Reconstruction Vol. 14, No. 3

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Mallarmé, poet of the earthly world: On spatiality in L'Après-midi d'un Faune / Rogério De Melo Franco

<1> To observe how a notable self-declared detractor of description and realism descripts nature may sound as a rather arbitrary or irreverent way of reading. Nonetheless, besides being a body of texts, Mallarmé is also the result of his interpreters; as much as any other literary authority, readings of his works have been negotiated by different groups, which must not be seen as untouchable or unmovable entities. Enthroning the author by accepting his considerations about his work without question and reasoning might deserve objections as well. In any case, would it be worthwhile to hold an investigation about a poem by Mallarmé whose foundations imply the consideration of landscape description as its expressive backbone? That is the tentative question this essay is committed to.

<2> The poetry of Mallarmé has a history of reception which has frequently focused upon rather centripetal [1] approaches to his oeuvre. In other words, a particular kind of criticism regarding this French poet has given rise to what could be called a purifying tendency toward the understanding of his use of artistic discourse. This productive, traditional perspective concerning Mallarmé had an undeniable influence on intellectual and literary thought throughout the 20th century. For instance, German theorist Hugo Friedrich, in his famous work The Structure of Modern Poetry, has condensed a number of principles which shaped (and still shapes) the most widespread regimen of reading regarding Mallarmé's work. If I were to restrain myself to some of the most influential critical landmarks, I would add that Michael Hamburger's The Truth of Poetry, to some extent, follows Friedrich's path in consideration of Mallarmé's writing, much like many other representatives of that distinctive interpretive community [2].

<3> While the aforementioned way of reading is as legitimate as it is highly persuasive, I will conduct a reflection upon Mallarmé's poem L'Après-midi d'un Faune in a more open fashion. As mentioned before, this essay aims to examine the centrality of landscape as a literary means within this piece of poetry, insofar as the author resorts to a particular use of spatial description. That piece of poetry is especially resourceful regarding the relationship between narration and description and has, hence, an unusual place in Mallarmean body of work. Although numerous theoretical understandings of description have been formulated, the perspective assumed in this essay connects descriptive features preferably with visual aspects of reality (or imagination) and the linguistic expedients concerned with writing them down/up (de-scribere, to transcribe). Description would be a mode of being of writing, as it brings a verbal utopia where language is celebrated in its strength as nomenclature (Hamon 1981: 6). The question of nomenclature reminds us how the poet famously advocated in favor of suggestive writing in preference of direct naming; in my estimation, this general disposition against naming is precisely what makes Mallarmé's descriptive procedures worthy of inquiry.

<4> Following the Tournon's crisis [3], the poet moved to Southern France for a couple of years, and his contact with the Mediterranean had a quite considerable impact on his overall motivation, which is well documented through the letters sent by him during that period. Inasmuch as the Faun is fictionally set in Sicily, Mallarmé has chosen an exemplary Mediterranean island as a locus for this solar poem, considered by his close friends to be one of his finest [4]. The existence of this biographical detail should not be perceived as a psychological explanation of the poet's creative mind or any type of quality warranty for his poem: It is not because Mallarmé moved to the south that his piece has aesthetic values. My reading does not rely on that contingency, even though it may have its contextual interest when approaching to the poem.

<5> L'Après-midi d'un Faune belongs to the églogue genre, according to its author [5]. The Romans derived their fundamental precepts for eclogues from Virgil's Book of Bucolics, whose pieces were called eclogae. It is not by chance that a Sicilian Greek, Theocritus, is recognized as the founder of bucolic poetry. That being said, it would be certainly a mistake to observe Mallarmé's poem in the light of ancient precepts; however, it would be equally unsuitable to erase the bucolic undertones of his poetic elaboration. The Afternoon of a Faun lyrically mobilizes a reimagined Sicilian wilderness intertwined with a dense, restricted narrative.

Mallarmé terre à terre

<6> Prudence is advisable when it comes to read Mallarmé, especially when addressing the issues of representation. Some authoritative commentators have stressed the idea of an obscure literary art, articulated with the poet's uncommon approach to fiction and language. The (quasi-)absence of outward attention, or centrifugal disposition, is a perspective supported by Mallarmé in a substantial number of his own critical texts. Moreover, Mallarmé's vocabulary and style is an affluent source for recent compelling intellectual enterprises [6]; this fact grounds a distinctive body of readers who sees Mallarméan production primarily as writing turned toward itself and a celebration of inaccessibility to the outside of the text ( hors-texte [7]).

<7> Apparently, Mallarmé has contrived his theory of fiction, pertinent in this context, under the impact of Cartesian thinking [8]. The hypothetical procedure conducted by the philosopher of the Discourse on the Method might have been a source to a sort of desertion sentiment when it comes to Mallarmé's representation of reality. Descartes imagines a depleted existence [9], whose last necessary foundation would be the cogito; one could suggest that Mallarmé's suspicion regarding representation adopts a similarly abstractive attitude. In any case, this fundamental approach should be understood, above all, as a sensibility of thought [10]: It naturally does not mean, in any respect, that Mallarmé's poetry doesn't describe or narrate anything through the descriptive or narrative aspects it is endowed with.

<8> This last reflection is not a gratuitous digression; it emphasizes the defense of a reasoned reception of the poet's own critical discourse and an effort to broaden the understanding of representation in his oeuvre. Worthy of noting is the fact that, according to etymology, "to suggest" (a very Mallarméan verb) is indeed a way of generating something (sub-genere [11]). In this regard, I would readily state that, by means of representation, the author of the Faun is a creator of spaces.

<9> As a general rule, a verbal material selection concerning representation is bound to be thought of as the avoidance of every other paradigmatic possibility; what does it mean, then, to represent a specific countryside in detriment of others? Furthermore, what does it mean, in this particular piece of poetry, to represent the aforesaid natural environment in a particular manner - as though the poem stood against the grain of description? In this vein, Jacques Rancière's perspective on the poet of the constellations is a source related to a movement that brings the reading of Mallarmé back to social landscapes. If it is true that his poetry is also a sort of politics, something crucial to Mallarmé's oeuvre is a peculiar assessment of distribution of the sensible, if I were to adhere to Rancière's lexicon. Hence, inasmuch as the poet produces the space represented within his piece of literary art, his poetic suggestion (or sub-generation) of landscape is a power grab, so to speak, by a particular sensibility concerning Sicily and the cultural tradition related to it. In fact, I hold that Sicily and mythology blend one with another by means of landscape description, which concerns the culture-nature relationship forged by an inhabitants-habitat link.

<10> A number of Mallarméan quotations have attained extensive publicity. Their sources are diverse. Parts of them came to be known through witnesses, or were originally extracted from letters and writings. At any rate, without enough care, those axioms would pass for the "symbolist" version of an Ars Poetica. In this regard, had the poet conducted the elaboration of such a prescriptive, lengthy endeavor, in the manner of Horace or Boileau, Mallarmé's alleged difficulty would be probably less shocking. Indeed, some would maintain, his self-imposed task as a poet had little to do with the easy exposition of his artistic intentions - and these, in fact, seemed to be astronomically ambitious [12].

<11> Among the most known Mallarméan dicta (1956: 869) are the following formulas: "To name an object is to suppress three quarters of the poem's pleasure, which comes from guessing little by little: To suggest, that's the dream" [13]; "To paint, not the thing, but the effect it produces" [14]; and "It's not with ideas that one composes verses… It's with words" [15]. The ideas that sustain these mottos are modern pills of wisdom, according to some artistic tendencies that frequented the last centuries, such as the focus on the subjective effect and the avoidance of straightforward representation. For a long time now has the crystal clear mimesis of nature been victim of suspicion, to say the least. Amid the fog of numerous narrations of this process, Monika Schmitz-Emans formulates it in an interesting way in a chapter regarding the relationship between landscape and literature, while mobilizing a quotation from the philosopher Hans Blumenberg:

Art in the modern era is largely marked by the "surpassing, disempowerment, and deformation [Entstaltung] of nature, a deep dissatisfaction with the given" (Blumenberg, 1957, 56), and it is for that very reason an exemplary expression of the relationship of modern man to the given reality. The works of art demand originality. Nature as the former basis of the work's instance is replaced by other instances [16].

<12> It is debatable whether we are still in an era presided by originality, but The Afternoon of a Faun fits this state of things as a classic example. So, a central question must be, with regard to Mallarmé, the reason why nature and landscape should hold a privileged placed in the question of literary representation. Nature is utterly present in the poem's lexical stock, but it is used in a way that defies traditional mimetic patterns [17]. Henri Meschonnic has mentioned the issue of description in Mallarméan corpus [18]. However, I would define its role, objecting the great critic in this matter, as a linguistic strategy frequently correlated with - and not necessarily opposed to - the avoidance of naming.

<13> For the sake of theoretical cohesion concerning the present inquiry, I have to advocate for the flexibility of description, a feature deeply involved with the nature of language regarding verbal representation of visual features. On a book about representation, Louis Marin quotes Blaise Pascal, who points out this descriptive property, which I'd loosely call elasticity, in a paragraph of his Pensées:

A city, a countryside, from a distance, are a city and a countryside, but whenever one gets nearer, they are houses, trees, roof tiles, leaves, grass, ants, ant legs, ad infinitum. Everything is wrapped by the noun countryside [19].

<14> In this passage, Pascal is probably concerned with other branches of knowledge, such as anatomy, theology, and the nature of sciences; however, his linguistic consideration may provide assistance to our reflection: How is Mallarméan "suggestion" associated to descriptive flexibility of the countryside, for instance? That's what I will try to pursue in the case of The Afternoon of a faun.

<15> The properly descriptive play of so-called "denomination" and "expansion" has been well investigated by structuralism specialists, such as Michael Riffaterre [20]. This play embodies the Faun's dissemination of descriptive features from end to end, which include a little bough (" rameau subtil") and the whole island's coastline ("ô bords siciliens !"). There's indeed a conflict taking place in Mallarméan descriptions, which a commentator identified as a tension between a "temptation of the detail" and a "temptation of the whole [ensemble] [21]". So to speak, word-wise, the description is derived in order to cover both minimal and huge visual features of the insular countryside. The issue of a necessary linearity of verbal signs has been extensively revised since Lessing [22]. There is no natural order for the description of a literary landscape, except the submission of the eye to the reading and its temporal regimen - even if literature, of all things, is frequently an effort to subvert temporal (and spatial) regimens, as in Proust or concrete poetry. Mallarmé employs this submission to temporal regimen so that it composes lively descriptions which are interlaid with a very unusual narration whose foundations may rest upon a conception of nature, divinity, and religion.

<16> As a matter of fact, Mallarmé's work Les Dieux antiques (The Ancient Gods) is a partial translation of a book by George William Cox, a follower of Max Müller's comparative religion. According to Bertrand Marchal [23], the idea of a "tragedy of nature" (" tragédie de la nature") is not an expression among others to be found in Mallarmé's translation, but also the symbol of a major tendency expressed by intellectual celebrities from French 19th century milieu. One of them is Edgar Quinet, that held (via German philology, mainly Creuzer) that mythology would be a kind of a byproduct of a much simpler cult of stars, elements, and first principles of nature, an archaic fusion of nature and divinity.

<17> Mallarmé's Les Dieux antiques cites the solar drama of daily sunrise and sunset as a sample of the tragedy of nature. I have the opinion that it may be productive to look at L'Après-midi d'un faune in this particular light: in this perspective, the horizon of the tragic flaw of nature [24] would be established since the very first verses, as soon as the faun mentions "the ideal error of roses" ("la faute idéale de roses"), or even earlier, as he expresses his desire for perpetuating the nymphs.

L'après-midi as a chronotope

<18> The French temporal expression après-midi has geographic undertones. Literally, it means afternoon, and morphologically, it is the combination of après and midi. The latter, in its appearances in a number of languages [25], is a common word meaning south. The reason for this is a conventional one: From the perspective of the Northern Hemisphere, during midday (noon), the Sun points to the south. The fact that Sicily is a southern island (from a Parisian or Roman perspective, for example) is manifested in both Italian and French by that spatiotemporal catachresis: Sicily is located nel mezzogiorno or dans le midi of the European continent.

<19> Analogically, I think that the poem's midi could be conceived in regard to what Bakhtin would call a chronotope of the artistic discourse:

What counts for us is the fact that it [chronotope] expresses the inseparability of space and time (time as the fourth dimension of space). We understand the chronotope as a formally constitutive category of literature; we will not deal with the chronotope in other areas of culture.' In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history. This intersection of axes and fusion of indicators characterizes the artistic chronotope [26].

<20> A scholar dedicated to spatiality in literary art, Robert T. Tally Jr. [27], points out that Bakhtin's chronotopic conception "elevates space to a level equal to (and, in fact, inseparable from) time", which puts Bakhtin's ahead of spatial turn in literary studies, as a sort of forerunner critic [28] of literary historicism (the Russian essay conveying the chronotope conceptualization was first published in 1937-1938). The continuity of time and space is bound to be recognized as a manifestation of a spatial turn in the sense that it questions historicism and the repression of space.

<21> What I am willing to elaborate in this paper is that the inseparability of space-time whose linguistic expression would be theaprès-midi reverberates throughout Mallarmé's composition of the poetic piece. The sign of time is present since the famousincipit of the definitive version of the Faun, related to the desire of perennial presence, or extended lastingness: "Ces nymphes, je les veux perpétuer"[29]. Many readers [30] pointed out the latent word tuer (to kill) suggested by perpétuer (perpetuate). I should recall, for that matter, a remarkable distich by Schiller (famously quoted by Hegel, Freud, and others): "Was unsterblich im Gesang soll leben / Muß im Leben untergehn": "What must live immortally in the song has to perish in life" [31], the ending verses of Die Götter Griechenlands (The Gods of Greece). Both poems, Schiller's and Mallarmé's, are grounded in an unrecoverable past; in substance, the "Blüthenalter der Natur" (blossom-time of Nature) and the nymphs function as a sort of consumable raw material, such as ink or paint, whose loss is necessary for artistic perpetuation.

<22> Mallarmé's verses weave the faun's soliloquy, whereby a mourning of a memory arguably takes place [32]. The capitalization of memory ("O nymphes, regonflons des souvenirs divers [33]", sixth stanza) and narration ("contez", second stanza) ingeniously stresses a frustrated, merely tentative recollection of unsure past events. In the absence of certain remembrance, the faun richly thematizes the countryside, inasmuch as natural spatiality stands for the nymphs themselves.

<23> The Mallarméan midi is frequently composed by means of descriptive effect of the nymphs: The brunette is "warm breeze"; the other one has eyes "blue and cold as a weeping fountainhead". The presence of the Etna volcano at the very end of the poem is what some narratologists would call a realeme [34]. Etna, the geographical monument, is a natural landmark, and Mallarmé mentions its magmatic activity. It is possible to look at the volcano's influence at the full length of Sicilian history like a recurrent tragedy of eruption ("Treading your lava with innocent feet" [35]) which closes the eclogue.

<24> The locus amoenus [36] is the scenery intended for the soliloquy since the first versions of the poem, initially thought of as a dramatic work [37]. It is sustainable that Mallarmé's spatial metaphors are not conceived, in his poetic discourse, as a traditional resort to the figure of speech which relates to an object in order to represent another object. I hold that the spatial descriptions create a bound between culture and space, for instance, insofar as they refer to both the natural objects and the mythological entities identified with them. So to speak, the landscape is unfolded and saturated of mythological density by poetic elaboration.

<25> Hence, the poetic power of metamorphosis, as it were a kind of narrative metaphor, or metaphor, as it were a kind of verbal metamorphosis, is manifested by the habitat/inhabitant intertwinement [38]. The avoidance of a one-sided, inert concept of landscape is not something unprecedented in 19 th century, as a famous quotation by Hölderlin witnesses: "Voll Verdienst, aber dichterisch wohnet der Mensch auf dieser Erde", "Full of merit, but poetically, resides man on this Earth [39]". Mallarmé's circumscription of the poet's only craft, " l'explication orphique de la terre [40]" ("orphic explanation of the earth"), reverberates the poet's duty, which is to explain or sing the land (or the planet). Lloyd James Austin [41] states that what have charmed Mallarmé's mind concerning the orphic myth is its effective relationship with the artistic ideal of immortality, among other powers of poetry. As the author correctly observes, Mallarmé is not especially inclined toward already existing mythology [42], and The Faun would be an important exception to this tendency. It follows, pursuant to Austin:

What means, then, the famous "orphic explanation of the earth"? There's nothing "orphic" in the strictest sense of the word. […] [W]e may conclude that what Mallarmé meant by "orphic" is merely "poetic", since Orpheus was for him the quintessential poet [43].

Contez, souvenirs - on narration of memory

<26> Much has been written and said, on the perspective of memory, about the time-space relationship. In his extensive work, Les Lieux de Mémoire (translated by Arthur Goldhammer as Realms of Memory), Pierre Nora (1984: 955) recalls the density of the landscape concerning its relationship with time and culture:

The landscape, this "historical monument", following the formula from a prisoner of the aerial archeology (Roger Agache) […]. But the landscape belongs to whom, this space developed by the combined forces of nature, man, and time? The geographer, who turns toward the historian? The traveler? The surveyor, the photographer, the writer? [44].

I would add: the mythologist, let alone the creator of mythologies?

<27> In his Handbook of Inaesthetics, Alain Badiou's reading of The Afternoon of a Faun is decidedly devoted to what he calls the "narration of the place" and its relationship with doubt and mystery. Badiou (2006: 128) understands that the Faun's landscape presents "indubitably" the "most general movement of Mallarmé's poems", which is "[t]he presentation of the place, followed by the attempt to discern within it the proof of some vanished event" [45].

<28> There are undeniable similarities between Badiou's interpretation of the role of landscape in Mallarméan poetry and the approach undertaken in this paper. It may be productive, however, that some of his suggestions be deepened. I would hold that some of Badiou's assertions concerning the very nature of The Faun may be looked at in an equally fertile - yet different - light. The French philosopher states that "the operation of the poem is that of thought, not of remembrance or anamnesis" [46]. I don't agree with every corollary derived from that particular statement; nevertheless, he concedes the following:

However, there still lingers a nostalgia for the void itself, such as it had been summoned up in the flash of the event. This is the tempting nostalgia of a full void, an inhabitable void, a perpetual ecstasy. Of course, this nostalgia demands the blindness of intoxication.

This is what the Faun abandons himself to and against which he finds no other resort than the brutal resumption of narrative memory [47].

<29> This nostalgia, in my estimation, is what Fredric Jameson has defined as nostalgia for nostalgia [48] on the occasion of a reading on J. G. Ballard's "displacement of time, the spatialization of the temporal": "what is mourned is the memory of deep memory; what is enacted is a nostalgia for nostalgia". Even though the literary pieces (Mallarmé's and Ballard's) are rooted in different traditions and conditions of production, this perspective may be true about a number of works from a number of traditions. Seeing that contemporary sensibility pays attention to the loss of deep memory and spatialization of temporality, the nostalgia of nostalgia is to be found in a wide range of literary works.

<30> The midi chronotope is the artistic alchemy which the faun takes as a doubtful scenery of a memory, perhaps a dreamed one ("Did I love a dream? / My doubt, a heap of ancient night, is finishing / In many subtle branches [49]") or a fruit of his own craft ("You, instrument of flight, Syrinx malign, / At lakes where you wait for me, bloom again!"). For that matter, as Badiou reasons, the idea of absolute fiction is not at all unrelated to Mallarméan thought [50]. It may come to mind a piercing abstract of Mallarmé formulated by Richard: "La beauté n'est qu'une fiction ", "beauty is nothing more than a fiction" [51].

<31> At any rate, in both hypotheses, the landscape is a supportive nature that bestows its permanence to the faun's pensive song about a dubious past event. This idea is inscribed in Mallarmé's polysemic verse "rien / n'aura eu lieu / que le lieu" ("nothing / will have taken place / but the place") from his A Throw of the Dice.

<32> Badiou's "proof of some vanished event" within a place has been observed by theorists connected to the spatial turn. The idea of a connection between what has been (das Gewesene) and spatial settings may be identified with the Benjamin concept of the past metamorphosed into space ( raumgerwordene Vergangenheit). This notion [52] was articulated by Walter Benjamin in his Arcades Project, which dealt with Parisian urban features and its attachment to time. The German philosopher states that distortion (Entstellung [53], a word whose etymology leads to displacement) is the form things assume when they are forgotten [54] and that there are "places (Stellen) where dreams open out onto waking existence [55]". So, it follows that past and dream are distortable into space. That idea, which might be a reinterpretation of Benjamin's work, is apparently analogous with Mallarméan, so to speak, "chronotopic" lyrical elaboration.

<33> Benjamin implies similarities between the flâneur of the modern city and the former wanderer of the forest [56]. In fact, it is conceivable that landscapes work as spaces of memory (Gedachtnisräume), in manner similar to the Parisian passages. Numerous contributions from memory studies have already explored the mnemonic dimension of spatial settings [57]. As Jameson noted, even Frances Yates' project dealing with the spatialization of memory in Renaissance architecture [58], for instance, may be interpreted within this specific aspect of spatial theoretical turn.

<34> Jean-Pierre Richard, whose investigation of Mallarmé's poetry is as extensive as it is influential, did not lose sight of the metamorphoses of nature and fiction which takes place in the faun's song of uncertain memory. Richard observes the Mallarméan taste for foliage and vegetal life in general [59]. The sensual aspiration of greenery is possibly connected to the "penetrability of foliage" and the desire to "become one with the forest" according to the same critic, which imply that Mallarmé's relationship to memory is a mystical one. Likewise, the faun's lust for the natural midi is accordingly a lust for the nymphs and the dreamlike rendezvous with them. The empty grape berries, of which the soliloquist speaks with sorrow, may stand for the absence of nymphs in their supposed habitat. The consumable nature of the grapes leaves a trace: the skin is their durable vestige. This polysemous elaboration belongs to synecdoche and metaphor figures of speech, inasmuch as the grape skins arguably represents both its own whole habitat and the nymphs.

So when I've sucked the clarity of grapes

To banish, laughing, rue my ruse escapes,

I, raising empty bunch to burning sky,

Blow up the shining skins, and yearn to lie

Dead drunk, 'til evening I see through it all [60]

<35> The last verses of the poem relates the drinking of the wine of stars, which has to do with another kind of metamorphosis which connects the transmutation of the nymphs (or their memory) to natural elements of this worldly space (grapes) and the outer space (the stars, a typical theme of the later Mallarmé [61]). All in all, grapes and stars are uncanny spaces in their ability to invoke intoxication and mysticism.

<36> In fact, the idea that space's durability surpasses the time span of an experience or phenomenon housed within it grounds the foundations of the relationship between space and memory. Halbwachs, one of the founders of memory studies, notes:

It is only the image of space that, due to its stability, creates the illusion of never changing at all through time and regaining the past in the present; yet this is how one might define memory; and only space is sufficiently stable in order to long without growing old nor losing any of its parts [62].

<37> Halbwachs gives samples of literary spatial description in the workings of social memory, such as Dickens' and Balzac's. These authors belong chiefly to a "legible-realist dominant [63]", which is naturally not the case when it comes to Mallarmé, but he certainly deals with issues of representation and memory as well, even if in a specific manner. This specificity is parallel to that of his suggestive doctrine, opposed to realist regimen, so that he would avoid directness both in its lexical-syntactical and representative expressions. If the the Faun's memory is not crystal-clear, accordingly, his language is not direct at all: there are deformations (Entstaltungen) as in a dream or a repressed memory.

The joy of perceiving oneself as simply and infinitely on the earth

<38> The passage "[…] joie […] de se percevoir simple, infiniment, sur la terre" closes one of Mallarmé's divagations [64], devoted to landscape and bucolic countryside. The proposal of inquire Mallarmé's spatial conception is not at all undiscovered, but it may presently find new outcomes, as the collection of writings by Mallarmé and about Mallarmé are subjected to the historical horizon of their endlessly renewable readers. The turnabouts of a body of works from the last decades have revived the interest of thinking space, spatialization, and spatiality.

<39> This attention is what guided the French scholar Bertrand Westphal, in his interesting book La Géocritique (translated asGeocriticism by Robert T. Tally Jr.), when it comes to the interpretation of Auerbach's classic contribution on Dantesque poetry, Dante als Dichter der irdischen Welt. For a long time, a sort of unintentional historicist catachresis has translated the word irdisch as secular, so that Dante, Poet of the Secular World is a very influential title for Auerbach's work in English-speaking countries. However, irdisch is evidently connected to the English word earth, which is much closer to the spatial lexicon than secular, even though secular effectively relates, by means of catachresis, to worldly or lay matters. After all, Dante's Commedia is blatantly affiliated with geography and space. The Dantesque depiction of afterlife has a lot do with his understanding of earthly life, especially Florentine spiritual and political behavior. In that light, bringing Mallarmé back to earth from a pure poetry of fictional constellations is something comparable to that perspective on the Commedia.

<40> What is yet to be shown is that Mallarmé has his share of creative spatial thinking - not only paper space, a facet which has been extensively observed, but also in a properly earthly sense of space. The conciliation of this earthly Mallarmé (from the Faun and some divagations, for instance) and the Mallarmé of the constellations (chiefly the Mallarmé of the unfinished Livre and of A Throw of the Dice) is not that impossible a task, if we understand space in a rather multilayered interpretation [65]. Foucault's heterotopia, for instance, which has informed contemporary geography, conceptualizes the coexistence of a number of spaces within a single space that opens itself to Otherness. This idea may be paralleled to the following verses from A Throw of the dice: "EXCEPT / at the altitude / PERHAPS as far as a place fuses with beyond" ("EXCEPTÉ / à l'altitude / PEUT-ÊTRE / aussi loin qu'un endroit // fusionne avec au delà") [66].

<41> The idea of a sort of place (connected to Foucauldian heterotopia? Or to Lefebvre's espace vécu?) which is fusible with beyond has affinities with Soja's thirdspace concept, for instance - represented paradigmatically by Borgesian aleph, the fusion of every worldly spatial possibility within itself. As the conclusion to his text about the mystery in letters, Mallarmé makes it clear: "the melody or song beneath a text convoys the divination from here to there" [67].

<42> One might hold that focusing in earthly and descriptive writing features of an author who considers himself against description and realist representation is to read his production in a contrived fashion, but this perception depends on a possible Mallarmé, historically formulated by some tendencies of a number of interpretive communities. I would advocate that this is where the interest of such inquiry lies. Some of Mallarmé's literary heroes were masters of description, such as Aloysius Bertrand [68], Victor Hugo, and Théophile Gautier. Moreover, to read an author in a contrived manner may produce a fruitful interpretation, as long it is historically reasonable and well informed. As Walter Benjamin stated on a different occasion, one should read the history against its grain [69]. The same disposition may have interesting outcomes when it comes to reading literary history and its unending turnarounds against the grain. The "explanation of the earth" and the idea of "[living] infinitely on earth" must not remain as sort of historical repressions of Mallarméan thought. I hold that such a perspective opens the horizon to an interesting reading of his writing: I think that conceiving the après-midi as the linguistic materialization of a chronotope and the spatialization of memory is a good place to start.

NOTES

[1] When using this expression, I'm employing a concept articulated by Northrop Frye in Anatomy of Criticism and The Critical Path. According to the Canadian critic Frye (1957: 73), "[w]henever we read anything, we find our attention moving in two directions at once. One direction is outward or centrifugal, in which we keep going outside our reading, from the individual words to the things they mean, or in practice, to our memory of the conventional association between them. The other direction is inward or centripetal, in which we try to develop from the words a sense of the larger verbal pattern they make. […] Verbal elements understood inwardly or centripetally, as parts of a verbal structure, are, as symbols, simply and literally verbal elements, or units of a verbal structure" (underlining mine). Unless otherwise stated, all translations are also mine.

[2] The concept of interpretive communities is connected to German reader-response criticism and was elaborated in a classic work called Is there a text in this class? The authority of interpretive communities, by Fish (1980). Fish supports that reading is not an entirely subjective process; diversely, it works under the influence of a body of beliefs about languages and writing whose presence is repeated and conserved by certain communities of culture agency.

[3] "Tournon crisis" is how some biographers and other scholars have baptized a series of professional and artistic crises which took place when Mallarmé taught English in a number of provincial cities, including Tournon and Besançon, and led to a more mature phase of his thought. Mallarmé (1995: 157-158), in his Letter from 12/30/1863, has deplored Tournon's gusty environment and its "hideous Northern wind" ("l'affreuse bise"), having described to Cazalis that "The weather here is gray and glacial, it's the only thing that leaves me gloomy. Tournon is on the road of every wind from Europe: it's an interstation and their meeting point" ("Le temps est gris et glacial, ici, cela seul me rend maussade. Tournon est sur la route de tous les vents de l'Europe : c'est un relais et leur rendez-vous"). Some months later, in his Letter from 08/30/1864, he wrote again to his confidant: "My friend, I'm absolutely dispirited. I think I have one year of Tournon in my spirit. [...] Tomorrow I'll flee from Ardèche. This name horrifies me." ("Mon ami, je suis éteint absolument. Pense que j'ai un an de Tournon sur l'esprit. [...] Demain, je fuirai L'Ardèche. Ce nom me fait horreur."). Steinmetz (1998) follows Mallarmé's itinerary through England, Tournon, Besançon, and Paris, and connects it with the poet's difficulties and crises until his fortunate residence in Paris and Fontainebleau. Mondor (1943) pays particular attention to the Tournon years and his correspondence with Cazalis and other friends, as well as his connection with Valéry. Gallardo (1998) also addresses the Tournon crisis and depicts a very compelling role when regarding this phase in Mallarméan conception of his aesthetic novelty.

[4] In fact, it is a much diffused opinion from Paul Valéry (1952: 46) that L'Après-midi is the greatest poem of French tradition. A number of reception tendencies regarding Mallarméan oeuvre were distilled taking Valéry's Mallarmé into account, in variable degrees. His Letter to Mallarmé from 04/18/1891 states: "Thus, what is imperative is the supreme conception of an elevated symphony that unifies the world that surrounds us and the world that haunts us, built according to a rigorous architecture […]. The Afternoon of a Faun is the only [poem] in France to achieve this aesthetic ideal, and the perfection unheard of that it demands displays the future disappearance of the infuriated false poets, annihilating their mediocrity in a sort of mechanical fashion". ("Alors s'impose la conception suprême d'une haute symphonie, unissant le monde qui nous entoure au monde qui nous hante, construite selon une rigoureuse architectonique [...]. L'Après-Midi d'un Faune est seule en France à réaliser cet idéal esthétique, et la perfection inouïe qu'elle exige démontre la disparition future des faux poètes exaspérés, et que leur médiocrité anéantit en quelque sorte mécaniquement.").

[5] It is persuasive that the definitive version of the piece has the noun "églogue" under its title.

[6] I would name Derrida's reading, for instance. In « La Double séance » ("The Double Session" in Barbara Johnson's translation) Derrida compares Mallarméan fiction to the Platonic views on representation, which produces a coherent and influential reading of a contemporary philosopher on a specter poet of the 20th century. I mean that Mallarmé was quite elderly to be considered an initiator of what a portion of literary historians came to call symbolism, even though he acted as an ancestor of younger symbolist poets. A hundred years later, he received a renewing reception by the nouvelle critique, Tel Quel, and structuralism approaches. So, Mallarmé had a sound moment of his reception history at that time (it would be precise to add that concrete poetry played a part on this). Mallarméan approach to representation is read in a doubtful manner which doesn't deny nor reaffirm Plato's critique of a copy of a copy: Mallarmé, according to this reading, plays with the ambiguity of representational discourse. Derrida is to be recalled as well in order to underline his affinity with my enterprise in this essay: The ambiguity of representational discourse has affinities with our point of view on Mallarmé, both geographical and mythical and written by someone who resists naming, but does so. Cf. Derrida, 1974, p.376 and Siscar, 2010: 83-102.

[7] This controversial quotation (« il n'y a pas d'hors texte ») which figures in Derrida's most famous work, De la Grammatologie (Cf. Derrida, 1967: .227) is probably meant to be understood with a grain of salt. As he advocated later, "Certainly, deconstruction tries to show that the question of reference is much more complex and problematic than traditional theories supposed. It even asks whether our term 'reference' is entirely adequate for designating the 'other.' The other, which is beyond language and which summons language, is perhaps not a 'referent' in the normal sense which linguists have attached to this term." (Jacques, 1984: 123-124).

[8] It is useful to remember that Marchal (1988: 97) composes an interesting outline about Mallarmé's dismissed thesis which would have dealt with the problematic of language and fiction. Apparently, Cartesian thought was the prevalent motivation of these preliminary scholarly drafts.

[9] Richard (1961: 376) stresses Mallarmé's "nausea of the material".

[10] We may ponder that this sensibility is also historical, for it might be related to the then recent visual revolution brought by photographical breakthroughs.

[11] The word "poésie" and its cognates, such as "poetry", are etymologically connected to the idea of production as well: The Greek verb poieō (ποιέω) means, literally, "I make". Accordingly, it is not inaccurate to state that "to suggest", as to generate, and "to poetize", as to make, are (diachronically) semantically connected. The aforementioned etymological fact (the connection between poetry and poiesis) is important for a plethora of aesthetic reflections over the last centuries.

[12] Undoubtedly, Mallarmé's self-imposed task is incommensurable, if one takes some of his writings into account. As a sample, I would note his particular reading of Émile Montégut. Mallarmé formulates a cultural history divided into three eras and their corresponding representatives: Phidias, Leonardo da Vinci, and the modern poet. The third era would be that of the Oeuvre, succeeding the lineage formed by the Venus de Milo and the Mona Lisa. A new kind of beauty would be forged by Mallarmé's work, which would be the most appropriate for the modern, godless world. A keen interpretation of those issues may be found in Marchal (op. cit.: 72-76).

[13] "Nommer un objet, c'est supprimer les trois quarts de la jouissance du poème qui est faite de deviner peu à peu : le suggérer, voilà le rêve." (Mallarmé, 1956 : 869).

[14] "Peindre, non la chose, mais l'effet qu'elle produit." (Mallarmé, 1995 : 206). According to the editor note, this new poetic may be read as an extension of Edgar A. Poe's conception of literary composition, an undeniable influence emphasized by Baudelaire's association with the American author.

[15] "Ce n'est point avec des idées que l'on fait des vers ... C'est avec des mots". This motto was spread by Paul Valéry in his "Poésie et pensée abstraite" (1945 : 141), who was intimate friends with both Mallarmé and Degas. According to Valéry, Mallarmé gave this piece of advice to Degas, who complained about his own inability to write verses, even though he effectively had ideas. As an answer from a poet to a painter full of ideas but lacking poems, it is a verisimilar fragment of a dialogue; still, one should always keep in mind that Valéry must be the ultimate author of the statement, since Mallarmé never published or gave notice of this particular literary conviction. Similarly to the Platonic Socrates, this quotation belongs to Valéry's Mallarmé.

[16] "Die Kunst steht in der Moderne weitgehend im Zeichen der 'Überbietung, Entmachtung und Entstaltung der Natur, eines tiefen Ungenügens am Gegebenen' (Blumenberg 1957: 56), und sie ist gerade darum exemplarischer Ausdruck der Beziehung des modernen Menschen zur gegebenen Wirklichkeit. Die künstlerischen Werke beanspruchen für sich Ursprünglichkeit. Die Natur als einstige Begründunginstanz des Werks wird durch andere Instanzen abgelöst" (Schmitz-Emans, 1999: 111).

[17] Indeed, these patterns coincide with Frye's very pragmatic definition of literary realism: "representative likeness of life", or "lifelikeness" (See Frye, Op. cit.: 134).

[18] Cf. Meschonnic (1999): "A poem transforms. That's why to name, to describe are worth nothing for the poem. And to describe is to name" ("Un poème transforme. C'est pourquoi nommer, décrire ne valent rien au poème. Et décrire est nommer"). The French scholar and poet insisted on the attention to the opposition between nommer (to name) and suggérer (to suggest) in Mallarméan poetic thinking. On another occasion, after presenting his disagreement with Michel Deguy about this subject, Meschonnic advocates its importance for modern poetry in the following interview: http://www.editions-verdier.fr/v3/auteur-meschonnic-2.html.

[19] "Une ville, une campagne, de loin, c'est une ville et une campagne, mais à mesure qu'on s'approche, ce sont des maisons, des arbres, des tuiles, des feuilles, des herbes, des fourmis, des jambes de fourmis, à l'infini. Tout cela s'enveloppe sous le nom de campagne." (Apud Marin, 1992: 245).

[20] Riffaterre's role in this itinerary is quickly summarized in Hamon, 1993: 127.

[21] Richard, 1961: 433.

[22]As to this everlasting issue concerning the relationship between words and images, I would refer to Vouilloux, 2005 (1994): 63.

[23] Marchal, Op. cit.:114, 344.

[24] The concept of the tragic flaw is connected to the Ancient Greek idea of hamartia (ἁμαρτία), most known in cultured practices via Aristotelian interpretation. Its role in drama would be connected to catharsis, a sort of emotional purgation attained through the representative arts. The concept plays a role in a great many theorizations, from Christian hermeneutics to Frye's "theory of modes" and Augusto Boal's "theater of the oppressed".

[25] Anglic Germanic languages, such as Scots and English, derived words for après-midi from Latin nona hora, rather than meridies. The nona hora (noon) concerned the midway of a monastic day, which started at what is modernly 6:00 a. m.; the ninth hour would be 3:00 p. m.; the noon was eventually retracted in order to fit the midday. The English "afternoon" and Scots "efternuin" reflect this.

[26] Bakhtin, 1982: 84.

[27] Tally, 2013: 58.

[28] Actually, the notion of forerunning is relative (besides being both a spatial and temporal metaphor), since others may be bestowed with that honor before Bakhtin, such as Wyndham Lewis, over and against Bergson and Joyce.

[29] A very literal translation would be: "Those nymphs, I want to perpetuate them". Every mention to the poem, unless otherwise stated, refers to Mallarmé, 1989: 75-79.

[30] This reading is currently widespread: for instance, a Portuguese translation influential in Brazil, by the critic and poet Augusto de Campos, propounds the neologism "perpematar", as it combines "perpetuar" (to perpetuate) and "matar" (to kill). Something close I would think of is the English neologism "perpetuerase".

[31] "Die Götter Griechenlands" in Schiller, 1972: 173.

[32] I will go further on this matter in the following pages.

[33] A translation I would sustain is: "Oh, nymphs, let us reinflate various remembrances".

[34] Cf. Even-Zohar, 1980: 65-74 and 1985: 109-118.

[35] Mallarmé, 1994: 41 (translation by Henry Weinfield).

[36] The most widespread description of the locus amoenus as a literary topos is found in a classic work by Curtius called Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (1973: 197-206). Bakhtin (op. cit.) also exposes the literary productivity of the idyllic chronotope in 18th and 19th centuries, even if mostly in regard to fictional prose.

[37] Actually, Mallarmé (1995:242) has even stated to Cazalis that the Faun would "call for a stage". Still, one must concede that the definitive version is a full-fledged poem and its primary reception was, for the most part, dependent on reading. On the other hand, the genetic account of the poem instills it with dramatic powers, so much so that a soliloquy aspect is legitimated by presence of the noun "Favne", as it were above the faun's solitary speech, or theatrical line.

[38] The metamorphosis into natural elements is highly frequent in Ancient Greek and Roman mythologies (to think of the metamorphosis of the nymph Syrinx into reeds and its use for the handcraft of pan pipes is an immediate reaction when it comes to elucidate the Faun, but I think this approach is intellectually unsatisfactory, as Mallarmé's own mythology has its peculiar strengths and subtleties as a poetic tale from a sound thinker of language and fiction). Other kind of metamorphosis which is quite easily found in Ancient mythology is the particular conversion into a constellation. This last idea is very close to Mallarméan universe and may have to do with the last verses of the Afternoon of a Faun, as I hold on the following pages of this paper.

[39] These verses were famously interpreted by Heidegger (1967: 61-78) in the context of his lectures on Hölderlin during his late career; Michel Deguy (2012) has extended his interpretation and put Hölderlin's verses side by side with our renewed attention for ecology and what Westphal (2007) calls the reign of the geocentric literary approach (a literary perspective based on earthly matters, rather than an egocentric perspective, based on individual standpoints).

[40] A more extended quotation goes like : "The orphic explanation of the Earth, which is the only task of the poet and the prevalent literary play" ("L'explication orphique de la Terre, qui est le seul devoir du poète et le jeu littéraire par excellence"). Mallarmé (1995: 586) is mentioning aspects of the Livre, his conjectural grand oeuvre.

[41] Austin, 1970: 169-180.

[42] Mallarmé richly displays his reservations concerning national mythology in his text about Richard Wagner: "Rêveries d'un poète Français" in Mallarmé, 1998. 363-368.

[43] "Que signifie alors la fameuse « explication orphique de la terre ? » Rien « d'orphique » au sens strict du mot. [...] [O]n peut conclure que Mallarmé voulait dire que Mallarmé voulait dire par « orphique » tout simplement « poétique », puisque Orphée était pour lui le poète par excellence." Austin, 1970 : 179.

[44] "Le paysage, ce 'monument historique', selon la formule d'un prisonnier de l'archéologie aérienne (Roger Agache) [...]. Mais à qui appartient le paysage, cet espace élaboré par les forces conjuguées de la nature, de l'homme et du temps ? Au géographe, qui se tourne vers l'historien ? Au voyageur ? A l'arpenteur, au photographe, à l'écrivain?" (Nora, 1984: 955).

[45] Badiou, 2006: 128.

[46] Ibidem: 127.

[47] Ibidem: 132.

[48] Cf. Jameson, 1991: 156.

[49] Transl. Roger Fry. Mallarmé, 1936.

[50] Badiou, Op. cit.: 132.

[51] Cf. Richard, 295. Much of French (and generally European continental, seemingly) thought may be overheard in this strong statement, which would be fiercely confronted with Keats' lapidary verse "beauty is truth, truth beauty - that is all".

[52] Apud Weigel, 1996, 112.

[53] The word, traditionally psychoanalytic in nature, has found an important reception by Homi Bhabha's cultural theory (cf. Bhabha, 1985: 102-122 and 105).

[54] Weigel 1996, 113.

[55] Ibidem: 103.

[56] Ibidem: 137.

[57] "To repeat a particular past in present time is the specific task of sites of memory in space and time. […] People store their remembrances not only in signs and objects, rather in sites, in rooms, courtyards, cities, public spaces, and landscapes. […] Specific locations form a contact zone between present and past, so as in these places a mysterious door opens to a bygone world. Pausanias mentions that there were places in the ancient world which were pointed out as though they led to the underworld. Odysseus receives from Circe the reference to the exact place where he could descend to the realm of the dead. Space and time, past and present, are connected in such sites." ("Es ist die besondere Aufgabe von Gedächtnisorten in Raum und Zeit, eine bestimmte Vergangenheit in die Gegenwart hereinzuholen. [...] Menschen lagern ihre Erinnerung nicht nur in Zeichen und Gegenstände aus, sondern auch in Orte, in Zimmer, Innenhöfe, Städte, öffentliche Plätze und Landschaften. [...] Bestimmte Orte eine Kontaktzone zwischen Gegenwart und Vergangenheit bilden, dass sich an diesen Orten ein geheimnisvolles Tor öffnet in eine vergangene Welt. Pausanias erwähnt, dass man in der antiken Welt Orte zeigte, an denen es in die Unterwelt hinabging. Odysseus erhält von Kirke den Hinweis auf den genauen Ort, wo er ins Totenreich hinabsteigen kann. An solchen Orten verbinden sich Raum und Zeit, Gegenwart und Vergangenheit."), Assmann, 2006: 217, 218.

[58] The influential work (Yates, 1966) is an important case of a spatial turn on memory studies.

[59] Richard, Op. cit.: 103ff.

[60] Trans. Winslow Shea. http://www.ancientworlds.net/aw/Article/1269922.

[61] An interesting reading on this matter concerning the grapes and their relationship with the nymphs is to be found in Thibaudet 2006: 363.

[62] "C'est l'image seule de l'espace qui, en raison de sa stabilité, nous donne l'illusion de ne point changer à travers le temps et de retrouver le passé dans le présent ; mais c'est bien ainsi qu'on peut définir la mémoire ; et que l'espace seul est assez stable pour pouvoir durer sans vieillir ni perdre aucune de ses parties.", Halbwachs, 1997 : 236.

[63] This descriptive typology is employed by Hamon (Op. cit.: 52) in order to classify the highly mimetic-oriented writing of fiction authors like Zola, Balzac, Dickens, and Walter Scott.

[64] Mallarmé, 2003, 318.

[65] Foucault, 2009 proposes the idea of heterotopias, with which this text will deal in the next lines. Lefebvre, 1974, formulates the proposition of a socially produced space. If I were to loosely and roughly resume it (since my lines are not infinite), his "trialectic" conception comprises the espace perçu (perceived space), which has to do with everyday space; espace conçu (conceived space) which deals with representations of space, with its languages, signs, and sights; and the espace vécu (lived spaces) which is derived from those different instances of spatiality and resists simplifications and is linked with the most hidden, private and subversive side of social production of space. Soja conceives his thirdspace from Foucault's and Lefebvre's conceptions of a multilayered and extremely dense spatiality (real-and-imagined space). Cf. Soja 1989, 1996.

[66] Mallarmé, Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hazard. Translated by A. S. Kline, 2007 (digitally republished at http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/French/MallarmeUnCoupdeDes.htm).

[67] Mallarmé, 2003: 288.

[68] Studies on Mallarmé's reading of Bertrand may be found in Melo Franco (2010), Richards (1998), and Palacio (1973).

[69] "Der historische Materialist rückt daher nach Maßgabe des Möglichen von ihr ab. Er betrachtet es als seine Aufgabe, die Geschichte gegen den Strich zu bürsten". The historical materialist thus moves as far away from this as measurably possible. He regards it as his task, to brush history against the grain. (Original German: Gesammelten Schriften I:2. Translation by Dennis Redmond. Suhrkamp Verlag: Frankfurt am Main, 1974. Available at http://www.marxists.org/refer).

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