Colourworks: Chromatic Innovation in Modern French Poetry and Art Writing 1350182206, 9781350182202

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COLOURWORKS

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COLOURWORKS

Chromatic Innovation in Modern French Poetry and Art Writing

Susan Harrow

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Copyright © Susan Harrow, 2020 Susan Harrow has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Toby Way Cover image: Stael, Nicolas de (1914–1955), Two Pears and an Apple; Deux Poires et une Pomme, 1954, Christie’s Images Limited. oil on canvas. 60 x 81cm © 2020. Christie’s Images, London/Scala, Florence © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2020 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Harrow, Susan, author. Title: Colourworks : chromatic innovation in modern French poetry and art writing / Susan Harrow. Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020036487 (print) | LCCN 2020036488 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350182202 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350182219 (pdf) | ISBN 9781350182226 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Mallarmé, Stéphane, 1842–1898–Aesthetics. | Valéry, Paul, 1871–1945–Aesthetics. | Bonnefoy, Yves–Aesthetics. | Color in literature. | French poetry--19th century–History and criticism. | French poetry–20th century–History and criticism. Classification: LCC PQ2344.Z5 H28 2020 (print) | LCC PQ2344.Z5 (ebook) | DDC 841/.809–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020036487 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020036488 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-8220-2 ePDF: 978-1-3501-8221-9 eBook: 978-1-3501-8222-6 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

for Alex and Ann, for colour, light and love

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CONTENTS List of plates ix Acknowledgementsxii INTRODUCTION: THINKING COLOUR-WRITING

1

Part I COLOUR CONCEPT AND PRACTICE: MALLARMÉ’S MONOCHROMES ‘UN VIEIL ET MAGIQUE INSTINCT ME MÈNE, INVINCIBLEMENT, VERS DES CHOSES COLORÉES’ MAKING MODERN, MOVING COLOUR DISPLACEMENTS OF BLACK AZURE IRONIES WHITE (IM)MATERIAL CONCLUSION

13 21 39 49 55 64

Part II MATTER, METAPHOR, METAMORPHOSIS: VALÉRY’S INTERMITTENT COLOUR VALERY: VANGUARD AND REARGUARD ‘CARROTY-RED BITS OF FIBRE’ AND A PINK-BRISTLED TOOTHBRUSH THINKING ART AND WRITING COLOUR RESISTING AND REVEALING COLOUR SENSE AND SENSUOUSNESS: SEASCAPE AND LANDSCAPE EKPHRASIS: FIGURE AND FRUIT CHIAROSCURO MODULATIONS CONCLUSION

67 75 80 88 94 105 113 123

Part III EMBLEMATIC CHROMATICS AND THE COLOUR OF ETHICS: YVES BONNEFOY’S LESSONS IN THINGS MOVING COLOUR THE DERELICTION OF COLOUR THE EQUIPOISE OF GREY

127 132 137

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Contents

COLOUR INCARNATE UNBIDDABLE COLOUR: THE ETHICAL TURN ACTS OF ATTENTION ETHICS AND EKPHRASTICS INTERRUPTED WHITE THE CURVE OF COLOUR CONCLUSION

142 147 152 159 168 174 180

CONCLUSION: MOVING COLOUR FORWARD COLOUR CONCEPT COLOUR CAPACITY COLOUR AGENCY

183 185 186 187

Notes191 Bibliography221 Index230

PLATES Part I 1. Edouard Manet (1832–83), A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, 1882 (oil on canvas). The Courtauld Gallery, London, UK/Bridgeman Images. 2. James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), Arrangement in Grey and Black no. 1, 1871 (oil on canvas). Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France/Bridgeman Images. 3. Edouard Manet (1832–83), Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets, 1872 (oil on canvas). Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France/Bridgeman Images. 4. James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), Nocturne in Blue and Silver: The Lagoon, Venice, 1879–80 (oil on canvas). Photograph © 2019 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts, USA, Emily L. Ainsley Fund/Bridgeman Images. 5. Edouard Manet (1832–83), The Swallows, 1873 (oil on canvas). Buhrle Collection, Zurich, Switzerland/Bridgeman Images. 6. Edouard Manet (1832–83), Le Linge, 1875 (oil on canvas). The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA/Bridgeman Images. 7. Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851), Dudley, Worcestershire, 1830–33 (watercolour on paper). Lady Lever Art Gallery, National Museums Liverpool/Bridgeman Images. 8. Patrick Heron (1920–99), Yellow Painting, October 1958/May/June 1959 (oil on canvas). Purchased with assistance from Tate Friends St Ives 1999; © Estate of Patrick Heron. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2019; Photo: © Tate. 9. James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903). Symphony in White no. 2: Little White Girl. 1864 (oil on canvas). Bequeathed by Arthur Studd (1919). Photo ©Tate. 10. Edouard Manet (1832–83), Masked Ball at the Opera, 1873 (oil on canvas). National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, USA/Bridgeman Images. 11. Joan Miró (1893–1983), Blue Triptych II, 1961 (oil on canvas). (C) Successio Miró/ADAGP. Paris, Centre Pompidou – Musée national d’art moderne – Centre de création industrielle. Photo (C) Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Philippe Migeat. 12. Berthe Morisot (1841–95), Lucie Léon at the piano, 1892 (oil on canvas). Private Collection/Bridgeman Images.

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13. Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–98), Jamais un coup de dés n’abolira le hasard: poème (épreuves d’imprimerie) (Paris: A. Vollard, 2 juillet 1897). – 39 cm. Epreuves d’imprimerie d’‘Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard’, avec corrections et annotations de l’auteur. (Jeu d’épreuves du premier tirage, corrigé par l’auteur à l’encre noire et au crayon rouge). RES FOL-NFY-130. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF). Photo (C) BnF, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/image BnF.

Part II 14. Loie Fuller (1862–1928), Loie Fuller, raising her very long gown in the shape of a butterfly, 1902. Everett Collection/Bridgeman Images. 15. Cristofano Allori (1577–1621), Tête d’un page (oil on canvas). © Musée Fabre de Montpellier Méditerranée Métropole/photographie Frédéric Jaulmes – Reproduction interdite sans autorisation. 16. Francisco de Zurbarán (1598–1664), Saint Agatha, 1630–33 (oil on canvas) Musée Fabre, Montpellier, France/Bridgeman Images. 17. Berthe Morisot (1841–95), Woman at her toilette, 1875–80 (oil on canvas). The Art Institute of Chicago, ILL, USA. Stickney Fund/Bridgeman Images. 18. Frederick Leighton (1830–96), Flaming June, c. 1895 (oil on canvas). ­Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico. Photo © The Maas Gallery, London/­ Bridgeman Images. 19. Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), Still life with Plaster Cupid, c. 1894 (oil on ­canvas). The Courtauld Gallery, London, UK/Bridgeman Images. 20. Antonio Ponce (1608–67), Pomegranates, second quarter of the c17th (oil on canvas). ©Museo Nacional del Prado. 21. Henri Matisse (1869–1954), Still Life with Pomegranates, 1947 (oil on canvas). Musée Matisse, Nice-Cimiez, France. © 2020 Succession H. Matisse/ DACS, London/Bridgeman Images. 22. Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978), Piazza d’Italia, c. 1913 (oil on canvas). The Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada. Gift of Sam and Ayala Zacks, 1970/ Bridgeman Images. 23. Jan (Johannes) Vermeer (1632–75), The Milkmaid, c. 1658–60 (oil on canvas). Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands/Bridgeman Images.

Part III 24. Andrea Mantegna (1431–1506), Altarpiece of San Zeno (Holy Conversation), 1456–59 (tempera on panel, polyptych, gilded frame). Photo © Luisa Ricciarini/Bridgeman Images.

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25. Claude Garache (b. 1930), Avocette, 1973 (oil on canvas) (C) ADAGP, Paris. Musée Cantini, Marseille, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/David Giancatarina. 26. Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964), Still Life/Natura morta, 1960 (oil on canvas). Private Collection. Photo © Christie’s Images/Bridgeman Images. 27. Raoul Ubac (1910–85), Sans titre, 1975 (coloured lithograph on Arches paper). ADAGP Paris Centre Pompidou, photo © Musée National d’Art Moderne-CCI. Distribution RMN-Grand Palais/Philippe Migeat. 28. Adam Elsheimer (1578–1610), Ceres and Stelio, c. 1605 (oil on copperplate). Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, Spain/Bridgeman Images. 29. Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665), Moses saved from the Water, 1647 (oil on ­canvas). Photo © Photo Josse/Bridgeman Images. 30. John Constable (1776–1837), Dedham from Langham, c. 1813 (oil on canvas). Bequeathed by George Salting (1910). Photo Credit: Photo ©Tate. 31. Claude Lorrain (1604/05–82), Landscape with Psyche outside the Palace of Cupid (‘The Enchanted Castle’), 1664 (oil on canvas). National Gallery. Bought with contributions from the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the National Art Collections Fund, 1981. © The National Gallery, London. 32. Piet Mondrian (1872–1944), The Red Cloud (c. 1907) (oil on canvas). Haags Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, Netherlands/Bridgeman Images.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS It is a pleasure to thank the following colleagues and friends for their critical insights in matters of poetry, art writing, colour, and much else: Michael Bishop, Serge Bourjea, Kathryn Brown, Charles Burdett, Jean Duffy, Andrew Ginger, Russell Goulbourne, Mathieu Gosztola, Edward Hughes, Shirley Jordan, Adrienne Mason, Haydn Mason†, Emily McLaughlin, Jean-Paul Michel, Clémence O’Connor, Nina Parish, Eric Robertson, Michael Sheringham†, Siobhán Shilton, Katherine Shingler, Brandon Taylor, Timothy Unwin, Davide Vago, Emma Wagstaff, and Adam Watt. For their sustaining friendship and their empathy, special thanks go to Adrienne and Haydn, to Eddie, and to Jean. In the years I was developing Colourworks, it was enlivening and rewarding to interact with my PhD students and postdoctoral researchers, whose projects have involved, in varying degrees, the study of colour in literature and visual culture (in chronological order): Hannah Scott, Sophie Leroy, Adrienne Mason, Jade Boyd, and Xander Ryan; Philippa Lewis and Daniel Finch-Race. My gratitude goes to Dr Mason for her insightful comments on translating Valéry’s poetry. I wish to thank the following individuals and organizations for plenary invitations that enabled me to deepen my thinking in dialogue with other researchers: the President and the Executive Committee of the Society of DixNeuviémistes (Exeter, 2013); Rey Conquer and Elodie Ripoll, organizers of the Colour Symposium held at the Graduiertenschule für Literaturwissenschaft Friedrich Schlegel, Freie Universität (Berlin, 2015); the President and Executive Committee of the Society for French Studies (Glasgow, 2016); the organizers of the Cerisy-la-Salle colloquium on Jean-Paul Michel (2016); and the organizers of the ‘Modernist Art Writing Conference’ (Nottingham, 2019). Parts of the Introduction to this book appeared in my introduction to the special number of French Studies ‘Thinking Colour-Writing’ that I edited in 2017. My thanks go to the journal’s Editors, and to Oxford University Press, for granting me permission to re-use that material. I am most grateful to the Bridgeman Library, especially Siân Phillips; the Réunion des musées nationaux (RMN); the Musée Fabre (Montpellier); the Museo Nacional del Prado (Madrid); and the National Gallery (London), for granting me permission to reproduce the colour images which illustrate this study. My gratitude goes to the School of Modern Languages and the Faculty of Arts at the University of Bristol for the invaluable research leave that allowed me to develop this project. The Faculty Research Fund gave generous support towards image acquisition, for which I am most grateful. At Bloomsbury, Frances

Acknowledgements

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Arnold and James Thompson were responsive and empowering editors. It was a pleasure to work with copy editor Khumanthem Seilesh, and I thank him for his professionalism and care. My final thanks, as ever, go to Francis Clarke, who, in a life bright with mathematics and music, made precious time for Colourworks.

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I N T R O D U C T IO N : T H I N K I N G C O L O U R - W R I T I N G

In 1923, Claude Monet awoke from cataract surgery and experienced blue, as if for the first time. The poet Paul Valéry recalls the Impressionist painter’s account of his startling chromatic vision: Monet […] m’a parlé de l’instant où l’acier extirpant de son œil le cristallin obscurci, il eut, me dit-il, la révélation d’un bleu d’une beauté cruelle et incomparable…1 Monet […] told me of the moment when the surgeon’s blade removed the cloudy lens from his eye and revealed, he said, an incomparably beautiful, savage blue …2

The artist’s blue epiphany, as related by the poet, sparks prospective connections with the figure of the punctum described by Roland Barthes in La Chambre claire (1980), his essay on photography. Barthes describes the experience of our gaze and our consciousness when they are pierced or punctured (as the painter has been, literally, by the surgeon’s trephine) by the image or the detail which ‘rushes’ our senses and transforms us subjectively and intellectually, its immense and immersive agency filling and redefining the space of our thought or imagination. For Barthes, revelation is about being ‘pricked’ by the phenomenon that we cannot name and cannot begin to capture in words.3 Monet’s chromatic revelation, and Valéry’s account of that experience, invoke ideas of jouissance, the experience of being rushed by a sensation or feeling that lacerates and enraptures in unequal measure as it disrupts normative habits of viewing and spurs us to fresh, invigorated ways of thinking and being; jouissance, in its Lacanian afterlife, is a concept prodigiously explored by Barthes, by Julia Kristeva, by Hélène Cixous, and by Gilles Deleuze, relative to the transgressive, fracturing power of exploratory literature, experimental visual culture, counter-cultural politics, and transformational psychic experiences.4 The power of colour to arrest our attention, to quicken our consciousness, and to generate creative responses and actions has its most immediate impact in the visual arena: in the exceptional and everyday events of sight, in cinema, and in the visual arts since the earliest cave paintings. The question of colour – its capacity (what it can do) and its agency

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(what it does) – has no less salience in literature. Colour has a different salience (and urgency) – aesthetic, ethical, existential – as I seek to reveal across this study of the poetry and related art writing of three landmark poets in the French modern tradition: Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–98), Paul Valéry (1871–1945), and Yves Bonnefoy (1923–2016). Monet’s account of his startled awakening to blue, retold by the modern poet, conjures up something qualitatively similar to – and analogous with – the transformative force of aesthetic modernism. Modernist revelation implies a ‘savaging’ of ordinary, ‘dulled’ vision and assumptions: it offers a radical redefinition of perspectives, displacing the horizon of expectations of reader or viewer. The aged painter’s raw experience of colour carries a sense of modernism’s unprecedented power. Modernist beauty is eruptive and enthralling, perplexing and empowering. At the furthest imaginable reach from the decorative and the symbological predictabilities of traditional colour-thinking, the kind of modernist colour revealed in the poetry of Mallarmé, Valéry, and Bonnefoy sparks affinities with the vertiginous charting of Rimbaud’s colour-steeped odyssey in ‘Le Bateau ivre’ (1871) and his mesmeric ‘Voyelles’ (1872); with André Breton’s definition of Surrealist beauty as convulsive and catalysing (Nadja, 1928); or with Julia Kristeva’s enraptured response to the ultramarine of Giotto’s frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel (1972).5 Valéry’s account of the Impressionist artist’s experience of blue – an experience at once shattering and galvanizing – intimates something of the inaugural value of aesthetic modernism and its prospective relation to the preoccupations and articulations of critical thought in our own age. Monet’s transformative colour experience looks ahead to particular strands of critical thought of the later twentieth century, from phenomenology to poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, feminist theory, and ethics, strands that will, in ways (I hope) deft and light, inform my reading of colour in modern poetry and art writing in French. Working out from Monet’s astonished encounter with blue, Valéry evokes the analogous experience of the writer rushed by words. He reflects on the power of certain words to solicit mental responses, and marvels at their capacity to flicker luminously into meaning and gather around them the visual and acoustic materials that generate poetry: Certains mots tout à coup s’imposent au poète, semblent orienter vers eux, dans la masse implicite de l’être mental, tels souvenirs infus: ils exigent, appellent, ou illuminent […] ce qu’il leur faut d’images et de figures phonétiques pour justifier leur apparition et l’obsession de leur présence. Ils se font germes de poèmes.6 Some words suddenly force themselves on the poet; they seem to draw, in the implied mass of our mental being, our innate memories: such words demand, solicit, or illumine […] what they require in terms of images and phonetic figures that justify their appearance and their obsessive presence. Such words become the very grain of poetry.

Engaging this more ample reflection on poetry’s power of self-making, Valéry considers the agency of words as they shape ideas, memories, desires, and fantasies.

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It is as if words are imbued with their own intentionality, energizing poetry’s capacity to work ceaselessly across the invisible borders between the material and the immaterial, the senses and sensibility, the created and the remembered, things and thought. It is with alertness to those relations and those rich tensions in modernist poetry that I read with, and for, colour in the writing of Mallarmé, Valéry, and Bonnefoy. The guiding premise of this book is that critical attentiveness to colour enables a more extensive and more profound understanding of the sensibility of modern and modernist poetry. Reversing the terms of the premise, I argue that modern and modernist poetry reveals, in the exceptional depth and diversity of its colourwriting, the consciousness at work in the material world and in the space of thought and feeling, enabling a deeper, fuller understanding of how colour participates – and may be apprehended – in verbal and interart media. In this study, I will be asking how these three canonical modern poets – who are also important writers on art – write colour in their black-and-white medium. How do readers respond to the invitation to ‘think colour’ as they read? To what extent can the critical encounter with visual media shed light on the textual life of colour? How might literary critics develop ways of capturing colour at work in a range of textual formats which, in this study, are verse and prose poetry, and art writing? These are some of the lines of enquiry that I explore in Colourworks. It will already be clear that the scope of my book is ambitious in its range and precise in its focus: it spans the broad modern period through a study of three pre-eminent writers whose work represents a major defining current of poetic modernism in its pursuit of innovation, its probing of consciousness, and its exploration of interart and visual values. Mallarmé, Valéry, and Bonnefoy, I will be arguing, provide us with ways of problematizing colour in the exploratory texts of poetry and art writing. And, concerted attention to colour can generate a deeper reading of poets whose engagement with painting from the Renaissance to the experimental art of their own time sheds crucial light on their writerly practice across an exceptional (and exceptionally prolonged) period of innovation that stretches from the 1860s to the early twenty-first century, and encompasses some of the key aesthetic developments, structural shifts, and interart values of the phenomenon we call ‘modernism’.7 (Whilst poetry and art writing form my primary corpus, I will draw into the discussion other, related textual formats, including journalism, cultural critique, and correspondence.) By the term ‘modernism’, I infer the moment and the momentum of invention that we associate with literary and artistic innovation from Baudelaire (of whom Mallarmé is a direct successor, and Valéry and Bonnefoy, inheritors) and Manet, which gathers pace across the later nineteenth century and the early and midtwentieth century. My use of ‘modernism’ is at once capacious (in terms of the historical range explored) and specific (in terms of the aesthetic values examined). For the purposes of this study, my working description of poetic modernism turns upon the resistance to lyric effusiveness; the re-figuring of the real; modes of ellipsis, abstraction, and simultaneity; the pursuit of non-telic outcomes; the self-consciousness of text and of visual image; the privileging of paradox and

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dissonance, and forms of indeterminacy; the intellectual, creative, and existential engagement of readers.8 Modernism is driven by a concern with the poem as process and with poetry as a field of perpetual experimental and experiential reinvention. In taking a ‘long view’ of the exploratory tradition in French poetry after Baudelaire, I have intentionally stretched the canvas of modernism beyond its customary parameters, given that Bonnefoy, a post-War poet, belongs to the late modern age and to a period after modernism is assumed to have ended.9 Yet, Bonnefoy’s vast corpus of poetry and art writing (which I explore in selective depth from the 1950s to the turn of the twenty-first century) offers a compelling microcosm of the unfinished trajectory of modernism. There is in Bonnefoy’s poetry and in his art writing a deep concern with abstraction, with the turn from (and with the return to) the here-and-now, and with metaphysical desire as well as présence and immanence. The memory of Mallarmé’s unfinished dramatic poem Hérodiade (1864–) echoes through the abstract and deconstructed baroque of Bonnefoy’s Du mouvement et de l’immobilité de Douve (1957); Valéry’s concern with myth, remembrance, sunlight, earth, and sea resonates in the expressive depth and the sparseness of Bonnefoy’s poetry of the later twentieth century. I trace a distinct line from Mallarmé, through Valéry, to Bonnefoy in terms of the poets’ exploration of the perceptual, of flesh and colour, of subjectivity, and of the external world, as they take forward the adventure of abstract thought and critical reflection. What relates Mallarmé, Valéry, and Bonnefoy is their profound reflection on the real and the material, and its relation to the metaphysical: there are, in the deep mesh of their writing, both abstractive and perceptual urges, and, in this, colour has powerful meaning-making agency, as the work of these major poets reveals in distinctive and, also, connected ways. In the unfolding history of literary modernity, Mallarmé, Valéry, and Bonnefoy sustain and extend the trajectory of poetic innovation in texts that sound the perpetual modulations and the tensions between the material and immaterial, past and present, and self and world. There is, too, a quality of affective rigour and spareness that intimates forms of subjectivity that are often occluded or recessed, but also fragmentally and insistently present. Their affinity of ethos and sensibility deepens through their concern for the demanding beauty and the complex clarity of language as they explore, each in his incomparable distinctiveness, idea, embodied existence, landscape, time, and the sensate and insensate worlds. Or, put simply, human presence in things: water, sunlight, stone, tree, fruit, hour, snow, face, sail, field, sound, wall. Modern poetry in French has an intense and enduring relation to visual practice through forms that include ekphrasis and the livre d’artiste, yet the question of colour in poetry remains critically under-explored by researchers. This is a striking paradox in today’s interdisciplinary and intermedial research contexts shaped, inter alia, by word-and-image studies, visuality research, emblem studies, screen culture research, and studies of the graphic novel. The persisting underexploration of poetry’s colour values is anomalous, too, given major contributions to the understanding of colour in the Western cultural tradition in key areas of

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aesthetics, philosophy, and art history by John Gage, Michel Pastoureau, Murielle Gagnebin, and Georges Roque, and in the cross-over area of literature and art examined brilliantly by Jacqueline Lichtenstein in La Couleur éloquente.10 The engagement with (primarily) visual colour by thinkers of the late modern era (Wittgenstein, Adorno, Merleau-Ponty, Barthes, Kristeva, Cixous, Derrida, Deleuze, Didi-Huberman) has had minimal translational impact on critical approaches to colour writing, yet can create more porous connections between visual and textual disciplines, as the poetry and art writing of Mallarmé, Valéry, and Bonnefoy reveal.11 Recently, critical enquiry in the contemporary humanities – cultural studies, postcolonial thought, screen studies, and literary narrative studies – has been turning fresh attention to colour, opening up perspectives that can, in turn, nourish exploratory readings in French and Francophone poetry and related art writing. Michael Taussig’s pioneering enquiry What Color Is the Sacred? (2010), with its entwined histories of colour and colonialism, spirals out of its roots in anthropology to draw in literary texts from Proust to Burroughs on a global journey through colour in transcultural, transhistorical, social, and scientific frames.12 Taussig probes colour as formative and reflective of what it means to be human, and interrogates – though does not actively displace – the competing alignments of chromophobia – the conservative or even aversive response to colour of ‘mature’ and ‘elite’ cultures – and chromophilia – the privileging of the exuberant colour culture that has been associated traditionally with the ‘primitive’, the feminine, and the childlike. The poetry of Mallarmé, Valéry, and Bonnefoy, as I aim to show here, works often to undo this dialectic, and to bring colour and line (variably arising as structure, form, fragment, or shape) into productive play beyond normative cultural recuperations: thus, we see Mallarmé explicitly resist exoticist assumptions through the intersubjectivity of the poet and the Chinese porcelain artist in ‘Las de l’amer repos … ’. The poet and the artisan pursue, mutatis mutandis, a more complex practice where the intentional restriction of colour expressivity coincides with immersion in singular colour and its material, affective, metaphysical, and aesthetic freighting: this emerges in the modernist poet’s privileging of the monochrome.13 Richard Dyer’s field-changing cultural study of film and photography – White (1997) – analyses the systemic Western ‘naturalization’ of whiteness evidenced by the perpetuation of the invisibility of white in white people’s constructions of themselves. Dyer argues for attention to be paid to the occluded racial significance of representations of white in sources not explicitly about race.14 Dyer’s study has important implications for the full span of French and Francophone studies, notably in asking us to reflect on the assumed unremarkability and the ‘naturalness’ of white in representations of the body and on the privileging of white as the colour synonymous with abstract and intellectualist values, and thus in many ways with key manifestations of aesthetic experimentalism and ‘difficult’ modernism, like Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897). Whilst postcolonial thought sheds crucial light on the unseen and the ignored, it also tends to default to what Shirley Jordan, in an intermedial reading of Marie

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NDiaye’s fiction, terms the ‘racialized paradigms’ of colour. Moving out from the purely skin deep, Jordan seeks to liberate colour and colour thinking from precisely those paradigms and thus reveal the critical and creative practice of colour in relation both to visual culture and to the poetic visuality of the literary text. As Jordan demonstrates, postcolonial literature has a colour consciousness that is more complex and more paradoxical, richer and more resistant, than racialized recuperations can account for: the life of colour thus includes, and works constantly to exceed, its political implications.15 Whilst my study of colour values in the work of three metropolitan French writers is not an intervention in postcolonial studies, it opens up ways of approaching colour that may travel porously across the borders between French poetry and poetry in French (and, for that matter, poetry in any language), with implications for how diasporic literatures and the poetry of exile and migration might be explored, themes which I touch on in relation to Mallarmé (exiled in London and alert to transcultural values), Valéry (figuring the Mediterranean as an immemorial place of human crossing and exchange), and Bonnefoy (exploring displacement, hospitality, the search for origins, and myths of belonging). Extending this deep concern with colour and what it means to be human, Georges Didi-Huberman’s philosophy of white and his exploration of monochrome primacy in conceptual and experimental art forms (Blancs soucis, 2013) offer ways of approaching colour (and not only colour) in literary texts and visual culture.16 Didi-Huberman’s call to care-taking and to repeated acts of slow looking, practices of patient viewing that are already inscribed in the French verb ‘regarder’ (‘garder deux fois’), informs my reading of Mallarmé’s painstaking lexical approaches to the textured black tones of Manet’s art, and of Bonnefoy’s ethos of quiet care and empathic concern for the things of nature (stone, river, birdsong, earth).17 My reading of modern poetry and art writing has affinity also with the ‘care-taking’ concerns of the literary critic James Wood, whose concept of ‘serious noticing’ resonates across aesthetics, ethics, and metaphysics. Wood affirms the power of literature to enhance four areas of human action: seeing better, transforming the world through metaphor, being selective, and developing a self-conscious sense of our own looking.18 Whilst Wood’s perspectives are grounded in literary narrative, their influence on critical studies reveals something of the potential and scope of cognate approaches to poetry and art writing. But let’s stay for the moment with colour noticing in visual culture. Blue is perhaps the most privileged focus of colour exploration for artists and filmmakers, from Yves Klein to Derek Jarman. In Blue Mythologies (2013), a highly original series of readings in the nexus of material cultural studies, historical study, and creative writing, Carol Mavor pursues a series of evocative reflections on the aesthetic and affective charge of blue.19 Whether she is viewing the cobalt cityscape of Jodphur or appraising the cynanotypes created by the British botanist Anna Atkins in the mid-nineteenth century, Mavor teaches us how to relish colour, visually, haptically, and affectively, putting to work a form of chromatic empathy that has affinities with Didi-Huberman’s call to us to look again, more deeply. Each of Mavor’s ‘blue mythologies’ is a site of cultural, poetic, and autobiographical

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practice that empowers the reader, in turn, to attend with curiosity and creativity to colour instances in art, in nature and the natural sciences, in the human face, in landscape, and in the built environment. Mavor shares ways of encountering the world – through places, people, objects, and ideas – that invite us to immerse in the flesh of colour, and this is what I seek to do across my reading of Mallarmé, Valéry, and Bonnefoy. In French film studies, attention to colour has produced sensitive, searching work by Emma Wilson on blue and the postmodern subject in her 1998 study of Trois couleurs: bleu in Kieślowski’s screen trilogy.20 Wilson writes against the grain of Kristeva’s retrospective reception of blue, her approach informed by Judith Butler’s cultural and political reading of the semiotic: thus, the colour blue, for Wilson, is integral to psychic constitution whilst the filmic focus on chromatic surface and light signals a postmodern concern with absence and emptiness. Wilson meditates on blue as affective process in her essay on La Vie d’Adèle, Abdellatif Kechiche’s 2013 film based on Julie Marot’s graphic novel Le Bleu est une couleur chaude (2010).21 Wilson’s attention to colour value in relation to memory and desire offers a model for how readings in literature and in film can, by resisting symbological recuperation, achieve a more immersive, integrated exploration of colour. From philosophical and visual cultural perspectives, Claude Imbert (2011) has explored black, not merely as ‘the seal of modernity’, recalling Baudelaire’s 1846 Salon, but as a source of modernist equivocation, and as a transformational force for viewers responsive to its simultaneous potential and its multi-valency.22 Imbert’s discussion of black both as texture and as a trope of flatness, her alertness to the reversible values of black and white, and her study of the luminous agency of black speak powerfully of colour that is consonant with modernism’s ethos of pliancy and indeterminacy. What unites Didi-Huberman, Mavor, Wilson, and Imbert is an interdisciplinary ethos and a qualitative approach to colour that allies materiality and affect: their critical thinking is exploratory in its method and empathic in its intellectual and affective engagement with the colour subject. Screen and visual culture studies, and broader material culture studies, benefit immeasurably from astute readings of colour values in their generative, interdisciplinary capacity. Colour study in the context of the modern and modernist novel, however, has until quite recently been limited and sporadic. Even in the pioneering field of contemporary visuality studies, Mieke Bal’s The Mottled Screen: Reading Proust Visually (1997) focuses on the visual tropes of modernist writing, yet Bal passes quickly over the place and power of prismatics: it is almost as if the ancient quarrel between line (in this case, the anti-telic values of modernist form) and colour were being revived, with colour once more the secondary or subaltern value.23 Dedicated colour study, where this has been undertaken, has tended to default to invocations of traditional colour symbolism: I am thinking here of Jane Goldman’s construction of the symbological values of Virginia Woolf ’s ‘feminist prismatics’ in suffragist contexts.24 At times, the study of colour in literature has restricted its methodological scope, privileging statistical analyses of chromatic frequencies

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in linguistic corpora and textual databases.25 Irrespective of their differing motivations, such approaches can have a fixing and flattening effect on the literary text, foreclosing its porous and protean qualities. In French poetry studies, and in poetry studies more generally, we need urgently to challenge the relative occlusion of chromatic values and, on the basis of qualitative approaches, argue for the transformative agency of colour in modern poetry’s aesthetic, existential, and philosophical projects, as Jack Stewart has done for modernist narrative fiction in English.26 Recently, fresh attention to colour in the disciplinary area of French studies has been evidenced by two important studies: these indicate substantive developments relative to the modern novel in French. In Proust en couleur (2012), Davide Vago opens a substantial window onto colour consciousness in À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27) that suggests how colour research might be undertaken in literary studies, both on a grand scale and in ways attentive to textual specificity. But, Vago’s search for an overarching colour methodology also reveals the risks of overly systematizing the equivocations of colour expressivity, and exposes the limitations of a quantitative study of chromatic instances.27 In her ambitious study, Penser la couleur en littérature: Explorations romanesques des Lumières au réalisme (2018), Elodie Ripoll pursues transhistorical perspectives on colour culture and writerly practice in the long history of the modern novel in French, with major implications for how we can deepen colour readings across disciplinary and national borders.28 So, colour is drawing intellectual interest and gaining status as an object of critical enquiry, at least in relation to narrative fiction. Colour values in poetry have engaged critics intermittently. One exceptional instance, in both senses of the word, is Michael Sheringham’s essay ‘Language, Colour and the Enigma of Everydayness’ (2011) on chromatic inscription in later-twentieth-century French poetry.29 Sheringham maps the colour ground on which French and Francophone studies can build. As he reviews the major currents in colour theory and thought from Goethe to Wittgenstein and MerleauPonty, via Ernst Jünger, Sheringham tracks the turn to subjectivity and to affect in philosophical and aesthetic discussions of colour values. At the heart of Sheringham’s concerns is the question of how colour resists language and how, also, it ceaselessly requires and solicits language: this idea is critical to understanding both the explicit and the immanent values of colour in the literary text, which is a key focus of my enquiry. This brings me to the aporia at the centre of my study: what language does inexpressible colour make for itself in texts? How does colour come to language? Conversely, how does language make space for colour? I explore the variable landscape of colour in writing and engage in the migration of colour concepts from critical thought and theory to the practice of reading texts visually and, especially, chromatically. Questions of colour saturation, the eruptive agency of colour, and, frequently, colour reticence – processes of elision and restriction in the chromatic economy – are central to the readings of Mallarmé, Valéry, and Bonnefoy that I will be developing in Colourworks. This book takes, then, an exploratory approach to the visuality of poetry and art writing produced in the aesthetic and cultural crosscurrents of literary

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experimentalism of the later nineteenth, twentieth, and early twenty-first centuries. Poetry and art writing informed by deep reflection on the visual arts in transnational and transhistorical contexts raise key questions about interart innovation that constantly cross and complicate the boundaries of medium and discipline. The writing of Mallarmé, Valéry, and Bonnefoy invites us to explore an exceptional range of media in terms of subject, sensibility, period, and provenance: from Italian Renaissance art and seventeenth-century Spanish painting to Dutch Golden Age and Flemish Baroque art; from English Romanticism, through French Impressionism and Symbolism, to Abstraction and Conceptual Art. Works by Zurbarán, Elsheimer, Mantegna, Rembrandt, Turner, Manet, Whistler, Degas, Morisot, Mondrian, and Morandi, briefly envisioned or more deeply absorbed into the heft of the poets’ writing on art and their poetry, bring colour values – in their complex mediation between word and image – into compelling focus. Placing colour at the centre of the study of French poetic modernity in its expansive timeframe, Colourworks probes the transformative interrelation of colour and structure, and begins, through this prism, to re-evaluate literary modernity and specifically modernism as a transcultural, intermedial, and transhistorical phenomenon. Through in-depth (and intermittently comparative) readings of Mallarmé, Valéry, and Bonnefoy, I examine the intriguing, paradoxical relationship of writers with colour: from the celebration of colour and the recognition of its meliorative value, through writerly resistance to colour, to the active critique of colour.30 I consider how colour and structure interrelate in modern poetry, and study how colour and modern consciousness coincide. Reading for colour is, I suggest, a way of illuminating questions of ethics, affect, perception, consciousness, and creativity in Mallarmé, Valéry, and Bonnefoy. Writerly meditations – in poetry and in art writing – on exile, pleasure, loss, landscape, consolation, beauty, violence, ageing, and mourning reveal a chromatic sensibility that is pervasive and profound. I seek to show how modern poets who are art writers explore colour often with an extreme economy of means that works to amplify and intensify its agency and its capacity for meaning. Poetry and art writing are parallel and analogous projects in the case of Mallarmé and Valéry, and, more explicitly and ekphrastically, they form an interwoven project in the case of Bonnefoy. The writings of the poets on visual art and material culture reveal a keen concern for colour values that can help elucidate, sometimes directly and at other times more diffusely, their poetry, which is the primary focus of my study. Whilst I will make connections and draw out parallels (and differences and divergences) between each of the poets, the purpose of each Part of this book is to offer an engaged, dedicated reading of a single writer, responsive to the distinctiveness of his aesthetic and his colour practice. At this point, then, let’s consider each poet in turn. From chocolate-coloured horse-drawn omnibuses to the blood-red brick facades of London’s Albert Hall, from cloisonné ware to jewel-like candied fruits, from the poet’s ‘yellow thoughts’ to his fondness for a white cat called Neige who blanks out his writing with a swish of her tail, Mallarmé’s engagement with colour is capacious and invigorated, and sustained across his art writing,

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his correspondence, and his poetry. In Part I ‘Colour Concept and Practice: Mallarmé’s Monochromes’, the fragmentary domestic and cultural history of colour that emerges in Mallarmé’s early essays, journalism, and letters provides a route into reading for monochrome colour in the aesthetic, experiential, and experimental aspects of his poetry and art writing. I investigate the relation of colour to material and abstract projects across the span of Mallarmé’s poetry, from the visual and affective richness of his vers de circonstance, through materializations of colour in the exasperated pursuit of the ideal, to the shattering structural and semantic play of whiteness (and blankness) in Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard. I consider how colour participates in the minimalism and the abstraction of Mallarmé’s ‘difficult’ poetry whilst asking how chromatic expressivity absorbs modernist paradox and scepsis. Works by Turner and T.S. Eliot, Baudelaire and Whistler, Manet and Morisot open up an interart dialogue with Mallarmé across the boundaries between modern painting and experimental poetry and in ways retrospective and prospective. My reading explores the agency of colour in revealing the tensions between material and metaphysical, affect and abstraction, desire and disconsolation. Colour dissolves the boundaries between inside and outside, between matter and thought, and, of course, between poetic word and visual image, which I explore through an immersive study of three monochromes (black (and grey), blue, and white). In signal ways, Mallarmé’s monochromes anticipate some of the colour concentrations of twentieth-century art, from Pierre Soulages’ blacks, through Mondrian’s white, to Paul Klee’s azure fields. If, conventionally, there are risks in isolating colour values and treating these discretely, Mallarmé’s monochrome practice seems to call for precisely such an approach with its capacity to illuminate the poet’s deep, textured inscription of idea(l) and affect, and object and sensation. Part II ‘Matter, Metaphor, Metamorphosis: Valéry’s Intermittent Colour’ is devoted to one of the most influential poets and thinkers in the French language, a major interlocutor of artists, philosophers, and fellow writers. Valéry’s powerful engagement with colour in art – from Leonardo to Rembrandt, and from Corot to Manet, Morisot, and Degas – provides a route into a colour-focused reading of the poetry of Charmes (1922), a major work in the canon of Western modern, and specifically modernist, poetry. Valéry’s reflections on pictorial colour in art from the Renaissance to the modern era, and his chromatic practice as a poet, reveal a writer who, through the intricate meshing of image and text, challenges the old dichotomy of line and colour. Valéry’s intellectual rigour and critical lucidity as an essayist, the assumed remoteness of his poetry from everyday human concerns (not to speak of the difficulty of his poetry), and his appreciation of mathematical rigour would, on the face of it, seem to place him on the side of line and the purer play of forms. Yet, a deeper enquiry into his poetry and art writing reveals an exquisite colour expressivity that draws the existential, the ethical, the intimate, and the perceptual into startling syntheses, and that gives voice to a more intimist self than the critical tradition has portrayed. As Valéry explores the transformative quality of Manet’s black (in his 1872 portrait of the painter Berthe Morisot), so he reflects directly on the aporia at the centre of his own writerly enterprise: the

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incommensurability of visual colour and the (inevitably constrained) capacity of the verbal artist, the writer, to express colour in his black-and-white medium. The colour consciousness in Valéry’s writing is active and transformative across the shared space of things and ideas, revealing the porous relations of the material and the metaphysical. Focusing on Valéry’s analogical thinking, my reading of the poetry and art writing seeks to uncover the writer’s metaphoric transpositions as he works between media, seeking poetry in art, and deepening the visuality of poetry through intermittent chromatic invention that is as intense as it is restrained. Across his poetry and his art writing over more than sixty years, Yves Bonnefoy  undertakes a fascinating journey through colour values. In Part III, ‘Emblematic Chromatics and the Colour of Ethics: Yves Bonnefoy’s Lessons in Things’, I investigate the development of the poet’s chromatic practice from the 1950s to the early twenty-first century, drawing in the poetics of Bonnefoy’s writing on painting from Mantegna to Edward Hopper to illuminate the colour capacity and agency of his art-responsive poetry. My reading charts the shift from the emblematic chromatics of the early poetry with its Symbolist landscape laid waste to the deeper ethical motivation of Bonnefoy’s mid-career and his later work through its alterations and modulations, its searching and probing of the human predicament. I seek to reveal the part that colour plays in sounding such enduring experiences as solitude and encounter, dereliction and consolation, desire and the gift. Chromatic values form a site of tension and creativity, of intense reflection and expressiveness in Bonnefoy’s poetry as it examines the boundaries between myth and embodied experience, and between inner life and the sentient encounter with nature. From Anti-Platon (1947) to Les Planches courbes (2001), poetry’s colour values are characterized by the tensions discerned by Bonnefoy, in his writing on art, between colour restriction and expressive intensity (that may be physical, affective, emblematic, elemental, intellectual, or philosophical): this is a defining characteristic of the work of the three writers explored in Colourworks. In Bonnefoy’s art writing and in his poetry, colour and light are deeply linked to questions of mortality, remembrance, language, longing, finitude, nature, home, landscape, hope, compassion, culture (painting, myth), veracity, and the intimate relationship of self and other. Part III draws on critical thought from Levinas to Didi-Huberman to examine the power and the acuity of Bonnefoy’s colour as it works across object, landscape, flesh, and memory, and as it develops a more intimist voice that seeks to share lessons in relating and being, connecting self to world in ways beneficent to humankind and to things. Through and beyond the deep study of colour in the work of Mallarmé, Valéry, and Bonnefoy, this book will, I hope, reveal its larger ambition: its aim to spark reflection on how poetry researchers, and those concerned with related art writing, of diverse provenances and periods, might deepen their engagement with colour – in its fullness and in its ellipsis – in the verbal medium, and how this might generate fresh, adventurous reading (and viewing) practices.

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Part I C O L OU R C O N C E P T A N D P R AC T IC E : M A L L A R M É ’ S M O N O C H R OM E S

‘Un vieil et magique instinct me mène, invinciblement, vers des choses colorées’ Writing about London, Paris’s twin capital of modernity, in the early 1870s, Mallarmé reveals in his reviews and his correspondence a discerning eye for colour in matters architectural and aesthetic.1 In atmospheric evocations of the International Exhibitions of 1871 and 1872 held in South Kensington, he surveys ceramics and cloisonné ware, arboriculture (‘le verdoyant quartier’), and the Royal Albert Hall (‘monument polychrome […] dans toute sa grandeur et familière beauté’).2 Mallarmé’s evocation of the Hall’s blood-red façades (‘de vastes panneaux d’une brique sanguine et vivante’) articulates a sense of transmanche exoticism that anticipates Apollinaire’s poetic encounter with English building materials in the south London neighbourhood of Stockwell thirty years later: the powerful opening quintil of Apollinaire’s innovatory ‘La Chanson du mal-aimé’ (1904) reveals a synthesizing vision of a Red Sea of brick-built terraced houses (‘Que tombent ses vagues de briques/Si tu ne fus pas bien-aimée’).3 Mallarmé’s modernist consciousness expresses the colour values of architecture, artefact, and nature: the green water of the Thames on a shady bank at Richmond brings to the poet’s mind the drowned Ophelia (and surely recalls for him the painting by John Everett Millais (1851–2) on the same subject, with its remarkable framing of Ophelia in intense, variegated greens of bough, reed, and riverweed).4 Informing Mallarmé’s writing is the perpetual desire to make the reader visualize through the textual medium. His aim is for visual language to find its translation or transposition into verbal language: so it is with reference to the new technology of colour lithography that Mallarmé the journalist and culture critic sets out to ‘présenter à l’esprit par quelques phrases rapides’ the alternation of red and yellow that he identifies as the chromatic forces of the 1872 Exhibition.5 Mallarmé writes of the striking art nouveau modernity of Eugène Rousseau’s display of japoniste porcelain and enamelwork in terms that reveal the poet’s detailed reading of shape, texture, tone, and colour, and his capacity to translate that unprecedented encounter with the material thing into subtle, textured writing:

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Colourworks ces tasses de porcelaine vermiculée, qui donnent l’impression blanche et délicate de grains de riz juxtaposés, avec des croissants de lune peints; ces vases dont l’émail turquoise ressemble, par l’intensité métallique de la nuance, à un émail sur cuivre, ces pâtes rapportées, figurines, sur fonds bleus, verts ou gris, aux voiles et à la nudité d’opale qui, par un enchantement adorable, deviennent roses […] à l’heure de la tombée du jour.6 the porcelain cups […] create the delicate, white impression of juxtaposed grains of rice, with their painted crescent moons; the vases whose turquoise enamel resembles, in terms of the metallic intensity of the shading, copper enamel; and the paste-on-paste, pâte rapportée figurines with their blue, green or grey backgrounds – wreathed in voile and in opaline nudity, by means of some adorable spell: all turn rosy-pink […] as evening falls.

Constructing a verbal colour palette that evokes the porcelain pieces in their visual and haptic distinctiveness, Mallarmé explores whiteness, both explicit and unuttered or immanent, in its textural variations and in ways that turn metaphor into a felt sense of chromatic materiality (‘vermiculée’, ‘grains de riz’, ‘croissants de lune’, ‘fonds […] gris’, ‘nudité d’opale’). Mallarmé, as culture critic and chronicler, reveals here a ‘care-giving’ appraisal that anticipates, in our own time, Georges Didi-Huberman’s exploration – in Blancs soucis (2013) – of the value of ‘re-garder’ and the practice of fuller, attentive looking founded on the desire to approach the object non-appropriatively, with proper regard for its specificity.7 The latenineteenth-century vogue for japonisme informs poems and material culture alike, but its appraisal by Mallarmé, resisting the decorative, suggests the search for solace in things crafted and coloured with subtlety and artfulness.8 Mallarmé’s study of porcelain, glass, and enamelware in his chronicles from the International Exhibitions echoes the early versions of ‘Las de l’amer repos … ’ (1864) and ‘Ses purs ongles … ’ (1866), poems written during his years of physical and intellectual crisis (1864–9) where the writer’s attention to colour – especially to tones of white and blue – in things of quiet beauty seems to create, in verse, a refuge or a pocket of possible consolation, for the tormented poet, and, in turn, for the reader.9 Mallarmé’s subsequent writing on the arts and entertainment, design, clothing, jewellery, and cuisine, for his short-lived magazine La Dernière Mode: Gazette du monde et de la famille (1874), demonstrates continuing attentiveness to colour and its artistic (and journalistic) possibilities.10 His engagement with commodity culture in his magazine contributions – often under feminine noms de plume – is expressed in language that is remarkable for its prismatic precision and its haptic discernment. Thus, a costume for the early Autumn season of 1874 is described in terms that capture tonal and textural variations (‘bleu marine et bleu turquoise avec guipure noire perlée’).11 Colour is at the heart of the poetjournalist’s aim to educate and counsel his readers on fashion and consumer trends. In the important matter of accessorizing outfits, a ‘corail rose’ necklace is judged wholly suitable for an about-town young woman, whilst, for a wedding trousseau, a formal red garnet necklace with its stones arranged in the shape

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of pears and apples is recommended by the pseudonymous fashion journalist known as ‘Marguerite de Ponty’ and ‘Miss Satin’.12 If decorative jewellery is fashioned into metaphorical fruits, real fruit glistens in the crystallized form of fruits confits. Remarkable in Mallarmé’s vers de circonstance is the articulation of the colour exoticism of the array of candied fruits presented by the poet to his friends at the New Year in 1896. The poet’s lexical precision transposes the confectioner’s artistry, bringing to language the jewel-like palette of candied fruits and generating a radiant vision of affection and affinity:13 Comme un délicieux effet Ou, je dirai plus, en échange Du soleil que votre cœur fait Considérez la fauve orange. Like a delicious effect Or, even, in exchange For the sun that your heart brings Behold the fulvous orange.14

Mallarmé’s poetic proffering of the orange, as a gift that emblematizes the gift of friendship, captures colour in its vital energy, its primary intensity, and its analogy with the sun of which it is a translation (‘en échange’). The imperative reach of ‘Considérez la fauve orange’ offers the object to be visualized, admired, and enjoyed: it is proffered in poetry, hailed in its ‘wild’ (authentic, spontaneous) beauty, in ways analogous to Manet’s startling treatment of the same luscious fruit in Un bar aux Folies-Bergère (1882) (Plate 1), where culture, commodity, and exoticism are invested in the sensuous appeal of the bar-top bowl of oranges in the foreground. The appreciation of friendship, celebrated in Mallarmé’s poem in the organic and cosmic figure of the fruit-sun, draws its power from the vivifying effect of deep, reciprocal affection (‘votre cœur’). The writer’s gift (of luscious glacé fruits, of reciprocated friendship, and of poetry of empathy and fellow feeling) raises circumstantial verse to a fresh level of intensity, as appetite (gustatory, visual, olfactory, and tactile) and affect ally in a zestful synthesis.15 Challenging Bonnefoy’s (somewhat baffling) view of Mallarmé’s vers de circonstance as futile and facile, Roger Pearson has argued that these poems demand to be appreciated as part of the poet’s development of a ‘subterranean network’ of relations and affinities that reach across the full span of his work.16 In ways appealingly sensuous and celebratory, and with an implicit sense of the ethical value of the material object of poetic attention – an objective correlative of the joyous warmth of friendship – Mallarmé anticipates the ‘object poetry’ of Francis Ponge, a later-twentieth-century appraiser of the visual, gustatory, tactile, and affective qualities of the orange, just as his writing looks forward to the sensuous still-life quality of Paul Valéry’s ‘Les Grenades’ and to the ethical resonance of certain texts of Yves Bonnefoy himself.17 Colour in material culture and in its metaphorical and analogical journey through the verbal medium creates links between journalistic writing and poetry in the

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evocation of a multi-sensorial appreciation of everyday and exceptional objects: in this we glimpse something of the multifaceted modernist who explores the embodied, affective, and ‘thought’ encounter of the human subject with the material, as he probes its tense relationship with the ideal.18 Engaging with the chromatic distinctiveness of fabric, food, or furniture through his journalism, his correspondence, and his art writing, Mallarmé contributes significantly to the still unwritten cultural history (and cultural geography) of colour in the later nineteenth century. Between London and Paris, Mallarmé’s writing explores colour culture in the Western European capitals of modernity, affording his reader insights into transnational and interart values. To a real extent, the writer begins to create a fragmentary version of that cultural history of colour, through art writing, culture chronicles, correspondence, and journalism, which it is revealing to read in parallel with his poetry, for that diverse body of writing affords important insights into Mallarmé’s concern for the capacity and the agency of colour in his own medium. If, so far, Mallarmé’s attention to the dazzling iridescence of the exceptional object is what is striking, his reflections on routine quotidian experience are also, often, coloured-freighted. Take the poet’s immersion in grey. Grey invokes a state of mind, a colouring of consciousness that is consonant with inwardness and introspection, and reveals, through those modes and moods, a rich, complex encounter with the pressures and paradoxes of existence. In Mallarmé’s poetry, as in his correspondence, grey is a site of meditation; it is a catalyst to thinking with and around colour, and to reflecting on the pressured life of the mind and the emotions. The poet’s expatriate experience of London gives rise to a colour geography where his constrained existence in an ex-centric location summons tones of grey or black (which are redolent of the experience of atmospheric conditions, both natural (mists, fog) and industrial (smog, steam)): the aversive experience of monochrome modernity, a concept to which I will return, is occasionally alleviated by bursts of colour, like the chocolate-colour livery of the Chelsea-line omnibus that unites the poet with his friends, the Yapp family, in the winter of 1862, breaking the cycle of urban exile and solitude, and sustaining convivial companionship.19 Reflecting the poet’s crisis of 1864–9, the dreary greyness of provincial atmosphere and topography materializes an acute sense of existential vacancy and hopelessness, but also, importantly, acts as a foil for imagined experiences of mystery, depth, and brilliance, such that the experience of grey actively spurs visions of pleasure and enchantment. There is the poet-holidaymaker’s desire to seek out ‘verdure’ and the blue of the ‘grande mer’ on the Côte d’Azur to compensate for the ‘aspect incendié’ of the grey granite geology of the Var hinterland (17 August 1868, letter to his friend Henri Cazalis).20 (I shall consider later in Part I the value of azure as ideal and as a source of disconsolation.) Grey, in its own right, ignites the writer’s creative stimulation in everyday culture and in exploratory art: in this respect, Mallarmé’s valorization of grey might be seen to anticipate the recent work of David Batchelor in The Luminous and the Grey (2014) where the equivocations around grey, its lability and its unresolved quality,

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are explored.21 The tonal elegance of grey in fashion and fabric is transposed in the nuanced lexical palette deployed by ‘Mademoiselle Satin’ and ‘Marguerite de Ponty’ in Mallarmé’s chronicles of culture and couture (‘gris perle’, ‘les crème et gris clair de lune’, ‘gris tzarine’).22 In 1891 the poet was instrumental in achieving, for the French state, the purchase of his friend James McNeill Whistler’s Arrangement in Grey and Black, no. 1 (1871) (Plate 2), a painting whose minimalist intensity and chromatic singularity – its suave variations on grey – spoke powerfully to the poet’s privileging of the monochrome for its pureness and its resonance.23 Mallarmé’s responsiveness to the colour of the everyday and of the exceptional is taken forward with a sustained attention to the preservation of the colour of memory. The poet’s (disappointed) anticipation of a Christmas Eve return to his family at Tournon turns on the recurrent memory of their riverside home’s ‘chambre rouge’ (letter to Mme Mallarmé, 19 December 1865).24 Colour forms here a lieu de mémoire as a chromatic memory spurs his longing and signifies the eruptive and the transformative power of the visual encounter articulated in this letter through the remembrance of intimate space and its colour saturation. Colour is a site where psychic and somatic pressures coincide, and from which creative sparks fly. The poet’s bleak experience of Franche-Comté (Besançon) and the French Jura extends through the ‘noirs sapins de la Suisse voisine’ (letter to Léon Dierx, 8 August 1867).25 The same black fir trees (‘ces noirs solitaires’) will be set ablaze (metaphorically) by the ‘or bourdonnant [des vers de Mistral]’, a phrase which conjoins chromatic and acoustic values in the expressed desire to release poetry’s transformative capacity, on the ear and upon the spirit and the imagination (letter to Frédéric Mistral, 8 (?) August 1867).26 Colour often links existential experience to the processes of reading and writing poetry. In a letter to Cazalis on 28 April 1866, Mallarmé recounts the mental anguish and corporeal trouble that are provoked by his agonized labours on his dramatic poem Hérodiade (1864–unfinished): he figures this state of mind and body as a dark, double abyss formed of the existential void (‘le Néant’) and the physiological chasm (his chronic breathing problems). But, he anticipates alleviating his sense of creative despondency via the move from writing at night (‘ce cruel labeur nocturne’) to renewed work on L’Après-midi d’un faune during ‘[d]es belles matinées bleues’ that are synonymous for him with Spring: here colour values slip between material and metaphysical experiences, revealing their transformative potential and their relation to creativity and affect.27 Colour is integral to the ordinary and the extraordinary life of the body and of the mind. Mallarmé reveals colour as a language through which embodied subjectivity, insistently, articulates both its constancy and its eruptive capacity. Embodied colour registers the effects of time, alteration, repetition, and contingency. Colour is read by Mallarmé as an index of the body ‘worked’, sometimes by work itself (notably the labour of writing), sometimes by illness. The tendency of bodies to exhibit sporadic and extreme colouring fascinates the poet. Thus, his epistolary portrait of Rimbaud focuses on the reddened calloused hands of the author of ‘Le Bateau ivre’, perceived by his near-contemporary as a craftsman first and foremost (rather than a genius) (letter of April 1896 to

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M. Harrison Rhodes, in ‘Quelques médaillons et portraits en pied’).28 Colour reflects and forms affect as Mallarmé reveals in his correspondence regarding his infant daughter Geneviève: to Joseph Roumanville (30 December 1864), he writes that the indescribable blue of Geneviève’s eyes turns her into poetry’s very embodiment and causes his creative outputs (namely Hérodiade) to rival (unsuccessfully) for his attention.29 In an arresting instance of colour ekphrasis in his correspondence, Mallarmé tells Théodore Aubanel (6 May 1865) how seeing Geneviève stirs his art-historical memory of a Murillo cherub envisioned against a blue background (a possible allusion to Murillo’s Virgin of Seville (1665–70)).30 At once more prosaic and more disquieting for the poet is the face of Geneviève, in the winter of 1865, covered in crimson splodges (‘toute tachetée de rouge’): her face is not the subject of an early Impressionist work but the site of an alarming manifestation of measles.31 Ideas of canvas, skin, and page converge as sites of chromatic, often monochrome, inscription, in the poet’s letter. Far from locating itself in the realm of Symbolist rarefaction (to which Mallarmé’s reputation confined him until relatively recently), colour in Mallarmé’s writing travels across values that are human, material, metaphoric, abyssal, quotidian, and ideal. Human colour can trigger connections with the world of animals – real and metaphorical – in Mallarmé’s extensive epistolary menagerie. The lexical and lingual articulations of his parsimonious stepmother as she makes her wearisome call to household frugality bring, leaping from her mouth, the ‘souris rouge’ (a figure which rhymes her metaphorized red tongue (‘souris’) with the dreaded word ‘économie’ that the tongue produces persistently) (letter of 4 June 1862 to Cazalis).32 The everyday experience of colour – oscillating between euphoria and disconsolation – filters through Mallarmé’s writing (in both his letters and his poetry), relaying affective responses from humour through despondency to empathy and a settled sense of pleasure in the domestic and familiar. Thus, the colourful plumage of pet birds and the fur of a cat named ‘Neige’, whose swishing white tail regularly obliterates (literally ‘blanks’) his writing (‘elle efface mes vers avec sa queue’), play their part in shaping the poet’s chromatic experience of literary labour. Mallarmé’s naming of Henri Cazalis as a parrot or a cockatoo (29 May 1867) recalls the parrot and the bluebird that are part of Mallarmé’s domestic menagerie at Tournon, as it captures the vividness of Cazalis’s life (‘le bariolage de ta vie’) and the poet’s affection for a friend who responds loyally to his needs.33 Colour fills the object, and the object materializes and shapes colour; beyond this, colour has a resonance that spans visual and acoustic values, investing sight and sound with the fragmentary intensity of affect. The poet’s concern with illumination and incandescence and his attentiveness to scattered light effects in his epistolary writing and in his reflections on painting and the decorative arts bring colour into play in sustained and profound ways. Colour participates in the articulation of value (affective, economic, cultural) in humanhuman and human-animal relations: colour is cultural capital in the social arena, in the material environment, in interart contexts, and, crucially, in the life of the emotions.34

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The examples I have been discussing, drawn from diverse contexts and situations, reveal something of Mallarmé’s rapt attention to the capacity and the agency of colour experienced in the ordinary and the exceptional encounters of self and things in the world, whether these things be physical objects, faces, ideas, values, feelings, responses, animals, atmosphere, or landscape. Colour is integral to the mediation of autobiographical and cultural values, and it plays a structuring role in the exploration of the relations and reversibility of the material and the metaphysical, the social and the intimate, and the domestic and the artistic. Colour values influence the experience of material modernity and aesthetic innovation, and they give flesh to the poet’s reflections on joy and suffering, leisure and work, family and friendship. Colour participates in the protean exploration of affect: it expresses dysphoria and assists, too, in the envisioning of the ideal; it is part of the deep texture of material culture, in the decorative arts. Inextricable from human relations, colour is variably freighted with the experience of beauty, sorrow, humour, playfulness, surprise, anguish, and consolation. I turn now to my principal focus, which is Mallarmé’s art writing and his poetry. I will be exploring his reflections on colour in painting and examining the poet and art essayist’s verbal colour practice. The meditation on colour is a formative feature of Mallarmé’s poetry from the beginning. In the 1864 prose poem ‘Frisson d’hiver’ (published in 1867), an early conversation poem, the poet, echoing the feelings of his interlocutor (his wife Maria), is preoccupied with perceptions of colour’s fading over time. The poem begins with a negative interrogative that tentatively opens up a guided speculation on the autobiographical experience of colour and of time: ‘est-ce qu’il ne te semble pas, même, que les Bengalis [birds of red plumage] et l’oiseau bleu ont déteint avec le temps?’. The question invites ideas of subjective perception, of finitude, of alterations in human affinities, and, perhaps also, of a diminution, real or anticipated, in perceptual, and specifically ophthalmic, acuity. Marie has a passion for faded things: she disdains the crudely coloured, and relishes instead traces of vanishing colour. The poem is a conjugal celebration of the domestic culture of curtains, upholstery, and a mahogany chest of drawers that together enfold and enclose the couple’s cherished memories; it is a paean to colour’s gradual recession and to its enduring capacity to haunt the memory. This poem about the afterlife of colour relates to remembrance and to the past as a richer, neglected store of affect, but only recognized as such in the present where vestigial colour bears the visible traces of ageing and loss such that de-colouration itself becomes an intriguing space of enquiry and interpretation. Faded colour is also a source of consolation in a culture in the throes of modernization (the poem’s external context is the urban capital whose brash streets have supplanted traditional fields of wheat, whose riotous colour (‘hardiesse criarde’) has shattered pale quietude). (In Part III we will see Yves Bonnefoy express a similar critique of the garish 1960s built environment whose chromatic ‘noise’ violates the peacefulness of ancient fields.35) The relation of colour and consciousness informs Mallarmé’s writing across genres as diverse as the art essay, the lecture, poetry (verse and prose),

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and epistolary writing. In his fragmentary project for a study of the science of language, begun and aborted in 1869–70 (‘Notes sur le langage’), Mallarmé offers a prospective appraisal of the linguistic foundations of subjectivity and the selfreflexivity of language.36 In the process, he offers some reflections on colour and light, and on the subjective experience of time, abstraction, and the bourgeois habitat, that recall, in tenor and in atmosphere, some of the spleen and ideal visions of Baudelaire. Written in pencil, in black ink, and in various shades of blue, the feuillets that make up ‘Notes sur le langage’ include a meditation on the pleasure of appreciating antique furniture and the temporary escape from ‘heures’ (whose plural form connotes the implacable drill of clock-time) that is afforded by a privileged immersion in material culture. In the luxurious patinas and the prismatic brilliance of wood inlays (where one senses strains of Baudelaire’s ‘L’Invitation au voyage’), antique furniture reflects the poet’s idea(l) of beauty as ricocheting reflections nurture ‘l’écho d’une sonore profondeur’: this alliance of (chromatic) resplendence and (acoustic) resonance creates ‘un luxe de miroitement irisé pareil à l’opale ou à la nacre, à l’agathe’.37 Here lapidary and musical values form a sounding board for memory work and for a creative imagination that is nourished by a subtle palette of pearlescent and opalescent whites and greys. The immersion in sublime colour, light, and texture makes possible the abstraction of real time, and with this the ‘idéal du plus vrai bonheur’ is discerned and solace fleetingly envisioned. Notwithstanding the fact that, in the early and mid-1870s, Mallarmé’s chronicles of the London International Exhibitions and his writings in La Dernière Mode absorb and celebrate the prodigious culture of colour, often in its decorative, ornamental, and exotic(ist) artefacts, his poetry preserves and perpetuates, as we shall see, the ideal of rareness, privileged reflection, paleness, nudity, and sometimes an intentional colour-resistant (‘incolore’) quality. Certainly, the fulsomeness of colour and its related ‘shrill’ subjectivity are inimical to Mallarmé’s modernist sensibility and to the fractured, elliptical style of his poetry and his related writing. An anti-exoticist and anti-Orientalist note is struck early in his career where Mallarmé repudiates excess colour in his ‘Sonnet à Wyse’, sent to the Irish-born Mistral poet William Bonaparte-Wyse on 2 July 1868: ‘De l’orient passé des Temps / Nulle étoffe jadis venue / Ne vaut la chevelure nue / Que loin des bijoux tu détends’ [From the ancient Orient / No rich cloth ever came that / Rivals with the pure waves of hair / That jewels cast aside you unfold].38 Beyond the spurning of decorative values by a speaker who recognizes the futility of his bid to conceal from himself the Néant (‘moi qui vis parmi les tentures’), it is spareness, purity, and a tenacious resistance to colour effusion (and to expressions of local colour) that characterize the Mallarméan sensibility traced here through empathy with his fellow poet in their mutual acceptance both of finitude and of the urge to embrace life and desire. When we look more deeply at the ‘Sonnet à Wyse’, we discern a mesmeric focus on colour as splintered light (and chiaroscuro darkness) and the acoustic ricochets of ‘or’ (deftly traced by Roger Pearson) combine in their capacity to transform perceptions and saturate object evocations and atmosphere.39

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Making modern, moving colour Accounts of modernism in art have long stressed the pursuit of deconstructed line and an aesthetics that privileges fragmentation, dispersal, ellipsis, and abstraction. Colour in the modernist project is notable for its subsidiary, even relegated, status: this is most strikingly instanced, to take a limit-case, by the chromatic austerity of Cubism’s ‘hermetic’ and analytical phase around 1907–10. In scholarly discussions of modernist experimentalism, colour is underexplored, indeed often overlooked, as a field of critical enquiry; this has much to do with the persisting alignment of colour with childhood, the life of the emotions, and irrationality, areas of human experience traditionally devalued by intellectualist aesthetics. Colour, placed on the side of ‘content’ and the decorative, is perceived at best as an adjunct to modernism’s formal experiment, at worst as a distraction inimical to the pursuit of modernism’s cerebral agenda. In what follows I want to revisit this enduring divide between colour and line that modernism and modernist historiography seem to enforce, or to reinforce. In exploring Mallarmé I will be asking whether colourin-writing extends the colour–line conflict of Aristotelian tradition, or whether colour and line are more deeply and reciprocally imbricated in the modernist text. Can we conceive of a more pliant and productive interrelation of colour and structure in the innovatory aesthetic of Mallarmé? The discussion of colour in Mallarmé’s thought and writing needs to be placed in the wider literary and visual context of the turn to abstraction, which, in its different guises, is foundational to Symbolism as one of the well-springs of interart modernism. The momentum towards abstractionism grows from the early 1860s to the later nineteenth century, in the poetry of Baudelaire, Rimbaud (Illuminations), and Mallarmé, and in the painting of J.M.W. Turner, Manet, Whistler, Redon, and Impressionist painters like Morisot and Pissarro. Symbolism’s flight into non-representationalist space, its turn from the object qua object, imparts fuller agency to colour, as we see in Whistler’s mesmerizing monochromes and Redon’s suggestive polychrome abstractions. And, one might add, in Mallarmé’s own early project for a dramatic poem based on the story of Salome, Hérodiade (1864 onwards). In the ‘Ouverture ancienne d’Hérodiade’ (1866), modernist structure fragments and coalesces around colour instances inscribed with the anguish and the desire of the disconsolate Hérodiade. JeanLuc Steinmetz describes Mallarmé’s achievement in the ‘Ouverture ancienne d’Hérodiade’ as ‘une abstraction baroque remarquable’, and, in many ways, it is a poem whose opulent ornamentalism, rhetorical difficulty, violence, and dramatic resonance look ahead to Yves Bonnefoy’s Du mouvement et de l’immobilité de Douve (1953).40 The overture is punctuated by evocations of crimson and red, which express longing and regret, and conjure a scenario of conflict that alludes to the pressure of modernist momentum (‘Des ors nus fustigeant l’espace cramoisi’, line 3). Challenging the state of psychic dereliction is a remarkable weave of connotations around materializations of white (swan, feather, lace, quill, water lily, diamond, veil) that subjects aberrant crimson to a new interrogatory agency:

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‘Crime ! bûcher ! aurore ancienne ! supplice ! / Pourpre d’un ciel ! Etang de la pourpre complice ! / Et sur les incarnats, grand ouvert, ce vitrail’ (lines 17–19). If colour values contribute to the dramatic power of poetry in Hérodiade, especially in the text’s evocative overture, it is chromatic periphrasis that Mallarmé singles out for its powerful effect, its capacity to summon up a fuller, embodied, multisensorial experience. In a letter to Eugène Lefébure (18 February 1865), the poet evokes the chromatic resonance of the name ‘Hérodiade’ in nourishing thoughts that are dark and red like the open flesh of a pomegranate.41 Thus, sound and sense linked to chromatic value have the capacity to trigger visual, gustatory, and erotic constructions in the mind of readers: La plus belle page de mon œuvre sera celle qui ne contiendra que ce nom divin Hérodiade. Le peu d’inspiration que j’ai eu, je le dois à ce nom, et je crois que si mon héroïne s’était appelée Salomé, j’eusse inventé ce mot sombre, et rouge comme une grenade ouverte.42 The most beautiful page of my writing will be that which contains only the divine name that is Hérodiade. The minimal inspiration that I have had I owe to this name, and I think that, if my heroine had been called Salome, I would have invented this dark word that is red like an opened pomegranate.

Modernist values coincide in the colour periphrasis of the heroine’s name: the sound of the word evokes a remembered or imagined chromatic experience; sound is envisioned as colour and, consequently, materialized as a coloured thing. Mallarmé’s complex poetry embodies the transformative and abstractive agency of the interart project of the later nineteenth century, in particular the modern movement that forms in the wake of Baudelaire and Manet.43 What part does colour practice play in Mallarmé’s oscillating and synthesizing modernism as it combines abstraction with immersion in the profoundly material? How might diverse genres – poetry, correspondence, art writing – interrelate through Mallarmé’s reflections on colour? I will be arguing that colour warrants fresh critical attention in terms of its active conjunction with questions of structure and fragmentation, as integral elements of the poet’s modernist project. Whereas line and colour represent the oppositional terms in an age-old rivalry, at least from Aristotle, central to modernism is the challenge to binary thought and the calling into question of fixed values. Modernism’s privileging of equivocation, paradox, reversibility, and indeterminacy has its well-spring in Baudelaire, a key influence on Mallarmé’s aesthetic thought and practice, and, of course, a major thinker on colour in visual culture. Baudelaire’s ‘Salon de 1846’ includes an important essay on colour, and a paean to the colourist art of Delacroix (in Baudelaire’s eyes, the leading modern painter) that insists on the association of line and kinaesthetic colour in the modernist aesthetic.44 Lloyd Austin has traced Baudelaire’s influence on Mallarmé through the tensions formative of the eleven Parnasse contemporain poems of 1866, especially those shaping the complex notion of spleen that Mallarmé inherits from Baudelaire and that envisions the fractured self torn between the rejection of tawdry reality and

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scepsis towards the unattainable ideal.45 Baudelaire’s ‘Hymne à la beauté’ invokes beauty and horror, spleen and ideal, heaven and the abyss, in order to challenge and abolish binary thinking: with visions of beauty liberated, the concept of fixed values itself is dissolved in a modernist performance of indeterminacy. Thus, the ideal and the real, the material and the abstract, give way in ‘Hymne à la beauté’ to exploratory values which, reflecting the disruptive rhythms of the modern age, are paradoxical, alterable, and endlessly generative of audacious forms of creativity. Baudelaire speculates on equivocal beauty across the poem’s seven stanzas, interrogating traditional assumptions, collapsing together normative distinctions, and embracing the elasticity of values: Viens-tu du ciel profond ou sors-tu de l’abîme, O Beauté ? ton regard, infernal et divin, Verse confusément le bienfait et le crime, Et l’on peut pour cela te comparer au vin. […] Sors-tu du gouffre noir ou descends-tu des astres? Le Destin charmé suit tes jupons comme un chien; Tu sèmes au hasard la joie et les désastres, Et tu gouvernes tout et ne réponds de rien. […] Que tu viennes du ciel ou de l’enfer, qu’importe, Ô Beauté ! monstre énorme, effrayant, ingénu ! Si ton œil, ton souris, ton pied, m’ouvrent la porte D’un Infini que j’aime et n’ai jamais connu ? De Satan ou de Dieu, qu’importe? Ange ou Sirène, Qu’importe, si tu rends, — fée aux yeux de velours, Rythme, parfum, lueur, ô mon unique reine! — L’univers moins hideux et les instants moins lourds? (‘Hymne à la beauté’, stanzas 1, 3, 6, 7) Do you come from Heaven or rise from the abyss, Beauty? Your gaze, divine and infernal, Pours out confusedly benevolence and crime, And one may for that, compare you to wine. […] Do you come from the stars or rise from the black pit? Destiny, bewitched, follows your skirts like a dog; You sow at random joy and disaster, And you govern all things but answer for nothing.

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Whether you come from heaven or from hell, who cares, O Beauty! Huge, fearful, ingenuous monster! If your regard, your smile, your foot, open for me An Infinite I love but have not ever known? From God or Satan, who cares? Angel or Siren, Who cares, if you make, — fay with the velvet eyes, Rhythm, perfume, glimmer; my one and only queen! The world less hideous, the minutes less leaden?46

In a vision that echoes and extends the ideas of ‘Hymne à la beauté’, Baudelaire reflects, in the concluding poem of Les Fleurs du mal, ‘Le Voyage’, on the nature of creative discovery. He revisits the urgency of reaching beyond normative parameters and challenging binary thinking in ways that will inform Mallarmé’s ethos and his aesthetic. The modernist quest for the new has its vital source in the undoing of traditional oppositions and the pursuit of plasticity: ‘Nous voulons […] / Plonger au fond du gouffre, Enfer ou Ciel, qu’importe? / Au fond de l’Inconnu, pour trouver du nouveau’ (‘Le Voyage’, lines 142–4). Paradoxical beauty works to abolish inherited distinctions and to generate art forms that are dynamic and dissonant, and that give rise to such powerful poems as ‘Une charogne’ with its startling revisioning of beauty and taste in the matter of visceral disgust. Mallarmé inherits this tendency towards anti-categorial thinking from Baudelaire, engaging in the dissolution of conceptual boundaries: this has important consequences for practices of colour and structure, enabling a more active interrelation of chromatic and formal values as poetry moves towards more impersonal forms of expression and a more disenchanted and ironic sensibility. At this point I want to look now at Mallarmé’s art writing in its preoccupation with abstraction and colour, before turning to consider his poetry in the context of modern painting. Colour is key to the interart project that links Mallarmé to Manet, Whistler, and Morisot, painters in pursuit of new, abstractive forms characterized by fragmentation, dissolution, and porosity. Mallarmé seizes the chromatic and structural affinities that connect his writerly practice to the work of some of his key interlocutors in modern art, whilst recognizing the poetic values of the work of the painters. Thus, Mallarmé will come to speak of Morisot’s art of ‘poeticizing’ in her pictorial medium, in a retrospective tribute that evokes the artist’s synthesis of structure and abstraction in language that is abstractive in its performative appreciation: Poétiser par art plastique, moyen de prestiges directs, semble, sans intervention, le fait de l’ambiance éveillant aux surfaces leur lumineux secret : ou la riche analyse, chastement pour la restaurer, de la vie, selon une alchimie – mobilité et illusion. (‘Berthe Morisot’, ‘Quelques médaillons et portraits en pied’, Divagations)47 Making poetry through the plastic arts, which is a means of direct magicmaking, seems, without any mediation, to be made possible by the atmosphere

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that awakens the luminous secret of the surfaces: or it is the rich analysis of life, delicately pursued in order to restore that life, according to a form of alchemy – all is movement and illusion.

The relationship of abstraction and chromatic intensity (coupled with rigour and restriction) is synonymous with aesthetic innovation across painting, art writing, and poetry, after Baudelaire. This is variously and powerfully revealed in the pools of glossy black in Manet’s 1872 portrait of Berthe Morisot (Plate 3); the liquid blues and silvers of Whistler’s London and Venice nocturnes (Plate 4), and the precarious spaces of white in Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard.48 The work of these contemporaries (who become close associates and friends) drives the search for purer colour, spurred by the desire to occlude or, at times, even abolish the empirical referent and sound art’s transformative capacity. Let’s turn now to some of the key staging posts of the interart engagement with colour and abstraction. From his early engagement with the work of Manet, Mallarmé is alert to the imbrication of colour and abstraction in visual culture. Indeed, Mallarmé’s defence of the paintings by Manet that had been rejected by the 1874 Salon – Bal masqué à l’Opéra (1873) and Hirondelles (1873) (Plate 5) – focuses on the articulation of colour through abstraction.49 It is in this context, in ‘Le Jury de peinture pour 1874 et M. Manet’, that the poet explores Manet’s palette of blacks (which I also discuss later in this chapter). To begin with Mallarmé’s engagement with Manet’s Hirondelles, we find the poet admiring in this plein air work, probably inspired by Berthe Morisot, the quality of impersonality (or de-personalization) and the dissolution of anecdote that Manet achieves through immersion in the subtleties of grey: Deux dames assises sur l’herbe d’une de ces dunes du nord de la France, s’étendant à l’horizon fermé par le village derrière lequel on sent la mer, tant est vaste l’atmosphère qui entoure les deux personnages. […] ces dames, absorbées dans leur songerie ou leur contemplation, ne sont d’ailleurs que des accessoires dans la composition, comme il sied que les perçoive dans un si grand espace l’œil du peintre, arrêté à la seule harmonie de leurs étoffes grises et d’une après-midi de septembre.50 (my emphasis) Two ladies sitting on the grass in one of the dunes of Northern France that extend to a horizon bordered by a village behind which one senses the sea, so vast is the atmosphere immersing the two figures. […] the ladies, deep in their daydreams or their thoughts, are only in fact accessories in the composition, as befits the painter’s perception of the figures in this immense space; his gaze is absorbed by the harmony produced by their grey clothing and the September afternoon.

Mallarmé captures the patches of variable grey blending with the evocation of the cool, late-summer atmosphere that produces a form of pictorial unity achieved in abstraction. His discourse performs the elision of the human subjects and stresses, in its own abstractive turn, values of space and distance, and, of course, the arresting power of the monochromes. He continues, championing precisely those values that the Salon’s judges and the wider public have condemned as the

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painting’s ‘underdeveloped’ or ‘unfinished’ appearance, its looser, more labile quality, which, for Mallarmé, constitutes its raison d’être and its unity.51 In an unpublished note sent to The Athenaeum in November 1875, Mallarmé discusses Manet’s Le Linge (1875) (Plate 6), praising the artist’s pursuit of dissolution, movement, and the ‘melting’ together of colour and atmosphere. This, together with the poet’s unfolding of that visual process in the abstractive tropes of his art writing, makes the passage worth quoting in extenso: Sur un fond de verdure et d’atmosphère bleuissante qui borne un jardin parisien, une dame en bleu lave, par jeu, ce qui de son linge ne sèche pas encore dans l’air transparent et tiède. Un enfant émerge des fleurs et regarde la lessive maternelle. Le corps de la jeune femme est entièrement baigné et comme absorbé par la lumière qui ne laisse d’elle qu’un aspect à la fois solide et vaporeux, ainsi que le veut le plein air à quoi tout le monde vise aujourd’hui en France : ce phénomène se produit principalement à l’égard des chairs, taches roses mobiles et fondues dans l’espace ambiant.52 (my emphasis) Against a backdrop of greenery, the air tinged with blue, there is a Paris garden where a lady dressed in blue washes, playfully, those items of linen that are not already drying in the clear, warm air. A child emerges from the flowers and observes her mother washing the clothes. The body of the young woman is entirely bathed in the light, almost absorbed by it; this leaves only an aspect of the figure that is both solid and vaporous, precisely as plein-air painting in France today aspires to render things: the phenomenon is observed in particular in the treatment of the flesh and skin, which appear as moving pink patches melted in the ambient space.

The precision and subtlety of Mallarmé’s art writing, as it unfolds, draw us, as readers, into the work of re-figuring in our minds the luminous absorption of the woman’s body, and its dissolution in patches of pink paint. Stressing the signal importance of Le Linge in terms of artistic innovation in the 1870s, Mallarmé resumes and extends his appraisal of the painting, less than a year later, in his seminal essay ‘Les Impressionnistes et Edouard Manet’ (The Art Monthly Review, 30 September 1876). Here Mallarmé reviews the painter’s major works, notably Olympia (1863) and briefly surveys Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863), L’Exécution de Maximilien (1868–9), and Un coin de bal à l’Opéra (1873). Focusing on colour and form in Le Linge, Mallarmé again develops a heuristic approach that draws the reader (and the potential viewer) into the shared appreciation of the material qualities of the artist’s work. Thus, he begins to nurture the reader’s capacity for simultaneous focus on colour and abstraction or dissolution as a more authentic, truer representation of the world: la lumière naturelle du jour, qui pénètre et modifie tout, tout en restant invisible, règne dans ce tableau exemplaire appelé Le Linge, que nous allons de suite étudier, et qui est tout un répertoire complet et définitif de toutes les idées actuelles et de leurs moyens d’exécution.

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Quelque frais feuillage de coloration égale, celui d’un jardin à la ville, tient dans ses mailles un flot d’air matinal d’été. Voici une jeune femme, vêtue de bleu, qui lave du linge […] jailli d’un fouillis de fleurs, un enfant regarde sa mère ; voilà pour le sujet. […] [le tableau] est inondé d’air. Partout l’atmosphère, lumineuse et transparente, est aux prises avec les figures, les vêtements, le feuillage, semblant s’approprier un peu de leur substance et de leur solidité, cependant que leurs contours, mangés par le soleil caché et consumés par l’espace, tremblent, se fondent et s’évaporent dans l’air ambiant, qui dérobe en apparence leur réalité aux figures pour préserver leur véridique aspect.53 (my emphasis) The natural light of day, that penetrates and alters everything, whilst remaining invisible, reigns in the exemplary painting entitled Le Linge to which we turn now, and which is a definitive summum of the current ideas [in painting] and their means of execution. Some fresh foliage of even coloration, belonging to a garden in the city, holds in its mesh the flow of air of a summer morning. Here is a young woman, dressed in blue, who is washing linen […] springing up from a mass of flowers, a child looks at her mother: that is the subject. […] [the painting] exudes fresh air. Everywhere the atmosphere, luminous and transparent, engages the figures, the clothes, and the foliage, and it seems to take on something of their substance and solidness, whilst their contours, devoured by the hidden sun and swallowed by the space, tremble, dissolve, and evaporate in the ambient air, which seems to obscure the reality of the figures in order to preserve their true appearance.

Bypassing the normative disegno/colore dualism, Mallarmé’s lexical choices highlight the porosity of substance and atmosphere and the interchangeability of the solid and the immaterial. His response to Le Linge tracks how colour and form, structure and materiality, collaborate to generate the essential truth of modern painting – that is, invention, not imitation or verisimilitude. He develops an analogous verbal response that is founded on evocations of harmony, movement, dissolution, and the elision of subject-matter. In his art writing of the  1870s we find Mallarmé working through the ideas he had sketched in his letter to Cazalis in October 1864 (relative to the Hérodiade project): there Mallarmé had stressed that his creative purpose was not to depict the subject itself but rather the effect that it produces, an objective consonant with the modernists’ will to resist representationalism and to enable the active reception of the work by the viewer or reader. More than this, when one medium (writing) transposes the values and processes of another (visual art) as Mallarmé’s art writing does in its focus on dissolution and abstraction, the intermedial capacity of both media – textual and visual – is revealed as an urgent site of scholarly study.54 In composing his tribute to Morisot’s art for the retrospective exhibition of the painter’s work in 1896, Mallarmé articulates, with an enduring sense of

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performativity, the painter’s (and the poet’s own) resistance to representation. He creates in his verbal medium a compelling synergy of abstraction and colour as he strives to capture the delicate agency of Morisot’s art and the subtle revelations it offers the attentive viewer: ‘la poudre fragile du coloris se défend par une vitre, divination pour certains’.55 Mallarmé affirms that chromatic values in Morisot’s work are not those of ‘la tribu’, echoing his own aspiration, expressed twenty years earlier, that poetry strives to ‘donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu’ (‘Le Tombeau d’Edgar Poe’, 1876). Chromatic values give themselves to be discerned by the few, a remark that reflects values of aesthetic exclusivity and seeks to underscore the anti-mimetic, anti-telic thrust of Morisot’s – and Mallarmé’s – art. The poet’s focus on Impressionism’s pursuit of ‘purer’ colour, which, for Michel Draguet, editing the Ecrits sur l’art, is ‘la logique alternative au dessin nominal’, a remark which, as it recognizes colour values, promptly endorses the traditional separation of line and colour, and confines Mallarmé in a binary which the poet’s writing, as we have already seen, resists and complicates in practice.56 Mallarmé is doing something quite different to what Draguet surmises: the poet and art writer is taking forward his subtle attention to colour in parallel with a reflection on form and the armature of the work, concepts that are consonant with his pursuit of poetic structure and with his (and Morisot’s) commitment to idea and to creative intentionality. So, let’s return to the poet’s tribute to the painter with its enraptured understanding of Morisot’s achievement in synthesizing abstractive and structural principles:57 Ici, que s’évanouissent, dispersant une caresse radieuse, idyllique, fine, poudroyante, diaprée, comme en ma mémoire, les tableaux, reste leur armature, maint superbe dessin […] pour attester une science dans la volontaire griffe, couleurs à part, sur un sujet.58 Here, the paintings seem to vanish, scattering a radiant, idyllic, fine, powdery, prismatic caress, as they do in my memory. All that remains is their form; a multitude of superb drawn lines that attest to the expertise of the intentional style – colours are something else – as it creates its subject.

Mallarmé’s poetic reading of interior space in an unspecified painting of Morisot unfolds to reveal a more abstract and generalizable evocation of Morisot’s art that combines, in the poetics of his art writing, chromatic discernment with structural ellipsis: Loin ou dés la croisée qui prépare à l’extérieur et qui maintient, dans une attente verte d’Hespérides aux simples oranges et parmi la brique rose d’Eldorados, tout à coup l’irruption à quelque carafe, éblouissement du jour, tandis que multicolore il se propage en perses et en tapis réjouis, le génie, distillateur de la Crise, où cesse l’étincelle des chimères au mobilier, est, d’abord, d’un peintre.59 In the distance or at the window pane that draws us towards the exterior and that maintains, in a Hesperidean green with simple oranges and among Eldoradan pink brick, suddenly there is an eruption on some carafe, dazzling daylight,

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whilst that multicoloured light reaches joyously into Persian carpets and rugs, the genius […] belongs in the first instance to a painter.

Mallarmé’s ecstatic engagement with light, with prismatic effects, and with modern painting as an eruptive process seems almost to enact the viewer’s – or the reader’s – awakening to the mesmeric power of fractured colour in the modernist work. Consolatory or celebratory, colour is woven into the luminous fabric of material, kinetic, and haptic values, and in this we discern jointly in Morisot’s experimentalism and in Mallarmé’s transposition of visual effects in his textual medium, a forerunner of the joie de vivre that Matisse will celebrate in the early years of the twentieth century. At this point, I want to draw some of the ideas I’ve been exploring in Mallarmé’s art writing into a consideration of his poetry that is informed by the poet’s response to innovation in visual culture. From the early 1870s Mallarmé is drawn to the work of Manet and, increasingly, to Impressionist art, discerning its anti-mimetic quality, its dissolution of subject-matter, its abstractive turn, and its self-reflexivity. Mallarmé works in ways broadly analogical in his own writerly medium: he pursues ellipsis and indeterminacy, fragmentation of form, and verbal abstraction, and his colour values resist anecdotal or symbological recuperation. ‘L’Azur’, Mallarmé’s first major poem (1864), invites us to reflect on colour in the envisioning of the ideal and on colour as concept.60 Read in parallel with the poet’s letter to Cazalis of 7 [?] January 1864, where he outlines his ‘art poétique’, ‘L’Azur’ stages the tension between the real and the ideal through the poet’s conflicted relation to l’azur, the concept-word that enfolds within it colour value and ideality, materiality and the absolute.61 ‘Azur’ is foundational in the (impossible) mediation of the ideal and in the expression of irony that springs from the realization of aborted hope. In his letter to Cazalis, the poet reflects on values of poetic craft (and on literature as hard graft), aesthetic design, art, reader reception, intentionality, dissonant beauty, and on the exploration of his own existential crisis. Mallarmé asks Cazalis, as reader, to consider how the poet’s thinking shaped the design of ‘L’Azur’ as it explores the rejection of pure poetry and strives to produce beauty out of dissonance and disillusion. The production of poetic effect springs from the coincidence of sound and semantics, and the translation of idea through colour concept; ‘Azur’ is the inaugurating value, and, for Mallarmé, it is generative of the poem: il n’y a pas un mot qui ne m’ait coûté plusieurs heures de recherche, et [que] le premier mot qui revêt la première idée, outre qu’il tend par lui-même à l’effet général du poème, sert encore à préparer le dernier. […] L’effet produit […] voilà ce que je cherche.62 (emphasis original) There is not a single word that did not require several hours of research, and […] the first word which clothes the first idea, apart from the fact that it contributes to the general effect of the poem, serves in fact to usher in the final word. The effect achieved is what I seek.

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Poetic effect is thus envisioned as the combined product of authorial intentionality and optimal reader receptiveness to its ideas and their afterlife. Thus, Mallarmé reflects on the influence of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Raven’ on his poem. ‘L’Azur’ is informed by Poe’s principle of writerly intentionality and active reader reception, and Cazalis is invited to test this, whilst being left in no doubt as to the poet’s belief in the primacy of poetic effect in the shaping of readerly affect (‘l’âme du lecteur jouit absolument comme le poète a voulu qu’elle jouit’). Central to modern sensibility is the will to impersonality, a key value for Mallarmé, and inextricably linked to this is the modernist crisis of subjectivity that coincides with the real-life existential crisis that the poet suffers from 1864: ‘pour débuter d’une façon plus large, et approfondir l’ensemble, je ne parais pas dans la première strophe. L’azur torture l’impuissant en général’.63 The value of Azure that tortures the feeble mind moves beyond the visual and chromatic to conjure up an active force that pushes consciousness to breaking point, precipitating a mental crisis. Modernist impersonality and a fuller – both wider and deeper – analytical probing of dysphoria are consonant with the evacuation of a Romantic or solipsistic self, and with the repudiation of metaphysical aspiration. The outlining of a revised vision involves scepsis and irony, and marks the turn to matters of human scale and to the (vicarious) embrace of proximate pleasures: la prière au Cher Ennui confirme mon impuissance. […] Le ciel est mort! Et, de suite, muni de cette admirable certitude, j’implore la Matière […] je veux goûter au bonheur commun de la foule. the appeal to Beloved Boredom confirms my powerlessness. […] Heaven is dead! And, straightaway, armed with this admirable certainty, I beseech Matter […] I want to experience the everyday happiness of the crowd.

If the modernist vision reveals a fractured self caught between ideal and material, the exasperated rejection of transcendental values and the desperate or deflated search for the real articulate the lucid realization of the self ’s limitation, the precariousness of agency, and the looming capitulation to powerlessness: ‘Je dis: Je veux! Mais l’ennemi est un spectre, le ciel mort revient. […] je veux fuir encore mais je sens mon tort et avoue que je suis hanté’. The poem envisions briefly the desired horizon where the real would be abolished and beauty reign.64 The poet invokes the azure-coloured ideal, then abruptly seeks to cancel it, but fails to. The azure ideal is repudiated and remembered, and, ultimately, it passes phantomatically into the future (‘L’Azur! L’Azur! L’Azur!) as colour and as sound (sound in the words of the poem, and sound transposed in the resonance of church bells). The ideal persists in paradoxical parallel with the urban hell and the mental wasteland that both lure and repel the poet (‘Le poète impuissant […] maudit son génie / À travers un désert stérile de douleurs’, line 4). ‘L’Azur’ unfolds a dystopian study in yellow and black that is a critique of material modernization. (Mallarmé’s poem reveals a proleptic chromatic affinity with Paul Valéry’s vision, early in his Cahiers, of an abject old man, a portrait in yellow and black of urban decay and disconsolation.)65 The poet’s critique of ‘sereine ironie’

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contains a note of oxymoronic equivocation as it explores the (limited) scope for reversibility: stanzas 3–6 stage a vision of fog and smoke rising; the apostrophe to Ennui expresses the poet’s growing exasperation, as he summons thick fogs to ascend, and challenges Boredom (‘Cher Ennui’, line 15) to rise from its Lethean source and stop up with sludge the ‘blue holes’ cruelly pecked out by birds. Dreary chimneys smoke, and a moving prison of soot with its ‘noires traînées’ is urged to extinguish the sun as the active pursuit of post-Romantic spleen resumes. Yellow gives way now to unnameable black: ‘Le soleil se mourant jaunâtre à l’horizon / Le ciel est mort’ (lines 20–21). ‘L’Azur’ is a poem that looks back to Baudelaire and, from an interart and art-historical perspective, to the abstractive sfumato of the modern artists (one thinks of Turner’s Dudley, Worcestershire (c. 1832)) (Plate 7), just as it looks ahead to the streaked black and yellow of Pissarro’s Boulevard Montmartre at Night (1897) or projects forwards, in the imbrication of corporeal and affective values, to the smudgy abstraction of Patrick Heron’s Yellow Painting (1958/59) (Plate 8).66 The influence of Baudelaire is pervasive in ‘L’Azur’, visible – and ‘felt’ – in the exploration of spleen, the evocation of atmospheric conditions, the poetics of reversibility, and the colour values of Mallarmé’s poem. The yellow saturation of Baudelaire’s ‘Les Sept Vieillards’ (‘un brouillard sale et jaune inondait tout l’espace’, line 9) prefigures Mallarmé’s sickly sun. Already, in a letter to Cazalis of 4 June 1862, Mallarmé had evoked his sense of ‘spleen printanier’: the ‘stérilité curieuse que le printemps avait installé en moi’ that gives rise to what he calls a new poetic genre where ‘effets matériels’, such as blood and nerves, are explored through a series of mental responses and states of consciousness extended in material and chromatic ways. Mallarmé had offered Cazalis ‘Vere novo … ’, the first version of ‘Renouveau’, as an example of this Spring-time spleen, a sensibility that seems to prefigure T.S. Eliot’s ‘April is the cruellest month’ trope in The Wasteland (1922).67 The original ‘Vere novo … ’ reveals ‘dans mon être […] un sang plombé préside’ (line 3), but the vision of lead-black blood is replaced in the definitive version by chromatic periphrasis in ‘le sang morne’ (‘Renouveau’) and by a shift from the elemental to the affective and atmospheric. In the development of transnational modernist poetry ‘L’Azur’, with its autumnal values and its searing irony, looks prospectively to the purulent yellow light evoked in Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (1915), which echoes Mallarmé’s ‘yellow’ experience of London’s ‘brouillard […] si jaune’ in Winter 1862 immersing Hyde Park in ‘solitude’. The disquieting (and poetically enabling) fog or smog is impenetrably yellow or, more disturbingly, yellowish, a chromatic equivocation that captures the tension, the in-distinction, the dysphoria, and the creativity of Mallarméan ennui. Disconsolate city atmospheres have a stimulating effect on thought and mood, in the poetry of both the early modernist Mallarmé and the high modernist Eliot.68 Here is Eliot: The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes, Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening, Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,

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Colourworks Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys, Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap, And seeing that it was a soft October night, Curled once about the house, and fell asleep. (ll. 15–22)

Modernism is, as well as a structural and formal venture, a chromatic project, and a space of existential enquiry, as Mallarmé articulates powerfully in a letter to Cazalis in July 1863, only a few months before he began composing ‘L’Azur’.69 The poet is writing amid – and about – the crisis that he is experiencing in London, where ‘ennui’ and illness combine at this point with examination pressure to induce an experience of chromatic dullness: hues of bright red and orange are sinking into faded tones reminiscent of infirmary gruel and building plaster (‘les rayons [de soleil] semblent avoir pris quelque chose de blafard aux pauvres murs d’hôpitaux’). Mallarmé’s letter to his friend tracks the migration of colour effects from material surface to immaterial light, uncovering the active agency of chromatic values in shaping personal and poetic meaning. The letter develops into a remarkable meditation on yellow and the wholesale capitulation to sickliness and torpor: Mon mal a été une éruption, et, depuis, je suis tout jaune – comme un envieux ou comme un coing. Sang jaune, yeux jaunes, face jaune – et pensée jaune. Est-ce ennui? Est-ce appauvrissement du sang? My trouble was an eruption and since that time I have been entirely yellow – like a jealous person or like a quince. Yellow blood, yellow eyes, yellow countenance – and yellow thoughts. Is boredom the cause? Does it mean my blood is bad?

Physiological and psychological experiences coincide, revealing something of the capacity of colour to work across the boundaries between sensual and emotional values, as well as its potential to travel between epistolarity and poetry. The poet’s encounter with colour reduces the most diverse and singular experiences to the self-same: everything is yellow, and yellow is all that there is. Embodied subjectivity combines physical malaise and mental turmoil, corporeal disorder and affective disarray. Internal and external signs of disturbance and disorientation are expressed strikingly through monochrome colour. Contributing to abstraction, colour dissolves the boundaries between inside and out, between face and thought, between human form and the humble quince. Monochrome saturation evokes a state of physical debility and mental torpor, and one that echoes in the image of ‘les plis jaunes de la pensée’ in the ‘Ouverture Ancienne d’Hérodiade’ (line 41), a text that is contemporary with the poet’s mental crisis and his parallel experience of poor physical health.70 The city is both an unquenchable source for the modern and modernist lyric and a resonant subject of painting across the long nineteenth century and beyond. The tensions between desire and dysphoria define the urban space in which Mallarmé develops the chromatic dimension of his modernist project. Urban space – the subject of poetry, of correspondence, and of visual culture – is for the

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artist (poet, painter, letter-writer) compelling and unfathomable, immediate and unknowable, sordid and seductive. In this respect too, Mallarmé was captivated by Baudelaire’s visionary evocation of dysphoria in Tableaux parisiens (added to the 1861 edition of Les Fleurs du mal), a signal source of inspiration that filters into his poetry and other writing. In late 1862 when Mallarmé was immersed in his first London experience, at once captivated and overwhelmed by the teeming beauty and the alienating strangeness of the city, Baudelaire was busy reviewing the etchings of the young American artist James McNeill Whistler and their atmospheric evocation of the everyday contexts of the working riverside city: industrial, commercial, and social worlds of Rotherhithe and Limehouse (1859–61).71 In his essay ‘L’Eau-forte est à la mode’ (1862), Baudelaire empathizes with Whistler’s treatment of subject-matter and atmosphere. Deploying figurative language and discursive structures that are reminiscent of his own spleen and Tableaux parisiens poems, Baudelaire explores, rhapsodically almost, the abstractive and atmospheric values of Whistler’s work: tout récemment, un jeune artiste américain, M. Whistler, exposait à la galerie Martinet une série d’eaux-fortes, subtiles, éveillées comme l’improvisation et l’inspiration, représentant les bords de la Tamise; merveilleux fouillis d’agrès, de vergues, de cordages; chaos de brumes, de fourneaux et de fumées tirebouchonnées; poésie profonde et compliquée d’une vaste capitale. (my emphasis)72 very recently, a young American artist, Mr Whistler, exhibited a series of etchings at the Martinet Gallery. They were subtle, and lively like improvisation and inspiration, and represented the banks of the Thames: a marvellous mesh of tackles, yards, and ropes; a chaos of mist, furnaces, and spiralling smoke; this is the profound, complex poetry of a vast capital city.

In this striking foregrounding of interart values, Baudelaire invokes the poetry of visual representation, transposing in his own medium the complex play of materiality and abstraction, of present-ness and impalpability. As the art writer conjures up the intriguing imbrication of physical and metaphysical values, there are distinct echoes of the opening lines of Baudelaire’s ‘Les Petites Vieilles’ (‘Dans les plis sinueux des vieilles capitales / Où tout, même l’horreur, tourne aux enchantements’, lines 1–2). The verbal poetry of Baudelaire’s art writing and the visual poetry of Whistler’s etchings reveal strong affinities through their exploratory representation of urban space: their interart sensibility is taken forward through Mallarmé’s writing. In ways broadly analogous to Baudelaire’s ekphrastic and abstractive response to Whistler’s etchings, Mallarmé’s ‘L’Azur’ unfolds the visuality of poetic expression, and invites deeper study.73 ‘L’Azur’ captures the spiralling smoke of industry, tracks the city’s inchoate geometry, and envisions the modern dystopia in monochrome abstraction: it does this in ways that invite readings, not only in intermedial studies, but in the contemporary environmental humanities.74 ‘L’Azur’ explores the contingency and the capacity of art (drawing and poetry) to articulate abstraction

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through materials, objects, and things which, in the empirical world, are real and proximate, but also ephemeral and practically intangible (the equivalent of Baudelaire’s rolling together of ‘fouillis’, ‘fumées’, and ‘chaos’ in his evocation of the atmospherics and the style of Whistler’s etchings). This reciprocity of values between poetry, art writing, and visual culture shapes modernism’s development in this period, as Peter Dayan has demonstrated decisively.75 Connecting Mallarmé’s ‘L’Azur’, Baudelaire’s art writing, and Whistler’s etchings is, I suggest, a poetics of interart empathy founded on indeterminacy and dissolution that responds, ironically and critically, to the pressures of material modernity, and that seizes, too, the potential for a radical, modernist beauty with colour values at its core. Mallarmé’s first impressions of London are coloured black, white, and grey. Holed up in his lodgings, the chronically coughing poet chokes on the fumes of his coal fire; when he ventures to open his bedroom window, he finds that ‘le brouillard sale de novembre [lui] emplissait les poumons’.76 In the prose poem ‘La Pipe’ (1864), written after Mallarmé’s return to France and his move to Tournon, a proto-Proustian memory comes spiralling out of the inhaling of tobacco smoke as the poet’s involuntary memory is stimulated by the immediacy of taste and smell, and he recalls the unfolding of a vision of London as he had experienced it during his exile: je ne m’attendais pas à la surprise que préparait cette [pipe] délaissée, à peine eus-je tiré la première bouffée, j’oubliai mes grands livres à faire, émerveillé, attendri, je respirai l’hiver dernier qui revenait. Je n’avais pas touché à la fidèle amie depuis ma rentrée en France, et tout Londres, Londres tel que je le vécus en entier à moi seul, il y a un an, est apparu. I was not expecting the surprise that this abandoned [pipe] triggered; hardly had I taken a first puff than I forgot my great book projects; marvelling and suddenly moved, I breathed in the memory of last winter. This was the first time I had turned to my faithful friend since returning to France, and all of London, London as I had experienced it completely and utterly alone, one year before, appeared before me.

‘La Pipe’ explores exile and estrangement in a deep meditation on personal memory and poetic inspiration that is consonant with the sensibility of ‘L’Azur’ and with Whistler’s atmospheric evocation of the city. Memories of his London square and his lodgings are re-captured in the poet’s monochrome materializations of animal, mineral, and element (‘le maigre chat noir’, ‘le charbon’, ‘[le] seau de tôle’, ‘la corbeille de fer’). The visualization of the domestic scene is punctuated by the dissonant sounds of coal rattling into the hearth and the insistent raps of the postman at the door. The evocation of greyness in the image of the maid’s dull, dust-coloured dress (‘longue robe terne couleur de poussière’) recalls a period punctuated by the poet’s separations from his wife Maria. If the glimpse of ‘feuilles bleues de soleil’ offers brief consolation in an image that is suggestive of the productive respite from angst and the poet’s

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creative disponibilité, the poem’s engulfing melancholy materializes in the explicit and the unspoken values of white, grey, and black. Olfactory memory stirs visual memory where the recollection of pervasive tobacco smell evokes a dark room with furniture covered in coal dust, traversed by a ‘maigre chat noir’ (of unmistakable Baudelairean descent) and by a rubicund servant (‘la bonne aux bras rouges’): here the indexical use of colour combines with images of kinetic agency, whether the sickly, slinking feline or the robustly gesticulating maid, to conjure up effort and ennui, banality and predictability, as other monochromes – now less indexical and more evocative – come into play as the poem extends its palette of black, grey, and white, intensified by the sfumato quality that Mallarmé transposes from art to poetry. The poet evokes the ‘steamer mouillé de bruine et noirci de fumée’, and this nominal phrase takes us simultaneously towards monochrome saturation and towards abstraction with only a lingering hint of colour’s material source; the poem reveals a sfumato impression suggestive of the smudging of line. Here the poet moves through evocations of atmosphere and material process (surfaces dripping with wet fog and streaked with soot, like the ‘cendres monotones’ of the fog in ‘L’Azur’, line 9) towards unnameable colour, for chromatic values in Mallarmé are more often immanent than explicit. Details become erased or blurred as the sfumato causes the monochrome dissipation of the boundaries between objects and processes; the turn to abstraction coincides with the pursuit of verbal precision that is meteorological and almost haptic as the reader is invited to imagine the feel of chill and wetness, as well as to see and smell the peculiar remembered smog (‘les chers brouillards qui emmitouflent nos cervelles et ont, là-bas, une odeur à eux, quand ils pénètrent sous la croisée’). Feelings of mental deadening and physical discomfort mingle with a vague sense of pleasure in the immersive experience of atmosphere; smog stimulates a keener sensuousness; solitude stirs alertness to ambiance in the synaesthetic mixing of visual, olfactory, and acoustic experiences: the poet’s concern with atmosphere – with clouds of dust, soot, smoke, and rain – reveals the relation of the mobile texture of colour to the articulation of remembered loss and melancholy.77 There is, then, a complex sensibility and sensorium at work, drawing together reflections on the pursuit of creativity, the critique of material (urban) modernity, and the capacity of aesthetic modernism (in terms of allying poetry and affect). The exploration of chromatic beauty experienced in disconsolation forms a strong connection between Mallarmé and Whistler. Although the two would only meet in 1887 (through Théodore Duret), their mutual immersion in the atmosphere of the modern metropolis and its transformative effects emerges in their respective media and through their monochrome colour practice.78 The aesthetics of Whistler’s London etchings and of Mallarmé’s ‘L’Azur’ and ‘La Pipe’ reveal convergent sensibilities in terms of colour and abstractionism that unsettle the boundaries between visual and textual (and acoustic) media as the material world is envisioned, embraced (ecstatically or ironically), and dissolved. The titles of Whistler’s Nocturne Blue and Silver: Cremorne Lights (1872) and his Nocturne Blue and Gold: Old Battersea Bridge (1872–5) capture ideas of sound harmony and colour precision, and intimations of a consolatory ethos that seeks in

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the beauty of colour, a source of serenity.79 In the abstraction of his titles, Whistler makes clear his pursuit of an innovative art that erases narrative elements and relates form and colour. Thus, he reflects on his adoption of the term ‘nocturne’ (suggested to him by his patron Frederick Leyland), stressing the defining interrelation of colour and line: By using nocturne I wished to indicate an artistic interest alone, divesting the picture of any outside anecdotal interest which might otherwise have attached to it. A nocturne is an arrangement of line, form, and colour first.80

So, colour is not decorative but has formative and structuring agency in the painting. Whistler’s oils seem actively to invite comparison with Mallarmé’s ‘L’Azur’. Monochrome colour is integral to the articulation of affect where the sounding of environment and atmosphere reveals a deep relationship between colour and consciousness. The experience of being-in-the-world is captured in the tension between monochrome intensity and a sense of existential vacancy in both Whistler’s art and Mallarmé’s writing; depopulated spaces of the city are figured by evocations of desert (‘L’Azur’) and dead trees (‘La Pipe’), and by the desolate expanses of water in Whistler’s studies of London’s riverside. Chromatic values articulate the experience of fracture and disenchantment. Colour participates in modernism’s lyric and pictorial projects, not only in the shift from representationalist to abstractionist values, but also through the reversibility of material and ideal in the displacements of memory and desire. Colour plays a formative role in the merging of values, always with a sense of intentional restriction (in terms of the palette of Whistler, and of Mallarmé in his medium) and intensity, as ‘La Pipe’ and ‘L’Azur’ reveal. Colour restriction is a defining feature of Mallarmé’s writing that has its creative corollary in chromatic concentration, rather than profusion. The poet makes precisely this point in relation to ‘L’Azur’, indicating that his objective was to avoid ‘fioriture’, a synonym for the kind of ornamentation that traditionally subordinates line to colour. Mallarmé’s modernism, in its pursuit of ellipsis and intentional restraint, materializes in the chromatic minimalism that captures intense perception or memory by means of fragment or trace.81 Thus, the ruddy flesh of the maid in ‘La Pipe’ instances, in fragment and in synecdoche, how monochrome modernism resists the profuse and the ornamental in its spareness and concentration. Some twenty years after the composition of ‘L’Azur’, Mallarmé would translate Whistler’s ‘Ten O’Clock Lecture’ (which the artist had delivered on 20 February 1885), an exploration of aesthetic values that reveals strong affinities with the poet’s own values. The ‘Ten O’Clock Lecture’ invokes seminal modernist ideas around transfiguration, dissolution, and the rejection of mimesis. In the text of his lecture, Whistler unfolds a landscape reminiscent of Rimbaud’s Une saison en enfer (‘Je m’habituai à l’hallucination simple: je voyais très franchement une mosquée à la place d’une usine’), or of Proust’s transformative vision of Venice (where, in Albertine disparue, a Renaissance palazzo morphs into ‘une chaîne de falaises de

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marbre’).82 Such visions turn on metamorphosis and tranfiguration, whilst also articulating the imperative of learning to see and to read the material world discerningly, which is to say imaginatively, metaphorically, and analogically.83 I quote Whistler at length here for his lecture is a ravishing example of poetic writing on the subject of painting: And when the evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry, as with a veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky, and the tall chimneys become campanili, and the warehouses are palaces in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens, and fairy-land is before us – then the wayfarer hastens home; the working man and the cultured one, the wise man and the one of pleasure, cease to understand as they have ceased to see, and Nature, who for once, has sung in tune, sings her exquisite song to the artist alone, her son and her master […] He does not confine himself to purposeless copying, without thought each blade of grass as commended by the inconsequent, but, in the long curve of the narrow leaf, corrected by the straight tall stem, he learns how grace is wedded to dignity; how strength enhances sweetness, that elegance shall be the result. […] In the citron wing of the pale butterfly with its dainty spots of orange – he sees before him the stately halls of fair gold, with their slender saffron pillars – and is taught how the delicate drawing, high upon the walls, shall be traced in tender tones of orpiment, and repeated by the base, in notes of graver hue. (my emphasis)

And here is Mallarmé’s translation: Et quand la brume du soir vêt de poésie un bord de rivière, ainsi que d’un voile et que les pauvres constructions se perdent dans le firmament sombre, et que les cheminées hautes se font campaniles, et que les magasins sont, dans la nuit, des palais, et que la cité entière est comme suspendue aux cieux – et qu’une contrée féerique gît devant nous – le passant se hâte vers le logis, travailleur et celui qui pense ; le sage et l’homme de plaisir cessent de comprendre comme ils ont cessé de voir, et la nature qui, pour une fois, a chanté juste, chante un chant exquis pour le seul artiste, son fils et son maître […]. Il ne se borne pas à copier oisivement, et sans pensée, chaque brin, comme l’en avisent des inconséquents, mais dans la courbe longue d’une feuille étroite, corrigé par le jet élancé de sa tige, il comprend comment la grâce se marie à la dignité, comment la douceur se rehausse de force, pour que résulte l’élégance.

[…] Avec l’aile couleur citron du papillon pâle, ses fines taches couleur orange, il voit devant lui les pompeux palais d’or clair, non sans leurs fluets piliers safrannés, et

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Whistler’s writing is performative as his words work their transfigurative magic, generating visions of alteration and metamorphosis in a philosophy of aesthetic innovation that foregrounds artistic process and the work-in-progress. The cancellation of ‘ordinary’ vision (instanced in art by realism) precedes purer poetic revelation.85 Thus, the text articulates a philosophy of modernism, as it puts to work tropes of dissolution, erasure, generation, education, and refiguring, and celebrates the modern painter’s rapt attention to colour and its translation into art and into art writing. To return for a moment to the matter of titles. Whistler’s choice of titles tends to privilege the artist’s colour work and subordinate subject-matter, displacing the referent, which is frequently absorbed into the sub-title: I am thinking here of his Symphony in White, No. 2 (1864) (Plate 9); of the Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Artist’s Mother (1871); and Symphony in Flesh Colour and Pink: Portrait of Mrs Frances Leyland (1871–4); and, much later, of his portrait of Mallarmé’s daughter Rose et gris: Geneviève Mallarmé (1897) (private collection).86 If the title ‘L’Azur’ is an early poetic move of Mallarmé’s in the direction of chromatic abstraction and the impersonal, the poet’s discussion of paintings takes writerly abstraction a step further with the frequent eclipse of titles, as in his extensive evocation of Morisot’s work. In this the poet and art essayist is affirming the modern painter’s resistance to representationalism and his subordination of narrative telos. The titles of Mallarmé’s poems tend towards the generic, the minimalist, and the serial, and his practice extends to nontitling, as if he were striving to avoid the indicative title that will pre-condition the reader’s expectations and ‘set’ the reception of the text.87 Mallarmé’s resistance to titles in his poetry has been much commented upon by Robert Greer Cohn, and subsequently by Jacques Derrida.88 In La Dissémination, Derrida reflects on Mallarmé’s active suspension of titles and his eschewal of the idea of a text’s ‘capital’.89 Derrida also explores the suspensive value of titles where these do appear in the poet’s writing. The title is the site where the poet suspends a metaphorical lamp over his work, such that the suspended title is like ‘un lustre de théâtre’.90 (Derrida’s theatre-lamp figure brings to mind Manet’s suspension of light over the trapeze artist and her audience in Un bar aux Folies-Bergère (1882), and thus its illumination of the painting itself as performance.) When the title is suppressed, the poet sources in that silence, in the space that is blanc/blank, poetry’s inaugural force and its generative momentum ‘comme à la ressource d’un blanc germinal ou séminal’.91 The matter of titles (or their absence) calls up the notion of the blank, linking verbal representation again with monochrome colour, with white. In ways more chromatically focused than most readers of Mallarmé, and more elliptical, Derrida traces the poet’s trajectory as it spirals out from the pursuit of the disappearance (desired lack and productive absence) of a too voluble title to the audacious immersion in white that is the chromatic

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signature of his experimentalism in Un coup de dés; the title has optimal and optimizing value when it is blank.92 The principle of active reception is central here: a tenet of the modernist work is its pursuit of openness and its activation of the reader as a dynamic participant in the creation of the work. Language, which is already a form of absolute absence from the thing, draws the reader into the active work of preparing to create the text or envision the image. Working across the boundaries between art writing and poetry, but with a fuller focus now on poetry, I turn to Mallarmé’s monochrome modernism, and explore specifically black, azure, and white as sites of tension and equivocation in Poésies. To focus chromatically on the material and the metaphysical in Mallarmé takes us into the semantic field of the ideal (figured variously as azure, white, blank, ethereal, and abstract) and into the space of the abyssal (figured as a white space, a grey territory, or a dark chasm). Engaging with the tensions between the real and the ideal, I will be exploring such questions as: where does colour pressure or prevail over line, which is to say structure, order, form, and format? And, to reverse the terms of that proposition: how do line and form reaffirm themselves in chromatic instances? How does structure unfold in the process of colour writing? What is the role of colour in the fractured momentum of Mallarmé’s modernist project? What leaps and what projections are made through colour in the pursuit of modernist equivocation? How is colour given shape and direction? How does it emerge? Does it surface as pure concept in the shape of a concept-word imbued with perceptual and material value and with affect (‘rougeur’, ‘incarnat’, ‘blancheur’)? Does colour inhere in a particular object? Is it bounded by the thing, the hard object? How does colour relate to its referents? How does colour pull towards idea and ideal, or, conversely, draw towards the thing? Does it retreat from materiality into the space of concept or value? What can we say of colour as process? With these lines of enquiry to guide us, it is to Mallarmé’s defining monochromes in black, azure, and white that I turn.

Displacements of black In ‘Le Jury de peinture pour 1874 et M. Manet’, Mallarmé comments at some length on the painter’s handling of the crowd of black-clothed figures in Le Bal masqué à l’Opéra (1873) (Plate 10). Mallarmé is alert to art’s indexing of cultural modernity represented by sartorial black, referring humorously to ‘l’uniforme contemporain’.93 He notes that Manet’s challenge was to avoid excessive colour (‘tapage’) and focus instead on ‘[le] fond d’habits noirs’, which, for the poet, captures ‘l’allure d’une foule moderne’ and exposes society’s valorization of cultural and political uniformity and its ideological pursuit of the self-same.94 But, above all, the poet is arrested by the tonal variation and the resonance of black in Manet’s painting, and by the painter’s discerning articulation of chromatic difference as a form of modernist pictorial resistance to the cultural homogeneity represented by bourgeois masculine clothing. Mallarmé develops thus a discerning reading of the tension at the heart of the painting as values of hegemonic sameness are

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challenged by the textural variation of myriad black tones, allied to a keen sense of the haptic detailing of fashions and fabrics: quant à la facture de ce morceau que les exigences de l’uniforme contemporain rendaient si parfaitement difficile, je ne crois pas qu’il y ait lieu de faire autre chose que de s’étonner de la gamme délicieuse trouvée dans les noirs: fracs et dominos, chapeaux et loups, velours, drap, satin et soie.95 (my emphasis) regarding the composition of this work, which the demands of the contemporary uniform made so fiendishly difficult, I do not believe that there is any other response than to marvel at the delicious range of black tones: morning coats and dominos, top hats and furs, velvet, flannel, satin, and silk.

Mallarmé extends here the view expressed by Baudelaire in his 1846 ‘Salon’ where he praised the modern painters’ art of the monochrome, highlighting its richness and differential expressivity: ‘les grands coloristes savent faire de la couleur avec un habit noir, une cravate blanche, et un fond gris’ (‘Salon de 1846’, XVIII, ‘De l’héroïsme de la vie moderne’).96 The nuanced palette of black in Manet’s painting of the masked ball has the effect of foregrounding the material specificity of commodity, clothing, and status, where, at first blush, impersonality seems to prevail and where bourgeois male subjecthood is engulfed (in black). The painting’s powerful monochrome concentration and discernment articulate social value, as well as abstraction: this Mallarmé brings out in his discourse, which is performative in its evacuation of the marks of individuality and its immersion in the array of items of clothing coloured black, the metonyms of bourgeois monochromy. With his choice of the musical analogy (‘la gamme’), Mallarmé seeks to relay the painter’s sense of gradation and of movement in colour, and intuits the art viewer’s appreciation of the order and colour harmony achieved by the painter exploring the subtleties of black.97 Naming the shapes and textures of black through the instancing of fabrics and garments, the art writer invokes the painter’s chromatic and haptic discernment.98 Much later, in his 1895 pen portrait of Manet (Divagations), Mallarmé will evoke the gaze of the painter as ‘posé, vierge et abstrait’, suggesting values of intention, innovation, and abstraction, and he will describe Manet’s art as ‘vivace, lavé, profond, aigu ou hanté de certain noir’ (my emphasis): the quickness of the poet’s cascading adjectives invokes the opulent variety of Manet’s exploration of black and its afterlife in works that ally lucidity with unfathomable depth.99 Mallarmé’s reading of Manet’s art exceeds the purely technical, revealing an important interart correspondence of pictorial medium, modernist poetry, and art writing. In his appraisal of Le Bal masqué à l’Opéra, Mallarmé draws attention to the existential resonance of the work as he highlights the male individual’s absorption in the monochrome figuration of the crowd. In ways that resonate with the poet’s writing of black in poems that draw on social critique and the expression of individual loss, black is commensurate with displacement, with the evacuation

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of an authentic self, and also, via its tonal variation, with the surge of resistant difference against the reductionism of the self-same, as we shall see shortly. Already for Baudelaire, black was the colour of the century, synonymous with the rise of the bourgeoisie – with its strait-jacketed hegemony, its democracyproclaiming hypocrisy, and its atrophying propensity to repetition. In his ‘Salon de 1846’ (XVIII, ‘De l’héroïsme de la vie moderne’), Baudelaire had speculated, and ironized, about black clothing and its disconsolate mission: n’est-il pas l’habit nécessaire de notre époque, souffrante et portant jusque sur ses épaules noires et maigres le symbole d’un deuil perpétuel? Remarquez bien que l’habit noir et la redingote ont non seulement leur beauté politique, qui est l’expression de l’égalité universelle, mais encore leur beauté poétique, qui est l’expression de l’âme publique; une immense défilade de croque-morts politiques, croque-morts amoureux, croque-morts bourgeois. Nous célébrons tous quelque enterrement. is it not the obligatory garment of our age, which, ailing, wears on its thin, black shoulders the symbol of perpetual mourning? Note how black tails and the overcoat have, not only, their own political beauty, which is the expression of universal equality, but also their poetic beauty, which is the expression of the public self; a vast procession of political undertakers, sentimental undertakers, and bourgeois undertakers. We are all marking an interment of some kind.

As Baudelaire’s ironic paean affirms, black is commensurate with a peculiarly modern sense of perpetual substitutability. Mallarmé builds on the idea that any individual (man) in Manet’s painting is absorbed or dissolved in the monochrome crowd, but he complexifies the matter in a probing reading of Manet’s tonal palette that affirms difference and identifies the artist’s concern with subjective nuance and distinction. Mallarmé is exquisitely attuned to colour’s capacity for discernment and difference. So, what of Mallarmé’s deployment of black in his own, poetic medium? In his 1890 poem ‘Billet (à Whistler)’, written in praise of the American painter and as a contribution to the latter’s English review The Whirlwind, Mallarmé captures the relation of black (and white) and abstraction (evoked in terms of gusts of wind, a flight of top hats, spume, and balletic whirlwinds materialized in the dancer’s muslin) to the practice of culture critique: Pas les rafales à propos De rien comme occuper la rue Sujette au noir vol de chapeaux; Mais une danseuse apparue Tourbillon de mousseline ou Fureur éparse en écumes

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42 Que soulève par son genou Celle même dont nous vécûmes Pour tout, hormis lui, rebattu Spirituelle, ivre, immobile Foudroyer avec le tutu, Sans se faire autrement de bile Sinon rieur que puisse l’air De sa jupe éventer Whistler. Not the squalls whose sole task Is to occupy the street Subject to the black flight of hats But a ballerina has appeared

A muslin whirlwind, or A fury scattered like foam That lifts with her knee The very muslin for which we lived To whip everything but him, Once more, witty, drunk and motionless With her tutu And with no other sign of rage Except a laugh that lets the air Of her skirt fan Whistler.100

This elliptical sonnet unfolds in ways that link Whistler – and Mallarmé – back to Baudelaire’s pioneering engagement with interart values, and, more contemporaneously, to Manet’s practice. Mallarmé’s abstractive evocation of the dancer has retrospective affinities with Baudelaire’s sonnet ‘À une passante’ with its moving female figure (‘agile et noble’) envisioned in the metonymic black of mourning (‘balançant le feston et l’ourlet’) and in the marmoreal white of a briefly glimpsed statuesque leg: La rue assourdissante autour de moi hurlait. Longue, mince, en grand deuil, douleur majestueuse, Une femme passa, d’une main fastueuse Soulevant, balançant le feston et l’ourlet; Agile et noble, avec sa jambe de statue. Moi, je buvais, crispé comme un extravagant, Dans son œil, ciel livide où germe l’ouragan, La douceur qui fascine et le plaisir qui tue.

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Un éclair… puis la nuit ! – Fugitive beauté Dont le regard m’a fait soudainement renaître, Ne te verrai-je plus que dans l’éternité ? (ll. 1–11)

The white swirl evoked in Mallarmé’s ‘Billet (à Whistler)’ echoes Manet’s lithographs of ballet dancers (‘La Danseuse: A Study of the Nude’ (1891)). In ‘Billet (à Whistler)’, a critique of prosaic attitudes and cultural constraint is compressed in the opening kinetic image of ‘la rue/Sujette au noir vol de chapeaux’. Black is a metonym for bourgeois masculinity whilst the metaphor of a swarm or an ornithological ‘congregation’ of black top hats ‘in flight’ evokes social process and political momentum in its figuration of bourgeois ascendance. The notion of ‘subject to’ infers the colonization of the public arena by the establishment, and specifically the triumph of the press whose middle-brow values are inimical to the innovative aesthetics of Whistler and his fellow artists and writers.101 Whistler writes to Mallarmé on 19 November 1890 praising the ‘noir vol’ image: Vous devez bien savoir, mon cher ami, que j’ai été ravi en lisant le joli Sonnet! – ..... ‘la rue Sujette au noir vol de chapeaux’;! – splendide !! – Tout le monde est enchanté, et nous sommes bien fier - surtout moi! ....’ puisse l’air De sa jupe De sa jupe éventer Whistler’ – ! – est ce assez superbe et dandy en même temps!!102 You should know, my dear friend, that I was delighted to read the lovely Sonnet! … ‘the street Subject to the black flight of hats’;! – splendid!! – Everyone is enchanted by it, and we are very proud, especially me. ….’ May the air Of her skirt Of her skirt fan Whistler’ – ! – is quite superb and strikes a dandyesque note at the same time!!

The sartorial indexing of the bourgeois mindset is counterpoised by the whirl (or swirl) of white, abolished by the figure of the ballet dancer, before the image of the froth of her dress is transformed into a vision of sea foam, fulgent fabric, or splintered light: ‘Tourbillon de mousseline ou/Fureur éparses en écumes’.103 In Whistler’s fragmentary reprise of Mallarmé’s sonnet, the evacuation of the top hats enacted by the ‘noir vol de chapeaux’ is a metonym for the desired banishing of bourgeois banality whilst the moves of the dancer figure the will to transcendence or sublimation, as the kinetic value (‘éventer’) embodies the bid to dissolution and abstraction that relate the dance to the art of Whistler.

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The resisted or negated black is synonymous with the opaqueness of social discourse and ritualized exchanges. The opacities of black evoke the impenetrable and intractable, and also relay ideas of seduction and sterility, stretching back to Mallarmé’s earliest poems. In ‘Angoisse’ (1866), the ‘colouring’ of concepts exposes a sexual encounter founded on illusion and speciousness: ‘après tes noirs mensonges’ (line 7). Anticipating the ‘noir vol’ of bourgeois values in ‘Billet (à Whistler)’, the ante-position of the colour adjective produces subjective saturation of the nominal value (‘mensonges’), thus black becomes identified with the inauthentic other and with the reality of betrayal. The ‘noirs mensonges’ of ‘Angoisse’ echo, chromatically and phonetically, in the ‘noir mélange’ of Mallarmé’s poetic homage to Edgar Allan Poe (who had died in 1849). ‘Le Tombeau d’Edgar Poe’ was first published in a commemorative volume of 1877.104 Mallarmé and Manet were both drawn by Poe’s vision of nocturnal fear and metaphysical anxiety, and their interart collaboration of 1875 over the illustrated translation of ‘The Raven’ was broadly contemporary with Mallarmé’s composition of his tribute poem in 1875 or 1876.105 ‘Le Tombeau d’Edgar Poe’ envisions the cosmic struggle between poetry (represented variously and synthetically by Poe, the Poëte, and the angel), on the one hand, and the forces of detraction and destruction, on the other. Poe’s sublime potion – his ‘Verbe poétique’ – has been adulterated by the abject brew (‘quelque noir mélange’ of whisky and ale) imbibed by the ‘tribu’, the hostile, stultified readership. Mallarmé’s poem envisions the struggle against the dread and uncertainty provoked by the dark concert of the ‘blasphemers’, who are the poet’s (and Poe’s) detractors: the vision of the ‘noirs vols du Blasphème’ of the ‘Tombeau’ to Poe reaches prospectively towards the ‘noir vol de chapeaux’ of the ‘Billet (à Whistler)’, a fellow artist similarly spurned by officialdom, by art critics, by pedlars of triviality, and by an uncomprehending public of naysayers.106 If black is often associated with the hegemony of the banal in the bourgeois age and with creaking stultification, it also conjures up the subject’s deeper experience of alienation, opens up interior spaces of memory and angst, and reveals a psychic landscape that transcends time and place. Black mixed with tones of grey and white expresses the poet’s sense of creative sterility and torpor, extending that deeper vein which stretches back to the years of Mallarmé’s profound crisis. The 1864 poem ‘Las de l’amer repos … ’ (published in Le Parnasse contemporain, 1866) draws us into the metaphorical hell of creative sterility and existential crisis, counterpointing it with the azure and rose tones of the idealized easefulness of childhood. The opening sequence exposes the mental wasteland that is the ‘terrain avare et froid de ma cervelle’ (line 5), across a sequence of allusions to brown earth, grey cerebellum, ash-coloured bone, and the black of mourning. The poem contours the pit of creative impotence through its Shakespearean suggestions of mortality (‘fosse’, ‘fossoyeur’, lines 4, 6), while Mallarmé’s restricted palette signals modernism’s chromatic restraint, anticipating, even, the austerity of earlytwentieth-century Cubist colour. Mallarmé’s monochrome evocation of the barren ground of creativity involves, frequently, the elision of actual colour signifiers and the privileging of elemental materials. Colour is implicit in the nominal values

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that summon visions of brain, earth, bone, lead, and death rituals. White and black cease here to be antonyms, but participate together, often with grey, in the exploration of the poet’s dysphoria. In his letter to Armand Renaud (8 January 1864), contemporaneous with the composition of ‘Las de l’amer repos … ’, Mallarmé evokes his debilitating depression and produces a similar abstraction, one that evacuates explicit colour and draws in, in its place, immanent colour: here Mallarmé refers to the ‘chaperon de plomb’ that engulfs him, a figure for overwhelming ennui.107 Colour, outwardly abstracted, resurfaces in the qualifier of the substantive, materializing the grey-black cloak of his depression.108 The values of black, both explicit and immanent, in Mallarmé’s writing reveal their capacity to merge with other colour values, abolishing the traditional white/ black dualism, in the more complex and more pliant expression of search and struggle, creativity and lethargy, vision and failure. Across his poetic corpus, Mallarmé deploys a palette of black, grey, brown, and white to evoke geological landscapes and cosmological visions and their capacity to suggest scenarios of psychic volatility and existential dislocation; he works these together with episodes of galvanizing mental and artistic energy. The late sonnet ‘À la nue accablante tu …’ (1892–4), in anticipation of the shipwreck of Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897), associates dark grey and black in the imbrication of geological and sculptural values that are the poem’s visual ground (‘basse de basaltes et de laves’, line 2), the rocks on which the poet’s ship founders and where poetic genius fractures and is lost. Colour, originally visualized in natural rock and stone, is given – or assumes – a protean plastic form as material referents (basalt and lava), with their implicit colour values, are mobilized, conjured as a seascape, and shaped into visions of (salutary) dereliction. We can trace this geological colour work across a series of poems that unfold elliptical narratives of devastation, each bearing a depersonalized freight of mourning or remembrance. Black stone is a material metaphor for the forces of dereliction and alteration, and the chromatic visualization of le néant. Mallarmé’s pursuit of paradox and tension reveals the transformative, generative potential that is accessed through these instances of insensate impenetrability and hopelessness. Lead and lava, earth and granite, metals and minerals: these elemental, geological, and cosmological referents provide a ground or screen of grey and black for the exploration of plastic and poetic values, and for the examination of the human predicament. Whilst these referents are often formative of scenarios of perdition and the abyss, as in ‘À la nue accablante tu … ’, their association with dereliction is often counterpointed by a narrative of resistance that materializes as a scintillating fragment or an obdurate mass, and launches a vision of creative defiance and authority. Thus, in the tercets of ‘Le Tombeau d’Edgar Poe’, the ‘noirs vols du Blasphème’ are countered by the dazzling silver of the meteorite or the resistance of the basalt block fallen to earth, the ‘calme bloc ici-bas chu d’un désastre obscur’ figuring the serene anticipation of the contemplative poet on the brink of a creative revelation. In ‘Hommage (à Wagner)’ (1886), the poem’s referential materials – those of the composer’s tomb – are silver-grey granite and dark basalt, draped in a

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luminous black veil. Here, ‘moire’ rhymes silently with the absent but immanent ‘noire’ as texture and colour echo each other, and, together, respond to the ‘silence’ of the poem’s opening line. Black is not decorative; nor is it immediately or wholly recuperated by tropes of mourning. Rather, black has inaugural and metaphorical value in the recognition of the challenges of interart modernism, as Mallarmé explains to his uncle Paul Mathieu in a brief gloss of the sonnet (letter of 17 February 1886): ‘c’est […] plutôt la mélancolie d’un poète qui voit s’effondrer le vieil affrontement poétique, et le luxe des mots pâlir devant le lever de soleil de la Musique contemporaine dont Wagner est le dernier dieu’.109 The furnishings representative of ‘le vieil affrontement poétique’ are obliterated by the crashing pillar that uproots and displaces the old and outworn. Out of this chaos of sound and material comes resonant authority (‘clartés maîtresses’), allowing the transfiguring radiance of creative genius to rise; modernism’s solar drama is envisioned with Wagner its divinity. A stunning chiaroscuro effect of black, gold, and the cream of the vellum (on which the musical score is composed or the poem written) figures the iconoclastic and transformative value of Wagner’s (and Mallarmé’s) aesthetic innovation, and expresses the poet’s artistic empathy with the composer, and their parallel enterprise as modernist pioneers. The sonnet entitled simply ‘Tombeau’ (1897) commemorates Verlaine on the first anniversary of his death in January 1896. The opening vision of exasperated creativity is figured by ‘le noir roc courroucé’ (line 1) that encompasses the leaden sky and the granite tomb but brings these alive with thoughts of the remembered poet’s vision and agency, and his humanity. Matter morphs, splits, and fuses, in recognition of Verlaine’s creative passion, whilst the colour (black) remains constant and its freight is persistently active and aggravated in a struggle envisioned as simultaneously cosmic and earthly. The evocation of elemental simplicity echoes through the material starkness of Mallarmé’s monosyllabic monochrome (‘noir roc’). Through the poem’s working of chromatic values that draw on the elements and on cosmology and astronomy (metal, stone, star dust, silver and black) emerges a glimpse of the authentic recognition that will illuminate the future and galvanize reception as Mallarmé formulates his prophecy for poetry and its potential to make sparks fly in reaching wider audiences: Cet immatériel deuil opprime de maints Nubiles plis l’astre mûri des lendemains Dont un scintillement argentera la foule. (ll. 6–8) This insubstantial grief burdens with scores Of nubile folds the future’s ripened star Whose scintillation will silvercoat the throng.110

The black ground (often a fond or background, that may be vacant or populated, geological or cosmological) provides the screen against which the drama of reversibility, transformation, or paradoxical illumination is played out in the

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tracery of silver and white. Black becomes a space of inscription and a site of revelation whilst remaining haunted by intimations of dejection and dereliction. The origin of the modernist trajectory of black can be traced back to Baudelaire, whose poetry synthesizes post-Romantic chiaroscuro and cosmic poetry. In the sonnet ‘Obsession’ (Les Fleurs du mal), Baudelaire unfolds a vision of rich darkness and immersive black that betokens a space of luminous inauguration beyond the territory of the known: Comme tu me plairais, ô nuit ! sans ces étoiles Dont la lumière parle un langage connu ! Car je cherche le vide, et le noir, et le nu ! Mais les ténèbres sont elles-mêmes des toiles Où vivent, jaillissant de mon œil par milliers Des êtres disparus aux regards familiers. (ll. 9–14) But, how you’d please me, night! Without those stars Whose light speaks in a language I have known! Since I search for the black, the blank, the bare! Ah, but the darkness is itself a screen Where thousands are projected from my eyes – Those vanished beings whom I recognize.111

Black in Baudelaire’s poem is figured at once as a screen (and, in an explicitly pictorial move, a canvas, or thousands of canvases) and as a deep source, an abyss or void, where the values of black and nakedness coincide or cluster in the poet’s conjunctive syntax. What appears at first sight to be an opaque, impenetrable wall of darkness (‘nuit’, ‘ténèbres’) gives itself to be read as powerfully enabling, offering lessons in difference, uniqueness, and the possibility of reinvigoration and rediscovery (‘jaillissant de mon œil par milliers/Des êtres disparus’). For Mallarmé in turn, luminous black is the ground upon which intellectual work, memory processes, and creativity can be nourished. This is revealed in Mallarmé’s tribute to the author of Les Fleurs du mal, ‘Le Tombeau de Charles Baudelaire’ (1895), where the shrouded temple is also the dark mouth of the sewer spewing mud and rubies, a spectacular vision which invokes the transformative genius of modernism’s poetic alchemist. The sonnet’s opening rhetorical move produces the structuring oxymoron that merges poet and prostitute figures, matter and colour, tactility and olfaction (‘un poison tutélaire toujours à respirer’), sublimation (‘temple’, ‘bouche sépulcrale’) and abomination (‘égout bavant’, ‘hagard un immortel pubis’), ideal (‘rubis’) and spleen (‘boue’), human (‘la mèche louche’, ‘essuyeuse […] des opprobres subis’) and animal (‘museau flambé’, ‘aboi farouche’). The obscure temple that gushes dark mud and crimson jewels extends Baudelairean reversibility where material values and metaphysical aspirations compete and substitute each other, and it is emblematic of modernist poetry more generally, reprising the idea of the transmutation of prosaic and abject matter into poetic

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gold.112 The chiaroscuro of this text, which is a structuring feature of Mallarmé’s homage poetry, aligns the darkness of the tomb with the darkness of the cityscape punctuated by radiant gaslight (‘réverbère’), as it creates its own nocturnal poetry from the mass of shadows and the spatters of beguiling light. Anubis is the black jackal-headed god, illuminating the urban prostitute, and offering a compressed image of animality and sexuality, profaneness and divinity, as Mallarmé unfolds a vision of unceasing metamorphosis in his homage to Baudelaire’s oscillatory art of the sublime and the sordid. In poems whose formative theme is death and whose purpose is to commemorate and offer a literary homage, black is predictably primary. ‘Toast funèbre’ (1873), Mallarmé’s homage to Théophile Gautier, opens with the dramatic black of funereal fabric and the stark vision of the rituals concluding at the tomb of the poet: ‘le rite est pour les mains d’éteindre le flambeau / Contre le fer épais des portes du tombeau’ (lines 7–8). The dark elemental vision conjures up the absoluteness of human finitude for the dead poet’s genius is as if dashed against the harsh railings that close around his tomb. But black is also subject to reversibility or transfiguration, associated with the material and the conceptual, the elemental and the metaphysical; its agency can banish the pessimism and inaction of those who are locked in solipsistic contemplation of their own posthumous prospects: ‘[…] nous sommes / La triste opacité de nos spectres futurs’ (lines 18–19). Yet, surging up against the funereal black (‘le blason des deuils épars sur de vains murs’, line 20) is a deeper philosophical quest to know, not what makes a poetic genius, but what it is to be human and be bound for oblivion: Gautier is ‘magnifique, total et solitaire’ (line 16) faced with the absoluteness of death (‘l’avare silence et la massive nuit’, line 56). The values of black are protean and porous, open to diverse meanings and values, endowed with capacity for transformation as they work between poles aversive and meliorative, challenging traditional dualities. Of all the poems where darkness and light are formative of the poem’s thematic substance and its modernist sensibility, ‘Quand l’ombre menaça de la fatale loi … ’ (‘Plusieurs sonnets’, published first in 1883 under the title ‘Cette nuit’) is perhaps most salient for understanding the suppleness of Mallarmé’s poetic treatment of black. Summed up by Robert Greer Cohn, with his own evocative oxymoron, as ‘a compact masterpiece of radiant darkness’, ‘Quand l’ombre menaça de la fatale loi … ’ offers a poetic cosmogony where values of unuttered black reveal their transformative agency.113 The first tercet evokes the luminous darkness projected by the resplendent Earth: ‘[…] la Terre / Jette d’un grand éclat l’insolite mystère / Sous les siècles hideux qui l’obscurcissent moins’ (lines 9–11). The false allure of ornamental colour is derided as gyrating polychromatic bands become tangled in their own death throes (‘Luxe, ô salle d’ébène où, pour séduire un roi / Se tordent dans leur mort des guirlandes célèbres’, lines 5–6). Ostentatious colour in the form of regal embellishments are exposed and derided. The richer, more mysterious palette of darkness is itself elided or abstracted, colour is absorbed in the rhymed referents of materiality, and the integrity of self is subject to material and atmospheric intimations of mortality (‘les plafonds funèbres’; ‘[les] ténèbres’, ‘salle

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d’ébène’). The traditional rivalry between darkness and dazzling light is beheld and transcended as oppositions collapse and values merge. Paradoxically, it is darkness and black that appear here actively to enable light as binary differences are once more abolished or abstracted in a poem that rewrites chiaroscuro such that darkness responds for the light that it absorbs. Thus, the formative modernist tropes of coincidence and dissolution, anticipated by Baudelaire and figured by Manet, are reprised and developed by Mallarmé in his poetry as he explores black in relation to society and psyche, to finitude and generation, and to dereliction and revelation.114

Azure ironies We know the sublime appeal of blue – from saturated ultramarine to the ethereal tones of azure, across time and across media, for painters, mosaicists, stained-glass makers, and film makers. The trajectory of the heavenly hue in the decorative arts and in visual culture includes Portuguese azulejo tiles and Poussin’s sublime blue; it spans borders of century, nationality, style, and subject. In the mid- and later twentieth century, the late modernists were often also pioneering practitioners of blue, whether in figurative mode (David Hockney’s dazzling azure skies and swimming pools) or in abstract aesthetics (Yves Klein’s working of synthetic ultramarine (IKB) and Joan Miró’s pursuit of ‘tension intérieure [et] dépouillement’ in his monumental Bleu I, II, III triptych (1961) (Plate 11)).115 In his 1993 essay Chroma, Derek Jarman invites us to envision the ‘fathomless blue of Bliss’ (the ideal expressed and informing, in some ways, the afterlife of Symbolist ‘azur’) in the colour filtering of Kieślowski’s first film of the Bleu-Blanc-Rouge trilogy (1993–4).116 Mallarmé is not immune to the seductive agency of blue, especially azure, and, as we saw earlier, he is alert, too, to its power of disenchantment. Jacques Rancière stresses that the order of Poésies has to be understood in terms of the progressive turn from the azure-invested ideal to the cold recognition of the impossibility of a transcendent ideal beyond the work of poetry itself.117 Before we begin to explore the movement and the morphing of blue, and specifically of azure in Mallarmé’s poetry, it is helpful to note the practice of his contemporaries and near-contemporaries, and the interart significance of azure in the modernist exploration of subjectivity in literature and visual culture. Among those artists close to Mallarmé, Berthe Morisot and Whistler are major practitioners of blue in the domestic arena and in the cityscape, respectively. The pictorial pursuit of saturated blue is represented mesmerisingly in Morisot’s portrait of Lucie Léon (1892) (Plate 12), where the azure of the young pianist’s dress is less framed than actively absorbed by the ultramarine and cobalt blue interiors. Morisot’s immersive working of blue in this late painting, which is as much a study of blue as it is a representation of leisured adolescence, anticipates in some ways Picasso’s monochrome experiment of a few years later, his Blue Period (1900–4), in the exploration of chromatic flatness that intimates variably boredom,

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dreaming, and longing. Whistler explores a range of cool blues, including azure, in his monochrome studies of London (Nocturne, Blue and Silver: Chelsea, 1871; Nocturne, Blue and Gold – Old Battersea Bridge, 1872–75): his scintillating blue harmonies evoke states of intense peacefulness and contemplation, and they offer a paean to pure colour. Whistler’s abolition of anecdote in favour of an atmospheric chromatics that exudes stillness looks ahead to the abstract colour contemplation of Rothko (Blue Divided by Blue, 1966) in the twentieth century. Among Mallarmé’s contemporaries, the poet Charles Cros, who was a theorist of colour photography, explores blue in the sublime note of azure in his poem in praise of canal building and intercultural exchange along the AtlanticMediterranean axes, ‘La Vision du Grand Canal Royal des Deux Mers’ (1888). Azure, in the allegorical embodiment of the apostrophized France, synthesizes values of technological authority, cultural exchange, natural beauty, the built environment, and national prestige: Je chante, ô ma Patrie, en des vers doux et lents La ceinture d’azur attachée à tes flancs, Le liquide chemin de Bordeaux à Narbonne Qu’abreuvent tour à tour et l’Aude et la Garonne. (ll. 3–6) I sing, cherished country, in verse slow and sweet Of the azure band fringing your flank, The liquid way from Bordeaux to Narbonne Into which flow each in turn the Aude and the Garonne.

In Mallarmé’s circle of fellow writers, Huysmans is, perhaps, the most obsessive writer of blue: in À rebours (1884) his hero, Des Esseintes, selects the stones that will adorn the shell of his tortoise. In Chapter 4 of the novel, the hero’s discerning choice of ‘phosphate blue’ over ‘Oriental turquoise’ constitutes a rejection of orientalist temptation and the clichéd preferences of ‘the common herd’.118 Instead, Des Esseintes’s selection of ‘saphirine’ and ‘cymophane’ (‘aux moires azurées’) presents a lapidary analogue to Mallarmé’s poetic bid to evade the ‘mots de la tribu’. Mallarmé’s response to the defining novel of the French Decadent aesthetic is ‘Prose (pour Des Esseintes)’ (1885), a complex and contradictory poetic reflection on the absolute and its conflict with the experiential that has given rise to major exploratory readings, notably by Malcolm Bowie and by Marshall Olds.119 Scrutinizing the poem’s creative momentum and its tense mesh of ideas, Bowie tracks the reader’s multiple possible journeys through the indecision and indecidability of this beguiling text. Around the primary botanical lexicon of ‘iris’ and ‘iridées’, Bowie is concerned with phonetic and musical values, revealing Mallarmé’s disparate groupings of sounds as the poetic equivalent of ‘contrasted blocks of ornamental colour […] in orchestral music’.120 I want to shift the focus now from musical colour to colour in the visual sense, which is all the more suggestive for being rarely explicitly lexicalized in the poem.

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The chromatic implications of ‘iris’ span Greek myth (Iris, goddess of the rainbow and messenger of the gods), meteorology, and light (the rainbow colours). Its semantic resonance is entomological (iris, a genus of praying mantis), lapidary (iris agate; iris quartz), and ophthalmic (structure of the inner eye), as well as botanical. Indeed, the poem’s explicit embrace of material book culture that is geographical, scientific, and cultural (‘livre de fer vêtu’, ‘l’œuvre de ma patience/Atlas, herbiers, rituels’, lines 4, 7–8) conjures up a sense of expansive transcultural and transhistorical knowledge and porous learning that is consonant with the etymological and semantic range of ‘iris’. Chromatic values in this text are, unarguably, immanent, and, for Marshall Olds appraising ‘L’or de la trompette d’Eté’ (line 20), colour is at least as acoustic as it is visual.121 Gold is the only colour specifically lexicalized in the ‘Prose (pour Des Esseintes)’, harnessed to ideas elemental and musicological. I want to explore here, briefly, chromatic immanence in the poetics of blue (and violet and white) that is formative of ‘Prose (pour Des Esseintes)’, for this has traditionally eluded critical attention. The conflicted engagement with the ideal and with the realm of ideas opens onto a landscape abounding in irises – ‘sol des cent iris’ – whose proliferation multiplies through recurrent sibilants and liquid vowels, summoning a sense of floral and chromatic generation. The phonetic closeness of ‘iridées’ to the unuttered verb ‘iriser’ performs the exponential generation of ideas and of (predominantly) violet, indigo, and white flowers.122 A hundredfold of irises invokes, through the related phonetico-botanical instances of ‘lis’ and ‘glaïeul’, the iridaceae family, whilst the migration from blue, violet, and white irises brings to sight the multicoloured tepals of gladioli. The flowers, as a botanical proliferation of colour and a manifestation of the poem’s inaugurating ‘Hyperbole!’, figure the generative power of poetry to spur and synthesize new creative undertakings in language that gives shape, texture, variety, and colour to ideas: Gloire du long désir, Idées Tout en moi s’exaltait de voir La famille des iridées Surgir à ce nouveau devoir. (ll. 29–32) Glory of the long desire, Ideas All of them in me leapt to see The family of irides Arise to this new duty.123

The memory of the ‘Gloire du long désir’ anticipates the ultimate floral exuberance of ‘le trop grand glaïeul’ (line 56) that overwhelms and obscures the inventions of beauty and poetry, a figure for the hyperbolic excess that cannot be brought to expression and refuses to be ordered into any definitive poetic form. In modernist literature in French, Proust is perhaps, with Mallarmé, the most discerning practitioner of the quality of blue that we call azure: in the opening volume of À la recherche du temps perdu, Du côté de chez Swann (1913), the

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narrator recalls his first factual observation of the striking black eyes of Gilberte and the conflicting chromatic memory of those eyes gleaming ‘d’un vif azur’;124 in the second volume, À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (1919), the narrator explores his encounter with the movement of a fish as it glides through ‘la fluidité d’un transparent et mobile azur’ where azure is both colour and aquatic medium.125 Proust’s image reminds us that azure has immersive value as sky and as sea, and as a tone that carries inexpressible desire. Proust’s enquiry into chromatic values that have kinetic and haptic resonance, that inflect subjective responses, and that shape and endlessly transform perceptions, affords important insights into the nuanced complexity of the colour palette of writers: these have implications for how we might read Mallarmé and modernist poetry.126 Mallarmé extends his poetic palette of blue to the refined, rarer precision of ‘azur’ with its religious, art-historical, and heraldic associations, azure being one of the tinctures of medieval emblem culture. The tonal and lexical specificity of the colour-word ‘azur’ – its spiritual and transcendental values – sets it in a different place to ‘simple’ chromatic nominals like ‘noir’ or ‘blanc’ and activates values beyond pure (empty) colour in the move from ‘azur’ to the metaphysical value that is ‘l’Azur’: azure is always at once evidence of hue and intimation of heaven (or, the higher order formed of the contemplative and the transcendental). The definite article and the word-initial capitalization take the perceptual value (‘azure’) repeatedly towards the imponderability and the otherness of ‘l’Azur’, a poetic passage in which the perceptual (and painterly) value of the hue persists in the invocation of the ideal. ‘Azur’ is always already inflected with the quality of discernment, with aesthetics, and painterliness. As a metonym for ‘sky’ (and for sea and waterway and as a metaphor for metaphysical aspiration), Azure intimates the desired destination of a transcendental trajectory coloured sky blue: thus, in the short poem of 1866 entitled ‘Soupir’, chromatic and kinetic values are united in ‘un blanc jet d’eau soupire vers l’Azur’ (line 5). Yet, the contemplation of remote, rarefied azure is deflected by more proximate perceptions spurred by personal remembrance and private longing. Mallarmé’s vision unfolds as a Corot-like landscape of autumnal quietude where ‘taches de rousseur’ (line 2) equivocate between the remembered face of the sister-figure (Mallarmé’s sister Maria died in her early teens in Autumn 1857) and a certain abstractive depiction of the russet-colours and shapes of the paysage. Prepositions with kinetic value, like ‘vers’, intimate the direction of the poet’s will and his desired agency as he recalls the line of his sister’s gaze, relative to the capacity of colour to open up territories of remembrance or emotion, and to act as a vehicle of desire. So, the girl’s gaze and the white stream or fountain aspire to azure: if colour writing is a vehicle or vector of longing, azure is its dreamedof destination.127 Immeasurably more than a matter of simple perception, azure figures the reaching towards a metaphysical project and the repetition of ‘vers l’Azur’ at the poem’s fulcrum, qualified by the intimation of Autumn’s paleness and purity. The azure ideal unravels in a glacial evocation of irremediable loss and sterility that is aggravated by the ironic, chromatically over-determined reach of ‘le soleil jaune d’un long rayon’ (line 10).

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To return to ‘Las de l’amer repos … ’, a poem that Mallarmé wrote in the early phase of his intellectual and mental crisis, with specific focus now on the second sequence of lines, we are drawn into the serenity of the encounter with porcelain plates that are moon-shaped and moon-coloured, and defined by a slender trace of azure. The poem proffers a model of craftsmanship for how the poet, like the Chinese painter of porcelain, might work on his own complex, carefully wrought materials. The mesmeric line of blue traces the discerning work of the Chinese craftsman that the poem remembers or imagines. Here, the dialogue of chromatic and formal values appears to achieve a perfect, fleeting fusion of colore and disegno (‘filigrane bleue’, line 20) that gives rise to a virtual figuring: the porcelain object that has become the conceptual object of poetic speculation, and that also figures analogically for the verbal crafting of the poem. The sublime beauty of white is doubly inscribed in the porcelain and in the poem: the ecstatic vision of ‘tasses de neige à la lune ravie’ (line 17) figures the luminous art of the painter of porcelain as he allies material and ideal; it imparts a sense of the joy of contemplating the artist’s process and the completed work. The marriage of azure and of white towards the poem’s end leads the poet to speculate on the morphing of line into a pool of colour through an image of virtual metamorphosis: ‘une ligne d’azur mince et pâle serait / Un lac, parmi le ciel de porcelaine nue’ (lines 24–5, my emphasis). Line and colour, traditionally set apart, are here united in the sublime chromatic trait that seems to contour a space of creative and receptive rapture (‘ravissement’). But there is more than aesthetic appreciation at work in this poem. Rather, colour working through notions of craft and beauty offers a glimpse of artistic freedom and invigorated creative agency.128 Colour, in drawing the poet, and the reader, into the deeper, care-taking study of art and object, briefly dispels ennui, and disconsolation is assuaged through the momentary envisioning of azure and white, the shared chromatic materials of the Chinese artist and the French poet, materials that traverse art forms, cultures, traditions, and nationalities.129 The relationship of azure to values of superiority, exception, liminality, art, and a kind of rare, minimalist beauty is often inverted and challenged by disillusion and disconsolation, as we saw in the poem ‘L’Azur’. Azure – the collocation of sky/heaven, the ideal, and the rarefied colour – is the envisioned end-point of the quest (‘vers’ in the propulsive sense of ‘towards’ in the venture of poetry); it spurs the desire for knowledge, for truth: it visualizes the ideal space of fuller, deeper poetic consciousness; but its mocking agency invariably checks that aspiration and affirms its susceptibility to being traduced, recalling the bitter disillusionment of the ‘mendieurs d’azur’ (line 3) of ‘Le Guignon’ (1862): the group’s abjectness personifies the beggared fate of the ideal expressed in an oxymoron charged with modernist irony. The long early exploration of the exasperating failure of the metaphysical quest and the debunking of the Symbolist ideal provoke bitterness that is experienced both in the sensorium and in the psyche (‘[les mendieurs mordent] au citron d’or de l’idéal amer’, line 9), and the taste turns sour with the ideal turned to ash in the mouth. The ideal is more than besmirched and tainted; it has dissolved into mud baked hard into an obdurate, ignoble mass:

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‘[Le Guignon] laisse un bloc boueux du blanc couple nageur’ (line 33). The azure ideal acts simultaneously to incite desire and to frustrate it in ways that are materially aversive (bitter tastes, flayed flesh, grating metallic sounds, biting winds). The multiple assault on the senses culminates in a vision of utter dejection as ‘Azur’, envisioned as a ‘high place’, a figure of luminous blissfulness, is replaced by the crude streetlamp on which the disconsolate will stage their own hanging. Mockery is expressed or discerned in the unpitying agency of Azure in the early sonnet ‘Renouveau’ (1862) where the agony of literary labour is explored through the tensions between azure and the monochrome colours of earth and dust. The lure of the ideal that is coloured light blue reverses here into the irresistible capitulation to the abyss (‘J’attends, en m’abîmant que mon Ennui s’élève’, line 12). That fall is anticipated by the elemental palette of black and grey, the colours of metal and earth (‘[mon crâne serré] par un cercle de fer’, line 6) that figure the poet’s debilitating headache and his creative and physical paralysis; ‘mordant la terre’, he hollows out his grave with his own face. The poet’s attempt to transcend or transform his ‘ennui’ is met with derision that erupts from the allegorized Azure (‘Cependant, l’Azur rit sur la haie et l’éveil/De tant de oiseaux gazouillant au soleil’, lines 13–14): the poet confronts the tension between Spring’s high colour (with its acoustic ‘noise’ and the preening prismatic opulence of the peacock (‘se pavane’)) and the self ’s disconsolation: Spring’s exuberance is re-staged as a parody. Azure always intimates the possibility of reaching, or coming close to, the metaphysical ideal, but the poet’s aspiration is disrupted by an excess of materiality in the form of repugnant tastes or irritating sounds – and by the colour – of irony. Azure is, then, a scandalous blue: it flaunts its visible perfection and, simultaneously, proffers a compromised or ironized ideal. In another early poem, ‘Les Fenêtres’ (1866), the mouth of a dying man is ‘fiévreuse et d’azur bleu vorace’ (line 9): colour is doubly figured as the ideal and its degradation: abjection is prefigured in the stinking drapery which parts to reveal the desolate hospital scene (‘la blancheur banale des rideaux’, line 2). Azure represents the ideal traduced, ingested, and regurgitated: ‘le vomissement impur de la Bêtise/Me force à me boucher le nez devant l’azur’ (lines 35–6). The realities of fever and fetidness block access to the ideal, and the Symbolist sublime is overpowered by a nauseating stench. The ideal is spoiled, maculated; azure sinks into dirt and futility. In a letter that captures the competing tensions in the early poetry between Symbolist transcendentalism and its modernist critique, played out in the rivalry between azure and viscerality, Mallarmé writes to Cazalis on 4 June 1862 of a new poetic ‘mixing’ of ‘effets matériels, du sang, des nerfs’ with moral and metaphysical manifestations: in a godless world, redemption is impossible, and the fall into torpor and (self-)loathing is inevitable, aggravated by pressures that are corporeal.130 The modernist consciousness is unheroic, failing, despairing, disabused, and irredeemably lapsed, and Mallarmé’s problematization of azure articulates a fractured subjectivity dramatized through the exacerbated experience of senses stretched and sapped, sharpened by the encounter with the abject. The disabused modern subject is personified by Hérodiade. Conflicted before the ideal, her exasperation gives rise to the repudiation of empty transcendentalism,

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denounced as a lure: ‘l’azur/Séraphique sourit dans les vitres profondes/Et je déteste, moi, le bel azur!’ (Hérodiade, ‘Scène dialoguée’).131 Mallarmé’s ideal is coloured heavenly blue, but colour-conceptualization and chromatic practice, dynamic and reversible, protean and porous, bear a constant sense of modernist irony or scepsis that problematizes colour values. Azure is often associated precisely with the experience of desolation and, importantly, with lucid recognition of the human predicament in the absence of transcendental promise. In the modernist poem, as values oscillate from meliorative to aversive, the ideal and the material coincide and vie to displace each other. Thus, subjectivity and subject-matter itself become unfixed around the play of colour values in the exploration of a consciousness that is pressured and paradoxical.

White (im)material Whistler insisted on the need for art to transcend representation and, in the process, free itself from affective, didactic, and anecdotal content.132 For the American painter, the modern artwork stood in and for itself, generating value that is aesthetic and exploratory rather than representational and mimetic.133 In terms of modernism’s own mythology, and exemplified by the abstractive ventures of Whistler and his close friend and interlocutor Mallarmé, it is, supremely, through white that modern art and modern poetry, stunningly instanced by Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897), work to resist representational recuperation. The journey of exploratory art into the twentieth century sees white become (increasingly) bright with material and conceptual value from Kazimir Malevich’s White on White (1918) through the mid-twentieth-century abstract expressionist works of Robert Rauschenberg (White Painting (1951)) and Mark Rothko (White Centre (1957)), works where subject-matter is evacuated from art’s field, and where white expresses the language of minimalism and conceptual ‘purity’ that becomes the hallmark of modernist rigour or contemplative abstraction.134 Already in the 1880s, Whistler’s re-titling of his ‘White Girl’ series through musical analogy – ‘Symphony’ – partakes of the modernist flight from subjectmatter and enacts art’s drive towards purer, more immaterial forms, whilst intimating the potential of interart dialogue. Whistler’s art is poised between the move towards abstraction and the enduring evocation of mood and atmosphere, which we are invited to interpret fragmentally in his works. Symphony in White, no. 2: The Little White Girl (1864) (Plate 9) holds together its concern for the materiality of white in its capaciousness and texture. The intimation of feminine longing hesitates between a vision of abstraction (in the lavish depths of the white dress) and the study of inner life (expressed by the disconsolate female face reflected in the mirror over the hearth). The exploratory practice of white is counterpointed by the ‘triple punctum’ effects of the girl’s oriental fan with its palette of azure, white, and red; the blue-and-white of the porcelain vase on the mantel-shelf; and the pink tones of flesh and flower. Like Whistler’s subsequent monochrome and minimalist painting, such as his Arrangement in Grey and Black, no. 1 (1871),

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which seems at once to confront and resist its subject-matter – the portrait of the painter’s mother – his Symphonies in White reveal the kind of modernist hesitation between modes of abstraction and expressions of affect, or between purity and materiality that we find in Mallarmé’s poetry of fractured subjectivity. White is a colour of indeterminate identity, which makes it a privileged material for the modernist’s paradoxical sensibility. Mallarmé is an audacious writer of white, the most unfathomable and unresolved of colours. The value of white is perhaps most indirectly captured in the poet’s preface to Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard in the Cosmopolis version, as we shall see shortly. If white is generally accepted to be a colour, it is a colour of a quite different order: it is the alpha and omega of colours, and the sum of all the chromatic values in-between. Notwithstanding, white is often perceived as the space of colour’s absence or its evacuation: white may be the screen visualized before colour reaches it; white may be the ground that remains after colour has left. White is the inaugural space of colour, and it is, also, the afterlife of colour; it is thus the most resistant and the most intriguing of Mallarmé’s monochromes. White clings tenaciously to the materials of dispossession and dereliction, desire and distance, in his poetry: it is vividly present in the materiality of bone, lace, feather, foam, wing, onyx, star, fingernail, sail, canvas, or page, things that are so often evoked, and invoked. White is, also, the chromatic figuration of compelling emptiness. The superiority and authority of white are fragile and powerful, momentary and enduring, human and marmoreal, as figured in ‘ses purs ongles très haut dédiant leur onyx’ of the late ‘Sonnet en -yx’ (1887). The fathomless fragmentariness of white in the poem ranges across musicology and cosmology (Ursa Major’s seven major star formations, ‘le septuor’), luminosity (‘lampadophore’), and human flesh (the fingernails that are suggestive of stars and striated onyx). Unuttered white tantalizes and disturbs us for it asks more questions – more intractable questions (both material and metaphysical) – than it begins to answer. The essence of Mallarmé’s poetry lies in its capacity for suggestion, its soliciting of the responsiveness of readers. In the mesmeric incipit of the ‘Sonnet en -yx’, a vision of the variations of white marries visual and material delicateness with the haptic resistance and cold mineral hardness of onyx in the gesture of dedication and gifting. The poem is gifted to the reader, who is enjoined to examine its semantic and syntactic filigree: ‘Ses purs ongles très haut dédiant leur onyx’ (line 1). Values of material hardness transfer to the conceptual resistance of whiteness, for what is already placed ‘très haut’ (the poem, poetry) seeks to proffer its gift, in the form of a dedication or veneration. White is unspoken, yet is immanent and everywhere active in this poem: from finger nails to onyx, both substances which ‘complicate’ the value of ‘white’ with striations of red and pink (blood, cream, and the carnate tones of the body’s flesh) and brown, black, gold (the chromatic seams, streaks, and clouds that pattern the stone). Pale luminosity is extended through the enigmatic ‘lampadophore’ (line 2), quickened by intimations of flame and consummation (‘Maint rêve vespéral brûlé par le Phénix’, line 3), and relayed in its afterlife by the evocation of ash and its absent receptacle, the ‘cinéraire amphore’ (line 4).135 The opening quatrain intimates beauty and serenity, but also reveals the desire that hesitates

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between creation and destruction, and mortality and renaissance. Yet, perhaps above all, white and whiteness suggest the vacancy that shapes the development of the sonnet through the second quatrain’s intimation of forms of absence: the empty salon, the absence of the ‘ptyx’, the abolition of the artefact, the persistence of sounds that deny sense-making (‘Aboli bibelot d’inanité sonore’), and the departed ‘Maître’, gone to the Styx in the vain search for consolation. Tropes of abolition, drowning, and evacuation suggest ‘blanking’: an emptied landscape, a bleached canvas, a virgin page. Provisionally challenging the sense of emptiness and absence that we associate with values of white and whiteness is the lineinitial ‘Mais’ of the first tercet, which introduces a counterforce. Asserting itself against ‘la croisée au Nord vacante’ is a patch of gold (‘un or’); the gold persists, contouring a state of physical and moral torment (‘agonise’) that echoes the distress represented by ‘Angoisse’, the force of emotion that is central to the poem’s conjuring of midnight with its train of absent presences – from the Poet and the presumed Maître to the dead, naked ‘nixe’. What is tenacious in the poem, as it is in the night sky (‘se fixe’), is ‘le septuor’ (the seven stars of The Plough asterism of Ursa Major), luminous white points that puncture the darkness and resist the vicissitudes of human emotion and earthly event, the universe’s stellar script figuring, metaphorically, the intricate and awe-inspiring application of the creative mind. In the short essay ‘L’Action restreinte’ in ‘Quant au livre’ (Divagations), Mallarmé evokes the relation of cosmos and creativity, envisioning the écriture of the stars as a felicitous inversion – white stars against the night’s sky ‘sombre dentelle’ – of the inscriptions of poetry in black ink on the white page: [On] n’écrit pas, lumineusement, sur champ obscur, l’alphabet des astres, seul, ainsi s’indique, ébauché ou interrompu ; l’homme poursuit noir sur blanc. Ce pli de sombre dentelle, qui retient l’infini, tissé par mille, chacun selon le fil ou prolongement ignoré son secret, assemble des entrelacs distants où dort un luxe à inventorier, stryge, nœud, feuillages et présenter.136 (my emphasis) [We] do not write luminously on a dark ground, the alphabet of stars, alone, indicates this, sketched or suspended: humankind continues black on white. The fold of dark lace, that holds back the infinite, woven by a thousand, each according to the thread or unknown extension its secret, draws together the distant interlacing where a source of luxury demands that we record it: winged demon, knot, foliage, and present it.

The suspended graphie of the stars whose eruptive brilliance punctures the fathomless darkness offers a metaphor for modernism’s shape-shifting agency, its pursuit of fragmentation, provisionality, and the suspension of telos. For the poet, it is not about asking what white might mean, but rather about speculating on what white might do in its own terms and in combination – and often in tension – with other chromatic values. Mallarmé’s writing invites us to shift our attention from identifying the signifying possibilities of white to tracking

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the agency of white.137 Progressively across Mallarmé’s corpus, white emerges as a value synonymous with abstraction, and with a more sustained exploration of art’s autonomy. Resistance to meaning and the flight from signification are figured by blanc (both blanc-white and blanc-blank). The habitat of minimalism and sparseness is white: the space of the blank page becomes the site of silence and vacancy most dramatically and perplexingly in Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard, to which I shall turn shortly. Two key poems situated close to the chronological extremes of Mallarmé’s work, ‘Brise marine’ (1866) and ‘Salut’ (1893), reveal the encounter with white to be formative of the experience of creativity envisioned and aborted. The volatility of white shapes the movement of the early poem ‘Brise marine’. The poet evokes the resisting agency of white in the conflicted space of the poet’s blank page: white neutralizes, neuters even, the creative impulse (‘sur le vide papier que la blancheur défend’, line 7): white is a space of defiant non-inscription and resistance, a site of postponed, denied, or foreclosed inauguration. White is also the enduring space of possibility, and acts as a spur to creativity. The dream of escape from too familiar books, from domestic predictability (itself coloured white by the milk of the nursing mother), and from a writer’s block, takes the mesmeric form of eruptive sea spray, an image that looks forward, rapturously, to the kinaesthetic agency of white in Un coup de dés (‘Fuir! Là-bas fuir! Je sens que des oiseaux sont ivres/D’être parmi l’écume inconnue et les cieux’, lines 2–3). White, integral to the competing values of domesticity and discovery both maritime and metaphysical, is thus the site of unresolved tension between the pull of tradition and familiarity, and the urgency of innovation; it figures the characteristically modernist impasse where desire and ennui collide in exasperated recognition of the risks and the temptations of invention, prefiguring the shipwreck of Un coup de dés: Un Ennui, désolé par les cruels espoirs, Croit encore à l’adieu suprême des mouchoirs ! Et, peut-être, les mâts, invitant les orages, Sont-ils de ceux qu’un vent penche sur les naufrages Perdus, sans mâts, sans mâts, ni fertiles îlots… Mais, ô mon cœur, entends le chant des matelots ! (ll. 11–16) A Boredom, made desolate by cruel hope Still believes in the last goodbye of handkerchiefs! And perhaps the masts, inviting storms, Are those the gale bends over shipwrecks, Lost, without masts, without masts, no fertile islands… But, oh my heart, listen to the sailors’ song!138

White/white and white/blank constitute, then, the stage or the screen where the modernist crisis is played out with dramatic intensity. ‘Salut’ (1893), placed as the initial text of Poésies, explores white in its affirmative, galvanizing momentum. This late sonnet on white’s effervescence reaches from the froth of champagne to the

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spume of breaking waves: here, the generative liquid white exceeds, almost, the containments of the stanza or the line of poetry, which surges and spills into the next: ‘Rien, cette écume, vierge vers/A ne désigner que la coupe’ (lines 1–2). A vision of energy and of fracturing beauty emerges where poetic creativity (‘vierge’ and the propulsive ‘vers’, at once poetry’s metonym and its kinetic momentum) is inflected with anxiety and borne by the white of sterility. White migrates from its original screen or fond (the blank surface of the artistic canvas, which is simultaneously material and metaphoric in its scope) and attaches itself to ‘souci’ (‘le blanc souci de notre toile’ (line 14, my emphasis)). ‘Toile’, precariously stretched, is worked by the values of poetic care and application. Creative activity is infused with a sense of anxious attentiveness (‘souci’) that is invested in the repeated skilled actions of sailing, painting, and writing; in its collective invocation ‘notre toile’ has oscillatory intermedial value, being at once a metonym for the mariner’s sail and for the painter’s canvas, and a metaphor for the poet’s blank page. ‘Toile’ (as sail and as page) bears the imponderable freight of anxiety and directed care. This is implicit in the initiating white of ‘Au seul souci de voyager’ (1898), a poem that celebrates, elliptically, the sixteenth-century Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama and the four-hundredth anniversary of the Western world’s discovery of India and the establishment of major routes of global imperialism. The kinetic agency of white is envisioned between écume and ébats, between erupting foam and fluttering wing: such images of organic movement sustain the dynamics of Un coup de dés. The whiteness that froths and disperses deflects the reified, exoticist vision of ‘une Inde splendide et trouble’ (line 2), as if the poet were resisting the Western colonial propensity to fetishize the ‘primitive’, a propensity that is particularly marked in matters of colour, as Michael Taussig reminds us.139 Instead, the plunge into spray and spume – into the effervescence of white (whose imperceptible migrations between objects conjure up the sfumato of Whistler’s Nocturne; Blue and Gold) – figures creativity as a journey, as a process of self-generation, rather than as a destination, and affirms the poet as a navigator of the material and the metaphysical.140 Mallarmé takes the thematic exploration of white in a markedly writerly (and proto-deconstructionist) direction in one of the key texts of Divagations, ‘Le Mystère dans les lettres’ (1896). Here he writes of the catalysing agency of white, of its transition to blank, and of the fissiparous potential of blanc/blank as a vehicle for the Idea. White materials fragment and disperse but always bear the formative traces or epistemological evidence (‘preuves nuptiales’) of the structuring Idea: Appuyer, selon la page, au blanc, qui l’inaugure son ingénuité, à soi, oublieuse même du titre qui parlerait trop haut: et, quand s’aligna, dans une brisure, la moindre, disséminée, le hasard vaincu mot par mot, indéfectiblement le blanc revient, tout à l’heure gratuit, certain maintenant, pour conclure que rien au-delà et authentiquer le silence – Virginité qui solitairement, devant une transparence du regard adéquat, elle-même s’est comme divisée en ses fragments de candeur, l’un et l’autre, preuves nuptiales de l’Idée.141

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White comes into its own as the integral force of the text’s self-generation and its afterlife. This heuristic sequence offers a proleptic description of the conceptual undertow of Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard, the hermetic, dazzling, iconic text of European modernism upon which Mallarmé ceased work in 1897 and which he first published in Cosmopolis that year.143 As the poet concedes in his Preface to Un coup de dés in the Cosmopolis version, the spacing of the poem is the impactful first impression on the reader hardwired to the linear arrangement of text: ‘les “blancs”, en effet, assument l’importance, frappent d’abord’. For Paul Valéry, who was the first to be shown the corrected proofs of Un coup de dés, the text’s white spaces were a sign of the poet’s unprecedented ambition to reveal the intricate patterning of thought in its constellations, suspensions, and reverberations. Writing in February 1920, Valéry described his astonished response to the poem’s ‘dispositif ’ and his keen sense of witnessing the revelation of abstract thought as it unfolds in the material space of the text: Il me sembla de voir la figure d’une pensée, pour la première fois placée dans notre espace … Ici, véritablement, l’étendue parlait, songeait, enfantait des formes temporelles. L’attente, le doute, la concentration étaient choses visibles. Ma vue avait affaire à des silences qui auraient pris corps. Je contemplais à mon aise d’inappréciables instants : la fraction d’une seconde, pendant laquelle s’étonne, brille, s’anéantit une idée ; l’atome de temps, germe de siècles psychologiques et de conséquences infinies, – paraissaient enfin comme des êtres, tout environnés de leur néant rendu sensible. C’était, murmure, insinuations, tonnerre pour les yeux, toute une tempête spirituelle menée de page en page jusqu’à l’extrême de la pensée, jusqu’à un point d’ineffable rupture : là, le prestige se produisait ; là, sur le papier même, je ne sais quelle scintillation de derniers astres tremblait infiniment pure dans le même vide interconscient, où comme une matière de nouvelle espèce, en systèmes, coexistait la Parole !144 (emphasis original) It was as if I were seeing the figure of thought, placed for the first time in material space … Here, truly, immensity was speaking, dreaming, generating temporal forms. Expectation, doubt, and concentration were visible things. My eyes were engaging with silences that seemed to have become flesh. I contemplated at leisure inappreciable instants: the fraction of a second during which an idea dazzles, shines, and dies; the atom of time, the germ of psychological centuries and infinite consequences. It was all murmur, insinuation, and thunderclap for the eyes, a wholesale mental storm unfolding from one page to the next right to

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the extreme edge of thought, right to the point of ineffable rupture; at that point, magic happened; there, on the very paper, some unnameable scintillation of late stars trembled, infinitely pure in the same interconscious void, where like a kind of new species, in the form of systems, the Word coexisted.

Valéry’s rapturous evocation of his reception of the text speaks powerfully of modernism’s complex trajectory: he captures brilliantly the momentum of Mallarmé’s writing as it conjures silence and emptiness into material form, and unfolds the process of the idea as it surges, dazzles, and retreats. The hegemony of rigid black print (and the discourse to which it gives rise) is challenged from within the work by the eruptiveness of poetic language (parole) as words and phrases cascade and explode, ricochet and reverberate, untamable and unstoppable. Spurred by the generative value of the white/blank, Mallarmé explains in his preface the integration of text and space, and the movement of thought. He reflects on the writerly imperative of his modernist aesthetic, on its anti-narrative and anti-telic purpose (‘la fiction affleurera et se dissipera, vite, d’après la mobilité de l’écrit’), its speculative quality (‘tout se passe, par raccourci, en hypothèse’), and its formative resistance to narrative recuperation (‘on évite le récit’).145 The poet intimates that the trope of dispersal and the blank spaces mobilized by the text have structuring value in enabling provisional, serial substitutions. There is here a striking reference to light and colour, which as far as I have been able to ascertain, has remained uncommented by critics: Le papier intervient chaque fois qu’une image d’elle-même, cesse ou rentre, acceptant la succession d’autres, et comme il ne s’agit pas […] de traits sonores réguliers ou vers – plutôt de subdivisions prismatiques de l’Idée, l’instant de paraître.146 The paper intervenes each time that an image, of its own volition, ceases or retreats, accepting the succession of other images, and because it is not a question […] of regular sound features or lines of poetry – but rather one of the prismatic subdivisions of the Idea, in the instant of their appearing.

Here, echoing the values of ‘Le Mystère dans les lettres’ (Divagations) and in the passing embrace of classificatory, quasi-scientific discourse, Mallarmé affirms colour as an integral force in the making of the poem and the metamorphoses of the Idea (‘subdivisions prismatiques de l’Idée’): as a manifestation (luminous trace or chromatic fragment) of poetry’s inexpressible vision, and as an integral part of the alliance between the liberated shape of the poem (visual, ideogrammatic) and the concept of the Idea de-constructed as ‘prismatic subdivisions’. The visual analogy of the prism enacts the fracturing of the Idea into its prismatic parts, like light (illumination) breaking down into its component colours, and so demystifies (up to a point) the process of Un coup de dés, where hued colour values are singularly absent (only white is named, and then only twice: in the early instance ‘l’Abîme blanchi’ and in the close-to-final nominal, ‘cette blancheur

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rigide dérisoire’).147 It might be conjectured that the allusion to colour instances in the shattering of the unitary Idea brims with modernist scepsis in a text where any persisting categorial notion of rigid ‘subdivisions’ is displaced by a poetics of disarticulation and dispersal. Coherence is abolished in favour of fragmentation, while certainty and permanence are displaced by provisionality. So, what of white? How does white – always already enfolded in ‘blanc’, ‘blanchi’, and ‘blancheur’, and shaping the conceptual and material dimensions of the blank – participate in the self-morphing momentum of this bewildering text? The eruption of white in Un coup de dés is captured fleetingly in the successive referents of diffuse or fragmented materiality that shape Mallarmé’s poetic imaginary in this work, and across the span of his writing: foam, flakes, feather, sea mist, spray, bones, sail, corpse, the seven stars (‘septentrion’) of The Plough, and their constellation (Ursa Major). Announced by ‘l’Abîme blanchi’ (a structural inversion of the constellation figure), the text draws in its wake ‘écumes originelles’, ‘plume solitaire éperdue’, ‘une constellation’, ‘l’issu stellaire’, and, beyond the substantives, adverbs bear the kinaesthetic values of white and light (‘sidéralement’). Colour is once more primarily immanent in the object evoked (whether as a material thing or an abstract concept), and colour clings to the remains of activity or creativity, like the debris of the shipwreck continues to call up the original integrity of the now lost entity.148 White has centrifugal force, departing from original bodies or constituencies, in order to flake, to split, and to disperse in the manner of meaning itself as it sparks and scatters. Derrida, in Acts of Literature, affirms the seminal role of white in Un coup de dés, underscoring its fissiparous agency as its material forms shift and alter, and foregrounding the imbrication of white matter with the blank spaces of the material page: The sign blanc (‘white’, ‘blank’, ‘space’), with all that is associated with it from one thing to the next, is a huge reservoir of meaning (snow, cold death, marble, etc.; swan, wing, fan, virginity, purity, hymen, etc.; page, canvas, veil, gauze, milk, semen, Milky Way, star, etc.). It permeates Mallarmé’s entire text, as if by symbolic magnetization. And yet, the white also marks, through the intermediacy of the white page, the place of the ‘writing’ of these whites, and first of all the spacing between the different significations (that of white among others), the spacing of reading.149 (emphasis original)

Poetry stages the turn from mimetic or narrative representation to abstraction – the flight from the narrative centre (in Un coup de dés, it is the interrupted story of a shipwreck) – that is integral to Mallarmé’s art. Un coup de dés represents stunningly, and in unprecedented ways, the idea expressed by W.B. Yeats in ‘The Second Coming’ (1919): ‘things fall apart; the centre cannot hold’. Mallarmé’s fractured, fissiparous aesthetic will be foundational in twentieth-century modernism, shoring up the tesserae of concrete poetry from Apollinaire to e.e. cummings, and relaying the polyphonic dispersals of the stream-of-consciousness narrative of Joyce, Proust, Djuna Barnes, and Beckett. At the same time, the

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Plate 13. Stéphane Mallarmé, Jamais un coup de dés n’abolira le hasard: poème (épreuves d’imprimerie) (Paris: A. Vollard, 2 juillet 1897). RES FOL-NFY-130. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France. Photo (C) BnF, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/image BnF.

material resistance of the empirical object, its propensity to endure in memory and in the creative imagination, prompts poetic (and readerly) investment in the fragmented object. The very processes of dissolution, fracturing, dispersal, and abstraction draw our attention back to the fleeting ‘thing’, the obscured, occluded object and its persisting or resurgent material trace, whether colour, shape, form, or process. Thus, the agency of white draws us to the fragment – the stuff of dereliction – as evidence of the greater, unattainable whole of which it forms part and to which it belongs and ceaselessly refers us. Paradoxically in poetry that seeks to transcend its material origins (recalling the ‘aboli bibelot d’inanité sonore’ of the ‘Sonnet en –yx’), we are drawn mesmerically to the occluded or evanescent object that persists in the shards of language, which make and unmake tenuous or more tenacious connections with the irrecuperable imagined whole. But what of the afterlife of white and whiteness in the text of poetry? In Un coup de dés whiteness becomes reified and petrified; its material dries hard and obdurate as a concept (‘cette blancheur rigide dérisoire’). A geology of impregnable whiteness is figured by the bleached or whitened abyss of the text’s inauguration: ‘L’Abîme blanchi’ suggests the aridity of conceptual thinking, the impotence of the viewer or narrator-subject, and a state of exasperated or arrested creativity. While white materializes as a series of scattered objects, the purer white that is the blancespace (space) is made palpable, almost, by the black texturing of typography that is its counterpoint. The fragments of black (bodied forth in typeface of vastly different emboldened thickness and italic delicateness that form a typographical

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phenomenology) are freighted with oscillating concepts of ancestry and immediacy, failure and invigoration, longing and lapsing. Dispersal anticipates reformations and concentrations as fragments of black ricochet through the spaces of the white page, producing explosive clusters or constellations impelled by the kinetic energy of successive present participles: ‘veillant, doutant, roulant, brillant et méditant’. Sublime constellations jostle with the abyssal space of the mythical shipwreck, and  creative impotence, lucidly embraced, provides the necessary fractured ground – blank or white ground – on which the struggle of Art, the struggle for Art, can take place. For Maurice Blanchot, the art of the modernist poet, and specifically that of Mallarmé, is about risk-taking; it is about placing language under pressure, eschewing art’s self-perpetuating containments, and assuming loss and vacancy in order to liberate the creative process: ce que fondent les poètes, l’espace, – abîme et fondement de la parole – est ce qui ne demeure pas, et le séjour authentique n’est pas l’abri où l’homme se préserve, mais est en rapport avec l’écueil; par la perdition et le gouffre, et avec cette ‘mémorable crise’ qui seule permet d’atteindre au vide mouvant, lieu où la tâche créatrice commence.150 what is foundational for poets, space – the abyss and the foundation of language – is what does not remain, and the authentic sojourn is not the shelter where the human being takes refuge, but relates to the shipwreck; through perdition and the abyss, and with this ‘memorable crisis’ which alone enables us to reach the moving void, the place where the creative task begins.

It is thus with white – the blank ground of the modernist’s simultaneous will to abolition and creation – that this reading of Mallarmé’s monochrome colours reaches its provisional end, the crucial point at which much of exploratory twentieth- and twenty-first-century art and thought launch their future.

Conclusion Sometimes, reading Mallarmé, it is easier to say what colour is not. Colour is not decorative (superficial, local, incidental, ornamental). Rather, colour participates in structure and shapes – and is shaped by – the modernist sensibility that values the porous and the paradoxical. Form, order, and design (natural or humancrafted; kinetic or visual; musical, pictorial, typographic, or material) are key to Mallarmé’s poetics and his art writing. And so too is the shape of colour: the trace or line of colour on a material surface; the way colour skims the object or moves across the mind; colour’s relationship to the movement of concept and value. The agency of colour is evident in the dance of words that is poetry (and that is related art writing). Colour saturation is not what is primarily at issue here: more often in Mallarmé’s writing there is sparseness in colour. We witness a momentary

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eruption or a sudden arcing of colour, but concentrated chromatic instances (like the concentration of ‘un or’ in the ‘Sonnet en -yx’ or the lapidary focalization on the ‘rubis’ of Hérodiade) are rare, affirming fragmentation as the modernist’s preferred means of creating intense new relations and interactions. It is as if Mallarmé’s poetic design were simply about design (form, structure, syntax) – artistic intentionality – and about colour touching form, only barely or briefly resting there. Yet, colour also clings to things or is, for a moment, resplendent across the material surface captured and transposed in poetry. Colour inflects and singularizes the form that is the fan, the neck of the swan, the cloud, the foam or spray, the conch-shell, the ballet-dancer’s arabesque, the porcelain cup, bibelot, the mast, the Livre. Colour reveals (and celebrates) form whether in the patterning of nature (cloud, sky, rain, rock), in the morphology of the material object (bowl, window, tombstone), in the flesh and movement of the body (face, arms, hand), or in the line and form of art itself. Colour is a site of affective investment and a pole of attraction for experience both aversive and meliorative; it is a source of irresolvability equally capable of probing disconsolation as of spurring a sense of pleasure or creating an opening on to joy. Colour is a focus of modernist equivocation and displacement; and in Mallarmé’s modernism colour is integral to the oscillations of forces material and metaphysical. If colour attaches to physical things, it also departs from those same things in order to migrate to concepts, and reverses that process. The flight of colour from the material to the abstract plots the trajectory – the line – of Mallarmé’s poetry, from ‘azur’ to ‘Azur’, but the direction of movement constantly reverses, for instance when the metaphysical ‘Abîme’ confronting the poet (and the reader) in Un coup de dés is, luminously and fragmentally, coloured white. Colour is absorbed or abstracted into other concept-words, but colour resurfaces, immanent, in the verbal armature of the object (whether a material or conceptual object). The vicissitudes or volatility of colour within a single poem and across the corpus is central to Mallarmé’s vision, a vision that is exquisitely attuned to the colour instance in painting especially its abstractive manifestations: the unceasing cancellation and restoration of chromatic values are sustained where the initiative is invested in language and its evocative power. Mallarmé’s call to ‘céder l’initiative aux mots’ (in ‘Relativement au vers’, Divagations) translates into the power of words to make us visualize; to solicit our investment in the words – and in the work – of colour. The ancient quarrel between line and colour in the visual arts needs to be resituated in the verbal medium in a modernist writerly context in order to begin to do justice to Mallarmé’s project. If line is analogous to the syntax of the poem (and the poet claims ‘Je suis syntaxier’),151 Mallarmé’s exploded syntax and complex, often baffling semantics militate against the telos of traditional form and signification. Line (structure) and colour are no longer antagonistic, but instead form a relation of eruptive complementarity liberated from the regularity of line. Fractured syntax coincides with fragmentary colour in radiant new relations to power modernism’s momentum and proclaim its transformative vision.

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I want to give the last word to Henri Lefébure, who, writing in praise of Mallarmé’s art, captures the poet’s sublime synthesis of colour, form, materiality, and affect, and so defines, perhaps, what it is to be an absolute poet: Vous […] ramassez tout dans votre étreinte, la composition, la ligne, la couleur, l’âme, la facture et vous y joignez cette coloration intense que votre esprit concentré verse sur les choses. Il est difficile d’être plus poète, mon ami. You […] gather everything in your embrace, composition, line, colour, soul, form, and you bring to it that intense colouration that your mental concentration casts on everything. It’s difficult to be more of a poet, my friend.152

Part II M AT T E R , M E TA P HO R , M E TA M O R P HO SI S : V A L É RY ’ S INTERMIT TENT COLOUR

Valéry: Vanguard and rearguard Paul Valéry’s thought and his poetry belong to the tradition of ‘classical modernism’, or what, in European literature historiography, is known as ‘High Modernism’ (Mallarmé, T.S. Eliot, Pound, Woolf, Proust, Stein, Joyce, Gide, Mann, Rilke, Svevo), writing founded on the autonomy of the text, self-referentiality, and the exploration of a fractured consciousness. If Valéry resists the lure of the earlytwentieth-century avant-gardist sensibility – the ‘shock of the new’ that defines the projects of Apollinaire, Cendrars, the Italian Futurists, and, later, the Dadaists and the Surrealists – he shared with them and, with Proust, Eliot, Joyce, and Woolf, the unfolding of equivocal subjectivity, immersion in complex temporalities, and a belief in the work of art or literature as beguilingly unresolved.1 Valéry and Gide corresponded for half a century, resolute in their commitment to the intellectual adventure of the modern writer; it was Gide who urged Valéry to write La Jeune Parque (1917), and thus break his writerly silence of twenty years.2 T.S. Eliot recognized Valéry as the foremost poet of the age; he engaged deeply with his writing, and spoke (though not uncritically) of the seminal ‘leçon de Valéry’ for modern literature.3 Eliot contributed the Introduction to the Bollingen translation of Valéry’s writings on poetry (The Art of Poetry), defining Valéry as a poet for the twentieth century in terms of his exploration of ‘questions which no poet of an earlier generation would have raised; […] questions that belong to the present, self-conscious century’.4 Valéry was appreciated by Joyce (who could recite ‘Ébauche d’un serpent’). Rilke was an admiring translator of Valéry, translating sixteen of the poems of Charmes (1922).5 In the development of modern poetry in French, Valéry was a sustained interlocutor of Mallarmé; he had unprecedented access to the newly completed Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897) and marvelled at the poem’s unfolding of the fissiparous trajectory of thought: la pensée avec ses trous, ses échappatoires, insinuations neuves et ses fils distincts non interrompus par les interruptions les plus irréductibles. Est le style – à condition – de se rappeler (et lutter contre) – quelle distance demeure absolue entre les éléments de l’une et ceux de l’autre.6

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If Valéry’s poetry and poetics connect Mallarmé and Yves Bonnefoy in key ways  – through the autonomy of the creative work, exploratory values, and the pursuit of equivocation – Bonnefoy’s assessment of Valéry’s legacy combines admiration and scepticism: his appreciation of the unresolve of ‘Le Cimetière marin’ (‘le plus beau poème de Valéry parce qu’il y a hésité’) is tempered by his critique of Valéry’s hermetical smoothness and his privileging of an ‘art de la forme close’, over a more material, more rugged ethos.7 Valéry is influential upon twentieth-century philosophy and critical enquiry. In the study of time, consciousness, and the process of thought, he shared certain broad affinities with Bergson.8 Valéry’s eulogy for the Jewish philosopher, given at the Académie Française in January 1941, in the dark days of the German Occupation of Paris, praised in Bergson the unshackled, universalist, interdisciplinary thought that was threatened by Nazi ideology. Valéry traced a portrait of the thinker whose intellectual vision and human values he shared: Très haute, très pure, très supérieure figure de l’homme pensant, et peutêtre l’un des derniers hommes qui auront exclusivement, profondément, et supérieurement pensé, dans une époque du monde où le monde va pensant et méditant de moins en moins, où la civilisation semble, de jour en jour, se réduire au souvenir et aux vestiges que nous gardons de sa richesse multiforme et de sa production intellectuelle libre et surabondante, cependant que la misère, les angoisses, les contraintes de tout ordre dépriment ou découragent les entreprises de l’esprit, Bergson semble déjà appartenir à un âge révolu, et son nom, le dernier grand nom de l’histoire de l’intelligence européenne.9 Very high, very pure, very superior figure of the thinking man, and perhaps one of the last men to have thought in ways exclusive, profound, and superior, in an age where the world is less and less reflective, where civilization seems, from one day to the next, to be reduced to the memories and vestiges that we preserve of civilization’s multifarious richness and prodigious, free intellectual production, whilst misery, anguish, and constraints of all kinds depress and discourage the projects of the intellect, Bergson seems to belong to a bygone era, and his name, to be the last great name in the history of the European intellect.

Maurice Blanchot shared Valéry’s commitment to ‘pure literature’. In a fascinating review of the first published volume of the Cahiers, Blanchot expressed his affinity with Valéry’s sense of literature as necessarily inimical to the everyday.10 Here, Blanchot admired the fragmentary form of Valéry’s waking thought: ‘cette simultanéité successive d’une pensée possible […] est la marque de cette écriture entre nuit et jour’. It is not surprising, then, that Blanchot was critical of Valéry’s

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will to organize freeform thought into a ‘système’, and, polemically (and unjustly), he drew a disparaging comparison with the encyclopaedic mission of Flaubert’s parodic pair, Bouvard and Pécuchet.11 Valéry became a literary touchstone for Emmanuel Levinas, encouraged by Blanchot. With a more empathic view (than Blanchot) of the poet’s vision of a ‘system’ of thought, Levinas shared Valéry’s concern for the architecture of a work, citing the poet in his essay on ‘Substitution’.12 A keen reader of Valéry, Levinas draws on ‘Le Cantique des colonnes’ (Charmes) in Humanisme de l’autre homme (1972) in order to illustrate the Platonic ideal conveyed in ‘désir sans défaut’.13 Many of the twentieth century’s most enduringly influential thinkers have acknowledged the significance of Valéry for our late-modern age. In the first wave of Structuralism, Valéry’s thought and poetics inspired pioneering journals of textual criticism like Tel Quel and Poétique, informing their inter-disciplinary ethos and their reach across literary theory and practice, politics, and science.14 Roland Barthes and Gérard Genette recognized in Valéry a poet and essayist whose commitment to the interior working of text was paramount, and who spurned, as they did, literary historiography envisioned as a succession of ‘great names’, in favour of ‘the death of the author’. Barthes, in an interview with Abdallah Bensmaïn in 1978, regretted late modernity’s devaluing (‘dévalorisation’) of Valéry’s achievement and endorsed the poet’s ‘opinions assez avancées et […] toujours valables’ regarding language, literature, and writing.15 For Barthes, Valéry’s writing pursued the ‘pensée-mot’, which he and other later-twentieth-century writers were spurred to take forward through a variety of forms that span the nouveau roman and autobiography/auto-fiction. In an important article challenging the formalist recuperation of Valéry’s poetics, Steven Cassedy argues against the Structuralist orthodoxy that confined Valéry’s writing to a form of ‘ideal autonomy’.16 Cassedy discerns in Valéry, instead, a fuller philosophical understanding of art that includes the human and the material as Valéry remains focused on ontology and advances the dual status of the work of art as both self-referential and continuous with its object. More recently, in similar vein, Michel Jarrety has offered a nuanced portrait of Valéry’s influence on critical thought of the later twentieth century, arguing that Valéry demands that we read him on his own terms. Jarrety underlines Valéry’s role in developing a poetics that anticipates aspects of Structuralism and ideas in reader reception, in its focus on poein, on textual making and crafting, rather than retreating to the notion of inspiration.17 Crucially, however, Jarrety affirms Valéry’s distinctiveness and his pursuit of an ‘authorial poetics’ that resists Structuralist prescriptiveness: Valéry’s privileging of the individual work is the antithesis of Structuralism’s systematizing approach to the literary text, as is his sustained development of ‘the secret trace of a Subject’.18 For Jarrety, Valéry’s specificity lies in his desire to reveal the consonance between words and poetry’s form (just as nature reveals its design, its secret architecture). Jarrety argues that Valéry’s pursuit of legato is what makes his poetry and his poetics distinctive: that is, the poet ‘smooths’ the differences between substance and structure, uniting form and matter, and achieving an art of dazzling integrity.

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Poststructuralist thought is alert to the capacity of Valéry’s writing to provoke dissolutions and release fluidity. Jacques Derrida, in ‘qual quelle: les sources de Valéry’, in Marges de la philosophie (1972), responded to Valéry’s ‘Louanges de l’eau’, a poem commissioned by the Perrier mineral water company in 1935.19 Derrida reveals the indeterminacies of Valéry’s writing which, in its movement of self-cancelling and patterns of resurgence, lends itself to poststructuralist and feminist readings. Gilles Deleuze, in Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation (1981), draws on Valéry’s view of sensation as directly transmitted and thus circumventing the impulse to tell a story: ‘Suivant un mot de Valéry, la sensation, c’est ce qui se transmet directement en évitant le détour ou l’ennui d’une histoire à raconter’.20 Whilst this is a passing paraphrase of Valéry, Deleuze’s focus on the relation of sensation to the anti-telic momentum of writing is indicative of modern theory’s affinity – actual and potential – with Valéry’s thought and writerly practice. Sensation and its relation to colour in Valéry’s poetry and related art writing are one of the defining lines of my study. The experimentalism of the nouveau roman and women’s writing have traced an important line of critical enquiry for Valéry studies that is still emerging. Exploratory work by Paul Gifford (reading Valéry through Hélène Cixous) and by Brian Stimpson (reading Valéry through Marguerite Duras) has uncovered striking affinities (and tensions) between écriture féminine and ideas in the philosophy of gender in French, and the poet’s exploratory thought and his scintillating poetry.21 Hélène Cixous in La Jeune Née (1975) discerns in Valéry’s La Jeune Parque (1917) the voice of the woman searching for a fluid subjectivity: Mais elle : s’élance, cherche à aimer. Ainsi, d’ailleurs l’a senti Valéry, marquant d’ambiguïté sa Jeune Parque se cherchant, masculin dans sa jalousie d’elle-même ‘se voyant se voir’, devise de toute la spéculation/spécularisation phallocentrique de tout Teste ; féminine dans l’éperdue descente plus bas, plus bas où dans le ressassement de la mer se perd une voix qui ne se connaît pas.22 But she: leaps forward, striving to love. That indeed was how Valéry understood it when he invested his Young Fate with ambiguity in her bid to know herself: masculine in her jealousy towards herself ‘seeing herself see herself ’, which is the motto of the entire speculation/specularisation of every Teste; feminine in the hopeless descent deeper and deeper, where in the endless churn of the sea a voice that does not know itself fades.

At the same time, Cixous affirms that woman’s capacity to create a subjectivity that fractures ‘sans regret’ is, ultimately, not the same as Valéry’s description of the Young Fate, who, irremediably splintered, is denied the possibility of holistic self-reconstitution: Est-ce un hasard si c’est de la femme, un féminin démembrement qui tourmente le Je/Moi qui n’est/naît qu’à se poursuivre divisé par Valéry infiniment disloqué, jamais vraiment recomposé dans La Jeune Parque ?23

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Is it a coincidence that it is a woman, a feminine dismemberment that torments the I/Self who is/is born only to continue fractured by Valéry infinitely dislocated, never properly reconstituted in The Young Fate?

Whilst there are limitations to viewing Valéry’s poetry as proto–écriture féminine, contemporary critical thought – in its move to undo binary thinking and in its search for a more porous, pliant subjectivity – has, through Cixous, identified in Valéry a voice that begins to trouble distinctions, causing them to ricochet and to morph. Notwithstanding the engagement of a long current of modern critical thought with the writer of the Cahiers, Monsieur Teste (1896), La Jeune Parque (1917), and ‘Le Cimetière marin’ (1922), Valéry’s reputation across the later twentieth century has placed him, unquestioningly, in the literary and political rearguard, though not without justification in some key respects. With his election to the Académie française in 1925 and his state funeral in 1945, Valéry’s reputation as an écrivain rangé was institutionalized by national elites, intellectual and political. His writing has nourished the thought of right-wing, left-wing, and centrist French presidents across the Fifth Republic from De Gaulle and Pompidou, through Mitterrand, to Emmanuel Macron.24 Related to this is the broader cultural institutionalization of a certain manner of viewing Valéry: his reputation is synonymous with the cerebral, the austere, the formal (in both senses of the word), and seems, on the face of it, the antithesis of material, social, and sensual values. We think of the poet’s signal recourse to classical myth (via La Jeune Parque and his extended ‘Narcissus’ project (‘Narcisse parle’ (1899), ‘Fragments du Narcisse’ (1926), and ‘Cantate du Narcisse’ (1939)); his exploratory work in philosophy (Zeno’s paradoxes); his fascination with mathematics and enduring concern for order and symmetry; his ‘dialogue’ with Leonardo da Vinci; and his pursuit of ‘pure’, aestheticist and allegorical forms (his appeal to the three Graces or the Golden Mean). In his enquiry into questions of eternity, cosmology, mythology, and the immemorial, Valéry is, for many, (resistibly) abstract, difficult, inaccessible even.25 All of this conspires to cement Valéry’s reputation as patrician: remote from the everyday world and contemporary culture, and indifferent to the concerns of late modernity. In the arts, Valéry’s reputation suffered due to his neglect of Cézanne and Picasso and his perceived antipathy towards twentieth-century aesthetic radicalism.26 He has long been straitjacketed as ‘conservative’ – culturally, socially, and politically. The perpetual reception of Valéry and the assumptions of the wider academic readership were addressed by the French New Novelist Nathalie Sarraute. In Paul Valéry et l’Enfant d’éléphant (1986), Sarraute identified the constraining critical institutionalization of Valéry’s work, taking issue with fossilized readings of the poet. Here she sought to unsettle the layers of accreted readings of Valéry that work to fix, rather than facilitate, reader reception.27 Sarraute ventures that Valéry is unreadable unless we undertake a tabula rasa of ossifying critical readings: Valéry suggested that faire table rase was a continuous and necessary process, when he affirmed that there was no given meaning in his writing and that the reader, each reader, is free to make his/her own interpretation of a text (‘Un poème

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n’est jamais achevé’).28 In broad terms, Sarraute recognizes Valéry’s pursuit of the informel and the open-endedness of écriture, and argues that, notwithstanding the formal perfection of Valéry’s poetry (she cites Narcisse parle), the acute critical ear registers ‘ce rayonnement, cette vibration à peine perceptible’ and can discern the expression of ‘de véritable poésie’.29 The invigorated research undertaken by leading Valéry scholars since the 1970s has uncovered the compelling salience of Valéry’s thought and writing for our own time. The more equivocal, more prospective, and more material voice of Valéry has been revealed by Christine Crow, Lloyd Austin, Paul Gifford, Brian Stimpson, Serge Bourjea, Michel Jarrety, Kirsteen Anderson, Florence de Lussy, Suzanne Nash, and Malcolm Bowie. In landmark monographs and illuminating shorter studies, they have opened up fresh perspectives on corporeality, the sensorium, nature, desire, and finitude that are responsive to the deeper sensuous seam and greater material richness in Valéry’s writing.30 Thus, the pure versus material dichotomy that has long prevailed, aligning Valéry with values of intellectual rigour and abstract austerity, has been questioned and complexified in the enduring work of Christine Crow. In Paul Valéry: Consciousness and Nature (1972), Crow offers a probing exploration of the poet’s approach to nature.31 She argues that his anti-nature pronouncements need to be understood as the poet’s resistance to the superabundance of nature without the benefits of human intentionality, whereas Valéry’s concern with the substance of things is inextricable, always, from his sense of human agency.32 Crow stresses Valéry’s investment in the ‘inter-fertilization of consciousness and world’, foregrounding the poet’s attention to texture (she has less to say about colour values).33 More recently, drawing on contemporary feminist thought and autobiography theory, Kirsteen Anderson has been attentive to voice in both material and imaginary realms, and to the vocalic capacity of consciousness. Anderson’s Paul Valéry and the Voice of Desire (2000) is an important exploration of subjectivity that looks ahead to the ‘acoustic turn’ in humanities research today as it uncovers a more equivocal imaginaire unresolved between male and female values. Valéry studies has thus begun to research corporeality and the sensorium, and a more ‘material’ Valéry has been revealed. Laurent Nunez captures this in his foreword to an important revisionist reading of Valéry’s projects: ‘[Valéry] n’est pas un pur esprit délivré de la chair: une évidente sensualité coule dans ses lettres et dans ses œuvres’.34 The immersion of pure poetry and thought, intermittent and precarious, in materiality and embodied subjectivity, has important implications for matters of colour in Valéry’s writing. So, what of colour? Approached in terms of the ancient and enduring colour– line debate, and the polymath poet’s interest in scientific discovery from relativity theory to the Riemann Hypothesis, Valéry appears, reputationally at least, to align with cerebral disegno over colore. Colour appears antithetical to Valéry’s purist sensibility, inimical to his formal concerns, his affective restraint, his intellectual ‘coolness’, and his rigorous pursuit of the life of the mind.35 Valéry’s appraisal of landscape and description, in painting and, by analogy, in literature, reveals at times his clear privileging of form and order. Working analogically

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across media and art forms (Corot is his subject),Valéry writes in ‘Réflexion sur le paysage et bien d’autres choses’ (1935) that pictorial landscape coincides with a loss of intellectual power in painting: ‘Enfin, le développement du paysage semble bien coïncider avec une diminution marquée de la portée intellectuelle de l’art’.36 He contends that description in literature has similar, depreciative consequences in weakening intellectual agency (‘capitis diminutio’).37 Excess(ive) description (which, Valéry affirms, denies clarifying order for it allows the viewer’s gaze to wander at random) leads to a loss of capacity for abstraction and limits the viewer’s power to engage intently and deeply. Instead, detrimentally, immediate effects are privileged, and, thus, he makes an implicit critique of plein air Impressionism. Valéry values, instead, the privileging of form, classical modelling, and ancient and Renaissance ideals – and thus disegno – that allow the immediate encounter with the material and the natural to be transformed and transcended. We come face to face with a paradox here: given Valéry’s insistence on idea, concept, and rigour, on intellectual abstraction as a core value, and on art as making, his perceived silence over post-Impressionism and Cubism is anomalous.38 Indeed, his belief in writing and art that spring from the will to create, rather than to replicate, is cognate with the values of Braque and Picasso, who made a lithograph portrait of the poet for the 1921 NRF edition of La Jeune Parque.39 Valéry’s preoccupation with the genesis of the work and with art (and literature) as process takes him more decisively in the direction of the creative principles of Cubism and twentieth-century exploratory art than Valéry himself, or his commentators, have acknowledged.40 Valéry’s poetics and his poetry and art writing are consonant with analytical Cubism’s non-representational, anti-mimetic art (and the residual visibility of the subject). Reading Paul Valéry, our mind is drawn into the play of forms, the coincidence of structures, the melting together or the disjunction of planes, the proliferation and self-cancelling of voices (notably in La Jeune Parque, ‘Fragments du Narcisse’, and ‘La Pythie’). Valéry’s emphasis on order and rigour and his pursuit of monochrome colour (and abhorrence of colourist exuberance) align with Cubism’s chromatic restriction. Whether Valéry engages with, or neglects, early-twentieth-century movements in art is perhaps not the central issue. There is, notwithstanding Valéry’s conspicuous silence over Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, and Braque, a foundational affinity between a poet and art writer committed to formal innovation and the creative process, and painters advancing the hermetic and technical inventiveness of, in particular, Cubism. For all his declared commitment to conceptual values, Valéry immerses in colour, engaging in its appraisal and its appreciation: he does this in ways that are remarkably sustained, if fragmentary. In his essay ‘Autour de Corot’ (the preface to Douze Estampes de Corot, 1932), Valéry reflects on why black-and-white values in art are more affecting than the spectrum of colour, and, specifically, on why the black colours of drawing, sketching, and lithography are more conducive to an art of suggestion and subtlety.41 He identifies Rembrandt, Claude Lorrain, Goya, and Corot as the great non-colourists who most subtly and powerfully deployed colour, and calls them ‘poètes’ (emphasis original): thus, Valéry sets out a chromatic

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paradox in painting. In a subtle analogical move, he goes on to think about white and black in terms of the intellectual process, and the practice, of writing: ‘le blanc et le noir sont en quelque manière plus près de l’esprit et des actes de l’écriture’, and this we shall explore more deeply towards the end of Part II (‘Chiaroscuro Modulations’).42 Valéry pays discerning attention to colour in the short essay ‘Des couleurs’ (1938, Instants) which explores the quality of black, from the depths of Pascalian ‘noir’ to the lustrous blacks of Catholic ritual.43 He describes ‘le “noir pur”’ as the ‘couleur puissante de la solitude totale, plénitude du rien, perfection du néant’, his language inscribing the essence of the modernist paradox suspended between ideal and abyss.44 Turning to incarnate red, Valéry reads the crimson of flushed flesh as the manifestation of the subject’s knowledge of Good and Evil. He ends his reflection with thoughts on colour as the sensation that has its source in what the object rejects, reprising the Newtonian view of colour as a consequence of refraction and not an inherent quality of the object or phenomenon, and thus affirming the essential role of subjectivity in appraising the colour of things.45 The critical reception of Valéry’s poetry has developed decisively, challenging its default ascription to the sphere of intellectualist poetry. This development and the greater emphasis by critics today on human and subjective values can be enriched by an immersive, colour-alert reading of Valéry’s poetry and his related art writing (which has received significantly less attention). Already, over the past two decades, as part of the ‘material’ turn of Valéry studies, colour in writing has come intermittently to critical attention. Paul Gifford in his close study of the poems of Charmes highlights the richness of colour, en passant, seizing the occasional quality of Valéry’s chromatic ‘modulations’ in ‘Le Cimetière marin’ and in related poems that explore the flesh of the body or of fruit.46 And, of course, Charmes as a title (with its etymology in carmina = songs, charms, and crimson (carmine) (from the Old French ‘carmina’)) immediately places the book under the twinned signs of colour (painterly and fleshly) and lyric agency, with charmes invoking ideas of poetic intoxication and transformation. The work of Serge Bourjea is a signal exception to the significant neglect of colour values in Valéry studies. In ‘Le Trait, la trace, la couleur’, the introduction to Le Sujet de l’écriture (1997), Bourjea makes the case for critical attentiveness to ‘la présence chromatique’ in Valéry: taking forward a close reading of an early ekphrastic prose poem inspired by Zurbarán’s Sainte-Agathe (1633), Bourjea draws out the tension between the naming and the silencing of colour.47 The question of colour remains, however, to be explored more widely and more deeply, as an integral part of Valéry’s poetic vision and practice. Valéry’s colour writing creates a kind of atelier or laboratory that invites us to take a speculative and experimental approach to how poets write colour in their own monochrome medium. Valéry’s relation with colour culture offers a route into exploring chromatic values in his poetry and art writing, as was the case with Mallarmé. So, I begin here by situating Valéry’s reflections on colour in the embodied and material experience of everyday – and exceptional – cultural contexts.

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‘Carroty-red bits of fibre’ and a pink-bristled toothbrush Valéry’s attention to colour across his writings on art and aesthetics, and in the vast Cahiers project that he began in 1894, aged twenty-three, and wrote every day until his death in 1945, is sustained and profound. Whether he is writing on Leonardo, Rembrandt, Corot, Manet, Degas, or Morisot, Valéry is attuned to the sudden eruption or concentration of colour in acts of perception, cognition, and recognition, in his engagement with everyday objects and with exceptional cultural forms. Valéry’s responsiveness to the cultural uses of colour is spurred by a variety of media and sources, from his evocation of the ‘chocolate-coloured depths’ of laternineteenth-century photographs through his multi-sensorial attentiveness to the textured iridescence of the sea.48 Valéry’s immersive colour practice as a painter is vividly present in his pastels and watercolours: his self-portrait (Musée de Sète) brims with green and orange-red contrasts, and his Mediterranean landscape painting (at Giens) draws deeply on ochres and old golds.49 His early notebooks (paper and pen) and his hand-illustrated letter-writing reveal a creative, even playful, visual colourist: a thin schoolboy jotter with a delicate orange cover has its title written in violet ink.50 His art writing, in its recollections and speculations, registers chromatic experiences that are often elliptical and ephemeral, but no less intense and stimulating. Valéry’s receptivity to colour and his chromatic practice speak powerfully, which is to say allusively, whatever medium he is exploring. Valéry’s writing on the arts and on artists weaves a strong relation between chromatism and affect, as it probes despair and disillusion, and desire and empathy. The poet’s engagement with the art of Degas and of Morisot, and with the prismatic effects of Loïe Fuller’s mesmeric dance reveals this relation in three brief instances to which I now turn. Edgar Degas Valéry was a regular visitor to the studio of Edgar Degas, from 1896. In his reflections on the artist and his contemporaries, Valéry turns to colour values to evoke a state of mind, to bring to life the everyday objects and materials that populate the artist’s studio. In ‘37 rue Victor-Massé’ (1905), his vignette of Degas is threaded with wry reference to the painter’s quotidien and to colour that is redolent with unease and disgust. He recalls, in resonant chromatic and textural terms, his distaste for certain foodstuffs, notably Keiller’s ‘Dundee’ marmalade, regularly offered to him by the elderly Degas (‘cette purée pénétrée de fibrilles couleur de carotte’).51 Valéry notes how his disgust has altered over time through the power of his memory in conjuring up a profoundly empathic vision of the dejected painter in his studio: [il existe] une certaine marmelade d’oranges de Dundee que je ne pouvais souffrir, et que j’ai fini par supporter, et que je crois que je ne déteste plus, à cause du souvenir. S’il m’arrive [d’y] goûter à présent […], je me retrouve assis en face

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d’un vieil homme affreusement solitaire, livré à de lugubres réflexions, privé par l’état de sa vue, du travail qui fut toute sa vie.52 [there is] a particular Dundee marmalade that I couldn’t stand, but which I ended up tolerating and which I think I no longer dislike, because of the memory it holds. If ever I eat [it] today […], I am transported back to my encounter with an elderly man who is dreadfully alone, who is prone to gloomy thoughts, and who is deprived, because of the condition of his sight, of the work that has defined his entire life.

The marmalade memory is an important instance of colour subjectivity linked to other sensory experiences and other material objects. Valéry writes vividly of the painter’s everyday clutter: ‘une brosse à dents, desséchée dans un verre, aux poils à demi teints d’un rose mort’ [a toothbrush in a glass, its dried-up bristles a deathly pink colour].53 He evokes Degas’s studio in ways that foreground the discrepancy between the mundane (often luridly coloured) and art (the purer play of forms, for what Valéry appreciates above all is Degas’s draughtsmanship, his disegno, and his abstractive values). So, the existential disgust sparked in Valéry by his aversive experience of quotidian colour and texture in the material space of the studio is mitigated by cherished memory and by his deep admiration for the genius of the painter.54 Berthe Morisot Valéry is acutely aware of cultural experience in shaping human responsiveness to colour. In his essay ‘Berthe Morisot’ (1926), he considers how the same landscape will be viewed differently by the geologist, the soldier, and the peasant, who pass through it.55 Chromatic relativism links those different actors in a landscape as each undertakes the mental work of transforming colour into cultural ‘signes’ that are meaningful for him.56 The landscape has values that connect history, autobiography, craft, expertise, physicality, the seasons, conflict, inheritance, and remembrance. Valéry’s colour writing combines retrospective and prospective shifts, taking us towards (often back towards) a memory or, alternately, moving us forward in the form of an intimation or expression of anticipation. He charts how individual colours, in Morisot’s abstractive works, disappear for the viewer, in the stirring of memory, desire, or idea: Ces jaunes, ces bleus, ces gris assemblés si bizarrement s’évanouissent dans l’instant même : le souvenir chasse le présent ; l’utile chasse le réel ; la signification des corps chasse leur forme. Nous ne voyons aussitôt que des espoirs ou des regrets, des propriétés et des vertus potentielles, des promesses de vendange, des symptômes de maturité, des catégories minérales ; nous ne voyons que du futur ou du passé, mais non les taches de l’instant pur. Quoi que ce soit de non-coloré se substitue sans retour à la présence chromatique, comme si la substance du non-artiste absorbait la sensation et ne la rendait jamais plus, l’ayant fuie vers les conséquences.57

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The yellows, the blues, and the greys that are brought together so strangely vanish at once; memory drives out the present; the useful drives out the real; the significance of bodies drives out their form. Straightaway we see only hopes and regrets, properties and potential virtues, promised harvests; signs of maturity, mineral categories; we see only the things of the future and those of the past, but not the patches of the pure moment. Non-coloured elements replace definitively chromatic presence, as if the substance of the non-artist were absorbing sensation but never again rendering it, having moved to embrace its consequences.

There is, Valéry maintains, no such thing as ‘pure’ colour-viewing; all colours are reclaimed by the viewer for whom the chromatic experience of the art work triggers a subjective response, one that erases or transcends colour, replacing it with affect; colour invites the viewer to create signs beyond itself. For Valéry, colour reception in painting, with its indissociable relation to narrative subjectivity and to viewer interpretation, is distinct from colour creation. The ‘purely seen’ is, for Valéry, a truth to which the artist alone accedes, and Morisot’s colour experience, as a painter, is absolute such that she arrives at a purer form of abstraction: ‘A l’opposite de cette abstraction [du regardant] est l’abstraction de l’artiste’.58 For the painter, Valéry affirms, it is about pure chromatism, the giving and the receiving of colour, with the acts of seeing and thinking colour imbricated one with the other and subject to competing impulses that are perceptual, cognitive, and aesthetic: la couleur parle couleur [à l’artiste], et il répond à la couleur par la couleur. Il vit dans son objet, au milieu même de ce qu’il cherche à saisir, et dans une tentation, un défi, des exemples, des problèmes, une analyse, une ivresse perpétuels. Il ne peut qu’il ne voie ce à quoi il songe, et songe ce qu’il voit.59 Colour speaks colour [to the artist], and she responds to colour by colour. She lives in her object, lives in the midst of what she is seeking to capture, and she lives with perpetual temptation, defiance, examples, problems, analysis, and creative intoxication. She has to see what she dreams and to dream what she sees.

In this essay on Morisot, Valéry proposes, in fine, that a life devoted to colours and forms is not necessarily ‘moins profonde, ni moins admirable qu’une vie passée dans les ombres intérieures’.60 Valéry appears here to problematize the traditional colore/disegno conflict when he affirms that colour values may be ‘as profound’ as the shadowlands of human experience. Thus, Valéry stresses the scope and the significance of colour immersion in language that implicitly rehabilitates chromatic values as a source of richer subjective meaning. Prompted by his contemplation of Morisot’s art, Valéry’s alertness to interart relations extends from painting and poetry to embrace painting and music. He proposes an analogy between the encounter with painting and the experience of listening to an orchestra tuning up, in search of its collective ‘a’: the productive impulse is stimulated by the accessible array of colours, and Valéry’s writing develops

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the idea of colour’s material and metaphoric capacity (as visual colour or as musical colour), its generative possibilities, and its multi-sensorial and analogical potential: L’état délicieux des laques, des terres, des oxydes et des alumines chante déjà de tous ses tons les préludes du possible et me ravit. Je ne trouve à lui comparer que le chaos fourmillant de sons purs et lumineux qui s’élève de l’orchestre quand il s’apprête, et semble rêver avant le commencement ; chacun cherchant son la, esquissant sa partie pour soi seul dans la forêt de tous les autres timbres, dans un désordre plein de promesses […] qui irrite avec délices toute l’âme sensitive, toutes les racines du plaisir.61 The delicious quality of lacquers, clay, oxides, and aluminas intimates, across the entire tonal range, their harmonious potential, which enchants me. I can only compare the experience to the teeming chaos of pure and luminous sounds that rises from an orchestra as it tunes up, and seems to dream before it begins properly to play; each musician seeking his A, tracing his own journey through the forest that is all the other timbres; the acoustic disorder is full of promise […] and irritates, in delectable ways, the soul of the sensitive listener, quickening every pleasurable stimulus.

Valéry’s method of analogical working, which reaches back to his writing on Leonardo, travels across media and genres; it moves between creative artists and writers in ways that echo Baudelaire’s programmatic exercise in poetic synaesthesia in the sonnet ‘Correspondances’ (Les Fleurs du mal). Valéry perceives the synthesizing power of art, through colour, to unite the material fact of paint, affective experience, the metaphysical project, and aesthetic reception that is urgent, provocative, and immersively pleasurable (somewhat in the manner of Barthes’s concept of ravissement).62 Loïe Fuller Valéry is an audacious analyst of dance, both in its aesthetic and material inventiveness and in its metaphorical and analogical values.63 Indeed, Valéry’s aphorism ‘un poème doit être une fête de l’intellect’ (‘Littérature’) anticipates the self-sufficient ‘dance of the intelligence among words and ideas’ of Ezra Pound.64 Valéry is the author of three key texts that stress the autonomy of dance and its transcendence of the here-and-now: the Socratic dialogue ‘L’Ame et la danse’ (1921), the lecture ‘Philosophie de la danse’ (1936), and, in the context of his writing around Degas and the painters, ‘De la danse’ (1936).65 My focus here is on Valéry’s poetic engagement with the American Loïe Fuller’s multi-coloured ‘Serpentine’ performance that took Paris by storm in 1893.66 In his Cahiers, Valéry unfolds a series of interrupted reflections on Fuller’s dance of light, colour, and movement.67 In the ellipsis of its luminous notations, his fragmentary text evokes prismatic and formal metamorphoses, a writerly analogue to the shape-shifting

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colour moves of the choreographic performance. He compares the dancer to the figure of the poet, related by their metaphorical work and their capacity to alter and morph the  material forms (body, words) that they touch (Plate 14). Thus, Valéry envisions the dancer as the embodiment of modernist expressivity – enigmatic, intoxicating, transformative, and abstractive: L[oïe] F[uller] Scène, noir, public, musique etc. La Loïe. Couleurs, formes, changements. Sa danse ; le mouvement.  Saoule énergie – [change de forme et de couleur]68 L[oïe] F[uller] Stage, dark, audience, music etc. Loïe. Colours, forms, changes. Her dance; movement.  Intoxicated energy – [changes shape and colour]

Valéry evokes the fusion of chromatic, kinaesthetic, and structural values revealed by the metamorphoses of the dancer. Her ‘formes particulières’ are materialized in the evocation of the arum lily, the pool of water, and the butterfly, and expressed in terms that relate colour and light (‘nacré’) to texture and fleshiness (‘charnu’), to affect (‘ardeur’), and to space (‘passage’, ‘pôle’), such that visual, haptic, and dynamic notations combine with ricochets of subjective feeling in Valéry’s writing. The manuscript notations (unpublished) for this text deploy a remarkably mobile verbal palette that focuses on chromatic gradation and nuance: ‘blanc futur’ ‘couleur par teintes de transition, rouge souvent base […] changement de couleur du rose au sombre … ’.69 As colour is projected onto Fuller’s dress, producing mesmerizing electric effects, her performance of chromatic simultanism (like Valéry’s elliptical inscriptions) looks towards the poetic simultanism of Apollinaire and Cendrars inspired by their fertile encounter with the abstract colourist Robert Delaunay, around 1912–14. In ‘Notes anciennes II’ (BN ms folio 100), Valéry registers the poetic qualities of popular theatre and spectacle in Fuller’s serpentine dance transformed by the multi-coloured lighting effects that she herself designed. In his fragmentary evocation of Fuller’s performance, with its focused colourist attention, Valéry takes the pulse of the modern sensibility expressed in the intermedial resonance of poetry in dance – and dance in poetry – through colour as it moves and morphs. The writerly revelation of unprecedented chromatic play in Fuller’s mesmeric dance demonstrates something of the power of colour words to draw around them

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ideas and images: that centripetal agency of colour writing can provide a route into exploring Charmes where colour values are intermittent but no less intense and invested with transformative potential. First, however, a closer reading of Valéry’s art writing will help take us deeper into the poet’s thinking around colour in interart contexts.

Thinking art and writing colour Valéry engages throughout his life in a deep, sustained meditation on works of art. His 1892 Glose sur quelques peintures, written in a style closer to poetry than to prose, explores several paintings that Valéry encountered as a young man at the Musée Fabre in Montpellier. Glose is a rich, fragmentary evocation of the formative influence of painting on Valéry, as Adam Watt has revealed in a comparative reading of early ekphrastic writing by Valéry and by Proust.70 Crucially, the texts of Glose are exercises in reading the visual image, and they are performative in the realization of their promise to explore art works poetically. Valéry’s poem on Cristofano Allori’s Head of a Page (early mid-sixteenth century) – a meditation on the beauty and the transience of youth – evokes the hair of the boy (the future King David) in the language of chromatic and kinaesthetic process (Plate 15). The expression of the fading of the golden light of infancy is sustained by alliterative play and internal rhyme: ‘la tendre figure est tournée, ornée d’une écume de boucles et de spires d’ambre, ou chevelure dont l’or enfantin s’atténue’.71 The blending of marine and architectural metaphors through the metonym of the hair envisions the young page’s portrait in three dimensions. In its metaphorical transposition and its deep texturing of visual, haptic, and acoustic values, Valéry’s prose solicits the reader’s active participation as boundaries of time and place are dissolved, and the distinctions between artist, subject, and viewer become unsettled: il y a deux siècles que [la chevelure] est ondée. Mais les yeux sont arrêtés fixement sur nous-mêmes, et dans la brume délicate que sera cette peinture demain, ils brilleront solitaires. (Des grands yeux toujours éclairés sous le front pur, pervenche …). Two centuries ago, the [hair] was set in waves. But his eyes stare obsessively at us, and in the delicate mist that will be the painting’s future, they shine incomparably. (Big eyes gleaming below a pure forehead, periwinkle …).

Light and colour notations (like the periwinkle blue of the child’s eyes) are embedded as a jewel-like parenthesis that takes us deeper into the chromatic complexity of the painting. Glose is also a meditation on the material life of the picture: the painted figure will age, the image dissolving into ‘la brume délicate’ of its faded colours and tones that will still be pierced by the child’s scintillating blue gaze.

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Current thought in word-and-image studies around art’s agency, around its power to ‘speak back’ to the viewer, as explored by W.J.T. Mitchell in What Do Pictures Want? (2004) and as captured by Mieke Bal’s concept of the ‘thinking image’, is foreshadowed by Valéry’s revelation of the intellectual stimulus of the image as it travels between the past, the present, and the future, preserving certain differences and abolishing others.72 The concerns of early-twentyfirst-century visual culture studies with questions of active, creative reception and with the viewer’s virtual extension of the painting are pre-empted in this evocative prose poem. Through the performative present tense of the poem, Valéry works to ‘complete’ the painting by extending the visual narrative via an imagined gesture, that of the untraceable hands darting across the pommel of the sword: ‘plus bas, se forme le pommeau sombre d’une épée, dont jouent les faibles mains invisibles’. In the closing apostrophe to the painted figure, where the visual image and the material fact of paint coincide, the poet sustains his meditation on the present and the future: he evokes the image created that is subject to alteration over time, doubly so, for the human subject will age, a process both materialized and metaphorized in the fading colours of the paint: the painting’s capturing of childhood is also a proleptic study of youth’s vanishing, and a portrait of the art work’s inevitable material fading. The portrait of a page, who is a future King, looks towards the triumphs and the disconsolations of maturity, and the certainty of finitude. Values of light, gradation, geometry, and gemstones combine with Valéry’s attention to textured colour to evoke the subtle encounter with time that relates poet, painter, viewer, reader, and biblical subject. Valéry’s prose poem on Saint Alexandrina (Zurbarán’s Saint Agatha) (1630–3) is a meditation on incarnation in the painting of the martyr of the severed breasts (Plate 16). Exploring the nexus of colour and corporeality, the text reveals the viewer–speaker arrested by ‘une rose!’, an image solicited, perhaps, by the tilt of the Saint’s body (‘la courbe de ce corps’) and by the chromatic transitions that form the deep folds of her crimson and purple robe. The floral idea instantly morphs into an idea of prismatic light and form where colour and texture – imagined petal and painted fabric – coincide (‘Une rose! C’est la première lueur parue sur l’ombre adorable’). The phatic quality of Valéry’s prose captures the immediacy of the visual sensation and its intellectual and creative impact on the viewer (actual or virtual), the writer, and the implied reader. Pink colouring ‘migrates’ in the text to singularize the complexion of the Sicilian martyr. Valéry’s painterly attention to the retreating fabric of her cloak and to the ‘folles manches citrines’ guides our gaze towards the voluminous yellow-gold sleeves enrobing the arms that bear the severed breasts of the martyr, sleeves threaded with chromatic intimations of psychic disturbance and lapidary beauty. Serge Bourjea, in an important article, ‘La Sainte Alexandrine de Valéry: vues d’un tableau’, explores colour values in the twenty-year-old poet’s encounter with Renaissance and Baroque art.73 Valéry’s prose poem on Zurbarán’s painting, Bourjea proposes, is simultaneously about the absence and the presence of colour,

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with the writer’s immersion in the painting’s variable darkness fleshed in the language of black, of shadow, and of obscurity. Bourjea focuses on the absence of an explicit reference to the colour red: ‘le vif manteau’ leaves red unspoken but implied by the writer to be envisioned by the reader. Red is ‘manque et marque à la fois’ (Bourjea), and one might add that the unuttered red, substituted and subsumed by ‘vif ’, acts as an energizing Barthesian punctum that we, as readers, must ‘colour in’ for ourselves, whilst the chromatic paradox – the cloak is at once red and not-red in Valéry’s text – implies a quality of equivocation characteristic of modernism’s volatile pattern of causations and cancellations. Bourjea discerns Valéry’s debt to classical thought, specifically to Plato’s theory of colour as the fourth sensory dimension, in the Timaeus. Red, central to Plato’s theory, is an intermediate value that belongs neither to fire nor to bodily humours in Valéry’s prose text. The poet (re)creates the mystery of this unclassifiable red, precisely by not naming it and, in the process, stirs the reader to envision the speculative space that is opened up by unnamed colour. Bourjea’s reflections on the silencing of colour words highlight a defining quality of Valéry’s poetry (and often, also, of his art writing), which is also shared by Mallarmé and by Bonnefoy.74 (This preference for the silence of colour words may have been sparked, in part, by Valéry’s early enthralled exposure to Un coup de dés.75) Bourjea makes an ekphrastic reading of the text as he discerns Valéry’s verbal tracing of the painting’s ‘geste idéal’.76 He underscores the opposition of ‘forme’ and ‘courbe’, and the poet’s contrastive working between lines and coloured surfaces. Bourjea argues for a prospective connection between Valéry’s writing of ‘Sainte Alexandrine’ and his vision of La Jeune Parque (1917) through the technique of morbidezza (from Leonardo), drawing out the soft paleness and the palpable quality of the flesh that the term evokes. In Bourjea’s reading, the martyr’s impassivity and her pink-tinged pallor connect with the appearance of the Fate, the text of La Jeune Parque representing, for Bourjea, the (unconscious) extension of Valéry’s evocation of ‘Alexandrine’ (Agatha). Making comparative links with Valéry’s evocation of Titian’s Venus (in ‘Du nu’) with its figural whiteness and its blue and gold landscape, Bourjea suggests that Valéry’s poem signals, without indicating, the moment of the martyr’s violation and art’s destabilizing power.77 The significance of unspoken colour, highlighted by Bourjea in this detailed reading of Valéry’s text on Zurbarán’s painting of the saint, can offer a key to reading Valéry chromatically. If Valéry stresses form above colour in his writing on art, he also reflects on immanent, rather than explicit, colour, often working in analogical ways, as I will explore now. Analogical thinking is at the heart of Valéry’s development of a methodology in Introduction à la méthode de Léonard de Vinci (1894). Analogy enables him to evoke indirectly, and often implicitly, a given source through recourse to another culture or discourse. Through his reflections on painting, Valéry gives voice to the rich potential of approaching one medium in terms of another: this is a way of bringing together disciplines traditionally perceived as disparate, and a means whereby every act of writing actualizes the potential for that cross-fertilization across normative boundaries of time, form, and medium.78

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Valéry extends his engagement with art from the Renaissance- and Early Modern-inspired Glose through his sequence of art writings around the laternineteenth-century modernist innovators.79 Together with Degas Danse Dessin (1936), Valéry’s abundant notes on aesthetics and art practice (Pièces sur l’art, 1934)  – ranging from lithography and ceramics to frescos and photography – reveal the adventurous scope of his transhistorical and intermedial engagement. The poet frequented Monet, Vuillard, Bonnard, and Jacques-Emile Blanche, as well as being a regular interlocutor of Degas and Morisot. His response to Manet’s art is deep and probing: he explores the opulence of Manet’s blacks, capturing, with poetic brio, chromatic brilliance and tonal variations. The discerning and deeply textured quality of Valéry’s colour writing – conjoining the haptic and the poetic – can be gauged by his evocation of the art of Rembrandt: ‘Pour Rembrandt, la chair est de la boue dont la lumière fait de l’or’.80 Valéry relays Rembrandt’s female bodies in their ‘masses charnues’ that are ‘[imprégnées ou effleurées] d’un soleil qui n’est qu’à lui’.81 While the trope of transfiguration carries echoes of Baudelairean transmutation, Valéry also writes with the kind of fluidity and material sensuousness that looks ahead to the undoing of distinctions in écriture féminine. Thus, he anticipates something of the deeply felt ethos – and the elegance – of Hélène Cixous’s essay on Rembrandt’s Bathsheba Bathing (1654) when she appraises the quality of blackness and identifies it as the ‘the secret blood of reds’, and when she asks ‘avec quelle boue est peinte Bethsabée ? Avec quelle terre ? Avec du beurre de chair ? Avec du ghi. Ce beurre blond rosé’.82 Valéry indicates at the start of ‘Berthe Morisot’ (1926) that ‘art criticism’ is precisely not what he is engaged in: ‘je ne me risquerai dans la critique d’art dont je n’ai nulle expérience, ni ne redirai sur [l’art de Morisot] ce qui est déjà connu de tous ceux qui le doivent connaître’.83 Degas Danse Dessin begins with the affirmation that his art-essay form will be ‘une manière de monologue’, a term that underlines the distillation of personal memories and subjective responses that inform his writing around Degas and other painters, and that can illuminate – retrospectively and prospectively, and always analogically – the writer’s own poetic art.84 I want to look more deeply at how Valéry evokes colour in his writings around art. I use the preposition ‘around’ intentionally as Valéry invokes the idea of circulating around a subject, digressing from it and returning to it. Gifford and Stimpson, in their Introduction to Reading Paul Valéry, recall the poet’s motto ‘je tourne autour’.85 Valéry turning ‘around’ a given subject imparts this key sense of aleatory practice. One might also invoke, from the context of écriture féminine, Luce Irigaray’s celebration of ‘à’ (‘J’aime à toi’), which undoes the appropriating implications of the transitive objectification (‘je t’aime’), and achieves a supple, more tentative sense of writing ‘to’ and, even, ‘towards’ as approximating to Valéry’s movement in search of the object or image.86 Valéry’s art-writing practice is altogether looser and more aleatory, and it works pliantly across and between media. Writing around (or towards) the art of Manet, Valéry reflects on poetry and on how a writer, translating visual sensation, might write colour. In ‘Le Triomphe de Manet’ (June 1932),Valéry stresses that he is

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not setting out to ‘explain’ Manet or seeking to define or describe the painter’s aesthetic, not least because of the incommensurability of visual colour and the (limited) capacity of the writer to bring colour to language: je n’ai l’intention ni la pertinence de rechercher la substance de l’art de Manet, le secret de son influence, ni de définir ce qu’il renforce, ce qu’il sacrifie dans l’exécution (problème capital). L’esthétique n’est pas mon fort ; et puis, comment parler des couleurs ? Il est raisonnable que les aveugles seuls en disputent, comme nous disputons tous de métaphysique ; mais les voyants savent que la parole est incommensurable avec ce qu’ils voient. Je vais essayer toutefois de fixer une de mes impressions.87 I have no intention of exploring the substance of Manet’s art or the secret of his influence, or of defining what he reinforces or what he sacrifices in the execution of his art (a major issue). Aesthetics is not my forte; and anyway, how does one begin to speak of colours? It is reasonable that blind people alone argue about colours, as we all argue about metaphysics; but sighted people know that language is incommensurable with what they observe. However, I will try to gauge my impression of Manet’s art.

Colour writing is an aporia to be tackled rather than deflected, and, in the very next paragraph, Valéry begins by evoking the sublime black of Manet’s enigmatic portrait of Berthe Morisot (1872): Je ne mets rien, dans l’œuvre de Manet, au-dessus d’un certain portrait de Berthe Morisot, daté de 1872. Sur le fond neutre et clair d’un rideau gris, cette figure est peinte : un peu plus petite que nature. Avant toute chose, le Noir, le noir absolu, le noir d’un chapeau de deuil et des brides de ce petit chapeau mêlées de mèches de cheveux châtains à reflets roses, le noir qui n’appartient qu’à Manet, m’a saisi. (‘le Noir’ original emphasis; other emphases are my own)88 I place nothing, in the work of Manet, more highly than a particular portrait of Berthe Morisot, from 1872. Against the light, neutral background of a grey curtain, the figure is painted, rather smaller than life-size. Above all else, Black, absolute black, the black of a mourning hat and of the ties of this little hat that reveals locks of chestnut hair with pink reflections; the black that is Manet’s alone, gripped me.

Valéry reveals his initial experience of the painting in terms of the colour that arrested his attention, visually and intellectually, before all other aspects of the

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work. And so, black begins its textual life here as an abstract value before Valéry draws colour values back into the object that is defined by its black contours and black content: Morisot’s hat as form and fabric. Black is not in the least decorative or ornamental here; rather, it is material and mesmerizing, intentional and essential, voluptuous and demanding. Black is supreme, a capital(ized) value, absolute and pure; black gives rise to the object with which it founds a transitive relationship. Black has agency, soliciting ideas of loss and bereavement. Valéry continues, exploring the subject’s flesh tones, attentive to the fluid materiality of Manet’s brushstrokes. After a comparison of Manet’s treatment of his living subject with Vermeer’s figuring of the Head of a Young Woman (The Girl with a Pearl Earring) (1665) in terms of the transparency and luminous quality of the flesh in the paintings, Valéry distinguishes between the focus on immediate perception in modern art and the slow, studied observation undertaken by painters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: ‘[chez Manet], l’exécution semble plus prompte, plus libre, plus immédiate [que chez Vermeer]. Le moderne va plus vite, et veut agir avant la mort de l’impression’.89 From his earliest writing on aesthetics to his later reflections on art, Valéry privileges invention over imitation; it is a key theme of the Introduction à la méthode de Léonard de Vinci (‘Toute intelligence se confond avec l’invention d’un ordre unique’; ‘[Léonard] s’adonnait à l’invention de visages purs et fumeux’).90 In the essay ‘Nécessité de la poésie’, a lecture given at the Université des Annales in 1937, Valéry writes in praise of the concept and practice of perpetual invention.91 The same stress on invention defines Valéry’s thinking around colour and his writerly response to artists in the wake of Manet, for whom colour is integral to modernism’s anti-mimetic project. In the essay ‘Tante Berthe’ (1926), Valéry emphasizes Manet’s creative interpretation of his subject over any mimetic rendering of Morisot’s eyes: ‘[ses yeux] étaient presque trop vastes, et si puissamment obscurs que Manet, dans plusieurs portraits qu’il fit d’elle, pour en fixer toute la force ténébreuse et magnétique, les a peints noirs au lieu de verdâtres qu’ils étaient’.92 If Valéry shares the sensitivity of art writers like Mallarmé to Manet’s unfathomable blacks, he also underscores the need for painters to resist (chromatic) verisimilitude in order to articulate a more profound artistic truth.93 In this there is a real, if unspoken, affinity between the modern painter and the modern poet founded on their shared preoccupation with aesthetic truth (over observational fact), with art’s transformative agency, and with the pursuit of analogical thinking.94 Articulating the relation of visual impression and creative momentum in ‘Triomphe de Manet’, Valéry returns to the values of Manet’s blacks and the concert of pink-tinged creams in his 1872 portrait of Morisot.95 Valéry proposes a strong analogy between the portrait and poetry. Now he moves from his evocation of absolute black to the colour instances of the larger portrait, and then to the total artistic effect, which elicits from him the idea of ‘visual poetry’. Valéry offers, here, a salient example of the tendency of modernist art forms to evoke their operation in the language of other art forms, as Peter Dayan has argued in his illuminating study of experimental painting, music, and poetry of the early twentieth century.96 Valéry is explicit about the interart relationship of painting and poetry among the innovators of aesthetic modernism. He notes ‘[la] profonde correspondance’ of

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Baudelaire and Manet, which, for Valéry, turns on the ‘organizing’ of sensation.97 When he is writing about painting, Valéry is reflecting concurrently on poetry’s synthesis of concrete and abstract, particular and conceptual, material and ideal. Valéry’s writing performs this synthesis through his detailed evocation of the multi-sensorial values of shape, luminosity, thermo-reception, kinaesthesia, and chromatism: La toute-puissance de ces noirs, la froideur simple du fond, les clartés pâles ou rosées de la chair, la bizarre silhouette du chapeau qui fut « à la dernière mode » et « jeune » ; le désordre des mèches, des brides, du ruban, qui encombrent les abords du visage ; ce visage aux grands yeux, dont la fixité vague est d’une distraction profonde, et offre, en quelque sorte, une présence d’absence, – tout ceci se concerte et m’impose une sensation singulière… de Poésie […]. […] Par l’harmonie étrange des couleurs, par la dissonance de leurs forces ; par l’opposition du détail futile et éphémère d’une coiffure de jadis avec je ne sais quoi d’assez tragique dans l’expression de la figure, Manet fait résonner son œuvre, compose du mystère à la fermeté de son art. Il combine à la ressemblance physique du modèle, l’accord unique qui convient à une personne singulière, et fixe fortement le charme distinct et abstrait de ‘Berthe Morisot’.98 The omnipotence of these black tones, the simple coolness of the ground, the pale or pinkish luminosity of the flesh, the strange silhouette of the hat that was ‘high fashion’ and ‘youthful’; the disordered hair, and the ties and the ribbon that cluster around the edge of the face; the face with its big eyes, whose vague stare is profoundly distracting, and offers, one night say, a presence in absence – all of these qualities come together and induce in me a distinctive feeling … of Poetry. […] Through the strange harmony of colour, through its dissonant forces, through the opposition of the trifling ephemeral detail of a hat from the past with something rather tragic in the facial expression, Manet makes his work resonate, composing mystery in the rigour of his art. He combines with the physical resemblance of the model, the unique tone that befits the particular person and captures in a strong way the distinct and abstract charm of ‘Berthe Morisot’.

This synthesizing project culminates in art’s achievement of its guiding objective, which Valéry has already named ‘le charme, terme que je prends ici dans toute sa force’ in resonant echo of his 1922 book of poetry.99 He identifies, in the ‘strong’ sense of charme, the transforming agency that turns the immediate and the proximate into ‘poetry’. He contemplates Manet’s portrait of Morisot in the language of modernist paradox and indeterminacy: ‘distraction profonde, et […] en quelque sorte, une présence d’absence’. In the evocation of Morisot’s face as painted by Manet, Valéry’s writing equivocates as to whether it is Morisot who is

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distracted, or Valéry, or indeed both. Performing his own interart move, he offers the reader a fascinating exploration of the poetic quality that he discerns in the painting’s interrelation of specificity and abstraction. In this essay, Valéry works performatively to make his art writing a space of interart dialogue, just as his earlier Glose sur quelques peintures is prose poetry that relates a privileged encounter with painting, one that is intensely visual (and also haptic and kinaesthetic) and nonmimetic. Valéry’s art writing on Manet tracks the oscillations between material and conceptual as the poet moves through the sensorial to describe the complex essence of Manet’s art, its mystery and its transcendence of its own means and materials, in its reach for ‘[un] charme distinct and abstrait’ (my emphasis).100 Valéry’s reflections on the analogies between painting and poetry inform an important later essay ‘Au sujet de Berthe Morisot’ (1941) where the poet and art writer makes the case for bringing Impressionism into parallel discussion with Mallarmé’s poetry.101 Remarkable here, as well as the holding together of line and colour values, is the analogical relation Valéry discerns between Morisot’s evocation of the mist-wreathed lake of the Bois de Boulogne and Mallarmé’s shorter poems: cela est fait de rien, un rien multiplié par l’art suprême de la touche, un rien de brume, des soupçons de cygnes, prestige d’une brosse qui frotte à peine le tissu. Cet effleurement donne tout.102 it is composed of nothing, nothing multiplied by the supreme art of the artistic touch, a trace of mist, an impression of swans, the magic of a brush that barely touches the canvas. This skimming of the surface produces it all.

He asserts, playfully but no less seriously, that he is finding connections across media that Mallarmé (disdainful of the meagre attractions of the Bois de Boulogne and a champion of the more ‘primitive’ spaces of the Forêt de Fontainebleau) had overlooked. Valéry works through his proposed analogy between painting and poetry, relating Morisot’s pictorial practice (the light brush stroke that merely skims the surface of the canvas) (Plate 17) and Mallarmé’s poetic practice in ‘Ô rêveuse, pour que je plonge … ’: the analogy is inscribed in ‘ainsi suffisait-il à Mallarmé à écrire sur un éventail’. Mallarmé’s poetic ‘élégance’, his rejection of ‘l’idolâtrie réaliste’, and his pursuit of an art of allusion are compared with Morisot’s ‘élégance naturelle’ (and her affinity with leading modern painters (Manet, Degas, Renoir)).103 The deep imbrication of word and image shapes Valéry’s conception of poetry and painting, linked to a sense of the meshing of sensory perception, from the visual and the acoustic to the haptic and the kinaesthetic. Writing about Leonardo’s ethos and aesthetic, in his complex essay on the artist’s notebooks and drawings, Valéry explores how the mind makes connections between discrete objects, how it draws disparate things together, how it works constantly towards abstraction in other words, with that sense of an intellectual movement – an aspiration – that never reaches its destination; indeed, it must never reach its destination for

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the idea is not to colonize the art object. Aesthetic genius makes unprecedented connections between things through analogical working that respects both the autonomy of each thing and the relationality discernible between them: ‘[l’analogie est] la faculté de varier les images, de les combiner, de faire coexister la partie de l’une avec la partie de l’autre, et d’apercevoir, volontairement ou non, la liaison de leurs structures’.104 Valéry evokes his analogical method founded on exquisite attention towards the object and a creative approach to connection-building. He sees the creative mind as making startling combinations, discerning differences, and inventing, even, a holistic ‘logique’. As we shall see, colour values play a key role in linking Valéry’s art writing and his poetry.

Resisting and revealing colour Valéry’s pursuit of intellectual rigour and an ostensibly ‘pure’ aesthetic might lead us to expect a spare, sober colour practice. His privileging of sound and form might suggest chromatic resistance, censure, even. In La Jeune Parque (1917), colour is aligned with treachery, fakery, disillusion, and, often, with the feminine. The evocation of the Young Fate’s life as ‘peint(e)’ anticipates the denouncing of the baroque ornamentalism of Douve in Bonnefoy’s first major work Du mouvement et de l’immobilité de Douve (1953).105 Similarly, in Charmes, in the poem ‘Le Rameur’, the landscape image ‘eau de ramages peinte’ (line 10) associates (implicit) colour with decorative values as it evokes the dark, streaked green water, and tilts towards abstraction; the temptations of chromatic beauty are spurned here in language that resists explicit colour values. The narrator seeks to tear down the worn topos of nature’s mantle troped in the feminine and in fetishized fabrics (‘beautés’, ‘charmes du jour’, ‘grâce’, ‘bandeau de soie’): he seeks to rend (‘déchire’) the picturesque and disrupt the ideal. Chromatic values dissolve in a liquid vision inflected by colour-critical intimations: ‘ample et naïve moire’ (line 9) has the sense of the too obvious and too replete, the shimmering watery co-relative of the ‘riants environs’ (line 2). The rower plunges stubbornly through the waves, ‘au mépris de tant d’azur oiseux’ as the ideal is rejected and a harsh, calcified future – the materialization of finitude – is embraced (‘le mouvement qui me revêt de pierres’, line 32).106 Treachery clothes itself in colours. Fragile hope in the consolatory power of colour cedes to despairing realization in ‘La Ceinture’. The poem draws on the myth of Aphrodite’s girdle of love, mimicking the blithe alignment of life and desire with colour: ‘Quand le ciel couleur d’une joue / Laisse enfin les yeux le chérir’ (lines 1–2). The poem ‘performs’ the evacuation of colour (pink and gold light, cloud and setting sun) in the present tense, as daylight capitulates to darkness. As the poem grows sparer in terms of colour expression, and as its metaphoric fabric shrivels, the solitary self addresses the shroud that awaits him: the movement of the poem from the seductive power of the sunset to terror before absolute loss is figured by the bleaching of colour. Contemplating the white of the shroud, the narrator envisions mortality and the blank void in the precipice of the final stanza’s monochrome

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desolation. Colour is resisted as specious, the poem limning the colour-aversion that David Batchelor sees as a defining feature of Western culture and values.107 Certain moments in ‘Le Cimetière marin’ clearly echo the Aristotelian association of colour with seduction and spell, and with ideas of illusion and inauthenticity. The poet makes an ironic apostrophe to his ‘grande âme’: does it hope for a vision that will bring freedom from the ‘couleurs de mensonge’, the easy charm created by the bedazzling chromatic play of sea and sky (‘l’onde et l’or’, line 99)? The values of white are volatile, shifting between the intangible and the obdurate: their associations span the skull, the cadaver, the ghost, sea mist and spume, limestone tombs, doves, the sky, and the blank page, extending the echo of Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés. Immortality – ‘maigre’ and ‘noire et dorée’ (line 103) – is metaphorized as a receptacle whose outward resplendence belies its meagre content. The poem follows the devaluation of gold and black as signs of chromatic and elemental prestige. ‘Maigre’, with the thin, dry quality of its rasping [g] and [r] sounds, exposes the gaudy superficial colourism that seduces the ‘yeux de chair’ (line 99). Immortality is exposed as dazzling and depleted; it is the essence of the visual lure, the ‘consolatrice affreusement laurée’ (line 104). Consolation is exposed as mere pretension and the promise of immortality provokes derision: ‘[ce] crâne vide et ce rire éternel’ (line 108). The peremptory phatic clarity of ‘[A]llez! Tout fuit!’ (line 101) marks the ultimate shattering of the illusion. In ‘Ébauche d’un serpent’, colour is a form of seductive treachery and a source of false consciousness, concealing the flawed world and perpetuating the illusion of purity (lines 29–30). The serpent, the force of lucidity, addresses the sun that masks death ‘sous l’azur et l’or d’une tente’ (line 23), which shares its trope of decorativeness with ‘Le Cimetière marin’. Solar agency encloses being in a slumber that is ‘trompeusement peint de campagnes’ (line 34), as pictorial and chromatic values are once more aligned with deception and disillusion. Whiteness, the chromatic residue that remains after the gaudy colours have leeched or been bleached, is synonymous with open-mouthed stupidity, the triple alliteration in [b] fusing notions of inanity, gullibility, and whiteness: ‘Vous êtes des hommes tout nus/Ô bêtes blanches et béates!’ (lines 89–90). If Valéry appears in these poems to reaffirm the Aristotelian rivalry between disegno and colore, cleaving to form and resisting or repudiating multifarious colourism, the textual realities are more complex. There is tension in the writerly treatment of colour, and variability in its presence and agency in poetry, that is synonymous with modernist equivocation. Coming-to-consciousness around colour spans scepsis and pleasure, and resistance to chromatic values is taken forward with the fuller embrace of colour-in-the-world, as we shall see. Valéry’s poetry reveals the transformative agency of colour in the sonnet ‘Le Vin perdu’: an abstract seascape captures chromatic contingency in the movement and altering of nature that is affected by human actions in ways that echo, distantly, the stained sea of Rimbaud’s ‘Le Bateau ivre’. In Valéry’s poem, the speaker throws rare wine as an offering into the ocean and into the void: ‘songeant au sang, versant le vin’ (line 8). The present-participle phrases in apposition, balancing the two halves of the octosyllabic line, ally, rhythmically, physical gesture and mental action; there

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is a sense of those actions being contingent and also of their being simultaneously captured in the alliterative pairings of ‘songeant’/‘sang’ and ‘versant’/‘vin’. The act of dispersing the wine in the waves produces a vermillion mist – a sfumato effect – that briefly stains the blue expanse. The sea, ‘après une rose fumée’, then returns to its pure transparent appearance. In the ellipsis of the sonnet, the kinaesthetic agency of colour traces the movement of modernist thought as it performs the making, and the cancelling, of idea and gesture. The active role of colour in acts of observation and intellectual stimulation emerges explicitly in ‘Aurore’ in the description of growing wakefulness. The initial evocation of the ‘morose confusion’ of the poet’s dreamscape echoes the misting and mingling of ideas, anxieties, dreams, and desires in the oceanic (con)fusion of wine and memory in ‘Le Vin perdu’. Here is the opening stanza of ‘Aurore’: La confusion morose Qui me servait de sommeil, Se dissipe dès la rose Apparence du soleil. Dans mon âme je m’avance, Tout ailé de confiance : C’est la première oraison ! À peine sorti des sables, Je fais des pas admirables Dans les pas de ma raison. (ll. 1–10) The morose confusion That served as my sleep Dispels with the pink Appearance of the sun In my soul I move On the wings of confidence This is the first oration! Barely emerged from the sands I take admirable steps In the steps of my reason.

‘[L]a rose/Apparence du soleil’ (lines 3–4) dispels the poet’s brooding on his tumultuous night of dreams. The rarity and the concentration of colour shape the economy of the poem, with the stress on the line-final ‘rose’ (line 3), semantically unresolved in its potential as noun (the flower) or adjective (colour qualifier). Between line 3 and line 4, the startling enjambement captures the galvanizing light of daybreak that resolves the ‘confusion morose’ of night: colour and sunlight are catalysts of coming to consciousness. The poet’s burden of care is assuaged as he places ‘son pied blanc’ on the golden ladder (lines 18–20), an action which marks the inaugural moment where he shakes off the dark thoughts at work in his unconscious (spiders’ webs of ideas woven ‘dans les ténèbres de toi’ (line 40) that

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morph with daybreak). The awakening to creativity transforms ideas into ‘cent mille soleils de soie’ (line 43). Colour is a catalysing force in the transformation that occurs as the poet journeys into ‘ma forêt sensuelle’ (line 53) and into a fuller, thicker apprehension of the world. The energizing revelation of the world’s depth and enigma is guided by his acoustic attentiveness to the material and the metaphysical. The texture of sound is privileged in Valéry’s poetry, so the focus on visuality can appear secondary and ‘other’, yet the reverberation of colour makes it integral to the landscape of sound experience. A sister poem of ‘Aurore’ and the concluding poem of Charmes, ‘Palme’ reveals the sound of colour. The palm tree is ‘Une Sage qui prépare / Tant d’or et d’autorité’ (lines 56–57): gold is immersed in tropes of prestige that are carried through the mobilization of acoustic values, from alliteration and anaphora, to external and internal rhyme. As we saw in the alliterative play of ‘Le Vin perdu’, internal relations develop around colour notations or evocations. In ‘Ébauche d’un serpent’, the luscious sonorities of ‘ces blondes bases d’ombre et d’ambre’ (stanza 25, line 246) create acoustic and chromatic correspondences that echo the rich patterning of alliteration and assonance in ‘La Dormeuse’ with its play of amber and shadow, and luminosity and darkness. Similarly, the mesmerizing blue saturation of the image ‘beau serpent bercé dans le bleu’ (stanza 31, line 301) conjoins alliteration [b] and sibilance, creating sonorous colour in the fusion of the oceanic and the serpentine. A discernible sense emerges, thus, of how brief, rare, often abstract colour notations can take on a more pervasive resonance as colour writing becomes amplified through the acoustic and figurative resources of poetry. The integration of material and metaphysical, object and consciousness, corporeality and ideality, reveals colour inscription to be deeply embedded in the larger poetic project. How, then, through colour, is the object transposed as idea, and how does the idea return in material form? What part does colour play in a poem’s structuring design? How is poetic texture created through the coincidence of visual and other sensory instances? How is colour sensation absorbed into metaphor or into myth? How is colour inflected or nuanced? How, also, are chromatic values isolated, abstracted or elided in the phrase, the line, or the stanza? The action of thinking through colour is central to Valéry’s poetry and art writing, and this is often a site of protean modernism: thus, in ‘Le Cimetière marin’, the sea is the absolute Hydra intoxicated by its own ‘chair bleue’ (line 136), a startling image where blue morphs from the marine element to the mythical and takes forward the idea of material incarnation that is transformed chromatically in the aquatic medium. Judith Robinson-Valéry’s reading of the poet’s synthesizing vision of Corps-Esprit-Monde (CEM) can assist us here. Robinson-Valéry underscores the participation of each of those three values with the other two; subjectivity is immersed, materially, in the world, and the world penetrates the embodied self (Robinson-Valéry illustrates the principle with reference to Narcissus seeking, in nature, a pool in order to see himself, just as the Young Fate requires the screen of both the cosmos and the serpent in order to undertake her own anguished work of self-interrogation).108 Colour is a space of productive

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tension between the physical (sensual, erotic) and the metaphysical in poetry’s reflection of the self and the world, and in its self-reflexivity. These matters are at the heart of ‘Au platane’ where the Mediterranean plane tree swaying in the Tramontane wind is a figure for human agency, desire, intent, and frustration, in a poem that draws on colour in subtle and significant ways.109 Colour is part of the connective tissue relating the material and the metaphysical in ‘Au platane’, yet colour is only subtly present in the poem’s early stanzas. The sensorium explored in the poem activates visual and acoustic values linked to kinaesthetic processes: the plane tree reaches, bends, tears, and splits; it tilts and sways, much like the poem tilts towards human concerns and then sways once more towards material ‘thingness’. The poem constantly transposes its object (the plane tree) in new and ceaselessly substitutable relations where chromatic values are immanent in the processes of nature and of the poem. The rhythmic swaying between the alexandrine and the classical hexameter that modulates each quatrain carries a vitalist and erotic urge: the figures of the plane tree and the young Scythian merge in imagined acts of sadism or masochism, where flesh invites flagellation. Sexual violence and desire are expressed in carnate flesh, as if the poem itself were finally getting under the skin of the ‘nu’ of ‘Au platane’ (line 1). The virgin quivers with desire and with shame: ‘toute chaude de honte’ (line 36) implies red, which, as Valéry suggests in his essay ‘Des couleurs’, is the colour of one who knows too much.110 In a series of transpositions from sensuous matter to metaphorical figuration, the tree is re-visioned as an athlete, a traveller, a body (‘souple chair du bois’), a ship, a harp, and a martyr. The stressed position of ‘Blanc’ (line 2), in the opening apostrophe to the tree, defines colour and candour as integral to the sculptural figure of the slender Scythian, the imaginary embodiment of the tree’s ready suppleness and rooted aspiration. The black mother-substance (‘la noire mère’, line 7) engenders the matrix of roots and capillaries that bind the tree to the black earth (‘ce pied natal et pur / A qui la fange pèse’, lines 7–8). The internal rhyme in ‘la terre tendre et sombre’ (line 10) fuses ideas of visuality and texture (‘la confuse cendre’, line 22), and white. The abstract materializes again in colour fragments or in instances of chromatic concentration such that there is no privileged direction, say, from material to abstract, but, instead, a reversible momentum. The emblematic plane tree represents struggle and energy nourished by coloured materials that are terrestrial or aerial. The plane tree immerses its ‘bras plus purs que les bras animaux / Toi qui dans l’or les plonge’ (lines 41–2). Chromatic and acoustic values coincide where the Tramontane wind sounds the ‘azure’ of winter on the ‘strings’ (branches) of the tree, creating an image that oscillates between Orphic harmony at the beginning of the poem, and a vision of cold sterility, as acoustic and thermal values sharpen. With its final, tearing ‘Non’, the voice of the plane tree rips apart the poet’s dream of having the power to represent and to express, abruptly cancelling that expectation with the brandishing of ‘l’étincellement / De sa tête superbe’ (lines 69–70). If the relationship between colour and poetic form is often more intimate and integral in Valéry than traditionally assumed, this raises key questions around the

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agency of colour where its expressivity appears restricted in the exploration of the abstract idea. So, how might chromatic and other sensory values carry the abstract idea, giving it flesh? And how might the abstract idea, in turn, amplify and deepen colour resonance? ‘Le Cantique des colonnes’ reveals, in its restricted colour expression, the agency of (immanent) colour in the pursuit of the idea. ‘Le Cantique des colonnes’ offers a route into the Mediterranean sensibility of Valéry’s writing that is pursued through the relations between self, environment, intellect, and material things, and it does this through absent or occluded colour and abstraction. At this point it is worth situating the Mediterranean context and ethos that shape Valéry’s poetry of seascape and landscape. In this I am following a route traced by Lloyd Austin, who reflects on the poet’s ‘genius of the Mediterranean’ in an important study of the interrelation of the physical and the abstract in Valéry’s poetry.111 Austin discusses the influence on Valéry’s thought and writing of his home town of Sète, his part-Corsican, part-Italian parentage, and his deep knowledge of Genoa. The poet’s affinity with the Mediterranean sea and shore, his delight in swimming, and his pleasure in sunlight are powerfully constitutive of ‘Le Cimetière marin’ with its immersion of body and mind in the sea and the sky. Something very similar, I suggest, holds for ‘Le Cantique des colonnes’, where the ecstatic evocation of a shimmering Mediterranean atmosphere infuses abstraction with fleshiness, with sensuous materiality, and with colour values. ‘Le Cantique des colonnes’ reveals how concrete and abstract interrelate through a palette of gold, honey tones, and white, that is fused with solar and sculptural significance. Explicit colour is marked by its absence, and white is inscribed more obliquely in the evocation of classical architecture that rises majestic in radiant light. White is the colour of natural luminosity and of intellectual illumination. As in ‘Au platane’, whiteness is present etymologically in the quality of ‘candeur’, evoking temperament and disposition. Once more, ‘candeur’ is a formative value, relating white (and white/gold), song, and affect in ‘hymnes candides’ (line 17), a celebration of innocence and inauguration. The lexical constellation around light and white, the clear and the crystalline, conjures up a landscape of antiquity that draws the encounter with stone and with sunlight into a resonant synthetic vision. White is physical (implicit in the lexis of light (‘jour’)) and metaphorical in expressions of candid innocence (‘jambes pures’) and clarity. And white makes its metaphorical return in forms that are floral (‘lys’) and fleshly (‘l’ongle de l’orteil’). The ‘Cantique des colonnes’ celebrates, through the sung voice of the classical columns, values of craft, sunlight, time, age, patience, stone, ethics, intellect, symmetry, and environment. The stone-work of architect and mason, crafters of the ‘blanc fardeau’ (stanza 10), exalts human endeavour: each column embodies the axis of aspiration that calls the poet to seek a form of secular divinity in a world without gods. Geometry and aesthetics (art, music, sculpture) come together as ‘nos grâces studieuses […] égales radieuses’. (stanza 3) that are the sublime product of the golden mean and form the material elevation of whiteness that is absorbed into evocations of majestic stone, light, and the conjoining of perceptual clarity and intellectual lucidity. The values of architecture, mathematics, and

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art combine in a paean to the intellect, which alone can invent form and create meaningful order, yet this is not to deny emotion and unconscious desire, as Peter Collier argues in a perspicacious reading of ‘Le Cantique des colonnes’.112 Collier underlines, too, the conjunction of musical and visual harmonies, the balancing of decoration and formal design, the synthesis of sensuousness and abstraction, the embrace of materiality, and the work of metaphor that, together, conjure up nearProustian visions of desire. To contemplate the columns is, for the poet, to envision, ecstatically, the marriage of art, nature, and the metaphysical. His bid to give chromatic nuance and liquescent texture to the abstract idea relativizes the rigour of white. Crystalline clarity allies with material depth in colour implications where the sun or sunlit sky calls up ‘un dieu couleur de miel’ slumbering over the classical columns. As metonym and metaphor infiltrate each other, they merge to the point of being indistinguishable, revealing the quality of modernist oscillation that sets, in simultaneous motion, the material and the abstract worlds of the poem. Chromatic values and other sensory material carry the abstract idea figured as line, as manifestation of order, and as cerebral form invested in material shape and design. The abstract idea, in turn, amplifies and deepens the luminous resonance of the white-gold columns. Colour – as idea and as substance – is formative in Valéry’s poetry. If the poet seeks ceaselessly the transcendence of contingency, colour plays its part in the space of consciousness as matter and as a process on which the intentional mind reflects. A key poem exposing and reflecting on the relations of colour and consciousness is ‘Le Cimetière marin’ as it weaves together intellectual sense and sensuousness, creating a dialogue between material and metaphysical in the evocation of seascape and landscape. I turn now to this major poem in the European modernist canon.

Sense and sensuousness: Seascape and landscape Seascape and landscape – their colours and textures, and their enfolding of an inner landscape of thought, remembrance, and desire – are major structuring forces of Valéry’s poetry, offering an expansiveness that embraces the complexities and shifts of the idea as it moves between the material and the metaphysical. The encounter with landscape and seascape uncovers, in the nexus of colour, intense moments of recognition and confrontation, but also opens up possibilities for assuaging feelings of anxiety or loss, of failure or limitation. In turning now more fully to ‘Le Cimetière marin’, we can explore how colour reflects and shapes affect in the unfolding of modernist subjectivity. Intriguing questions are raised by Valéry’s colour writing. How, for example, might colour complicate the tensions between modernist values (fragmentation, equivocation, irony, abstraction) and neo-classical values (coherence, purity, austerity, and formal perfection)? Prismatic brilliance and intensity relay a deep feeling for the material world, as we have already seen. In ‘Le Cimetière marin’, the sustained engagement of the self with the phenomenological world works through

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the fluctuations of metaphor and metonym as these erupt on the surface of the poem and in the mind of the poet. Vivid colour instances intimate a thickened materiality that engages the self, galvanizing intellectual action and spurring affective responses that are articulated, often, through analogy. Light and shadow chart the movement of consciousness on the uneven journey of the poet through self-interrogation, discovery, uncertainty, and affirmation. Punctuated by colour, those instances reveal the stirrings of ecstasy and the ceaseless surfacing of anxiety (‘mes repentirs, mes doutes, mes contraintes’, line 80). In ‘Le Cimetière marin’, the sea is the enduring object of ‘un long regard’ (line 6) that is a figure for the poem itself, an extended exploration of nature, mortality, and human significance, across twenty-four sestets; the long gaze is also a figure for our readerly act of unfolding the seascape in our mind’s eye. The poet observes the sea from the cemetery’s high terrace, the privileged place – and a foundational trope – that Valéry will celebrate subsequently in the essay ‘Regards sur la mer’ (1930), a text that can illuminate Valéry’s Mediterranean inspiration retrospectively through the poems of Charmes, especially ‘Le Cantique des colonnes’ and ‘Le Cimetière marin’.113 In this remarkable essay, which looks ahead to late-modern cultural-studies approaches to our human engagement with the marine environment, Valéry explores the sea both as surface and as abyss, weaving together reflections on maritime discovery, geography, botany, travel writing, and classical and modern literature (‘Verne est le Virgile qui guide les jeunes dans ces Enfers’).114 In ‘Le Cimetière marin’, as in ‘Regards sur la mer’, the sea extends the space of the encounter between the poet and the material world. The self/sea encounter activates the senses, stimulates a synaesthetic imagination, and powers a metaphysical urge to explore an inner landscape. In ‘Regards sur la mer’ Valéry begins by evoking the multi-sensorial experience of the sea in gustatory, acoustic, olfactory, chromatic, and kinaesthetic terms: ‘le sel sur les lèvres et l’oreille flattée ou heurtée de la rumeur ou des éclats des eaux’; ‘l’âcre odeur de la mer, le vent salé qui nous donne la sensation de respirer de l’étendue, la confusion colorée et mouvementée des ports communiquent une inquiétude merveilleuse’.115 Trepidation and wonderment combine in an intoxicating mix of sense, affect, and idea that echoes the rich exploration of thought and sensation in ‘Le Cimetière marin’: ‘je hume ici ma future fumée’ (line 28); ‘j’attends l’écho de ma grandeur interne’ (line 46); ‘les cris aigus des filles chatouillées’ (line 91); ‘il voit, il veut, il sent, il touche’ (line 118); ‘le son m’enfante’ (line 124); ‘buvez, mon sein, la naissance du vent. […] puissance salée’ (lines 129, 131); ‘un tumulte au silence pareil’ (line 138). In ‘Le Cimetière marin’, beyond the shifting multi-sensorial apprehension of the acoustic and visual textures of the sea, the poet is also the constant mariner of the metaphysical, and the gaze of the poet-thinker produces the ‘marine’, the seascape that is, also, always an internal landscape (‘Tout entouré de mon regard marin’ (line 21)), revealing a strong affinity with Mallarmé’s transformative vision of the sea in both its perceptual and metaphysical dimensions.116 The poet is receptive, physically and intellectually, to the figures that appear upon, and alter, ‘la scintillation sereine’ (line 23), where luminosity intimates the possibility of solace.

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The inner landscape, which enfolds reflections on time, subjective change, and finitude, finds its analogue in the beguiling, altering formations of nature. Sky and sea are called upon to witness the shifts of unresolved subjectivity (‘Beau ciel, vrai ciel, regarde-moi qui change’, line 31). The search for an analogue is perpetually frustrated, or its outcome deferred, in images which speak urgently of poetry’s own process, of the poem as a receptacle of sound, colour, thought, and emotion, and a space where time past, present, and future melt together in a simultanist vision of the sea as echo-chamber: ‘J’attends l’écho de ma grandeur interne / Amère, sombre et sonore citerne / Sonnant dans l’âme un creux toujours futur’ (lines 46–8): the internal rhyme (‘interne’/‘citerne’) connects the sonorous darkness and the empty clamour of the metaphysical void as the sea proffers beauty in the form of a reward (‘récompense’, line 5) that is equivocal, a troubled revelation. The metaphorical merging and morphing of landscape and seascape create, in ‘Le Cimetière marin’, ‘le toit’ that is punctuated by the movement, across its surface, of animate white objects (‘des colombes’, line 1), which may be doves (or shapes that resemble doves). The white shapes are at once constant and fluid in the reversible relation between metonymy (the spume of the breaking waves) and metaphor (doves); the ground of the image is white, white that forms itself now into sea spray, now into bird, but always with an equivocation as to what is real and what is imagined, and a Proust-like vision unfolds as metaphors and material referents interchange, resisting and then resuming, their original form.117 The field of eruptive reflections in lines 7–12 expresses the shimmering quality of the poet’s vision of Time, and the refracted light of the sea spume, with its echo of Mallarméan prestige: ‘maint diamant d’imperceptible écume’ (line 8). Radiant light, glinting foam, sparkling eruptions, and the unceasing fractures of the water’s surface create a seascape of white, silver, and transparency, whilst the image of the light-reverberating facetted surface of diamonds offers a metaphor for the energized sparks and flashes of intellectual illumination. The shaping of silver and white in the image of poetic faceting is redolent of the values of craft and ‘travail’ that embrace physical, intellectual, and aesthetic achievements (‘ouvrages purs d’une éternelle cause’ (line 11)), as in ‘Le Cantique des colonnes’. ‘Quel pur travail’ expresses ecstatic recognition of beauty that is discerned both in the work of nature and in poetry’s ideal art. Classical architectural form reveals the absorption of colour (white, honey colour, and gold) into values of serenity, rarity, order, and wisdom, as we saw in ‘Le Cantique des colonnes’: ‘stable trésor, temple simple à Minerve / Masse de calme, et visible réserve’ (lines 13–14). Both the idea of white and the material fact of limestone, marble, breaking waves, sea foam, and doves are carried forward in the metonymic and metaphoric crafting of the poem. Warmth attaches to white here, countering perceptions of the cold austerity identified with Valéry’s intellectualism and with (modernist) poetic difficulty in general: it is the white of radiant being-in-the-world. Nature and the built space of the cemetery are embraced as signs of the vigour and variability of the world, and, also, significantly, valued for their perceived empathy with the poet’s fluctuating thought and feeling. Consciousness is stimulated by sights and sounds, scents and movements, that are registered in the natural world, and the

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poet’s absorptive subjective experience (‘ma présence est poreuse’, line 101), shaped by the intellect, gives rise to images of design and construction that turn around architectural figures evocative of order, rigour, and protection: ‘toit’, ‘temple simple à Minerve’, ‘temple du Temps’, ‘Édifice dans l’âme’. The apostrophe ‘comble d’or aux mille tuiles, Toit!’ (line 18) evokes the tessellated surface of the metaphorical Roof (sea): here, a sense of visual texture is foregrounded, intimating the many parts that constitute the One. This unifying vision aspires beyond white to gold in an ecstatic embrace of the sea’s colour and its movement. Evocations of gleaming gold, relayed by liquid vowels, convey notions of reflection and reverberation, while the ecstatic call to the Roof (sea, mind) – ‘comble d’or’ – is sustained through the echoing of ‘scintille’ and ‘scintillation’ (line 23). In ‘Le Cimetière marin’ the poet figures himself as a shepherd contemplating the community of tombstones: ‘le blanc troupeau de mes tranquilles tombes’ (line 64). This fragmentary troping of an Arcadian scene invokes Poussin’s Et in arcadia ego (1637–8) where shepherds walk among tombstones, acknowledging the dominion of mortality. The teeming tombstones are similar in the way that countless waves or numberless sheep are similar, but each is unique, giving material form to the desire to memorialize a singular life.118 The white stone consecrates value-in-death, and each grave stands as a momento mori.119 As the poet explores finitude, he exposes the lure of immortality signalled by the medley of colours that are a surging reminder of speciousness (‘couleurs de mensonge’ (line 98)). Recognition of finitude does not banish colour, but causes materiality to be evoked in startling reds, dramatic blacks, and brilliant white. The encounter with luminous time (‘Midi le juste’, line 3) brings into ironic relief the burden of suffering borne by the human individual, the receptacle of doubt and anxiety (line 80). This is the flaw in the material or metaphorical diamond (line 81): the intrinsic impurity that makes every stone unique; the flaw that makes each human life original, defying purist recuperation. Death is the absolute abdication of the self, marked by the absorption of humankind into the stark red clay: ‘l’argile rouge a bu la blanche espèce’ (line 86). The dialogue of pale flesh and red earth suggests a challenge to (Western) human hegemony (for the last word belongs to the clay; the friable body disintegrates and is absorbed, indistinguishably, into the roughness of the material environment). Bereftness is materialized where thought and emotion turn to larvae and to clay, and where the living join the community of the dead: this produces ‘une absence épaisse’ (line 85), the startling oxymoron capturing something of the modernist paradox whereby poetry is simultaneously ‘thickening’ concepts in fleshly and material ways, and depleting that same thickness. Human agency is decentred and drained in the process of decomposition as nature absorbs its life force. Corporeal decay produces humus, and the élan vital passes into a quickening of nature itself (‘Le don de vivre a passé dans les fleurs’, line 87). Animus transfers to plant life and animal life (insects and birds, and the larvae that make their way across the surfaces of the earth, the page, and the imagination). The poem invokes a strong sense of the co-existence of the seen and the invisible, the living and the dead, the organic and the human, the experienced

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and the imagined, whose collective conduit is monochrome materiality. This takes forward figuratively the idea expressed in the poem’s epigraph: Pindar’s exhortation to renounce ideas of immortality and instead extract value from the material and the possible. That potential is envisioned in the stanza that follows where the life drive surges in arrestingly sensual form (stanza 16). Now, the poet’s longing for tranquillity is suddenly disrupted by female laughter and visions of quickened flesh as young girls respond to tickling (line 91). The suggestion of an erotic fantasy foregrounds the incarnate body in ways at once fleshly and universal: ‘le sein charmant qui joue avec le feu / Le sang qui brille aux lèvres qui se rendent’ (lines 93–4). The lips’ blood-red brilliance figures the embrace of life (and playfulness) and, briefly, obscures the dead. The phrase ‘rentre dans le jeu’ is a cliché re-motivated, affirming that, in the perpetual tension between life force and death drive, the natural order of things is always preserved: as life moves forward, the cycle repeats itself, for each successive life is lived and is, in that very process, devoured by mortality, figured by the earthworm, magnified and metaphorized here as if it had morphed into a vampire, an image that draws Baudelairean spleen into a Shakespearean vision of mortality (‘le vrai rongeur, le ver véritable / … / Il vit de vie, il ne me quitte pas!’ (lines 112, 114)).120 The apostrophe to the sea, the fons et origo of the poem, conjures up the figure of the Hydra ‘ivre de ta chair bleue’ (line 136), which I discussed above.121 In the poem’s expanded sensorium, colour and flesh, animal skin and fabric, comingle as the sea is envisioned now as a panther’s coat, now as a torn chlamys [Greek cloak]. ‘[I]vre’ suggests capitulation to desire and signals the unleashing of possibility in the capaciousness of chromatic and haptic values. Colour – the more intense for being experienced intermittently – is deeply felt, drawn into a vertigo of immersion, intoxication, haptic pleasure, chaos, rupture, fullness, and silence. The wind rises, spurring the poet’s will to action and to resilience and persistence: ‘il faut tenter de vivre!’ (line 139). The breeze opens his book (the poem) and closes it once more. As the sea spume surges from the rocks, the poet urges his pages to disperse in the wind (‘pages tout éblouies’ (line 142)), a final mise en abyme of the poem as it ends with its metaphoric freight of diamonds and diadems, its light and solar transfigurations, its beauty and its unfathomable depths: this vision reconnects, Ouroboros-style, with the diamond vision of the poem’s opening stanzas. The dazzling eruption of white also carries the echo of Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard. The sea is figured materially as a screen, a stage, a reservoir, a mirror, a temple roof, a place of retreat (which is to say, as a series of metaphors) and a site of confrontation, of celebration, of recognition, and of learning. The chiastic structure of modernist poetry is revealed where colour informs thought, and thought in turn becomes coloured; and, more generally, where material substance gives rise to metaphor, and metaphor engenders more things. The de-centring of human agency, figured by evocations of process, thickness, and phenomenological matter, provokes a characteristically modernist erasure of distinctions, of which there are intermittent oxymoronic instances (from the ‘absence épaisse’ (line 85) to the ‘tumulte au silence pareil’ (line 138)), such that it becomes impossible to differentiate object and image,

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metonymy and metaphor, or the thing and its analogy. The poem’s expansive vision (sea/roof/sky) is constantly checked by its recessive urge, figured by the retreat into the tomb, and into the very earth. The exploration of the intellect in ‘Le Cimetière marin’, as we have seen, reveals the tension between the abstract momentum of the poet’s thought and action, and the tilt to the material and corporeal. The rival pressures of the physical and metaphysical are permanently in flux and frequently charged with colour value. The poem has that quality of solipsistic consciousness that is necessary to the modernist interrogation of subjectivity. So, what of human presence external to self in the poetic imaginaire of ‘Le Cimetière marin’? In external landscapes, others are absent or evacuated; the exuberant intrusion of the young girls (stanza 16) is a rare exception. Significant instead is the insistent presence of natural elements, animal life, inanimate objects, or artefacts that reveal human passage through the world, like the epitaphs on headstones that record the perpetuity of the dead. The external landscape might appear to be a space devoid of social and discursive imprints, but traces of human presence and action, signs of craft, invention, and intellectual activity persist and work between the material and the metaphorical, as ‘Le Cantique des colonnes’ revealed. Valéry shapes the landscape and seascape of ‘Le Cimetière marin’ by conjuring up the absent (the figural, the metaphorical, the analogical) and enfolding it into the present and the palpable. The relation of flesh and materiality to colour is a major strand of continuity between ‘Le Cimetière marin’ and other poems like ‘Ode secrète’ where the relation of sensuousness and sensuality is made more complex and more acute through colour expressivity, and through the transposition from human to mythological, via the figuration of the sublime Hydra that moves through ‘Ode secrète’ as an agent of metamorphosis and as a metaphor for poetry’s shape-shifting power. Let’s turn now to ‘Ode secrète’. The transformative agency of the Hydra works explicitly and now also silently, and through colour shifts, to relate the earth and the celestial sphere of ‘Ode secrète’. The meaning of this poem is the subject of enduring critical debate. Whilst, at its most general and most classical, it evokes the heroic pleasure of victory after battle, the poem also offers itself to be read as a celebration of the Allied victory in the First World War, even if the text’s ellipsis and its appeal to myth and to cosmic sense-making resist any too determinedly historicized reading.122 The landscape of ‘Ode secrète’ figures the unbinding of the warrior’s body in its ecstatic fusion with nature. The poem opens with a vision of sensuous corporeality, experienced in the contact between the exhausted martial body and the moss, and charts a shift from fleshliness towards abstraction. The heroic body, that becomes explicitly the divine body of Heracles (Hercules in the Roman tradition), is abstracted into the pleasurable fall as flesh merges with the greenery in the body’s luxuriant stretch against the mossy earth. The poem stages the fall into restfulness on the unnamed green of the moss: ‘à même la mousse’ (l. 3), where the soft spongey sound of the alliteration [m] suggests the mutually receptive interface of body and vegetation. Visual intensity is paralleled by haptic alertness to the body’s liquid smoothness (‘le corps lisse’, line 4) where beads of sweat glisten on

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his brow. Rosy twilight colours the body and turns it into ‘une masse de roses’ (line 12), a chromatic and textural metamorphosis that shares the transformational agency figured in ‘Le Cimetière marin’ by the Hydra intoxicated by its own blue flesh. In ‘Ode secrète’, the Hydra is explicitly ‘inhérent au héros’ (line 15), affirming the capacity for alteration as interior, corporeal, and subjective. The morphing of colour into a material abundance, ‘la masse’, reveals the chromatic imagination at work, in anticipation of the celebration of the ultimate agency, that of poets and cosmologists when they create form and meaning from the ‘informe’ in the knowing, and the naming, of the constellations: Ô quel Taureau, quel Chien, quelle Ourse, Quels objets de victoire énorme Quand elle entre aux temps sans ressource L’âme impose à l’espace informe. (ll. 17–20) O the Bull, the Dog, the Bear, Such objects of immense victory When it enters the age of no resource The soul imposes on formless space.

The poem is a paean to the sense-making work of the human mind in creating shape and significance, and language, from the unformed and the unfathomed.123 Corporeal, solar, and stellar trajectories coincide in ‘Ode secrète’: the sun declines and the physical body lapses after feats of martial dance and muscular effort. It is as if the body of the warrior were subsumed into the figure of ‘les pas sidéraux’, a silver trail of footsteps/stars that trace a cosmic chiaroscuro.124 ‘Étincellement’ (rhyming with ‘universellement’) marks the supreme conclusion where aspiration is envisioned in the absolute. Great actions are transposed in the universe, proclaimed and perpetuated through language in the enduring forms of myth and fiction (‘par les monstres et les dieux’, line 22). ‘Ode secrète’ reveals a subtle colour consciousness that expands across the boundaries between ideas and physical phenomena, unfolding the porous dialogue of the material and the abstract that is a defining quality of Valéry’s poetry. Whilst the poem culminates with the expansion to the mythological and cosmological, the agency of white and silver—effecting the transposition from sensuousness to intellectual vision, from singular earth to celestial space— generates the poem’s concluding dynamic. What is striking, then, in ‘Ode secrète’ is the dance of corporeal and chromatic values that shape the poem’s dialogue with the abstract and the metaphysical, revealing an expanded consciousness that is at once immersed in the palpable and the proximate and seeking truth through the transposition from individual consciousness to a universal plane of human selfreflexivity. I want to turn fuller attention to the sustained strand of sensuousness and sensuality that is formative of Valéry’s poetry even in its most abstract and transcendent projects. In the colour expressivity of landscapes and seascapes,

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the senses are evoked, celebrated, and ceaselessly transformed by the work of the consciousness and the drive to self-reflexivity. Sensuousness, as we have seen, tips over into sensuality that is implicit or more directly expressed, as in La Jeune Parque and in shorter works such as ‘L’Abeille’ and in the chromatic fireworks of ‘Les Grenades’ where luscious colour and palpable flesh come into being. Beyond the merging of abstract and material, of which corporeality and the embodied consciousness are so often a catalyst, Valéry’s poetry reveals more constantly sensuous writing, sensual even, in ‘Le Cimetière marin’, ‘Au platane’, and ‘Ode secrète’ than the poet’s reputation for formalism and pure poetry implies. The sensual investment in colour through landscapes and seascapes is explored powerfully, even mesmerically, in La Jeune Parque, the extended interior monologue of the Young Fate, which represented Valéry’s return to writing poetry after a silence of some twenty years. Over four years of intense work that coincided with the First World War, Valéry created La Jeune Parque in response to Gide’s invitation to him to publish in the new NRF series, and thus prepared the ground for Charmes (1922).125 La Jeune Parque is a staging of consciousness that explores the deep imbrication of intellectual and sensual values. The consciousness of the Young Fate shatters and rebuilds itself, repeatedly, as her fractured mind grapples with memory, dreams, and desire, and undertakes an agonisingly critical interrogation of her past and the future. Consciousness works across corporeal and chromatic values  that are  activated, negated, and resurrected in instances spanning the acoustic, the haptic, the visual, the olfactory, and the gustatory. The complex plasticity of the Fate’s thought and emotion are inscribed in the rips and tears of the poetic monologue that defies linear sense-making in its modernist reversibility and indeterminacy. Valéry’s most incisive readers have urged new readers to immerse themselves in the scintillatingly disruptive text, embrace its intentional affective unevenness, and submit to the psychic chaos that pushes against the powerful order of Valéry’s alexandrine couplets. Thus, for Malcolm Bowie, La Jeune Parque is a ‘turbulent dreamscape’, plunging us into the maelstrom of conscious and unconscious desires.126 For Christine Crow, the poem demands that the reader pursue competing thematic and signifying possibilities concurrently, an approach that is true to the imbrication of simultanist values in Valéry’s poetic narrative: La Jeune Parque yields most fruit when all possible ‘levels’ of interpretation (the erotic, the ‘affectif ’, the generally representative, and so on) are seen […] as the substance from which the elusive central experience of ‘le changement d’une conscience’ is actually built up.127

Across its 512 alexandrines, the poetic narrative evokes the awakening of the Young Fate in the depths of night; it charts the altering movements of her embodied consciousness as she relives her entire existence.128 The intellectual project is entwined with a physical one, the Fate’s awakening to ideas coinciding with the awakening of her senses. La Jeune Parque has two principal phases or movements: there is the anxious journey through initial darkness and an opaque

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world that is transformed, intermittently, by the seductive, colouristic vision of her life before her consciousness stirred. Then, having resisted the temptation of selfdestruction, the tormented Fate confronts the complexities of revelation as dawn breaks. In this second phase of the poem, the growing lucidity of the disenchanted Fate demands the repudiation of colourist values and contemplates the embrace of darkness and of black. The intermittent colour narrative of the text is integral to the staging of the Fate’s crisis of consciousness and the fluctuations of her thought.129 The opening lines of the text create a mesh of sensory instances: her hand slips over her features (line 4), the swell of the sea murmurs a reproach, and a dissonant sound originating in the rocks prompts an analogy with the ingestion of a bitter drink (lines 9–11). A sense of the deep connectedness of colour, sensual flesh, frustrated desire, uncertainty, and exasperation develops through the vicissitudes of probing selfinterrogation (‘J’interroge mon cœur’, line 26). Across the dislocations and the redirections of her monologue, the Young Fate articulates a sense of self, past and future, that engages with the colour, shape, and texture of things. The dark night of the Fate’s soul is the first revelation, and interiority speaks through a sense of irremediable loss that is expressed in the disappearance of things of colour, the sacrifice of light, and the loss of sources of certainty and consolation: ‘(au velours du souffle envolé l’or des lampes)’ (line 29). As Florence de Lussy affirms, ‘darkness is, consistently, the symbolic colour of the unknowable, while the “golden” pasture refers us […] to a paradise of being now lost (“Souvenir, ô bûcher dont le vent d’or m’affronte”)’.130 De Lussy’s observation can be extended, for the critical selfreflection of the Young Fate, ceaselessly multiplied, is a gaze upon a gaze and is consciousness of consciousness. The resulting specular image is seen to saturate the ancient wood with burnished gold: ‘Je me voyais me voir, sinueuse, et dorais / De regards en regards, mes profondes forêts’ (lines 35–6). Sinuosity of image and idea anticipates the intrusion of the serpent, the privileged figure for the Valéryian intellect, whose venom brings illumination and a surge of new colour as it reveals the Fate more fully to herself: ‘Le poison, mon poison, m’éclaire et se connaît / Il colore une vierge à soi-même enlacée’ (lines 44–5). The apostrophe to the serpent brings the Fate to a clarifying reflection on her self-sufficiency: her acceptance of instability and chaos means that, having drawn benefit from the serpent’s paradoxical gift (‘gift’ is, of course, German for ‘poison’, a theme which echoes through this instance), she can condemn the creature to slither back along the route of dark, thickened mystery: ‘Fuis-moi! Du noir retour reprends le fil visqueux’ (line 84). Sensual and sometimes voluptuous values shape remembrance and desire in the monologue of the Young Fate: those values may be read as a counter to the agony of the modern world in 1917. The poem is one of extreme introspection and fractured self-analysis, but the movement towards self-knowledge is also expressed in terms of profound physical connection with the world of things and a continuingly fertile and ambivalent reflection on colour. The Young Fate’s journey reveals something more affirmative, I believe, than Hélène Cixous contends in her reading of an irremediably broken Fate.131 Throughout that journey, the pliancy of

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colour values charts subjectivity in the fluctuations of ecstasy, nostalgia, torment, and lucidity. The Fate’s retrospective evaluation of her actions and responses, desires and motivations, resurrects scenarios of fertility and seduction that turn on merged visions of luscious golden fruit and flesh, synthesizing visual, haptic, acoustic, and gustatory values: Je m’offrais dans mon fruit de velours qu’il [l’éternel] dévore Rien ne me murmurait qu’un désir de mourir Dans cette blonde pulpe au soleil pût mûrir Mon amère saveur ne m’était point venue Je ne sacrifiais que mon épaule nue A la lumière ; et sur cette gorge de miel, Dont la tendre naissance accomplissait le ciel Se venait assoupir la figure du monde. (ll. 114–21) (my emphasis) I offered myself up in my velvety fruit that [eternity] devours Nothing murmured to me that the will to die In this blond pulp in the sun could mature My bitter taste had not taken hold I sacrificed only my naked shoulder To the light; and on this honey-coloured breast Whose tender appearance the sky realised Came to rest the face of the world.

This complex image-work of La Jeune Parque looks ahead to the voluptuous movement of the blond insect of ‘L’Abeille’, which I will explore shortly. The Young Fate reflects on her erotic body, arching and naked (‘nu sous le voile enflé de vivantes couleurs’ (line 131)), where colours are emblematic of the sensual energy and the blithe agency that are now called into question (‘cette vaine puissance’, line 133). The Fate’s dawning realization is that her authentic ‘Ennemie’ is her own Shadow, ‘la mobile et souple Momie’ that is a variation on her ‘absence peinte’ (line 142) (with the colourist ‘peinte’ suggestive of decorative values that are as inauthentic as they are beguiling). The Fate reviews her memory of countless days lived in multifarious colours that are synonymous with vibrancy, and with vanity: […] l’œil spirituel sur ses plages de soie Avait déjà vu luire et pâlir trop de jours Dont je m’étais prédit les couleurs et le cours. L’ennui, le clair ennui de mirer leur nuance Me donnait sur ma vie une funeste avance. L’aube me dévoilait tout le jour ennemi. (ll. 176–81) […] the spiritual eye on its silken beaches Had already seen too many days glow and grow pale Whose colours and courses I had predicted

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Boredom, the lucid boredom of mirroring their nuance Gave me a baleful advance on my life. Dawn revealed to me the antagonistic day.

‘Ennui’ (line 179), rising here in an almost Baudelairean sense, is a recurrent incitement to the deeper exploration of consciousness, spurred by the alternation of darkness and uncompromising daybreak, that projects true light and relativizes perceptions and understanding. Colour, its shape and its process, is revisited with the lucidity that comes from the acceptance of mortality, whilst memory preserves something of the consoling crimson glow of childhood (‘De ma docile enfance un reflet de rougeur’, line 190). Linking the vicissitudes of the past is ‘un long rose de honte’ that may be dipped in emerald (line 191) but is unalterably freighted with bitter realization: colour takes on nominal value here as the flushed flesh tone that signals naivety; shame is spatialized and temporalized (‘long’). The conscious mind forges connections between the material and the abstract, but only the intellect can create order, shape form, and invest – or resist – colour. The Young Fate calls on the pyre to breathe crimson onto the sterile mask of her assumed perfection, thus suffusing that mask with her refusal to be, in herself, the other that she was. She beseeches her blood: […] venir rougir la pâle circonstance Qu’ennoblissait l’azur de la sainte distance Et l’insensible iris du temps que j’adorais ! Viens consumer sur moi ce don décoloré. (ll. 195–98) […] to redden the pale circumstance That the azure of sacred distance made noble And the insensate iris of the time that I adored! Come and consummate upon me the colour-bled gift.

The appeal to blood marks a brief, desperate (and repeated) rallying against the deathly pallor that signals the leeching of values of grandeur, remote dignity, and consecration that were once symbolized by the prestigious tones of azure and iris. Now, an irrepressible desire to break free of the seductions of colourism surges, expressed in the longing for the gift of the ‘décoloré’: ‘La terre ne m’est plus qu’un bandeau de couleur. Qui coule et se refuse au front blanc de vertige’. (ll. 214–15) ‘The earth is no more to me than a band of colour. That flows and resists the white forehead of vertigo’.

The Young Fate’s capitulation to territories of blackness and the vertigo that grips her white brow enable her to relativize her subjective view of the earth that is

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expressed in the restrictive syntax as no more than a simple band of colour, in her freshly disabused vision. Yet, when the darkness leaves the Fate, she discovers her own crimson flesh to be trapped in an infernal cycle of past, present, and future desire that defines the human predicament: L’ombre qui m’abandonne, impérissable hostie Me découvre vermeille à de nouveaux désirs. Sur le terrible autel de tous mes souvenirs. (ll. 342–44) The shadow that abandons me, the imperishable host Offers me up crimson to new desires. On the terrible altar of all my memories.

The tormented young Fate has lived in and for the world of colour(s). The persisting desire for elusive purity develops as her consciousness revisits the immersion in seductive chromatism: this is a necessary stage on the tortuous journey towards more lucid self-knowledge. Brief moments of respite attenuate the terror of absolutes, offering intermittent relief and glimpsed appeasement: ‘Le noir n’est pas si noir’ (line 464). The Young Fate is caught between the vivid colours of life and living with their seduction and their speciousness (her eyes are still lured by ‘tant d’azur’ (line 485), on the one hand, and the darker tonalities of finitude and mortality, on the other). Her predicament is a figure for the indeterminacy of the modernist self, irremediably fractured, and endlessly subject to the vicissitudes of memory, desire, and realization.

Ekphrasis: Figure and fruit Where sensuous and sensual values shape the larger movements – the chromatic and affective fluctuations – of La Jeune Parque, other poems, often much shorter forms and sonnets, reveal a more concentrated erotic narrative where colour values shape the movement of desire. These shorter works are often, also, powerfully ekphrastic, often in the absence of an explicit art-historical reference. To read a poem in ekphrastic terms through a painting which is not an actual source for the poet, but an analogue of that poem, is to respond to Valéry’s suggestion, in his essay on Corot, that any art work solicits its own, distinctive response.132 Just as readers may ‘hear’ echoes of poems by other poets in a given text, so we may ‘visualize’ affinities between a given poem and an absent (remembered) art work. Such a reading can work to uncover what I shall call ‘virtual’ or ‘speculative’ ekphrasis.133 This is an approach that Valéry’s writing invites, as Peter Collier’s reading of ‘Le Cantique des colonnes’ demonstrates, as we saw earlier. As well as exposing the retrospective interart consonance of Valéry’s poem with the neo-classical landscapes of Claude Lorrain and Poussin, Collier moves proleptically to speculate on the affinity of Valéry’s ‘Cantique’ with Matisse’s evocation of the sensual body

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and natural beauty in the absence of any particular pictorial reference.134 With a similar, speculative approach, I now consider some of Valéry’s shorter poems. Often Valéry’s verse strikes us by its capacity to shape a visual image that draws on the relation of colour and curve. The sonnet ‘La Dormeuse’ evokes a languorous female body in a Mediterranean and classical setting. The image of the ‘ventre pur qu’un bras fluide drape’ (line 13) seems to ‘speak back’ to the sensuous sculpting of the Victorian Aestheticist painter Frederick Leighton’s Flaming June (1895) (Plate 18). The fluidity of embodied colour expression in ‘La Dormeuse’ echoes the curving arm of Leighton’s allegorical June. These works of Valéry and of Leighton appear to join in ekphrastic dialogue one with the other as they figure rapture and, in turn, stir an equivalent response in the reader and in the viewer.135 My speculative ekphrastics has its source in the enraptured evocation of la dormeuse. Valéry’s poem unfolds a portrait of sensuous mystery with its meshing of hushed phonemes and its vision of rich golds and blacks: ‘Dormeuse, amas doré d’ombres et d’abandons’ (line 9). The poem shimmers with the intense quietude of Leighton’s Flaming June. Prismatic radiance connotes opulence, appeasement, and sensuous reverberation in the poem, as in the painting. The dormeuse occupies the whole of the text just as the allegorical June’s semi-sleeping, semi-watching form fills almost the entire space of the canvas, soliciting the viewer’s mesmerized gaze. There are references to pretence and to illusion (‘le doux masque aspirant une fleur’) that connote unknowability, and to the impression of luminosity and illumination that echo the scintillation of the sea in Flaming June. The Aestheticist sensibility of Frederick Leighton (1830–96) privileges beauty, chromatic intensity, Mediterranean and classical values, and the monochrome harmony of materiality and ideality.136 There is, to this extent, a multi-point consonance with Valéry’s pursuit of an ideal vision founded on abstraction, sculptural form, mythology, and an art of voluptuousness. The sensorium in the painting and in the sonnet is remarkable for its synthesis of visual, haptic, thermal, chromatic, and olfactory values, and this is reinforced by the acoustic values of the poem: ‘Souffles, songes, silence’ (line 5) echoes the quality of breathing, dreaming, and peacefulness exuded by Flaming June, and the rich alliterative phrasing of Valéry’s poem has its pictorial equivalent in the saturated harmonies of orange and gold that create the hushed quality of the painting. There is a further, strong affinity between the sublime and proximate figures of Leighton’s painting and Valéry’s poem: ‘ta forme veille, et mes yeux sont ouverts’ (line 14). The sleeping muse appears, in both works, to interrogate the reader: she watches over the implicit reader, as June watches the viewer. Pleasure is allied here with an unfathomable quality that does not lull (to sleep) so much as stir the poet and the reader. The slumbering figure, in each work, suggests, paradoxically, a quickening of sensation. The magnetic vision of vital peacefulness in each medium places the woman at the nexus of the movement of the sea and the stillness of sleep: Valéry’s poem intimates a state of reflective wakefulness (‘l’onde grave’) and unfathomable resonance (‘l’ampleur’), while Leighton’s dreaming June is framed by the luminous ripples of the nocturnal sea.

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Valéry’s sonnet and Leighton’s painting exude warmth and heat (‘brûle’), which conjure up an atmosphere at once indolent and strangely stimulating in which the unnamed sleeper and the allegorical June dream in parallel. Tropes of luminosity, scintillation, and weighty peace (‘amas’; ‘naïve chaleur’) combine to create ‘ce rayonnement d’une femme endormie’ (line 4). Painting and sonnet evoke intensity and beauty, languor and concentration, abandonment and presence. They spur the reader, and the viewer, to speculate on the secret thoughts of the desired other (‘ma jeune amie’), in her unsettling presence and her unfathomable mystery. Breath (‘souffle’), dream (‘songe’), and silence combine in the evocation of enigmatic quietude in both the poem and the painting. The evocation of sleep is mysteriously charged: the ‘repos redoutable’ is laden with unpredictable gifts and with a sense of immanent agency. There is equivocation for the figure sleeps and is also awake: ‘veille’ introduces the paradox that she sees whilst she slumbers. Her bodily presence bears witness to the world, as her soul sleeps. But ‘l’âme absente’ suggests an exploration of the unconscious or the ‘enfers’ of the mind, thus any too idyllic impulse (and decorative urge) is checked, explicitly in the poem, and implicitly in the dark, recessive sea of the painting, by the intimation of an unresolved inner landscape, by the suggestion of psychic ‘trouble’, and by a sense of the unknowable intensity of the female figure. The envisioning of rapture in the poem, as in the painting, is paralleled in the ‘real world’ by the stimulation of visual and intellectual ravissement in the reader and in the viewer, experiences closer to Barthes’s jouissance than to everyday pleasure. Jouissance, in the reader, is stirred by the alliterative, incantatory sounds, by the rolling ‘or’ that is sustained across words, phrases, lines, and stanzas. The poem refers to form and to drapery, invoking sculpture with its values of decorativeness, beauty, and luxuriance, but there is also something deeper and disquieting for the narrator and for the reader. Valéry’s sleeper burns secrets ‘dans son cœur’ (line 1), spurring our curiosity as to the secret knowledge that she holds and generates. The project of expansion from ‘naïve chaleur’ of ‘ma jeune amie’ to ‘ce rayonnement d’une femme endormie’ suggests the maturing of the female figure through her actions and through the incandescent power of her secrets. Her assumed bodily purity is shadowed by suggestions of antagonism (‘ennemie’, ‘conspirent’, ‘repos redoutable’ (line 10)); the absent soul is known or conjectured to be ‘occupée aux enfers’ in a poem where those secrets assume a darker resonance in the second quatrain. The regular sonnet form suggests formal beauty and order, whilst the pliancy of Valéry’s alexandrines offers an equivalent to the intriguing suppleness of Leighton’s radiant June. The suggestion, in both works, of a secret life disrupts the calm, allowing an interior landscape, or dreamscape, to be intuited. The insistence on ‘or’ (‘dormeuse’, ‘endormie’, ‘doré’) punctuates the poem. It conjures up, through sound and its visual translation, a vision of gold that resonates chromatically and kinaesthetically with Leighton’s representation of his sleeping muse. The saturation in rich sound and in colour evocation in ‘La Dormeuse’ is the poetic equivalent of the chromatic immersion of Leighton’s painting. Subtle erotic stirrings ripple through each work.

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It may seem counter-intuitive to seek to compare a British Victorian-era painting with the work of a modernist French poet, yet there is a strong consonance between the two works that is physical, chromatic, psychic, and narrative. The suggestion of peacefulness is strangely unsettled and unsettling (‘repos redoutable)’; it seems partly to conceal and partly to reveal its store of gifts. Why is the unknown other recognized as ‘une telle ennemie’ (line 8)? Valéry’s evocation of a banquet formed of ‘dons’, ‘grappe’, and ‘biche’ has its visual analogue in Leighton’s vision of the Mediterranean and the classical temple setting. In Valéry’s poem, as in Leighton’s painting, the female figure resists the appropriation traditionally associated with idealized sculptural forms. There is, perhaps, in the sensuous rhythms of orange and gold, and in the seriousness of their aesthetic purpose, a desire in the poet and in the painter to develop, in their respective media, the relation of materiality and the ideal in synchrony through the supple movement of colour and curve. Compellingly, both works resist narrative recuperation for, in each instance, the woman sleeps, and we know not what she dreams. The figures, defined by their strangely active repose, nourish speculation in the reader and in the viewer as to their desire, their agency, their past and their future, and our relation to them. Some poems give themselves, in their chromatic intermittences and in their fragments, to be read ekphrastically, with or without a known pictorial referent. The arresting relation of ‘La Dormeuse’ and Flaming June is evidence of how virtual ekphrasis can help us deepen the comparative study of poetry and painting, based on the active role of the reader and the viewer in identifying correspondences in the absence of actual, attested influences. Contemporary ekphrasis studies certainly takes a more pliant approach to the relations between visual and verbal media.137 W.J.T. Mitchell in Picture Theory (1994) sees art works and texts as fundamentally similar in their capacity to create an affective response in the viewer/reader. For Mitchell, that response may begin with ‘ekphrastic indifference’ (a sense that the visual and the textual objects will always be irremediably alien to each other); it may give rise to ‘ekphrastic hope’ (the perception of a potential dialogue between text and picture); and it may also trigger ‘ekphrastic fear’ (the concern that the verbal medium could displace the visual source).138 Among Valéry’s shorter poems and sonnets with concentrated erotic narrative (perhaps more visible because it materializes in a short format), ‘L’Abeille’ and ‘Les Grenades’, like ‘La Dormeuse’, invite ekphrastic hope, to reprise Mitchell’s notion of visual/verbal recognition and potential reciprocity beyond a known pictorial source. In ‘L’Abeille’, the evocation of a still-life cornucopia, a Cupid statuette, and a hovering insect is reminiscent of Dutch Golden Age art and Baroque painting. The presence of the Cupid embodies the idea of ornamentalism and of ‘hard form’, thus framing the sonnet’s engagement with the finely wrought and with the neoclassicism and mythology that are integral to the poet’s vision. The poem reveals, in compressed form, the turn to more explicitly eroticized values. There is a deep relation of colour and corporeality through the analogy of insect life, the life of the erotic self, and the life of an imagined art work. The depiction of ripe fruits in a narrative of desire that equivocates between pleasure and pain in ‘L’Abeille’ has its analogue in the envisioning of succulent

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split flesh, eroticized fruits, and round pulpiness in Caravaggio’s art (e.g. Still Life with Fruit (1601–5), attributed to Caravaggio). Reading Valéry’s ‘bee’ sonnet stirs memories of cognate art works where cornucopias are animated by insect life: Henri Ostolle Delage’s Nature morte aux abeilles (n.d., mid-late nineteenth century) and Ferdinand Küss’s Still Life with a Basket of Fruit and Bee (n.d., midlate nineteenth century), where ripe peaches attract the activity of the insects, provide further ekphrastic motivation for my reading. The figure of the somnolent Cupid in ‘L’Abeille’ invites comparison with the tawdry Cupid foregrounded in Cézanne’s Still Life with Plaster Cupid (1895) (Plate 19), which is a broadly contemporaneous staging of the unfathomable relation between representation and real life. Both Cupids, Valéry’s and Cézanne’s, in their discoloured dejection, embody a modernist debunking of ornamentalism. Reworking the topos of the cornucopia, ‘L’Abeille’ is a voluptuous evocation of the colouring of the skin and the puncturing of flesh. It speaks of the vitalization of the body and the spurring of consciousness through the pricking agency of the golden insect. Allying sensual intimacy and the stirring or stimulation of the intellect, the movement of the bee is paralleled by the moving of the female speaker’s eye and her altering sensory experience. Touch and texture are constitutive of the experience of meaning, as consciousness is embodied in the imagined contact with flesh and fabric, with the polysemous ‘gourde’ (fruit, flask), which has its corporeal and affective reflection in the young woman’s rebellion against continuing engourdissement. ‘L’Abeille’ inscribes an apostrophe to the ‘blond’ bee that turns on erotic stimulation that is desired and rehearsed, more than it is actualized. The ‘blonde’ bee whose sting the (female) speaker longs for is at the centre of a poem where voluptuousness is inscribed in the play of gold, white, and vermilion. The poet’s palette is refined (lexically and chromatically), like the lace that covers the plate of luscious fruits; the desired prick of sharp pain vicariously played out on the ‘gourde’ is a horticultural displacement of the figure of the female breast or belly; eroticism is suggested in the ‘dentelle’ that is almost immaterial, like the ‘songe de dentelle’; a membrane of lace that implies the almost-not-there-ness of white, of a bodice, of a hymen. The speaker recognizes the insect’s agency, as a catalyst of sensual and mental arousal: ‘mon sens illuminé / Par cette infime alerte d’or’ (lines 12–13). Without this momentarily sharp stimulus, Cupid and the desired experience of love continue inert and unfulfilled. Colour attaches to the bee, activating the idea of arousal, and, as blond morphs into gold, it reveals the vermilion that intimates longing, colour that is ‘un peu de moi-même’ (line 7). The eruption of crimson blood on flesh that is round and rebellious figures the felt experience of the illumination of her ‘sens’ (activating both meanings: sensuality and consciousness). ‘Vermeille’ is the chromatic sign of the stimulation initiated by the sting: haptic colour marks the quickening of self – of body and of mind – and makes possible the renewal of individual agency. The tense, sometimes tortuous, relationship of the experiential and the intellectual makes poetry possible: the idea in Valéry’s poetry is invested in materiality that bears a chromatic freight, and, reciprocally, the coloured thing

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and its processes, through the working of metaphor and analogy, give depth and density to the idea. ‘Les Grenades’ unfolds at one level as a fantasy of erotic cruelty where the deep red fruits submit to the sun’s ripening power. The sonnet takes forward the evocation of fruit and sensuality and, conjoining erotic, haptic, and gustatory values, turns the poem into a celebration of physical consumption and voluptuous consummation. The phenomenology of the pomegranates details their splitting, fissuring, and exploding into colour and into flesh as the fruit yields under the vital pressure of its seed. Internal order is breached and torn apart: the sadism inflicted on the fruit is a dual metaphor for the pressure and the possibilities of the intellectual process and the erotic experience: the work of the mind ‘splits’ ideas apart and creates new meaning, and sensuous and sensual experience is activated in parallel. Violence brings forth colour formed in jewel-like clusters: ‘cloisons de rubis’ (line 8) and ‘gemmes rouges de jus’ (line 11), images which combine notions of the gemellary and the lapidary, compressing ideas of structure and substance, and conjoining processes of hardening and liquefying of the near-identical fruits. Sensuality and its sublimation are announced at the beginning of the sonnet: the erotic urge is allowed to expand but is also held in check, framed by the analogy with the mind and its proliferating idea-seeds. The encounter with the voluptuous fruit metaphorizes the experience of epistemophilia, the desire to know more fully the object and to explore the ideas that form in the material encounter. The evocation of the ‘fronts souverains’ (l. 3) and the memory of the calyx, or head, of the fruit affirm consciousness in things; the fruit and the mind are analogically related in their complexity, their eruptive energy, and their qualities of generation and revelation. The pomegranates succumb to spillage due to the pressure of the idea-seeds building on the inside and pushing out words. Metonymy is evoked and then is displaced by the metaphor of intellectual and creative agency. A productive ‘éclosion’ will ultimately expose the ‘secrète architecture’ (line 14) of compartments and chambers (‘cloisons’) of the fruit and of the mind. James Lawler sums up the poem’s central image as ‘un dessin et une couleur brillants’, and he sets the ‘grenade’ in its polysemous contexts, as Granada, with the Alhambra conjured out of the ‘cloisons de rubis’, and also as First World War artillery fire-power, the grenade.139 The network of cells and chambers constitutes the internal form that poetic revelation will make visible in exploded form (‘craquer’, line 8). The process of splitting is visual and tactile, and its violence is recreated in the hard consonants [/k/] of ‘craquer’ and ‘crève’ (line 11). Beauty is allied thematically, acoustically, and chromatically, with violence, eroticism, and discovery, and these values combine to generate the procreative analogy of the long maturing of ideas that burst forth from the mind, and from the poem as it is read. ‘Grenade’ has its etymological source in ‘grenat’ [garnet], and this sonnet in red (‘rouge’, ‘rubis’) and some gold (‘l’or’, line 9) presents, by its title, as a poetic still life. Yet, any idea of ‘stillness’ is countered by the stress on the partial breaching of the fruit (‘entr’ouvertes’, ‘entre-baîllées’, lines 1 and 6). As pressure intensifies on the inside, the dry gold of the skin bursts: sensuousness tips into sensuality as an unnamed power (‘la demande d’une force’, line 10) causes the skin to split and the flesh to gape open. That force makes the ‘or sec de l’écorce’ (the mirroring/

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reflection of ‘or’ in the name of the rough outer husk of the fruit) produce its luscious red gems as aridity is transformed into flesh and liquidity. The poem has a powerful visual quality arising from the evocation of the ‘thingness’ of the fruit, and the intricate relation, sometimes implied and at other times more explicit, between the organic object and human agency. The skin of the fruit is again foregrounded, as in ‘L’Abeille’. Skin is the surface that can be inscribed and on which signs can be erased; it is also the container, the bodily envelope, and the giver of form to the inchoate. Sensory arousal parallels intellectual stimulation. The sensorium is activated in multiple ways: the pomegranate is not only visible in its intimate detail, but also experienced as proximate and touchable in the rupture of its internal fibres. Gustatory pleasure is sourced in the archaic spurt of juice, and the poem exposes the relation of that liquid urgency to architectural order, revealing, not their separation, but the dialogue between them that is produced by the altering of the fruit. The poem takes the reader vicariously close to the experience of seeing, touching, smelling, tasting, and even hearing the fruit through the trope of maturation and rupturing, as in the encounter with a still-life painting, just as it invites us, through the pomegranate metaphor, to reflect on the intellectual work that involves fracture, penetration, and generation. The encounter with the opened fruit is an opening onto the ‘secrète architecture’ of the poet’s inner self or his mind as thought is born, ripens, multiplies, splits, and disperses in order to self-generate as manifold ideas. Valéry’s powerful portrait of the pomegranate recalls Mallarmé’s evocation of the chromatic mystery of the name ‘Hérodiade’ and the implicit violence of modernist revelation (‘ce mot sombre, et rouge comme une grenade ouverte, Hérodiade’).140 The ‘lumineuse rupture’ (line 12) of the culminating tercet figures the necessary modernist breach, one that is propitious in its de-constructive effect. Expression in both senses is mobilized as clusters of ruby-coloured seeds are expressed from the fruit, and the words (including words of colour) are then expressed by the act of poetry-writing: both processes are transformative for the reader, who relishes the memory of the fruit and immerses in the poem’s exploration of its material and metaphorical potential. The evocation of ‘une âme que j’eus’ (line 13) reveals a selfreflexive subjectivity that cherishes the past, accessed through dream, but that also sets the past aside to immerse in the here-and-now. The modernist self is always protean, affected by and responding to change, like the fruit. In many respects ‘Les Grenades’ is an ekphrastic sonnet without a specified art object, but one which speaks back to the rich tradition of still-life and cornucopia painting.141 By its concentration, its verbal texturing of the fruits, its attention to surface/skin and interior, to fibres and liquid profusion, the sonnet brings the fruit vividly to life, infusing it with the power to stir our desire and our imagination, whetting appetites sensual and intellectual. Valéry’s poetic still life is energized, as if a still-life painting had flickered into life, conjuring its colour and texture in three dimensions. Reading ‘Les Grenades’ ekphrastically reveals analogies with still-life painting from the Baroque to the modern. A poem about pomegranates that evokes Grenada and the Alhambra stirs memories of the Spanish Baroque painter

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Antonio Ponce’s, Pomegranates (1625–50) (Plate 20). Caravaggio’s Still Life with Fruit on a Stone Ledge (1603) relays the strength of the fruits, their pulpiness, their sensual value, and, in the case of the pomegranates in the left-hand corner of the painting, it captures their wholeness and their explosion as fleshy fruit, and their tonal variations from red to green-brown. Caravaggio conveys the luminosity and the exceptional hapticity of these fruits, qualities that solicit the gaze, and the touch, of the viewer. In the modern era, Matisse’s Still Life with Pomegranates (1947) presents intact fruits, except for one, already halved, that exposes its ruby seeds of juice (Plate 21). Valéry’s poem has a similar equivocal intensity, as it captures the precarious balance of rigour and yielding quality; it inscribes the intense chromatic notation of fruits, just as Matisse’s pure colour and flattened forms create the autonomy of the irregular spheres of identical colour that roll and radiate like so many small, misshapen suns. Matisse’s pomegranates, some resting on the flat dish, others exploring the table beyond the space of the platter, seem not to do the painter’s will, but tumble, disorderly and unbiddable, onto the red tablecloth, demonstrating their kinaesthetic and chromatic capacity, and free-rolling independence. Matisse’s fruit, like Valéry’s, stages a generative spillage: the pomegranate exceeds its containing form; the intense crimson interior of the fruit ricochets into the chromatics of the shutter, the drape, and, stunningly, the pomegranate-like patterning of the chairback in the painting. The break with standard sonnet rhyme-scheme in the variation between the rhymes of the first tercet and those of the second consecrates the notion of rupture, such that there can be no resurrection for the pomegranate: a pomegranate burst open can never regain its integrity and its form; it is irremediably altered, and there may here be a metaphor about reader reception: once opened, the pomegranate/ poem gives itself to be approached, consumed, and digested as we wish, whether with care or without, but it is no longer unbreached. Like the fruit, the creative idea, nourished by the poet, is ceded to the other, the reader, to nurture or to neglect. ‘Les Grenades’ reveals a degree of parenté with ‘Le Cimetière marin’, where liquescence and sensual pleasure erupt together to reveal, in the transposition from gustatory sensation to olfactory intimation, a compelling momento mori: Comme le fruit se fond en jouissance, Comme en délice il change son absence Dans une bouche où sa forme se meurt Je hume ici ma future fumée. (ll. 25–28) As the fruit dissolves into pleasure As into delight it transforms its absence In a mouth where its form slowly fades Here I inbreathe the smoke wreathing my future.

The material fruit dissolves and ‘dies’ in the process of creating pleasure. Its disappearing in tactile and visual form and its melting on the palate produce

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delectation and also signal finitude (intimation of the poet’s own ceasing): the luscious taste of the fruit mingles with the imagined inhalation of the poet’s ‘future smoke’. The colour of the fruit’s flesh or juice (unnamed in the poem) and the rush of ‘f ’ sounds (‘forme’, ‘future’, ‘fumée’) connect shape to its morphing into the grey-white smoke of the posthumous horizon. The gustatory memory is explored as an analogy for human experience and the moment that is lived and that dies, connecting all moments past and future. The momento mori draws on the fruit experienced, ultimately and fleetingly, as an explosion of sensation and a catalyst of the poet’s, and the reader’s, recognition of their mortality. The close reading of several of Valéry’s powerful ‘still life’ sonnets brings us full circle back to the poet’s early encounter with particular Renaissance and Baroque paintings in the early prose texts of Glose. The colour relations between poetry and painting suggest that there is an analogical rationale for considering Valéry in relation, not only to Renaissance and Baroque art, but also relative to the experimentalist modern art (of post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism) that he appears, by passing silently over the work of Cézanne and Matisse, Braque and Picasso, to resist or reject. Reading these still-life sonnets as speculative ekphrasis draws together the various strands explored across materiality, abstraction, sensuality, portrait, and landscape through which the poet weaves colour. The actual ekphrastic motivation of Glose is sustained in La Jeune Parque and, more elliptically and intermittently, in the poetry of Charmes, and wherever Valéry writes of the colour and material thickness of things: often, as these sonnets reveal searchingly and subtly, that ekphrastic motivation is pursued in ways implicit and analogical and no less deep and evocative. One specific dimension of poetic visuality that I want to explore – and it forms an essential link between Valéry and Bonnefoy, the subject of Part III – is the poet’s practice of writerly chiaroscuro. Chiaroscuro is a complex dimension of colour writing that engenders intriguing relations with aspects of chromatic resistance and reticence that are a defining feature of Valéry’s visuality.

Chiaroscuro modulations Chiaroscuro, in all its variations and gradations, gives rise to a long tradition in world art that stretches back to shadow painting, but it is, perhaps above all, a defining feature of Renaissance art and modern visual culture. Leonardo achieved work of sublime precision and subtlety in the modelling of the human face, allying chiaroscuro and sfumato to achieve gradations between objects (The Virgin of the Rocks (1483–6), Mona Lisa (1503–4)).142 Chiaroscuro technique is used to dramatic effect in the interplay of light and dark, in the work of Mantegna, and later in Caravaggio and in Georges de la Tour. In the age of industrialization and accelerating scientific discovery, the dramatic play of light and dark shaped Joseph Wright of Derby’s representation of modern forges and his parallel depiction of eruptive volcanoes. Chiaroscuro is the tonal signature of modernist art and film, intimating suspense and fear, and inducing uncertainty in the viewer: from the

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deep shadows of De Chirico’s urban arcades (Plate 22) to the experimentalism of Eisenstein (Ivan the Terrible (1944)) and Hitchcock (Psycho (1960)), the culture of film noir, and the art films of Ingmar Bergman (The Seventh Seal, 1957), Alain Resnais (L’Année dernière à Marienbad, 1961), and Jean-Luc Godard (Alphaville, 1965). In Fortuna (2018), a searing narrative of twenty-first-century exile and loss, the filmmaker Germinal Rouax employs chiaroscuro to evoke bleakness and determination, beauty and grief, and to stir our empathy for the young Ethiopian migrant seeking sanctuary in the Swiss Alps. In Part III of this book, I will be discussing clair obscur in Yves Bonnefoy’s art writing and poetry: dark and light, and white and black nourish the material and intellectual tensions of the unfolding scenarios of Bonnefoy’s poems, and are a major focus of his encounter with Mantegna and Elsheimer.143 But what of Valéry’s chiaroscuro practice? How does the treatment of tonal contrasts relate to the modulation of thought and the contouring of feeling in La Jeune Parque and in Charmes? Valéry writes in his essay on Leonardo that, as mental landscapes shift and chromatic values alter, light (as much as darkness) can intimate suffering and opaqueness. His evocation of Leonardo’s artistic and intellectual authority is made repeatedly in the key of white, in competing metaphors of bedazzlement (‘ses dessins, ses manuscrits m’avaient comme ébloui’) and clarifying light (Leonardo’s ‘miracle’ is to ‘s’éclaircir’).144 Valéry unfolds a poetic geography charting the modulations of Leonardo’s complex treatment of light and dark. This has important implications for how chiaroscuro landscapes might be approached in their altering signification in Valéry’s poetry. In the following quotation, which I reproduce here in extenso, Valéry identifies transitional states as being rich in ‘lessons’ for the painter and the thinker (and viewer). The art writer’s reflections on Leonardo offer a deep reading of modernist values (those of movement, equivocation, alterability, and paradox), a reading that is resonant with Baudelaire’s exploration of the abyss and of visionary monstrosity as a source of discovery. Valéry writes: ce sont des monstres pleins de leçons que ces monstres de l’entendement, et que ces états de passage, – espaces dans lesquels la continuité, la connexion, la mobilité connues sont altérées ; empires où la lumière est associée à la douleur ; champs de forces où les craintes et les désirs orientés nous assignent d’étranges circuits ; matière qui est faite de temps ; abîmes littéralement d’horreur, ou d’amour, ou de quiétude ; régions bizarrement soudées à elles-mêmes, domaines non-archimédiens qui défient le mouvement ; sites perpétuels dans un éclair ; surfaces qui se creusent, conjuguées à notre nausée, infléchies sous nos moindres intentions… On ne peut pas dire qu’ils sont réels ; on ne peut pas dire qu’ils ne le sont pas. Qui ne les a pas traversés ne connaît pas le prix de la lumière naturelle et du milieu le plus banal ; il ne connaît pas la véritable fragilité du monde, qui ne se rapporte pas à l’alternative de l’être et du non-être ; ce serait trop simple !145 These monsters of understanding are monsters full of lessons, and these states of passage – spaces in which familiar continuity, connection, and mobility are

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altered; empires where light is associated with suffering; force fields where directed fears and desires impose strange circuits upon us; matter that is made of time itself; abysses literally full of horror, or of love, or of peacefulness; regions bizarrely soldered to themselves; non-Archimedean domains that defy motion; perpetual sites in a lightening flash; surfaces that open up, attached to our nausea, shaped by the very least of our intentions …. We cannot say that they are real; we cannot say that they are not. Those who have not traversed them do not know the value of natural light and of the most banal setting; they do not realise the real fragility of the world, which does not correspond to the alternative between being and non-being; that would be too simple.

In his appraisal of the equivocations of Leonardo’s art, Valéry joins Renaissance art to the reversibility poetics of Baudelaire, and illuminates, in the process, his own art of indeterminacy and un-resolve. He foregrounds the capacity of values to coincide and interchange, problematizing the traditional light/dark dialectic and exploring a more dialogical interplay of values. We see this at work in ‘Poésie’ where the mythic Poet recalls drinking at the breast of Poetry; the milk of inspiration generates a poetics of white that is mostly immanent and implied (‘duvet’, ‘la mère Intelligence / De qui la douceur coulait’, ‘son lait’, ‘blancs liens’, ‘Le silence au vol de cygnes’). The flow of inspiration/milk is synonymous with darkness in the complex alternation of light and shadow (‘sombre’ / ‘ombre’; ‘clarté’ / ‘beauté’) that turns on the nurturing agency of the Mother-Muse. The act of internalizing the rich mystery of inspiration is envisioned as an experience of illumination as chiaroscuro values become interchangeable: À peine, dans ton ciel sombre, Abattu sur ta beauté, Je sentais, à boire l’ombre, M’envahir une clarté ! (ll 13–16) Hardly, in your dark sky Fallen on to your beauty Drinking the shadow, I felt Myself immersed in clarity!

Modernist chiaroscuro in poetry can be understood relative to art history and the long reflection of artists and writers on colour. Charting the development of chiaroscuro in the Western art tradition, John Harvey reprises Bridget Riley’s distinction between, on the one hand, the traditional chiaroscuro of Caravaggio and his successors, who create narrative suggestiveness through the stark contrasts of light and dark, and, on the other hand, the ‘black of the colourists’ like Rubens and Delacroix (and, one might add, Manet, who is absent from Harvey’s account) for whom black (and presumably also white) enters, on its own terms, into play with crimson and gold.146 Harvey, following Riley, highlights the modernists’ complexifying approach to light and dark. This has relevance for how we might read Valéry’s chiaroscuro for his poetry works ceaselessly to problematize

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traditional chiaroscuro: white and black are the tense and fluctuating embodiment of abstract values in Valéry’s writing, where any sense of a persisting dark/light dialectic is subject to modernist revision. In Valéry’s poetry, black and darkness with their semantic values of enigma and interiority are often the site of intellectual tension. Black and dark are synonymous with anxiety and exasperating unfathomability, but also with anticipation and promise, and with paradoxical illumination. Valéry’s poetry thus reveals a more complex ‘travelling’ through the values of white and black where austerity and richness coincide more than they compete; where the traditional light-dark dialectic cedes to a more porous dialogue of values, as categories merge and mingle. White and black are often also participants with other colours in a richer evocation, as we shall see shortly in ‘Fragments du Narcisse’. ‘Les Pas’ is an intense and intimist poem that conjures, in chiaroscuro terms and acoustic terms, the feminine figure in anticipation of a union founded on intellectual desire and sensual longing. The approach of the ‘personne pure, ombre divine’ (line 5) of ‘Les Pas’ is fleshed as both luminosity and nocturnality; her dark form is counterpointed by white instances that alternate between the explicit and the immanent (‘[pas] muets et glacés’ (line 4); ‘pieds nus’ (line 8)). A figure poised between the real and the imaginary, she corresponds in the manuscript versions to Psyche awaited by Eros.147 The evocation of the mysterious figure in the tense balancing of shadow and light – with the footsteps placed ‘saintement, lentement’ (line 2) – recalls the quietist drama of Georges de la Tour’s penitent Magdalene (c.  1640) or his vision of St Joseph’s dream (c. 1640). Valéry’s poem works to dissolve the traditional dialectical distinction of dark and light in the representation of subjectivity founded on irresolvable complexity (‘douceur d’être et de n’être pas’, line 14), as a way of perpetuating desire, which, if consummation takes place, will be destroyed. Dark and light, in the evocative interiority of ‘Les Pas’, collaborate in the coming-into-being of the desired other – present and pressing – in the figure of the ‘pas’. Chiaroscuro is integral to the examination of crisis, intellectual, mystical, or erotic; whether it be the predicament of a nameless poetic voice, the turmoil of Narcissus, the struggle of the Young Fate, or the trials of the Pythoness, to which I turn now. The oscillations of dark and light, and colour, reveal, in ‘La Pythie’, the mysterious territory of the psyche. In Part I, the tormented prophetess is the spectator of her own abject horror: she contemplates her ‘ombre démente’ (line 11) and witnesses the hollow, imitative gestures of a phantom that is intent on parodying her (‘[un fantôme nageur] mime de noirs enthousiasmes’ (line 18)). In ways that recall the chromatic freighting of concepts in Mallarmé, the colour adjective imparts material value to an abstract noun to evoke the Pythia’s predicament and the sterility of her response. The adjective ‘colours’ the abstract noun, cloaking faked emotion and hollow performance in menacing darkness. Through its trope of theatricality, the narrative of the Pythoness looks proleptically to the Baroque protagonist of Bonnefoy’s Du mouvement et de l’immobilité de Douve. In the smoke of her torment, in the opening stanza, the raging Pythia is ‘Pâle, profondément mordue, / Et la prunelle suspendue / Au point le plus haut de l’horreur’ (lines 5–7)

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as she contemplates, fixated, her own abjectness. The poem unfolds a vision of the Prophetess’s madness in the midst of her ‘odorante tourmente’ (line 13) where acoustic and olfactory values collide in a sensory assault on the agonizing figure. Colour and corporeality form a site of cognition and recognition in the audacious image-work of ‘La Pythie’. At the centre of the poem, ‘Ils m’ont connue aux bleus stigmates / Apparues sur ma pauvre peau’ (lines 111–12) evokes the flesh’s contusions; its altering coloration. Erotic violence is thus revealed in the bruised and fragilized flesh of the incarnate self. The strange blue stigmata are traces of action and reaction that give themselves to be read chromatically on the Pythoness’s body, and in the mind of the reader. The tenebrist qualities of the narrative exposed in the chaos of smoke and fury (at the beginning of stanza 2) are subject to meliorative transformation. The dark cartography that is the Pythoness’s body reveals a rich mystery, where an enigmatically fleshed vision merges into a nocturnal landscape: ‘Intacte nuit, tendres sommets’ (line 84). The Pythoness embodies palpable darkness that seems to unfold in three dimensions (‘Mon abîme a bu les immenses / Profondeurs qu’apportent les vents’ (lines 99–100)). The evocation is simultaneously geological and sensual, affective and chromatic, abyssal and ascensional. Chiaroscuro collaborates with the eruption of colour where the body as a whole is momentarily obscured, by the gold rising up from the liquid black that is smoothed into voluptuous playfulness on the skin: ‘Toi, mon épaule, où l’or se joue / D’une fontaine de noirceur’ (lines 91–2). The ravishing image has its wellspring in a Baudelaire-inspired chromatics of alchemic transmutation, that moves between a briefly glimpsed ideal (golden fleshly beauty) and pervasive spleen, for fulgent chromatic beauty resists but cannot resolve negativity.148 Challenging rigid value systems, Valéry’s modernist poetics explores black and white, and darkness and light, as fluctuating fields. Black may conjure anxiety and obscure chaos, but black is also a bedazzling seam, mesmeric and unfathomable. The values of white and light have similar pliancy as they travel across the extremes of abjectness and nostalgic candour; there is the initial pallor of the furious Pythoness that colours the poem’s opening stanza, and there are blithe evocations of the ideal incarnated by ‘une voix nouvelle et blanche’ (line 219). Light is the anticipated bearer of knowledge (‘l’épouvantable éclair’), but, when it undergoes a modernist revision, it is revealed as the bearer of the stark realization of irremediable loneliness that is affectively sterile: Il éclate ! … Il va nous instruire ! … Non ! La solitude vient luire Dans la plaie immense des airs Où nulle pâle architecture, Mais la déchirante rupture Nous imprime de purs déserts ! (ll. 155–60) It explodes! … It will teach us! No! Solitude begins to gleam

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In the immense wound of the air Where no pale architecture But searing rupture Imprints upon us pure deserts!

In modernist poetry’s equivocation, the will to clarity spurs the counter-desire to obscure vision as light and dark collapse together, and the agency of the witness is diminished; thus, intellectual illumination cedes to impenetrability, and the values of visual and epistemic hegemony are resisted. Here, the light/dark dialectic is abolished, as darkness, as much as light, becomes a source of affective nourishment that springs from true consciousness: Noirs témoins de tant de lumières Ne cherchez plus… Pleurez, mes yeux ! Ô pleurs dont les sources premières Sont trop profondes dans les cieux !… Jamais plus amère demande !… Mais la prunelle la plus grande De ténèbres se doit nourrir !… (ll. 171–77) Dark witnesses of so many lights Search no more … Weep, my eyes! O tears whose first sources Are too deep in the heavens! … Never a more bitter request! … But the greatest eye From darkness must draw its strength!

Chiaroscuro is formative in ‘Fragments du Narcisse’, a major text and the second of the three related reworkings of the myth (with Narcisse parle (1889) and Cantate du Narcisse (1939)). The volatile play of light and dark, and black and white and some silver, has dramatic agency in scenarios of crisis and self-interrogation as Narcissus implores the nymphs to tolerate ‘ce beau reflet des désordres humains’ (l. 28), the specular coincidence of beauty and Narcissus’s inner turmoil. The chiaroscuro lexicon of ‘Fragments du Narcisse’ gives rise to layers of dark and light that are synonymous with Narcissus’s accreted experience of psychic chaos as he confronts ennui and intolerable doubt: the lexicon of ‘noir’, ‘nuit’, ‘sombre’, ‘ombre’, and ‘épaisseur’ evokes the dark density of foliage, trees, river, and night sky. Darkness has its correlative in the materials of paleness and white, from ‘lueur’ and ‘lumière’ to ‘blancheur’, ‘rayons’, ‘lait’, and ‘lune’. The fertile interaction of light and dark, and white and black, is, again, less dialectical than dialogical, with values constantly in flux, modulating Narcissus’s inner conflict and corrosive uncertainty. Suzanne Nash, in a brilliant essay, argues that Valéry problematizes the Narcissus narrative as a means of provoking a disjunction between the

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Symbolist tradition and his own poetic experiment.149 Stressing Narcissus’s return to the nocturnal source and to originary darkness, Nash underscores Valéry’s concern that his poetry should be understood as a critical dialogue with his lyric antecedents. She tracks Valéry’s ironic reworking of Symbolist values as he sets about fracturing the traditional representation of coherence between Narcissus and his specular image.150 Reading Valéry as a ‘classical modernist’, a term which captures Valéry’s creative equivocation, Nash stresses fragmentation as a structuring principle of the text (from the title, the lay-out, and the fractured lines of the poem, to the rupturing of the illusion of a continuous identity between Narcissus and his reflection) as the poet effects a breach with the smooth intactness of the Symbolist ideal.151 Although chiaroscuro values are not Nash’s specific concern, the will to fragmentation and the modernist destabilization of Symbolist ideality that she discerns inform the clair-obscur expressivity of ‘Fragments du Narcisse’. The luminous end of Narcissus’s quest is expressed as desire, in the poem’s incipit: ‘que tu brilles enfin, terme pur de ma course!’ (line 1), but the quest will conclude with the permanent unsettling, rather than with the affirmation, of self, and will precipitate the bitter realization of the fracture between Narcissus and his image. In the first movement of the poem, strong tonal contrasts evoke Narcissus’s coming to consciousness of the futility of his quest for specular reflection, and expose his anguished lucidity at the irreparable schism of self and image. There is, however, the quickening of Narcissus to the luxuriance of nature, the sensing of a deep potential reciprocity between the natural world and self, that relativizes the pure ideal. Narcissus interprets the acoustic revelation of a dark organic proliferation as auspicious: ‘J’entends l’herbe des nuits croître dans l’ombre sainte’ (line 37). But, quickly, clarity and luminosity are revealed as a lure, sparking a desire to self-define through the retaliatory gestures of opaqueness. Concurrently, the silent sanctuary of Symbolist darkness is challenged as Narcissus both ‘hears’ and observes a ‘thickening’ of nature. Through the densification of shadow, modernist chiaroscuro works once more to destabilize the traditional light/dark dialectic as shadow is privileged as a place of discovery and generation where implicit whiteness is treacherous, but also reversible and necessary to the probing work of self-examination: Et la lune perfide élève son miroir Jusque dans les secrets de la fontaine éteinte… Jusque dans les secrets que je crains de savoir, Jusque dans le repli de l’amour de soi-même, Rien ne peut échapper au silence du soir. (Part I, ll. 38–42) And the perfidious moon raises her mirror Penetrating the secrets of the stilled fountain Penetrating the secrets whose truth I fear Penetrating the recess where self loves self Nothing can escape the silence of evening.

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Chiaroscuro values are in tension with the wider colour palette where the rosy flush of erotic stimulation provokes a crimson saturation that is consonant with pleasure and appeasement. If this colour influx represents the sovereignty of desire and the challenge to death’s dominion, colour persists as a manifestation of the specious seductiveness that masks, and thus perpetually reveals, the brutal truth of mortality: Ô douceur de survivre à la force du jour, Quand elle se retire enfin rose d’amour, Encore un peu brûlante, et lasse, mais comblée, Et de tant de trésors tendrement accablée Par de tels souvenirs qu’ils empourprent sa mort. (Part I, ll. 48–52) O sweet survival as daylight breaks And when it retreats finally rose-tinged with love Still burning, and weary, but fulfilled, And overwhelmed by so many treasures tenderly stored And by the many memories that turn its fall crimson. Et dans la sombre terre, un clair tombeau qui s’ouvre … Mais ce n’est pas le calme, hélas ! que j’y découvre ! Quand l’opaque délice où dort cette clarté, Cède à mon corps l’horreur du feuillage écarté, Alors, vainqueur de l’ombre, ô mon corps tyrannique, Repoussant aux forêts leur épaisseur panique, Tu regrettes bientôt leur éternelle nuit ! Pour l’inquiet Narcisse, il n’est ici qu’ennui ! (Part I, ll. 61–68) And in the dark earth, a luminous tomb opens But here there is no peace, alas! As I discover here! When the opaque delight where this clarity sleeps, Cedes to my flesh the horror of parted foliage Then, victor of the darkness, o my tyrannical body Pushing back the forests’ panicked density And soon you come to miss their eternal night! For the anxious Narcissus, here there is only ennui!

The emerging image of the luminous tomb gaping open in the dark earth (line 61) captures that chiaroscuro instance where light and dark values implode together in a vision of sterility and despair: here, the dark earth offers no solace, but opens up to consume Narcissus. Symbolist white is de-idealized, ceding to the glaring revelation of inescapable ennui. As the dark horrors of the foliage are revealed, in Part I of the ‘Fragments’, the Narcissus narrator seeks to defeat the immersive shadow as his body pushes back the obscurity of the forests, a figure for mental opacity and psychic disarray.

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The texturing of darkness in the tactile, panicked ‘thickness’ of forests sets up an opposition with the (false) luminous ideal and the smooth corporeal perfection to which the embodied consciousness is bound (‘la chair lumineuse’, line 69): the selfidealizing vision of Narcissus, synonymous with the Symbolist ideal, is confronted with the falseness of his belief in his own perfectibility. Chiaroscuro is a means of assimilating internal and external worlds, a way of ‘con-figuring’ material and mental landscapes as a site of irremediable conflict. Narcissus beseeches the ‘sombres esprits’ (line 79) to cease the work of creating ‘cet ouvrage anxieux’, which figures his confrontation with his now de-idealized image. Darkness is associated with the working of consciousness, which is redolent of the somber imaginary of Baudelairean spleen. Narcissus yearns to suppress his dark anguish and urges the forces of dread to capitulate to the ‘corps délicieux’ of the pool. But the encounter with the reflection is necessarily traumatic: the reflection is both similar to and more perfect than self, creating an unbearable dissonance within Narcissus. The oxymoron ‘éphémère immortel’ captures the modernist paradox where illumination conjoins with conflict in images of unattainable white. Here, pure beauty, in a further challenge to the Symbolist ideal, is revealed as cold and cadaverous, and a source of insidious antagonism: Ô semblable ! … Et pourtant plus parfait que moi-même, Éphémère immortel, si clair devant mes yeux, Pâles membres de perle, et ces cheveux soyeux, Faut-il qu’à peine aimés, l’ombre les obscurcisse, Et que la nuit déjà nous divise, ô Narcisse, Et glisse entre nous deux le fer qui coupe un fruit ! (Part I, ll. 124–29) My likeness! … And yet more perfect than myself, Ephemeral immortal, so clear before my eyes, Pale limbs of pearl, and silken hair, Must it be that scarcely loved, the shadow obscures them, And the night already divides us, o Narcissus, And slides between us the blade that cuts open the fruit!

Night presents with trenchant force: it is the knife that slices through the fruit, breaching the sanctity of the ideal. Its clarifying agency effects the separation of image and self, shattering the specular (near-)unity of Narcissus and his reflection; authentic light is thus encountered as darkness as clair and obscur values collapse together. The agency of darkness exposes the lie, deconstructs the ideal, and reveals the enduring psychic burden: modernist chiaroscuro where equivocal dark, with its illuminating power, and treacherous light are forces integral to the ceaseless probing of the human predicament. In Part II of ‘Fragments du Narcisse’, chiaroscuro gives way to a more vividly polychromatic vision as erotic values prevail, and the crimson flooding their eyes blinds the lovers to truth. The coloration of the erotic is immanent in ‘le sang qui dore’: blood is turned into precious metal; red morphs into gold, as the pool

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becomes witness to the torment of ‘sombre amour’ and the burning lover enlaces ‘la blanche amante’. The powerful hand that speaks on the shoulder and reigns over the flesh deepens the haptic resonance of the poem. Chiaroscuro values are disrupted by the treacherous crimson surge that obscures sight of the ‘éternel éther’ in the higher, luminous air, and occludes light, causing the lovers to betray each other (‘se ment’). Yet, the lovers ultimately prize darkness for its quality of consolation and enduring appeasement: Mais s’ils traînent dans l’or leurs yeux secs et funèbres Ils se sentent des pleurs défendre leurs ténèbres Plus chères à jamais que tous les feux du jour ! (Part II, ll. 70–72) But if they drag through gold their dry, funereal eyes They feel tears defending the shadows That are more eternally cherished than all the light of day!

Narcissus, on the other hand, prizes only his own flesh, whilst recognizing the superficiality of his desire: ‘vous n’êtes que lumière, adorable moitié / D’une amour trop pareille à la faible amitié !’ sums up the luminous ‘half ’ of the unresolvable clair-obscur paradox. Towards the end of Part II, the body beseeched by Narcissus takes the form of an image with the potential to heal the Cartesian mind–body split as the self gazes lucidly upon the body’s ‘husk’: ‘sans quitter mes yeux, sans cesser d’être moi, / Tendre ta forme fraîche, et cette claire écorce’ (lines 24–5). But the self is forced once more into engulfing darkness where the psyche and the shadows coincide and become indistinguishable in the revelation of mortality: Mon âme ainsi se perd dans sa propre forêt, Où la puissance échappe à ses formes suprêmes … L’âme, l’âme aux yeux noirs, touche aux ténèbres mêmes, Elle se fait immense et ne rencontre rien … Entre la mort et soi, quel regard est le sien ! (Part III, ll. 40–45) My soul loses its way in its own forest, Where power escapes its supreme forms … The soul, the dark-eyed soul, touches the very darkness It grows immense and encounters nothing … Between death and self, its gaze is sublime!

Capitulation to immersive black is expressed in the solipsistic vision of Narcissus’s body, his soul and the cosmos merging in the in-distinction that is darkness and black, and hastening the ultimate recognition of mortality. Narcissus had invoked his body as ‘[l’]unique objet qui me défends des morts’ (Part III, line 13). Yearning to dispel the tenebrist weight of his torment, he seeks solace in multifarious fleeting colour. Thus, he beseeches the gods to arrest daylight on its crimson slope so that they may create once more ‘une lueur de rose

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ou d’émeraudes’ (Part III, line 19). But the hopelessly blithe attitude of prismatic openness soon fades with Narcissus’s capitulation to encroaching darkness: ‘Bientôt va frissonner le désordre des ombres! / L’arbre aveugle vers l’arbre étend ses membres sombres’ (Part III, lines 38–9) where insistent internal echoes and rhymes and near-rhymes produce a thickening effect. Engulfing darkness is figured as the blind(ed) tree that seeks ‘affreusement’ the tree that disappears, an analogue of Narcissus’s soul that loses itself in its own dark forest, just as it fails to find itself in its specular image. ‘Fragments du Narcisse’, with its oscillating focus on troubled luminescence and on deep darkness and equivocal shadow, and its tendency to displace set values, is, in certain ways, the nocturnal equivalent of ‘Le Cimetière marin’. Solar values and values of darkness and shade are the agencies shaping the metaphysical drama and the existential theatre of Valéry’s poetry. Solar myths, schemes of ascension, transcendental élans, aspiration, and radiant energy fuse in constellations of cerebral illumination and poetic recognition in ‘Le Cimetière marin’. In ‘Fragments du Narcisse’, shadow and shade, and black and grey, speak to an alternative illumination, to the shattering of illusion, and to the stark, necessary realization of the ultimate capitulation to dust, earth, and finitude. Valéry’s chiaroscuro practice reveals something of the heterogeneous impetus of modernist poetry that generates oscillations and inversions of black/white where traditional contrasts are challenged and values collide and mingle, interchange and self-cancel.152 The volatility of chiaroscuro in ‘Fragments du Narcisse’ reveals the modernist poet’s ceaseless desire to transform, erase, restore, and relativize values.

Conclusion Reading Valéry has revealed that, if we are to gain a fuller, deeper understanding of colour in poetry and related art writing, we must take care not to sever chromatic instances from the signifying whole. Valéry’s poetry itself teaches us to be alert to colour signifying in the fuller scheme of meaning. ‘Palme’ – an evocative study in white – offers an instructive example. An angel sets down bread and milk – white materials – whose nourishing simplicity connotes calm and care. In its intimation of purity, its focus on patient concentration, and its paean to material practices that sustain and transform, the poem spurs analogies with the quietist domesticity of Vermeer’s The Milkmaid (1657–8) (Plate 23): here, the servant lays out bread and pours an even stream of milk in a painting that imparts the texture of bodies and things, just as Valéry’s poem, with its attention to the same white substances and the subtle bodily gestures, communicates empathy and unfolds a profound understanding of everyday human values: De sa grâce redoutable Voilant à peine l’éclat, Un ange met sur ma table Le pain tendre, le lait plat;

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Il me fait de la paupière Le signe d’une prière Qui parle à ma vision. (ll. 1–7) With his formidable grace Barely veiling the stream of light An angel puts down on my table New bread and stilled milk; His eyelids close before me As he makes the sign of a prayer That speaks to my vision.

The evocation of the angel who lays, before the poet, milk and bread conjures a phenomenology of yielding whiteness, without ‘blanc’ ever being expressed explicitly. As in Vermeer’s study of the flow of milk and the golden-crusted soft white bread, Valéry’s poem creates a sense of textured whiteness in its variations and its unity, from angel’s wings to the crumb of the already cut loaves and the milk. ‘Palme’ articulates colour and light that seem almost palpable, and through adjectives suggestive of serenity and peace (‘pain tendre’, ‘lait plat’), the poem creates an atmosphere of respite and relief. The movement of the intellect among ideas and among things challenges settled meanings and nourishes equivocation and irresolution in modernist poetry. Colour values, in their fragmentariness, their intermittence, and their volatility, are integral to the shifts of the poet’s thought. At the same time, colour works connectively in Valéry’s poetry, weaving relations between the consciousness and its objects as part of the larger poetic project. Chromatic participation extends, as we have seen, from poems where explicit colour shapes a sensuous geography or landscape, often in elliptical ways, to texts where direct colour references are all but non-existent: colour lives, immanent and profound, without colour-words. Colour creates a space of pure reflection and speculation, but often – for the most part, even, – colour inhabits objects, shapes, recesses, surfaces, and screens. Colour has a transitive, integral, and, often, transformative relation with things. Material and affective contiguities affect colour, adding value, or subtracting it, ceaselessly altering it through the working of memory, desire, conflict, awakening, nature, celebration, reticence, disgust, pleasure, and scepticism. ‘Toute abstraction est faite d’images hétérogènes’, Valéry writes, and poetry itself is both the ultimate abstraction and a constructed thing made of heterogeneous images and materials, including the chromatic materials of language.153 Valéry’s poetry and his writing on art alert us to the shape-shifting agency of colour in modernism’s transformative vision. In its resonant intermittence, colour plays an integral part in the poet’s complex and shifting syntheses of myth and materiality, abstraction and corporeality, and art and sensuousness. We sense a deep affinity between chromatic instances in Valéry and the ‘petit pan de mur jaune’ that dazzles and arrests Proust’s fictional author Bergotte, before his death,

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in an interart encounter that is a profound revelation (to the character, to the narrator, and to ourselves as readers and as viewers of painting) of the capacity of colour to offer transformative lessons through media both visual and textual: the colour values in Valéry are, I suggest, comparable in their concentration and intensity, and in their compelling power over the reader, who relives the poem in her head. Valéry draws us into exploring the relation of colour to other poetic resources, for colour is often made more fully material and more deeply embodied through its relation to other senses: in particular, sound, touch, and movement. Valéry’s poetry reveals the closer collaboration of chromatic values and other materials in the evocation of a fuller sensorial experience that blends visuality with acoustic and haptic values. Thus, for example, a phenomenology of colour is unfolded as white, cream, and grey take on three-dimensional density in the evocation of a colour haptics in the Cahiers: Blancheur d’amande – l’air mouvant parmi et sur le rugueux et le poli de l’arbre – le nu de la feuille glacée, de la flaque d’eau, la lumière sur le terrain, petits morceaux durs, mottes spongieuses, langues de sable – (‘Eikones’)154 Whiteness of almond – the air moving amid and across the tree’s roughness and its polished husk – the naked figure of the frozen leaf, of the pool of water, the light on the ground, little hard pieces, spongey clumps, tongues of sand –

Colour values reveal here their ‘thingness’, their textural variety, and their inherent capacity for alteration. Colour hapticity in Valéry offers much for us still to explore: it is an area of broader literary and interdisciplinary study that will repay fuller attention. Sound in Valéry has a rich association with colour that owes something to traditional Symbolist synaesthesia, and even more to the boundarychallenging sensibility of the modernist poet. There are echoes of colour words in alliterative instances: ‘Ébauche d’un serpent’ brings sound and colour together in the greenness that ‘speaks’ through the lucid tongue of the serpent (‘une voix dans la verdure’). Colour writing relays cultural, natural, material, or spiritual values, and there are chromatic configurations which seem to communicate the sound or the movement of colour. And lapidary forms are revealed in the ‘Ébauche’ where colour is made to speak through the resonant echoes of the triple-repeated [r] and the word-initial [t]: the head of the serpent with its split tongue (‘mon triangle d’émeraude/Tire sa langue à deux fils’). Valéry’s poetry reveals the ceaseless potential of colour values to challenge and undo traditional recuperations, as part of the transformative momentum of modernism. Chromatic mouvance, in its working across the boundaries between the material and the abstract, in turn, challenges the old dichotomies, uncovering a more pliant, more dialogical Valéry.

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Part III E M B L E M AT IC C H R OM AT IC S A N D T H E C O L O U R O F E T H IC S : Y V E S B O N N E F OY ’ S L E S S O N S I N T H I N G S

Moving colour In his searching appraisal of the art of Mantegna, first published in 1978, Yves Bonnefoy explores the decisive, inaugural value of colour. For the poet and art writer, colour makes its own meaning, materializes the idea, and shapes the expression of affect in the work of the Renaissance painter whose ‘poétique de l’évidence’ resonates with Bonnefoy’s own poetic art and his ethos of presence. Exploring the altarpiece (1457–60) of the Church of San Zeno at Verona, the art writer evokes the garland of fruit above the figures of the Madonna and Child in the central panel of the triptych (Plate 24):1 la couleur de Mantegna ajoute à cette impression d’évidence et de joie d’une façon décisive, car elle semble émaner de ces fruits rouges et jaunes, de ce vert – et aussi bien de l’épaisse couleur du ciel […] comme à chaque fois d’une gemme, pour un échange sans fin de vibrations et de feux. Chaque chose, disons plutôt pour cette peinture chaque présence, apparaît de ce fait comme un des mots du sacré, comme une des sources distinctes de l’indivisible lumière. (Dessin, couleur et lumière, 204) colour in Mantegna enhances, decisively, the impression of evidence and joy because it seems to emanate from the red and yellow fruits, and from the green – and also from the dense colour of the sky […] colour emanates each time as if from a gemstone, creating an unceasing exchange of vibrations and lights. Each thing, or, rather, as regards this aesthetic, each presence, is like a sacred utterance, like a clear source of indivisible light.

Bonnefoy instances the predella, the lower part of the altarpiece, evoking the lucid, probing agency of colour, its trenchancy even: ‘cette couleur […] proclame ses liens avec l’intellect; […] ces tons […] coupent comme l’acier dans un espace qui semble sans atmosphère’ (DCL, 197). The art writer reaches back to the quattrocento, to Mantegna, to identify a paradoxical sensibility, unresolved between ideal and material. In Lamentation of Christ (1480), Mantegna paints a state of self-

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consciousness grown disenchanted with the absolute and with God: for Bonnefoy, scepsis and unconquered doubt are bodied forth in a modulated practice of grey that manifests itself in the rocky materiality, the grisaille, that is ‘[l’]emblème de l’être’ (DCL, 195) of the Renaissance master. Mantegna’s use of colour is never ‘easy’ or decorative; rather, colour fills an intellectual and intentional space of conflict and contradiction, in Bonnefoy’s appraisal. Mantegna’s monochrome practice in his late grisaille works reveals this tension as it articulates the struggle of the human mind, the gradations of grey imparting chromatic texture to the artist’s modulation of desire and suffering (DCL, 197). Often, this echoes through wastelands of grey and stone: for Bonnefoy, works such as Samson and Delilah (1495–1500) define Mantegna’s ‘conscience de soi moderne’ in ways that resonate with the modern poet’s landscapes of disconsolation expressed in the monochromes of rock, river, and tree (DCL, 213), as in the poetry of Hier régnant désert (1958), to which I will turn shortly (‘The Equipoise of Grey’).2 The landscape, explicit or implied, of mineral grey, is emblematized in many of Bonnefoy’s poems by the evocation of ‘une pierre’ and through the gradations of grey. Bonnefoy’s essay on Mantegna provides a luminous example of Yves Bonnefoy’s alertness to the intellectual agency and the transformative potential of colour in art from the early Christian era to the contemporary. Bonnefoy writes with painters, as he explores painting’s capacity to probe the complexities of the human predicament: the exploratory ethos that brings poetry, painting, and art writing into dialogue will guide my reading of France’s foremost poet of the twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries, and one of late modernity’s most penetrating and most affecting writers on art. Bonnefoy’s art writing, which is at once a poetics and an ethics of painting, invites us to read his poetry alert to the values – ethical, affective, and cultural – of his colour practice. Colour throws off the burden of symbolism to speak in its own stark terms of anguish and longing, of joy and recognition, and to proffer lessons in existing in the world and being with, and for, others. The art writer’s reflections on the work of the Hungarian abstract painter Miklos Bokor are illuminating in this regard for they speak powerfully of Bonnefoy’s profound concern for colour (in nature, as in art), for its transformative expressivity and for its capacity to assuage suffering and longing: Celui qui sait retrouver ses sentiments les plus ténus, les plus fugitifs, dans la couleur ou dans le grain des choses de la nature découvre vite que celle-ci nous propose, dans ses accords de ton, de matière, une solution aux conflits que ces sentiments déchaînent dans l’isolement, dans l’esseulement, de l’esprit qui l’a oubliée. Il comprend que l’apparence sensible n’est nullement, par rapport à nous, une indifférence, mais la parole qui va sans mots et n’en est que plus véridique.3 The painter who is able to regain his most tenuous, most fleeting feelings in colour or in the grain of the things of nature quickly discovers that nature offers us, in its affinities of tone and matter, a solution to the conflicts that these feelings

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unleash in the isolation, in the solitude, of the mind that has forgotten nature. He understands that the appearance of material things is never, relative to us, a form of indifference, but rather it is a language that is all the more truthful for being wordless.

The valorization of colour is one of the major axes of Bonnefoy’s reflection on art before Poussin and after, and this has key implications for how we might read colour practice in Bonnefoy’s poetry where it is characterized by the deep connection between lexical restriction (where rigour allies with preciseness) and eruptive intensity. In this third part of Colourworks, I shall extend and develop more fully the line of enquiry drawn through the writing of Mallarmé and of Valéry for, in Bonnefoy, art writing, aesthetics, and poetry form a space of interart reciprocity and discovery: painting is read by the art writer through the figures of poetry and poetics, whilst poetry reveals its chromatic values and, often too, its pictorial resonance or ekphrastic empathy.4 We can discern here a continuation of the interart dialogue that Peter Dayan identified in his brilliant reading of late-nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century modernism in poetry, music, and painting.5 In Bonnefoy’s writing on aesthetics from Zeuxis, through the Renaissance and the Baroque age, to the modern era, analogies between art and poetry are proposed or implied, as we saw in Valéry’s poetry and art writing, in Part II. But there is something deeper too, and more synthetic, for painting is approached in poetic terms, as the art writer articulates art’s power to speak to us in ways that shape, today, our response to visual culture. Thus, Bonnefoy’s 1996 essay ‘Ut pictura poesis’ moves beyond the poetry/painting analogy, which defines Valéry, to propose ‘l’identité, à un certain niveau, de pictura et de poesis’: this quality of interart consciousness is integral to the deep structure of poetry writing, as it is to Bonnefoy’s appraisal of art practice.6 Bonnefoy invokes the ‘poetics’ of the painter when he explores Adam Elsheimer’s ‘esprit de poésie’ (which, for him, relates Elsheimer’s painting prospectively to the poetry of Nerval and Hölderlin). He analyses Elsheimer’s ‘écriture de peintre’ (Le Nuage rouge, 31), alert to what he sees as the painter’s remarkable articulation of the search for the absolute in the ‘everyday poetry’ of early seventeenth-century painting. Just as, in 1978, he had considered the strong intellectual charge of Mantegna’s ‘poétique de l’évidence’ (NR, 205), so Bonnefoy extends the poetry/ painting equivalence in 1985, appraising the modernist ‘metaphysical’ painting of De Chirico as ‘poetry of the end of time’ (DCL, 437): for Bonnefoy, the art of De Chirico, like that of Mantegna, is built on the ruins of presence. In an interart frame that expands from avant-garde European art to modern American art, Bonnefoy invokes Edward Hopper’s ‘poétique nouvelle’ in an essay (1989) that explores the evolution of the artist’s early practice towards a deep immersion in light and colour. The art writer charts Hopper’s turn from the shadows to a more luminous art and draws our attention to the little red chimney that is a chromatic punctum in Squam Light (1912, private collection). In its distinctiveness and

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its autonomy, the bright figure of the chimney seems to dialogue with the surrounding colour tones: for Bonnefoy ‘[cela] semble un acte, plus qu’un objet, une pensée, plus qu’une apparence’ (DCL, 410–11).7 In his appraisal of the agency of red in Squam Light, Bonnefoy explicitly allies ‘couleurs’ and ‘valeurs’: ‘ce petit pan de brique rouge’ stirs the art writer’s remembrance of Proust’s ‘“petit pan de mur jaune”’ (and of Vermeer’s painting of Delft) in the penultimate volume of À la recherche du temps perdu (La Prisonnière). Colour affirms its ethical value in Hopper’s Squam Light: this turns on colour’s redemptive capacity to inspire in the viewer a renewed taste for living and to prompt beneficent action in and upon the world. The art writer invests subtle attention in chromatic values as he reflects on the shift in Hopper’s painting from the dystopian colours of existential malaise (in his earliest phrase) to a radiant prismatics (after his encounter with France and French painting), a prismatics that expresses human resilience and confidence and enacts the embrace of the real. The defining value that guides Bonnefoy’s essay, reflecting the American painter’s developing aesthetic (and the poet and art writer’s own ethos), is receptivity to colour in the material world that allows art to become the site of our reconciliation with life. Colour that betokens confidence is, Bonnefoy affirms, the means of Hopper’s redemption (NR, 411) made manifest in his articulation of the flesh of colour (‘ce corps charnel et mortel’, NR, 425). Something similar can be said about poetry’s embrace of colour and its deep, formative connection to embodied subjectivity in Bonnefoy’s Dans le leurre du seuil (1975), a seven-part free-verse poem. Colour is part of the material thickness of things, for Bonnefoy the poet and the art writer, such that we can speak of the chromatic incarnation that links colour to the body and to self: this is consonant with Georges Didi-Huberman’s thought, in La Peinture incarnée (1985), when he suggests, following Merleau-Ponty, that the gleam of flesh that persists in the patch of paint heals, provisionally, the fracture between art and its object. The chromatic encounter in and via art writing is integral to the experience of things apprehended, appraised, and proffered by an attentive poet-subject such that the reader in turn may tend and explore colour in the things of the world, be they poems, paintings, places, or people. Bonnefoy is attentive reciprocally to the chromatic quality of art and to the writerly practice of colour and alert to the capacity of painting and poetry to stimulate the intellectual and imaginative work of readers (and viewers) in turn: this is the focus of my reading. In ‘Peinture, poésie: vertige, paix’ (NR, 117–25), Bonnefoy accounts for the chromatic consciousness of poets who, like Baudelaire, seek to approach, in their medium, the palpable immediacy of the colour work of painters, and who, to this end, come to poetry ‘en peintre’, that is, with the sensibility of the visual artist (NR, 118). For Bonnefoy, Baudelaire’s poetry exemplifies the spirit and the practice of painterly poetry, that is poetry quickened by ‘l’ange de la couleur qui passe’, and he quotes the fragmentary chromatic evocation in Fusées of a torrid evening: ‘les ténèbres vertes dans les soirs humides de la belle saison’ (NR, 118). Bonnefoy’s poetry folds within it the forms and figurations of art and pursues a sustained dialogue with painting. In porous and pliant ways, the poet thinks

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and writes with art and around art. Bonnefoy eschews traditional, appropriative ekphrasis, venturing that ‘perfect’ ekphrasis would be silence itself (L’Inachevable, 273).8 This ekphrastic resistance is part of his wider repudiation of mimesis as an art form that privileges superficial seeing over deeper knowing. Bonnefoy affirms the transformative capacity of poetry and painting and underscores the creative (as opposed to the reproductive) work of poets and artists; he explains this principle with reference to the intertwined vocations of art and of poetry in search of ‘le poétique’.9 Bonnefoy reflects explicitly on colour writing, signalling his appreciation of chromatic instances in poetry that are unprecedented, concentrated, and fleeting. Turning to a fragment of Rimbaud’s ‘Le Bateau ivre’, Bonnefoy reflects on colour’s capacity in poetry: ‘“J’ai vu le soleil bas” [de Rimbaud] peut être aussi brutalement “rouge”, malgré les mots, que le tableau de Van Gogh le plus ardent à vouloir l’outre-regard’ (NR, 122, my emphasis). This is an illuminating example, for ‘Le Bateau ivre’ is an exercise in chromatic immersion, and ‘le soleil bas’ is insistently red (for Rimbaud, for Bonnefoy), notwithstanding the absence of the adjective ‘rouge’ (or, perhaps, precisely because of that absence). Bonnefoy is drawing attention to the chromatic capacity of words which themselves are not colour words, and, as we have seen in Mallarmé and Valéry, this is significant where poetry (often) absorbs and relays chromatic value whilst resisting the explicit lexicalization of colour. So there is a turn away from direct confrontation with colour qua colour, but colour is silently present (in the poem, in the world), pressed into objects, subsumed by the nominal (in Bonnefoy’s early works), absorbed into emblem and allegory, and caught in the fragmentary existence of natural things (in the poet’s mature work). Bonnefoy’s writing reveals a sustained yet altering colour consciousness across the extensive corpus of his poetry and in his art writing: this is his distinctiveness. I discuss many of the major works as I travel through Bonnefoy’s poetry from the 1950s to 2001 (from Du mouvement et de l’immobilité de Douve to Les Planches courbes), but there will be omissions too (Le Digamma, L’Echarpe rouge) for no other reason than my desire to ensure that an already extensive reading of Bonnefoy’s corpus can be optimally deep. I investigate Bonnefoy’s writing across a span of fifty years with, I hope, an empathic sense of the porousness of the boundaries between poetry, art, and art writing, and between visual colour and its verbal expression.10 In this reading of Bonnefoy, I examine colour values in two broad phases: first, I turn to the poet’s earlier output, from Du mouvement et de l’immobilité de Douve (1953) to Pierre écrite (1965), and his related art writing, to consider how a discernible alteration in colour practice relates to the poet’s fluid exploration of human subjectivity and evolving perspectives on poetry’s purpose. Then, extending my reading into Bonnefoy’s œuvre from Dans le leurre du seuil (1975) to Planches courbes (2001), I focus on chromatic values in relation to poetry’s significance as an exemplum, as a form of teaching about how to live more attentively and more intensely. I probe this ethical turn in Bonnefoy’s poetry in relation to colour and consider how his engagement with art, in its conjunction of aesthetic and human values, informs his poetry from 1975 to the turn of the twenty-first century.

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The dereliction of colour The most conspicuous quality of Bonnefoy’s colour practice across his early poetry is, arguably, its restraint.11 In Du mouvement et de l’immobilité de Douve (1953), Bonnefoy’s exploration of mortality and finitude, through the violent metamorphoses of the allegorical Douve, articulates colours that are all the more powerful for being evoked intermittently and with a Shakespearean intensity that conjoins violence and majesty.12 The restriction of the colour palette to (predominantly) white/grey, red, and black translates the affective rigour of the work that founds Bonnefoy’s reputation as a major contemporary poet. Colour words are sparse and chromatic meaning is frequently absorbed into recurrent nominal values (sang, cendre, pierre, blancheur). White is the colour of mourning, of dereliction, and of the symbolic recuperation of Douve. For the poet in his challenge to idealism, white is emblematic of sterile aestheticism and of the materialization of death (‘Théâtre’, XIV): [Douve est] blanche sous un plafond d’insectes (Poèmes, p. 53) Je vois Douve étendue. Dans une pièce blanche, les yeux cernés de plâtre (Poèmes, p. 58)

Bonnefoy’s interrogation of aesthetic values and his anti-Platonic thought shape his colour practice in Douve in ways that anticipate the ampler exploration of the existential and the ethical in his later work. Chromatic restraint is a counter to the perceived inauthenticity and seductive lure of the ‘image’ and the imaginary as the repository of disembodied ideas and illusions. Resistance to spurious imagemaking and recognition of a failed aesthetic project lead the poet to apostrophize Douve as the ideal dissolves: ‘Je te détiens froide à une profondeur où les images ne prennent plus’ (Poèmes, ‘Théâtre’, XIII, 57).13 Throughout Douve vivid colour, synonymous with artifice, provokes scepsis and disenchantment. The drama of death in the opening section ‘Théâtre’ foregrounds tropes of decorative and cosmetic colouring that dead-end in fakery (‘pavoisement de mort’, ‘fardée de neige’). The movement against the inauthentic and the unreal (against obtrusive colourism and against ‘art’) can be traced back to Bonnefoy’s Anti-Platon (1947) (‘un homme forme de cire et de couleurs le simulacre d’une femme, le pare de toutes les ressemblances’, III): the rejection of indiscriminate colouring will remain a constant across Bonnefoy’s poetry. The resistance to applied colours and the deconstructive energy turned on carnivalesque colour in Douve – fabric dyes, embellished lips, and painted masks (all artefacts and artifices concealing true presence) – extend into Bonnefoy’s final work (‘une couleur grossière défigure / Cette bouche, ces yeux. Moquer la vie / Par la couleur, c’était alors l’usage’ in ‘Une photographie’ (lines 2–4) in L’Heure présente).14 Integral to the critique of the classical ideal and its plastic perfectibility, then, is a critique of colourism. In Douve (54), the flight from the image is staged in the sequence beginning ‘Cassandre, dira-t-il, mains désertes et peintes’ (Douve, 101). Cassandra is implored to receive

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in her painted hands the sluggish consciousness that has lost all sense of time. The idealizing self is sequestered, by its own volition, in a high place, and seeks refuge in timelessness, purity, and prismatic distraction (‘Lisse-moi, farde-moi. Colore mon absence’), where colour and smoothness represent the Platonic perfection of abstract beauty that is irretrievable. The rejection of colour as ornamentation is carried over from Douve into Hier régnant désert (1958) where normative beauty is a lure to be resisted (‘La Beauté’, HRD, 136). Here, beauty, identified with the ruination of being (136), is censured in its decorative and decorous forms. Poetry enacts now the sadistic treatment of the concept of embodied beauty (which echoes Rimbaud’s repudiation of classical beauty in ‘Vénus Anadyomène’ and in Une saison en enfer). Marmoreal beauty is the object of frenzied destruction in the dithyrambic ‘détruire et détruire et détruire’ of ‘L’Imperfection est la cime’ (HRD, 139); ‘marteler toute forme toute beauté’. The purge on beauty is a purge on colour. A retreat from the perfected world of ornamentation and decorousness is marked by the chromatic alterations of white. Beauty’s marmoreal intactness is displaced in Douve by the white of burned bone and the body’s reduction to ash. White turns grey, becomes mixed and maculated, and de-idealized. Teeth and bone reduce the body to the coldly anatomical and the drily skeletal (X). Unfleshed bones morph into a grey web lit up by a massive spider as white, launched on its anti-Platonic trajectory, becomes inextricable from figures of death, decay, and desiccation. Chromatic alterations map to stages in the protagonist’s life cycle. Colour words are resisted yet colour (red) is present in the stain that besmirches abstract beauty and asserts material authenticity: ‘le froid saignait sur tes lèvres’ and ‘la foudre […] tache les vitres blanches de ton sang’ (‘Théâtre’, I, Douve, 45). Thus, colour undergoes deterioration as bones dry and crack, as blood spills and smears, as the ivy leaf rots, as green is penetrated by black. In the dereliction of Douve, the body turns inside out in the spillage of bone, ash, and blood. What was constant and contained (coloured substance) is split apart; like modernist meaning itself, the body is fractured and dispersed. Colour, in its deleterious variations, in its de-centred volatility, is a means of rejecting the Platonic ideal and resisting the lure of perfectibility. Resurgent across Douve is the desire to avoid the illusionist trap of the image, traditionally synonymous with chromatic excess, and to consider deeply the self ’s relation to the real. The poet explores a kind of negative theology in relation to conventional descriptions of beauty as colour surges in de-idealized, re-materialized forms through the chromatic connotations of sand, silex, and bones, and via the restrained palette of white/grey, red, and black. Douve is associated now with sand (p. 51), now with the morphing of bones into ‘toile grise’ (p. 54), now with the silver-grey-black scattering of mineral elements: coal and flint (‘la houille’, ‘[le] pas noir de la terre’ (p. 56), ‘l’éclat du silex’ (p. 59)): the monochrome rigour of Douve will be sustained and transformed by the variability of grey in Hier régnant désert and, again, deepened and altered in the poetry of Bonnefoy’s mature career. Douve unfolds a developing consciousness of colour in poetry around the body’s undoing and around elemental materiality. How might colour offer a

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means of exploring the value of presence, its desirability, and its contradictions? The restriction of colourist values in Douve moves forward with the perpetuation of certain chosen colours (black, red, grey-white); thus we can conceive both of immobility and of movement around colour. Red, grey-white, and black track the body’s undoing, which is the body’s becoming in the poetic drama as it moves from the once incarnate object, erotic being, and living presence (red) to the grey-white of exposed bone, of ash, and of the capitulation to death, and finally to black and to the stark, salutary recognition of the failure of the ideal. In poetry’s enactment of the violence inflicted upon Douve, corporeality is disarticulated, reduced to a wooden construct noisily dismantled. The colours of the undoing of Douve (‘être défait’, I) and her resurgent blood have a homological parenté with the fracturing action of modernist poetry as it rips apart defunct forms – its lyric inheritance – in order to give birth to itself (XVIII). The fragility of the body materializes the fragility of the spoken word and connects with the formative theme of finitude in Bonnefoy’s poetry (in ‘Que saisir sinon qui s’échappe’, ‘Derniers gestes’, Poèmes, p. 66): Que saisir sinon qui s’échappe Que voir sinon qui s’obscurcit Que désire sinon qui meurt Sinon qui parle et se déchire ? What shall I seize but what escapes What shall I see but what fades What shall I desire but what dies But what speaks and tears itself?15

The recognition and the knowing of death in Douve are intimated by the epigraph from Hegel, intended by Bonnefoy to be read ironically: for the poet, inhabiting death exposes violence and destruction, not familiarity, far less consolation.16 Douve is becoming black (‘Ô plus noire et déserte. Enfin je te vis morte’, Derniers gestes, VI, Poèmes, p. 72). Through the violence turned on Douve, through her death, her rebirth, and her perpetuation in poetry, the speaker comes to knowledge and to language: ‘Douve, je parle en toi; et je t’enserre / Dans l’acte de connaître et de nommer’ (p. 77). The search for knowledge unfolds through the process of naming, including, ultimately, the naming of colour. So green and grey instances begin to surge against the chromatic restriction of red, black, and white, liberating colour’s agency and its redemptive value, in ways that look ahead to the poetry of Hier régnant désert and the later works. Restraining colour is, in Bonnefoy’s writing, a means of containing passion and restricting lyrical épanchement. The ‘high’ colour of emotion is replaced by austere realization. The censuring of excess colour is consonant, too, with the censuring of narrative explicitness, and the sparseness of Bonnefoy’s style, its ellipses enhancing its anti-telic quality.17 Colour’s rare quality, its monochromatic minimalism, finds it homology in a stark vision of a world characterized by a single object, a

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given place, or a particular instant: this explains in part Bonnefoy’s affinity with Giacometti’s sculptural investment in the One.18 If sculpture is Giacometti’s art of human tragedy, Bonnefoy, reading against the grain, appraises the will to life embodied by the same slender and tenacious grey figures, limning (‘[la] résistance [des frêles apparitions] à l’érosion du vide alentour’, NR, 484). Timothy Mathews, in his landmark interart study Albert Giacometti: The Art of Relation (2014), notes Didi-Huberman’s attention to Bonnefoy’s art-writerly practice of ‘folding’, or enfolding, contradictory impulses and argues for a vision of Giacometti that is alert (as Bonnefoy is) to the perpetuation (and non-resolution) of tensions across media and across time.19 Drawing represents a place of rebirth for the Swiss artist, and here Bonnefoy discerns in Giacometti’s colour work a chromatic connection with his own ethos of presence: à la jonction de ces deux grisailles [sculpture et dessin], la couleur [est] comme chiffre de la présence, qu’il n’aura donc que rêvée sauf dans […] quelques petites toiles : instants certes bouleversants de plénitude furtive. (‘L’Etranger de Giacometti’, I, 319–32 (p. 332)) at the point where these two forms of grisaille meet (sculpture and drawing], colour is like a sign of presence that he will have only dreamt of, save for a few small canvases: moments that overwhelm us in their capturing of secret presence.

Rigour and austerity articulate the travails of Douve. In Bonnefoy’s poetic drama there is a Shakespearean concern for grey, white, and black materials, and also a painterly concern for light, dark, and chiaroscuro qualities. The colours of the earth, of landscape, and of underground regions have their source of illumination in obscurity: light shines in the dark earth; radiance surges from the shadows. So the play of light and dark has more to do with oxymoron and simultanism than with dualist determinacy. Colourist instances are rare; instead, there is a stark visualization of monochrome colour – red, black, white/grey – envisioned in isolation. Where poetic discourse is elliptical and opaque, material and chromatic precision plays a powerful role of differentiation and discernment. In Douve, things have an emblematic value and, also, a precise nature: the fire, the hand, the stone, the leaf. The coloured thing, rather than colour itself, is named. Colour quality is absorbed into the nominative, into the name of things. Colour is distributed and materialized in the naming of terre, braise, bras, branche, fange, chemins noircis, terre cendreuse, houille, brume, foudre, flammes, arbre, sable, roche, dents, araignée, toile, insectes, aigles, eau, saules, neige, orangerie, olivier, arbre (statue verte), salamandre. The nominal materials of death, sacrifice, antagonism, desire, and hope form, thus, a landscape of emblematic colours: colours are individually material but, in concert, they articulate the devastation of Douve, the dereliction of the ideal, and the inauguration of the real. Bonnefoy’s reflections on the significance of chromatic restriction in art can reveal homologies for our reading of his poetry. In an essay on the work of the contemporary painter Claude Garache, written some twenty years after Douve,

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Bonnefoy reflects on monochrome values and their potential to assist in the rejection of narrative. (‘Peinture, poésie: vertige, paix’ (1975), NR, 119–20). Here the poet speculates as to whether Garache painted in one constant colour (redpink) in order to resist the ‘structuring’ effect that the play of colours – with their symbological and anecdotal baggage – would introduce (Plate 25). Chromatic unity – the oneness of colour – allows the painter to liberate art from its symbolic and narrative charge and thus frees the consciousness (‘délivrer l’attention’) of all the memories and all the fables that haunt the dictionary of colours. Unfreighted monochrome colour can then write its own history, exercise its generative capacity, and move towards a vision of presence. In similar ways, and with explicit attention to the primacy of the sensorium and an embodied experience of presence, Bonnefoy evokes colour as an active force in the resistance to narrative in Delacroix’s art. By focusing on the sheer redness of the ‘soleil vu’ (NR, 119), Delacroix erases allegorical values in favour of the colour of visual evidence (Bonnefoy may be instancing the painter’s Coucher de soleil aux environs de Paris, c. 1850). Displacing the freight of inherited memories exposes the significance of truth, founded in the real and invested in colour: for the art writer, chromatic agency in Delacroix takes us towards a vision of presence. The altering landscape of red in Douve registers the precariousness of presence: spilled blood, menstrual blood in particular, spoils the aesthetic ideal of perfected femininity. Unspoken red is the colour of the desired and desiring body (‘une épaule de sang’ (‘Phénix’, Derniers gestes (p. 75)), whilst attenuated, more peaceful implications attend the ‘orangerie’ that will be home to the enduringly impenetrable Douve (‘Douve profonde et noire’ (p. 104)). Beyond black, crimson, and grey-white, other colours are evoked rarely and obliquely, and thus their participation is the more striking. Green is a case in point: the rejected folds of greenery and of mud (‘draps de verdure et de boue’, V) anticipate, via the darkening Douve (‘Gestes de Douve, gestes déjà plus lents, gestes noirs’), the embrace of black and red in the fire of her devastation. There are, in chromatic counterpoint, the temptations of the ‘herbe luxuriante’ (Douve, 58) and the desire to breach ‘l’épaisseur du monde’ (63). In ‘Aux arbres’ the address to the trees which bordered Douve’s passage to death elides colour words and imparts a haptic sense of a thickened reality (‘vous fibreuse matière et densité’ (Douve, 65)), anticipating the bid to plunge into the thickness of the world at the end of ‘Théâtre’. The trees have a mediating acoustic role as austere witnesses to her fortune (as well as his), such that Douve, with her low, luminous forest face, seems to merge with nature (Douve, 72). The revelation of the immanence of colour in things completes the spurning of decorative values and announces the embrace of emblematic materiality, foregrounded by certain chromatic intermittences that echo other material recurrences – animal, human, and object (the grey of the stone, the stag or the salamander; lips, cold, foliage, water, the hall). Consciousness begins to move among things, opposing facile colourism and discovering authentic colour in the familiar and the proximate (‘nappe rouge et grise, vrai bonheur’, untitled, L’Orangerie, p. 95). The encounter with the thing leads the poet to move on

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from it and, often at some later point, to reach again towards it. This constant retrospective and prospective momentum of Douve is reflected in the restriction and the constancy of chromatic values. Consciousness in (coloured) things dilates in the absorption of auditory or gestural values in the multi-sensorial exploration of corporeality. This more expansive, intentional encounter with the world is formative of Bonnefoy’s poetics and ethics of presence whose origins surface tenaciously in Douve and work prospectively to transform colour consciousness in far-reaching ways, beginning with Bonnefoy’s encounter with grey in Hier régnant désert, to which I now turn.20

The equipoise of grey To suggest that Hier régnant désert (1958) spurs a more discernible turn to colour in Bonnefoy’s poetry may seem paradoxical given the defining presence of that most culturally devalued hue: grey.21 Hier régnant désert is, to quote John Naughton, Bonnefoy’s ‘greyest book’, suggesting that grey fills a space of consciousness in this work.22 Indeed, grey rises to contour a state of mind, to fill a space of consciousness that is not stilled, but actively doubting, struggling, and aspiring. Cleaving neither to black nor to white, grey is the colour of unresolve and of oscillation: exploring grey, the poet works between poles aversive and affirmative and across spaces both connected and conflicted; grey is the colour of an embattled modern consciousness. Artists of grey materials are empathic touchstones for Bonnefoy in his writing on aesthetics: he engages with the quiet interiority of Giorgio Morandi’s still objects (‘témoin des choses muettes’ (NR, 45)); he embraces Raoul Ubac’s salutary grey of presence (‘le gris majeur […] c’est l’adhésion de la personne qu’il signifie. Il est posé sur la toile comme l’hypothèse d’une confiance’ (I, 300)), in writing consonant with his sense of the will to life in Giacometti that I discussed above. The grey saturation of the early poems of Hier régnant désert materializes disconsolation in the space evoked as ‘régnant désert’; the dominion of muted monochromatism is the point of origin of the poet’s journey across a landscape of disillusion and loss. Yet, gradually, there begins a rehabilitation of grey. The salutary driving out of ideal beauty and decorativeness has privileged the incolore, which establishes straightaway its naked affinity with the muted values of grey. But, if sterility and apathy suggest a negative valorization of grey, Bonnefoy’s writing interrogates fixed values and readerly expectations, exploring the capacity of colour to endure and, in enduring, to alter its signification, or to reach an exquisite equipoise between opposing poles. Grey reveals across Hier régnant désert its fuller agency as a value that is supple and mobile, sustaining a new consciousness in unceasing search of authenticity and truth. The dominance of grey (ash, smoke, water, iron) colours the inhospitable country of the opening movement of Hier régnant désert. If the lexical repetition of ‘gris’ and its normative semantic field inscribe the idea of uniformity, the colour word also contains the promise of one-ness, creating a precarious balance (or

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equivocation) between yesterday’s disconsolation and tomorrow’s fragile hope. Capitulation to negativity is suggested by the grey of ‘la mer cendreuse’ (HRD, 132). Evocations of spoiling and wasting relate grey to darker values, like the lamp oil that has turned black, or memory, the extinguished flame, that is the colour of ash (‘cendre’ (121)). The book opens to a severe monochrome world in which the self doubts and grows indifferent. Informed by Bonnefoy’s fascination with Hamlet, Hier régnant désert explores a sense of uncertainty and doubt, emptiness and anxiety, through the self-interrogation of a fractured subjectivity (‘tu es déjà séparé de toi-même’ (‘Menaces du témoin’, IV, 121)) that has echoes of Valéry’s Narcissus and his Pythoness. The book opens with the retrospective appraisal of ‘yesterday’s’ dereliction: an experience of the paralysing forces of desolation and indifference. In this dystopia all is, initially, defined by bitter taste and failed orientation (‘Menaces du témoin’, III and IV, p. 121). The separation of self from self brings the temptation of renunciation. (‘Menaces’, V): ‘le fer d’une eau grise’ will persist after the nocturnal angel has sealed the port, an image of sequestering and aborted possibility. Here the self absorbs disconsolation in the aversive elemental materiality of grey: grey is at once corporealized as the felt experience of bleak colour, cold rigidity, and the harsh taste of desolation and stagnation. The synaesthetic amplification of the poem exposes the desert of the soul. Linked to ageing and losing hope, greyness is the dominion of stasis and sterility induced by anguish and pessimism. With the destruction of the bare red table, values in their once-settled form are laid waste. For this divided self, a sense of unity and purpose is lost (IV). Desire has shrivelled in the grey light (Le jour se penche sur le fleuve du passé). In Hier régnant désert ‘gris’ embraces colour, material things, and metaphysical uncertainty. Grey shapes psychic structures of paralysis and vacancy, as it does poetic structures founded on ellipsis and disjunction: if this is the foundation of a fractured self, it is also the ground on which writing builds or rebuilds (like the ‘grisaille’, which is at once atmosphere, and also painting’s chromatic vocabulary and its ground, in Mantegna). Chromatic values oscillate as structures become pliant around the evocation of grey: here begins the ‘othering’ of grey, and its rehabilitation as its meliorative value is revealed in fragments. Thus, there is the beneficial setting aside of the ‘eau grise’ that fills the heart (‘Le Bruit des voix’, 122). With this comes the recognition of an alternative (‘un autre chant’, ‘un autre espoir’, in ‘Le Bruit des voix’). ‘Le Pont de fer’ (133) reveals the beginning of the inflection of grey towards sources of nourishment and consolation that assuage the material harshness whose colour values are immanent. Poetry has worked free of fixed values, setting aside ideal beauty and chromatic conventions: Il y a sans doute toujours au bout d’une longue rue Où je marchais enfant une mare d’huile, Un rectangle de lourde mort sous le ciel noir. Depuis la poésie A séparé ses eaux des autres eaux

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Nulle beauté nulle couleur ne la retiennent, Elle s’angoisse pour du fer et de la nuit. No doubt there is still at the far end of a long street Where I walked as a child a pool of oil, Rectangle of heavy death under dark sky. Since then, poetry Has kept its waters apart from other waters, No beauty, no colour can retain it Iron and night cause it to suffer.23

So desire that had shrivelled and become paralysed is now revitalized, and poetry grows anxious for iron and for night (metallic grey and black), and in the process values are unfixed and transformed. The values of grey – unweighted by traditional symbolism – precipitate a turn towards colour as a space of intellectual reflection and transformative poetic practice. Grey in Hier régnant désert is tenacious, a force for alteration: it travels from monochrome aversiveness towards a generative and colour-rich future.24 There is, in this respect, a development similar to that discerned by Bonnefoy in his empathic reading of the relation between colour values and the theme of nihilism in Morandi’s art (‘A l’horizon de Morandi’, NR, 41–50). Bonnefoy’s chromatic affinity with Morandi is salient for understanding Hier régnant désert and the trajectory beyond this work as an uneven journey from pessimism to the envisioning of hope. Bonnefoy praises Morandi’s act of bearing witness in an age where society is bereft of tree, stone, and fire, and is gripped by a sense of moral destitution and privation (NR, 50). Bonnefoy admires the painter’s restricted palette and the gentle beauty it infuses into things (Plate 26). Morandi’s ochres and pale pinks, as well as the greys of the local Bologna architecture, play their part in the revelation of silence as the painter appraises particular jugs, plates, and bottles, which seem not to relate one to the other. Bonnefoy establishes an analogy between the gesture of the painter and the deft verbal work of the poet in terms of a colour haptics: ‘quel pouvoir, dans les décisions d’une main posant un peu de bleu, un soupçon de rose sur la toile’ (NR, 43), an evocation that creates a vivid parallel with Mallarmé’s appraisal of the azure tracing of the Chinese porcelain painter.25 Proceeding by touches, the poet applies words of colour to the page and to the mind of the reader. Haptic values compress physical gesture and intentionality in a more deeply embodied consciousness of colour, a developing feature of Bonnefoy’s poetic writing in Hier régnant désert that comes more fully into focus over time, as we shall see. Bonnefoy identifies in the greys, bisques, and pinks of Morandi’s palette the patient work of transforming despair into hope (and into colour): this truth lies at the heart of Hier régnant désert as the poet explores, through the expressivity of grey, what it is to be human. The movement from despair towards hope, through the revalorization of grey, shapes the direction of Hier régnant désert where the

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original negativity of grey is rivalled by the eruption of colour. Grey in Hier régnant désert is punctured by crimson, and the red of resurgent being counters the ‘old’ grey of renunciation. Eruptive colour marks the acceptance of struggle and contradiction as foundational to human experience. With the opening into the ‘jardin de présence’ (the place that can be ‘habitable pour toi dans le nouvel amour’), the speaker’s voice moves through colour, dissolving into a feminine voice (a fragmentary remembrance of the rehabilitated Douve) that proclaims now a ‘greening’ of self (‘je passe verte’). Here the alterations of colour and of gender mark a supple gesture of opening out in the work of revisioning values and boundaries. There is an epiphanic coming to maturity and to a realization of possibility that is made through colour and in a particular hue – green – one sparingly evoked by Bonnefoy. The journey from dereliction to affirmation, from the desolation of grey to the rare eruption of green, is spurred in Hier régnant désert by the transformation of the value of grey itself. In a remarkable poem that celebrates the voice of Kathleen Ferrier, grey is a chromatic ‘hinge’ as values turn from negative to affirmative. The tremulous quality of the contralto voice is analogous with the unresolved quality of grey, hesitating between white and black (and here, once more, the poet’s reflection on Mantegna’s grisaille comes to mind in its cognate resonance, creating a triangulation of poetry, music, and painting). The visual and the acoustic values of grey conjoin in an epiphany formed of poetry, song, and synaesthetic responsiveness: ‘Je célèbre la voix mêlée de couleur grise / Qui hésite aux lointains du chant qui s’est perdu’ (‘À la voix de Kathleen Ferrier’, lines 5–6). The contralto voice expresses the poles of suffering and of joy, and it reaches its completion in the equipoise of grey. This affective alteration of grey spurs a greater openness in colour expression, enabling a dialogue between sensory values – visual and acoustic – that creates a powerful sensorium for the exploration of colour. The accumulation of mineral grey (stone) that corrects the formless gris or amorphous ‘grisaille’ of complacency and indifference is evoked towards the end of Hier régnant désert. The bird of the ruins moves free of death, creating its nest in the grey stone that is warmed by the sun (a vision that anticipates the grey olive that nestles on the branch in Les Planches courbes (2001)).26 As it gradually absorbs and relays (solar) values synonymous with refuge, warmth, and comfort, grey brings values of energy and material form to the idea of presence: ‘[l]a face grise adorante du feu’ of the female figure in the early Christian Veneranda fresco (Domitilla Catacombs, Rome) (HRD, 143) embodies the rehabilitation of grey, connecting with the sense of grisaille as the ‘ground’ on which colours are layered and constructed, in poetry as in painting. Bonnefoy’s poetic practice of grey in Hier régnant désert has a deep connection with his broadly contemporaneous exploration of the work of Raoul Ubac in the trio of essays (1955, 1964, 1966) collected in L’Improbable et autres essais.27 In ‘Des fruits montant de l’abîme’ (1964), Bonnefoy uncovers a consciousness that, founded in grey, infiltrates and re-colours the world (Plate 27). Here the play of meaning (where the adjective ‘gris’ signifies both chromatic value and a state of mild

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intoxication) suggests a capacity for undoing fixed values and expanding colour consciousness: ‘une âme grise de la couleur qui pénètre aussi bien les ocres, les bruns, les rouges’.28 Thus, the beneficial restriction of colour in grey, paradoxically, makes possible the revelation of new forms of beauty in the porousness of colour. The formative significance of grey in Bonnefoy’s study of Ubac reaches proleptically across his poetry, from Hier régnant désert, through Pierre écrite (1965) (Ubac’s lithographs accompanied the first edition), to Dans le leurre du seuil (1975) where the poet will probe the beauty derived from (normative) prismatic values and contemplate the other, more profound beauty that is grey. Exceptional attention is paid in Hier régnant désert to tonal variations through the poet’s discerning reading of paint, body, surface, and stone. The mingling of flesh and stone in ‘Veneranda’ (HRD, 140) reveals a subtle, textured concern for colour in its fragmentary presence and its preciseness. The faded blue robe of the woman praying in the fresco is arresting in its uncovering of the naked stone – art and its material ground are united by subtle colour values (‘bleu’, ‘ocre’). (Attuned to the multi-sensorial experience of the insensate world and to the ‘living’ presence of the mineral, Bonnefoy evokes the ‘breathing’ of stones in his reflections on the Hungarian painter Miklos Bokor.29) The ochre of her flesh and the colour of the fresco’s stone surface are one where art and materiality coincide. Visual and lexical precision are allied with an alertness to texture, to its friability, and to its persistent traces.30 The desiccated, scale-like (‘écaillé’) residue of blue paint reveals the ochre of naked flesh and naked stone. The exceptional patch of pale blue (HRD, 140) illumines a fragmentary colour poetics that bears comparison with Julia Kristeva’s ecstatic evocation of Giotto’s ultramarine frescoes (Arena Chapel, Padua).31 Blue is perhaps the colour most often ‘absent’ from Bonnefoy’s poetry (at least before Dans le leurre du seuil in 1975), so its rare eruptions are all the more powerful: Poussin’s blue provides the opening colour instance in L’Arrière-pays, intermittent splashes of blue surface in Ce qui fut sans lumière, and an exquisite appraisal of blue is offered by Bonnefoy in his essay on Mondrian in Le Nuage rouge.32 The surge of colour provokes the rise of desire in the final sequence of Hier régnant désert, ‘A une terre d’aube’. In ‘Aube, fille des larmes, rétablis … ’, dawn is solicited to restore the ‘paix de chose grise’ (l. 2): thus, as forms of disconsolation are shed, grey becomes a locus of values of peace and material ease (‘Aube, soulève, prends le visage sans ombre / Colore peu à peu le temps recommencé’, lines 10– 11). There is now a slow, richer, more intentional embrace of colour that is the antithesis of the decorative values inspected and repudiated in Douve. Signs of chromatic development suggested in ‘Veneranda’ are pursued beyond Hier régnant désert and encapsulated in the brief epilogue sequence entitled Dévotion (1959). Here Bonnefoy, in praise of the work of mind and the craft of hand, celebrates the illuminating power of colour in forms of intellectual and artistic invention that encompass Florence, architecture, mathematics, and the Brancacci Chapel. The inaugurating energy of carnate red, which has the agency of the Barthesian punctum, punctures the visual field and quickens the consciousness where the ‘porte murée de briques couleur de sang’ surges against the grey walls of Valladolid cathedral. This poetic figure of coloured brick relates, proleptically, to the poet’s

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encounter with eruptive red in his 1989 essay on Edward Hopper’s Squam Light, which I discussed at the beginning of Part III.33 Exploring the values of grey, the poetry of Hier régnant désert opens with those instances where consciousness fails to grasp its object and falls back, shattering in pieces on the ground, or dropping into the abyss, or, more prosaically, lapsing into indifference or torpor. But grey, across the poetry of Hier régnant désert, reveals its capacity to move towards a different affective colouration and to draw other colour values in its wake. The altering greyscape of Hier régnant désert, volatilized by colour eruptions, prepares us for the fuller chromatic space of Pierre écrite (1965) and for the opening out into presence as Bonnefoy begins to explore more fully poetry’s ethical response to living in the world.

Colour incarnate Colour is articulated increasingly both as a concept, as a value, and as an existential fact in Pierre écrite (1965) and Dans le leurre du seuil (1975). Pierre écrite creates a space of colour (in nature, in fruit, in flesh) where the aversive connotations of grey – its burden of despair and apathy – are dispelled. A keener sense of attainable, if momentary, harmony through the unity of ‘l’Un’ (Poèmes, 243) is gained through an ethos of reconciliation. An opening out to the other and to the world releases memories that have their source in art, music, landscape, and myth (Tintoretto, Mozart, the sea at Trieste, the mythical Koré). Pierre écrite has, at its core, a heightened sense of poetry’s affective capacity and its spur to authentic emotion: ‘On a dit au cœur / D’être le cœur’ (Poèmes, 249). Colour, with its deep connection to affect, plays a formative part in poetry that is now more directly expressive of the inner self. Poetry absorbs the fleshy warm tones of ripened fruits, and the lover’s red dress materializes the threshold of the desired body. Beyond the autobiographical, the poet reflects on the transformative agency of colour across time and culture: ‘le rouge de la robe illumine et disperse / Loin, au ciel, le charroi de l’antique douleur’ (‘L’Arbre, la lampe’, Poèmes, 223). The affinity of colour and consolation, as suffering is borne away, inaugurates the exploration of broader, ethical values which will gain powerful resonance in Bonnefoy’s poetry from Dans le leurre du seuil onwards. Grey, both in its constancy and in its alteration in Hier régnant désert, has prepared the new chromatic space of Pierre écrite with its intermittent allusions to the legacy of Hier régnant désert. Opposing values dissolve or seem to resolve themselves now in the dilation of the poet’s colour palette (‘Il me semble, ce soir, / Que le ciel étoilé, s’élargissant, / Se rapproche de nous; et que la nuit, / Derrière est moins obscure’ (PE, Poèmes, 185)). As space fills up with the rich orange and green of ripe fruit and the carnate tones of the lover’s flesh, grey and greyness dissolve: ‘Et le feuillage aussi brille sous le feuillage, / Le vert, et l’orangé des fruits mûrs, s’est accru’ (185); ‘La grisaille se perd dans le fruit mûr’ (242). After the baroque travails of Douve and the pervasive desolation of Hier régnant désert, colour marks a surge of optimism and reciprocity. Colour consciousness,

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with its source in the reciprocity of embodied self and other, intimates a deeper relation of poetry to the earth, to art, and to the human predicament in all ages. Three brief but intense examples unfold such intimations. The evocation of ‘rayures bleues et noires’ (‘Le Soir’, 228) springs from a perception of the differentiated colouration of the ploughed field at nightfall. The rippling of the world through the ‘eau profonde et limpide et verte’ of the shore (‘Le Dialogue d’angoisse et de désir’, II, 242) signals alertness to the coincidence of the chromatic and the kinetic. The black railings that frame the elegance of a late-Renaissance pietà (247) gleam incandescent in the sun’s evening rays in Bonnefoy’s meditation on human suffering and its translation into inspiriting art (‘Sur une pietà de Tintoret’).34 The relationality of ‘je’, ‘tu’, and the world itself betokens an expansion of colour capacity founded on the gift that passes from self to other: ‘Et je t’offrais le fruit qui illimite l’arbre / Sans angoisse ni mort, d’un monde partagé’ (186). Desire for the emerging presence of ‘tu’ in Pierre écrite summons a new luminosity expressed as a coincidence of the lifting of faceless shadow, the deepening of love, and the dissolution of estrangement: ‘O moins à contre-jour! O mieux aimée! Qui ne m’es plus étrangère’ (244). Once presence as idea becomes presence materialized – incorporated and incarnated – a fuller experience of colour and light begins to infiltrate the space of poetry, dispelling grey: ‘Il n’est plus de désert puisque tout est en nous’ (186). Extending the idea of the equivocal gift, altered light proffers open palms, offering hope and also anguish, in an expression of the endless reversibility and the resilience of human experience (245). In Pierre écrite, colour and intimacy are synonymous. More than this, colour expression seems to usher in a poetics of intimacy and harmony founded in the corporeal, in small objects, and in nature, encountered as fragments of colour. The body is envisioned as a moving landscape, an empathic and sensual geography, where textured colour reveals its kinetic and material agency in encounters of the abstract and the physical, the thought and the known. The poet instances acts of attention invested in materialized colour, whether corporeal or cosmic: ‘la blancheur du sable’ [the whiteness of the sand] rises to bless the lovers’ bodies (‘L’Eté de nuit’, II, Poèmes, p. 186) the woman is ‘couleur d’été’ [colour of summer] and the ‘bleu [est] d’une autre pierre’ [blue [is] of another stone] (‘L’Eté de nuit’, VII, Poèmes, p. 191) daylight is evoked as ‘le plus bas rougeoiement mêlé de sable noir’ [the reddening, down low, mingled with black sand] (‘L’Eté de nuit’, IX, Poèmes, p. 193) the mirrored reflection of the other brings into being ‘la parcelle d’un rouge en feu’ [a patch of flaming red earth] (‘Une pierre’, Poèmes, p. 194) the hands of solitude intimate meaning on ‘les pentes ocres d’un corps’ [the ochre slopes of a body] (‘Dans ses coffres le rêve a replié …’, Poèmes, p. 196)

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the body is fused with images of a seascape in ‘les rougeurs d’une eau sombre’ [the crimson depths of dark water] (‘Dans ses coffres le rêve a replié …’, Poèmes, p. 196)

In contrast with Douve’s austere bodily drama, flesh here is vivid, quickened, and receptive, the present tense enfolding ideas of immediacy and perpetuity. The evocation of flesh colours, of the skin’s reddening, or of the textured ‘skin’ of a façade or a fresco reveals a sustained concern with colour as process: the dilution of colour or its intensification reveals the poet’s intimate attention as it turns to the particularity of the coloured thing. The colour of flesh and of warm light participates in the revelation of the qualities of domesticity and intimacy. The emblematic values of Douve – and the remoteness of the eponymous figure – are displaced by revitalized colour and a sense of intimate reciprocity. The body of the lover is evoked as if it were the object of a fragmentary and fleshly medieval ‘blason’: ‘la nuque proche se courbe’ (‘Une pierre’, 209). The ‘bending’ gesture asks us to envision how the curve of the body (the shoulder, the breast, the head) relates to shape and to colour. Whether flesh or fruit, colour is deeply embodied, desired, and warm in the palette of red and orange, and in the unnamed, unnameable colour of the lover’s body. Lived colours are proximate, so with alteration (the ripening fruits, maturing love) comes colour that skims or saturates the everyday captured in its familiar and mesmeric fragments (red dress, red fabric, red table). At the energized chromatic core of Pierre écrite, harmony is disrupted by the surge of crimson, the sudden rise of unappeased blood. Naughton stresses ‘pourpre’ (crimson) as the colour of erotic union in Pierre écrite.35 Exceeding its residual representational value, crimson reveals its desiring agency. The sense of chromatic rivalry between crimson and grey suggests at once intimacy and difference. As Pierre écrite unfolds, and especially in its closing poems, the surge of crimson evokes a rush of vigour: ‘tout ton sang voûté sous une main rêveuse’ [all your blood arched beneath a dreaming hand] in ‘Les chemins’ (line 4) (Poèmes, p. 224). In an access of erotic desire, impersonal values and paratactic structures produce a thematic and stylistic ‘heurt’, amplifying the idea of conflict, and, in the process, articulate the drawing down of self and other in the shared saturation of crimson: ‘le sang inapaisé heurte le sang. / Le nageur est aveugle. / Il descend par étages pourpres dans le battement de ton cœur’ (‘Le sang, la note si’, Poèmes, p. 226). A physiology of crimson enacted in the present tense gives dramatic form to the intimate theatre of the couple’s togetherness and their separation. Flesh is vigorous, and also vulnerable, at risk of tearing. Whether the flesh of a fruit or the flesh of a shoulder (‘ton épaule se déchire dans les arbres’, Poèmes, p. 192), coloured things need tending and preserving: this, I suggest, is the lesson of Pierre écrite in advance of the ethical turn of Bonnefoy’s poetry discernible from Dans le leurre du seuil. Erotic values and colour form a site of tension where corporeal integrity may be breached and flesh fragilized. The body’s presence is tense and tenuous, for flesh is the object of competing desires: the urge to protect, and the instinct, or will, to damage. Death haunts desire, and desire is spurred by the consciousness of finitude and mobilizes against it. Colour is the site of

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struggle between perpetually opposed forces (black sand and its reddening, 193). Desire and anguish are experienced simultaneously; the self is fractured, at once over-reaching and failing (like Ceres in Adam Elsheimer’s painting, and in Ovid’s poetry). Enduring difference and distance between the lovers leave each to yearn without hope of reconciliation: ‘Solitude à ne pas gravir, que de chemins! / Robe rouge, que d’heures proches sous les arbres! / Mais adieu, dans cette aube froide, mon eau pure, / Adieu malgré le cri, l’épaule, le sommeil’ (‘L’Écume, le récif ’). Colour and its attendant values of togetherness are precarious and provisional, likely to founder, and solitude is insurmountable. Difference gives rise to cold indifference, marked by the insistent dullness of a de-idealized blue that stubbornly blocks metaphysical hope: ‘le bleu du ciel est morne aujourd’hui, ici. / Le glaive de l’indifférence de l’étoile / Blesse une fois de plus la terre du dormeur’ (‘L’Écume, le récif ’, 197). Thus, intimacy and its undoing are played out through colour shifts and the slippage to indifference, remoteness, and rising antagonism is envisioned in cosmological and allegorical terms. With altering chromatic values come differences of tone – rhetorical and affective – across Bonnefoy’s œuvre. The more remote, emblematic concerns of Douve and the existential vacancy explored in Hier régnant désert are counterpointed by the intimist space of Pierre écrite as values of maturity, reciprocity, life force, and incarnation unfold, and, with this, a kind of reconciliation with finitude is achieved through the growing affinity of self and other (‘Nous vieillissions, lui le feuillage et moi la source, / Lui le peu de soleil et moi la profondeur, / Et lui la mort et moi la sagesse de vivre’ (‘Une voix’, 219)). Harmony and fulfilment are envisioned, and with that come a fraught reconciliation with death and speculation about the dead, their presence, and their language (‘Le lieu des morts’, 205). Ideas of difference and distinction expand, through the poet’s colour work, from the exploration of love to the exploration of art. Inspired by the Tintoretto pietà (247), the poet returns to the question of the image and asks whether the image can articulate the true force of desire and suffering. The poet is arrested by the searing beauty of the pietà, which becomes the object of a reflection on realness, that of feeling and that of art. The poet contemplates the source of desire in grief and sorrow, and he speculates on the role of the painted image as a spur to that desire. Desire without blood (represented by the livid Christ figure) is colourless. Art bestows the gift of colour like the ‘grilles noires’ which surround the image with their radiant strength and defining elegance. Through a chiastic structure there springs a new understanding of the possible reciprocity of art and life in colour unseen and unspoken, in text as in the body: ‘Le désir déchira le voile de l’image, / L’image donna vie à l’exsangue désir’. The evocation of bloodless desire reminds us of the intermittence of colour, its tendency to drain away, the desperate bid to work beyond symbolic recuperations in order to tend colour, and the need for the reader and the viewer to bring chromatic intelligence to the reception of poetry and art. The poet’s reflection on pictorial language produces, through chiasmus, a sense of reconciliation with the capacity of the image, but also in Pierre écrite, through the central theme of love and desire for the other, springs, a surer sense of the value of language itself: ‘je trouve / Ma seule chaleur vraie dans tes mots fondateurs’ (237).

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In Pierre écrite a probing colour consciousness offers a corrective to former states of desolation; colour assuages and transforms, promises appeasement, and spurs creativity, but, precisely for these reasons, it is not straightforward or undemanding. Rather, colour solicits commitment and requires persistence, and brings its own freight of conflicted emotion. Colour transforms the tonal austerity of Douve and the monochrome disconsolation of Hier régnant désert, opening up a space where pessimism and harshness may be alleviated through the luminous, if fleeting, coming together of self and other. As the abstract cedes to the material and the corporeal, the allegorical and the aversive give way to values of harmony and empathy. The chiaroscuro abstraction of Douve and the pervasiveness of grey in Hier régnant désert are countered by the quality of sight and insight afforded by a more expansive chromatic immersion (‘des flaques de couleur’, 229) that speaks powerfully of the mutuality of art, truth, and desire. Yet Bonnefoy’s practice of colour remains elliptical and rare, which means that colour instances solicit the reader’s attention; in resisting narrative or symbological recuperation, such instances attract more complex meaning. Pierre écrite explores a fuller consciousness of colour where chromatic values suffuse or punctuate moments of longing, renunciation, remembrance, and recognition, and where colour in its intensity and in its attenuation shapes reflections on mortality, love, hope, and attention. The imagined ‘feel’ of colours is hospitable, nourishing, and sensuous as a new, beneficial set of values takes form, founded on intimacy and reciprocity. In Pierre écrite – and onwards from Pierre écrite – colour is a generative force sustaining a meliorative world view. Concurrently, colour is always under pressure, at risk of challenge, compromise, and redefinition. *** Across the poetry from Du mouvement et de l’immobilité de Douve to Pierre écrite, colour in Bonnefoy, by its sparseness and its intermittence, and by its specificity, resists the recuperations of chromatic symbolism. Colour’s transformative agency is released through its attachment to things, bodies, and places. Whereas a restricted colour palette defines the first phase of Bonnefoy’s work (in Douve and Hier régnant désert), linked to the materials and the metaphors of desolation and finitude – bone, ash, plaster, the cadaver, and iron – gradually, from Pierre écrite, there is an opening onto colour and a perceptible, if still restrained, expansion of the poet’s colour palette linked to the exploration of ethical values. In poetry and in art writing, the poet’s raison d’écrire springs from his perpetual bid to see more keenly, to feel more acutely, to tend memory, to nurture desire, to confront finitude, and to explore the capacity of thought and gesture in deepening meaningfulness. When the allegory of Douve falls away and the pessimism of Hier régnant désert is quieted, assuaged by the revalorized grey of the olive or the rich grey of the contralto voice, poetry’s world view is transformed in the light and colour that suffuses Pierre écrite. Thus, poetry begins to move into a more open, shared space where personal and wider human concerns coincide. This is

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captured in Ce qui fut sans lumière (1987) in ‘ma première conscience de ce monde où l’on va seul’ (‘L’Agitation du rêve’, 87). Here the incorporation of a personal voice (‘je’) and a collective voice (‘on’) opens the singular and the solitary to a fuller, shared human experience of the world. There are, through the experience of ‘je’ and ‘nous’, lessons for the poet and for the reader in how to live more deeply, alert to the sounds, gestures, and sights of the material world (from hoopoes and stone walls, to wayside shrines, rural roads, and a solitary poppy). The affirmation of the human bond (whether with lover, parent, rescuer, artist, or child) brings recognition of the values of shared creativity (painting, music, architecture) in making sense of the world. A more marked turn in Bonnefoy’s writing towards the experiential and the existential, amplified through the evocation of the lived space of Valsaintes, the poet’s ruined abbey-home in a remote area of Haute Provence, creates the conditions for a reciprocal empathy between poet and reader founded in a sense of true place. That opening of self to other (human, animal, material) creates a space for the poetic exploration of ethical values in which colour plays a fundamental role.

Unbiddable colour: The ethical turn Bonnefoy’s essays on painting – from Piero della Francesca to Poussin, from Delacroix to Mondrian, from Constable to Nasser Assar – are a sustained reflection on the deep connection of art with human values and lived experience. Integral to Bonnefoy’s art writing is his intense concern with colour and its power to deepen consciousness-in-things and to spur acts of creative making. Bonnefoy’s writing of the 1950s and 1960s reveals the tonal variations of affect that form the poet’s encounter with the present and with memory, with anguish, and with longing. Colour is not an escape from desolation but is itself incarnated in those experiences of separation and intimacy, of struggle and finitude. Colour is not easeful; rather, it is arduous, demanding, the manifestation of the embrace of rigorous reality (from Mantegna’s rocky landscapes of the soul to Rimbaud’s ‘réalité rugueuse’ via the rhyming of ‘couleur’ and ‘douleur’ in Bonnefoy’s appraisal of Delacroix (NR, 393)). The celebration of material texture and unevenness has its source in Bonnefoy’s scepticism towards the smooth, perfected ‘image’ and his rejection of sublime beauty.36 Colour vivifies perception and spurs affective and intellectual responses: the coloured earth (ochre, sandstone, clay, stone, mud) articulates a deep sense of the real and the formative elements of presence. So, as Hier régnant désert revealed to us, grey can be inspiriting or can be synonymous with consolation withheld, but its agency is always unbiddable; colour is indifferent to us in its resistance to our attempts to colonize or fetishize. Chromatic indifference or autonomy is revealed when colour moves from one experiential pole to another, say, from affirmation to disconsolation, and when colour moves across unexpected objects and surfaces: in this way, colour repeatedly enacts its resistance to symbological recuperation or fetishization. Unbiddable colour has ethical lessons to offer to the poet, and to the reader, and this quality of Bonnefoy’s

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poetry, traced in the earlier works, becomes a defining aspect of his poetry and art writing from the 1970s to the later works. Yet, if the encounter with ‘true colour’, colour that refuses to do our bidding, is articulated more explicitly in art writing, modern poetry – with its ellipses, its compressions, and its equivocations – poses particular challenges to the reader attentive to colour writing. In the second part of this chapter, art writing, with its sustained focus on colour, will help illuminate the ethical project of Bonnefoy’s poetry from Dans le leurre du seuil (1975) to Les Planches courbes (2001). In ‘Terre seconde’ (1976) (NR, 127–47), part-reflection on the work of the ceramicist Norbert Pierlot, part-exploration of the value(s) of art and poetry in the modern world, Bonnefoy returns to an essay in which Georges Formentelli questioned the sustainability of poetry in the late modern era.37 Bonnefoy makes his response in stark chromatic terms: in an age where bleak tracts of grey tarmac define our built environment, and fake colour – ‘[maisons] hideusement fardées’ and ‘couleurs grimaçantes’ – lays claim to ancient fields (NR, 131), poetry preserves a sense of immemorial place – enduring landscape – that is urgently relevant. Bonnefoy counters the charge of poetry’s unsustainability: for him, the solitary tree in the suburban desert is, by its very solitariness, an eloquent manifestation of beauty that ‘speaks back’ to the colonizing project of late modernity (NR, 133). Implicit, and often explicit, in Bonnefoy’s reflections is an awareness of ethical values learned through acts of patient attentiveness that ensure that poetry fulfils its vocation as ‘“incarnation”’ (NR, 129). ‘Terre seconde’ urges the reader to reappraise age-old things and to appreciate examples of craft and material forms of wisdom, for such practices teach lessons about desire, struggle, reciprocity, creativity, and legacy. In his advocacy of ethical values, Bonnefoy urges poets (and their readers) to engage with nature’s ethos of profound simplicity (NR, 133). The poet expresses the objective of poetry, which is to ‘faire apparaître’ (NR, 147), to bring to light evidence and to enable the earth in its ‘épaisseur’ (NR, 136) to make its empathic response to the doubt and the disconsolation that form the broken bedrock of the modern consciousness.38 If colour in its garish guises is synonymous with sterility, conversely, colour – unnamed and immanent in the things of nature and in the painstaking attentiveness of humans – demands to be perpetuated in poetry. The ethical concerns at the heart of Bonnefoy’s poetry and his poetics emerge in the rigorous attention invested in the neglected and the nameless, the superseded and the unspoken – foliage, water, gravel, stones, crickets, fabric, rain, grass, ember, ash, field, flame, tree, windowpanes, wells, or the ruined walls at Valsaintes. Material things may be particular or generic but their power over the beholder is deep and enduring; their capacity to shape understanding and inspire new practices (poetic, cultural, relational) is intuited by the poet and offered in turn to the reader as a lesson in appreciation or insight. External signs and material evidence reverberate across the inner landscape of hope, mourning, longing, or acceptance. Animate and inanimate things offer a felicitous if arduous opening onto a space of more profound reflection on alteration, separation, recognition, and death. Poetry enacts the slowing and the silencing of the world: its close appraisal

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of the particularity of things charts their constancy and their altering. The quieting of the world (and of each poem) and the rapt attention practised in poetry and art writing have their source in Bonnefoy’s immersion in the natural world – and in the geological and topographical specificity of Valsaintes and Haute Provence – as a corrective to the encroachments of modernization (‘réseau urbain’).39 Bonnefoy’s poetic art and his aesthetic vision reveal exceptional integrity, in both senses of the word: the concern for human values and the consistency of vision underpinning his thought. Anticipated by the development of a more personal voice in Pierre écrite, the autobiographical inflection of Dans le leurre du seuil, Ce qui fut sans lumière, Début et fin de la neige, Les Planches courbes, and L’Heure présente opens an ethical reflection. The experience of the ‘je’ is allied to the desire for a deep engagement with the world – first announced as ‘l’ouverture tentée dans l’épaisseur du monde’ – evoked in the explicit of Douve (‘Théâtre’): it is, always, an attempted breaching of the thickness of the world that the poet takes forward in his bid to know more deeply, to develop a keener sense of what it is to be human. The longing to find a route into things, to introject into their texture and colour, is the poet’s raison d’écrire. At the same time, ‘tenter une ouverture’ expresses the frailness of the desiring self, the lack of commensurability of self with the thickness of the world. So intentions and actions are formed in the language of possibility and difficulty, precariousness and hesitation. Poetry is a ceaseless venturing towards knowledge and understanding: I stress this tentative sense of ‘towards’, with its connotations of action, of movement, of intimation, and of embodied gestures of reaching. I want to consider colour now more directly in the context of the ethical values of Bonnefoy’s poetry from Dans le leurre du seuil (1975) where the move to a keener, deeper engagement with the world is most marked. Dans le leurre du seuil inaugurates a fuller concern with the human situation. We saw the emblematic drama of Douve give way to the landscape of despair encountered and fragmentally transformed in Hier régnant désert – a dysphoric vision that is ‘corrected’ by the reconciliation of self and other envisioned in Pierre écrite. These earlier stages of Bonnefoy’s poetry prepare for the dilation of colour values which, building on Pierre écrite, find more ample expression in Dans le leurre du seuil and are developed across Bonnefoy’s poetry from the 1980s to the later works; from the red ochre reflection of the stones of ‘Le Miroir courbe’ (CQFSL, 25), through the chromatic convulsion that is ‘le tresaillement du bleu des lointains’ (DFN, 135), to the apposition of ‘l’or du fruit mûr’ and ‘l’or de la feuille sèche’ (PC, 27). In focusing on ethics and its relation to colour we must factor back in the question of ekphrasis, which I raised at the beginning of Part III. Ethics and ekphrastics are closely aligned in Bonnefoy’s art writing and that pairing, as I will show, shapes his poetry. Two key examples of Bonnefoy’s engagement with seventeenth-century art will repay close attention: the first is his response to the work of the German Baroque painter Adam Elsheimer; the second, his encounter with the art of Poussin. Bonnefoy’s major essay of 1968 on Elsheimer’s The Mocking of Ceres (1605) (Plate 28) explores a painting whose ethical and aesthetic influence on the poet’s probing

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of anguish, injustice, and outsiderness informs the entire span of his mature poetry from Dans le leurre du seuil and Ce qui fut sans lumière to Les Planches courbes.40 For Bonnefoy writing in 1968, Elsheimer is a ‘conscience nocturne’ in whose poetics of fracture the world of Ovid’s Metamorphoses is suffused with the doubt of modern, post-Christian subjectivity.41 Responding to the painting, Bonnefoy draws our attention to the closed door, to the obscure paths, to the threatening foliage, as evidence of the profound uncertainty and threat that accompany the gesture of hospitality (Ceres, during her desperate search for her daughter Persephone, is offered water by the old woman Hecuba, only to be ridiculed by the young boy Stelio when she drinks it greedily) (NR, 27–39 (p. 27)). The fracture is represented here, narratively, by the alienation of Ceres, by her loss of majesty, by her harsh encounter with everyday offence, by the failure of hospitality, and by the excesses of retribution (when Ceres punishes Stelio by turning him into a lizard). In ‘Elsheimer et les siens’, Bonnefoy explores the quality of darkness and its agency in the painting. He points to the two light sources, placed each side of Ceres, that do not light up the central figure so much as emphasize the darkness that fills the centre of the painting. The shadows are thus highlighted in the space where sovereign clarity (the light of the Christian world) is lost and where darkness rises, implacably, ‘comme une sorte de flamme’ (NR, 30). The shadow itself is thrown into relief, like a photographic negative: ‘Cérès apparaît, en somme, et son visage […] reste sombre’ (NR, 30). Ceres appears and yet her face remains in darkness: she is the spurned one, the outsider. The painter seeks the light of dawn, the identity of tree or stone, and the simple line of the horizon promising modest victories over resurgent anguish. Elsheimer’s Ceres turns away from classicism, her body becoming absorbed in the high wall that is half lit and half dark (grey, green, and black), and this lost legibility articulates the tension between grace and suffering. The poet and art writer engages with indeterminacy and aporia, drawing the reader-viewer’s attention to Elsheimer’s intuiting of the absolute in the everyday, his rejection of fixed symbols, and his pursuit of an unresolved quality of incandescent light and luminous dark.42 As Bonnefoy explores the equivocal value of darkness (and dark colours) and light in Elsheimer, he reflects on the human predicament and on the precariousness of empathy and the failure of compassion. It is in relation to notions of gifting and of rescue, of hospitality and of care, that Derrida’s thought around the paradox, or the aporia, of the gift is salient for our reading of Bonnefoy reading Elsheimer (reading Ovid). For Derrida, the gift ceases to exist as soon as it appears, for any gift solicits an exchange (in the form of a counter-gift, or forms of recognition and return, real or symbolic).43 The gift participates in the broken dialogue of self and other and prompts acts of failed repair and restitution, embodied by the old woman’s gesture and its consequence, the child’s mocking of the outsider, mocking that spurs, as a perverse counter-gift, an exorbitant act of revenge. The example of Bonnefoy’s appraisal of Elsheimer’s painting thus has wider implications for how we may approach Bonnefoy’s poetry and understand his ethical poetics, drawing on modern critical thought from Derrida, through Levinas, Kristeva, and Georges Didi-Huberman, to Martha Nussbaum and Mary Jacobus.

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Like Elsheimer, Poussin is an ekphrastic presence whose ethical values are a recurrent focus of attention (and allusiveness) in Bonnefoy’s poetry already before Dans le leurre du seuil. L’Arrière-pays (1972), for example, opens by focusing our attention on the arresting patch of blue in Poussin’s Bachannale à la joueuse de luth (1628): ‘le bleu […] a l’immédiateté orageuse, la clair-voyance non-conceptuelle qu’il faudrait à notre conscience comme un tout’ (AP, 12). Bonnefoy highlights the transformative agency of (non-conceptual) colour: the consciousness is ‘rushed’ by chromatic energy that is sudden, unanticipated, and, somehow, intentional. Bonnefoy’s alertness to the transformative power of colour, what I have been calling ‘colour agency’, stretches back as far as Les Tombeaux de Ravenne (1953) (I, 13–30), Bonnefoy’s first essay on art and a text that is contemporaneous with Douve. There, he speaks of combatting conceptual reflection in order to encounter the world materially and evidentially and in ways deeply embodied (incarnate, a word that allies flesh and colour).44 In Les Tombeaux de Ravenne the material presence of the memorial stone – evidenced by the paleo-Christian tomb of Galla Placida, the tomb of Theodoric, and the memorial to Dante – affirms the dominion of the real against the vacancy of the abstract and the illusory: for the young writer, art (and poetry) need to engage deeply with ‘tout ce qui a visage, […] tout ce qui a chair, pulsation, immanence’ (I, 20). Two decades later, in L’Arrière-pays, Bonnefoy’s capturing of the eruptive agency of blue takes forward that quickening sense of presence – galvanizing, non-conceptual – where mind and materiality coincide powerfully in the flesh of things and in the body of colour. Bonnefoy’s writing on the intellectual, visual, and affective shock of blue in Poussin resonates, again, with Kristeva’s appraisal of Giotto’s blue in the Padua frescoes.45 Colour is encountered experientially as a shattering (in both senses: fragmentary colour and arresting affective energy). Colour applies itself to the consciousness and, simultaneously, also to conscience, the two meanings being absorbed in French within the single word ‘conscience’. The poetry of Dans le leurre du seuil represents a more decisive turning outwards from self to other, to nature, to painting, and to the arena of inanimate objects, where art – and specifically the art of Poussin – is a spur to ethical reflection and practice. A deep concern with nature, art, world, and home has its source in the poet’s search for ‘le vrai lieu’, which is Valsaintes.46 The alliance of landscape and history, architecture and the pastoral, creates a profound connection for the poet between his experience of Valsaintes and his response to Poussin and especially to Poussin’s (second) representation of the discovery of the infant Moses by the Pharaoh’s daughter (Moïse sauvé des eaux, 1647) (Plate 29).47 The ethical responses of beneficence, compassion, and the rescue of the other that the art writer appraises in Poussin’s reworking of the biblical narrative are extended, by the poet, as he undertakes to preserve and perpetuate his sense of true place through acts of retrieval and preservation (of lives, of place, of memory, of painting). From Pierre écrite and more concertedly from Dans le leurre du seuil and Ce qui fut sans lumière, ethical values, developed in the deep seam of Bonnefoy’s art writing and his poetry, gain in definition and clarity; the greater expansiveness of ethical concerns draws the reader into a fuller encounter with the world made

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word. Some of the key directions of recent critical thought – in the philosophy of the image, in interart analysis, and in ethics – can help shed fuller light on the values shaping Bonnefoy’s writing and its colour project. Acts of attention are solicited by inanimate things, by others, by memory, by nature, by poetry. A keen alertness to change, to distress, to beauty, to truth, and to bonheur, intimated or envisioned, is formative of Dans le leurre du seuil (1975) and of Début et fin de la neige (1991): here, Didi-Huberman’s felicitous play on ‘regarder/re-garder’, in Blancs soucis (2013), combining the ethos of invested visual attention and the benefits of care, can help illuminate Bonnefoy’s practice.48 Reciprocity is a current shaping Bonnefoy’s writing: the reciprocity between self and other, between self and nature, and between self and art. Levinas explores the encounter of self with the other, a relationship which instils a sense of reciprocity and mutual responsibility. Levinas’s ‘face-to-face encounter’ uncovers a fuller sense of knowing the other through acts of recognizing, through the experience of wonderment, and through open-minded reflection and speculation. The Levinassian encounter can help us approach Bonnefoy’s commitment to apprehending the relation with the other (person or object) and to communicating this through poetry, which brings together these three processes in one place.49 Whilst Levinas’s concern is with human-to-human encounters, it can help us probe Bonnefoy’s concern with how we approach things and how things make demands that are necessary and beneficial (and also demanding) upon the human subjects who encounter them. The importance of compassion in Bonnefoy also leads us towards the thought of Martha Nussbaum in ethics and justice as she advocates for literature’s capacity to teach us lessons in empathy, whilst highlighting the risks of empathy that prompt us to invest empathically in some people and some objects and to neglect others that are too ‘other’ to us.50 Mary Jacobus, investigating the empathic representation of nature in Romantic poetry, landscape narrative, and related film, can help illuminate those values which Bonnefoy’s poetry reflects upon in an increasingly intimate dialogue of poetry with autobiography and painting (notably in Les Planches courbes (2001)).51

Acts of attention Across its seven parts, the free-verse poetry of Dans le leurre du seuil – grave, resonant, and searing – explores being in the world.52 This book is, in striking ways, a sustained reflection on attention and on living more keenly in nature and in community with others, attentive to those instances where sense-making fails or is interrupted. The difficulty of Bonnefoy’s writing in Dans le leurre du seuil – its ellipsis and its telic resistance – echoes the arduousness and the fragmentariness of the bid to know more intensely through acts of attention that engage with the acoustic and the visual and, to a lesser degree, with the tactile and the kinaesthetic. The poet’s inaugural instruction (to himself and to us) is to look deeply and capaciously and to invest lucid attention in nature, in architecture, and in the interplay of evidence and appearance:

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Regarde, L’arbre, le parapet de la terrasse L’aire qui semble peinte sur le vide Les masses du safre clair dans le ravin A peine frémissent-ils, reflets peut-être D’autres arbres et d’autres pierres sur un fleuve. (‘Le Fleuve’, Poèmes, p. 253) Look The tree, the low terrace wall, The field that seems painted on nothing The mass of light sandstone in the ravine, Are barely trembling, perhaps the reflection Of other trees and other stones in a river.53

The iteration of ‘regarde’ in this first text of Dans le leurre du seuil works to alert us to the expressivity of the world and to our capacity for receptivity. The adumbration of visual instances (volume and colour, mass and light, movement and stasis) encourages the notion of the extendibility of this experience within and beyond the text. The space of immediate experience (the soft sandstone rock that is a source of cobalt oxide) summons up a remembered space (putatively that of Poussin’s treatment of the discovery of the infant Moses at the river’s edge). The poet’s strenuous appeal to acts of strenuous looking (‘regarde de tous tes yeux’) in ‘Le Fleuve’ (DLS, 253), in the pronominal reach from the speaker to the reader, solicits fuller, slower acts of attention. The work of registering and of remembering is undertaken by the poet whose words proffer a model for the reader in turn to replicate. The poem is intensely focused on the expressivity of the bird, of the human body, of painting, and it enacts modes of (at)tending to those phenomena. Acts of imaginative looking and mental listening have their source in exceptional or intermittent sights, sounds, vibrations, atmosphere, textures, and alterations, that are registered in the majestic sparseness of Bonnefoy’s poetic language. As Bonnefoy asks us to attend to colour, set now in the larger context of synchronous and synthesizing acts of attention, so colour is often connected to eruptions of gesture, rhythm, and ‘felt’ sensation – that precede it or spur it. Human murmurs and cries (‘ta voix rauque’, 253) and nature’s vocalizations (the croaking of frogs, the chirrups of crickets, the scream of the sparrow hawk, a gurgling stream) are accompanied by kinetic stirrings (shimmers, rustles, shivers, gradations of light). Thus, acts of auditory attention, visual vigilance, and gestural alertness are solicited, enacted, and rewarded in poetry. Poussin’s representation of the rescue of the infant Moses by the Pharaoh’s daughter informs and amplifies the lived experience evoked in Dans le leurre du seuil. We enter here a world of remembered vividness that is instanced by the blackness of earth and mud, by the crimson of the robes of Poussin’s Égyptienne in the act of rescue, and by the liminal blue/green where the tree canopy tinges the dark blue sky at nightfall. The figural evidence of Dans le leurre du seuil, surfacing in ekphrastic fragmentariness, enfolds the ethical themes of stranger-ness,

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hospitality, and compassion evoked by the biblical story and by its interpretation by Poussin and, in turn, by the poet’s reception of that art-historical representation. Painting is a site of instruction and understanding that may be translated into ways of existing in the world and in poetry, through the encounter with the other. Modes of attention spur deeper reflection on the trace and the fragment. This ‘translates’ in the ‘writerly’ style of parataxis in Dans le leurre du seuil: it turns on the tension between the accumulation of values and phrases and their dispersal across the poem where syntax or structure is dislocated and where the reader is drawn into the active re-creation of the poem through the patient gleaning of fragments of meaningfulness.54 The journey of this extended poem goes deeper into black as the boatman – le passeur – steers his cargo of dark pitch through opaque water.55 Black is the inchoate matter against which persistence and desire are tested in the figure of the straining boatman. Evoked at the midpoint of the opening poem, ‘Le Fleuve’, is the black of the remembered dream of the passeur, with his load of black earth, as he sails to the other shore. His pole, reaching into the water, strives to touch the nameless mud of the riverbed and thus to achieve a form of grounding or simple contact: the figural reaching for the true and the evidential signals the poet’s gestural resistance to the ideal whose hegemony was deposed in Douve. Black is the matter and the colour of the unknown and the desirable; it is also the colour of desolation and uncertainty.56 In this respect Dans le leurre du seuil would appear to dialogue, prospectively, with a major essay of 1993 on monochrome value – ‘La Couleur sous le manteau d’encre’ – where Bonnefoy celebrates the revalorization of black by modern painters. Here, he discusses how black, in secular art, moves beyond its traditional binary values and becomes porous and receptive as transcendence is called into question in an age of scepticism (NR, 385). At the same time Bonnefoy is mindful of the persistence of the dualism of white/colour and black, and, in this context, he reflects on the anguished depths of Goya’s abyssal blacks: Pour Goya le noir est la preuve que l’âme dont il avait cru la noblesse, dont il perçoit encore les grands élans, est ravagée par des forces privées de sens, incontrôlables, mixtes de sauvagerie et d’effroi qui découragent de vivre. Dans ses gravures, dans beaucoup de ses toiles, le noir est soleil noir, émanation d’un abîme. (NR, 388) For Goya, black is evidence that the soul, in whose nobleness he believed, and of which he continues to perceive the powerful momentum, is ravaged by meaningless forces that are uncontrollable and mix savagery and dread, and discourage humankind from living. In his engravings, and in many of his paintings, black is the black sun that rises from the abyss.

Bonnefoy’s boatman stretches his pole into the water in a bid to retrieve meaningfulness from the opaqueness of the world. As the quester figure stirs up the mud, so he stirs unanswerable questions about the loss of meaningfulness when perfect form or beauty fails; the passeur’s mud figures the desirable, the

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imperfectible, and the unattainable. This gives rise to an aporia whereby the image makes its insistent claim on our consciousness, whilst denying being.57 ‘Heurte’ is the opening injunction of the second poem entitled ‘Dans le leurre du seuil’: it is the instruction to venture beyond visual perception towards more dynamic, connective forms of corporeal responsiveness (kinetic and tactile) and of mental action in order to confront the impenetrable real (figured by the black pitch): Heurte Heurte à jamais Dans le leurre du seuil. À la porte, scellée, À la phrase, vide. […] Dans le langage, noir Dans la main qui retient Une main absente Dans l’inutilité De se souvenir.  (ll. 1–5, 8, 18–21, Poèmes, pp. 257–8) Knock Knock forever. In the lure of the threshold At the sealed door, At the empty phrase […] In speech, blackness In the hand that holds on To an absent hand In the uselessness Of recollection.58

‘Heurte’ initiates a series of anaphoric variations on the will to probe more fully (‘plus avant’) the structures of experience through the exploration of distance and depth. Physical engagement and ethical perseverance, which began in the opening poem ‘Le Fleuve’ with the dream vision of the boatman prodding the inchoate mud, translate into mental probing figured as an attempted penetration of glossy black matter, the chromatic figure for the desirable and the irretrievable. Seeking to advance in the impenetrability of things (‘heurte, heurte’, 257), the boatman continues to plunge his pole into the turbid waters, into the black

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unknown, his mouth full of mud. Black matter, as a figure for the real, is viscous and alterable, unbiddable and inescapable. Black is a metaphor for the black words on the page that resist our understanding. The boatman seeks out the dark shore, his gestures sustained by the imperative that joins together poet and reader. The extreme monochrome restriction of this poem is punctured by the desire to ‘plant’ the boatman’s phosphorescence and to capture an instant of chromatic luminosity and relief. The dark pole now shines at the shoulder of the other (‘tu’), rewarding ethical persistence and heralding the possibility of discovery. Black in its material impenetrability and obduracy is rivalled by the multisensorial agency of red: from the resounding laughter that colours the atmosphere red to the crimson fabric of the robes of the Pharaoh’s daughter in Moïse sauvé des eaux. The eruption of red vivifies the acoustic and the visual signs of human activity, countering despair and ignorance with pleasure, memories, vividness, and the quotidian: red is thus integral to the process of remediation. The falling drapery of blood evokes an engorging of life as the self breaks away from the burden of illusions, empties, grows crimson (‘s’empourprant’, ‘Dans le leurre du seuil’, 266), and fills with the promise of distant plenitude. Opening to colour, the self can begin to envision the future of presence. One, unnamed colour burns in the night of the world, like painted fabric on black water (268). Now the allusive quality of Bonnefoy’s poetry finds a fresh channel into the ‘felt’, that forges an affirmative connection with the other and with the earth itself, as chromatic values give way to deeper acoustic and haptic sensations: ‘Je t’écoute vibrer dans le rien de l’œuvre’ (269); ‘Je prends la terre à poignées / Dans cet évasement aux parois lisses’ (269). The suggestion of regeneration is instanced in a gesture of protection and nurturing (‘Dans la main de dehors, fermée / A commencé à germer / Le blé des choses du monde’, 270) before doubt and unknowing resurge in fine: Bonnefoy’s poetry finds its paradoxical resolution in the persistence of a sense of precariousness. ‘Deux couleurs’, the third extended poem of Dans le leurre du seuil, resolves (at least provisionally) some of the enduring tension between obscurity and clarity through acts of chromatic association that intimate an ethics of rapprochement. The coming-together of two colours (blue and green) defines the forward movement of the poet in an enacted union with the other who is inseparable from the earth itself. Acquiring confidence, in turn, has a quickening effect on the desire for experience and discovery: Terres, entr’aperçues Herbes d’avant le temps, pierres mûries Couleurs autres, jamais Rêvées si simples Je touche à vos épis, lourds, que courbe le flux Dans la ténèbre. (ll. 52–7, Poèmes, p. 273) Landscapes glimpsed Grasses from before time began, immemorial stones Different colours, never

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Dreamt to be so simple I touch your heavy sheaves that are curved by the flow In the darkness.

Yet the commitment to discovery is still charged with uncertainty. The final lines of  ‘Deux couleurs’ reprise the Moses narrative (both painting and biblical story) in  a concentrated and fragmented evocation of the chromatic richness and nocturnal luminosity of the river. The world is coloured blue and is suffused with green from the merging of the night sky and the canopy of trees, whilst the crimson robes of the Pharaoh’s daughter (in Poussin’s second interpretation of the biblical story) complete this intensely chromatic vision of harmony and generosity with the force of a punctum. In a fragmentary ekphrastic gesture, Bonnefoy relates his own interpretation of the painting to an imagined (or remembered) still life when he compares the heightening of colours to the flame that grows brighter when placed among fruit.59 ‘Deux couleurs’ connects closely with the fourth poem, ‘Deux barques’, where openness and recognition are embraced through the desiring contact of self with the beloved other: Accueille-moi intensément mais distraitement Fais que je n’aie pas de visage, pas de nom Pour qu’étant voleur je te donne plus Et l’étranger l’exil, en toi, en moi Se fasse l’origine. (ll. 15–19, Poèmes, p. 275) Receive me intensely but abstractedly Let me have no face or name for you, So that being the thief I can give you more And the stranger, exile, in you, in me May become the origin.60

Poetry limns thus its lessons in empathy in the analogous merging of two colours and two boats, and it articulates the reciprocated feeling of the one for the other. Fleetingly, the two become one (without loss of difference) where the transcendence of the separation of the two is envisioned in the lips that follow the lips on the glass. Here, solipsistic selfhood is abdicated in favour of a new reciprocity of being (‘Invente-moi, redouble-moi peut-être / Sur ces confins de fable déchirée’, lines 41–2, Poèmes, p. 276). In the fifth poem of Dans le leurre du seuil, ‘La Terre’, the vision of gold’s transfiguring light spurs the poet’s exhortation to the reader to attend to the everyday: wood in the shed, fruit drying touched by light (‘Je crie, Regarde / La lumière / Vivait là, près de nous!’, Poèmes, p. 283). He draws our attention to the almond tree in the (unspoken) white proliferation of its blossom (‘L’amandier se couvre brusquement de milliers de fleurs’, Poèmes, p, 284). Poetry captures, in the iterative present tense, both the immediacy and the perpetuity of material change. The reaching out to take the face of the dawn in his hands (‘La Terre’, Poèmes, p. 285): these are gestures of the self, seeking forms of reconciliation with the

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world, however partial and temporary, through the embrace of ardour, solitude, and mourning. The knowledge that consciousness and suffering and joy are not immured within the self (Poèmes, p. 287) derives from a sense of connection with the external world and with the other; each subjectivity is an intersubjectivity. The emerging recognition is that consciousness is externalized and expanded, immeasurably, beyond the confines of the self (‘Ta conscience n’est pas en toi’, Poèmes, p. 287). Alertness to movement, to light, to colour, and to texture is the route to a fuller sense of being in the world: receptivity to external things, the turn to the other, and the return to self are the connected foundations of what it is to be human. Throughout Dans le leurre du seuil, the act of attention is vitalized through the compelling intermittence of colour. In the penultimate poem ‘Les Nuées’, colour accompanies the explicit return of the passeur in instances of resurgent intensity. Colour is immanent – fleshed – in figuration: the sun is envisioned as a humming insect with its soul enveloped in red elytra (forewings) (Poèmes, p. 299). Crimson cloud formations shape themselves into the figures of a father and his daughter (‘Nuages / Et ces deux pourpres là-bas un père, une fille’, Poèmes, p. 301). This vision of coming-into-presence anticipates Bonnefoy’s appraisal of Mondrian’s red cloud as a figure of true depth and of the aspiration of the self to présence. The red cloud is the sign of consciousness quickened, of the act of reading recommenced with the colour echo (the repeated diphthong [ou] of ‘rouge’) resounding across the spaces of the Book, the cloud, and the sea swell (‘Livre rouvert, nuage rouge, au faîte / De la houle qui s’enfle’, Poèmes, p. 302, my emphasis). Colour is expressed as a sudden illumination and revelation or as a glimpse of what endures in the things of nature (stone, earth, rock, grass, bark, tree). Dans le leurre du seuil enacts the work of preserving colour and colour-in-things, of thinking (and working) with colour as part of the journey towards deeper awareness and fuller presence. Colour has a salutary agency, drawing us into the thing or the place that requires, and might reward, our attention. Colour in the world and in writing has salience, then, in both senses: it obtrudes; it prompts our attention; and that attention, taken forward through acts of care, refreshes vision and thought and sharpens our consciousness of being in the world. The ethical lesson of Dans le leurre du seuil is that colour impels – and assists – the poet, the reader, and the viewer of art to come to a fuller understanding of desire, action, and memory. Bonnefoy’s poetry, from the earliest works, urges us to read colour against the grain, against normative, symbological recuperations. The materialization of colour in leaf, stone, and river is a form of resistance to the ideal and the conceptual. Integral to this, chromatic reticence is part of the modern poet’s enduring scepticism towards the image. In Dans le leurre du seuil, the poet warns against colour saturation, for the one who seeks to flood the wound with colour and light lacks compassion and cannot accede to the true (‘L’Epars, l’indivisible’). Colour resists attempts to reduce its depth and complexity to discrete categories of ‘meaning’ but participates in the search for meaningfulness (‘le désir d’une vérité qui serait non de la signification, mais du sens’).61 The reader is entreated to see colour as a site of unceasing tension between the persisting lure of the image and

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the desire for a truer, sparer beauty. In place of colour reflection, de-colouration is sought sometimes, and a vision of nakedness comes to prevail over specious image-making: here, the value of true beauty is glimpsed.

Ethics and ekphrastics Bonnefoy won the Prix Goncourt for Ce qui fut sans lumière (1987), where the concern with land and with landscape (topographical and art historical) leads the poet to contemplate, once more, cultural practices (architecture, art, artefact): these extend from traditional crafts such as sheep-rearing and stone-walling – practices envisioned in the dominant of white and grey – to the Western art tradition exemplified by Claude Lorrain, Poussin, and Constable. Ce qui fut sans lumière reveals some remarkable ekphrastic poetry, in the pliant sense I outlined above, where Bonnefoy responds to art in ways hospitable to the ethos of the given artwork. Here colour is expressed, subtly and powerfully, in reflections on Constable’s Dedham, from Langham (1830) and on Claude Lorrain’s Psyché devant le château d’amour (1664). Poetry continues here, as in Dans le leurre du seuil, in a vein that is still chromatically subdued as colour values are grasped fleetingly or seem to disappear, and, often, colour is immanent, not explicit. The presence of a man and a woman in Ce qui fut sans lumière has its origin in the biographical fact of the immersion of Bonnefoy and his wife Lucy Vines in the land, and the landscape, of Valsaintes. Yet the poet’s search for ‘true place’ resonates as a larger expression of human yearning, action, and sorrow, and it responds to the dream of immemorial time unfolded by forms of living presence – by the sight of its old walls, by its evening colour, and by the very breath of the place: Je ne doute pas que Valsaintes ait ranimé mes nostalgies œdipiennes, prenant appui sur le signe que ses hauts murs, sa couleur le soir, sa respiration la nuit semblaient être, pour m’inciter à penser que j’étais parvenu au lieu que de longue date je désirais, où reprendrait le temps naturel, élémentaire, qui est d’avant les horloges.62 I am sure that Valsaintes stirred once more my oedipal nostalgia, drawing on the sign that its high walls, its evening colour, and the very breath of the place at night seemed to intimate; it spurred me to think that I had reached the place which I had sought for so long, the place where natural, elementary, immemorial time would resume.

Fifteen years before the publication of Ce qui fut sans lumière, Bonnefoy articulated his quest for place in terms that resist the exoticist escapism of colour. Thus, in L’Arrière-pays (1972) the poet declared that he was not seeking idealized or fantasized colour visions but, rather, an existential attachment to the visual (and auditory) presence of this world. The experience of the non-human world and of nature is so affecting that he feels that material things must exist in the world for our intentional good, linked to a profound sense of place:

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Ce n’est pas mon goût de rêver de couleurs ou de formes inconnues, ni d’un dépassement de la beauté de ce monde. J’aime la terre, ce que je vois me comble, et il m’arrive même de croire que la ligne pure des cimes, la majesté des arbres, la vivacité du mouvement de l’eau au fond d’un ravin, la grâce d’une façade d’église […] ne peuvent qu’avoir été voulues, et pour notre bien. Cette harmonie a un sens, ces paysages et ces espèces sont, figés encore, enchantés peut-être, une parole, il ne s’agit que de regarder et d’écouter avec force pour que l’absolu se déclare, au bout de nos errements. Ici, dans cette promesse, est donc le lieu. (AP, 10, my emphasis) I have no taste for imagining unknown colours or forms, or a beauty superior to that of the world. I love the earth, and what I see delights me, and sometimes I even believe that the unbroken line of peaks, the majesty of the trees, the liveliness of water moving through the bottom of a ravine, the graceful façade of a church […] must have been intended for our benefit. This harmony has a meaning, these landscapes, and these objects, while they are still fixed, or possibly enchanted, are almost like a language, as if the absolute would declare itself, if we could only look and listen intently, at the end of our wanderings. And it is here, within this promise, that the place is found.63

The figure of the couple, and that of the remembered child, whose journeys crisscross the landscape of Ce qui fut sans lumière, draws us into a fragmentary lyric of intimacy that opens up a fuller meditation on love, companionship, the body, solitariness, loss, shared endeavour, and finitude. These intense moments, where poetry moves from private, autobiographical instance to explore its wider human implications, sustain the deep ethical engagement integral to Bonnefoy’s poetry from Pierre écrite onwards. Across the five sections of Ce qui fut sans lumière, lessons in reciprocity appear to offer the gift of true place. The idea of nature as a gift is a key tenet of Bonnefoy’s vision: he senses the capacity of the material world to reward, partially and provisionally, our patient acts of tending and attending – in ways visual, acoustic, haptic, and kinaesthetic: ‘Et j’avance dans l’herbe froide. O terre, terre, / Présence si consentante, si donnée’ (13). To speak of the ethical value of the ‘gift’ is to engage with some of the complexities of modern critical thought around the gift, notably, once more, Derrida’s reflections in Donner le temps: I. La fausse monnaie (1991). Derrida proposes that there is no such thing as a pure gift, a gift that lies outside of a set of obligations and exchanges.64 He explores the aporia of gifting for the gift is irreparably altered as soon as it is proffered: as recipient, I am called upon to respond, and the value of the gift qua gift is instantly breached, returned (and reduced) to a relationship of exchange.65 Bonnefoy’s poetry, for its (un-Derridean) part, evokes the obligation and the duty of care implicit in the receiving of benefit and value in the anticipation of the gift of true place. This implies a reciprocity which, far from debasing the exchange, has the potential to enhance intersubjective relations. My focus is on the value of reciprocity between poet and world, world and poet; this reciprocity stretches to include the reader who is participating (mentally,

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imaginatively) in acts of attention and care for the world by nurturing the poetic word. In this sense my approach draws more on the values of ethical reciprocity and responsibility implied by the gift. (Derrida would assert that it is misleading to persist in speaking of ‘gift’, but let’s persist for the moment.) This reciprocity, mutual gifting, in Bonnefoy’s poetry is situated in an intersubjective space where human and non-human worlds overlap, and where colour participates in more immanent and elemental ways, and also in the persistent material fact of paint, especially colour, in the artworks evoked in Ce qui fut sans lumière. ‘La Voix, qui a repris’ (CQFSL, I, 27) teaches the lesson that true place is a temporary concession, never an enduring possession, and it is in this briefly proffered gift that the potential for benefit resides (‘“Entre, je te permets presque une halte”’; ‘“je te permets la clé dans la lourde porte”’). The dream of sovereignty (‘“être maître du seuil”’, 27) is a lure: absolute hospitality, like the absolute gift, is an aporia (precisely as Derrida argues). The place of birth or rebirth is a provisional gift, given into the protection of its temporary custodian: (‘“je t’aurai donné, en la reprenant, / Une terre natale, et il n’est rien d’autre”’, 27). The gift requires action in return, yet the self is limited by time that harries. Thus, absolute values become relativized in material contexts. The idea of a relative gift and of provisional hospitality aligns with Bonnefoy’s emphasis on finitude and, here, with the vanishing of colour – its concealment and its extinguishing (‘“T’éloignant, te décolorant, ne percevant / La lumière qu’en rêve”’, 27). This anticipates in Début et fin de la neige (1991) the encounter with the ephemeral gift that is snow and colour that is part of the fleeting experience of the writer’s gift. Bonnefoy’s poetry contours the benefits of reciprocity that the gift makes necessary: the emergent self is deeply immersed in the landscape which, in turn, seems to respond to human longing. Presence that is glimpsed or briefly gifted highlights a reciprocal relationship of self and world that resists forms of appropriation. The sensuous embrace of the poet and the earth is figured by the touch of human hands or the movement of lips, in actions of desiring, as the earth slips away in its phosphorescence (blue/green), and he must turn away (15) as if the gift is unreal, too perfect, too consenting, for this is the point at which its agency and authenticity might be compromised. Poetry traces the space of the gift, but the gift can never materialize in any real and permanent sense (‘Je m’éveille nuit après nuit dans la maison vide’, 16). Consciousness of gifting and of hospitality informs ‘Les Arbres’ (I), a poem which, by evacuating prismatic colour, enables chiaroscuro values to shape expression. Here the sun is the host (‘hôte silencieux’, 17) whilst the human presences (absorbed into the shadows of the poet and his companion) are drawn to the luminous, ruined house. Here, agency passes from the host to his guests as the sun retreats, a process that the poet recognizes as empathic. Ethical qualities, immanent in the rich play of light and dark, are thus discerned in the movement of the non-human world: exploring ethical qualities in the muteness of nature, envisioning the (temporary) absolute gift that the sun seems to proffer. As the sun withdraws, the house remains immense and illuminated as human shoulders merge and are absorbed into the darkness of the rough stone wall, a

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late echo of Bonnefoy’s evocation of Elsheimer’s depiction of Ceres illuminated by shadow. Suddenly the sun is compassionate in the deeper sense that Martha Nussbaum explores in Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions: beyond empathy, compassion springs from a more profound recognition and feeling of the need of the other: and so, Bonnefoy’s sun enables the human shadows to stretch and to touch their beloved trees.66 Poetry reveals the model of ethical being in this chiaroscuro modulation of trees, sun, stone, and shadows that reflects back to us nature’s capacity for generosity and empathy, capacity that we assume to be the preserve of humankind. The theme of nature’s compassion (here, that of the sun, following that of the bird, in ‘Le Souvenir’) connects the poet and the reader to Lucretius (whose presence will be integral to Début et fin de la neige), just as the ellipses of Bonnefoy’s poetry revitalize the Romantic notion of a beneficent nature that is synonymous with the thought and poetry of Ralph Waldo Emerson.67 Nature is filled with compassion towards human dwellers: in ‘L’Agitation du rêve’ (CQFSL, V, 86), the ‘lumière compassionnée’ of dawn does not wake the sleeping lovers; agency passes to atmosphere, to place, to nature, in instances of ‘moving across’, as we might say, from human to material and back again. These are the kinds of instances that Mary Jacobus, in Romantic Things, has identified in modern literary and visual enactments of the dissolution of differences between thinking and non-thinking things and in the compelling obduracy of material phenomena in shaping our human responsiveness to nature.68 As nature proffers a model, the lesson of compassion is internalized by the young child of ‘La Barque aux deux sommeils’ (V). Seeing the lovers lie together, united such that their faces appear as one, the boy is filled with compassion before their merged bodies; he is moved by the effect on their sleeping flesh of years of work and effort. Their (unintentional) gift, working reciprocally and generatively, inspires his actions, producing further acts of beneficence: Il s’approche, il se penche, Il voit dans leur travail l’homme, la femme, C’est une terre pauvre, dont les voies Sont emplies d’eau comme après les orages, Il place dans ce sol Le germe d’une plante […] […] Le lieu de l’origine, aux rives basses, C’est elle qu’il pressent […] […] Et c’est elle qu’il veut, contre le ciel, Voir croître chaque jour, dans l’évidence Des oiseaux qui se croisent en criant. Il ira tard le soir dans son feuillage,

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Il cherchera le fruit dans la couleur, Il en pressera l’or dans ses mains paisibles, Puis il prendra la barque, il ira poser Le vin du temps désert, dans une jarre, Au pied du dieu du rêve. (ll.12–17, 19–20, 24–32, CQFSL, pp. 98–9) He draws near and bends down He sees the man, the woman, in the midst of their labor It is but a poor earth, whose paths Are filled with water, as after storms. He places in this ground The seed of a plant […] […] The low-banked place where all things began He had sensed it ever since […] And now, it is what he wants to see growing Each day against the sky in the bright clearness Of the birds that cross each other, clamouring. Late at evening, he will go among its leaves, There he will seek the fruit in the color He will press its pure gold in his quiet hands. Then he will take the boat, and he will go To place the wine of empty time, in a jar At the foot of the god of dreams.69

These are exempla of the gifts – the lessons and the values – that the external world proffers as traces of true place. There are other gifts too – the remembered colour that appears as a site of crisis and a place of learning. Ce qui fut sans lumière opens with the recurrent memory of the coloured fabric of the world that is suddenly rent by a violent wind: this is experienced as a laceration in the deep of existence. The poet is haunted by the dislocation of presence that was attached to the coloured thing (‘ce fut le lieu de l’évidence, mais déchirée’, in ‘L’Adieu’, I, 21; ‘le déchirement de la couleur’ intimates the dislocation of presence and promise in ‘La Voix encore’, I, 28). Colour, never ‘settled’, fills a space of disruption and equivocation. The gift of evidence is offered and swiftly withdrawn. Never absolute, that gift is defined by its precarious quality, and this reflects a sense of the self as relative, incomplete, and (repeatedly) ‘désemparé’ by the gift. The fracturing of the coloured thing spurs a poignant reflection on the equivocal gifts of memory: ‘Que faire de tes dons, ô souvenir’ (CFQSL, 11)? What sense does the recipient make of the gift? And what responsibility does the gift confer on the

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recipient? The gift requires a response, a return in the form of attention and care, and solicits an enabling action. But the process of dispersal is already under way, prompting a retreat from colour.70 ‘[L]e déchirement de la couleur’ (p. 28) and the black water that surrounds the boat in which the man and the woman endeavour to sail counter the energy of action with the despair of stasis. The gesture of return and reciprocation is curtailed or cancelled. Night falls quickly over the ‘bleu du dehors du monde’ (p. 29), a vision that seems to extend the repudiation of the ideal-named-‘azur’ that is continuous from Mallarmé to Valéry and, now, to Bonnefoy. Dispersal and dissolution are linked to finitude; nothing can be held in perpetuity and this is the truth of fractured colour: the gift is impaired, which is not to suggest that giving is always an irredeemably failed project, for the poet gains a sense of the fragility of the other and is moved to commit patience and care in the proffering and the receiving of future gifts. The encounter with damage and devastation, or the threat of these, prompts a renewed bid towards reciprocation that is solicited in the acts of attention that take shape in Dans le leurre du seuil. Altering qualities of colour, light, shadow, and texture seem to respond to human waves of empathy and compassion. Such qualities also resist appropriation by mind or by hand, evidence of the agency and intentionality of nature that Jacobus traces in her study of Romantic poetry.71 Thus, nature invites the return gift of fuller attention and deeper care that, in turn, inspire further acts of poetry. In ‘L’Adieu’ (CQFSL, I, p. 22), the poet identifies the task of poetry as one of recognition and restoration: Tout est toujours à remailler du monde. Le paradis est épars, je le sais, C’est la tâche terrestre d’en reconnaître Les fleurs disséminées dans l’herbe pauvre Mais l’ange a disparu, une lumière Qui ne fut plus soudain que soleil couchant. (ll. 35–40) The work of mending in this world never ends. Paradise lies scattered, this I know, It is our earthly task to recognise Its flowers that are strewn in the humble grass But the angel has disappeared, a light That suddenly was but a setting sun.72

If nature seems to solicit and reward acts of recognizing, it also demands the active repair of the intricate mesh of the world. The poet outlines the task of humans, their obligation to take up the models offered by nature and to replicate the gestures shown.73 There is, then, no pure gift for obligation is always implied or explicit, but here (contrasting once more with Derrida’s view) that obligation is positive and empowering and in its turn formative of poetry itself. An ethics of reciprocity emerges, then, in Ce qui fut sans lumière that expresses itself as forms of resistance or persistence in the face of change. Human projects

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are invested in the world, but their materialization is always thwarted by the unstoppable flow of time figured by the boat that slips into the distance with its freight of red stones – the weight of the ineluctable – representing all that cannot be altered by human intention: Nous formions nos projets : mais une barque, Chargée de pierres rouges, s’éloignait irrésistiblement d’une rive, et l’oubli Posait déjà sa cendre sur les rêves Que nous recommencions sans fin, peuplant d’images Le feu qui a brûlé jusqu’au dernier jour. (‘L’Adieu’, ll. 12–17, CQFSL, p. 21) We would make our plans, but a boat, Loaded with red stones, moved away Irresistibly from a shore, and oblivion Was already placing its ashes on the dreams That we endlessly renewed, peopling with images The fire that burned until the last morning.74

The poem narrates the persistence of desire, the imperfect tense expressing the unceasing repetition of gestures that is rivalled by loss (the distancing of the boat) and mapped by the chromatic transition from incandescence to ash – from red to grey and black – before hope can rekindle itself. Bonnefoy’s poetry, in this vision of ethical perseverance, articulates a sense of human tenacity born of the recognition of the fragile existence that struggles to preserve value and works to transform despair. Already in ‘Sur des branches chargées de neige’ (CQFSL, 45–6), the poet urges the reader to embrace the proffered gift of deep cold colour as visual and haptic values coincide. Here, the agency of self is counterweighted by the rhetorical appeal to colour-become-subject in the hues of blue and crimson that ‘speak’ from unfathomable depths, nature reflecting – and, in turn, carrying – human intention: Couleurs avec le froid plus denses, bleus et pourpres Qui appelez de plus loin que le fruit Etes-vous notre rêve qui moins s’efface Qu’il ne se fait de la prescience et la voie? (ll. 9–12) Colors that grow deeper with the cold, blues and purples That call from further off than the fruit, Are you our dream that does not so much vanish As become prescience and path?75

Beauty is difficult and demanding (CQFSL, 46): it presents as a mystery and proffers a lesson that has to be learnt all over again (‘apprentissage’) for real meaning (‘le vrai sens’) is to be found in a meadow in flower that is partially

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covered by slabs of snow, a figure for the desirability of immersion in the particular that is concealed by the uniform and homogenous. By focusing on the small and the persistent thing that comes into the consciousness of the poet and takes shape in language, the poem opens out from the particular to the exploration of a truth about receptivity and the readiness to rethink concepts like beauty through their illuminating relation to colour. Poetry explores nature’s capacity to solicit acts of quiet appraisal. In Bonnefoy’s poetry, nature and the non-sentient world (grass, walls, well, field) are invested with practices of thinking and responding, registering and generating, whilst the sentient world may be empathic in ways that are material in their stillness and muteness. Through both responses – the speaking or showing, and the silent or obscured – acts of attention are rewarded. Thus, in the opening poem ‘Le Souvenir’, the poet explores the act of reliving and recognizing signs of presence: the soundless breathing of the house and the bird cry which is mocking and yet also sounds a note of compassion. These signs expose a deeper relation of self to world through the perceived reciprocity between human and non-human spheres. In the process, poetry focuses on its own ethics and its particular responsibility for responding to object and to other, and on its sustainability. In ‘Le mot ronce, dis-tu’ (CQFSL, 42), the poet asks if poetry is not about knowing how to love a particular quality of light; about opening the almond of absence in language, a cream-coloured space of pleasure. This is an instance where the shaping of colour captures the value of poetry as a place of incomplete, imperfect, and always necessary mediation between self and world. If Ce qui fut sans lumière holds up to examination and to celebration, the profound relation of nature and poetry, a more explicitly ekphrastic gesture draws in the landscape painting of Constable. With this, colour comes more fully into focus. Bonnefoy articulates the importance of painting in making the poet and the reader apprehend the material immediacy of experience. Asked by John Naughton why painting matters to his poetry, Bonnefoy articulates the incorporation of colour in the work of the visual artist in ways that the worker of words can only desire to replicate: [L]es peintres sont prisonniers des mots presque autant que les poètes, c’est vrai, puisqu’ils regardent un monde qu’a structuré le langage; mais ils peuvent, eux, percevoir directement, presque pleinement, la qualité sensible qui est l’au-delà du mot dans la chose, ils voient ainsi la couleur qui n’a pas de sens, le trait dont la vibration excède la signification qu’il dessine, – et de ce fait ils s’abreuvent de l’univers comme les poètes ne peuvent jamais le faire, et quel exemple alors, quelle incitation est-ce là ! On peut les croire l’eau retrouvée, la soif enfin étanchée. ‘Pleurant, je voyais de l’or, et ne pus boire’, s’écrie Rimbaud. Mais on le voit alors regarder au ciel les peintures de l’orage, ces tons noirs, ces rouges, ces bleus que le peintre a pouvoir de recommencer sur la toile. Le peintre nous conduit dans l’approche de l’immédiat au-delà du point où le langage s’arrête.76 Painters are prisoners of words almost as much as poets, it’s true, because they observe a world that language has structured, but they can perceive directly,

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almost completely, the physical quality that exists beyond the word in things; so they see colour, that has no meaning, the line whose vibration exceeds the meaning that it outlines, and thus they draw deep on the universe in ways that poets never can, and what an example they offer, what encouragement lies in that! We may think that they have discovered water, that their thirst is finally quenched. ‘Weeping, I saw gold, and could not drink of it’, exclaimed Rimbaud. But we see him at that point looking at the sky and its painting of the storm, these black tones, these reds, these blues, that the painter can begin to work again on the canvas. The painter leads us into the vicinity of the immediate beyond the point where language ceases.

As he draws on the language of colour and corporeality (taste, thirst, and quenching), Bonnefoy expresses the power of the visual artist to immerse us in the thickness of things; thus the painter’s colour always exceeds the capacity of words to translate that thickness. The artist therefore provides a lesson or a model that might enable the poet to approach his textual practice through the mediation of colour that gets beneath language and beyond it. Colour in painting takes us closer to nature, to the lived world beyond the limits where language fails: Bonnefoy reflects on this in the poem ‘Dedham vu de Langham’. ‘Dedham vu de Langham’ (III, 65–9) explores the gift of landscape painting through the poet’s quietly ecstatic appraisal of Constable’s 1813 depiction of the Essex countryside (Plate 30). The poem is alive to the visual, haptic, and acoustic resonances of Constable’s painting apprehended in its thick, variable colour texture. Crossing boundaries of century, nation, and media, with ekphrastic attention to painterly process, the poet addresses the painter: ‘tu as su mêler à ta couleur  / Une sorte de sable qui du ciel / Accueille l’étincellement dans la matière’ (65). Here, chromatic and haptic values participate in poetry’s evocation of the material richness of Constable’s art as Bonnefoy explores the lesson that landscape painting offers across media and across time. The encounter with tree, river, and cloud stirs the sensorium and releases its capacity to connect – and make sense of – individual perceptions: by turning outwards to nature, the painter immerses more deeply in the self-world relation and thus assuages his existential burden. The metaphysical quality of the painting defies the sense of finitude that is borne by the flowing river, by the altering hedgerows, and by the fading sound of the church bell. Constable’s vision, deposing haste and fear in favour of slow attentiveness, calls up a form of joy: his divine hand has stopped the sky above the world, like the angel over Agar as she wandered in the labyrinth of stone, an allusion to Claude’s painting of Hagar and the Angel (1646) that Constable had praised.77 Constable’s teaching of the gift of attention in his painting is held out by the poet – to the reader – as an exemplum of the felt connection between art and nature, between self and landscape. Invoking the value of repair – a response to the renting of colour that we explored earlier – the poet envisions the painter taking the fruit of shattered colour and broken form and placing that real fruit of colour among spoken things (67). This is the ‘tâche terrestre’ acquitted, for the painter has accomplished his bid to articulate all things: murmurings, materials, moods. In this, Bonnefoy sees Constable as guiding things ‘vers leur vraie place’ (68). His painting undoes time:

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it reveals the wall that the sunset illuminates, and it offers gifts of reciprocity and sustenance, beauty and connection, in the form of transfiguring light and the stirrings of nature (‘Les fruits, les voix, les reflets, les rumeurs, / Le vin léger dans rien que la lumière’ (69)). The poem ‘Dedham vu de Langham’, informed by the concern with reception, thus approaches the eponymous painting in ways that engage with our experience of Constable’s sensibility (and also, perhaps, with the reader’s actual or imagined experience of England’s Stour Valley). Bonnefoy’s poem explores art as a gift proffered that can assist us to see more keenly (in life and in art) alert to light, colour, texture, and sound. The other major poem of Ce qui fut sans lumière to engage with painting takes the title of Claude’s Psyché devant le château d’Amour (1664) (Plate 31).78 Bonnefoy explains in an interview with Daniel Bergez that the poem is autobiographical and that the poet imagines himself in the role of painter of the scene.79 This complicates the ekphrastic project because the very painting has changed, replaced by the work that the poet imagines in his mind’s eye and that he composes in the poem entitled ‘Psyché devant le Château d’Amour’. With the slippage from the actual, historical painter (Claude) to the virtual painter (the poet), Bonnefoy’s reading of works by Claude eschews any mimetic desire and redefines ekphrastic agency in speculative terms: je n’y considère [ses] tableaux pour ce qu’ils sont en réalité, j’en imagine ce qu’ils seraient devenus si, au moment où j’ai découvert Psyché devant le Château d’amour […] je m’en étais fait le peintre.80 (my emphasis) I don’t contemplate [his] paintings for what they are in reality; rather, I imagine what they would have become if, at the point where I discovered Psyché devant le Château d’amour, […] I had become its painter.

With Claude, as with Goya, Bonnefoy is not speaking about art and the artist, but speaking with them. Art, then, and specifically that of Claude and of Constable, separated by two centuries, resists closure and fixed meaning; rather, it solicits receptivity, offering its potential, generously, to the poet-painter to generate, in turn, the work of art. Specifically, in the opening stanza, the dreaming poet-painter envisions the ‘eau grise’ of shadow as the very origin of ‘la future couleur’ – colour’s transformative capacity – and awakes to produce that colour in the chromatic gradations impelled by poetry’s process: ‘intensifier / Le bleu d’ici, les ocres, tous les rouges’. It is as if the poet were translating the gestures of the painter in the particularity of colour, as a counter to pervasive finitude.

Interrupted white Début et fin de la neige (1991) is an elegant volume of both shorter and longer reflections – imaged revelations – inspired by snow. Bonnefoy’s poetry shifts

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between the ephemeral flocon and snow’s dense, moving masses, whilst opening out to a meditation that draws on Renaissance poetry (Petrarch) and architecture (the Italian school), philosophy (Aristotle’s Poetics, Lucretius), mythology (Circe), and the bible (the risen Christ’s injunction to Mary Magdalene not to touch his flesh). The poems enact the responsibility of the regarding self to attend to snow, to discern and sustain its compelling specificity, and thus to capture the ephemeral, whilst briefly envisioning the eternal. Bonnefoy’s poetry here is poised between the delicate and the all-encompassing, the infinitesimally small snowflake and the infinitely extendible drift of whiteness that redefines space and prompts a capacious meditation on nature, time, and place. The poetic snowscape resists the lure of the ‘whiteout’; the preface-poem of the opening section ‘La Grande Neige’ speaks, gently yet insistently, of the persistence of colour (‘L’ocre, le vert / Se réfugient sous les arbres’). Colour, almost invisible, is recognized, remembered, and nurtured (‘Ne demeure / De la couleur / Que les aiguilles de pin’). The ‘Grande Neige’ section ends with the vision of whiteness abolished by expansive blue water, an image about which I shall have more to say shortly (‘Une flaque bleue / S’étend, brillante un peu, devant les arbres / D’une paroi à l’autre de la nuit’, DFN, 125). Likewise, towards the end of Début et fin de la neige, in the opening poem of ‘Le Tout, le Rien’, the first snowfall is identified with colour fragments and with the ricochets of affect: ‘taches / De couleur, plaisirs brefs, craintes, chagrins / Inconsistants, faute de la parole’. Throughout Bonnefoy’s exploration of time and place, moving whiteness has the capacity to bring other colours into relief, the experience of snow offering a chromatic gift to the beholder: ‘Les Pommes’ (DFN, 118) outlines a still-life study of apples altering as their golden flush is tinged with snow, like a lover’s shoulder edged with white, the analogy creating a superposition of sensuous still life and intimist portrait of the impersonal other. The play of colours charts the altering of perception and perspective – from stunned delight at the discovery of fallen apples to the appreciation of their sensuous haptic and visual qualities. The shift from barer metonymy to richer metaphor moves the material encounter with the fruit into a subtle evocation of beauty and tenaciousness. Poetry hesitates between the particular in its momentary, fragile beauty that is beyond capture and sublime whiteness that obliterates the contour and the shape of what lies beneath. White is substance (the materiality of snow) and it is also the ground against which other colours come suddenly into relief. In a deft reading of ‘Les Pommes’, Emily McLaughlin combines eco-critical thought and affect theory, demonstrating how colour punctures the persistence of transcendental values and affirms, in their place, existence as contingent and participative, constantly drawing us into its provisionality and its process.81 Throughout Début et fin de la neige the idea of a precarious human presence finds its correlative in the mesmeric beauty and the fragile impermanence of snowfall. The poet explores desire that is borne by a snowflake, until snowflake and desire dissolve together, leaving only traces that may intimate material memories or metaphysical longing. Faced with the impossibility of expressing the presence and the vacancy of snow, language risks losing its anchor points and becoming a kind of analogous blankness, but chromatic intermittences – in their quiet tenacity  – create pockets of meaning and understanding. Snowfall

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and the emptying of the sky mirror the disorder of words as the poet grasps the empathy between the volatility of nature and the fluctuations of language. Snowing and becoming undone, preserving and losing, persisting and vanishing, these processes and the thought they inform create the alternating momentum of Début et fin de la neige. Closely related to Ce qui fut sans lumière in its turn to the autobiographical and its embrace of the real and of place, Début et fin de la neige takes forward the encounter with snow as materiality and as memory. This book develops, too, the recognition of the lessons offered by nature in the intimation of finitude and of the cosmic slightness of the human individual that was central to Ce qui fut sans lumière. Bonnefoy’s autobiographical account of his contemplation of snow in Hopkins Forest in Massachusetts is discerning in its colour work and its attention to the effect of intermittent whiteness on perception and understanding.82 In dialogue with John Naughton, Bonnefoy traces the continuity of his poetic project from Ce qui fut sans lumière to Début et fin de la neige in terms of the apprehension of nature and its articulation in poetry. I quote Bonnefoy at length as he unfolds, with discerning chromatic care, the lesson of snow and its part in bringing him consolation after the disillusionment experienced in the restoration of his Valsaintes abbey-home: Quant aux États-Unis, ils m’ont toujours attiré par l’immensité des lieux qu’ils ouvrent au voyageur, par leurs longues routes happées par l’infini : leçon de décentrement, enseignement que nous ne sommes qu’une étincelle, essentiellement furtive, sur la terre. Or, cette dernière leçon, je l’ai surtout entendue à l’occasion du séjour que j’ai fait en 1985 à Williamstown, Mass. Je marchais là dans Hopkins Forest, d’abord verte, puis empourprée par l’automne, puis grise et noire mais alors illuminée par la neige. À la tombée de la nuit je regardais sur une route à flanc de colline, très loin au-delà des bois, les feux des voitures qui semblaient fuir, silencieusement, vers quelque au-delà de ce monde. La neige couvrait la forêt, la neige était ici et là, par nappes sur lesquelles la rouille des arbres se détachait, fragmentation qui faisait paraître plus grandes les distances, c’est comme si l’ailleurs était déjà commencé ici, qui en était comme dissipé, et pourtant, sur ces chemins ou dans les rues du village, rien n’était plus joyeux que les flocons qui tourbillonnaient dans la lumière, avivant les couleurs, et tout de suite après les moments d’assombrissement le ciel était bleu comme aucun ciel d’été ne peut l’être. Voici de quoi apprendre à se détacher des biens, et aussi de ces signes qui, tel Valsaintes, semblant des formes privilégiées de l’émergence de l’être, sont nos biens encore, ceux qui nous assurent notre écriture, nos rêves. Et voici qui venait à point, après les déceptions du lieu de Provence. J’ai essayé d’écouter la leçon, sans grand succès peut-être, ce furent les quelques poèmes de la neige dans Ce qui fut sans lumière, poèmes de réflexion sur ce qu’il faut oublier pour être, si j’ose dire ; et là est donc, dans ces pages, l’effet, peut-être trop fugitif, de ce qui est l’autre pôle dans cette existence troublée qui cherche à se clarifier dans un livre.83 (my emphasis)

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Regarding the United States, I have always been drawn by the vastness of places that open up to the traveller, revealing their long roads that lead to infinity: they teach us a lesson about de-centering, they teach us that we are a mere spark, a furtive one at that, on the earth. Now, that lesson, I understood it when I stayed at Williamstown, Mass., in 1985. There I was walking in Hopkins Forest, which was initially green, then made crimson in the Fall, then grey and black but illuminated by the snow. At nightfall, I would look up at the road that climbed the hill, very far in the distance, beyond the woods, where the car lights seemed to flee silently towards somewhere beyond this world. The snow covered the forest, the snow was here and there in folds against which the rust colour of the trees stood out; that fragmentation made the distances seem greater. It was as if elsewhere had already begun here. […] nothing was more joyous than the snowflakes that whirled in the light, quickening the colours, and immediately afterwards came moments of darkening, the sky was blue as no summer sky can ever be. This is what teaches us to detach ourselves from material things, and also to detach ourselves from signs, such as Valsaintes, which seem to be privileged forms in which being emerges, but they are still our material goods, goods that sustain our writing and our dreams. And this is what was timely, after the disappointment over the place in Provence. I tried now to listen to that lesson, not entirely successfully perhaps, this took the form of those snow poems in Ce qui fut sans lumière, poems that reflect on what we must forget, in order to exist, if I can put it like that. And there, in those pages, lies the effect, perhaps all too fleeting, of what is the other pole in this troubled existence that seeks to achieve clarity in a book of poetry.

In Début et fin de la neige the experience of precarious beauty and of the remediating power of nature takes the form of a quiet epiphany and the penetrating evocation of the altering colour experience of the poet as he explores the forest in the snow. The spareness of the typographical layout, especially in the early texts of ‘La Grande Neige’, enhances the values of white/blank and materializes the book’s thematic core. Illustrated by the painter Geneviève Asse’s palette of blue, grey, and white, the original livre d’artiste reveals its abstract design – text and image – at once present and evanescent like snow and like meaning itself. Bonnefoy offers lessons based on his lived experience of appraising and touching nature as he reflects on the relation between humankind and the absolute, and between landscape and language. Bonnefoy’s sustained contemplation of snow, emerging out of sudden revelation, gives itself to be read through Levinas’s concept of the encounter – the ‘face à face’ – even if the encounter here is between human and non-human worlds.84 This is to take Levinas’s concept in a different but related direction, one that is consonant with Bonnefoy’s feeling for things: ‘dans l’expérience de la présence, les choses sont des êtres autant que les personnes humaines. J’ai souvent dit qu’en poésie il n’y a que des noms propres’.85 In Hopkins Forest, the poet is looking into the face of snow, contemplating its beginning and its ending, its movements, and its morphings. Début et fin de la neige is an extended example

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of the practice of attention that Bonnefoy’s poetry enacts and encourages: here the encounter with snow prompts an ethical response that recognizes the alterable beauty and the transformative power of the natural phenomenon, and its influence on the poet’s sense of existing in the world. Nature proffers a lesson where the landscape gives itself to be read in the face-to-face with the ephemeral flake and with the impenetrable (and also dissolvable) mass. The face-to-face encounter with the otherness of snow – its vanishing and its persistence – shapes poems that explore the startling vision of interrupted whiteness that rewards slow looking and demands nurturing thought. Bonnefoy’s elliptical lessons in looking at snow and having regard for it anticipate the care ethics of Didi-Huberman’s regarder/re-garder. The poet is alert to the alterity of snow, to its creativity, and to its transformative effect on nature, on human percipience, and on poetry.86 In Début et fin de la neige the idea of the gift, formative of Ce qui fut sans lumière, re-surfaces searchingly: ‘Les Flambeaux’ opens with the apostrophe to ‘Neige / qui as cessé de donner, qui n’es plus’ (129). The snow has sought to gift itself, a gift that exhausts itself in the act of giving. The gift – every gift – is provisional and fleeting, relative rather than absolute. Nature is itself actively awaiting our response to its gift: an analogy forms here between words and snowflakes for both are combinations leading to dispersion and dissolution, and both leave imperceptible traces on matter and on the mind. The indifference of nature and its insouciance are evoked to suggest that agency has passed from humankind to the non-human world (to nature’s colours and textures). The emerging lesson of Début et fin de la neige is, then, one of human in-significance. Bonnefoy’s gravity moves forward with a freer sensuousness in the encounter of self and nature; a lightness of being counterpoints metaphysical reflection as the poet revels in the potential of snow to reveal small everyday epiphanies. The ephemeral presence of snow on the skin of a finger, on the flesh of gathered fruit (the apples), or on the fabric of a scarf reveals the otherness of snow – and it throws into relief the otherness of quotidian things. The encounter with snow produces wonderment at the fragility of snow, its power to startle and to mesmerize. The slender evanescence of a snowflake is sufficient to call up other, absent figures in vivid colour: the memory of the poppy picked on the country path the previous summer recalls the concentration of red amid the grey of arid stones (‘Neige’, DFN, 115). The capacity of white and of blankness to nourish remembered visions of red translates the potential of the present (and the always already disappearing) to connect us with what has gone: as we have noted already, Bonnefoy’s recourse to red (that of the petal or of the fabric of a dress) disrupts the perceived smoothness of the here-and-now with the insistent claims of the past and fleeting intimations of the absolute. The freight of colour fragments and the intermittent correspondence of colours shape the poetry of Début et fin de la neige. The scrupula – the obstacle or the object that obtrudes – calls the poet back repeatedly to the mundane, as an opening onto the metaphysical. The poet’s scarf, caught on a barb of rusty metal, stops him in his movement and anticipates the metaphoric ripping within him of the stuff of dreams (DFN, 117): as if snow were a visual lure that the real of inconsequential

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things disrupts in asserting its dominion. The poet has to turn away from snow in order to preserve its otherness (now as memory); he has to turn from snow out of respect for its impermanence. Once touched, snow dissolves and this calls up the resurrection theme ‘Noli me tangere’ (DFN, 124): a trembling snowflake against the blue sky prompts the analogy with the instruction of Jesus to Mary Magdalene not  to  touch His unrisen body (and thus Bonnefoy’s poetry connects with the Gospel of John and the major iconographic tradition inspired by this scene as represented in the work of Giotto, Fra Angelico, Titian, Correggio, Mantegna, Hans Holbein, Claude Lorrain, Graham Sutherland). Emily McLaughlin, examining the mesh of visual and haptic values in ‘Noli me tangere’, draws on Jean-Luc Nancy and Derrida to argue that the failure of touch explored in deconstructionist thought can enable a fuller understanding of Bonnefoy’s ‘présence’ as a ‘presence  that absents itself, that withdraws’.87 Certainly, the ‘touch me not’ theme reminds the poet, and the reader, not to seek to fix the ephemeral snowflake, but to envision its evanescent plenitude. The snowflake passes through the world and through the consciousness of the poet and of the reader, leaving its trace in the memory and on the page in the swirl of signs that defy conclusive meaning. The poet turns a whimsical eye to nature as a source of lessons in solitude and togetherness. In ‘De natura rerum’ (DFN, 122) the play of two snowflakes stages a human dilemma as one flake turns away from its gemellar other, its semblable, in the bid to preserve difference. Bonnefoy draws Lucretius’s theory of atoms into his vision of snowflakes, proposing affinities between philosophy and poetry, and also perceiving their differences. Following Lucretius, Bonnefoy oscillates between the non-human world and the human world through the part-analogy of ‘deux flocons’ and ‘deux ombres’ that walk and share laughter in the forest. Beyond the Lucretian intertext, Bonnefoy’s poem counter-echoes, for me, Verlaine’s ‘Colloque sentimental’ (Fêtes galantes) where the love and the memory of two shadows are explored with wry humour and a tinge of cruelty as one denies their shared past, leaving the other (shadow, narrator, reader) forlorn and without explanation. In contradistinction to the Verlainean narrative of difference based on the growing disenchantment of one shadow, Bonnefoy’s vision of the snowflakes offers an example of difference that is compatible with the togetherness of two subsequent human shadows that go, laughing, with one snuggly wrapped in red wool. The move from Lucretius’s lesson on swirling atoms (‘Lucrèce le savait’) to the human experience of togetherness-in-difference finds its material point d’orgue in the colour fragment – the ‘laine rouge’ – of the poem’s explicit. Attention to the non-human world and to sensate and non-sensate nature – in its struggle and its persistence – is at the centre of ‘Juste avant l’aube’ (DFN, 125), a poem that moves visual experience into a fuller synaesthetic experience that is acoustic and thermal (epidermal, even) as correspondences between the senses are discerned. The poet’s visual attention is transfixed by the brilliant pool of blue that stretches from one wall of darkness to the other. Here, chromatic coolness connects with thermal percipience and acoustic awareness to support the sharpening of visual discernment and recognition. In the chill of morning the poet’s mind is clearer and can better register the silence of things. The soundlessness of

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the snow layer allows him to follow the tiny tracks of the chipmunk and to unfold the memories that surge against the blankness of snow: as if white is the enabling ground upon which things come into being, give themselves to be read, and are apprehended. Like the stone obsessively inscribed in Pierre écrite, the snow bears the black traces of the animal’s passage. This ‘black-on-white’ raises an important analogy between snow and language: the presence and the abolition of the sign. The capacity of nature to reveal meaning through the language of traces and signs, visual or auditory, involves the consciousness making sense of interrupted whiteness and apprehending the eruption of colour in the vast forest. In the poem entitled ‘Hopkins Forest’, the poet is drawn by the absolute blackness of the night sky (‘Le noir le plus intense y régnait seul’) that is interrupted by the clustering of stars that glow red. The text of the poet’s book has become indecipherable to him, a swarm of signs covering ‘une blancheur d’abîme’ (133): Bonnefoy’s poetry suddenly opens into a Mallarméan vision that resonates with the material and intellectual values of Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard: the white space of the page (Le Livre) sees meaning spiralling into meaninglessness, where the verbal volatility induced by the visual (chromatic) experience of reading stars replaces any stabilized order.88 The monochrome analogue of the black firmament with its red traces, which envisions the encounter with the Book, causes the agency of the poet to be suspended, displaced by the alterity of white. The fall of the spirit, soundless like snow, is only alleviated by the persistence of colour as a trace of human presence or action. In ‘Hopkins Forest’ (133–5) the white mass falls, drowning colour, but for a single painted plank of timber: the tenuous persistence of colour, startling and mysterious, disrupts the absolute beauty of snow. The sign of the material that we behold but cannot enduringly hold creates, thus, an epiphanic moment that reactivates the ‘noli me tangere’ theme. The encounter with snow in Hopkins Forest is articulated in terms of the poet’s debt to the place (‘je dois vraiment beaucoup à Hopkins Forest’), and here the idea of gift surfaces explicitly once more. The gift solicits a return from the poet-recipient and, in this instance, that return takes the form of recognition: recognition of the brief opening onto the infinite; acknowledgement of the possible abolition of opposites (high and low are differences undone); attentiveness to the snowflakes that begin to fill the space with their soft whispering, opening into a momentary experience of great snowfall. Real recognition, in fine, comes with the return from the forest to the urban space, to frozen streets and icy sludge where the poet’s final gaze is fixed by the mud of trampled snow. Dark human traces on the snow proffer unexpected (de-idealized) beauty and the affirmation of direction in a vision that synthesizes ideas of nature and the search for human bearings (la rose des vents): ‘La neige piétinée est la seule rose’.

The curve of colour The intense moments, where poetry moves from autobiographical instance to wider human and ethical implications – amplified through Bonnefoy’s art writing – create the elliptical concentrations in the verse and prose poetry that

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we have explored. Across the seven sections of Les Planches courbes (2001), the autobiographical and the ethical are now more fully fleshed in prose poetry, verse, and poetic narrative that, together, have the power of testimony and, to a degree, the value of testament. Ethical values emerge in Les Planches courbes through a profound meditation on exile, ageing, loss, separation, childhood, longing, care, and legacy. Empathy and compassion, increasingly formative themes across Bonnefoy’s œuvre, reveal a fuller and more deeply felt turn towards the other (lover, child, father, the mythical Ceres, the biblical Ruth). Often the other is an exile, intimately connected with, but also enduringly separate from, self. In Les Planches courbes, values of hope and love are sustained through the exploration of myth, painting, nature, and personal memory (in elliptical and transposed forms). Here the enfolding of the values of red and orange carries a rich, sensuous, and sometimes sensual charge that extends the warmer colouration of Bonnefoy’s writing of intimacy and the private self. Subtly evoked in Ce qui fut sans lumière and expressed with enigmatic lightness of touch in Début et fin de la neige, desire and intimacy inform Les Planches courbes where the autobiographical impulse is keen and vivid, often attached to the repeated title ‘Une pierre’ with its insistent suggestions of white and grey, and dryness and cold, suggestions that are, momentarily, countered, cancelled, or transformed. Thus, the memory of an intimacy founded on the reciprocal gift of innocence – which is also the gift of colour and light – in ‘Une pierre’ (18) is perpetuated through the simple repetition of gestures and desires enacted by the two who form the couple. Their physical togetherness is measured in the vibrancy of the flame where rare, fragmentary colour carries an erotic charge (‘la même étoffe rouge, dégrafée’, 14; ‘nos deux corps’, 18). Longing and mutuality are expressed in the intensity of orange and red, in anticipation of the lovers’ ecstatic capitulation to the vast flame of the evening sky (‘Une pierre’ (18)). In the dedication of the fire of their innocence is a model for being in the world, as self and other in their singularity are renounced and, in their place, the poet offers a lesson in togetherness. This is poetry of marked inclusivity where the autobiographical self reaches out empathically to the exiled, like Ceres and like Ruth. Love is founded on empathy that stretches constantly outwards: from the intimacy of the couple to others who love, and who despair, and to their representation in art and in poetry. So echoes of Ovid and of Adam Elsheimer are woven into the fabric of Les Planches courbes with the biblical narrative of the displaced Ruth and Keats’s empathy for Ruth in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. The ethos of care for the other (nature, human other, the object, and forms of beauty) that informed the earlier works is now amplified, suffused with the value of hope. So we might ask what fuller part colour plays in articulating autobiographical and ethical values in the final book considered here.89 Across the poems of Les Planches courbes the word ‘couleur’ recurs in the expression of fuller percipience linked to profound affect and ethical feeling around themes of beauty, reciprocity, the gift, and responsiveness. Colour is part of the work of attention and care invested in the other and in the world, and it gives rise, in Bonnefoy’s late poetry, to minor epiphanies. A deeper, resolved connection with the world conjoins colour and other sensory experiences, instantly producing a fuller apprehension

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of the encounter of body and the world (‘odeurs, couleurs, saveurs’ and the ‘roucoulement’ of doves (‘Une pierre’, 37)). There is the gift of sound and of vision in ‘Les Rainettes, le soir’, II (11), ‘Rauques étaient les voix / Des rainettes le soir, / … / Et rouge était le ciel’: in the sensory concert, colour is part of the embodied subjectivity that draws in sound, movement, touch, and sight. A branch is moved away to uncover the gold epiphany that is the mature fig (12), an echo of Hier régnant désert. Poetry’s concentration on such small revelations unfolds the textures of keen appreciation as vision, supplemented by other senses, explores shape and colour in the thing of true presence. Poetry examines the colouring and the re-colouring of the world: quietly ecstatic but always alert to nature in its alterations and variations and its chromatic vibrancy. Together with the green and dark tones of nature at night, gold and red instances are here more frequent; the grey olive of Les Planches courbes (25) that is a sign of the world’s persistence against death reveals once more the immanence of colour in nature and signals the legacy of Bonnefoy’s earlier poetry – the grey of the olive and of the contralto voice appraised in Hier régnant désert.90 The poetry of Les Planches courbes is attentive to the beauty of the world glimpsed and remembered in its arresting fragments, in their alteration and their passing. Through this there unfolds a retrospective vision of life as the poet reflects, via the figure of the child-initiator, on the work of remembering and of forgetting, and on the enduring gift of writing. In ‘La Pluie d’été’ (15–16), the sky seems to proffer the quality of gold sought by the alchemist: desire, never fulfilled, is assuaged in the liquid beauty of the poet’s gathering of gold. The shared experience of going together and gathering together reveals his careful attention to torn beauty in the world (‘couleurs / Qui se déchirent’, in ‘Une voix’ II (34)). In ‘L’Or encore’ the play of gold, green, and grey creates a space of appeasement and restoration, but one haunted by fracture. Early in Les Planches courbes, empathy and the recognition of true beauty emerge as formative of the poet’s vision of the world and of the responses that the world solicits. The longing for the perpetuation of beauty in the face of death is expressed in the insistence of anaphora: ‘Que ce monde demeure’ (25), with its echo of J.S. Bach’s cantata (in French) Jésu, que ma joie demeure (1723) (Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring), reveals the desire to generate a legacy. The earth gives signs that are ‘désaccordés’, dispersal and disorientation confront the self, but they also trigger the impulse to preserve beauty in its myriad fractures and inconstant resurgence: ‘Que ce monde demeure, / Malgré la mort!’. The confrontation with finitude, characteristic of Bonnefoy’s poetic reversibilities, is an articulation of the poet’s hope in the world’s capacity to perpetuate itself. In ‘Une pierre’ (39), the ripping of books gives rise to a salutary erasure of the page that, in becoming blank/white again, offers itself as the receptive ground on which new words will be shaped and fresh meaning made. The torn face of the world uncovers another quality of beauty, one that is more human precisely for being ravaged (‘dévasté’). Once more, the poet, proffering an instance of imperfect beauty in small things, moves against spurious ideality, a constant of his writing since Anti-Platon (1947). The grey olive – the coloured thing – clings to the branch, and it clings to the poem’s concluding line, as a material chromatic sign

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of the poet’s enduring attachment to the world and to the persistence of things that are tangible, proximate, and exquisitely coloured. The discrete object, like the fragile grey olive, carries the value of hope and desire. Such exemplars in Les Planches courbes produce, and are sustained by, larger structures of experience, vivid in shape (often, human-shaped) and intense in coloration: the interrelation of memory, imagination, and art is a model for being in the world and being with, and for, others. Les Planches courbes explores instances of perceiving the beauty of the world in the everyday, in the shifting patterns of natural phenomena like the alterations of weather and in colour that is fragmentary, fleeting, and often implicit. Returning now are the figures of the navigator (passeur) and the boat (barque) that were central to Dans le leurre du seuil. The curved planking of the boat here is a figure for the human project and a metaphor for consciousness that reaches towards the horizon as it sounds the depth of things. The barque asserts itself against the weight of selfregard and the immobility of solipsism that Bonnefoy’s poetry seeks to dispel: Nous sommes des navires lourds de nous-mêmes, Débordants de choses fermées, nous regardons À la proue de notre périple toute une eau noire S’ouvrir presque et se refuser, à jamais sans rive. (‘Dans le leurre des mots’, I) Ships weighed down by ourselves, we burst With locked-up things. From our journey’s prow We peer as blackened waters almost open up for us And then refuse, perpetually without a shore.91

The viscous black water signals the obduracy of the struggle to move forwards, to advance life. In its curved adaptation to the movement of the water, the boat figures a consciousness alert to the world that seeks to cut through the dark element. The curved planks, crafted objects freighted with human intent, are an empathic metaphor for the mind that strives to shape itself in relation to external forces, and to curve itself around the world, working under the weight of the imponderable (PC, 76), like the young boy whose sleep registers the rhythm of the sea (87).92 In ‘Les Planches courbes’, the eponymous, enigmatic figure, resonating across the book, embodies the poet’s bid to take the measure of the world, to feel the rhythm of human longing, and to register the soundings of nature. He makes a sighting of hope (‘Nuée rouge debout au brisant des plages’, 73); the white of the foam and of the lighthouse lamp is transfigured – touched and altered – by the dense red cloud (80), an ekphrastic echo of Mondrian’s Le Nuage rouge (c. 1907) (Plate 32) and an intertextual memory of Bonnefoy’s art writing. Hope, vested in the human object that is the curved planking, is appraised here as a form of desire and defiance that generates new and beneficent actions. Poetry brings to light – and to colour – the ethical project that gives itself to be read in nature and in works of craft and of art. If poetry is perceived, in the abstract, to propose forms of teaching, to which the human subject needs

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to be alert and attentive, the individual poem – or poetic instance – transposes the  idea of lesson into a form of (imagined) practice through the actions of mythical, biblical, literary, and autobiographical personae. In Les Planches courbes this frequently takes the form of a rewriting or re-envisioning of the myth of Ceres. Returning to Ceres’s search for her lost daughter Persephone, a formative theme of Dans le leurre du seuil, the poet introjects into the figure of the child and traces now a corrective to Ovid and, inter alia, to Adam Elsheimer (whose pictorial treatment of the Ceres myth, explored by Bonnefoy in Le Nuage rouge, I discussed above).93 This is a further instance of what the poet described in his rewriting of Claude’s enchanted castle, a rejection of traditional ekphrasis in favour of a practice of writing with the painting, beyond the painting, as he, the poet, might have done.94 In the poet’s rewriting, the child-poet would offer, in place of derision (as portrayed by Elsheimer), an empathic response to the suffering of the exiled mother. The envisioned gift of care and hospitality is bathed in luminous halflight, the subjunctive mood marking the corrective that poetry can bring to the story of Ceres (and to Elsheimer’s treatment of the goddess’s plight) (‘[Cérès] eût reçu de lui / Repos, refuge / Et ce qu’elle perdit, / Elle l’eut reconnu’ (‘Les Chemins, III’, 21)). But, in the perpetual present of the myth and its depictions, hospitality is refused, the expectation of compassion aborts, and Ceres’s unfulfilled hope is figured by the dark absolute of the ‘portes closes’. La Maison natale (83–100) revisits the Ceres myth in an ekphrastic revision of Elsheimer’s painting. This extended poem explores, through a series of waking dreams expressed in the white of breaking sea foam and the grey of ash, the ‘original home’ idea. In the third sequence, the poet, haunted by the Ceres story, rewrites the myth by introjecting once more into the figure of the young boy awake in the darkness (‘Il faisait nuit, des arbres se pressaient / De toutes parts autour de notre porte’). Eschewing the mockery displayed by the original child in Ovid’s tale (and by the boy in Elsheimer’s depiction), the child-poet seeks now to respond with love and empathy: the repeated aim to ‘correct’ the myth affirms the meliorative effect of poetry. But Ceres misinterprets his cry of compassion (‘un cri d’amour’, 85): she fails to recognize empathy and punishes the one who loved her with the poison coursing through his body. Ceres, misreading an act of kindness as an expression of derision, destroys beneficence and thus signals the precariousness of the gesture of gifting. The failed gift exemplifies the sequestering of self from other. Thus, Bonnefoy underscores the lesson for the present that is exemplified by the poetic reworking of the myth narrative: ‘ainsi parle aujourd’hui la vie murée dans la vie’. The lesson is one of empathy aborted in the turning of the gift against the giver through the failure of recognition and the erosion of the capacity for reciprocal empathy. The poet explores the risks of giving and the precariousness of empathy, in settings mythological and aesthetic, and he transposes those preoccupations to the quotidian and the intimate, sustaining the concern for the human that transcends differences of culture and history, experience and time. Ethical values and care for the other contain, always, the seed of their failure. In the seventh sequence of

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La Maison natale, in a vein now more directly autobiographical and affecting (for the poet and for the reader), Bonnefoy recalls the love and care of his young self for his ageing father and reflects on the failure of empathy (90) in the chiaroscuro setting of a luminous garden and a shuttered house. The son recognizes the weight of time and a life’s struggle that are legible in his father’s slowed gestures in the summer light, as the old man appears to interrupt his activity and reflect on what is left undone at life’s end. During their subsequent game of cards in the obscurity of the dining room, the young son covertly replaces his father’s losing hand with the winning sequence. The child awaits the triumphant outcome (for the father and, of course, for himself); he yearns for the other – his parent – to read in his (false) triumph a sign of hope and renewed confidence. But misguided empathy and spurious hope – the obscure work of the naive son in the shaded room – only hasten the inevitable separation of their two lives and two ways: this sequence of La Maison natale presents, in autobiographic mode, an ironic and unspoken poetic echo of Elsheimer’s representation of the young Stelio’s lack of empathy, with a corresponding weaving of light and dark tones. The poet’s voice speaks now in more abstract tones as he evokes the way that becomes lost and the subject/object of ‘avide oubli’, the oxymoron capturing at once the keenness of mourning and the gradual dissolution of memory. Colour cedes to the tense contiguity of light and dark that figures the unceasing oscillation between youth and finitude, desire and reconciliation, falseness and recognition. In the final sequence of La Maison natale, ‘Beauté et vérité’, the poet articulates his mature plea for opening out, for generosity, and for the preservation of hope. He solicits alertness to the distress of the other and urges a quality of empathy that reaches across the agitation of life and the opaqueness of gestures (97–8), giving his own example as a lesson learnt – and to be learnt – in authenticity. ‘Les Planches courbes’ is the eponymous title of the enigmatic poetic narrative at the centre of the book, where themes of gifting and hospitality, exile and rescue, preservation and empathy, resurge in the narrative of the child who has no memory of his name, of his father or mother, or of his home. The boy enjoins the boatman – the Charon-like figure whose presence, at once unfathomable and consoling, haunts Bonnefoy’s œuvre – to take him across the river. The dominant chiaroscuro of the poem is synonymous with the suspension of ordinary life and the imponderability of loss and rescue. The traversing of the boy/boat/boatman is an extended metaphor and a figure for the tribulations of the poetic consciousness, and a site for the sounding of ethical values. Sensing the deep empathy of the boatman, the boy asks his guide to be his father and his home. The boatman rejects the child’s extortionate request, but when the boat founders and splits apart, the man rescues the boy, urging him to forget words of request and even to forget words altogether. The true gift cannot be requested or negotiated. The lesson in empathy is founded on the encounter with the other (child/giant; water/land), an encounter that gives rise to reciprocity, generosity, and above all authenticity, and that calls fixed values into question, where acts of rescue and consolation exist beyond the capacity of language to give them form and meaning.

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In ‘Jeter des pierres’, the final sequence, the poet urges us to look to the horizon and the reddening of the sky, which extends the ekphrastic memory of Mondrian’s red cloud and relates Bonnefoy’s poetry again to the poetics and the chromatics of his art writing. The movement of thought and of poetry attaches once more to the process of colouring. Motion, volatilized by the play of light and darkness and by the arc of white/grey stones, creates unevenness in the terrain. Arriving at the water’s edge, the children raise grey stones above their heads, watching their granite flecks scintillate in the dark. A sudden surging of red against the darkening night sky brings insistent corporeality into a concert of visual, haptic, elemental, and cosmic perceptions as faces turn crimson, clouds grow red, and hands bleed, grazed by the stones. The children’s tenaciousness, marked in the red of quickened flesh, is captured in their looking up from the devastation of the earth towards other eyes, and laughing: the unceasing, re-energized quest for fuller understanding in the world is expressed in the book’s closing paean to unity.

Conclusion Colour reveals its formative – and transformative – agency across Yves Bonnefoy’s poetry. The wider frame of our reading has enabled us to chart Bonnefoy’s journey through the poetic, art historical, and ethical values of colour, from the earliest poetry, through the works of his mid-career and into the later phase of the poet’s creativity illumined by his profound writing on art. Colour’s agency in poetry relates to what colour does – how it nourishes and articulates feeling, how it mediates and modulates value, how it bears the charge of desire and memory. We can relate altered and fuller stress on colour as part of the structural and philosophical development of Bonnefoy’s early work as he moves on from challenging idealism and the legacy of the image and investigates the more material, more existential, and more perceptual qualities of presence: it is here that colour consciousness develops in the exploration of perennial human concerns with nature, with ageing, with creativity, and with solitude and togetherness. Colour also reveals, as it moves and morphs across Bonnefoy’s writing, its capacity to work free of the parodies of colour that are anathema to the poet seeking authenticity and presence. The chromatic austerity of Du mouvement et de l’immobilité de Douve and the restriction of colour to the emblematic and the elemental are integral to this early extended poetic drama of desire and mourning, articulated through the magisterial monochromes of red, white, and black that rise in austere resistance to the temptations of colourism and other manifestations of image and ideal. The transition from the rigour of Douve to the harsh landscape of sterility, disillusion, and doubt in Hier régnant désert expresses itself in the dysphoria of grey. But it is here that grey undergoes a meliorative revalorization and becomes part of a fuller percipience in a bid to correct the aversive power of grey. Thus, monochrome colour makes clear its capacity for alteration, its potential reversibility, and its transformation, and it participates in poetry’s active, generative interrogation of fixed meaning. The idea of colour as integral to things

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and to the world, and a sense of its unbiddable quality – in its presence and its disappearance – are constants of Bonnefoy’s writing from Pierre écrite and Dans le leurre du seuil onwards. Poetry reveals now a fuller, richer chromatic range and a keener sense of the more fluid, more porous agency of colour (like black, which takes on deeper resonance and fills with beauty). The concern with beauty, its value and its ethical capacity, is a constant poetic focus from Dans le leurre du seuil, and colour consciousness is inherent in the work of attention and care. Across Bonnefoy’s poetry, as in Mallarmé’s and Valéry’s, the reader is also struck by the ellipsis or the elision of colour: its intermittence, its rareness, and its silence in texts. This is, in Bonnefoy’s case, a sign of the writerly care taken over the gift of colour: like all gifts, colour is a precarious value, easily damaged, readily compromised. Poetry urges the practice of attention and rewards that investment of care: thus, the three-part prose poem of La Longue chaîne de l’ancre (2008), entitled ‘Le Peintre dont le nom est la neige’, unfolds as a sustained meditation, a conceit even, on snow as a painter attentive to the preservation and the perpetuation of colour. ‘Le Peintre dont le nom est la neige’ opens with a rapturous encounter with colour, specifically with crimson, and with a quiet recognition of the adventitious prismatics of snowfall: Quelle pourpre là-bas, du côté effondré du ciel ! La neige est donc venue cette nuit avec dans ses mains la couleur. (I, 81) Look at the crimson there, on the collapsed side of the sky! So snow has come tonight bearing colour.

Inspired by the chromatic fluctuations of snow to create his own verbal modulations, the poet unfolds a discerning engagement with the coloured materials that shape his connection with the world: Et à des moments je ne vois plus rien que ma chaussure qui troue la blancheur crissante. Le bleu vif des lacets, l’ocre de la toile, d’un grain serré, les marques brunes qu’y laisse la neige qui s’en détache dès que mon pas s’en dégage pour me porter en avant, dans des remous de lumière. (I, 83) And at times I see nothing at all except my shoe that rips a hole in the squeaking whiteness. The bright blue of the laces, the ochre of the canvas, with its fine grain, the brown patches made by the snow which drops off when my steps begin to move me forward, in the turbulent light.

Colour as presence and as process in the world, and in poetry, bears the traces of changing affect and perception; colour registers the movement of memory and desire. As Bonnefoy’s poetry alerts the reader to the capacity of colour in poetry and painting, so he opens up a fuller sensory experience that is present in its fragments and momentary eruptions, and here sound (human, animal, and material) plays a key role (from the grey-rich contralto voice to the green chorus

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of frogs). The imbrication of chromatic and acoustic values reveals the soundscape of Bonnefoy’s poetry as an under-explored area of critical enquiry and one that can benefit significantly from the ‘acoustic turn’ in arts and humanities research today. The poet’s own palette extends with repeated expression of ‘phosphorescence’ and the recurrent evocation of ochre, thick black, blue-green, green, amber, and gold, together with the textures of red-orange petals and fruit (poppy, apples, grapes) (Ce qui fut sans lumière, Début et fin de la neige) and the red that is the preserve of flesh and fabric right up to Bonnefoy’s final poetry in L’Écharpe rouge (2016). A richer palette emerges in Ce qui fut sans lumière that is inspired by and responds to the memory of the ‘true place’, the poet’s home at Valsaintes. In Ce qui fut sans lumière the engagement with painting through the medium of poetry is marked by deeply felt appraisals of nature and of art inspired by the painting of Constable and by the discovery of longing and loss visualized in Claude Lorrain. This intermittent palette expresses the tenacity and the fragility of human experience whenever chromatic values are invested with hope and desire, recognition and empathy, sensuousness and memory. Les Planches courbes, the work that marks our endpoint in this reading of Bonnefoy, reveals, in its weaving together of autobiography and ethics, poetry’s exploration of how to live with self, with other, and how to act in the world, as values of light and dark, and rarer colour, speak powerfully of truth, illusion, recognition, and compassion.95 Bonnefoy’s lesson of attention to things, to nature, to art, and to human beings, made present through colour – colour that is as tenacious as it is often tenuous – offers an affecting appeal to the care needed to repair a fractured world.

C O N C LU SIO N : M OV I N G C O L O U R F O RWA R D

Colour fills an important space of coincidence and of difference between verbal and visual media, yet colour questions are often elided in discussions of poetry (and in studies of literature more generally). Bound by the monochrome world of the printed word, literary researchers can appear chromatically indifferent, judging colour as a referent somehow not proper to their domain, viewing colour as improper even. When colour engages us directly as readers and literary critics, we often deem it inconsequential or incidental, synonymous with and reducible to ‘local colour’. A (black) line is thus drawn. Yet, the case for studying colour in poetry and related art writing is powerfully evidenced by the shape-shifting force of colour in the modernist poetry and art writing of Mallarmé, Valéry, and Bonnefoy. From the celebration of colour and the embrace of its meliorative value, through resistance to colour, to the critique of colour, the relationship of Mallarmé, Valéry, and Bonnefoy with colour is complex and intriguingly paradoxical. Their colour writing bears a charge of uncertainty or anguish that relates to the scepsis and indeterminacy that define the modernist worldview. Colour is an integral part of the modernist sensibility and it is equally central to its structural (and de-structuring) project characterized by metamorphosis, fracture, flux, and dissolution. Across Colourworks we have seen how colour moves and morphs in poetry and related art writing, such that to speak of ‘modernist colour’ seems justified, necessary even, to describe its transformative agency. Colour in Mallarmé, Valéry, and Bonnefoy challenges the traditionalist containments of chromatic symbolism in ways consonant with the anti-telic, fracturing momentum of modernism, and with the resistance of exploratory poetry to the anecdotal and the allegorical, the ornamental and the decorative. More than this, modernist poetry and the poets’ art writing reveal how one value – structure – moves towards the other – colour – such that form and colour are not in Aristotelian conflict; rather, together they create a more reciprocally productive, interactive tension synonymous with modernist pliancy. Fluidity, movement, and dissolution define the colour writing of the poets and art writers studied in this book. The modernist colourist is, perhaps, above all an abstractionist: thus, in a proto-Proustian transformative vision, Mallarmé performs an experimental dissolving of boundaries as he compresses and dilates worlds real and imaginary, concrete and abstract. Valéry’s poetry and art writing

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reveal how the fluctuations of colour, now quickening, now slowing, inhabit objects, surfaces, flesh, and landscapes: this is part of the design and form of things, which also includes ideas, things shaped by the intellect and the critical consciousness invested in poetry and immersed in the appraisal of painting. It is, paradoxically, in the spareness of his late-modern style that Bonnefoy conjoins colour and matter to invoke the thickness of the world and open a sphere of reflection on enduring human concerns: relations, ageing, nature, gifting, hospitality, solitude, empathy, and creativity. Modernist poetry resists the exuberant display of colour, as we have seen across this study: its ways, like those of modernism more generally, are abstractive, elliptical, and paradoxical; frequently austere, but always beguilingly resonant. In Mallarmé, Valéry, and Bonnefoy’s art writing and poetry, colour is reticent rather than saturated; fragmentary rather than fulsome. Colour is subject to intentional restriction, in ways that illuminate modernism’s privileging of the incomplete and the equivocal. As modernist poetry elides, eludes, abstracts, or simply silences the language of explicit colour, so the muting of colour words reveals the immanence of colour. I began this study by making important claims for colour in writing, and for the value of colour study in critical enquiry in poetry and art writing. My sense, reaching the destination of this journey through colour values in modernist writing, is that colour makes a powerful case for our critical attention as soon as we begin to turn our mental sights upon it. At this point, I want to look forwards, at least as much as backwards, and seek to offer some reflections on the working implications of this reading of poetry and art writing for colour study in other areas of literary scholarship and in the wider humanities landscape. To that end, I propose three interrelated ways of approaching colour in text and in other media: colour concept; colour capacity; colour agency. Put succinctly, colour concept addresses the urgency of ‘thinking’ colour actively and purposely: it recognizes the intellectual, affective, and pragmatic intentionality of colour in text, and relates to the translational value of critical thought. Colour capacity, as I envisage it, invites us to examine the untapped or overlooked potential of colour in texts and images; it spans the possibilities that colour brings to the researcher; and, also, relates to the potential of research and researchers to explore colour values. Critical attention to colour agency can help us reveal how colour works in texts, how it affects and alters ideas and values, how it transforms structures, and how it reinvents itself ceaselessly; colour is poein. I should stress that I am speaking purposely about ‘ways’ with and around colour because an alternative term, such as ‘methods’, would be inappropriately formalist as the approaches put to work across this book are intended to be supple in their conception and their practice. I identify these three ways with and around colour, not because things always seem to come in threes, but because these approaches seem to me, at the endpoint of my study, most salient in the textual context of Colourworks; and they seem promising, too, in a wider humanities frame. This trio of terms can be fleshed out, retrospectively, in light of the readings made synchronously (and also comparatively), and always with a strong sense of

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how they might migrate to other media, other chronologies, and other contexts. Let’s now look in more depth at these three ways forward with colour.

Colour concept One of my aims at the outset was to underline the need to ‘think’ colour: to bring intellectual focus and invigoration to colour as a dimension of texts that is often subsidiarized and that slips free of critical engagement. In the first instance, my aim was to track the thought and writerly practice of Mallarmé, Valéry, and Bonnefoy as they engage with colour in art, in nature, in the everyday, and in its material and metaphysical dimensions. Reading modernist poetry and related art writing, in its complexities and slippages, empowers us to develop richer ways of appraising colour, beyond the reductive predictabilities of traditional chromatic symbolism. Across the three Parts of this study, I have taken an exploratory approach to the visuality of the verbal medium, drawing on modern critical thought in ways that are, I hope, sympathetic to the supple working of the writerly colourist. Perspectives drawn from ethics and the philosophy of the image, from gender studies and photography theory, from art history and ekphrasis studies, have revealed the potential for concepts to travel between media, across centuries, and through cultures. Colour is explored by these poets and art writers in ways that resonate with contemporary inter-disciplinary concerns in the academy. Informing my readings, then, has been a concern to explore the translational value of critical thought and pursue inter-disciplinary routes towards broader and deeper colour understanding. Such approaches align with modernism’s deconstructive agency in making colour a site of quickened and equivocal consciousness, which anticipates (or coincides with, in the case of Bonnefoy) some of the directions in critical thought of recent decades. The work of Barthes, Kristeva, Cixous, Deleuze, Levinas, and DidiHuberman, often in visual (as opposed to textual) contexts, has provided concepts and approaches that help us to gain purchase on colour in poetry and art writing; or, put in less appropriative terms, such approaches help liberate colour from normative recuperations, and, in turn, free us to explore colour more deeply and more capaciously, and in ways that traverse boundaries of medium, philosophy, and aesthetic (which relates to ‘colour capacity’ which I’ll return to shortly). My drawing on critical thought and theory has been pliant rather than prescriptive, attentive to the movement and the subtlety of poetry that works blissfully free of methodological determinations and conceptual constrictions. At the same time, the poetry and art writing of these pre-eminent poets of the broad modern period often reveals itself to be ahead of critical thought on colour in our own era: thus, we have seen, in Mallarmé’s writing, for example, how colour values modulate in relation to pressured subjectivity and to the human, often psychic, resonance of material culture. Modern French literature and, especially, ‘difficult’ poetry have to date made little impact in Blue Humanities and Mediterranean studies, inter-disciplinary areas which are shaped primarily by historical studies

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and cultural history studies. The understanding of Valéry’s thought and his writing can contribute to, and benefit from, perspectives developed in migration studies and human geography studies in terms of border-crossing, cultural transmission, and the lived environment.1 It is clear how reading colour (and caring for its value in poetry and art writing) in Bonnefoy might help shed light on how empathy and ethics work in modern poetry (and in the critical understanding of modern poetry). Reading colour helps us relate human concerns through a deep engagement with things in nature (water, light, bird, branch, stone, sound) – especially the fragile and the fragmentary – prefiguring the related concern with the philosophy and practices of care and empathy that is one of the defining strands of humanities enquiry today. In his moving engagement with exile and concepts of home, in poetry and in art writing, Bonnefoy opens ways to the still-underexamined possibilities of dialogue between literature studies and human geography studies and offers fresh directions in environmental humanities whose exploration of poetry and art writing is only now beginning. The colour values explored by Mallarmé, Valéry, and Bonnefoy in their essays on art and on culture are often, strikingly, pre-emptive of critical theory of the late-modern period in articulating colour as a material source and resource, as a conduit of thought, as a site of artistic and interart reflection, and as an intrinsic dimension of human experience. Reading the colour work of Mallarmé, Valéry, and Bonnefoy reveals how colour concepts travel between disciplines. Integral to ethics, affect, perception, consciousness, and creativity, the values of colour we’ve examined anticipate some of the directions of sensory studies, affect studies, material culture studies, sound studies, and visuality studies. In their turn, these approaches in critical thought play their part in helping us conceptualize how colour works across a wide range of formats and media, with reciprocal benefits for poetry and for critical thought: the traffic goes in both directions.

Colour capacity The notion of colour capacity can be thought of in (at least) three ways: the capacity of colour; the capacity of the text; the capacity (or perhaps, borrowing a key concept from Martha Nussbaum, capability) of the reader.2 My exploration of these poets and their art writing and poetry will, I hope, offer ways of thinking colour that help build research capacity in this area of critical enquiry, to demonstrate the intellectual value and the scholarly potential of focusing on the life of colour in texts and in other media. I envisage reader capacity or capability as something beyond ‘reception’, as a form of critical empowerment that motivates the researcher to examine colour actively, prospectively, and speculatively. This is less concerned with the actual reader experience, and more focused on the opportunities of the implied reader to explore and expand ways of reading colour. Responding to the work of Mary Jacobus and of Georges DidiHuberman, and others, I have focused on how the poem shapes the reading that I make and that others, in turn, might make (or not). To respond actively to the opportunity to attend to colour is to make space for it (imaginatively, theoretically,

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ethically); it is to acknowledge its power and its scope. And, as we have seen, this is an active, invigorated area within the contemporary humanities, perhaps most of all in postcolonial studies (viz. the work of Michael Taussig and Richard Dyer), but also, as we have seen, compellingly, in visual culture studies and – with increasing attention to the qualitative dimension of colour – in literature studies. Modernist poetry and art writing reflect on the capacity of colour itself as it travels between media and draws readers into acts of critical reflection on the colour work of text and image. The thought and the writing of Mallarmé, Valéry, and Bonnefoy frame and illuminate the potential of colour work, often in intermedial contexts (painting, sculpture, artefact, screen, fabric), thus creating space for colour reflection, and inciting reader responsiveness to the relations between colour and value that may be aesthetic, cultural, affective, environmental, metaphysical, or embodied. Turning to the capacity of the text: I have paid close attention to colour in the absence of colour words where poetry makes us ‘feel’ or intuit colour without explicitly lexicalizing colour; so, we should not underestimate the capacity of the text, especially where it appears, at first blush, to conceal its own chromatic tracks. The colour capacity of texts where colour is recessed or occluded invites us to focus our attention on colour’s untold story.

Colour agency My purpose in this study has been to give a fuller, focused account of colour at work in the texts of poetry and art writing. To that end I have been concerned primarily with how discourse works, with how words work, which is the fundamental matter of poetry in every age and in all contexts. Colour agency values colour as a force with transformative (e.g. abstractive momentum), shape-shifting power, oscillatory movement. To attend to colour agency is to track the fluctuations of colour in the expansions and contractions of the poetic word. Through critical responsiveness to colour agency – to what colour does in texts  – we begin the work of freeing colour from traditional symbolic recuperations. The critic’s task of liberating colour is empowered by the energy and the lability of colour writing itself in modernist poetry and in art writing. Chromatic agency is perhaps most visible in the colour consciousness of the modernist text. Mallarmé teaches us lessons about consciousness through the invoking of colour, attaching affect to colour, reading colour through idea and feeling; colour as a process connected to time and to finitude; colour informing material cultural studies, organic and inorganic. Valéry invites us to contemplate the fuller sensuousness, even sensuality, and lushness of colour; Bonnefoy, in his art writing as well as his poetry, draws us into a keener sense of environment and landscape, always attentive to the object or the thing, such that categorial distinctions like the exquisitely sensate (skin) or obdurately insensate (rock, stone) reveal deeper connections between them. To focus agency in terms of the visual and the kinetic power of colour brings to light, as we’ve seen across Colourworks, other unexpected dimensions, such

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as the haptic and fleshed quality of colour that reveals something of its multisensorial implications; this takes on particular valency in the modernist lyric with its privileging of flux and indeterminacy, and its exploration of an embodied consciousness. Looking towards future research, colour agency in text and visual image can be approached from a variety of perspectives (affect theory, reader reception theory, ethics, as well as psychology and neurosciences) working individually or in concert. Irrespective of disciplinary perspective, having a concern for the agency of colour invites us to think about how we write about colour: what metaphors are most meaningful to capture how colour works? Indeed, often the critical terms that have, over the course of this study, seemed most pertinent for foregrounding chromatic agency have been metaphors of movement and process. But, we might usefully invoke economic metaphors and construct colour in terms of ‘lack’ and ‘supply’, reflecting colour as a source and resource in our objects of study; we might use (as I have repeatedly, tracking modernist poetry’s transformative project) kinetic metaphors, focusing on the ‘movement’ of colour (its materializations and its vanishing; its blending and its bleeding); and there is also the value of thinking colour corporeally, as a body that dilates and contracts, given that embodied consciousness reveals a sustained, sensuous encounter with colour and relates this to a weave of multi-sensorial values: haptic, acoustic, olfactory, or rhythmic. Colour is a site where theory and practice (writing, reading, viewing, touching, moving, shifting, altering) coincide and collaborate. By taking care over the critical discourse we develop to explore colour, we bring a more intentional and more subject-sensitive approach to the matter of colour. Whilst I’ve continued to refer to ‘text’ based on this study of modernist poetry and art writing, I offer colour concept, colour capacity, and colour agency as possible means of thinking through, and working with, chromatic values and practice in other forms of textuality and material culture, and in other humanities areas from installation art to epistolarity, from the digital art work to the graphic novel or the video game. *** In fine, I return to the three writers studied in Colourworks. Ultimately, and at all points along the way, this study has been about the three chosen poets and art writers. In exploring the work of Mallarmé, Valéry, and Bonnefoy, I set out, implicitly, but committedly, to challenge the idées fixes that prevail among readers more immediately attracted by authorial voices that seem more ‘relevant’ to obvious twenty-first-century concerns; that are more appealingly autobiographical; that are more in sync with fast-reading, fast-consuming contemporary culture, than the reputations of this trio of ‘difficult’ modern poets imply: their work hardly flatters those inclinations. Reading Mallarmé or Valéry and, indeed, much of Bonnefoy’s work might be judged inimical to contemporary culture’s concern with immediacy and, if not explicitness, then a sort of amenable accessibility. What reading for colour has brought out is the more complex

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mediation of modernist poets as they work between the abstract and the material, for colour is something present and palpable (it ‘touches’ our eye) and also unalterably conceptual and abstract, recalcitrant, even, when it comes to trying to put visual colour into verbal patterns of poetry. The agency of colour works to challenge dialectical constraints, and reveals its transformative energy in the mediations that we make between text and world, literature and visual culture, perception and consciousness. Reading for colour thus offers a route into a deeper, more vivid exploration of the work of Mallarmé, Valéry, and Bonnefoy. Reading for colour through the detailed study of modernist poetry and art writing is also, I hope I’ve shown, a way of demonstrating the integral role and value of colour in text. And, reading for colour opens up new pathways in critical enquiry and helps develop fresh inter-disciplinary routes. One of the risks of a multi-author study (whether focused on colour and the modernist lyric in French, or any other theme and form) is the temptation to identify the same or similar characteristics in each of the studied writers, to overdetermine, in other words. In devoting a substantial reading to each poet, I have sought to preserve the specificity of the individual writer, whilst taking opportunities to acknowledge affinities, reveal continuities, discern analogies, and discover equivalences between Mallarmé, Valéry, and Bonnefoy, and thus map a possible reading of French modernism that makes connections where these are often overlooked or underexamined; and those connections happen across the boundaries between texts, genres, material cultures, and art and its reception in the essay. My aim has been to discern differences as well as to identity consonances and convergences. In that context Colourworks contributes to the ongoing, longterm rehabilitation of Valéry, as a writer whose intellectualism and formalism reveal, paradoxically, a more material and sensuous dimension where colour consciousness informs the exploration of corporeality, the senses, and the environment. Beyond this, Valéry’s expansive cultural horizons, his immersion in the classical world, and his deep concern for ‘le monde actuel’ and for the perennial (e.g. his reflections on the Mediterranean as a crossroads of commerce and culture) open up frames that are transhistorical, transcultural, and bordercrossing. Much the same may be ventured for the study of Mallarmé, whose rich material sensibility has captured critics’ attention relative to the poet’s journalism and his verse in ways now well established, yet colour matters have remained under-explored. Colour has been an intermittent focus of critical attention in studies of Bonnefoy: I hope that this reading of Bonnefoy’s art writing and his poetry, whilst inevitably partial and incomplete, gives some sense of the scope and complexity that his writing offers critical enquiry into colour in art, in literature, and in life. My primary focus has been verse and prose poetry and related art writing; framing my study has been a concern with cultural mediations, and, of course, with the relations between poetry and art writing and the paintings that inspire each. That would seem a sufficiently large ambition in itself; a fuller consideration of the historical contexts and historiography of modernism would require another book, and a different kind of study, as would the cultural history – or geography – of colour that the writing of Mallarmé, Valéry, and Bonnefoy

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invites or, even, seems to require, and of which I have been able only to trace an outline and sketch some beginnings. This book will have fulfilled one of its aims if it sparks reflection on how researchers of literature of all periods and disciplinary backgrounds might deepen their engagement with colour, generating fresh, adventurous reading (and viewing) practices across a range of media and formats. As well as opening up the colour life – actual and immanent – of text, I hope to spur readers to realize their own critical capability as readers, and researchers, of colour.

NOTES Introduction 1 2 3 4

5 6 7

Paul Valéry, Œuvres, ed. by Jean Hytier (Paris: Gallimard, ‘Pléiade’, 1960), vol. II, ‘Autour de Corot’ (1932), pp. 1307–25 (p. 1320) (emphasis original). Hereafter in this Introduction, reference will be to OE, II, followed by page range. Translations, unless indicated otherwise, are my own. Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire: Note sur la photographie, Œuvres complètes, vol. V (1977–80), ed. by Éric Marty (Paris: Seuil, 1995), pp. 785–892. I am thinking here of Barthes’s description of jouissance and the disruptive, writerly text in Le Plaisir du texte (1973); of Kristeva’s exploration of jouissance as simultaneously fracturing and enabling in radical poetic and political practice, in La Révolution du langage poétique (1980); of Cixous’s philosophy and practice of écriture féminine; and of Deleuze’s response to figure and flesh, and to the eruptive energy of colour and structure in the art of Francis Bacon (Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation, 1981). Arthur Rimbaud, Œuvres poétiques, ed. by Antoine Adam (Paris: Gallimard, ‘Pléiade’, 1972); André Breton, Nadja (1928) (Paris: Gallimard, 1976); Julia Kristeva, ‘La Joie de Giotto’, in Polylogue (Paris: Seuil, 1977), pp. 210–36. OE, II, ‘Autour de Corot’ (1932), pp. 1307–25 (p. 1320) (emphasis original). If modernism is usually taken to refer to a body of cultural and aesthetic responses to the dislocations of history across two world wars, colonialism, industrialization, and urbanization, the critical construction of modernism’s historiography is complex and fascinatingly contradictory. The unresolvable relationships, in theoretical constructions and in aesthetic practice, between modernism(s) and the experimental avant-gardes, and between modernism and postmodernism, continue to be debated and are enriched today by critical enquiry into mainstream and marginal modernisms (defined by geography, genre, gender, and ethnicity). Competing and complementary studies of the modernist phenomenon in Anglo-American and Continental European literature and related arts include: Stephen Bann, Ways around Modernism (London: Routledge, 2007); Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, Modernism 1890–1930: A Guide to European Literature (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976); Peter Brooker (ed.), Modernism/ Postmodernism (London: Longman, 1992); Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1977); Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism (Cornell University Press, 1990); Michael Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 1984); Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (London: Macmillan, 1995); Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism (London: Verso, 1989). Of those studies which explore modernism in European or specifically French contexts, Bradbury and McFarlane set modernism (and the multifarious avant-garde movements that intersect with modernism) in a dilated

192

8

9

10

11

12 13

Notes frame that allies aesthetic shifts and national variants, a vision whose diachronic range and synchronic focus find their reflection in the scope and specificity of the three-poet study I offer here; Bann argues for a long history of modernism that connects later-nineteenth-century and twentieth-century practitioners to their avatars in Renaissance and Early Modern innovation, a perspective that chimes with Yves Bonnefoy’s transhistorical visual concerns in his poetry and his art writing. Roland Barthes would come to define these qualities as ‘scriptible’ (‘writerly’) in Le Plaisir du texte (1973) and relate them to the self-effacing, neutral style that he called ‘écriture blanche’ (‘blank writing’) in Le Degré zéro de l’écriture (1953). See Roland Barthes, Le Degré zéro de l’écriture, Œuvres complètes, vol. 1 (1942–61), ed. by Éric Marty (Paris: Seuil, 1993), pp. 169–255. The time span of modernism varies according to genre, geography, interdisciplinary values, and, always, individual critical construction. If the 1930s are often seen as marking the end of a period of intense experimentalism (modernism in a strict sense), the interface of modernism and late modernism is not easily discerned, but might be seen to coincide and rival with the postmodern turn of the later 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. John Gage’s studies include Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (London: Thames & Hudson, 1993); Colour and Meaning: Art, Science and Symbolism (London: Thames & Hudson, 1999); Colour in Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 2006). Michel Pastoureau’s works on colour history and colour symbolism include Bleu: Histoire d’une couleur (Paris: Seuil, 2000) and Vert: Histoire d’une couleur (Paris: Seuil, 2013). Murielle Gagnebin, ‘Chromatique et herméneutique’, in Question de couleurs: IXièmes rencontres psychanalytiques d’Aix-en-Provence, ed. by C. David et al. (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1991), offers an important philosophical reflection on art-historical colour. Georges Roque, Art et science de la couleur: Chevreul et les peintres, de Delacroix à l’abstraction (Paris: Gallimard (Tel), 2009), explores the interdisciplinary correspondences between science, aesthetics, and art practice across the modern period. Jacqueline Lichtenstein’s magisterial study La Couleur éloquente: rhétorique et peinture à l’âge classique (Paris: Flammarion, 1989) examines the shift in value that occurs when seventeenth-century art develops reciprocities between reason and sensuality, and colour comes to the fore in a productive relation with line and form. Lichtenstein’s work takes ‘colour’ into the metaphorical realm as rhetorical device (hyperbole, pathos, ornament), a discursive analogue of visual colour. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedermann (London: Bloomsbury, 2013); Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour, ed. by G.E.M. Anscombe (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007); Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l’invisible, suivi de Notes de travail (Paris: Gallimard, 1964); Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon, Logique de la sensation (Paris: Seuil, 2002); Julia Kristeva, ‘La Joie de Giotto’, Polylogue; Jacques Derrida, La Vérité en peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1978); Hélène Cixous, ‘Bathsheba or the Interior Bible’, in Stigmata: Escaping Texts (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 3–15; Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire: Note sur la photographie (1980); Georges Didi-Huberman, L’Homme qui marchait dans la couleur (Paris: Minuit, 2001). Michael Taussig, What Color Is the Sacred? (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010). See my reading of ‘Las de l’amer repos …’ Part I, pp. 44–45, 53.

Notes 14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25

26

27 28 29 30

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Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture (London: Routledge, 1997). Shirley Jordan, ‘Washes and Hues: Reading for Colour in Marie NDiaye’, Thinking Colour-Writing, ed. by Susan Harrow, special number of French Studies, vol. 71, no. 3, July 2017, pp. 362–73. Georges Didi-Huberman, Blancs soucis (Paris: Minuit, 2013). See Part I, pp. 25–26. 39–40. and Part III, pp. 147–68, respectively for these readings of the poetry of Mallarmé and of Bonnefoy through the ethics of care. James Wood, The Nearest Thing to Life (London: Jonathan Cape, 2015). See also Wood’s Serious Noticing: Selected Essays (London: Penguin, 2019). Carol Mavor, Blue Mythologies (London: Reaktion, 2013). Mavor’s recent reflections on blue emerge out of her work on colour in their corporeal contexts in film (Resnais, Marker) and in critical thought (Barthes). See Mavor, Black and Blue: The Bruising Passion of ‘Camera Lucida’, ‘La Jetée’, ‘Sans soleil’ and ‘Hiroshima mon amour’ (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). Emma Wilson, ‘Three Colours, Blue: Kieślowski, Colour and the Postmodern Subject’, Screen, vol. 39, no. 4, 1998, pp. 349–62. Emma Wilson, film review of La Vie d’Adèle, Paris Update, 13 October 2013, n.p. Claude Imbert, ‘Manet, Effects of Black’, Paragraph, vol. 34, no. 2, 2011, pp. 187–98 (p. 189). Mieke Bal, The Mottled Screen: Reading Proust Visually (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997). Jane Goldman, The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf: Modernism, PostImpressionism, and the Politics of the Visual (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Haibing Zhang, ‘Symbolic Meanings of Colors in The Great Gatsby’, Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 10, no. 6, 2015, pp. 38–44. The collaborative project New Directions in Colour Studies, ed. by Carole Biggam (Amsterdam and London: John Benjamins, 2011), crosses fields as diverse as social practice, heraldry, linguistic evolution, onomastics, and psychology, but the primary focus of this survey volume is on evidence-gathering and on interpretations based on lexical frequencies and the statistical distribution of colour instances. Jack Stewart, Color, Space and Creativity: Art and Ontology in Five British Writers (Madison, NJ, and Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2008), gathers much of the critic’s sustained work, over several decades, on colour writing in the modernist novel. Davide Vago, Proust en couleur (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2012). Elodie Ripoll, Penser la couleur en littérature: Explorations romanesques des Lumières au réalisme (Paris: Editions Garnier, 2018). Michael Sheringham, ‘Language, Colour and the Enigma of Everydayness’, in Sensual Reading: Reading in Relation to the Senses, ed. by M. Syrotinski and I. MacLachlan (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2011), pp. 127–52. There is, always, the question of which poets to study and which to leave out: across the same time span, Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Ponge, and Réda, for example, have much to teach us about colour, an area that I touched on in The Material, the Real, and the Fractured Self (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2004). The present study, responding to modernism’s sense of irony and practice of oxymoron, sets out to explore poets whose reputation would more naturally align with indifference or resistance to colour: the cerebral reputation of Mallarmé and the intellectual depth

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Notes and capaciousness of Valéry, poets united in their pursuit of complex structure and form for whom colour may be assumed to be a subordinate or subsidiary focus; Bonnefoy, whilst a subtle, questioning analyst of pictorial colour in his prodigious art writing, takes an elliptical approach to colour in his poetry. This colour restriction unites the three poets of my study and uncovers a fascinating conundrum around colour values that tend at once to the intense and to the spare.

Part I 1

2 3

4 5 6 7 8 9

10

The quotation that forms this section-heading comes from Mallarmé’s ‘Souvenir de l’Exposition de Londres (1872), premier article’, Œuvres complètes, ed. by Bertrand Marchal (Paris: Gallimard, ‘Pléiade’, II, pp. 389–95 (p. 393)); references to this edition will hereafter be abbreviated as OC, followed by the relevant volume number. References to the authoritative, single-volume edition of Mallarmé’s correspondence are to Stéphane Mallarmé, Correspondance 1854–1898, ed. by Bertrand Marchal (Paris: Gallimard, 2019) and will be abbreviated as Correspondance followed by the relevant page number(s). Mallarmé, Écrits sur l’art, ed. by Michel Draguet (Paris: Flammarion, 1998), pp. 100–3. Gayle Zachmann’s important study, Frameworks for Mallarmé: The Photo and the Graphic of an Interdisciplinary Aesthetic (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), challenges the containment of Mallarmé as a purely ‘abstract’ thinker and writer in an integrated discussion of the poet’s engagement with new industrial techniques and related cultural outputs. Zachmann, whilst primarily concerned with technological chromatism, makes a subtle reading of colour in her discussion of ‘Ses purs ongles …’ (pp. 137–40). Apollinaire’s passionate pursuit of Annie Playden, the English governess he had met in the Rhineland in 1901, led him to her family home in Landor Road, Stockwell. She rejected his proposal of marriage and emigrated to America. The experience inspired modernist poetry that mingles lyricism, realism, and fantasy in ‘L’Emigrant de Landor Road’ and ‘Annie’ (Alcools, 1913). Correspondance, letter to Henri Cazalis of 23 or 24 July 1863, pp. 80–2. Mallarmé, Écrits sur l’art, pp. 102–3. Mallarmé, Écrits sur l’art, p. 106. Georges Didi-Huberman, Blancs soucis (Paris: Minuit, 2013). Pamela Genova, Writing Japonisme: Aesthetic Translation in Nineteenth-Century French Prose (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016). Heather Williams, ‘Mallarmé’s Early Correspondence: The Language of Crisis’, Romance Studies, vol. 19, no. 2, 2001, pp. 148–59, argues that the poet’s expression of crisis needs to be approached as a crisis of language itself, and reveals how psychic, corporeal, and metaphysical crises are drawn together in the lexical laboratory of the poet’s early letters. Single-handedly Mallarmé began creating, compiling, and editing La Dernière Mode in the Autumn of 1874. Whether his attention to colour in fashion is ‘genuine’ or merely imitative of the culture of fashion journalism is immaterial. What is significant is, as the poet would say in a different context, the effect of words on the reader. See Jean-Pierre Lecercle’s account of Mallarmé’s fashion-writing, its

Notes

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substance and style, relative to this short-lived journal and contemporaneous fashion journalism in Mallarmé et la mode (Paris: Librairie Séguier, 1989). 11 Mallarmé, Écrits sur l’art, p. 109 (plan for the first issue of the magazine, 6 September 1874). 12 Mallarmé, Écrits sur l’art, p. 115. 13 John McCann comments on this tiny poem in ‘Mallarmé and the Art of Celebration’, in Challenges of Translation in French Literature: Studies in Honour of Peter Broome, ed. by Richard Bales (Bern: Peter Lang, 2005), pp. 186–91 (p. 187). 14 I have sought to capture, via this recherché colour-word, the ochre hue (and, even, perhaps the darker, buff tone of the fruit in its crystallized form). At the same time, I preserve the nominal trace of ‘la fauve’, which means ‘wild beast’, and, with prospective significance, anticipates the Fauvist colour experiment around Matisse, in the early twentieth century. 15 Roger Pearson, Mallarmé and Circumstance: The Translation of Silence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 2004), Part II explores the alliance of quotidian and creative values in the poet’s vers de circonstance. 16 Pearson, Mallarmé and Circumstance, takes Yves Bonnefoy to task for the opinion expressed in his preface to Bertrand Marchal’s edition of Mallarmé’s Poésies (Paris: Gallimard, ‘Collection Poésie’, 1992) (p. 16). 17 Francis Ponge, Le Parti pris des choses (1942). See Parts II and III for discussion of fruit poetics in Valéry and in Bonnefoy, pp. 74, 109–112 and pp. 127, 142, 144, 157, respectively. 18 The everyday, at the centre of much critical thought in the twenty-first-century academy, has been influential in contemporary Mallarmé studies. Hélène Stafford’s, Mallarmé and the Poetics of Everyday Life (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2000), and Damian Catani’s, The Poet in Society: Consumerism, and Politics in Mallarmé (Bern: Peter Lang, 2003) make an important contribution to a vision of Mallarmé as a writer allying complex thought with penetrating attention to the culture of ordinariness. 19 Correspondance, letter of 14 November 1862 to Henri Cazalis, pp. 50–3 (p. 51). 20 Correspondance, pp. 216–17 (p. 216). 21 David Batchelor, The Luminous and the Grey (London: Reaktion, 2014). 22 The variations on grey are captured respectively in ‘Avis’ (6 September 1874) and in ‘La Mode’ (1 November 1874, 15 November 1874) (OC, II, pp. 512, 581, and 602). 23 See the University of Glasgow’s online catalogue raisonné of Whistler’s etchings at http://etchings.arts.gla.ac.uk/catalogue/biog/?nid=MallS (accessed 15 August 2020). 24 Correspondance, pp. 143–4 (p. 144). 25 Correspondance, p. 196. 26 Correspondance, p. 197. 27 Correspondance, pp. 160–2 (p. 161). 28 Divagations, pp. 132–42 (134). 29 Correspondance, pp. 117–18. 30 Correspondance, letter to Théodore Aubanel of 6 May 1865, pp. 128–9 (p. 128). 31 Correspondance, letter to Théodore Aubanel of 6 December 1865, p. 141. 32 Correspondance, pp. 30–2 (p. 31). 33 Correspondance, letter to Henri Cazalis of 29 May 1867, pp. 192–3 (p. 192). 34 Colour – visual and acoustic – becomes a site of empathy, poignancy, and friendship with the arrival of the parakeet named Semiramis, imported from the West Indies, that is a gift for Mallarmé’s dying son, Anatole, from the Comte de Montesquiou (letter of 10 August 1879, Correspondance, pp. 457–8).

196 35 36 37

38 39

40 41 42 43

44

45 46 47

48

49

Notes See Part III for Bonnefoy on the encroachments of modern urban space, pp. 148, 174. ‘Notes sur le langage’, in Igitur, Divigations, Un coup de dés, ed. by Bertrand Marchal (Paris: Gallimard, Folio, 2003), pp. 63–76. Cf. ‘L’Invitation au voyage’ : ‘Des meubles luisants, / Polis par les ans, / Décoreraient notre chambre ; / Les plus rares fleurs / Mêlant leurs odeurs / Aux vagues senteurs de l’ambre, / Les riches plafonds, / Les miroirs profonds, / La splendeur orientale, / Tout y parlerait / À l’âme en secret / Sa douce langue natale’ (lines 15–26). OC, I, p. 132. Roger Pearson, Stéphane Mallarmé (London: Reaktion, 2010), pp. 76–8, makes a close reading of the tensions staged in this poem in terms of the perpetual, empty lure of the Néant, the refuge sought in the material world (metaphorized by drapes), and the mental anguish sparked by the memory of pure beauty. Robert Greer Cohn, Towards the Poems of Mallarmé (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980), discusses certain images of the ‘Sonnet à Wyse’, notably the cosmological evocation of the hair that relates a number of Mallarmé’s early poems in tones reminiscent of Baudelaire. Jean-Luc Steinmetz (ed.), Mallarmé: Poésies et autres textes (Paris: Livre de Poche, 2005), p. 55. See discussion of Valéry’s pomegranate poem in Part II, pp. 110–112. OC, II, pp. 667–71 (p. 669). Joy Newton discusses Zola’s practice in terms of ‘interdisciplinary osmosis’ in ‘French Literary Landscapes’, in Richard Thomson (ed.), Framing France: The Representation of Landscape 1870–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), pp. 35–58 (p. 35). The key primary texts are Baudelaire’s ‘Salon de 1846’ and ‘Le Peintre de la vie moderne’ (1863). Jennifer Phillips, ‘Relative Color: Baudelaire, Chevreul, and the Reconsideration of Critical Methodology’, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, vol. 33, nos 3–4, Spring–Summer 2005, pp. 342–57, is an important assessment of Baudelaire’s debt to scientific colour-thinking. See Lloyd James Austin, Essais sur Mallarmé (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), chapter 2, ‘Mallarmé, disciple de Baudelaire : Le Parnasse contemporain’. Translated by William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954), https://fleursdumal.org/poem/202 (accessed 15 August 2020). OC, II, p. 151. This extract is from the preface to the catalogue for the retrospective exhibition of Morisot’s work held at the Durand-Ruel Gallery, 5–21 March 1896, on the first anniversary of the painter’s death. I return to this important essay on Morisot, pp. 27–29. Manet’s blacks are central to his painting, emerging often in representations of clothing, male and female: Breakfast in the Studio: The Black Jacket (1868); Berthe Morisot, in Black Hat (1872); the barmaid’s dress in Un bar aux Folies-Bergère (1882). The 2012 exhibition at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts devoted to ‘Manet in Black’ focused on the artist’s printmaking and graphic art. In ekphrastic terms we encounter the stark visual-verbal power of black in Manet and Mallarmé’s collaboration over the translation-illustration of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven in 1875. Only Manet’s Le Chemin de fer (1872–73) had been accepted by the Salon. See Carol Armstrong, Manet Manette (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), chapter 8, for a discussion of Manet’s strategy of seeking official acceptance of his innovative work by painting towards the expectations of the Salon in this period.

Notes 50 51 52 53 54

55

56 57

58 59 60 61

197

Mallarmé, Écrits sur l’art, p. 300. Mallarmé, Écrits sur l’art, pp. 300–1. Mallarmé, Écrits sur l’art, pp. 303–4. Mallarmé, Écrits sur l’art, pp. 306–24 (p. 313). The potential of an intermedial approach may often go unnoticed or neglected, as Henri Mitterand, discussing Zola, suggests when he identifies an unexpected relation between Manet, Zola, and Mallarmé: ‘un même fil, inaperçu des critiques, et encore mal perçu aujourd’hui, unit L’Assommoir, Le Linge et L’Après-midi d’un faune, en dépit des différences de genres et de langages’ (Zola, vol. II, L’Homme de Germinal 1871– 1893 (Paris: Fayard, 2001), p. 338). It is fascinating to speculate as to what Mitterand is alluding to: whether their celebration of blank/white in different media, stylistic convergences around abstraction and ambiguity (e.g., free indirect style), interart experimentalism that challenges telic values and representationalism, and a turn to silence beyond the clamour of surface. Zola’s early essays on the painting of Manet (1866–8) illuminate the prismatic patch or the colour trace that slips free of its referent: when Zola writes ‘[Manet] voit blond et il voit par masses’, his very syntax enacts the flight from a subject (or subject matter) to style, echoing the abstractionist aesthetic that will develop across the arts in the latter part of the century. When Zola is discussing Manet’s Le Linge (1875), he foregrounds the painter’s insistence on colour that is fragmented, flattened, and planal in the treatment of the central laundress figure: ‘Les yeux [de sa laveuse] sont représentés par deux plaques noires: le nez, les lèvres, sont réduits à de simples lignes roses’ (Zola, Écrits sur l’art, ed. by Jean-Pierre Leduc-Adine (Paris: Gallimard, collection ‘Tel’, 1991), p. 349). Mallarmé, Écrits sur l’art, p. 354 (‘Berthe Morisot’, ‘Quelques Médaillons et portraits en pied’, in Divagations). Jill Anderson, ‘The Meaning beyond the Dress: Alterity and Economy of Desire in Mallarmé’s “Berthe Morisot”’, French Studies, vol. 60, no. 1, January 2006, pp. 33–48, focuses on the erotic and the national/transnational values articulated by Mallarmé in his tribute to Morisot. Mallarmé, Écrits sur l’art, p. 50. See Theo Hermans, The Structure of Modernist Poetry (London and Sydney: Croom Helm, 1982) for a clarifying discussion of order and structure in Mallarmé’s poetry that sets the poet’s theory and practice in a wider, transnational modernist context (Chapter One, ‘Mallarmé’s Language: Transposition, Structure’). Mallarmé, Écrits sur l’art, p. 355. Mallarmé, Écrits sur l’art, p. 356. The poem was first published in 1866 in the Poèmes du ‘Parnasse contemporain’. Mallarmé’s letter to Henri Cazalis of 7 [?] January 1864, Correspondance, pp. 88–9, explains his protracted struggle over the composition of the poem; the 200 readings to which the poet has subjected his text; the intended reading process for ‘L’Azur’; and the notion of the ‘effet produit’. The struggle for the poem reflects the struggle within the poem and the figuration of ‘le vrai drame’ through the lure and the loathing of azure. In his letter to Cazalis (12 May 1866), the poet describes the conflict that is rehearsed in ‘L’Azur’: the possible joy of the powerless poet springs from the deflection from the ideal and the search for happiness of a more quotidian kind; yet azure persists spectrally (in both senses). Jean-Luc Steinmetz evokes the haunting of Mallarmé’s poem by Baudelaire’s ‘Le Cygne’ and its ‘ciel cruel et ironiquement bleu’, and by Hugo’s ‘Le Titan’ (Mallarmé, Poésies et autres textes, p. 136, p. 138). The phrase ‘grands trous bleus’ (line 16), with its insistent monosyllables, suggests, lexically and rhythmically, the puncturing of an Ideal. ‘Je

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62 63

64

65

Notes suis hanté. L’Azur! l’Azur! l’Azur!’ – what the poet names ‘le cri sincère, et bizarre, de la fin, l’azur … ’, in his 7 (?) January 1864 letter to Cazalis, – casts the colour ideal as no more than a ‘vocable’, a collocation of sounds, a signifier emptying out as it is repeated, ending up signifying nothing. OC, I, p. 654. ‘Impersonality’ guides Mallarmé’s modernism, opening up a range of substitutable identities. In terms of gender identity, Mallarmé was playfully creative in his pseudonymous assuming of feminine personae in his fashion journalism (La Dernière Mode). Mallarmé is at Tournon at this time: a rheumatism-afflicted, exasperated teacher of English, he loathes his provincial posting (‘mon exil’, Correspondance., pp. 86–7 (p. 86)); in another letter to Armand Renaud, 8 January 1864, Correspondance, pp. 91–2 (p. 91), he writes, ‘L’Ennui m’a coiffé’. Mallarmé’s attention to the symbolic and plastic resonance of monochrome values is a structuring quality of his poetry and his poetics. See Helen Abbott (infra, note 97) on the expressive qualities of colour in Baudelaire’s and Mallarmé’s aesthetics, specifically the power of colour to speak as if with its own voice. In ‘Eikones’ (October 1899) (Cahiers 1894–1945, ed. by Nicole Celeyrette-Pietri and Judith Robinson-Valéry (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), vol. I), Valéry unfolds his vision of the everyday scene in central Paris in ways redolent of Baudelairean spleen. He traces the figure of the suffering man through alliterative repetition that scans his slow shuffling movement. Kinesis gives way to colourism where the figure is abstracted, at the end of the phrase, into a vision of yellow and black that is reminiscent of Mallarmé’s evocations of London. This writerly vision of the sick man is created in duotone terms: ‘[il] passe à pas pénibles, jaune et noir’ (p. 305), whilst the urban space is captured in its tactile, visual, olfactory, and thermal values as Valéry orders the fragments of a multi-sensorial landscape.

‘Paris – octobre – midi I. Boulevard des Capucines, soyeux, vitres laquées, glacées d’azur sombre […] odeur de peinture fraîche’ (p. 309). ‘toute la nue et le rose du soir’ (p. 309) Paris – October – midday I. Boulevard des Capucines, sleek, lacquered windows, glazed in dark azure […] the smell of wet paint ‘all the nakedness and the pink of the evening light’ 66 67 68 69 70

The notes to the text of ‘Eikones’ discuss this chromatic cityscape as an early version of ‘La Ceinture’ (Charmes). Correspondance, letter of 23 or 24 July 1863 to Cazalis, pp. 145–9 (pp. 145–6). Correspondance, letter of 4 June 1862 to Cazalis, pp. 53–5 (pp. 54–5). Correspondance, letter of 28 or 30 December 1862 to Cazalis, pp. 108–9 (p. 108). Mallarmé had arrived in London in November 1862. Correspondance, letter to 23 July 1863 to Cazalis, pp. 145–9 (p. 145). Correspondance, letter of 28 April 1866 to Cazalis, pp. 296–301 (pp. 297–8). The same coincidence of physical and mental states emerges, as Mallarmé reflects on the difficult work of advancing Hérodiade. Poetological matters and physiology produce the two voids: the void that is the transcendental ideal and the void inside the poet’s chest. I discuss this on pp. 29, 30–32, 44, 52.

Notes 71

72

73 74

75

76 77

78 79 80 81 82 83

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Whistler’s ‘Thames set’ includes ‘Limehouse’ (1859); ‘Thames Warehouses from Thames Tunnel Pier’ (1859); and ‘Rotherhithe’ (1860). Nicholas Daly, in an article on The White Girl, quotes George Du Maurier’s evocation of Whistler busy painting ‘among a beastly set of cads and every possible annoyance and misery’ (Modernism/ Modernity, vol. 12, no. 1, January 2005, pp. 1–26 (p. 4)). Baudelaire, critique d’art suivi de critique musicale, ed. by Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), pp. 395–6. Baudelaire affirms, at the end of his commentary, that the etching is the pictorial medium ‘[qui] se rapproche le plus de l’expression littéraire’. Rosemary Lloyd describes ‘L’Azur’ as ‘the most Baudelairean of Mallarmé’s poems’, in Mallarmé: The Poet and His Circle (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), p. 43. For environmental humanities approaches to French nineteenth-century literature and related culture, see Daniel Finch-Race and Julien Weber (eds), French Ecocriticism/Ecocritique française, L’Esprit créateur, vol. 57, no. 1, 2017, for its introduction and for studies of Fromentin, Verne, Mallarmé, and Zola. See also Stephanie Posthumus, French ‘Eco-critique’: Reading Contemporary French Fiction and Theory Ecologically (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2017). Peter Dayan, Art as Music, Music as Poetry, Poetry as Art, from Whistler to Stravinsky (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), reveals the capacity of individual arts in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to enfold the qualities of other arts, such that each art gives itself to be understood and approached through values that define one of its sister disciplines. Correspondance, letter of 13 or 14 November 1862 to Cazalis, pp. 90–4 (p. 91). See Mary Jacobus, Romantic Things: A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2012), for a deep-reaching study of weather, atmosphere, and material things in Romantic and modern poetry and visual culture that interrogates the reciprocally active relations between the sensate and the insensate. Jacobus explores the alertness of poets, painters, filmmakers, and photographers to the urgent unknowability of the world and to our unceasing desire to explore its landscapes through projects perceptual, intellectual, and aesthetic. See Pearson, Mallarmé and Circumstance, p. 214. See also Carl Paul Barbier (ed.), Correspondance Mallarmé–Whistler: histoire de la grande amitié de leurs dernières années (Paris: Nizet, 1964) and Lloyd, Mallarmé: The Poet and his Circle. Stephen Hackney, ‘Colour and Tone in Whistler’s “Nocturnes” and “Harmonies” 1871–72’, Burlington Magazine, no. 136, October 1994, pp. 695–9. Margaret MacDonald and Patricia de Montfort, An American in London: Whistler and the Thames (London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2013), p. 125. Correspondance, letter to Henri Cazalis of 7 [?] January 1864, pp. 88–9 (p. 88). Marcel Proust, Albertine disparue, chapter three (‘Séjour à Venise’). Whistler articulates his thoughts in the discourse of rarefaction that is consonant with the project of high art and elite cultural values, but he offsets these ‘superior’ values with a more humble sense of the artist’s need to learn how to view and place himself at the service of his subject, nature. For a thoroughgoing revision of the critical poncif of Mallarmé, stereotypically cast as the elitist poet, see Catani, The Poet in Society: Art, Consumerism and Politics in Mallarmé on the poet’s commitment to democratic principles and collective values. Stéphane Mallarmé, Le ‘Ten O’Clock’ de M. Whistler (Paris: Imprimerie de la Revue Indépendante, 1888), pp. 15–16. For Mallarmé’s strategy as translator of the lecture,

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see his letter to Whistler of 25 April 1888 at the University of Glasgow Whistler electronic archive: https://www.whistler.arts.gla.ac.uk/correspondence/inst/ display/?rs=5&instid=RevInd (accessed 15 August 2020). 85 Margaret MacDonald, Palaces in the Night: Whistler in Venice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), studies the significance of the Venice episode for Whistler’s art and his aesthetic, tracing the evolution of his etching practice. Suzanne Singletary, James McNeill Whistler and France: A Dialogue of Painting, Poetry and Music (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), offers a detailed reading of the deep affinities of Mallarmé and Whistler, and their relation to Monet. See Singletary on Mallarmé’s blanks as an analogue to Whistler’s colour work. 86 For Whistler, the modern artwork stands in and for itself, generating value that is existential rather than representational. 87 Inter alia, ‘Les Fenêtres’, ‘Les Fleurs’, ‘Soupir’, ‘Angoisse’, ‘Epilogue’, ‘Eventail’, ‘Autre éventail’, ‘Billet’. Among the untitled poems are some of the most powerful and intriguing written by Mallarmé: ‘Quand l’ombre menaça …’, ‘Le vierge, le vivace …’, ‘Victorieusement fui …’, ‘Ses purs ongles très haut …’, ‘À la nue accablante tu …’. 88 Robert Greer Cohn, L’Œuvre de Mallarmé, Un coup de dés (Paris: Les Lettres, 1951); Jacques Derrida, La Dissémination (Paris: Seuil, 1972). 89 Derrida, La Dissémination (p. 220), refers to Cohn’s work on the ‘phrase-titre’ and generative phrases in L’Œuvre de Mallarmé, Un coup de dés, chapter II, ‘La phrasetitre comme noyau’, pp. 53–68. 90 Derrida, La Dissémination, p. 222. 91 Derrida, La Dissémination, p. 222. 92 Derrida, La Dissémination, p. 322. The integration of the blank and of words, both soliciting and resisting meaning, reveals what Derrida calls ‘l’hymen’ (p. 221), and which is consonant with the threshold figure of equivocation central to Mallarmé’s poetry and poetics, and which becomes a founding tenet of deconstructionist thought. 93 Claude Imbert in ‘Manet, Effects of Black’, Paragraph, vol. 34, no. 2, 2011, pp. 187–98 (p. 189) recalls Baudelaire, Zola, and Mallarmé’s appreciation of Manet’s blacks, highlighting their sense that the painter’s particular use of black was ‘the seal of modernity and [evidence of] the newcomer fulfilling the contract between modernity and colour already set out quite eloquently by Baudelaire’s Salons’. Rosemary Lloyd stresses Mallarmé’s alertness to Manet’s experiment with black in Mallarmé: The Poet and his Circle (p. 124). 94 ‘Le Jury de peinture pour 1874 et M. Manet’, Mallarmé, Ecrits sur l’art, pp. 297–302 (p. 300). 95 ‘Le Jury de peinture pour 1874 et M. Manet’, Mallarmé, Ecrits sur l’art, pp. 297–302 (p. 300). 96 Baudelaire, critique d’art suivi de critique musicale, pp. 153–6 (p. 155). 97 The acoustic values of colour are explored by Helen Abbott in Between Baudelaire and Mallarmé: Voice, Conversation and Music (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 168–70. She makes a close reading of the sound performance of ‘azur’ in ‘L’Azur’. 98 This bears comparison with Matisse’s appraisal of Manet’s radiant blacks (referring to Manet’s 1866 portrait of Zacharie Astruc ‘a new velvet jacket is expressed by a blunt, luminous black’). See David Batchelor (ed.), Colour: Documents of Contemporary Art (London and Cambridge, MA: Whitechapel Gallery/MIT Press, 2008), p. 100. 99 ‘Edouard Manet’, Divagations, p. 169. 100 Translated by Rosemary Lloyd, Mallarmé; The Poet and his Circle, pp. 140–1.

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101 Pearson, Mallarmé and Circumstance, pp. 214–15. 102 See the University of Glasgow electronic edition of Whistler’s correspondence, ms Whistler M137, http://www.whistler.arts.gla.ac.uk/correspondence/ (accessed 15 August 2020). 103 Pearson suggests that this is an indirect metonymic allusion to the press and to hostile critics, in Mallarmé and Circumstance, p. 214. 104 Blackness engulfs or threatens the edges of his space. See the landmark article on Mallarmé and photography by Yves Bonnefoy, ‘Igitur and Photography’, translated by Mary Ann Caws, PMLA, vol. 114, no. 3, May 1999, pp. 329–45, where the contemporary poet reads ‘Igitur’ in proleptic relation to Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard, and reflects on the relationship between Igitur’s mirror and Degas’s photographic portrait of Mallarmé, discerning the reversal of despair (poetic, autobiographic) into tenacious hope. 105 See Seth Whidden, Models of Collaboration in Nineteenth-Century French Literature: Several Authors, One Pen (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010). Whidden highlights the quarrel over colour that saw Manet and Mallarmé resist the publisher’s choice of black silk for the portfolio presentation of the work, and their selection instead of a parchment cover in green or light yellow to match the cover (p. 85). 106 John Ruskin famously insulted Whistler by claiming that the American artist was ‘flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face’ when he painted Nocturne in Black and Gold (1875), which was exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877 (Fors Clavigera, no. 79, June 1877). The resulting libel case was won by Whistler. 107 Correspondance, pp. 91–2 (p. 91). 108 Black needs to be read conjointly in terms of autobiographical values and poetic values, for these are inseparable. A sense of creative impotence exacerbated by depression due to unalleviated personal circumstances (a dysphoric existence in Tournon and Besançon; the travails of school-teaching; economic pressures; interrupted writing of Hérodiade and of L’Après-midi d’un faune) surfaces obliquely in the poetry, creating a space for self-analysis (1869). 109 Correspondance, p. 581. Malcolm Bowie, Mallarmé and the Art of Being Difficult (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), explores the difficulty of reading the sonnet’s ‘Du souriant fracas originel haï’, revealing the instability of the conditions for making meaning, and opening up the plurality of readings that the poet’s audacious syntax makes possible (pp. 7–8). 110 Translated by Hubert Creekmore (the online Poetry Foundation), https://www. poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=25940 (accessed 15 August 2020). 111 Translated by Jonathan Culler, Baudelaire, the Flowers of Evil (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 150. 112 Michael Taussig, What Color Is the Sacred? (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009), reminds us that alchemy is fundamentally about the colouring of base metals (p. 26). 113 Cohn, Towards the Poems of Mallarmé, p. 120. 114 For an exceptional, multi-level analysis of the sonnet in its philosophical, cultural, cosmological, and syntactic irresolution, see Malcolm Bowie, ‘Genius at Nightfall: Mallarmé’s “Quand l’ombre menaça de la fatale loi …”’, in Nineteenth-Century French Poetry: Introductions to Close Reading, ed. by Christopher Prendergast (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 225–42.

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115 Quoted in Margit Rowell, ‘Bleu II, 1961, de Joan Miró’, Cahiers du musée national d’art moderne, no. 15, 1985, pp. 48–59 (p. 48). 116 Jarman’s last film Blue (1993) attains a point of pure visual abstraction that registers the artist and filmmaker’s diminishing ophthalmic powers. 117 Jacques Rancière, Mallarmé: La Politique de la sirène (Paris: Hachette, 1996), p. 41. 118 J.-K. Huysmans, À rebours (Paris: Lettres françaises, 1981), chapter four, pp. 111–22 (p. 116). 119 Bowie, Mallarmé and the Art of Being Difficult, undertakes a detailed examination of ‘Prose (pour Des Esseintes)’. Marshall Olds’s monograph study of the poem, Desire Seeking Expression: ‘Prose pour Des Esseintes’ (Lexington, KY: French Forum, no. 42, 1983), pursues a close etymological exegesis of the poem and an exploration of the relation between desire and language in this text and in the wider context of Mallarmé’s poetry. Olds highlights the acoustic value of colour in ‘L’or de la trompette d’Eté’ (p. 27). 120 Bowie, Mallarmé and the Art of Being Difficult, p. 60. 121 Olds, Desire Seeking Expression, p. 33. 122 Whilst irises are most often associated with late Monet and with Van Gogh (and, in our own time, with the work of Elizabeth Blackadder), Manet’s ‘Branche d’iris’ series (1880, watercolour on paper, which John Singer Sargent purchased at a posthumous sale of Manet’s work in 1885) is a possible pictorial echo in Mallarmé’s poem. 123 Translated by Peter Manson, at http://enclavereview.org/stephane-mallarme-thepoems-in-verse-translation-with-notes-by-peter-manson/ (accessed 15 August 2020). 124 Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, ed. by Jean-Yves Tadié (Paris: Gallimard, Pléiade, 1987), vol. I, p. 139. 125 Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, vol. II, p. 154. 126 Peter Collier, Proust and Venice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), especially chapter 4, examines Proust’s transformative working of azure (and red) as a writerly practice analogous with the art of Ruskin. 127 See Michel Serres, Angels: A Modern Myth (Paris: Flammarion, 1995; original French publication, Flammarion, 1993), ‘The Place of Prepositions’, pp. 140–7. 128 Richard Serrano, Neither a Borrower: Forging Traditions in French, Chinese, and Arabic Poetry (London: Routledge, 2017), argues that Mallarmé de-appropriates Chinese art by recognizing the creative autonomy and agency of the artist freed from exoticist recuperations. 129 Contemporary with Mallarmé’s writing of ‘Las de l’amer repos …’ is Whistler’s Symphony in White, No. 2 (1864), which, as it explores the harmonies of white, draws visual and haptic values together where the young woman’s fingers caress the porcelain vase on the mantelshelf. 130 Correspondance, pp. 30–2 (p. 31). 131 OC, I, p. 146. The ‘Scène dialoguée’ (1869 / 1871) is the second stage of the Hérodiade project; the project would end in 1896 with the publication of the Noces d’Hérodiade. 132 J.M. Whistler, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (1890) (London: Dover Fine Art Publications, 1968). In his famous ‘Ten O’Clock Lecture’, published in 1888, which Mallarmé translated, Whistler unfolded his aesthetic of ‘pure art’ founded on the rejection of didactic and utilitarian values, and on a turn to abstraction. See pp. 36–8.

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133 For a probing examination of Whistler’s aesthetic and of how John Ruskin, accusing Whistler of offending public taste, had identified accurately the antirepresentational and abstractive values of the painter’s aesthetic, see Dayan, Art as Music, Music as Poetry, Poetry as Art, chapter 1. Dayan demonstrates, behind the invocation of musical values of harmony, the precarious balance in Whistler’s art between the suggestion of subject-matter and the embrace of abstraction. 134 David Batchelor, Chromophobia (London: Reaktion, 2000), discusses the tyranny of white in twentieth-century architecture and design as a manifestation of the Western world’s denigration of colour as infantile, feminine, unruly, and incontrovertibly ‘other’. 135 Ellen Burt, ‘Mallarmé’s “Sonnet en yx”’, Yale French Studies, no. 54, 1977, pp. 55–82, explores the alterations of white and black in the poem, underlining the importance of white’s heterogeneity and drawing attention to the suspended concentration of black-and-white values in the central onyx figure and its textual repercussions (pp. 61–2). 136 OC, II, pp. 214–18 (p. 215). 137 It is to the alteration of colour-effect in white that Mallarmé draws our attention. Bowie, Mallarmé and the Art of Being Difficult, tracks, incomparably, the modulation of whiteness in the tercets of ‘Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui’ (1885), where whiteness is visited upon the swan in the first tercet and whiteness is innate to the swan in the second tercet (p. 11). The modulation that Bowie discerns points to a framing of colour as a concept, as a state, and as a process. 138 Adapted from the translation by A.S. Kline (the Poetry in Translation website), https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/French/Mallarme.php#anchor_ Toc223495106 (accessed 15 August 2020). 139 Taussig, What Color Is the Sacred? p. 245. 140 Singletary, James McNeill Whistler and France, p. 119, focusing on the solitude of the creative figure for Mallarmé as for Whistler, reads ‘Salut’ as a methodology of creativity whereby the confrontation with writerly anxiety (‘le blanc souci de notre toile’) is always integral to the process of poetic (and artistic) making. 141 OC, II, ‘Le Mystère dans les lettres’, pp. 229–34 (p. 234). 142 ‘The Mystery in Letters’, translated by Barbara Johnson, Stéphane Mallarmé, Divagations (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 2007), pp. 231–6 (p. 236). 143 Doubt, hesitation, and effort become visible on the page. Bowie views the poem’s graphic layout as ‘a tenuous tracery of suggestion around [Mallarmé’s] startling syntactic scheme’, inviting the study of acoustic features, syntactic values, and imagery (Mallarmé and the Art of Being Difficult, p. 120). 144 Paul Valéry, Œuvres, I, ed. by Jean Hytier (Paris: Gallimard, ‘Pléiade’, 1957), ‘Un coup de dés : lettre au Directeur des Marges, 15 février 1920’, pp. 622–30 (p. 624). 145 Stéphane Mallarmé, Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (Paris: Gallimard, 1914), Préface, n.p. 146 Mallarmé, Un coup de dés, Préface, n.p. 147 I am not aware of any critical readings that comment specifically on the poet’s reference to prismatic values in the preface of Un coup de dés. 148 In a major article on monochrome colour in modernist exploratory art forms, ‘“Le blanc souci de notre toile”: Writing White in French Poetry and Art’, French Studies, vol. 71, no. 3, 2017, pp. 319–32, Eric Robertson investigates the ethical, political, and

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149 150

151 152

Notes aesthetic resonance of white, with a particular focus on iconic modern shipwreck narratives. Robertson’s pursuit of the modulation of white (and of some black) draws on Romantic history painting, on Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés, on Apollinaire’s dialogue with Orphist art, and on Caroline Bergvall’s multi-media vision of maritime trauma Drift (2014). Reflecting on the representation of the shipwrecked victims of political and colonialist cynicism, Robertson discusses the deconstructive energy of Géricault’s Le Radeau de la Méduse (1818–19), scrutinizing the values of white that hover between representations of the still living and the dead, and that are offset by the luminous dark skin of the slave who waves the tricolore. Robertson meditates on colour that impels acts of creativity, focusing on Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard: he is concerned with the movement of the values of white across the space of visual, auditory, and cognitive signals. Robertson tracks the modernist momentum of white from Kandinsky to Jean Arp, highlighting monochromatic values both as structuring form and as fathomless enigma. Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 115. See Maurice Blanchot, Le Livre à venir (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), p. 289. An important article by Leslie Hill, ‘Blanchot and Mallarmé’, Modern Language Notes, vol. 105, no. 5, December 1990, pp. 889–913, charts Blanchot’s sustained engagement with Mallarmé’s thought and writing, his recognition of its formative impact on the development of literary theory, and his assertion that, contrary to Valéry’s projection of a systematizing vision of Mallarmé’s language experiment, its value lies in its irrepressible refusal to be contained or made programmatic. Quoted in Henri Mondor, Vie de Mallarmé (Paris: Gallimard, 1941), p. 507. The quotation is from Henri Mondor (ed.), Eugène Lefébure: Sa Vie, Ses Lettres à Mallarmé (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), pp. 212–14 (p. 214) (letter of 29 April 1866). Translated by Rosemary Lloyd, Mallarmé: The Poet and his Circle, pp. 35–6.

Part II 1

2 3 4 5

Dirk Van Hulle, James Joyce’s ‘Work in Progress’: Pre-Publication of Finnegans Wake Fragments (London: Routledge, 2018), outlines the shared interest of Joyce and Valéry in the serpent that sheds its skin as a figure for the author ‘shedding’ successive versions of his work. Valéry dedicated a copy of the book-length version of ‘Ébauche d’un serpent’, entitled Le Serpent, to Joyce on its publication in 1922 (p. 207, n. 4). André Gide–Paul Valéry Correspondance 1890–1942, ed. by Peter Fawcett (Paris: Gallimard, 2009). Tony Pinkney, ‘T.S. Eliot and the “Leçon” de Valéry’, Critical Quarterly, 1982, vol. 24, no. 2, pp. 69–77. Paul Gifford, ‘The Birth of Modern Criticism: Literature According to Eliot and Valéry’, Modern Language Review, vol. 99, 2004, pp. 856–7. Paul Valéry, The Art of Poetry, ed. by Jackson Mathews, Bollingen Series XLV (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1958), Introduction, pp. vii–xxiv (p. xi). Valéry’s tribute to his friendship with Rilke includes a moving evocation of the austere beauty of the landscape of the Austrian poet’s home in Switzerland (‘À Rainer Maria Rilke’, Paul Valéry, Œuvres, ed. by Michel Jarrety (Paris: Livre de Poche, 2016), vol. 1, p. 1651).

Notes

205

Paul Valéry: Cahiers 1894–1914, ed. by Nicole Celeyrette-Pietri and Judith Robinson-Valéry (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), vol. I, ‘Technical Improving in Literature’, p. 266. See also Paul Valéry, Œuvres, ed. by Jean Hytier (Paris: Gallimard, ‘Pléiade’, 1957), vol. I, pp. 622–30, for Valéry’s first exposure to Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard. Hereafter reference to the two volumes of Hytier’s Pléiade edition of the Œuvres will be to Œ followed by the relevant volume number, See Part I, pp. 5, 10, 25, 38–39, 45, 55–64, 65 and Part II, pp. 82, 89, 98, for discussion of Un coup de dés. 7 Yves Bonnefoy, ‘Paul Valéry’, in L’Improbable et autres essais (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), pp. 99–105 (p. 104). Interviewed by Shusha Guppy in The Paris Review, issue 131, Summer 1994, Bonnefoy speaks of his youthful enthusiasm for Valéry whose lectures he (and Barthes) followed at the Collège de France. 8 Judith Robinson, ‘Valéry, critique de Bergson’, Cahiers de l’AIEF, 1965, pp. 203–15, is a discerning discussion of the divergences between the poet and the philosopher that also clarifies their points communs. 9 ‘Discours sur Bergson’ (1941), in ‘Les classiques des sciences sociales’, ed. by JeanMarie Tremblay, at the Université de Québec on-line resource: http://classiques. uqac.ca/classiques/Valery_paul/discours_sur_bergson/discours_sur_bergson.html (accessed 15 August 2020). 10 Quinzaine littéraire, no. 171 (16–30 September 1973), pp. 3–4. See Leslie Hill, Blanchot, Extreme Contemporary (London: Routledge, 1997), on Blanchot’s admiration for Valéry, a position that is all the more remarkable given that Blanchot had, understandably, been unsparing of Valéry’s rallying to the anti-Dreyfussard cause at the time of the affaire. 11 Quinzaine littéraire, p. 3. 12 Seán Hand, A Levinas Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). 13 Emmanuel Levinas, Humanisme de l’autre homme (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1972), chapter VII (‘Sens et éthique’), p. 63. 14 Paul Gifford and Brian Stimpson (eds), Reading Paul Valéry: Universe in Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 3. William Marx, in an article in Fabula, explores the influence of Valéry on Poétique (‘Quelle poétique de Valéry pour la revue Poétique?’, 17 December 2012), https://www.fabula.org/lht/10/marx. html (accessed 15 August 2020). 15 Roland Barthes, ‘Entre le plaisir du texte et l’utopie de la pensée’, in Œuvres complètes, ed. by Eric Marty (Paris: Seuil, 1977), vol. 5, pp. 533–40 (p. 536). 16 Steven Cassedy, ‘Paul Valéry’s Modernist Aesthetic Object’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 45, no. 1 (Autumn 1986), pp. 77–86 (p. 77). 17 Michel Jarrety, ‘The Poetics of Practice and Theory’, in Reading Paul Valéry, ed. by Paul Gifford and Brian Stimpson, pp. 105–20. 18 Jarrety, ‘The Poetics of Practice and Theory’, p. 118. 19 Jacques Derrida, Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972), pp. 325–64. 20 Gilles Deleuze, Logique de la sensation (Paris: Seuil, 2002), pp. 40–1. 21 Brian Stimpson, ‘Au commencement fut la fin: l’écriture en devenir chez Valéry et Duras’, in La Création en acte, ed. by Paul Gifford and Marion Schmid (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2007), pp. 111–29; Paul Gifford, Love, Desire and Transcendence in French Literature: Deciphering Eros (Farnham: Ashgate, 2006). 22 Hélène Cixous, Le Rire de la méduse et autres ironies (Paris: Galilée, 2010), pp. 129–30. 23 Cixous, Le Rire de la méduse et autres ironies, p. 125, n. 1. 6

206 24

Notes

De Gaulle decreed that Valéry, France’s ‘poète national’, should have a full State funeral; Georges Duhamel delivered the eulogy to the nation. François Mitterrand wrote of his affinity with Valéry and other major writers from Stendhal and Flaubert to Aragon and Jules Romains (Lettres à Anne (Paris: Gallimard, 2016), p. 607 (letter of 5 January 1969)). Emmanuel Macron, in an extended interview with Le Point in August 2017, expressed his admiration for Valéry’s writing. 25 An extended review of Paul Gifford and Brian Stimpson (eds), Reading Paul Valéry by Alan Pero (South Atlantic Review, vol. 68, no. 1 (Winter, 2003), pp. 128–30), attributes the neglect of Valéry by academe to the writer’s perceived obscurantism; to Valéry’s troubled relation with democracy; to the forbidding complexity of his thought; and to intellectual suspicion about what appears an ideologically prescriptive ‘Système’. 26 Gifford and Stimpson (eds), Reading Paul Valéry, p. 2. Cahier I, ed. by Nicole Celeyrette-Pietri and Judith Robinson-Valéry, ‘Self book’, p. 204. The young Valéry worked briefly for the Cecil Rhodes company in London, whilst the mature Valéry prevented Pétain from addressing the Académie Française. Valéry’s refusal to collaborate during the Occupation led to his dismissal from the administrative leadership of the Centre Universitaire Méditerranéen in Nice. His tribute to Bergson, following the death of the philosopher in 1941, was received as an act of courage and resistance against the Vichy regime (see p. 68, p. 205, n. 9). 27 Valerie Minogue, ‘L’Enfant et les sortilèges’, in Autour de Nathalie Sarraute: actes du colloque international de Cerisy-la-Salle, ed. by Sabine Raffy (Besançon: Presses de l’Université de Franche-Comté. 1995), pp. 49–62. Christine Crow, Paul Valéry: Consciousness and Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), makes tantalizing reference to the affinities between Valéry’s writing and that of the French ‘nouveaux romanciers’. Crow makes connections, inter alia, between Valéry and Nathalie Sarraute in terms of their engagement with human universals (p. 7). Crow considers the precision of Valéry’s vision of the natural world and speculates on its analogical relation to Alain Robbe-Grillet’s La Jalousie (p. 82). 28 Œ, II, p. 553. 29 Nathalie Sarraute, Paul Valéry et l’Enfant d’éléphant (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), p. 22. Sarraute is scathing about what she identifies as decorative and ornamental excess in other work of Valéry. 30 See Christine Crow, Paul Valéry: Consciousness and Nature; Lloyd James Austin, ‘The Genius of Paul Valéry’, in Poetic Principles and Practices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 227–45; Paul Gifford and Brian Stimpson (eds), Reading Paul Valéry: Universe in Mind; Serge Bourjea, Paul Valéry: Le sujet de l’écriture (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997); Kirsteen Anderson, Paul Valéry and the Voice of Desire (Oxford: Legenda, 2000); Florence de Lussy, ‘Manuscript Steps: “Les Pas”’, in Reading Paul Valéry, ed. by Gifford and Stimpson, pp. 200–16 (pp. 211–12); Suzanne Nash, ‘Other Voices: Intertextuality and the Art of Pure Poetry’, in Reading Paul Valéry, ed. by Paul Gifford and Brian Stimpson, pp. 187–99; and Malcolm Bowie, ‘Dream and the Unconscious’, in Reading Paul Valéry, ed. by Gifford and Stimpson, pp. 262–79. 31 Especially chapter 4, ‘Nature and the Imagination’, 32 Crow, Paul Valéry: Consciousness and Nature, p. 77. 33 Crow, Paul Valéry: Consciousness and Nature, p. 78. 34 Le Magazine littéraire (hors série): Paul Valéry, malgré lui (2011). In his foreword, Laurent Nunez instances the sensual values of La Jeune Parque and of the prose poetry of the Cahiers, p. 4.

Notes 35 36 37 38

39 40

41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

49

50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

207

André Gide, ‘Paul Valéry’, Kenyon Review, vol. 8, no. 2, Spring 1946, pp. 277–90. Œ, II, pp. 1218–20 (1219). Œ, II, pp. 1218–20 (1220). Paul Ryan, ‘Valéry: From Artistic Practice to a Conception of Drawing’, French Studies, 2010, vol. 64, no. 1, pp. 38–50, refers to Valéry’s relationship with Picasso (and with Marie Laurencin) and to the existence of unpublished correspondence of Valéry with some of the major avant-garde painters. See online source at https://www.artic.edu/artworks/61771/portrait-of-paul-valeryfrom-la-jeune-parque (accessed 15 August 2020). Douglas Cooper’s introduction to Degas, Manet, Morisot (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), Bollingen Series XLV, no. 12, pp. ix–xxxiv (p. xiii), sums up the paradox that turns on Valéry’s affinity with modern painting of the postImpressionist and Cubist traditions, and his silence over early-twentieth-century artistic experimentalism. Œ, II, pp. 1307–25 (p. 1318). Œ, II, p. 1316, p. 1318. Œ, I, pp. 377–8. Œ, I, p. 378. Œ, I, p. 378. Paul Gifford, Paul Valéry, Charmes (Glasgow: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1995), Introductory Guides to French Literature, no. 30, p. 69. Serge Bourjea, Paul Valéry: Le Sujet de l’écriture (Paris: Harmattan, 1997), pp. 7–28 (p. 11). Valéry’s evocation of the chromatic depth of early photographs appears in Degas, Manet, Morisot, in a short piece ‘A Recollection of Renoir’ (pp. 129–33) (p. 132). This text, which was published as ‘Souvenirs sur Renoir’, in La Revue hebdomadaire, 3 January 1920, and which also appeared in L’Amour de l’art, February 1921 (a special number on Renoir), is not collected in the Pléiade Œuvres complètes. I discuss the essay ‘Regards sur la mer’, Œ, II, pp. 1334–41, in relation to Valéry’s Mediterraneaninspired poems of seascape and classical landscape. See p. 95. The Paul Valéry Museum at Sète has an important collection of the writer’s artwork in different media, including his Self-Portrait (n.d.) with a vivid red jersey. The Magazine littéraire 2011 special number on Valéry reproduces, inter alia, his selfportraits in oils, watercolours, ink drawings of sea and shore, and sketches of the human figure in everyday settings. Cahiers, I, ‘Journal de bord’, p. 27. Œ, II, p. 1176. Œ, II, p. 1176. Œ, II, p. 1177. See Part I, p. 198, n. 65, for a brief discussion of Valéry’s portrait of dejected humanity in Paris evoked in the values of yellow and black in ‘Eikones’, Cahiers, I. note 40. Œ, II, pp. 1302–6. Œ, II, p. 1303. Œ, II, p. 1303. Œ, II, p. 1304. Œ, II (‘Berthe Morisot’), pp. 1302–6 (p. 1304). Œ, II, p. 1306. Œ, II (‘Berthe Morisot’), p. 1304 (my emphasis).

208 62

63 64

65 66

67

68 69 70 71 72

Notes Brian Stimpson, ‘An Aesthetics of the Subject: Music and the Visual Arts’, in Reading Paul Valéry, ed. by Paul Gifford and Brian Stimpson, pp. 219–35, quotes Valéry’s evocation of ‘les taches de l’instant pur […] la présence chromatique’ that constitute the painter’s pure field of vision before viewers’ recuperations turn any painting into a series of interpretable signs that are effectively colour-less (Œ, II, p. 1303) (Gifford and Stimpson, eds, p. 228). Stimpson argues that ‘the artist’s vision eliminates time-linked associations, allowing perception to give way to visual sensation and to “l’impression-sans-signification”’ (p. 228). He underscores Valéry’s stress on the instantaneity of colour experience and its ahistorical value (p. 228). Valéry’s reflections on dance and its visual representation inspired the exhibition ‘Degas, Danse, Dessin: Hommage à Degas avec Paul Valéry’ at the Musée d’Orsay (Paris, 2017). Œ, II, ‘Littérature’, pp. 546–9 (p. 547). Ezra Pound defined ‘difficult’ poetry, in an essay published in The Little Review (March 1918, ‘List of Books’, p. 57), as ‘logopoeia or poetry that is akin to nothing but language, which is a dance of the intelligence among words and ideas’. For Pound, this was to be found most powerfully in the poetry of Eliot and of Mina Loy, in the wake of Laforgue. These are collected in the Pléiade Œuvres, respectively in Œ, II, pp. 148–76; Œ, I, pp. 1390–1403; and Œ, II, pp. 1169–73. See Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art (London and New York: Verso, 2013), chapter 6, ‘The Dance of Light’, pp. 93–110, on Fuller’s cultural and technological innovation, and its reception by Mallarmé and other ‘elite’ viewers (Valéry is not discussed by Rancière). Paul Valéry, ‘La Philosophie de la danse (1936)’, Œ, 1, pp. 1390–1403 (p. 1402), and ‘L’Âme et la danse (1922)’, Œ, II, 148–76. In ‘La Philosophie de la danse’, Valéry proposes an analogy between dance and the intellectual pirouette of metaphor: ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une métaphore, si ce n’est une sorte de pirouette de l’idée dont on rapproche les diverses images ou les divers noms ? Et que sont toutes ces figures dont nous usons, tous ces moyens, comme les rimes, les inversions, les antithèses, si ce ne sont des usages de toutes les possibilités du langage, qui nous détachent du monde pratique pour nous former, nous aussi, notre univers particulier, lieu privilégié de la danse spirituelle ?’ Valéry’s figuration of the kinetic and cerebral value of metaphor is close to Ezra Pound’s definition of poetry as ‘the dance of the intelligence among words and ideas’. ‘– Qui crie sans aucun bruit – le conseil des X – ’, Cahiers, I, pp. 273–86 (p. 279). See the notes to Cahiers, I, p. 470. Adam Watt, ‘Portraits by the Artists as Young Men: Proust, Valéry, Colour’, in Thinking Colour-Writing, ed. by Susan Harrow, French Studies, 2017, vol. 71, no. 3, pp. 333–47. Œ, II, 1288. W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004), invites us to attend to the agency of the visual image, constructing it as an active, thinking, probing subject, rather than an inert object and empty cipher. Mieke Bal’s concept of the ‘thinking image’ has informed her work across studies of Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Louise Bourgeois, advertisements, and diverse intermedial creations. Bal’s stress on the ‘propositional content’ of visual images is outlined in A Mieke Bal Reader (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006), p. 304.

Notes 73 74 75

76 77 78

79

80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88

209

Serge Bourjea, ‘La Sainte Alexandrine de Valéry: vues d’un tableau’, Le français dans tous ses états: revue du réseau CNDP, no. 30. ‘Paul Valéry’ [n.p., undated]. I discuss colour-word resistance in relation to Mallarmé and to Bonnefoy, Part I, pp. 14, 35, 45, 46, 51, 56, 62, 65 and Part III, pp. 138, 148, 158, 159, 161, respectively. Rachel Killick examines Valéry’s complex reception of Mallarmé in terms both of his sense of connection with Mallarmé and his need to define himself against the towering achievements of his predecessor. Killick stresses Valéry’s strategy of inflecting his reading of Mallarmé’s writings in conspicuously Valéryian ways. See ‘Dis/Re/Membering the Master: Valéry’s Écrits divers sur Stéphane Mallarmé’, in Meetings with Mallarmé in Contemporary French Culture, ed. by Michael Temple (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1998), pp. 24–45. Bourjea, ‘La Sainte Alexandrine de Valéry’. ‘Du nu’, Œ, II, pp. 1196–200 (p. 1117). Laurence Dahan-Gaida, ‘Pensée analogique et dynamique de la forme chez Paul Valéry: modèles, forces, diagrammes’, Tangence, no. 95, 2011, pp. 43–65, offers an important discussion of the value of analogical working in the context of visuality. Dahan-Gaida puts to work Valéry’s analogical method specifically in epistemological terms, taking models, forces, and diagrams as ‘operators of continuity’ that generate analogical relations between nature and art, or the arts and technicity, in his writing. She focuses on the ‘continuités’ that Valéry discerns between forms and fields normatively assumed to be distinct and (largely) autonomous. The imagination is the means of making visible the analogy. Analogy implies the activity of making an analogy, so this is performance and process. Valéry foregrounds the productive possibilities of forces, rather than the product; his intense interest in Leonardo centres on virtualities and capacities. For Valéry, the genius of Leonardo has its source in his gift for discerning connections in disparate entities. He identifies the arabesque as the figure that elides and eludes mimetic content in order to pursue its own pure form (Dahan-Gaida, p. 56). She highlights ornament in Valéry as synonymous with the pure force of figuration; abstraction is the process whereby objects are freed from their contexts and can merge. The selection of texts Paul Valéry: Degas, Manet, Morisot, trans. by David Paul, Bollingen Series XLV/12 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), offers us myriad openings into colour in Valéry’s poetry. As well as including the full text of Valéry’s essays in Degas Danse Dessin, it offers key essays for understanding Valéry’s chromatic poetics. Œ, II, p. 1198. Nicola Suthor, Rembrandt’s Roughness (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), acknowledges Valéry’s engagement with the sense of textured roughness in the Dutch master’s painting. Œ, II, p. 1198. Hélène Cixous, Peinetures: écrits sur l’art (Paris: Hermann, 2010), pp. 47–55 (p. 50). ‘The secret blood of reds’ is evoked in the translated version of the original essay which appeared in New Literary History, vol. 24, no. 4, 1993, pp. 820–37 (p. 820). Œ, II, pp. 1302–6 (p. 1302). Œ, II, p. 1163. Gifford and Stimpson (eds), Reading Paul Valéry, p. 8. Luce Irigaray, J’aime à toi (Paris: Grasset, 1992). Œ, II, pp. 1326–33 (1332). Œ, II, p. 1332.

210 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112

113 114 115 116 117

Notes Œ, II, p. 1332. Œ, I, pp. 1154, 1198. Œ, I, pp. 1378–90 (p. 1387). Œ, II, pp. 1302–6. See pp. 6, 10, 25, 39–4, on Mallarmé’s appraisal of pictorial black. I discuss the importance of analogical practice, pp. 72–74, 78, 82–83, 85, 87, 88, 99, 110, 113, 206 n.27, 209 n.78. Œ, II, pp. 1326–33. Peter Dayan, Art as Music, Music as Poetry, Poetry as Art: From Whistler to Stravinsky and Beyond (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). Œ, II, p. 1328. Œ, II, pp. 1332–3. Œ, II, p. 1329. Œ, II, p. 1333. ‘Au sujet de Berthe Morisot’, the preface to the 1941 Orangerie retrospective, is published in Vues (1948) (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1948), pp. 337–45. Vues, p. 344. Vues, pp. 344–5. Œ, I, p. 1159. See Glenn S. Burne, ‘An Approach to Valéry’s Leonardo’, French Review, vol. 34, no. 1, 1960, pp. 26–34. I discuss Bonnefoy’s repudiation of the decorative and overly coloured, in Part III, pp. 103, 128, 132, 133, 136, 137, 141. Likewise, in ‘Fragments du Narcisse’ (Part 1), the water offers ‘un mortel azur’: colour conjugates seductive beauty with fatality, taking forward Mallarmé’s subversion of the ideal values of azure. David Batchelor, Chromophobia (London: Reaktion, 2001). Judith Robinson-Valéry, ‘The Fascination of Science’, in Reading Paul Valéry, ed. by Gifford and Stimpson, pp. 70–84 (p. 82). See James Lawler, ‘An Ironic Elegy: Valéry’s “Au platane”’, The French Review, vol. 36, no. 4, February 1963, pp. 339–51, for a comprehensive reading of the genesis of the poem and its structuring tensions. See my earlier discussion of this essay on chromatic values, p. 74. Lloyd James Austin, ‘The Genius of Paul Valéry’, in Poetic Principles and Practices, pp. 227–45 (p. 229). Peter Collier, ‘Paul Valéry: “Le Cantique des colonnes”’, in Twentieth-Century French Poetry: A Critical Anthology, ed. by Hugues Azérad and Peter Collier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 17–24, highlights the ‘colourless contrasts of light’ (p. 22) over the fuller prismatics of white and gold. I return to Collier’s reading of this poem in the discussion of ekphrasis, pp. 105–06. Œ, II, pp. 1334–41 (p. 1339). Œ, II, pp. 1334–41. Œ, II, pp. 1334–5. See my discussion of Mallarmé’s material and metaphysical seascapes, pp. 45, 55–64. Jean-Luc Nancy, Au fond des images (Paris: Galilée, 2003), is a searching reflection on the hidden content, the very ground, of the visual image. Whilst using the idea of ‘ground’ in a referential sense, Nancy’s enquiry into the hidden depths of the image engages with the kind of tension between surface and profound truth that is staged in Valéry’s poetry and also, as we shall see in Part III, in Bonnefoy’s writing around the ‘lure’ of the image.

Notes

211

118 The modernist play on Arcadian myth in image-making connects Valéry’s vision to that of the opening lines of Apollinaire’s 1912 poem ‘Zone’ where pastoral quietude morphs into the urban cacophony: ‘Bergère ô tour Eiffel le troupeau des ponts bêle ce matin’ (line 2). 119 See Emilio de Grazia, ‘Poe’s Other Beautiful Woman’, in Literature and Lore of the Sea, ed. by Patricia Ann Carlson (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1986), pp. 176–84, on Poe’s seascape, particularly his evocation of white as a natural chromatic value of sea: it extends a literary tradition that begins with Dante and takes in Poe’s contemporary Mary Shelley (p. 183), and Mallarmé. 120 ‘Let’s talk of graves, of worms and epitaphs/Make dust our paper, and with raining eyes/Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth/Let’s choose executors and talk of wills/ And yet not so for what can we bequeath/Save our deposed bodies to the ground’ (Richard II, Act III, Scene 2, Richard’s monologue). 121 See discussion of the Hydra figure, p. 91. 122 Graham Dunstan Martin, ‘Valéry’s “Ode secrète”: The Enigma Solved?’ French Studies, vol. 31, no. 4, 1977, pp. 425–36, speculates that the secret of the text lies in Valéry’s figuring of Heracles’s struggle with the Hydra as an allegory of the Allied victory in the First World War leading, not to resolution (in the 1918 Armistice), but to recognition of the perpetuity of human conflict across time and cultures. In this context, Martin reads the final stanza as ironic, rather than as portentous and celebratory. 123 Michel Collot, ‘“Ode secrète”’, in Charmes de Paul Valéry: Six Lectures, ed. by Jean Pierrot (Presses de l’Université de Rouen, 1995), pp. 47–54 (p. 53), discerns a persisting equivocation between the lure of victory and the acknowledgement of failure in a poem that is at once a valorization of human creativity and a sustained expression of sensuousness. 124 I discuss chiaroscuro at pp. 113–23. 125 See Paul Valéry, La Jeune Parque, with preface by Jean Levaillant (Paris: Gallimard, NRF/ Poésies, 1974) for the different manuscript versions of the text. 126 Bowie, ‘Dream and the Unconscious’, in Reading Paul Valéry, ed. by Paul Gifford and Brian Stimpson, pp. 262–79 (p. 262). 127 Crow, Paul Valéry: Consciousness and Nature, p. 20. 128 David Evans, ‘Paul Valéry and the Search for Poetic Rhythm’, Paragraph, vol. 33, no. 2, 2010, pp. 158–75, warns against reading Valéry’s rhythms as in any way imitative of cosmic patterns or corporeal rhythms. For Valéry, the requirement was to set a strict rhythmic armature in order to establish the frame for the practice of multiple irregularities and counter-rhythms. 129 Benedetta Zaccarello, ‘Chiaroscuro de l’écriture: figures et fantômes en marge des brouillons de “La Jeune Parque” de Paul Valéry’, in Dessins d’écrivains: de l’archive à l’oeuvre, ed. by Yves Chevrefils Desbiolles (Paris: Le Manuscrit, 2011), pp. 69–97, explores the marginal drawings in the draft manuscripts. Zaccarello underlines the importance of visualization processes that enable the abstract and the material to be explored in combination, both in drawing and in poetry: ‘Au cours de la gestation de son poème, Valéry construit non seulement un personnage, mais un imaginaire qui lui est propre (le serpent, la barque, la statue). Le travail sur la Parque devient alors tentative de visualiser ce personnage mystérieux jusqu’à son corps, pour en saisir les traits spécifiques. Dessiner en marge pour mieux peindre par des mots ? La convocation du dessin dans la genèse du poème est lue ici comme la trace d’une dialectique entre pensée discursive et visualization heuristique que

212

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Valéry expérimente, mais dont la portée sémiotique déborde le simple intérêt des spécialistes: une stratégie de l’écriture capable de brouiller toute distinction entre clarté de l’esprit et obscurité du sensible’ (p. 69). 130 Florence de Lussy, ‘Manuscript Steps: “Les Pas”’, in Reading Paul Valéry, ed. by Gifford and Stimpson, pp. 200–16 (pp. 211–12). 131 See my discussion of Cixous’s reading of the Fate, pp. 70–1. 132 Œ, II, 1307–25 (p. 1307). 133 John Hollander, The Gazer’s Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995), deploys the term ‘notional ekphrasis’ for instances where poetry’s art-historical project is more explicitly intentional than in the examples I explore in Valéry’s verse. 134 Collier, ‘Paul Valéry, “Le Cantique des colonnes”’, pp. 22, 23. Collier stops short of undertaking an ekphrastic reading, but what is noteworthy is the ekphrastic spur that the poem prompts in the critic. 135 I have found no reference to Leighton in Valéry’s corpus, nor have I encountered any comparative reference in critical studies to the chromatic and thematic parenté of these two works. 136 Tim Barringer and Elizabeth Prettejohn, Frederick Leighton: Antiquity, Renaissance, Modernity (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1999). 137 See New Ekphrastic Poetics, ed. by Susan Harrow, a special number of French Studies, vol. LXIV, no. 3 (2010), Introduction, pp. 255–64. 138 W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Visual and Verbal Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 152–5. 139 James Lawler, Lecture de Valéry (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963), pp. 177–82 (p. 178). See also Jean Pierrot (ed.), Charmes de Paul Valéry: Six Lectures (Presses de l’Université de Rouen, 1995), for Pierrot’s excellent essay on ‘Les Grenades’, pp. 23–38, relating the lapidary aesthetic of Valéry’s poem back to the sensibility of Moreau, Poe, and Huysmans (p. 29). 140 Stéphane Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, I, ed. by Bertrand Marchal (Paris: Gallimard, ‘Pléiade’, 1998), p. 669 (letter of 18 February 1865 to Eugène Lefébure). 141 Pierrot, in a move towards an ekphrastic reading, aligns the pomegranate with the skull of the vanitas, before proposing a prospective link to Ponge’s ‘L’Orange’ (Le Parti pris des choses) in terms of the polysemous values that open up ‘l’intimité de l’objet’ (Charmes de Paul Valéry, pp. 23–38 (p. 36)). Pierrot makes a persuasive case for Valéry as a distinctly modernist poet. 142 In his 1919 ‘Note et digression’, his retrospective reflections on his Leonardo exploration, Valéry notes the painter’s artistic force and his sfumato practice, Œ, I, pp. 1199–233 (p. 2002). 143 See Part III, pp. 129, 150, 151. 144 ‘Cet Apollon [Léonard] me ravissait au plus haut degré de moi-même. Quoi de plus séduisant qu’un dieu qui repousse le mystère, qui ne fonde pas sa puissance sur le trouble de notre sens; qui n’adresse pas ses prestiges au plus obscur, au plus tendre, au plus sinistre de nous-mêmes; qui nous force de convenir et non de ployer; et de qui le miracle est de s’éclaircir’ (Introduction à la méthode de Léonard de Vinci, Œ, I, p. 1201). 145 Introduction à la méthode de Léonard de Vinci. Œ, I, p. 1221. 146 John Harvey, The Story of Black (London: Reaktion, 2013), p. 284. See Bridget Riley, ‘Colour for the Painter’, in Colour: Art and Science, ed. by Trevor Lamb and Janine Bourriau (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 31–64.

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147 Florence de Lussy, ‘Manuscript Steps: “Les Pas”’, in Reading Paul Valéry, ed. by Gifford and Stimpson, pp. 200–16. 148 Bowie, ‘Dream and the Unconscious’, in Reading Paul Valéry, ed. by Gifford and Stimpson, pp. 262–79, underscores the narrative integration of rival elements and its intentional melding of conflicts and paradoxes, noting a synthetic tendency towards coalescence and coincidence (p. 270). Bowie associates the monologues of La Jeune Parque and ‘La Pythie’ in terms of their jostling realities of bodies, moods, subjectivities, and competing urges and responses. 149 Suzanne Nash, ‘Other Voices: Intertextuality and the Art of Pure Poetry’, in Reading Paul Valéry, ed. by Paul Gifford and Brian Stimpson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 187–99. Nash draws attention to the echoed voices of his predecessors, especially Hugo and Mallarmé in Part II of the ‘Fragments’. 150 Nash, ‘Other Voices: Intertextuality and the Art of Pure Poetry’, p. 191. 151 Nash, ‘Other Voices: Intertextuality and the Art of Pure Poetry’, p. 196. 152 Jane Goldman, The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf: Modernism, PostImpressionism, and the Politics of the Visual (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), argues that colour is the space of feminist resistance to patriarchal chiaroscuro, which leads her to interpret colour symbolically, for example, as indication of suffragette meaning, and more generally to reinforce the essentialist dichotomy of line/light/lucidity (= ‘masculine’) and colour (= ‘feminine’). 153 Cahiers, I, ‘Log-Book’, p. 144. 154 Cahiers, I, p. 303.

Part III 1

2

3 4

The date of first publication of Yves Bonnefoy’s key essays on art and aesthetics, prior to their appearing in the collections L’Improbable et autres essais (1959) (Paris: Gallimard/NRF, 1980); L’Arrière-pays (1972) (Paris: Gallimard/NRF, 2005); Le Nuage rouge (1977) and Dessin, couleur et lumière (1995), attests to the poet’s extended engagement with the pictorial and plastic arts. Integral to this is his sustained meditation on colour. Page references to these works, after their initial mention, will use the following abbreviations, followed by page numbers: I (L’Improbable), AP (L’Arrière-pays), NR (Le Nuage rouge), and DCL (Dessin, couleur et lumière). Whilst Le Nuage rouge and Dessin, couleur et lumière form a single volume under the main title Le Nuage rouge (Paris: Mercure de France/Folio ‘Essais’, 1999), page references to NR and DCL respectively will distinguish the two sets of essays. My discussion of Yves Bonnefoy’s poetry references the following four volumes: Poèmes: Du mouvement et de l’immobilité de Douve, Hier régnant désert, Pierre écrite, Dans le leurre du seuil (Paris: Poésie/Gallimard, 1982), with preface by Jean Starobinski; Ce qui fut sans lumière suivi de Début et fin de la neige (Paris: Poésie/ Gallimard, 1991); Les Planches courbes (Paris: Poésie/Gallimard, 2001); L’Heure présente et autres textes (Paris: Poésie/Gallimard, 2014). The following abbreviations, followed by page numbers, will be used for the above volumes: Poèmes, CQFSL and DFN, PC, and HP. ‘À propos de Miklos Bokor’, in ‘Remarques sur la couleur’, Récits en rêve (Paris: Mercure de France, 1987), pp. 162–6 (p. 165). See the essays that explore poetry and art through reflections on Poussin and on Delacroix in ‘Peinture, poésie: vertige, paix’ (NR, pp. 117–25). See also essays on

214

5

6 7

8

9 10

11

12

Notes Mondrian and the painting which gives rise to the eponymous title Le Nuage rouge and on other modern artists from Hopper to Morandi, Ubac, and Garache. See Peter Dayan on intermedial transpositions in relation to painting, poetry, and music in the later nineteenth century and early twentieth century in Art as Music, Music as Poetry, Poetry as Art: From Whistler to Stravinsky (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). L’Esprit créateur, special number on Yves Bonnefoy, vol. 36, no. 3, Fall 1996, pp. 9–26. Elsheimer’s ‘esprit de poésie’ is explored in ‘Elsheimer et les siens’ in Le Nuage rouge (NR, 27–39 (p. 31)); Mantegna’s ‘poétique de l’évidence’ is invoked in ‘Andrea Mantegna’, in Dessin couleur et lumière (DCL, 193–213 (p. 204)); De Chirico’s ‘poetry’ is named in the short essay ‘Georges de Chirico’ (DCL, 435–7 (p. 437)); Hopper’s ‘poétique nouvelle’ is described in ‘Edward Hopper: la photosynthèse de l’être’ (DCL, 403–33 (p. 406; p. 410 for the quotation)). ‘Entretien avec Odile Bombarde (1996)’, L’Inachevable: Entretiens sur la poésie 1990– 2010 (Paris: Albin Michel, 2010), pp. 254–76. From the outset, Bonnefoy places art and poetry on an equal footing, as reciprocal and mutually influencing (see ‘Peinture, poésie: vertige, paix’ (1975), NR 117–25 (118–19)). His practice is more aligned with the pliant ekphrastic practice I explored in my introduction to New Ekphrastic Poetics, special number of French Studies, vol. 64, no. 3, 2010, pp. 255–64. Yves Bonnefoy, ‘Ut pictura poesis’, L’Esprit créateur, vol. 36, no. 3, Fall 1996, pp. 9–26 (p. 19). Yves Bonnefoy’s poetry after 2001 continued, prodigious and compelling, with works including L’Heure présente (2011) and Le Digamma (2012). An exhaustive account would require several monographs devoted exclusively to Bonnefoy. Given my desire to balance scope and depth in exploring colour writing in Bonnefoy, I have set the parameters of this study in terms of the first fifty years, albeit with an acute awareness of the works not discussed here. John T. Naughton, The Poetics of Yves Bonnefoy (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984), chapter three, pp. 72–4, devotes a short discussion to Bonnefoy’s ‘discreet use of colour’ in the context of non-verbal language in Du mouvement et de l’immobilité de Douve. One might ask, although Naughton does not venture down this road, whether colour restriction is a form of resistance to translating the visual in Bonnefoy’s poetry. Is colour evacuated as part of a broader devaluing of sight itself? Is sight, captured in rare chromatic instances, posited as the primary lure? Much of Bonnefoy’s sensory work affirms sound (with recurrent stress on ‘parole’) and gesture, as well as movement. Acoustic and gestural aspects are formative of the allegorical and hieratical world of Du mouvement et de l’immobilité de Douve: alertness to murmur and receptivity to signs that abstract colour are privileged tropes. Naughton sees black and white as dominant, and the ground against which light and illumination can be better grasped. Naughton refers to Bonnefoy’s evocation of the tension of black and white values, that for the poet is ‘celle du néant et de l’être’ (in Le Nuage rouge, p. 361). Black and white are, for Naughton, ‘suggestive of illumination in death’ (p. 73). The critic passes over green (p. 72) but is alert to red and to the formative value of grey (‘la nappe rouge et grise’) (pp. 73–5). Naughton is keen to avoid the suggestion that colours are used in a programmatic way; rather he aligns the poet’s colours with the movement of reality and with a ‘vigilant consciousness’ (p. 74). Subsequent reference to this work will use the abbreviated form Douve.

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13 In L’Arrière-pays (1972) Bonnefoy explores his resistance to the ideal or fantasized image through paintings that speak to him of presence and of (Rimbaldian) ‘“réalité rugueuse”’ (AP, 106). Likewise, in his inaugural lecture following his election to the Chaire de Poétique at the Collège de France in 1981, Bonnefoy spoke of his resistance to the lure of the image. See Naughton’s translation, ‘Image and Presence: Yves Bonnefoy’s Inaugural Address to the Collège de France’, New Literary History, vol. 15, no. 3, Spring 1984, pp. 433–51: the ‘image’ is generated by ‘words that have turned away from incarnation’ and that lure us with their ‘impression of a reality fully incarnate’ (p. 442). 14 Examples abound of Bonnefoy’s expressed resistance to applied colours, to colourism, and to forms of local colour. At times, there is an intentional détournement of colourist images: thus, a blason effect evokes Douve in death in violent, sterile, or mocking colours: ‘la gorge se farde de neige et de loups’ (Poèmes, p. 61); ‘des liasses de mort pavoisent ton sourire’ (Poèmes, p. 63). 15 Translated by Galway Kinnell, Yves Bonnefoy, On the Motion and the Immobility of Douve, Bloodaxe Contemporary French Poets, no. 1 (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1992), p. 69. 16 The epigraph from the Preface to the Phenomenology of the Spirit is translated by Bonnefoy as follows: ‘[m]ais la vie de l’esprit ne s’effraie point devant la mort et n’est pas celle qui s’en garde pure. Elle est la vie qui la supporte et se maintient en elle’. 17 Jean Starobinski writes, in his preface to Poèmes, ‘La Poésie entre deux mondes’ (pp. 7–30), that the poet opts for elliptical syntax and for an uncluttered world of real, often simple, things (p. 15). Bonnefoy rejects the lure of exhaustiveness and avoids lexical excess (p. 20) and, by extension, he resists chromatic effusiveness. 18 Bonnefoy devotes a substantial biography to the sculptor, Alberto Giacometti, biographie d’une oeuvre (Paris: Flammarion, 2012). Two biography-informed essays on the sculptor’s work are collected in Dessin, couleur et lumière. 19 Timothy Mathews, Albert Giacometti: The Art of Relation (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014), pp. 22–3. Mathews underlines, through Bonnefoy, the importance of Beckett’s existential vision to Giacometti and to our understanding of Giacometti. See ‘Walking with Angels in Beckett and Giacometti’, pp. 116–31 (pp. 117–18). 20 See Naughton, The Poetics of Yves Bonnefoy, on the integration of visual, acoustic, and gestural values in Douve (especially, pp. 75–6). 21 David Batchelor, The Luminous and the Grey (London: Reaktion, 2014), is an inquiry into the hidden realms of grey that challenges the negativity traditionally surrounding this chromatic value and inflecting (and limiting) its cultural reception. 22 Naughton, The Poetics of Yves Bonnefoy, p. 108 (note 25, p. 188), engages with grey and asserts the near-total elimination of colour in Hier régnant désert. I argue here that grey has a depth and complexity worthy of a fuller reading of monochrome values in this work. 23 Translated by Antony Rudolf, in Antony Rudolf, John Naughton and Stephen Romer (eds), Yves Bonnefoy I: Poems (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2017), p. 31. 24 Derek Jarman, Chroma: A Book of Colour (London: Vintage, 1993), in his appraisal of grey, empathizes with Kandinsky’s reflection on grey as the articulation of ‘inconsolable immobility’ (p. 51). Ahead of Batchelor, Jarman writes in praise of ‘tenacious’ grey (p. 52). Like Bonnefoy, Jarman hails Mantegna as a ‘master of grey’ and of Renaissance ‘grisaille’ practice, and he considers Mantegna’s legacy in the grey work of Giacometti, Jasper Johns, Joseph Beuys, and Anselm Kieffer (p. 52). 25 See Part I, pp. 5, 53.

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Les Planches courbes is discussed on pp. 174–80. L’Improbable suivi de Un rêve fait à Mantoue (Paris: Gallimard, 1980). In ‘Raoul Ubac’ (1955, pp. 59–62) Bonnefoy discerns the dominance of ‘une pierre cendreuse’ in the landscape paintings. In ‘Des fruits montant de l’abîme’ (1964, pp. 297–307), he writes in praise of Ubac’s consecration of nature and his infusion of colour with hope and confidence. In ‘Proximité du visage’ (1966, pp. 309–18), Bonnefoy celebrates the ethos of ‘prudence’ that he sees in Ubac, the sign of his commitment to humanity (p. 315). Ubac provided two sketches for the 1967 edition of ‘La poésie moderne et le principe d’identité’ (1965). 28 ‘Des fruits montant de l’abîme’ (1964), pp. 297–307 (p. 298). 29 ‘À propos de Miklos Bokor’, Récits en rêve, p. 164. 30 See my discussion of Dans le leurre du seuil, pp. 151, 152–9. 31 Julia Kristeva, Polylogue (Paris: Seuil, 1977), pp. 210–36 (‘La Joie de Giotto’). 32 A rare example from Pierre écrite emerges in ‘L’Eté de nuit’, VII, ‘N’étais-je pas le rêve aux prunelles absentes / Qui prend et ne prend pas, et ne veut retenir / De ta couleur d’été qu’un bleu d’une autre pierre / Pour un été plus grand, ou rien ne peut finir’. [Was I not the dream with the absent eyes that takes and does not take, and only wants to retain of your summer colour a blue from another stone for a greater summer where nothing can end?] (p. 191). 33 See pp. 129–30. 34 I discuss this more fully at p. 145. 35 Naughton, The Poetics of Yves Bonnefoy, pp. 141–3, stresses the fluctuating values that shape evocations of hand and of heart as a particularly rich seam of corporeal figuration. 36 Murielle Gagnebin (ed.), Yves Bonnefoy: Lumière et nuit des images (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2005), explores the oscillations and ambivalences in the poet’s philosophy and practice of the image, with chapters devoted, inter alia, to the Surrealist image, the elemental image, image and landscape, the architectural image, and the resistance to imagery. 37 Terre seconde was a 1976 exhibition of Pierlot’s work at the Château de Ratilly (Yonne), organized under the aegis of Bonnefoy, who wrote this essay for the catalogue. 38 Richard Vernier, ‘Yves Bonnefoy and the Conscience of Poetry’, SubStance, vol. 8, nos 2/3, 1979, pp. 149–56. 39 In his essay ‘Terre seconde’ (1976) (NR, pp. 127–47), Bonnefoy asserts the importance of nature and the elements as a means of reaffirming presence against the encroachments of material and urban modernity: ‘Je marche dans les dernières campagnes, mais je vois que de toutes parts les chemins qui suivaient les pentes, […], appropriant le sol à notre besoin, le faisant parler dans nos jambes, fermenter dans notre fatigue, se faire en nous le vin de l’évidence, la profondeur d’où vient la lumière, disparaissent l’un après l’autre, sous l’asphalte’ (p. 131). He continues with reflections on modern domestic architecture in the form of a critique of gaudy colour that sees traditional properties ‘fardées’ or razed and replaced by ‘des masses et des couleurs grimaçantes’ (p. 131). 40 The art writer’s appraisal of Elsheimer’s painting inspired by the search of Ceres for her daughter Proserpine informs ‘La Pluie d’été’ and ‘La Maison natale, III’ (PC, 21 and 85, respectively). 41 Bonnefoy, ‘Elsheimer et les siens’ (1968), NR, pp. 27–39 (p. 27). 42 The poetic chiaroscuro explores death and illumination, not as antinomies, but as mutually affirming and nourishing values. Naughton, The Poetics of Yves Bonnefoy, 26 27

Notes

43 44

45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

53 54 55

56

57 58 59 60

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refers to Georges de la Tour’s painting (p. 63), though passes over the chiaroscuro effects in Bonnefoy’s poetry. Jacques Derrida, Donner le temps: I. La fausse monnaie (Paris: Galilée, 1991). ‘Entretien avec Tom Van de Voorde (1999), in L’Inachevable, pp. 351–62. Bonnefoy discusses ‘Les Tombeaux de Ravenne’ as a bid to move from the conceptual project to a fuller engagement with the world in the form of ‘une poésie de la finitude, de l’existence incarnée’ (p. 358). See my earlier discussion of Kristeva and the agency of blue, pp. 2, 141. Valsaintes is the site of the poet’s reflection and the key signifier of Dans le leurre du seuil (L’Inachevable, pp. 197–8). ‘Entretien avec Alain Freixe (1995)’, L’Inachevable, pp. 239–53 (pp. 246–7). Georges Didi-Huberman, Blancs soucis (Paris: Minuit, 2013), explores the fuller resonance of ‘re-garder’ with its call to us to look more keenly, more respectfully, and in ways that preserve the object in its integrity and its autonomy. Emmanuel Levinas, Totalité et infini: essai sur l’extériorité (The Hague, NL: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971, 1st edition 1961). Martha C. Nussbaum, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton University Press, 2012). Mary Jacobus, Romantic Things: A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud (Chicago University Press, 2012). Michael Bishop offers an illuminating extended introductory essay on Dans le leurre du seuil in the electronic Literary Encyclopedia. Bishop contextualizes the work and develops a close reading of aspects of Bonnefoy’s poetic discourse and its powerful figurations, sensitive to the poet’s reach to the ethical, the existential, and qualities of ‘lived-ness’ (12 November 2013), https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks. php?rec=true&UID=25262 (accessed 15 August 2020). Translated by Richard Pevear, in Yves Bonnefoy I: Poems, ed. by Antony Rudolf, John Naughton, and Stephen Romer, p. 73. I use ‘writerly’ in the Barthesian sense of discourse that, in its slippages and ellipses, challenges the reader to participate creatively in acts of sense-making. Colour writing, with its proleptic and analeptic effects, might be considered one of the forces that allow the poet to ‘sustain’ (in the musical sense) the long poem. Mary Ann Caws, in ‘Yves Bonnefoy, Sostenuto: On Sustaining the Long Poem’, L’Esprit créateur, vol. 36, no. 3, Fall 1996, pp. 84–93, reflects on the challenges and the poetic opportunity offered by the extended poem, without considering chromatic values. Major explorations of black from cultural studies, historical and art-historical studies, screen studies, and interdisciplinary perspectives include Michel Pastoureau, Black: The History of a Colour (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); Carol Mavor, Black and Blue: The Bruising Passion of Camera Lucida, La Jetée, Sans soleil, and Hiroshima mon amour (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); and John Harvey, The Story of Black (London: Reaktion, 2015). Later sections of Dans le leurre du seuil return to this question of beauty and its value. Translated by Richard Pevear, in Yves Bonnefoy I: Poems, ed. by Antony Rudolf, John Naughton, and Stephen Romer, p. 79. The vivid colour of the Pharaoh’s daughter’s robes in Dans le leurre du seuil, an instance of enriched ekphrastic writing, contrasts with the austere vestimentary values of Douve. Translated by Richard Pevear, in Yves Bonnefoy I: Poems, ed. by Antony Rudolf, John Naughton, and Stephen Romer, p. 99.

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61 Bonnefoy, ‘Ut pictura poesis’, L’Esprit créateur, vol. 36, no. 3, Fall 1996, pp. 9–26 (p. 25). 62 Daniel Lançon and Stephen Romer (eds), ‘Yves Bonnefoy: entretien avec John Naughton à propos de Ce qui fut sans lumière’, in Yves Bonnefoy: L’amitié et la réflexion (Tours: Presses Universitaires François–Rabelais, 2007), pp. 153–68. Bonnefoy evokes the continuity of the book with his preceding work in terms of his founding ideas on place (and specifically on Valsaintes with its Virgilian appeal and its materialization of the desire and the spirit evoked by Poussin in Et in Arcadia ego (1637–8)). He discusses deep structure in his writing, which is formed of the profound sense of presence (made tangible in place) and of past self. The poet evokes repeatedly the idea of experience as a form of learning. The poet’s lesson in decentering arose from his experience of the chromatic fluctuations of Hopkins Forest (‘[forêt] d’abord verte, puis empourprée par l’automne, puis grise et noire mais alors illuminée par la neige’). 63 Translated by Stephen Romer, Yves Bonnefoy, the Arrière-Pays (London: Seagull, 2012), pp. 25–6. 64 Asserting this reading within the space of an exchange economy, and economy tout court, Derrida frames exchange as a negative value, as a loss, since exchange detracts from – and renders impossible – the concept of ‘pure’ or ‘absolute’ gift. (Donner le temps: I. La fausse monnaie). 65 Derrida, Donner le temps: I. La fausse monnaie (‘[le don] s’annule chaque fois qu’il y a restitution ou contre-don’, p. 25). 66 Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge University Press, 2001), Part II, discusses the distinction between the more detached value of empathy (our attempt to construct for ourselves an understanding of another’s pain) and the deeper value of compassion (our sense that another’s pain matters to us). 67 Emerson’s essay ‘Nature’ (1836), from a collection of essays on beauty, commodity, language, and idealism, is a keystone of Romantic philosophy, exploring the notion of nature as a gift not properly recognized by humankind. See Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature and Selected Writings, ed. by Larzer Ziff (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001). 68 Mary Jacobus, in Romantic Things, has explored human–nature relations through ethical and aesthetic frames in the poetry of Wordsworth, John Clare, and Rilke, contemporary literature (Sebald), painting (Constable), film (Tacita Dean), and photography (Gerhard Richter), 69 Translated by John Naughton, Yves Bonnefoy, In the Shadow’s Light (University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 147–9. 70 Richard Stamelman, ‘The “Presence” of Memory’, L’Esprit créateur, vol. 36, no. 3, Fall 1996, pp. 65–79, explores memory as a phantomatic process or haunting, yet it provides a structuring chromatic presence in relation to the Poussin-inspired Arcadia. Stamelman does not engage with colour or with its elision in writing, but he does indicate some rich routes for future research that present suggestive analogues with the presence and process of colour (inter alia, the question of borders and limits, memory as epiphany, the preservation of memory fragments, and memory as a form of language and a process of disruption). 71 See Jacobus, Romantic Things, especially chapters 6 and 8. 72 Translated by John Naughton, in Yves Bonnefoy I: Poems, ed. by Antony Rudolf, John Naughton, and Stephen Romer, p. 157.

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Elaine Scarry, in On Beauty and Being Just (Harvard University Press, 2001), pays subtle attention to the gestures of replication and repetition that beauty in nature and in art provokes in those who contemplate with due attention. This ethos of quiet looking and attentive, enthralled replication offers an analogue to the encounter of poet and nature, and of poet and art, in Bonnefoy’s writing. 74 Translated by John Naughton, in Yves Bonnefoy I: Poems, ed. by Antony Rudolf, John Naughton, and Stephen Romer, p. 153. 75 Translated by John Naughton, Yves Bonnefoy, In the Shadow’s Light (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 59. 76 Lançon and Romer (eds), ‘Yves Bonnefoy: entretien avec John Naughton à propos de Ce qui fut sans lumière’, pp. 153–68 (p. 157). 77 Claude Lorrain (1600–82) is the other major painter whose work is the subject of ekphrastic treatment in Ce qui fut sans lumière. 78 I am careful not to suggest that this is the ‘second’ poem on painting. Responding to John Naughton, Bonnefoy affirms that the sequences of Ce qui fut sans lumière, in the nature of his poetry more generally, are only apparently successive, in terms of their surface structure: this appearance of a narrative line is the antithesis of the ‘structures profondes’, which are interior to the human subject and inform poetry in unbiddable and fragmentary forms whose contiguity and simultaneity may spark reciprocal illumination in the inventive space of writing (L’Inachevable, pp. 195–6). 79 ‘Sur la création artistique: entretien avec Daniel Bergez (2007)’, L’Inachevable, pp. 37–66. 80 ‘Sur la création artistique: entretien avec Daniel Bergez (2007)’, L’Inachevable, p. 65. 81 Emily McLaughlin, ‘“Et que faut-il penser / De ces pommes jaunes?”: An Ecocritical Reading of Yves Bonnefoy’s Punctual Colour-work’, in Thinking Colour-Writing, ed. by Susan Harrow, French Studies, vol. 71, no. 3, July 2017, pp. 348–61. McLaughlin considers affect through approaches which reach from the Barthesian punctum to art history, anthropology, cultural studies, and literary criticism. 82 Hopkins Forest crosses state lines, those of Massachusetts, New York, and Vermont, but is usually referred to by Bonnefoy in relation to Massachusetts, where he spent the autumn and winter of 1985 as the guest of Williams College. 83 Lançon and Romer (eds), ‘Yves Bonnefoy: entretien avec John Naughton à propos de Ce qui fut sans lumière’, pp. 153–68 (p. 160) (my emphasis). 84 Levinas, Totalité et infini: essai sur l’extériorité. 85 ‘Entretien avec Ahmet Soysal’, L’Inachevable, pp. 363–74 (p. 366). 86 Pamela A. Genova, ‘White on Black on White: Yves Bonnefoy’s Début et fin de la neige’, Romance Studies, vol. 23, no. 2, July 2005, pp. 143–58, is a searching reading of the intricate relations between the material, philosophical, aesthetic, and linguistic worlds explored in these affecting poems. Chromatic matters are only briefly evoked by Genova whose focus is the extinction of colour by snow. 87 Emily McLaughlin, ‘Noli me tangere: Bonnefoy, Nancy, Derrida’, French Forum, vol. 37, nos 1–2, Winter/Spring 2012, pp. 183–94 (p. 184), explores Bonnefoy’s treatment of the ‘not touching’ trope through Jean-Luc Nancy’s reading of the play of hands in iconographic representations of the scene from St John’s Gospel. 88 See my discussion of Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard in Part I, pp. 55–64. 89 Bonnefoy published, inter alia, Le Cœur espace (2001), La Longue Chaîne de l’ancre (2008), L’Heure présente (2011), Le Digamma (2012), and L’Écharpe rouge (2016). 90 See my discussion of Hier régnant désert, pp. 137–42. 73

220 91 92

93 94 95

Notes Translated by Hoyt Rogers, Yves Bonnefoy, The Curved Planks (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), p. 97. In the curved planks figure, there is, perhaps, a distant echo or part-echo of Kant’s dictum ‘out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made’, Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose, 1784, in Amélie Oksenberg Rorty and James Schmidt (eds), Kant’s Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose, with English translation of Kant’s text by Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Where Kant’s figure affirms the imperfectible, obdurate nature of humankind (and, implicitly, its resilience and power of resistance), Bonnefoy’s ‘smoothed’ image of the boat’s curved planks suggests the will to give shape and direction to dreams and desires. See my discussion of Bonnefoy on Elsheimer in Le Nuage rouge, pp. 145, 150, 161–62, 178–79. See footnote 8 above for Bonnefoy’s discussion of ‘thinking with’ the painter, in his interview with Odile Bombarde. Ethical values emerge from a keen sense of intersubjective relationality: self and other, self and object, self and nature; and the narrating ‘je’ in dialogue with the world and with the reader.

Conclusion 1

2

Valéry does not deny emotion, instinct, and unconscious desires, but focuses on the conscious mind as the agent, for only the intellect can shape material, creating form and order: in this we might, unexpectedly, assess Valéry to have proleptic value in resisting clichéd, Europeanist appropriations of the Mediterranean. His poetic recourse to landscape is more subtle, more restrained, sparer, and interrupted. Martha C. Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2011).

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INDEX Abbott, Helen 200 n.97 Adorno, Theodor 5 Aestheticism 106–8 Allori, Cristofano Head of a Page (early c16th) (Plate 15) 80–1 Anderson, Jill 197 n.55 Anderson, Kirsteen 72 Apollinaire, Guillaume 62, 67, 79, 194 n.3 ‘La Chanson du mal-aimé’ 13 ‘L’Émigrant de Landor Road’ 194 n.3 ‘Zone’ 211 n.118 Aristotle 21, 22, 27, 53, 73, 77, 89, 168–9, 183 Assar, Nasser 147 Asse, Geneviève 171 Austin, Lloyd James 22–3, 72, 93 azulejo tiles 49 Bach, Johann Sebastian 176 Bal, Mieke 81, 208 n.72 The Mottled Screen 7 Barnes, Djuna 63 Baroque art 108–9, 111–12, 113, 129, 149 Barthes, Roland 1, 5, 69, 107, 185 Batchelor, David 16, 89, 203 n.134, 215 n.21 Baudelaire, Charles 3, 4, 10, 21, 22, 35, 49 Art writing ‘L’Eau forte est à la mode’ 33 ‘Salon de 1846’ 7, 22, 40–1 Bonnefoy on 130 Valéry on 85–6, 98 Valéry, echoes in 114–15, 117, 121 Poetry ‘À une passante’ 42–3 ‘Correspondances’ 78 Les Fleurs du mal 33 ‘Hymne à la beauté’ 23, 24 ‘L’Invitation au voyage’ 20 ‘Obsession’ 47 ‘Les Petites Vieilles’ 33

‘Les Sept Vieillards’ 31 ‘Une charogne’ 24 ‘Le Voyage’ 24 Beckett, Samuel 63 Bergman, Ingmar 114 Bergson, Henri 68, 205 nn.8, 9 Bishop, Michael 217 n.52 Blanche, Jacques-Émile 83 Blanchot, Maurice 64, 68–9 Bonnard, Pierre 83 Bonnefoy, Yves 2–3, 5–9, 11, 19, 113, 127–82, 183–90 anti-Platonism 132–7, 154, 164, 180 Art writing L’Arrière-pays 141, 151, 159–60 ‘La Couleur sous le manteau d’encre’ 154 ‘Des fruits montant de l’abîme’ 140 L’Improbable et autres essais 140 Le Nuage rouge 127–82 ‘Peinture, poésie: vertige paix’ 130 ‘Remarques sur la couleur’ 128–9 Les Tombeaux de Ravenne 151 ‘Ut pictura poesis’ 129 Bach, J.S., echoes of 176 on Baudelaire 130 on Bokor, Miklos 128–9, 141 Ceres, figure of 149–50, 161–2, 175, 178–9 Claude, influence of 159, 167, 178 Constable, influence of 159, 166–8, 182 on De Chirico 129 on Delacroix 136 on ekphrasis 130–1, 149 on Elsheimer, Adam 129, 145, 149–50, 161–2 Emerson, echoes of 162 on Garache, Claude 135–6 on Giacometti 134–5 on Goya’s blacks 154 on Hopper 129–30, 141–2

Index Keats, echoes of 175 Lucretius, influence of 173 on Mallarmé 15, 201 n.104 on Mantegna 127–8, 140 on Mondrian 141, 147, 158 Mondrian, echoes of 177, 180 on Morandi, Giorgio 137, 139 Ovid, influence of 150, 175 on Pierlot, Norbert 148 Poetry Anti-Platon 11, 176 Ce qui fut sans lumière 146–7, 150, 151–2, 159–68, 170, 172, 175, 182 Dans le leurre du seuil 130, 131, 141–2, 144, 148–50, 151–2, 152–9, 177, 178, 181 Du mouvement et de l’immobilité de Douve 4, 21, 88, 116–7, 131, 132–7, 144–6, 149, 154, 180 Début et fin de la neige 149, 152, 162, 168–74, 182 L’Écharpe rouge 182 L’Heure présente 132, 149 Hier régnant désert 128, 133, 137–42, 145, 146, 147–8, 149, 176, 180–1 La Longue Chaîne de l’ancre 181–2 Pierre écrite 131, 142–7, 174 Les Planches courbes 11, 131, 140, 148, 149–50, 152, 174–80, 182 Poussin, influence of 141, 149, 151–2, 156–7, 159 on Proust 130 Rimbaud, echoes of 133 Shakespeare, echoes of 132, 135 on Tintoretto 143, 145 on Ubac, Raoul 137, 140–1, 216 n.27 Valéry, echoes of 138 on Valéry 68, 205 n.7 Valsaintes, influence of 147, 159, 170–1 on Van Gogh 131 Verlaine, echoes of 173 on Vermeer 130 Bourjea, Serge 72, 74, 81–2 Bowie, Malcolm 50, 72, 101, 201 n.109, 203 nn.137, 143, 213 n.148 Braque, Georges 73, 113 Burroughs, William 5 Burt, Ellen 203 n.135

231

Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da Still Life with Fruit (1601–5) 109 Still Life with Fruit on a Stone Ledge (1605) 111–12 Cassedy, Steven 69 Catani, Damian 199 n.83 Caws, Mary Ann 217 n.55 Cendrars, Blaise 67, 79 Ceres 145, 149–50, 175, 178–9 Cézanne, Paul 71, 73, 113 Still Life with Plaster Cupid (c. 1894) (Plate 19) 109 chiaroscuro 115–16, 120, 211 n.129, 213 n.152, 216 n.42 in Bonnefoy 135, 146, 161–2, 179 in Mallarmé 20, 46, 47–8, 49 in Valéry 74, 100, 113–23 Cixous, Hélène 1, 5, 70–1, 83, 102, 185 Claude Lorrain 73, 105, 167, 173 Hagar and the Angel (1646) 167 Psyché devant le château d’amour (1664) (Plate 31) 159, 168 Collier, Peter 93–4, 202 n.126, 210 n.112, 212 n.134 Collot, Michel 211 n.123 colour agency 1, 4, 8, 19, 151, 158, 184, 187–8 capacity 1, 19, 172, 183, 184, 186–7, 188 concept 184, 185–6, 188 hapticity 6, 189 in Bonnefoy 139–40, 156, 165, 167, 172–3, 180, 187–8 in Mallarmé 14, 29, 35, 39–40 in Valéry 79, 80, 87, 98, 99–100, 101–3, 111, 112, 122, 125 immanence 4, 8, 184, 190 in Bonnefoy 136, 138, 148, 151, 158–9, 161, 176 in Mallarmé 14, 35, 45–6, 51, 56, 62, 65 in Valéry 82, 92–3, 107, 115–16, 121–2, 124–5 meliorative value 9, 48, 55, 65, 107–8, 117, 138, 146, 178, 180, 183 reticence and chromatic resistance 6, 8, 9, 44, 183, 215 n.14 in Bonnefoy 131, 133, 146, 147, 159 in Mallarmé 20, 56, 58, 64

232

Index

in Valéry 88–94, 104, 113, 118 saturation 8, 184 in Bonnefoy 137, 144, 158–9 in Mallarmé 17, 31, 32, 35, 48–9, 64 in Valéry 91, 106–8, 120 Constable, John 147, 166–8 Dedham, from Langham (c. 1813) (Plate 30) 159, 166–8 Cooper, Douglas 207 n.40 Corot, Jean-Baptiste-Camille 10, 52, 74, 75, 105 Correggio, Antonio da 173 Cros, Charles 50 Crow, Christine 72, 101, 206 n.27 Cubism 21, 73, 113 cummings, e.e. 62–3 Dahan-Gaida, Laurence 209 n.78 Dayan, Peter 34, 85, 129, 199 n.75, 203 n.133 De Chirico, Giorgio 129 Piazza d’Italia (c. 1913) (Plate 22) 113–14 Degas, Edgar 9, 10, 75–6, 83 Delacroix, Eugène 136, 147 Delage, Henri Ostolle Nature morte aux abeilles (mid-late 19C) 109 Delaunay, Robert 79 Deleuze, Gilles 1, 5, 70, 185 Derrida, Jacques 5, 70, 150, 164, 218 n.64 Acts of Literature 62 La Dissémination 38–9, 200 n.92 Donner le temps 160–1 Didi-Huberman, Georges 5, 6, 7, 11, 135, 150, 185, 186 Blancs soucis 6, 14, 152, 172 La Peinture incarnée 130 Draguet, Michel 28 Dutch Golden Age painting 108–9, 123–4 Dyer, Richard 5 Eisenstein, Sergei 114 ekphrasis 4, 9, 185, 212 nn.133, 134, 141, 213 n.8, 217 n.59 in Bonnefoy 127–31, 149–52, 153, 157, 159–68, 177–80 Bonnefoy on 130–1 in Mallarmé 18, 33 in Valéry 74, 80, 80–2, 105–13, 105–13

Eliot, T.S. 10, 67 ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ 31–2 ‘The Waste Land’ 31 Elsheimer, Adam 9, 145, 149–50, 161–2 The Mocking of Ceres (c. 1605) (Plate 28) 149–50, 161–2, 175, 178–9 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 162, 218 n.67 Evans, David 211 n.128 Fauvism 113 Ferrier, Kathleen 140, 176 film noir 114 flesh 74, 79, 82 in Bonnefoy 130, 133, 141–2, 144, 151, 158, 182–4, 188 in Mallarmé 18, 26, 56, 203–4 n.148 in Valéry 85, 91–3, 98–9, 108–11, 116, 117, 122 Fuller, Loïe 75, 78–80, 208 n.66 Butterfly Dance (Plate 14) 79 Futurism 67 Gage, John 5 Gagnebin, Murielle 5 Garache, Claude Avocette (1973) (Plate 25) 136 Gautier, Théophile 48 Genova, Pamela 219 n.86 Giacometti, Alberto 134–5 Gide, André 67, 101 Gifford, Paul 70, 72, 74 Giotto 2, 141, 151, 173 Godard, Jean-Luc 114 Goldman, Jane 7, 213 n.152 Goya, Francisco 73, 154, 168 grisaille 127–8, 140, 142 Harrow, Susan 193 n.30, 214 n.8 Harvey, John 115–6 Heron, Patrick Yellow Painting (1958–9) (Plate 8) 31 Hill, Leslie 204 n.150, 205 n.10 Hitchcock, Alfred 114 Hockney, David 49 Holbein, Hans 173 Hollander, John 212 n.133 Hopper, Edward 11, 129–30, 141–2 Squam Light (1912) 129–30, 141–2 Huysmans, Joris-Karl 50

Index Imbert, Claude 7, 200 n.93 Impressionism 9, 21, 29, 73 International Exhibitions 1871, 1872 13, 20 Irigaray, Luce 83 Jacobus, Mary 150, 152, 162, 164, 186, 199 n.77 Jarman, Derek 6, 49, 202 n.116, 215 n.24 Jarrety, Michel 69, 72 Jordan, Shirley 5, 6 Joyce, James 63, 67 Kant, Immanuel 220 n.92 Kechiche, Abdellatif 7 Keiller’s ‘Dundee’ marmalade 75–6 Kieślowski, Krzysztof 7, 49 Killick, Rachel 209 n.75 Klee, Paul 10 Klein, Yves 6, 49 Kristeva, Julia 1, 2, 5, 7, 141, 150, 185 Küss, Ferdinand Still Life with a Basket of Fruit and Bee (mid 19C) 109 La Tour, Georges de 113 The Penitent Magdalene (c. 1640) 116 Leighton, Frederick Flaming June (c. 1895) (Plate 18) 106–8 Leonardo da Vinci 10, 75, 78 Mona Lisa (1503–4) 113 The Virgin of the Rocks (1483–6) 113 Levinas, Emmanuel 11, 69, 150, 152, 171–2, 185 Lichtenstein, Jacqueline 5 livre d’artiste 4 Lucretius 162, 168–9, 173 Lussy, Florence de 72, 102 MacDonald, Margaret 200 n.85 ‘Mademoiselle Satin’. See Mallarmé: fashion writing Mallarmé, Geneviève (Mallarmé’s daughter) 18 Mallarmé, Maria (Mallarmé’s wife) 17, 19 Mallarmé, Stéphane 2–3, 5–9, 11, 13–66, 67, 68, 74, 129, 131, 139, 164, 181, 183–90 Art writing ‘Les Impressionnistes et Édouard Manet’ 26

233 ‘Le Jury de peinture pour 1874 et M. Manet’ 25, 39–41 ‘On Manet’s Le Linge’ 26–7 Correspondence with Aubanel, Théodore 18 Cazalis, Henri 16, 18, 29–30, 31, 54 Dierx, Léon 17 Lefébure, Henri 66 Mathieu, Paul 46 Mistral, Frédéric 17 Renaud, Armand 45 fashion writing 14, 15, 17, 194–5 n.10, 198 n.63 in London 6, 9, 13, 16, 20, 34 Mediterranean culture in 16 on Morisot 24–5, 27–9, 38 Other writing Divagations 40, 57–8, 59–60, 61, 65 ‘Notes sur le langage’ 20 Poetry ‘À la nue accablante tu …’ 45 ‘Angoisse’ 44, 57 L’Après-midi d’un faune 17 ‘Au seul souci de voyager’ 59 ‘L’Azur’ 29–34, 35, 36, 38, 53, 197–8 n.61 ‘Billet (à Whistler)’ 41–3 ‘Brise marine’ 58 ‘Les Fenêtres’ 54 ‘Frisson d’hiver’ 19 ‘Le Guignon’ 53–4 ‘Hommage (à Wagner)’ 45–6 Hérodiade 4, 17, 21, 22, 27, 54–5, 65, 111, 198 n.70 ‘Las de l’amer repos …’ 5, 14, 44–5, 53 ‘Ouverture ancienne d’Hérodiade’ 21, 32 ‘La Pipe’ 34, 36 ‘Prose (pour Des Esseintes)’ 50–1 ‘Quand l’ombre menaça de la fatale loi …’ 48–9 ‘Renouveau’ 31, 54 ‘Salut’ 58–9, 203 n.140 ‘Ses purs ongles …’ 14 ‘Sonnet en -yx’ 56–7, 63, 65 ‘Sonnet à Wyse’ 20, 196 n.39 ‘Soupir’ 52 ‘Toast funèbre’ 48

234

Index

‘Le Tombeau d’Edgar Poe’ 28, 44, 45 ‘Le Tombeau de Charles Baudelaire’ 47–8 ‘Tombeau’ 46–7 Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard 5, 10, 25, 38–9, 45, 55–64, 65, 67–8, 82, 89, 98, 174 vers de circonstance 10, 15 translator of Whistler 37–8 ‘Un coup de dés’, detail of proof (Plate 13) 63 Valéry on 87 Manet, Édouard 3, 9, 10, 21, 22, 24, 29, 49, 75 black, treatment of 6, 10, 39–41, 83–5, 196 n.48 Valéry on 85–6 Le Bal masqué à l’Opéra (1873) (Plate 10) 25, 39–41 Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863) 26 L’Exécution de Maximilien (1868–9) 26 Hirondelles (1873) (Plate 5) 25 Le Linge (1875) (Plate 6) 26–7 Olympia (1863) 26 Portrait of Berthe Morisot (1872) (Plate 3) 10, 11, 25 Un bar aux Folies-Bergère (1882) (Plate 1) 15, 38 Mann, Thomas 67 Mantegna, Andrea 9, 11, 113, 129, 147, 173 Altarpiece of San Zeno (Holy Conversation) (1456–9) (Plate 24) 127–8 Lamentation of Christ (1480) 127–8 Samson and Delilah (1495–1500) 128 ‘Marguerite de Ponty’. See Mallarmé: fashion writing Martin, Graham Dunstan 211 n.122 Mathews, Timothy 135, 215 n.19 Matisse, Henri 29, 73, 105–6, 195 n.14 Still Life with Pomegranates (1947) (Plate 21) 112 Mavor, Carol 6, 7 McLaughlin, Emily 169, 173, 219 n.87 Mediterranean culture 6, 16, 75, 92–9, 106–8, 189, 220 n.1 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 5, 130

Millais, John Everett Ophelia (1851–2) 13 Miró, Joan Blue Triptych II (1961) (Plate 11) 49 Mitchell, W.J.T. 81, 108, 208 n.72 Mitterand, Henri 197 n.54 modernism 2–5, 7, 9, 21–2, 32–6, 38–9, 44–7, 55–7, 60–2, 65–7, 82–5, 91, 124–5, 129, 183–5, 189, 191 n.7, 192 n.9 Mondrian, Piet 9, 10, 147 The Red Cloud (c. 1907) (Plate 32) 177 Monet, Claude 1, 2, 83 Morandi, Giorgio 9, 137, 139 Still Life/Natura morta (1960) (Plate 26) 139 Morisot, Berthe 9, 10, 21, 24, 75 Lucie Léon at the Piano (1892) (Plate 12) 49 Murillo, Bartolomé Esteban Virgin of Seville (1665–70) 18 Nancy, Jean-Luc 173, 210 n.117 Nash, Suzanne 72, 118–19 Naughton, John 137, 166–7, 170–1, 214 n.11, 219 n.78 Nunez, Laurent 72 Nussbaum, Martha C. 150, 152, 162, 186, 218 n.66 Olds, Marshall 50–1, 202 n.119 Pastoureau, Michel 5 Pearson, Roger 15, 20, 196 n.39 Picasso, Pablo 49–50, 71, 73, 113 Pierlot, Norbert 148 Piero della Francesca 147 Pierrot, Jean 212 n.139 Pissarro, Camille 21 Boulevard Montmartre at Night (1897) 31 Plato 82 Poe, Edgar Allan ‘The Raven’ 30, 44 pomegranates 15, 22, 101, 109–13 Ponce, Antonio Pomegranates (1625–50) (Plate 20) 111–12

Index

235

Ponge, Francis 15 post-Impressionism 73, 113 Pound, Ezra 67, 208 n.64 Poussin, Nicolas 49, 97, 105, 147, 159 Art works Bachannale à la joueuse de luth (1628) 151 Moïse sauvé des eaux (1647) (Plate 29) 151, 153–4, 156–7 Bonnefoy, influence on 151–2, 153–4, 156–7 Bonnefoy on 141, 149 Proust, Marcel 5, 7, 8, 34, 63, 67, 80, 124–5, 130 À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs 52 Albertine disparue 36 Du côté de chez Swann 51–2 La Prisonnière 130

Serrano, Richard 202 n.128 sfumato 31, 35, 59, 90, 113 Shakespeare, William 44, 98 Sheringham, Michael 8 simultaneity 3, 79 Singletary, Suzanne 200 n.85, 203 n.140 Soulages, Pierre 10 Stamelman, Richard 218 n.70 Stein, Gertrude 67 Steinmetz, Jean-Luc 21 Stewart, Jack 8 Stimpson, Brian 70, 72, 208 n.62 Surrealism 2, 67 Sutherland, Graham 173 Suthor, Nicola 209 n.80 Svevo, Italo 67 Symbolism 21, 118–21 synaesthesia 125, 138

Rancière, Jacques 49, 208 n.66 Rauschenberg, Robert White Painting (1951) 55 Redon, Odilon 21 Rembrandt 9, 10, 73–4, 75, 83 Renaissance art 3, 113, 115, 127–9, 143 Resnais, Alain 114 Riley, Bridget 115–16 Rilke, Rainer Maria 67, 204 n.5 Rimbaud, Arthur 21, 147 ‘Le Bateau ivre’ 2, 17, 89, 131 Une saison en enfer 36, 133 ‘Voyelles’ 2 Ripoll, Elodie 8 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 206 n.27 Robertson, Eric 203–4 n.148 Roque, Georges 5 Rothko, Mark Blue Divided by Blue (1966) 50 White Centre (1957) 55 Rouax, Germinal 114 Rousseau, Eugène 13–14 Ruskin, John 201 n.106

Taussig, Michael 5, 59 Tintoretto 143, 145 Titian 173 Turner, J.M.W. 9, 10, 21 Dudley, Worcestershire (1830–3) (Plate 7) 31

Sarraute, Nathalie 71–2, 206 n.27 senses and the sensorium 187 in Bonnefoy 136, 138, 140, 167, 173–4 in Mallarmé 34, 35, 53–5 in Valéry 72, 92, 95, 98, 101–2, 106, 111–13

Ubac, Raoul 137, 141 Sans titre (1975) (Plate 27) 140 Vago, Davide 8 Valsaintes 147, 151, 159, 182, 218 n.62 Valéry, Paul 1–5, 7–11, 67–125, 129, 131, 164, 181, 183–90 analogical thinking 209 n.78 Art work Mediterranean landscape 75 Art writing ‘Au sujet de Berthe Morisot’ 87 ‘Berthe Morisot’ 83 ‘Des couleurs’ 74, 92 ‘Tante Berthe’ 85 ‘Le Triomphe de Manet’ 83–5 Baudelaire, echoes of 78, 83, 85–6, 98, 104, 114–15, 117 and Bergson 68, 205 nn.8, 9 on black and red 74 Bonnefoy, echoes in 138 Bonnefoy on 205 n.7 on Corot 72–3

236

Index

Cubism and post-Impressionism, affinities with 207 n.40 on Degas 75–6 Deleuze on 70 Derrida on 70 on Fuller, Loïe 75, 78–80 on Impressionism and Mallarmé’s poetry 87 on Leonardo da Vinci 78, 82, 85, 87–8, 114–15, 212 n.144 on Mallarmé 60, 67, 82, 87 on Manet 84–5, 85–6 Mediterranean culture in 6, 75, 92–9, 106–8, 189, 220 n.1 on Morisot 76–8, 87 nouveau roman, affinities with the 206 n.27 Other writing Cahiers 30, 68–9, 71, 75, 78–9, 124, 125 ‘Regards sur la mer’ 95 own art work 207 n.49 Poétique and Tel quel, influence on 69 Poetry ‘L’Abeille’ 101, 103, 108–10, 111 ‘Au platane’ 92, 101, 107, 210 n.109 ‘Aurore’ 90–1 ‘Le Cantique des colonnes’ 69, 93–4, 96, 105–6 ‘La Ceinture’ 88–9, 198 n.65 Charmes 10, 67, 74, 79–80, 95, 101, 113 ‘Le Cimetière marin’ 71, 74, 89, 91, 94–101, 112, 123 ‘La Dormeuse’ 91, 106–8 ‘Ébauche d’un serpent’ 67, 89, 91, 125, 204 n.1 ‘Fragments du Narcisse’ 71, 73, 116, 118–23, 121 Glose sur quelques peintures 74, 80–2, 87, 113 ‘Les Grenades’ 15, 101, 109–13, 212 n.139 La Jeune Parque 67, 71, 73, 82, 88, 101, 101–5, 113, 211 n.129, 213 n.148 ‘Ode secrète’ 99–100, 211 nn.122, 123 ‘Palme’ 91, 123–4

‘Les Pas’ 116 ‘Poésie’ 115 ‘La Pythie’ 73, 116–18, 213 n.148 ‘Le Rameur’ 88 ‘Sainte Alexandrine’ 81–2 ‘Le Vin perdu’ 89–90 Proust, affinity with 124–5 on Rembrandt 83 and Rilke 204 n.5 Shakespeare, echoes of 98 on Vermeer 85 Van Gogh, Vincent 131 Van Hulle, Dirk 204 n.1 Verlaine, Paul 173 Vermeer, Johannes 130 The Milkmaid (1658–60) (Plate 23) 123–4 Vuillard, Édouard 83 Watt, Adam 80 Whidden, Seth 201 n.105 Whistler, James McNeill 9, 10, 21, 24, 33, 34–5, 43–4, 55 Art works Arrangement in Grey and Black no. 1 (1871) (Plate 2) 17, 38, 55–6 Nocturne Blue and Gold: Old Battersea Bridge (1872) 35–6, 50, 59 Nocturne Blue and Silver: Cremorne Lights (1872) 35–6, 50 Nocturne Blue and Silver: The Lagoon, Venice (1879–80) (Plate 4) 25 Rose et gris: Geneviève Mallarmé (1897) 38 Symphony in Flesh Colour and Pink: Portrait of Mrs Frances Leyland (1871–4) 38 Symphony in White no. 2: The Little White Girl (1864) (Plate 9) 38, 55–6 Art writing ‘Ten O’Clock Lecture’ 36–8, 199–200 n.84, 202 n.132 The Gentle Art of Making Enemies 202 n.132 Williams, Heather 194 n.9 Wilson, Emma 7

Index Wittgenstein, Ludwig 5 Wood, James 6 Woolf, Virginia 7, 67 Wright, Joseph, of Derby 113 Yeats, W.B. 62

237

Zaccarello, Benedetta 211 n.129 Zachmann, Gayle 194 n.3 Zola, Émile 197 n.54 Zurbarán, Francisco de 9 Sainte-Agathe (1630–3) (Plate 16) 74, 81–2

238

239

240

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1  Edouard Manet (1832–83), A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, 1882 (oil on canvas). The Courtauld Gallery, London, UK/Bridgeman Images.

2  James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), Arrangement in Grey and Black no. 1, 1871 (oil on canvas). Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France/Bridgeman Images.

3  Edouard Manet (1832–83), Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets, 1872 (oil on canvas). Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France/Bridgeman Images.

4  James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), Nocturne in Blue and Silver: The Lagoon, Venice, 1879–80 (oil on canvas). Photograph © 2019 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts, USA, Emily L. Ainsley Fund/Bridgeman Images.

5  Edouard Manet (1832–83), The Swallows, 1873 (oil on canvas). Buhrle Collection, Zurich, Switzerland/Bridgeman Images.

6  Edouard Manet (1832–83), Le Linge, 1875 (oil on canvas). The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA/Bridgeman Images.

7  Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851), Dudley, Worcestershire, 1830–33 (watercolour on paper). Lady Lever Art Gallery, National Museums Liverpool/Bridgeman Images.

8  Patrick Heron (1920–99), Yellow Painting, October 1958/May/June 1959 (oil on canvas). Purchased with assistance from Tate Friends St Ives 1999; © Estate of Patrick Heron. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2019; Photo: © Tate.

9  James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903). Symphony in White no. 2: Little White Girl. 1864 (oil on canvas). Bequeathed by Arthur Studd (1919). Photo ©Tate.

10  Edouard Manet (1832–83), Masked Ball at the Opera, 1873 (oil on canvas). National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, USA/Bridgeman Images.

11  Joan Miró (1893–1983), Blue Triptych II, 1961 (oil on canvas). (C) Successio Miró/ ADAGP. Paris, Centre Pompidou – Musée national d’art moderne – Centre de création industrielle. Photo (C) Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Philippe Migeat.

12  Berthe Morisot (1841–95), Lucie Léon at the piano, 1892 (oil on canvas). Private Collection/Bridgeman Images.

13  Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–98), Jamais un coup de dés n’abolira le hasard: poème (épreuves d’imprimerie) (Paris: A. Vollard, 2 juillet 1897). – 39 cm. Epreuves d’imprimerie d’‘Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard’, avec corrections et annotations de l’auteur. (Jeu d’épreuves du premier tirage, corrigé par l’auteur à l’encre noire et au crayon rouge). RES FOL-NFY-130. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF). Photo (C) BnF, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/image BnF.

14  Loie Fuller (1862–1928), Loie Fuller, raising her very long gown in the shape of a butterfly, 1902. Everett Collection/Bridgeman Images.

15  Cristofano Allori (1577–1621), Tête d’un page (oil on canvas). © Musée Fabre de Montpellier Méditerranée Métropole/photographie Frédéric Jaulmes – Reproduction interdite sans autorisation.

16  Francisco de Zurbarán (1598–1664), Saint Agatha, 1630–33 (oil on canvas). Musée Fabre, Montpellier, France/Bridgeman Images.

17  Berthe Morisot (1841–95), Woman at her toilette, 1875–80 (oil on canvas). The Art Institute of Chicago, ILL, USA. Stickney Fund/Bridgeman Images.

18  Frederick Leighton (1830–96), Flaming June, c. 1895 (oil on canvas). Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico. Photo © The Maas Gallery, London/Bridgeman Images.

19  Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), Still Life with Plaster Cupid, c. 1894 (oil on canvas). The Courtauld Gallery, London, UK/Bridgeman Images.

20  Antonio Ponce (1608–67), Pomegranates, second quarter of the c17th (oil on canvas). ©Museo Nacional del Prado.

21  Henri Matisse (1869–1954), Still Life with Pomegranates, 1947 (oil on canvas). Musée Matisse, Nice-Cimiez, France. © 2020 Succession H. Matisse/DACS, London/Bridgeman Images.

22  Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978), Piazza d’Italia, c. 1913 (oil on canvas). The Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada. Gift of Sam and Ayala Zacks, 1970/Bridgeman Images.

23  Jan (Johannes) Vermeer (1632–75), The Milkmaid, c. 1658–60 (oil on canvas). Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands/Bridgeman Images.

24  Andrea Mantegna (1431–1506), Altarpiece of San Zeno (Holy Conversation), 1456–59 (tempera on panel, polyptych, gilded frame). Photo © Luisa Ricciarini/Bridgeman Images.

25  Claude Garache (b. 1930), Avocette, 1973 (oil on canvas). (C) ADAGP, Paris. Musée Cantini, Marseille, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/David Giancatarina.

26  Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964), Still Life/Natura morta, 1960 (oil on canvas). Private Collection. Photo © Christie’s Images/Bridgeman Images.

27  Raoul Ubac (1910–85), Sans titre, 1975 (coloured lithograph on Arches paper). ADAGP Paris Centre Pompidou, photo © Musée National d’Art Moderne-CCI. Distribution RMN-Grand Palais/Philippe Migeat.

28  Adam Elsheimer (1578–1610), Ceres and Stelio, c. 1605 (oil on copperplate). Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, Spain/Bridgeman Images.

29  Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665), Moses saved from the Water, 1647 (oil on canvas). Photo © Photo Josse/Bridgeman Images.

30  John Constable (1776–1837), Dedham from Langham, c. 1813 (oil on canvas). Bequeathed by George Salting (1910). Photo Credit: Photo ©Tate.

31  Claude Lorrain (1604/05–82), Landscape with Psyche outside the Palace of Cupid (‘The Enchanted Castle’), 1664 (oil on canvas). National Gallery. Bought with contributions from the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the National Art Collections Fund, 1981. © The National Gallery, London.

32  Piet Mondrian (1872–1944), The Red Cloud (c. 1907) (oil on canvas). Haags Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, Netherlands/Bridgeman Images.