‘Pli sur pli, pli selon pli’: The Folding of Epistolary and Pictorial Space in Stéphane Mallarmé’s Les Loisirs de la Poste and James McNeill Whistler’s Thames Set Etchings

Fascinated by the limits of poetic and aesthetic form, Stéphane Mallarmé and his friend James McNeill Whistler experimented with the contextual and framing elements of their works. Mallarmé's poems in Les Loisirs de la poste were written on envelopes and sent through the post, the quatrain replacing the address of the letter, while Whistler's portrayal of blank spaces and vertical lines in the Thames Set etchings manifests a folding aesthetic. Mallarmé's poems and Whistler's etchings enact a folding which disregards the poem-addressee and subject-frame distinctions and instead foregrounds the works' own status as verbal and visual media.