The Master\'s Testament

王敖

The Master\'s Testament
Richard Sieburth


The day after Stephane Mallarme\'s funeral on September 10, 1898, his daughter Genevieve made her way into the study of his small country house at Valvins. There, on his desk, she found the manuscript of his final poem, "Cantique de Saint Jean", seven elliptical stanzas evoking the song of the Baptist\'s decapitated head - "soleil cou coupe" - momentarily poised at summer\'s solstice and then arcing back down to earth, having passed through an incandescent baptism of death. Also on the desk was an envelope which Mallarme had entitled "Recommendation quant a mes papiers". Opening this pli, lifting the flap of this diminutive paper tomb and peering in, Veve (as she was called) discovered nothing inside - no mortal remains, no written traces, not even an absent ptyx ("Car le Maitre est alle puiser des pleurs au Styx").

It was only a fortnight later, while arranging her father\'s study, that she chanced upon the missing contents of the envelope. Slipped under the desk blotter was a hastily pencilled note which Mallarme had composed the night before he died, during a brief respite from the first of the two severe glottal spasms that would bring about his ultimate "disparition elocutoire du poete" the following day, hands clawing at his throat to ward off self-asphyxiation.

Paul Valery, the poet\'s closest disciple, was quickly summoned from Paris to decipher and interpret the Master\'s illegible last will and testament. A typically Mallarmean performative utterance in which instructions were at once delivered and withdrawn (secreted as they had been beneath his blotter in what might have been a moment of panicky afterthought), the message to his wife and daughter read in part as follows:

Mere, Veve, Le spasme terrible d\'etouffement subi tout a l\'heure peut se reproduire au cours de la nuit et avoir raison de moi. Alors, ne vous etonnerez pas que je pense au monceau demi-seculaire de mes notes, lequel ne vous deviendra qu\'un grand embarras; attendu que pas un feuillet n\'en peut servir. Moi-meme, l\'unique pourrais seul en tirer ce qu\'il y a . . . . Je l\'eusse fait si les dernieres annees manquant ne

m\'avaient trahi. Brulez, par consequent: il n\'y a pas la d\'heritage litteraire, mes pauvres enfants . . . .

Croyez que ce devait etre tres beau . . . .

Faced with instructions this Neronian ("Brulez") and yet this equivocal (given that the letter was never, as it were, actually posted), it is unclear how ces dames Mallarme went about respecting the Master\'s final wishes. Contemporary evidence strongly suggests that they may have burned some of the papers he kept in his Japanese lacquer cabinet at Valvins, but the

precise extent of the obliteration will remain

for ever unknown.

Fragments of Mallarme\'s Nachlass none the less continued to surface well after his death, their posthumous publication assuring his

work a signal place within the development of twentieth-century poetics. Un Coup de des,

provisionally printed in l897, was first revealed in its definitive typographical form by the

Nouvelle Revue Francaise in l914, a publishing event that confirmed (for Ezra Pound, among others) Mallarme\'s vanguard role in the experimental scoring of the modernist page. Igitur, edited and reconstructed by Mallarme\'s son-in-law Edmond Bonniot, appeared in l925, its Gothic dreamscapes and crypto-Hegelian metaphysics immediately finding sympathetic readers among the Surrealists. Henri Mondor\'s massive l941 biography brought further unpublished material to light, and inspired major Existentialist revisions of the poet by Blanchot and Sartre. Nearer to our own day, the theoretical projects of a Derrida or a Kristeva (or even a Lacan) would somehow be inconceivable without the impetus supplied by the publication of Jacques Scherer\'s edition of Le Livre in 1957 or, for that matter, of Jean-Pierre Richard\'s 1961 presentation of Pour un Tombeau d\'Anatole.

With the exception of Igitur, however, none of these unfinished works appeared in Mondor\'s 1945 Pleiade collection of the Oeuvres completes - which, printing after printing, continued to purvey a more canonical version of the Master, his poetry and prose enshrined within the authoritative confines of a single 1,600-page volume, Holy Grail and Bible for generations of Mallarmistes. Long overdue, and issued in celebration of the centenary of the poet\'s death, Bertrand Marchal\'s magnificent new Pleiade edition of Mallarme\'s poetical works (a second volume devoted to his critical prose and translations is promised in the near future) at last catches up with an intervening half-century of scholarship and, in the process, consolidates a body of writing whose most salient posthumous feature here emerges as its radical - and perhaps inevitable - provisionality.

Mallarme may have been the first modern poet to have conceptualized his oeuvre as essentially virtual or fictive - that is, as a field of possibilities ever deferred and, by that very token, ever unrealized, ever "a venir". To study his

bibliography is to be struck by how little of his poetry he actually published in book form in his own lifetime. He was forty-five when he brought out his first volume of collected poems in 1887 - a photolithographic copy of his handwritten manuscript, printed on Japanese vellum, divided into nine cahiers, and issued in forty copies (plus sept hors commerce), a perfect

rarity for the library of a Des Esseintes. De luxe editions of L\'Apres-midi d\'un faune and Les Poemes d\'Edgar Poe followed (both illustrated by Manet), but, apart from two omnibus albums of Vers et prose, Mallarme continued to procrastinate about giving his poetic corpus definitive shape - consisting as it did, he claimed, mostly of "lambeaux", "bribes", or "etudes en vue de mieux". In l891, he entered into correspondence with the Belgian publisher Deman about the possible publication of an official collected Poesies. Famously fastidious in these matters, Mallarme stipulated a pearl-grey cover (with a Whistler frontispiece), filigree paper, special Roman type (more "impersonal" than the italics then in favour for books of verse), a maximum of eighteen lines per page and, for the printing of his sonnets, title, quatrains and tercets each to occupy a separate page. Deman humoured the poet as best he could, but the epistolary skirmishes continued over the next seven years, with Mallarme\'s inability to finish "Herodiade" (now over thirty years in the making) no doubt further contributing to the delay. In the end, the poet was in the grave a year before the "definitive" 136-page edition of his Poesies finally appeared in Brussels, overseen by Valery and Veve - fifty-two poems in all, conventionally laid out, and printed entirely in the italics Mallarme abhorred.

Marchal sensibly uses this posthumous edition as his base-text for the Poesies, but unlike earlier editors, he has added a substantial "Dossier" which reprints in their entirety all the previous versions, whether published or unpublished, of the poems included in this volume. On the one hand, this seems like sheer editorial overkill; the texts of such well-known poems as "Brise Marine", "L\'Azur" and "Les Fenetres" are given in full four separate times (even though their significant variants would amount to no more than a handful of notes). On the other hand, Marchal\'s editorial arrangement, cumbersome though it is, allows the reader to follow the ways in which Mallarme\'s poems move in time through their various occasions, evolving from early drafts into magazine or anthology publications, assuming new meanings and new facets in the shifting illumination of different contexts and configurations. This is particularly evident in the special "Dossiers" Marchal supplies for L\'Apres-midi d\'un faune and Herodiade. In the case of the former, in addition to the Poesies text, Marchal provides us with three avatars, each in a different genre: Le Faune, Intermede heroique, the ill-starred stage version of 1865 (which he classifies among Mallarme\'s

"Oeuvres inachevees"), the dramatic monologue, Improvisation d\'un faune, of 1875 (rejected by the Parnasse contemporain on the grounds that, according to Anatole France, "on se moquerait de nous") and the first printing of the poem as an independent "eglogue" in l875. Some 150 pages are in turn devoted to tracking the various manuscript permutations of "Herodiade" as it evolves from its initial "Ouverture" of 1866 into the unfinished mystery play, "Noces d\'Herodiade", on which Mallarme was still working at his death - a depressing record of thirty-two years of poetic blockage inspired by the merciless beauty of his Muse.

Unlike Mondor\'s Pleiade, Marchal\'s edition also features all of

Mallarme\'s extant juvenilia, most notably the fifty-six poems he inscribed into a copybook in l859-60 under the title "Entre les murs", and the strange fairy-tale prose poem "Ce que disaient les trois cigognes"

(a key document in Charles Mauron\'s classic

psychocritical analysis of the poet\'s childhood obsession with the maiden figure of Death). Among the other material unpublished during Mallarme\'s lifetime, Marchal also includes selections from the poet\'s correspondence as well as the Vers de circonstance, first printed

in l920 and here augmented by 100 additional texts. Consisting of rhymed addresses inscribed on envelopes ("Les Loisirs de la poste" and "Recreations postales") and dedicatory squibs written on albums, photographs, fans, Easter eggs, jugs of calvados or pebbles, these miniature commemorations of occasion represent Mallarme at his most sociable and most puckishly anti-monumental. Finding their inspiration in the purely quotidian (a birthday, a gift of flowers, a missed rendezvous), these ephemeral epigraphs demonstrate that any surface or

circumstance, no matter how trivial, can lend itself to poetry - as in the following graffito (or ars poetica) traced on the wall of a public WC in Valvins and instructing the local farmers in the finer uses of paper: "Toi qui soulages ta tripe / Tu peux dans cet acte obscur / Chanter ou fumer la pipe / Sans mettre tes doigts au mur."

"Un coup de des jamais n\'abolira le hasard" is, in a sense, an extension of these performative experiments in the relation of poem to

circumstance and of text to its material support - a ceremonial raising of the page, as Valery remarked, to the power of the starry sky.

Marchal\'s edition reproduces in facsimile the only version whose publication Mallarme himself supervised - the l897 printing in the magazine Cosmopolis, accompanied by the poet\'s explanatory preface and arrayed in various different (and quite fin-de-siecle) typefaces, but still traditional in its pagination. Marchal\'s text of the "definitive" 1914 double-page version of the poem, however, unfortunately bows to the typographical norms of the Pleiade series, providing a poem entirely set in Garamond instead of the period founts Mallarme had apparently envisaged for the Ambrose Vollard edition - at least to judge from the blue-pencilled instructions (for instance, "16 thorey") that are to be found in the manuscript he prepared for the printer. This manuscript quietly lays to rest the influential theory propounded by Mitsou Ronat\'s l980 edition of Un Coup de des, namely, that the poem\'s twenty-four pages, each designed to hold thirty-six potential lines of print, all pointed to the number twelve (the syllabic ghost, as it were, of the alexandrine) as the dodecahydral key to its hidden architecture. The marginal notes to Mallarme\'s graph-paper manuscript (here published for the first time) by contrast explicitly state that "Chaque page / texte et blancs / est etablie sur un chiffre de / 40 lignes", suggesting a grid composition technique far more aleatory - and far more visual - than Ronat\'s strictly numerological interpretation would allow.

The Marchal edition\'s most significant contribution to our re-understanding of Mallarme lies, however, in the sections devoted to the poet\'s "Oeuvres inachevees" - which take up fully a quarter of this enormous 1,600-page volume, largely because of the editor\'s decision to print each of these unfinished works twice, first in the form of a reading text reconstituted into unlineated prose, and then in the form of a diplomatic transcription of the manuscript which respects as closely as possible the line breaks, spacings and cancellations of Mallarme\'s original pages.

Marchal justifies the inclusion of these prosified "versions lineaires" on the grounds that they impart "une lisibilite maximale" to the manuscripts - a rather curious philological position to take, given Mallarme\'s celebrated hostility toward conventional notions of readability and, as a corollary, his fundamental dismissal (in Un Coup de des and his late theoretical pieces) of the distinction between "poetry" and "prose" as irrelevant to the authentic practice

of reading ("la lecture comme pratique

desesperee").

This desperation is already evident in Igitur, the prose tale (or poem? or drama? or philosophical text?) that Mallarme apparently abandoned after reading it aloud in l870 to the utter disconcertion of his friends Villiers de L\'Isle Adam, Catulle Mendes and Judith Gautier. Returning to the original manuscript, Marchal disassembles the official 1925 Bonniot version of the text into a work-in-progress far more open and far more fragmentary, its movement less linear than spiral. Whereas Mallarme\'s son-in-law had rearranged pages to heighten those features of Igitur that made it more recognizable as a conte symboliste (divided into five "chapters", followed by a series of "Scolies"), Marchal boldly denarrativizes the text into a mosaic of "notes" (mostly in pencil), followed by a number of "ebauches" (mostly in pen). He thereby provides a far more faithful genetic image of the work\'s ongoing resistance to hermeneutic or formal closure - a Hamletic resistance announced by its very title, Igitur, Latin for "therefore" and (Marchal argues) no doubt an allusion to the Cartesian ergo, the syllogistic epistemology of which this fragmentary text systematically subverts in the name of the dice throws of "le hazard" (as the English teacher Mallarme preferred to spell it).

Mallarme referred to the writing of Igitur, ou la Folie d\'Elbehnon as a homoeopathic attempt ("similia similibus") to cure himself of "le vieux monstre de l\'Impuissance" that had held him in its mad grip during his great metaphysical crisis of the 1860s. A similar attempt to free himself from the suicidal impasse of post-

Romantic Idealism may be observed in the "Notes sur le langage" that Marchal also newly classifies among the poet\'s "Oeuvres inachevees". Contemporary with Igitur and apparently growing out of the licence es lettres and subsequent doctoral thesis Mallarme intended to prepare in hopes of professional advancement (yet another project withered on the vine), these fragmentary notes outline a philosophy of language that goes hand in hand with the insights won from his recently composed

"Sonnet allegorique de lui-meme": with the death of God, only language can provide man with the mirror of a "supreme fiction" that might redeem the contingency of his existence, precisely because the order of language is self-reflexive or, as he puts it in these notes, in

permanent "conversation" with itself. The

proto-structuralist linguistics of Mallarme\'s "Notes sur le langage" (derived in part from his readings of Max Muller) not only prepares

the breakthrough to the increasingly autotelic language games of his later poetry, but also foreshadows the idiosyncratic Cratylism of his

English textbook, Les Mots anglais (1878), and the ludic semiology of fashion displayed in his one-man woman\'s magazine, La Derniere Mode (l874-5).

The relative serenity of the l870s (marked by Mallarme\'s transfer from the provinces to a Paris lycee and by his close friendship with Manet) was, however, brutally cut short by the death of his seven-year-old son Anatole in l879. The unfinished "Notes pour un tombeau d\'Anatole", written over the course of the following year, enact a father\'s anguished attempt to work through the loss by sublimating his son\'s death into his own - Abraham sacrificing Isaac in order to resurrect him, now transformed into an Absolute, within the sepulchre of the Mind. Alternating between first-person elegy and third-person cosmic allegory (featuring Father, Mother, Child, Sister, Earth, Sun and Death), the 210 small manuscript pages of this tombeau are composed of telegraphic notations so taut with grief that syntax, articles and punctuation all drop away: "petit corps / mis de cote / par mort / une main // qui un instant / avant etait lui". The fractured lineations of Mallarme\'s Trauerwerk (which unfortunately vanish in Marchal\'s "version lineaire" of the text) show a poet deliberately eschewing the funereal grandeur of Hugo\'s "A Villequier" in favour of a sorrow as spare as Dickinson\'s: "pas connu / mere, et fils ne / m\'a pas connu! - / - image de moi / autre que moi / emporte en / mort!" Or, even more wrenchingly, this last Orphic glance cast at the disbelieving eyes of the dying child: "tu me regardes / toujours / etonne / va-ferme ces doux yeux / - ne sache pas - / je me / charge - continue / et tu vivras - ".

"our un tombeau d\'Anatole", unmentioned even to the closest of his friends, remained the most private of Mallarme\'s works, a text that apparently never left the household whose devastation it so lucidly recorded. A similar secrecy attended the elaboration of the notes toward "Le Livre", his masterpiece of incompletion - and in a sense the greatest of his tombeaux. Based on a fresh examination of the 258-page manuscript held by Harvard, Marchal\'s diplomatic transcription improves considerably on Scherer\'s 1957 edition; many puzzing textual cruces have been solved, reshuffled leaves have been restored to their original order, and the entire manuscript (portions of which may have been burned at Valvins by Mallarme\'s wife and daughter) has been definitely dated to the final decade of the poet\'s life. The overall disposition of text, however, remains far more seductive to the eye in the

aerated pagination of Scherer\'s older volume. Forced to work within the more exiguous dimensions of the Pleiade page, Marchal instead offers us a typographic reproduction whose layout is so cramped that the distinctive graphic features of many of its individual sheets are lost to view. Although not as overtly iconic as the shape of shipwreck in Un coup de des, there is none the less a kind of visual prosody at work in these handwritten notes to "Le Livre", the page acting as the graphic seismograph of Mallarme\'s mind at play within "les subdivisions prismatiques de l\'Idee", as he now sketches out scenes for the ideal performance of the Book (recited in a salon, under an electric light), now calculates the precise permutations of its loose-leaf pages (twenty volumes of 384 or 480 pages each), the number of its double seances (one and a half hours each, spread out over five years), while factoring in audience size (twenty-four), ticket prices (1,000 francs), and eventual distribution in print (480,000 copies, which at one point

even includes the possibility of serial newspaper publication with advertisements).

Conceived as a multigeneric mixture of Book and Theatre - ranging from secular drama to sacred mystery play and including ballets, pantomimes, parades, circuses and fireworks all mentally orchestrated by an impersonal "Operator" - "Le Livre" is on one level Mallarme\'s answer to Wagner\'s Gesamtkunstwerk, a

utopian synthesis of artistic forms and practices both high and low, designed to usher in the new millennium and aesthetically redeem mankind. Unlike Wagner, however, Mallarme systematically deconstructs the hierarchies of stage and audience, performer and spectator, text and reader into a ritual event far more radically participatory and, ultimately, far more democratic. Indeed, within the seances d\'interpretation proposed by "Le Livre" - interpretation here carrying the full valences of performance, interpretation and translation - all these positions and identities eventually become reversible or, more precisely, cross over into each other by one of the manuscript\'s most frequent tropes or diagrams: the"X" of cancellation or of chiasmus. In his extremely useful book Stephane Mallarme et le Mystere du "Livre" - the first major monograph ever to be devoted to the subject - Eric Benoit teases out the Hegelian implications of these constant dialectical reversals

of self into other, identity into difference, and whose mechanism he locates in the Book\'s

central allegorical operation of la lecture, for it is in the very act of reading that the Spirit becomes conscious of itself and, thus speculatively split into two (like a "heros-dyade"), in turn attempts to reidentify with itself in order to (in Mallarme\'s words) "racheter cette scission". According to Benoit, the entire gnostic drama of "Le Livre" can be reduced to this perpetual fall from One into Two and the concomitant struggle to redeem Duality into Unity.

At its most abstract, "Le Livre" aspires to function like some elaborate mathemathical theorem or proof which will display - or rather enact - the fundamental equation of things with themselves (one of the working titles for the project was

simply the enigmatic - and very Heideggerian - demonstrative, "C\'est"). One of the manucript notes reads: "Le Dr(ame) est en le mystere de l\'equation suivante faite d\'une double identite / si ceci est cela cela est ceci." If this is that, that is this: in the Looking-Glass logic of the Book, all propositions tend toward tautology, all drama resides within the mystery of an equation. Pages and pages are covered with arcane calculations in which Mallarme attempts to work out the mathematical equivalences (or ratios) between the various elements of the project: the number of spectators, the number of sheets deployed by the Operator and arbitrarily distributed into a

precise number of pigeon-holes in the lacquer cabinet by his side, the number of seances, the precise dimensions of the volume, its eventual print-run and pricing.

This is Mallarme at his most OuLiPian, for in a very real sense, "Le Livre" has no "content" to speak of, proposing instead only a series of arithmetical permutations or mental "operations" for its ideal construction. Aspiring to the condition of music, its only formal proof of existence will therefore occur when all of its constituent parts have become mathematically equal, that is, when it has achieved a perfect self-identity: "equation sous un dieu Janus, totale, se prouvant". "Tout le mystere est la," Mallarme wrote at the outset of the project, "etablir les identites secretes par un deux a deux qui ronge et use les objets au nom d\'une centrale purete." While this "central purity" has often been associated in Mallarme criticism with the workings of metaphor (that "tiers aspect fusible et clair" produced by the encounter of two opposites), or with the mystical "3e genre" (beyond either Theatre or Book) often mentioned in these notes, or even with the deep structure of rhyme, Benoit\'s incisive reading of "Le Livre" shows us that this Hegelian drive to synthesis, this attempt to seize the Absolute at the moment of its self-coincidence, is doomed to failure. Try though he may to mathematize or spatialize "Le Livre" as a formal object existing outside of time ("le livre supprime le temps", he writes, and therefore should be experienced with "un maximum de simultaneite"), Mallarme\'s corres-ponding tendency to think of it as an evenement (or avenement) - that is, as performance piece (or Mass) eucharistically celebrating the perpetual coming-into-being of the Oeuvre - inevitably leads him to conclude that "un livre ne commence ni ne finit", but only defers itself over time, asymptotically driven to an apocalyptic marriage of contraries ("l\'Hymen"), whose consummation would by definition destroy its ideal - and virginal - purity.

Benoit\'s analysis of the differance that systematically undermines this utopian quest for self-identity is in turn grounded in a far more

ambitious historical argument concerning

Mallarme\'s modernity - or postmodernity.

Tracing the metaphysics of "Le Livre" to a tradition that reaches back to Boehme, Swedenborg,

Leibniz and Jena Romanticism, and closely examining Mallarme\'s possible readings of such nineteenth-century French Hegelians as Vera and Scherer, Benoit locates "Le Livre" at the point of crisis where Idealism, haunted by its epistemological double-binds, turns in on itself to admire its own collapse. A self-consuming artefact, Mallarme\'s fictive Book thus offers itself as the tomb - or exemplary ruin - of all the great totalizing systems of its century, be they philosophical or scientific, social or economic. Refusing all completion, and sacrificing even its own existence as a "work" in the process, "Le Livre" (according to Benoit) announces the end of all totalities and, poised at the threshold of the twentieth century, offers its self-immolation as a prophetic caveat against totalitarianisms to come. "Croyez que ca devrait etre tres beau."

Richard Sieburth is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at New York University. His edition of Nerval\'s Selected Writings was published earlier this year.