Kick-off: Mallarmé

It may seem superfluous to accuse the avant-garde of literary excess, the heights (or depths) of which they repeatedly discovered. But I thought I'd start us off with this little gem from Mallarmé, quoted and glossed by the British art historian T.J. Clark. He clearly has serious misgivings about the direction all this is going.

'You will be terrified to learn that I have arrived at the idea of the Universe by sensation alone (and that, for example, to keep firm hold of the notion of pure Nothingness I had to impose on my brain the sensation of the absolute void.' Which leads us straight to Hegel and other disagreeable topics.

- T. J. Clark, The Image of the People (1973), p. 19

Yikes. I look eagerly forward to the next installment.