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A contribution to: Myth

Edited by John McKeane and Joanna Neilly

MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities 5

Modern Humanities Research Association

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Abstract.  In twentieth century Mallarmé scholarship there are two books which famously deal with ‘le drame solaire’ as a key element of Mallarmé’s literary production. The first is Gardner Davies’s Mallarmé et le drame solaire, and the second La religion de Mallarmé by Bertrand Marchal. Davies provides readings of poems by Mallarmé which stage the solar drama and is guided in these readings by his interpretation of the principle of transposition in Mallarmé’s work, which is seen for instance in ‘Théodore de Banville’, where the poet speaks of ‘La divine transposition, pour l’accomplissement de quoi existe l’homme’ which ‘va du fait à l’idéal’. According to this reading the sunset is a central motif in Mallarmé’s work because it enacts the movement of negation through which natural phenomena are destroyed in their existence and subsequently resurrected ideally in the poetic work. The poetic Absolute would correspond to the success of this transposition. In Maurice Blanchot’s readings of Mallarmé this conclusion is fundamentally put into question. The work of the negative cannot arrive at a final resolution and the work turns to an interrogation of its origin. Blanchot does not explicitly deal with ‘le drame solaire’ as a motif in Mallarmé’s work, but he does make an interpretation of the myth of Orpheus the ‘displaced centre’ of L’espace littéraire. Of interest in this essay is that this reading takes the Orpheus story as a kind of solar myth, and ‘littérature’, in the particular sense he understands this word/activity, is confronted by the other night, the night which the Orphic text contemplates as it fails to resolve itself in the calm of the first night. In this essay, I will begin by turning to La religion de Mallarmé, the second book dedicated to ‘le drame solaire’ in Mallarmé’s work, in order to suggest a proximity with Blanchot’s reading of the myth of Orpheus. By making this rapprochement I hope to suggest another perspective from which to consider both Blanchot’s writings and ‘le drame solaire’ in Mallarmé’s texts. If we see ‘le drame solaire’ as the site of the recollection of an originary trauma repressed until its resurgence in the work of Mallarmé (and if we pay attention to Blanchot’s reading of Orpheus as a solar myth) then we can use it as a means to account for Mallarmé’s significance in Blanchot’s work. From this perspective, it will be argued, we can gain a fuller understanding of Blanchot’s reading of Mallarmé as a site of passage to what he calls the ‘l’autre nuit’.

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