Roberto Calasso - Literature and the Gods

One could go on with the comparison, but already the evidence is damning. Still, we mustn’t fall into the trap of thinking this is merely a question of prolixity versus concision, poeticizing — enemy of all literature — versus sobriety. Even less should we conclude that verse is intrinsically superior to prose: indeed it would be all too easy to find a reverse example of a redundant poem that ruins the sober dispatch of a note made in prose. The reason I offered this example has to do with Mallarmé’s theory as to the nonexistence of prose. If the lines of the “Invitation” are incomparably more attractive than the version in prose, it is first and foremost because the sovereign power of meter is so strongly at work in them, because the lines are held tight in the gentle pincers of meter and rhyme: two five-syllable lines with a masculine rhyme, followed by a seven-syllable line with feminine rhyme, where the sharpness of the masculine rhymes — like points of a triangle — are answered by the slight dip of the feminine rhymes. And this berceuse, rocking as gently boat of humeur vagabonde that you might see in some canal in Amsterdam, European storehouse of Oriental spice — this movement that is barely hinted at, yet perceptible with Flemish clarity, makes every single word its prisoner, so that they can’t expand even by a single syllable, they can’t launch into the explanation that kills, with what Verlaine called “la Pointe assassine.”

But what happens in the prose version? Does it really have, as Mallarmé’s argument suggests, a hidden and unnamed meter? And if it does, wouldn’t that contradict Baudelaire’s own claims, for in the dedication to Houssaye that opens the Spleen de Paris he presents the work as an example of “a poetic prose, musical without rhythm and without rhyme”? “Without rhythm”: that sounds like a thesis that is the direct opposite of Mallarmé’s — as if prose were seeking to conquer the territory of poetry without bowing to the yoke of meter. But it’s well known that declarations of poetics all too often turn out to be traps lovingly set by writers for their readers. So it was that Gianfranco Contini’s analytical lancet would one day identify, in the very first paragraph of that remarkable declaration of intent, a weave of alexandrine hemistiches culminating, in the last sentence, in a pure alexandrine: “J’ose vous dédier le serpent tout entier.” And that’s not all. Extending his inquiry to the poèmes en prose themselves, Contini found numerous other alexandrine hemistiches, and most outstanding of all “a complete alexandrine, indeed one of the most extraordinary Baudelaire ever wrote: ‘au loin je ne sais quoi avec ses yeux de marbre.’” Or a slightly irregular alexandrine like: “Que les fins de journées d’automne sont pénétrantes.” And he eventually reaches the conclusion that the whole of the Spleen de Paris was “drenched in internal alexandrines.” But what happens when, as with “Invitation au voyage,” the prose is based on a model in verse that “has no relationship with the alexandrine”? We have already seen the semantic consequences, a tendency to amplify that dissolves the magic formula of the verse in a slow wave, whose charm is less intense, albeit still there. Now, Contini’s fine ear succeeded in pinning down the numerus of that wave: “So much sumptuousness allows of but one interpretation, which might concisely be described thus: the transformation of the Invitation’ into an equivalent of the poem in alexandrines.” As if Baudelaire had once again obeyed an obscure compulsion that drove him to say everything in alexandrines. Only in this meter would the lingua adamica articulate itself. So in the two versions of the “Invitation” the struggle is not between meter and prose “without rhythm,” as Baudelaire would have it, but between two different meters. And, for once, the alexandrine is beaten by the berceuse — something all the more remarkable when one considers that, as Contini put it, “Baudelaire speaks naturally in alexandrines or fragments of alexandrines, even where he tones them down and breaks them up.” The alexandrines within the Spleen de Paris thus confirm, in a sort of proof ab absurdo , the thesis put forward by Mallarmé.

But did Mallarmé merely want to tell us that meter was everywhere present in prose? Or was he trying to get at something at once more subtle and more serious? Let’s go back to the most surprising moments of the interview as reported by Huret: “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.” It’s hard at first to grasp the full — indeed, as we shall gradually appreciate, immense — consequences of these remarks. Like opium, as Baudelaire describes it, they have the power to “stretch out the unlimited.” The landscape that now opens up before us has two extremes: on the one hand, the alphabet; on the other, rhythm. And rhythm means meter. One’s immediate thought is that language, which until a moment ago was strutting center stage, has disappeared. Then we find it again, as a pure material that appears and continually migrates back and forth from one extreme to another. The relationships have changed: meter is no longer a mere function of language, but rather the contrary: language comes into being function of meter. It is only thanks to meter that we have style. And only thanks to style that we have literature. Consequently: any distinction between prose and poetry is insubstantial. They are just different degrees within the same continuum. Whether easy to recognize or not, rhythm is always the underlying power that governs the word, as if the literary depended most of all on a tension between this nonverbal, gestural, urgent element and the articulation of the word itself. What’s more, if “prose doesn’t exist,” one might equally well say that poetry doesn’t exist either. So what is left? Literature. Mallarmé had put this as clearly as it can be put: “The form called verse is simply itself literature.” But he also said that until Hugo’s death this truth had been hidden away like a divinity in a crypt, where “like a majestic, unconscious idea” it caused literature to weave a sort of secret dream around itself. Now that dream had burst out into the light. This was what Mallarmé was thinking of when he wrote that the end of the century had seen a “fretting of the veil in the temple, with significant folds and even some tearing.” The words were still ringing in Yeats’s ears when he entitled the first part of his Autobiographies “The Trembling of the Veil.” And ringing still louder the evening of the première of Ubu Roi , when he said to some friends: “After Stéphane Mallarmé, after Paul Verlaine, after Gustave Moreau, after Puvis de Chavannes, after our own verse, after all our subtle colour and nervous rhythm, after the faint mixed tints of Conder, what more is possible? After us the Savage God.”

Though it is with a certain incredulity, a century on, that one tries to imagine Puvis de Chavannes ever having had such a subversive power, all the same we can’t help hearing in Yeats’s words the striking, overheated chord of a new era. And especially when we see Mallarmé cited as the leading name in the list.

At this point it becomes increasingly clear how Mallarmé had seen and grasped, behind the claims of vers libre , a far more momentous event, one that manifested itself “for the first time in the literary history of any people”: the possibility, that is, for each individual, “with his own way of playing and his own individual ear, to fashion an instrument for himself, as soon as he blows, touches, or beats it with science.” In other words, an escape from the rhetorical canon , which was not to be rejected as such, only that it no longer had any power to bind and could no longer claim to be the voice of the community. At best the whole of rhetoric could now expect the same fate that awaited the alexandrine: as the “national cadence” it could be waved like a flag, at festivals and special celebrations. But to abandon the fortress of rhetoric did not, for Mallarmé, mean one need plunge into an amorphous maelstrom. On the contrary, what flashed before his vision was a literature where the power of form would be raised to an even higher level. True, form would be cut loose now from everything else, it would be more arduously encoded than it had been in the past; but perhaps precisely because of that it might also get closer to the underlying ground of our experience, since “There must be something occult in the ground of everyone.” This unprecedented literature opened out before him like a vast surface for possible combinations to form upon, a surface composed of letters and strewn with meters — whole, broken, obvious, disguised. So just when meter itself was being discredited as the voice of the community, the single meters, the single physiological feet of rhythm, became the hidden numerus and animating force of all literature, which was now entering a phase that would be “polymorphic” in the extreme. And yet nothing could have been more alien to Mallarmé than the cavalier gesturing of the avant-garde. Certainly the situation had forced upon everyone a “newly acquired liberty.” Yet something else needed saying too, and Mallarmé says it in a tone as calm as it is severe: “I cannot see, and this remains my firm opinion, that anything that was beautiful in the past is canceled out by this.” What did change radically was the strategic position of the word “literature.” On the one hand, it was rendered superfluous and ineffective by the flood of “universal reportage” that suffocated it; but at the same time, it was catapulted into a “new heaven and a new earth.” And this was at once the most disturbing news and the most difficult to grasp. Mallarmé places it at the center of his Oxford lecture. And he approaches it with maximum caution, solicitously advising his audience that it is surely an “exaggeration”: