One Toss of the Dice

July 18, 2016
Praising Stéphane Mallarmé’s 1897 poem “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard” (translated here as “One Toss of the Dice”) as “the birth certificate of modern poetry,” Bloch (A Needle in the Right Hand of God) meticulously reconstructs the events leading to its composition. He shows how the poem was a synthesis of the poet’s experiences and influences and an “enormous break with the conceptual world in place since the Renaissance” that anticipated developments in painting, music, and dance. From a densely detailed biographical sketch packed with accounts of Mallarmé’s family life and his association with the Mardists—a salon whose members included Paul Verlaine, André Gide, Edgar Degas, and other leading artists—Bloch singles out two major influences on the poem’s final structure: the “all-embracing total artwork” of Richard Wagner’s operas, then all the rage in Europe; and the Lumière brothers’ pioneering work in cinema. The full text of the poem (as translated by J.D. McClatchy) is reproduced here in its entirety, and it’s a visually striking collage of fonts, type sizes, fragmented phrases, and empty spaces that encourage and inhibit interpretation. Bloch’s analysis of the poem’s verbal and syntactical acrobatics and its resonance with later works is enlightening. For most readers, this book will be an engrossing introduction to a work of literature whose artistic significance the author makes seem inarguable.

The creation and influence of an iconic modernist poem.In 1897, Stephane Mallarme (1842-1898) published a 20-page poem in a British magazine, daring in its syntax, typography, and spatial design. "One Toss of the Dice Never Will Abolish Chance" was meant to be read across an open double page; large blank spaces separate verses of different lengths; some lines contain a single word. In French and a translation by poet J.D. McClatchy, "One Toss of the Dice" appears in a central section of this volume. Jarring and visually and verbally bold, the poem, argues French scholar Bloch (French/Yale Univ.; A Needle in the Right Hand of God: The Norman Conquest of 1066 and the Making and Meaning of the Bayeux Tapestry, 2006, etc.), "dramatizes the difficulty of making sense of a world in which truth, meaning, and order are no longer given, and are constantly changing." The difficulty of the poem is amply proven by Bloch's attempt at explication. Like others among his contemporaries--including Verlaine, Valery, Baudelaire, Whistler, Manet, Degas, and Renoir--Mallarme sought ways to reinvent and invigorate art. In 1866, he experienced a "state of altered consciousness," from which he felt transformed into a "vessel of truth" that channeled the "spiritual Universe." Nevertheless, he supported himself and his family by teaching high school English and, for a time, writing the entirety of The Latest Fashion, a ladies' magazine that celebrated elegance and gracious living. His larger project, however, was "to make life rhyme" by "investing the world with poetry." He tried, Bloch astutely observes, "to reclaim for poetry what poetry had lost to music" and to visual spectacle. Bloch is strongest on Mallarme's effervescent artistic context and his centrality to a protean group of artists and writers who frequented his evening salons. He is less persuasive, though, in defending the extravagant claim that Mallarme's poem "blazed" the way to modernist movements in art, music, literature, science, and technology. A deeply informed investigation into a radically innovative poet. COPYRIGHT(1) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from October 15, 2016

A single poem made literary history and, presumably, ushered in modernity and the digital age that we live in--that's how powerful and revolutionary is French Symbolist poet and critic Stephane Mallarme's "One Toss of the Dice." Its publication in 1897 was considered a precursor literary event, which subsequently inspired several 20th-century schools of thought, such as surrealism, futurism, cubism, and Dadaism. Considered among the most enigmatic poems ever written, it tells the epic of loss, ruin, and recovery; a story about a shipwreck; a Master struggling in the waves, clutching dice in his fist just before sinking. As if to liberate the language, the poet uses a combination of free verse and inventive typographical layout spread over 20 pages with considerable blank space. Not only does Bloch (Sterling Professor of French, Yale Univ.) meticulously analyze the famed poem, but he also masterly situates the poet and his work in Belle Epoque Paris among prominent literary and intellectual figures. Also included is a new full translation of the poem by J.D. McClatchy. VERDICT This solid scholarly contribution is highly recommended for all literature collections and academic libraries and is essential for anyone interested in modern literary and arts history.--Ali Houissa, Cornell Univ., Ithaca, NY

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from October 15, 2016
Notoriously the most difficult major poet in European literature, Stephane Mallarme (184298) led the quiet life of a high-school teacher of English. Yet he was a connoisseur of food, wine, tobacco, women's dress, furniture and furnishings, fine art, and, most grandly (as a Wagnerian), music; was recognized as the greatest French poet of his time; and hosted a salon to which most writers and artists in Paris aspired to be invited and that he dominated as a conversationalist nonpareil. He suffered two great tragedies, the deaths of his younger sister at 13 and his only son at 8. Those haunted him and account for the basic image, that of a shipwreck, of the poem whose title this book shares. Bloch (A Needle in the Right Hand of God, 2006) regards Un Coups de Des as the culmination of Mallarme's life, ideas, and intentions, and as he relates the poet's story, persistently connects it to the poem, which he characterizes as epic. In it, Mallarme, Bloch argues, sought to make words and images simultaneously portray action and emotion, thereby anticipating the simultaneity of Einsteinian physics, cubist art and literature, and today's hypertext, whose common aim is to dispel time. The biography of a person and a great book, this is altogether extraordinary.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)