Mallarmé's shadow of the soul's journey begins before a text. The path through the darkness of the self points for Igitur to an indeterminate end, where the clarté chimérique - the monstrous clarity - of the flickering candle's extinction falls upon a closed page. Indeed, the closing of the book in Igitur follows rather abruptly upon its disclosure, open in its ‘pallor’ upon the table. Perhaps we should expect no more from a work which has been pared to its symbolic overtones, where Midnight is the moment of ‘clarity’, and the light falls on the page in the darkness of pure dream. No doubt to such purity of paradox we must bring, as Mallarmé suggests, a few of our own ‘stage trappings’. Certainly Poulet has found in the opening of the ‘dramatic’ fragment a heightened paradigm of the consciousness of the reader: ‘In an empty room on a table, a book awaits its reader. It seems to me that this is the initial condition of every literary work.’ Before consciousness approaches it is an object. What is on Mallarmé's page? Does it connect in some way with ‘an ancient idea’? Or is the page blank? We shall not know which tabula is rasa and how consciousness will transform this encounter. For Poulet the image suggests a locus classicus of the text's otherness, of the entry into one's awareness of a consciousness which is not one's own, and whose alien presence startles through its very existence.