The Poet in Society: Art, Consumerism, and Politics in Mallarmé (review)

Mallarmé as the elitist, ivory-tower intellectual, scorning the masses and couching his work in a deliberately obfuscated language to protect it from hoi polloi is an image that may be well entrenched in literary cliché, but it has been under vigorous attack for some time, thanks largely to the work of such scholars as Bertrand Marchal, Jacques Rancière and Hélène Stafford. In this sparkling contribution to the realignment of Mallarmé, Damian Catani explores the poet's journalistic writings of the 1870s as well as his complex and beautiful Variations sur un Sujet, recycled and recast in Divagations, to argue that when Mallarmé insists that 'tout se résume dans l'Esthétique et l'Économie politique' he is driven both by a sharp awareness of, and an altruistic concern for, the economic and aesthetic needs of the masses. As Catani rightly insists, the difficulty of Mallarmé's writing has nothing to do with elitism, but stems rather from a determination to make the world intelligible through language by reducing that language to its essentials, clearing it of all the prejudices and clichés, the hackneyed expressions and ready-made judgments that prevent true vision. Through a series of close and contextualized readings of Mallarmé's writing in La Dernière Mode, as well as his piece proposing a tax on books, and La Musique et les lettres, Catani explores the arguments and the stylistic devices that attempt to promote an aesthetics for the people in the face of the coarsening materialism of an increasingly consumerist society. Breaking down barriers between highbrow and lowbrow art, between the vision of art as cult and art as commodity, together with the determination to purge language of predictability and cliché, lies at the heart of Mallarmé's endeavour here. The poet is thus revealed as seeking the key to social change in 'an all-encompassing literary work, established by the writer alone […] and which assumes the authority of law' (p. 230). The study is well grounded in the critical literature, not just making good use of it, but also probing it in useful and searching ways. A few quibbles: the bibliography is so fragmented into subsections as to make searching for a particular work unnecessarily complicated, and, despite Catani's often astute exegeses, I missed a sense of Mallarmé's humour. Nevertheless, reading the closing passage where Catani, having justified his choice to focus uniquely on the journalistic writing, moves on to offer seductive hints pointing to another book focusing on the seepage and cross-fertilization between that writing and the poetry, one can only hope that the implicit promise will soon be performed.