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Lyric obscurity serves, however, as a medium linking vernacular poetry to its literary counterpart. Stéphane Mallarmé, for example, whose verse represents a kind of gold standard, one might say, of lyric obscurity, toiled as a young writer in one of poetry's frivolous underworlds, the topsy-turvy realm of Mother Goose, converting 141 English nursery rhymes into veritable prose poems. One would want to mention that he was sampling Mother Goose at about the same time he first began translating the verse of Edgar Allan Poe, but it is more important to stress that he produced these nursery rhymes for his day job as an English teacher, as grammatical exercises for a classroom of chattering ten-year-olds. Mallarmé discovered in the verbal prosthetics of the classroom, comprising mnemonic phrases, philological jargon, and antiquarian kitsch, a sort of glamour akin to the netherworld of his own poetry. This chapter reviews Mallarmé's transactions in lyric obscurity—between the illogic of Mother Goose and his own, evolving Symbolist doctrine. From this perspective, the correspondences between Mallarmé's formidable poems and his nursery rhymes offer a striking illustration of the hypothesis that obscurity in literary poetry owes a general and sometimes quite specific debt to vernacular forms and idioms. Yet it is precisely the vernacular and pedagogical orientation of these writings that inhibited not only their publication but closer examination of their relation to Mallarmé's poetry.

This chapter outlines a response to the world's thoroughgoing arbitrariness, looking at the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé and the performances of Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin and Mallarmé set out to remedy the predicament by creating an alternative world, one which exists only in and through poetry, one where everything has to be exactly what and where it is. He also provided his readers with a formal model and the skills required for the creation of their own. In pointing to their own fictionality, the poems accustom their readers in the divided attitude required to believe in fictions they themselves have created. The chapter also notes that Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin's magic performances work in exactly the same way. It concludes that self-reflexivity at large, a central feature of literary modernism, may have emerged from this need to re-enchant the world.

This chapter stages a kind of debate between writers and critics such as Remy de Gourmont, who protested against English and all its works, and others such as the poet (and teacher of English) Stéphane Mallarmé, whose treatise Les Mots anglais (1877) has a powerful affinity with Proust’s aesthetic. Mallarmé makes the philologist’s, but also the poet’s, case for language as necessarily mixed and cross-bred. His analysis of English as an ‘idiome composite’ speaks directly to A la recherche; more important even than this, he suggests a potent reason for Marcel’s fascination with etymology, which occupies whole swathes of the novel’s later volumes and seems, at first sight, such an odd distraction from the business of social comedy or sexual tragedy. The connection between etymology and ‘involuntary’ memory, the mainspring of the novel’s creative impulse, forms the culminating point of the argument and the book.

The first chapter opens with the familiar modernist topic of the Chinese written character in the poetics of Ernest Fenollosa, Ezra Pound, and Imagism. Through a comparison of their poetics to the explicitly allegorical and antivisual ideographic imaginings of their French contemporary Paul Claudel, this chapter critiques Imagism’s claims to visual immediacy by arguing for its essentially allegorical underpinnings. It specifically shows that Imagism, despite its apparently contrasting ontology of the image, shares with Claudel’s Mallarmé-influenced poetics a common anti-pictorial tendency that reflects their shared rejection and imitation of photography as a model of vision without consciousness. This model is itself enmeshed with their similarly conflicted notions of Oriental subjectivity as both insufficiently mediated and happily free from convention.

Why has Stéphane Mallarmé — the notoriously difficult and seemingly aristocratic leader of the late-19th century French Symbolists — been so important for the some of France’s greatest 20th century thinkers? Why, in particular, has his work been invested with political significance by philosophers and theorists of the French Left, from Jean-Paul Sartre to Alain Badiou, Julia Kristeva to Jacques Rancière? Comrade Mallarmé? introduces the series of political readings of the poet that have been proposed since Paul Valéry’s seminal interpretation. It also engages with contemporary scholarship on Mallarmé, and offers a critical reading of Jean-François Hamel’s recent work Camarade Mallarmé, which addresses a similar corpus of works to Mallarmé and the Politics of Literature. This introduction argues that the key mystery to be solved is why Mallarmé has so consistently oscillated between being a hero and villain of the French Left, from Sartre to today’s readers.

This fifth chapter presents Jacques Rancière’s reading of Mallarmé through a critical exegesis of his 1996 book Mallarmé: The Politics of the Siren. By exploring Rancière’s studied opposition to the critical tradition that has framed Mallarmé as a hermetic recluse concerned exclusively with literature’s relation to itself, this chapter shows how Rancière presents Mallarmé as a thinker deeply engaged with the political crises of his times and committed to equality. The chapter explains how Rancière reformulates Mallarmé’s proposal for a poetic religion in terms of his famous account of the aesthetic regime of art, and closes with the argument that Rancière ultimately considers Mallarmé a conservative figure whose poetic utopia is infinitely deferred.

This first chapter presents an in-depth study of Jean-Paul Sartre’s career-long engagement with Mallarmé. Beginning with a discussion of Sartre’s notorious side-lining of poetry in favour of committed literature, the chapter asks why Sartre nevertheless chose to devote so many pages to Mallarmé, particularly in his incomplete existential biography Mallarmé, or, The Poet of Nothingness. The chapter begins with an extensive reading of this latter work, tracking Sartre’s trenchant Marxist analysis of the post-1848 literary field in France before exploring his account of Mallarmé’s personal trajectory. Finally, it turns to the third volume of Sartre’s The Family Idiot and argues for the consistency of Sartre’s reading of Mallarmé as a nihilist and as a political quietist.

Stéphane Mallarmé was the first poet to understand the pragmatic and theoretical ramifications of the emergence of cinema for writing, literature and poetry. Likely influenced by shorts of the Lumière brothers, he undertook to translate the new mobility of the screen into his visual poem, A Throw of the Dice, and his last opus known as Le Livre. This chapter demonstrates that the preface of a Throw of the Dice was written form the same textual matrix as Mallarmé's comments on cinema. It documents the multiple connexions between the poet and the budding world of cinema via Paul Nadar, Octave Uzanne, Jules Huret and Villiers de L’Isle-Adam. The term ‘unfolding’ is at the heart of Mallarmé's sense of automorphosis applied to text, and it is compared to its contemporary uses by Henri Bergson, Étienne-Jules Marey, and Loïe Fuller. Cinepoetic aspects in the work of two close disciples, Paul Valéry and André Gide, are briefly analyzed.

This chapter examines Alain Badiou's reading of the works of Stéphane Mallarmé. It explains that in the very first pages of Logic of Worlds, Badiou called Mallarmé his master and claimed that his first philosophical proposition was formulated in Mallarmean style. The chapter discusses the reasons behind Badiou's interest in Mallarmé and evaluates Mallarmé's influence on the philosophical style of Badiou.

This third chapter tracks Alain Badiou’s reading of Mallarmé, beginning with his extensive treatment of the poet in his first and most politically-committed work, Theory of the Subject, where Mallarmé figures as a liminal figure: an ingenious political conservative whose insights need to be integrated yet surpassed by Badiou, the political radical. The chapter then turns to Badiou’s post-Being and Event work and offers a close reading of the latter book’s treatment of Mallarmé before investigating Mallarmé’s political significance for Badiou in this second stage of his philosophical career. Through a reading of Badiou’s polemic with Czeslaw Milosz in Handbook of Inaesthetics, the chapter argues that Mallarmé becomes an unequivocal comrade for Badiou in his post-Being and Event period: a resolute egalitarian who points the way towards the advent of a generic humanity.

The first chapter examines musical portraits of literary figures. It first explores Virgil Thomson’s multiple works in the genre including his portrait of Gertrude Stein, to interpret the influence of Stein’s modernist literary portraits on Thomson’s compositions. It then turns to Pierre Boulez’s orchestral portrait Pli selon pli: portrait de Mallarmé. Analyzing Boulez’s incorporation of elements of Stéphane Mallarmé’s poetry as well as the complex and idiosyncratic theories regarding the relationship between poetry and music that Mallarmé developed in his essays. Through the discussion of these portraits, the chapter addresses the crucial role of language in the musical representation of identity.

This second chapter engages with Julia Kristeva’s reading of Mallarmé in her 1974 work Revolution in Poetic Language. This chapter offers the first extended analysis of this work’s long and detailed study of Mallarmé, and introduces Kristeva’s unique interpretation of such key works as Prose (Pour des Esseintes) and Un Coup de dés. It also presents the first English-language engagement of any length with the third — and longest — chapter of Revolution in Poetic Language, ‘The State and Mystery’. The chapter argues that Kristeva’s reading culminates in a critique of Mallarmé’s poetry’s content, which covers over the radicality of its form, thus leading to the suppression of the revolutionary political power contained in his work.

This chapter explores Nietzsche and Mallarmé’s critical response to Wagner, where they articulate the two poles of the total work, the political and the spiritual, respectively. Both Mallarmé and Nietzsche affirm the absolute need of great art at the same time as they assert the primacy of “great poetry and thought” against the seductive power of music. Both are led through their agon with Wagner and the idea of the total work of art to confront the question of aesthetic illusion and to ponder the staging of the absolute in the age of aesthetics that is also the age of nihilism. Mallarmé’s grandiose idea of the Book as symbolist Mystery announces the avant-garde quest for a resacralized theatre; Nietzsche’s prophecy of the coming theatrical age of the political actor and the masses foreshadows the mass politics of the twentieth century.

This concluding chapter first presents a reading of Quentin Meillassoux’s book The Number and the Siren, which aims to overcome the limitations of Rancière’s interpretation of Mallarmé by showing how the poet succeeded in creating a secular Eucharist. The chapter argues, however, that Meillassoux’s book has the unexpected consequence of showing the gap between Mallarmé’s poetry and its alleged political ambitions. It closes with a call for renewed thinking on the link between literature and politics.

This chapter follows representations of peddlers from Baudelaire to François Coppée, Charles Cros, and Jean Richepin, and finally to symbolists such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Joris Karl Huysmans. It considers whether they perceived the city-as-concert as harmonious or dissonant by analyzing the extent to which their poems reflect or inflect the discourse on the picturesque. Poetry about peddlers incorporates the vitality of street noise, the formal experimentation of popular song, and the aural acuity of flâneur-writing into the art of the establishment or the avant-garde. Such mixing of high and low registers is especially salient when Mallarmé's Chansons bas are read alongside Jean-François Raffaëlli's illustrations of types in the tradition of the Cris de Paris. The parodic poetry of Cros and Richepin, written in reaction to Coppée's moralizing sentimental dizain, in a way sets the stage for Mallarmé's “lowly songs.”

This chapter considers the reception of the idea of the total work of art in European symbolism, as it is reflected, on the one hand, in the tributes in the media of sculpture, painting, literature, and music; and on the other, in Mallarmé’s and in Scriabin’s ambition to surpass Wagner by creating the absolute and ultimate work. It argues that Mallarmé’s Book can only gesture toward the unrealizable idea of the total work of art. It is also an appropriate complement and antithesis to Scriabin’s Dionysian version of dematerialization in his Mysterium, which was to bring about the ecstatic realization—through return to the godhead—of the universal correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm.

This fourth chapter introduces Jean-Claude Milner’s reading of Mallarmé, and offers a critical exegesis of his 1999 book Mallarmé au tombeau. The chapter argues that Milner presents Mallarmé as a committed nihilist who refused to recognise the existence of the 19th century’s revolutionary events, from 1848 to the Commune. Milner transforms Mallarmé into a figure strictly opposed to the Mallarmé of Badiou, or indeed of any reader hoping to include the poet in their pantheon of progressive or revolutionary writers.

This chapter examines the advent of distinct forms of body imagery and corresponding patterns of femininity, and the associated discourse on dance reform at the turn of the century. The discussions include dress reform and women’s bodies; the thoughts of Stéphane Mallarmé on fashion and modernity; fabrics of dance and patterns of textural production; the concept of antiquity; and exotic dance. It argues that the body of the dancer, dressed or concealed, presented as Greek or exotic, becomes a medium of staging the difference between “nature” and culture.