Collected Prose

the other hand: wariness. Although he was deeply moved by the fragments, he was uncertain whether publication was appropriate, given the intensely private nature of the work. He concluded, however, that anything that could enhance our understanding of Mallarmé would be valuable. “And if these phrases are no more than sighs,” he wrote, “that makes them all the more precious to us. It seemed to me that the very nakedness of these notes … made their distribution desirable. It was useful in fact to prove once again to what extent the famous Mallarméan serenity was based on the impulses of a very vivid sensibility, at times even quite close to frenzy and delirium…. Nor was it irrelevant to show, by means of a precise example, how this impersonality, this vaunted objectivity, was in reality connected to the most subjective upheavals of a life.”
    A close reading of the fragments will clearly show that they are no more than notes for a possible work: a long poem in four parts with a series of very specific themes. That Mallarmé projected such a work and then abandoned it is indicated in a memoir written by Geneviève that was published in a 1926 issue of the N.R.F.: “In 1879, we had the immense sorrow of losing my little brother, an exquisite child of eight. I was quite young then, but the deep and silent pain I felt in my father made an unforgettable impression on me: ‘Hugo,’ he said, ‘was happy to have been able to speak (about the death of his daughter); for me, it’s impossible.’”
    As they stand now, the notes are a kind of ur-text, the raw data of the poetic process. Although they seem to resemble poems on the page, they should not be confused with poetry per se. Nevertheless, more than one hundred years after they were written, they are perhaps closer to what we today consider possible in poetry than at the time of their composition. For here we find a language of immediate contact, a syntax of abrupt, lightning shifts that still manages to maintain a sense, and in their brevity, the sparse presence of their words, we are given a rare and early example of isolate words able to span the enormous mental spaces that lie between them — as if intelligible links could be created by the brute force of each word or phrase, so densely charged that these tiny particles of language could somehow leap out of themselves and catch hold of the succeeding cliff-edge of thought. Unlike Mallarmé’s finished poems, these fragments have a startlingly unmediated quality. Faithful not to the demands of art but to the jostling movement of thought — and with a speed and precision that astonish — these notes seem to emerge from such an interior place, it is as though we could hear the crackling of the wires in Mallarmé’s brain, experience each synapse of thought as a physical sensation. If these fragments cannot be read as a work of art, neither, I think, should they be treated simply as a scholarly appendage to Mallarmé’s collected writings. For, in spite of everything, the Anatole notes do carry the force of poetry, and in the end they achieve a stunning wholeness. They are a work in their own right — but one that cannot be categorized, one that does not fit into any preexistent literary form.
    The subject matter of the fragments requires little comment. In general, Mallarmé’s motivation seems to have been the following: feeling himself responsible for the disease that led to Anatole’s death, for not giving his son a body strong enough to withstand the blows of life, he would take it upon himself to give the boy the one indomitable thing he was capable of giving: his thought. He would transmute Anatole into words and thereby prolong his life. He would, literally , resurrect him, since the work of building a tomb — a tomb of poetry — would obliterate the presence of death. For Mallarmé, death is the consciousness of death, not the physical act of dying. Because Anatole was too young to understand his fate (a theme that occurs repeatedly throughout the fragments), it was as though he had not yet died. He was still alive in his father, and it was only when Mallarmé himself died that the boy would die as well. This is one of the most moving accounts of a man trying to come to grips with modern death — that is to say, death without God, death without hope of salvation — and it reveals the secret meaning of Mallarmé’s entire aesthetic: the elevation of art to the stature of religion.