L’économie mallarméenne de la gloire

Beyond its officially epideictic purpose, Rodenbach’s sonnet “Pour la gloire de Mallarmé” (1897) offers a probing commentary on what can be seen as the Mallarméan economy of glory. It calls for a reflection on certain aspects of Mallarmé’s persona and social scenography, which may have facilitated the glorious inscription of his name in the literary landscape of his time and in the history of modern literature. Conversely, turning to a textual dimension, it draws attention to the rhetorical and hermeneutic motivations of this economy; it suggests that a strategy of self-fetishization, similar to that which the poet deploys in the social space, is at work in his rhetoric, in his way of appearing or disappearing as a subject of enunciation. It is this Mallarméan economy of glory that I intend to explore in both its institutional and textual dimensions. To do so, the close reading that I propose will focus on the image of the relic that represents the symbolic core of Rodenbach’s poem. (In French)