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Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898) |
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French poet and leader of the Symbolist movement in poetry with Paul Verlaine. Mallarmé was a provincial school teacher who came to Paris to live a bourgeois life on the rue de Rome, but published allusive, compressed poems, which suggested rather than denoted. He saw that his purified language gives "a purer meaning to the words of the tribe." (from the sonnet on Edgar Allan Poe) Mallarmé never gained wide recognition for his work during his lifetime. O rêveuse, pour que je plonge Stéphane Mallarmé was born in Paris into a family in which his father and grandfather had made a noteworthy career in the French civil service. He was expected to follow the family tradition but at school he did not do well except in languages. Mallarmé began writing poetry at an early age under the influence of Victor Hugo. At the age of nineteen he found Charles Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil, which had appeared in 1857. Under its influence he wrote 'Briese marine,' starting with the much quoted line "Le chair est triste, hélas! et j'ai lu tous les livres". After leaving school he visited England and while in London he married Marie Gerhard. Mallarmé taught English from 1864 in Tournon, Besançon, Avignon, and Paris until his retirement in 1893. The solitary years in Tournon and Besançon were his years of apprenticeship, during which he prepared himself for his career as a man of letters. Mallarmé's poems started to appear in magazines in the 1860s. His first important poem, 'L'Azur', was published when he
was 24. All his life he spent a very long time on each of his poems,
making them as perfect as possible. In between writing, he suffered from bouts of physical illness and metaphysical anguish. Claude Debussy had set Mallarmé's poem
'Apparation' to music in 1882, but their first meeting
took place years later.. L'Après-Midi d'un faune
(1865-67; published in 1876), best-known work, inspired Debussy's
tone poem (1894) of the same name and was illustrated by the
famous painter Manet. Originally Debussy had planned to write a three-part
composition on the poem, but only completed the 'Prelude.' The great
Russian-born ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky made it the score for his
ballet choreography, which was performed in 1912. Nijinsky played the
role of the faun. Against all expectations, he made only one leap. At
the end, the faun thrusts his body into a scarf the most beautiful
nymph has left behind. This sexual act shocked the premiere audience,
but the producer Serghei Diaghilev commissioned a repeat performance
and it was danced again. When the national newspaper Le Figaro launched a campaign against the ballet, Auguste Renoir and Odilon Redon rushed to the dancer's defence. Diaghilev was delighted. From time to time Debussy attended Mallermé's Tuesday evening gatherings, which attracted such writers, artists, musicians, and intellectuals as André Gide, Paul Valéry and Oscar Wilde, the painters Renoir, Monet, Degas, Redon, and Whistler, and the sculptor Rodin. "Certainly Mallarmé prepared his conversations," recalled Gide later, "but he spoke with such art and in a tone that had so little of the doctrinal about it that it seemed as if he had just that instant invented each new proposition". The Afternoon of the Faun presents the wandering thoughts of a faun on a drowsy summer afternoon. "Forgetful let me lie where summer's drouth / Sifts fine the sand and then with gaping mouth / Dream planet-struck by the grape's round wine-red star. / Nymphs, I shall see the shade that now you are." (translated by Aldous Huxley) Mallarmé began to write the poems while working in Tournon, a town he found ugly and unpleasant. For Claude Debussy he wrote in December 1894 after coming from the concert: "... what a marvel! your illustration of the Afternoon of a Faun – not in the slightest disaccord with my text, except that it goes further, truly, in nostalgia and light, so delicate, disquieting, and rich." Between the years 1867 and 1873 Mallarmé did not finish any of his large poetical works, Hérodiade (1869) included. Among Mallarmé's later publications are Toast funèbre, which was written in memory of the author Théophile Gautier, and the experimental poem, one of his masterpieces, 'Un Coup De Dés' (1914, A Throw of the Dice), which was published posthumously. From the 1880s Mallarmé was the center of a group of French writers in Paris, which had such members Gide, Paul Valéry, and Proust. Mallarmé's ideas on poetry and art were considered difficult and obscure. When Mallarmé started to write poetry in the 1850s', French poets were still rather obedient to certain conventions concerning rhyme, metre, theme, etc. Victor's Hugo's notion that 'pure poetry' is essentially 'useless' was widely accepted. Proust wrote once: "How unfortunate that so gifted a man should become insane every time he takes up the pen", and Mallarmé's friend, the painter Edgar Degas, came out from his lecture, and crying "I do not understand, I do not understand." Challenging his readers, Mallarmé sought out from a dictionary the long-forgotten meanings of common words and used these. Naturally this provoked a hostility, that followed Mallarmé through his career. To Proust's attack he answered in The Mystery in Literature: "Every piece of writing, on the outside of its treasure, must-out of respect for those from whom, after all, it borrows the language, for a different purpose-present with the words a meaning, even if an unimportant one: there is an advantage to turning away the idler, who is charmed that nothing here concerns him at first sight." According to Mallarmé's theories, nothing lies beyond reality, but within this nothingness lie the essence of perfect forms. It is the task of the poet to reveal and crystallize these essences. Mallarmé's poetry employs condensed figures and unorthodox syntax. He believed that the point of a poem was the beauty of the language. "You don't make a poem with ideas, but with words." Thus a poem should be read as an object independent of the world in which it existed. But sometimes he became bored of the antique gardens of words, where he wanted to live: "The flesh grows weary. And books, I've read them all. / Off, then, to where I glimpse through spray and squall / Strange birds delighting in their unknown skies!" (from 'Seabreeze') Each poem is built around a central symbol, idea, or metaphor and consists of subordinate images that illustrate and help to develop the idea. However, he preferred to hint between the l ines at meanings rather than state them clearly. "Nommer un object, c'est supprimer les trois-quarts de la jouissance du poème qui est fait peu à peu: le suggérer." The reader must return over and over again to the lines, concentrate on the music of the words rather than the referential meaning. Once he stated: "I become obscure, of course! if one makes a mistake and thinks one is opening a newspaper." For the rest of his life Mallarmé devoted himself to putting his literary theories into practice and writing his Grand Oeuvre (Great Work). Mallarmé died in Paris, on September 9, 1898 without completing this work. Mallarmé's vers libre had a huge influence on twentieth century French poetry, and in the creation of the modernist tradition in German and American poetry.
Selected works:
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