Music and Dance in "L'Apres-Midi D'un Faune"

Abstract

Assigning a clear-cut label to Mallarme's L'Apres-midi d'un faune presents unresolvable problems for the literary critic. Although classified at times as symbolist, at others as impressionist, and at yet others as having affinities with music, the poem defies any simple definition.' As is often the case with Mallarme's poetry, it suggests other aspects of artistic creation, all the while commenting implicitly on poetry itself. The transposition of this poem into music and dance is no mere accident: it is a manifestation of the non-literary aspects of the work. Here, Mallarme endeavors to create a poem which crosses the traditionally accepted barriers between poetry and other art forms; one which allows poetry to assimilate the suggestiveness of music and dance in order to transform it into a complete art form. Perhaps the best-known of Mallarme's poems, L'Apres'midi d'un faune breaks with poetic tradition in its attempt to incorporate within it techniques from different arts. The linear development so common in traditional literature is absent here, as the poem moves back and forth from the present to past to future, from the real to the illusory, and never clarifies the nature of the central experience. As the faun gropes for truth in the shadows of the woods, a sensation or intuition triggers a quest which proceeds on an instinctual rather than a logical level, causing him to experience a wide range of impressions. Words and images appear in the manner described by Roland Barthes in Degre zero de l'ecriture: Le Mot poetique ne peut jamais etre faux parce qu'il est total; il brille d'une liberte infinie et s'apprete a rayonner vers milles rapports incertains et possibles. Les rapports fixes abolis, le mot n'a plus qu'un projet vertical, il est comme in bloc, un pilier qui plonge dans un total de sens, de reflexes et de remanences.2