An Anatomy of Poesis: The Prose Poems of Stéphane Mallarmé 9780807891674, 1469646005, 9781469646008

Table of contents :
Cover
AN ANATOMY OF POESIS: THE PROSE POEMS OF STÉPHANE MALLARMÉ
Title
Copyright
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface
Introduction
Le Phénomène Futur
Plainte d'Automne
Frisson d'Hiver
Le Démon de l'Analogie
Pauvre Enfant Pâle
La Pipe
Un Spectacle Interrompu
Réminiscence
La Déclaration Foraine
Le Nénuphar Blanc
L'Ecclésiastique
La Gloire
Conflit
Conclusion
Appendix
A List of Works Cited
Back Cover

Citation preview

UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL DEPARTMENT OF ROMANCE LANGUAGES

NORTH CAROLINA STUDIES IN THE ROMANCE LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES ESSAYS; TEXTS, TEXTUAL STUDIES AND TRANSLATIONS; SYMPOSIA

Founder: URBAN TIGNER HOLMES

Distributed by: UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS CHAPEL HILL

North Carolina 27514 U.S.A.

NORTH CAROLINA STUDIES IN THE ROMANCE LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES Essays

Number 16

AN ANATOMY OF POESIS: THE PROSE POEMS OF STEPHANE MALLARME

AN ANATOMY OF POESIS: THE PROSE POEMS OF STEPHANE MALLARME ?

?

BY

URSULA FRANKLIN Grand Valley State Colleges

CHAPEL HILL NORTH CAROLINA STUDIES IN THE ROMANCE LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES U.N.C. DEPARTMENT OF ROMANCE LANGUAGES

1976

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Franklin, Ursula. An anatomy of poesis. (North Carolina studies in the Romance language and literature: Essays; 16) "Appendix" (p. consists of Mallarme's Anecdotes ou poemes (first published together in 1897 as part of his collection entitled Divagations) in French and English. 1. Mallarme, Stephane, 1842-1898. Divagations. 2. Mallarme, Stephane, 1842-1898-Criticism and interpretation. I. Mallarme, Stephane, 1842-1898. Divagations. Selections. English & French. 1975. II. Title. III. Series. PQ2344.D53F7

841'.8

75-29040

ISBN 9780807891674

DEPOSITO LEGAL: V.

281 - 1976

ARTES GRAFICAS SOLER, S. A. - JAVEA,

28 -

VALENCIA

(8) - 1976

TABLE OF CONTENTS Page

Preface .......................... . Introduction . . . . . . . .. Le PMnomene Futur . . . . . . . . . . .. Plainte d'Automne . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. Frisson d'Hiver . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. Le Demon de l'Analogie ........ . Pauvre Enfant Pale . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. La Pipe .................... . Un Spectacle Interrompu .............. . Reminiscence . . . . . . . .. La Declaration Foraine ... Le Nenuphar Blanc ... L'Ecclesiastique . . . . . . . ..... La Gloire ... Confiit ... Conclusion .. . Appendix ........... . A List of Works Cited ........... .

8 9 18

29 40

52 67 82 93

109 119 136

150 160 172

195 210 265

PREFACE

Stephane Mallarm6's verse and prose has produced a considerable volume of perceptive and sometimes exciting criticism and interpretation. However, the poet's important prose poems have for the most part escaped the attention of scholars. This study, a detailed analysis of each prose poem, following the order established by Mallarme himself, addresses itself to filling this gap. I am indebted to Professor Laurence M. Porter who drew my attention to Mallarm6's prose poems a few years ago and directed an earlier version of this study. He has taught me much about literary scholarship. My reading of Mallarme owes much to his previous commentators: to Haskell M. Block, Gardner Davies, Wallace Fowlie, Emilie Noulet, Jean-Pierre Richard, Kurt Wais and others; but especially to Robert Gr·eer Cohn, I am grateful for guidance in my exploration of the Mallarmean universe. I regret that the important recent studies of the poet by Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva were not available to me during the time that this book was being written. I thank the editors of The French Review, Nineteenth-Century French Studies and The Romanic Review for their kind permission to use material which first appeared in their journals. Finally I wish to express my deepest gratitude to my friend and teacher Professor John A. Yunck who first introduced me to poetry. His constant encouragement, his criticism and untiring advice, made this study possible. Grand Valley April 8, 1974

INTRODUCTION

Mallarme's monumental literary significance, both historical and intrinsic, has produced an abundance of excellent critical scholarship devoted to his work during the past fifty years. Attention has been focused, however, almost wholly on his verse; 1 his prose - a substantial and artistically important part of his work- has only recently begun to receive attention. Dieter Steland 2 has pointed out that Mallarme's prose works cannot be indiscriminately designated as kritische Schriften, for even his critical prose, like that represented in "Symphonie Litteraire," is a special type of poetry. 3 The Divagations, 4 Mallarme's collected prose work, published under his supervision in 1897, introduces a new prose genre, the "poeme critique," which term appears in the "Bibliographie" of the Divagations, where the poet explains: Les cassures du texte, on se tranquillisera, observent de concorder, avec sens et n'inscrivant d'espace nu que jusqu'a leurs points d'illumination: une forme, peut-etre, 1 Mallarme's verse attracted critical attention during his lifetime, and more intensively since the publication of Albert Thibaudet's La Poesie de Stephane Mallarme (Paris: Gallimard, 1912; 2e ed., 1926). 2 Dieter Steland, Dialektische Gedanken in Stephane Mallarmes "Divagations" (Miinchen: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1965). 3 Henri Mondor, Stephane Mallarme: Correspondance 1862-1871 I (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), p. 113; in a letter to Albert Collignon, of April 11, 1864, Mallarme writes:

Je vous envoie aujourd'hui quelques poemes en prose dont vous aimez les inspirateurs. The "inspirateurs" are Gautier, Banville, and Baudelaire. • Stephane Mallarme, Divagations (Paris: Bibliotheque Charpentier, 1897).

10

AN ANATOMY OF POE SIS

en sort, actuelle, permettant, a ce qui fut longtemps le poeme en prose et notre recherche, d'aboutir, en tant, si l'on joint mieux les mots, que poeme critique. Mobiliser, autour d'une idee, Ies lueurs diverses de !'esprit, a distance voulue, par phrases ... 5 In this study I will examine a body of prose which stands between Mallarme's verse and the poeme critique: his prose poems, which are not critically interpretive in the manner of the poetic essay. The term "prose poems" refers here to the thirteen prose pieces first published separately in various reviews from 1864 to 1895, and finally grouped together as the "Anecdotes ou Poemes" of Divagations, a book which reflects the author's own structural determination of his prose work a year before his death. 6 The prose poem did not appear suddenly in the nineteenth century. Rather it grew out of the much earlier concept of poetic prose, whose basic idea- simply stated, that prose can be poetic - represented a striking revolt against the formalism of the seventeenth century. Classicism's most typical spokesmen, grammarians and critics like Vaugelas and Bouhours, insisted on rigorous distinctions among genres, and specifically between prose and verse. Nevertheless, the revolt was already voiced by La Bruyere, and was manifest, moreover, in many a page of Bossuet. But it is with Fenelon's Telemaque that poetry most obviously invades the prose of the classical century. 7 Poetic prose came into its own in the following century, in the pages of two of the Enlightenment's greatest representatives: Diderot and Rousseau. Hence the nineteenth century inherited a long tradition of poetic prose which it developed richly. Mme de Stael, • Mallarme, Divagations, p. 373. • The first twelve of these poems had been gathered together in Pages of 1891, and common editorial practice tends misleadingly to follow this early grouping, despite Mallarme's own later addition. Cf., e.g., H. Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry, CEuvres completes de Stephane Mallarme (Paris: Gallimard, 1945). The editors indicate in a note, p. 1573, the appearance of "Conflit" as the closing piece of the "Anecdotes ou Poemes" of Divagations. All quotations are from this Pteiade edition, unless otherwise indicated. 7 The origin of the prose poem in reaction against the classical tradition is traced thoroughly in Vista Clayton, The Prose Poem in French Literature of the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia Univ., 1936). See especially pp. 181 ff.

INTRODUCTION

11

enthusiast of the "souffle lyrique" of German Romanticism, notes in De l'Allemagne that France's best lyric poets are perhaps her great prosateurs, Bossuet, Pascal, Fenelon, Buffon and JeanJacques. 8 In Chateaubriand poetic prose finds its great master; and it is in Chateaubriand also that the first signs of the prose poem begin to appear, in the form of his "beaux morceaux" dispersed here and there in his work, which seem like lyric songs - in prose -interpolated in his romans. Thus, the early nineteenth