One Toss of the Dice
Page 25
15.Le Figaro, September 13, 1898.
16.Mallarmé, Selected Prose, 27; French, OC-Mondor, 380.
17.Aristotle, Physics 6:9, 239b15, and 6:9, 239b5.
Chapter VII: The Dice Are Tossed
1.This letter, in a private collection, is cited by Gordon Millan, A Throw of the Dice: The Life of Stéphane Mallarmé (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994), 311.
2.Correspondance, 9:172.
3.Ibid., 241.
4.Quoted in Léon Bloy, Mon Journal (Paris: Mercure de France, 1904), 51.
5.Jules Huret, La Catastrophe du Bazar de la Charité (Paris: F. Juven, 1897), 148.
6.Cornelia Otis Skinner, Elegant Wits and Grand Horizontals (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962), 40.
7.Dominique Paoli, Il y a cent ans: L’Incendie du Bazar de la Charité (Paris: Desgrandschamps, 1997), 32.
8.Henri de Régnier, Nos Rencontres (Paris: Mercure de France, 1931), 155–65.
9.Correspondance, 9:171, n2.
10.Ibid., 172. Gide read from Mallarmé’s letter in the lecture delivered at the Théâtre du Vieux Columbier on November 2, 1913 (André Gide, “Verlaine et Mallarmé,” La Vie des letters 5 [April 1914]: 13).
11.Correspondance, 9:172.
12.OC-Marchal, 1:433.
13.Ibid., 2:1465.
14.OC-Mondor, 850.
15.Paul Valéry, Oeuvres, ed. Jean Hytier (Paris: Pléiade-Gallimard, 1957), 1:623.
16.Correspondance, 9:196.
17.Écrits divers sur Stéphane Mallarmé (Paris: Gallimard, 1950), 18.
18.Correspondance, 9:34.
19.Henri de Régnier, Figures et caractères (Paris: Mercure de France, 1901), 122.
20.Henri de Régnier, Les Cahiers inédits, 1887–1936, ed. David J. Niederauer and François Broche (Paris: Pygmalion, 2002), 379.
21.OC-Mondor, 168.
22.Camille Mauclair, Mallarmé chez lui (Paris: Grasset, 1935), 116.
23.G. Combès and J. Farges, eds., De Doctrina Christiana (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1949), 300.
24.Max Müller, The Science of Language (Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 1899), 35; Max Müller, “The Last Results of the Researches Respecting the Non-Iranian and Non-Semitic Languages of Asia or Europe,” in C. C. J. Bunsen, Outline of the Philosophy of Universal History (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1854), 1:268.
25.Correspondance, 1:318. Mallarmé, like many nineteenth-century philologists, including Bopp, thought that Zend was a language; however, it is a contraction of the Avestan word zainti, meaning “interpretation.”
26.OC-Mondor, 363.
27.Ibid., 963.
28.Ibid., 1053.
29.Ibid., 919.
30.Ibid., 941.
31.Ibid., 921.
32.Ibid., 192.
33.Maurice de Fleury, “M. Stéphane Mallarmé,” Le Figaro, February 11, 1891, p. 3.
34.OC-Mondor, 364–65.
35.Ibid., 921, 933.
36.Ibid., 855.
37.Ibid., 921.
38.Ibid., 947.
39.Ibid., 958.
40.Ibid., 940.
41.Ibid., 960.
42.Jacques Scherer, Grammaire de Mallarmé (Paris: Nizet, 1977), 50.
43.OC-Mondor, 905.
44.Ibid., 255.
Chapter VIII: “It’s the Same for the Man of Science”
1.Correspondance, 10:177.
2.Le Voltaire, April 18, 1879.
3.Correspondance, 2:146.
4.Correspondance, 10:154.
5.Aristide Marie, La Fôret symboliste (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1936), 178.
6.Correspondance, 10:189.
7.Écrits divers sur Stéphane Mallarmé (Paris: Gallimard, 1950), 16.
8.Robert Mallet, ed., Correspondance André Gide-Paul Valéry, 1890–1942 (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), 331.
9.Correspondance, 10:250.
10.OC-Mondor, 883.
11.Guillaume Apollinaire, “Simultanisme-librettisme,” Les Soirées de Paris 25 (June 15, 1914): 323–24.
12.Cited in Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Movement: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 8.
13.Jean Cocteau, “La Collaboration de ‘Parade,’ ” in Oeuvres complètes (Lausanne: Marguerat, 1946–1951), 9:53.
14.Alan M. Gillmor, Erik Satie (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1988), 102.
15.T. S. Eliot, “Prose and Verse,” Chapbook 22 (April 1921): 3–10; T.S. Eliot, “Notes sur Mallarmé et Poe,” La Nouvelle Revue française 14 (November 1926): 524–26.
16.T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Poems, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 58, 68, 58, 59.
17.Ibid., 66.
18.Henri Poincaré, “La Mesure du temps,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale 6 (1898): 12.
19.On Poincaré and Einstein, see Peter Galison, Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003).
20.William Hermanns reports in his book Einstein and the Poet: In Search of the Cosmic Man (Brookline, Mass.: Branden Press, 1983) that the scientist repeated the phrase in 1943: “As I have said so many times, God doesn’t play dice with the world” (p. 58).
21.In a way analogous to Mallarmé’s making the visual verbal, Einstein emphasized the importance of feelings and the visual nature of such feelings before they take verbal shape. “During all those years there was a feeling of direction, of going straight toward something concrete. It is very hard to express that feeling in words. . . . Of course, behind such a direction there is always something logical; but I have it in a kind of survey, in a way visually” (Max Wertheimer, Productive Thinking [New York: Harper & Row, 1959], 227–28).
22.Quoted in André Maurois, Illusions (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), 35.
23.Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 122.
24.Albert Einstein, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” available at http://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/vol2-doc/311.
25.In “On a Heuristic Point of View Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light,” one of the papers published in 1905, his “annus mirabilis,” Einstein staked a synthetic claim: “According to the assumption to be considered here, when a light ray is propagated from a point, the energy is not continuously distributed over an increasing space but consists of a finite number of energy quanta which are localized at points in space and which can be produced and absorbed only as complete units”: see Isaacson, Einstein, 98.
26.Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and General Theory, trans. Robert W. Lawson (London: Methuen, 1920), 50.
27.James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Random House, 2000), 668–69.
28.Albert Einstein, “On the Method of Theoretical Physics,” in Ideas and Opinions, ed. Carl Seelig (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1982), 271.
29.Albert Einstein, Autobiographical Notes, trans. Paul Arthur Schilpp (Carbondale, Ill.: Open Court Press, 1979), 5.
30.Cited in Gerald Holton and Yehuda Elkana, eds., Albert Einstein. Historical and Cultural Perspectives (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982), 240.
31.Ibid., 104.
32.“I liked Enquire and made good use of it because it stored information without using structures like matrices or trees. The human mind uses these organizing structures all the time, but can also break out of them and make intuitive leaps across the boundaries—those coveted random associations. Once I discovered such connections, Enquire could at least store them”: Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web (Harper: New York, 2000), 10.
33.Ibid., 9.
34.Correspondance 10:245.
35.The account of the poet’s final hours is contained in a letter from Paul Valéry to Francis Vielé-Griffin, which is itself based upon a letter from Geneviève in Correspondance, 10:260.
36.Henri Mondor, Vie de Mallarmé (Paris: Gallimard, 1941), 7.
37.Jean Binet, Les Vies multiples de He
nri Mondor (Paris: Masson, 1993), 63.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I have benefited from a number of blessings—large and small, personal and institutional, current and long past—that have made the writing of this book both easier and more pleasant. First, the generosity of Yale University, which offered a year free of teaching and administrative duties to pursue the meaning of a poem that has haunted me since I first encountered it as a graduate student at Stanford. I have profited immensely from conversations with colleagues in the Yale French Department and the Humanities Program, and from teaching Yale’s Directed Studies “great ideas and works” syllabus, which is designed to encourage first-year students to think big and aim high. I am indebted to Bertrand Marchal, France’s premier Mallarmé scholar, for sharing with me a tiny bit of his vast knowledge of nineteenth-century French poetry; to my wife Caroline Merrill, whose keen reading of the manuscript along the way has sharpened the conjugal grammar; and to Robert Weil, an incomparable editor, whose eagle eye upon the big picture has made the tedious bits downright jolly.
INDEX
Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your device’s search function to locate particular terms in the text.
Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations.
ablative absolute, 222
Académie Française, 62, 63, 118, 144, 272
Académie Mallarmé, 291
Academy of Medicine, 129
Achilles and the tortoise paradox, 231
Adam, Adolph-Charles, 83
Adam, Paul, 120, 122
advertisements, 100, 138–39, 159, 210, 268, 271, 288
Aesop’s Feast (The Immoralist’s Review), 267
Against the Grain (Huysmans), 240
Agence Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, 63
Alain de Lille, 75
Albert of Saxony, Prince, 81
alchemy, 132
Alençon, Duchesse d’, 239
alexandrine, 147–48
Algeria, 34, 223, 225
alliteration, 255
ambulance wagons, 126
American Register, 119, 126
“Analytic Engine” (Babbage’s calculator), 23
analytic languages, 212
Anglo-Saxon poetry, 255
Ansermet, Ernest, 275
Anti-Semitic League of France, 19
anti-Semitism, 19, 264
Apollinaire, Guillaume 267–71, 283
Arendt, Hannah, 156
Argus, 16
Aristotle, 231
Arrangement in Grey and Black (Whistler’s Mother; Whistler), 119
Arsenal Library, 62
Artist, The (Manet), 125
Art Nouveau, 218
Artwork of the Future, The (Wagner), 108–9
Aryan languages, 252
Assommoir, L’, (Zola), 264
Atlantic Monthly, 286
Aubanel, Théodore, 71, 72, 78
Augustine, Saint, 227–28, 234, 251
Au Père Lathuille (Manet), 236
Aurore, L’, 263
Auster, Paul, 134
Austerlitz, Battle of (1805), 87
Autobiographical Notes (Einstein), 284
Babbage, Charles, 22–23
Bacon, Francis, 232
Balla, Giacomo, 271
ballet, 109, 275
Balzac, Honoré de, 73, 265–66
banquets, 235
Banville, Théodore de, 15
Barbedienne, Ferdinand, 93
Barbey d’Aurevilly, Jules, 61, 65, 124
Barnum, P. T., 157
“Bartleby the Scrivener” (Melville), 45
Baudelaire, Charles, 15, 43, 53, 61, 63, 64, 72, 102, 110, 124
Bazar de la Charité, 238
Beckford, William, 222
Beethoven, Ludwig von, 114
Beeton, Isabella, 98–99
Beeton, Samuel Orchart, 98
Belle Époque, 14, 15, 22, 52, 74, 97, 101, 114, 130, 139, 153, 236, 290
Béranger, Pierre-Jean de, 39, 44
Bérès, Pierre, 293
Bergson, Henri, 233
Berners-Lee, Tim, 286, 287, 306n
Bern Patent Office, 279
Berrichon, Paterne, 152
Besso, Michele, 279, 281, 284
Beurdeley, Paul, 140, 149, 150
Bible, 75, 261
Bibliothèque de France, 74
Bibliothèque Jacques Doucet, 293
Big Dipper, 104, 245
Bismarck, Otto von, 81, 84
Blavatsky, Helena, 132
Bloch, A. M., 158
Bloom, Leopold (char.), 283
Bloy, Léon, 124, 239
Boccioni, Umberto, 271
Boissière, Jules, 155
Boldini, Giovanni, 239
Bon Marché (department store), 103
Bonnard, Pierre, 17, 20
Bonnier, Charles, 148
Bonniot, Edmond, 118, 252, 289, 291, 292
Book, The (Grand Ouevre; Mallarmé)
as attempt to transpose symphonic music to written word, 109
effect of movie projection on, 159–60
as epic poem of humanity, 71–72, 74, 89
letter to Verlaine on, 136
as “new theater,” 137, 162
notes for, in Harvard University’s Houghton Library, 293
planned printing of, 137–38, 138
plan of, 92
as poetic equivalent of The Ring, 21
progress on, 132, 153, 266
proposed newspaper advertisements in, 138–39
vision of infinitely connected universe in, 285
World Wide Web in relation to, 286
Book of Jade, The, 65
Bopp, Franz, 252–53
Borges, Jorge Luis, 132
Born, Max, 279–80
Borodino, Battle of (1812), 128–29
Boulez, Pierre, 26
Bréal, Michel, 252
Brébant, Paul, 99
Breton, Geneviève, 84, 89, 94
bricolage, 15
Brient, Marcel, 292
British Arts and Crafts movement, 91
Broodthaers, Marcel, 212, 213
Buddhism, 123
Burali-Forti, Cesare, 233
Bureau, Maître (lawyer), 150
Burty, Phillipe, 112
Bush, Vannaver, 286
Buzenval, Battle of (1871), 84
Cage, John, 26, 276
Calligrammes, Les (Apollinaire), 267–68
Canary Islands, 224
“Cantique de Noël,” 83
Cantor, Georg, 232
Carjat, Étienne, 96
Carnot, M. F. S., 223
Carrefour des Demoiselles, 48, 49, 51, 52, 67, 83, 89, 91, 110, 113
carrier pigeons, 82
Carroll, Lewis, 22
Cazalis, Henri, 48, 51, 66, 91
SM’s correspondence with, 38, 46, 52, 55, 57–59, 61–62, 68–69, 77, 88–89, 92, 129, 142
Cendrars, Blaise, 271
censer, 42
census data, 23
Central Committee of the Commune, 85
Central European Time, 223
Cézanne, Paul, 110
chance, 26, 230–31
Einstein and, 279–80, 305n
SM’s obsession with, 78, 103
see also “One Toss of the Dice” (Mallarmé)
Chap Book, The, 18
Chapu, Henri, 265
Charlemagne, 239
Charlus, Baron de (char.), 240
Charpentier, Henri, 292
Chat Noir, Le (café), 272
“Chats, Les” (Baudelaire), 15
Chez Vachette (restaurant), 99
Chinese Wedding, The (Le Mariage de Chine; Dauphin), 112
Christian Brothers, 37, 41
Church Fathers, 227, 231, 251, 303n
Church of the Madeleine, 88
cinema, 225, 238, 239,
cinématographe, 25, 160
Cladel, Léon, 62, 63
Cl
airin, Georges, 84
Claudel, Camille, 121
Claudel, Paul, 23, 116, 124
Clemenceau, Georges, 116, 156, 120, 263, 289
Clement-Thomas, Jacques Leon, 85, 88
clocks, 20, 27, 55, 56, 93, 223, 279, 293
Club des Hashischins, 43, 66
Cocteau, Jean, 275
Cohn, Robert G., 296n
Collet, Louise, 112
Collignon, Albert, 60
Comédie Française, 62, 63
Comité des Universités de Paris et d’Amérique, 252
Commune, Communards, 79, 85–88, 90, 91, 98, 110, 131
comparative anthropology, 252
comparative philology, 251
Congress of Photographic Societies, 159
constellations, 245
in “One Toss of the Dice,” 23, 28, 51, 104, 187
Consulate of 1799 to 1804, 73
Contemporains, Les (Lazare), 117
Contemporary Parnassian, The, 64
“continual present,” 26
Coppée, François, 62, 63, 211, 238
Cortat, Raymond, 293
Cosmopolis, 212, 235–38
Coubet, Gustave, 87
Courteline, Georges, 120
Cox, William, 131, 245–46, 252
Crane, Walter, 91
Cratylus (Plato), 251
Creation, 227, 228, 280
Crick, Francis, 26
Cros, Charles, 110
Cubism, 26, 270–71, 274, 275, 283
Cuvier, Georges, 251, 254
cybernetics, 285
Dadaism, Dadaists, 26, 275
Daily Telegraph, 49, 91
Dante, 75
Dantine, Marie, 140–41
Darwin, Charles, 123
Daudet, Alphonse, 82, 229
Daudet, Léon, 18
Daughters of Catulle Mendès, The (Renoir), 67
Dauphin, Léopold, 112, 113, 130, 289
Debussy, Claude, 116, 273
Dedekind, Richard, 232
Dégas, Edgar, 116, 125, 144
Degeneration (Nordau), 300n–301n
De Genesi ad litteram (The Literal Meaning of Genesis; Augustine), 227
Delaunay, Sonia, 271
Delzant, Alidor, 106, 211
Demoiselles d’Avignon, Les (Picasso), 25, 270
Descartes, René, 107, 231, 278
Des Esseintes (char.), 240
Desmolins, André Marie Léger, 33, 36, 43, 44, 46–47, 54
Desmolins, Fanny, 35–37, 46–47, 90