Mallarmé Rambles (in the middle of a crowd)
Building on the distinction put forward by Christian Doumet between meditation and rambling as two ways of thinking in poetry, we emphasize how the latter has a collective character that the former lacks. We therefore propose to consider the collection of texts Divagations by Mallarmé as writings concerned with the community, either to contribute to it, or to describe it or give it a critical counterpart. Thus, the figure of the crowd appears insistently in his prose poems, especially when compared to the poems of Baudelaire. For unlike the latter, Mallarmé tries to find, if not a number, at least a meaning to crowds. Associated with movement and walking, crowds have a haphazard and fickle nature that make them a privileged object of “rambling.” Opposing the figure of the crowd is the dialogue of mutual understanding, and above all, the aesthetic phenomenon that, settling on the ruins of religion, can give substance to the “multitude” and extricate it from the dispersion that animates crowds.