Stéphane Mallarmé

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Stéphane Mallarmé, 1891. (credit: Archives Photographiques, Paris)

(born March 18, 1842, Paris, France — died Sept. 9, 1898, Valvins, near Fontainbleau) French poet. With Paul Verlaine, he was a founder and leader of the Symbolist movement. A schoolteacher throughout his life, Mallarmé made steady progress in his parallel career as a poet. Perhaps partly owing to tragedies in his life, most of his verse expresses an intellectual longing to transcend reality and find refuge in an ideal world, as in the dramatic poems Hérodiade (1869) and L'Après-midi d'un faune (1876; "The Afternoon of a Faun"), which inspired Claude Debussy's famous prelude, and the typographically innovative Un Coup de dés (1897). After 1868 he devoted himself to writing complex, exquisitely wrought, and extraordinarily difficult poems about the nature of imagination itself. The poems were intended for what he called his Grand oeuvre, which he never completed.

For more information on Stéphane Mallarmé, visit Britannica.com.

(b Paris, 18 March 1842; d Valvins, 9 Sept 1898). French poet. His poem L′après-midi d′un faune inspired Debussy's orchestral piece, and Boulez's Pli selon pli (1957-62) uses both his words and the elusive atmosphere of his poetry.

The French poet Stéphane Mallarmé(1842-1898) was the master of the symbolist writers in France. His poetic theories and difficult, allusive poems separated him from the general public but won him intense admiration within the circle of his initiates.

Stéphane Mallarméwas born in Paris on March 18, 1842. After a mediocre beginning at school, young Stéphane excelled in languages (French, Latin, Greek, and English) and obtained his baccalaureate degree in November 1860. In February 1862 he published his first poem (Placet) in Le Papillon. His liaison with Maria Gerhard led to their marriage on Aug. 10, 1863, and to the birth of a daughter, Françoise Geneviève Stéphanie (in November 1864), and a son, Anatole (1871-1879). In September 1863 Mallarméobtained his certificate for teaching English and at the end of the year went with his wife to Tournon to teach in the lycée there. His teaching career was to last for 30 years and to take him to Besançon (1866), Avignon (1867), and finally Paris (1871). An agonizing spiritual crisis in 1866 led to Mallarmé's complete loss of religious faith and to his austere, half-mystical preoccupation with eternity and le Néant (Nothingness, or Annihilation).

In 1875 Mallarmépublished Le Corbeau (his translation of Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven) with illustrations by Édouard Manet; and the following year appeared L'Aprèsmidi d'un faune, églogu…., one of his most memorable poems. L'Après-midi d'un faune exemplifies many characteristics of Mallarmé's exquisitely evocative poetry and many of his cherished ideas - for example, that in the "pure work" the poet disappears as speaker and gives over the initiative to the words, which "kindle each other with reciprocal reflections like a virtual trail of fires over precious stones." The faun, in his evocation by the word lis (lily), exemplifies also Mallarmé's claim in the essay Crise de vers for the ideal power of verbal creation.

In L'Après-midi d'un faune there emerges from Mallarmé's subtle suggestion and evocation the drama of a young faun trying to decide between dream and reality in his confused recollection of an erotic adventure with two nymphs, who finally escaped from his embrace. In a vague Sicilian landscape we see the faun, after trying vainly to resolve the mystery of his experience, turn to a fantasy of ravishing Venus herself and then, at the last, going back to sleep under the silence of the noonday sun.

Mallarméis cited by Jules Huret in 1891 as criticizing the Parnassians' direct presentation of objects in poetry: "To name an object is to suppress three-fourths of the enjoyment of the poem which is made up of gradual discovery: to suggest it, that is the dream…. There must always be an enigma in poetry…." In his later writings, Mallarméasxspired to the creation of hermetic poetry.

J. K. Huysmans' …rebours and Paul Verlaine's Poètes maudits in 1884 helped make Mallarmémore generally known in France. He was known also through his famous "mardis" (Tuesday receptions from 9 to midnight in his home at 89 Rue de Rome), which flourished into the 1890s and brought together over the years many of the most significant writers, musicians, and artists of the time.

In 1887 appeared Mallarmé's Poésies, and the following year his prose translations of Les Poèmes d'Edgar Poe and of Ten o'Clock, James McNeill Whistler's famous lecture on art. On Jan. 27, 1896, Mallarméwas elected "prince of poets," succeeding Verlaine. Publications near the end of his life included Vers et prose (1893), La Musique et les lettres (1895), Divagations (1897), and Un Coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard (1897). Mallarmédied at Valvins on Sept. 9, 1898, and was buried 2 days later in the cemetery of Samoreau (Seine-et-Marne). Posthumous publications included a separate edition of Un Coup de dés (1914), Madrigaux (1920), Vers de circonstance (1920), Igitur ou La Folie d'Elbehnon (1925), Contes indiens (1927), and Thèmes anglais (1937). Mallarmé's Oeuvres complètes was published in 1945.

Critical Assessment

The exquisite qualities of Mallarmé's art are evident both in his poetry and in such prose poems as Plainte d'automne and Frisson d'hiver. Of individual poems (aside from those named earlier) one may cite such examples as Apparition, Les Fenêtres, L'Azur, Brise marine, Soupir, Hérodiade, the more difficult Prose pour des Esseintes, the three Tombeaux (Poe, Baudelaire, Verlaine), and the sonnets Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hui, Victorieusement fui le suicide beau, and Ses purs ongles très haut dédiant leur onyx.

Mallarméliked images of snow, ice, swans, gems, mirrors, cold stars, and women's fans. There is often a burning sensuality under the austere form of his poems; but there are also numerous overt images of chastity, sterility, and artistic impotence. In Un Coup de dés Mallarméused typography to dramatize his words and enhance their imaginative suggestiveness. He saw the poet's function as being, above all, "to give a purer meaning to the words of the tribe." He claimed to have come to understand "the intimate correlation of Poetry with the Universe" and hinted that he was beginning where Baudelaire left off. Finally, he carried his ideal so far that, as he admitted, his art became "a dead end." But Mallarméwas not a sterile artist; he was one of the most exquisite poets of the century.

Further Reading

For translations from Mallarmésee Some Poems of Mallarmé (1936), translated by Roger Fry with commentaries by Charles Mauron; the Selected Poems (1957), translated by C. F. Maclntyre; and Anthony Hartley, ed., Mallarmé (1965), with prose translations. Among useful studies in English are Hasye Cooperman, The Aesthetics of Stéphane Mallarmé (1933); Wallace Fowlie, Mallarmé (1953); Joseph Chiari, Symbolism from Poe to Mallarmé: The Growth of a Myth (1956), with a foreword by T. S. Eliot; Haskell M. Block, Mallarméand the Symbolist Drama (1963); Guy Michaud's Mallarmé (trans. 1965); Robert Greer Cohn, Toward the Poems of Mallarmé (1965) and Mallarmé's Masterwork: New Findings (1966); and Thomas A. Williams, Mallarméand the Language of Mysticism (1970).

Additional Sources

Millan, Gordan, A throw of the dice: the life of Stéphane Mallarmé, New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1994.

Sartre, Jean Paul, Mallarmé, or, The poet of nothingness, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988.

Woolley, Grange, Stéphane Mallarmé, 1842-189, New York: AMS Press, 1981.

Mallarmé, Stéphane (1842-98). French poet in verse and prose, patron saint of the Symbolist movement, and essential reference-point for countless later writers, artists, and theorists. From Valéry to Sartre, Blanchot, and Bonnefoy, and from Surrealism through Oulipo to Derridean deconstruction, Mallarmé's work has come to represent a nec plus ultra of the self-absorbed literary imagination. Academic critics have responded to the famous obscurity or ‘difficulty’ of his writing with a multitude of competing interpretations, and in the process have conferred upon his slender corpus of poems an atmosphere of strenuous cerebration. Yet if Mallarmé is read without undue regard for this daunting posthumous reputation he often seems strikingly direct in his address to the reader. He writes about sexual desire, parenthood, and friendship, about ceremonious social conduct and the anxieties of the isolated individual, about the ordinary life of the senses and the daily presence of pain and death in human affairs. The arresting diction in which he handles these fundamental experiences is at certain times plain and lucid, and has at others an air of ecstatic incantation.

Outwardly, Mallarmé's life was not crowded with incident. His father and maternal grandfather were civil servants, and he himself, upon completing his lycée education in Sens, embarked upon a series of modest appointments as an English teacher; these took him to Tournon, Besançon, Avignon, and eventually back to Paris, his birthplace. His domestic life with Maria Gerhard, to whom he was married in 1863, was tranquil, though occasionally disturbed by financial difficulties and periods of ill health. The story of Mallarmé's ruling passion for literature, however, is altogether more eventful. By the age of 12 his literary career was launched, and from his mid-teens he was a voracious reader of modern poetry. Gautier, Hugo, Baudelaire, and Poe all had a profound impact upon his developing craft, and throughout the period of his apprenticeship he had a circle of close friends who understood and nurtured his single-minded artistic enthusiasm. Bereavement had a special role in his literary career: his mother died when he was 5, and his second child, Anatole, at the age of 8 in 1879; as his poetic masters disappeared one by one, and were commemorated in a sequence of verse ‘tombeaux’, loss and mourning came to occupy a central place in his writing. His sonnet ‘Quand l'ombre menaça de la fatale loi’ (1883), perhaps the finest of his elegiac works, is at once a requiem for all dead artists and a heroic celebration of his own creative gift. For Mallarmé, poetry was an exemplary act of resistance in a dark and godless world.

Mallarmé was a writer's writer who embodied an entire spectrum of attitudes to the verbal medium. At one extreme, literature was, or was to become, the supreme mechanism for making the world intelligible. The epistemological claims of literature were akin to those of science and philosophy in so far as it sought knowledge of the true nature of things, but literature outstripped these kindred disciplines in that it alone recapitulated and re-enacted within itself—or in the supreme Book that it foreshadowed—the creativity of the cosmos. This exalted vision, together with the generous encouragement he gave to the younger writers who sought his advice and, from 1880, attended his mardis, made Mallarmé into an almost priestly figure. But at the same time he was a jobbing writer for whom the pen had many worldly and potentially lucrative uses. He compiled a fashion journal (La Dernière Mode, 1874) and a number of school textbooks (including Les Mots anglais, 1877, and Les Dieux antiques, 1880); he was a translator, a reporter, a reviewer, a loyal and energetic correspondent, the author of lectures, tributes, and addresses, the master-confectioner of messages in verse to accompany Easter eggs and glacé fruits.

There is no contradiction, for Mallarmé, between these different styles or intensities of verbal performance: the frivolous-seeming journalism that he wrote as ‘Miss Satin’ or ‘Marguerite de Ponty’ contains brilliant set-pieces in praise of the great couturier's structural audacity, and ‘serious’ philosophical works like ‘Prose pour des Esseintes’ (1884) or the picture-poem Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard (1897) are alive with word-play and ingenious conceits. The learned etymologies that he catalogued, and occasionally invented, for his school pupils reappear, charged with a new intensity of meaning, in the elaborate faceting of his verse.

A clear line of development may be traced from such early works as ‘Les Fenêtres’ (1863) or ‘Brise marine’ (1865), in which Baudelaire's presence is everywhere visible, through the middle-period poems in alexandrines (e.g. the eclogue ‘L'Aprèsmidi d'un faune’, 1876; two sections of the dramatic poem, Hérodiade, 1876-87), in which Mallarmé found his distinctive density of expression, to elliptical late works in octosyllables such as ‘A la nue accablante tu’ (1895). Mallarmé moves gradually from a semi-allegorical narrative manner towards a style that brings together a host of criss-crossing metrical, syntactic, and acoustic pathways. Yet these are differences of degree, not kind, for all Mallarmé's poems, early and late, hesitate between consecutive and simultaneous methods of textual organization—between the desire to go somewhere, in story or in argument, and the desire to explore the layered and interconnected elements that any one moment of perception comprises. The characteristic sensation that his verse, and to a lesser extent his prose (see Divagations, 1897), affords is that of stable structure being pursued in a semantic force-field which constantly threatens to overwhelm it. Images suggesting an underlying or an overarching principle of order in the universe—a constellation in Un coup de dés, a genus of ideal flowers in ‘Prose pour des Esseintes’, a bird's triumphant flight in ‘Le Vierge, le Vivace et le Bel Aujourd'hui’ (1885)—emerge from within busy verbal textures that speak of chance, contingency, and fragmentation. This tension between the possibility and the impossibility of poetry continues to make Mallarmé's work provocative and topical, more than a hundred years after its first appearance in print.

— Malcolm Bowie

Bibliography

• J.-P. Richard, L'Univers imaginaire de Mallarmé (1961)
• E. Noulet, Vingt poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé (1965)
• G. Millan, The Throw of the Dice: The Life of Stéphane Mallarmé (1994)

Quotes:

"The pure work implies the disappearance of the poet as speaker, who hands over to the words."

"The poetic act consists of suddenly seeing that an idea splits up into a number of equal motifs and of grouping them; they rhyme."

"There is only beauty -- and it has only one perfect expression -- poetry. All the rest is a lie --except for those who live by the body, love, and, that love of the mind, friendship. For me, Poetry takes the place of love, because it is enamored of itself, and because its sensual delight falls back deliciously in my soul."

"Everything in the world exists to end up in a book."