hans-jost frey, spume mallarme

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Spume Author(s): Hans-Jost Frey and Bruce Lawder Source: Yale French Studies, No. 74, Phantom Proxies: Symbolism and the Rhetoric of History (1988), pp. 249-260 Published by: Yale University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2930298 Accessed: 14/07/2010 15:43 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=yale. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Yale University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Yale French Studies. http://www.jstor.org

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Page 1: Hans-Jost Frey, Spume Mallarme

SpumeAuthor(s): Hans-Jost Frey and Bruce LawderSource: Yale French Studies, No. 74, Phantom Proxies: Symbolism and the Rhetoric of History(1988), pp. 249-260Published by: Yale University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2930298Accessed: 14/07/2010 15:43

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=yale.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Yale University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Yale FrenchStudies.

http://www.jstor.org

Page 2: Hans-Jost Frey, Spume Mallarme

HANS-JOST FREY

Spume*

A la nue accablante tu Basse de basalte et de laves A meme les echos esclaves Par une trompe sans vertu

Quel sepulcral naufrage (tu Le sais, ecume, mais y baves) Supreme une entre les epaves Abolit le mat devetu

Ou cela que furibond faute De quelque perdition haute Tout l'ablime vain eploye

Dans le si blanc cheveu qui traine Avarement aura noye Le flanc enfant d'une sirene

[Stephane Mallarme, Poesies (Paris: Gallimard, Pleiade ed., 1945) 76.]

Hushed to the overwhelming cloud Base of basalt and lava Down even with the enslaved echoes By a virtueless horn

What sepulcral shipwreck (you Know, foam [spume], but just drool there) Supreme one among the bits of floating wreckage Abolished the stripped mast

*Reprinted from Studien uiber das Reden der Dichter (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1986), with their kind permission.

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Or that for furious lack Of some exalted perdition All the vain abyss outspread

In the so white hair which drags Will have probably drowned stingily The childish flank of a siren.

[Robert Greer Cohn, Toward the Poems of Mallarmg (University of California Press, 1980), 27.] Despite its obscurity, this poem remains sufficiently respectful of conventions to allow the attempt to read it for a meaning to appear to make sense. The sonnet consists of a single sentence whose subject is naufrage. The verb abolit certainly belongs to it, and perhaps cela as well, which could be either a form of the verb celer, [to conceal] or a demonstrative pronoun. Accordingly, the word ou offers either two objects for the verb abolir (le mat, cela) or two actions (abolir, celer) for the noun naufrage. In either case both tercets are to be read as one relative clause, introduced by que, whose subject is 1'abime and whose verb is aura noye. The entire first strophe is related appositionally to naufrage, the relation being given through the word tu. Finally, the word quel at the beginning of the fifth verse indicates that the sentence is a question, which can now be constructed in the following manner: "Quel naufrage, tu a la nue accablante par une trompe sans vertu, abolit le mat d6vetu ou cela que l'ablme aura noye le flanc enfant d'une sirene? " To this is attached the inserted paren- thetical clause, which is a direct address that makes its special status known through the internal punctuation otherwise completely absent in the poem. Within the parentheses the word ecume is emphasized once again through commas and thus indicated as the addressed instance.

The poem speaks to the spume, yet does not itself know about what. That to which the discourse should refer is the object of the question that con- stitutes the poem. The spume has knowledge that would permit the answer to the question, yet does not relinquish it. The spume does indeed indicate that something has happened, yet only allows for a conjecture as to what it could have been. Perhaps a shipwreck, yet this remains unclear. If we attempt to locate the shipwreck in the first strophe, the syntax makes it possible to read the second line (Basse de basalte et de laves) in apposition to naufrage. Since the rock (basse) is not the shipwreck but rather what causes it, the result (naufrage) stands here metonymically for the cause (basse). The rock remains silenced (tu) as the cause of the shipwreck because it is hidden under the sea's surface, known only by the spume, which merely spumes (mais y baves) about what it knows. If a ship actually sank at all, what led to that remains unknown. The rock can only be presumed from the spume. This wholly undeterminable relation between rock and shipwreck, when and if sepulcral naufrage is taken metonymically as the basalt rock, suggests that the rock is the invisible tombstone for whatever sank during the shipwreck. It recalls what died

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through its agency, though it is removed and only given insofar as the spume possibly refers to it, and not to something else.

However, not only is it unknown whether a shipwreck took place and what caused it, but also what went under with it. Perhaps it is a ship (le mat devetu) but perhaps also a siren [une sirene] that sank in the sea. Whatever it might have been is accessible only through the mediation of spume. Since everything has disappeared, what it was cannot be determined. It is in this way that the centrality of the spume is established in this poem. It is the only given. Everything else is presumable only through it. The spume is language. But it speaks in such a way that it never becomes an affirmative statement. Since spume does not speak explicitly, but rather gives only possibilities to consider, it has the potential of ambiguous discourse. It refers perhaps to a rock, which perhaps caused a shipwreck, whereby perhaps a ship but perhaps also a siren went under. All this remains suspended in the potential meaning of spume and is condemned to the uncertainty from which the poem as question constitutes itself.

This is not the only place where ecume stands as a metaphor for language. In the slightly later poem Salut, the 6cume in the glass of wine is explicitly equated with verse as the poem's discourse: "Rien, cette ecume, vierge vers / A ne designer que la coupe." In A la nue accablante tu as well, nothing prohibits understanding ecume as the discourse of the poem itself and the parenthetical clause as the poem's address to itself; that is, as long as we are willing to take into account the rather far-reaching consequences of such an equation. When the poem addresses itself as spume, it thematizes itself as ambiguous dis- course. Such a poem is discourse of a special kind insofar as it not only is ambiguous, but also makes its own ambiguity the object of its discourse. In this way, however, the poem falls into the difficulty which arises whenever ambiguity does not simply occur, but is spoken about. Ambiguity requires a simultaneity of meanings. But if the meanings are given together, then they cannot be separated from one another. What constitutes the density of ambigu- ous discourse also occasions its vagueness. The latter can only be removed through the precise and successive unfolding of the meanings, which would also eliminate the density of the dilution. Yet if the poem not only is ambigu- ous discourse, but also speaks about ambiguity, then it must consider more precisely the dual possibility of spume. This is indeed the case, for the move- ment of the poem constitutes itself as the questioning and deliberating explica- tion of that to which the spume could refer. The alternative that is formulated between ship and siren ("Quel naufrage abolit le mat devetu ou cela que") unfolds into clear possibilities what the spume only vaguely and obscurely hints at. In the structure of its overall movement, the poem is the spreading of the fishtail to which its last word discretely alludes.

Such a reading of the poem makes it out to be a reconciliation of appar- ently irreconcilable elements. It would consist not only in the density of ambi- guity, but also in an unrolling of the multiplicity into a graspable succession.

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Here ambiguous discourse unfolds the ambiguity of which it speaks and so speaks implicitly and explicitly at once. In such cases one has to comprehend the simultaneity of simultaneity and succession, the reconciliation of ambigu- ity and elucidation in one single movement. (To this belongs the fact that the indeterminate word cela reestablishes the ambiguity in its own explicitation.) In order to approach this simultaneity, one could proceed by remarking that where the vagueness or obscurity of an ambiguous text is an irreparable defi- ciency, then it cannot be replaced by an explanatory text, but rather is irreduci- ble. Each explanation, because it must choose, even if only tentatively, is reductive. In the explanation, what is gained in clarity is lost in density; just as, conversely, where a text achieves density, obscurity must be tolerated. If Mal- larme's text reconciles both of these contradictory tendencies in itself, the question arises whether there perhaps exists a possibility of unfolding it that would not be reductive and that would attempt to preserve its density. The differentiation of simultaneous meanings in a poem's successive movement can occur in different ways. With Mallarme the differentiation is decisive neither in the sense that one possibility is to be preferred to another, nor in the lack of tension within a bare enumeration; rather differentiation itself occurs as alternative. The elements of succession are connected through the conjunc- tion ou. In an alternative, things which cannot be brought together remain opposed to each other because they are mutually exclusive. Their simultaneity in the either/or of the alternative is therefore precarious and untenable, and so it presses toward a solution. The alternative has in itself the demand for a decision that would eliminate one or the other of its elements. But insofar as the alternative or calls out for the decision, it makes explicit precisely the fact that it has not yet occurred. The pressure toward decision is only possible in the indecision which indeed first leads to the formulation of the alternative. The or is the suspension of the decision which would reduce the ambiguity. As long as the possible meanings of the unfolding spume are connected through the word or, the decision is deferred. In this copresence which unfolds into an alternative, the untenable simultaneity is retained. Insofar as the alternative demands a decision, it tends toward simple statement. But insofar as the deci- sion does not occur, the indecision of the ambiguity remains intact.

Mallarme's poem unfolds the ambiguity of the discourse of which it speaks (6cume) in such a way that it succeeds in circumventing the decision. But the indecision of the unfolding discourse differs from that of ambiguous discourse in that it fluctuates between expressly different and named pos- sibilities, while spume has the undifferentiated potential of implicit, vague, suggestive discourse. If it is possible for the alternative to name the meanings of spume, and if the alternative has in itself the impulse toward decision, what hinders the decision? Every criterion is missing. For a decision to take place, the spume would have to relinquish its knowledge and communicate its mean- ing. In relation to its silence or concealment, all attempts to explain the spume yield only fictive meanings which cannot be measured by anything and which

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therefore are of equal worth, since one cannot be preferred to another. The interpretation of spume is therefore in no way conclusive, but rather charac- terized by a groundless arbitrariness. Besides the ship and the siren, many other things could be considered, all of equal worth. The arbitrariness of what the explicating discourse of the poem evokes leads to the fact that the spume's unfolding revokes whatever it has already invoked. What does not yet exist in the undifferentiated vagueness of spume arises in the unfolding discourse as that which is no more and perhaps never was. What unfolds here is the story of the disappearance of whatever appeared. The ship sails out to undergo the shipwreck the way the siren surfaces to drown. With the revocation of what- ever was arrived at through an explanation of the spume, the poem returns to the vague ambiguity of spume, which it remains. By reading itself circularly and by returning through the revocation of such a reading to itself as discourse, the poem prevents its being-discourse from falling into oblivion; it continues to mean without ever coming to rest in a meaning.

The attempted interpretation of the poem remains disappointing. The poem now appears to say that the ambiguity is not reducible and that the density of the discourse can only be unfolded in such a way that the decision between its possible meanings remains suspended. By constituting itself as alternative, the poem, seen as discourse explicating spume, brings undecidability into view. But in this case, the poem is read in precisely the way that is refused by what the poem says. The undecidability has now become the meaning to which the poem is reduced. Instead of being undecidable, the poem "says" undecidability and thus loses it by pinning it down. As discourse about undecidability, the poem withdraws into the decidability of communicative statement. And yet, precisely because the undecidability which it treats is its own, the poem could be read as the spume to which and from which it speaks. This does not mean that the sustained attempt at communicative meaning becomes invalid. It is rather that the bifurcation of meanings in the discourse supplies the energy which impels the poem to spume.

Such a bifurcation is evident not only in the indecision between ship and siren, both of which could be considered as possible causes of the spume. The word basse must indeed be read as a noun if one wants to construct the sen- tence coherently, a noun which designates a rock concealed below the surface of the water. But the assumption that it might also refer to the adjective bas is not necessarily wrong. Not only is it a matter of the same word, but in the tenth line the word haute appears, and high and low are brought together in basalte. Basse and haute unfold from basalte, just as in the overall structure of the poem 6cume is explicated in mat and sirene. But this repetition of the struc- tural unfolding is not merely a confirmation; rather it brings into view some- thing previously unnoticed. Etymologically the word basalte has nothing to do with high and low. This connection arises only when the word is confronted with the words haute and basse and related to them through acoustical asso-

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ciations. The word is thus being used not in its conventional meaning as sign, but rather according to its tonal value, which because of its phonic promixity to other words enriches it with a definite and, in this case, actually exploited capital of allusion. But if basalte does indeed retain in itself the opposition between bas and haut, the conventional meaning of the word is not thereby eliminated. Basalt as volcanic rock is corroborated by the lava which appears in the same verse. The verse "Basse de basalte et de laves" becomes in this way thet representation of the double value of words in Mallarme's text. Basalte refers phonically to basse, semantically to laves. The words are to be read both ways. On the one hand, they fulfill their quotidian referential function, from which it would be illusory and fatal to want to free them completely, and, on the other hand, they introduce new meaning through acoustical relations with their poetic environment. The word basalte, by means of its inner opposi- tionality, stands for words in general, which always radiate upward as well as downward and which are just as important as signifiers as they are through their meaning. This counteracting effect of the word-away from itself and toward itself-takes shape in the verse through the phonic reversals, which allow the middle word basalte to become an axis of symmetry from which the verse develops in opposite directions, acoustically toward basse and seman- tically toward laves:

Bas se de bas alte et de la v es

The quotidian and the poetic meaning of basalte do not lie next to each other unconnected, but are meaningfully related to each other. The basaltic crys- tallization of the lava of language, which conjoins high and low, lends the word itself the volcanic quality of its meaning. The movement from low to high is the eruption over which the furious abyss ("furibond . . . abime") erects itself. Conversely, the sinking of the ship and the drowning of the siren plunge down- ward from above.

Such unfolding is present in other places in the text, most conspicuously in the word 6ploy6, which occurs not only for the sake of its conventional meaning, but also because it makes visible through the letter y the branching that it says. The text of the eighth page of Un Coup de des, where the fishtail of the siren appears, is organized into a Y. The letter v, especially frequent in A la nue accablante tu, has a similar form. The branching from below is opposed to the branching from above in the reversal of the v to'. The accent circonflexe [circumflex accent] (circonflexe: "Tourn6 de cot6 et d'autre ... signe ortho- graphique en forme de v renvers6" [Littre] and the letter v are related to each other exactly as the two parts are related to the other. Where they meet, a basalt structure arises, somewhat similar to what happens in the word devetu, whose graphic configuration mimes its relation to the word nue, which not only means cloud, but is also the positive expression of being undressed, while

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devetu negatively rewrites nakedness. The same suspension between above and below appears in the verse "Tout l'abilme vain eploye" where the white hair (blanc cheveu) of the spume curls between sky and sea in the form of the unfolding abyss.

This moment is suspended in yet another way. The twelfth line can be linked as a further qualification to 6ploy6 as well as to noy6. Unfolded in the white hair, the abyss drowned the siren, but it drowned her precisely in this hair which, as the sea's spume, is among other things the language of the poem itself. Indeed in the verse "Dans le si blanc cheveu qui traine" the siren as si ... [t]raine is drowned and even bears the crown of spume in the accent circonflexe that belongs to her as reine. But according to this reading, the verse, which after all appears as black on white, would be the white hair, in which case the hair would be floating between the lines. Then whoever or whatever drowned would be accessible only to those who knew how to read between the lines. This is what the trompe sans vertu conceals without silencing a single verse (sans vers tu), because it speaks without virtuality. In contrast, a reading between the lines perceives language as language, black on white, and experi- ences it more as a basis of possible meaning than in its given semiotic function. A poem that allows language uncontrollable possibilities is not a discourse which gives back the already given; discourse here is productive, in that it leaves the initiative to words, as Mallarme says. (Crise de Vers, 366).

A discourse that lets language go its own way is no longer easily ascribable to a subject. The responsibility for what is said is no longer to be ascribed to a speaker, but rather to the language which speaks it to him, perhaps without his knowing it. Moreover, nothing is said that existed prior to its being said or otherwise than the way it is thus given. Discourse is no longer communication of something to someone and also no longer understanding between people about something. Discourse is no longer comprehensible in terms of commu- nication and no longer receives its meaning from a purpose which it serves. But what kind of discourse is it, and how can it be grasped other than by what it is not? It is a discourse in which language spumes, and for which the word baver stands in the poem.

Baver is the stammering of children and the discourse of those who have difficulty keeping to the subject. In old French, the word means primarily "to chatter," "to say unrhymed stuff." Babiller and bavarder are variants. The chatterer speaks too much for he says too little. But precisely because prattle says so little, it is still not enough. Its deficiency is that it remains in- comprehensible insofar as it says nothing. Chatter is discourse for the sake of discourse. One chatters precisely because one has nothing to say. Chatter is niggardly with communication. This avarice is contained in the French word bavard, as conversely the word avare is itself only a little too avaricious to become bavard. As discourse that says too little, baver is not communicative. The spume in the poem possesses knowledge, but it speaks in such a way that it does not relinquish it. In terms of conventional language use, baver has a

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negative ring to it. It could very plausibly stand for that hermetic, locked art of discourse for which Mallarme has always been reproached. One journalist who did so wrote the following words in an 1898 obituary:

... a poet who, in all sincerity and without the least intention of mystifying his con- temporaries, composed the extraordinary "logogriphes" [word plays] which account for his fame and the key to which he was careful to keep all to himself. But what mental aberration led this learned and subtle man of letters, this connoisseur of our greatest classics, to ignore, as if on purpose, in the very act of writing, one of the most fundamen- tal qualities of the genius of the French tongue: clarity? Mystery! But he could, ultimate- ly, recognize his own thought among the impenetrable shadows he was wont to clothe it in. [Documents Mallarm6 2, presented by Carl Paul Barber (Paris: Nizet, 1970), 39.]

If one grants the word baver its devaluing coloration-and nothing in the poem would prohibit this-then these sentences could be read as a paraphrase of "tu / Le sais, ecume, mais y baves. " The poem anticipates its later criticism by ironically treating its own discourse from the standpoint of incomprehension. Incomprehension here consists of expecting messages where none are to be given. Comprehension begins at that point where baver no longer passes for devalued discourse. This revaluation requires the renunciation of instrumen- tality and the recognition of a discourse that is either not communicative or else is communicative in another way. If one breaks through the constraints of convention, it becomes questionable whether spume possesses a knowledge which it silences. The ending of the word naufrage suggests the first person (je), thus making the attribution of this knowledge uncertain: je-tu / Le sais, ecume, mais y bave(s). Were the speaker of the poem also to possess the knowledge which spume has, he could communicate it. If on the contrary he himself foams like spume, then either it is unimportant to know what this knowledge refers to, or else what it refers to is exactly that manner of discourse, baver, which "I" and "you" share. Baver is the discourse of the poem which can no longer be criticized from the standpoint of instrumentality for its defi- ciency, but is rather to be grasped positively as the spuming of language.

The words ecume and baver serve not only the characterization of the poem's manner of discourse but themselves belong to the discourse which they characterize. They not only refer to spume, they are spume. The poem is the spuming of these two words, from which the majority of the text's pre- dominant phonic groups is derived. Baves is referred to several times as a rhyme word, but it also belongs to basse, basalte or to abolit, abime, where its initial sound appears reversed, as well as to the many other words with a and/or v. Ecume finds an echo in echos esclaves and accablante, but also in supreme, abime and in the frequent u and e sounds. The whole poem appears, like spume, to spring from ecume and baves. A new kind of unfolding is revealed here. It is no longer a case of unfolding the semantic possibilities of spume, but rather of letting it spume in the proliferation of language. This is what happens in the verse "Tout l'abime vain eploye." For the abyss is not only

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what unfolds in the spume, it is also the spuming itself. The word abime contains elements from ecume and baver, and in the i in the middle of the word spume rises up as that which produces language here. Perhaps in this i, an infrequent sound in this poem, there is also something of the accompanying spuming song of the siren drowned in the abyss. This spuming of language has nothing to do with onomatopoeia, which always presupposes an already given sense or meaning (as in Pope's "The sound must seem an echo to the sense."), and which is then accompanied by the sound. Here the spuming of language is not representational, but rather productive. It is not about the presentation, or re-presentation of spume that the poem speaks; but the poem's speaking of spume is rather an attempt to say it as that which happens.

Where language itself spumes, statement is endangered. The poem A la nue accablante tu does indeed allow itself to be constructed as one sentence and thus accommodates itself to the linearity in which a discourse dominated by logic unfolds. But the difficulty in determining the sentence construction, together with the uncertain relations between the parts of speech, indicates that grammar is threatened here and that another force is operative next to and indeed against it. Spume does not spume linearly. It radiates the way that fireworks make everything simultaneously light up and burn out. The move- ment of spume is without goal, an eruption out of the predetermined and regulated course, a volcanic eruption, not forward but rather from below up- ward, basaltlike, opening a space in which relations run out over and across each other and no longer respect any convention. For Mallarme, words are no longer closed units of unquestionable meaning bound to quotidian language. They have a depth out of which they say things otherwise than the instrumen- tal use of language permits. Thus accablante contains blanc, 6cume alludes to 6crire, and about to lire. But the frontiers between the words become unstable: in blanc cheveu the feminine form of the adjective blanche is displaced. Such a radiating of speech-sparks does not allow itself to be forced into the pattern of coherent communication. Bubbles of language swirl up, confront each other spuming in the free play of the poem, build cloudlike constellations, mirror and permeate each other, and burst. What bursts, breaks apart and flies away is the communicable, which in the spume of the storm of language, ship- wrecklike, sinks and leaves the last word to language itself. In spume the superfluous announces itself, breaking through the crust of serviceable, instru- mental language. Where the superfluous takes the upper hand, it no longer allows itself to be overlooked and becomes disquieting. The superfluous is in no way what does not matter because one does not need or use it. Precisely that it is there, without being needed or used, is what is disquieting in it. The useable becomes useless when it has been used up. The superfluous asserts itself, precisely by not allowing itself to be consumed, as the scandalous pres- ence of that whose why and wherefore remains unknown. What is disquieting and not to be overcome in literature is its spuming, in which instrumental discourse dissolves and evaporates, and in which language begins to unfold its

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own abyss of groundlessness. The play of language in the free play of the poem cannot be grounded in anything. Since no established or establishing order underlies them, they are the dubious guarantors of their own order, as is the dream which, according to an early insight of Mallarm6's, constitutes itself in its lack of referentiality as men-songe (Mallarme Correspondance, vol. 1, 207- 08). To spume is to dream, and the poem is a dreamspace in which the norms of the wakeful world are put aside and the accustomed references thrown to- gether like dice. Dreamlike are the cross-connections that are allowed to flash out over widely separated places in the poem, untroubled by any grammatical order. Thus in trompe, faute, avarement, lie and deception (mentir, tromper) are suggested without being derived from the conventional use of the words, and without being supplied by a statement ascribable to the sentence. But precisely such allusions that are not recoverable through grammatical struc- ture are the bubbles of spuming language. The spume of language is the play of language which, precisely because it is ungroundable, also remains irreducible and does not lead beyond the free play of the poem. The poem does not say nothing, but it flows over what it says with its superfluous allusions. In its play of allusions language spumes without ground, no longer secondary to some- thing external but rather the suspended proliferation and volatilization of itself.

Spume stands for language. It characterizes the poem's mode of discourse. It is thus a metaphor: the poem speaks the way spume spumes. But almost nothing is gained by this. The similarity between language and spume does not become accessible at the conceptual level. The "understanding" of the metaphor im- plies that the poem is experienced as spuming. This is possible to the degree that the poem happens, that it is in the widest sense said and perceived. In other words, the metaphor means the saying of the poem, but this is only accessible insofar as the poem is said.

But then what happens when the poem is said? Not only is the poem said, but at the same time the poem itself says something. For to say the poem is to say something. This something said, however, leads away from the saying. All saying is always preoccupied with obscuring itself and being forgotten through its adjustment to what it says. By tending away from itself to what is said, saying itself remains unsaid. Nevertheless, when the poem is said, saying is somehow there and indeed as that through which what is said is first made possible. Not only is something said, but language also happens, without which nothing could be said at all. Language that happens as saying remains unsaid, but can be experienced through what is said, and precisely as its pos- sibility, insofar as what is said is perceived as language and not confused with that for which it stands. The experience of saying depends on the experience of what is said as something said, though without saying's becoming in this way articulated or said.

Must saying, however, remain unsaid? If it is said, then it is no longer

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saying but what is said. The word saying, which I keep using, is saying which is said. In it, precisely because it distorts saying into what is said, (which is what I myself am doing here, my discourse on saying), the act of saying, which makes possible saying's being said, recedes into an unreachable distance. To avoid the inevitable loss of saying in its being said, one would have to satisfy the appar- ently absurd requirement of saying saying without its becoming what is said, or: to say it as well as not to say it. This is perhaps less hopeless than it appears. If saying is not to become what is said, thus losing itself as saying, it must be replaced by another said that indirectly says the saying that remains unnamed. This possibility is metaphor. In metaphor saying is not said, but rather meant. What is said is something else, but in such a way that it makes accessible what is meant though not said. In this way saying can be said without becoming what is said: that is, when it is what is meant by what is said.

This accessibility of saying by way of a detour around what is said is related to the untranslatability of metaphor. For since saying can never become what is said without deviating from the saying that it is, what is meant by what is said must not for its part ever become what is said. The reserve of metaphor, which does not say what it means, must be preserved. Stepping outside the hardly limiting case of metaphor, one can say in general that a discourse can make its saying accessible when what it means does not collapse into what is said; in other words, when it does not name but rather speaks figuratively.

But how does saying become accessible in figurative language if it is never what is said but always only what is meant by what is said? The step from what is said to what is meant must be made without dismantling the metaphor. The metaphor must take place rather than be translated. Saying cannot become accessible as what is said because as such it would no longer be itself. It is itself only as the act of saying. If the metaphor makes saying accessible as what is meant but left unsaid by the metaphor, then this can only happen by its provoking the act of saying as the taking place of the metaphor itself. The irreducible metaphor releases the saying that is meant by it.

There remains something to add. The saying which is to become accessi- ble is not any saying whatsoever but rather that one whose concern is to say itself. It is thus the saying of a discourse which from the very beginning speaks under the sign of the refusal to lose itself in what it says. Thus, it has to do with the saying of a particular mode of discourse, a saying which is thereby nega- tively determined in order not to allow itself to be reduced to the saying of something; in Mallarme's poem this becomes accessible as what is meant by spume. Spume is a metaphor for the saying of the poem. However, saying, as what is meant by the metaphor, does not become accessible through its trans- lation, but rather only in such a way that the metaphor releases the act of spuming discourse.

The transition from the situation of the irreducible metaphor to the meta- phor of spume in Mallarme's poem, which has indeed just now been taking place, is not without difficulties. It is easy to speak about the irreducibility of

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260 Yale French Studies

metaphor as long as one does not expose oneself to it. Being exposed to it, however, means experiencing its indomitability. The metaphor that can be mastered can be translated. All attempts to say what the spumelike quality of language would be are attempts at mastery; attempts to determine definitively the saying of the poem, to confine it to the secure sphere of what is said. But if the metaphor is based on the impossibility of transforming saying into what is said and is therefore untranslatable, then spume as the metaphor for saying can be grasped when saying begins to spume and thus surrenders itself to the metaphoric which it produces in order to be able to say itself.

Saying, which is provoked through the metaphor as what is meant by it, is then the saying of the poem itself, for the poem indeed says itself by way of the detour through what is said. The poem speaks in this way so that what it says leads back to its being said as well as to what is meant but left unsaid by it. Is it not now, however, conceivable that the metaphor releases yet another saying? The metaphor is not translatable, and what is meant by it cannot become what is said without disappearing. On the other hand, there is in the metaphoricity of metaphor the requirement of translatability. Every metaphor requires that what is meant by it be said. What happens-in particular with regard to Mal- larme's poem-if one admits the consequences of this requirement? The spuming of saying will be said as what is meant by the spume said. In this way it becomes possible to bring into the discourse the reserve and silence of meta- phor. The spuming of language allows itself to be described and becomes per- ceivable at the level of what is expressed. But the saying that says the spuming of the poem has itself no part in it. It is a saying that loses itself in its said, hence that lapses into precisely that mode of discourse from which this particular discourse (spume) disengages itself. It may be, however, that the discourse that says the spuming of saying begins itself to spume. Then what is meant and said by the translated metaphor approaches once again the metaphor by leaving unsaid its own becoming-said. This secondary metaphorical discourse is not fundamentally different from the primary one, but only distinguishes itself from it gradually in that what is meant by the primary metaphor becomes what is said by the secondary. But it is precisely in the inadmissible transformation of saying into what is said, which occurs in the translation of the metaphor, that what is said secondarily becomes again the metaphor of a secondary say- ing that remains unsaid, and so the primary situation is once again produced.

Translated by Bruce Lawder