An analysis of the achievement of the French Symbolist Movement exacts both a strong measure of awe and a sharp critique. The grounds for awe are evident: for many reasons, not the least among them the towering figure of Mallarmé, symbolism was able to render the clearest answer to the modern confrontation of self and world, to give the most precise shape to the self-conscious concern with the nature of the object in an “atmosphere of the mind.” Indeed, the insistent probings of symbolist poets in France, Belgium, and eventually throughout Europe created a climate which forced realism in literature into a radical crisis. Once poets had discovered the means whereby to accept the dominance of the psyche over the object, of aesthetic freedom over scientific causation, the issues of romanticism had been successfully joined in an era of fin de siècle technology. But such an appraisal of symbolism is necessarily accompanied by an awareness of its implicit failure, for in shaping its program, it created its own impasse.

I

Although historically the language of French symbolism was developed as a lyrical language, many of its implications are revealed with particular clarity in prose. Le symbole is, after all, an object transformed by the poet's mind to reveal the true or ideal reality beyond. The inward turning of experience, its deformation by the mind through the word's alchemy, expresses and suppresses the act of knowledge which to dramatize is one of the classic functions of narrative. The early Gide—refined prose artist par excellence—dramatized precisely this situation in his Traité du Narcisse (1892). As the self reaches for knowledge, the world is instantaneously transformed. “I” and objects, psychologically fused in apprehension, become one metaphysically as le symbole is born to represent both in the ideal. Such a reworking of the Coleridgean imagination is more easily accepted in poetry than in prose because the epistemological difficulties implied by this transformation are blurred by the instantaneous action of the lyric and by the poet's concentration on the word as a thing-in-itself. But in prose narrative, writers and critics must deal with an established convention in which the intercourse between minds and things is rendered explicit and hence cannot avoid whatever difficulties may be implied in the language of symbolism.

Kenneth Cornell, then, need not wonder that critics of symbolism viewed the “parallel path” of prose fiction with the same anathema as that bestowed upon the poets.¹ Their hostility had to be particularly directed at prose. And, surely, it is not coincidence that long after Jean Moréas' lofty claims for symbolism in the Manifeste of 1886, one of the most incisive attacks upon it occurred in the series of essays entitled “Le Roman d'aventure” (1913). In turning against the symbolist novel, Jacques Rivière clearly criticized the problematic character of its language. His chief point of departure signified a renewed insistence on the traditional terms of narrative, for he seized upon the symbolists' abandonment of subject matter, i.e., of the world and objects the story is about. Describing the symbolist's method in an image, he likens his reworking of subject matter to the sweep of fire consuming the frame of a house, gradually transforming and dissolving the beams until only an iridescent suggestion of structure is left. In this way, Rivière insists, the mind consumes its objects, analyzing and decomposing them, until there remain only the ideas behind them.² Now this critical perception would have been less evident in the lyric where we actually admire the disintegration of subject matter as a higher artistic act. Yet the problem is the same; only it is revealed more sharply by the expectation of narrative. As we shall see, the symbolist's manner of dissolving and transforming the objects of life is epistemologically more difficult than it has been in other forms of experimental distortion, because it requires that objects qua objects be eliminated and transmuted into different things. It therefore disengages the mind from its usual intercourse with things in the midst of the act of knowledge by confronting it with a different set of objects—objects unknowable by the usual means of sense perception. Transforming, like Baudelaire, a forest of trees into one of symbols, the poet demands of the reader that he abandon epistemological for metaphysical understanding while maintaining the posture of confrontation implicit in the act of knowledge.

The symbolist's linguistic requirement, then, is his most pervasive paradox in a theory of literature in which paradox plays so important a role. A dream house becomes a diadem, a silver buckle, a black book, even a moment of stillness, yet the knower relates to the new objects in a pose of perception appropriate to the apprehension of houses. This paradox has profound implications for literary composition, both in terms of the continuity of language and of its moral and ideational content. Language and meanings, as Huysmans' Des Esseintes put it, can be concentrated in a state of “meat” as a picture embodying their significance.³ Yet language, especially prose, also strains outward towards a telling of interrelations between sensibility and world. Moreover, such a contraction of the mind's intercourse with life—at the same time a contraction of the act of knowledge—introduces new terms of relation. When Des Esseintes was struck by Gustave Moreau's painting of Salomé dancing for Herod, he observed a transformation of moral causality into formal extension. As the aroused king is affected by the glittering jewels and snake-like movements of the dance, as moral decision and psychological response produce John the Baptist's fate, all these causes are absorbed into the shining objects of art. The causal term response is thus gradually transmuted into the term embodiment which is metaphysical and pictorial alike. Mind has created a situation in which the artificial object embodies the idea. It therefore cannot strain towards knowledge, for in the place of the usual epistemological object it views a thing in which knowledge is already contained.⁴

“Neither “discontinuity” nor “transformation” appears first in symbolist language. Both suggest the stresses and strains between movement and form common to the lyric. But used as a self-conscious artistic method and a programmatically defined vision of language they have issued in a special kind of writing. If in a dramatic poem like Mallarmé's Hérodiade gardens are not perceived through the shrubs and flowers of nature's creation, nor allegorically in Marvell's sense, but have become “jardins d'améthyste, enfouis / sans fin dans de savantes abîmes éblouis,” ordinary perception loses its meaning. The act of knowledge is already complete and its significance (rendered through the confluence of object and mind) exists within and beyond the objects presented to the reader. It is this inversion of the act of knowledge—the conversion of the epistemological into a metaphysical object prior to cognition—that has led to the characteristic impasse in symbolist literature which is particularly crucial to narrative.

II

The symbol is an object which the mind has absorbed into its internal world where it exists as a new creation. When we look at the gardens of Mallarmé, at the dining-room of Huysmans' Des Esseintes, or at the “chimerical islands” in Gide's Voyage d'Urien (1893), we view mental images whose significance is not given directly in sense experience. But we also realize that any understanding we might have of these “metaphysical” objects must somehow involve perception. The austere décor in Mallarmé's sonnet “Ses purs ongles …,” for example, presupposes a very visual imagination, equally adept at composition and at decomposition. As the mind recreates the “metaphysical” form from scattered objects, it at once reaches beyond itself. We confront, then, a version of Coleridge's imagination, for the mind seems to repeat God's creation, reassembling a world of shapes, colors, and things. But there is also a great difference. Coleridge, like Schelling and the other romantics, retained the vision's empirical base, the ground in Lockean sensibility, which the imaginative vision transcends. It is one of the paradoxes of fin de siècle symbolism that the poet literally makes the objects of his imagination, that he deforms and in fact obliterates the ground in sense experience as well.⁵ The inquiring mind, intrigued by the sensual display, soon comes upon the unknowable object, one which his senses cannot fathom.

This paradoxical activity of the mind creates a highly problematic character for the self and its role in literature. Again in poetry the difficulty is obscured by the purity of the lyrical process into which the self as Poet-Magician can be absorbed. Thus, it is part of the imagery of “Ses purs ongles …” for the Poet-Master to withdraw, leaving behind an emptiness which contains only a suggestion of the assemblage of objects, “car le Maître est allé puiser des pleurs au Styx / avec le seul objet dont le Néant s'honore.” The poet's role as the ordering spirit, accentuated by his absence, is part of the composition which emerges like a locked box whose key has been deliberately removed. But once the poet functions as a protagonist, his relation to the deformed or absent world must somehow be dramatized. Jean Moréas describes the hero in symbolist narrative as a clown, a unique personage whose world has been deformed by his own hallucination, i.e., who creates his own reality by transmuting the empirical world in accordance with his image of himself. He therefore “acts out” what the lyric implies. Figures with mechanical gestures exist only as a pretext for the protagonist's sensations and conjectures. The clown's mask, already seen by Baudelaire as the poet's proper costume, comes to represent the true reality, reflecting the self's own dream as it is mirrored in art.⁶

Moréas' hero, like Gide's Narcissus, thus reveals the paradox implied in symbolist “cognition.” He appears to perceive, but at the crucial moment deforms the worlds he encounters: images of perception are turned into images of hallucination, i.e., they are transmuted into something else. At the same time they are also part of his own mask as clown, produced in the very pose of knowledge. The epistemological object, then, not only is actually a metaphysical object, it is also an extension of the subject, its “mask.” In this way, the symbolist hero, as a persona for the poet's self, portrays in fiction the essential characteristics of Mallarmé's soliloquists—Hérodiade and the Faun.

This description of the self as hero is clearly supported in Mallarmé's view of Hamlet as the only reality in Shakespeare's play, contained in the famous review of 1886 (the same year as Moréas' Manifeste). “Comparses, il le faut! car dans l'idéale peinture de la scène tout se meut selon une réciprocité symbolique des types entre eux ou relativement à une figure seule.” Surely, this is to some extent a particular interpretation of Hamlet “si bien façonnée selon le seul théâtre de notre esprit,” but it is also a description of the symbolist hero and his existential situation. All figures other than the hero himself are deformed and become his attributes, that is, they become objects and images which derive their existence solely from their relation to the hero. Polonius, therefore, becomes more than the foolish, senile character he is, but a mere figure “… comme découpée dans l'usure d'une tapisserie pareille à celle où il le faut rentrer pour mourir.” “Qui erre autour d'un type exceptionnel comme Hamlet,” Mallarmé concludes, “n'est que lui, Hamlet.”⁷ The “I” is not the percipient; it is the only existent for whom things and figures are attributes.

Mallarmé's conception of Hamlet gives us a clue not only to the function of the self but also to the idea of transformation. Polonius may indeed be capable of functioning as a character in his own right, but in relation to Hamlet he is no longer himself. He becomes a thing deformed, cut out of the arras, finally an attribute of Hamlet. In the purely lyrical situation, such an absorption of selves into the poet's mind requires no explanation. “Die Poesie,” Novalis once wrote, “löst fremdes Dasein im eignen auf.”⁸ But an explanation is demanded in drama or narrative. Polonius has to be understood as ceasing to exist, as becoming a thing expressing a state of mind. If in “L'Evolution de la littérature” Mallarmé counsels against the description or naming of things and calls instead for the creation of symbols—new things that are states of the soul—he reinforces this dramatic interchange, this réciprocité between mind and thing (whether the latter is a person or not) which continues to give credence to the analogy between the symbolist poet's stance and the act of cognition. But this drama, which suggests knowledge but conveys no knowledge, indicates the turn from the perceptually based imagination of Schelling and Coleridge to the world-denying will of Schopenhauer. Instead of being a knowing mind, the poet or hero acts as a mind that dissolves the world of things and accepts only those that embody his special vision.⁹

The implication of this view for narrative is clear. The epistemological act, while suggested, must at once be denied. Narrative action which had been turned into perception in the novel of sensibility, as well as in romantic allegories, is now stripped down even further to a symbolic interplay of mind and self-created images. In the very act of story-telling, a world of sensible nature is rendered and is at once transformed. The effect of this manner is particularly evident in the prose poem which had once been celebrated as the “purest novel” because it shows great affinity with the lyric while at the same time retaining the motion and form of prose discourse. In the eighteenth century Gessner's idylls and Macpherson's Ossian suggest a base in description. But when in the nineteenth century the prose poem reached its late but vigorous flowering in France, it was also this effort to describe that delineated the boundaries of lyrical prose. Description, hence perception seen through the empiricist's eye, became the means of defining both the world of objects and the poet-narrator's masks. From Chateaubriand to Aloysius Bertrand, from Baudelaire and Laforgue to Mallarmé and Valéry, prose poems came to be defined as arrangements of described scenes, perceptions absorbed into limiting designs. Thus Baudelaire's clown in “Le Fou et la Vénus” transforms a brilliantly described garden into a meaningful image of beauty which is finally condensed into the fool's artificial costume as he kneels at the feet of the statue of Venus in a persiflage of a Petrarchan lover. Even in stories like “Le Mauvais vîtrier,” in which the poet maligns a vendor for his inability to brighten squalor with beauty, the poet's double persona (both himself and his victim) insists on the juxtaposition of patterns (the deftly described city and the suggested possibilities of beauty) which are exploded in the comically violent gesture of his acte gratuit. Although most of these poets were guiltily hesitant about their form, and although the public was never wholly won over, the prose poem developed more and more sharply into a mode of expression that played the cadences of prose, and even its narrative potential, against the concentrated imagery of objects drawing the poet's self.

It is therefore no coincidence that since the beginning of the modern prose poem so many examples of the genre have been descriptive, relating perceptions to the poet as a present or effaced consciousness. Although many important prose poems—Rimbaud's Illuminations en prose, for example—developed a “free” sensibility through the poet's heightened vision, much significant prose poetry is also restrictive. Especially in the later nineteenth century limits were clearly drawn and Breton's comparison of the prose poem to the sonnet was by no means misplaced. Far from opening the form to Whitmanesque cadences, an important version of the later prose poem established rigid conventions, perceptions condensed into aesthetically formed patterns of objects. Especially the compositions of Mallarmé have utilized consecutive prose to achieve repetitions and counterpoints with which to explore, in poetry, the paradox of movement and form, of the self's act of knowledge directed towards objects and their disposition as things in which a new knowledge is already contained.

A passage from Mallarmé's prose poem “Le Nénuphar blanc” may serve as an example. The poet, rowing a boat, stops briefly at the bank near a park. He reflects in silence, imagining the figure of a lady to whom he addresses a soliloquy in adoration. The self delivering this address is a specially created, imaginary self—poet, troubadour, pirate. His dream counsels him against making himself known. He departs, taking with him the idea of a white water lily as a symbol of his devotion. The story opens:

J'avais beaucoup ramé, d'un grand geste net assoupi, les yeux au dedans fixés sur l'entier oubli d'aller, comme le rire de l'heure coulait alentour. Tant d'immobilité parassait que frôlé d'un bruit inerte où fila jusqu'à moitié la yole, je ne vérifiai l'arrêt qu'à l'étincellement table d'intiales sur les avirons mis à nu, ce qui me rappela à mon identité mondaine.

Qu'arrivait-il, où étais-je?¹⁰

The passage renders its description in the narrative past with all the outward trappings of story-telling. A situation akin to that of a tale is actually established by the poet's figure rowing his boat, stopping, listening, his oars half raised. Yet all these tangible relevancies to fact are at once cancelled out. The self's action is set in the past perfect tense: “J'avais … ramé.” His eyes are turned within: they are fastened neither on motion nor on stillness but on “l'entier oubli d'aller,” forgetfulness of motion. Immobility is personified: “(il) paressait.” In this way, Mallarmé converts description and action into a denaturalized type of action implied by objects. He does not tell us events directly, although he seems to. For example, he does not say that the boat reached shallower water which changed the sound of the oars. Rather, he was “frôlé d'un bruit inerte où fila jusqu'à moitié la yole.” He realizes the motion had stopped by the glistening initials on the oars raised above the water. Things and personified abstractions act the part of characters and natural objects, but they also cancel out their own activities as they produce the cessation of the very motion they appear to create. A picture emerges in which all things are related to the poet, no longer as perceptions but as re-envisioned objects in which movement is rendered immobile and projected in images through an ostensible narrative form.

Fiction developing from, and accompanying, this type of prose poem, is determined by such a use of prose to render explicit the new relation between self and thing. Remy de Gourmont's novel Sixtine (1890), for example, reflects a mode of narrative by today's standards fairly conventional, within which characters constantly seek to mirror the empirical self and its adventures in an ideal self and its symbolic creation. Our example is drawn from a remarkable passage in a seduction scene which occurs in a story narrated by the hero Entragues. Coquerette has taken a lover, Sidoine. Unlike husbands who are fathers (this is a Victorian age) lovers are things one has created for one's pleasure. Coquerette experiences the most sensuous thrill as Sidoine begins his seduction by kissing each joint of each of her fingers, his lips playing on her fingers much as Des Esseintes had played on the bottles of colorful liqueurs to achieve a symphony of taste. Even as he thus transforms parts of her person into things, in his turn creating his erotic toy, Sidoine professes his love and calms her suspicions. Kissing each joint he first exclaims “Magnifique,” then, as he reaches the second joint of her ring finger, varies it with “Funèbre!” At first Coquerette does not understand and takes these words to be witty professions of love; each time she believes and is content. But suddenly the expected campaign halts in its predetermined course and the individual actions are given a new meaning. Pale, Sidoine rises and looks upon the bed as upon a sad spectacle: “L'appareil est funèbre, et mon coeur s'épouvante.” From the actual sensual encounter, a new vision has emerged:

Les mots s'étaient rejoints et de la conjonction magique naissait et surgissait l'unité réelle contenue en leurs éléments.

The fingers have become funeral candles, the woman a corpse, the bed a coffin in which her beauty is laid out in a sterile and perfect immobility. The recognition continues in an image:

Trois cierges au chevet s'allumèrent et à cette lueur la blanche figure sembla sourire aux anges, comme les petits enfants dans leur berceau. Un grand crucifix noir apparut sous ses mains croisées; des fleurs furent semées, des roses sur son sein, sur son ventre des lys et à ses pieds des violettes.¹¹

The lover's titillating kisses have turned his mistress into an object of his vision, a Poësque horror which also becomes a source of their passion. But in this scene, in which the play between self and other, consciousness and thing, is reversed with clever irony, feeling becomes “real” only through a game of illusion. The thick sensuousness continues to act on the reader like a drug, but as fingers become candles and the recollection of the idea of death—immobility and artifice—becomes the true stimulant, the psychology of motive is dissolved. In this way, the deformed object is not rendered only as a mental object; it is also depersonalized. The candles, which have replaced the fingers, embody the idea intended through their transformation. Emerging from the mind, but ultimately excluding it, these deformed things have become symbols into which the mental act that gave rise to them has been wholly absorbed. The symbol has become a terminus.

Symbolist conversions of empirical into “real” objects require, then, not just a psychologization of experience. Their mirrored images, like that of Narcissus, must themselves become artifacts, purposive distortions of the original perceptions which become part of the self's own features—the mask of poet, persona, or hero. Thus Coquerette's inviting body must first become a corpse of her lover's imagination, the images in Moréas' and Paul Adam's Thé chez Miranda must turn into tableaux, or encounters must be distorted in the Gothic of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's Contes cruels. In one of these tales, “Le Désir d'être un homme,” for example, several blocks of Paris are set on fire in an artificial stimulation of remorse that does not come off. An old tragedian, playing at being Nero with real matches, finds that even this self-created stimulus cannot turn the defunct image of himself he had perceived in a mirror into a real identity. But, despite this necessary failure, the search for a “real” self through the violent transformation of the empirical world is clearly seen. Objects, converted within the poet, are transformed as if by a magic hand. These “real” objects may have moral consequences—like the diadems of Salomé in the painting to which we have referred—but they do not exist for this purpose; they exist for ends of their own, suggesting a trans-empirical “real” world which is basically inaccessible to the organs and language of sense. By reversing and corrupting nature, by numbing himself with real flowers aping horrible artifice rather than with artificial flowers emulating the real, by being nursed with colorful enemas rather than human food, Des Esseintes of A rebours counteracts impotence in life with the grandeur and madness of the symbolic imagination.

III

The point of these reflections is two-fold: first, that objects in symbolism exist only in relation to the particular mind of the artist and his persona. They are deformed by him as they become extensions of himself in the way Mallarmé's Polonius becomes an extension of Hamlet. Secondly, they exist by themselves, being significant as ideas. The self is thus freed from the bondage of race, moment, or milieu. It acts in the realm of the infinite. It makes and unmakes objects as it transforms them into universal symbols which replace psychologically conditioned motives. The symbol as terminus, however, creates a paradox and an impasse. For on the bed of Coquerette and in the actor's pose before the mirror we see dramatized an interchange of self and “other” that issues in the classic posture of cognition but ends in the object's conversion into something other than itself. We thus witness the problem always implicit in the symbolist imagination: to the extent that the object suggests the infinite it is no longer itself and cognition is a pose; to the extent that consciousness engages itself in it, the self is deformed by its own creation.

These points have been, to be sure, a dead issue since “Le Roman d'aventure,” which denounced the circularity of the symbolist novel and, by implication, exposed its paradox. For its crucial difficulty resides in the discrepancy between symbolism as a substantially lyrical method and the nature of the genre to which it has been applied. The result has been a kind of prose narrative in which the self (elsewhere in the novel the hero or an acting persona) becomes the receptacle for objects and an agent for their transmutation into objets d'art. On the one hand, the hero is liberated by asserting his independence in the realm of the imagination while conceding his impotence in the realm of fact. On the other hand, he is imprisoned, locked, as it were, into the work with all the rigor and severity of Mallarmé's famous swan. But despite this paradox the symbolist imagination has remained a constant alternative to classical realism as the techniques it developed became crucial to the novel of the mind. The insistence on the bankruptcy of the external world led to an elevation of private vision to public symbols and to an overvaluation of aesthetic relations over cause, time, or character—the conventional determinants of narrative form. Thus, the point Rivière criticized more than half a century ago still lingers in our conception of narrative. The external world, transmuted and projected into the self, thence abstracted from the self as objects in which knowledge is contained, leaves us with a circular vision in which the novel's traditional intercourse between persona and world can be dissolved and replaced by configurations of imagery.

Notes

1. Kenneth Cornell, The Symbolist Movement (New Haven, 1951), p. 73.

2. Jacques Rivière, Nouvelles études, 9th ed. (Paris, 1947), p. 238.

3. Joris Karl Huysmans, Oeuvres complètes (Paris, 1928-34), VII, 301-302.

4. Note Rivière's insistence on the mind-enclosed dissolution of the perceived world into a “weak” reality. “Le monde sensible s'était réduit en une tapisserie légandaire, ornée de motifs noblement fantastiques, et qui semblait tendue sur les parois intérieures du cerveau.” Nouvelles études, p. 246.

5. This intricate concept of poetic creation through the negation of the external world has been illuminated in all its subtlety in Georges Poulet's essay on Mallarmé in La Distance intérieur (Paris, 1952), pp. 298-355 passim.

6. In Léon Vanier, Les Premiers armes du symbolisme (Paris, 1889), pp. 40 ff.

7. Stéphane Mallarmé, Divagations (Paris, 1942), pp. 176-177. In his study of Mallarmé and the symbolist drama, Haskell Block speaks of Mallarmé's cosmic symbolization of Hamlet, the “collision of dream and destiny” as “the full expression of the tragedy of the human condition.” Mallarmé and the Symbolist Drama (Detroit, 1963), p. 91.

8. Schriften, ed. P. Kluckhohn (Leipzig, 1929), II, 327.

9. These ideas were developed explicitly in Remy de Gourmont's Idéalisme and in his Esthétique de la langue française as well as in the Philosophie de Schopenhauer. A clear exposition of de Gourmont's view of the poet as percipient can be found in the small volume by Karl Uitti, The Concept of Self in the Symbolist Novel (The Hague, 1961) and, more elaborately, in Uitti's La Passion littéraire de Remy de Gourmont (Paris, 1962).

10. Stéphane Mallarmé, p. 51.

11. Remy de Gourmont, Sixtine (Paris, 1915), pp. 171-172.