English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Mallarmé in prose and the context of "Conflit" 0:00 I cannot resist the wish, or even the desire, to read you an excerpt from the Mallarmé I prefer.
0:30 That is, not the verse poet — he is splendid, admirable there too. "Such as into himself at last eternity changes him." You know, the phrase "such as into himself," which everyone uses every day now, comes from Mallarmé's "The Tomb of Edgar Poe." Well, no, no, but here it's Mallarmé in prose. And his poetry reaches its heights when it expresses itself in prose. Baudelaire had opened up a movement, as you know, with Spleen de Paris, a poetic prose, wasn't it? And Nerval, of course, had been the precursor.
1:02 So, among this series of Mallarmé's prose texts, which are a bit like... let me take one of his titles, Divagations, plural, you see, Divagations. I'm taking this text called... the title itself is already musical, isn't it, "Variation on a Subject." This subject is the crisis poetry was undergoing in his time, which for him was a crisis of extraordinary fecundity. Anyway.
1:33 It's Mallarmé, it's difficult — he's reproached for being hermetic, that is, you understand nothing on a first reading, at any rate, so I do tell you, to make the listening easier, and of course the reading, I refer you to his reading of it. It's a matter of variations on a subject, and the first piece of the variations on a subject, the first variation, is called "Conflict," singular. And you'll see this goes far, and we won't be far off, and it's very unexpected coming from this decadent, aristocratic author — he's not aristocratic by birth at all, but has aristocratic mannerisms, very fin-de-siècle, very precious — that he should, in this text, you'll see, illustrate, as he puts it, the class struggle on the lawn, with the workers.
2:24 So, "Conflict," singular. And let me give you the context, the pitch if you prefer, so it's clear: the author Mallarmé had the habit of going to a suburban house, a house whose owners were not there, to admire the setting sun through the garden gate — there, and so — and then, that day, he arrives, and the text begins, and suddenly this whole landscape is ruined for him by noise, by a construction site, by mud; it turns out a railway line is being built, and he is furious that his jewel is being spoiled for him — the brutal clash between progress, industry, the worker with his big hands full of fingers, as a very dear friend of mine used to say, namely René Commer, and then the aristocratic, decadent, refined poet — well, I'll say no more, that's the context.
The abandoned house invaded by the workers 3:16 "For a long time now, I believed that my thought exempted itself from any accident, even a real one, preferring to draw at random from its principle of surging forth" — I won't interrupt myself, if you don't understand everything, it's not serious, it will be explained as we go — "a taste for an abandoned house, which seems very favorable to this disposition, leads me to unsay myself, so much did the same contentment each year, greening the outer stone staircase, push the winter shutters back against the walls, so as to reconcile" — as if, no interruption — "the once-upon-a-time with the present, with the immobilized spectacle of former days" — there, that's what he found there each time, with delight, if you will, a pledge of faithful return. But then, this worm-eaten beating scans an uproar, a refrain, an altercation below, and I recall, notably, the legend of the wretched dwelling, whose intact corner I haunt, invaded by a band of workers busy offending the countryside, because everything was solitude, with a railway line—
4:27 this memory arose, distressed me, at the outset, to join it there, almost made me hesitate to return; too bad, so they decide to go anyway — this would have to be defended — yes, a struggle begins against the working class — this would have to be defended, as mine, arbitrarily if need be, the place, and here I am, an exclusive tenderness henceforth, that it was this, this very corner, a tenderness for the spot which, amid the suppression affecting precious sites, received the worst insult — I become, unbelievably, the guest of its degradation, the cherished retreat, through disuse and exception, turned by progress into a canteen for railway workers, navvies, well-diggers, through whom a velvet, haggard about the legs, makes it seem the embankment is moving — he raises, they, plural, raise at rest, in a trench, the blue and white transparent stripe of their jerseys,
5:37 like the sheet of water, little by little — and in parentheses, clothing — water that man, elect, is the source he seeks; these are, my former lodgers, in spirit, when I used to meet them on the roads — they crossed paths with workers sometimes like that, cherished like the workers, ordinary above all, rumor calls them tramps, you see them on the roads, don't you, a weary and proud swarming, wherever the earth cares to be altered they find, in the absence of a factory — because there they're a little more free, there's no boss's eye on them, they're on a job site — they find, in the absence of a factory, under the weather, independence.
6:20 I'll skip three-quarters of the text — he's planning, making a little garden that will be his corner, with a little path where they'll pass, going around his garden. There. And so I pick up again there, yes, where I wished, to cut things short, that a quarrel might be picked with me, meanwhile, and the sole strategy is to enclose a little garden, sanded, flowered by my art, and, on a terrace over the water, the dwelling place in the countryside.
"Fumier!": the class struggle on the lawn 6:54 Let no stranger cross the threshold as if into a tavern; the workers will go to their site by a hired path, mown through the harvests. Full stop, new paragraph. "Dung!" In quotation marks. Accompanied by feet against the gate, uttered violently. I understand who this amenity is naming. It's addressed to him, of course. "Dung!" Well, even from a drunk, a big fellow, his face against the bars, it vexes me despite myself.
7:25 Is it a matter of castes? Not at all! He was broke, poor devil. He had been an English teacher at Tournon, a backwater in the Ardèche. And he used to say, writing to a friend, "this department sums up my destiny, l'art et l'Ardèche." So, I do not measure man against man in terms of difference at this moment, and cannot help but consider the madman, staggering and shouting, as a man, or deny the resentment I feel toward him. Very stiff, he scrutinizes me.
7:55 What an extraordinary scene. Very stiff, he scrutinizes me with animosity. And here comes this sentence I adore: impossible to erase him mentally — he would like nothing better — impossible to erase him mentally, to complete the work of drink, to lay him down in advance in the dust, so that he might not be this colossus all of a sudden, coarse and mean, without my yielding even to a fistfight that would illustrate on the lawn — listen carefully, it's stated in so many words — the class struggle.
8:32 It's a fresh, overflowing provocation. Careful, because the reversal of the text begins here. The affliction that is ruining him, drunkenness, will see to it in my place. So much so that, knowing this, I suffer from my own silence, kept indifferent, which makes me complicit. I'll skip a passage and go straight to the moment when the workers are exhausted, they've worked all day, night has fallen, and so he says to himself: at last I'll be able — I came for this — to contemplate the view through the stars, the moonlight on the garden, and I continue.
The sleeping workers and the share of the sacred 9:14 Truly, today, what is there? The squad of labor lies at the meeting-place, but vanquished. One after another they found the place, here sprawled in the grass, their momentum barely faltering, just as under a projectile, managing to fill this narrow battlefield. What a sleep of bodies against the deaf clod of earth! So, may I now freely admire and dream?
9:46 We come back to the beginning! And listen, this is one of the most beautiful things I know, overwhelming! No! My gaze cannot escape, from the opening where I lean, toward the horizon, without something of myself unduly overstepping — unduly! I have no right, do I? Sorry, it's written small — unduly overstepping, with a lack of regard and propriety, in my turn, this scattered heap of a scourge whose mystery, by virtue of my station, I must understand, and whose duty I must judge.
10:30 For unlike the implied majority of us, unlike the far more fortunate majority, bread has not been enough for them. They toiled a considerable part of the week to obtain it — first! And now, here it is. Tomorrow, they don't know when — in that era it was day laborers, there was no monthly salaried employment, was there? They toiled a...
11:00 Excuse me. "Tomorrow they do not know" — encamped by the vague and near, motionless, which makes in its lot a hole equal to the one dug so far every day in the reality of the ground — foundation, certainly, of temples. They honorably reserve, without showing what it is that lights up this feast, the share of the sacred in existence. Yes, these workers bear witness to the share of the sacred in existence through a halt, the waiting, and momentary suicide.
11:34 The knowledge that would shine with a pride inherent in daily labor, to resist simply and stand upright, roundabout, magnified by a colonnade of tall trees — there must be a small forest nearby — some instinct sought it out in considerable numbers, to throw them off course with little glasses, and they feel themselves, with the absoluteness of a ritual accomplishment, less officiants than victims, marking out in the evening the beats of their tasks, if observance stems from fatality rather than will.
12:10 They say Mallarmé is incomprehensible — I find this of striking clarity. The constellations — this is the end, well the last development — the constellations begin to shine, as I would wish that, amid the darkness running over the blind flock, the workers who sleep there exhausted, points of clarity too, that some thought, just now, might fix itself despite their sealed eyes, not distinguishing them — for the sake of it, for exactness, so it be said, I will therefore think only of them, the intruders who, by their abandon while sleeping, close off for me, more than their tumult did a while ago, the far-off evening distance.
13:01 These artisans, sorry, perform elementary tasks; it is granted to me, watching over them — he who was their adversary has become the one who watches over them, who guards them, who protects their sleep — watching over them, beside a limpid river, to keep looking, looking at what? The people, a robust understanding of the human condition, bends their backs daily to draw — excuse me, I've got the flu coming on, my voice is a bit hoarse — to draw, without the intermediary of wheat, the miracle of life that ensures our presence.
13:43 Others carried out the clearings of the past and the aqueducts — these are the last six lines — where they will deliver a level ground for some machine, the same men, Louis, Pierre, Martin, Poitou, the Norman — when they are not asleep, thus they call upon one another by names or by province. But rather, births sank into anonymity. And the immense sleep, praised across the generation, the prostrate ones, this time, undergo an overwhelming and a broadening across all the centuries.
14:22 And, as far as possible, reduced to social proportions — and this is the last word — of eternity. That was "Conflict," without doubt one of the most beautiful texts of that fin de siècle. So many contradictory things have been stirred up. And there it is: one of the supposedly most reactionary, aristocratic poets producing perhaps one of the most social texts, of a depth rarely seen even in properly revolutionary literature.
15:02 And one of the most generous.
