Avant-garde Orientalism: An Introduction, #avantgardeorientalism

Extended version of a lecture presented at the American University of Beirut on Wednesday, March 27th, 2019, and at Pace University in New York for the Dyson Seminar Series on April 17th, 2017.  #avantgardeorientalism, #thepersonalreview

Today I’m going to talk about my new book Avant-garde Orientalism: The Eastern ‘Other’ in Twentieth-Century Travel Narrative and Poetry (Palgrave Macmillan).  In doing so I’ll be discussing my aims and methods for bringing together two very different topics of study--Orientalism and the Avant-garde--topics that seem unrelated if not antagonistic to each other.

What is the Avant-garde and What is Orientalism?

Duchamp's "Large Glass"

The Avant-garde represents the cutting edge—the “advance guard”—of Modernism in the arts, literature, architecture, and other media.  It is a military term that starts being used in the arts in France in the 19^th Century (Poggioli).  It is embraced by the more youthful and innovative artists and poets in the 20^th Century and continues to be used in our own time, though to a lesser and perhaps less meaningful extent.  In its heyday, of course, the Avant-garde was at the forefront of Modernist developments—especially as they emerged in the modern metropolis (Williams)—but it was also often at odds with modernization in its broader social or economic manifestations; that is, the Avant-garde was both ahead of its time AND highly critical of the “modern” as such, so much so that it sometimes defied modern expectations.  Here are some examples from Marcel Duchamp and Russian Suprematist El Lissitsky (one of his later Constructivist designs). 

El Lissitsky, Construc-
tivist Design

Orientalism, on the other hand, is the study and representation of what many in the West once considered a fairly homogeneous space called the Orient.  In classic 19^th-century scholarly terms, Orientalism focused on the Near East (that is, North Africa and the Middle East).  But the Orient could also include India and the Far East (that is, China, Japan, etc.) when broadly applied.  Orientalism is conspicuous in 19^th-century realist painting, but also in literature—as in the novels of Pierre Loti or Rudyard Kipling.  Here's an example, a real masterpiece by Delacroix.  (Works by Gérome are more typical of the orientalist paintings we love to hate.)  

Delacroix's "Death of Sardanapalus" 

Orientalism in lit- ature and painting is not so much practiced today as denigrated.  It’s a kind of representation that originated with Romanticism (painters like Ingres and Delacroix and poets like Victor Hugo or even Coleridge and Shelley) and which relies largely on stereotypes and cultural prejudices in the West as a way of understanding its oriental or “Eastern” subject matter.   But it is also seen today as a kind of academic handmaid of colonialism in the 19^th and early 20^th Centuries, using its knowledge of oriental peoples and customs for the advantage of Western nations administering their colonial territories, whether in the Orient or elsewhere.  This view might sound harsh to some, but many scholars agree it’s a fair appraisal of orientalist practice.  It’s also a view that became pervasive with the success of Edward Said’s book, Orientalism, published in 1978, which articulates what we call the postcolonial view of this kind of work.  So, in effect, orientalism has long been a target of postcolonial criticism, the schol-

Cover of Said's book with Gerome's
"Snake Charmer"

arly field that interprets culture in light of modern colonialism and imperialism.  Prominent scholars in the field are Said, Gayatry Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Ali Behdad, Gyan Prakash, Timothy Brennan, Anwar Acheraiou, historian Anwar Abdel Malek, Derek Gregory, and others.

What’s the Difference between Classic Orientalism and Avant-garde Orientalism?

Orientalism then, has a pretty bad reputation among postcolonial scholars.  So when a new book entitled Avant-garde Orientalism comes along, it might at first seem to be promoting Orientalism, or to be an attack on the postcolonial critique, one that many thought had killed any impulse to BE an orientalist:  That is, the orientalist impulse to represent oriental places, peoples, and cultures as exciting, exotic destinations or topics of study where one can go to enjoy relative freedom from the repressive atmosphere of life back home in Europe or America.  The classic orientalist does this by exploring or indulging in presumed Eastern extravagances, often related to sex but also to a kind of pre-modern existence that is considered backward, effeminate, decadent, feudal and cruel (if not without its own impressive cultural legacies).  As such, these exotic cultures were considered the opposite of modern Western states and the West’s so-called “grand narratives” (Lyotard) of enlightenment, emancipation, individuality, democracy, nationhood, and a general moderation of values that supposedly made the West the West.  The West could feel good about itself knowing (or believing) it was greater, more advanced, more tempered, more reasonable, and thus even exceptional (at least the U.S.A. part, according to its more triumphalist apologists). 

Tomb of Humayun, Delhi

Although an avant-garde writer who travels to Asia, Africa, or the South Pacific might exhibit similar exoticist impulses, “Avant-garde Orientalism” is not the same as what I’ve been describing.  That said, by suggesting there is an “avant-garde” kind of Orientalism, I’m not claiming that there’s a new kind of Orientalism that dissolves the postcolonial arguments against it.  I am acknowledging, however, the importance and difference of certain writings on a range of North African and Asian cultures, produced in the mid- to late 20^th Century (and since) by select European and North American writers.  By this I mean an international collection of experimental Western writers whose ideas about the Orient don’t conform to the postcolonial picture of Orientalism as the servant of 

Hunt, "The Awakening Conscience

 colonialism or as the cultural judge of the East we’ve come to see it as. These writers were not associated with the academy's more 19^th-century Victorian or Realist values (see Holman Hunt's "The Awakening Conscience"—a classic work of Victorian moralizing), but with 20th-century avant-garde ones (see Lyubov Popova's constructionist design below).  As such, they were committed to experimental techniques in the literary and plastic arts yielding works that undermined the institution of art itself and certain ideological assumptions behind it.  These assumptions have mostly to do with the transcendence of the arts, their ability to reflect society as in a mirror while not being tainted by it or not being judged in the same way one might judge the rest of society.  Thus the ideology of art is often consistent with notions of class hierarchy or even of racial and cultural supremacy (based on theories of Peter Bürger, Renato Poggioli, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno).  The avant-garde critique of art as an institution thus results in an increasing politicization of art, not as a corrupting influence, as some might say, but as a valid artistic function.  It’s not surprising then that the Avant-garde, which could be highly critical of many Western institutions, would overlap with post-colonialism in taking a critical attitude toward colonialism and conventional Western representations of Eastern cultures. 

Lyubov Popova, Constructivist design

What’s the Relationship between the Avant-garde, the Modern, and the Postmodern?

As a phenomenon mostly associated with the modern metropolis, the Avant-garde tended to stay there.  So its interest in the East was atypical, making such travels or such works fairly unique.  Yet when they happened, they were still part of an agenda of artistic rebellion and antagonism to many Western values, including colonization and hegemony.  That said, this avant-garde version of anti-colonialism might not seem consistent with the Avant-garde’s supposed modernity, since most Westerners at the time, including many very advanced Modernists, considered colonialism a necessary prelude to the modernization of the non-Western world.  What, then, did writers associated with experimental techniques see in the opportunity to travel East or to represent it in novels, poems, and travel memoirs?  What novelty did they find in the opportunity to bear witness to what many still considered a backward world of lazy natives, decadent cultural practices, and ruthless, unenlightened despots?  In the section of my book introduction entitled “Avant-garde Offensive,” I explain the complex relationship between the Avant-garde and Western modernity.  What needs to be made clear is the fact that, as the “shock troops” of modernity in the arts and literature, 20^th-century avant-gardists often deviated from Modernism’s ideals and pieties.  In a way, then, the Avant-garde is Modernism’s anticipation of Postmodernism (emerging in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s), or a sort of bridge between the two eras, pre- and post-War.  Their eyes fixed always on the future, avant-gardists looked less to the prescribed vision of modern predictability, of industrialized capitalist economies, or of artistic perfection in finished works of art, than to a more dystopic future of diverse and hybrid forms, forms that seemed resistant to the global monoculture that Modernism seemed to foreshadow.   A strong statement, but one that reflects, I think, the avant-garde discontents with modernity.  So what I am saying is that the Avant-garde, in some measure, shares with postmodernist critiques of modernity—and thus with post-colonial theory as well—a strong hostility to the hegemony of the West as manifested in colonialist policies and as reflected in classic orientalist scholarship:  its idea that the scholar's knowledge of the Other should be used to exercise power over it.  Avant-garde writers are also mostly marginal to the literary canon, and thus do not readily serve the more hegemonic functions of canonical works. 

Spectrum of Avant-garde Politics  

What are the anti-colonialist strains in the international Avant-garde?  One finds them in works by the French Surrealists, the American Beats, and others.  Note, for instance, André Breton’s denunciations of France's colonial war in Morocco in the early 1920s; or, the verbal

André Breton

salvos against the War in Vietnam and against capital punishment, coming from Beat writers Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs; or, back in France, Jean Genet’s staunch support for unpopular causes such as those of the Palestinians and the Black Panthers; or Thomas Pynchon’s horrific parodies of colonial intervention in Africa in his novel V.; or, again—back in Europe and back in time—Berlin Dada in the years before Hitler’s ascendancy in which the art movement became an actual political party with an explicitly socialist agenda (participants such as Richard Huelsenbeck, John Heartfield); and later, the Situationist International in France railing against bourgeois complacency and the “society of the spectacle” (Guy Debord, Jean Baudrillard).

That said, it should be pointed out that the International Avant-garde is by no means a monolith consistently voicing left-leaning or progressive ideological positions about the Orient and the colonies.  Historically, avant-gardists have positioned themselves across the ideological spectrum, sometimes presenting themselves as a gifted artistic elite prepared to advocate for colonialist agendas if necessary.  For example, consider the proto-fascist declarations of the Futurist F. T. Marinetti who called war “the world’s only hygiene,”[i] or Ezra Pound’s propagandizing for Mussolini during World War II, or T. S. Eliot’s stuffy royalism and Anglicanism.  I don’t cover Pound or Eliot in my book, but I do discuss Marinetti and the more benign Jean Cocteau and Lawrence Durrell, all three of whom wrote about Egypt and used avant-garde strategies in various ways.   

Methodological Concepts:  Simultaneous Contrasts, the Hermeneutic motion, and “Pure Language” 

So, as a way of covering the ideological spectrum of avant-garde attitudes in travel writings about the East, I have used the idea of “simultaneous cultural contrasts” as a way to describe the multiplicity of ideological positions on the Orient and on resistance movements in Asia and Africa in the Twentieth Century.   That said, while most of these writers are trying to be provocative and novel, they are also, in my view, attempting to discover alternatives to the West’s globalist preconceptions.  The term “simultaneous contrasts” is taken from French painter Robert Delaunay’s ideas about color theory, ideas glossed by the French avant-garde poet Guillaume Apollinaire as “[e]very shade [calling] forth and [being] illumined by all the other colors of the prism” (see Delaunay's "Circular Forms" below).

Robert Delaunay, "Circular Forms: Sun and Moons"

I’ve also made use of translation theory to characterize avant-garde interpretive strategies.  Simply put, I’ve applied George Steiner’s idea of the “hermeneutic motion” as a strategy for describing the uniqueness of avant-garde representations of North African, Middle Eastern, South or East Asian peoples and regions.  Steiner’s idea of translation or interpretation involves four things:  (1) initiative trust, (2) aggression, (3) incorporation, and (4) reciprocity.  Though one can find all four in works by the travelers to North Africa and Asia that I discuss in my book, what stands out for me is the pairing of interpretive aggression and reciprocity—in short, a desire to provoke, but also to affirm, an alternative potentiality, something hybrid or multicultural, if also weighted by the writers’ own subjective idiosyncrasies and obsessions.  In this respect, I’ve also made use of Walter Benjamin’s idea of “Pure Language,” a sort of mystic future of linguistic potentiality, of Language’s totality in its combined semantic functions, but not to be confused with cultural purism.  As I write in my discussion of hermeneutics in may chapter on the Maghreb:  "Avant-gardists are less concerned ... with respecting [different] environments and peoples than they are with respecting [the] potentialto [be or] become [themselves] more fully through [...] an uncoerced cultural concourse with global alternatives" (116). 

  
Moving West to East, from Tangier to Tokyo

So what I have done is bring together a number of texts

Marguerite Duras

about travel or expatriation in cities like Tangier, Cairo, Beirut or Calcutta, texts written by an international collection of Western writers but not excluding transnational or postcolonial “Third World” writers committed to literary experimentation (for instance, the Mexican poet Octavio Paz or the Bengali American Amitav Ghosh).  Though I focus primarily on actual travel writing—texts written during or after actual journeys—I have made liberal use of texts in other genres—poems, plays, novels—that deal with problems of dislocation stemming from travel, usually the kind of voluntary displacements one should distinguish from involuntary ones such as exile or immigration.

In other words, I mostly discuss the kind of travel associated with leisure, pleasure, and acculturation, just as art and literature are associated with these things.  Some of these travels are purely imaginary, such as those in Frederic Prokosch’s book The Asiatics; or Marguerite Duras’s depiction of a madwoman’s journey by foot from Cambodia to Calcutta in The Vice-Consul (certainly a case of involuntary displacement), a journey the author juxtaposes with the story of Anne-Marie Stretter, whose journey to the heart of the French delegation in British India as the wife of the French ambassador allows her to become a force of instability in the phallocentric order of empire.

The texts I discuss are organized from West to East, from North Africa to the Middle East and on to South and East Asia.  My own text, while devoting long chapters to the Maghreb, Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon, and finally to India, concludes with a somewhat cursory glimpse at China and Japan by examining certain prose works of Victor Segalen (whose “aesthetic of diversity” provides a prototype to my “simultaneous cultural contrasts” concept).  Next, I look at the surrealist poet and artist Henri Michaux’s A Barbarian in Asia, which describes his travels in China and Japan (if also in India and Sri Lanka) in the 1930s (incidentally—though he has many flippant things to say about Indians and other Asians, it is clear by the end of that text that he considers himself the barbarian).  And finally, I discuss Roland Barthes’ Empire of Signs, a work of semiotics that signals the academic appropriation of certain avant-garde tactics related to the study of the East, marking it with a kind of detachment and ahistoricism.  Though this detachment suggests a return to aestheticism, it is tempered with some of Michaux’s poetic inventiveness, something Barthes manages to transform into a unique decoding of the cultural signs of Japan.

A Genealogy of Avant-garde Orientalism

So—after grappling with all these theoretical issues in Chapters One and Two (the latter a sustained discursus of theoretical works on postcolonial method, travel writing, and avant-garde practice), I finally get to the more literary concerns that prompted the writing of the book in the first place.  Chapter Three is a literary genealogy of Avant-garde Orientalism, which traces its roots to various Romanticist and Symbolist poets, and then moves on to certain High Modernist authors like Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka before manifesting itself fully as a kind of literary phenotype in works by such authors as Genet and Duras.  This genealogy helps to illustrate the very important modulation between modernist and avant-gardist treatments of Eastern settings.  The settings in the earlier works seem richly allegorized as a space both liberating and threatening to the Western visitor, spaces that seem to fuse all things Eastern to heighten the psychological "dissociation of sensibility" the Westerner experiences or seeks.  But as the century progresses, the settings become more specific in ways that seem more explicitly historical, that is, more about colonial interference or injustice than the psychological tohu-bohu of the displaced traveler.  This shift is most strikingly achieved in Genet's The Screens, a play about the Algerian War of Independence, but also about what Genet seems to have considered the war’s lost opportunity as a moment of creative potentiality, one

that ended up ossifying—or so he saw it—into a militarized Third World state.  I conclude this chapter with my only post-millennial text:  Geoff Dyer’s Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (2010).  Dyer’s two-part travel novel uses Mann’s Death in Venice as an occasion to make mock of the German author’s heavy-handed Modernism, but also to lay bare the subtle Orientalism of that work, where Venice—a high point of Western Civ—succumbs to an Eastern disease imported from India.  But this cultural infection turns out to have originated from the West after all—like the Aryanism I think it allegorizes.  Unlike Mann, Dyer goes on to set the second half of his schizoid novel in India itself—Varanasi—where the protagonist, in his response to a more genuine city of death (corpses, burning ghats) transforms himself into a postmodern multicultural deity, a sort of ascetic, Hinduized Virgin Mary pregnant with a kangaroo god named Ganoona.  The book both mocks and celebrates, I think, the hybrid potentiality of East and West. 

Bowles, Burroughs, and Gide in the Maghreb

The chapter “Tangier and the Maghreb” covers ground that’s been more thoroughly explored by scholars, thanks to the notoriety of the novel William Burroughs wrote in Tangier (Naked Lunch) and to the late popularity of Paul Bowles, whose first novel, The Shelter- 

ing Sky, was filmed by Bernardo Bertolucci in the late 1980s.

Paul Bowles

Studies like Greg Mullins’ Colonial Affairs and Brian Edwards’ Morocco Bound provide very thorough historico-biographical accounts of the ways in which the contemporary political situations in Morocco and Algeria in the 1950s contributed to both authors’ literary output as well as their critical outlook on independence movements in North Africa.  What I do that is different, I think (but which I do consistently throughout the book), is to provide close readings of the texts at issue apropos of their Orientalism, in this case Burroughs’s Naked Lunch and Bowles’s Sheltering Sky, but also with a focus on the latter author’s travel writings and personal anthropological studies, the most important of which are compiled in Their Heads Are Green and their Hands Are Blue.  I also link both of these American writers with the French author André Gide, whose travel narrative Amyntas provides biographical clues to his better-known novel The Immoralist, set in Tunisia and Algeria at the turn of the 19th Century.  In The Immoralist modernist notions about the liberating potential of life in the Maghreb are illustrated, but always, again, with the sense of death’s proximity, signaled, in part, by the ever-encroaching Sahara Desert but also by the death of the protagonist’s wife.  Gide’s sexually-liberated protagonist, Michel, seems to thrive in the Maghreb, while his wife, Marceline, is sacrificed with almost complete indifference on his part.  (He’s basically discovered he’s gay.)  Bowles takes a similar path in The Sheltering Sky in which his American protagonist, Port Moresby, runs adrift in his strange, inexplicable search for minimalist existential conditions, only to die of an undiagnosed disease in an obscure village.  But this time he’s survived, barely, by his own American wife, Kit, who is “incorporated,” one might say, into the family of a Touareg trader—that is, a “harem,” a word that can obviously be read in almost diametrically opposed ways.  Kit escapes, if only to become a wandering, perhaps mad figure.  On the other hand, William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch is an all-out avant-garde romp in which Tangier is nightmarishly, if

William Burroughs

sometimes zanily depicted as a lurid colonialist dumping ground in which, as Burroughs famously wrote, “all Agents defect and all Resistors sell out” (142).  The then International Zone of the City of Tangier—where virtually all foreigners had more legal rights than the locals—was the inspiration for Burroughs’ so-called “Interzone” in Naked Lunch where an international criminal regime seems to hold sway.  Perhaps most diabolically, Islam itself is appropriated and transformed into a business corporation (Islam Inc.), a mask for colonialist interests in North Africa to be used when needed to help snuff out any genuine political reforms or revolutionary appeals on behalf of indigenous peoples.  One can’t help thinking of how today’s neo-imperial regimes in the West have exploited Islamist terror to justify perma-war in the Middle East and the ongoing expansion of the military industrial complex.

Chapters on Egypt/Palestine, India  

I don’t have time to discuss in any detail the other chapters included in the book:  first, on Egypt and Palestine (actually Jordan and Lebanon where Palestinians were displaced), and second, India.  More Modernist writers seem to have traveled to Egypt than anywhere else in the Orient during the 20th Century.  So I had my work cut out for me in trying to write up interesting analyses about such divers writers as Jean Cocteau, F. T. Marinetti, Lawrence Durrell (author of The Alexandria Quartet), Thomas Pynchon (who sets a chapter of his novel V. in Alexandria and Cairo), and finally the Bengali American novelist Amitav Ghosh, whose memoir, In an Antique Land, wraps up my discussion of

Jean Genet

Egypt before I move on to look at the one text on the Middle East that I include.  (Incidentally, Ghosh’s work is the subtlest of all in its avant-gardist strategies while surreptitiously borrowing and exploiting certain orientalist habits of mind).  The text on the Middle East is Jean Genet’s Prisoner of Love, which depicts, in a completely subjective, personalized way, the lives and living conditions of the so-called Fedayeen in their struggles with Israel and other local powers (such as the Jordanian and Syrian Armies or Phalangist militias in Lebanon) all in the 1970s and early 80s (it was Genet’s last book).  This long but discontinuous narrative shows again Genet’s strong empathy for groups and individuals “othered” by various nation states, perhaps even by the entire world community of that time; however, as in The Screens, one senses the writer’s empathy partly depends on the Palestinians’ ongoing inability to achieve statehood, Genet’s instinctive mistrust of all states providing a check on his capacity to embrace any group or revolution that might succeed as one.  In the India chapter I discuss Prokosch’s The Asiatics before going on to discuss the poetry and travel narratives of three poets:  the French Belgian, Henri Michaux, the Mexican Octavio Paz—who was his country’s ambassador to India from 1962 to 1968 when he resigned in protest over the Tlatelolco massacre in Mexico City—and the American Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, each of whom wrote extensively about India, including a substantial number of poems on various experiences and topics associated with South Asian cultures.

Though all of these works are fascinating in their own ways and strain after new insights into the Other with the help of formal techniques that attempt to break up Western discourses of power (what Burroughs calls the “Word Hoard”), it is these discourses of power that continue to impede alternative outlooks.  We might consider such alternatives as a prelude to what some critics now call “relationality” (Edward J. Hughes), a concept that echoes Said’s original appeal for new ways to “study other cultures and peoples from a libertarian, or a nonrepressive and nonmanipulative, perspective” (Orientalism 24).  Though not an academic study, Ginsberg's Indian Journals

Allen Ginsberg

seems to respond in advance to this sort of appeal.  It is iconic, I think, as an instance of “Avant-garde Orientalism” because of the poet’s sustained experimentalism apropos of trying to understand Indians in an empathetic way while also probing his own preconceptions and vulnerabilities.  It is as if he were seeking the Other both within and without, by teaching himself to query its differences and similarities simultaneously.  So although there is really no one book that exemplifies what I mean by Avant-garde Orientalism, I think Ginsberg’s provides an instructive and useful starting point. 

Why does Avant-garde Orientalism matter?  Because it constitutes for the West an alternative way or “other tradition” of trying to imagine the Other’s returned gaze and to remind the West of what seems to have become its all but extinguished capacities for empathy with unknown peoples, groups, practices, and faiths that are too quickly reduced to threatening forces—all lurking in the shadows—that it convinces itself must be vanquished.

  

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[i] From Daniele Conversi, “Art, Nationalism and War: Political Futurism in Italy (1909 - 1944)."  Sociology Compass 3.1 (2009): 92 - 117.  

The French Symbolists, #frenchsymbolism, #symbolistpoets

Synaesthesia and the Ideal of Music:  Baudelaire and Mallarmé

An excerpt from my book Savage Sight/Constructed Noise:  Poetic Adaptations of Painterly Techniques in the French and American Avant-Gardes. The discussion provides an analysis of Baudelaire’s and Mallarmé’s Symbolist contributions to avant-garde efforts to break down barriers among the arts and their respective media to create an aesthetics of inter-arts transgression.  #thepersonalreview #savagesightconstructednoise #frenchsymbolism

Nineteenth-century aesthetics derived largely from a deep concern about the autonomy of the various arts and their relation to corresponding senses, especially optical and auditory perception.  The precise formulation of that concern can be found in the discourse of synaesthesia, Baudelaire’s theory of “reciprocal analogies” between the senses that express the “complex, indivisible totality” of the universe.[1]In poetry this preoccupation manifests itself in verbal analogies between various sensory experiences as demonstrated in the familiar stanza from “Correspondances”:

Comme de long échos qui de loin se confondent

Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité, 

Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté,

Les parfums, les couleurs, et les sons se répondent.[2]

(As far-off echoes from a distance sound

In unity profound and recondite,

Boundless as night itself and as light, 

Sounds, fragrances, and colours correspond.)[3]

As Jean-Paul Sartre informs us in his study of the poet, Baudelaire’s borrowing of the Swedenborgian notion of correspondences did not mean he adhered to its mystic hermeneutics:  “it was rather because he wanted to find in each reality a fixed non-satisfaction, an appeal to another thing, an objectified transcendence….  Ultimately these acts of transcendence would extend to the whole world.  The world as totality would have meaning ….”[4]

            A technical analogue for Baudelaire’s idea of universal correspondences can be found in Eugène Delacroix’s formulation and application of color theory, which the poet himself elaborated in articles on the artist long before the publication of Les Fleurs du mal.[5] In Baudelaire’s description of Delacroix’s system, color is defined as a balance of tones, each of which can never exist in and of itself, but only in relation to the others.[6] Color, then, represents a total scale of tonal relations—not unlike those of music—which reflects or gives the illusion of an ideal order.  For many nineteenth-century poets, music came closest to this ideal order, an order that presumably motivated creative production. Unfortunately, this privileging of music often depended on the poets’ own lack of technical expertise in that field. But even when musical terminology was effectively employed (as in Baudelaire’s use of “melody,” “harmony,” “tone,” and “scale”), music’s prerogative was rarely challenged in discussions of the other arts, while features of those arts that lent comparison to music were emphasized.  Color, therefore, easily accommodated the concert of musical analogies Baudelaire utilized in his critical writings on art because its qualities seemed fleeting and immaterial—like sound itself—but not like the material objects or environments with which it could be mistaken.  

            Furthermore, as Baudelaire learned from his musical idol Richard Wagner, the arts, too, were situated in a scale of relations—or rather, they occupied specific territories in an aesthetic geography where artistic borders were cooperatively maintained through aesthetic alliances.  Wagner explains: 

I recognized in fact that at the precise point where one of these arts reached limits beyond which it could not go, there began at once with rigorous precision the sphere of action of the other; that, consequently, by the intimate union of these two arts, it would be possible to express with wholly satisfying clarity what each of them could not express separately.[7]

Thus, whenever a “gap” in one art had to be “bridged by the imagination,”[8]the imagination would be assisted by the action or memory of another art.  Not surprisingly, Wagner occupies a special place in Baudelaire’s system insofar as the composer of Tannhäuser conceived of the dramatic art as “art in the fullest sense of the term, the most all-embracing and the most perfect.”[9]But the complete success of the dramatic art depended on the harmonious interaction of distinct arts whose limits were recognized by the sensitive spectator.  Where specific boundaries were not observed, the illusion of wholeness broke down, as Baudelaire, quoting Wagner again, reveals:  “Any attempt to express with the means of one [art] what could be expressed only by the two together, must inevitably lead to obscurity and confusion first of all, and then to the decay and corruption of each art individually.”[10]

            Thus the assumption of one art’s means by another was risky business.  Baudelaire himself offered a caveat about synaesthetic interactions that applied above all to language:  “There is in words, in the Word itself, something sacred that forbids our turning them into games of chance.”[11] An instance of this was when words assumed the character of plastic elements, the significance of which were bound to material  circumstance.  Not surprisingly, the one art that came closest, in Baudelaire’s view, to the inertia of materialism or the inconsequentiality of accident, was sculpture, which he dismissed as “a bore”[12]precisely because he believed it was too close to nature, the realm of physical extension and pure contingency.  

            By contrast, Mallarmé seems less dismissive of nature’s capacity to climb in the scale of the various arts with intent to molest (or partake of) the purity of their universal idea—perhaps because he premised so much upon that purity.  As the self-designated father/protector of Poetry, Mallarmé acutely sensed the delicacy of the poet’s charge insofar as the very tissue of poetic textuality seemed positioned for its own preservation/violation with every reading. For Mallarmé, Nature, or Chance, represented the possibility of literary mishandling—i.e., misreading by hermeneutic closure, a kind of forcing of the text to a condition of semantic servitude. But for Poetry’s pure ideality to be true, it had to be constantly “tested,” the ambiguity of this word suggesting the poet’s own ironic position:  he imposed on language strict codes of conduct (prosodic, metaphoric, etc.), which enhanced the possibility of its aesthetic liberation, but also its intellectual misapprehension.  Literary composition, then, became an act of presentation and withdrawal, exposure and disguise, as the text—virgin with each new reading—awaited the One reading. 

            In his essay “Crise de vers” Mallarmé employs a musical conceit to suggest that, of all the arts, music comes closest to their universal idea by virtue of its rigorous composition in which nothing is left to chance.  For Mallarmé, great music writes itself as an attribute of cultural necessity: “Whether willed or not by the musician, the meteor of modern times, the symphony, approaches thought.”[13] This is the reason poets must “investigate the art of transposing the symphony to the book” (S 9). And, like musical composition, the “structure of a book of verse must arise throughout from internal necessity—in this way both chance and the author will be excluded” (S 8).  This internal necessity would seem to be inviolate, free of any “material constraint” (8) or specific manifestation.  In short, it should exist only as an abstraction.  Nevertheless, it bears a name:  Language.  

Les langues imparfaite en cela que plusieurs, manqué la suprême:  penser étant écrire sans accessoires, ni chuchotement mais tacite encore l’immortelle parole, la diversité, sur terre, des idioms empêche personne de proférer les mots qui, sinon se trouverait, par une frappe unique, elle-même matériellment la vérité.[14]

(Languages being imperfect because they are so numerous, the supreme one is missing: Since thought is writing without accessories or whispering without the Immortal Word, the diversity of idioms on earth prevents anyone from producing words which would bear the direct imprint of Truth incarnate.) (S 5) 

            It seems then that mere languages can only approximate the Music beyond their means.  Through prosody, versification, and other devices, language can simulate musical composition, but its basic medium remains the drab, utilitarian, and material signifier of the word.  But this condition is not the stumbling block to truth it would at first seem to be for Mallarmé.  After all, music must rely on various instruments to produce its idea; so too, poetry depends on individual languages to evoke the idea of Language in its essence. Like Hegel’s concept of the notion, Mallarmé’s pure aesthetic idea must be conscious of itself through its concrete manifestations.  Thus, all the arts express their idea in a sensuous way and in so doing constitute restless, yet mutually reinforcing analogies for each other. 

            For Mallarmé, both music and poetry exist on a continuum between ideality and its negation through chance, contingency, and diversity.  Each artistic embodiment involves imperfection or an almost Gnostic degradation of the ideal, an ideal that is nevertheless premised upon that degradation; therefore, no necessary hierarchy among the arts exists except insofar as one may provide a propaedeutic for another’s evolution.  This exception explains Mallarmé’s deployment of musical analogies in “Crise de vers.”  With respect to language, musical phenomena are situated in the same sense category of sound, yet they transcend, in terms of receptive ease, the plurality of linguistic and phonological sign systems that constitute language’s actuality. Cultural differences, historical developments, individual styles, even the diversity of sounds themselves are downplayed in Mallarmé’s essay in order to establish Music as the analogue of purity that language must strive, poetically, to restore.  The dialectic of purity and impurity (or perfection and imperfection) in music is largely repressed in order for the reader to conceive of music as an idea instead of as concrete works, as the latter would vitiate music’s heuristic function in a discussion of language, the only medium through which Mallarmé understands music:  “For Music must undeniably result from the full power of the intellectual word, not from the elemental sounds of strings, brass and woodwind:  it must be a full, manifest totality of relationships” (S 10). 

            It is through his sustained disquisitions on language, not the suggestiveness of his metaphors of music, that Mallarmé explores the complexities of the dialectic he pronounces.  Language, in its existential modifications of the “supreme one” he imagines, both produces and devalues its potential ideality. Language—especially as poetry—is always in and out of itself, aspiring toward a purity too often confused with its opposite:  transparent meaning.  Mallarmé’s search for a supreme language does not represent an attempt to cut it off from history, but to focus it on its own history as language, to condense that explicit history or etymology into a more resonant linguistic configuration similar to myth—or what Mallarmé called the Orphic explanation of the universe.  But, unlike the linguist’s concept of a proto-Indo-European language, Mallarmé’s aesthetic formulation is not reductive, an ideological expedient, but an open hypothesis in order to enrich one’s responses to and uses of language.  Thus, the notion of Pure Language emits an almost sonorous polysemy that gives “un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu” (a purer sense/meaning to the words of the tribe).[15] This purity has a sensuous appeal precisely because its significance is inexplicit and—for Mallarmé—universal.  As he wrote to Villiers de l’Isle-Adam in 1866:  “I discovered the idea of the universe through sensation alone.”[16]

            Clearly then the “sense” attributes of any medium do not represent barriers to the ideal but provide a vehicle for it.  Yet the statement’s implications for any medium besides language and music are not elaborated in “Crise de vers.”  By confining his aesthetic analogizing to musical figures, Mallarmé dismisses the visual arts as an adequate paradigm for his own aesthetic speculations.  One word, however, conveys the poet’s attitude toward painting:  at one point the word “color” is used to describe the music of the human voice (S 5). Although the word already had specific musical applications at the time, Mallarmé, by conflating the idea of color with voice in this single reference, dissociates it from the studio and the palette to resituate it in the conservatory.  

            Yet the word synaesthetically evokes the sole property by which painting was considered among the Symbolists to participate in the universal—as a scale of visual tones.  In identifying color with sound, Mallarmé further refines it by liberating color from physical objects—of which paintings themselves form a part. Beyond any critical advocacy of Impressionist experimentation with color,[17]Mallarmé’s dictum that artists should “paint not the thing, but the effect that it produces”[18]underscores his antipathy for the object of representation and the representational object—the commercial product the plastic work of art is destined to become.  It would seem, therefore, that Mallarmé severely limits the importance of plastic expression in his primary statement of aesthetics because he finds its main attributes as material objects to be at odds with his aspirations for language, to be reminders of what he considers impure with respect to Language.  

            Mallarmé’s discomfort with the material contingencies of the creative act (a throw of the dice, as it were) has less to do with the sensuous properties of those “material constraints” than their venality apropos of utilitarian or exchange values.  Nowhere is language more corrupt than in the form of “ordinary communication”: “Speech has only a commercial interest in the reality of things” (S 8). Its most pervasive print form is journalism, the narrative discourse of which must be transcended by poetry: 

Un désir indéniable à mon temps est de séparer comme en vue d’attributions

différentes de double état de la parole, brut ou immediate ici, là essentiel. 

    Narrer, enseigner, même décrire, cela va et encore qu’à chacun suffirait peut-être pour échanger la pensée humaine, de prendre ou de mettre dans la main d’autrui en silence une pièce de monnaie, l’emploi élémentaire du discours dessert l’universel reportage dont, la littérature exceptée, participe tout entre les genres d’écrits contemporains.  (OC 368) 

(One of the most undeniable desires of my age is to separate the functions of words with the result that there is a crude and immediate language on the one hand and an essential language on the other.  

    The former use of language in narration, instruction, and description—necessary of course, though one could get by with a silent language of coins—is reflected by the ubiquitous journalism which attracts all forms of contemporary writing except literature.) (S 10) 

Be that as it may, Mallarmé saw the work of various Symbolist poets as evidence of a poetic revival that was, by his own account, “taking place publicly” (S 3).  Yet the public nature of thie revival was the source of more anxiety than celebration, which is why his own poetry assumes the portentous tones it does, particularly in “Un Coup de dès….”  Far from being revived, poetry seems on the brink of extinction here (another Hegelian topos) as it enters the public sphere.  The blank spaces, those painterly voids negatively contoured by the wayward trace of a poetic line, foretell the intrusion of the poetic space of language by public speech and the complicity of the latter with commodity exchange. 

Such is the extreme risk run by pure language whenever poets attempt its public transcription—as Mallarmé does in “Un Coup de dés…” where the distribution of words on the page mimics his aesthetic wager. Such a transcription is a modern gamble, the rarified signifiers of each line yielding a lucky or unlucky number depending on whether they add up, whether they invite interpretation.  Yet poetry’s greatest peril is no reception at all, the mute hostility of a public that no longer has time for its mystery, that sees only a pure void (its own image) in the white spaces between lines.  Such a reception is Chance realized in its inconsequentiality, not its surprising coincidence.  

Mallarmé disdains the ideologues of commerce who can only ask of poetry, “What purpose?”  Yet his pure idea is premised on risking all to avoid empty abstraction. Thus the white spaces in Mallarmé’s poem also act as a kind of sensuous matrix through which the ever-receding message of words can compose itself, splinter, regroup, and resonate in memory. To the demand “What purpose?” poetry offers pure imagination:  both nothing (“Rien, cette écume”) and everything—verbal constellations for the infinite expansion of meaning.  But to preserve its exquisite insubstantiality, Mallarmé banishes ordinary communication from his gossamer pantheon of sense where his faith in eternal values is ritualized in an almost silent, almost invisible language.  

In their critical writings Baudelaire and Mallarmé extend the domains of the different arts to what they believe to be their respective limits.  Only upon reaching those limits can the artist achieve sensuous purity in his medium through the establishment of a definitive (yet suggestive) border between it and what is foreign to it.  In this way, both poets adhere ideologically to a vitally important notion of purity—however precarious they may want it to seem.  Any lapse or transgression of aesthetic means is interdicted in their systems, systems that nevertheless obscure such interdictions through a seductive discourse of sense and sensuosity.  Hence, the exact contours of the different arts are never unanimously declared, and one wonders if Baudelaire would not have greeted Mallarmé’s typographic innovations in “Un Coup de dés…” as just such a transgression.  Where they clearly agree, however, is on the urgent need to prevent the total collapse of language into modes of mere communication, instruction, or anecdote.  Above all else, this disdain for what was considered a bourgeois “language of coins”[19]sets the nineteenth-century avant-garde poets apart from their successors.  A later wave of French poets, emerging after the turn of the century, reinvested everyday, utilitarian language with a poetic significance that the Symbolists denied it. Yet the consequence would be an even stronger barricade against the bourgeois appropriation of language through acts of creative misappropriation.  Apollinaire was among the first to re-sacralize, in a sense, the reified language of modern life on the basis of collage techniques.  

---

[1]Charles Baudelaire, “Richard Wagner and Tannhäuserin Paris” in Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art & Artists, trans. P. E. Charvet. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University, 1972: 331. 

[2]Baudelaire, “Correspondances” in Les Fleurs du mal.  Paris:  Librairie Générale Française, 1972: 16. 

[3]Baudelaire, “Correspondances” in Selected Poems, trans. Joanna Richardson.  New York: Penguin, 1975: 12. 

[4]Jean-Paul Sartre, Baudelaire, trans. Martin Turnell.  New York:  New Directions, 1950: 178. 

[5]It should be noted that Baudelaire’s own insights to the art of Delacroix were supported by literary antecedents, notably Hoffmann’s Kreisleriana, in which “colors, sounds, and scents” are said to “unite in a wonderful concert.”  Hoffmann qtd. in Baudelaire. “The Salon of 1846” in Selected Writings: 58. 

[6]Ibid., 56. 

[7]Richard Wagner qtd. in Baudelaire’s “Richard Wagner and Tannhäuser in Paris” in Selected Writings: 336. 

[8]Ibid., 328. 

[9]Ibid.  

[10]Ibid., 336. 

[11]“Theophile Gautier” in Selected Writings: 272. 

[12]“Why Sculpture Is a Bore” in Selected Writings: 97. 

[13]Stéphane Mallarmé, “Crise in Verse” in Symbolism: An Anthology, ed. and trans. T. G. West. London: Methuen, 1980: 7.  All subsequent references to “Crisis in Verse” will refer to this translation and will be cited in the text as S, followed by the page number.   

[14]Stéphane Mallarmé, “Crise de vers” in Œuvres Complêtes, Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry, eds. Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Gallimard, 1945: 363-364.  Subsequent references to “Crise de vers” will refer to this edition and will be indicated in the text by OC followed by the page numbers. 

[15]Mallarmé, “Le Tombeau d’Edgar Poe” (trans. M. A. Caws) in Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Mary Ann Caws.  New York: New Directions, 1982: 50. 

[16]Mallarmé, letter to Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, September 24, 1866 (trans. Bradford Cook), in Selected Poetry and Prose: 86. 

[17]In “The Impressionists and Edouard Manet” this advocacy assumes the form of identifying plein air painting (almost exclusively) with the “search after truth” that Impressionism promises.  For Mallarmé, plein air painting allows the subject in painting to “palpitate with movement, light, and life” in being “composed of a harmony of reflected and ever-changing lights” by means of “simple color, fresh, or lightly laid on.”  Color, once again, is a system of tones reflecting nature as a whole, but only to the extent that the artist “endeavor[s] to suppress individuality for the benefit of nature.”  At the same time, the truth that such painting yields is somewhat different in aspect to that of poetry, inasmuch as Manet and the Impressionists, in re-educating the public eye, usher in the day when “the graces which exist in the bourgeoisie will then be recognized and taken as worthy models in art.”  Although in the hands of these modern masters, modern painting will indeed, like poetry, achieve the purity of its own idea, Mallarmé seems to suggest that its idea is of a somewhat lower grade than poetry’s insofar as painting is so closely bound to the education of the public eye:  “the noble visionaries of other times, whose works are the semblance of worldly things seen by unworldly eyes (not the ages of mankind; recluses to whom were given the genius of a dominion over an ignorant multitude.  But to-day the multitude demands to see with its own eyes; and if our latter-day art is less glorious, intense, and rich, it is not without the compensations of truth, simplicity, and child-like charm.”  Stéphane  Mallarmé, “The Impressionists and Edouard Manet” in Penny Florence’s Mallarmé, Manet, and Redon.  Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University, 1986: 11-18. 

[18]Mallarmé, letter to H. Cazalis, October 1864, quoted in translation by Wallace Fowlie in Mallarmé.  Chicago: University of Chicago, 1953: 125. 

[19]Ibid., 10.