A Throw of the Snore Will Surge the Potatoes: John M. Bennett meets Stéphane Mallarmé (1998)

A Throw of the Snore Will Surge the Potatoes: John M. Bennett meets Stéphane Mallarmé (1998)
Jim Clinefelter
Saddle-stitched with staples, card and pink end sheets over twelve sheets of copier paper, H280 x W215 mm. Acquired from John M. Bennett, 8 July 2020.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Clinefelter’s is not the first parody or spoof of Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard. That claim belongs to a nineteenth-century Australian poet and aficionado of Mallarmé’s poetry — Christopher Brennan. Brennan’s Prose-Verse-Poster-Algebraic-Symbolico-Riddle Musicopoematographoscope appeared in manuscript in 1897 but wasn’t published until 1981.

With images from a reprint of an early Sears Roebuck Catalogue and drawing on John M. Bennett‘s poetry as well as Un Coup de Dés, Clinefelter composed his book on a borrowed Macintosh SE — the late twentieth-century substitute for penmanship. Mallarmé only thought of having some images from his friend Odilon Redon separated from the text Un Coup de Dés. Clinefelter’s sense of fun and close attention to the original led him to integrate those Sears images throughout with the text to mimic Mallarmé’s textual and typographic road signs. Notice in the third row of the photos above how the hands holding pencils point toward lines (or perhaps enclose the lines between them like single quotation marks) and how the figure of the man’s head with directional arrows indicates the order or path in which the text should be read.

Clinefelter’s text, which draws on Bennett’s boisterous poems, pokes fun at the original’s emphasis on sonority even at the expense of semantic or syntactic clarity. It also pokes fun at some of the lines that have challenged readers and translators alike:

LE MAÎTRE surgi inférant de cette conflagration à ses pieds de l’horizon unanime que se prépare s’agite et mêle au poing qui l’étreindrait … becomes

“THE MASTER knees inferring from this conflagration drips there as soft threatens the unique clam”

and cadavre par le bras écarté du secret qu’il détient … becomes

“corpse mud the arm”.

For their parody, Clinefelter and Bennett may have to apply for honorary Australian citizenship. It seems that, starting with Christopher Brennan, the Australians cannot stop teasing Mallarmé. We have Chris Edwards’ A Fluke: A Mistranslation of Stéphane Mallarmé’s “Un Coup De Dés…” with Parallel French Pretext (2005) and John Tranter’s Desmond’s Coupé (2006). Parody, pastiche or spoof — Clinefelter’s and these other responses enrich the genre of Un Coup de Dés. Somehow in their exuberance they are all saying “yes” to the abyss or, at least, managing one more guffaw of the dice.

A Rohrshach Alphabet: Zwirn 4 (1999)

A Rohrshach Alphabet: Zwirn 4 (1999)
Jim Clinefelter
Stapled loose leaf, card covers. H280 x W211 mm. 27 folios. Twenty-six Rohrshach inkblots printed over BW copy of motor parts ordering catalogue. Acquired from Zubal Books, 15 August 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

If the juxtaposition of the alphabet with the utterly unrelated pages of an engine parts catalogue has not disabused you of your pattern-seeking hopes, do not let approximation of the letter A resurrect them.

Like the letter A, several other letters of the alphabet have that characteristic of bilateral symmetry (H, I, M, O, T, U, V, W and X). Occasionally, Clinefelter lets it slip through (as with T), but in general, his zaniness will not allow it (as with the “blotted” rear wheel for O).

This use of catalogue pages and mechanical parts finds some ancestry in Francis Picabia and the Dadaists. In 2015, there was a journal called 291. Its July-August cover was Picabia’s Here, This is Stieglitz / Faith and Love. The artist’s visual pun of substituting the mechanical diagram for the artist is less puzzling or disconcerting than Clinefelter’s visual puns in A Throw of the Snore. But then along came Henri Matisse Ceci n’est pas une pipe (1929) and later Marcel Broodthaers to layer on that filter of “huh?” before Clinefelter and other book artists began adding their take.

Francis Picabia, Ici, c’est ici Stieglitz, foi et amour. Cover of 291, No.1, 1915.

Clinefelter’s take on the complement and clash of image and text brings together two related but unrelated tools: the Rohrshach test and the parts catalogue. Both are tools for searching. One for the mind. One for machinery. It’s a jokey, subversive take on searches for meaning and order, for patterns and structures, in parts that may not add up. The alphabet, which is rooted in images, also serves for ordering things as well as for making meaning or making sense of the world. Or does it? What can you spell out with a Rohrshach alphabet? And what if your catalogue for ordering parts is incomplete and out of order?

For related but very different explorations of bilateral symmetry and the art of the fold, see Étienne Pressager’s Mis-en-pli (2016) and Pramod Chavan’s The Voice of the Yarn (2022), but not before reveling further in Clinefelter’s throwback to Dada.

Further Reading

“Rodney Graham“, Books On Books Collection, 3 July 2020.

“Alphabets Alive!” 19 July 2023.

Guest, Stephanie. “Barbecued sunrise: Translation and transnationalism in Australian poetry“, Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 18.3.

Lomas, David. 2010. “‘New in art, they are already soaked in humanity’: Word and Image, 1900-45,” in Art, Word and Image: Two Thousand Years of Visual/Textual Interaction. Eds. John Dixon Hunt, David Lomas and Michael Corris. London: Reaktion Books.