Synaesthetics: Symbolism, Dance, and the Failure of Metaphor

Abstract

Synaesthetics:Symbolism, Dance, and the Failure of Metaphor Julie Townsend (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Loïe Fuller in "La danse Blance [sic], ca. 1898"; photograph by Taber. Reproduced with permission from the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. [End Page 126] I. Symbolist Criticism and the Question of History In the critical introduction to his influential and often cited work L'Univers imaginaire de Mallarmé (1961), Jean-Pierre Richard posits Mallarmé's dream of the dancer's entrechats as an entry into the process of reading the Mallarméan universe: Voici définie une parfaite méthode de lecture: remplaçons la danseuse par Mallarmé lui-même, substituons au texte chorégraphique les figures verbales d'un poème, et nous aurons trouvé le moyen le plus commode d'entrer dans son univers tout en restant fidèle à sa leçon.1 It comes as no surprise to learn that the perfect method of reading Mallarmé would be found within his own writings. The critical seductiveness of Mallarmé's universe lies precisely its propensity for substitution. He lures the reader with an aesthetic system in which the gaps between poet and dancer or critic and poet dissolve. Similarly, according to Jacques Derrida, Mallarmé seduces by way of an "allusion perpétuelle" that abolishes not only "différence" but also the difference between "la différence et la non-différence."2 As such, entry into the Mallarméan world demands a suspension of time; and, while a poetic system in which time extends infinitely and the artistic subject moves through unceasing transformations in the form of disembodied yet corporeal figures has appealed to many critics, Richard's simple "voici" and Derrida's unexamined ahistoricity strike me as troubling. The Mallarméan world of unraveled contradictions, I argue, itself rests on a phenomenological impossibility—namely, the disembodied dancer. The centrality of dance in Symbolist aesthetics has of course been observed by many generations of critics. In addition to the writings of Mallarmé and Valéry themselves, even the earliest scholars of Symbolist aesthetics noted the extent to which dance seemed to harmonize the problematic relationships between the artist and the work of art, the ideal and the material, as well as the mind and the body. Fin-de-siècle British poet Arthur Symons proposed that Symbolism was "a literature in which the visible world is no longer a reality, and the unseen [End Page 127] world no longer a dream."3 Yet such an assertion, which readily became a critical orthodoxy, certainly requires reassessment. In a poetics that valorizes dream over reality and ideal over material, it is assuredly strange that dance—arguably the most embodied of the arts—would hold such a privileged position. Symbolist poetics, however, demanded the appearance of ideals in a work of art and thus frequently addressed the problem of how those ideals could or should be made manifest. In other words, to ensure that the Symbolist Idéal would be useful, it had both to take some form and to remain free from corruption or limitation. Rather than constructing the dancing body as an opposition to the written poem, both Mallarmé and Valéry strove to posit a symbiotic relationship between these two artistic modes. For many of their readers, Symbolist poets successfully fulfilled this ideal. For example, in his 1927 response to Valéry's work, conservative dance critic André Levinson congratulates the Symbolist use of dance as an operating metaphor for poetry: "De tous les arts, la danse se révèle le plus matériel mais aussi le plus abstrait. Elle résout l'antithèse de la chair et de l'esprit; c'est là son miracle."4 Such commentary suggests that the miraculous resolution achieved by ideal forms could accomplish a kind of cultural redemption through artistic ritual. It is clear that Symons's and Levinson's writings on Symbolism have served to champion a movement to which they remained unquestioningly devoted; as Richard's comments show, these proponents from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been remarkably...