[D66] The Most Beautiful Perhaps

[Antid Oto]

42+24=66

http://hyperallergic.com/58076/the-most-beautiful-perhaps/

The Most Beautiful Perhaps
by Barry Schwabsky on October 7, 2012

I wrote, a few months ago, of Stéphane Mallarmé as a difficult poet — 
difficult to understand, and difficult to translate, perhaps especially 
into English. What I should have also said then is that part of the 
difficulty lies in the fact that his poems in verse, as Peter Manson 
titled them in his estimable recent translation, that is, his Poésies, 
constitute only one facet of his work. There’s also what Mallarmé called 
vers de circonstance, occasional verse of which he turned a considerable 
quantity, and which might or might not be, as it appears, as 
insubstantial as it is sparkling — that is, it might or might not be in 
reality what the poet sometimes pretended all his verse was, “Rien, 
cette écume, vierge vers”: nothing but foam. These pieces arewell and 
truly untranslatable in their wispy evanescence. Then there’s a mass of 
prose, ranging from literary criticism to a strange sort of fashion 
journalism to the scattered notes toward his unfinished, indeed unbegun 
yet long contemplated project known simply as the Book, Le Livre. Prose 
poetry is something else, and there’s that too. And finally there’s that 
famous, prophetic and (despite a century of commentary) barely 
comprehended work that Mallarmé himself designated, on its title page, a 
Poème — not a Poésie — though it’s neither in verse nor exactly in prose 
but in a writing of some other kind that as yet still lacks a name: I’m 
referring, of course, to Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira pas la hazard, 
A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance. Only certain dimensions 
of Mallarmé’s sense of poetry can be gleaned from the poems in verse; to 
comprehend it more deeply demands an acquaintance with the rest of his 
writing, and perhaps above all the notes toward the Book and Un coup de dés.

Un coup de dés has been translated a number of times, and the 
translations on the whole seem adequate, yet while certain arguably 
superficial aspects of the work have been enormously influential — its 
typographical experimentation, the theme of chance — one has always had 
the sense that the work is fundamentally misunderstood. In a different 
way than the verse, certainly, but to the same degree, it is a difficult 
text. What does this mean? That can be argued, but as Quentin 
Meillassoux points out in his recently translated study The Number and 
the Siren, what most commentators broadly agree on is that it is 
difficult is not because there is something hidden in it. In the words 
Meillassoux quotes from Jacques Rancière, “Mallarmé is not a hermetic 
author, he is a difficult author.” Pierre Macherey is of precisely the 
same opinion, and explains more fully what he means: “Mallarmé is not 
hermetic, in the sense of a well-hidden secret that ought to be found 
out; he is only difficult…. The secret is, finally, that there is no 
secret.” And as Meillassoux admits, albeit with some irony, this is 
precisely as we would hope it to be, for to encode a hidden meaning in 
this way “is basically something rather puerile, whatever its 
complexity; something devoid of literary value, in any case.” The 
situation is similar, one might say, to what makes mystery stories a 
subliterary genre: As Edmund Wilson asked, “Who cares who killed Roger 
Ackroyd?” Not to say that this encoding would necessarily deprive the 
work of value — but that value would still have to be situated somewhere 
beyond the code, just as, for instance, the mere fact that a work is 
constructed according to rhyme and meter would not give it literary 
value — the poetry subsists somewhere on the far side of that. But 
nonetheless, Meillassoux insists, Un coup de dès does conceal a secret, 
and he can tell us what it is. Meillassoux can hardly deny that Mallarmé 
is a difficult poet, one who, as he says, for instance, “at the turn of 
the 1870s…developed a writing technique that consisted of losing readers 
from the outset with an opening line whose construction initially 
escapes them entirely, it being possible to reconstitute the first 
phrase only by means of verses sometimes located far into the poem. One 
has the impression of words that are simply juxtaposed, not which, for 
this very reason, scintillate, as if they were appearing for the first 
time in their originary strangeness.” But nonetheless he insists that 
Mallarmé is also, at least in Un coup de dès and a few others of his 
last lyrics, a hermetic poet.

But who is this Meillassoux who claims to have found what a century of 
readers have failed to find, and who is willing to point out a dimension 
of this foundational modern text that would be so contrary to modern 
aesthetics — more like a Baroque allegory, perhaps, than any work of 
modernity ought to be? He is a philosopher teaching at the École Normale 
Supérieure in Paris, a former student of Alain Badiou, and the author of 
several books, of which one has previously been translated into English, 
After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (Continuum, 
2008). He is a leading light of a philosophical trend called speculative 
realism, whose adherents are mainly active in England. However, and 
while it’s not insignificant that Mallarmé has attracted the attention 
of an unusual number of philosophers — Rancière, Badiou, Jacques 
Derrida, and Jean-Paul Sartre are only the first to come to mind — The 
Number and the Siren is not a book of philosophy but a very close 
empirical examination of Mallarmé’s poem.

I’ve never before written a review of a book on poetry in which I’ve had 
to watch out for spoilers, but in this case I think it really would be 
better if I tell you you’d better go read the book if you want to know 
the secret Meillassoux claims to have uncovered—and that despite the 
fact that he reveals it pretty early on in the book. The suspense isn’t 
so much about what the secret will be but about how he will convince 
you, if not to believe him, at least to suspend your disbelief. One 
Mallarmé authority I spoke to said the book seemed suspiciously like the 
old Douglas Adams novel in which the answer to the great question of 
life, the universe and everything turned out to be the number forty-two. 
One reason is that in his decipherment of Un coup de dès Meillassoux 
never entirely loses himself in its details; in fact, whether or not one 
accepts Meillassoux’s central contention, The Number and the Siren makes 
for the best overview of Mallarmé’s poetics that I know.

In particular, Meillassoux makes clear the poem’s relation to Mallarmé’s 
reflections on politics. This is all the more crucial as the poet is 
sometimes made to seem nothing more than a fabricator of crystalline 
literary baubles. Mallarmé was convinced that the civil state had need 
of a civil religion, what might be called a post-theistic secular 
Church. “Mallarmé thus considers as impossible a strict neutrality of 
the public domain that would reserve all spiritual impulses for the 
personal sphere alone,” Meillassoux points out. “There must be a common 
elevation.” Though Meillassoux doesn’t mention them, one thinks of the 
civic festivals promoted by the Jacobins in the wake of the French 
Revolution — for instance in Strasbourg, 30 Brumaire, Year II of the 
Revolution, when the cathedral was proclaimed a Temple of Reason and a 
choir of 10,000 voices sang hymns to this new deity under the sign, 
light after darkness. The Book of which Mallarmé dreamed—and which he 
presumably could not write because by nature it would have had to have 
been anonymous — was to be likewise the instrument of a new godless 
religion. Poetry, in this dream, was to be “a diffusion of the divine,” 
writes Meillassoux, “as opposed to its representation (the Greek scene), 
or its presentation (the Christian Parousia).” What might be surprising 
is that Mallarmé’s political thinking is directly tied to his position 
on the “crisis in verse” of his time, the break between classical 
versification, above all the alexandrine, and free verse, and the 
attendant ambivalence as to how classical verse should be pronounced on 
stage. Accordingly, although “Mallarmé sees in meter the condition of a 
ceremonial and public poetry,” each individual, explains Meillassoux, 
may “introduce a principle of uncertainty into the reading of the verse.”

Meillassoux traces Mallarmé’s poetics from its broadest 
socio-theological implications to the most minute details of prosody. 
Yet his strategy, strange as it may seem to say, depends precisely on 
maintaining the reader’s skepticism even as he inveigles you into 
entertaining the possibility that his thesis is correct. For him, the 
poem is “the most beautiful peut-être in the French language,” and the 
beauty is all in the conditionality of this “perhaps.” And to see this, 
as Meillassoux points out, is to understand that our notions of 
authorial intention may have to be revised. “There is a strong 
possibility,” as he says, “that Mallarmé basically knew no more than we 
do about his poem, and even that he did not wish to know more; and this 
is because the Poem is in itself, in fact, a ‘machine’ for hypotheses — 
a machine that functions without him, indifferent to his innermost 
conviction.” It really is a throw of the dice in this sense, that its 
result is beyond the thrower’s control.

 From Lucretius onward at least, to accept the idea of materialism is to 
accept the primacy of randomness, the clinamen — and therefore to accept 
meaninglessness, or what amounts to the same thing, the arbitrariness of 
meaning. The fundamental question for Mallarmé — in this I am entirely 
in agreement with Meillassoux — is, always, how can an act, poetic or 
otherwise, have meaning in a wholly secular, wholly material world, that 
is, a world ruled by chance. “The condition of the new poetry is thus 
identified as that of the absence of the old divine transcendence,” 
writes Meillassoux, “but this absence lived no longer in the mode of an 
infinite mourning, but in the mode of a creative, fecund nothingness.”

...


Quentin Meillassoux’s The Number and the Siren: A Decipherment of 
Mallarmé’s Coup de dès, translated by Robin Mackay (Urbanomic/Sequence 
Press), and Michael Fried’s Flaubert’s “Gueuloir” (Yale University 
Press) are available online.