Tuesday 8th June 2021, 5:15-6:30pm

Online

Kristina Astrom (University of Glasgow) - '[P]li sur pli, pli selon pli': The folding of epistolary and pictorial space in Stéphane Mallarmé's Les Loisirs de la poste and James McNeill Whistler's Thames Set

The nineteenth-century poet Stéphane Mallarmé and his friend the painter James McNeill Whistler were both fascinated by the limits of poetic and aesthetic form and sought to experiment with the contextual and framing elements of their respective works. In particular, Mallarmé's collection of octosyllabic quatrains, Les Loisirs de la poste (1894), grapples with the different addresses of a poetic work, as the poems were written on envelopes and sent through the post, with the quatrain replacing the address of the letter. The letter has this been folded inside out, transposing the subject content with the frame or carrier of the poem. In a similar vein, Whistler's Thames Set etchings The Lime Burner (1859) and Old Putney Bridge (1879) manifest a folding aesthetic through their portrayal of blank spaces and vertical lines, in which it could be argued that the frame becomes the central subject of the etching. Here, Gilles Deleuze's notion of the fold, as inferred from Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's concept of the 'Baroque', makes visible a constant folding as central to poetic and aesthetic signification in that the fold generates a new meaning between text or artwork, reader(s) or viewer(s) and context(s), each time that it is read or viewed. In this paper, I will contend that Mallarmé's postal poems and Whistler's Thames Set etchings enact a folding which disregards the distinction between poem and addressee, subject and frame, and instead foregrounds their own status as verbal and visual media. This enfolding of text and artwork, along with their contexts broadens our understanding of modernist aesthetics, further opening up the fields of literary and art historical research to interdisciplinary enquiries.