Book as a Total Work of Art. From Mallarme to Perec

Abstract

The article is an attempt to look at the literary concept of the "Book" as a total work of art. The author first analyses the theory of Stéphane Mallarmé, for whom the Book as a "total expansion of the letter" was both a literary and material work, seeking to capture the constantly escaping reality. The endless pursuit of the material realization of the potential of infinity allow us to consider the Book a project that in reality was never intended to be realized and existed in the author's consciousness as a kind of literary myth. In a similar way, we can analyse the works of Georges Perec, who, through the figure of enumeration or the constant obsession of cataloging and classification, also aimed to embrace reality as a whole through literature. As the author argues, what both writers have in common is the desire to create an ideal work of art, whose paradox consists in the fact that it aims to embody what is infinite and to name the what is still unknown.