Fifth Floor Special Sharing Session｜4.15 Mallarmé’s “Throw of the Dice”

Lecture Introduction:

There is no doubt that Mallarmé is the most respected of the modern French poets, and this is largely due to his peculiar poem "A Throw of the Dice Will Not Change Chance". This poem, with its words scattered on the page, is only 21 pages long, but it leaves endless mysteries and mysteries for future generations. It has also inspired later poets, composers, artists, and philosophers. In 2023, the French emerging philosopher Meillassoux's interpretation of this poem "Numbers and Sirens" was finally translated into Chinese, which aroused our curiosity again. Coincidentally, last year, singer Wu Qingfeng also added the French poet Mallarmé to the name of the album, and quoted Mallarmé's famous work "The Afternoon of a Faun", bringing a lyrical and romantic image of the poet, so we will present to you a thoughtful, mysterious and authentic Mallarmé.

This poem will reveal part of its secrets to us through a detail. During the months when the poet was writing it, the most important part of the creation was the layout of the poem. What is the difference between the double page layout set by Mallarmé himself and the single page published in the magazine during his lifetime? What was his intention? What is the relationship between this unprecedented layout and the text of the poem? Compared with the puzzle-solving reading of philosopher Meillassoux, the layout of "Dice", after repeated revisions by the poet, may better show the poet's original intention. We will understand how this poem, in its unique form, condenses the poet's lifelong thinking on "creation" itself.

About the speaker:

Li Zeliang is a PhD candidate in French literature at the University of Paris VIII. His dissertation topic is "Layers of Wrinkles: Four Readings of Mallarmé's Poem "A Throw of the Dice". His two studies on the manuscript of "A Throw of the Dice" were published in the core journals of French literary research, RHLF, "French Literary History Review" and "Mallarmé Studies". He has also published other research and translation results.

Lecture information:

Fifth Floor Bookstore, 43 boulevard Haussmann, 75009 Paris

2023.4.15 15:00-17:00

Price: 12 Euros per person (including drinks)

Lecture outline (provided by the speaker):

For hundreds of years, scholars have never stopped studying Mallarmé's poem "A Throw of the Dice", perhaps first of all because it was not officially completed, but only reprinted many times based on the manuscript. Researchers have continued to approach the lost source, that is, the poet's layout conception, exploring the poet's repeated design of this poem in the last two years of his life. The creation of this poem was also groundbreaking for Mallarmé. He used words to form graphics, combined with the meaning of the words, so that the appearance of the words also expressed and conveyed meaning.

In the poem "Dice", Mallarmé used a variety of fonts, spread across the double pages, as if borrowing the form of a newspaper, or using words to form a musical score like the starry sky, creating the ultimate work of "the highest intellectual discourse". "Dice" is readable, visible and audible, bringing a possible solution to the crisis of traditional regulated verse (sonnets based on twelve feet), integrating traditional meter, free verse and prose poetry, while retaining their respective characteristics.

At the same time, the poet is still "overcoming chance" "word by word" as usual. Through precise calculations, he divides the words of the whole poem into 8 fonts, and "precisely" distributes each word in the 11-page double page. However, unlike Meillassoux's interpretation, the poet's infinite approach to a few certain numbers is still "a roll of the dice". If the arrangement of the poem touches or throws the number that can change everything (LE NOMBRE), it may also be due to chance. After all, we also read the smile (muet rire) full of helplessness, irony and aphasia in the poem. This action has long seen through the word game in the title of this poem in the darkness: a roll of the dice will not change chance. The original meaning of "chance" (hasard) is "dice" (az-zahr). In this poetic universe that has lost its certainty, the unchanging constellation that guides the poet's voyage may have long been dim, but in our gaze, it reflects and flashes the former "Septet" - the supreme poetry presented to us by Mallarmé.

Our lecture will first introduce several important moments in Mallarmé's life, and then use the poem "Salut" as an introduction to point out the theme of "Dice". We will understand the creation process of the poem based on the poet's letters. Then, we will analyze in detail the advantages and disadvantages of the poem being published on a single page during the poet's lifetime, and then explore the necessity of the poem being spread on two pages. From Mallarmé's manuscripts, five editions of proofs, and a series of comments, we can see that he constantly pursued unchanging and stable numbers in order to "beat chance", but he was always aware of the futility of such "operations". For the poet, the original meaning of creating this poem is to add some human thinking, meaning and creation to a world engraved with nothingness.

Paul Claudel, a later poet, once regarded Mallarmé's "Dice" as a "great poem that combines typography and the evolution of the universe". The static layout of typography, combined with the dynamic of multiple pages being spread out one by one, simulates the structure and evolution of the universe in the creative space of the poem, allowing us to see the complementarity of regularity and turbidity, as well as a seemingly boundless and gradually expanding poetic universe. Paul Valery saw in the poem "Dice" a great attempt of Mallarmé, which was to "elevate the page so that it has the power of the starry sky" (élever enfin une page à la puissance du ciel étoilé). The page constitutes the starry sky and becomes its reverse reflection, because the space of the poem has been witnessing the black ink drops falling into the blank space on the paper. We can also regard "Dice" as Mallarmé's last attempt at his lifelong pursuit - the capital "book" (le Livre), or as the end and mourning of the dream of "book" full of complex calculations. Therefore, "Dice" is a last effort with the nature of a will, which not only shows the final failure or the last struggle of the poet's great attempt, but also seems to inherit the intuition, conception and creation of the poet's first three creative periods (youth, thought construction period and mature period). Between "constant" and "chance", Mallarmé buried the secret of creation itself in "Dice".