One Toss of the Dice

by R. Howard Bloch

  A key element of Mallarmé’s “attack on verse” lies in his breach of the simplest rules of syntax. The poet referred to himself as a “syntax man,” making the connection between even the empty margins that surround every poem and the big blank spaces of “One Toss of the Dice,” which interrupt the flow of language and meaning in some more shocking way. “If one accepts the invitation of the great white space left on purpose at the top of the page as if to separate from everything the already-read-elsewhere, if one comes to it with a new and virgin soul, one recognizes then that I am profoundly and scrupulously a syntax man [syntaxier], that my writing is devoid of obscurity, and my sentence is what it should be and be forever.”7

  Marcel Broodthaers, folio from “Un Coup de Dés.”

  Broodthaers, Marcel (1924–1976) © ARS, NY. “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard” by Stéphane Mallarmé. 1969. 20 photolithographs. Purchased with funds given by Howard B. Johnson in honor of Riva Castleman (178.1994.16). The Museum of Modern Art Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA I Art Resource, NY.

  What could such a wildly implausible claim mean? Surely the poet could not have expected his readers to find his writing—poetry or prose—to be easy. Nor could he have believed that his sentences, devoid of obscurity, would last forever. How is it possible to reconcile the difficult syntax of “One Toss of the Dice” with the poet’s denial of obscurity—his boast of clarity?

  Both English and French are “analytic languages.” Unlike, say, Latin, in which the form of a word determines its role in a sentence, meaning in English and French is determined by word order. And although the arrangement of the words is generally more flexible in a poem than in prose, “One Toss of the Dice” pushes our expectations of syntactic sequence to an extreme beyond which the loose logic of the sentence threatens the logic of sense.

  The basic syntax of “One Toss of the Dice” is difficult to decipher. The sudden interruption of the flow of a phrase, reversals of word order, abrupt interjections, and missing connections are a puzzle to even the most skillful grammarians. To diagram the relations between the poem’s uncertain and shifting parts of speech would be impossible, even if we were, as below, to render a compressed, punctuated version in which the spatial gaps that the poet claimed to be the unique quality of his verse have been eliminated:

  ONE TOSS OF THE DICE NEVER, EVEN WHEN THROWN IN THE MEASURELESS CIRCUMSTANCES FROM THE DEPTHS OF A SHIPWRECK, EVEN if the Abyss turned white, stalled, roiling beneath a desperately sloping incline of its own wing, in advance fallen back from the difficulty of trimming its sails, and stopping the gushing, preventing the surges deep in the very heart, the shadow buried in the deep by this alternative sail, almost the length of the wingspan of the great hull’s gaping breadth, a vessel listing from side to side

  THE MASTER, beyond old calculations, where skills are lost with age, risen, implying, once he grasped the helm, from this conflagration at his feet of the seamless horizon, that there is readied, moiling and merging, with the fist that would clasp it, as one threatens fate and the winds, a unique Number which cannot be any other Spirit, to heave it into the storm, to fold up division and pass proudly, hesitates by its arms a corpse separated from the secret it guards, rather than playing sides, like a cranky graybeard, on behalf of the waves: one invades the head, flows through the undulant beard, that shipwreck of the man himself without a ship, no matter where, vain

  from ancient times not to open the hand clenched above the worthless head, legacy amidst disappearance, to someone ambiguous, the ulterior immemorial demon having, from dead lands, led the old man toward this final meeting with probability, this one, his boyish shade caressed and polished and restored and washed, made supple by the waves, and freed from the hard bones lost between the planks, born of a revel, the sea enticing the sire or the sire against the sea, an idle chance Betrothal, whose veil of illusion fluttered their obsession, like the phantom of a gesture will tremble, will collapse, madness, WILL ABOLISH

  AS IF A simple insinuation in the silence, tangled in irony, or the mystery hurled, howled, in an oncoming eddy of hilarity and horror, hovers round the vortex without scattering or fleeing, and cradles its virgin symbol AS IF

  a solitary wandering plume, save a glancing encounter with a toque of midnight that fixes it in velvet, crumpled by a dark guffaw, this rigid whiteness, ridiculous, in opposition to the sky, too much not to mark faintly anyone, bitter prince of the reef wears it like a heroic headpiece, irresistible, but limited by his trifling manly mind, in a thunderbolt

  anxious expiatory and pubescent mute laughter that IF The lucid and lordly aigrette of vertigo on the invisible brow scintillates, then shadows, a delicate dark form, upright in its sea siren’s sinuosity, time enough to slap with impatient terminal scurf, forked, a rock, false manor, all at once evaporated in mists, which imposed a limit on infinity

  IT WAS THE NUMBER, born of the stars, IF IT EXISTED other than as agony’s flickering hallucination; IF IT BEGAN AND ENDED, rising only to be denied and shut down when revealed at last by some profusion lavished in scarcity; IF IT HAD AMOUNTED to a totality, however meager; IF IT HAD ILLUMINATED, IT WOULD BE worse, neither more nor less, indifferent but as much, CHANCE Falls the plume, rhythmic suspense of disaster, to be sunk in the first foam, whence once its delirium surged to a peak, withered by the identical sameness of the vortex

  NOTHING of the memorable crisis or the event might have been accomplished with no result in sight human WILL HAVE TAKEN PLACE, an ordinary swell pours out absence, BUT THE PLACE, some lapping below, as if to water down the empty act abruptly, which else by its lies would have justified extinction, in this region of waves where all reality dissolves

  EXCEPT in the heights PERHAPS, as far as a place can fuse with the beyond, apart from the interest assigned to it in general, by such a slant and such a slope of fires, toward what must be the Septentrion or North A CONSTELLATION cold from neglect and disuse, not so much that it does not count, on some empty and superior surface, the successive shock from the stars of a final reckoning in the making, watching, doubting, rolling, blazing, and brooding before stopping at some last point that consecrates it

  All Thought casts a Toss of the Dice

  The syntax of “One Toss of the Dice” is as hard to decipher when regularly spaced and punctuated as it is as radical free verse. Even when smoothed out in the above translation of the poem into prose, the cavernous syntactic gap between “ONE TOSS OF THE DICE NEVER” at the beginning of the first stanza and “WILL ABOLISH” at the end of the third stanza needs to be closed. The verse demands that the reader make sense of numerous phrases that intervene between the main subject, the main verb, and its object. Mallarmé’s epic poem requires keeping in mind the sentence, set off in capitals and 16-point type: “ONE TOSS OF THE DICE NEVER . . . WILL ABOLISH . . . CHANCE.”

  Although the title of the poem may be enigmatic, it is nonetheless a complete sentence that makes a certain amount of sense, and is easily retained in our mind. It is like a proverb, a sentence of wisdom with an epigrammatic ring. However, “NEVER” (“JAMAIS”) and “WILL ABOLISH” (“N’ABOLIRA”) are separated in Mallarmé’s original by six pages of intervening text, and “WILL ABOLISH” and “CHANCE” (“LE HASARD”) are separated by another eight pages. Though we know the shape and the meaning of the whole, we must wait, while reading, for the sequential unfolding through time of the words of the central sentence. The same is true for the sentence, all in capitals, but in 8-point type, spread over four pages: “NOTHING . . . WILL HAVE TAKEN PLACE . . . BUT THE PLACE . . . EXCEPT . . . PERHAPS . . . A CONSTELLATION” (pp 184-87). The “NOTHING” and the “WILL HAVE TAKEN PLACE” are separated in the original French by sixteen words, the “WILL HAVE TAKEN PLACE” and the “BUT THE PLACE” by five words, the “BUT THE PLACE” and “EXCEPT” by thirty words, the “EXCEPT” and “PERHAPS” by two words, and the “PERHAPS” and “A CONSTELLATION” by thirty-two words.

  Mallarm
é’s syntactic suspensions circle back and forth between one phrase and its interruptions, as if the reader were moving in time, while repeatedly returned to a fixed place in time—or, if it is not fixed, to a place that is moving syntactically at a different pace than the interruptions. At every moment of reading we hold in mindful suspense the main and subordinate clauses of a single sentence fractured by enclaves of intervening phrases and subphrases, exclamations and detached bits of syntactic information; the whole punctuated by the menace of dissolution in the “extinction / in this region / of waves / where all reality dissolves” (p. 185).

  Like the fugue and counterfugue of certain musical compositions, the intervening subordinated phrases, subphrases, parentheses, and ellipses, which are themselves interrupted by smaller segments and shards of meaning, are designed to interrupt the comprehension of the central sentence, whose words are strung like pearls on a string. The Mallarméan sentence thus is plastic. Some have compared its sinuosity to the organic arabesque designs of contemporary Art Nouveau, the style of “One Toss of the Dice” a poetic style métro. It spreads out branches, disjunctive pseudopods, that take us in one direction, then in another, before rejoining the original line of language and thought.

  Alongside wide gaps of meaning held in suspense, “One Toss of the Dice” is packed with syntactic reversals and inversions of expected word sequence. The normal syntax of the sentence Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard is Un coup de dés n’abolira jamais le hasard; here, the jamais (“never”), an adverb of time, comes before, instead of after, the verb, as it almost never does in French, thus reversing time syntactically and chronologically. Elsewhere, possessive adjectives are placed after the possessing noun, aile la sienne (here); demonstratives, after the modified noun, naufrage cela (here); adjectives, before the noun, which in French, with some exceptions, are normally placed after the noun, béante profondeur (here), l’unique Nombre (here), anciens calculs (here), l’inutile tête (here), le vierge indice (here), La lucide et seigneuriale aigrette (here), mémorable crise (here), inférieur clapotis (here); adjectives, both before and after the noun, durs os perdus (here), impatientes squames ultimes (here); adjectives, after the noun that ordinarily precede the noun, point dernier (here); verbs are placed before the subject Choit la plume (here); adverbs occur before, and not after, the verb, JAMAIS . . . N’ABOLIRA in the title, but also in the phrases très à l’intérieur résume (here) and ancestralement à n’ouvrir pas la main (here). In each case, the reversal of traditional word order, and of the ordinary time of reading, loosens the unidirectional grip of chronological time, so that we are moving both back and forth along time’s continuum.

  Ellipses abound in “One Toss of the Dice”: omitted negatives, Soit que instead of ne Soit que (here), sourdant que nié et clot quand apparu (here); omitted articles, naufrage cela (here), Fiançailles dont (here), plume solitaire éperdue (here) prince amer de l’écueil (here); omitted verbs, l’homme sans nef n’importe où vaine (here) So separated are the words that modify each other—articles and nouns, adjectives and nouns, nouns and verbs, adverbs and verbs—that it is hard to tell whether something is missing, or whether the phrase should be structured in some other way. Mallarmé’s poem resembles a great cosmic telegram whose terse syntactic leaps make sense along the lines of juxtaposition and not subordination. The overall impression is one of enormous compression.

  Villiers de l’Isle-Adam had an uncanny perception of the condensed Mallarméan style in a dream that he recounted to the novelist and playwright Gustave Guiches. In his sleep, Villiers saw himself remove a packet of cigarette papers from his pocket. But, instead of the usual brand of Job, which recalled his biblical brother, he saw in miniature writing The Collected Works of Stéphane Mallarmé. Starting to read the papers, he saw that they followed one after the other, until he awoke, finally, to find Afternoon of a Faun lying open on his bed. “There is only one poet,” concluded Villiers, “capable of capturing the infinite in such a small space!”8

  Mallarmé’s simultaneous syntax, which combines the impression of chronological linear time with that of being outside of time, does not build on acquired understandings of how literally to read the words on the page. Often, the beginning of a sentence yields little clue as to where it will end, so vivid and disorienting are the darts and dodges, the feints, flashes, and flickers of what France’s “Prince of Poets” defined, in the context of Impressionist painting, as the “aspect of things, which perpetually lives but dies every moment,”9 which flares into focus in the phrase “The lucid and lordly aigrette of vertigo on the invisible brow scintillates then shadows” (here) or, in “agony’s flickering hallucination . . . rising only to be denied and shut down” (here).

  The “syntax man” created in “One Toss of the Dice” a great simultaneous sentence that renders both the objective uniform passage of clock time and the vast stillness of eternity. He cinched such a sensation through a framing symmetry that is not unlike the first and last page of the ideal Book. “One Toss of the Dice” begins and ends with the phrase “Un coup de dés,” which means that we find ourselves, having read the whole, at the place of beginning. In this, the modern poem reproduces the ring structure of ancient and medieval epics, a technique of oral poetry that allowed the singer to keep in mind the overall structure of plot while concentrating upon more local moments of narration.

  Such containing symmetry is part of the modernist aesthetic. The last sentence of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, a sentence about circulation and recirculation, completes the first: “A way a lone a last a loved a long the / riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.” Likewise, Marcel Proust’s three-thousand-page Remembrance of Things Past begins with “For a long time, I used to go to bed early” (Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure) and ends with the word “Time” (Temps) and a meditation upon the relationship of chronological time to immeasurable recurrent time:

  If at least, time enough were allotted to me to accomplish my work, I would not fail to mark it with the seal of Time . . . , and I would therein describe men, if need be, as monsters occupying a place in Time infinitely more important than the restricted one reserved for them in space, a place, on the, contrary, prolonged immeasurably since, simultaneously touching widely separated years and the distant periods they have lived through—between which so many days have ranged themselves—they stand like giants immersed in Time.10

  Like the effects of “One Toss of the Dice,” the Proustian long sentence, with its multiple subordinate clauses, both places us in time and loses us in the reticulated twists of a thought process according to which every moment is contained in every other moment, and punctual linear time gives way to uninterrupted presence.

  The framing symmetry of the beginning and end of “One Toss of the Dice,” is reinforced by the central symmetry of the poem’s middle pages (here) with five two-page spreads on either side, which begins and ends with the words “AS IF.” At its two ends and in the middle, Mallarmé’s masterpiece is built upon a mirror image that both progresses, from beginning to middle and from middle to end, through time, yet returns cyclically to words that are identical, and thus gives the impression that time has not moved at all. A similar principle operates at the level of certain of the discernible pages, phrases, and sentences of the poem. The words mer and aïeul are the mirror images of each other—“the sea enticing the sire or the sire against the sea” (here). The phrase “RIEN . . . N’AURA EU LIEU . . . QUE LE LIEU” (“NOTHING . . . WILL HAVE TAKEN PLACE . . . BUT THE PLACE”) (here) is a tautology that performs an unfolding of time and a resistance to time. Though the sentence progresses, with subject, verb and object or predicate nominative, it fails to progress through time. The future perfect tense, the “WILL HAVE TAKEN PLACE,” a completed action in the future, renders perfectly time folding back upon itself.

  Mallarmé’s sentences recall the syn
tax of Latin when Latin suits the desired effects of time simultaneity. He uses, for example, a participle, either present or past, in absolute apposition to a noun, as in l’Abîme blanchi (“the abyss turned white”) (here), la manoeuvre avec l’âge oubliée (“where skills are lost with age”) (here), Une insinuation simple au silence enroulée (“A simple insinuation in the silence”) (here). The poet’s noun and participle phrases derive from the Latin ablative absolute, a form that designates an action having been completed or a condition having been fulfilled as essential to the action of the sentence’s main verb. Such a structure is perfect for the simultaneous syntax of “One Toss of the Dice,” since, like the future perfect tense, which designates in the present a completed action in the future, the ablative absolute designates a completed action in the past with consequences for the present. In both cases, future and past bleed into the present in a great affirmation of the fungibility of time—the timeliness of a toss of the dice and the timelessness of chance.

  Mallarmé’s privileging of nouns and relative negligence of verbs make for an environment of states of being disrupted only occasionally by punctual action. Verbs are the poor cousins of Mallarmé’s poetic universe. He often eliminated active verbs in successive revisions of his poems. When the verb was retained, more often than not it took the form of an infinitive or of a participle, either the present participle or gerund, a verb phrase that can be used as a noun phrase, couvrant, coupant (both p. 193), inférant (here) veillant doutant roulant brillant et méditant (here); or the past participle, celui son ombre puérile caressée et polie et rendue et lavée assouplie par la vague et soustraite aux durs os perdus entre les ais né (“this one his boyish shade caressed and polished and restored and washed made supple by the waves and freed from the hard bones lost between the planks”) (here); le mystère précipité hurlé (“the mystery hurled howled”) (here). In the most spectacular example of the dominance of nouns to be found elsewhere in the poet’s Oeuvre, Mallarmé’s preface to William Beckford’s Gothic novel Vathek contains a sentence of some fifty-five words with only one finite verb.