For K--

So, instead of finishing up my new Keats draft, I was obliged to work on a presentation for my Mallarme' class. Mallarme' just might be the most difficult thing I have ever read. Any given poem ranks up there. I come out of that class, and I think, "Holy crap. Reading is hard." That's how hard it is.

So, I was nervous about my presentation, which was supposed to be on this poem called Le Sonneur--or, The Bell-ringer. But it went fine.

Anyway. I thought to post it here. On the one hand, I'm going to post it just to see whether you guys appreciate this kind of thing--I know most of you don't ever see me in "trying-to-be-a-scholar" mode--and, on the other, because one of the last IMversations I had with Kendall--maybe fifth-to-last--I was trying to walk him through my way of reading a poem. That poem was Keats' ode on melancholy. I've been thinking about Keats a lot, so I thought of that conversation, and how it didn't really go very far. I think that's because I had to go to work. Anyway, this presentation is more or less written conversationally and at the same time as I did my reading, so you can see how my process goes, Kendall, if you're still interested.

Before we start, know that this shit is hard, and the final, or definitive version of Le Sonneur was too tough for me to attack head on. I came at it from behind, with the first published version of the text, one written almost a quarter century before the final version--the idea being that I could maybe jiggle something out with the differences between them.

So, this is the text of the first, 1862 version in French:


Le Sonneur (1862)

Cependant que la cloche enivre sa voix claire
De l’air plein de rosée et du matin,
Et fait à la faucheuse entonner, pour lui plaire,
Un Angelus qui sent la lavande et le thym ;

Le sonneur essoufflé, qu’un cierge pâle éclaire,
Chevauchant tristement en geignant du latin,
Sur la pierre qui tend la corde séculaire,
N’entend descendre à lui qu’un tintement lointain,

Je suis cet homme. Hélas ! dans ardeur peureuse,
J’ai beau broyer le câble à sonner l’idéal,
Depuis que le Mal trône en mon cœur lilial

La Voix ne me vient plus que par bribes et creuse.
--Si bien qu’un jour, après avoir en vain tiré,
Ô Satan, j’ôterai la pierre et me pendrai !


And these, here, are two of the strongest possible readings of these lines in English (translations are for meaning, not for aesthetics--so no calling me to task):

1.
While the bell intoxicates its clear voice
With the young, dew-filled air of the morning,
And makes the harvest-girl sing, to please it,
An Angelus that smells of lavender and thyme;

The breathless bell-ringer, illuminated by a pale candle,
Sadly riding, while grumbling some Latin,
The stone that tenders the centenary chord,
Hears nothing descend to him but a faraway ringing.

I am this man. Alas! In my fearful ardor,
I have crushed the cable that sounds the ideal,
Since Evil sits enthroned in my lily-white heart,

The Voice no longer comes to me except by morsels and void.
--So well that one day, after having pulled in vain,
O Satan, I will lift the stone and hang myself!

2.
[While the bell makes known its ecstatic state with its clear voice,
Filled with dew and young from the air of the morning,
And makes the reaper begin to sing (and set the tone) to please it
A prayer that smells of lavender and thyme;]


[The stalled (unable to continue his progression) bell-ringer, made to understand by a pale candle,
Sadly superimposing himself while muttering a prayer
On the stone which tenders the centenary chord,
Only a faraway ringing descends to his ears.]

[I am this man. Alas! In my ardor,
I did well to break the cable to sound the ideal,
Since Evil sits in honor in my blameless heart,]

[The Voice no longer comes to me except in morsels, digging.
--So well that one day, after having abused the situation (your patience) in vain,
O Satan, I will cast off the stone and hang myself!]

Obviously, these are lego readings. Match as you want to. And never assume they are the only ways the lines can be read. Mallarme' was smarter than me--so just know there's more in there.

Here, in case you are wondering, is the text of the Angelus in Latin and English, courtesy of wikipedia:

Latin text of the Angelus:
V/. Angelus Domini nuntiavit Mariæ,R/. Et concepit de Spiritu Sancto.
Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Jesus.Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostræ. Amen.
V/. "Ecce Ancilla Domini."R/. "Fiat mihi secundum Verbum tuum."
Ave Maria, gratia plena...
V/. Et Verbum caro factum est.R/. Et habitavit in nobis.
Ave Maria, gratia plena...
V/. Ora pro nobis, Sancta Dei Genetrix.R/. Ut digni efficiamur promissionibus Christi.
Oremus: Gratiam tuam quæsumus, Domine, mentibus nostris infunde; ut qui, angelo nuntiante, Christi Filii tui Incarnationem cognovimus, per passionem eius et crucem, ad resurrectionis gloriam perducamur. Per eumdem Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen.

English text of the Angelus:
V/. The Angel of the Lord declared unto Mary,R/. And she conceived of the Holy Spirit.
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed are thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
V/. "Behold the handmaid of the Lord."R/. "Be it done unto me according to your Word."
Hail Mary, full of grace...
V/. And the Word was made flesh,R/. And dwelt among us.
Hail Mary, full of grace...
V/. Pray for us, O Holy Mother of God.R/. That we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.
Let us pray: Pour forth, we beseech thee, O Lord, thy Grace into our hearts; that we to whom the Incarnation of Christ thy Son, was made known by the message of an angel, may by his passion and cross, be brought to the glory of His resurrection, through the same Christ our Lord. Amen.

Okay. Sorry for the long build-up to what will assuredly be a let-down. My 15 minute oral presentation (if you care about references, just ask me):

Formally, Le Sonneur is a sonnet. It is divided into two quatrains and two tercets, corresponding to an octet and a sextet, respectively. The versification is Alexandrine. First, an overall look at the narrative of the poem as it appears in the 1862 version.

In it, a bell rings out in the morning air, and causes a harvest girl (perhaps in the middle of harvesting lavender and thyme) to sing the Angelus, which when it is capitalized refers to the Catholic prayer by the same name. As the bell rings out, we move to the bell-ringer, who is breathless—perhaps from climbing a bell-tower, perhaps from ringing the bell, perhaps for some other reason—lit by the pale light of a candle, sitting astride the stone that tautens and holds the rope leading up to the bell. The sound of the ringing bell is distant as it descends to him. Up until the first word of the first tercet we are in an impersonal descriptive mode.

At that moment, the “je” of the poem makes itself known, with the speaker claiming identity with the bell-ringer. After an interjection expressing lament, the voice claims that in a fearful ardor, it has in some way broken the cable that sounds the Ideal. It is easy to jump into an allegorical mode, here, since the word “ideal” is so open to polysemy. But since there has been only one rope or cable in the poem, the one that leads to the bell, it might behoove us to take some advice from Ellen S. Burt, or from Paul de Man’s Lyric and Modernity, and stay with the symbolic reading for a moment, supposing that ‘ideal’ and ‘bell’ have here become the same thing. The poetic voice continues, saying that ever since Evil has been in a place of honor in the heart of the speaker, the Voice, or—again, staying within the symbolic—the sound of the bell from the first quatrain only comes in morsels, and when it does, it is empty. The speaker then says that one day, after having pulled in vain—that is to say, having pulled without hearing the voice of the bell at all—he will remove the stone and hang himself. In doing so, he invokes Satan, revealed to be the addressee of the sonnet.

If, moving quickly, we outline an underlying progression in the poem, we can see that the first quatrain shows us a pastoral scene, with a girl working in the fields hearing the sound of a church bell that calls her to a morning prayer. The second quatrain is one of enclosure. The bell-ringer’s difficulty in drawing breath is indicative that he does not smell the lavender and the thyme that mix with the voice of the bell and the song of the girl. The “dew,” playing on “pink” in the first quatrain, and the use of “clear” and “air” as well as the presence of “morning” give a sense of the burgeoning light of dawn, and all of this is contrasted to the pale candle that lights the bell-ringer’s quatrain. Youthful song in prayer and the clear ringing of the bell are answered with grumbling and muttering in Latin. (Do the harvest-girl and the bell-ringer speak the same prayer?) The loud voice of the bell is muffled for the bell-ringer, either because it must descend through a tower of stone (if he rings his bell from the bottom of the bell-tower) to reach his ears, or because he has grown deaf, like Quasimodo, through proximity to the noise. In either case, the sense of enclosure is more present. The underlying progression in the octet, then, is one from exterior to interior, from openness to enclosure, from a mélange and intoxication (enivrement) of the senses to their flattening and dulling. At the sextet, another move becomes apparent: the movement from the concrete world to the abstract. Rapidly, Ardor, fear, the ideal, evil, Satan, and future action replace description and present action. The movement away from the scene of morning is finalized in a future suicide. (Another way to regard the shift could be from the explicitly symbolic (i.e., if we read lavender and thyme as symbolic of the sensuousness of Poetry, for example) to the allegorical (i.e., if we read the lily as the stand in for Christ, or purity even without a motivating connection).

The identification of the voice of the poem (I will call him the narrator-poet) with the bell-ringer provides a logical place to read a passage from the symbolic (or representational) to the allegorical (or emblematic) within the poem, since it is a definite break. There are two possibilities for reading, “Je suis cet homme,” here: A = A, or A @ B. That is to say, either the narrator-poet is the bell-ringer, in the tautological sense, and the thoughts of the sextet are the thoughts he has as he rings the bell in the second quatrain or at any other time for which the second quatrain stands, OR the narrator-poet is the bell-ringer by metaphor, that is to say the narrator-poet is like the bell-ringer. Either there is complete identification, or there is only partial identification which allows for a widening of the gap between the word and the representation, a place where we could suppose the production of excess meaning. For if the narrator-poet is like the bell-ringer we must complete the comparison ourselves, and determine the ground of the comparison and the tension, or dissimilarities, that such a comparison would imply.

A move like this allows us at long last to attack the word “ideal” in more of an allegorical mode. If, through comparison, the narrator-poet has grown more and more insensible to the clear voice of the ideal-as-bell that speaks in the first quatrain, that is, deaf to the voice of the ideal-as-pastoral-poetry, deaf to the mixture of the senses, deaf to the future promise that poems invoking morning typically suggest, even so, he is still able to employ that voice. He did, after all, write the verses that contain the ideal to which it points.

The narrator-poet shows us, however, that in his fearful ardor he has “broyer le câble à sonner l’idéal.” While remaining in the symbolic mode, the mode of correspondence between the thing and what it represents, we were forced to read this as something like, “broken the cable that sounds the bell.” That would be a reading that leaves us, appropriately, with a length of broken cable, which is ideal for hanging. However, in a passage from the symbolic to the allegorical, it is not stretching too far to say that the poet has crushed or ground the cable to sound the ideal, suggesting that it is the act of sounding the ideal that breaks the connection to it. The narrator-poet’s sense of the ideal is broken by his attempts to employ it in writing.

This process is enacted by the poem itself. The ideal’s presence in the first quatrain is what sheds light on the cost to the narrator-poet in the second. He has become breathless—in the sense of winded. He is unable to draw breath, let alone to sing as does the girl at harvest—but he is breathless also in the sense of stalled, or unable to follow a rhythm of progression, the other definition of essoufflé. The act of writing poetry—ringing the bell—daily has resulted in the stagnation of the narrator-poet’s progression and leads to the belief that one day he will be unable to hear poetry’s voice at all. The mere exercise of that which is sensible in the presentation of the sensuous is desensitizing. Another way to look at this is as the hollowing out of language. The use of language itself grows dimmer and dimmer to the narrator-poet’s ear by the end of the octet. The use of language renders one deaf to its Voice. This leads to thoughts of suicide.

As the rope is still present in the final word however, as the thing from which the hanged man hangs, the chord that links the narrator-poet and the ideal is not at all ground to pieces or broken or crushed: it merely undergoes changes. As Blanchot suggests Mallarmé to be first of all a poet of changes, it might benefit us to follow such a line of thought.

First, that cable is the unseen rope that rings the bell in the first line. Next, it is the centenary chord that, in a representational mode, supports the bell’s weight and keeps it from ringing in the wind. At the same time, it is also the centenary rope tendered by the rock, allegorically, of St. Peter. The Rock that tenders the chord is the Catholic Church, as well as a stone. The rope, then, could simply be the belt that cinches the monk’s habit—if, like Marchal, we read the bell-ringer to be the mauvais moine—or it could be the representation of the Church’s function as marker of continuity between past and present. Séculaire means many centuries old, and the Angelus is the prayer that marks the passage of the day, as it has for centuries. In the first tercet, the rope becomes le corde sensible that is the vulnerable link between the narrator-poet and the peak of his art, and, in the last one, it has become the rope around the neck of the hanged man. The last line would seem to reinforce the reading of the rock as Catholic Church, as the church hath ever fixed its canon ‘gainst self-slaughter. It would be, effectively, a casting off the burden of the Church’s laws in committing the sin of suicide.

The movement from pastoral to suicidal is not a straight-forward progression however, and may, in some measure, be ironic. Death is not absent from the first quatrain. It is present in the form of La Faucheuse, the reaper. The reaper intones (fait à la facheuse entonner) the poem in the choral sense, from within the heart of the ideal situation of the first quatrain; it comes at the beginning to set the tone for the poem. Obviously, if the reaper’s presence isn’t enough, the harvest also takes place in preparation for winter. The “Angelus” is an important word as well for the structure and meaning of the poem. “Angelus” refers to the prayer, but the “angelus” is also the ringing of the bell that precedes the prayer or calls it forth from the listener.

The text of the Angelus-as-prayer affirms the declaration of the angel to Mary, and her conception by the Holy Spirit, and requests intercession on behalf of the speaker. The Hail Mary occurs within the Angelus three times, just as the voice of the bell is heard in the first line, in the eighth line, and, mutely, as the future incarnation of the Voice in the thirteenth line, when the bell-ringer will, one day, have pulled in vain. The Angelus recalls not only the conception of Christ, but also the passion of the cross, the death of Christ, and the resurrection in its final supplication for the redemption of the speakers. The effect, then, of the repetition of the Angelus first clearly, then faintly as from a distance, and finally in a prophetic mode of future silence is a wasting away of hope and a foreshortening of the time until the hanging day that seems to ironically parallel the Ave Maria’s in hora mortis nostræ.

Le Sonneur as an apostrophe to Satan, then, acts parodically, but not in a simple mode, as mockery, for the faint possibility of redemption is inscribed within the poem as the presence of recurring presence of the Angelus always repeats the call for redemption. I say it is not simply a parody, also, because the “clear voice” in which the narrator-poet calls on Satan in the last line will be as effectively cut off from speech as the sound of the bell when the rope that at one time sounded the “ideal” strangles the narrator-poet or breaks his neck. Even the Satanic mode—the so called “simplistic” Satanism that Marchal thinks is borrowed from Baudelaire—is defeated by time. It will be time that executes the final transformation hidden in the poem. The bell-ringer will hang himself on the rope that sounds the bell, and in doing so, will sound the bell again. The moment of death will cause a re-sounding of the bell, and the narrator-poet will find the ideal again. The sense remains, however, that this is not victory, as the narrator-poet will be beyond hearing its clear voice. The poetry of Le Sonneur as it exists in its first version, then, is a poetry that uses itself up through expression, that enacts its own disparition, and that falls continually from song into silence.