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Benjamin Williams MALLARMÉ's SOCRATIC MONOLOGUES

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Benjamin Williams MALLARMÉ's SOCRATIC MONOLOGUES Benjamin Williams MALLARMÉ’S SOCRATIC MONOLOGUES ince the 1880s, when numerous studies of Stéphane Mallarmé began to Sappear, interpreters have taken him to stand for different and sometimes even opposite values. He might be a lucid teacher or a mystifying charlatan, a byzantine elitist or a socially conscious democrat. His writing’s celebrated richness of meaning helps explain why interpretations of Mallarmé seem to be, when taken together, at once contradictory and strangely absolutist. Jean-François Hamel analyzes such tendencies in his excellent recent book on ideologically motivated recuperations of the poet: Camarade Mallarmé: Une politique de la lecture (2014).1 While my study focuses on some of the same twentieth-century interpretations of Mallarmé, it differs in its emphasis on the Mardis (the weekly gatherings at the poet’s home in Paris). Of particular interest to me are the Mardistes’ comparisons of Mallarmé’s monologues or causeries to Socrates’s interrogative teachings. These comparisons emphasize the active listening elicited by the maître, which in turn calls to mind Socrates’s objections to writing in Plato’s Phaedrus. There, Socrates observes that, instead of an interactive exchange, writing results only in the reader’s passive reception of a fxed message (Plato 275b). Writing also fails to provide the privacy of a spoken conversation, according to this famous argument, because it cannot tell to whom it should divulge its contents (Plato 275e).2 In my analysis of the Mardis, I argue that references to Socrates evoke these two objections to writing in a general way but not, for example, the irony of Plato’s formulation of them in a written text. This probable overall infuence of the Phaedrus provides occasion to reexamine some divergent understandings of Mallarmé. Whereas the Mardistes cast him as a modern exemplar of the Socratic and Platonic privileging of speech over writing, more recent thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and Jacques Rancière have taken Mallarmé to represent a key 1. Hamel’s book came to my attention shortly before this article went to press. Much more wide ranging in scope, his work corresponds with one of my larger intentions for this study: to examine critically what Hamel calls “allegorical” readings of Mallarmé. 2. Responding in part to Plato, the philosopher Jacques Rancière celebrates this accessibility of writing, saying that “la démocratie est proprement le régime de l’écriture” (Parole 84). The Romanic Review Volume 105 Numbers 3–4 © The Trustees of Columbia University Romanicv105n03-04.indb 319 12/22/15 3:19 PM 320 Benjamin Williams break with Plato’s attitude.3 Thus Mallarmé has been compared to Socrates and Plato in entirely opposite senses: for a number of Mardistes, Mallarmé was above all an oral genius, but for these two philosophers, he was among the frst to depart from the Western tradition’s long-standing view of writing as a “dead” imitation of speech. Very broadly put, in Derrida’s and Rancière’s interpretations, Mallarmé’s originality resided in his conception of writing (not just his own) as independent from the pretense of substituting for an absent speaker. The philosophers’ interpretations differ in other respects, of course, but they seem to agree in their characterization of Mallarmé as not an oral but a paradigmatically written genius. These contrary receptions of Mallarmé derive from different evidence and are not always entirely incompatible. If a Mardiste had in mind a conversation with Mallarmé and a twentieth-century scholar had in mind the Coup de dés, it makes sense that the former would dwell on the maître’s oral genius and the latter on his written genius. The Mardistes did not say that Mallarmé’s writings did not matter, but some claimed that his conversations mattered more. The frst sections of my article analyze this contemporary reputation for spoken genius, putting emphasis throughout on appraisals of the Mardis that correspond with the two points just raised from the Phaedrus (the “interactivity” and “privacy” of speech). I then return in more detail to Mallarmé’s Socratic reputation and twentieth-century arguments that he was intent only on his writing and his eventual readers. Interactivity and Privacy in Oral and Written Communication Two of the Phaedrus’s objections to writing might be summed up as a lack of interactivity (it cannot respond to questions) and a lack of privacy (it shares its contents with anyone who can read). Both objections are relevant implicitly and explicitly to accounts of Mallarmé and the Mardis. In this article, “interactivity” especially appears in various, somewhat approximate terms. That is partly because, for the authors under consideration, any number of rationales might allow them to characterize writing or speech as either static or interactive. In the Phaedrus, a written text does not participate in any kind of exchange, in that it continues always to say the same thing (Plato 275d; see also Ong 79). Yet, by shifting focus, one might insist, as many symbolists did, that a reader contributes prior knowledge, interprets, and thereby takes a creative role in the production of meaning. Like writing, speech can be characterized in either sense. If one interlocutor concedes entirely to what the other says, their conversation might seem to lack any meaningful interaction 3. Respectively, these arguments appear in La Dissémination (210) and in Mallarmé: La Politique de la sirène (90). Romanicv105n03-04.indb 320 12/22/15 3:19 PM Mallarmé’s Socratic Monologues 321 of ideas. Such a dialogue could be qualifed as simply a disguised monologue. The Mardistes, however, felt that even as Mallarmé gave forth without their interrupting him, an active intellectual relationship resulted from the intangibles (or “charm”) of hearing him live and in person.4 “Disparition élocutoire” notwithstanding, Mallarmé’s followers accorded real signifcance to his presence, which resulted in effects of “interactivity” as well as privacy. Physical proximity to Mallarmé, his gestures, and other factors supposedly enriched the Mardistes’ intellectual development and yet could never truly be shared with the greater public by a transcript or even a sound recording. Mallarmé’s voice was, in fact, never recorded at all. With respect to privacy and sound recording, the Mardistes who lived to see the wide availability of the new technology would have realized that Mallarmé was, historically, one of the last thinkers for whom the dichotomy of spoken and written communication would have been largely the same as in antiquity.5 In the twentieth century, anyone of Mallarmé’s intellectual status would, like Jacques Lacan, almost certainly have been recorded speaking at some time or another.6 After Mallarmé’s death, only those who had known him personally could recount the experience of the Mardis. Two of the attendees especially, Édouard Dujardin and Camille Mauclair, made the strongest claims not only that Mallarmé’s persona and charm were of great artistic importance but also that, in terms of bare content, 4. Pierre Quillard’s account of a “Conférence de M. Charles Morice” recalls that “bien que seul M. Charles Morice ait pris formellement la parole, il le ft avec un tel soin d’éviter toute pédagogie qu’une sorte de colloque mental s’établit entre lui et ses interlocuteurs muets” (285). In addition to the common dislike of pédagogie, this remark affrms the possibility of an “interactive” monologue. Quillard also notes that, during this gathering, Morice and his listeners paid to Mallarmé “un juste et unanime hommage” (286). 5. “Il est regrettable, dit encore M. Edmond Jaloux, que personne n’ait eu la précaution de noter les conversations de Mallarmé” (Dujardin, Siens 6). Édouard Dujardin then adds that they would have needed a “sténographe invisible” or a “microphone enregistreur soigneusement dissimulé.” Jaloux makes this point in the preface to the 1936 Cinquantenaire du Symbolisme (xii–xiii; quoted in Genova 97). In his 1998 book on the Mardis, however, Patrick Besnier argues that posterity has not lost much for being deprived of a recorded echo of Mallarmé’s voice (54). 6. A bande dessinée depicting Lacan’s spoken genius is described in a press release: “Patrick Chambon dessine la voix de Lacan [. .] Voici comme une porte ouverte à tous ceux, nombreux, qui n’ont pas assisté au séminaire de Lacan et qui entrevoient cependant que quelque chose se perd à la seule lecture des diverses transcriptions de ses propos” (Epel Edition). Despite the video recordings of Lacan, something apparently remained uncaptured. For an infuential meditation on the ephemerality of spoken genius, see Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly’s essay on dandyism (696–97). Romanicv105n03-04.indb 321 12/22/15 3:19 PM 322 Benjamin Williams his “œuvre parlée” was a crucial part of his unfnished life’s work.7 In 1895 Bernard Lazare claimed that Mallarmé’s published poems enclosed the essential of his thought and, somewhat unusually among the Mardistes, that the poet’s conversation provided a “commentary” of those poems.8 More to the point, Lazare identifed Mallarmé as setting himself apart from his contemporaries by making his conversation the sole vehicle of his “theories.” Non qu’il les [ses théories] ait exprimées dans des écrits dogmatiques, comme les esthètes allemands et anglais, mais il les a répandues par la parole, et ce fut là, en ce temps, son originalité. Il a repris la tradition des philosophes et des sages de jadis, de ceux qui entretenaient leurs disciples dans les jardins ou sous les portiques [. .] L’enseignement que veulent donner les rares métaphysiciens ou moralistes qui subsistent encore doit être privé, mieux même : mystérieux. (242–43) This passage conforms to the familiar assessment, also humorously expressed by Marcel Proust, that Mallarmé’s thought was accessible in speech but fugitive in writing.
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