has submitted to the laws of probability, which have been confirmed rather than abolished by the throw. Nothing fundamental has changed: “nothing will have taken place but the place except perhaps a constellation.” But constellations guide the mariner. Thus at another level, the throw of the dice is like a shipwreck, in that the thrower loses his mastery and flounders in the tumbling arithmetical possibilities of two dice before recovering his bearings when once the result is known.
If all this appears itself chaotic, things may become clearer if we read these various scenarios as descriptions of the poetic process itself. And this is the hallmark of Mallarmé’s work: all his poems, in verse and prose, may be approached as performances of their own linguistic and textual nature—each, as he put it, an “allegory of itself.” Thus the feather hovering over a toque may indeed suggest a white quill about to plunge into the blackness of an inkwell: the act of writing, of using language, is itself a throw of the dice—metaphorically, but in the case of this poem, also in the more precise sense that a throw of the word dé has produced the poem. “The pure work,” writes Mallarmé in Crise de vers (Verse Crisis), “implies the elocutionary disappearance of the poet, who cedes the initiative to words.” The impure work, by contrast, is one in which a poet sets out to impose his own agenda on language, forcing it to behave as a medium for self-expression, say, or for philosophical reflection. In “pure” poetry, the poet lets the words demonstrate for themselves what they can do, while still, though “ceding the initiative,” retaining an important role in orchestrating the demonstration. He is, as Mallarmé terms it in some important notes that were brought to light after his death, the “operator” who masterminds the opus.
A History of Modern French Literature Page 60