Mallarmé and the Strategy of Transformation in "Igitur"

Author(s): Nicholas M. Huckle

Source: Nineteenth-Century French Studies , Winter 1991, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Winter 1991),
pp. 290-303
Published by: University of Nebraska Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23532155

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 Mallarmé and the Strategy of
Transformation in "Igitur"

Nicholas M. Huckle

The inner freedom from the practical de

sire, The release from action and suffering,
release from the inner And the outer com
pulsion, yet surrounded By a grace of sense,
a white light still and moving,
T. S. Eliot

In his 1981 study of the text, Robert Greer Cohn has described Igitur
as a "curative work," the writing of which was for Mallarmé, he sug
gests, a sort of catharsis. It is through this catharsis that the central
elements of the poet's imaginary drama find what is perhaps their
first, if imperfect, expression. Supposedly left unfinished and never ac
tually published during its author's lifetime, since, aside from other
possible reasons, it was probably considered an aesthetic failure, Igitur
is interesting, I think, not only as yet another means of access to the
seemingly impenetrable vision of Mallarmé—another throw of the
dice, so to speak, as all of the key terms are here—but interesting also
for what it leaves behind aesthetically and psychologically. In other
words, what is introduced here is an insistent structure which is to be
come progressively more ironic with the later works.
Cohn's study is thus a point of departure. I shall emphasize the
dramatic aspect of the tale (or scenario) and argue that its successive
parts do not take place on a single scene. I suspect, however, that Cohn's
insistence on the absurdist aspect of Mallarmé's tale might blind us to
the presence in it of something like a structure of transformation. This
transformation, moving through and subtly changing the basic opposi
tion of the key terms "l'Infini" and "L'Absolu," effects a change in the
Mallarmean obsession with nothingness. If my reading is correct, this
happens as a result of changes in the imaginary focus of the writing, i.e.
the changes of scene. If it is true that the ultimate place of the action,
i.e. the fatal dice throw, is to reappear in the poet's later works, this is
not so much the case with the settings of the earlier parts of the tale.
Briefly, Igitur, can be read as a transitional work in which certain
aspects of Mallarmé's original Ideal are still being worked through,
just as the later more deeply ironic vision is being refined. However, to
distinguish between the earlier and the later Ideal is by no means an
easy task, for, if the poet's original vision is defined as sentimental,

290

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 Nicholas M. Huckle 291

childlike, and religious, it

vision profane. Indeed, in a w
definition of "être-pour-soi,
Mallarmé's later Ideal on th
e.g. not that kind of thing; n
the irony. Therefore, to com
Mallarmé's later poetry is b
necessary to re-evaluate what we mean by "sentimental" and
"childlike." If my analysis is correct, the meandering and tortuous
prose of lgitur can be seen to provide the place for, and even to constitute
itself, just such a re-evaluation.
In the following study, I make some reference to alchemy, as did
Mallarmé on more than one occasion. In doing so, as Mallarmé elo
quently put it, I run the risk of committing a crime:

Coupable qui, sur cet art, avec cécité opérera un dédoublement: ou en sépare,
pour les réaliser dans une magie à côté, les délicieuses, pudiques—pourtant
exprimables, métaphores.^

In other words, by taking as a basis for comparison another system of

magic, i.e. alchemy, there is the possibility that one might distort the
original text through the introduction of anachronistic ideas. But this
is a risk which is perhaps part of all criticism. The aim of this compar
ison is not to provide a sort of alchemical key to the text which would
explain away all enigma, as if every line were to have its alchemical
reference, and the following study does not argue that any alchemical
references were actually part of the author's intention. Alchemy is
used, as is the philosophy of Sartre, primarily as a means to get at the
sense of the text, and to demonstrate clearly what is meant by its
"imaginary focus."
I.

Consider the first part of the tale, "Le Minuit." Here, in terms of
both form and content, the text seeks a certain type of presence. This
presence, I want to suggest, is at first static and thinglike. For, at this
magic hour, when the sea and stars are separated out as two reciprocal
voids, the sought-after revelation is defined as, "le présent absolu des
choses." Now, in many contexts the term "choses" might be a throw
away word adding nothing of significance to the meaning. In this con
text, however, the word gains significance from the fact that the over
all atmosphere of the scene is strongly marked by the presence in it of
the furniture of the room. The setting is almost claustrophobic, and
there is a distinct heaviness about the place. It looks very much as if

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292 Nineteenth-Century French Studies

the desire to produce a pure self is inhibited by an obsession with tim

which is tied to the heavy material object as its imaginary focus.
example:

Et du Minuit demeure la présence en la vision d'une chambre du temps où le

mystérieux ameublement arrête un vague frémissement de pensée . . .

... le temps est résolu en des tentures sur lesquelles s'est arrêté, les complé
tant de sa splendeur, le frémissement amorti...

. . . l'ameublement accompli qui se tassera en ténèbres comme les tentures,

déjà alourdies en une forme permanente de toujours . . . (435-36)

This is in marked contrast to the later parts of the tale which are not
haunted by the presence of things. At the end of the first part, the pres
ence which is associated with the wallhangings is contrasted with
what Mallarmé describes as a "lueur virtuelle," and it is to this virtual
gleam or flash (which recalls the "lueur" of the introductory notes)
that the entire temporal problematic is shifted.
Now, as I intimated earlier, it is precisely this imaginary setting
that underpins our understanding of the key terms. The latter, e.g.
"l'être," "le néant," "l'absolu," "l'infini," etc., are apparently image
less ciphers of a sought-after pure understanding. It is tempting, in fact,
to think that the point at which we understand them best is precisely
the point at which we fall into error, the mind being gripped by a false
picture. Indeed, Mallarmé's poetics—the plethora of disappearing ob
jects and the cult of silence—are in part responsible for this attitude.
Yet, I want to suggest that this is a misleading attitude.
In this respect, the definition of "l'être-pour-soi" that we find in
Sartre's L'être et le néant bears comparison with the temporal prob
lematic which we see in "Le Minuit." It is most significant that in first
presenting the idea of the "pour-soi," what gets Sartre's analysis going,
so to speak, is the prior description of "l'être-en-soi" as profoundly
thinglike. Like the furniture in Igitur's room, it is heavy and to some
extent threatening. For example:

. . . l'être est partout, contre moi, autour de moi, il pèse sur moi, il m'assiège et
je suis perpétuellement renvoyé d'être en être, cette table qui est là c'est de
l'être et rien de plus; cette roche, cet arbre, ce paysage: de l'être et autrement
rien. Je veux saisir cet être et je ne trouve plus que moi?

Ironically, this attitude towards the material world, which is, of

course, a form of Cartesianism, is itself a product of the imagination.

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 Nicholas M. Huckle 293

One thinks here of Jung's cha

the darkness of anything exter
such, an interior psychic life t
sis of the "en-soi" is not strict
Iris Murdoch with regard to
categories" as a whole, it is a q
this psychology, however, whi
The problem that confronts u
Mallarmé, concerns the relatio
if we think hard about the ma
claim in L'imaginaire that,

Il ne saurait y avoir une intuiti

n'est rien et que toute conscien
quelque chose. Le néant ne peut
quelque chose.3

Yet, at the same time as we m

we must nevertheless recogn
against the diversity of human
fication to assume that "nothi
all times? It is in this context that we can best understand the
Symbolist insistence that the reader create the poem, and, on an
mentary level, the importance of the idea of chance. For, in this way
each poem is a throw of the dice—understanding it being a hit or mi
affair. Hence the crucial role of the imaginary focus which is the sy
bol insofar as it is not simply a "false-picture." If my analysis is corre
Igitur attempts a psychology of nothingness which, in contrast to th
of Sartre, is multi-dimensional.
In Igitur, the shift from the heavily furnished room of "Le Minui
to the staircase/tomb of the second part signals the failure of a f
synthesis—that which is defined as "l'antagonisme de ce songe p
laire." The final paragraph of "Le Minuit" begins with the w
"Inutile," and the scene effectively collapses into what is describe
a "miroitement de l'obscurité" in which alone shines the pure diamon
fire of the clock. Time is personified, and through the identification
clock-face and mirror, the room is annihilated by the movemen
through the mirror, which is also an entry into the tomb which for
part of the setting of part II:

... l'heure se formule en cet écho, au seuil de panneaux ouverts par son
de la Nuit: "Adieu, nuit que je fus, ton propre sépulcre, mais qui, l'ombre su
vivante, se métamorphosera en Eternité." (436)

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294 Nineteenth-Century French Studies

Here, the same sets of opposites, i.e. light and dark, etherealit
heaviness, continue to function. But they do so at a level which li
yond the initial establishment of the Cartesian consciousness. The
moves to what is effectively, in Sartre's terms, the "pour-so
there is no noticeable change in the metaphors used. Sartre, fo
ple, refers to the "en-soi" as that which exists in "la nuit tot
l'identité," and the "pour-soi" is described variously as dark, du
nature as a "néant," or more often as transparent, and this is
doubt, to the influence of the idea of the "light of reason." In
however, there is a multiplicity of shades of night, and this allow
a far greater refinement of feeling. Thus it seems singularly inad
(although, once again, not strictly wrong) to sum up Mallarmé'
as Blanchot does, in terms of an opposition between a nonsubst
impersonal consciousness and a material, autonomous language.
this does is to fix the understanding of what are essentially th
metaphorical elements which we find in Igitur in an easily gr
pattern. But surely it is just this sort of stratification that Malla
text works against.
Indeed, stratification might be said to constitute the theme of
two—what is defined as "cette inquiétante et belle symétrie de
struction de mon rêve"—and which, in parallel fashion to "Le Min
ends also in failure and in a departure apparently through a mirr
saying that this is actually another act and not simply a repeti
the first, I am not drawing attention to a narrative chronology. A
clear that the story takes place in a "timeless" setting, there
tain simultaneity about all of the "events." The transformation
the text enacts does not appeal directly to a narrative chronology
dependent rather upon the change of setting which, as in counter
alters the meaning (perhaps "feeling" is a better term?) of the
metaphors.
At the beginning of part II, Igitur, as Cohn notes, is already dead on
one level and thus the focus shifts from the more concrete and realistic
setting of part I to a dream landscape . Here, the text is marked by the
repeated upsetting of images of equilibrium. Cohn calls this process of
upsetting "antisynthesis" and the resultant complex structure
"polypolarity. " As I understand it, "polypolarity" is produced by
those passages where two sets of opposites are held in tension at the
same time while a fifth element, acting as a reminder of time, sends the
structure into a diachronic spiral. I do not wish to question this very
thorough analysis here. Rather, I want to question the role of the im
agery of the self. Although it is certainly true that the concern with
substantiality and with emptiness continues in part II—the core image

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 Nicholas M. Huckle 295

remains an empty space—it

nary focus does emerge throu
As was intimated above, the
the image of the tomb. Ho
arrested movement of falling
is part of what I take to be t

. . . comme si la chute totale

tombeau, n'en étouffait pas l'hô

. . . comme si c'était soi-mêm

tournât sur soi en la spirale ver

The more expansive moveme

in such terms as "un soi prop
beyond that of the Igitur
also associated with "un âge
génie," is presented in a pr
this part of the text. This
shadow, takes over from the
inant focus.7
The pure shadow, however, which appears to be a sort of projected
image of Igitur, undergoes an inner collapsing. Its self-recognition de
mands a synthesis of all of its prior appearances, "la foule des appari
tions," which are also defined as an infinite number of layers of night.
Yet, once this synthesis is apparently accomplished, the scene shifts
immediately to one in which the shadow, no longer all encompassing, is
defined as an empty space situated between its own final form and a pit
which is itself the re-formed image of the layers of night, this time
stretched out before the empty space in a double sequence of known and
unknown:

. . . elle, pure, l'Ombre, ayant sa dernière forme qu'elle foule, derrière elle,
couchée et étendue, et puis, devant elle, en un puits, l'étendue de couches
d'ombre, rendue à la nuit pure, de toutes ses nuits pareilles, des couches à ja
mais séparées d'elles et que sans doute elles ne connurent pas—(437)

In this way, having set up an opposition between shadow and night in

which it looked very much as if Igitur actually was the shadow, the
text disengages itself once again with the shadow taking on the quality
of heaviness—it is "un lourd somme, massif." I want to suggest that, on
one level at least, what is being avoided or neutralised here is a naïve
form of Romanticism in which there is an inflation of the ego through,
following Jung, an identification with the image of the hero.8 Part II,

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296 Nineteenth-Century French Studies

therefore, forms part of both an aesthetic and a psychological pu

tion.
In the final paragraph of part II, we see in slightly altered
essentially the same elements that formed the final scene of
Minuit," i.e. the movement through the mirror:

L'heure a sonné pour moi de partir, la pureté de la glace s'établira, sans c

sonnage, vision de moi —mais il emportera la lumière!—la nuit! Su
meubles vacants, le Rêve a agonisé en cette fiole de verre, pureté,
ferme la substance du Néant. (439)

Here, we can contrast the empty, vacant furniture with "l'ameublement

accompli" of the first part, just as we can identify "le Rêve" with the
pure "Ombre" and ultimately with the final vision in the mirror. There
is also, in the preceding paragraphs, the suggestion that the dream be
explained and stripped of its "costume" and there is a reference to an
hallucination. All of this, I think, points to the idea of a struggle with
the imagination, as if the text were attempting to disengage itself from
the dazzling effect of the vision of the hero, i.e. from the "vision de
moi." So, if what was left behind at the end of part I was the heavy
furniture, here we leave behind a vision of the self—the image in the
glass which is, at this point, an inflated "pour-soi." Although it is true
that at the end of part II there remains the enigmatic pairing of
"pureté" and "Néant" (darkness is not yet vanquished), the enigma has
effectively been refined as, stripped of facile identifications, the
essence of night is neutralised.

II.

From the introductory "Argument" of the tale, it is clear that

Igitur's ambiguous act, his "Folie utile, " is to produce a synthesis of the
key elements, "L'Absolu" and "L' Infini. " For example, there is this cu
rious sentence: "Ceci devait avoir lieu dans les combinaisons de l'Infini
vis-à-vis de l'Absolu." Here, the term "combinaisons" seems particu
larly enigmatic. On the one hand, as Cohn has suggested, it might refer
to the infinite permutations of nature understood as the products of
"Chance, " or, on the other hand, it could refer to the various ways in
which the already mentioned synthesis might be conceived. Thus the
image of the dice-throw plays a double role here, i. e. the term
"combinaisons" suggesting a series of mental scenes each one of which
might be haunted by the possibility of its ultimate meaninglessness.9
Now, if part III begins with a recapitulation of the desire for a con
crete presence such as we saw in part I, it closes with a new

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 Nicholas M. Huckle 297

"combinaison" since, at th
through the mirror. It is im
of time will replace the on
Compare the following passa
second from the end of part

J'ai toujours vécu mon âme fix

temps qu'elle sonna restât prése
ture et la vie—(439)

Et ce temps ne va pas comme jadis s'arrêter en un frémissement gris sur les

ébènes massifs dont les chimères fermaient les lèvres avec une accablante
sensation de fini... (440)

Part III repeats, in an apparently more successful way, the movement

through the mirror of the previous section and this is defined as the
completion of the "Idea." Thus the "vision de moi" which was absent
from the glass at the close of the previous scene is replaced by the pres
ence in the mirror of "le fantôme de l'horreur," the image of Igitur
which eventually becomes an autonomous entity, i.e. "—jusqu'à ce qu'il
se détachât, permanent, de la glace absolument pure, comme pris dans
son froid—." It looks very much as if the terror aroused by the vision of
the face in the mirror has the effect of absorbing and neutralizing the
prior obsession with time. In the penultimate paragraph of this part,
for instance, Igitur is obviously suffering due to the seeming ethereality
of the setting. He sees himself in a rarified atmosphere which is, in
fact, no atmosphere at all, i.e. "absence d'atmosphère," and the furni
ture is described as writhing in emptiness:

. . . voyant la glace horriblement nulle, s'y voyant entouré d'une raréfaction,

absence d'atmosphère, et les meubles, tordre leurs chimères dans le vide, et
les rideaux frissonner invisiblement, inquiets; alors, il ouvre les meubles, pour
qu'ils versent leur mystère, l'inconnu, le ur mémoire, leur silence, facultés et
impressions humaines—(440)

Naturally, it is not clear what this mystery is. What is clear, how
ever, is that in the final scene, as the pure image emerges from the
glass, the threatening darkness of the furniture and of the heavy cur
tains is, in a sense, vanquished. Of the furniture, we read: "leurs mon
stres ayant succombé avec leurs anneaux convulsifs," and of the curtains:
"les rideaux cessant d'être inquiets tombassent, avec une attitude qu'ils
devaient conserver à jamais" (440). Our sense of context is thus com

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298 Nineteenth-Century French Studies

pletely worked over. The furniture, like that of the strange room
end of Kubrick's 2001, seems to have lost its density and the pers
is no longer quite human. Rather, it is as if we sense the Universe
its ubiquitous centre.
Now, as I intimated at the outset, what makes the story difficu
read (apart from the terribly long sentences and the odd syntax),
fact that one is never quite sure whether one is dealing with one
described in several ways or with a series of events. This amb
however, allows for the feeling of a focusing in on a static presen
co-exist with the diachronic change of setting, which I have
sized here, and which alters and expands the meaning of that pres
The change of setting itself is not hard to perceive. The movem
from a very concrete scene with which the reader can easily iden
i.e. Igitur, alone in his room, staring at his face in a mirror, towa
sort of cosmic perspective, "L'Infini," which results from the abs
any clear setting in the final two parts of the tale. This final
tive, however, appears to be paradoxical.
As Cohn observes, Igitur is in essence a cycle of rebirth: "..
cent into the dark womb of the unconscious, eternal night, and r
gence, rebirth to a vision of undying light and truth."10 But it is
birth that, for Cohn, is devoid of any facile optimism due to
phasis placed upon the absurd and upon the ideas of madness
iocy, i.e. "la Folie." However, I think it is fair to say that a gr
depends upon how we interpret the major positive and negative te
the final parts of the tale, the terms "la pureté" and "l'absurde." I
is clearly a Messianic hero-figure, "suprême incarnation de cette r
and as such, it is his destiny to enact in his own being what had be
his ancestors something external—a dream or lifeless myth. So, b
looking at the negative aspects of this destiny, I want to consi
final parts of the tale in a more positive light.
The first three parts of the story effect a refinement of the m
of presence such that Igitur is eventually transformed into hi
which can be understood as a pure impersonal Self. Now, this i
can be seen from the introductory "Schème" to part IV, is not
guished from "le hasard":

Bref dans un acte où le hasard est en jeu, c'est toujours le hasard qui acco
sa propre Idée en s'affirmant ou se niant. Devant son existence la nég
l'affirmation viennent s'échouer. Il contient l'Absurde—l'implique, mais
latent et l'empêche d'exister: ce qui permet à l'Infini d'être. (441)

The text is so constructed that "la chance," as the basis of all other
elements, is profoundly neutral, i.e. neither negative nor positive in

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 Nicholas M. Huckle 299

human terms. Hence, in res

was necessary, we read l
l'humanité.)" It would be qu
the absurdity of humanisti
vidual against a cruel and s
Mallarmé's text attempts to
it attempts to neutralize the
soi." This accounts for the
bility of "le hasard," is opp
emphasis upon the senseless
subject. In contrast, "L'Infin
alchemical aspect of the sto
tion of the subject with the
to support the idea that this
absurd, i.e. "... quant à l'Ac
mouvement (personnel) rendu
(442).
Following this affirmation, the term "l'Absolu" is actually replaced
by the two strong terms of the final parts, "l'Infini" and "la pureté."
First we read, "... l'Absolu a disparu, en pureté de sa race," and sec
ondly,

Le personnage qui, croyant à l'existence du seul Absolu, s'imagine être partout

dans un rêve ( il agit au point de vue Absolu) trouve l'acte inutile, car il y a et n'y
a pas de hasard—il réduit le hasard à l'Infini—qui, dit-il, doit exister quelque
part. (442)

I want to suggest here that "l'Infini" (the only term in the Gallimard
text which is both capitalized and in italics) represents an absorption
or a transformation of the Absolute which is similar to the progression
from the dream vision of the true Self which we saw in parts II and III.
In this way, the terms functioning like successive perspectives, the
Absolute replaces the Absurd as an inherent possibility of "le hasard"
which is again in some way suppressed in order for the Infinite to
emerge. The final statement that the Infinite "doit exister quelque
part" effectively eliminates any sense of context and thus suggests
again a universal perspective.
In his analysis of this part of the text, Cohn does recognize the
multi-dimensional nature of the absurd. However, he does not identify
the ultimate dimension, which he calls "meaningless," with the goal
of Igitur. Instead, he insists upon the primacy of "l'Absolu," e.g.:

But Igitur's dream, the project, is not abandoned. The act reduces chance to

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300 Nineteenth-Century French Studies

the Infinite, i.e. as a specific gesture, it sets up a concrete equivalent of

the endless becoming-procession of phenomena, of which this is on
Infinite "must exist somewhere," which makes it too concrete for his drea
the Absolute.11

Here again, much depends upon my suggestion that the dream vis
already worked over and transformed into the Idea since this wou
fine the "rêve" as a transitional phase and would correspondin
hance the idea of "l'Infini" as a fusion of matter and spirit. Su
sion does, in fact, appear to be present in the final brief section:

Sur les cendres des astres, celles indivises de la famille, était le pauvre p
nage, couché, après avoir bu la goutte de néant qui manque à la mer.
vide, folie, tout ce qui reste du château?) Le Néant parti, reste le château
pureté. (443)

Here, the contradiction, "cendres . .. indivises," the interplay

and sky, and the black on black (black but not massive) of "cendre
astres, " effectively destroys any sense of concrete place. Since Ig
finally dead, the "Néant, " as the place of human mystery, or,
will, the unconscious, has disappeared leaving his body wh
transformed matter, is totally pure. The scene has thus under
cosmic expansion in which the nature of matter, psychologically
ing, has been transformed. Jung' s comments on the nature of the
ical process are curiously apposite. In an interview with Mircea
he has said:

In the language of the alchemists, matter suffers until the nigredo disappear
when the "dawn" (aurora) will be announced by the "peacock's tail" (cau
pavonis) and a new day will break, the leukosis or albedo. But in this state of
"whiteness" one does not live in the true sense of the word, it is a sort of ab
stract, ideal State.^

A stasis has thus been defined that is quite different from the sta
presence of the first part of the tale, and this is achieved through th
gradual elimination of material density, of the image of the hero, and
of individual perspective. Its primary quality is evocative of the
chemical albedo, as indeed is Eliot's "white light still and moving
from Four Quartets, that I quote in the epigraph. Ultimately, Igitur is
described as "le pauvre personnage" and his august ancestry is redu
to "la famille." This is, I think, quite consistent with the idea of
withdrawal from the inflated image of self. The image with whi
the text leaves us, i.e. "le château de la pureté," is neither entirely
stract nor entirely concrete. In alchemical terms, it might be a symbo

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 Nicholas M. Huckle 301

for the transforming subs

vented the dice game.13 Th
Mallarmé's own understandin

Je dis qu'existe entre les vieux

une parité secrète; je l'énonce
complu à le marquer, par d
l'aptitude à en jouir consentie p

Is it not perhaps possible tha

his mind?

The above analysis, if it works, does so as a result of the privileged

status in it of the terms "l'Infini" and "la pureté" with regard to the
ironic echoes set up, for example, by the note in the margin, "il profère
la prédiction, dont il se moque au fond. Il y a eu folie" (442). These nega
tive aspects will be stressed, as they are in Cohn's analysis, only if the
final synthesis of Absolute and Infinite is not accepted, i.e. if the
Absolute remains a dream. If, on the other hand, the Infinite is under
stood as ultimately all-encompassing, then the negative aspects lose
their force and become mere signposts of human fickleness, and, on an
other level, manifestations of Hermes as Trickster.
To sum up: Igitur constitutes an act of depersonalization, a
"sacrficium intellectus" that seeks to avoid or bypass what Sartre
would have called the impossibility of the Self, i.e. the impossibility
of God as the "en-soi-pour-soi," through a transformation of the mate
rial basis of that Self (i.e. what the "en-soi" represents in psychologi
cal terms) and through the attainment, therefore, of a radically differ
ent kind of ens causa sui. The identification of Absolute and Infinite,
although it is still, strictly speaking, a "useless passion," thus repre
sents a refined religiosity which bears some comparison to that of the
alchemists. However, it is vital to note that the dominant quality re
mains that of the "whitening."14 Indeed, it is specifically this quality
which, through connections with alchemy which are far from ex
hausted at the present juncture, can be seen as definitive of the
Mallarmean sensibility.

Department of Modern Foreign Languages & Literatures

Boston University
Boston, MA 02215

^Stéphane Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard 1945) 400. Ail

further references in the text are to this edition; the pagination appears in

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 302 Nineteenth-Century French Studies

parentheses after each quotation. This text, which is a copy of the

transcription of Dr. Edmond Bonniot, is the best guide that we have at
as to the content of the original manuscript. It is however, as Bonniot m
clear in his Preface to the text, somewhat provisional in that the orderi
what were in effect a series of disparate fragments was to a large exten
work of Bonniot himself. As we read in the Preface, "Il comporte p
fragments, les uns à l'encre, d'autres au crayon, d'écritures visiblem
différentes époques .. . enfin surtout pour les troisième et quatrième par
lecture attentive des fragments dont plusieurs certes pouvaient être des
du même, mais où cependant l'idée se complétait de l'un à l'autre d
manière que j'ai pu en faire un vraisemblable rejointement" (424).
become clear, the present reading, since it emphasizes the variations fro
fragment to the next is very much dependant upon Bonniot's transcriptio
2j.-P. Sartre, L'Etre et le néant (Paris: Gallimard, 1943) 270.
^C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy trans. R. F. C. Hull (New York: Pan
1953) 234. The present study follows closely the extensive Jungian analy
Igitur to be found in Bettina L. Knapp, Dream and Image (New
Whitston, 1979) 355-401.
^In this regard, she writes: "Sartre offers nothing like a convincing deduc
his categories... What Sartre has given is a brilliant and generally instru
self-analysis. We are tempted to say to him: this is one kind of person,
there are others." I. Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (Glasgow: Fon
1976) 99.
5j.-P. Sartre, L'Imaginaire (Paris: Gallimard, 1940) 358.

n
^Cf. M. Blanchot, La Part du feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949) 111.
Although the comparison with the passage from the "Unhappy
sciousness" to "Reason" that we find in Hegel's Phenomenology is tempting,
is, I think, ultimately unsatisfying. The ego-Self structure that is in questi
here does bear resemblence to the "Master-Slave" dialectic in Hegel, and
heavy, threatening furniture is reminiscent perhaps of the figure of
"Master." But, the final suicide in Igitur seems to have little to do with
Hegelian "Reason." Whatever Mallarmé's contact with Hegel may have b
it seems fair to assert that the poet's sensiblity, certainly at the tim
composition of Igitur, was more broadly mystical, as can be gathered f
these comments in a letter of the period to Lefébure: "Je suis véritable
décomposé, et dire qu'il faut cela pour avoir une vue très—une de l'Univ
Autrement, on ne sent d'autre unité que celle de sa vie." Correspondanc
Mondor (Paris: Gallimard, 1959) 1: 249.
®Jung writes in this respect: "... the ego all too easily succumbs to t
temptation to identify with the hero, thus bringing on a psychic inflation wi
its consequences." Symbols of Transformation trans. R.F.C.Hull (Prince
University Press, 1956) 392.
^At the same time, I think it is worth pointing out that the final appositio
this section, i.e. "Preuve .. . (Creuser tout cela)" is perhaps not as negativ

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Nicholas M. Huckle 303

Cohn would have it when he wri

84). In Littré, the term "creuse
for treasure or to go into a ph
image of the tomb. It is also inte
face through anguish which , of
face in the glass. Indeed, the
sacrifice since it suggests the
between the figurative "Creu
perte, la ruine" and "Creuser
dans la terre qu'on creuse; l'app
in parentheses can thus be seen
text rather than as simply as a
10R. G. Cohn, Igitur 2.
ÜR. G. Cohn, Igitur 138
l^C. G. Jung Speaking ed. W.
University Press, 1977) 229.
Derrida, La Dissémination (Par
^In fact, in the Dictionnaire
Bauche, 1758), we find confirma
reads as follows: "Matière des
l'a ainsi nommé de ce que la co
appellée Mort, Immondice du
même le fymbole de la pureté,

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