One Toss of the Dice: The Incredible Story of How a Poem Made Us Modern

by R. Howard Bloch

Overview

In the tradition of The Swerve comes this thrilling, detective-like work of literary history that reveals how a poem created the world we live in today.It was, improbably, the forerunner of our digital age: a French poem about a shipwreck published in 1897 that, with its mind-bending possibilities of being read up and down, backward and forward, even sideways, launched modernism. Stéphane Mallarmé’s "One Toss of the Dice," a daring, twenty-page epic of ruin and recovery, provided an epochal “tipping point,” defining the spirit of the age and anticipating radical thinkers of the twentieth century, from Albert Einstein to T. S. Eliot.Celebrating its intrinsic influence on our culture, renowned scholar R. Howard Bloch masterfully decodes the poem still considered among the most enigmatic ever written. In Bloch’s shimmering portrait of Belle Époque Paris, Mallarmé stands as the spiritual giant of the era, gathering around him every Tuesday a luminous cast of characters including Émile Zola, Victor Hugo, Claude Monet, André Gide, Claude Debussy, Oscar Wilde, and even the future French prime minister Georges Clemenceau. A simple schoolteacher whose salons and prodigious literary talent won him the adoration of Paris’s elite, Mallarmé achieved the reputation of France’s greatest living poet. He was so beloved that mourners crowded along the Seine for his funeral in 1898, many refusing to depart until late into the night, leaving Auguste Renoir to ponder, “How long will it take for nature to make another such a mind?”Over a century later, the allure of Mallarmé’s linguistic feat continues to ignite the imaginations of the world’s greatest thinkers. Featuring a new, authoritative translation of the French poem by J. D. McClatchy, One Toss of the Dice reveals how a literary masterpiece launched the modernist movement, contributed to the rise of pop art, influenced modern Web design, and shaped the perceptual world we now inhabit. And as Alex Ross remarks in The New Yorker, "If you can crack [Mallarmé’s] poems, it seems, you can crack the riddles of existence." In One Toss of the Dice, Bloch finally, and brilliantly, dissects one of literary history’s greatest mysteries to reveal how a poem made us modern.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780871406637
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	11/08/2016
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	350,666
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

R. Howard Bloch is the Sterling Professor of French at Yale University. He lives in Hamden, Connecticut, and is the author of numerous award-winning books on French literature and art.

Table of Contents

Introduction 13

I A Poet Is Born 33

II The Foundation of a Magnificent Work 54

III Enchanting a Devastated World 80

IV Tuesdays in the "Little House of Socrates" 108

V "There Has Been an Attack on Verse!" 136

Mallarme's Original Preface to the 1897 Cosmopolis Edition of "Un Coup Dé Des Jamais Nabolira Le Hasard" 163

"One Toss of the Dice Never Will Abolish Chance" 167

"Un Coup De Dés Jamais N'abolira Le Hasard" 189

VI "There, I've Added a Bit of Shadow" 210

VII The Dice Are Tossed 235

VIII "It's the Same for the Man of Science" 262

Notes 295

Acknowledgments 307

Index 309

Editorial Reviews

Bloch is to be congratulated on capturing pleasurably an entire era, largely through adducing a stream of mostly entertaining stories, some famous, some surprising. In the process, he also reveals an impressive erudition, covering a good many fields.

The New York Times Book Review - John Simon

07/18/2016
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. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

There is only one poet capable of capturing the infinite in such a small space, and, we can now add, only one critic capable of capturing the mind-altering qualities of Stéphane Mallarmé’s1897 poem, "One Toss of the Dice." That a family man, a high school English teacher, and a follower of fashion could have unleashed the potential of the World Wide Web over a century ago is among the many revelations in R. Howard Bloch’s astonishing book.

Alice Kaplan

A vivid evocation, at moments hilarious and at others poignant, of the astonishing world that gathered around the poet Stéphane Mallarmé.…And at the center, gathering moment as the story unfolds, is Mallarmé’s creation of his supremely radical poem.

Stephen Greenblatt

This was the poem that, in the 1920s, long after Mallarmé’s apparently obscure death, compelled T. S. Eliot to recognize that ‘every battle this French poet fought with syntax represents the effort to transmit lead into gold, ordinary language into poetry.’ And the rest of Mr. Bloch’s beautifully clear book explains How a Poem Made Us Modern.”

Richard Howard

A tour de force by a brilliant scholar dedicated to the most mysterious of poets.

Arthur Goldhammer

★ 10/15/2016
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 Stéphane Mallarmé'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 Époque 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

Library Journal

2016-07-31
The creation and influence of an iconic modernist poem.In 1897, Stéphane Mallarmé (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, Valéry, Baudelaire, Whistler, Manet, Dégas, and Renoir—Mallarmé 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 Mallarmé’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 Mallarmé’s poem “blazed” the way to modernist movements in art, music, literature, science, and technology. A deeply informed investigation into a radically innovative poet.

Kirkus Review