Christa Giles

illiance, to indicate a creature or thing to
which he would have had to attach a host of
different epithets in order to bring out all its
various aspects and qualities, if it had merely
been referred to by its technical name. By this
means he managed to do away with the
formal statement of a comparison that the
reader’s mind made by itself as soon as it had
understood the symbol, and he avoided
dispersing the reader’s attention over all the
several qualities that a row of adjectives
would have presented one by one,
concentrating it instead on a single word, a
single entity, producing, as in the case of a
picture, a unique and comprehensive
impression, an overall view. 587
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This ˝wonderfully condensed style˝ placed a new emphasis
on language, words as units, and white spaces (by
extension, silences) on a page. The function of art was not
to define or represent but to evoke, present. Much of
Mallarmé’s poetry evinced this self-consciousness and
awareness of the material used which was a characteristic
of modernism. It dealt with the idea of ˝le néant,˝ which he
suggested obliquely in linguistic terms. The evocation of
silence was, of course, closely identified with subjectivity at
the time. Thus Mallarmé wanted to describe not things, but