Néant sonore: Mallarmé ou la traversée des paradoxes (review)

For his most recent book on Mallarmé, Benoit sets himself a broad agenda asking the question ‘comment peut-il y avoir quelque chose à partir de rien?’ (p. 9), and recognizing that ‘la parole poétique [. . .] affronte le néant pour créer’ (p. 10). Taking the title of this study from the famous ‘Sonnet en –yx’ which is embued with the preoccupation that words might be devoid of meaning, Benoit suggests that Mallarmé discovers that the ‘néant’ is in fact, paradoxically, already something. It is this relationship between something and nothing that drives Benoit’s readings of Mallarmé, focusing on mourning, death, disappearance and emptiness, both figurative (the setting sun, the end of the world, the resurrection) and factual/biographical (the death of his son Anatole, Mallarmé’s own death in 1898). For Benoit the biographical and the figurative also coincide, since he perceives that the figure of Anatole ‘est [. . .] intégrédans le grand symbolisme solaire qui se retrouve dans toute l’œuvre de Mallarmé’ (p. 161). Benoit recognizes that the ‘drame solaire’ for Mallarméis filled with both anguish and glory as the poet fears that in the cold light of day his night-time hopes of glorious poetic production may in fact turn out to be nothing more than inglorious failure (such as is the case in ‘Las de l’amer repos’ and ‘Don du poème’). This same cycle of anguish and glory is what characterizes, according to Benoit, the reading process inspired by Mallarmé’s poems. A voice heard by the poet (such as in ‘Le Démon de l’analogie’) dies away and is replaced by the written word: ‘Mais, chaque fois que le poème est lu, et relu, la voici qui de nouveau [. . .] chante, et de nouveau nous hante. . .’ (p. 126). Poetic language is a song (or even a ‘mélodie syncopée’) that emerges out of nothingness or, more specifically, out of ‘le néant rhythmique’ of the haunting presence of verse form (p. 11). Benoit takes a broadly chronological approach, starting with analyses of Mallarmé’s early poems and ending with a biographical account of Mallarmé’s last year. Each of the chapters functions as a stand-alone piece; this is due, in part, to the fact that 11 of the 14 chapters that are brought together in this volume have previously been published elsewhere. Consequently, although this book has a broad thematic and chronological thread, it does not seem to develop a single narrative thrust or argument. A number of the chapters are rather brief (at six to eight pages), and some of the analyses remain under-developed. There is, moreover, a frustrating lack of acknowledgement of English-language scholarship on Mallarmé, and a number of the ideas put forward by Benoit do not always offer the exciting new insights into Mallarmé’s work. Nonetheless, Benoit’s decision to address the full gamut of Mallarmé’s textual output—from the Poésies to La Dernière mode, from the Divagations to the draft pages of Le Livre—offers an engaging perspective on how Mallarmé functioned as a writer in the face of nothingness, the blank page and the eschatological inevitability of death.