To tell the truth, the honest truth, cross my heart and hope to die, it’s something I find very hard to admit. That seminal explosion, those cumulus and cirrus clouds that blanket our imaginary geography are enough to sadden anyone. Fucking when you don’t have the strength to fuck can be beautiful, even epic. Then it turns into a nightmare. But what can you do? That’s how it is. Consider, for instance, a Mexican jail. A new prisoner arrives. Not what you’d call handsome: squat, greasy, pot-bellied, cross-eyed, malevolent and smelly into the bargain. Before long, this guy, whose shadow creeps over the prison walls or the walls of the corridors at an exasperating, slug-like pace, becomes the lover of another guy, who is just as ugly, but stronger. It’s not a long, drawn-out romance, proceeding by tentative steps and hesitations. It’s not a case of elective affinity, as Goethe understood it. It’s love at first sight; primitive, if you like, but their objective is not so different from that of many normal couples or couples we consider to be normal. They are sweethearts. Their flirting and their swooning are like X-ray images. They fuck every night. Sometimes they hit each other. Sometimes they tell the stories of their lives, as if they were friends, but they’re not really friends, they’re lovers. And on Sundays, their respective wives, who are every bit as ugly as they are, come to visit. Obviously, neither of these men is what we would normally call a homosexual. If someone called them homosexuals to their faces, they’d probably get so angry and be so offended, they’d brutally rape the offender, then kill him. That’s how it is. Victor Hugo, who, according to Daudet, was capable of eating a whole orange in one mouthful — a supreme test of good health, according to Daudet, and a sign of pig-like manners, according to my wife — set down the following reflection in Les Misérables: sinister people, malicious people know a sinister and malicious happiness. Or that’s what I seem to remember, because Les Misérables is a book I read in Mexico many years ago and left behind in Mexico when I left Mexico for good, and I’m not planning to buy it or reread it, because there’s no point reading, much less rereading, books that have been made into movies, and I think Les Misérables has even been turned into a musical. Anyway, the malicious people in question, with their malicious happiness, are the horrible family who adopt Cosette when she is a little girl, and not only are they the perfect incarnations of evil and a certain petit bourgeois meanness or rather the meanness of those who aspire to join the petit bourgeoisie, they are also, at this point in history, thanks to technological progress, emblematic of the middle class in its entirety, or almost, be it left- or right-wing, educated or illiterate, corrupt or apparently upstanding: healthy individuals, busily maintaining their good health; they may be less violent, less courageous, more prudent and more discreet, but basically they’re just the same as the two Mexican gunmen living out their idyll in the confines of a penitentiary. There’s no stopping Dionysus. He has infiltrated the churches and the NGOs, the governments and the royal families, the offices and the shantytowns. Dionysus is to blame for everything. Dionysus rules. And his antagonist or counterpart is not even Apollo but Mr. Uppity or Mrs. Toplofty, Mr. Prissy or Mrs. Lonely Neuron — bodyguards who are ready to cross over to the enemy camp at the first suspicious bang.
Where has that faggot Apollo got to? Apollo is ill, seriously ill.
As the French are well aware, the finest poetry of the nineteenth century was written in France, and in some sense the pages and the lines of that poetry prefigured the major and still unresolved problems that Europe and Western culture were to face in the twentieth century. A short list of the key themes would include revolution, death, boredom and escape. That great poetry is the work of a handful of poets, and its point of departure is not Lamartine, or Hugo or Nerval, but Baudelaire. Let’s say that it begins with Baudelaire, reaches its highest volatility with Lautréamont and Rimbaud and comes to an end with Mallarmé. Of course there are other remarkable poets, like Corbière or Verlaine, and others of considerable talent, like Laforgue or Catulle Mendès or Charles Cros, and even a few who are not entirely insignificant, like Banville. But, really, with Baudelaire, Lautréamont, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé, there’s plenty to be going on with. Let’s begin with the last of the four. I don’t mean the youngest, but the last one to die, Mallarmé, who missed out on the twentieth century by two years. He wrote in Brise marine:
The flesh is sad — and I’ve read every book.
O to escape — to get away. Birds look
as though they’re drunk for unknown spray and skies.
No ancient gardens mirrored in the eyes,
nothing can hold this heart steeped in the sea —
not my lamp’s desolate luminosity
nor the blank paper guarded by its white
nor the young wife feeding her child, O night!
I’m off! You steamer with your swaying helm,
raise anchor for some more exotic realm!
Ennui, crushed down by cruel hopes, still relies
on handkerchief’s definitive goodbyes!
Is this the kind of squall-inviting mast
the storm winds buckle above shipwrecks cast
away — no mast, no islets flourishing?. .
Still, my soul, listen to the sailors sing!
A charming poem. Although Nabokov would have advised the translators, E.H. and A.M. Blackmore, to abandon the rhyme scheme, to use free verse, to produce a deliberately ugly version, and if he’d known Alfonso Reyes, who translated the poem into Spanish, with rhymes, he’d have given him the same advice. Now Reyes might not mean a lot to Western culture as a whole, but he does (or should) mean a great deal to that part of Western culture that is Latin America. What did Mallarmé mean when he said that the flesh was sad and that he’d read all the books? That he’d had his fill of reading and of fucking? That beyond a certain point, every book we read and every act of carnal knowledge is a repetition? And after that there is only travel? That fucking and reading are boring in the end, and that travel is the only way out? I think Mallarmé is talking about illness, about the battle between illness and health: two totalitarian states, or powers if you prefer. I think he’s talking about illness tricked out in the rags of boredom. And yet he presents an image of illness that has a certain originality; he speaks of illness as resignation, resignation to living, or to whatever. In other words, he’s talking about defeat. And in order to counter that defeat, he vainly invokes sex and reading, which, I suspect, in Mallarmé’s case — to his greater glory and the bemusement of his good wife — were interchangeable, because how else could anyone in their right mind say that the flesh is sad, period, in that emphatic way? How could anyone declare that the flesh is essentially sad, that la petite mort, which doesn’t even last a minute, casts a pall over all lovemaking, which, it is widely known, can last for hours and hours, and go on interminably? If the line had been written by a Spanish poet like Campoamor, it might have meant something like that, but such a reading is quite at odds with the work and life of Mallarmé, which are indissolubly linked, except in this poem, this encoded manifesto, which Paul Gauguin, and he alone, followed to the letter (as far as we know, Mallarmé himself never listened to the sailors singing, or if he did, it certainly wasn’t on board a ship bound for an unknown destination). And the claim to have read all the books makes even less sense, because although books themselves may come to an end, no one ever finishes reading them all, and Mallarmé was well aware of that. Books are finite, sexual encounters are finite, but the desire to read and to fuck is infinite; it surpasses our own deaths, our fears, our hopes for peace. And what is left for Mallarmé, in this famous poem, when the desire to read and the desire to fuck, so he says, are all used up? Well, what is left is travel, the desire to go traveling. And maybe that’s the key to the crime. Because if Mallarmé had concluded that the only thing left to do was pray or cry or go crazy, maybe he’d have come up with the perfect alibi. But no, what Mallarmé says is that the only thing left to do is travel — which is like saying “to sail is necessary, to live is not necessary,” a sentence I used to be able to quote in Latin, but that’s just one of the many things I’ve forgotten with the help of my liver’s traveling toxins — in other words he sides with the bare-chested traveler, with Freedom (who’s bare-chested too), with the simple existence of the sailor and the explorer, which isn’t so simple when you get right down to it: an affirmation of life, but also a constant game with death, and the first rung on the ladder, the first step in a certain kind of poetic apprenticeship. The second step is sex, and the third, books. Which means that the Mallarmean choice is paradoxical or regressive, a starting over. And at this point, before we return to the elevator, I can’t help recalling a poem by Baudelaire, the father of them all, in which he speaks of travel, the voyage, the naïve enthusiasm of setting out, and the bitterness that every voyage bequeaths to the voyager when all is said and done, and it occurs to me that perhaps Mallarmé’s sonnet is a reply to Baudelaire’s poem, one of the most terrible poems I have read, an ill poem, a poem that offers no way out, but perhaps the most clear-eyed poem of the entire nineteenth century.