Situating Mallarme (review)

Situating Mallarmé. David Kinlock and Gordon Millan. eds. Bern and New York: Peter Lang, 2000. Pp. 191. ISBN 3-906766-18-7

This collection of essays, representing papers read at a conference in Strathclyde in 1998, seeks to situate Mallarmé with reference to arts other than poetry, to his preoc-cupation with death and to his artistic influence on posterity. The essays, however, explore diverse questions with only general thematic unity.

Heath Lees begins by tracing the pervasive influence of Wagner's music on Mallarmé. He then examines in detail Mallarmé's "La Pénultième est morte" for its relationship to the si of the musical scale. Mallarmé's writings on Wagner reveal a concern for the competition between text and music in opera and his appreciation of Wagner for invigorating language.

Deirdre Reynolds examines Mallarmé's writings on Loïe Fuller whose dance presentations, incorporating tricks of staging and lighting, fascinated the symbolists. The ambiguity of dance can lead to a self-negation. Reynolds than analyzes Un Coup de dés for its contrasting elements of stability and freedom of form, a freedom that calls on both dance and free verse. This irregular movement corresponds to the work of several modern dancers.

Rosemary Lloyd takes several of Mallarmé's definitions of his art as a point of departure to examine how what critics have seen as obscurity could represent for Mallarmé a unique vision of deeper truth. Central to this process is the image of the eye mirroring the printed word. Images from poems by Banville and Baudelaire lead to a concept of the poet freeing himself from the constraints of the world. Parallel uses of circus figures in Baudelaire and Mallarmé pose the question of man's superiority to animals, and texts on Wagner and Huysmans define ways is which texts must be deciphered.

In an essay continuing the theme of his dissertation on the poet as democrat, Damian Catani focuses on Mallarmé's journalism in La Dernière Mode. The several female pseudonyms Mallarmé adopted are linked to artistic themes. "Marguerite de Ponty" attempts to define a basic creativity that, in the manner of the noble savage, primitive people demonstrate but society tends the stifle. "Marliani" validates new products with the example of the gas lamp elevated to serve a religious purpose. "Ix" advises readers to prefer economical alternatives to the wonders of rising con-sumerism and, along with "une Lectrice alsacienne," describes decorations for the newly popular Christmas tree. All of these voices validate shared responses to popular culture.

Roger Pearson traces the theme of death in Mallarmé's work including the deaths of other poets commemorated in the Tombeaux poems, the death of his son Anatole, and the anticipation of his own death. For the poet, death may present a release, allowing him immortality through his art which attains a perfection the earthly self never could. Mallarmé sees eccentric poets such as Verlaine and Poe as gaining regular structures only in their writing. Similarly in a lecture on the death of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Mallarmé sought to recreate the presence of a man immortalized, as he hoped to be, through language.

James Lawler turns to Mallarmé's correspondence for clues to the evolution of his explicit consciousness of the suffering integral to the poet's creation in Igitur. He focuses on the influence of Poe, from the Raven but even more from Eureka where Poe posited a balance between matter and spirit. Both Poe and Mallarmé create works that defy definition of either genre or content, but that share a story of the pro-gression of knowledge.

Patrick McGuinness draws on notes, published in 1961, that Mallarmé made in an attempt to write a poem on his son Anatole's death. A contrast with a story by Villiers de l'Isle-Adam shows Mallarmé as unable to evoke the presence of the departed as Villiers' hero had done. The notes, far from explicit, suggest a development from anticipation...