Roberto Calasso - Literature and the Gods

Let’s take a closer look at the sequence of gestures in this piece of pure mental theatre, something that after all is Mallarmé’s chosen discipline. Invited to speak on the subject of “French poetry” as if at an evening school, and preceded — for those few in the know — by a reputation for being one of the least accessible of poets, Mallarmé begins with an announcement that might be written in block capitals on the front page of an evening paper. A few lines later he declares, or implies, one of his most radical ideas: that prose doesn’t exist, that everything is verse, whether easily recognizable as such or not; then he winds up with one of those radiant formulations to which he alone knew the secret: the soul is a “rhythmical knot.” Those who cannot, in the succession of these three scenes, grasp Mallarmé’s “flower”—and I use the word in the sense it had for Zeami, founder of Noh theatre — are not likely to grasp it in one of his sonnets.

But let’s try to reconstruct the events Mallarmé was eager to bring news of. Behind it all is the death, in 1885, of Victor Hugo. It marked an abrupt turning point in the secret history of literature. Mallarmé spoke of it thus in Crise de vers:

In performing his mysterious task, Hugo channeled all prose, philosophy, eloquence, and history into verse, and since he personally was that verse, he more or less confiscated the right of those who think, discuss, or narrate to make themselves heard. Monument in this desert, with silence far away; in a crypt the divinity of a majestic, unconscious idea: that the form called verse is simply itself literature; that verse occurs as soon as diction is marked, rhythm as soon as we have style. Verse, I believe, waited respectfully for the giant who had caused it to be identified with his iron hand and ever firmer blacksmith’s grip to die before breaking up. All language articulated with metrics, whence it draws its vital rhythms, escapes in a free disjunction of thousands of simple elements.

If literary history were capable of saying what it is that happens in literature, this is how it would speak. In a few lines Mallarmé has told the story of that movement, first centripetal, then centrifugal, which governs the French language, before him, and then after him down to the present day. Centripetal: Hugo appropriates all the forms in his smoky forge. In so doing he leads us to understand that verse incorporates all of literature in itself. Centrifugal: when Hugo dies, literature seizes the opportunity to escape from the magic circle of meter, no longer guarded by the powerful Cyclops, and to disperse “in a free disjunction of thousands of simple elements.” First symptom of this new phase: some young poets begin to champion, often with naïve arrogance, the practice of vers libre . Mallarmé knows better than anyone else that vers libre is no great discovery. On the contrary, he knows that to speak of liberty in literature is out of place — and so suggests (ingeniously) that this new verse be called “polymorphous” instead. But he doesn’t discourage the young poets; for he sees in them the first agents of a healthy shake-up following the “fragmentation of the great literary rhythms.” All at once the poetic meters, and even their “definitive jewel,” the alexandrine, are no more than noble flotsam and jetsam bobbing about in the mix like some “old and worn-out cast,” while already Laforgue is inviting his readers to submit to “the sure enchantment of false verse.” Now a “deft dissonance” becomes an attraction for the delicate sensibility, where once it would have been condemned out of hand in a rage of pedantry. And something similar was going on in music too: an exacerbated chromaticism was tormenting tonality, emptying it from within, until eventually the Viennese would reject it altogether.

But these developments were also to be seen in the light of another piece of traumatic news that once again Mallarmé felt it important to report. This time, and with the most studied carelessness, the occasion he chose for his announcement was a survey carried out on behalf of the Echo de Paris by the providential journalist Jules Huret, to whom Mallarmé spoke thus:

Verse occurs whenever there is rhythm in language, which is to say everywhere but on posters and the advertising page of the newspapers. There are verses in the genre called prose, sometimes wonderful verses and in every rhythm. But to tell the truth, prose doesn’t exist: there is the alphabet and then there is verse, which may be more or less tight, more or less diffuse. Every time there is a strain toward style, there is versification.

Thus does Mallarmé turn all the terms in the argument on their heads with a boldness incomparably greater than that of the proponents of free verse. In just a couple of sentences verse is made to take on a physiognomy that would hitherto have been unthinkable: we no longer have canonical verse with its established metrics, nor even the amorphous free verse, but an all-pervasive, ubiquitous being which turns out to be the hidden nerve structure of every composition made of words. If the integrity of a respectful and canonical versification is forever wounded by this attack, and if it now seems that prose “doesn’t exist” at all, then what is left? Literature, but in what is now its new avatar: sparkling everywhere, like an all-enfolding spiral of dust, and subject to a “dispersal in articulate shivers akin to instrumentation.”

Such a radical development could hardly be attributed to a few callow young poets trying out new voices. They were just one sign of a vast and silent upheaval, the first hint of the fact that an immediate correspondence between style and society was no longer possible now. Mallarmé tried to explain as much to his interviewer in the plainest, most straightforward terms: “Above all what has gone is the unquestionable notion that in a society with neither stability nor unity one cannot create a stable art, a definitive art.” Hence “the restlessness of minds”: hence “the unexplained need for individuality of which contemporary literary manifestations are the direct reflection.” A formidable sociologist when he chose to be, Mallarmé was far more interested in another order of events that was taking shape: the now evident incapacity of the community to create a style for itself would give style the chance — perhaps this is what it had always been waiting for — to free itself, to escape outside the society which hitherto had always exploited it for its own ends. Now in contrast a new and unknown land was opening up: the land of the “rhythmical knots,” a place where forms are freed from obedience to any authority and rest entirely on themselves.

The claims Mallarmé makes for prose, in his interview with Huret, are presented without demonstration, yet they carry immediate conviction. But can we demonstrate their truth? Let me try to approach the question with an example. In the Spleen de Paris Baudelaire has three prose pieces with the same title and subject matter as three of the poems in the Fleurs du mal . One of these is the famous “Invitation au voyage.” The poem is perfect, fused together like a Vermeer, every syllable pervaded by that “dose of natural opium, incessantly secreted and renewed,” that “every man has in him”—but with which Baudelaire had been more generously endowed than most. The poème en prose , written some time later, follows the poem step by step, but is much less effective and sometimes ponderous, at least for those who know the poem. But it’s hard to see why. Putting the two texts side by side, we find that many of the same images and tournures appear in both. Yet the prose piece has a flaw: it is at once lyrical and lavishly detailed. The lines of the poem, on the other hand, are sober and laconic. There are various points where it really would not be possible to offer a simpler version. Take, for example, the description of the furniture that would grace the place of happiness the piece evokes. The poem says: “Des meubles luisants, / Polis par les ans, / Décoreraient notre chambre.” The prose piece says: “Huge, odd, bizarre furniture bristling like subtle souls with locks and secrets. The mirrors, the metal fittings, the upholstery, the precious items and the majolica-ware play a mute and mysterious symphony for the eyes; and every single thing from every single corner, from the chinks in the drawers and the creases in the upholstery, gives off a special perfume, a Sumatran essence, that is as it were the soul of the apartment.” Here the accumulation of detail dilutes the effect. It’s hard to decide what to criticize most: whether the likening of the furniture to “subtle souls,” merely on account of the locks; or perhaps even worse, the idea of the various objects playing “a mute and mysterious symphony for the eyes”; or the punctiliousness with which we are told that a certain exotic perfume would be “the soul of the apartment,” where the word “apartment” with its cruel reminder of land registers and property laws deals the coup de grâce to any enchantment the piece might have had. The prose version is further flawed by a number of tactless remarks that aren’t there in the verse. In the first line of the poem the woman invited on the journey is evoked with a definitive “Mon enfant, ma soeur,” to which nothing need be added. In the prose, on the other hand, she is first referred to as “une vieille amie,” something that already sounds like a gaffe, while later on and with steadily increasing blandness she will become “mon cher ange,” then “la femme aimée,” and at last “la soeur d’élection” (where that élection is another detail we didn’t need). The use of the adjective profond is likewise a telltale sign: in the prose it turns up twice — which is already once too often, especially given the mention of the “profondeurs du ciel”—and what’s more, only three lines apart, first to refer to the sound of the clocks, then to some paintings that are to decorate the rooms of those absent: “Blessed, calm, and profound as the souls of the artists who created them.” The poem on the other hand speaks only of there being “miroirs profonds” in these rooms. And at once we are struck by how much more intense and mysterious those two words are than the cumbersome piling-up of adjectives the prose offers, aggravated, what’s more, by another appearance of the word âme , this time in the plural.