Mallarmé’s Tomb and His Critics

“Les absents ne sont qu’un nom” (The absent are only a name), Mallarmé wrote to Henri Cazalis on 5 March 1863. The day before, Marie Gerhard, the German governess he meant to marry, had left him in London for Brussels, and he had just found one of her hairs on his shoulder. Yesterday, he went on, she was alive within these walls, and today she is no more than a word; there are moments when one doubts whether the absent even live, and the dead have this over them, that they have a tomb one can see and pray upon.

Charles Mauron, a psychoanalytic critic, showed that Mallarmé’s poems kept returning to the same symbols: the same empty room, the same mirror, the same tomb and the same dead girl. Mauron identified the girl as the poet’s sister Maria, dead at thirteen, when he was fifteen. It appears at first glance to resemble the familiar story of the psychoanalyst tracing everything in a person’s life to a traumatic childhood event, but Mauron found the pattern in 1939 with no life to explain it. Eighty-seven years later, Mauron could explain Mallarmé’s cold ambivalence toward the fiancée who had just left him as the feelings of a young man who had become accustomed to loss. Documents that confirm an inferred hypothesis about a childhood tragedy are the grand prix in the world of psychoanalysis, and Charles Mauron achieved exactly that. Could one understand Mallarmé’s works, then, through his biography? Was the psychoanalytic method vindicated? While I fully respect Mauron’s achievement, this essay will argue otherwise.

Mauron tried to bury Mallarmé under his biography, when the poet wanted to be buried under his word. Mallarmé himself announced his program in his Crise de vers: “L’œuvre pure implique la disparition élocutoire du poète, qui cède l’initiative aux mots” (The pure work implies the elocutionary disappearance of the poet, who cedes the initiative to the words). Mallarmé attempted to hold two moments that his interpreters would later try to tear apart: the poet who created the word, and the word which then takes the initiative from the poet and reaches an independent existence. Yes, Mallarmé’s traumas and experiences may help produce the word, but they cannot stop the word from taking the place of the poet. I leave aside the poems’ prosody and the long history of their exegesis, except where Mauron and his two principal rivals, Émilie Noulet and Roland Barthes, depend on it.