One Toss of the Dice

by R. Howard Bloch

  EVEN

  if

  the Abyss

  turned white

  stalled

  roiling

  beneath a desperately

  sloping incline

  of its own

  wing

  in

  The top half of the folio page in the original French displays just fifteen words disposed in eleven lines, eight of which hold only a single word, and four of which contain only a single syllable. While the layout of the page does not wholly stop the process of reading, it certainly slows it down in the very place that the words themselves—“stalled roiling”—designate a halt to the forward motion of the boat. The layout of English page 170 is sparse, the syntax halting, and the image evoked, along with the meaning of the words themselves, summon a pale, roiling, halted abyss.

  The descending type that speaks of sinking in the sea here leaves us gasping for air, as if we were really going under. And though we lurch and almost sink on the top left portion of the double page, on the lower right third we settle, as the sinking ship has righted itself, and we are saved from drowning. The form of the sentence made from “the Abyss . . . beneath a desperately sloping incline of its own wing” appears to descend, while “in advance fallen back from the difficulty” mirrors the sudden updraft of wind in a sail, or the swoop of a winged bird. The listing ship rights itself in a series of lines that become increasingly symmetrically poised on top of one another, as the disposal of words on the page coincides with their meaning—a hull which has regained its balance in a series of centrally justified lines on page 171.

  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

  Mallarmé’s use of space and design to render meaning was an early version of Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum “the medium is the message.” It anticipated a world in which software programs for layout and display on screens and in print have endowed us all with the potential, if not to write visual poetry, at least to organize our thoughts along the lines of a PowerPoint presentation, with different sizes and forms of type, bullet points and subpoints, decorative and plain backgrounds, image and text boxes, SmartArt, headers and footers, inserts and fades, all of which are designed to project the shape of our thoughts upon a screen. Such “talking points” are merely technical versions of the kind of graphic art that began with “One Toss of the Dice.”

  In an even more stunning coincidence of typographical layout with meaning, Mallarmé promised that on the final page of the authorized version of “One Toss of the Dice,” Gide would “see that the constellation will take the shape, according to precise laws and as much as it is possible in a printed text, fatally, of a constellation.”11

  The layout of the type here resembles a toss of the dice, a descending arc of a line, at the end of which the scatter of words reproduces the dispersion of dice, the whole held up by the concluding phrase “All Thought casts a Toss of the Dice.” More important, the shape of the tossed dice duplicates the figure of the Big Dipper, part of the constellation Ursa Major, by which the northern pole star, Polaris, might be located. The poem thus appears literally as a constellation, the projection of points in space—in the instance, words scattered on the page—upon an imagined plane.

  Mallarmé knew the Ursa Major, a pattern of stars in the northern celestial hemisphere, originally recognized by Ptolemy in the second century C.E., and one of eighty-eight constellations still acknowledged today. His readers, much closer to the world of celestial navigation than we are in a world of global positioning systems, would have recognized in the Big Dipper or the Plough an asterism of seven bright stars within the Ursa Major. The constellation’s brightest star, Polaris, was a way of determining true north for the purpose of earthly navigation.

  Mallarmé and his contemporaries were also more familiar with the mythological significance of the Ursa Major. At the age of twenty-one, in the first version of what would become his prose poem “Autumn Complaint” (“Plainte d’automne”), a lament for his dead sister, the poet singled out the constellation as the place of dead souls and the source of his own solitude: “Since Maria left me on her journey to another star—oh, which one? Orion, Sirius, the Great Bear?—I have always cherished solitude.”12 In The Ancient Gods, his translation and adaptation of William Cox’s Manual of Mythology, written some seventeen years after “Autumn Complaint,” Mallarmé discussed the seven great sages of Hindu astronomy, the Rishis, in terms of the blended roots in Sanskrit of the words for “wise ones” and “shining ones,” which were converted in Greek to “ ‘arctoï’ or ‘bear,’ belonging also to this root.”13

  Mallarmé’s shaping of his verse to resemble the Big Dipper, his final orientation in the direction of the northern pole star at the end of “One Toss of the Dice,” goes further than mere consolation to set the world aright, to heal the threat of shipwreck in a world that many modern writers and thinkers declared to be without meaning. Like the Ursa Major, which points reliably north, the end of “One Toss of the Dice” situates the reader, fixes us in the universe, and makes the connection between poetic and geographic orientation. Mallarmé thus affirmed poetry’s power to identify familiar patterns amid the seeming chaos of looking into unordered space.

  “One Toss of the Dice” is filled with nodal points of threat and rescue. The words in places disorient and tug us under. We lose our bearing—only to be delivered at other points by the coincidence of the material layout of words on the page with their meaning. Words may seem unlimited, arbitrary, chaotic. Properly disposed, they make for the discernment of constellations of meaning just as the stars, scattered throughout the sky, coalesce in discernible patterns oriented around the Septentrion or North Star.

  The ending of “One Toss of the Dice” is determining and significant for our understanding of Mallarmé’s poetry and of modernity writ large. It answers the question of whether life, in the absence of some guiding presence outside of man—the role that God used to play—might have meaning. The righting of the listing boat along with the whirling universe pointed, finally, north puts Mallarmé on the side not of waffling, degenerate, impotent indeterminacy, but of the great Platonic connection of all things, man the microcosm of the wider world. “Yes!” Mallarmé exclaimed, in his essay “Literature. Doctrine,” “With its twenty-four signs, this Literature exactly called Letters, along with multiple couplings in the form of phrases, then verse, a system disposed as a spiritual zodiac, implies its own doctrine, abstract, esoteric like some theology.”14

  Paul Valéry visited Mallarmé at his summer home just two weeks after the appearance of “One Toss of the Dice.” He reported in a letter to André Gide that their mentor called him over to his desk, opened a drawer, pulled out a copy of “One Toss of the Dice,” then recited it to him privately “in a low voice, unmodulated, without the least ‘affect,’ as if he were reading it to himself.”15 Valéry also described the walk from the house to the train station. The two poets experienced what was apparently an incredibly starry night in Valvins: “The sky moreover was full of extraordinary tosses of the dice.” Mallarmé reported to his wife and daughter on the very same evening that it was “a night of stars without equal.”16 If chance had spoiled the publication of “One Toss of the Dice,” the poet must have wondered if the dice in the stars had not arrayed themselves in constellations in imitation of his masterwork. Valéry later remarked that Mallarmé “tried to raise a page to the power of the starry sky!”17

  One could find no better example of signs reproducing the thing signified than Mallarmé’s writing a poem whose imagery summons writing itself. The sail of “One Toss of the Dice” com
bines with falling feathers—quills—to reproduce the very motion of putting pen to paper. The poet described writing as an “oar stroke,” and the sail as a “white page.”18 Henri de Régnier recalled that Mallarmé the sailor took pleasure in cruises on the league of the Seine between Samois and Valvins, at the mercy of the moving sail, rectangular and white, which, he said, with a smile and a finger pointing in that direction, reminded him of “the white page on which one writes.”19 De Régnier also reported that at the Tuesday meeting of March 27, 1894, Mallarmé announced that he was going to publish something on sails. “When I am dreaming on the river, stretched out on my boat, it is really the white page on which one writes,” the poet said, according to Régnier. It contains all of philosophy. It implies the identity of opposites, because one tips it to the left to go right, and also the other way around.”20

  Mallarmé sailing on the Seine.

  Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet, Paris, ms MNR 1864.

  Two feathers and one feathered wing that appear out of nowhere in “One Toss of the Dice” fall through the air, as Mallarmé duplicates the sensation of thought coming into being from nowhere, and of the feather-pen descending to transcribe thought to paper. In correcting the proofs of “One Toss of the Dice” as part of the preparation of the enhanced version in the months after the Cosmopolis edition had appeared, the poet picked up his own pen and crossed out the ordinary printed “f,” substituting a handwritten flowing “f,” more like the florin “f, ” used as a symbol for the coin, in order to give it the appearance of a feather.

  A wing appears in “One Toss of the Dice” as a hesitating feather, tossed in the wind. It descends from the white abyss in the direction of the sail of a rocking and listing boat. At the bottom of page 170, the feathers take shape “beneath a desperately / sloping incline / of its own / wing.” On page 171, “this alternative sail” comes to rest, “almost the length / of the wingspan / of the great hull’s gaping breadth.” The disposition of type on the two folios reproduces the visual effects of a falling feather, which sways gracefully in the air from side to side, from “EVEN” to “Abyss,” left to right; then, in starts and stops, from “turned white” to “of its own,” right to left; then, from “of its own” to “in,” right to left, again. The shape of the whole can be taken for a large open wing encompassing all the words—feathers on the wing—between “EVEN” and “in.”

  The second dropping of the feather/plume/pen in “One Toss of the Dice” renders the sensation of what it feels like when the ideal wholeness of an idea is broken into bits of language—words—arrayed on the page, one after the other.

  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 (here)

  Whereas the first feather is lost in “rigid whiteness / ridiculous / in opposition to the sky,” the second sinks into an eddy of the sea. It is as if, in not making a mark, it avoids disaster, remains pure potential, coalesces into “the identical sameness of the vortex” without ever assuming a particular material shape. The pen’s written depiction of the failure of the plume to make its mark is, of course, a contradiction, but “One Toss of the Dice” is built upon a world of alternative logics, which seek both to respect and infringe logical laws as we read.

  The impossible thing that Mallarmé wishes to come momentarily true is just the opposite of the obscurity of which he is sometimes accused. He brought about a literal coincidence of signs with the thing signified, of the words of his poem with the images that the words evoke. The impulse was pervasive. Édouard Dujardin, editor of the Revue indépendente, reported that in editing one of Mallarmé’s articles, he reminded the poet of the grammatical impossibility of placing an exclamation point in the middle of a sentence. To which Mallarmé replied with a couplet, now famous among his occasional pieces: “Ce point, Dujardin, on le met / Afin d’imiter un plumet ” (“This point, Dujardin, you will resume it / In order to imitate a plumet”).21 We have seen that the falling plumes of “One Toss of the Dice” represent the process of writing, the pen lowered to paper. The warning to Dujardin goes even further in aligning the cast of the grammatical sign with its meaning, the shape of the exclamation point with that of a feather.

  In the copy of “One Toss of the Dice” sent to his friend the Mardist Camille Mauclair, Mallarmé expressed the possibility of an unmediated relation between language and the world at the level of the sentence or larger linguistic unit. “I believe that every phrase or thought, if it has a rhythm, should model it on the object that it depicts and reproduce, cast all naked, immediately, as sprung in the mind, a little of the disposition of this object in every way. Literature shows this; no other reason to write on paper.”22

  The goal of uniting the appearance of words and their meaning has a long history in the West, beginning with Plato’s dialogue Cratylus, which turns around the question of whether words are divinely imposed and maintain some necessary relationship with their referent or are merely the result of social convention, and are therefore unreliable as vehicles of proof or truth. Saint Augustine picked up the Platonic thread in late antiquity. “Everyone seeks,” he affirmed, “a certain resemblance in his ways of signifying such that signs themselves reproduce to the extent possible, the thing signified.”23 The harmony of words and things was, for the early Church Father, the equivalent of a sacrament, the melding of symbols—wine and wafer—with the blood and body of Christ, the eucharistic presence of Christ’s body in the words of the mass. In the seventh century, the Spanish bishop Isidore of Seville transformed the search for etymologies, the “causes of the original imposition” of names upon things based upon the resemblance of letters and the objects to which they refer, into the basis of all natural and moral philosophy.

  Ancient and medieval ideas about the etymological relationship of language and meaning resurfaced in the nineteenth century with the birth of the science of comparative philology in Germany among the Romantics and its implantation in France after the Franco-Prussian War. At the end of the eighteenth century, the naturalist Georges Cuvier had advanced the theory that one could recognize the whole of an organism by only a part of the skeleton. Linguists of the period focused upon the bits of surviving linguistic material that allow us, according to phonetic laws originally formulated by the fairy-tale writer Jacob Grimm in the 1820s, to trace the history of words back to that primitive place where words, meaning, and the world converge, which is Mallarmé’s driving ambition for “One Toss of the Dice.”

  The man usually considered the first philologist, the German Franz Bopp, published a Comparative Grammar between 1833 and 1852. Bopp’s work, building on the discovery of Sanskrit texts in the eighteenth century, traced the etymology of words beyond Hebrew and the Semitic languages to their Indo-European roots, which were thought to contain the basic elements of all human speech. Interest in Bopp’s work was sparked in France by the translation in 1866 of his Comparative Grammar by the linguist Michel Bréal. The son of a rabbi, the original force behind the marathon at the first modern Olympic Games in 1896, and an early defender of Dreyfus in the affair that would quicken in the interval between the composition and the appearance of “One Toss of the Dice,” Bréal was one of the pioneers of modern semantics. Mallarmé had met Bréal at the home of none other than Napoleon III’s American dentist, the Parisian social gadfly Dr. Thomas Evans. Both men were present at a gathering of the Comité des Universités de Paris et d’Amérique that Evans hosted on October 12, 1895, for the purpose of countering the excessive influence of German universities in the United States.

  Before that, Mallarmé had come across the early ideas of comparative anthropology, the combined origins of languages and of peoples, through Max Müller’s Science of Language, translated into French in 1864. “It is said that blood is thicker than wate
r, but it may be said with even greater truth,” Müller asserted, “that language is thicker than blood.” The assimilation of pure language and pure blood culminated for Müller in the Aryan languages of northern India: “the blood which circulates in their grammar is Aryan blood.”24 Müller’s racialist ideas were vulgarized in English by William Cox and, as previously mentioned, Mallarmé translated into French Cox’s Manual of Mythology and Mythology of the Aryan Nations under the title of Les Dieux antiques.

  Mallarmé was interested in the origins of languages. Throughout his life, he nurtured the vague project of completing the equivalent of a Ph.D. in comparative linguistics. As early as 1865, he compiled notes that, according to Edmond Bonniot, included a Latin thesis on “The Divinity of Intelligence (the spirituality of the soul).” “Finally, what remains for me to do,” Mallarmé wrote to Eugène Lefébure, on March 20, 1870, “is a little German, with which, around Easter, I should begin the study of a comparative Grammar (not in translation) of the indo-germanic languages, I mean Sanskrit, Greek and Latin, this for two years later to do a ‘licence’; then, I will start a more external study of Semitic languages which I will arrive at via Zend (middle Persian).”25

  In the thinking of the Romance philologists of the nineteenth century, all modern languages derived from “the Aryan family.” Mallarmé, however, did not study Sanskrit, Zend, or the Semitic languages. He studied English, and he crafted “One Toss of the Dice” by drawing on English roots and forms that he concluded came closer than those of his native tongue or the verbal patterns of Latin to “the miraculous stamp of Truth Herself Incarnate.”26 French, even more than English, had become distanced from the primordial attachment of the sound of words to things. Mallarmé chose for an example of the obscurity of French the very words that designate “shadows” along with the words that point to “day” and “night.” The poet claimed to be disappointed that in French the word ténèbres (“shadows”) does not seem very dark when compared with the opacity of the word ombre (“shade”). Likewise, he was frustrated at the perverseness and contradiction that lends dark tones to jour (“day”) and bright tones to nuit (“night”).