Modern Languages and Literatures, Department of
Title
Desire Seeking Expression: Mallarmé's "Prose Pour Des Esseintes"
Document Type
Article
Date of this Version
October 1983
Over the past sixty-five years of Mallarméan criticism, few poems
have come to occupy as central a place in the discussion of the
poet's work as "Prose pour des Esseintes." While it is generally
agreed that, beginning around 1862, the development of Mallarmé's
principal conceits and images, of his syntax and his directing
ideas, culminates in "Un Coup de dés," "Prose" is often held
to be not only Mallarmé's most hermetic poem but also the one
that deals most directly with the nature of poetic composition.
Commentators have variously called it Mallarmé's ars poetica, a
conviction piece, a taking stock prior to beginning the Grand
Oeuvre, a repudiation of the earlier verse in favor of a new vision
and procedure. All of these views are tenable and have the merit
of pointing out a number of ways to consider, through "Prose,"
the development of Mallarmé's ideas about poetry. Equally
important, of course, is the aspect they have in common: namely,
that "Prose" is somehow at the center of Mallarmé's poetic
thought and practice. Yet, there is no evidence that Mallarmé
attached any special importance to "Prose" in this regard, nor
for that matter to any other poem. From the time of his earliest
mature compositions, Mallarmé tended to project his work in
terms of groups of poems, somewhat like the constellations of
which he was so fond. Such arrangements suggest a center instead
of specifically pinpointing one and we should also keep in mind
that so many of his poems, by raising questions about the nature
of poetry, show individual facets of a much larger ars poetica. It
might be more to the point, then, to say that of the dozen or so
poems that explicitly deal with poetry or the poet "Prose pour
des Esseintes" exposes more fully than do the others a concern
which runs throughout, or just behind, the entire oeuvre.
It is my view that the concern which Mallarmé has developed
in "Prose" is made up of two closely related considerations. One
of these is the relationship between language and thought. Unique
in all of Mallarmé's poetry is the invocation to hyperbole which
opens the poem: "Hyperbole! de ma mémoire / Triomphalement
ne sais-tu / Te lever ...." To identify hyperbole with poetry in
some general sense, as is often done, is to miss what is at stake
in this opening question. Poetry as description and synthesis is
already present in the "oeuvre de patience," and the poet clearly
would like to complement these qualities with something else.
True, poetry is ultimately the matter and, with hyperbole, poetry
in the fullest sense will be attained; but the vehicle for that attainment
is what is called for, and that vehicle is language. This insistence
carries with it a specificity not found in the other poems,
where the emphasis is also on poetry, but not on poetry seen
specifically as language. With his opening question, the poet is
asking whether language is capable of an expressiveness which
might go beyond the mere description (however metaphorical)
of the objects of experience and thus carry thought to a radically
new and different understanding of those objects and of that
experience. "Les choses existent," wrote Mallarmé, "nous
n'avons qu'à en saisir les rapports." Language, poetical language
to be sure, does not reorder experience. Rather, it orders our comprehension
of it, and without this expressiveness which is language
there would be no comprehension in any meaningful sense,
but only the unrealized thought of the "grimoire." Thought and
language do not exist apart.
In conjunction with this first consideration and informing it
is a second, which also is present in terms of a relationship. It is
the relationship between desire and thought. Most of Mallarmé's
poetry beginning with "Les Fenêtres" in 1862 evinces the desire
for a spiritual regeneration that would free the poet from the
contingencies of everyday experience. This is of course a modified
Christian theme inherited from the Romantic poets and
Baudelaire, who saw the poetic imagination as the way to this
new freedom. The peculiar problem which Mallarmé encountered
in this respect is not in any difference in the extent of his desire,
which is infinite. Rather, this problem, the barrier which is present
in so many of his poems, is in the limits imposed on the
movement towards the absolute, which are the limits of thought
itself. As Baudelaire had seen, Mallarmé saw as an imperative the
need to account for thought and emotions as complementary and
mutually influencing facets of human experience, and recognized
in poetry the means most likely to do this. However, he also discovered
relatively early on that thought, even poetic thought,
cannot extend infinitely. Of necessity tied to the image, to the
language of wordly experience, thought can be abstracted only
so far before it breaks this bond and encounters the void of
thoughtlessness. Thus, desire and thought are not entirely coextensive,
and the task for their difficult joining falls squarely
upon language. For the question is really that of desire seeking
an expressiveness that will allow thought to reach its very limits
and yet without ceasing to gesture beyond those limits to the
absolute which is the object of desire.
The present study outlines and explores these two relationships
as they are found in "Prose pour des Esseintes" and throughout
Mallarmé's writing. The first section is a detailed exegesis of the
poem, in which I have tried to keep the discussion as free as possible
from any anecdotal presuppositions in order that meaning
within the poem may emerge unobstructed. It is my conviction
that Mallarmé was as much a thinker as he was a poet or, more
properly, a thinker poetically in relation with the language he
used. Unfortunately, it has often been the case in commentaries
on "Prose" that resorting to anecdote, doubtless in an attempt
to simplify seemingly insurmountable difficulties, mitigates the
poem's complexity and impoverishes thought. In this chapter, I
rely heavily on interpretation based on etymologies, and also
bring to the discussion an examination of the variants. I do turn
to other writings at times, as in the extended digression concerning
the sense in which Mallarmé refers to memory and time, in
order to ground certain fundamental observations.
The second section broadens the context of the relationships
between desire, thought and language. Focusing on poems, prose
and correspondence, it traces Mallarmé's recognition of these
relationships and his deepening understanding of them, primarily
over the period from 1862 to 1875. I have placed an important
part of this discussion within an ontological framework because
it appears to me that Mallarmé's concern with the relationship
between thought and desire brings to light a preoccupation with
contingent and absolute being and with how both are manifest
in language. In order to enhance our appreciation of Mallarmé's
thinking in this regard, I have indicated how his ideas fall within
the traditional confrontation of Idealism and Nominalism and
have drawn what I hope is a useful parallel between "Prose pour
des Esseintes" and Anselm of Canterbury's Fides quaerens intellectum:
Proslogion, which deals in a strikingly similar way with
the relationship between thought and desire for the absolute.
Quite aside from my personal work on "Prose pour des Esseintes,"
it is my hope that the third and final section of this study
may be of help to other scholars. I have included a critical bibliography
of the work done on the poem since 1954. This date is
not at all arbitrary, since it was then that Lloyd James Austin
published in conjunction with his well-known study a critical
discussion of most of the exegetical commentary up to that time.
His contribution has been of immeasurable value not only because
it brought together many readings of the poem, but also because
it offered a convenient cross-section of Mallarméan criticism, and
it is to continue his work that I present this bibliography. I have
also included several items which may have escaped Austin's
notice and, following the critical entries, have supplied the complete
bibliography. Also offered as a convenience, the append ices
bring together the earlier versions of the poem as well as other
pertinent documents.
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French Forum Monographs #42. Copyright (c) 1983 French Forum Publishers Inc.