Noise That Stays Noise: Essays

Bones: Mallarmé’s Dice Game

Bones Mallarmé’s Dice Game It’s an accepted tenet of Modernism that Mallarmé instigated a new use of the space of the page, which began in his new awareness of the page, an awareness that appreciated its physicality , and thus its status as a visual object. This awareness reflected change in the state of poetr y in the late nineteenth-centur y Western world. By then, poetr y was irrevocably launched on its gradual shift from an art primarily heard to one primarily read. Its realm had become, perhaps for the first time eve , more the page than the open air, and its r uling sense more the eye than the ear. In response, Mallarmé truly saw the page; it was an object to him, not an abstract concept, not a place to score a performance occurring somewhere else. His seminal long poemUn coup de dés1 acknowledges this shift and celebrates it by making the page a location, a locus of action that does not represent or record the poem, but enacts it, thus becoming a cr ucial aspect of it. But Un coup de dés did more than establish this concrete, vis ible body. It also allowed a new level of ambiguity and a new mode of simultaneity to enter poetr y. It caused the reader to make new and constant choices—or at least to attempt to, for often the reader’s eye simply can’t choose, and ends up absorbing all available possibilities. Initially, we look at his pages as we would look at a work of visual ar t rather than reading them as we would a more traditionally arranged page. By disrupting the visual tradition of the page, he draws our attention to the variety of stimuli that he has scattered about the sur face, which means that we see this text first as a su face, first as a singl thing, which we then star t scanning for striking elements, im12 mediate patterns, and discernable flo . All of this derails the default : we have not yet approached his page in the nor mal (to European literature) left-to-right, top-to-bottom order . And our scanning doesn’t cover the page just once; it passes again and again ver y quickly over the sur face, following dif ferent paths, accumulating ever greater detail, building in layers. In the particular case of Un coup de dés, this reading strategy means that we get several poems on each spread, and that the poem as an entirety is never -ending because our active gaze is constantly rewriting it by taking its elements in different orders. Because of this, and because of the inar ticulable infor mation contained in the blank spaces that sur round the language on each page, a poem such as Un coup de dés is even more resistant to paraphrase and more insistent on the physical reality of the word than poetry that offers relatively fewer reading options by maintaining a constant left mar gin and a more traditional line arrangement. But before Mallar mé published Un coup de dés in 1897, we could not have spoken of “a poem such as . . . ,” for Un coup de dés marked the first instance of a poet s treating the open twopage spread as a single unit and planning the distribution of words with not only that extension in mind, but that extension plus the inevitable gutter that would necessarily divide it in two. And while that gutter is an abyss, a constant reminder of the mise en abyme that is all language, a constant reminder of the way language severs us from the world of immediate experience , it also reminds us that language and the poem are two completely different things. Like those ambiguous image pairs, such as W ittgenstein’s “rabbit-duck,” that we cannot see all at once, Mallar mé’s gutter can suddenly flip from that negativ space in language to a positive space in the poem, that of the spine. It can suddenly appear as a bold white streak stabilizing the disparate language launching out from both sides, allowing us to see that poetr y has bones, that it is built on a rangy architecture of articulations that radiate outward, continually deviating from a core, managing to be somehow both ungainly and graceful. Mallarmé’s emphasis on the spine underscores the fact that poetry uses a fundamentally dif ferent mode of or ganization 13 [18...