Our response to all this, as Bowie suggests, is either to try and get ‘with panic-stricken rapidity’ at ‘what it means’, or to abandon it for ever. ‘The double effort required to allow Mallarmé's gaps their full disjunctive and destructive power’, he says, ‘yet at the same time remain attentive to the multitude of invisible currents which pass back and forth between the separated segments, will strike many readers as inexcusably arduous and unrewarding.’ However, he concludes, ‘the view I shall propose, is that … time spent learning to read Mallarmé is amply repaid’.
In a sense Mallarmé is only carrying to extremes what poetry has always done: playing off meaning against rhythm and rhyme, forward movement against stillness and repetition. English poetry contains many examples of dense and compacted poetry, often in the form of sonnets, from Shakespeare to Hopkins. We could say that what happens in such poems is that the clear distinction between foreground and background, between what the poet ‘is saying’ and ‘how he says it’, grows more and more blurred the more dense and compact the language. We can, in other words, after a while, provide a rough paraphrase of ‘O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall/ Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed’, but what Hopkins is saying cannot really be separated from how he is saying it. Or rather, to say the same thing in a different way would take several pages, while Hopkins does it in two lines. Those lines, moreover, are ‘alive’ in Bacon's sense, in a way the paraphrase would never be. Indeed, the poem as a whole fulfils Bacon's prescription for an art that is more than illustrational, anecdotaclass="underline" ‘It lives on its own, like the image one's trying to trap.’ The reader engages with a living thing, not merely a ‘story’.
Mallarmé's sonnet is less overtly dramatic than Hopkins', but it is just as ‘alive’. Yet even here one firm foothold remains for the reader, in spite of the syntax, in spite of the dizzying negatives, and that is our knowledge, immediately acquired on first looking at it, that this is a poem, and that it is a sonnet. Even that assurance is removed, though, in the great work of Mallarmé's maturity, Un Coup de dés. As even those who have never read it know, Mallarmé, in that work, carried his explorations to an extreme by creating, for what he was trying to say, a form unlike any other, a form created to suit this work and no other.
The spatial disposition of the poem and its typographical distinctions bear little relation to the visual games played by Apollinaire or the use of Chinese ideograms by Pound in the Cantos. ‘The space created by the poem’, says Bowie, ‘is for Mallarmé no more empty than physical space is for Descartes or for Einstein. It is rather a “field”, a comprehensive realm of interrelated energies, which are organised yet indefinitely subject to mutation and inflection.’ A central statement marches across this space: ‘Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard’, a throw of the dice will never eliminate chance. This is an odd statement in itself, since no-one ever imagined it could, but suggestive if we put it in the context of Kierkegaard's notion of ‘the leap’, a notion he toyed with all his life. By a leap the young man of Either/Or would become like the Judge; by a leap the anxious Christian like himself would become a Knight of Faith like Abraham. And just as Kierkegaard, writing about despair, realised that the only way to be true to his material was to work dialectically, so that he could explore the despair of necessity-without-possibility only by pairing it with the despair of possibility-without-necessity, so Mallarmé places around his mysterious central sentence a whole host of subordinate clauses, and clauses subordinate to those, and clauses hanging somehow on to those, and leaves it to us to decide how we want to make our way through his work, how many of the clauses we wish to take in, how many to ignore. As we move repeatedly through it we find ourselves in a world familiar to us from so much nineteenth- and twentieth-century writing: that of Kierkegaard, as I have said, but also that of parts of The Prelude, of Melville's Moby Dick, of Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym, of Mann's The Magic Mountain, a world of choice and necessity, of shipwreck and illumination, a world where the blank page or the whiteness of the whale or of snow is both the ultimate illumination and the ultimate disaster. It is also a world where distinctions between background and foreground have finally been all but abolished, where the white that surrounds the words is as meaningful as the words themselves, where sound, sight and meaning play with and against each other and are never allowed to settle. ‘Tout se passe, par raccourci, en hypothèse; on évite le récit’, said Mallarmé, with that wonderful down-to-earthness which is so endearing a trait of his character. That could of course be a description of any of his mature poems — ‘Everything happens by means of short cuts, hypothetically; narrative is avoided’ — but it applies most of all to this, his greatest poem.
Mallarmé is unique in the degree to which he pushed his explorations, but both his project and his execution of it help us to understand not only Modernist poetry but Modernism in general. ‘Everything happens by means of short cuts, hypothetically; narrative is avoided’ — that could be the prescription for a work that would overcome Valéry's strictures, Borges' dark forebodings. When Bowie remarks that ‘these virtualities will of course become fewer as we move towards a relatively stable syntactic armature for the poem. But the meanings we relinquish do not simply disappear; the atmosphere of multiple potentiality which they create is part of Mallarmé's poetic substance’, we cannot help thinking of the late novels of Henry James or the early novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet. ‘Quite often the anecdotal details he has worked out in his plans do not merely disappear from the finished text but turn up as incidents he refers to as precisely what has not occurred’, says Maurice Blanchot of James. ‘Thus James experiences the negative of the story he has to write rather than the actual story’, he adds. And he concludes his brief study of the novelist:
What we might then call the passionate paradox of the plot in James is that it represents for him the security of a work determined in advance, but also its opposite: the joy of creation, that which coincides with the pure indeterminacy of the work, which puts it to the test but without reducing it, without depriving it of all the possibles that it contains. And this is perhaps the essence of James's art: to make the whole work present at each moment, and even, behind the constructed and limited work which he brings into being, to allow us to feel other forms, the infinite yet weightless space of the narrative as it might have been, as it was before all beginnings.