Eroticism and the Poetics of Sublime Evasion in a Prose Poem and Poem of Mallarmé

Eroticism and the Poetics of Sublime Evasion in a Prose Poem and Poem of Mallarmé Charles D. Minahen ""W" E NENUPHAR BLANC," perhaps the best known of Mallarmé's I prose poems, was written and published in 1895 when he was 53, J—y three years before his death and mree decades after his most famous verse poem, "L'Après-midi d'un faune," was first conceived by him at age 23.' The two works thus stand at opposite ends of the poet's career, the one a product of youth, the other a reflection of middle age. Because "Le Nénuphar blanc" is a prose poem and has been eclipsed like all of his prose poems by his verse, I do not think its significance as a rewriting of the earlier verse poem has been fully recognized, beyond certain obvious figurai and thematic links. As I hope to show, both texts exhibit what I have termed in another study of the poem alone, a certain "structure of desire,"2 that is, a pattern of relations between images and ideas on me level of the erotic imagination—in both cases it is a matter of a particular male heterosexual erotic phantasm involving female objects of desire—that corresponds to a nexus of lexical and semantic elements in the texts. This pattern is similar in both instances but by no means identical, and it is in the differences between them, between the poem's reckless, impetuous representation of the fantasy and the prose poem's more tempered and deliberate version of it, that we can discern a clever, subtly subversive adaptation to an overbearing and ultimately overpowering late-nineteenth-century bourgeois conformist social imperative. An experiment I performed, in which specific signifiers shared by both the prose poem and the poem were listed in their contexts side by side, proves quite revealing. Although I limited the list to what seemed to me to be distinctive , noteworthy terms—as opposed to common conjunctions, personal pronouns, and the like—I ultimately compiled a list of no fewer than 50 such signifiers, which is already evidence of a more than haphazard or incidental correlation between the texts. One cluster of shared elements denotes the similar setting for both works: "en l'onde" (3/64),3 "roseaux" (3/26), "bosquet" (3/17), "une source" (3, 19/11), "verdure(s)" (4/28), "jonc(s)" (12/43), "fleur(s)" (18/25), "eau" (19/16). The scene, in both cases, is en pleine nature and, specifically, on or near a threshold where land and water meet and mingle. This mingling is suggested by the parallel modifying of the land-related noun "bosquet," common 48 Spring 1999 Minahen to bom texts, by the aqueous adjectives "fluvial" (3) in the prose poem and "arrosé" (17) in the poem. In addition to place (space), another shared word, "après-midi," indicates the principal time frame in both works, which is announced straight off in the title of the poem and is reflected indirectly in the allusion to "l'indiscrétion éclatante des après-midi" (5), that is, midday invasions of privacy like the potentially indiscreet adventure the poet-rower describes himself risking in the prose poem (to him it would be an indiscretion only if he got caught). In both texts, the afternoon is associated with the present tense, the period of the faun's reflection upon real or imagined events of the morning and of me rower's account of the possible near encounter with an unseen lady, which starts in the past (also in the morning) and is described in various past tenses, only to shift to the immediate past of the present tense about halfway through. This ambiguity of past/present is underscored by the deployment of "ir(e)" verb forms, such as "je souris" (7), "se suffit" (13), and "j'accomplis" (19), mat can be read, out of context, as either present or past. In the poem, the relationship between past and present is more polarized and antagonistic, as the image of "Ie matin frais" struggling with the "lasse pâmoison" (14-15) of the afternoon's suffocating heat cogently depicts. Although both texts evince...