Reading Order
Un coup de désUn coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard Reading Order
Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard (A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance, 1897) by Stéphane Mallarmé is the most radical formal experiment in nineteenth-century French literature — a poem printed across a double-page spread with words in multiple sizes and typefaces distributed in complex spatial arrangements across the white of the page, so that the poem is read as a visual field rather than as a conventional left-to-right sequence. Published in the literary journal Cosmopolis in 1897, the definitive edition was being prepared when Mallarmé died in 1898 and appeared posthumously. The poem is in a sense the logical conclusion of all Mallarmé's work: if silence and white space are as meaningful as words, and if the page is as much a part of the poem as the text on it, then the ultimate poem would distribute words across the page in ways that make the spatial relationship between them part of the meaning. Un coup de dés is the founding document of concrete poetry, of the poet's book as visual object, and of the entire tradition of spatially composed text art. Mallarmé said the poem was his 'authentic' work — everything else was a preparation for this.
Where to start
The poem must be read in a facsimile of the original publication (or in a format that reproduces the spatial layout) — it does not work in conventional book format. The NRF/Gallimard edition and several bilingual editions (the Hartley Miles Copeman translation, or the Stéphane Mallarmé translated by Henry Weinfield) preserve the visual layout. Read it as you would look at a painting — scanning the whole page before reading, noticing the sizes and positions of words, attending to the white space as much as the text.
Complete Un coup de dés Book List
- 1Buy
Un coup de dés (1897, Cosmopolis)
Stéphane Mallarmé·1897·Available in the Pléiade Œuvres complètes and in the NRF/Gallimard edition that preserves the spatial layout; also in a bilingual French-English edition translated by Henry Weinfield (University of California Press, 1994) — essential to read in a format that reproduces the original typography. - 2Buy
Poésies (1899)
Stéphane Mallarmé·1899·The verse poems that provide the context for understanding Un coup de dés — the complete verse body of which this spatial poem is the culmination and radical extension. - 3Buy
Divagations (1897)
Stéphane Mallarmé·1897·Published the same year as Un coup de dés, the prose essays in Divagations — especially 'Crise de vers' — provide the theoretical context for the poem's formal experiment: music, silence, the page, the Book. - 4Buy
The Waste Land
T.S. Eliot·1922·The modernist poem that most directly inherits the formal ambition of Un coup de dés — the fragmented, multi-register, spatially distributed text; Eliot was influenced by Mallarmé through the Symbolist tradition. - 5Buy
Calligrammes
Guillaume Apollinaire·1918·Apollinaire's collection of shaped poems (poems whose visual layout mirrors their subject) is the most direct creative response to Un coup de dés — both treat the spatial arrangement of words on the page as a meaningful element of the poem.
Un coup de dés — Frequently Asked Questions
What is Un coup de dés actually about?
The poem is notoriously difficult to summarize, but the central narrative (to the extent there is one) concerns a ship's master on a sinking ship in a storm, holding dice in his hand and trying to decide whether to throw them — and the meditation on whether any human action (the throw of the dice) can overcome chance and necessity. The title sentence runs through the entire poem in large type: 'Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard' (A throw of the dice will never abolish chance). But the poem is not primarily a narrative: it is a meditation on the relationship between the human will to impose order (art, poetry) and the fundamental randomness of existence (chance, the void).
Why is the spatial arrangement of the words important?
Mallarmé treated the white space of the page as 'silence' — as meaningful absence, not empty background. The spatial distribution of words means that some are read 'louder' (larger type) or 'quieter' (smaller type), and that words are grouped by their spatial proximity rather than by conventional syntactic order. The poem offers multiple possible reading paths across the page — you can follow the main sentence in large type, then read the subsidiary clauses in smaller type, or scan the visual field as a whole. This multiplicity of reading paths is itself part of the meaning: the poem enacts the impossibility of a single, fixed, determinate meaning.
Is Un coup de dés a poem or an artwork?
It is both, and deliberately so. Mallarmé was working toward his lifelong ideal of 'le Livre' (the Book) — a total work of art that would be simultaneously poetry, visual art, music, and philosophical statement. Un coup de dés is the closest he came to realizing this ideal: the typography is part of the meaning, the visual layout is an argument, the white space is silence-as-content. The poem anticipates the twentieth century's entire tradition of the artist's book, concrete poetry, and the visual text art.
How did Mallarmé influence twentieth-century poetry?
The influence is enormous and runs through virtually every significant modernist and avant-garde poetic tradition: the Symbolist tradition (via Valéry, who was Mallarmé's disciple); the Anglo-American modernists (Eliot and Pound absorbed the Symbolist aesthetic through Arthur Symons's 1899 study); the Surrealists (Breton's concept of the image as an irrational spark between incompatible realities is descended from Mallarmé's practice); concrete poetry (Un coup de dés is the founding text); the Language poets; and any poetry that treats the opacity of language as a resource rather than an obstacle. Mallarmé is the hinge between nineteenth-century Romanticism and twentieth-century modernism.
What is 'le Livre' that Mallarmé wrote about but never completed?
'Le Livre' (the Book) was Mallarmé's lifelong project for a total work of art — a single comprehensive text that would be the orphic explanation of the Earth, combining all knowledge, all art, and all human experience in a single self-sufficient structure. He left extensive notes (published in 1957 as 'Le Livre') but never wrote it. The Book was a utopian ideal more than a practical project: the idea that art could create a total alternative world that would make the ordinary world unnecessary. Un coup de dés is in many ways the most concrete realization of the Book's ambition — a poem that contains its own theory of reading and that demands to be read as a spatial object.
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