Nirodbaran

Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo

Second Series

2. Art and Literature

Mallarmé

Some questions were put by me on Mallarmé and his work. Sri Aurobindo made marginal comments.

Blake is Europe's greatest mystic poet and Mallarmé turned the whole current of French poetry (one might almost say, of all modernist poetry) into a channel of which his poems were an opening.

We hear that he used to write with a set determination to make his works unintelligible: is it true? And are his works unintelligible?

Comment on the first question:

Certainly not. The French language was too clear and limited to express mystic truth, so he had to wrestle with it and turn it this way and that to arrive at a mystic speech. Also he refused to be satisfied with anything that was a merely intellectual or even at all intellectual rendering of his vision. That is why the surface understanding finds it difficult to follow him. But he is so great that it has laboured to follow him all the same.

Comment on the second question:

Then why did they have so much influence on the finest French writers and why is modernist poetry trying to burrow into the subliminal in order to catch something even one quarter as fine as his language, images and mystic suggestions?

Please read, Guru, A Book of French Poetry by Professor K. In the Introduction he seems to say about Mallarmé just what I have said, though he speaks of him as being an acknowledged master and of his great influence on contemporary poetry. Do you agree with the other things he says about Mallarmé? He says: “an intellectual artist, never evoking emotion but only thought about thought.... Obscurity was part of his doctrine. Another cause of his obscurity is that he chose his words and phrases for their evocative value alone, and here again the verbal sonorities suggested by the tortuous trend of his mind make no appeal except to the initiated. His life-long endeavour to achieve an impossible ideal accounts for his sterility – he has left some 60 poems only – and the darkness of his later work, though he did write, before he had fallen a victim to his own theories, a few poems of great beauty and perfectly intelligible.”

Comment on the opening sentence of the letter:

He can't deny such an obvious fact, I suppose – but he would like to....

Comment on the rest of the letter:

Certainly not – this man is a mere pedant; his remarks are unintelligent, commonplace, often perfectly imbecile.... Rubbish! His [Mallarmé's] doctrines are perfectly tenable and intelligible. It is true that the finest things in art and poetry are appreciated only by the few and he chose therefore not to sacrifice the truth of his mystic (impressionist, symbolist) expression in order to be easily understood by the multitude, including this professor. Not only that – his will to arrive at a true and deep, instead of a superficial and intellectual language. I gave two reasons for Mallarmé's unusual style and not this one of the limitedness of the French language only....60 poems, if they have beauty, are as good as 600. It is not the mass of the poet's work that determines his greatness. Gray and Catullus wrote little; we have only seven plays of Sophocles and seven of Aeschylus (though they wrote more), but these seven put them still in the front rank of poets.

He says also that Mallarmé's verse is acquired while Verlaine's is inspired. X says M adopted the path of arduous tapasya with language because the French language is too simple, clear and transparent etc. etc. And then he remarks that just as in spirituality simple (sahaj) sadhana leads to truth, so also in poetry simplicity leads to beauty. Does it mean that M's acrobatics with words in poems won't or don't lead to beauty?

Only X can say what he meant, but to refuse beauty to M's poetry would be itself an acrobacy of intellect. For what then is beauty? Simplicity and beauty are not convertible terms. There can be a difficult beauty. What about Aeschylus then? or Blake?

Mallarmé says that the poet's mission is either to evoke gradually an object in order to suggest a mood, or inversely, to choose an object as a symbol and disengage from it a mood by a series of decipherments. I don't quite follow what he means but it seems something different from Housman's idea that the mission or function of poetry is to transfuse emotion, which Mallarmé had none of!

It is a very good description of the impressionist method in literature. Verlaine and others do the same even if they do not hold the theory.... Housman is not an impressionist or symbolist in theory.

Comment on the phrase about Mallarmé's lack of emotion:

Indeed? Because the professor says so? How easily you are impressed by anybody's opinion and take it as final!

Please read M's sonnet No. 199. Pardi! Guru, it is indeed a hard nut; a tortuous trend of mind, no doubt! Look at that image “Le transparent glacier des vols qui  n'ont pas fui....” etc. The transparent glacier of flights haunting the hard lake under the frost! Frost or snow has become the glacier, and the glaciers compose the lake or what? What do you think of this sonnet?

How does hoar-frost or rime become the glacier? “Givre” is not the same as “glace” – it is not ice, but a covering of hoar-frost such as you find on the trees etc., the congealed moisture of the air – that is the “blanche agonie” which has come down from the insulted Space on the swan and on the lake. He can shake off that but the glacier holds him; he can no more rise to the skies, caught in the frozen cold mass of the failures of the soul that refused to fly upward and escape. It is one of the finest sonnets I have ever read. Magnificent line, by the way, “le transparent glacier des vols qui n'ont pas fui! ” This idea of the denied flights (imprisoned powers) of the soul that have frozen into a glacier seems to me as powerful as it is violent. Of course in French such expressions were quite new – in some other languages they were already possible. You will find lots of kindred things in the most modern poetry which specialises in violent revelatory (or at least would-be revelatory) images. You disapprove? Well one may do so, – classical taste does; but I find myself obliged here to admire.

I do not know what you mean by emotion. If you mean the surface vital joy and grief of outer life, these poems of Mallarmé do not contain it. But if emotion can include also the deeper spiritual or inner feeling  which does not weep or shout, then they are here in these two sonnets. The swan is to my understanding not merely the poet who has not sung in the higher spaces of the consciousness, which is already a fine idea, but the soul that has not risen there and found its higher expression, the poet, if Mallarmé thought of that specially, being only a signal instance of this spiritual frustration. There can be no more powerful, moving and formidable expression of this spiritual frustration, this chilled and sterile greatness than the image of the frozen lake and the imprisoned swan as developed by Mallarmé.

I do not say that the spiritual or occult cannot be given an easier expression or that if one can arrive at that without minimising the inner significance, it is not perhaps the greatest achievement. But there is room for more than one kind of spiritual or mystic poetry. One has to avoid mere mistiness or vagueness, one has to be true, vivid, profound in one's images; but, that given, I am free to write either as in Nirvana or Transformation, giving a clear mental indication or I can suppress the mental indication and give the image only with the content suggested in the language – but not expressed so that even those can superficially understand who are unable to read behind the mental idea – that is what I have done in the Bird of. Fire. It seems to me that both methods are legitimate.

Comment on Professor K's comparison between Mallarmé's verse and Verlaine's:

If these two magnificent sonnets (the last two) are not inspired then there is no such thing as inspiration. It is rubbish to say of a man who refused to limit himself by intellectual expression, that he was an intellectual artist. Symbolism, impressionism go beyond intellect to the pure sight and Mallarmé was the creator of symbolism.

I sent Professor K's book because of the interesting reference.

I don't find it interesting, – it is abysmally stupid.