Documents Stephane Mallarme, nouvelle Serie II (review)

Mallarmé's theatre, ballet, and literary criticism is not his violond'Ingres. Important recent studies (notably pieces in Mallarmé et la prose, special edition of La Licorne, 45 (1998)) have established that Mallarmé prosateur can be every bit as exciting, and as important in terms of the history of writing, as Mallarmé the versifier. The texts collected and edited by Gordon Millan in this volume are all post 1885, which is the year often taken to mark the beginning of Mallarmé's mature output: it is also the year that saw the publication of "Prose (pour des Esseintes)," the composition of the Wagner sonnet "Hommage," not to mention Mallarmé's rise to fame largely as a result of Verlaine's Poètes maudits (1883), and Huysmans's A Rebours (1884). As such the texts collected here: "Richard Wagner: Rêverie d'un poète français" (1885), "Crayonné au théâtre" (1886-1896), "Quelques médaillons et portraits en pied" (1890-1896), are radically different from the "criticism" Mallarmé produced in the 1860s, such as the infamous manifesto piece: "Hérésies artistiques - l'Art pour tous" (included in Millan's first volume of this new series of dsm (Saint-Genouph: Nizet, 1998). Now he is no longer a distant observer, wistfully recording his thoughts on the meaning of art in letters to close friends, but an established writer, directly facing the everyday problems of the profession, and coming into contact with all branches of contemporary culture, from philosophizing to dancing. Criticism's increasing focus on these pieces: "les grands morceaux de critique dramatique et littéraire" (9) has done much towards the demolition of Mallarmé's ivory tower over the last few decades: we now know him as democrat, as journalist, as commentator on contem-porary thought, in short as "témoin de son temps." A thoroughly-researched and reliable edition was therefore overdue, as these texts were revised for republication by Mallarmé, and so exist in various states. Until now the 1945 Pléiade edition of Mallarmé's Œuvres complètes, had to be complemented by the reprints of the original texts contained in Norman Paxton's The Development of Mallarmé's prose style (Geneva: Droz, 1968).

Millan's aim, in accordance with the intentions of the first series (under the editorship of Carl Paul Barbier), was to: "fournir aux spécialistes et aux chercheurs un outil de travail qui leur permettra de suivre jusque dans le moindre détail l'élaboration des textes mallarméens depuis le moment de leur conception jusqu'à l'état imprimé le plus évolué, en passant par tous les états" (9). In many places the variants already known from the Mondor/Jean-Aubry Pléiade edition are supple-mented and refined by evidence drawn from manuscripts held in private collections (manuscripts of both of the articles themselves and of letters which illuminate their genesis).

In "Rêverie d'un poète français," written for Dujardin's Revue wagnérienne, Mallarmé situates his own project within the history of the theatre, from its Greek origins to contemporary German flowering. In using Wagner as case-study, he sets himself the challenge of writing about all that transcends "realism" in the theatre; this is more difficult to envisage (the word is Mallarmé's) than a "non-realism" in the other domains of art - literature, painting - but eminently envisageable in music, which is already and essentially something other than realism. In his notes to this piece Millan quotes appositely from Mallarmé's correspondence (reminding us that Mallarmé's knowledge of Wagner is at best second-hand, and that the piece's generic ambiguity marks a new stage in Mallarmé's writing), but most valuable here is an extract from a letter by Dujardin held in a private collection, in which the embarrassed editor refuses a sonnet sent to him by the Master...