Mallarmé and/or Barbara Johnson: A Decidable

In Barbara Johnson's deconstructive reading of two poems of Mallarmé, the whiteness is seen only as negative, sterile, whereas it turns into the supremely sensuous whiteness chain – foam, milk, Milky Way, feather – as in Réminiscence. The azuris said to be invoked an outworn imagery, cliché, in L'Azur: but the poet used it later in many major poems. The swan in Le vierge, le vivace . . . is construed as an intertextual reference to Baudelaire (Le Cygne), but it is difficult to see the very self-involved cygne d'autrefois (qui) se souvient que c'est lui as anything other than a metaphor for the aging poet remembering his youthful poetic (swan) self and his failure to "fly away" to perfection then: les vols qui n'ont pas fui . . . (RGC)