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
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.
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