Etalages : Mallarm6 displaying "the fascination of what's difficult''

ROSEMARY LLOYD

Yeats, who once went to visit Mallarm6 but found the master absent, bringing audiences in Oxford and Cambridge the vital news about vers fibre,' laments, in one of his pseudo-sonnets, that

The fascination of what's difficult Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent Spontaneous joy and natural content Out of my heart.2

Had he lived to read it (the poem dates from 1909), Mallarm6 would surely have recognized in Yeats's poem a reworking of themes in his own "Las de l'amer repos" and might have smiled to find the impetuous Irish poet swearing to set Pegasus free again, to "find the stable and pull out the bolt", while Mallarm6 himself had chosen to turn to that image of tranquillity, the Chinese artist painting in the restricted framework of the white porcelain plate. But Yeats's difficulty, at least in t h i s poem, was imposed from the outside, through his in- volvement with what he tersely terms here "Theatre business, management of men". In Mallarm6's case, difficulty is presented as both internally produced and exerting a quite different fascination, "le sens enseveli" being held to invite the reader to penetrate beyond the surface layer in search of "l'air ou chant sous le texte" which, he claimed, in one of those interweaving of the arts charac- teristic of him, "y applique son motif en fleuron et cul-de-lampe invisibles" (MOC, p. 387). Many readers have attested to, and many critics sought to define, or even refine, what Malcolm Bowie has termed Mallarm6's art of being diff i~ul t .~ Eughe Lefkbure, the friend in whom he so often confided during

' The story is frequently told: see for instance Stephen Coote. W. B. Yeas, A Life, London,

' W. B. Yeats, Collected Works: I: The Poems, ed. Richard J . Finneran. New York, Scribner,

Stkphane Mallarm& Euvres compl&es, ed. Henri Mondor & G. Jean-Aubry, Paris,

Malcolm Bowie, M a l l a d and the Art of Being Dincult, Cambridge, Cambridge University

Hodder & Stoughton. 1997, pp. 121-122.

1997, p. 92.

Gallimard, Bibliothkque de la PICiade, 1945, p. 372. Henceforth MOC in the text.

Press, 1976.

392 Rosemary Lloyd

those bleak years spent in the provinces, saw it as the desire to condense as much meaning as possible into the words used,5 while the hostile Goncourt brothers dismissed his work as an attempt to create a “logogryphic” language.6 Recent readings, especially of the poetry, have surmised a thesaurus limited to words with few rhymes (Graham Robb) or a constant desire to offer alternative, punning readings (Roger Pearson), while other analyses, for instance that of Michael Temple, assert an anagrammatic presence of words beneath the words.’ For his part, this number’s dedicatee, Peter Hambly, presents it as an intricate inter- textual reference system building on contemporary readers’ familiarity with the work of other poets of the time.’ But whatever the means may be, the question remains: what was at stake for Mallarmt in positing his famous claim that there must always be enigma? And how is the “toujours” to be read: does it indicate that all language used for purposes other than mere reporting should on first reading contain elements of ultimately reducible uncertainty, or that the opacity should be always present, however often we read, that there should be a constant element of unresolvable undecidability? Anyone who reads Mallarmt ’s poetry frequently enough knows the charm with which that opacity dissolves to reveal the “miroitement en dessous”, suggesting yet further strata of intelligibility beneath and beyond the most obvious. Moreover, Mallarmt’s claim about the act of reading appears to imply that the presence of enigma does not negate the possibility of a recuperable meaning: “Un solitaire tacite concert se donne, par la lecture, i l’esprit qui regagne, sur une sonoritt moindre, la signification: aucun moyen mental exaltant la symphonie ne manquera, rarefit et c’est tout - du fait de la penste” (MOC, p. 380). Regaining meaning through the power of thought lies, indeed, at the heart of all MallarmC’s pronouncements about the art of reading, just as many of his statements concerning writing stress the presence of mystery, most memorably, perhaps, the lines in his memorial lecture for Villiers: “Sait-on ce que c’est qu’tcrire? Une ancienne et tr2s vague mais jalouse pratique, dont git le sens au myst2re du caeur” (MOC, p. 481). Here, while writing is yet

Henri Mondor. EugPne Lefkbure: so vie, ses lettres cf Mallard, Paris, Gallimard, 1951, pp. 178-179. Lefkbure’s poems, published in the first and second Parnasse contemporain, are im- placably Parnassian in their transparency.

Goncourt brothers, Journal, Paris, Lafont, 1956, 4 vols, 111, p. 556. Graham Robb, Unlocking Mallard, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1996; Roger

Pearson, Unfolding Mallard: The Development of a Poetic Art, Oxford. Clarendon Press, 1996; Michael Temple, The Name of the Poet, Exeter, Exeter University Press, 1995.

* Among his numerous studies, see in particular, “Lecture intertextuelle de ‘Don du pOeme’”, Littkratures, 22. Spring 1990. pp. 93-103; “RCflexions sur quatre pokmes de Mallarmk”, AJFS, XXIX, 1992, pp. 78-101; “Mallarmk A la lumikre du Parnasse”, AJFS, XXXII, 1995. pp. 301-361; and “Pastiche et parodie chez Mallarmk” in K. Cameron. ed., L.e Champ lineraire, studies in honour of Michael Pakenham, Amsterdam, Rodopi, 1996, pp. 177-202.

"The Fascination of What's Diflcult 393

again intimately linked to the enigmatic, Mallarm6 affirms that, however deeply it may be hidden, writing does indeed possess meaning.

Throughout Mallarm6's writing, both creative and critical, runs a sense of literature as occupying a space, and of reading as constituting the active exploration of that space. This is a landscape of depths and far horizons, where light comes to us from far below or out of the furthermost reaches of distant constellations. There is always a feeling in reading Mallarm6, even in reading the most familiar works, that we set out "au seul souci de voyager / Outre", beyond the conventions of language and of reading itself. As readers, as actors in "le seul theatre de notre esprit" (MOC, p. 300), we are invited not just to travel along on the caravelle, but to participate in the act of creating meaning, or, as Mallarm6 idiosyncratically puts it: "Aidons l'hydre ii vider son brouillard" (MOC, p. 413). Yet, in many ways, there appears to be a contradiction between this empowerment of the reader and the desire for control that Mallarm6 reveals in numerous other contexts, in his relationships with friends, in his love affair with MCry Laurent, in the images of his life and his personality he wanted to pass on to others, in his choice of models and patterns of strict verse form rather than the personal and perhaps wayward keyboard of vers libre. Feminist critics have presented a desire for control and difficulty as linked with a concept of masculinity and virility that led the Parnassians to reject the more fluid and mobile works of the Romantics as well as those of the symbolist^.^ Sartre's vision of an effeminate Mallarm6, a "petit homme f6minin, discret, peu port6 sur les femmes", fussily draping his plaid around his shoulders in Paul Nadar's photograph of him, would in such a reading be counteracted by the poet's in- sistence on the virility exhibited by the iron control exerted over both the text and immediate context, the substance of the work and its appearance on the printed page." The Mallarm6 that has come down to us from those who related the habitual scenarios of the Mar& is more associated with an aspiration to control," while the Mallarm6 who demands such active participation from the reader seems to display traits that are far less associated with the desire for

For a representative study see Gretchen Schultz. The Gendered Lyric: Subjectivify and

lo Jean-Paul Same. M a l l a d : La luciditt! et sa face d'ombre. Paris, Gallimard, 1986, p. 167. l 1 See for instance Henri de Rkgnier's unpublished diaries, under the title Annules psychiques

et occulaires, Bibliothtque nationale, Paris. Mss nouvelles acquisitions franGaises 14974-77; and Edmond Bonniot, "Notes sur les mardis", Les Marges, 52, 1936, pp. 12-13. Paul Valery also provides illuminating insights in Ecrits divers sur Stkphune M a l l a d , Paris, Gallimard. 1950. Pierre Louys noted in his diary after his first Murdi that Mallarmk had pontificated in a most unbearable way: see Louys. (Euvres complPtes, Geneva, Slatkine Reprints, 1973, 13 vols. IX. p. 293.

Diference in 19th-cenrury French Poetry, W . Lafayette, Ind.. Purdue University Press, 1999.

394 Rosemary Lloyd

dominance. And whereas the very young MallarmC could propose the elitist view of literature and language that appears in “HCrCsies artistiques” with its presentation of the poet as “un adorateur du beau inaccessible au vulgaire” (MOC, p. 259),12 his later works, influenced perhaps by the irritant of seeing Wagner create beauty that was indeed accessible to many, including many of MallarmC’s friends, seem to invite many more to join the happy few. While there is always in Mallam6 the dichotomy between a HCrodiade who seeks self- containment and self-sufficiency, and a Faun who offers himself and his music to the world at large, the disruptive nature of MallarmSs use of language, perhaps above all in the prose pieces that are grouped under the heading Variations sur un sujet, suggests a writer clutching the dice in closed hands, forever hesitating to take the chance of revealing what he holds.

MallarmC was fascinated by the nature of language, as we know from his early plans to write a thesis in the field of linguistics and from his delighted observation of the way in which his children acquired language skills. l 3 But that fascination tends to express itself, not as in the case of certain writers, notably Hugo or Dickens, Balzac or Zola, Laforgue or Krysinska, through an instantly recognizable delight in reflecting the cadences and habits of popular speech, but rather in a determined rejection of anything that smacked of habit or cliche, together with the constant demand on his reader to build and deploy interpreta- tive skills that go well beyond those associated with the perusal of the morning paper. With the well-known result that countless of his readers, not at all con- vinced by his suave assurance that he was merely announcing an intention to blow his nose, while they may not necessarily have flapped their skirts and snorted “Comprends pas!” (MOC, p. 383), have nevertheless joined the narrator of “L’Action restreinte” in asking: “que visait-il [. . .], j’insiste, qu’entendait-il expressCment?” (MOC, p. 369). And after all, if you merely want to blow your nose, why not just get on and do it, without making a general and unintelligible announcement?

It may be that, even though it is MallarmC’s narrator who asks it, “qu’entendait-il expresskment” is not the best question to ask. In the hope of finding a better question I want to meditate here on one of his variations on a subject that displays the problem of the relationship between literature and the commercial world, the poet and the worker, Etalages.

* * * *

Iz The very claim the young Proust was to make in his attack on the symbolists. when he excoriated their “dtsir de protkger leur auvre contre les atteintes du vulgaire” (Proust, “Contre I’obscuri3” in Contre Suinte-Beuve, Paris, Gallimard, 1971, pp. 393-394).

l 3 See Mallarmt, Correspondunce, Lenres sur la poksie, ed. Betrand Marchal, Paris, Folio, 1995, p. 424.

The Fascination of What’s Dificult” 395

But, as MallarmC crisply reminds us, “mkliter, sans traces, devient Cvanescent” (MOC, p. 369). Let us take as a purely heuristic question that of how he goes about transforming the everyday and potentially banal, a slump in book sales, into the miroitement.

MallarmC himself, as we know from countless letters and from such published explorations of other writers’ texts as his review of Des Essarts’ Les Poksies parisiennes or Huysmans Lh-bas, would start by meditating on the title: in the absence of a preface, he asserts, “on recherche l’idee dans le titre, qui la resume, et dans les Cpigraphes, qui la rCv6lent” (MOC, p. 249). According to the Larousse, “Ctalage” can indicate: “l’exposition de marchandises offertes B la vente, lieu ou sont exposees les marchandises, l’ensemble de ses marchan- dises, l’action d’exposer avec ostentation (faire Ctalage de ses sucds), ou bien, dam le domaine des textiles, la premike opCration de filature du lin peignC, visant B transformer les poignCes de lin en un ruban continu”. Showing, selling, skiting, spinning, as a revised version of the “Coup de dCs” might frame it. For its part, the LittrC omits the reference to spinning, but includes “grande toilette”, and, in the plural, “la partie ia plus renfltk dans les hauts-fourneaux”, thus allowing the word to have something to offer both to the ridacteur en chef of La Demi2re Mode and to the verbal alchemist who penned Magie. “Etaler”, again according to the LittrC, adds further nuances, that of producing on the stage, that of revealing something “en un langage qui fait valoir les choses” , and, in colloquial usage, that of hurling someone to the ground, MallarmC as the being of light, gold, and gauze “Terrass[ant] I’Cnorme Satan” perhaps. l4 “Les mots”, MallarmC argues in “Le mysthre dans les lettres”, “d’eux-memes, s’exal- tent B mainte facette reconnue la plus rare ou valant pour l’esprit, centre de suspens vibratoire” (MOC, p. 386). Several of the facets of the word ktalage are allowed to glimmer as the text unfolds around its “centre de suspens vibra- toire”, a centre that displays the fan as image and producer of that vibration.

As with many of his prose poems and his other prose pieces, MallarmC’s ostensible subject is simple, journalistic by nature: in this case, that of the relationship between writing and publishing, the book as product of the mind, and the book as object for sale. The poet’s task lies in transposing the basic anecdote of a slump in book sales out of the banal field of reality- “artifice que la rkalitk, bon B fixer l’intellect moyen entre les mirages d’un fait” (MOC, p. 276)-and placing it in the light most appropriate for reverie: “Je veux, en we de moi seul, Ccrire comme elle frappa mon regard de poete, telle Anecdote” (loc. cit.).

l4 Baudelaire, (Euvres complt?tes, Paris, Gallimard, Bibliotheque de la PICaide, 1975-1976, 2 vols, I, p. 55.

396 Rosemary Lloyd

Autumn has covered the ground not just with leaves, but with books, the traditional high season for book sales having found the public indifferent. Mallarme, locating an immediate cause for this within that domain of dream that he argues should be the focus and substance of at least one journal in every city, wryly suggests that the public, instead of reading about the beauty of autumn sunsets, have decided to contemplate them on their own, unmediated. Or perhaps, adds a more cynical MallarmCan voice, it is all just part of the publicity, adding spice to the novels by suggesting that they wait, languishing, on the bookstalls. Typically, MallarmC focuses on a linguistic aspect, the return of the word “krach”, associated particularly with the financial disarray of the late 1870s.

Equally typically, he breaks his paragraph, to indicate in a succinct and pellucid sentence that the “haut commerce des Lettres” is reduced in such discussions to the novel. “Personne ne fit d’allusion aux vers”, he comments with a particularly dry crispness, surrounding his comment with the white space that invites, enables, and certainly here demands of the reader active contemplation. This, indeed, will be the subject or at least the focus of subsequent paragraphs: Mallarme’s technique here as so often is to raise the question, prompt the medi- tation, then let it lie for a while, crystallizing in the reader’s mind.

Another of Mallarme’s great skills as a prose writer is his capacity for condensation, especially as regards the architecture of his sentences. “Ken omis en cette farce (importance, consultations et gestes) de ce qui signifiait qu’on allait donc Ctre, B la faveur de I’idCal, assimile aux banquiers dequs, avoir une situation, sujette aux baisses et aux revirements, sur la place: y prendre un pied, presque en le levant.” 1892, the year in which this piece first appeared, is also that in which Renoir made his portrait of the poet, a portrait far less to Mallarme’s liking than Manet’s evocation of him: according to his future son- in-law Bonniot, he claimed it made him look like a “financier C O S S U ” . ~ ~ It is hard on a poet to find himself portrayed as afinancier cossu and assimilated with the banquiers d&us all in such a short period. MallarmC’s contempt for such a situation, in which the world of the ideal was to be used to bolster petty dreams of wealth, can be heard in the rapid unfolding of the sentence and especially in the accumulation of sibilants: farce, imporfance, consultations, gestes, signifiait, assimilk, situation, sujette, baisses, place. It can be detected too in the paren- thetical vignette of the farce (“importance, consultations et gestes”), a miniature one-act play, with its parallel picture conveyed in the punning final phrase, pirouetting around the concepts of prendre pied and lever pied. If such tightly packed ellipticism is characteristic of him, so too is the change of pace, the long breath of simulated relief, that dominates the next sentence. And here, as in

IS Edmond BoMiot, “Les Mardis de Mallarm6“. Les Murges, 1936.

“The Fascination of What’s Dificult ’’ 397

certain moments of his poetry (the “le sais-tu, oui!” of “0 si chtre de loin” and the “Non, la bouche ne sera sfire” of “Quelle soie aux baumes de temps”, for instance), we hear the rhythms if not of colloquial language at least of Mallarme’s spoken voice: “Non: ce semble que non, vantardise; il faut en rabattre. ”

Malland’s imagination, fanciful, freewheeling, at times somewhat fey, is also capable of transposing the abstract into the concrete, and often the intellectual into the architectural, as he does in depicting the accretions of past poetry as a vast cathedral in his tribute to Theodore de Banville. Here, we find him strolling through a quiet, springtime Paris, the orderly citizen glad to find the streets so calm-not for Mallarm6 the delights of the “rue assourdissante” whose denizens kept another poet “crisp6 comme un extravagant”. But then, 1892 was a year of anarchist attacks in Paris, an ivresse of the sort Baudelaire invokes in remembering his emotions in the revolution of 1848.16 The book crisis over - how could it last when this “mentale denrCe” is indispensable, MallarmC briefly explains, in allusive echo of Baudelaire’s snarl: “VOUS pouvez vivre trois jours sans pain; -sans poesie jamais” 17- but it leaves its reflec- tions in the architecture of what are termed the grocery stores and shoe shops of the mind, in the piles or colonnades of books for sale. The new cathedrals of commerce, whose architecture of glass and steel Zola so brilliantly describes in Au bonheur des dames, find their more homely equivalent here, with pillars of books that manifest the merchants’ worries about sales. Whimsically, Mallarmk even attributes to architectural concerns the way in which the main selling season has been advanced from winter to the threshold of summer, surmising that the need to keep the books indoors, visible only through the windows, froze sales as if the panes were of ice, whereas the new timing allows lectrices, as they set out on holiday, to pluck a volume from the open-air displays, eager to place it, as he puts it in a phrase that recalls impressionist paintings, between their eyes and the sea. While the breezy style here is reminiscent of La Dernikre Mode, an echo of an earlier paragraph intervenes at this point, supported by the elliptical command “Interception, notez -”, effecting one of those moments of miroite- ment en dessous that suggest a significant slippage between rhetoric and inten- tion. Earlier he had suggested that readers had abandoned books in order to gaze upon the beauty of sunsets without the intermediary of the poet, while here the placing of the book between the viewer and the sea, whose beauty had so pro- foundly affected him when he visited the Mediterranean coast in the company of Lefebure, hints that this particular dkplacement has not been entirely avantageux.

l6 Baudelaire, Euvres complPtes, I, p. 679. *’ bid., II, p. 415.

398 Rosemary Lloyd

I do not think that the fact that the reader in this instance is presented as female need be taken as intrinsically disparaging. It represents much more a demo- graphic reality that Mallarm6 had already noted: “On va repetant, non sans vCritC, qu’il n’y a plus de lecteurs; je crois bien, ce sont des lectrices” (MOC, p. 716). More centrally still, it was in the summer immediately before this piece was published that Genevike Mallarm6 took her first holiday without her parents, spending it with family friends, the Ponsots, by the sea. That she is the lectrice he has specifically in mind here is suggested by the way in which his next metaphor unfolds.

Mallarm6 uses the apparently frivolous fact of the book placed between the viewer and the summer landscape to move into a deeper meditation on the representative power of literature, a meditation set in motion here by the similarities between the book and the fan. His exploration of the fan’s function is at once an encapsulation of his own poems about fans, and a reworking of his famous definition from the avant-propos written for RenC Ghil: “a quoi bon la merveille de transposer un fait de nature en sa presque disparition vibratoire selon le jeu de la parole, cependant; si ce n’est pour qu’en 6mane, sans le gene d’un proche ou concret rappel, la notion pure” (MOC, p. 368). The vibration set up by the fan, with its “muette fleur peinte”, symbolizes the unspoken reverie, gives it a language that renders the poet’s couplets not just unnecessary but excessive, just as, in “0 si ch2re de loin”, the poet’s tender names for his beloved are surpassed by the word she teaches him, that of the kiss. The fan poem that is closest to this passage is, however, the one written for his daughter Genevikve and first published in 1884, specifically recalled here by the phrase ”l’inconscience du d6lice sans cause”:

0 reveuse, pour que plonge Au pur dClice sans chemin, Sache par un subtil mensonge Garder mon aile dans ta main (MOC, p. 58).

Unlike the fan, which hides the external world in order to further a reverie it instigates but does not direct, fiction, Mallarm6 goes on to assert, operates by replacing the world around us with a fictional world in which we see ourselves reflected. Mallarmk’s long meditation on fiction and in particular on the nature of the contemporary novel can be followed in his letters, and especially those to Zola and Huysmans, where he raises the question of the reader’s role. In 1878, writing to congratulate Zola on Unepuge d’umour, he had already pointed to what he perceived as a flaw in the nature of this kind of impersonally presented narrative: what if impersonality is such that it convinces the reader that the work is perfectly self-contained, enclosed within itself and

“The Fascination of What’s Diflcult ” 399

therefore allowing no loophole through which the reader can enter and dream? Balzac’s novels, precisely because of that insistent voice-over of the omniscient narrator, constantly provoke and frequently invite readerly rebellion or at least readerly independence: paradoxically, Zola’s white-noise narration can leave the sense that all has been said, that no chink allows access to the reader’s reverie. It is the kind of argument that Mallarm6 uses against Wagner, with his determination to control every aspect of the work of art and of his audience’s responses. Here in Etalages MallarmC displays yet another misgiving about the novel, its tendency merely to offer a mirror image of reality, however banal. Mallarm6 demands a transposition of that mirror image into an overarching symbol that reveals its “sens auguste”. This is where he sees the primary division between poetry and fiction, not in the outward signs of its presentation on the page, its alignment “panni les marges et du blanc”, but in the “secr&te pour- suite de musique”. This affirmation continues the meditation on poetry and its relationship to music that informs Crise de vers, restating one of the fiats promulgated in that article: “que vers il y a sit6t que s’accentue la diction, rythme d b que style” (MOC, p. 361).

One of the difficulties that a reader has to overcome in exploring Mallarmk’s prose stems from the fact that the unfolding of his argument has little of the Cartesian about it. Logical progression is set aside in favour of a movement that recalls more the flickering of light on precious stones. He sets up an idea or provokes a meditation, moves on, then abruptly returns to it. Having asserted the dichotomy between representative fiction with its overt mirroring of the reader and poetic writing with its positing of a higher sense and its secret pursuit of beauty, he turns back to his exploration of the nature and role of the kind of literature offered to the contemporary public. This freewheeling structure is strengthened by the underpinning of recurrent images, in this case, that of the fan. Whereas the fan mentioned earlier, with its symbolic roses, had extended the landscape through its facilitation of reverie, the book, being discursive rather than symbolic, limits the reader’s perspective. No longer the “aile ancienne” that offered “l’horizon dans une bouffCe”, as Mallarm6 expresses it on a fan given to his daughter (MOC, p. 107), the volume the summer reader is induced to buy reduces “l’horizon et le spectacle A une moyenne bouff6e de banalitC” . And where the fan is productive of breath, providing the bouffie of air, the kind of reader Mallarm6 has in mind at this point is capable only of absorbing air, a passivity represented here in the word bdillement. MallarmC, who delighted in discovering words whose sound echoes their sense and lamented, memorably, that the sound of nuit was so bright while that ofjour was so sombre (MOC, p. 364), must have enjoyed contrasting these two, the pronunciation of the first being indeed productive of air, the second requiring an intake of breath and a

400 Rosemary Lloyd

yawning gape. Two problems have led to this predicament which, rather than the slump in sales, is the real collapse in literary values: the writer’s failure to perceive that the task lies not in representing all that is vague and commonplace, but precisely in banishing it; and the reader’s failure to seek a higher measure and a more ethereal rhythm, or as Mallarm6 puts it to “scander son vol d’aprb un 6bat inn6 ou selon la rdcitation de quelques vers, nouveaux ou toujours les memes, sus” .

Meditating on the role that the press has played in this transformation of values, Mallarm6 picks up his earlier architectural image to explore the way in which French newspapers long devoted considerable space to the serialized novel. Normally occupying the lower third of the front page, this section was habitually referred to as the “rez-de-chauss6e” , a clich6 Mallarm6 transposes here by yet another allusion to contemporary architectural styles:

son traditionnel feuilleton en rez-de-chaussk longtemps soutint la masse du format entier: ainsi qu’aux avenues, sur le fragile magasin iblouissant, glaces i scintillation de bijoux ou par la nuance de tissues baignks, siirement pose un immeuble lourd d’ktages nombreux.

This depiction in itself encapsulates the nature and function of metaphor, opening out from a small but luminous base to support numerous stories rising above it. Once launched, Malland’s metaphor takes wings, as if Yeats had indeed found the stable and set the colt free, depicting daily papers in which the fictional takes such precedence over the factual as to dislodge it from its primary place. Typically, Mallarm6 draws from this a witty and improbable lesson: the news- paper has sought to symbolize by this allocation of space to the fictional and the timeless that “aujourd’hui n’est seulement le remplasant d’hier, presageant demain, mais sort du temps, comme general, avec une int6grit6 l a d e ou neuve”. Moving rapidly from this assumption, he concludes that in fact the twists and turns of politics, the motility that lies perforce at the heart of every news item, merely serves to reinforce the unchanging nature of poetry, which alone is lofty and precious. Though MallarmC’s friendships with leading anarchists, his support of FCn6on and Zola, and his involvement with periodicals connected with left- wing political movements, brought him under the eye of the police and made him more keenly aware of the current political situation than many critics have acknowledged, his assertion that no bomb was as effective as literature, and no political figure as powerful as the poet” finds a quieter reflection here, in his

Mallarm&, Correspondunce, ed. Henri Mondor & Lloyd James Austin, Paris, Gallimard, 1959-1985, 11 V O ~ S , VI. p. 287.

“The Fascination of What’s Dincult 401

argument that the proliferation of newspapers was no more than a parody of poetry’s flight beyond the mere confines of paper. The recurrent image of the fan is subtly alluded to at this point, when poetry is evoked as a “frkmissement de vols”.

Given the immense burgeoning of published matter, true lovers of literature, Mallarm6 tells us, hesitate to publish anything at all, lest it be defiled by contamination with the newspaper, lest it have directed at it that blaze of gaslight that reveals language “ h nu, vulgaire, dardQ sur le carrefour”. This is language from which all enigma, all suggestion has been stripped, language, in other words, which is not that of the poet. That the poet’s refusal to publish will inevitably lead to “rien ensuite” might seem to pose a problem. How except by counter-example can one stem the tide of such a debasement of literature? Mallarme calmly affirms that nothing can stop the poet, whose glory is in no way dependent on the ”combinaisons mercantiles” with which the article began. The poet is depicted here in terms of upward movement, as if poetry itself lifted its practitioners up in stately progression or with whirlwind speed to where they could reach whatever they needed, skills not in any way ordinary or within normal reach. The link between poets and whirlwinds is one he uses on several occasions, when he transforms Theodore de Banville into “le fol, adamantin, c o k e , tourbillonnant gCnie” (MOC, p. 521) or symbolizes Whistler’s inspiration as a dancer, a “tourbillon de mousseline” (MOC, p. 65).

Mallarme’s image of how such a poet would be recognized by the age, without any need for either publications or publicity, has about it the same kind of whimsical fantasy as his depiction of the election of fellows to Oxford or Cambridge would have a few years later. Any poet struggling to find pub- lishers for his volumes, as Mallarme was struggling, in 1892, to find a Parisian publisher for Vers et Prose, would dream of the miracle provoking an “essor extraordinaire en l’abstention d’aucune annonce”. Yet there is an element of autobiographical truth in this depiction, too, for when Mallarmk imagines the poet’s young friends, ”jusqu’au recul de la province”, eagerly keeping abreast of what he is writing, he clearly has in mind such personal friends as Paul Valtry who, just two years before this article was published, had found the courage to write to Mallarmk, describing himself as a young man, lost in the provinces.lg It is a fantasy he sums up in a sentence that is in many ways characteristic of his prose style with its hesitations, its meanders, its slow and apparently hesitant build to a swift and powerful conclusion, underpinned by a phonetic chain, weaving a representative image, and incorporating a suggestive play on words: “ h rCver”, he begins, correcting himself to say “ce l’est, h croire,

l9 Paul ValCry, Lenres d quelques-uns, Paris, Gallimard, 1952, p. 28.

402 Rosemary Lloyd

le temps juste de le refuter, que le rkseau des communications omettant quel- ques renseignements les m2mes journaliers, ait activ6 spontankment, ses fils, vers ce r6sultat” . The phonetic chain of rk, adumbrated in some sense by rher , allows rkseuu and rksultat to outweigh refuter. The image of the network with its threads spread out across the country recalls Mallame’s earlier longings to establish an international guild of poets,*’ while the puns of vers ce rksulfut, in which vers suggests at once “towards” and “poetry”, and sesfils, where the noun can be either the threads of the network or the poet’s spiritual sons, give this fantasy depth and resonance, allowing it to present a world in which action is indeed, at least for the duration of the sentence, the sister of dream.

From this high point of wish-fulfilment, Mallarm6 brings his essay back to its initial subject, asserting that if the book trade is suffering, and more specifically, if, as he again punningly puts it, there is any discrkdif, it is not because people have stopped buying, but because it fails to respond adequately to l’ceuvre excepfionnelle. Throughout Mallarm6 has explored concepts of value and credit, in terms of art, the power of reading, and the value of the poet’s trade, but here he ties up the loose ends, arguing that the book trade has de- based not only literature but language, and has turned the concept of confidence and trust into a question of fiscal responsibility. After all, as he rather wearily remarks, there is in the making of books no possibility of a colossal gain-for that, you should have turned to metallurgy, become an engineer. The allusion to metallurgy ties a further knot, in that it casts its light on one of the many facets of the word ktuluges, the one connected with the furnaces. And with a resigned and debonair shrug he asks: “A quoi bon trafiquer de ce qui, peut-etre, ne se doit vendre, surtout quand cela ne se vend pas.” The definition of trufiquer is in- controvertible: “tirer profit (de quelque chose qui n’est pas vCnal)” .

Again, it is typical of MallarmC’s mature prose style to dismiss in an apparently low key and punning sentence the subject he has been debating, setting it aside to conclude with a powerful affirmation of where the true value and the true evaluation of his task as poet lies:

C o m e le Poete a sa divulgation, de meme il vit; hors et h l’insu de l’affchage, du comptoir affaisse sous les exemplaires ou de placiers exasper&: antkrieurement selon un pacte avec la Beaut6 qu’il se chargea d’apercevoir de son nkessaire et comprkhensif regard, et dont il connait les transformations.

On this see Marshall Olds, “Mallarmt and Internationalism”, Kaleidoscope, ed. Graham Falconer and Mary Donaldson-Evans, Toronto, Centre d’ttudes romantiques. 1996, pp. 156-167.

"The Fascination of What's Diflcult 403

It is the poet's revelation that allows him to live, not the money that comes from book sales, and if that divulgution is also a divugution, as, like the Faun, he amuses himself and his surroundings by musing on the function of the muse, it allows him to have done with the mercantile aspects of contemporary literature, dismissing them here in the parenthetical statement in the middle of his conclusion. The pact he has signed is far older, and its formulation likewise re- calls earlier assertions he has made about the poet's role, from his portrayal of Gautier's gift of seeing beauty,*l through his affirmation of the duty to offer the Orphic explanation of the earth (MOC, p. 663).

Etaluges is far from being the most difficult of Mallarmb's prose pieces, but it is representative of the way in which he operates, building into his reverie the facets of his pivotal word, displaying in adequate language the disparity between the language of journalism and that of poetry, laying low the mercantile preoccupations of those who want to make literature a trade, forging something new of the act of reportage in the high furnaces of his imagination. Etaluges takes a central conceit, that of the similarity between the book and the fan, to create at the heart of his piece a moment that borders on a "disparition vibra- toire", that "rkitation de quelques vers" that allows the soul to take wing. Just as Or had transformed the scandal of the Panama canal into an excuse to meditate on the true gold of sunsets, and Mugie had recast his review of Huysmans' novel Lci-bas into an exploration of literary alchemy - "bvoquer, dans une ombre exprks, l'objet tu, par des mots allusifs, jamais directs, se rbduisant B du silence Cgal, comporte tentative proche de cr&r" (MOC, p. 400)-, so Etaluges uses a financial problem as a springboard for exploring the nature of writing and that of reading.

That exploration is also a demonstration, in which the nineteenth-cen- tury's re-examination of genre, though not explicitly raised, is nevertheless, I would argue, what provides the answer to the question: "que visait-il [. . .I, j'insiste, qu'entendait-il expresskment?" The ways in which those panicking about a "krach" limit the term "literature" to focus uniquely on fiction, the discussion of contemporary fiction's "oscillation" between the Charybdis of dealing with others and the Scylla of dealing with ourselves, the depiction of the modem reader's passivity, all these are indications, intensified by the contrast sug- gested between the novel's oscillation and the fan's vibration, that what Mallarmk is attempting here is to display a new genre. The development of prose poetry, together with experiments in creative criticism, on the one hand, and vers libre on the other, finds numerous echoes in MallarmC, from the experimental political

21 On this see Colloque Mal lard en l'honneur d'Austin Gill, Paris, Nizet, 1975, p. 50 and Mallarmt, Correspondance, XI . pp. 24-25.

404 Rosemary Lloyd

commentary of Or to the recasting of literary theory offered in La Musique et les lettres. Here, we might say, Mallarme transforms economic theory into a vision of literary economy, forging as he does so one facet of the art of the genre he names “divagation”.

Yeats, taking up a Ronsardian theme to ponder on the fickleness of the public in his poem “At the Abbey Theatre”, asks:

Dear Craoibhin Aoibhin, look into our case. When we are high and airy hundreds say That if we hold that flight they’ll leave the place, While those same hundreds mock another day Because we have made our art of common things,

[ . . . I Is there a bridle for this Proteus That turns and changes like his draughty seas? Or is there none, most popular of men, But when they mock us, that we mock again?22

MallarmC presents the act of reading as a form of theatre, “le seul theitre de notre esprit” (MOC, p. 300), subject to the same forms of public incomprehen- sion as the conventional stage, and requiring, to the same extent as “Theatre business”, the “management of men” and women. Etalages suggests that Mal- larmC would surely have counselled wit in preference to mockery, but he would also have urged Yeats neither to abandon the search for Proteus’ bridle nor to descend from the high and airy place, but to revel in the creative “fascination of what’s difficult”, and in so doing tempt Proteus to enjoy it too. Yet Etalages also intimates, and in this I believe it is typical of Mallarmk’s prose writing, that for all the semantic density, creative syntax, and multivalent symbols, meaning is not endlessly deferred, but rather enriched and intensified by repeated reading and frequent meditation. What was at stake for MallarmC in weaving such a bridle for Proteus? In an age of rapidly expanding literacy and exponentially increasing production of the printed word, he clearly saw not just the possibility but the necessity of new modes of reading, modes that went beyond the placing of the book between the reader and the horizon, to encapsulate that horizon within a series of infinitely expandable symbols, pli selon pli.

Indiana University

22 Yeats, Poems, p. 15.