MLN

“Je suis pour—aucune illustration.” With his characteristically dashed hesitation and enigmatic irony, Mallarmé’s opinion about new novels illustrated by photographs leaves a puzzle. Is he for—or sharply against—mixed media books? What relationship do text and image have in his poetics—married, divorced, mistress, prostitute, or pacsé? Arnar arrests our eye at the word “illustration.” Her landmark study establishes a distinction between the tawdry ornament of mere illustration, and the original print of an artist’s book or the authorial design of the experimental book. The master poet dismisses poorly [End Page 967] mixed media and facile representation with a flick of the wrist, yet his sleight of hand endorses organically hybrid works. As the fields of arts and literature reconsider their relation to media, this study renews Mallarmé’s relevance to his period and to esthetic theory.

Arnar’s title tweaks Mallarmé’s essay from Divagations (1897) “Le livre, instrument spirituel.” The exclusion of the spiritual demonstrates perfectly the limitation and premise of her research: a thorough practical history of Mallarmé’s pioneering involvement in the burgeoning art forms of the book. He revered the material object of book as much as he did its language—indeed book and language become inseparable. As an instrument for the highest form of “democratic” practice, Arnar frames Mallarmé’s characteristic opacity as a means to emancipate the reader from authorial (and authoritative) intention to create her own meaning. More importantly, this esthetic spotlights the book as a public site of negotiation. Here lies Arnar’s intervention, to fuse modernism’s emancipatory poetics to a fine art book object that can diffuse its vanguard reading practice within a saturating media culture.

While seemingly every study involving Mallarmé sets up camp within his interior world, Arnar writes a cultural history of the outside world of print through which he happens to pass. The real subject of the book is the sector of Parisian print culture where Mallarmé was one player, and its optimal case study. Names like Alfred Cadart, Alphonse Lemerre, Ambroise Vollard, Édouard Manet and Charles Cros replace the typical list of continental esthetic philosophers, poets and literary critics that populate Mallarmé research. The first chapter quickly moves to render a straightforward humanist version of Mallarmé’s poetics, preferring Rancière’s optimistic formulation. This version stands within the tradition of Blanchot, Derrida, and Kristeva in their opposition to attacks on modernist obscurity and decadence; however, Arnar’s idiom of print culture follows the full turn to history and cultural studies.

The study’s four parts divide this print culture into a review and three general subjects: the livre de peinture, the livre d’avant-garde, and public mediation. The narrative arc moves from pre-1860s France to a twentieth century heritage, but its nonlinear development is not rigidly incremental nor biographical. The first chapter succinctly organizes a century of Mallarmé criticism; although it does not detail research in the last decade, it includes useful overviews of Mallarmé’s importance to visual art theory from Greenberg to Krauss, and of his reception by the Frankfurt School. The second chapter jumps back to “The Heroic legacy of the book” in mid-nineteenth century France, beginning with Baudelaire’s hierarchy of print forms and their relation to the mores of the public sphere. “Industrial” mass literature was traditionally more vulgar and more illustrated, while proper books carry an ethical charge beyond the mere album.

Upon this background, chapter three traces the development of the livre de peinture or artist’s book “From illustration to original print” (ch.3). Arnar recounts the etching revival from the Romantic period to Manet’s work as original printmaker, with its relation to the liberating esthetic of open-air [End Page 968] painting. Chapter four discusses the strategy of exquisite limited editions through the cases of Le Corbeau, L’après...