Auguste and Louis Lumière had married two sisters on the same day, and the two couples lived with their children in a large house near the factory where their famous fast Etiquette Bleue film was manufactured. That night, Louis Lumière, on his way to bed, stopped to chat with the family seamstress when he experienced an extraordinary breakthrough—a “eureka!” moment. The mechanism capable of making the individual still photos of the film band stop long enough for the light to pass through it, and then move on, was that of the sewing machine, whose technology, within a matter of months, the Lumière brothers had adapted to the photographic shutter.
The Lumière brothers had solved the problem of the intermittent-stop-motion shutter, which allows the projected picture to fade while the retina still retains its image, causing the viewing eye to experience simultaneously both an instant in time and the aftereffects of a previous instant. However short the persistence of luminous impressions on our retina may be, the overall sensation is one of temporal duration, the passage of time as a continuous stream and not a succession of separate points. Further, by reversing the relationship between the light source and lens of the traditional camera, Auguste and Louis Lumière also managed, using the older technology of the magic lantern, to project moving images so that more than one person could view them at the same time.
While their lawyers worked on patents, the wizards of Lyon shared their invention with the members of the Congress of Photographic Societies in June 1895. A filmshot of congress attendees disembarking from a boat in the morning was processed and projected that very night. And, on December 28, 1895, in the Salon Indien du Grand Café on Paris’s boulevard des Capucines, the Lumière brothers offered to the world the first public movie projection.
The event created an immediate sensation, which resonated with Mallarmé’s calculations of the interactive sessions for the Grand Oeuvre. On the model of the Tuesday gatherings in his home, which was within walking distance of the Salon Indien, the poet imagined an audience guided by a leader or “opérateur,” which is the French term for projectionist. He spoke in the preface to “One Toss of the Dice” of an “implicit guiding thread” (fil conducteur latent—a more literal translation would be “latent conducting wire”); and he foresaw, in the performances of The Book, electrically projected images along with the commercial trappings of the movies—ticket sales and advertisements. And, as we shall see, Mallarmé’s ambitions for The Book coincided uncannily with the vitalizing effects of moving pictures.34
Newspaper reports stressed the animating power of film. In what may be the first movie review ever, La Poste reported in its edition of December 30 on a Lumière film called Exit from the Lumière Factory in Lyon. From the workshop door that opened poured forth a sea of workmen and women, with bicycles, dogs that run, and cars. “It all moves, it swarms. It is life itself, movement captured live.” Someday, the reviewer predicted, these machines will be available to the public. Then we can all photograph those most dear to us, no longer in their immobile form, but in their movements, with their familiar gestures, with speech on the tip of their tongues. At that moment, “death will cease to be absolute. . . . Life will have left an indelible trace.” Le Radical of the same day noted that man had already captured and reproduced words, and now one has reproduced life. “We will be able to see our loved ones move long after we have lost them.”35
By sheer coincidence, on the same day that the world learned of the Cinématographe, as the Lumières called their device, in Paris, Wilhelm Röntgen published in Würzburg, Germany a paper announcing the discovery of X-rays. The actual experiment had taken place two months earlier. In the first focus upon a human subject, Röntgen X-rayed the hand of his wife, Anna Bertha, who, looking at the ghostly image of the bones of her hand, declared, “I have seen my death!” If the moving pictures made the dead come alive, the still shot of the skeleton reminded the living of their mortality.
In the imagination of the first moviegoers, the Cinématographe seemed to conquer death and to offer the possibility of time travel. Journalist Henri de Parville had noted only a month before the Lumière brothers revealed their invention to the public, “It is clear that from now on any historic scene can be reproduced. Up until now all we had were paintings and photographs. Henceforth, we will have kinétogrammes. Our descendants will be able to attend the marriage of their grandmothers. They will see the fiancés approach the altar, the maids of honor present their velvet and satin purses. . . . They will all be alive, gay, young, and primped . . . secula seculorum. ‘O Time! Suspend your flight!’ ”36 This last line, quoting Alphonse de Lamartine, was especially appropriate, appearing as it had in “The Lake” (“Le Lac”), an elegiac evocation of the Romantic poet’s dead lost love, an attempt to make her live again. Who knows if Romanticism, a poetic movement based upon lost and dead loves, would have come about in a world with Cinématographes, and the possibility of attending one’s grandmother’s wedding?
Mallarmé was clearly aware of the advent of cinema. In April 1896, the poet Charles Morice delivered a lecture on France’s new “Prince of Poets.” Mallarmé, who was at the time nursing a prolonged bout of influenza, read the review of Morice’s lecture in Le Figaro, since he wrote the lecturer a note of thanks. He must have read on the same page of Le Figaro a report by his friend Jules Huret, who had famously interviewed him for the same newspaper in 1891, that “between two and six o’clock, the Cinématographe-Lumière recorded more than 1200 admissions.” In the first year, the short clips of the first movie shows—Leaving the Lumière Factory at Lyons, Feeding Baby, The Blacksmith, Arrival of a Train, Boat Leaving the Port—attracted as many as 2,500 viewers a day. Among the numerous projection houses that sprang up in Paris during the year 1896, the Pirou-Normandin, at 86, rue de Clichy, in Mallarmé’s own neighborhood, would have caught his attention. Even closer, on May 1, 1897, the Lumières, who at first resisted selling the Cinématographe on the open market, opened a dealership at 35, rue de Rome.
Mallarmé was known to have commented directly on movies only once. In January 1898, in response to a poll on illustrated books, the print-bound poet told Le Mercure de France, “I am for—no illustrations. Everything that a book evokes should happen in the mind of the reader: but, if you replace photography, why not go all the way to the Cinématographe, whose unrolling will supplant favorably many a volume, images and text.”37
Mallarmé’s fear that Wagner had usurped the proper place of poetry and that “nothing was left to do” must have paled next to the effects of early cinema. Indeed, the close chronological relationship between the invention of cinema in late December 1895 and Mallarmé’s composition of “One Toss of the Dice” six months later was not accidental, and one can imagine the following scenario. For thirty years, the poet had wrestled with the next-to-impossible project of The Book. During the whole long period between the crisis of his midtwenties and retirement, the only rival form was Wagnerian opera, which, alongside the spectacular but singular performances of Augusta Holmès’s Triumphal Ode in 1889, came as close as one could imagine at the time to the total work of art. The advent of the movies in late 1895, however, represented a powerful reminder of the possibility of transformative “future spectacle.” For the poet, it was now or never, and within six months, having made the necessary home improvements to the poetry-writing cottage in Valvins, he began his masterwork.
MARLLARMÉ’S ORIGINAL PREFACE
to the 1897 Cosmopolis Edition of “Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard”
I would prefer that this Note not be read or, if skimmed, that it be forgotten. It offers the clever Reader little beyond his own perceptions: but it might confuse the inexperienced one obliged to look at the first words of this Poem, so that those that follow, arranged as they are, lead to the last, the whole of it without novelty except for the spacing of the text. The “blanks,” in effect, assume importance because they strike the reader first; the versification usually demanded them, as the surrounding sil
ence, to the point that any one portion, of a lyric or even of just a few measures, occupies about a third of the page on which it is centered: I do not violate this procedure, only scatter it on the page. The paper intervenes every time an image, on its own, ceases or withdraws, accepting the succession of others; and, since it does not concern, as it usually does, regular sound patterns or verse so much as the prismatic subdivisions of the Idea, the instant they appear and for the duration of their role in some exact spiritual setting, near or far from the implicit guiding thread, for the sake of verisimilitude, the text imposes itself. The literary advantage, if I may call it that, of this copied distance which mentally separates groups of words or words from each other, is that it seems to accelerate or slow down the movement, stressing it, even intimating it by a simultaneous vision of the Page: this being the leading principle, as elsewhere the verse or the perfect line is. The fiction shows through, then quickly dissipates, following the expressiveness of the writing, around the fragmentary interruptions of a central sentence, introduced by the title and continuing on. Everything that occurs is, by foreshortening, hypothetical; narrative is avoided. Add that from this stripped-down method of thought, with its withdrawals, prolongations, flights, or from its very layout, there results, for whoever reads it aloud, a musical score. The difference in typefaces, between the dominant size, a secondary and adjacent ones, dictates their importance for oral performance, and the range, in the middle, at the top or bottom of the page, will indicate how the intonation may rise or fall. Only a certain number of daring directions, infringements, etc., forming the counterpoint to the prosody, remain in their elementary state in a work which lacks precedents: not that I respect the appropriateness of timid attempts; but it does not seem right to me, except in one’s own self-publications, in a Periodical however valiant, gracious and open to experiments, to step too far beyond custom. I shall have pointed out, nevertheless, about this Poem a “state” rather than a sketch, and one that does not break with tradition at all; extended its application in many senses without having offended anyone: sufficiently to open some eyes. Today, or without presuming on the future that will follow on it—nothing or something like a new art—let us readily acknowledge that the attempt participates, in unforeseen ways, in a number of pursuits dear to our time, free verse and the prose poem. They are joined, I know, under a strange influence, that of Music as heard at a concert; one discovers here several methods which seemed to apply to Literature and which I adopt. Its genre, if it should gradually become one like the symphony, alongside the art song, leaves intact the ancient technique of verse, which I continue to worship and to which I attribute the empire of passion and of dreams; this would be the preferred place to treat (as may yet follow) subjects of pure and complex imagination or intellect: there is no reason to exclude them from Poetry—the unique source.
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Six
“THERE, I’VE ADDED A BIT OF SHADOW”
Journalists aiming to entertain the readers of fin-de-siècle France turned to Mallarmé on topics from poetry to fashion trends, bicycles to house pets. In January 1897, Le Figaro sought the poet’s views about haberdashery to commemorate the centenary of the stovepipe hat, which had been introduced to France just after the Revolution. “You frighten me to speak about this topic,” he replied, “whoever wears such a thing cannot take it off. The world may end, but not the top hat, which probably always existed in some invisible state.”1 For some time after that, grateful hat manufacturers included in their advertising, “the world may end, but not silk hats.”
Two years earlier, Mallarmé had been asked by a journalist, “What do you think of punctuation?” The poet, who must have already begun thinking about “One Toss of the Dice,” offered, by his own account, a long and complicated disquisition on the “use or rejection of conventional signs . . . to indicate the distinction between prose and verse.” Verse might dispense with punctuation by offering a pause to constrain the forward thrust of the voice. Prose, however, required punctuation. The confused interviewer begged Mallarmé for a single sentence to sum up his point of view. “He knows what he is doing, clever chap,” the poet quipped. “Could such a thing be a sentence?” “Wait,” Mallarmé called out to the departing journalist, one foot out the door, “for decency’s sake, let me add at least a little obscurity.”2
Something similar occurred three months later, after the funeral of Paul Verlaine, which brought together motley bohemians and the cream of Parisian literary life, on January 10, 1896. Mallarmé—one of the pallbearers, along with the poets François Coppée, Catulle Mendès, and Robert de Montesquiou—delivered a eulogy in the church of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont, just behind the Pantheon. To the journalist Alidor Delzant’s request for a copy of his oration, Mallarmé replied that he had nothing in writing. Delzant proposed that he try to reconstitute it after the burial in Batignolles, while lunch was being prepared. And in his beautiful hand, round and majestic, decorated with a few knowing flourishes, Mallarmé wrote down twenty or so lines. “Then his face, Mephisto-like, contracted, a circumflex of a wrinkle knotted his brow. Furiously, he made a few corrections and additions.” Handing Delzant the sheet of paper, he said, “There, I’ve added a bit of shadow.”3
Mallarmé’s search for shadow has contributed to his reputation as an intentionally difficult poet—not only in his poetry, but in his prose writings, correspondence, and everyday exchanges as well. The American expatriate man of letters Robert Sherard recounted that in 1891 he invited the poet to lunch with Oscar Wilde and the Greek-born Symbolist poet Jean Moréas. Mallarmé responded via pneumatique, one of the little blue letters that circulated as a form of rapid communication—with delivery guaranteed in a matter of hours—throughout Belle Époque Paris. Sherard was unable to make out from its contents whether his invitation had been accepted or refused. “It was not until Mallarmé arrived at the café that I gathered that his involuted phrases had implied an acceptance.”4 The critic Jules Renard famously quipped that Mallarmé’s poetry was untranslatable, even into French.5
The difficulty of Mallarmé’s writing, his attack upon conventional verse, can be seen first in his rejection of the ordinary poetic lines that allow an easy distinction between poetry and prose and make for poetry’s musical effects. The scattering of the words of his masterwork shifts the traditional appeal of poetic sound, meter, rhythm, and rhyme from the ear to the eye. “One Toss of the Dice” was not intended to be read aloud, much less memorized. It was meant to be seen and to be taken in as much as a feat of graphic design as of aural effect.
In keeping with the intensely visual character of our own era, which began with the invention of cinema, Mallarmé’s epic stands as th
e world’s most deeply optical poem. In a lecture he delivered on Mallarmé and Verlaine at the Théâtre du Vieux Colombier in 1913, André Gide expressed regret at not having the original copy of “One Toss of the Dice” from the magazine Cosmopolis, the only extant edition at that time, to show his audience. If he had brought it along, Gide maintained, he would not have read it aloud. Instead, he would have held it up to show to the audience, since Mallarmé’s last work was more visible than readable: “the characters are so majestic that, even the most nearsighted person might have read it from the back of the room.”6 The poem as an eye chart would resurface ironically in 1969, when the artist Marcel Broodthaers published a purely graphic edition of “One Toss of the Dice,” preserving the layout of the type, but with its words replaced by thick horizontal black bars.
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