ABSTRACT
The name 'Mallarme' evoked to mark the opening of the 'literary' according to Blanchot's and Derrida's understanding of this term. His text is understood to operate a kind of transition. This chapter provides an account of how this transition is effected in Mallarme's writings. It turns to what was recognized at various points in twentieth-century Mallarme scholarship to be a central motif in his work. The chapter argues that through a consideration of the 'sunset' in Mallarme's work one can contemplate both the closure of the 'book' and the opening of the space of 'littera-ture'. The first quatrain of the Sonnet evokes, then, the solar catastrophe. In the second quatrain the darkness of the scene is again evoked. The tercets begin with the vision, through the north window, of the frame of a mirror, evoked only as the fleeting disappearance of its sumptuous decoration, showing the struggle between a god and a water nymph, into the darkness of the mirror.
