Abolishing the impossible in perpresentational poetry

Mallarmé, Haroldo de Campos and the modes of presence

Abstract

The article offers a comparative reading between Rodrigo Duarte's modes of presence and the critical poetics of Mallarmé and Haroldo de Campos, based on an investigation into the double aspect of irrepresentation. It thus takes on the task suggested by Duarte of investigating the property of a supposed priority relationship between musical phenomena - in the strict sense - and the ability to understand extreme phenomena - in the broad sense. This intuition is questioned by a twofold movement: i) the separation between irrepresentation and the irrepresentable; ii) the suggestion that it is representation - literary phenomena - that could perhaps aspire to some priority. Mallarmé and Haroldo are mobilized as examples of perpresentative poetry and placed alongside the theme of the possibility or impossibility of post-Auschwitz poetry. Finally, it proposes a re-diagramming of the modes of presence, relocating perpresentation between the vertices of a triangle - because it is hybrid - and outside the plane - because it can also deal with the irrepresentable. In this way, the illusion of priority is undone, both for irrepresentation and for representation.