Mallarme's Sunset Read online

  The poem considered in the final chapter is Un coup de dés, or the poem of dissemination in Derrida’s text. This chapter begins by examining the notion of the ‘livre’ in some of Derrida’s earlier publications (La Voix et le phénomène and De la grammatologie) before going on to look at his readings of Mallarmé given in La Dissémination. We will see how Mallarmé’s name figures a profound displacement of the metaphysics of presence. The third part of the chapter sets off from Derrida’s reading to analyse three of Mallarmé’s works (Or, Un coup de dés, and Hamlet).

  The context for the whole is provided by Hegel. It is with the end of art in Hegel’s Aesthetics that Mallarmé coordinates his project (Chapter 2, 2.3), and it is towards a beyond of the Hegelian system, towards a time that has outlived (‘survit’) beauty, that Mallarmé’s work draws Blanchot and Derrida. We will need therefore to understand this end of art. The first chapter will follow Hegel through an illustrious history towards its problematic conclusion. We will be interested in the way in which his text authorizes a poetic Absolute as the apotheosis of its system only to override that authorization. Drawing out the reasons for this ambivalence, it will be possible to account for the extraordinary difficulties Mallarmé experienced as he sought to consecrate his new poetics. This in turn will set us on the path of the sunset, the divided heart of this study.

  Notes to the Introduction

  1.

  Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. by Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. xi (hereafter referred to as IC). Translations are taken from standard editions listed in the bibliography. If there is none listed then the translation is my own. Indication is given when the translation provided differs from the standard edition.

  2.

  Maurice Blanchot, L’Entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), p. vi (hereafter referred to as EI).

  3.

  Jacques Derrida, Positions (Paris: Les Éditions de Galilée, 1972), p. 11. Interview with Henri

  4.

  Jacques Derrida, La Dissémination (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972), hereafter referred to as D.

  5.

  Bertrand Marchal, La Religion de Mallarmé (Paris: Librairie José Corti, 1988).

  6.

  Gardner Davies, Mallarmé et le drame solaire (Paris: Librairie José Corti, 1959).

  7.

  Stéphane Mallarmé, Igitur/Divagations/Un coup de dés, ed. by Bertrand Marchal (Paris: Gallimard, 2003).

  CHAPTER 1

  ❖

  Hegel: The End of Art

  Now, therefore, what the particular arts realise in individual works of art is according to the Concept of art, only the universal forms of the self-unfolding Idea of beauty. It is as the external actualisation of this Idea that the wide Pantheon of art is rising. Its architect and builder is the self-comprehending spirit of beauty, but to complete it will need the history of the world in its development through thousands of years.

  G. W. F. HEGEL1

  There are two good reasons for looking at the broad architecture of Hegel’s Aesthetics at this stage. The first has to do with the way in which Mallarmé situates his project in relation to Hegel. The second has to do with the way in which Blanchot and Derrida situate their projects in relation to Hegel. These relations form, therefore, the context for the reading of Hegel’s Aesthetics that I will give here. Broadly, I am interested in the way in which ‘littérature’, as it is re-inscribed in the work of Blanchot and Derrida, emerges as a contestation to the ‘end of art’ as it is encountered in Hegel’s work, and the position that Mallarmé occupies in this context. Mallarmé’s engagement with Hegel is a complex and contested matter, but I will show in Chapter 2 how, despite scant reference to the philosopher in his published works and correspondence, the poet in fact mimics Hegel’s art-historical schema in his own reflections on the history of art, and how he inscribes his own project at the apotheosis of this process. It will then be a matter, in Chapters 3, 4, and 5, of showing how the system in its entirety is displaced through this encounter with the ‘limit’ implied by Mallarmé’s poetics. The question we will ask of the Aesthetics is therefore twofold: what is the work of art for Hegel, and how can he declare the historical development of the artwork to have come to an end?

  1. The Aesthetics as Art-History

  At the beginning of the Aesthetics, Hegel defines his subject. Simply put, he is interested in beauty. His immediate concern in the introduction, therefore, is to specify what he means by beauty. He does this by delimiting artistic beauty from natural beauty, which he considers to be of a second order, derivative of the primary beauty discovered through the consideration of works of art. There is a ‘qualitative’ difference between natural beauty and the beauty of art, because only in art do we find spirit reflecting on itself.2 Spirit, as the concretization of the concept in the world takes the path of a progression towards self-understanding(self-consciousness), and the contemplation of beauty in nature is displaced from the self-relation implied by artistic activity. In art, spirit reflects on itself; and while the contemplation of beauty in nature may be informed by this self-comprehension, its object is too dispersed to become the locus of a rational investigation, and the beauty there discovered is imperfect and incomplete. So Hegel writes:

  spirit is alone the true, comprehending everything in itself, so that everything beautiful is truly beautiful only as sharing in this higher sphere generated by it. In this sense the beauty of nature appears only as a reflection of the beauty that belongs to spirit, as an imperfect incomplete mode [of beauty], a mode which in its substance is contained in the spirit itself. […] In [discussing] natural beauty we feel ourselves too much in a vague sphere, without a criterion, and therefore such a classification would provide too little interest for us to undertake it. (Aesthetics, 1, 2–3)3

  The classification of beauty will therefore take the form of a classification of man’s spiritual productions through which he expresses himself as a spiritual being. Because art is a manifestation of spirit as it reflects on itself; it is considered by Hegel to be one of the spheres of the Absolute through which man comes to an understanding of himself. In Hegel’s system, therefore, it is placed alongside religion and philosophy, and the three together form the tripartite structure of absolute spirit.4 The specificity of art, in contradistinction to religion and philosophy, is that it is the manifestation of spirit in sensuous form. We will see below how this form constitutes a hindrance for the artwork and ultimately leads Hegel to declare that it is a ‘thing of the past’. But, before looking at how art, in poetry, encounters this curious limitation, I will look at Hegel’s understanding of the ‘content’ which is manifested in art, at how this content develops in complexity through world history, and at how this development implies a hierarchical sequencing of the various art forms, leading from architecture to poetry (via sculpture, painting, and music).

  The content of the artwork is engendered by the fact that man is a thinking being. By this, Hegel means that ‘man draws out of himself and puts before himself what he is and whatever else is’. Man exists in the same way as things in nature, he simply is, but unlike natural beings he is ‘just as much for himself’. It is this ability to be in relation with his own being which, for Hegel, distinguishes man as a spiritual being: ‘he sees himself, represents himself to himself; thinks, and only on the strength of this active placing himself before himself is he spirit’. Man can express this self-relation through his practical activity. By his activity in the world, man is able to transform the external conditions in which he finds himself and to impress on his productions ‘[…] the seal of his inner being’ .5 This is what gives works of art their specific spiritual content. When the artwork is free and pure, an end in itself; it becomes a mirror capable of reflecting man’s inner being. Artistic activity enables man to comprehend himself as spirit, and the content of the artwork is nothing other than man himself as he progresses towards self-knowing. This progress takes time,
and this time is the time of history. How then does the content develop temporally, and how does Hegel relate this development to the various art forms?

  Hegel understands the progression of history as the process through which spirit develops in its self-comprehension. In man, spirit achieves an ever deepening self-understandingas it develops through its dialectical transformations. In the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, he provides the following account of this movement:

  The entirety of the development is a sequence of developments that returns into itself. Each development is a stage of spirit. The progression of development does not proceed into abstract infinity, but returns into itself. The entirety of the progression, the goal of this development, is none other than spirit’s coming to itself, knowing itself (for then it is present to self), in that it has consciousness of itself, that it becomes object for itself […]. The more highly it is developed, the deeper it is […]. This very development is spirit’s plumbing its own depth […]. So the goal of spirit is for it to apprehend or grasp what it is, for it should no longer be concealed from itself, but know itself. The path to this goal, the series of developments, is to be grasped as stages of its development.6

  The progress of spirit in the world is, therefore, the progress of an ever-deepening self-comprehension. When Hegel surveys the philosophical tradition he discovers there a dialectical movement through which thought deepens in its self-understanding as it discovers and surpasses the contradictions inherent at each stage of the movement. When all contradictions have been eliminated, a position that Hegel claims for his own philosophy, the process comes to an end with thought thinking itself in absolute knowledge (absolute self-presence). This is the end, the telos, of spirit’s passage through the world. In the Aesthetics, Hegel’s claim is that this deepening of self-comprehension is manifest in the works of art that man produces through the course of world history. The Aesthetics sets out, therefore, a systematic and totalizing art-history, in which the different art forms each come to the fore at different moments in the system as the most suitable means of expressing spirit’s development at that stage.7

  Broadly, says the Aesthetics, there are three major periods of art-history. They are the symbolic, the classical, and the romantic. The movement to the next period in each case implies a development in the complexity of the content of the artwork, but this deepening of the content does not always imply an increasing harmonization between form and content. In this regard, the classical stage represents a high point in the history of art which will never again be attained. In Hegel’s schema the whole of the romantic period is a steady decline from the harmony of classical art. The reason for this seeming paradox is straightforward. In the classical stage there is a balance between the content of the work and the form in which it is manifested. At this stage of spiritual development, the sculptures of the Greeks are perfectly adequate to the content-seeking expression. Before and after the classical stage there is an imbalance between the content to be expressed and the means of expression. In the symbolic stage the content is inadequate to the form and in the romantic stage the form is inadequate to the content.

  In the symbolic period, spirit is not yet sufficiently developed for its sensuous manifestation, and the period is characterized by a searching uncertainty which leads to defective works.8 This stage is the threshold of art and it takes the form of a kind of ground-clearing exercise preparing the way for the adequate expression of the Idea. The architecture of the symbolic stage constructs the temple in which the sculpture of the classical period will be installed.9

  In the classical period, there is a brief moment of harmony. In the sculpture of this period, spirit finds a form of expression which is in perfect balance with the content to be expressed. At this stage, spirit has not yet reached the point where it turns to an inner contemplation. Man has, however, become the proper object of his own consideration, and this explains the focus on the body in classical sculpture. Man has, to a degree, recognized his spiritual nature. He has understood that he must put himself forward as the object of his own contemplation, but the crucial break which will open him to his interiority has not yet taken place. In classical sculpture man represents himself to himself as an externality, and this is why there is a harmony between the art form and the content it is to express. The essential characteristic of art is, for Hegel, its sensuousness, the fact that it is a representation of spirit in externality. In classical times the necessity of the turn towards interiority has not yet been recognized, and so the limitation of the artwork, which maintains it in an irreducible relation with externality, does not become an issue. The break comes through the Christian revelation. Christianity disrupts the harmony of the classical ideal by initiating a turn towards interiority which becomes increasingly difficult to express in the sensuous form of art, and which leads to a consequent degradation of the artwork as it struggles to represent a content with which it is ultimately incompatible.

  The restriction of the artwork, says Hegel, ‘lies in the fact that art in general takes as its subject-matter the spirit (i.e. the universal, infinite and concrete in its nature) in a sensuously concrete form’. In romantic art, in contrast to the classical form, ‘the true element for the realisation of this content is no longer the sensuous immediate existence of the spiritual in the bodily form of man, but instead the inwardness of self-consciousness’ (Aesthetics, 1, 80). Immediately after this comment Hegel underlines that it is Christianity that has introduced this new content.10 As this content is not compatible with expression in exteriority it renders the romantic stage of art a curious movement which retreats as it advances.11 The more highly developed the content, the less suitable the form of its expression becomes. Hegel therefore offers the following characterization: ‘In this way romantic art is the self-transcendence of art but within its own sphere and in the form of art itself’ (Aesthetics, 1, 80).

  The transition from the classical to the romantic stage takes place as a transition from sculpture to painting. This does not mean, of course, that no paintings were produced before the romantic period, or that no sculptures were made after the classical period. For Hegel, it simply means that painting is a more suitable means for bringing forward the higher content of romantic art. Painting is better able to express the interiority of the new content because it can evoke the inner life of its subjects through attention to the eye:

  If we compare the vocation of romantic art with the task of classical art, fulfilled in the most adequate way by Greek sculpture, the plastic shape of the gods does not express the movement and activity of the spirit which has retired into itself out of its corporeal reality and made its way to inner self-awareness […]. This defect is shown externally in the fact that the expression of the soul in its simplicity, namely the light of the eye, is absent from the sculptures. The supreme works of beautiful sculpture are sightless, and their inner being does not look out of them as self-knowing inwardness in this spiritual concentrationwhich the eye discloses. The light of the soul falls outside them and belongs to the spectator alone; when he looks at these shapes, soul cannot meet soul nor eye eye. But the God of romantic art appears all seeing, self-knowing, inwardly subjective, and disclosing his inner being to man’s inner being. (Aesthetics, 1, 520)12

  But painting remains deficient because, however successful it may be in evoking the inner lives of its subjects, the form itself is spatial and can therefore have no true access to interiority.13 The last two art forms in Hegel’s hierarchy are distinct from the others because they imply a direct relation with the inner life of the one who contemplates them. Being essentially sonorous, music and poetry have the inner world as their proper realm. They break (to a degree) the dependence on sensuous externality and for this reason are key for Hegel as he seeks to describe the self-transcendence of art in its highest form.

  2 Poetry and Interiority (The End of Art)

  Music is situated by Hegel at the centre of the romantic stage. Music, he says, ‘form
s the centre of the romantic arts and makes the point of transition between the abstract spatial sensuousness of painting and the abstract spirituality of poetry’ (Aesthetics, 1, 88). Music is a crucial site of transition because in this art form we find the total ‘obliteration’ of ‘the whole of space’ (Aesthetics, 11, 889). Being sonorous, music ‘relinquishes the element of external form’ and is perceived through the sense of hearing which ‘is more ideal than sight’ (Aesthetics, 11, 890). Hearing is more ideal than sight in Hegel’s schema because it is more appropriate to the evocation of the inner life, which is the ultimate goal of art once it has effected the transition to its romantic stage.14 Music is the ‘art of the soul and it is directly addressed to the soul’ (Aesthetics, 11, 891).

  Although the transition to music marks a significant advance on painting, it does not have a supreme position in the hierarchy of the arts. The problem with music is that, while formally it implies access to the inner life, it cannot gain a proper purchase there because it cannot ‘transcend the rather abstract inner life of feeling’. With music we have ‘an undeveloped concentration of feeling’, finding a ‘purely symbolic expression in notes’ (Aesthetics, 11, 959). The meaning of music is bound to the notes it uses for its expression, and so, although it destroys the spatial sensuousness of the plastic arts, its content remains soldered to the sensuousness of the form. It is this link between the notes used and the meaning evoked which makes music a purely symbolic means of expression. Music is a kind of sound and fury signifying nothing, because its content is never independent from the medium of its expression.