IS THIS THE REAL LIFE? IS THIS JUST FANTASY?
We may well ask ourselves this question as we work our way through this groundbreaking postmodernist mini-epic. And we are right to ask it.
Stéphane Mallarme even saw HIMSELF as possessing two minds: one, that of an impersonal, abstract artificer, and two, that of the half-spiritual human dreamer eternally feeling ‘son plumage pris par l’horreur du sol’ - his feathers caught in the horror of this planet.
Yes, like the mythical inventor of flight, Dedalus, he sought to provide a means for an escape from hard reality in the free figurative flight of literature.
But, also like Dedalus, he turned into a mythical artificer who watched in impersonal horror as Icarus’ wonderful flying machine caught fire, and killed him in its crash.
To be an IMPERSONAL artificer, you see, was his only escape from that pain. And Mallarme needed the parallel escape of literature as well.
But the price of freedom is absolute terror. And if we choose the gift of freedom we have to pay the price.
So this - his final masterpiece - is Mallarme’s Mount Doom. Do or die.
There are two personages in it: the Master - the artificer - watching a catastrophic event from a great, though dizzily ungrounded, height; and the ancient mariner, grappling with a monumental storm at sea - much like Hemingway’s old man, Santiago, grappling with the Marlin.
There is ultimately no obvious place of refuge for either, from the viewpoint of the Artificer - who is no longer free from the pain of it all.
This, indeed, is ´l’immémorial demon’ of postmodernism.
Mallarme chose vers libre for his idiom, and he seems to have accepted the penalty for this strange last fling of freedom. For without the closure that his sonnets always gave us, here he really leads us out to sea.
It has left out the very human God who wove our painful, ruined human fabric into the tapestry of a stormy world in which there nevertheless ALWAYS remains the hope of Peace - the ‘fulgurante console’ of the earlier works.
But perhaps I am being to harsh on this personally revered poet - the man whom his friend Valery deemed so noble as to dub him Saint Stéphane after his death, a death which occurred not long after this work was written.
And - who knows? - perhaps this man knew within, even then, that peace that is only won by taking the full brunt of the storm of rejection, violence and apathy that this world had to offer him, and by long-suffering forgiveness to gradually find a real and gentle refuge from Terror!
For this long poem DOES end with the sighting of a mysterious constellation - a possible augury of hope and rest for many a beleaguered mariner, perhaps?
Perhaps...
And the name of this refuge is perhaps Eternal Love, the ONLY possible final resting place for our compulsive thinking - a journey’s end for us beleaguered survivors upon this stormy sea of life, ever obsessively casting our dice!