Hardcover
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780801436628 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Cornell University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/21/1999 |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.94(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Reading in Mallarmé's Letters
Lire—
cette pratique—
—Œuvres complètes, 386
Understanding Mallarmé's letters, so many of which are responses to works of literature, demands some understanding of how he read, what he looked for, what attracted his attention, and what he tended to skate over. Yet exploring the nature of someone else's reading habits demands a leap of imagination and an attention to detail that is not often discussed in either literature or criticism. The delights of the mind and of the flesh are staple fare for much of literature. The joys of the table and the bed, the pleasure of painting or swimming, the sense of achievement at climbing a mountain or mastering a boat are captured in countless tales and evoked in countless lyrics. Yet reading them we might meditate on the relative paucity of descriptions of another pleasure: that of reading itself. Artists give us glimpses of readers lost in a book (what better way of getting your model to sit still?)—Pierre-Auguste Renoir's painting The Children's Afternoon at Wagemont, for instance, or Gustave Courbet's famous image of Baudelaire deep in a massive tome on the edge of his canvas The Artist's Studio. Films sometimes use it as a device to move into the plot, as happens in The Never Ending Story (1984), or to suggest cultural differences: Here one might think of the pages flicking across the scene in Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout (1971), as the white boy tells the Aboriginal a fairy tale he hasread. But where is it that art reveals how other people read and in particular how poets and writer's themselves read? Montaigne may have been right when he asserted in his essay "De l'expérience" that there are more books on books than on any other subjects, but as A. S. Byatt maintains in Possession,
Novels have their obligatory tour-de-force, the green—flecked gold omelette aux fines herbes, melting into buttery formlessness and tasting of summer, or the creamy human haunch, firm and warm, curved back to reveal a hot hollow, a crisping hair or two, the glimpsed sex. They do not habitually elaborate on the equally intense pleasure of reading. There are obvious reasons for this, the most obvious being the regressive nature of the pleasure, a miseen-abyme even, where words draw attention to the power and delight of words, and so ad infinitum, thus making the imagination experience something papery and dry, narcissistic and yet disagreeably distanced, without the immediacy of sexual moisture or the scented garnet glow of good burgundy. And yet, natures such as Roland's are at their most alert and heady when reading is violently yet steadily alive.
In this and in many other areas Marcel Proust breaks free from what novelists, in Byatt's term, "habitually" do. His first-person narrator is also one of those who is "at their most alert" or at least most intense when alive to reading and its effects: "in sleeping I hadn't stopped meditating on what I had just been reading, but those meditations had taken a particular form; it seemed to me that I myself was whatever the book had been talking about: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François Ier and Charles-Quint." Wallace Stevens's beautiful poem "The House was quiet" explores a similar imbrication of reader and book, but in a different register:
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
His poem "The Reader," less analytical and less exegetical, distills even more forcefully the experience of reading: "All night I sat reading a book, / Sat reading as if in a book / Of somber pages." Like Proust's Marcel as a child, Stevens's reader moves through the interstices of reading, "as if in a book," daydreaming through the cracks of reading, through the gaps that are misunderstood or in Marcel's case omitted as his mother censors George Sand's novel François le champi as she reads, prudishly leaving out links and explanations that would make sense of the story but that would also close it, transforming somber pages into mere white light.
Writers do, of course, and particularly in autobiography, give us glimpses into how they read, allow us, to use the title of Robert Graves's essay collection, to "read over their shoulder." Thumbnail sketches of the reader leap out from a range of texts: Simone de Beauvoir as a child, lost in the world of Little Women, Jules Vallès's unforgettable vignette of Jacques Vingtras punished for an offense at school by being locked in a room where he finds Robinson Crusoe and loses all sense of time and place, Arthur Rimbaud's robust if fleeting vision of the seven-year-old poet dreaming of sea voyages in the enclosed space of the attic, or Baudelaire's even briefer allusion to the child in love with maps and engravings? But what I have in mind here is the desire to know not just the sense of joy and discovery and heady excitement, but how, to quote Baudelaire, writers transform the "volupté" of receding into "connaissance," intense pleasure into understanding. With Baudelaire we have, if not a clear sense of how this works, at least something stronger than an inkling, a series of suggestions and hints that he himself analyzes in his art and literary criticism with his characteristically lucid desire to comprehend. Why is it, he asks, thinking of the poetry of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, that our reading sometimes awakens responses that seem to run counter to our deeply held convictions and loudly proclaimed opinions? Or, and here it is Hugo's poetry that has goaded him into going deeper into his initial response, why is it that what others uphold as great poetry and that we ourselves intermittently glimpse as such still does not satisfy us? Baudelaire's reading habits, disorganized and fragmented by the exigencies of his chaotic lifestyle, find a fragmented reflection not only in his literary criticism but also in his translations of Edgar Allan Poe and Thomas de Quincey, where the slips and errors that separate their idiosyncratic English from Baudelaire's far more classic French not only remold them as writers into palpably different figures but also indicate that in gazing into the language of the other Baudelaire was also gazing into his own language. In this case, it is not so much that the translator is a traitor, as the Italian proverb puts it; it is more that other writers are always magic mirrors that let him present himself more tellingly.
Perhaps even more than Baudelaire, the image we have of Mallarmé is of a reader. If there is, to my knowledge, no portrait, painted or photographed, that shows him in the act of reading, there is Paul Gauguin's haunting image of him with Poe's raven close behind him, as if reading over his shoulder, as if suggesting that what he has read, like the raven, will leave him nevermore. We know a great deal about what books he had in his library. Many of them are still there in Valvins, in what has now become the Musée Mallarmé. We can deduce from the more than eleven volumes of correspondence and from the numerous accounts of his Tuesday evening gatherings much of how he talked about reading. We can grasp from the care he paid in his own publications to such physical matters as typeface, spacing, paper quality, binding, and ornamentation that for him reading was not just a question of focusing on the words: Gérard Genette's notion of the paratext was already fully familiar to him. And the way in which his poetry takes up familiar themes, responds to challenges set down by other poets, and plays with the poetic language and structures of his day allows us to perceive aspects of his reading as if it were a watermark glimpsed through the paper. The challenge, I think, lies in using these indications to reach a deeper awareness of how he read and how he experienced those moments when, like Wallace Stevens's reader, he "became the book."
A very early critical piece, an appreciation of his friend Emmanuel Des Essarts's Les Poésies parisiennes, shows him drawing on a series of indications and suggestions before even beginning to read the text. Although he would later argue that a book needs no introduction by another voice, he asserts here—and there's no reason to think he changed his mind later on—that a preface by the author plays an essential role in helping the reader to find out what the writer "set out to do" (OC, 249). There's no timidity on his part about intentional fallacies: "I've always had a deep love for prefaces. When there is no preface and you have the good fortune to find a book as sincere as this one, you seek out the idea in the title, which encapsulates it, and in the epigraphs, which reveal it" (OC, 249). It is of course noticeable that Mallarmé himself rarely offered his reader such clues, naming his collection of poems simply Poésies, frequently supplying no titles for his sonnets, and delighting in bestowing on his volumes of criticism such bland, modest names as Pages, Crayonné au théâtre, and Variations sur un sujet. Part of the value for Mallarmé of focusing on the title is that it allows him to meditate, at least for a while, on what the poetry might do, rather than facing the rather more embarrassing task of responding to what Des Essarts actually had done: "clearly delineated contours, a sure sense of rhythm, and a certain breadth unfolding as do great monuments: that," he suggests, "is the sum of what one might expect" (OC, 250). Meditation based on a title, an epigraph, or a hint in the text or paratext becomes a constant theme in his criticism and especially in his correspondence; it finds what is perhaps its best-known formulation in the closing poem of Poésies, initially entitled "Autre sonnet" (Another sonnet) and now known only by its opening line: "Mes bouquins refermés sur le nom de Paphos" (My books closed once more on the name of Paphos):
Mes bouquins refermés sur le nom de Paphos, Il m'amuse d'élire avec le seul génie, Une ruine, par mille écumes bénie Sous I'hyacinthe, au loin, de ses jours triomphaux.
Coure le froid avec ses silences de faulx, Je n'y hululerai pas de vide nénie Si ce très blanc ébat au ras du sol dénie A tout site l'honneur du paysage faux.
Ma faim qui d'aucuns fruits ici ne se régale Trouve en leur docte manque une saveur égale: Qu'un éclate de chair humain et parfumant!
Le pied sur quelque guivre où notre amour tisonne, Je pense plus longtemps peut-être éperdument A l'autre, au sein brûlé d'une antique amazone.
(My books closed once more on the name of Paphos, I delight in summoning up, with nothing but my genius, A ruin, blessed by a thousand foams Under the far-off hyacinth of its days of triumph.
Let the wind speed by with its silence of sickles, I will not howl in empty denial If this very white ecstasy level with the soil maintains That no site has had the honor of my false landscape.
My hunger which cannot be sated with the fruit found here Finds in their erudite absence an equal savor: Let one of them burst forth with perfumed human flesh!
My foot on some fire-dog where our love burns quietly, I ponder even longer perhaps and lost in thought On the other, on the burnt breast of an Amazon of antiquity.) (OC, 76)
"Summoning up, with nothing but [his] genius" an imaginary landscape, or dreaming, with his foot on the fire dogs, of "the burnt breast of an Amazon of antiquity": This is Mallarmé's archetypal image of the reader moving beyond the text and into the theater of his or her own imagination.
It is not that Mallarmé merely uses hints in the text he is reading as a springboard into daydreaming: as his early prose piece, Symphonie littéraire, demonstrates, these reveries generally stem from a more standard exploration of the text, offering in other words a response based on, but going beyond, analysis. The section of the Symphonie littéraire that deals with Les Fleurs du mal is both an admiring pastiche of one of Baudelaire's own critical techniques and a creative meditation on the text. Baudelaire's reading of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore's poetry, a reading that represents her imaginary world as a landscape and especially as a garden, seems to be the starting point for Mallarmé's own representation of Les Fleurs du mal as "a surprising landscape that comes to life under the gaze with the intensity of those created by that deep drug, opium" (OC, 263). His exploration of Baudelaire's landscape leaves him with a more general question—"What, therefore, is the fatherland?"—one that precipitates the study's final paragraph, a meditation with both book and eyes closed. Reading becomes, in the admirable formulation of Mallarmé's January 1888 letter to the Belgian poet Emile Verhaeren, "after a great delight, a prolonged study amidst the lamplight" (Corr., III: 162). As that curious but typically Mallarméan use of "amidst" (parmi) suggests with its hints of reading through and by means of, but also surrounded by, the lamp is at once the physical object lighting the book, the context in which it is read, and the imaginative reader's active response to what is read, a symbol for the light of intelligence.
"After a great delight (jouissance)": Like Baudelaire's term volupté, jouissance is strongly physical, and it is not a random choice either. The Symphonie littéraire had already used it, more than twenty years earlier, to convey the poet's sense of impotence when reading "the inaccessible masters whose beauty fills me with despair" (OC, 261). Addressing the modern Muse of impotence who is about to read his response to these great masters, the narrative voice here announces, "You will find in it the delights of a purely passive soul which is as yet merely a woman and which tomorrow may be a beast" (OC, 261). The feminization of the reader, thus gendered because of the passivity generally associated with reading, is a frequent image in nineteenth-century writing, from Honoré de Balzac's addresses to his lectrices, through Baudelaire's more complex image of the astrologers whose reading of a woman's eyes leads to their fall and who seek escape from potential Circes in order, precisely, not to be changed into beasts, to Huysmans's Des Esseintes, whose feverish and extensive reading is revealed as yet another aspect of his impotence. In the misogynistic terms that run through so much late-nineteenth-century writing, passive reading is construed as feminine, an essential first step, but one that must be followed up by active analysis, a process gendered as virile. It would seem, therefore, that reading fully demands for Mallarmé a doubly gendered response.
It has been argued that much of what Mallarmé wrote to other poets when thanking them for the countless stream of books that were sent to him consists of nothing more than reflections about himself. This may be true enough in the case of some of the minor poets, or others whose themes and style were far removed from Mallarmé's, so that the only way to respond without being downright rude was to transform them into a mirror. But writers like Emile Verhaeren, Georges Rodenbach, and Henri de Régnier inspired letters that demand images based on quite different optical devices—if not microscopes revealing previously unknown truths then at least telescopes opening onto new horizons. Certainly Mallarmé's reading of Régnier's poetry, with its slowly evolving form of vers libre, led to a long series of letters exploring the nature of poetry and the value of the alexandrine, and this at a time when Mallarmé was working on the much revised study "Crise de vers," an essay that attempts to account for the development of free verse and at the same time to show its potential, its limitations, and its weaknesses.
Mallarmé's reading, it would seem from these letters and from the critical articles I've quoted thus far, is active and analytical, a playing out in the theater of his mind, to use his own expression (OC, 300), of what he feels a writer is attempting to achieve. It is also, perhaps inevitably, focused on techniques and artistry. We rarely get the sense of him being lost in the book's narrative or themes, except perhaps in his references to his adolescent reading of Charles Baudelaire or Théodore de Banville, Victor Hugo or Théophile Gautier. The correspondence, together with such contemporary accounts as those of Henri de Régnier, Edmond Bonniot (who was to marry Mallarmé's daughter), and Edouard Dujardin (best known for his development of interior monologue, in a novel that inspired James Joyce's use of the technique), lead us to think that for him the real delight lay not so much in the reading as in discussing what was read, through letters if necessary but even more pleasurably in the presence of the writer him or (rarely) herself. Although Mallarmé wrote his journalistic articles to earn money, I do not think anyone can be in much doubt that sharing his ideas with others in this way also caused him a real sense of joy, however much he might have complained about any task that reduced the time he could devote to poetry. Moreover, those articles allowed him to explore the concept of reading in a broader sense, turning the analytical skills to work on theater, mime, and dance.
He is in a sense also developing here the technique of the poets he admired as an adolescent: Banville, in his remarkable short story exploring the art of tightrope walker Hébé Caristi, and Gautier, in his theater criticism and the ballet Giselle, had both suggested ways of looking at the body as a signifier, even if they didn't explicitly analyze or theorize their thinking in this regard. And while Baudelaire's criticism focuses on the reading of texts, paintings, and in one case music, he does provide a starting point for reading a performer's body not just as displaying emotion but as symbolizing political or metaphysical revolt in his prose poem "Une mort héroïque" (A heroic death). But Mallarmé—more inward-looking, more determined not just to extract the connaissance from the volupté but to link that knowledge to a profound truth about human destiny, symbolized through an external sign—takes the metaphor of reading further than any of them. His remarkable piece Hamlet begins by playing on the concept of his own return to Paris in time for the theater season, a return forced on him by the coming of autumn, the season when his daughter, Geneviève, would rather pointedly indicate to him that it was time to leave Valvins by failing to replace the flower displays as they died. His conceit of reading autumn as a symbol of the brevity of human life is saved from cliché and banality by the intensity of the expression and by its function within the article itself, serving as an invitation to read symbolically in ways that are familiar to all of us from such banal examples as the fall of the leaves, but that, Mallarmé implies, we fail to extend into the life of the mind: "Far from everything, Nature, in autumn, prepares her Theater, sublime and pure, waiting to illuminate, in solitude, moments of meaning and prestige, so that a lucid eye may penetrate their sense (and it's a notable one, the destiny of man), so that a Poet may be recalled to mediocre pleasures and cares" (OC, 299). Within this context of interpretation, Hamlet, the play par excellence for Mallarmé, can be seen to embody the theater's sole subject: "the antagonism of dream in man, with the fatalities of his existence handed out by misfortune" (OC, 300).
Mallarmé's lucid eye also presents the ballet as a spectacle to be read. In his study "Ballets" he (famously) argues that
the ballerina is not a woman who dances, for these juxtaposed reasons that she is not a woman, but a metaphor resuming one of the elementary aspects of our form, a blade, cup, flower, etc., and because she does not dance, suggesting, by the miracle of shortcuts or leaps, with a corporeal writing what it would take paragraphs in dialogued or descriptive prose: she's a poem set free from all the apparel of a scribe (OC, 304).
"Blade, cup, flower": Quintessential motifs in Mallarmé's poetry, they are revealed in this suggestive evocation as metaphors we are invited to read, not just in the poems but in nature, where they, like the stars that constantly draw the gaze of the Mallarméan hero, demand interpretation as crucial elements of human existence.
When the curtain falls on play or ballet, when the books are closed or the letters set aside, when the fire of love burns quietly, the reader who is Mallarmé, or at least the image he provides of himself within the poems, chooses to retreat into the theater of the mind, to summon up with nothing but his imagination a triumphant summer landscape or merely a symbol of lost beauty. We may never find Mallarmé lost in a book, but we do find him, once the book has been closed, lost in thought, as he puts it in "Mes bouquins refermés," "plus longtemps peut-être éperdument" (perhaps for even longer, passionately).
Table of Contents
| Illustrations | ix |
| Acknowledgments | xi |
| Abbreviations | xiii |
| INTRODUCTION: Corresponding | 1 |
| INTERLUDE ONE • Reading in Mallarmé's Letters | 19 |
| CHAPTER ONE • Writing in Exile | 27 |
| INTERLUDE TWO • Depression | 66 |
| CHAPTER TWO • Finding a Voice | 77 |
| INTERLUDE THREE • Father and Daughter | 109 |
| CHAPTER THREE • Forging an Aesthetic | 121 |
| INTERLUDE FOUR • Love and Friendship | 156 |
| CHAPTER FOUR • Becoming a Symbol | 166 |
| INTERLUDE FIVE • "A Passerby Seeking Refuge": Poetry, | |
| Politics and Bombs | 202 |
| CONCLUSION: Remembering the Dead | 217 |
| Appendix: "Crise de vers" | 227 |
| Notes | 235 |
| Selected Bibliography | 245 |
| Index | 255 |
What People are Saying About This
Unique among Mallarme's biographers (in French or in English), Rosemary Lloyd has articulated the intricate structure of his procedures as the true poet of reading—his and ours. Not only a formidable achievement, but a mandatory one, putting us richly in her debt, and happy to be there.
To encounter this remarkable study of Mallarme's life, character, and surroundings with a focus on a broad exchange of letters is to read, for once, from the inside out. At every turn, Rosemary Lloyd's lively and authoritative translations, her deep knowledge, and subtle grasp of what really matters—in a life and in a reading—make this book a triumph.
Highly original in form and conception, Mallarmé: The Poet and His Circle stands out from other biographies. Rosemary Lloyd demonstrates the central importance of the letters for Mallarmé's aesthetic theory and practice, and their critical interest as a testing ground for the great experiments of Symbolism.
Rosemary Lloyd's Mallarme occupies a peopled landscape rather than the desert of abstraction to which many recent critics have sought to confine him. But the remarkable thing about this book is that Lloyd's discussion of Mallarme's people—the crowd of artists and litterateurs with whom he had dealings—offers us new ways of reading his poems, essays, and letters at their most difficult and provocative. This is a landmark in the historical understanding of an incomparable writer.
Taking the poet's correspondence as the focus of her study, Rosemary Lloyd brilliantly captures the savor of Mallarme. Her delightful, finely drawn portrait illuminates Mallarme's relationships with his many artist friends, from Zola to Redon.