Le Nombre et la sirène: Un déchiffrage du Coup de dés de Mallarmé by Quentin Meillassoux, and: The Number and the Siren: A Decipherment of Mallarmé’s Coup de dés by Quentin Meillassoux (review)

Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard consists of one verse with a heretofore hidden meter of 707 words. Or, Mallarmé encoded Un coup de dés with the unprecedented meter of 707 words and intentionally hid the code. Or, Mallarmé designed Un coup de dés to present the possibility of a hidden code that could only be discovered by chance, one verse composed of 707 words, and intentionally left that possibility compelling yet ultimately uncertain. Or perhaps mere fancy has hallucinated the code, but why … Through this logical mise en abyme Quentin Meillassoux unveils a beautiful interpretation of Mallarmé’s poem. Against prevailing twentieth century readings of the work as an ironic testament to literature’s failure since the death of God, Meillassoux shows how Un coup de dés (1897/1914) realizes the nineteenth-century Romantic aspiration to an Ultimate founded on the immanent human conditions of uncertainty and chance. Out of the somber fin-de-siècle springs a kind of gospel for what Bertrand Marchal calls La Religion de Mallarmé (Corti 1988). “Religion” may appear an oxymoron for a non-theist absolute; here divinity does not reside in a higher celestial dimension, but in the mind’s mysterious ability to create such a fiction and to gain awareness of that creative power. Meillassoux’s possible code draws a constellation in a similar manner.

The introduction initiates a liberal method of persuasion, openly acknowledging the hypothetical character of Meillassoux’s own reading. He stands against the consensus of critics including Rancière and Murat who express hostility to the idea of a hidden code. They still belong to the existentialist tradition of Blanchot and Sartre, who do not abide any supposed certainty except perhaps death. With a pessimistic attitude to chance, they see Un coup’s fragmentation perform an Icarian failure to realize the impossibly grand Livre, at best touching a negative absolute of nothingness. Meillassoux proposes that the poem copes with absolute indeterminacy through more optimistic means: possibility and chance.

Part one deciphers l’unique Nombre of 707 from both internal and external evidence. Meillassoux begins with a lucid articulation of the poem’s shipwreck tale. At the instant before his head submerges, the captain contemplates throwing the dice he clutches as a symbolic and paradoxical act. Without clarifying the outcome of his hesitation, the maelstrom swallows all except for a siren’s brief appearance and the stars above. The study then turns to the “Notes en vue du livre” that had convinced Mitsou Ronat (1980) that the alexandrine’s number twelve surreptitiously coded the poem, down to the sizes of its typography (additional manuscripts later disproved this detail). Meillassoux presses upon a second number obsessed over in the poet’s notes—5—and its significant difference from 12—7. In the poem’s own text only one number appears, in the name of the little dipper constellation—le Septentrion. Composed of seven stars, the significance of its pivotal North Star for navigation needs no belaboring. The whirlpool at the poem’s center delivers a cæsural zero, bracketed by a repeated COMME SI (performing an absurd rhyme). SI signifies the seventh note in the Western musical scale (Do Re Mi …); SI also denotes the Latin initials of Saint John the Baptist, whose decapitation and spiritual deliverance will mirror the drowning captain-poet’s fate.

The unique meter presents an ingenious solution to the free verse controversy. Its determinate and symmetrical number, cæsura, and coupled phrases qualify the single verse as regular, while its unprecedented yet unstable sum emancipate the reader from all previous...