Profils perdus de Stéphane Mallarmé: court traité de lecture par Jean-Claude Milner (review)

Two decades after Mallarmé au tombeau (Lagrasse: Verdier, 1999), Jean-Claude Milner has published a second set of reflections on Stéphane Mallarmé. As the title indicates, the six essays in this new volume seek to restore as many lost, oblique perspectives on the poet (a ‘profil perdu’ is a figure painted from the back, its head turned just far enough to reveal a partial profile). Emerging from this cubist collage is a strikingly new Mallarmé, provocative, unexpected, and indeed almost unrecognizable. Although his identity is at times less than certain, there can be little doubt that the figure depicted here is a man caught in the act of renunciation. This Mallarmé is still ‘le Maître’, but the art of which he is the master is not the art of verse: it is the art of losing (Elizabeth Bishop’s sestina ‘One Art’ could well provide the book’s incipit). The first essay sees Mallarmé bid farewell to constellations and, with them, the entire cosmos known to the ancient world. Acknowledging the triumph of a hyper-scientific perspective that concedes reality to stars alone, Mallarmé’s verse takes one last, hard look at ‘l’alphabet des astres’, fusing renunciation with indelible recollection. This farewell sets the stage for Mallarmé to relinquish verse itself in Chapter 2, which Milner presents through a radical rereading of ‘Crise de vers’. Far from assuring verse’s survival in the wake of Victor Hugo’s death, this Mallarmé relinquishes verse and champions prose (a reading Milner is able to sustain only by proposing a deeply duplicitous Mallarmé in Chapter 5, one whose equivocal praise of the vers libristes belies a sneering indifference). Chapter 3, something of an outlier, proposes a novel reading of ‘Ses purs ongles très-haut.. .’, associating the enigmatic expression ‘nul ptyx’ with the primordial phonemes of Indo-European in order to suggest how the expression might be read as the absence of A, and the sonnet, an elegy to Anatole. Chapter 4 sees Mallarmé renounce the idea of establishing a political order organized around the Livre; by Milner’s account, this ambition gives way to the surrender to chance that is Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard. The final essay presents Mallarmé as a ‘sociologue cruel’ exposing the disquieting realities of his everyday world. This Mallarmé bears an almost Baudelairean fury at structural injustice, though it leads him not to engagement, but — once again — to renunciation (for Milner, ‘L’Action restreinte’ is less a prudent call to action than a lament of poets’ impotence; the famous ‘Penultième’ is an ironic name for every idealistic revolution, which precipitates a reactionary response). Disillusioned, duplicitous, detached, and even ‘cruel’ (though this provocative adjective is not justified by the actions it describes), Milner’s Mallarmé would seem to have little to recommend him. Yet there is a majesty in this expressly unlikeable character’s lucidity before impossibility. For those willing to look closely, the unexpected angles of his depiction will also reveal the unforeseen openings that emerge only after impossibility has been recognized as entirely possible.