Reading, Attention, and Poetic Suggestion: ‘Éventail (de Madame Mallarmé)’

Abstract

Abstract Much like the shift from print to digital media today, the expansion of cheaper, more portable literature in nineteenth-century France led many readers to regard texts as destined for rapid consumption rather than careful contemplation. Responding to this development, Stéphane Mallarmé fashioned his poetry to resist casual reading and solicit halting, iterative processing instead. Scholars usually see this laboured engagement as resulting from his fragmented syntax, arcane vocabulary, and the number of phonetic, metrical, and lexical patterns competing for readers’ attention. However, as the following analysis of ‘Éventail (de Madame Mallarmé)’ demonstrates, the difficulty of reading Mallarmé’s work is also a function of the visible properties of the text — not only the typography and white spaces discussed in studies of Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard, but punctuation, line breaks, and even the patterning of letters. Adopting terminology from cognitive science to identify Mallarmé’s innovative tactics, this article explains how the visual texture of his poetry interacts with its other features (aural, syntactic, semantic, and so on) to interrupt the continuity of reading and enhance the poetics of suggestion for which he is celebrated.