Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés and the Poem and/as Book as Diagram

Abstract

Few works of poetry have made a more dramatic case for the and/as book as a diagrammatic expression than Stephane Mallarme's renowned Un Coup de Des. (1) Initially issued in the May 1897 issue of the British publication, Cosmopolis, the work was produced in a second edition by the Nouvelle Revue Francaise in 1914. That later edition is considered by most Mallarme scholars to more closely resemble the manuscript and instructions conceived by the poet in advance of his death in 1898. Paul Valery saw those manuscripts, lying on a window sill at the house in which he visited the aging poet. (2) Valery left a suggestive, rather than detailed, description of those papers covered with calligraphic glyphs anticipating the typographic treatment Mallarme envisioned for the work. Photocopies have been published of the marked up manuscript, itself in the collection of the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, but even that is still an unreliable testimonial for editorial events that might have followed had the poet lived to see the project finished. An edition created by Michael Pierson and published in 2004 by Ptyx attempts a most faithful rendering of the edition originally planned by Ambrose Vollard. Discussions of the are always subject to qualification, therefore, since the work does not exist in any form authorized by Mallarme or produced under his final supervision. Further and final changes or alterations to either the textual composition or its graphical expression could have entered in the process, and so we have to qualify all critical discussion by an understanding that the poem in question is only tentatively the work Mallarme imagined. Such reservations are more appropriate to this than to many others, however, since its fundamental tensions are dynamic ones that circle around questions of being and nothing, chance and constellationary order, and the human master who struggles to mediate sense within the ongoing conflicts of these conditions. Because the is so completely about this process, as well as embodying and expressing it, the character of self-referentiality implodes in a state of dynamic incompleteness that is only further sustained by the fact that we are engaging in a state of the that is neither final nor definitive. The Cosmopolis and N.R.F. editions of 1897 and 1914 offer points of departure. The spatial drama of the work is evident in all its iterations, and the intention on the part of the author to articulate the within and across the spaces of a book is clear. And it is that specific attention to spatial and graphical articulation that makes Un Coup de Des the unique example that proves a significant point: that poems are, by their nature, structure, and expression, diagrammatic works par excellence. They are literary works whose meaning depends upon the spatialized relations of embodied in their texts and whose spatial relations are rendered meaningful by their graphical expression. Rather than considering Un Coup de Des to be an anomaly in the history of poetic work, I would suggest that its diagrammatic features demonstrate that it is exemplary, showing explicitly what is usually left implicit in discussions of poetic works--that a is a spatial work whose operation is diagrammatic. The distribution of phrases in Un Coup de Des does not follow strict linear rules. Poems never do, even when their lines are laid out one after another, the features of poetic works emphasize the articulation of verbal elements in space. Rhyme, meter, and textual echoes in content, meaning, associative value, or any of the many ways that poetic composition functions, put the elements of into multiple configurations in relation to each other. This is one of the fundamental distinctions between prose and poetry, even if prose discourse manages such spatial associations in the same way that a symphonic work might--through theme and variation, phrase, narrative, mood, etc. …