Mallarmé's Sunset Poetry at the End of Time

Mallarmé’s Sunset Poetry at the End of Time Norman.indb 1 29/7/14 16:09:35 LEGENDA , founded in 1995 by the European Humanities Research Centre of the University of Oxford, is now a joint imprint of the Modern Humanities Research Association and Maney Publishing. Titles range from medieval texts to contemporary cinema and form a widely comparative view of the modern humanities, including works on Arabic, Catalan, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Yiddish literature. An Editorial Board of distinguished academic specialists works in collaboration with leading scholarly bodies such as the Society for French Studies, the British Comparative Literature Association and the Association of Hispanists of Great Britain & Ireland. The Modern Humanities Research Association () encourages and promotes advanced study and research in the field of the modern humanities, especially modern European languages and literature, including English, and also cinema. It also aims to break down the barriers between scholars working in different disciplines and to maintain the unity of humanistic scholarship in the face of increasing specialization. The Association fulfils this purpose primarily through the publication of journals, bibliographies, monographs and other aids to research. Maney Publishing is one of the few remaining independent British academic publishers. Founded in 1900 the company has offices both in the UK, in Leeds and London, and in North America, in Philadelphia. Since 1945 Maney Publishing has worked closely with learned societies, their editors, authors, and members, in publishing academic books and journals to the highest traditional standards of materials and production. Norman.indb 2 29/7/14 16:09:36 EDitoriAL BOARD Chairman Professor Colin Davis, Royal Holloway, University of London Professor Malcolm Cook, University of Exeter (French) Professor Robin Fiddian, Wadham College, Oxford (Spanish) Professor Anne Fuchs, University of Warwick (German) Professor Paul Garner, University of Leeds (Spanish) Professor Andrew Hadfield, University of Sussex (English) Professor Marian Hobson Jeanneret, Queen Mary University of London (French) Professor Catriona Kelly, New College, Oxford (Russian) Professor Martin McLaughlin, Magdalen College, Oxford (Italian) Professor Martin Maiden, Trinity College, Oxford (Linguistics) Professor Peter Matthews, St John’s College, Cambridge (Linguistics) Dr Stephen Parkinson, Linacre College, Oxford (Portuguese) Professor Suzanne Raitt, William and Mary College, Virginia (English) Professor Ritchie Robertson, The Queen’s College, Oxford (German) Professor David Shepherd, Keele University (Russian) Professor Michael Sheringham, All Souls College, Oxford (French) Professor Alison Sinclair, Clare College, Cambridge (Spanish) Professor David Treece, King’s College London (Portuguese) Managing Editor Dr Graham Nelson 41 Wellington Square, Oxford ox1 2jf, UK www.legendabooks.com Norman.indb 3 29/7/14 16:09:36 Norman.indb 4 29/7/14 16:09:36 Mallarmé’s Sunset Poetry at the End of Time ❖ Barnaby Norman Modern Humanities Research Association and Maney Publishing 2014 Norman.indb 5 29/7/14 16:09:36 Published by the Modern Humanities Research Association and Maney Publishing 1 Carlton House Terrace London SW 1Y 5AF United Kingdom LEGENDA is an imprint of the Modern Humanities Research Association and Maney Publishing Maney Publishing is the trading name of W. S. Maney & Son Ltd, whose registered office is at Suite 1C, Joseph’s Well, Hanover Walk, Leeds LS 3 1AB ISBN 978-1-909662-29-2 First published 2014 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or disseminated or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in any retrieval system, or otherwise used in any manner whatsoever without the express permission of the copyright owner © Modern Humanities Research Association and W. S. Maney & Son Ltd 2014 Printed in Great Britain Cover: 875 Design Copy-Editor: Charlotte Brown Norman.indb 6 29/7/14 16:09:36 CONTENTS ❖ Acknowledgements i Acknowledgements 1 Introduction: Depuis Mallarmé 1 1 Hegel: The End of Art 1 The Aesthetics as Art History Poetry and Interiority (The End of Art) 2 Hérodiade and the Conception of the ‘Œuvre pure’ 1 Hérodiade Letters (The Great Ecstasy of Stéphane Mallarmé) Igitur 3 ‘Le Drame solaire’: Sonnet allégorique de lui-même 1 The ‘Sonnet nul’ The ‘Nothing-ing of Nothing’ The End of Art 4 L’Espace littéraire 1 ‘L’Espace nocturne’ From Orpheus to ‘The Book’s Absence’ 5 La Dissémination 1 The End of the Book: ‘La fin du livre e(s)t le commencement de l’écriture’ The Sessions Crisis Afterword: Into the Zone 1 Bibliography 1 Index 1 Norman.indb 7 29/7/14 16:09:36 For my wife Anna Un astre, en vérité Norman.indb 8 29/7/14 16:09:36 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ❖ This book has benefited from the encouragement and insight of many people. Without the sustained support of family, academic mentors and friends, the project would never have got to this point, and looking back from here it is with unreserved gratitude that I would like to acknowledge this support. I thank my wife, Anna, who was there in Paris when the seed was planted and has done so much to help it bear fruit; Mike and Di Norman — it is rare that you get this kind of opportunity to say how much you appreciate your parents; my brother, Sam, and my godmother, Anna Allport — who have both made life significantly easier. The study itself has benefited enormously from my supervisor Hector Kollias’s exacting reading, and from the encouragement of Patrick ffrench who helped me to shape the project in the early stages. Shortcomings are of course my own responsibility. When it came to converting the manuscript for publication, I was greatly aided by the analyses and comments of my doctoral examiners, Colin Davis and Nikolaj Lübecker, and in practical matters by Graham Nelson at Legenda. Finally, I thank four friends with whom I have been able to discuss this project: Henry Dicks, John Mckeane, David O’Hara, and Greg Kerr. b.n., June 2014 Norman.indb 9 29/7/14 16:09:36 Tout aujourd’hui, dans les idées comme dans les choses, dans la société comme dans l’individu, est à l’état de crépuscule. De quelle nature est ce crépuscule, de quoi sera-t-il suivi? Victor Hugo La littérature ici subit une exquise crise, fondamentale. Stéphane Mallarmé Norman.indb 10 29/7/14 16:09:36 INTRODUCTION ❖ Depuis Mallarmé depuis Mallarmé (pour réduire celui-ci à un nom et ce nom à un repère), ce qui a tendu à rendre stériles de telles distinctions, c’est que à travers elles et plus importante qu’elles, s’est fait jour l’expérience de quelque chose qu’on a continué à appeler “littérature”, mais avec un sérieux renouvelé et, de plus, entre guillemets. [since Mallarmé (reducing the latter to a name and the name to a reference point), what has tended to make such distinctions sterile is that by way of them, and more important than they are, there has come to light the experience of something one continues to call, but with renewed seriousness, and moreover in quotation marks, ‘literature’]1 Maurice Blanchot2 La note à laquelle vous faites allusion rappelait aussi la nécessité de ces ‘blancs’, dont on sait, au moins depuis Mallarmé, qu’en tout texte ils ‘assument l’importance’. [The note to which you are referring also recalled the necessity of these ‘whites’, about which we know, at least since Mallarmé, that in any text they ‘come to the fore’] Jacques Derrida3 ‘Depuis Mallarmé’: the refrain rings out across twentieth-century French criticism. Mallarmé has fascinated the literary world for almost one hundred and fifty years now, beginning with the Mardistes –– his immediate acolytes from the Rue de Rome sessions — going by way of Valéry, to Sartre, Blanchot, Barthes, Derrida, Badiou, and Rancière, to name just the most obvious. He is the father of modernity with his extraordinary formal innovations, and a key reference of post-modernity. Literature changed with Mallarmé, and there is a sense that if we can understand what happened, if we can understand something of this event, then we can understand something of the opening of our own epoch. But, as the collection of names above indicates, he is not simply a poet’s poet: in the second half of the twentieth century, Mallarmé became the philosopher’s poet par excellence. His work seemed to point to a region of co-implication where the dialogue between philosophy and literature would become particularly involved. It is this region that we will be approaching in this study as we seek to establish what the ‘event Mallarmé’ meant for two of his most formidable readers: Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida. In the quotation from L’Entretien infini given above, Blanchot sketches out a position that I would like to highlight by way of introduction. Firstly, we note, Norman.indb 1 29/7/14 16:09:36 2 Depuis Mallarmé Mallarmé is ‘reduced’ to a name and then to a reference point. This has to do with the broader argument of Blanchot’s book, and the historic dimensions that his discourse takes on at this time. Further on in the passage, Blanchot will speak of this writing — for which Mallarmé’s name becomes a convenient shorthand — as representing the ‘end of history’. We need not concern ourselves with what exactly he means by this at this stage, this claim will be examined specifically as it relates to Mallarmé, and in detail, in Chapter 4. For now, it is enough to signal a displacement going beyond the sphere of poetics or aesthetics, and to recognise Mallarmé’s implication in this: Mallarmé is placed at the very site of this transition, and so the question as to why this is the case imposes itself.

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