Mallarme's Sunset Read online

  MALLARMÉ’S SUNSET

  POETRY AT THE END OF TIME

  LEGENDA

  LEGENDA, founded in 1995 by the European Humanities Research Centre of the University of Oxford, is now a joint imprint of the Modern Humanities Research association and Routledge. Titles range from medieval texts to contemporary cinema and form a widely comparative view of the modern humanities, including works on arabic, Catalan, English, French, german, greek, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Yiddish literature. an Editorial Board of distinguished academic specialists works in collaboration with leading scholarly bodies such as the Society for French Studies, the British Comparative literature association and the association of Hispanists of great Britain & Ireland.

  MHRA

  The Modern Humanities Research Association (MHRA ) encourages and promotes advanced study and research in the field of the modern humanities, especially modern European languages and literature, including English, and also cinema. It also aims to break down the barriers between scholars working in different disciplines and to maintain the unity of humanistic scholarship in the face of increasing specialization. The Association fulfils this purpose primarily through the publication of journals, bibliographies, monographs and other aids to research.

  Routledge is a global publisher of academic books, journals and online resources in the humanities and social sciences. Founded in 1836, it has published many of the greatest thinkers and scholars of the last hundred years, including Adorno, Einstein, Russell, Popper, Wittgenstein, Jung, Bohm, Hayek, McLuhan, Marcuse and Sartre. Today Routledge is one of the world’s leading academic publishers in the Humanities and Social Sciences. It publishes thousands of books and journals each year, serving scholars, instructors, and professional communities worldwide.

  www.routledge.com

  EDITORIAL BOARD

  Chairman

  Professor Colin Davis, Royal Holloway, University of London

  Professor Malcolm Cook, University of Exeter (French)

  Professor Robin Fiddian, Wadham College, Oxford (Spanish)

  Professor Anne Fuchs, University of Warwick (German)

  Professor Paul Garner, University of Leeds (Spanish)

  Professor Andrew Hadfield, University of Sussex (English)

  Professor Marian Hobson Jeanneret,

  Queen Mary University of London (French)

  Professor Catriona Kelly, New College, Oxford (Russian)

  Professor Martin McLaughlin, Magdalen College, Oxford (Italian)

  Professor Martin Maiden, Trinity College, Oxford (Linguistics)

  Professor Peter Matthews, St John’s College, Cambridge (Linguistics)

  Dr Stephen Parkinson, Linacre College, Oxford (Portuguese)

  Professor Suzanne Raitt, William and Mary College, Virginia (English)

  Professor Ritchie Robertson, The Queen’s College, Oxford (German)

  Professor David Shepherd, Keele University (Russian)

  Professor Michael Sheringham, All Souls College, Oxford (French)

  Professor Alison Sinclair, Clare College, Cambridge (Spanish)

  Professor David Treece, King’s College London (Portuguese)

  Managing Editor

  Dr Graham Nelson

  41 Wellington Square, Oxford ox1 2JF, UK

  www.legendabooks.com

  Mallarmé’s Sunset

  Poetry at the End of Time

  ❖

  BARNABY NORMAN

  l

  LEGENDA

  Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge

  2014

  First published 2014

  Published by the

  Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge

  2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

  711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

  LEGENDA is an imprint of the

  Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge

  Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

  © Modern Humanities Research Association and Taylor & Francis 2014

  ISBN 978-1-909662-29-2 (hbk)

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, including photocopying, recordings, fax or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and the publisher.

  Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

  CONTENTS

  ❖

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction: Depuis Mallarmé

  1

  Hegel: The End of Art

  The Aesthetics as Art History

  Poetry and Interiority (The End of Art)

  2

  Hérodiade and the Conception of the ‘Œuvre pure’

  Hérodiade

  Letters (The Great Ecstasy of Stéphane Mallarmé)

  Igitur

  3

  ‘Le Drame solaire’: Sonnet allégorique de lui-même

  The ‘Sonnet nul’

  The ‘Nothing-ing of Nothing’

  The End of Art

  4

  L’Espace littéraire

  ‘L’Espace nocturne’

  From Orpheus to ‘L’Absence de livre’

  5

  La Dissémination

  The End of the Book: ‘La fin du livre e(s)t le commencement de l’écriture’

  The Sessions

  Crisis

  Afterword: Into the Zone

  Bibliography

  Index

  For my wife Anna

  Un astre, en vérité

  Acknowledgements

  ❖

  This book has benefited from the encouragement and insight of many people. Without the sustained support of family, academic mentors and friends, the project would never have got to this point, and looking back from here it is with unreserved gratitude that I would like to acknowledge this support. I thank my wife, Anna, who was there in Paris when the seed was planted and has done so much to help it bear fruit; Mike and Di Norman — it is rare that you get this kind of opportunity to say how much you appreciate your parents; my brother, Sam, and my godmother, Anna Allport — who have both made life significantly easier. The study itself has benefited enormously from my supervisor Hector Kollias’s exacting reading, and from the encouragement of Patrick ffrench who helped me to shape the project in the early stages. Shortcomings are of course my own responsibility. When it came to converting the manuscript for publication, I was greatly aided by the analyses and comments of my doctoral examiners, Colin Davis and Nikolaj Lübecker, and in practical matters by Graham Nelson at Legenda. Finally, I thank four friends with whom I have been able to discuss this project: Henry Dicks, John Mckeane, David O’Hara, and Greg Kerr.

  B.N., June 2014

  Tout aujourd’hui, dans les idées comme dans les choses, dans

  la société comme dans l’individu, est à l’état de crépuscule. De

  quelle nature est ce crépuscule, de quoi sera-t-il suivi?

  VICTOR HUGO

  La littérature ici subit une exquise crise, fondamentale.

  STÉPHANE MALLARMÉ

  INTRODUCTION

  ❖

  Depuis Mallarmé

  depuis Mallarmé (pour réduire celui-ci à un nom et ce nom à un repère), ce qui a tendu à rendre stériles de telles distinctions, c’est que à travers elles et plus importante qu’elles, s’est fait jour l’expérience de quelque chose qu’on a continué à appeler “littérature“, mais avec un sérieux renouvelé et, de plus, entre guillemets.

  [since Mallarmé (red
ucing the latter to a name and the name to a reference point), what has tended to make such distinctions sterile is that by way of them, and more important than they are, there has come to light the experience of something one continues to call, but with renewed seriousness, and moreover in quotation marks, literature’]1

  MAURICE BLANCHOT2

  La note à laquelle vous faites allusion rappelait aussi la nécessité de ces ‘blancs’, dont on sait, au moins depuis Mallarmé, qu’en tout texte ils ‘assument l’importance’.

  [The note to which you are referring also recalled the necessity of these ‘whites’, about which we know, at least since Mallarmé, that in any text they ‘come to the fore’]

  JACQUES DERRIDA3

  Depuis Mallarmé’: the refrain rings out across twentieth-century French criticism. Mallarmé has fascinated the literary world for almost one hundred and fifty years now, beginning with the Mardistes — his immediate acolytes from the Rue de Rome sessions — going by way of Valéry, to Sartre, Blanchot, Barthes, Derrida, Badiou, and Rancière, to name just the most obvious. He is the father of modernity with his extraordinary formal innovations, and a key reference of post-modernity. Literature changed with Mallarmé, and there is a sense that if we can understand what happened, if we can understand something of this event, then we can understand something of the opening of our own epoch. But, as the collection of names above indicates, he is not simply a poet’s poet: in the second half of the twentieth century, Mallarmé became the philosopher’s poet par excellence. His work seemed to point to a region of co-implication where the dialogue between philosophy and literature would become particularly involved. It is this region that we will be approaching in this study as we seek to establish what the ‘event Mallarmé’ meant for two of his most formidable readers: Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida.

  In the quotation from L’Entretien infini given above, Blanchot sketches out a position that I would like to highlight by way of introduction. Firstly, we note, Mallarmé is ‘reduced’ to a name and then to a reference point. This has to do with the broader argument of Blanchot’s book, and the historic dimensions that his discourse takes on at this time. Further on in the passage, Blanchot will speak of this writing — for which Mallarmé’s name becomes a convenient shorthand — as representing the ‘end of history’. We need not concern ourselves with what exactly he means by this at this stage, this claim will be examined specifically as it relates to Mallarmé, and in detail, in Chapter 4. For now, it is enough to signal a displacement going beyond the sphere of poetics or aesthetics, and to recognise Mallarmé’s implication in this: Mallarmé is placed at the very site of this transition, and so the question as to why this is the case imposes itself. In the second quotation above, we find Derrida likewise situating Mallarmé as a transitional writer and a little later, in La Dissémination, Derrida places Mallarmé at the end of the history opened by the ‘decision’ of Platonism.4 We will find in Chapter 5 that what at first sight seems a fairly impenetrable allusion to the ‘blancs’ in Mallarmé’s text, in fact indicates a profound displacement of the sign as a metaphysical construct. We will then be able to follow the similarly historical implications of Derrida’s intervention.

  It is because both Blanchot and Derrida position Mallarmé in comparable ways that it is possible and instructive to consider their readings in the same study. Ultimately they will use the same language to describe the end of the ‘book’ and the opening of the ‘literary’ in its radically modern sense — and it is Mallarmé’s role in this that will be of interest. This is not to say, however, that Blanchot and Derrida give the same reading — each discourse is irreducibly singular, and this singularity will be respected as the context for the readings is reconstructed. But it is nevertheless for similar reasons, and with similar motivations, that they make such radical claims for their writer.

  Secondary literature on Mallarmé is vast, and there would be little sense in attempting even a schematic overview. Suffice to say, it represents an extremely rich resource, and one on which this study has drawn deeply. One vein of research does, however, require particular reference, as it was largely on the basis of this work that the approach taken here was set up. Bertrand Marchal’s La Religion de Mallarmé (1988) is an extensive study of the Solar Drama as it is operative across Mallarmé’s text.5 The book focuses unflinchingly on the motif of the sunset and it was this sustained interest that suggested it perhaps played a structural role in Mallarmé’s poetics which would help to account for his transitional position in the writings of Blanchot and Derrida. Marchal’s book suggested, therefore, a way of approaching anew these classics of Mallarmé scholarship, of resetting them in a context that would fully take into account the trajectory of Mallarmé’s poetic development. If an interpretation of Mallarmé’s sunset could be successfully drawn into the context of Blanchot’s and Derrida’s readings, then it would perhaps be possible to bring new clarification to what are complex and sometimes opaque engagements.

  One other author should be mentioned in this connection: the sunset had already been isolated and interrogated in Gardner Davies’s Mallarmé et le drame solaire (1959), although not so exhaustively.6 Davies’s work did, however, place emphasis on a Hegelian reading of Mallarmé (something that is more or less excluded by Marchal), and this is important especially in the early stages of this study. Gaining an understanding of Mallarmé’s Hegelianism is crucial to any understanding of his importance for Blanchot and Derrida who, as is well known, were both involved in ongoing interpretations of Hegel’s writings. Since Mallarmé makes barely any reference to the philosopher and never comments directly on any specific works, this becomes a complex issue. It is discussed at length in Chapter 2.

  The argument presented here is highly structured, and necessarily so. A certain order imposed itself on my research, with each chapter tending to build on the findings of the last. It will therefore be helpful to give an overview of how the argument runs through the sequence of chapters.

  After Beauty

  Un ciel pâle, sur un monde qui finit de décrépitude, va peut-être partir avec les nuages: les lambeaux de la pourpre usée des couchants déteignent dans une rivière dormant à l’horizon submergé de rayons et d’eau. — Stéphane Mallarmé7

  [Over the world as it ends in decrepitude is a pale sky that may perhaps dissipate in clouds — streaks of used sunsets that bleed into the dormant waters of a river, submerged beneath rays and drops]

  And so it begins. These are the first words of Le Phénomène futur, the first text in the first division of Divagations Mallarmé paints a post-apocalyptic landscape and it is as though we are Cloy, peering out of Beckett’s Fin de partie. In a tent, beneath dusty trees, is a spectacle to be shown to the miserable crowd. Something has been preserved from the past: a woman. She is an extraordinary manifestation of beauty, but she provokes only incomprehension or sorrow amongst the masses, since she clearly does not belong in this time. Nevertheless, there are still poets, and they will feel ‘their extinguished eyes reignite’. Inspired, they will return to work — but only because they have been able to forget that they are ‘living in a time that has outlived beauty’.

  What does it mean to have outlived beauty? How did it come to this? What, most importantly, does Mallarmé know about it? These are the questions that are on the horizon and orientate the path taken through Mallarmé’s writings in this study. Starting in Chapter 2, this path will follow a rough chronology (rough because it will sometimes be necessary to jump forward or step back) through four key texts: Hérodiade, Sonnet allégorique de lui-même, Igitur, and Un coup de dés.

  Chapters 2 and 3 (Hérodiade and Sonnet allégorique de lui-même respectively) give direct readings of the poems. These readings are undertaken in the context of the work of the first chapter where Hegel’s Aesthetics will have brought us to the point of accomplishment at which, I argue, Mallarmé’s poetics needs to be situated. In Chapter 2, Hérodiade is read as a poem of transition that quite
literally narrates this status. Hérodiade’s dialogue with her nursemaid provides a narrative of passage in which the poem will abandon a transcendent measure of value (which we will not hesitate to coordinate with God) to move toward the consecration of a poetics of pure interiority, in which beauty is in and for itself (or absolute). The second part of the chapter draws on Mallarmé’s correspondence to link this new conception to the poetic Absolute implied in Hegel’s Aesthetics. Part 3 takes a first look at Igitur.

  Chapter 3 provides a reading of the Sonnet as an attempt to achieve this pure poetics of interiority. As a perfectly reflexive work (purely narcissistic), the Sonnet must dispatch all reference to anything outside itself. This takes place through the agency of a global annihilation, or the ‘pure crime’ of the sunset evoked in the first quatrain. This is the central chapter of the book, and it is here that we will isolate an essential and irreducible ambiguity that forms the very heart of Mallarmé’s poetics. The sunset emerges as a closing/opening mechanism that will operate the transition between the closure of absolute beauty (the ‘livre’) and the opening of its beyond (the ‘text’ or the ‘literary’). As such it is the motif of crisis in Mallarmé’s text.

  Chapter 4 is principally concerned with Maurice Blanchot’s reading of Igitur. In this chapter I argue that Blanchot’s literary criticism is structured around an opposition. This first emerges in his discussion of the two ‘slopes’ of literature in his seminal essay ‘Littérature et le droit à la mort’, is carried through into his discourse on ‘la nuit’ and ‘l’autre nuit’ (L’Espace littéraire), before being taken up again in terms of ‘le livre’ and ‘l’absence de livre’ (L’Entretien infini). This chapter links this oppositional structure to Blanchot’s reading of Mallarmé — it is made possible by the opening/closing mechanism isolated in the previous chapter. Mallarmé emerges therefore as an essential reference in Blanchot’s criticism of the totalizing logic of the Hegelian dialectic, and as the site of passage beyond the Absolute.