Édouard Manet, frontispiece for L’après-midi d’un faune. Public Domain.
The following is drawn from one of three texts accompanying Florian Hecker’s Resynthese FAVN, a 10-CD box set to be released by Blank Forms in December. Hecker’s work points back to Stéphane Mallarmé’s 1876 poem L’Après-midi d’un faune—and its subsequent musical and choreographic interpretations by Claude Debussy and Vaslav Nijinsky—in which a faun, straddling reverie and reality, recounts a sensuous meeting with several nymphs. It is unclear whether the experience was an illusion; asks the faun, “Did I love a dream?” Hecker, in turn, asks listeners to examine their own sensory perceptions, destabilizing the language of Robin Mackay’s libretto within the hallucinatory textures of his composition. This excerpt from Meillassoux’s essay “The Faun, Hero of a Dyad,” translated by Maya B. Kronic, is a close reading of Mallarmé’s rhymes.
What L’Après-midi d’un faune presents is a fully developed form of the poetic art: a form that resulted from Mallarmé’s discovery of the “Void” ten years earlier, as he put it in a 1866 letter to his friend the poet and physician Henri Cazalis. The tension inherent to his project from the moment of this “negative revelation” stems from the fact that it is combined with a refusal to renounce the vaulting ambitions of early Romanticism. Victor Hugo and Alphonse de Lamartine assigned to poetry the unprecedented task, following the example of the Psalms, of configuring a new religion to succeed an outdated Catholicism: a religion of modern man, heir to the universalist rupture of the French Revolution. Mallarmé never renounced this ambition, as can be seen in his Le Livre (probably written between 1888 and 1895), in which his own poetry becomes the centerpiece of a future ritual that resembles a kind of civic Mass.
But Romanticism had staked its legitimacy upon the poet’s divine inspiration; how could Mallarmé uphold its ambitions when his art was based on a Void, on primordial nonmeaning, on the eternal absence of any divine referent capable of sanctioning the superior meaning of his verse? In his unfinished tale Igitur ou la folie d’Elbehnon, written in 1869, Mallarmé tackles this question for the first time, in a dramatic and particularly sombre way. In Igitur, the Void is said to be “infinite,” but in a malign sense: it levels all attempts at poetry, whether successful or mediocre, since it renders all of them equally futile. This situation comes about when Igitur descends into the vaults of his ancestors as an “absolute,” i.e., convinced, like the Romantic poets in whose lineage he follows, that poetry is either absolute or it is nothing—and that in the latter case it is merely an elevated form of entertainment. It therefore apparently makes no difference whether or not he rolls the dice—the symbol of the poetic gesture in this tale—whatever the outcome of the dice roll might be. The results may certainly differ in terms of aesthetic value—after all, a perfect line of poetry is not just any line—but there is no longer any difference in terms of their claim to absoluteness: even the most perfect of lines betokens nothing other than its chance origin, which harbors no inherent destiny. Hence Igitur’s hesitation as to whether to repeat his gesture, and Mallarmé’s own hesitation about the ending he should choose for his fable: in one ending Igitur rolls the dice and gets a twelve (the number of the alexandrine, symbol of perfect verse), a result greeted by the furious hissing of his ancestors (hostile to the perpetuation of their art in the name of the Void alone); in the other he shakes the dice in his hand only to lie down upon the tomb of his ancestors—signaling his renunciation of writing.
Igitur thus constitutes an initial failure in the attempt to construct a coherent poetics of the Void capable of overcoming its nihilistic threat. Faune, on the other hand—not the aborted theatrical version of 1865 but the poetic version of 1876—will represent a significant breakthrough in this regard. It will be a matter of responding to this challenge by placing poetic writing in relation to its now undecidable nature: poetry must henceforth proceed from the poet’s very uncertainty about the absoluteness of his art. Instead of arguing, as in Igitur, that the infinity of the Void derives from the equal futility of all available options, Mallarmé will try to show that the fecundity of the Void owes to the fact that it induces inescapable doubt, and that poetry can be born of the new rhapsodist’s perpetual enquiry into whether his act is capable of laying a new foundation—something of which he will never be sure.
How is this shift possible? The Void is the nonbeing of any originary Meaning. And yet we participate in this Void through significations: these give rise to fictions (unicorns, mermaids, the “nixies” so dear to Mallarmé), which express our longings for that which is not of this world. But there is nothing beyond the world—unless perhaps the very nothing of which fictions speak. Are fictions pure chimeras, or do they indicate our ability to resist complete reduction to what Mallarmé calls “merely empty forms of matter”? This point is undecidable: the Void is nothing, but the Void also designates our capacity to aspire to that which, being nothing, exceeds the real in which everything comes down to being. Hesitation now begins to mean something different: Igitur had hesitated because the two options before him (writing for nothing, no longer writing) were equally futile. His hesitation had no value in itself: it was merely a failure to decide, an inability to choose because of the equally disastrous nature of both options. The Faun, on the other hand, makes of hesitation the very locus of a new poetry. The poetic absolute becomes the always incomplete art of the contrary hypotheses that poetry generates about its potential greatness and its potential nullity—about whether or not the Void can lead us out of the world toward the nothing to which it has been reduced. Having ceased to pledge itself to the infinite being of God, Poetry is not consequently doomed to collapse into the nonbeing of the Void: between being and nonbeing there is the peut-être, the “perhaps.”
Not even the greatest aesthetic success, therefore, can guarantee that a poem will be (absolute) Poetry—but neither can any success entirely dismiss the possibility that it might be destined for something greater than the mere metrical beauty of its verses. To produce a Poetry of the Void, then, is to describe the poet’s relationship with the ambiguous being of his song: has it taken place, is it still something that elevates us and raises us above our condition, or is it merely a pleasant diversion? This is no longer a poem of elevation (Hugolian, Promethean) or one of the fall (Baudelairian, Icarian), but one of conjuncture and conjecture. Conjuncture: a verse has in fact taken place, with all the hallmarks of success. Conjecture: Is it a bearer of absolutes, or merely a sign of the mastery of a given procedure?
This song of uncertainty is not, however, a poetics of anxiety or torment, for that would sound resonances with the all-too-familiar song to a God sensed in moments of ecstasy—without ever gaining any assurance of his existence in the throes of such ecstasy. No, it is a poetics of enquiry which constructs a network of possibilities that are patiently explored, to the point of forming a labyrinth that will reconcile the poem with its own verses. It involves the construction of a definitive alternative which however cannot be said to lack an answer to be sought within its two terms, because nothing can be superior to it. The Void is the infinity that fuels the obstinate exploration of a continually preserved possibility: always, something may have taken place.
The hypothetical encounter between the Faun and the naiads therefore stands as a figure for the experiment that the poet makes with his verse, with no guarantee of success: Did Poetry take place? From now on, the poet must doubt not God, but the status of his own writing.
However, we need to demonstrate what it is that leads us to believe that the Faun, through the intermediary of the two nymphs, is indeed addressing the verses that the poet has just written. To do so, we shall seek to establish the following thesis: the duo of naiads symbolizes the duo of rhymed verses. Rhyme, insofar as it may have taken place—but may not have, except in a banally aesthetic way—this is what we believe the whole of Mallarmé’s Faune addresses, with rhyme standing as a symbol for poetry itself.
***
In June 1865, Mallarmé announced to Henri Cazalis that he was “rhyming a heroic interlude, whose hero is a Faun.” At that point the poem was intended for the theater, even though Mallarmé was already aware that it was probably unsuited to any traditional kind of performance: ‘This poem contains a most lofty and beautiful idea, but the verses are terribly difficult to do, because I am making it absolutely scenic—it is not a work that may conceivably be given in the theater; it demands the theater.” In September of the same year, he went up to Paris to submit a first version of his text—”Monologue d’un faune”—to the Théâtre-Français; Banville and Coquelin rejected the play, for lack, they said, of the “necessary anecdote.” This “heroic interlude” contained at least three scenes, of which we have today a late copy: “Monologue of a Faun” from 1873–1874, fragments of a “Dialogue of the Nymphs” (Iane and Ianthé), and an “Awakening of the Faun.”
In a letter to Cazalis on April 28, 1866, Mallarmé announced that he would get back to writing the poem over the summer. However, there is no further mention of Faune in his correspondence in the ensuing years, and the project seems to have been abandoned until 1875. In that year Mallarmé resumed work on the Faun’s monologue alone, which, under the title “Improvisations d’un faune”—now a poem rather than a stage play, as the disappearance of all the stage directions attests—was sent in June to the publisher Alphonse Lemerre for the third issue of Parnasse contemporain. The poem was rejected by the selection committee, but Mallarmé had it published the following year—in April 1876—in a further modified form, under its definitive title L’Après-midi d’un faune, in a deluxe edition illustrated by Manet.
There are three versions of the scene of the Faun, then, only the last of which was published during the author’s lifetime: “Monologue d’un faune” (1865), “Improvisations d’un faune” (1875), and L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876). What are the most significant changes from one version to the next?
The poem depicts the meditations of a Faun, who, upon awakening, believes—but cannot be sure—that he has enjoyed a romp with two nymphs whom he managed to briefly seize hold of before they escaped him. The entire monologue consists of the various hypotheses advanced by the Faun in order to decide upon the reality of this encounter. In the 1865 version, the Faun discovers the truth of the erotic tryst by means of a “female bite” on his breast: a truth which, had the play been completed, would have been confirmed by a dialogue between the escaped naiads. In the poems of 1875 and 1876, on the other hand, the Faun is no more able than the reader to determine whether the encounter was real or fantasized. The principal change between these last two versions concerns the first line. The 1875 “Monologue” began with:
Ces nymphes, je les veux émerveiller
(These nymphs, I would enthrall them)
In this case, then, the Faun—with his flute—is still singing a song of seduction to the nymphs, and the nymphs in their reality are the principal object of his desire. The 1876 poem, on the other hand, begins as follows:
Ces nymphes, je les veux perpétuer
(These nymphs, I would perpetuate them)
In this version, the aim of the song is to prolong the dreamlike feeling with which the Satyr is still imbued when he awakens—to the point of using poetry alone to compensate for the absence of the nymphs, whose reality, in the end, no longer matters.
As early as 1865, the poet had sought to exhibit the essential principles of his writing by way of the relation that the Faun sets up between his fantasy, the existence of the naiads, and the “twin reed” (his flute) through which he expresses, musically, the essence of his desire. So there can be no doubt about the reflexive dimension of the eclogue. Indeed, such reflexivity is the commonplace par excellence of commentaries on Mallarmé. Paradoxically, however, we have perhaps not yet done justice to the degree of reflexivity of this writing, which in its detail sometimes goes far beyond what is usually admitted. Lucidity sometimes arrives belatedly: it is now, wearied as we are of essays on the autotelic nature of Mallarmé’s work, that we shall have to discover what we think we know all too well, by demonstrating that we still have not realized the extent to which the Mallarméan poem refers only to itself, and the great originality with which it does so.
Commentators have generally accepted that Faune underwent a decisive change at the moment at which the nymphs, now entirely hypothetical, began to symbolize Mallarmé’s rejection of a poetry subservient to the description of objects, in favor of an art capable of perpetuating an impression in its own right—an impression whose reality becomes irrelevant once the poet begins to focus solely upon the power of his idealized fantasy. The naiads, then, symbolize the nature with which this now autonomous art of the Satyr has ceased to concern itself. But we must go further than this. This interpretation identifies the nymphs with reality, while the Satyr would be at the level of the aesthetic reworking or replacement of this reality. Yet this approach fails to observe a quite obvious point: nymphs were already a privileged symbol of poetic fiction in Mallarmé’s work. In this poem, then, Mallarmé is not talking about a material, natural event distanced from us by a fleeting mode of appearance that renders it uncertain: he is evoking creatures that are already fictional, to which he adds undecidability. What is striking, then, is the doubling of fictionality implied by the Faun’s relation to the hypothetical naiads: it may be that a fiction has taken place, but nothing remains to attest to it. Or, even more remarkably: a being who is already quite obviously fictional—the Faun—wonders whether the fictions he has encountered—the nymphs—are not dreams of fictions, fictions dreamt up by a fiction—chimeras to the power of two … One could hardly diminish the object any further without its disappearing altogether. But then what is supposed to be designated by these naiads—these doubled phantasms which we may doubt were even so much as fictions?
It is their duality that points us in the right direction: the nymphs are desired and interrogated by the Faun always in terms of the sapphic relation that is the subtext to their insistent pairing. We should therefore see in them a transparent allusion to rhyme—and more specifically to feminine rhyme, which in French has the advantage of being both sonorous and visual (via the silent e), and thus of being grounded in the written word as well as in oral speech. A rhyme is a pair of lines eternally joined by the affinity between their conclusions, yet eternally separated by the white space between them. Union and separation, a love without fusion which compensates for the “harm of being two” specific to modern poetry, so unlike ancient poetry whose verses are single and find in themselves alone the principle of their unity. Verse is therefore Fiction, since it subjects things to the principle of the sonorous approximation of words which, entirely conventionally, designate them. The question posed by Faune therefore consists in determining whether or not there is any reliable criterion for recognizing when a rhyme is truly poetic. Did rhyme take place—or was there just a hollow assonance, a homophony that imagined it was a distich, a vain dream of poetry? Was there Fiction, i.e., the power of Verse freed from the shackles of reference so as to transport the Self into the absolute Void by means of pure chimeras? Or was there only a phantasm of Fiction—a phantasm of Verse, of Rhyme, of Poetry? The essential difference, as we have seen, is that the 1875 and 1876 versions—unlike the 1865 version—refuse to reassure the poet that his intuition of Beauty did in fact take place. Literature thus enters into a relationship of undecidability with what constitutes its essence, symbolized no longer by Woman as Muse, but by Women Intertwined around the void of their reciprocal chasm.
Quentin Meillassoux is a professor of philosophy and the author of After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency and The Number and the Siren: A Decipherment of Mallarme’s Coup De Des, among other books.
Maya B. Kronic is the author, most recently, of Cute Accelerationism and Head of Research and Development at the publisher Urbanomic, which aims to engender interdisciplinary thinking and production. Their essay “Return of the Faun (Formulations)” examines the afterlife of Mallarmé’s poem in the context of Hecker’s FAVN.
