The Tempest Since the Bottom of the Inkwell, with Victor Hugo and Stéphane Mallarmé

Abstract

In the poem “Réponse à un acte d’accusation” (1856), Victor Hugo synthesized his poetic principles with the image of a wind blown from “a tempest at the bottom of the inkwell” on the tradition of fixed forms and classical rhetoric and about the state of the French language in general, divided, according to him, by a conservative and class perspective. Our objective here is to return to this “rhythmic” of Hugo’s pen, as Georges Didi-Huberman describes it, and comment on it from another “tempest” produced by poetry, the one, perhaps less romantic, or more serene, of Mallarmé, for whom writing must abandon the “inkwell without Night” to allow its readers to rediscover and recognize their own part of “darkness”. The essay aims, finally, to show to what extent the two French poets decisively contribute to the definitive desegregation between prose and poetry, between poetic gesture and revolutionary gesture.