-
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
New York New Rochelle Melbourne Sydney
-
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
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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)
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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)
~~~~;~.:- ~ ~ -~-~:".~~~-;;-:~':;:-
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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)
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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
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124 Pictorialist poetics
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
'Spatial' structure and the prose poem 125
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
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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
'Spatial' structure and the prose poem 127
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.
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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
'Spatial' structure and the prose poem 129
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
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130 Pictorialist poetics
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
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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
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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
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136 Pictorialist poetics
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
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138 Pictorialist poetics
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
'Spatial' structure and the prose poem 139
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
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140 Pictorialist poetics
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
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142 Pictorialist poetics
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
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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
'Spatial' structure and the prose poem 145
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
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146 Pictorialist poetics
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]