Here is thus
the most limping and most offended by the vulgar
of poets, worse than Baudelaire's albatros,
« a wretched, lamentable lord exiling his
ghost of ruins slow to shroud himself into
legend and melodrama, here does he stand in
daily care and order ». Sheltered in dreams, he vehemently refuses the idea of an
« art for all » and begs his
companions never to become « worker-poets
». « Ô thou, poets, who forever
were proud, now do become more : become
disdainful ! »
Such would be the
first portrait of Mallarmé, exasperated
as he was by the real and devoured by the Ideal
at a time when the latter has tired out its
borrowed names : whether it be God, the People,
Progress and the very Beauty itself. Azure is
reduced to its nerve : the blue filigree of the
soul. Poetry goes on claiming « some other
thing » but it is well aware that is
totally in vain and for nothing. Mallarmé
surges at the terminal stage of romantic
lyricism : it will lead him all the way to
aphasia after Rimbaud had made it give its last
goose note. As the man from Ardennes had to,
either will he have to give up writing rhymed lines, or to grasp again radically the figure
and task of the poet by making them more ideal,
more critical and more lucid, more impersonal
and more prosaic : « I will sing as a
desperate man », such will be his creed.
In Idumée's
night, hence, is a new Mallarmé born from
monstrous kinships, a mourning and an abortion :
Baudelaire's death, the « Prince of dream
» and the missed genesis of the dramatic
work that was to lead Princess Herodiade to
drama.
Mallarmé at
last begets his own self, gifted of his own
poetics as he is and having determined the topic
of his work &endash; i.e. Beauty &endash; by
dreaming the unattainable perfection of
Hérodiade. Cuddling a chimera, he invents
a very new poetics. His so difficult task begets
a revelation in the shape of a resolution.
Stepping down from the absolute, as he himself
writes to Lefébure on May 3., 1868, he
turns his collapse into a victorious fall and a
paradoxical coronation. Hérodiade
operates a reversal of weakness into strength
and the loss of the metaphysical heavens into a
bias of relationship. Then a poetics of the link
substitutes itself to the impossible fusion to
the object and the « pratical jealousy
» of his writing to the elocutory forlorn poet. No other strength than that of lines
themselves will ever stand up forever on. The
ideal will no longer keep alive the itching of a
spleen. It becomes the awareness of an
irremediable burn, the won and kept pace of he
who fought with the « old and nasty plumage
» of the divine and closed down its wings hereafter. Having understood that one may
neither reach Eden nor do without it,
Mallarmé intends, fully aware of it,
despite anything that fights against it , to
further on the page that very lyrical task that
the persistence of a « sky instinct »
claims in him. On April 28, 1866, he wrote to
Cazalis about the strenuous efforts that the
lines of Hérodiade demanded from him and
about the abyss which such a task of digging
deeper into the line, had compelled him to meet
with :
« Yes, indeed,
I know we are but vain shapes of matter but so
sublime as to have invented both God and our own
souls. So sublime, dear friend ! That I wish to
give myself that show of matter, by being aware
of it, and yet by rushing frenzily into the
Dream it knows that it is not, bringing the Soul
and all the divine similar impressions that have
gathered in us for ages, thus proclaiming such
glorious lies in front of that very Nothingness
which is truth ! Such is the pattern of my
lyrical volume, and such may be its title. The
Glory of Lies or The Glorious Lie. I will sing
as a desperate man. »
A true «
Overture » which witnesses belief closing
in and poetry reopening itself in its «
demented interplay », such is thus
Hérodiade. In order to reach that point,
Mallarmé will have had to go through
several years of crisis, to work furiously away
at the line and acknowledge that the
metaphysical sky had definitely closed itself on
to the poem with aphasia and Baudelaire's death
in 1867.
He will then on
move in « lucid heights » with his
azure turned into white. His last spiritual
casket is made of himself, of his soul, his
reflexive conscience, such as he wishes to hold
on to both as one holds to some new behaviour, a resolution, a principle and as one remains in a
place where one thinks he may have found «
an area where to dwell and live ». Hence a
new figure of the poet as a spider, strongly
grasping the center of its web, taking care of it, of its
threads, its weaving and, above all,
of the weaving of its intersections.
In a letter to
Aubanel, dated July 28, 1866, three months later exactly, Mallarmé wrote :
« I only
wanted to say to you that I had just thrown the
plan of my whole Work after having found the key
to myself &endash; a keystone, or centre, if you wish, in order not to get mixed up with
metaphors &endash; the center of myself where I
stand as a holy spider on the major threads of
my soul and with which I will weave at the
crossways a few lace which I guess already exist
in the heart of Beauty ».
The « light,
winged and sacred » creature to which Plato
identified the poet in Ion, such a luminous bee
having its own field day with everything, has
now become a « spider ». For ever holy, no longer flying with its
wings, busy only
to joint together. What did the bee used to do
too when gathering pollens if not jointing and
even impregnating the flowers by letting its
pollens gliding along with its flights and its
works. But the threads it was delineating were
not visible, whereas the spider is the silent
and motionless mistress of a thread by now
obvious and resting like a « drop of
darkness » in the centre of its
night.
When one watches it
from a closer angle, what does a spider do ? One
would believe it builds in space. At least,
doesn't it build a nest in the way a bird would
: it never piles up either straw or mud. Rather,
it draws, geometrizes, wefts, institutes, outlines. Its dwelling is not resting on things
but is hardly sketched, suggested, hanging above
between themselves, almost as if it were
invisibly clinging to them. Indeed it is an
« architectural and aforethought matter
», but so thin, fragile and imponderable a
texture that no one would be able to catch it in
one's hands without running the risk of
destroying it. After all, the spider is such
that it gives a seat to a place, in the very
element of the web out of nothing will take
place but place itself, working slowly in the
boredom of time and whose web is woven in dead
angles where no existence is moving. In
Tournon's entrenchment, for example. A cobweb is nothing, being nothing but such a «
foam, a
virgin line » or threads worthy, when all
is said, only by what allows itself to be caught
in it whether it be an insect or a
circumstance…
Weaving in the
secrecy of the room as the spider does, in its
soul as the thinker does too, the poet is
neither « a gold spark of nature light
», nor a rope dancer, a funambulist or a
hanged man. Even if, as Francis Ponge reminded
us of, in « The spider », it is also
precisely « that very animal which, in the void, as an anchor is first to be chucked
». Rimbaud used to stretch « Sentences
» like chords, garlands or gold chains
between the windows, the church spires and the
stars, Mallarmé's task is less ambitious
and more patient and domestic : very much like
Penelope's rather than a Promethean one but it
still carefully looks to relationships, to
links, to encounters and transitions.
Like the spider,
the poet destroys what lets itself be caught in
its dark ink-web, whether it be an insect, an
object or a circumstance. It enables things to
disappear instead of displaying them. But by
spiriting them, it makes them subtle. At the
very crossroads of both subject and object, on
the very spot where « marvellous lace
» are woven, it warps its web and
transposes a fact or nature into its «
almost vibratory appearance ». Instead of
the object, an idea surges and the totality of
its qualities, almost as « something else
than known chalices » musically and all of
a sudden are substituted to the flower. That
« something else » is first and
foremost the sign, the « divine numerator
of our apotheosis », such that it comes to
dwell amid « the central chasm of a
spiritual impossibility that nothing were
exclusively belonging to everything », thus
dedicated to resting on the very void of the
page or of space its net of correspondances, its
strange and unique system of structures and
links in which no detail exists but when it
asserts and strengthens the whole.
Thus inspiration is
less a matter of breath than of weaving and spinning. Mallarmé erects its task in
terms of delineation, like a long thread
unwinding itself, circulating, branching off,
branching out and weaving itself into a web. If
both thought and writing are, according tp
Ponge's words, a work of dribble, then the body
becomes both production and resonance chamber of
this very thin thread of intimate chords. On May
27, 1867, Mallarmé wrote to
Lefébure :
« one should
think with one's whole body, which gives a full
thought and in tune, in the same way as those
violin chords immediately vibrating with its box
of hollow wood ».
The man who thinks
builds chords. Like the thoughtful and pensive
spider, as Ponge had noted it, never stretching
a line without its own body having gone through
the very same attempt which consists in turning
its body into chords and erecting some kind of
meaning without loosening the rein on the
sensible. It means inventing - as
Mallarmé said once more in La Musique des
Lettres - those motifs that « compose some
kind of logic with our fibres ». It means
playing from one's fibre exposed, since man is a
musical instrument.
Poetry, one is
aware of it, has always remained since the
Ancient Bards a matter of chords carefully
stretched and giving an adequate tune. But where
the « bell ringer », breathless as he
still was in 1866, were trying in vain to pull
the cable meant to ring the ideal,
Mallarmé, such as himself at last, says
he can do with only acknowledging the «
magnificent lace » he guesses and which, as
he stresses it, « already exist in the
heart of beauty ».
« Nature takes
place, nothing will be added to it, cities,
railroads and several inventions, such is our
material
Any act at hand
forever and only remains compelled as it is to
grasp the relationships between the times be
they rare or multiplied ; according to some
interior state whether one wishes of his own
free will to widen or to tighten the world.
»
Grasping the
relationships means « attempting to explain
the earth Orpheus-like, to decypher or to
translate rather than invent or create. Hence,
writing which is the pattern for such a «
jealous practice » is closely linked to
that very desperate practice, called reading in
which an everlasting quest of meaning of its debates, of its difficulties and trials repeats
itself. In the same way as the cannibalistic
spider, an expert in conjunction weaving its web
in order to catch something to feed upon, the
poet's strain consists in apprehending,
understanding and grasping through a tight
meshing of words.
Mallarmé,
like Rimbaud, turns the meaning into the plural.
But where the man from Ardennes advocates the
« systematic disturbance of all senses
» and invents the poetics of Illuminations (brainwaves and
coinages: « diamonds devoid
of control », « inventions of some
unheard of »…), to the void of meaning
Mallarmé substitutes the patient
settlement of meanings understood as a system of
calculated relationships. He develops a poetics
of refraction: gleamings reflections of meanings
linked to the interplay of reciprocity, «
transitions of scales » and an erection of
that very single « total word » which
is the line… For that linguist algebrist,
« Syntax, which is some kind of calculation, was to recapture the rank of the
Muse ». The poem is the seat of a new
economy of language, the actual seat of a kept
or reinstalled value, the space for an upgrading
of both gestures, affecting meaning from the
closestr : writing and reading. If access to
Eden or to Azure is barred or blocked, it yet
remains liable virtually through the upward
strength proper to the exercise of language.
The spider doesn't fly, I used to
say, and yet something in its
weaving is close to the take off up to the point
that people may have spoken of the flight of the
spider (at least dictionaries say so) about the
gossamer covering with white snowflakes the
grass of fields in autumn used by young spiders
as aerofoils implements to carry themselves afar
… Those threads were thus called because
the popular imagination thought them to have
escaped Marie's bobbin. Wasn't Marie, the
Christian name of Mallarmé's wife
?
If he be neither bee, nor rope
dancer, nor eagle, albatros or
seagull flying over the world with wide
twinklings of the wings, but rather, a swan
caught in ice, Mallarmé could also be
allegorized as a bat or, rather, what he calls
« the genius », a night-mammal,
familiar with the ruin and, like the spider,
with dead angles. In his medallion of Theodore
de Banville, he wrote :
« Like the
shining bat and the fanning of gravity, all of a sudden, of the site by an an autochtonous tip of
a wing, I wait for the mad, adamantine, angry,
swirling genius, colliding the ruin and freeing
himself in acrobatics, so is he, so am I : alone. »
Here again, in
order to conclude, a new brisk figure of
inspiration, all opposed to the spider's
patience, however consecrated as it may be to
ruins and dark nooks and recesses. « A holy
spider », « a dazzling bat »,
such oxymorons are inscribed in the filiation of
mythologies about poetic creation but, this
time, amid darkness, they look for the ugliest
and least loved animals liable to raise them to
the loftiness of symbols. From these insects and
black birds, over which Edgar Poe's tombstone
comes to project its « never more »,
Mallarmé does not create ironical
counter-patterns in the manner of
Corbière or Lautréamont. Rather,
he believes in showing accurately wherefrom the
poem proceeds and from which dead realities his
task is to extract himself from. It is by virtue
of a sky instinct kept but also upturned towards
the hereafter, falling back onto the page, or
folded back into a fan like the very paper-wing
in Geneviève's hand that his Orpheus-like
task is carried out.
To the poet who
flew off, the perplexed poet substituted himself, going deeper and deeper by virtue of a
doubt, cautious like the spider, working like it
at spinning the line drawn from oneself, or
digging and going down like a miner in the
depths of language. For Baudelaire, the modern
pote was twinned and doubled by the critic, for
Mallarmé, he is « ac critic before
all ». A reversed Icarus, such a miner is
not just fallen on the ground but further down
into the twenty-four letters of the alphabet to
which unyieldingly he keeps his piety
:
« Reborn
through his own self, (…) however much he
may have taken care of keeping from his closet a
piety for those twenty-four letters as they,
through the miracle of infinity, fixed in some
language of his own, then into some meaning
through the symmetries, actions, reflections all
the way to transfigurations into the
supernatural terms of the very line, such an
Edennic civilized creature owns, beyond any
other goods, the element of bliss, i.e. a
doctrine as well as a land. »
Language is both
doctrine and land. Writing presupposes some kind
of behaviour. Its own economy, made both of
solitude and elective affinities, rules the
multifold modalities of friendship, of the links
and of the lyrical relationships. Against the
figure of the doomed, necessarily a solitary
man, Mallarmé rents up again that of the
poet surrounded in his publications and his
Tuesdays. Entrenched and surrounded, such is
also the spider standing at the center of its
web. Its threads, as he is well aware of, are of
two kinds : those which help to hang the web and
those which catch and keep the preys. Such is
also the case with the Mallarméan web
either when it works at recreating the Dream and
keeping its capital letter to the Book, or when
it catches as a passing remark any odd circumstance, which it either burns or
consumes.
An ideal or a circumstance, what is thus the poem after all if
not some kind of a salvation ? An exquisite
politeness the day before it disappears. The
poet remains courteous, he whose Lady is under
the slab. His reverence now goes on onto the
language through which the links are both held
and sublimated. Taking leave of presence and
advantage of absence, he works at keeping above
all on paper the « liability of something
else ». it works at projecting through such
a trickery which writing represents, to «
some forbidden loftiness made of thunder !
» Dont' we miss the consciousness of what
is bursting up there… »
