Mallarmé on Derrida

Author(s): Robert Greer Cohn

Source: The French Review, Vol. 61, No. 6 (May, 1988), pp. 884-889
Published by: American Association of Teachers of French
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THEFRENCH Vol. 61, No. 6, May 1988
REVIEW, Printed in U.S.A.

Mallarme on Derrida

By RobertGreerCohn

NOTION of the undecidable stems, as he knows and acknowl-

DERRIDA'S
JACQUES but he handles it with a new sort of stubborn
from a
edges, long tradition,
virtuosity, particularly in what is often regarded as his best book, La Dissemi-
nation. There he applies it to Plato and then to a sort of duet between Plato and
Mallarme, starting with the latter's Mimique and passing to all sorts of other
texts for confirmation of his deconstructive reading of Mimique and his refuta-
tion of Jean-Pierre Richard's thematic approach to Mallarme. For all of this he
draws, as he graciously acknowledges, on my previous work in L'Oeuvre de
Mallarme: un coup de des. This puts me in a somewhat awkward position: I am
grateful for his support and his preference for my wide-open approach to that
of Richard, as he demonstrates and declares, but on the other hand I have
definite reservations about some of his analysis, particularly in reference to his
well-known concept of the hymen, which I find quite mistaken.
The idea is superficially attractive: a hymen is a marriage which unites, of
course, but it is offset, in a typical Mallarmean suspension of opposites, by
another sense of the word, in French as in English: the membrane which
separates (before it is pierced in the love-act). But in none of the examples he
adduces does the word convincingly suggest the latter, somewhat technical (for
Mallarme) meaning, certainly not in the sense of "barrier' on which Derrida
insists. Furthermore, in some cases which he emphasizes, this second meaning
makes for truly clumsy and even grotesque imagery. All we have to do is look
at those texts to see that this is so.
First, a glance into Mallarme's favorite dictionary, Littre,tells us the following
about the word as Mallarme uses it, meaning "marriage': "ETYM.Latin Hymen,
de [Greek word], dieu du mariage ... et chant de mariage ... Parmi les
etymologies, les uns le rattachent a [Greek word], membrane, ce qui est peu
probable, les autres a [Greek word], hymne." The word hymen, meaning
"membrane", does come from the Greek equivalent. There is no recorded
example of Mallarme using that word, so far as I know.
The anagram and probable derivation make hymne a compelling overtone of
hymen for Mallarme, as I had noted in my commentary on Prose (pour des
Esseintes)in Toward the Poems of Mallarme (243). Both refer to a joining in love,
communion. There are further minor echoes, possibly, of "Hymettus" (honey)
and "amen";also the y-shape is delicately suggestive of a convergence, as had
been observed in various studies.
884

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MALLARME ON DERRIDA 885

On the other hand, the word meaning "membrane blocking the vagina" seems
too technical, biological, anatomical, medical, for inclusion in the poetic "Jeu
supreme"; it is hard to think of a parallel inclusion in the work of Mallarme.
The only example where the minor sense does no harm (though the idea of
barrier is not there) is from L'Apres-midid'un faune: "Tropd'hymen souhaite de
qui cherche le la." The passage is patently sexual already without the "mem-
brane," and so it adds little. The dream is of gratifying union, so the barrier
notion is really subdued here--at most it may hint at the virginity of the two
nymphs (dubious in the case of one of them)--but in the rush of the faun's
desire, that minor obstacle is almost totally obscured by the triumphally greedy
Trop.
In none of the other examples do we have even that possibility of an evoked
membrane.
"Richard Wagner ...": "des deux elements de beaute qui s'excluent et, tout
au moins, l'un l'autre, s'ignorent, le drame personnel et la musique ideale, il
[Wagner] effectua l'hymen." (Mallarme, 543). Unless both the partners here
have membranes, there is no way for that biological entity to creep in here.
Besides, it is Wagner who "effectuates the hymen" and how could he be
installing a membrane? Or even a barrier?
Likewise in '"Crayonneau thetre":
A deduirele point philosophiqueauquelest situee l'impersonnalitede la danseuse,
entresa feminineapparenceet un objetmime, pourquel hymen:elle le piqued'une
suirepointe,le pose;puis deroulenotreconvictionen le chiffrede pirouettesprolonge
vers un autremotif.. .(296)

Derrida would have us believe that the pique refers to the pricking of a
membrane by the ballet dancer's pointed toe. But that can hardly refer to the
hymen which the ballet dancer as metaphor, or sign, sets up between her
feminine appearance and the mimed object. If we imagine the membrane as
either in her feminine self or as between that and the object, it is manifestly
impossible to imagine her pricking that entity with her own toe, no matter how
limber she might be. Derrida fudges a bit here and sees the generally textury
(linked to membrane) atmosphere of dance, with all that gauze, as what is
being pricked. But that is not the hymen itself. No, what Mallarme is saying,
quite clearly, is this: "The philosophic point where the impersonality of the
dancer is situated is for us to deduce: between her feminine appearance and a
mimed object; for what marriage;"So far the "philosophical point" is the creation
of a "child"-metaphor from the marrying of a feminine appearance and a "male"
object. Mallarme speaks in the piece of "allegory" in just this sense: "quelque
confusion exquise d'elle avec cette forme envole'e . . . enonce de l'Idee
...
allegorique" (295-96).
In other pieces on the dance he uses the term "mitaphore"(304) or "signe"
(307) for the exact same purpose as the "Idee ... allegorique."
But again, the object can hardly prick the membrane of the female appearance

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886 FRENCH REVIEW

since it is she who does the pricking: "elle le pique." What does she prick with
her pointed shoe? The word can mean "prickan item off a list" according to my
dictionary, published in England. We would rather say, in America, 'to tick it
off" or "check it off"-and that is obviously what she does: she surely fixes
momentarily as with a pen the first motif, in a static moment which produces
that motif, stunningly, arrestingly, as the child of her metaphorizing hymen
between self and object; then she pirouettes away "vers un autre motif." She
"unreels our conviction"-our first apprehension of a philosophic point, that of
the metaphor-production-toward the next one as the text goes on to say:
elle le pique [not the hymenbut the philosophicpoint] d'une suirepointe, le pose
[obviouslynot the hymen;"pose"means "presentsit fixedly",as in a pose]; puis
deroule notre convictionen le chiffre de pirouettesprolonge vers un autre motif,
attenduque tout ... est, comme le veut l'artmeme,fictif ou momentane.
This is exactly the situation in the other major example of the word hymen,
in Mimique:
Lascene n'illustreque l'idee, pas une actioneffective,dans un hymen (d'oii procede
le Re've),vicieux mais sacre, entre le desir et l'accomplissement,la perpetrationet
son souvenir:ici devanpant,la rememorant,au futur,au passe, sous une apparence
fausse de present.Tel operele Mime,dont le jeu se bornea une allusionperpetuelle,
sans briserla glace:il installe,ainsi, un milieu, pur, de fiction.(310)
The "milieu, pur, de fiction" here is clearly the same as the "point philoso-
phique ... fictif ou momentane"above.
Here too there is no membrane to be pricked. The hymen is again a sort of
mobile synthesis: the hymen is between polar entities, at first desire and
accomplishment along one axis, and that hymen is not pricked by an entry,
rather it is abolished by a divorce and the movement to another axis, between
perpetration and its recall. The two axes are complexly related, as I will now
show, through the hymen which is itself polarized by "vicieux mais sacr6", i.e.,
contains the seeds of its negation. All this complex dialectic is summed up in
his key word "jeu"as in his "Jeu supreme" (Une dentelle s'abolit). The motility
of the synthesis, or hymen, is also suggested in the hovering "Reve,"another of
his key terms. The biological membrane is left far behind indeed in all this and
has nothing to do with it.
I agree with Derrida on one main point here: that Mallarme is not "Hegelian"
(or "Platonist"). I would have to agree, since that was the gravamen of my
preceding study on the Coup de des where I claimed that Mallarme had gone
beyond Hegel in this crucial way. To the familiar Hegelian triad of thesis-
antithesis-synthesis he added a term I was forced to coin, "antisynthesis." Thus
the synthesis of the metaphor is negated, radically, by its being "unreeled"
(deroule) toward a new nexus, in the passage from "Crayonne . . . " above. The
same is true of Mimique: the mimed hymen between two poles in one aspect of
becoming in time is abandoned, canceled by a sort of divorce, and then another
aspect is mimed in another fleeting hymen.

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MALLARMEON DERRIDA 887

As I suggested above, the two, or more, polarities (axes) are related in what
one can call "tetrapolarity"and, more complexly, "polypolarity"(there are three
axes in the Mimique passage). Mallarme did not use that terminology, but he
was fully aware of the "jeu"going on here, as I demonstrated in my book. It
constituted the little nexus from Le Livre which Derrida quotes (237); it had
previously been cited by Bonniot in his edition of Igitur (429). It also will
become the armature of the Coup de des, which he announced in La Musique et
les lettres as "la symphonique equation propre aux saisons" (646).
Let me go over the difficult point once again: posing a fundamental paradox
(between any two poles of reality, as in Zeno of Elea, et al.) such as Mallarme
does with his "fiction" ("La fiction ... le procede meme de l'esprit," [852]) sets
up an epistemological situation in which the concept (absurd concept, aporia,
antinomy, paradox) itself is momentarily undermined by its own statement: in
other words the problem is itself problematic, both true and not true. The two
poles have become four, and so on in a potential infinite regress. But the mind
tends to settle for a provisional resting place, naturally, and that is the case
with Mallarme above: in the little nexus between Theatre, Idee, Heros, Hymne-
four poles-Mallarme puts at the center the term Drame to sum it all up
provisionally. Derrida's quotation does not show this fact, which is clear in the
Bonniot reproduction. Moreover, Derrida reduces it to a "chaine"(237) when it
really is multi-dimensional, as I said, (as tone-production is in music, which
Mallarme moved toward ideationally, as we know). This little dubious core is
parallel to the one Kierkegaard installed at the crucifying nexus of his "Absolute
Paradox" (from Philosophic Trivia) which was a paradox crossed by itself as I
noted, a paradox "squared", as it were; at that crucial moment he "leaped" (to
use Camus's good term) into faith, which is what we more or less all tend to
do at that point, even if the faith is only the impulse to settle for something
and go on in the usual way, or flow, of life. That is what "milieu" (clearly
central) means for Mallarme; or his "jeu"('Jeu supreme), or "fiction",or "Reve"
(above), and so on. One can call it philosophically a "quintessential" point,
following the four-polar dilemma. Camus, incidentally, settled for a blind
"revolt"at that exact juncture of his preface to L'Homme revolte once he had
discovered that his earlier sure-fire formula of the absurd was problematic
indeed in a murderous world which needed some values. So he settled, as I
noted, for some goodhearted human impulse which was hardly more than a
"That isn't done." Do we parents know anything better to tell our children?
Back to Derrida. He knew about all of this philosophizing: "Il faudrait citer
tout entiere-et peut-etre en discuter certains moments speculatifs-les analyses
que R. G. Cohn reserve a ce qu'il appelle 'l'antisynthese' et le scheme 'tetra-
polaire' de Mallarme (op. cit, pp. 41-2 et Appendice 1)" (his page 293). But he
never did follow through.
Perhaps it is indeed ungracious of me, but the sober fact is that this is where
I feel Derrida and many with him have gone astray, not only in Mallarme study
but much else in our time: they become obsessed with one dimension, in this

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888 FRENCH REVIEW

case the undecidable, or call it what you will, in the monotonous, monolinear
chain of deconstruction. It is a sort of sorcerer's apprenticeship gone wild.
Mallarme, like Kierkegaard, and Camus later, had, as I indicated, found a
very human way out of that danger; he reversed his wide-open field at an
instinctive juncture and settled for flashes of meaning here and there. That is
why he is a very present poet, exquisitely human and incarnate and not just a
runaway deconstructionist. In the total scheme of things that ultimate belief is
represented in his famous remark to Ghil "You can't do without Eden" (or in a
similar remark to the Rosny brothers "Il y a des lois"). Or the "vers ... UNE
CONSTELLATION"at the end of the Coup de des; i.e., we cannot ever reach
absolute meaning but neither can we deny it is way out there somewhere in
space-time, and we sort of muddle through toward it, metaphysically speaking,
throughout our lives. That is why there are moments like those in Proust--
"moments bienheureux"--which are at least a glimmer, enough to encourage us
and keep us going. In one's favorite art, e.g., Pissarro's Entree du village, one
feels at home in this sense, not only in the nostalgic village, but in the world.
Brahms, Debussy et al. can do this for me. But no need to press the point. Either
one knows that or one does not. I am sorry that Derrida does not, and that our
whole critical era is distorted thereby.
Does this justify Richard vs. Derrida? Partly, yes. Richard does settle rather
quickly for "le bonheur" in Mallarme (La Dissemination 293)-Genette too was
right on that score, as Derrida notes (La Dissemination 279). Moreover, he too
never understands the "polypolar"epistemology of Mallarme and flattens it all
into a Hegelian dialectic. That will not do. Jean Hippolyte in an article ("Le
Coup de des de Mallarme et le message") confirms us on this notion of
Mallarme's post-Hegelianism.
But one can say this: the warmth of Richard is a welcome one even if it is
premature! One is human, after all, and what is the point of throwing out, or
trashing, all those instinctively good approximations to a fuller view which we
find in a bunch of august ancestral critics like Thibaudet, Mauron, Poulet,
Blanchot, in the name of a sweeping new epistemological critique?
Here we are at a crucial point: Derrida is somewhat lacking both in terms of
epistemological depth or adequacy and, in radical reverse, in terms of warmth
of belief--totally and, along the line of Adamic becoming and tradition, in
respect to piety to tradition, including some close-by ancestors, mallarmisants.
Fairness dictates that we acknowledge, along with the approximatepenetrations
in Richard, his warmth of belief which surpasses that of Derrida. We must
allow, finally, that Derrida himself is not altogether lacking in graciousness,
toward Richard and much else: his whole later concept of la cl6ture moves
hearteningly in that direction, as does the sense of responsibility toward his
tradition which caused him to see danger in the runaway aspects of mind in
his era, in an essay published in The Structuralist Controversy,also in an essay
on Rousset, in L'Ecritureet la difference. One must add too that he flirts with
tetrapolarity and polypolarity in la cl6ture-present-past-bond-divorce-as well

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MALLARME ON DERRIDA 889

as the concept of la differance-a two-dimensional play on difference, temporal

and spatial. In the closing section of La Dissemination he and Sollers toy with
the quaternary. But none of this comes to a direct confrontation of the issue,
the true epistemological vision of Mallarme, which is somehow seeping its way
and subtly influencing the cream of the century's thought as well as its poetry.
"All we do is repeat Mallarm6. And we do very well when it is Mallarme we
repeat" (Barthes 51).

STANFORD UNIVERSITY

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. "Conversation with Stephen Heath." Signs of the Times. Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 1970. 41-51.
Bonniot, Edmond. Igitur, ou La folie d'Elbehnon.Paris: Nouvelle Revue Frangaise, 1925.
Cohn, Robert Greer. L'Oeuvrede Mallarme: un coup de d&s.Paris: Librairie Les Lettres, 1951.
.Toward the Poems of Mallarme. Berkeley: U of California P, 1980.
Derrida, Jacques. La Dissemination. Paris: Seuil, Collection "Tel Quel," 1972.
L'Ecritureet la difference.Paris: Seuil, 1967.
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'Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences." The Structuralist Contro-
versy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man. Eds. Richard Macksey and Eugenio
Donato. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1972.
Hippolyte, Jean. "Le Coup de des de Mallarm6 et le message.' Etudes philosophiques 4 (1958): 463-
68.
Mallarm6, St6phane. (Euvres completes. Eds. Henri Mondor and F. Jean-Aubry. Paris: Gallimard,
1956.
Richard, Jean-Pierre. L'Univers imaginaire de Mallarme. Paris: Seuil, 1962.

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