Comparative literature



Text/ile: Reading the Derridean “Hymen” in Mallarmé’s La dernière mode Junior Paper Submitted to the Department of Comparative LiteratureHarvard University December 2, 2016“[...] (s’il est vrai, comme le disent les po?tes, qu’une robe veuille dire quelque chose)?” Madame de Ponty (La dernière mode, no°6, 43)In the famous letter to Paul Verlaine later dubbed his Autobiographie, Stéphane Mallarmé confesses he’s written some “potboilers,” as Barbara Johnson puts it in her translation. “J’ai d? faire,” he writes, “dans des moment de gêne ou pour acheter de ruineux canots, des besognes propres” (Oeuvres complètes, 663). Mallarmé wrote these works, which he mentions by name –– Les Dieux Antiques, Les Mots Anglais –– only to pay the bills or “boil the pot.” As such, they mark a departure from the project which otherwise ruled his literary life: le Livre. “The Book,” which Mallarmé outlines in the same letter to Verlaine, would be the ultimate book, “architectural et prémédité, non un recueil des inspirations du hasard, fussent-elles merveilleuses…” (663). It would capture every object, every idea perfectly, totally, without any corner overlooked or unassimilated –– it would be absolute. La dernière mode, the poet’s short-lived fashion magazine, was published not long after his “potboilers” and has often been dismissed by critics along with them. Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry, the editors of the first Plé?ade edition of Mallarmé’s Oeuvres complètes, even pushed La dernière mode out of chronology to the very end of the book, to group the magazine in with the rest of Mallarmé’s “concessions to need.” Those who read the Autobiographie closely however (such as critics Jean-Pierre LeCercle and Claire Lyu, as well as contemporary translators P.N. Furbank and A.M. Cain), note that Mallarmé explicitly considered La dernière mode otherwise. Rather than embarrass him, as his ‘concessions to need’ did, Mallarmé tells Verlaine that “les huit ou dix numéros parus servent encore quand je les dévêts de leur poussière à me faire longtemps rêver.” (664). Likewise, the project’s warm reception amongst his literary friends, suggests its aesthetic value was largely acknowledged by Mallarmé’s contemporaries. Paul Verlaine, pupil of Mallarmé’s and recipient of his Autobiographie, wrote in the February 1887 issue of Les Hommes d’aujourd’hui:Mallarmé fonda et rédigea à lui tout seul, un journal avec ce titre fier: La Dernière mode (sic). Combien curieux, ai-je besoin d’ajouter intéressant à l’extrême? durent en être les articles, traités par un artiste et qui ne concernaient rien moins que les plus minces détails de la vie voulue, compétemment entendue et décrétée, raffinée, toilettes, bijoux, mobiliers, jusqu’aux thé?tres et menus de d?ners. Avis aux fureteurs intelligents et heureux. (119)Even as the issues of La dernière mode enjoyed widespread acceptance as works qua works among Mallarmé’s literary friends and peers, few contemporary scholars have risen to the challenge of unpacking them. In the later half of the twentieth century, Mallarmé’s deeply complicated prose and poetry rose in popularity. The mime, the dancer, the butterfly –– each had their moment at the center of scholarly debate over if and how such material, finite interests might be assimilated into Mallarmé’s ideal and infinite project. His magazines, by contrast, have never been examined at great length and never translated in full. Few have managed to satisfactorily answer the question one must ask of these magazines: is it possible Mallarmé found in fashion, as he had before in mimodrama and dance, a new way to talk about poetry? It is this question which this paper endeavors to answer, interrogating the opposition of shallowness and depth both in the text of the fashion magazine, and in the textiles it portrays.Mallarmé took on the project of La dernière mode in 1874, at the behest of his neighbor, Charles Wendelen, a Parisian publisher and the magazine’s main financier. The journal published poems and stories, many of them written by Mallarmé’s friends and literary peers, but (save for a single translation of a Tennyson poem) Mallarmé’s own work was never among them –– his pen, however, appeared everywhere else. Over the course of eight issues, Mallarmé single-handedly wrote the fashion journalism, theatre and book reviews, false advertisements, and fictional letters-to-the-editor that fill the pages of La dernière mode; he planned dinner menus and even developed sewing patterns for readers to craft garments of their own; and he did this all under the guise of several pseudonyms. Among others, his writing “staff” included a foreign fashion correspondent named Miss Satin, a theatre critic named Ix, “Le Chef de bouche chez Brébant” and his primary fashion columnist, Madame Marguerite de Ponty. It is in the writing of Madame de Ponty that the poetic resonances of this deceptively shallow work make themselves most clear. In Ponty’s fourth column, she launches into the description of a traditional dress, an ‘ancient’ dress, a classic dress: “la coutume antique du vêtement féminine par excellence, blanc et vaporeux” (no°4, 2). Which dress is this? “tel qu’il se porte au Mariage” (no°4, 2), she tells us –– the wedding dress, “female garment par excellence”. In her sixth column, Ponty introduces us to a second type of dress, nearly the opposite of the first. She writes, regretting the poverty of recent fashion developments, “Aucune transformation très sensible dans le Costume, qui se soit manifestée depuis quinze jours ou que ne montrent d’elle-mêmes les Toilettes de Bal, sujet de notre étude” (no°6, 42). In contrast to the wedding dress, that “coutume antique,” the ballgown errs on the side of trend –– novelties in fashion will find themselves assimilated into the ballgown within “quinze jours.” While introducing these seemingly opposite gowns, Ponty writes in a light, conversational tone. She peppers her prose with digressions, exclamations, asides to the reader. She writes like a lifestyle journalist, that profession Mallarmé so scorned for its superficiality. In a short prose piece called Le livre, instrument spirituel, the poet explained that everything in the world exists to end up as a book: “tout, au monde, existe pour aboutir à un livre” (Oeuvres complètes, 378). In this ongoing project, however, journalism and the newspaper “reste[nt] le point de départ,” in that they reveal only “au premier degré, brut, la coulée d’un texte” (379). That is to say, in the project to convert all of existence into the literary purity of a book, journalism is only the starting point –– it can only represent the first layer of things, the surface of things. It can’t break the surface, it can’t dive deeper, the way literature can. To a superficial reader, Ponty’s two dresses, and indeed the larger project of La dernière mode itself, may seem as frivolous as Mallarmé considered journalism to be. They are, however, the subject of a deeply complicated meditation on literature and on poetry, a meditation which manifests through the play of superficiality and depth, of “premier degrés” and the layers below –– both in language and in fabric –– and a meditation which brings La dernière mode far closer to “un livre” than the newspaper that it seems to be. Textual Surface, Textual DepthAs each dress’ introduction indicates, Madame de Ponty presents the wedding dress and ballgown as directly opposed. She describes the wedding dress as “[...] ne donnant pas du tout l’impression d’une Toilette de Bal, défaut grave” (La dernière mode, no°4, 2). So at odds are these two dresses, that for the wedding dress to suggest the ball gown would be a défaut grave, suggesting both the seriousness of the mistake while gesturing to a certain sense of heaviness or weightiness. Madame de Ponty writes that traditionally, the aim of the ball gown is to “rendre légère, vaporeuse, aérienne pour cette fa?on supérieure de marcher qui s’appelle danser,” (no°6, 42) while she calls the wedding dress, by contrast, a “solennité” (no°4, 2). To conflate the two garments, Ponty seems to say, is to negate or annul their social purposes. For the marriage dress to give the impression of the ball gown then, is to make the “weighty” error of making “light.”Below the claims of the surface, within the dresses’ colors and materials, even the words that describe them –– the very space of poetry -– these dresses are as alike as they are different. Although placed at opposite ends of Ponty’s sartorial spectrum, these two dresses are always put in relation to one another, echoing each other in both fabric and language. In terms of material, the two dresses are virtually identical. Both the wedding dress and ballgown have underskirts of satin, veils of tulle illusion, and are, explicitly, white. Both have bows and trains and lace, and are fringed with flowers, shaped with basques, and gathered into flounces. Ponty describes a wedding dress with a “pardessous (sic) de satin blanc” and a “voile de tulle illusion” (no°4, 3). White is not surprising for the wedding dress, but it is in style for ball gown: Ponty tells young girls to look for ball gowns “en tulle illusion de toutes nuances, mais surtout blanc” with “pardessous (sic) en satin,” and for married women to find “robes de danse en satin ou en faille voilée de tulle illusion blanc” (no°6, 42). Ponty allows that some gowns may come in other colors, but she pushes any discussion of shade to the final paragraph of the piece. Even then, she does not scrounge up more than two alternatives to white, and chooses them precisely because they are close to “éblouissement” of the white ballgown she has already described: Je ne puis….que citer une étoffe privilégiée ou deux: soit encore près des éblouissement de tout à l’heure, le tulle gris argent et (si nous passons sur toutes les teintes), le tulle noir entièrement brodé de jais. (no°6, 43)Ponty begins to name others but trails off into ellipses: “....., mais, je m’arrête.” If Ponty’s unwillingness to dwell on descriptions of other color possibilities is any indication, white is the ballgown color of the moment, just as it has been the essential wedding dress color for much, much longer. In more than just color or fabric, the two gowns resemble one another at the textual level, as well, as Madame de Ponty repeats words and phrases in her descriptions of both. Near the end of her wedding dress column, Ponty remarks that her article has strayed from its usual subject matter: “courrier presque exceptionnel que le présent: car voué d’abord aux fêtes, il n’a trait enfin qu’à des solennités […]” (no°4, 2, italics mine). In other words, her column’s focus on the garments of weddings (des solennités) was exceptional, out of character. Usually, Ponty clarifies, her column focuses on fantasy: "Quoique réel et très réel, son r?le [...] est de porter le cachet véritable de la Fantaisie” (no°4, 3). What, exactly, Ponty means by “fantasy” is clarified by a short announcement: “l’annonce d’un emblêmatique (sic) Papillon...taillé dans les tissues légers et délicieux...rempla?ant par son caprice la fraise historique de ces dernières années” (no°4, 3). Her description later reveals the “papillon” to be a kind of headpiece, and it’s this butterfly headpiece which sheds light on what, precisely, she means in describing the wedding dress as uncharacteristic of her column. Ponty’s fantasies are those things which are far less serious (solennel) than the wedding dress, which are flights of fancy (caprices), which are light and delicious (recalling the ballgown, which adapts to trends and aims to “rendre légère” and “vaporeuse,”) and also which are novel ––?the novelty of the butterfly headpiece demands its announcement and offsets the column’s detour into the solemn and traditional world of wedding attire. In this sense, the fantasy of the headpiece recalls the ballgown, which quickly adapts to new trends and which aims to “rendre légère” and “vaporeuse.”Ponty thus seems to establish an opposition between the serious occasion of a wedding (whose solennités explain the défaut grave of lightness in a wedding dress) and the fantasy of fêtes (which call for styles that are light, delicious and new, like the ballgown and the butterfly headpiece). The binary association of fantasy and ballgown is both explicitly affirmed and troubled, however, when Ponty describes both ballgown and the fête to which it is worn: “les Robes de ces solennités mondaines, c’est la fantaisie même” (no°6, 42). To the solennités of weddings she adds the solennités mondaines of balls. The ballgown, she insists, is “fantasy itself” –– but a fantasy that itself comes out of worldly seriousness. In this way, the surface-level opposition between wedding dress (as heavy/serious) and ballgown (as light/fantasy) is thus troubled by claims within the text. The ballgown is born out of “solennités mondaines.” What Ponty calls “fantasy itself” comes from “worldly seriousness.”The dresses are still further likened in Ponty’s description of the wedding dress. Ponty describes it as “blanc et vaporeux,” radiating “quelque chose de riche et de léger avec un recueillement” (no°4, 3, italics mine). Recall that she also observed the ball gown aimed to “rendre légère, vaporeuse, aérienne pour cette fa?on supérieure de marcher qui s’appelle danser” (no°6, 42, italics mine). The oppositions of heavy/light, and serious/fantasy are further undermined: both wedding dress and ballgown are light and vaporous.Their verbal resemblance is captured most succinctly by Ponty’s summation of the wedding dress in two words (as if reducing the dress’ essence to the simplest of terms). “Tout cela,” she says, “mondaine et virginale” (no°4, 2). Even in this distillation, the dresses’ similarity persists: in ‘mondaine’ we hear the echo of the ball gown –– “les Robes de ces solennités mondaines,” (no°6, 42).The marked disparity between the opposition Madame de Ponty claims for the two dresses and their apparent similarity might be explained when considered alongside Julia Kristeva’s theory of Mallarméan syntax. In a chapter of her book, La Révolution du langage poétique called “Syntaxe et composition,” Kristeva identifies in Mallarméan poetry and prose a certain shattered syntax. In some of his writing, Kristeva argues, Mallarmé modifies his syntax such that one may read his words in a number of ways. To do this, Kristeva says, the poets uses “des inversions, des appositions et des ellipses dont on peut reconstituer les structures sous-jacentes, mais qui appara?tront alors comme le résultat de très nombreuses transformations de ces structures sous-jacentes” (269). In other words, the claim at the surface –– the literal, ‘first degree’ reading of the words as they stand –– is complicated, even contradicted by the many possible semantic reconstructions that lie, available, beneath that claim. Perhaps this is how we must understand the two dresses –– which first appear to be diametrically opposed, and then resemble each other in the internal claims of the text –– to be related. It is not that their opposition is incorrect, or that there is some failure in their relation, but simply that their relation is multiplicitous. That is to say, it is possible for Ponty to oppose the two dresses, while underlying similarities link them –– for a multiplicity of meanings to compete:Il s’agit non pas d’une défaillance de la capacité syntaxique, mais au contraire d’un surplus entra?nant une ambigu?té ou une polysémie qu’on ne saurait désambigu?ser, d'autant plus que des processus primaires (transposition, condensation, répétition) viennent l'augmenter et que de cette polyvalence se constitue le sens mimétique du texte. (269). Perhaps then, we can find traces of Ponty’s dresses in Kristeva’s claim that “de cette polyvalence se constitue le sens mimétique du texte” (269). Here, Kristeva suggests that the polyvalence of the syntax is merely augmented in the process of writing, in those “primary processes.” She argues that the acts of transposing, of condensing and of repeating (in other words, of representing), consist of nothing more than magnifying that ambiguous surplus of syntax. In this sense, the layered meanings of Mallarmé’s sentences serve as the springboard for mimesis –– or, as Derrida puts it, Mallarméan mimicry. Equally, perhaps in the polyvalent relation of Ponty’s dresses, we can find another springboard: the seed of something deeper than journalism, of something which resembles the very project of writing, representation, and poetry. Textile Surface, Textile DepthMallarmé’s text presenting the wedding dress and ballgown operates on multiple levels, and so do the dresses themselves, constituted by transparent fabrics layered over shimmering satin. After introducing the ballgown, Madame de Ponty announces the latest trend, a new rule which applies to gowns of that kind, the ballgown’s “article premier et unique:”Si les tissus classiques de bal se plaisent à nous envelopper comme d’une brume envolée et faite de toutes les blancheurs, la robe elle-même, au contraire, corsage et jupe, moule plus que jamais la personne: opposition délicieuse et savante entre le vague et ce qui doit s’accuser. ( no°6, 42, italics as written)That is to say, the primary and singular rule of the ballgown is, precisely, that it has multiple, contradictory layers: on top, the white “tissus” which envelop the wearer like a “brume envolée,” and below, the dress itself, molded more tightly to the female body than ever. The irony here, of course, is that Ponty’s language suggests two layers are derived from the same material. Structurally, we know the dress consists of a satin underskirt and a tulle veil, but here Ponty uses the terms “Les tissus” (or simply, the fabric) and “la robe elle-même” (or, the dress itself). Without further specification, these phrases mutually imply each other: the fabric is shaped into the dress, the dress is made from the fabric. The effect is that, like Kristeva’s multiple “structures sous-jacentes” (269) which are extracted from the same syntactic phrase, the competing layers which comprise the ballgown seem themselves to be created from the same matter: the fabric, the dress itself. The ballgown’s structural multiplicity is made clear, but the layers of the wedding dress are harder to parse. Madame de Ponty writes, “Cela ne crée pas, une Toilette de Mariée: on la remarque, telle qu’elle appara?t, mystérieuse” (no°4, 2-3). With the wedding dress, one must accept the whole thing at once, as it ‘appears:’ mysterious. Even though its internal tensions and layers are less clearly defined, Ponty still sees them there, and exposes them to her reader. She describes the dress as “suivant la mode et pas, ne hasardant le go?t du jour que tempéré par des réminiscences vagues et éternelles, avec des détails très-neufs enveloppés de généralité comme par le voile” (no°4, 3). That is to say, the dress certainly contains competing elements: things which follow fashion and things which don’t, things which are modern and and things which are traditional, things which cover and things which are covered. In the latter dynamic of covering and exposing, Ponty signals the idea of depth of the wedding dress, the détails très neufs enveloped by –– that is, covered over, obscured by –– its veil. The description of layers is more subtle than in the case of the ballgown, but layers are just as essential to the wedding dress: through them, the dress successfully hides any innovations, any creations under its veil of tradition. Ponty’s manner of indicating the depth of each dress is telling. The wedding dress’ primary quality, we are told, is that it is mysterious. Its layers are hidden, implied only in Ponty’s description of the veil. Likewise, Ponty never states what, precisely, the veil covers –– she merely states that they are very new details. It isn’t surprising, then, that the (merely implied) layers would behave in a similarly obfuscating manner. Just like the veiled description by which it is presented to the reader, the veil of the wedding dress has a hiding effect. By contrast, the ballgown’s opposition (between vague and definite forms) is stated explicitly. Ponty sets the description apart from the text by giving the description its own heading (“article premier et unique”) and its own paragraph, and she highlights the text even further by putting it in italics. Such directness marks a departure from the description of the wedding dress, where Ponty’s language was as veiled as the very dress it describes. The clarity of Ponty’s description here parallels the behavior of the ballgown itself –– whose frothy layers have a revealing effect; they do not hide, but rather show the advancing trend of a tightly molded bodice. The passage describing this effect clearer and more direct than the description of the wedding dress. It foregrounds its meaning or rather, allows its meaning to be seen, instead of obscuring the description through veiled implications. It makes itself clear. The revealing effect manifests in the ballgown’s combination of new and old sartorial elements. Like the wedding dress, the ballgown keeps one foot in the past but, unlike the wedding dress, thrusts its other foot forward, as if into the future. Ponty describes the Toilette de Bal as “aventurée parfois, hardie et presque future, qui se fait jour à travers des habitudes anciennes” (no°6, pg. 42). Here arises an interesting similarity and departure from the mixed temporality of the wedding dress. On the one hand, we see the same “réminiscences” of the wedding dress in the “habitudes anciennes” of the ball gown, a textual echo like those discussed above. But for the wedding gown, in which the past “tempered” novelty like a veil, the ballgown’s “habitudes anciennes” become the means through which (“à travers [lesquelles]”) the dress is able to project forward and become “presque future.” If the traditional hides the new in the wedding dress, old habits are precisely what reveals the “presque future” in the ballgown. The irony here is that the same material is used for two different dresses. In one dress, tradition serves to hide, in the other to reveal; significantly, both gestures are accomplished by the very same fabric: tulle illusion. The fabric adorns both gowns as a veil: most obviously for the wedding dress, but Ponty likewise describes ballgowns as “voilée de tulle illusion.” Tulle illusion both covers the present and reveals the “presque future.” In other words, it is the exact same material that, in the context of each dress’ respective blending of time, is used to very different effect.In this sense, the tulle illusion perfectly illustrates the Derridean "hymen," which the the deconstructionist reads as essential in other texts by Mallarmé. Derrida understood the “hymen” to behave in Mallarmé’s work with a double identity: it gestures to binary oppositions, as a thin veil that both separates the terms, and envelops them together. The word itself comes from Latin, meaning both the “virginal membrane” of the vagina, and also Hymen, the god of marriage. The hymen then, as the literal membrane destroyed during sex, embodies virginity par excellence, while at the same time symbolizing union and consummation. It functions as both literal barrier and its penetration. This double meaning already suggests the veil of tulle illusion, which in wrapping the body can either conceal or foreground it. The vaginal membrane functions like a veil, in that it wraps/protects/shields; but it also suggests the revealing, its penetration. Likewise, when Mallarmé references the hymen in his short prose text Mimique, he describes it as “vicieux mais sacré, entre le désir et l’accomplissement, la perpétration et son souvenir: ici devan?ant, là remémorant, au futur, au passé” (Oeuvres complètes, 310). In so doing, Mallarmé marks the hymen as a space between two contradictory meanings (vice/sacred, desire/fulfillment, perpetration/remembrance, anticipation/recollection, future/past) whose participation in both sides of the opposition undermines the very tension which opposes them. The veil of tulle illusion, then, marks that same betweenness: at once obscuring the past and revealing the “presque future” and in so doing, dissolving the distinction between them.Derrida grounds his discussion of the hymen in analysis of its use in Mimique, but Derrida himself concedes that the use of the word isn’t necessary to justify a discussion of the concept. Mallarmé never says the word “hymen” in La dernière mode, but its trace remains in the fashion magazines nevertheless: it’s there in the veils of tulle illusion, the wedding veil and the “brume envolée” of the ballgown. The veil of tulle illusion is a medium of the dresses, one of their shared fabrics; as such it unites them, and collapses the opposition that Ponty tries to establish between them. But it also stands in between the dresses, establishing their distance. It is via this material, the wedding dress stays traditional, and via this same material, that the ballgown thrusts its foot into the future. Derrida himself suggests the hymen is a “sort of textile. Its threads should be interwoven with all the veils, gauzes, canvases, fabrics, moires, wings, feathers, all the curtains and fans that hold within their folds all -–– almost–– of the Mallarméan corpus” (213). Consider the gravity of this claim, of its implications for La dernière mode: (almost) all of Mallarmé’s poetic and prosaic works are penetrated, woven, by the threads of a textile: fabric and his literature are essentially related. We can see these threads at play in an essay called Crise de vers, where Mallarmé’s description of two poetic forms recalls the distinction between the surface/depth relation of the ballgown from that of the wedding dress. The poet diagnoses the crisis of poetry as the emergence of a free verse form rid of rigid metrical, rhythmic, or other formal rules. Leading up to this crisis, Mallarmé sketches two other kinds of contemporary poetry and their relationship to traditional poetic forms. He begins with the most traditional: those poems which are “fidèles à l’alexandrin, notre hexamètre,” (Oeuvres complètes, 362) or those which adhere to the classic French meter. In the modern era, Mallarmé explains, apparent loyalists, in fact, appropriate the traditional form and “desserrent (sic) intérieurement ce mécanisme rigide et puérile de sa mesure; l’oreille, affranchie d’un compteur factice, conna?t une jouissance à discerner, seule, toutes les combinaisons possibles, entre eux, de douzes timbres” (362). In other words, they are “loosening” the tight hold of the rigid mechanism (the alexandrine) from inside it. In evoking the interior of the poem as the place of innovation, Mallarmé sets up a dichotomy between inside and outside. From the outside, these poems appear loyal to traditional form, following the alexandrine of twelve “timbres,” just as the “reminiscences” (La dernière mode, no°4, 2) of the past characterize the exterior of the wedding dress. As the veil of the past wraps and dissimulates the wedding dress’ détails très neufs, so the old form of the poem veils a looser, more modern content. Just as the depths of the wedding dress are never articulated by Ponty, it isn’t clear what the “loosened” internal form of the poem looks like or even is, exactly. These modern innovations –– the détails très neufs and the traces of internal “loosening” –– are obscured by the veil of tradition. In stark contrast to this traditionalist approach, but not yet as liberated as free verse, Mallarmé names a second type of poetry –– an intermediate step between classic and modern forms. This type of poet still sees the alexandrine as a “joyau définif,” but not as a determining force “à ne sortir […] que peu et selon quelque motif prémédité” (362). Instead, faced with the alexandrine form, this more-intrepid poet “y touche comme pudiquement ou se joue à l’entour, il en octroie de voisins accords, avant de le donner superbe et nu : laissant son doigté défaillir contre la onzième syllabe ou se propager jusqu’à une treizième mainte fois” (362). These intermediate poets, between traditionalists and free verse, stick (mostly) to the twelve beat line, but occasionally stop at eleven or go on to thirteen. In other words, they introduce slight innovations to the classic meter as a means to point outside of it. The form doesn’t veil modernity, but instead provides the material through which poetic modernity hints at itself. In so doing, this intermediate form mirrors how the “habitudes anciennes” of the ball gown — with the same material of the wedding dress, but through innovations in form — become the means by which the dress makes itself “presque future.”By comparing Ponty’s descriptions of the two dresses to Mallarmé’s treatment of verse, the hiding and revealing effects of the wedding dress and ballgown, respectively, become all the more apparent. Likewise, the relation of the poetic forms echo the threads of the hymen woven through the wedding dress and ballgown. Just as the dresses use the same fabric (tulle illusion) in their veils to drastically different effect, the two competing forms take up precisely the same poetic material –– the alexandrine –– to realize their different ends of revealing and concealment poetic innovation. Here it is important to return to the consideration of what the ballgown’s tulle reveals, something which is significant to the consideration of literature and poetry in La dernière mode: “the secret.” Text/ile’s Surface, Text/iles’s DepthUnlike the wedding gown, whose veil hides what is beneath it and appears, simply, “mystérieuse” (La dernière mode, no°4, 2), the ballgown actually reveals or unveils something –– a mystery in its own right. Ponty writes, “qui regarde, y voit, m?lés (sic) au satin, des sympt?mes dont se révèle déjà le secret, sous la gaze, sous le tulle, ou sous les dentelles” (no°6, 42). Under the veils of gauze, tulle and lace, the observer of the dress sees “the secret” reveal itself. But what, exactly, is the secret, whose symptoms are confused with the satin underskirt? In her essay “The Frivolous Other and the Authentic Self,” Claire Lyu offers a clue in her analysis of Mallarmé’s negative view of journalism in relation to literature. As Mallarmé’s famously describes the vacuity of the journalistic goal in his prose text, Le mystère dans les lettres:D’exhiber les choses à un imperturbable premier plan, en camelots, activés par la pression de l’instant, d’accord –– écrire, dans le cas, pourquoi, ind?ment, sauf pour étaler la banalité; plut?t que tendre le nuage, précieux, flottant sur l’intime gouffre de chaque pensée, vu que vulgaire l’est ce à quoi on décerne, pas plus, un caractère immédiat. (Oeuvres complètes, 384)Upon first reading, Mallarmé’s argument here seems straightforward. Journalism is surface, literature is depth. Journalism is straightforward, simple, and one-dimensional; literature is complex, multi-dimensional, and profound. Journalism flaunts “les choses à un imperturbable premier plan;” literature plumbs “l’intime gouffre de chaque pensée.” But Lyu calls this opposition an illusion. Journalism might live only in the foreground, she argues, but literature is not diving as deep as it purports to. In writing, the littérateur only spreads the cloud over the abyss of thought, allowing it to float there without ever plumbing its depths. In other words, the literary writer is working from outside the depth of thought, on its surface. If depth exists at all, it is only in literature’s evoking it (through spreading over it), an evocation which must always take place at the surface. Lyu calls this evocation a “veiling” and a “highlighting of the surface itself:”The uncovering (“flaunt”; “display”) and covering (“spread forth...the cloud”) both happen on and across the surface [of the abyss]. Depth, if there is such a thing, can only be suggested in Mallarmé by a veiling, that is, by a highlighting of the surface itself. (68).When Lyu says “veiling,” she refers to the gesture of writing of “spread[ing] forth...the cloud,” or as Johnson puts it, “spread[ing] a fog” (Johnson, 223). “Tendre” and “spread” both imply a kind of lateral movement –– a gesture across a surface, rather than into any depths. “Nuage,” of course, suggests a cloud, a fog, something that obscures sight, and even renders murky. In that sense, “tendre le nuage” is precisely a kind of veiling: covering something at the surface. After all, one can’t veil the depths of something from within those depths; like a lid, the veil rests on top. Nevertheless, in the act of “covering,” of “veiling,” the veil still suggests a depth –– it points to something being covered, something being veiled. Thus, a paradox arises: veiling creates depth, but itself can only take place at the surface. The depth, in other words, is an illusion created by and at the surface. This is what Lyu means when she says “highlighting of the surface itself:” in the act of suggesting depth, the veil merely re-affirms the surface that it is. Lyu’s argument also reminds us that Mallarmé scorned journalism. Recall how, in Le Livre, Instrument Spirituel, he described the newspaper as “la feuille à même, comme elle a re?u empreinte, montrant, au premier degré, brut, la coulée d’un texte” (Oeuvres complètes, 379). Mallarmé saw the newspaper as simple surface. But by pointing to the Mallarmé’s awareness of the “surface” of literary work through her reading of the surface “cloud” of literary writing, Lyu reveals something close to an equation between journalism and literature. In the passage she cites, journalism and literature live in the same place –– they both sit at the surface. The only difference, according to Lyu, is the illusion of depth in literature granted by veiling, by highlighting the surface itself.When Ponty describes the revelation of the secret peeking beneath the ballgown’s tulle illusion, she is gesturing toward the same procedure: highlighting surface to create the illusion of depth. Beneath the veil (“sous la gaze, sous le tulle, ou sous les dentelles”), which is notably made in part from “tulle illusion,” one finds “symptoms of the secret.” Notably, “the secret” is “m?lés (sic) au satin” (no°6, 42). When Madame de Ponty advises girls to have theirs skirts made of satin, she cites their sheen as justification: “Les pardessous en satin sont généralement préférables [...] comme plus chatoyants sous le tulle ou la gaze” (no°6, 42, italics mine). In appreciating the satin for its ability to shimmer beneath the tulle and gauze that envelop it, Ponty reminds us that the veil of the ballgown is transparent. As such, it allows what lies below it to shine through –– in this case, it allows one to see the chatoiement of the satin through the veil of tulle. In this sense, when one sees the symptoms of the “secret” “m?lés au satin” and “sous” the veil, one is really just seeing the surface: the top-most veil, whose transparent surface suggests what lies below it. Thus, the veil of Ponty’s ballgown embodies the notion of “highlighting the surface” par excellence. The material of the veil (the “tulle illusion”) creates the impression of depth by letting one see the shimmer of the satin (a kind of light) within its very surface. Perhaps “the secret” is simply that shine –– the light of the surface itself.In Le mystères dans les lettres, Mallarmé points to this ability –– to veil, to highlight surface–– as the defining difference between journalism and literature. But Mallarmé’s journalism achieves precisely this difference: it veils, it highlights surface. The magazine is filled with veils –– some literal, of course, as in the case of the wedding dress and the ballgown. But one also finds veils elsewhere in La dernière mode. The pseudonyms, for example, suggest a group of writers (multiple identities), but in fact, only lead back to Mallarmé himself (a singular identity). Moreover, some of the pseudonyms actually hint at this illusion. Claire Lyu points out, for example, that the initials of Miss Satin mark the mirror image of Mallarmé’s own signature: SM. The crossing of their initials, she argues, is mirrored in the name of the theatre critic, Ix. This confusion of identity parallels the illusion of depth (the illusion of several identities) and the highlighting of the surface; the pseudonyms are veils that obscure the identity they cover, while hinting at it all the same. Likewise, in all of its eight issues, La dernière mode claimed to be in its “second year.” Mallarmé claimed, the magazine had existed in its “first year”: as a text-less publication, comprising only lithographs and engravings. In its second edition, by contrast, the magazine found itself unable to reproduce the “images” it had once published and had to recreate them in text and description alone. In truth of fact, La dernière mode had never appeared in such a text-less format and its publication spanned only one year. The texts and the “descriptions” were as fictional as everything else in the magazine. Here, Mallarmé’s “journalism” claimed a kind of depth for itself –– a past, a history, a set of images –– which, in reality, was nothing more than “illusion,” a veil which did nothing more than highlight its own surface, by recreating those images in pure text. Arguably, the entire project of La dernière mode is engaged this same gesture. Just as the veil of the ballgown suggests depth from within its very surface, so La dernière mode creates the illusion of depth with a variety of veils, while highlighting the surface by taking up a “frivolous” subject (fashion) in a “superficial” medium (journalism). In this sense, Derrida’s hymen, (which collapses the difference between oppositions, while maintaining its integrity as a barrier, as a veil), allows us to maintain the difference, both between Ponty’s two opposed dresses and between the opposition of journalism and literature, while also proving their inextricability. ................
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