Mallarmé: la grammaire et le grimoire (review)

Taking the etymological kinship of 'grammaire' and 'grimoire' as their cue in this opaquely argued study of Mallarmé's poetic theory and practice, the co-authors (university specialists in linguistics and literature respectively) seek to shed new light on a familiar story: namely, how Mallarmé, influenced by Poe and Baudelaire, replaced a traditional poetic appeal to the transcendental with the silent mysteries of a sacred, quasi-magical text ('grimoire') in which language, sufficient unto itself in a godless world, is woven in a complex syntax ('grammaire') that reflects 'la seule "divinité de l'esprit humain"' (p. 17). After two unsurprising chapters in which Mallarmé adopts Poe's 'Poetic Principle' and begins to 'creuser le vers' in composing 'Hérodiade', Ruppli and Thorel-Cailleteau contend unobjectionably that he found in linguistic study a remedy to the anguish of having to 'renoncer au rêve d'une élévation de l'âme vers le ciel' (p. 48). After an innovative but disappointingly short chapter ('La Linguistique en 1870') that sketches a contemporary mindset profoundly affected by the religious and metaphysical implications of comparative philology, attention focuses on Mallarmé's Notes sur le langage (1869-70), twenty-nine sheets of crossed-out manuscript that have survived because his draft translations of Poe's poems occupy the other side. Hitherto a largely undeciphered Rosetta Stone, these notes offer tantalizing glimpses of Mallarmé's intended doctoral thesis on the 'science of language' (and the compulsory thèse complémentaire, in Latin, to be entitled De divinitate), and the principal merit of this book lies in its attempt to contextualize and explicate these glimpses. There are illuminating pages here on how the poet may have derived his conception and practice of reflexivity from Bopp's foundational analyses of Indo-European grammar (language as both object and instrument of knowledge) as well as from Descartes's Discours de la méthode (thinking about thinking, 'fiction' as a heuristic device). These insights further inform a brief, suggestive account of Igitur as an allegory of the poet's self-view following his notorious 'crise de Tournon'. In Les Mots anglais and Les Dieux antiques (seen as counterparts of the projected theses) Mallarmé is shown, respectively, probing the boundaries of linguistic analysis the better to reveal what poetry alone can do as a 'demonstration' of language, and then disseminating Max Müller's account of Indo-European myths and religions as linguistically 'diseased' versions of an original solar myth (which we knew already from Bertrand Marchal's La Religion de Mallarmé). In the remaining chapters the Mallarmé an landscape is either very familiar — the rejection of personal, quasi-musical lyricism à la Verlaine ('La Tentation de la flûte'), the non-mimetic 'réflexion' of an inherently meaningless world at the level of the prosodic ('Le Vers') and the paginal ('Le Champ de la page') — or else viewed from a highly questionable perspective: for example, the extrapolation from a (misinterpreted) aspiration to 'Imiter le Chinois' in 'Las de l'amer repos …' to an alleged miniaturist poetics of exquisite but ostensibly straightforward deixis ('Les Fleurs de la poésie', 'Éventails'). The fourteen chapters of this book are arranged in implicitly chronological sequence, but the discussion of individual poems (for example, 'Hérodiade', the 'Sonnet en yx') can be cavalier — and occasionally illegitimate (pp. 39, 90) — in its synchronic disregard of important textual revisions. Despite the central theme of a poet shaping the 'virtualités' of language, versification itself is rarely analysed: fortunately, perhaps, since the heptasyllabic 'Toute l'âme résumée …' is deemed octosyllabic (p. 191). Poe's was an 'Imp of the Perverse', not perverseness (p. 29), a lapse which may explain the unflattering lack of reference to anglophone secondary literature. Lastly, and most importantly, it is simply not true that Mallarmé never contemplated the pejorative sense of 'grimoire' (p. 9): his other, finely grammatical and chiastic phrase for it was 'Aboli bibelot d'inanité sonore'. He knew that what he wrote was nearly nonsense...