Mallarmé – Becoming Individu-Livre

Beginning with a contextual reading of the prose-text ‘Le Livre, instrument spirituel’, this chapter argues that Mallarmé (like Baudelaire and Verlaine) understands reading and writing as a practice through which we mediate our relation to the world. This can also be seen in the pedagogical material which Mallarmé put together as an English teacher (L’Anglais récréatif): students were meant to play their way to an understanding of the English language and themselves. The chapter then suggests that the famous ‘Notes en vue du « Livre »’ can be understood as an ambitious version of such game-design. The aim of this game was to make book, world and human beings align in a process of shared unfolding. In this manner, Mallarmé emerges as a contemporary and radically ecological writer, defiantly dreaming about how fiction can help to align humans and their environments.