The Orphic Moment: Shaman to Poet Thinker in Plato, Nietzsche, and Mallarmé (review)

BOOK NOTES is experimenting with different combinations and "alloys," mixing together the narratives ofthe cat-author Murr and the musician-artist Kreisler. Although Kropfis generally on target with his readings, I believe he misses much of the irony in Hoffmann, particularly in his discussion ofthe author's use ofclichés. This is a highly readable and insightful book, one which makes intelligent and appropriate use of a variety of literary theories and methodologies (Deleuze and Guattari, Jakobson, Bakhtin, reader-response theory). Inevitably, given its limited scope, it is more satisfying in the light it sheds on individual works than in its elucidation ofthe general issues ofgenre and the institution of literary authorship. Robert Godwin-Jones Virginia Commonwealth University ROBERT MCGAHEY. The Orphic Moment: Shaman to Poet Thinker in Plato, Nietzsche, andMallarmé (SUNY Series, The Margins of Literature. Ed. Mihai I. Spariosu). Albany: SUNY Press, 1994. 209 pp. Robert McGahey's book illuminates Mallarmé's poetry from behind—splendidly , subtly. This backlighting originates in the complex image ofOrpheus that has survived from classical antiquity, especially in the works ofPlato. And this image of Orpheus, as the learned first chapter seeks to establish, preserves the archaic image ofthe tribal shaman, the master ofanimals whose descent into the world of the spirits provides a model for the later Orpheus myth. Thus Mallarmé, "Orphic poet of the modern" (51), sings a world of remote horizons into being through suggestion and indirection. It is a fascinating thesis, and by developing it at length the author adds a new dimension to our appreciation ofthe nature ofMallarmé's poetic—and shamanistic—activity. The second chapter, on "Plato's Orphic Universe," extends the arguments of Jack Lindsay (The Clashing Rocks, 1965), E. R. Dodds (The Greeks andthe Irrational , 1951), and others, and reveals a Plato who is Orphic in spite of himself. Plato's "implicit" Orphism, writes McGahey, is not only a question oftheology but ofimages, and it is in demonstrating that Orphic images play a major role in Plato's philosophy as well as in Mallarmé's poetry that the author does superb work as a comparatist. (It should be notedthat the neo-Jungian psychologist Thomas Moore, author ofthe recent bestsellers Care ofthe Soul and Soul Mates, wrote a foreword for The Orphic Moment; Moore's own mentor James Hillman is famous for saying "stick to the image"—as opposed to the concept, that is.) Nietzsche mainly serves as a contextualizing figure for McGahey's presentation of Mallarmé; as the title ofthe third chapter indicates, the author sees both, along with Wagner, as "brothers in decadence." But I am not sure that Nietzsche's presence in the text is altogether a happy one. No doubt, it enables the author to herald "the reappearance of Orpheus, marking the threshold between the modal forces represented by Apollo and Dionysos" (58). But the chapter seems unnecessary to me, at least as it stands, and I looked instead for some discussion ofRimbaud and Baudelaire as "poètes voyants." The presence of Mallarmé's glorious French text consistently cited in the original (with translation following) while poor Vol. 20 (1996): 206 THE COMPAnATIST translated Nietzsche is left writing in English only, seems a bit unfair. And the assertion that 'TAe Birth ofTragedy is Nietzsche's most important book" (56) left me bouche bée. If it had been my book (should reviewers be allowed to say this— without being suspected ofenvy?), I would have scratched Nietzsche's name from the subtitle, and published the third chapter, which is quite interesting as a study of Mallarmé and Nietzsche coming to terms with Wagner, as a separate article. With chapters four ("The Orphic Moment of Stéphane Mallarmé") and five ("Tombs, Fans, Cosmologies: A View from the Prison House"), Robert McGahey really shows his capabilities. Whether in analyzing the Orphic resonance of images ofthe lute (as in "Une dentelle s'abolit"), the tomb, or the grotto, or in demonstrating how "with respect to the narrative cycle ofOrpheus, . . . Mallarmé's Orphic moment occurs when the scattered limbs first begin to stir back into life" and that "the oscillatory or vibratory reflex is the key to Mallarmé's Orphic moment" (79), McGahey fulfills the promise of...