Le (Dé)montage de la fiction: la révélation moderne de Mallarmé (review)

The familiar debate on the difficulty of Mallarmé’s work is revisited by Patrick Thériault in this intellectually dense and engaging study of the poet’s writing and theories. The title derives from Mallarmé’s lecture on La Musique et les lettres given at Oxford and Cambridge in 1894, in which the poet explores the idea of explaining the mechanism behind writing literature. Thériault reveals how, for Mallarmé, literature is ‘la manifestation sociale par excellence’ (p. 15). Thériault’s engagement with Bourdieu’s sociological reading of Mallarmé is the impetus for his study, and the author singles out Bourdieu’s reflection on the relationship between literature and desire from Les Règles de l’art (1992) — ‘la littérature existe, puisque j’en jouis’ — as having particular relevance to Mallarmé’s theoretical position as both poet and critic. Where Thériault’s book comes into its own, however, is in his reading of familiar texts such as the poem ‘Salut’ alongside less familiar texts like Mallarmé’s translation of an English-language handbook on comparative mythology, Les Dieux antiques. Thériault’s analyses reveal a double action on Mallarmé’s part: the poet demonstrates an impious lack of veneration for literature while at the same time contributing to the myth of its sacred nature. This is what Thériault confirms as a dual process of ‘démontage’ and ‘montage’ of fiction (p. 87) which hinges on the ludic and allegorical nature of language. Although, clearly, Thériault engages with Malcolm Bowie’s field-defining Mallarmé and the Art of Being Difficult (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), it is a shame that he does not also engage with other English-language scholarship on Mallarmé, such as Damian Catani’s The Poet in Society: Art, Consumerism, and Politics in Mallarmé (Bern: Peter Lang, 2003) or Peter Dayan’s Mallarmé’s ‘Divine Transposition’: Real and Apparent Sources of Literary Value (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), each of which addresses, in ways that intersect fruitfully with Thériault’s analysis, how Mallarmé perceives the status of the literary text in relation to society, and the exchange value of the literary work. Nonetheless, the contribution that Thériault makes to Mallarmé scholarship is through his detailed examination of the relationship between classical antiquity and Mallarmé’s modernity, especially in terms of his literary persona. For Thériault, Mallarmé’s literary voice takes on the status of an oracle because of its ‘pouvoir d’évocation’ (p. 287), according to which it is impossible to tell who is speaking. The impersonal nature of the voice of an oracle is thus allied to the impersonal nature of Mallarmé’s writing subject, and this is what reveals the ‘(dé)montage de la fiction’: ‘Quand on ne sait plus qui s’énonce [...] alors commence la fiction’ (p. 313). Thériault’s analysis is thoughtful and draws on a refreshingly wide range of sources, from Plato to Blanchot, via Valéry and Wittgenstein, in order to tease out the fuller impact of Mallarmé’s creative and critical endeavour.