The verse poetry of Baudelaire might be said to marry the formalist aesthetic of the Parnassians and Gautier—to whom Les fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil, 1857) is warmly dedicated—with a subversion of Romantic poetic theory. Where Lamartine and Hugo looked to the examples of Solon and Lycurgus in seeking a role as political leaders and to Orpheus and Moses as representatives of a poetic task that consisted essentially in the exploration and communication of the mysteries of God’s creation, Baudelaire adopts a less exalted and more provocative stance. For him, beauty is not intrinsic in the world but rather an effect. Thanks to poetry, the tedious becomes once again interesting. The poet’s role is no longer to reveal symbolic correspondences between the terrestrial and the divine, but to produce “conjecture” in his reader. Where the symbol (etymologically, from the Greek, something “thrown together”) places two things in knowing juxtaposition, Baudelaire presents comparisons, in the form of similes and metaphors, that provoke “conjecture” (etymologically, from the Latin, also something “thrown together”). And the more disparate or surprising the comparison, the greater the shock and the more resonant the reader’s own conjecture: “Je suis comme le roi d’un pays pluvieux” (I am like the king of a rainy country) (“Spleen [III]”); “Quand le ciel bas et lourd pèse comme un couvercle” (When the low, heavy sky weighs down like a lid) (“Spleen [IV]”). In this way, the everyday becomes invested with novelty, the boring becomes fascinating, and we are led to view the world as through the eyes of a wide-eyed child: “Genius,” Baudelaire comments in Le peintre de la vie moderne (The Painter of Modern Life), “is childhood recovered at will.”
In Les fleurs du mal, some of the surprise comes from finding all sorts of “unpoetic” things evoked in the most accomplished of verse. In his prose poems (published posthumously as Le spleen de Paris [The Spleen of Paris] in 1869), Baudelaire reverses the trick: the banality of prose is the default, and the “poetic” is achieved through a variety of means. Urban experience itself constitutes a rich source of “conjectures,” of random juxtapositions, as the poet-stroller (“flâneur”) observes the incongruous and the decrepit, the dirty and the nondescript. A walk is a throw of the dice. Here poetry is born of chance encounters and the arresting incongruities of both human behavior and of a literary style that refuses to settle at any fixed point on a spectrum of linguistic register stretching from the high-flown to the colloquial and even the obscene. And in this refusal lies its enduring strength.
As a self-conscious heir to Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud (1854–91) also sought the “new”—bringing new words, new procedures, new images within the ambit of the poetic. By administering shock treatment to his own perceptual system—for example, by means of intoxicants and sleep deprivation—he sought out new “visions,” attempting “by a long, immense and carefully thought-out disruption of the senses” to turn himself into a “seer”—not the seer who is privy to some divine reality beyond the grasp of ordinary human beings but the observer of an as yet uncharted realm of the self. “I is another,” he famously wrote. In the celebrated verse poem, “Le bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”), as also in his prose poems, we find a foretaste of the surrealists’ later conception of poetry as an expression of the Freudian unconscious. For Rimbaud, as for the surrealists, the image is all-important: and poetry comes to consist in fabulous, extraordinary, often violently incongruous or unexpected pictures that have the strange logic and coherence of a dream. The more contingent and arbitrary the association, the more authentic the poetic experience. “La terre est bleue comme une orange” (The earth is blue like an orange), Paul Éluard would write in L’amour la poésie (Love, Poetry) in 1929: “Jamais une erreur” (Never an error), he continues; “les mots ne mentent pas” (words do not lie).
And so with the surrealists we have now begun to follow the new poetic rivers that flowed from the watershed that was Mallarmé. Previously, the poets of the nineteenth century had wanted to express what they had already thought, felt, or intuited. Even the radical and incomparable Rimbaud, having tapped into his “other” self, worried about his capacity to describe these vistas and visions—“I was noting the inexpressible” (Une saison en enfer [A Season in Hell])—and wondered if he had failed. But Mallarmé started at the other end, with language, and saw what visions—no, what ideas, what shapes or patterns—might spring from words. And this is the example followed by Mallarmé’s young protégé and literary executor Paul Valéry (1871–1945). For him, the poem must be “just so,” a unique and necessary combination of words that could not be other. A poem, he argued, is that which cannot be paraphrased. It may start out as a contingent flash of insight, but that insight has to be consciously worked on and developed through language. Take, for example, his poem “Les pas” (“The Steps”) in Charmes (Charms, 1922), where the word pas—meaning “pace” or “step,” but also “not” (as in “je n’aime pas”)—is employed in the evocation of desire as the experience of an exquisite suspense between the prospect of satisfaction and the deliciousness of deferral. From the simple word pas emerges a delicate, carefully versified poem about tremulous approach: of a lover toward a bed, of an idea toward consciousness, of a poem toward the page.
In the work of Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918), however, chance is allowed to play a more central role, and the poem in unpunctuated free verse titled “Zone” with which he opens Alcools (Alcohols, 1913) contains many startling comparisons and allusions in its depiction of modern Paris. “A la fin tu es las de ce monde ancien” (In the end you are tired of this ancient world), it begins, “Bergère ô tour Eiffel le troupeau des ponts bêle ce matin” (Shepherdess O Eiffel Tower the herd of bridges is bleating this morning). As the title of the collection suggests, Apollinaire presents himself as heir to the Baudelaire and Rimbaud who saw poetry as a form of intoxication, and he employs proto-surrealist imagery to conjure strangeness and newness out of the old and familiar. Indeed, he is credited with coining the term “surrealism” (in 1917), and for many he heralds the new age of modernism in French literature. In Calligrammes, published posthumously in 1918 and subtitled Poems of War and Peace 1913–1916, the influence of Un coup de Dés may clearly be seen in Apollinaire’s wholehearted embrace of so-called visual or concrete poetry.
And thus he in turn anticipates the coining of the latter term by the Noigrandres group of Brazilian poets for an exhibition in São Paulo in 1956. In “La cravate et la montre” (“The Tie and the Watch”), for example, the bourgeois regalia of the eponymous tie and pocket watch are depicted visually by word-pictures whose verbal constituents explicitly celebrate freedom and nonconformity and implicitly mock bourgeois philistinism. A literal-minded reader may see only a tie and a watch and remain baffled by such a highly unconventional poem. A more receptive reader, however, may note that the hands on the watch stand at five to midnight, suggesting perhaps that art alone can stay the hand of time as war and the human capacity for destruction threaten to engulf us all. In the words that visually depict “The Tie” we read: “that painful tie you’re wearing and that decorates you, o civilized man, remove it if you want to breathe,” while each hour on the watch-face contains a coded verbal reference in place of a number: two eyes, the child as the third member of a family, the hand with five fingers, the week with seven days, the nine muses and the nine portals of the body, the eleven-syllable line of Dante’s Divine Comedy. The poem now resembles a puzzle, a display of ingenuity and sheer fun snatched from the jaws of global annihilation, a celebration of imagination and of the playful logic of eight o’clock: “the infinite [∞] stood on end by a crazy philosopher.”
But in Calligrammes a certain logic thus remains. By contrast, in the first surrealist manifesto (1924), André Breton advocates for poetry and for all art the desirability of going beyond logic. For Breton, as for Mallarmé, “every thought is a throw of the dice”; but whereas Mallarmé, having thrown his dice, was minded to rearrange the numbers and create conscious patterns of his own, Breton reveled in
the contingency and pursued his poetic journey guided not by the stars but by a compass that was subject to the magnetic attraction of some mysterious internal force. Chance contains its own objective truth, and the weirder the truer. Hence Breton’s definition of surrealism: “Pure psychic automatism by which it is proposed to express, whether orally, or in writing, or in any other manner, the actual functioning of thought. Dictation by thought, in the absence of any control by reason, independent of all aesthetic or moral considerations.”
And so for Breton anything can be a poem: “Everything is grist to the mill when it comes to deriving the desirable suddenness from certain associations. The papiers collés of Picasso and Braque have the same value as the insertion of a cliché into the most polished piece of literary writing. It is even permissible to give the title of POÈME to what one may obtain from the most gratuitous assembly possible (you can observe the rules of syntax if you wish) of headlines or parts of headlines cut out of newspapers.” Though Mallarmé had himself been inspired by newspaper layouts and even poster art, he had never gone this far. Some thirty years after Un coup de dés, Breton wanted to leave poetry to its own, automatic devices. Let the random stitch itself together. But not for Mallarmé. No chance. Not if he could help it.
WORKS CITED AND RECOMMENDED FURTHER READING
Note: All translations of passages quoted in this chapter are my own.
Apollinaire, Guillaume. Alcools and Calligrammes. In Œuvres poétiques. Edited by Marcel Adéma and Michel Décaudin. Paris: Gallimard, 1965.
Breton, André, Manifeste du surréalisme. In Œuvres complètes I. Edited by Marguerite Bonnet. Paris: Gallimard, 1988.
Éluard, Paul, L’amour la poésie. In Œuvres complètes I. Edited by Marcelle Dumas and Lucien Scheler. Paris: Gallimard, 1968.
Gautier, Théophile, Emaux et camées. In Œuvres poétiques complètes. Edited by Michel Brix. Paris: Bartillat, 2004.
Mallarmé, Stéphane, Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard. In Œuvres complètes I. Edited by Bertrand Marchal. Paris: Gallimard, 1998.
Mallarmé, Stéphane, Crise de vers. In Œuvres poétiques complètes II. Edited by Bertrand Marchal. Paris: Gallimard, 2003.
Mercier, Louis-Sébastien, Néologie, ou Vocabulaire des mots nouveaux, à renouveler, ou pris dans des acceptions nouvelles. Paris: Moussard and Maradan, 1801.
Rimbaud, Arthur, Œuvres complètes. Edited by André Guyaux. Paris: Gallimard, 2009.
Valéry, Paul, Charmes. In Œuvres I. Edited by Jean Hytier. Paris: Gallimard, 1957.
The manuscript, final proofs, and Cosmopolis version of Un coup de dés may be viewed in Stéphane Mallarmé, Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard, ed. Françoise Morel (Paris: La Table Ronde, 2007). For a comprehensive English translation of Mallarmé’s verse and prose poems, see Collected Poems, trans. Henry Weinfield (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Also (but without Un coup de dés) Collected Poems and Other Verse, trans. E. H. and A. M. Blakemore, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Both volumes include the French originals. For Divagations, which was first published in 1897 under Mallarmé’s careful supervision and constitutes a collected edition of all his works in prose to date, including prose poems, revised newspaper articles (which he calls “critical poems”), and other writings, see Divagations, trans. Barbara Johnson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007). For a useful sample, see Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Mary Ann Caws (New York: New Directions Books, 1982).
For Mallarmé’s correspondence, particularly the important letters of the late 1860s and also the 1885 letter to Verlaine, see Selected Correspondence, trans. Rosemary Lloyd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). For a short biography and critical introduction, see Roger Pearson, Stéphane Mallarmé, Critical Lives (London: Reaktion Books, 2010); and for an account of the writers and artists he knew, see Rosemary Lloyd, Mallarmé: The Poet and His Circle (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999). For critical discussion in English see Malcolm Bowie, Mallarmé and the Art of Being Difficult (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); Mary Lewis Shaw, Performance in the Texts of Mallarmé: The Passage from Art to Ritual (State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993); Graham Robb, Unlocking Mallarmé (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996); Roger Pearson, Unfolding Mallarmé: The Development of a Poetic Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); and Pearson, Mallarmé and Circumstance: The Translation of Silence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). For discussion of Mallarmé’s legacy, see Michael Temple, ed., Meetings with Mallarmé in Contemporary French Culture (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1998).
Becoming Proust in Time
MICHAEL LUCEY
More than a few of the very first readers of Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) found the novel difficult to appreciate. First readers often being the ones deciding if something will be accepted for publication, their opinions may well carry more weight than they deserve. Proust’s status as a major writer appears secure these days. The jacket blurbs of recent editions of his seven-volume novel tell us that it is “indispensable,” an “inexhaustible artwork,” “crucial.” Online and in-person Proust reading groups are not hard to find. Various published guides can be found to help readers on their journey through the more than three thousand pages that make up the novel. There is an abundant scholarly literature about Proust and his writings, and there is an immense amount of lore that circulates about the man, his life, and his novel. Among that lore is the intriguing tale of the difficulties he had finding a publisher for the novel’s first volume.
It was in 1912, at the age of forty-one, that Proust started looking in earnest for a publisher for what then seemed likely to be a two-volume novel. He contacted two different publishing houses, Charpentier and the Nouvelle Revue Française. (The NRF is the publisher known today as Gallimard.) To Eugène Fasquelle at Charpentier he wrote with a caveat: “I should like to warn you very frankly in advance that the work in question is what used to be called an indecent one, indeed much more indecent than what is usually published.” The reader whom Fasquelle asked to provide an expert opinion on the manuscript did not react strongly to anything in the pages he read that might qualify as indecent. He began his report in this way: “At the end of the seven hundred and twelve pages of this manuscript (seven hundred and twelve at least, because lots of pages have numbers graced with a, b, c, d)—after the utter depression of seeming to drown in fathomless complications and after irritating feelings of impatience at never being able to surface—the reader has simply no idea of what it’s all about. What is all this for? What does all this mean? Where is it leading to?—It’s impossible to make head or tail of it! It’s impossible to comment on it!” Toward the end of the report, he sums up as best he can: “It’s the study of a sickly, abnormally nervous little boy whose sensitivity, impressionable nature and reflective subtlety are in a state of irritation.” As for its indecency, the reader notes, “It’s hardly worth taking into account the very brief and misleading appearance of the future ‘homosexual,’ Baron de Fleurus. … If the little boy does not become a homosexual what is the point of the whole book?” (We see that in 1912 Proust had not yet fixed the name of all of his characters. Fleurus would become Charlus in the published novel.) Obviously, this reader did not recommend publication, but he did add, “In the work as a whole, indeed, and even in each unit taken on its own it is impossible not to see here an extraordinary intellectual phenomenon.”
The Nouvelle Revue Française also turned down the manuscript. One of the moving forces at the NRF was André Gide. He would write remorsefully to Proust in January 1914, while reading the published volume: “For several days, I have not put down your book; I am supersaturating myself in it, rapturously, wallowing in it. Alas! why must it be so painful for me to like it so much? … The rejection of the book will remain the gravest mistake ever made by the NRF—and (for I bear the shame of being largely responsible for it) one of the most
bitterly remorseful regrets of my life.” Gide claimed that he barely looked at Proust’s manuscript, stumbling by chance across a number of sentences he found unappealing before unthinkingly rejecting it. Contributing to his decision, he admits, was the image he had of Proust as a fellow lacking in seriousness, a socialite and a snob, an image based on a number of chance encounters between the two many years earlier. A person like the one he imagined Proust to be could have no place at the NRF, he wrote, since the NRF meant to publish only the most significant and consequential kinds of literature by serious authors. (Proust certainly had been a socialite, and indeed he authored a number of society columns for a newspaper, Le Figaro, in the early years of the century, which he published under a number of pseudonyms. Perhaps atypically for society columns, a couple of them made extensive reference to the novels of Balzac and Stendhal.)
Proust tried a third publisher for his novel, Ollendorff, this time offering to pay the expenses of publication himself. Ollendorff refused, on the advice of another expert reader, who complained that there was no justification for spending the thirty opening pages of the manuscript describing someone’s difficulties in falling asleep. Only on his fourth attempt, would Proust find someone willing to publish him. The first volume of his novel, Du côté de chez Swann (Swann’s Way or, in some recent editions, The Way by Swann’s), would finally appear in November 1913, published by Grasset, and at the author’s expense.
In the second volume of Proust’s novel, A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur (In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower), which would not appear until 1919, after the end of World War I (but which would, along with the rest of the volumes, be published by the NRF), the narrator pauses to reflect on how long it can take for a difficult new musical work to find a public that appreciates or understands those parts of it that are “newest” or most “novel”: “it is always the least precious parts that one notices first. … The beauties one discovers soonest are also those which pall soonest, a double effect with a single cause: they are the parts that most resemble other works, with which one is already familiar. But when those parts have receded, we can still be captivated by another phrase, which, because its shape was too novel to let our mind see anything there but confusion, had been made undetectable and kept intact.” Difficult works, Proust’s narrator notes, have to give birth to their own publics, a process that can take years, decades, or even centuries. “The work has to create its own posterity.” The reception of a work of art or of literature, its circulation, and the accumulation of value to it, the set of meanings associated with it, all happen over time and through a complicated set of processes that can be understood not only aesthetically, but also historically and sociologically. How—through what processes—does a public end up noticing, and then appreciating—giving value to—something new? Proust’s novel represents this set of processes unfolding in the way it talks about artists, composers, actors and actresses, and writers (both real and fictional) struggling to achieve recognition, but the novel was itself also caught up in the very processes it represents.
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