scott 88 spacial structure and the prose poem

I Honore Daumier, L'Amateur d'estampes (1860; oil; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia)

PICTORIALIST POETICS ,

POETRY AND THE VISUAL AR TS IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE

DAVID SCOTT Lecturer and Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin

Tlrt right of tlrt Uni'"rsity of Cambridgt

to print and st/I all manntr of books

was granttd by Htnry VIII in IJJ-1.

Tht Uni'llrsily has printtd and publishtd continuowly

sinct 1$84.

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge

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PQ433 .537 1988 Pictcrialist poetics poetry and the visual arts in nineteenth-century France

Published by the Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 IRP

32 East 57th Street, New York, NY 10022, USA 10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3 166, Australia

Cambridge University Press 1988

First published 1988

Printed in Great Britain at the University Press, Cambridge

British Library cataloguing in publication data

Scott, David Pictorialist poetics: poetry and the

visual arts in nineteenth-century France. - (Cambridge studies in French). r. French poetry - 19th century -

History and criticism 2. Art, Modern - 19th century - France 3. Art and

literature I. Title

84r.790 PQ433

Library of Congress cataloguing in publication data Scott, David H. T. Pictorialist poetics

Bibliography. Includes index.

r. French poetry - 19th century - History and criticism. 2. Art and literature - France - History -

19th century. 3. Ut pictura poesis (Aesthetics) 4. Aesthetics, French - 19th century. 5. Picturesque,

The, in literature. I. Title. PQ433-537 1988 841'.8'09357 87-6591

ISBN 0 521 34117 5

SE

REED COLLEGE LIBRARY PORTLAND OREGON 97202

r

For Louis and Georgia

6 'SPATIAL' STRUCTURE AND THE PROSE

POEM

J'aimais !es peintures idiotes ... je me flattai d'inventer un verbe poetique accessible ... a tous Jes sens ... J' ecrivais des silences ... 1

Chapters 4 and 5 showed how nineteenth-century French poets explored, with an increasing degree of self-consciousness, the 'spatial' potential of prosodic structures - whether on the level of rhyme, verse line or strophic forms - with a view to promoting the apprehension of the poem as a quasi-pictorial totality. The implications of this strategy for the other systems operative in poetry -syntactical, linguistic, typographical, phonetic and semantic - were also investigated, the general tendency towards ellipsis and inversion; nominalization; refinement of punctuation; and the complex interaction of semantic and phonetic elements both with each other and with typography, spacing, etc., further promoting the 'spatialization' of the text. The aim of this chapter will be to show how nineteenth-century prose poets, notably Bertrand, Rimbaud and Mallarme,z profiting both from their study of the visual arts and of contemporary verse poetry, contrived to achieve a similar pictorial impact without exploiting the resources of prosody-at least in its coded or conventional forms.

The term 'spatial' will not be used in what follows in the wider and somewhat ambiguous sense employed by Joseph Frank in his famous article 'Spatial Form in Modern Literature'.3 In effect, for Frank, the word 'spatial' means 'anti-temporal' or 'atemporal',4 and he uses it to describe what he sees as being the undermining in modernist literature, especially as exemplified in the work of Joyce, Eliot and Pound, of traditional temporal models: on a structural level, the replacement of the linearity of history and narrative by the synchronicity of myth; on a linguistic level, the gearing of syntax and discourse not so much towards logical sequence as towards juxtaposition.5 Although important elements of Frank's conception of 'spatial' form in literature will be shared by my use of the term, especially on a linguistic and syntactical level, overall it will be understood in a far more literal and specific way. For it seems to me important - especially in the context of poetry - to stress the fact that 'spatial' implies the apprehension of space, that is, the perception of the page itself as a site on which textual elements are arranged or juxtaposed. 'Spatial' texts are those which, in foregrounding the

II6

25 Pieter Breughel, Children's Games (1560; oil; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna)

26 Pieter Breughel, Landscape with Fall of Icarus ( r 560; oil; Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels)

118 'Spatial' structure and the prose poem 119

27 Pieter De Hooch, Courtyard in Delft (16j8; oil; The National Gallery, London)

29 Nicolas Maes, The Eavesdropper (16n; oil; Dordrechts Museum, Dordrecht)

~~~~;~.:- ~ ~ -~-~:".~~~-;;-:~':;:-

120 Pictorialist poetics 'Spatial' structure and the prose poem 121

31 Gerrie Dou, Jeune Femme accrochant un coq a la Jenetre (1650; oil; Musee du Louvre, Paris)

30 Gerrit Dou, A Poulterer's Shop (1650s; oil; The National Gallery, London)

122 Pictorialist poetics

32 Fran~ois Boucher, Peche chinoise (1742; oil; Musee des Beaux-Arts, Besan~on)

'Spatial' structure and the prose poem 123

materiality of the word as a (visual) signifier, depend for their full impact on visual - as well as aural - attention. Literary texts which are 'spatial', furthermore, unlike those of Joyce or Eliot, are those which, in most cases, emerge from a literary tradition saturated with the visual arts, one in which composition is conceived as being partly dependent on the organization of constituent elements within a visible framework. In this way, the interrelationship of the various parts of the text tends to be seized simultaneously or through multiple - and multidirectional - strategies of reading, of which the traditional linear, horizontal model is only one of a variety of options open to the reader.

BERTRAND: 'GASPARD DE LA NUIT'

The remarkable degree to which the characteristics of 'spatial' form, as just outlined, are already developed in French poetry three-quarters of a century before the onset of Modernism is borne out by Aloysius Bertrand's Gaspard de la Nuit, first published in 1842 (a year after the poet's death), but in fact written in the 18zos and 30s. In these Fantaisiesa la maniere de Rembrandt et de Callot, Bertrand so thoroughly explored the spatial potential ofliterature that he was able to invent a new poetic genre, the poeme en prose, the aesthetic integrity of which was not dependent on such traditional prosodic resources as rhyme and verse. Despite having, in Gaspard de la Nuit, no recourse to these latter6 Bertrand's overall strategy as a pictorialist poet nevetheless had much in common with that of the poets examined in chapter 5. For, in paying extreme attention to the way his prose poems presented themselves to the reader as signifying surfaces - in particular with regard to typography and punctuation, spacing of constituent elements and the overall format of the text - and to the way these (formal) systems interacted with linguistic and semantic structures, Bertrand was able to achieve visual effects comparable to those manifested in V erlainian and Mallarmean verse.

In particular, Bertrand was to compensate for the loss of the effects of contrast and juxtaposition afforded by rhyme with the adaptation of pictorial models which were conducive to the creation of such effects in visual terms. This is reflected in the sources Bertrand repeatedly admits to exploiting: Rembrandt and Callot, cited in Gaspard's subtitle; the painters listed in the first poem of'L'Ecole flamande', 'Harlem':

Harlem, cette admirable bambochade qui resume l'ecole flamande, Harlem peint par Jean-Breughel, Peeter-Neef, David-Teniers et Paul Rembrandt . ..

and the more extensive inventory drawn up in his preface: et voici, outre des fantaisies a la maniere de Rembrandt et de Callot, des etudes sur Van-Eyck, Lucas de Leyde, Albert Diirer, Peeter Neef, Breughel de Velours, Breughel d'Enfer, Van-Ostade, Gerard Dow, Salvator-Rosa, Murillo, Fusely et plusieurs autres maitres de differentes ecoles .7


What have all these artists - Flemish, German, Swiss, Italian, French and Spanish, from the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries8 in common? Part of the answer to this question is provided by Bertrand himself earlier in the same preface, in which Rembrandt and Callot are seen as rep-resenting the two antithetical sides of the coin of art, the one (Rembrandt), austere and meditative, the other (Callot), more frivolous and extravert. This polarity is however broadened and nuanced by the wide spectrum of other artists named: the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pre-Romantic painters (Salva tor Rosa, Murillo and Fuseli) seem to gravitate towards the pole of Rembrandt, sharing with the latter the sombre palette, effects of chiaroscuro and tragic mood -the three painters being associated, respectively, with stormy land- or sea-scapes, religious apotheoses, or nightmares, though Murillo was also a notable painter of genre subjects. Diirer, Van Eyck and Lucas van der Leyden, in their sobriety and moral seriousness, are also close to the spirit of Rembrandt. Although Callot, with his famous series of etchings The Miseries of War, is far from being a uniquely light-hearted artist, he is nevertheless seen by Bertrand as representing a pole opposite that of Rembrandt, one around which is grouped a large company of Flemish painters - the Breughels, Pieter Neeffs, David Teniers, Van Ostade and Gerrit Dou. What these latter artists have in common is their affection for the bambochade,9 or genre picture, characterized by an abundance of colour and graphic detail, often humourous or grotesque- see, for example, David Teniers's _Monkrys' Banquet in the Prado Museum, a 'peinture idiote' par excellence. The fact that Rembrandt himself is grouped with three other Flemish bamboccii in the first stanza of 'Harlem' underlines, however, the instability of the polarity Bertrand has attempted to set up, an instability further emphasized by the similarity of Rembrandt and Callot from certain points of view: both were master engravers or etchers, though Rembrandt was above all, of course, a great painter; both were seventeenth-century artists, both of whose work at times betrays a profoundly pessimistic view of life. Ultimately, then, what Bertrand seems to have been seeking was a kind of synthesis of the polar opposites he sets up in the guise of Rembrandt and Callot.10 This would seem to be borne out both by the original title of Gaspard, which was to have been Bambochades romantiques, a formula which expresses the paradoxical synthesis of the comic and the Romantic, and by his addition of the name of Rembrandt to the subtitle which he adapted from E.T. A. Hoffmann's collection of short stories - Phantasiestiicke in Ca/lots lvfanier.

As we shall see, Bertrand benefitted as a poet from the example of this heterogeneous yet polarized selection of artists in a variety of ways, learning from them lessons in the graphic representation of the grotesque or macabre and in the hallucinatory effects that could be created by chiaroscuro or other painterly techniques. Most important of all, however, since it was to have bearing on the formal as well as the thematic development of Bertrand's poetry, was his adaptation of some of the compositional models used by Dutch and Flemish


genre painters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These artists' compositional techniques are too various and complex to investigate thoroughly here, but some examples of their methods of presenting two or more events or images simultaneously will briefly be explored since they are relevant to Bertrand's formal experiments as a prose poet. It seems likely, for example, that the poet of Gaspard learnt something from the pictorial organization of the Breughels' works in which objects and figures are often evenly distributed across the painting (as in, for example, Pieter Breughel's Children's Games, fig. 25). Details are sometimes brought into focus as clearly as principal motifs and there is little trace of the hierarchization of elements generally instituted in Renaissance and post-Renaissance history painting in which certain figures or images dominate the scene at the expense of less important details. Diderot's system of pictorial analysis, cited in chapter 2, geared primarily to 'la grande peinture', would have been oflittle use to Bertrand in his study of the Breughels or of other Flemish painters of this period since their presentation simultaneously of a multitude of diverse actions or events demands an energetic and comparatively free movement of the eye. What happens in a distant and at first relatively overlooked corner of the canvas can be as interesting or significant as what goes on in the foreground of the painting. Pieter Breughel's Landscape with Fall of Icarus is the classic example of this sort of composition: a ploughman, thematically insignificant, occupying the foreground of the canvas, seems oblivious to the distant catastrophe taking place in the corner of the picture and yet which is, in theory at any rate, the subject of the painting (see fig. 26).11

The establishment of a compositional grid which could be used to structure a number of different scenarios, actions or juxtapositions was another practice, common among seventeenth-century Dutch or Flemish artists, from which Bertrand seems to have learned. Pieter de Hooch, for example, invented a framework (Diagram A) of a passageway in a brick courtyard offering a view through a house to a street and building opposite which in two different paintings provided a virtually identical basis for two contrasting scenes. In the Courtyard in Delft ( 165 8; fig. 27) in the National Gallery, London, a mother and her daughter leave the trellised arbour to the right foreground of the picture while at the bottom end of the passageway another female figure, a contre-:Jour, gazes into the street. In Courtyard with an Arbour and Drinkers (1658; fig. 28), two men, seated under the trellised arbour, drink and smoke in the company of a woman who holds a wineglass. Meanwhile, at the near entrance of the passageway, a small child sits with a dog on her lap. In both paintings appears the same epigraph-like inscription over the passage door which supplies a, to a varying degree, oblique comment on the two scenes depicted.12 A similar framework, though more elaborately contrived, both in its rendering of recession and in its glimpses into adjacent rooms, is used by Nicolas Maes in his Eavesdropper (1657; fig. 29), the more explicit title of which underlines the less subtle nature of the treatment

126

~ h

Diagram A De Hooch

Pictorialist poetics

epigraph -bas relief

Diagram B Dou

given to the psychological relationship between the figures in it. 13 In this case, the eavesdropper at the bottom of the passage of stairs on the left is unseen by the amorous couple at the bottom of the passage on the right. The written epigraph in De Hooch's painting is replaced in a similar position in Maes's by the bust of Juno, Goddess of marriage.14

Another compositional model exploited by seventeenth-century Dutch or Flemish genre painters from Rembrandt (see his Lac!J with a Fan, 1641, in the Royal Collection) to Job Berckheyde (The Baker, l 68 l; Worcester Art Museum, Mass., U.S.A.),15 is that of the arched window or vault opening onto a room (see Diagram B). This basic framework was adapted particularly frequently by Gerrit Dou who through a variety of different treatments was able to use the same basic compositional framework to strikingly different effect. Thus the dramatic chiaroscuro of his Astronomer fry Candlelight (late l 6 5 os, Private Collection)16 contrasts with the graphic and colourful detail of the Jeune Femme accrochant un coq a la fenetre ( l 6 5 o; fig. 3 l) or A Poulterer's Shop ( l 65 os; fig. 30 ). Of particular note in the latter work (as also in The Grocer's Shop, in the Royal Collection at Buckingham Palace) is the way the bas-relief in the lower right-hand corner of the picture, depicting the sacrifice of a goat by putti, operates as a kind of visual epigraph to the main scene: while two women in the foreground examine the game displayed in the shop window, in the background, the presumed procurer of the birds and animals, the hunter or gamekeeper, seems to be settling accounts with the shopkeeper.

Commentators on Bertrand and the prose poem from Suzanne Bernard onwards17 have, obtusely it seems to me, criticized the author of Gaspard de la N uit for his consistent recourse to a more or less 'fixed' form of the prose poem, usually


cons1stmg of six well-spaced prose 'stanzas' or 'couplets' (sometimes five or seven) preceded by one or, occasionally, two epigraphs and a title. This is curious in view of the fact that such a structure was consistently adapted by Bertrand precisely because it lent itself most effectively to the dimensions of the page: like the canvas for the painter, the page for the poet was there to be composed and Bertrand's model of the prose poem provided him with a literary equivalent of the compositional models - equivalent in both its unity and relative flexibility -which had been used repeatedly by Dutch or Flemish genre painters. Bertrand's grasp of the principle of composition through juxtaposition is confirmed in particular by his consistent use of the epigraph - even, like De Hooch, using the same epigraph for two different works (as in the per fenestras intrabunt of 'Les Grandes Compagnies' and 'Jacques-les-Andelys', Gaspard, pp. qo and 249). For, like the fragment of text, bas-relief or picture frequently inserted in genre paintings as both a compositional and thematic device,1s Bertrand's epigraphs emphasize both the relationship of simultaneity as much as of sequence of the fragments of text which constitute his poems, and set up a system of spatial cross-reference within the text, allowing a wide range of readings - complementary, contradic-tory or ironic.

No poem in Gaspard de la Nuit illustrates this point and, more generally, Bertrand's transposition into literature of the compositional methods of Flemish genre painters, better than the first poem in 'L'Ecole flamande' - 'Harlem':

Quand d' Amsterdam le coq d' or chantera La poule d' or de Harlem ponder a. Les Centuries de Nostredamus.

Harlem, cette admirable bambochade qui resume l'ecole flamande, Harlem peint par Jean-Breughel, Peeter-Neef, David-Teniers et Paul Rembrandt.

Et le canal ou l'eau bleue tremble, et l'eglise ou le vitrage d'or flamboie, et le Stoel OU seche le linge au soleil, et !es toits, verts de houblon.

Et !es cigognes qui battent des ailes autour de l'horloge de la ville, tendant le col du haut des airs et recevant clans leur bee les gouttes de pluie.

Et !'insouciant bourguemestre qui Caresse de la main son double menton, et l'amoureux fleuriste qui maigrit, I' o:il attache a une tulipe.

Et la bohemienne qui se pime sur sa mandoline, et le vieillard qui joue du Rommelpot, et l'enfant qui enile une vess1e.

Et !es buveurs qui foment clans l'estaminet borgne, et la servante de l'h6tellerie qui accroche a la fenetre un faisan mort.

128 Pictoria!ist poetics

First of all, the idea of simultaneity is expressed by the epigraph which, in announcing the bizarre synchronization of events which take place in Amsterdam and in Harlem, also suggests the oblique and often unexpected relationship which Bertrand institutes or discovers between his epigraph and the text which follows. Inserted like a legende or inscription, the role of which is to announce or explain the content of a picture or illustration, the epigraph can become part of the subject of the text while still maintaining a certain distance or independence from it. The first couplet of 'Harlem' is also epigraph-like to the extent that it develops dis-cursively the implications of the title before the evocation proper which begins only in the second stanza of the poem. In defining what is to follow - a bambochade in the Flemish manner, the first couplet also underlines the multiplicity of viewpoints that will be offered: Harlem as painted not by one but by four different artists, a multiplicity which will be evoked more or less simultaneously by the following couplets which proffer diverse images according to no dis-cernible system of priority or hierarchy. Thus, as when faced with, say, the picturesque profile of a town portrayed in Vermeer's View of Delft, the mind's eye of the reader confronting the second stanza of 'Harlem' is struck equally by the various details of the scene depicted. Similarly, the reader/observer's attention is, in theory, equally divided amongst the various couplets which follow, all of which contain intensely visual images, in each case juxtaposed, rather than linked, by the neutral conjunction: et, repeated twelve times in the last five stanzas. Only the images placed at the end of each couplet - in, as it were, the rhyme-position -and, in particular, that placed at the end of the poem, and which thus benefit from a kind of spatial prominence, attract special attention. This attention is further stimulated in the case of 'l'ceil attache a une tulipe' and the dead pheasant framed by the window, which are images providing the viewer with a reflection of his or her own visual activity (the eye) or of a model of pictorial representation (the frame). The structure of Bertrand's text thus, with its juxtaposition of apparently discrete elements and yet constant reference, direct or oblique, to visual processes, l9 has the effect not so much of foregrounding, as in history painting, narrativeZO or symbolic links21 through hierarchical composition or coded gesture, but rather of stimulating in the reader/observer an awareness of his or her own act of reading or observation.

The esthitique de la discontinuite22 which characterizes Bertrand's approach to composition is also a function of the disparate nature of his images' sources. Unlike his contemporary Gautier, Bertrand's aim as a pictorialist poet was never reallv that of systematic transposition. As H. van der Tuin has shown, the pictures studied by Bertrand 'ne sont pas entres tels quels dans son ceuvre litteraire. Ils n'ont servi que de motifs'.23 Like Goya's Los Caprichos in the context of Baudelaire, the advantage to Bertrand of genre painting and some of Callot's series of etchings (such as The Complete Beggars, The Grotesque Dwarfs or Gobbi, The Complete Fantasies, etc.) was that they supplied a wide range of motifs which could


easily be detached from their context and reintegrated into a different setting. The creation of new and striking juxtapositions of images from different sources constitutes in effect the basis of Bertrand's technique as a poet, one which he developed to such a degree of refinement that it is difficult to identify with certainty the pictorial origins of even the most spectacular images. Thus the final image of 'Harlem', already noted, of the girl hanging up a dead pheasant in a window, may have its source in one of a number ofGerrit Dou's paintings24 or in Rembrandt,25 while the image of the 'vieillard qui joue du Rommel pot' and the 'enfant qui enfle une vessie' may be based on Frans Hals,26 the latter motif also appearing in Breughel's famous painting, Children's Games ( 15 60; fig. 2 5 ). The same applies to etchings and engravings. Although Rembrandt's subtle use of chiaroscuro in his engravings and the incisive delineation of the picturesque or grotesque in Callot's etchings was to have a marked impact on Bertrand's choice and presentation of images, it is often difficult to relate a given motif to a specific visual source. Although there can be little doubt that in Callot's Gobbi or Grotesque Dwarfs (two of which are reproduced in fig. 13), Bertrand discovered a crys-tallization in visual terms of the imagined demons, in particular the figure of Scarbo, the 'nain railleur', which haunted the nocturnal chambers evoked in 'La Chambre gothique', 'Scarbo', 'Le Nain', etc., images which have their origin in Rembrandt are more difficult to isolate. As Max Milner has suggested (Gaspard, pp. 21-2), it was perhaps a certain contemplative atmosphere as much as specific visual motifs that Bertrand derived from the painter of The Philosopher and The Night Watch.

A further interesting dimension to this problem is provided by the fact that Bertrand himself had intended Gaspard de la N uit to be illustrated, and included in his list of details for illustration both the 'servante a l'hotellerie' of 'Harlem' and the 'gnome qui se soule de l'huile de ma lampe' of'La Chambre gothique'.27 This ambiguous relationship between source image, text and illustration, in which the poem is the pivot between two different transpositional activities, is significant in the more general context of the nineteenth-century prose poem. For the aim of the latter (in the context of Rimbaud and Mallarme as well as that of Bertrand) seems often to have been, in creating a text which incorporated in itself, as it were, its own illustration, to resolve the problem of the relationship, rarely satisfactory, between text and illustrative image. The disappointment of the illustration which, because too explicit, too visible even, reduces a considerable part of the text's suggestive potential, is well known. As Mallarme said, 'Je suis pour -aucune illustration, tout ce qu'evoque un livre devant se passer dans l'esprit du lecteur .. . '(MOC, p. 878). The solution to this problem seems to be either, as with Blake (who was in the privileged position of being able to illustrate his own texts), to institute an oblique and ambiguous relationship between text and image,28 in which the illustration becomes a kind of visual epigraph to the text; or, as is the case with the French poets we are concerned with here, to transpose


visual images into texts, maintaining as far as possible their graphic qualities through the exploitation of 'spatial' structures and typographical artifice.

No nineteenth-century French poet knew better than Bertrand that 'clans typographique il y a graphique',29 and his altogether modern intuition of the visual possibilities of the text is confirmed by the infinite care he took in planning his poems' mise en page. Bertrand knew that he could isolate certain images or groups of images through the use of different sizes of character and that the smallest typographical indications (stars, asterisks) could signal important developments. Thus, in his instructions to the typesetter, he insists on the necessity of placing: clans la mise en page les etoiles ... figurees clans le manuscrit entre les couplets de quelques pieces, et qui indiquent qu'il faut en outre un double blanc.

Quand aux epigraphes de chaque piece ... je le prie de les composer en tres petits caracteres. (Gaspard, p. 302)

The various formal units of the text (epigraph, introductory couplets, subsequent stanzas) are thus made to stand out as visually differentiatable, the totality of the poem being, in most cases, visible in its entirety and framed by the white margin of the page. The importance of the intrusion of b/ancs into the text is also stressed by Bertrand in his instructions to the metteur en page when he asserts as a general rule the necessity to - 'Blanchir comme si le texte etait de la poesie ... [Jeter] de larges b/ancs entre [les] couplets comme sic' etaient des strophes en vers' (Gaspard, p. 301). The effect of this, as we noted above, was to spatialize the relationship between the various elements of the text, giving rise, in the words of Max Milner, to a:

poesie spatiale, ou le lecteur parcourt un es pace, prend possession d'une multiplicite dont il articule les elements selon une combinatoire suggeree par !'auteur, mais en laissant entre eux assez de jeu pour procluire [un] miroitement kaleidoscopique. (Gaspard, p. 28)

Milner also compares Bertrand's technique to that of a 'maitre-verrier' (Gaspard, p. 29) and although he does not develop this analogy, there is plenty of evidence for doing so given the obsessive repetition in Gaspard of images of windows or optical and lighting effects. Indeed the image of the window suggests itself as a structural model for the text in which the stanzas or couplets are the panes of glass arranged in squares or lozenges. For it is above all by his division of the visual field into sections - either by the insertion of extraneous elements (such as the epigraph, a fragment from another text inserted into the poem like an escutcheon or coat of arms in a church or castle window) or by the juxtaposition of the various formal units - that Bertrand manages to create the bizarre hallucinatory or kaleidoscopic effects which characterize his poems. Thus, as was suggested above, the aim of Gaspard de la N uit seems to have been in part that of exploring as far as possible the act of seeing, the role of each poem being, in effect, to recreate, in the manner of the painter or engraver, the experience of

'Spatial' structure and the prose poem I 3 I

v1s1on, especially of vision deformed by illusion or hallucination.30 In 'La Chambre gothique', the distorted nocturnal view of the earth as 'un calice embaume dont le pistil et les etamines sont la lune et les etoiles' is perceived by eyes 'lourds de sommeil' through a window 'qu'incrusta la croix du calvaire, noire clans la jaune aureole des vitraux'. In 'Ondine', the illusion of the fairy's presence is created in the first couplet by the raindrops falling on 'les losanges sonores de [la] fenetre illuminee par les mornes rayons de la lune' and disappears only at the end of the poem 'en giboulees qui ruisselerent blanches le long [des] vitraux bleus'. 31 And in 'Le Clair de lune', the perception, in the first couplet of a grotesque but still inoffensive moon: 'Oh! qu'il est doux, quand l'heure tremble au clocher, la nuit, de regarder la lune qui a le nez fait comme un carolus d'or!' undergoes, in the following stanzas, a gradual modification - suggested, no doubt, in part, by the sinister and morbid cry of the crieur de nuit cited in the epigraph - which results in the disquieting and hallucinatory, but intensely graphic, image of the final couplet: 'Et moi, il me semblait, - tant la fievre est incoherente! - que la lune, grimant sa face, me tirait la langue comme un pendu!' Thus, like medieval stained glass or modern comic strips, Bertrand creates, through the various subdivisions of his text, an essentially diagrammatic or illustrative pattern of development.

RIMBAUD: 'ILLUMINATIONS'

Rimbaud's creative methods in the Illuminations have much in common with those of Bertrand except that they are more radical and concentrated than those of his predecessor and exploit a far greater variety of formal options. Whereas Bertrand adopted a format which he was to use more or less consistently throughout Gaspard de la Nuit, with only minor variations in length and number of stanzas, the form of the poems in the Illuminations is much less fixed. Nevertheless, they share a certain regularity of profile, the vast majority con-sisting of dense and concentrated blocks of prose3Z easily accommodated by a single page. As texts indeed, like those in Gaspard, they present themselves essentially as individual pages, only half a dozen texts (out of forty-two) over-running the page by a few lines (excluding the small group of composite texts, such as 'Vies', 'Phrases', 'Veillees', 'Enfance' and 'Jeunesse', which are divided into several short passages).

Likewise, the systematic spacing of the internal constituents of the text follows in Rimbaud's work a principle similar to that in Bertrand's, except that, once again, Rimbaud is more various and experimental in his approach. Extending and radicalizing Bertrand's use of the neutral conjunction 'et', as noted above in 'Harlem', Rimbaud has increasing recourse to punctuation alone as a spacing device, as in the more or less systematic use of dashes and semi-colons we shall observe in such poems as 'Ornieres', 'Promontoire' and 'Fete d'hiver'.33 Where

I 32 Pictoria!ist poetics

Bertrand had spaced out his images and phrases, Rimbaud will often attempt a more abrupt confrontation without, however, risking fusion: the heterogeneity of his images is safeguarded by a punctuation promoting juxtaposition rather than liaison.

As with Gaspard de la N uit, references to painting and the graphic arts in the Illuminations34 are many and varied, ranging from vague though suggestive allusions to painterly themes:

A quelque fete de nuit clans une cite du Nord, j'ai rencontre toutes lcs femmes des anciens peintres ..

to the sensitive analysis of colour and light: Impossible d'exprimer le jour mat produit par le ciel immuablement gris ...

and of pictorial structure: la mer etagee la-haut comme sur les gravures.

('Vies,' m)

('Villes')

('A pres le deluge')

Most indicative, however, of Rimbaud's orientation towards the visual arts is his choice of title and proposed subtitle for the prose poems: Illuminations, Coloured Plates. For the conception of the text as an illustration or coloured plate seems to confirm that Rimbaud, like Bertrand and other nineteenth-century prose poets, saw the poem as being auto-illustrative, as absorbing into itself the graphic or pictorial qualities of the visual arts. Unlike Bertrand, however, Rimbaud did not seek inspiration in the work of the great European masters of painting, whether in prestigious or more lowly genres. Boucher, the only painter named in the Illuminations, is the nearest he gets to European high art, and even here it is the Boucher of the carpet designs and chinoiseries rather than the history painter who exhibited in the Salons of the mid-eighteenth century.35 This relative lack of specific reference to painters or their works, compared with the plethora of names cited in Bertrand's or Gautier's writings, confirms the trend, noted in chapter 3 in the context of Baudelaire, towards a broader and more synthetic approach, in the later poetry of the century, to an increasingly wide range of visual sources. Interesting himself even less than Bertrand in straightforward transposition d'art, manifesting enthusiasm for no painter in particular - either past or con-temporary ,36 Rimbaud, it seems, was stimulated rather by the idea of painting in general; that is as a relatively undifferentiated source of visual motifs and structures.37 Ignoring the masterpieces of the museums and the academic painting of the Salons, Rimbaud preferred those images - cheap prints, illustrations and vignettes, shop signs, theatre and fairground decors - the very incongruity of whose pictorial structure set them apart from conventional models of art. In this respect, the catalogue of visual sources he draws up in 'Alchimie du verbe' is as revealing in the context of the Illuminations as the inventory of painters made by Bertrand in the preface of Gaspard de la Nuit:

'Spatial' structure and the prose poem I 3 3

J'aimais !es peintures idiotes, dessus de portes, decors, toiles de saltimbanques, enseignes, enluminures populaires; la litterature demodee, latin d'cglise, livres erotiques sans orthographe, romans de nos a!eules, contes de fees, petits livres de l'enfance, operas vieux, refrains niais, rhythmes na1fs. (Oeuvres, p. 228)

Of particular interest is the interpenetration of text and image which characterizes the sources listed here; for, if those items in the first half of the passage (up to the semi-colon) appear primarily visual in their appeal, and those in the second half, textual or musical, closer inspection reveals that in fact, in nearly all cases, the media are mixed: just as operas have decors and children's books have illustrations, so signs and enluminures are associated with texts, even if only a few words or phrases. The attraction to Rimbaud of the objects cited seems precisely to lie in the naive or bizarre mixture (the terms naif, idiot, niais he uses are worth underlining here) of image and text that they propose, a mixture potentially rich in improbable yet suggestive juxtapositions.Just, then, as Flemish genre painting seems to have suggested to Bertrand pictorial structures adaptable to his prose poems, so the sources Rimbaud cites appear to have offered semiotic models he could recreate in composing his own texts.

An important lesson Rimbaud seems to have learned from the naive image, painted or engraved, was that there is no fixed hierarchy of pictorial values. For the poet of the Illuminations, therefore, the conventional structures and codes of visual representation perspective, verisimilitude of colour, certain compositional models - are not seen as being especially privileged. On the contrary, in expressing his vision of the world, Rimbaud will try to abstract, in Suzanne Bernard's words 'toutes les notions intellectuelles qui etablissent entre les objets des rapports, des lignes de demarcation'.38 In reconstructing the elements of his vision in linguistic terms, he will thus constantly stress surface values both of the text itself and the images it proposes. Avoiding gradations or depth, he will try, like the naive painting, to keep everything in the foreground. In' A pres le deluge', the sea is envisaged not as receding into the background as in classical seascapes but as being 'etagee la-haut comme sur les gravures'. In the same poem, the bizarre image of 'Madame *** [qui] etablit un piano clans les Alpes' (an image the source of which may well have been in some naive enseigne or peinture idiote), has the effect of telescoping the foreground and background of our field of vision. Like the children evoked in this poem who 'clans la grande maison de vitres encore ruisselante ... regarderent les merveilleuses images', the reader of the Rimbaldian text is confronted with a series of surfaces constructed of multiple fragments which fuse only in the kaleidoscopic movement of reading.

Another technique Rimbaud learned from illustrated or children's books and applied in his prose poems was the reduction of the narrative or syntagmatic impetus of the phrase in the interests of promoting in it something more like the stasis of the image. Unlike the sign-painter or book illustrator, the poet was not of course able literally to frame his fragments of text in pictorial motifs and the

I 34 Pictoria!ist poetics

commitment, in most of the Illuminations, to prose meant that prosodic options such as rhyme and the short verse line could not be exploited as stabilizing or spatializing devices. In attempting to isolate certain elements or phrases, then, the prose poet had at his disposal only the resources - grammatical, punctuational, typographical, rhythmic - which, in theory, were equally available to conven-tional prose. Nevertheless, by instituting a new economy and purposefulness in his use of the regular organizational procedures of prose, Rimbaud was able to create remarkable effects, particularly with respect to the image.

First, he succeeded in reducing the linearity of the text through the application of a whole range of procedures geared towards the fragmentation of discourse and phrase. Logical or narrative links are thus systematically cut, using ellipses, juxtaposition, spacing- even within the context of an individual phrase. The first sentence of'Apres le deluge', for example, a curious amalgam of Biblical style and children's book, is set out in two versets:

Aussit6t apres que l'idee du Deluge se fut rassise,

Un lievre s'arreta clans Jes sainfoins et Jes clochettes mouvantes et dit sa priere a l'arc-en-ciel a travers la toile de l'araignee ...

The verse ts which follow consist of a series of narrative fragments, of apostrophes or of heterogeneous images, juxtaposed by spacing and by a punctuation heavily reliant on dashes. This text demonstrates, in fact, the wide range of methods used by Rimbaud in transforming fragments of prose into poetry, in particular the elevation to the status of poetic image of scraps of story or description.

If to poeticize and to spatialize become, in the context of the Illuminations more or less synonymous, it is not only through spacing that this spatialization is effected. As texts such as 'Apres le deluge', 'Aube' or the free verse poems 'Marine' and '11ouvement' show, Rimbaud was, as much as Bertrand and Mallarme, aware of the important role blancs play in the creation of poetic effects. But it is the manner in which Rimbaud succeeds in spatializing the internal elements of isolated fragments of prose of varying length which distinguishes his technique as a prose poet. It is here that punctuation, in particular the use of semi-colons and dashes, will play a fundamental role.

The prose poem 'Ornieres' provides an interesting example both of the new relationship instituted in Rimbaud's prose poetry between image and syntagmatic energies and the role of punctuation in regulating the tension between the two impulses:

A droite l'aube d'ete eveille Jes feuilles et !es vapeurs et !es bruits de ce coin du pare, et Jes talus de gauche tiennent clans leur ombre violette !es mille rapides ornieres de la route humide. Defile de feeries. En effet: des chars charges d'animaux de bois dore, de

'Spatial' structure and the prose poem

mats et de toiles bariolccs, au grand galop de vingt chevaux de cirque tachetes, et !es enfants et !es hommes sur leurs betes !es plus Ctonnantes; - vingt vehicules, bosses, pavoiscs et fleuris comme des car-rosses ancicns ou de contes, pleins d'enfants attifes pour une pastorale suburbaine. - Meme des cercueils sous leur dais de nuit dressant des panaches d'cbene, filant au trop des grandes juments bleues et noires.

I 3 5

'Ornieres', like 'Promontoire', is divided into two parts, the first of which, relatively short, plays the role of overture or exposition, and the second, very long, consists of a detailed and complex elaboration of the scene announced in the first. We are thus, in a sense, confronted by two texts, of which the former, active and indicative, outlines the theme of which the latter, passive39 and appositional, provides an illustration. The structure of 'Ornieres' is, in fact, like that of Bertrand's 'Harlem' in which, as we saw, a discursive opening stanza is followed by a series of illustrations. Thus, in the first sentence of 'Ornieres', which contains the only active verbs in the poem, both present indicative, the visual field is divided into two contrasting sections, the right hand side lit by the dawn, the left still in shadow. The generality of these features is marked by the systematic use of the plural: 'A droite ... !es feuilles et !es vapeurs et !es bruits' (note the use of conjunctions in the manner of Bertrand), 'et les talus de gauche ... !es mille rap ides ornieres de la route' .4o This sentence is followed by a fragment- 'Defile de feeries', the isolated and inactive form of which makes it look more like a heading or title than a phrase. Its role is, in fact, that of announcing the three hallucinatory visions which follow, visions juxtaposed through the simple insertion of two dashes with semi-colon or full stop.

Unlike R. Riese Hubert in her analysis of this text, it does not seem to me that the funereal quality of the last of the three processions evoked 'finit par abolir' the overall vision, nor that they deploy themselves 'sur un plan horizontal ... et finiront par s'enfoncer clans la nuit'.41 On the contrary, the funeral cortege is viewed, in a deliberate paradox, in terms as lively and gay as those of the preceding processions, what Rimbaud is proposing here being less a linear evocation than a hallucinatory superimposition of images both linked and contrasting. Moreover, it is significant that, avoiding such adverbs as 'puis' or 'ensuite', which would have facilitated the logical and temporal progression of the phrase, Rimbaud contents himself with 'Me me des cercueils .. .' The role of Rimbaldian punctuation is, then, precisely to maintain his images in a state of suspense, in a state of simultaneity which recreates, as far as is possible in linguistic terms, the effect of visual illustration.

It is in this way that the Rimbaldian text, opening with an active and rapid exposition of a theme, soon transforms itself into a pure juxtapositon of elements organized in a spatial or illustrative manner. In his original and exhaustive


analysis of 'Promontoire', Atle Kittang explains how a landscape 'se trouve soudain transforme en surface picturale',42 and, in effect, the same structure of expositional dynamic followed by juxtapositional stasis noted in 'Ornieres' is operative here. The only difference is that it is given even more radical and extended application:

L',\ube d'or ct la soiree frissonnante trouvent notre brick en large en face de cette \-illa ct de ses dcpcndances, qui forment un promontoire aussi Ctendu que l'Epire et le Peloponnese, ou que la grande ile du Japon, ou que l' Arabie' Des fanums qu'eclaire la rentree des theories, d'immenses \'UCS de )a defense des cotes modernes; des dunes illustrees de chaudes fleurs et de bacchana)es; de grands canaux de Carthage et des Embankments d'une Venise louche; de molles eruptions d'Etnas ct de crn-asscs de fleurs et d'eaux des glaciers; des lavoirs entoures de peupliers d' Allemagne; des talus de pares singuliers penchant des tetes d'Arbre du Japon; les fac;:ades circulaires des 'Royal' ou des 'Grand' de Scarbro' ou de Brooklyn; et leurs railways flanquent, creusent, surplombent les dispositions de cet Hotel, choisies dans l'histoire des plus elegantes et des plus colossales constructions de l'ltalie, de l' Amerique et de l' Asie, dont les fenerres et les terrasses a present pleines d'eclairagcs, de boissons et de brises riches, sont ouvertes a !'esprit des voyageurs et des nobles -qui permettent, aux heures du jour, a toutes !es tarentelles des cotes, - et meme aux ritournelles des Yallees illustres de !'art, de decorer merveilleusement les fac;:ades du Palais-Promontoire.

As with 'Ornieres', then, a preliminary sentence evoking the title word and subject of the poem, is followed by a vast juxtapositional construction in which seven fragments of varying length (the last constituting approximately half of the text), separated by six semi-colons, explore the various aspects of the 'promontoire' theme. In this way the pictorial effect of the poem begins to assert itself on the level of signifiers as well as signifieds. For in citing a plethora of proper nouns, all names of places whether towns (Carthage, Venice, Scarborough, Brooklyn), countries or geographical regions (Epirus, the Peloponnese, Japan, Arabia, America, Asia), buildings (the 'Royal', the 'Grand' the 'Palais-Promontoire'), etc. - Rimbaud erects a verbal structure in which capital letters, systematically repeated, thicken the texture of the poem, pro-jecting the signifier sharply into the foreground, creating thus a textual surface or ja(ade which dazzles and fascinates the reader as much as the imaginary vision signified behind the words.

Kittang notes that this tendency towards the 'retrait du signifie' is general in the Illuminations and in confirming that 'Promontoire' represents the extreme example, goes so far as to say that the role of the text is to 's'effacer, en tant que signifie, devant l'espace multiple du signifiant' in order to 'fournir une fa~ade, un espace vide, une toile pour le dynamisme decoratif et "merveilleux" de l'ecriture' .43 This is a seductive thesis and well argued by Kittang in what is probably the best study to date of Rimbaud's poetry; but it is, I think, taken a little too far. For the Illuminations are not concrete poetry and the fascination and challenge that they offer the reader is precisely in the tension they set up between the sensuality of the signifying surface and the lure of the imaginative vision embedded in the signifieds. No text illustrates this point better perhaps than 'Fete

'.Spatial' structure and the prose poem 1 37

d'hiver', for this poem - surprisingly overlooked, not only by Kittang but also by other commentators44 _in setting itself up as what seems to be a purely decorative surface nevertheless suggests a pattern of signifieds rich in pictorial reverberations:

La Cascade sonne derriere !es huttes d'opera comique. Des girandoles prolongent, clans les vergers et !es allees voisins du Meandre, - !es verts et les rouges du couchant. Nymphes d'Horace coiffees au Premier Empire, - Rondes Siberiennes, Chinoises de Boucher.

The structure of this short text is generally analogous to that of 'Ornieres' and 'Promontoire': a first part consisting of two descriptive sentences, fully articulated (two present active verbs), is followed by fragments of phrase the relationship of which is purely juxtapositional. The use of the dash, as in 'Ornieres' and 'Promontoire', is again notable here and again primarily aesthetic in function. For in liberating the phrase 'les verts et !es rouges du couchant' from any exclusive obligation to the sentence to which, grammatically it is attached, it becomes free to illuminate with its lurid colours the bizarre and heterogeneous elements proposed in the following phrase: 'Nymphes d'Horace coiffees au Premier Empire, - Rondes Siberiennes, Chinoises de Boucher'. Here again the role of the dash is purely juxtapositional, the numerous capital letters - 'Nymphes d'Horace', 'Premier Empire', 'Rondes Siberiennes', 'Chinoises de Boucher' -having a similar effect to that noted in 'Promontoire', that is, of foregrounding the signifying surface of the poem as an aesthetic decor. This decor is, however, immeasurably enriched by the signifieds attached to the proper names, in particular that of Boucher which, in conjunction with the mention of'Chinoises', conjures up a vision of Boucher's numerous chinoiseries (see for example, Peche chinoise, fig. 32), a number of which, in the form of engravings, had been reproduced by L' Artiste in the 1 86os, that is, in the decade immediately preceding the composition of 'Fete d'hiver'. 45 Boucher's chinoiseries are 'peintures idiotes' par excellence, in the rococo dynamics of their composition (Peche chinoise is a kind of variation on the motif of the curve - from the central meander of the river to the costumes, poses, architecture and vegetation of the scene) and in their curiously heterogeneous and anachronistic mixture of periods and styles (an eighteenth-century European landscape back-drop cluttered with oriental bric-a-brac, female figures a la Pompadour, dolled up in Chinese costume). In this way they supplied all the elements Rimbaud needed to reconstruct a charming but incongruous imaginative vision, one which, as we have seen, he was able to recreate both on the level of signifier and signified.

A point that has frequently been stressed in this chapter is that an important ambition of the prose poem as practised by nineteenth-century French poets, was to integrate into the text its own illustration. Now it seems that the relation text/illustration is not unrelated to that of signifier/signified in so far as, unlike conventional prose, the prose poem is a text which tries to foreground the


signifier by allowing it to absorb into itself as many as possible of the resources of the signified. It is in this sense that it becomes 'poetic'. The remarkable achievement of Bertrand and Rimbaud was to have succeeded in balancing the tension between the two different semiotic or signifying systems operative in their prose poems. For in avoiding the trivialization of the visual image through over-explicit illustration (as in some of Apollinaire's Calligrammes) or the disintegration of the text through its reduction to isolated words or even letters (as in much modern concrete poetry), they were able to propose images which were both spatial and textual, which offered both the impact of the graphic image and yet retained the complex ambiguity of suggestive poetry.46

MALLARME: 'UN COUP DE DES'

The dynamics of spatiality and textuality in poetry were to be investigated in an nTen more radical manner by the author of Un coup de Des47 for Mallarme was the first modern poet fully to articulate the page, both as a concept (the 'armature intellectuelle du poeme', MOC, p. 872) and as the white surface on which the words were printed, while, at the same time, extending more or less to their limits the intrinsic structures of language. To structure the page became, in effect, for Mallarme, an essential part of the art of poetry. As J. Scherer confirms: ~Iallarme considerait une page d'un livre comme une unite, clans laquelle ii y avait lieu d'introduire une construction, tout comme clans ccs autres unites que sont la phrase ou le vers ... A la confection de ces pages, unites visuelles, ii apporte tous ses soins ... Lorsqu'il voudra ecrire le Liin, la page sera !'element constitutif essentiel de son entreprise.48

Un coup de Des represents a similarly ambitious attempt to explore the relationship between the artistic text and its support. But how does a writer structure the page?

In conventional reading and writing, the page goes largely unnoticed. It is taken for granted and has been so in particular since the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century when its role became that of accommodating as many words as clarity and legibility would allow. It presents itself evenly and systematically covered with print, 'cette unite artificielle, jadis, mesuree en bloc au livre' as Mallarme puts it (JWOC, p. 367). The modern extension of this convention is visible above all in the novel, in which all articulation is achieved by language, excluding the page and, with it, the initiative of the reader. As Mallarme wrote to Zola in connection with the latter's Une Page d' amour:

alors, tout est dit ct le poeme est contenu, tout en tier, clans le livre comme en !'esprit du lecteur, sans c1ue par une !acune quefconqtte on puisse y laisser penetrcr de soi, ni re\er a cote. (lvIC n, p. 172)

As Mallarme saw it, it was one of poetry's functions to adapt the page as a safeguard of the interests of the reader. It had, of course, nearly always done this, though mostly unconsciously, through the conventions of prosody. It was apt, if ironic, that in exploring the poetic potential of the poeme en prose, Mallarme should


seize the opportunity of reinstating 'prosodic' space into prose itself. As he writes in the preface to Un coup de Des:

Les 'blancs' en effet, assument !'importance, frappent d'abord; la versification en exigea, comme silence alentour, ordinairement, au point qu'un morceau, lyrique ou de peu de pieds, occupe, au milieu, le tiers environ du feuillet: je ne transgresse cette mesure, seulement la disperse.

(MOC, p. 45 5)

What are the implications of this reinstatement of the page, literally, the writing of the page back into the text? As the last two chapters of this study have shown, in the work of Mallarme's immediate predecessors and contemporaries, as in his own verse poetry, the relationship between text and page increasingly became one both of tension and complementarity. In inviting the page back into the text, the poem enhances its own profile and visual impact, but at the cost of a certain dislocation of language's intrinsic functions, especially those associated with linear advance: syntax and the logic of proposition. The page thus asserts itself both as an ironic denial of language's positive, rational gestures and as a potentially symbolic field, capable, silently, of reverberating, extending or enlarging the irrational or unconscious implications of the text. In a sense it seems that Mallarme is attempting, by composing the page, to bring nearer to consciousness those unconscious areas of experience - vague traces of myth, desire or anguish - that language itself never fully articulates. In doing so, he was to adopt a number of strategies.

The most obvious of these relates to typography. In the printing of Un coup de Des, Mallarme opted for the use of eight different typefaces, three of which appear both as Romans and italics, constituting thus six different characters, the remaining five being either Roman (three) or italic (two), offering thus a total of eleven different character styles.49 In this way, Mallarme is able to hierarchize the structure of the page and also the thinking process: the use of different typographical series on the same page makes it possible to present several lines or levels of thought more or less simultaneously. To this extent, Un coup de Des represents an extension and refinement of Mallarme's customarily parenthetic style. As Scherer has noted in his analysis of Mallarmean syntax:

La place considerable qu'occupent Jes incidentes et !es incises clans la phrase de Mallarme entraine ... des consequences importantes. Ces perperuelles enclaves, qui trouent sans cesse la phrase, \' determinent des differences de niveau ...

This 'difference des plans' implies, as Scherer continues, a new kind of structure, instituting 'etages, qui vont permettre une etude de la profondeur de la phrase'.50 In other words, Un coup de Des proposes a spatial representation, a diagrammatic portrayal of the hierarchical levels implicit in linear discourse which, as Scherer shows in his Grammaire de Mallarme, 51 it is possible to impose on some of Mallarme's more conventionally laid out passages of prose. Whereas, however, in most Mallarmean prose, the main clause may be fragmented or suspended over as


much as a paragraph, in Un coup de Des it becomes a matter of pages. Thus the massive capitals of the poem's main proposition, dwarfing the other typographi-cal characters, are spread over four pages - ( z b ), (3 b ), (6b ), (rob) [seen. 4 7] -- like an epigraph:

UN COUP DE DES // J AMAIS // N' ABOLIRA II LE HASARD In a sense, Mallarme's Un coup de Dis represents an attempt to spread the impact of a single page over twelve, to create the impression of simultaneity within sequence. The large capitals, engraving themselves on the reader's mind, become an ever-present backdrop to the more detailed and extensive ramifications of thinking explored over the successive pages in the smaller type. The first major qualification of the title/epigraph statement is also in capitals, though smaller, and again is spread over a number of pages - (3 b ), (4a), (5 a), ( IOb ), ( r r) and ( r z): QUAN D B IE N '.I.IE lvl E LANCE DANS DES CIR C 0 NS TAN CE S ET ERNE LL ES / DU FOND D'UN NAUFRAGE //soIT // LE MAirRE // EXISTAT-IL /coM'.'.1EN


degrees of repercussion in the larger context of the poem. Whereas the phrases in miniscule Roman and italic typefaces are strictly local, qualifying only the respective clusters of capitals to which they are attached (these two typefaces appear nowhere else in the poem), the other four sets of phrases, as we have seen, relate to preceding and/or following sets of typographically matching proposi-tions. It is this sense of parts of the text being pulled in different directions which gives rise to the seemingly inchoate and asymmetrical structure of this page. In spatializing, in this way, the normally horizontal and consecutive dynamics of language, Mallarme is attempting to illustrate diagrammatically the complex processes of human thought, to give expression to the irregular and evanescent meanderings of reverie as well as to the more consistent and consequential logic of rational thinking. In exploring the tensions between impulse and argument, desire and knowledge, Mallarme tries to be sensitive to all features, however small, of the mental landscape.

Mallarme's choice of the double page as the basic formal unit of Un coup de Des reflects both his understanding of the dynamics of the reading process and his

~'\ ~

: '\ '\ '\

'\ '\

'\ '\

'\ '\

Diagram C

'\ '\

'\

('\'\~ o~ 0 .,

'-, . '-,

', '-,

'-,

Diagram D

.................. : ':,~ .

1'--.;.,_ : : : '-...... . ' ' . ' ' ~ 1 ~ ',('', ~

: . o'-,: ~ 1 : 30 "'

concern to exploit the diagrammatic potential of the page. Conceiving of the work as a set of prints ('Au fond, des estampes' he wrote in a letter to Camille Mauclair (MC1x, p. 288)), he looked upon the double page as an aesthetic totality, one which, nevertheless, as a text, was bound to reflect to a certain extent the dynamics of conventional reading. In the Western world, these are essentially diagonal, the reader's gaze progressively moving in a zig-zag pattern from top left to lower right of the page53 - see Diagram C. Mallarme's adoption of the double page in Un coup de Des was to bring about a modification both of the dynamics of reading and of the conception of the page as a space. First, the wider format provided by the double leaf offered a panoramic vision of the text and page. Although the central margins of the pages continued to be observed, that is,

,...--

'Spatial' structure and the prose poem 1 43

they were not printed over, the reader/observer in effect perceives the adjacent verso and recto as a totality, reading across the double sheet, the marked horizontal orientation of which54 is in noticeable contrast to the verticality of the single page. In this way, the double page approximates to something more like the 'landscape' format in painting. Second, the doubling of the area of the page has the effect of lengthening the diagonal trajectory of reading and thus of reducing the gradient of its descent from around 5 o 0 to 30 from horizontal (see Diagrams C and D). In this way, the reader is given a fuller view of the totality of the text and the rate of reading is markedly reduced. The helter-skelter rhythm of normal reading, as the eye follows a zig-zagging trajectory down the page, is superseded by a more leisurely and meandering descent in which parentheses or other outlying clusters of words are absorbed at different tempos from that of central elements.

Reflecting the norms of conventional reading, the thrust of nearly all the pages in Un coup de Des continues, however, to be diagonal and this orientation is reflected in the consistent diagonal slippage of the phrases which make up the text. It is particularly marked in (4), (6), ( 7), (8), (9), ( 11) and ( 12), indeed it becomes the

CN COCP DE oEs

JAMAIS LE HASARD

N' ABO LIRA

(zb) (3 b) (6b) (10b)

Diagram E

dominant pa_ttern of all the pages once (after page (3)) the rhythm of the poem's exposition gets into its stride. The one notable exception to this is ( 10) in which, as was suggested above, the crucial juxtaposition of different typefaces and lines of thought results in a more truly spatial arrangement of the text. The general tendency towards spillage of phrases diagonally across the page, results in the formation of a step-like pattern of descent which is reflected both in the poem's main propositions - in capitals - and in developments in the lower case typefaces. Thus the constituent elements of the title phrase are inserted into the text following a step-like pattern (see Diagram E), except that the bottom of the page being reached with 'N' ABOLIRA' on (6b), results in 'LE HASARD' being placed a step back up (this position also being a consequence of the Roman capital

144 Pictoria!ist poetics

system coming into conflict with the diagonal disposition of the italic series). On the last page of the poem, the cast of the dice is most suggestively figured by the tumbling participles, arranged in a similar step-like pattern:

veillant doutant

roulant brillant et meditant

avant de s'arreter a quelque point dernier qui le sacre.

Although Mallarme wrote in a letter to Camille mauclair apropos of Un coup de Dis: je crois que toute phrase ou pensee, si elle a un rythme, doit le modeler sur l'objet qu'elle vise et reproduire, jetee a nu, immediatement, comme jaillie en !'esprit, un peu de !'attitude de cet objet quant a tout (MC IX, p. 288)

it is a mistake to overplay, as some commentators have tended to,ss the representational nature, in conventional terms, of the pictorial elements in the poem, for it is not really calligrammatic or concrete. Certainly, the marked emphasis, just noted, on the diagonal thrust of the page's dynamics results in the creation of typographical motifs which lend themselves to the idea of the listing ship (4), the surging wave (5 ), the flight of a bird (7), the plume of a toque (8), or the outline, on (12), of the Plough or Septentrion into which the word 'coNSTELLATION' is inserted. But the profiles of these motifs are diffuse and ambiguous: they propose suggestive possibilities but do not so rigorously define outlines as to preclude an apprehension of the page's pictorial qualities in more abstract terms. Thus the symmetry of page (7) can, as a pictorial motif, be enjoyed as a purely aesthetic shape, a graceful encapsulation of a wistful hypothesis, while the step-like slippage of phrases, noted above, suggests a rhythm of measured but inevitable descent which evokes in visual terms a number of the themes central to the text; the casting of the dice, the act of writing, the movement of the waves, etc. In this respect, Mallarme's intention, in spite of his antipathy to the concept of the illustrated text (see MOC, p. 878, cited above), of incorporating into Un coup de Des four lithographs by Odilon Redon56 may seem somewhat inconsistent. But as Robert G. Cohn suggests: It seems evident that these illustrations were not in any sense an integral part of the Work - which incorporates its own visual effects - but rather decorations probably intended to appear on endpapers. 57

Like the prose poems of Bertrand and Rimbaud already examined in this chapter, Mallarme's Un coup de Des is essentially auto-illustrative, not in any crude representational sense, but as a diagram which attempted to picture forth a mental landscape, one, that is, in which the models and structures of thought and language interact with those of visual impression.

In attempting to become more pictorial, the intrinsic structures and functions


of language as an expression of thought inevitably undergo some modification -particularly in the area of syntax and punctuation. Mallarme was well aware of the arbitrariness of syntax, its tendency to create a linear sense of logic which was not necessarily true to all thinking, especially poetic or imaginative thought. But Mallarme was also aware that syntax is necessary to language, that there are no meanings without sentences, no propositions without predicates. In a sense, the whole of Un coup de Des is an elaborate embroidery on a couple of syllogistic propositions.ss Nevertheless, Mallarme was anxious to assert the precariousness of all assertions and to give a hearing to the manifold reservations, parentheses and doubts to which they give rise. Un coup de Des is a philosophical text in the Cartesian tradition, but as a Discours de la methode it also attempts to be truer to the emotional and sensual reverberations of thought. Unlike Descartes, Mallarme does not reserve the treatment of the passions to another treatise. The poem represents, as we have seen, an amalgam, precisely, of different levels of thought and experience which, since they all find expression in the same language, have to be distinguished visually by typography and spacing. But since these strands also sometimes come together, provision for their connection or interpenetration has to be made. In this respect, Mallarme's abandonment of punctuation is significant since it promotes infinitely greater fluidity of movement between phrases. The absence of full stops provokes a terrible sense of insecurity in the reader but also a sense of freedom: though the self-evident logic of certain heavily foregrounded phrases obviates the necessity for such signals, their absence elsewhere gives the mind the opportunity constantly to seek new combinations or alternative solutions to the rational but overbearing propositions under the shadow of which they labour.

Mallarme's spatialization of syntax and abandonment of punctuation also has the effect of undermining the synchronization of signifier and signified. Words or fragments of phrase are allowed, from time to time, like small craft, to slip their painters and to float free of the syntactical convoy's relentless advance. But the poignancy of their isolation and their buffetings from the winds and waves of chance is a function of their links with the larger linguistic context. Like Rimbaud's 'Promontoire' or 'Ornieres', Mallarme's Un coup de Des has to be read59 as well as seen. The richness of the text is in part a function of the tension between the word as signifier - free to mobilize a multiplicity of signifieds - and language as syntax - the obligation to make sense, between, in other words, seeing and reading, the image and the symbol.

This tension between two different semiotic systems - one heavily coded, logical and linear, the other comparatively uncoded, gestural and spatial, con-stitutes of course an essential element of the drama of the poem: will the Word assert its age-old authority and vanquish the powerful but inarticulate forces of the page? Although the latter is indelibly motivated by its interrelationship with language, contaminated, as it were, by the imprint of the word, it is also capable of


undermining language's efforts to structure itself into logical, rational patterns. As was suggested above, the page is a potentially signifying silence, an invisible sea of signifieds, the unconscious of language's articulations. In a sense then, there is a kind of polarization of principles: language and text representing order and reason, the page chaos and chance (le hasard). It is appropriate, therefore, that Mallarme should make his first fully spatial poem a dramatization of this confrontation, for, on one level, one may read the proposition Un coup de Des jamais n' abolira le hasard as: writing will never obliterate the page.

The page/hasard analogy is frequently repeated in Mallarme's theoretical writings on poetry: 'Une ordonnance du livre de vers poind innee ou partout, elimine le hasard' (MOC, p. 366), he writes in Crise de vers, while in Quant au livre he talks of'le hasard' being 'vaincu mot par mot' (MOC, p. 387). Although in both these instances Mallarme envisages chance being eliminated or vanquished by the overall structure of the work or the intrinsic coherence of the words as arranged by the poet, he is of course well aware that the conventions of writing are also infected with the arbitrary and the chance. Languages are 'imparfaites en cela que plusieurs' (MOC, p. 363), their phonetic structures often not in synchronization with their semantic (MOC, p. 364). Mallarme's solution is the traditional one of the imposition of numerical order: the Alexandrine's twelve syllables 'philosophiquement remuner [ent] le defaut des langues, complement superieur' (MOC, p. 364); the sonnet's fourteen lines, though arbitrary, offer a framework which, proven over half a millenium, provides a principle of order preferable to the 'incoherent de la mise en page romantique' (MOC, pp. 366-7). As Mitsou Ronat and others have shown, Mallarme plays the numbers game even more elaborately in Un coup de Des, the magic number twelve, or its multiples, governing a wide range of important considerations in the poem. The allegory of the dice throw is a representation of this in thematic terms. But, as the unfolding of this allegory seems to confirm, neither the dice throw nor the withholding of it, abolish chance: all gesture - numerical, linguistic, poetic or artistic - is tainted with the arbitrary, powerles"s to control the potentially infinite combinations at its disposal, symbolized by the ever-present space - of mathematical tables, the universe, the canvas or the page.

The ultimate Book or Page then, as Mallarme was well aware, will never by humankind be written, but any progress towards it would of necessity involve the combination of textual and visual elements. The former would provide a logic, a grammar, a numerical sequence, the latter a sense of space, chance, the unconscious and the incalculable. In spite of the uneasy tension between the two, the relationship between visual and textual is essentially symbiotic: no expression of human experience would be complete without the involvement of both elements. The truth of this would seem to be borne out by a great deal of modern, that is, post-Mallarmean, art and literature.

..

POE ME

Un coup de Des Jamais n'aholira le Hasard

par

STEPHANE MA.LLA.RME

[ 147]

scott 88 spacial structure and the prose poem

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