On Mallarmé’s Tomb for Anatole—Or What to Do With Absence
Few of us are spared the experience of losing someone we love. When it happens, when someone we love dies, the loss echoes around and resounds within us. Even the absence of an initial reaction—or perhaps especially a palpable lack of response, like the world not immediately ending—can be part of the constellation of grief. We are surprised to still be living, we are dismayed that after such a tragedy we can and do in fact still live. Guilt may slink in; guilt at not feeling the tragedy of the loss more heavily, more continuously, more loudly, for all of our waking moments, for the rest of our lives.
As Camus remarks in his play Caligula, "Most people imagine that a man suffers because out of the blue death snatches away the woman that he loves. But his real suffering […] comes from the discovery that grief, too, cannot last." As if in continuation of this thought, he writes in his novel The Plague that "really to think about someone means thinking about that person every minute of the day, without letting one's thoughts be diverted by anything; by meals, by a fly that settles on one's cheek, by household duties, or by a sudden itch somewhere." But there are always meals, flies, itches, and duties; which is why, according to Camus, life is so difficult to live. And why, perhaps, grief cannot last—or be nearly as substantial as we feel that it ought to be.
If thinking of someone always is difficult when they are with us, might it not be easier when they no longer are? Memory is a world in itself; thinking can spark slivers of past experience into infinite realities, limited only by our finite existence. In considering our loss, we can become split. Whether we realize it or not, we might either give ourselves up entirely to grief (the only response seemingly worthy of the one we loved); or, for the sake of our sanity and wellbeing (and perhaps from the perspective of the one who loved us and had our best interests at heart), we may come to feel that, eventually, we ought to move on. Eventually as a continuous variable: we may wait for the moment while it never arrives.
Not everyone can accept the comfort that, one day, we will be reunited with the one we love; a comfort readily offered by most of the world's religions. In the face of modernity, in the dubious absence of God and afterlife, one can no longer appeal to (future) fantasies of once again holding the dearly departed, of once more sharing laughter, of anticipating even a trivial bit of conversation. When the prospect of something tangible, something to hold onto—a future reunion after death—is withheld, is there anything that we can put in its place? Memories, after all, fleet and flicker.
In the event (it can only be described as an event) of a heart-shattering loss, is there anything that we can build? Is there something positive that we can create, out of the negative, for the one we love? To put them—and with them, ourselves—back together again? What is loss, if not concrete absence? And what is more natural than wanting to place something where someone has gone?
Anatole, the second child of the French symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé, died in 1879 at the age of eight. Tole, as he was affectionately called, suffered from the same disease as his father—a kind of rheumatism, apparently in much-aggravated form. For a long time, Anatole lay ill, and the Mallarmé family lived in the shadow-world between hope and fear. As Mallarmé wrote to a friend: "My sick little boy smiles at you from his bed, like a white flower remembering the vanished sun."
That was to be the last news of Anatole's condition that Mallarmé would share. When he returned after having mailed the letter to his friend, he learned that his son had passed away.
At some point, Mallarmé had written a tombeau ("tomb") poem for Edgar Allan Poe, as well as, later on, for Charles Baudelaire and Paul Verlaine. The idea behind the tombeaux seems to have been not only to grieve the deaths of great artists, but also to immortalize, to eternalize, to preserve their being in some form—a form created, and carefully tended, by Mallarmé. This tomb-building can be seen as a specific form of the general idea of art as a way of capturing reality, of holding something diffuse and infinitely detailed in a moment of (writing, reading) time and space. We give things we love a place in the earth by burying them. In a similar vein, a tomb poem buries its subject through—and within—art, preserving it for all who will want to see.
Shattered by the death of his beloved son, and overcome by guilt, having (probably) been the source of the disease that caused his son so much suffering, Mallarmé began working on a tombeau poem for Anatole. He was never able to finish it.
"Oh! you understand
that if I consent
to live—to seem
to forget you—
it is to
feed my pain
—and so that this apparent
forgetfulness
can spring forth more
horribly in tears, at
some random
moment, in
the middle of this
life, when you
appear to me."
When Mallarmé himself died in 1898, he left behind 202 sheets of fragmentary notes that would be published for the first time in 1961 as Pour un tombeau d'Anatole. (I have the 1983 bilingual translation by Paul Auster, A Tomb for Anatole, published by New Directions. There is a newer, 2003 edition translated by Patrick McGuinness, For Anatole's Tomb, which I have not yet read).
With regard to the fragmentary notes, Auster puts it well. They are "a kind of uhr-text, the raw data of the poetic process. Although they seem to resemble poems on the page, they should not be confused with poetry per se. Nevertheless, more than one hundred years after they were written, they are perhaps closer to what we today consider possible in poetry than at the time of their composition. For here we find language of immediate contact, a syntax of abrupt, lightning shifts that still manages to maintain a sense, and in their brevity, the sparse presence of their words, we are given a rare and early example of isolate words able to span the enormous mental spaces that lie between them…".
I would add that, in the spaces between the words, we find a father's love for his son, his pain in missing him, his guilt over having caused him suffering—even if unintentionally; in short, we find in the notes many of the things that cannot ever really be conveyed directly through language, but glimpses of which can be sensed within the currents below and between the words we use to communicate. We find gestures that move us beyond what could be said—gestures that bring us into the imperfect space between our emotions and the utterances that vainly try to latch onto and explain them. There is no moving on, but perhaps there is a kind of moving into. A Kafkaesque sort of burrowing, but with a more determinate sense of creation.
It is telling that Mallarmé never finished his tombeau for Anatole. Can a tomb ever be complete? But, faced with irrevocable absence, building a tomb is probably the most that anyone can do for their beloved. And for oneself, of course. Still here.