Mallarmé: The Transcendence of Language and the Aesthetics of the Book

Abstract

Mallarmé’s dream of a book in which all existence is to be contained is predicted upon the isolation of poetic language between the world of things and the universe of meaning. Ordinary speech is structured in order to mediate between these two worlds, but Mallarmé seeks to liberate poetic language from this mediating function, and to establish it as a reality in a world of its own, by substituting the syntax of music for the syntax of speech. Moreover, the syntax of music is to be realized typographically: the words of the poem are to be arranged within the spatial field of the white page in a way that describes a musical structure. Thus the world will find expression in a book—not, however, as a structure of meanings, but in abstract form as a system of pure relations. Mallarmé gestures toward his ideal book in Un Coup de dés, in which a simple narrative is organized, not temporally as a sequence of episodes, but spatially and typographically as a concurrence of themes that are distinguished chiefly by different point sizes of type. Thus typography becomes a principle of composition and the book itself a part of the poetic universe.