La Présence de Mallarmé par Arild Michel Bakken (review)

As its title indicates, Arild Michel Bakken’s excellent and thought-provoking study of Mallarmé examines the different ways in which the poet makes himself present to his readers. Divided into two large sections, the volume first takes issue with the well-known idea of Mallarmé as a poet of destruction and absence — an idea Bakken traces through selected texts by Paul Valéry, Maurice Blanchot, Roland Barthes, and Michel Foucault. Taking inspiration from readers such as Jean-Pierre Richard and (in particular) Bertrand Marchal, the second and much longer part of the study then details the different ways in which Mallarmé’s writings dramatize the appearance of the poet. In this second part, we encounter the poète français, the petit-bourgeois, the voyant, the Maître, the poète engagé, and other roles that Mallarmé adopts with a mixture of humour, irony, and sincerity. The analysis also reserves a space for the ‘Figure que Nul n’est’, emphasizing how this figure allows an author–reader exchange that is situated, concrete, and communal. To bring home his argument about the poet’s appearances, Bakken proceeds through a long series of close readings. He prioritizes Mallarmé’s prose, but also engages with ‘Les Notes en vue du “Livre”’ and a substantial selection of the verse poetry. These readings are illuminating and perfectly weighted: in lucid prose they move the argument forward, keeping the reader engaged. As with most good books about Mallarmé, readers will also find ideas to debate and disagree with. The opening section about the ‘poet of absence’ sometimes appears surprisingly polemical considering that Bakken is engaging with critical texts written between fifty and a hundred years ago. And it could be argued that Bakken forces his critique of Foucault and Barthes when he writes that Mallarmé ‘du fond de son dix-neuvième siècle’ could not possibly have anything to do with ideas that ‘remettent radicalement en question le sujet’ (p. 58). When he later concludes that Mallarmé’s figure is ‘constamment inconstante’, that it ‘oscille sans cesse entre différentes postures’ (p. 248), the idea of a radical questioning of subjectivity seems considerably closer. It can also be said that Bakken’s opening section conflates ‘sacrifice’ and ‘destruction’, thereby overlooking that the first notion speaks to an extreme attention and care for the sacrificed object, which disturbs the dichotomy between presence and absence. These remarks should not detract from the fact that this work makes a significant contribution to the vast field of Mallarmé studies: Bakken’s analysis of the poet’s mises-en-scène is exciting and original, and it convincingly makes Mallarmé’s writings available to the many colleagues working in the field of life-writing. It is a testament to the strength of Bakken’s central idea that it would be easy to expand on the analysis presented here: one could for instance consider the poet’s playful gender-bending in La Dernière Mode (Mallarmé writing as Miss Satin and ‘une dame créole’, for instance), or jump to Mallarmean intertexts and investigate how the poet appears in the many paintings, drawings, and photos that he was so happy to sit for.