Un Coup De Dés
A Collage Novel
Abstract
The collages illustrated here made by hand from original copies of the French newspaper La Grande Illustré (1904) They form a visual novel inspired by Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés, that dates 1897. Like the poem, the collages presented here are heterogeneous and their protagonists are ‘found’, both in terms of their scale and detail, in the dramatized newspaper of the period. The engravings are a snapshot of the terrible uncertainties, reported disasters and social unrest that coloured Parisian life at the time. The re-invented figures, scenes and architectural settings are offered as spatial analogues to the poetic passages, exploring the non-perspectival space of the text, its content and poetic imagery as much as it’s solipsism and incoherence. There is no overarching narrative intended, but all narratives that are available to the reader, all possible connections and dislocations.
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