Mallarme ́’s pessimistic metaphysics [claims that] within matter – that shapes
infinity – there seems to be some deep-seated need to turn back on itself in order
to know itself. To shed light on its obscure infinity, matter seems to produce those
shreds of fire, those tatters of thought, called man. But infinite dispersion takes
hold of the Idea and scatters it. Man and contingency arise simultaneously and
engender one another.
(M 136 )
They are destined to disappear together.
With Mallarme ́’s “conversion” to critical poetry and the notion
of creating a “poem without men” which “must refuse to subordinate
words to a preconceived meaning, [it follows that] on the contrary, he
must arrange them so that a specific meaning emerges from their
juxtaposition” (M 138 ). It appears that the poet in his later work, at
least, is anticipating Foucault’s famous “death of the author” and its
replacement with the “author function,” commonly seen as a structural-
ist move.^28
The hero in spite of himselfOur third theme is complex and pervasive because it addresses the
problem of the unconscious that has plagued Sartre’s thought at least
sinceBeing and Nothingness. Here its focus is Sartre’s view of Mallarme ́’s
“conversion.” We have mentioned his materialism and the determinism
that it entailed. Sartre is alive to the threat of crass materialism, the
kind not softened by a dialectic. We see it in his call for the poet-hero
or martyr which Mallarme ́’s generation requires but that his contempor-
aries cannot produce: “Superstructures which are little more than
reflections of the existing social order...If such passive objectivity were
to be transcended, someone was needed who could internalize it, impose
his personal stamp on it, and live out the Paradox in all its contradictions
to the point of dying for it” (M 64 ). What is called for is a “dialectic” of
interiorization/exteriorization by an artist who will be drawn by “certain
(^28) Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?,” in Donald Bouchard (ed.),Language, Counter-
Memory, Practice(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), 120. It also gestures toward the
“automatic writing” of the surrealists, another reason why Sartre might have preferred the
early Mallarme ́.
Mallarme ́: the shadowy side of lucidity 393