Ainsi procède le Mime ou la fiction au présent
Ainsi procède le Mime or the fiction in the present tense

Summary/Abstract: Theoretical research regarding temporality in fictional discourse deals mostly with the narrative discourse, focusing on the various usages of tenses and verbal forms in this rhetorical mode. The narrative discourse is commonly analyzed as the result of an act of narration (an assertive act whose content entails a succession of events ordered logically). With Mallarmé, now, the art of fiction, related since Aristotle to muthos (“tale”), will be defined by the very exclusion of narration. Quite remarkably, though, in his poems, time markers characteristic of narrative fiction are not given up. In a writing style allegedly anchored in the present of writing, a present actually displaced through several shifts in perspective, the linear chronology is abolished: it is a chronology where the statement “I am here now” loses its meaning, so that the basic terms of all chronological development (flow of time, precedence, subsequence, etc.) lose their common axis and become floating. Our aim, in this paper, is to emphasize the way in which verb forms respond to this (“alien”) chronology, dominated by a “false present”, in order to deduce at least some of the rules of the rather peculiar temporal syntax at work in Mallarme’s poems.

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