Psychologizing Stéphane Mallarmé to Understand 'Un Coup de Dés'

"The latest scholar to argue for our renewed attention to [Stéphane Mallarmé's "Un Coup De Des Jamais N’abolira Le Hasard” (One Toss of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance)] is R. Howard Bloch, in a new book called One Toss of the Dice: The Incredible Story of How a Poem Made Us Modern," writes Ellen Handler Spitz for the New Republic. "It’s precisely the poem’s difficulty that makes its influence so enduring."

Spitz continues to look at Bloch's book, but she stresses a desire to psychologize: "By psychology, I mean delicate, nuanced, non-reductive efforts to connect an artist’s life with his or her art; I mean the posing of questions as to how inner streams of feeling find external expression in objects of aesthetic value and originality."

To read Mallarmé’s poetry against a backdrop of repeated unpreventable tragic human loss is to attune oneself to its elegiac aspects. Knowing this, we can better understand how, in “Un Coup de Dés,” the empty space never feels empty. The poem denies sequential time and refuses to observe the normative conventions of narrative and poetic art. In so doing, it symbolically refuses the ineluctable limits of human life.

Consider its title. Bloch points out that Jamais (Never) is out of sequence for an ordinary French sentence, where it would conventionally follow the verb. What then motivates this terrible “Never,” with its abnormal, jarring priority? What is this extreme of negativity that cannot be gainsaid? If the poem emerges, in part, from repetitions of grief, that “Never” may point toward death. Death came early and often to the poet and by chance. It is that with which he cannot be reconciled even when he evades sequential time in favor of a pretense—the creation of a virtual universe of simultaneity. But each human life, after all, starts and ends. No tricks of the intellect can disrupt that fated aspect of our being.

The poet’s privations, suffered in childhood and then later as the father of a child, suffuse “Un Coup de Dés” with much of its affective quality. Imagine a boy overcome, fatefully, by a succession of griefs that rained down upon him. He bears them in his heart until—in Mallarmé’s case—he can invent ever more subtle and nuanced means for representing them again and again in his poetry, this very form of expression itself being indebted also to chance—to his crucial meeting at age seven with the daughter of a friend of his stepmother. This lady, Fanny Dubois-Davesne, taught him how to rhyme, and it is she to whom he wrote his first poem, promising her to be wise (good) and to love her always, this from a child whose mother had been laid to rest barely two years before.

Bloch is the Sterling Professor of French at Yale University. Read more of "The Poem that Foretold Modernism" here.