One Toss of the Dice

Journalists aiming to entertain the readers of fin-de-siècle France turned to Mallarmé on topics from poetry to fashion trends, bicycles to house pets. In January 1897, Le Figaro sought the poet’s views about haberdashery to commemorate the centenary of the stovepipe hat, which had been introduced to France just after the Revolution. “You frighten me to speak about this topic,” he replied, “whoever wears such a thing cannot take it off. The world may end, but not the top hat, which probably always existed in some invisible state.”1 For some time after that, grateful hat manufacturers included in their advertising, “the world may end, but not silk hats.”

Two years earlier, Mallarmé had been asked by a journalist, “What do you think of punctuation?” The poet, who must have already begun thinking about “One Toss of the Dice,” offered, by his own account, a long and complicated disquisition on the “use or rejection of conventional signs . . . to indicate the distinction between prose and verse.” Verse might dispense with punctuation by offering a pause to constrain the forward thrust of the voice. Prose, however, required punctuation. The confused interviewer begged Mallarmé for a single sentence to sum up his point of view. “He knows what he is doing, clever chap,” the poet quipped. “Could such a thing be a sentence?” “Wait,” Mallarmé called out to the departing journalist, one foot out the door, “for decency’s sake, let me add at least a little obscurity.”2

Something similar occurred three months later, after the funeral of Paul Verlaine, which brought together motley bohemians and the cream of Parisian literary life, on January 10, 1896. Mallarmé—one of the pallbearers, along with the poets François Coppée, Catulle Mendès, and Robert de Montesquiou—delivered a eulogy in the church of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont, just behind the Pantheon. To the journalist Alidor Delzant’s request for a copy of his oration, Mallarmé replied that he had nothing in writing. Delzant proposed that he try to reconstitute it after the burial in Batignolles, while lunch was being prepared. And in his beautiful hand, round and majestic, decorated with a few knowing flourishes, Mallarmé wrote down twenty or so lines. “Then his face, Mephisto-like, contracted, a circumflex of a wrinkle knotted his brow. Furiously, he made a few corrections and additions.” Handing Delzant the sheet of paper, he said, “There, I’ve added a bit of shadow.”3

Mallarmé’s search for shadow has contributed to his reputation as an intentionally difficult poet—not only in his poetry, but in his prose writings, correspondence, and everyday exchanges as well. The American expatriate man of letters Robert Sherard recounted that in 1891 he invited the poet to lunch with Oscar Wilde and the Greek-born Symbolist poet Jean Moréas. Mallarmé responded via pneumatique, one of the little blue letters that circulated as a form of rapid communication—with delivery guaranteed in a matter of hours—throughout Belle Époque Paris. Sherard was unable to make out from its contents whether his invitation had been accepted or refused. “It was not until Mallarmé arrived at the café that I gathered that his involuted phrases had implied an acceptance.”4 The critic Jules Renard famously quipped that Mallarmé’s poetry was untranslatable, even into French.5

The difficulty of Mallarmé’s writing, his attack upon conventional verse, can be seen first in his rejection of the ordinary poetic lines that allow an easy distinction between poetry and prose and make for poetry’s musical effects. The scattering of the words of his masterwork shifts the traditional appeal of poetic sound, meter, rhythm, and rhyme from the ear to the eye. “One Toss of the Dice” was not intended to be read aloud, much less memorized. It was meant to be seen and to be taken in as much as a feat of graphic design as of aural effect.

In keeping with the intensely visual character of our own era, which began with the invention of cinema, Mallarmé’s epic stands as the world’s most deeply optical poem. In a lecture he delivered on Mallarmé and Verlaine at the Théâtre du Vieux Colombier in 1913, André Gide expressed regret at not having the original copy of “One Toss of the Dice” from the magazine Cosmopolis, the only extant edition at that time, to show his audience. If he had brought it along, Gide maintained, he would not have read it aloud. Instead, he would have held it up to show to the audience, since Mallarmé’s last work was more visible than readable: “the characters are so majestic that, even the most nearsighted person might have read it from the back of the room.”6 The poem as an eye chart would resurface ironically in 1969, when the artist Marcel Broodthaers published a purely graphic edition of “One Toss of the Dice,” preserving the layout of the type, but with its words replaced by thick horizontal black bars.

A key element of Mallarmé’s “attack on verse” lies in his breach of the simplest rules of syntax. The poet referred to himself as a “syntax man,” making the connection between even the empty margins that surround every poem and the big blank spaces of “One Toss of the Dice,” which interrupt the flow of language and meaning in some more shocking way. “If one accepts the invitation of the great white space left on purpose at the top of the page as if to separate from everything the already-read-elsewhere, if one comes to it with a new and virgin soul, one recognizes then that I am profoundly and scrupulously a syntax man [syntaxier], that my writing is devoid of obscurity, and my sentence is what it should be and be forever.”7

Marcel Broodthaers, folio from “Un Coup de Dés.”

Broodthaers, Marcel (1924–1976) © ARS, NY. “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard” by Stéphane Mallarmé. 1969. 20 photolithographs. Purchased with funds given by Howard B. Johnson in honor of Riva Castleman (178.1994.16). The Museum of Modern Art Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA I Art Resource, NY.

What could such a wildly implausible claim mean? Surely the poet could not have expected his readers to find his writing—poetry or prose—to be easy. Nor could he have believed that his sentences, devoid of obscurity, would last forever. How is it possible to reconcile the difficult syntax of “One Toss of the Dice” with the poet’s denial of obscurity—his boast of clarity?

Both English and French are “analytic languages.” Unlike, say, Latin, in which the form of a word determines its role in a sentence, meaning in English and French is determined by word order. And although the arrangement of the words is generally more flexible in a poem than in prose, “One Toss of the Dice” pushes our expectations of syntactic sequence to an extreme beyond which the loose logic of the sentence threatens the logic of sense.

The basic syntax of “One Toss of the Dice” is difficult to decipher. The sudden interruption of the flow of a phrase, reversals of word order, abrupt interjections, and missing connections are a puzzle to even the most skillful grammarians. To diagram the relations between the poem’s uncertain and shifting parts of speech would be impossible, even if we were, as below, to render a compressed, punctuated version in which the spatial gaps that the poet claimed to be the unique quality of his verse have been eliminated:

ONE TOSS OF THE DICE 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, almost the length of the wingspan of the great hull’s gaping breadth, a vessel listing from side to side

THE MASTER, beyond old calculations, where skills are lost with age, risen, implying, once he grasped the helm, from this conflagration at his feet of the seamless horizon, that there is readied, moiling and merging, with the fist that would clasp it, as one threatens fate and the winds, a unique Number which cannot be any other Spirit, to heave it into the storm, to fold up division and pass proudly, hesitates by its arms a corpse separated from the secret it guards, rather than playing sides, like a cranky graybeard, on behalf of the waves: one invades the head, flows through the undulant beard, that shipwreck of the man himself without a ship, no matter where, vain

from ancient times not to open the hand clenched above the worthless head, legacy amidst disappearance, to someone ambiguous, the ulterior immemorial demon having, from dead lands, led the old man toward this final meeting with probability, this one, his boyish shade caressed and polished and restored and washed, made supple by the waves, and freed from the hard bones lost between the planks, born of a revel, the sea enticing the sire or the sire against the sea, an idle chance Betrothal, whose veil of illusion fluttered their obsession, like the phantom of a gesture will tremble, will collapse, madness, WILL ABOLISH

AS IF A simple insinuation in the silence, tangled in irony, or the mystery hurled, howled, in an oncoming eddy of hilarity and horror, hovers round the vortex without scattering or fleeing, and cradles its virgin symbol AS IF

a solitary wandering plume, save a glancing encounter with a toque of midnight that fixes it in velvet, crumpled by a dark guffaw, this rigid whiteness, ridiculous, in opposition to the sky, too much not to mark faintly anyone, bitter prince of the reef wears it like a heroic headpiece, irresistible, but limited by his trifling manly mind, in a thunderbolt

anxious expiatory and pubescent mute laughter that IF The lucid and lordly aigrette of vertigo on the invisible brow scintillates, then shadows, a delicate dark form, upright in its sea siren’s sinuosity, time enough to slap with impatient terminal scurf, forked, a rock, false manor, all at once evaporated in mists, which imposed a limit on infinity

IT WAS THE NUMBER, born of the stars, IF IT EXISTED other than as agony’s flickering hallucination; IF IT BEGAN AND ENDED, rising only to be denied and shut down when revealed at last by some profusion lavished in scarcity; IF IT HAD AMOUNTED to a totality, however meager; IF IT HAD ILLUMINATED, IT WOULD BE worse, neither more nor less, indifferent but as much, CHANCE 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

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 abruptly, which else by its lies would have justified extinction, in this region of waves where all reality dissolves

EXCEPT in the heights PERHAPS, as far as a place can fuse with the beyond, apart from the interest assigned to it in general, by such a slant and such a slope of fires, toward what must be the Septentrion or North A CONSTELLATION cold from neglect and disuse, not so much that it does not count, on some empty and superior surface, the successive shock from the stars of a final reckoning in the making, watching, doubting, rolling, blazing, and brooding before stopping at some last point that consecrates it

The syntax of “One Toss of the Dice” is as hard to decipher when regularly spaced and punctuated as it is as radical free verse. Even when smoothed out in the above translation of the poem into prose, the cavernous syntactic gap between “ONE TOSS OF THE DICE NEVER” at the beginning of the first stanza and “WILL ABOLISH” at the end of the third stanza needs to be closed. The verse demands that the reader make sense of numerous phrases that intervene between the main subject, the main verb, and its object. Mallarmé’s epic poem requires keeping in mind the sentence, set off in capitals and 16-point type: “ONE TOSS OF THE DICE NEVER . . . WILL ABOLISH . . . CHANCE.”

Although the title of the poem may be enigmatic, it is nonetheless a complete sentence that makes a certain amount of sense, and is easily retained in our mind. It is like a proverb, a sentence of wisdom with an epigrammatic ring. However, “NEVER” (“JAMAIS”) and “WILL ABOLISH” (“N’ABOLIRA”) are separated in Mallarmé’s original by six pages of intervening text, and “WILL ABOLISH” and “CHANCE” (“LE HASARD”) are separated by another eight pages. Though we know the shape and the meaning of the whole, we must wait, while reading, for the sequential unfolding through time of the words of the central sentence. The same is true for the sentence, all in capitals, but in 8-point type, spread over four pages: “NOTHING . . . WILL HAVE TAKEN PLACE . . . BUT THE PLACE . . . EXCEPT . . . PERHAPS . . . A CONSTELLATION” (pp 184-87). The “NOTHING” and the “WILL HAVE TAKEN PLACE” are separated in the original French by sixteen words, the “WILL HAVE TAKEN PLACE” and the “BUT THE PLACE” by five words, the “BUT THE PLACE” and “EXCEPT” by thirty words, the “EXCEPT” and “PERHAPS” by two words, and the “PERHAPS” and “A CONSTELLATION” by thirty-two words.

Mallarmé’s syntactic suspensions circle back and forth between one phrase and its interruptions, as if the reader were moving in time, while repeatedly returned to a fixed place in time—or, if it is not fixed, to a place that is moving syntactically at a different pace than the interruptions. At every moment of reading we hold in mindful suspense the main and subordinate clauses of a single sentence fractured by enclaves of intervening phrases and subphrases, exclamations and detached bits of syntactic information; the whole punctuated by the menace of dissolution in the “extinction / in this region / of waves / where all reality dissolves” (p. 185).

Like the fugue and counterfugue of certain musical compositions, the intervening subordinated phrases, subphrases, parentheses, and ellipses, which are themselves interrupted by smaller segments and shards of meaning, are designed to interrupt the comprehension of the central sentence, whose words are strung like pearls on a string. The Mallarméan sentence thus is plastic. Some have compared its sinuosity to the organic arabesque designs of contemporary Art Nouveau, the style of “One Toss of the Dice” a poetic style métro. It spreads out branches, disjunctive pseudopods, that take us in one direction, then in another, before rejoining the original line of language and thought.

Alongside wide gaps of meaning held in suspense, “One Toss of the Dice” is packed with syntactic reversals and inversions of expected word sequence. The normal syntax of the sentence Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard is Un coup de dés n’abolira jamais le hasard; here, the jamais (“never”), an adverb of time, comes before, instead of after, the verb, as it almost never does in French, thus reversing time syntactically and chronologically. Elsewhere, possessive adjectives are placed after the possessing noun, aile la sienne (here); demonstratives, after the modified noun, naufrage cela (here); adjectives, before the noun, which in French, with some exceptions, are normally placed after the noun, béante profondeur (here), l’unique Nombre (here), anciens calculs (here), l’inutile tête (here), le vierge indice (here), La lucide et seigneuriale aigrette (here), mémorable crise (here), inférieur clapotis (here); adjectives, both before and after the noun, durs os perdus (here), impatientes squames ultimes (here); adjectives, after the noun that ordinarily precede the noun, point dernier (here); verbs are placed before the subject Choit la plume (here); adverbs occur before, and not after, the verb, JAMAIS . . . N’ABOLIRA in the title, but also in the phrases très à l’intérieur résume (here) and ancestralement à n’ouvrir pas la main (here). In each case, the reversal of traditional word order, and of the ordinary time of reading, loosens the unidirectional grip of chronological time, so that we are moving both back and forth along time’s continuum.

Ellipses abound in “One Toss of the Dice”: omitted negatives, Soit que instead of ne Soit que (here), sourdant que nié et clot quand apparu (here); omitted articles, naufrage cela (here), Fiançailles dont (here), plume solitaire éperdue (here) prince amer de l’écueil (here); omitted verbs, l’homme sans nef n’importe où vaine (here) So separated are the words that modify each other—articles and nouns, adjectives and nouns, nouns and verbs, adverbs and verbs—that it is hard to tell whether something is missing, or whether the phrase should be structured in some other way. Mallarmé’s poem resembles a great cosmic telegram whose terse syntactic leaps make sense along the lines of juxtaposition and not subordination. The overall impression is one of enormous compression.

Villiers de l’Isle-Adam had an uncanny perception of the condensed Mallarméan style in a dream that he recounted to the novelist and playwright Gustave Guiches. In his sleep, Villiers saw himself remove a packet of cigarette papers from his pocket. But, instead of the usual brand of Job, which recalled his biblical brother, he saw in miniature writing The Collected Works of Stéphane Mallarmé. Starting to read the papers, he saw that they followed one after the other, until he awoke, finally, to find Afternoon of a Faun lying open on his bed. “There is only one poet,” concluded Villiers, “capable of capturing the infinite in such a small space!”8

Mallarmé’s simultaneous syntax, which combines the impression of chronological linear time with that of being outside of time, does not build on acquired understandings of how literally to read the words on the page. Often, the beginning of a sentence yields little clue as to where it will end, so vivid and disorienting are the darts and dodges, the feints, flashes, and flickers of what France’s “Prince of Poets” defined, in the context of Impressionist painting, as the “aspect of things, which perpetually lives but dies every moment,”9 which flares into focus in the phrase “The lucid and lordly aigrette of vertigo on the invisible brow scintillates then shadows” (here) or, in “agony’s flickering hallucination . . . rising only to be denied and shut down” (here).

The “syntax man” created in “One Toss of the Dice” a great simultaneous sentence that renders both the objective uniform passage of clock time and the vast stillness of eternity. He cinched such a sensation through a framing symmetry that is not unlike the first and last page of the ideal Book. “One Toss of the Dice” begins and ends with the phrase “Un coup de dés,” which means that we find ourselves, having read the whole, at the place of beginning. In this, the modern poem reproduces the ring structure of ancient and medieval epics, a technique of oral poetry that allowed the singer to keep in mind the overall structure of plot while concentrating upon more local moments of narration.

Such containing symmetry is part of the modernist aesthetic. The last sentence of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, a sentence about circulation and recirculation, completes the first: “A way a lone a last a loved a long the / riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.” Likewise, Marcel Proust’s three-thousand-page Remembrance of Things Past begins with “For a long time, I used to go to bed early” (Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure) and ends with the word “Time” (Temps) and a meditation upon the relationship of chronological time to immeasurable recurrent time:

If at least, time enough were allotted to me to accomplish my work, I would not fail to mark it with the seal of Time . . . , and I would therein describe men, if need be, as monsters occupying a place in Time infinitely more important than the restricted one reserved for them in space, a place, on the, contrary, prolonged immeasurably since, simultaneously touching widely separated years and the distant periods they have lived through—between which so many days have ranged themselves—they stand like giants immersed in Time.10

Like the effects of “One Toss of the Dice,” the Proustian long sentence, with its multiple subordinate clauses, both places us in time and loses us in the reticulated twists of a thought process according to which every moment is contained in every other moment, and punctual linear time gives way to uninterrupted presence.

The framing symmetry of the beginning and end of “One Toss of the Dice,” is reinforced by the central symmetry of the poem’s middle pages (here) with five two-page spreads on either side, which begins and ends with the words “AS IF.” At its two ends and in the middle, Mallarmé’s masterpiece is built upon a mirror image that both progresses, from beginning to middle and from middle to end, through time, yet returns cyclically to words that are identical, and thus gives the impression that time has not moved at all. A similar principle operates at the level of certain of the discernible pages, phrases, and sentences of the poem. The words mer and aïeul are the mirror images of each other—“the sea enticing the sire or the sire against the sea” (here). The phrase “RIEN . . . N’AURA EU LIEU . . . QUE LE LIEU” (“NOTHING . . . WILL HAVE TAKEN PLACE . . . BUT THE PLACE”) (here) is a tautology that performs an unfolding of time and a resistance to time. Though the sentence progresses, with subject, verb and object or predicate nominative, it fails to progress through time. The future perfect tense, the “WILL HAVE TAKEN PLACE,” a completed action in the future, renders perfectly time folding back upon itself.

Mallarmé’s sentences recall the syntax of Latin when Latin suits the desired effects of time simultaneity. He uses, for example, a participle, either present or past, in absolute apposition to a noun, as in l’Abîme blanchi (“the abyss turned white”) (here), la manoeuvre avec l’âge oubliée (“where skills are lost with age”) (here), Une insinuation simple au silence enroulée (“A simple insinuation in the silence”) (here). The poet’s noun and participle phrases derive from the Latin ablative absolute, a form that designates an action having been completed or a condition having been fulfilled as essential to the action of the sentence’s main verb. Such a structure is perfect for the simultaneous syntax of “One Toss of the Dice,” since, like the future perfect tense, which designates in the present a completed action in the future, the ablative absolute designates a completed action in the past with consequences for the present. In both cases, future and past bleed into the present in a great affirmation of the fungibility of time—the timeliness of a toss of the dice and the timelessness of chance.

Mallarmé’s privileging of nouns and relative negligence of verbs make for an environment of states of being disrupted only occasionally by punctual action. Verbs are the poor cousins of Mallarmé’s poetic universe. He often eliminated active verbs in successive revisions of his poems. When the verb was retained, more often than not it took the form of an infinitive or of a participle, either the present participle or gerund, a verb phrase that can be used as a noun phrase, couvrant, coupant (both p. 193), inférant (here) veillant doutant roulant brillant et méditant (here); or the past participle, celui son ombre puérile caressée et polie et rendue et lavée assouplie par la vague et soustraite aux durs os perdus entre les ais né (“this one his boyish shade caressed and polished and restored and washed made supple by the waves and freed from the hard bones lost between the planks”) (here); le mystère précipité hurlé (“the mystery hurled howled”) (here). In the most spectacular example of the dominance of nouns to be found elsewhere in the poet’s Oeuvre, Mallarmé’s preface to William Beckford’s Gothic novel Vathek contains a sentence of some fifty-five words with only one finite verb.

The simultaneous syntax of Mallarmé’s masterwork contributed to more theoretical discussions of what time is and how it should be measured as part of the historical quest, between 1870 and 1920, to coordinate clocks in France and in the rest of the world.

The desire for universal time in France was in part a function of the railroads, and there is a case to be made that the sudden exclamations of “One Toss of the Dice,” the discontinuous phrases and ellipses, reproduce the sensation of train travel, with its abrupt appearances and disappearances of close objects that pass by like little surprises in a rapidly moving visual field. Mallarmé was, as we have seen, a frequent traveler by train between Paris and Valvins.

Before 1888 there were at least three temporal systems in use in France. Every town had its own local or solar time tied to the moment when the sun passed through the meridian at that longitudinal location. Local inhabitants were also aware of Paris Time, or mean solar time along the meridian of the Paris Observatory. Finally, clocks in French railway stations displayed an offset time—in advance by five minutes—in the track area in order to discourage missed trains. The establishment of a single temporal measure by which cities and towns linked by trains might schedule arrivals and departures was essential to smooth operation along the rails. In January 1888, M. F. S. Carnot, the president of the Republic, announced the formation of a commission to study the question of a single civil time for the entire country, and on March 15, 1891, a law was passed making Parisian Time “the legal hour of France, Algeria, and Tunisia.”

The great impetus to French unification of time came from Germany. In an address on the very day after the French passed their law, and just a month before his death, the formidable Prussian general Helmuth von Moltke, who had defeated Napoleon III at Sedan in 1870, reminded the members of the Reischtag of the importance of railroads for military maneuver and of the significance of a single time zone for the coordination of trains. On April 1, 1892, Germany adopted for all railway, postal, and telegraphic services Greenwich Time plus one hour, or Central European Time.

The question of time simultaneity was, of course, inseparable from that of universally recognized spatial meridians. No one disputed the meridian as a unit of global measure: the earth is divided longitudinally into 360 degrees, the sun rotates every 24 hours or 1440 minutes, and each degree represents 4 minutes of longitude. Nationalism erupted, however, in the matter of fixing a prime meridian to be used worldwide for navigational maps and charts, or for astronomical and scientific purposes. In the area of spatial measurement, the French assumed they would play a dominant role as they did in the treaty—written in French and signed by seventeen nations in Paris on May 20, 1875—establishing the meter as the international standard of length. A prototype, made of 90 percent platinum and 10 percent iridium alloy, was stored at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures at Sèvres, with thirty exact copies distributed worldwide.

In 1870, up to fourteen different prime meridians were still being used on European topographical maps, with three main contenders: that passing through Ferro, the most westerly of the Canary Islands, 20 degrees west of Paris; the Paris meridian, passing through the Paris Observatory; and the meridian passing through the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. At the International Geographic Congress held in Antwerp in 1871, Greenwich was adopted for sea charts, but land maps were still predicated upon local meridians.

The International Meridian Conference held in Washington, D.C., in the fall of 1884 established a universal day. Of the twenty-five nations in attendance, only France abstained from recognizing the English prime meridian. Unable to hold out any longer, however, a bill was introduced in the Chamber of Deputies in October 1896—that is, at the very time that Mallarmé wrestled with time simultaneity in “One Toss of the Dice”—to change France’s prime meridian from the Paris Observatory to Greenwich. The bill was immediately amended to read, “The legal time in France and Algeria is the mean time of Paris, retarded by 9 minutes, 21 seconds,” which corresponded exactly to the longitudinal difference between Paris and Greenwich. It was only on March 9, 1911, fourteen and a half years later, that the bill became law, and France reluctantly joined the world community in acknowledging both universal time and the prime meridian of the English national observatory.

Time signals were first transmitted from the Eiffel Tower on May 23, 1910, but on July 1, 1911, the signals shifted to reflect Greenwich Time. From Paris, the almost instantaneous transmission of wireless signals to eight relay stations worldwide solved the problem of time simultaneity and aided in the plotting of location as well. The Mallarmé of “One Toss of the Dice” would have been moved, though perhaps not surprised, believing as he did in the interconnection of all earthly things, to know that some of the earliest uses of telegraph signals dispatched worldwide involved shipwrecks: the rescue in 1909 of 1,600 passengers from the White Star Liner Republic, which collided with the S.S. Florida off the coast of Nantucket, and, on the night of April 14, 1912, the distress call and calculation of the exact location of the Titanic: “MGY (Titanic) CQD in 41.46 N. 40.14 W. Wants immediate assistance.”

“One Toss of the Dice” participated, alongside cinema, in the worldwide quest for time simultaneity. Yet Mallarmé’s epic poem also summoned ideas that were much older than the technological advances and poetic breaks of the last decade of the nineteenth century. The dream of animating individual things, still and detached, by making them part of a greater whole, reached all the way back to the thinking of such questions in the West. Mallarmé can be situated within the great Platonic articulation of the relation of the realm of matter and the senses, both of which are limited by time, to that of ideas, which are conceived to exist outside of time. His last poem sits alongside Neoplatonic, and even theological, understandings of the troubling link between language, which is time-bound, and the divine, which is imagined to be beyond earthly time.

“One Toss of the Dice” responds more powerfully than any poem I know to the age-old question that still presses powerfully upon modern philosophy: How is it that we can conceive of whole, universal, abstract things, yet we cannot capture their wholeness in language? Why is it that we cannot render—speak or write, or even think—their unified ideal nature through words?

The answer has to do in part with the relation of the visual to the verbal. “One Toss of the Dice” is a poem that is structured at the level not of the line of verse, nor even of the strophe, but of the page, extended in Mallarmé’s ambitious final version to two pages. As a visual unit, we take in the page all at once, though we must read it through time. We can see many things, including many words, all at once, logically and simultaneously. We cannot, however, understand them without the successive orderings of one word placed after another in sequence. Given that we see and can conceive of many things at once, holding them in our mind, Mallarmé was obsessed by the question of how the simultaneity of what the eye sees or the mind imagines might be translated into patterns of thought, might manifest in figures of speech, might be communicated from speaker to listener, or, most important, might be captured in writing and communicated from the written or printed page to the reader—all of which requires that words be spoken, written, or read in time.

No one has gone further in thinking about the relation of the wholeness of what we can conceive to the fragmentary nature of what we can think, say, write, or read than Augustine of Hippo, who lived fifteen centuries before Mallarmé. The most profound of all the early Church Fathers, the main conduit of Plato, Christianized, to the West, and a man for whom words and the Word stood at the center of all understandings of personal, social, and religious experience, Augustine articulated the relation of the wholeness of ideas to the fragmentary nature of language in terms of God’s Creation of the world on the model of human speech. “Just as when we speak of matter and form,” Augustine wrote in De Genesi ad litteram (The Literal Meaning of Genesis), “we understand that they are simultaneously implicated in each other, but we cannot pronounce one and the other simultaneously. So it is that we need a brief space of time when we pronounce these two words, to pronounce one before the other, so it is too in the unfolding of a narrative, it is necessary to recount the creation of one before that of the other, even though God, as we have said, created both simultaneously.”11 Augustine was fascinated by the question of how God could have held the words of Creation in His mind long enough to arrive at the end of the sentence, which made sense of the whole, just as he wondered how this is possible in the sentences spoken by one human being to another. Every sentence, spoken, written, or read, each creation of meaning in words, participates—for both Augustine and Mallarmé—in the drama of the original creation of the world.

It is unlikely that the poet, living under the desperately secular regime of Third Republic France, as amid positivist faith in empirical science and emerging social sciences, ever read the writings of the fifth-century bishop of Hippo. Yet the two men engaged in a common thinking of the relation of words to the world that makes it seem that some questions are so deep and enduring that they appear naturally in the most disparate of places.

Mallarmé, like Augustine, equated human language with creation, or at least the ability to summon things with words. “I say: ‘a flower!’ then from that forgetfulness to which my voice consigns all floral form, something different from the usual calyces arises, something all music, essence, and softness: the flower which is absent from all bouquets.”12 Reading the poet’s sentences, whether in verse or in prose, is a creative process, which mimes Augustine’s account of God’s Creation of the world. In “One Toss of the Dice” in particular, we are obliged to keep in mind words pronounced in time, substantial swaths of syntax, while other words interrupt to break the chain of meaning, or start other chains, all before returning to the originally interrupted phrase, which may seem never to end. All the while, we maintain some idea of the meaning of the whole.

Mallarmé sought in his epic poem to produce the sensation of an aboriginal speech act, the sentence that God spoke in creating the world. No less than Augustine, he attempted, in his reversals of word order, ellipses and omissions, interruptions of meaning, and wild syntactic jumps, to create a kind of artificial simultaneity resembling what Augustine attributed to “God’s coeternally present Word.” Mallarmé and Augustine aspired to an understanding that contains the whole of Creation, that exists before the material words that make vibrations in the air, that, when pronounced in time, created the physical world, the world of time, in time. “Nothing,” wrote the bishop of Hippo, in a phrase whose syntactical complication prefigured that of Mallarmé, “could be created which, if before time, is not coeternal with the Creator, or if at the beginning of time or at some time, does not base the reason for its creation—if the term ‘reason’ is not used improperly—in the partaking of a life coeternal in the Word of God coeternal with the Father.”13

If all this thinking about how language structures the poetic effects of “One Toss of the Dice” seems a little removed from the everyday and a little abstract, bear in mind that poetry in this regard is no different from any other language act, no different from the combinations of words we use all the time. Nothing, in fact, could be closer to our experience of how it feels to think, to speak, or to write about even the smallest things.

When we think, our thought gives the impression of a great full simultaneity in which all parts of the equation are present—what Augustine calls an “intuition” or “intellection.”14 However, as soon as we begin to put such thoughts into words, something is lost. The same is true when we read one word after the other in a sentence, and even more so when we write, writing being synonymous with the shadowy ink that obscures the blank neatness of white paper. The poet Georges Rodenbach reported having asked Mallarmé, at a café and in the presence of the art critic and novelist Edmond de Goncourt and the novelist Alphonse Daudet, if he did not “willingly withdraw into the shadows, in order to be alone with an elite, with himself, or his dream?” There was a long silence: Daudet tipped his monocle, Goncourt smirked, and “then, Mallarmé, with his smiling serenity, made one of those gestures (a little priest, a little dancer) with which he seemed each time to enter the conversation as one enters on the stage, and said: ‘But doesn’t the act of writing itself require putting black on white?’ ”15

Mallarmé aimed in “One Toss of the Dice” to recover in time the sensation of fullness that is outside of time, and which makes us feel spiritually alive, in essence, by putting black on white. “Let us have no more of those successive, incessant, back-and-forth motions of our eyes, traveling from one line to the next and beginning all over again,” he wrote in his famous essay “The Book, a Spiritual Instrument.” “Otherwise we will miss that ecstacy in which we become immortal for a brief hour, free of all reality, and raise our obsessions to the level of creation.”16

“One Toss of the Dice” chronicles the shipwreck of speech and of writing: that in laying out our thoughts through time, they lose their wholeness, become fragmented, seem arbitrary, wrecked, partial. This is something that each of us experiences when we begin to write, or even to organize our thoughts before writing. The fullness of our imagining of things never enters language, to the extent that if we use a word, the thing itself is absent. The golden glow of our unarticulated ideas, a state of pure potential and boundless hope, in which the whole of things is vaguely perceptible along with the relation of parts, is punctured by the necessity of choosing one word instead of another, of eliminating some meanings in favor of others. Such wholeness is further shattered by the putting of one thought, one word, before another in the making of phrases, sentences, and paragraphs—what Mallarmé in the poem’s preface termed the “prismatic subdivisions of the Idea.” The making of small, sequential, meanings, compared to the seamless integrity of the imagination, feels like disaster.

“One Toss of the Dice” engages the thought process at large, the writing process at large, the relation of writing to thought and to intuition, and the relation of small, physical, particular events and things (the material world and the world of history) to universals and abstractions—to ideas that, if they are true or even axiomatic, are not conceived to exist in time or to be bound by time. The relation of individual happenings and things to universal ones is, to take up the terms of our poem, that of any single toss of the dice to the concept of chance itself, or, to adopt the first proposition of the poem, a single toss of the dice “THROWN IN THE MEASURELESS CIRCUMSTANCES” (here). Our prediction about how any particular roll might come out, in light of the infinity of all possible rolls, is a flawed calculation, but something nonetheless accessible to the imagination or the mind. Chance may set the background of each toss of the dice, but it has no purchase upon its result; nor does any particular roll change the nature of chance, our ideas about chance, or our chances in relation to the next roll. Each new toss of the dice is a wholly new beginning, in which the odds of any specific outcome are identical to every other toss—past, present, or future.

The incommensurability of individual material things to abstract ideas has haunted the West in one form or another, from Plato’s distinction between the soul and the material world accessible to the senses, to the early Church Fathers’ distinction between God and the earthly realm, to Descartes’s mind-body split, to Hegel’s universal and particular, the infinitude that moves finite things, Spirit and Nature. There is some indication that Mallarmé, at the behest of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, read Hegel, whose thought via translation entered France, alongside of the music of Wagner, beginning in the 1860s.

The dice image itself is one of metaphysical gambling with a theological ring. Against the abstract background of chance, any individual toss of the dice poses the question, at the core of philosophy since the sixth-century B.C.E. philosopher Heraclitus, of the relationship of what is timeless to that which is in time, of being to becoming, and of ideal abstraction to historical event. For the ancients, the question of how an individual moment in time relates to the series of all such moments was subsumed in the paradoxes of another pre-Socratic philosopher, Zeno of Elea, who in the fifth century B.C.E. articulated the conundrum of the race between Achilles and the tortoise, which we know from Aristotle: “In a race, the quickest runner can never overtake the slowest, since the pursuer must first reach the point whence the pursued started, so that the slower must always hold a lead.” Or, in the paradox of an arrow moving along a trajectory in space: “If everything when it occupies an equal space is at rest, and if that which is in locomotion is always occupying such a space at any moment, the flying arrow is therefore motionless.”17 Aristotle took up the paradoxes in his assertion of the reality of individual things in distinction to Plato’s insistence upon the illusory nature of all sublunar reality, the knowledge of which enters the mind through the senses. For Plato, individual things were merely the degraded images of Ideas, which alone are real and true.

The question of the reality of individual things versus universals ran like a rich vein through the Middle Ages, tipping from Platonic belief in the reality of Ideas to a recognition of particular things as part of a new interest in empirical observation and science at the time of the Renaissance of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. As part of the Renaissance of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the English philosopher Francis Bacon would reject the “intellectual sciences” and philosophy, which, he maintained, lead to disputations rather than knowledge. He favored an inductive scientific method based upon the close scrutiny of particular natural events. For Bacon, the senses may deceive, but “they also supply the means of discovering their own errors.”

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.