Out of the Néant into the Everyday: A Rediscovery of Mallarmé’s Poetics Séverine C. Martin Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Science COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2014 © 2014 Séverine C. Martin All rights reserved ABSTRACT Out of the Néant into the Everyday: A Rediscovery of Mallarmé’s Poetics Séverine C. Martin This dissertation, focusing on the Vers de circonstance, takes issue with traditional views on Stéphane Mallarmé’s aesthetics and his positioning on the relation of art to society. Whereas Mallarmé has often been branded as an ivory-tower poet, invested solely in abstract ideals and removed from the masses, my research demonstrates his interest in concrete essences and the small events of the everyday. As such, the Vers de circonstance offer an exemplary entry point to understanding these poetic preoccupations as the poems of this collection are both characterized by their materiality and their celebration of ordinary festivities. Indeed, most of the poems either accompany or are directly written on objects that were offered as gifts on such occasions as birthdays, anniversaries or seasonal holidays. The omnipresence of objects and dates that can be referred back to real events displays Mallarmé’s on-going questioning on the relation of art to reality. As I show, some of these interrogations rejoin the aesthetic preoccupations of the major artistic currents of the time, such as Impressionism in France and the Decorative Arts in England. These movements were defining new norms for the representation of reality in reaction to the changes of nineteenth century society. But as the genetic study of the Vers de circonstance reveals, along with the contextual framing and analysis of his other works, the occasional and the concept of the real play a fundamental role in his poetics at large. On the one hand, the aesthetic concept of the real allows him to draw the attention of his readers to the tension between the concreteness of reality with its elusiveness and ephemerality. On the other hand, the occasional is a way for Mallarmé to humanize the otherwise anonymous and impersonal quality of print. In an epoch when reality became mechanically reproducible and the distance between an author and its readers became increasingly distant and diffuse, the questions posed by Mallarmé on the relation of art to real objects, people and events were fundamental. As I conclude, therefore, the use of widely accessible quotidian objects, the mise en abyme of the visuality of writing, and Mallarmé’s programmatic note to the reader to emulate his poetic project, all combine to validate his postulation of a new poetic art turned towards the everyday and his contemporaries. TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vi DEDICATION vii INTRODUCTION 1 A Questionable Distinction: Mallarmé’s “Major” and 1 “Minor” Works Synoptic Overview of Mallarmé Scholarship 15 Dissertation Outline 17 PART ONE: THE POETIC FALLACIES ABOUT THE VERS DE 24 CIRCONSTANCE INTRODUCTORY REMARKS 25 CHAPTER 1: THE VERS DE CIRCONSTANCE AS TEXT AND AS 26 OBJECT A Textual Object 26 An Aesthetic and Material Artifact 36 Issues Associated with this Work 48 Genetic History of the Vers de circonstance 51 CHAPTER 2: HYPER-CONTEXT AND ERASURE 58 The Seemingly Private and Personal Nature of the Vers de 58 Circonstance Turning Private Occasions into Social Capital 66 The Occasional as Genre: Deliberate Erasure and the Production of 82 Artificial Occasions CONCLUDING REMARKS 89 i PART TWO: REINSTATING THE OBJECT IN MALLARME’S POETICS 91 INTRODUCTORY REMARKS 93 CHAPTER 3: FROM A DECORATIVE AESTHETIC TO AN 95 AESTHETIC OF THE EVERYDAY The Influence of the Decorative Arts on Mallarmé 95 Departure from the Decorative: The Emancipation from Beauty and 108 the Conquest of the Everyday The Emergence of the “Real” 112 Sampling Real Objects: Handkerchiefs and Galets d’Honfleur 131 CHAPTER 4: READING THE “SONNET EN X:” THE VALENCE OF 146 THE INSIGNIFICANT OBJECT Poetry as Plastic Form 146 The Dialectic of Subjects and Objects in Mallarmé’s Poetry 151 Understanding the Word “Ptyx” 161 The Valence of the Insignificant Object 164 The Centrality of the “Home” 167 The Counter-Active Movement of Music Against Abstraction 172 CONCLUDING REMARKS 180 PART THREE: MALLARME’S NEW ARS POETICA 181 INTRODUCTORY REMARKS 183 CHAPTER 5: THE EMERGENCE OF MATERIALITY IN THE 185 NINETEENTH CENTURY Mallarmé’s Materialism 185 Art, Materiality and Form: The Philosophical Status of Materiality 202 Examination of the Aesthetic Properties of the Vers de circonstance 211 CHAPTER 6: MALLARMÉ’S POÉSIE CRITIQUE 218 Towards a Conceptual Poetics 219 “Art as Idea as Idea” 222 ii The Minor Versus the Major 227 Mallarmé’s New Poetic Art 231 Mallarmé’s Social Critique 239 Mallarmé’s Poetic Language: A Language for his Contemporaries 247 CONCLUDING REMARKS 253 CONCLUSION 257 ILLUSTRATIONS 259 BIBLIOGRAPHY 286 iii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Illustration 1 Rabelais 255 Cinquième Livre, “La Dive Bouteille, ” 1564 2 Stéphane Mallarmé 256 [Autograph quatrain in a letter] 3 Stéphane Mallarmé 257 [Autograph quatrain on a calling card] 4 James McNeil Whistler 258 The Princess in the Land of Porcelain, 1863-1865 5 James McNeill Whistler 259 Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room, 1876-1877 6 Pendulum of Saxony 260 7 Auguste Renoir 261 Bal du moulin de la Galette, 1876 8 Caspar David Friedrich 262 Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer, circa 1817 9 Carl Spitzweg 263 Der arme Poet, 1839 10 Käthe Kollwitz 264 Not und Schande der Armut, circa 1900 11 Edouard Manet 265 Stéphane Mallarmé, 1876 12 Stéphane Mallarmé 266 [Autograph quatrain on a fan] 13 Stéphane Mallarmé, La Dernière Mode, 1874 267 14 Edouard Manet 268 Frontispiece for Mallarmé’s Le Corbeau, 1875 iv 15 Edouard Manet 269 Illustration of L’Après-Midi d’un Faune, 1876 16 Félicien Rops 270 Frontispiece for Mallarmé’s Poésies, 1887 17 Jean François Raffaëlli 271 Types de Paris with an autograph quatrain by Stéphane Mallarmé 18 René Magritte 272 La Condition humaine, 1933 René Magritte La Clé des Champs, 1936 19 Edouard Manet 273 Polichinelle, 1874 20 Edgar Degas 274 Danseuses, 1879 21 Comparison of Mallarmé’s handwriting 275 22 François Coppée 276 [Drawing] 23 Stéphane Mallarmé 277 [Autograph quatrain] 24 Stéphane Mallarmé 278 [Autograph quatrain on a fan] 25 Stéphane Mallarmé 279 Eventail de Mademoiselle Mallarmé 26 Edgar Degas 280 At the Milliners, 1882 v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First, I would like to thank my advisor, Elisabeth Ladenson, who has provided continuous guidance and support to me from the very day I started working with her. Her encouraging mentoring, which has accompanied me in New York and Paris, has been an invaluable source of strength and inspiration for my work. I would also like to thank Professor Bachir Diagne, Professor Anne Higonnet and Professor Edward Mendelson for generously agreeing to be part of my dissertation committee. I would like to address a special thanks to Professor Philip Watts who should have been part of my committee. He left this world too soon but his kindness and gentleness towards others is unlikely to be forgotten. Then, I would like to thank all those who have given me constructive criticism on my work, notably, Antoine Compagnon, Pierre Force, Bertrand Marchal, Cameron Tolton and most recently and intensively, Vincent Debaene. His help was extremely valuable in the overall structuring of my work. But, I am also very thankful to the French Department for its constant assistance to me over the years, since I started taking French classes as an undergraduate at Barnard. I would like to give special thanks to Meritza, Isabelle, and most particularly Benita, for their ever joyful and efficient assistance. They make the department feel like a second home. Finally, I do not have enough words to say thank you to my beloved parents and husband who have provided vital and unquestionable support to all my work. Their love, sensibility and erudition are the pillars upon which I stand. I hope to transmit some of their wisdom and kindness to my son Ludwig Octavian Hartenstein who has accompanied me through the final stages of my dissertation as a shining star. vi DEDICATION « Ce qui me tourmente [...], c’est un peu, dans chacun de ces hommes, Mozart assassiné. » Antoine de Saint Exupéry, Terre des hommes À Kéken (10 ans) et Barbara (5 ans), hyperboles de ma mémoire, … ABANDONNÉS je vous garde dans mon souvenir avec ce coucher de Soleil aussi, d’une belle et silencieuse soirée ô Xarangua ! pauvre Haïti ! Il est toujours pour moi le 24 avril 2010, entre cinq heures et cinq heures et demie… à vous mes enfants, j’offre ce Soleil Prométhée… vii INTRODUCTION A Questionable Distinction: Mallarmé’s “Major” and “Minor” Works There exists a long-standing debate regarding the reading and interpretation of the work of the nineteenth century French poet, Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898). As a recent critic, Barbara Bohac, points out in the opening lines of her critical study dedicated to the notion of the everyday in his poetics, “Mallarmé offre plusieurs visages, qu’il n’est pas toujours aisé de concilier.”1 The manifold faces of the poet to which Bohac refers consist in the tension in his writings between apparently serious works that seem to pertain to high art, and seemingly frivolous works that seem to be simple leisure time pursuits outside the very categories of high or low art. The first works (Poésies, L’Après-Midi d’un Faune, Hérodiade) are recognizable as cultural objects belonging to high art due to three important factors: first, their form – indeed, most poems follow classical poetic forms such as the sonnet written in octosyllabic meters or alexandrins; or they follow the modern genre of the prose poem initiated by Aloysius Bertrand; then, the gravitas of their author’s poetic intentionality expressed by way of letters or of commentaries around his work; and finally, the quality and reputation of the journals and publications in which the poems were first individually and then collectively published.