Mallarmé: The Poet and His Circle (review)

Book Reviews éry's allegorical geography contributes to its subversiveness as a feminocentric model of love and friendship tiiat playfully questions die masculinist norms of seventeendi-century French society. Tendre's success led to numerous spinoffs and satires. The tiiird chapter focuses on two of these, d'Aubignac's "Carte du royaume de Coquetterie" and Boileau's Dialogue des héros de roman, both of which deployed allegorical cartography to accuse die précieuses of licentiousness, affectation, and obscurantist overuse of language (on the latter issue, the satirists may have had a point). Peters shows how diey aimed to discipline die activities of women by re-establishing the masculine authority of tiieir cartographic forefadiers. Again, in the context of gender politics, maps express power. Chapter four discusses Furetière's "Carte de la bataille des romans," where Princess Rhétorique tries to defend the land of Éloquence against Galimatias. Furetière seems to advance die Académie's project of purifying a national language; a close reading shows how Furetière actually reveals the impossibility of establishing boundaries between eloquence and nonsense. Rhetoric holds die potential bodi for harmonious expression of truth and for flowery excess. The readings of Scudéry and her discontents point to a gap between systems of representation and their supposed objects. In chapter five, Peters considers die debates over the description of Achilles's shield in Homer's Iliad to analyze cartographic expressions of opinion in early modern culture wars. François de Callières's Histoire poétique de la guerre nouvellement déclarée entre les anciens et les modernes "uses allegorical cartography ... to represent visually and conceptually me fundamental convergence of rationality and figurality." Beyond die opposition between the rhetorical and die (apparently) objective, Callières points the way toward a more complex model of knowledge. By examining die coexistence of apparent epistemological opposites in early modern allegorical maps, Peters makes a substantial and exciting scholarly contribution that will be useful to readers widi interests ranging from medieval culture to postmodern dieory. Roland Racevskis The University of Iowa Rosemary Lloyd. Mallarmé: The Poet and His Circle. Ithaca: Cornell Paperbacks, 2005. Pp. xiii + 258. Newly reissued in paperback form, Rosemary Lloyd's acclaimed Mallarmé: The Poet and His Circle is ostensibly a biography written tiirough die prism of the artist's correspondence. To die author's credit, the book is much more; die biographical conceit serves here as a springboard to a subtle and nuanced discussion of the evolution of Mallarméan poetics. Lloyd's flair for poignant exegesis, her deep understanding of die poet's cultural milieu, and her first-rate translations (including a full translation of die poet's seminal "Crise de vers") demonstrate that me intellectual biography is, in the end, always about die work. The book is constructed in alternating chapters and "interludes." Whereas the chapters' more or less chronological approach to the artist's intellectual and aesthetic development makes up the gravitational center of this project, the interludes, like planets in orbit, present a series of topical essays which bodi reveal and complicate tile many forces at work in Lloyd's depiction of MaIlarm é's universe. In this way the book mimics the social space it describes, as it places the poet at the center of a vast network of sociability whose list of characters—too numerous to name here—reads like a cosmology of late-nineteenm-century Culture. What binds these characters together, asserts Lloyd, is friendship. What is unique about Lloyd's claim for friendship is her underscoring of me place tiiat MaIlarm é's sensitivities and personal feelings occupy in both his private and public pronouncements. When Lloyd writes tiiat "many of his letters, poems, and occasional verse form a monument to love and friendship"(156), this is, of course, an extraordinary claim when one considers how Vol. XLV, No. 4 93 L'Esprit Créateur much effort the plasticien Mallarmé made to eradicate almost all traces of subjective authorship in his poetry. The study of friendships cultivated (and often created) in die correspondence serve to reveal another innovative aspect of Lloyd's book, which is to look to die poet's mature period for clues...