Literature and ‘Universel Reportage’ in Mallarmé’s ‘Livre’

Abstract

ABSTRACTMallarmé’s writings offer two opposing views of the press. On the one hand, ‘Crise de vers’ casts ‘universel reportage’ as the enemy of true literature. On the other hand, ‘Quant au livre’ extols the profusion of literary texts in contemporary newspapers and outlines a bold vision of literary-journalistic hybridity. Both were published in Divagations (1897), Mallarmé’s final prose collection, which expresses his most fully realized theoretical position. Previous accounts of Mallarmé’s relationship to the press tend to emphasize either the hostility of the first text or the enthusiasm of the second without resolving the tension between them. Since Mallarmé was not an inherently contradictory thinker, I argue the opposition between literature and reportage in ‘Crise de vers’ can best be understood as part of an implicit dialectical movement that culminates in a rapturous synthesis of book and newspaper in ‘Quant au livre’.