Mallarmé’s Preface to René Ghil’s Traité du Verbe

Mallarmé’s Preface to René Ghil’s Traité du Verbe Anna Balakian O NE OF THE SHORTEST PREFACES in French Literature is Mallarmé’s on René Ghil’s Traité du Verbe. It has, however, a pivotal position; it emerges as the kernel of his poetics and at the same time places Mallarmé’s views of poetry outside and beyond that of the members of the Symbolist Cénacle although in unexpected con­ cordance with other aspects of the cultural history of France in the period between the 1860s and 80s. Normally, prefaces are platforms of overtly direct communication between author and reader, sometimes almost militant presentations of a theory that is to be put in practice in the body of the work itself. Such is Victor Hugo’s preface to his own Cromwell or Théophile Gautier’s to his Mademoiselle de Maupin, two red flags proclaiming breaks with literary conventions, hostility to the set ideas of the very audience to whom they are addressed. Their message is clear and self-contained, and the text is in no need of any particular exegesis. Elsewhere, prefaces are sponsorships that familiar authors accord less familiar ones, as discoverers: such were the early prefaces attached to Les Fleurs du mal and to Les Chants de Maldoror. The rise of the literary fortune of an author can be traced through such successive prefaces. Sometimes prefaces present a more profound communication than the work itself which they presume to launch and which instead they use as a vehicle to carry them in their own particular direction. In that instance, the preface becomes a testing ground for an idea further devel­ oped in a more elaborate piece of writing. In the twentieth century such a one is the continuous “ preface” of André Breton’s Anthologie de l’Humour noir, interspersed with excerpts that illustrate to a certain degree but none totally his definition not simply of “ black humour” but of the ontological crisis he sees developing through the cultural maze of literary history. Breton’s commentary, if put end to end, becomes a book in its own right on the subject of subversive writing through several cen­ turies in the context of the History of Ideas. Mallarmé rather casually at first sight seems to have inserted the same type of intellectual statement into a single page which is quite unintelli­ 58 F a l l 1987 Balarían gible by itself without referencing with other texts of his. It also gains in meaning when viewed in the light of developments in linguistics at the time of the burgeoning of his ideas about poetry. The several pieces of writings which René Ghil had collected under the imposing title of Traité du Verbe did not become for Mallarmé a vehicle, not an excuse for a platform, not a testing ground, but the revelation of a paradox that goes to the heart of the Symbolist aesthetics and to the problematic position Mallarmé occupies in the collective effort to relate literature to music following the precepts of Wagner. As I have tried to demonstrate elsewhere,1there are two approaches to the Symbolist aesthetics/mystique, that of the ’60s and that of the ’80s. Ghil’s Traité is a document of the ’80s. It was to have five editions of which only two carry Mallarmé’s Avant-Dire.1In those first two edi­ tions it is an echo of his enthusiasm for several of the Avant-garde per­ sonalities of Symbolism, and mostly Mallarmé whose style he imitates almost to the extent of creating a pastiche. It is a piece of representative writing and a source of motivation to the French Symbolists of the ’80s. Mallarmé’s Avant-Dire, however, is symptomatic of the ’60s. Ghil’s effervescent salute to Mallarmé, Wagner, Huysmans, Verlaine is more relevant to his contemporaries who were frequenting Mallarmé’s mardis than is the theory Mallarmé encoded in the Avant-Dire, in which his references to the powers of language have nothing to do with the musical instruments and color correspondences Ghil conjures to enhance poetry. Ghil is dealing with language as an instrument to crystalize meaning and express affective states; it is a medium of...