In the poetic universe of Stéphane Mallarmé, the poet has the power to create with words, to go beyond the object by making an absolute out of language. On nearly every page of his prose commentaries on the essence of poetry, Mallarmé expresses commitment to “le Texte … parlant de lui-même” (“the Text speaking by itself,” OC, p. 663).¹ And, indeed, in his poetry, the object becomes a word which dissolves its material reference points and reveals a permanence beyond words, an authentic silence which communicates “perfect certainty” (OC, p. 446). This transformation of the real permits us to describe him as a “pure” poet.

Looking at the great diversity of Mallarmé's writing—his verse poems, letters, prose poems, theoretical musings, articles, notes—we find two fundamental patterns in operation in his communication of the pure realm of poetry. On a thematic level, Mallarmé is concerned first and foremost with the representation of poetry regardless of its actual mode of expression (formal poem, music, theater, ballet, art, prose), while, on a linguistic level, he continually has recourse to a language of elasticity, a language which expands and contracts in a vibratory movement of displacement. As the poet is an “ordonnateur de fêtes” (OC, p. 330), poetry is “[la] nature animée” (OC, p. 303), and both conjoin in the mobilization of words (OC, p. 336), a rhythm of constricted release. The recurring motif which brings together these two patterns into a single contextual structure is what Mallarmé calls “la mobilité de l'écrit” (“the mobility of the text,” OC, p. 455), and it takes the form of his favorite word as object, object as word: the fan.

A fan is basically a segment of a circle which is constructed with thin rods which move on a pivot; made out of silk, feathers, paper, it opens and closes, mystifies and reveals, in a simulation of movement which is neither dynamic nor static, but vibrant. Fans commonly produce air currents and promote a cooling, refreshing sensation. But fans are not limited to their use by people; they are also connected to leaves, bird wings, bird tails, cards, book pages, garden trellises, marine construction, painting. Structured on the principle of folding and unfolding, a fan always recovers its size and shape regardless of its effects and affects of deformation. Never rigid, a fan maintains a measure of control which permits resistance to change and mobility, and its elasticity is inherent to its fundamental intactness. While a fan may suggest formation through color, shape, or movement, it never abandons its original source of form or balance. Yet, a fan is not mobile in that it can change its condition; rather, a fan transforms the perspective and angles of the condition.

Certainly, Mallarmé's interest in fans is well-known² and has been well-documented in numerous critical studies.³ But attention to his use of the fan is limited to an examination of vocabulary clusters in which fan is linked with wing, pen, feather, foam, fold. What is singularly overlooked is Mallarmé's usage of the fan as a preferred intertextual structure in the basic act of writing. For Mallarmé, writing fixes; and, by its fixity, it denies reader space and textual autonomy. In order to cede the initiative to words (OC, p. 366), in order to project words towards the reader so that he may discover their significance, Mallarmé turns to a textual linguistic form which animates the words on the page (“des places variables,” OC, p. 455). Moreover, this mobilization and manipulation of words—the act of writing—evolves chronologically in his work from the fixity of the texts in Entre quatre murs to a veritable volatilization of the reading-writing experience in Un Coup de dés, in which the text finally becomes subject and the reader becomes object.

In his first works (Entre quatre murs and Poëmes d'enfance et de jeunesse), Mallarmé writes in standard traditional verse forms and rime schema. While he experiments with the pliancy of language, his early poems are marked by a spatial and temporal localization: words are concepts which do not reveal things which have no existence other than a poetic one. Yet, in the early poems, we find a vocabulary of motion which remains in his work: fan, foam, wing, wave, fold, smoke, swan, feather. In fact, all of Mallarmé's poetry can be justly described as a repository of terms of motion as though his very word choices are efforts to unblock the immobility of the act of writing in order to capture the “mobiles variations de l'Idée, que l'écrit revendique de fixer” (“mobile variations of the Idea, which the text insists on fixing,” OC, p. 648).

Parallel to Mallarmé's early use of words of motion is his fascination with punctuation as a means to vibrate the text. The dash, ellipses, capital letters, quotation marks, parentheses, and exclamation point (described in one text as a “plumet,” OC, p. 168), as well as his concern with varying type sizes, attest to Mallarmé's interest in the visual power of the word on the page. But when he later finds that punctuation is artificial (OC, p. 407), a hindrance to textual mobility and reader manipulation, he undertakes experiments with the formal structure of the verse poem in a studied attempt to eliminate the artifices which punctuation imposes. Copies of his fan poems, for example, reveal the absence of punctuation, but fan poems appear rather late in Mallarmé's career. It is as though his initial efforts to deal with writing on paper fail to free sufficiently the poem from the confines of black ink. Once Mallarmé begins to play with writing on objects, notably the fans, envelopes, pebbles, Easter eggs, bottles of Calvados, etc., in Vers de circonstance, he decreases and frequently eliminates punctuation. It appears that the substitution of an object for a sheet of paper enables him to overcome the obstacle of the page as well as the trappings of punctuation. Like the textual gamesmanship which Mallarmé displays in Vers de circonstance, the later texts of Poésies, which are considered his most hermetic and purest poems, reflect an increasing liberation of the written word from its position on the page. In “A la nue accablante tu” (OC, p. 76), for example, we are struck by the diminished use of punctuation and by syntactical dislocations. The words and phrases literally move on the page, free from time and space, free from material referentials. As a text of verbal displacement,⁴ “A la nue accablante tu” destroys the word as concept and offers the word as object and the text as process.

Yet, looking closely at the inner fiber of “A la nue accablante tu,” we find in operation the same structuring principle of the object poems in Vers de circonstance.⁵ The words and phrases move on a pivot; portions of the text appear and disappear as the reader folds and unfolds the words and lines. The use of parentheses in this highly ambiguous poem signifies the mobilization of an occasion. In the final analysis, the actual event of the text—be it the capturing of the floating debris of a shipwreck or a fanciful rendering of a bath—should not concern us; rather, because we can recover the referentials, we should be more detached in our approach to the process of the echoes which draw attention to the unsaid by the details of what is said. Dispersal of the fragments is what Mallarmé describes in a fan poem as the disengagement—liberation—of a future verse (“Le futur vers se dégage,” OC, p. 57)—the verse which the reader will “write” in response. In other words, we are supposed to be mystified in order to read the traces and construct our own poems. Mallarmé's success in the creation of a text of release which engenders reader desire for union is dependent upon the structure he uses in his fan texts.

While the elastic “A la nue accablante tu” is a preparation for Un Coup de dés, there are other poems, especially ones written before “A la nue accablante tu,” which indicate that Mallarmé is moving in the direction of such highly polished experimental texts. In “Brise marine,” for example, he uses the folding-unfolding fan technique to transpose the quayside scene into an exotic dream. The final lines of the text contain the evocation of the voyage and the longing of the poet for adventure: “… sans mâts, sans mâts, ni fertiles îlots … / Mais, ô mon coeur, entends le chant des matelots!” (“… without masts, without masts, nor fertile islets … / But, o my heart, hear the song of the sailors!” OC, p. 38). By folding the words mâts and îlots into matelots, Mallarmé creates a mobile image of the sailors and reduces the entire text to an evocation of departure.

Linguistic constriction and expansion is present in all of Mallarmé's poetry and the examples in Poésies are numerous: “de la cendre/descendre” (OC, p. 54), “un frisson/unisson” (OC, p. 49), “la flamme/l'âme” (OC, pp. 52-53), “le plumage est pris/mépris” (OC, p. 68), “le vide nénie/dénie” (OC, p. 76), “harpe par l'Ange/phalange” (OC, p. 54), “vole-t-il/vil” (OC, p. 73). At times, Mallarmé reverses the process and unfolds, expands, a given word or phrase (“las/les lilas,” OC, p. 34), while on other occasions he merely alters one letter or syllable (“glacier/l'acier,” OC, p. 43; “lune/l'une,” OC, p. 42). His “Prose (pour des Esseintes)” (OC, pp. 55-57) is rich in examples of a linguistic fan structure: “de visions/devisions,” “se para/sépara,” “désir Idées/iridées,” “devoir/de voir,” “sensée et tendre/entendre,” “par chemins/parchemins,” “sépulcre ne rit/Pulchérie,” “site/cite.” But, after all, is this not Mallarmé's famous invocation to “Hyperbole!”, the opening line of the text? Hyperbole is a figure of rhetoric which either greatly augments or diminishes the expression; it is the extravagant exaggeration of something as much greater or much lesser. In Mallarmé's universe, hyperbole enables the poet to avoid narrative (“on évite le récit,” OC, p. 455) in an acceleration and retardation of movement (OC, p. 455).

The structure of the fan is not limited to linguistic contraction and expansion, however, for it also accounts for a predominant interplay of light and dark in Mallarmé's work. The use of shadows cast by the folds of things, the opening and closing of a book, a fan, a spectacle of any sort, what Mallarmé describes as suspense in the “Scolies” to Igitur (OC, p. 450), is basic to all of his work. “L'Après-midi d'un faune” is particularly rich in its reliance upon recreative fading light, as the nymphs are metamorphosized at the end into a shadow which perpetuates the fawn's dream of them (OC, p. 53). The scintillation of the constellation in the mirror at the end of “Sonnet en yx” (OC, pp. 68-69) is glimpsed through the shadows cast by the lamp bearer at midnight; further, the effect of shimmering (motion) in a fixed mode (stasis) is dependent upon a simultaneous opening and closing of the decor. The in-out and out-in juxtaposition of the mirror and the constellation is reworked into an ascending-descending motif in Mallarmé's 1891 fan poem to his wife, a text in which the setting (“logis”) reflects “un battement aux cieux” (“a fluttering in the skies,” OC, pp. 57-58).

Hence, Mallarmé's poetry reveals a preoccupation with a stable but mobile structure, an elasticity, and we find this same quality in his short story Igitur, as well as in his theatrically oriented works. His notations and articles in Crayonné au théâtre and Variations sur un sujet continually return to the problem of the elastic, as we witness a definite movement in his formal poetry from fixity to displacement. In addition, in his correspondence and prose commentaries on the essence of poetry, we note a chronologically developing concern for a vocabulary and form which capture the substantive nature of a fan. In fact, one may accurately read his theoretical writings as descriptions of fans,⁶ especially his discussions of ballet and music, which he praises for their fluid qualities which communicate an order despite the motion inherent to their representation. In a poem on Edouard Manet's painting of Polichinelle (OC, p. 161), Mallarmé views the dance in a simultaneous rise and fall motif, while his poem on Léopold Dauphin's music (OC, p. 161) is built around the image of a fountain. Focus on the pulsation of rhythmic movements enables the reader to grasp the relationships between things, just as the curve of a fan suggests motion and indicates the gesture of movement (“les gestes de l'idée”).

Generation without a translative intermediary is the construct of the hyperbolic fan: “Je dis: une fleur!” (“I say: a flower!” OC, p. 368). It is little wonder, then, that in La Dernière Mode Mallarmé chooses as one of his pseudonyms Ixion, the tortured ancestor of the centaurs, who was condemned to a flaming wheel in Hades; only when Orpheus visited was the wheel still. Like a turning sun, Mallarmé the poet seeks a textual stricture which retains the mystery of its motion. Nowhere is this motif more developed, more actualized from theory into practice, than in Un Coup de dés.

Like his fan poems and relying in fact upon a fan-like structure, Un Coup de dés is formally written without the artifices of punctuation and depends upon the reader's act of unfolding for entry into the text. While the fragments of Le Livre⁷ go beyond this text in Mallarmé's insistence upon the role of the reader in folding, refolding, and moving around the given pages in order to generate a plurality of readings, Un Coup de dés is, nonetheless, a conscious text-as-subject which insists upon a skillful reader (OC, p. 455). Like a fan, Un Coup de dés has neither verso nor recto pages, and it is topographically a segment of a circle which opens and closes, folds and unfolds, moving from a flat and static horizon to a heightened arc of activity.⁸ Moreover, it has two definite terminal slats, the pair of dice which begins and ends the text. Visually, Un Coup de dés crystallizes what Mallarmé declares in a fan poem dedicated to Méry Laurent: “A jeter le ciel en détail” (“To cast the heavens in detail,” OC, p. 59). For, every double page of Un Coup de dés reads like a fan poem, literally and figuratively turning idea into object. The pieces make the horizon withdraw, as they open up the vastness of the universe. Breaking up into various stellar scintillations, the rods of the fan so agitate the air that the act basic to the text, the throwing of the pair of dice, actually disperses into a final unity of the poetic experience. The “frisson final” of “Toast funèbre” (OC, p. 55) survives intact through total engagement in the transformation of the real.⁹

A pattern of “obliquité-déclivité” reduces the profusion of the dispersed words and white spaces. Signaling “sidéralement,” the Master hurls his dice in a challenge to the reader to open his eyes to the variables of the fiction which “affleurera et se dissipera, vite, d‘après la mobilité de l'écrit” (“will crop out and vanish, quickly, according to the mobility of the text,” OC, p. 455). Consequently, in Un Coup de dés, we find a vocabulary and a phraseology of motion: lancé, naufrage, furieux, plane, retombée, dresser le vol, jaillissements, bond, envergure, penché, surgi, conflagration, s'agite et mêle, jeter, reployer, jouer, flots, crispée, rejailli, précipité, hurlé, tourbillon, vertige, sursaute, dispersa, and the final verb in the poem, émet.¹⁰ But despite the overwhelming onslaught of a vocabulary of motion, there is an immovable quality about the text, a pivot of the immutable and the rigid. The first indicator of this in the text is found in the negative “ne … jamais” of the title: A throw of the dice will never abolish chance.

It is certainly possible to read “chance” as a euphemism for change, the dynamic principle of motion, the actual power to move and relocate place and condition. And, such a reading would not be inconsistent with Mallarmé's demonstrated preoccupation with a writing which is neither static nor dynamic. The reader's throw of the dice—turning of the pages, opening of the fan—is controlled by the poet's arrangement of the rods—the words and phrases. The contextual structure—its outer limits and framework—cannot be moved; only its inner fragments are free from the constraints of time and place. The reader may fold and unfold the pages as he will, and I suspect that inherent in Mallarmé's use of double pages lies the same interchangeability seen in the fragments of Le Livre. We do not have to read Un Coup de dés in a linear fashion, from the first page to the last one; we may read it backwards, and we may even read it in random order. Like a painting, we may enter the universe of the poem at will; like a fan, we may open as many rods at a time as the notion may take us, but, regardless of the approach to the reading of the text which we may adopt, we cannot escape the allegorical capital letters of the title which orient our reading, nor can we escape a certain typographical structuration which aligns phrases into fixed groups (the pages in italics, the pages in Roman type, etc.). The reading experience is elastic;¹¹ we can never leave the source of the text; we may only dwell upon its variations, for, in the manner of a fan, the text continually retracts to its base, its “fil conducteur.” The images of the shipwreck, the constellation, the feather, the foam, all conspire to control the freedom of the reading experience. The original throw of the dice is Mallarmé's; he has set in motion a given set of “subdivisons prismatiques” (OC, p. 455), which deform the reality of the referentials but which at the same time affirm the authenticity of the fiction.

Doubling and redoubling upon itself, Un Coup de dés fulfills Mallarmés own stated description for Le Livre, The Work of Poetry (OC, p. 663). It must be premeditated and architectural; it must have a prescribed, predetermined pivot around which the lines are formally constructed. It must be conjunctive, rather than disjunctive. And we find in Un Coup de dés a linguistic coding of terms of union and fusion which qualitatively dominate the vocabulary of motion: résume, l'horizon unanime, unique Nombre, conjonction suprême, Fiançailles, le lieu, une constellation, un compte total en formation, Toute Pensée. As in Igitur, a work which is demonstrably related to Un Coup de dés, we find Mallarmé concerned with reducing “le hasard” (“chance,” “happenstance”) to Infinity (OC, p. 442), that is, to absolute fixity through an action. The attempt on his part to conquer chance word by word (OC, p. 387) has frequently been viewed as a metaphysically oriented effort; what is overlooked in our reading of Mallarmé on chance, especially in Un Coup de dés, is that this term usually appears in the context of conjunction and in connection with the role of the reader. If the text is truly subject (the fan) and the reader is object (the recipient of the poet's fan), then the conquest of chance in the Mallarmé universe is ultimately a challenge to the reader to act, to discover the potentials (unfold the rods) of the conjunctions (“le hasard infini des conjonctions,” OC, p. 435).

Writing several decades before Reverdy published his famous definition of the image, Mallarmé juxtaposes heterogeneous elements in order to make a third appear—appear to the reader—and, like Reverdy, his measure of control, his pivot, is “le mot juste,” which expands before the reader in an unlimited horizon of signs. The pleasure of the Mallarmé text lies less in the purity of its ambiguity and more in its structure of contraction-expansion, its elastic intertextuality. Neither open nor closed, it receives an impression, turns it into a form, and then returns to its unique source, Poetry.

Notes

1. Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1945). All references to Mallarmé's work are from this edition and appear within the text, abbreviated as OC and with page numbers. All translations are my own; obvious cognates and listings of vocabulary patterns have not been translated.

2. Mallarmé wrote 21 fan poems, and three of these are found in Poésies. Fan poems are his only object poems (poems written on things) which appear with his “pure” poetry. In addition, Mallarmé refers to fans in Variations sur un sujet and other writings when he writes about poetry.

3. See Jean-Pierre Richard, L'Univers imaginaire de Mallarmé (Paris: Seuil, 1961), especially pp. 19, 28, 79, 122, 177-179, 285; also see Robert Greer Cohn, Toward the Poems of Mallarmé (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965).

4. Robert Goffin does not hesitate to describe “A la nue accablante tu” as an elastic text, Mallarmé vivant (Paris: Nizet, 1956), p. 8.

5. Mallarmé's Easter egg poems, for example, are structured so as to allow the interchange of the verse lines; destruction of imposed formal order permits the reader to rearrange the lines at will.

6. Typical of critical usage of the fan referential when describing Mallarmé's poetry is Jacques Derrida's observation: “La polysémie des ‘blancs’ et des ‘plis’ so déploie et se reploie en éventail … il désigne … l'objet empirique” (“The polysemy of the ‘blanks’ and ‘folds’ unfolds as a fan … it designates … the empirical object”), La Dissémination (Paris: Seuil, 1972), p. 283. In L'Univers imaginaire de Mallarmé, Richard suggests that the fan may be an ars poetica for Mallarmé (pp. 314-315), but not a poetic structure.

7. See Jacques Scherer, Le “Livre” de Mallarmé (Paris: Gallimard, 1957).

8. For a discussion of vertical and horizontal dimensions in this poem, see Robert Greer Cohn, L'Oeuvre de Mallarmé: Un Coup de dés (Paris: Librairie Les Lettres, 1951).

9. Mallarmé's use of frisson (shiver, quiver) to evoke the vibrancy of poetry and life also survives in contemporary literature in Louis Aragon's Le Paysan de Paris (1926), in which frisson is the key term, in André Breton's 1928 Nadja (“La beauté sera CONVULSIVE ou ne sera pas”), and in Denis Roche's pulsion of Eros énergumène (1968).

10. In fact, the only act which occurs in the present tense in Un Coup de dés is found in the final line: “Toute Pensée émet un Coup de Dés.” Emettre (to send forth) is a dynamic verb of motion which actually indicates the creation of motion.

11. Again, however, in Un Coup de dés as in the object poems of Vers de circonstance, the lines are static in their arrangement on a pivot, while the reading process is dynamic in the freedom to move the order of the lines, thus capturing the elastic quality of the poetic experience: its pulsating, vibrant essence. See Jean-Paul Sartre: “L'objet littéraire … n'existe qu'en mouvement. Pour le faire surgir, il faut un acte concret qui s'appelle la lecture” (“The literary object … exists only in movement. To call it forth, there must be a concrete act which is called reading”), Situations II (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), p. 91.