The power of phantasm in Stephane Mallarme's youth poetry and in the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan

Sharing various radical stylistic features, Mallarmé's poetry and Lacan's theories are implicated in other significant ways, including their views about desire and the language of the unconscious. Focusing on Mallarmé's youth poetry (1857–1870), I adopt the methods of major postmodern psychoanalytic theorists in reading Mallarmé through Lacan's theories and vice versa.;Drawing on Lacan's theory of drive, which I compare to Kristeva's semiotic chora, I examine the enigmas of phantasm in its relation to Mallarmé's obsessive search for the “feminine.” Such longing for the feminine within was caused, as Charles Mauron discovered, by the poet's unresolved grief over the deaths of his mother and sister—a loss resulting in cyclic melancholia. The vicissitudes of Mallarmé's mood-swings are reflected in his poetry through allosemes and “pluri-signification”—nuances of polypolarity that can be understood in part through reference to Petit Littre, the dictionary the poet used. Mallarmé's struggles to resolve conflicts generated by his narcissistic wound and expressed through his complex poetic structures may be construed as Lacan's third term.;Inspired by Abraham/Torok's discussions of (and Derrida's interventions on) Cryptology, I analyze five major poems. I begin with Brise Marine and conclude with Igitur, the powerful poem that terminates Mallarmé's youth poetry and his narcissism. Cryptology is particularly appropriate for a study of Mallarmé's early poems, since my assumption is that the “Thing,” introjected and buried in the crypt, is composed of the deaths of his two closest relatives.;Renouveau concerns the poet's mind/body dialectic. In Azur he meets his Ideal, a guide to understanding his phantasmatic, cryptic Dream. Herodiade, the protagonist of the poem that bears her name, represents his female soul and helps him separate the illusionary from the Real in phantasmatic desire. Les Fenetres depicts Mallarmé's subject/object struggle involving repetition compulsion in the signifying chain; and in L'Apres-midi d'un faune he comes to terms with the role sexuality plays in his life. Finally, through a death/rebirth experience realized in Igitur, Mallarmé transcends his oral/anal fixation and becomes liberated from the encrypted ego structure. The obscurity of Mallarmé's writing becomes less enigmatic when viewed through Lacan's anamorphic gaze.