[…] I am dead and resurrected with the jewelled key of the ultimate treasure chest in my mind.’18 He intended the as yet unfinished Herodias as a central part of a huge work that he thought would take him twenty years. This huge theatre project, a sort of modern mystery play—his answer to Wagner—would incorporate mime, dance, music, and text. It consumed him, but was never completed. The ‘Scene’, written in 1865, was published largely unedited in 1871; but Mallarmé abandoned the ‘Overture’ and worked on the ‘Prelude’, of which the only completed part is the ‘Canticle of John the Baptist’, right up to his death in 1898.

Mallarmé’s thought seems dominated also by the principle of a mythical, all-encompassing Book. Although the concept behind the Work or Book remained constant, its envisaged shape kept changing over his career. In 1885 he writes to Verlaine: ‘I have always dreamed of attempting something else, with the patience of an alchemist. […] A book, quite simply, in many volumes, a book that is truly a book, structured and premeditated. […] I will go further. I will say: the Book, persuaded that there is only one. […] The Orphic explanation of the Earth that is the sole task of the poet and the supreme literary game.’19 The Book would be a system of all thought in language. A year later he was reported as saying: ‘I believe that Literature, rediscovering its origins that are a combination of Art and Science, will provide us with a Theatre of which the performances will be the truly modern religious celebration.’20 His grand, totalizing ambition would never bear its final fruit. He conceived of the Book more as a guiding light in his search for secular Truth than as a realizable goal: he proved ‘by the parts that have been written that such a book exists and that I have knowledge of what I have not been able to accomplish’.21 It lends a beguiling cosmic dimension of incomparable grandeur and scope to the theatres of reading, to the performative and permutational structures of his ‘supreme literary game’.

‘Sonnet Allegorical of Itself’

It has been argued that Herodias, in its various forms, allegorically represents the emergence of a new kind of writing that explores the reflexivity of language, that is to say the self-reflecting, self-enacting power of language freed from its representational function. The icy virgin in the ‘Scene’ (1865) says: ‘I love the horror of being virgin. […] For myself alone I bloom, in isolation.’ ‘Gift of the Poem’ and ‘Saint’, written in the same year, also offer examples.

‘With her pure nails offering their onyx’ is overloaded with such reflexivity. Written in 1868 after the ‘crisis’ period, under the title ‘Sonnet Allegorical of Itself, then revised in 1887, the verse seems born of language itself. In the second stanza, for example, commentators have devoted much ink to pondering the possible referents of ‘ptyx’. The debate highlights very well the relative inadequacy of traditional attempts to recuperate Mallarmé’s difficult poems as ‘intentional’ representations of the real world (which is not by any means to say that all attempts to find a degree of coherence in Mallarmé’s work are fruitless). For, cut free from immediate semantic reference, ‘ptyx’ asserts first and foremost its pure rhyming sonority. ‘On the empty room’s credences: no ptyx.’ The space left by the ptyx’s absence is filled by the material sound of the word itself. ‘Abolished bauble, sonorous inanity’: rhyme used for arbitrary ornamental effect has been abolished. The true representation of an object is achieved when the sound is reflected in and of itself. The stanza’s ‘-yx’ rhyme proliferates across the poem, carrying in its letter ‘x’ the symbol of its own reflexivity. Sound is literally born of the poem and gives rise to the poem.

The sonnet’s ambiguous syntax creates different semantic discontinuities. Although the first and third lines of the first stanza have recognizable syntactical structure, the second line, even after several rereadings, is likely to be puzzling. Its rhythm and sound pattern give it a certain authority, but its four elements are cut off from one another. The critic Malcolm Bowie writes: ‘The four ideas do not form part of a continuous syntactic sequence, but are free to develop new relationships of affinity or contrast among themselves.’22 Equally, the line begins a proposition that will not be completed until the fifth line.

Reading such verse requires a constant switching between waves of pure sonority and of sense that emanate from the multi-contoured texture of the verse surface. Valéry evokes the fluctuation inherent in modern verse as ‘that prolonged hesitation between the sound and the sense’.23 Mallarmé’s reader is pulled between those two simultaneously interwoven elements. The unfamiliar music arising from the unusual juxtaposition of words disorientates the ear: words dipped in and out of sound and sense prevent it from picking out immediate meanings.

Existence becomes both empty and yet resoundingly beautiful. Mallarmé’s verse explores a paradoxical, shifting world of speculation and uncertainty, setting up a new kind of contract with the reader. Productive reading entails that conflicting patterns be made, simultaneously held, tested, revised, and allowed to falter.

Reading Mallarmé

The opening poem or dedication of the verse collected by Mallarmé in 1894 launches the reader on a labyrinthine journey that will conceal and constantly defer its destination. ‘Toast’ is at once a giant, overarching metaphor for this journey, which is about travelling and exploring rather than arriving, and an enactment of it. There will be moments of illumination, where patterns of coherence, local and large-scale, seem to crystallize, and moments where those patterns evaporate and we feel utterly lost. What we face ultimately are the limits of knowledge and the limitations of language for expressing the world. ‘Toast’ was written in 1893 as a special sonnet for one of a series of banquets organized by the literary magazine La Plume, at which Mallarmé was the guest of honour. By this time Mallarmé had a very busy social life in Paris and was looked to as the undisputed leader of French Symbolist poetry.