Literature and the Gods

V. An Abandoned Room

The principal argument leveled against the Greek myths was always of a moral, and above all a sexual, nature: the myths, it appeared, were to be condemned because full of unseemly stories, the chief offenders being the gods themselves. The objection was not, as some might suppose, invented by the Church Fathers; all they did, duty bound as they were, was to pad it out. We can find it in Xenophanes or, in exemplary form, in Plato. After which every age would color it as they chose, from the Alexandrians through to the Rococo. Indeed, the long chain of condemnation had still to be broken when, in 1879, Stéphane Mallarmé set out to translate and adapt a handbook of mythology: the Reverend George W. Cox’s Manual of Mythology. Mallarmé had taken on the job — the book was to be used in secondary schools — partly because he needed the money, but partly too out of the same privately esoteric propensities that a few years before had prompted him to produce and edit every word of a frivolous magazine called La Dernière Mode, a publication that could still, he claimed, when pulled out and dusted off, make him “dream for hours.” In adapting Cox’s text to the “French spirit,” Mallarmé made cuts and additions, paraphrasing here and reformulating there. The criteria he applied are revealing, so much so that when we come across a difference between the two texts, we immediately find ourselves wondering how and why Mallarmé made his changes. Until at a certain point the eye falls on a quite remarkable statement: “Si les dieux ne font rien d’inconvenant, c’est alors qu’ils ne sont plus dieux du tout”—“If the gods do nothing unseemly, then they are no longer gods at all.”

Twenty-five centuries of morality — pagan, Christian, and secular — seem to fall away before these words. Can it be, then, that in order to be a god one must be involved in unseemly behavior? Can it be that that vast repertoire of unnameable acts we come across in the ancient fables is itself the code through which the gods make themselves manifest? Such a theological vision would demand long and considered reflection. And in the end it might actually turn out to be more farsighted than the usual disapproval, at least if we think of it as the unsettling prelude to some kind of mystery. Having recovered from the shock, we turn at once to check Cox’s text, where we discover that the Reverend was himself translating, correctly this time, from Euripides: “If the gods do aught unseemly, then they are not gods at all.” Which is the opposite of what Mallarmé wrote. Yet his translation of the surrounding context respects Cox’s work in every detail, a state of affairs that prompted Bertrand Marchai to offer the following hypothesis: “It is nevertheless possible that Mallarmé did in fact write ‘Si les dieux font rien d’inconvenant,’ and that an overzealous typesetter added the regrettable ne, which the poet then failed to pick up.” Theological catastrophe thus comes, in this version of events, as the consequence of the fussiness of the setter and a mental lapse on the part of the poet. After long years of persecution, the revenge of the pagan gods, we are invited to suppose, reaches its acme in a misprint, something all the more significant in that it occurs on a page written by the very man who said he wanted to eliminate chance from writing. If this were the case, we should have to confess that no one before then had dared even conceive of the idea that chance, on this occasion, helped to formulate.

But the whole thing will take on a different light if we recall Lautréamont’s Poésies: for Mallarmé’s scandalous statement looks very like something Lautréamont might have come up with using his sarcastic process of plagiarism plus inversion. At which point it’s as if the uncertainty, indeed vertigo, that Poésies inspires had spread, stretching out silky octopus tentacles as far as Mallarmé; as if this huge joke at literature’s expense were now mingling its lymph with the work of a man who attempted the supreme vindication of literature.

That sentence about the gods reminds us of another curiosity in Mallarmé’s adaptation of Cox, one that cannot this time be attributed to the mischievous vagaries of chance. Almost every time Cox writes “God,” Mallarmé translates the word as “divinity.” And the moment of “maximum deviation” comes in the paragraph immediately after the scandalous statement above, as follows:

COX: “Zeus was a mere name by which they might speak of Him in whom we live and move, and have our being.”

MALLARMÉ “Zeus était un pur nom, à la faveur de quoi il leur fût possible de parler de la divinité, inscrite au fond de notre être.”

The deviation is evident and the consequences farreaching. On the one hand we have Cox, who treats the Greeks as children allowed only a confused glimpse of that truth which will only become available through the Christian revelation, the appearance of Him who truly is that Person “in whom we live and move and have our being,” as the King James Version so eloquently translates Saint Paul’s words to the Athenians. On the other we have Mallarmé, who refers to an impersonal entity of which he says only, in words both sober and mysterious, that it is “inscribed in the very ground of our being.” But what did Mallarmé mean when he used the word “divinity”? Rather than to the gods, who in their Parnassian version could all too easily be suspected of heralding some noble kind of rhythmic gymnastics, or at best looking forward to Isadora Duncan, Mallarmé was always drawn to a neutral form of the divine, an underlying ground beneath everything else, nourishing everything else and from which all else springs, a ground at once cosmic and mental, equally shared out, and of which he would one day write: “There must be something occult in the ground of everyone; I firmly believe in something hidden away, a closed and secret signifier, that inhabits the ordinary.” But before gaining access to that “closed and secret signifier,” which was to be his entire opus, Mallarmé was to go through a ferocious, silent, and protracted mental drama that culminated in a “terrible struggle with that old and evil plumage, happily brought to earth, God.” To be more precise: “That struggle took place on his bony wing, the which, in more vigorous death throes than I had thought possible from him, had dragged me into the Shadows.” The first thing we can say about this duel is that it takes place just months before the gruesome descriptions of repeated battles between Maldoror and his Creator, as for example when the latter sees “the annals of the heavens knocked off their pedestal,” while Maldoror applies his “four hundred suckers to the hollow of his armpit,” causing him to “let out terrible screams.”

Before approaching any underlying divine ground, then, one first had to kill a being called God, an old and tenacious bird who clung to his antagonist throughout long-protracted death throes. And what would happen when the fight was over? Again, in a letter from the same period, Mallarmé recounts: “I had just drawn up the plan of my entire life’s work, having found the key to myself — the keystone, or center, if you like, so as not to mix ourselves up with metaphor, the center of myself, where I dwell like a sacred spider, on the principal threads already spun from my mind, and with the help of which I will weave, at the crossing points, some marvelous laces, which I can foresee and which already exist in the bosom of Beauty.” Like the “bony wing,” this “sacred spider” also belongs to the zoology of Lautréamont. What went on in the secret depths of the mind seemed anxiously to be awaiting this new teratologist, the visionary who would expand the animal realm to include new kinds of monsters.

But why does Mallarmé call himself a “sacred” spider? Is it that, having brought down the old plumage, God, he plans, in a delirium of omnipotence, to take his place? Or was it rather a delirium of impotence that afflicted the young English teacher, secluded as he was in the gloomiest of provinces? Neither one nor the other. In referring to himself as a “sacred spider,”

Mallarmé was doing no more, no less, than performing his function as a poet, which is first of all that of being precise. What he couldn’t know was that he wasn’t speaking of himself, but of the Self, the ātman.

Let us open the :

“As a spider sends forth its thread, as small sparks rise from the fire, so all senses, all worlds, all gods, all beings, spring from the Self.”

And another speaks of a “single god who like a spider cloaks himself in the threads spun from the primordial matter [pradhāna], according to his nature .” And another again says: “As a spider spins out and swallows up his thread, as the grasses spring from the earth, as the hairs from the head and body of a living being, so everything here springs from the indestructible.”

Unfamiliar with the Vedic texts, barely initiated in the rudiments of Buddhism by his friend Lefébure and always punctilious in rejecting any direct connection with it (“the Nothing, which I arrived at without knowing Buddhism,” he says), Mallarmé was clearing a path toward something that had no name in the lexicon of his times, but within which he would always live and work. It was the same thing to which three years later he planned to dedicate a thèse d’agrégation, of which only the title now remains: De divinitate. But we do know that Mallarmé saw in that thesis both the outcome and the convalescence of a long, devastating process that had transformed him into another being.

The acute, precipitous phase of that process lasted a year, from May 1866 to May 1867. Mallarmé was then a twenty-four-year-old English teacher at the high school in Tournon, moving later to Besançon, where the climate is “black, damp, and icy.” He came from a family who had long been and still were Public Registry officials. In his family, to “have a career” meant to have a career in the Registry Office. Mallarmé was the first to betray his breed, choosing poetry. Already he had sensed that the world around him had “a kitchen smell.” As a poet, his main task would be to work Baudelaire’s furrow and push it that little bit further. This he had already started to do, with great mastery, when he wrote “L’Azur” and “Brise marine.” Then, in the spring of 1866, Mallarmé spends a week in Cannes and something happens—a sort of primordial event that looks forward to Valéry’s “night in Genoa.” His first mention of it comes in a letter to Cazalis on April 28th.

Mallarmé explains: “Quarrying the verse to that point I encountered two chasms, which bring me to despair. One is Nothingness.” This “crushing thought” forced him to abandon writing poetry. But immediately afterwards Mallarmé launches into a paragraph that lays a sort of metaphysical foundation for the poetry he was yet to write: “Yes, I know, we are nothing but vain forms of matter — yet sublime too when you think that we invented God and our own souls. So sublime, my friend! that I want to give myself this spectacle of a matter aware, yes, of what it is but throwing itself madly into the Dream that it knows it is not, singing the Soul and all those divine impressions that gather in us from earliest childhood, and proclaiming, before the Nothingness that is the truth, those glorious falsehoods!” The threads that interweave in this sentence would go on spinning out until Mallarmé’s death. And likewise the ambiguities: above all in that verb s’élançant (“throwing itself”), in which converge both the subject who wants to give himself “this spectacle of a matter,” etc., and the matter itself observing its own behavior.

At this point we realize we have been abruptly introduced into that geometrical locus called Mallarmé. Immediately the atmosphere is both chemical — a vivisection laboratory, in fact — and alchemical: the heat of the opus alchymicum. This, then, is the great atmosphere of décadence, something that sprang before anything else out of a dissociation of forms and psyche. Mallarmé was to become at once the high priest and the scientist of this process, which, in fact, was already at work. In July Mallarmé observes, once again for the benefit of Cazalis: “For a month now I have been in the pure glaciers of aesthetics — having discovered Nothingness I have found the Beautiful.” And the work starts to take shape, not une oeuvre now, but “le Grand Oeuvre, as our forebears the alchemists used to say.” A long period of elaboration would be required: “I shall give myself twenty years to bring it [the opus] to completion, and the rest of my life will be given over to an Aesthetics of Poetry.”

What was going on? “A descent into Nothingness,” which we could liken to a saison en enfer, but not of the torrid and turbulent variety Rimbaud experienced. On the contrary, from the outside there was nothing to be seen: like a building that dissolves into rubble and dust while the façade remains intact — until one day the windows are empty sockets framing the sky behind them. Something chilling and secretive was happening. Mallarmé describes it thus: “I really have decomposed, and to think that this is what it takes to have a vision of the universe that is really whole! Otherwise, the only wholeness one feels is that of one’s own life. In a museum in London there is an exhibit called ‘The Value of a Man’: a long coffinlike box with lots of compartments where they’ve put starch — phosphorus — flour — bottles of water and alcohol — and big pieces of gelatin. I am a man like that.” Once again we sense the all-pervasive, slightly nauseous smell of formaldehyde. But who is it describing himself in this way? The obscure English teacher — or someone else? Or who in him?

So it is that once again the Progenitor, the Prajāpati of the , appears on the scene: exhausted, dislocated, breath rattling in his throat, it is he who had to decompose before anything else could appear and exist. Including the gods, for they too are beings with a shape and hence do not know the spasm of the “indefinite,” anirukta, from which they sprang and which glows within them. But this time, shrugging off the fog of centuries, Prajāpati finds himself transposed into the golden age of positivism, when man is no more than physics plus chemistry, and consciousness but a vague by-product of the higher functions, something nobody has time to be bothered with. This too the Progenitor would have to put up with, one more insult in his interminably long life. But why had Mallarmé gone looking for Prajāpati, without even knowing who he was?

Here modern and primordial meet and a spark is struck: to create a work of absolute literature one must reunite oneself with the indistinct time before the gods were born, the time when Prajāpati elaborated, with that “ardor” or heat that is called tapas. his desire for an outward existence that would be both visible and palpable. When Mallarmé spoke of the fire beneath his alchemist’s crucible, he was referring to that same tapas. And in fact he had always felt drawn to this obscure figure, always been ready to be led that way, ready to have the elements of his body deposit out into those gloomy chemical compartments that remind us at once of pharmacy and of morgue. But who did the leading? The poet answers: “Destruction was my Beatrice.”

In Mallarmé’s apartment there was a Venetian mirror, a talisman. During the process that had “dragged” him down “into the Shadows,” he felt he was sinking “desperately and infinitely” into that mirror. For now it no longer reflected the poet looking into it and studying his reflection there. But one day Mallarmé would surface in the mirror again, like a piece of flotsam in a pond. He looked at himself, recognized himself — and went back to his old life. But he knew that something had changed — and his closest friend, Cazalis, sensed it too: he was no longer, Mallarmé wrote to him, the “Stéphane you knew — but a disposition of the Spiritual Universe to see itself and develop itself, through what I was.” These words, which in a newsy letter to a friend sound, as it were, calmly delirious, will seem perfectly plausible and even self-evident if we think of them as a description of an episode in the life of Prajāpati. Mallarmé was trying to give a name to a process that had not been recorded in the lexicon of the tradition he worked in. Yet he kept trying, as if with a presentiment that that impossible path was the only one available to him. But what was the link that welded Mallarmé to that being, Prajāpati, of whom the West knew absolutely nothing then (not one of the had been translated at the time)?

A word: manas, “mind” (the Latin mens). The say: “Prajāpati is, so to speak, the mind,” or elsewhere, “The mind is Prajāpati.” If we had to define that characteristic which makes Mallarmé so radically different from the poetry that came before — and after — we would have to say: never had poetry been so magnificently superimposed upon the most elementary and mysterious fact of all — that a certain fragment of matter is endowed with that quality which is like no other, that is, on the contrary, the very medium in which every quality and every likeness appear, and which is called “consciousness.”

As Proust would one day write to Reynaldo Hahn, it is not true that in Mallarmé images disappear. No, they are “still images of things, since we would never be able to imagine anything else, only that they are reflected, as it were, in a smooth dark mirror of black marble.” And that “black marble” is the mind. In Mallarmé the material of poetry is brought back, with unprecedented and as yet unrepeated determination, to mental experience. Shut away in an invisible templum, the word evokes, one after another, simulacra, mutations, events, all of which issue and disperse in the sealed chamber of the mind, where the primordial crucible burns. This is the place the reader is invited to discover, but before he can penetrate it he will have to make the same journey the poet did. This is what Mallarmé meant when he insisted so stubbornly that his poetry was composed of effects and suggestions that must act as if on a mental keyboard. Never state the thing, but the resonance of the thing. Why this obsession? Many recent readers have taken this precept of Mallarmé’s to imply a reduction of the world to the word, with the inevitable consequence that all becomes entirely self-referential and self-sufficient. But this is not the case: on the contrary, such a vision impoverishes and frustrates what is secretly at work in this poetry. The premise behind this interpretation is one that governs much of our world today — indeed, that makes it possible for that world to operate — but that at the same time leaves it unable to grasp a great deal of what is essential. In its most concise form this premise declares that thought is language. More ambitiously it claims that the mind is language. But we do not think in words. Or rather, we sometimes think in words. Words are scattered archipelagos, drifting, sporadic. The mind is the sea. To recognize this sea in the mind seems to have become something forbidden, something that the presiding orthodoxies, in their various manifestations, whether scientistic or merely commonsensical, instinctively avoid. Yet this is the crucial parting of the ways. It is at this crossroads that we decide in which direction knowledge will go.

A question presents itself: in what way, then, did the tremendous upheaval Mallarmé experienced between May 1866 and May 1867 manifest itself in his poetry? Let’s look at the sonnet that is known as “in ix, because it includes a sequence of difficult rhymes in ix. The poem is defined by Mallarmé as “a sonnet allegorical of itself,” and this definition immediately serves as a warning that we are on the threshold of something that had never been tried before. In an age where allegory was becoming no more than an appendage of the department of public works, used mainly in the conception of those clumsily complacent monuments that celebrate some capitalized abstraction, as, for example, Humanity, Country, Progress, Victory, or whatever — in such an age merely to claim that a sequence of words was offering something “allegorical of itself” was a gesture of impertinent defiance. Equally challenging was the decision to build the sonnet around rhymes in ix—rhymes among the rarest in the French language, so much so that while working on the poem Mallarmé had to ask his friends if anyone knew the exact meaning of the word ptyx, which he needed for a rhyme. But though this may be the most immediately noticeable aspect of the poem, it is not the most important.

The territory that this sonnet sets out to conquer is certainly not that of the virtuoso sequence of ix rhymes. The poets of the Baroque, after all, had produced any number of such feats, and a trip to the library would have more than satisfied anyone’s desires for that kind of thing. Nor is it the play of refractions, the “mirage within the words themselves,” to use the precept that Mallarmé explained thus: “I believe that … what we should be aiming for above all in poetry is to have the words reflect each other to the point that they no longer retain their own color but can only be seen as transitions in a spectrum.” This rule would apply to all Mallarmé’s poetry: but to understand it we must first establish the space within which the rule operates.

To help us approach that space, we have at our disposal — and it’s a rare privilege indeed — a paraphrase of this least paraphrasable of sonnets, written by the author himself. Mallarmé wrote it because the sonnet was to be included in a collection of poems by various authors, each poem being printed beside an etching. He wanted his illustration to be “full of Dream and Emptiness”; and to help the eventual artist, who in fact never materialized, because the poem was rejected, no doubt because considered incomprehensible, Mallarmé paraphrased his poem thus:

For example, an open window at night, the two shutters secured; a room with no one in it, despite the stable atmosphere produced by the secured shutters, and in a night made of absence and questioning, no furniture, except perhaps some plausible hint of vague consoles, a frame, combative, with death throes, around a mirror hung in the background, with its reflection, starry and incomprehensible, of the Ursa Major, the Great Bear, that connects this abandoned lodging of the world to the sky alone.

This paraphrase, itself an enchanted shred of prose, refers to the one lyric of which Mallarmé declared that he didn’t even know if it made sense or not, and that even if it didn’t the author nevertheless “would take comfort from it … thanks to the amount of poetry that it contains.” All of which will serve as the definitive demonstration that the only acceptable paraphrase is not the one that results from the improvident determination to translate a poem into some supposed meaning, but on the contrary a literary genre in its own right. And one that in this case is especially precious to us, because it states the implicit subject of the poem: the “room with no one in it.” It has been observed that from the upheaval of 1866 on, Mallarmé’s poetry abandons the outside world and shuts itself away in a room. But what is this room that coincides with the very space of the poem? Could it be that room “with no one in it,” inhabited only by a mirror? And who was it who just left that room, a few seconds, or millennia, ago?

There is a very strong and very ancient emotion that is rarely mentioned or recognized: it is the anguish we feel for the absence of idols. If the eye has no image on which to rest, if there is nothing to mediate between the mental phantasm and that which simply is, then a subtle despondency creeps in. This is the atmosphere that reigns in the first dream of which we have a record, a dream told by a woman, Addudûri, overseer of the palace of Mari in Mesopotamia, in a letter etched on clay tablets more than three thousand years ago. “In my dream I had gone into the temple of the goddess Bêllit-ekallim; but the statue of Bêllitekallim wasn’t there! Nor were the statues of the other divinities that normally stand beside Her. Faced with this sight I wept and wept.” The first of all dreams speaks of an empty temple, like Mallarmé’s empty room. The statues have been carried off, deported perhaps, along with the people who worshiped them. That kind of thing happened then. Loss precedes presence: every image must abide by this rule. And this helps us understand why literature, guardian of every space haunted by phantoms, has so adroitly searched out those fugitive idols and restored them to their pedestals.

And the mirror? Mightn’t that too be inhabited? Let’s take a look. Along the frame we see the perennial pursuit, tussle, and flight of gods, Nymphs, and fabled beasts. In the center — on the surface of the mirror — a vast, deep emptiness, where seven bright points tremble, like seven pupils: they are the reflection of the Ursa Major, the Great Bear, and thus of the seven who keep watch over the cosmos and are its ever wakeful consciousness. Once again Mallarmé has gone back to something before the gods, for the are also the seven breaths that, uniting together, compose Prajāpati. All that is going on in the soft gilt glow of the mirror’s frame — the divine melee — as likewise all that is going on in the darkness of the night outside the windows — the world, which is itself a frame — is equally open to their gaze. Which is the pure fact of consciousness, cut off from all else. Did Mallarmé mean to allude to the ? Wasn’t it only years later that he began to read some Indian texts? It’s unlikely that we will ever know for certain. But does it matter? The belong to the Ursa Major: one only need rediscover them. Where the constellation is, there they are. And what can we say of the mirror they appear in? Here it’s hard not to see a reference to the Venetian mirror Mallarmé himself was engulfed in, as he described, during his first exploration of the shadow lands of literature. One day, he told his friend Cazalis, he saw himself again in that mirror “the same person I had forgotten months before.” But this having been absent from the mirror would be one of the premises underlying all his poetry. The sonnet records the continuing absence of the poet. And as we read it, words that had seemed obscure now ring out to us with sudden clarity: “a disposition of the Spiritual Universe to see itself and develop itself, through what I was.” Isn’t it this that has found its “objective correlative” in the sonnet? What is left is the world (the night sensed without), an empty room (the hollow shell, as it were, of the vanished author), and the reflection of the seven stars in a mirror, “de scintillations le septuor”: thus the mind manifests itself, nor will its wakefulness ever be more sharply discernible.