Etalages: Mallarmé displaying "the fascination of what's difficult"

Preface (2014) by Rosemary LloydI first encountered the writing of Stephane Mallarme in my third year at the University of Adelaide and was instantly, and permanently, enthralled by his enigmatic and beautiful use of language. My honours thesis, directed by Peter Hambly and inspired by Lloyd Austin's article in Syntheses '"L'Apres-midi d'un faune': Essai d'explication",1 set out to examine the critical approaches to the poem and the "tres haute et belle idee"2 that underpins it. The excitement I felt in reading not just the poem but Mallarme's poetry and prose more generally still shines out in the opening sentences to that thesis: "Des qu'il aborde un poeme de Mallarme, le lecteur se trouve devant une langue nouvelle. Cette langue est d'autant plus etrange qu'elle semble, a premiere vue, familiere." When I came to write the following article for the number that AJFS dedicated to honouring the many contributions of Peter Hambly, there was no question that its subject would be Mallarme and its focus yet again that strangely familiar language.While "L'Apres-midi d'un faune" had drawn its inspiration from a blend of classical mythology and exotic location, Mallarme also had the ability to take a banal newspaper article, written in the kind of language, he wittily argues, that most readers expect to find in everything they read, and transform it into a meditation on reading, literature and the ways in which a simple anecdote can take fire in the furnace of the imagination. Like Yeats turning the irritations of running a theatre into the pleasure of poetry-his fluid rhythms and unstrained rhymes producing a cunning counterpoint to the surface meaning of his statement that "The fascination of what's difficult / Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent / Spontaneous joy and natural content / Out of my heart"3-Mallarme uses the image of burdened bookcases not so much to explore the problems of a struggling book trade as to display his own literary values and preferences and to convince us that they should be ours too.And what of Mallarme now, when poetry seems most at risk, when printed books appear likely to yield to electronically produced versions? The poet's invocation in "Etalages" of a "reseau de communications"4 linking kindred spirits may have changed form, turned into a different kind of web with different kinds of connecting threads creating different varieties of networks, but it may be that the world-wide web is in the process of producing a wider and more greatly enriched readership for Mallarme. To read a digital form of a poem, with dictionaries and the equivalent of encyclopedias at your fingertips and with instant access to images, is often to enter into a deeper encounter with the work, but it can also pose the temptation of merely going further away from it, pursuing threads that, however inviting and intriguing, ultimately have little to do with the original poem. To some extent, Mallarme sanctions such a reading with his evocation of the sailor setting out not with a specific goal in mind but "au seul souci de voyager". But for all that, there comes a moment when the reader has to grapple with the poem, on her own, drawing on but leaving behind that "reseau de communications" if she is ever to share the fascination of what's difficult.Sharing the fascination of whatever it may have been that they found arresting, intriguing or irritating in French Studies, the numerous contributors whose articles have graced the periodical over fifty years have greatly added to my pleasure in reading and significantly extended my knowledge of the topic. For this, I am deeply grateful to the journal and its editors.Yeats, who once went to visit Mallarme but found the master absent, bringing audiences in Oxford and Cambridge the vital news about vers libre,5 laments, in one of his pseudo-sonnets, thatThe fascination of what's difficultHas dried the sap out of my veins, and rentSpontaneous joy and natural contentOut of my heart. …