Reading Poetry Makes You Happy and Healthy: Mallarmé’s ‘jouissance du poëme’

This article reconsiders Stéphane Mallarmé's concept of ‘la jouissance du poëme' by shifting attention from textual obscurity to readerly experience. It argues that poetic ‘jouissance' is created through conjecture, delay and sustained engagement, producing a paradoxical pleasure grounded in the deferral rather than resolution of meaning. A close reading of ‘Le Démon de l'analogie' shows how repetition, fragmentation, sound, sight and silence generate meaning through an inevitably incomplete process. Framed through Albert Camus's notion of happiness in struggle, this Sisyphean model of reading also informs bibliotherapy, suggesting that attentive, iterative reading can foster aesthetic pleasure alongside cognitive and emotional well-being.