Space Subjectivized

The separate discussions of page and stage in Chapters 2 and 3 are followed in Chapters 4 and 5 by a more abstract investigation of parallel inverse processes—the subjectivization of space and the spatialization of the subject—manifest in both the poetry and drama of the period. As already made clear, space is presented in the works to be discussed not as objective outside but as emanation of character; by the same token, the subject does not remain fully demarcated from its surroundings, and exhibits varying degrees of spatial dispersion. Exploring various types of subjectivization and associated formal techniques such as collage, montage, and temporal telescoping, Chapter 4 focuses on Maeterlinck’s one-acts, Apollinaire’s ‘Zone’ and ‘Lundi Rue Christine’, and Jarry’s Ubu roi.

Defamiliarizing the Page

Chapter 2 focuses on Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés and Apollinaire’s calligrammes—works that defamiliarize page-space by undermining various (naturalized) conventions of paginal configuration. Many of the calligrammes are non-linear, having no ‘beginning’ or ‘end’; Un coup de dés is more accurately described as multi-cursal, its typographical hierarchy generating a network of forking paths that presents a formidable challenge to the first-time reader. Mallarmé and Apollinaire transform page-space from an inert ground into an integral component of the text; the syntax of Un cup de dés and the calligrammes is not merely verbal but visual, and calls for spatio-textual parsing. The chapter concludes with a comparative analysis of the ways in which Mallarmé and Apollinaire manipulate the institutional frame of the page, comprised of a series of typographic and spatial norms endemic to conventionally printed texts.

Conclusion

The book concludes with broader, more speculative reflections on subjecthood, spatiality, and humanism. Fin-de-siècle modes of literary, dramatic, and pictorial representation are frequently anti-humanistic in character, challenging as they do the centrality of the human form and the anthropocentric world view that elevated it to pre-eminence. But anti-humanism must not be equated with the anti-human. The relative marginalization of the human figure does not, contrary to what José Ortega y Gasset argues in The Dehumanization of Art (1925), necessarily entail a flight from ‘human contents’; as the work of Mallarmé, Apollinaire, Maeterlinck, and Jarry bears witness, those contents can be distributed into space, expressed as gaps, fragments, and fissures.

Staging the Liminal

Chapter 3 implements the notion of liminality (the experience or condition of the betwixt and between) in an analysis of character and diegetic space in Jarry’s Ubu roi and Maeterlinck’s one-acts. Both playwrights’ characters are uncanny schematizations of the human form that blur the distinctions between subject and object, human and non-human, animate and inanimate. I examine the uncanny as a category of liminality, invoking Victor Turner, Antonin Artaud, the ‘uncanny valley’ theory of Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori, and the fin-de-siècle cult of the marionette. Both playwrights also refuse to localize dramatic space, to transform it into a specific Somewhere by means of consistent diegetic framing. Deliberately eschewing any geographical or historical consistency in his use of proper names and toponyms, Jarry foregrounds the liminal character of his ‘Poland’ by mixing and matching names, accents, and costumes from various periods and locales. Maeterlinck, meanwhile, underscores the neither-here-nor-there-ness or indeterminacy of the dramatic situations in L’Intruse, Intérieur, and Les Aveugles.

Space and Subject as Historically Contingent

Chapter 1 serves as a kind of overture, introducing the book’s recurring themes and motifs: spatiality, subjecthood, embodiment, dynamics of spectatorship and reading, and so on. My purpose here is threefold: to contextualize the work of my four principal authors in relation to the fin-de-siècle period; to situate the fin de siècle itself in a broader historico-philosophical context; and, finally, to demonstrate that said practices reflect a particular, historically contingent understanding of space and subject. Opening the chapter with a discussion of Newtonian absolute space, the Cartesian ego, and the dualisms of subject/object and self/world, I evaluate the fin-de-siècle problematization of these notions with reference to my quartet of authors, and to the period’s scenographic and typographic practices generally. The aforementioned recorporealization of reader and spectator is then examined in this light.

Introduction

The Introduction sets out the key concerns of the book—early modernist conceptualizations of spatiality and subjecthood, and the treatment of space and subject in the poetic and dramatic works of Stéphane Mallarmé, Guillaume Apollinaire, Maurice Maeterlinck, and Alfred Jarry. It also examines some of the critical literature on these four principal authors, remarking on the variable quality of existing analyses—while the semiotics of Jarry’s Ubu cycle, for example, has been brilliantly and comprehensively elucidated, critics have, until comparatively recently, tended to gloss over the semiotic complexity of Apollinaire’s calligrammes, some doing so with unjustified disparagement. The Introduction concludes with a brief overview of the book’s five chapters.

Spatialized Subjects

Chapter 5 is a grand synthesis of the principal themes of the book. The previous chapter’s investigation of the blurring of boundaries between subject and space is reprised, but this time from the opposite angle (focusing on spatialization rather than subjectivization) and presented in tandem with a final discussion of the dialogue between page and stage, and between poetry, drama, and narrative, that takes place across the oeuvres of my four principal authors. The chapter consists of close readings of ‘Zone’ and ‘Lettre-Océan’ (Apollinaire), Igitur (Mallarmé), and Intérieur (Maeterlinck). Spatialization is taken to the furthest possible extreme in the Acte héraldique of Jarry’s César-Antechrist, whose dramatis personae are segments of the two-dimensional field of an escutcheon (shield).