Visible Writings: Cultures, Forms, Readings

Un coup de dés and La Prose du Transsibérien: A Study in Contraries

Mary Shaw UN COUP DE DÉS AND LA PROSE DU TRANSSIBÉRIEN A Study in Contraries “Visible writing,” as the present collection underscores, varies widely in different times and places. It is therefore tempting to simplify the notion by assuming that it corresponds to a single, homogeneous phenomenon within a given cultural framework. We might think, for instance, that modern poetic texts draw attention to their own visual aspects for similar aesthetic reasons and in similar ways. Yet a close look at examples emerging in roughly the same time, place, and cultural context reveals that this is hardly the case. Indeed, the two most widely known European works inaugurating the modern tradition of poetic visible writing—Stéphane Mallarm é’s Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance) and Blaise Cendrars’s La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France (The Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jehanne of France)—prove to be far more different than they are alike. Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés, first published in the 1897 journal Cosmopolis, and then again in 1914 in a separate, more developed version, was famously characterized by Paul Claudel as a “great typographic and cosmogonic poem” (figures 8.1a–c).1 The Swiss-born Cendrars published La Prose du Transsibérien in 1913. A long poem in every sense, it billed itself as “the first simultaneous book” and appeared in an edition of 150, interspersed with lively, expressive colors by the Russian artist Sonia Delaunay (figures 8.2a–b). Although these two examples of writing made emphatically visible share a comparable, inaugural ambition and were produced in Paris within the same modernist aesthetic milieu, they in fact present little in common to the eye. Mallarmé’s work, in black and white, has had an enormous impact on contemporary western literature and art. The posthumously published 1914 version of the poem, which spreads across eleven double pages, is widely cited as the first modern concrete poem.2 Nonetheless , readers have rarely agreed on how to interpret the text’s radical compositional novelty. Paul Valéry, a prominent disciple of Mallarm é and an early twentieth-century French poet, memorably A Study in Contraries 135 8.1a–c, clockwise from top left. Cosmopolis (May 1897): (a) cover, (b) first page, and (c) central pages of the original edition of Stéphane Mallarm é’s 1897 Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard. Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Acquired with the Herbert D. and Ruth Schimmel Museum Library Fund. Photograph by Jack Abraham. 1995.0118. 136 Mary Shaw described the work as an attempt to “finally lift a page to the power of the starry sky.” He disapproved of the various avant-garde performances that it inspired and attempted to fix its value as a sacred, immutable text disposing with the vagaries of chance.3 Others, however , such as the Dada artist Marcel Duchamp and the composers Pierre Boulez and John Cage, saw the work as a model and an inspiration for their own chance-determined productions.4 The poem itself , as the title suggests, is paradoxical and self-reflexive, presenting 8.2a–b. Blaise Cendrars and Sonia Delaunay, La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France, 1913: (a) complete work and (b) detail. Gouache on parchment and stencil colored pochoir with typography. Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Riabov Collection , Avenir Foundation Art Acquisition Fund. Photograph by Jack Abraham. 1998.0614.001–002. © L & M Services B.V. The Hague 20090104. © Miriam Cendrars. itself as a chance act (a dice throw) pitted against the principle of chance; and what first strikes the reader visually in the typographical arrangement is the fact of a radical dispersal of writing on the page.5 This impression perfectly suits the poem’s thematic content, for what the text suggests is a metaphysical disaster, a universal shipwreck. All that survives the dissolution of human reality is, “perhaps,” “a constellation ,” a moving cluster of stars, which the poet ultimately presents as the projection on the heavens of a still-rolling throw of the dice. As Mallarmé himself states, nothing really happens in this poem. It evokes a symbolic shipwreck, along with an unwilled dice throw at...