Briefly then, let us enumerate the critical tradition of miscegenating Joyce, Dante and Mallarmé. Most often if one of our three writers is cited in a study of another one of the three, it is done so as a way of reasserting the difficulty of those writers, each one becomes a badge or emblem of obscurity for the others. Most typical of this tendency is R.G. Cohn's L'oeuvre de Mallarmé "Un coup de dés", where many fleeting references to Joyce, as well as the odd gesture to Dante are made. There exists a notable lack of work between Mallarmé and Dante; the only exceptions would be Sollers's separate essays on each (see below); marginal referencing in Jeremy Tambling's Dante and Difference (128 and 148), and Arturo Marasso's "El pensamiento secreto de Mallarmé" which uncovers sources for Mallarmé in the works of Dante, Ovid, Virgil and others.
Affinities between James Agustin Joyce and his august Florentine counterpart date back to Samuel Beckett's "Dante... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce" which appeared while Finnegans Wake was still a Work in Progress. Later, Louis Gillet proposed a Dantean foufolded allegorical hermeneutic for Finnegans Wake (Gillet, 58). The most thorough exposition of Joycean modulations of Dante can be found in Mary T. Reynolds's Joyce and Dante; this is the work most often cited by dantiste when they refer to Joyce. Numerous articles have appeared since, adding further to our knowledge of Dantean glosses in Joyce's work. Recent work by Laurent Milesi (Milesi, 176-91), Jean-Michel Rabaté (Rabaté 1984, 136-55) and Lucia Boldrini shifts the focus away from description of influence towards an analysis of the implications (for all three, linguistic) of said influence.
Joyce's affinities with Mallarmé are a tad more apparent as both breathe within the heady atmosphere of modernism, Mallarmé as precursor and Joyce as full-fledged participant. Marshall McLuhan briefly examined both Joyce and Mallarme's attitudes towards the popular media of communication in "Joyce, Mallarmé and the Press". David Hayman undertook a systematic study of Mallarmé's influence on Joyce in the two volumes of Joyce et Mallarmé. Clive Hart in his inordinately influential Structure and Motif in "Finnegans Wake" attempted to disabuse Joycean critics from the idea of paying attention to Mallarmé, to wit, "In contrast with the effect created by great suggestive works like those of Mallarmé--with which Joyce's art has almost nothing in common--the more one reads Finnegans Wake and learns to recognize how all the little bricks fit into the finished structure, the less suggestive the book seems" (Hart, 32). Fortunately this call has not been heeded and the name "Mallarmé" manages to crop up every now and then in Joyce criticism. Three such crops for Master Mallarmé are: William Carpenter's thematic study Death and Marriage: Structural Metaphors for the Work of Art in Joyce and Mallarmé, Jean-Michel Rabaté's typographic study "'Alphybettyformed verbage': the shape of sounds and letters in Finnegans Wake, and Simone Verdin's brief "Mallarmé et Joyce, somptuosités vitales et magnifique veille de la pensée."
Joyce and Mallarmé have provided much fodder for the post-structuralists. Indeed, one of these, Philippe Sollers has written (separate) essays on Joyce, Mallarmé and Dante (his novels betray a great influence of these three writers), and he does suggest connections (some quite intriguing) between the three, and especially Dante and Mallarmé; see his Logiques for the Dante and Mallarmé essays; the name Joyce recurs almost mantra-like throughout Sollers's work (both critical and literary), his main essay is "Joyce et cie." Jacques Derrida has written extensively on both Joyce and Mallarmé, both of whom appear to occupy a privileged position in his continuing response to the dysfunctional vagaries of writing; for his work on Joyce see L'origine de la Géometrie de Husserl. Introduction et traduction (104-7), La carte postale (255-8) and the two essays in Ulysse gramophone as well as sundry other references peppered throughout his work; for his readings of Mallarmé see "La double séance" (Derrida 1972, 199-317) and his rather eccentric introduction "Mallarmé". The history of Joyce's reception by the French post structuralists has been extensively covered by Geert Lernout in The French Joyce (see especially chapter 2 for an account of the uses and abuses of Joyce by Cixous, Derrida and Lacan, chapter 3 for the university critics and chapter 3 for the Tel Quelistes; we now give an unexpected consideration to space by omitting further citation of the vast critical literature upon Derrida's readings of Joyce and Mallarmé. Sollers and Derrida's, as well as other post-structuralists, follow (although sometimes obliquely, and perhaps deservedly so) from the work of Maurice Blanchot, whose notions of literature and writing emerge and disvelop strongly from a fascination with Mallarmé. He concludes the essay "Mallarmé et l'art du roman" with the following characterization of a hypothetical novelist who would take seriously Mallarmé's writings: "Ce romancier, pour lequel un écrivain comme Joyce nous offre quelques traits, se poserait assurément les mêmes problèmes dans lesquels Mallarmé; a épuisé sa vie, et comme Mallarmé, il serait heureux de vivre pour effectuer en soi des transformations singulières et pour tirer de la parole le silence où il doit mourir" (Blanchot 1943, 196).