Mallarmé's Crisis Of Verse

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 twice, 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 you 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 19^th 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 28^th, 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 20^th 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 17^th 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 19^th 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 flashes of 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.