Frameworks for Mallarmé: The Photo and the Graphic of an Interdisciplinary Aesthetic (review)

Gayle Zachmann sets out to reveal how deeply embedded in Mallarmé's theorising and practice intermedial thinking was, and to do so by exploring his participation in, and responses to, the economic and intellectual context; for too long, Mallarmé has been treated as indissolubly hermit and hermetic. This approach turns out to be remarkably fruitful and justifies a view of the poet as canny ducker and weaver among the varied and increasing pressures of commerce, commercial writing, and of journalism in particular, which itself attracted and fostered critical exchanges between the arts. These pressures are sketched out with admirable concision and pertinence in the first chapter, although the absence of exemplification and primary source leaves the argument a little unballasted and expository. The second chapter explores Mallarmé's reflections on the making and reading of verse as cognitive, psychophysiological process, and what those reflections might owe to Taine and to contemporary investigations into optics: 'Just as in the era's understanding of retinal afterimages and optical reconstitution, or in Taine's allusion to "molecular movements", the dynamic is one of fragmentation and resynthesis' (pp. 56–7). As percept, the linchpin in the debate about realism and mimesis in the latter half of the nineteenth century, yields ground to the perceiving consciousness, so the dynamics of textual interstices are what syntax is called upon to activate and shape. A probing reading of the fragmentary and uncompleted Igitur is undertaken in Chapter 3, with particular emphasis being paid to the way in which the mirror, the interrogative frame, objectifies self, subjectivity and the performance of signification. Chapter 4 takes us through a patient, rewarding analysis of 'The impressionists and M. Manet', alert to every nuance of word-choice and formulation. Zachmann suggests that photography is an unseen point of reference throughout, and traces the ways in which this wonderfully perspicacious piece is an updated pursuit of affiliations between painting and poetry, in the dramatisation of processes of selection and framing, in the fruitful reciprocal corrosions of space and matter, reflected light and textures, in the recreation of nature touch by touch. These findings are further applied and extended in Chapter 5, where movement and mobility are the hub of the discussion. It is not narrative or the subject which moves, so much as perception itself, and the signifying operation. This is a kinesis as much of palpitation as of displacement, the stilling of representation in the interests of the dynamics of semiosis and the interweaving of psychic and semantic layers and levels. Dance becomes the ideal metaphor of both meaning-making and poetry, in the visuality of its choreographic writing. A shorter Chapter 6 warns against overestimating music's role as the appropriate analogical art in Mallarmé's work, at the expense of the visual's conceptual precedence; Mallarmé 'articulates his comparisons with music, theatre, and dance through games of light and graphics' (p. 13). A recapitulative coda, constructed around the 1871 and 1872 articles on the London Exhibition, brings this fascinating and deftly argued re-assessment to a close.