Frequently quoted but never before translated in its entirety, The
Book is a visual poem about its own construction
The French poet Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-98) was modernism's great
champion of the book as both a conceptual and material entity: perhaps
his most famous pronouncement is everything in the world exists in order
to end up as a book. A colossal influence on literature from Huysmans to
Ashbery, art from Manet to Broodthaers, music from Debussy to Boulez and
philosophy from Blanchot to Rancière, Mallarmé spent more than 30 years
on a project he called Le Livre. This legendary, unfinished project is
now translated into English for the first time.
The Book was Mallarmé's total artwork, a book to encompass all books.
His collected drafts and notes toward it, published only posthumously in
French in 1957, are alternately mystical, lyrical and gloriously banal;
for example, many concern the dimensions, page count and cost of
printing this ideal book. Resembling sheet music, the lines are laid out
like a musical score, with abundant expanses of blank space between
them. Frequently quoted, sometimes excerpted, but never before
translated in its entirety, The Book is a visual poem about its own
construction, the scaffolding of a cosmic architecture intended to
reveal all existing relations between everything.
