One Toss of the Dice Read online

  Published first in 1897, “One Toss of the Dice” broke with the expectations of two thousand years of metric verse. Nothing like it had ever been seen. Even Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark, An Agony in Eight Fits (1876), another seagoing poem full of enigmas that border on nonsense, had none of the visual boldness of “Un Coup de dés.” Mallarmé’s manuscript looks in places like sheet music, and the poet saw the layout of his poem as a musical score whose ups and downs indicate the rising or falling intonation of the voice. The typography, with different letters ranging from 3 to 22 points in size, of varying weight and typeface (bold, normal, italics), and blank spaces, resembles the poster art of Belle Époque Paris, with its varied type sizes, forms, and irregular spatial design.10 “One Toss of the Dice” brings to mind the original punch cards that Joseph-Marie Jacquard invented at the end of the eighteenth century for the programming of textile looms, that the English polymath Charles Babbage adapted for his calculating “Analytic Engine” (1864), that Herman Hollerith used for the tabulation of census data in the 1880s, or that Mallarmé encountered in the barrel organ, organette, and player piano rolls, that were popular in fin-de-siècle France, even after Edison’s invention of the phonograph in 1877. The poet originally envisaged a disposition of print that involved reading not down, but across an open double page. He insisted on great patches of blank space between verses of wildly different lengths. Some lines were to contain a single word, others to stretch fully across two pages. Some folios of “One Toss of the Dice” hold only a single word, while others are densely packed, in what, in the phrase of fellow poet Paul Claudel, is a “great typographic and cosmogonic poem.”11

  The balky syntax of “One Toss of the Dice” is unsettling, its logical leaps a form of grammatical dissonance that assails the reader, as the music of Stravinsky and Schoenberg, or the paintings of Picasso and Kandinsky, would jar listeners and viewers only a decade later. Print gives pattern to space, and scatters, becomes mobile, aggressive even. Intelligibility is constantly under threat. The task of the reader is to disentangle main from subordinate material in order to make the lines of a sentence, to make meaning, to distinguish subjects from predicates, order from chaos, arguments, explanations, chronologies, causes and effects, narrative structures.

  Reading “One Toss of the Dice” is an active process. As we begin, we are made insecure. In the place of a founding story, guiding directives, or description, which might orient and comfort us, we sense randomness and danger. Through careful reading, however, we begin to recognize certain patterns; and, by the end, on the last folio, the constellation of words on the page aligns fully with the constellation of the stars to which the words point, like the needle of a compass after a geomagnetic storm.

  Part of the challenge of “One Toss of the Dice” stems from the newness of its ideas, and from a change in the look of the poetry to which we are accustomed. Mallarmé recognized at the end of the preface originally printed with the poem that new forms are appropriate for dealing with “subjects of pure and complex imagination or intellect.” Yet the poem’s rigor also derives from a performance of meaning that coincides with meaning—language that appears somewhat arbitrary and haphazard used to describe a chaotic universe, a dice throw about a throw of the dice. The poem dramatizes the difficulty of making sense of a world in which truth, meaning, and order are no longer given, and are constantly changing. The spatial layout—without the margins that contain the body of text in a conventionally printed book, without fixed line lengths or a set number of lines on a given page—renders a work beyond borders, without limits, out of bounds. Seven of the ten double pages of “One Toss of the Dice” contain lines that cross from the verso, the left-hand page, to the recto, the right-hand page, requiring us to read across the open fold, or gutter.

  “One Toss of the Dice” is a disaster poem, and the experience of reading it is akin to being tossed overboard in a shipwreck. We grasp at bits of linguistic debris or meaning as if words and phrases were the flotsam and jetsam of the scattered pieces of a foundering ship. The lines on the page sink to threaten us, or remain aligned to keep us afloat. Mallarmé’s masterwork is full of counterintuitive reversals having to do with space. “The first words of the Poem, so that those that follow, arranged as they are, lead to the last, the whole of it without novelty except the spacing of the text,” the poet states in the preface.

  Space in “One Toss of the Dice” has the function of punctuation, a have-stop function. It distracts and destabilizes, disrupts the normal expectation that the order of appearance of syntactical units will correspond to the logical sequence of meaning, and that meaning will coincide with the world. The empty spaces leave hanging elements of language that cannot stand alone, e.g., “than playing” (que de jouer), “no matter where” (n’importe où), “or the event” (ou se fût l’évènement), “not so much” (pas tant). Space dissolves what the printed elements of the poem unite. The spaces encourage us to pause, to seek another method of reading, other paths to follow, such great unexpected reversals, surprises, ellipses, and setbacks all being part of verbal modernism, and of the hypertext of the information age in which we now live.

  Mallarmé described himself as a “sacred spider,” the inventor of a “marvelous lacework.” The appearance of “One Toss of the Dice” thus colluded, in its lacy lack of transitions, with the Lumière brothers’s cinématographe, which had burst upon the world in late December 1895 and was barely up and running before Mallarmé began his optical oeuvre. Bravely conceived and fiercely written against the long tradition of verbal poetry, “One Toss of the Dice” marked a great shift in the direction of the visuality of our own era, with its still and moving projections, hand-held personal data devices, monitors, and screens.

  Is “One Toss of the Dice” a verse or prose poem? Or both? A lyric, dramatic, concrete, or metaphysical poem? Is it a picture poem? Something akin to a Chinese ideogram? Or not a poem at all, but a visual work of art, which was known in the nineteenth century as a livre de peintre, the painter’s or artist’s book?12 Whatever its origins or type, “One Toss of the Dice” makes meaning not in the traditional way, by the sound and rhythm of its verses, but by the visual layout of the letters on its double pages and the spaces between them.

  Mallarmé’s masterwork, presented here in a new translation by J. D. McClatchy, cut a wide swath across twentieth-century literature and the arts, and deserves more recognition in the English-speaking world. “One Toss of the Dice” was the birth certificate of modern poetry in the same way that Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon was the inaugural work of modern painting, and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, of modern music. Mallarmé’s poem became an icon of modernism, in a line that associates difficulty and modernity, from “One Toss of the Dice” to “Zone” (1912), Guillaume Apollinaire’s epic of urban dislocation, to The Waste Land (1924), T. S. Eliot’s jarring poem of disintegration and regret. In fact, the logical leaps of “One Toss of the Dice” were the first signs of what would become the free-­associative modernist novel—Marcel Proust’s flashbacks of involuntary memory, Franz Kafka’s wild mixings of fantasy and everyday life, James Joyce’s and Virginia Woolf’s streams of consciousness, and Gertrude Stein’s “continual present.” Joyce kept a copy of “One Toss of the Dice” close at hand while writing Finnegans Wake.

  Mallarmé’s epic poem laid the groundwork for the temporal and spatial dislocations of cubist painting and poetry. It anticipated, among other things, Italian futurism, and French and Swiss Dadaist visual displays. Elements of “One Toss of the Dice” surfaced in the concrete sheet music and the syncopated beats of Erik Satie. Cy Twombly’s word pictures and John Cage’s chance-controlled music looked for inspiration to “One Toss of the Dice,” as did the musique aléatoire of Pierre Boulez. In his longest composition, “Pli selon pli” (“Fold by Fold”), Boulez set five of Mallarmé’s poems to music, “so, fold by fold,” the composer states, “as the five movements develop, a portrait of Mallarmé i
s revealed.”

  “One Toss of the Dice” is an atomic poem, conceived a full four decades before the discovery of nuclear fission in 1938. Words are broken into particles. Negatives are supplanted by further negatives. Prepositions lose their weight. Parentheses gain in substance. Each phrase is potentially a nucleus around which others may be construed, a large semantic periphery beyond which wide spaces separate similar clusters of scattered print. The poem, in a happy coincidence, appeared just five days after the publication of the British physicist J. J. Thomson’s article announcing the discovery of the electron as the fundamental unit of matter. Mallarmé, despite his anglophilia, could not have known Thomson. Yet the preface to “One Toss of the Dice,” which defines the originality of the poem as a scattering of words upon the page, resonates uncannily with Thomson’s radical spacing of the basic elements of the material universe.

  The vision of a word genius like Mallarmé—no less than scientific geniuses like Thomson and Einstein for physics, Watson and Crick for molecular biology, and Freud for psychology—shaped the perceptual world out of which scientific breakthroughs emerged. Art this great is the fellow traveler, if not the lubricant, of science and technology. The effects of simultaneity that “One Toss of the Dice” produce in the reader contributed to the coming into being, beginning in the 1880s, of universal time and fixed longitudinal zones among the nations of the world. Einstein went to work on clock coordination for the Bern patent office just five years after Mallarmé strove to produce the sensation of time simultaneity in his masterwork. The first theory of relativity, which can be understood in terms that resonate with those of “One Toss of the Dice,” would emerge out of the scientist’s experience with the mechanics of time just four years after that.

  “One Toss of the Dice” marked an enormous break with the conceptual world in place since the Renaissance. Its verbal and visual dislocations make it more like an interactive poem of the digital age than like any kind of traditional verse. A great existential crossword puzzle, Mallarmé’s masterwork invites the reader to fill in the stretches between words, the gaps in his or her understanding, to organize a wide array of scattered bits of meaning. Many works of literature, both poetry and prose, elicit multiple interpretations, yet none before it maintains so fully a lack of hierarchy in its word order or its sense. None offers the kind of multiple paths through disparate interconnected images and ideas of “One Toss of the Dice.”

  At the furthest reach of its effective horizon, Mallarmé’s poem is an early avatar of the hypertext of our era, with its modular possibilities of reading up and down, backward, forward, and obliquely, with great leaps. In its juddering jumps from one place of meaning to another, “One Toss of the Dice” is the zero point of a change of mental universe that culminated in the World Wide Web.

  What will taking the chance of reading “One Toss of the Dice” do for you? Why should you, in such a fissionable age as our own, read it?

  I am convinced that part of the benefit of reading “One Toss of the Dice” has to do with the sheer pleasure of cracking something hard. A great poetic Rorschach test, the poem is an exercise in mastering words as a way of mastering the world. Mallarmé tells you what his great work means in its title, the capitalized, centripetal sentence that runs like a verbal skewer through the poem: “ONE TOSS OF THE DICE NEVER WILL ABOLISH CHANCE.” Yet, the dispersed constellation of words begs for order, and the way we understand the poem’s title tells us more about ourselves than the words on the page, which are, after all, mute until they are read and infused with sense.

  A masterpiece about the enduring question of beating, cheating, or gaming the odds attached to every life worth living, “One Toss of the Dice” is about risk management and tolerance for the unknown. Engaging with it is risky in the way that committing ourselves to any consuming passion, work, hobby, sport, spiritual quest, journey of self-discovery, creative or intellectual project threatens a loss of the self. It is dangerous in the way that falling in love threatens to take the lover to unfamiliar places, the danger, of course, being part of the thrill. That risk taken, arranging and dispersing the poem’s shards of meaning around its central phrase puts us up against the question of whether we think of our world as ordered from the start and from without, or chaotic and wild, without design or purpose—or somewhere in between.

  Rightly understood, “One Toss of the Dice” sheds new light upon the condition of modernity, which is sometimes associated with a loss of moral direction, with skepticism, anxiety, self-­criticism, paralysis, doubt, and despair. Mallarmé, against the grain of discontent of the period of great upheaval between 1870 and World War I, unites us with a tradition reaching all the way back to the Greeks and with questions so deep and enduring as to clarify what it means to be fully human. This “desperately modest man” with a “sweeping cosmic manner,” the poet who could fuss about the paint on his easy chair while contemplating the metaphysical nature of human language, has much to teach us about how to live, both spiritually and in a myriad of small ways.13 “One Toss of the Dice” contains a great lesson in how to negotiate, after Nietzsche’s declaration of the death of God, the treacheries of a rootless secular world.

  One

  A POET IS BORN

  Stéphane Mallarmé’s last poem, an epic drama of shipwreck and survival, reached so far into the poet’s past, so deep into the psychic recesses of what it meant to suffer, recover, and write, that it can be said to have been growing in him his whole life.

  Étienne, as he was known as a child, was born in March 1842 to a comfortable, even affluent, middle-class family of lawyers and soldiers, alongside bureaucrats, notaries, and clerks who had worked for the government both before and after the Revolution of 1789. A measure of the solidity of Mallarmé’s origins can be seen in the two witnesses who signed his birth certificate in Paris’s second arrondissement. His maternal grandfather, André Marie Léger Desmolins, head of the Service of Registration and Domains in the Ministry of Finance, and his uncle, Jules Charles Adélaïde Mallarmé, lieutenant in the Garde Municipal, both had been awarded the Legion of Honor, France’s highest prize for national service. At the time of Étienne’s birth, his parents, Numa and Élizabeth Mallarmé, lived with the Desmolins in Paris. The infant was put out to nurse. The birth of a second child, Maria, two years later, encouraged Numa to buy a house on the rue de l’Hameau de Boulainvilliers, in what is now Paris’s chic sixteenth arrondissement.

  Louis-Philippe, king at the time of Étienne Mallarmé’s birth, was the third royal to govern during the restoration of the monarchy, after the second exile of Napoleon I in 1815. More liberal than his Bourbon predecessors, the Orleanist “Citizen King” had ruled, after the July Revolution of 1830, as “King of the French,” and not as “King of France,” by national sovereignty limited by a constitution, and not by divine right. Louis-Philippe presided over the industrial revolution in France, the building of roads and railroads, the development of factories and mines, and a consolidation of the power of the wealthy bourgeoisie—landowners, merchants, those who exercised liberal professions, and civil servants—at the expense of the working poor. The nation as a whole expanded its territorial reach and its sense of national pride by the conquest of Algeria between 1830 and 1847, as a result of intense colonial competition among the European powers over the continent of Africa.

  As a midlevel government employee, Numa Mallarmé profited little from the economic takeoff of the July Monarchy. This may have had to do with a genuine lack of ambition. But it may also have had to do with a desire not to draw attention to the role played by one of his ancestors during the Reign of Terror, the ten-month period between September 1793 and July 1794, when tens of thousands of “enemies of the Revolution” were executed by guillotine. François René Auguste Mallarmé had presided over a meeting of the National Convention that voted for the execution of King Louis XVI, “without appeal and without delay.” With the return of monarchy after the departure of Napoleon I in 1815,
the members of the Convention were banished from France. François Mallarmé, Numa’s great-uncle, who had served under Napoleon I during the Empire as well as during the Hundred Days of his return between March and July 1815, went into exile in Belgium, where he died in a mental hospital in 1831. He was one of the relatively lucky ones. According to a reckoning compiled in 1829, only 86 of the 338 members of the Convention died of natural causes; 33 were guillotined; 14 committed suicide; 7 were assassinated; 5 perished in French Guiana, having been deported; 2 drowned; and 5 died, as François Mallarmé soon would, as a result of madness.

  The legacy of a regicide in the family was still alive long after the event. One of Stéphane’s high school teachers, Emmanuel des Essarts, mentioned it in a memoir about his famous student. Paul Verlaine, in preparing a book on contemporary poets, wrote to Mallarmé in 1885, to ask him about this ancestor. Verlaine was especially interested in how François died, a question that his fellow poet, despite the lifting of any moral sanction with the disappearance of monarchy altogether after 1848, simply neglected to answer. Numa Mallarmé, however, had every reason to maintain a low profile as a civil servant in the government of Louis-Philippe, whose own father, along with the revolutionary Mallarmé, had voted to execute his cousin Louis XVI and had himself been put to death during the Reign of Terror.