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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...