19 TH
CENTURY
MUSIC
Édouard Dujardin, Wagner, and the
Origins of Stream of Consciousness Writing
STEVEN HUEBNER
“The reader is positioned from the first lines in
the thoughts of the main character, and it is
the uninterrupted unfolding of these thoughts,
which completely replace the usual form of
narrative, that tells us what the character does
and what happens to him.”1 Thus did James
Joyce describe Édouard Dujardin’s novel Les
Lauriers sont coupés to the writer Valéry Lar-
baud in 1921 just after Ulysses had appeared in
print. Throughout his career after that point,
Joyce openly acknowledged his debt to Dujardin
for having been the first writer to use stream of
consciousness in Les Lauriers sont coupés. Joyce
happened upon the novel at a railway bookstall
in 1903, noticing it because he knew his Irish
colleague George Moore to be a friend of the
author.2 Dujardin had serialized his novel in La
1
Valéry Larbaud, preface to Édouard Dujardin, Les Lauriers
sont coupés (Paris: Éditions Messein, 1925), 9.
2
Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, rev. edn. (New York: Ox-
ford University Press, 1982), 131.
56 19th-Century Music, vol. 37, no. 1, pp. 56–88 ISSN: 0148-2076, electronic ISSN 1533-8606. © 2013 by the Regents of
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Revue indépendante long before, in summer
1887. The novel was little read at the time, and
its fortunes did not improve during the ensuing
decades—that is, until Ulysses shot into world-
wide prominence. Critics promptly became
aware of the precursor, and Dujardin hit the
lecture circuit to explain his work. He eventu-
ally gathered this material into a small treatise
called Le Monologue intérieur (1931), part re-
flection on Les Lauriers sont coupés in light of
Joyce, part account of the context in which he
had written it.3
To that context belong the twenty-four-year-
old Dujardin’s frenetic activity in founding the
Revue wagnérienne in 1885 and running it for
three years, to which he added the directorship
3
For a negative appraisal of Dujardin’s decision to publish
a treatise on the novel fifty years after it was written in
order to extend its literary life, see Melvin Friedman,
Stream of Consciousness: A Study in Literary Method (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), 144.
reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/ncm.2013.37.3.56.
of La Revue indépendante in 1886. Both publi-
cations nurtured Symbolist literature as it blos-
somed on the Parisian literary scene. Dujardin
became a key player in the movement on both
its managerial and creative sides. He knew all
of its major figures and later memorialized his
association with Stéphane Mallarmé,4 toward
whom he exhibited the same reverential atti-
tude as many other young French writers. The
period of the mid-1880s retains its fascination
as a key moment in the fermentation of cul-
tural matter that fed emerging modernism, of
which the link between Les Lauriers sont
coupés and Ulysses is certainly exemplary.
Dujardin’s other literary and creative endeav-
ors from this period also exhibit a self-con-
scious experimental attitude in the sheer vari-
ety of their explorations of little-tried literary
techniques and esoteric subject matter: prose
poems (À la gloire d’Antonia, 1886, and Pour la
vierge du roc ardent, 1889), short stories about
the supernatural (Les Hantises, 1886), transla-
tions (L’Or du Rhein [sic], traduction française
littérale de la première scène, 1885), a para-
phrase of a scene from Parsifal (“Amfortas, Para-
phrase moderne,” 1885), and the music and
text of a song cycle in vers libre (Litanies, 1888).
The latter would remain the only piece of
music Dujardin ever published and probably
the last he composed, the most substantial tes-
timony to his composition studies at the
Conservatoire National Supérieur in the late
1870s or early 1880s.5 In Ernest Guiraud’s com-
position class he rubbed shoulders with Paul
Dukas and Claude Debussy. “The musical de-
mon promoted itself to a prominent place in
my heart,” he once remarked about this period
in his life,6 and it was indeed as an occasional
4
Édouard Dujardin, Mallarmé par un des siens (Paris:
Éditions Messein, 1936); includes “Les Premiers poètes du
vers libre” and “La Revue wagnérienne.”
5
In her critical edition of Dujardin’s novel, Carmen Licari
reports that Dujardin enrolled at the Conservatoire in 1879,
but supplies no supporting document. See Licari, intro. to
Édouard Dujardin, Les Lauriers sont coupés suivi de Le
Monologue intérieur, ed. Carmen Licari (Rome: Bulzoni,
1977), 76. In a brief autobiographical sketch written in
1888, Dujardin is less clear about the date, but the chrono-
logical sequence of his account suggests the early 1880s.
See Édouard Dujardin, “Considérations sur l’art wagnérien,”
Revue wagnérienne 3 (1887/8), 175.
6
Dujardin, “Considérations sur l’art wagnérien,” 175.
music critic for La Renaissance musicale in STEVEN
HUEBNER
1882–83 that he broke into print. He wore Wag- Dujardin and
nerian colors on his sleeve early on. At perfor- Wagner
mances of Wagner extracts by Pasdeloup and
Colonne he “applauded noisily, while others
booed,”7 and after a Munich Tristan in summer
1883 he characteristically collapsed the Gesamt-
kunstwerk into literary terms by observing that
the third act represented “the last word in lyric
and dramatic poetry.”8
Dujardin conducted his subsequent literary
experiments under a Wagnerian banner and fos-
tered a type of French Wagnerism that saw
Wagner’s work as an invitation to push ahead
into uncharted waters. Yet critics have mea-
sured the Wagnerian component in Les Lauriers
sont coupés with different results. In the most
extended study of influences on Dujardin’s
novel published so far, Kathleen McKilligan
deemphasizes the importance of the Wagne-
rian element, at least as it played out at the
time Les Lauriers sont coupés was written, ar-
guing that Dujardin only highlighted this debt
retrospectively in Le Monologue intérieur
through the lens of Joyce, and that in the 1880s
he sought to construct a lineage that extended
back to the playwright Jean Racine (to whom
the novel is dedicated).9 In an insightful intro-
duction to his translation of Les Lauriers sont
coupés, Anthony Suter gives greater weight to
the Wagner link, as does Cécile Leblanc, writ-
ing independently over a decade later in a larger
study of literary French Wagnerism.10 They are
7
Ibid.
8
Dujardin, “Étranger,” La Renaissance musicale 3 (25 Aug.
1883), 271.
9
Kathleen M. McKilligan, Édouard Dujardin: Les Lauriers
sont coupés and the Interior Monologue (Hull: University
of Hull Publications, 1977). McKilligan takes into account
previous shorter studies, including an important article by
Frida Weisman, “Édouard Dujardin, le monologue intérieur,
et Racine,” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 74
(1974), 489–94. In his much-cited older study of Wagner
and French literature, Léon Guichard was also skeptical of
genuine connections between Dujardin’s novel and
Wagner’s music. See Léon Guichard, La Musique et les
lettres en France au temps du wagnérisme (Paris: Presses
universitaires de France, 1963), 217–20.
10
Anthony Suter, intro. to Édouard Dujardin, The Bays Are
Sere and Interior Monologue (London: Libris, 1991), xi–
lxvii; Cécile Leblanc, Wagnérisme et création en France
1883–1889 (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2005), 241–321.
Carmen Licari’s intro. to her edition of the novel (see n. 5)
is another important secondary source. Historian Kelly
57
 19 TH right to do so. My own reflections on the early
CENTURY
MUSIC development of one of the most important writ-
ing techniques in the modernist novel probe
the Wagnerian ambience even further, situat-
ing Les Lauriers sont coupés in a web of
Dujardin’s other contemporaneous writing, with
special attention to “Amfortas paraphrase
moderne,” the Litanies, and Dujardin’s criti-
cism for the Revue wagnérienne—all of these
left off the table by previous critics.
MONOLOGUE INTÉRIEUR:
Theater and Sound
Les Lauriers sont coupés follows the thoughts
of a wealthy young man, named Daniel Prince,
from the provinces one April evening in 1886
from six o’clock to midnight. He seeks to be-
come the lover of a small-time Parisian actress
named Léa d’Arsay, and the plot of the novel,
inasmuch as one can speak of one, centers on
his preparations for an evening rendezvous with
her. Prince meets a friend, has supper in a res-
taurant, goes home, walks to Léa’s apartment,
takes her on a carriage ride, and leaves her
company—but not before acceding to her re-
quest for 100 francs. Feeling duped because she
has repeatedly profited from his unrequited in-
fatuation, he vows never to see her again, al-
though with the to-and-fro in his mind earlier
that evening, the reader cannot be sure of his
resolve. Léa herself does not physically appear
until the seventh of nine chapters, and even
after this she largely continues to function as
she has since the beginning, a construct of a
masculine imagination that wafts between
idealization and suspicious brooding. As
McKilligan points out, notwithstanding the
fame Les Lauriers sont coupés has achieved as
a precursor to Joyce, large sections of the novel
are quite conventional because information and
states of mind emerge in Prince’s conversa-
tions with acquaintances and in letters that he
rereads.11 The protagonist’s unvoiced thoughts
Maynard includes an important chapter on Édouard
Dujardin in her doctoral dissertation, The Enemy Within:
Encountering Wagner in Early Third Republic France (PhD
diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2007), 253–
320.
11
McKilligan, Édouard Dujardin, 67.
58
do occur in other passages, and for these
Dujardin applied a number of different narra-
tive styles (as did Joyce with much greater sty-
listic, generic, and cultural scope for the un-
voiced thought in Ulysses).12 The writing some-
times shifts between lyrical evocations of set-
ting and quick-fire impressions linked by loca-
tion or theme. At other times, Prince imagines
future exchanges with Léa, or his thoughts be-
come shot through with a series of unconnected
associations triggered by what he sees and ex-
periences. These distinctions are important to
bear in mind in light of Dujardin’s capsule defi-
nition of monologue intérieur as “the most
intimate thought, closest to the unconscious;
in concept, it is speech before any logical orga-
nization, reproducing this thought as it comes
into being and in its apparently raw state; in its
form, it is realized through sentences in direct
speech reduced to a syntactic minimum.”13 The
components of this pithy outline make them-
selves felt to variable degrees; few of the pas-
sages that trace Prince’s thoughts correspond
to it in all respects. Perhaps the clearest ex-
ample of a prelogical sequence in the entire
novel occurs as Prince drifts off into a brief nap
on Léa’s sofa in chapter 7. Suspension points
enhance the sense of a dream state:
Here is her body; her breast swells and swells; and
the sweet scent mingled . . . fine April night . . . in a
while we’ll go for a ride . . . the cool air . . . we’re
going to leave . . . in a while . . . the two candles . . .
there . . . along the boulevards . . . “love you more
than anything” . . . love you more . . . that girl,
slender, with the brazen look, red lips . . . the bed-
room, the tall mantelpiece . . . the room my father
. . . all three sitting, my father, my mother . . . myself
. . . why is my mother pale? . . . she’s looking at me
. . . we’re going to dine, yes, in the grove . . . the maid
12
C. D. King pointed out long ago that interior monologue
and stream of consciousness should not be taken as strictly
synonymous. For example, “interior monologue” has a
more rational connotation than “stream of consciousness”
and is fundamentally verbal, whereas stream of conscious-
ness might be made up of, say, a series of images (though
of course usually described verbally). See C. D. King,
“Édouard Dujardin, Inner Monologue and the Stream of
Consciousness,” French Studies 7 (1953), 116–28.
13
Dujardin, Interior Monologue, 113.
. . . bring the table . . . Léa . . . she is setting the table
. . . my father.14
The sequence of fragmentary images and sud-
den splices between a carriage ride, a street-
walker, and his parents’ house meet the re-
quirement of “syntactic minimum” and
“thought . . . in its apparently raw state,” and
with a strong sense of verisimilitude inasmuch
as one would expect a staccato jumble as a
character falls asleep.
Elsewhere in the novel, impressions of
Prince’s quotidian activities spool out in some-
what longer syntactical units. Entering a café
much earlier in the evening he mentally notes:
“Blazing with light, red, golden, the restaurant;
the glittering mirrors; a waiter in a white apron;
the pillars heavy with hats and overcoats. Any-
one here I know? These people are looking at
me as I come in.”15 Here Prince’s thoughts
modulate from the brief sparks of single words,
to fuller phrases, and then to short sentences.
The verbless phrases “the glittering mirrors”
and “the pillars heavy with hats and overcoats”
would have been idiomatic as stage directions
in a play or opera. Prince’s self-consciousness
sustains the theatrical moment as in his mind’s
eye he pictures himself entering a roomful of
people who watch his every move, like an actor
walking onto a stage. Eager to project a dandi-
fied image, he wonders whether he executes
the gesture of throwing his gloves on the table
14
Adapted from Dujardin, The Bays Are Sere as translated
by Suter, 55–56. All subsequent translations of Les Lauriers
are adaptations from Suter. Original French: “Voilà son
corps; sa poitrine qui monte et monte; et le très doux
parfum mêlé . . . la belle nuit d’avril . . . tout à l’heure
nous nous promenerons . . . l’air frais . . . nous allons partir
. . . tout à l’heure . . . les deux bougies . . . là . . . au cours
des boulevards . . . ‘j’t’aim’ mieux qu’mes moutons’ . . .
j’t’aim’mieux . . . cette fille, yeux éhontés, frêle, aux lèvres
rouges . . . la chambre, la cheminée haute . . . la salle . . .
mon père . . . tous trois assis, mon père, ma mère . . . moi-
même . . . pourquoi ma mère est-elle pâle? . . . elle me
regarde . . . nous allons dîner, oui, sous le bosquet . . . la
bonne . . . apportez la table . . . Léa . . . elle dresse la table .
. . mon père.” (Dujardin, Les Lauriers sont coupés [rpt.
Paris: Éditions 10/18, 1968], 92. All subsequent citations
in French are from this edition.)
15
“Illuminé, rouge, doré, le café; les glaces étincelantes; un
garçon au tablier blanc; les colonnes chargées de chapeaux
et de pardessus. Y a-t-il quelqu’un de connaissance? Ces
gens me regardent entrer” (ibid., 39; Suter, trans., 10).
with requisite nonchalance.16 While he dines STEVEN
HUEBNER
on fish he thinks about shrimping at home Dujardin and
with his family, wearing yellow shoes he has Wagner
bought at a store on the Place de la Bourse, a
thought that gets immediately cut off by a brief
reflection on his stock market losses. Perhaps
the rotund lawyer sitting with a pretty woman
across the way has some stock tips to offer?
Soon Prince tries to write a note to slip to the
woman. He quickly crumples it and discreetly
eats the paper when he thinks that other diners
are observing him as he tries to set up an assig-
nation. Notwithstanding the high comedy, the
theatrical spotlight that Prince feels beaming
down on him plays out in his mind no less
than in the later dream sequence.
Prince’s very emergence as a character at the
beginning of the novel occurs in the same the-
atrical vein, albeit more metaphysically framed:
An evening of setting sun, remote air, deep skies;
and of obscure crowds; sounds, shades, multitudes;
infinite vastnesses of space; an ill-defined evening.
...
For from the chaos of appearances, amid dura-
tions and places, in the illusion of things begotten
and born, one among others, distinct from the oth-
ers, yet similar to the others, from the infinity of
possible existences, I rise; and now time and space
become defined; it is the Now; it is the Here; the
clock striking; and, around me, life; the time, the
place, an April evening. Paris, on a clear evening
with the setting sun, the dull noises, the pale houses,
the foliage of the shadows; a milder evening; and the
joy of being someone, of walking; the streets and
multitudes, and, stretching far in the air, the sky.17
16
On Daniel Prince and Édouard Dujardin as dandies, see
Stefan Buck, Édouard Dujardin als Repräsentant des Fin
de siècle (Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 1987),
66–103.
17
“Un soir de soleil couchant, d’air lointain, de cieux
profonds; et des foules confuses; des bruits, des ombres,
des multitudes; des espaces infiniment étendus; un vague
soir . . .
“Car sous le chaos des apparences, parmi les durées et
les sites, dans l’illusion des choses qui s’engendrent et qui
s’enfantent, un parmi les autres, un comme les autres,
distinct des autres, semblable aux autres, un le même et
un de plus, de l’infini des possibles existences, je surgis; et
voici que le temps et le lieux se précisent; c’est
l’aujourd’hui; c’est l’ici; l’heure qui sonne; et, autour de
moi, la vie; l’heure, le lieu, un soir d’avril, Paris, un soir
clair de soleil couchant, les monotones bruits, les maisons
blanches, les feuillages d’ombres; le soir plus doux, et une
59
 19 TH Whereas actors merely appear on stage, here
CENTURY
MUSIC the protagonist “rises” out of the inchoate tur-
bulence of the cityscape, a distinct reverbera-
tion from Charles Baudelaire’s setting of the
individual against the urban environment in
his prose poems Le Spleen de Paris (1869). Be-
yond the subject, all is chaos, imperceptible.
“To rise” as opposed to merely “to appear”
underlines the larger stakes of the Kantian
premise beyond Prince, Léa, and the yellow
shoes, an affirmation of a kinetic subject who
shapes reality. Yet the list of descriptors in the
first paragraph once again reads like a play-
wright’s instructions, and in a preparatory
sketch for the novel Dujardin meticulously re-
corded the attributes of Prince (height: 1 meter,
70; build: thin; hair: short, chestnut brown) and
atmospheric conditions (thermometer: 15 de-
grees; moon: second day of the first quarter).
The sketch continues by informing the reader
that the book is “a drama with only one char-
acter” to be “performed mentally by the
reader.”18 The reader is thus meant to envisage
a character who looks upon himself as an actor,
the self-reflexive spectator in the book wit-
nessed by the spectator without. (The addi-
tional point in all this is that the conversion of
allegedly spontaneous impressions into lan-
guage comes burdened with self-consciousness.)
Prince experiences his environment—and him-
self as an actor within that environment—with
the same immediacy as the spectator of a play
or opera. When, in a projected dedication to his
friend (and key collaborator on the Revue
wagnérienne) Teodor de Wyzewa, Dujardin re-
ferred to his work as having eliminated a “rudi-
mentary initial stage of analysis” so as to pro-
duce “a synthetic novel that aims to be experi-
enced directly,” he implied, by leaving the sub-
ject ambiguous, the recursive theatricality I
have in mind: to be experienced by whom?19
joie d’être quelqu’un, d’aller; les rues et les multitudes, et,
dans l’air très lointainement étendu, le ciel” (Dujardin,
Les Lauriers, 29, Suter, 3).
18
Licari, intro., 49–50: “drame d’un seul personnage”;
“mentalement joué par le lecteur.”
19
Cited in Licari, intro., 47–48: “le primitif nécessaire tra-
vail de l’analyse”; “un roman de synthèse voulant être
directement vécu.” Dujardin did not include this dedica-
tion in the first edition.
60
The distance imposed by conventional narra-
tion gets broken down as, at least in theory, the
direct impressions of the protagonist become
those of the reader.
The lyricism of the initial setting of scene
quoted above is achieved through alliteration,
assonance, and, in particular, word repetition:
the first paragraph framed by the word
“evening,” the next paragraph shot through with
hypnotic repetitions of the word “other,” and
so forth. As the evening unfolds, Prince often
settles into a similar lyrical mood. Just before
he falls asleep on Léa’s sofa, he watches as she
herself dozes off, an obvious parallelism to the
dream sequence that is typical of Dujardin’s
approach to organization on the local level. But
the style is different from both the dream and
the café episode:
The poor, charming, tender little thing lets herself
be enlaced by my arms; she rests her dear body
against mine; her head rises delicately from her dress
as she lies stretched out; and here are her chest, her
breasts; here are her arms, and her tiny hands, here
is her neck, and in the whiteness of her neck the fine
gold hair escaping; her slim waist, and her ample
hips, in the embrace of the black satin; there, the
darling tip of her foot; and slowly her bodice swells
in long, regular breaths; the buttons on the bodice
quiver; the froth of the black lace faintly ripples on
her bosom; a brighter light, from the candles, shim-
mers on her left breast; and womanly life is at work,
at work in this incessant movement of the two
breasts; quite motionless, her body seems to modu-
late, imperceptibly; her rounded arms, her breast
moving and her neck, her slim waist, her high hips
curve in blurred contours, finest grace of delicately
softened flesh and fleeting forms.20
20
“La très pauvre, très charmante, très tendre, elle se laisse
en l’enlancement de mes bras; elle repose contre moi son
cher corps; elle est étendue, en sa robe, d’où frêle monte sa
tête; et voilà cette poitrine, ses seins, voilà ses bras, et,
fluettes, les mains; voilà ce cou, et dans le blanc du cou les
fins cheveux dorés épars; la mince taille, et les larges
hanches, en l’étreinte du noir satin; là, le bout mignon de
son pied; et lentement le corsage se soulève en longs
gonflements réguliers; du corsage les boutons tremblotent;
faiblement sur la gorge ondoie le flot des dentelles noires;
un reflet plus brillant, venant des bougies, se meut sur le
sein gauche; et la feminine vie marche et marche en cet
incessant mouvement des deux mamelles; son corps, tout
immobile, a comme des ondoiements, imperceptiblement;
les bras arrondis, la poitrine mouvante, et le cou, la mince
taille, les hautes hanches s’arrondissent en des contours
A cursory glance at the passage might suggest
that, as in the dream sequence, a succession of
short impressions unfolds to produce the frag-
mentary quality associated with the “raw state”
of language to which Dujardin refers in his
capsule definition. But with occasional subsid-
iary clauses incorporated between semicolon
articulations, the syntactical units are more
extended than in Prince’s reverie and the dic-
tion richer than in the café chapter. In addition
to a free flow of images that one might enter-
tain in “prelogical” thought, one might also
argue that the passage betrays a calculated and
obviously artistic orientation. The rapid suc-
cession “poor, charming, tender” leads imme-
diately to the more widely spaced “she lets
herself . . . she rests . . . she lies stretched out.
. . .” Following this, the pace changes again
with repeated iterations of “here are” and a
quick enumeration of body parts. The phrases
become longer and absorb extended alliteration
on the letter “w”: “and womanly life is at work,
at work in this incessant movement of the two
breasts.”21 The body parts are then recalled in
almost the same order (“arms” now come be-
fore “breast”—elegant variation, one might say).
Sound and idea receive different, and unpre-
dictable, weight in the rhythms of the passage:
the repeated return to “she” to initiate syntac-
tical units at the beginning seems to aim mainly
for euphonic effect, whereas the repetition of
the description of Léa’s body after intervening
material produces a longer spanning rhythm
associated more with an idea, a fetishized ab-
sorption with parts instead of the whole, albeit
with the resonance of some word repetition.
Wagnerian Links:
A View in Retrospect
In his treatise Le Monologue intérieur, written
forty-four years after Les Lauriers sont coupés
was first published, Dujardin refers twice, and
in quite different ways, to Wagner’s impact on
estompées, suprême grâce des chairs délicatement amollies
et des formes fuyantes et effacées” (Dujardin, Les Lauriers,
92, Suter, trans. 54).
21
The repeated letters in the original French is “m”: “et la
feminine vie marche et marche en cet incessant
mouvement des deux mamelles.”
the techniques I have just described. In the first STEVEN
HUEBNER
extended reference, he pulls Wagner out of a Dujardin and
hat as an influence that critics have missed, a Wagner
revelation that leaves the impression of an im-
plicit, and perhaps nostalgic, valorization of his
own background as a musician. Dujardin notes
an analogy between the short sentences in the
novel and musical leitmotifs, “as short as two
notes, or sometimes a single chord.” Taking a
restricted view of leitmotifs in their “pure
state,” he maintains that Wagner employed
them without development, especially in the
Ring and in Parsifal: “Just as a page of a Wagner
score is most often a succession of undevel-
oped motifs each of which expresses an im-
pulse of the soul, monologue intérieur is a suc-
cession of short sentences each of which ex-
presses an impulse of the soul, being alike in
that they are not linked together according to a
rational order but according to a purely emo-
tional order, irrespective of all intellectual ar-
rangement.” One would suppose that Dujardin
was enough of a musician to know that Wagner
often actually develops motifs or uses them to
structure discrete passages at the local level.
But he sweeps this casually aside by noting
that “the appearance of motifs [in Wagner’s
operas] is not always as spontaneous as might
be; there are sometimes very un-Wagnerian
things in Wagner”:22 an inelegant contortion,
to say the least, ostensibly required by a combi-
nation of his definition of monologue intérieur
as prerational and an imperative to ground the
technique in Wagner’s works that was deeply
rooted in the memory of his days with the
Revue wagnérienne.
Dujardin continues by citing two examples
of leitmotifs in Les Lauriers sont coupés that
are equally unpersuasive as illustrations of the
technique.23 He refers first to a reprise of mate-
rial from the passage at the beginning of the
novel that occurs at the outset of chapter 8. On
22
Dujardin, Interior Monologue, 110, 111.
23
McKilligan’s discussion remains uncritical of Dujardin’s
use of the term in Dujardin: Les Lauriers sont coupés, 72–
77; Erika Höhnisch provides a good discussion in Das
Gefangene Ich (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag,
1967), 128–31.
61
 19 TH a short carriage ride through Paris with Léa,
CENTURY
MUSIC Prince ruminates:
One in the limitless mass of lives, thus I go on my
way henceforth, forever one among the others; so
have been created in me the day, the Here and Now,
the time, the individual life; a soul soaring to dreams
of kissing, that is it; the day is a dream of woman;
touching a woman’s flesh is my Here and Now. . . .
And they hum with life, the streets, the boulevards,
the muffled noises, the movement of the carriage, it
jolting, the wheels over the cobbles, the bright
evening, the two of us sitting in the carriage, the
noise and the jolting in the movement.”24
Certain words from the beginning of the novel
do indeed recur (the day, the Here and Now,
evening), but, given that these do not appear in
close juxtaposition anywhere else in the book
to sustain an experience of a frequently recur-
ring leitmotif, and are not especially marked as
single-word leitmotifs, in musical terms it
seems more compelling to understand the en-
tire passage at the beginning of chapter 8 as a
block varied reprise of the whole first para-
graph, certainly Wagnerian enough as a proce-
dure—think of Isolde’s Liebestod as a reprise of
the end of her act II duet with Tristan—rather
than as the spontaneous small leitmotifs dis-
cussed by Dujardin. This reprise occurs as much
on the level of idea as of sonic phenomenon:
Prince returns to the same existential thoughts
(and validation of monologue intérieur) by con-
trasting the here-and-now with limitless urban
space. This time Léa sits beside him, a mute
witness to his self-absorption. Characteristi-
cally denied real agency, she appears merely as
“feminine flesh” (chair feminine), an addition
to material from the opening paragraph that
articulates Prince’s sense of the present in a
new way.
Dujardin’s second example of leitmotivic re-
24
“Un dans la foule illimitée des existences, telle je mène
désormais ma course, un définitivement parmi les autres;
tels se sont en moi créés l’aujourd’hui, l’ici, l’heure, la vie;
une âme qui vole à des songes d’embrassement, c’est cela;
c’est un songe feminin, l’aujourd’hui; c’est une chair femi-
nine touchée, mon ici. . . . Et bourdonnent les rues, le
boulevard, les bruits assoupis, la voiture qui marche, le
cahotement, les roues sur les pavés, le soir clair, nous
assis dans la voiture, le bruit et le cahotement qui roulent”
(Dujardin, Les Lauriers, 99; Suter, trans. 59–60).
62
prise produces an even more extended return of
previous material. Just before Léa asks him for
more money, the last significant action of the
novel, Prince retraces the events of the evening,
alternately in conversation with her and si-
lently as a counterpoint to that dialogue. By
this time the novel has created its own past
that can be played back as thought, fertile
ground for a conventional understanding of
leitmotif. What actually happens, however,
seems conceptually different from leitmotivic
recall and much more like an abbreviated reca-
pitulation. Across several pages, previous epi-
sodes appear in the correct original sequence,
but each is collapsed into a few sentences, some-
times with an adjustment of affect from the
initial event, sometimes not.
In short, leitmotifs with more than two it-
erations spanning the entire novel, or substan-
tial parts of it, are difficult to detect as such:
repeated references at temporally separated in-
tervals to Léa’s blonde hair or to her hips might
qualify (Léa herself is simply too ubiquitous)
but also seem poetically trivial inasmuch her
specific attributes inevitably belong to a com-
posite image that Prince keeps conjuring on
practically every page, and do not seem indi-
vidually highlighted in the story. 25 What
Dujardin does do, however, is to organize sec-
tions on a more local level with repeated mate-
rial. We have already observed small ternary
organization in the scene where Prince watches
Léa nap. The same might be said of the first
two paragraphs in the novel where “I rise” and
the phrases after it function as a kind of pivot,
after which Prince returns to a variation of the
same sequence of images that occurred before
“I rise” (evening, sounds, shadow, multitudes).
In the episode in which Prince walks to Léa’s
apartment, an organ-grinder, distant street crier,
and rustling leaves encourage him to imagine a
pastoral fantasy—fulfillment away from the as-
phalt jungle.26 As in a rondo, a small refrain
25
Suter argues for the pervasive presence of leitmotifs in
the novel but does not illustrate these beyond the passages
that Dujardin identifies; Suter, intro., liv–lv.
26
The passage can be related to the title of the novel, a
quotation from the folk song “Nous n’irons plus au bois,”
signifying the protagonist’s nostalgic look backward at a
youth lived in the provinces.
made up of just three words, “I love you more”
(mieux je t’aime) punctuates this short escap-
ist reverie. Earlier, Prince stops off at his own
apartment to get ready for the evening and takes
a moment to enjoy the night air on his balcony.
Tristan-like imagery celebrating the indistinct-
ness of night fuels his ardor,27 and at one point
he even remarks “in the final analysis, this
darkness is sad” (Ces noirs à la fin sont tristes).
He imagines Léa in the garden. Another paral-
lel might be drawn to Tristan, this time to its
night/day binary, because the passage shifts sev-
eral times between erotically tinged descrip-
tions of the fresh nocturnal breeze and the
warm, stifling, lit-up, and boring interior, “the
cool night” (la nuit fraîche) contrasted with
“the bedroom warmer” (la chambre plus
chaude). Alternation between segments related
to “the night” and “the room,” each of differ-
ent length, creates the formal rhythm of the
episode.
Such articulation of form by means of alter-
nating ideas seems more calculated than spon-
taneous and might profitably be seen against a
set of issues raised by Dujardin’s second nod to
Wagner in Le Monologue intérieur. This refer-
ence occurs in the context of situating Les
Lauriers sont coupés against a backdrop of mid-
1880s Symbolism.28 Dujardin warns his reader
that he cannot give a history of the movement,
but underlines its chief characteristic as a privi-
leging of interior life governed by irrational
forces, “in the area until then despised (today
we would say repressed) of the unconscious.”29
The dream world is just as “real” as the exter-
nal, writes Dujardin, and readily interchange-
able with it, for even in a waking state observa-
tion cannot occur without metaphors and analo-
gies created dispassionately out of the deep well-
springs of the mind that seem more “real,”
more present, than concrete objects themselves.
As the Symbolist poet Gustave Kahn succinctly
put it in an essay published while Dujardin was
working on the novel, “The essential goal of
our art is to objectify the subjective (the exter-
27
Both Suter (intro., lv) and Erika Höhnisch (“Das Gefangene
Ich,” 117) suggest the influence of Tristan on the passage.
28
In his intro. (xlvi–xlix), Suter effectively discusses Sym-
bolist tropes in the novel.
29
Dujardin, Interior Monologue, 133.
nalization of the Idea) instead of taking a sub- STEVEN
HUEBNER
jective stance towards the objective (nature seen Dujardin and
through temperament). Therefore, to push the Wagner
analysis of the self to an extreme, to match the
multiplicity and entwinement of [its] rhythms
with the tempo of the Idea.”30 For his part,
Dujardin in Le Monologue intérieur funneled
the influence of music through Schopenhauer
by arguing that poets responded to the con-
struct of the Will by equating poetry with mu-
sic in its realization of impulses stemming from
the prerational Self. With no space for more
than this passing acknowledgment of Schopen-
hauer in his treatise, Dujardin suggests both
that Wagner was the medium through which
Symbolists came to the German philosopher
and that he had provided a cogent example of
how “music could be the Will to Life.”31
Closer to the ground in 1886, Teodor de
Wyzewa, a student of philosophy and profi-
cient in German, served as Dujardin’s intellec-
tual guide to idealism. In an important piece of
philosophical revisionism for the Revue wagnér-
ienne, Wyzewa (reasonably) urged readers not
to despair at the renunciation of the Will to
Life in Tristan by arguing that Wagner had
actually fashioned a positive reading of Schopen-
hauer. For “only the Self lives” (Seul vit le Moi)
Wyzewa said; in a Tristanesque confrontation
of the Self with oblivion, the Self conceives of
repudiation of the ego as a way to propel its
creative energy to an even greater sense of
coextensiveness with the universe around—al-
truistically combining with the non-Self, reach-
ing back to primordial unities, and striving for-
ward to a truly synthetic vision.32 With anti-
30
From an article on symbolism that Kahn published in
L’Événement, 28 September 1886, and cited by Paul
Delsemme, Teodor de Wyzewa et le cosmopolitisme
littéraire en France à l’époque du Symbolisme (Bruxelles:
Presses Universitaires de Bruxelles, 1967), 135: “Le but
essentiel de notre art est d’objectiver le subjectif
(l’extériorisation de l’Idée) au lieu de subjectiver l’objectif
(la nature vue à travers un temperament). Donc, pousser
l’analyse du moi à l’extrême, faire concorder la multiplicité
et l’entrelacement des rythmes avec la mesure de l’Idée.”
31
Dujardin, Interior Monologue, 133. The original French
is “la musique savait être Volonté de Vivre” (Licari edn.,
256).
32
Teodor de Wyzewa, “Le Pessimisme de Richard Wagner,”
Revue wagnérienne 1 (8 July 1885), 167–70. Wyzewa re-
turned briefly to Schopenhauer in “La Religion de Richard
Wagner et la religion du comte Léon Tolstoy,” Revue
63
 19 TH materialist fervor, Wyzewa urged his contem-
CENTURY
MUSIC poraries not to become prisoners of the objects
they had created; these were no more real than
nature celebrated by the Romantics.
Dujardin would take up a variant of Wy-
zewa’s epithet as an epigraph for his short-
story collection Les Hantises, “Only the soul
lives” (Seul vit notre âme)33 and explain to his
readers that ambiences we create can be ordi-
nary and supernatural in equal measure, the
latter following Poe and Baudelaire, and con-
cordant with the darker side of the Symbolism
of a writer such as Villiers de L’Isle Adam.34
The speaker of “Le Kabbaliste,” one of the sto-
ries, explores “an infinite number of worlds
beyond the one visible to men” and no less real
than it,35 peopled by sylphs, gnomes, undines,
and elves representing the four elements in
occult traditions. He follows the sylph Trilby
on a fiery star to an incandescent realm filled
with Apollo’s song. Then, in an analogical splice
around the idea of music, he suddenly conjures
up Brünnhilde on her fiery rock in the theater
of his dreams. To make the point in the collec-
tion as a whole that quotidian events and the
supernatural are subjective constructs to equal
degrees, Dujardin also included a story of strik-
ing contrast in its materials entitled “Histoire
d’une journée” about a day in the life of a law
clerk and dandy named Maurice Dupont: morn-
ing shave, the office, lunch, and so forth. Al-
though written in third-person style indirect
libre, it served not only as a foil to the bizarre
events of the other tales, but also as a trial run
for the first-person day-in-the-life account of
Les Lauriers sont coupés.36
wagnérienne 1 (8 Oct. 1885), 243. Martha Calhoun has
detailed the ways in which Wyzewa’s writing was a distor-
tion of Wagner’s thinking about Schopenhauer in The ‘Re-
vue wagnérienne’ and the Literature of Music: The Trans-
lation of an Aesthetic (PhD diss. State University of New
York, Stony Brook, 1987), 78–100.
33
Wyzewa used this variant himself in “La Religion de
Richard Wagner,” 255.
34
Édouard Dujardin, Les Hantises (1886), ed. Federica
D’Ascenzo (Rome: Il Calamo, 2001), 107.
35
Ibid., 199: “cette infinité de mondes, hors du monde vis-
ible aux hommes.”
36
For a brief discussion of Flaubert’s style indirect libre,
heavily weighted with imperfect tense and characterized
by frequent changes of tone, see Melvin Friedman, Stream
of Consciousness: A Study in Literary Method (New Ha-
ven: Yale University Press, 1955), 62–65.
64
Wyzewa’s reception of Schopenhauer and the
claims he made for the depth and breadth of
interiority expand the resonance of Prince’s
emergence at the beginning of the novel (“I
rise”). Dujardin ends his elision of Wagner and
Schopenhauer in Le Monologue intérieur by
implicitly circling back to the spirit of his ear-
lier reflections on leitmotifs. The “life of the
soul” (vie de l’âme) could best be expressed in
prose, he argues, by means of short and unpre-
dictable reactive phrases that transposed
Wagner’s “incessant eruption of musical mo-
tifs, coming up to speak, one after the other,
vague and in succession.”37 Yet (unacknowl-
edged by Dujardin) the calculated reprise struc-
tures built into Les Lauriers sont coupés at
local and wider levels were no less musical,
and even Wagnerian. Both orientations fa-
mously inform Wagnerian opera: language-
driven leitmotifs (either in tautological response
to the libretto or, more rarely, contiguous
signifiers triggered by the text), as well as more
abstract musical designs and strategies.
Translating Wagner
The literary style of Les Lauriers sont coupés
thus has twin origins in an ambition to create a
seamless and ostensibly open-ended unfolding
of new impressions and an inclination to lyri-
cal repetition and order (such organization at
local or larger levels should not be understood
as inimical to spontaneity). I want to continue
by developing the point that both trends relate
to literary exploration of interiority in the
shadow of Wagner. In underlining not only the
free flow of different ideas but also the reduc-
tion of sentences “to a grammatical minimum”
in monologue intérieur, Dujardin posited that
his technique constituted a return to “primi-
tive forms of language.”38 Dujardin’s own study
of Wagner’s mature libretto texts, and particu-
larly his concern for how they might be trans-
lated into French, almost certainly colored his
penchant for pared-down writing. For, as he
37
Dujardin, Interior Monologue, 135.
38
Ibid., 109. Dujardin also made the claim in an earlier
essay, De Stéphane Mallarmé au prophète Ezéchiel et essai
d’une théorie du réalisme symbolique (Paris: Mercure de
France, 1919), 53.
argued much earlier in the Revue wagnérienne,
Wagner himself cultivated concision, privileg-
ing “ordinary language” stripped of excess: “for
one twenty-word line of prose, a short verse,
several syllables, a key word.”39 In one respect,
this is different from the relatively simple sen-
tences of monologue intérieur where concision
stems from spontaneous reaction rather than
telescoping. But Dujardin also claimed that
Wagner’s libretto style was necessarily pithy in
order to capture nuances and rapid changes in
emotion, and one might argue that this is the
case with monologue intérieur. The substance
of Dujardin’s thought became particularly clear
in his perennial excoriation of Victor Wilder’s
French translations of Wagner’s librettos into
classical, rhyming stanzas.40 Although the con-
comitant expansion was clearer in meaning, in
Dujardin’s view Wilder sacrificed affective im-
mediacy to wordiness.
So taken was Dujardin with Wagner’s ap-
proach that, enlisting the help of Houston
Stewart Chamberlain, he provided readers of
the Revue with a word-by-word experimental
translation of the first scene from Das Rhein-
gold, “each archaism matched by an archaism,
each neologism by a neologism, each contrived,
obscure, bizarre expression by a contrived, ob-
scure, bizarre expression.”41 For Woglinde’s first
words this produced “Weia! Waga! Vogue, ô la
vague, vibre en la vive! Wagala weia! Wallala
39
Édouard Dujardin, “Une nouvelle traduction de la
Walküre,” Revue wagnérienne 2 (8 June 1886), 141: “pour
une ligne de prose de vingt mots, un court vers, quelques
syllables, un mot-sommet.”
40
In addition to “Une nouvelle traduction de la Walküre,”
see also “Les chagrins d’un vieux wagnérien,” Le Figaro,
18 May 1893; Houston Chamberlain, “La Walküre de Ri-
chard Wagner et La Valkyrie de M. Victor Wilder,” Revue
wagnérienne 3 (1887–88), 190–208. For a recent study, see
Jean-Louis Jam et Gérard Loubinoux, “D’une Walkyrie à
l’autre . . . Querelles de traductions,” in Von Wagner zum
Wagnérisme: Musik, Literatur, Kunst, Politik, ed. Fauser
and Schwartz (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 1999),
410–30.
41
Édouard Dujardin and Houston Stewart Chamberlain,
“L’Or du Rhein, Das Rheingold, Traduction française
littérale de la première scène,” Revue wagnérienne 1 (8
Oct. 1885), 258: “de l’archaïsme sous l’archaïsme, d’un
néologisme sous le néologisme, de l’expression contournée,
obscure, bizarre, sous l’expression contournée, obscure, bi-
zarre.” Dujardin also translated “L’Evocation Erda” (Re-
vue wagnérienne, 8 May 1885), 116–19 and “Brünnhilde,
scène finale de l’Anneau du Nibelung,” 214–19.
weiala weia!” Soon Alberich intones “Troublé STEVEN
HUEBNER
je votre jeu, lors qu’ebahi ici je reste coi?” and Dujardin and
then later “Laide, lisse, glissante glace! Comme Wagner
je glisse! . . . Je ne saisi ni ne tiens la lèche-
marche/Humide mouille m’emplit le nez.”
Alberich’s “Troublé je votre jeu” is missing the
auxiliary verb for “troublé,” “la lèche-marche”
is an invented expression for Wagner’s equally
imaginative (and sonically evocative) “das
schlecke Geschlüpfer” (more idiomatically in
French: marche glissante), and “humide
mouille” turns the verb mouiller into a noun.
Dujardin was able to keep the alliteration of
Wagner’s Stabreim for Woglinde’s and some of
Alberich’s lines here, and he regretted not be-
ing able to reproduce this aspect of Wagner’s
style more consistently in his translation. But
as we have seen, the alliterative style did leave
its mark on Les Lauriers sont coupés, certainly
a component of its musicality. So did unidiom-
atic word order and unusual expressions—at
least on the version of the novel published in
1887, for in later revisions Dujardin opted for
more conventional syntax and diction. The first
iteration of the beginning that I examined in
the definitive text above (cf. n. 17) reads:
Un soir de soleil couchant, d’air lointain, de cieux
profonds; et des foules qui confuses vont; des bruits,
des ombres, des multitudes; des espaces infiniment
en l’oubli d’heures étendus; un vague soir. . . .
Car sous le chaos des apparences, parmi les durées
et les sites, dans l’illusoire des choses qui s’engend-
rent et qui s’enfantent.
In the definitive version “foules qui confuses
vont,” with its awkward (and Germanic) termi-
nal verb, becomes the more prosaic “foules con-
fuses,” “des espaces en l’oubli d’heures étendus”
turns into “espaces infiniment étendus,” and
“l’illusoire” (an adjective treated as a noun) is
replaced by “illusion.” Dujardin made hundreds
of similar changes. In the Tristan-like sequence
to which I briefly alluded in the previous sec-
tion, the original and recherché “la beauté des
nocturnités” became conventionalized as “la
beauté de la nuit”; in the later carriage ride
with Léa, “féminin” as a nebulous noun with a
definite article (“vole à des songes d’embrasse-
ment; c’est un feminin, l’aujourd’hui”) turned
into a much clearer adjective “c’est un songe
féminin, l’aujourd’hui.”
65
 19 TH Given that the hermetic language of
CENTURY
MUSIC Mallarmé and the poets around him almost
certainly influenced Dujardin’s lexical and syn-
tactical choices, it is difficult to assess the im-
pact of Wagner’s style in the Ring on the first
version of Les Lauriers sont coupés. One might
reasonably suppose that the last thing Dujardin
would have wanted to do as a writer would
have been to produce Germanified French,
though this was implicitly the result in Claude
Debussy’s opinion when he needled the
Dujardin translation of Rheingold for emitting
“the pleasant little odor of a swamp.” 42
Dujardin’s experience with Wagner’s poetry
must have suggested an experimental orienta-
tion toward elisions and unconventional usage
that could be cross-applied to another language,
if only to communicate a sense of atavistic
spontaneity. His assertions of tapping into
“primitive forms of language”—and, perhaps
more important, that these forms constituted
“an illustration of the very doctrine of the mu-
sical origin of poetry”43—seem analogous to
Wagner’s claim for his own verse in the Ring,
especially in the alliterative dimension of
Stabreim. Wagner alleged that his style ex-
tended back to the primal creative impulse
among medieval Nordic peoples in order to
perpetuate the principle of a common well-
spring for music and language.44 In this respect,
Dujardin’s choice of the first scene of Rheingold
seems particularly suggestive (notwithstanding
that he simply started from the beginning of
the cycle in his soon-to-be aborted experiment).
As Jean-Jacques Nattiez has shown, the first
nineteen lines of Rheingold bear witness to the
primeval fashioning of melody out of harmony
and then nothing less significant than the birth
of language out of melody: “Weia! Waga!”—
full of feeling but devoid of meaning—modu-
42
Claude Debussy to Ernest Chausson, letter 22 May 1893,
in Claude Debussy, Correspondance 1872–1918, ed.
François Lesure and Denis Herlin (Paris: Gallimard, 2005),
130.
43
Dujardin, Interior Monologue, 109.
44
See Thomas Grey, “Stabreim,” in The Wagner Compen-
dium: A Guide to Wagner’s Life and Music, ed. Barry
Millington (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992), 239–40.
See also Richard Wagner, Eine Mitteilung an meine
Freunde, Gesammelte Schriften (Leipzig: G. W. Frisch,
1888), IV, 329–30.
66
lates into “Woge du Welle,” an effect actually
reproduced by Dujardin.45
VERS LIBRE, Prose Poetry,
and MONOLOGUE INTÉRIEUR
In counterpoint to such language-music asso-
ciations, the style of Les Lauriers sont coupés
also owes a great deal to the contemporaneous
development of vers libre. Dujardin recalled
this stylistic revolution in an essay titled Les
premiers poètes du vers libre that became a
standard reference about it, part-memoir/part-
study ostensibly conceived with an agenda of
countering Gustave Kahn’s contention that it
was he who “invented” the new approach.46
Rather, argued Dujardin, the idea of vers libres
came to many French poets around the same
time as a product of particular historical and
cultural forces, which included both the culti-
vation of the prose poem by some writers (in-
cluding Kahn) and the impact of Wagner’s mu-
sic on the young generation in the 1880s.47 As
early as 1862 Baudelaire had described “poetic
prose, without rhythm or rhyme, supple and
irregular enough to adapt to the lyrical fluctua-
tions of the soul” in the dedicatory preface of
Le Spleen de Paris to Arsène Houssaye.48 Al-
though unacknowledged in print by Dujardin,
the passage seems premonitory for his own later
experiments. Others followed Baudelaire’s ex-
ample, including Mallarmé. In his famous es-
say “Crise de vers,” Mallarmé maintained that
the dissolution of traditional French verse would
45
Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Wagner Androgyne, trans. Stewart
Spencer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 57–
59.
46
For background to the essay, including an overview of
correspondence that Dujardin initiated around 1920 with
older colleagues to tap into their recollections of the liter-
ary scene in the mid-1880s that gave rise to vers libre, see
Cécile Leblanc, “‘La réforme de l’instrument poétique’:
Dujardin et les premiers poètes du vers libre,” in Le Vers
libre dans tous ses états: Histoire et poétique d’une forme
(1886–1914), ed. Catherine Boschian-Campaner (Paris:
L’Harmattan, 2009), 147–57.
47
Édouard Dujardin, “Les Premiers poètes du vers libre,”
in Mallarmé par un des siens, 131–33.
48
Charles Baudelaire, Le Spleen de Paris in Œuvres
complètes, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard [Biblio-
thèque de la Pléiade], 1975), I, 275: “une prose poétique,
musicale sans rythme et sans rime, assez souple et assez
heurtée pour s’adapter aux mouvements lyriques de l’âme.”
not perforce sacrifice the essence of what had
been considered beautiful in the past,49 though
in his own poetry he mainly cleaved to the
traditional patterns. Following Baudelaire, but
pressing the case much more emphatically both
in this essay and elsewhere, Mallarmé assimi-
lated the new liberty with an amorphous mu-
sic of the soul. He continues later in the same
paragraph: “Every soul is a melody that must
be renewed, and for this, the flute or viol of
each.” And in the next, the poet yearns not
merely to express himself but “to modulate, at
his pleasure.”50 The appeal to a “music of the
soul” resonates with both the epigraph of Les
Hantises (“Only the soul lives”) and the later
claim that the prose of monologue intérieur
reflects the “life of the soul” by way of its Wag-
nerian techniques.
But Dujardin took a more syntactical ap-
proach to vers libre in Les premiers poètes du
vers libre.51 In defining his terms he carefully
distinguished among vers libéré (liberated
verse), vers libre, and prose poem in a way that
is important for understanding both the musi-
cal grounding of vers libre and the way this
played out in the kind of prose that frequently
surfaces in Les Lauriers sont coupés.52 Whereas
vers libéré featured variations on standard po-
etic lines, for example, elimination of the
hemistich break, vers libre by contrast freely
combined unorthodox lines of different lengths
without rhyme, as, in Katherine Bergeron’s fe-
licitous phrase (after Valéry), “poets learned to
follow the delicacy of their own ears, listening
49
Stéphane Mallarmé, “Crise de vers,” Oeuvres complètes,
ed. Bertrand Marchal (Paris: Gallimard [Bibliothèque de la
Pléiade], 2003), II, 207–08: “effacement de rien qui ait été
beau dans le passé.” The essay as published in Divaga-
tions (1897) is a composite of several smaller pieces writ-
ten at various times in the preceding twelve years. This
citation is from an article for the National Observer (26
March 1892) entitled “Vers et musique en France.” See
“Notes et variantes,” Oeuvres complètes, II, 1643.
50
“Toute âme est une mélodie, qu’il s’agit de renouer; et
pour cela, sont la flûte ou la viole de chacun”; “de
s’exprimer non seulement, mais de se moduler, à son gré.”
51
On various attempts to define vers libre, see Ida Merello,
“Pour une définition du vers libre,” in Le Vers libre, ed.
Bochian-Campaner, 123–32.
52
Dujardin, “Les Premiers poètes du vers libre,” 109–21.
only to gently lapping waves.”53 But in his ef- STEVEN
HUEBNER
fort to distinguish vers libre from prose poetry, Dujardin and
Dujardin argued that, like traditional verse, vers Wagner
libre aimed to project unity of thought within
individual lines and maintain a sense of rhythm,
that is “feet . . . ordered in tight unity.” By this
Dujardin meant a word or groups of words uni-
fied by meaning or sound with an accent on the
last syllable. Prose poetry paid much less atten-
tion to rhythms and “feet,” he observed, a re-
mark that we might infer applied not only to
“feet” but to a higher level of repeating words
or patterns as well. Significantly, Dujardin noted
that “the difference between vers libre and po-
etic prose is greater than between vers libre
and conventional verse.” In short, in a direct
comparison, vers libre was considerably more
ordered than prose poetry.54 Dujardin implic-
itly conceptualized this difference as a product
of separate lineages: vers libre (like vers libéré)
emerged out of conventional poetry, whereas
prose poetry did not.
Yet as traditional as the origins of vers libre
were in this analysis, there remained room for
Wagner’s influence. In discussing the path of
the Belgian Symbolist poet Albert Mockel to
vers libre, Dujardin quoted a letter in which
his colleague compared the alexandrine “that
crawls about on twelve feet with two hemistich
limbs” to the musical phrase “with eight mea-
sure limbs and segmented in smaller units, that
symmetrical phrase that Wagner’s genius for-
ever destroyed.”55 Dujardin tied his own preoc-
cupation with vers-librisme just as directly to
Wagner by explaining that in the 1880s it oc-
curred to him that a form of poésie libre should
reflect Wagner’s cultivation of a musique libre,
and that because his “musical phrase had
53
Katherine Bergeron, Voice Lessons: French Mélodie in
the Belle Epoque (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010),
144.
54
Dujardin, “Les Premiers poètes du vers libre,” 121: “les
pieds . . . ordonnés dans l’unité resserré”; “La différence
est donc plus grande entre le vers libre et le poème en
prose qu’entre le vers libre et le vers régulier.”
55
Letter dated 2 September 1920, cited by Dujardin, “Les
premiers poètes du vers libre,” 171: “L’Alexandrin qui
rampe sur ses douze pattes et s’articule en hemistiche”;
“membrée de huit mesures et segmentée en incises—cette
phrase symétrique que le génie de Wagner avait à jamais
rompue.”
67
 19 TH achieved freedom of rhythm, it was necessary
CENTURY
MUSIC to claim analogous rhythmic freedom for
verse.”56 Here Dujardin was not necessarily ar-
guing that phrases had disappeared in vers libre
(or in Wagner) or that they were disorganized,
but merely that their rhythms had become freer.
But the reference to musique libre also taps
into that other (and somewhat contradictory)
dimension of vers libre tied to the immeasur-
able and inchoate fluctuations of the soul by
Mallarmé and others. Dujardin never resolved
the paradox. In the mid-1880s vers libre could
be both an imperative of raw experience, of the
same sort that shaped a primitive language,
and a historically grounded literary practice.
And Wagner could serve both perspectives.57
Despite Dujardin’s theoretical distancing of
vers libre from the prose poem, in practice they
were thoroughly meshed, and with significant
bleeding through of the prose poem to other
genres. In an important essay on contemporary
literature published in the Revue wagnérienne
just as Dujardin began writing Les Lauriers sont
coupés (and which served as something of a
prolegomenon for his friend’s project), Wyzewa
anticipated a new kind of novel wherein an
author could “mix the musical forms of Poetry
with the narrative form” and even combine
words by privileging their sound over their
meaning.58 Shortly after the novel was pub-
lished, Dujardin echoed Wyzewa’s desideratum
in a letter to an Italian journalist named Vittorio
56
Dujardin, “Les Premiers poètes du vers libre,” 173: “je
m’étais dit qu’à la forme musique libre de Wagner devait
correspondre une forme poésie libre; autrement dit, puisque
la phrase musicale avait conquis la liberté de son rythme,
il fallait conquérir pour le vers une liberté rythmique ana-
logue.”
57
The most substantial study of the French prose poem
remains Suzanne Bernard, Le Poème en prose de Baudelaire
jusqu’à nos jours (Paris: Librairie Nizet, 1959). Bernard
introduces an additional category of prose rythmée (as dis-
tinct from poème en prose) and discusses intersections
between vers libre and the prose poem at length. Much as
Dujardin does with monologue intérieur, she argues that
the prose poem in general explores a wide structural range
between anarchy and organization; see 407–65. On vers
libre in a musical context, see Bergeron, Voice Lessons, 9–
11.
58
Teodor de Wyzewa, “Notes sur la littérature wagnérienne
et les livres en 1885–1886,” Revue wagnérienne 2 (8 June
1886), 170: “mêler à la forme du récit, la forme musicale
de la Poésie.”
68
Pica that contained an outline for an article
about his intentions, which he never completed.
To reproduce the life of the soul required a
“continuous mixing of lyricism and prose” and
an incessant balancing between “poetic exalta-
tion” and “ordinary events from vulgar daily
life,” an alternating sequence that could occur
within paragraphs and even individual sentences
(and, we might add, just as it had occurred at a
higher level of organization from story to story
in Les Hantises).59 Much later, in Les premiers
poètes du vers libre, Dujardin applied a more
technical vocabulary to this phenomenon by
championing writing that explored a continuum
between vers libre and prose where rhythmic
“feet” might instantaneously dissolve into
“quasi-prose.”60
Vers libre might even masquerade as prose.
Elsewhere in Les premiers poètes Dujardin re-
called Wyzewa’s skepticism about vers libre
when he first began to experiment with the
technique in the first half of 1886 in a work
entitled À la gloire d’Antonia, an extended,
probably autobiographical, lover’s paean that
explores a space between the dream world and
reality. In the original plan, Dujardin had meant
prose passages to alternate with vers libre, but
sensitive to the ironic quips of his friend about
the artifice of line divisions, Dujardin changed
the layout of the vers libre into lines of prose.61
Extrapolating from this remark, then, we might
reassemble the published prose layout back into
vers libre, as in the following passage where
Dujardin exploits both a parallelism in verb
construction and a succession of relatively short
semantic/rhythmic units:
Ayons, mon épouse, nos éternelles fiançailles;
soyons nous, et jubilons de ce que nous sommes;
fêtons-nous d’être; rêvons dans la sécurité
indubitable de notre foi.62
59
The letter is cited in Weissman, “Édouard Dujardin, le
monologue intérieur et Racine,” 491: “un continu
emmêlement de lyrisme et de prose”; “exaltation
poétique”; “quelconque du quotidien vulgaire.”
60
Dujardin, “Les Premiers poètes du vers libre,” 127.
61
Ibid., 176–77.
62
Édouard Dujardin, À la gloire d’Antonia, in Les Lauriers
sont coupés—Les Hantises—Trois poèmes en prose (Paris:
Mercure de France, 1897), 170.
 Ayons, mon épouse, nos éternelles fiançailles,
Soyons nous, et jubilons de ce que nous sommes,
Fêtons-nous d’être,
Rêvons dans la sécurité indubitable de notre foi.
(Let us have, my wife, an eternal engagement; let
us be ourselves and let us rejoice in what we are;
let us celebrate being; let us dream in the
steadfast security of our faith.)
For a wide panoply of literary techniques
nothing in Dujardin’s output surpassed Pour la
vierge du roc ardent (For the Virgin of the Flam-
ing Rock), published in 1887 (just after Les
Lauriers sont coupés), with its combinations of
dialogue in real time, imagined dialogue, narra-
tive prose, rhyming vers libéré, vers libre laid
out as verse, and vers libre presented as prose.
The protagonist, about to enter a marriage of
convenience, thinks back to his true love and
the bitterness of an earlier rejection by her fam-
ily. Past infatuation commandeers his whole
imagination and ignites a series of fantastical
visions, including ballet sequences (actually set
off in the text as separate “entrées de ballet”)
and analogies to Wagner’s operas—the virgin
on the rock of the title, flower maidens, Isolde.
All of these provide respite from the conformist
pressures to which he has been subjected. The
seaside setting triggers a vision of himself as a
modern Tristan on the verge of death, not from
a fatal wound but from the scent of poisonous
flowers, ostensibly appropriated from Parsifal:
If this Tristan wanted to die, the site of his death and
his departure from the here and now would be a
place of entwined Manchineel trees; in that place
would flower the most marvelously flowering flow-
ers with footpaths through fragrances never before
experienced, in that place would spread clumps of
crenellated and stagnant vegetation, in that place
would twist strings of calyx with scents of prodi-
gious poignancy and in that place would spices give
off aromas of paradisal and Arabic balms.63
63
Édouard Dujardin, Pour la vierge du roc ardent, La Re-
vue indépendante 8 (July 1888), 340: “Si ce Tristan voulait
mourir, le lieu de sa mort et du départ au dehors de l’ici
serait un site de vagues mancenilliers; là fleuriraient des
fleurs merveilleusement fleurantes et des sentes de senteurs
inouies aux sens, là croitraient des croissances de
végétations crénelées et croupissantes, là serpenteraient
des sequences de calices aux odorances de prodigieuses
poignances et fumeraient les aromates de baumes arabiques
et paradisiaques.”
As elsewhere in Pour la vierge du roc ardent, STEVEN
HUEBNER
Wagnerisms seem to invite an approach at once Dujardin and
musical and spontaneous in this passage: reit- Wagner
eration of “in that place” (là) creates a parallel-
ism and implicit line beginning that in each
case Dujardin decorates with a different suc-
cession of overwrought alliterations, in the origi-
nal French, first a sequence of “f” followed by
“s,” then “cr,” and then finally “s” (and soft
“c”) again. Grammatical redeployment of word
roots, with its soupçon of Wagner’s writing,
also characterize the style, as in the chain would
flower (verb)—flowers (noun)—flowering (adjec-
tive).
To continue in a Tristanesque vein: the scene
in Les Lauriers sont coupés where Daniel stands
on his balcony to contemplate the night also
reveals a particularly pronounced tendency to-
ward prose infiltrated by a free flow of vers
libre. Parallelisms and the play of syntactical
variation recall Kahn’s Symbolist probing of
the self where we might equate his musical
“entwinement of its rhythms” within “the
tempo of the Idea” with the brisk and fluid
local-level playing out of vers libre within larger
(and slower) shifts between dark and light pro-
duced by Prince’s momentary Wagnerian ide-
alization of Léa: “Oh, lovely spring breeze,
lovely summer, night breeze! Léa, my sweet
dear, my little Léa, my loved one, my Léa! The
darkness of night mingles all things; my friend
with the carefree smile and laugh, with the
laughing eyes, with the wide eyes, little laugh-
ing mouth, yes, smiling lips!”64 I have already
drawn attention to the local-level rhythms—
which I now want to suggest produced vers
libre-like writing—of other excepts from Les
Lauriers coupés, for example, the sequence “she
lets herself . . . she rests . . . she lies stretched
out” as Prince watches Léa fall asleep.65 Ter-
nary and reprise structures also suggest the same
tendency, as do the large recapitulations in the
64
“Oh! bon souffle printanière, bon souffle estival et noc-
turne! Léa, ma tendre chère, ma petite Léa, mon aimée,
ma Léa! Les tenèbres de la nuit emmêlent toutes les choses;
ô mon amie au sourire et au rire léger, aux yeux qui rient,
aux grands yeux, petite rieuse bouche, oui, souriantes
lèvres!” (Dujardin, Les Lauriers, 62, Suter, trans. 28).
65
For further discussion of vers libres-like writing in Les
Lauriers, see Erika Höhnisch, Das Gefangene Ich, 138–42.
69
 19 TH final chapter. Small wonder that many years
CENTURY
MUSIC later George Moore observed about monologue
intérieur: “When reason stops returning to the
wings in order to turn the crank, we begin to
hear exquisite music. The cage is opened and
the birds (our thoughts) sing in vers libre.”66
Theater and sound once again: for Moore, the
staging of monologue intérieur modulates to
opera.
It would, however, be incorrect to claim that
vers libre-like writing dominates Les Lauriers
sont coupés, for many passages unfurl in less
highly charged prose according to the ideal of
mixture articulated by Wyzewa and Dujardin
himself. Indeed, the mélange of registers in
Dujardin’s novel modestly anticipates the much
wider virtuosic range of stylistic and generic
reference in Ulysses. Nonetheless, the very or-
der exhibited by those passages carved in a
more lyrical style counterweighs the inflated
claims of formless leitmotivic writing in Les
Lauriers sont coupés that Dujardin made in Le
Monologue intérieur. He almost certainly un-
derstated the structured element in his novel
as a response to Joyce, or at least to certain
perceptions of Joyce that described his work as
plumbing the depths of the chaotic unconscious.
For his perceptions also had to contend with
the ordered surface of many passages in Ulysses,
as had (in a different time and place) Wagner’s
proposition that the Eddas emanated from
primitive impulses, a claim that flew in the
face of their refined stylistic traits.
LITANIES: Between Sounding
and Unsounding Music
At around the same time that he flattened vers
libre into the prose of certain parts of Les
Lauriers sont coupés and other works, Dujardin
published a song cycle of six poems entitled
Litanies that has considerable bearing on my
reflections about order, artifice, and monologue
intérieur. He must have thought of them as
vers libre because he cited the fifth, “Chant de
66
George Moore, typed letter to Dujardin dated 8 Novem-
ber 1930, in the Fonds Dujardin, Bibliothèque Jacques
Doucet; cited by Leblanc, “‘La réforme de l’instrument
poétique,” 157.
70
l’éternel impossible,” as an example of the style
in Les premiers poètes du vers libre.67 Yet in
the 1888 private-run edition the poems appear
only in their musical setting.68 A separate type-
script included with Dujardin’s copy of the page
proofs seems to be the only source for the cor-
rect layout of the poetry, of value because it
furnishes another rare example of Dujardin’s
approach to the rhythms of vers libre.69 In the
Litanies, then, as in some of his prose writings,
Dujardin obfuscates the structure of vers libre
in print, now not through a prose layout but
rather by implanting the verse in a score. This
draws attention to the musicality of the liter-
ary practice and explores the correspondences
between poésie libre and musique libre. Be-
cause of the close link between Dujardin’s vers
libre and poetic prose, the Litanies enrich the
connections between monologue intérieur it-
self and post-Wagnerian music.70 Before we rel-
egate the Litanies to a heap of Symbolist ephem-
era on account of Dujardin’s limited talent as a
composer, it is worth noting that the page of
buyers included with the page proofs reads as a
who’s who of progressive French art in the late
1880s, including composers Claude Debussy,
Ernest Chausson, Augusta Holmès, and Vincent
d’Indy, critics such as Alfred Ernst and Louis de
Fourcaud, and writers Gustave Kahn, Emile
Verhaeren, and Stéphane Mallarmé.
Beyond their intrinsic suggestiveness regard-
ing monologue intérieur, the Litanies crop up
67
The incipit of the poem (discussed below) is “Les voiles
voguent sur les vagues.” Dujardin almost disowns his own
efforts by confessing “Je ne suis aucunement fier de ces
poèmes écrits dans la pire manière décadante qui florissait
alors.” Les Premiers poètes du vers libre, 142–43.
68
The score was copublished by the Revue indépendante
and the widow of the publisher Girod. See François Lesure,
Claude Debussy: Biographie critique (Paris: Klincksieck,
1994), 95.
69
This score of the Litanies is among the Dujardin Papers,
housed at the Ransom Center, University of Texas at Aus-
tin.
70
Dujardin, “Les Premiers poètes du vers libre,” 177. Such
is the close link between prose poetry and vers libre that,
without guidance of the typescript, the first mélodie (shown
in ex. 2) might have laid out as “De l’ombre aux larges
sommeils, de l’ombre large où dorment les repos, où
reposent les puissances et les existences, où git l’envol de
tous possibles et invincibles destins, du sommeil plein
d’attendus et de futures et de promis et d’ors si nouveaux,
des ombres d’indifférence, voici l’enfin, l’enfin du jour et
de mon jour.”
in Dujardin’s outline for an explanatory essay
about Les Lauriers sont coupés for the critic
Vittorio Pica. We need to step back a few paces
in Dujardin’s argument to understand the point.
After alluding to the entwinement of “prose”
and “lyrisme” in his novel, Dujardin vituper-
ated against one of his favorite targets, the natu-
ralist claim to represent the world as it really
is. The transposition of a subjective construc-
tion of reality to art necessarily required “ab-
stract and symbolic means,” an art of the “sec-
ond degree” instead of the art of the “first de-
gree” practiced by writers such as Zola. It was
the difference, said Dujardin, between superfi-
cial arithmetic and “algebra.” In other words,
he implicitly decried surface-level metaphors—
for example a vivid, true-to-life description of a
fire mapped by the mind onto a bouquet of
yellow flowers—as mere inscriptions of the val-
ues of naturalism. “To get to the background
sketch, by means of a phrase, a stroke, or a
melody!” wrote Dujardin. Enter the Litanies:
the goal of the piece was to “abstract, in as
unpolished a way as possible, essential melodic
lines.”71 Not all of this is very clear in the form
that Dujardin presented it to Pica, and from
one perspective it is at odds with those parts of
Les Lauriers sont coupés where thought pro-
cesses have a realistic complexion difficult to
separate from the textures of the described ob-
ject. And the analogy to “algebra” seems diffi-
cult to square with thoughts “prior to all logi-
cal organization” that Dujardin had included
in the basic definition of monologue intérieur
in his late treatise. Algebra might be thought
more effectively to point up the artifice im-
plied in the use of vers libre. But in the specific
sense suggested in the letter to Pica, algebra
also refers to the construct of a set of abstract
71
Weissman, “Édouard Dujardin, le monologue intérieur et
Racine,” 491: “Comme il y a après l’arithmétique l’algèbre,
il y a après l’art naturaliste (art de premier degré) un art de
second degré, symbolique si vous le voulez. J’admire les
toiles de mon ami Anquetin qui si hautement expriment
en les seules lignes caractéristiques. Arriver, par la phrase
ou le trait ou la mélodie au schéma! Je viens de publier
une plaquette de mélopées; car savez-vous, mon cher ami,
que j’ai travaillé la composition musicale? Hélas! La
musique me reste le vice familier. . . . Et l’effort de ces
mélopées est à abstraire, aussi fruste que possible, les lignes
mélodiques essentielles.”
principles, operations, or rules that underlie STEVEN
HUEBNER
complex surface reality and that Dujardin con- Dujardin and
nected to the idea of music as another way in Wagner
which a “background” could play out, vari-
ously organized or irrational according to the
disposition of the soul. All of this remains con-
sonant with Mallarmé’s thought as expressed
in “Crise de vers,” where quotidian language
that may be measured or quantified contrasts
with a set of imponderable ideas and images
that form a more essential substrate. Mallarmé
at one point compares everyday language and,
implicitly, naturalist literature to coins, and
near the conclusion he refers to surface
numeracy: “Contrary to a numerical function,
both facile and representational, as the crowd
treats it at first, the act of saying, above all,
dreams and sings, and finds in the Poet, neces-
sarily constitutive of an art given over to fic-
tion, its virtual existence.”72 There is much
here that rhymes with Dujardin’s letter to Pica:
an allusion to arithmetic—facile and merely
representational—and the true act of “saying,”
the analogical language of dreams and of song.
For Dujardin, the Litanies realize a Symbolist
discourse of song in a Mallarméan spirit, but
more literally (because actually notated) than
intended by him. This might appear at some
remove from monologue intérieur, but it is im-
portant to remember that in the letter Dujardin
frames his musical experiment in the context
of a critique of the naturalist novel and careful
reflections on subjectivity.
For like À la gloire d’Antonia, Pour la vierge
du roc ardent, and Les Lauriers sont coupés
itself, the poems of Litanies center on the unat-
tainable beloved, but now cast in an even more
abstract vein. The theatrical element has be-
come radically attenuated: the time, place, and
speaker’s name remain undisclosed. Dujardin
uses the first and second person singular only
once, in the first poem, and it remains unclear
72
Mallarmé, “Crise de vers,” 213: “Au contraire d’une
fonction de numéraire facile et représentatif, comme le
traite d’abord la foule, le dire, avant tout, rêve et chant,
retrouve chez le Poëte, par nécessité constitutive d’un art
consacré aux fictions, sa virtualité.” This paragraph was
first published in the preface to René Ghil, Traité du verbe
in 1886. See “Notes et variantes,” Œuvres completes, II,
1643.
71
 19 TH throughout whether the beloved even really
CENTURY
MUSIC exists in flesh and blood. Images of darkness
and dawn at the beginning progress to vague
visions of medieval parapets, towers, white
barques, and a queen. Togetherness (in the
fourth poem) is fleeting (“Enfin ensemble / Au
blanc des plaines d’arbres blancs”; Together at
last / In the whiteness of the white-tree plains)
and segues into evocations of sails, the sea, and
reaching for dreams. In the last poem, the
speaker bids the beloved to gather up “un langui
de chant amoureux” (a languishing of amorous
song: the past participle of the verb “languir” is
treated here as a noun, much like the syntacti-
cal experimentation in the Wagner libretto
translations or the first edition of Les Lauriers).
She is also to collect “sons aux consonants
reflets” (sounds with sounding reflections: ver-
bal play around the same root). The hovering
soul of the speaker will continue to float in the
“voix invocatrice” (the invoking voice: part
material, part ethereal) until death. The title of
the cycle suggests a spiritual process more than
a kinetic narrative, one that seems animated
by an unvoiced and repeated solipsistic plea to
the construct of the beloved to hear him. This
is not unrelated to the position of Prince in Les
Lauriers sont coupés, especially at those mo-
ments when he idealizes Léa, an illustration in
its very abstractness of the deep, scarcely dis-
cernible symbols that (one imagines) occupy
the substrate beneath the teeming surface of
his sensory impressions.
That the score for Litanies does not include
indications of dynamics, tempo, articulation,
or phrasing seems especially significant in light
of reflections on symbiotic relationships be-
tween word and tone. One way to account for
this would be to think of performance instruc-
tions as redundant in an environment in which
the “word” regulates the shape and nuance of
its expressive rendition. This would add a point
to the words-as-music side of the ledger. For to
include expressive marks would be superfluous
to the necessary and sufficient information pro-
vided by the text, as in old-fashioned recitative
but now with more varied musical textures to
suggest some of those deep images or patterns
to which Dujardin-the-Symbolist alluded. As it
happened, Dujardin did supply some general
verbal performance instructions on the type-
72
script that contained the poetry for the cycle.
They call for moderate tempo and dynamics
throughout, and an avoidance of both pianis-
simo and fortissimo—in short, for musical un-
derstatement.73 The words are meant to work
their own magic within a narrow expressive
band. This strongly recalls the l’art de dire
recently documented by Bergeron that devel-
oped as a way into the aesthetics of the fin-de-
siècle mélodie.74 From the Symbolist perspec-
tive one might argue that performative histri-
onics—in either musical or spoken rendition—
belong to the art of the “first degree,” an im-
pulse to appear real and sincere that is disso-
nant with the language of the soul—chaotic
and whimsical, ordered and unordered. If sound-
ing music is necessary, the instructions to the
Litanies seem to say, let the performance be
restrained. But it is also difficult to escape the
impression that the very lack of expressive
marks points the way to discouraging audible
music in favor of mental reenactment. The pi-
ano part also seems generally to suggest this,
inasmuch as it is so obviously unpianistic in
its foregoing of fuller figuration and the tactile
pleasures of the instrument in favor of single
melodic lines and isolated chords.
The fifth mélodie (ex. 1 shows both text and
music) provides a succinct example of Dujar-
din’s conjoining of vers libre and music. Allit-
eration unifies a poem that moves from three
parallel lines initiated with an article-noun se-
quence, to a succession triggered by the word
“vers” and then a return in the last line to the
key words of “voile” and “vent.” The images
and repetitive phonemes twist spontaneously
around themselves, a trancelike effect that, as
with the Tristan-related excerpts from Pour la
vierge du roc ardent and Les Lauriers sont
coupés, might (for some readers) compensate
for the poor quality of the verse as lyric writing.
With its thin texture, the music bears out
Dujardin’s claim of striving for an unpolished
or unrefined background structure, including
73
“Le tempo n’est pas indiqué, étant laissé au sentiment
des interprêtes, dans les limites, bien entendu, d’un con-
stant ‘moderato.’ De même quant aux nuances, qui doivent
toujours s’abstenir autant du fortissimo que du pianissimo.”
74
Bergeron, Voice Lessons, 183–254.
  
        
STEVEN
                 HUEBNER

Dujardin and
Les voi - les vo - guent sur les va - gues, Le Vent se tra - ver - se dans les ver - gues, Les
Wagner
       




          
        
  

9
     

                
vents ap - pel - lent les voi - lu - res , Vers des ter - res, Vers des ter - res

       



                  

    




18
                        

 
pro - ches, Ou vers des ter - res dis - tan - tes, Vers des cieux d’o - cre, Des cieux d’en - cre,

 

        
         
                          



28
2             

4  
 
Vers le rêve, Oh voile! oh vent!

2           

4 
 
         

   
 24                     

 
41
 

      

        

       
      

    

      

Example 1: Édouard Dujardin, Litanies (1888), no. 5.

73
 19 TH
CENTURY
49
     
  
MUSIC

oh vol vi - va - ce!

   

      
 
  
     
 
Les voiles voguent sur les vagues,
Le vent se traverse dans les vergues,
Les vents appellent les voilures,
Vers des terres,
Vers des terres proches,
Vers des terres distantes,
Vers des cieux d’ocre,
Des cieux d’encre,
Vers le rêve,
Oh voile! oh vent! oh vol vivace!
Example 1 (continued)
the faux imitation at the opening and ensuing
counterpoint that project a vaguely archaic air.
The sparse piano textures seem less an accom-
paniment at the same phenomenological level
as the text than a sonic adjunct exploring its
nebulous essence, an abstract presence conso-
nant with the idea of an inexpressive back-
ground schema. Few critics will want to vouch
for Dujardin’s skill as a composer (or poet) here,
but for our purposes it is significant that the
music and text are symbiotically related through
consistent meter changes, the kind of freedom
to which Dujardin said Wagner had opened the
door. Metrical choices in the first fourteen mea-
sures are conditioned by the alliteration, each
successive “v” underlined by a downbeat. But
freedom and an impression of spontaneity do
not mean disorder. The musical setting appears
motivically ordered, just as one imagines
Wagner might have organized it (in principle
and certainly not in actual execution) inasmuch
as the first motive (a rising fifth) is taken up
again in a new key (F  minor, mm. 15–16) to
initiate the second phase of the poem. The
upward fifth motif recurs at the return of the
words “voile” and “vent” (mm. 25–32), a
“rounded” structure further developed by a var-
ied reprise of mm. 3–6 at the end in mm. 46–48.
The first poem in the cycle (ex. 2) also carves
74
   
 

(Sails drift over the waves
The wind crisscrosses the yards,
The winds beckon the sails,
Towards lands,
Towards near lands,
Towards distant lands,
Towards ocher skies,
Inky skies,
Towards the dream,
Oh sail! Oh wind! Oh enduring flight!)
order out of spontaneity. It is in three distinct
parts, an initial section focused on darkness
and sleep, followed by dawn and the appear-
ance of the speaker (“Je m’élèverai,” “I will
arise”), and then a conflation of an image of the
beloved with the day ahead. We might trace
the course of the first part from the soft “m”
sounds in the first distich (highlighted by met-
rical musical accents), to the noun and verb
incorporating “repos” (also accented), to the
juxtaposition within the same poetic line of
rhyming “puissances” and “existences” (both
drawn out with quarter-note triplets), to the
rhyme between “impossible” and “invincibles”
(also accented), and finally to several iterations
of the hard article “de.” Viewed from a higher
level, the parallel to the beginning of Les
Lauriers sont coupés is unmistakable in the
progression from nebulous confusion (the word
“ombre” or “shadow” occurs three times in
the first part) to assertion of the subject with “I
will arise.” At this moment, bare declamation
and an unexpected, portentous low E suddenly
open into a highly chromatic sequence (m. 23).
That is, after a beginning characterized by har-
monies grounded in a single bass note, the sub-
ject emerges in a wash of thicker texture, a
procedure that seems, however refracted,
vaguely redolent of the beginning of Das
 ( =  ) STEVEN
      
HUEBNER

           
        Dujardin and
Wagner
De l’ombre aux lar - ges som - meils, De l’om - bre large où dor - ment les re - pos, Où re -

      

 

     

  

7
     

      
                       

po - sent les puis - san - ces et les ex - is - ten - ces, Où git l’en - vol de tous pos - si - bles et in - vin - ci - bles des - tins, Du som



       

  

       

 
  
13
      

              
 


meil plein d’at - ten - dus et de fu - turs et de pro - mis et d’ors si nou veaux, Des om - bres d’in - dif - fé -

 

        

  

        

20
           
             
[]

   
ren - ce, Voi - ci l’en - fin, l’en - fin du jour et de mon jour, Aux veil - les je m’é - lè - ver - rai,


        


        
           
  

 
26

         

      
Je m’é - lè - ve - rai, À l’au - be de ta

     

                   

         

  
 
 
   

Example 2: Édouard Dujardin, Litanies (1888), no. 1.

75
 19 TH 33
  
CENTURY
       
MUSIC
       
gloire, Au mi - di, Au soir de ta gloire, A au jour Qu’il

 
    


          
       
           

40
 

                     
  
naisse ou flam - boie ou qu’il fi - nis - se Jour qui me trai - ne, Oh cré - a - tu - re.



           

    
          



De l’ombre aux larges sommeils, (From the shadow of ample slumbers,
De l’ombre large où dorment les repos, From the large shadow where rests sleep,
Où reposent les puissances et les existences, Where the powers and the souls rest,
Où git l’envol de tous possibles et invincibles Where the flight of all possible and invincible
destins, destinies lies grounded,
Du sommeil plein d’attendus et de futurs et de From sleep filled with expectations and with
promis et d’ors si nouveaux, futures and with promises and with gold so new,
Des ombres d’indifférence, From shadows of indifference,
Voici l’enfin, l’enfin du jour et de mon jour, Here is the at-last, the at-last of the day, my day,
Aux veilles je m’élèverai, Upon awakening I will arise,
Je m’élèverai, I will arise,
A l’aube de ta gloire, At the dawn of your glory,
Au jour, On the day,
Qu’il naisse ou qu’il flamboie ou qu’il finisse Be it newborn or radiating or at its end
Jour qui me traine, Day that pulls me along,
Oh créature. Oh beautiful one.)

Example 2 (continued)

Rheingold. And just as the progression at the resonance of Prince’s no-less flamboyant “I rise”
beginning of the Tristan prelude occurs three at the beginning of the novel and self-defini-
times, so too does Dujardin spin out a threefold tion by his attraction to Léa. The naturalist
chromatic sequence. Like the Wagnerian fore- might say “Paris, 6:00 clock in the evening,”
bear, each limb is decorated by a long, unpre- and leave it at that; the Symbolist poet and
pared appoggiatura and ends on an unresolved critic transposes into the language of desire.
dominant harmony (in m. 26 a seventh chord And just as Dujardin crafts the opening se-
on G  sounds as the dominant to the B-major quence in Les Lauriers sont coupés with re-
harmony heard at m. 23; the sequence is then peating elements that occur both before and
twice transposed up a perfect fourth). after “I rise,” so too does the music of the first
The distant allusion to Tristan underscores poem return to material from the initial sec-
a subject who emerges as a desiring subject, tion as it draws to a close (mm. 32ff.) with
extending (by association) the Schopenhauerian sequential development of the opening melody

76
and the same voicing of the tonic E-minor triad.
Suggesting both A minor and C major in the
final eight measures and avoiding dominant
harmony, the piece seems to drift off, matching
the trancelike tone of the speaker as he imag-
ines himself helplessly pulled along by the day.
Pulled he is, as well, toward hazy medieval
images of arches, turrets, and belfries at the
beginning of the second mélodie (not shown)
by the return of the main motif of the first
mélodie. This creates both the continuity char-
acteristic of monologue intérieur and the ana-
logical play essential to the Symbolist project
because the temporal images of the first song
become associated via common music—or a
silent “algebraic” pattern?—to the archaic ones
of the second. As we will now see, Dujardin
contested sounding music more robustly in
other writings.
PARSIFAL as Mental Theater
The musicality of Les Lauriers sont coupés plays
out within an imagined theatrical context, as I
suggested in the first part of this article. The
two arts came together more explicitly in
Dujardin’s first published piece of creative writ-
ing, “Amfortas: Paraphrase moderne,” published
in the Revue wagnérienne a few months before
he began work on the novel and just after his
“experimental” translation of the first scene of
Rheingold.75 In its own way the paraphrase is
no less self-consciously experimental. Given
its immediate relevance to the creation of mono-
logue intérieur it is surprising that the piece
has slipped by the eyes of literary critics. Hous-
ton Stewart Chamberlain pronounced it “splen-
did, utterly beautiful” when he received his
copy, although he correctly predicted it would
contribute to the charges of decadence that the
Revue had already been saddled with and that
would ultimately contribute to its demise.76
75
“Amfortas: Paraphrase moderne,” Revue wagnérienne 1
(1885), 310–13. The original text is given here as the Ap-
pendix. An English translation is available in Richard
Wagner and His World, ed. Thomas Grey (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2009), 384–87.
76
Letter from Chamberlain to Dujardin, 17 December 1885,
Dujardin Papers, Ransom Research Center, University of
Texas, Austin: “splendide, de toute beauté.” This kind of
writing also ruffled the aesthetic sensibilities of some of
The paraphrase cleaves to the first act of STEVEN
HUEBNER
Parsifal from the Grail knight chorus “Zum Dujardin and
letzen Liebesmahle” to the final words of Wagner
Amfortas’s anguished monologue: “Nimm mir
mein Erbe, / schliesse die Wunde, / dass heilig
ich sterbe, / rein Dir gesunde!” Dujardin devel-
ops his adaptation closely around Wagner’s
mise-en-scène and Amfortas’s musical and ver-
bal text, but frames his paraphrase with two
paratextual elements. Thus before beginning
the paraphrase proper, he presents a section
called “Program”:
Le temple du Saint-Gral; chœur des chevaliers:
“der Labung darf er nahn . . .” ; chœur des jeunes
homes: “den sündigen Welten . . .” chœur des enfants:
“die Glaube lebt . . .”—Entrée d’Amfortas; —
Amfortas couché.
Titurel;—Amfortas: “Wehe! Wehe mir! . . . ”—
Titurel.
Amfortas: “Nein! . . . ”—“wehvolles Erbe . . .”—
“nach ihm . . .”—“Die Stunde naht . . .”—“des
eignen sündigen Blutes Gewell . . .”—“der dort dem
Erlœser . . .”—“und aus der nun mir . . .”—“aus der
Sehnen’s Quelle, das ach! keine Büssung je mir stellt!
[sic = stillt] . . . ”—“Erbarmen! . . . dass heilig ich
sterbe.”
(Parsifal, act I, sc. 3)
This passage both sets the scene and traces its
sequence of events by stringing together incho-
ate fragments from the libretto. Dujardin’s in-
tentions are not entirely clear here. As a text it
is scarcely comprehensible without foreknowl-
edge of Parsifal, belying the designation “pro-
gram” as conventionally understood, that is, a
clear outline of what follows. Instead, the pas-
sage suggests fragmentary recollections of an
event in the past, a speaker who has seen
Parsifal and strains to remember the experi-
ence, or, in a half-somnolent state, vaguely re-
calls images from the performance. The para-
phrase fills out this sketchy material in a “for-
eign” language—explaining and clarifying it, as
paraphrases are meant to do, and, even more,
actually reenacting it; I want to suggest that
instead of reporting on a live theatrical event
the Revue’s principal patrons and led to attacks on it as a
decadent publication. See Édouard Dujardin, “La Revue
wagnérienne,” La Revue musicale (special issue, 1 Oct.
1923), 141–50.
77
 19 TH the paraphrase is a restaging that takes place in
CENTURY
MUSIC the mind’s eye of its author.
The end of the paraphrase proper leads from
Amfortas’s final words to a concluding plea in
which the speaker refers to himself explicitly
outside the narrative: “O suffering of Desire, of
double Desire, the Mystical and the Carnal,
suffering of the mysterious aspirations of the
Angel and the Beast, o suffering of Concupi-
scence and Religion, carnal and mystical man,
Amfortas, thus you lament, and we, with you,
we live the great endless Desire of multiple
lives.”77 Here the agent of the reenactment, the
author/director of the paraphrase, confesses to
his complete identification with Wagner’s pro-
tagonist. Although he writes in the third-per-
son singular in the narrative sections of the
paraphrase, by replaying Wagner’s scene the
speaker has inevitably internalized it. Some-
thing similar occurs in the short story “Le
Kabbaliste” from the collection Les Hantises,
where the speaker crouches in the corner of his
living room and re-creates Brünnhilde’s rock:
“I feel you and think you and in the majestic
and happy conflagration of fire, I dream with
you of future Dusks.”78
In the paraphrase Dujardin prepares the move
from third person to first not only by setting off
the “program” at the beginning, thereby im-
plicitly establishing a voice outside the narra-
tive, but also by slipping seamlessly without
quotation marks between descriptions of the
action and expansions of the first-person texts
that Amfortas sings in Wagner’s scene. Thus,
just before the closing third-person frame,
Amfortas recalls Kundry and then launches a
paraphrase of his great cry for mercy in the
opera: “A woman was there, shameless flower-
ing of sensualities, a woman that he, the chaste
one, had. Pity, Lord! On illusory delight, pity!
77
See the final sentence in the Appendix here.
78
Dujardin, “Le Kabbaliste,” in Les Hantises, 205: “Je te
sens et je te pense et dans les majestueux gais
épanouissements du feu, avec toi je rêve aux Crépuscules
futurs.” Another analog occurs in the Gerty Macdowell
episode of Ulysses (leaping over Les Lauriers sont coupés
for the moment because modulations among different
voices are rare in the novel) where third-person writing
reflects Leopold Bloom’s own sexual fantasy of what goes
on in Gerty’s mind as she watches the fireworks. The
episode occurs in the thirteenth chapter of James Joyce,
Ulysses (London: Penguin, 1968), 476–77.
78
. . . and I implore the grace of the Merciful
One,—his unique grace on my misery, yes, re-
demption, peace, oblivion, death.” To be sure,
the first person here represents Amfortas speak-
ing, but the explicit emergence of the narrator
by the end hints at another voice. Fittingly, the
paraphrase concludes on a note of fractured
subjectivity: “and we, with you, we live the
great endless Desire of multiple lives.”
Although for convenience one might iden-
tify certain sections of the paraphrase as narra-
tives, these are all lyrically charged, for the
most part so expressive that they project an
emotional investment on the part of the para-
phraser that also contributes to the obfuscation
of boundaries between first person and third.
Dujardin rewrites the beginning of the scene
with particularly evocative flair. In place of
Wagner’s orderly knights in procession, he imag-
ines a large church “lofty and filled with light”
where “groups of people praying wander aim-
lessly,” the air filled with “confused humming.”
Wagner’s succession of choruses (Grail knights,
youths, and boys’ choir) do appear in the first
paragraph, but they occur simultaneously
against the ongoing drone, an imagined sonic
environment that is nebulous and murky—and
punctuated by solemn silences for prayerful
appeals to the “Most Holy.” The paragraph ends
with a return to the images of the church as
large and filled with light, another example of a
“rounded” approach to organization on the lo-
cal level. And then, Amfortas: yet another pro-
tagonist who recalls Prince’s “I rise” by materi-
alizing against an indistinct background (sec-
ond paragraph). While the human crowd swirls
about, he remains oblivious and lost in his own
thoughts: “time is blurred, space is misted over
in a chaos of vegetation; and he dreams of he
knows not what pieties, what sufferings” (third
paragraph). Titurel commands the Grail to be
uncovered, Amfortas resists (fourth paragraph).
Whereas Wagner’s character begs for the im-
mediate material cause of his anguish to re-
main concealed, Dujardin’s narrator “realizes”
Wagner’s orchestra, replete with Kundry’s
laughter at this point, to explore the root causes
of his pain in acrid memories of her as a tempt-
ress. “Infernal Lust, laughter of the carnal Curse,
fury of female Concupiscence,” he recalls, as
Wagner’s music becomes transmuted into a lyri-
cal verbal text as rich with assonance as the
vers libre we have already examined (fifth para-
graph). Dujardin effects the same sort of trans-
position from music to words in the second
part of the paraphrase as well, extending the
moment when Amfortas hallucinates the un-
covered Grail with vers libre-like writing into
a frenetic enactment of the holy sacrament:
“here is the body of bread, here is the blood of
drink; the mystic vase will shine, here is the
food; God’s blood, here is the wine; take, take,
take; sinners, here is the wine and the bread”
(eighth paragraph). Because of the frenzied tone,
the line between a paraphrase of Amfortas’s
text and the narratorial voice seems particu-
larly thin.
Following the hallucination, Dujardin’s nar-
rator takes over with third-person writing as
Amfortas’s anguish intensifies: “the blood of
the Suffering One flows in his veins; and it is
his own blood, which boils up and flows.” At
this point in Parsifal itself Amfortas’s verbal
text continues in the same vein: the pulsing
blood, the wound, the analogy to the Redeemer.
Meanwhile, Klingsor motifs alternate with frag-
ments of Grail music in the orchestra. Kundry’s
laughter returns and combines with other mo-
tifs to culminate in a famous Wagnerian mo-
ment of collapsed time: an anticipation of the
threefold semitone swell that will occur at the
moment of the kiss in act II and that also re-
calls Kundry’s seduction of Amfortas in the
prehistory of the opera. In Dujardin’s verbal
paraphrase (ninth paragraph), Wagner’s music
triggers a complete replaying of the seduction,
with Amfortas reliving it in his mind after he
imagines the uncovering of the Grail. In sum, a
mental act in the present simultaneously
projects to the future and to the past:
He feels the great gardens full of smoking fragrances
and hot colors; the softness of warmth was soft,
when before his body she rose up, the animal fe-
male, mad with her body . . . she had that laughter
and that voice, yes, that gaze that so restlessly ca-
ressed him, those lips, yes, so trembling on him,
that hair cascading over him, yes, those flattering
curls, and around his neck those arms, so tender
those cheeks, so new that mouth that, in the com-
munion of all sufferings, kissed away the salvation
of his soul . . . monstrous kiss!
From the perspective of style, the narrator uses STEVEN
HUEBNER
the imperfect tense, the style indirect libre, a Dujardin and
precursor technique to the present-tense flow Wagner
of monologue intérieur. The grammatical
rearticulation of “soft” (“the softness of warmth
was soft”) suggests vers libre writing, as does
the regular rhythmic cut produced by repeated
iterations of “that,” “those,” and “so” in the
urgent drive to the culminating kiss. Seen from
a higher level—that is, taking into account the
frame of the initiating program—in such places
the paraphrase constitutes what amounts to a
mental reenactment of a mental reenactment.
This anticipates the recursive quality of sec-
tions of Les Lauriers sont coupés where Prince
seems to think of himself on a stage, within
the larger mental theater that the reader has
been invited to construct. Indeed, the poetic
prose and clipped succession of short syntacti-
cal units separated by semicolons throughout
“Amfortas: Paraphrase moderne” also look for-
ward to the writing in the novel and in
Dujardin’s short works. For example, the enu-
meration of Kundry’s hair, neck, cheeks, and
lips is not much different than the passage,
cited earlier, where Prince deconstructs Léa’s
body as she naps. And the rhythmic momen-
tum building to Kundry’s kiss anticipates
Prince’s sex-in-the-mind scenario (here desired,
not dreaded) as he holds her:
the poor dear is asleep in my friendly arms; and I am
drunk on her scent; this mingled, subtle, intimate
scent she has perfumed her body with, is mingled
with the very scent of her body, and it is her body’s
perfume I can sense in the deep essence of the min-
gling of flowers; yes, her woman’s being; and the
profound mystery of her sex in love; lecherously,
daemonically, when virile mastery of fleshly im-
pulse surrenders to a kiss, thus the terrible, bitter,
blanching ecstasy rises. . . . To possess such joy!79
79
“Elle dort, la pauvre, entre mes bras amis; et je me grise
de ses parfums; ce parfum mêlé, subtil, intime, dont elle a
parfumé son corps, c’est qu’il se mêle au parfum même de
son corps, et c’est lui, son corporel parfum, que je reconnais
parmi l’intensité des essences des fleurs conjointes; oui, sa
féminité; et le profond mystère de son sexe dans l’amour;
luxurieusement, oh! démonialement, quand sous la
maîtrise virile les puissances de la chair se délivrent dans
le baiser, ainsi l’âcre et terrible et pâlissante ivresse monte.
. . . Ah! jouir de cette joie!”(Dujardin, Les Lauriers 93;
Suter, trans. 55).
79
 19 TH One might also leap over Les Lauriers sont
CENTURY
MUSIC coupés to admire Dujardin’s prescience in
“Amfortas: Paraphrase moderne” of Ulysses
with its many instances of slippage between
first person and third, for example, the begin-
ning of the Lestrygonians chapter (with a flat-
ter tone): “As he set foot on O’Connell bridge a
puffball of smoke plumed up from the parapet.
Brewery barge with export stout. England. Sea
air sours it, I heard. Be interesting some day get
a pass through Hancock to see the brewery.”80
Joyce also spins out the same effect in the Lo-
tus-eater chapter and combines it with the self-
conscious theatricality I have been discussing.
Here Leopold Bloom feels all eyes are upon him
as he guiltily enters the post office to retrieve a
letter from his mistress, slips into an alley to
read it, and then tears it to shreds that he dis-
tributes to the wind. This sequence of events
recalls the moment when Prince destroys his
note to the attractive woman sitting with the
lawyer cited earlier: in both cases the protago-
nists act with the sensation of submitting to
the gaze of others. “Going under the railway
arch he took out the envelope, tore it swiftly in
shreds and scattered them towards the road,”81
writes Joyce in the third person about the pro-
tagonist. This act leads Bloom to fantasize about
tearing up a check, which segues into thoughts
about a check of one million pounds represent-
ing the fortune of Lord Iveagh made from sell-
ing liquor, leading (in turn) to calculations of
the number of barrels it would require to gener-
ate that amount. Note the slippage from the
third person of the previous quotation to first
person and then to third person again without
use of quotation marks: “Twopence a pint,
fourpence a quart, eightpence a gallon of por-
ter, no, one and fourpence a gallon of porter.
One and four into twenty: fifteen about. Yes,
exactly. Fifteen millions of barrels of porter.
What am I saying barrels? Gallons. About a
million barrels all the same. An incoming train
clanked heavily above his head, coach after
coach.” Theatricality lies closer to the surface
in the Circe chapter of Ulysses where (famously)
Bloom’s visit to a brothel is actually laid out as
80
Joyce, Ulysses, 191.
81
Ibid., 97.
80
a play with separate speeches, including imag-
ined dialogues with characters previously in-
troduced in the novel who are not present.82
Rearticulating
the GESAMTKUNSTWERK
In short, a specific Wagnerian scene—a mono-
logue—provided an important site for the incu-
bation of monologue intérieur, and points to a
way of understanding the relationship of this
technique to music different from that of the
Litanies. I want to push the argument further,
however, to suggest that the Amfortas para-
phrase, described as “modern” in its title, func-
tioned as a real stepping-stone to monologue
intérieur as part of a larger historical impera-
tive, albeit an amorphous one, identified by
Dujardin and Wyzewa. For sheer intellectual
ambition, the young writers did not take a sec-
ond place to the maître de Bayreuth.
Wyzewa opened a wide angle in his review
of literature that I have already mentioned, trac-
ing a broad sweep from the Greeks to his own
day with an important way station at Racine in
the seventeenth century. This is a significant
point of articulation for our purposes because
Dujardin dedicated Les Lauriers sont coupés
not to Wagner but to the “suprême romancier
d’âmes, Racine” (the supreme novelist of souls,
Racine). Whereas in most seventeenth-century
plays, wrote Wyzewa, uncontrollable passions
functioned as antagonists to reason, Racine cre-
ated “romans psychologiques” (psychological
novels) that combined the two.83 He accounted
for his anachronistic description of the novel
avant l’heure by explaining (and overstating
his point) that Racine produced a rational analy-
sis of passions in lieu of conventional mind/
body dichotomies. This occurred as his charac-
ters expressed “l’enchainement de leurs intimes
motifs” (the sequence of their private motiva-
tions) in theatrical dialogue that merely func-
tioned as a pretext to reveal inner thoughts.
Dujardin himself also gave pride of place to
82
For more on this point, see Kimberly J. Devlin, “‘See
Ourselves as Others See Us’: Joyce’s Look at the Eye of the
Other,” Proceedings of the Modern Language Association
104 (1989), 882–93.
83
Wyzewa, “Notes sur la literature wagnérienne,” 159.
Racine in his letter about Les Lauriers sont
coupés to Vittorio Pica. After noting that tradi-
tional theater dealt in the “anti-artistic” mat-
ter of actors and sets, he praised the playwright
as the inventor of the “drama of the soul,” that
is, nontheatrical dramas, without instructions
for setting and décor, written for diseurs (speak-
ers) of the court. The analogy stood the test of
time because he returned to it over forty years
later in Le Monologue intérieur, drawing atten-
tion to Racine’s practice of writing dialogues in
which characters often appear to be speaking to
themselves.84 Dujardin specifically singles out
the second act of Phèdre: believing her hus-
band, Theseus, dead, Phèdre declares her long-
repressed love to her stepson, Hippolyte. The
forbidden nature of the tabooed feelings makes
them seem to rise from a very deep recess of
the soul indeed.
Wyzewa’s essay moves breezily beyond
Racine, the eighteenth century, and on to the
Romantics: Stendhal scores points for under-
standing characters as representing conflicting
inner purposes; later realists such as Balzac and
Zola do not. The real goal for literature, he
continued, was to achieve a “total view” that
combined psychological perspicacity and atten-
tion to the soul in the tradition of Racine with
realistic detail.85 Verse favored the soul, of
course, and Wyzewa concluded his discussion
of poetry with praise for developments in vers
libre and Mallarmé’s demanding combination
of reason and emotion. The discussion, too
briefly summarized here, culminates in a call
for a new a kind of novel “that twenty centu-
ries of literature have prepared.” The only way
to create the “total view,” presented implicitly
by Wyzewa as a kind of hyper-Gesamt-
kunstwerk, was to focus on “a single soul.” For
to create more than one character required a
constant shifting of perspective that disrupted
the organic flow within the thoughts of each
character, thoughts that were meant to shift
randomly and continuously between concrete
images and emotional responses projected by
vers libre. “I think I hear the voice of Wagner
84
Dujardin, Interior Monologue, 100.
85
Wyzewa, “La Littérature wagnérienne,” 161: “aspect to-
tal.”
making these ingenious demands on the art of STEVEN
HUEBNER
our time,” Wyzewa concluded, despite his im- Dujardin and
plicit critique of Gesamtkunstwerk. He added Wagner
that writers seemed on the verge of its realiza-
tion. Les Lauriers sont coupés remains unmen-
tioned, but clearly referenced.
In a long and rambling valedictory essay that
he published in the Revue wagnérienne two
years later just before it folded, Dujardin ad-
dressed the problem of Gesamtkunstwerk in
nearly the same terms as Wyzewa, suggesting
that any attempt to combine different art forms
was bound to violate the very premise of the
total work of art by dividing aesthetic atten-
tion among different media. A blind person
listening to a play hears with greater intensity
than a sighted person. If he were to attend an
opera performance where the music, because of
some bizarre circumstance, became silent, the
philosopher in him would be able more pro-
foundly to reflect on the significance of the
text: “Words, what expressive intensity would
they have [if they were] isolated in the mind!”86
Given the great complexity of the world,
Dujardin seems to be saying, an effect of total-
ity is a product more of concentration than of
sensory dilation.
Brief references along the same lines surface
in the writings of Wyzewa and Dujardin even
before the December 1885 publication of
“Amfortas: Paraphrase moderne,” that is sev-
eral months before Les Lauriers sont coupés
was begun. In reflecting on program music in
the issue of April 1885, Wyzewa wrote of an
ideal theatrical work that would be purged of
“all decorative machinery.” This would be an
“ideal theater, not that of Bayreuth . . . but the
adorably realistic theater of our imagination”
for a public capable of re-creating it upon read-
ing and without “electrical or musical tricks.”87
Dujardin considerably elaborated on this idea
from a different angle in an essay on Wagnerian
86
Édouard Dujardin, “Considérations sur l’art wagnérien,”
Revue wagnérienne 3 (July-August 1888), 155–56: “les mots,
quelle intensité expressive n’auront-ils pas, isolés dans
l’esprit!”
87
Teodor de Wyzewa, “La musique descriptive,” Revue
wagnérienne 1 (1885), 77: “toute machinerie decorative”;
“le théâtre idéal, non celui de Bayreuth . . . mais le théâtre
adorablement réaliste de notre imagination”; “sans nul
besoin de trucs éléctriques ou musicaux.”
81
 19 TH theory published in August of the same year.
CENTURY
MUSIC He posited that Wagner had a vision of the
refined and unified Gesamtkunstwerk created
with a didactic and religious intent. It is worth
citing the passage at greater length:
He conceived of the art Work, voice of Religion,
propagated like a Gospel, in a new Bible, universally
read, a book.
And this Book, where his two ways of thinking
were fully signified, the Book, this all powerful sug-
gestion of the Idea, this Book that contained his
Work of Poetry and Theology,—Wagner, the imperi-
ous creator, read it, and he alone, in the calm silence
of his dream, running over the many pages with his
eyes, and with his eyes following the Signs,—the
letter, the note, the line,—he saw and he heard,
manifestly suggested by the Signs, come alive within,
in the marvelous and supreme theater of his Imagi-
nation, the real and symbolic drama.—Perhaps some
people, reading, reading orchestral scores, are able to
see and hear the musical Drama, just as all of us see
and hear the literary drama merely by reading. Just
as all of us re-create in our minds the tableaux that
the novel describes only by reading; thus these people,
too, would take pleasure in the Book, reading with-
out obstacle and without distraction of the splen-
dors, magically evoked, of the ideal Wagnerian The-
ater; as a pure vision not troubled by strange mate-
rial things, impudent or hypocritical, of theaters,—
in the complete truth of the world of the imagina-
tion, the Religious Sense would appear to them. . . .
The Book would be the place of performance for the
metaphysical and naturalist Drama.88
88
Édouard Dujardin, “Bayreuth—Théories wagnériennes,”
Revue wagnérienne 1 (8 Aug. 1885), 208: “Il conçut l’Œuvre
artistique, porte-voix de la Religion, divulguée, comme un
Évangile, dans une nouvelle Bible, universellement lue,
un livre.
“Et ce Livre, où sa double pensée, pleinement, était
signifiée, le Livre, ce tout puissant suggestif de l’Idée, ce
Livre qui contenait son Œuvre de Poésie et de Théologie,—
Wagner le lisait l’Impérieux créateur, et, seul, dans le calme
silence de son rêve, parcourant des yeux les pages multiples,
et des yeux suivant les Signes,—la lettre, la note et le trait,—
il voyait et il entendait, manifestement suggérés par les
Signes, vivre en lui, en le merveilleux et suprême théâtre de
son Imagination, le drame réel et symbolique.—Peut-être,
quelques uns, lisant, lisant les partitions d’orchestre, peuvent
voir et entendre le Drame musical, ainsi que, tous, nous
voyons et entendons, le lisant seulement, le drame littéraire,
ainsi que, tous, par la seule lecture, nous suscitons, en notre
esprit, les tableaux que le roman décrit; or, ces quelques uns
aussi, lisant, jouiront dans le Livre, sans obstacle et sans
divertissement, des splendeurs, magiquement évoquées, du
Théâtre Wagnérien idéal; et pur vision non troublée par les
82
Once again, Dujardin collapses Gesamtkunst-
werk into the word. Music drama had been
fashioned out of the abstract concept of a Book
made up of signs and infused with religious
spirit—a level made up of pure ideas and shapes
beneath the phenomenal artistic surface. In the
letter to Pica, as we have seen, Dujardin re-
ferred to this level as algebra, as opposed to the
mere arithmetic of the surface realists, and drew
a link to the music of his own Litanies. Wagner,
too, was able to peruse the Book and follow its
“signs.” These are broken down in the Revue
wagnérienne essay to “the letter, the note, and
the stroke,” analogous to the expression in the
Pica letter “to get to the background sketch, by
means of a phrase, a stroke, or a melody!”:
words, music, and drawing/writing have an
equal role in the reduction of the Gesamt-
kunstwerk to concentrated essences. Wagner’s
genius brought the surface to life in the mate-
rial environment of the theater, but Dujardin
suggests that mental reproduction of the music
drama, a reading of the allegedly abstract “signs”
of the score (the sounding strokes, one might
say) would bring the reader closer to the back-
ground level of the Book, that is, to fundamen-
tal principles, the governing Idea.89 This was
just as in the Litanies, with their implication
of silent execution—or if not silent, at least
with a minimal injection of surface expression.
And more broadly, the essay seems to touch at
the motivation for “Amfortas: Paraphrase mo-
derne” with its goal of turning Wagner’s music
into words, words that operate as vers libre in
the spirit of a kind of music that probes sym-
bolic essences.
étrangères materialités, impudentes ou hypocrites, des salles
théâtrales,—en la complète vérité d’un monde imaginative,
le Sens Religieux leur apparaîtra. . . . Le Livre serait le lieu de
Représentation, au Drame métaphysique et naturaliste.”
89
In the final issue of the Revue wagnérienne, Houston
Stewart Chamberlain praised its breadth while acknowl-
edging that Dujardin and Wyzewa had often taken a stance
that was too literary, writing of “le théâtre idéal c’est le
cerveau d’un homme isolé, qui rêve, etc.” According to
Chamberlain, this went against Wagner’s own thinking
that the work of art exists only at the moment of its
sensual realization. “Le Wagnérisme en 1888,” Revue
wagnérienne 3 (1888), 291.
 Mallarmé and
Mental Theater
Dujardin surely invokes the Book in a sense
related to Stéphane Mallarmé’s notoriously dif-
ficult concept: literary microcosm of the uni-
verse, blueprint for existence, sacred revelation
of all existing relations between everything. He
reads backward in time through Mallarmé’s
concept to a fantasized intention, conscious or
subconscious, on Wagner’s part. Without initi-
ating a discussion of Mallarmé’s Book here, it
is nonetheless pertinent to take stock of the
context of Dujardin’s reference.90 The previous
spring Dujardin had invited Mallarmé to the
Concerts Lamoureux to hear some of Wagner’s
works during the first months of publication of
the Revue wagnérienne, an occasion that evi-
dently persuaded Mallarmé to return often for
Wagner performances.91 One of Dujardin’s goals
was to secure the great poet’s support for his
journal, and to this end he commissioned an
essay about Wagner from him. Mallarmé’s “Ri-
chard Wagner, Rêverie d’un poète français,”
published in the same issue as Dujardin’s re-
marks on the Book, has become one of the
iconic documents of French Wagnerism, a sta-
tus to which Dujardin sought to elevate it im-
mediately.92 In a letter of gratitude to Mallarmé
written in 1885 shortly after the “Rêverie” was
published, Dujardin projected a much larger,
widely ranging journal with the title “Revue
Wagnérienne littéraire” and beseeched his se-
nior colleague to become “the moral guide . . .
the spiritual leader.”93
In his response of 10 September of the same
year, Mallarmé declined Dujardin’s flattering
offer, holding out for strict independence from
any literary project, but as an aside he remarked
90
For a study of techniques that Mallarmé meant to incor-
porate into the Book, see Robert Greer Cohn, L’Œuvre de
Mallarmé: Un Coup de dès, trans. René Arnaud (Paris:
Librairie les lettres, 1951).
91
Édouard Dujardin, Mallarmé par un des siens, 40.
92
See Stéphane Mallarmé, “Richard Wagner Rêverie d’un
poëte français,” Œuvres complètes, II, 153–59. Mallarmé
referred to it as “moitié article, moitié poëme en prose” in
a letter to Dujardin, 5 July 1885, Œuvres complètes, ed.
Bertrand Marchal (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), I, 784.
93
Letter, Dujardin to Mallarmé, 29 August 1885. For the
complete text, see Leblanc, Wagnérisme et création, 176–
77: “le chef moral . . . le directeur spiritual.”
that he had noticed Dujardin’s remarks on the STEVEN
HUEBNER
Book, which he found “very insightful, very Dujardin and
new.”94 A couple of years later, Mallarmé re- Wagner
sponded to Les Lauriers sont coupés with praise
for its “curling and curving mode of notation
that, independent of great literary architectures,
verses or sentences twisting decoratively, has
as its only raison d’être that of expressing, with-
out misapplications of sublime methods, the
quotidian which is so difficult to grasp.”95 He
concluded that Dujardin attempted what “we
are all tending towards in our different ways.”
In the “curling and curving mode of notation”
Mallarmé implicitly assimilates Dujardin’s
writing with both musical notation and the
arabesque, a concept that also might be aligned
with Dujardin’s references to both “la note”
and “le trait” and, at further remove, from the
sparse accompaniments of the Litanies which,
in effect, isolate “notes” and “figures.” If we
agree with literary critic Elizabeth McCombie
and others that a key aspect of the arabesque
for Mallarmé was its nonlinearity,96 then the
spontaneous and unpredictable shifting of
Prince’s thoughts might well be the analogy
that Mallarmé had in mind. Had Mallarmé lived
to read them, the stream of consciousness pas-
sages in Ulysses might have done so to an even
greater extent because they are so much more
richly textured. For Mallarmé, the arabesque
produced a certain kind of musico-literary
rhythm (hence the reference to notation in the
letter), a theme that he would develop in his
essay “La Musique et les lettres” to character-
ize the prose of “the sumptuous writer” as
simultaneously ornamental and made up of bro-
ken verses, colors, and dissimulated rhymes—
94
Letter to Édouard Dujardin, 10 September 1885, Œuvres
complètes, I, 785: “très pénétrant, très neuf.”
95
Letter of 8 April 1888 cited in Licari, intro., 13: “un
mode de notation virevoltant et cursif qui, en dehors des
grands architectures littéraires, vers ou phrases
décorativement contournées, a seul raison d’être, pour
exprimer, sans méapplications des moyens sublimes, le
quotidien si précieux à saisir.”
96
For a succinct discussion of Mallarmé’s arabesque, see
Elizabeth McCombie, Mallarmé and Debussy: Unheard
Music, Unseen Text (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), 40–
44. For more on the musical arabesque in this period, see
Gurminder Kaur Bhogal, “Debussy’s Arabesque and Ravel’s
Daphnis et Chloé (1912),” Twentieth-Century Music 3
(2006), 171–99.
83
 19 TH what people used to call the prose poem, he
CENTURY
MUSIC added.97 In the letter to Dujardin, the equation
of a temporal dimension (the difficulty of “pres-
entness”) with a visual/sonic construct (the ara-
besque as a “curling and curving mode of nota-
tion”) makes for a synesthetic Mallarméan
move: for just as a point of origin is impercep-
tible in the latter (think: the curlicues of Middle
Eastern illumination), so too is the present in-
effable and ungraspable because it has already
disappeared at the instant that thought pro-
cesses it.
Reading further back in time from a
Mallarméan perspective to “Amfortas Para-
phrase moderne,” we might identify ornamen-
tal prose in local-level circling back to words
with the same root, as in the third paragraph:
“he dreams obscurely of pious practices and
penances; a mental sleep is in the rigidity of
flesh; the soul is drowsy; it hears like one who
sleeps. . . .” And in the next paragraph, now
circling back: “banish sleep!” On a larger tem-
poral level the word “concupiscence” weaves
its way, like a leitmotif, in and out of the tex-
ture throughout the paraphrase. Creative iden-
tification of the Mallarméan arabesque might
also take up Dujardin’s imagery, a mirroring of
the structural in the figurative that is charac-
teristic of the poet. As I have already noted, the
Amfortas of the paraphrase experiences “time
that becomes blurred, space that is misted over
with the chaos of vegetation,”98 redolent at once
of an Art Nouveau kind of arabesque and
Klingsor’s magic garden. Dujardin’s Amfortas
is overcome with confused memories that blend
with the jumble of voices emerging from differ-
ent parts of the church. As in the dream se-
quence in Les Lauriers discussed above, these
sensory impressions are not presented on a lin-
ear axis. Locating the arabesque constitutes a
performative critical act that via the “Para-
phrase moderne” and Les Lauriers also does
not seem unreasonable to associate with Ulys-
ses, even though Joyce himself may not have
97
Mallarmé, “La Musique et les lettres,” in Œuvres
complètes, II, 64: “écrivain fastueux.”
98
“Amfortas: Paraphrase moderne,” cited in Grey, Richard
Wagner and His World, 385.
84
made the link to Mallarmé. For example, we
have this anecdote:
In the late thirties Joyce was having an afternoon of
Dublin gossip [with Niall Sheridan, a recent gradu-
ate of U.C.D. (University College, Dublin)]. In the
midst of a complicated web of relationships, Joyce
suddenly paused, extended his hand, and traced an
arabesque in the air before him. “It all makes a
pattern,” he mused. The patterns of which he
dreamed throughout his long exile form the texture
of Ulysses, and provide readers with some of the
most compelling meanings.99
For Ezra Pound, Ulysses represented a “triumph
in form, in balance, a main scheme which con-
tinues unweaving and arabesque.”100
Dujardin’s call for a mental theater in his
essay on Wagnerian theory from 1885 rhymes
in more direct ways with Mallarmé’s thinking
in “Richard Wagner: Rêverie d’un poète
français.” Mallarmé is characteristically opaque
and challenging, but he leaves no doubt that
Wagnerian opera, while an impressive accom-
plishment, stops well short of the Ideal.101 Af-
ter obliquely tracing (and celebrating) the evo-
lution of Wagner’s thought, he finds much to
criticize: the restricted compass of Germanic
legends and the overall over-determination of
experience inherent in Wagner’s articulation of
them. Wagner’s reforms are thrown back at
him as insufficient. For as Philippe Lacoue-
Labarthe remarks in his excellent gloss on
Mallarmé’s text, the poet’s “theater, in its truth,
is not theatrical. It does not have to submit
itself to the imperatives of performance.”102
99
Richard M. Kain, “Motif as Meaning: The Case of Leopold
Bloom,” in Approaches to Ulysses: Ten Essays, ed. Tho-
mas F. Staley and Bernard Benstock (Pittsburgh: Univer-
sity of Pittsburgh Press, 1970), 61.
100
Ezra Pound, “Ulysses,” in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound
(New York: New Directions, 1968), 406.
101
Leblanc writes about the simultaneous admiration for
and contestation of Wagner by Mallarmé in Wagnérisme
et création en France, 202–04.
102
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Musica Ficta (Figures of
Wagner), trans. Felicia McCarren (Stanford: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 1994), 71–72. For additional commentary on
Mallarmé’s essay, see the fine analysis by Heath Lees,
Mallarmé and Wagner: Music and Poetic Language
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 201–26; and Joseph Acquisto,
French Symbolist Poetry and the Idea of Music (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2006), 49–54.
And, striking a nationalist note, Mallarmé re-
jects Germanic legend as inimical to “the
French spirit, strictly imaginative and abstract.”
With no plot, no characters, it is to be a kind of
theater that reflects the multiple aspects of the
French spirit: its hero, an impersonal figure, a
“type without prior denomination” and its ac-
tion essentially the musical and poetic charac-
ter of language itself.103 As a corollary, its loca-
tion is to be elsewhere than “the fictional foyer
on display, lanced by the stares of the crowd.”104
A dematerialized theater would be subsumed
by the Book, and as part of the process the
writer was to become synonymous with an
actor on an ideal stage. Mallarmé suggested as
much in the multipartite essay “Quant au livre”
first published in La Revue blanche and then
in Divagations:
The writer, from his troubles, dragons that he has
tamed, or from joy, must establish himself, in the
text, as a witty actor.
Floorboards, chandelier, the disappearance of fab-
rics and liquefaction of mirrors, in the real order,
until the excessive leaping of our own gaseous form
around a stopping point, at the foot of a virile stat-
ure, a Place reveals itself, a stage, an inflation of the
spectacle of the Self before everyone.105
Here it is worth remembering that in Les
Lauriers sont coupés the narrating voice
conflates with that of the actor, just as in
Dujardin’s Amfortas paraphrase the remember-
ing writer/narrator strongly identifies with
Wagner’s theatrical protagonist. In an analo-
gous way, the grammatical subject of Mal-
larmé’s first sentence is bifocal: the reflexive
103
“L’esprit français, strictement imaginative et abstrait”;
“Type sans dénomination préalable.” For a further discus-
sion of this point, see William Carpenter, “‘Le Livre’ of
Mallarmé and James Joyce’s Ulysses,” in Mallarmé in the
Twentieth Century, ed. Robert Greer Cohn (Madison:
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998), 190.
104
Mallarmé, “Richard Wagner Rêverie,” 157: “le fictive
foyer de vision dardé par le regard d’une foule!”
105
Stéphane Mallarmé, Divagations in Œuvres, II, 215:
“L’écrivain, de ses maux, dragons qu’il a choyés, ou d’une
allégresse, doit s’instituer, au texte, le spirituel histrion.
“Plancher, lustre, obnubilation des tissus et liquéfaction
de miroirs, en l’ordre reel, jusqu’aux bonds excessifs de
notre forme gazée autour d’un arrêt, sur pied, de la virile
stature, un Lieu se présente, scène, majoration devant tous
du spectacle de Soi.”
verb “s’instituer” (establish oneself) can apply STEVEN
HUEBNER
either to the “writer” or, reading backwards Dujardin and
from the end of the first sentence more poeti- Wagner
cally, to the “witty actor.” Writer and actor
counterbalance each other as equal weights at
both ends. And then the real theater evaporates
at the command of the conflated writer/actor
to reveal a new space for the enactment of the
spectacle of interiority. Mallarmé would actu-
ally identify Shakespeare’s Hamlet as far closer
than Wagnerian opera to his vision of an exis-
tential drama of “transition between the old
action and the future monologue or drama of
the Self.”106 It could dispense with sets and
even all the characters, except Hamlet him-
self.107
In an article for the Revue de Genève on
Wagner and French poetry the following year,
Dujardin reformulated elements of Mallarmé’s
“Rêverie” in terms more consonant with those
of the vocabulary he would use in the letter to
Pica by interpreting Mallarmé’s writing/acting
subject in terms of the soul: “Life is the life of
the soul . . . the Self thinks, and all is; the Self
is God, if he thinks of himself as God. Because
the universe is a fictional reality.”108 Thus the
utter artifice of Les Lauriers, a cityscape and
play of images unique to the mind of Prince,
with no existence outside of it. Prince and Léa
form a binary pair, the first a proto-writer/actor
with aspirations (albeit at times risible) to Sym-
bolist perspicacity, the second a synecdoche of
the traditional theatrical world, a materialistic
actress—banal and petty. Also of a piece with
Mallarmé is Dujardin’s turn to Racine for the
epigram of Les Lauriers, a quintessential repre-
sentative of the French spirit that Mallarmé
had opposed to the German. Dujardin even re-
turned to the centrality of Racine in his vale-
106
Mallarmé, Divagations, 275: “transitoire entre la vieille
action multiple et le Monologue ou drame avec Soi, futur.”
107
For more on this point, see Haskell M. Block, Mallarmé
and the Symbolist Drama (Detroit: Wayne State Univer-
sity Press, 1963), 83–100; Serge Meitinger, “Mallarmé, poète
et histrion,” Romantisme 17 (1987), 91–102; Eric Benoit,
Mallarmé et le mystère du “livre” (Paris: Honoré Cham-
pion, 1998), 59–64.
108
Édouard Dujardin, “Richard Wagner et la poésie française
contemporaine,” Revue de Genève 2 (25 July 1886), 263:
“La vie, c’est la vie de l’âme; . . . le moi pense, et tout est;
le moi est dieux, s’il se sait dieu. Car l’univers est une
réalité de fiction.”
85
 19 TH dictory essay “Considérations sur l’art wag-
CENTURY
MUSIC nérien” by arguing that of Wagner’s operas only
Tristan came close to Symbolist abstraction
because it approximated the static, abstract,
and psychologically acute character of the great
French playwright, a model so vital to Mal-
larmé’s generation.109
Dujardin’s ideas for monologue intérieur,
then, congealed in the shadow of Mallarmé.
“Amfortas: paraphrase moderne” represents a
key moment in the Symbolists’ simultaneous
embrace and rejection of Wagner: a real Wagne-
rian passage retooled to produce more “com-
plete” mental theater. In a later review of a
Dujardin play called La Fin d’Antonia, Mal-
larmé spoke of the triumph of the word, an
“opera without accompaniment, but spoken;
now the Book will attempt to suffice in order
to pry open the interior stage and whisper its
echoes.”110 In distinct ways, the Litanies and
“Amfortas: Paraphrase moderne” stand at dif-
ferent points on a continuum from sounding
Wagnerian opera to monologue intérieur and
mental theater. The first explores the ground-
ing of vers libre in music in a texturally uncon-
ventional setting: threadbare accompaniments
open the way for poetry to rival music in ex-
pressive power and music and poetry mesh into
a highly abstract subject. The second pushes
sound entirely out of existence by turning the
music of Wagnerian opera into words. But these
steps do not occur on an evolutionary chain:
the “Paraphrase moderne” is more precise in
its delineation of context and narrative than
the Litanies. Les Lauriers sont coupés in turn
is much closer to the fabric of life, but with no
less a claim than the Litanies and the “Para-
phrase moderne” to revealing the language of
the soul. In the transmutation of Wagner’s the-
ater into the “theater” of Dujardin’s ground-
breaking novel, monologue intérieur was thus
109
Dujardin, “Considérations sur l’art wagnérien,” 177.
Houston Stewart Chamberlain develops a thesis of affini-
ties between Racine and Wagner in “Wagner et le genie
français,” Revue des deux mondes 196 (July 1896), 451–
54.
110
Stéphane Mallarmé, “Planches et feuillets,” Divagations
(1897), 195: “un opéra sans accompagnement ni chanté,
mais parlé; maintenant le livre essaiera de suffire, pour
entrouvrir la scène intérieure et en chuchoter les échos.”
This article dates from 1893.
86
born on a paradoxical cusp between sounding
music and the absorption of music by poetry, a
paradox that connects Mallarmé to Joyce. As
far as I am aware, links between these two
seminal figures of modernism have not been
substantially developed in literary criticism, or
at least not beyond a broad consensus that
Mallarmé stands at the fons et origo of so much
that was key to avant-garde art at the turn of
the century, and that Joyce was pulled up in
this wake.111 The lesson I want to suggest con-
cerns Dujardin’s work and its refractions of
Wagner as a more precisely articulated meeting
ground for Joyce and Mallarmé—part resource,
part mirror of their own practices, a fertile site
for a fundamental reorientation of West-
ern literature and art. l
111
For a survey of Mallarmé’s general influence, see Robert
Greer Cohn, “Mallarmé’s Wake,” New Literary History
26 (1995), 885–901.
Abstract.
Édouard Dujardin’s novel Les Lauriers sont coupés
(1887) has long been acknowledged as an important
influence on the stream of consciousness style (called
monologue intérieur by Dujardin) found in James
Joyce’s Ulysses. Dujardin wrote the book during the
period he edited the short-lived Revue wagnérienne.
The study shows how monologue intérieur was con-
nected to experimental literary trends debated on
the pages of the Revue as well as in the Symbolist
movement more generally. Two of these trends were
vers libre and the construct of an interiorized men-
tal theater, and both were grounded in particular
perceptions of Wagnerian opera. Dujardin and his
Symbolist colleagues appreciated Wagner’s move to
abstraction, but thought he had not gone far enough.
The article illustrates how putative syntactical free-
doms in Wagner’s work encouraged vers libre, how a
song cycle Dujardin composed to his own vers libre
tested the boundaries between literature and music
against a Wagnerian backcloth, and how a “para-
phrase” of the Amfortas monologue in the first act
of Parsifal published in the Revue produced a the-
ater of the mind. The invention of monologue
intérieur emerges as a rich and multivalent point of
intersection between Wagnerian opera and moder-
nity. Keywords: Dujardin, monologue intérieur,
stream of consciousness, vers libre, Symbolism,
Wagner influence
 APPENDIX
AMFORTAS
Paraphrase moderne
Programme
Le temple du Saint-Gral; chœur des chevaliers:
“der Labung darf er nahn . . . ”; chœur des jeunes
hommes: “den sündigen Welten . . . ” chœur des
enfants: “die Glaube lebt . . . ”—Entrée d’Amfortas;—
Amfortas couché.
Titurel;—Amfortas: “Wehe ! Wehe mir ! . . . ”—
Titurel.
Amfortas: “Nein ! . . . ”—“wehvolles Erbe . . . ”—
“nach ihm . . . ”—“die Stunde naht . . . ”—“des eignen
sündigen Blutes Gewell . . . ”—“der dort dem Erlœser
. . . ”—“und aus der nun mir . . . ”—“aus der Sehnen’s
Quelle, das ach! keine Büssung je mir stellt! [sic] . . .”
—“Erbarmen! . . . dass heilig ich sterbe.”
(PARSIFAL, I, 3)
L’église est haute et claire; des groupes de priants
passent vaguement; des agenouillés prolongent des
rangées indistinctes de fronts; le confus bruissement
des litanies s’atténue en silences graves. Et, près les
vastes piliers forts, des hommes sont, mâles voix,
âmes glorifiantes, en l’attente de la divine Venue:
“venons vers Dieu ! . . .” des voix de jeunes hommes
s’ajoutent, que la vie a touchés, et qui se lamentent,
moins adorants hélas ! au fils de la Femme: “pour
les mondes pécheurs Christ a donné son corps . . . ”
et, par instants, des voix descendent d’invisibles
sommets, enfantines et angéliques, virginales: “la
Foi vit, l’Esprit plane . . . ” donc s’emmêlent les
chants pieux des glorifications et des lamentements
et des célestes virginités. Et parmi les chants sont de
graves silences, des solennels appels du Très-Saint
dans les silences des voix humaines . . . des silences
et des chants s’emmêlent, pieux murmures, sous les
hautes arcades de l’église lumineusement élargie.
Il est, le Malade, immobile en son siège, prostré,
tandis que flue au tour de lui un peuple de fidèles; il
demeure, et son corps en arrière est penché, ses mains
à ses côtés pendent, sa tête est renversée, et sa face,
face à face au ciel de la coupole, a des yeux fixes dans
le haut de l’air; et ses lèvres, entrécartées par une
haleine faible, gardent cette torpidité rigide des
affaissements . . .
En les vastes nefs grouille la foule humaine . . .
Volez, bruits des prières, ailes des confessions pieuses!
. . . les voix qui tonnent et les silences qui
formidablement retentissent, les voix et les silences
dans l’âme qui les ouit sont murmures.—Venons à
Dieu! . . mondes pécheurs! . . . la Foi vit, l’Esprit plane!
. . . chants qui vont et qui vont, s’éparsemant dans
STEVEN
HUEBNER
Dujardin and
Wagner
l’âme de celui qui tient l’angoisse mortuaire du proche
crucifîment; dans son âme il les ouit murmures; et les
paroles de ces silences, comme de ces chants, au tour
de son âme bourdonnent. Chantez, voix! il demeure
en une perception amortie de vous; le temps
s’embrouille, l’espace s’embrume en chaos de
végétations; et il songe d’il ne sait quelles piétés,
quelles souffrances; il songe obscurément de
religiosités et de douleurs; un sommeil mental est en
la rigidité des chairs; l’âme est ensommeillée; elle
ouit comme une qui sommeillerait; et c’est, en cette
âme, un très loin écho des entourants cantiques mêlés
de silences, des emmêlés cantiques, pieux, lamentants
et virginaux.
—Accomplir l’Office, s’éveiller, vivre, agir,—il le
doit! l’heure est d’officier, et de vivre: loin, les
sommeils! et l’impérieuse et mélancolique parole qui
commande l’action, parle. D’un brusque sursaut, le
Malade tressaille; des sens lui viennent; à demi il se
dresse, et, en son siège, il se trouble, avec de vagues
pensées, des gestes vagues:
“Aïe! Aïe à moi! . .” le souvenir apparaît, hélas! la
mémoire des souffrances, et des angoisses, et des
lamentations, et des forfaitures, aussi des châtiments,
et des cris de la Concupiscence: “ô Christ, ta lamen-
tation déjà me résonne. . . . Non! laissez que je dorme
mon oubli, mon léthargique assoupissement du mal:
n’éveillez pas le Malade! oh! que je meure! . . .” Il doit
s’éveiller, vivre: et le Très-Saint l’appelle, de nouveau,
gravement, à l’Office: “l’Office! accomplir l’Office!
. . .” donc il vit; il vit, et il se lève, dans une rage de la
tourmentante pensée.
Infernale Luxure, rire de la charnelle Malédiction,
fureur de la Concupiscence femelle: soudain rayonne
un luxurieux œil, un coin de gorge pâmée, l’éclair d’un
diabolique baiser,—pendant qu’il clame: “non!” et
cette évocation de luxure rieuse et concupiscente;
c’est l’éternel motif qui surgit de l’Hérodias antique,
de la Gundryggia, et de l’Innommée, Pré-Diablesse,
Rose de l’Enfer, ô originelle Perdition, Kundry!
C’est le péché,—Car il a péché contre la Grâce du
Seigneur; l’élu d’entre les purs est devenu entre les
purs l’unique pêcheur: ô châtiment de l’offensé riche
de Grâces . . .
. . . Saint des Saints, ô mémoire du Saint! comme
grave il montait en l’âme, le Saint aujourd’hui outragé!
ô mémoire des saluts de bénédiction! mémoire du
Divin! aspiration qui du très fond de l’âme fume vers
87
 19 TH les hautes pénitences, les pénitences au lamentant
CENTURY Seigneur misérablement outragé! . . .
MUSIC
Chant du Très-Saint, chante! luis, lumière du Pur!
dévoile toi, voile du Mystérieux! paroles, parlez, toutes,
en la précursion du Seigneur qui vient! ouvre toi,
triste ciel, que le rite se réinstitue de l’éternel
Sacrifice!—voici le corps de nourriture, voici le sang
de breuvage; le mystique vase brillera, voici l’aliment;
sang de Dieu, voici le vin; prenez, prenez, prenez;
pécheurs, voici le vin et le pain; approchez, très
mélancoliquement; car le vin coulera en vos sangs, le
pain se fera vos chairs, et le sacré sang coulera par
votre cœur . . .
Le sang sacré coule, ô Malade, par son cœur; le
sang du Souffrant en ses veines coule; et c’est son
propre sang, qui s’embouillonne, et qui coule, effroy-
ablement!—jadis fut un charme pervers, un attirement
sortilégique, un enchantement païen; jadis, une luxure
terriblement belle; et ce souvenir le hante: et lui, qui
croit la promesse du Maître, il geint sous la
Concupiscence, et il hurle les infinies lamentations,
toujours vibrantes, du Crucifié qui palpite en sa chair.
Pour les mondes pécheurs Christ a agonisé, à cause
qu’il avait la désirante pitié des Désirs . . . ô pitié du
Seigneur, vois ton fils agonisant, palpitant, crucifié: il
fut le Saint, et le Pur, et le Bon; il chanta ton nom, lui
qui pleure aujourd’hui: agréable il te fut, ce réprouvé;
il fut ton garde, ton serviteur, ta force, ta splendeur, ta
joie, lui qui presque blasphème, et qui se perd, l’affolé
des sensuels souvenirs, et qui tournoie en la démence
de sa chair, et se maudit, ne connaissant plus ta parole
. . . ta divine parole sous l’effort des concupiscences se
fait étrange, elle s’altère, elle se corrompt, voilà qu’elle
se fait autre affreusement, et c’est des sons magiques:
IN OUR NEXT ISSUE (FALL 2013)
ARTICLES Gavin Williams: A Voice of the Crowd: Futurism and
the Politics of Noise
Kelly St. Pierre: Smetana’s “Vys̆ehrad” and Mythologies
of Czechness in Scholarship
Jesse Fillerup: Ravel and Robert-Houdin, Magicians
88
la prière à Dieu se tourne en suggestion d’enfer: rude,
le sortilège ramène la mauvaise; et elle est. . . . O
pensée toujours vive des délices coupables, inoubliable,
inoubliable pensée! le Malade revoit les damnées
visions, et dans ses yeux fanés passent des lubriques
choses: yeux pécheurs! sens pécheurs! pécheresses
sensations! il ressent les grands jardins pleins d’odeurs
fumantes et de teintures chaudes; les mollesses des
tiédeurs étaient molles, lorsque devant son corps elle
surgit, la femelle bête, folle de son corps . . . elle avait
ces rires et cette voix, oui, ce regard qui si inquiet lui
caressait, ces lèvres, oui, à lui si frémissantes, ces
cheveux inclinés à lui, oui, ces flattantes boucles, et
au tour de son cou ces bras, si tendres ces joues, si
nouvelle cette bouche qui, en la communion de toutes
les souffrances, lui embrassa le salut de son âme . . .
monstrueux baiser ! une femme était là, impudique
floraison des sensualités, que lui, très chaste, il eut.
Miséricorde, Seigneur! des prestigieuses
jouissances, miséricorde! Seigneur! des joies, et des
joies absolument désirables, miséricorde! miséricorde,
car j’ai dans ce baiser connu tout ce dont a soif
irrévocablement ma chair!—et j’implore la grâce du
Miséricordieux,—l’unique grâce à ma misère, oui, la
rédemption, l’apaisement, l’oubli, la mort.
O souffrant du Désir, du double Désir, du Mys-
tique et du Charnel, souffrant des mystérieuses aspi-
rations de l’Ange et de la Bête, ô souffrant des
Concupiscences et des Religions, charnel et mystique
homme, Amfortas, ainsi tu te lamentes, et nous, avec
toi, nous vivons le grand Désir sans fin des vies
multiples.
ÉDOUARD DUJARDIN