Leo Tolstoy recovered Zeno’s paradox in his discussion of the causality of historical events in War and Peace. Is it great men and the spirit of the times or the swarm of unknown individuals whose wills coalesce into the collective feelings that make for social movement? Given the infinite divisibility of the instants that make up the continuum of time, how is it possible, Tolstoy asked, to know when any particular event begins or ends?
Interest in Zeno’s paradox, which lies at the philosophical core of “One Toss of the Dice,” quickened among mathematicians around the time of the poem’s composition. The German mathematician Richard Dedekind, looking at rational and irrational numbers, concluded that there are no discontinuities along the number/line continuum. The mathematician Georg Cantor, considered to be the father of set theory, distinguished between real numbers, which are not countable, and natural numbers, which are countable, leading to what were known at the end of the century as set-theory paradoxes. In 1897, the very year “One Toss of the Dice” appeared, the Italian mathematician Cesare Burali-Forti articulated one such conundrum that resembles the core phrase of Mallarmé’s poem: “the ordinal number of the sets of all ordinal numbers must be an ordinal.” Bertrand Russell would pick up the contradiction from Burali-Forti in his 1903 The Principles of Mathematics. Contemporaneous mathematicians and philosophers who looked at the irrational numbers between whole numbers asked into how many parts a line might be divided, how many numbers lie between zero and one.
The most important philosopher of fin-de-siècle France, Henri Bergson, the son of a Jewish pianist from a prominent Polish family, married a cousin of Marcel Proust, who served as best man at his wedding. Both the philosopher and the novelist placed the role of human memory at the core of their thinking of the world, and both were obsessed by the relationship of individual moments in time to time as a continuum. Bergson took up the relation of individual things—points in space and instants in time—to the collective experiences that subsume them, encompass them, make them disappear, and transform them into the sensation of something more whole and higher than the sum of individual parts. In Matter and Memory, published in 1896, the philosopher posited consciousness itself as “a threading on the continuous string of memory of an uninterrupted series of instantaneous visions.” He was fascinated by the ways we transform individual experiences, which are at first conscious and particular, into the unconscious habits of living, the flow of life itself, what he termed “duration” (la durée).
Mallarmé aimed in “One Toss of the Dice” to resolve the contradiction between temporal atomism and temporal continuity by writing a sentence that reproduced the sensation of being both in and outside of time. In Bergson’s terms, the poet collapsed discrete temporal moments into seamless duration. What may appear as the poet’s obscurity is, in reality, an attempt to reproduce the world as an idea, whole and abstract, alongside the things, partial and concrete, that might fill that world—a creation that would be both outside of language and time and yet still part of the time-bound fragmentary orderings that language brings. The reader is obliged to make sense of the disorderings, which is divinely challenging, but which simulates the power of all creations—God’s Creation of the world via the Word alongside the poet’s summoning of a flower with words. It is not that Mallarmé introduced shadow for shadow’s sake or was difficult for the sake of difficulty. It is that he, like Augustine, and like all of us, wanted it all—to be and to know, to feel and to be conscious of feeling, to be ourselves and to see ourselves as others see us, to be outside of time and in it, to be both dead and alive.
Seven
THE DICE ARE TOSSED
In the autumn of 1896, Stéphane Mallarmé received an invitation from Cosmopolis, a cultural magazine with headquarters in London and local offices in Berlin, Paris, and Saint Petersburg to publish the poem or article of his choice. Whether “One Toss of the Dice” was the first draft, or a first chapter, or even a finished version of The Book, it had found a worthy venue, which was important, given the poem’s unusual format and syntactic provocation. The poet would not face a repeat of the humiliating rejection that had accompanied his submission of Afternoon of a Faun to the timidity or resentment of editors and other writers.
The good fortune of such an open-ended invitation deepened when Mallarmé was honored by one of the most lavish, indeed, still remembered, banquets of those “banquet years,” as Roger Shattuck came to call the period between 1885 and World War I. Younger poets, who acknowledged Mallarmé as their leader, organized not a twelve-, but a fifteen-course dinner in his honor on February 2, 1897. The poet, a gourmand who appreciated exquisite food and wine as well as fine furniture and bibelots, consumed with pleasure the potage valois, fillets of sole à la vénitienne, roasted chickens, pheasants surrounded by partridges, steak tenderloin in Madeira sauce, cheeses and fruits, pralines and ice cream, washed down by Mâcon, Chablis, Côte Saint Jacques, Champagne, coffee, and liqueurs. The venue was the elegant Au Père Lathuille restaurant on Paris’s avenue de Clichy, situated just beyond the city line, in what is now Paris’s seventeenth arrondissement, in order to escape the city tax on wine. Nearly a century before, the owner of Au Père Lathuille had distributed the contents of his cellar to the troops of the First Empire. He urged them to drink his wine so that it would not fall into the hands of invading Russian, Austrian, and Prussian troops, whose capture of Paris in March 1814 led to Napoleon I’s downfall and exile. In 1879, Édouard Manet rendered the famous restaurant’s luxurious soft light and pastel colors, delights of table and talk, lush plants and flowers in his painting Au Père Lathuille. Mallarmé, famous for delivering eloquent toasts to others at some of the greatest banquets of France’s Belle Époque, had been feted at a good address. As exacting as he was in all things sensual and esthetic, he pronounced the evening “unique and perfect.”
In an exchange of letters that preceded the appearance of “One Toss of the Dice” in the spring of 1897, André Lichtenberger, the Paris editor of Cosmopolis, informed Mallarmé that “the originality of the form of your poem provoked some objections from our English publisher,” who is afraid of offending “our readership, which is a little conservative when it comes to artistic matters.” In his response of March 4, 1897, the poet reminded Lichtenberger that he had broken no rules; and, besides, “a journal neither informs nor approves the work which it publishes.”1 In the end, the editors persuaded Mallarmé to compose a statement that would address the unconventional appearance of “One Toss of the Dice.” The poet’s initial reluctance to frame his masterwork with explanation can still be seen in the preface to the Cosmopolis edition, which begins, “I would prefer that this Note not be read or, if skimmed, that it be forgotten” (here).
The editors of Cosmopolis, hoping not to compromise the circulation of their magazine, restrained Mallarmé’s typographic ambitions to only ten pages, while his own design had called for twenty, plus a title page. “Cosmopolis was brave and delightful,” he wrote to André Gide, “but I could only offer them half of what I had intended, it was already such a risk for them!”2 The initial page was significant. There, we learn that Mallarmé baptized his work a “poem”; and there, the spinal sentence, the poem’s title, “Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard,” would be assembled in full. The poet thought of his poem as a complete book that should stand alone between two covers, which drew the accusation, as Mallarmé reported to Gide, that he was trying to make money by selling blank space.
By the time “One Toss of the Dice” appeared in Cosmopolis, Mallarmé had already planned in detail the layout of a more elaborate version, the undertaking of the art dealer Ambroise Vollard, with illustrations by Odilon Redon. Two hundred copies of the luxury edition were to be sold for the considerable sum of fifty francs. The poet was anxious that Redon’s drawings not be integrated into the visual layout of his words. They were to appear on separate pages, set against a shaded background in order not to rival “One Toss of the Dice” as a work of gra
phic design in its own right.3 Mallarmé was meticulous in his correction of the proofs for the expanded edition. Using graph paper to plot the layout across the two-page spreads, he issued written orders about the spacing of lines, the alignment of words, measurement of left, right, and center margins, type size and weight, and even warnings that “bad” letters—that is, those made from worn type, which might not make a full impression—be checked. The poet envisaged a full-folio presentation of this volume, 27 × 36 centimeters, but, in its final corrected version, it never saw the light of day.
For Stéphane Mallarmé, the dice were tossed on May 4, 1897, when “One Toss of the Dice Never Will Abolish Chance” became available to the conservative readers of Cosmopolis. As chance would have it, however, the literary event was eclipsed by news of a catastrophic fire that broke out the very same day at a gala to aid the indigent children of Paris. At three o’clock in the afternoon, just after the papal nuncio had bestowed his benediction upon the orphans and their clerical chaperones at the Bazar de la Charité, a movie projector, run not by electricity but by a mixture of ether and oxygen, burst into flame. A makeshift tent, the kind still used for charity benefits, on the rue Jean-Goujon in Paris’s chic eighth arrondissement, was quickly consumed. In the panic to escape through a single exit, 126 members of France’s social elite, mostly women, lost their lives. Some of the dead were burned so badly that they could be identified only by their teeth, in what was one of the earliest instances of forensic dentistry.
The disaster at the Bazar de la Charité, so prominent because the very rich were involved, was seen by some as divine punishment. The movie projector, invented by the Lumière brothers only two years before, and the elegant but highly flammable clothes of the victims figured as instruments of Satan. The charitable ladies, the poet François Coppée said, had come together to do good. “Everyone, of course, accuses God.”4 Everyone, that is, except God’s representatives on earth. A solemn mass was held the following Saturday in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame. At ten o’clock in the morning, the Republican Guard cleared the parvis in front of the west façade, with its elaborate sculptural program of birth and resurrection. Onlookers could be seen sitting on the branches of nearby trees and leaning out of the windows of the Hôtel-Dieu on the northern side of the square. The procession of mourners, government officials, and journalists filed past a mound of wreaths laid at the foot of the equestrian statue of Charlemagne and into the central door of the church. There, in the presence of President Félix Faure, the Père Ollivier blamed the infernal human invention of moving pictures for the tragedy of the Bazar de la Charité: “Without doubt, O sovereign Master of men and societies . . . , You have turned against him the conquests of science . . . ; and, the fire that he pretends to have wrested from Your hands like Prometheus of old, you have made the instrument of your vengeance. That which gave the illusion of life produced the horrible reality of death.”5
Certain of the women who perished in the Bazar de la Charité fire showed remarkable bravery. The Duchesse d’Alençon, sister of Empress Elisabeth of Austria, refused the aid of a worker who had offered to help her escape. “Because of my title I had to be the first to enter here. I shall be the last to go out,” she is reported to have said.6 She was later identified only by her dental records and the ring on her finger: “28 septembre 1888, Ferdinand d’Orléans à Sophie de Bavière.” Many of the aristocratic men, as in the shipwreck of the Titanic some fifteen years later, acted very badly, clawing their way to safety. The Catholic decadent writer Léon Bloy reported that one man cried, “It’s everyone for himself,” and it was widely rumored that men had used their canes, an aristocratic accessory, to fight their way out of the panicked crowd. Le Journal reported that “among the men, two were admirable, as many as ten did their duty. But the rest bolted, and not only saved no one, but cleared a path through feminine flesh with kicks of the feet and fist, and thrusts of the cane.”7
Mallarmé’s friend and sometime Mardist Count Robert de Montesquiou, known visually by the painting by Giovanni Boldini, which depicts him gazing lovingly at his cane, may have been there. He apparently showed up the next day and, pretending to look for friends, used his cane to lift the sheets covering the bodies laid out on the floor of the temporary morgue set up in the Palace of Industry. One of the policemen on duty is reported to have scolded, “One does not touch the dead with the end of a cane, Mr. Clubman! If it disgusts you, I can do the unveiling!” News of Montesquiou’s extreme bad taste reached the poet and novelist Jean Lorrain. From there it spread to fellow Mardist Henri de Régnier, whose sister-in-law, the daughter of poet José-Maria de Heredia, and mother-in-law, were injured trying to escape. Régnier suggested that at the upcoming party of the Baronne Alphonse de Rothschild, Montesquiou might do well to leave his cane at home and carry a muff. The day after the reception, the count “left his cards” at Régnier’s home, challenging him to a duel.8 Régnier, who confessed to an “almost complete ignorance” of swordsmanship, took several lessons. The duel took place in a remote area of the Park of Neuilly, and ended when Régnier managed to inflict a slight thumb wound upon Montesquiou, who went on to become one of the models for the dissolute Baron de Charlus in Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.
Despite his closeness to the Mallarmé family during the illness of eight-year-old Anatole in the summer of 1879, Montesquiou had broken temporarily with his master because of what he felt to be an indiscretion on Mallarmé’s part. In 1882, the consummate dandy introduced Mallarmé to his fantastic apartment on the quai d’Orsay late one evening. Two years later, the portrait of the overripe aesthete Des Esseintes surfaced in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novel Against the Grain. Montesquiou became convinced that the poet had shared with Huysmans such details of his nightcap in the “Cave of Ali-Baba” as the sanctus bell used as a doorbell, the gold painted tortoise, and the rooms decorated as a monastery cell or as the cabin of a yacht. This did not prevent Montesquiou, however, from declaring “One Toss of the Dice” to be “the last word of all human thought.”
On the day of the fire at the gala of the Bazar de la Charité, Mallarmé was in Paris, having returned from a brief stay in Valvins. He was aware of the event, since he wrote to José-Maria de Heredia to wish his wife and daughter a speedy recovery, as well as to the society painter Jean-François Raffaëlli, whose own wife and daughter were injured in the crush. By May 8, the poet was back in Valvins to prepare the summer house for the arrival of Marie and Geneviève, as he did each summer.
For weeks after the fire, French newspapers spoke of little else. Their failure to take notice of Mallarmé’s “attack on verse” seemed an unfortunate, but relatively minor consequence of a major national tragedy. Yet, how could the poet, having published on the very same day an epic poem about disaster and chance, not have wondered if its appearance and the explosion of a movie projector in Paris’s eighth arrondissement were mere coincidence or part of a larger and more meaningful pattern of events? The question lies at the heart of “One Toss of the Dice.”
Fellow poets with whom Mallarmé had shared his epic poem were his best audience. André Gide, who was vacationing in Florence at the time, wrote to his mentor to praise the poem’s “literary boldness . . . like a strangely jutting high promontory, beyond which there is nothing but night—or the sea and the sky full of dawn.”9 Yet, for Mallarmé, the version Gide had read was not bold enough. He expressed appreciation that the editors of Cosmopolis had taken the risk of publishing such an unusual work. The poet was dissatisfied, however, with the layout, and promised to send Gide the first suitable proof of his revision, which was already in the process of being published in the Vollard edition by the well-established printer Firmin Didot.
This second edition of “One Toss of the Dice,” Mallarmé assured Gide, would feature a proper layout. Lines of text crowded together on a single page of Cosmopolis would be spread across two pages, the separation rendering visually, and not just semantically, the meaning of the word
s. The phrase “by its arm a corpse . . . separated from the secret it guards” (cadavre par le bras . . . écarté du secret qu’il détient) (here), which occupied a single folio of the poem’s first printing, would, in the full edition, be physically laid across two folio pages, the word écarté (“spread”) designating the very process of thrusting apart. The same would be true of the phrase “with impatient terminal scurf . . . forked” (par d’impatientes squames ultimes . . . bifurquées) (here), the “forked” pointing to the words, on one page in Cosmopolis, situated along the fold of the book upon two separate pages in Mallarmé’s design for the full edition. Something similar occurs here where the phrase voltige . . . autour du gouffre (“hovers . . . round the vortex”) literally crosses the gutter or depressed fold—a vortex or abyss (gouffre)—that lies between the open pages of the printed book.
More startling, Gide would see in the full twenty-page version of “One Toss of the Dice,” when Mallarmé describes a boat about to sink amid the scattered debris of a shipwreck, that the typographical layout, the actual words, displayed across two pages, would dip across their full breadth and depth from left to right. The words will go down with the boat. “The vessel lists,” he promises, “from the top of one page to the bottom of the other.”10
In his response to Gide, Mallarmé referred to here, one of those sheets in which the visual layout of the words on the page coincides with their syntactic outlay and their meaning. The essential images, which move in a descending arc, gaining typographic mass across the double-page spread, involve a feathered wing descending through the whitened, spread-out, roiling abyss toward the sail of a rocking and listing boat, which eventually rights itself. The first word on this folio page is only the eighteenth word of the French poem, and plunges us full gale force into the attempt to make the appearance of the poem coincide with its meaning.
One Toss of the Dice Page 18