EPHEMERAL SIGNS: APPREHENDING THE IDEA
THROUGH POETRY AND DANCE
Mary Lewis Shaw
Though his dance criticism constitutes no more than a few pages,
the nineteenth-century poet Stephane Mallarme has come to be
considered an important dance theorist. * His dance essays set forth
a complex and original view of dance as a poetry of the body and
prefigure contemporary efforts to study dance as a system of signs.
Mallarme's prose style is, however, notoriously obscure and resistant to translation. Thus despite the power and beauty of their
literary expression, his ideas on dance remain largely inaccessible
without critical examination. Through a close reading and translation of several of his key passages on dance, this essay will seek
to clarify his theory of the aesthetico-metaphysical function of dance
and his concept of its relationship to his own art, poetry.2
Mallarme described dance as a "rite . . . the expression of the
Idea" ("rite . . . enonce de lldee") (295) and as "the superlative
theatrical form of poetry" (forme theatrale de poesie par excellence")
(308). Among theatrical arts, he deemed dance "... alone capable,
through its summary writing, of translating the fleeting, and the sudden, even the Idea" (". .. seule capable, par son ecriture sommaire,
de traduire le fugace et le soudain jusqu, a lldee") (emphasis mine,
541). He thus allies and underscores two aspects of dance, which
are not ordinarily simultaneously emphasized — its ritual character
and its character as a writing, a system of theatrical signs.
The objects of Mallarme's dance criticism are quite dissimilar. In
"Ballets" he discusses Viviane (choreographed by Luigi Manzotti
in 1884) and Les Deux Pigeons (choreographed by Louis Merante in
1886). In "Autre etude de danse, Les fonds dans le ballet" ("Another
Dance Study, the Resources of Ballet") and a short untitled essay
he analyzes one of the earliest forms of modern dance the stunning veil dances of Loie Fuller — who, highly acclaimed in 1890s
Paris, came to personify Art Nouveau.3 As is evident, however, even
in the title of his initial essay on Fuller, Mallarme did not draw a
sharp distinction between these two kinds of dance. Rather, he considered dance very broadly and primarily in terms of its relationship to poetry.
In describing the similarities and differences between poetry and
dance, Mallarme uses both metaphor and comparison, often rapidly shifting between them. This occurs most strikingly in "Ballets,"
where he stresses first the similarity of dance to poetic writing —
stating explicitly that the dancer is a metaphorical figure and that
she writes — and second, that dance writing is fundamentally
distinct from writing in the literal sense. More economical than
prose, it is corporeal and not actually written. The dancer's text is
thus, he suggests, a poem that, paradoxically, is never inscribed
— that is, fixed or permanently recorded as is the poem on the
page.4
. . . the dancer is not a woman who dances, for the juxtaposed reasons
that she is not a woman but a metaphor summarizing one of the
rudimentary elements of our form, sword, cup, flower, etc., and that
she does not dance, suggesting rather, by the marvel of abbreviations
or lunges, through a corporeal form of writing, that which would
require paragraphs of dialogue as well as descriptive prose, to
express, in the writing of a text: a poem free of all writing apparatus.
. . . la danseuse n'est pas une femme qui danse, pour ces motifs juxtaposes qu elle n'est pas une femme, mais une metaphore rdsumant
un des aspects elementaires de notre forme, glaive, coupe, fleur, etc.,
et qu'elle ne danse pas, suggerant, par le prodige de raccourcis ou
d'elans, avec une ecriture corporelle ce qu'U faudrait des paragraphes
en prose dialoguee autant que descriptive, pour exprimer, dans la
redaction: poeme dgage de tout appareil du scribe (304).
Mallarme introduces his articulation of the fundamental duality
of dance — its combined poetic (or metaphorical) function and its
corporeal, uninscribed nature — as "the jugment, or axiom, to affirm with respect to ballet!" ("Le jugement, ou l'axiome, a affirmer
en fait de ballet!") (p. 304). In fact, his perception of the dual,
oxymoronic character of dance (as an unwritten body writing) is
already implicit in his designation of the dancer as a "metaphor"
(a woman dancing who is not a woman dancing).5 Like the ensemble of her text, the dancer acts, for the poet as a negative poetic sign.
The absence-in-presence of the dancing figure implies a presencein-absence of the literary text.
If the ballerina writes like a poet, it is because her steps are
generally "emblematic" (that is, in Mallarme's terms, abstractly
representational) not mimetic (or representational through
verisimilitude). For Mallarme (unlike for Noverre), the dancer is
different in essence from the mime.6 He compares the writing of
dance to hieroglyphs, not because its symbols are iconic (that is,
forged in the image of real, concrete objects) but rather because this
pictorial writing (like that of the musical score) has a mysterious
and sacred quality and is difficult to decipher.
In "Ballets," after having described dance as a kind of (unwritten) poetic text, Mallarme recommends that the spectator make the
effort to read it:
The only imaginative exercise consists in... patiently and passively
asking oneself before each step, each attitude — so strange those
pointings, tappings, lunges, and bounds — "What can this signify"
or better yet, inspired, in reading it.
L'unique entrainement imaginatif consiste . . . patiemment et
passivement a se demander devant tout pas, chaque attitude si
etranges, ces pointes et taquetes, allonge's ou ballons. [sic] "Que peut
signifier ceci" ou mieux, d'inspiration, le lire (307).
Dance Research journal 20/1 (Summer 1988) 3
In order to read or interpret the dance poem, the spectator must
study the dancer's various attitudes and transpose what he sees
into the poetic language of his own imagination. The spectator
holds within the key to the significance of the dance. He offers to
the dancer the flower of his own "poetic instinct," an intangible
flower similar to the ideal "roses" that her pointe-shoes pick and
offer for his interpretation. It is through the spectator's attribution
of a metaphorical sense to the dance steps that the dancer attains
a sign-function and the dance become a poem:
. . . (might you be lost in a theater hall, unknown spectator, Friend)
if you will but humbly place at her unwittingly revealing feet (like
the roses that aflickof her slippers of vertiginous pale satin picks
up and casts off into the visibility of higher regions) the Flower, first,
of you r poetic instinct, expecting nothing other than the clear revelation and in the light of day of a thousand latent imaginations: then
by an exchange whose secret seems poured out by her smile, without
delay she will deliver you the nudity of your concepts across the
always remaining final veil and silently will write your vision in the
manner of a Sign, which she herself is.
. . . (serais-tu perdu en une salle, spectateur tres etranger, Ami) pour
peu que tu deposes avec soumission a ses pieds d'inconsciente
revelatrice ainsi que les roses qu'enleve et jette en la visibility de
regions superieures un jeu de ses chaussons de satin pale vertigineux, la Fleur d'abord de ton poetique instinct, n'attendant de rien
autre la mise en evidence et sous le vrai jour des mille imaginations
latentes: alors, par un commerce dont parait son sourire verser le
secret, sans tarder elle te livre a travers le voile dernier qui toujours
reste, la nudite de tes concepts et silencieusement ecrira ta vision
a la fagon d'un Signe, qu'elle est (307).
In this description of dance's signifying process, the veil, which
remains intact but across which the dancer transports the spectator's imagination, symbolizes that mysterious, undefinable element dividing the sign into two entities at once identical and contrary (i.e., equivalent and yet complementary in their opposition)
— the dance step (signifier) and its meaning (the signified).
Dance, then, is like poetry in that it constitutes a signifying
system. However, insofar as it remains true to its symbolic nature
— which is neither mimetic, nor arbitrarily prescribed by convention — dance is not strictly speaking a gestural form of language.
Its symbolism does not develop as that of poetry does from a codified
semiotic system. Dance movements may constitute signs for the
spectator, but unlike most linguistic signs, these signs are inherently
open-ended. Only the signifier is given; the reader is free to choose
the signified.
This explains in part why, for Mallarme, the dancer — whom he
perceives as inseparable from the dance — constitutes an ideal sign.
His belief in the ideality of dance (underscored in the above-cited
passage by the capitalization of the term "Sign") is, however, also
determined by his perception of the dance sign as being not only
a representation but also a symbolic embodiment of whatever ideal
form of beauty the spectator interprets it to represent. Unlike
linguistic signs, which, he often explained, can only name or refer
to what is physically present in the world (or evoke, as in poetry,
the affecting presence of things in their absence), dance signs seem
to constitute their own referents; they do not merely name, copy,
or suggest but actually materially incorporate what they signify.
Moreover, like The'ophile Gautier, who described the primary subject of dance as dancing,7 Mallarme deemed "the mobile synthesis"
of the dancers' attitudes to be the ultimate signified of every dance
and of the art of dance on the whole. He dismisses the plots of both
Viiriane (an allegorical battle between light and darkness) and Les
Deux Pigeons (a fable about love, separation and reconciliation) as
pretexts (albeit charming) for the exposition of the signifying process of dance itself.
4 Dance Research Journal 20/1 (Summer 1988)
That which permits the completion of this ideal signifying process is, of course, the spectator's capacity to transpose form and
movement into virtual poetry — in effect, into a not yet written
poem. And it is this exchange between dance and poetry, which
Mallarme views as revealing the Idea: for him, a metaphysical principle of the identity-in-difference of tangible forms and immaterial
concepts determined by the identity-in-difference of body and
mind within the human self.
For Mallarme, the existence of the Idea can be revealed by merely presenting a human being with one or the other of its contrary
manifestations — either tangible being (a dynamic vision or sound,
as is set forth in dance or music) or its transposition in the realm
of the imaginary (which the language of poetry transcribes). By virtue of his own participation in both these worlds of being, the Self
beholding either one of the Idea's manifestations will inevitably
supply the other.
Thus, the reader/spectator of the poetic or balletic art work
already carries within him, as it were, the art work's other half. He
reacts to poetry sensorially and to dance intellectually. This does
not mean that poetry is directly experienced as sensorial or dance
as intellectual. Rather, the text appeals directly to the reader's intellect, but his intellect calls upon his imagination to recreate the
sensory impressions produced by the spectacle of dance. Conversely, when witnessing dance, the spectator's senses are appealed to
directly, but in such a way as to provoke the intellectual process
of meaning deciphering implicit in the reading of poetic texts.
Ballet is an art especially well suited to this process of exchange
because in its bareness or lack of particular signification, the dance
form provides the imagining intellect with an ideal complement
for its own "nudity," which (conversely to that of dance) consists
in an inherent lack of tangible form. It is in the marriage or juxtaposition of these two nudities — the naked beauty of dance forms
(metaphorically interpreted as "fleur, onde, nuee, et bijou" ["flower,
wave, cloud, and jewel"]) and that of concepts ("notre nudite
spirituelle" ["our spiritual nudity"]) — that the "rite" of the Idea
consists. Since the dancer herself appears as dual, that is, as half
sign-object — "a demi l'element en cause" ("half the [metaphorical]
element in question") — and half an imagining subject, a human
being who like the spectator interprets signs — "half humanity apt
to become confused in the flotation of reverie" ("a demi humanite
apte a s'y confondre, dans la flottaison de reverie") — she is both
the real and symbolic focal point of what Mallarme calls the
aesthetic "operation":8
Ballet gives but little: it is the imaginative genre. When for our eyes
a sign of scattered general beauty isolates itself,flower,wave, cloud,
and jewel, etc., if, for us, the sole means of knowing it consists in
juxtaposing its appearance to our spiritual nudity so that our mind
may feel (the sign) analogous and adapt it to itself in some exquisite
confusion of (our spiritual nudity) with that vanishedform— by virtue alone of the rite, there, expression of the Idea, doesn't the dancer
seem half the element in question, and half humanity apt to become
confused in theflotationof reverie? (This is) the operation which is
poetry, par excellence, and theater.
Le ballet ne donne que peu: c'est le genre imaginatif. Quand s'isole
pour le regard un signe de l'eparse beautd generate,fleur,onde, nuee
et bijou, etc., si, chez nous, le moyen exclusif de le savoir consiste
a en juxtaposer l'aspect a notre nudite spirituelle afin qu'elle le sente
analogue et se l'adapte dans quelque confusion exquise d'elle avec
cette forme envolee — rien qu' au travers durite,li, enonc^ de lidee,
est-ce que ne parait pas la danseuse a demi l'elernent en cause, a demi
humanite apte a s'y confondre, dans laflottaisonde reverie? Ii>peration, ou poesie, par excellence et le theatre (295-296).
Dance, then, like poetry, produces semiosis — the process
whereby the initial, representational value of a sign becomes
integrated into a higher, more complex level of significance.9 But,
for Mallarme, dance is more closely associated with the signifier
(body and exteriority) than is literature, which (although it too
depends upon a minimal amount of material) is more closely
associated with the signified, the immaterial concept.
While Mallarme was undoubtedly aware of the weakness of this
dichotomy — both literature and dance consisting in material form
with the potential for producing meaning — his dance essays go
very far in the direction of establishing it. He often presents dance
and literature as contraries — the former as the purest art of the
body, and the latter as the purest art of the mind — for he posited
that it was only through a full taking into account of the differencein-nature of these art forms that their identity-in-function could be
authentically demonstrated or proved.
Thus, not only in his dance essays, but persistently throughout
his critical prose, dance superlatively expresses tangible being —
exteriority, materiality and act — while the literary text is presented
as the privileged expressive medium of the intangible reflection of
being in consciousness — interiority, immateriality and thought.
The literary text must directly (i.e., verbally) convey the existence
of an imagined, immaterial world of meaning. But, like the crystal
chandelier, which hangs above the audience exhibiting only its
illuminated intricate glasswork, dance should concretely present
nothing to the spectator but a transparent multifaceted form: a
luminous dynamic exteriority reflecting only itself and the spectator's multifaceted visions. The ceaselessly mobile dancer (in an
unbroken chain of pirouettes) demonstrates, for Mallarme, the
axiomatic principle that everything represented in the theater
should be (although concretely present) "as art itself commands
. . . fictional or ephemeral" ("comme le veut l'art meme . . . fictif ou
momentane").
(This is the) sole principle! and just as the chandelier shines setting itself aglow, promptly exhibiting, in all of its facets all possible
things and our adamantine vision, the dramatic work shows the succession of the act's exteriorities without any of its moments remaining real and without anything, in the final analysis, taking place.
Seul principe! et ainsi que resplendit le lustre, cfest-a-dire lui-meme,
l'exhibition prompte, sous toutes les facettes, de quoi que ce soit et
notre vue adamantine, une oeuvre dramatique monrre la succession
des exteriorites de l'acte sans qu'aucun moment garde de realite et
qu'il se passe, enfin de compte, rien (296).
Though dance (and particularly ballet) clearly aspires toward the
immaterial realm of poetry, Mallarme refers to it as the supremely
material art form, as the visual and plastic "incorporation of the
Idea" (306,541). In order to reveal the Idea, the dancer uses her body
as a vehicle or instrument (again, she is not just a woman but a
"metaphor"). This instrument, which draws out form, is at once
similar to and different from the writer's pen, which verbally communicates or transcribes the conceptual world of thought. While
the dancer does not articulate thought, she shares with the writer
the common goal of establishing communication between the sensory and conceptual worlds: "... before taking a step, she invites,
with two fingers, a trembling fold of her skirt and simulates a penfeathered impatience moving toward the Idea" ("... avant un pas,
elle invite, avec deux doigts, un pli fremissant de sa jupe et simule
une impatience de plumes vers l'idee") (306).10 We perceive the
dancer's legs as "having some other than personal significance, as
a direct instrument of the Idea" (". . . sous quelque signification
autre que personnelle, comme un instrument direct d'idee") (312).
Thus, by contrast to the various genres of literary expression
(whether poetic, fictional, or dramatic) dance actually requires not
only a text form (which in and of evokes the inner-theater of the
mind) but three-dimensional space within which to unfold:
It seems to me that dance alone, because of its evolutions, along
with mime, requires a real space, or the stage.
A sheet of paper may finally suffice to evoke any play: assisted by
his multiple personality each reader can perform the dramatic work
within his mind, which is not at all the case when it comes to
pirouettes.
La danse seule, du fait de ses evolutions, avec le mime me parait
necessiter un espace reel, ou la scene.
A la rigueur un papier suffit pour evoquer toute piece: aide1 de sa
personnalite multiple chacun pouvant se la jouer en dedans, ce qui
n'est pas le cas quand il s'agit de pirouettes (315).
Recognizing that dance, by contrast to literature, is a highly
physical phenomenon, Mallarme emphasizes that the dancer is
bound by the laws of nature. He appreciates that try as she might,
she cannot overcome her fundamental attachment to the earth. Indeed, he delights in "that ecstatic incapacity to disappear which
deliciously attaches the dancer to the stage boards" ("cette espece
d'extatique impuissance a disparaitre qui delicieusement attache
aux planchers la danseuse") (305). The ballerina may appear to
overcome gravity, but this illusion is the result of a difficult-tomaintain inner tension, a masterful control over her body.11
"Ballets" opens with a description of Elena Cornalba, who seems
without even the help of a light, floating costume, to suspend
herself in the air:
La Cornalba enraptures me, who dances as though undressed;
I mean that without the semblance of aid offered for an uplifting or
the fall by aflyingand gauze-drowsed presence, she seems called
into the air, to sustain herself, by the Italian virtue of a soft tension
of her body.
La Cornalba me ravit, qui danse comme devetue; c'est-a-dire que
sans le semblant d'aide offert a un enlevement ou a la chute par une
presence volante et assoupie de gazes, elle parait, appelee dans l'air,
s'y soutenir, du fait italien d'une moelleuse tension de sa personne
(303).
By contrast to the tutu-clad ballerina, Loi'e Fuller makes full use
of her costume, but she too attempts to defy the laws of physics,
filling the stage with yards of illuminated silks suspended in the
air by the skillfull manipulation of her body.12 Impressed at once
by the aesthetic effect (produced by the lighting) and the technical
difficulty of this feat, Mallarme associates its production with both
art and industry: "the exercise comparable to an invention, without
its utilitarian purpose, involves an intoxication of art and,
simultaneously, an industrial achievement" ("L'exercice, comme
invention, sans l'emploi, comporte une ivresse d'art et, simultane
un accomplissement industriel") (307).
It is the tangible quality of dance, the fact that it is a highly
physical mode of expression, both exemplifying and constrained
by the laws of the natural world, that constitutes, for Mallarme, its
major distinction from literature. Literature which presents itself
in writing or print on paper, is, of course, also tangible (and
Mallarme focuses with increasing intensity on its concrete aspects
in his later works such as Un coup de des and Le Livre). But dance
is certainly experienced by both dancer and spectator as being far
more tangible and concrete than literature. Moreover, what is tangible in dance is generally more relevant to its mode of expression
than are the tangible aspects of a text. This explains why a
choreographic score (a text of dance notation) is much less
aesthetically satisfying than a poetic "score" — the former is clearly not the dance, while the latter does adequately embody the
poem. The relative difference in the degree of concreteness of
literature and dance also, somewhat paradoxically, explains why
a literary text can be submitted to various types of radical formal
transformation (e.g. oral performance and translation) and still
retain some measure of its identity while a dance cannot.13
Dance Research Journal 20/1 (Summer 1988) 5
Thus, despite his insistence on the semiotic character of dance,
Mallarme does not imply that the signifying function of the dancer
presupposes a possible abstraction of her physical being. Though
he sometimes describes the dancer as an apparition — the ballerina
is a "prestigious being removed beyond all possible life" ("etre
prestigieux recule au dela de toute vie possible") (307) and Loie
Fuller a "phantome stranger" (Tetranger, fantome") (308) — he does
not suggest that the dancer's presence can be itself illusory or imaginatively evoked as the mere effect of a (written) sign. On the contrary, it is owing to her concrete, physical presence that the spectator
can perform the theatrical "operation" of illusion, trans-forming
her being into a ghost.
Contrary to what several critics have proclaimed, dance and
poetry are not then presented by Mallarme as merely two variants
of a single type of writing.14 Rather, owing to its greater participation in matter, and to the earlier discussed inherent duality of the
dancer as both interpreting subject and sign, Mallarme views dance
as an art contrary to poetry in some respects and as one fulfilling
certain requirements of an ideal, all-encompassing, art work which
poetry in and of itself cannot.
If Mallarme wished only to emphasize that poetry and dance are
two forms of writing, two different manifestations of a general sign
language, it would be pointless for him to stress as he does another
distinguishing factor — the non-linguistic character of dance.
While it is obvious that dance is a non-verbal form of expression
and communication,15 this is far from insignificant for Mallarme,
who underlines it on several occasions. The dancer cannot express
herself verbally; she is "mute" and silent, her only eloquence is
dancing (304). More strikingly (because it seems less generally relevant to an evaluation of dance) Mallarme characterizes the dancer as
illiterate. In "Ballets" the narrator instructs the spectator to follow
attentively the configurations of the "illiterate ballerina abandoning herself to the devices of her profession" ("la ballerine illettree
se livrant aux jeux de sa profession") (307). In effect, he dramatically
cuts off the dancer from every possible access to language.
If Mallarme so emphasizes the point that the dancer does not
communicate verbally, that dance is not linguistic, it is because of
the close association he makes between language and consciousness. He considers dance, by contrast to poetry, to be a
primarily unconscious and instinctive form of art. This appraisal
of dance is, of course, highly questionable. Dancers do not
necessarily any more than poets operate by instinct. Mallarme,
nevertheless, in stressing the physical, sensorial quality of dance,
persistently implies that its performance does not depend upon
any intellectual process at all. This may be explained partly by his
lack of familiarity with what the performance of dance involves,
and partly by his desire to underscore what he felt to be its natural
opposition and complementarity to poetry.
Recall that in "Ballets," he tells the spectator to surrender his
imagination not to the ballerina, but to her "unwittingly revealing
feet ("ses pieds d'inconsciente revelatrice") (307). And though
Mallarme credits Loie Fuller with being an innovator, capable of
teaching aesthetic lessons, she too is characterized as a barely conscious source of revelation (her lesson is that dance ought not to
be confined within the context of a fixed decor, i.e., immobile cardboard stage sets):
. . . I denounce . . . a usual error in staging: assisted as I am, unexpectedly, suddenly by the solution which my hardly conscious or here
willing inspirer unfolds through the sole movement of her gown.
. . . je denonce... une erreur ordinaire a la mise en scene: aide comme je suis, inespe'rement soudain par la solution que deploie avec
I'emoi seul de sa robe ma tris peu conscknte ou volontairement ici en cause
inspiratrice (emphasis mine, 308).
6 Dance Research ]ournal 20/1 (Summer 1988)
It is bacause the dancer does not read, write, or speak that she
is seen by Mallarme as closer to the beings of the natural world than
those who do. Dancers, he says, communicate through their bodies
and operate "by instinct" (309). Hence they portray animals better than, for example, actors do. The dancing characters of Les Deux
Pigeons are well suited to represent lovebirds because they are "more
instinctive leaping and mute than those enabled to speak by a conscious language in playacting" ("plus instinctifs comme bondissants
et mue'ts que ceux a qui un conscient langage permet de s'enoncer
dans la comedie") (304).
Yet, Mallarme describes the female lead of Les Deux Pigeons as
both animal-like and divine: ". . . the amazing Miss (Rosita) Mauri
sums up the subject by her divination mixed with troubled and
pure animality..." (Te'merveillante Mademoiselle Mauri resume
le sujet par sa divination melee d'animalite trouble et pure . . .")
(305-306). The ballerina's "divination" clearly consists in the fact
that without the assistance of any form of human "sign" language,
either gestural (she does not mime), written, or spoken, she nevertheless signifies, expresses, and communicates. Moreover, (as
earlier discussed) her body language does not seem, to Mallarme,
merely to represent. Rather, like the Word of God, it embodies its
own signifieds and is thus a divine utterance (parole divine).
Of crucial importance to Mallarme is the capacity of dancetobe
precisely what it expresses: "There is an a r t . . . the unique or pure
one in which to state means to produce, it roars out its demonstrations through its practice" (II est . . . un art, l'unique ou pur
qu'enoncer signifie produire, il hurle ses demonstrations par la
pratique") (295). And what dance expresses most keenly is the
physical dynamism of the human self. This is its particular virtue
for Mallarme, and what draws him to consider dance as the perfect
counterpart for the poetic text.
Literature on its own can constitute the perfect monument to the
human spirit, the solid binding of the book ". . . offering the
miniscule tomb, naturally, of the soul" ("offrant le miniscule
tombeau, certes, de l'ame") (379).16 And insofar as it maintains its
distance from the sense-oriented world of theater, literature can also
express the secret of its own distinctive origin in the mind, an everhidden, always intangible aspect of the self.
Yet literature, on its own, lacks an essential element that can
testify to the total fact of human being; it lacks the very aspects of
the self and the Idea (the metaphysical principle which allows the
Self's being) that dance provides in its presentation of a performing body. While the text can and should contain the author's image as a depersonalized origin of duality (as actor) — "(t)he writer
. . . must appoint himself in the text the spiritual histrion" ("L'ecrivain . . . doit s'instituer, au texte, le spirituel histrion") (370) — it
can only do this in an already dead, or in Mallarme's terms "annulled" or "abolished," form — for example, through the narrative
pronoun "I." The advantage of dance is that in performance we
perceive directly a depersonalized incorporation of the origin of
duality. We behold the performer of the aesthetic operation through
which the Idea is revealed and we behold her live and in full action.
Thus, for Mallarme, if the artist is to attempt the creation of an
ideal, total, art work — a work permitting the apprehension of the
Idea in both of its contrary manifestations — he must not only write;
he must also dance.
This does not simply mean that his phrasing should emulate the
movement of dance, although, as is evident in the following
passage on Loie Fuller, Mallarme's phrasing sometimes does: (Note,
for example, how his description evokes her employment of centrifugal force by alternating in focus between her central, rigid body
and the surrounding expanse of whirling veils.)
Thus, this multiple disengagement around a nudity, great with
contradictory flights wherever she commands, stormy, planing,
magnifies the naked figure, central, unto dissolution: for all obeys
an impulse fleeting in whirlwinds, she sums up, by an act of will
extending to the extremities of each frantic wing and thrusts her
statuette, rigid, erect — dead from the effort of condensing out of
this virtual extraction of herself belated decorative starts of skies, sea,
evenings, perfume, and froth.
Ainsi ce degagement multiple autour d'une nudite, grand des contradictoires vols ou celle-ci l'ordonne, orageux, planant l'y magnifie
jusqu' a la dissoudre: centrale, car tout obeit a une impulsion fugace
en tourbillons, elle resume, par le vouloir aux extremites eperdu de
chaque aile et darde sa statuette, stricte, debout — morte de l'effort
a condenser hors d'une liberation presque d'elle des sursautements
attardes decoratifs de cieux, de mer, de soirs, de parfum et d'ecume
(309).
In an essay entitled "lAction restreinte" ("Restricted Action")
Mallarme actually suggests that the writer should himself become
a dancer to demonstrate, before a community of witnesses, the
authentic correspondence of his text to the sensorial, theatrical
world. He describes this process as a ritual self-sacrifice that the
poet performs in order to consecrate the fact of his own existence
(as a poet) and that of the metaphysical Idea:
Stage, chandelier, clouding of fabrics and liquification of mirrors,
of a real order, even down to the excessive bounds of our gauzy form
around the halted virile stature; a Place presents itself, a stage, an
aggrandizement before all of the spectacle of Self; there, by virtue
of the intermediaries of light, of flesh, and of laughter, the sacrifice
made of the inspirer's identity comes forth complete or it resides now
in a strange resurrection, removed from himself: whose word echoed
and henceforth vain is exhaled by the orchestral chimera.
(In) a theater, he celebrates himself, anonymous, in the hero.
All this, as in the functioning of festivals: a people bears witness
to his transfiguration into truth.
Plancher, lustre, obnubilation des tissus et liquefaction de miroirs,
en l'ordre reel, jusqu'aux bonds excessifs de notre forme gazee autour
d'un arret, sur pied, de la virile stature, un Lieu se presente, scene,
majoration devant tous du^pectacle de Soi; la en raison des intermediaires de la lumiere, de la chair et des rires, le sacrifice qu'y
fait, relativerrtent a sa personnalite, l'inspirateur, aboutit complet ou
c'est, dans une resurrection etrangere, fini de celui-ci: de qui le verbe
repercuW et vain desormais s'exhale par la chimere orchestrale.
Une salle, il se celebre, anonyme, dans le heros.
Tout, comme fonctionnement de fetes: un peuple temoigne de sa
transfiguration en verite. (371)
Mallarme suggests that it is only through such a mirror-like dance
of auto-negation — one reflecting the presence-in-absence of the
writer and of his "word" ("le verbe") — that the poet can break out
of the confines of his sedentary existence to ideally, authentically
act.
This call to writers to sanctify themselves and their texts through
their transfiguration in a sacrificial dance cannot but strike the
reader as odd. Although, Mallarme, like Wagner, transforms poetry
into theater with a view toward its ritual celebration, his conception of the ideal interaction between poetry and dance does not at
all imply their synthesis in a Wagnerian Gesamtkuntswerk. (Note in
the passage above that when the poet has been resurrected as a
dancer, his "word" is deemed henceforth vain). Moreover, despite
the striking similarity between Mallarme's description of this ritual
dance and his earlier cited description of Fuller, it is quite difficult
to imagine precisely what the nature of such a dance would be.
Nevertheless, as odd and inconceivable as it may seem,
Mallarme's idea of developing a ritual dance of negation was not
just a passing whim. His preoccupation with finding a means of
introducing this type of a dance into his own work is manifested
by the incorporation of notes for an extraordinary "ballet" into the
manuscript of his unfinished mystery play, Les Noces d'Herodiade,
mystere. In this work, Mallarme transposes what he disdainfully
refers to as the literary "anecdote" of Salome's legendary veil dance
into an actual dance serving to conclude rather than to introduce
his play. This dance is as difficult to imagine as the sacrificial dance
of the poet described in "UAction restreinte." It is, however,
schematically described as a kind of negating, negative dance —
a bizarre series of double gestures through which the heroine
simultaneously mirrors and cancels out what has previously been
articulated and (verbally) negated within the poetic text:
she awakens —
(none of this has happened)
and dances a moment
for herself alone — in order to be
at the same time here and there — and
so that none of this will have happened
. . . she leans to one
side — to the other —
showing one
breast* — the other —
and surprised
without gauze
*in accordance with this breast, the other
identity
and that done — on
one foot the other,
themselves
on the feet
breasts
a kind of dance
terrifying outlined
— and in place, without
moving
— site null
. . . elle se reveille —
(rien de tout cela est-il arrive^
et danse un moment
pour elle seule — afin d'etre
a la fois ici la — et que
rien de cela ne soit arrive
. . . se penche-t-elle d'un
cote — de l'autre —
montrant un
sein* — l'autre —
et surprise
sans gaze
*selon ce sein, celui-la
identite
et cela fait — sur
un pied l'autre,
eux memes
sur les pieds
seins
une sorte de danse
effrayante esquisse
— et sur place, sans
bouger
— lieu nul17
There is, moreover, further and equally striking evidence that
Mallarme planned to transpose poetry into dance in Le Livre, his
posthumously published manuscript describing the ultimate Book
— a Book that could replace the Bible as foundation for a modern
religion. This unfinished manuscript describes a text to be perDance Research Journal 20/1 (Summer 1988) 7
formed in a series of ritual seances, and it contains numerous
diagrams showing the juxtaposition of ballets and arcane poems.
While these ballets are not described, we find frequent allusions
to dance interspersed throughout the schematic narration of one
of four modern "myths," which seem to elaborate the essence of
the Book's thematic content.18
Clearly, Mallarme's thinking on dance led him far afield not only of ballets such as Les Deux Pigeons, but also of the veil dances of
Loi'e Fuller. His projects involving the transposition of poetry into
dance strike even the contemporary reader as uncannily avantgarde. This, however, may also be true, of the paradoxical aesthetic
theory sketched out in his dance essays, which, as we have seen,
inextricably bind two art forms which are rarely even allied. In
recognizing the identity-in-difference of the signifying systems of
poetry and dance, in affirming their autonomy as much as their
interdependence, and in stressing the semiotic as well as the ritual
character of dance, Mallarme anticipates the ideas of a wide range
of twentieth-century artists and theorists of dance. This leads one
to wonder whether the ideal interaction between poetry and dance
which he recommends has been attempted or even realized by
others. It would be interesting to investigate this as well as to
examine contemporary collaborations of dance and poetry in relation to the dance performances which his own unfinished
manuscripts describe.
NOTES
1. The critic Andre' Levinson was perhaps the first to bring Mallarme's
dance essays to the attention of the dance public, labeling Mallarme a
"metaphysician of Ballet" in a 1923 article for La Revue Musicale (No. 5,
21-33). Many of Mallarme's statements on dance are rearticulated in the
essays of his disciple Paul Valery and also paraphrased in Valery's wellknown socratic dialogue LAme et la danse (in Oeuvres, vol. II, ed. Jean
Hytier [Paris: Gallimard, 1957]). Frank Kermode discusses Mallarme's
writings on Loi'e Fuller at length in "Poet and the Dancer before
Diaghilev" (in Puzzles and Epiphanies, 1962). The inclusion of Mallarme's
essay "Ballets" in the recent anthology What Is Dance: Readings in Theory
and Criticism (Eds. Roger Copeland and Marshall Cohen [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983,145-160]) indicates a wide-spread recognition of his contribution to dance theory by scholars in that field.
2. Unless otherwise specified, Mallarme citations are taken from his
Oeuvres completes (Eds. Henri Mondon and G. Jean-Aubry [Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1945]). My translations do not attempt to render
Mallarme's prose in either clear or idiomatic English, but rather to conserve as much as possible the ambiguities, punctuation, and syntactic
anomalies of the original, in order to convey to English-speaking readers
the complexity of thought conveyed in the poetic obliquity of his style.
Other translations of many of the excerpted passages are available in
Bradford Cook's Mallarme: Selected Prose Poems, Essays, & Letters
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1956), Mary Ann Caws's Mallarme:
Selected Poetry and Prose (New Directions, 1982), Frank Kermode's "Poet
and the Dancer before Diaghilev" (op. cit) and in Barbara Johnson's
translation of Jacques Derrida's "The Double Session" in Dissemination
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
3. "Ballets" was first published in 1886, "Autre etude de danse" in 1893.
Other essays including significant discussion of dance are "Crayonne
au theatre" (1887) and a short article on Wagner entitled "Parenthese"
(1886-1887).
4. I do not think that Mallarme ever considered the possibility of dance
notation, which would, undoubtedly, have interested him from several
points of view.
5. In LAme et la danse, Valery simplifies Mallarme's presentation of the dual
aspect of the dancer, alluding to the above-cited passage from "Ballets":
She (the dancer) is a woman who dances, and who would
divinely cease to be a woman, if the leap she made could summon her as far as the clouds. But just as we cannot reach infinity either in dream or in wakefulness so too does she always
become herself again: ceasing to be snowflake, bird, idea; to be
finally whatever the flute desired to make of her, for the same
earth that sent her up, recalls her, and returns her all out of breath
to her womanly nature and to her beau . . .
Elle (la danseuse) est une femme qui danse, et qui cesserait
divinement d'etre femme si le bond qu'elle a fait y pouvait obeir
jusqu'aux nues. Mais comme nous ne pouvons pas aller a l'infini, ni dans lereve,ni dans la veille, elle, pareillement redevient
toujours elle-meme: cesse d'etre enfin tout ce qu'il plut a la flute
qu'elle fut car la meme terre qui l'a envoyee, la rappelle, et la rend
toute haletante a sa nature de femme, et a son a m i . . . (op. cit.,
151).
8 Dance Research Journal 20/1 (Summer 1988)
6. Mallarme was fascinated by pantomime and eloquently describes its
essence in "Mimique." Relentless, however, in advocating the necessity for purity in genres, he resented the mixing of dance and pantomime.
In "Ballets" he states that these two rival, silent art forms should be
"allied" but not confused, and expresses his regret that "the dancer, who
expresses herself through steps" understanding "no other eloquence,
even gesture" is by some choreographers required to mime (306).
7. Gautier cited in Walter Sorell's, The Dance Has Many Faces (Cleveland:
World Publishing Co., 1951, p. 89).
8. Thus, while Mallarme discusses the dancer primarily from the point
of view of the spectator, he was aware that she too is in a sense a reader
interpreting in her choreographed role the inner-world of her own imagination as well as that of the spectator (which is indeed possible given
the open-ended signification of dance signs). That is why he points to
her as the center of the aesthetic "operation." We shall see further,
however, that in the process of underscoring the physical quality of
dance, he also characterizes the dancer as a not fully conscious artist,
as one who (contrary to the poet) acts "instinctively" through her body
rather than through her mind.
9. See Michael Riffaterre's discussion of semiosis in Semiotics of Poetry.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978, p. 4).
10. My translation of "une impatience de plumes" seeks to render the double
meaning of "plumes" in French (pens and feathers) as the term definitely
functions as a syllepsis in this passage.
11. In Feeling and Form, Suzanne Langer presents dance as the manifestation of "virtual powers." Primary among these is the illusion of the conquest of gravity, which makes the ballerina seem like an apparition:
Free dance movement produces, above all (for the performer as
well as for the spectator) the illusion of the conquest of gravity,
i.e. freedom from the actual forces that are normally known and
felt to control the dancer's body (New York: Charles Scribner's
Sons, 1953, 194).
12. In "Le sacre du printemps," Jacques Riviere draws a parallel between
two types of artifice in dance, which Nijinsky set out to destroy. The
first is that of Loie Fuller, in which the dancer's body appears to become
lost in her illuminated veils. The second occurs in those ballets where
the lines of the body are lost in hazy, indefinite movements. (See this
article in What is Dance, op. cit., 115-123). In a passage on Loie Fuller,
Mallarme comments on the same parallel without objecting to either
type of artifice. Indeed, he claims that a fundamental characteristic of
dance is to fill itself out. While the ballerina is too sparsely-clothed, she
too (like Fuller) creates "imaginary wefts," but throughflightand movement alone (311).
13. I think this point is important though I realize that, touching on several
complex issues, it is debatable. What I wish to stress is that when a dance
is rechoreographed or radically formally altered in a manner comparable
to that required by a literary work's translation, the altered dance is
neither necessarily perceived nor expected to constitute a reflection of
an earlier "original" dance form. Rather, by virtue of its
rechoreographing, the dance is felt to be a new and original work of art.
14. Arguing (in my view incorrectly) that Mallarme wished in his own poetry
to achieve a synthesis of the arts comparable to Wagnerian music-drama,
In The Dance, John Martin emphasizes the significance of this exception
many critics have emphasized only his articulation of the similarities
in describing dance as "the common impulse to resort to movement to
between poetry and dance (see for example Suzanne Bernard's Mallarme
externalize emotional states which cannot be externalized by rational
et la musique [Paris: Nizet, 1959] and Guy Delfel's LEsthetique de Stephane
means." For Martin, "rational means" are evidently those of language
Mallarme [Paris: Flammarion, 1951]). In "La double seance, " Jacques
since he perceives the dance as an "intuitive reaction which is too deep
Derrida underscores Mallarme's articulation of differences among the
for words" (New York: Tudor Publishing Company, 1980, 10).
arts. However, he too perhaps underplays a critical difference between
16. Mallarme defines the book as a "spiritual instrument" and describes
literature and dance (the one being literally written, the other performed)
its modality of presence as absolutely distinct from all that (in nature)
suggesting that all differences among the arts are, for Mallarme, less
is: " — Yes, Literature exists, and if you will, alone, to the exclusion of
important than their collective demonstration of the general principle
all else" (646); " . . . a leaf enclosed (in the binding) contains a secret,
of writing as difference or differentiation. Derrida does not discuss the
silence lingers there, precious, and evocative signs follow, for the mind
fact that Mallarme sometimes presents literal and corporeal writing as
literarily abolished from all things" (379). (" — Oui, que la Literature
not only different but also as partially contrary or antithetical modes
existe et, si Ton veut, seule, a l'exception de tout" (646); "une feuille
(see this discussion in La dissemination. Paris: Seuil, 1972, 273-275).
fermee (dans le pliage) contien(t) un secret, le silence y demeure,
15. Because dance is a means of expression and communication many
precieux et des signes evocatoires succedent, pour lesprit a tout litte'rairedancers and theorists refer to it as a language in spite of its nonverbal
ment aboli" (379).
character. In The Language of Dance (Trans. Walter Sorell [Middletown, 17. LesNocesd'He'rodiade, mystere, ed. Gardner Davies (Paris: Gallimard, 1959,
Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1966]), Mary Wigman stresses
pp. 139, 113-114). It is interesting to note that Martha Graham's "ritual
the immediacy and directness with which dance conveys "man's innerdance" Herodiade (1944) was inspired by a much earlier version of
most emotions and need for communication," as does Rudolf von Laban
Mallarme's work, a poetic dialogue which does not contain any
in The Language of Movement (Boston: Plays, Inc., 1974). In To Dance is
references to dance.
Human: A Theory of Non-verbal Communication, Judith Lynn Hanna
18. I analyze more fully Mallarme's references to dance in Le Livre and Les
analyzes dance as a form of communication very similar to language
Noces d'He'rodiade in "Performance in the Texts of Mallarme: The Passage
except for its nonverbal aspect (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979).
from Art to Ritual" (Doctoral Dissertation, Columbia University, 1986).
Dance Research Journal 20/1 (Summer 1988) 9
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