Sea and structure in fin-de-siècle France: Mallarmé and Debussy

Malcolm Bowie

European Review, 2000, vol. 8, issue 1, 87-94

Abstract: A copious sea literature exists in nineteenth-century France, and the works of such figures as Hugo, Baudelaire, Michelet and Rimbaud contain a recurrent tension between two divergent views of maritime experience. On the one hand, the sea offers the encouraging spectacle of endless possibility and plurality, but on the other hand it is an emblem of intellectual defeat and of humankind at the mercy of an inhospitable natural world. In major works by Mallarmé (1842–98) and Debussy (1862–1918) this contradiction is placed centre stage. The poet and the musician have found ingenious ways of maintaining intellectual and artistic control while constructing ‘open’ textures designed to recreate the sensations of chaos and contingency. In both works – Un Coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard (1897) and La Mer (1905) – the remorseless action of the sea is associated with the periodic achievement and loss of aesthetic structure.

Date: 2000
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:eurrev:v:8:y:2000:i:01:p:87-94_00

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in European Review from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().