Igitur's interest does not come directly from the thought which serves as its theme, which is such that thinking would smother it, and which is similar in this respect to Hölderlin's. Holderlin's is, however, richer, more active. He was familiar from youth with Hegel, whereas Mallarmé received only an impression of Hegelian philosophy. And yet this impression corresponds to the deep current which drew him, precisely, to the "frightful years." Everything is summed up for Mallarmé by the relationship among the words thought, absence, language, and death. The materialist profession of faith ("Yes, I know, we are but vain forms of matter"), is not Mallarmé's point of departure. Such a revelation would have obliged him to reduce thought, God, and all the other figures of the ideal to nothing. Quite obviously it is from this nothing that he starts. He felt its secret vitality, its force and mystery in his contemplation and accomplishment of the poetic task. His Hegelian vocabulary would merit no attention, were it not animated by an authentic experience, and this experience is that of the power of the negative.
One can say that Mallarme saw this nothing in action; he experienced the activity of absence. In absence he grasped a presence, a strength still persisting, as if in nothingness there were a strange power of affirmation. All his remarks on language tend to acknowledge the word's ability to make things absent, to evoke them in this absence, and then to remain faithful to this value of absence, realizing it completely in a supreme and silent disappearance. In fact, the problem for Mallarmé is not to escape from the real in which he feels trapped, according to a still generally accepted interpretation of the sonnet on the swan. The true search and the drama take place in the other sphere, the one in which pure absence affirms itself and where, in so doing, it eludes itself, causing itself still to be present. It subsists as the dissimulated presence of being, and in this dissimulation it persists as chance which cannot be abolished. And yet this is where everything is at
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stake, for the work is possible only if absence is pure and perfect, only if, in the presence of Midnight, the dice can be thrown. There alone the work's origin speaks; there it begins, it finds there the force of the beginning.
More precisely: the greatest difficulty does not come from the pressure of beings, from what we call their reality, their persistent affirmation, whose action can never be altogether suspended. It is in unreality itself that the poet encounters the resistance of a muffled presence. It is unreality from which he cannot free himself; it is in unreality that, disengaged from beings, he meets with the mystery of "those very words: it is." And this is not because in the unreal something subsists -- not because the rejection of real things was insufficient and the work of negation brought to a halt too soon -- but because when there is nothing, it is this nothing itself which can no longer be negated. It affirms, keeps on affirming, and it states nothingness as being, the inertia of being.
This is the situation which would form the subject of Igitur, were it not necessary to add that the narrative avoids this situation, seeking to surmount it by putting a term to it. These are pages in which some readers have thought they recognized the somber hues of despair. But actually they carry a youthful expression of great hope. For if Igitur were to be right -- if death is true, if it is a genuine act, not a random occurrence but the supreme possibility, the extreme moment in which negation is founded and completed -- then the negation that operates in words, and "this drop of nothingness" which is the presence of consciousness in us, the death from which we derive the power not to be which is our essence, also partake of truth. They bear witness to something definitive; they function to "set a limit upon the infinite." And so the work which is linked to the purity of negation can in its turn arise in the certainty of that distant Orient which is its origin.
The Three Movements toward Death.
Igitur is thus not only an exploration but a purification of absence -- it is an attempt to make absence possible and to glean possibility from it. The whole interest of this narrative lies in the way three movements are accomplished together. To a certain extent they are distinct from each other, and yet they are so closely linked that their interdependence remains hidden. All three movements are necessary to reach death; but which controls the others, which is the most important? The act by which the hero leaves the chamber, descends the staircase
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drinks the poison, and enters the tomb apparently constitutes the initial decision, the "deed" which alone gives reality to absence and authenticates nothingness. But in fact this is not the case. This accomplishment is only an insignificant moment. What is done must first be dreamed, thought, grasped in advance by the mind, not in a moment of psychological contemplation, but through an actual movement -- a lucid effort on the part of the mind to advance outside of itself, to see itself disappear and to appear to itself in the mirage of this disappearance, to gather itself all up into this essential death which is the life of the consciousness and, out of all the various acts of death through which we are, to form the unique act of the death to come which thought reaches at the same time that it reaches, and thereby liquidates, itself.
Here voluntary death is no longer anything but a dying in spirit, which seems to restore to the act of dying its pure, inward dignity -- but not according to the ideal of Jean-Paul Richter, whose heroes, "lofty men," die in a pure desire to die, "their eyes gazing steadfastly beyond the clouds" in response to the call of a dream which disembodies and dissolves them. The idea of suicide found in Igitur is more akin to what Novalis means when he makes suicide "the principle of his entire philosophy." "The truly philosophical act is suicide; the real beginning of all philosophy lies in it; all the philosopher's desires tend toward it. Only this act fulfills all the conditions and bears all the marks of a trans-worldly action." Yet these last words indicate a horizon unknown to Igitur. Novalis, like most of the German Romantics, seeks in death a further region beyond death, something more than death, a return to the transfigured whole -- in that night, for example, which is not night but the peaceful oneness of day and night. Moreover, in Novalis the
movement toward death is a concentration of the will, an affirmation of its magical force, an energetic expenditure or yet again an unruly affection for the remote. But Igitur does not seek to surpass itself or to discover, through this voluntary move, a new point of view on the other side of life. It dies by the spirit -- through the spirit's very development, through its presence to itself, to its own profound, beating heart, which is precisely absence, the intimacy of absence, night.
Midnight
Night: here is where the true profundity of Igitur is to be felt, and it is here that we can find the third movement, which, perhaps, commands the two others. If the narrative begins with the episode called
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"Midnight" -- with the evocation of that pure presence where nothing but the subsistence of nothing subsists -- this is certainly not in order to offer us a choice literary passage, nor is it, as some have claimed, in order to set the scene for the action: the empty chamber and its lavish furnishings enveloped, however, in shadows, the image of which is, in Mallarmé, something like the original medium of poetry. This "décor" is in reality the center of the narration whose true hero is Midnight and whose action is the ebb and flow of Midnight.
The story begins with the end, and that is what forms its troubling truth. With the very first words, the chamber is empty, as if everything were already accomplished, the poison drunk, the vial emptied, and the "lamentable personage" laid out upon his own ashes. Midnight is here; the hour when the cast dice have absolved all movement is here; night has been restored to itself, absence is complete, and silence pure. Thus everything has come to an end. Everything the end must make manifest, all that Igitur seeks to create by means of his death -- the solitude of darkness, the deep of disappearance -- is given in advance, and seems the condition for this death: its anticipated appearance, its eternal image. A strange reversal. It is not the youth who, by disappearing into death, institutes disappearance and therein establishes the night. It is the
absolute presence of this disappearance, its dark glistening, which alone permits him to die. It alone introduces him to his mortal decision and act. It is as though death had first to be
anonymous in order to occur with certainty in someone's name, or as if, before being my death, a personal act in which my person deliberately comes to an end, death had to be the neutrality and impersonality in which nothing is accomplished, the empty omnipotence which consumes itself eternally.
We are now a long way away from that voluntary death which the final episode let us see. Drawing back from the precise action which consists in emptying the vial, we have returned to a thought, the ideal act, already impersonal, where thinking and dying explored each other in their reciprocal truth and their hidden identity. But now we find ourselves before the immense
passivity which, in advance, dissolves all action, even the action by which Igitur wants to die, the momentary master of chance. It seems that three figures of death confront each other here in a motionless simultaneity. All three are necessary for death's accomplishment, and the most secret is apparently the substance of absence, the deep of the void created when one dies, the eternal outside -- a space formed by my death and yet whose approach is alone what makes me die. From such a perspective the event could
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never happen (death could never become an event): that is what is inscribed in this prerequisite night. The situation could also be expressed as follows: in order for the hero to be able to leave the chamber and for the final chapter, "Leaving the Chamber," to be written, it is necessary that the chamber already be empty and that the word to be written have returned forever into silence. And this is not a difficulty in logic. This contradiction expresses everything that makes both
death and the work difficult. One and the other are somehow unapproachable, as Mallarmé said in notes that seem, precisely, to concern Igitur: "The Drama is only insoluble because
unapproachable." And he comments further in the same passage: "The Drama is caused by the Mystery of what follows -- Identity (Idea) Self -- of the Theater and the Hero through the Hymn. Operation. -- the Hero disengages -- the (maternal) hymn which creates him, and he restores himself to the Theater which it was -- of the Mystery where this hymn was hidden." If the "Theater" here means Midnight's space, a moment which is a place, then theater and hero are indeed identical, through the hymn which is death become word. How can Igitur "disengage" this death my making it become song and hymn, and thereby restore himself to the theater, to the pure subsistence of Midnight where death was hidden? That is the "operation." It is an end which can only be a return to the beginning, as the last words of the narrative say: "Nothingness having departed, there remains the Castle of purity," that empty chamber in which everything persists.
The "Act of Night"
The way Mallarmé nevertheless tries to approach the drama, in order to find a solution to it, is very revealing. Among night, the hero's thoughts, and his real acts, or, in other words, among absence, the thought of this absence, and the act by which it is realized, an exchange is
established, a reciprocity of movements. First we see that this Midnight, eternal beginning and eternal end, is not so immobile as one might think. "Certainly a presence of Midnight subsists." But this subsisting presence is not a presence. This substantial present is the negation of the present. It is a vanished present. And Midnight, where first "the absolute present of things" (their unreal essence) gathered itself together, becomes "the pure dream of a Midnight vanished into itself": it is no longer a present, but the past, symbolized, as is the end of history in Hegel, by a book lying open upon the table, "page and usual décor of Night." Night is the book: the silence and inaction of a
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book when, after everything has been proffered, everything returns into the silence that alone speaks -- that speaks from the depth of the past and is at the same time the whole future of the word. For present Midnight, that hour at which the present lacks absolutely, is also the hour in which the past touches and, without the intervention of any timely act whatever, immediately attains the future at its most extreme. And such, we have seen, is the very instant of death, which is never present, which is the celebration of the absolute future, the instant at which one might say that, in a time without present, what has been will be. This is announced to us in two famous sentences of Igitur. "I was the hour which is to make me pure"; and, more exactly, in Midnight's farewell to night -- a farewell which can never end because it never takes place now, because it is present only in night's eternal absence: "Adieu, night, that I was, your own tomb, but which, surviving shade, will change into Eternity." 4
However, this structure of Night has already given us back a movement: its immobility is constituted by this call of the past to the future, the muffled scansion by which what has been affirms its identity with what will be beyond the wrecked and sunken present, the abyss of the present. With this "double beat," the night stirs, it acts, it becomes an act, and this act opens the gleaming doors of the tomb, creating the solution which makes the "exit from the chamber" possible. 5Here Mallarmé discovers the motionless sliding which causes things to move forward at the heart of their eternal annulment. There is an imperceptible exchange among the inner
oscillation of the night, the pulse of the clock, the back and forth of the doors of the open tomb, the back and forth of consciousness which returns to and goes out from itself, which divides and escapes from itself, wandering distantly from itself with a rustling of nocturnal wings, a phantom already confused with the ghosts of those who have already died. This "rhythm," in all these forms, is the movement of a disappearance, the movement of return to the heart of disappearance -- a "faltering beat," however, which bit by bit affirms itself, takes on body, and finally becomes the living heart of Igitur, that heart whose too lucid certainty then "troubles" him and summons him to the real act of death. Thus we have come from the most interior to the most exterior. Indefinite absence, immutable and sterile, has imperceptibly transformed itself. It has taken on the look
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4In his essay on Mallarmé ( The Interior Distance), Georges Poulet is right to say that this hour
can "never be expressed by a present, always by a past or a future."
5"The hour formulates itself in this echo, at the threshold of the open doors by its act of night."
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and the form of this youth, and having become real in him, it finds in this reality the means of realizing the decision that annihilates him. Thus night, which is Igitur's intimacy, the pulsating death which is the heart of each of us, must become life itself, the sure heart of life, so that death may ensue, so that death may for an instant let itself be grasped, identified--in order that death might become the death of an identity which has decided it and willed it.
The earlier versions of Mallarmé's narrative show that in the death and the suicide of Igitur he initially saw the death and the purification of night. In these pages (in particular in scholium d), it is no longer either Igitur or his consciousness that acts and keeps watch, but night itself, and all the events are lived by the night. The heart which, in the definitive text, Igitur recognizes as his own--"I hear the pulsating of my own heart. I do not like this noise: this perfection of my certitude troubles me; everything is too clear" -- this heart, then, is, in the earlier versions, the night's heart: "Everything was perfect; night was pure Night, and it heard its own heart beat. Still, this heart troubled it, gave it the disquietude of too much certainty, of a proof too self-confident. Night wanted in its turn to plunge back into the darkness of its unique tomb and to abjure the idea of its form." The night is Igitur, and Igitur is that portion of night which the night must "reduce to the state of darkness" in order to become again the liberty of night.