Fashioned Texts and Painted Books by Erin E. Edgington

Author:Erin E. Edgington
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Department of Romance Studies
Published: 2017-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

5.2. NONLINEARITY IN THE ÉVENTAILS

Some of the most significant elements of the éventails’ presentation in my view are the images on the fans themselves, images that relate to the text of the poems in complicated ways. The first thing to consider regarding the images is the fact that, although he likely would have taken some care in selecting the fans he wrote on from among the many fans owned by a particular woman, Mallarmé was not himself an éventailliste and, as such, he worked with readymade images. In some cases this fact is more evident than in others since not all the texts make overt reference to the fans upon which they are inscribed. “Éventail de Madame Mallarmé,” for example, contains no specific reference to the fan’s appearance whereas the imagery in “Éventail de Méry Laurent” is strongly linked with the fan’s design; the “frigides roses” that alternately freeze and melt over the course of the poem are none other than those pictured on the fan’s surface (Mallarmé 1: 68, l. 1). 65). For a more general discussion of the important role of lace in nineteenth-century French literature, see Gordon.

If we imagine Mallarmé carefully selecting his fans, which, given the fact that the texts of several éventails reference their substrates, there is no reason not to do, then we cannot overlook the visual component of these works. Sadly, since the original fans for some of the shorter éventails have been lost, it is impossible to fully analyze the significance of the fans’ imagery (Mallarmé 1: 1268-1270). We can perhaps presume, though, that the shorter texts, especially those addressed to women outside of the poet’s intimate acquaintance, and with whose fan collections Mallarmé may have been less familiar, may be somewhat less dependent on their substrate’s imagery than the three longer fans, or any of the shorter éventails dedicated to his daughter Geneviève or to Méry, even if some of the shorter texts very clearly interact with their paratexts in ways quite similar to the longer éventails.

A preliminary consideration concerning the styles of the painted images on the respective fans is that, of the fans whose appearance we can be sure of, Mallarmé tended to select examples featuring floral motifs and landscapes rather than scenes with human figures, which of course remained popular for fans at the time.5 Within these general specifications, however, the particular choices made by the poet are also significant in that Orientalist floral motifs are prevalent. Indeed, even in the first issue of La Dernière Mode discussed above Mallarmé anticipated this bias remarking on the subject of stylish fans that “[l]e Sujet se place de côté et non plus au milieu” (2: 492). A preference for asymmetry is, of course, linked with the Zen belief that “the work of art itself should not be a complete whole; it must arouse the desire of the beholder to complete it in his own imagination” (Dufwa 13). Certainly such images provoked Mallarmé to do just this; “Éventail de Madame Mallarmé” is an important example among the longer fans, as is Misia Sert’s fan among the shorter ones.

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