katherine borse
mallarmé. stéphane.
poem: uncoupdedesjamaisn’aboliralehasard
.
athrowofthedicewillneverabolishchance
po em
pa ge
ab yss
wo rd
wo rd
vo id
wo rd
wo
rd
word
ART
.
see
.
look
more closely
look
again
read
.
see
.
look
more closely
or
shred
(evidence
of a totality however meager)
. an
attempt .
an offering
of
‘some .
thing’
which is perhaps
an de(generat(e)ion
An ideal. art. The poetic word.
This is an offer.
An offering of liv(ed) intensity
lived.
deconstruct.
synthesize.
synthesis is not
one
but
t wo
in
one.
see through
synthesis.
v.
i. d.
Angst. Experience. Art.
This is an offer.
Text
.
Poem
.
.
art
( com
.ment )
bridge gulf.
live [in] void.
life
lived exists..
[(( or.
not.)
“one
invades the
head”
“a
scattered dying hallucination”
The unexplained should by all means be
unexplainable, the unexplainable by all means unnatural, supernatural,
miraculous – thus goes the demand in the souls of all the religious and
metaphysicians (of artists too, if they are at the same time thinkers)
. nietzsche
. human, all-too-human .
only what
conjoins itself out of world becomes a thing . heideggar . . poetry,
language, thought.
THOUGH IT BE
that
the Abyss
blanched
spread
furious
beneath an
incline
desperately plane
a scattered dying hallucination
Stéphane
Mallarmé was an artist and poet who was such after first being an individual
plagued by the various impetuses that the recognized existence of an Void - an
Absolute that is empty by virtue of eternity - engenders.
Mallarmé encountered an essential ‘paradox of existence’ early in
his life; this paradox has been essentialized into an rift between life and
death or between being and nothingness, while the fundamental ground of this
type of duality exists within an temporal reality of chance and process
consistently juxtaposed against, confined by, and existent within, that which is
an encompassing eternity. There is then within Mallarmé’s conception and expression
of reality multiple layers of what Robert Cohn deems “polypolarity” (Cohn
Ex14). As Mallarmé’s paradoxes
lay on a textual and linguistic level within his poetry and particularly within
the singular poem Un Coup de Des, they are also conveyed within the
content of what is being symbolized and translated.
Consequently, as the paradox of being and nothingness engenders all in
the face of a void, “Mallarmé is squarely in the mystic – the
romantic-ideational – tradition which goes back to Plato and which includes
prominently his immediate spiritual forebears, Lamartine, Hugo, Nerval, Poe, and
Baudelaire. He shares their belief
in universal analogy, in the ultimate harmony or connectivity of all reality”
(Cohn T3).
Mallarmé’s
search for meaning amid pervasive existential and ontological inquiry is coupled
with his romantic understanding and emotive passion for the brilliance of
thinking, feeling, seeing, hearing, tasting, and touching – for life - as well
as for the aesthetic - for Art. These
passions conjoined with his search for meaning culminate in an “trajectory of
the artist,” and his individual trajectory becomes manifest as Un Coup de
Des. This coupling within
Mallarmé is intrinsic to his innovation and accomplishment as an artist, as it
imbues his poetic vision with “a heightened power of perception which reveals
fundamental unity and eternity of the self and the world” (Wi 5).
Notable though, is that in an acknowledgement of an Ideal, Mallarmé
sublimates the artist’s trajectory to the trajectory of the poem itself, the
poetic form, individual words, and eventually, only that sublimity and
conception which the word and the poem are capable of symbolically transferring;
the poem, and at times a single word, becomes the relative Ideal which conveys
and communes the continuous and subtle, ultimately paradoxical existence of the
Abyss. The poem similarly contains
within its form that which is both autonomous and relative, or the objective
nature of existence as it is refined through Art.
As a work of art exists in a final ‘product,’ it is the work itself
which becomes autonomous and is removed from the subjective author, from the
signature. The autonomous nature of
the work of art provides, as well as fully allows, the transference of
the fundamental unity and eternity of existence and annihilation that was first
experienced and captured by the individual artist as the impetus for creation -
that which was somehow seen through the “mysterious gift of seeing with the
eyes” (We 212).
The
paradox of existence between life and death that is compounded by the
relationship between lived moments and the inability for anything to be
definitive, becomes manifest in various varieties of paradox within Un Coup
de Des while these paradoxes overlap and contradict one another on multiple
levels of interpretation. This
realm, or rather labyrinth, of paradox which Mallarmé not only experienced but
also wrote, is full then of a series of polarities which engender relationships
on both macro and micro planes, and which, through their relationship to other
sets of polarities, establish a matrix of intertwining paradox which Mallarmé
conveys symbolically through the “polypolarity” of the symbol, as it is
dispersed throughout the entire corpus of his work. Yet, “all of his favorite symbols, flower, window, feather,
siren, bird, star, hair, and so on, are at a crossroads of cognate polarities
– up-down, static-kinetic, light-dark, male-female, cold-hot – that emanate
from a parent pair, Being and Nothingness” (Cohn T4), while they each evoke in
their individuality and seemingly singular paradox, an aurora of significations.
The particular doubling of various dichotomies which all become absorbed
“by the identical neutrality of the abyss” (folio 9) is portrayed throughout
Mallarmé’s cannon while it actively culminates within the poem Un Coup de
Des n’Abolira le Hasard, as Un Coup de Des has been considered to be
Mallarmé’s most synthetic and constructed poem in terms of his entire
individual vision, as well as of the “concrete universal” “Poetic
Vision” which exists in the face of the ineffable.
The
paradox of existence that Mallarmé identifies, translates, and transfers within
Un Coup de Des is compounded by an notion of “poetic faith” or
“poetic vision” that he both constructs and holds.
Within Un Coup de Des this poetic faith assumes the position of a
“concrete universal” in which the artist, who has also become universalized
into an “anyone” or “everyone” ((quiconque) folio 7) through the
loss of their subjectivity, ultimately places their faith in Art as an, if not
the, Ideal, while similarly allowing Art in its created product to surpass the
general Ideal and exist as an Ideal which is one of absence, for it is in the
case of Un Coup de Des, an Ideal that is the Void.
Art and the aesthetic of life as they exist within the earthly,
corporeal, and sensual world thus sublimate the Ideal that is the eternal Abyss.
This Artistic imperative as an meaning which Mallarmé essentializes into
an purpose or need for human existence may be found illumined within the first
sonnet of Plusieurs Sonnets, Quand l’ombre Menaca de la Fatale Loi.
When the shadow menaced with its
fatal law
That
old Dream, desire and pain of my spine,
Grieved
at being swallowed in night’s black maw
It
folded within me its indubitable wing
In commenting on
this sonnet Weinfeld notes that “Dream is not annihilated by doubt, by the
shadow, precisely because it is able, so to speak, to fold itself within the
individual as experience – in other words, to emerge as Poetry” (We 211).
The enfolding within this “indubitable wing” resurfaces within Un
Coup de Des in the imagery of an wing, the ‘crest of the wave,’ as well
as the sail, as all of these images are used at some point to symbolize and
evoke Poetry (among many other notions which will be further examined though not
in length, below). Within Toast
Funebre pour Gautier Mallarmé similarly composes the notion that it is
With
large and humble gesture the pure poet must
Stand
guard against the dream as enemy to his trust (We 45).
Mallarmé alludes
to this construction and guarding of Art as an construction and guarding of an
Ideal, as Art is the enactment of an dream - Dreams themselves too existent on
the level of the Ideal, and both the dream as well as art for Mallarmé are
simultaneous Ideals which must be defined and defended through the very act of
their creation or manifestation as the Poem.
The
construction of the Poem also becomes the rationalization of an “poetic
faith” that the individual poet creates and enacts as it grants the dream
validity, and life meaning, even though it is an acknowledged rationalization,
and within this extant paradox, must still occur.
In one of his letters to Cazalis Mallarmé writes:
Yes,
I know, we are merely empty forms of matter, but we are indeed sublime in having
invented God and our soul. So
sublime, my friend, that I want to gaze upon matter, fully conscious that it
exists, and yet launching itself madly into Dream, despite its knowledge that
Dream has no existence, extolling the Soul and all the divine impressions of
that kind which have collected within us from the beginning of time and
proclaiming, in the face of the Void which is truth, these glorious lies! (We
212-13).
It must first be
noted that within the work of Mallarmé,
the
book imitates the soul or the soul imitates the book, because each is the image
or likeness of the other. Both of
these likenesses, even before resembling each other, were in themselves already
reproductive, imitative, and pictorial (in the representative sense of the word)
in essence. Logos must
indeed be shaped according to the model of the eidos (truth of the image); the
book then reproduces the logos, and the whole is organized by this
relation of repetition, resemblance (homoiosis), doubling, duplication,
this sort of specular process and play of reflections where things, speech, and
writing come to repeat and mirror each other (De 135).
Thus in gazing
upon matter, enacting “the mysterious gift” that is sight, Mallarmé’s
impulse to create and extol the soul as Art, which is a process of repetition
and doubling, as well as to communicate the energy of the matter that is seen
itself, encounters an surge of angst in the very attempt to describe and
communicate that which is Ideal, and particularly various Ideals which though
different, mirror each other by virtue of their constructed ideological status
as Ideal (whether the ideal is actually existent or existent merely in falsity
as an construct). Thus while the
nature of expression in the face of the inexorable must occur as a process of
translation, the actual translation seems at times futile, or at least forever
remaining incomplete. The way in
which Mallarmé attempted to resolve this angst was through an engagement with
an new “poetic technique.”
Mallarmé’s
poetic trajectory contained “a predilection toward the indefinite word” (Co
12). This proclivity toward the
indefinite revolutionized the traditional poetic lineage of lyricism of which he
was a part. Similarly, this
proclivity was enacted “not because he wished to be vague and meaningless, but
because he wished his symbols and images to be all-inclusive, absorbing and
suggesting every possible allusion; bringing with them a definite revelation and
a real meaning; like a crystal, which is brilliant, refractive, full of many
prismatic colors and exposing many surfaces” (Co 12).
Cohn similarly notes that through “digging down into his essential
apprehension of reality, [Mallarmé] came up with a syntactical structure, an
objective, organic architecture which, after further modifications in subsequent
session with the uttermost self, became the armature of the Coup de Des”
(Cohn MM29).
The
trajectory of the poet, or the poetic technique begins in an experience
of the Void which is an experience of sublimity, as it too must become, in the
manifestation of the poem itself, an act which marks the void.
This trajectory originates, as Mallarmé eludes with the symbol of the
shipwreck, both as every birth and every death (as death is merely a rebirth),
as well as within each momentary occurrence of chance - as each and every moment
existent is one of the dice rolled, of a number “born of the stars.”
Each instant of chance as a placement or occurrence in the encounter of
life ecstatically experienced in the intensity of the shipwreck thus must be
conveyed. For the poet, and
certainly for Mallarmé, it is not merely the experience however that must be
communicated, but rather the ecstatic experience saturated with the immensity of
an experience of eternity, the potency of being
LAUNCED IN
ETERNAL
CIRCUMSTANCES
FROM THE DEPTH OF A SHIPWRECK
(folio
1).
Within
Un Coup de Des Mallarmé writes of this nature of chance and experience
as the sum of the die, the NUMBER. This
number may also be read as it symbolizes the forever occurring “throw,” as
life is continually manifesting new moments, a new thought, insight, object, or
image, and yet in the manifestation the experience itself becomes of an order
which may and perhaps must be conveyed: “the unique Number which cannot / be
another / Spirit” (folio 4). Spirit
for Mallarmé is what is encountered, that which is embodied, as it is similarly
that which must be written into an poem in the magnificence of the individual
and autonomous occurrence. Weinfeld
“essentializes” this poetic trajectory of conveyance by noting the immensity
that is of Spirit as it is unique and particularly specific, as well as forever
completely ungraspable - elusive: “It
is that the epiphanic vision (of God, of Beauty – however one wants to label
it) simply transcends the power of Reason to encompass or encapsulate it” (We
195).
The
poet is thus required to “sublimate his ecstasy and, through the patient labor
of prosody, to translate – that is, to carry across or bring back – that
ecstasy in the form of poetry” (We 195).
Williams similarly recognizes this “sublimation” of the ecstasy of
the moment to the poem in that
the
task of the poet-mystic, as Hart Crane said, [is] to “String some constant
harmony.” But he must do the job
with a broken or imperfect instrument [...] Mallarmé felt very keenly that to
write at all was, in a sense, to risk drawing a limit to infinity, and therefore
a kind of sin against the absolute. No
poem, he feared, could possibly be as expansive as the experience which inspired
it (Wi 35-6).
Mallarmé’s
risk to “draw a limit to infinity” enacts itself as a confession of this
fear within Un Coup de Des, and yet the angst or fear is coupled with the
necessity “to mark”:
this
rigid whiteness
ridiculous
in
opposition to the sky
too much so
not
to mark
in
the slightest detail
(folio
7)
One of the
poem’s functions then, is to memorialize the ecstatic experience of an
encounter with the Void, even if the poem which results, and namely Un Coup
de Des, seems as if it reads like “delicate traceries of words without any
significance” (Co 13). However, Un
Coup de Des is anything but “delicate traceries of words without any
significance”; Un Coup de Des is rather “perhaps the most disciplined
and artificially rendered of all his works” (Co 205).
It is because Mallarmé very clearly created a poem which
“appeals primarily to the intellect,” that Un Coup de Des is so very
difficult to access, and so full once it is, so capable of transferring all of
its potency.
In
the creation of Un Coup de Des Jamai n’Abolira le Hasard Mallarmé was,
according to Valéry, “actively in search of a perfect and synthetic abstract
form” (Co 205). This quest for an
“art of the future: a perfected, compact association of images,” (Co 205) is
evident from Mallarmé’s own confession of it as such within the preface to Un
Coup de Des:
In
a work lacking in precedents, only a certain number of very bold directions,
infringements, and so forth, forming the counterpoint to the prosody, remain in
an elementary state: not that I judge it expedient to be timid in one’s first
attempts; but it isn’t appropriate, outside of one’s own special pages or
volume, to go too much against custom in a Periodical, however courageous,
generous, and open to freedom it may be. In
any event, I shall have indicated a “state” rather than a sketch of this
Poem, a “state” that does not break with tradition at all; I shall have
extended its presentation in many directions, but not so far as to offend
anyone: just enough to open some eyes. Today,
or at least presuming upon the future that will emerge from this – nothing or
perhaps what merely verges on art – let us openly acknowledge that the attempt
participates, in a way that could not be foreseen, in a number of pursuits that
are dear to our time: free verse and the prose-poem (We 122).
While Mallarmé
emphasizes that he should not “go too much against custom” or “break with
tradition,” his poetic trajectory is also clearly “an attempt” that
“participates, in a way that could not be foreseen.”
As Mallarmé held an “religious veneration” for form which was
particularly charged, the transgression of the poetic form became both a
personal transgression as well as an seeming cultural violation; yet for this
innovative mind, innovation was nothing but an necessity.
In
another correspondence with Cavalis, Mallarmé wrote: “I am inventing a
language which necessarily must spring from a highly original poetics” (De
111). In actualizing this
unforeseen innovative act of combining the free verse and prose poem, while also
conveying a new rhetoric within which the word itself was revolutionized into a
new and potent symbol which was capable of transferring passion and sublimity
through language, Mallarmé created a work of art, which he offered as
“prismatic subdivisions of the Idea.” This
offering was in an radical form conceptualized out of his confrontation with
eternity.
Aligned
with Mallarmé’s trajectory as a poet as well as his creation of Un Coup de
Des, is the poem Toast Funebre and those conceptions which symbolize
this trajectory and vision as offered within:
Vast abyss transported to the gathered mists prevailing,
By the irascible wind of words that he did not say,
Nothingness to this Man, abolished yesterday:
“Memories of horizons, O thou, what is the Earth?”
[...]
The Master’s piercing eye, wherever he would go,
Has calmed the unquiet marvels of Eden’s wild delights,
Of which the final spasm, in his lone voice, excites
For the Lily and the Rose the mystery of a name.
[...]
For one who now has vanished into the ideal
Duty we are given by the gardens of that star,
A solemn agitation of language in the air,
In commemoration
of a calm catastrophe,
Vast translucent
calyx and purple ecstasy
That, diamond and
rain, with gaze forever clear
Remaining on
those flowers, of which none disappear,
Isolates in the
hour and radiance of the day! (We 45)
Poetry is the
ultimate raison d’etre for all artists who work with language, and
particularly for Mallarmé when it is not sacrificed to the ultimate that is the
Void, “the neutrality of the abyss.” For
“if [wo]man is defined by his confrontation with the Void, and in terms of his
“memories of horizons,” then the question arises as to whether nothing
remains of his destiny. What
remains, of course, is Poetry itself,” (We 190).
The
Poet, as conveyed both within Funeral Toast as well as from the position
of the “concrete universal,” acts then as “one who, having disciplined his
own ecstasy, is able to awaken in the Rose and the Lily the mystery of a name
– that is, as one who is able to articulate, and memorialize, the Ideal” (We
190-91). As mentioned above, the
poetic word for Mallarmé is “irresistible,” (folio 7) even if it may
only be
contained
by
his small virile reason
in
a lightening flash
(folio
7).
The poetic word
thus awakens the Rose and Lily out of an intrinsic necessity and yet does so too
with the knowledge of its inevitable, if not instantaneous, dissolution.
This urgency, combined with the poetic faith and the poetic trajectory
eventually sublimates the poet to the very “act of writing,” to the
manifestation of the spark and the lightening.
The
poet becomes enfolded within “the indubitable wing” of the Ideal in order to
generate the poem, just as the dice must always and continuously be thrown
without knowledge of the number that will be the outcome (as all is subject to
chance). Folio 3 of Un Coup de
Des begins to address this poetic need and poetic inevitability which is
never definitive but subject again to another enactment of chance, while
similarly mimicking this conception in the form of the “ebb and flow of the
text, constituting an internal mimesis of the waves” (We 268).
It is then within folio 4 of the poem that Mallarmé actually incarnates
the poet, or the Master, (which may also be read as every individual who
encounters both chance and destiny) who ‘arises’ in an active role “from
this conflagration” which seemingly has rendered them as passive recipients of
the totality of eternity.
on a wing
its own
fallen
back in advance from being unable to
dress its flight
and covering the spurtings
cutting off the surges
most
inwardly sums up
the
shadow buried in the deeps by this alternate sail
to
the point of adapting
to the wingspan
The following
interpretation of the preceding lines are conceptualized within the overarching
paradox of being and nothingness, and yet it the analysis is also relevant to
the poetic trajectory of the creation of the work of art and its similar or
eventual dissolution within its own enactment, its very “commemoration”:
The
conception Mallarmé is developing in these lines, vague and oceanic as they
are, has something to do with a simultaneity of creativity and destruction, such
that the confrontation with the Abyss is fructative also of plentitude. Being
and Nothingness meet at the site of the wave, which is both crest and trough,
reaching up desperately and despairingly only to fall back down again (We 268).
Creation, as
symbolically conveyed through the ebb and flow of the oceanic movement, of each
wave and wave cap formed and dissolved, is mimicked by the ebb and flow of the
words on the page. The ebb and flow
similarly manifest or create through relief the negative space of the page and
of the text, the space within which also symbolically lies the eternal abyss.
The blank space or whiteness of the page is compounded again by the
duality of the folio, with the existence of the hymen dividing the entire
composition. It is this hymen which
must both be broken through the process of creation and yet which also remains
intact, even as virginal, as it is paradoxically merely bridged rather than
broken through the eternal tidal patterns constantly created and recreated.
Mallarmé’s
poetry as a manifestation of the poetic trajectory thus begins in the totality
of the Void, as does every experience, and yet while there is experience, the
experience is most potent as this ebb and flow of presencing which becomes most
potent in lack as it too enacts an transference of meaning through the primacy
of that which is absent, through the space itself:
Once,
and only once, for, because of an event which I shall explain, always, here is
no Present, no – a present does not exist...For lack of a declaration by the
crowd, for lack – of everything. The
one who would call himself his own contemporary is misinformed, deserting,
usurping, with equal impudence, when the past has ceased and a future is delayed
or when the two are perplexingly mixed in order to mask the space between them. (Quant au
livre, reprinted in De 112)
Coupled with this
notion, Mallarmé symbolically alludes to the notion that life, like the poem
will eventually dissolve, or is always in the process of dissolution as it to is
consistently becoming. Life, along
with Art, the ideal, and each act-of-poem will be absorbed by the “latitudes
of indeterminate waves,” “the identical neutrality of the abyss” (folio
10,9), if it is not already forever abiding within it.
However, within the poem that is extant there still remains those
impulses that arise by virtue of the original shipwreck - that arise within the
binary relationship of time and eternity as placed within the abyss that
engenders and absorbs all living life, all “reality” (folio 10).
That
which is the birth or becoming, also conceptualized by Mallarmé as an fall into
existence, as symbolized through the shipwreck, necessitates the erection of an
“veil of illusion” (folio 5). This
veil becomes or exists as the very “reality” within which we engage in each
moment. These impulses of
experience as the outcome symbolized by the “NUMBER / born of the stars” are
of value namely in and of themselves, by virtue of the fact that they are precisely
impulses, impulses of reality, impulses of life, impulses toward destiny,
death, and absorption. These
impulses are conveyed by way of their movement, flux, the ebb and flow, a series
of individual occurrences that are at once moments, feathers, and chance itself;
yet in the impulse, as it comes into existence, it also recreates the absent
space, abides within the continuum of the void, and exists most potently in
absence.
While
nothing which is lived as an circumstance within the myriad of “eternal
circumstances” is definitive as such, each chance circumstance is suggested
within Un Coup de Des to belong to chance itself while through this
belonging necessitates the poetic trajectory.
It is the combined lived emotions of ecstasy and angst within these
chance instances, as they are most potent when noticed in their absence or
nonexistence, or their precise passing, which necessitates their
sublimation to the act of writing - the birth or creation, the
manifestation of the Dream as Art. However,
even that which is birthed within the space of the ebb and flow, across or
within the hymen, as it will fall into its own absence, must occur first
within its own potency as an lack of meaning in order to lose its own absence.
This occurs through the simultaneous shift, from a subjective author to
an objective work and then the sublimation of the creation of this objective act
to the dissolution of even the objective signature, which allows the autonomy of
the objective piece - an work of Art which was first an act of
writing – to accomplish all that is required of it, namely the transference of
meaning through the deconstruction of the word which is the conveyance of life
made possible through this deconstruction.
“For
Barthes and Foucault, as for Derrida, a text cannot be the expression of an
individual’s interior, nor simply the representation of some social exterior,
for it is as an act of writing, the material manipulation of signs,
discursive structures, textual elements, and act of inscription, with its own
protocols, modes of constraint, and regulation” .elizabeth grosz.
Mallarmé’s
Un Coup de Des exemplifies this act of writing both as “an
act” he enacts, as well as an act which is deliberately conveyed within the
very form and content of the poem itself. The
potent nature of the Ideal and the Idea as existent within the neutrality
of the abyss enacts itself through an recording of chance which becomes for
Mallarmé “a solemn agitation of language in air.”
This act of writing as an “surrendering” of the identity of the poet
to the act itself is recognized through the objective creation of the poem as it
was an intellectual rendering. Similarly,
the actual creation of the poem occurs as do constellations – through an
imprint in the sky, an mark on the page; like the ‘big dipper’ though, what
is created contains within it’s outline the inherent absence of itself as a
Form, while also being signified most saliently through the space which is
absent and null around the Form.
As
the sky or the page is first blank, it represents the blank which is the most
complete representation of the eternal expanse of the Ideal and the Void.
It is then through this space as well as in it where the act occurs and
remains to be transferred. This may
be conveyed through the notion of Chora, which
is
the space in which place is made possible, the chasm for the passage of
spaceless Forms into a spatialized reality, a dimensionless tunnel opening
itself to spatialization, obliterating itself to make others possible and
actual. It is the space that
engenders without possessing, that nurtures without requirements of its own,
that receives without giving, and that gives without receiving, a space that
evades all characterizations including the disconcerting logic of identity, of
hierarchy, of being, the regulation of order.
Linguistically, Un
Coup de Des communicates the brilliant urgency with which the embodied poet
who has lost subjectivity to become an anyone, or whoever, “quiconque,”
creates this act:
Solitary distraught feather [...]
this
rigid whiteness
ridiculous
in
opposition to the sky
too much so
not
to mark
in
the slightest detail
whoever
(folio
7)
Cohn describes
the beginning of this folio as “the advent of the Artist,” and proceeds to
note in the transition to Mallarmé’s evocation of the actual creation of art
that the feather is first an representation of an “unassigned art-vision, a
pen waiting to write, [and] true to its Sanskrit root, it was floating
listlessly, and the u’s in the line imply that it is still passive, waiting to
be made upright by a master. As a
plain feather it will become the upright feather in the genius’s cap,” (Cohn
Ex72). While the impetus to write
is evident, stasis abides as does the neutrality of the abyss while searching
for the impetus for the artistic act to be supplanted by kinesis”
Falls
the
feather
rhythmic
suspension of disaster
to
be buried
in the original spray
whence formerly its delirium sprang up to a peak
withered
by
the identical neutrality of the abyss
(folio 9).
Etching thus into
the whiteness of the page, the void, the feather falls, and inscribes through
the inherent absence of presence the natural living existence of things as
granted by the Master, shipwrecked and alive within the dialectical oceanic
flux. There is similarly in the act of writing a very sexual implication which
is engendered through the oceanic movement, the feather entering the page, and
the “flowering of reality, Art” (Cohn MM75).
The
act of writing thus becomes that act which scars the abyss, penetrates the hymen
that is the blank rift of the “double page,” the binding’s crease, thus
marking the void of the blank page in the recording of an instance while
simultaneously producing the book. Within
Mallarmé’s highly sexualized language this act as erotically conveyed reads
as such:
The lucid and
lordly crest
of vertigo
invisible
on the brow
scintillates
then shadows
a
delicate dark form
standing upright
in its Siren twist
(folio
8).
For Mallarmé
this sexual act is similarly steeped within the poetic tradition in which it
provides particular allusions to Shakespeare’s Hamlet as well as Poe, not to
mention a multitude of Mallarmé’s other poems.
However, the potency of the act of writing occurs most profoundly
within its enactment of a very distinct “death of vanity,” or the
sublimation of the poet as the subjective creator to the poem that is created by
means of this act.
“The
death of vanity” as such occurs by way of “the theory of objective creation
of art” in that it is “a mind willfully neutral and severed from its own
emotions” that is must become “an artistic intellect” (Co 205) in order to
render the poem intellectually and objectively enough that it first becomes this
act of writing which communicates on the level of the intellect.
Mallarmé, according to Cohn, in utilizing the word Idée within
his preface, has particularly illustrated the way in which “the poet” was
“to designate an artistic brand of it (the poem)” for “the ambitious Work
that this Preface envisages, encompasses, dialectically, is of an intellectual
phase. All the theoretical writings
of Mallarmé on the Work discuss the idea of a fusion of two terms representing
two poles of art – intuitive and rational” (Cohn MM20).
It is precisely because the poem is rendered intellectually and
objectively within the conception of the poetic trajectory that the poem itself
is exists as an act of writing to be engaged with as an text, as a book like the
soul, while furthermore necessitating after reading that which is the intuitive
facet of communication through which the poem actually lives kinetically
and through which the original emotive passion which was the impetus for the act
of writing becomes an instantaneous transference or intuition and nearness of
meaning.
Mallarmé’s
enactment of an new poetics succeeds in making this Art objective such that it
may effectively exist as an conveyance of the Ideal which it too contains
embedded within its objective existence. The
act of writing Un Coup de Des and the creation of a work of art that
loses its subjectivity begins to exemplify the other facet of this objectivity,
namely “the theory of the signature,” “which Mallarmé, defining precisely
what he called the “operation,” never ceased derailing” (De 113).
A
text is made to do without references; either to the thing itself, or to the
author who consigns to it nothing except its disappearance.
This disappearance is actively inscribed, it is not an accident of the
text, it is rather its nature; it marks the signature of an unceasing omission
(De 113).
Mallarmé thus
poetically, or rather artistically within the poetic form, writes within Un
Coup de Des what Derrida has intellectually conceptualized in the
disappearance - the act of writing is conveyed in that “An ordinary elevation
pours out absence” (folio 10), while the poem itself becomes “some splashing
below of water as if to disperse the empty act” (folio 10).
This reading of “the poem” within the poem moreover recognizes by
virtue of the fact that it is a reading read within the work of art itself
reading Art, inaugurates the existence of the poem in the face of chance,
even if what the poem accomplishes is an conveying of the very absence of
itself, and thus subverts chance while also enacting chance – hence
paradigmatic paradoxes. Thus while
this poem is intellectually rendered, and the signature or identity of the poet
has undergone one form of loss, there remains an trace of the signature not
of the artist or the act, but an “general signature” which is the trace that
is the poem. Derrida identifies
this trace as one “modality of signature:”
a
general signature, or signature of the signature, the fold of the placement in
abyss where, after the manner of the signature in the current sense, the work of
writing designates, describes, and inscribes itself as act (action and archive),
signs itself before the end by affording us the opportunity to read: I refer to
myself, this is writing, I am a writing, this is writing – which excludes
nothing since, when the placement in abyss succeeds, and is thereby decomposed
and produces an event, it is the other, the thing as other, that signs (G 19).
Thus as Mallarmé
has written a poem, the act that became the poem has become “placed within the
abyss,” both as Derrida has noted and as he himself conveys and embodies
through creation.
As
if the chance that chance may be abolished in order to convey “the diamond and
rain,” “the Lily and the Rose,” to accomplish an “act of writing,”
could occur, it would stand as “an insinuation simple,” and one which is not
merely enacted, but is “offered” for the reader as an trace in order
to provide an illumination and thus a mode for an engagement with an
transference of meaning. Writing
the poem then illuminates the urgency of the poet to convey and to offer, the
questionable ability to do so, as well as the actual creation of an illumination
which is the actual unique and brilliant nature of being “thrown”:
WERE
IT TO EXIST
other than as a scattered dying hallucination
WERE
IT TO BEGIN AND WERE IT TO CEASE
springing
up as denied and closed up when made manifest
at
last
through
some thinly diffused emanation
WERE
IT TO BE NUMBERED
evidence of a totality however meager
WERE
IT TO ILLUMINE
(folio 9).
The possibility
of the poem and what the poem could be if it could be written, or received in
trace, begins to be conveyed within Un Coup de Des in folio 6.
AS IF
An insinuation
simple
In the silence
enrolled with irony
or
the mystery
hurled
howled
in some nearby
whirlpool of hilarity and horror
flutters
about
the abyss
without
strewing it
or
fleeing
and
out of it cradles the virgin sign
AS IF
The placement of
this section of the poem in italics emphasizes that it is offered as an
postulate; for even if the postulate could be enacted, as it is, the
“lightening flash” is “immediately evaporated in mist” (folio, 8).
With this confession of an evaporation, “the neutrality of the abyss”
has again been invoked and any “being” within nothingness is recognized as
an ephemeral phase of being. Importantly
though, there is another reference to a varied layer of the paradox; the
unceasing omission that is enacted which succeeds as it is enacted, the writing
of what is written – the poem’s worth is engendered through the poem itself.
Beginning with
the passage within Un Coup de Des “when a midnight toque encounters
or grazes it and immobilizes on the crumpled velvet by a somber guffaw”
(folio 7) that which is the possibility of “WERE” begins, Mallarmé begins
to manifest the chance that could be as a chance that could be not merely
chance, but a form of chance which could perhaps succeed.
The trace of the signature which exists then as an absence of an poem
bestows the poem itself while providing the very substance through which a
transference of meaning, of symbolism, and a very potent transference of the
nature of an encounter with the sublime, can occur “to illumine.”
If
the act of writing succeeds, as it seems to be capable of doing, it is by virtue
of its ability to “flutter” about the abyss, to record and transfer as an
disruption rather than as an concrete representation.
Poetic worth is thus derived from its enactment as “a terminus
sanctified” (folio 11), though subject to chance dissolution, which has in
effect already occurred by confining it to the trace – pure objectivity is not
achieved in print, in ink, in number, but in the movement already moved past
which occurs during the reading of the trace of the act.
For as Derrida notes, the poem eventually dissolves into its own paradox,
being a signature in itself, as an “insinuation,” actively inscribed as
“an unceasing omission” such that ultimately, “NOTHING WILL HAVE TAKEN
PLACE BUT THE PLACE” (folio 10), for the poem is “enrolled with irony or the
mystery” – and as in a whirlpool (folio 6).
Within
these convoluted labyrinths of interpretation which attempt to access the poem
as it stands in its entirety as an conveyance of an poetic trajectory located
within paradoxical notions of ontology and various faiths in Forms which are
phases of constructed Ideals, the poem contains various clear ideological
conceptions through which significant ontological revelations, or en-lightened
instances arise. It is through the
sensual, earthly, and mundane urges of torment, ecstasy, and sublimity though in
which these clarities become discernable – namely, through the process of
reading. The nature of the void or
abyss thus communicates through the poem into one’s being only within a form
of primary textual reading which merely directs the reader’s being toward an
primary experience of that which is conveyed. Thus while the poet engages in a
process which is an “creative transformation of consciousness” (We 195),
there remains: “Poeme...symphonie...imagination pure et complexe ou
intellect,” (Cohn MM20). In other
words, the poet translates while the poem transfers a secondary form of an
transference which is each and every chance obliterating chance itself and then
recreating it or first engaging with it experientially.
The
Void is conveyed, or transferred, through Un Coup de Des within that form
of language with is the highly crafted written and spoken word – the poem -
while the angst of the process of transference emerges by way of the
transference of the difficulty to transfer.
The use of poetry and the heavy reliance upon a symbol, and a particular
form of an symbol as the indefinite word, which was reconfigured by Mallarmé
into a highly abstract system which intertwines and enfolds within his own
poetic cannon, offers an accessible method of transference which is truly
capable of transferring the knowledge of the poetic vision and the sublime Ideal
through a feeling of intuition while at the same time being conveyed through a
form of language.
Goethe recognized the potential for transference within the potency of the symbol, while similarly the employment of the symbol fulfilled Mallarmé’s “need for a synthesis of the highly individual with the universal” (Co 10) as it becomes that which is the actual component – even if in absence and deconstructed - of effectually illuminating - transferring. The symbol as a potent form bestows meaning, in relationship to what it symbolizes as well as in relationship to itself, as well as to the autonomy of the poem as an whole, a communication alive: Goethe noted that “true symbolism is where the particular represents the more general, not as a dream or a shadow, but as a living momentary revelation of the inscrutable.” In continuation of Goethe’s statement it is noted “whereby the symbol participates in the reality of the symbolized, enunciating while remaining unified with that which it represents” (L 180). Within this former conception of the symbol lies the particular potency of transference and of the salient nature of Mallarmé’s symbols, (though difficulty does surface in that Mallarmé roots reality in the possibility, or inevitability, that it is merely an veil of illusion – and yet the symbol allows the revelation of this inscrutability). The symbols provided within Mallarmé’s work in their individual conceptions do evoke if not reality then at least encounters with that which may seem to be real – even while what is real lay within the realm of the indefinite, the infinite