Mallarmé’s epic poem suggests that the loosening of time and space relations began earlier, and began not only among scientists and mathematicians but among the makers of modern poetry. “One Toss of the Dice” was the first poem of literary relativity. The equation would not have surprised Einstein, who regarded scientific principle as a kind of fiction, arrived at not through observation and deduction, but by a purely conceptual act of mind that Mallarmé called the “ideal.” “The rational and empirical components of human knowledge stand in eternal antithesis,” the father of scientific relativity wrote in 1933, “for propositions arrived at by pure logical means are completely empty as regards reality. In this sense, the fundamentals of scientific theory, being initially free inventions of the human mind, are of purely fictional character.”28 Like the poet, the scientist sought a single key, a central idea, a general field theory that would explain all observable phenomena of the natural world. “Will we ever in our lifetime,” he asked his friend Michele Besso, “get hold of the redeeming idea?”
Einstein’s “redeeming idea” might look something like Mallarmé’s project of The Book. The poet, haunted by “the mystery of letters,” the Book of Nature before which we stand in reverent awe, anticipated the scientist, who described the world in his Autobiographical Notes as “a great, eternal riddle, at least partially accessible to our inspection and thinking.”29 Mallarmé may have aimed in his masterwork to write the sentence that God pronounced when He created the world, but Einstein wanted “to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts, the rest are details.”30 In rehearsing his theory, as it developed between special and general relativity, the scientist compared what he had done to the very kind of mystery that Mallarmé identified with letters. “Hardly anyone who has truly understood this theory,” Einstein noted in a paper presented in 1915, “will be able to resist being captivated by its magic.”31
Some of the irresistible magic of Einstein’s theory began with the vision of a poet like Mallarmé, who, in “One Toss of the Dice,” stretched the perceptual world out of which so many new cultural forms, including scientific theories, emerged. Mallarmé and Einstein worked in the same mental universe, which, for several decades and on multiple fronts, had been immersed in the question of time simultaneity. The poet expressed the blurred boundary between continuous space and linear time via the medium of verse whose scattered words were meant to be read one after the other, yet taken in all at once—an approximation of the simultaneity that Einstein articulated via imaginary thought problems and mathematical equations. Mallarmé’s prescient poem defined the spirit of the age, what the historian of science Peter Galison called a “critical opalescence,” and the popular psychologist Malcolm Gladwell termed a “tipping point” toward the digital revolution.
At its furthest reach, Mallarmé’s practice of interactive reading, as expressed in “One Toss of the Dice,” and his vision of an infinitely connected universe, as expressed in the idea of The Book, have materialized in the hypertext of contemporary media, and in the global, public computer network system, the World Wide Web.
“One Toss of the Dice” is a seafaring poem, and “cybernetics” is a nautically derived term: its roots, in the Greek word “kubernetes,” hark back to the third-century philosopher Plotinus, who used it to refer to the “steersman” of a boat. Almost all the characteristics of our cybernetic world are as if preordained in the terms that Mallarmé used to describe this “total word” and “Poem of Humanity”; this “terrifying and harmonious plenitude”; this “immaculate grouping of universal relationships come together for some miraculous and glittering occasion”; this “latent conducting wire” that “would explain all earthly existence”; this Universal Library whose fluid pages exceed the bindings of any traditional book; and this alchemical source of limitless wealth that would transform the nature of the human community. In turn, the ambitions of those who made computers, their software, and the Internet elide surprisingly with those of France’s “Prince of Poets.”
Early contributors to the development of the Internet emphasize the associational logic that we have seen to be an integral part of “One Toss of the Dice.” In a landmark article published in The Atlantic Monthly of July 1945, Vannaver Bush, an engineer and inventor in charge of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II, spoke of “wholly new forms of encyclopedias . . . , ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them.” Information technology pioneer Ted Nelson, the son of Hollywood director Ralph Nelson and actress Celeste Holm, wrote in 1965 of “literary machines,” computers that would enable people to write and publish in a new, nonlinear format, hypertext, which, when combined with graphics, video, and audio, constituted a new way of imagining knowledge: hypermedia. For Nelson, “hypermedia” meant “nonsequential” text, “in which a reader was not constrained to read in any particular order, but could follow links and delve into the original document from a short quotation.” The English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee, working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research in the late 1980s, developed HTML, a universal language by which various computer software programs might communicate with one another. He emphasized the decentered nature of hypertext in the earliest version of the Web, Enquire, which allows us to break out of ordinary linear modes of thought and to “make intuitive leaps across the boundaries—those coveted random associations.”32
Mallarmé’s integral vision of The Book is echoed in the totalizing push of the World Wide Web. Vannaver Bush asked us to imagine a “future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library.” He suggested we call this device a “Memex,” “in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications.” Tim Berners-Lee imagined that the universal HTML language might connect “all the bits of information . . . on the planet” into “a single, global information space.”33
Cybernetic information sharing and storage, in the wake of Mallarmé’s original poetic articulation, have revived the ancient dream of assembling boundless, unified fields of knowledge in a single volume. The poet’s Grand Oeuvre may, in fact, be most fully realized in the electronic encyclopedia, available worldwide in a plethora of languages, Wikipedia, and in Google’s attempt, announced around the beginning of the twenty-first century, to organize the world’s books by scanning the holdings of five American research libraries. A Chinese company, Superstar, reported that, as of 2006, it had digitized 1 million books in Chinese, or half the titles published since 1949. With whole libraries accessible online, we imagine that whatever we wish to know or to have or to do is somehow to be found or obtained or done via the World Wide Web, a virtual mirror of the universe that carries to completion Mallarmé’s vast project of writing on everything by assembling writing about everything.
The Internet has brought to fruition the poet’s ambition to compose a work that would “change the nature of the human community,” whose isolated parts are now connected worldwide. Mallarmé, writing in the 1880s and 1890s, imagined his project of The Book along the lines of a peculiar theatrical performance, one in which those in attendance would read a series of folios alongside the “operator,” the “simple reader,” or the “first reader.” The poet provided for a participatory community of readers that anticipated the new communities of readers on the Web. Whether in a bar in Brazil, an office in Bangalore, a basement in Beijing, an attic in Brooklyn, a beach on the Riviera, or a bistro in Beirut, internauts are potentially in contact with one another. As long as someone has an online device, he or she can read, author, correct, comment, and contest information on the World Wide Web. Today’s global websites are forums in which participants exhibit still photographs and video; make restaurant and travel reservations; read dining, hotel, theater, and shopping reviews; play interactive games; meet online, and mingle via social media; rent apartments and houses; and buy and
sell real estate as well as all manner of consumer goods and services.
Mallarmé, who suffered from a lack of money his whole life, may have seen The Book, alongside The Latest Fashion, as a get-rich scheme. Ready to burn “the furniture and the rafters of the roof, to feed the furnace of the Grand Oeuvre,” he described its potential for generating wealth in alchemical terms. When it came to an actual business plan, however, his ideas focused on the conventional means of selling a large quantity of books, whose blank spaces, like those in “One Toss of the Dice,” would be loaded with advertising inserts. The poet, who wrote an advice column for women and endorsed some of the most exclusive luxury merchandise of fin-de-siècle France, could not have imagined the potential of the Internet for generating exponential sums via the sale of advertising, commissions on transactions over commercial websites, or the explosive increase in the market value of stocks in companies that in some cases have yet to turn a profit. Both the Web and the poet’s unrealized project of The Book hold the potential for mysterious, wanton wealth, whose source and limits are unclear.
Mallarmé’s master poem indisputably and unapologetically set the agenda for artistic modernity, for the associative logic of the modern novel and poetry, the flattened perspective of modern painting, the atonal harmonies and syncopated rhythms of modern music. The poet’s masterwork was the first of a series of great breaks with traditional notions of time and space, which, along with an emphasis upon the quanta of matter, are the stuff of modern physics. The enchantment of the world that Mallarmé envisaged via poetry prefigured astonishingly the World Wide Web, whose speed, vastness, and endless possibilities of connection bring the times in which we live closer than any in the past to that great Platonic harmony, of which “One Toss of the Dice” is an early beacon and a guiding light.
Throughout the summer of 1898, Mallarmé continued to experience a general fatigue. The “Pen Man” complained in a letter to old friend and musician Léopold Dauphin that a “laziness of the pen had set in.”34 A cough persisted despite the prognosis of the country doctor in Valvins that the discomfort in his throat would pass in a few days. Congestion on the night of September 8 was cause to summon the doctor back. By morning the gagging had subsided, and the poet managed to dictate a letter to his daughter. When the doctor arrived around eleven a.m., Mallarmé, who loved turning the smallest everyday things and events into imaginative fancy, joked that the redness in his face made him look like a puffing “snake charmer” or a “ruddy cock.” The doctor again pronounced the patient fit, but, as he began to leave, Mallarmé, seized by a sudden loss of breath, fell to his knees. Grasping the doctor, and looking in horror toward Marie and Geneviève, France’s most celebrated poet choked to death within a matter of minutes. Together, wife and daughter lifted him onto the bed. Geneviève picked up her father’s pen and began to write to friends, “Oh! Dear Sir, father died this morning. The burial is Sunday afternoon.”
On the hot Sunday of September 11, 1898, the train that the poet had taken so often between Paris’s Gare de Lyon and Valvins brought the poets José-Maria de Heredia, Henri de Régnier, and Paul Valéry to Fontainebleau. They were joined by Julie Manet, painters Edouard Vuillard and Auguste Renoir, sculptor Auguste Rodin, Mardists Edouard Dujardin, Edmond Bonniot, and Henry Roujon, poets Catulle Mendès and Léon Dierx, intimate friend Méry Laurent, Thadée and Misia Natanson, Georges Clemenceau, and a crowd of local farmers and boatmen in their Sunday best. Many of the Parisians, taken by surprise at the suddenness of the event, rushed to Valvins still wearing their everyday clothes. Unlike the large crowd that had attended the public funeral of Paul Verlaine, including the bohemians and prostitutes whom he had frequented in the course of decades of carousing in Paris’s Left Bank, this was an intimate gathering of neighbors and the best-known artists and writers of the Belle Époque. The crowd of mourners assembled on the lawn between the boatman’s house and the Seine. They walked with the coffin on a horse-drawn cart to the cemetery of Samoreau, where Mallarmé, who had visited his son earlier that summer, was buried next to Anatole.
In the course of the customary words of adieu, some of the most articulate writers in France were now mute with grief. Henri Roujon, who was designated to pay homage on behalf of the poets of an older generation, broke down in tears before he could finish. Valéry, who was to represent younger poets, was also unable to speak. He would not write another poem for twenty years after his mentor’s death. At the gathering at the Mallarmé house after the burial, Rodin, a towering figure with the sadness on his face of one of his Burghers of Calais, was reported to have said, “How long will it take for nature to make another such a mind?” Renoir remarked enigmatically, “It’s not every day that one buries Mallarmé.” Vuillard, Bonnard, and Renoir spent the night with the Natansons at their nearby summer house, La Grangette. The crowd of mourners, artists inside and local residents outside the cottage, lingered late into the night, the poet’s boat bobbing without a captain on its mooring along the Seine.
Mallarmé’s boat without its captain.
Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet, Paris, ms MNR 1876.
In the days following the funeral, Geneviève—no longer wearing her habitual white long dress with balloon sleeves but cloaked in black, like her mother had been ever since the death of Anatole—began to delve through the papers on her father’s desk. Next to a book on Beethoven and Wagner, she found a note scribbled in pencil and tucked inside a pad of blotting paper. It seemed that only he had suspected the worst. “The terrible fit of coughing which I have just suffered may return in the night and see me off . . . ,” he had written the night before his death. “My thoughts turn to this semisecular mountain of notes, which will only cause you difficulties. . . . I alone could make sense out of what remains. . . . Burn everything. . . . There is no literary heritage, my poor children. . . . I leave no unedited papers, except a few printed bits and pieces that you will find, then the ‘Coup de Dés’ and Hérodiade, finished if fate so wills.”35 He referred, of course, to the definitive edition, still in progress, of his master poem, a work about chance that he had left to chance.
Geneviève would not burn her father’s papers. Rather, she shared them with the man she would marry in 1901, Dr. Edmond Bonniot, a Mardist who began as a law student and subsequently completed medical school. After Geneviève died of cancer in 1919, Bonniot published a number of unedited pieces by his late father-in-law before his own premature death in 1930. His literary executor, the poet Henri Charpentier, would become the secretary of the Académie Mallarmé, founded in 1937. The direct chain continued when Charpentier left his share of the Mallarmé’s papers to his daughter Françoise Morel, who, finally, after over a century, published in 2007 an edition of “One Toss of the Dice” to the poet’s specifications. After Mme Morel’s death, the handwritten copy of “One Toss of the Dice” that was to be published by the art dealer Ambroise Vollard came up for auction at Sotheby’s Paris. A few days before the sale, lot 163, which Vollard originally had described as “the mythic manuscript of the most beautiful edition in the world,” was declared by the French Ministry of Culture to be a national treasure, and thus not eligible for export. As representatives of foreign libraries and dealers stepped aside, bidding on the night of October 15, 2015, became fierce. When the hammer finally fell, the house burst into resounding applause. The autograph copy of Mallarmé’s masterwork had been sold for 963,000 euros to art collector Marcel Brient.
Dr. Henri Mondor, whose biography of Mallarmé is the primary source of information about his last days, had amassed some 8,000 to 10,000 letters and documents connected to the poet. Mondor was a professor of surgery and, more than anyone else, was responsible for the revival of interest in the poet after almost half a century of neglect. He began his Life of Mallarmé with an evocation of the terrible events of June 1940: “June 14, when one saw the German regiments occupy Paris . . . , we chose to study an existence that no one had yet tried to capture, and in which one finds, in
order to reconcile the present with certain French glories of the past, extraordinary virtues.”36 As crowds were fleeing the capital in automobiles, on bicycles, and on foot, Mondor stayed behind, with the image of Mallarmé as an example of courage in adversity fixed in his mind.
A week after the German bombardment of Paris in June 1940, Mondor confided his collection of Mallarmé papers, along with a brand-new Chrysler sedan to the poet Raymond Cortat, with instructions to drive both to his native Auvergne, in central France, but to deposit the papers in the National Library should he not survive the war. Cortat recounted that he got as far as the suburbs of Moulins, some 200 miles from Paris, when he encountered the invading German army. He decided to abandon the “flaming new” Chrysler and to continue on foot and whatever public transportation was available.37
One Toss of the Dice Page 23