Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Richard Candida Smith is Director of the Program in American Culture and Associate Professor of History and American Culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is the author of Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry, and Politics in California (California, 1995).

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Mallarm's Children: Symbolism and the Renewal of Experience

University of California Press

The arts as a precious interior world, marked by a home whose brocaded wall coverings muffle the intrusions of an ever noisier, machine-driven, vulgar society; an enclave of beauty where a delicate, pale aristocrat nurtures the finer sensibilities through immersion in the higher realities found in exquisitely crafted books, art, and music; the more ornate the better, for every golden filigree and each glittering gem stops the mind's inner noise and provides a structure for contemplating the mysteries of creativity. One of the first public presentations of a luxuriously ostentatious aestheticism that could exist only as a result of modern modes of commercial organization was Joris Huysmans's novel from 1884, Rebours , translated into English as Against the Grain , an accurate rendering for this portrait of a man who feels out of place in modern life, although the English title misses the equally important connotations of movement in reverse.1 Huysmans's book was unexpectedly successful. The attention it gained surprised the author, who thought he had written an eccentric book that only a handful of people would find to their taste. The novel has no story line and only one character, the neurasthenic aesthete Jean Floressas des Esseintes, the last of a minor but distinguished line of French aristocrats. The book chronicles his retreat from the world through a series of increasingly precious reflections on the solace he finds in the arts. But whatever he turns to bores him. He finds the great master works of world literature and art that everyone else applauds filled with the clichs of commonplace emotions. Themes of love, greed, revenge, even as treated

by Shakespeare or Balzac, lead his imagination inevitably back to the world of trains, steamships, and factories that has made his proud family traditions irrelevant. Denied his birthright as a leader, he refuses to make the compromises that might allow him to be an officer in the military, the one field where the nobility still dominates, if at the sufferance of vulgar politicians. All that remains for him is patronage of the arts, to seek out the few odd items that give him entry into worlds totally independent of a France that no longer needs his kind.2

In what serves as the climax to Huysmans's novel, des Esseintes picks up a privately printed edition of Stphane Mallarm's lyric poem Afternoon of a Faun . The novel's narrator tells us that even the physical form of the book offered des Esseintes's imagination the possibility of escape, that he

felt entangling delights as he fingered the minuscule chapbook, the covers of which, made from Japanese felt as white as clotted milk, were fastened with two silk cords, one China pink, the other black. Tucked into the binding, the black braided ribbon joined the pink one whose velvety softness added a suspicion of modern Japanese rouge, a hint of romantic license, to the antique whiteness, the pure natural tint of the book which it entwined, knotting together somber and bright colors into a lacy miniature rose that discretely suggested regrets and vaguely warned of the melancholy that succeeds the extinguished transports of passion and the appeased appeals to desire given the senses.3

The book as object provided the stage dressing for a drama mounted entirely inside des Esseintes's mind, an orchestration of gesture felt within but without the necessity of externally observable movement. The narrator, reproducing the point of view of des Esseintes as he skims and reads, provides a concise statement of Mallarm's method. In this passage, Huysmans explains Mallarm's technique of suppressing the middle term of analogies, and the literature-reading public learned that Mallarm's poetry used "symbols" to convey what other writers stated directly through exposition:

Reaching for the most distant analogies, [Mallarm] often designated by a word suggesting by an effect of likeness all at once the form, the scent, the color, the quality, the brilliancy, the object or being which he might have followed with a host of epithets that expostulated all its aspects, all its lights and shades, if it had been merely referred to by its technical name. He thus dispensed with the formal statement of a comparison, which arose of itself in readers' minds as a result of the analogy, once they had deciphered the symbol, and avoided diluting attention over each of the several qualities that he

might otherwise have been presented one by one in a series of adjectives. He focused the imagination instead on one single word, on one whole vision, producing, as a painter does, one unique and complete effect, one general aspect.

The result was a concentrated, condensed literature that provided the essence of its nutriment in a sublimated art. This technique, employed at first with restraint in his earlier works, Mallarm had boldly cultivated in a piece he wrote on Thophile Gautier and in The Afternoon of a Faun , an eclogue in which the subtleties of sensual joys unwound in evasively mysterious verses, broken suddenly by this wild and delirious cry of the Faun:

Alors m'veillerai-je  la ferveur premire,
Droit et seul, sous un flot antique de lumire,
Lys! et l'un de vous tous pour l'ingnuit.

[And so I shall awake to the first fervor, / upright and alone beneath an ancient surge of light, / lilies! with one of you in a state of natural frankness.]

The line with its monosyllable "Lys!" [lilies!] thrown back to the beginning called up the idea of things rigid, tall, and white, an image, strengthened by the noun "ingnuit" [natural frankness] brought in as a rhyme, that expressed allegorically, in a single word, the passion, the effervescence, the instant of excitement arising from the virgin faun, transformed by lust at sight of the nymphs.4

Mallarm's elliptical poetry was so exacting that it provided those with perfected taste a replacement for the novel that the vulgar public could never contaminate with their interest:

The words selected must be so inevitable that they eliminate the possibility of all others; each adjective must be chosen in so ingenious and masterful a fashion that justice would deny the right of any other word to supplant it; it would open up vast perspectives to set readers dreaming for weeks on end of its meaning, at once precise and multiple; it would enable them to ascertain the present, to reconstruct the past, to view the future spiritual history of the characters, all revealed in the prismatic light of this single epithet.

The novel, thus conceived, thus condensed into one or two pages, would mature into a mental communion between a magic-working author and his ideal reader, into an intellectual collaboration knowingly undertaken perhaps by a dozen or so persons of superior intellect scattered around the world, into a feast available to the most sensitive spirits and appreciable by them only.5

At the time Huysmans's book reached the reading public, Mallarm (18421898, born tienne Mallarm) had published twenty-one short poems and eleven brief prose pieces. He was a writer known only to the most dedicated connoisseurs of contemporary poetry, and that was Huysmans's point. Even the poem Huysmans (18481907) selected to represent the poet, Afternoon of a Faun , underscored the eccentricity of des

Esseintes's tastes. In 1876 the poem had caused a minor scandal among poets when the editors of Le Parnasse contemporain (Contemporary Parnassus), a leading anthology of new poetry, rejected it as too obscure for inclusion in their third volume. Thanks to friends shocked at the treatment Mallarm had received from men he thought were his supporters, a printer prepared 195 copies of the four-page work in a luxury edition illustrated by douard Manet.6

In his midforties at the time Rebours was published, Mallarm had lived most of his life in isolation. During the 1860s he taught English in secondary schools in provincial cities in the south of France. In 1871, shortly after the end of the Franco-Prussian War, he managed to secure a post in Paris. Performance reviews suggest that he likely was a poor teacher. It is clear that he had a difficult time with his supervisors throughout his career. His calling as a poet was evidence of unconventional ideas presumed inappropriate for the classroom, and in 1866 a majority of parents in the school at Besanon, where he was teaching, petitioned to have him fired when they read in the national newspapers of his eleven poems published in the first volume of Le Parnasse contemporain . He held onto his job thanks only to the intervention of a family friend with influence in the government who helped arrange a transfer to Avignon. One of Mallarm's students in Paris, the writer Jean Ajalbert (18631947), recalled that the poet was uncomfortable speaking English. American and British students often corrected mistakes in pronunciation or grammar that Mallarm made during his lessons. Beyond that, Ajalbert thought that the poet found teaching boring. Frequently he began class by setting up translation exercises on the chalkboard for the students to work on their own, while he sat at his desk working in his notebook, mumbling to himself as he experimented with rhymes and rhythms until the bell rang for the end of the period.7

Mallarm's relations to France's competitive literary world were equally mixed. His contributions to the first edition of Le Parnasse contemporain had gained a flurry of positive reviews, but the powerful Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly (18081889) scorned his work, which he described as the product of a "wild colt, at every turn disheveled and entangled."8 Critics ignored the few pieces he published subsequently, and Mallarm vanished from public discussion for nearly twenty years until he was resurrected by Huysmans. Unlike most other poets, he had no volume of verse to his name, nor did he publish regularly in small journals. He talked of a major book occupying his time, but it was a project for which the only evidence were references made in conversation. No friends ever

saw excerpts of it, and when he died in 1898, his family found only a folder of disorganized notes along with fragments of projects for the theater.

He had ambitious plans for books, plays, and magazines, but his teaching duties, for many years divided between two lyces on opposite ends of Paris, left him with little time to concentrate on his literary interests. Yet he told friends that he could not think of leaving his teaching position to try his hand as a freelance writer. He earned barely enough money to support himself, his wife, and their two children in their small fourth-floor walk-up apartment on the unfashionable, modestly middle-class rue de Rome that journalists, after he had become a national figure, described as chtif , that is, "run-down" or "shabby." He simply could not afford the uncertainty of a career in journalism, but beyond that his difficulties in focusing his diffuse thoughts into words on paper made him ill suited for the pressures inherent to a professional writing career. In prose as well as in verse, Mallarm seemed unable to express his ideas succinctly, nor to understand that the language of an essay ought to be less allusive than that of a poem.

On the other hand, his teaching, however much he disliked it, secured him the tactical freedom that allowed him to offer the public an approach to literature that could be found nowhere else. "What's the good of trafficking," Mallarm quipped late in life, "with something that perhaps ought not to sell, especially when it doesn't sell."9 Even when he complained about the thirty years hard labor he put in as a high school teacher, he added, "The poet must accept the most difficult jobs if they are the condition of his independence."10 Still, he was not a recluse. On Tuesday evenings at ten o'clock he received visitors to discuss poetry, painting, and aesthetic theory. He knew most of the major poets of his day, and they knew him. Evidence suggests that his peers considered him talented. They also thought he was naive to an extreme about the craft of writing and the demands that both editors and readers made that literature have a readily comprehensible, morally enlightening point. When Mallarm showed Catulle Mends (18411909) and Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam (18381889) a section from his proposed modernization of Hamlet , they could barely restrain themselves from laughing out loud to his face. The language was so convoluted and the story so obscure that it was clear to them he had no idea whatsoever how to communicate to readers. Their reaction was so negative that he put the play aside, and it remained uncompleted. Possibly he would never have finished this project in any event, since he had little gift for concise dramatic situa-

tion or for creating sharply delineated characters. He preferred exploring the complex associations surrounding words. His closest friends were not writers but painters, particularly the impressionists Berthe Morisot (18411895) and douard Manet (18321883). Manet's portrait of the poet captured what may be a characteristic mixture of diffidence, shyness, and ambition jostling within a man who strove to put on paper feelings that went beyond words (fig. 1).11

The eight pages Huysmans dedicated to discussing Mallarm's work yanked him overnight from an obscurity that some interpreted as a mythic act of defiance, as if it had been purely voluntary. A series of publications over the next two years reinforced public interest in him. Among the most important was the republication in book form of Paul Verlaine's series of essays on poets he considered unjustly neglected, Les Potes maudits (The Damned Poets), featuring a lengthy study of Mallarm along with several previously unpublished poems. Other studies appeared, new literary journals reprinted older poems that had become difficult to locate, and he received requests for new work. In the two years following Rebours , Mallarm published more than he had in the preceding twenty years. In 1887, two short books of poems appeared, offering the public collections of materials already largely published in periodicals, and the following year his translations of Edgar Allan Poe went on the market. His anticipated master work"The Book," he called iteluded him and the many readers who waited for it with anticipation, for there they expected to find the systematic and precise presentation of a method tantalizingly hinted at in his shorter poems. Unable to produce the work his readers wanted, Mallarm might have sunk back into obscurity had not a younger generation of poets, dissatisfied with prevailing standards, seized upon this once "rejected" author as an inspirationnot for retreat from the world as he had been for des Esseintes but for an active battle to create a new poetic language that could capture the experiences of the modern world growing up around them. For them the short poems were enough to launch a revolution of the word.

Ren Ghil (18621925, born Ren Ghilbert) was still in lyce in 1884 when he and several friends attended a lecture on the poets of Le Parnasse contemporain . In his memoirs, Ghil recalled that the lecturer, the widely read and widely published lyricist Catulle Mends, presented Mallarm as an eccentricity within French poetry. Mends noted that Afternoon of a Faun had not merited inclusion in the anthology, but because several writers had recently returned to it as a piece worthy of attention, he thought he might read from the poem to highlight the ele-

ments linking Mallarm to more important writers. This reading, despite its unfriendly context, had a magical effect on Ghil and his schoolmates:

I recall our common and sudden emotion: we wanted to cry out, we wanted to multiply our numbers. We had felt a blow from something unknown that had harrowed us with its power. Our unanimous applause rang through the hall. It would not stop. We were moved by an energy of protest, indeed even of provocation! Mends turned toward us, for we were not very far from him, with a look of surprise and perhaps with an indulgent smile.12

Ghil wrote directly to Mallarm to express his admiration and sent along several of his own poems. In turn Mallarm invited the young man to his salon, where he joined the growing number of young men who spoke of the older poet as their "master," of themselves as "disciples," and of the master's salon as a "chapel" where poetry had become a way of worshiping the only absolute truths that humans could know.13 By 1885, most of the young poets in Paris interested in new approaches to poetic language and form had become regular participants, as had many younger painters and musicians. The most faithful in presenting themselves every Tuesday evening were the young men who found their own ideas about poetry confirmed in the example provided by the older poet: Gustave Kahn, Jules Laforgue, Saint-Pol Roux, Flix Fnon, Jean Ajalbert, Ren Ghil, douard Dujardin, Todor de Wyzewa, Stuart Merrill, Francis Viel-Griffin, and Henri de Rgnier. In the 1890s, Andr Gide, Pierre Lous, Paul Valry, and Paul Claudel joined the group, replacing those who had dropped out. From 1884 to Mallarm's death, the tenor of the group remained throughout one of young men in their early to middle twenties surrounding a master of mature years. Claude Debussy was also a regular participant, as were the Irish poet William Butler Yeats and the German poet Stefan George during their visits to Paris. The American painter James McNeill Whistler came from time to time, but he had too strong a personality and left a poor impression. Because his opinions clashed with those of the master, the young men disliked him. Oscar Wilde also made his appearances, but as Dujardin remembered, "Our mute reprobation taught him that one did not come to Mallarm's to run at the mouth."14 In addition to literary figures, scientific, political, and social leaders also appeared. Georges Clemenceau, who would lead the government of France during World War I, was a regular participant.

Women also came regularly, sometimes in their own right as did the novelist Rachilde (18601953, born Margurite Eymery), but usually they appeared as the companions of ambitious young men. The novelist and playwright Colette (18731954, born Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette) ac-

companied her husband Willy (18591931, born Henri Gauthier-Villars), a former lyce student in Mallarm's English classes who had achieved notoriety as an author of zany comic novels. No one knew yet that Colette herself was a writer or that she spent four hours a day locked in a study working on books that her husband published under his name. Colette's memoirs, Mes apprentissages (My Apprenticeships), recount nothing of the many hours she spent sipping punch while heady discussions of the arts raged around her. She found no recognition or authorization of her talent in a place that remained sacred in the memory of the men who had flocked there.15

They intended to take over the literary world, and Mallarm was the genial spirit presiding over their aspirations. The habitus of his salon founded more than twenty new journals dedicated to greater variety in form and content. Among the most important were Le Dcadent (The Decadent), La Dcadence (Decadence), La Revue Rose (The Pink Review), Art et Critique (Art and Criticism), Le Scapin (The Rogue), La Revue Wagnrienne (The Wagnerian Review), La Revue Indpendante (The Independent Review), La Vogue (Vogue), and Le Chat Noir (The Black Cat). In the 1890s, the editors and publishers of three of the most influential journals of "advanced" thought, Entretiens politiques et littraires (Political and Literary Conversations), La Plume (The Quill), and La Revue Blanche (The White Review), acknowledged the privilege that they felt at being friends and students of Mallarm. The young men and their competing journals usually argued with each other as much as with the older generation. Mallarm stood above all disputes as the incarnation of poetic "independence" and integrity. However bitter the small reviews' comments about each other, they shared the goal of rendering justice to the master and establishing his undisputed prominence in French literature.

In this effort, they created for the public a myth of a saintly figure whose "incorruptible pride" exposed the shortcomings of a literary scene dominated by stifling convention and a base politics of patronage. The purity and power of his work had so shamed their elders, his peers, that they had conspired to slight him, but the "youth revolution" (as they themselves referred to their activities) would render him his due. Mallarm himself wanted nothing, they said, but to live in the pure light of poetry. There was nothing heavy or morose about him, Ghil recalled. He was serene, and those who visited with him found the power of his self-assurance calming to their own troubled souls. His eyes were like jewels in the way they subtly reflected light. His face radiated a singularly

intense spirituality that yet was calm and airily elegant. There was only one unusual trait in a face otherwise entirely spiritual: the poet who had explored the soul of the faun had slightly pointed ears, adding a curious, ironic, sensuous undercurrent to the man: "The spirit of Youth seemed to radiate from Mallarm with all the hopeful assurance that gave him such persuasive charm."16 Afternoon of a Faun was frankly erotic, but he used sexuality as a metaphor for intellectual thought, which he revealed as the most distinctively human expression of eros. The power one felt as a sexual being had a parallel aspect, that of the spirit to delight in the manipulation of categories. In the process, however, thought in Mallarm was surrounded by flesh and desire and became inseparable from the pleasures of the body. He was a poet who appealed to a spirit of youthinstead of negating the body, he pictured it as the mirror of the mind's passions.

Here was a master crafted by his disciples in an image that seemed to justify their own impetuous and often intolerant attitudes, while simultaneously pulling back from the self-destructive excesses of Charles Baudelaire (18211867), Arthur Rimbaud (18541891), or Paul Verlaine (18441896). It was a curious relationship, for, given Mallarm's peculiar position in the literary world, there was little he himself could do to help on practical concerns. Mallarm's disciples emphasized that his influence on them was "spiritual." He helped them see poetry as an ethical challenge to established social conventions. Camille Mauclair (18701947, born Sverin Faust) looked back on Mallarm as the master who had taught him everything he valued morally and professionally.17 Francis Viel-Griffin (18641937) thought that the word master was insufficient to suggest the patient supervision Mallarm provided his young friends.18 Pierre Lous (18701925, born Pierre Louis), coming from one of the richest families in France and brother of the ambassador to Russia, enjoyed socializing at Mallarm's salons precisely because it was a sanctuary where love of poetry allowed all worldly distinctions to vanish. Lous wrote to the master, "I look upon you not as a writer, but as Literature itself." According to one of Lous's closest friends at the time, the young man compared Mallarm to the shoemaker Socrates, whose wisdom attracted both the sons of the mightiest families and the sons of workmen and let them sit across from each other as the equals all men were only in the world of ideas.19

Older critics scoffed. This idolization of Mallarm was mere youthful mockery of their elders' more considered judgments. In the August 6, 1885, issue of Le Temps , Paul Bourde (18511914) wrote that Mal-

larm insulted his readers because he threw words in a hat and then drew them out one at a time, violating the precision and clarity that were the unique gifts of the French language. The description of Mallarm's method was untrue, but the barb inspired countless efforts to see what a poem might look like if done according to Bourde's formula.20 In collapsing the difficulties in Mallarm's method with the stereotype of unkempt Left Bank pranksters, Bourde had missed the mark. Mallarm and his young followers were not simply old-fashioned bohemians engaged in drunken high jinks and sexual escapades while waiting their turns for respectable bourgeois positions. They were also engaged in new ways of thinking about language, which they knew was the first step to asserting their intellectual supremacy over a culture they described as moribund. All of them, Mallarm and his disciples, wanted power, but they did not seek simply recognition and respectability. They seemed determined to transform how creative process was conceived, practiced, and discussed. Bourde knew well that bohemian scandal made good copy, so he had his own motivations for making an issue of Mallarm's apparent disdain for comprehensibility. The difficulty that he and other critics in the major press had with such intellectual opponents was getting the right kind of response.

At the time of Bourde's attack, Ren Ghil asked the older poet to write a preface to a short book of essays Ghil had prepared, Le Trait du Verbe (Treatise on the Word).21 Mallarm's three-page remarks opening Ghil's book were widely quoted as his reply to the abusive comments that had come his way since his resurfacing as a public figure, yet they float above all hints of controversy to make some general observations on the nature of language. He stressed that poetry existed only because of the double nature of the spoken word. In the examples he provided, this inherent duplicity built into language proves to be of several distinct types that he himself did not distinguish: first, as a vocalization, that is, as sound, a word is an immediate here and now that slips away from one's grasp as soon as it presents itself, remaining only in the sense memory of those within earshot. Yet that same fleeting rumble is also a concept pointing to an abstracted form of reality, always present because it is outside time and freed from the concrete.

As Mallarm put it, "I say: a flower! and . . . a laughable and lofty idea arisesthe absent of all bouquets."22 Mallarm used the word absente , which places emphasis on that which is not present, but might be, an absent experience, an absent presence that can be strongly contrasted with the sense of absence , which denotes lack in general. Words create a

secondary type of experience that echoes the effects of bodily sensationswe almost smell the flowers, we almost see their colorsbut then linguistic experience mocks the body's senses by showing that such effects are not dependent on immediate presence. This would suggest that the possibility of experience per se was already contained within the mind's ability to imagine and invent. Language allows us to experience flowers that have never existed, nor, having taken root in a world only partially overlapping botany, may ever exist. As Mallarm put it, speech "finds in the poet its virtuality ."23

On another level, as a means of exchange, Mallarm noted that the elementary use of words was for everyday practical description. Language is a useful tool for getting various projects done, and when people get together to accomplish a task, they expect a certain precision of meaning. But that precision is not inherent to words, the communicability of which lies in generality. Specificity emerges through processes of negotiation that take place whenever people come into contact. Poetry, on the other hand, is language without any practical purpose whatsoever; it is the site simply of "dream and song." "Dream" in Mallarm's special use should not be confused with material states of slumber, nor is it the unconscious as it would appear ten years later in Freud's writings. The word refers to a state of mind particularly receptive to the flow of sensation because purposive activity has been suspended. It is the place where intellect and sensation are inseparable, because the mind has freed itself from the prison of logic. Dream reveals the predilection to link words together in consistent patterns that spell out a secret history of relationships, desires, and terrors. Language, moving in and out of the body, becomes the site of a history that we no longer think about but which we can still feel when words come together and mysteriously provide a stimulus for feelings we had thought were dead.24 Jules Laforgue, one of the young poets in the Mallarm circle, was quite aware that the older poet's highly controlled reworking of dream was very different from the "unconscious ecstasy" that Laforgue wanted to capture in verse. In his diaries, Laforgue noted of Mallarm's highly refined use of rverie : "This is not the suttering of a child, but a Sage who wanders. . . . His technique is entirely rational, and one often sees that he has altered his first expression."25

Mallarm's knowledge of the play of meaning inherent to language was practical rather than theoretical.26 As he explored and developed the images that constituted his poems, he concluded that the distinctive character of poetry grew from a poet's more or less conscious manipu-

lation of the tensions involved in sorting through the multiple associations that surrounded all representations. In conversation with his disciples, Mallarm stressed the importance of using words that the "whole world" thinks it understands very clearly but then showing how little people knew the words through which they connected the disparate experiences of their lives. "I use only absolutely ordinary words! The same words that the bourgeois reads every morning in his paper, the very same! But there it is in one of my poems, not at all so easy to grasp! That is because it has been rewritten by a poet." In invoking the "atmosphere" surrounding words, poets can make words seem fresh again, as if liberated from the limiting and flat concision of everyday uses. Words, however familiar, become strange and thus as if heard in a dream, but it is a dream that tells a suppressed truth about the nature of the connections one feels with the world.27

Formal rules governing rhythm and rhyme had developed to separate poetry from everyday, descriptive language, but every speech act involved elements of playfulness. People read or listened to poetry for the pleasure it gave them, which was first physical and then intellectual. Demands for moral lessons undermined the associative power that poets revealed but did not create themselves, by inserting a "message" that readers were supposed to learn for their betterment. The idea that literature had moral lessons to convey was therefore a corruption, but nonetheless it was a prejudice that had become dominant. Mallarm pointed to a purer sense of language that preceded all practical uses but was itself not inherently antirational. In that sense his aesthetic theory was "modern" and influenced by contemporary scientific thinking, for Mallarm argued that poetry reflected the most basic conditions of language, not the most advanced, which he conceded to science and philosophy. Poetry involved manipulating the disarticulation of the significatory and physical aspects of speech.

Mallarm's position on the double nature of language echoed the conclusions that Jean-Jacques Rousseau had reached in his "Essay on the Origin of Language" (1755). Rousseau had speculated that since passion and emotion brought people together, while practical needs divided them, language emerged in the course of primitive humans striving to strengthen the emotional effects that their cries and grunts had on each other. Language was first and foremost an exchange of passions, and thus song, or modulated vocalization, had been the primordial form of what would later become the vehicle for reason. "At first only poetry was spoken," Rousseau concluded. The first words were neither abstractions nor

signs, but coincided with feelings that could always be known directly through empathy. Words, he reasoned, "would have to correspond to their initial objects and present to the senses, as well as to the understanding, the almost inevitable impression of the feelings that they seek to communicate." Language persuaded but did not convince. Rather than being signs for concepts, words were symbols of emotions that had been felt in the course of an experience. The first words were "love me!" and "help me!" To express was to experience, so that to speak or hear desire was to achieve pleasure at once. As language developed in the course of being applied to practical needs, it became clearer but also duller and colder because it formed a wall between the speaker and the persons he or she addressed. As language became a purposive tool, it deferred experience instead of fulfilling it. Language no longer conveyed anybody's responsiveness to situations except fortuitously.28

The separation of language from feeling had led to the rise of poets, Rousseau concluded. The power of poets as a professional class rested on their ability to resurrect the ancient primal powers of words that social convention had buried. The distinction between words and what they signified allowed poets to create combinations that had never before been experienced directly but could nonetheless produce interior effects, largely in the emotions. In this effect upon the sensibilities lay that special state of consciousness that Mallarm called the dream. Poetry allowed one to hear the calls of nature, but then to redirect them into an imaginary realm that was the virtual opposite of the immediate and the present. Poetry expressed deep physical and biological urges as they lifted up into a spiritual realm. One could follow those urges that led to further growth and struggle with expressions that pointed back to humanity's brutish origins. Language's double origin meant that discursive experiences might have two distinct types of practicality: the first leading to augmentation of the material world through problem solving, the second leading to the articulation of a spiritualized universe opening entirely new emotional territory for exploration.

Rather than renouncing logic as had Rimbaud and Laforgue, Mallarm stressed that the power of poetry grew from its intersection of the intellectual and the sensational. Lacking either register, a poem was dead. Nature may be every bit as mechanistic as post-Darwinian science seemed to suggest. Mallarm himself had no doubt that the soul was a function of the body and vanished at death. Language, however, did not. It passed from mouth to mouth across generations. Only in that transpiration could be found the intangible yet real world of spiritual life, which would per-

sist as long as words were exchanged and repeated. Poetry might be a secondary by-product of stimulus-response mechanisms, as many learned men of the late nineteenth century argued. Even if language emerged from an ape species expressing desires and fears, Mallarm did not think such origins put any limits on speech processes. Linguistic capability remained in the brain at all times, even when it was not needed. That excess presence was a source of the purely creative. Language's dual nature guaranteed that expression went beyond utilitarian purposes and, simultaneously, that no representation could ever adequately exhaust the symbolic potential of a phenomenon.

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