Twenty-First-Century Symbolism: Verlaine, Baudelaire, Mallarmé by Nikolaj Lübecker (review)

Reviewed by: Twenty-First-Century Symbolism: Verlaine, Baudelaire, Mallarmé by Nikolaj Lübecker Greg Kerr Twenty-First-Century Symbolism: Verlaine, Baudelaire, Mallarmé. By Nikolaj Lübecker. (Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures) Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. 2022. viii+219 pp. £90. ISBN 978–1–802– 07012–5. Although the word may be absent from its title, an entry in this book's index ('ecology, everywhere' (p. 216)) makes clear something of the spirit in which it is offered. Nikolaj Lübecker's monograph does not present itself as a study in ecocriticism, yet at every turn it implicitly underscores the ecological basis of contemporary, non-anthropocentric understandings of humans' relations with the world. In a study of impressive intellectual range, encompassing contemporary scholarship on colour categorization, cybernetics, theories of media and affect, and other areas, Lübecker demonstrates how symbolist writing draws close to key preoccupations of the present day. Two chapters each are devoted to Verlaine, Baudelaire, and Mallarmé (in that order). Verlaine's haiku-like poems 'La Lune blanche' and 'C'est l'extase…' are read convincingly as a 'practice of ecological individuation' (p. 17); they allude to natural processes in which the individual occupies but one 'phase' (to use Gilbert Simon-don's term) and does not exist in isolation. Lübecker draws on Barthes's discussion of the haiku as 'what happens', only in so far as what happens 'entoure le sujet' (p. 28), to explore the evocative soundscapes woven by these texts. Later, an analysis of affect in Baudelaire's prose poem 'Le Crépuscule du soir' shows how it invites us to see individuals as mediated by their surroundings. Colour in Baudelaire's art-historical writings is understood as 'relational', and therefore 'ecological' (p. 104), involved in an active interplay between itself, environments, and humans. Lübecker thus underscores Baudelaire's contribution to areas traditionally overshadowed by the figure of the modern urban poet in scholarship. Mallarmé's conception of the book as spiritual instrument is the focus of the first chapter on that poet, primarily because it 'relies on an ecological conception of subjectivity' (p. 140); this is in so far as ideas manifest themselves in the universe, like the constellation of Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard, through the combined performative agency of the written word and of humans as authors and readers. A final chapter centring on a reading of 'Le Démon de l'analogie' emphasizes the unsettling entanglement of language and environment in that text, in ways that lie outside the scope of the poem's narrator himself, and which are taken to foreshadow theoretical approaches to life in contemporary digital society, with the latter's often perplexing codes and forms of mediation. While the book's arguments are rich and informative, at times long passages of exposition of theory by figures such as Mark B. N. Hansen, N. Katherine Hayles, Eleanor Rosch, and Simondon may cause the reader occasionally to lose sight of the poetry itself. Nonetheless, successive chapters communicate an abiding sense of poetry as a practice, one with the capacity to 'draw us into—and make us participate in—the crystallization of an environment' (p. 28) in ways that emphasize aspects of becoming, interplay, and hybridization. Among the important contributions End Page 272 that this book will make to literary studies and critical theory, then, is that it offers a distinctly fluid, open kind of contextualization, situating poetry and poetic criticism, to paraphrase the language of the final chapter on Mallarmé, 'as part of a larger data ecology' (p. 175). Greg Kerr University of Glasgow Copyright © 2024 The Modern Humanities Research Association