Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dsjbd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-02T19:38:43.198Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Mallarmé's Symbolist Eclogue: The “Faune” as Pastoral

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Steven F. Walker
Steven F. Walker*
Affiliation:
Livingston College, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The sexual comedy of “L’Après-Midi d’un faune” reflects the sophisticated French taste of its times. As an “églogue,” however, Mallarmé’s poem has roots in the classical pastoral tradition. Various structural elements show that Mallarmé was consciously working within the boundaries of an established genre, and even suggest that he was at times involved in the direct imitation of classical models. Classical parallels are explored in order to discover how Mallarmé used and transformed traditional pastoral themes and material. A close examination of some of the extraordinarily ambiguous poetic language of Mallarmé’s eclogue reveals that the “Faune” can be read as a complex ironic version of pastoral, in which the poet embroiders on the theme of the analogy between writing poetry and making love.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 93 , Issue 1 , January 1978 , pp. 106 - 117
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1978

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1 The Oaten Flute: Essays on Pastoral Poetry and the Pastoral Ideal (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1975), p. 284. Several chapters of this posthumous work were published earlier as separate articles and are well known to students of pastoral. Most of the material, however, is published here for the first time, including the chapter on the “Faune,” entitled “ ‘L'Heure du Berger’: Mallarmé's Grand Eclogue.”

2 “Mallarmé and the Greeks,” in The Persistent Voice: Essays on Hellenism in French Literature since the 18th Century in Honor of Professor Henri M. Peyre, ed. Walter G. Langlois (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1971), p. 81. The slopes of Mt. Etna are the haunts of the Polyphemus of Idyll xi and the Thyrsis of Idyll i of Theocritus. Venus was the wife of Vulcan, whose activities were associated with the volcano.

3 See Henri Mondor, Histoire d'un faune (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), esp. Chs. ii and iii.

4 Correspondance de Stéphane Mallarmé, ed. Henri Mondor (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), i, 169. For all three versions of the poem, see Œuvres complètes de Stéphane Mallarmé, ed. Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry (Paris: Gallimard, 1945).

5 The anecdote aims at a comic deflation of the faun's ego. Its nonsexist wit can be better appreciated if the reader contrasts it with the anecdote of the contemporary tale “Le Plus Bel Amour de Dom Juan” (in Les Diaboliques, 1874), where the humor of Barbey d'Aurevilly is characteristically rather cruel. Mallarmé's extravagant sexual wit in the “Faune” is at the service of an idea that can certainly make claims to profundity. Compare the end of Faust, II, where Goethe devises an unexpectedly comic means for the soul of Faust to escape from the watchful eye of Mephistopheles; or Plato's Symposium, where the myth told by Aristophanes of the original division of mankind into sexes mixes the sublime with the ridiculous.

6 A detailed account of the Diaghilev ballet and the veil that scandalized the audience can be found in Richard Buckle's Nijinsky (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), pp. 237–46; several striking photographs of Nijinsky as faun follow p. 270. The ballet had little in common with Mallarmé's poem beyond the general theme. Action drawings of the ballet, by Valentine Gross, can be found in Nijinsky on Stage, ed. Jean Hugo and Richard Buckle (London: Studio Vista, 1971), pp. 91–105. See also the article by Thomas Munro, “ ‘The Afternoon of a Faun’ and the Interrelation of the Arts,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 10 (1951), 95–111.

7 Credit is certainly due to Charles Chassé, whose critical writings have encouraged a more open discussion of the erotic themes of Mallarmé's poetry. See, e.g., his pages on the “Faune” in the chapter “Erotisme et Stérilité” in his book Les Clés de Mallarmé (Paris: Aubier, 1954).

8 As Henri Mondor points out in Histoire d'un faune, Boucher's piece of rococo pastoralism was not displayed publicly until 1880. However, Lloyd James Austin does not consider the case closed and believes that Mallarmé may have been inspired by some form of reproduction of the painting. See his article “ ‘L'Après-Midi d'un faune’: Essai d'explication,” Synthèses, 258/259 (Dec./Jan. 1968), p. 34, n. 33.

9 Literature as System (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1971), p. 128.

10 For a discussion of the dramatic aspect of the “Faune,” see Haskell M. Block, Mallarmé and the Symbolist Drama (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1963), pp. 21–35.

11 Variations sur les bucoliques (Paris: Gallimard, 1956), p. 19.

12 Trans, by -A. S. F. Gow, Theocritus, I (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1952). Gow's translations of Theocritus are used, unless otherwise indicated.

13 In this particular example I mean by catharsis the reduction of sexual energy to a normal level through the conscious sublimation of the portion of that energy needed for creative activity. But see the discussion of the term in F. L. Lucas, Tragedy (New York: Collier Books, 1962), pp. 34–49.

14 See Eleanor Winsor Leach, Virgil's Eclogues: Landscapes of Experience (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1974), pp. 166–70, for a similar appreciation of the role of Gallus in Arcadia.

15 Cf. Harold J. Smith, “Mallarmé's Faun: Hero or Anti-Hero?” Romantic Review, 64 (March 1973), 111–24. According to Smith, “the subject of the poem is not the triumph but the defeat of art, the defeat of the Faun-musician by the Faun-lover” (p. 112). Up to this point I agree with Smith's thesis. However, my own attention is drawn to the extraordinary way Mallarmé communicates a sense of the faun as unconscious poetic genius, pastoral diamond in the rough.

16 Translation in Modern Continental Literary Criticism, ed. O. B. Hardison, Jr. (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1962), p. 38.

17 Cohn, in a recent article, speaks of an “overall similarity of atmosphere” between the “Faune” and various passages in the works of Keats: “the fusion of sparkling intellect and plunging sensuality, this is surely the main point.” Yes. But Keats lacks, in my opinion, the deep sense of irony and humor that, in the “Faune,” keeps sensual sweetness from cloying and intellectual enthusiasm from making vapid proclamations. See Robert Greer Cohn, “Keats and Mallarmé,” Comparative Literature Studies, 7 (1970), 201–03.