Mallarmé's Igitur and the infinite at last fixed: the original manuscripts

• Grant number: 08/05820-8
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research
• Start date: October 20, 2008
• End date: March 31, 2009
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Modern Foreign Literatures
• Principal Investigator: Rosie Mehoudar
• Grantee: Rosie Mehoudar
• Host Investigator: Irene Fenoglio
• Host Institution: Pró-Reitoria Acadêmica. Centro Universitário FIEO (UNIFIEO). Fundação Instituto de Ensino para Osasco (FIEO). Osasco , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: École Normale Supérieure, Paris (ENS), France

Abstract

An internship abroad is integral part of our plan for postdoctoral research, as established in the project approved by FAPESP, in effect since 2007. That project's abstract defined the research as a "textual and genetic analysis of the final version and early drafts of Mallarmé's Igitur, ou la folie d'Elbehnon, with an appreciation of the intrinsic logic of each initial outline and of the laws that seem to have guided their evolvement into the last rendering. Such a method will elicit a better interpretation of this unfinished and, until now, practically undecipherable story." Therefore, the study of the manuscripts in France was an essential activity of the initial project. Even if we do have the transcription of the manuscripts in the 1998 edition of the Complete Works of Mallarmé, it is no substitute for studying the originals, for the reasons given in the aforementioned project and which I will repeat and complete in the present one. Although the genetic investigation of the original manuscripts of Igitur will be our focus, two other activities are equally important. The first is a survey of the author's library at the Mallarmé Museum, in Vulaines-sur-Seine, near Paris, where our interest will be not only what he read, but also to examine some of his notes on the books. The second is actually reading the books found at the time in Parisian libraries pertaining to the hermetic and literary universes with which Igitur dialogues. This will help us to investigate the tale's constitutive intertextuality, inasmuch as the Mallarmean theory of language emerges from a dialogue with certain epistemologies, the hermetic one being specifically insinuated. (AU)