Dennis Cooper Spotlights Mallarmé’s Expansive, Flexible Le Livre (The Book)

Dennis Cooper casts a bright light on Stéphane Mallarmé’s project Le Livre (The Book) today. Printed Matter—publishers of Mallarme, The Book,  by Montreal-based artist Klaus Scherubel—writes, Mallarmé “envisioned The Book as a cosmic text-architecture: an extremely flexible structure that would reveal nothing short of ‘all existing relations between everything.’” Sounds a little like Cooper’s own blog posts: He quotes Barbara Johnson, Sam Slote, Maurice Blanchot, and Mallarmé himself in order to dive into the mechanics of this book, a “total expansion of the letter,” a newspaper as secondary to a miracle. From the Slote excerpt:

First, I would like to turn briefly to the remnants of the notes Mallarmé wrote in preparation for the Livre. Most of these were burned after his death in 1898, according to his wishes, but one notebook survived and was published in 1957 by Jacques Scherer in the volume Le “livre” de Mallarmé (with the word livre within quotation marks). In his introduction, Scherer characterizes these notes as an imperfect record of a thinking of and towards le Livre. Scherer thus defines them by some missing book which would have been their fulfillment.

‘The notes Mallarmé left behind deal very little with the content of the planned Livre, and instead concentrate a great deal on the form and format the Livre was to take, even dealing with such incidentals as its final cost. Unlike a regular book, Mallarmé planned to have the pages unbound, and so the order in which the Livre would be read would be subject to permutation. Each reading of the Livre would be a performance or séance in which it would adapt itself to its circumstance (cf. Scherer, 58-61). For example, the number of pages in each volume of the Livre would vary according to the number of operators and auditors present at each séance (Scherer 102-3). Verso and recto are to be interchangeable in the multiple possibilities of this volume’s binding; and so the Livre would not impose a single direction or vector of reading. Indeed, the notes seem to be experimental jottings concerning this variable ordination of pagination. In a sense, one could consider Mallarmé’s plan as an attempt to enact a manual or non-digital hypertext: a hypertext that does not depend on the latest HTML ordinance from Bill Gates or the WWW Consortium.

‘In Le livre à venir, Maurice Blanchot notes that this performative aspect to the Livre–as planned in the notes–would guarantee that the Livre will always be iterated variably, with no original. The Livre is always in progress and “est toujours autre… il n’est jamais là, sans cesse à se défaire tandis qu’il se fait” (Blanchot, 330 n.1) The Livre remains conjugated in the conditional, and this conditionality is what has impacted into a book, which is still, always, a livre à venir. Each single iteration of the Livre is always an imperfect manifestation. The Livre thus oscillates between manifestation and disappearance, a hypothetical disappearance of what never had been.’ 

Read the entire feature at Dennis Cooper’s Blog.