Meghan OLeary

ENGL 200
April 10, 2015
Effective Perceptions of Mallarm
Depending on View of Authorship
Many writers and critics have questioned the issue of ownership
of a work of literature or poetry. They wonder if an authors intentions
have any bearing on how a work should be read and what the
significance of this effect may be. The spectrum of opinions ranges
from reading a text only exactly as the writer intended, to reading with
no regard for the author and his or her context and intentions.
Stephan Mallarm provides a clear example of how the different ways
in which a reader views authorship can affect interpretations of a work,
such as his poem Sea Breeze (25).
Mallarm is known for providing multiple meanings in his works;
however, the casual reader of Mallarms poetry may attempt to make
one interpretation of his poem Sea Breeze. One possible perception
of the poem is that the narrator is a man on land who longs to be a
sailor, and has a heart steeped in the sea whose soil jealously
listen[s] to the sailors sing! A reader with no information about the
author may assume that he is a former sailor, or a man with land ties
that render him unable to pursue his dreams of the ocean. If a reader
was unfamiliar with Mallarm and his negative views on women, his

reader could possibly assume that the speaker is a woman. The woman
may desire to have a life unlike the norm, since she does not want to
be the young wife feeding her child and instead wants to escape the
life she feels she is destined for. The narrator could be dreaming or
wishing, the speaker could be insane or depressed, the dreamer could
be male or female. These possibilities all exist when the reader is
unfamiliar with the nature and history of the poet, Mallarm.
A reader who is generally familiar with the work of Mallarm may
narrow the interpretation of Sea Breeze. Mallarm generally looks
upon women as weak, tempting, and inferior, so it is unlikely that the
informed reader would assume that the intelligent and ambitious
speaker is a woman (Chadwick). This reader would probably focus on
the oceanic language, since Mallarm uses language relating to the
sea in many of his works. In fact, the mindset of a sailor may be the
first conclusion this reader jumps to, and he or she may have no
reason to come up with other possible interpretations. If this reader
knew that Mallarm was notorious for multi-layered poems, maybe he
or she would come up with one other possibility. The narrator could be
interpreted as a writer having a crisis, taunted by the blank space
guarded by its white. The writer pens stories of adventure and
danger, but the page illuminated by the lamp is not enough, and he
yearns for a reality, some exotic realm filled with the kinds of things
he writes about.

However, a reader who has in-depth knowledge about Mallarm

may come up with a completely different interpretation. Background
knowledge about the author may lead a reader to assume that
Mallarm himself is the speaker, narrating Sea Breeze as himself
relating to his own life. After all, Sea Breeze was written in May of
1865, less than a year after the birth of his daughter Genevieve
(Chadwick). So a well-informed reader might read this poem and
immediately assume Mallarm was musing about his own struggles
with his new family. Having a child could make him aware of his own
age and mortality, the ancient gardens mirrored in the eyes that he
wishes were not present in his own. He may think that his writing
career was going to suffer, and that family life would hold him back
from the adventures he so desperately wanted. One might interpret
that Mallarm is tempted to escape, either his family life or his writing
career or both, but that he resists the sailors song and recognizes the
obstacles that would be present in that kind of life as well. A scholar
who knows Mallarm may be familiar with his struggle to write ideal
poetry, and could interpret Sea Breeze as being solely about his
struggles in his works. The blank page he fears is cruel and unknown.
He wants to know and write great art, but his mast is squall inciting,
and his great desire only hinders him more as the pressures mount
with age. He feels shipwrecked, and fears more dangerous storms, or
worse, smooth sailing with more blank space on the paper. One could

say that his desire to write of impressions, rather than material things,
could be expressed in his analogy to the sea in Sea Breeze. However,
only a reader who is familiar with Mallarms parallels with the
Impressionists would most likely interpret the poem in this way.
This question of the necessity of knowing the author has
interested many scholars, including Roland Barthes. His piece The
Death of the Author addresses this problem of attribution, as
demonstrated in Mallarms poem. He argues strongly that the text
should exist independent of the author, allowing the readers to retain
full interpretative creativity and the ability to apply art to their own
experiences. Barthes says that Mallarm was the first to see and to
foresee in its full extent the necessity to substitute language for the
person who until then had been supposed to be its owner (Barthes).
This actually coincides with the very ideas of Impressionism that
Mallarm begins to exhibit, since Barthes suggests that the only
meaning for a reader is the perception that he or she finds inherently
in the text. Any further information and research that would
inexplicably tie an author to his work would bias the readers personal
interpretation. Barthes states, Once the author is removed, the claim
to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to
impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close
the writing (Barthes). Barthes supports ignorance of the author of a
text in order for a reader to more purely read a text in his or her own

unique way, the way a reader could find multiple meanings in the
works of Mallarm.
The different possible interpretations of Mallarms Sea Breeze
support Barthess assertion that the sacrifice of the author is necessary
in order to preserve the purity of art for the reader; purity, the idea
that the readers interpretation is untouched by even the authors
intentions, maintains the readers freedom. Background knowledge
about the author limits the perceptions of his works, and keeps them
cemented in the authors own time and circumstances. Barthess
inclusion of Mallarm as an author who did not want readers to have
the author on the page with them as they read further affirms the
position that Sea Breeze exemplifies the advantages of readers who
are unfamiliar with the author of a text.

Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. The Death of the Author. 1967. Web. 3 Apr. 2015.
Chadwick, Charles. "Stphane Mallarm (18 March 1842-9 September
1898)." Nineteenth-Century French Poets. Ed. Robert Lawrence
Beum. Vol. 217. Detroit: Gale, 2000. 186-196. Dictionary of

Literary Biography Vol. 217. Dictionary of Literary Biography

Main Series. Web. 3 Apr. 2015.
Mallarm, Stephan. Collected Poems and Other Verse. Sea Breeze.
Trans. E.H. Blackmore and A.M. Blackmore. N.p.: n.p., 2008. Print.