A. S.

Bessa

Vers: Une Architecture1

This essay explores the architectural trope in concrete poetry by concentrating in one of its major sources of inspi-
ration-the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé. Departing from a small number of texts by Mallarmé on the condition of
poetry (vers) during his life time, I attempt to demarcate his concept of verse; one that brings together both archi-
tectural as well as musical concerns. A considerable part of the essay consists of applying this concept to an analy-
sis of Mallarmé’s masterwork Un coup de dés.

Le futur vers se dégage

Du logis très précieux
Stéphane Mallarmé

A arquitetura como construir portas,

de abrir; ou como construir o aberto;
construir, não como ilhar e prender,
nem construir como fechar secretos;
construir portas abertas, em portas;
casas exclusivamente portas e tecto.
O arquiteto: o que abre para o homem
(tudo se sanearia desde casas abertas)
portas por-onde, jamais portas-contra;
por onde, livres: ar luz razão certa.
João Cabral de Melo Neto

As one can’t get architecture or even mural stuff DONE one retreats to printed page.
Ezra Pound2

The concrete poetry movement attributes its radical experimentalism in language to the
influence of Mallarmé’s work, and although this influence has been perennially heralded,
intriguing aspects of it have thus far been left unexamined. Chief among these is the pre-
1
The title of this essay refers to Le Corbusier’s seminal text Vers une architecture (Towards a new architec-
ture). By inserting a colon in Le Corbusier’s title I intend to isolate the word vers and make its ambiguities
resonate — in French, vers takes on several meanings according to the context in which it is presented: to-
ward, verse and worm. Although the equation worm/verse is full of implications to the kind of writing I am in-
terested in exploring — the “night worm” in Blake’s The Rose comes to mind — I will use vers mainly in re-
gard to its other two meanings.
2
In 1929, when inquiring whether Wyndham Lewis might be willing to design decorative initials for his Aquila
edition of Cavalcanti, Pound observed, “As one can’t get architecture or even mural stuff DONE one retreats
to printed page.” Pound/Lewis: The Letters of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, ed. by Timothy Materer (NY:
New Directions, 1985), p. 168. I thank Richard Sieburth for bringing Pound’s quote to my attention.
42 A. S. Bessa

dominantly architectural bent of Brazilian concretism, which seems to taint the more nu-
anced elements that might have manifested from Mallarmé’s influence. The concept of
concretism elaborated by the Noigandres Group in their manifesto Plano Piloto para Poe-
sia Concreta has given rise to an eminently architectural perception of concrete poetry, as
opposed to the more musically oriented model proposed by Öyvind Fahlström in his Mani-
festo for Concrete Poetry; in Mallarmé’s work, as we shall see, architecture and music co-
exist and are inextricably woven into the vers (“ou ligne parfait”).3
For Mallarmé, the vers has the same fluid, protean meaning that the word carries in its
definition — it means both “verse” and “toward.” It is through (à travers) the vers that Mal-
larmé bridges the depths of the white page, moves over the gutter between pages, and ulti-
mately structures the edifice of his oeuvre. The “toward” of the vers also points to the futur
vers, the poetry to come, the vers being his connection to the past (for Mallarmé intends to
“laisser intact l’antique vers”) and to the future.4 Like Nietzsche’s, Mallarmé’s work was
preparing the ground for what was to come, bridging the gap between the poet of the past
and the poet of the future. This future might not be a utopia, as he made clear in Le Phé-
nomène Future, but, as Henry Weinfield points out, “the poets have not disappeared; at the
end of the piece, they ‘make their way toward their lamps, their brains momentarily drunk
with an obscure glory, haunted by a Rhythm and forgetting that they exist in an age that has
outlived beauty’.”5
There are few examples of finished works by Mallarmé, the greater part of his oeuvre
falls into the category of vers de circonstance — tributes to dead friends or colleagues,
gifts, envois divers, and so forth. Even a poem such as Un coup de dés has to be considered
in the context of the specific circumstances of a commissioned work. All this leads to the
conclusion that Mallarmé was interested in the concept (of poetry) rather than in poetry
itself and the vers is where this concept is formulated.
The microscopic lens Mallarmé applies to the vers can be glimpsed in an excerpt from a
letter to Swinburne, dated 1876, in which he suggests minor changes to a poem Swinburne
wrote in homage to Theophile Gautier:

A peine si je préférais lire au second vers “Pour y cueillir qu’un souffle d’amour” au lieu de “Pour recueillir
rien qu’un souffle d’amour” à cause de l’équilibre assez heureux dans le vers des deux monosyllabes y et rien
et du moins grand nombre de fois qu’apparaîtra de suite la lettre r appuyée notamment sur une voyelle muette
e dans re après avoir servi de finale à pour.6

The same method is, of course, applied to Mallarmé’s own poetry, in which similar exam-
ples are abundant. The first line of Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui, for instance,
has three v’s in its first half, counterbalanced by three u’s in its second half. The visual
sharpness of the initial v’s is suddenly smoothed by the curvaceous u’s in the line’s last
words. This is a poem to be both read and seen: the eyes hear its music.

3
Stéphane Mallarmé, Oeuvre Complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), p. 455.
4
Mallarmé, p. 456.
5
Henry Weinfield, Collected Poems: Stéphane Mallarmé (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 242.
6
Berrtand Marchal, Mallarmé: Correspondance: Lettres sur la poésie (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), pp. 546-7.
 Vers: Une Architecture 43

In “On the Way to Language,” Heidegger writes that a poet might “come to the point where
he is compelled to put into language the experience he undergoes with language.”7 Mal-
larmé’s fascination with words and letters of the alphabet, and their endless combinatory
possibilities, is at the core of a poetic venture that can only be called an “experience with
language.” This notion of an experience with language, through which “language brings
itself to language,” has often been used to describe Mallarmé’s unique rapport with poetry.
Whether through the linguistic explorations in “Les Mots Anglais,” the intricate meditations
on poetry and art in his innumerable essays, his poems, or his Tuesday-night gatherings, the
image one holds of Mallarmé is of a demiurge pouring out an all-encompassing system of
discourse grounded in the nineteenth century, but reaching to both the past and the future.
The vers is the way (la voi, or un envoi), the path through which Mallarmé travels back
and forth in space and time. This path, this ground, is also where he buries things, such as
names. He frequently inserted his own name (Stéphane: “Reste là sur ces fleurs dont nulle
ne se fane”) or friends’ names (such as Verlaine: “Je te lance mon pied vers l’aine”) in the
verses of his poetry.8 A typical Mallarméan text resembles a field with a variety of traps —
ambush, trick, stratagem, maneuver, artifice. The relationship, in a vers, between names,
space, and time is exemplified by Les loisirs de la poste, which also establishes the rapport
between his vers and architecture.
In its entirety, Les loisirs de la poste works as a poetic mapping of Paris in space and
time, with the names of recipients and streets mixed up with contemporary events, anec-
dotes, and miscellaneous elements. Rhyme is the main focus in each quatrain, thus confer-
ring on the general plan an intrinsic musicality. This musicality is attained by the juxtaposi-
tion of urban elements — urban planning as music, music as planned urbanity. It is worth
noting that at the time Mallarmé was conducting his alleged “assault on language,” the city
of Paris had just gone through major transformations under the direction of Baron Georges
Eugène Haussmann. The opening up of rationally planned avenues and boulevards in the
organic maze of the old city is an apt metaphor for the task Mallarmé set himself with re-
gard to the French language.
The parallels between language and architecture are particularly evident in the study of
Mallarmé’s progress as a writer. The evolution of his prose texts, as methodically examined
by Norman Paxton, exposes the kind of rational decisions Mallarmé adopted in order to
achieve a high level of structural complexity in writing:

This complexity forces the reader to go slowly and therefore to be more aware of the careful balance of the
sentence, comprehending it only at the end, when he can look back and see the whole nebulous confection in
suspension. The artistic construction of a sentence is almost an end in itself. In the Préface à Vathek there is a
considerable step forward towards a sentence structure which shall give aesthetic satisfaction by the original
beauty of its involved construction and also communicate a thought modified by the unexpected juxtaposition
of its elements.9

7
Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings: from Being and Time (1927) to The Task of Thinking (1964), ed. by David
Farrell Krell. (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 59.
8
Stéphane Mallarmé, Oeuvre Complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), pp. 55; 82.
9
Norman Paxton, The Development of Mallarmé’s Prose Style, (Geneva: Droz, 1968), p. 52.
44 A. S. Bessa

Terms such as “construction” and “structure” per se already insinuate the architectural mo-
tif, and the image of the reader going “slowly” down the sentence further enhances the sug-
gestion of the sentence as a via — the vers as a path, although at times the path leads the
reader to nowhere or to an abyss. In innumerable reworkings of the same texts, Mallarmé
often omitted entire sentences, thus abandoning the reader to his own musings. In L’action
restreinte, for instance,

After “Écrire —” Mallarmé had originally written “A personne, sans savoir quoi; du fait de ne te addresser,
un objet, tu le traites.” This sentence was simply omitted in the revision, with the result that “Écrire —” is
launched into the void much more than before; but even originally Mallarmé had implied the relative
unimportance of communication — only we need the original to see just what is that he was saying.10

It is this sense of structure that captivated the Noigandres poets. After the extremism of the
Miesian beinahe nichts in modernistic architecture, the concrete poets embraced “structure”
as a means to reach “essence.” The importance of the structure in concretism supplanted
that of the vers, and gradually blended into the notion of design. The vers was blown up to a
point at which it gradually disappeared, leaving behind only a word or even just a fraction
of it. Such is the case in Decio Pignatari’s 1960 poem Organismo:

O ORGANISMO QUER PERDURAR

O ORGANISMO QUER REPT
O ORGANISMO QUER RE
O ORGANISMO QUER
O ORGANISMO
ORGASM
OO
O

Thus the versatility of the Mallarméan vers is reduced by concretism to the point of extinc-
tion. What triumphs instead is a notion of structure that seems foreign to any reader of Mal-
larmé’s work. The minimalism hinted at by some of Mallarmé’s mature work was one of
high intellectual concentration and skill. There is nothing mechanical or repetitive in his
poetics, nothing that would justify mistaking it for a method or a process. Any attempt to
emulate his achievements — visual display in Un coup de dés, for example — will forever
fail, because he did not propose rules for the poetry to come, but only prepared the ground
for it. Nevertheless, the Noigandres group found in Mallarmé a confirmation for their own
architectural tendency; and emphasized this aspect to the detriment of the more subtle as-
pects of the vers. In Poesia, Estrutura, written in 1955, Augusto de Campos wrote:

Mallarmé is the inventor of a process of poetic organization whose significance for the art of letters seems to
us aesthetically comparable to the musical value of “serialism” created by the musical universes of a Boulez or
a Stockhausen. This process can best be expressed by the word structure. We should add that the particular
use, that we here make of the word structure has in mind an entity medularly defined by a gestaltian principle

10
Ibid., p. 79.
 Vers: Une Architecture 45

that the whole is more than the sole addition of the parts, or that the whole is something qualitatively diverse
of each component, thus ever being misunderstood as an additive phenomenon.11

Although there is in this passage a reference to music, it is not intrinsically connected to

structure, but only compared to it. It is important to emphasize that the structure in Mal-
larmé is both musical and mobile, like a fan (“Rien qu’un battement aux cieux”), pliable,
adapting to various circumstances and ends.12 Virginia La Charité writes that the fan is “a
segment of a circle which is constructed with thin rods which move on a pivot; made out of
silk, feathers or paper, it opens and closes, mystifies and reveals.”13 This deceptively simple
structure in fact will be used to great profit in Mallarmé’s hands, for the movement of con-
striction and expansion, the act of folding and unfolding, will on the one hand generate a
bountiful source of verbal joy (“de la cendre/descendre,” “un frisson/unisson,” “la
flamme/l’âme,” “le plumage est pris/mépris,” “le vide nénie/dénie,” “vole-t-il/vil,”
“las/les lilas,” “glacier/l’acier,” “lune/l’une,” “de visions/dévisions,” “se para/sépara,”
“désir Idées/iridées,” “devoir/de voir”), and, on the other, provide the final shape of poems
such as Soupir, where a dash in the fifth line provides the sole visual mark where the poem
will fold into two opposed movements, ascending and descending as one’s chest might
when emitting a sigh.14 That’s how subtle, Mallarmé seems to tell us, the sound can be, like
the flapping of a wing. Nevertheless, music is embedded into structure to the same degree
as letters: “Je pose, à mes risques esthétiquement, cette conclusion: que la Musique et les
Lettres sont la face alternative ici élargie vers l’obscur; scintillante là, avec certitude, d’un
phénomè, le seul, je l’appelai, l’Idée.”15
The “Idea” manifests itself through letters and music, but Mallarmé’s music will never
reach the operatic dimensions of Wagner’s, for he is more interested in the “music of the
spheres,” which is highly abstract, or in the music produced by everyday objects — the
chiming of bells, the ruffling of skirts, the flapping of fans, the rocking of a cradle.
When in motion, the fan emits sound waves — delicately, imperceptibly. Its sound rep-
licates a pulsation, or a palpitation. It speeds up or slows down according to the physical
and/or emotional condition of the one who manipulates it. For Mallarmé, a poem offers this
kind of flexibility — it is ultimately left to the discretion of the reader how to manipulate or
unfold the poem, which thus becomes extremely objectified. In the particular case of the
éventails, some of which Mallarmé actually wrote on fans, the object itself becomes the
poem. “The conception thus involves the mysterious transformation of the animate to the
inanimate, the concrete to the abstract, the material to the spiritual.”16 It has been noticed
that from the final letters of éventail an “aile springs poetically” standing for the traditional
symbol of poetic inspiration.17 This circularity, a poem about a fan that stands for a poem, is

11
Augusto de Campos, “Poema, Ideograma,” in Mallarmé (São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1974), p. 177.
12
Mallarmé, Oeuvre, p. 57.
13
Virginia La Charité, The Dynamics of Space: Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard, French
Forum Monographs, 67 (Lexington: French Forum, 1987), p. 16.
14
La Charité, p. 17.
15
Mallarmé, Oeuvres, p. 649.
16
Weinfield, Collected, p. 196.
17
Weinfield, p. 196.
46 A. S. Bessa

the essence of Mallarmé’s poetic meditation — a poem writes itself about itself, a thought
thinks itself about a thought, “un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard.”
Un coup de dés is the work in which all the aspects addressed above regarding architec-
ture, music, poetry, and idea are so finely tuned as to provide us with an ideal model for
discussion. “Vers is the primary direction in the text,” writes La Charité, underlining the
main motif in the poem — the alexandrine verse. Hasard derives from Arabic for “the die,”
thus “a throw of the dice will never abolish the di[c]e,“ a tautological statement that reiter-
ates that the poem is not about something other than itself. “Un coup de dés, as ‘POÈME’ is
an authentic object which is at the same time its own subject.”18 There is no message to be
found at the bottom of this shipwreck, but only the POÈME as it is written on the title page.
“The poem is and confirms itself through the informative and descriptive declaration of the
titular phrase.”19 We go down the vers (à tavers), between wonderment and stasis, only to
be thrown back to the beginning of the poem. And we come up with nothing — no major
revelation, everything still kept secret. The poetic experience is confined to its duration, not
the acquisition of truth. The poet is a performer who sets the conditions for such experi-
ence. The poet titles the experience, and the title is the experience. Un coup de dés is the
unfolding of its title, of its gesture, of its performance.
Un coup de dés is the most extreme of the fan-poems and also the first modernist archi-
tectural construction. Its extremely calculated use of space opens up a series of questions
regarding the brokering of the printed page as a territory for action. This calculation is the
inverse of ratiocination, for Mallarmé’s intention is to restore the primacy of language (lan-
guage that speaks itself) through the poem. Poetry will unveil, in space, the “subdivisions
prismatiques de l’Idée.”20 Heidegger contends that poetry is in the neighborhood of
thought, “but because we are caught in the prejudice nurtured through centuries that think-
ing is a matter of ratiocination, that is, of calculation in the widest sense, the mere talk of a
neighborhood of thinking to poetry is suspect.“21 With Un coup de dés, Mallarmé inaugu-
rates the page as a field of action — the poet ruling over the constraints of space. La Charité
brings our attention to the material and utilitarian aspect of the printed page, and its inherent
set of laws:

The unit of the printed page is a utilitarian form which makes the word visible through a given assembly of
words into lines and lines into stanzas or paragraphs. Rules dictate how parts (words, lines, paragraphs) fit to-
gether and deny authorial freedom. Certain two-dimensional limits are imposed on the text by the medium of
its communication. The formal order of the medium directs the reader: sequential pagination, a certain balance
of type and space. To reassert the original freedom of the language as an initiating experience, Mallarmé turns
his attention to an art of space and the role of the reader.22

Utility, rules, limits, formal order constrict language in its movement to speak itself. “Only
because in everyday speaking language does not bring itself to language but holds back, are

18
La Charité, Dynamics, p. 102.
19
La Charité, p. 59.
20
Mallarmé, Oeuvres, p. 455.
21
Heidegger, Writings, p. 330.
22
La Charité, Dynamics, p. 15.
 Vers: Une Architecture 47

we able simply to go ahead and speak a language, and so to deal with something and nego-
tiate something by speaking.”23 In Un coup de dés, Mallarmé inveighs against this conform-
ism and undermines the rules of the game. Reportedly, the printer for the first edition of Un
coup de dés reacted strongly to Mallarmé’s use of space, and this contretemps between
writer and printer raises a series of questions that are essential to understanding the signifi-
cance of the leap that Un coup de dés represents.

A page is printed in signature sheets, the most common one being in multiples of four; signatures are then
folded to page size, the largest signature being a folio. Pages appear as verso and recto. Hence, a page is a
fixed framework which delimits the amount of words and lines which it can support. A page may be said to
represent a unity of space, the place for the confrontation of printed elements, but the writer does not own at
any time a whole page because of the dictum of printer space. Printer space is space owned by the printer, not
the writer, to wit the first verso after a title is generally unprinted and each page is surrounded by dead, unus-
able space or printer’s margin. The margin frames or encloses the printed elements. Center margin or gutters
further compromise the integrity of the page and create a columnar effect; as a result, the vertical always
dominates the horizontal although the horizontal does not actually oppose the vertical, but is harmonious in its
subordination to it. The restraints of a page impose spatial ordering. Every page in a given printed work begins
and ends with a predetermined line length, a length further dictated by type selection and margin space, which
is a function of line length.24

The promise of “un livre qui soit un livre, architectural et prémédité, et non un recueil des
inspirations de hasard, fussent-elles merveilleuses [...]. Le jeu littéraire par excellence: car
le rythme même du livre, alors impersonnel et vivant, jusque dans sa pagination, se juxta-
pose aux équations de ce rêve, ou Ode” is partly fulfilled in Un coup de dés, for the rela-
tionship of book to poem in this work is so closely knit as to render it impossible to unra-
vel.25 Un coup de dés is a poem-book-object, hence the futility of trying to quote it: any
attempt to quote Un coup de dés will invariably be transformed into an illustration.26 All its
parts are connected to such a degree that to select any cluster of words is utterly useless.
Furthermore, there are no bons mots in this work that justify their isolation from the whole.
The experience of reading it is one of movement in space and time. The reader scrutinizes
the page, downward, from left to right, making bridges through the white space, the eyes
squinting or widening to adapt to the changes in type size.

The type visually expands the emission of the thought into the concrete object of dice, space is crossed and
filled, presence replaces absence, contact is established, and the reading activity is the experience of creation,

23
Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982), p.
59.
24
La Charité, Dynamics, pp. 41-42.
25
Marchal, Mallarmé, p. 585.
26
Paradoxically, the worst printing of Un coup de dès is to be found in the Pléiade edition of Mallarmé’s Oeuvre
complète. This edition does not observe Mallarmé’s specifications regarding page size, font, type, or align-
ment. The general effect is thus of a miniaturized illustration of the ‘real thing,’ which as a matter of fact was
never really materialized.
48 A. S. Bessa

in which the text emerges as both object and subject: a perpetual coming into being. The text is the event and
place of the communication.27

“Thinking is not a means to gain knowledge. Thinking cuts furrows into the soil of Be-
ing.”28 Likewise, there’s no knowledge to be extracted from Un coup de dés, just a thinking
act. In reading, seeing, and listening to it, the basic requirements of any Gesamtkunstwerk,
we perform the act of thinking, and grasp the “subdivisions prismatiques de l’Idée.” A
poème does not refer to anything outside itself. “Rien n’aura eu lieu que le lieu.” This is
the site, here in these pages. “In thinking there is neither method nor theme, but rather the
region, so called because it gives its realm and free reign to what thinking is given to
think.”29
It was necessary to construct this book, so carefully planned, in order to distinguish the
poème from any other written text, thus revealing the poème as a “power book.” Un coup de
dés is the prototype of hypertext, in which highly sensitive words carry the power to remit
the reader to other texts. And the units of this construction are the page and the printing
process.

Basically, print is static, inert, concrete, impersonal, and utilitarian. Print is what the reader reads; it bestows
order in its linearity, sets points of convergence and divergence, establishes sequence and stratification (sub-
ordination), fixes the fiction by controlling groupings of words which in turn offer precision and concision in
the determination of the restraints which bring about meaning and the communication of that meaning through
the assembly of the words into lines. Print is a psychological framework for the reader, who goes forward,
word by word, line by line, page by page, identifying figures and their relations, or he goes backward in order
to reconstruct the events of the forward-motion of the narrative.30

Mallarmé subverts this order and, in so doing, exposes the invisible structure that upholds
literature — linearity, convergence, sequence, stratification, in summa, all the “restraints
that bring about meaning.”31 Through his exploration of typography and topology, Mal-
larmé emphasized the idea of language as an artifice, a construction — not a natural trait,
but a technique to express ideas, or the idea. The problem with assertions such as this lies in
the likelihood that it will always be taken for an absolute (“language as a construct”), after
all the nuances have been brushed aside. Hence the emphasis, by the majority of concre-
tists, on the architectural aspect of Mallarmé’s enterprise.
But Mallarmé’s architecture is diaphanous, or at least mobile. In the letter to Verlaine
known as “Autobiographie,” when he refers to “un livre architectural et prémédité,” he
writes that the pagination of this book “se juxtapose aux équations de ce rêve, ou Ode.”
Writing about Maeterlinck, for instance, he notes that “une symétrie, comme elle règne en
tout édifice, le plus vaporeux, de vision et de songes.” And referring to Hugo, he writes,
“Monument en ce désert, avec le silence loin; dans une crypte la divinité ainsi d’une majes-

27
La Charité, Dynamics, p. 124.
28
Heidegger, On the Way, p. 20.
29
Heidegger, p. 74.
30
La Charité, Dynamics, pp. 84-85.
31
La Charité, pp. 84-5.
 Vers: Une Architecture 49

tueuse idée inconsciente, à savoir que la forme appellée vers est simplement elle-même la
littérature.” At the end of “Igitur,” after nothingness has been conquered, “reste le château
de la pureté.” “Dream” and “vision” are terms often invoked by Mallarmé, alongside
“symmetry,” “edifice,” “monument,” and “tomb”; but above all, this impalpable architec-
ture is always called upon to provide an image, a stage set:

Exterieurement, comme le cri de l’étendue, le voyageur perçoit la détresse du sifflet. “Sans doute,” il se
convainc “on traverse un tunnel — l’époque — celui, long le dernier, rampant sous la cité avant la gare toute-
puissante du virginal palais central, qui courronne.” Le souterrain durera, ô impatient, ton recueillement à pré-
parer l’édifice de haut verre essuyé d’un vol de la Justice.32

Mallarmé’s architecture often has the ghostly quality of the tower William Beckford had
built after his own design — an architecture that is already a ruin, a monument, a tomb. Or
perhaps an architecture such as is seen onstage: suggestive, evocative, and easily dissipated.
The “architecture” of Un coup de dés is mobile, like the screens in a Japanese home. The
reader is never able to contemplate the entire “edifice,” but each space opens onto the next,
revealing chambers, niches, and staircases, never differentiating between inside and outside.
And while there has been excessive stress on the term “structure” with regard to Mal-
larmé’s poetics, there is a general tendency to ignore his penchant for ornamental motifs.

Il y a à Versailles des boiseries à rinceaux, jolis à faire pleurer; des coquilles, des enroulements, des courbes,
des reprises de motifs. Telle m’apparaît d’abord la phrase que je jette sur le papier, en un dessin sommaire,
que je revois ensuite, que j’épure, que je réduis, que je synthétise. Si l’on obéit à l’invitation de ce grand es-
pace blanc laissé à dessein au haut de la page comme pour séparer de tout, le déjà lu ailleurs, si l’on arrive
avec une âme vierge, neuve, on s’aperçoit alors que je suis profondeement et scrupuleusement syntaxier, que
mon écriture est dépourvue d’obscurité, que ma phrase est ce qu’elle doit être et être pour toujours.33

The relationship between syntax and architecture is one that concrete poets also pursue, but
they equate syntax with structure, never with ornament. One might find the justification for
such misreading in early texts on modernistic architecture, such as the condemnation of
ornament by Adolf Loos titled “Ornament and Crime.” Modernistic architecture repudiated
ornament and advocated the supremacy of structure over surface beauty. The architecture of
concrete poetry is not the same as Mallarmé’s: the tendency toward ornament in Mallarmé
is not merely a figure of speech, but an important feature of his whole enterprise, ranging
from the curlicues in his signature to the subtle variation of font styles and sizes in Un coup
de dés. Above all, this tendency manifests itself in effects that are sometimes nearly imper-
ceptible, such as this particular topological display in Un coup de dés:

There is considerable verticality attained by the ascending kerns, especially d, l, b. The unit begins with “de la
mémorable,” and the ascending kerns point upward. Moreover, the layout demands that this group be placed
so that the b of “mémorable” be over the f of “fût” and that the f be over the l of “l’évènement.” The vertical

32
Mallarmé, Oeuvres, pp. 371-372.
33
Paxton, Development, p. 54.
50 A. S. Bessa

kerns and the capital letters stabilize the space of 10v [page 10 verso]; contrary to the lexical meaning of the
unit “RIEN” which dominates by size, it has identity.34

Several of the tombeaux already hinted at the confluence of architecture and writing, even
though visually they do not resemble tombs. The fan is an architectural construct par excel-
lence: awnings are based on the fan’s principle of pliability. But the fan poems do not evin-
ce an architectural shape. So where is the architecture in Mallarmé to be seen? It is in the
vers (“l’exact ligne”) that one will find this architecture. “Dans le genre appelé prose, il y a
des vers, quelquefois admirables, de tous rythmes. Mais, en vérité, il n’y a pas de prose: il y
a l’alphabet et puis des vers plus ou moins serrés: plus ou moins diffus. Toutes les fois qu’il
y a effort au style, il y a versification.”35 The vers is the bridge through which Mallarmé
will transcend the non-materiality of the page. Before the vers there is nothing, only the
white page. The vers creates a site where the eye and the mind can find shelter. In Building
Dwelling Thinking, Heidegger discusses the nature of a construction and the creation of a
site:

The bridge swings over the stream with ease and power. It does not just connect banks that are already there.
The banks emerge as banks only as the bridge crosses the stream. The bridge designedly causes them to lie
across from each other. One side is set off against the other by the bridge. Nor do the banks stretch along the
stream as indifferent border strips of the dry land. With the banks, the bridge brings to the stream the one and
other expanse of the landscape lying behind them. It brings stream and bank and land into each other’s
neighborhood. The bridge gathers the earth as landscape around the stream.36

Heidegger is interested in the relationship of thinking to construction (edificare, cultivare),

and therefore the proximity of architecture and language. Although its conciliatory and con-
trite tone (owing to the circumstances that informed the delivery of this lecture) is in sharp
contrast with Mallarmé’s style, Heidegger’s exploration of the bridge image is an apt meta-
phor for some aspects of the concept of Vers.

To be sure, the bridge is a thing of its own kind; for it gathers the fourfold in such a way that it allows a site
for it. But only something that is itself a location can make space for a site. The location is not already there
before the bridge is. Before the bridge stands, there are of course many spots along the stream that can be oc-
cupied by something. One of them proves to be a location, and does so because of the bridge. Thus the bridge
does not first come to a location to stand in it; rather a location comes into existence only by virtue of the
bridge.37

The vers is the organizing principle. It brings (metric) order and symmetry to the chaos of
unelaborated ideas: it is through the vers that the “Idea” actually flows. The vers has the
power to name things, rescuing them from the depths of memory. “Je dis: une fleur! et,
hors de l’oubli où ma voix relègue aucun contour, en tant que quelque chose d’autre que

34
La Charité, Dynamics, p. 78.
35
Mallarmé, Oeuvres, p. 867.
36
Heidegger, Basic, p. 330.
37
Heidegger, p. 332.
 Vers: Une Architecture 51

les calices sus, musicalement se lève, idée même et suave, l’absente de tous bouquets.”38
(“Language is the flower of the mouth,” as Heidegger paraphrases Hölderlin).39 The vers
inaugurates a space, opens up a possibility for this space, and baptizes it. “What appears on
the page is real; it exists; it is both trustworthy and credible because it is so deliberately set,
displayed, and constructed.”40 The vers is a landmark, a point of orientation, an organizing
principle, it casts a new light on space and objects.

Le vers qui de plusieurs vocables refait un mot total, neuf, étranger à la langue et comme incantatoire, achève
cet isolement de la parole: niant, d’un trait souverain, le hasard demeuré aux termes malgré l’artifice de leur
retrempe alternée en les sens et la sonorité, et vous cause cette surprise de n’avoir ouï jamais tel fragment or-
dinaire d’élocution, en même temps que la réminiscence de l’objet nommé baigne dans une neuve atmos-
phère.41

The vers creates out of the book a site. “For Mallarmé, the poet has the power to create with
words, to go beyond the object by making an absolute out of language. The very act of writ-
ing on the page ordains the credibility of the text,” writes La Charité. The conversion of the
page into a site attests to Mallarmé’s belief in the transcendent power of language and the
tools and skills involved in its pursuit:
Écrire —

L’encrier, cristal comme une conscience, avec sa goutte, au fond, de ténèbres relative à ce que quelque chose
soit: puis, écarte la lampe.

Tu remarquas, on n’écrit pas, lumineusement, sur champ obscur, l’alphabet des astres, seul, ainsi s’indique
ébauché ou interrompu; l’homme poursuit noir sur blanc.

Ce pli de sombre dentelle, qui retient l’infini, tissé par mille, chacun selon le fil ou prolongement ignoré son
secret, assemble des entrelacs distants où dort un luxe à inventorier, tryge, noeud, feuillages et présenter.42

There is a hopeful attitude in Mallarmé toward (vers) the progress of the vers — writing
poetry as a philosophical practice, a practical manner of thinking, a science not confined to
the restraints of the page and the printing process. The progress of the vers corresponds to
the progress of the “Idea.” Through (à travers) writing — and, among its various modes,
poetry in particular — thinking takes form, expands, takes place. The author is a reader, a
scribe, meticulously following the many unfoldings of the “Idea” and setting down on paper
its every move. The vers is the unit of construction in this process — the micro that mirrors
the macro, the encoding of a thought. The Crise de Vers is thus a constant crisis insofar as
thought is constantly revolving, evolving, unfolding. Crise de Vers is the ever-present state
of poetry, for the vers is always toward the poetry to come.

38
Mallarmé, Oeuvres, p. 368.
39
Heidegger, On the Way, p. 99.
40
La Charité, Dynamics, p. 43.
41
Mallarmé, Oeuvres, p. 368.
42
Mallarmé, p. 370.