Stéphane Mallarmé by Roger Pearson

Author:Roger Pearson [Pearson, Roger]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-86189-727-5
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Published: 2010-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

5

Tuesdays

In the weeks leading up to Anatole’s death Mallarmé had hesitated to tell his correspondents that his son’s illness was probably terminal. To have done so, he thought, would have seemed like hastening that inevitable outcome himself. Now, as he tried to write his way through his grief, he found himself faced with a similar reluctance: to mark this death with a literary work of art, as he had the deaths of Gautier and Poe, would be to confirm it, to accept it. But he could not countenance a ‘moral burial’ of this kind: ‘Oh! this sacrifice – for that to deny his life – to bury him – let us talk about him some more, evoke him – in reality, silence.’ The extensive, fragmentary notes that bear poignant witness to this attempt (OC, I. 513–45) reveal the conflicting currents of guilt, outrage and regret that fuelled this grief and this reluctance.

‘Never knew mother, son never knew me!’: an angry sense of generational interruption runs strongly through the notes, as though the natural order of things had been profoundly upset. Indeed time has been reversed, with the son predeceasing his father and mother. The father feels it as a duty to ‘perpetuate’ his son (‘it’s me, the man you would have been’) while somehow dying himself: ‘no more life for me and I can feel myself laid out in the tomb beside you’. Likewise a perfect symmetry has been shattered: ‘equilibrium father son mother daughter broken – three, a void between us, searching’. The father,’cursing his blood’ and the ‘hereditary illness in me’, does not ‘dare endure this gaze full of the future’. He tries desperately, as in ‘Toast funèbre’, to deny the importance of a physical absence, and he wants to treasure instead the ‘spiritual’ survival of the departed in the thoughts and loving remembrance of the living: ‘he is nothing but spirit in us now … death powerless against human genius so long as humanity’. But vivid memories of his son keep returning, and he thinks sadly of the sailor suit in which they buried him: ‘little sailor – with your suit on / eh? – for a great crossing / a wave swept you away / sea, ascites’. ‘Ascites’, or dropsy of the abdomen, recalls the fluid retention that had so discomfited and disfigured Anatole in his dying days. It is here transformed into the tsunami of mortality in a poetic image that seems clumsy and grotesque. This time art cannot perpetuate life: the solar drama has stalled.

One of the first notes jotted down by Anatole’s grieving father shows his characteristic mindset: ‘Ill in spring dead in autumn – it’s the sun’. It was therefore by a sad irony that Les Dieux antiques, his translation-cum-adaptation of George Cox’s Manual of Mythology, should appear two months later. Just as Les Mots anglais grew out of Mallarmé’s erstwhile ambition to write a doctoral thesis about language, so Les Dieux antiques may correspond to ‘De divinitate’, the compulsory subsidiary thesis in Latin that he had also once envisaged.

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