Music and Dance in L'Après-Midi D'un Faune

Music and Dance in UAprès-MidiD'un Faune by Mary Beth Nelson* Assigning a clear-cut label to Mallarmé's "L'Après-midi d'un faune" presents unresolvable problems for the literary critic. Although classified at times as symbolist, at others as impressionist, and at yet others as having affinities with music, the poem defies any simple definition.1 As is often the case with Mallarmé's poetry, it suggests other aspects of artistic creation, all the while commenting implicitly on poetry itself. The transposition ofthis poem into music and dance is no mere accident: it is a manifestation ofthe non-literary aspects ofthe work. Here, Mallarmé endeavors to create a poem which crosses the traditionally accepted barriers between poetry and other art forms; one which allows poetry to assimilate the suggestiveness of music and dance in order to transform it into a complete art form. Perhaps the best-known of Mallarmé's poems, "L'Après'midi d'un faune" breaks with poetic tradition in its attemptto incorporate within it techniques from different arts. The linear development so common in traditional literature is absent here, as the poem moves back and forth from the present to past to future, from the real to the illusory, and never clarifies the nature of the central experience. As the faun gropes for truth in the shadows of the woods, a sensation or intuition triggers a quest which proceeds on an instinctual rather than a logical level, causing him to experience a wide range of impressions. Words and images appear in the manner described by Roland Barthes in Le Degré zéro de l'écriture: "Le Mot poétique ne peut jamais être faux parce qu'il est total; il brille d'une liberté infinie et s'apprête à rayonner vers milles rapports incertains et possibles. Les rapports fixes abolis, le mot n'a plus qu'un projet vertical, il est comme in bloc, un pilier qui plonge dans un total de sens, de réflexes et de rémanences."2 ?MARY BETH NELSON is a member ofthe Department ofFrenchand Italian at the University of California in Santa Barbara. 'The symbolist label comes from Harold J. Smith in "Mallarmé's Faun: Hero or Anti-Hero?," RR 1973, pp. 1 1 1-24. Bernard Weinberg, in The Limits ofSymbolism(Ch\cago, 1966) has called the poem impressionist (p. 167). And A.R. Chisholm has suggested the link between the poem and music in Mallarmé's Grand Oeuvre (Manchester, 1962), p. 33.¡(Paris, 1972), p. 37, ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW65 Mary Beth Nelson Poetry which conforms to this ideal partakes of various art forms. Theatre fascinated Mallarmé, and the first known rendition of the Faun poem was "Monologue d'un faune," which the poet intended to have produced at the Théâtre Français.3 The dramatic and visual elements of the poem are evident even in the final version. Movement is vital to the poem and betrays the poet's concern with dance as an art form which translates without words man's aspirations towards the ideal. The dancer was in Mallarmé's eyes much like the poet. A dancer's leap gives momentarily the impression that the law ofgravity has been defied and that the dancer reaches toward the sky. The attempt is beautiful, but the fall back to earth is inevitable. "La danse est ailes, il s'agit d'oiseaux et des départs en Fà-jamais, des retours vibrants comme flèche."4 Mallarmé writes of "cette espèce d'extatique impuissance à disparaître qui délicieusement attache aux planches la danseuse."5 Jean-Pierre Richard has noted that this interdependence of the leap and resultant fall so essential to dance evokes the sensations of tension and suffering.6 We shall see that aspiration towards the ideal, followed by the inevitable fall, is essential to the development of"L'Après-midi d'un faune." Not only dance, but also music plays a role similar to that of poetry. Mallarmé writes: "...je pose, à mes risques esthétiquement, cette conclusion...: que la Musique et les Lettres sont la face alternative ici élargie vers l'obscur; scintillante là, avec certitude, d'un...