A Throw of the Dice: The Life of Stephane Mallarme

by Gordon Millan

Stephane Mallarme is one of the most influential French poets of the last hundred years. Father of Symbolism, friend of Manet and defender of the Impressionists, supporter of Zola and Rodin, he was at the very center of French creative life at the high point of late-nineteenth-century culture. His emphasis on the limitations of human consciousness and the reflexive nature of expression mark him as a seminal figure in Modernism. As George Steiner has said, Mallarme, along with Joyce, Kafka, Beckett, and Borges, is one of "the master-builders of modern literature."
Gordon Millan's excellent biography, the first of Mallarme in fifty years, draws on unpublished correspondence and on new documentation, humanizing this elusive figure and bringing to life an intellectual adventure of rare intensity. In the process, Mallarme's poetry is brought into a new and sharper focus.

389 pages, Hardcover

First published March 14, 1994

Reviews

[Alyosha · Rating 3 out of 5]

Millan provides an ample glimpse into the life of this writer's writer, though the analysis of these texts or writings remains for the most part lacking. This is especially concerning given Millan's conceit that Mallarmé's writing must be understood in conjunction with his life - for herein we have the life lacking much of the work. We have the life - that is to say, the facts; but to think with Mallarmé one must follow the inverse aspect of this life, which binds it to the writing. One must follow the dying of Mallarmé, suspended eternally before us in the always yet to be translated (that is, ever untranslatable) saying of the poetry, the inscription of the writing, and the passioned agony which emerged with the faulted birth of this work. The other side or aspect of this double work, divided in itself from itself (in dédoublement), remains forgotten, obscured so as to appear as though it never were, that it were not lacking - it appears insofar as it does not appear. Millan provides an exterior portrait, or perhaps even just a frame and a dedication, but the work itself remains (necessarily) absent. A portrait in white, void of a portrait - the only virgin is the one that never yet was, that remains ever yet to be.

[david-baptiste · Rating 4 out of 5]

a good solid bio