In a 1959 interview, after admitting that he had drawn on his writings extensively in Saint Genet and in his work on Flaubert – work which would soon become the monumental The Family Idiot, published in 1971–72 – Jean-Paul Sartre confessed that he had ‘only just begun’ to read Mallarmé. Yet as we will see in this first chapter, despite being, on his own admission, both provisional and incomplete, Sartre's reading of Mallarmé was remarkably consistent. Developed at greatest length in his ‘existential biography’ Mallarmé, or the Poet of Nothingness, a half-finished manuscript published in a 1979 edition of Obliques but composed much earlier in the years 1948–52, Sartre's interpretation of Mallarmé can be found throughout such majors works as What is Literature?, ‘Black Orpheus’, and the third and final volume of The Family Idiot. For Sartre, the poet was the ‘hero of an ontological drama’ (MPN 122), an ingenious artistic precursor to the philosopher's own tragic vision of human existence, as developed in Being and Nothingness. Yet he was also a member of a late nineteenth-century French literary generation that Sartre, partisan of ‘committed literature’, constantly excoriated. The aim of this chapter is to explore this foundational tension.

In the scholarship on Sartre's Mallarmé to date, commentators seem to have taken their cue from the philosopher's own remarks. As Sartre states in the same 1959 interview: ‘I mention [Mallarmé] only to indicate that “pure” literature is a dream. If literature is not everything’, he continues, ‘it is worth nothing’: ‘This is what I mean by “commitment”. It wilts if it is reduced to innocence, or to songs. If a sentence does not reverberate at every level of man and society, then it makes no sense. What is the literature of an epoch but the epoch appropriated by its literature?’ Commentators from Rhiannon Goldthorpe to Carey Wolfe, Benoît Denis to Jean-François Hamel, have all read The Poet of Nothingness as a significant chapter in Sartre's development of his concept of ‘committed literature’. Echoing this critical consensus, Hamel argues that in Mallarmé Sartre ‘envisages the possibility of a committed negativity of poetry: that is, of a terroristic politics of literature that ruptures with his own doctrine of commitment’ (CM 95).