Mallarme on CD-ROM: Un coup de des jamais n'abolira le hasard (review)

Given the significance of the virtual in Mallarmé's Un coup de dés, with its indefinite hypothetical, conditional, and subjunctive elements, it would seem a particularly appropriate candidate for transposition to the virtual space of the computer, a feat Penny Florence has imaginatively and resourcefully accomplished in this hybrid booklet/cd-rom publication. The experimental nature of the project is in keeping with the spirit of Mallarmé's poem, but, as often happens with experiments, there are both successful and unsuccessful results. Some of the latter stem from production or technical flaws: the booklet fell apart in my hands after turning a few pages, and all five of the "Readings," in which vocal renditions are, in principle, synchronized with the text on screen, were frustratingly out of synch, with, by the end, the voice halfway through the following page before the screen switched to it. The audio of the reading in French by Nicole Ward Jouve also broke off abruptly in the middle of the poem's ninth page. While on the subject of the readings, I must hasten to add that they are nonetheless enlightening pairings of text and voice in various French-French, English-English, and French-English versions. Yves Bonnefoy's reading in French is par-ticularly stirring and beautiful, and listening to Florence's English while following the text in French allows for a direct, immediate assimilation and comparison of the translation.

Although the cd-rom is the really innovative part of the project, the booklet does offer some thought-provoking considerations of the implications of transposing poetry from traditional printed page to screen. An introduction and four essays cover a wide range, as the following list of topics taken from the various titles clearly shows: "typography," "technology," "the book," "transposition," "translation," "decon-struction," "the virtual," "the visual," "intersign," "digital poetry," "hypermedia," "sex," "abstract art." While at times refreshingly eclectic, there is a risk of incoherence, particularly noticeable in the first essay, which alternates rather confusedly between segments (in contrasting types) by Florence and a co-author, Jason Whittaker, whose styles and perspectives are quite different and distinct. In effect, the essays are as much, if not more, about the digitalizing of literature and the other arts than about, specifically, Mallarmé's Un coup de dés. With respect to the poem, Florence does convincingly establish "the position of Un coup de dés as forerunner of all the variety of visual poetry [the twentieth] century has produced" (39), but there are some remarks about Mallarmé that scholars familiar with his work may find questionable. In the second essay, she claims that "Un coup de dés is explicitly still based on the alexandrine" (34) but offers no specific examples. Two phrases that might have been cited but weren't are "l'unique Nombre qui ne peut pas être un autre" (4) and "si c'était le nombre, ce serait le hasard" (8-9), but the alexandrin is generally hard to verify in this beyond-free-verse experiment. The suggestion two pages later that, in "Hérodiade," "Mallarmé, typically, has displaced the traditional story, in this case away from Salome, the daughter, to focus on the mother-figure," would seem more valid for Flaubert's "Hérodias" than for Mallarmé's poem, although Hérodiade as "anti-mother" is a provocative idea that is unfortunately asserted without argument or proof. The claim, then, that Hérodiade has become, in Un coup de dés, "the elemental matrix, disappearing into a paronomasia, a linguistic slip between the mother la mère and the sea la mer" is not particularly evident or convincing. One small inaccuracy, the identification of "the waterspout" as an example of "moving water" (45) in Un coup de dés...