Eurydice’s Face: the Paradox of Mallarmé’s Musical Poetics

Inspired by Maurice Blanchot (1907—2003) who compares Stéphane Mallarmé’s (1842—1898) poetics to Orpheus’s descent into the underworld, this article seeks to account for the relationship between the two seemingly contradictory sides of Mallarmé as a psychological journey—one that seeks the mystery of things hidden in eternal night, and the other proclaims that poetry should contain nothingness only as the Orphic poet realizes that his desire to find the essence has violated the law and would thus make the thing disappear altogether. The first two sections of the article elucidate Mallarmé’s lesser-known musical poetics which seeks to distill the essence of things, to transcribe“the symphonic equation proper to the seasons,”with reference to his prose poems and Arthur Schopenhauer’s (1788— 1860) philosophy of music. The final section argues that Mallarmé’s nothingness means not autonomous language, as asserted by his idealist predecessors or structuralist/poststructuralist critics, but an ethical pronouncement to protect the mystery of the thing from poetic exploitation and exhaustion.