ABSTRACT
The imposition of chinoiserie upon China is reflected in the term for porcelain 'decorated to the order of Europeans with representations provided by them in blue and white': chine de commande. Theodore Aubanel, the Provencal poet, enthused in a letter to Stephane Mallarme: Judith is wonderful: tall, dark, pale, with the buxom figure and nonchalance of an Oriental woman. Steven Winspur describes this strategy as Mallarme's 'call to readers to make up the constative deficiencies of the written word with their own performative force', producing a poem which is 'a making through words that constantly redefines everything in life'. Mallarme seems to have written French poems closer to Chinese in the demands made upon the reader than Judith Gautier's French translations from Chinese. Mallarme's salon vide is not a representation of the 'comfortable clutter' of the 'middle-class domestic interior', but if representational at all, is relentlessly ironic in its representation.
