The simultaneous syntax of Mallarmé’s masterwork contributed to more theoretical discussions of what time is and how it should be measured as part of the historical quest, between 1870 and 1920, to coordinate clocks in France and in the rest of the world.
The desire for universal time in France was in part a function of the railroads, and there is a case to be made that the sudden exclamations of “One Toss of the Dice,” the discontinuous phrases and ellipses, reproduce the sensation of train travel, with its abrupt appearances and disappearances of close objects that pass by like little surprises in a rapidly moving visual field. Mallarmé was, as we have seen, a frequent traveler by train between Paris and Valvins.
Before 1888 there were at least three temporal systems in use in France. Every town had its own local or solar time tied to the moment when the sun passed through the meridian at that longitudinal location. Local inhabitants were also aware of Paris Time, or mean solar time along the meridian of the Paris Observatory. Finally, clocks in French railway stations displayed an offset time—in advance by five minutes—in the track area in order to discourage missed trains. The establishment of a single temporal measure by which cities and towns linked by trains might schedule arrivals and departures was essential to smooth operation along the rails. In January 1888, M. F. S. Carnot, the president of the Republic, announced the formation of a commission to study the question of a single civil time for the entire country, and on March 15, 1891, a law was passed making Parisian Time “the legal hour of France, Algeria, and Tunisia.”
The great impetus to French unification of time came from Germany. In an address on the very day after the French passed their law, and just a month before his death, the formidable Prussian general Helmuth von Moltke, who had defeated Napoleon III at Sedan in 1870, reminded the members of the Reischtag of the importance of railroads for military maneuver and of the significance of a single time zone for the coordination of trains. On April 1, 1892, Germany adopted for all railway, postal, and telegraphic services Greenwich Time plus one hour, or Central European Time.
The question of time simultaneity was, of course, inseparable from that of universally recognized spatial meridians. No one disputed the meridian as a unit of global measure: the earth is divided longitudinally into 360 degrees, the sun rotates every 24 hours or 1440 minutes, and each degree represents 4 minutes of longitude. Nationalism erupted, however, in the matter of fixing a prime meridian to be used worldwide for navigational maps and charts, or for astronomical and scientific purposes. In the area of spatial measurement, the French assumed they would play a dominant role as they did in the treaty—written in French and signed by seventeen nations in Paris on May 20, 1875—establishing the meter as the international standard of length. A prototype, made of 90 percent platinum and 10 percent iridium alloy, was stored at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures at Sèvres, with thirty exact copies distributed worldwide.
In 1870, up to fourteen different prime meridians were still being used on European topographical maps, with three main contenders: that passing through Ferro, the most westerly of the Canary Islands, 20 degrees west of Paris; the Paris meridian, passing through the Paris Observatory; and the meridian passing through the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. At the International Geographic Congress held in Antwerp in 1871, Greenwich was adopted for sea charts, but land maps were still predicated upon local meridians.
The International Meridian Conference held in Washington, D.C., in the fall of 1884 established a universal day. Of the twenty-five nations in attendance, only France abstained from recognizing the English prime meridian. Unable to hold out any longer, however, a bill was introduced in the Chamber of Deputies in October 1896—that is, at the very time that Mallarmé wrestled with time simultaneity in “One Toss of the Dice”—to change France’s prime meridian from the Paris Observatory to Greenwich. The bill was immediately amended to read, “The legal time in France and Algeria is the mean time of Paris, retarded by 9 minutes, 21 seconds,” which corresponded exactly to the longitudinal difference between Paris and Greenwich. It was only on March 9, 1911, fourteen and a half years later, that the bill became law, and France reluctantly joined the world community in acknowledging both universal time and the prime meridian of the English national observatory.
Time signals were first transmitted from the Eiffel Tower on May 23, 1910, but on July 1, 1911, the signals shifted to reflect Greenwich Time. From Paris, the almost instantaneous transmission of wireless signals to eight relay stations worldwide solved the problem of time simultaneity and aided in the plotting of location as well. The Mallarmé of “One Toss of the Dice” would have been moved, though perhaps not surprised, believing as he did in the interconnection of all earthly things, to know that some of the earliest uses of telegraph signals dispatched worldwide involved shipwrecks: the rescue in 1909 of 1,600 passengers from the White Star Liner Republic, which collided with the S.S. Florida off the coast of Nantucket, and, on the night of April 14, 1912, the distress call and calculation of the exact location of the Titanic: “MGY (Titanic) CQD in 41.46 N. 40.14 W. Wants immediate assistance.”
“One Toss of the Dice” participated, alongside cinema, in the worldwide quest for time simultaneity. Yet Mallarmé’s epic poem also summoned ideas that were much older than the technological advances and poetic breaks of the last decade of the nineteenth century. The dream of animating individual things, still and detached, by making them part of a greater whole, reached all the way back to the thinking of such questions in the West. Mallarmé can be situated within the great Platonic articulation of the relation of the realm of matter and the senses, both of which are limited by time, to that of ideas, which are conceived to exist outside of time. His last poem sits alongside Neoplatonic, and even theological, understandings of the troubling link between language, which is time-bound, and the divine, which is imagined to be beyond earthly time.
“One Toss of the Dice” responds more powerfully than any poem I know to the age-old question that still presses powerfully upon modern philosophy: How is it that we can conceive of whole, universal, abstract things, yet we cannot capture their wholeness in language? Why is it that we cannot render—speak or write, or even think—their unified ideal nature through words?
The answer has to do in part with the relation of the visual to the verbal. “One Toss of the Dice” is a poem that is structured at the level not of the line of verse, nor even of the strophe, but of the page, extended in Mallarmé’s ambitious final version to two pages. As a visual unit, we take in the page all at once, though we must read it through time. We can see many things, including many words, all at once, logically and simultaneously. We cannot, however, understand them without the successive orderings of one word placed after another in sequence. Given that we see and can conceive of many things at once, holding them in our mind, Mallarmé was obsessed by the question of how the simultaneity of what the eye sees or the mind imagines might be translated into patterns of thought, might manifest in figures of speech, might be communicated from speaker to listener, or, most important, might be captured in writing and communicated from the written or printed page to the reader—all of which requires that words be spoken, written, or read in time.
No one has gone further in thinking about the relation of the wholeness of what we can conceive to the fragmentary nature of what we can think, say, write, or read than Augustine of Hippo, who lived fifteen centuries before Mallarmé. The most profound of all the early Church Fathers, the main conduit of Plato, Christianized, to the West, and a man for whom words and the Word stood at the center of all understandings of personal, social, and religious experience, Augustine articulated the relation of the wholeness of ideas to the fragmentary nature of language in terms of God’s Creation of the world on the model of human speech. “Just as when we speak of matter and form,” Augustine wrote in De Genesi ad litteram (The Literal Meaning of Genesis), “we understand that they are simultaneously implicated in each other
, but we cannot pronounce one and the other simultaneously. So it is that we need a brief space of time when we pronounce these two words, to pronounce one before the other, so it is too in the unfolding of a narrative, it is necessary to recount the creation of one before that of the other, even though God, as we have said, created both simultaneously.”11 Augustine was fascinated by the question of how God could have held the words of Creation in His mind long enough to arrive at the end of the sentence, which made sense of the whole, just as he wondered how this is possible in the sentences spoken by one human being to another. Every sentence, spoken, written, or read, each creation of meaning in words, participates—for both Augustine and Mallarmé—in the drama of the original creation of the world.
It is unlikely that the poet, living under the desperately secular regime of Third Republic France, as amid positivist faith in empirical science and emerging social sciences, ever read the writings of the fifth-century bishop of Hippo. Yet the two men engaged in a common thinking of the relation of words to the world that makes it seem that some questions are so deep and enduring that they appear naturally in the most disparate of places.
Mallarmé, like Augustine, equated human language with creation, or at least the ability to summon things with words. “I say: ‘a flower!’ then from that forgetfulness to which my voice consigns all floral form, something different from the usual calyces arises, something all music, essence, and softness: the flower which is absent from all bouquets.”12 Reading the poet’s sentences, whether in verse or in prose, is a creative process, which mimes Augustine’s account of God’s Creation of the world. In “One Toss of the Dice” in particular, we are obliged to keep in mind words pronounced in time, substantial swaths of syntax, while other words interrupt to break the chain of meaning, or start other chains, all before returning to the originally interrupted phrase, which may seem never to end. All the while, we maintain some idea of the meaning of the whole.
Mallarmé sought in his epic poem to produce the sensation of an aboriginal speech act, the sentence that God spoke in creating the world. No less than Augustine, he attempted, in his reversals of word order, ellipses and omissions, interruptions of meaning, and wild syntactic jumps, to create a kind of artificial simultaneity resembling what Augustine attributed to “God’s coeternally present Word.” Mallarmé and Augustine aspired to an understanding that contains the whole of Creation, that exists before the material words that make vibrations in the air, that, when pronounced in time, created the physical world, the world of time, in time. “Nothing,” wrote the bishop of Hippo, in a phrase whose syntactical complication prefigured that of Mallarmé, “could be created which, if before time, is not coeternal with the Creator, or if at the beginning of time or at some time, does not base the reason for its creation—if the term ‘reason’ is not used improperly—in the partaking of a life coeternal in the Word of God coeternal with the Father.”13
If all this thinking about how language structures the poetic effects of “One Toss of the Dice” seems a little removed from the everyday and a little abstract, bear in mind that poetry in this regard is no different from any other language act, no different from the combinations of words we use all the time. Nothing, in fact, could be closer to our experience of how it feels to think, to speak, or to write about even the smallest things.
When we think, our thought gives the impression of a great full simultaneity in which all parts of the equation are present—what Augustine calls an “intuition” or “intellection.”14 However, as soon as we begin to put such thoughts into words, something is lost. The same is true when we read one word after the other in a sentence, and even more so when we write, writing being synonymous with the shadowy ink that obscures the blank neatness of white paper. The poet Georges Rodenbach reported having asked Mallarmé, at a café and in the presence of the art critic and novelist Edmond de Goncourt and the novelist Alphonse Daudet, if he did not “willingly withdraw into the shadows, in order to be alone with an elite, with himself, or his dream?” There was a long silence: Daudet tipped his monocle, Goncourt smirked, and “then, Mallarmé, with his smiling serenity, made one of those gestures (a little priest, a little dancer) with which he seemed each time to enter the conversation as one enters on the stage, and said: ‘But doesn’t the act of writing itself require putting black on white?’ ”15
Mallarmé aimed in “One Toss of the Dice” to recover in time the sensation of fullness that is outside of time, and which makes us feel spiritually alive, in essence, by putting black on white. “Let us have no more of those successive, incessant, back-and-forth motions of our eyes, traveling from one line to the next and beginning all over again,” he wrote in his famous essay “The Book, a Spiritual Instrument.” “Otherwise we will miss that ecstacy in which we become immortal for a brief hour, free of all reality, and raise our obsessions to the level of creation.”16
“One Toss of the Dice” chronicles the shipwreck of speech and of writing: that in laying out our thoughts through time, they lose their wholeness, become fragmented, seem arbitrary, wrecked, partial. This is something that each of us experiences when we begin to write, or even to organize our thoughts before writing. The fullness of our imagining of things never enters language, to the extent that if we use a word, the thing itself is absent. The golden glow of our unarticulated ideas, a state of pure potential and boundless hope, in which the whole of things is vaguely perceptible along with the relation of parts, is punctured by the necessity of choosing one word instead of another, of eliminating some meanings in favor of others. Such wholeness is further shattered by the putting of one thought, one word, before another in the making of phrases, sentences, and paragraphs—what Mallarmé in the poem’s preface termed the “prismatic subdivisions of the Idea.” The making of small, sequential, meanings, compared to the seamless integrity of the imagination, feels like disaster.
“One Toss of the Dice” engages the thought process at large, the writing process at large, the relation of writing to thought and to intuition, and the relation of small, physical, particular events and things (the material world and the world of history) to universals and abstractions—to ideas that, if they are true or even axiomatic, are not conceived to exist in time or to be bound by time. The relation of individual happenings and things to universal ones is, to take up the terms of our poem, that of any single toss of the dice to the concept of chance itself, or, to adopt the first proposition of the poem, a single toss of the dice “THROWN IN THE MEASURELESS CIRCUMSTANCES” (here). Our prediction about how any particular roll might come out, in light of the infinity of all possible rolls, is a flawed calculation, but something nonetheless accessible to the imagination or the mind. Chance may set the background of each toss of the dice, but it has no purchase upon its result; nor does any particular roll change the nature of chance, our ideas about chance, or our chances in relation to the next roll. Each new toss of the dice is a wholly new beginning, in which the odds of any specific outcome are identical to every other toss—past, present, or future.
The incommensurability of individual material things to abstract ideas has haunted the West in one form or another, from Plato’s distinction between the soul and the material world accessible to the senses, to the early Church Fathers’ distinction between God and the earthly realm, to Descartes’s mind-body split, to Hegel’s universal and particular, the infinitude that moves finite things, Spirit and Nature. There is some indication that Mallarmé, at the behest of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, read Hegel, whose thought via translation entered France, alongside of the music of Wagner, beginning in the 1860s.
The dice image itself is one of metaphysical gambling with a theological ring. Against the abstract background of chance, any individual toss of the dice poses the question, at the core of philosophy since the sixth-century B.C.E. philosopher Heraclitus, of the relationship of what is timeless to that which is in time, of being to becoming, and of ideal abstraction to historical event. For the ancients,
the question of how an individual moment in time relates to the series of all such moments was subsumed in the paradoxes of another pre-Socratic philosopher, Zeno of Elea, who in the fifth century B.C.E. articulated the conundrum of the race between Achilles and the tortoise, which we know from Aristotle: “In a race, the quickest runner can never overtake the slowest, since the pursuer must first reach the point whence the pursued started, so that the slower must always hold a lead.” Or, in the paradox of an arrow moving along a trajectory in space: “If everything when it occupies an equal space is at rest, and if that which is in locomotion is always occupying such a space at any moment, the flying arrow is therefore motionless.”17 Aristotle took up the paradoxes in his assertion of the reality of individual things in distinction to Plato’s insistence upon the illusory nature of all sublunar reality, the knowledge of which enters the mind through the senses. For Plato, individual things were merely the degraded images of Ideas, which alone are real and true.
The question of the reality of individual things versus universals ran like a rich vein through the Middle Ages, tipping from Platonic belief in the reality of Ideas to a recognition of particular things as part of a new interest in empirical observation and science at the time of the Renaissance of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. As part of the Renaissance of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the English philosopher Francis Bacon would reject the “intellectual sciences” and philosophy, which, he maintained, lead to disputations rather than knowledge. He favored an inductive scientific method based upon the close scrutiny of particular natural events. For Bacon, the senses may deceive, but “they also supply the means of discovering their own errors.”
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