PICTORIALIST

POETICS

,
POETRY AND THE VISUAL AR TS IN
NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE
DAVID SCOTT
Lecturer and Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin

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Uni'"rsity of Cambridgt

to print and st/I

all manntr of books

was granttd by

Htnry VIII in IJJ-1.

Tht Uni'llrsily has printtd

and publishtd continuowly

sinct 1$84.

Honore Daumier, L'Amateur d'estampes (1860; oil; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia)

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

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Cambridge
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PQ433 .537 1988

Pictcrialist poetics

poetry and the visual arts

in nineteenth-century France

Published by the Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge

The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 IRP

32 East 57th Street, New York, NY 10022, USA

10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia

Cambridge

University Press 1988

First published 1988

Printed in Great Britain at

the University Press, Cambridge

British Library cataloguing in publication data

Scott, David

Pictorialist poetics: poetry and the

visual arts in nineteenth-century France.

- (Cambridge studies in French).

r. French poetry - 19th century

History and criticism 2. Art, Modern

- 19th century - France 3. Art and

literature

I. Title

84r.790 PQ433

Library of Congress cataloguing in publication data

Scott, David H. T.

Pictorialist poetics

Bibliography.

Includes index.

r. French poetry - 19th century - History and

criticism. 2. Art and literature - France - History
19th century. 3. Ut pictura poesis (Aesthetics)

4. Aesthetics, French - 19th century. 5. Picturesque,

The, in literature. I. Title.

PQ433-537 1988 841'.8'09357 87-6591

ISBN 0 521 34117 5

SE

REED COLLEGE LIBRARY

PORTLAND OREGON 97202

For Louis and Georgia

'SPATIAL' STRUCTURE AND THE PROSE

POEM
J'aimais !es peintures idiotes ... je me flattai d'inventer un verbe poetique accessible
... a tous Jes sens ... J'ecrivais des silences ... 1

Chapters 4 and 5 showed how nineteenth-century French poets explored, with an

increasing degree of self-consciousness, the 'spatial' potential of prosodic
structures - whether on the level of rhyme, verse line or strophic forms - with a
view to promoting the apprehension of the poem as a quasi-pictorial totality. The
implications of this strategy for the other systems operative in poetry
syntactical, linguistic, typographical, phonetic and semantic - were also
investigated, the general tendency towards ellipsis and inversion;
nominalization; refinement of punctuation; and the complex interaction of
semantic and phonetic elements both with each other and with typography,
spacing, etc., further promoting the 'spatialization' of the text. The aim of this
chapter will be to show how nineteenth-century prose poets, notably Bertrand,
Rimbaud and Mallarme,z profiting both from their study of the visual arts and of
contemporary verse poetry, contrived to achieve a similar pictorial impact
without exploiting the resources ofprosody-at least in its coded or conventional
forms.
The term 'spatial' will not be used in what follows in the wider and somewhat
ambiguous sense employed by Joseph Frank in his famous article 'Spatial Form
in Modern Literature'.3 In effect, for Frank, the word 'spatial' means 'anti
temporal' or 'atemporal', 4 and he uses it to describe what he sees as being the
undermining in modernist literature, especially as exemplified in the work of
Joyce, Eliot and Pound, of traditional temporal models: on a structural level, the
replacement of the linearity of history and narrative by the synchronicity of myth;
on a linguistic level, the gearing of syntax and discourse not so much towards
logical sequence as towards juxtaposition. 5 Although important elements of
Frank's conception of 'spatial' form in literature will be shared by my use of the
term, especially on a linguistic and syntactical level, overall it will be understood
in a far more literal and specific way. For it seems to me important - especially in
the context of poetry - to stress the fact that 'spatial' implies the apprehension of
space, that is, the perception of the page itself as a site on which textual elements
are arranged or juxtaposed. 'Spatial' texts are those which, in foregrounding the

25

26

II6

Pieter Breughel, Children's Games (1560; oil; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna)

Pieter Breughel, Landscape with Fall of Icarus ( r 560; oil; Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels)

'Spatial' structure and the prose poem

118

27

Pieter De Hooch, Courtyard in Delft (16j8; oil; The National Gallery, London)

29

~~~~;~.:-~
~
-~~:".~~~-;;-:~':;:-<'f,,~i_j: --~

~
~---~~~~
~~-4~~

28

Pieter De Hooch, Courtyard with Arbour and Drinkers (16j 8; oil; Private Collection, Great Britain)

Nicolas Maes, The Eavesdropper (16n; oil; Dordrechts Museum, Dordrecht)

119

'Spatial' structure and the prose poem

Pictorialist poetics

120

31

30

Gerrit Dou, A Poulterer's Shop (1650s; oil; The National Gallery, London)

Gerrie Dou, Jeune Femme accrochant un coq

a la Jenetre

(1650; oil; Musee du Louvre, Paris)

121

'Spatial' structure and the prose poem

Pictorialist poetics

122

123

materiality of the word as a (visual) signifier, depend for their full impact on
visual - as well as aural - attention. Literary texts which are 'spatial', furthermore,
unlike those of Joyce or Eliot, are those which, in most cases, emerge from a
literary tradition saturated with the visual arts, one in which composition is
conceived as being partly dependent on the organization of constituent elements
within a visible framework. In this way, the interrelationship of the various parts
of the text tends to be seized simultaneously or through multiple - and
multidirectional - strategies of reading, ofwhich the traditional linear, horizontal
model is only one of a variety of options open to the reader.

BERTRAND: 'GASPARD DE LA NUIT'

32

Fran~ois

Boucher, Peche chinoise (1742; oil; Musee des Beaux-Arts,

Besan~on)

The remarkable degree to which the characteristics of 'spatial' form, as just

outlined, are already developed in French poetry three-quarters of a century
before the onset of Modernism is borne out by Aloysius Bertrand's Gaspard de la
Nuit, first published in 1842 (a year after the poet's death), but in fact written in
the 18zos and 30s. In these Fantaisiesa la maniere de Rembrandt et de Callot, Bertrand
so thoroughly explored the spatial potential ofliterature that he was able to invent
a new poetic genre, the poeme en prose, the aesthetic integrity of which was not
dependent on such traditional prosodic resources as rhyme and verse. Despite
having, in Gaspard de la Nuit, no recourse to these latter6 Bertrand's overall
strategy as a pictorialist poet nevetheless had much in common with that of the
poets examined in chapter 5. For, in paying extreme attention to the way his prose
poems presented themselves to the reader as signifying surfaces - in particular
with regard to typography and punctuation, spacing of constituent elements and
the overall format of the text - and to the way these (formal) systems interacted
with linguistic and semantic structures, Bertrand was able to achieve visual
effects comparable to those manifested in V erlainian and Mallarmean verse.
In particular, Bertrand was to compensate for the loss of the effects of contrast
and juxtaposition afforded by rhyme with the adaptation of pictorial models
which were conducive to the creation of such effects in visual terms. This is
reflected in the sources Bertrand repeatedly admits to exploiting: Rembrandt and
Callot, cited in Gaspard's subtitle; the painters listed in the first poem of'L'Ecole
flamande', 'Harlem':
Harlem, cette admirable bambochade qui resume l'ecole
flamande, Harlem peint par Jean-Breughel, Peeter-Neef,
David-Teniers et Paul Rembrandt . ..

and the more extensive inventory drawn up in his preface:

et voici, outre des fantaisies ala maniere de Rembrandt et de Callot, des etudes sur Van-Eyck, Lucas
de Leyde, Albert Diirer, Peeter Neef, Breughel de Velours, Breughel d'Enfer, Van-Ostade, Gerard
Dow, Salvator-Rosa, Murillo, Fusely et plusieurs autres maitres de differentes ecoles.7

Pictorialist poetics

'Spatial' structure and the prose poem

What have all these artists - Flemish, German, Swiss, Italian, French and Spanish,
from the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries 8
in
common? Part of the answer to this question is provided by Bertrand himself
earlier in the same preface, in which Rembrandt and Callot are seen as rep
resenting the two antithetical sides of the coin of art, the one (Rembrandt),
austere and meditative, the other (Callot), more frivolous and extravert. This
polarity is however broadened and nuanced by the wide spectrum of other artists
named: the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pre-Romantic painters (Salvator
Rosa, Murillo and Fuseli) seem to gravitate towards the pole of Rembrandt,
sharing with the latter the sombre palette, effects of chiaroscuro and tragic mood
the three painters being associated, respectively, with stormy land- or sea-scapes,
religious apotheoses, or nightmares, though Murillo was also a notable painter of
genre subjects. Diirer, Van Eyck and Lucas van der Leyden, in their sobriety and
moral seriousness, are also close to the spirit of Rembrandt. Although Callot,
with his famous series of etchings The Miseries of War, is far from being a uniquely
light-hearted artist, he is nevertheless seen by Bertrand as representing a pole
opposite that of Rembrandt, one around which is grouped a large company of
Flemish painters - the Breughels, Pieter Neeffs, David Teniers, Van Ostade and
Gerrit Dou. What these latter artists have in common is their affection for the
bambochade,9 or genre picture, characterized by an abundance of colour and
graphic detail, often humourous or grotesque- see, for example, David Teniers's
_Monkrys' Banquet in the Prado Museum, a 'peinture idiote' par excellence. The fact
that Rembrandt himself is grouped with three other Flemish bamboccii in the first
stanza of 'Harlem' underlines, however, the instability of the polarity Bertrand
has attempted to set up, an instability further emphasized by the similarity of
Rembrandt and Callot from certain points of view: both were master engravers or
etchers, though Rembrandt was above all, of course, a great painter; both were
seventeenth-century artists, both of whose work at times betrays a profoundly
pessimistic view of life. Ultimately, then, what Bertrand seems to have been
seeking was a kind of synthesis of the polar opposites he sets up in the guise of
Rembrandt and Callot.10 This would seem to be borne out both by the original
title of Gaspard, which was to have been Bambochades romantiques, a formula which
expresses the paradoxical synthesis of the comic and the Romantic, and by his
addition of the name of Rembrandt to the subtitle which he adapted from E.T. A.
Hoffmann's collection of short stories - Phantasiestiicke in Ca/lots lvfanier.
As we shall see, Bertrand benefitted as a poet from the example of this
heterogeneous yet polarized selection of artists in a variety of ways, learning from
them lessons in the graphic representation of the grotesque or macabre and in the
hallucinatory effects that could be created by chiaroscuro or other painterly
techniques. Most important of all, however, since it was to have bearing on the
formal as well as the thematic development of Bertrand's poetry, was his
adaptation of some of the compositional models used by Dutch and Flemish

genre painters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These artists'

compositional techniques are too various and complex to investigate thoroughly
here, but some examples of their methods of presenting two or more events or
images simultaneously will briefly be explored since they are relevant to
Bertrand's formal experiments as a prose poet. It seems likely, for example, that
the poet of Gaspard learnt something from the pictorial organization of the
Breughels' works in which objects and figures are often evenly distributed across
the painting (as in, for example, Pieter Breughel's Children's Games, fig. 25).
Details are sometimes brought into focus as clearly as principal motifs and there is
little trace of the hierarchization of elements generally instituted in Renaissance
and post-Renaissance history painting in which certain figures or images
dominate the scene at the expense of less important details. Diderot's system of
pictorial analysis, cited in chapter 2, geared primarily to 'la grande peinture',
would have been oflittle use to Bertrand in his study of the Breughels or of other
Flemish painters of this period since their presentation simultaneously of a
multitude of diverse actions or events demands an energetic and comparatively
free movement of the eye. What happens in a distant and at first relatively
overlooked corner of the canvas can be as interesting or significant as what goes
on in the foreground of the painting. Pieter Breughel's Landscape with Fall of
Icarus is the classic example of this sort of composition: a ploughman,
thematically insignificant, occupying the foreground of the canvas, seems
oblivious to the distant catastrophe taking place in the corner of the picture and
yet which is, in theory at any rate, the subject of the painting (see fig. 26).11
The establishment of a compositional grid which could be used to structure a
number of different scenarios, actions or juxtapositions was another practice,
common among seventeenth-century Dutch or Flemish artists, from which
Bertrand seems to have learned. Pieter de Hooch, for example, invented a
framework (Diagram A) of a passageway in a brick courtyard offering a view
through a house to a street and building opposite which in two different paintings
provided a virtually identical basis for two contrasting scenes. In the Courtyard in
Delft ( 165 8; fig. 27) in the National Gallery, London, a mother and her daughter
leave the trellised arbour to the right foreground of the picture while at the
bottom end of the passageway another female figure, acontre-:Jour, gazes into the
street. In Courtyard with an Arbour and Drinkers (1658; fig. 28), two men, seated
under the trellised arbour, drink and smoke in the company of a woman who
holds a wineglass. Meanwhile, at the near entrance of the passageway, a small
child sits with a dog on her lap. In both paintings appears the same epigraph-like
inscription over the passage door which supplies a, to a varying degree, oblique
comment on the two scenes depicted.12 A similar framework, though more
elaborately contrived, both in its rendering of recession and in its glimpses into
adjacent rooms, is used by Nicolas Maes in his Eavesdropper (1657; fig. 29), the
more explicit title of which underlines the less subtle nature of the treatment

124

125

126

Pictorialist poetics

'Spatial' structure and the prose poem

~
h

epigraph
bas relief
Diagram A

De Hooch

Diagram B

Dou

given to the psychological relationship between the figures in it. 13 In this case, the
eavesdropper at the bottom of the passage of stairs on the left is unseen by the
amorous couple at the bottom of the passage on the right. The written epigraph in
De Hooch's painting is replaced in a similar position in Maes's by the bust of
Juno, Goddess of marriage.14
Another compositional model exploited by seventeenth-century Dutch or
Flemish genre painters from Rembrandt (see his Lac!J with a Fan, 1641, in the
Royal Collection) to Job Berckheyde (The Baker, l 68 l; Worcester Art Museum,
Mass., U.S.A.),15 is that of the arched window or vault opening onto a room (see
Diagram B). This basic framework was adapted particularly frequently by Gerrit
Dou who through a variety of different treatments was able to use the same basic
compositional framework to strikingly different effect. Thus the dramatic
chiaroscuro of his Astronomer fry Candlelight (late l 6 5os, Private Collection) 16
contrasts with the graphic and colourful detail of the Jeune Femme accrochant un coq
ala fenetre ( l 6 5o; fig. 3 l) or A Poulterer's Shop ( l 65 os; fig. 30). Of particular note in
the latter work (as also in The Grocer's Shop, in the Royal Collection at
Buckingham Palace) is the way the bas-reliefin the lower right-hand corner of the
picture, depicting the sacrifice of a goat by putti, operates as a kind of visual
epigraph to the main scene: while two women in the foreground examine the
game displayed in the shop window, in the background, the presumed procurer
of the birds and animals, the hunter or gamekeeper, seems to be settling accounts
with the shopkeeper.
Commentators on Bertrand and the prose poem from Suzanne Bernard
onwards 17 have, obtusely it seems to me, criticized the author of Gaspard de la N uit
for his consistent recourse to a more or less 'fixed' form of the prose poem, usually

127

cons1stmg of six well-spaced prose 'stanzas' or 'couplets' (sometimes five or

seven) preceded by one or, occasionally, two epigraphs and a title. This is curious
in view of the fact that such a structure was consistently adapted by Bertrand
precisely because it lent itself most effectively to the dimensions of the page: like
the canvas for the painter, the page for the poet was there to be composed and
Bertrand's model of the prose poem provided him with a literary equivalent of the
compositional models - equivalent in both its unity and relative flexibility
which had been used repeatedly by Dutch or Flemish genre painters. Bertrand's
grasp of the principle of composition through juxtaposition is confirmed in particular
by his consistent use of the epigraph - even, like De Hooch, using the same
epigraph for two different works (as in the per fenestras intrabunt of 'Les Grandes
Compagnies' and 'Jacques-les-Andelys', Gaspard, pp. qo and 249). For, like the
fragment of text, bas-relief or picture frequently inserted in genre paintings as
both a compositional and thematic device,1s Bertrand's epigraphs emphasize
both the relationship of simultaneity as much as of sequence of the fragments of
text which constitute his poems, and set up a system of spatial cross-reference
within the text, allowing a wide range of readings - complementary, contradic
tory or ironic.
No poem in Gaspard de la Nuit illustrates this point and, more generally,
Bertrand's transposition into literature of the compositional methods of Flemish
genre painters, better than the first poem in 'L'Ecole flamande' - 'Harlem':
Quand d' Amsterdam le coq d' or chantera
La poule d' or de Harlem pondera.
Les Centuries de Nostredamus.

Harlem, cette admirable bambochade qui resume l'ecole

flamande, Harlem peint par Jean-Breughel, Peeter-Neef,
David-Teniers et Paul Rembrandt.
Et le canal ou l'eau bleue tremble, et l'eglise ou
le vitrage d'or flamboie, et le Stoel OU seche le linge
au soleil, et !es toits, verts de houblon.
Et !es cigognes qui battent des ailes autour de l'horloge
de la ville, tendant le col du haut des airs et recevant
clans leur bee les gouttes de pluie.
Et !'insouciant bourguemestre qui Caresse de la main
son double menton, et l'amoureux fleuriste qui maigrit,
I' o:il attache a une tulipe.
Et la bohemienne qui se pime sur sa mandoline, et le
vieillard qui joue du Rommelpot, et l'enfant qui enile
une vess1e.
Et !es buveurs qui foment clans l'estaminet borgne, et
la servante de l'h6tellerie qui accroche a la fenetre un
faisan mort.

Pictoria!ist poetics

'Spatial' structure and the prose poem

First of all, the idea of simultaneity is expressed by the epigraph which, in

announcing the bizarre synchronization of events which take place in Amsterdam
and in Harlem, also suggests the oblique and often unexpected relationship which
Bertrand institutes or discovers between his epigraph and the text which follows.
Inserted like a legende or inscription, the role of which is to announce or explain the
content of a picture or illustration, the epigraph can become part of the subject of
the text while still maintaining a certain distance or independence from it. The
first couplet of 'Harlem' is also epigraph-like to the extent that it develops dis
cursively the implications of the title before the evocation proper which begins
only in the second stanza of the poem. In defining what is to follow - a bambochade
in the Flemish manner, the first couplet also underlines the multiplicity of
viewpoints that will be offered: Harlem as painted not by one but by four
different artists, a multiplicity which will be evoked more or less simultaneously
by the following couplets which proffer diverse images according to no dis
cernible system of priority or hierarchy. Thus, as when faced with, say, the
picturesque profile of a town portrayed in Vermeer's View ofDelft, the mind's eye
of the reader confronting the second stanza of 'Harlem' is struck equally by the
various details of the scene depicted. Similarly, the reader/observer's attention is,
in theory, equally divided amongst the various couplets which follow, all of
which contain intensely visual images, in each case juxtaposed, rather than linked,
by the neutral conjunction: et, repeated twelve times in the last five stanzas. Only
the images placed at the end of each couplet - in, as it were, the rhyme-position
and, in particular, that placed at the end of the poem, and which thus benefit from
a kind of spatial prominence, attract special attention. This attention is further
stimulated in the case of 'l'ceil attache aune tulipe' and the dead pheasant framed
by the window, which are images providing the viewer with a reflection of his or
her own visual activity (the eye) or of a model of pictorial representation (the
frame). The structure of Bertrand's text thus, with its juxtaposition of apparently
discrete elements and yet constant reference, direct or oblique, to visual
processes, l9 has the effect not so much of foregrounding, as in history painting,
narrativeZO or symbolic links21 through hierarchical composition or coded
gesture, but rather ofstimulating in the reader/observer an awareness of his or her
own act of reading or observation.
The esthitique de la discontinuite22 which characterizes Bertrand's approach to
composition is also a function of the disparate nature of his images' sources.
Unlike his contemporary Gautier, Bertrand's aim as a pictorialist poet was never
reallv that of systematic transposition. As H. van der Tuin has shown, the pictures
studied by Bertrand 'ne sont pas entres tels quels dans son ceuvre litteraire. Ils
n'ont servi que de motifs'. 23 Like Goya's Los Caprichos in the context of
Baudelaire, the advantage to Bertrand of genre painting and some of Callot's
series of etchings (such as The Complete Beggars, The Grotesque Dwarfs or Gobbi, The
Complete Fantasies, etc.) was that they supplied a wide range of motifs which could

easily be detached from their context and reintegrated into a different setting. The
creation of new and striking juxtapositions of images from different sources
constitutes in effect the basis of Bertrand's technique as a poet, one which he
developed to such a degree of refinement that it is difficult to identify with
certainty the pictorial origins of even the most spectacular images. Thus the final
image of 'Harlem', already noted, of the girl hanging up a dead pheasant in a
window, may have its source in one of a number ofGerrit Dou's paintings24 or in
Rembrandt,25 while the image of the 'vieillard qui joue du Rommelpot' and the
'enfant qui enfle une vessie' may be based on Frans Hals, 26 the latter motif also
appearing in Breughel's famous painting, Children's Games ( 15 60; fig. 2 5). The
same applies to etchings and engravings. Although Rembrandt's subtle use of
chiaroscuro in his engravings and the incisive delineation of the picturesque or
grotesque in Callot's etchings was to have a marked impact on Bertrand's choice
and presentation of images, it is often difficult to relate a given motif to a specific
visual source. Although there can be little doubt that in Callot's Gobbi or Grotesque
Dwarfs (two of which are reproduced in fig. 13), Bertrand discovered a crys
tallization in visual terms of the imagined demons, in particular the figure of
Scarbo, the 'nain railleur', which haunted the nocturnal chambers evoked in 'La
Chambre gothique', 'Scarbo', 'Le Nain', etc., images which have their origin in
Rembrandt are more difficult to isolate. As Max Milner has suggested (Gaspard,
pp. 21-2), it was perhaps a certain contemplative atmosphere as much as specific
visual motifs that Bertrand derived from the painter of The Philosopher and The
Night Watch.
A further interesting dimension to this problem is provided by the fact that
Bertrand himself had intended Gaspard de la N uit to be illustrated, and included in
his list of details for illustration both the 'servante a l'hotellerie' of 'Harlem' and
the 'gnome qui se soule de l'huile de ma lampe' of'La Chambre gothique'.27 This
ambiguous relationship between source image, text and illustration, in which the
poem is the pivot between two different transpositional activities, is significant in
the more general context of the nineteenth-century prose poem. For the aim of
the latter (in the context of Rimbaud and Mallarme as well as that of Bertrand)
seems often to have been, in creating a text which incorporated in itself, as it were,
its own illustration, to resolve the problem of the relationship, rarely satisfactory,
between text and illustrative image. The disappointment of the illustration
which, because too explicit, too visible even, reduces a considerable part of the
text's suggestive potential, is well known. As Mallarme said, 'Je suis pour
aucune illustration, tout ce qu'evoque un livre devant se passer dans l'esprit du
lecteur .. .'(MOC, p. 878). The solution to this problem seems to be either, as
with Blake (who was in the privileged position of being able to illustrate his own
texts), to institute an oblique and ambiguous relationship between text and
image,28 in which the illustration becomes a kind of visual epigraph to the text; or,
as is the case with the French poets we are concerned with here, to transpose

128

129

Pictorialist poetics

'Spatial' structure and the prose poem

visual images into texts, maintaining as far as possible their graphic qualities
through the exploitation of 'spatial' structures and typographical artifice.
No nineteenth-century French poet knew better than Bertrand that 'clans
typographique il y a graphique',29 and his altogether modern intuition of the
visual possibilities of the text is confirmed by the infinite care he took in planning
his poems' mise en page. Bertrand knew that he could isolate certain images or
groups of images through the use of different sizes of character and that the
smallest typographical indications (stars, asterisks) could signal important
developments. Thus, in his instructions to the typesetter, he insists on the
necessity of placing:

v1s1on, especially of vision deformed by illusion or hallucination. 30 In 'La

Chambre gothique', the distorted nocturnal view of the earth as 'un calice
embaume dont le pistil et les etamines sont la lune et les etoiles' is perceived by
eyes 'lourds de sommeil' through a window 'qu'incrusta la croix du calvaire,
noire clans la jaune aureole des vitraux'. In 'Ondine', the illusion of the fairy's
presence is created in the first couplet by the raindrops falling on 'les losanges
sonores de [la] fenetre illuminee par les mornes rayons de la lune' and disappears
only at the end of the poem 'en giboulees qui ruisselerent blanches le long [des]
vitraux bleus'. 31 And in 'Le Clair de lune', the perception, in the first couplet of a
grotesque but still inoffensive moon: 'Oh! qu'il est doux, quand l'heure tremble
au clocher, la nuit, de regarder la lune qui a le nez fait comme un carolus d'or!'
undergoes, in the following stanzas, a gradual modification - suggested, no
doubt, in part, by the sinister and morbid cry of the crieur de nuit cited in the
epigraph - which results in the disquieting and hallucinatory, but intensely
graphic, image of the final couplet: 'Et moi, il me semblait, - tant la fievre est
incoherente! - que la lune, grimant sa face, me tirait la langue comme un pendu!'
Thus, like medieval stained glass or modern comic strips, Bertrand creates,
through the various subdivisions of his text, an essentially diagrammatic or
illustrative pattern of development.

130

clans la mise en page les etoiles ... figurees clans le manuscrit entre les couplets de quelques pieces, et
qui indiquent qu'il faut en outre un double blanc.
Quand aux epigraphes de chaque piece ... je le prie de les composer en tres petits caracteres.
(Gaspard, p. 302)

The various formal units ofthe text (epigraph, introductory couplets, subsequent
stanzas) are thus made to stand out as visually differentiatable, the totality of the
poem being, in most cases, visible in its entirety and framed by the white margin
of the page. The importance of the intrusion of b/ancs into the text is also stressed
by Bertrand in his instructions to the metteur en page when he asserts as a general
rule the necessity to - 'Blanchir comme si le texte etait de la poesie ... [Jeter] de
larges b/ancs entre [les] couplets comme sic'etaient des strophes en vers' (Gaspard,
p. 301). The effect of this, as we noted above, was to spatialize the relationship
between the various elements of the text, giving rise, in the words of Max Milner,
to a:
poesie spatiale, ou le lecteur parcourt un es pace, prend possession d'une multiplicite dont il articule
les elements selon une combinatoire suggeree par !'auteur, mais en laissant entre eux assez de jeu
pour procluire [un] miroitement kaleidoscopique.
(Gaspard, p. 28)

Milner also compares Bertrand's technique to that of a 'maitre-verrier'

(Gaspard, p. 29) and although he does not develop this analogy, there is plenty of
evidence for doing so given the obsessive repetition in Gaspard of images of
windows or optical and lighting effects. Indeed the image of the window suggests
itself as a structural model for the text in which the stanzas or couplets are the
panes of glass arranged in squares or lozenges. For it is above all by his
division of the visual field into sections - either by the insertion of extraneous
elements (such as the epigraph, a fragment from another text inserted into the
poem like an escutcheon or coat of arms in a church or castle window) or by the
juxtaposition of the various formal units - that Bertrand manages to create the
bizarre hallucinatory or kaleidoscopic effects which characterize his poems.
Thus, as was suggested above, the aim of Gaspard de la N uit seems to have been in
part that of exploring as far as possible the act ofseeing, the role of each poem being,
in effect, to recreate, in the manner of the painter or engraver, the experience of

3I

RIMBAUD: 'ILLUMINATIONS'

Rimbaud's creative methods in the Illuminations have much in common with

those of Bertrand except that they are more radical and concentrated than those of
his predecessor and exploit a far greater variety of formal options. Whereas
Bertrand adopted a format which he was to use more or less consistently
throughout Gaspard de la Nuit, with only minor variations in length and number
of stanzas, the form of the poems in the Illuminations is much less fixed.
Nevertheless, they share a certain regularity of profile, the vast majority con
sisting of dense and concentrated blocks of prose3Z easily accommodated by a
single page. As texts indeed, like those in Gaspard, they present themselves
essentially as individual pages, only half a dozen texts (out of forty-two) over
running the page by a few lines (excluding the small group of composite texts,
such as 'Vies', 'Phrases', 'Veillees', 'Enfance' and 'Jeunesse', which are divided
into several short passages).
Likewise, the systematic spacing of the internal constituents of the text follows
in Rimbaud's work a principle similar to that in Bertrand's, except that, once
again, Rimbaud is more various and experimental in his approach. Extending and
radicalizing Bertrand's use of the neutral conjunction 'et', as noted above in
'Harlem', Rimbaud has increasing recourse to punctuation alone as a spacing
device, as in the more or less systematic use of dashes and semi-colons we shall
observe in such poems as 'Ornieres', 'Promontoire' and 'Fete d'hiver'.33 Where

Pictoria!ist poetics

'Spatial' structure and the prose poem

Bertrand had spaced out his images and phrases, Rimbaud will often attempt a
more abrupt confrontation without, however, risking fusion: the heterogeneity
of his images is safeguarded by a punctuation promoting juxtaposition rather
than liaison.
As with Gaspard de la N uit, references to painting and the graphic arts in the
Illuminations34 are many and varied, ranging from vague though suggestive
allusions to painterly themes:

J'aimais !es peintures idiotes, dessus de portes, decors, toiles de saltimbanques, enseignes,
enluminures populaires; la litterature demodee, latin d'cglise, livres erotiques sans orthographe,
romans de nos a!eules, contes de fees, petits livres de l'enfance, operas vieux, refrains niais,
rhythmes na1fs.
(Oeuvres, p. 228)

32

A quelque fete de nuit clans une cite du Nord, j'ai

rencontre toutes lcs femmes des anciens peintres ..

('Vies,' m)

to the sensitive analysis of colour and light:

Impossible d'exprimer le jour mat produit par le ciel
immuablement gris ...

('Villes')

and of pictorial structure:

la mer etagee la-haut comme sur les gravures.

('A pres le deluge')

Most indicative, however, of Rimbaud's orientation towards the visual arts is his
choice of title and proposed subtitle for the prose poems: Illuminations, Coloured
Plates. For the conception of the text as an illustration or coloured plate seems to
confirm that Rimbaud, like Bertrand and other nineteenth-century prose poets,
saw the poem as being auto-illustrative, as absorbing into itself the graphic or
pictorial qualities of the visual arts. Unlike Bertrand, however, Rimbaud did not
seek inspiration in the work of the great European masters of painting, whether
in prestigious or more lowly genres. Boucher, the only painter named in the
Illuminations, is the nearest he gets to European high art, and even here it is the
Boucher of the carpet designs and chinoiseries rather than the history painter who
exhibited in the Salons of the mid-eighteenth century.35 This relative lack of
specific reference to painters or their works, compared with the plethora of names
cited in Bertrand's or Gautier's writings, confirms the trend, noted in chapter 3 in
the context of Baudelaire, towards a broader and more synthetic approach, in the
later poetry of the century, to an increasingly wide range of visual sources.
Interesting himself even less than Bertrand in straightforward transposition d'art,
manifesting enthusiasm for no painter in particular - either past or con
temporary ,36 Rimbaud, it seems, was stimulated rather by the idea of painting in
general; that is as a relatively undifferentiated source of visual motifs and
structures.37 Ignoring the masterpieces of the museums and the academic
painting of the Salons, Rimbaud preferred those images - cheap prints,
illustrations and vignettes, shop signs, theatre and fairground decors - the very
incongruity of whose pictorial structure set them apart from conventional
models of art. In this respect, the catalogue of visual sources he draws up in
'Alchimie du verbe' is as revealing in the context of the Illuminations as the
inventory of painters made by Bertrand in the preface of Gaspard de la Nuit:

33

Of particular interest is the interpenetration of text and image which

characterizes the sources listed here; for, if those items in the first half of the
passage (up to the semi-colon) appear primarily visual in their appeal, and those in
the second half, textual or musical, closer inspection reveals that in fact, in nearly
all cases, the media are mixed: just as operas have decors and children's books have
illustrations, so signs and enluminures are associated with texts, even if only a few
words or phrases. The attraction to Rimbaud of the objects cited seems precisely
to lie in the naive or bizarre mixture (the terms naif, idiot, niais he uses are worth
underlining here) of image and text that they propose, a mixture potentially rich
in improbable yet suggestive juxtapositions.Just, then, as Flemish genre painting
seems to have suggested to Bertrand pictorial structures adaptable to his prose
poems, so the sources Rimbaud cites appear to have offered semiotic models he
could recreate in composing his own texts.
An important lesson Rimbaud seems to have learned from the naive image,
painted or engraved, was that there is no fixed hierarchy of pictorial values. For
the poet of the Illuminations, therefore, the conventional structures and codes of
visual representation
perspective, verisimilitude of colour, certain
compositional models - are not seen as being especially privileged. On the
contrary, in expressing his vision of the world, Rimbaud will try to abstract, in
Suzanne Bernard's words 'toutes les notions intellectuelles qui etablissent entre
les objets des rapports, des lignes de demarcation'.38 In reconstructing the
elements of his vision in linguistic terms, he will thus constantly stress surface
values both of the text itself and the images it proposes. Avoiding gradations or
depth, he will try, like the naive painting, to keep everything in the foreground.
In' Apres le deluge', the sea is envisaged not as receding into the background as in
classical seascapes but as being 'etagee la-haut comme sur les gravures'. In the
same poem, the bizarre image of 'Madame *** [qui] etablit un piano clans les
Alpes' (an image the source of which may well have been in some naive enseigne or
peinture idiote), has the effect of telescoping the foreground and background of
our field of vision. Like the children evoked in this poem who 'clans la grande
maison de vitres encore ruisselante ... regarderent les merveilleuses images', the
reader of the Rimbaldian text is confronted with a series of surfaces constructed of
multiple fragments which fuse only in the kaleidoscopic movement of reading.
Another technique Rimbaud learned from illustrated or children's books and
applied in his prose poems was the reduction of the narrative or syntagmatic
impetus of the phrase in the interests of promoting in it something more like the
stasis of the image. Unlike the sign-painter or book illustrator, the poet was not of
course able literally to frame his fragments of text in pictorial motifs and the

34

Pictoria!ist poetics

commitment, in most of the Illuminations, to prose meant that prosodic options

such as rhyme and the short verse line could not be exploited as stabilizing or
spatializing devices. In attempting to isolate certain elements or phrases, then, the
prose poet had at his disposal only the resources - grammatical, punctuational,
typographical, rhythmic - which, in theory, were equally available to conven
tional prose. Nevertheless, by instituting a new economy and purposefulness in
his use of the regular organizational procedures of prose, Rimbaud was able to
create remarkable effects, particularly with respect to the image.
First, he succeeded in reducing the linearity of the text through the application
of a whole range of procedures geared towards the fragmentation of discourse
and phrase. Logical or narrative links are thus systematically cut, using ellipses,
juxtaposition, spacing- even within the context of an individual phrase. The first
sentence of'Apres le deluge', for example, a curious amalgam of Biblical style and
children's book, is set out in two versets:
Aussit6t apres que l'idee du Deluge se fut
rassise,
Un lievre s'arreta clans Jes sainfoins et Jes
clochettes mouvantes et dit sa priere a l'arc-en-ciel
a travers la toile de l'araignee ...

The versets which follow consist of a series of narrative fragments, of apostrophes

or of heterogeneous images, juxtaposed by spacing and by a punctuation heavily
reliant on dashes. This text demonstrates, in fact, the wide range of methods used
by Rimbaud in transforming fragments of prose into poetry, in particular the
elevation to the status of poetic image of scraps of story or description.
If to poeticize and to spatialize become, in the context of the Illuminations more
or less synonymous, it is not only through spacing that this spatialization is
effected. As texts such as 'Apres le deluge', 'Aube' or the free verse poems
'Marine' and '11ouvement' show, Rimbaud was, as much as Bertrand and
Mallarme, aware of the important role blancs play in the creation of poetic effects.
But it is the manner in which Rimbaud succeeds in spatializing the internal
elements of isolated fragments of prose of varying length which distinguishes his
technique as a prose poet. It is here that punctuation, in particular the use of semi
colons and dashes, will play a fundamental role.
The prose poem 'Ornieres' provides an interesting example both of the new
relationship instituted in Rimbaud's prose poetry between image and
syntagmatic energies and the role of punctuation in regulating the tension
between the two impulses:
A droite l'aube d'ete eveille Jes feuilles et !es
vapeurs et !es bruits de ce coin du pare, et Jes talus
de gauche tiennent clans leur ombre violette !es mille
rapides ornieres de la route humide. Defile de feeries.
En effet: des chars charges d'animaux de bois dore, de

'Spatial' structure and the prose poem

35

mats et de toiles bariolccs, au grand galop de vingt

chevaux de cirque tachetes, et !es enfants et !es
hommes sur leurs betes !es plus Ctonnantes; - vingt
vehicules, bosses, pavoiscs et fleuris comme des car
rosses ancicns ou de contes, pleins d'enfants attifes
pour une pastorale suburbaine. - Meme des cercueils
sous leur dais de nuit dressant des panaches d'cbene,
filant au trop des grandes juments bleues et noires.

'Ornieres', like 'Promontoire', is divided into two parts, the first of which,
relatively short, plays the role of overture or exposition, and the second, very
long, consists of a detailed and complex elaboration of the scene announced in the
first. We are thus, in a sense, confronted by two texts, of which the former, active
and indicative, outlines the theme of which the latter, passive39 and appositional,
provides an illustration. The structure of 'Ornieres' is, in fact, like that of
Bertrand's 'Harlem' in which, as we saw, a discursive opening stanza is followed
by a series of illustrations. Thus, in the first sentence of 'Ornieres', which contains
the only active verbs in the poem, both present indicative, the visual field is
divided into two contrasting sections, the right hand side lit by the dawn, the left
still in shadow. The generality of these features is marked by the systematic use of
the plural: 'A droite ... !es feuilles et !es vapeurs et !es bruits' (note the use of
conjunctions in the manner of Bertrand), 'et les talus de gauche ... !es mille
rapides ornieres de la route' .4o This sentence is followed by a fragment- 'Defile de
feeries', the isolated and inactive form of which makes it look more like a heading
or title than a phrase. Its role is, in fact, that of announcing the three hallucinatory
visions which follow, visions juxtaposed through the simple insertion of two
dashes with semi-colon or full stop.
Unlike R. Riese Hubert in her analysis of this text, it does not seem to me that
the funereal quality of the last of the three processions evoked 'finit par abolir' the
overall vision, nor that they deploy themselves 'sur un plan horizontal ... et
finiront par s'enfoncer clans la nuit'.41 On the contrary, the funeral cortege is
viewed, in a deliberate paradox, in terms as lively and gay as those of the
preceding processions, what Rimbaud is proposing here being less a linear
evocation than a hallucinatory superimposition of images both linked and
contrasting. Moreover, it is significant that, avoiding such adverbs as 'puis' or
'ensuite', which would have facilitated the logical and temporal progression of
the phrase, Rimbaud contents himself with 'Me me des cercueils .. .' The role of
Rimbaldian punctuation is, then, precisely to maintain his images in a state of
suspense, in a state of simultaneity which recreates, as far as is possible in linguistic
terms, the effect of visual illustration.
It is in this way that the Rimbaldian text, opening with an active and rapid
exposition of a theme, soon transforms itself into a pure juxtapositon of elements
organized in a spatial or illustrative manner. In his original and exhaustive

136

Pictorialist poetics

analysis of 'Promontoire', Atle Kittang explains how a landscape 'se trouve

soudain transforme en surface picturale',42 and, in effect, the same structure of
expositional dynamic followed by juxtapositional stasis noted in 'Ornieres' is
operative here. The only difference is that it is given even more radical and
extended application:
L',\ube d'or ct la soiree frissonnante trouvent notre brick en large en face de cette \-illa ct de ses
dcpcndances, qui forment un promontoire aussi Ctendu que l'Epire et le Peloponnese, ou que la
grande ile du Japon, ou que l' Arabie' Des fanums qu'eclaire la rentree des theories, d'immenses
\'UCS de )a defense des cotes modernes; des dunes illustrees de chaudes fleurs et de bacchana)es; de
grands canaux de Carthage et des Embankments d'une Venise louche; de molles eruptions d'Etnas
ct de crn-asscs de fleurs et d'eaux des glaciers; des lavoirs entoures de peupliers d' Allemagne; des
talus de pares singuliers penchant des tetes d'Arbre du Japon; les fac;:ades circulaires des 'Royal' ou
des 'Grand' de Scarbro' ou de Brooklyn; et leurs railways flanquent, creusent, surplombent les
dispositions de cet Hotel, choisies dans l'histoire des plus elegantes et des plus colossales
constructions de l'ltalie, de l' Amerique et de l' Asie, dont les fenerres et les terrasses apresent pleines
d'eclairagcs, de boissons et de brises riches, sont ouvertes a!'esprit des voyageurs et des nobles -qui
permettent, aux heures du jour, a toutes !es tarentelles des cotes, - et meme aux ritournelles des
Yallees illustres de !'art, de decorer merveilleusement les fac;:ades du Palais-Promontoire.

As with 'Ornieres', then, a preliminary sentence evoking the title word and
subject of the poem, is followed by a vast juxtapositional construction in which
seven fragments of varying length (the last constituting approximately half of the
text), separated by six semi-colons, explore the various aspects of the
'promontoire' theme. In this way the pictorial effect of the poem begins to assert
itself on the level of signifiers as well as signifieds. For in citing a plethora of
proper nouns, all names of places
whether towns (Carthage, Venice,
Scarborough, Brooklyn), countries or geographical regions (Epirus, the
Peloponnese, Japan, Arabia, America, Asia), buildings (the 'Royal', the 'Grand'
the 'Palais-Promontoire'), etc. - Rimbaud erects a verbal structure in which
capital letters, systematically repeated, thicken the texture of the poem, pro
jecting the signifier sharply into the foreground, creating thus a textual surface or
ja(ade which dazzles and fascinates the reader as much as the imaginary vision
signified behind the words.
Kittang notes that this tendency towards the 'retrait du signifie' is general in
the Illuminations and in confirming that 'Promontoire' represents the extreme
example, goes so far as to say that the role of the text is to 's'effacer, en tant que
signifie, devant l'espace multiple du signifiant' in order to 'fournir une fa~ade, un
espace vide, une toile pour le dynamisme decoratif et "merveilleux" de
l'ecriture' .43 This is a seductive thesis and well argued by Kittang in what is
probably the best study to date of Rimbaud's poetry; but it is, I think, taken a little
too far. For the Illuminations are not concrete poetry and the fascination and
challenge that they offer the reader is precisely in the tension they set up between
the sensuality of the signifying surface and the lure of the imaginative vision
embedded in the signifieds. No text illustrates this point better perhaps than 'Fete

'.Spatial' structure and the prose poem

1 37

d'hiver', for this poem - surprisingly overlooked, not only by Kittang but also by
other commentators44 _in setting itself up as what seems to be a purely decorative
surface nevertheless suggests a pattern of signifieds rich in pictorial
reverberations:
La Cascade sonne derriere !es huttes d'opera comique. Des girandoles prolongent, clans les vergers
et !es allees voisins du Meandre, - !es verts et les rouges du couchant. Nymphes d'Horace coiffees au
Premier Empire, - Rondes Siberiennes, Chinoises de Boucher.

The structure of this short text is generally analogous to that of 'Ornieres' and
'Promontoire': a first part consisting of two descriptive sentences, fully
articulated (two present active verbs), is followed by fragments of phrase the
relationship of which is purely juxtapositional. The use of the dash, as in
'Ornieres' and 'Promontoire', is again notable here and again primarily aesthetic
in function. For in liberating the phrase 'les verts et !es rouges du couchant' from
any exclusive obligation to the sentence to which, grammatically it is attached, it
becomes free to illuminate with its lurid colours the bizarre and heterogeneous
elements proposed in the following phrase: 'Nymphes d'Horace coiffees au
Premier Empire, - Rondes Siberiennes, Chinoises de Boucher'. Here again the
role of the dash is purely juxtapositional, the numerous capital letters - 'Nymphes
d'Horace', 'Premier Empire', 'Rondes Siberiennes', 'Chinoises de Boucher'
having a similar effect to that noted in 'Promontoire', that is, of foregrounding
the signifying surface of the poem as an aesthetic decor. This decor is, however,
immeasurably enriched by the signifieds attached to the proper names, in
particular that of Boucher which, in conjunction with the mention of'Chinoises',
conjures up a vision of Boucher's numerous chinoiseries (see for example, Peche
chinoise, fig. 32), a number of which, in the form of engravings, had been
reproduced by L' Artiste in the 1 86os, that is, in the decade immediately
preceding the composition of 'Fete d'hiver'. 45 Boucher's chinoiseries are 'peintures
idiotes' par excellence, in the rococo dynamics of their composition (Peche chinoise is
a kind of variation on the motif of the curve - from the central meander of the river
to the costumes, poses, architecture and vegetation of the scene) and in their
curiously heterogeneous and anachronistic mixture of periods and styles (an
eighteenth-century European landscape back-drop cluttered with oriental bric-a
brac, female figures a la Pompadour, dolled up in Chinese costume). In this way
they supplied all the elements Rimbaud needed to reconstruct a charming but
incongruous imaginative vision, one which, as we have seen, he was able to
recreate both on the level of signifier and signified.
A point that has frequently been stressed in this chapter is that an important
ambition of the prose poem as practised by nineteenth-century French poets, was
to integrate into the text its own illustration. Now it seems that the relation
text/illustration is not unrelated to that of signifier/signified in so far as, unlike
conventional prose, the prose poem is a text which tries to foreground the

Pictorialist poetics

'Spatial' structure and the prose poem

signifier by allowing it to absorb into itself as many as possible of the resources of

the signified. It is in this sense that it becomes 'poetic'. The remarkable
achievement of Bertrand and Rimbaud was to have succeeded in balancing the
tension between the two different semiotic or signifying systems operative in
their prose poems. For in avoiding the trivialization of the visual image through
over-explicit illustration (as in some of Apollinaire's Calligrammes) or the
disintegration of the text through its reduction to isolated words or even letters
(as in much modern concrete poetry), they were able to propose images which
were both spatial and textual, which offered both the impact of the graphic image
and yet retained the complex ambiguity of suggestive poetry.46

seize the opportunity of reinstating 'prosodic' space into prose itself. As he writes
in the preface to Un coup de Des:

138

MALLARME: 'UN COUP DE DES'

The dynamics of spatiality and textuality in poetry were to be investigated in an

nTen more radical manner by the author of Un coup de Des4 7 for Mallarme was the
first modern poet fully to articulate the page, both as a concept (the 'armature
intellectuelle du poeme', MOC, p. 872) and as the white surface on which the
words were printed, while, at the same time, extending more or less to their limits
the intrinsic structures of language. To structure the page became, in effect, for
Mallarme, an essential part of the art of poetry. As J. Scherer confirms:
~Iallarme

considerait une page d'un livre comme une unite, clans laquelle ii y avait lieu d'introduire
une construction, tout comme clans ccs autres unites que sont la phrase ou le vers ... A la
confection de ces pages, unites visuelles, ii apporte tous ses soins ... Lorsqu'il voudra ecrire le
Liin, la page sera !'element constitutif essentiel de son entreprise.48

Un coup de Des represents a similarly ambitious attempt to explore the relationship

between the artistic text and its support. But how does a writer structure the page?
In conventional reading and writing, the page goes largely unnoticed. It is
taken for granted and has been so in particular since the invention of the printing
press in the fifteenth century when its role became that of accommodating as
many words as clarity and legibility would allow. It presents itself evenly and
systematically covered with print, 'cette unite artificielle, jadis, mesuree en bloc
au livre' as Mallarme puts it (JWOC, p. 367). The modern extension of this
convention is visible above all in the novel, in which all articulation is achieved by
language, excluding the page and, with it, the initiative of the reader. As
Mallarme wrote to Zola in connection with the latter's Une Page d' amour:
alors, tout est dit ct le poeme est contenu, tout entier, clans le livre comme en !'esprit du lecteur, sans
c1ue par une !acune quefconqtte on puisse y laisser penetrcr de soi, ni re\er a cote. (lvIC n, p. 172)

As Mallarme saw it, it was one of poetry's functions to adapt the page as a
safeguard of the interests of the reader. It had, of course, nearly always done this,
though mostly unconsciously, through the conventions of prosody. It was apt, if
ironic, that in exploring the poetic potential of the poeme en prose, Mallarme should

139

Les 'blancs' en effet, assument !'importance, frappent d'abord; la versification en exigea, comme
silence alentour, ordinairement, au point qu'un morceau, lyrique ou de peu de pieds, occupe, au
milieu, le tiers environ du feuillet: je ne transgresse cette mesure, seulement la disperse.
(MOC, p. 45 5)

What are the implications of this reinstatement of the page, literally, the
writing of the page back into the text? As the last two chapters of this study have
shown, in the work of Mallarme's immediate predecessors and contemporaries,
as in his own verse poetry, the relationship between text and page increasingly
became one both of tension and complementarity. In inviting the page back into
the text, the poem enhances its own profile and visual impact, but at the cost of a
certain dislocation of language's intrinsic functions, especially those associated
with linear advance: syntax and the logic of proposition. The page thus asserts
itself both as an ironic denial of language's positive, rational gestures and as a
potentially symbolic field, capable, silently, of reverberating, extending or
enlarging the irrational or unconscious implications of the text. In a sense it seems
that Mallarme is attempting, by composing the page, to bring nearer to
consciousness those unconscious areas of experience - vague traces of myth,
desire or anguish - that language itself never fully articulates. In doing so, he was
to adopt a number of strategies.
The most obvious of these relates to typography. In the printing of Un coup de
Des, Mallarme opted for the use of eight different typefaces, three of which
appear both as Romans and italics, constituting thus six different characters, the
remaining five being either Roman (three) or italic (two), offering thus a total of
eleven different character styles.49 In this way, Mallarme is able to hierarchize the
structure of the page and also the thinking process: the use of different
typographical series on the same page makes it possible to present several lines or
levels of thought more or less simultaneously. To this extent, Un coup de Des
represents an extension and refinement of Mallarme's customarily parenthetic
style. As Scherer has noted in his analysis of Mallarmean syntax:
La place considerable qu'occupent Jes incidentes et !es incises clans la phrase de Mallarme entraine
... des consequences importantes. Ces perperuelles enclaves, qui trouent sans cesse la phrase, \'
determinent des differences de niveau ...

This 'difference des plans' implies, as Scherer continues, a new kind of structure,
instituting 'etages, qui vont permettre une etude de la profondeur de la phrase'.50
In other words, Un coup de Des proposes a spatial representation, a diagrammatic
portrayal of the hierarchical levels implicit in linear discourse which, as Scherer
shows in his Grammaire de Mallarme, 51 it is possible to impose on some of
Mallarme's more conventionally laid out passages ofprose. Whereas, however, in
most Mallarmean prose, the main clause may be fragmented or suspended over as

Pictorialist poetics

'Spatial' structure and the prose poem

much as a paragraph, in Un coup de Des it becomes a matter of pages. Thus the

massive capitals of the poem's main proposition, dwarfing the other typographi
cal characters, are spread over four pages - ( z b ), (3 b ), (6b), (rob) [seen. 47] -- like
an epigraph:

of (Sa) falls on page (rob) beneath the crushing weight of LE HASARD, in a

decorative but tragic cul-de-lampe:

140

UN COUP DE DES // J AMAIS //

N'

ABOLIRA

II

QUAN D B IE N '.I.IE lvl E LANCE DANS DES CIR C0 NS TAN CE S ET ERNE LL ES / DU

FOND D'UN NAUFRAGE //soIT // LE MAirRE // EXISTAT-IL
/coM'.'.1EN<;AT-IL ET cEssAT-rL /SE CHIFFRAT-IL / ILLUMINAT-IL //
RIEN I N' AURA EU LIEU I QCE LE LIEU// EXCEPTE I PEUT-ETRE I UNE
CONSTELLATION
By far the larger part of the rest of the text is in lower-case characters.
A second major area of contrast is that between the use of Roman and italic
typefaces, in both upper and lower cases. Pages (7), (8), (9) and (IO), which use
four different italic sizes (two capital, two lower case) are embraced by pages (z
6) and ( r r-r z) in which lower case Roman, occasionally relieved by capitals,
holds sway. Although it is inadvisable to lay down hard and fast rules here, it
seems that the more fragile and tenuous quality of italics gives expression to the
more tentative and hypothetical suggestions which are explored in the middle
section of the poem. This would seem to be borne out by the repetition of the s I//
COMI'cfE SI formula in this section:
COMAfE SI

I COMME

SI 11SI11

c 'ETAIT

I LE

NOMBRE

Choit
la plume
rythmique suspens du sinistre

LE HASARD

In a sense, Mallarme's Un coup de Dis represents an attempt to spread the impact of

a single page over twelve, to create the impression of simultaneity within
sequence. The large capitals, engraving themselves on the reader's mind, become
an ever-present backdrop to the more detailed and extensive ramifications of
thinking explored over the successive pages in the smaller type. The first major
qualification of the title/epigraph statement is also in capitals, though smaller,
and again is spread over a number of pages - (3 b ), (4a), (5 a), ( IOb ), ( r r) and ( r z):

I CE

SERA IT.

In this respect, page (IO), approximately two-thirds of the way through the
poem, offers a most interesting example of the visual intermeshing of the various
typographical registers and the corresponding levels of statement they represent.
Here Mallarme uses six different typefaces, three Roman, three italic - the richest
and most varied combination in Un coup de Dis - to express the complex
interaction of various strands of thought or calculation at a crucial point in the
poem. First, the weighty central presence of the word LE HASARD (rob), not
only completes the poem's main - and pessimistic - proposition, but in asserting
the ineluctable nature of Chance also in effect puts paid to the elaborate and
tentative hypotheses explored in the italics of the immediately preceding pages
(7-ro). The fragile hope attached to the 'plume solitaire eperdue' floated on the top

14I

s'enseve!ir
aux ecumes origine!!es
nagueres d' oit sursauta son de/ire jusqu' a une cime
ftetrie
par la neutralite identique du goujfre

The hypothesis of pages (9 b-IO), expressed in the italic capitals s I// c 'ET A Ir/
LE No MB RE / c E s ER A IT, meets a similar fate as the general disposition of the
typography makes 'LE HASARD' appear the inevitable object of'cE SERA Ir' as
well as of the' N' AB o LIRA' of (6b ).sz In any case, there is no further use of italics
after (rob), so the 'cE SERAIT' remains poignantly suspended and incomplete,
qualified only by the slightest and most miniscule of typefaces used in the poem,
whose self-contradictory logic does little to promote expectations of a positive
predicate for' CE SERAIT':
pire
non
davantage ni moins
indijfiremment mais autant

Nonetheless, the distant twinkle of 'issu stellaire' at the top of page (roa), in
similarly miniscule italics, offers a glimmer of hopeful anticipation of the
constellation image which will eventually assert itself on the last page of the
poem. For while quill and hypothesis quietly succumb at the bottom of page
(IOb), hectic calculations are being made at the top of the same page which,
picking up through typographical similarity the reference to 'LE MAirRE' (5),
anticipate the final major proposition of the poem:
RIEN IN' AURA EU LIEU
CONSTELLATION ...

QCE LE LIEU// EXCEPTE

PEUT-ETRE

CNE

Like the 'sI //c'ETAIT /LE NOMBRE /cE SERAIT hypothesis, the
'EXISTAT-IL .. .' cluster of suggestions is qualified by the smallest Roman
lower case characters used in the poem, the pessimistic suspicion of an
'hallucination eparse d'agonie' being balanced by the glimmer of 'issu stellaire' in
equally miniscule italics on the page directly opposite.
The somewhat ragged overall typographical lay-out of page (IO), which has
none of the elegant diagonal structure of both the immediately preceding and
following sheets, signals, then, the tensions caused by the overlap of several.main
typographical series, Roman and italic, and the thematic implications they carry.
Multiple levels of thought are being pursued at the same time but with different

,...--

Pictorialist poetics

'Spatial' structure and the prose poem

degrees of repercussion in the larger context of the poem. Whereas the phrases in
miniscule Roman and italic typefaces are strictly local, qualifying only the
respective clusters of capitals to which they are attached (these two typefaces
appear nowhere else in the poem), the other four sets of phrases, as we have seen,
relate to preceding and/or following sets of typographically matching proposi
tions. It is this sense of parts of the text being pulled in different directions which
gives rise to the seemingly inchoate and asymmetrical structure of this page. In
spatializing, in this way, the normally horizontal and consecutive dynamics of
language, Mallarme is attempting to illustrate diagrammatically the complex
processes of human thought, to give expression to the irregular and evanescent
meanderings of reverie as well as to the more consistent and consequential logic
of rational thinking. In exploring the tensions between impulse and argument,
desire and knowledge, Mallarme tries to be sensitive to all features, however
small, of the mental landscape.
Mallarme's choice of the double page as the basic formal unit of Un coup de Des
reflects both his understanding of the dynamics of the reading process and his

they were not printed over, the reader/observer in effect perceives the adjacent
verso and recto as a totality, reading across the double sheet, the marked
horizontal orientation of which5 4 is in noticeable contrast to the verticality of the
single page. In this way, the double page approximates to something more like
the 'landscape' format in painting. Second, the doubling of the area of the page
has the effect of lengthening the diagonal trajectory of reading and thus of
reducing the gradient of its descent from around 5o to 30 from horizontal (see
Diagrams C and D). In this way, the reader is given a fuller view of the totality of
the text and the rate of reading is markedly reduced. The helter-skelter rhythm of
normal reading, as the eye follows a zig-zagging trajectory down the page, is
superseded by a more leisurely and meandering descent in which parentheses or
other outlying clusters of words are absorbed at different tempos from that of
central elements.
Reflecting the norms of conventional reading, the thrust of nearly all the pages
in Un coup de Des continues, however, to be diagonal and this orientation is
reflected in the consistent diagonal slippage of the phrases which make up the text.
It is particularly marked in (4), (6), (7), (8), (9), ( 11) and ( 12), indeed it becomes the

142

'-,

~
'\

~
'\
'\

'-,

CN COCP DE

..................

'\
'\
'\

'\

..

'\

'\

(
Diagram C

'\'\~
0

o~

.,

oEs

':,~ .
1'--.;.,_
:
: '-......

'\

'\

'-,

' , '-,

: '\ '\

1 43

:'
'

1
:

1 :

JAMAIS

LE HASARD

''
',('',

N' ABO LIRA

o'-,:

30

"'

Diagram D

concern to exploit the diagrammatic potential of the page. Conceiving of the

work as a set of prints ('Au fond, des estampes' he wrote in a letter to Camille
Mauclair (MC1x, p. 288)), he looked upon the double page as an aesthetic totality,
one which, nevertheless, as a text, was bound to reflect to a certain extent the
dynamics of conventional reading. In the Western world, these are essentially
diagonal, the reader's gaze progressively moving in a zig-zag pattern from top
left to lower right of the page53 - see Diagram C. Mallarme's adoption of the
double page in Un coup de Des was to bring about a modification both of the
dynamics of reading and of the conception of the page as a space. First, the wider
format provided by the double leaf offered a panoramic vision of the text and
page. Although the central margins of the pages continued to be observed, that is,

(zb)

(3 b)

(6b)

(10b)

Diagram E
dominant pa_ttern of all the pages once (after page (3)) the rhythm of the poem's
exposition gets into its stride. The one notable exception to this is ( 10) in which,
as was suggested above, the crucial juxtaposition of different typefaces and lines
of thought results in a more truly spatial arrangement of the text. The general
tendency towards spillage of phrases diagonally across the page, results in the
formation of a step-like pattern of descent which is reflected both in the poem's
main propositions - in capitals - and in developments in the lower case typefaces.
Thus the constituent elements of the title phrase are inserted into the text
following a step-like pattern (see Diagram E), except that the bottom of the page
being reached with 'N' ABOLIRA' on (6b), results in 'LE HASARD' being
placed a step back up (this position also being a consequence of the Roman capital

Pictoria!ist poetics

'Spatial' structure and the prose poem

system coming into conflict with the diagonal disposition of the italic series). On
the last page of the poem, the cast of the dice is most suggestively figured by the
tumbling participles, arranged in a similar step-like pattern:

of language as an expression of thought inevitably undergo some modification

particularly in the area of syntax and punctuation. Mallarme was well aware of the
arbitrariness of syntax, its tendency to create a linear sense of logic which was not
necessarily true to all thinking, especially poetic or imaginative thought. But
Mallarme was also aware that syntax is necessary to language, that there are no
meanings without sentences, no propositions without predicates. In a sense, the
whole of Un coup de Des is an elaborate embroidery on a couple of syllogistic
propositions.ss Nevertheless, Mallarme was anxious to assert the precariousness
of all assertions and to give a hearing to the manifold reservations, parentheses
and doubts to which they give rise. Un coup de Des is a philosophical text in the
Cartesian tradition, but as a Discours de la methode it also attempts to be truer to the
emotional and sensual reverberations of thought. Unlike Descartes, Mallarme
does not reserve the treatment of the passions to another treatise. The poem
represents, as we have seen, an amalgam, precisely, of different levels of thought
and experience which, since they all find expression in the same language, have to
be distinguished visually by typography and spacing. But since these strands also
sometimes come together, provision for their connection or interpenetration has
to be made. In this respect, Mallarme's abandonment of punctuation is significant
since it promotes infinitely greater fluidity of movement between phrases. The
absence of full stops provokes a terrible sense of insecurity in the reader but also a
sense of freedom: though the self-evident logic of certain heavily foregrounded
phrases obviates the necessity for such signals, their absence elsewhere gives the
mind the opportunity constantly to seek new combinations or alternative
solutions to the rational but overbearing propositions under the shadow of which
they labour.
Mallarme's spatialization of syntax and abandonment of punctuation also has
the effect of undermining the synchronization of signifier and signified. Words or
fragments of phrase are allowed, from time to time, like small craft, to slip their
painters and to float free of the syntactical convoy's relentless advance. But the
poignancy of their isolation and their buffetings from the winds and waves of
chance is a function of their links with the larger linguistic context. Like
Rimbaud's 'Promontoire' or 'Ornieres', Mallarme's Un coup de Des has to be read59
as well as seen. The richness of the text is in part a function of the tension between
the word as signifier - free to mobilize a multiplicity of signifieds - and language
as syntax - the obligation to make sense, between, in other words, seeing and
reading, the image and the symbol.
This tension between two different semiotic systems - one heavily coded,
logical and linear, the other comparatively uncoded, gestural and spatial, con
stitutes of course an essential element of the drama of the poem: will the Word
assert its age-old authority and vanquish the powerful but inarticulate forces of
the page? Although the latter is indelibly motivated by its interrelationship with
language, contaminated, as it were, by the imprint of the word, it is also capable of

144

veillant
doutant
roulant
brillant et meditant
avant de s'arreter
a quelque point dernier qui le sacre.

Although Mallarme wrote in a letter to Camille mauclair apropos of Un coup de

Dis:
je crois que toute phrase ou pensee, si elle a un rythme, doit le modeler sur l'objet qu'elle vise et
reproduire, jetee a nu, immediatement, comme jaillie en !'esprit, un peu de !'attitude de cet objet
quant a tout
(MC IX, p. 288)

it is a mistake to overplay, as some commentators have tended to,ss the

representational nature, in conventional terms, of the pictorial elements in the
poem, for it is not really calligrammatic or concrete. Certainly, the marked
emphasis, just noted, on the diagonal thrust of the page's dynamics results in the
creation of typographical motifs which lend themselves to the idea of the listing
ship (4), the surging wave (5 ), the flight of a bird (7), the plume of a toque (8), or
the outline, on (12), of the Plough or Septentrion into which the word
'coNSTELLATION' is inserted. But the profiles of these motifs are diffuse and
ambiguous: they propose suggestive possibilities but do not so rigorously define
outlines as to preclude an apprehension of the page's pictorial qualities in more
abstract terms. Thus the symmetry of page (7) can, as a pictorial motif, be
enjoyed as a purely aesthetic shape, a graceful encapsulation of a wistful
hypothesis, while the step-like slippage of phrases, noted above, suggests a
rhythm of measured but inevitable descent which evokes in visual terms a
number of the themes central to the text; the casting of the dice, the act of writing,
the movement of the waves, etc. In this respect, Mallarme's intention, in spite of
his antipathy to the concept of the illustrated text (see MOC, p. 878, cited above),
of incorporating into Un coup de Des four lithographs by Odilon Redon 56 may
seem somewhat inconsistent. But as Robert G. Cohn suggests:
It seems evident that these illustrations were not in any sense an integral part of the Work - which
incorporates its own visual effects - but rather decorations probably intended to appear on
endpapers. 57

Like the prose poems of Bertrand and Rimbaud already examined in this chapter,
Mallarme's Un coup de Des is essentially auto-illustrative, not in any crude
representational sense, but as a diagram which attempted to picture forth a mental
landscape, one, that is, in which the models and structures of thought and
language interact with those of visual impression.
In attempting to become more pictorial, the intrinsic structures and functions

145

146

Pictorialist poetics

undermining language's efforts to structure itself into logical, rational patterns.

As was suggested above, the page is a potentially signifying silence, an invisible
sea of signifieds, the unconscious of language's articulations. In a sense then,
there is a kind of polarization of principles: language and text representing order
and reason, the page chaos and chance (le hasard). It is appropriate, therefore, that
Mallarme should make his first fully spatial poem a dramatization of this
confrontation, for, on one level, one may read the proposition Un coup de Des
jamais n' abolira le hasard as: writing will never obliterate the page.
The page/hasard analogy is frequently repeated in Mallarme's theoretical
writings on poetry: 'Une ordonnance du livre de vers poind innee ou partout,
elimine le hasard' (MOC, p. 366), he writes in Crise de vers, while in Quant au livre he
talks of'le hasard' being 'vaincu mot par mot' (MOC, p. 387). Although in both
these instances Mallarme envisages chance being eliminated or vanquished by the
overall structure of the work or the intrinsic coherence of the words as arranged
by the poet, he is of course well aware that the conventions of writing are also
infected with the arbitrary and the chance. Languages are 'imparfaites en cela que
plusieurs' (MOC, p. 363), their phonetic structures often not in synchronization
with their semantic (MOC, p. 364). Mallarme's solution is the traditional one of
the imposition of numerical order: the Alexandrine's twelve syllables
'philosophiquement remuner [ent] le defaut des langues, complement superieur'
(MOC, p. 364); the sonnet's fourteen lines, though arbitrary, offer a framework
which, proven over half a millenium, provides a principle of order preferable to
the 'incoherent de la mise en page romantique' (MOC, pp. 366-7). As Mitsou
Ronat and others have shown, Mallarme plays the numbers game even more
elaborately in Un coup de Des, the magic number twelve, or its multiples,
governing a wide range of important considerations in the poem. The allegory of
the dice throw is a representation of this in thematic terms. But, as the unfolding
of this allegory seems to confirm, neither the dice throw nor the withholding ofit,
abolish chance: all gesture - numerical, linguistic, poetic or artistic - is tainted
with the arbitrary, powerles"s to control the potentially infinite combinations at its
disposal, symbolized by the ever-present space - of mathematical tables, the
universe, the canvas or the page.
The ultimate Book or Page then, as Mallarme was well aware, will never by
humankind be written, but any progress towards it would of necessity involve
the combination of textual and visual elements. The former would provide a
logic, a grammar, a numerical sequence, the latter a sense of space, chance, the
unconscious and the incalculable. In spite of the uneasy tension between the two,
the relationship between visual and textual is essentially symbiotic: no expression
of human experience would be complete without the involvement of both
elements. The truth of this would seem to be borne out by a great deal of modern,
that is, post-Mallarmean, art and literature.

POE ME

Un coup de Des Jamais n'aholira le Hasard

par

STEPHANE MA.LLA.RME

[147]