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Stein the Romantic, Mallarmé the Radical Like people, writers can belie their surfaces. Case in point: Gertrude Stein and Stephan Mallarmé. On the surface, Stein’s usual practice destroys the commonly accepted nature, the syntactic and referential powers, of her linguistic materials. On the surface, Mallarmé’s usual practice preserves syntax, allusions, coherent images, and other ordinary linguistic qualities. But in spite of Stein’s apparent radicalism and Mallarmé’s apparent “classicism,” Stein is arguably the more naturalistic and conventional writer: her ultimate concern can be seen as a kind of absolute representation of the external world. And underneath, Mallarmé is arguably a more radical and disruptive writer because he is not interested in representing anything about the world—only a purely internalized, allegorical space. Both writers share the goal of defamiliarizing language, preventing normal semiotic processes from being taken for granted. Stein wanted to remove the perceived object from its surrounding context, Mallarmé to multiply its contexts (even at the expense of the object itself). Stein, according to her own frequent reports, was attempting to make the reader more aware of his/her perceptions of the world in the present moment. Mallarmé, on the other hand, hoped to focus the reader less on perception and more on the processes that precede perception. Mallarmé is thus the more “absolutist” writer in the sense in which Hart Crane used the word in “General Aims and Theories ”: “It is as though a poem gave the reader as he left it a single, new word, never before spoken and impossible to actually enunciate, but self-evident as an active principle in the reader’s consciousness henceforward.” If Stein seemed to concentrate more on space than on time, 112 Mallarmé concentrated more on time than on space—time as the arena of human memory and desire, and hence of human identity and all that identity brings to human perception. Mallarm é uses disjunction not to take energy away from the usual linguistic signifying process, as Stein does, but to explore that process, replete with all its conscious and unconscious human preconceptions—to move within one linguistic moment. If the semiotic in language is equated with disjointed and physically driven language and the thetic with the signifying function, then both writers embody the interplay between the two, in opposing ways. Mallarmé infuses the signifying, thetic function of language with semiotic energy and almost destroys it, while Stein uses semiotic, irrational forces as building blocks to recreate a more perfectly functioning conventional world of represented objects, which are no less present for the fact that they are always only imperfectly perceived. The more exquisitely Mallarmé’s exploration of the thetic bases itself on the edge between meaning and nonmeaning, the more insidious and ultimately destructive of the thetic it proves to be. In “Herodias,” the intellectually posited and desired object, the woman Herodias, is a speaking subject, but barely a subject: she has no desires of her own, and no real responses. Her only awareness seems to be an acute consciousness of her own position as an object, and her only feeling the knowledge of the pain of the object-position. Because she is so limited in her subjecthood, Herodias remains still practically an object, and the reader’s awareness of that fact leads to the preservation of the thetic within the reading process. The razor-thin line between the preserved thetic and its destruction—a destruction that Herodias initiates through her non-objectlike consciousness—means that there is no escape for the reader from an awareness of the thetic process within the reading mind, with all its implications. This experience of the reader relates fundamentally to Mallarm é’s own stated objective during the writing of “Herodias”: “I am inventing a language which must spring from a completely new poetics that might be brieBy deAned in the following way: Describe not the object itself, but the effect which it produces.” Since, as Julia Kristeva puts it, in Revolution in Public Language, “there exists only one signiAcation, that of the thetic phase,” any signiAed object can participate in the thetic phase only as if in a 113 Platonic form; it is signiAed only insofar as it participates in this phase, and no object can participate completely in this phase. Therefore the object of desire is always by deAnition an abstraction , an ideal; and therefore Mallarmé’s movement away from the object in itself and toward the effect it produces is also a movement away from the ideal, toward...

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