Mallarm at the Millennium

Author(s): Rosemary Lloyd

Source: The Modern Language Review, Vol. 95, No. 3 (Jul., 2000), pp. 674-683
Published by: Modern Humanities Research Association
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MALLARME AT THE MILLENNIUM

The Gare Saint Lazare on a sweltering late summer morning, swirling groups of
travellers coming to a disconsolate stop before the barriers as they wait for the
details of their train to be flashed on the big screens above them, with small
constellations gathering as friends or colleagues meet. This is Mallarme's station,
the one he saw on leaving his apartment on the rue de Rome, the one his friend
Manet painted in one of those great transformationsof cultural icons, the cathedral
of the industrial age. In addition, in the summer of I997 it was for a group of
Mallarme scholars the point of departure for the first of the conferences organized
to celebrate his life and work. Through his poetry, through his intricately worded
meditations on all branches of the arts, and through his demandingly innovative
work Un coupde des,Stephane Mallarme, who died in September I898, exerted an
extensive influence over twentieth-century art and thought. A close friend of most
of the impressionistpainters, especially Manet, Berthe Morisot, Monet, Renoir, and
Whistler, of musicians such as Chausson, Debussy, and Augusta Holmes, of
numerous writers from Oscar Wilde to Emile Zola, from Villiers to Valery,
Mallarme has continued to challenge creative and critical writers,philosophers, and
poets throughout the twentieth century, inspiring some of the most profound and
stimulatingwork of Derrida, Lacan, and Kristeva, Bonnefoy, Wallace Stevens, and
Paul Auster, among numerous others. Painters and photographers have delighted
in his image of the dice or his celebration of the ballerina. Musicians, from Ravel
and Debussy to Cage and Boulez, have sought to capture in their works that sense,
on the one hand, of sensuality and melancholy, and on the other, of silence and
dislocation, that marks Mallarme's writing. He certainly left his stamp on his
century and on ours, as the French postal service acknowledged by issuing its own
stamp in 1998, Mallarme's face against a backgroundof the night skywith the Great
Bear. And from the tranquil depths of rural Normandy to the blatant postmodernism of New York, in gothic northern towns, and in one of the planet's
southernmost cities, that influence has recently been celebrated and explored in a
remarkablevariety of conferences, exhibitions, publications, and performances.
They began in the summer of 1997, with a ten-day colloquium at the seventeenthcentury chateau of Cerisy-la-Salle, deep in the heart of Normandy. The Mallarme
'decade' offered a satisfactory point of departure, for Cerisy, both in its physical
manifestation and as a well-established series of summer conferences, suggests a
continuity through time, its walls hung with photos of earlier participants such as
Gide, Lytton Strachey, and Dorothy Bussy. Moreover, through its isolation,
together with the intensity that a ten-day colloquium engenders, it enacted
something of the hermeticism and high seriousness of symbolism itself. Unlike its
equivalents in Anglophone countries, Cerisy colloquia are amazingly eclectic, for
while the organizers of each conference invite the main speakers, the audience
consists of whoever wishes to come and spend some vacation time in a rural setting.
People can, and do, sign up each year for the same ten days, not particularly
concerned about whether the topic is children's literature or eroticism, Jarry or
Racine, Malherbe or Mallarme. Moreover, they take it all remarkably seriously,
attending each of the one-hour presentations and participating in the following
hour of discussion and questions. It makes for some unpredictable questions and

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some equally remarkablefootwork as the speakersattempt to fit those questions into

some recognizable category. This, together with the copious nature of the meals
and the generous supplies of wine and cider that goes with them, has led at times to
a particularlyheightened sense of dicing with words, but in the case of the Mallarme
'decade' it also produced a surprisinglycoherent image of the subject. The Cerisy
Mallarme was above all the Mallarm6 of philosophical meditation on art and music,
the master manipulator of verse form and poetic discourse. This was the man whose
desire for mastery extended even to his control of the representation of his closest
friendship, that with Mery Laurent.
Organized by Jean-Luc Steinmetz, the poet and critic whose biography of
Mallarme appeared in 1998, and Bertrand Marchal, editor of the new Pleiade
edition of the poet's work,' the firstvolume of which also came out in the centennial
year, the Cerisy colloquium attractedparticipantsfromJapan, Australia, Germany,
and France, but with, remarkably, only two from the United States and one from
the United Kingdom. In part, as conferences over the next eighteen months would
seem to confirm, this may be indicative of a division between continental and
Anglophone readings of Mallarme. The list of invited speakerswas remarkablenot
least for its choice of scholars from a range of different domains, including Daniel
Oster, permanent secretary of the Academie, Jean-Michel Nectoux, directeur-adjoint
of music on Radio-France, the poet Salah Stetie, and the philosopher Jacques
Ranciere, as well as academics from universities and lyceesin France (and its
dominions), the United States, Scotland, and Belgium. A group of actors from the
Thietre du Loup-Blanc created and performed readings from Mallarme'spublished
and private writings, bringing together letters, poems, journal articles, and responses
to surveys to present a dynamic and in many ways illuminatingly idiosyncratic
vision of the man and his work. Although the tone for most of the proceedings was
one of stately formality, mirrored by the orderly beauty of the library in which the
proceedings took place, a degree of spontaneity was introduced by short presentations followed by more wide-ranging discussions, and by a typically Mallarmean
absence of one of the principal speakers,leaving time for unscheduled readings and
an unforgettable Bosnian version of the sonnetenyx. If the conference ended with
discussions by both Bertrand Marchal and Gordon Millan on the all but
insurmountable difficultiesfacing any attempt to provide a truly satisfactoryedition
of Mallarme's work, the figure who emerged from the conference was less the writer
than the thinker, less the poet than the philosopher, or, if that word is too grand for
the modesty of Mallarme, the inspirer of philosophers.
In April 1998, the French Studies Department of ELTE University, Budapest,
Hungary, organized a two-day international conference (in French), held at the
Centre Interuniversitaired'Etudes francaises. The focus was on Mallarme as he has
been translated and absorbed into other cultures, with papers on Mallarme himself
as translator,and other looser interpretationsof the term 'translation'.With around
sixty participants, this was a well-attended and very friendly event, with an
impressivemix of nationalities. The InstitutFrancaisen Hongrie had even organized
a concert with the Budapest Sinfonietta in honour of Mallarme. As a conference, it
worked best at its most focused, or when the title was taken at its most literal. Rather
than look at Mallarme from a fixed perspective, this conference traced the
1 For

publishing details of all books mentioned see the bibliography at the end of this article.

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676

Mallarmeat theMillennium

trajectoriescoming out of his work. The object of study was not so much Mallarme
the versifier, Mallarme the theorizer, or Mallarme the philosopher/metaphysician,
as Mallarme the seductive 'point de repere' and 'point de d6part'. A Mallarme
absorbed into another literature or culture is a continuing process of happy
coincidences and missed opportunities, which not only tells something about that
culture but can also reveal a different Mallarme. Some of these trajectorieswere of
course familiar (if not in any detail) like Russia, whereas others were unknown, like
Wales or Hungary.
While so many of the centenary celebrations have been about rediscovery
(rediscovery of Un coupde dis in the last room of the Musee d'Orsay exhibition, rediscovery of the actual texts in Marchal's new edition), this one brought together
new information to identify a new area. When the proceedings are published in the
Department's Revue d'Etudes franqaises,this will provide a great base for a project
waiting to be done, perhaps a companion to the collection of essays Michael Temple
edited under the title Meetingswith Mallarme,but not so much in contemporary
French culture as across continents.2
It was the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, when that city was preparing to
be Europe's architectural capital, that had the honour of holding a conference on
the exact centenary of Mallarme's death. It may have been the date that led two of
the participants to focus on the poet's response to loss and mourning. Roger
Pearson'sfine exploration of the haunting lines 'Un peu profond ruisseau calomnie'
led beautifully into PatrickMcGuiness's moving meditation on Mallarme's attempt
for his dead son, Anatole. Other papers in this colloquium (which
to write a tombeau
was one of the most unified of all of them, despite its apparently open-ended title,
'Situating Mallarme') saw Dee Reynolds's sensitive evocation of Mallarme's
influence on contemporary dance, Heath Lees's spirited and witty examination of
the complexities of the poet's response to Wagner, and Penny Florence's work in
progress on a CD-ROM of Un coup de des. Bertrand Marchal's presentation,
'Mallarm6 et les noces du Livre', drew on his familiarity with the manuscripts,
reread and reinterpretedfor the new Pleiade edition, with some significant changes
to earlier transcriptions. The leisurely pace of the Glasgow conference, leaving
ample time for discussions and socializing, and allowing for a sense of unity to build
in a group that came from places as far afield as Auckland, New Zealand and
Bloomington, Indiana, seemed fitting for a city marked by the clean lines and
delicate arabesques of Charles Rennie Macintosh. The conference was organized
by Gordon Millan, who will be bringing out many of the documents he and Carl
Barbier assembled and planned to publish with Flammarion. As far as I have been
able to ascertain, apart from an interview with Dee Reynolds on the BBC, this was
the only celebration of Mallarme in the United Kingdom in his centennial year.
Mallarme's evocation, in his study entitled 'Etalages',of a 'reseau de communications' may not have included the world-wide web, but he would certainly have
enjoyed finding himself transformed and represented in electronic media, and may
well have reformulated Uncoupdedis into something more digital. The commemorations at Sens, where Mallarme attended the lycee, were accompanied by a beautiful
2 The section on the
Budapest Mallarm6 conference was provided by Dr Heather Williams, to whom I wish
to express my thanks. I am also grateful to Professor Marshall Olds for providing a copy of the conference
programme.

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web site (www.mallarme.org/index2.htm), showing their artistic richness and

displaying the variety of papers at the conference held in late September. Again,
this was primarilyattended by French scholars, with a handful of contributionsfrom
elsewhere. The Musees de Sens produced two catalogues to accompany exhibitions
held at the Palais synodal from 28 June to 28 September 1998: LesEchosdeMallarme:
and the very attractive volume
Mallarmeet la typographie,
ducoupdedesa l'informatique.
entitled Mallarmeet les 'siens'.In addition to numerous photos and manuscripts
illustrating the relationships between the poet and his family and friends, the
exhibition included several objects, notably Genevieve's doll, a gold medallion with
the names of Stephane and Maria, and the poet's pipe, with its carving of a stocky
little horse.
Meanwhile, other conferences, smaller in size but equally serious in purpose and
outcome, were taking place in towns as far afield as Avallon and Iowa City. Home
to one of the country's best-known writing programmes, and renowned for the value
it places on the creative arts, the University of Iowa held a two-day Mallarme
conference, celebrating him in their fine art museum and exploring his relationships
with other arts. My own paper explored aspects of Mallarme's art of reading,
Marshall Olds spoke illuminatingly of the French poet's influence on novelist and
translator Paul Auster, Walter Strauss on 'Mallarme's Theater of the Abstract' and
Alan Nagel on 'Translations and Mallarme's mainssales' and graduate students
Jessica Locheed and Robert Hopson explored the poet's responses to art and music,
respectively.
While Cerisy's Mallarme was very French, the grey stone chateau set against the
lush countryside combining with the good home-cooked food to suggest a poet
deeply rooted in past values and very much part of France's heritage, the Mallarm&
who arose from the Melbourne, Australia, conference was altogether different, a
Mallarme of the I99OS, with scant time for eating and a quirky, stimulating
juxtaposition of conventional papers and avant-gardeperformances. It was perhaps
fitting, too, that the Australian commemoration of Mallarme's life and work should
be celebrated in Melbourne rather than Sydney. Of these two Australian cities,
Sydney is more sybaritic, Melbourne more intense, Sydney more consciously
beautiful, Melbourne more funky, Sydney more sophisticated, and Melbourne
more cultural. There is between them a rivalry unmatched by any other, above
Oxford and Cambridge, New York and Chicago. Yet it remains the fact that while
Australia's first great reader of Mallarme, the poet and scholar Chris Brennan,
between whose poetry and his own Mallarme claimed to detect 'une parente de
songe', taught at the University of Sydney, Mallarme studies moved to Melbourne
with the next generation and has stayed there ever since, producing a disproportionately high number of outstanding Mallarme scholars, notably A. R. Chisholm,
Lloyd Austin, Gardner Davies, James Lawler, and Peter Hambly. (Ross Chambers,
who participated in the conference by means of a characteristically witty and
idiosyncratic telegram, graduated from Sydney, where even the football is different,
as his telegram reminded us.)
Melbourne's celebrations, guided by Jill Anderson and Michael Graf, were
typical of that city's gritty and imaginative modernity of outlook. A beautifully titled
art exhibition, 'On the Ashes of the Stars,' at the Monash Art Gallery displayed
paintings and etchings by familiar names such as Manet, Matisse, Redon, and
Whistler, with a galaxy of works by contemporary artists, most of them living and

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Mallarmneat the Millennium

working in Melbourne. A stunningly imaginative performance based on 'Les Noces

d'Herodiade' and entitled 'Seam', in which dance, projections, light, and voice
combined to reconfigureMallarme's image of the Salome persona, took place in the
elegant surroundingsof the Alliance franyaise at the seaside resort of Saint Kilda, a
short and picturesque tram ride from the city centre. The Astra chamber music
Society presented a concert including Ravel's 'Soupir', astonishingly arranged for
sixteen-part choir, Debussy's 'Trois poemes de Stephane Mallarme', and a
dramatized performance of 'L'Apres-midi d'un Faune', based on the two piano
arrangement of Debussy's prelude. Two further concerts by the contemporary
music group re-soundpresented works by Cage and Boulez. The Tuesday evening
gatherings at the rue de Rome were imaginatively recreated by Russell Walsh, using
multiple readers to create a five-hour 'soundscape' based on texts drawn from
Mallarme's writings and from others influenced by him. In addition, an exhibition
at Melbourne University's Baillieu Library focused especially on the connections
between Mallarme and Australia, with, among other gems, a fine display of
Brennan's own works. The main railway station was the venue for a further
exhibition inspired by Mallarme, one that viewed Un coupdedesas the starting-point
for concrete and visual poetry, and featured work by almost two hundred visual
poets.
With all this going on from May through the entire year, the Mallarme
celebrations attracted the attention of the Australian Broadcasting Commission,
which devoted time to two programmes on the poet and his Australian links, the
first an interview with painter Imants Tillers, poet Robert Adamson, and myself,
the second a series of interviews with a range of writers and critics, beautifully
coordinated and arranged by Mireille Vignol. And if it is a bit too naive to imagine
Melbournites crying out 'all this and Heaven too', it is certainly the case that they
had a chance at least to discover Mallarme in an enormous variety of guises, since
in addition to enjoying these artistic interpretations, they could have attended two
back-to-back conferences, the first entitled 'AustralianDivagations: Mallarme and
the Twentieth Century', while the second brought together a group of Australian
and French writers with links to Mallarme. It was symptomatic of the energy and
apparent spontaneity of much of these celebrationsthat while the writers'conference
was taking place, an installation was gradually appearing around the walls of the
main hall, imaginatively recreating Mallarme's life through a series of photographs,
as though the writers' spoken contributions were somehow finding a visual
accretion.
If the sheer number of papers all given sequentially in the more academic
Divagationsconference occasionally led to muffled cries of'pitie pitie!' and a struggle
against the desire to 'ouvrir [la] bouche a l'astre efficace des vins', the richness and
variety, as well as the very high quality, of these presentations is a credit to the
organizer, Jill Anderson. She is also to be congratulated for bringing together wellknown figures from the field of Mallarme studies3and also younger scholars such as
Patricia Harris Stablein, Patrice Bougnon, and Thierry Alcoloumbre, and those
3 Among others, Jean-Luc Steinmetz on Mallarme's image in the highly influential NouvelleRevuefranfaise,
Mary Anne Caws on Bloomsbury's depictions of Mallarme, James Lawler introducing the book exhibition
with a characteristically beautiful evocation of the French poet's links with Australia as well as a more formal
study of the relationships between Mallarme and Claudel, and Peter Hambly with an equally characteristic
illumination of the 'Tombeau de Baudelaire' in the light of the poet's contemporaries.

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from different disciplines, Simon During, better known for his work on Patrick
White, Roger Benjamin, currently a Research Fellow in the Centre for CrossCultural Research at the AustralianNational University, and John Hawke from the
Faculty of Creative Arts at the University of Wollongong. J'enpasseetdesmeilleurs.
Two of the poets who spoke at this part of the commemorations also participated
in the Writers' Event: Chris Wallace Crabbe, well-known Australian poet and
academic, and the French poet Michel Deguy. They were joined by poet Robert
Adamson in a session that also included a reading ofJean-Luc Steinmetz's poems. I
hope it will not be seen as invidious if I single out Robert Adamson, for while the
other three are able to read Mallarme in the original (Chris Wallace-Crabbe
providing a fine proof of his skillsin this regard with a translationof the sonnetenyx),
Robert Adamson carries with him, and has done for decades, a little paperback
edition with a prose translation at the bottom of each page, and from this has
deduced a Mallarme of singular beauty and power, whom he distils into his own
highly original and resonant poetry. The writers' conference had as its principal
aim that of presenting nineteenth-century symbolism as an alternative tradition to
modernism in the evolution of Australian poetry, and it did so both by round-table
discussion and by performances, notably Michael Farrell'sremarkable 'translation'
of Mallarme's notes for the never-completed memorial poem for his son Anatole
into a series of English anagrams for each line of the original, and Alex Selenitsch's
endearing tale of his continuing attempt to create a typographic version of
Brennan's pastiche of Un coupde des, his 'Prose-verse-poster-algebraic-symbolicriddle-musicopoematographoscope'. And I find I still have not mentioned the
conference's launch of Textbase, a writing collective and a visual arts project that
can be visited at www.skynet.apana.org.au/ samiam/textbase.htm, and the
special number of the poetry journal Boxkite,devoted to contemporary French
poetry (details fromjtaylor@ideal.net.au).
Other Australian tributes to Mallarme include an exhibition in Hobart,
Tasmania, with Mary Knights as curator, entitled Whispers,Lies and Text,focusing
on visual artists who use text in their work, with the aim of reflecting one aspect of
the poet's vast influence on art and literaturein the century after his death.
It was a year for publications: in addition to the long-awaited first volume of the
new Pleiade, a twelfth volume was added to the correspondence, bringing together
the additions and corrections Lloyd Austin and Bertrand Marchal had been
publishing in FrenchStudiessince the appearance of what must now be called not the
final but the penultimate volume. The new Pleiade, devoted largely to the poetry
and including a selection of the correspondence, is a remarkable testament to
Marchal's erudition and devotion to the texts. It includes pieces discovered since
the publication of the I945 Pleiade, notably the sonnet 'Dans le jardin', the notes
for a 'Tombeau d'Anatole' retranscribedand emended, the notes entitled 'Epouser
la notion' and the version of Un coupde dis as it appeared in Cosmopolis.
Its riches
are such that it is sure to inaugurate a new era in Mallarme studies, especially,
perhaps, concerning questions of genetics. Garnier-Flammarion produced an
edition of Mallarme's Ecritssurl'art,with a useful introduction by Michel Draguet,
although the volume itself adds little to our knowledge of the articles that this most
sensitive friend of Manet and Whistler devoted to painting. We owe to the Editions
descendresa fine facsimile edition of the manuscripts for the collection of rhyming
addresses Mallarme considered publishing under the title Les Loisirsde la poste,

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Mallarme at the Millennium

beautifully photographed here by Michel Nguyen and including a postface by the

Doucet's chief librarian, Yves Peyre. Olivier Daulte and Manuel Dupertuis have
combined with the Bibliotheque des arts to produce the letters that Mallarme and
Berthe Morisot wrote to each other. While these letters were available before, this
volume allows them to be read as an exchange and as proof of a growing friendship.
In addition to conference proceedings, notably Mallarmein the TwentiethCentury,
there were collections of essays and special numbers of periodicals:Poesie,Romantisme,
and Europe,each devoted a special number to Mallarme.4 In addition, Le Magazine
litterairecelebrated him in its September number, with articles by, among others,
Musee d'Orsay curator Luce Abeles, metrics specialist Henri Meschonnic, Bernard
Delvaille, editor of a very rich and varied anthology of symbolist poetry, and Jill
Anderson, organizer of the Melbourne conference.
Hans Therre published his portrait of Mallarme with Deutscher Taschenbuch
d'uneaouvre:
Verlag, while analyses of the poems appeared in Pierre Brunel's Lectures
lespoesiesde StiphaneMallarmeou echecau neant,and in Folio's PascalDurandcommente
'Poesies'deStephane
Mallarme.Daniele Wieckowskiproduced her study of Mallarm&'s
poetics, with the fascinating subtitle of 'La fabrique des Iridees'. Jean Michel
Nectoux's interdisciplinaryinterests and knowledge animate his beautifully written
and produced Mallarme.un clairregarddansles tenebres,
peinture,musique,
poesie,which
concludes with an extremely interesting and illuminating attempt to produce a
catalogue of the works of art the poet owned, including the Nadar photo of
Baudelaire and the Follain engraving of Rochegrosse's portrait of Banville in his
library, his bonnet on his head and his little dog at his feet. Since parodies of
Mallarme have been written since the I870s, it is hardly surprising that the
centennial year should see more of them, notably Jim Clinefelter's A Throwof the
SnoreWillSurgethePotatoes.
Mallarme was celebrated in other media, too. The radio station France Culture
devoted two programmes to him, on Io September with Paul Benichou, Michael
Draguet,Jean-Michel Nectoux, andJean-Luc Steinmetz, and another on 5 October
in Panorama
with Christian Giudicelli. The French television channel Arte showed
Jean-Paul Fargier'simaginative and richly documented film, LesMardisdeMallarme,
which was also on view at the Musee d'Orsay's exhibition. Two composers were
commissioned to write pieces for the centenary. Denis Cohen's 'Voiles', ambitiously
inspired by both Un coupde des and 'La Chevelure', is orchestrated for clarinet,
soprano clarinet, trumpet, alto, cello, and taped voice with 'dispositifelectronique'.
Sylvano Bussotti, who combines the multiple talents of composer, artist, writer,
theatre producer, and costume designer, produced a striking 'aesthetic score'
embellished with a finely drawn faun amidst reeds, and entitled 'Questo fauno', a
piece for three instruments, bass, and narrator, inspired by 'Monologue'. Both
works were performed in concerts at the Orsay in late December and again in
January.
it was hardly surprising that
With Poesieson the programme for the agregation,
Paris vii-Rue d'Ulm should devote several 'journies de lecture' to the volume. The
Sorbonne offered its own 'colloque universitaire' jointly organized by Jacques
Noiray and Andre Guyaux, while the library at the Centre Pompidou devoted an
4 Conference proceedings still forthcoming include those from Budapest, Glasgow, Melbourne, and New
York; essays include Temple's Meetingswith Mallarme,and Mallarme,ed. by Raoul Klein.

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afternoon to a study of the genetique

of Mallarme's writings, and the Musee d'Orsay
offered a series of public lectures on Mallarme and the arts. Marseille, whose cabaret
is known for its own Mardis, sponsored a lecture by Richard di Rocco, while
litteraire
Avallon's costume museum was inspired to put on an exhibition of Mallarme and
fashion.
If it was fitting that the Mallarme celebrations began with a departure from a
railway station for ever associated with him, it was even more fitting that the major
exhibition celebrating his achievements was held in a railway station from which no
journey can any more depart, except in the imagination. The Musee d'Orsay's
Mallarme exhibition was exceptionally rich and varied, well organized, and
frequently very moving. Drawing on the collections of the Jacques Doucet library
and the Mallarme museum at Valvins, as well as numerous items in private hands,
the curatorswere able to show a large number of manuscriptsof poems, letters, and
prose pieces, as well as items associated with his role as a teacher, including an
amusing cardboard-mounted drawing showing a man demonstrating a putative
pronunciation of English 'th', a drawing destined to mislead anyone trying to use it.
Portraitsof Mallarme by Manet, Renoir (the one he disliked because, as he rightly
said, it made him look like a chubby banker), Gaugin, Munch, Whistler, and
Vallotin, photographs by Nadar and Degas, family portraits, including the two
copies made by their stepmother of Mallarme and his sister as children, the tiny
Whistler portrait of Genevieve Mallarme entitled 'Rose et gris', portraits and
photographs of Mery Laurent, and paintings of the house at Valvins as well as
objects he owned (Gauguin's carving inspired by the 'Apres-midid'un faune' for
instance) or that he signed (pebbles from Honfleur and a series of fans) rounded out
a vision of the man and of his work. Those familiar with Mallarme's biography and
his correspondence could delight in seeing the painting entitled 'Le TrainaJeufosse'
that Monet gave him in compensation for not being able to illustrate one of the
prose poems.
Most imaginative of all was the room devoted to the late work, around the walls
of which had been reproduced Un coupde des, revealing in all its suggestive and
elliptical beauty the full force of this first great visual poem. The manuscriptversion
of the poem, still held in private hands but lent for this exhibition, was perhaps the
most important single piece, its documentary value further enhanced by the
presence beside it of the proofs for the envisaged but abortive Vollard edition,
showing Mallarme's corrections for alignment and spacing.
The Mallarme 'year' ended in New York in February 1999, with a typically New
York multi-media and international celebration, complete with dice cake, readings
of Un coupde des, and an exhibition. The City University of New York graduate
centre's performance room provided a suitably stark setting for a ballet inspired by
Un coupde des and previously performed in Philadelphia. With the performers
dressed in stiff white sheets on which were transcribed the lines of the poem, the
dance itself was carried out by the floodlight moving from 'page' to 'page' as the
performers unfolded the poem before us. The recording of Yves Bonnefoy reading
the poem, the showing of Man Ray's exuberantly exploratory movie, and a virtuoso
recital performance of Un coupde des translated and explicated, all brought this
enigmatic work sharply into focus within the field of modernism and beyond. The
conference papers themselves represented a productively eclectic mixture between
the analytical, the speculative, and the creative. A California foursome, book

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682

Mallarmeat theMillennium

designers Felicia White and Gary Young, and translatorsD. J. Waldie and Elizabeth
Jackson, explored the challenges and satisfactions of putting together the English
translation of Un coupde des in a version as close as possible to the poet's original
vision. Their discussion of the problems and solutions of such an undertaking
conveyed a sense of pleasure and excitement that quickly carried to the audience.
Other speakers focused on the poet's links with painters, on his delight in food, on
his fascination with the fleeting aspects of modernity, on his role as teacher of
and of his witty prose
English. There were explorations of Uncoupdedes,of Herodiade,
of
his
with theatre and
as
well
as
studies
fascination
poem, 'L'Ecclesiastique',
parody, and his influence on Spanish-speakingwriters.
The New Yorkconference was also a celebration of the Hunter College exhibition
of Mallarme materials lent by the Bibliotheque Jacques Doucet and others. In
addition to items that had been on view at the Musee d'Orsay, this exhibition, with
its handsome catalogue, A Painter'sPoet, included two contemporary works by
husband and wife team Alastair Noble and Kathy Bruce. Noble's white marble
'Tomb for Mallarme', beautifully lit from within, and Bruce's fascinating little box
both draw
with its ship and dice, entitled Comocion,
cerebrales,
Contucidn,yCompresion
marine
of
Un
de
des
and
both
from
the
coup
speak eloquently to
imagery
inspiration
the poet's continuing ability to inspire. One enigma was posed by the exhibition,
however: this was the portrait by Charles Giron, entitled 'Stephane Mallarme' and
dated 1889. The problem with this portrait is that while those by Renoir, Manet,
Degas, Gauguin, Munch, and Whistler all predictably show different versions of
Mallarme, they all nevertheless have an airdefamille,leaving us with the impression
that were we to meet the poet today we would recognize him. Giron offers a blandly
unrecognizable figure, seated on furniturethat resembles neither that of Valvins nor
that of the rue de Rome. Nevertheless, if Mallarme posed in the artist'sown studio,
no mention of his doing so can be found either in the correspondence or in any of
the biographies. So is this really Mallarme at all? Or has the New York exhibition
revealed further versions of the poet, hitherto unsuspected? And what were
Mallarme's relationships,if any, with this Swiss painter?
What did we gain from all this activity around the centenary?First,without doubt
Mallarme's name and to some extent his work became somewhat more familiar to
a wider public, especially perhaps in France. While the Mus6e d'Orsay did not
follow the lead of the Chicago Art Institute, which provided visitors to its Mary
Cassatt exhibition with the opportunity to buy dressing-gownsor towels inspired by
the paintings, thereby denying Mallarme enthusiaststhe joy of stocking up on their
very own ptyx or a personal copy of 'Le Train a Jeufosse' or even the plaid shawl
and rocker seen in the Nadar photograph, Mallarme nevertheless became a more
familiar figure during the course of the year. For specialists, the Mallarme year will
have served to make available a large number of studies of the poet's work, it has
provided a sense of community among scholars from many different countries, and
it has left a remarkablevisual record, preserved in such beautiful catalogues as those
produced by the Mus6e d'Orsay, Hunter College, and the museums of Sens. The
publication of the first volume of the new Pleiade gives more variants and more
transcriptions than were previously available, and the focus on Mallarme and his
circle arising both from the exhibitions and from such studies as that ofJean-Michel
Nectoux brings together critical and creative writing and contextualizes it more
wide-rangingly than ever before. While there is a risk in any such undertaking that

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ROSEMARY

LLOYD

683

the poet may become submerged in the weight of materials or find himself
transformed into some barely recognizable idealization, the title Henri Meschonnic
gave his piece in the Magazine litteraire, 'Liberez Mallarme', remains only partly
pertinent. Transparent and nocturnal, as Claude Estaban describes it, Mallarme's
work seems more sharply present, more poignantly questioning at the end of the
year than it was at the beginning.
INDIANA UNIVERSITY

ROSEMARY LLOYD

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