Sensing a Fragile Blanc: Mimesis and Poetics in Elaine Scarry, Gautier, and Mallarmé

This essay explores how nineteenth-­century poetry harnesses the synergy between mimesis and synesthesia to cultivate a mode of reading I call synesthetic mimesis of sight and touch that attunes meaning to sensation. Taking Elaine Scarry’s work on perception and literary image-­making as its guide, it examines Mallarmé’s Symbolist blanc (Un coup de dés) through Gautier’s Parnassian blanc (“Symphonie en blanc majeur”) to propose that, when read sensorially, the obscure blanc gives itself as fragile; and that poetry leads us to care for the fragile finitude of our sensorially replete world. More broadly, the essay takes up the accusation of deceitful imitation philosophy levels against poetry in what Plato alludes to as “an ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry” in The Republic; and, by shifting the terms of the debate on mimesis from epistemology to ethics, reconceives poetry as a practice that opens knowing to caring.