Benjamin Williams

MALLARMÉ’S SOCRATIC MONOLOGUES

ince the 1880s, when numerous studies of Stéphane Mallarmé began to Sappear, interpreters have taken him to stand for different and sometimes even opposite values. He might be a lucid teacher or a mystifying charlatan, a byzantine elitist or a socially conscious democrat. His writing’s celebrated richness of meaning helps explain why interpretations of Mallarmé seem to be, when taken together, at once contradictory and strangely absolutist. Jean-François Hamel analyzes such tendencies in his excellent recent book on ideologically motivated recuperations of the poet: Camarade Mallarmé: Une politique de la lecture (2014).1 While my study focuses on some of the same twentieth-century interpretations of Mallarmé, it differs in its emphasis on the Mardis (the weekly gatherings at the poet’s home in Paris). Of particular interest to me are the Mardistes’ comparisons of Mallarmé’s monologues or causeries to Socrates’s interrogative teachings. These comparisons emphasize the active listening elicited by the maître, which in turn calls to mind Socrates’s objections to writing in Plato’s Phaedrus. There, Socrates observes that, instead of an interactive exchange, writing results only in the reader’s passive reception of a fxed message (Plato 275b). Writing also fails to provide the privacy of a spoken conversation, according to this famous argument, because it cannot tell to whom it should divulge its contents (Plato 275e).2 In my analysis of the Mardis, I argue that references to Socrates evoke these two objections to writing in a general way but not, for example, the irony of Plato’s formulation of them in a written text. This probable overall infuence of the Phaedrus provides occasion to reexamine some divergent understandings of Mallarmé. Whereas the Mardistes cast him as a modern exemplar of the Socratic and Platonic privileging of speech over writing, more recent thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and Jacques Rancière have taken Mallarmé to represent a key

1. Hamel’s book came to my attention shortly before this article went to press. Much more wide ranging in scope, his work corresponds with one of my larger intentions for this study: to examine critically what Hamel calls “allegorical” readings of Mallarmé. 2. Responding in part to Plato, the philosopher Jacques Rancière celebrates this accessibility of writing, saying that “la démocratie est proprement le régime de l’écriture” (Parole 84).

The Romanic Review Volume 105 Numbers 3–4 © The Trustees of Columbia University

Romanicv105n03-04.indb 319 12/22/15 3:19 PM 320 Benjamin Williams

break with Plato’s attitude.3 Thus Mallarmé has been compared to Socrates and Plato in entirely opposite senses: for a number of Mardistes, Mallarmé was above all an oral genius, but for these two philosophers, he was among the frst to depart from the Western tradition’s long-standing view of writing as a “dead” imitation of speech. Very broadly put, in Derrida’s and Rancière’s interpretations, Mallarmé’s originality resided in his conception of writing (not just his own) as independent from the pretense of substituting for an absent speaker. The philosophers’ interpretations differ in other respects, of course, but they seem to agree in their characterization of Mallarmé as not an oral but a paradigmatically written genius. These contrary receptions of Mallarmé derive from different evidence and are not always entirely incompatible. If a Mardiste had in mind a conversation with Mallarmé and a twentieth-century scholar had in mind the Coup de dés, it makes sense that the former would dwell on the maître’s oral genius and the latter on his written genius. The Mardistes did not say that Mallarmé’s writings did not matter, but some claimed that his conversations mattered more. The frst sections of my article analyze this contemporary reputation for spoken genius, putting emphasis throughout on appraisals of the Mardis that correspond with the two points just raised from the Phaedrus (the “interactivity” and “privacy” of speech). I then return in more detail to Mallarmé’s Socratic reputation and twentieth-century arguments that he was intent only on his writing and his eventual readers.

Interactivity and Privacy in Oral and Written Communication Two of the Phaedrus’s objections to writing might be summed up as a lack of interactivity (it cannot respond to questions) and a lack of privacy (it shares its contents with anyone who can read). Both objections are relevant implicitly and explicitly to accounts of Mallarmé and the Mardis. In this article, “interactivity” especially appears in various, somewhat approximate terms. That is partly because, for the authors under consideration, any number of rationales might allow them to characterize writing or speech as either static or interactive. In the Phaedrus, a written text does not participate in any kind of exchange, in that it continues always to say the same thing (Plato 275d; see also Ong 79). Yet, by shifting focus, one might insist, as many symbolists did, that a reader contributes prior knowledge, interprets, and thereby takes a creative role in the production of meaning. Like writing, speech can be characterized in either sense. If one interlocutor concedes entirely to what the other says, their conversation might seem to lack any meaningful interaction

3. Respectively, these arguments appear in La Dissémination (210) and in Mallarmé: La Politique de la sirène (90).

Romanicv105n03-04.indb 320 12/22/15 3:19 PM Mallarmé’s Socratic Monologues 321

of ideas. Such a dialogue could be qualifed as simply a disguised monologue. The Mardistes, however, felt that even as Mallarmé gave forth without their interrupting him, an active intellectual relationship resulted from the intangibles (or “charm”) of hearing him live and in person.4 “Disparition élocutoire” notwithstanding, Mallarmé’s followers accorded real signifcance to his presence, which resulted in effects of “interactivity” as well as privacy. Physical proximity to Mallarmé, his gestures, and other factors supposedly enriched the Mardistes’ intellectual development and yet could never truly be shared with the greater public by a transcript or even a sound recording. Mallarmé’s voice was, in fact, never recorded at all. With respect to privacy and sound recording, the Mardistes who lived to see the wide availability of the new technology would have realized that Mallarmé was, historically, one of the last thinkers for whom the dichotomy of spoken and written communication would have been largely the same as in antiquity.5 In the twentieth century, anyone of Mallarmé’s intellectual status would, like Jacques Lacan, almost certainly have been recorded speaking at some time or another.6 After Mallarmé’s death, only those who had known him personally could recount the experience of the Mardis. Two of the attendees especially, Édouard Dujardin and Camille Mauclair, made the strongest claims not only that Mallarmé’s persona and charm were of great artistic importance but also that, in terms of bare content,

4. Pierre Quillard’s account of a “Conférence de M. Charles Morice” recalls that “bien que seul M. Charles Morice ait pris formellement la parole, il le ft avec un tel soin d’éviter toute pédagogie qu’une sorte de colloque mental s’établit entre lui et ses interlocuteurs muets” (285). In addition to the common dislike of pédagogie, this remark affrms the possibility of an “interactive” monologue. Quillard also notes that, during this gathering, Morice and his listeners paid to Mallarmé “un juste et unanime hommage” (286). 5. “Il est regrettable, dit encore M. Edmond Jaloux, que personne n’ait eu la précaution de noter les conversations de Mallarmé” (Dujardin, Siens 6). Édouard Dujardin then adds that they would have needed a “sténographe invisible” or a “microphone enregistreur soigneusement dissimulé.” Jaloux makes this point in the preface to the 1936 Cinquantenaire du Symbolisme (xii–xiii; quoted in Genova 97). In his 1998 book on the Mardis, however, Patrick Besnier argues that posterity has not lost much for being deprived of a recorded echo of Mallarmé’s voice (54). 6. A bande dessinée depicting Lacan’s spoken genius is described in a press release: “Patrick Chambon dessine la voix de Lacan [. . .] Voici comme une porte ouverte à tous ceux, nombreux, qui n’ont pas assisté au séminaire de Lacan et qui entrevoient cependant que quelque chose se perd à la seule lecture des diverses transcriptions de ses propos” (Epel Edition). Despite the video recordings of Lacan, something apparently remained uncaptured. For an infuential meditation on the ephemerality of spoken genius, see Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly’s essay on dandyism (696–97).

Romanicv105n03-04.indb 321 12/22/15 3:19 PM 322 Benjamin Williams

his “œuvre parlée” was a crucial part of his unfnished life’s work.7 In 1895 Bernard Lazare claimed that Mallarmé’s published poems enclosed the essential of his thought and, somewhat unusually among the Mardistes, that the poet’s conversation provided a “commentary” of those poems.8 More to the point, Lazare identifed Mallarmé as setting himself apart from his contemporaries by making his conversation the sole vehicle of his “theories.”

Non qu’il les [ses théories] ait exprimées dans des écrits dogmatiques, comme les esthètes allemands et anglais, mais il les a répandues par la parole, et ce fut là, en ce temps, son originalité. Il a repris la tradition des philosophes et des sages de jadis, de ceux qui entretenaient leurs disciples dans les jardins ou sous les portiques [. . .] L’enseignement que veulent donner les rares métaphysiciens ou moralistes qui subsistent encore doit être privé, mieux même : mystérieux. (242–43)

This passage conforms to the familiar assessment, also humorously expressed by Marcel Proust, that Mallarmé’s thought was accessible in speech but fugitive in writing. The novelist’s “Mondanité de Bouvard et Pécuchet” depicts Mallarmé as “un brillant causeur. Quel malheur qu’un homme aussi doué devienne fou chaque fois qu’il prend la plume” (63; quoted in Marchal Mémoire 279). Since Lazare evokes the tradition of philosophers speaking out in the open, when he says that their teaching ought to be “privé” and “mystérieux,” he must be referring partly to the privacy afforded to these commentaries by oral communication. Some of the Mardistes—Mauclair, especially—repeatedly maintained that to appreciate Mallarmé’s genius, “you had to be there” (Chez lui 87).

7. In a dedicatory poem, Dujardin praised Mallarmé as providing “le plus noble enseignement [. . .] Maître, vous avez été, certes, le maître de nos jeunes esprits, mais vous avez été le maître de nos âmes. / Votre œuvre fut votre vie, votre parole et votre exemple, et ces douces et enjouées causeries où vous vous complaisiez” (Prophète 1). Some years later, Dujardin wrote even more strongly: “La grande œuvre non réalisée ? les rares documents qui nous renseignent ne peuvent être utilisés qu’en corrélation avec le souvenir de ce que lui-même en a dit. Son enseignement idéologique ? tradition orale, dont ses articles ne sont guère que les échos” (Siens 5). Mauclair felt that what did survive of Mallarmé’s “testament intellectuel [. . .] est à jamais irréalisable. Il restera oral. Gustave Kahn, Henri de Régnier, Pierre Louÿs, André Gide, Ferdinand Hérold, Edouard Dujardin, Teodor de Wyzewa, , en savent comme moi des fragments, , Whistler, Samain, en savaient d’autres, ils sont morts et nous disparaîtrons à notre tour” (Princes 136). 8. According to Lazare, “La conversation de Stéphane Mallarmé n’est autre que le commentaire de ses vers et de ses proses. Dans ses poèmes il a enfermé la substance même de ses rêves et de ses idées [. . .] que, tels les hiérophantes des mystères, il a seulement fait pressentir” (246).

Romanicv105n03-04.indb 322 12/22/15 3:19 PM Mallarmé’s Socratic Monologues 323

One reason for insisting on the poet’s oral genius after his death may be that doing so positioned the Mardistes as prestigious intermediaries between the public and Mallarmé. Their gesture of publishing loving descriptions of the Mardis was ambiguous in that, with Mallarmé dead, they purported to “share” an experience that no one else could ever know directly. Even as the memoirists alerted readers to the tantalizing signifcance of Mallarmé’s causeries, most insisted that no account could ever replicate their own frsthand impressions. The claim that the causeries’ content remains totally unknown is to some extent a myth, but one that continues today.9 Contemporaries did in fact write partial accounts from memory of Mallarmé’s causeries in direct discourse, for example, Edmond Bonniot (in Marges), Henri de Régnier (his Cahiers), André Fontainas (his De Stéphane Mallarmé à Paul Valéry: Notes d’un témoin), and Mauclair himself (in his 1898 roman à clef, Le Soleil des morts). They give us at least a passable sense of the content and phrasing of a small fragment of the causeries.10 More so than the degree to which they actually documented the Mardis, however, the Mardistes’ fxation on the uncaptured and uncapturable aspects of Mallarmé’s “œuvre parlée” demonstrates their sensitivity to the dichotomy of speaking and writing. Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s younger admirers, some of whom were also Mardistes, similarly deplored that no one ever recorded Villiers’s improvised stories and conversations.11 The extensive attention paid to Mallarmé’s skill as a “Socratic” interlocutor makes it likely that the Mardistes were at least loosely recalling the preference of speech over writing expressed in the Phaedrus.

Mallarmé as Teacher Lazare referred to Mallarmé’s conversations as a mysterious “enseigne- ment.”12 Despite Mallarmé’s well-known dislike for teaching as a career and for didacticism in general, many accounts of the Mardis do give reason to

9. For Pamela Genova, “It is in fact undeniable that from among the numerous later books and articles that memorialize the Tuesday salons, no member present at any of those frequent and popular gatherings seems to have taken any notes, or to have attempted in any way to reconstitute Mallarmé’s conversational discourse, though it was so often described in a nebulous way as extraordinary” (95–96). 10. In 1893, having recorded some of Mallarmé’s thoughts on mankind’s idealism (“l’au-delà est en lui-même”), Régnier exclaimed: “Mais qu’est-ce que je transcris auprès de ce qu’il disait !” (319). 11. Jean Ajalbert, Lazare, E. Michelet, and Ephraïm Mikhaël were among those to refer to Villiers’s oral genius. As Jean-Jacques Lefrère put it, “Toute la génération symboliste en a témoigné : la conversation de Villiers a compté à ses yeux autant que son œuvre publiée” (326). Furthermore, lent to Villiers the somewhat Socratic glory of having “corrompu les fls” of the modern bourgeois (“Fête nationale” 196). 12. A comparison could be made with the infuence of Ferdinand de Saussure’s teaching, which was also oral but much more thoroughly transcribed than Mallarmé’s.

Romanicv105n03-04.indb 323 12/22/15 3:19 PM 324 Benjamin Williams

see a resemblance with a classroom. In 1894 Pierre Louÿs wrote a letter to Mallarmé praising his “causeries du mardi soir, ce cours plus que supérieur où depuis dix années notre génération s’est formée” (Corr. VII, 115; quoted in Millan, Mardis 46). Among others, Albert Arnat (50), Georges Beaujon (8), Paul Claudel (19), André Fontainas (Souvenirs 20, 102), Paul Fort (64), and Francis Vielé-Griffn (“Entretiens,” 536) referred to Mallarmé as a teacher. Some admirers felt that Mallarmé’s personal example and teaching were even more valuable than his poetry: “Je mets l’enseignement de Mallarmé très au-dessus de son œuvre” (Louÿs; quoted in Millan, Amitié 157n50). Yet some of these same Mardistes denied that Mallarmé had, strictly speaking, “taught” them.13 At least two reasons might explain the disagreement over whether he taught younger poets. First, too strong an avowal of Mallarmé’s infuence could undermine their own pretentions to individual originality. Several accounts describe the Mardis as creating a community founded on Mallarmé’s special imprint.14 Perhaps some Mardistes did not want to seem quite so subordinate to Mallarmé. Second, many did not wish for the maître to appear as a dogmatic pedagogue or a stilted, uninspired poet. As a writer, he had the reputation of refusing spontaneous inspiration, even to the point of poetic “impuissance.” Admirers tried to nuance this reputation by describing his clarity and natural, improvisational verve as astonishing (and implicitly in accord with the tradition

Roy Harris’s study Saussure and His Interpreters analyzes the linguist’s reception via his students’ notes (15–18). Harris also provides a detailed critique of Derrida’s interpretation of Saussure and the relationship of writing to speech (177). 13. Fontainas countered the popular image of a “Mallarmé doctrinaire,” claiming that no Eckermann could have captured his propos. Stressing that Mallarmé’s “voix pliée aux souplesses des syllabes” provided occasion for refection and not simple acceptance of a leçon suivie, Fontainas concluded: “Mallarmé n’enseignait pas ; il renseignait” (Souvenirs 188). Mauclair rejects the same verb: “J’insiste sur ce point : Mallarmé ne nous enseignait pas” (Chez lui 88). On this point, see also Mauclair, Chez lui 65–66, and Gide (see n. 20 below). 14. Gabriel Mourey was aware of the subservience potentially suggested by allegiance to Mallarmé: “C’est à M. Stéphane Mallarmé qu’il sied de décerner, sans s’abaisser, le titre de : Maître” (186). Referring to the common identity of those who followed him, two years before Mallarmé’s death, Mauclair described “ces causeries dont l’éloquence rêveuse et l’incomparable charme marquent l’âme de qui les entendit une heure” (Causerie 18). Similarly, some twenty years after Mallarmé’s death, Dujardin wrote of the “souvenir du maître” that “les jeunes religions n’ont pas d’autre unité” (Prophète 9). José-Maria de Heredia’s salon supposedly had the same unifying effect. Yann Mortelette introduces a 1923 quotation from Alfred Poizat suggesting that the closing of the salons of Mallarmé and Heredia “fut à l’origine de l’éclatement du groupe symboliste” (47). Around 1902 Francis Jammes expressed largely the same regret about the loss of unity after Mallarmé’s death (66).

Romanicv105n03-04.indb 324 12/22/15 3:19 PM Mallarmé’s Socratic Monologues 325

of great conversationalist authors like Charles Nodier). Ultimately, however, this disagreement comes down to a question of word choice. Although the Mardis were clearly not a cours magistral in any traditional sense, Mallarmé’s discourse did constitute what many frsthand observers referred to as “enseignement.” This ambivalence about Mallarmé’s teaching is manifest in comparisons to Socrates, who also “taught” without dogmatism.15

Mallarmé as Socrates and as Living Artwork Mallarmé himself saw the analogy with Socrates: in an outstanding, com- prehensive study of the Mardis, Gordon Millan cites and approves of the poet’s own self-association with the philosopher, remarking that he died at Valvins, not “à ce que, non sans raison dans une lettre à Léo d’Orfer, il avait appelé sa ‘petite maison de Socrate’” (Mardis 40, 30 juin 1888, Corr. III, 218). Some decades after Lazare’s 1895 study, Dujardin was among those to reite- rate the comparison of Mallarmé’s name with “les noms de certains grands penseurs comme Socrate ou, mieux encore, de ces fondateurs de religions qui vivent par le souvenir indéfniment perpétué dans le cœur de leurs disciples, plus encore que par leurs œuvres écrites” (Prophète 8). In 1904, Remy de Gourmont (quoted in Michaud 123), and later Fort (71) and Fernand Gregh (237) repeated the comparison with Socrates. As he had done in 1920 in Princes de l’esprit, in 1935 Mauclair claimed that “la perte [des monologues] est irréparable, car c’était la part essentielle de l’œuvre [. . .]. Il aurait fallu un Platon pour fxer les entretiens de ce Socrate” (65–66). Somewhat ironi- cally, Charles-Henry Hirsch claimed in 1898 that Mauclair himself had largely succeeded in summarizing the effect of the Tuesday causeries.16 Yet, in 1901, Mauclair claimed that, from early on, all the Mardistes were in agreement about what was being lost:

Les conversations merveilleuses de Stéphane Mallarmé n’ont pas été notées par ses amis et nous devons tenir cette perte pour capitale; on pourra sourire si je dis ici, faisant appel à mes

15. Prior to Paul Valéry’s defnitive assumption of the “Plato” role, the comparison between Mallarmé and Socrates was apparently compelling enough that it was felt that someone should be the chief inheritor of the poet’s teachings, even an author as different as Vielé-Griffn (see Kuhn 118, 128). 16. Hirsch was responding to Mauclair’s study in La Grande Revue, “L’esthétique de Stéphane Mallarmé”: “Ceux qui ont eu le grand honneur d’approcher Mallarmé et le goût de lire ses écrits, devront à M. Mauclair d’avoir formulé d’une manière précise la plupart des réfexions qu’ils s’étaient faites, peut-être, au sortir d’un ‘mardi’ de la rue de Rome ou après une lecture” (775).

Romanicv105n03-04.indb 325 12/22/15 3:19 PM 326 Benjamin Williams

souvenirs d’intime familier, que souvent ses amis et moi, à l’issue d’une causerie lumineuse et inspirée par le génie, nous déplorâmes de n’avoir pas imité les disciples de Socrate perpétuant la parole de leur maître. Mallarmé nous donna maintes fois l’impression haute de l’âme de Socrate, dont Verlaine nous évoquait le visage. / Mais l’interviewer moderne a rendu impossible le fait de se tenir, crayon et carnet en main, devant un homme qui énonce des pensées : nous eussions eu l’air de reporters ou de lycéens au cours. (Silence 84; quoted in Genova 97)

Apart from the comparison with Socrates, this passage recalls the unresolved question mentioned earlier: how to show that Mallarmé left his mark on this generation without their taking on the appearance of mere pupils (or reporters) and without making Mallarmé out to be a pedantic lecturer. In the same book, Mauclair attributes to “on” the perception of Mallarmé as “une grande personnalité incomprise du vulgaire et capable d’un enseignement esthétique sans analogue dans notre temps” (Silence 174). Mauclair then adds that “ses conversations, de plus en plus suivies, eurent le caractère des dialogues platoniciens, encore qu’il en écartât expressément toute intention professorale, se voulant isolé et ne parlant que pour lui seul” (174–75). Finally, a little later, Mauclair insists again that “Mallarmé se défendait de tout enseignement, et c’est pourtant autour de son autorité morale que les idées du symbolisme s’agglomérèrent” (193). In part because of this character of “dialogues platoniciens,” the same ambivalence repeats itself over and over in Mauclair: Mallarmé taught yet did not teach. There are several other reasons for the comparison between Mallarmé and Socrates, in addition to the claim that they both privileged speech as a medium for teaching. As it happens, Derrida and Rancière (who both contrast Plato with Mallarmé in passages to be examined later) note appraisals of Socrates that also support the comparison: “[Socrate] a pour vertu de donner l’essor, aussi bien à la divination tout entière (mantikè pasa) qu’à l’art des prêtres pour ce qui concerne sacrifces et initiations” (Derrida, Pharmacie 48). This description of Socrates’s effect on his listeners recalls Mauclair’s assessment: “Il eût fallu être là [. . .] par l’enchantement de sa parole et de sa personne, [Mallarmé] mettait chacun de nous, si je puis dire, en état de poésie” (Chez lui 87–88). Fontainas confded to his journal in 1897: “Deux heures merveilleuses, et la voix, le regard, les gestes familiers à Mallarmé : je me suis senti tout réconforté, illuminé” (Notes 22 décembre 1897). In La Parole muette, Rancière says that Socrates provides an example of mimesis of virtue through lived action as opposed to artistic mimesis; he is an “œuvre d’art lui-même, comme l’atteste Alcibiade dans le Banquet” (85). Given the appreciation of Mallarmé’s presence and of his exemplary persona as, itself, an

Romanicv105n03-04.indb 326 12/22/15 3:19 PM Mallarmé’s Socratic Monologues 327

artwork, Alcibiades’s assessment reinforces the supposed similarities between Mallarmé and Socrates.17

Skepticism toward Comparisons between Mallarmé and Socrates Numerous Mardistes fetishized Mallarmé’s speaking voice, as well as his gestures and physical person (including his faun-like ears). In the 1890s the poet came to be known for his dangerous and seductive infuence on the young men of his city. Mauclair and Lazare made the parallel with Socrates explicit: “On l’accusait de pervertir les jeunes consciences, tout comme Socrate” (Mauclair, Silence 73). As Lazare put it, “La foule et la police même verraient d’un mauvais œil le passant qui, dans les Tuileries ou le Luxembourg, réunirait autour de lui des éphèbes enthousiastes” (242–43). The infuence of the Tuesday conversations on the poetic youth of was remarked by detractors as well, as when Georges Bonnamour had a character exclaim: “Mallarmé ! voilà leur bon Dieu. Ah ! ce pur artiste, mais c’est plein de sottises sa philosophie, puisque vous appelez ça de la philosophie, vous, des causeries d’artiste . . . [. . .] est-ce qu’on ne va pas bientôt le fermer [son salon] par mesure de salubrité intellectuelle [?]” (289). As in this passage, most of Mallarmé’s enemies would not have made the prestigious comparison with Socrates.18 Adolphe Retté’s 1903 memoirs took Lazare’s use of the comparison as evidence of the excessive enthusiasm inspired by Mallarmé (86). In 1995, Daniel Oster critiqued this same passage and the presumptuousness of the would-be disciples:

En 1895 Bernard Lazare publie Figures contemporaines, où il est écrit que ceux qui auront connu Stéphane Mallarmé, plus tard “raconteront sa vie comme le bon Xénophon raconta celle de Socrate.” Voire. Solitude parut dans la Revue Blanche en juin 1895, c’est tout dire. La même année, toujours dans la Revue, Mallarmé publie L’Action restreinte, comme pour dissuader encore un peu plus les disciples [. . .] Car le Maître alors ne manquant pas de prétendus ou soi-disant disciples, c’est à eux qu’il s’adresse, dans Solitude et dans Action restreinte, pour les claquer net d’une fn de non-recevoir. (7)

17. As Vielé-Griffn put it, “Stéphane Mallarmé a réalisé plus qu’une œuvre littéraire : il s’est créé une âme humaine” (“Rôle” 175). For Mauclair, “Mallarmé offrait à la génération qui s’est développée de 1885 à nos jours un exemple vivant de ses goûts [. . .] sa personne a tenu dans ce temps une place véritable” (quoted in Hirsch 779). 18. According to the naturist Maurice Le Blond, “[Mallarmé] réussit tout à fait à affoler une génération d’artistes avec des paradoxes” (658).

Romanicv105n03-04.indb 327 12/22/15 3:19 PM 328 Benjamin Williams

Oster concludes his article by asking: “Comment être le disciple d’une fction ?” (12). If Oster’s interpretation is correct, then it is unclear just why Mallarmé spent so much time each week conversing with such misguided admirers. Like Oster, Maurice Blanchot doubted the value of frsthand accounts of Mallarmé. Comparing Valéry to Plato, he wrote that the former had “éclairé et voilé la fgure de son maître ; il lui a fait écran en l’illuminant ; il lui a trop donné, trop emprunté” (35). Several twentieth-century critics have, like Oster, expressed impatience with the cult of personality surrounding Mallarmé. Alain Vaillant provides a valuable overview of Mauclair’s reuse of “un cliché d’époque, qui oppose la parole vivante et lumineuse de l’homme à l’œuvre de l’écrivain” (207). Vaillant’s overview shows how the legend of Mallarmé’s “Socratic” conversations can also be understood in the larger context of conversation’s transformation into a “mythe culturel” (197). Comparisons of Mallarmé to Socrates may indeed seem superfcial. Certain accounts, however, put far more careful emphasis on the Socratic, philosophical effects of Mallarmé’s causeries.19

The Philosophical Qualities and Effects of the Causeries The Mardistes likened not only the personas of Mallarmé and Socrates but also their distinctive methods of thinking and speaking. Several examples have already suggested the importance attached by the Mardistes to the effects of their nondogmatic or dialogic styles of communication. These effects also help explain disagreements as to whether Mallarmé really “taught” at the Mardis. Apparently, he held the foor exclusively at times, making it diffcult to see how the causeries could have been anything like a dialogue. Yet some attendees recalled a tendency to gesture dramatically, to hesitate, or to say “n’est-ce pas.”20 Such pauses are reminiscent of those distinctive moments in Plato when all that prevents a dialogue from becoming a Socratic monologue

19. Diana Schiau-Botea highlights the enriching effect of Mallarmé’s discourse and its Socratic effect of anamnesis in the listener (360–61). She also refers to Derrida’s “Double séance” in arguing that Mallarmé undoes Plato’s gesture of excluding the poet from the Republic. On Mallarmé and the banishment of the poet, see also Alain Badiou’s article “Philosophie et poésie: Au point de l’innommable” and Albert Mockel’s 1898 study “Stéphane Mallarmé, un héros” (Esthétique du symbolisme 178). 20. R. de Bury quotes Paul and Victor Margueritte as recalling: “Souvent même, il n’achevait pas . . . un sourire, un doigt levé!” (251). In 1924’s Si le grain ne meurt, Gide asserted that “Mallarmé préparait ses conversations, qui ne différaient souvent pas beaucoup de ses ‘divagations’ les plus écrites ; mais il parlait avec tant d’art et d’un ton si peu doctrinal qu’il semblait qu’il vînt d’inventer à l’instant chaque proposition nouvelle, laquelle il n’affrmait point tant qu’il ne semblait vous la soumettre,

Romanicv105n03-04.indb 328 12/22/15 3:19 PM Mallarmé’s Socratic Monologues 329

is an interlocutor’s brief affrmation, such as “Very true” or “No doubt.” The critic Patrick Besnier does not draw a connection with Plato but supposes that only a “fction d’une conversation” was established at the Mardis (45). The following passage from Vielé-Griffn confrms such characterizations of the causeries as monologues but notably foregrounds their possibly dialogic effects and stimulation of “refection”:

La discipline mallarméenne, par un procédé tant soit peu socra- tique, créa le Symbolisme : Mallarmé fut un accoucheur d’esprits. Sa pensée, infniment variée, toujours très haute et parfois d’une richesse surprenante, stimulait la réfexion. C’était moins des dialogues qu’un monologue interrogateur, avec, pour trame, des affrmations précises et évidentes. Cette œuvre parlée de Mal- larmé fut considérable, et, de fait, elle se réalise partiellement dans la nôtre même : il n’est personne d’entre les écrivains, pos- térieurs à Mallarmé et dignes de considérations qui ne doive au poète d’Hérodiade et de L’Après-midi d’un Faune, mais surtout du causeur prestigieux des mardis de la rue de Rome, quelque chose de sa pensée et de son expression. (Discipline 949; quoted in Kuhn 131)

Referring to Mallarmé as an “accoucheur d’esprits” reinforces the comparison of his “procédé” with Socrates’s in that it directly recalls the etymology of maieutics; in the Theaetetus, Socrates likens his teaching method to midwifery. Vielé-Griffn argues that Mallarmé’s “œuvre parlée” was, in part, further developed by his listeners.21 Like Gide, Vielé-Griffn points out the “interrogatory” nature of these monologues, as well as their “haute” character. Fontainas’s later Souvenirs also recalled this feeling of elevation provoked in the listeners: “Nous venions, assidus, rue de Rome, dissiper une cécité. Nous nous élevions, ces soirs-là, outre nous-mêmes” (189). The impression of

interrogativement presque, l’index levé, l’air de dire : ‘Ne pourrait-on pas dire aussi ? . . .’ et faisant presque toujours suivre sa phrase d’un: ‘N’est-ce pas ?’” (254). 21. Thierry Roger notes that, in 1913, Dujardin organized three matinées in honor of Mallarmé and the Mardis (84). The third, held at the Théâtre Antoine, included a ballet performance and readings of Claudel and Jammes. As with Vielé-Griffn’s claim that Mallarmé’s thought lived on in his listeners’ own thoughts, Dujardin did not aim at literally replicating the master’s teaching (which he later referred to as a “tradition orale”). He appears rather to have aspired to a public continuation of Mallarmé’s spirit. For more on these 1913 events, see the clippings assembled in the Arts du spectacle collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (Cote 8-RT-4220).

Romanicv105n03-04.indb 329 12/22/15 3:19 PM 330 Benjamin Williams

elevation features prominently in the critic Lucien Muhlfeld’s 1892 account of the Mardis, published in the Revue blanche:

N’imaginez point qu’il s’agisse d’entretiens mystiques. M. Mal- larmé parlera d’Hugo, de Banville, de Manet, de Whistler, de la dernière affche, du concert de dimanche, du marché de la place Clichy. Mais c’est l’homme au rêve habitué qui parle. Jamais un sujet ne lui sera traitable, concevable, sous un angle plus bas que celui du rêve. Un philosophe explicateur dirait : un fait divers22 est un moment d’infni et d’éternité [. . .] le rêve est l’effort vers les traductions symboliques les plus hautes. / M. Mallarmé élève avec lui ses partenaires de conversation. (278)

Regarding the privacy and feetingness of spoken discourse, in the same article, after referring to the Mardis and to the published causerie on Villiers, Muhlfeld claims somewhat cryptically that the “Verbe” of Mallarmé would have “suffced” even next to his fxed masterpieces like the “Après-midi d’un faune” (279). Muhlfeld was aware in 1892 of the Mardis’ Platonic precedent but does not fnd the comparison with a dialogue convincing. He remarks parenthetically: “(Le nom platonicien de dialogues s’évoque peu à ces soirs où le dialectique est volontiers lâche ; plutôt, il y aurait quelque néoplatonisme dans le merveilleux de causeries si détachées.)” (278). Indeed, many critics qualifed Mallarmé’s “idealism” as Platonist or Neoplatonist during his lifetime and in the decades immediately following his death (e.g., in Guy Delfel’s 1951 book on Mallarmé’s aesthetic). Personally, I am convinced by subsequent scholars such as Peter Dayan’s characterizations of Mallarmé’s “ideal” as human and individual rather than eternal or transcendent (112). In any case, these labels attached to Mallarmé by his contemporaries confrm their perception of him as a philosophical thinker. In his obituary of Mallarmé, Henri de Régnier recalled to the readers of the Mercure that “l’entendre parler, c’était l’entendre travailler, assister un instant à sa recherche de la vérité. Il voulut trouver le sens de tout, la signifcation universelle, être le Poète de la Connaissance” (7). Régnier focuses less on the causeries’ effect on the listeners than on Mallarmé’s personal aims, but as in Muhlfeld’s article, Mallarmé appears at the Mardis less as a poet than as a thinker in pursuit of truth. In certain accounts of the Mardis, then, Mallarmé did not share secret theories with his listeners so much as he included them in a kind of dialogic (or interactive) philosophical process.

22. Muhlfeld’s example of such a fait divers is Mallarmé’s telling of an encounter with a starving boy in one of the halles (278).

Romanicv105n03-04.indb 330 12/22/15 3:19 PM Mallarmé’s Socratic Monologues 331

Twentieth-Century Philosophers’ Contrasts of Mallarmé and Plato Numerous late twentieth-century philosophers have compared Mallarmé’s writings and Plato’s dialogues, with the Phaedrus among the most frequently cited.23 Rancière evokes it in explaining how Mallarmé, with his sirène, departs from that key Platonic text. This emblem would be Mallarmé’s response to Horace’s refusal of the monstrous in his Ars poetica: “La sirène est l’emblème de la beauté nouvelle, la belle puissance de l’artifce opposée au ‘beau vivant’ dont le Platon du Phèdre avait légué le modèle à Aristote, Aristote à Horace, Horace à Boileau, Boileau à tout le monde” (Politique 33). Mallarmé’s sirène breaks not just with Plato but with his entire legacy in Western thought. The “artifce” of the sirène seems to have something in common with Rancière’s notion of writing that neither legitimizes itself by pretending to stand in for something that was once “alive.” Rancière takes issue with both of the Phaedrus’s objections to writing (that it is a “dead” replacement for living speech and that it is “bavarde”). While apparently no Mardistes explicitly cited these objections, many were ambivalent about the tendency of writing to circulate freely and understood Mallarmé as sharing this preoccupation. In addition to his famous request that his wife and daughter burn his notes for the Livre, in at least one instance, according to Régnier in 1888, Mallarmé complained about a loss of control over his spoken ideas: “[Mallarmé] s’est plaint de [René] Ghil et de ces bêtes imitations qui s’emparent de l’esquisse parlée de ses idées” (Cahiers 112–13). Speaking in private evidently does not provide complete control over a given statement; it just allows a greater degree of control than, say, publishing it in the newspaper. Whether or not Régnier’s quotation is representative of a consistent desire for privacy on Mallarmé’s part, his causeries were central to younger poets’ heightened awareness of the value of speech and the presence of the speaker. In contrast, Rancière, who interprets Mallarmé as embracing the democratic qualities of writing, critiques the ancient anxiety of privacy. According to Rancière’s encapsulation of this anxiety, the written word is “trop bavarde. N’étant pas guidée par un père qui la porte, selon un protocole légitime, vers le lieu où elle peut fructifer, la parole écrite s’en va rouler au hasard, de droite et de gauche. Elle s’en va parler, à sa manière muette, à n’importe qui” (Parole 81–82). Rancière then appears to paraphrase Socrates’s account of how writing fails completely “to know who it should and shouldn’t talk to” (Plato 275e). In the same vein, La Pharmacie de Platon—Derrida’s famous

23. Yves Délègue’s 2004 article provides an overview of the diverging reception of Mallarmé among philosophers like Badiou and Derrida, on the one hand, and literary critics like Jean-Pierre Richard and Bertrand Marchal, on the other. See also Robert McGahey’s comparison of Mallarmé’s writings with the Phaedrus (102–3).

Romanicv105n03-04.indb 331 12/22/15 3:19 PM 332 Benjamin Williams

reading of the Phaedrus—undermines the notion of the “paternal” primacy and vitality of speech. Derrida says of Thoth that “le dieu de l’écriture est aussi, cela va de soi, le dieu de la mort. N’oublions pas que dans le Phèdre, on reprochera aussi à l’invention du pharmakon de substituer le signe essouffé à la parole vivante, de prétendre se passer du père (vivant et source de vie) du logos” (Pharmacie 27). According to Walter Ong’s gloss of the Phaedrus, writing is “inhuman, pretending to establish outside the mind what in reality can be only in the mind” (79). Again, it is diffcult to say just how explicitly the Mardistes had in mind a specifc Platonic precedent. Some did characterize writing as “dead,” but rarely enough that it did not constitute a signifcant pattern (cf. Morice 5–6). Derrida, however, consistently critiqued this so-called living quality of speech. In “La double séance,” he refers to the “métaphore du livre” that appears in Plato’s Philebus. If a book serves as a “substitute” for a speaker’s presence and voice, then this metaphorical book has “tous les caractères que, jusqu’à Mallarmé, l’on aura toujours assigné au livre, quelque démenti que la pratique littéraire ait pu ou dû lui apporter. Livre, donc, comme substitut du dialogue soi-disant, soi-disant vivant” (Dissémination 210). In Derrida’s essay, Mallarmé appears as the writer to have broken with the “soi- disant” vitality of speech. Invoking this same dichotomy of life and death, Rancière asserts that “chez Mallarmé, à l’inverse de Platon, le discours vivant s’appelle écriture. C’est l’écriture qui est la parole de l’esprit contre le mutisme bavard des voix” (Politique 90). If one accepts Rancière’s interpretation of Mallarmé’s attitude toward writing, then the poet would certainly not have allowed the “essential” of his thought to be lost in the smoke of his Tuesday evening causeries, as Dujardin and Mauclair assert. According to interpretations of Mallarmé as democratic, he privileged intellectual exchanges between a widely circulating text and any and all readers willing to expend the necessary effort. Referring to Mallarmé’s “Confit,” Rancière contrasts Plato’s and Mallarmé’s views of the worker’s and the thinker’s tasks.

Platon séparait la race de ceux auxquels le dieu avait conféré l’or de la pensée et celle des hommes voués au travail du fer. En donnant aux premiers l’or symbolique et le commandement de la cité, il leur interdisait de tenir dans leurs mains l’or matériel des biens possédés et du travail rémunéré. La séparation de l’homme à la pioche et du poète accomplit un partage du même type entre l’or réel et l’or symbolique. Mallarmé, pourtant, y marque une différence essentielle. Pour lui, nul n’a reçu, dans la composition de son âme, l’or ou le fer distribués par la divinité. Les révolutions ont été faites pour cela précisément : pour que “l’élu” soit n’importe qui. (63–64)

Romanicv105n03-04.indb 332 12/22/15 3:19 PM Mallarmé’s Socratic Monologues 333

Certainly Rancière is right that Mallarmé saw each individual as having the potential for work with “l’or symbolique.”24 By the end of his life, the poet had moved from an earlier belief in a predetermined, fnite artistic elite to the affrmation of the potential of “quiconque” to interpret a fragmentary text (2: 226; quoted in Arnar 143).25 Mallarmé clearly did not believe any longer in an intellectual elect determined by “la divinité.” Nonetheless, it does not necessarily follow that an elect is particularly inclusive simply because no one is innately excluded from its ranks. Similarly, any writer at all could be credited with democratic beliefs on the broad basis of writing’s freedom to circulate and to be interpreted by anyone.26 Mallarmé did publish some newspaper articles but, instead of consistently amplifying writing’s ostensibly democratic qualities, for much of his career he famously favored rare and costly editions of his work.

Contemporary Listeners and Eventual Readers In questioning the extent to which Mallarmé should be seen as democratic, and in emphasizing his relationship with contemporary listeners, I do not mean to suggest a simple connection between those two points. Obviously not all oral communication is inherently private and elitist (the same goes for “democratic” writing: not all published texts are equally accessible). For

24. Rancière claims that the poet, since he is not to be remunerated for work with the “gold” of intellectual labor, must also serve as a salarié (64). Antoine Compagnon, however, points out two direct contradictions to Rancière’s interpretation: frst, as a teacher, the poet effectively regarded “son salaire comme une rente” (86). Additionally, Compagnon recalls Mallarmé’s proposal of a Fonds littéraire, a state-run fund that would spare writers from working day jobs. Finally, according to Régnier’s 1894 cahier entry, Mallarmé said that democracies ought to construct cities like Oxford, so that poets too could live a “vie de cloître,” like “de hauts pensionnaires” (377–78). Rancière uses nearly identical terms to characterize Mallarmé as opposing poets’ living like “les ‘moines’ des universités anglaises” (64). See also Hamel’s analysis of Rancière’s interpretation (178–79). 25. In “L’art pour tous” (1862), the twenty-year-old Mallarmé also expressed admiration for the inaccessibility of hieroglyphics and musical notation (2: 360–61). Ong quotes Eric Havelock as saying that the alphabet is a fundamentally democratic and accessible form of writing (90). 26. The poet’s demand of exceptional interpretive “effort” from the reader is seen by some scholars today as a mark of democratic or egalitarian esteem (see Arnar 173). A great many of his contemporaries, however, perceived this same demand as unambiguous in its elitist, exclusionary intent. As Proust’s text indicates, it was a commonplace that Mallarmé expressed his ideas clearly in speech and abstrusely in writing (Proust 63).

Romanicv105n03-04.indb 333 12/22/15 3:19 PM 334 Benjamin Williams

example, it is possible to conceive of Mallarmé’s spoken teaching as typifed not by its “secret content” but by its dialogic, interactive effects. Those effects could perhaps never truly be reproduced and shared; they would remain intrinsically private, whether Mallarmé wanted it so or not. That being said, the Mardis were long perceived as having “elitist” qualities, and one simple reason for this perception is that so many attendees claimed that Mallarmé did indeed share “ideas” or “teachings” that could have but do not appear in his writings.27 I believe that such contemporary claims have validity, but I am not arguing for a simplistic return to understanding Mallarmé as an elitist. There certainly is a textual basis for interpreting aspects of his thought as democratic.28 Regarding the Mardis, however, on a weekly basis, Mallarmé spent time and effort speaking to an often self-consciously elitist group. If his values were fundamentally democratic, then he spent years being misunderstood by those listeners who believed themselves to be privileged by inclusion in a deliberately private, oral exchange. The pleasure of belonging to an elite was undoubtedly one feature of the Mardis. That social aspect, however, does not suffce entirely to explain the gatherings. Patrick Thériault’s 2010 study makes social exclusion the starting point for his analysis of the Mardis. Employing some of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological precepts, Thériault claims that, although perceived by the attendees as private (362), Mallarmé intended the Mardis as a sort of indirect advertising technique. Mardistes, seduced into writing about Mallarmé, would “trigger the public’s curiosity” and produce “symbolic value” (365). As I understand this argument, the attendees who lamented that the maître’s magical speech was never recorded were unwittingly fulflling the one real purpose of that speech, which was to create wider publicity. Thériault’s view of the Mardis seems to cohere with Mallarmé’s twentieth-century reputation for prioritizing writing; the poet cleverly utilized his listeners in order to reach out to eventual readers. I have no doubt that “symbolic value” was a major factor, among others, at play in the mythologizing of the Mardis. The Mardistes too came to beneft from their status as intermediaries between Mallarmé and the public. Yet their reminiscences also constantly affrm that they benefted intellectually from listening to Mallarmé (and perhaps vice versa, for example, in that his

27. In Mauclair’s 1898 roman à clef, his fgure for Mallarmé explains why he would not “compromettre les pensées de l’élite dans [. . .] une chronique quotidienne” (Soleil 23). See also n. 7 above. 28. For example, Mallarmé’s speculative theatrical projects and interest in public fêtes may be seen as democratic. I have misgivings about the slipperiness of the term democratic itself, but, above all, I do not think that it can be applied generally to Mallarmé’s entire oeuvre (even as a corrective to the decades during which critics exaggerated Mallarmé’s “elitist” beliefs).

Romanicv105n03-04.indb 334 12/22/15 3:19 PM Mallarmé’s Socratic Monologues 335

listeners provided an opportunity to work through “sketches” of ideas without committing them to print). Analyzing the Mardis’ supposedly exclusionary social aspects does not necessitate the minimization of Mallarmé’s intellectual relationship with his listeners.29 It is at times entirely logical to interpret Mallarmé as far more intent on an eventual, anonymous reading public than on his contemporary listeners. Nonetheless, not all evidence necessarily supports such an interpretation. According to Bertrand Marchal, “La musique et les lettres,” originally delivered in French at Cambridge and Oxford, had two distinct audiences. First were the English listeners, a public for whom Mallarmé was conscious of his outright “inintelligibilité” (Musique 292). Second was “un public plus lointain,” those who would have learned to read “autrement que dans le journal” (293). In Marchal’s interpretation, Mallarmé expected his diffcult text to be appreciated through reading alone. Yet, regarding the discourse’s reception, Mallarmé’s letter from Cambridge to his wife and daughter is much more positive than the one sent from Oxford (Corr. VI 232–36). And after the poet’s return from England in 1894, Régnier recorded Mallarmé’s impression of “un public choisi, dont [Mallarmé] entend, à mesure qu’il parle, le souffe d’attention, dont il sent le pouls intellectuel” (Cahiers 377, quoted in Corr. VI 236). Régnier’s account accentuates Mallarmé’s memory of the physical cues of comprehension (souffe and pouls) from the listeners present; likewise, Mallarmé later recalled a “bruit d’attention respiré” (2: 63). This public’s “chosen” quality aside, the question of oral communication’s privacy is, in this instance, a nonstarter: given that he published the talk a month later, Mallarmé evidently considered it ready for a wider public (it was not an “esquisse parlée”). The point to retain from Régnier’s journal, then, is that Mallarmé likely did not perceive such a drastic contrast between uncomprehending listeners and eventual, active readers. It certainly confrms that Mardistes like Régnier believed Mallarmé to have cultivated meaningful connections with all his listeners.

Conclusion A trend in studies of Mallarmé has been to stress his preoccupation with writing and, at times, to downplay the extent to which he sought meaningful communication with contemporary listeners. I think that the consideration of the Mardistes’ recollections can in some respects enrich scholarly interpretations

29. To understand how some Mardistes may have conceived of the relationship between the gatherings’ social exclusivity and intellectual value, it is helpful to recall Morice’s curiously materialistic ideas on the subject. He argued that the vulgarization of learning results in its inevitable degradation (2, 5–6).

Romanicv105n03-04.indb 335 12/22/15 3:19 PM 336 Benjamin Williams

of Mallarmé’s oeuvre; at the same time, next to the poet’s own writing, there are of course real limits to the evidential value of these recollections. If I push for taking the Mardistes into account, it is not out of personal investment in proving that Mallarmé was indeed “Socratic.” Rather, I make some fnal remarks on my project of setting side by side contrasting understandings of Mallarmé. On a modest scale, my work takes after Étiemble’s classic juxtapositions of fatly contradictory myths of Arthur Rimbaud. More specifcally, by showing how Mallarmé was seen as both Socratic and anti-Platonic, I have aimed to attenuate the most extreme iterations of both views and to refect on some problems of evidence and interpretation that they pose. By problem of evidence I mean, frst of all, the special status of the Mardistes’ memoirs. Because they refer to an experience that we can never know directly, the Socratic Mallarmé is a myth that cannot strictly be nullifed by the oeuvre, as Étiemble advised: “Pour ridiculiser la fable de Rimbaud rien ne vaut l’œuvre de Rimbaud” (quoted in Hamel 13). The Mardistes’ memories of the poet’s spoken ideas, therefore, pose the inevitable question of where the oeuvre stops or starts.30 Rather than discount recollections of Mallarmé entirely, critics might weigh their evidential value, case by case. The second problem of evidence occurs in twentieth-century ideological and philosophical utilizations of Mallarmé, as Hamel demonstrates throughout his study. In the most polemical of these debates, evidence from Mallarmé’s written oeuvre sometimes plays a relatively limited role next to the exegete’s own ideas. Unlike strictly text-based analyses, these late nineteenth- and twentieth-century interpretations may be set against each other because the former are based on evidence that we cannot know directly, while the latter are founded on a polemical and sometimes partial use of textual evidence. Firsthand listeners provide a perspective on the poet as causeur that can serve not to supplant but to challenge and nuance subsequent interpretations of Mallarmé.

Works Cited Arnar, Anna Sigrídur. The Book as Instrument: Stéphane Mallarmé, the Artist’s Book, and the Transformation of Print Culture. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2011. Arnat, Albert. “Chronique littéraire.” Rev. of La Musique et les Lettres, by Stephane Mallarmé. Réveil 1895: 38–59.

30. It might be argued that Mallarmé’s inimitable syntax is so inseparable from his thought that even a sound recording of his speech, while conveying a more easily understandable expression of his thought, would not be the real Mallarmé. Such an argument would recall Proust’s Bergotte, who barely, if at all, sounds like Bergotte when he speaks.

Romanicv105n03-04.indb 336 12/22/15 3:19 PM Mallarmé’s Socratic Monologues 337

Badiou, Alain. “Philosophie et poésie: Au point de l’innommable.” Po&sie 64 (1993): 92. Barbey d’Aurevilly, Jules. “Du dandysme et de George Brummell.” Œuvres romanesques complètes. Ed. Jacques Petit. Vol. 2. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Paris: Gallimard, 1966. Beaujon, Georges. L’École symboliste: Contribution à l’histoire de la poésie lyrique française contemporaine. Basel: Druck von F. Bürgin, 1900. Besnier, Patrick. Mallarmé le théâtre de la rue de Rome. Paris: Ed. du Limon, 1998. Blanchot, Maurice. La Part du feu. Paris: Gallimard, 1949. Bonnamour, Georges. “Préface d’un livre inédit.” Revue indépendante 68 (June 1892): 289–99. Bonniot, Edmond. “Mardis soir, Rue de Rome.” Marges 57 (1936): 7–18. Bury, R. de. “Les journaux.” 28 (October 1898): 247–53. Claudel, Paul. “La catastrophe d’Igitur.” Œuvres complètes. Vol. 15. Paris: Gallimard, 1959. Compagnon, Antoine. “La place des fêtes: Mallarmé et la IIIe République des Lettres.” Mallarmé ou l’obscurité lumineuse. Ed. Bertrand Marchal and Jean-Luc Steinmetz. Paris : Hermann, 1997. 39–86. Dayan, Peter. Mallarmé’s Divine Transposition: Real and Apparent Sources of Literary Value. New York: Clarendon Press, 1986. Délègue, Yves. “Mallarmé, les philosophes et les gestes de la philosophie.” Romantisme 124 (2004): 127–40. Derrida, Jacques. La Pharmacie de Platon. Tel Quel, 1968. ———. La Dissémination. Tel quel. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972. Dujardin, Édouard. De Stéphane Mallarmé au prophète Ézéchiel. Paris: Mercure de France, 1919. ———. Mallarmé par un des siens. Paris: Albert Messein, 1936. Epel Edition. Lacan: La Scène, by Patrick Chambon. Press release. 2012 http://www.epel-edition.com/publication/247/lacan-la-scene.html. Fontainas, André. Mes Souvenirs du symbolisme. Paris: Éditions de la “Nouvelle Revue critique,” 1928. Fontainas, André, and Paul Valéry. De Stéphane Mallarmé à Paul Valéry: Notes d’un témoin 1894–1922. Paris: E. Bernard, 1928. Fort, Paul. Mes Mémoires, toute la vie d’un poète, 1872–1943. Paris (Lagny): Flammarion, 1944. Genova, Pamela Antonia. Symbolist Journals: A Culture of Correspondence. Studies in European Cultural Transition. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002. Gide, André. Souvenirs et Voyages. Ed. Pierre Masson, with Daniel Durosay and Martine Sagaert. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Paris: Gallimard, 2001. Gourmont, Remy de. “Fête nationale.” Mercure de France 5 (July 1892): 193–97.

Romanicv105n03-04.indb 337 12/22/15 3:19 PM 338 Benjamin Williams

Gregh, Fernand. L’Âge d’or: Souvenirs d’enfance et de jeunesse. Paris: B. Grasset, 1947. Hamel, Jean-François. Camarade Mallarmé: Une politique de la lecture. Paris: Minuit, 2014. Harris, Roy. Saussure and His Interpreters. New York: New York UP, 2001. Hirsch, Charles-Henry. “Les revues.” Mercure de France 28 (December 1898): 775–85. Jaloux, Edmond. Introduction to Cinquantenaire du Symbolisme [. . .]. Paris: Édition des Bibliothèques nationales, 1936. Jammes, Francis, and Francis Vielé-Griffin. Correspondance. Ed. Reinhard Kuhn. Genève: Droz, 1966. Kuhn, Reinhard. The Return to Reality. A Study of Francis Vielé-Griffin. Genève: Droz, 1962. Lazare, Bernard. Figures contemporaines: Ceux d’aujourd’hui, ceux de demain. Paris: Perrin, 1895. Le Blond, Maurice. “Documents sur la poésie contemporaine.” Plume 205 (November 1897): 657–64. Lefrère, Jean-Jacques. Les Saisons littéraires de Rodolphe Darzens. Paris: Fayard, 1998. Mallarmé, Stéphane. Correspondance III 1886–1889. Ed. Henri Mondor and Lloyd James Austin. Paris: Gallimard, 1969. ———. Correspondance VI Janvier 1893–Juillet 1894. Ed. Henri Mondor and Lloyd James Austin. Paris: Gallimard, 1981. ———. Correspondance VII Juillet 1894–décembre 1895. Ed. Henri Mondor and Lloyd James Austin. Paris: Gallimard, 1982. ———. Œuvres complètes. Ed. Bertrand Marchal. Vol. 2. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Paris: Gallimard, 2003. Marchal, Bertrand. “La Musique et les Lettres de Mallarmé, ou le discours inintelligible.” Mallarmé ou l’obscurité lumineuse. Ed. Bertrand Marchal and Jean-Luc Steinmetz. Paris: Hermann, 1997. 279–94. ———. Mallarmé: Mémoire de la critique. Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1998. Mauclair, Camille. “Une causerie avant des poèmes.” Ermitage 12.1 (1896): 12–21. ———. Le Soleil des morts, roman contemporain. Paris: P. Ollendorff, 1898. ———. L’Art en silence: Edgar Poë, Mallarmé, Flaubert lyrique, le symbolisme [. . .] Paris: P. Ollendorff, 1901. ———. Princes de l’esprit: Poë, Flaubert, Mallarmé, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Delacroix, Rembrandt, etc. Paris: Ollendorff, 1920. ———. Mallarmé chez lui. Paris: Grasset, 1935. McGahey, Robert. The Orphic Moment: Shaman to Poet-Thinker in Plato, Nietzsche, and Mallarmé. Albany: State U of New York P, 1994.

Romanicv105n03-04.indb 338 12/22/15 3:19 PM Mallarmé’s Socratic Monologues 339

Michaud, Guy. Mallarmé. Ed. Marie Collins and Bertha Humez. New York: New York UP, 1965. Millan, Gordon. Pierre Louÿs ou le culte de l’amitié. Aix-en-Provence: Pan- dora, 1979. ———. Les Mardis de Stéphane Mallarmé, mythes et réalités. Saint-Genouph: Nizet, 2008. Mockel, Albert. Esthétique du symbolisme. Bruxelles: Palais des Académies, 1962. Morice, Charles. La Littérature de tout à l’heure. Paris: Perrin, 1889. Mortelette, Yann. “Le Salon de José-Maria de Heredia, entre deux générations de poètes.” Marie de Régnier, muse et poète de la belle époque. Ed. Marie de Laubier. Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, 2004. Mourey, Gabriel. “Les Livres.” Rev. of Vers et Prose, by Stephane Mallarmé. Idée libre 4 (January 1893): 186–87. Muhlfeld, Lucien. “Chronique de la littérature.” Revue blanche 3 (November 1892): 269–80. Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Routledge, 1988. Oster, Daniel. “Salut.” Mallarmé a-t-il eu des disciples . . . de son vivant? Ed. Jean-Louis Backes. Spec. issue of Littérature et Nation 15 (1995): 5–12. Plato. Phaedrus. Trans. Robin Waterfield. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. Proust, Marcel. “Études. VIII. Mondanité de Bouvard et Pécuchet.” Revue blanche 5 (1893): 62–68. Quillard, Pierre. “Echos divers et communications: Conférence de M. Charles Morice.” Mercure de France 5 (July 1892): 285–87. Rancière, Jacques. Mallarmé: La politique de la sirène. Paris: Hachette, 1996. ———. La Parole muette: Essai sur les contradictions de la littérature. Paris: Hachette littératures, 1998. Régnier, Henri de. “Stéphane Mallarmé.” Mercure de France 28 (October 1898): 5–9. ———. Les Cahiers inédits, 1887–1936. Ed. David J. Niederauer and François Broche. Paris: Pygmalion, 2002. Retté, Adolphe. Le Symbolisme: Anecdotes et Souvenirs. Paris: Librairie Léon Vanier, 1903. Roger, Thierry. L’Archive du Coup de dés: Étude critique de la réception d’Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard de Stéphane Mallarmé (1897– 2007). Paris: Éditions Classiques Garnier, 2010. Schiau-Botea, Diana. “Le texte et le lieu du spectacle de la Plume au Mur. Stéphane Mallarmé parmi les avant-gardes.” New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2010. Thériault, Patrick. “Mallarmé’s ‘Sectarian Game’: The Late Mardis (1890– 1898).” , Its Origins and Its Consequences. Ed. Rosina

Romanicv105n03-04.indb 339 12/22/15 3:19 PM 340 Benjamin Williams

Neginsky. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010. Vaillant, Alain. La Crise de la littérature romantisme et modernité. Grenoble: Ellug, 2005. Vielé-Griffin, Francis. “Entretiens sur le Mouvement Poétique.” Entretiens politiques et littéraires 45 (June 1893): 529–37. ———. “Le rôle de Stéphane Mallarmé.” Ermitage 16 (1898): 173–76. ———. “La discipline mallarméenne.” Phalange 5.2 (May 1907): 949.

Romanicv105n03-04.indb 340 12/22/15 3:19 PM