Mallarme's Wake

Mallarmé’s Wake Robert Greer Cohn (bio) In After Babel (along with his Real Presences and Heidegger) George Steiner forthrightly gives Mallarmé the pivotal position in the formation of modern thought and literature, seeing Rilke as his only rival on the poetic front, Heidegger on the ideational one. Like Julia Kristeva (who, in her Revolution of Poetic Language, pushes Lautréamont into the spotlight as well; but he comes later, as did Rimbaud), he singles out Mallarmé, starting with the “Sonnet allégorique de lui-même” (Sonnet allegorical of itself) (1868; published under the definitive title “Ses purs ongles” in 1887) as the pioneer who metamorphosed the use of language for our time, with a greater cultural impact than “World Wars I and II combined.” As he, Kristeva, and almost the entire French critical intelligentsia of our day see it, the master symbolist stretched the power of verbal expression beyond normal usage so far that he instituted a quantum leap, a whole new universe of modern literary reality. Of course, this perspective didn’t wait for Steiner and his contemporaries. Mallarmé himself realized what he was doing and explained it in the demanding prose of Divagations (collected critical pieces, 1897) as well as in key passages of his poetry, such as “Prose (pour des Esseintes).” There was no lack of authoritative voices—notably, that of his prize pupil, Paul Valéry—to proclaim the unprecedented nature of the Mallarmé phenomenon: “Mallarmé the purest, the most intransigent, the hardest on himself of all those who have held a pen.” Proust, Claudel, Gide were comparably impressed, with varying nuances according to their personal needs. The finest French critic of the early twentieth century, Albert Thibaudet, devoted his major work to him, and, from then on, it is hardly too much to say that no aspiring critic could avoid wrestling with that angel (Blanchot, Sartre, Poulet, Richard, Foucault, Barthes . . .), who stood athwart their promising paths. For example, Blanchot, who occupies a position in the later century comparable to Thibaudet’s, is unthinkable without the eminent ghost. Arthur Symons, Edmund Gosse, James Huneker, Yeats, T. S. Eliot first put us on, in the English-speaking world, to the ground-breaking events [End Page 885] in Paris; Edmund Wilson, in Axel’s Castle (1931), went further: he construed Mallarmé as the closest literary equivalent to Einstein, installing a whole new episteme, with practically all the major figures of modern writing—Proust, Valéry, Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, Gertrude Stein (sic)—as emanations of that lux candida, a hidden sun so dazzling as hardly to be contemplated, at least in his otherwise boldly venturous book, which has remained a classic, his central contribution (Wilson was, no doubt, our counterpart of Thibaudet). Saul Bellow recently, in It All Adds Up, recalls the decisive impact it had on his own cultural formation. We must imagine those literary folks listening for the first time to Debussy’s “Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un faune” (Prelude to the afternoon of a faun), perhaps reading in the program the poem which inspired it as well as Nijinsky’s ballet, vibrantly aware of the painterly impressionism influencing these intimately related arts. In airy openness, subtlety, exquisite French nuance of sensuality, the leap into modernity—like Nijinsky’s onto the stage—is breathtaking. In his time, Mallarmé’s impact was limited to a “happy few,” especially those privileged young people who came, in the waning years of the nineteenth century, to the mardis in his modest apartment on the rue de Rome, but that handful embraced practically everyone who was going to be anyone in the various twentieth century arts: in addition to Proust, Claudel, Valéry, Gide, there were Debussy, Rodin, Whistler, Renoir, Monet, Pissarro, Gauguin, Vuillard, Morisot. The greatest painter of the twentieth century, Matisse, was inspired by the Poésies—he illustrated them—to the culmination of his style. Subsequent figures in this lineage include Ravel (who set some of his poems), Picasso (who came to Paris partly because of him), the futurists, for example, Marinetti, who took off from his new free spatial structures in the Coup de Dés as did Apollinaire. Later came Faulkner, whose

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