SOURCE: Balakian, Anna. “From Mallarmé to Breton: Continuity and Discontinuity in the Poetics of Ambiguity.” In Writing in a Modern Temper: Essays on French Literature and Thought in Honor of Henri Peyre, edited by Mary Ann Caws, pp. 118-34. Saratoga, CA: Amna Libri, 1984.

[In the following essay, Balakian traces the path of modern French poetry with an examination of the works of Stéphane Mallarmé and André Breton.]

Separated by half a century, Stéphane Mallarmé and André Breton follow each other like two milestones on the path of modern poetics, and their roles as heads of literary schools, symbolism and surrealism, invite comparison. Their positions as masters in the throes of the poetic activities of the avant-garde of their respective times had gained for them a cosmopolitan following in Paris, clusters of poets who were as much affected by the stature of their two personalities as by their pronouncements. By associating poetics with the processes in the other arts, such as music and dance in the case of Mallarmé and painting in the case of Breton, they succeeded in reducing the distance between poets and other categories of artists but also increased the gap between poetry and the other forms of literature, particularly in the dislike both expressed of the narrative form. At the end of their careers both reached advanced forms of writing, Mallarmé with his Un Coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard, Breton with his Constellations, surpassing the models they had first created and the variants adopted by those who had imitated them and followed in their paths.¹

But the first level of the parallel between Breton and Mallarmé in its most obvious aspects stops here. Before looking in depth at other levels of connection, let us look at some obvious differences.

Mallarmé became a master among disciples who were some twenty years his juniors. Breton, on the other hand, became a leader among his contemporaries, despite the fact that he was identified as the “Pope” of surrealism. The concepts that constituted Mallarmé's ars poetica were handed down a posteriori, after he had practiced them in his poetry for some twenty years, after his aesthetics had been put to the test in his works, recognized and appreciated even if only by a limited number of readers. On the other hand, Breton had made his declarations of theory at an age when he had written little and proved nothing. His doctrines were chosen and pronounced a priori and accepted on faith. Mallarmé's manner was quiet, nondogmatic, his aspirations qualitative rather than quantitative. He had said that if he could catch the attention of one person in each city of France he would be quite satisfied. Breton's concepts took the form of Manifestoes, and like political manifestoes aimed to reach the many, with the firm conviction that poetry was a human necessity.

In a recent book called Poetry and Repression, the American critic, Harold Bloom, states—perhaps in reaction to the analytical studies of literature in isolated fragments—the importance of placing every writer in the current which reaches him.² Every act of poetic creativity, he insists, is actually a form of revision of previous poetic achievements, and consequently, there exists in literary history a flux and reflux in the course of literary phenomena and periods. This is, of course, another way of saying that the greatest influences are the negative, reactionary ones. Gide had made the same observation a while back. One can explain much about symbolism and surrealism on the basis of the theory of reactions. Although André Breton at age sixteen was writing Mallarmean sonnets, he was soon to attack the artifices of the symbolists, their withdrawal from the lifestream, their protracted introspections, their espousal of an ontology of fiction. The reaction of the surrealists to these postures is readily evident in the surrealist behavior and the revisionist character of the early poetry that ensued. The interiority of the poetic stance, which had become traditional, was reversed as the surrealists emerged from the expected shell to project themselves and their work into the concrete world and to try to transform it instead of turning their backs to it. The chamber is abandoned in favor of the street. Instead of withdrawing from exterior reality they wanted to come to grips with it and to manipulate it. One of the first poems of Breton is nothing more than a rebuttal of the symbolist mystique. Let me quote a few lines from the excellent translation of Kenneth White:

Rather life than those prisms without depth even if
          the colors are purer
Rather than that always clouded hour those terrible
          wagons of cold flame
Than those soft stones
Rather this triggered heart
Than that murmuring mere
And that white cloth singing in the air and in the
          earth
That nuptial blessing linking my brow to the brow
          of absolute vanity
                                                  Rather life

Clair de terre³

On the level of symbols, the revision of the symbolist vision is also very obvious. The preponderant image of the symbolist lily is transformed into banal and common flowers, such as the wild rose and the sunflower. The swan is replaced by the high flying and more resilient egret or eagle (not yet considered an endangered species!), and if a certain difficulty of interpretation of discourse is preserved as we pass from symbolism to surrealism, it is no longer due to lexical rarefactions and semantic intricacies but to a vocabulary that is replete with words that have never been associated with each other before, which are innocent of previous poetic connotations, having been culled from the fields not of literature but botany and biology. Even in the choice of mythological figures, reaction to the standard choices brings back from the past some of the ones that have had less visibility in modern literature: Leda fades away; she was a favorite of the symbolists because she suggested to them the human being in whom divine seed is put by the embrace of a god. She is replaced by Melusine, suggesting on the contrary the divine being who aspires to become and to stay human in the interpretation of Breton. Hérodiade, Mallarmé's version of that fascinating Salome of the symbolists, is sterile in her static existence, and we know to what terrible violence her sickly narcissism was to lead her. The character of Esclarmonde in Breton's Les Etats-Généraux is a revolutionary heroine chosen from the medieval history of the religious wars of France; she is also violent but her violence is part of her martyrdom caused in the course of her quest for the common salvation of her people.

The examples could be multiplied to prove that reaction and revision were part of the passage from symbolism to surrealism, and this element has indeed been recognized in the commentaries of literary history. And on that level there is no need to comment further on differences already noted.

However, as soon as we detach Mallarmé from the symbolist framework, and Breton from the surrealist label, an analysis more closely applied to these two poets reveals elements that bring them closer together and which go beyond the purely aesthetic considerations to enter the field of ontological inquiry. What is poetry? What is its field of interaction? How is it a factor in the apprehension of reality? What is the nature of symbol?

Breton tells us in an article called “Fronton-Virage” that he was familiar with the cryptic sonnets of Mallarmé. And in his autobiographical Entretiens (published in the later years of his life) he explains in retrospective meditation that of course it was normal for an activist group like the surrealists to reject what came before them and free themselves from ancestors. But what surprised him, he said, was the fact that the official body of literary historians did not seem to recognize the fact that there was a chain of transmission that linked the two movements. How did they fail to notice that there were threads that knit together an underground tradition? an esoteric tradition that linked all across Europe from the early nineteenth century the poetic preoccupations of poets such as Novalis, Hoelderlin in Germany, Blake and Coleridge in England, Nerval and Baudelaire in France, and reached a peak with Mallarmé?⁴ In this hermetic tradition, the need for the marvelous and the imponderable remain constants among the variations in style related to passing literary schools, but the symbols changed, and certain natural phenomena took turns in functioning as mediations between human imagination and a reality which wavers behind certain common appearances. In this current which manifests successive foils for concealment and eventually reaches him, Breton recognizes the most fruitful indices of modern poetics. And in the case of Mallarmé, there had occurred a strange paradox. The agnostic little bourgeois that Mallarmé was in his personal life had carried on a sustained search for gnostic revelations and had made him dream of a future when “the instinct for heaven which resides in each human being” would be stirred by the poet who would have assumed the role of “mystagogue.” But Mallarmé's mistake, according to Breton, was to have cultivated mystery for its own sake, simply to become difficult. Said Breton: “I know nothing so puerile as Mallarmé's compulsion not to let any text of his be read which might be too easily understood without injecting into it some shadow of mystification” (in “Le Merveilleux contre le mystère”).⁵ He found in this type of artificial mystification a form of weakness unworthy of Mallarmé and more characteristic of the minor symbolist poets. For this artificial mystery Breton wanted to substitute the marvelous, which is veiled only so that it may be unveiled, in the spirit of the operations of the alchemists who had found the same basic linguistic root in the word “veil” (voile) as in “revelation” and whose every effort for veiling carried in itself the clues to the unveiling and then to the reveiling of significations. Thus, the veil that in the eyes of the Romantic poets was the barrier between the real world and the supernal, and in the case of the symbolists “trembled” at the temple of Isis and became torn with Mallarmé and in Yeats; more and more permanent fissures became visible in the so-called impenetrable cloisters into which retreated the symbolists. The marvelous to which the symbolists sometimes yielded almost unconsciously became for Breton a form of reception, total and englobing, through which human beings could reach each other over and above the limitation of time and space.

Breton's criticism of Mallarmé is not altogether fair. If it is true that Mallarmé told the poets around him to work with mystery, he meant exactly the same thing as when Breton declared in his Second Manifesto that the surrealist must engage in deep occultation. Both meant that the poet had to work in silence and secrecy with the patience of an alchemist and be aware of the process of poetic creation. The admonition implied the difficulty of the process of writing poetry; it suggested that poetry required infinite care and undisturbed monitoring of the altered state. This awareness is manifest in all of Mallarmé's writings from the mysterious Igitur, the creation of which almost drove Mallarmé out of his mind, to the obsession he had in the last years of his life to write the Book, in the guise of a Magus and adept in the use of a magical language of hieroglyphics. In fact, this sense of a language of high power is the basis of the link between Mallarmé and Breton over and above the variety of poetic forms they adopt. Both feel that the mysterious powers of language enlarge consciousness and deepen the sense of existence. Mallarmé expressed this sense in his famous sentence: “The orphic explanation of the Earth, which is the only duty of the poet and the only literary play that counts.”⁶ This literary maneuver of language changes, according to both poets, the functioning of the logical, linear train of thought, and it is this change which distinguishes the new poetic form from all other forms of writing whether written in verse or prose. One of the most important propositions that Mallarmé made in the domain of poetics was that language was henceforth to be not a conveyer of thoughts but a container or thesaurus of poetic images whose disposition or precipitation or even tension with each other created poetic states or phenomena. Language thus became for him a pursuit and an end in itself. In his last poems as well as in his much studied last will and testament, Un Coup de dés, Mallarmé had discovered a secret inaccessible to most of his symbolist colleagues, and that he seems to have passed directly to Breton: that language contains in its sounds and words and in its morphological contours a great number of meanings that can be utilized simultaneously; this character of language was indeed the source of the ancient enigmas, or the rebus, or the oracle, and could be adapted to a polysemantic harmony in modern poetry. When we say that symbolism cultivated ambiguity in poetry, the word “ambiguity” is itself ambiguous. There is the kind of ambiguity you can find in the poetry of Verlaine, what he called “la chanson grise,” the gray song, which creates a general sense of mystery inviting each reader to find his own interpretation of Verlaine's state of being, or substitute one of his own parallel to Verlaine's. The ambiguity of Mallarmé, which was to be passed on to Breton and to a few other surrealists is a systematic construction of associations of words which interplay, which create different states of meanings in synchronized structure, begin a series and suggest to the reader, through clues, how to continue the scale. It is a system which he called architectural and premeditated like the work of the alchemist to whom he compared himself. And contrary to the very spirit of this type of poetic construction, learned readers have been trying to decode a single meaning, to untangle the so-called difficulty, when the target of reader-critic should indeed be to discover and appreciate the process that creates a multiplicity of meanings. As early as 1923, when his own poetic writings were still ahead of him, Breton realized that there was much to be discovered about Mallarmé's poetics that was avant-garde and not to be confused with his conservative life-style. He also believed that it would take some time to sort out and understand his achievements: “It will be some time before Mallarmé will be discovered, the work of Mallarmé which the person of Mallarmé still hides from us, and eyes will be turned particularly in the direction of Un Coup de dés (letter of December 8, 1923). Breton meditated along the same lines as Mallarmé when he asked in his article on Raymond Roussel in “Fronton-Virage”: how can one hide something in such a way as to invited possibilities of eventual deciphering? He came to the conclusion that this attitude which was of half-deceit, and at the same time somewhat engaging, was strictly conforming to the discourse of hermetic philosophers (La Clé des champs, p. 192). Both poets conclude in the same manner: that the occult does not reside principally in a particular philosophy but in the depths of language itself with its hide-and-seek quality, and if this quality is integral to language it means of course that the hermeticism is inherent in all thought that reaches beyond the surface of consciousness, the movement from the first layer of the self to the next is what Breton called the passage from the moi to the soi. The search for these facets of language was in fact for Breton, manifesting his belief in the poetry of language over and above the language of poetry, the guiding principle of his work from his first poems to the majestic ones of his mature period. Although he talked readily about the miracle of automatic writing, whatever psychic provocations he used were a means rather than an end, like finger exercises to the very structured poetics that combined with the aid of carefully chosen words and their fortuitous gravitations several registers of poetic states, generally one having to do with the immediacy of life, one on a mythological universal plane, and one digging into unconscious desire or dream, the synchronization suggesting a complex reality in the manner in which Mallarmé had evoked through the meditations of a Faun that unforgettable afternoon. And the timid school teacher that Mallarmé was, had crystallized desire, universal throughout the ages, through the miracle of a language that fused dream, fiction, and reality. He had pushed the art of the polysemantic much further on to a cosmic plane in the Coup de dés. For instance, the word that means in French pen and wing, plume brought together writing and flying, and the word veil and sail, voile associating sea and obstruction communicating human frailty and poetic power simultaneously, replaced linear thought with a system of analogical circularity going beyond allegory or even symbol.

Thus, poetry becomes a provocative guessing game, in principle inexhaustible, and in which the message that each person can pick up is apt to surpass the projections that the poet might have had in mind, creating an activity of the mind which can well illustrate the statement that the poet Aragon made in Le Paysan de Paris: that the very idea of limit is the only concept that is unacceptable to the human mind.⁷

But if both Mallarmé and Breton believed in the polysemantic character of language as a base for poetic activity, there is a basic difference in the search for the multiplicity of meaning. Mallarmé went about finding this multiplicity in a methodical manner, with etymological dictionaries, and relied on his knowledge of foreign languages—in his case English, his means of livelihood! Many of his findings (trouvailles) in polyvalence were put to use in a somewhat artificial manner and their hidden meanings were acceptable only in a fictitious world. Breton, however, thought etymological significations inert, unfunctional. He sought polyvalence in the subconscious functioning of language, such as in the speech of mediums or the deranged, on through the process of automatic writing, or dream transcription. That is why it is not paradoxical or contradictory to claim that Breton's poetry is both automatic and structured. Automatism is a state of grace for him, a state in which he can spontaneously make discoveries about language that hours of reflective study may fail to achieve. In retrospection he tells us this in his Entretiens: “Automatism, under whatever form you may want to envisage it, does not come upon demand.” It is most likely to come, he says, to those who have an intimate relationship with the natural world; it is spontaneous, in the case of primitive societies, desired and sought by revolutionaries “who have believed in and who believe in the restauration of man in a world from which he has ceased to be alienated.”⁸

In a short article called “Le La” Breton compared the role of the automatic phase to the “A” of the orchestra when it tunes up in preparation for performance.⁹ For the poet, the “A” of automatism is the pure unmitigated data catalyzing the artistic work; this parallel between the musicians who prepare to perform and the poet who sharpens his imagination is a distinction which to my knowledge no one has shown except Breton and in a more subtle way Mallarmé before him in Afternoon of a Faun. In Breton's opinion it is the spontaneous process of automatism that breaks the shackles of inhibition and thereby permits the poet to collect the materials with which he will then consciously create his work of art. His essential work will consist of blending the spontaneous or fortuitous with the deliberate.

Meditating on the spontaneously creative power of words, Breton associated his efforts of course with those of Rimbaud, adventurer in poetics as in life-style. What Breton found noteworthy in the famous sonnet of the “Vowels” was not simply the polysemantic play with words and the discovery of their associations but the manner in which Rimbaud had “turned the word away from its duty to signify.” This comment occurs in an early article entitled “Les Mots sans rides” in which Breton speculates about magnetic fields that make certain words gravitate toward others not only on the basis of associative meanings but by their spacial qualities and cognitive tensions. Words, he says, are creators of energy, and “the expression of an idea depends as much on the appearance of the words as on their meaning. There are words that work against the idea that they presume to express.”¹⁰ What he is saying is that once you have exploited the riches of meanings, once you have—in modern terminology—deconstructed their ordinary and mechanical connotations, you reach a point zero but you don't stay there—at least if you are a poet. You assign new significations to them. Mallarmé had had the same idea when he said that the “Aim of language is to become beautiful, and not to give preference to the expression of the beautiful over everything else.”¹¹

In “Les Mots sans rides,” which was a work of his youth, Breton placed on the same level of theoretical conjecture what Mallarmé had already tried and tested concretely in his untitled sonnet “Le vierge, le vivace, et le bel aujourd'hui,” in which the process he used is precisely to let the meaning of words and their analogical sonorities as well as morphological parallels spill on to each other and in a cumulative movement create the synthetic, virtual (as opposed to real) image of a swan, all the while crystallizing on the semantic register the physical and psychological state of the poet. This poem is the perfect example of Mallarmé's theory of the interaction of words in the creation of a substitute reality. He stated this notion in his preface to the theoretical work of a co-symbolist, René Ghil. He said in the preface to his Traité du verbe: “Contrary to a face value, easy and representative, as handled by the masses, Discourse is before anything else, a dream and song, which finds in the hands of the poet, because of the necessary constitution of an art dedicated to fictions, its own virtual image.”¹² The dexterity needed to accomplish this feat of recreating the universe with the aid of language, Mallarmé characterizes it as a linguistic one attained through the cultivation of the possibilities of the interplay of words. His theoretical writings are widely interspersed with expressions such as “language in its play,” “word play,” “literary play.” We might say that the game theory of language is at work, and that its work is a verbal play activity. When we come to Breton, however, “play” is too lowly a word to characterize what he considers the high mission of the destiny of language. The analogy is no longer confined to play but aims at love. Words make love with each other, subjected to all the traps and perils of chance, desire, attraction, copulation, and procreation. “From the moment when words are appreciated from a more and more emotional angle, from which we lend to their association, under certain forms, a power of deep, unique relationship, between one being and another, better still in which we dream thanks to them of reaching essence, it is clear that behavior in terms of language, will tend more and more to follow the pattern of behavior in love” (La Clé des champs, p. 12). The association of words includes the factor of the “emotional” here which is never mentioned in Mallarmé.

Onward from the major poem of his early period, “L'Union libre” to the series of love poems called L'Air de l'eau, and on and up to his last series of prose poems, Constellations, in which he departs completely from the verse line as Mallarmé had done in Coup de dés, the dominant pattern of Breton's poetry is that of verbal alliance paralleling intimate protoplasmic and cosmic alliances, with the broader structure of the erotic embrace. “Poetry is made in bed like love / Its rumpled sheets are the dawn of things” (“Sur la route de San Romano”).¹³ The mixing of metaphors is not a failing of rhetoric but a conscious effort to suggest the intermingling of spheres of human, natural, and cosmic activity such as human movement synchronized with snowing, soaring of birds, convulsion of earthquake: “Your flesh sprinkled with the flight of a thousand birds of paradise / Is a high flame lying in the snow.”¹⁴ Sometimes when the central word of the image has more than one meaning in French, it does not come off in English translation. The following lines in French do not carry across their double identity into English even in the expert hands of Kenneth White: “En partant j'ai mis le feu à une mèche de cheveux qui est celle d'une bombe / Et la mèche de cheveux creuse un tunnel sous Paris / Si seulement mon train entrait dans ce tunnel” rendered as “On leaving I set fire to a lock of hair which was the fuse of a bomb / And the lock of hair is hollowing out a tunnel under Paris / If only my train could enter that tunnel” (Clair de terre). The trouble is that the sensuality of hair and the explosive character of bomb which are integrated into the verbal polyvalence in French where “mèche” means both lock of hair and bomb, do not carry over into English and the hair-meaning cannot penetrate the bomb-meaning and vise versa although the translator can suggest a parallel on a linear level (“Aigrette”). The reason Breton loved the sunflower, “tournesol,” so much is because his own poetic movements were like the physical ones of the sunflower and could be called “heliotropic.” The words he chose gravitate like the sunflower toward fire (and explosion) whether of a human or cosmic nature. That is indeed the broad meaning of his last sentence in Nadja: “Beauty must be convulsive or not at all.”

The dexterity Breton developed in making verbal alliances in close step with human concordances with the rhythms of nature, reached its peak with the prose poems called Constellations, and this structural pattern is evidenced in the number of words that are signifiers of conjunction and function as links in the interplay. The central character is a prestigitator whose success depends on the combination of dexterity and chance, the very attributes that Breton manipulates one against the other in the creation of poetry.

What is most significant in all this over and above common interests in language, is the fact that the problems of writing are directly associated both by Mallarmé and by Breton with the crucial problematics of life although the circumstance of life are not the same for the two poets. Above all the interest in the functioning of language is motivated by the thought that man finds his liberty in the use he makes of language; the other side of the coin is that if he does not find his liberty through language he may well risk finding his bondage in using language in the stilted way society can induce him to do. Breton moreover believes that there is a strong carry-over from man's effort to emancipate his language to that of emancipating his life. Thus is language in its poetic function integrally tied to the notion of existence in both poets in their awareness of the power of language to burgeon with thought rather than simply to express it. According to Breton, the last great French poet to have used language in its traditional way to convey thought rather than generate it was Baudelaire.

But despite this important parallel between Mallarmé and Breton in the composition of a poem and the central significance of language, we are obliged to recognize that distance between a poem of Mallarmé and one of Breton is not narrowed. If some of the means to the poetic objective are similar, if some of the techniques are handed down from the one to the other over the heads of a host of lesser poets of imitative nature, the objectives or intentions of the poetic activity envisaged, desired, reflect the differences both of their individual characters and the separate epochs in which they were nurtured. In their pursuit of liberty, both are obsessed by the forces of chance. Mallarmé spent a lifetime confronting and combatting chance in the context of the human will. Unable to cope with the struggle on the philosophical level, he posits it on the level of poetry. Un Coup de dés is the monument to the great battle he waged against chance. The artist/writer cannot abolish chance but in the very utterance of that statement he causes chance to stumble; in the spaces of the book even as in the spaces of the cosmos his presence and his effort to daunt the forces leading him to sure catastrophe compel him to engage with those forces and consider the possibility of survival through language. In the broad literature that emanates from symbolism, with which Mallarmé's name is so closely connected, I am aware only of two poets who tackle this cosmic problem, although many have used the exterior format of the Coup de dés. They are two Latin-American poets, Aldo Pellegrini of Argentina in Distribución del silencio and the Chilean Vincente Huidobro in Altazor.¹⁵

Breton was of an age that had had time to accept chance as a substitute for providence. Some of his contemporaries succumbed to that acceptance and developed an écriture that reflects not the struggle of Mallarmé but a diffidence and a begrudging imitation of the indifference with which chance strikes and passes. Theirs is the world of the absurd, as we all know. But Breton's stance is neither that of Mallarmé nor of the absurdists. Instead of thinking like Mallarmé that chance intrudes into the ordered scheme of the mind, he invites it with open arms; he sets out to seduce it, to court it, to appropriate its powers for his own ends whether along the lines of poetic discoveries or in questions of love as important to him as his poetics.

Both poets were rebels against the conditions of the society of their time, but they compensated for their dissatisfaction in quite different ways. Mallarmé turned his back on society, Breton attacked it with the notorious but symbolic revolver shot which he characterized as the typical surrealist attitude of alarm and anger in relation to the ills of society. Mallarmé's introverted rebellion reflected the spirit of decadence of the time. Writing became a refuge for him, an act of interiority, and the communication of a poem to others was likened by him to the dropping of a visiting card at someone's doorstep to say: “I came by but you were not there.” The assumption was, of course, that symbolically speaking he was unlikely to be received by those on whose doors he knocked; that is to say, the poetic message would be subject to an absence of reception. But the retreat was not only vis-à-vis the readers, whom he assumed to be sparse. The withdrawal was also manifest in the kind of lexicon he chose, a lexicon which created for him a synthetic existence, a fictitious one, in which would flourish the flower absent from all bouquets, or that Hérodiade, enclosed in stone and tapistry, removed in time and space from any possibility of historical identification, a Salome intentionally misnamed to add a fictitious character beyond even legendary identification. With Mallarmé something new happened, and in this respect he was to have many followers into the modern world: he creates the fiction of the poet, ever more removed from reality than ever the fiction of the novelist was or has been, in which life itself finds a substitute in the undecipherable book (le grimoire). Biographers of Mallarmé have observed that he was sexually inhibited and repressed because of a very early marriage and a structured bourgeois life. That may be so; I am not here to dispute the conjectures of psychocriticism. But the sexual repression found vivid compensation in a language-oriented eroticism, in the virtual rather than real world, audacious and isolated, moving in the direction of the Septentrion, which he conceived as a dead star. There he can do all that he does not dare to do within the narrow confines of his life. Language in its liberty and generosity makes it possible for him to make love with two nymphs simultaneously, and if Beauty is on the wane in the real world, he shows us in that cryptic poem called “Prose pour Des Esseintes” a “Pulcherie” who survives thanks to the fictitious hyperbole of a gladiola too tall for this world but quite comfortable in “a world that did not exist.”¹⁶ In the pursuit of this fictitious world of new alliances of signifiers with signified his following is immense and international: Yeats, Valéry, Rilke, Stevens, to name some of the greatest.

André Breton's sense of the meaning of liberation was quite different. Here we have a philosophy of life which makes of man and the human experience of living a triumph over the artist, or, as he said it himself, makes art reversible to life. Rebellion, even as Mallarmé's refuge, is manifest in language which instead of crystallizing in a swan caught in ice, or a golden bird of Byzantium, plunges into natural phenomena to find there the hyperbole that surpasses the fictitious. Over and above all the exterior lables that his poetry has acquired, he characterized poetry as the result of “exceptional intensity of man before the spectacle of life.”¹⁷ He felt this as he viewed the activity of the Martiniquan poet, Aimé Césaire, in a country where the savage eye which Breton had sought to cultivate in his own Parisian environment had a much better chance to realize its potential. In a “Dialogue créole” which he conducted with his artist friend André Masson he observed: “One can wonder to what degree the poverty of European vegetation is responsible for the escape of the mind toward an imaginary flora. Should we not try to escape from that particular perception of what falls under our senses when we return to less favored places?”¹⁸

In conclusion, I will reiterate some of the points I have tried to make about the Mallarmé/Breton axis as they relate directly to current preoccupations with polysemantics, symbolization and writer/reader relationships. The impact of Mallarmé and Breton has been in three categories as we might conclude from my discussion, moving poetics toward a redefinition of the sacred, toward the reconsideration of the question of human relationship with nature, and the writer's relationship to the reader.

Mallarmé and Breton belonged to an era of philosophical transition, Mallarmé at its beginning, Breton at its closure. They were both intent on using poetry as an adjustment factor. In that respect, as they saw the divine being dislocated from its erstwhile association with the arts as a supernal presence, participating in the process of artistic creativity, they tried to preserve the notion of the sacred by appropriating its power.

Mallarmé's so-called “virtual reality” was such an attempt to capture the sacred. The artifact he created with high intellectual lucidity did not englobe him but was endowed with a certain autonomy from circumstantial strictures. Nothing is clearer than the analogy he makes in that early poem, “Le Don du poème,” in which he compares the birth of a poem with the birth of a child. After difficult and prolonged labor, it is born and given, i.e., severed from the one who begot it. All we hear about the process is that it was “horrible” and if we look at the years Mallarmé spent correcting his works, we know that he was not exaggerating about the difficulties of creating. Lately he has been quoted repeatedly from Crise de vers where he says that his “I” disappeared into the poem.¹⁹ In truth, it disappeared from the poem as well, leaving in its trace a multiplicity of potential “I”'s. The notion of the “sacred” surfaces in the manner in which a sacerdotal ritual is performed in the symbolization process whereby the earthly bread incorporates divine spirit. Mallarmé saw himself performing that type of ritual over and over again as he distilled material entities into ideations containing in their contours an infinite series of reidentifications. For Mallarmé, the word “Verbe” is sacred, as opposed to languages which are subjected to changing codes and mores. The poet is a mediator between the Verbe, with its integral meaning, and the languages of comprehension.

Breton also saw a desperate need in the modern world to preserve the notion of the sacred while rejecting its supernatural character. His solution was different although like Mallarmé he claimed a whole line of predecessors. He attached the creative process to that of analogical thinking which he found at the basis of all magical operations. But his major objective was not the production of an artifact endowed with a sacred character reinterpretable through the ages. For Breton, the process of creativity was more important than the ultimate product, and not something horribly difficult to do but rather supremely enjoyable. Influenced by the esoterism of the ages, and by contemporaries such as Pierre Mabille who was studying voodoo ritual, and Malcolm de Chazal engrossed in the rituals of Eastern cultures, he saw the transfer of the sacred into the notion of volupté, i.e., a vertiginous reception of physical reality and the effervescent participation of the poet in the universal intercourse amongst beings, things, animal, vegetable, mineral, human existences. Because this flow was evident not only in the primitive but in modern poetic perceptions—and he drew his examples from among the great poets of the nineteenth century in particular—he believed that it was a permanent manifestation which the polysemantic character of languages supported. The resulting artifact was part of the life experience, a provocation for other creative activity, i.e., everyman's rite of passage from surface reality to deeper levels where antinomies ceased to exist. The symbolization was not confined to the work of art but in the pool of language available to all. We proceed thus from the notion of poetry as an elitist activity to poetry for all. In this respect, the intentionality, so often the very subject of Breton's writings, is as important a text as the work of art that may arise to implement it. In fact, three of his major prose writings: Nadja (1928), Les Vases communicants (1932), and L'Amour fou (1937) are expressions of that intentionality. They are projects, instigations for works of greater proportion open to others. In these times, when the discussion of intentionality of the writer is frowned upon in critical circles, it is important to realize that in the case of surrealist writings it is at the heart of the matter and part of the transformational process of the work of art.

Like Mallarmé, Breton had that sense of delivery of the work of art to the reader except that for him the catalytic power (or sacred character) resided in the process of production rather than in the work produced. That is why sharing his intentions with the reader was so important. In the case of Mallarmé, the value of the work is to be judged empirically through the reception of the work itself; in the case of Breton it is the creator's communication of the altered state of apperception that has to be received along with the work itself, i.e., the transfer of emotion, of a sublimation.

What light do Mallarmé and Breton throw on the altered relationship of man with nature? In the case of Mallarmé, as I pointed out earlier, much of his work presents a rupture with the ordinary flow of natural states and phenomena. His garden is artificial, in a country that does not exist; his planet is dead except as it is cultivated by language creating artifacts on an empty and indifferent canvas. Nature in no way contributes to the sacralization of the poet's universe. He has deconstructed what was there before projecting his interiority onto a tangible exteriority. His negation of the gods involves also the negation of the principal sites where they had established correspondences. On this matter, he concurred with George W. Cox, whose work he rendered into French in his Les Dieux antiques, a work in which Cox had demythified ancient mythology by reducing the powers of the gods to natural movements of earth, sun, stars, etc.²⁰

But the blank space, depopulated of its gods, does not thereby return to a void. Mallarmé does not deal in abstractions. His images are very concrete but the composite, derived from culling of physical images, no longer functions in its natural and original habitat. Instead, it is staged in a new space totally controlled by the stage directions of the poet. He is not alienated as a creator although he may well have been exiled as a human being.

Breton had the same preoccupation: how to revise modern man's relation with nature. Like Mallarmé, he considered his answer of primary importance to his role as poet. But his proposed solution was quite different. He made himself permeable to the larger and unpredictable movements of the physical world which work toward integration rather than separation of man in relation to nature. He could reach this sense of monistic integration by developing as we have already mentioned, the mental activity involved in establishing analogies. Every symbol created through analogy is integrated in a pool and only provisionally detached from the matrix where it correlates with an infinite number of others.

Now we might think that this resembles belief in a Swedenborgian network of correspondences except for the very important fact that nature is not viewed as a temple, intermediary between earth and an unknowable heaven; instead, we might say that it is a cauldron ever productive and attainable. The mission of the poet is not to make a break but to enter into the “synthetic comprehension of the world and to make man enter into this knowledge,” as expressed by Pierre Mabille and quoted by Breton in one of his last essays, entitled “Pont Levis,” which was published in the posthumous collection of Breton's prose, Perspective cavalière.²¹ The fact of the matter is—and this is the basic quality of modernism as I see it—that correspondences are no longer recognized as preexisting to the artist's recognition of them; they are established by the artist himself, and their impact on human consciousness is strictly monitored by the artist. The aleatory character of natural and human phenomena is captured and vigilantly structured into the artifact.

To come to the third question: the relationship with the reader, Mallarmé and Breton united in their recognition of the writer's responsibility vis-à-vis the reader. Their position preempts that of modern hermeneutics in the assumption that interpretation is a creative activity and conducive to what Breton called “a perplexed lucidity.” Both opened their works to the uncertainty and multiplicity of interpretation. Mallarmé based his polysemy on the strategic composition of the poem aimed at creating ambiguity. Breton relied on the inherent riches of the analogical content captured by both writer and reader through the practice of nonlinear reading. This procedure is not identifiable with modern poetics of criticism although the works of both poets have served as objects of the critical exercise in hermeneutics which decodes and recodes so-called “texts” through the practice of logical discourse. One of the basic distinctions Mallarmé and Breton made between poetry and other forms of writing was poetry's inherent hermeneutic function. In making this broad separation between poésie and prose, they had thought that they had liberated poetry from what Breton called the “yoke of Greco-Roman logistics.” Poetry's subjection to methodologies applicable to expository writing would have struck them as paradoxical, indeed as a threat to the very survival of poetry.

Notes

1. Stéphane Mallarmé, Un Coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard in Oeuvres complètes (Editions de la Pléiade, 1956), pp. 455-77; hereafter abbreviated OC. André Breton, Constellations in Signe ascendant (Gallimard, 1968), pp. 127-71.

2. Harold Bloom, Poetry and Repression (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976).

3. André Breton, Clair de terre, tr. Kenneth White, Selected Poems of André Breton (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969), p. 19.

4. Breton, “Fronton-Virage” in La Clé des champs (Sagittaire, 1953) (written in 1948), and Entretiens (Gallimard, 1952), p. 78.

5. Breton, “Le Merveilleux contre le mystère,” in La Clé des champs (Sagittaire, 1953), pp. 11-12 (written in 1936); the translation is mine.

6. Mallarmé, “Autobiographie,” OC, p. 663; the translation is mine.

7. Louis Aragon, Le Paysan de Paris (Gallimard, 1926).

8. Breton, Entretiens, p. 257.

9. Breton, “Le La” in Signe ascendant, pp. 174-75 (written about 1960).

10. Breton, Les Pas perdus (Gallimard, 1924), p. 133.

11. Mallarmé, Diptyque: Une Méthode, OC, p. 853.

12. Mallarmé, Traité de verbe, OC, p. 858.

13. Breton, Signe ascendant, p. 122 (the translation is mine).

14. Breton, L'Air de l'eau in Clair de terre (Gallimard, 1966), p. 160 (original date of the poem 1934).

15. Aldo Pellegrini, Distribución del silencio (Buenos Aires: Ediciones “A partir de Cero,” 1957), p. 27. Vicente Huidobro, Altazor in Obras completas, I (Zig-Zag, 1964).

16. Mallarmé, “Prose pour Des Esseintes,” OC, p. 55.

17. Breton, “Un Grand Poète noir,” in Martinique, charmeuse de serpents (Pauvert, 1972), p. 105.

18. Breton, “Dialogue créole,” ibid., pp. 18-19.

19. Mallarmé, Crise de vers, OC, p. 366.

20. Mallarmé, Les Dieux antiques, OC, pp. 1159-276.

21. Perspective cavalière (Gallimard, 1970), p. 201.