Sign, Swan, Mermaid: notes about the (dis)encounter in Mallarmé and Blanchot

Abstract

Somehow, the formal requirements of Stéphane Mallarmé(1842-1898) are echoed in the same risky theorizations of Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003), in which the literature is a place of meaning, of secrets and of the mystery without mystery of the word and of the art. Separated temporally, the second delved into the poetics of the first as a discreet and elegant symptom of a saying that plays the word work to the timeless poetry of the future. These notes depart from the Blanchotians thoughts that open The book to come (2005) about a mythical (dis) encounter between the character Ulisses and the mermaid’s chant, that would be the paradigm of literature, and also some articles, from this and other books, about the work of the French poet, toward what I elaborate as another (dis) encounter, between Swan and Sign, proposed in a Mallarmean sonnet, that also announces what is next: criticism, books (the Book), poems and theories of modern literature and art.