Eurydice’s Face:the Paradox of Mallarmé’s Musical Poetics*

Abstract:Inspired by Maurice Blanchot (1907—2003) who compares Stéphane Mallarmé’s (1842—1898) poetics to Orpheus’s descent into the underworld,this article seeks to account for the relationship between the two seemingly contradictory sides of Mallarmé as a psychological journey—one that seeks the mystery of things hidden in eternal night,and the other proclaims that poetry should contain nothingness only as the Orphic poet realizes that his desire to find the essence has violated the law and would thus make the thing disappear altogether.The first two sections of the article elucidate Mallarmé’s lesser-known musical poetics which seeks to distill the essence of things,to transcribe “the symphonic equation proper to the seasons,” with reference to his prose poems and Arthur Schopenhauer’s (1788—1860) philosophy of music.The final section argues that Mallarmé’s nothingness means not autonomous language,as asserted by his idealist predecessors or structuralist/poststructuralist critics,but an ethical pronouncement to protect the mystery of the thing from poetic exploitation and exhaustion.

Keywords:Mallarmé;Schopenhauer;musical poetics;de-anthropocentrism;object-oriented ontology;ethics

Mallarmé’s nothingness has been read in two major senses.According to one,in both Hegelian and Derridean criticisms,1For one Hegelian criticism,see Gerald L.Bruns,“Mallarmé:The Transcendence of Language and the Aesthetics of the Book,” in Modern Poetry and the Idea of Language:A Critical and Historical Study,1st pbk.ed (Normal,Ill.:Dalkey Archive Press,2001),101—17.For Derrida’s own dicussion on Mallarmé,see Jacques Derrida,“The Double Session,” in Dissemination,trans.Barbara Johnson (Chicago:University Press,1981),173—226.nothingness of consciousness or of language stands independent of and thus replaces the material world,which is associated with poetic pride or the primacy of signs.According to another,in Blanchot’s reading2Maurice Blanchot,The Space of Literature,trans.Ann Smock (Lincoln:University of Nebraska Press,1982).All references to Blanchot in the article are cited or paraphrased from this book.influenced partly by Martin Heidegger (1889—1976),nothingness is a doomed impotence that fails to contain the essence of things,although,reading in a positive light,the author’s proactive pronouncement of nothingness also bears an ethical purpose to preserve the mystery of material things,which can never be approached through the direct poetic gaze.Though both Hegelian and Blanchotian readings of Mallarmé begin with the understanding that consciousness and language can never capture the thing-in-itself,the ethical values of the two differ:one affirms the autonomy of language;the other asserts a lack that perpetually seeks the thing,which affirms the absence only as a way to veil and protect the thing.This article follows Blanchot’s lead,not only because his understanding is more relevant to the materialist or object-oriented turn in humanities in the twenty-first century,but because,arguably,Mallarmé himself never really refers to nothingness with a tone of complacency that would lend his work to Hegelian readings.Late in his writing career,in 1893,Mallarmé pronounces in his poem “Salut” (Toast) clearly and calmly that his vocation is an impossible one,for he knows well that the unreality of the word floats only like the foam in a wine cup,but stillseeks to write about the turbulent sea and distant stars:“Solitude,récif,étoile/A n’importe ce qui valut/Le blanc souci de notre toile” (solitude,star,or rocky coast/to things of any kind deserving/of our sail’s white preoccupation).3Stéphane Mallarmé,Collected Poems and Other Verse,trans.E.H.and A.M.Blackmore (Oxford:Oxford University Press,2008),2—3.For the original,see Stéphane Mallarmé,Poésies (Poetry),8th ed.(Paris:Nouvelle Revue française,1914),9.

Blanchot reads Mallarmé not as a poet of self-sufficient nothingness,but rather a poet whose primary relationship is one with the thing that forever eludes his grasp.For Blanchot,Mallarmé has dreamed of transgressing his bounds to seek the mystery of the thing that exists only in the eternal night and should never be exposed to daylight,like Orpheus who descends into the underworld in the hope of retrieving Eurydice.4Blanchot,“Orpheus’s Gaze” in The Space of Literature, 171—76.Hades is persuaded by the musician’s seductive lyre and grants his wish to bring Eurydice back,on the condition that Orpheus should never look back at Eurydice’s face till they return to the land of living—precisely because the mystery of the thing is not violable regardless of the poetic prowess,for what belongs only to the eternal night cannot suffer the poetic gaze.Of course,the Orphic poet did not understand the law and looked,only to find that such a forbidden gaze would destroy utterly the object of love.It is then out of deepest remorse that Mallarmé proclaims that his poetry can and should contain nothing material.In Blanchot’s reading,Mallarmé’s nothingness is not a fixed position;rather,it has behind it a long journey,one that has travelled from the forbidden desire which seeks to retrieve the essence hidden in mystery,to a painful realization that he must proclaim nothingness of poetry in order to protect the mystery of the thing,forever withdrawn.5This reading aligns well with Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology,which proclaims that the mystery of an object is never exhaustible by language.Graham Harman,“The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer:Object-Oriented Literary Criticism,” New Literary History 43,no.2 (August 2012):196.

Critics rarely read the two contradictory sides of Mallarmé together as an integral process of psychological development—one that has dreamed of transposing “l’ensemble des rapports existant dans tout” (the totality of relations existing in everything) into a Book;6Stéphane Mallarmé,Divagations (Paris:Eugène Fasquelle,1897),249;Barbara Johnson,Divagations (Cambridge:Harvard University Press,2009),210.and the other mourns the existential condition of the poetic work as impotence and nothingness.More often,critics—including Blanchot at times—wrongly collapse and confuse the two spectrums of Mallarmé by arguing for the infinite potential of nothingness,by rhetorically equating nothingness with essence.Hence Mallarmé’s poetics of transposition,of releasing the essence of things through musical poetry,receives far less critical attention.But Mallarmé has indeed a rather sophisticated musical poetics—which this article reconstructs out of his prose poems and with reference to Schopenhauer’s philosophy of music,in which the Orphic poet has dreamed of finding “la symphonique équation propre aux saisons” (the symphonic equation proper to the seasons).7Stéphane Mallarmé,La Musique et Les Lettres (Music and Letters) (Paris:Perrin,1895),42;Johnson,Divagations,186.The goal of this article is to provide a global view of Mallarmé’s poetics in which nothingness is related to the Orphic poet’s inspiration to distill the essence of things out of darkness,which derives its ethical meaning only as the Orphic poet has learned not to violate essence.

Specifically,I argue that Mallarmé’s musical poetics—oscillating between his desire to distill sensation out of material things and his voluntary agony in nothingness—might be better understood when contextualized in Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of will and representation.Inspired by Schopenhauer’s proposal that the only way to escape the Kantian trap of mental representation is through our bodily cognition of the monist material force underlying all phenomena,Mallarmé aspires to distill sensation out of material things—sensation that in Schopenhauer’s system evince the whole world.But as the instrument through which Mallarmé distills the sensation out of matter is his mental apparatus,and because the essential sensation is abstracted out of the matter like a soul leaving its body,Mallarmé is forever fearful that the sensation will soon disappear in vibration.In this manner Mallarmé swings between his highest ideal of musical sensation and mental nothingness.

I.Mallarmé’s Ambition with Musical Poetry,Reconstructed with Reference to Schopenhauer’s Philosophy

In chapter XIV of J.K.Huysmans’s (1848—1907) novelÀ rebours(Against Nature) (1884),8Joris-Karl Huysmans,À Rebours (Against Nature) (Bronx:Georges Crès,1922);Joris-Karl Huysmans,Against Nature,trans.Robert Baldick (London and New York:Penguin Books,2003).In Patrick McGuinness’s introduction to Baldick’s translation of Against Nature,he details Huysmans’s communication with Mallarmé and comments on Mallarm work.(pp.19—59) As McGuinness quotes a letter Huysmans writes to Jules Laforgue in September 1885,Huysmans comments on his own achievement with Against Nature:“I explained Mallarmé,the most abstruse of poets,so as to make him almost clear” (39).the hero des Esseintes finds himself unable to tolerate the odor of fat and blood on the meat.To nourish himself,he invents a method to distill beef essence,or “osmazome,” in a slow-cooking pressure pot,so he needs only take a few spoonfuls of the condensed juice to soothe his empty stomach.Gaining energy,des Esseintes starts to rearrange his library.The duke’s private anthology of Mallarmé’s prose poems,which would not be published until 1887 and 1891,is the final book completing his library.The anemic aesthete makes an interesting assessment on Mallarmé:“En un mot,le poème en prose représentait,pour des Esseintes,le suc concret,l’osmazome de la littérature,l’huile essentielle de l’art” (In short,the prose poem represented in Des Esseintes’s eyes the dry juice,the osmazome of literature,the essential oil of art).9Huysmans,À Rebours,260;Baldick,Against Nature,380.Des Esseintes’s metaphor that compares Mallarmé’s poetry to concrete essence distilled out of mass materiality is striking,in opposition to Mallarmé’s most prominent reputation as the poet who replaces the material world with immaterial words.Des Esseintes’s reading differs radically from the canonical structuralist reading that Mallarmé’sUn coup de désresembles “a visual experience of music” because it abandons the sign’s referential capacity in favor of alphabetic forms carefully arranged on the white pages.10Bruns,“Mallarmé:The Transcendence of Language and the Aesthetics of the Book,” 116.Rather,as Des Esseintes sees it,although Mallarmé rejects detailed descriptions that represent reality,the poet’s goal is to condense and transport raw materials into an essential sensation.The distilled sensation is real,potent,dense in content,and capable of reinvigorating the soul in the same way the beef juice nourishes the body.Reading “L’Après-midi d’un faune” (A Faun in the Afternoon),des Esseintes remarks that when the faun calls out the monosyllable “lys!” (lilies!) the single word evokes “la passion,l’effervescence,l’état momentané du faune vierge,affolé de rut par la vue des nymphes” (the passion,the effervescence,the momentary excitement of the virgin faun,maddened with desire by the sign of the nymphs)11Huysmans,À Rebours,257—58;Baldick,Against Nature,377..Responding to des Esseintes’s comment,Mallarmé in his poem “Prose:pour des Esseintes (Prose:for des Esseintes)” paints an image of an alchemist who,by performing some sort of magical incantation,defines his final poetic goal as one that extracts “Idées”out of enlarged flowers:“Gloire du long désir,Idées” (Ideas,glory of long desire).12Mallarmé,Collected Poems and Other Verse,54.

How accurate might Huysmans’s appraisal be? Or,a better question to ask may be:how productive might it be to tinker with this proposition,in order to open up an entirely new path to study Mallarmé’s relation with materiality? Huysmans’s metaphor that Mallarmé is an alchemist who distills essential sensation out of dense materiality in fact strikes a similar chord among certain critics.In addition to the faun’s vibratory cry of “lys!” which encapsulates in one word his virgin passion,Anna Balakian notes how a line in “Hérodiade:Ouverture”—“Crime! bûcher! aurore ancienne! supplice!” （Crime! stake! ancient aurora! Punishment）13Stéphane Mallermé,“Ouverture d’Hérodiade,” in Œuvres complètes (Paris:Gallimard,1951),63.—“bespeaks a drama that,if cast in movement and time,would take reams of paper to transcribe and,even on the stage,an hour or two to represent.For Mallarmé four words suffice to tell us the story of Hérodiade.”14Anna Elizabeth Balakian,The Fiction of the Poet:In the Post-Symbolist Mode (Princeton:Princeton University Press,2014),36.It is,however,difficult for us to speak with any certainty about what exactly Mallarmé means with his capitalizedl’Idée.As Heather Williams argues,even in Mallarmé’s most philosophical treatment of the term in his verse poems,which for Williams is the line in “Prose”—“Gloire du long désir,Idées”—we cannot say for sure what preciselyIdéesitself means,because Mallarmé carefully isolates the pivotal word with a comma and dissociates it from its syntactical context,except for suggesting thatIdéesis the glorious goal of the poet’s long desirous quest.15Heather Williams,“Mallarmé and the Language of Ideas,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 29,no.3 (April 2001):305.What we can say at most is that,as Olds argues,when Mallarmé evokesl’Idéeit suggests something about the essence of the thing,as opposed to its everyday perception.

He has something in mind akin to the being or essence of a thing rather than to the perception(no matter how delightful) of the thing as it exists in relation to the everyday world.And,when he says “transposition,” he is clearly talking about an operation of thought or consciousness on the thing that exists.16Without recoursing to Schopenhauer,Olds argues that Mallarmé’s Idea is Aristotelian.Marshall Olds,“Desire Seeking Expression:Mallarmé’s‘ Prose Pour Des Esseintes,’” French Language and Literature Papers (October 1983):50.

But what is the essence of the thing like? And how to extract it?Idéesin the poem functions rather like an enticing treasure box,which gestures to us that the poet is on a quest,without knowing in advance what exactly the Holy Grail is.Any criticism that seeks to say something about whatl’IdéeIS EMBARKS on this very same repuest with Mallarmé too—it does not have enough evidence to say anything conclusive;rather it only follows a few tantalizing signposts to speculate what is inside the treasure box.

Building upon the suggestions of Blanchot,Huysmans,and Olds that half of Mallarmé’s poetics intends to distill the essence of things,one possible way to proceed with this speculation is to contextualizel’Idéein philosophical discourses that align well with these suggestions.While ample studies have experimented with interpretingl’Idéein Platonic or Hegelian senses,this article pioneers to decipher it in the context of Schopenhauer’s philosophy,and with reference to Mallarmé’s more discursive prose poems.Whether this interpretation is successful cannot be judged on the ground of textual evidence,which Mallarmé has intentionally made obscure,but perhaps by how original and productive this reading is.Mallarmé never mentions Schopenhauer by name.But reading through his letters,I speculate that Mallarmé could have become acquainted with Schopenhauer as early as his so-called crisis years of 1864—1869,when he began to conceive his famous project of “l’explication or phique de la Terre” (the Orphic Explanation of the Earth)17Stéphane Mallarmé,Autobiographie:Lettre à Verlaine (Autobiography:Letter to Verlaine) (Caen:L’Échoppe,1991),15;Johnson,Divagations,3.and spoke about “l’Idée de l’Univers” (the Idea of the Universe).18Stéphane Mallarmé,Correspondence:Vol.1,1862—1871,eds.Henri Mondor and Jean-Pierre Richard (New York:French &European Publications,Incorporated,n.d.),366.This five-year period is also the time,as is well known,when Mallarmé was obsessed with the emptiness of the poetic consciousness.This is the time when Mallarmé develops his lifelong hesitation between his dream to transcribe the law of the Earth in a single,vibratory poetic line,and his qualms that his mental exertion might end up capturing nothing.

Critics often argue that Mallarmé’s ideal of musical poetry is influenced by Richard Wagner(1813—1883),and that Mallarmé competes jealously with Wagner as he seeks to achieve with his poetry the same elevating effect of music,as Heath Lees comments:“TheRêverieis itself the herald of Mallarmé’s fusion of music and poetic language through words alone.”19Heath Lees,Mallarmé and Wagner:Music and Poetic Language (London and New York:Routledge,2017),235.However,I argue that Mallarmé keeps a distance from Wagner’s total work of art in order to return to Schopenhauer’s original philosophy.Wagner revises Schopenhauer’s philosophy of music and invents a new ideal of total art—the fusion of the sensuous force of music and representation of drama—as a symbol of the marriage of mind and body.20Richard Wagner,“The Art-Work of the Future,” in Richard Wagner’s Prose Works,vol.1 (London:Kegan Paul,1892),97—98.But Mallarmé criticizes Wagner’s total work of art for deviating from Schopenhauer’s philosophical principle of music in his article published in the magazineRevue wagnérienne(1885),titled “Richard Wagner:rêverie d’un poëte français” (Richard Wagner:The Reverie of a French Poet):

Quoique philosophiquement elle ne fasse là encore que se juxtaposer,la Musique (je somme qu’on insinue d’où elle poind,son sens premier et sa fatalité) pénètre et enveloppe le Drame de par l’éblouissante volonté et s’y allie:pas d’ingénuité ou de profondeur qu’avec un éveil enthousiaste elle ne prodigue dans ce dessein,sauf que son principe même,à la Musique,échappe.

Although,philosophically,they are still only juxtaposed,Music (I command that one say where it comes from,what its first meaning was,and what its destiny is) penetrates and envelops the Drama through its dazzling will,and allies itself with it:there is no innocence or depth that it doesn’t throw itself into,as if awakening into enthusiasm,except for the fact that Music’s very principle still escapes.21Mallarmé,Divagations,145;Johnson,Divagations,110.

Wagner’s music is dazzling with its intense emotions,which is referred to here as “la volonté”(the will) according to the jargon that Schopenhauer invents and Wagner inherits.But Mallarmé asks us to be reminded of music’s original metaphysical meaning and its destined function—and Schopenhauer,whom Wagner recognizes to be his master in his essay on Beethoven (1770—1827),should be the only possible referent in Mallarmé’s passage here.Schopenhauer’s philosophy means to solve the Kantian predicament that we only see appearance or representation of things,and never be in touch the thing-in-itself.For Schopenhauer,music among all forms of art is a kind of direct sensation that escapes Kantian appearance,and can reveal to us the thing-in-itself.

Schopenhauer argues that the goal of art is to reveal the essence of material things,and I argue that such is Mallarmé’s poetic ideal.Schopenhauer lambastes German Idealism for failing to seek the thing-in-itself,calling it a “theoretical egoism,which considers all appearances outside of the individual to be phantoms.”22Arthur Schopenhauer,The World as Will and Representation,trans.Judith Norman,Alistair Welchman,and Christopher Janaway (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press,2010),§ 19,129.While agreeing with Immanuel Kant (1724—1804) that our intellect can only see representation,or the appearance of things,Schopenhauer seeks to break free from the Kantian trap as he proposes that our body can intuit the essence of things in the form of their innate material forces.That is,Schopenhauer seeks to break free from what we call“correlationism”23See:Quentin Meillassoux,After Finitude:An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency,trans.Ray Brassier (London:Continuum,2010),5.today,which he summarizes as the belief “that everything there is for cognition(i.e.the whole world) is only an object in relation to a subject,an intuition of a beholder,is,in a word,representation”24Schopenhauer,Will and Representation,§1,pp.23—24..I quote a passage from Schopenhauer to show his forceful commitment to materiality and to finding the Kantian thing-in-itself independent of our anthropocentric perception:

What Kant opposed asthing in itselfto merephenomenon—called more decidedly by merepresentation—and that he held to be absolutely unknowable,that thisthing in itself,this substratum of all phenomena,and therefore of the whole of Nature,is nothing but what we know directly and intimately and find within ourselves asthe will....

Accordingly,not only the voluntary actions of animals,but the organic mechanism,nay even the shape and quality of their living body,the vegetation of plants and finally,even in inorganic Nature,crystallization,and in general every primary force which manifests itself in physical and chemical phenomena,not excepting Gravity—that all this,I say,in itself,i.e.independently of phenomenon (which only means,independently of our brain and its representations),is absolutely identical with the will we find within us and know as intimately as we can know anything.25Arthur Schopenhauer,“On the Will in Nature,” in Two Essays (London:G.Bell and Sons,1889),216—17.

Our body has affectations and motivations that we know from within,which to Schopenhauer is the same kind of force innate in matter.And such bodily force is an important medium through which we can be in touch with matter.As“the will” denotes not the human will but the fundamental drive of all organic and inorganic things to expand itself,it would be a serious mistake to consider Schopenhauer’s usage of the term as some kind of idealism.26The kind of mistake is still very common in recent scholarship,as Fernand Vial writes:“Mallarmé’s idealism took a distinctly Schopenhauerian form expressed in the thought that the world is destined only to be represented in ideas.”Fernand Vial,The Unconscious in Philosophy,and French and European Literature:Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century (Amsterdam:Rodopi,2009),160.Rather,after the decade of German Idealism which endeavored to reduce the material world to subjective appearance,Schopenhauer blazes an untrodden and epoch-making trail to inspire an entire fin-desiècle generation—most famously Huysmans and Wagner,but also,I argue,Mallarmé—to explore the sensuous forces innate in material things.

Although the will is the essential force innate in material things,Schopenhauer argues that the goal of art is to communicate the Idea,the objectification of the will in the realm of representation,which in its concentrated form would reveal the essence of the whole world.This mediation of art is important,since it allows us to contemplate disinterestedly the Idea in the realm of representation,rather than be caught up in the blind,relentless passion of the will.27Ibid.,§ 36.Schopenhauer here uses the term Idea in the sense of essential reality independent of the anthropocentric appearance28Ibid.,§ 31..But as we can see,Schopenhauer often articulates the Idea as material law:

...the ice on the window-pane forms crystals according to the laws of crystallization,which reveal the essence of the natural forces that emerge here and present the Idea.But the images of trees and flowers formed by the ice are inessential[appearance]and exist only for us[in our perception].29Ibid.,§ 35,p.205.

For Schopenhauer,the purpose of art is not to experience the passionate will,but rather to see in a disinterested way the will in its objectified form that he calls Idea.In other words,Schopenhauer would not approve of Wagner’s interpretation that the art of music reveals the will through its passionate emotions.30Richard Wagner,Beethoven:With a Supplement from the Philosophical Works of Arthur Schopenhauer(Bloomington:W.Reeves,1880),35.For Schopenhauer,even as music by its sensuous nature “is a copy of the will itself” and therefore the most compelling of all arts,31Ibid.,§ 52,p.285.music as an art is valuable not because it is intensively passionate,but because it can reveal the inner relations between things and bears a“mimetic relation to the world”32Ibid.,p.284..

Idea is the touchstone in Schopenhauer’s aesthetics which allows us to see the world in an essential form,33Ibid.,§ 57,p.338.just as Louis-Alexandre Foucher de Careil’s (1826—1891)Hegel et Schopenhauer(1862),one of the first books on Schopenhauer published in France,thus begins Chapter VI titled“L’Artiste” (The Artist):

Entre le monde conçu comme représentation et le monde comme volonté,entre la volonté,seule réalité absolue,et ses manifestations éphémères dans le monde,il y a un abîme.Qui le comblera? Schopenhauer répond d’un mot:les idées.34Louis-Alexandre Foucher de Careil,Hegel et Schopenhauer.Etudes sur la philosophie Allemande moderne depuis Kant jusqu’à nos jours (Hegel and Schopenhauer:Studies on Modern German Philosophy from Kant to the Present Day)(Paris:L.Hachette,1862),245.The English translation is mine.

Between the world conceived as representation and the world as the will;between the will,the only absolute reality,and its ephemeral manifestations in the world—there is an abyss.What can fill it? Schopenhauer answers with one word:ideas.

This passage shows a striking parallel with Mallarmé’s famous passage in his “La Musique et les Lettres” (Music and Letters) (1895) where he argues that both music and his art,poetry,compete to extract the essence out of material things,an essence which in Schopenhauer’s jargon is called Idea:

Je pose,à mes risques esthétiquement,cette conclusion...:que la Musique et les Lettres sont la face alternative ici élargie vers l’obscur;scintillante là,avec certitude,d’un phénomène,le seul,je l’appelai l’Idée.

I pose,at my own risk aesthetically,the following conclusion...:that Music and Letters are two sides of the same coin;here extending into obscurity;there dazzling with clarity;alternative sides to the one and only phenomenon I have called the Idea.35Mallarmé,La Musique et Les Lettres,52;Johnson,Divagations,189.

Supposedly,Mallarmé capitalizes “La Musique” and “Les Lettres” to signify its metaphysical significance of Schopenhauer’s related system of the will and representation.Whereas for Schopenhauer literary art shows only the appearance of things,however,Mallarmé asserts that poetry may extract the Idea in a superior way,since it dazzles with clarity,as opposed to music which conveys its message only obscurely.And Mallarmé’s Idea here indeed denotes the essence of things that cannot be captured by representation:

Les monuments,la mer,la face humaine,dans leur plénitude,natifs,conservant une vertu autrement attrayante que ne les voilera une description,évocation dites,allusion je sais,suggestion.

Monument,the sea,the human face,in their natural fullness,conserve a property differently attractive than the veiling any description can offer—say,evocation,or,I know,allusionorsuggestion.36Mallarmé,La Musique et Les Lettres,37;Johnson,Divagations,184.

As opposed to mimetic description which in Schopenhauer’s system is only the appearance of things,Mallarmé seeks to invent literary means that might be comparable to the sensuous force of music,which might be called evocation,allusion,or suggestion.As I will further discuss,however,all of which,as Mallarmé is well aware of,can evoke sensation that is only fleeting,and will soon disappear in vibration.

II.How Poetry is Superior to Music:Its Concision and Clarity

Mallarmé dreams not of a kind of poetry that can emulate music;rather,he dreams of a literary art superior to music by virtue of its concision—music must unfold in time,but literary art might transpose the sensuous force into a few intellectual words.The fin-de-siècle fad of correspondence was not only promulgated by Baudelaire’s reading of Swedenborg (1688—1772)37Charles Baudelaire,“Réflexions Sur Quelques-Uns de Mes Contemporains:I.Victor Hugo (Reflexions on Some of My Contemporaries:I.Victor Hugo),” in Œuvres complètes de Charles Baudelaire (Complete Works of Charles Baudelaire),vol.Ⅲ (Paris:Calmann Lévy,1885),317.and of Wagner,as is more well known,but also by Schopenhauer’s conception that a piece of symphony can evince the whole corporeal world.Mallarmé is tremendously fascinated by this notion of symphonic correspondence.Schopenhauer imagines that the vibrations of each instrument in an orchestra correspond to the composition of the physical world:the metal bass corresponds to inorganic nature and the highest violin to human consciousness.The musical relation between the ground bass and the higher notes demonstrates the relationship between the“planetary mass” and the living organisms it supports:

In the lowest notes of harmony,in the ground bass,I recognize the lowest levels of the objectivation of the will,inorganic nature,the mass of the planet.All the higher notes,which are brisk,sprightly and die away more quickly,are known to originate from the secondary vibrations of the deep tonic note (they always resonate softly with this tonic note) and it is the law of harmony that a bass note may be accompanied only by those high notes that actually already sound with it on their own (itssons harmoniques) through these secondary vibrations.Now this is analogous to the fact that all the natural bodies and organizations must be seen as arising from a stepwise development out of the planetary mass:this mass is both their support and their source:and this is the same relationship that the higher notes have to the ground bass.38Schopenhauer,Will and Representation,§52,p.285.

The harmonic structure of music,although purely relational,does not build a world independent of the physical world.Rather,Schopenhauer’s mystic imagination is that the musical relation contains in itthe laws of the physical world.More intensively monist however,Mallarmé intuits that the world can be condensed into one single Idea that all books but repeat:“...que,plus ou moins,tous les livres,contiennent la fusion de quelques redites comptées:même il n’en serait qu’un—au monde,sa loi” (all books contain the fusion of a few repeated sayings,few enough to count,or even only one—in the world,its law).39Mallarmé,Divagations,248;Johnson,Divagations,209.As David Roberts (1796—1864) rightly notes,when Mallarmé mentions musicality in his literary art,it is “to signify the rhythm between relationships,the proportions and ratios informing the abstract architecture of the world”40David Roberts,The Total Work of Art in European Modernism (Cornell University Press,211),131—32..

Whereas Schopenhauer theorizes that in a symphony each instrument corresponds to a different phenomenon,only separately and successively,Mallarmé asserts that literary art can summarize in a few words the essence of the world through its intellectual power.Mallarmé calls this “transposition,” like essential oil distilled out of raw materials as Huysmans’s alchemist metaphor goes—superior to Schopenhauer’s orchestra which must unfold itself in time.In his eulogy to Théodore de Banville (1823—1891),Mallarmé affirms the Schopenhauerian correspondence that music can evoke images of natural landscape:each instrument successively,continuously,and fluidly brings forth images of forests,meadows,rivers.But Mallarmé goes on to assert that literary art can summarize all these images in one single sentence and one single vibration:“Une ligne,quelque vibration,sommaires et tout s’indique” (A line,a vibration,a few summary details,and all is indicated):

Si je recours,en vue d’un éclaircissement ou de généraliser,aux fonctions de l’Orchestre...:Observez que les instruments détachent,selon un sortilège aisé à surprendre,la cime,pour ainsi voir,de naturels paysages;les évapore et les renoue,flottants,dans un état supérieur.Voici qu’à exprimer la forêt,fondue en le vert horizon crépusculaire,suffit tel accord dénué presque d’une réminiscence de chasse;ou le pré,avec sa pastorale fluidité d’une après-midi écoulée,se mire et fuit dans des rappels de ruisseau.Une ligne,quelque vibration,sommaires et tout s’indique.Contrairement à l’art lyrique comme il fut,élocutoire,en raison du besoin,strict,de signification.—Quoiqu’y confine une suprématie,ou déchirement de voile et lucidité,le Verbe reste,de sujets,de moyens,plus massivement lié à la nature.

La divine transposition,pour l’accomplissement de quoi existe l’homme,va du fait à l’idéal.

If I may resort,in an attempt at clarifying or generalizing,to the functions of the Orchestra...:note how the instruments separately bring out,according to a magic easy to surprise,at the summit,in order to see better,natural landscapes;they dissolve them and restore them higher up.Thus it is that,to express a forest blending into the green horizon at dusk,it suffices to find a chord almost totally devoid of associations with the hunt;or a meadow,its pastoral fluidity flowing away in the late afternoon,is reflected and disappears in recollections of the river.A line,a vibration,a few summary details,and all is indicated.In contrast to lyric art the way it was,full of eloquence,because of the strict need for meaning.Although it contains a supremacy,or a rending of the veil,a lucidity,the Verb remains,along with subjects,and means,only more massively linked to nature.

The divine transposition,for the accomplishment of which man exists,goes from facts to ideals.41Mallarmé,Divagations,120—21;Johnson,Divagations,94.

Opposing the contemporary idealist trend,Mallarmé insists that such transposition that goes from fact to ideal is “plus massivement lié à la nature” (only more massively linked to nature).Compared to music,literary transposition does not merely transcribe relations between things according to Schopenhauer’s understanding of correspondence,but rather—like an alchemist distilling essential oils out of mass matter—it summarizes in one law,clear and concise,the principle of the material world.

Mallarmé’s poetic ideal,of course,is extremely difficult.Like Schopenhauer’s music,which is sensuous but nevertheless evinces the relations that constitute the corporeal world,such as the relation between the earth,vegetation,and human consciousness,Mallarmé’s Idea is at once sensuous and intellectual.His poetic line must evoke the sensuous vibration as the essence of things,and at once summarize,through its intellectual power,this vibration in a few words,to transcribe this vibration into some law or relation of all physical things.Mallarmé is certainly a master of rhythm and of sensuous pleasure of language,but concision is the very yardstick to measure how literary art can be superior to music,as Mallarmé writes in “Crise de vers” (Crisis of Verse):

...un art d’achever la transposition,au Livre,de la symphonie ou uniment de reprendre notre bien:car,ce n’est pas de sonorités élémentaires par les cuivres,les cordes,les bois,indéniablement mais de l’intellectuelle parole à son apogée que doit avec plénitude et évidence,résulter,en tant que l’ensemble des rapports existant dans tout,la Musique....an art of achieving the transposition into the Book of symphony,or merely to take back what is ours:for it is not through the elementary sounds of brasses,strings,or woods,but undeniably through the intellectual word at its height that there should result,with plenitude and obviousness,as the totality of relations existing in everything,the system otherwise known as Music.42Mallarmé,Divagations,248—49;Johnson,Divagations,221.

To Mallarmé,the sounds of various instruments are only elementary,for a single intellectual word might summarize all these vibrations into a written law that tells the relation of all things.Mallarmé most beautifully aspires for poetry to arrive at “la symphonique équation propre aux saisons,habitude de rayon et de nuée;deux remarques ou trois d’ordre analogue à ces ardeurs,à ces intempéries par où notre passion relève des divers ciels” (the symphonic equation proper to the seasons,a habit of ray and cloud;two remarks or three analogous to those ardors,those storms that suggest that our passions derive from several types of sky).43Mallarmé,La Musique et Les Lettres (Music and Letters),42;Johnson,Divagations,186.Believing in the material powers innate in the seasons,the habitual ways of the light and the clouds,and the ardor of the storms that might reveal our passions,Mallarmé dreams of finding the symphonic equation that evokes these powers in two or three remarks.He dreams of a poetic line that is at once sensuously vibratory and intellectually concise,evoking the material power and giving the Orphic explanation of the Earth.

While Mallarmé dreams of evokingl’Idéeout of matter,he often secretly recognizes that he has fallen short of his ideal by proclaiming his failure in a deceivingly solemn tone.For example,contradictory to his own lefty ideal,Mallarmé insists that the so-called essential sensation of matter is but a product of our thought which,once released,will soon disappear in the air.In the passage from “La Musique et Les Lettres” quoted above,after Mallarmé proposes that the purpose of literary art is to liberate the plenitude innate in monuments,the sea,the human face,we find that what is being extracted is not the essence of things but rather “la dispersion volatile” (the volatile dispersal) that he identifies as “l’esprit” (the spirit),presumably because the sensation is extracted from the text rather than from physical reality,reality that the book cannot enclose:

Son sortilège,à lui,si ce n’est libérer,hors d’une poignée de poussière ou réalité sans l’enclore,au livre,même comme texte,la dispersion volatile soit l’esprit,qui n’a que faire de rien outre la musicalité de tout.

The literary charm,if it’s not to liberate,outside of a fistful of dust or reality without enclosing it,in the book,even as a text,the volatile dispersal of the spirit,which has to do with nothing but the musicality of everything.44Mallarmé,La Musique et Les Lettres,37;Johnson,Divagations,184—85.

There surely is a reason to explain why Mallarmé’s grand dream of transposition is always immediately subsumed under his proactive claim that poetry can contain only nothingness.And Mallarmé might have realized that his alchemy is doomed to fail very early on in his career of writing.In his 1867 letter to Eugène Lefébure (1838—1908),Mallarmé explains the simple reason why his poetry cannot transpose and release the essence of things:because the sensation is produced by the poetic mind alone:

Je crois que pour être bien l’homme,la nature se pensant,il faut penser de tout son corps—ce qui donne une pensée pleine et à l’unisson comme ces cordes du violon vibrant immédiatement avec sa boîte de bois creux.Les pensées partant du seul cerveau (dont j’ai tant abusé l’été dernier et une partie de cet hiver) me font maintenant l’effet d’airs joués sur la partie aiguë de la chanterelle dont le son ne réconforte pas dans la boîte—qui passent et s’en vont sans secréer,sans laisser de trace d’elles.En effet,je ne me rappelle plus aucune de ceidéessubitesl’an dernier.45Mallarmé,Correspondence,353—54,emphases original.

I think that to be truly a man,to be nature capable of thought,one must think with one’s entire body,which creates a full,harmonious thought,like those violin strings vibrating directly with the hollow wooden box.As thoughts are produced by the brain alone (which I so abused last summer and part of this winter),they now appear to me like airs played on the high part of the E-string without being strengthened by the box,—which pass through and disappear withoutcreatingthemselves,without leaving a trace of themselves.Indeed,I no longer remember any of those suddenideasI had last year.46Stéphane Mallarmé,Selected Letters of Stéphane Mallarmé,trans.Rosemary Lloyd (Chicago:University of Chicago Press,1988),80,emphases original.

Mallarmé realizes that the vibration produced by the mind without body can only be as feeble as that of violin strings that are not strengthened by a wooden box.Since this realization,Mallarmé confides with Lefébure,he came to admire the crickets in the field,whose thrumming is the “voix sacrée de la terre ingénue” (the sacred voice of the innocent earth),sacred because the voice is produced when the crickets’ wings rub,their body trembles with desire,calling out to court.The cricket’s thrumming is more integral than that of the birds which sing with their vocal organ,and all the more unified than the representational language of humans,“pénétrée de Néant!”(penetrated by the Void!).47Ibid.,355;81.Lloyd translates this phrase as “pregnant with the Void.”The human language vibrates with transparent words produced out of the immaterial mind,but not with the body—therefore language is Nothingness separated from the material world.This letter clearly shows Mallarmé’s value system,which rejects the mind and body divide of German Idealism.Mallarmé prefers the earthy happiness rather than a chilly Azure.

III.Ethical Nothingness:Preserving Mystery in Matter

Mallarmé’s nothingness or vibratory disappearance has been amply discussed,but we may return to these familiar vocabularies now that we have a better sense of the poet’s alternative ideal.If Mallarmé indeed aspires for poetry to be the voice of the thrumming crickets,and if by the term transposition Mallarmé indeed dreams of extracting the essential sensation that would evince the relation of all things in the world,of giving the Orphic explanation of the Earth—why,then,does Mallarmé on the other hand obsessively insist that his poetry is the haunting,empty Azure that traps “le poëte impuissant” (the impotent poet)?48Mallarmé,Collected Poems and Other Verse,20—21.

Blanchot,whose readings of Mallarmé still engage recent critical attentions,best captures Mallarmé’s hesitant dialectics with his explication of the Orpheus myth.If Eurydice is the symbol for the essential mystery hidden in material things,“l’art est la puissance par laquelle s’ouvre la nuit” (art is the power by which night opens).49Maurice Blanchot,L’espace Littéraire (The Space of Literature),4.éd (Paris:Gallimard,1955),179;Blanchot,The Space of Literature,171.“La nuit” (Night) is Mallarmé’s own metaphor which he uses to set in contrast with human intelligence,and,given the mind-body divide that Mallarmé engages with,the Night could be interpreted as the mystery hidden in things:“Les individus,à son avis,ont tort,dans leur dessein avéré propre—parce qu’ils puisent à quelque encrier sans Nuit la vaine couche suffisante d’intelligibilité” (individuals are wrong,in their supposedly species-specific design—because they draw from an inkwell with no Night the vain layer of intelligibility).50Mallarmé,Divagations,285;Johnson,Divagations,232.Orpheus is the archetypical artist whose desire is to see what the Night conceals,to bring Eurydice back into the daylight.The mystery of things made intelligible,exposed to daylight,however,is necessarily a form of anthropocentrism,whose poetic genius is nothing more than a design valid only among humans and brings forth the mystery only according to that which the human intelligence conceives.Such exposure and such transposition—just as Orpheus is short of an acceptance of the mystery—will only evaporate the Night by transforming the Night according to human imagination.While Blanchot is often known for reading in Mallarmé how “language destroys the material reality of things,”51William S.Allen,“The Image of the Absolute Novel:Blanchot,Mallarmé,and Aminadab,” MLN 125,no.5 (2010):1098—125.here,however desperate Blanchot’s rhetoric is to affirm the value of art,it would simply be too heartless to suggest that Orpheus would sacrifice his wife for his heartrending music.If Orpheus’s desire to look at Eurydice is inevitable and understandable for an artist,Blanchot here presents Mallarmé—rather to our surprise—as a wiser Orpheus,who sacrifices his work and betrays its nothingnessonly in order to preserve the mystery of things,the origin of his inspiration.Reading in this light,Mallarmé’s failure of transposition and his mental trap on the one hand,his obscurity or his outright silence about his poetics of alchemy on the other,are not predicated upon a technical incapacity—such as not knowing how to employ his body to produce the sensation—but is rather an ethical declaration that must be reiterated over and over to preserve the mystery of Nature from being exposed by daylight.52See also Amy Billone’s article on how Baudelaire’s and Mallarme’s famous swan poems are at once an intense“self-reflexivity” of “the loss of the representational function of poetic language” (287),and how the poets ultimately“enlist negativity as a vehicle through which they recuperate the very origin whose loss they mourn” (288).Amy Billone,“‘Cette Blanche Agonie’:Baudelaire,Mallarmé and the Ice of Sound,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 29,no.3/4(2001):287—301.By the term ethics,I mean that Mallarmé’s impotence is a chosen,created relationship with materiality.Just as the mystery of the thing inspires the work,the poet chooses to be on the perpetually descending,desirous movement toward the mystery,rather than to transport the thing to the artwork that would only betray its essence:“...à faire de l’oeuvre une voie vers l’inspiration,ce qui protège et preserve la pureté de l’inspirtation,et non pas de l’inspiration une voie vers l’oeuvre” (...to make of the work a road toward inspiration—that which protects and preserves the purity of inspiration—and not of inspiration a road toward the work).53Blanchot,L’espace Littéraire (The Space of Literature),195;Blanchot,The Space of Literature,186.When we read Mallarmé’s powerful negation,his “abandoning of language in favor of the silence of the absolute,”54Allen,“The Image of the Absolute Novel,” 104.we should remember such is due to Mallarmé’s piety toward his inspiration.

In the final pages of this article,I will analyze Mallarmé’s critical poem “Bucolique”(Bucolic) to discuss his dialectics of essence and nothingness,now that we know Mallarmé never dreams of erasing physical reality,but rather sacrifices his artistic agency in order to preserve its mystery.Revising Mallarmé’s reductive reputation as the poet of absence,“Bucolique”has been repeatedly cited by Paul de Man as evidence of the primacy of nature in Mallarmé’s oeuvre,55Paul de Man,The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York:Columbia University Press,2000),9,59.and discussed by Stacy Pies as the portal to refashioning the relationship between the real and the imaginary.The poem gestures as an intimate revelation of a truer part of the poet perhaps lesser known,as it begins with the spirit of the poet debating with his public persona,who,in conformity with his anti-nature reputation,insists on staying in the apartment and secludes himself in his imagination when the spring comes.But the spirit in “Bucolique” confides with the reader what Mallarmé’s public persona is unwilling to tell us.The spirit tells us that the two sources of Mallarmé’s creation,Nature and Music,exert their influences on his work,“dans l’ordre absolu” (in absolute order),nature first as the material and then music as the artistic means.56Mallarmé,Divagations,330;Johnson,Divagations,267.Nature is the first influence,which Mallarmé refers to as the “Idée tangible” (Idea that is tangible).57Ibid.But in the poet’s private reflection of his creative process,music as his method,he now recognizes that behind music there is a mental flame,backgrounded yet reviving.The mind,instead of distilling the essence of things,merely evaporates them into an exasperating smoke which envelops the city,so as to fulfill its transcendental desire,a desire unimaginative yet receiving public respect as would a temple:

Aussi,quand mené par je comprends quel instinct,un soir d’âge,à la musique,irrésistiblement au foyer subtil,je reconnus,sans douter,l’arrière mais renaissante flamme,où se sacrifièrent les bosquets et les cieux;là,en public,éventée par le manque du rêve qu’elle consume,pour en épandre les ténèbres comme plafond de temple.

Esthétiquement la succession de deux états sacrés,ainsi m’invitèrent-ils—primitif,l’un ou foncier,dense des matériaux encore (nul scandale que l’industrie,l’en émonde ou le purifie):l’autre,ardent,volatil dépouillement en traits qui se correspondent,maintenant proches la pensée,en plus que l’abolition de texte,lui soustrayant l’image.La merveille,selon une chronologie,d’avoir étagé la concordance.

Thus,while being led by a well-known instinct,one evening of agedness,toward music,irresistibly into the subtle origin of all.I recognized,without doubt,the backgrounded but reviving flame,where woods and skies are sacrificed;there,fanned by the lack of dream it consumes,it spreads shadows around like the roof of a temple.

Aesthetically,the succession of two sacred states thus invited me—the one,primitive or fundamental,still with the density of material (it’s no scandal that industry either shapes it or purifies it):the other,more volatile,a reduction into corresponding features,now nearing pure thought,along with a textual abolition if the image is forbidden.The marvel,chronologically,is to have layered their concordance.58Mallarmé,Divagations,331;Johnson,Divagations,268

Mallarmé here alludes to Baudelaire’s famous poem “Correspondances” (Correspondences)where nature is referred to with the simile “temple.” But in Mallarmé’s unflattering version,correspondence between spirit and sense occurs only when the mental flame burns down the woods and sacrifices dense materiality,and its smoke—“ayant l’expansion des choses infinies”(having dimensions infinitely vast)59Charles Baudelaire,The Flowers of Evil (Oxford:Oxford University Press,2008),18—19.—replace perfumes to envelop the city.Between Mallarmé’s close-packed discourse we find something very disturbing:Mallarmé seems to refer to his own poetics of transposition as an industrial process which shapes and purifies materiality so as to conform to the poetic thought.The concordance between nature and thoughts provides comfort,just as in Mallarmé’s early poem “L’Azur” the impotent poet prays that the sad chimneys will ceaselessly emit smoke to cover up the haunting empty sky:“que sans répit les tristes cheminées/Fument” (ceaselessly let sad chimneys smoke).Mallarmé now purposefully confuses music and mental flame,continues to explicate music as the “haut furneau transmutatoire” (high transmutatory furnace).60Mallarmé,Divagations,335;Johnson,Divagations,270.What can be distilled is not,as Mallarmé has dreamed of,the essence and energy of material things,but rather “plusieurs signes d’abréviation mentale” (a few mental abbreviations).61Mallarmé,Divagations,334;Johnson,Divagations,270.

But in “Bucolique,” Mallarmé insists,against his own poetic agency,that nothing should transgress the organic fabric of natural things,the figures of valley,meadow,and tree:“Rien ne transgresse les figures du val,du pré,de l’arbre” (Nothingness transgresses the figures of the valley,the meadow,the tree) (ibid.).If one disjoints Nature by writing the sea into a parenthesis,omitting to include the sky above it,one should rather remain silent:

La mer dont mieux vaudrait se taire que l’inscrire dans une parenthèse si,avec,n’y entre le firmament—de même se disjoint,proprement,de la nature.

The sea—which one would do better to keep silent about than to inscribe in parentheses,if the firmament doesn’t enter along with it—becomes disjoined,properly speaking,from nature.62Mallarmé,Divagations,332;Johnson,Divagations,269.

To illustrate his point,Mallarmé’s conscience,against the wish of his public persona to stay in the apartment in solitude,rather urges us to leave the capital city shadowed by the thick smoke,or “miasma” (miasma)63Mallarmé,Divagations,334;Johnson,Divagations,270.caused by the mental flame,to leave the fortress constructed by people against the magnificence of nature,and to take a train heading toward the field.Unlike the faun in “L’Après-midi d’un faune” whose journey is “Le visible et serein soufflé artificial/De l’inspiration,qui regagne le ciel” (the visible,serene and artificial sign/of inspiration reascending to the sky),64Mallarmé,Collected Poems and Other Verse,40—41.Pies notes the field trip in “Bucolique” does not involve “substitution or replacement” but is really a trip into nature.65Stacy Pies,“‘La Succession Des Deux États Sacrés’:Mallarmé’s ‘L’Après-Midi d’un Faune’ and ‘Bucolique’”(The Succession of Two Sacred States:Mallarmé’s “A Faun in the Afternoon” and “Bucolic”),Nineteenth-Century French Studies 39,no.3/4 (2011):301.There,the tranquility of the fields will induce one into silence,facing the grandeur which one knows he cannot show through words,words that are but “des dissipations ou verbiages” (those dissipations or that verbiage)66Mallarmé,Divagations,333;Johnson,Divagations,269..“Bucolique”ends with Mallarmé’s exhortation that the poet should give up appropriating a few fragmentary natural images just to express his personal pleasure,to silence the faun’s “flûte où nouer sa joie selon divers motifs” (flute on which he can bind together his joy according to various motifs)—as the poet “se percevoir,simple,infiniment sur la terre” (perceiving himself,simply,infinitely on earth).67Mallarmé,Divagations,335;Johnson,Divagations,270.

While silence and the writer’s self-imposed agony over his writerly failure is a prominent modernist motif,it has a renewed significance,I propose,for the topical interest in deanthropocentrism today.Mallarmé’s Orphic dream aligns well with the focus of,say,the philosophical movement of speculative realism,which inherits the Kantian framework but is all the more eager to approach the thing-in-itself.Mallarmé experiment with Schopenhauer not only opens up a new path as to how we might relate to the thing through sensation instead of representation—he in fact has gone very far,till its very dead end,and warns us that sensation should not be released by means of mental poetic prowess.And Mallarmé is not the only modernist writer who rethinks the idealist legacy.Contrary to Mallarmé’s poetic prowess are impressionist painters and Virginia Woolf,who relinquish reason’s innate tendency to organize sensation,so as to receive impressions and streams of consciousness to come as they are.I would like to conclude this article by proposing that modernism,as the first generation to rethink the idealist legacy with such intensity and originality,provides rich inspiration for de-anthropocentric criticism.

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