Mallarme Faun PDF

The Formal Rhythms of Mallarm's Faun
Author(s): DAVID J. CODE

Source: Representations, Vol. 86, No. 1 (Spring 2004), pp. 73-119
Published by: University of California Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/rep.2004.86.1.73 .
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D A V I D J. C O D E
The Formal Rhythms

of Mallarmes Faun
The poetic fact itself consists of grouping, rapidly, in a certain number of equal strokes,
in order to bring them into focus, certain thoughts which otherwise would be distant and
scattered; but whichthis is what is strikingrhyme together, so to speak. It is thus
necessary, above all, to employ the common measure, which must be applied; in other
words, the Verse. The poem remains brief, and is multiplied to form a book; its xed
order creates a norm, as does the verse.1
N be written about Stephane Mallarme

and poetic rhythm in the simplest sense of the term. After all, this poet, endlessly
celebrated for his initiatory modernism and his anticipation of the theoretical concerns of post-structuralism, nonetheless continued to negotiate with classical meters from his years as a lyceen through his last refractory sonnets in octosyllables and
alexandrines. Detailed attention to his prosody could well further the attempt to
recover the historical perspective on his oeuvre that is so often lost when his criticism
is given pride of place over his verse and selectively sampled as the foundation of
later literary theory rather than as attendant musings on a pratique poetique.2
It would be easy to nd preliminary purchase for such attention in Mallarmes
own comments on prosodic rhythmas, for example, when he writes:
All the same, the Parnassians caution is not without value: it provides the point of orientation between the resurgence, in all audacity, of romanticism, and freedom; and demonstrates (before versication dissolves into something identical to the primitive keyboard of
words) an ocial game, submitted to the xed rhythm.3
Of course, Mallarmes placement of Parnassian poetry between a fallback to romanticism and the (excessive) prosodic liberty that might lie ahead is, in itself,
entirely unsurprising. But his ne metaphor of the primitive keyboard of language that will remain after ordered prosody dissolves might usefully comple
The eclogue LApre`s-midi dun faune has long been seen as a breakthrough to the mature
symbolist phase of Mallarmes oeuvre. Cliches about the mystery essential to symbolist poetic style have,
however, forestalled rigorous analysis of the works structure. Exposing a formal rhythm that draws the
strophic sections into a pattern of virtual folios and bifolios, this article reads the faun eclogue as a secret model of le Livre, the Book, lodestar of Mallarmes aesthetic project. In giving new focus to the
works pointed dialogue with classical Virgilian pastoral, this reading also draws on Benvenistes writings
about linguistic subjectivity to understand its enactment, through the character of the faun, of an agonistic
search for voiced presence. / R 86. Spring 2004 The Regents of the University of
California. 0734-6018, electronic 1533-855X, pages 73119. All rights reserved. Direct requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content to the University of California Press at
www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.
73
ment the more famous announcement of poetic crisis in his Oxford lecture,
whose most succinct statement hints delicately at the same metaphor: on a touche
au vers.4 His approval of the Parnassians caution, in other words, might be taken
to imply that the best way to position his poetry in history is to reattune ourselves to his touch with le vers, the ocial constraint that can (still) keep poetry
from falling away into vapid improvisations on undierentiated verbal keys
(touches).
Rhythm in this simple sense will indeed play a central role in my reading of
LApre`s-midi dun faune, long celebrated as a pivotal work in Mallarmes attainment
of stylistic maturity. Indeed, an investigation of this poems rhythmic touch would
be highly appropriate, given that Mallarme, years later, claimed to have composed
into the verses of its last prepublication version, the 1875 Improvisation dun faune, a
running pianistic commentary on the alexandrine.5 But in my attempt to reinsert
the faun poem into its historical moment, I will only arrive at detailed considerations of Mallarmes ngering on the measured syllables of le vers by focusing rst
on his rhythm at a wider formal level of the text.6 The rhyming alexandrines of
LApre`s-midi dun faune are organized into strophes whose formal array may seem,
at rst glance, to lack any unifying pattern. The series of strophes can, however,
actually be shown to fall into pairings and gatherings that mimic, in poetic structure itself, the form of le Livre, lodestar of Mallarmes aesthetic. To imagine lifting
and assembling this virtual book while readingto imagine thumbing through
its rhythm of folios and bifolios fold by fold, as it wereis to be led to experience,
at the center of the foliated form, a moment in which the poets touch with le vers
brings into tangible focus a particular moment in the history of his art.
The structural sense of rhythm that underpins such a reading can nd deep
etymological justication if we recall Emile Benvenistes argument that the archaic
Greek rythmos, before it accrued its later (Platonic) associations with measured motion, originally bore the slightly dierent meaning of distinctive form, proportioned gure, arrangement, disposition.7 Benveniste elaborates with imagery that
can further enrich our sense of virtual feuillets within the faun poems dispositional rhythms:
The root of rhythm . . . designates the form in the instant that it is assumed by what is
moving, mobile and uid, the form of that which does not have organic consistency; it ts
the pattern of a uid element, of a letter arbitrarily shaped, of a robe which one arranges
at ones will, of a particular state of character or mood.8
This emphasis on the mobile and uid aspects of rythmos suggestively parallels
Mallarmes many attempts, in his own criticism, to negotiate the balance between
xity and mobility in the relationship he often poses between poetic structure
and le Livre.
I have, for example, chosen for my epigram one particularly decisive comparison of the xed order of verse to the pagination of a book. Rather more typical,
74
in its equivocation between static measure and dynamic process, is the formalist
variation of the keyboard metaphor through which Mallarme exhorts the reader,
elsewhere, to approach his poetry like pieces at the keyboard, active, measured by
folios ( feuillets).9 Most intriguing of all, perhaps, is the passing mention, in one
obscure instance, of the intervention of folding, or rhythm, which might be said
to attach Mallarmes ideal of le Livre, with its formal-conceptual folds of paper, directly to the archaic sense of rythmos Benveniste so compellingly associates with the
loosely arranged folds of a robe.
Still, these arbitrary gleanings from Mallarmes prose should not be understood as justications before the fact for a reading that (willfully) seeks a rythmos of
folds in the faun poem. I oer here, instead, an example of the ways an analysis of
the poetry can illuminate the criticism. The Book, as it is repeatedly invoked in
Mallarmes writings, has often been taken as a purely metaphysical gure for the
unattainablein other words, to put it simply, either as a symbol of the overweening ideal that doomed his literary labors to agonized incompletion, or, conversely, as
the all-encompassing goal that, in its own endless postponement, provided constant
motivation for the obsessive, compressed, fragmentary oeuvre he did in fact create.
These and other more theoretical interpretations aside, I suggest that after paging
through the virtual feuillets of LApre`s-midi dun faune, we may be able to recognize,
behind many of Mallarmes invocations of le Livre, something more substantive,
more tangible, and more fully achieved than can be seen from any purely metaphysical standpoint.10
It might seem surprising that such grandiose conclusions could still be derived
from one of Mallarmes best-known poems. But it is typical of the Mallarme literature, on the whole, that while many of the best glosses of LApre`s-midi dun faune aid
greatly in the attempt to understand the vague narrative, none say much about
structure, beyond an occasional acknowledgment that its 110 lines fall roughly into
two halves.11 Even Roger Pearson, whose analyses of the shorter poems in his 1996
book Unfolding Mallarme: The Development of a Poetic Art are more attuned to structure than many others, nds in the poem as published in 1876 a greater formal looseness than in the 1875 Improvisation:
The previously approximate binary structure continues to be approximate (rather than numerically precise), and the central division of the poem (between ll. 51 and 52 in both the
Improvisation and the Eglogue) is now less pronounced within an otherwise more fragmented,
apparently improvised structure.12
Pearsons readiness to overlook the analytical implications of Mallarmes change of

title, from the vague Improvisation to the more generically precise Eglogue, implicitly
endorses a common cliche about the poets artistic development. The greater fragmentation he nds in the 1876 poem, that is, is exactly what we would expect given
Mallarmes supposed progression toward the more rareed mystery always seen
as typical of his mature symbolism.
The Formal Rhythms of Mallarmes Faun
75
Although genetic considerations will be secondary to my argument, I will indicate a few revisions that, by creating clearer imagery and ner precision of form,
demand a reappraisal of such cliches about the travail de mallarmeisation (as Gerard
Genette called it) undergone by the faun poem through its various stages of revision.13 And indeed, one key to an appreciation of the last versions tighter formal
focus is its new subtitle, Eglogue. Often noted as an obvious signal of the poems
many pointed echoes of Virgils archetypical Eclogues, Mallarmes generic subtitle
highlights a response to Virgil that unfolds at a deeper level than pastoral imagery alone.
Most fundamentally, the subtitle implicitly marks Mallarmes own concern
with the elusive generic relationship between lyric and dramatic verse that he experienced as irresolvably problematic from his rst inklings of the faun project in
1865.14 This relationship is encapsulated, in Virgil, by his designation of each of
his Eclogues as the words of named speakers. Mallarme both follows and signicantly alters the convention, by identifying an unconventional dramatic speaker,
LE FAUNE, for his own Eglogue. The divided body of this exceptional pastoral
character can be seen as an obvious symbol of the mind-body duality he experiences in his pursuit of two nymphs. More richly, however, it might be taken as a
summons to the reader to take this role, and thus to experience a similar division
in the encounter with poetic language itself. Reading as the faun, in other words,
we are invited to experience directly the division between printed poetrys illusory
promise of materialized speech, and its factual inertness as writing on a page.
A conict between speech and writing has occasionally been recognized as one
theme of LApre`s-midi dun faune. But even the best critics have, of late, allowed
Jacques Derridas deconstruction of traditional logocentrism (which was, of
course, partly derived from Mallarme) to deect them from the poems selfconsciously classical instantiation of this dichotomy.15 Pearson, for example, who
begins his book by distancing himself from Derrida, nonetheless interprets what he
sees as the conict in Mallarmes Eglogue between the calm control of a written
text and the unruly noise of spoken verse in ways that develop the Derridean
inection of the following methodological assertion:
We must, like the poet, let the words of the text play upon our own lips, murmur them,
adapt them, remember their past, try placing unexpected silences between them, and
thereby discover de voeux intellectuels une speculation dierente, a dierent (and deferring) way of mirroring intellectual intentions.16
No doubt support for this attribution of dierance to the spoken level of the poetry
could be found in Mallarmes criticism, which is deeply contradictory on this issue (as on many others). But a deconstructive approach to speech and writing in
Lapre`s-midi dun faune is anachronistic in the most problematic sense, for it makes
impossible a recognition of its manipulation of lyric conventionsaddress, apostrophe, verbal musicas itself a nely formed confrontation with the agon of a
76
crepuscular moment (in Pearsons apt description) in the history of classical

logocentrism.17
Indeed, Mallarme signicantly deepens the classical inection of his staging of
idealized vocality by reactivating the self-conscious intertextuality exemplied by
Virgil himself, through his own thoroughgoing adaptations of Theocrituss Idylls.18
In the faun Eglogue, whose references to the naive Theocritean wellspring of the
pastoral tradition are just as well-attested as its nods to Virgil, Mallarme might
well be said to take a stance as a latter-day Virgil, at a self-conscious remove from
prelapsarian utterance. As Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve once put it, in an ecient formulation with obvious appeal for the present study, by comparison with
the immediacy and fullness of Theocritean lyricism Virgils pastoral poetry must
be recognized as modern, because, while he may love the countryside, he also
loves books.19
Appropriately enough, in other words, a formal analysis of the struggle with
voice and writing in this virtual book nds that it is best characterized by returning to the somewhat naive terms with which Jacques Scherer, rst editor of
the sketches many take as preliminary jottings for le Livre itself, once characterized
this relationship for Mallarme:
Like Diderot, Mallarme was a great speaker, and as with Diderot, the problem of the relationship between speech and writing is fundamental for the comprehension of his work. It
is not easy to grasp the connection between this exceptionally sober and restrainedand
also extremely obscurewriting style and this speech, which struck all hearers with its
direct, if subtle, character, and with its clarity. In this confrontation the advantage always
returns to the spoken.20
Scherers biographical trope, as well as his particular adjectives, are reminiscent of

countless classicist paeans to Theocrituss originaryclear, direct, and personal
pastoral voice (Sainte-Beuve, again, is exemplary).21 But such pretheoretical naivete
can serve to highlight, alongside the (Virgilian) writerly obscurity usually taken to
represent Mallarmes deepest motivations, the humblermore touchingpoetic
ideals evident in his election of the conversational tone as the supreme limit; in
his characterization of poetry as the most judicious way of speaking, appropriate
to a given epoch; or in his celebration of the very intimacy of the race, in its
ower, speech.22 In following the fauns pursuit of intimate speech through the
feuillets of his Eglogue, we should recall that the sketches Scherer presents as le Livre
itself were to envision, years later, a similar fusion of the lyrical and the dramatic
in a rite uniting speakeroperatorand audience. The 1876 Eglogue, a virtual book poised between the physical and metaphysical dimensions Scherer distinguishes in the later sketches, thus takes its place behind the mature oeuvre as the rst
intensive, rhythmic structuring of all the unstable oppositionsspeech and writing,
presence and absence, personality and impersonalityMallarme would subsequently confront, again and again, under the sign of the unattainable Livre.23
77
Strophes and Blanks,

Folios and Gatherings
When Marcel Proust criticized the excessive mystery of symbolist poetry

in his 1896 essay Contre lobscurite, Mallarme could well have replied that such
obscurity was, in his view, the only acceptable goal of modern literature.24 Instead,
he asserted bluntly, in Le Myste`re dans les Lettres, that our contemporaries do
not know how to read. He proceeded to characterize the act of reading in several
untranslatable sentences that hint at the way LApre`s-midi dun faune, in particular,
can be opened to formal analysis:
Lire / Cette pratique / Appuyer, selon la page, au blanc, qui linaugure son ingenuite,
a` soi, . . . Virginite que solitairement, devant une transparence du regard adequat, ellememe sest comme divisee en ses fragments de candeur, lun et lautre, preuves nuptiales
de lIdee.25
The passage is strikingly saturated with the very synonyms for the theme of chastityvirginity, ingenuity, candorthat occur in the Eglogues clouded narrative of a fauns desirous pursuit of two nymphs, one more chaste than the other.
In Le Myste`re dans les Lettres, Mallarme brings these synonyms for sexual purity
under a single master-symbol. It is the virginal blankness of the page, he suggests,
that can, under the transparency of an adequate scrutiny, be seen to articulate
the fragments of a text into a nuptial proof of the Idea. Elsewhere, he emphasized the structural importance of the blank spaces that articulate the strophes within
his poems: the intellectual armature of the poem is concealed andhas its
placeholds fast in the space that isolates the strophes and amidst the blankness
of the paper, signicant silence that it is no less beautiful to compose than the
verse.26 Taken together, these two references to the blanks that isolate poetic strophes on the page can suggest a way to read through the surface sexual story of
LApre`s-midi dun faune and discover the deeper drama of linguistic material beneath.
In this poem, the armature intellectuelle of blanks separates the 110 lines
into strophes whose precise proportional and symmetrical relationships are reinforced, on the one hand, by a careful use of punctuation and, on the other, by a
typographical distinction between roman type and italics in quotation marks.
There is no doubt that a certain obscurityas Proust would have itinitially
shrouds any coherent pattern that might lie beneath these sectional relationships.
I suggest that one essential divination (one of Mallarmes favored terms for the
act of reading) is necessary if we are to recognize that the symmetries, the punctuation, and the typography all demarcate an armature best portrayed as the gathered feuillets of a book. If the structural blanks between strophes are taken as standins for blank folios (that is, blank versos of printed rectos, or vice versa), and strophic
demarcations by typography and punctuation with no intervening blank space are
seen, concomitantly, to operate as direct turns from recto to verso on a single
78
1. Pictorial representation and bibliographic diagram of the book.

folio, we can begin to gather the poems array of strophes and blanks on the printed
page into an orderly rythmos of folios and bifolios.
Figure 1 illustrates the book form that emerges from this reading of the intellectual armature of LApre`s-midi dun faune. As the diagram shows, the virtual
book is enfolded by an outer bifolio representing the rst and last strophes. Within
this cover, so to speak, the internal strophes fall into a structure that expands
incrementally from a single folio, to a single bifolio, to a gathering of two bifolios.27
Perhaps this synoptic representation already risks, in its clarity and simplicity, overbalancing our experience of the virtual book too far toward xity. I suggest,
however, that the exquisite interplay in this poetic morceau between structure and
process, uidity and form, can only be sensed if we begin, at least, by attributing
to it enough substance to imagine taking it up and reading it folio by folio with
LE FAUNE.
79
The strenuous attention to detail in the reading that follows is inevitable given
the complex interplay of its threefold motivations. My primary purpose is, quite
simply, to show that the texts various themes, gures, and classical references are
far more intensively structured than we might expect from the non- (and anti-) formalist tendencies in the Mallarme literature. This task, intricate enough in itself,
is further complicated by a few attempts to question the genetic trope under whose
sway only a predictable deepening of symbolist mystery has been seen in all the
poets revisions. But in addition, I have tried both to enact the dilemmas of reading
such a structure brings into focus, and to interpret that enactment. It is hard to prevent the simultaneous pursuit of all three tasks from becoming, at times, laborious.
The worthy result, in my view, is a new appreciation of the agonistic material dimension of Mallarmes poetic practice, and a newly precise sense of the way this
practice enfolds the central linguistic crisis of its historical moment.
An Echo of Virgil;
a glimpse of the Book
Figure 2 shows the rst seven lines of the poem, the rst folio of the
virtual book. A particularly close reading of this folio is necessary, for not only
does it eciently introduce many central themes and problems, it also eectively
pregures the entire livre-form in its own poetic structure.
Mallarme once wrote that The fabrication of the book, as the ensemble that
will unfold, begins with a single sentence.28 In the rst sentence we readers are
given to speak withasthe faun, Mallarme commences the fabrication of this
poem-livre by recomposing the opening of Virgils rst Eclogue:
1
Ces nymphes, je les veux perpetuer.
2
3
Si clair,
Leur incarnat leger, quil voltige dans lair
Assoupi de sommeils touus.
Aimai-je un reve?
4
5
6
7
Mon doute, amas de nuit ancienne, sache`ve

En maint rameau subtil, qui, demeure les vrais
Bois memes, prouve, helas! que bien seul je morais
Pour triomphe la faute ideale de roses
[Those nymphs, I want to perpetuate them. So clear / Their light carnation, that it vaults
into the air / Weighed down by tufted slumbers. Did I love a dream? / My doubt, accumulation of ancient night, completes itself / In many a subtle branch, which, remaining the real /
Trees themselves, proves, alas! That all alone I was oering myself / For triumph the ideal
fault of roses.]
80
LAprs-midi dun faune

glogue
LE FAUNE
1 Ces nymphes, je les veux perptuer.
Si clair,
2 Leur incarnat lger, quil voltige dans lair
3 Assoupi de sommeils touffus.
Aimai-je un rve?
1 r
4
5
6
7
Mon doute, amas de nuit ancienne, sachve

En maint rameau subtil, qui, demeur les vrais
Bois mmes, prouve, hlas! que bien seul je moffrais
Pour triomphe la faute idale de roses
2. Folio 1 recto of the virtual book.

Virgils poem, a dialogue between two shepherds, begins with Meliboeus, who is
leaving into exile, bidding farewell to Tityrus, who remains in the pastoral
landscape:
Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi
silvestrem tenui musam meditaris avena;
nos patriae nis et dulcia linquimus arva.
nos patriam fugimus; tu, Tityre, lentus in umbra
formosam resonare doces Amaryllida silvas.
[Tityrus, you, under the spreading, sheltering beech, / tune woodland musings on a delicate
reed; / We ee our countrys borders, our sweet elds, / Abandon home; you, Tityrus, lazing
in the shade, / Make woods resound with lovely Amaryllis.]29
In fact, the very rst words spoken by the faun encapsulate the problem Mallarme
confronts in this Eglogue. The precise rhythmic congruence between his Ces
nymphes, je . . . and Meliboeuss Tityre, tu . . . highlights a fundamental dierence in pronominal position. Even though Meliboeus anticipates exile from his
pastoral world, he can still name his friend and address him directly with the
second-person pronoun, tu. The faun, by contrast, can only indicate obliquely,
as ces and les, the objects he sees.
Tu does, in fact, appear in Mallarmes rst sentence, but it is separated from
the je, secreted within the last verb, perpe-tu-er. This verb, a new addition to
the Eglogue (the Improvisation had emerveiller), has often served as a mot clef for a
81
reading that takes the perpetuity of artistic representation as the poems main
theme.30 Once the delicate rhythmic nod to Virgil is recognized, however, it is better
to recognize Mallarmes cunningand surprisingchoice of verb as a discrete
signal that his pastoral book will be motivated, in large part, by a search for the
je-tu address that has conventionally held lyric poetrys most compelling promise
of direct speech.
The recomposition of Virgil continues, at several levels, through the rst folio. While Meliboeus is able to repeat Tityruss name and the tu four lines later,
when the faun returns to the rst person in line 3, he can only restate his relationship
to his objects as a question about a dream. In the next four lines, the adaptation of
Virgil shifts to the imagery, as the faun senses a confusion between his own doubt
and the subtle branches of real trees. Sheltering trees, tegmine fagi, are a
trope of Virgilian pastoral; Tityruss posture, lazing in the shadelentus in umbrais the conventional posture of the mode. But the faun cannot laze beneath
the trees of his pastoral world because he is unsure where their shade leaves o and
the shadows of his own doubt begin.
Drawing his rst strophe to a close, the faun, like Meliboeus, turns to metaphor.
But unlike the shepherd, who can celebrate the pastoral music that lls the woods
with the beauty of the nymph Amaryllis, he can only bemoan the displacement of
his desired nymphs by roses, an inadequate metaphorical compensation for his
objects of desire (faute ideale). The trope of pastoral piping is strikingly absent
from this rst folio. But Mallarme nely emphasizes the fauns loss of pastoral security with the verbal music of the last line, whose two dark o sounds, faute and
roses, contrast poignantly with the felicitous echo (resonare) in Meliboeuss
Amaryllida silvas.
Rhythmically, the broken lines and internal blank spaces of this rst folio compose an emergence of prosody from formally unconstrained speech. After the rst
line, broken ten syllables plus two, line 2 coheres as a pure alexandrine articulated
in hemistichs. But then line 3 is also broken: line 2 hangs amidst irregular surrounds
as an isolated conventional vers. After the free-oating question completes line 3,
lines 4 and 7 then frame the poems rst rhymed couplet of alexandrines, 5 and
6both, like line 2, classically articulated in hemistichs.
In terms of the poems primary motivations, such an incremental congealing
of prosodic order represents a loss: a move from immediacy of utterance to the mediation of literary craft. A similar progression can be said to characterize the fauns
visual relationship to his world: the clear rosiness collapses into the obscurity of
tufted slumbers, leading the faun to question the reliability of his sight; after sight
dims further with Virgilian shadows, the desirable hue, incarnat is displaced by
metaphorical roses. But at a deeper level, we should recognize that seeing, as an
aspect of internal imagery, can stand metaphoricallyas in Mallarmes response to
Proustfor our own eorts of reading. And if we attune our eyes to the typographical
progression of the rst seven vers we can glimpse, in their emerging prosodic order
82
on the page, a preguration of the virtual book that will enfold the whole ensuing
struggle to recover lyric voice.
In a recurring trope in Mallarmes criticism, the rhyme between two vers in a
poem is described as a small-scale reection of a similar, higher-level rhyme between two feuillets in a book. Scherer, summarizing this idea, quotes from the
Livre sketches:
Two symmetrical folios can serve to bring about rhyme already, as if in echo of two vers
. . . , if, on the one hand, the verses eectively rhyme from one folio to the other, or, on the
other hand, the content of one folio bears, more generally, a resonance with the content of
the other comparable to the sonorous, yet mysterious, relationship that rhyme establishes
between two words.31
When the rst feuillet of the faun poem is brought under an adequate transparency
of regard, the sonorous relationships and virginal blanks that determine the
progression to a single, framed rhyming couplet can be recognized as an advance
echo of the poem-books internal foliation. The emergence of the rhyming alexandrines, that is, exactly pregures the incremental expansion from folio to bifolio
to gathering (see the diagram in g. 2): one nearly complete vers begins, followed
by approximately two together (lines 23), followed by precisely four (lines 47).
Deepening the numerical congruence, the framed couplet in lines 56 can be seen
to echo, at the higher formal level, the bifolio (f6f 7) within the gathering of four
feuillets. Even more deftly, the line-breaks in the rst and third vers allow the pair of
lines, 2 and 3, which begin together at left, to end at right in an extra, o-kilter
relation sonore between clair and lair that echoes, structurally, the poembooks rst internal bifolio (f 3f4).
In other words, with blanks between lines that pregure the armature of
blanks between pages, Mallarme opens his pastoral morceau by composing an elaborate, secret, prefatory counterpoint between rhyme-rhythm and structural
rythmos. The seemingly improvisatory revoicings of Virgil that commence his
Eglogue-livre thus actually oer, under closer study, the nest imaginable exemplication of his reverence for le Vers as the dispenser, organizer of the game of pages,
master of the book.32
A Literary Fugue
The esoteric structural counterpoint between two levels of formal

rythmos on the rst feuillet could conceivably be understood as an oblique, purely
visual reection of the iconic musical topos of Virgilian pastoral. But it seems best
to recognize that by restricting himself, at a more immediate level, to a purely verbal
echo of Virgils music, Mallarme saves his explicit confrontation with the thematic
music of pastoral piping for the series of strophes that follow the poems rst structural blank. In lines 851, the theme of ute-playing enters into the negotiations
83
with pastoral lyricism. And through the formal disposition of his treatment of this
theme across various strophes, Mallarme now brings the musical-textual possibilities of counterpoint right to the surface of the poem, creating a far more explicit
formal-thematic interplay than the secret structural rhymes just seen between
vers and feuillets.
As has often been noted, Mallarmes portrayal of the faun as a desirous musician draws on Ovidian myth: Pan chased the nymph Syrinx to the waters edge,
where the water nymphs saved her by turning her into a stand of reeds, from
which Pan constructed the pipes he played to compensate for thwarted desire. This
mythological background easily blends with the Virgilian aspects of Mallarmes
Eglogue, for Virgils shepherds often take up their pipes in compensation for lost
love, and they also often invoke Pan. But in Mallarme, after explicitly identifying
himself as a pastoral piper three times, all in passages that admit to the elusiveness
of the desired nymphs, the fauns fourth and nal reference to his utethe only
time, in fact, that he names it as Syrinxlaunches the second half of the poem
by casting the instrument aside. Rejecting musics supposed compensation for thwarted
desire, along with the Virgilian trope by which pastoral music becomes metaphorical for the art of poetry itself, he thus makes clearMe, proud of my noise, I am
going to speak [line 54, my emphasis]that he does not want to pipe in memory
of the nymphs, he wants to contact them directly with the lyric voice.
Matching the mastery with which he pregures the poem-book in the rst
seven vers, Mallarme composes the fauns threefold confrontation with the deceptive
promises of pastoral music into the poetic equivalent of a musical form. It seems
that Paul Valery, in his many discussions with Mallarme, may have received some
rsthand knowledge of this formal conceit, for he is the only commentator to both
name the form and specify its principal themes:
The poem became [through revision] a sort of literary fugue, in which the themes interweave
with prodigious artistry; every resource of poetics is employed to sustain a triple development of images and ideas. An extreme sensuality, an extreme intellectuality, an extreme
musicality, combine, intermingle, or oppose each other in this extraordinary work.33
Indeed, Valerys literary fugue proves beautifully accurate as a structural description of one large section of the poem, lines 851. Across these lines, three themes
which I will identify more simply as seeing (Valerys intellectualite), feeling (sensualite), and musicare treated in precise fugal proportions: a subject of normative length presents the themes, followed by an augmentation (the same thematic
pattern doubled) and a diminution (halved). But after the pivotal rejection of the
ute in lines 5253, fugal proportions (the patterns of an explicitly musical poetic
rythmos) are also discarded. The second half of the poem, in which the fauns pursuit
of voice gains focus in the absence of pastoral piping, proceeds as a structure of
typographically distinct pairs of sections in one-to-one proportional relation-
84
3. Folio 2r (folio 1v is blank). S marks

the subject of the literary fugue.
shipsin other words, in a structure more simply and directly analogous to the
symmetrical feuillets in a book.
In truth, both of Valerys terms are important to understand the formal role of
the whole contrapuntal section. In this literary fugue, the fugal patterns that
project the theme of music into the formal rythmos of the poem also begin to arrangerecall Benvenistes robeits strophes, and its armature of blanks, into a
foliated structure. To perceive this double formal eect, we must imagine turning
the rst feuillet, and begin to read the internal foliation. As I have shown in gure
3, the blank between lines 7 and 8 can be represented as a blank folio, 1v. Indeed,
we might take the rst, isolated word on folio 2r, Reechissons, as a linguistic
mark of the page-turn. The collective rst-person imperative serves as a pronominal pivot from the fauns opening soliloquy to his rst voicing of the second-person
tu. At this point, tu does not yet address the nymphs, it turns back on the
faun himself.
In gure 3, I indicate the main themes that articulate the fteen lines into the
subject of the literary fugue. With boxes, I highlight in particular the contrast
between seeing and feeling most fundamental to the fauns pursuit of personal voice.
In all three sections of the fuguesubject, augmentation, and diminutionthis
contrast is followed by two further thematic occurrences: an explicit reference to the
fauns music, then a disappearance of the desired objects, seemingly caused by the
music in each case. A closer reading of the subject can prepare the exploration
of the contrapuntal intricacy with which Mallarme handles these themes.
8
Reechissons . . .
ou si les femmes dont tu gloses

Figurent un souhait de tes sens fabuleux!
85
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
Faune, lillusion sechappe des yeux bleus

Et froids, comme une source en pleurs, de la plus chaste:
Mais, lautre tout soupirs, dis-tu quelle contraste
Comme brise du jour chaude dans ta toison?
Que non! par limmobile et lasse pamoison
Suoquant de chaleurs le matin frais sil lutte,
Ne murmure point deau que ne verse ma ute
Au bosquet arrose daccords; et le seul vent
Hors des deux tuyaux prompt a` sexhaler avant
Quil disperse le son dans une pluie aride,
Cest, a` lhorizon pas remue dune ride,
Le visible et serein soue articiel
De linspiration, qui regagne le ciel.
[Let us reect . . . or if the women you are glossing / Figure a wish of your fabulous senses! /
Faun, the illusion escapes of the eyes, blue / And cold, like a spring in tears, of the more
chaste one: / But, the other all sighs, would you say she contrasts / Like warm breeze of
day into your eece? / Ah no! from the immobile and weary swoon / Suocating with
warmth the cold morning if it struggles, / Murmurs no water save that my ute pours /
Into the thicket sprinkled with chords; and the only wind / Besides the two pipes quick to
exhale before / It disperses the sound into a dry rain, / It is, at the horizon not stirred by a
ripple, / The visible and serene articial breath / Of inspiration, which regains the sky.]
After the pronominal pivot, the faun begins to develop the doubt from the
rst feuillet. Juxtaposing two verbs, gloser (to gloss, or speak about) and gurer
(to gure or represent), he eciently distills, before the more structurally signicant
contrast, the problematic relationship between speech and visual representation.
Making a palpable attempt to gain control over the discourse by naming himself
at the start of line 10, he then attempts, inquiringly, to describe his two desired
nymphs, in four lines punctuated as two plus two.
Characterizing the more chaste one as an escaping illusion of blue eyes (10
11), he leaves no doubt about the poverty of vision as a means of sensuous gratication. By asking himself whether the other, all sighs, might be like a hot breeze
into his eece, he poses heat against coldness; an intimate approach against an
escape to distance; lower-bodyanimalsensation against seen illusions. Here,
the 1875 Improvisation had the more precious lautre au tie`de aveu for lautre
tout soupirs, and brise du jour vaine for chaude. Not only is the 1876 language
clearer and more formally incisive, but the revision adds to the readers experience
a brief foretaste (or foresense) of the breathy passion that might lie in store with the
full attainment of spoken music. With the new adjective (chaude), that is, the
fauns words actually materialize the sighs and the hot breeze of the day as a
crescendo of sibilant consonants: brise du jour chaude, sjch.
The faun answers his inquiry with an abrupt denial, Que non! And now,
for the rst time, he recognizes the metaphorical deceptions of his own musical
86
performance. This pastoral ute explicitly replaces speech, in the murmurs of

the waters it pours forth. The nely chosen verb, verser (to pour), relates
the deceitful music directly to the art of poetryversitself. And while we
might now, belatedly, recognize Virgils resounding woods in the description of
the thicket as sprinkled with chords, Mallarmes liquid adjective arrose clearly
echoes the roses the faun recognized, just prior to the fugue, as false substitutes
for the envisioned rosy esh. Pastoral piping is identied as just as treacherous, in
its proliferation of metaphors, as the poetic imagination that reduces sensuous experience to faulty symbols.
The disappearance that completes the fugue subject negates or confuses the idea
of breathing in particular. In the last mention of the ute (line 18), the deux tuyaux (two pipes) are said to exhale. As the sound disperses, the fauns experience of his world becomes visual again: an articial breath of inspiration becomes
visible at the horizon and regains the sky to draw the subject to a close (lines 20
22.) Some general rhythms can be discerned through the syntactical haze: inspiration, which can also mean inhalation, answers the earlier exhalation of the ute,
and brings this now-disembodied breath under the shadow of the adjective articial (line 21). Articial inspiration, it seems to me, sums up the recognition
across the whole passage that poetic craftat least in its traditional pastoral form,
infused with metaphors and metaphorical musicsoers only an insubstantial artice of experience. With a nal rise of breath to the sky (ciel), the fauns language
regains the upper reaches of the imagination from which the search for sensuous
substances began.
If we imagine turning the page, we arrive, after the blank folio 2v, at folio 3r,
which begins the fugal augmentation and the poems rst internal bifolio. In
gure 4, I show the complete augmentation as it appears on both 3r and 4r (the
blank between lines 37 and 38 becomes the blank 3v), so that its thematic patterns
can be compared with gure 3.
The themes identied on the right in gure 4 show how precisely Mallarme
has adapted fugal process to literary form. In the rst, somewhat clouded instance
of an arithmetic principle that will later become more precise and more unmistakeable, the proportions can be said to be exact to within one line: the augmentation, doubling the thematic pattern of the fteen-line subject to twenty-nine lines,
enfolds the diminution, distinguished by the italics, which halves the pattern to
(approximately) seven lines. I have given, for these two later sections, one further
theme. The location by the shores, clear in both the augmentation and the diminution, further strengthens their formal relationship.
23
24
25
26
bords siciliens dun calme marecage

O
Qua` lenvi des soleils ma vanite saccage,
Tacite sous les eurs detincelles, CONTEZ
Que je coupais ici les creux roseaux domptes
87
4. Folios 3r and 4r (2v and 3v are blank). The broken

vertical (lower image) marks a fold; D=Diminution,
A=Augmentation.
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
Par le talent; quand, sur lor glauque de lointaines

Verdures dediant leur vigne a` des fontaines
Ondoie une blancheur animale au repos:
Et quau prelude lent ou` naissent les pipeaux
Ce vol de cygnes, non! de nades se sauve
Ou plonge . . .
Inerte, tout brule dans lheure fauve
Sans marquer par quel art ensemble detala
Trop dhymen souhaite de qui cherche le la:
Alors meveillerai-je a` la ferveur premie`re,
Droit et seul, sous un ot antique de lumie`re,
Lys! et lun de vous tous pour lingenuite.
[O Sicilian shores of a calm marsh, / Which in envy of sunbeams my vanity ransacks, /

Tacit beneath owers of sparks, TELL That I was cutting here hollow reeds tamed / By talent;
when on the glaucous gold of distant / Greenery dedicating their vine to fountains / Undulates an animal
88
whiteness at rest: / And that at the slow prelude in which the pipes are born / This ight of swans, no!
of naads save themselves / Or plunge . . . Inert, everything burns in the tawny hour / Without
indicating by which art together ed / Too much union desired by the one who searches
for the A: / Thus I will awaken to the rst fervor, / Erect and alone, beneath an antique
wave of light, / Lilies! And one of all of you for ingenuity.]
The contrapuntal elaboration begins with an even stronger linguistic gesture

than the pronominal pivot that opened the subject. With an apostrophic invocation
(line 23), one of the most powerful devices of lyric utterance, the faun addresses his
pastoral setting: O Sicilian shores of a calm marsh. This overt nod to Theocritus,
Sicilian founder of pastoral poetry, is a typical Virgilian device, as in the fourth and
sixth Eclogues: Sicilian muse, lets sing a nobler song; My playful muse rst chose
Sicilian verse: / She did not blush to dwell among the woods.34 But rather than
invoking a Sicilian muse, the faun can onlyin his vanityclaim to be ransacking Sicilian shores, which remain tacites (silent, but also hidden or implied) beneath owers of sparks (line 25). In the simplest reading, we might say
that dazzling reections on the water conceal the shores from his eyes. But a deeper
meaning suggests itself if we look again to Sainte-Beuves Etude sur Virgile.
In his preface, a Discours given on his accession to the chair of Latin poetry
at the Colle`ge de France in 1855, Sainte-Beuve celebrates literary tradition with
the metaphor of a torch (ambeau) passed from the Greeks to the Romans,
through the Renaissance, to the modern era. More precisely, in his view, only a
few etincelles from this torch have survived the vicissitudes of modern literary
extravagance; it is the job of careful classicists to make sure they are never extinguished.35 For Mallarmes faun, if the eurs detincelles are the sparks of tradition
so cherished by classicist critics, they do not guide his eyes into historical vistas, they
rather obscure the Sicilian shores from his ransacking vision. The overwritten
pages of modern literature, we might say, intervene, blindingly, between this
speaker and the Theocritean muse of his art. He can only beg the silent shores to
TELL, in a plea for aural recovery, at least, of prelapsarian voice.
The poems rst change of typography suggests that the shores respond to the
summons to speak. But the seven-line diminution begins in the rst person rather
than the third person of narrative, and while it starts in the past tense (coupais)
it soon shifts to the present (ondoie, line 29). The faun can only pretend to hear
the originary Sicilian voice as he himself revisits the thematic pattern of the fugue
subject. After marking his location by the shores of the marsh (cutting hollow
reeds, creux roseauxanother echo of deceptive roses), and giving a few details of the setting (the greenery, the fountains), he glimpses an undulating vision
(line 29).
The contrast between seeing and feeling is encapsulated in just two words:
blancheur animale. Whiteness, a seen color, relates back to the vision in the
subject of the blue-eyed nymph; through its gurative meaning of purity or innocence it also recalls the chastity of that prior illusion. The adjective animale, on
89
the other hand, adds a palpable frisson to the visionas if the whiteness is suddenly
recognized as desirable eshand a link back to the sighing nymph in the subject,
who seemed to sigh into the eece of the fauns own animal half. (Given that the
motion of ondoie at the beginning of this line also contrasts with the stasis of
au repos at the end, we might see the two-word contrast as dividing the whole
alexandrine into two hemistichs, which brings this moment more closely into line
with the proportional diminution.)
This contrast, too, leads immediately to music. Now both the type of music,
a slow prelude, and the instrument, the pipes, enter the italicized telling,
dispersing both vision and sensation (lines 3031). Unable to decide whether he
has seen swans or naiads, the faun is equally confused about their manner of escape.
If associated with ight (vol), the verb se sauve would most strongly match
the sense of upward disappearance in the subject; the obscure objects, however,
might instead plunge into the waters beyond the shores.
The augmentation that enfolds the diminution resumes with the return to roman type. In a transitional passage, the faun notes that the burning heat of noon
(lheure fauve) erases all trace of the desired objects, and he identies himself in
musical terms as the one who searches for the A (line 34). One way of relating
this passage to the fugal process would be to look back to the beginning of the
augmentation, and note that the seven italicized lines are, in eect, inserted between
two verbsconter (to tell) and marquer (to mark or indicate)that juxtapose
speech and visual representation much in the way that gloser and gurer did
in the same position in the subject (two of these four verbs, gloses and contez,
already appeared in the Improvisation; gurent and marquer were both added
in 1876). In this wider view, the italicized telling, with its (ctive) implications of
speech indicated visually by the typography, can be seen to gure or mark the
poems motivating dichotomy in the textual presentation itself.
Mallarme further strengthened the fugue structure in 1876 by adding the word
souhaite to the line before the augmented version of the contrast (line 34), matching the position of souhait in the subject (line 9). The augmented contrast, just
as strongly marked by punctuation, begins with the faun asserting, in three lines
to a full stop, that he will awaken to his rst fervor, erect and alone, beneath an
antique wave of light. It is as if he claims the visual stage of the poem, beneath a
spotlight of tradition. Such boldness, it seems, inspires a sudden lurch to metaphor.
Exclaiming the name of a white owerLys!and relating it to his own ingenuite or innocence, the faun underlines its symbolic link, through the blancheur
in the diminution, back to the chaste nymph of the subject.
38
39
40
41
42
90
Autre que ce doux rien par leur le`vre ebruite,

Le baiser, qui tout bas des perdes assure,
Mon sein, vierge de preuve, atteste une morsure
Mysterieuse, due a` quelque auguste dent;
Mais, bast! arcane tel elut pour condent
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
Le jonc vaste et jumeau dont sous lazur on joue:

Qui, detournant a` soi le trouble de la joue,
Reve, dans un solo long, que nous amusions
La beaute dalentour par des confusions
Fausses entre elle-meme et notre chant credule,
Et de faire aussi haut que lamour se module
Evanouir du songe ordinaire de dos
Ou de anc pur suivis avec mes regards clos,
Une sonore, vaine et monotone ligne.
[Other than this soft nothing by their lip sounded out, / The kiss, that in low tones the
perdious ones assures, / My breast, virgin of proof, attests a Mysterious / Bite, due to some
august tooth; / But enough! such a secret elected as condant / The vast, twin reed on
which under the azure one plays: / Which, returning to itself the trouble of the cheek, /
Dreams, in a long solo, that we amuse / The beauty of the surrounds with false / Confusions between itself and our credulous song, / And to make just as high as love modulates /
To vanish from ordinary dream of back / Or of pure ank followed by my closed gazes, /
A sonorous, vain and monotonous line.]
After the blank folio 3v, the second half of the contrast appears on 4r, in four
lines to a colon, 3841. The faun resumes, obscurely, in midthought: other than
this sweet nothing by their lip sounded out. Perhaps the line refers back to the
ctive telling, in acknowledgment that the lip of the shores actually said nothing. But deeper formal implications can be recognized by reading these lines as a
multiple chiasmus around the fauns reference to his breast (Mon sein). On one
side, we read of the lip and the kiss, on the other, of the bite and the tooth;
also, the guilty overtones of perdes on one side contrast with the purity of
vierge; nally, baslowon the side of the lip opposes augusteaugust,
or highon the side of the tooth. Altogether, two more animal types of contact,
the kiss of a (lower?) lip and the bite of an (upper?) tooth, here intensify the sensuality of the oral/tactile conjunction previously given in breezy sighs.
With an abrupt ejaculationMais bast!in the same place as Que non!
in the subject, the faun turns, again, to pastoral piping (line 43). As in the diminution, the theme of music in the augmentation includes both the instrument, the vast
twin reed, and what it plays, a long solo. The dream attributed to the reed
that we amuse / the surrounding beauty with false confusions / between itself and
our credulous songblends music and setting much in the way the ute that murmured into the chord-sprinkled thicket did in the subject. And as before, the syntax
now becomes particularly baroque: the reed, it seems, also dreams . . . to make as
high as love modulates / to vanish from the ordinary dream of back / or of pure
ank pursued by my blind looks / a sonorous, vain and monotonous line (lines
4551).
Reading through the verbal tangles, we can recognize in this disappearance (to
vanish) both the turn to vision (regards) and the rising motion (aussi haut)
91
suggested in the subject (visible soue . . . regagne le ciel) and also in the diminution (vol de cygnes . . . se sauve). Perhaps the odd ascription of vision to blind
or closed eyes (line 50) adds a note of confusion similar to the indistinct whiteness
in the diminution. With a negative turn similar to the articial breath that closed
the subject, the fugue ends with an acknowledgment that artistic modulations of
sensuous desires into representational or musical lines can only be vain and
monotonous.
From subject to augmentation, the faun has made some progress in his attempt
to secure presence and clarity within language. The contrast between seeing and
feeling initially appeared within a description of the nymphs and featured the pronominal prevaricationta toisonof internal dialogue. In the later, expanded
contrast, not only is the faun himself staged, lilylike, in light, but he claims, with
the rst-person Mon sein, a more centered bodily experience. In the formal model
of the book, this cohering of pronominal security has the eect of opening the rst
fold within the internal pagination. We might say there is something gravitational
about the corporeal armation of the rst person, as if the very verbal texture of
such personal utterance attains a delicate weight somewhat like the fabric of Benvenistes robethe substance that, falling as it will, imparts its own folded form.36
Such metaphors aside, perhaps the larger implications of this rst inner fold
for the dispositional rythmos of the whole Eglogue can be sensed once we note that it
appears as a strange absence, or signicant silence, as Mallarme might have it,
between the fauns descriptions of himself in the contrasting terms of seeing and
feeling. In the second, sensuous half of this contrast, the terms of oral experience,
kiss and bite and tooth and lip, have gained particular specicity. At this point,
however, these oral attributes and activities still remain the property of some other
mysterious mouth. To read on is to discover that the chiasmus after this rst visible fold actually pregures, in formed language itself, the fauns true (and more
truly substantive) goal: the conjunction of his own lower lip and upper tooth in audible,
passionate speechwhich can only be attained by discarding the pastoral ute and
breaking free of fugal form.
The Gathering Around

the Central Fold
Turning the page, we begin reading the second half of the poem with
the lines on folio 5r, gure 5. This folio is strongly related in textual form and linguistic detail to folio 8v, its companion on one bifolio. I will begin by reading in
order and then demonstrate the relationships that eect the foliation later.
To begin the gathering of two bifolios, the faun speaks the pronoun tu to an
external other for the rst time. But the addressee is not yet a true second person, rather it is his ute, the Syrinx. In rejecting this instrument des fuites, he
92
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
Tche donc, instrument des fuites, maligne

Syrinx, de refleurir aux lacs o tu mattends!
Moi, de ma rumeur fier, je vais parler longtemps
Des desses; et par didoltres peintures,
leur ombre enlever encore des ceintures:
Ainsi, quand des raisins jai suc la clart,
Pour bannir un regret par ma feinte cart,
Rieur, jlve au ciel dt la grappe vide
Et, soufflant dans ses peaux lumineuses, avide
Divresse, jusquau soir je regarde au travers.
5. Folio 5r (folio 4v is blank).

could well be said to reject fugal form as well, for etymologically, fugue derives
from the Latin fugere, to ee. Indeed, line 53 can suggest an explicit recognition
of the ensnaring artices of the fugal form associated with the Syrinx, for lacs,
often translated as lakes, can also mean snare or snares (le lacs or les
lacs).37
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
Tache donc, instrument des fuites, o maligne

Syrinx, de reeurir aux lacs ou` tu mattends!
Moi, de ma rumeur er, je vais parler longtemps
Des deesses; et par didolatres peintures,
` leur ombre enlever encore des ceintures:
A
Ainsi, quand des raisins jai suce la clarte,
Pour bannir un regret par ma feinte ecarte,
Rieur, jele`ve au ciel dete la grappe vide
Et, souant dans ses peaux lumineuses, avide
[Try then, instrument of ights, o malign / Syrinx, to reower at the lakes where you await
me! / Me, proud of my noise, I am going to speak at length / Of the goddesses; and by
idolatrous paintings, / From their shadow lift again the girdles: / Then, when from the
grapes I have sucked the clarity, / To banish a regret by my feint put aside, / Laughing, I
raise to the summer sky the empty bunch / And, breathing into their luminous skins, avid /
With drunkenness, until evening I stare through.]
The escape from the snares of music is marked immediately in the language.
Line 54 begins with the strongest rst-person pronoun, Moi, and continues with
93
verbal musicde ma rumeur erthat audibly reclaims the murmure initially

displaced onto the ute.38 The proud anticipation of speechje vais parler
becomes conated with a direct, lascivious seeing, which anticipates a sensuous
promise in vision far richer than any chaste illusion. Like idolatres peintures,
the address the faun desires will be a moment of undress: in a line with obvious
sexual overtones, he will enlever des ceintures from the ombre of these goddesses.39 Still, at this point speech and sight remain wishful ambitions, in the future
tense. In the last ve lines of the folio, it becomes clear that he has not yet broken
free of metaphor. A bunch of grapes becomes the focus of a temporally confused
fantasy. Shuttling strangely between past and present, he claims to suck the grapes
and to look through their skins, in some drunken equivalent of the pleasures of
noisy speech and prurient sight.
However weak his linguistic hold on reality may still be, and however troubled
by regret (an immediate rebuttal to the anticipation of pride), the faun has, nonetheless, made signicant progress in pronominal power. The rst-person construction je vais parler continues through enlever to several more: jai suce, jele`ve, je regarde (the participle, souant, which adds breathing, a crucial
component of lyric speech, to the list of activities, is also implicitly a rst-person
action). Prior to this folio, and after the wish of the opening line, we have read only
two such clear rst-person verbs, both in the past tense. The rst, je morais (line
8), was reexive and tinged with woe; the second, je coupais (line 26) occurred in
the italics of the tale ostensibly told by the shores. Every other prior action has
been attributed to other beings or objects, including the faun as a virtual second
person (tu gloses) and his attributes (ma vanite saccage). In its new pronominal
force, this rst folio of the gathering represents a further stage in the gradual coherence of the poems language around the speaking self.
Turning the page, after the blank folio 5v, we arrive at folio 6r, gure 6. The
twelve-line strophe in italics and quotes is introduced by a one-line apostrophe in
roman type in which the faun calls on the nymphs to swell again with MEMORIES. This interpolated apostrophe, in fact, both underlines the main point of the
whole palindromic second half and deepens the dynamic move toward the central crux. Invocation, a summoning of the world through speech, is precisely the aesthetic motivation of this whole climactic series of strophes.
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
94
nymphes, regonons des SOUVENIRS divers.

O
Mon oeil, trouant les joncs, dardait chaque encolure
Immortelle, qui noie en londe sa brulure
Avec un cri de rage au ciel de la foret;
Et le splendide bain de cheveux disparat
Dans les clartes et les frissons, o pierreries!
Jaccours; quand, a` mes pieds, sentrejoignent (meurtries
De la langueur goutee a` ce mal detre deux)
Des dormeuses parmi leurs seuls bras hasardeux;
62 nymphes, regonflons des SOUVENIRS divers.

63 Mon oeil, trouant les joncs, dardait chaque encolure
64 Immortelle, qui noie en londe sa brlure
65 Avec un cri de rage au ciel de la fort;
66 Et le splendide bain de cheveux disparat
67 Dans les clarts et les frissons, pierreries!
68 Jaccours; quand, mes pieds, sentrejoignent (meurtries
69 De la langueur gote ce mal dtre deux)
70 Des dormeuses parmi leurs seuls bras hasardeux;
71 Je les ravis, sans les dsenlacer, et vole
72 ce massif, ha par lombrage frivole,
73 De roses tarissant tout parfum au soleil,
74 O notre bat au jour consum soit pareil.
6. Folio 6r (folio 5v is blank).

71
72
73
74
Je les ravis, sans les desenlacer, et vole

A` ce massif, ha par lombrage frivole,
De roses tarissant tout parfum au soleil,
Ou` notre ebat au jour consume soit pareil.
[O nymphs, let us swell again with diverse MEMORIES. / My eye, piercing the reeds, stung
each immortal / Neck, which drowned in the wave its burn / With a cry of rage to the sky of the forest; /
And the splendid bath of hair disappeared / Into the clarities and the shivers, o jewels! / I run up;
when, at my feet, join together (bruised / By the languor tasted by this evil of being two) / The sleepers
amidst their own arms in disarray; / I take them up, without disentangling them, and y / To this
hilltop, hated by the frivolous shade, / Of roses {exhaling} all perfume to the sun, / Where our sport
is similar to the consumed day.]
The capitalization of SOUVENIRS marks a formal relationship that gains

clarity from the book model. The only other internal bifolio of this livre (folios 3
and 4) similarly begins with an apostrophe (O bords . . .) in which one word,
CONTEZ, is capitalized. Furthermore, like that earlier apostrophe, this later
invocation to the nymphs is an altered pastoral convention. The archetype
Where were ye nymphs, when Daphnis lay dying?appears in Theocrituss rst
Idyll. It is echoed in Virgils tenth Eclogue: Where were you, Naiads, in what groves
or glades, / As Gallus languished in ignoble love?40 This lineage of pastoral invocation exemplies the elegiac tendencies of the modeits attempts, as Paul Alpers
puts it, to mitigate a loss by poetic practice.41 In adapting this tradition and initiating an internal bifolio that is now free of the snares of music, the faun invokes
the nymphs to help him recover a direct lyric address to them.
95
Although the faun does speak directly to the nymphs here, he cannot yet lay
claim to the second-person pronoun present in both classical prototypes. Intimate
address is only implicit in the collective imperative regonons. This verb picks
up the image of breath into empty skins from the previous folio, as if breathy
speech itself, not yet attained, might eventually allow shared memories to cohere.
When the ensuing italicized strophe (g. 6) begins with a strong rst-person possessive, Mon oeil, it is as if the fauns eye attains physically penetrative force. Piercing the reeds, and spearing each neck of the desired bodies, his burning gaze
has found, in place of the metaphorical grape skins that ended the previous folio,
the true sensuous objects. The rich sensuality of the rst few lines of the foliothe
splendid bath of hairstimulates an apostrophic exclamation, o pierreries!
But sight, again, cannot be upheld as the ultimate goal: this energetic ejaculation
can only record the disappearance of his sensuous vision.
Folio 6 further strengthens in pronominal force, the principal engine of the
fauns linguistic progress. While rst-person claims were distributed throughout the
vers on folio 5, now, for the rst time, rst-person actions appear, twice, at the beginnings of lines. With Jaccours, the faun lays claims to his rst physical motion
toward the nymphsindeed, his rst decisive motion within these perennially confusing pastoral spaces. After describing the intertwined sleepers he nds at his
feet, he makes a second line-leading claim, Je les ravis, which literally captures
the nymphs as grammatical objects as he seizes them physically.
At the end of the section, he ies up to a mountaintop to sport with the objects
he has nally grasped, eectively claiming for himself the rising motion that played
a negating role in the fugal rst half. As if to underline the progress he has made
since the poem beganthe nymphs already were linguistic objects, after all (je les
veux), but only of vision and fantasythe folio ends with another image of roses.
Now separated from the nymphs, no longer frustrating metaphorical substitutions,
these read like real roses, perfuming the air of the mountainside on which sensual
sport consumes itself like the day.
Turning the page, we reach the peak of the crescendo of pronominal agency
and the consummation of the desire to speak. No blank intervenes between the italics and the roman type that follows. Translated to the livre form, this gives a section
articulation with no intervening blank pagea direct turn from recto to verso on
the same folio, 6r to 6v. The seven lines in gure 7, folio 6v to 7r, enact a linguistic
crux best represented as a fold, the preeminent Mallarmean image. Here, unlike
between f3v4r, the fold no longer opens between text and textual absence; it is
made palpable through the woven texture of language itself.
75
76
77
78
96
Je tadore, courroux des vierges, o delice

Farouche du sacre fardeau nu qui se glisse
Pour fuir ma le`vre an feu buvant, comme un eclair
Tressaille! la frayeur secre`te de la chair:
75
76
77
78
Je tadore, courroux des vierges, dlice

Farouche du sacr fardeau nu qui se glisse
Pour fuir ma lvre an feu buvant, comme un clair
la frayeur secrte de la chair:
Tressaille!
79 Des pieds de linhumaine au coeur de la timide
80 Que dlaisse la fois une innocence, humide
81 De larmes folles ou de moins tristes vapeurs.
6
v
r 7
7. Open bifolio showing 6v and 7r. The central fold.

79
80
81
Des pieds de linhumaine au coeur de la timide

Que delaisse a` la fois une innocence, humide
De larmes folles ou de moins tristes vapeurs.
[I adore you, wrath of virgins, o erce / Delight of the sacred naked burden that slides /
To ee my lip drinking re, like a lightning-bolt / Thrills! the secret terror of the esh: /
From the feet of the inhuman one to the heart of the shy / Let be relinquished at once an
innocence, humid / With foolish tears or with less mournful vapors.]
The declaration of love, Je tadore, is the only time the faun speaks to the
nymphs directly, with the je-tu address that gives the most potent promise of vocal
presence in lyric poetry. Rhythmically, the ensuing lines demand a reading aloud:
the rst few words, through vierges, form an octosyllable, a verse-rhythm closely
associated with oral tradition and ancient drama.42 Then, from the apostrophe, o
delice, the prosody dissolves in a literally delicious rush to the climactic consonants of Tre- and the slide of the double s into the diphthong -aille. The double
s is only the last of a hissing chain of sibilantsvierges, delice, farouche, sacre, se glissethat claim for the lyric voice the breathy sounds sensed earlier in
97
the brise du jour chaude; even more palpably, the labiodental fricatives in
vierges, farouche, fardeau, fuir, le`vre, feu, and buvant bring the
lower lip and upper tooth of the literary fugues last thematic contrast together in
the fauns own mouth. Claiming the sighor the kissof lyric address for
my lip instead of their lip (the only two instances of this word in the poem), he
gives thrilling voice to materialized speech in its maximal intimacy.
Just into the central line of seven, after an exclamation mark, the rush of lyricism stumbles as the faun admits to a secret terror. Now the language palpably
turns a corner. The prosody falls into order again, as he separates and species the
two bodies in a parallel structure that clearly marks the hemistichs of the alexandrine: Des pieds de linhumaine / au coeur de la timide. Unlike the tumbling
elisions that led to the central thrill, the enjambment between lines 80 and 81
stutters on the blandest vowel: humide / De larmes. The liquid l and the closelipped m accumulate, quenching the breathy hiss as we read out, through the musically crowded pairing moins tristes, to the dissipation of passion and linguistic
presence into vapors.
Reading for verbal music, we share with the faun a sense of breathy vocal presence that surges to an ultimate owering on Tressaille! We share, too, after this
pivotal moment, the feeling of retreat: the congealing of prosodic order, the muting
of the poetic music, the deceleration. As a composition for mouth and ear, the passage seems, briey, to consummate the desire for speech that has motivated the
entire form. But while we may want to believe, with the faun, that his climactic
lyric music, in lling out his own corporeal character, has also attained intimate
contact with the world, the text will not, in fact, allow such unreective naivete. For
beyond the word that seems like the climactic arrival, the rush of breath delivers us
to a clause whose aective cast perturbs any sense of lyric wholeness.
The exclamation mark may insist on the thrilling sounds in Tressaille, but
this verb, here, is transitive. At its sonorous climax, the phrase remains grammatically incomplete. With the given completion, we nd ourselves carried beyond
voiced presence to a darker, more inward realm of experience.
Any one-sided sense of this climactic turn would sell it short. To speak of a secret terror right after a thrill of vocal presence might seem to undercut such
presence with thought. But it could be, conversely, that the central fold marks the
place where thought and feeling truly merge, in a tangible, near-graspable distillation of all the elusive promises of the unitary symbol. It could be, in other words,
that even if we seem to be brought up, with the faun, against a recognition that
speech, too, is trapped in illusionis vaporous rather than substantivewe might
still be permitted, eetingly, to celebrate the vibrant expression of this illusion
through mouth and body.
Still, in the awareness of the inexorable formal rythmos of turning pages, it
seems impossible to escape fully (or forget completely) the sense of loss that tinges
this central crux. In slipping ineluctably from a reading of dramatic passion to a
98
mentally mediated reading, we are, I think, forced to acknowledge that the surrender to the music of these lines has only been possible through a willful blindness to
problematic shadows of meaning. Looking back, once we begin to scrutinize the
text more carefully, pensively, we nd that it is shot through with reminiscences that
undermine the lyric address.
Even in this moment, for example, the nymphs remain vierges. The theme
of chastity, associated throughout the poem with seeing, carries over into the attempt to arm the carnal promises of speech. And the very sensation of breath
and tooth on lip, we must now notice, derives its energy from the ight of these
virginal nymphs from vocal contact, much in the way that the illusion of eyes and
the swans (or naiads) and the bath of hair ed the fauns sight. Finally, even the
climactic conjunction of je and tu, saved for this moment, nds only an unindividuated courroux of virgins and an unspecied fardeau nu. These two
nouns encapsulate, synesthetically, the balancing act Mallarme has prepared for
the reader. We hear, in passing, sonorous ashes of a rosy hue: cour-roux; fard-eau.
But with a closer look, not only do we stumble on the strangely negative overtones
wrath, burdenbut we also realize that this address to the incarnat once
only seen has not succeeded in separating the naked burden into a unitary object.
Indeed, the very attempt to specify a single tu for intimate linguistic union occurs
withinperhaps even causesthe withdrawal of language into the ordered prosody of the printed poem and the folded virtual feuillets of its book-like form.
The contrast between seeing and feeling, previously a thematic opposition
across a blank folio and a fold, becomes, in this climactic turn, a superimposed
opposition between ways of reading. In gure 7, I have represented the fearful
clause astride the central fold, in order to show the precise rhythmic touch on a
single word that resonates tantalizingly with one of Mallarmes invocations of the
book as a form. The structural focus provided by this poems central folding, that
is, allows for a new, surprisingly claried understanding of the one brief reference
to the book I previously singled out as most suggestive in light of Benvenistes
thoughts on rythmos (I give a slightly awkward translation, to retain word order):
Even to the format, pointless: and, vainly, concurs that extraordinary, like a wing gathered
in but ready to open, intervention of folding or rhythm, initial cause that a closed page contains a
secret, silence remains there, precious and evocative signs lead, for the mind, to everything
literarily abolished. [my emphasis]43
After the fauns burst of lyric passion, the completion of line 78 can indeed be seen
(and sensed) as an intervention of rhythm. Nine syllables divided three plus three
plus threela frayeur / secre`te / de la chairframe the adjective secre`te between the two nouns. Se-cre`-te, a symmetrical vowel structure, becomes the pivotal
word in the pivotal clause. This poem-book literally contains a secret exactly at
the intervention of folding.
Indeed, Mallarmes gloss on the book format has further resonance with this
99
reading experience. The comparison of le Livre to a ight of wings strengthens

one allegorical association of the vol de cygnes seen earlier, in the poems rst
italicized tellingindeed, the cygnes reappear here as written signes.44
When Mallarme gives these signes a subtle inection of vocalityevocatoiresand then leads, through a turn to mind (lesprit) to the nal words, tout
litterairement aboli (all is abolished into literature) the whole succession comes to
seem like an oblique gloss on the experience of reading, as the faun, through the
crux of his Eglogue. After formal analysis, in other words, it seems that this tangled
invocation of le Livre is not just a future-oriented fantasy about an impossible
Oeuvre, but alsolike the other hints at rhymes between vers and feuillets
a trace in Mallarmes criticism of a book already completed in the intellectual
armature of this poem.45
Still, it is probably better to recognize that the precise moment of linguistic
folding is unlocatable, secreted within the faunlike experience of reading. For now,
we need to close the central bifolio, acknowledging that only silence remains
(silence y demeure, as Mallarme puts it) after the eeting claim to speech, and complete the exposure of the formal gathering that centers on this intervention of
folding, or rhythm. If we imagine turning folio 7, we nd that the central utterance
in roman type leads directly, with no intervening blank space, to an eleven-line
strophe in italics and quotes. Again, in the virtual book this implies a turn directly
from 7r to 7v. From this point, we read on versos until the end.
To illustrate what it would be like to continue reading in sequence, I have
shown folios 7v and 8v, alongside their companion blank folios, 8r and 9r, in gures
8 and 9. In reading these last internal folios, however, I will open out the two bifolios
of the gathering, to show their symmetries. Figure 10 opens out the central bifolio,
folios 6 and 7, such that 7v appears to the left of 6r.
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
Mon crime, cest davoir, gai de vaincre ces peurs

Traitresses, divise la toue echevelee
De baisers que les dieux gardaient si bien melee:
Car, a` peine jallais cacher un rire ardent
Sous les replis heureux dune seule (gardant
Par un doigt simple, an que sa candeur de plume
Se teignt a` lemoi de sa soeur qui sallume,
La petite, nave et ne rougissant pas:)
Que de mes bras, defaits par de vagues trepas,
Cette proie, a` jamais ingrate se delivre
Sans pitie du sanglot dont jetais encore ivre.
[My crime, it is to have, gay from vanquishing those treacherous / Fears, divided the dishevelled tuft /
Of kisses which the Gods were keeping so well mixed: / For, hardly was I going to hide an ardent laugh /
Beneath the happy folds of a single one (holding / With a little nger, so that her feathery candor /
Became tinted by the passion of her sister who ares up, / The little one, naive and not blushing:) / But
from my arms, defeated by some vague deaths, / This prey, forever ungrateful, breaks free / Without
pity for the sob with which I was still drunk.]
100
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92

Traitresses, divis la touffe chevele
De baisers que les dieux gardaient si bien mle:
Car, peine jallais cacher un rire ardent
Par un doigt simple, afin que sa candeur de plume
Se teignt lmoi de sa soeur qui sallume,
Que de mes bras, dfaits par de vagues trpas,
Cette proie, jamais ingrate se dlivre
Sans piti du sanglot dont jtais encore ivre.
7
v
8. Folio 7v (8r is blank).
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
Tant pis! vers le bonheur dautres mentraneront

Par leur tresse noue aux cornes de mon front:
Tu sais, ma passion, que, pourpre et dj mre,
Chaque grnade clate et dabeilles murmure;
Et notre sang, pris de qui le va saisir,
Coule pour tout lessaim ternel du dsir.
lheure o ce bois dor et de cendres se teinte
Une fte sexalte en la feuille teinte:
Etna! cest parmi toi visit de Vnus
Sur ta lave posant ses talons ingnus,
Quand tonne un somme triste ou spuise la flamme.
9. Folio 8v (9r is blank).
101
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92

Traitresses, divis la touffe chevele
De baisers que les dieux gardaient si bien mle:
Car, peine jallais cacher un rire ardent
Par un doigt simple, afin que sa candeur de plume
Se teignt lmoi de sa soeur qui sallume,
Que de mes bras, dfaits par de vagues trpas,
Cette proie, jamais ingrate se dlivre
Sans piti du sanglot dont jtais encore ivre.
62 nymphes, regonflons des SOUVENIRS divers.

63 Mon oeil, trouant les joncs, dardait chaque encolure
64 Immortelle, qui noie en londe sa brlure
65 Avec un cri de rage au ciel de la fort;
66 Et le splendide bain de cheveux disparat
67 Dans les clarts et les frissons, pierreries!
68 Jaccours; quand, mes pieds, sentrejoignent (meurtries
69 De la langueur gote ce mal dtre deux)
70 Des dormeuses parmi leurs seuls bras hasardeux;
71 Je les ravis, sans les dsenlacer, et vole
72 ce massif, ha par lombrage frivole,
73 De roses tarissant tout parfum au soleil,
74 O notre bat au jour consum soit pareil.
6
v
10. Open bifolio showing 7v and 6r.

The italicized strophe after the central fold, 7v, forms a direct response to the
one before, 6r. Each begins with a rst-person possessive, Mon oeil and Mon
crime (the change of the rst from Mes yeux in the Improvisation nicely exemplies formal clarication through revision), and proceeds through three linked lines,
with similar internal structures of commas and clauses, to a strong point of punctuation. Later in both strophes, another striking similarity of punctuation is apparent:
the poems only two instances of parentheses (new to this version) delicately reinforce the visual symmetry between the two folios.
This congruence of structure gives emphasis to the linguistic contrast appropriate to the two folios dierent formal positions. The rst-person possessive that begins 6r initiates the crescendo of pronominal force towards the lyric climax. 7v, by
contrast, begins with moral judgment instead of agency: it owns up to a crime.
Then, after some oblique, past-tense rst-person constructionscest davoir divise, a` peine jallais cachermost actions in the later strophe become attributed, in reexive verbs, to the objects of the discourse. One such third-person reexive, Se teignt, now comes to occupy the line-leading position formerly
102
claimed by Jaccours, and is followed by another reexive, sallume. In direct

response to his earlier claim to seize the nymphs with the words Je les ravis, they
now escape, se delivre, from his defeated arms.
The later folio also continues, and deepens, the poems underlying reection
on the act of reading. The central turn in language involved, in part, a settling into
ordered prosody, which was related to the attempt to specify the nymphs. Now, in
identifying his crime as one of division on 7v, the faun elaborates on the association between the bodies in the poem and the poetic language in his mouth. He
admits having divided a disheveled tuft of kisses. In the central outburst, the sensuous fricatives materialized the contact between lower lip and upper tooth as
a lyric kiss. The fauns crime, then, which was signaled by the settling into
prosodic order, was to divide the beautifully mixedbien meleeoral sensations of lyric speech in the search for meaning. Now, attempting to be more precise
about this crime, he touches again on lost oral pleasures: hardly was I going to
hide an ardent laugh / beneath the happy folds of one of them. The image of a
spasm of laughter into happy folds has obvious sexual implications, but it can
also be read as a gure for the joyous lyricism breathed into the open fold of the
single central bifoliothat is, into the replis heureux dun seul feuillet.
In the parenthesis on 7v, the faun turns to the language of visual description
and deepens his remorse with a retrospection on the other side of the divided experience of reading. The whiteness of one nymph is described with a metaphor, candeur de plume, feathery whiteness, that recalls the plume of the writer, the
pen that makes the marks that seek, vainly, to capture sensuous experience on the
page. The naive nymph, it seems, is not blushing, ne rougissant pasa coloristic echo of his earliest vision of esh (incarnat) and of the climactic echoes
(-roux and fard-), now recognized as beyond the grasp of language.
Although the faun tries to hold onto his desirous illusion, and to rekindle passion with a single nger, the prey inevitably escapes. Given that our experience
as faunlike readers has been so compellingly composed into the poem, we could
well recall here Mallarmes summons to treat his poems as pieces at the keyboard,
active, measured by feuillets. We might ask, in other words, whether this is, in fact,
our single nger, poised on the outer edge of the central bifolio, reluctantly closing
it even as we try to recall the promise of rosy presence in the lyric address, already
faded into innocent marks on the white paper, litterairement aboli.
If we restore the central bifolio and turn folio 8 (let us avoid sobbing with the
faun), we would see 8v and the blank 9r, gure 9. As before, I will refer in my analysis
to the open bifolio, gure 11, showing 8v to the left of 5r.
93
94
95

Par leur tresse nouee aux cornes de mon front:
Tu sais, ma passion, que, pourpre et deja` mure,
103
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103

Par leur tresse noue aux cornes de mon front:
Tu sais, ma passion, que, pourpre et dj mre,
Chaque grnade clate et dabeilles murmure;
Et notre sang, pris de qui le va saisir,
Coule pour tout lessaim ternel du dsir.
lheure o ce bois dor et de cendres se teinte
Une fte sexalte en la feuille teinte:
Etna! cest parmi toi visit de Vnus
Sur ta lave posant ses talons ingnus,
Quand tonne un somme triste ou spuise la flamme.
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
Tche donc, instrument des fuites, maligne

Syrinx, de refleurir aux lacs o tu mattends!
Moi, de ma rumeur fier, je vais parler longtemps
Des desses; et par didoltres peintures,
leur ombre enlever encore des ceintures:
Ainsi, quand des raisins jai suc la clart,
Pour bannir un regret par ma feinte cart,
Rieur, jlve au ciel dt la grappe vide
Et, soufflant dans ses peaux lumineuses, avide
5
r

96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
Chaque grenade eclate et dabeilles murmure;

Et notre sang, epris de qui le va saisir,
Coule pour tout lessaim eternel du desir.
` lheure ou` ce bois dor et de cendres se teinte
A
Une fete sexalte en la feuillee eteinte:
Etna! cest parmi toi visite de Venus
Sur ta lave posant ses talons ingenus,
Quand tonne un somme triste ou sepuise la amme.
[Too bad! toward happiness others will lead me / By their tress knotted around the horns
on my brow: / You know, my passion, that, purple and already ripe, / Each pomegranate
bursts and murmurs with bees, / And our blood, taken by that which will seize it, / Flows
for all the eternal swarm of desire. / In the hour that this wood becomes tinted with gold
and cinders / A festival is celebrated in the extinguished foliage: / Etna! it is amongst you
visited by Venus / On your lava treading her innocent talons, / When a sad sleep thunders
where the ame is extinguished.]
The formal relationship between these two strophes in roman type, eleven and
ten lines long, is as clear as that between the two italicized strophes. Again, the
104
structural parallel is clearest at the start. Each begins with the same consonant,
heading a two-word fragment of comparatively direct speechejaculation (Tant
pis!) and imperative (Tache donc)and continues through two lines to a strong
point of punctuation. And again, Mallarmes revision strengthened the parallel.
The Improvisation, with Dedaignons-les! and Tache, noble instrument . . . , did
not even have the shared consonant. The 1876 version brings the ejaculation and
imperative closer both in grammar (two words to a point of punctuation) and tone
(a similar hint of colloquial speech in donc).
As on 7v and 6r, the structural congruence marks a change in pronominal situation. On 5r the faun rejects the Syrinx as tu. On 8v, attempting to console himself
in his solitude, he imagines himself as an object, me, passively led to happiness
(in some imagined future) by others. The rejection of the ute on 5r sets up the
anticipation of speech to goddesses led by the strong rst-person Moi. The
third line of 8v leads with the tu turned back on the faun himself. Addressing
his own emotiontu sais, ma passionand soon pivoting to the collective rst
person notre, he tries to derive a general moral from the linguistic frustration he
has experienced.
As on 6r and 7v, once more, the progression from 5r to 8v is most evident in
the verbs. In place of the fauns earlier energetic agency, it is now each pomegranate
that bursts and our blood that ows. Again, reexive verbs accumulate: the
wood becomes tinted (se teinte), a feast is exalted (sexalte).
The counterposed imagery in the two strophes also serves the pronominal progression. In anticipating later agency on 5r, the faun imagines lifting the girdles
of goddesses and visually penetrating their ombre. By contrast, 8v begins by
transposing the implied hair imagery of ombre to the nymphs tresses, now
knotted to the horns of the fauns brow. Desirous contact is literally sublimated
upwards. Furthermore, the grapes on 5r, metaphorical substitutes subject to the
agency of sight and breath, are answered on 8v by a dierent fruit, the pomegranate that murmurs with bees. This fruit thus explicitly retakes, with this verb, the
speechma rumeuronce claimed by the faun from the murmuring ute. Finally,
8v replaces the deesses that grandly stand, on 5r, for the desired nymphs with a
cry of Venus, which species the goddess image, transforms it into a named
metaphor for the universal problematic of desire, and associates it, through the
crime of division, with loss.
It is also possible to read 8v in a way that enriches the formal implications of
the book model. In addition to its answers to 5r, the pronominal sequence on this
last internal folio precisely reverses that on the poems rst internal folio. On
2r, that is, the collective rst-person Reechissons pivoted to self-directed second
person, tu gloses (and dis-tu), which became rst-person possessive, ma ute
(see g. 3). On 8v, in exact reversal, a rst-person possessive, mon front, shifts to
self-directed second-person, tu sais, ma passion, and then to the collective rst-
105
person notre. Referring now to the schematic diagram that accompanies the various gures, we might notice that the folios of the virtual book could actually be
opened out dierently, to show 8v alongside 2r.
Perhaps we glimpse, in these alternative juxtapositions (8v and 5r, 8v and 2r),
a quasi-material demonstration of the link between the mobility Benveniste highlights in the formal implications of rythmos and the similar notions Mallarme expresses about le Livre. At one point, for example, he writes that the book, total
expansion of the letter, must take from it, directly, a mobility. Elsewhere, he muses
that the volume, in spite of the impression of xity, becomes through this game,
mobilefrom death it becomes life.46 Scherers gloss on this idea is, again, particularly clear:
Ordinary books are bound, that is, their pages follow one another in a xed order, which
their numeration indicates. Le Livre is not obliged to submit to this subjection, and Mallarme
clearly intended that its folios were to be mobile. It will thus be possible to change their
positions, and read them, certainly not in any order whatsoever, but according to several
distinct orders determined by the laws of permutation.47
In changing the place of 8v, and reading it alongside 2r as well as 5r, we glimpse
two of several distinct orders in which this virtual book might be read. Neither
one of these orders8v and 5r; 8v and 2ris an arbitrary order (an ordre quelconque) because both arise from permutations of the virtual foliation. Both, in
other words, give dierent possible expressions of the structural rythmos carried by
the most important gravitational force in the poems linguistic texture, pronominal form.
One possible law limiting such permutations suggests itself if we look to the
last ve lines of 5r and 8v (see again g. 11). At this point, each folio indicates a time:
a` lheure ou` falls in the same position as ainsi, quand. The temporal sequence is
relatively clear. Folio 5r nishes in the bright light of day beneath the ciel dete;
8v ends with the sunset hues of or and cendres in the extinguished foliage.
Indeed, with a brief glance back through the entire poem, we can recognize that
these are, in fact, two moments in yet another, broad, supra-imagistic rhythmic order.
A temporal progression runs steadily through the whole succession of formal
feuillets. The fauns backward look in line 4 to la nuit ancienne (ancient night,
or more simply last night), leads through le matin frais (line 15) to the burning
heat of lheure fauve in line 32. Later, after the noon brightness of the ciel dete
that begins the second half, we reach jusquau soir on 5r, which anticipates that
the language of the whole gathering will occur in the apre`s-midi of the poems
title. The sunset hues on 8v, then, in fullling the earlier anticipation of evening
and completing one diurnal cycle of this pastoral world, also tie o the continuous
106
thread of time that loosely binds the Eglogue-livre, limiting the permutations of its
mobile feuillets.
The anticipation of evening in 5r, however, has further implications for this composed reading experience, as not only diachronic and progressive but also synchronicthat is, folded and interleaved. Recall that the lines that precede jusquau soir je regarde au travers (5761) are shadowed with regret. The faun, it
seems, does not only foresee his eventual isolation in the falling dusk, he also knows
in advance that by then he will have done nothing more than stare into grape skins.
The whole attempt to speak, with full presence and true address, will have been
the future anterior implied in quand jai suceonly a feint to banish this
regret.
We, too, have only been able to pretend briey to nd real presence in written
language by blinding ourselves to the delicious falsehood of breathing passionate
language into luminous pages. As evening descends at the end of 8v, the faun manages a last, despairing cryand a toito Etna, the Sicilian mountain of Theocritean pastoral, in the knowledge that he has not been able to make these conventional spaces sustain lyric desire. As a sad sleep thunders, we can only share his
gloom as we read through one last echoand negationof the conventional imagery of classical continuity: the ame is extinguished. On this direct refutation
of any attempt to reignite the sparks of tradition, we must reluctantly turn the
outer cover over lost dreams of lyricism.
Closing the Book

with a Pastoral Valediction
If we were to close the outer bifolio over the inner spaces of the book we
would see only the last seven lines, folio 9v. I will not represent the nal folio alone,
because I want to show how it relates to the rst. Still, I think we could imagine
holding the closed book, and turning it back and forth to see the relationship shown
in gure 12, as a way to experience one ironic, material subtext of the fauns claim
to hold the queen.
Earlier, the page-turn into the internal feuillets was marked by the four freehanging syllables of a pronominal pivot (Reechissons, line 8). Now, four isolated
)mark the turn out
syllablesje tiens la reine! (the e atone elides with the O
onto the outer bifolio:
104
Je tiens la reine!
sur chatiment . . .
O
105
Non, mais lame

De paroles vacantes et ce corps alourdi
107
LAprs-midi dun faune

glogue
LE FAUNE
1 Ces nymphes, je les veux perptuer.
104 Je tiens la reine!

sr chtiment ...
105
106
107
108
109
Non, mais lme

Tard succombent au fier silence de midi:
Sans plus il faut dormir en loubli du blasphme,
Sur le sable altr gisant et comme jaime
Ouvrir ma bouche lastre efficace des vins!
110 Couple, adieu; je vais voir lombre que tu devins.
1 r
Si clair,
2 Leur incarnat lger, quil voltige dans lair
3 Assoupi de sommeils touffus.
Aimai-je un rve?
4
5
6
7
Mon doute, amas de nuit ancienne, sachve

En maint rameau subtil, qui, demeur les vrais
Bois mmes, prouve, hlas! que bien seul je moffrais
Pour triomphe la faute idale de roses
v 9

106
107
108
109
Tard succombent au er silence de midi:

Sans plus il faut dormir en loubli du blasphe`me,
Sur le sable altere gisant et comme jaime
Ouvrir ma bouche a` lastre ecace des vins!
110
Couple, adieu; je vais voir lombre que tu devins.
[I hold the queen! O sure chastisement . . . No, but the soul / Empty of words and this
weighty body / Belatedly succumb to the proud silence of noon: / Without more ado it is
necessary to sleep forgetting blasphemy, / On the corrupted sand lying prone and as I like /
To open my mouth to the ecacious star of wines! / Couple, adieu; I will see the shadow
that you became.]
After the extinguished ame at the end of 8v, this strong rst-person exclamation
comes as a surprise. But the faun immediately recognizesas we do, holding nothing but the book itselfthat his bold claim to hold the queen is a spasm of pronominal agency whose time has passed. The next fragment of this broken vers, o
sur chatiment, states all ve vowels in a row, o-u-a-i-e, marking a recognition
that the o of apostrophe, however evocatoire it might once have seemed, is
really just one mute vowel signe among many others.
108
With a blunt non, the faun turns away from his untimely rst-person asser and acknowledges the split in his
tion and from the loss of the world-invoking O
identity that has undermined his search for speech. With a soul now empty of
words, his heavy body belatedly succumbs to the proud silence of noon. Here,
nally, is a delayed recognition that proud noise has been unsustainable. Only
silence remainssilence y demeurein the secret, folded center of the closed
Eglogue-livre.
Considered prosodically, the last folio, which begins by recapitulating the disordered speech of the rst, might be seen to take the initial loss of speech to versication one step further, to two rhyming couplets (1058). Indeed, the formal relationship between these two outer feuillets attains an exceptional tightness that again
recalls Mallarmes vision of the book format, as glossed by Scherer:
One schema Mallarme seems to have considered would be the following: the rst and the
last page of a booklet would be written on the same folded bifolio, which would not move
and would serve as a kind of cover . . . ; in the interior would be placed single folios, mobile,
dierent, and somewhat interchangeable; needless to say, each complete ensemble consisting of the rst folio, the interleaved folios, and the last folio, would have to present a
coherent meaning and succession.48
Beyond their relatively clear positional and proportional relationship, the rst and
last folios of the faun poem might well be seen to articulate an immovable cover,
for their precise visual deployment of spacing and line-breaks actually makes it
possible to interweave them.
If we take the pronominal similarity between the rst lines (both bring je
together with an object) to suggest two interchangeable openings, the woven aggregate looks like this:
Je tiens la reine! (Ces nymphes, je les veux perpetuer.)
sur chatiment . . . Si clair,
O
Leur incarnat leger, quil voltige dans lair
Assoupi de sommeils touus. Non, mais lame
Tard succombent au er silence de midi: Aimai-je un reve?
Sans plus il faut dormir en loubli du blasphe`me . . .
[I hold the queen! (Those nymphs, I want to perpetuate them.) / O sure chastisement . . .
So clear, their light carnation, that it vaults into the air / Weighted down with tufted slumbers. No, but the soul / Empty of words and this heavy body / At last succumb to the proud
silence of noon: Did I love a dream? / Without more it is necessary to sleep forgetful of
blasphemy . . .]
I have stretched the prosody only once, where the colon at the end of line 106 seems
to allow the fauns question from line 3 to be added as an extra, rhythmically unconstrained wisp of speech. And perhaps I have shown one too many lines: the question
Aimai-je . . . ? seems a good ending for this tangle of two feuillets (but I like the
109
answer of reve by il faut dormir en loubli). At any rate, this is not, in fact, the
nal note of the poem. From this point, Mallarme brings back his nely tuned
response to classical pastoral, in a way that further strengthens the outer bifolio as
the couverture of the whole poem.
The poem began with several recompositions of the opening of Virgils rst
Eclogue. It ends, now, by echoing the celebrated vespertinal valedictory tone that
ends several of Virgils pastorals.49 More precisely, and most appropriately, the last
words of Mallarmes Eglogue-livre can be read as a revoicing of the closing gesture
of Virgils whole book of pastoral poems.
The tenth and last Eclogue, a song for an unrequited lover that names itself (a
song for Gallus), ends with a return, after Galluss monologue, to the voice of
the poet:
surgamus: solet esse gravis cantantibus umbra,
iuniperi gravis umbra; nocent et frugibus umbrae.
ite domum saturae, venit Hesperus, ite capellae.
[Arise: the shade weighs heavily on singers, / The shade of junipers, and shade harms
crops. / Go home well fed, my goats: go: Vesper comes.]50
Rather than arising, Mallarmes faun falls pronegisanton the sand, assuming Tityruss posture when a desertlike emptiness is all that remains of his pastoral world. But he ends by pointedly recalling the two most distinctive features of
Virgils twilit ending. An astre, echoing Virgils evening star, becomes the intoxicating goalthe star of winesof his gaping mouth, replacing the esh for
which he thirsted in the central utterance (ma le`vre en feu buvant). In the last
line, an ombre echoes Virgils umbra, the shadow of junipers and of the falling
dusk, distantly answering the initial transformation of sheltering shade into
shadows of doubt.
In a remarkably ecient gesture of summation, Mallarme weaves all of his
poems main linguistic dilemmas into a web of oppositions around this last Virgilian shadow. Addressing the couple with the singular pronoun tu, the faun
revisits his persistent failure to separate the mass of esh into specic objects. Je
and tu appear together in this line, but the second person has become grammatically distanced by an interposed que. In the two last verbs, vais voir and devins, seeing opposes being, the spoken future tense opposes the (written) past historic. Within this formal web, the Virgilian shadow comes to stand, multiply, for
the shadowy divide between je and tu that the lyric voice seeks vainly to overleap; for the shadowy point of loss between collective and specic address; and for
the shadowy present, ungraspable between future and past.
With respect to the main, motivating dichotomy of the poem, it seems that the
faun has settled for seeingreadingas his only remaining relationship to the
world. But one word remains unaccounted for. In a last, less obvious juxtaposition,
110
adieu contrasts with the ombre (the last sight) as the poems last trace of pure
speech. With the address of valediction, the faun reaches out to the world one more
time, only to relinquish it.
Architecture, History,
Expressionand Personality
In the sketches for Le Livre, as Scherer observes, the reections on structure are very well developed, those about the contents are hardly sketched.51 Perhaps such vagueness about contents appears self-explanatory, given that Mallarmes vision of the Book as the orphic explication of the Earth (as once he
expressed it to Verlaine) seems so impossibly grandiose as to render its specics
eternally unwritable. But the other side of Scherers simple observation, regarding
Mallarmes near-manic obsession in the sketches with issues of structure, also nds
an echo in the very letter that states this orphic ambition. The envisioned Livre, he
asserts, will be architectural and premeditated, and not a collection of unordered
inspirations.52 When LApre`s-midi dun faune is approached in light of these obsessive structural ideals rather than as a loosely ordered recueil of suggestive imagery,
it can be recognized as a secret, virtual Book whose premeditated architecture
is created through the formal composition of poetic contents themselves.
With this recognition, some common tropes about the place of the Book
within Mallarmes development come into question. Scherer, for example, suggests
that the unity and sense of the whole oeuvre begins to become clear once we see
that the summits of the published work are bathed in a strange light that has its
invisible origin in the last, incomplete Livre.53 But it is better to say that this
strange light has its invisible origin not only in the future Livre dernier et inacheve, but also in the past, in the virtual feuillets of the fauns Eglogue-livre. Indeed,
a memory of that earlier poem-book shines within the Livre sketches themselves. In
indicating the most important fragment of the manuscript that does elaborate a
content, Scherer describes one detailed instance of a recurring theme of appeal:
A narrator who speaks in the rst person is confronted with two women. The ensemble of
these three characters evokes the faun and the two nymphs all the more in that the scene,
here as there, oscillates between the levels of reality, memory, and the imagination, and that
it is accompanied by reminiscences both metaphysical and sensuous in nature. Furthermore, as in the Faune, the narrator of the fragment directs his attention toward the two
women, but they are only attentive to one another.54
This reappearance of the ensemble of LApre`s-midi dun faune for the dramatis personae of a staged appeal in le Livre thus ties this ever-incomplete project back to the
work in which Mallarme made the problem of lyric addressspeech in the rst
personthe organizing force for a virtual foliation in poetic form.
The relationship between these past and future books takes on wider implicaThe Formal Rhythms of Mallarmes Faun
111
tions once we recognize the extent to which many critics, in reading Mallarme
through the lens of his own criticism, have been willing to ignore the centrality of
speech in the rst person to his poetic practice. The possibility that any one of his
poems might be structured through a reactivation of the classical dream of voiced
presence is lost, for example, in any unreective acceptance of these famous lines
from Crise de vers:
The pure work implies the elocutionary disappearance of the poet, who cedes the initiative
to the words, mobilized by the shock of their inequality; they are up with reciprocal reections like a virtual trail of re on jewels, replacing the perceptible respiration in the ancient
lyric breath and the enthusiastic personal direction of the phrase.55
Often quoted to encapsulate Mallarmes impersonal poetic accomplishment, the

paragraph is striking, now, for the precision with which it species the components
of lyricism reclaimed at the crux of LApre`s-midi dun faune: the perceptible respiration in the ancient lyric breath in the sibilant verbal music; the enthusiastic personal direction of the phrase in the je-tu address. Of course this poem also shows
lyricism shattering into reciprocal reections of words. But its premeditated architecture comes into being through a reinvestment in the devices of personal
utterance that can only be shared, and enacted, by holding in abeyance all assumptions about Mallarmes elocutionary disappearance. Only in this way can the
reader come to experience, in its full vibrancy, an eect once succinctly described by
Peter Dayan, who distinguishes the aesthetic motives of Mallarmes desperate
expenditure of poetic energy from any purely theoretical concerns with the nature of discourse. Even for a poet acutely aware of languages illusory nature, Dayan suggests in his book Mallarmes Divine Transposition, the illusion that the illusion
is no illusion must, at the poetic moment, be total.56
Dayans exemplary caution regarding theory and practice does not, however,
prevent him from blurring one linguistic distinction fundamental to the faun
poems encapsulation of its poetic moment. He suggests that the standard, bourgeois discourse Mallarme rejects in his pursuit of ideal instinct is characterized
by both its urge to facile representation and its clarity, linearity, and expressiveness.
Mallarmes poetry, in other words, means the death both of the individual and
of the ability to express; of the poet-as-man, and of a certain type of representative
literature.57 I highlight the two functions of language brought together in this capsule account of bourgeois discourse, because I think historical understanding of
LApre`s-midi dun faune depends on a recognition that poetic practice might aim to
distinguish between them.
Generally, in fact, readings of this poem have been somewhat one-sided. Pearson, for one, repeatedly highlights the fauns rejection of the paltry art of representation.58 But while representation is undeniably one of the poems themes, its
form arises, primarily, out of the pursuit of the dierent linguistic promise glimpsed
in Scherers theme of appeal and in Mallarmes enthusiastic personal direction
112
of the phrase. The central focus for Mallarmes desperate expenditure of poetic
energy in 1876, that is, is not reference or mimesis; it is, rather, address, communication, expression.
Pearsons emphasis on representation reects his focus, throughout his book,
on what he terms, with an obvious Saussurian inection, Mallarmes rejection of
conventional and arbitrary reference. Indeed, he claims that both a Structuralist and a Post-Structuralist Mallarme come into being in the works of the
1860s.59 Against such anachronism, we might ask whether the expressive motivations of LApre`s-midi dun faune could be better interpreted in light of the trinomial
linguistics Benveniste once proposed as an alternative to Saussures binary system:
Language . . . is always built up on two planes, those of the signicant and the signied.
The study of that constituent quality of language and of the correlations of regularity or
disharmony which it involves . . . could alone serve as a basis for linguistics. But language
is also human; it is the point of interaction between the mental and the cultural life in man,
and at the same time the instrument of that interaction. Another linguistics could be
founded on the terms of this trinomial: language, culture, and personality.60
Clearly, this other linguistics will seem a strange basis for Mallarme interpretation as long as personality is presumptively eaced from accounts of his poetics.
But absent this presumption, Benvenistes trinomial promises a richer account
of the motivations of LApre`s-midi dun faune than any reexive invocation of languages two planes of signication. After all, the faun never has much trouble
seeingor indicating, or describinghis desired nymphs. His diculty throughout
is, precisely, one of interaction (or, to put it more bluntly, intercourse) with them,
through the instrument of language. And here Benvenistes third term, culture,
also obviously comes into play, through this Eglogues pointed, intricate negotiation
with the intertextual layers of pastoral tradition, which can seem to turn the Syrinx of poetic language into an instrument des fuitesa barrier to, rather than
a facilitator of, personal interaction.
Precise historical understanding begins to come into view along this trinomial approach if we turn rst to Benvenistes comments on pronouns, the preeminent devices of linguistic personality and the primary determinants of this
poems structural rythmos. He begins by emphasizing the nonreferential nature of
such signs:
These pronominal forms do not refer to reality or to objective positions in space or
time but to the utterance, unique each time, that contains them. . . . The importance of
their function will be measured by the nature of the problem they serve to solve, which is
none other than that of intersubjective communication. Language has solved this problem
by creating an ensemble of empty signs that . . . are always available and become full
as soon as the speaker introduces them into each instance of his discourse.61
Perhaps, then, we might describe LApre`s-midi dun faune, with its articulation around
a fraught claim to intersubjective communication, as the projection through form
113
of an attempt to make empty pronominal signs full. But while this formulation
resonates with some of its imagerysay, with the breath into grape skins and the
swelling again with memories; or with the vaine ligne and the later paroles
vacantesit does not yet do justice to the poems precise calibration of the emptiness or fullness of various pronominal utterances.
We approach the core issue more closely by considering Benvenistes comments
on the most weighty of all pronominal promises:
I posits another person, the one who, being, as he is, completely exterior to me, becomes
my echo to whom I say you and who says you to me. This polarity of persons is the fundamental condition in language, of which the process of communication, in which we share, is
only a mere pragmatic consequence.62
It is in this light that we might, now, glimpse a crucial distinction between the position articulated in this poem and the most famous of all catchphrases for the nde-sie`cle crisis in subjectivity, Arthur Rimbauds je est un autre. For Mallarmes
faun, that is, the rst person is not, in itself, the primary problem. He begins and
ends by saying je and has access to rst-person reexives and possessives from
start to nish. It is, rather, the polarity of persons, as Benveniste puts it, the (previously implicit) relationship between je and its addressee, tu, that is called into
question when the faun, in his very rst utterance, replaces Meliboeuss communication, Tityre, tu, with the observation Ces nymphes, je. It is, furthermore, his
desire to reestablish this fundamental condition of language that creates, through
a desperate expenditure of poetic energy, the livre form, with its mobile rythmos
of folds, around the climactic voicing of je tadore. And it is, nally, the acknowledged futility of this desire that brings the Eglogue to a close on the shadowy valediction we can now repunctuate to reect its precise, historically determined pronominal
implication: je vais voir lombre que tu devins.
No t e s
1. Le fait poetique lui-meme consiste a` grouper, rapidement, en un certain nombre de

traits egaux, pour les ajuster, telles pensees lointaines autrement et eparses; mais qui,
cela eclate, riment ensemble, pour ainsi parler. Il faut donc, avant tout, disposer la commune mesure, quil sagit dappliquer; ou le Vers. Le poe`me reste bref, se multiplie, en
un livre; sa xite formant norme, comme le vers; Stephane Mallarme, letter to Charles
Bonnier, March 1893, in Stephane Mallarme, Correspondance, ed. Henri Mondor and
Lloyd James Austin (Paris, 195985), vol. 6 ( January 1893July 1894), 6566. To avoid
potential confusion, note that le vers, whether translated as verse or line, should
be understood throughout to mean a line of poetry, rather than a strophe or stanza (as its
English cognate might imply). Unless otherwise noted, translations are my own; here,
I have found valuable assistance in Selected Letters of Stephane Mallarme, ed. and trans.
Rosemary Lloyd (Chicago, 1988), 191.
114
2. As Bertrand Marchal once suggested, on oublie alors trop souvent que la theorie mallarmeenne sest faite au travers dune pratique poetique; Lecture de Mallarme (Paris,
1985), 7.
3. Toutefois la precaution parnassienne ne reste pas oiseuse: elle fournit le point de repe`re entre la refonte, toute daudace, romantique, et la liberte; et marque (avant que ne
dissolve, en quelque chose didentique au clavier primitif de la parole, la versication)
un jeu ociel ou soumis au rythme xe; Villiers de lIsle Adam, in Quelques Medaillons et Portraits en Pied, in Stephane Mallarme, Oeuvres comple`tes, ed. Henri Mondor and
G. Jean-Aubry (Paris, 1945) (hereafter OC ), 491.
4. OC, 643.
5. Jy essayais de mettre, a` cote de lalexandrin dans toute sa tenue, une sorte de feu
courant pianote autour, comme qui dirait dun accompagnement musical fait par le
poe`te lui-meme; Sur levolution litteraire (1891 interview with Jules Huret), in
OC, 870.
6. For ngering (doigte), see, for example, Crise de Vers, where Mallarme writes
of the poet laissant son doigte defaillir contre la onzie`me syllable ou se propager jusqua` une treizie`me; OC 362.
7. Emile Benveniste, The Notion of Rhythm in Its Linguistic Expression, in his Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, Fla., 1971), 281
88, 285.
8. Ibid., 28586.
9. De morceaux sur le clavier, active, mesuree par les feuillets; Le Livre, Instrument
Spirituel, in Quant au Livre, in OC, 380.
10. The literature that touches on Mallarmes Livre is of course vast; the primary sources
include Jacques Scherer, Le Livre de Mallarme, rev. ed. (Paris, 1977); and Stephane Mallarme, ecrits sur le Livre, ed. Henri Meschonnic (Paris, 1985); the new edition of Stephane
Mallarme, Oeuvres comple`tes, vol. 1, ed. Bertrand Marchal (Paris, 1998) presents the
Notes en vue du Livre in a slightly dierent foliation than shown in Scherer: see
547626 and (for a diplomatic transcription) 9451060. (This edition of the Oeuvres
comple`tes cited hereafter as OC2). For a relatively recent, quite exhaustive bibliography
see Eric Benoits book-length study Mallarme et le Myste`re du Livre (Paris, 1998). Benoit
generally exemplies the metaphysical slant of the existing literature; no doubt there
are important qualications to this bias in his and many other contributions, but I hope
the dierent thrust of my analysis speaks for itself.
11. On the faun poem, see for example Jill Anderson, Paroles creuses: du duo de vierges
au solo du Faune, in Bertrand Marchal and Jean-Luc Steinmetz, eds., Mallarme ou
lobscurite lumineuse (Paris, 1999): 24154; Lloyd J. Austin, LApre`s-midi dun faune de
Stephane Mallarme: Lexique comparee des troits etats du poe`me, and LApre`s-midi
dun faune: essai dexplication, in his Essais sur Mallarme, ed. Malcolm Bowie (Manchester, 1995), 17581 and 182200; A. R. Chisholm, Mallarmes LApre`s-midi dun faune: An
Exegetical and Critical Study (Melbourne, 1958); Robert Greer Cohn, Toward the Poems of
Mallarme, rev. ed. (Berkeley, 1980), 1332; Gardner Davies, Mallarme et la Couche
susante dintelligibilite (Paris, 1988), 41137; Wallace Fowlie, Mallarme (Chicago,
1953), 14867; Joshua Landy, Music, Letters, Truth, and Lies: LApre`s-midi dun
faune as an ars poetica, Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 42 (1994): 5769;
Marchal, Lecture, 6778; Charles D. Minahen, Le Schizo and Oedipe: The Structure of
Desire in Lapre`s-midi dun faune (Poem and Prelude), Australian Journal of French Studies
25, no. 2 (MayAugust 1988): 17689; Henri Mondor, Histoire dun faune (Paris, 1948);
E. Noulet, LOeuvre poetique de Stephane Mallarme (Paris, 1940): 22047; Roger Pearson,
115
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
116
Unfolding Mallarme: The Development of a Poetic Art (Oxford, 1996), 10836; Renato Poggioli, The Oaten Flute: Essays on Pastoral Poetry and the Pastoral Ideal (Cambridge, Mass.,
1975), 283311; Stephen Walker, Mallarmes Symbolist Eclogue: The Faune as Pastoral, PMLA 93 (1978): 10617.
Pearson, Unfolding Mallarme, 116.
Gerard Genette, Palimpsestes (Paris, 1981), 261.
Mallarme rst conceived the poem in 1865 as a verse drama on the model of Theodore
de Banvilles Diane au bois, and he wrote in a letter to his friend Henri Cazalis of his
diculty adapting his vers to the drama; for the whole history of the various versions
up to the 1876 edition, see OC, 144866.
For Jacques Derridas most important engagements with Mallarme, see the chapters
La Double Seance and La Dissemination in La Dissemination (Paris, 1972). Derrida
focuses primarily on Mallarmes criticism, Un coup de des, and le Livre, rather than the
verse.
Pearson, Unfolding Mallarme. The dichotomy is stated for the faun poem on 123; the
methodological statement appears on 79.
Ibid., 100.
The Virgil-Theocritus relationship is central to all discussions of the pastoral tradition;
I have found most illuminating two books by Paul Alpers, The Singer of the Eclogues: A
Study of Virgilian Pastoral (Berkeley, 1979), and What Is Pastoral? (Chicago, 1996).
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Etude sur Virgile (Paris, 1857), 106.
Comme Diderot, Mallarme a donc ete un grand parleur et, comme pour Diderot, le
proble`me des rapports entre parle et lecrit est fondamental pour la comprehension de
son oeuvre. La relation nest pas aisee a` saisir entre une ecriture des plus sobres et des
plus retenues, des plus obscures aussi, et une parole qui a frappe tous ses auditeurs par
son caracte`re direct, bien que subtil, et sa clarte. Dans cette confrontation lavantage
revient incontestablement au parle; Jacques Scherer, Grammaire de Mallarme (Paris,
1977), 66.
See C. A. Sainte-Beuve, Theocrite, in his Portraits litteraires, rev. ed. (Paris, 1862).
Sainte-Beuves basic point, that Theocrituss rustic dialecte dorien permits his poetry to
represent nature with a directness and fullness lost to subsequent generations, is a common trope.
For ton de la conversation comme limite supreme see the unpublished Notes on
literature written in 1869, in OC, 852; for poetry as le type le plus juste du parler
propre a` une epoque see Les Mots Anglais, in OC, 913; for lintimite meme de la race,
en sa eur, le parler see Villiers de lIsle Adam, in OC, 492.
La metaphysique du livre entrane necessairement une physique du livre qui lexprime; Scherer, Le Livre, 24.
Marcel Proust, Contre lobscurite, La Revue Blanche 11, no. 75 (15 July 1896): 69.
Le Myste`re dans les Lettres, in Quant au Livre, in OC, 38687. The essay originally
appeared in La Revue Blanche 11, no. 78 (1 September 1896): 214. Cohns translation
gives a good sense of the extraordinary diculty of the passage: To apply ones own
ingenuousness to the whiteness (ingenuousness) which inaugurates it (the page), according to the page (itself; in tune with its originally white purity) . . . Virginity (the
white page, the pure originary self ) which solitarily, before a transparency of the adequate (pure) look, itself has as if divided itself into fragments of candor, both nuptial
proof of Idea; Robert Greer Cohn, Mallarmes Divagations: A Guide and Commentary
(New York, 1990), 3012. It is ironic that this response to a charge of obscurity is
itself so syntactically refracted as to defy adequate translation.
26. Larmature intellectuelle du poe`me se dissimule eta lieutient dans lespace qui
isole les strophes et parmi le blanc du papier; signicatif silence quil nest pas moins
beau de composer que les vers; from the draft of a letter found amongst the Livre
sketches, treated by Scherer as f 2[suite] of the Book itself, given in the section Feuillets
du Livre sans rapport direct avec le Livre, in OC2, 623.
27. For a facsimile of the 1876 Derenne edition showing the blank spaces between strophes
that determine my foliation, see Jean-Michel Nectoux, Ninjinsky: Prelude a` lapre`s-midi
dun faune (Paris, 1989), 1617. In my reading, the details of presentation (including the
blanks and line-breaks that appear within sections) will reproduce this editionthough
I include Mallarmes 1887 emendation to line 47 (dans un solo long for en un long
solo). The OC2, pages 16366, reprints the Edition de 1876 without the blank between lines 103 and 104 (that is, before my last folio). This reects an ambiguity in
the Derenne edition: the last seven lines appear on a folio of their own; it is unclear
whether a blank is intended after the previous text. Neither this blank nor that between
lines 7 and 8 are consistent in all editions. My understanding of the form depends not
only on the blanks but also on issues of grammar, punctuation, and proportion, as well
as on the details of the language.
28. La fabrication du livre, en lensemble qui sepanouira, commence, de`s une phrase;
Le Livre, Instrument Spirituel, in OC 380.
29. Translation adapted from Alpers, Singer of the Eclogues, 11.
30. For the Improvisation dun faune, see OC2, 16062.
31. Deux demi-feuilles symetriques peuvent servir a` amener deja` la rime en echo de deux
vers . . . , soit que des vers riment eectivement dun feuillet a` lautre, soit que le
contenu dun feuillet ait, dune manie`re plus generale, une resonance avec le contenu
de lautre qui soit comparable a` la relation sonore, mais apre`s tout mysterieuse, que la
rime etablit entre deux mots; Scherer, Le Livre, 59.
32. Le Vers, dispensateur, ordonnateur du jeu des pages, matre du livre; Etalages, in
Quant au Livre, in OC, 375.
33. Le poe`me est devenu une sorte de fugue litteraire, ou` des the`mes sentrecroisent avec
un art prodigieux; toutes les ressources de la poetique semploient a` soutenir un triple
developpement dimages et didees. Une extreme sensualite, une extreme intellectualite, une extreme musicalite sentremelent ou sopposent dans cet ouvrage extraordinaire; Paul Valery, Ecrits divers sur Stephane Mallarme (Paris, 1950), 86.
34. Translations from Alpers, Singer of the Eclogues, 27 and 37.
35. Sainte-Beuve, Etude sur Virgile, 3031.
36. Pearson makes the nice point that the word sein at this point in the poem derives
etymologically from sinus, or fold; Unfolding Mallarme, 127.
37. I owe this observation to Pearson, who writes of the textual weavings of the amorous Faune (taking lacs in its senses of knotted cord, noose, and love-knot); ibid.,
129.
38. Both the attribution of murmure to the ute and the phrase de ma rumeur er are
new to the 1876 version of the poem.
39. Cohn, Toward the Poems of Mallarme, 264, discusses this aspect of Mallarmes symbolic
repertoire, with its immediate ancestry in Charles Baudelaire. For some further
thoughts on the importance of the fauns invocation of peinture as well as speech,
see Marchal, Lecture de Mallarme, 72.
40. Translation of Theocritus taken from The Poems of Theocritus, trans. Anna Rist (Chapel
Hill, N.C., 1978), 30. Virgil trans. from Alpers, Singer of the Eclogues, 59. John Miltons
Lycidas, lines 5051, in John Milton, ed. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg (Ox-
117
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
118
ford, 1991), 40, makes use of both models: Where were ye nymphs when the remorseless deep / Closed oer the head of your loved Lycidas?
Alpers, What Is Pastoral? 229.
According to T. V. F. Brogan and Clive Scott, Octosyllable, in Alex Preminger and
T. V. F. Brogan, eds., The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton, 1993),
the octosyllable, the oldest [verse form] in French, is the staple meter of folk verse,
of poetry of the oral tradition, as in the late medieval ballads. In succeeding centuries
[it] never lost the close connections thus established to hymnody, song, and orality, and
(esp. in couplets) to narrative (854). For a sense of the historical and critical complexity
attendant upon this association, see Evelyn Birge Vitz, Rethinking Old French Literature: The Orality of the Octosyllabic Couplet, Romanic Review 77, no. 4 (1986): 307
21; and the response by Jerey Kittay, On Octo, Romanic Review 78, no. 3 (1987):
29198.
Jusquau format, oiseux: et vainement, concourt cette extraordinaire, comme un vol
recueilli mais pret a` selargir, intervention du pliage ou le rythme, initiale cause quune
feuille fermee, contienne un secret, le silence y demeure, precieux et des signes evocatoires succe`dent, pour lesprit, a` tout litterairement aboli; Le Livre, Instrument spirituel, in OC, 379. Translation adapted from Cohn, Mallarmes Divagations, 280. The
passage is actually comparing the journal or feuilleton unfavorably to the Book. Cohn
nds in these writings on the journal, in spite of their negative overtones (e.g., the
pointless format), some clear echoes of the accomplishments of Un coup de des; I similarly nd resonances in the fauns virtual feuilleton that seem to justify reading through
Mallarmes critical tone regarding the popular press.
The association of the pages of the book with wings recurs many times in the criticism.
A similar point is made about the Ouverture ancienne of Herodiade in one of the only
truly rigorous formal analyses of Mallarme I know: Jean-Pierre Chausserie-Lapree,
Larchitecture secre`te de l Ouverture ancienne, Europe 54 (AprilMay 1976): 74
103. Chausserie-Lapree concludes his extraordinarily detailed analysis by asserting
that on comprend mieux aussi cette fascination que le Livre exerce sur lui tout au long
de son existence: lOeuvre est deja` fait tout entie`re dans lOuverture. But he does not, in
fact, derive a virtual foliation from his analysis; whether or not this can be done, I wonder
if this poems concentric organization (as Chausserie-Lapree puts it) might be better
understood as a projection into textual structure of its own primary theme of mirroring.
Le livre, expansion totale de la lettre, doit delle tirer, directement, une mobilite; Le
Livre, Instrument spirituel, in OC, 380; le volume, malgre limpression xe, devient
par ce jeu, mobilede mort il devient vie; Scherer, Le Livre, f191 (OC2, 619).
Les livres ordinaires sont broches, cest-a`-dire que leurs pages se suivent dans un ordre
xe, quindique leur numerotation. Le Livre ne sera pas oblige de se tenir a` cette sujetion, et Mallarme entendait bien que les feuillets en fussent mobiles. On pourra ainsi
les changer de place, et les lire, non certes dans un ordre quelconque, mais selon plusieurs ordres distinct determines par les lois de la permutation; ibid., 5859.
Un schema auquel Mallarme semble avoir pensee serait le suivant: la premie`re et la
dernie`re feuille dun cahier seraient ecrites sur un meme feuillet double plie, qui ne
bougerait pas et servirait en quelque sorte de couverture au cahier; a` linterieur viendraient se placer des feuillets simples, mobiles, dierents et pourtant interchangeables;
bien entendu, chaque ensemble constitue par la premie`re feuille, les feuillets intercalaires et la dernie`re feuille, devrait presenter un sens et une suite; ibid., 59.
The word is Erwin Panofskys: In Virgils ideal Arcady human suering and superhumanly perfect surroundings create a dissonance. This dissonance, once felt, had to be
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
61.
62.
resolved, and it was resolved in that vespertinal mixture of sadness and tranquillity
which is perhaps Virgils most personal contribution to poetry. With only slight exaggeration one might say that he discovered the evening; Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin
and the Elegiac Tradition, in Meaning in the Visual Arts (New York, 1955), 300.
Trans. from Alpers, Singer of the Eclogues, 63.
La` reexion sur la structure sest poussee tre`s loin, celle sur le contenu est a` peine
esquissee; Scherer, Le Livre, 125.
Both phrases, lexplication orphique de la Terre and architectural et premedite, et
non un recueil des inspirations de hasard, appear in the famous autobiographical letter to Verlaine of 16 November 1885, in Mallarme, Correspondance, vol. 2 (1871
1885), 301.
Si lon admet que loeuvre entie`re de Mallarme, tout au moins depuis 1866, sexplique
et soriente par le Livre que en est laboutissement, . . . on reconstitue a` la fois lunite et
le sens de la creation mallarmeenne . . . Les sommets de loeuvre publiee sont baignes
dans une lumie`re etrange dont le Livre dernier et inacheve est lorigine invisible;
Scherer, Le Livre, 84, 142.
Scherer refers to 1626 as Le fragment du manuscript le plus important qui elabore
un contenu, and emphasizes the theatrical and poetic richness of this instance of a
the`me dappel: Un narrateur qui parle a` la premie`re personne est confronte avec
deux femmes. Lensemble de ces trois personnages evoque dautant plus le Faune et les
deux nymphes de Lapre`s-midi que la sce`ne, ici comme la`, hesite entre plan de la realite,
celui du souvenir et cului de limaginaire, et quelle saccompagne darrie`re-pensees a`
la fois metaphysiques et sensuelles. Comme dans le Faune encore, le narrateur du fragment tend son attention vers les deux femmes, et celles-ci ne sont attentives que lune
a` lautre; ibid., 132 (for Scherers 1626, see OC2, 55255).
Loeuvre pure implique la disparition elocutoire du poe`te, qui ce`de linitiative aux
mots, par le heurt de leur inegalite mobilises; ils sallument de reets reciproques
comme une virtuelle tranee de feu sur des pierreries, remplacant la respiration perceptible en lancien soue lyrique et la direction personnelle enthousiaste de la phrase;
OC, 366.
Peter Dayan, Mallarmes Divine Transposition: Real and Apparent Sources of Literary Value
(Oxford, 1986). See esp. 18287. Dayan earlier distinguishes Mallarmes aesthetic motivations from, for example, Derridas theoretical interests; see 14648.
Ibid., 36.
Pearson, Unfolding Mallarme, This mimetic or representational emphasis recurs
throughout Pearsons book; as regards the faun poem, see for example 120.
Ibid., 41.
Emile Benveniste, Recent Trends in General Linguistics, in Problems in General Linguistics 315, 14.
Emile Benveniste, The Nature of Pronouns, in ibid., 21722, 220.
Emile Benveniste, Subjectivity in Language, in ibid., 22330, 225.
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The Formal Rhythms of Mallarm's Faun

Author(s): DAVID J. CODE

The Formal Rhythms

N be written about Stephane Mallarme

Pearsons readiness to overlook the analytical implications of Mallarmes change of

crepuscular moment (in Pearsons apt description) in the history of classical

Scherers biographical trope, as well as his particular adjectives, are reminiscent of

Strophes and Blanks,

When Marcel Proust criticized the excessive mystery of symbolist poetry

1. Pictorial representation and bibliographic diagram of the book.

Ces nymphes, je les veux perpetuer.

Mon doute, amas de nuit ancienne, sache`ve

LAprs-midi dun faune

Mon doute, amas de nuit ancienne, sachve

2. Folio 1 recto of the virtual book.

The Formal Rhythms of Mallarmes Faun

The esoteric structural counterpoint between two levels of formal

3. Folio 2r (folio 1v is blank). S marks

ou si les femmes dont tu gloses

The Formal Rhythms of Mallarmes Faun

Faune, lillusion sechappe des yeux bleus

performance. This pastoral ute explicitly replaces speech, in the murmurs of

bords siciliens dun calme marecage

The Formal Rhythms of Mallarmes Faun

4. Folios 3r and 4r (2v and 3v are blank). The broken

Par le talent; quand, sur lor glauque de lointaines

[O Sicilian shores of a calm marsh, / Which in envy of sunbeams my vanity ransacks, /

The contrapuntal elaboration begins with an even stronger linguistic gesture

Autre que ce doux rien par leur le`vre ebruite,

Le jonc vaste et jumeau dont sous lazur on joue:

The Gathering Around

Tche donc, instrument des fuites, maligne

5. Folio 5r (folio 4v is blank).

Tache donc, instrument des fuites, o maligne

verbal musicde ma rumeur erthat audibly reclaims the murmure initially

nymphes, regonons des SOUVENIRS divers.

62 nymphes, regonflons des SOUVENIRS divers.

6. Folio 6r (folio 5v is blank).

Je les ravis, sans les desenlacer, et vole

The capitalization of SOUVENIRS marks a formal relationship that gains

Je tadore, courroux des vierges, o delice

Je tadore, courroux des vierges, dlice

7. Open bifolio showing 6v and 7r. The central fold.

Des pieds de linhumaine au coeur de la timide

The Formal Rhythms of Mallarmes Faun

reading experience. The comparison of le Livre to a ight of wings strengthens

Mon crime, cest davoir, gai de vaincre ces peurs

Mon crime, cest davoir, gai de vaincre ces peurs

8. Folio 7v (8r is blank).

Tant pis! vers le bonheur dautres mentraneront

9. Folio 8v (9r is blank).

The Formal Rhythms of Mallarmes Faun

Mon crime, cest davoir, gai de vaincre ces peurs

62 nymphes, regonflons des SOUVENIRS divers.

10. Open bifolio showing 7v and 6r.

claimed by Jaccours, and is followed by another reexive, sallume. In direct

Tant pis! vers le bonheur dautres mentraneront

The Formal Rhythms of Mallarmes Faun

Tant pis! vers le bonheur dautres mentraneront

Tche donc, instrument des fuites, maligne

11. Open bifolio showing 8v and 5r.

Chaque grenade eclate et dabeilles murmure;