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  • The Tombeau Ideal Mallarmes Tombeau Dana

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    The tombeau. - Mallarme

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    The tombeau. - Mallarme

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    Signaler comme contenu inapproprié
    219 vues14 pages

    The Tombeau Ideal Mallarmes Tombeau Dana

    Transféré par

    Eris Cosmo
    The tombeau. - Mallarme

    Droits d'auteur :

    © All Rights Reserved
    Téléchargez comme PDF ou lisez en ligne sur Scribd
    Signaler comme contenu inapproprié
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    DALHOUSIE FRENCH STUDIES Raymond Bach: The "Tombeau idéal": Mallarmé's Tombeau d’Anatole Claudia Moscovici: Androgyny and Morality in Germinal Richard L. Hattendorf: "Piracy" Proves the Difference: Pierre Reverdy's Les jockeys camouflés et Période hors-texte Robert Ziegler: Judgment—Silence—Empathy: Reading and Transference in Julien Green's Le malfaiteur John Gregg: ‘Theoretical and Fictional Portrayals of Reading in Blanchot Recent Canadian Theses in French Literature Volume Twenty Spring-Summer 1991 The editors of Dalhousie French Studies wish gratefully to acknowledge the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and of Di alhousie University. The "Tombeau idéal": Mallarmé's Tombeau d'Anatole Raymond Bach MBlatarmé sutfered three profound losses during his life. In 1847, when he was only five, his mother died of tuberculosis; ten years later his younger sister, Maria, succumbed to the same illness. ‘Butit was the third loss that dealt him the greatest blow. On October 6, 1879, the writer's eight-year-old son, Anatole, died after an illness which had lasted several painful months. Only quite recently, however, with the publication of Pour un tombeau d’Anatole, have we been able to gauge the depth of the emotional and spizitual crisis into which Anatole's death plunged Mallarmé. In this moving document, composed of over two hundred feuillets, Mallarmé sketched a poem that would have resurrected the lost child through the imaginative power of fiction, He eventually abandoned the projected work, although exactly when he did so we do not know since he kept its existence secret from both his family and friends. The Tombeau d’Anatole comes as a shock to a reader accustomed to the highly polished, crystalline poetry and prose that Mallarmé published during his lifetime. These works were generally the result of weeks, months and even years of intense labor, during which time each word was weighed, tested and scrutinized again and again. Their complex, often elusive syntax and highly condensed imagery represent the purest distillation of the author's ideas and emotions, and it is fair to say that no French writer ever distilled more consciously, carefully and consistently than Mallarmé. Next to such works, the Tombeau d'Anatole possesses an immediacy, a rawness that both disconcerts and moves the reader. Mallarmé’s pain at Anatole's death is palpable, at times almost unbearably so, We learn from one of the feuillets that Mallarmé had originally intended to transform his personal tragedy into a more anonymous, and hence more universal, event: "quoique pome basé sur faits toujours—doive ne prendre que faits généraux—il se trouve ici que donnée d'ensemble s‘accorde souvent avec les moments demiers du délicieux enfant—."! This plan represents Mallarmé’s ultimate Dalhousie French Studies 20 (1991) ambition; the sketch we have, however, i bi a ', necessarily emphasi: Particular over the general, Anatole's death over the idea of deat The poem was eventually abandoned i 1 and the feuillers i fpeether and hidden away. What was the stumbling block hat kept Poet from carrying out his original conception? Was he afrard be 2 wansformed ino a work on the death of a "universal ehild « the actual, original child getting lost somewhere ai way, without, in other words, the sacrifi Siena i . f Anatole? Such sactifice, coming so soon after the boy's, which, in Mallarmé’ eyes, was also a type of sucifce, alten of set Kind) would have been too palnfl for Malorne st gee sterent later, less directly autobiographical poone ee 20 bea Only in ter, iographical poems such as the " dés" or the sonnets of Tripiyque, would Mallarmé be able se vite fe ransformation of Anatole into a universal figure. 7 in apt ts, however, hold the problem of the project's incompletion Broughton by mile ws examine in greater detail the actual ers on . This crisis parallels in many respect Matiarme's famous metphysica and poetic crisis of 1866-18609 Provided fertile ground for critics d ne fact that much of the writer's corr this petfod has 1 ; respordence from this peri survived. In his letters, especially th Fis closest friend, Henri Cazalis, Mallarmé does aot hestane ie de est , , Mallarmé does not hesitate to describe his ‘ormpent as well as the deep insights bem from his Suffeung Ths Fas of 1879, on the other hand, remains almost completely hidden acta an ea appearance of calm. There are, it is true, several {pitching references to Anatole in letters waitten during the childs Ehessi ut we are far from the outpouring of emotion that Gehl cee, athe isis. And once the boy is deady hs name rom the father’s correspondence. ” Rides for second esis comes almost exlaively fom ie Sen hundred slips of paper which make up the Tombean The crisis of the 1860's culminates i i . Z sin the wri i {isis of 1879 in that of the Tombeau a'Anavore, Bote ws Romeopathic in that they use pain to overcome pain. In a letter 1 lis, Mallarmé describes Zgitur as “ua conte par lequel je veus terrasser le vieux monstre de I'Impuissance, son sujet, du reste, afin de me cloitrer dans moh grand labeur déja réétudié, S'il est fait (le conte), je suis guéri: simila similibus" (Mondor 1959:313). Mallarmé writes his conte in order to save himself from a madness brought on in the first place by writing. TheTombeau d’Anatole represents an analogous effort, except that now the poet is fighting a madness brought on by the death of his son, Every stage of the tragedy, from that first day when the child no longer felt like playing to the burial, will be remembered, relived and recounted. In order to go beyond suffering, the suffering itself must be repeated and made Conscious. Although it might at first appear that /gitur deals with a purely metaphysical crisis (the death of the self) and the Tombeau d’Ana- tole with a purely existential one (Anatole's death), such a view would be misleading. There are no simple dichotomies with Mal- larmé, For him the metaphysical and existential dimensions of all phenomena are necessarily and inevitably intertwined. Indeed, his art consists in capturing the interplay of these dimensions, in re- vealing the tensions that always exist between them. Thus, in a letter to Cazalis where he speaks of his encounter with nothingness, both dimensions are present: the metaphysical "abime” which constantly threatens to undermine meaning and the physical "abime" of his, chest, ie. his difficulty breathing (Mondor 1959:206). Similarly, during the most severe attacks of the first crisis Mallarmé finds that he is unable to pick up a pen without feeling violently ill: "Ie simple acte d’écrire installe Phystérie dans ma téte” (Mondor 1959:301). Looking for a moment beyond the opposition of these dimensions, we can see that at the heart of both crises lies the problem of death and rebirth. In the crisis of 1866-1869 we witness the death and rebirth of the self; in that of 1879, the death and resurrection of the son. But the death of the child is also in a way the death of the father—a metaphoric death, for fathers and sons are always bound to one another by a deep form of identity. Emmanuel Levinas, in Totalité et infini, describes this paradoxical relationship as follows: “Je n’ai pas mon enfant, je suis mon enfant. La paternité est une relation avec un étranger qui tout en étant autrui...est moi; une relation du moi avee un soi qui cependant n'est pas moi" (254), The son stands in relation to his father as both self and Other, as both identity and alterity. Given this deeply paradoxical relationship, it is not surprising that Mallarmé felt that he had in some way died with Anatole. A crucial difference, however, separates the poet's two “deaths,” for whereas that of the first crisis involves physical elements which seem analogous to death (il near-madness), that ofthe second i based on an wenn nent Anatole’ 's disappearance is all too real. In both cases the father both dies and does not die; but because in the second case the father's metaphoric death depends on his child's actual death, it remains immune to the narcissistic, almost solipsistic, quality that threatens at times to undermine the metaphoric death of the first crisis. What was the nature of Mallarmé's first metaphoric death and rebirth? In a rhapsodic letter to Henri Cazalis (14 May 1867), the Poet announces for the first time his own death (Mondor 1959:240)- Je viens de passer une année, effrayante: ma Pen: ‘es Pensée, et est arivée une Conception pur. Tout ee que: fos contre-coups, mon ére a souffer, pendant ceite longue agonie, est inénarrable, mais heureusement, je suis parfaitement mort, et la ségion la plus impue 0b mon Eom ook ee st 'Etemité, mon Esprit, ce soliite habituel de so prone Pureté, que n‘obscurcit plus méme le reflet du ‘Temps. Despite the claim that his "agonie" cannot be ni 1 BC arrated, he goes on to give Cazalis a rough account of his battle, a battle, it turns out, 2 > S Out, Snipa come ete a paste nt acest tsa hs ena an Je tombai, victorieux, éperdument et infiniment—jusqu’a ce sec same, Sten nian tel que je m’étais oublié plusieurs mois auparavant. is As Jacob wrestled with God, and Jesus with Satan, engages in combat with an absolute power. In Maliorme's cet iowever, this power can be overcome not by faith, but by the poets willingness to carry his doubts as far as they will go. Where they do go is © a total acceptance of nothingness and tothe death of the self “plied by such an acceptance. Following his veriginous fall into the "Ténebres,” Mallarmé suddenly finds himself back in an inary room where nothingness is momentarily vanquished by the Poet's reflection ina mirror. He insists that without the reassurance of the mirror's reflection, "je redeviendzais le Néant." The reflected image links him, however tentatively, however tenuously, to reality: it saves him from the terrors of pure nothingness. Despite his bruck with death and absurdity, he has resurfaced—barely--holding on Mallarmé. 7 desperately to his own reflected image. Specular existence, which now appears as the only type of existence possible, implies that the material world is necessarily at one remove from the observer, just as objects are at one remove from the language that names them. The catoptrical gap between reflection and being that Mallarmé experiences is thus analogous to the gap he describes in "Crise de vers” between the object named and the name. In both cases, ordinary reality suffers an initial, specular setback; but in both cases itretums, redeemed and transformed. “Mallarmé insists that his fall into the shadows constituted a death from which he was nevertheless able to reemerge as a new man. His fall was thus a kind of baptism, a rite of purification and transformation. Or, to remain within the Christological vocabulary Mallarmé employs, we might say that he experienced a kind of conversion. In fact, it is precisely in the terms of conversion that he describes the appearance of his new self (Mondor 1959:241-42): Cest apprendre que je suis maintenant impersonnel et non plus Stéphane que tu as connu—mais une aptitude qu’a TUnivers spirituel & se voir et & se développer, & travers ce qui fut moi, ‘The old Stéphane has disappeared and been replaced by the new Stéphane, by an "homme nouveau" (as he will describe himself in a later letter). True to the topos of conversion there is a sudden split between the two Stéphanes; between them lies an abyss. ‘Ilumination replaces blindness; redemptive vision supplants purely ‘Adamic knowledge. In an important letter to Eugene Lefébure from the same period (17 May 1867), Mallarmé underlines the importance of self- destruction, both poetic and ontological, as a necessary condition for attaining vision, But he also expresses the fear that he has gone too quickly “par la voie pécheressse et hitive, satanique et facile, de la Destriction de moi, produisant non la force, mais une sensibilité qui, fatalement, m'a conduit 18" (Mondor 1959:246). The Faustian overtones are striking: the poet fears the Satanic dimension of his revelation—was it really possible to attain his new vision by himself, without the help of some devilish intervention? Was there not a compromise along the way, a compromise that would undermine his victory? Did he succeed through strength or was this, strength simply weakness disguised as its opposite? Did he truly experience the death and rebirth of the self, or was this transformation merely a Faustian sleight of hand? __These doubts, although quickly overcome, lead thé insight that "toute naissance est une destruction et tours vig deg moment 'agonie dans laquelle on ressuscite ce quon a perdu, pour Ie voir, on T'ignorait avant." This formula, which already looks forward to Proustian logic, encapsulates the underlying dialectic of creation that Mallarmé would express throughout his life: creation is, (and is not) destruction, for the latter paradoxically resuscitates what was previously hidden and unknown, Without negation there can be no creation. Art is necessarily sacrificial! Mallarmé goes so far as to assert that he has created his works Par élimination, et toute vérité acquise ne naissait que de Ia Perte d'une impression qui, ayant étincele, salt consumée et ‘me permettait, grace a ses téndbres dégagées, d'avancer profondément dans la sensation des Ténébres absolues. La destruction fut ma Béatrice. (Mondor 1959:246) The reference to Dante's conversion and redemptive lov: s no surprise. Just as Dante the solitary pilgrim is allowed to witness that which all other men can see only after death, so Mallarmé believes that he has attained a vision of the mysteries of existence that is denied to those who have not experienced psychic suicide. Dante's redemptory love for Beatrice opens the gates of poetry and visionary knowledge; Mallarmé implies that the principle of destruction has done much the same for him. In both cases the wrenching and nearly fatal experience of metaphorical death ly transforms the survivor's experi i oa perience of the world and his _,But to what does Mallarmé’s death lead? How does the n differ from the old one? Before his "death," Mallarmé had viewed poetic language as a means to link language to sensation: the poet had to paint "non la chose, mais leffet qu'elle produit" (Mondor 1959:137). Language was a weapon to be wielded by the artist. After the crisis of the 1860's, however, Mallarmé speaks of a deeper, more mystic connection between language and the world, and of his duty to give voice to this connection, Instead of wielding language he is wielded by it; or, as he would put it later in Crise de vers, “{i}ceuyre pure implique la disparition élocutoire du poste, qui céde T'initiative aux mots” (Mondor 1945:366). Language possesces hhim and he in turn interprets the world through it. He becomes lune aptitude qu’a 'Univers spirituel & se voir et a se développer, & travers ce qui fut moi. Fragile comme est mon apparition terrestre, je ne puis subir que les développements absolument nécessaires pour que Univers retrouve en moi son identité. Ainsi je viens, a Theure de la Synthese, de délimiter Yeeuvre qui sera Timage de ce développement. (Mondor 1959:242) In another letter, Mallarmé conveys this idea of being possessed by an even more striking formulation: "il faut penser de tout son corps, ce qui donne une pensée pleine et I'unisson comme ces cordes de violon vibrant immédiatement avec sa boite de bois creux" (Mondor 1959:349). He then proceeds to describe how he sketched an entire poem (“longtemps révé") by tightening his nerves and muscles "de fagon & produire une vibration.” He insists that the poem sketched itself only because he had let his brain rest and his, heart work; only his absence, the disappearance of the self, allowed him to attain a domain that was ordinarily inaccessible: "Je suis véritablement décomposé, et dire qu'il faut cela pour avoir une vue trés—une de I'Univers! Autrement, on ne sent d'autre unité que celle de sa vie" (Mondor 1959249). In order to compose one must first be, in a certain sense, decomposed... T mentioned earlier that at one level the writing of the Tombeau d’Anatole served as a homeopathic cure for Mallarmé. The "literary" repetition of the child's illness and death, as well as of the parents! intense suffering, undermines the absolute and unalterable nature of death itself. Writing negates death's monolithic character by breaking it up into separate moments which, however terrible they may be in themselves, are easier to bear than their sum total. Furthermore, in the same way that the transformation of a fact into a concept or of a feeling into language gives a sense of power to the transformer, so the very act of writing about death gives the writer a form of power over it. But the opposite is also true: death only attains its power over us when we become conscious of it. Without such consciousness, death means nothing, signifies nothing; and we, consequently, do not and cannot fear it. The paradox is that at the very moment we do become conscious of it, death both gains and loses its power over us. We are like Pascal's "roseau pensant," helpless before the course of nature and yet superior to it because conscious of it. Mallarmé explores this paradox to its limits. On the one: hand he denies the power of death over Anatole because the boy is too young to understand what is happening to him; the child's "heureuse ignorance” (f. 129) keeps him from falling into death's hands, lets him die without dying. The father compares his son to a h sudden death precludes any awareness of it: "(ear morts ne savent pas quills sont morts~, ni méme qu'ls meurent—pour enfants du moins—ou héros—morts soudaines" (f. 61-62). Death falters at the Yery moment of its victory and becomes nothing more than a wnemic jui ne pet x infli; i tage st miei ne peux & esfant inflige a notion que tu larmé, we should note, had been told by th thre was no Bope ofa cre tat the boys ate ve sealed “mot gut ur lui porte un terrible secret! pere—Iui, 10 de telles choses" (f. 166). This terrible knowledge ternerted arn and put him in the difficult position of trying to appear hopeful even while knowing that there was no hope. But even more importantly, according’ to his own logic of death, he, and not Anatole, was death's true victim: his knowledge, his consciousness of Anatole's fate, meant that he would experience death for Anatole. The true battle between death and man, which demands consciousness of death, would therefore take place within the father's being. ‘Thus Mallarmé dies a second time, But just as the death brought on by the crisis of the 1860's led to spiritual and poetic rebirth, so will this second, and even more paradoxical, death lead to a form of redemption. Destruction and creation remain painfully linked. The shift in consciousness from son to father means that the latter now accepts to "die" for the former. Mallarmé, in other words, agrees to replace, metaphorically, the child as the sacrificial victim: Ti {Anatole} n’en sait rien! (...) oui, prenons tout sur nous” (£. 38). This assumption of the child's death, however, is complicated by the father's uneasiness about denying Anatole the consciousness of death: “oh—pourvu qu'il n’en sache rien—ne se doute pas— pendant maladie—mais d'od trahison le mort ignorée" (f. 153). And behind this uneasiness lies the deeper fear that he is somehow exploiting and betraying his son in order to penetate into the ath. Jean-Pierre a i i mysteries of dent. Jan-Piere Richard has amiably desorbed the Fil tot i ao ae ber moment od il écrit ces feuillets funébres, n’ait au fond de Iui- mpm ees i a on sépare pas d'une crucifixion, A cette seule condition débouchera-t-elle sur un salut et sur une gloire. Mallarmé : ‘Mallarmé’s attempt to assume Anatole's consciousness of death involves a parallel task: that of allowing the child to continue to live within the father.4 So death will be doubly tricked out of its prey. Not only will the child not die (because he does not understand what is happening to him), but he will in fact survive in the father: "moi qui le sais pour lui porte un terrible secret! pére—lui, trop enfant pour de telles choses—je le sais, c'est en cela que son étre est perpétué—" (f. 166). And in the following feuiller, Mallarmé moves from knowing that Anatole lives within him (""e le sais"), to sensing this existence: "je le sens en moi qui veur—sinon la vie perdue, du moins l’équivalent—" (f. 167). The poet often uses the term "résorber" to describe this movement of the child into the father: "fils résorbé pas parti" (F. 4); “pre raccordera tout plus tard en prolongeant son étre, résorbant etc.” (f. 117). Only a parent could conceive of this redemptive process as one of re-absorption, for the parent-child relationship is the only one where one being does originally have another one “absorbed” within him, Since the overtone here is dominantly matemal, we might say that at one level Mallarmé assumes (usurps?) the mother's role. It should be stressed, however, that Mallarmé's relationship to ‘Anatole is always dialectical: father and son act upon one another. Thus, while it is true that Mallarmé’s reabsorption of Anatole will allow the latter to exist after death, this same reabsorption will purify the father: "car en nous, pur lui, épuration—devenu notre honneur, la source de nos meilleurs sentiments—" (f. 34). The child transforms the father as much as the father transforms the child. Between the two there is an exchange: "pére raccordera tout plus tard en prolongeant son atre, résorbant" (f. 117; my emphasis); "contrecoup inréalité dans les deux cas) a €i6 terrible et wraie — (£. 81-85) Death and redemption (ontological transfusion) are equally absolute and equally illusory. Since one contains the other (in the same way that in dialectical thought every concept contains its opposite), an ‘on-going movement between the two poles is engenderes. Mallarmé v7 When Mallarmé speaks here of. being allowed "to seem to forget” the pain of absolute separation, he is insisting on the momentary nature of his victory over the reality of Death and on the need constantly to renew his struggle. For inscribed in this forgetfulness lies the other pole that must necessarily bring the poet back to the inescapable pain he feels at Anatole's disappearance. Mallarmé knows that without the crucial "paraitre,” forgetfulness becomes only an illusory victory, a victory based on self-delusion rather than on the possibility of transcendence. Indeed, he becomes harshly self-critical whenever he finds that the boy's reconstitutee presence as pensée obscures the actual living child he once was: “quoi! jouir de la présence et l'oublier absent—simplement! ingratitude! non—prise’ sur l'étre de qui a été—absolu" (f. 102), Anatole's presence must always contain his absence, must always contain the sign of his absence. In order to ensure that the intense pain of physical separation does not subside, Mallarmé insists on going to the cemetery where Anatole lies buried: "cimetigre nécessaire diy aller pour renouveler déchirure douleur—par I'étre cher idée de «mort I—quand Tillusion trop forte de l'avoir toujours avec soi non, tu n’es pas un ‘mort—tu ne seras pas parmi les morts, toujours en nous devient une Jouissance (point assez amére) pour nous—et_injuste pour celui qui este Ia bas, et est en réalité privé de tout ce & quoi nous l'associons" (, 126-127). The child is dead; no, he is not dead. The movement of this paradox is caught in these feuillets when there intervenes at the very moment Mallarmé asserts the reality of Anatole's death the emotional denial of this reality: “non, tu n'es pas mort.” The tension between absence and presence that so dominates Mallarmé's work, produces in the Tombeau d’Anatole some of the most moving feuillers where the poet's anguish at his loss makes him cry out in pain and desperation. At one point he looks down at his lap where Anatole used to sit, and, suddenly overwhelmed by the reality of the boy's disappearance, falls to his knees: "Genoux, enfant genoux—besoin d'y avoir I'enfant—son absence—genoux tombent—et mains se joignent vers celui qu'on ne peut presser_— mais qui est—qu'un espace sépare—" (f. 11-12). There is no “je” controlling this passage; instead, the knees seem to call out for the child through metonymic association: knees are nothing without a child on them. But when they sense only absence they fall to the ground and the hands join together of their own accord.6 The father's body, and not his consciousness, brings him into a position of prayer and devotion before the absent boy. Kneeling becomes the “natural” expression of both the body's sense of desolation and of its instinctive belief that the child is still there, separated only by a space.” Mallarmé contrasts his ability to move beyond the child's absence with the mother's resistance to transcendence: “trouver absence scule—en présence de petits vétements—etc—mire" (f 184). For the moher, the child's clothes are a sign of his absence: they constitute the painful reality of her irreparable loss.8 But soon the mother is no longer able to bear this reality and, despite the fact that she has seen Anatole buried, she begins to cling desperately to a fiction that the child is only temporarily absent: fiction de Vabsence gardée par mére—appartement "je ne sais as ce quils en ont fait—dans le rouble et les pleurs alors — Je sais seulement quil n'est plus ici mais elle a suivi au * Gimetitre. et si, il y est—absemt—d'ot mere elle-méme fantme devenue—spiritualisée par habitude de vivre avee une vision tandis que lui pEre—qui construisit le tombeau— mura..soit—et son esprit n'y va--il pas chercher les traces J6 Aesiruction—et wansmuer en esprit pur? si bien que la pureté sort de la corruption. (f. 186-189} ‘These feuillets make it clear that for Mallarmé each parent has his own separate fiction of absence. The mother's is based on the denial of the child's death and on the hope that there has been some terrible iistake and that Anatole is only temporarily gone. The longer she lives with this fiction, the more phantom-like she becomes, the more removed from the reality of the situation. The father’s fiction, on the other hand, is built directly on Anatole's death and on the traces of the child's absence such as he boy's clothes and on the father's own empty lap. From this initial acceptance of the child's disappearance, the father can then move on to creete a higher fiction in which the child will be redeemed. The "tombeau” which Mallarmé constructs is at one level the very poem he is sketching. But itis also the poet himself, for, as we saw above, Mallarmé insists that the child will Continue to live in him; he will be the child's living tomb: "non—pas mélé aux grands morts—etc.—tant que nous vivons, il vit—en nous—ce rest qu'aprés notre mort qu'il en sera—et que les cloches des Morts sonneront pour lui" (f. 46). And finally, the "tombeau" will also be the "Grand (Euvre" which will incarnate both father and son, and perpetuate them forever: "ou po&mes, pour plus tard, apres nous, mort—étre" (f, 145). The mother's fiction, ironically, leads her further and further away from life; the father's forces him to come to terms with the harsh reality that stands at the center of existence—with death. The mother’s fiction is based on absence Maliarme re denied; the father’s on absence accepted and transcended. And yet, paradoxically, the father's very ability to attempt transcendence depends on the feminine, or maternal, dimension of his project. The poet's reabsorption of his son reenact, as we suggested earlier, the mother’s carrying of the child during pregnancy. The child ‘will grow and develop in the father’s being as it once did in the mother's ly 9 : * Mallarmé, however, experiences a certain uneasiness at the thought of having completely replaced the mother, and the same feuillet which prociaims the “alliance” and "hymen" between father and son, ends with the troubling question: “donc pas mére alors At the same time, he feels humbled by the mother’s intense desire that Anatole should live, by her faith in the child's ability, against all odds, to recover. His own resignation before the boy's death and his project of redemption pale, in a certain sense, next to the mother’s stubborn refusal to accept defeat at the physical level. The poet experiences a similar humility before the mother's procreative power. We are reminded of "Don du poéme” (Mondor 1945:56), where the poet must ask the mother to give life to his poor literary creation ("cette relique"): Olaberceuse, avert fille eFinnocence De vos pieds froids, accueille une horrible naissance: Et ta voix rappelant viole et clavecin, ‘Avec le doigt fané presseras-tu le sein Par qui coule en blancheur sibyline ta femme Pour les eves que Tair du vierge azur affame? But if the father is indeed to rival (though not outdo) the mother’s procreative power, he must appropriate the underlying rhythmic power of "la berceuse”: mtr ides de vie mort pe repend rythme pris ict du bercement de suspens—vie ‘mort — potsie—pensée!! With her cradle-rocking rhythm the mother encompasses both life and death, both movement and that infinitesimal moment of stasis, 20 Raymond Bach “suspens," which occurs when the cradle reaches the highest point {in its arc. Were he unable to assimilate this rhythm, the father would be left only with suspense and hesitation, with sterile thought. Hience the necessity of moving from "pensée" to "poésie,” from death to life, from idea to creation...and back again.!? - ‘This same tension between father and mother, between "pensée" and "vie" surfaces several times in the text: "soins de mere jnterrompant pensée—et enfant entre pére qui le pense mort, et mére Vie—'soigne le bien etc” (f. 196);,"pere et méze deux leur amour idée de l'enfant mére pleure toi—moi, je pense" (f. 131); "mere a saigné et pleuré pére sacrifie—et divinise” (f. 154). But at certain moments this opposition disappears and a tentative unity issues from the duality of the sexes: "Ie double cdté homme femme—tantdt chez union profonde Tun, chez autre, dou" (f. 56). Although we are not shown how this union operates in the mother, we do catch occasional glimpses of the father suddenly adopting the mother’s attitude: "parfois quand tout semble trop bien aller—ainsi en idéal— S'écrier—du ton de mére, qui elle est devenue attentive—Ce n'est pas tout cela je le veux, ni—et—non moi" (£. 43). The bottom falls out and, for a moment, the father, like the mother, senses only that the child is gone and that the recorsstitution of the boy is a lie. But the pendulum (or cradle) eventually swings to the other side and the poet moves once again toward the creation of renewed presence, toward re-creation.13 ‘Whereas the mother finds “absence seule" in the child's clothes, the father integrates them, especially the little sailor suit which ‘Anatole wears in the few photographs we have of him, into a larger symbolic universe: "petit marin—costume marin quoi!—pour sande traversée une vague temportera ascete mer" (f. 185). The theme of the shipwreck retums frequently in Mallarmé’s works, from the gentle running aground in 'Le nénuphar blanc” to the cosmic "naufrage" of the "Coup de dés.” But the shipwrecked sailor of this feuillet most closely resembles tie drowning child evoked in the tercets of the sonnet, "A la nue accablante tu” (Mondor 1945:76): Oucela que furibond faute De quelque perdition haute Tout fabime vain épioyé Dans le si blanc cheveu qui traine ‘Avarement aura noyé Le flanc enfant d'une siréne. Mallarmé 2 ‘The white froth of the ocean comes from either a shipwreck or (in the passage quoted above) the drowning of a child-like creature, a siren, The disparity of forces between the ocean and its child victim resembles the one between death and little Anatole: “quoi! la mort énorme—la terrible mort—frapper un si petit étre—je dis a la mort liche" (£. 104). There is something dérisoire in the miserly victories of both ocean and death over a helpless young child. And there is something ambiguous, too, for in each case a sign of the victim remains which denies total defeat, or rather, which shows that through defeat there is victory.4 In "A la nue accablante tu" the "si blanc cheveu qui traine," the whisp or thread of white foam which lingers on the ocean's surface, is all that remains of the drowned child. And yet in this trace lies the hope of transcending death. Robert G. Cohn (1980) has shown how the "cheveu" connects within the Mallarméan web to the strands of writing (art), death, and sexual procreation. Man leaves behind in the world a trace of himself—a child or a poem—which negates and overcomes the defeat he has suffered at the hands of death. “The drama of Mallarmé's life is the same as that of his poetry. Or, as Paul Bénichou has claimed, "chez Mallarmé la poésie ne tenait pas lieu de la vie; elle en concentrait seulement les problémes et les conflits" (71). The intertwining of the child and the old man which figures prominently in the "Coup de. dés," "A la nue accablante tu," and Le Livre, as well as in other poems, stems in part from the poet's own attempt to conjoin his being with Anatole's after Anatole’s death. This does not mean that the significance of this conjunction is limited to the events of Mallarmé's life, that once ‘we have identified the old man as Mallarmé and the young child as Anatole we have finished our task as critics. On the contrary, for biography does not limit meaning, it engenders it. Anatole's death forces Mallarmé into regions where the status of paternity is deeply problematic; it forces him to create a "hymen" and an “alliance” with his son, thereby revealing the links which bound them from the start but which had remained hidden, unfathomed and unexplored. The existential moment leads to a revelation concerning both the self and the world. As Cohn points out (1980:234), Mallarmé probably had ‘Anatole "somewhere in his mind” when writing the "Coup de dés" and "A la nue accablante tu," but that "the father and the son...coalesce mysteriously... The ‘child: or the ‘siren’ is, rather, a generic figure of man, father or son, faced with the etemal; for, after all—and particularly this is true for the artist—where does the Self end? Are our children (or dead children) in our own minds not ourself, ‘quelqu'un ambigu'?" The strand of foam is both the 22 Raymond Bach polysemous trace of the old man (with his white hair) and his child; Fe death by drowning and the possibility of rebirth by joining the ocean (mer/mére) to the semen-like foam (as in Aphrodite's birth ‘according 10 Hesiod); of the death of the self and the resurrection through another (the child/poem) that remains, ambiguously, the self. "All these paradoxes are explored and developed in the “Coup de és," especially on page four where the master (poet/father/man) is engulfed by the ocean’s tempestuous waters, and on page five Shore he resurfaces as his own shadow, as his child ("son ombre puérile”; "le fantome d'un geste"). The child is in turn engulfed, as Fre move constantly from the trough of the wave (at the bottom of the page) to its crest (at the top of the follwoing page) and then back to the trough again.!3 This cyclical, spiral-like movement between Geath and rebirth (cf. “rythme...du bercement” of feuillet 128), Suhich constitutes the underlying motion of the poem and, according to Mallarmé, of all reality, transforms the father and his heir (quelqu'un ambigu") into figures that are neither clearly differentiated nor clearly identical. The complex pivoting of the "Coup de dés" between various poles of paradox (what Cohn has called its "polypolarity”) owes Puch, [ believe, to the existential inversion and confusion between father and son that Mallarmé experiences when Anatole dies. This Geath brings on a continuous movement from unity to duality: “(mort alors—tu ne fus donc que moi—puisque je suis ici—seul, tiste—-non, je me souviens d'une enfance—la tienne deux voix)” (f 23-24), The father who finds himself alone momentarily thinks that the son never existed, that the original unity, the self, never moved into a duality; then the memory of the boy's childhood wells tp and the duality asserts itself: "deux voix.” But the child dies and 3a reabsorbed into the father thereby creating a complex, paradoxical unity, a unity raised to the power of two: “ainsi Cest moi, mains maudites--qui t'ai légué!—silence (il pardonne) Oh! laisse..novs Sur ce mot—-qui nous confond tous deux—nous unit enfin car qui Ta dit la tienne” (f. 25-26). The father is no longer simply the father and the son no longer simply the son. Together they form a unity ("hymen,” “alliance") which atevery moment threatens to break apart into a new duality. “In the crisis of the 1860's, Mallamé’s “death” had entailed an jnitial destruction of the self which had led to a state of pure receptivity and openness to everything around it: the self was reborn as “all” The poet's death during the crisis of 1879 is more Gireumscribed, at least in its first stage, for the purpose behind the Mallarmé 23 destruction of the self is now to recuperate the child. But when he associates his attempt at reabsorption of Anatole with the creation of his "Grand Euvre," Mallarmé moves once again toward the poetic integration of the self into the universe. During both crises we witness the same need for transcendence; the self must break out of its solipsistic shell in order to seek a deeper connection with the world. The necessary condition for attaining this connection is the metaphoric death of the self. To gain all demands first that all must be lost; or, as Mallarmé would put it in Le Livre, "car il faut la mort pour savoir le mystére" (Scherer 32{A). Of course, Mallarmé's self never disappears completely for, as we have seen, father and son always coexist, albeit in, paradoxical fashion, in the Tombeau a@Anatole. Colgate University NOTES 1. Richard 1961: f. 66-67. All futher references to Pour un Tombeau d’Anatole ‘will be indicated parenthetically in our text; the numbers refer to Richard's numbering of the feuilets. 2. Hugo's work was by far the most prominent model for the fictional redemption of a dead child in the nineteenth century. That Mallarmé was extremely conscious of this model can be seen from a remark made many {years after Anatole's death by Genevitve Mallarmé, the writer's only other thilé: "En 79 nous edmes Timmense peine de perdre sion petit frere, un enfant exquis de huit ans. étais bien jeune alors mais la douleur si profonde aquoique sans fracas que je senais en pere me fit une impression inovbliable. "Hugo, disait-il, est heureux d'avoir pu parler {& propos de la mort de sa fille], moi cela m'est impossible" (Mallarmé 1926:521). 3. In his excellent introduction to the Tombeau d’Anatole Richard hints at such a connection: "Le passage de la fiction (de lillusoire) Yabsolu, qui fu ef fectué par Mallarmé dans le champ esthétique ds Tannée 1866, il le recom- ‘ence ici dans le champ existentiel” (75). The distinction between "esthéti- «que" and "existente,” however, is not as clear-cut as Richard would have it dialectical interplay continuously takes place between the two terms or poles. 4. Mallarmé expressed a similar desire after his friend, the artist Henri Regnault, was killed during the Franco-Prussian War. In a letter to Henri que son corps méme est perdu, enfoui parmi les dépouilles de soldats. Veux-tu, cher, Yensevelir au moins dans les plis de notre meilleure pensée; Iui dédier, nous, certaines pages qui disent ce quill n'aura pas fait” (Mondor 1959:341), And one month later, in another leter to Cazalis, he developed this idea of reabsorption in a way that clearly prefigures his attempt to resurrect Anatole: "Il n'y a qu'un moyen de venget notre frére, de faire que le crime ait €4 moins irsémédiablement accompli. [Nrest-ce pas de 'incarer dans nos natures différentes?" Finally, ina speech 24 . We Raymond Bach ‘made at a ceremony commemorating the first anniversary of Regnaul's death, Mallarmé set forth a less personal version of the survivor's task, but fone which nonetheless points to the future creative effort which Anatole's death would demand from him: "Cependart, ila & nécessaire et décent que cette solennité nous réunit une premitre fois, et la coutume traditionelle a cela de pieux que chacun croit sa propre téche accrue de ce qui semble, dans la destinge du glorieux jeune homme, inéparablement annulé” (Mondor 1945:688)—In the very letter to Cazalis where he announces Regnaults death, Mallarmé also announces that Marie is expecting a second child. That the very first reference to Anatole should be linked to both death and a ‘project of resurrection strikes us as uncanny. . This series of feuillets also shows how the child's death brings about an inversion or pivoting of the roles of father and son: the father becomes the child's heir—“héritant de cette merveilleuse intelligence filiale." This type of complex pivoting will play an important role in the "Coup de ds.” ht add that the very word “genoux” includes both a “je” and a ‘Thus the term itself would seem to bring the father and son “no together. ‘This movement from felt absence to prayer and adoration retumns later with the same image of the poet falling to his knees: "assis, réveur «ne pas> causant avee lui ne pas te sentir sur mes genoux, cela fait quits se dérobent et que je me suis agenouillé—non plus devant enfant familie etc.—alors, avec sa veste—(marin?) mais devant le jeune dieu, héros, sacré par mort” (E. 74-75). Hers the poet's consciousness, his "e,” is now fully involved in the devotional gesture. The transformation of the dead son into a god, before whom the adoring father prays, reminds us ofa passage from the Wisdom of Solomon, one of the apocryphal books of the Bible. The biblical author claims that this type of transformation of the child lies at the origin of idolatry, since the disconsolate father goes on to create an image of the child which he and his followers can then worship. With Mallarmé, however, the idolatry (if we can even call it that) operates on moral and esthetic levels. ‘The dead son becomes the new source of faith for the father, a faith that will Jet him continue living and will even lead to renewed artistic creation (the "Grand Euvre,” etc). In Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, a peasant woman comes to see the saintly Father Zossima after the death of her three-year-old child. She tells the elder of her inability to accept har loss; of how she has left her village to go on a pilgrimage; and of how now she no longer cares about her husband or her home: "T've done with him, I've done. I've done with them all. I don't care to look upon my house ard my goods. I don't care to see anything at alll” (Garnett 54). Zossima tries to console the woman by telling her thatthe child is now in heaven with God and the angels, But she only sighs and answers that similar words 0 comfort from her husband were not able to lessen her grief. She wants the child, the real, tangible child, and not the idea of the chil Mallarmé 25 . Kristeva has 10. n. 12. "And if only I could look upon him one little time, if only I could Peep at him one little time, without going up to him, without speaking, if I could be hidden in a comer and only see him for one little minote, hear him playing in the yard, calling in his litle voice,

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