L'Esprit Créateur

Book Reviews scripts, including a page of die Coup de dés. The essays, of interest to Mallarmistes and a wider public alike, offer a suggestive tour d'horizon of Mallarmé's contribution to the culture of the last 100 years. Peyré himself has two essays, the first an imaginative and beautifully written meditation on Mallarmé's invention of a poetic language and a persona, die second an exploration of his attraction to painting, which Peyré argues is more cerebral, less spontaneous man that of Baudelaire, and shaped above all by friendships and his realization of Manet as his double. Jean Starobinski explores the evolution in Mallarmé's poetry of flowers, as a gift leading to die dirow of the dice. Bertrand Marchai, volume one of whose impeccably annotated edition of die new Pléiade Mallarm é also appeared in die centennial year, explores the apparent absence of the contemporary world in Poésies, but argues that the conflict between an economic order and a symbolic that describes all human reality is explored in Divagations. Marchai also offers a brief survey of Mallarm é's response to contemporary literature, a survey stamped by the critic's sense of Mallarmé's essential isolation within mat intellectual context. For Malcolm Bowie the initial violence of pose and affectation in die early poetry is later transformed into die violence of the act of writing itself. Luce Abeles reflects on his complex response to the illustrated book, while Ivanka Stoi'anova charts die links between die poet and music, most interestingly exploring Mallarmé's préfiguration of much contemporary music, with its fascination with silence, the interplay of music and text or graphic, and die concept of the open work. Sylvia Massias focuses on Mallarmé's vision of the dancer as gestural poem, while Michèle Finck contemplates die relatively minor influence die poet exerted over German writers, and James Lawler traces the evolution of Australian Mallarm é studies from me poet Christopher Brennan. The most moving and die most original contribution is from Yves Bonnefoy, whose densely argued meditation on Igitur and photography presents Igitur as reflective, like photography itself, of a desire to represent vision wimout comprehension, to indicate the strangeness of the world, but also to insist on the hie et nunc of human experience. This is certainly a collection anyone interested in art, music, and poetry in the late nineteenth century will want to own and will find pleasure in exploring and contemplating. Rosemary Lloyd Indiana University Michael Temple, ed. Meetings with Mallarmé in Contemporary French Culture. Exeter: U of Exeter P, 1998. Pp. 276. This book draws us into a community of 20th-century admiring readers who have variously confused diemselves with Mallarmé. Michael Temple situates us with friendly advice in die intimate but not too critical position of Mallarmé's wife and daughter—who in Degas' well-known photograph dimly look on as one luminary (the photographer) captures a meeting of another (Renoir) with die Master, as well as his own light in the mirror. Thus, Temple prepares us for the experience of reading his selection of essays, which with few exceptions focus more on how a constellation of thinkers in French culture have set about constructing Mallarmé's image in relation to Üieir own than on the practice of reading Mallarmé per se. In fact, Malcolm Bowie's essay, which examines word-play on derivatives of separare and parare in Mallarmé's "Prose pour des Esseintes" and Lacan 's "Positions de l'inconscient," is die only one framed purely in terms of a parallel between the writings of Mallarmé and diose of another author, as opposed to highlighting either die poet's influence or his exemplarity. Perhaps this is why Bowie's essay is the one revealing me most stunning, multi-faceted parity. Far from a haphazard compilation, the volume is ingeniously constructed, with the essays unfolding in a reciprocally illuminating fashion. The book begins with Rachel Killick's careful analysis of the complex relationship between Mallarmé and Valéry. In the latter's silencing or sacVol . XL, No. 3 113 L'Esprit Créateur rificing of Mallarmé's texts by subordinating them to the interest of mymologizing his personal...