Sea and structure in fin-de-siècle France: Mallarmé and Debussy

Abstract

A copious sea literature exists in nineteenth-century France, and the works of such figures as Hugo, Baudelaire, Michelet and Rimbaud contain a recurrent tension between two divergent views of maritime experience. On the one hand, the sea offers the encouraging spectacle of endless possibility and plurality, but on the other hand it is an emblem of intellectual defeat and of humankind at the mercy of an inhospitable natural world. In major works by Mallarmé (1842–98) and Debussy (1862–1918) this contradiction is placed centre stage. The poet and the musician have found ingenious ways of maintaining intellectual and artistic control while constructing ‘open’ textures designed to recreate the sensations of chaos and contingency. In both works – Un Coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard (1897) and La Mer (1905) – the remorseless action of the sea is associated with the periodic achievement and loss of aesthetic structure.