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Ephemeral Signs: Apprehending the Idea through Poetry and Dance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2014

Mary Lewis Shaw
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Extract

Though his dance criticism constitutes no more than a few pages, the nineteenth-century poet Stéphane Mallarmé has come to be considered an important dance theorist. His dance essays set forth a complex and original view of dance as a poetry of the body and prefigure contemporary efforts to study dance as a system of signs. Mallarmé's prose style is, however, notoriously obscure and resistant to translation. Thus despite the power and beauty of their literary expression, his ideas on dance remain largely inaccessible without critical examination. Through a close reading and translation of several of his key passages on dance, this essay will seek to clarify his theory of the aesthetico-metaphysical function of dance and his concept of its relationship to his own art, poetry.

Type
Research Article
Information
Dance Research Journal , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , Summer 1988 , pp. 3 - 9
Copyright
Copyright © Congress on Research in Dance 1988

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References

NOTES

1. The critic André Levinson was perhaps the first to bring Mallarmé's dance essays to the attention of the dance public, labeling Mallarmé a “metaphysician of Ballet” in a 1923 article for La Revue Musicale (No. 5, 21-33). Many of Mallarmé's statements on dance are rearticulated in the essays of his disciple Paul Valéry and also paraphrased in Valéry's well-known socratic dialogue L'Âme et la danse (in Oeuvres, vol. II, ed. Hytier, Jean [Paris: Gallimard, 1957])Google Scholar. Frank Kermode discusses Mallarmé's writings on Fuller, Loïe at length in “Poet and the Dancer before Diaghilev” (in Puzzles and Epiphanies, 1962)Google Scholar. The inclusion of Mallarmé's, essay “Ballets” in the recent anthology What Is Dance: Readings in Theory and Criticism (Eds. Copeland, Roger and Cohen, Marshall [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983, 145–160])Google Scholar indicates a wide-spread recognition of his contribution to dance theory by scholars in that field.

2. Unless otherwise specified, Mallarmé citations are taken from his Oeuvres complètes (Eds. Mondon, Henri and Jean-Aubry, G. [Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1945])Google Scholar. My translations do not attempt to render Mallarmé's prose in either clear or idiomatic English, but rather to conserve as much as possible the ambiguities, punctuation, and syntactic anomalies of the original, in order to convey to English-speaking readers the complexity of thought conveyed in the poetic obliquity of his style. Other translations of many of the excerpted passages are available in Cook's, BradfordMallarmé: Selected Prose Poems, Essays, & Letters (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1956)Google Scholar, Caws's, Mary AnnMallarmé: Selected Poetry and Prose (New Directions, 1982)Google Scholar, Frank Kermode's “Poet and the Dancer before Diaghilev” (op. cit) and in Johnson's, Barbara translation of Derrida's, Jacques “The Double Session” in Dissemination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981)Google Scholar.

3. “Ballets” was first published in 1886, “Autre étude de danse” in 1893. Other essays including significant discussion of dance are “Crayonné au théâtre” (1887) and a short article on Wagner entitled “Parenthèse” (1886-1887).

4. I do not think that Mallarmé ever considered the possibility of dance notation, which would, undoubtedly, have interested him from several points of view.

5. In L'Âme et la danse, Valéry simplifies Mallarmé's presentation of the dual aspect of the dancer, alluding to the above-cited passage from “Ballets”:

She (the dancer) is a woman who dances, and who would divinely cease to be a woman, i f the leap she made could summon her as far as the clouds. But just as we cannot reach infinity either in dream or in wakefulness so too does she always become herself again: ceasing to be snowflake, bird, idea; to be finally whatever the flute desired to make of her, for the same earth that sent her up, recalls her, and returns her all out of breath to her womanly nature and to her beau …

Elle (la danseuse) est une femme qui danse, et qui cesserait divinement d'être femme si le bond qu'elle a fait y pouvait obéir jusqu'aux nues. Mais comme nous ne pouvons pas aller à l'infini, ni dans le rêve, ni dans la veille, elle, pareillement redevient toujours elle-même: cesse d'être enfin tout ce qu'il plut a la flute qu'elle fut car la même terre qui l'a envoyée, la rappelle, et la rend toute haletante à sa nature de femme, et à son ami… (op. cit., 151).

6. Mallarmé was fascinated by pantomime and eloquently describes its essence in “Mimique.” Relentless, however, in advocating the necessity for purity in genres, he resented the mixing of dance and pantomime. In “Ballets” he states that these two rival, silent art forms should be “allied” but not confused, and expresses his regret that “the dancer, who expresses herself through steps” understanding “no other eloquence, even gesture” is by some choreographers required to mime (306).

7. Gautier cited in Sorell's, Walter, The Dance Has Many Faces (Cleveland: World Publishing Co., 1951, p. 89)Google Scholar.

8. Thus, while Mallarmé discusses the dancer primarily from the point of view of the spectator, he was aware that she too is in a sense a reader interpreting in her choreographed role the inner-world of her own imagination as well as that of the spectator (which is indeed possible given the open-ended signification of dance signs). That is why he points to her as the center of the aesthetic “operation.” We shall see further, however, that in the process of underscoring the physical quality of dance, he also characterizes the dancer as a not fully conscious artist, as one who (contrary to the poet) acts “instinctively” through her body rather than through her mind.

9. See Riffaterre's, Michael discussion of semiosis in Semiotics of Poetry. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978, p. 4)Google Scholar.

10. My translation of “une impatience de plumes” seeks to render the double meaning of “plumes” in French (pens and feathers) as the term definitely functions as a syllepsis in this passage.

11. In Feeling and Form, Suzanne Langer presents dance as the manifestation of “virtual powers.” Primary among these is the illusion of the conquest of gravity, which makes the ballerina seem like an apparition:

Free dance movement produces, above all (for the performer as well as for the spectator) the illusion of the conquest of gravity, i.e. freedom from the actual forces that are normally known and felt to control the dancer's body (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1953, 194).

12. In “Le sacre du printemps,” Jacques Rivière draws a parallel between two types of artifice in dance, which Nijinsky set out to destroy. The first is that of Loïe Fuller, in which the dancer's body appears to become lost in her illuminated veils. The second occurs in those ballets where the lines of the body are lost in hazy, indefinite movements. (See this article in What is Dance, op. cit., 115-123). In a passage on Loïe Fuller, Mallarmé comments on the same parallel without objecting to either type of artifice. Indeed, he claims that a fundamental characteristic of dance is to fill itself out. While the ballerina is too sparsely-clothed, she too (like Fuller) creates “imaginary wefts,” but through flight and movement alone (311).

13. I think this point is important though I realize that, touching on several complex issues, it is debatable. What I wish to stress is that when a dance is rechoreographed or radically formally altered in a manner comparable to that required by a literary work's translation, the altered dance is neither necessarily perceived nor expected to constitute a reflection of an earlier “original” dance form. Rather, by virtue of its rechoreographing, the dance is felt to be a new and original work of art.

14. Arguing (in my view incorrectly) that Mallarmé wished in his own poetry to achieve a synthesis of the arts comparable to Wagnerian music-drama, many critics have emphasized only his articulation of the similarities between poetry and dance (see for example Bernard's, SuzanneMallarmé et la musique [Paris: Nizet, 1959]Google Scholar and Delfel's, GuyL'Esthétique de Stéphane Mallarmé [Paris: Flammarion, 1951])Google Scholar. In “La double séance,” Jacques Derrida underscores Mallarmé's articulation of differences among the arts. However, he too perhaps underplays a critical difference between literature and dance (the one being literally written, the other performed) suggesting that all differences among the arts are, for Mallarmé, less important than their collective demonstration of the general principle of writing as difference or differentiation. Derrida does not discuss the fact that Mallarmé sometimes presents literal and corporeal writing as not only different but also as partially contrary or antithetical modes (see this discussion in La dissémination. Paris: Seuil, 1972, 273–275)Google Scholar.

15. Because dance is a means of expression and communication many dancers and theorists refer to it as a language in spite of its nonverbal character. In The Language of Dance (Trans. Sorell, Walter [Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1966])Google Scholar, Mary Wigman stresses the immediacy and directness with which dance conveys “man's innermost emotions and need for communication,” as does Rudolf von Laban in The Language of Movement (Boston: Plays, Inc., 1974)Google Scholar. In To Dance is Human: A Theory of Non-verbal Communication, Hanna, Judith Lynn analyzes dance as a form of communication very similar to language except for its nonverbal aspect (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979)Google Scholar. In The Dance, John Martin emphasizes the significance of this exception in describing dance as “the common impulse to resort to movement to externalize emotional states which cannot be externalized by rational means.” For Martin, “rational means” are evidently those of language since he perceives the dance as an “intuitive reaction which is too deep for words” (New York: Tudor Publishing Company, 1980, 10).

16. Mallarmé defines the book as a “spiritual instrument” and describes its modality of presence as absolutely distinct from all that (in nature) is: “ — Yes, Literature exists, and i f you will, alone, to the exclusion of all else” (646); “… a leaf enclosed (in the binding) contains a secret, silence lingers there, precious, and evocative signs follow, for the mind literarily abolished from all things” (379). (“ — Oui, que la Littérature existe et, si l'on veut, seule, à l'exception de tout” (646); “une feuille fermée (dans le pliage) contien(t) un secret, le silence y demeure, précieux et des signes évocatoires succèdent, pour l'esprit à toùt littérairement aboli” (379).

17. Les Noces d'Hérodiade, mystère, ed. Davies, Gardner (Paris: Gallimard, 1959, pp. 139Google Scholar, 113–114). It is interesting to note that Martha Graham's “ritual dance” Hérodiade (1944) was inspired by a much earlier version of Mallarmé's work, a poetic dialogue which does not contain any references to dance.

18. I analyze more fully Mallarmé's references to dance in Le Livre and Les Noces d'Hérodiade in “Performance in the Texts of Mallarmé: The Passage from Art to Ritual” (Doctoral Dissertation, Columbia University, 1986)Google Scholar.