Twenty-First-Century Symbolism: Verlaine, Baudelaire, Mallarmé. By Nikolaj Lübecker

Abstract

In this eloquent book, Nikolaj Lübecker provides a fresh way of reading three of the major poets of nineteenth-century France through the lens of what he calls the ‘non-anthropocentric’ turn in twenty-first-century scholarship. A new reading of Verlaine, Baudelaire, and Mallarmé, attuned to the way these poets decentre the human and elucidate the process of what Gilbert Simondon (and later Gilles Deleuze) called ‘individuation’, allows contemporary critics to understand how literature figures our relationship to the world as dynamic, entangled, in the process of becoming. Rather than impose a vocabulary derived from contemporary theory, the readings in this book develop complex and clear analyses of the unsettling forms of the poems studied; we are then invited to compare these discoveries to the work of well-known non-anthropocentric thinkers such as N. Katherine Hayles, Rosa Braidotti, Brian Massumi, and Mark Hansen. The chapters on Verlaine claim that what Lübecker calls the poet’s ‘haikus’ demonstrate that ‘poetry is a practice that allows the reader to sense the co-emergence and entwinement of the mental and the environmental’ (p. 8). The book then turns to Baudelaire; Lübecker shows how some of Baudelaire’s less-studied poems force us to think outside of the anthropocentric paradigm and engage with contemporary affect theory. From there, Lübecker goes on to show that Baudelaire’s art criticism proposes a theory of colour that moves us beyond subject–object dichotomies and towards an ecological way of thinking. Lübecker concludes with chapters on Mallarmé that build on the themes of the rest of the book, but he adds analogies to contemporary media theories to show the dangers and benefits — the ‘pharmacological’ aspect — of technology. What makes Lübecker’s book outstanding, and what guarantees that we will be discussing it for a long time, is that he takes to heart Mallarmé’s invitation and warning about the ‘Démon de l’analogie’; Lübecker sets out to show that these nineteenth-century poets can contribute to debates happening now. And yet the process of confronting these poems with the twenty-first century ends up putting into question the notion of ‘contemporaneity’, as is made clear through a reference to Proust’s simultaneous production of past and future (p. 9) and Mallarmé’s ‘Il n’est pas de Présent, non — un présent n’existe pas’ (cited p. 147). Lübecker, true to the ecological and non-anthropocentric ethos of the book, stays in the background, letting the texts speak among themselves, and yet he subtly performs operations, like Mallarmé, that trouble our critical certainties, such as placing Verlaine before Baudelaire, and labelling the three poets ‘twenty-first-century symbolists’. Our contemporary moment is not synchronous or homogeneous, and the contemporary theories evoked in the book bring us back to Deleuze, Barthes, Simondon, Bergson, Spinoza, and perhaps even further back to the pre-Socratics. Lübecker challenges us to think outside of fixed categories and to stay attuned to resonances within the environment and also across time.