One Toss of the Dice

by R. Howard Bloch

  Like the Septentrion or North Star, which orients us at the end of “One Toss of the Dice,” English is superior because of its northern roots. English escaped the influence of classical languages, which it would not encounter until the Norman Conquest of 1066, in the form of Norman French. It thus preserved in sounds and spellings some of the original spirit of the primordial Sanskrit roots. “He who wants to speak wisely can only say one thing about English, that this idiom, thanks to its monosyllabic character and the neutrality of certain forms apt to mark several grammatical functions at once, lays bare its Radicals: if by this designation one means certain words (even though all can equally aspire to such), simple in their notion and aspect.”27 Oddly, too, since Mallarmé envisaged a return via poetry to the truth that lies in the origin of words, English also points to the direction in which language will evolve. The poet was convinced that English grammar, though rooted in very ancient and sacred beginnings of language, was headed toward some great future linguistic point. “English: Contemporary Language par excellence, the one that marks the double character of the era, retrospective and advanced.”28

  Mallarmé developed his anthropological ideas about language in English Words, completed in 1878, just before his son Anatole’s illness and death. There, he maintained that “certain keys” exist “between languages, or sometimes even in one language,” and that English is especially vital in the keys that survive from its ancient Indo-­European rudiments. The words “house” and “husband,” for example, have always been linked, since the husband is the head of household. The poet rejoiced in the English affiliation between the word “loaf” and “lord,” since the role of a lord is to distribute bread; between “spur” and “spurn”; between “well” and “wealth”; and between “thrash,” the floor for beating grain, and “threshold.”29 He insisted that the letter “k” was a key to the verbal kinship between English words: revealing “the sense of knottedness, of joining, etc. Take note of the group ‘kin, kind, king,’ from which comes the notion of family goodness.”30

  The survival of families of sound reveal clusters of meaning, which were especially visible in the first consonant, or combination of consonants, of English words. The initial letters of words were, for the poet, the equivalent of Cuvier’s skeletal parts by which one might recognize the whole animal as well as its relation to other species. The poet thus organized the words discussed in his English Words alphabetically, because the first letter of a word, unlike the first name of a person, was the equivalent of a family name. The truth contained in the beginning of words was fixed in the body and indicative of family relations.

  Alliteration, rhyme based on the first stressed syllable of a series of words within a single line of verse, was, for Mallarmé, “one of the sacred or perilous mysteries of Language”;31 and it was much more of an English than a French metric principle. English alliteration reached all the way back to Anglo-Saxon poetry, and it culminated in the works of Edgar Allan Poe. As a teenager, Mallarmé had copied and translated Poe’s verse, and the translation he published in 1875 of “The Raven,” with illustrations by Édouard Manet, preserved Poe’s repeated occlusive “g” sounds: the original “What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore / Meant in croacking ‘Nevermore’ ” was rendered by “à ce que ce sombre, disgracieux, sinistre, maigre et augural oiseau de jadis signifiait en croissant: ‘Jamais plus!’ ”32 Alliteration affirmed the original connection of words via the vestigial sounds of their Aryan roots still affixed to the first syllable, and was thus the guarantee of an original connection of words to things as well as of things among themselves.

  For Mallarmé, the role of poetry was to reunite families of words separated through time, and whose relationship, attested only by similarities of sound, was no longer apparent. The genius of the poet—Mallarmé’s “purifying the words of the tribe”—was to sense such relations, which he might not necessarily fully understand, but which he, or his genius, or some invisible spiritual source beyond the consciousness of any individual, would transcribe from thought, or intuition, or inspiration, to paper. “I have found the genuine poetry that men have lost since Orpheus!” the poet exclaimed in a phrase harking back to the origins of verse.33

  “One Toss of the Dice” is filled with repeated consonant sounds that not only imitate the alliterative potential of English but fix the French sounds of Mallarmé’s poem in the original organic elements of human speech—a “similitude between verses and the old proportions.”34 The falling feather of here, the “solitary wandering plume,” starts atop a page dominated by the florin “f,” “f”: sauf / que la rencontre ou l’effleure une toque de minuit / et immobilise / au velours chiffonné par un esclaffement sombre . . . prince amer de l’écueil / s’en coiffe comme de l’héroïque” (here) (“save / a glancing encounter with a toque of midnight / that fixes it / in velvet crumpled by a dark guffaw . . . bitter prince of the reef / wears it like a heroic headpiece”; here). In Mallarmé’s discussion of English consonants, “f,” especially in combination with “l,” denotes the act of flying or beating space, examples to be found in “to fall,” “to flow,” “to float,” “to fly,” “to flap,” “to flutter,” “to flit.”35 Though the “f’s” of page 201 are not initials, and only in the word “l’effleure” is an “f” bound to an “l,” it is hard not to see in their repetition along the trajectory of the falling feather, whose shape is bound to the “f,” an attempt to elide organically letter, sound, and sense.

  True alliteration is to be found in the falling feather of page 205, especially if we count the “ch” and the soft “c” of “cime” and the ligature “s” sound of “aux écumes” among the sibilant “s’s”: “Choit / la plume / rythmique suspens du sinistre / s’ensevelir / aux écumes originelles / naguères d’où sursauta son délire jusqu’à une cime / flétrie” (“Falls / the plume / rhythmic suspense of disaster / to be sunk / in the first foam / whence once its delirium surged to a peak”; p. 183). The “s’s” of “One Toss of the Dice,” like the florin “f ” for feather, are ideographs, letters that take the visual shape of the thing they represent. Mallarmé’s notes, written just before “One Toss of the Dice,” and published after his death, indicate as much: “ ‘S,’ I say, is an analytic letter: dissolving and disseminating, par excellence. . . . I find in it the occasion to affirm the existence, outside of verbal value as much of a purely hieroglyphic one . . . , of a secret direction, confusedly indicated by orthography, and which converges mysteriously upon the pure general sign made to indicate verse.”36 The letter “S” points and curls back and forth, like a hieroglyph of the wavering arc of the wafting feather as it falls.

  “S” bound to another consonant is, Mallarmé averred, a sinister sound. “SNEER is a ‘bad smile’ and SNAKE, a perverse animal, le serpent, SN impresses an English reader as a sinister digraph. . . .”37 “S, alone, however, has no other sense than that very clearly of to place, to seat, or, on the contrary, to seek.”38 How perfect, then, to trace the path of the falling feather, whose meaning is allied with the lowering of the plume/pen seeking paper, in “s” sounds, beginning with the “ch” of choit, third-person singular of the archaic verb choir, “to fall,” which shares a root with “chance,” from the popular Latin cadentia, plural neutral of the present participle cadere, “to fall.” And how perfect that the “s,” which connotes placement or seating, should come to rest (here) on the sibilant surface of the North Star: “sur quelque surface vacante et supérieure / le heurt successif / sidéralement” (“on some empty and superior surface / the successive shock / from the stars”; p. 187).

  “One Toss of the Dice,” a shipwreck poem littered with debris on the surface of water, features prominently the liquid sounds “m,” “n,” “r,” and “l.” In Mallarmé’s Anglo-cratylism, the letter “L” “seems sometimes incapable of expressing anything other than a natural desire [appétition] followed by no outcome, slowness, stagnation of things which drag or lag or conti
nue even; it recovers spontaneity in meanings like to leap and all its powers of yearning in meanings of listening and loving, satisfied by the group of loaf to lord.”39 here hold a series of “l’s” in stressed position, which depict the ship’s captain, slowed by the stalled sea and full of desire to regain his former mastery of the boat, yet unable to do so: “LE MAÎTRE / hors d’anciens calculs / où la manoeuvre avec l’âge oubliée.” (“THE MASTER / beyond old calculations / where skills are lost with age”; here). Nor is he able, when the time comes, to cast the dice clasped in his raised fist.

  The symmetrical alliterative “la mer par l’aïeul tentant ou l’aïeul contre la mer” (“the sea enticing the sire or the sire against the sea”) turns around the liquids “l” and “m” in what might be seen as one of those tautologies of “One Toss of the Dice” which expresses desire with no outcome, the ultimate form of which is to be found here: “RIEN / de la mémorable crise / ou se fût l’évènement / accompli en vue de tout résultat nul / humain / N’AURA EU LIEU / une élévation ordinaire verse l’absence / QUE LE LIEU / inférieur clapotis quelconque comme pour disperser l’acte vide” (“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”; here).

  “The stagnation of things” rendered by “L’s” is fully expressed in the dorsal dominant phrase “RIEN . . . N’AURA EU LIEU . . . QUE LE LIEU” (“NOTHING . . . WILL HAVE TAKEN PLACE . . . BUT THE PLACE”), as “desire followed by no outcome” is conveyed in “l’évènement accompli en vue de tout résultat nul humain.” Against the passivity conveyed by the “L,” one finds the alliterative “inférieur clapotis quelconque comme pour disperser l’acte vide,” dominated by the velar hard “c,” including the que- of quelconque. “Words in ‘C,’ a consonant with a ready and decisive attack,” Mallarmé contended, “are seen in great number, receiving from this initial letter meaning connected to lively acts like to embrace, to split, to climb, thanks to the addition of an ‘l ’; and with ‘r ’, splinter and break: ‘ch’ implies a violent effort and with that preserves an impression of roughness.”40 On the penultimate folio of “One Toss of the Dice,” the active “C’s” and “Ch’s” do battle with “passive” “L’s,” mirroring the more general theme of states of being or background interrupted by an event, smooth sailing, in the instance, punctured by a shipwreck.

  In Mallarmé’s linking of the sounds of English to their primordial meaning, “ ‘M’ translates the power to do or to make, thus the joy, male and maternal; then, according to a meaning coming from very far in the past, measure and duty, the number, meeting, fusion and the middle term: by a reversal, not as sudden as it appears, inferiority, weakness or rage.”41 “N” connotes purity, because it “cannot support the presence of another consonant at the beginning of a word . . . ‘N,’ less frequent than ‘M’ marked with the seal of plenitude: judge it rather incisive and clean, as in the act of cutting or in the senses expressed by the Families of NAIL and NOSE, ‘ongle’ and ‘nez,’ from which ‘bec’ [NOZZLE].” here, full of “m’s” and “n’s,” are covered by the “weakness and rage” of the “stalled roiling abyss.”

  JAMAIS / QUAND BIEN MÊME LANCÉ DANS DES CIRCONSTANCES / ÉTERNELLES / DU FOND D’UN NAUFRAGE / SOIT / que / l’Abîme / blanchi / étale / furieux / sous une inclinaison / plane désespérément / d’aile / la sienne / par / avance retombée d’un mal à dresser le vol / et couvrant les jaillissements / coupant au ras les bonds / très à l’intérieur résume / l’ombre enfouie dans la profondeur par cette voile alternative

  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

  The “veillant / doutant / roulant / brillant et méditant / avant de s’arrêter / à quelque point dernier qui le sacre” (“watching / doubting rolling / blazing and brooding / before stopping / at some last point that consecrates it”) of the final page of “One Toss of the Dice” offers a series of nasal present participle suffixes that renders states of being and plenitude, ended incisively by a “stopping,” a cutting short. Couper in French means “to cut,” and a coup de dés, a “cut of the dice,” seals and consecrates the entire poem, just as writing fixes or “cuts short” the fullness of an idea.

  Mallarmé took the sounds of English to be close to the truth of things, and he used English phonology in “One Toss of the Dice” to make visible the hidden relationships between them. So, too, the poet uses many French words with their English connotation: dénier as “to deny,” in the sense of “to refuse,” which was an archaism in French; vacante, meaning “open” as in English, and not “vacant” or “unoccupied,” as in French; vain and veuf as synonyms of “empty,” as in English, and not “vain, ineffectual, useless” or “bereft,” as in French. Mallarmé uses Sûr, at the beginning of a sentence, like the English “Sure,” which ordinarily in French would be Certes, and coin to refer to money, a pure anglicism that does not exist in French.42 Certain phrases of “One Toss of the Dice” seem to have been borrowed from English, “prince amer de l’écueil” (here) “bitter prince of the reef,” “la mémorable crise” (here), mémorable being a French word, more usual in English as “memorable” than in the rare French from “mémorable.” The word “résume” appears on page 193 of “One Toss of the Dice,” “très à l’intérieur résume,” in its etymological sense of “to take back,” closer to the English “to resume” than to its French sense of “to summarize” or “to sum up.” “Alternative” is also found on page 193 as an “alternating” and not as in the French, more literally “alternative,” except in the restricted realm of “alternating current,” courant alternatif.

  The word order of “One Toss of the Dice” derives in part from modern English, especially the placement of adjectives before nouns, as in “la mémorable crise.” On some deep level, however, under the assumption that the oldest forms of English were the most authentic, Mallarmé turned to archaic examples of recognizable English, found in Low German, which he reproduced in English Words. There, the poet, in a completely improbable effort to recover the lost truth of words as a key to the truth of things, offered a translation of the Bible of the fourth-century bishop Ulfilas, from what he calls Mœso-Gothic, into both English and French:

  1)Vairthai vilja theins, svê in himina yah ana airthai

  BE-DONE WILL THINE AS IN HEAVEN YEA ON EARTH

  (Être faite veut ta . . . comme au ciel oui sur la terre)

  2)Hlaif unsarana thana sinteinan gif uns himma daga

  LOAF OUR THE CONTINUOUS GIVE US THIS DAY

  (Pain notre le perpétual donne-nous ce jour)

  3)Svasve yah veis afletam thaim skulam unsaraim

  SO-AS YEA WE OFF-LET THOSE DEBTORS OF OURS

  (Comme oui nous laissons de côté ces débiteurs des nôtres)43

  In a world where the origin of words was the guarantee of their authenticity, the closer one gets to Aryan roots, the closer one is to the “Immortal Truth Herself.” For Mallarmé, this meant the astonishing prospect of sentences written at the end of the nineteenth century that imitated the jumbled word order of the fourth-century Gothic Bible, or at least the poet’s word-by-word translation of the Bible of Ulfilas. The contours of the sentences of “One Toss of the Dice” had been in place since the fourth century, and participated in the spiritual aura of the Word of God. “All the great masters, ancient and modern, plagiarized Homer,” Mallarmé observed, “and Homer plagiarized God.”44

  Eight

  “IT’S THE SAME FOR THE MAN OF SCIENCE”

  Two years after beginning “One Toss of th
e Dice,” and a little over a year after its publication, Mallarmé was plagued by bouts of what was thought to be tonsillitis. He had been coughing all spring. The return to Valvins in late April 1898 to prepare the house for the arrival of Marie and Geneviève brought intermittent relief. The discomfort seemed at some times to subside and, at others, to be chronic, often within the space of a single day. On May 1, he wrote to his wife and daughter that he “was practically no longer coughing, and felt, even, the good encroachment of repose.” Later that evening, after a dinner with the poet Édouard Dujardin at which he remained “completely sober,” he wondered if he had not caught whooping cough from one of the local girls who brought it home from school that winter.

  The poet made the usual calls at neighboring houses, and some of the local residents dropped by to indulge in the yearly round of gossip and news with the humble man who sometimes appeared lost in his thoughts, and who was now world famous. A purveyor of construction materials, Monsieur Maire, predicted that there would be no unemployment in the coming year. The postman was bitten in the leg by a dog, and had to be taken home in a horse-drawn cart. He would be incapacitated for a few days. The liberal candidate from Fontainebleau, Gustave Hubbard, was not reelected to the Chamber of Deputies. Queen Victoria, then in the fifty-first year of her reign, passed through on the rail line just behind Valvins on her way back to London from Nice. The weather had been so intemperate that Méry Laurent, who was to spend time with Mallarmé and other friends near Valvins, postponed her holiday. Once he had settled in, the poet visited the cemetery where Anatole lay, writing plaintively back to wife and daughter, “for we had been four, my poor friends. . . . I carried your thoughts with me there. . . . I have almost stopped coughing.”1