The Death of Stéphane Mallarmé by Leo Bersani (review)

ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW 72), the "drunken maenads" ("Conversation," p. 61), and birds that sing "endless obbligatos to my trysts" ("Parisian Landscape," p. 87) might well correspond to the basic situation evoked in the respective poems, but these expressions accomplish little else than to illustrate the distance between the translator and the poet. Certain poems ("The Balcony" and "Evening Harmony") capture to a great extent the atmosphere and the feeling of the originals; in these poems, though, Howard has remained closer to the originals. Undeniably, some liberal translations are actually more precise in an English context (e.g. "the primrose path" [p. 39] of "Posthumous Regret" for the more vague "course aventureuse"). An instance of alliteration that is quite acceptable occurs in "Cats": "Dozing, all cats assume the svelte design/of desert sphinxes sprawled in solitude"; this might well be as precise, and as alliterative, as one can propose for: "Ils prennent en songeant les nobles attitudes/Des grands sphinx allongés au fond des solitudes." Also in "The Cracked Bell" and in "Duellum" the alliteration is more or less harmonious with theoriginal text. Howard's freedom of translation, resulting from his guarded distance from the poet, is a dangerous enterprise, somewhat similar to the flight of Icarus, who in going too far and too close to thesun: "Sous je ne sais quel oeil de feu/Je sens mon aile qui se casse" ("Les Plaintes d'un Icare"). FRANCIS S. HECK University of Wyoming Leo Bersani. The Death of Stéphane Mallarmé. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982. 100p. In this study Bersani examines three kinds of death in Mallarmé's work: the "death" of Mallarmé as a subjective human being which he announced in hisletters to friends, the preoccupation with the demise of poets and poetry reflected in the "Tombeaux" poems and various critical writings and, finally, the extinction of consciousness described in "Un Coup de dés" and "Hérodiade" and illustrated by Igitur's fate which Bersani describes as "a process of aggravated negativity." However, Bersani's analytic pursuit takes him beyond the theme of death to a kind of resurrection of Mallarmé's poetry, or, better, a salvaging of its very human (Bersani frequently uses the term social) complexities and contradictions from burial in decades of exegetical criticism. Bersani objects to attempts to make the Mallarméan text more coherent "as if it were deficient in narrativity." He also looks askance at the immobilizing effect of much psychoanalytic and thematic criticism, even Jean-Pierre Richard's monumental L'Univers imaginaire de Mallarmé, because it tends to create structural coherence incompatible with the poet's concern with the impossible nature of words and meanings and the inability of consciousness to seize an image. As he did for Baudelaire in his earlier Baudelaire and Freud (University of California Press, 1977), Bersani encourages a much freer, although extremely complex, reading of the poet by enjoining the reader to consider the mobility of fantasy rather than the structures of fantasy. He seeks Mallarmé's poetic intent not in images, not in rearranging of syntax and filling in the blanks, but in the intervals between the possibilities of sense provided by the text. Consciousness in the Mallarméan text negates the image, but this very act of negation, of displacing of meanings, generates a "supplemental, or procreative power" in a movement equivalent toan eroticized perception. Ifone accepts that Mallarmé's meaninglies in Book Reviews the erotically charged moves of a negativizing consciousness which continuously produce an unlocatable sense, then, says Bersani, "Mallarmé is at once impossible to read and extremely easy to read. We should . . . find him close to the most familiar moves of ordinary consciousness." The book is divided into three parts. The first, entitled "The Man Dies," presents Mallarmé's early struggle with nothingness in the 1860's, his anxiety and illnesses and his creative "sterility." Close readings of "Hérodiade" and "le Pitre châtié" illustrate the poet's struggle with the unlocability of self and his recognition that contemplation cannot capture an image. In the second part, "Poetry is Buried," confronting the paradox that Mallarmé's major enterprise was an effort to do away with literature, Bersani defines...