💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › peter-lamborn-wilson-mallarme-anarchist.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 13:26:05. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
➡️ Next capture (2024-06-20)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Mallarmé: Anarchist Author: Peter Lamborn Wilson Date: 2014 Language: en Topics: biography, Fifth Estate, Stephane Mallarmé, literature, Fifth Estate #391 Source: Retrieved on 7th October 2021 from https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/391-springsummer-2014/mallarme-anarchist/ Notes: Published in Fifth Estate #391, Spring/Summer 2014 — Anarchy!
“…all poets are outlaws.”
–Stephane Mallarmé, The Evolution of Literature (1891)
Art historians, literary historians and theorists seldom bother to learn
anything about their subjects outside their own little bailiwicks,
especially when it comes to anarchism.
A painter or poet might have been an anarchist, but entire biographies
and studies of him or her can be (and are) written without mentioning
the fact. If any academic bothers to notice the matter, it will be done
perfunctorily and with embarrassment.
I’ve read recent biographies of Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp in
which their involvement with anarchism was treated briefly as youthful
folly, with the implication that a real artist could never have taken
such notions seriously.
For instance, Duchamp’s enthusiasm for individualist anarchist Max
Stirner (which he acquired from French painter, poet, and typographist,
Francis Picabia) was dismissed with a single paragraph–although for me
it shed great light on Duchamp’s work. Clearly, the biographer hadn’t
even bothered to read Stirner.
Like the interest many artists and poets have taken in occultism, their
involvement in anarchism can safely be ignored–in fact, to show concern
with it could prove dangerous for academic critics or historians, who
might thus be tarred with the brush of crackpottery and thereby lose
their tenure track! The ideas which might have inspired a creative mind
are considered mere dreck.
Unfortunately, many anarchists suffer from a similar self-blindfolding.
The Cause for them is too often limited to its political and/or
philosophical aspects at the expense of its cultural efflorescences.
Certain artists and poets may have been anarchists, but other anarchists
will remain dismissive of this fact, especially if the art in question
is “difficult”– i.e., supposedly elitist.
Anarchism has always been for some, the preserve of a self-chosen elite
or radical aristocracy (as Nietzsche might have defined it), but the
residual influence of workerism and social realism often inculcate an
anti-intellectual or anti-aesthetic attitude in many of us. Anarchists
are often ignorant of our own cultural heritage, and this seems sad to
me.
Recently I picked up a book by Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social
Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune (N.Y.: Verso, 1988/2008) hoping to
find an exception to the dreary rule of separation between poetry and
politique. Rimbaud is often treated as a radical stylist, but rarely as
a radical thinker or activist, and I eagerly anticipated a study of his
involvement in the Paris Commune of 1871. Unfortunately, Ross pays no
attention (and even dismisses as irrelevant) the interesting question of
Rimbaud’s presence in Paris during the days of the Commune and what he
might have done there. She does devote a few interesting pages to
Rimbaud’s revolutionary and even anarchist ideas, but the largest
portion of her book is devoted to LitCrit-type expositions of Form.
In order to boost Rimbaud as a down and dirty proletarian leftist, Ross
uses Stephane Mallarmé as a whipping boy and never ceases to slag him at
every opportunity as a bourgeois aesthete. Mallarmé was a lifelong and
enthusiastic anarchist, so her ignorance (or willful ignoring) of this
fact began to annoy me.
Of course, most studies of Mallarmé never ever breathe a word about his
politics, but the facts can be learned if you try. She didn’t.
Ross makes a big fuss about how Baudelaire and Mallarmé have been
elevated to the academic canon of accepted greatness while Rimbaud has
been slighted. This might be true in France, but hardly in
Anglo-America, where Rimbaud is quite literally sanctified–as he well
deserves.
But Mallarmé is merely a “bourgeois intellectual,” a “fetishizer of the
poetic text,” she writes. Oddly enough, Ross turns to Mallarmé for a
quotation defending Rimbaud’s work as “a unique adventure in the history
of art,” but fails to wonder why such a bourgeois elitist so admired her
hero. Perhaps the two were, in some sense, on the same wave-length?
Comrades in arms, so to speak? Never mind, don’t ask.
After reading Ross, I fortunately turned up (in a used bookstore) a copy
of Richard D. Sonn’s Anarchism and Cultural Politics in Fin de Siecle
France (Univ. of Nebraska, 1989), a rare example of an academic study
linking politique and poetique.
Sonn plants Mallarmé firmly in the anarchist milieu during the period of
the attentat bombings of the 1890s. Mallarmé was especially close to the
anarchist art critic Felix Feneon, who published Mallarmé in his La
Revue Indépendante, and was a regular guest at Mallarmé’s famous Tuesday
at-homes.
Mallarmé subscribed faithfully to Jean Grave’s Le Révolté, the bible of
French anarchism. He contributed to the cause, including ten francs to
an anarchist “soup-lecture” series that had been busted by the flics–“a
gift from a man who is not rich…From the heart for your work, Mallarmé.”
Sonn writes of Mallarmé’s literary work: “[He] recognized the
anarchistic implications of signifying freedom through poetic discourse,
and he clearly believed that poetry should…embody anarchist ideals. A
poem that shocked bourgeois sensibilities was akin to revolution; one
that achieved freedom from prior constraints was a metaphor for utopia.”
When Felix Feneon was arrested for possession of explosive devices
(which we know, from later research, he actually used at least once, in
the unsolved 1894 bombing of the Restaurant Foyot in Paris where the
wealthy and politicians dined), Mallarmé commented, “I know of no other
bomb, but a book. Certainly, there were not any better detonators for
Feneon than his articles. And I do not think that one can use a more
effective weapon than literature.”
When Feneon stood trial along with 29 other anarchists for conspiracy in
the famous Case of the Thirty, Mallarmé appeared as a character witness
for him. All were acquitted.
The great value of Sonn’s book lies in his understanding that the
movement known as Symbolism was inspired not just by hermeticism and
occultism (Baudelaire and Rimbaud learned about the “correspondences”
and symbols of alchemy from the protosurrealist “utopian socialist”
Charles Fourier), but also from the works of Proudhon, Stirner,
Kropotkin, Bakunin, Reclus, and even Nietzsche.
Mallarmé’s poetry, which is certainly among the most “difficult” ever
written, nevertheless, reveals these influences both in form and
content. He deserves much better than to be written off as a “bourgeois
intellectual.”
He was a comrade.