MALLARMÉ’S PIVOTAL JUDAISM


        In our mainstream, Western, religious tradition, Judaism came first in time, arising somewhere around 1200 BC; its principle heir, Christianity, came onto the scene roughly at the beginning of our official calendar era. Islam derived from both in the 6th Century. Christianity split into Eastern (Orthodox) and Western (Roman Catholic) churches in the 11th Century, and Protestantism separated from Catholicism in the 16th Century.
        Splinter groups came into being all along, until our day, but our present conspectus limits itself to the familiar three: Judaism, Catholicism, and Protestantism.
        Early in our AD era, Christianity began to eclipse Judaism in numerical and this-worldly power, but the ancestral faith kept a profound hold on its heirs, and cyclically surged up in consciousness as a sort of baptismal renewal, a moment of social-psychic death-and-rebirth visible, periodically, in practically all of mankind:
        We are referring to a universal, deep communion with dead forebears, in time, occasionally transversally projected as a (spatial) descent into an underworld (or, more typically later, a heaven above) where they are intuited to be living as spirits. One readily thinks of Aeneas's visit with his dead mother in pagan times, and the parallel itinerary of Dante, which included the major Hebrew prophets.
        From then on, in any crisis of renewal, the foundational Judaism of the Bible ("Old Testament") springs into awareness. The university-level study of the Hebrew language in connection with the ancient texts accordingly began in the Renaissance as part of the general psychic upheaval, which took place with a rediscovery of the rival, pardy, ancestral, pagan (Greco-Roman) culture, but very quickly reasserted its Christian impulse through the "humanism" exemplified by Erasmus and, then, Protestantism.
        The 16th-century religious drama by Theodore de Beze, Abraham sacrifiant, illustrates the renascent power of the Judaic wellspring at this crucial juncture, along with the cosmogonic, rather Jahvistic, tone of the coeval Protestant epics by Agrippa d'Aubigne and Guillaume Du Bartas, followed in England by John Milton.
        Another wave of reform rose up in the 17th Century in the mode of Jansenism, which mightily influenced Pascal and Racine in particular; Racine's final plays, Esther and Athalie, were entirely Hebrew in theme and inspiration. Lucien Goldmann offered a lucid account of the sway that the Old Testament "Dieu cache" held over that supreme neo-classical era.
        To be sure, the Biblical, including the New Testament, was central to all higher study in Western countries until quite recent years. It is hard to realize now, but Thomas Jefferson's University of Virginia was the first to be established on clearly secular grounds—all other such institutions had been denominational and most continued to be so for many years.  The motto on the stained-glass windows of Yale, I well remember, is in Hebrew (though the descendents of that tribe in my Yale days were scarcely welcome there; another familiar old story).
        Throughout the 19th Century, the Old Testament continued to color—as it had done in radiant cathedral windows and statuary, painting like Rembrandt's, music like Bach's and Handel's, and literature like Milton's or Blake's since the Middle Ages—much of its finest writing, art, and music. Victor Hugo's most exquisite poem, "Booz Endormi", is taken from the book of Ruth, and he is as steeped in that primal spirit throughout his oeuvre as Claudel, Gide, Faulkner, and Robert Prost would be in their turn.
        Persistently in Western history, the myth of the Lost Tribe has appealed to many different peoples: English, Irish, French Protestant (as in the Chambon region), even Ethiopian or otherwise Africans.
        In America, the sense of an ancient kinship with the delivered seekers of a Promised Land has always been strong, especially in the Mormons. Children allover were, and are still, stubbornly and widely called Sarah, Esther, David, Benjamin, Ruth, Deborah.
        When Abraham Lincoln died, the sensitive artist John R. Peters featured him in a collage with a woebegone Star of David.
        In The Marble Faun, Nathaniel Hawthorne's heroine, the pure New England Calvinist Hilda, encounters insufferable sin in a bosom friend, Miriam, and plunges for comfort, despite strong-clinging, anti-Catholic prejudice, into a confessional in St. Peter’s. Later, she goes the added step toward a renewing source: walking along the Tiber with a male companion, she recalls that the golden menorah Titus had ravished from the temple in Jerusalem had been flung into the river where it sank deep into the mud. And she remarks, longingly, that if only it could be brought back up to us it would "illuminate the world".
        This is mainstream meditation by a very serious writer, and points in a promising direction of not just ecumenicality, but a specific development of Judeo-Christian consciousness growing in the modern period through figures like Leon Bloy, Jacques Maritain, Scholem Asch, Franz Rosenzweig, and, recently, Cardinal Lustiger of Paris and Pope John Paul II.
        At times, the resurgent "ghost" of Judaism is expressed in a fascinatingly mystical or magic mode, as in the wise old Nathan of Lessing, Walter Scott's Ivanhoe (Rebecca's healing powers), Balzac's La Peau de Chagrin (the knowing, old antique dealer), Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander (Uncle Izaak, Ishmael) and, more dauntingly, colorful villains like Fagin or Svengali. Eugene Sue's influential Wandering Jew illustrates the power of immemoriality in this theme, echoed in the itinerant, deeply rooted, universally resonant, Semitic protagonist of James Joyce's Ulysses and Thomas Mann's Joseph story.
        These things are generally known to cultured people; I go over them briefly here only to lead into a moment of the familiar, pious drama which is less mentioned or appreciated.
        Roger Martin du Gard, in his monumental posthumous novel Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort, reminds us nostalgically of the enviably calm, artistically, intellectually and generally bourgeois-classy tone of the French Third Republic in the last quarter of the 19th Century. Religion was hardly practiced by the intelligentsia but it was lingeringly, quietly, mutely present still in virtuous consciences and in related substitute beliefs, such as human progress through reason and science. Most of them, like Balzac earlier, thought Christianity was good for the behavior of ordinary people. There was little of the rigid atheism which, the maturing Camus agreed with Benjamin Constant, was "vulgar".
        Stéphane Mallarmé, whom Martin du Gard points to as one of the enduring lights of the era, illustrates its idealism, its undogmatic spiritual independence and its serenely decorous good sense.
        Born in Paris in 1842, into a modest middle class family—his mother died when he was five; his father soon remarried—he was a pious child, and wrote religious poems until later adolescence, when he was spurred to fitful revolt by some tragic losses, especially that of his cherished sister Maria, culminating in his well-known "struggle with God" in his mid-twenties and his definitive departure from his family's traditional faith.
        This is, of course, an entirely familiar pattern and, for those of us who follow such things, there is an equally familiar detectable relapse, or resurgence, from time to time (as in Joyce, Camus, whonot).
        Mallarmé never returned to the official Christian fold, and he is often rather glibly assumed to be unreligious. The matter is more complex: although the word "Oublions" in an essay on Catholicism indicates a clear distancing from his family's church, he makes equally plain his respect for its insights, and there are important references to the non-denominational sacred, such as "the instinct of heaven in everyone" (English Words) and "One can't do without Eden" (letter to R. Ghil).
        Most tellingly, the pivotal Judeo-Christian figure of St. John dominates his late fragments for "Hérodiade", and that takes us to the heart of our present thesis:
        "Hérodiade", Mallarmé's major work, second in importance only to the Coup de Dés, was influenced by the image of the exquisite Jewess in Heinrich Heine's Atta Troll. A posthumously-discovered fragment features the blond-brunette pair we also find in Rowena-Rebecca as well as "The Afternoon of a Faun", so we might suspect an influence of Scott, but that is less certain.
But the fatally-beautiful daughter of Herod at the threshold of the new faith obviously haunted him, intimately bound up with the martyred heroism of the key transitional figure between Judaism and Christianity.
        In a word, the resurgent Judaism plays the role of a spirit from the oh-so-distant past which accompanies one, like an Ariadne thread, in an agony of lost self in rebirth, like an Urvater's blessing or the apparition of a fairy godmother, or ancestral guide way up on a mountain or in a tower-room or down in the bowels of the earth, as in familiar myths and legendary stories from around the world.
The nurse in "Hérodiade" is such a sibylline "phantom", emerging mysteriously from a faded tapestry or stained-glass window, in the fragmentary "L'Ouverture". She sings an incantation meant to ease the initiatory crisis of her princess-mistress's rebirth from childhood into mature womanhood—paralleling Mallarmé’s stormy struggle in late, characteristically-delayed, adolescence toward creative maturity. She chants,


                A long evocation of the past,
                . . . . the old veiled dazzlement
                Rises (oh, what a distance is hidden in those calls)
                . . .
                Will it cast its gold in last splendors (?) . . .


        Because Mallarmé is, in the minds and on the pages of our leading critics from, say, Albert Thibaudet, Maurice Blanchot, Edmund Wilson through Hugh Kenner and George Steiner, the key figure, parallel to Einstein, in the advent of the modern mindset—l 'Express during his recent centennial, referred to him as the "inventor of the twentieth century" (almost all the best-known writers are in his wake, even Kafka)—it is not just his heroine or the poet-thinker who are upheaved with a whole new way of thinking and being, but the entire modern era since his death.
         The nostalgic, pure, authentic, golden gleam in Hawthorne’s imaginarily retrieved menorah, I submit, plays midwife to that dreamed-of better life, much as it did in our time through the Hanukkah candle Pope John Paul II lit in the Vatican not long ago. The more-open, Spinozistically inclusive and conciliatory, but fiercely-tenderly focused cast of mind which Mallarmé made a central contribution to, passing through countless of our finest writers (as well as musicians like Debussy and Ravel, artists like Gauguin, Vuillard, Matisse), represented a working-out of his own way to the sacred, with powerful Christian themes mingled with the Judaic, together the very essence of miraculous transition, the transformation of our mainstream of culture at its spiritual core.
        Let Sartre and the quondam Tel Quel bunch and the "sixty-eighters" generally rave on about the "materialism" of Mallarmé and try to pull him into a neo-Marxist camp or an allied deconstructive debunking till the cows come home, it is all blatherskite. Other critics like Jean-François Revel tried that maneuver out on Proust and got attention for it, and that has become a commonplace in our critical time. In vain did Camus protest, in a published interview, that "There is something vulgar about the anti-religious attitude", the trendy journalist-machine has done a Procrustean job on him too. Peu importe.
        But what is crucial is an understanding of what is going on under the usual hurly burly of commercial mass, or middlebrow, culture. The "intellectual" sophisticates on or off campuses won't mess with religion at all. The staunch believers stick to a literalism, which makes it hard for most moderns to join up. But the need for belief, for a faith which can help us to survive an increasingly unrecognizable, ugly, flavorless, artificial and abstract, in many ways threatening, reality, is no doubt more pressing than ever, as Malraux surmised not long before his death.
        An understated Judeo-Christian sensibility, refracting through the suggestive, approximate expressions of our august and beautiful religious texts, and the allied utterances, sounds, images, of our independent but, yes inspired, artists—the finest of them unquestionably took off in this sense, from a long tradition, and modified it in the way Mallarmé, above all, pointed out to them—even today can sustain many of us through who-knows-what?