Typography Presentation

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1SzvTzNzMpbZElQQlpFUC12amM/view?usp=sharing

livre notes

So, all the preceding are copies I made of a few pages from the collection of Mallarmé's notes (gathered by Jacques Scherer) towards 'Le Livre' - notes which (like Kafka) Mallarmé requested be destroyed. Luckily they weren't.

Here are my notes from the commentary I gave in the last meeting about this extraordinary document (I hope they kind of make sense):

Letter to Verlaine 1885: ’I have always dreamed and attempted something else, with the patience of an alchemist, ready to sacrifice all vanity and all satisfaction, the way they used to burn their furniture and the beams from their ceilings, to stoke the fires of the Great Work. What would it be? It is hard to say: a book, quite simply, in several volumes, a book that would be a real book, architectural and premeditated, and not a collection of chance inspiration, however wonderful… I would even go further and say the Book, convinced as I am that in the final analysis there’s only one, unwittingly attempted by anyone who writes, even Geniuses. The orphic explanation of the Earth, which is the poet’s only duty and the literary mechanism par excellence: for the rhythm of the book, then impersonal and alive, right down to its pagination, would line up with the equations of that dream, or Ode.’

M Calls this his ‘vice… I am possessed by it and I will succeed, perhaps – not in drafting the whole of it (one would have to be I don’t know who for that!) but in showing a fully executed fragment… and indicating the rest, for which a single lifetime would not suffice. To prove, by means of these finished pieces, that this book exists, that I knew what it was I couldn’t accomplish.’

M conceives idea for Livre in 1866, but can’t really work on it then - really gets down to it in 1892; by 1894 completely working on it 

These notes - meant to be destroyed - not book but notes towards - always to-come

it’s 202 pages of notes - outlining material aspects of both book and ‘seances’ in which it would be enacted - including ticket price and seat layout - mathematical correspondences between volumes and performances - also thematic schema (relations between genres, modes etc) - it’s all about relationality - 

‘myth’ instead of narrative - cos it’s about sacred rite

all about symmetry/duality/dedoublement - Scherer: various correspondences function as reciprocal proofs

numbers are really high - i.e. projected numbers for attenders and copies: as Sch points out, M aspired to acquire a readership comparable to the Bible’s

book should have paralleliped (rhomboid) form - and purpose of seances (or double-seances) is to reveal mathematical foundation of book (like in Igitur: consciousness reveals itself) - to show that it’s not chance: ‘it has not fallen. from chance/ sacred to a unique / from which it issues… The lectures having no other goal / than to show these scientific relations / in discover of book (40-41 A)

each seance led by ‘operator’ or enactor -

Mary-Lewis Shaw: ‘The opérateur accomplishes this by performing various permutations of the text, before an audience of twenty-four ‘assistants’ who are themselves symmetrically arranged in either eight ‘triple places’ or six ‘double places’ on either side of an auditorium. He changes the order of the distribution of the feuillets in a ‘meuble de laque’ containing six open vertical slots and reads the fragments in two different ways as if to demonstrate their perfect congruity and that of the text as a whole… Every fragment of the text is read twice. Every text is presented through two different readings in a double séance. Each double séance lasts two hours, consisting of a preliminary 15-minute waiting period, a 15-minute intermission, and two 45-minute reading periods, in which the opérateur directs his attention toward either half of the audience. Two double séances are given in one day.’

‘drama’ is profane; ‘mystere’ is sacred

chiasmus is criscrossing-correspondence/‘reciprocity of proofs’ pattern that M uses a lot - nb I think that line ‘reciprocity of proofs’ explains a lot - it’s also about mirroring/doubling, thereby creating logic that self-confirms

so, yes: work will be published in text and presented in performance - operator’s role is to coordinate this - his hat is important!

2 mythes sketched out: 1. calling and hesitation to come forwards… 2. two mermaids on beach, mirroring each other, reaching out arms to join, like dancers… this second is kind of marriage (fiancailles)

Then digression on nature of INTERMISSION - but intermission is actually entr’acte, which is dance - so a performed pause - cf Interrupted Performance, and M’s obsession with interregnums and intervals

then wild animals eating meat (like bear)

3rd myth: sacrifice of old man - goes into tomb/Book - and this before WORKER/CROWD (like in Conflict)

4th myth: two characters come together and eat each other - which is also marriage ceremony, and crime

le livre

This is the typed out version of the previous one - i.e. the previous image (if you rotate it, which I can't work out how to do) is what Mallarmé wrote, and this is Scherer's transcription of it.