22.

Zoom out. Stéphane Mallarmé claims that the book, in fact, constitutes the minimal element of writing, “that when all is said and done there is only one, unwittingly attempted by whoever has written” — its unity, in the end, encompassing the world, so as to become “the orphic explanation of the Earth” :³⁵ i.e., “all earthly existence must ultimately be contained in a book.” ³⁶ Mallarmé imagines that, in its singularity, such a book is a cosmos unto itself, and each poet can only ever hope to express a fragment of its entirety, aspiring, at best, to realize this “book-to-come” through the book that the poet has at hand to make. I might note again that, in such a vision of bookish oneness, we see the spectre of the Droste effect: the book imitates, in miniature, the universe that it inhabits, making of itself a microcosm that contains a facsimile of the macrocosm.