The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Mallarmé in Prose by Stéphane Mallarmé. Trans. Jill Anderson, et al.
Robert Buckeye

Stéphane Mallarmé. Mallarmé in Prose. Trans. Jill Anderson, et al. Ed. Mary Ann Caws. New Directions, 2001. 152 pp. Paper: $14.95.

La Dernière Mode (The Latest Fashion) was the title of the magazine that Mallarmé edited in which he wrote everything in each issue under different pseudonyms and in different voices. One cannot imagine an enterprise further removed from Mallarmé’s own poetic project. His poetry cannot be understood as dernier mode unless we read the term as he does (as this book makes us understand). For Mallarmé, dernier mode is never anything more than an acknowledgment of failure; we use the latest and most fashionable in language and thought because we cannot make the ineffable speak and we must say something, somehow, to deny what cannot be denied. All of Mallarmé’s writing begins and ends with that silence; the dernier mode can never be anything more than premier mode, endlessly; the blank page stares out from anything written on it. “She dances as if she wore nothing,” Mallarmé writes; as if she were, at last, herself, and needed no covering of any kind to explain, justify, place; as if no form can say more than her own. For Mallarmé to write about dernier mode is to acknowledge the binary dialectic of the enterprise; if it is not poetry, even if it can never be, it is all, always, dernier mode. In these essays and observations about dance, music, art, theater and performance; in his consideration of pipes, furniture, and female bicycling gear; and in his examination of solitude and the bucolic, Mallarmé asks how it is possible to express what cannot be expressed, “the question whether there is any reason to write at all.” “One has to locate oneself somewhere,” he writes. Mallarmé is like Orpheus, Roland Barthes writes, “who can save what he loves only by renouncing it.” We cannot call what he writes literature, even if it might be the only literature possible. [Robert Buckeye]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Mallarmé in Prose by Stéphane Mallarmé. Trans. Jill Anderson, et al. Robert Buckeye Stéphane Mallarmé. Mallarmé in Prose. Trans. Jill Anderson, et al. Ed. Mary Ann Caws. New Directions, 2001. 152 pp. Paper: $14.95. La Dernière Mode (The Latest Fashion) was the title of the magazine that Mallarmé edited in which he wrote everything in each issue under different pseudonyms and in different voices. One cannot imagine an enterprise further removed from Mallarmé’s own poetic project. His poetry cannot be understood as dernier mode unless we read the term as he does (as this book makes us understand). For Mallarmé, dernier mode is never anything more than an acknowledgment of failure; we use the latest and most fashionable in language and thought because we cannot make the ineffable speak and we must say something, somehow, to deny what cannot be denied. All of Mallarmé’s writing begins and ends with that silence; the dernier mode can never be anything more than premier mode, endlessly; the blank page stares out from anything written on it. “She dances as if she wore nothing,” Mallarmé writes; as if she were, at last, herself, and needed no covering of any kind to explain, justify, place; as if no form can say more than her own. For Mallarmé to write about dernier mode is to acknowledge the binary dialectic of the enterprise; if it is not poetry, even if it can never be, it is all, always, dernier mode. In these essays and observations about dance, music, art, theater and performance; in his consideration of pipes, furniture, and female bicycling gear; and in his examination of solitude and the bucolic, Mallarmé asks how it is possible to express what cannot be expressed, “the question whether there is any reason to write at all.” “One has to locate oneself somewhere,” he writes. Mallarmé is like Orpheus, Roland Barthes writes, “who can save what he loves only by renouncing it.” We cannot call what he writes literature, even if it might be the only literature possible. [Robert Buckeye]

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