Mallarmé Sociologist of the Republic of Letters

Nothing more refractory, at first glance, to sociological analysis, than the unique figure of Stéphane Mallarmé: what could sociology teach us of hermetic poet of the poet of the poet of Shot And from the Sonnet in X, without arbitrarily submitting it to categories foreign to his work, reduce it to the disguised biography of a small embittered, even downgraded, as it is once ? Didn’t this poet say, in response to an investigation: “ For me, the case of a poet, in this society which does not allow him to live, this is the case of a man who isolates himself to sculpt his own tomb. »»

However, a poet who responds to investigations from the mainstream press-and Mallarmé is customary because-is it at this point cut off from the world ? The figure of the tomb, so agreed at that time, is it really the index of a radical asociality, or, rather, the rallying sign of a social background in search of the conditions of its economic survival ? This environment is that of scholars and poets, which flourishes at the end of XIX^e century. No poet was less lonely, or at least isolated, than Mallarmé. The strength of the study proposed by Pascal Durand, professor at the University of Liège, specialist and Mallarmé, and of the sociology of cultural institutions, is primarily due to his method, which renews the work of a Bourdieu or a Nathalie Heinich: it is, he says, to design and put into practice a sociology of literature not on, but with Writers. Not to reduce the work to the socio-economic infrastructure of its development, but to draw the sociological instruments to decipher it. And this work deemed to be indecipherable becomes, or almost transparent. Because Mallarmé makes all these instruments available. If he felt the need to accompany the collection of his Poetrypublished just after his death in 1899, of a Bibliography detailing the circumstances of composition and publication of each of his poems, it is, says P. Durand, for “ place all of its Poetry under the sign of a social space for the registration and circulation of texts “, So that to make people understand that” The most worked form is put at the service of the social formalities of the literature ». Inaugurations, colloquiums and banquets, thanks and tombs, a whole economy of donation and counter-donation is carefully recorded in the final collection, after an exemplary career transfiguring the obscure provincial epigone of parnassians as a master reigning, from its small apartment in the rue de Rome, over an entire generation of artists and poets, and beyond.

Poet profession

Few poets have as much as Mallarmé sacrificed to news, journalism, ceremonies, so much so that it is all his work which takes the appearance of a vast literary ceremonial. The coup de force of Durand’s book is to make this ceremonial the sole object of the work, which would only formalize the social procedures specific to an environment (the “ Republic of letters », To use the name of the review founded by the poet), and nothing else. He shows a Mallarmé gradually converting to new forms of production, and being very interested in the social and economic conditions of the literature, inspired by the form of the newspaper to write the Shot ; Finally, dreaming of popular and democratic art, and an appropriate economy.

P. Durand therefore does not linger, in the wake of Sartre or Barthes, to ironize on the small professor dreaming of elitism and nobility of letters, on his desperate efforts to unravel in the little world of Parnassians, then on the scenes of the theater, then in the fashion world, etc. What interests him is to bring out of the very work of Mallarmé, even in his most abstruse poems, the principles of a sociology of literature. Not only his rare and precious sonnets, but also his circumstance books, tributes, toasts (funeral or not), pedagogy works, fashion chronicles, responses – many and funny – to journalistic surveys, etc., all this is part of the same ambition: that of formulating the social rules at the literature of his time as exactly, without being dupe. Disturbing obsequity, desire to want to do things too well: Mallarmé disturbs by dint of conformism, too polite to be honest.

The debate on vulgarity

One of his detractors is none other than the young Marcel Proust, who published in 1896 a pamphlet entitled Against darknessmocking the systematic hermeticism of symbolists, and their claim to “ Protect their work against the attacks of the vulgar ». The vulgar, replied Proust, “ is not where we think “:” Any look back towards the vulgar, whether it is to flatter it by an easy expression, whether it is to disconcert it by an obscure expression, makes the goal of the divine archer forever. His work will mercilessly keep the trace of his desire to please or displease the crowd, also mediocre desires, which will delight, alas, the second -order readers. ” THE “ small clan », The Cenacle of the Verdurin is already in germ in this attack of the symbolist imposture. According to Proust, the poet must take the very nature of nature, and not give up contemplating it so that only dispense signs of belonging or distinction.

The arrow, known as P. Durand, touched the breastplate. In his answer (The mystery in the letters) Mallarmé does everything to reduce Proust to “ Baratineurs from the mainstream press “:” argue of darkness … implies a prior renunciation to judge “,” To unload the public to understand ». The darkness, he retorts, is never a quality of the text, as the lazy or vulgar readers claim, but a fact of perception produced by an unsuitable reading: “ The adequate gaze must be applied to the text ». Recognizing the possibility of such reading is to affirm the possibility, and the need, of a suitable social environment, that of poets, the poetic text doing nothing other than addressing a “ Hi », Signs of recognition – symbols To good understanding, who in turn will relay the good news of the Quisaliéné language with the general public, which Mallarmé has never desperate to touch and convert, into a real founder of sect, subject to first forming a small group of apostles.

There is therefore indeed a social ambition in Mallarmé, inscribed in his conception of language and poetry: to conceive and practice a language which does not say anything, does not pretend to state some truth, does not refer to anything other than itself-that is to say to the social bond itself and its formalities.

The aphasia of which Mallarmé says to himself from his threatened youth becomes, at the end of the various social setbacks of the poet, a doctrine and a method to rule out any interhuman conflict. Hence his constant courtesy, the rave praise of which he ritually overwhelms his correspondents, the abstention of all criticism: approval and neutrality are the rule. And even his death, by suffocation when the Dreyfus affair broke out which introduces the split within the Cenacle, is part of this logic. Because always he wanted to keep his hand on his small group:

We sail, O my various

Friends, me already on the stern,

You the sumptuous before cutting

The flood of thunderbolts and winters. (Hi))

On the stern: at the rear, but the rudder in hand.

Donation and against donation

Mallarmé is therefore a group leader, using the same sneaky methods as a few decades later, André Breton. The figure of the poet cut in the world was actually made from scratch by Verlaine (in Cursed poets) and especially by Huysmans in Backwardsmaking Mallarmé the favorite poet of Esseintes. Very beautiful, the letter by which Mallarmé thanks Huysmans for his book:

What I cannot expect is not to thank you (because you have not talked to please me), but to tell me simply and deeply happy, that my name, as at home and about, in this beautiful book (back room of your mind), circulates, host adorned with which horny dresses woven from the most exquisite art sympathy ! I only believe in two sensations of glory, almost also chimerical, that learned from the delirium of a people to whom one could, by means of art, shape a new idol: the other, to see each other, reader of an exceptionally loved book, oneself appear at the bottom of the pages, where one was, without his knowledge and by a will of the author. You made me know this one, my faith ! Until delight.

And very entertaining, the deconstruction of this letter by P. Durand showing that far from being done “ unbeknown From the poet, this portrait was, so to speak, commanded by him, inviting Huysmans to his Tuesdays, providing him in Rares and editions Rares, advising him the model of Montesquiou for the character of Des Esseintes, etc. And the same for Verlaine to whom Mallarmé sends a kind of curriculum vitae designed ad hoctaken to the letter by future biographers. In short, no one better than Mallarmé was able to organize his own advertising and promotion (he went so far as to write himself, anonymously, the inserts and announcements of his own works in the newspapers). But the most remarkable is the amnesia that thanks to Huysmans: very concerted amnesia, illustrating what Bourdieu says of this economy of donation and counter-gift: “ What is important in the exchange of donations is the fact that through the time interval intervenes the two exchangers work, without knowing it and without consulting, masking or repressing the objective truth of what they do ». Everywhere Durand dissects with humor and virtuosity this practice of exchange which is not said, otherwise under the kind of social formalities of politeness, which is for Mallarmé “ a statement of the enunciation as much as a polishing of the network of relations of which he occupies the center ». Literary existence “ Supposes belonging to an environment which has its particular laws and in which any value, far from existing in itself, is, as poetic meaning, a fact of value asking that everyone be related to all the others within the same space. “The master’s correspondence, where the” International Poets Society “, Has no other object than” The social horizon of the literature, the system of reciprocal accreditations with which the literary field is in part. “(P. 194) Cenacular environment at the border of mysticism and mystification, causing himself of connivance and oblivion, by each member, of the conditions having presided over his admission, and a kind of compulsory belief in the charisma of the master, to the essential figure of the apostate: Adolphe retté, the” Renégat breaking the circle of silence, conspired by symbolists as much as by most specialists in the poet, who will relay their fury and their illusions to us until us (P. 189).

The Mallarmé de Pascal Durand, master in Salamalecs and prince of this world, therefore teaches us, “ Far from any essentialist conception of art and literature, that it is no work, reputation, even meaning, apart from a space of circulation and accreditation of names, forms and values. The demonstration is perfectly convincing. We just wonder, at the end of this exciting reading, if sociology will have the last word on this work which has already served as pretexts for so many exegeses projecting their own doctrine, as sarcastic reminds us before proposing his, or if it will not one day appear as the dominant reading of our time. Domination that such a work is amply justified.