The Last Word in Lyric: Mallarme's Silent Siren

Abstract

POSTROMANTic era in France, which lasted roughly from Louis-Napol?on Bonaparte's brutal dismissal of the Second Republic in December 1851 to the start of the First World War, is most often evoked as a prelude to modernism. Yet the unique force and ambition of its greatest poetry reflects the persistence of romantic faith in the privileged language of lyric to reveal the foundations of human desire. In the social order that emerged from the economic and political revolutions of the eighteenth century, the marketplace replaced the Old Regime's central redistribution system as the dominant social institu tion. foregrounding of secular exchange over ritual-based systems of interaction inspired Marx's words in the Communist Manifesto: The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. ... It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation.1 This was a Copernican revolution more profound than the astronomical one that had dislocated humanity from its anthropocentric universe. lesson of both these revolutions has been described in terms of human growth, whether as a Comtean passage from childhood to maturity or a Rousseauian fall from the generosity of youth into the cynical greed of age. But bourgeois society is neither a growing body nor a falling soul; it comprises a system of physical interactions (an economy) inextricably bound up with a system of representations (a culture) through which the significance of the first set is mediated. Unlike members of ritual-based societies, participants in the exchange-based social order can assume their role as agents only under the protection of a sense of individual significance, a personal sacred that guards the self against the shifting mimetic flows of the marketplace.