You have to bend your brain a little to read Mallarmé.
It isn’t just that his language is difficult, his language is perverse, deviant,
anomalous, weird. Reading it is not unlike the abrupt angular shifts one must
make while white water river rafting, the alert attention one must pay to the capricious
currents and rocks and eddies and surges and swirls in a mountain river. And
not just his poetry, but his prose. Mallarmé’s prose is a startling mix of insightful
exposition and syntactical chaos in which slivers and crags of reality tumble
into consciousness with a surprising degree of veracity, a luminous fullness,
moments when the mind is open to the quantum vagaries of phenomena in a
universe of flux and convulsion. A poesis of fragments, odd juxtapositions, vagueness
punctured by astonishing details, ricochets of polyphonous meaning.
Mallarmé’s language refuses definition, the cement of
language. The tone is expository, but the language is volatile, erratic,
feverish. The language itself is indicative of a crisis, the radical changes
occurring in the language of verse. It’s a language of implication, folds and insignia.
Intentions. Evocations. Potentials of meaning. Because nothing truly exists. Everything
is words, and words are nothing. Not things, but effects. Opalescence, not bricks.
Consciousness, not bone. “To name an object is to suppress three-fourths
of the enjoyment of the poem which is made up of gradual discovery: to suggest
it, that is the dream,” said Mallarmé.
You don’t expect to see this in prose. The odd weight
of a subject in a body of words with the dizzying velocity of quarks in a
Hadron collider. Not only can you not step twice in the same river, you
can’t read the same paragraph twice. The words will appear to have shifted, their
function in the sentence more or less the same, but the scenery has oddly
changed, the focus has diminished in one area and expanded in another. The
theme remains, but the interactions have created a web no longer there, unless
the dew brings it out, and the sun shines through it. It’s an unstable world,
and Mallarmé knows what to do with it. Put it in your pipe and smoke it. It’s a
hopeless case. The forms that result from light are comedians of mist. Mallarmé,
wrote Mary Ann Caws, “is, above all, the advocate of (and in some strong sense,
the hero of ) imagination.”
“Literature here,” writes Mallarmé, “is undergoing a
fundamental, exquisite crisis.”
What is meant by ‘here’? ‘Here’ can mean France,
Mallarmé’s study, or a point in time, the late 19th century.
Industry has kicked in hard. Commerce is fierce. The world of poetry, whose sacred
values are foreign to the goals of industry and commerce, has been severed from
the mainstream public. Its concerns are of little interest to a society consumed
with consumerism. It is now free to explore other possibilities, an otherness
that feels exciting, a little daunting, a little subversive.
Mallarmé wrote “Crisis in Verse” between 1886 and 1895,
during which time the Eiffel Tower was built, France had expanded its railroad and
telegraph lines, electrical power and telephones had been introduced, and iron
and steel production benefited from the Bessemer process - removal of
impurities from the iron by oxidation with air being blown through the molten
iron – although France lagged behind Britain and Belgium and experienced a
sluggish economy due to a lack of resources and the residual effects of three major
revolutions, the revolution of 1789 which brought down the monarchy, the July revolution
of 1830, and the February revolution of 1848. French culture did not take
readily to the industrialization burgeoning in Europe and the United States. Its
literary culture had been dominated by Romanticism and authors such Victor Hugo,
Alexandre Dumas, père, François-René de Chateaubriand, Alphonse de Lamartine,
Gérard de Nerval, Charles Nodier, Alfred de Musset, Théophile Gautier and
Alfred de Vigny.
On December 28th, 1895, the Lumière
brothers, Auguste and Louis, launched the first commercial showing of a movie
using a device called the Cinématographe, “Workers Leaving the Lumière
Factory.” The movie is available on YouTube and runs for approximately 46
seconds. The workforce is almost entirely women, all of them dressed in full
length skirts with high collars and leg of mutton sleeves. This, too, would
have an enormous impact on the kineticism of poetry as it was further developed
by poets like Guillaume Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars at the beginning the 20th
century, though Mallarmé’s nonlinear shifts and dissonances should be credited
with its initial impetus.
In 1875, Mallarmé moved to 89 Rue de Rome in the 17th
arrondissement. It’s one of Paris’s less expensive neighborhoods. The building
is large and has the elegant charm of most of Paris’s apartment buildings.
Today, at street level, is La Centrale du Casque, a motorcycle shop. 89 Rue de
Rome is where – beginning in 1885 – Mallarmé hosted his Tuesday salons, a
symposium of painters and poets including people like Oscar Wilde, Paul Valéry,
André Gide, W.B. Yeats, Rainer Maria Rilke, Claude Monet and Édouard Manet. It
was during this time that he became especially close to Manet and Monet, Manet
doing an important portrait and Monet devoting a painting to “Gloire,” one of
the prose poems included in Mallarmé’s Divagations, a collection of
prose poems and bios of painters, musicians and writers he called “medallions.”
As hermetic as Mallarmé’s poetry may be, he was extremely social, genial,
witty, and welcoming.
Mallarmé retired from teaching in 1893 and went to
live in his cottage at Valvins, a village on the Seine near Fontainebleau,
accompanied by his wife Maria and daughter Geneviève. This is where Mallarmé would complete Crise
de vers, an essay he’d begun in 1886 encapsulating the changes that had
diffused throughout poetry in latter decades of the 19th century.
“Just now, in abandonment of gesture, with the lassitude
that bad weather brings about, despairing one afternoon after another,” begins
the first paragraph of Crise de vers, “I made fall again, without any
curiosity yet it seems to him to have read everything here twenty years ago,
the elongation of multi-colored pearls that coruscates in the rain, again, to
the shimmering of the brochures in the library. Many a work, under the glass of
the curtain, will align its own scintillation: I love in the consummate sky,
against the window, to follow the lights of the storm.”
“I love in the consummate sky, against the glass, to
follow the lights of the storm.” There it is, an open window on Mallarmé’s
poesis. Can you feel the breeze? Can you smell the electricity? Can you feel
the charge of negative ions? The air is turbulent, there’s a hurly-burly of
sensation, a suddenness of impressions so quick they can only be registered in
a spontaneity of abrupt, fragmented phrasing, evocations of brilliance in a
non-linear framework. The world flashes into uncanny detail during a lightning
strike. The effect is fleeting. When it strikes elsewhere, in different
conditions, the scene will be very different.
“Whoever grants this function a place,” he states a
few paragraphs later, “or the first, recognizes, there, the current fact: we
are witnessing, as the end of a century, not as it was in the last, to
upheavals; but, outside the public square, to a disquiet of the veil in the
temple with significant folds and a little its tearing.”
“Disquiet of the veil in the temple” refers to the
sacred art of poetry, and its goal of remediating the disenchantment of the
industrial age and its soot covered buildings and obsession with material goods
and the extraction of resources, which would achieve maximal climax with WWI. Military
exports skyrocketed from $40 million in 1914 to over $2 billion in
the final years of the war. The steel industry alone experienced a massive boom.
This would certainly count as one of the upheavals to which Mallarmé was
referring, though he would not live to see WWI.
A language under the control of tyrants, governments, cults,
religions, academies, institutions, or corporate power is undermined by all the
mutinous and mutational instincts already inherent in language. Censorship is
useless. You can’t control a gas as atmospheric as air.
“The pure work implies the elocutionary disappearance
of the poet, who yields the initiative to the words, by the collision of their
mobilized inequality; they light up with reciprocal reflections like a virtual torrent
of fires on precious stones, replacing the perceptible breathing in the old
lyrical breath or the enthusiastic personal direction of the sentence.”
“L’oeuvre pure.” Pure work. The work of the poet who
dissolves into the language, surrenders to its spell. Invokes a divine energy
more sacred and transcendent than the old rules of metric or the boundaries of
taste fashioned by an elite close to the levers of power.
It’s what’s so wildly apparent in Mallarmé’s approach
to language, his full immersion in it, and the electrifying consequences of
this enthrallment. Getting these revelations into the hands of the reading
public is another difficulty, particularly when one’s efforts result in an
extremely difficult language, which will, no doubt, incur accusations of
indulgence, of employing a hermetic style to disguise one’s failings as a poet
or writer. I don’t have a solution for that. I do know that Frank James used to
quote Shakespeare when he and his brother Jesse robbed trains. I believe the
term for that is ‘captive audience.’ And probably a pissed off audience. So
never mind. I don’t have a solution for getting people to toss their electronic
garbage out and return to books. All I can do is point to the savage poets out
on the savannah, and envy their freedom.
The academics have coaxed poetry back into the
protection of the universities. This is where you will find awards and panels
and erudite symposiums. It’s not a perfect solution, and it’s pricey, but there
it is. Those of us outside collegiate walls pound away on our keyboards with the
glee of quixotic myriapods, oblivious of the public, envious of musicians, and indulging
freely in an orgasmic orphism of spectacular thermal winds. Columns of rising
air, shared with eagles, circling over Idaho’s Craters of the Moon. Feeling pulse
and radiate within the nerves of one’s spine a divine hand giving one the
ultimate push, a kundalini awakening, the ravenous appetence to exist, and say
things, and start things, and sing things into being. “The poet’s spell, if not
to free, from a clenched fist of dust or reality without enclosing it, in the
book, even as text, the volatile dispersion of the mind, which has nothing to
do with anything beyond the musicality of everything.” “The volatile dispersion
of the mind.” It’s all music. Rhythm and breath.
Thank you for your patience. Here’s the money shot: “I
say: a flower! and, out of the oblivion where my voice relegates no contour, as
something other than the above chalices, musically rises, the very suave idea,
the absent one of all bouquets.”
Maurice Blanchot provides a fascinating essay on this
revelation, perhaps the most important one of Crise de vers, titled “The
Myth of Mallarmé.” In it, he presents a theory of language: “In authentic
language, the word has a function, not only representative, but destructive. It
makes things disappear, it renders the object absent, it annihilates it.”
“I say: a flower,” Blanchot elaborates, “and I have
before my eyes neither a flower, nor an image of a flower, nor a memory of a
flower, but an absence of a flower. Is this absence, however, the sign of
something else, of truth, for example, in the classical sense, having value for
all and at all times? Let us not hasten to conclude this; despite the use of
abstract words: "calices above, idea," it is to be sensed that the
poet is in an order that asks nothing of knowledge. For the real absence of an
object he does not substitute its ideal presence. "Suave" and
"musically," it is certainly not an intellectual concept that is here
again in contact with reality but a more evasive reality, which presents itself
and evaporates, which is heard and vanishes, is abolished, on the other it
reappears in its most sensitive form, like a series of fugitive and unstable
nuances, in the very place of the abstract meaning whose void it claims to
fill."
There are implications to this that do result in
crisis: what is reality, what is the relationship between language and reality,
can language create its own reality, à la Raymond Roussell’s Impressions of
Africa, or almost anything by Kafka, or Stanislaw Lem, or Breton’s Soluble
Fish, Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, or Philip K. Dick, or Ursula K.
LeGuin, or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. The
most dramatic treatment of this in my view is Shakespeare’s The Tempest,
in which Prospero, the exiled scholar and Duke of Milan maneuvers reality like
chess pieces to achieve revenge on a treacherous brother and has supernatural
beings under his control, Ariel and Caliban. Though in Caliban’s case, the
control is somewhat imperfect. "You taught me language, and my profit on't
is I know how to curse.”
