A History of Modern French Literature

by Christopher Prendergast

  And already in one of his earlier poems, the “Sonnet in -yx,” Mallarmé had shown very cleverly how this might work. Beginning with the apparently arbitrary decision to employ some rhymes ending in “-yx” (sounding in French like the English “eeks!”)—but perhaps to suggest the mystery, or the “x,” at the heart of all linguistic expression—he finds only three words in French to answer his purpose: onyx, Phoenix, and Styx. Seemingly allowing these words to carry him along, he evokes an empty room at midnight, a nowhere time, neither yesterday nor today—and for empty room at midnight, read the as yet unfilled sonnet form that awaits its fourteen lines of twelve syllables each (so-called alexandrines). And we learn that from this room—or stanza!—“The Master,” is absent and that the only object present is a gilded mirror reflecting a constellation of seven stars in the onyx-black sky: a double seven, like the repeated 4 + 3 stanzaic structure of this Petrarchan sonnet, and itself “framed” by a rhyme-scheme that combines “-yx” with “-or” (meaning “gold”). From the emptiness and absence created by his initial surrender to language, the poet thus sees a pattern come into being (“nothing will have taken place but the place except perhaps a constellation”)—like a Phoenix being born again from the ashes, like the poet Orpheus first crossing and then returning over the river Styx (the river of death surrounding the underworld), like Christ rising from the dead, like the sun rising once again at dawn. Indeed the poem presents itself as a secular Eucharist: taking the humble wafer of a word and rendering it sacred by the ceremony that is the poem itself.

  Mallarmé adopts this strategy in many of his verse poems, the great majority of which are in sonnet form. The dice-words differ, of course. In one poem a swan tries in vain to take flight from a frozen lake in which it has become trapped before stoically accepting its “useless exile” from the sky. But the French for “swan”—cygne (denoting also the constellation Cygnus)—sounds like signe, meaning “sign”: and we are invited to think of the linguistic sign as attempting to take poetic flight, to reach out to the ideal, the absolute, the sublime—as it may once have done in Romantic poetry—before now accepting the reality of its random nature and settling for its new poetic status as a purely earth-bound “constellation” of richly suggestive but inconclusive meanings.

  In Crise de vers, Mallarmé describes this radically new approach to the poetic act in these terms: “I say: a flower! and, out of the oblivion to which my voice relegates any contour, as something other than the calyxes on it, musically there arises, as very idea and suave, the flower that is absent from all bouquets.” When a poet—or any of us—says a word, this is first and foremost a linguistic event, an utterance with its own special reality: not a daffodil in sight! Indeed, the very act of speaking is so far removed from the physical reality named that we might just as well have forgotten this reality. But out of this oblivion, out of this simple refusal to accept the everyday referential function of language as self-evident, there arises a different phenomenon: the “poetic” flower, an “idea” or complex set of alternative relationships of sound and sense. But for Mallarmé this “idea” is not the same as the big “Thought” that “emits a Throw of the Dice.” “Idea” derives from the Greek verb meaning “to see,” and an idea is first and foremost a perceived shape, a form. It is the poet’s duty to see, to perceive pattern, to discover new constellations. In English, for example, we might hear the word “eye” in “iris” and make a connection with the iris of the eye … with which we see and perceive an “eye-dea” (idea).

  This is the kind of pattern making that Mallarmé regarded as “musical.” In 1893, in a letter to the English poet and critic Edmund Gosse (1849–1928), he defined “music” as “basically meaning Idea or rhythm between relationships.” As he concedes to Gosse, poetry is musical in the obvious sense that the poet tries to achieve harmonious sound patterns and other euphonious effects. But for him there is a much more fundamental sense: poetry creates “ideas,” that is, “rhythms between relationships”—and thus relationships between relationships, a network of lace or embroidered pattern having an air of “musical” necessity. Constellations, after all, are just stars randomly distributed in space (even if that apparent randomness may one day be accounted for by astrophysicists), but to our human eye some groupings look like swans or plows or dippers. So, too, for Mallarmé, the sounds and multiple meanings of words.

  As an atheist, Mallarmé acknowledged no higher authority or other source of truth than our own human thought processes. And since for him one cannot think except in language, these thought processes are highly hazardous undertakings. Take indeed the very sentence: “Un coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard.” Because hasard derives from the Arabic word for dice (al zahr = the die), this simply means that a throw of the dice never shall abolish the dice. How could it? A throw of the dice implies the existence of the dice! But if one listens to (rather than seeing/reading) the French “Un coup de dés,” one might just as easily hear: “un coud deux dés,” meaning “one sews two dice,” where “one” is the number 1 or simply the indefinite article “a.” And maybe that is indeed what the poet has done in Un coup de dés: he has put one and one together. He has stitched the random. Quite a coup.

  So is this all just a game, mere wordplay? In one of his poems (“Une dentelle s’abolit …” [“A piece of lace abolishes itself …”]) Mallarmé calls poetry “le Jeu suprême” (the supreme Game), doubtless because the use of language is a rule-bound activity (syntax, he noted, is “the sole guarantee of intelligibility”) but also because it is through language that the human species undertakes the supreme endeavor of making sense of itself and its surroundings. And poetry is the language-game played for the highest stakes, a source of both laughter and terror. In Un coup de dés, as we have seen, the poem calls attention to itself as an “insinuation.” This word signifies not only an oblique comment, a curve-ball insertion of language into silence: it is also the technical term, in English as in French, for the official registration of a document. So this poem—any poem—represents the official record, as much birth certificate as last will and testament, of a “memorable crisis” in language.

  On leaving school, and before training to be an English teacher (which he remained until taking early retirement on health grounds in 1894), Mallarmé had worked briefly in the department of the Ministry of Finance that had been responsible since the 1789 Revolution for the registration and taxation of property and commercial transactions. In a famous letter to Paul Verlaine (1844–96) on November 16, 1885, Mallarmé emphasized the fact that all his ancestors since the Revolution had, both on his father’s side of the family and on his mother’s, worked for this department; and he noted with pride that he had managed to dodge a career “that people had meant for me since I was in diapers.” With equal pride he mentions three earlier family members “who used a pen for something other than registering acts” and to whom he implies his preferred affiliation: an official overseeing the book trade under Louis XVI, a very minor poet, and the author of a “full-blooded Romantic volume entitled Angel or Demon.” Pen-pushers come in different forms, and it is testimony to Mallarmé’s characteristically keen sense of irony—and politically subversive wit—that he should present such an extraordinarily unconventional poem as Un coup de dés as the parody of a bureaucratic act. In his preface he compares it to a musical score, but he could just as easily have suggested that it was a balance sheet. In fact, on the very last page of the poem, the tumbling dice are said to represent “un compte total en formation” (a total account in the making), as the words, like numbers, add themselves up before our eyes.

  But what indeed does all this amount to? At issue here is the question of authority, and it is in this respect that Un coup de dés in particular and Mallarmé’s work in general constitute such an important watershed in the history of French poetry. For something quite new is being said about the status of poetry and the role of the poet. When Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–1869) published his M�
�ditations poétiques in 1820, he had himself ushered in a new era in this history. Seven years earlier, Napoleonic Paris had witnessed the lavish state funeral accorded to the man then regarded as the greatest poet of the age, Jacques Delille (1738–1813), whom almost no one now reads or remembers. After an early poem about recent advances in the manufacture of prosthetic limbs, Delille had come to prominence for his verse translation of Virgil’s Georgics in 1769 and had at once been proposed by Voltaire (1694–1778) for election to the Académie française. He then went on to publish his own long verse poem Les jardins, ou l’art d’embellir les paysages (Gardens, or The Art of Embellishing the Landscape, 1782). Here, in imitation of Virgil and drawing on the finest examples of European horticulture, he provides useful advice on garden design and techniques, for example, on the best use of streams and cascades as water features and on the charm conferred on an artificial lake by the careful positioning of a decorative boat. The state funeral was due in large part to the helpful orthodoxy of Delille’s political and religious views, while in his poetry he was simply doing—only better—what many educated people in the eighteenth century could do: write verse. Versifying was a universal practice in polite society, an accomplishment to set beside horsemanship and needlework. For everyone, the point of poetry was to express thought in as clear, elegant, and memorable a manner as possible.

  But in the last decades of the century it was becoming the commonly held view that verse itself was something of an irrelevance, an artificial exercise in which true “poetry”—defined as that which stimulates the imagination and appeals to our sensibility—was lost. In 1801, the dramatist and inveterate controversialist Louis-Sébastien Mercier (1740–1814) stated unequivocally in his Néologie (Neology) that “the prose-writers are our real poets,” and his evidence was Atala, published in the same year by François-René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848). In this prose tale recounting the tragic story of two native American Indians “poetry” was everywhere—in the descriptions of nature and personal feeling and in the brilliantly controlled power of the language that earned its creator the nickname of “enchanter”—and all without meter or rhyme.

  Lamartine’s Méditations poétiques thus constituted a literary counterrevolution. Just as Lamartine, a minor Burgundian aristocrat, and then his young rival, Victor Hugo (1802–85), the upper-class scion of a general, both supported the royalist cause when the Bourbon dynasty was restored to the throne of France in 1815, so they both arrested the decline of verse and, together with the putatively aristocratic Alfred de Vigny (1797–1863), initiated a spectacular revival in its fortunes. Marceline Desbordes-Valmore (1786–1859) was doing so also, in verse of a more intimate, lyrical, and indeed experimental kind (Charles Baudelaire [1821–67] and Verlaine were subsequently among her greatest fans), but it was the men who strutted the stage. In the wake of the 1789 Revolution, and more especially the Reign of Terror (1793–94), reason was suspect: for this “reason” that had been championed by Voltaire and the Enlightenment had now fueled the fanaticism of Maximilien de Robespierre (1758–94) in his murderous pursuit of “pure” republican virtue. Better perhaps to trust to feeling, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) had argued, and how better to appeal to people’s feelings than through poetry and the music of words? Lamartine’s gift for writing verse that is clear, elegant, and memorable, that flows effortlessly and gives the impression that the strict and complex rules of French versification are actually helping rather than hindering this flow, proved a godsend to those who favored a Restoration, whether political or aesthetic. The nation that had spent the entire previous century seeking successors to Corneille and Racine could now look proudly on its three young poet-musketeers: Lamartine, Hugo, Vigny.

  They in turn had big ideas. Both before and after the Revolution, writers and critics had been looking increasingly to the example of ancient Greece for evidence of the political power of poets. In the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Étienne de Condillac (1715–80), Denis Diderot (1713–84), Jean-François Marmontel (1723–99), Mercier, and others—men who themselves had big ideas about the capacity of the writer to change society—it became almost commonplace to cite the examples of Solon and Lycurgus, the former being the politician and poet who introduced democracy to Athens, and the latter being the legal reformer who enlisted the aid of the poet Thales of Crete to persuade the inhabitants of Sparta to accept his reforms. Add in Orpheus, who could tame even wild animals with his songs, and Amphion, who could build cities by moving stone through the power of music, and here was a model for poets to follow. In the aftermath of the Revolution, for which many held writers particularly responsible, it was natural—especially for writers!—to think that the poet (in the broad sense of a creative writer, whether in verse or prose) might lead the nation forward as once Moses had led the Israelites toward the Promised Land.

  And poets wrote and behaved accordingly. As events unfolded, Lamartine and Hugo moved gradually but decisively toward republicanism, and both became major public figures. For a very brief moment during the 1848 Revolution, Lamartine, as minister of foreign affairs, became the de facto head of the government—only to be sidelined by the rise of Louis-Napoleon, the future emperor. Hugo, disillusioned and (as he saw it) betrayed by this same Louis-Napoleon, went into exile, first on the island of Jersey, then Guernsey, where he became the thundering prophet of the republic, inveighing against the new emperor and proclaiming his vision of progress, of the moral restoration of humanity across the world through a gospel of love and social reform. Here was the poet-prophet writ large, the poet who listened to God and ended up more or less equating himself with God. Here was the poet who, like the shamans and soothsayers of old, had privileged, visionary access to divine truth and used the lyric, the sacred song of poetry, to convey it to the people.

  Vigny, on the other hand, held a more jaundiced view. Where Lamartine and Hugo were deists of a sort, he took God’s silence badly. In the face of human suffering we have to rely on ourselves, he thought, and he called his poems “pearls of thought,” sedimented human knowledge handed down from generation to generation—like a message in a bottle (as one of his poems has it), a navigational chart drawn up by a doomed explorer who nevertheless can thereby consign his discoveries to the sea in the hope that they may one day be known to others—something salvaged from a shipwreck. For Vigny, poetry was wisdom: human rather than divine wisdom, but wisdom nevertheless, hard-won and independently achieved. For this reason, the poet was condemned to remain in eternal and inevitable conflict with those who held political power and for whom any “alternative” wisdom represented a threat to their authority. This is the lesson of Stello (1832), a prose work comprising three short historical narratives about real poets and unified by an overarching debate between feeling and reason, between a young, idealistic poet (Stello, the star) and a cynic called Doctor Black. It is also the lesson of Vigny’s prose drama Chatterton (1835) about the English poet of that name, whose tragic fate he had already recounted in Stello. From Vigny the message is clear: the poet must remain aloof from society the better to guide it with his truth.

  This idea of separation, stripped of the aspiration to wisdom, struck a chord with the younger generation. Théophile Gautier (1811–72) pointedly published his first book of Poésies at the very height of the July Revolution in 1830. Later, in his most celebrated collection, Émaux et camées (Enamels and Cameos, 1852), he included a prefatory poem explaining how he had needed to shut his window, literally and metaphorically, on the 1848 Revolution in order to write. In Poésies, Gautier revels in the delight of composing verse for its own sake (hence, in his case, the title Poésies: they have no moral, political, or philosophical messages to impart), and when critics taxed him with producing “art for art’s sake,” he proudly wore the insult as a badge of pride. The poet was not a prophet but an artist. Thus in Émaux et camées, Gautier seeks to imitate the other arts in a series of verse “transpositions.” Sculpture, painting, music, dance, jewelry—a
ll have their say. And each poem shares the same meter, stanzaic form, and rhyme scheme, as though the poet were having to hew each one from the same piece of white marble. Thus “Art,” the final poem, begins: “Oui, l’œuvre sort plus belle / D’une forme au travail / Rebelle / Vers, marbre, onyx, émail” (Yes, the work emerges more beautiful / from a form that resists / being worked, / verse, marble, onyx, enamel). This approach in turn inspired a group of poets—among them Leconte de Lisle (1818–94), Théodore de Banville (1823–91), and Sully Prudhomme (1839–1907)—to publish selections of verse (their own and other people’s) under the title of Le Parnasse contemporain (The Contemporary Parnassus, 1866, 1869 [1871], 1876). United in the belief that poetry should seek to reacquire the impassivity and sacred character of ancient Greek art, they were the creators of a new mountain of the Muses, a forum for contemporary verse that rejected the subjective outpourings and politico-philosophizing of the Romantic generation.