In the first full-length study of Mallarmé--La poésie de Stéphane Mallarmé (1912)--Albert Thibaudet attempted to show that the standard critical methods of explication could be applied to Mallarmé as efficiently as with any classical author; initially Thibaudet had to publish this work (his dissertation) at his own expense since the Sorbonne had refused it (Morris, 15). This exemplifies the typical critical response to accusations of obscurity: demonstrate that the work can be rendered legible by paring away difficulty through parsing, thereby establishing the work within a genealogy of commentary. Recent Mallarméan criticism admits of difficulty while still preserving the possibility of a clear meaning somewhere, as if difficulty were only skein-deep: "Mallarmé is the type of the modern artist... who is intent upon breaking up ready-made Gestalten and smooth surface textures in order to compel his audience to look elsewhere for artistic coherence, to venture beneath the surface into the difficult, undifferentiated world of unconscious process, to interrupt the easy flow of horizontal perception with strenuous excursions into multi-level, all-at-once 'verticality'" (Bowie, 16).
As for Joyce, this restitutive tendency is clearly evident in the essays in the volume Our Exagmination Round His Factification For Incamination Of Work In Progress (Beckett's is a notable exception as he reserves the possibility of confusion: "You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all" [Beckett, 14]); to wit, from Stuart Gilbert's essay: "The obscurity of that passage, its prolixity and redundancy--all are deliberate, and artistically logical" (Gilbert 1939, 55).