The Afternoon of a Faun by Stéphane Mallarmé;

First published:L’Après-midi d’un faune, 1876 (English translation, 1936)

Type of work: Poetry

The Poem

Stéphane Mallarmé’s The Afternoon of a Faun is first and foremost poetry, but its origins link it to the theater. At the time of its composition, Mallarmé described it as a “heroic interlude,” a fragment of a dramatic presentation. In the same letter, however, he also refers to its lines as “verses,” and when the text was ready for publication, he submitted it for inclusion in the third collection of Le Parnasse contemporain in 1874. Rejected for inclusion in this volume, the poem finally appeared in its own limited edition in 1876.

Mallarmé’s subtitle calls the work an “eclogue,” a word derived from the idea of a poetic fragment that in later usage came to designate a work with a bucolic setting. While both senses of the word fit the text that follows, that alone does not prepare the reader to understand the first lines on an initial reading.

In the manner of the French classical theater, the faun’s speech draws on events that have already begun and translates past action into dramatic discourse. The first line, “These nymphs, I want to perpetuate them,” indicates from the initial descriptive adjective a need to refer to circumstances that the faun knows but that the reader must intuit. The French phrase “je les veux perpétuer” uses archaic word order and links the speech to past time, underlining both the dramatic conventions and the mythological persona that define the faun.

As with much of Mallarmé’s poetry, the reader must imagine the action. Here, however, Mallarmé supplies more obvious clues than he does in his difficult poems. Idyllic images immediately lead the reader into a reverie resembling that of the faun. Given the reader’s participation in the creation of the poem, the experience is all the more likely to touch the reader personally.

The faun apparently just awakens from a dream in which he sees the nymphs. Mallarmé immediately forces the reader to exert his or her interpretive faculties by the use of nontraditional language to describe this experience. When the nymphs appear in “leur incarnat léger,” the pale rosy color that might normally be a descriptive adjective takes on the substance of a noun. The faun himself is “drowsy with bushy sleep.” The adjective “touffus” may allude to the woodland setting in which the faun sleeps, but its other possible use in describing an involved style of writing suggests the faun’s confused state of mind. He asks, after a pause, whether he loves a dream, since the empty woods around him suggest that he is alone. As he reflects on his memory, however, a number of specific details attest to the reality of the experience. There were clearly two nymphs. The first, he recalls, had the cold blue eyes of chastity. The other was defined by the music of her sighs. The faun expands on the musical sound, similar to the tone he can produce on his panpipes, and on the breath that produced it, warm as a summer breeze.

Emboldened by these specific memories, the faun invokes the “Sicilian shores” that his vanity would “pillage” to tell him what actually happened. Here Mallarmé introduces the first of three italicized segments of the poem in which the faun, playing both parts of the still theatrical dialogue, seems to answer his own question. However, the answer remains incomplete. The faun recalls only that he was cutting reeds to play music when he suddenly saw an “animal whiteness” that could have been either swans or naiads.

Then the memory, along with the italics, disappears. The faun remains alone under a hot sun, thinking that his own sexual longing may have inspired the fantasy. As he awakens, presumably returning to the present, he finds himself beneath an “ancient flood of light.” The light of the sun, constant over time, represents to him a link with the past and recalls the state in which he had awakened in the first lines of the poem, troubled by a doubt that came from “old night.” Both images suggest the hold the past still has upon him. Still contemplating his memories, the faun finds evidence of a kiss in the bite mark of a tooth in his breast. Still he hesitates, knowing that beauty can deceive and that he seems to have confused it with his own “credulous song.” Perhaps all that happened is that he had a banal glimpse of the two fleeing creatures.

Even if the vision led to an imagined encounter, the faun knows how to relive the event. He addresses his panpipes, “the instrument of flight,” asking them to make the lakes “flower again.” The pipes may evoke the flight of the nymphs, but they also enable the faun’s imagination to take flight in the sense that the images of the nymphs will bloom through his artistic re-creation. This imaging of the nymphs draws on important analogies between Mallarmé’s work and the poems of Charles Baudelaire. In Les Fleurs du mal (1857, 1861, 1868; Flowers of Evil, 1931), Baudelaire developed a vision of a female figure as muse that both inspired and tormented the poet. Similarly, Mallarmé’s faun says that he will “speak at length of goddesses,” whom he seems to dominate (he “removes the belts from their shades” to reveal their physical being) at the same time that he allows them to dominate him. In a further association with Baudelaire, the vision of the nymphs reminds the faun of intoxication. He will reveal the intimate picture of them just as he saw light through the empty skins of grapes when he spent a long afternoon “sucking out the brightness” of their apparently intoxicating juice. The fusion of images of bright light, fruits of nature, and the female figures emphasizes the role of woman as muse. She inspires the faun’s visions that are linked to his music and provides an analogy to the creation of the poet’s songs.

The inspiration provided by the nymphs leads to Mallarmé’s second italicized section, much more explicit than the first, in which the faun recalls finding the two nymphs asleep and ravishing them. Nature images in this section reinforce the sensuality of the experience. At first, the faun sees only fragments of the nymphs’ bodies as his eye pierces the reeds. Then he runs toward them as toward a mass of blooming roses. More Baudelairean themes occur as he likens the light reflected in their hair to jewels and evokes the secret perfume of the flowers.

Between this and the final italicized section, the faun pauses to reflect on the “wrath of virgins” that he provokes. The nymphs’ resistance increases his desire, but apparently they do not resist long, as fear “abandons their innocence.” Despite references to their trembling and tears, the passage ends with emotions that are “less sad.” The nymphs seem moved by the desire of the faun. Whereas the nymphs awaken to desire, the faun begins to see the harm of his attack.

The final italicized section begins with his reference to “my crime.” Devoted to pleasure as he is, however, the faun cannot think of seduction in negative terms. A number of positive references seek to justify his action as he “gaily vanquished their fears” with an “ardent laugh under the happy folds” of the nymphs. He even sees a divine sanction for the seduction in that “the gods had kept their kisses so well mingled.”

By the end of this scene a reversal takes place. The nymphs, no longer blushing, are inspired to passion by the faun’s advances. However, the encounter ends. The nymphs, whom the faun now describes as his “prey,” free themselves, leaving “without pity for the sob still intoxicating” him. The faun may have sought to exploit the nymphs, but he now sees himself as the victim of the emotions he releases. The faun does not remain emotionally engaged for long. Immediately after the italicized memory ends, he looks to the future and to others who will bring him new happiness, “knotting their tresses around the horns on my forehead.” Each passionate encounter, far from representing a unique event, forms a part of the lascivious pattern of nature. The faun sees his passion as resembling a ripe pomegranate surrounded by bees that represent “the eternal swarming of desire.”

The faun’s erotic insouciance echoes the traditions linked to such creatures in classical times. The faun invokes this past tradition as the setting of the festival of nature that will take place on “Etna, visited by Venus.” The goddess arrives to touch the mountain’s lava with her “naïve heels.” Thus she recalls the innocence of the nymphs, but her hovering light, as she barely touches the ground, parallels that often attributed to the muse by the Romantic poets. Ethereal though the nymph may be, the faun sees her as yet another woman because, when sleep finally extinguishes the flame of his desire, he concludes this section with the exclamation, “I hold the queen!” This declaration of possession, almost as if he were referring to the queen in a deck of cards, reasserts the faun’s dominance.

The poem asks whether the fatigued sleep is a punishment for the faun’s actions, to which he answers that it is not, but that he merely “succumbs to the proud silence of noon” for a midday nap, his mouth open to the sun, the producer of wine. In the last line of the poem, an adieu to the nymphs before the faun goes to sleep, he declares, “I will see the shadow that you become.” He will sleep and dream, again, of his vision of the nymphs. The time invoked by this final section seems to conflict with the title of the poem. If, after the major events described, the faun falls asleep in the noon sun, the “afternoon” of the title has not yet begun. The question arises as what the true subject of the poem is. The faun will probably spend the afternoon re-creating the events in his dream. If the afternoon is the true subject, the major importance attaches not to the event but to its re-creation, the element evocative of the composition of the poet.

Bibliography

Evans, David. Rhythm, Illusion, and the Poetic Idea: Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004. Analyzes the form and aesthetics in the work of three major nineteenth century French poets, with particular focus on these poets’ uses of and ideas about rhythm. Part 3 provides an analysis of Mallarmé’s poetry, including The Afternoon of a Faun, and the references to this poem are listed in the index.

Fowlie, Wallace. Mallarmé. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953. The first part of this study analyzes the dominant themes in Mallarmé’s work. In the second part, Fowlie discusses specific texts. Chapter 5 is devoted to a discussion of the genesis of the poem The Afternoon of a Faun as well as to a close reading and interpretation.

Gill, Austin. The Early Mallarmé. 2 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. Two chapters in volume 1, discussing Mallarmé’s early compositions, focus on his use of the god Pan and provide background to The Afternoon of a Faun.

McCombie, Elizabeth. Mallarmé and Debussy: Unheard Music, Unseen Text. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Mallarmé’s poem inspired composer Claude Debussy to create Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun); Mallarmé had a vision of combining music and poetry. This book points out the similarities between Mallarmé’s poetry and Debussy’s music and discusses Mallarmé’s “musico-poetic” aesthetic.

Shaw, Mary Lewis. Performance in the Texts of Mallarmé: The Passage from Art to Ritual. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993. In chapter 8, Shaw analyzes The Afternoon of a Faun with an emphasis on its theoretical elements. An examination of the evolution of Mallarmé’s text reveals the work’s distinctly theatrical genesis.

St. Aubyn, Frederic Chase. Stéphane Mallarmé. Rev. ed. New York: Twayne, 1989. Discusses The Afternoon of a Faun in chapter 5, “The Secret Terror of the Flesh,” and provides a close and accurate reading of the text.

Williams, Heather. Mallarmé’s Ideas in Language. New York: Peter Lang, 2004. Examines Mallarmé’s concern with ideas and the way language behaves when it is placed within the constraints of poetry.

Woolley, Grange. Stéphane Mallarmé: 1842-1898. Madison, N.J.: Drew University Press, 1981. Begins with a lengthy biographical sketch followed by short essays on various poems. The discussion of The Afternoon of a Faun provides information on the poem’s sources and critical reception and concludes with a narrative analysis.