Mallarmé’s Sunset: Poetry at the End of Time by Barnaby Norman (review)

This study analyses the crucial role of Stéphane Mallarmé’s poetry in the work of two of the twentieth century’s most important theorists: Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida. Mallarmé’s Hegelianism, a long-contested issue in Mallarmé scholarship, assumes centre stage in Barnaby Norman’s understanding both of the poet’s development and of the position Blanchot and Derrida assign him as marking the transition from the Livre to écriture. Readers familiar with the work of Derrida will recognize aspects of Derrida’s argument regarding Georges Bataille’s engagement with Georg Hegel’s philosophy in Derrida’s ‘De l’économie restreinte à l’économie générale: un hégélianisme sans réserve’ (L’Écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967), pp. 369–407 (p. 373)), as Norman here applies Derrida’s rhetoric from this essay to the poetry of Mallarmé. Following the insights of Gardner Davies and Bertrand Marchal concerning the important structural role of the sunset in Mallarmé’s work, Norman connects the transitional sunset motif to Blanchot and Derrida’s vision of the poet at the close of History and the opening of the space of littérature. The book follows a rough chronology through readings of four key texts by Mallarmé: ‘Hérodiade’, ‘Sonnet allégorique de lui-même’, ‘Igitur’, and ‘Un coup de dés’. Chapter 1 highlights Hegel’s formulation of a poetic Absolute at the apotheosis of the art-historical development the philosopher traces in his Aesthetics. Norman perceives Mallarmé’s early pursuit of a purely self-reflexive work as the poet’s attempt to achieve Hegel’s Absolute. Chapter 2 outlines how Mallarmé’s work on ‘Hérodiade’ and ‘Igitur’ deepens the poet’s understanding of the difficulties involved in this task. In Chapter 3, these difficulties amount to an impossibility in the ‘Sonnet allégorique de lui-même’, where, Norman argues, Mallarmé discovers the ‘irreducibility of externality’ (p. 60). Beyond this point, Mallarmé’s work becomes a powerful challenge to Hegel’s Absolute. Chapters 4 and 5, where readers will find some of Norman’s most insightful and well-founded arguments, explore Mallarmé’s role in Blanchot’s and Derrida’s writing respectively. Norman argues that both theorists situate Mallarmé at the site of passage from the totalizing idea of the Livre to the space of littérature as a result of the poet’s co-ordination with—and eventual challenge to—Hegel. Norman enters slippery territory when he attempts to demonstrate a ‘coordination’ (p. 37) between Mallarmé’s early poetry and Hegel’s poetic Absolute. (The author acknowledges the difficulty of such an argument: ‘there is no mention of the philosopher [Hegel] in the correspondence and only one in the Œuvres complètes’ (p. 37).) The first chapters successfully establish Mallarmé’s interest in purity and reflexivity, interests that indeed co-ordinate with Hegel, but Norman does not address the poet’s preoccupation during this period with creating effects and impressions, including those of a sensory nature. What we do find in the correspondence, after all, is Mallarmé’s dedication to the Edgar Allan Poe of The Philosophy of Composition. A more compelling argument would, among other things, give some account of Mallarmé’s thrill in producing ‘une sensation assez cabalistique’ (p. 56; my emphasis) with his ‘Sonnet allégorique de lui-même’ and explain how this aligns with Hegel’s apotheosis in which ‘poetry would begin to detach itself from its sensuous element’ (p. 11).