"La succession des deux états sacrés": Mallarmé's "L'Après-midi d'un faune" and "Bucolique"

This essay discusses how, through a series of allusions to his poem "L'Après-midi-d'un faune," Stéphane Mallarmé's poème critique "Bucolique" dramatizes Mallarmé's incorporation of poetry into prose and demonstrates his notion of poetic creation as an act of reminiscence. The author analyzes the different autobiographical monologues in these works in order to argue that in its return to "Faune," "Bucolique" revises the act of imagination that "Faune" portrays. The essay shows that while in "L'Après-midi-d'un faune," a negation of physical presence opens up the possibilities for a present imaginary, "Bucolique" proposes a version of fictionalizing that does not depend on absence.