TESIS DOCTORAL
Título
DADA / USA. Connections between the Dada movement
and eight American fiction writers
Autor/es
Rubén Fernández Abella
Director/es
Carlos Villar Flor
Facultad
Facultad de Letras y de la Educación
Titulación
Departamento
Filologías Modernas
Curso Académico
DADA / USA. Connections between the Dada movement and eight American
fiction writers, tesis doctoral
de Rubén Fernández Abella, dirigida por Carlos Villar Flor (publicada por la Universidad de
La Rioja), se difunde bajo una Licencia
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©
©
El autor
Universidad de La Rioja, Servicio de Publicaciones, 2017
publicaciones.unirioja.es
E-mail: publicaciones@unirioja.es
UNIVERSIDAD DE LA RIOJA
Facultad de Letras y de la Educación
Departamento de Filologías Modernas
PHD THESIS
DADA / USA
CONNECTIONS BETWEEN THE DADA MOVEMENT
AND EIGHT AMERICAN FICTION WRITERS
Rubén Fernández Abella
Supervisor: Dr. Carlos Villar Flor
2016
Contents
Acknowledgements
4
1. Introduction
1. 1. Purpose and Structure
5
1. 2. State of the Art
11
1. 3. Theoretical Framework
19
2. A Brief History of Dada
2. 1. The Birth of Dada
28
2. 2. New York Dada
36
2. 3. Paris Dada: The Demise of the Movement?
42
2. 4. Dada and Surrealism
45
3. Dada, Language, and Literature
3. 1. Dada’s Theory of Language
49
3. 2. Dada and the Novel: A Survey of Dadaist Fiction
52
3. 2. 1. Hugo Ball: Flametti oder vom Dandysmus der Armen and
Tenderenda der Phantast
55
3. 2. 2. Kurt Schwitters: “Die Zwiebel” and Franz Müllers
Drahtfrühling
60
3. 2. 3. Louis Aragon: Anicet ou le Panorama, Les Aventures de
Télémaque, and Le Libertinage
64
3. 2. 4. Francis Picabia: Caravansérail
68
3. 2. 5. George Ribemont-Dessaignes: Céleste Ugolin and Le Bar
du Lendemain
3. 2. 6. Blaise Cendrars: Moravagine
70
73
3. 2. 7. Philippe Soupault: Les dernières nuits de Paris
74
3. 2. 8. André Breton: Poisson soluble
76
4. Dadaist Playfulness in Robert Coates’ The Eater of Darkness
79
5. Djuna Barnes’ Fiction and the Dark Side of Dada
98
6. “Language is in its January”: Dada and William Carlos Williams’ Early Prose
117
7. Violence, Murder, Suicide, and the “Unmotivated Crime” in Dada and
Laurence Vail’s Murder! Murder!
142
8. Dadaist Art and Poetry in John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer
156
9. “I am that I am”: The Dadaist Anti-Fiction of E. E. Cummings
174
10. Dadaist Disgust in Nathanael West’s The Dream Life of Balso Snell
196
11. Gertrude Stein: The Mama of Dada?
214
12. Conclusions
229
Appendixes
Appendix A. Hugo Ball: “Dada Manifesto”
239
Appendix B. Tristan Tzara: “Dada Manifesto 1918”
241
Appendix C. Richard Huelsenbeck: “Collective Dada Manifesto”
252
Appendix D. André Breton: “Dada Skating” and “Dada Geography”
257
Appendix E. Francis Picabia: “Dada Manifesto”
260
Appendix F. George Ribemont-Dessaignes: “The Pleasures of Dada” and
262
“To the Public”
Appendix G. Marsden Hartley: “The importance of Being Dada”
266
Appendix H. Tristan Tzara: “Lecture on Dada”
272
Bibliography
279
List of Figures
297
Acknowledgements
My thanks are due to the following persons, without whose assistance this thesis could
have never been written: to my supervisor, Dr. Carlos Villar Flor, for encouraging me to
start this adventure and accompanying me along the way; to Rosa Jiménez for her
patience and invaluable theoretical insights; to the staff of the University of La Rioja for
their generous help throughout my candidature; and to my sister María for her unfailing
support. This work is dedicated to the memory of my beloved mother, Lola Abella, who
would have been so proud of my achievement.
1. Introduction
1. 1. Purpose and Structure
The Dadaists had little faith in the novel as a viable means for the expression of their
ideas. In their view, the genre had become a bourgeois pastime whose goal was to
glorify the life of the middle classes. Besides, its traditional reliance on causality and
coherence was in direct contradiction with Dada’s belief that “[l]ogic is a
complication.” “Logic,” affirms Tristan Tzara in his “Dada Manifesto 1918,” “is always
false. It draws the superficial threads of
concepts and words towards illusory
conclusions and centers. Its chains kill,
an enormous myriapod that asphyxiates
independence” (see Appendix B 249).
The Dadaists’ misgivings about the
novel were not only ideological, but
technical also. By definition, writing a
Fig. 1. Theo van Doesburg with Kurt Schwitters. Kleine
Dada Soirée. 1922.
novel required a sustained effort, which
seemed to preclude Tzara’s precept that, in true literature, “[e]very page should
explode” (see Appendix B 245). Accordingly, the Dadaists were eager to relinquish
fiction in favor of other literary genres more suitable to their aims, such as poetry,
drama, or Dada’s own form of literary criticism: the critical synthesis.
It must be noted, however, that despite their abhorrence of the mores and selfcontentedness of the bourgeoisie—their riotous public manifestations were primarily
aimed at insulting and mystifying the middle classes—most Dadaists came from well-
5
to-do families. Tzara’s father and grandfather were entrepreneurs in the forestry
business in Romania. Hugo Ball, the founder of the movement, was raised in a middleclass Catholic environment in Pirmasens, Germany. Kurt Schwitters’ father was an
affluent rentier in Hanover. Equally bourgeois were the family backgrounds of Louis
Aragon, Max Ernst, Marcel Janco, Francis Picabia, and Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes,
to name a few prominent Dada members. This fact is hardly surprising since,
understandably, given the general economic precariousness that followed World War I,
only by being financially independent could one devote all of one’s time and energy to
the promotion of a, on the face of it, marginal artistic movement. To complete the
paradox, despite their bombastic rejection of fiction as an apt vehicle for the
conveyance of their ideas—Aragon proclaimed the death of the novel in the early 1920s
(Josephson 114)—the Dadaists did write novels and short stories. Yet, in conformity
with Dada’s official creed, which unequivocally regarded success as a disgrace, an
unwanted restriction in the creative life of the artist, they made no effort to get their
work published nor, when they did get it published, to disseminate it. As will be
explained below, this programmatic—and, to be sure, not always sincere—attitude
towards public recognition has had a great impact on the writing of this thesis.
My first academic contact with Dada was through the reading of Malcolm Cowley’s
1951 memoirs Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s. Prior to that reading my
knowledge of the movement had been admittedly rather fragmentary. I was familiar
with Marcel Duchamp’s readymades and Hugo Ball’s momentous 1916 performance at
Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire, and sympathized with Tzara’s grandiloquent attempts to turn
the art world topsy-turvy. Yet I was ignorant of Dada’s true intent and of its profound
repercussions on the culture of the 20th century. Cowley’s book proved instrumental at
three different levels. Firstly, although Dada is not its main topic—the book tells the
6
story to 1930 of the so-called Lost Generation of American writers—its fifth chapter,
“The Death of Dada,” provides an authoritative 33-page elucidation of the movement.
Secondly, in that same chapter Cowley discusses at some length Dada’s attitude towards
success as well as the movement’s contribution to the art and literature of its time. He
recounts, among other things, how Louis Aragon once threatened to give a beating to
any critic who reviewed his books (153). Surprisingly, given Dada’s official distrust of
fiction, Cowley also mentions a Dadaist—whose name he does not reveal—who
“simultaneously wrote novels, conducted four love affairs and a marriage, [and]
plunged into the wildest business ventures” (154). There were new subjects waiting to
be described, states Cowley: “[M]achinery, massacre, skyscrapers, urinals, sexual
orgies, revolution—for Dada nothing could be too commonplace or novel, too cruel or
shocking, to be celebrated by the writer in his own fashion” (154). Or, Cowley
continues, the writer might abandon subject entirely:
[I]f he was writing a novel about modern Paris, he need not hesitate to
introduce a tribe of Redskins, an octopus, a unicorn, Napoleon or the Virgin
Mary. It suddenly seemed that all the writers of the past had been enslaved
by reality: they had been limited to the task of copying the world, whereas
the new writer could disregard it and create a world of his own in which he
was master. (154)
Thirdly, Cowley’s book offers a compelling, albeit sketchy, account of the connections
between Paris Dada and a number of expatriate American writers and artists, including
Robert M. Coates, Man Ray, Laurence Vail, Matthew Josephson, Jack Wheelwright,
John Dos Passos, Robert McAlmon, and E. E. Cummings.
7
In short, Exile’s Return was a pivotal reading in that it: a) provided me with a lucid,
overall clarification of Dada; b) brought my attention to the fact that, despite their
programmatic repudiation of fiction and success, which they expressed unambiguously
in their manifestos, group gatherings and public performances, the Dadaists did write—
and sometimes published—novels and short stories; and c) provided me with the first
intimation that the work of some of the expatriate American writers who lived in Paris
during the 1920s might have benefited from their contact with Dada. These three
discoveries ignited my fascination with the subject and prompted me to embark on the
three lines of research that, over the years, have led to the writing of this thesis, namely:
Dada as a crucial movement in the cultural history of the 20th-century; Dadaist fiction;
and the influence of Dada on modern American fiction.
The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the connections between the Dadaist
movement and eight expatriate American fiction writers and to illustrate its impact on
their work. In order to do this, I have unearthed a whole body of narrative works by
French, German and American authors thus far almost entirely neglected. Chapter 2
comprises a brief history of Dada and acknowledges the presence in New York City,
towards which most of the American writers and artists gravitated prior to their
expatriation to France in the late 1910s and early 1920s, of the Dada Spirit and of what
has come to be termed proto-Dada. Chapter 3 consists of a description of Dada’s theory
of language, together with a survey—the only one published to date—of the most
representative works of fiction by French and German Dadaist authors. The analysis of
these works highlights their common features as well as their obvious and far from
coincidental similarities with the American novels and short stories viewed in
subsequent chapters. The different ways in which Dadaism affected Robert M. Coates,
Djuna Barnes, William Carlos Williams, Laurence Vail, John Dos Passos, E. E.
8
Cummings, and Nathanael West, and was affected by Gertrude Stein, are examined in
chapters 4 to 11. Each of these chapters comments on the American authors’ general
involvement with the movement, focusing on one aspect of Dada that became
particularly visible in their work: playfulness in Coates’ The Eater of Darkness;
existential despondency in Barnes’ short stories; destruction and renovation in
Williams’ early prose; violence, murder, suicide and the “unmotivated crime" in Vail’s
Murder! Murder!; Dadaist pictorial and poetic techniques in Dos Passos’ Manhattan
Transfer; disgust in West’s The Dream Life of Balso Snell; formal experimentation in
Cummings’ [No Title] and Eimi; and the object-portrait as Stein’s contribution to Dada.
Some readers of this thesis might deem it odd to find Dos Passos, Barnes, or West
in association with Dada. Yet, this should be no source of surprise. Dada, more than any
other avant-garde coterie of its time, was the direct result of a profound dissatisfaction
with the war and what was looked upon as the self-indulgent contentedness of modern
society. It was a youthful explosion of pent-up anger and creative energy, a perfect
forum for the artistic expression of the young American writers who, tired of the
wasteland in which they thought their country to be irretrievably immersed, had chosen
to exile themselves to Europe. Thus, the artistic and literary products of Dada and some
of the early writings of the Lost Generation can be viewed as a common, frenzied
reaction to the times that, in some cases, bear little or no resemblance to what the same
artists and authors produced later on in their lives. As a point in fact, most of the
Dadaists advanced in new directions after the movement’s demise, and some (George
Grosz comes to mind) even denied having been involved in it at all. Louis Aragon, an
adamant denouncer of war and politics in his Dadaist years, ended up joining the
communist party and being decorated for his bravery in World War II. Matthew
Josephson was converted to Dada by Aragon during his expatriation in France. He
9
signed Dadaist manifestos, wrote Dadaist poetry, and became an unyielding spokesman
for Dada upon his return to the United States in the early 1920s. In later years, however,
he repudiated the movement and became a commercially successful writer of literary
biographies. Most of the works studied in this thesis, including those of Dos Passos,
Barnes and West, were written when their authors were still in their twenties, under the
invigorating influence of Dada, and for the most part have little to do with what they
were to write—or think—once the fireworks of Dada had died away.
The inclusion of William Carlos Williams and E. E. Cummings in a study devoted
to fiction writers may also raise some eyebrows. Yet, it must be remembered that,
although best known for their poetry, they both cultivated other literary genres.
Williams also wrote essays, plays, prose-poem improvisations, a travelogue—A Voyage
to Pagany (1928), an autobiography (1951), several collections of short stories—The
Knife of the Times (1932), Life Along the Passaic River (1938), The Farmers’
Daughters (1961), a heterodox novella—included in A Novelette and Other Prose
(1932), and four novels—The Great American Novel (1923), White Mule (1937), In the
Money (1940) and The Build-Up (1952). In addition to his numerous books of poems,
Cummings is the author of four plays, one untitled collection of short stories, and two
autobiographical novels—The Enormous Room (1922) and Eimi (1933).
As a movement, Dada went beyond the provinces of literature and the arts. It was a
way of life, a state of mind, a spirit—now known as the Dada Spirit—the goal of which,
as George Ribemont-Dessaignes once wrote, was the “liberation of man” (Motherwell
105) from the shackles of modern existence. Art and literature always played a
subsidiary role in the development of the movement. The Dadaist notions burst forth
and took shape during the group’s vibrant gatherings in the Parisian Café Certâ, and
were disseminated not so much through their writings, which were never widely read, or
10
their evanescent works of art, as through
their provocative public demonstrations
and mystifying acts of Dadaist derringdo. One did not become a Dadaist by
virtue of one’s literary or artistic
creations
alone.
Dadaist
art
and
literature came naturally when one lived
Dada; and, I believe, in order to live
Fig. 2. André Breton, Tristan Tzara and Philippe Soupault
reading a manifesto at a Dada demonstration. Saint Julien le
Pauvre. Paris, 1921.
Dada and, as a result, create Dadaist
literature and art, one had to be personally acquainted with the Dadaists and take part in
their activities. That is the reason why in the chapters concerned with individual
American writers I have placed considerable emphasis upon their involvement with the
group and their personal connections with its members, so as to measure their
“dadaness” as well as that of their writings.
1. 2. State of the Art
Dada did not last long. It was officially founded in 1916 and came to an end in 1925,
when Surrealism, Dada’s first and more conservative offspring, decided to become
political. For many years after its demise, the movement was largely ignored by critics
and scholars. When dealt with, as Mark A. Pegrum has pointed out, it was “rarely
considered as a separate entity, being viewed rather as an appendix of Expressionism by
the Germans, as an appendix of Futurism by the Italians and as a forerunner to
Surrealism by the French and by Anglo-Saxon academia which by and large took its cue
from Paris” (1). Several factors may account for such a sustained critical void. As part
11
of its intellectual agenda, Dada endorsed overall destruction and vociferously
proclaimed the death of literature and art. As a consequence, it produced a relatively
small amount of tangible works, when compared with other artistic isms, by which to be
judged by posterity. “Nobody can read about the Dada movement,” says Malcolm
Cowley, “without being impressed by the absurd and half-tragic disproportion between
its rich, complicated background and its poor achievements” (Exile’s Return 152).
Dada’s strident and, in a way, juvenile nature worked against the movement’s prestige,
muffling its immediate repercussions. During the 1930s and 40s scholars felt hesitant to
grant critical attention to a movement they regarded as ancillary and superficial, a
boisterous flash in the pan without any significant effect on modern cultural history.
Also detrimental to the study of Dada
was André Breton’s obdurate denial of
Dada’s now universally acknowledged
influence on Surrealism.
First published in 1951, Robert
Motherwell’s The Dada Painters and
Poets constitutes the first serious
attempt to create a comprehensive
Fig. 3. Jean (Hans) Arp. Shirtfront and Fork. c. 1922.
critical picture of the movement. Edited by Motherwell with the collaboration of Marcel
Duchamp, Hans Arp, Marx Ernst, and other major Dada figures, the book contains
retrospective studies, personal memoirs and significant samples of Dada literature and
art by Hugo Ball, Erik Satie, Richard Huelsenbeck, Kurt Schwitters, Arthur Cravan,
Tristan Tzara, George Ribemont-Dessaignes, André Vaché, Paul Éluard, Georges
Hugnet, Hans Richter, André Breton, and Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia, among others.
Fourteen years later, Michel Sanouillet’s Dada à Paris (1965) reintroduced the
12
movement to a public that, according to the publishers of the 2009 English-language
edition, “had largely ignored or forgotten it” (back cover). Monumental in scope, the
book features a massive compilation of previously unpublished documents, including
more than two hundred letters to and from such Dadaist leaders as Tristan Tzara, André
Breton and Francis Picabia.
Although still indispensable for an overall understanding of Dada, Motherwell’s
and Sanouillet’s comprehensive texts do not provide an in-depth examination of its
artistic and literary manifestations. That gap has been partially filled by more recent
studies such as Mary Ann Caws’ The Poetry of Dada and Surrealism (1970), J. H.
Matthews’ Theatre in Dada and Surrealism (1974), William S. Rubin’s Dada and
Surrealist Art (1969), and Inez Hedges’ Languages of Revolt: Dada and Surrealist
Literature and Film (1983). Dickran Tashjian has documented the influence of Dada on
modern American art and poetry (William Carlos Williams and E. E. Cummings are
among the poets included in his 1975 seminal study Skyscraper Primitives: Dada and
the American Avant-Garde). Also, he has been the first scholar to recognize and analyze
the Dadaist inclinations of some American magazines such as The Soil, Contact, Broom
and Secession. Yet, despite these and other academic approaches to Dada—Stephen C.
Foster’s Dada/Dimensions (1985), Rex W. Last’s German Dadaist Literature (1973),
Serge Lemoine’s Dada (1987), Willard Bohn’s The Dada Market: An Anthology of
Poetry (1993), Helena Lewis’ Dada Turns Red: The Politics of Surrealism (1990), Jed
Rasula’s Destruction Was My Beatrice: Dada and the Unmaking of the Twentieth
Century (2015), Ileana B. Leavens’ From 291 to Zurich: The Birth of Dada (1983),
Alan Young’s Dada and After: Extremist Modernism and English Literature (1981),
Dafydd Jones’ Dada Culture: Critical Texts on the Avant-Garde (2006), Mark A.
Pegrum’s Challenging Modernity: Dada Between Modern and Postmodern (2000),
13
David Hopkins’ A Companion to Dada and Surrealism (2016), and Naomi SawelsonGorse’s Women in Dada. Essays on Sex, Gender, and Identity (1998)—no attempt has
as yet been made to study Dadaist fiction. The Dadaists’ belief in the unviability of
fiction as a literary means for the expression of their tenets, and the extremely limited
circulation of the works of fiction they actually wrote, can hardly account for such an
absence of scholarly interest in the subject.
Karen Lane Rood’s American Writers in Paris, 1920-1930 (1980) and Humphrey
Carpenter’s Geniuses Together: American Writers in Paris in the 1920s (1988) have
rendered the task of researching who was in Paris and when a great deal easier. Hugh
Ford’s Published in Paris: American and British
Writers, Painters, and Publishers in Paris, 19201939 (1975) is essential in that it provides accurate
information concerning the publication of works by
American writers in Paris in the 1920s and 30s.
Those
interested
in
further
investigating
the
artistic/literary atmosphere in Paris at that time and
the circumstances that precipitated the American
expatriation to Europe will find particularly helpful
the memoirs of Malcolm Cowley—Exile’s Return: A
Fig. 4. Sylvia Beach at her Paris
bookstore Shakespeare and Company.
1920s.
Literary Odyssey of the 1920s (1951); Matthew Josephson—Life Among the Surrealists
(1962); Samuel Putnam—Paris Was Our Mistress: Memoirs of a Lost and Found
Generation (1947); and Sylvia Beach—Shakespeare and Company (1959); as well as
Shari Benstock’s insightful study Women of the Left Bank, Paris 1900-1940 (1987).
Critics and historians have largely disregarded Laurence Vail despite his significant
contribution to the life, art and literature of his generation. Academic references to him
14
are cursory and mostly concerned either with his role as bon vivant and exuberant
cultural agitator—Matthew Josephson characteristically says of him that he “wrote and
also painted a little, but more often and more seriously seemed bent on painting the Left
Bank of the River Seine red” (86)—or with the stormy relationships he had with his two
wives: the wealthy art collector and socialite Peggy Gugghenheim and the writer,
educator, and political activist Kay Boyle. Valuable information on Vail can be found in
the books mentioned in the previous paragraph (Cowley draws a rather bemused portrait
of Vail in Exile’s Return and Rood dedicates a chapter of American Writers in Paris,
1920-1930 to his life and work), as well as in Mary V. Dearborn’s Mistress of
Modernism. The Life of Peggy Guggenheim (2004), Caresse Crosby’s The Passionate
Years (1953), Francine Prose’s Peggy Guggenheim: The Shock of the Modern (2015),
Sandra Spanier’s Kay Boyle: A Twentieth-Century Life in Letters (2015), and Peggy
Gugghenheim’s autobiography Out of this Century: Confessions of an Art Addict
(1980).
In his lifetime Robert M. Coates was mainly known as the author of a best-selling
novel called Wisteria Cottage (1948)—an exceptional success in his otherwise low-key
literary career—and for his long association with The New Yorker as a columnist, book
reviewer and critic. His avant-garde fiction was held in high respect by a few
contemporary critics and some fellow writers and friends such as Ford Madox Ford,
Gertrude Stein, and Malcolm Cowley. After his death in 1973, however, his work fell
into an almost absolute oblivion that lasted until 1999, when Mathilde Roza published
“Robert Myron Coates in the 1920s and Early 1930s: The Impact of Dada and the
Development of a Distinctive City Fiction.” This seminal work was followed by “Lost
in ‘The Dada City’: The New York City Fiction of Robert M. Coates” (2001);
“American Modernism, Popular Culture and Metropolitan Mass Life: The Early Fiction
15
of Robert M. Coates” (2004); “Collecting Robert M. Coates” (2007), published in
collaboration with Jack Mearns; and Following Strangers: The Life and Literary Works
of Robert M. Coates (2011). Roza’s groundbreaking corpus of critical essays has
rescued Coates’ oeuvre from neglect, thus setting the foundations for all future research
on the author.
Over the past fifty years the lives and literary works of Djuna Barnes, William
Carlos Williams, John Dos Passos, E. E. Cummings, Nathanael West, and Gertrude
Stein have been the subject of innumerable academic studies, too many, indeed, to be
accounted for in this review. Very little has been said, however, about the connections
between the Dada movement and these authors’ fiction. Deborah Wyrick has explored
West’s interest in the visual arts in “Dadaist Collage Structure and Nathanael West’s
The Dream Life of Balso Snell” (1979). The connections between Cummings’ prose and
Dada have been partially examined in three recent studies: Michael Webster’s “The
Enormous Room: A Dada of One’s Own” (2006); Rajeev Kumar Kinra’s “Eimi and
Louis Aragon’s The Adventures of Telamachus” (1999)—whose main claim, that
Cummings wrote Eimi under the influence of Aragon’s Dadaist novel, is revised and
elaborated upon by Joshua D. Huber in his master’s thesis Marvelous Whirlings: E. E.
Cummings’ Eimi, Louis Aragon, Ezra Pound, & Krazy Kat (2015); and Antonio Ruiz’s
“The Dadaist Prose of Williams and Cummings: A Novelette and [No title] (2011),
which, as the title indicates, concerns itself also—and is the only academic essay to do
so—with the impact of Dada on Williams’ early prose. The interrelationship between
Stein and Dada has been alluded to by several critics—Richard Aldington in “The
Disciples of Gertrude Stein” (1920), Norman Weinstein in Gertrude Stein and the
Literature of the Modern Consciousness (1970), John Malcolm Brinnin in The Third
Rose: Gertrude Stein and her World (1968), Sarah Bay-Cheng in Mama Dada.
16
Gertrude Stein’s Avant-Garde Theater (2005)—but never fully investigated. The
insistence of most Stein scholars on associating her experimental prose with the Cubist
pictorial innovations has overshadowed her connections with Dada. The same can be
said of Dos Passos, whose Manhattan Transfer is indubitably akin to the Dadaist
collage and, as will be demonstrated in chapter 8, one step beyond the, in retrospect,
relatively timid Cubist pursuits. Through Michel Sanouillet we know that Barnes came
in contact with the Dadaists through the offices of Man Ray in the early 1920s.
Surprisingly, given Barnes’ stature in 20th-century American literature, the
consequences of that contact on Barnes’ work have not thus far been traced.
Composing this thesis has required the careful reading of a vast amount of primary
and secondary sources in English, French and, to a lesser extent, Spanish and German,
only the most relevant of which have been included in the Bibliography. The result of
so demanding an endeavor is a two-fold contribution to the academic literature on both
Dada and modern American fiction. As indicated above, the thesis offers the first
comprehensive survey of Dada fiction ever published. Because of Dada’s weariness of
fiction and aversion to success, the task of unearthing Dada’s novels and short stories
has been an arduous one. Most of them were brought out by modest publishing houses,
had a very limited circulation, and received little or no critical attention, sinking into
oblivion soon after being published. Francis Picabia made no effort to bring to press his
1924 novel Caravansérail, which appeared posthumously, and rather inconspicuously,
in 1974. The disregard the book has experienced since that date is evidenced by the fact
that it was not included in the definitive English translation of the artist’s writings, I Am
a Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose and Provocation, published by the MIT Press in
2012. Kurt Schwitters’ short story “Die Zwiebel” appeared in the German magazine
Der Sturm in 1919 only to go virtually unnoticed until 1973, when Rex W. Last
17
included it in his anthology German Dadaist Literature. Despite the success it enjoyed
among the author’s intellectual circle, Hugo Ball’s Flametti oder von Dandysmus der
Armen underwent almost a century of critical neglect between its publication in 1918
and the early 2010s. Ball’s second Dadaist novel, Tenderenda der Phantast, composed
between 1914 and 1920, was not published until as late as 1967. Despite Jonathan
Hammer’s sprightly 2002 English translation, Tenderenda remains an overlooked
literary rarity. Finding, researching, interpreting, and interconnecting these and the rest
of the works of Dadaist fiction included in the survey has proven a laborious yet
extremely rewarding job.
The same can be said of the process of tracing Dada’s influence on modern
American fiction, which, given the scarcity of academic literature on the subject,
involved the reading of hundreds of documents. After much consideration, that process
resulted in the present catalog of eight American authors. In that sense—the number of
writers discussed—this exploration has a distinctly comprehensive nature in that,
instead of focusing on one particular author, it deals with all the American fiction
writers whose novels and short stories, as revealed by my research, show the palpable
imprint of Dada. This is so for two reasons. Firstly, this being the only extended
scholarly study on the topic to date, I thought it more appropriate to offer a complete,
all-inclusive picture than a partial, restrictive view. In that respect, this thesis has been
conceived as an academic keystone, a gateway to further knowledge. Secondly, with the
exception of Gertrude Stein, who stands in a category of her own but without whose
presence no study of the American writers in Paris in the 1920s would be complete, the
American authors examined in the following pages share so many relevant features—
they were born at the turn of the 20th century, they were creatively restive and deeply
dissatisfied with America’s prevailing philistinism, they wrote highly experimental
18
fiction, they spent time in Paris, they came in contact with Dada and were affected by
its radical tenets—that despite their natural differences it is only reasonable, within the
context of this thesis, to consider them as a single, cogent subject of scholarly inquiry.
1. 3. Theoretical Framework
At a theoretical level, the contents of this thesis are underpinned by the general premises
of intertextuality. Julia Kristeva—who coined the term in her 1966 essay “Word,
Dialogue and Novel”—and other recent theorists—Tzvetan Todorov in Mikhail
Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle (1981), Gérard Genette in Palimpsests: Literature in
the Second Degree (1982), George P. Landow in Hypertext: The Convergence of
Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (1992), Harold Bloom in The Anxiety of
Influence: A Theory of Poetry (1973), Omar Calabrese in Neo-Baroque: A Sign of the
Times (1992)—agree that texts are constructed, to use Kristeva’s words, as “a mosaic of
quotations” (37); that is, they are made out of other texts, made possible by prior works
which they take up, repeat, and challenge. A text exists between and among other texts,
through its relations to them. To read something as literature is to consider it as a
“linguistic event that has meaning in relation to other discourses” (Culler, Literary
Theory 34-35).
The theory of intertextuality insists that a text cannot exist as a hermetic or selfsufficient unity, and so does not function as a closed, autonomous system. This is for
two reasons. Firstly, writers are readers of texts—in the broader sense—before they are
creators of texts. As a consequence, their work is inevitably—and often consciously—
interspersed with references, quotations, and influences of every kind. Secondly, texts
are available only through some process of reading. What is produced at the moment of
19
reading is due to the fertilization of the actual textual material—a book, for instance—
by all the texts—again, in the broader sense—the reader has “read” before (Worton and
Still 1-2).
By stressing the fact that texts are not unique, independent entities but part of a
large body of representations, intertextuality calls into question the concept of
originality in literature and art. Nothing is truly singular. What is interesting is the ways
stories, themes and ideas are reshaped and retold. This refusal to consider any text as
“original” helps explain why much postmodern writing seems fragmentary and selfconscious, and why postmodern artists and writers have unanimously turned their back
on traditionally accepted “master narratives”—such as the notions that art emanates
from individual genius, that there is a single, all-encompassing “truth,” that science
leads to objective knowledge—trying to make sense of a disjointed culture focused on
commodities.
Contrary to the impression the previous paragraphs may have given, intertextuality
is not a fixed doctrine but a flexible set of interrelated discourses. The last five decades
have seen a vertiginous increase in the number of theoretical proposals dealing directly
with intertextuality and/or trying to provide answers within the various fields where
intertextuality is applied. According to Julia Kristeva, “[t]o investigate the status of the
word is to study its articulations . . . with other words in the sentence, and then to look
for the same functions or relationships at the articulatory level or larger sequences”
(36). Building on Mikhail Bakhtin’s seminal concepts of dialogue (the horizontal axis
of the textual space, consisting of the writing subject and the addressee) and
ambivalence (the vertical axis, including the text and its contents), Kristeva argues that
“any text is the absorption and transformation of another. The notion of intertextuality
replaces that of intersubjectivity, and poetic language is read as at least double” (37). In
20
Tzvetan Todorov’s view, literature is a long chain whose links are the literary genres.
“Every genre that is an essential genre,” says Todorov, “is a complex system of ways
and means of apprehending reality in order to complete it while understanding it” (83).
At a primary level, genres are intertextual because of their connection with literature.
Since they are characterized by the repetition of certain distinguishing elements, genres
are also intertextual in that the texts they group together are, by virtue of those shared
elements, intertextually related.
Harold Bloom’s approach to intertextuality focuses on creativity in art. Bloom
agrees with William Blake that “[t]o be enslaved by any precursor’s system . . . is to be
inhibited from creativity by an obsessive reasoning and comparing, presumably of one’s
own work to the precursor’s” (29). Poets feel constrained and impotent when facing the
work of the great poets of the past, as if they were condemned to repeating century after
century what has already been said. This prevents their own originality from emerging
and, as a result, causes them angst. In Bloom’s words:
Poetic Influence—when it involves two strong, authentic poets—always
proceeds by a misreading of the prior poet, an act of creative correction that
is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation. The history of fruitful poetic
influence, which is to say the main tradition of Western poetry since the
Renaissance, is a history of anxiety and self-saving caricature, of distortion,
of perverse, willful revisionism without which modern poetry as such could
not exist. (30)
Gérard Genette’s concept of transtextuality constitutes at bottom a generic
definition of intertextuality: the capacity of texts to talk about other texts. In order to
21
illustrate his approach, Genette avails himself of the palimpsest, an old document on
which the original writing has been partially erased and replaced with new layers of
writing; that is, a text that has changed over time and shows evidence of that change.
Transtextuality is subdivided into five more specific categories. The first kind of
transtextuality is intertextuality, which Genette defines as “the actual presence of one
text within another” (2). Genette’s intertextuality consists of quotation, plagiarism, and
allusion. The second type of transtextuality—paratextuality—deals with those elements
at the entrance of a text that help direct and control the reception of the text by its
readers. This threshold consists of a peritext (which includes elements such as titles,
prefaces, captions, illustrations, notes, and dedications) and an epitext (which includes
elements outside of the text such as interviews, publicity announcements, reviews,
private letters, and other authorial and editorial discourse). The third type of
transtextuality is metatextuality, which “unites a given text to another, of which it
speaks without necessarily citing it (without summoning it), in fact sometimes even
without naming it” (Genette 4). Hypertextuality is the fourth type of transtextuality and
involves, says Genette, “any relationship uniting a text B (which I shall call hypertext)
to an earlier text A (I shall, of course, call it the hypotext), upon which it is grafted in a
manner that is not that of commentary” (5). Lastly, architextuality considers texts as
part of a genre or genres. The architextual nature of texts also includes thematic and
figurative expectations about texts. Genette admits that the five types of transtextuality
cannot be absolutely separated from each other, due to their reciprocal relationship or
inevitable overlapping.
George P. Landow’s brand of intertextual theory revolves around hypertext, that is,
the link between two texts in the Internet, a key concept in order to understand the
information society. Landow advocates the implementation of electronic hypertext in
22
the humanities in general and in literature in particular, since, he holds, hypertext
“display[s] many points of convergence” with “contemporary discussions of critical
theory, particularly those of the poststructuralists” (87). Landow’s approach to
intertextuality is particularly pertinent today in that it examines the connections between
current literary and social theory and the latest advances in computer software at the
same time as the electronic book is under scrutiny due to its inability to provide a
hypertextual reading experience.
According to semiologist Omar Calabrese, who finds today’s prevailing cultural
taste to be “neo-baroque,” the massive amount of narrative now being produced has led
to an apparently cul-de-sac situation wherein “all has already been said and already
been written” (38). The only way of avoiding
saturation has been to turn to a poetics of
repetition. As in the Kabuki theatre, argues
Calabrese, “it may then be the most minuscule
variant that will produce pleasure in the text”
(38). As a result, a certain kind of citation,
which can only be described as intertextual,
has taken on a central importance that would
have been inconceivable only a few years ago.
In practice, intertextuality employs a
variety of figures (allusion, quotation, calque,
Fig. 5. Marcel Duchamp. L. H. O. O. Q. 1919.
plagiarism, pastiche, parody, appropriation),
all of which are present in one form or another in the artistic and literary works
produced by Dada. Duchamp’s irreverent 1919 L. H. O. O. Q.—when pronounced in
French, the letters sound like “elle a chaud au cul,” loosely, and politely, translated by
23
Duchamp himself in a late interview as “there is fire down below” (Schwarz 477)—
would be meaningless without the preexistence of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, to
which Duchamp adds a moustache and goatee. The same can be said of the rest of his
readymades, whose impact depends almost entirely on the repositioning and slight
modification of “found objects” such as a shovel, a bicycle wheel, or a porcelain urinal;
that is, cultural “texts” with which the public is familiar. Intertextuality is also present in
the bringing together of disparate items (newspaper ads, illustrations from popular
novels, transportation tickets, maps, plastic wrappers, banknotes) characteristic of Dada
collage art, or in Kurt Schwitters’ Merz
project, where everyday items of junk and
refuse are assembled and mounted onto
drawings, pictures and larger installations.
Dadaist literature in general (and
Dadaist fiction in particular) is heavily
intertextual in that it is mostly built upon
previous
texts.
Louis
Aragon’s
Les
Aventures de Télémaque is a Dadaist
reworking of Fénelon’s 1699 didactic epic
prose poem of the same title. Balso’s alter
ego in Nathanael West’s The Dream Life of
Fig. 6. Raoul Hausmann. ABCD. 1923-24.
Balso Snell, John Raskolnikov Gilson, is conspicuously named after the hero in
Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, while Balso himself and the guide he meets
inside the Trojan horse—another cultural reference—bear obvious overtones of Dante’s
Divine Comedy. Robert M. Coates’ The Eater of Darkness can be construed as, among
other things, a travesty of the detective novel. The examples of intertextuality are
24
plentiful and will be provided in the corresponding chapters. Dadaist literature cannot
be fully appreciated without an awareness of the texts it parodies, alludes to, quotes
from or plagiarizes.
Since, according to the general premises of intertextuality, to read a work of
fiction—or a poem, or a play—is to relate it to other works of fiction, to compare and
contrast the way it makes sense with the ways others do, it is possible to read fiction as,
at some level, about fiction itself. In that sense, all the novels and short stories analyzed
in the following chapters are self-reflective; that is, they are partly about writing novels
and short stories, about the problems and possibilities of representing and giving
shape—or meaning—to human experience through the conventions of literary narration.
In this light, William Carlos Williams’ A Novelette, Kurt Schwitters’ “Die Zwiebel,”
John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer, Philippe Soupault’s Les dernières nuits de
Paris, E. E. Cummings’ [No Title], Blaise Cendrars’ Moravagine, or Djuna Barnes’
“The Perfect Murder,” to name a few examples, can be read as explorations of the limits
of traditional fiction and, in some cases, as anti-fiction.
It may be argued that West’s The Dream Life of Balso Snell, Coates’ The Eater of
Darkness and Vail’s Murder! Murder! constitute parodies of Dada rather than
representative examples of Dada literature. Such a contention can be refuted on the
grounds that Dada and parody are indistinguishable. Gallimard, the house that published
most of Dada’s writings in Paris, announced Ribemont-Dessaignes’ Le Bar du
Lendemain both as the most significant novel of the Dada era and as a hidden parody of
the movement. Dada is parody of the lunacy of the times, of war, of society, of art, and
ultimately, of itself. If the abovementioned novels are parodies of Dada, then they are
Dada because Dada is always and most of all a travesty of itself. A further level of
intertextuality is added to this study by recognizing that, like Duchamp’s parody of the
25
Mona Lisa, which requires for full effect that the viewer be familiar with Leonardo da
Vinci’s painting, none of the novels and short stories included in the following chapters
would make full sense without the unifying presence of Dada, the one shared
discourse—or hypotext, to use Genette’s term (5)—with which they all converse.
To recapitulate the contents of this introduction, the purpose of this thesis is to explore
the connections between Dadaism and eight American fiction writers and to illustrate
the impact of the movement on their work. The chapters are arranged in the following
manner. Chapter 2 provides an accurate picture of what Dada meant both in Europe and
the United States between the mid 1910s and the mid 1920s. Chapter 3 narrows down
the topic by describing Dada’s approach to language and, more importantly, by
providing the first-ever comprehensive survey of Dadaist fiction, which, in addition to
the novels and short stories mentioned above, includes: Louis Aragon’s Anicet ou le
Panorama, Les Aventures de Télémaque, and Le Libertinage; George RibemontDessaignes’ Céleste Ugolin and Le Bar du Lendemain; Blaise Cendrars’ Moravagine;
Philippe Soupault’s Les dernières nuits de Paris; and André Breton’s Poisson soluble.
This survey defines the peculiarities of Dadaist fiction and sets the basis for the
comparative analysis of the novels and short stories by Coates, Barnes, Williams, Vail,
Dos Passos, Cummings, West, and Stein included in chapters 4 to 11.
I am aware that the present study, comprehensive as it is, does not exhaust the
subject. Despite Tashjian’s seminal efforts—he dedicates a whole chapter of his
Skyscraper Primitives to The Soil and Contact—much remains to be said about the
American “little” magazines that flourished both in Europe and America during the
1920s and 30s and their connections with Dada. Thorough as my research has been, the
American fiction writers with whom the following chapters are concerned might not be
26
the only ones influenced by Dada. Also, given
the proclivity of the Dadaists to reject publicity
and to destroy their manuscripts or leave them
unpublished, there could be further works of
Dada fiction still to be discovered. In the 1960s
Dada experienced a revival in America: the
literary manifestations of this Neo Dada—a
designation that includes Pop Art, Happenings,
Environmental Art, and Conceptual Art—are
Fig. 7. Francis Picabia. Still Lifes (Portrait of
Cézanne, Portrait of Renoir, Portrait of
Rembrandt). 1920.
worth considering. A limited number of critics
have explored the connections between Dada
and postmodernism. Richard Sheppard’s Modernism–Dada–Postmodernism situates
Dada “as a major link between modernism and postmodernism” (xi). More specifically,
Laura P. Rice-Sayre has linked Dada with the postmodernist stream of literature and art
in her revealing “The Fabula Rasa of Dada” (1978). Yet, the impact of Dada on the
generation of postmodern American fiction writers has not yet been duly explored. It is
my hope this thesis will encourage other students of modern literature to do more
research and cast more light upon this fascinating field.
27
2. A Brief History of Dada
Every product of disgust that is capable of becoming
a negation of the family is dada; protest with the fists
of one’s whole being in destructive action: DADA ;
acquaintance with all the means hitherto rejected by
the sexual prudishness of easy compromise and
good manners: DADA; abolition of logic, dance of
those who are incapable of creation: DADA; every
hierarchy and social equation established for values
by our valets: DADA; every object, all objects,
feelings and obscurities, every apparition and the
precise shock of parallel lines, are means for the
battle of: DADA; the abolition of memory: DADA;
the abolition of archaeology: DADA; the abolition
of prophets: DADA; the abolition of the future:
DADA; the absolute and indiscutable belief in every
god that is an immediate product of spontaneity:
DADA . . . Liberty: DADA, DADA, DADA; —the
roar of contorted pains, the interweaving of
contraries and of all contradictions, freaks and
irrelevancies: LIFE. (From Tristan Tzara’s “Dada
Manifesto 1918,” see Appendix B 250-51)
2. 1. The Birth of Dada
There is no lack of historiographical studies of Dada. Nonetheless, an outline of its birth
and quick international development will provide a background essential to the
understanding of the Paris Dada encountered by the American expatriates. It will also
belie some deep-seated misconceptions of the movement, and prepare the way for the
view of Dadaist fiction that will be offered in chapter 3.
In a March 1950 letter to Robert Motherwell, Jacques-Henri Lévesque made the
following groping attempt at elucidating the Dada Spirit:
The dada spirit is undefinable, like life, with which, in the end, it can be
identified; . . . [It] condemns, because of their inefficacy, literature, art,
28 philosophy, ethics—not only theoretically, but also in regard to the
pretentiousness of the men who are their high priests. (Motherwell xxxix)
Prior to the official inception of the movement, the Dada Spirit had been embodied in
the restive lives of artists and poets like Jacques Vaché, Arthur Cravan, Guillaume
Apollinaire, Erik Satie, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Alfred Jarry and Blaise
Cendrars, who engaged themselves in a head-on struggle against the shackles of society,
family, art, literature, and conventional
mores, and who fought, as Gabrielle BuffetPicabia wrote, “to retain and express their
individualities, soaring above the crushing,
ruthless wheel of the madness of modern
civilization” (Motherwell 13).
Unlike the Dada Spirit, which is akin to
life itself and consequently cannot be
chronicled, the Dada movement does have a
history. It sprang simultaneously—partly
Fig. 8. Guillaume Apollinaire. “Reconnais-toi.” 1915. spontaneously, partly through the exchange
of ideas—in various European countries and in the United States, and was officially
baptized in Zurich in 1916. The first artists to call themselves Dadaists (Hugo Ball,
Tristan Tzara, Richard Huelsenbeck, Hans Arp, Emmy Hennings, Marcel and Georges
Janco, and Sophie Taeuber) were exiles who had fled their war-ridden countries for
neutral Switzerland. They soon became involved in the activities of the Cabaret
Voltaire, a combination of café-bar, cabaret, show-room and art gallery opened by Ball
in the back room of the Höllandisches Meierei, a popular tavern located at Spiegelgasse
29 1, Zurich, on February 5, 1916. The Cabaret was contrived by its founder to be “a center
for artistic entertainment, where artists will come and give musical performances and
readings at the daily meetings,” as well as an open invitation to the “young artists of
Zurich, whatever their orientation . . . to come along with suggestions and contributions
of all kinds” (Ball, Flight 50).
Before long, the Cabaret Voltaire became a melting pot for the latest trends in
music, art, and literature; a clearing-house of the newest products of Expressionism,
Cubism, and Futurism. The only agglutinative elements in such an eclectic mélange
were a shared disgust with the war and an
explicit revolt against the bourgeois, whose
blind faith in the infallibility of logic was
held responsible for the war, and whose
philistine appreciation of mainstream artistic
manifestations was held in contempt.
It was not until Ball’s final break with
Dada at the end of May 1917 (he was at
odds with Tzara’s ambition to turn the
movement into an international doctrine)
and the ensuing take-over of the formation
Fig. 9. Marcel Janco. Cabaret Voltaire. 1916.
by Tzara, that Dada’s extreme positions on art, literature, society, and Western
civilization took shape. By the time Dada commenced its rapid growth throughout the
world, a consolidated body of Dadaist notions and attitudes had crystallized from the
early confusion.
Dada sprang from disgust at the war. It represented an attempt to outdo the madness
of those who brought it about and an unyielding rejection of an inherited world of what
30 the Dadaists thought to be obsolete bourgeois values. In order to retreat from the
contradictions of their time, the Dadaists adopted a pose of brilliant child-like naïveté.
Bent on subverting the bourgeois, they vindicated the exploitation of the naive, the
irrational, the spontaneous and the abnormal, as well as the abolition of logicality and
the systematic transgression of the prevailing moral system. Dada sought to bridge
differences between nations and stood in direct opposition to politics and the institutions
of the Western World: nationalism, patriotism, militarism, capitalism and religion. It
was also against art and literature insomuch as they might conform to the conventions
of the past. After a short period of support, the Dadaists came to reject even the most
innovative forms of artistic and literary expression (Cubism, Expressionism and
Futurism), which they looked upon as “laboratories of formal ideas” (see Appendix B
243), as systematized attempts to achieve a merely aesthetic goal. They proclaimed the
imperative necessity to create new forms of expression in art and literature. In the same
breath, the Dadaists were individualistic and gregarious, earnest and indifferent,
disgusted and naive, high-spirited and potentially suicidal, simple and mystifying. They
expressed their revolt against “this humiliating age” (Ball, Flight xxiv) with manifestos,
poems, paintings, sculptures and demonstrations conceived to shock the public. They
were against all systems, since, according to Tzara, “the most acceptable system is that
of having none on no principle” (see Appendix B 247).
Such extreme negativity has led both the critics and the general public, despite
Motherwell’s dispassionate revaluation of the movement, to regard Dada as a disruptive
phenomenon and an encumbrance to the healthy growth of modern art and literature. T.
S. Eliot described it as a “diagnosis of a disease of the French mind” (Young 97), while
Robert McAlmon dismissed it as a multi-color detonation that was “nothing,” to which
young, artistically-inclined loafers adhered because it gave them the opportunity to “do
31 nothing and feel fine about it” (167). A quick illustration of the geographical
proportions attained by Dada in barely a five years’ space, its persistent recurrence in
the form of artistic explosions and retrospective art exhibits from its official demise in
the mid-1920s up to the present, and the intellectual stature of its young members will
suffice to give an idea of the sincerity of the movement and the degree to which the
notions it propounded affected modern and contemporary art and literature.
In 1917, Richard Huelsenbeck left Zurich for Berlin, where social distress,
revolutionary effervescence, disillusionment with the war, and the imminent decline of
imperialism led the Berlin Dadaists to abandon art and literature almost entirely and to
participate in the on-going socio-political
struggle. Together with Johannes Baader
and
Raoul
Hausmann,
Huelsenbeck
introduced Dada with a roaring success
in Leipzig, Teplitz, Prague, Mozarteum
and Karlsbad. Max Ernst and Kurt
Schwitters waved the Dadaist banner in
Cologne and Hanover respectively; and
Rudolf Schlichter, W. Schtuckenschmidt,
Hans Citroen, Clément Pansaers, Otto
Fig. 10. Cover of Der Dada nº 2, edited by Raoul
Hausmann. Berlin, 1919.
Schmalhausen, Mac Robber and Jacques
Edwards did the same in Karlsruhe, Magdeburg, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Brussels,
Calcutta, and Chile. The journal MA, published in Budapest and Vienna, carried some
of the most arresting examples of Dadaist verbal and visual images. In 1919 a Dadaist
group called Nichevoki [the Nothingists] was founded in Moscow. Soon afterwards the
poet Ilia Zdanevich, leader of the avant-garde group H2SO4 in Tiflis, founded the
32 “official” Russian branch of the movement. In Japan Takahashi Shinkichi published
Poems of Dadaist Shinkichi and a novel entitled Dada in 1923. In Italy Julius Evola
became Dada’s foremost representative, while Picabia introduced it in Barcelona. In
1921 the first and only issue of New York Dada, edited by Picabia, Duchamp and Man
Ray, was humorously ratified by Tzara as an “official” Dada publication. In January of
the previous year Dada had arrived in Paris. In his 1920 “Zurich Chronicle 1915-1919,”
Tzara was proud to announce that:
Up to October 15, 8,590 articles on Dadaism have appeared in the
newspapers and magazines of: Barcelona, St. Gall, New York, Rapperswill,
Berlin, Warsaw, Mannheim, Prague, Rorschach, Vienna, Bordeaux,
Hamburg, Bologna, Nuremberg, Chaux-de-fonds, Colmar, Jassy, Bari,
Copenhagen, Bucharest, Geneva, Boston, Frankfurt, Budapest, Madrid,
Zurich, Lyon, Basel, Christiania, Berne, Naples, Cologne, Seville, Munich,
Rome, Horgen, Paris, Effretikon, London, Innsbruck, Amsterdam, Santa
Cruz, Leipzig, Lausanne, Chemnitz, Rotterdam, Brussels, Dresden,
Santiago, Stockholm, Hanover, Florence, Venice, Washington, etc. etc.
(Motherwell 242)
As late as 1936, in the fall issue of Transition, Huelsenbeck, the self-designated
historian of Dada, published “Dada lives,” where he contended that the movement was
still alive and well. The impact of Dada on the German public was so powerful that
Hitler thought it necessary to mention it in his Nuremberg speech of 1934 and also in
Mein Kampf. He threatened the Dadaists and their successors with arrest, and referred to
the movement as “spiritual madness” and “art bolshevism” (Motherwell 281). Soon
33 after his rise to power, an
exhibition of “Dadaist Works of
Shame and Filth” was organized
to educate the German people
on the dangers of decadent and
subversive art. Since the end of
World War II there has been a
Fig. 11. Adolf Hitler and other Nazi officials standing by the Dada wall
at the Degenerate Art exhibition. 16 July 1937.
. plethora of exhibitions on Dada: at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1959; at the
Kunsthaus in Zurich in 1966 (celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the birth of Dada);
at the Musée National d´Art Moderne in Paris in 1967; at the Museum of Contemporary
Art in Chicago in 1985; at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2006; at the
National Art Center in Tokyo in 2016 (honoring the centennial of the birth of Dada).
The 1960s saw the development of a Dada-like, deadpan realism in art and
literature that came to be known as Neo-Dada or Neo-Realism. Two decades later, Ihab
Hassan included Dadaism as one of the distinguishing features of postmodernism (91).
According to Antonio Ruiz, this inclusion is highly significant in that it suggests that
many of the traits of postmodern thought had been previously embodied in Dada (102).
Like Dada, which is a reaction against the rationalist tradition of Western thought,
postmodernism “partakes of uncertainty and doubt, and accepts ambiguity,” says
Sanouillet (226). Like Dada, also, postmodernism is nihilistically defined by the
rejection of “all-encompassing, teleological theories of human and social change
associated with Enlightenment ideas about reason and progress.” Postmodernism
aspires to link “claims about social life, human nature, and criteria of truth and validity
with strategies of power,” and to replace “the emphasis on subject and consciousness
with an emphasis on language as intersubjective” (Locher). These goals, assures Ruiz,
34 had already been proposed by Dada in the 1920s. The Dadaists believed that meaning
was arbitrary. “I shall be reading poems that are meant to dispense with conventional
language, no less, and to have done with it,” announced Hugo Ball at the first public
Dada soirée (see Appendix A 240). Language signified nothing, so it could be
manipulated at will. The Dadaists also believed that
there is no absolute truth and abolished the distinction between the concepts
of high and low (or popular) art and culture. As a matter of fact, most of the
features assigned to postmodernism [by Hassan] can also be applied to
Dadaism
(pataphysics/Dadaism,
chance,
antiform,
play,
anarchy,
exhaustion/silence, performance, participation, deconstruction, antithesis,
absence, dispersal, combination, against interpretation…). (Ruiz 102)
Dada gathered to its cause some of the brightest young artists and writers of the war
generation and became a vehicle for the expression of their disdain of Western culture.
It was “the phenomenon of the finest minds of a young generation rising up and crying
a loud and resounding ‘merde!’ to all the human civilization that had gone before”
(Putnam 163). Contrary to the widespread belief that they were ignorant of the Western
literary/artistic heritage, the Dadaists were in fact widely read and learned. Malcolm
Cowley was genuinely impressed by Louis Aragon, of whom he said that he had “read
everything and mastered it” (Exile’s Return 163). The same was true of André Breton,
Tzara, Ball, Ribemont-Dessaignes, and the rest of the Dadaists. “There was not one of
them,” affirms Cowley, “who lacked the ability to become a good writer . . . They had
behind them the long traditions of French literature (and knew them perfectly); they had
the examples of living masters (and had pondered them); they had a burning love of
35 their art and a fury to excel” (Exile’s Return 152). It must be understood, then, that the
scornful, nihilistic position they adopted was not prompted by the deficiency of their
knowledge of the past, but was the logical consequence of the impossibility of
employing such knowledge to express the paradoxical realities of modern life.
2. 2. New York Dada
New York City was the undisputed American center of the arts during the war, and was
to remain so, despite social and political changes, for many years after it. Most of the
literary and artistic fermentation and insubordination took place in Greenwich Village,
the home to most American and foreign artists and writers while in New York.
In 1914 the patron of the arts Walter Conrad Arensberg and his wife Louise moved
from Boston to New York. Their salon soon became a haven for European as well as
American young writers and artists. Many years later, in 1949, Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia
would remember the Arensbergs’ Salon as a place where “at any hour of the night one
was sure to find sandwiches, first-class chess players, and an atmosphere free from
conventional prejudice,” and would say of the Arensbergs themselves that they
displayed “a sympathetic curiosity, not entirely free from alarm, towards the most
extreme ideas and towards the works which outraged every accepted notion of art in
general and of painting in particular” (Motherwell 260).
Nine years before the Arensbergs’ establishment in New York, Alfred Stieglitz had
opened the Camera Work Gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue. Intense photographic
experimentation was carried out there, the results of which appeared periodically in
Camera Work, the gallery’s own magazine. Both the gallery and the magazine, which
later on changed their names to 291, were extremely influential in that they prepared the
36 way for the First International Exhibition of Modern Art, commonly known as the
Armory Show, which opened in New York on February 13, 1913. Paintings and
sculptures representative of all the trends of modern European art (Cubism, Futurism,
Abstract Art, Fauvism, etc.) were exhibited there and thus introduced for the first time
to the American public.
For three years, until its closing in 1917, Stieglitz’s gallery vied amicably with the
Arensbergs’ Salon as a haven of modernism. Among the young artists who frequented
both venues were Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, who shortly
afterwards would be celebrated by the Swiss and French Dadaists as proto-Dada figures,
and would become involved in the development of the Dadaist movements in Zurich,
Paris, and New York itself. Due to the unconventionality of its gatherings, its anti-social
and anti-traditional leanings and, most importantly, to the endless discussions on
modern art and literature it promoted, the Arensbergs’ Salon is considered by many
critics the birthplace of American Dada and, consequently, given that the Cabaret
Voltaire did not open its doors until February 1916, of international Dada. Contrary to
this notion, Ileana B. Leavens contends that the Salon was not Dadaist insomuch as it
lacked an undercurrent of thought, “in contrast to Zurich, in which the common factor
for the group was a protest against the war.” It must be noted, though, that her denial of
the Salon’s founding role stems from her conviction that such a role belongs instead to
291, “where the unifying philosophy had been, throughout its history, a revolt against
tradition.” Both 291 and the Salon, she concedes, “comprised an attack on the
philistines, on the bourgeoisie,” but the desire for experimentation common to Zurich
and 291, she concludes, was absent from the Salon (140).
Purely Dadaist gestures, gratuitous acts in defiance of order, tradition, and
intellectual high-mindedness were common in those days in the Village. On January 23,
37 1917, Marcel Duchamp, together with John Sloan and a few other enthusiastic friends,
climbed onto the top of the Washington Arch in the heart of the Village. The object of
the enterprise was to have a “midnight picnic,” and to boisterously “proclaim the
independent
republic
of
Greenwich
Village” (Leavens 143). Two months later,
Duchamp selected a urinal, signed it with
the name R. Mutt, and proudly submitted it
to the 1917 Society of Independent Artists
Exhibition. At the same exhibition, protoDada hero Arthur Cravan, notorious for his
attacks against the philistines who looked
upon art as a social event, was invited to
Fig. 12. Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain photographed by
Alfred Stieglitz at 291 Gallery, in front of Marsden
Hartley’s painting The Warriors.
give a lecture on the subject he was
supposed to know most about: modern art.
He appeared on the stage obviously inebriated, and immediately proceeded to strip
himself of his clothes before the astonished audience. The police were summoned and
Cravan was manhandled, handcuffed and carried off to prison before he could finish his
extemporaneous performance. Walter Arensberg, who looked upon Cravan’s action as a
perfect succès de scandale, bailed him out of jail that same evening.
Another mystifying resident of the Village was the Baroness Elsa von FreytagLoringhoven. Matthew Josephson has portrayed her in the following manner:
She was said to be the widow of a German nobleman who had lived for a
time in New York. She wrote poetry in a mixed German-English, and also
made Dadaist artifacts in imitation of Marcel Duchamp, as well as
38 sculptured reliefs that had bits of colored rubbish and tinfoil in them. She
decorated her own person in a mechanistic style of her own device, shaving
her head and painting it purple; wearing an inverted coal scuttle for a hat, a
vegetable grater as a brooch, long ice-cream spoons for earrings, and metal
teaballs attached to her pendulant breasts. Thus adorned and clad in an old
fur coat, or simply a Mexican blanket, and very little underneath, she would
saunter forth to serve as one of the truly curious sights of the Village. (12021)
Considered separately, all the above gestures might be construed as the humorous
antics of a few young men and women. Examined together, as the product of the artistic
community of the Village, they reveal a pattern of thought, a disrespectful, antiacademic, and anti-bourgeois attitude that was rapidly spreading not only in New York
but in other urban centers of the world under the name of Dada.
The formation of the Inje-Inje movement in New York in 1920 clearly
foreshadowed the foundation of New York Dada the following year. John Baur, in
Revolution and Tradition in Modern American Art, has described the Inje-Inje as having
been founded by Holger Cahill:
Inje, Cahill had read in a book by a Fellow of the Royal Geographical
Society, was the only word in the language of a South American tribe of
Indians, who managed however to communicate a wide range of meanings
through different inflections of the word accompanied by various gestures.
His movement proposed to return to a comparable simplicity, to cut away
the superstructure of our cultural refinements and discover the basic and
39 most direct forms of human expression . . . Inje-Inje lasted for only two or
three years and had relatively little effect on American painting . . . Several
Inje-Inje poems were written by Malcolm Cowley and Orrick Johns.
(Leavens 143)
When lecturing about his group in 1957, Cahill recalled that Cowley had been sent to
France in 1921 as a representative of the Inje-Inje. Cowley answered Leavens’ queries
about the matter by stating that Inje-Inje was “a Dada joke—but there was no school,
except those like me who enjoyed the joke” (Leavens 144).
On April 1, 1921 the Société Anonyme, established the previous year by Katherine
Drier, Duchamp and Man Ray in defense of the modernist tendencies in America,
organized a soiree entitled “Do You Want To
Know What a Dada Is?” The program included a
lecture by Marsden Hartley called “Explaining
Dadaism,”
which
officially
introduced
the
movement to the American public. For Hartley,
Dada was a breath of fresh air in “that chamber in
the brain where art takes hold and flourishes like
a bed of fungus in the dark” (Hole 84). Later that
month, Duchamp, Man Ray, Hartley, Arensberg,
Buffet-Picabia, Adon Lacroix, the Baroness,
Fig. 13. Cover of New York Dada. 1921.
Joseph Stella, Beatrice Wood, Edgar Varèse, Stieglitz and others founded New York
Dada and published the first and last issue of its homonymous magazine. The cover
consisted of the minute multiple repetition of the title upside down surrounding
Duchamp's altered readymade, the perfume bottle Belle Haleine: Eau de Voilette
40 [Beautiful Breath: Veil Water], with the artist’s portrait as Rrose Sélavy on the label.
The issue contained, among other Dadaist items, a “letter of authorization” from Tristan
Tzara and a reproduction of Man Ray’s The Coat-Stand. Instrumental to the
dissemination of Dada’s ideas in the United States was Hartley’s collection of essays,
Adventures in the Arts, in whose afterword, entitled “The Importance of Being Dada,”
he summed up the propelling forces of New York Dada as: liberation from convention,
tradition, heritage and the past, together with an
acrid criticism of the older generation through
the witty implementation of humor (see
Appendix E).
The arrival of the movement in America
was eagerly echoed by the press. An article
published in The World described Dada as the
“very latest fad,” claiming that it was “so many
miles away from the other conceits of the ultraFig. 14. Man Ray. The Coat-Stand. 1920. modernists that post-Futurism, vers libre and
psychoanalysis” were “lucid by comparison.” “Dada will get you if you don’t watch
out,” warned the Evening Journal after asking members of the Société Anonyme to
define the movement. According to Drier, Dada meant “irony.” Duchamp contradicted
her by assuring that it meant “nothing.” Dada, claimed Man Ray, consisted “largely of
negations” and was, in essence, “a state of mind” (Burke 203). Despite its apparent
initial success, New York Dada, which was particularly prolific in the visual arts,
experienced its sudden demise when Duchamp and Man Ray, who constituted the
backbone of the movement, moved to Paris in their search for a better soil to sow their
creative seeds.
41 With the exception of Gertrude Stein, who was quite a few years their senior, all the
American writers on whom the following chapters will focus lived or spent time in New
York City during the years prior to their departure for France in the early and middle
1920s. Born at the turn of the century, they, like most of the writers of their generation
(Harry Crosby, Matthew Josephson, Malcolm Cowley, Slater Brown, Dashiell
Hammett, Sidney Howard, Hart Crane, Janet Flanner, Mina Loy and others), rebelled
against their middle-class families and the philistinism of their hometowns, and left for
New York as soon as they had the opportunity to do so. There, they became imbued
with the artistic and literary activity of the Village, and met other American and
European avant-gardists. Also, they became familiar to a greater or lesser extent with
the pervading Dada Spirit, the proto-Dada personalities and coteries of the Village, and,
finally, with New York Dada itself. Their time in New York prepared them for what the
European avant-garde in general, and Dada in particular, had to offer.
2. 3. Paris Dada: The Demise of the Movement?
Three features distinguished the Paris Dadaists from their counterparts in America and
the rest of Europe: their almost exclusive dedication to literature and relative neglect of
the visual arts; their admission to belonging to a literary tradition of which they
considered themselves the last triumphant stage; and their notorious public
demonstrations.
When Tzara arrived in Paris from Zurich in January 1920 he was profusely
welcomed by the leading literary coteries, which, thanks to Breton’s enthusiastic
promotional campaign, were already favorably inclined towards the Dadaist cause.
These were André Gide and the Mid-Sud group, the writers grouped around Apollinaire,
42 and, most importantly, the Littérature group, of
which Breton, Aragon, and Philippe Soupault were
the founders. It was not until 1919, after the three
young writers had been discharged from military
service, that the first issue of Littérature was
published. The magazine conveyed the aggressive
reaction of its editors against the self-contented
bourgeoisie and the prevailing conformism of their
Fig. 15. Man Ray. Tristan Tzara. 1924
time, a reaction that had been accentuated by their
experience of the war. It is not surprising that they aligned themselves with the Dadaist
principles immediately they became acquainted with the movement. As if to illustrate
their official adherence to Dada, the May 1920 issue of Littérature featured twentythree Dada manifestos by twelve different authors: Breton (see Appendix D), Aragon,
Soupault, Paul Éluard, Ribemont-Dessaignes (see Appendix F), and some Zurich and
New York Dadaists.
Contrary to the most extreme Dadaist postulates, the Paris Dadaists were willing to
revaluate their literary past, preferring to direct their attacks against particular “fatuous
writers” (Balakian, Breton 54), usually chosen by Breton, rather than, as had been the
case in Zurich, against literature in general. They admitted to being part of a long
tradition of French writers that dated back to Rousseau and included the Romantics, the
Symbolists, and the Cubists. A few writers were rescued from oblivion and elevated to
the category of Dadaist heroes: Arthur Rimbaud, Isidore Ducasse, Count of
Lautréamont (the author of Les Chants de Maldoror), Alfred Jarry (the author of the
play Ubu Roi), and Apollinaire, who was the link between Cubist and Futurist literature
and the pioneer of automatic writing and the use of free associations.
43 Details of the campaigns of public mystification and desecration on which the Paris
Dadaists embarked between 1920 and 1923 are available from various sources (see
Motherwell and Sanouillet). It suffices to say that their anti-public crusade—they
chased about Paris interrupting bourgeois plays, burned popular writers in effigy,
decried religion from churchyards—was one of the main factors that precipitated
Dada’s demise. The insulting actions that at first infuriated the audiences at the Dada
public demonstrations, often ending with fights on the stage and the police called in,
gradually became predictable antics that the public learned to enjoy. Plays, manifestos
and gestures intended to offend the audiences soon became innocuous sources of
entertainment. The Dadaists’ efforts to scandalize and outrage became ineffective. Paris
Dada was doomed from its birth, it
being only a matter of time before it
found itself unable to conjure up
hoaxes provocative enough to elicit
social outrage.
Two events need to be recounted
as symptomatic of Dada’s final agony
as a movement. In May 1921 the Trial
Fig. 16. The Maurice Barrès trial. 1921.
and Sentencing of M. Maurice Barrès, by DADA, organized by Breton, was staged at
the Salle de Sociétés Savantes. Barrès, who had once been a spirited writer and had now
turned, in the Dadaists’ opinion, into a nationalistic spokesperson of war and patriotism,
was accused of “offence against the security of the spirit” (Motherwell 185). Present in
effigy, Barrès was defended by Aragon and judged by Breton, while RibemontDessaignes performed the duties of public prosecutor and Jacques Rigaut and Benjamin
Péret played the part of witnesses. The trial was regarded by some of the “kernel”
44 Dadaists as a betrayal of the anarchic principles Dada stood for, since it represented a
serious, organized action directed towards the achievement of a predetermined goal.
Dissatisfied with the direction his associates were taking, Picabia refused to participate
in the event and removed himself from the movement. Tzara, probably the most radical
of the Dadaists, took part in the trial and did his best to be as disruptive as possible. His
attempts to turn it into a typical free-for-all Dadaist hullabaloo, however, met with
failure: Barrès was found guilty and sentenced to twenty years of forced labor.
Breton’s attempt in February 1922 to organize the Congrès International pour la
Detérmination des Directives de la Défense de l’Esprit Modern, with representatives
from all the literary and artistic modern trends, was the last straw for Tzara, RibemontDessaignes and others. Upon declining in civil terms Breton’s invitation to participate
in what in his opinion was an unforgiveable breach of the Dadaist faith, Tzara was
accused by Breton of being a “publicity-mad impostor” (Motherwell 119). In several
articles printed in Comœdia, Breton held Tzara responsible for the difficulties he was
having organizing the Congress, accused him of not being the legitimate father of Dada,
and ridiculed his lack of intellectual power. A meeting was called by RibemontDessaignes at the Closerie des Lilas to give Breton the opportunity to explain publicly
his sallies against Tzara and further to discuss the Paris Congress. During the meeting,
Breton and Tzara failed to work out their differences. Insults were exchanged, and the
Paris Congress collapsed.
3. 4. Dada and Surrealism
Once the Paris Congress was scuttled, divisions within the Dadaist ranks became
unavoidable due to differences of principles and personal antagonisms. Breton and his
45 associates (Péret, Éluard, Soupault, Baron, and Vitrac, to name a few) began their
groping steps towards the proclamation of a new faith that became official in 1924 with
the publication of Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto. Despite Breton’s initial efforts to
minimize the obvious influence of Dada on his new program (by celebrating Jacques
Vaché as the true Surrealist source of inspiration and decrying Dada as inefficacious
and aimless), the first years of Surrealism, between 1922 and 1925, proved to be a
continuation of Dada with very minor changes. Not until ten years later, in “Surrealism:
Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow,” which appeared in the September 1932 issue of
Edward Titus’ This Quarter, would Breton bring himself to recognize the importance of
Dada in the birth and later development of Surrealism. In this essay he spoke of Dada as
“a group whose germinating force has . . . been decisive and, by general consent of
present day critics, has greatly influenced the course of ideas” (Motherwell xxxiii), and
emphasized the invaluable contributions of Duchamp, Picabia, Tzara, and Vaché.
Unlike Dada, Surrealism was not fully satisfied with the idea of absolute
destruction, and firmly believed in the existence of a world between reality and dream, a
surreality, wherein all the contradictions between the two worlds were resolved. The
only way to reach “the marvelous” was through the liberation of the subconscious and
by bringing down the barriers imposed on man by reason, which they aspired to achieve
by dint of the conscientious implementation of techniques such as dream recitals,
hypnotic trances, and automatic writing. Also in contrast to Dada, the Surrealists felt
confident they could alter society by means of their intellectual revolution.
It is noteworthy, however, that these—their desire to discover a new reality, or
surreality, and their confidence in their ability to effect a drastic change in the social
consciousness—were the only aspects that distinguished the early Surrealism from
Dada. The revolt against conservatism, the necessity to abolish conventional beliefs, the
46 struggle against rationality in human behavior, and the expression of their precepts
through scandalous, insulting gestures were the props supporting both Surrealism and
Dada. Furthermore, the literary works published by the Surrealists between 1922 and
1925 were hardly distinguishable from those of the Dadaists. Mary Ann Caws has
pointed out that “frequently the chief difference between Dada and Surrealism . . .
seems to be only a difference of tone or of style, since the themes they deal with are so
similar . . . At other times, even their styles are similar, especially in the more ‘poetic’
writings” (Poetry 100). J. H. Matthews corroborates such a notion: “No guaranteed
criterion exists that, cutting across misleading chronological boundaries, would permit
us to classify this play as unquestionably of
Dada inspiration and that play as of purely
Surrealist derivation” (4).
It was not until 1925 that Surrealism
really parted from Dada. By then the idea of
revolution had been exalted for a number of
years, to the extent that Surrealist actions
had become, like Dada’s, an end in
themselves. Thinking that Naville and Péret,
the
editors
of
Surrealism’s
official
publication, La Révolution Surréaliste, were
Fig. 17. Cover of the first issue of La Révolution
Surréaliste. December 1924.
still too involved with Dada’s anti-art
farcicality, Breton took over the editorship and gave Surrealism a new direction by
making a public commitment to the Revolution, one which was not only intellectual but
also political. Like Dada, Surrealism had always been in favor of the revolution against
the bourgeois establishment and the old social system it upheld. As far as the Surrealists
47 knew, only the Russian Revolution had succeeded in overturning the bourgeois system.
Sharing the same enemy, Surrealism joined the communist cause in 1925. Whereas
Dada had always refused to compromise and preferred to perish rather than to join in an
organized cause, Surrealism chose political commitment to avoid going stale and
becoming innocuously inoperative in the modern world. From 1925 onwards Surrealism
became the leading avant-garde movement in France and, soon, in Europe. Dada,
despite its official demise, continued to produce uncompromising works of art and
literature during the middle and late twenties.
48 3. Dada, Language, and Literature
The BAZOOKA is only for my understanding. I
write because it’s natural like I piss like I’m ill.
(From Tzara’s “Unpretentious Proclamation,” Tzara
16)
3. 1. Dada’s Theory of Language
Part of the absurdity that emanated from the Dada artistic and public manifestations
derived from the Dadaists’ conviction that human beings are unable to communicate
among themselves by using the language of the past: “A monstrous aberration makes
people believe that language was
born
to
facilitate
their
mutual
relations,” wrote Breton (Motherwell
xxxiii). The Dadaists developed a
theory of language based on their
view that the existing linguistic sign
system
was
the
most
elaborate
fabrication of human reason. Through
the codes of syntax, grammar, and
semantics, people have sought to
interpret the world rationally. This
anthropomorphic
language
scheme
Fig 18. Raoul Hausmann. Mechanical Head (The Spirit of Our
Time). c. 1920.
constitutes the so-called “cultural order.” Because people forget they have created such
an order, the structure of social values it represents is held to be absolutely valid and not
an arbitrary interpretation of reality.
49 It is these social values and the cultural world created by language, the Dadaists
felt, that had caused the war, thence their determination to subvert such a disastrous,
reason-ridden status quo by, among other things, destroying words and disrupting
syntax. In the new language devised by Dada, words lost their denotative attributes and,
through their sound, distribution and rhythm, permitted new meanings to emerge in
vibrations at a spiritual—not intellectual—level. The new language conveyed emotions
and sounds that suggested ideas and images without quite naming them. It brought
together elements from different semantic fields and connected disparate items and
concepts in startling images and irrational juxtapositions, doing away with the
traditional notions of linguistic coherence. In
order to liberate text and speech from the
stifling norms of the past, the Dadaists
unleashed an arsenal of puns, wordplay and
experimental writing. Some Dada artists like
Hans Harp or Kurt Schwitters turned words
and letters into abstract forms, thus depriving
them of their legibility. The aim of these
experiments was to reveal the arbitrary
relationships
between
words
and
their
meaning. With the necessary adaptational
Fig. 19. June 1929 issue of Transition, featuring the
“Revolution of the Word Proclamation.”
changes, the Dadaist writers used the new
language in their poems, plays, manifestos, essays, critical literary syntheses (Dada’s
own version of literary criticism), short stories and novels, thus preparing the way for
the linguistic literary experimentation of the 1920s and 30s, and for the inception of
some American little magazines such as Matthew Josephson’s Broom, Gorham
50 Munson’s Secession, and Eugene Jolas’ Transition, whose 1929 “Revolution of the
Word” is deeply indebted to Dada. In what could be regarded as a pure Dada manifesto,
the sixteen signers of the “Revolution of the Word Proclamation” wrote:
Tired of the spectacle of short stories, novels, poems and plays still under
the hegemony of the banal word, monotonous syntax, static psychology,
descriptive naturalism, and desirous of crystallizing a viewpoint, we hereby
declare that:
1. The revolution in the English language is an accomplished fact.
2. The imagination in search of a fabulous world is autonomous and
unconfined.
3. Pure poetry is a lyrical absolute that seeks an a-priori reality within
ourselves alone.
4. Narrative is not mere anecdote, but the projection of a metamorphosis
of reality.
5. The expression of these concepts can be achieved only through the
rhythmic “hallucination of the word.”
6. The literary creator has the right to disintegrate the primal matter of
words imposed on him by textbooks and dictionaries.
7. He has the right to use words of his own fashioning and to disregard
existing grammatical and syntactical laws.
8. The “litany of words” is admitted as an independent unit.
9. We are not concerned with the propagation of sociological ideas,
except to emancipate the creative elements from the present ideology.
10. Time is a tyranny to be abolished.
51 11. The writer expresses. He does not communicate.
12. The plain reader be damned. (Cowley, Exile’s Return 276-77)
The language of literature had to be invented all over again just as painters were
inventing new visual images for themselves. In poetry, the Dadaists’ favorite genre, the
new language comprised absolute openness, chance revelations of language and
experience in defiance of the logical strait-jacket, a bringing together of elements from
different spheres, a connecting of the unrelated through poetic vision and irrational
juxtaposition, and a tendency towards the “point sublime” at which all contradictions
are resolved but which can never be reached. The Dadaist
poets made use of wordplay, automatic transcriptions,
innovative distribution of the lines in shocking visual
patterns, and different type fonts in the same poem. They
rejected conventional norms of punctuation and used free
verse. In theater, the new language entailed a lack of
thematic consistency and the neglect or abolition of plot. The
Dadaist playwrights used absurd dialogues, nonsensical
repetitions of words, and bizarre human situations against the
backdrop of a precarious but shocking setting.
3. 2. Dada and the Novel: A Survey of Dadaist Fiction
Fig. 20. Francis Picabia.
Portrait of a Young American
Girl in the State of Nudity.
1915.
In his “Dada Manifesto 1918,” Tzara defined true literature as that which “never reaches
the voracious masses. The work of creative writers written out of the author’s necessity,
and for his own benefit.” Writing Dadaist literature, he continued, entailed:
52 The awareness of a supreme egoism, wherein laws become insignificant.
Every page should explode, either because of its profound gravity, or its
vortex, vertigo, newness, eternity, or because of its staggering absurdity, the
enthusiasm of its principles, or its typography. (See Appendix B 245)
A Dadaist work of literature must be, like every Dadaist act, “a cerebral revolver
shot” (Motherwell 85). Some of the means employed by the Dadaist poets and
playwrights to achieve such a startling effect have been briefly mentioned above. Yet,
the Dadaists had serious misgivings about fiction. At the time Tzara wrote his
manifesto, they believed the novel had emerged as a pastime of the middle classes, who
were eager to see themselves and their problems in action. It had become one of the
bourgeois’ means for imposing their vision of the world upon society. Moreover,
whereas the creative explosion alluded to by Tzara could be, and was being,
successfully accomplished in poetry and drama, the Dadaist writers could not see
clearly how it could be achieved in fiction, a genre that, by definition, demanded a
sustained effort that smothered the author’s inventive impulse. The indefinite
prolongation of “profound gravity,” “vertigo,” “staggering absurdity,” or enthusiastic
typography along the pages of a novel could only lead, they thought, to the physical and
mental exhaustion of the author and the failure to make each page “explode.” Fiction,
the Dadaists concluded, did not lend itself to the proper expression of their principles.
Accordingly, they proclaimed the official death of the novel. Aragon, the most prolific
fiction writer of the group, confided to Matthew Josephson during one of their long
walks through Paris in the early 1920s that the novel was “dead,” and expressed his
determination to abandon literature altogether, “as Rimbaud had abandoned it long ago”
(Josephson 114).
53 However, and not at all surprisingly considering the contradictory nature of Dada—
“IF EVERYONE SAYS THE OPPOSITE,” wrote Tzara, “IT’S BECAUSE HE’S
RIGHT” (16)—some Dadaists did write fiction. They hated publicity and success and,
at the same time, prided themselves on the many magazines in which Dadaist writings
were being published. Although they believed in chance as the chief force of artistic and
literary creation, there were Dadaists who “spent weeks or months in polishing and
consciously perfecting a few lines of verse” (Cowley, Exile’s Return 153). They were
out to laugh it all off, to make light of everything, but that was just a way to express
their disgust at the world. They rejected the language of the past but had no problem
accepting inherited literary genres. They wrote poems, manifestos and plays. Why not
write fiction, even if fiction is dead?
Recurrent themes in Dadaist fiction are: violence, erotic perversion, action for
action’s sake, revolutionary destruction, praise of the machine, suicide, gratuitous
crime, and a passion for primal ways of thought. The Dadaist fiction heroes are
invariably males, typically a young artist or poet eager to fulfill his creative potential,
sometimes a psychotic man on the verge of insanity. They follow inner impulses that
they themselves cannot understand and, as a consequence, engage in activities that are
either inherently nonsensical or blatant distortions of reality. The characters, events and
mental processes described by Dadaist fiction are alien to those with which the vast
majority of the readers are familiar. Complex character development is thus absent in
Dadaist fiction, since its protagonists do not abide by the commonly accepted norms of
behavior. By accommodating the conventions of traditional fiction writing to the
expression of their unorthodox themes and ideas, the Dadaist fiction writers flout the
notions of literary propriety and allegiance to the past. Plot is either abolished or heavily
disrupted by parenthetical insertions, the juxtaposition of non-associated events, long
54 lists of words, and typographical experiments. The city, an emblem of the modern
world, is the locale where most Dadaist works of fiction are set. A new, Dadaist beauty
exists in the realities of the city: automobiles, subways, locomotives, skylines, neon
lights, sirens and mechanical devices. Dadaist fiction attacks society, morality, art,
literature, reason, culture, and the past. It conveys a message of nihilistic anarchism
enveloped in morbid humor and neurotic
laughter. Like Dadaist art and poetry,
Dadaist fiction celebrates chance, parody,
and irreverence while challenging the
notion of authorship. Lastly, all Dadaist
novels and short stories are paradoxically
intertextual in that, despite their vehement
Fig. 21. George Grosz and John Heartfield. Life and Work
in Universal City, 12:05 Noon. 1919.
rejection of the past, they rely on previous
cultural texts and discourses in order to transmit their destructive import. Moreover,
every work of Dadaist fiction is intertextual inasmuch as they allude to, plagiarize,
parody, quote from or appropriate the large, shared discourse that is Dada.
The following is a survey of the works of fiction published by some of the most
representative practitioners of Dadaism.
3. 2. 1. Hugo Ball: Flametti oder vom Dandysmus der Armen and Tenderenda der
Phantast
Although not strictly a Dadaist novel, Flametti oder vom Dandysmus der Armen
[Flametti, or the Dandyism of the Poor] must be included in this survey because it is the
first work of fiction created within the spiritual framework of the movement.
55 Completed, according to Ball’s own account, in October 1916 (Flight 84)—at the height
of his involvement with Zurich Dada—but not published until two years later—well
after his breakup with Tzara—the narrative draws extensively from the author’s preDada period as a struggling actor in Berlin’s nightclub circuit. Max Flametti, the
protagonist, is the passionate, self-delusional leader of a vaudeville company striving to
scrape a living in the gutters and back-alleys of neutral Switzerland during World War I.
The novel opens with Flametti, penniless yet optimistic, fishing in a polluted river to
feed his troupe while prostitutes and school children look on. The bulk of the story is
mostly concerned with Flametti’s tragic-comic
attempts to pursue an artistic career while
fending off financial ruin—he fishes, deals with
drugs, gets in trouble with the police—which
culminate in the presentation in Zurich of a
theatrical extravaganza called The Indians or
The Last Tribe of the Delaware.
Unlike most of the novels in this survey,
Flametti is a rather straightforward narrative
artifact
built
on
causality
and
lexical
denotation. There is no incongruity in its pages,
no defamiliarization, no radical disruption of
Fig. 22. Tal R. Illustration for Flametti, or the
Dandyism of the Poor. 2014. logicality and meaning. For all its excesses (there is rape, drugs, war), offbeat characters
(there is a frog contortionist called Leporello), and romantic exuberance, the novel is
essentially a realistic exploration of the relationship between penury and artistry, very
much in line, I believe, with Henri Murger’s Scènes de la vie de bohème, which almost
seventy years earlier had succeeded in transforming “contemptible Grub Street, the
56 haunt of apprentices and failures” into “glamorous bohemia” (Cowley, Exile’s Return
57). In a letter to his sister, Maria Hildebrand-Ball, dated December 1916, Ball reveals
that Flametti contains his whole philosophy on two hundred pages: “Love for those who
are on their knees, for the outcasts, the crushed, the tormented” (Steinke 197). By virtue
of that love, Ball’s marginal characters become “truer humans than the ordinary citizens
who seemingly manage to keep to the middle,” asserts Peter Sloterdijk, who considers
Ball, alongside Kafka, as “the most significant German-language vaudeville
existentialist, both in his Dadaist phase and in his Catholic period” (53). Flametti’s
impoverished troupe, like Murger’s Water Drinkers—so called because they could
rarely afford another drink—are, Ball and Murger seem to be saying, the only ones who
live lives worth living.
Ball’s Dadaism is present in the novel’s dazzling, free-flowing language (at times
reminiscent in its jazziness of Tzara’s writings), in the notion of art it conveys (art for
Flametti means amazement, “[t]hunderous, fulgurating music” (Flametti 46), and
razzmatazz), and, above all, in the riotous representations of The Indians, a parody of
American history where Flametti, starring as Chief Fireglow, leads his tribe to battle.
The play triumphs on opening night at Zurich’s Krokodil theater, but in subsequent
representations the audience is unimpressed, failing even to appreciate Flametti’s fire
act, when, “the petroleum dripping from his mouth, his bulging lips would glisten in a
bluish putrescence, which, mixed with mourning and melancholy, typified those
harbingers of hell who are in actual fact zealots of noble consciousness and the damned
of the heavenly bourgeoisie” (Flametti 156).
In his diary, Ball confessed to having written Flametti “[i]n an odd kind of split
mentality,” unable to find a satisfactory compromise between his art and his socialist
ideas. “As an occasional piece,” he ponders, “as a gloss to dadaism, it will disappear
57 along with dadaism for all I care” (Flight 84). He was mistaken. Contrary to his
prediction, Flametti, which many of Ball’s friends had read prior to its publication in
1918, not only did not disappear but proved instrumental in the shaping of Zurich Dada
and, as a consequence, has become an important document in the history of the
movement. “The idea of the Cabaret Voltaire,” Huelsenbeck has acknowledged in his
Memoirs of a Dada Drummer, “grew out
of literary thoughts as well as the slum
atmosphere of the music-hall performers,
the singers, the magicians, fire-eaters, and
others portrayed by Ball in his novel
Flametti” (5).
Ball finished his second novel, a
“‘Phantastischer Roman’ . . . to be called
Tenderenda, after Laurentius Tenderenda,
the church poet,” on July 15, 1920, after
seven years of “playing with these words
and sentences in the midst of torments
Fig. 23. Hugo Ball reciting his Verse ohne Worte at Cabaret
Voltaire. 1916.
and doubts” (Flight 186). Not published
until 1967, Tenderenda der Phantast [Tenderenda the Fastast] is a full-fledged Dada
novel as opposed to Flametti, with which, nonetheless, it shares an underlying,
genuinely Dadaist concern for the artist’s precarious position in modern society. The
book is divided into fifteen loosely connected chapters. Each chapter is introduced by a
brief summary of its contents, followed by the narrative proper. Chapter I, “The Rise of
the Seer,” is set in an imaginary city whose citizens are preparing themselves for the
58 apparition of a new god. A woman named Foudretête, who has chosen to live in a tower
and will not appear again in the novel, devotes her time to distributing colorful leaflets
dealing with the evolution of things. In the old square, a charlatan—the Seer—engages
in a long-winded exposition of a personal theory that will enable him to ascend to
heaven. As he talks, the evening wind blows a woman in the incredulous audience
eastwards over the city roofs. A “cock with a ruffled sickle” overflies the ladies’ fans,
which is interpreted as “a sign of divisive vanity.” The giant magnifying glass that the
Seer holds up to the sky—“the size of a Russian swing, like the kind seen at fairs”
(Tenderenda 27)—shatters into smithereens. The flying splinters “cut the houses, the
people, the cattle, the tightrope acts, the mine shafts, and all nonbelievers, so the
number of those cut increased from day to day” (30). Like Dada, the Seer fails to
achieve his goal due to the skepticism of the audience.
The introduction to Chapter XI, called “Jolifanto Bamblo Ô Falli Bamblo” in
allusion to Ball’s Lautgedichte, reads as follows:
Description of an elephant caravan from the world notorious cycle “gadji
beri bimba.” The author celebrated this cycle as a novelty for the first time
in 1916 at the Cabaret Voltaire. At the time he wore a bishop’s costume of
glossy paper, with a towering blue-white shaman’s hat, which to this day is
being worshipped as a fetish by the mild inhabitants of Hawaii. (82)
Instead of a narrative text, the chapter includes only “Karawane,” Ball’s famous sound
poem of 1916: “jolifanto / bambla ô falli bambla / grossiga m’pfa habla horem / égiga
goramen / higo bloiko russula huju / hollaka hollala / anlogo bung / blago bung / blago
bung / bosso fataka / ü üü ü / schampa wulla wussa ólobo / het tatta gôrem / eschige
59 zunbada / wulubu ssubudu ulu wasubada / tumba ba—umf / kusa gauma / ba—umf”
(82-83).
The book’s final chapter, “Mr. and Mrs. Goldkopf,” features “[a] kind of heavenly
puppet play” in which three segments can be distinguished. In the first, Mr. and Mrs.
Goldkopf have a mystical experience as a white avalanche of “heightened purity and
brilliance” comes to call on them. The second segment is the Ballad of Koko the Green
God who, kept in captivity, “avenges himself by casting magic spells on those nearest
him.” The third segment is an epilogue for the Goldkopf couple. The play—and the
book—concludes with a verse from “Sir Poet Prince, Johann von Goethe” (100).
Lacking plot or characters, Tenderenda is a shapeless, often incoherent amalgam of
prose and poetry, religious imagery and metaphysical ruminations, a “hallucinatory
tale,” according to the publishers of the 2002 English edition, of Ball’s “own Dada
enchantment and disenchantment.” At times visionary and esoteric, at times playfully
absurd, the novel is meant, asserts Jonathan Hammer in his essay “Formative
Esotericism in Zurich Dada: A Revisionist Reading of Tenderenda the Phantast,” “both
as a mirror of the times and as a DADA vehicle, a text that at once bears witness and
works to shape the times” (130).
3. 2. 2. Kurt Schwitters: “Die Zwiebel” and Franz Müllers Drahtfrühling
“Die Zwiebel” [The Onion] is a short prose piece of about 2,500 words published in
1919 in the tenth issue of the German magazine Der Sturm. The text opens with the
voice of the narrator, Alves Baeselstiel, describing the beauty of the day on which he is
going to be butchered. After mentioning that even the king will be present at the
execution and that medical assistance has been thoughtfully requested in case somebody
60 happens to feel unwell, Baeselstiel closes the paragraph by saying how pleasant it is for
him to think that the two “immaculate chambermaids” present—“clean-as-a-whistle
wenches” (109)—will whisk up his blood and wash and prepare his inner organs. Next
he welcomes the approach of the
moment of his death with a piece of
virtuoso acting that is greeted by those
present with a round of applause.
The story advances in a simple,
dispassionate fashion in contrast with
the human suffering it depicts. At one
point during the gory execution, the
king expresses his desire to taste
Baeselstiel’s
eyes.
“Bring
me,
daughter, the eyes of the Baptist!” he
Fig. 24. Kurt Schwitters. Merzbild (Rossfett). 1918-1919.
orders (112). Upon eating the eyes, the king dies, which has been construed by most
critics as the decline of order and reason and the fall of the systems that have so far
deterred humankind from the fulfillment of its potentialities. “I’ve been poisoned,” the
king exclaims (112), and Baeselstiel experiences a reversed process of recovery, as in a
film played backwards.
The doctor swooned. I ordered that two yellow candles be inserted in the
holes in his majesty’s royal gut and that they be ceremoniously lit. (Postage
stamps are acceptable forms of payment.) When the little flame burnt all the
way down into the king’s innards, the king exploded. The people called out
a rousing hip-hip-hurrah on my behalf. (Socialism means work.) (115)
61 The narration is continually interrupted by parenthetical comments that sometimes
contribute to the story, but in most cases—as in the final paragraph transcribed above or
after the king’s request to taste Baeselstiel’s eyes, which is followed by the incongruous
addition: “Deaf and dumb veterans will receive advice and information free of charge”
(112)—are totally irrelevant to the narrative. Not only does this disrupt the flow of the
prose and the narration of the event but it adds a new prose style to the tale, that of
advertising and propagandistic texts, introducing a new level of reality independent of
that of the main narration.
Conceived as a Dadaist textual collage of assorted shreds of truisms, nonsensical
statements, diatribes, advertisements, and non sequiturs, “Die Zwiebel” portrays the
artist “as sacrificial lamb who gets his own in the end by reassembling his severed
parts” (Wortsman 183), and presents in a playful manner the fragmented reality of
culture’s collapse. “I sympathize with nonsense,” Schwitters once said. Or as he put it in
a letter: “We play till death takes us away” (115).
The first and only chapter of Schwitters’ incomplete novel Franz Müllers Drahtfrühling
[Franz Müller’s Wire Spring], entitled “Cause and Beginning of the Great and Glorious
Revolution in Revon,” was published, like “Die Zwiebel,” in Der Sturm in 1919, and a
few years later in Jolas’ Transition in its English version. It presents a child asking his
mother why there is a man standing there doing nothing. Alves Baeselstiel from “Die
Zwiebel” is also present. Herr Doktor Leopold Feuerhake and his wife join the group.
Every time the doctor’s name is mentioned it receives a new appellation, until in the end
it grotesquely becomes Herr Doktor Friedrich August Leopold Kasimir Amadeus
Gneomar Lutetius Obadja Jona Micha Nahum Habakuk Zephanja Hagai Sacharja
Maleachi Feuerhake, the editor of the Revon newspaper. The standing man is
62 unanimously condemned by the on-lookers, who think him a disgrace. At this point,
Schwitters introduces a poem with no bearing on the text, returns to the story, goes back
to the poem, and finally shifts back to the story, in which we now find Anna Blume, the
main character in an earlier poem by Schwitters. The action is interrupted once more by
irrelevant parenthetical absurdities, many of them written, as in “Die Zwiebel,” in
imitation of commercial advertisements: “To increase the safety of the operation the
front half is to be more fully occupied during the journey up the mountains, the rear half
on the journey down. Abuses are prohibited by law” (Last 53).
When Anna Blume beholds the man standing in the street, she recognizes the artist
in him, his originality, sensitivity, and commendable stance against mediocrity, which
the others fail to see. When a policeman addresses Franz Müller—that is the name the
man has been given since the introduction of Anna Blume to the text—he does not
reply. By this time a considerable crowd has gathered around him. A child is smothered
to death by two women and used as a stool by a short man to see what is happening.
Franz eventually walks off, which causes pandemonium and multiple deaths among the
roaring public.
This highly imaginative piece of prose is interspersed with repetitions and
variations of words, derived from the author’s—and Dada’s—notion that words are not
mere instruments for conveying meaning, but actual parts of the structure of the text and
aesthetic objects in themselves. By repeating and rearranging words, Schwitters
intended to liberate them from their association with reality and to present them to the
reader as plastic objects in their own right. He also used shifting points of view that
multiply the levels of reality and tantalize the reader by letting him into the narrative
and pushing him out of it when the point of view is altered, thus challenging his
narrative expectations.
63 3. 2. 3. Louis Aragon: Anicet ou le Panorama, Les Aventures de Télémaque, and Le
Libertinage
The scarcity of translations of his works and the notoriety of his political leanings may
account for Aragon’s lack of literary recognition outside of France. By and large the
most prolific of the Dadaists, Aragon wrote a number of novels, two of which are
considered paradigmatically Dadaist in style and content.
In 1921 Gallimard, the enterprising publishing house that issued many of the works
of the Dadaists and the Surrealists, published Aragon’s first novel, Anicet ou le
Panorama [Anicet or the Panorama], a combination of picaresque story and
philosophical tale. The main character, Anicet, is a young poet who has retained from
his secondary studies only the rule of the three
dramatic unities and the conception of relativity
of time and space. Horrified by their son’s
poetic inclinations, Anicet’s parents think him
ungrateful and send him away on a trip. In a
roadside inn he meets a man who is eating
without touching his food and apparently
enjoying the experience immensely. Anicet
Fig. 25. Louis Aragon in 1919, during the writing
of Anicet ou le Panorama.
recognizes in him a twin spirit untouched by the
constrictions of drab reality. The man introduces himself as Arthur Rimbaud—whom
Anicet has always admired—and proceeds to teach him the Religion of Love, which
proclaims the necessity of the poet to accomplish absolute beauty through Woman.
Anicet listens attentively and, as a response, tells Rimbaud the story of his life. He
describes in full detail the shops in the Parisian arcade through which he used to pass
64 every day: the wallpaper dealer, the grocer of exotic foods, two tailors, the shop of
orthopedic devices. He explains how, as fantastic shapes began to form in his
imagination, he would try to convince himself that he was not hallucinating. He would
hear the scratching of jackals’ nails on dead leaves, the howling of white wolves, the
hissing of boa constrictors, but would dismiss them as the noises of the sewing
machines in the street.
As part of his search for the meaning of life, Anicet is initiated into a secret society
devoted to the cult of Mirabelle, a symbol of Woman and modern beauty. The seven
members of the society are thinly disguised portraits of André Breton, Jean Cocteau,
Charles Chaplin, Paul Valéry, Pablo Picasso, Jacques Vaché, Max Jacob and Pierre
Reverdy, all of whom were in one way or another associated with Dada. They vie for
Mirabelle’s favor, bringing her offerings that express their individual aesthetics,
expecting to receive from her absolute beauty as a reward for their efforts. At one point,
Anicet must perform an act that will prove his aesthetic standards. He breaks into a
museum, steals the paintings, which in his system of aesthetic values represent the
obsolete results of long-forsaken queries, and burns them on top of the Arc de Triomphe
in order to make room for the new beauty. He is admitted to the society and continues to
learn from the other members. The novel closes with a mysterious voice whispering that
love and Woman are the poet’s only salvation, and reassuring Anicet of the existence of
art.
Technically, Anicet, ou le Panorama flouts the conventional mechanisms of the
novel by avoiding the logical sequence of events, realistic descriptions of people and
objects, and the complex development of characters. Conceptually, it depicts the revolt
of the young generation against the traditional values of art and society, and provides an
insight into the motives of the genuine artist as well as a guide to confused young poets
65 unable to find the right path to the fulfillment of their talents. It renders an accurate
portrait of the Dadaist poet on his quest for a meaning beyond the trite boundaries of
reality, and emphasizes the groundbreaking Dadaist notion of performance in life and in
art. The poets’ actions are the best illustration of their art. True art lies in the creative
process rather than in the final product. Anicet’s destruction of the paintings of the
museum is an example of a Dada work of art.
In 1922 Gallimard published Aragon’s second novel, Les Aventures de Télémaque [The
Adventures of Telemachus]. The title, plot and characters are borrowed from Fénelon’s
didactic epic prose poem of the 17th century, itself a retelling of Homer and Virgil, but
the message now is that of anarchy. Telemachus, accompanied by his tutor—Mentor—
lands on the island of Ogygia (mentioned in Book V of Homer’s Odyssey) in search of
Ulysses. While there, Aragon has his characters act in ways that are far from
conforming with the upright moral values propounded by Fénelon’s text. Telemachus
makes love to the nymph Eucharis (and gets her pregnant), and the honorable Mentor
yields to Calypso’s charms behind a thicket. The narration of the events is enriched by
Mentor’s comments, which convey a Dadaist nihilism encapsulated in small aphoristic
statements such as: “They made laws, ethics, aesthetics to instill in you the respect of
frail objects. Whatever is frail is fair game for breakage” (34). At one point, Telemachus
leaves the island in Neptune’s company. Upon his return, Calypso and Eucharis share
his bed. When Telemachus, exhausted by their ardor, asks for some rest, they start
“reciprocating services” which they find so much to their liking that they gradually
manage to do without Telemachus, and “one fine day” they advise him “to make
himself scarce” (85). Thus forcefully restored to their original virtue, Telemachus and
Mentor have no choice but to go away. But instead of leaving the island in search for
66 new adventures, they die nonsensically—and Dadaistically—while arguing about
freedom, chance, and necessity. In order to prove his total freedom and his absolute
detachment from the world’s constrictions, Telemachus jumps off a cliff and kills
himself. Mentor contends that Telemachus’ suicide does not substantiate his liberty. On
the contrary, inasmuch as his suicide is a rationalized response to his need to prove his
freedom, his action is nothing but a corroboration of his enslavement to logicality.
Mentor pronounces Telemachus’ epitaph: “With Telemachus chance has perished. Now
begins the reign of wisdom” (101). He is immediately proven wrong, though, since no
sooner has he finished uttering these words than a loose rock falls from above and
crushes him dead as God “astride his steeds of tenderness burst[s] into wild guffaws”
(102).
Frolicsome and experimental—“The literal meaning of words,” says Aragon in the
preface, “can hardly provide anyone with what is conventionally called an ideal” (7)—
Les Aventures de Télémaque is a highly intertextual artifact, a playful exercise in
literary allusion and cultural reference. By flouting the conventions of fiction writing,
Aragon “freed himself from the constraints of mimeticism,” say Judd David Hubert and
Renée Reise Hubert in the introduction to their 1987 English translation of the novel,
and “descen[ed] into the diabolical nirvana of Dada” (5).
Le Libertinage [The Libertine], published in 1924, contains a number of descriptive
passages, confessions, a playlet, pastiches of other writers’ styles, and a short story, the
last Dadaist piece of fiction written by Aragon before his official embracement of
communism. The title of the volume, as well as the preface—in which Aragon demands
absolute freedom for the artist, who is above society—are intended to baffle the
bourgeois.
67 The short story included in Le Libertinage is entitled “La Demoiselle aux principes”
[The Young Lady with Principles]. Originally published in the August-September 1918
issue of Écrits nouveaux, at the height of Aragon’s engagement with Dada, it describes
the experiments carried out by a young man on a young woman with the purpose of
evaluating the effects upon her of incomprehensible behavior, actions and words. Once
the logic she is accustomed to is abolished, she loses her vital supports and commits
suicide. In this piece of fiction, as in Anicet, ou le Panorama, Aragon exalts freedom to
such an extent that it becomes an absolute value permeating all aspects of human
actuality, including, of course, language. He develops a Dadaist urban mythology by
conferring aesthetic worth upon aspects of modern life such as automobiles, shops,
streets, scissors, or cutting irons. The old concept of beauty has been dislocated and
transported to new realities.
3. 2. 4. Francis Picabia: Caravansérail
As it is the case with Kurt Schwitters and other
leading Dadaists—Huelsenbeck, Arp, Hausmann,
Fig. 26. Man Ray. Francis Picabia. 1921. etc.—Picabia’s reputation as an artist has eclipsed his notable achievements as a writer
and poet. In fact, there was no definitive English translation of his writings until 2012,
when the MIT Press brought out I Am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose, and
Provocation. This comprehensive volume, aptly translated by Marc Lowenthal, includes
Picabia’s books Fifty-two Mirrors, Poems and Drawings of the Daughter Born without
a Mother, Purring Poetry, Unique Eunuch, Yes No, Chi-lo-sa, Thoughts without
Language, and others, but not his 1924 Dadaist novel, Caravanserérail, of which, to the
best of my knowledge, there is still no reliable English edition.
68 Finished the same year the Surrealist Manifesto appeared, and promptly dismissed
by Breton in a letter to Picabia as “un roman fort ennuyeux” [a very irritating novel]
(Caravanserérail 5), Caravanserérail was not published until 1974. Partly
autobiography, partly Dadaist extravaganza, and partly roman à clef, it presents a series
of tableaux evoking the swirling Parisian art scene in the early 1920s. In the opening
scene, a young writer called Claude Lareincay reads the manuscript of his novel,
L’Omnibus, to Picabia, who interrupts the reading to affirm that he would rather look at
a basket of pineapples than contemplate a Rembrandt. La Pomme de pins [The
pineapple], clarifies Luc-Henri Mécier in the informative preface to the novel, was the
name of the single-issue magazine published by Picabia in Saint-Raphaël in February
1922. As to Rembrandt, he stands as a synonym for “genius” to all lovers of “retinal
art,” a term coined by Duchamp to denote those artistic works intended only to please
the eye. To take on Rembrandt means to stigmatize “great art,” thence the subversive
formula proposed by Duchamp to create ready-mades: to use a Rembrandt as an ironing
board. Taking this notion to the extreme, it is easy to understand why, to Picabia, a pile
of unsold issues of La Pomme de pins is nicer to look at than a Rembrandt, even if the
Rembrandt has been turned into an ironing board (Caravanserérail 8).
Caravanssérail consists of a rapid succession of scenes in which Picabia,
sometimes accompanied by Lareincay, attends restaurants, bars, opium dens, and dinner
parties; and talks—mostly about art and the artists—with actual luminaries of the time
such as Picasso, Ernst, Breton, Éluard, Cocteau, Aragon, Vitrac, Desnos, Péret, and
Cendrars. The conversations, held almost on the go, as Picabia races from one social
gathering to another, combine wit, playfulness, and despondency. At one point, a young
officer asks Picabia to explain Dadaism. In unequivocably Dadaist terms, Picabia
responds: “Dada, c’est l’armistice, c’est la paix; c’est la concentration qui s’évapore ou
69 le contraire, concentration de nos imbeciles ambitions” (56). A few lines later, after
stating that he is not a painter nor a writer nor a Cuban nor an American nor a Dadaist,
he declares: “[J]e suis vivant” (57). As opposed to Breton’s increasing dogmatism,
Picabia proposes an unrestrained celebration of life and freedom. In this view,
Caravansérail can be read as an anti-manifesto, as a Dadaist protest against Surrealism.
3. 2. 5. George Ribemont-Dessaignes: Céleste Ugolin and Le Bar du Lendemain
The author of some of the most arresting
Dadaist plays, Ribemont-Dessaignes wrote
his first Dadaist novel, Céleste Ugolin, in
1926. In it he studies the case of a person
who spontaneously commits several violent
crimes. The narration begins with Céleste’s
seduction of his maid and his self-defense
against her vehement accusation that he is
totally insane by replying that there are
many fewer madmen in the world than is
Fig. 27. George
Musician. 1920.
Ribemont-Dessaignes.
Grand
commonly believed. In another scene,
Céleste’s wife, who is playing the piano for the patients of a sanatorium, is forced to
play on until she collapses from fatigue. Two of the patients approach her and dribble
saliva onto her pallid face, as her husband suddenly slams the keyboard lid down on her
cracking hands. In Le Sein d’or, a café full of male and female prostitutes, Céleste
meets the poet André Vesuve, a caricature of Breton, whose lover at the time, a blind
prostitute called Violette, soon becomes his own mistress. A few days later Céleste
70 turns up at the café dripping with blood, with Violette’s corpse in the car, and
incongruously names himself Iggledon, after a real English portrait painter.
After several fiascos in his quest for love and pure beauty through Woman, Céleste
marries Anna Zennana, a forty-year-old bourgeois who replied to a personal
advertisement he placed in a newspaper. She truly loves him, but her love is not
reciprocated. In retaliation for her attempt to prevent him from leaving her by locking
him up, he murders her in the most explicitly brutal scene in the novel: he bites off her
lips, spits out the pieces, twists her arms, cracks her bones, and tears off her nose and
ears. His last violent act is the gratuitous assassination of the leader of the Romanian
government. Before being decapitated, he claims that he is neither mad nor an anarchist.
The narrative style is colorful and vigorous, even comprehensible, at all times. The
dislocation of reality depicted in the novel is not attained through the alteration and
disruption of the narrative thread, which remains intact, but through the subversion of
rationality and morality implicit in Céleste’s criminal deeds. Cruelty, degeneration and
depravity are presented in a dispassionate style with strokes of burlesque and black
humor. In essence, Céleste Ugolin is a gory illustration of the futility of everything, a
metaphor of the banality of the lives and actions of human beings. Sudden bursts of
violence are the only means at the disposal of men and women for escaping the vacuity
and hopelessness of their existence. Céleste himself embodies the most extreme,
destructive principles of Dada.
One year later, in 1927, Ribemont-Dessaignes wrote Le Bar du Lendemain [The Bar of
the Following Day], advertised by Gallimard as “une des ouvres les plus significatives
de l’epoque dada.” The novel presents in a simple style the adventures of the Lafleurette
brothers (Ben, Daniel and Cesar), who have rented a room in New New, a city born of
71 the imagination of the author, in the house of M. Mosé Mosé, the director of the French
Fisheries of the Baffin Territory. Ben is an artist who, like the German Dadaist George
Grosz, paints cruel caricatures of judges, lawyers and army officers, the symbols of
reason, logic and war. He believes in the absurdity of human actuality. Although he
cannot help painting, he is disgusted by it. Daniel is the spirited man of action,
uncommitted to any cause, keen on carrying on an extraordinary action without
motivation, without result, a pure Dadaist gesture. He takes his lover’s naive comment
that he is an artist—he admits to seeing beauty in locomotives and in black songs—as
an insult. Cesar believes in humankind’s incapability of discovering Truth. The three
brothers live on the hoaxes and mystifying jokes they contrive, of which they are
usually the first victims. Following a series of vicissitudes, M. Mosé Mosé hires them
and sends them to the Eskimo villages in the Baffin Territory to protect the interests of
the company. On arriving, they open a bar that, to their own astonishment, becomes the
temple of a new religion among the Eskimos, whose leader, Famelik, preaches a fishing
manual he himself is unable to understand.
The Lafleurette brothers are looked upon by the bourgeoisie of New New as
mischievous young men leading a life of debauchery, as enemies of society and
civilization. Like the Dadaists, the brothers spend most of their time contriving ways of
vexing the establishment. They have no use for museums and abhor religion, which, in
their view, brings about nothing but pandemonium and death. When M. Mosé Mosé
offers them the job in Baffin, Daniel accepts hesitantly on his brothers’ behalf, not
allowing himself to ponder the pros and cons of his decision and, as a consequence,
allowing chance to guide their steps. Suicide is encouraged throughout the novel as a
gratuitous act of self-destruction, the most honorable way of leaving behind the
absurdities of the world.
72 3. 2. 6. Blaise Cendrars: Moravagine
Moravagine (1926) begins with a formal lecture on the evils of psychiatry and
confinement in mental institutions. The narrator, Raymond la Science, is a young intern
in a Swiss sanatorium. Impressed by the warmth and solitary grandeur of patient
number 1731, a little man with a bad leg named Moravagine who quietly indulges in
masturbation in his room, he gives up the internship and plans for his escape from the
sanatorium.
Moravagine, it must be noted, is an adopted name whose origin and meaning are
never revealed, but a French reader would find a rather unavoidable pun on “mort à
vagin” [death by vagina]. The last heir of the Hungarian throne, Raymond discovers,
and born prematurely on the day of his father’s assassination, Moravagine has spent all
his life in complete seclusion. Married at the age of six to a little princess of the same
age, he fell in love with her eyes and lives only for her annual visits on their wedding
anniversary. A series of frantic, absurd acts of violence performed by Moravagine
culminates in the disemboweling of his wife when she tells him she has come to visit
him for the last time. Once freed by Raymond, Moravagine immediately stabs a little
girl. During the next ten years, his path is strewn with women’s dead bodies. After
innumerable trips, adventures and violent acts (he travels to pre-revolutionary Russia,
Finland, Liverpool, New York, New Orleans, Arizona, the Gulf of Mexico, and then,
through shipwreck, up the Orinoco river), the saga comes to an end when Raymond
finds Moravagine, toward the end of the First World War, in the cell of a military
mental hospital in Paris. He is now a morphine addict who imagines himself on Mars
and is feverishly writing L’An 2013, an apocalyptic literary anticipation of the atomic
threat.
73 Moravagine can be viewed as Cendrars’ Dadaist reaction to the war. Caustic and
visionary in tone, the text spares nothing: politicians, women, the law, Jews, funerals,
the French family, the USA, psychiatrists… All the traditions and institutions of
Western society run the gantlet of Cendrars’ satire. But Moravagine is, above all, a
Dadaist celebration of reckless action and violence. Insanity represents the last stage of
artistic sensitivity. Any attempt to lock the insane (the artist) in mental institutions
(social norms) is condemned.
3. 2. 7. Philippe Soupault: Les dernières nuits de Paris
Fig. 28. Facsimile dust jacket of Philippe Soupault’s Last Nights of Paris. 1929.
Published by Calmann-Lévy in Paris in 1928 and translated into English by William
Carlos Williams the following year, Les dernières nuits de Paris [Last Nights of Paris]
recounts the after-dark exploits of its nameless narrator and a beguiling young prostitute
named Georgette. The night of their first encounter, while rambling the streets of Paris,
they witness a series of mystifying events. A landau driven by a very pale coachman
rushes by at full speed. Then comes a silent procession of a dozen men carrying a long
box. A man with a beige bowler alights an automobile. Everybody stands still. One
74 onlooker—a young man who seems to know Georgette—pronounces these enigmatic
words: “They won’t get him . . . I searched the three streets designated by Volpe and
found nothing” (12). A drum announces the arrival of a second procession formed by
four men and a woman holding what looks like a large sack. The woman kneels down
before the man with the bowler, but is forced to stand up again and inexplicably pushed
around. She manages to hand the sack to the man with the bowler and then drops to the
ground, after which everybody scurries away.
The meaning of these puzzling actions is partly elucidated the next day, when the
narrator reads a newspaper account of a sailor who had killed and dismembered a man.
The sailor’s lover, a prostitute named Marie, had informed the police that the body was
hidden under the Pont-Neuf, only a few meters away from where the goings-on of the
previous night had occurred. From then on, the narrator finds himself drawn deeper and
deeper into a netherworld that comes to life only at night. Presiding over it all is
Georgette, a Dadaist femme fatale involved with a secret gang of bookies, thieves,
prostitutes, murderers and eccentrics led by a schemer called Volpe. Georgette, says the
spellbound narrator, “loved only the dark which she seemed each night to wed and her
charm itself did not become real until she withdrew from the light to enter obscurity.
Looking closely at her one could not picture her as living during the day. She was the
night itself and her beauty was nocturnal” (49-50).
The novel is partly about Paris, not the actual, evident city but a Dadaist version of
it infused with hallucinatory darkness, mystery and murderous beauty. In Soupault’s
Paris, the rue de Medicis, described by the narrator as “the street of everlasting rain,” is
home to a “modest and silent club” where “masochistic bachelors” meet every night.
The rue Vaugirard “stinks of books. The odor comes from every side” (3). “I relied on
Paris, on the night and on the wind,” assures the narrator, and adds forebodingly: “I
75 expected much of the Gare d'Orsay where one may occasionally hope and wait without
aim or reason. The two twin clocks pointed to the hour of one; on the Seine, the
reflections of fires and lights were still dancing by, like a galloping flock” (91).
Written after Soupault’s expulsion from the Surrealist movement in 1926 for his
“isolated pursuit of the stupid literary adventure” (v), Les dernières nuits de Paris can
be viewed as Soupault’s relieved return to the effervescence and creative freedom of his
Dadaist origins. The narrator is unknowingly lured into a cryptic cityscape governed by
obscurity, violence and purposelessness. “The days when we follow the secret voice of
diversion,” the narrator assures, “are those chosen by chance to show us its ways” (135).
In fact, chance, which the narrator praises for its ability to give to his “comings and
goings . . . the glamour of miracles” (43), might be said to be the novel’s main concern.
Although the narrator eventually finds an explanation—of sorts—for the strange events
of the first night, he does not do so by using logic and interpreting clues, but by drifting
from one place to another while confusedly pursuing Georgette—that is, by subjecting
himself to the whims of chance.
3. 2. 8. André Breton: Poisson soluble
It is not without hesitation that I include Breton’s first poetic novel, Poisson soluble
[Soluble Fish], in this survey of Dadaist fiction. Published, like the Surrealist
Manifesto—which Breton had initially envisaged as the novel’s preface—in 1924,
Poisson soluble is a thesis literary artifact in that its main point is to illustrate the
theories of its author’s new faith. Surrealism, writes Breton, is “psychic automatism in
its pure state, by which one proposes to express—verbally, by means of the written
word, or in any other manner—the actual functioning of thought” (26). Accordingly,
76 Poisson soluble reads as an erratic flow of thoughts and images that seems to surrender
to the unconscious. Divided into thirty-two unconnected segments, the text is an
extended “monologue spoken as rapidly as possible without any intervention on the part
of the critical faculties, a monologue consequently unencumbered by the slightest
inhibition” (Breton 23).
Inevitably, in writing Poisson soluble Breton built on some of the Dadaist notions
he himself had helped establish in previous years, such as the use of irrationality and the
head-on rejection of bourgeois values. The plotless text abounds in illogical sentences—
“A building is the steeple bell of our flights” (52); “Are verdigris and rust really the
song of sirens?” (64); “Meanwhile the mountebanks . . . raise their favorite monkey
with butterfly cuffs to the sun” (82)—shocking associations of concepts reminiscent of
Duchamp’s readymades and Isidore Ducasse’s definition of beauty—“In the school’s
chalk there is a sewing machine” (73); “This turkey . . . looked at himself with mystery
in a Venetian mirror” (93); “The central furnace with blue eyes . . . glanced up at me
with the look of white coordinates on the blackboard” (97)—and unexpected images
such as “[g]reat isosceles wasps” (53), an “underwater smoking room” (63), and a large
watering trough on the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève “where at nightfall all the
disturbing animals and surprise-plants still left in Paris come to refresh themselves”
(64).
As a whole, Poisson soluble rests upon the vibrant foundation of Dada. Yet its
deliberate tone (despite its alleged spontaneity, one perceives a rather lofty, selfconscious intentionality in its pages), its programmatic nature (the work is normally
printed together with the surrealist manifestos and other constitutional Surrealist texts),
and its earnest advocating of dream, automatic writing, and the poetic dialogue as the
true engines of literature mark a turning point in Breton’s irrevocable separation from
77 Dadaism. In this sense, Poisson soluble can be viewed as the first Surrealist novel—
where “the characters speak in poetic lines of painterly images” (Detrich)—and, I
believe, as an out-and-out anti-Dada proclamation.
All the works included in this survey reflect the Dadaist principles in which their
authors believed. They were written in the first and second decades of the 20th century,
before and during the American writers’ expatriation in Paris. Like Robert M. Coates’
The Eater of Darkness, Nathaniel West’s The Dream Life of Balso Snell, Laurence
Vail’s Murder! Murder!, John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer, William Carlos
Williams’ A Novelette, E. E. Cummings’ [No Title], and some of the short stories by
Djuna Barnes, they illustrate a Dadaist conception of modern life, the one their authors
had, to a greater or lesser extent, at the time they wrote them. The way these American
writers came in contact with the Dadaist ideas, and the way their novels and short
stories mirror those ideas, will be shown in the following chapters.
78 4. Dadaist Playfulness in Robert M. Coates’ The Eater of Darkness
[T]o be a Dadaist means to let oneself be thrown by
things . . . the gigantic hocus-pocus of existence fires
the nerves of the true Dadaist—and there he is,
reclining, hunting, cycling—half Pantagruel, half St.
Francis,
laughing
and
laughing.
(From
Huelsenbeck’s “Collective Dada Manifesto,” see
Appendix C 256)
To the present date, the works of Robert Myron Coates have received little critical
attention, a rather perplexing fact considering his long, consistent contribution to
twentieth-century American fiction. From his return to New York from France in the
fall of 1927 through the 1960s, Coates produced a nonfictional book—The Outlaw
Years (1930); five novels, one of which, Wisteria Cottage (1948), experienced a brief
flirtation with popular and critical success;
two travel books—Beyond the Alps (1961)
and South of Rome (1965); a reminiscence—
The View from Here (1960); and three
collections of short stories—All the Year
Round (1943), The Hour After Westerly
(1957), and The Man Just Ahead of You
(1965).
In 1921 he traveled to Paris, obeying
some “complex of impulses” that was always
“a little obscure” to him (Coates, View 42).
Fig. 29. Erich Hartmann. Robert M. Coates.
During the next six years he became “fairly
close friends” with Hemingway (View 212), was adopted by Gertrude Stein as one of
her rare protégés, and attended parties held by Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound and the
79 Jewetts. His tall, red-haired figure grew to be a familiar, almost ubiquitous, landmark in
the American haunts of Montparnasse.
Despite his popularity, Coates was far from being a typical American literary
expatriate in that his activities were not confined to the boundaries of the Left Bank and
he did not search the association with his fellow countrymen only. From the moment the
liner Oropesa nosed into the harbor of Cherbourg, he showed a genuine fascination for
everything that was French. He knew the language well and was not one to miss an
opportunity to use it in his struggle to fit in. “I worked at it,” he wrote in 1960: “It was
somehow important to me not only to be in France and to speak French, but also as far
as possible to be French (View 209). It was mainly his open disposition that allowed
him to make the acquaintance of “great ones” (View 212) such as Léger, Picasso, Satie,
Pascin, Juan Gris, and Tristan Tzara, who were unavailable to most Americans. He also
became involved with Paris Dada and wrote what Ford Madox Ford celebrated as “not
the first but the best Dada novel” (Earle 345): The Eater of Darkness.
Coates shared with Dada the belief that literature, like art, is a private affair
conducted by the writer for his/her own satisfaction. Consequently, what an author
writes must be incomprehensible to the vast majority of the readers. An intelligible
work is the product of a journalist. Success means nothing and must be held in
contempt. According to Tzara:
The author or the artist praised by the papers observes that his work has
been understood: a miserable lining to a coat that is of public utility; rags
covering brutishness, horse-piss collaborating with the heat of an animal
incubating the baser instincts. Flabby, insipid flesh multiplying itself with
the aid of typographical microbes. (See Appendix B 248)
80 A favorable review, if it came from the wrong quarters, “from one of the Pooh-Bahs of
the period,” was exasperating. “We felt,” Coates wrote of himself and the Dadaists,
“that if we were in revolt we could never give quarter to the enemy nor accept it. We
were so far out, as the saying goes now, that success distressed us” (View 211). Such a
supercilious disposition had been Dadaistically dramatized by Aragon, who once wrote
an inflamed letter to Les Nouvelles Littéraires threatening to wreck the editorial offices
if his name was mentioned again in the paper. His name was mentioned again, and the
offices were wrecked. When he announced that he would give a beating to any critic
who dared to review his new novel—which “incidentally was a good one,” according to
Malcolm Cowley (Exile’s Return 153)—the critics, aware of his irrevocable intention to
carry out his threat, did not call his bluff and the book went totally unacknowledged and
soon fell into oblivion.
It must be noted, however, that Coates’ attitude at the time he finished writing The
Eater of Darkness was not as radical as Tzara’s nor as aggressive as Aragon’s. He
described it as “a confused, variable, and thoroughly jejune mixture of François Villon
(the medieval influence and also general rascality) . . . Sir Philip Sidney (the great
sixteenth-century English poet, representing the aristocratic impulse) and Dada, or
devil-may-careness” (Eater vi). When the book was completed, he typed it off carefully
and, with James Butler’s help, illustrated it, bound it neatly, and “thought that would be
the end of it” (Eater vii). Soon afterwards, however, following Sidney’s example—the
English poet had “never stooped to seek out a publisher for his writings” (Eater vi), but
had always distributed a few fair copies among his acquaintances—Coates made a few
copies of the book and proceeded to circulate them among his friends. One of them was
Gertrude Stein, who “read it, and liked it, and immediately set about getting it
published” (Eater vii). Although his first reaction to Stein’s initiative and the prospect
81 of seeing his novel in print was a “delicate yawn,” he later admitted that he felt “pretty
darned pleased at the way things were turning out,” and confessed that his disdain at the
idea of mixing literature with popular success had been simply “hedging” (Eater viiviii). The Eater of Darkness was published in Paris in 1926 by McAlmon’s Contact
Publishing Company. Although not an “actual flop . . . [it] had a gratifying lack of
success in the proper quarters, and a pleasantly
comforting succès d’estime elsewhere” (Eater v-vi).
As it turned out, the publication of the book
represented a rarely achieved reconciliation of the
author’s Dadaist beliefs and his haughtily suppressed
desire for recognition.
If Sidney’s “aristocratic impulse” prevailed over
Dada’s “devil-may-careness” in what concerned its
publication, it was Coates’ Dadaism that dominated
Fig. 30. First edition cover of Robert M.
Coates’ The Eater of Darkness. 1926.
all the other aspects of the novel.
There is insufficient written evidence to measure the depth of Coates’
understanding of Dada. In the introduction to the 1959 edition of The Eater of Darkness
he described it simply as “the one artistic movement I know of whose main purpose was
having fun” (iv). Yet, it remains unclear whether Coates’ conception of the movement
included only its mocking playfulness and “I-don’t-give-a-damn attitude of life” (Tzara,
see Appendix B 247), or, having a more complete comprehension of it, he chose to
ignore its grimmer underside of disgust and ontological frustration and to subscribe to
and employ its lighter side to suit his literary purposes.
The Eater of Darkness reflects Coates’ perception of the atmosphere of the period
in which it was written, a combination of “optimism, enthusiasm, and intense, if
82 occasionally disorganized, activity” (Coates, View 208); a time of experimentation and
ferment in all the arts. The early and mid-1920s in Paris were, Coates believed, “a gay
time, and it’s no accident, I think, that it was the Dada period” (View 209). Such a
perception seems oblivious to the darker aspects of the age (confusion, dissipation,
aimlessness, suicidal recklessness, lack of ideals, etc.), of which Dada was sharply
aware. Accordingly, the Dada pervading Coates’ first novel is playful, mischievous, and
absurd, not despondent and nihilistically destructive. Coates wrote it—egoistically and,
thus, Dadaistically—for his own amusement and that of his friends. Created “out of the
author’s necessity,” each one of its pages explodes, not because of its “profound
gravity” or “eternity,” but because of its “vertigo,” “newness,” “staggering absurdity,”
arresting typography, and the “enthusiasm of its principles.” Human actuality and all its
implications (love, hate, death, sex, reason, social conventions and institutions, etc.) are
presented as one nonsensical hoax that must not be taken seriously but healthily
ridiculed. By writing The Eater of Darkness, Coates became an accomplice in Dada’s
scheme to “mock existence at each moment, mock ourselves, mock others, mock
everything by the perpetual creation of grotesque attitudes, gestures and attributes”
(Tahjian, Skyscraper 23). By parodying modern urban life and literature, he ridiculed
himself and Dada—both urban and literary—in a Dadaist, gratuitous act of selfmockery.
The Eater of Darkness is dedicated in a characteristically Dadaist fashion to
eighteen ill-assorted personalities and institutions. The dedication, which was intended
as a tribute to friends and other persons or organizations who had helped in one way or
another in the book’s production, is a forerunner of the extravagant excesses which are
to follow. Among those listed are Coates’ father and mother, some of his friends from
Paris (Kathleen Cannell, Gertrude Stein and Harold Loeb), New York ex-Mayor Hylan,
83 the publisher (Robert McAlmon), The New York
Times (to which Coates contributed regularly
“color” stories from Europe), Gerald Chapman (a
bank robber and gunman in the news at the time),
Nick Carter (a detective created by John R.
Coryell, who wrote popular fiction profusely
under more than 1,000 pseudonyms), “Sapper”
(the British thriller writer H. C. McNeile), and
Fantômas (Carter’s French counterpart and
Coates’ inspiration). The 1926 French edition
Fig. 31. Cover illustration for the first volume of
Fantômas. 1911.
also featured a two-page preface by Arthur Moss
entitled “A Soft Note of Introduction” in which Coates was endowed with “familiar
Contact credentials:” no obeisance to tradition, a “lonewolf character,” a “young
Mahomet blazing his own new religion” (Ford 75).
The novel is a melodramatic, at times absurd, at times comic, always humorously
subjective account of the urban adventures, real or imaginary, of a quintessentially
Dadaist hero, Charles Drogar,
. . . one of those rare souls whose spirit seems to have been compounded, as
it were, of more fragile substance, of emotion more volatile, perception
more finely tunable than the rest, so that he rode currents of intuition that
others sank through seeking the rock-bottom of logic, and was uplifted and
exalted by the transcendental vapors of a perhaps earthy—even, to continue
the figure ad locandum, miry—concept into which others, trudging, stuck
bogged and bemisted. (Eater 41)
84 Drogar abandons his lover in Paris and sails for New York, where he rents a room
in a lodging house on West Twenty-Third Street. During the first months there, he
subsists on graham crackers and a box of powdered milk he bought in a delicatessen as
“a reward to himself for having discovered that its name, when read backward, spelled
‘milK’” (18). He spends his time lying in his bed, reading Macaulay’s History of the
English Nation, skimming through the worn pages of a copy of a Cosmopolitan
Magazine, walking along Lexington Avenue, and “cutting out bits of paper into intricate
designs” (9).
One night he meets an enigmatic old man, living on the third floor of the rooming
house, who calls himself the “Eater of Darkness.” He is naked, except for a pair of long
green silk stockings and some tattoos on his back, and shows Drogar a sophisticated
contrivance of his own invention, a machine that emits a deadly laser-bullet into the
victim’s brain at long distances. Still unaware of the contraption’s mortal effects,
Drogar presses a button and destroys the brain of Edward B. Trulge, a retired
businessman of Union Hill, New Jersey. Exhilarated by the possibilities of such an
invention, the old man and his new accomplice soon decide to commit a 19-milliondollar bank robbery.
In the meantime Drogar convinces a stranger, Rupert Pragman, to resign his
position with the Buckeye Belt and Leather Corporation by offering him a job in a nonexistent detective agency, giving him the secret password “Eggs are indeterminate but
fowls are firm” (97). Drogar murders the literary critics of the New Republic, Atlantic,
Liberator, Nation, Aesthete, Dial, and Vanity Fair, as well as several writers (Waldo
Frank, Asa Huddleberry, James Thurber and George Jean Nathan among them);
becomes entangled in a series of absurd street confrontations; and, pretending to be
Trulge’s nephew, makes love to Adeline, Trulge’s niece. We are told that the old man,
85 known in the rooming house a Mr. Constantin, is at the same time Thorndyke Smithers
of Long Island (a Gatsby-like stockbroker), Prince Eugène de Montenegro, and Mr.
Carolo Faudras of Thirty-Eighth Street (an old eccentric who wheels himself around in
a bathtub-shaped device and seems to have found a mysterious use for canned pears,
truckloads of which are delivered to his house daily). Among Mr. Constantin’s known
past
crimes
attempted
are
rape,
arson,
manslaughter,
shop-lifting,
barratry,
drunkenness, obscene language, resisting
arrest, promoting revolutions, and running
a house of prostitution without a license.
As prearranged, on the night of the
robbery
the
old
man,
whose
overt
homosexual advances have been rejected
by Drogar, stays in the lodging house in
control of the killing machine while Drogar
Fig. 32. Raoul Hausmann. The Art Critic. 1919-1920.
drives to the bank to collect the money. As he walks into the bank, the lurking guards
and policemen fall one by one dead on the floor. Enraged by Drogar’s rejection of him,
the old man aims the beam at Drogar’s brain when he is climbing back into the car, but
a stranger suddenly gets in the bullet’s way, dying and saving the young man’s life. A
car chase ensues, as Drogar speeds, as planned, towards the old man’s country house on
Long Island. The chase comes to an end when Drogar, at he top of the tower, finds
himself besieged by the police, Trulge’s real nephew, Adeline (frustrated and expecting
Drogar’s child), a tough detective hoping for a promotion, and his lover, a prostitute
who has fallen in love with Drogar watching him through a pair of binoculars from the
window across the street. As all this is happening, Rupert Pragman unintentionally
86 blows up the lodging house on West Twenty-Third Street, killing the old man. Next, we
find Drogar ambling down Fifth Avenue with a cigar in his mouth, as his old lover
rejoices over a letter from him telling her that he is returning to Paris.
True to its Dadaist inspiration, The Eater of Darkness reads as a tongue-in-cheek
manifesto against the conventions of fiction writing. The plot, contrary to the
impression that the above précis may have given, advances by fits and starts, gambols
on swiftly at times, then is interrupted by nebulous concentric parenthetical sections:
(“Dear Edward. I can’t imagine . . . (“Oh! If the police would only . . .
(“Now now you know that Mr. Larton . . . (An as yet unidentified lady in a
checked taffeta blouse burst into violent tears and Charles rivetting [sic]) . . .
said that they are nothing more than a pack of . . .”) . . . do something about .
. .” . . . how any one could have . . .”). (76)
It meanders its way around digressive chunks of prose (an apologetic address to the
vegetable world, a few specious philosophical ruminations and pseudoscientific
disquisitions, etc.) with no bearing on the story, and is worked into newspaper headlines
and articles, business door shingles, explanatory footnotes, and enumerations of, for the
most part, inconsequential actions and events.
The narrative thread is constantly disrupted by lists of objects and people. As the
laser beam seeks out its first victim the narrative is broken by a three-page record of the
things and persons through which it travels. These include a bottle of glue, a cigar, a
train station turnstile, two pretzels, a copy of Ranch Romances, the calf of a woman’s
leg, a glass eye, Laurence Vail, Peggy Guggenheim, Theodore Dreiser, H. L. Mencken,
Kenneth Burke, Arthur Moss and Malcolm Cowley. Normally unrelated constituents of
87 reality are thus gathered together by the random path of the X-ray bullet, much in the
same way as disparate odds and ends are plastered on canvas in a Dadaist collage or
words dropped onto the page in a Dadaist chance poem. By listing segments of the
physical world and real people, Coates not only illustrates in a playful manner how
reality can interfere with the successful production of an imaginative work of literature,
but also transports the reader to a plane where the real and the imaginary mingle.
According to David M. Earle, it was such mixing of “low-brow literary ephemera” as
Ranch Romances pulp magazines with “high-brow impresarios” as Cowley—so
characteristic, it must be noted, of both
modernist and postmodern fiction—that
led Ford Madox Ford to hail The Eater of
Darkness as the best Dada novel (345).
The prose style changes capriciously
throughout the novel. Sometimes it is
plainly reportorial: “He went into a
drugstore and had a malted milk and a
cream cheese sandwich. Then he went to
Weber and Heilbroner’s and bought six
silk shirts” (52); sometimes scientific:
Fig. 33. First October issue of Ranch Romances. 1927.
“Observed phenomena and observed matter are obviously equivalent terms in equation
(A) and in equation (B). We can, therefor [sic], subtract equation (A) from equation (B)
and . . .” (104); melodramatic: “Charles! My love! My life! My soul! I could not stay
without you. If it be not fated that we live and love together, then grant me this, my last
request, that we die—yes, die! here, together!” (231); impressionistic: “There are purple
hills in the background, and the sun glows like magenta moon-light, with shadow,
88 reclining, chill, violet, and still, behind the Dutch-cut trees that cluster in the blackoutlined groups among the deep-napped verdure” (84); or speculative: “Truth, like all
things else, fatigues itself in repetition. The secret of revolution. One verges, perhaps
unwisely but as always with new systems, on an attempt to define the motivation of all
human progress” (79).
In addition to the various prose styles, Coates employs techniques borrowed from
the silent movies, thus doing away with the notion of fiction as an immutable literary
genre and encroaching upon other artistic disciplines. Paragraphs describing specific
scenes are followed by captions including the import of the characters’ dialogues,
resembling a movie script:
Steps of rooming house on West Twenty-Third Street. A fuzzy little man
ascends to door, rings bell. Landlady opens. They talk.
Caption:
“Can I get a room here, Ma’am?” (196)
The cinematographic effect is further pursued by introducing written directions for the
camera, such as “Close-up flash of story” (194), “Fade-out” (192), or “Iris out on the
machine” (184).
Coates made a point of flouting the notion of narrative time as a linear succession of
events from the first line of The Eater of Darkness: “It seems it had been years . . .”
(11). The present tense may correspond to the point in time from which the narrator
refers to the time when she was remembering her lover (Drogar), or may be the actual
word spoken or thought by her upon realizing that it seemed it had been years since her
lover had left her. The verbal form “had been” brings the reader unequivocably to the
89 point in time from which the narrator speaks, and to the time when Drogar left his lover.
Three temporal levels (when she is reminiscing, when Drogar left her, when the narrator
speaks) coalesce in a single sentence. One more time frame is added in the second
chapter when “we next find him [Drogar] in a rooming house” (15), which happened
sometime between his leaving his lover and the narrative act itself.
The narrative backtracks in time (as when the author transcribes an excerpt from a
Scotland Yard docket that gives the reader details of the old man’s criminal past), or
jumps forward, revealing the outcome of situations before they actually occur. As the
reader is given information about Mr. Constantin’s past, he is also informed that the old
man is going to die soon, that his death is going to be spectacular, and that it will be
recorded later in the pages of the novel. Sometimes time appears to be totally
inconsequential to the author. When the reader first finds Drogar in the rooming house
at the beginning of the second chapter, he is informed by the narrator that Drogar has
been living there for two months and three days. On the next page, however, after a
quite detailed description of the layout and furniture of the room, the time period has
changed to two months and four days. On other occasions, the author provides the times
when actions take place with punctilious accuracy. At 3:37 one afternoon, for instance,
an innocent woman is shot dead when she is caught in the middle of a street shoot-out
between three men in the tonneau of a taxi and a man on the sidewalk (85-86).
The novel contains numerous examples of syntactic, grammatical, and
typographical excesses. It is replete with ill-formed sentences such as “the empty
parrot’s cage they had decorated it with watercolors together” (14), or “I will show you
my studio the address is we will make tea together I shall give you tea” (11). Many
paragraphs are not punctuated and/or finish with commas, colons, or semi-colons. There
is an abundance of print types. Next to a newspaper article filled with blank spaces and
90 unfinished words and sentences announcing the mysterious death of Trulge, the author
places a column describing Drogar’s reactions when he reads the news. This is intended
to fill the article’s empty spaces—almost necessitating a simultaneous reading of the
two columns—and to produce a shocking visual impact on the reader.
But The Eater of Darkness is above all a good-humored intertextual joke, a parody
of the detective and romantic novels in vogue at the time (which anticipates the antidetective fiction of postmodernism), a send-up of the stylistic idiosyncrasies of some
contemporary writers, and a pyrotechnical, Dadaist spoof of literature.
In an attempt to ridicule the pseudo-scientific aspirations of detective stories, Coates
furnishes the pages of his novel with a profusion of voluminous footnotes added to the
main narrative by a voice other than the narrator’s. Some of them refer to dubious
sources corroborating or elaborating on the characters’ contentions: Springart and
Carm’s The Physicist’s Handbook (Cincinnati, 1914), Gogorza’s La Esencia de las
Ciencias (Valladolid, 1743), Federman’s Die Fabrelationem von Raum (Leipzig, 1878).
Other footnotes address the reader and comment on particular aspects of the narrative:
“The complete ignorance on the part of Mr. Coates of the most elementary principles of
plot construction, apparent throughout the book, is here devastatingly revealed” (163);
or even continue the narration of the main text, thus forfeiting their original function:
“‘Look here,’ he said thickly rising and he waving a sh-h-h hand the old gentleman
understanding nodding to the blackdraped engine but with a sly eye” (108).
A stranger and Mr. Pragman travel to Chicago and Erie, Pennsylvania, in search of
clues about Mr. Constantin. During the trip a number of absurd events take place. The
stranger buys a little gilt locket, opens it, and discovers a picture of a fair-haired little
girl. After looking at it for a while he says pithily: “We must hurry” (164). Pulling an
old broom out of an ashcan, he studies the handle with a magnifying glass; then he
91 purchases bichloride tablets, a couple dozen bananas, and a can of tomatoes in a grocery
store. The chain of senseless actions finishes when he is shot at from a window, thus
discovering the address of the old man’s former lover. Unlike in detective stories, where
the sleuth’s methodical, although seemingly incoherent, actions eventually unravel the
mystery, in The Eater of Darkness the solution to the enigma comes nonsensically after
a series of unconnected absurdities.
The melodramatic tone of the romantic novels popular at the time is also put to
ridicule in The Eater of Darkness, particularly in the last scene, which is a lampoon of
the climactic endings of such romances. Drogar, trapped at the top of the tower, is shot
at from all sides. Invigorated by his own foolhardiness, he rips his shirt open and waits
for the final blow. As a “leaden messenger of death” shoots forth from Adeline’s gun in
Drogar’s direction,
from the mouth of the tower stairway, all blue and pink and beautiful, burst
sobbing panting in the open moonlight to fling herself wildly into his
arms—Hélène Montmorency, come to cover his lips’ last life with kisses, to
shield with the warmth of her fair body that of her lover. (230)
Among the contemporary writers Coates parodies in the pages of The Eater of
Darkness, Eliot Paul, one of the leading American critics in Paris at the time, was able
to identify Waldo Frank, E. E. Cummings, Sherwood Anderson, Jean Toomer, Max
Bodenheim, Frank Harris, Ben Hecht, James Joyce:
Ah! It had been wonderful in the old days!) remembering; the arm behind
her back his legs (hooked) into hers while (the night like a shawl about her
92 shoulders and) the writhing filmy night. I said yes. I always (and) looking
down: (186)
and Gertrude Stein:
Decomposition so intricately prolonged . . . The vegetables are not
vindictive. (53-54)
By making recognizable the styles of some of the most influential authors of the time in
his incongruous anti-novel, Coates intended to question their universally acknowledged
value and to shake the foundations of literature itself. “Uncouth, galloping, riding
astride on hiccups,” he set out to play a Dadaist joke on the “literary medicasters in
desperate need of amelioration” (Tzara, see Appendix B 245).
All the Dadaist themes appear in the action-packed pages of The Eater of Darkness.
Gratuitous acts of violence are performed by Drogar throughout the novel, although due
to the absence of gory descriptions and to the facetious tone of the narrative, they lack
the blood-curdling effect achieved by Ribemont-Dessaignes in Céleste Ugolin or by
Cendrars in Moravagine. As in these novels, it is not maliciousness that prompts the
characters to act violently, but an inner urge they themselves do not understand nor are
able to control. In the course of the narration Drogar wields the laser machine
repeatedly for murderous purposes and becomes absurdly involved in a number of
sordid street brawls. Hearing footsteps behind him as he walks down a New York street,
he expects to be attacked, killed and robbed. When he sees the man whose steps he was
hearing walk past him and halt by a door ahead of him, he becomes furious and buffets
the man for not living up to his own brutal expectations.
93 A Dadaist fascination for the machine is obvious in The Eater of Darkness. Dada’s
artistic/literary aesthetics was closely related to the machine, which was glorified, but
whose disastrous social effects were disregarded. The laser machine—in a way the main
“character” of Coates’ novel—is
also glorified but seen the way
children see a toy. The old man and
Drogar are fascinated by it, but fail
to comprehend the suffering it
inflicts on others.
A Dadaist interest in abnormal
Fig. 34. Francis Picabia. Girl Born without a Mother 1916-1917.
sexual behaviors also pervades the
pages of The Eater of Darkness. It is a prostitute who falls in love with Drogar and later
is willing to give up her life to save his. In a pang of exulting enthusiasm at the prospect
of a successful robbery, the old man—two of whose past crimes, as mentioned above,
were attempted rape and running a house of prostitution without a license—confesses
his love to Drogar and shares with him his dreams about their future together. On his
first date with Adeline, in one of the most intense and stylistically accomplished
sections of the novel, Drogar ends up having sexual intercourse with her in spite of her
initial rejection.
The world of The Eater of Darkness, like that of all the Dadaist novels, is a
subjective one. The characters act spontaneously, regardless of logic, reason, or social
conventions, and embark on shocking activities alien to the reader’s world. No logical
motives move them to action. Drogar decides to rent a room in the lodging house at
West Twenty-Third Street because he is curious to find out the location of the Seaside
Employment Agency advertised by a tin sign in one of the first floor windows. There is
94 no reason for him to think that the man walking behind him in the street has the
intention of killing him and stealing his money. There is no reason why, when a
passerby bumps into him accidentally in the street, he should slam into him with both
fists accusing him of trying to convince his wife (Drogar does not have a wife) to run
away with him and of being a communist.
The book, says Mathilde Roza, “is very much an exploration of newly available
artistic possibilities for the creation of an indigenous American art” (“American Literary
Modernism” 114), a concern that Coates, as will be seen in chapters 6 and 9, shared
with William Carlos Williams and E. E. Cummings. The city—the urban-technological
landscape and its mechanical development—plays a crucial role in that exploration. In
that sense, affirms Roza, The Eater of Darkness “responds both to the Dadaists’ formal
experiments and to their suggestions about literary content” (116), as well as to Dada’s
fascination with America as a vanguard artifact in its own right. The novel depicts the
cacophonous and kaleidoscopic life of New York City—advertising signs, traffic,
buildings, newspaper headlines, shop fronts, etc.—in a ground-breaking literary style.
The publication of The Eater of Darkness caused a considerable, although
momentary, critical stir in Paris. The novel’s succès de scandale is mirrored in two
opposing reviews printed in The Tribune, one by Eliot Paul, the other by Alex Small.
Paul praised Coates’ skill as a parodist and found his spoofs of contemporary writers
“delicious” (Ford 75). Small, notorious for his ruthless sallies against Left Bank writers,
particularly Joyce and Stein, thought the novel worthless and wondered how much
longer would intelligent people in Montparnasse “be bullied by the sort of stuff and
nonsense which Mr. Coates has the infernal cheek to put into print” (Ford 76).
Robert Sage prophesied that, in so far as the novel mirrored the environment of its
time, it would not live long (Ford 76). However, three years after its French publication,
95 Lee Furman, the head of Macaulay Company—a New York publishing house
specializing in mildly prurient stories and “ghosted autobiographies” (Coates,
Yesterday’s Burdens 267-68)—was persuaded by Matthew Josephson to include a few
avant-garde works on his list. The Eater of Darkness appeared in America, with a
critical portrait of the author written by Cowley, in 1929, causing a wave of critical
uproar. Among the praising reviews was the one printed in The Nation, which
concluded that the novel was “one of the most amusing novels of the season. According
to Ford Madox Ford, it is a Dada novel. This should prove that if Dadaism is not taken
too seriously, its very unintelligibility may become quite intelligible” (TN 129: 310 S18
’29). The literary reviewer of the New York Evening Post deemed the book “one of the
cleverest tours de force ever contrived by the pen of a wit. He has managed to inoculate
more real back-breaking humor into a single chapter than you will find in the mouths of
a dozen Groucho Marxes” (Knight 191). On the negative side, the reviewer for The New
Republic dismissed “the first Dada novel in English” as “a dime novel, concocted by a
young man who wears his tongue in his cheek” (TNR 60: 133 S18 ’29). The reviewer
for the Saturday Review of Literature did not qualify his repulsion towards the book:
“Typographically, rhetorically, and artistically The Eater of Darkness is mad” (Knight
191). No true Dadaist could have expected a better response.
The lack of structure and continuity, the emphasis on subjective perception, and the
literary playfulness—all of which he picked up from the Dadaists during his Paris
years—remained a part of Coates’ style throughout most of his career. His 1953 novel,
Yesterday’s Burdens, although less chaotic than The Eater of Darkness, still relies on
devices like repetition of words and phrases, inverted time sequences, and subjectivity
as a means to blur the distinction between reality and imagination. But the Dadaist
anarchy of The Eater of Darkness would not appear again until “The Law,” one of the
96 short stories included in The Hour After Westerly, was published in 1957. In that story
Coates makes his point by creating a situation in which the law of averages and the law
of diminishing returns are repealed.
In the afterword to Yesterday’s Burdens (1933), Malcolm Cowley lamented Coates’
neglect to follow up his rare literary triumphs. Always aware of the disastrous effects
success had had upon some of his friends—Hemingway and Thurber are good
examples—Coates made it a habit to stay out of the way of success, which may explain,
at least in part, why his meritorious fiction has been thus far “sadly neglected” by critics
and historians (Roza, “American Literary Modernism” 109). When The Outlaw Years
became an overnight critical and popular success in 1930 and was chosen by the
Literary Guild, Coates, unable to understand what exactly he had done “to deserve such
loathsome encomiums” (Yesterday’s Burdens v), immediately retired to the country,
investing the substantial royalties in the first of his country houses in Sherman,
Connecticut. Wisteria Cottage, in which the author, for the first time in his career,
abandoned his highly subjective and autobiographic approach, almost became a best
seller in 1948. Seven years elapsed before his next novel, The Farther Shore, was
published, almost failing to gain an audience. Cowley was hopeful that the time of
Coates’ works would come. This chapter is my contribution to the realization of that
hope.
97 5. Djuna Barnes’ Fiction and the Dark Side of Dada
Dada is life with neither bedroom slippers nor
parallels; it is against and for unity and definitely
against the future; we are wise enough to know that
our brains are going to become flabby cushions, that
our antidogmatism is as exclusive as a civil servant,
and that we cry liberty but are not free; a severe
necessity with neither discipline nor morals and that
we spit on humanity. (From Tzara’s “Monsieur
Antipyrine’s Manifesto,” Tzara 1)
For all their obstreperous proclamations of liberal notions about sexual freedom, the
Dadaists held highly conventional, even traditional ideas about women. Aragon’s
inveterate proclivity to monogamous infatuation and his restless quest for platonic
sublimity in his relationships with women were all too known to his friends. While
some Dadaists chose to express their contempt for passé sexual mores and the bourgeois
institution of the family by patronizing the Parisian brothels or engaging in marriages of
convenience with moneyed women (neither of which practices, to be sure, strikes one as
being particularly progressive), their heavy-handed chef d’école, André Breton,
according to one-time American Dadaist Matthew Josephson, “talked much of
exercising freedom in every direction, and exhorted us to destroy the institutions of the
family and the church,” but, he continues, “our learned young anarch admittedly had no
taste for libertinage himself” (137).
Shari Benstock has insightfully drawn attention to the fact that “Hands Off Love,”
one of Dada’s most daring manifestos, written in support of Charles Chaplin—whose
wife had sued him for divorce accusing him of asking her to perform “unnatural acts”—
which justified fellatio and advocated abortion, child desertion, and ménage à trois
living, counted no women among its signatories (380). As a point in fact, very rarely
were women included among the signatories of the Dada manifestos and public
98 declarations, and, when they were, it was usually due to their status of wife or mistress
to a member of the group. Women’s involvement with Dada, as with most avant-garde
coteries in the 1920s, was in many cases characterized by financial support (Nancy
Cunard is known to have donated generous amounts of money to Aragon, with whom
she had a brief romantic affair, and his associates), and free-of-charge publicity (the
works of Tzara and other Dadaists were printed and supported by Margaret Anderson
and Jane Heap during the Paris stage of their Little Review). America’s most mystifying
contribution to European Dada, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, who was
never a publicist of the movement nor the mistress of any of its adherents, was
presented and consistently promoted by the
Little Review as a female Dadaist, for which
Anderson and Heap were constantly rebuked.
Michel Sanouillet has provided a list of
American writers and artists who came in
contact with the French Dadaists through the
offices of Man Ray (300). It includes thirteen
men (Harold Stearns, Ezra Pound, Ernest
Hemingway—who dismissed Tzara and Dada
Fig. 35. Berenice Abbot. Djuna Barnes. c. 1926. as “shit” (Carpenter 132)—Slater Brown, E. E.
Cummings, Gorham B. Munson, Matthew Josephson, Lewis Galantière, Robert
McAlmon, Laurence Vail, Frances Milton Francis, Robert M. Coates and Arthur Moss),
and only four women, three of whom are clear exponents of the aforementioned
“publicist” category: Florence Moss, editor together with her husband of the Village
magazine Quill; the bookseller and publisher Sylvia Beach, who, with her French friend
and counterpart, Adrienne Monnier, played an invaluable part in the promotion of
99 pioneering French and American writers; Man Ray’s assistant, photographer Berenice
Abbot; and Djuna Barnes, bohemian novelist, playwright, short-story writer, journalist
and graphic artist whose life and writings defy any attempt of classification. (For an indepth exploration of women’s participation in Dada see Sawelson-Gorse.)
Unyieldingly individualistic, dashingly attractive, and armed with an acrid wit and a
haughty aloofness, Barnes came to represent the female embodiment of Modernism. If
today she stands out as one of the most innovative writers of her time, it was only
during the years prior to her death in 1982, after more than forty years of obdurate
seclusion—and perhaps because of it—that her works began to arouse serious critical
interest. Today Nightwood (1936), which has become a sort of cult novel, and the
hermetic play The Antiphon (1958) are considered her masterpieces by most critics. The
present chapter, however, moves away from such major, deeply idiosyncratic works in
order to elaborate on the presence of this exceptional woman on Sanouillet’s list. It
explores the beliefs she shared with Dada, and reveals Dada’s influence on five of her
short stories and an uncompleted novel.
By the time of her arrival in Paris in 1919 or 1920—she was never certain of the
exact date (O’Neal 62)—Barnes had already adopted a series of positions akin to the
ones vociferously postulated by the French Dadaists. Such an adoption was the result of
her intense journalistic activity in New York City, her association with a number of
proto-Dada figures (of which the Baroness and Laurence Vail were the most influential
ones), and what was described as her genuine and rather dreadful “morbidity” by the
notorious Greenwich Village bohemian, Guido Bruno, who interviewed Barnes in
Pearson’s Magazine in 1929 (Barnes, Interviews 386).
During her pre-Paris years in the Village, Barnes interviewed popular writers,
actors, artists, stage and film directors, boxers, dancers, and singers. She also wrote an
100 impressive amount of feature stories and short-fiction pieces for newspapers such as the
Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the New York Press, the New York Morning Telegraph Sunday
Magazine, and the All Story Cavalier Weekly. In her capacity as newspaper reporter she
visited Dinah, the then famous gorilla,
becoming the recipient of its “at once
impersonal and condescending, and yet
rather agreeable” embrace (Barnes, New
York 183). She allowed herself to be
forcibly fed in order to raise awareness of
the
excruciating
ordeal
the
British
suffragettes, her “English sisters” (New
York 175), were made to suffer in the
British prisons. She listened to the
impassioned diatribes of truth-searching
soapbox orators round Ben Franklin’s
Fig. 36. Djuna Barnes. This satirical drawing of a
dandyish Greenwich Village resident accompanied her
1916 article "How the Villagers Amuse Themselves."
statue, and probed “the souls of jungle folk” (New York 190). She tangoed at the
Arcadia Dance Hall, and visited the last impoverished squatter of the city of New York;
joined the mesmerized throng gathered around dentist-showman Twingeless Twitchell
and his “tantalizing tweezers” (New York 21) at a street corner in Brooklyn, and
caricatured her fellow Village bohemians; she saw the diamonds of American magnate
Jim Brady, and covered the controversy surrounding the closing of Arbuckle’s floating
hotel for the poor.
Barnes’ contemporaries’ perception of the overall significance of her journalistic
writings must have been substantially limited by their piecemeal appearance over the
years. Fortunately, today’s readers can avail themselves of the thematic cohesion
101 afforded by the two compilations of interviews and articles published by Alyce Barry in
1985 and 1990 respectively. From this vantage point Barnes’ feature stories and
interviews, written in a half-reportorial, half-subjective style, have the quality of
transcending the anecdotal details and directing the reader to the social, political, and,
ultimately, existential implications of what the celebrities say and the stories signify.
They expose the contradictions inherent in modern urban life, and highlight the
simultaneity of disparate occurrences in New York City, which functions as a mirror of
Western existence in general. Moreover, they emphasize the contrast between the
nullifying effects of reason on human behavior and the primitive, uncanny wisdom of
the animal world. The opposition of the human and the animal, civilized sophistication
and natural naïveté—“Animals and children: this is the state of creation; after that is
civilization,” wrote Barnes (New York 192)—rationality and suppressed spontaneity,
with an ill-hidden apology of the instinctual in humankind, appears as the thematic
undercurrent cutting through the bulk of Barnes’ early newspaper writings.
It was in her newspaper days in New York that Barnes met the Baroness, whom she
described in an article printed in the New York Morning Telegraph Sunday Magazine
(“How the Villagers Amuse Themselves”) in 1916 in the following manner:
[O]ne sees the Baroness leap lightly from one of those new white taxis with
seventy black and purple anklets clanking about her secular feet, a foreign
postage stamp—cancelled—perched upon her cheek; a wig of purple and
gold caught roguishly up with strands from a cable once used to moor
importations from far Cathay; red trousers—and catch the subtle, dusty
perfume blown back from her—an ancient human notebook on which has
been written all the follies of a past generation. (New York 259)
102 After the Baroness’ suicide in 1927, Barnes, whom the Baroness had nominated
executor of her heterodox literary state, wrote a tribute to her that appeared in
Transition with a short statement by herself and a selection of Dadaist prose and poems
by the Baroness. However, Barnes would not carry out her promise to have her friend’s
works put into print in book form until 1979, when she asked Hank O’Neal to revise
and make ready for publication the Baroness’ papers kept in the McKeldin Library at
the University of Maryland. O’Neal complied with her request and patiently organized
and typed up the Baroness’ poems. Although
Barnes was willing to write an introduction,
O’Neal has described her reaction to them as
“non-committal” (55). A volume of the
Baroness’ work finally appeared, without the
promised introduction, in 1987.
Barnes’ stubborn reluctance to reveal
details of her past renders the task of
defining her attitude towards the works of
the Baroness in the 1920s a matter of
Fig. 37. The Baroness
Loringhoven. n.d.
Elsa
von
Freytag-
speculation. It seems quite apparent, though,
that Barnes had looked upon her eccentric friend as a source of literary material rather
than as a significant poet. This presumption is corroborated by O’Neal’s discovery in
1979, among the material on the Baroness given to him by Barnes, of a manuscript, a
thinly fictionalized account of the Baroness’ life, which, on the face of it, was never
completed. It is O’Neal’s theory that Barnes must have busied herself with it after the
first draft of Nightwood (Bow Down) was completed. Her project to produce a booklength work based on something other than her family background was eventually
103 abandoned. Yet, the fact that the material she used was the life of her Dadaist friend is
significant and must be emphasized.
The unfinished manuscript retrieved by O’Neal was not Barnes’ first attempt at
writing fiction inspired by a Dadaist figure. Two years before the Baroness’ death,
Barnes had paid tribute to young French Dadaist Raymond Radiguet with her story
“The Little Girl Continues,” first published in Ford Madox Ford’s Transatlantic Review
in 1925 and much later reprinted in her 1962
collection of short stories, Spillway, under the
title “The Grande Malade.” Man Ray, whom
Barnes had met during her New York days in
his Village studio, introduced her to Radiguet
and other Dadaists at the famed Boeuf sur le
Toit, one of the rare Paris night-clubs
frequented by both the French and the
American writers and artists. At the time of
their meeting, Radiguet was one of the
Fig. 38. Man Ray. Raymond Radiguet. 1922.
“nouveux venus” in the Dada group, together with Jacques Rigaut, Pierre Drieu La
Rochelle, René Crevel, Robert Desnos, Roger Vitrac and Jacques Baron (Sanouillet
174-91). He was emotionally involved with Bronjia Perlmutter (Moydia in “The Grande
Malade,” and Sari in McAlmon’s account in Being Geniuses Together), a young Polish
model who, with her sister Tylia, had taken the Boeuf sur le Toit by storm.
The first works of Radiguet to be published were his poems “Poème” and “Tohu,”
printed in two issues of SIC, the Dada-spirited precursor of Littérature, in 1918. In 1919
his poem “Incognito” appeared in Littérature, to which he soon became a habitual
contributor. He is best remembered, though, for his two novels—Le Diable au corps
104 and Le Bal du comte d’Orgel—and for his strong impact on his friend Jean Cocteau,
who, although eleven years his senior, spoke of him as his “examiner” (51). In 1923
Radiguet caught a cold that developed into pneumonia. Cocteau sat at his bedside till
the end, and, according to McAlmon, let Radiguet have all the drink he wanted so he
died as he had been born—unconscious (116).
Barnes’ story, narrated by Moydia’s sister to a stranger who might well be Barnes
herself in a Parisian café, is an account of Radiguet’s (Monsieur X in the story) last
days, and of his death during his lover’s absence:
He had caught a chill the evening that Moydia left, and it had grown worse
and worse. It was reported the Baron [Cocteau] was always with him, and
when the Baron saw that Monsieur X was truly going to die, he made him a
drink. They drank together all night and into the morning. The Baron
wanted it that way: “For that,” he said, “he might die as he was born,
without knowing.” (Barnes, Selected 27)
Whether Radiguet’s prose had any tangible influence on Barnes’ own style is
difficult to say. During one of her many conversations with O’Neal shortly before her
death, Barnes “mentioned Radiguet and how she had once written a story about him”
(O’Neal 27). Apparently, she made no further comment, so that her appreciation of
Radiguet as a writer remains undetermined. It is nonetheless remarkable that the life and
early death (Radiguet died at the age of twenty) of the young Dadaist had enough
impact on her to inspire the writing of one of her more accomplished short stories.
At the time Barnes met Laurence Vail, the “golden boy of the Village,” he
“epitomized the wildness of the Village at its most sophisticated” (Field 60, 15). “High-
105 spirited” and “promiscuous,” with “little connection with ordinary behavior”
(Guggenheim 54), Vail, considered by Tzara one of the fathers of Dadaism (Rood 394),
joined the Dadaist ranks upon his arrival in Paris after World War I. Andrew Field has
asserted that Vail was an important figure in Barnes’ life for only one reason: for having
provided her with his English translation of Charles-Louis Philippe’s novel Bubu de
Montparnasse, which, in Field’s opinion, “exercised a strong vectoral force” on the
writing of Nightwood (158). However, the consistent correspondence between the two
writers over the decades, Barnes’ conception of Western civilization, and, most
importantly, the stylistic and thematic characteristics of her Dadaist short story, “The
Perfect Murder,” counter Field’s contention and point to a stronger impact of Vail on
Barnes.
From her keen observation of the paradoxical and absurd manifestations of human
actuality in the instinct-smothering metropolis, her association with proto-Dada antiartists like the Baroness and Vail, and her innately pessimistic view of the world—
“Look at the life around me . . . is not everything morbid? I mean the life of people
stripped of their masks. Where are the relieving features?” (Barnes, Interviews 386)—
Barnes came to the realization that, behind an illusion of progress, Western history has
been a complex record of disunity and disharmony. She found herself inhabiting a
barren territory not unlike T. S. Eliot’s waste land: “The whole world is nothing but a
noise, as hot as the inside of a tiger’s mouth. They call it civilization—that is a lie!”
(Barnes, Selected 18). It was her belief that all of the former certainties have vanished
along with the systems of thought and religion that supported them. Western institutions
are the crumbling ruins of a long-gone past that beguile by providing or condoning the
lies of the “[l]ittle, dirty, gravy-spilling bourgeoisie” (Barnes, Smoke 63). True
knowledge, which can only be obtained by the subjugation of logic by the forces of the
106 primitive and the irrational, is intuitive and resides in the extemporaneous, impulsive
side of the human soul. In the contemporary social order, however, there is no room for
the instinctual.
As a result, Barnes’ short stories present individuals inextricably entangled in the
mesh of a reason-ridden civilization, who nevertheless cannot summon reason or
convention to combat inner forces that threaten their sense of order and sanity. Most of
Barnes’ short fiction characters fritter away their lives, like Clochette Brin in “Prize
Ticket 177,” “whistling a popular air between bites of a ham sandwich and trips to the
stove to stir coffee with a tarnished spoon” (Smoke 76); or are bogged down, like Varra
Kolveed in “The Coward,” in a stultifying “life of unending sameness that has its end in
hysteria or melancholy” (Smoke 113). They look upon life as “filthy” and “frightful,”
pregnant with “pain, beauty, disease—death” (Barnes, Selected 9). At one point of their
lives, the one depicted in the stories, they are put in a position where they are urged to
act. Some of them let the opportunity to act and make a change slip away, and at the end
of the story continue to look on life without participating in it. Others, on whom I will
focus, abandon reason and venture into the unchartered province of unrestrained action,
responding to the world in which they live in a Dadaist fashion by performing
gratuitous, ineffective gestures of revolt.
Barnes’ only purely Dadaist short story, and the last she published—“The Perfect
Murder,” printed in the Harvard Advocate in 1942—shares with the others her distrust
of linear progression and chronological character development, as well as an
unconventional approach to plot. It reveals Barnes’ inclination to subjective rendition
and her Dadaist penchant for cryptic, aphoristic statements. The story concerns itself
with middle-aged professor Anatol Profax (his last name hints at his “pro-fact” frame of
mind), who has devoted his life to the study of the “effect of environment on the
107 tongue” (Culler, Harvard Advocate 249). After having conversed with the “trained” and
the “untrained,” the “loquacious” and the “inarticulate”—he found the inarticulate
particularly satisfactory in that “they were rather more racial than individual” (249)—he
feels he has covered his field thoroughly and prides himself on not having found
anybody who defied his tabulations. Preposterously, he conceives that, although
“certainly at some point in his life he must have curbed an emotion, crushed a desire,
trampled a weakness” (251), he is a man of violent passions.
Crossing New York’s Third Avenue, Profax ponders abstractedly over the “keywords of fanatics, men like Swedenborg and his New Church, Blake and his Bush of
Angels,” who have “saved themselves by the simple expedient of Getting Out Of
Reach” (250). As he broods over his ostensibly emotionless past, he notices a poster
depicting the “True and Only Elephant Woman.” At this point a woman bowls into him.
She introduces herself by taking the professor’s arm and exclaiming: “Dying . . . I am
shallow until you get used to me. If it were not so early I’d suggest tripes and a pint of
bitters” (252). She confides to him that she has just died from a fall from a circus
trapeze and that, devoted to coming back, she sometimes is the elephant girl, sometimes
a milliner, sometimes hungry. She defines herself as a “trauma” (252) and “the purest
abomination imaginable” (254). Her speech, which greatly resembles that of the
characters of the Dadaist novels and plays, is a series of unclear aphorisms—“Man is a
worm and won’t risk discredit, and discredit is the only beauty” (252)—non sequiturs
and hollow utterances. Her dialogues with Profax are mostly absurd:
“For instance, I’m lovable and offensive. Imagine that position!”
“Do you play dominos?”
“No. I want to be married.” (253)
108 They decide to get married, but later. Upon his suggesting a cup of coffee, they start
for his rooms, her velvet dress “sweeping through the dust, dragging cigarette butts and
stubs of theater tickets” (253). He does not know how to class her and fears his great
work is now hardly readable. As he sees her fall face down among a pile of his musical
instruments, sending sheet music fluttering into the air, he experiences something he has
never experienced before. Leaning over, “with one firm precise gesture” (254), he
unexpectedly draws his penknife across her throat and puts her piece by piece inside a
trunk. It dawns upon him that he has destroyed definition and will never be able to place
her. As he lifts the lid of the trunk a few seconds later she is not there. He runs into the
street and hails a cab. As the taxi starts down the street, he sees her pressing her face
against the window of a twin taxi running next to his. He tries to call, but a van comes
between them and a traffic light separates them.
The story’s facetious tone, the ingenious combination of dream and reality, the
subjective description of the professor’s scientific enterprises, and the unnecessarily
murderous denouement place “The Perfect Murder” in the Dadaist tradition. By
juxtaposing incongruous elements, Barnes highlights the ontological obfuscation
prevailing in modern society. Gratuitous violence constitutes Profax’s response to a
reality he is unable to comprehend and tabulate. Yet, his action proves fruitless, since by
eliminating the source of mystification he also obliterates the possibility of ever coming
to terms with it. The professor’s gesture represents his instinctual way of coping with a
state of affairs that has defeated his logical resources.
While “The Perfect Murder” concerns itself with an uncalled-for murder, “The
Doctors” (originally published as “Katrina Silverstaff” in the Little Review in 1921)
deals with suicide, an act fervently discussed by all and not less passionately performed
by some of the Dadaists. Ribemont-Dessaignes wrote that the Dadaists “were haunted
109 by the uselessness of life.” Their revolt against society, art, and the past inevitably took
the form of revolt against life itself: “there is only one wonderful remedy: suicide”
(Motherwell 105). The suicides of René Crevel, Jacques Rigaut and others during the
1920s and early 1930s had been
foreshadowed
by
Vaché—“dandy,
that
of
Jacques
anglomaniac
and
opium addict, a young man who
rejected life” (Motherwell 105)—in
1918, shortly after the birth of Dada,
which, however, was unknown to him.
Although she considered herself too
much of a coward to commit it herself,
Barnes strongly endorsed suicide as the
most beautiful way of putting an end to
Fig. 39. George Grosz. Suicide. 1916. life, which, she once said to O’Neal, is “painful, nasty and short”—and, according to
her own account, in her case only “painful and nasty” (O’Neal used this quotation as the
title of his book on Barnes). In one of her early journalistic pieces (signed Lydia
Steptoe), “What is Good Form of Dying,” Barnes jocularly assumes that there is a
correct manner in which a young lady must die, determined by her hair coloring
(prophetically, she states that the red-haired woman can resort to seclusion as an
alternative to absolute death). Facetiousness, however, gives way to Dadaist decadence
in “The Doctors.”
Doctors Katrina and Otto Silverstaff had both started for a doctorate in gynaecology
at Freiburg im Breisgau. Otto had “made it” (Barnes, Selected 54), but Katrina had “lost
her way somewhere in vivisection, behaving as though she were aware of an
110 impudence” (54). They came to America in the early 1920s and, at the time of the story,
they have a girl and a boy, have been practicing medicine for ten years, and live
comfortably on Second Avenue, much respected and appreciated by their neighbors.
Otto, who considers himself a “liberal in the earlier saner sense of the word” (55), does
not see anything strange in his wife’s abstraction, withdrawal, and silence. He thinks of
her as being “sea water” and “impersonal fortitude” (55).
One day Katrina receives, to his surprise, a peddler of books selling bibles. She
confides to him her intention to “have religion become out of reach of the few . . . out of
reach for the few; something impossible again; to find again” (57). In order to do this,
she will become his mistress. Puzzled and feeling “fear quite foreign to him” (57), the
peddler takes his leave with an invitation to see her the next day. Several days elapse,
during which his calls are rebuffed, before she finally decides to see him. Coolly, she
starts to undress and tells him, in a tone reminiscent of “What is Good Form of Dying:”
“some people drink poison, some take the knife, others drown. I take you” (58). A few
days later, “at dusk, his heart the heart of a dog” (59), he comes into the street of the
doctors and, on looking at the house, beholds a length of black crepe hung at the door
that advises him of her suicide. Thereafter he becomes a boisterous drunkard, roaming
the doctors’ quarter. Seeing Otto Silverstaff once with his children, he bursts into
profuse laughter and tears.
Nothing in the development of the story leads logically to such an end. Despite her
abstractedness, Katrina is not a despondent or disturbed woman. She expresses her love
for her husband in unequivocal terms—“I love my husband” (58)—and has two healthy
children. Her decision to make religion unbelievable and impracticable to others (the
motives of which remain unknown to the reader and possibly to herself) is carried out
by performing two instinctual, unthought actions, adultery and suicide, which defy both
111 her and her family’s perception of an orderly world. Her gestures leave those close to
her (her children and husband), the book peddler, and the reader wondering why. There
is no answer to such a question, insomuch as Katrina’s suicide is a Dadaist geste gratuit
outside the parameters of logicality.
In “The Perfect Murder” and “The Doctors” Barnes presented gratuitous murder
and suicide as professor Profax’s and Doctor Katrina Silverstaff’s ways of individual,
instinctual revolt against existential confusion and a congruent world respectively. “The
Terrorists”—first published in the New York Morning Telegraph Sunday Magazine in
1917—examines the viability of revolutionary destruction as the only means of
attaining freedom. Revolution and destruction were salient aspects of the Dadaist
philosophy: “Revolution,” declares Bernard Karpel in his critical bibliography of
Dadaism titled “Did Dada Die?” “is the consequence of a series of premises, inexorably
translated from concept to reality. Pursued fervently, it dominates Dada in the heart of
Europe” (Motherwell 321).
Pilaat, the protagonist of “The Terrorists,” is a melancholy, middle-aged man who,
coming from a “cleanly” family, has been “comforted and maimed in his conceptions
and his fellow love by two many clean shirts in youth” (Barnes, Smoke 160). He is
painfully aware of how “pitifully weak” the people are, and speaks of them as “the
Unfortunate” and “the Miserable” (160). Sensing the world is not going in the direction
he has wished, he longs to correct things, like Dada, “as one cleans up a floor, not as
one binds up a wound” (160). Like the Dadaists, who rejected art as commonly
understood in that it must conform to the rules imposed by bourgeois philistinism, Pilaat
has abandoned literature. He no longer writes poetry or plays, and has failed to “keep up
his connection with a paper which he started, and which spoke harshly of all things”
(163). Pilaat’s young wife, whose name is not revealed in the story, believes in “the
112 vanity of all things and the pessimism of all things” (160-61). She spends every
afternoon in the cafés. At six she clears out for the bourgeois customers, “the pigs, the
smug and respectable who [bring] their wives and children to dine” (161). She returns at
nine to read Pilaat’s old poetry, of which
she has grown tired long ago, and to talk
about “the revolutionists” (161).
The story reaches its climax one night
in their bohemian garret. After Pilaat has
threatened to kill the vocalist who is
teaching someone to sing in the room
below them (a scene which brings to
mind the violent tantrums for which Vail
was notorious, and with which Barnes
was familiar), he discusses the viability of
Fig. 40. Hanna Höch. Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife
through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in
Germany. 1919.
“destruction on a large scale” (168) with his friends and some derelicts he has picked up
at his doorstep, as his wife sits quietly in a corner. He propounds his program of
anarchic holocaust in vehement Dadaist terms:
I would tear down the scenery . . . I would rip the whole existing plan [of
civilization] to pieces. How she would shiver, how she would implore. But I
should have no mercy. No, not even when she got upon her knees and wept
at my feet and covered them with her insufferable tears. I would invite her
to suicide. I would mock at the stains upon her cheeks. I would glory at the
dirt on the imploring knees. I would laugh aloud, and shake her by those
horrible, ample shoulders of hers, and would cry out to her, “Now die, die;
113 we do not care! . . . Destroy yourself, for we need a harp on which to sing
the song of freedom. (167)
In a huddle, the revolutionists start talking about besieging the town. Names are
mentioned as persons to be destroyed (Dada’s idea to subject Maurice Barrès to a mock
trial must have originated in a meeting such as this, with Breton calling out the culprit’s
name): “Fists doubled up, eyes sparkled, and the tongue knew no forbidden thing”
(168). As the night gets on they decide: “In the dawn we shall do it” (169). Soon, “deep
breathing” takes the place of “cries, oaths, imprecations” as “the terrorists fall asleep”
(169). When Pilaat’s wife wakes up the next day at noon, it is too late to start a
revolution. In their sleep all the men have moved away the objects they had collected as
weapons. Looking out of the window, “[s]he thought of her favorite café, and she
smiled as she contemplated one or two new phrases she would use in relation to life”
(169-70). “The Terrorists” can be construed as a satire of café life. The plan to destroy
civilization, conceived within the province of such life, backfires, resembling Profax’s
crime and Katrina’s suicide in their Dadaist ineffectuality.
The tensions between the forces of nature and the dehumanizing powers of
civilization, one of Dada’s preoccupations, is brought up in one of Barnes’ most popular
short stories, “A Night Among the Horses,” first published in the Little Review in 1918.
Mankind is being drawn away from its original, primitively spontaneous state and
contaminated with complications of an intricate civilization, which in Barnes’ story is
embodied by Freda Buckler.
Freda is perverse and sophisticated. She is described as a complex piece of
machinery (manufactured by the civilization to which she belongs): a “small fiery
woman with a battery for a heart and the body of a toy, who ran everything, who purred,
114 saturated with impudence, with a mechanical buzz that ticked away her humanity”
(Barnes, Selected 31). Her affair with her ostler has “become a game without any
pleasure” (31). She torments him with her objects of culture and is arrogantly bent on
stepping him up from being a “thing” (31) while he keeps telling her and himself that he
likes “being common” (32). If he married her, he reflects, “[h]e wouldn’t fit anywhere
after Freda, he’d be neither what he was nor what he had been; he’d be a thing, half
standing, half crouching, like those figures under the roofs of historic buildings, the halt
position of the damned” (32).
One night she insists upon his presence at a fancy-dress party to be held in the
house: “Come just as you are,” she says tauntingly, “and be our whipper-in” (33).
Rebelliously, he appears dressed “like an ordinary gentleman; he was the only person
present who was not ‘in dress,’ that is, in the accepted sense” (33). As he dances with
her, he sees her as a praying mantis. Stepping back, he draws a circle in the rosin around
her with the knob end of his cane and darts out of the house. As he attempts to approach
the horses in order to ride away, they do not seem to recognize him. He has spurned
Freda—civilization. However, he is not what he once was, or at least that is what the
horses sense. In spite of his struggle to return to the primitive, he finds himself, after all,
in the “halt position of the damned,” in a limbo between nature and civilization, claimed
by neither. As he stumbles toward the horses he trips and falls to the ground: “The
upraised hooves of the first horse missed him, the second did not” (35). “A Night
Among the Horses” comes to corroborate the notions exposed in “The Terrorists.” In
order for humanity to be able to regain its original, primitive rapport with nature,
civilization must be done away with.
In spite of her Dadaist beliefs and conception of human actuality, mirrored in “The
Perfect Murder,” “The Doctors,” “The Terrorists,” and “A Night Among the Horses,”
115 Barnes lacked the Dadaist ability to be playfully paradoxical, to condemn the
inconsistencies of life in our world and, in the same breath, enjoy them with the joyous
naivety of a child. Life weighed too heavily on Barnes. Upon her final return to the
United States in the late 1930s, she was convinced, as she confessed to O’Neal many
years later, that, since she was not radiantly beautiful any longer and had written what
she considered her best work—Nightwood—she had accomplished her mission in life
and had no incentive to carry on living. Not courageous enough for suicide (by her own
admission), she resorted to the alternative of the red-haired woman: seclusion. She was
to remain hermetically confined in her small apartment at Patchin Place in Greenwich
Village for over forty years, until evasive and long-awaited Death came to knock on her
door in 1982. Despite her strong desire to die, she did not do so until the age of ninety.
116 6. “Language is in its January”: Dada and William Carlos Williams’ Early Prose
I’m writing this manifesto to show that you can
perform contrary actions at the same time, in one
single, fresh breath; I am against action; as for
continual contradiction, and affirmation too, I am
neither for nor against them, and I won’t explain
myself because I hate common sense. (From Tzara’s
“Dada Manifesto 1918,” see Appendix B 242)
William Carlos Williams was well acquainted with New York Dada. Marcel Duchamp
arrived in Manhattan in 1915, amidst publicity generated by his participation in the
Armory Show two years earlier. In his Autobiography, Williams recounts how, on
seeing
Duchamp’s
Nude
Descending
a
Staircase for the first time, he laughed out
loud, “happily, with relief.” He also enjoyed
Duchamp’s urinal, which he describes as
“magnificent” while lamenting the “silly”
committee’s decision to throw it out, “asses
that they were” (134). Williams and Duchamp
met regularly at Walter Arensberg’s studio
where, together with Francis Picabia, Man
Ray, Mina Loy, Arthur Cravan and others,
they would engage in ardent discussions on
art and poetry. Thus Williams, who otherwise
Fig. 41. Marcel Duchamp. Nude Descending a
Staircase, nº 2. 1912.
led a rather conventional life as a doctor and
family man in nearby Rutherford, New Jersey, was caught up in the “loose network of
friends and acquaintances that comprised New York Dada during the decade of the First
World War” (Tashjian, Scene 56).
117 In 1921 Duchamp, Picabia and Man Ray left New York for Paris and immediately
joined the ranks of Broom, Secession and Paris Dada. Williams subscribed and
contributed to both magazines and was eager to meet the Dadaists in Paris three years
later, on his 1924 sabbatical. Robert McAlmon, his friend and editor, had the
connections but “didn’t consider the Dadaists particularly significant” (Tashjian, Scene
57), so he was lukewarm to Williams’ request. As a consequence of his friend’s
misjudgment, Williams did not have extensive personal contact with the Paris Dadaists
until the outbreak of European hostilities in
the late 1930s, when a number of the
group’s members were forced to come to
New York.
Williams’ attitude towards Dadaism
was complex and ambivalent. The essays he
published in Contact during the early 1920s
were dotted with depreciating references to
it. He regarded it as a sign of a dying
culture, an irrelevant European phenomenon
Fig. 42. Passport photograph of William Carlos
Williams. 1921.
that should be ignored by American artists. Three decades later, while discussing with
Edith Heal his 1929 translation of Philippe Soupault’s novel Last Nights of Paris, he
candidly portrayed the French author as “a very amusing person, really amusing, all
wound up in Dadaism,” and immediately went on to clarify: “I didn’t understand what
Dadaism was but I liked Soupault” (I Wanted 47). In another conversation with Heal,
however, Williams seemed to have no trouble admitting that the pieces included in his A
Novelette and Other Prose show the influence of Dada: “I didn’t originate Dadaism,” he
conceded, “but I had it in my soul to write it. Spring and All [also] shows that. Paris had
118 influenced me; there is a French feeling in this work” (48). So much so, it may be
added, that at the end of Spring and All, as he discusses the necessity to “free the world
of fact from the impositions of ‘art,’” he directs his readers to “see Heartley’s last
chapter” (Imaginations 150)1, which refers to an essay by Marsden Heartley entitled
“The Importance of Being Dada” (see Appendix G). In The Great American Novel,
Williams not only employs a full array of Dadaist techniques but goes as far as to
mention the movement by name. After quite Dadaistically stating that Expressionism in
America “has a water attachment to be released with a button,” he concludes: “That is
art. Everyone agrees that that is art. Just as one uses a handkerchief. It is the apotheosis
of relief. Dadaism in one of its prettiest modes: rien, rien, rien. —But wait a bit. Maybe
Dadaism is not so weak as one might imagine” (173). On the one hand, Williams
belittled Dada. On the other, he openly acknowledged his debt to the movement and
gave the impression that he “couldn’t take his eyes off it” (Tashjian, Scene 58).
Williams was naturally inclined towards Dadaism because it cut across the arts and
made writing easier for someone who saw literature within the context of the visual arts.
As Webster Schott insightfully points out in his introduction to A Novelette, the
presence of painters as paragons of Williams’ aesthetic aims, his free-flowing phrasing
and his constant insistence on the power of instinct and the inability of science to
achieve any sort of wisdom are an indication that he was taking Dadaism “more
seriously than history would” (270-71). Also, and much to Williams’ approval, New
York Dada attacked American smugness and cultural apathy with radical wit and gusto.
Like Williams, who in Spring and All overtly decries the “traditionalists of plagiarism”
(94), Dadaism advocated the destruction of the past and, through free experimentation
and the use, among other techniques, of automatic writing, grammatical wordplay,
1 Page numbers of citations from Williams’ Kora in Hell, Spring and All, The Great American Novel and A Novelette, as well as
from Williams’ prologues and Webster Schott’s introductions to those works, correspond to the 1971 compilation Imaginations.
119 improvisation and parody, aimed at creating shocking, purely imaginative works
hitherto unrecognized as art by society and culture. Like Dadaism, Williams, believed in
the inefficacy of language as a means of human communication and repeatedly
proclaimed the supremacy of novelty: “Nothing is good save the new,” he announces in
Kora in Hell (23). Like Dadaism, also, his work was internally contradictory, “as
rational and irrational as life itself,” says Schott of A Novelette (271). Viewed in this
light, Williams’ dismissing comments on Dadaism can only be construed as “downright
confusing . . . subterfuges” (Tashjian, Skyscraper 91) intended to conceal his true
appreciation of the movement and, more importantly, its indisputable impact on his
work.
Since very early in his career, Williams had made it his business to create a wholly
American poetic language and to liberate American writing from the threat of what
several decades later Harold Bloom would denominate the “anxiety of influence.” In the
past, Williams argues in A Novelette, the excellence of literature had been “conceived
upon a borrowed basis” (293). Europe’s enemy was its past and, in turn, America’s
enemy was Europe, “a thing unrelated to us in any way,” he states in The Great
American Novel, where everything that was done was “a repetition of the past with a
difference” (209-10). Americans did not need to learn from anyone but themselves.
Critics should begin to look at American work from an American perspective. “What I
conceive,” he proposes in chapter VII of A Novelette, appropriately entitled “Fierce
Singleness,” “is writing as an actual creation. It is the birth of another cycle” (293).
Firm as his intentions may be, however, Williams cannot avoid falling into
contradictions. He has no use for the past, but his writing is replete with references to it.
According to his own account, the method he employed to structure Kora in Hell was
taken from an 18th-century poetry book, Varie Poesie dell’ Abate Pietro Metastasio,
120 which Ezra Pound had left in Williams’ house in Rutherford after one of his visits (I
Wanted 27). The title of the book is also indebted to the past, since Kore is another
name for Persephone. In Spring and All Williams emphatically celebrates the
imagination as the only force capable of refining, clarifying and intensifying the
present. “The only realism in art is of the imagination,” he affirms. “It is only thus that
the work escapes plagiarism after nature and becomes a creation” (111). Tradition is a
burden but, paradoxically, Spring and All is full of references to masters of the past
such as Shakespeare, Samuel Butler, Homer, Goya, Holbein or Velázquez. This is also
true of The Great American Novel, which contains allusions to Wagner, Rimbaud,
Chekhov, Chaucer, Monet, and Richard Coeur de Lion among many others. For all his
desire to do away with the past, Williams, who considered the appearance of T. S.
Eliot’s The Wasteland the “great catastrophe” of American letters (Autobiography 146),
remained closely attached to his artistic predecessors, composing a number of early
fiction and poetry texts that may be legitimately construed as derivative and,
consequently, as fair illustrations of Julia Kristeva’s “mosaic of quotations” (37).
This apparent inconsistency—his wish to abolish tradition and, in the same breath,
his conspicuous dependence on it—is only one of a number of contradictions to be
found in Williams’ early work. In his prologue to Kora in Hell, he flippantly declares
that there is nothing sacred about literature and that it is “damned from one end to the
other” (13). The brassy spirit of this remark is revalidated in the 1950s, when he
confides to Edith Heal that he would rather have been a painter than to “bother with
these god-damn words” (I Wanted 29). This iconoclastic and rather despondent attitude
towards literature is in direct conflict with Williams’ enthusiastic life-long engagement
not only with writing but with writing about writing. “This is the theme of all I do,” he
candidly acknowledges in A Novelette: “It is the writing” (291).
121 In Williams’ view—as in Dada’s—conventional language had proven impotent to
generate beauty, communication and knowledge. Logic made no sense anymore. There
was work to be done, he felt, in the creation of “new forms, new names for experience”
(203). In order to achieve this, he pushed language beyond its semantic and formal
limits, well aware that in doing so he was bound to lose his already slim American
readership—which, it may be argued, is still another contradiction in that his overall
aim was, in his own words, to “sound like an American” (295). Radical as his intentions
were, however, he did not dare take them to their final consequences. In one of his
interviews with Heal, Williams provides illuminating details on the writing process of
Kora in Hell. For a year he would come home after visiting his patients and, no matter
how late it was, even if he had nothing in mind, he would put something down before
going to bed. As may be expected, he recognizes, “some of the entries were pure
nonsense and were rejected when the time of publication came” (I Wanted 27). Despite
his plan to revolutionize language, he couldn’t bring himself to include “pure nonsense”
in his work and decided instead to add interpretations of his improvisations.
Williams’ contradictions are consistent with the Dada Spirit—which was very much
akin to his natural artistic restiveness—and with his long-sustained ambition to create
an autochthonous literary expression in America—which ultimately stopped him from
embracing Dadaism fully and openly. According to Tzara, Dada is “the interweaving of
contraries and of all contradictions” (see Appendix B 251). To Dada, order equals
disorder, ego is the same as non-ego, and there is no difference between right and
wrong. True to Dada’s creed, Tzara flamboyantly affirms that he is “by principle against
manifestos,” even though he wrote seven of them, and that he is “also against
principles” (see Appendix B 241). Many artists, including Williams, gladly adhered to
this anarchic doctrine because in doing away with the stifling rules of the past—and
122 with all rules, for that matter—it established a universal tabula rasa that allowed them
absolute freedom to pursue their creative and vital interests as they saw fit.
It would be an overstatement to say that Williams saw eye to eye with Dadaism. As
mentioned above, during the 1920s and early 1930s, when he composed his
experimental fiction and poetry pieces, he led a busy, ordinary life as a doctor and
family man in Rutherford, with
little or no time for writing and
artistic socialization. He had
no
taste—nor
leisure—for
Dada’s histrionics and riotous
antics. Also, as April Boone
has rightly pointed out, he
never came to agree with the
sector of Dadaism that would
Fig. 43. William Carlos Williams with his sons outside of his home
pediatric care office in Rutherford. 1918.
disparage art as a whole and he “resisted the term ‘anti-art’ sometimes applied to his
own writing” (4). In fact, his brief introduction to Spring and All is, in essence, an
attempt to defend his work against those who consider it “antipoetry.”
It doesn’t cease to perplex critics how vehemently—and how Dadaistically—
Williams urged destruction in the early stages of his career. “The imagination,
intoxicated by prohibitions, rises to drunken heights to destroy the world,” he
triumphantly announces in Spring and All. “Let it rage, let it kill. The imagination is
supreme . . . To it now we come to dedicate our secret project: the annihilation of every
human creature on the face of the earth” (90-91). Williams’ brand of destruction,
however, differs from Dada’s in that it is not to be practiced for its own sake. Far from
being gratuitous, the wreckage he advocates can only be justified inasmuch as it clears
123 the way for a new type of creation. As Joshua Schuster has suggested, Williams adopted
“the tactic of calling for the destruction of the past as a way to generate the future”
(124). Williams himself confirms this view by implicitly rejecting Dada’s predictions of
the end of art in Book V of Paterson:
Paterson, from the air
above the low range of its hills
across the river
on a rock-ridge
has returned to the old scenes
to witness
What has happened
since Soupault gave him the novel
the Dadaist novel
to translate—
The Last Nights of Paris.
“What has happened to Paris
since that time?
and to myself”?
A WORLD OF ART
THAT THROUGH THE YEARS HAS
SURVIVED! (207)
All in all, however, Dadaism offered Williams the conceptual framework and the
tools he needed to fight the “traditionalists of plagiarism,” eradicate the cultural past
124 and create a brand new, tradition-free American literary language. If he didn’t take full
advantage of them it was, precisely, because he feared losing his American identity to a
largely foreign cause. He didn’t see the logic of building America’s new alphabet—
“Language is in its January,” he claims in A Novelette (280)—upon an extraneous
foundation. Much as he relished—and shared—Dada’s programmatic inconsistencies,
he refused to fall into that one contradiction. To
allow Americanness to prevail called for a
“subversion worthy of Dada,” says Tashjian
(Scene 58). Dada “does not lie. It is the single
truth,” admits Williams in A Novelette. “But it is
French. It is their invention” (281).
Despite Williams’ caution towards Dadaism,
it is impossible not to perceive the movement’s
imprint in his early prose and hybrid works. Kora
in Hell: Improvisations has mystified its readers
Fig. 44. First edition cover of Kora in Hell,
with a sketch by Williams. 1920.
since its publication by Boston-based Four Seas
Company in 1920. Antonio Ruiz has gone as far as to claim that the book is “the fruit of
Dadaist improvisation techniques in which hazard and chance are motors to the creative
process” (103). Such a claim, which assigns a Dadaist “methodology” and intent to the
book as a whole, may seem slightly farfetched when one stops to consider Williams’
own reminiscences on the work’s inception. The improvisations, he explained to Heal,
were “a reflection of the day’s happenings more or less.” Since many of them were
“unintelligible to a stranger,” he knew that he would also have to write an interpretation.
It was while he was “groping around” to find a way to fit the interpretations into the
book that he came upon Metastasio’s volume of poetry in his Rutherford home (I
125 Wanted 27). This recollection evidences that the book’s structure—unlike its content, as
will be analyzed below—is not the result of a spontaneous creative impulse. On the
contrary, Williams worked hard to achieve a rational, well-balanced format for his
writing, organizing the improvisations in groups, “somewhat after the A. B. A.
formula,” he explains in the prologue, “that one may support the other, clarifying or
enforcing perhaps the other’s intention” (28).
The original edition of Kora in Hell includes the abovementioned prologue by
Williams, entitled “The Return of the Sun,” and twenty-seven chapters headed by
Roman numerals. Each chapter, in turn, contains improvised prose texts numbered in
Arabic, followed after a dividing line by their corresponding interpretations in italic
type. The different sections, jotted down, as explained above, during the scarce
moments of calm that Williams’ stressing medical practice and family duties allowed
him, do not follow any discernible order nor have a central unifying theme. The
improvisations are quickly scribbled, free-flowing, unrevised pieces in which Williams
employs many of the tools provided by Dadaism—absurdity, nihilism, black humor,
linguistic playfulness, idealism—and whose ultimate goal is to glorify the primacy of
the imagination as a creative force and to undermine the conventions imposed by
literary tradition. As to the interpretations, Williams admits in his prologue to the 1957
City Lights edition of the book that they are often “more dense” than the pieces they are
meant to elucidate (29).
In “The Return of the Sun,” amid references to Duchamp, Man Ray, Charles
Damuth, Alfred Kreymborg, and others, Williams responds to negative critiques by
fellow poets Ezra Pound—who considered the work incoherent—Hilda Doolittle—who
thought it flippant—and Wallace Stevens—who lamented the book’s lack of a fixed
point of view. “I’ll write whatever I damn please, whenever I damn please and as I
126 damn please,” retorts Williams, “and it’ll be good if the authentic spirit of change is on
it” (13). He goes on to express his aversion to what he terms America’s “prize poems,”
which are “especially to be damned” not because they are badly written or aesthetically
displeasing, but because they are mere rehash, repetition, just as Eliot’s best poetry is
rehash and repetition “in another way” of Verlaine, Baudelaire, or Maeterlinck (24).
Then, in what reads like a full-blown Dadaist manifesto, he declares:
I praise those who have the wit and courage, and the conventionality, to go
direct toward their vision of perfection in an objective world where the signposts are clearly marked, viz., to London. But confine them in hell for their
paretic assumption that there is no alternative but their own groove. (27)
The alternative Williams proposes entails leveling the past and generating a brand-new
American language that affirms life through annihilation and freedom. In Kora in Hell,
a seminal vitality emerges from the debris of tradition and inherited values. The texts
follow one another spontaneously, fluctuating between opacity and meaning,
destruction and creation, interiority and exteriority, calm and violence, in a dynamism
akin to Dada’s radical contradictions.
The opening improvisation sets the tone of the book:
Fools have big wombs. For the rest?—here is pennyroyal if one knows to
use it. But time is only another liar, so go along the wall a little further: if
blackberries prove bitter there’ll be mushrooms, fairy-ring mushrooms, in
the grass, sweetest of all fungi. (33)
127 Forty-four pages later, near the end of the book, we find this characteristically cryptic
piece:
This song is to Phyllis! By this deep snow I know it’s springtime, not ring
time! Good God no! The screaming brat’s a sheep bleating, the rattling cribside sheep shaking a bush. We are young! We are happy! says Colin.
What’s an icy room and the sun not up? This song is to Phyllis.
Reproduction lets death in, says Joyce. Rot, say I. To Phyllis this song is!
(74)
Next comes Williams’ note of explanation, just as opaque and deeply imbued by Dada’s
contradictory spirit as the improvisation itself:
That which is known has value only by virtue of the dark. This cannot be
otherwise. A thing known passes out of the mind into the muscles, the will is
quit of it, save only when set into vibration by the forces of darkness
opposed to it. (74)
Williams’ admission in his 1957 City Lights prologue that, due to its obscurity and
experimental nature, Kora in Hell “would mean nothing to a casual reader” (29) has led
some critics to regard the book as the untoward public surfacing of a strictly personal
language marked by darkness of meaning and extreme egocentrism. In response to this
adverse line of interpretation—which, it must be noted, is as accurate a definition of
Dada writing as any—Mitchum Huehls argues that the book is a “negotiation of the
personal and objective” (62). William Q. Malcuit takes Huehls’ point further by
128 suggesting that Kora in Hell is really a continuation of the series of “my townspeople”
poems—“Invitation,” “Tract,” “Gulls” and others—which Williams wrote around 19141915. In this sense, Malcuit contends, Williams is still “attempting to discover (or
create) the poet’s place in modernity, and to fathom the relation between poet and
audience” (64). What has changed, according to Malcuit, is the “pedagogy” employed
by Williams. In Kora, as opposed to earlier townspeople pieces such as “Tract,” where
the poet assumes the role of teacher leading the audience to make use of the legacy of
the past in an aesthetically satisfying way, he “turns unreservedly to the manifesto to
accomplish his goal of both critiquing and addressing the public” (64). The subtle
animosity to be found in “Gulls,” for example, becomes much more acute in Kora:
Some fools once were listening to a poet reading his poem . . . But they
getting the whole matter sadly muddled in their minds made such a
confused business of listening that not only were they not pleased at the
poet’s exertions but no sooner had he done than they burst out against him
with violent imprecations. (56)
The role of the poet in modernity is no longer to address his “townspeople” directly but
to cleanse and recreate language. His new, self-appointed mission is not to educate his
audience but to destroy the stale, tradition-laden literature of the past and prepare the
way for a fresh form of expression. In order to do that, and despite all his reservations
towards the movement, Williams availed himself of the radical tactics of Dadaism,
which he had admired since he first met Duchamp in 1915. Beginning with Kora in
Hell, Williams set off on a journey of intense formal and conceptual experimentation
that during the next twelve years would engender three of his more audacious and,
129 unaccountably, less studied works: Spring and All, The Great American Novel and A
Novelette.
A “fooling-around book that became a crucial book” (85), as Webster Schott
describes it in his prologue to its 1970 edition, Spring and All was printed in Dijon and
first published in Paris in 1923 by Robert McAlmon’s Contact Publishing Co., which at
the time was also bringing out early books by Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Gertrude
Stein and others. It is a “beautiful, misshapen box” (85) that contains, among other
things, Williams’ most ardent and thoroughly Dadaistic statements against
contemporary civilization—“This is not civilization but stupidity” (140)—and in
defense of the imagination—“The imagination is an actual force comparable to
electricity or steam” (120)—numerous manifesto-like remarks on modern poetry—
“Whitman’s proposals are of the same piece with the modern trend toward imaginative
understanding of life” (112)—and some of his more celebrated short poems, including
“The Red Wheelbarrow” and “By the Road to the Contagious Hospital.” Commenting
on it in I Wanted to Write a Poem, Williams describes the book as follows:
Nobody ever saw it—it had no circulation at all—but I had a lot of fun with
it. It consists of poems interspersed with prose, the same idea as
Improvisations. It was written when all the world was going crazy about
typographical form and is really a travesty on the idea. Chapter headings are
printed upside down on purpose, the chapters are numbered all out of order,
sometimes with a Roman numeral, sometimes with an Arabic, anything that
came in handy. The prose is a mixture of philosophy and nonsense. It made
sense to me, at least to my disturbed mind—because I was disturbed at that
time—but I doubt if it made any sense to anyone else. (37)
130 As in Kora in Hell, Williams begins the book by responding—on this occasion
humorously—to those who believe there is “nothing appealing” in his work and
consider it “positively repellent” because it lacks rhyme and rhythm, is “heartless” and
derides humanity. Although he loves his fellow creatures “endways, sideways,
frontways and all the other ways,” he declares mockingly, the truth is they do not exist.
“To whom then am I addressed?” he asks himself: “To the imagination . . . This is its
book” (88-89).
The prose sections of Spring and All are as random as the improvisations of Kora.
Oracular in tone—“Yes, hope has awakened once more in men’s hearts. It is the NEW!
Let us go forward!” (97)—they jump erratically from one topic to the next. Ideas are not
followed through. Syntax is often disjointed and many sentences end in midair: “Crude
symbolism is to associate emotions with natural phenomena such as anger with
lightning, flowers with love it goes further and associates certain textures with” (100).
Argumentation is as emphatic as contradictory. Williams holds, for instance, that prose
and poetry “are not by any means the same thing.” The purpose of prose, he claims, is
“to clarify and enlighten the understanding,” a notion which appears to be in direct
opposition to his own prose work, whereas poetry “has to do with the crystallization of
the imagination” (140). Four pages later, however, he gainsays himself by arguing that
“since there is according to [his] proposal no discoverable difference between prose and
verse, that in all probability none exists and that both are phases of the same thing”
(144).
Although it is unknown whether or not Williams ever read Tzara’s Dadaist
manifestos, there are striking similarities between the ideas enunciated and the
semantics employed in Spring and All and those commonly associated with Dada
(Jaussen 18). In his writing, Tzara calls for a climatic emotional moment when “beauty
131 and life itself, brought into high tension on a wire, ascend towards a flashpoint; the blue
tremor linked to the ground by our magnetized gaze which covers the peak with snow.
The miracle. I open my heart to creation” (55-56). In the same vein, Williams celebrates
the metaphorical advent of spring and the cleansing, life-generating power of the
imagination:
Now at last that process of miraculous verisimilitude, that great copying
which evolution has followed, repeating move for move every move it made
in the past—is approaching the end.
Suddenly it is at an end. THE WORLD IS NEW. (95)
The fragmentary nature of Spring and
All, its overall patchwork format, the
unfathomable obliqueness of most of its
postulations, its self-absorption and utter
disregard for the reader, its playful use of
typography and syntax, the technical and
conceptual parallels it bears, as William
Marling has aptly pointed out in William
Fig. 45. Marcel Duchamp. Bicycle Wheel. 1951
(third version, after lost original of 1913).
Carlos Williams and the Painters, 1909-1923, with the work of coetaneous visual artists
(“The Red Wheelbarrow,” one of the book’s more celebrated poems, has often been
construed as a verse interpretation of Duchamp’s readymades), its contradictory
essence, its declamatory tone, and, of course, Williams’ own remark in I Wanted to
Write a Poem on the way Paris had influenced him are evidence of to what extent he
was writing under the spell of Dadaism in the early stages of his career.
132 Williams’ concern for the future of American literature not only had to do with
poetry but, more relevantly to the purpose of this thesis, with the novel also. He was
unsettled by the lack of originality of most American fiction of the time. In his view,
American novelists—particularly those engaged in historical and detective fiction—
made use of an exhausted, cliché-ridden language, heavily dependent on European
models, and had a tendency to oversimplify or misrepresent the American experience.
The Great American Novel, Williams’ first extended work of prose, was published in
1923 in Paris—like Spring and All—in an edition of three hundred copies. More than
three decades later Williams would describe the book as a parody of what he regarded
as commonplace American writing. “People were always talking about the Great
American Novel,” he explains, “so I thought I’d write it. The heroine is a little Ford
car—she was very passionate—a hot little baby” (I Wanted 38-39). A few years later, in
his Autobiography, he insists on the mocking nature of the book by affirming that it was
“a satire on the novel form in which a little (female) Ford car falls more or less in love
with a Mack truck” (237).
Williams’ recollections, however, as Schott suggests in the introduction to the
book’s 1970 edition—the first, it must be acknowledged, since its original publication—
should be taken with a grain of salt. It is true that a couple of paragraphs deal with the
automotive love story mentioned by Williams. It is also true that the book contains
some full-fledged satirical passages. But The Great American Novel is, above all else,
“an attempt to write a serious novel” (155). Under the disconcerting surface of the text
runs an inflamed commentary on the futility of attempting to write a novel within
America’s literary conventions. In order to achieve a minimum degree of originality,
American writers must break the chains of tradition and emulation. “Are we doomed?”
cries Williams. “Must we be another Europe or another Japan with our coats copied
133 from China, another bastard country in a world of bastards?” (176). The book is also a
sustained exploration of American life as Williams was experiencing it, and of its
history.
Formally speaking, The Great American Novel is an anti-novel in that it
contravenes all the rules of traditional fiction writing. Despite Williams’ allusions to the
romance of the female Ford and the Mack truck, the book has no characters as such and,
consequently, no plot. Instead it contains a motley, collage-like selection of materials,
including bills, excerpts from book reviews, advertisements for women’s clothing,
letters from imaginary readers, newspaper clippings, ruminations on American history,
and fragments from Williams’ domestic and professional life. The text is indifferent to
the attention span of its readers—“It requires functional devotion to Williams to read
the book once,” says Schott (155)—and vehemently hostile to America’s European
heritage and bleak contemporary culture. It is, like Kora in Hell and Spring and All, a
self-conscious work whose main purpose seems to be to brood over its own construction
and, ultimately, over the nature of fiction. Page after page, Williams fumbles for
answers to elusive questions such as what exactly makes a novel, where are its sources,
how does a novel become American, and what is the function of language. In this
sense—the text’s drawing attention to its own status as a literary artifact—The Great
American Novel can be regarded as one of America’s earlier metafictional projects.
Furthermore, its parodic intent and paradoxical dependence on tradition to make a case
for a fresh American literature convert it also into a paradigmatic intertextual device
and, as a result, into a distinguished precursor of American postmodern fiction.
In discussing the book’s facetious underside, April Boone has likened Williams’
writing to Man Ray’s Dadaist sculpture The Gift (1921). The piece looks like an iron
that one would typically use to remove wrinkles from clothing, but the iron also has
134 fourteen nails sticking out of the ironing face, which makes Boone wonder how
seriously we are to take such a work of art. “The same is true of The Great American
Novel,” she claims (2). She is not alone in detecting Dadaist features in the book.
Tashjian
affirms
it
is
“an
exercise
complementary to European Dada” and
notes that Dada has never been sufficiently
explored in relation to Williams’ writing in
general (Skyscraper 109, 251). Peter
Schmidt has acknowledged the need for
more critical attention to the work, which
he
includes
among
Williams’
“own
versions of Dadaist ‘automatic’ writing” (8,
91). In his turn, Ruiz argues that Williams’
Fig. 46. Man Ray. Gift. 1958 (replica of 1921 original).
interest in Dadaism was mainly motivated
by his interest in painting, and highlights the fact that he was less conservative and, as a
result, more inclined to Dadaist experimentation in his prose than in his poems (112).
Along the same lines, Lisa Siraganian contends that Williams’ interjection in The Great
American Novel: “One word: Bing! One accurate word and a shower of colored glass
following it” (170), is not only a literary illustration but also an implicit endorsement of
Duchamp’s claim, as recounted to Williams by Walter Arensberg, that “a stained glass
window that had fallen out and lay more or less together on the ground was of far
greater interest than the thing conventionally composed in situ” (Imaginations 8).
Duchamp, elaborates Siraganian, understood Dadaism as a way to avoid being
influenced by one’s immediate environment, or by the past (122). The same could be
said of Williams.
135 The experimental journey Williams had started in 1920 with Kora in Hell led him,
through Spring and All and The Great American Novel, to the writing in 1932 of his
more purely Dadaist work: A Novelette. Published in Toulon in an edition of five
hundred copies along with an assortment of miscellaneous prose pieces, the book had
virtually no readers and remained unexplored by criticism until 2011, when Ruiz’s “The
Dadaist Prose of Williams and Cummings: A Novelette and [No title]” appeared in
William Carlos Williams Review. It is no coincidence that A Novelette came out only
three years after the publication of Williams’ English translation of Philippe Soupault’s
Dada novel Last Nights of Paris (see p. 74). Williams had read the original in 1928 and
had “admired it” (I Wanted 47). This remark, together with the translation itself and
Williams’ explicit admission that, although he hadn’t originated Dadaism, he had it in
his soul to “write” it are indications of how present the movement was in his mind at the
time.
Written, Dadaistically enough, “for personal satisfaction” during a particularly
hectic time of his life, Williams considered A Novelette “a tremendous leap ahead of
conventional prose,” similar in method to Kora in Hell but “more sophisticated” (I
Wanted 49). The book deals partly—and obliquely—with the influenza epidemic that
hit the United States in the late 1920s and the pressures that, as a physician practicing
both pediatrics and general medicine, Williams felt as a result. It deals also with
difficulties that had arisen—and were solved—in Williams’ marriage with Florence
Herman. He and his wife are, in fact, the book’s only characters of consequence,
developed exclusively through conversation. “The plot, if it’s a plot,” says Schott in the
introduction, “is their relationship” (269).
A number of passages in A Novelette convey Williams’ anxiety for not having
enough time to write due to his medical practice. “There is no time to stop the car to
136 write when only the writing that comes of an intense simplification would be actual,” he
complains at the end of chapter I (275). “RING, RING, RING, RING!” begins chapter
II, meaningfully entitled “The Simplicity of Disorder.” “There’s no end to the ringing of
the damned—The bell rings to announce the illness of someone else. It rings today
intimately in the warm house. That’s your bread and butter” (275-76). On occasions,
weariness and the constant pressure to attend to his patients make him despondent: “The
hundred pages have become twenty five,” he frets in chapter VI. “I can do no more just
now. I simply cannot . . . I am alone only while I am in the car. What then? Take a pad
in the car with me and write while running” (290). These and other references to the
stress he was under may have led some readers—and critics—to interpret the disorder
and overall irrationality of A Novelette as an effect of Williams’ fatigue after his long
working days and of his urge to get some writing done before going to bed. This
interpretation, however, is rendered implausible by the seriousness with which Williams
took writing.
Some dialogues in the book seem to indicate that his need to write had become a
cause of friction with his wife. “At forty-five there is no quitting. Now especially must
the thing be driven through,” he argues as he tries to justify his late night writing.
It is, sweetheart, a culmination of effort. Can you not see?
What I conceive is writing as an actual creation. It is the birth of
another cycle.
In the past the excellence of literature has been conceived upon
a borrowed basis. In this you have no existence. I am broken
apart, not so much with various desire—but with the inability to
conceive desire upon a basis that is satisfactory to either.
137 The common resort is to divorce. What is that? It is for the
police. (293)
Writing is, in fact, of much more importance to him than his own life. Should he be
taken with the flue and die, he speculates, it would have no significance at all. That he
write “actually—and well—overweighs all the rest” (291). This last remark is
illuminating because it shows that Williams’ compulsion was not to write per se, but to
write “well.” At a high personal cost, he had taken upon himself to do away with the
stale American literary tradition and, through the agency of the imagination, create
language anew. Bearing that in mind, it would be a simplification to see the
disjointedness and opacity of A Novelette as an accidental consequence of Williams’ life
circumstances. More appropriately, Ruiz
suggests that they are “the result of
Williams’ conscious and determined
assumption of several Dadaist premises”
(104).
As in Williams’ previous prose
works, the chaotic nature of A Novelette
is emphasized by the use of the Dadaist
collage, which differs from the Cubist in
that the associations it evokes are
“schizophrenic and cryptic,” with no
Fig. 47. George Grosz, John Heartfield. Dada-merica.
1919.
sense of order or design emerging from its
juxtaposed fragments (Schmidt 146). Accordingly, A Novelette has no plot and no
apparent central topic. One needs to be acquainted with Williams’ biography—not to
138 mention a perspicacious reader—to be able to identify and relate the various thematic
threads in the narration: his marital troubles—“So believe in me, dear. That’s the only
thing I’ve ever asked of you” (277); the influenza epidemic—“It has the same effect—
the epidemic—as a clear thought” (279); dialogues with his patients—“This morning,
eh, will you stop in to see Mamie Jefferson, eh, she’s having pains, eh, quite often”
(279), and with his wife—“How are you? I’m all right. Sleeping? A hm” (289-90);
descriptions of landscapes—“The snow lies on the branches in patches, as in an old
drawing” (302), and everyday scenes—“[T]hey have added a new brick front to the old
brick house, coming out of the sidewalk edge for a store” (279); reflections on art—
“Van Gogh would paint the light” (302), and literature—“Most literature is now silent”
(282); and comments on the writing process itself—“This sounds transcendental. One
must come to the point. I begin, finally, to sound like an American” (295).
These thematic threads intersect erratically throughout the text, weaving an
unplanned mesh of disjointed sentences and non sequiturs. Williams’ phrasing is urgent
and spontaneous, which validates his subsequent recollection in I Wanted to Write a
Poem as regards the automatic nature of the writing: “I sat and faced the paper and
wrote” (49). As a result, A Novelette seems to be governed by chaos and Dadaist
contradiction.
As pointed out above, almost since the start of his writing career Williams had been
embarked on a one-man crusade to liberate American culture from the stifling
deadweight of the past—the past being mostly Europe—and bring forth a fresh,
autochthonous literary idiom. In A Novelette he unaccountably puts that goal aside.
Disregarding his audience, he writes solely—and Dadaistically—“for personal
satisfaction,” and admits, it is unclear whether proudly or wistfully, that he has
“abandoned all hope of getting American readers” because, should they read the book,
139 they would be “lost entirely” (I Wanted 49). He yearns to “sound like an American,” but
his prose is deliberately unintelligible to American readers. He wishes above all to
write, and to write “well,” but instead of carefully composing the text, he fires away
with the typewriter and leaves the results unrevised. One of the book’s leitmotifs is the
vitality of instinct and the impotence of science as a vehicle of enlightenment. Williams’
enthusiasm, argues Schott astutely, “didn’t stop to enquire whether there was anything
illogical in a physician’s knocking science because it couldn’t write poetry” (271). In
this sense—the book’s self-conflicting core—A Novelette is, as Tzara said of Dada “the
interweaving of contraries and of all contradictions.” In it, more than in any other of his
previous works, Williams veers away from conventional writing and his self-imposed
quest for an American idiom, openly embracing Dadaist experimentation in order to
“create, to advance the concept of the real” (271).
To be sure, Dadaism is not the only ingredient in A Novelette. In his determined
quest for the new, Williams availed himself freely of a wide array of innovative
techniques made available to him by both literature and the arts, including, among
others, the fragmentation of Synthetic Cubism, the metafictional practices of Laurence
Sterne, and the wordplay of Gertrude Stein, whose writing Williams applauded because,
as he explains in “The Work of Gertrude Stein,” it “[stayed] art, not seeking to be
science, philosophy, history, the humanities, or anything else [art] has been made to
carry in the past” (Imaginations 353). However, it is doubtful he would have written A
Novelette—nor any of the works analyzed in this chapter—had Dadaism not existed.
Dada, more than any other avant-garde movement of the time, offered him the freedom,
the tools and the intellectual framework to pursue his endeavor to destroy and renovate
American literature. In a way, it sanctioned his disdain for American philistinism as
well as his distrust for the denotative power of language. It allowed him, so to speak, to
140 take full advantage of nonsense, collage, parody, contradiction, playfulness,
confrontation, chaos, vehemence and automatic writing. Dada, it may be argued, gave
him a voice or, at least, helped him fine-tune his tone as a writer. Seen in this light,
Kora in Hell, Spring and All, The Great American Novel and A Novelette should be
regarded as qualified fictions that employ Dadaist tools to probe the idea of fiction.
They are, in Schott’s words, “books of primary belief” (xii), seminal prose efforts that
boldly—and paradoxically—chart the course Williams would later take towards
Paterson and the masterly poems for which he is universally celebrated.
141 7. Violence, Murder, Suicide, and the “Unmotivated Crime” in Dada and
Laurence Vail’s Murder! Murder!
“It’s easy enough to find motives for a crime.”
“No doubt . . . but that’s exactly what I don’t want
to do. I don’t want a motive for a crime—all I want
is an explanation of the criminal. Yes! I mean to
lead him into committing a crime gratuitously—into
wanting to commit a crime without any motive at
all.” (Lafcadio and Julius de Baraglioul in André
Gide’s The Vatican Cellars, 197)
Laurence Vail, the son of an aristocratic New England lady and the once commercially
successful French-American painter Eugene Lawrence Vail, was born in Paris and
brought up, as Ian S. MacNiven has pointed out, “to live like a Frenchman but think like
an American” (Rood 394). He attended schools in
Oxford and Connecticut. After World War I, during
which he served in the American army as an officer
assigned to the Corps of Interpreters, he crossed the
Atlantic again to spend the rest of his life in Europe,
mainly in France.
During the 1920s Vail, novelist, poet, painter,
sculptor, playwright and bon vivant, joined Paris
Fig. 48. Laurence Vail. c. 1920.
Dada—Tzara considered him one of the fathers of
the movement (Rood 394)—was an early practitioner of Surrealism in art and literature,
and became known to everyone in the artistic community of the Parisian Left Bank as
the King of Bohemia and the King of Montparnasse. According to his first wife, the
American art collector and socialite Peggy Guggenheim, he knew all the American
writers and painters of the Latin Quarter and a lot of the French ones too (27). Matthew
142 Josephson, a fellow Dadaist and bohemian, describes him in the following manner:
“With his long mane always uncovered, his red or pink shirts, his trousers of blue
sailcloth, he made an eye-filling figure in the quarter. Moreover, he was young,
handsome, and for all his wild talk, a prince of a fellow; whenever he came riding in,
usually with a flock of charming women in his train, he would set all the cafés of
Montparnasse agog” (86). Always “bursting with ideas” (Guggenheim 36), Vail, who in
his own words “would be fused into anyone going new ways,” led an extremely varied
creative life and exerted a “catalytic force” (Rood 394) upon his many friends, among
them Djuna Barnes, Hart Crane, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Robert M. Coates
and Ezra Pound.
In literature Vail experimented with form, diction and style. He was one of the
sixteen writers who, “[t]ired of the spectacle of short stories, novels, poems and plays
still under the hegemony of the banal word” (Cowley, Exile’s Return 276), signed the
“Proclamation” which announced the “Revolution of the Word” in the June 1929 issue
of Eugene Jolas’ Transition (see pp. 51-52). Vail’s published works include: two
novels—Piri and I (1923) and Murder! Murder! (1931); an early play—What D’You
Want?—produced by the Provincetown Players in December 1920 and January 1921;
and poems and short stories printed in American little magazines such as Bellman,
Broom, Dial, New Review, Bob Brown’s Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine anthology,
The Smart Set, and Peter Neagoes’s Americans Abroad. Yet, despite his significant
contributions to the life, art, and literature of his generation, Vail has been thus far
largely overlooked by critics and historians. Such a lack of recognition must be
attributed to his unusual status as a French-born American writer/artist living in France,
and to his clearly Dadaist disposition towards fame and success.
In spite of his birth and total command of the French language—he even rolled his
143 r’s when he spoke English (Guggenheim 24)—Vail rendered himself unavailable to the
French public and critics by writing all his published works in English. In the
contemporary French critics’ eyes Vail was one more of the American writers exiled in
Paris. It cannot be said this tendency has changed in more recent times. In his
authoritative 1965 Dada à Paris, Michel Sanouillet included Vail among the American
authors who, like Djuna Barnes and Robert M. Coates, had come in contact with Dada
through the offices of Man Ray (300). As for the few American critics familiar with
Vail and his work, they all seem to have shared MacNiven’s opinion that he had “too
much to do in too many creative fields for him to fulfill all the promise he showed”
(Rood 396). His decision to remain permanently in France after World War I did not
help to bring him any closer to the American readers and scholars. As a result of all this,
Vail stands today in a no-man’s-land between the critical establishments of France and
the United States, unclaimed by either.
Also, and, I believe, more importantly, Vail never showed any interest at all in
being recognized by the critics—in being successful. Furthermore, he, like the Dadaists,
took every opportunity to manifest his contempt for the work of art and literature as a
finished product to be consumed by the public/critics—a “ball and chain” in Breton’s
words, “that hold back the soul after death” (Motherwell 200)—and always vindicated
the Dadaist notion of “art on the make” and of the artists themselves as living works of
art. One does not have to produce art, it was Dada’s and Vail’s belief, in order to be an
artist: “I said to hell with art,” exclaims Vail’s alter ego, Martin Asp, in Murder!
Murder! “I know I can write. Damn well if I want to. Only . . . I may not always want”
(68). One simply has to live to be an artist, because art and life are indistinguishable:
“And I’m never going to write another poem in my life,” cries Asp again, “Why should
we—living poems, fuss about with ink? (40-41).
144 It has often been argued that the Dadaists contradicted themselves in this point by,
on the one hand, haughtily expressing their animosity towards art and success as
unwanted restrictions in the creative life of the artist and, on the other, going to
surprisingly great lengths to have their writings published and their artistic works
exhibited. True as this may be of some Dadaists, it was not so of Vail. Following in the
footsteps of “kernel” Dadaists such as Jacques Vaché, who, Breton wrote in “For
Dada,” had the “good fortune” of having produced “nothing” (Motherwell 200);
Duchamp, who gave up painting early in
his career to dedicate himself to playing
chess;
and
Jacques
Rigaut,
who
“destroyed his writings as they were
finished” (Motherwell xxxi), Vail never
published the many other novels he
wrote. According to Kay Boyle—Vail’s
second wife and herself an accomplished
writer—he destroyed seven or eight
manuscripts during the years they spent
together—approximately from 1928 until
1941 (Rood 396). Peggy Guggenheim
Fig. 49. First edition of Vail’s Murder! Murder! 1931.
has related how the day Pauline Turkel was coming from Nice to their house in
Pramousquier to type the recently completed manuscript of Murder! Murder! Vail
seized it and burned it in the stove of his studio. He had to dictate a rough draft of it
from memory (Guggenheim 68). Fortunately, Murder! Murder! survived its author’s
destructive impulses, and it stands today as a literary illustration of the Dadaist notions
on violence and crime.
145 As a state of mind, Dada had implications beyond literature and the arts. It aimed,
as Ribemont-Dessaignes explains in “In Praise of Violence,” at the liberation of the
individual from dogmas, laws, and morality, since to free man “seemed to them [the
Dadaists] far more desirable than to know how one ought to write” (Motherwell 105).
Dada looked upon itself as the foremost manifestation of an “epoch of violence” that
“assailed all the moral defenses” established by society (Ribemont-Dessaignes 40).
“Morals,” Tzara contended in his “Dada Manifesto 1918," “have given rise to charity
and pity, two dumplings that have grown like elephants, planets, which people call
good” (see Appendix B 250). The violence vindicated by Dada, rather Nietzschean in
spirit, was directed against the prevailing moral system. It could be collective, in which
case it was aimed at the realization of a goal; or individual—purposeless, fleeting, and
ineffectual.
Nothing is lost sooner than violence (unless it be collective). Only when arm
in arm with his brothers has the individual any lasting strength. War or
revolution is all right; between two bombs nothing keeps man from
dreaming of his armchair or his cabbages. But left alone on the tight rope
with no one in front or behind, a grenade in each hand to kill, every minute,
it does not last. A star bursts in the sky and passes in a veil of fleeting
brilliance. The warm deep darkness remains with its nightingale’s songs, its
quilts, its flakes of hope. (Ribemont Dessaignes 40)
Intimately connected with the idea of destruction—“the reactions of individuals
contaminated by destruction are rather violent,” says Tzara—Dadaist violence always
leads to apathy: “[W]hen these reactions are exhausted, annihilated by the Satanic
146 insistence of a continuous and progressive ‘What for?’ what remains, what dominates is
indifference” (Motherwell 247). Ultimately, although not always explicitly, aimed at
flouting the prevailing moral system (society), “the uselessness of everything” in the
“concentration-camp universe” that encircles us (Gerrard 32), Dadaist violence is
gratuitous—which reflects the, in theory, liberated ethic values of the group—exerted
for pleasure’s sake—“It is a question of our pleasure, which claims to refresh itself in
Violence” (Ribemont-Dessaignes 41)—and can be directed against oneself (suicide) or,
as in Vail’s case, against others (which may ultimately lead to murder).
Mercurial by nature, Vail was given to tantrums and sudden bursts of verbal and
physical violence. Right after World War I, during a dance held by the Liberal Club at
the Hotel Commodore in New York City, he
began to tell people how disagreeable he
thought they were. Understandably, “some of
them didn’t like being called smug—it took
four detectives to throw him out, and he left
behind a great handful of bloodstained yellow
hair” (Cowley, Exile’s Return 68). A New York
Times article dated December 30, 1926, and
headlined “Love Lifts Jail Sentence of
Laurence Vail When Frenchman He Struck
Wins His Sister,” reports that “American
dramatist” Laurence Vail was sentenced to
Fig. 50. Laurence Vail with Peggy Guggenheim
and their son Sinbad. c. 1925.
three months in prison for hitting a certain
Captain Alain Lemerdy over the head with a champagne bottle in a Montparnasse café.
The charges were dropped when Lemerdy fell in love and decided to marry Vail’s
147 sister, Clotilde (Prose 65). In her memoirs, Peggy Guggenheim recalls Vail’s proneness
to create scenes with her in front of servants or in cafés.
He particularly liked throwing my shoes out of the window, breaking
crockery and smashing mirrors and attacking chandeliers. Fights went on for
hours, sometimes days, once even for two weeks . . . When our fights would
work up to a grand finale, he would rub jam in my hair. What I hated most
was being knocked down in the streets, or having things thrown in
restaurants. Once he held me down under water in the bathtub until I felt I
was going to drown. (36)
Also Kay Boyle was
the
victim
of
Vail’s
violent and uncontrollable
temper. Once, during an
argument in a Paris café,
he
lifted
the
marble
tabletop and threatened to
smash it down on her
Fig. 51. Laurence Vail and Kay Boyle with their daughter Sharon. Early 1930s.
head. “Duchamp stepped between them, restraining Vail while Kay rushed out of the
café. Kay was to recall running down the street with tears streaming down her face,
flanked by Duchamp on one side and Vail on the other. When Duchamp advised Kay to
go to his hotel room, where she would be safe, Vail threatened to kill them both” (Prose
34). Given his explosive, exhibitionistic character, it is easy to understand that Vail
would feel attracted to Dada, a movement that promoted overall destruction and
148 endorsed gratuitous, Dionysian violence—more theoretically, it must be admitted, than
in practice—as a legitimate means of combating despair, morality and, ultimately,
civilization.
Matthew Josephson has acknowledged that “much of the group’s discussion turned
upon the matter of ‘unmotivated’ crimes, or those having a complex motivation” (143).
The concept of a crime committed without a motive, by which the Dadaists were
fascinated, had been introduced to modern French literature by Stendhal (whose hero in
The Red and the Black, Julian Sorel, shoots his
mistress), Dostoyevsky (Stavrogin instigates a
young girl’s suicide in The Possessed, and
Raskolnikov brutally murders a pawnbroker in
Crime and Punishment), and André Gide, who
always showed a supportive attitude towards
Dada’s endeavors and was held in unanimous
admiration by the Dadaist writers. The hero of
Gide’s The Vatican Cellars (1914), Lafcadio,
murders a stranger in a train compartment by
undoing the door fastening against which his
victim, Amédée Fleurissoire, is leaning. Suddenly
out of balance, Fleusissoire falls “into the darkness
like a stone” (Gide 191). Lafcadio’s reason for
committing the crime “is just to commit it without
Fig. 52. George Grosz as Dada Death.
Berlin. 1918.
any reason” (Gide 205). Through this action,
Lafcadio, who likes to consider himself an “adventurer” rather than a “criminal” (Gide
191)—because “there is no reason that a man who commits a crime without a reason
149 should be considered a criminal”—makes himself into a “free man” (Gide 205). Crimes
of a similar nature are committed by a number of characters of Dadaist fiction: Céleste
Ugolin (in Ribemont-Dessaignes’ Céleste Ugolin), Telemachus (in Aragon’s Les
Aventures de Telémaque), Moravagine (in Cendrars’ Moravagine), Charles Drogar (in
Coates’ The Eater of Darkness), Professor Profax (in Barnes’ “The Murder”), and John
Raskolnikov Gilson (in West’s The Dream Life of Balso Snell). An unmotivated murder
is also the main theme in Vail’s Murder! Murder!
In his novel, Vail presents the desire to kill a fellow human being as a perfectly
normal constituent of human nature. “There is no man,” it is Asp’s conviction, “who
does not at least once a week desire to kill his father, mother, sweetheart, baby, wife, or
an obnoxious friend or stranger” (151). There are, Asp contends, two types of human
beings. The first type is those who, unable to bridge “the gulf between the imagination
and the deed,” draw back “when it comes to the point” (Gide 192) and, instead of
following their instincts to the end,
argue, sulk; raise their voices, slam a door; join the army, write a play, bite
their nails; break china, weep, repent; go in for drink, or women, or
exploration; buy flowers, collect stamps; get old, go far away, ruin their
health and disposition. (Vail 151)
The second type is “those rare spontaneous fellows” who, “even as they wish to kill,
they kill,” and eventually become what society calls “assassins” (Vail 152). Asp—a
violent young man, like Vail, who after brutally beating up Mercy Fogg in the halfreality of a drunken dream explains: “I am, I admit, satisfied with my firm behaviour.
One must be singularly free of prejudice to strike a small defenceless woman on the
150 nose” (29)—likes to consider himself a representative example of the second type: “It’s
so beautiful—ah, wonderful, wonderful—to kill a man. Something different from
playwriting, literature. Oh, la, la. That’s living, my friends” (209).
Asp’s decision to kill Mercy Fogg comes impulsively during a conversation with
Miriam Oon in a crowded café in Montparnasse: “I . . . feel wild tonight. I’d like to hurt
someone, kill someone. But all people are so horrible. I don’t know on whom to start,”
says Asp as he drinks cognac. Made angry by Oon’s comment that “[i]t’s easy to sit and
talk,” Asp vows he will murder anyone of her choice. Oon directs Asp’s attention to
Mercy Fogg as she walks down the street: “Now if you want to try any experiments,”
she dares him (72). Leaping out of his chair, Asp follows Mercy Fogg through the
streets of Paris, planning his crime, pausing regularly at bars to “rapidly swallow some
good wet fire” (73):
No, I shall not kill the little prig with one thrust. First, quite unsexually,
making unflattering remarks about her shapes, I shall forcibly remove her
clothes. Then, turning her over, I shall try with a knife to improve her
posterior parts. Nor will I consider this exercise a waste of time. I should
have a fashionable figure for my virgin crime. (73)
Presently, Mercy Fogg disappears into a door in a quiet street. Asp’s speech becomes
drunkenly muddled as he torpidly eggs himself on to carry out his plan:
Am I too trunk to pill? Not a fit of it, not a tit of it. Not a hip hip hip of it.
Besides, I have my veppons. My steeth, my snails, my boob-nails poops . . .
I must be a man, a real murderous man, anyhow some sort of man, push
151 myself into that black crack which any moment may be closing. But the
house, blown about by the vapours of my head, will turn, turn, over-turn;
now it’s here—in front; now there—behind; I do not know in what direction
to lurch my person. (74)
The next morning, as he tries to remember the events of the previous night, Asp is
informed by a friend that Mercy Fogg has been murdered in her room at the Hotel de
Chicago et de Madrid. “Am I a murderer?” he wonders (79). Once he has come to terms
with the idea that he, “a man of action” (203), as he regards himself, may have
committed a murder, he decides to turn himself in to the police: “I’m going to confess,”
he confides to Miriam Oon nonchalantly. “Who knows? They may bring out the old
guillotine” (256). It is through his fruitless attempts at giving himself up that an
“explanation of the murderer,” if not of the murder—which remains unmotivated—is
provided, and obvious similarities between Asp’s crime and those committed by other
Dadaist fiction characters are revealed. Determined to confess, to have his crime duly
acknowledged by society, Asp is not taken seriously by Peticu—the detective in charge
of the case—and is frustratingly ignored by the Sous-Sous Préfet, the Sous Préfet, and,
finally, the Préfet of French Police himself. As he becomes entangled in the
bureaucratic mesh, Asp’s facetious nonchalance gradually gives way to ontological
despondency. “His flippancy is honest,” says Asp’s friend, Grusha, in a statement that
could also be applied to the Dadaists: “it’s real despair” (254).
In his self-searching quest for an explication of the crime, Asp begins by blaming
Miriam Oon: “If [she] hadn’t egged me on, I would never have committed murder,” and
his wife: “[I]f Polly had been willing to follow me to the Rhine.” (191). Finding such
condemnations hasty and unsatisfactory, he holds his parents responsible for his crime:
152 No doubt they erred. They spared the rod, or struck me in righteous places;
made irritations and calluses which, as I grew, grew too, became fullfledged inhibitions and fixations, which, in the long run, caused me to seek
relief in assassination. (193)
His anguished struggle to rationalize the murder continues as he puts the blame on
society, since, he reflects, his parents, friends, wife, and ancestors were, after all, the
products of their times: “Was not society to blame? Did it not by incommoding me with
its stiff institutions and nagging laws create the irritability which caused me to spill
female blood?” (197). Ultimately, there is only himself, the individual, to accuse. In a
modern world full of “unbaked,
undigested sanity” (41), in which even
an outlaw has no choice but to stand
in line to turn himself in, murder
represents the only way at the
individual’s disposal of affirming
itself. Only by obliterating someone’s
existence can one “contribute to the
life force” and become “life” (209).
Yet, in order for the individual to
assert its own self, the murder must be
acknowledged by the society in which
it has been committed. As his attempts
Fig. 53. Raoul Hausmann. Self-Portrait of the Dadasoph. 1920.
to confess meet with failure, Asp begins to feel the disintegration of his own
individuality: “Something is wrong with me; it’s as though I were gradually ceasing to
153 be a unit. The line is the unit. I, Martin Asp, myself, am but a humble servant fraction
(269). At the end of his rope—“No doubt about it,” he thinks to himself, “I am a null, a
zero” (274)—Asp, in an inebriated stupor, decides to commit the ultimate act, one
which will “make a sensation” (284), as well as ascertain his existence:
Before them all—my friends, my wife, I shall demonstrate and affirm the
life in me by showing how different I am without it. I shall affirm the life in
me by destroying it before them. In the Latin Quarter, in the bar, on the bar,
I shall commit suicide before them. (285)
As noted in previous chapters, murder and
suicide were acts unanimously endorsed, and
sometimes practiced, not only by Dadaist fiction
characters but by Dadaist authors as well. Both
theoretic murder and suicide became a gruesome
reality on January 6, 1919, when Jacques Vaché
killed himself in a formidable way by taking,
and forcing two unwary comrades to take, a
large overdose of opium, although he knew well
the correct method of employing the drug.
Unlike Vaché, Rigaut, Crevel, Telemachus,
Ugolin, and other suicidal or murderous Dadaist
Fig. 54. Jacques Vaché. c. 1914.
authors and characters, Asp cannot bring himself
to act. His self-confidence sinks when, as he expresses to his wife his intention to kill
himself, she reprimands him for turning on all the lights in the house before resuming
154 her interrupted night sleep. As it turns out, he never killed Mercy Fogg either. His desire
to defend his individuality is thus unfulfilled: “Mercy Fogg is across the street! Then I
have never killed her. No one has ever killed her. But what have I been doing all these
weeks? Nothing. I have done nothing. I am a nobody. A nothing” (291).
The novel comes to an end when, painfully aware of his being nothing, and,
consequently, of his incapability of committing suicide—“But how can I kill myself if
I’m nothing?” (291)—Asp begins to cross the street to kill Mercy Fogg, thus bringing
the story full circle.
Through his torrential thoughts and desperate desire to express himself through
destructive action, Asp secures a place amongst the Dadaist characters. His jocularity is
his reaction to the sordidness of modern life. Only when the heaviness of existence
overweighs his hunger for living does his hidden, deeply despondent side comes up to
the surface. Lost in the sameness of the collective body, and constrained by the laws and
rules imposed by society, Asp struggles to affirm his individuality, his otherness, by
performing a gratuitous act of destruction, of others or of himself. Yet, his triumph, had
he killed Mercy Fogg or himself, would have been nothing but, as RibemontDessaignes wrote, a star exploding in the sky and passing “in a veil of fleeting
brilliance” (40). Since the crime must be made known to all of society, murder can only
lead to incarceration and deprivation of freedom. Suicide affirms the freedom of the
individual at the same time as it prevents the individual from continuing to practice that
freedom. Murder, suicide, and acts of violence thus become as ineffectual in the life of
the individual as Dada itself in the artistic life of its time. Maybe Ribemont-Dessaignes
was right when he wrote: “Dadaism did not last anymore than the length of skirts or a
fashionable colour. It may have been the excess of violence itself that did it” (40).
155 8. Dadaist Art and Poetry in John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer
What I call the I-don’t-give-a-damn attitude of life is
when everyone minds his own business . . . the twostep becoming a national anthem, a junk shop, the
wireless (the wire-less telephone) transmitting Bach
fugues, illuminated advertisements for placards for
brothels, the organ broadcasting carnations for
God, all this at the same time, and in real terms,
replacing photography and unilateral catechism.
(From Tzara’s “Dada Manifesto 1918,” see
Appendix B 247-48)
It was during one of his frequent sojourns in Paris in the early 1920s that John Dos
Passos, together with the American author and screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart,
experienced first-hand Dada’s most preposterous side. One night, after dining with
Dadaists Drieu La Rochelle—whom Dos Passos thought to be “the coming French
writer”—and Louis Aragon—whom he described as “very much the dashing young
poet”—the four writers, “full of beans” and feeling like doing “something outrageous,”
joined Tzara and the rest of his coterie in a typical Dadaist foray:
Tzara, trailed by the rest in a solemnfaced cue, marched about the streets
executing a number of idiotic maneuvers. They had a little chant: Dada,
Dada . . . We ended marching pokerfaced through a Turkish bath. Fat men
sweating in steamrooms or dunking in swimming pools looked up
astonished but offered no resistance. The attendants asked “What the hell?”
All any of the marchers would say was “C’est le Dada.” (Best Times 159)
Dos Passos finishes his rather sardonic account by admitting that such “idiotic” antics
left him feeling “a wee mite squeamish” (160). Yet, despite his reservations about
156 Dada’s public acts, an attentive reading of his literary works from his Harvard days in
the mid 1910s to Manhattan Transfer (1925)—which include three novels: One Man’s
Initiation (1917), Three Soldiers (1921), and Streets of Night (1923); and one play: A
Pushcart at the Curb (1922)—reveals the presence of a number of Dadaist poetic and
pictorial techniques that Dos Passos absorbed in part through his appreciation of
collages by Duchamp, Arp, Ernst, Schwitters, Picabia and other artists associated with
Dada, in part through his friendships with, and admiration of, the works of Dadaists
Aragon and George Grosz, and proto-Dadaist Blaise Cendrars. Such techniques became
particularly evident in his first mature novel, Manhattan Transfer, which represents Dos
Passos’ attempt to come to grips with the
contradictions of modern urban life and to keep
up with the latest developments in literature and
the arts.
Highly experimental in its juxtaposition of
prose and poetic forms, its radically nonlinear
structure, and its daring use of fragmentation,
multiple perspectives and narrative simultaneity,
Manhattan Transfer concerns itself with the
Fig. 55. John Dos Passos. c. 1927.
development of urban life in New York City from
the Gilded Age (1870-1900) to the Jazz Age (1920s) through the overlapping individual
stories of more than thirty characters. Though it met with mixed reviews when first
published by Harper & Brothers—some critics dismissed it as merely another
“experimental piece;” Moses Harper wrote in The New Republic that it was “too much
influenced by the French naturalists;” and Lloyd Morris condescendingly informed
readers of The New York Times Book Review that it was a “courageous but not
157 impressive attempt to achieve an impressionistic picture of New York”—the book was
enthusiastically received by Sinclair Lewis, then regarded by most of his
contemporaries as the greatest writer in America, who in an essay published in The
Saturday Review of Literature described Manhattan Transfer as “a novel of the very
first importance . . . The dawn of a whole new school in writing . . . more important in
any way than anything by Gertrude Stein or Marcel Proust, or even the great white boar,
Mr. Joyce’s Ulysses.” Scott Fitzgerald thought it was “astonishingly good.” Hemingway
termed it a “spiritual Baedeker to New York.” One year after its publication, D. H.
Lawrence called it “the best modern book about New York” he had ever read (Spencer
Carr 214-15).
Manhattan Transfer consists of three sections. Each section, in its turn, is divided
into chapters headed by short, highly impressionistic prose segments in italic type that
serve as an imagistic backdrop to the narrative. Newspaper headlines and articles,
popular songs, advertising signs and slogans, together with the introductory segments
and the narrative proper, constitute the multi-faceted reality of the novel. There is no
discernible plot, no narrative progression, and, except for “Ferryslip” and “Nine Days
Wonder,” no connection between the titles and the chapters they introduce. Forceful
images follow one another without transition, bringing together seemingly unrelated
fragments of the characters’ lives. It is due to this rearrangement of different aspects of
reality and to the deluge of images, newspaper cutouts and snatches of modern
existence that make up the narrative that Manhattan Transfer has come to be labeled a
literary collage and connections have been drawn between Dos Passos and Cubism. Yet,
I believe that Manhattan Transfer as a collage is akin to the Dadaist art works of the
aforementioned Dadaist artists, and one step beyond the, in retrospect, relatively timid
Cubist pursuits.
158 Whereas for the Cubists the collage elements were “a counterpoint to the painted
lines and forms in a whole oriented toward formal values” (Rubin 95), to the Dadaists
plasticity was of secondary interest. They borrowed elements from the Cubists for their
image value, mixing them in irrational and unsuspected ways, turning, as E. L. T.
Mesens puts it, “plastic revolution into mental subversion” (Rubin 95). “[C]ollage as
one understands it today,” noted Aragon in his essay “The Challenge to Painting,”
written for an exhibition of Max Ernst’s collages in 1930, “is something entirely
different from the papier collé of Cubism”
(52). The Dadaist collage is the artistic
presentation of a meeting of two or more
distant realities on a plane foreign to them
both, a culture of systematic displacement
and its effects. By combining materials
rejected by artistic tradition and rarely
used by the Cubists (such as bus tickets,
driftwood, bottle labels, cloakroom stubs,
wheel parts, trash baskets, buttons and all
Fig. 56. Juan Gris. Coffee Grinder, Cup and Glass on a
Table. 1915-1916. sorts of odds and ends collected in the city streets), the Dadaist artists aimed at
translating onto canvas Lautréamont’s poetic—and inherently intertextual—chance
meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table (Rubin 95). Whereas
the Cubist collage was the result of the deliberate manipulation of artistic materials by
the artist, the Dadaist collage is, in its purest state, entirely governed by chance. The
materials are placed—sometimes simply dropped—onto the canvas, thus allowing for
spontaneity and chance to dominate the creative process. The Dadaist collage always
seeks to convey a message to the viewer. It reveals the chaotic disjointedness of the
159 modern world, and, like all other Dadaist literary, artistic, and public manifestations,
represents a “cerebral revolver shot” (Motherwell 85) aimed at the bourgeois. The
Dadaist collagists intended to ridicule and mystify the bourgeois through the shocking
juxtaposition of components of their everyday life. Contrary to the Cubists, creating an
aesthetic product was not the first artistic priority among the Dadaists. Lastly, and
unlike the Cubist collage, a Dadaist collage is characterized by its pervasively poetic
tone, the intensity and vividness of its colors, the incongruity of its title and, as pointed
out by Aragon in the abovementioned
essay, the absence of glue as an
essential feature of composition (55).
New York City is the “dissection
table” on which distant realities are
juxtaposed in Manhattan Transfer.
Born into wealth, Jimmy Herf, the
novel’s “hero,” arrives in Manhattan
on a Fourth of July after spending his
childhood in England and, rebelling
against his aunt and uncle, who wish to
Fig. 57. Max Ernst. Fruit of a Long Experience. 1919. prepare him for financial success, turns to journalism and becomes a radical anticapitalist. Anna Cohen is a Jewish girl who drifts from man to man and is thrown out
from her home by her mother for having picketed in a workers’ strike. George Baldwin,
a struggling lawyer, climbs his way to the district attorney’s office and ends up running
for mayor. Emile and Congo Jake are French defectors who hope to start a new life in
America. Marco is an Italian anarchist determined to overthrow the capitalist system.
Immigrants, milkmen, burglars, architects, publicists, real estate agents, bootleggers,
160 seamstresses, drunkards, second-string actors and actresses, corrupted politicians, and
World War I veterans, people whose stories would be of little interest to many readers
were it not for the author’s ability to shuffle and rearrange their episodes, are “dropped”
onto the enormous canvas that Manhattan represents. The appeal of the novel does not
lie so much in the individual stories as in the way snippets of those stories become
fleetingly interrelated, as if by chance, with episodes of the other characters’ lives, in
the same way that the materials are overlapped, superimposed, or piled up in the
Dadaist collages.
In writing Manhattan Transfer, Dos Passos seems to have followed Tzara’s recipe
to create a chance poem:
To make a Dadaist poem
Take a newspaper
Take a pair of scissors
Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem
Cut out the article
Then cut out each of the words that make up the article and put them in a
bag
Shake it gently
Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left
the bag
Copy conscientiously. (Motherwell 92)
A number of modern urban lives in New York—New York representing Tzara’s
newspaper—are the “articles” chosen by Dos Passos to compose his narrative. Once the
161 lives/articles have been selected, he cut them into pieces—which accounts for the
fragmentary appearance of the characters’ lives in the novel—mixed them, and
rearranged them in a seemingly random fashion. In this light, Manhattan Transfer could
be construed as a haphazard combination of Dadaist poems that greatly resembles the
works of the Dadaist collagists.
However, as was the case with many Dadaist poems and works of art, the sense of
chance as a governing force in the creative process is illusory in Manhattan Transfer
because it is achieved through the implementation of a method. Paradoxically, both
Dada and Dos Passos sought to produce chaos by following a pre-established
formula/recipe. Moreover, the methodical process
was often repeated—the scraps were shaken in the
bag, the street odds and ends dropped onto the
canvas, the snippets of the characters’ lives in
Manhattan Transfer repeatedly rearrayed—until,
as in Hans Arp’s collages, the “chance” result
appeared to be satisfactorily chaotic.
Manhattan
Transfer
conveys
a
Dadaist
message of despair, disgust, isolation, and
destruction. Its protagonist—I use this word in the
sense that he appears more often than the rest of
the characters—is Jimmy Herf, a young, bitter
intellectual in the vein of James Joyce’s Stephen
Fig. 58. Hans Arp. Rectangles Arranged
According to the Laws of Chance. 1916. Dedalus who has aspirations to become a creative
writer but finds himself hopelessly bogged down in he drudgery of journalism. Like
Dedalus, and contrary to other heroes of Dadaist fiction such as Anicet, Ugolin,
162 Telemachus, or Moravagine, who manifest their disgust mainly by violent action, Herf
evinces his dissatisfaction in a brooding, self-corroding fashion. It is not until the last
sections of the novel that he brings himself to act. His ultimate gesture of revolt, leaving
New York without a destination, is as ineffectual as any Dadaist gratuitous act. It is
only through their ineffectualness, it must be remembered, that the Dadaist acts
managed to communicate the dismal nature of modern existence and the magnitude of
the perpetrator’s disgust.
Whereas Herf’s abhorrence of modern life is chiefly a ruminative one and, as a
consequence, not typically Dadaist, Stan Emery’s expresses itself in a paradigmatically
Dadaist manner. The son of the head of one of the most important law firms of New
York, Emery left Harvard “under slightly unfortunate circumstances,” and spends his
time “astonishing the natives . . . with his exploits” (Dos Passos, MT 167). Aware of the
inadequacy of language as a tool for human communication, Emery has long ceased to
believe in words: “You know, marriage, success, love, they’re just words” (225). He
regards success as a sign of human subjugation by modern society: “Why the hell does
everybody want to succeed?” he asks himself; “I’d like to meet somebody who wanted
to fail. That’s the only sublime thing” (148). He finally puts an end to what he considers
his nonsensical existence by burning himself to death as he drunkenly sings: “Fire, fire,
pour on water, Scotland’s burning” (214).
Manhattan Transfer conveys the Dadaist notion that Western civilization, in which
“more power has been put in the hands of a few men than there has been in the history
of the world since the horrible slave civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia” (Corley
181), must be obliterated. Echoing Mentor’s pronouncement on the same subject in
Aragon’s Les Aventures de Télémaque, Marco believes that “[p]olice, governments,
armies, presidents, kings… all that is force” (MT 32), and that “[r]eligion, politics,
163 democracy all that is to keep us asleep” (33). The annihilation of Western civilization is
symbolized in Manhattan Transfer by the destruction of New York as envisioned by
one of the characters, an old man who believes that “there’s more wickedness” in one
block in that city “than there was in a square mile in Nineveh.” In his vision, the old
man sees “the fire an brimstone an the earthquake an the tidal wave an the tall buildins
crashing together” (323).
Dos Passos’ use of impressionistic imagery instead of explanatory prose in order to
illustrate the sordidness of Manhattan life and, by extension, of all urban life, tints
Manhattan Transfer with a poetic glow similar to the one found in the Dadaist collages
and unlikely to be found in the more cerebral, rectilinear Cubist pictorial compositions.
The following images exemplify Dos Passos’ ability to confer a delicate lyrical tone
upon the crude realities of New York:
The newborn baby squirmed in the cottonwool feebly, like a knot of
earthworms. (3)
Men and women press through the manuresmelling wooden tunnel of the
ferryhouse, crushed and jostling like apples fed down a chute into a press.
(3)
At the corner of Riverton the old man with the hempen beard who sleeps
where nobody knows is putting out his pickle stand. Tubs of gherkins,
pimentos, melonrind, piccalilli give out twining vines and cold tendrils of
dank pepperyfragrance that grow like a marshgarden out of the musky
bedsmells and the rancid clangor of the cobbled awakening streets.
164 The old man with the hempen beard who sleeps where nobody knows sits
in the midst of it like Jonah under his gourd. (109)
Unlike the more subdued hues of the Cubist collage, the colors of Manhattan
Transfer are bright and vivid, conveying a kaleidoscopic vision of the city. Looking out
of the window in his wife’s hospital room,
Ed Thatcher sees the avenue lamps
“coming on marking off with green
shimmer brickpurple blocks of houses;
chimney pots and water tanks cut sharp
into a sky flushed like flesh” (6). The
wallpaper in the room where Jimmy Herf’s
cousin Maisie plays the piano is “yellow
with silveryshiny roses between the cream
woodwork
and
the
gold
frames
of
oilpaintings of woods and people in a
Fig. 59. Kurt Schwitters. Merz Picture 410. Something
or Other. 1922. gondola and a fat cardinal drinking” (83). Ellen Thatcher strolls up and down her hotel
room while “[o]utside the window the backyards are striped with blue and lilac and
topaz of a rainy twilight” (219).
Glue was the conventional substance used by the Cubists to bring together the
materials of their collages. Contrarily, Ernst described the Dadaist collage as a
superimposition of images. In his own words: “Si ce sont les plumes qui font le
plumage, ce n’est pas la colle qui fait le collage” (Rubin 95). Ernst, Arp, Grosz,
Schwitters, Duchamp and other Dadaist artists rebelled against conventionality by doing
away with glue. In their collages, the materials are tacked, balanced, stapled, or
165 superimposed on the canvas. The sense
of unity is thus merely visual, since the
materials, even though they form part
of a whole, continue to be individual
realities. Like the Dadaist collagists,
Dos Passos did away with “glue” in
Manhattan
Transfer
by
purposely
failing to join the characters with an
agglutinative element. Nothing seems
to bring the characters together. The
Fig. 60. Kurt Schwitters. Merz Picture 46 A. The Skittle
Picture. 1921. readers know nothing about their past,
their motives, or the way they came in contact with one another; they see the characters
interact in medias res, shortly, but are ignorant of how such an interaction came to
occur. The relationships between the characters appear to be weak and coincidental,
lacking a strong reason to be.
For the reproduction of the sounds, rhythm, and movement of the city, Dos Passos
drew upon the works of Blaise Cendrars. Labeled by Henry Miller “the most
contemporary of contemporaries” (Chefdor, Blaise 97), Cendrars lived an anarchic,
reckless life and endorsed a number of artistic and literary movements during the first
decades of the 20th century. His restive persona and ground-breaking literary work—
including an impressive amount of poems and one of the most representative Dada
novels, Moravagine (see p. 73)—won the admiration of the Dadaists, who soon
regarded him—born in 1887, he was a few years their senior—as a proto-Dada
hero/poet. Several poems by Cendrars were printed by Julius Heuberger in Dada’s first
publication, Cabaret Voltaire, in the early days of the movement. Later, when the
166 Dadaist journal Littérature was founded in 1919, Cendrars welcomed the new
possibilities it presented for poetic expression and contributed poems to several issues.
Fig. 61. Blaise Cendrars & Sonia Delaunay. Prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France. 1913.
Most of Cendrars’ poetry represents the realization of Dada’s poetic ideals. In La
Prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France [The Prose of the TransSiberian and of Little Jeannie of France] (1913), created in collaboration with artist
Sonia Delaunay and allegedly the first simultaneous poem, he used free verse and relied
on the strength of words and images for poetic effect. This narrative poem is a study in
contrasts between past and present, time and space, as well as a poetic depiction of
destruction and revolution. Images, words without correlatives, and extraordinary
associations of ideas produce a whirlpool of sensations and thoughts in which past and
present become one and, as in Dadaist poetry and Manhattan Transfer, the opposites
come together apparently through the intervention of chance. In Le Panama ou les
aventures de mes sept oncles [Panama or The Adventures of My Seven Uncles] (1918),
a first step towards the incongruity of Dada, Cendrars presented sections of
contemporary life from daily papers, publicity, slogans and catchwords, and alternated
them with poetic images and random thoughts. Like the unrelated snippets of the
characters’ lives in Manhattan Transfer, Cendrars’ poems became series of totally
unrelated words in Dix-neuf poêmes élastiques [Nineteen Elastic Poems] (1919), his
167 most daring achievement. In his poetic works, Cendrars showed his mastery in the
depiction of speed, elasticity, light, color, movement, sound, and rhythm.
Dos Passos began to read Cendrars’ poetry in the last years of World War I, and his
admiration for the French poet’s work only increased after the two writers met in the
mid 1920s. In 1926 Dos Passos’ article “Blaise Cendrars, Homer of the Transsibérien”
appeared in the Saturday Review of Literature. In 1931 he translated and illustrated Le
Panama ou les aventures de mes sept oncles, La Prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite
Jehanne de France, three poems from Kodak (1923), and forty-seven poems which
constituted the bulk of Formose, the first of the three volumes of Feuilles de route
[Waybills] (1924). Both the article and the translations attest to Dos Passos’ “continued,
engaged interest in Cendrars’ poetry” (Dow 398). George-Albert Aster, one of the most
highly respected Dos Passos scholars in France, has taken this point further by
concluding in “Themes et structures dans l’ouvre de John Dos Passos” that “il n’est pas
abusif de conclure á une directe influence” of Cendrars on the American author; and
that “voir en Cendrars . . . un des responsables de Manhattan Transfer est . . . une
nécessité d’histoire littéraire” (Chefdor, Cendrars et l’Amérique 106-107).
Cendrars’ impact on Dos Passos is apparent in the latter’s use of simultaneity as a
means to cope with the multiplicity of urban life in Manhattan Transfer. Simultaneity
had been introduced by Robert and Sonia Delaunay in painting and by Cendrars in
poetry, and had been employed by the Cubist and Futurist artists and writers and
exploited by the Dadaists before the publication of Dos Passos’ novel. However, the
influence of the French poet is most obvious in Dos Passos’ reproduction of the rhythm,
sounds and movement of Manhattan. Sometimes, like Cendrars, Dos Passos chose the
train and its sounds as a symbol of the city’s pulse. The similarity of the following
passages from Manhattan Transfer and La Prose du Transsibérien is remarkable:
168 The rumpetybump, rumpetybump spaced out, slackened, bumpers banged all
down the train. (MT 64)
Everything is out of tune
The “broun roun roun” of the wheels
Shocks
Shattering leaps. (Chefdor, Blaise 44)
Morning clatters with the first L train down Allen St. Daylight rattles
through the windows, shaking the old brick houses, splatters the girders of
the L structure with bright confetti. (MT 109)
The rhythms of the train
...
The noise of doors voices wheels grinding over frozen tracks
The rustling of women
And the steam engine’s whistle
And the everlasting sound of wheels whirling madly along in their ruts in
the sky. (Chefdor, Blaise 43)
Other times, as the following paragraphs reveal, Dos Passos reproduces the clashing
sounds and frictional movement of the city itself:
The sun’s moved to Jersey, the sun’s behind Hoboken. Covers are clicking
on typewriters, roll-up desks are closing; elevators go up empty, come down
169 jammed. It’s ebbtide in the downtown district, flood in Flatbush, Woodlawn,
Dyckman Street, Sheepshead Bay, New Lots Avenue, Canarsie. (143)
Red light. Bell.
A block deep four ranks of cars wait at the grade crossing, fenders in
taillights, mudguards scraping mudguards, motors purring hot, exhausts
reeking . . . Green light. Motors race, gears screech into first. The cars
space out, flow in a long ribbon along the ghostly cement road. (204)
Dos Passos was also greatly influenced by
the drawings of George Grosz. Grosz, whose
“elemental
strength,”
in
Hans
Richter’s
opinion, “was the life blood of Dada even
before the movement got under way” (Hess
70), stood out as one of the most active and
provocative Berlin Dadaists. Along with Raoul
Hausmann and Richard Huelsenbeck, he
participated in the first Dada recital at the
Berlin Secession Hall in 1918. In collaboration
Fig. 62. George Grosz. Grey Day. 1921. with the brothers Wieland Herzfelde (Wieland
Herzfeld) and John Heartfield (Helmut Herzfeld), Grosz contributed drawings to
various Dadaist journals in Berlin, such as Die Pleite [Gone Bust], Der blutige Ernst
[Deadly Earnest], Der Dada, and Jedermann sein eigner Fussball [Everyone His Own
Football]. He was also one of the signatories of the collective Dada Manifesto of 1920
(see Appendix C). In his drawings, paintings, and collages Grosz, who anglicized his
170 first name and slavicized his last in 1917—he was born Georg Ehrenfried Groß—as a
protest against the jingoism prevalent in Germany at the time, reveals in a
straightforward manner his contempt for the German bourgeoisie, whom he, like the
rest of the Dadaists, held responsible for the death and destruction of the war. Also
present in his work are his radical antimilitarism, his utter disdain for tradition—which
eventually led him to abandon paint as an artistic material—his sharp awareness of the
absurdities of modern life, and his ability to satirize the horrors of society. In a
representative drawing entitled Fit for Active Service, Grosz shows a rotten skeleton in
glasses being declared fit to fight on
the front by a portly doctor, thus
emphasizing the contrasts between
the lives of those who promoted the
war—the ruling class—and those
who actually fought it.
Dos Passos was very much alive
to Grosz’ works during his Chicago
and Harvard years. In 1936, by
which time he and Grosz had been
Fig. 63. George Grosz. Fit for Active Service. 1918. corresponding for a number of years, a volume of earlier and more recent drawings by
Grosz was brought out by a New York publisher with a laudatory foreword by Dos
Passos entitled “Grosz Comes to America.” Dos Passos, who liked to consider himself a
satirist, saw in the German artist the qualities of the true satirist, who cannot witness
“filth, oppression, the complacency of the powerful, the degradation of the weak
without crying out in disgust,” and succeeds in turning that disgust into “violent
explosive beauty” (Dos Passos, The Fourteenth Chronicle 420).
171 From this point of view, Manhattan Transfer represents Dos Passos’ Grosz-like
effort to transform the atrocities of life in New York into an attractive artistic product
endowed with a high shock value. On a gray winter day a man stands on a soap-box at
Second Avenue and Hudson. Capitalism, he shouts, is a “vampire that sucks your blood
. . . day . . . and . . . night.” Snow begins to fall while across the street in the
Cosmopolitan Café faces “blob whitely round the tables like ill-assorted fishes.” As
umbrellas “begin to bob in clusters up the snow-mottled street,” the orator “turns up his
collar and walks briskly east along Hudson, holding the muddy soap-box away from his
trousers” (240). On a cold morning, Herf’s cousin James Merivale, recently returned
from the war, which he describes as “a great little war while it lasted,” and in which he
has fought to make “the world safe for democracy” (256), enjoys breakfast with his
mother and sister in their comfortable
uptown apartment. At the same time, in
other parts of the city, “men and women
stir under blankets and bed-quilts on
mattresses in corners of rooms, clots of
kids begin to untangle, to scream and
kick” (121).
In no other drawing is the likeness of
Grosz’ and Dos Passos’ satirical visions as
evident as in Cross Section, drawn in 1920
in the turmoil of Grosz’ Dadaist activities.
Against a background of city buildings,
Grosz presents an appalling cross-section
Fig. 64. George Grosz. Cross Section. 1919-1920. of Berlin life: a crippled soldier with
172 crutches, a street vendor hawking his merchandise, a rich-looking man smoking a cigar
as he walks, a young woman in flimsy sports attire ogled by a monocled man with a hat,
a naked woman, a man drinking beer, and two men being shot at by two soldiers as a
dead body lies next to them on the ground. Cross Section appears to be the visual
rendition of Manhattan Tranfer. By using equivalent techniques in their respective
media, Grosz’ and Dos Passos’ all-at-once satirical visions of modern society succeed in
transforming their disgust into explosive Dadaist beauty.
The influence of Cendrars and Grosz, as well as the artistic techniques borrowed
from Dada, continued to be present in Dos Passos’ work during the late 1920s and the
1930s. Miles Orvell has pointed out how Dos Passos’ use of the Newsreels in U. S. A. to
“import ‘reality’ into the fiction” and, at the same time, “comment ironically on the
issues and actions of the period . . . is more nearly related to the Dadaist spirit than . . .
to the documentary spirit of the 1930s” (266). It must be noted, however, that U. S. A.
and the rest of Dos Passos’ later works generally moved away from Dada in that they
went beyond the accumulation of shocking images of modernity and became explicitly
political, socially concerned commentaries by the author. In this sense, Dos Passos and
Nathanael West followed similar paths, from an early painful awareness of the
inconsistencies of modern life reflected in their early works to an overt commitment to
the communist cause.
173 9. “I am that I am”: The Dadaist Anti-Fiction of E. E. Cummings
I don't want words that other people have invented.
All the words are other people's inventions. I want
my own stuff, my own rhythm, and vowels and
consonants too, matching the rhythm and all my own
. . . Dada is the heart of words . . . Each thing has its
word, but the word has become a thing by itself.
Why shouldn't I find it? Why can't a tree be called
Pluplusch, and Pluplubasch when it has been
raining? . . . The word, gentlemen, is a public
concern of the first importance. (From Hugo Ball’s
“Dada Manifesto,” see Appendix A 240)
E. E. Cummings was, more than anything else, an antagonistic writer. He was against
science as an impersonalizing force when, he believed, the only reality is the person. He
was in revolt against people in high places, in crowded cities, in ruts, to whom the only
pronoun he considered applicable was “it”—“a salesman is an it that stinks,” begins one
of his poems (Poems 549). He rejected any form of abstraction. “Knowledge,” he
contended, “is a polite word for dead but
not buried imagination” (“Jottings” 81). He
resented expressions like “most people,”
which he ran into one word: “it’s no use to
pretend that mostpeople and ourselves are
alike . . . You and I are human beings;
mostpeople are snobs” (Poems 461). He
also opposed communism, particularly
after a trip he made to the Soviet Union in
Fig. 65. J. Sibley Watson. E. E. Cummings. 1930s.
the early 1930s. He found the country to be
a soul-killing hell and denounced it in a highly experimental anti-novel called Eimi. He
was no more indulgent to conservatives. He harshly criticized the supposedly
174 wholesome young men ready to die for God or for country, the “Cambridge ladies who
live in furnished souls that don’t belong to them” (Poems 115), the writers who write by
imitation and inherited formulas, the warmongers who prevent other people from living
freely and in peace, the philosophers, scientists, and religious fanatics who try to ruin
the natural instinctive world by putting unnatural chains on it, the flagwavers who say
they love America and mean only the “land of the Cluett Shirt, Boston Garter and
Spearmint Girl with the Wrigley Eyes” (Poems 228).
Like his friend and fellow poet William Carlos Williams, Cummings was intent on
reshaping American literature, and did so partly by attacking language and
typographical convention. Although his diction relied heavily on common speech, he
constantly made up words and distorted grammar and syntax to the point of making his
usually straightforward message undecipherable: “this(a up green hugestness who and
climbs),” begins one of his late poems (Poems 1010). He used punctuation only for
special effects. Many of his poems exploit odd typographical arrangements, creating
shocking visual shapes and often allowing letters of words to trail over from one line to
the next in total indifference to syllables. These and other experiments—hyphenation,
lack of capitalization, etc.—were carried out for the reader’s eyes as well as ears. In
order to express his sense that life was always in process, Cummings wrote untitled,
fragmentary poems without beginnings or endings.
Over the last fifty years much critical attention has been paid to Cummings’s poetic
idiosyncrasies and their relation with the visual arts in general. However, very little has
been said—and not always felicitously—about his innovative fiction pieces and the debt
they owe to Dadaism, a disconcerting fact considering that in those works—again, like
Williams—Cummings reached a level of experimentation and creative derring-do he
would not dare reach in his poetry.
175 Cummings’s first literary success was The Enormous Room (1922), a lively prose
account of his experience in a French prison camp during World War I. He and his
friend William Slater Brown had joined the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps in France
the day after the United States entered the war. Their disdain for the military
bureaucracy and their cynicism about the war, expressed in outspoken letters home,
aroused animosity among French officials and they were imprisoned. Michael Webster
claims that the activities and frame of mind of Cummings’ fellow prisoners, who are
gathered in a large room, are interchangeable with those of the Zurich Dadaists at the
Cabaret Voltaire in 1916:
Almost all of them are frustrated with the madness and killing of war and
alienated from social authority, propriety, regimentation, bourgeois jingoism, and the hypocritical, pompous discourse of officialdom. They defy
authority by singing nonsense songs, playing childish games, exalting the
primal and the “primitive,” and reviling the architects of the war in terms
both nonsensical and natural. Some of them draw and some make abstract,
biomorphic assemblages of colored planes out of whatever material is at
hand. (127)
Webster goes further by stating that Cummings’s concept of a non-linear, timeless
actuality, as conveyed through the room’s unending present, conforms with the way
Dada sought to express direct “primitive” emotions in art. Also, Dada and other wartime
forms of avant-garde art-making, he assures, help understand Cummings’s “equivocal
and paradoxical aesthetic theory,” which, like The Enormous Room, is “both serious and
playful, simultaneously for and against art, for and against representation, seeing art as
176 both alive and a thing made, as manipulative puppetry and magical invention, as
timebound form and timeless actual emotion” (129).
On reading Webster’s words one feels that, despite the apparent soundness of his
assertions, he is actually at pains to establish a tangible link between Dadaism and
Cummings’ book. As Webster himself concedes, it is unlikely that Cummings had ever
heard the term “Dadaism” in the fall of 1917, when he was incarcerated. As the
movement was taking shape in Zurich
in 1916, he was finishing his studies at
Harvard and later living at home in
Cambridge, Massachusetts. In January
1917 he moved to New York, and in
April, like many young American
writers—Ernest Hemingway, John Dos
Passos, and Dashiell Hammett among
others—he volunteered as an ambulance
driver, soon embarking for France. Due
to an administrative mix-up, he was not
assigned to an ambulance unit for five
Fig. 66. Lachmann. Costume by Picasso for Parade, staged
by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1917. weeks, during which time—May 8 to June 12—he stayed in Paris. Through Richard S.
Kennedy’s exhaustive biography of Cummings, Dreams in the Mirror, we know that he
enjoyed the city’s cultural life immensely. He attended Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes,
where he “saw Stravinsky’s Petrouchka more than once,” as well as the premiere of
Erik Satie’s Parade with Cubist sets and costumes by Picasso. When the audience
booed Satie’s ballet, Cummings “got angry and shouted abuse at the crowd” (140).
There is no evidence, however, that he met the Dadaists at that time or had any
177 knowledge of their activities. Consequently, the correspondences detected by Webster
between Dada and The Enormous Room can only be construed as coincidental or,
rather, as a logical confluence of dispositions, since Cummings’ character was naturally
akin to the Dada Spirit. He was playful, contradictory, restless, irreverent, and, as
pointed out at the beginning of this chapter, adamantly antagonistic. His 1915 Harvard
graduation lecture, written at the age of twenty, not only reveals an early alertness to the
new developments in the arts but, as Tashjian has indicated, “some proto-Dada attitudes
as well” (Skyscraper 166), such as his multi-media interests, his artistic individualism,
his appreciation of nonsense, his lack of concern for arbitrary definitions of art, and his
embracing of experimentation. Also, it is important to note that the Dadaists’ ambitions
were not unique in their generation. In his introduction to Hugo Ball’s Flight Out of
Time, John Elderfield affirms pertinently: “[A] wave of irrational feeling and concern
for wholeness had swept Europe in reaction to nineteenth-century scientism and
materialism, and was intensified by World War I” (xxvi).
Formally, The Enormous Room is a spirited and, all in all, intelligible work, a far
cry from the radical experiments of Dada fiction. It is, to be sure, zesty, confrontational,
iconoclastic and rich in metaphors and superlatives, but also respectful of the traditional
notions of grammar, meaning, syntax and punctuation. The style is “free-ranging, partly
colloquial, partly involved” (Cowley, Flowering 337), and, one cannot but admit, not
Dadaist at all. In order to see the Dadaist side of Cummings, one must read instead two
of his most audacious and least studied books: the untitled collection of shorts stories he
published in 1929, conventionally known as [No Title], and his 1933 anti-novel Eimi.
Cummings did meet the Dadaists, although not in 1917 but later, during his
extended stays in Paris in the 1920s. In fact, he became friends with Louis Aragon—by
then a passionate practitioner of Dada—whose poem “Le Front Rouge” he translated
178 into English in 1933. Occasionally Cummings even took part in a Dada gesture. One
evening of 1923, he and John Dos Passos left Paris to visit Malcolm Cowley in his
Giverny studio. With Aragon, who was also living in Giverny at the time, they went to a
restaurant and had a cheerful dinner “with several bottles of wine.” Back in the studio,
Cowley made a speech “against book fetishism.” Wherever he lived—he said—books
seemed to accumulate. There in France his American books could not be sold and
nobody wanted them as presents. Yet, feeling “an unreasoning and almost Chinese
respect for the printed word,” he could not bring himself to destroy them when he
moved home. They all had that weakness, he warned his visitors, and should take
violent steps to overcome it. “I went over to the shelves,” reminisces Cowley,
and pulled down an assortment of bad review books and French university
texts that I wouldn’t need again. After tearing some of them apart I piled
them all on the asbestos mat in front of the stove; then I put a match to the
pile. It was a gesture in the Dada manner, but not a successful one, for the
books merely smoldered. We talked about bad writers while the smoke grew
thicker; then Cummings proved that he was a better Dadaist—at least in
someone else’s studio—by walking over and urinating on the fire. (Exile’s
Return 158-59)
Cummings’ contributions to the little magazines of the period show clear
associations with the experimental “dynamics of Dada” (Tashjian, Skyscraper 172).
Many of the twenty pieces he published in Broom between 1922 and 1924 are Dadaist
in their use of juxtaposition, satire, typographical complexity or childlike primitivism.
His poem “workingman with hand so hairy-sturdy,” which appeared in the 1922 issue
179 of Secession, is at the same time an “elegiac chant” (Ruiz 108) and a mocking
celebration of the death of Dada “as one of its many transmutations” (Tashjian,
Skyscraper 177):
workingman with hand so hairy-sturdy
you may turn O turn that airy hurdysturdygurdy
but when will turn backward O backward Time in your no thy flight
and make me a child,a pretty dribbling child,a little child.
In thy your ear:
en amérique on ne boit que de Jingyale.
things are going rather kaka
over there,over there.
yet we scarcely fare much better—
what’s become of(if you please)
all the glory that or which was Greece
all the grandja
Fig. 67. May 1922 issue of Broom,
containing E. E. Cummings “Three
United States Sonnets.” that was dada?
make me a child,stout hurdysturdygurdyman
waiter,make me a child. So this is Paris.
i will sit in the corner and drink thinks and think drinks,
in memory of the Grand and Old days:
of Amy Sandburg
180 of Algernon Carl Swinburned.
Waiter a drink waiter two or three drinks
What’s become of Maeterlinck
now that April’s here?
(ask the man who owns one
ask Dad,He knows). (Poems 231)
Kennedy has aptly summarized Cummings’s relation to Dadaism by stating that he
embraced its principle “to destroy the accepted and the traditional in order to discover
something new and surprising in artistic effect, or in order to seek some hidden truth
that lies beyond the traditional” (Dreams 71). Indeed the destruction of all convention
seems to be the primary—perhaps the only—goal of [No Title]. Norman Friedman, one
of the more relevant specialists in Cummings’ work, maintains that in writing [No Title]
Cummings “was not content to talk about the rejection of categories, but rather intended
to make a book which would be a rejection of categories” (97). The result is an obscure
and thoroughly irrational literary artifact whose meaning Friedman confesses himself
unable to comprehend. “There are limits to the fun of pure nonsense,” he explains. “[I]f
there is a point [to [No Title]], I have completely failed to grasp it” (99).
It is easy to imagine that [No Title] is one of the works Kennedy has in mind,
together with some of Cummings’ more “gimmicky” poems, when he accuses
Cummings of having published “a great deal of chaff throughout his career” (“Major”
39). This view—that [No Title] is chaff—may be partly substantiated by the book’s
preface, which contains a dramatized dialogue between “ALMOST Any Publisher” and
“A certain Author” where the work is described by the former as “ABSOLUTELY
181 CRAZY!” “I should call it hyperscientific”, retorts the author nonchalantly.
PUBLISHER: “HYPERscienTIFic”?
AUTHOR: Why not? The title is inframicroscopic—the frontispiece is
extratelescopic—the pictures are superstereoscopic—the meaning is
postultraviolet—the format is preautoerogenous.
.........
PUBLISHER: And if this BABYISH NONSENSE BORES ME STIFF?
AUTHOR: If this babyish nonsense bores you stiff, you have “civilization.”
The dialogue concludes with the publisher swallowing his checkbook and saying, as he
drops dead: "No thanks…" ([No Title]162).
Friedman’s authoritative disapproval of [No Title], expressed as early as 1964, and
the radical obscurity of the book help explain why it has received virtually no critical
attention during the last five decades. Tahjian mentions it only once in his 1975
Skyscraper Primitives, as a reaffirmation, together with the play Him—to which, in
contrast, he dedicates four pages—of Cummings’ early appreciation of nonsense (166).
John T. Ordeman offers a brief, noncommittal record of the book’s publication details
and a summary of the preface in his 2000 article “Cummings’s Titles” (163). The first
serious analysis of [No Title], however, and the only one to date, is Ruiz’s 2011 “The
Dadaist Prose of Williams and Cummings,” which affirms that the book is “without a
doubt the most Dadaist of Cummings’s works, and perhaps for that reason the most
forgotten” (107). Due to its irreverence and almost absolute opacity, [No Title] has been
consistently ignored or regarded as a mere capriccio, a piece of helter-skelter
experimentation. But taking into account Cummings’s artistic inclinations and literary
182 stature, perhaps it is more sensible to see it as a serious writing effort and, more
importantly for this thesis, as an exemplary piece of anti-fiction, that is to say, a Dadaist
attack on the short story genre and its conventions.
[No Title] was originally published as “A Book Without a Title” in an anthology,
The New American Caravan, in 1929. The anthology, which was subtitled “A Yearbook
of American Literature,” was edited by Alfred Kreymborg, Lewis Mumford and Paul
Rosenfeld, and contained stories, poems, plays and essays by twenty-nine writers
including Erskine Caldwell, Stanley Kunitz, Robert McAlmon, Matthew Josephson and
Ivor Winters. Cummings’ contribution—eight Dadaist “short stories”—was published
again the following year as a separate 31-page book called [No Title] with drawings by
Cummings that hold no relation with the text. In neither printing was the work given an
actual title. The title page of the 1930 book just reads:
BY
E. E. Cummings
with illustrations
by the author
Opposite the title page, instead of the customary illustration, are a blank space and the
caption “frontispiece.”
Reading [No Title] is an arduous endeavor. The stories, burlesque in tone, have no
clear plot and contain numerous absurd statements that defy interpretation. The first
story, for example, is essentially a journalistic piece informing of a series of calamities,
but its extravagant assertions and caricatural rendition of violence wipe out any trace of
realistic description and turn the text into a tongue-in-cheek, Schwitters-like vagary:
183 A dog, stepped on, bit in the neck a beautiful high-strung woman who had
for some time suffered from insomnia, and who—far too enraged to realize,
except in a very general way, the source of the pain—instantly struck a child
of four, knocking its front teeth out. Another woman, profiting by the
general excitement, fainted and with a hideous shriek fell through a plate
glass window. On the outskirts of the throng, several octogenarians
succumbed to heart trouble with grave internal complications. A motorcycle
ran over an idiot. A stone-deaf night-watchman’s left eye was exterminated
by the point of a missing spectator’s parasol. Falling seven stories from a
nearby office building, James Anderson (colored) landed in the midst of the
crowd absolutely unhurt, killing eleven persons including the ambassador to
Uruguay. At this truly unfortunate occurrence, one of the most prominent
business-men of the city, Aloysius K. Vanderdecker, a member of the
Harvard, Yale, and Raquet Clubs, swallowed a cigar and died instantly.
(165)
The open syntax expands the sentences endlessly. There are constant changes of
tone, subject, point of view and style. The bizarre nature of the text is especially
conspicuous in the use of absurd numbers (there is a Chinese laundryman whose
business is at 686 868th St.; a fire engine that reaches a speed of (a+b)a+b miles per
hour), initials and abbreviations (Old Dr. F.’s; Desinterested spectator R.F.D.; YOUNG
g.look. S. Amer., sér. High éduc.g. danc.), and offbeat names (Count Cazazza, Signor
Alhambra, The Anvil Chorus and Donna e Mobile). Meaning and congruity are
boastfully flaunted through whimsical images, absurd statements, illogical affirmations
and hyperbolic descriptions:
184 Taking a sea-lion out of a watermelon he first deposited it in the goldfishbowl bottomside up, causing an explosion which changed the color of
everyone’s eyebrows, and next, to the delight of all present, caused an
angleworm to appear on the janitor’s instep, but guffaws fairly rang out
when seven six-hundred pound fairies began coming five by five slowly out
of the graphophone horn, waving furious the Stars and Stripes and chewing
colossal home-made whisperless mince-pies. Desperate as was the situation,
Captain Dimple was not a man of anyone else’s word, no. In a trice Edward
had unfurled the tricolor and drawn his Spanish rapier clear to the nozzle,
only to be seized by a stupendous octopus and disappear magnetically with
a winsome splash. (171)
In analyzing [No Title], Ruiz states that the same can be said of it as Williams said
of The Great American Novel: “It was Joyce with a difference. The difference being
greater opacity, less erudition, reduced power of perception” (Imaginations 167). It is
beyond the scope of this thesis to explore the influence of the Irish writer on the work of
either Williams or Cummings. However, it seems inaccurate, not to say farfetched, to
compare their probing prose experiments, significant as they are, with monumental, allencompassing literary accomplishments such as Ulysses or Finnegan’s Wake. In the
first of the six nonlectures Cummings delivered at Harvard in the early 1950s, he simply
described [No Title] as “an untitled volume of satire” (4). The work seems to offer no
reason to question this succinct definition. [No Title] is a notable book in that, as John
Rocco points out in Another E. E. Cummings—a collection of Cummings’ avant-garde
writings published in 1998—“it is an extensive provocation of the reader’s sense of
narrative,” and, as a consequence, a challenge to the way we read (215-16). The opening
185 of the first story is an example. “Once upon a time,boys and girls,there were two
congenital ministers to Belgium, one of whom was insane whereas the other was
sixfingered” ([No Title]164). After the classic fairy tale opening, Cummings goes on to
recount a series of unrelated occurrences—in fact, the ministers are not mentioned again
after line four—thus disappointing the reader’s narrative expectations. Also, [No Title]
is an interesting exercise in intertextuality.
Each drawing represents a story—“The
Garden of Eden,” “The Death of Abraham
Lincoln,” “The Swan and Leda,” “The
Dog in the Manger”—which, writes
Rocco, “comments upon the way stories
form and merge and disappear throughout
the eight chapters.” The stories, in their
turn,
are
represented
by
“emblems,
tableaus of famous and fabulous scenes
Fig. 68. E. E. Cummings. The Garden of Eden … before
the dawn of history … 1929.
from our collective memory of narrative”
(216). In essence, however, [No Title] is a playful parody of short story writing, a
Dadaist travesty aimed at deriding the conventions of the genre and having fun in the
process.
The few scholars who have explored Cummings’s relation to Dada agree that there
are significant disparities between his writing and Dada’s aesthetics. Tashjian, probably
the staunchest proponent of the movement’s influence on Cummings, points out that,
“[d]espite an extensive exposure to Dada, Cummings did not engage in typographical
experimentation simply for the sake of shock alone, as many Dadaists had originally
done . . . Nor did he undergo the violently anarchic or destructive phase endemic to
186 Dada” (Skyscraper 165). Kennedy, who overtly considers [No Title] “a kind of
bagatelle” (Dreams 316), admits with reluctance that “there is occasional evidence that
the Dada movement had made an impact on Cummings while he was in Paris in 192122.” Later, he seems happy to detach Cummings’ incoherent writings from Dada’s
nihilism. “It is heartening,” he says, “to see Cummings’ taste for irrationality veer away
from Dadaesque absurdities and turn to the tradition of nonsense, with its origins in folk
literature” (Revisited 70, 107). Milton Cohen concedes that Cummings may have flirted
with Dadaism in the early stages of his career, both in his “machinerish” drawings of
the mid-teens, reminiscent of Duchamp and Picabia, and in such non sequitur poems as
“Will I ever forget that precarious moment?” but he “did not practice artistic destruction
for its own sake, as the Dadaists had” (25). Cummings’s work cannot be said to
participate in the nihilism and extreme radicalism of Dada. However, the annihilation of
all convention seems to be the main objective of [No Title]. Unlike the Dadaists, says
Tashjian, “Cummings did not engage in ritualistic destruction” (Skyscraper 182). Yet,
[No Title] is a destructive artifact, a “bomb,” to use Max Ernst’s expression (Bigsby 4),
planted in the foundations of an outmoded literary establishment, which, claims Ruiz
rightly, causes the work to occupy “a problematic position in Cummings’s canon”
(111).
[No Title] is Dadaist for a number of reasons. It has no plot or clear meaning. The
events it describes are shocking in that, due to their eccentricity, hallucinatory nature or
hyperbolic violence, they bear no similitude with actual life. Narrative time and logic
are rendered irrelevant. Grammar and syntax yield to formal experimentation and
anarchic spontaneity. “Every page and paragraph of this short work,” explains Ruiz,
“strives to break our expectations and deconstruct the very process of reading” (111).
Dada was intent on offending its audiences. “The plain reader be damned,” said
187 Transitions’s Dadaist “Proclamation” of the “Revolution of the Word” (see p. 52).
Accordingly, [No Title] may be viewed as Cummings’s own version of Motherwell’s
“cerebral revolver shot” (85), a Dadaist literary bomb aimed at irritating and trying the
patience of even the most enthusiastic readers, some of whom, as Friedman says, may
find themselves “on the side of Cummings’ harassed publisher whose anxiety makes
him speak mostly in capitals: ‘And if this BABYISH NONSENSE BORES ME
STIFF?’” (102).
Like William Carlos Williams, Cummings is closer to Dada in his prose than in his
poetry. He is one of the most innovative of contemporary poets, but in some ways he is
also oddly traditional. Though he discards most punctuation and capitalization, he is
fond of the sonnet and other time-honored forms. He alters parts of speech and makes
verbs into nouns and nouns into verbs, but he does so mainly to express feelings whose
simplicity belies all this formal complication. In his prose, however, he totally lets go of
tradition, which allows him to engage in a freer, more unself-conscious experimentation
akin to that of Dada. Dada is, more than any other artistic movement of the time, the life
juice than runs through the lines of Cummings’s [No Title] and his anti-novel Eimi.
Eimi did not receive any serious critical attention until 1998, when C. K. Sample,
III submitted his Master of Arts thesis Egotist Eimi: Cummings’ Russian Experience at
Illinois State University. Aware of the erroneous original response to Joyce’s Ulysses,
argues Sample, and, at the same time, faced with a new, disconcerting book critiquing
an ideology exalted by other left-wing contemporary writers, reviewers did not know
exactly what to say about Eimi when Covici-Friede first printed a subscription-based
edition of the book in February of 1933 (15). The most negative review—and probably
the most influential—was released in the April 1933 issue of The American Spectator,
which had gone to press before there were even galley prints of the novel. The reviewer,
188 who could not possibly have read the book, bluntly dismissed it as “THE WORST
BOOK OF THE MONTH” (Norman 273). Soon this unfounded opinion became a trend
among many reviewers who “balked at Cummings’ 432 pages of innovative narrative”
(Sample 17). By June of the same year The American Spectator printed a more
favorable review by Ben Hecht that, rather surprisingly, stated: “[E]very red-blooded
American should do his best to wade through the thing” (Dendinger 153). However,
neither this partial retraction nor Ezra Pound’s June 1934 review, where he openly
expresses his disappointment with the unfair critical reception of Eimi, were able to
counteract the disparaging reviews nor avoid the scholarly neglect the book was to
receive during the next six decades.
Eimi recounts Cummings’ five-week journey to Russia in 1931, during the rise of
the Stalinist government. Cummings “had heard conflicting reports about the USSR”
(Huber 1). On the one hand, the Soviet experiment in social planning thrilled European
and American intellectuals, especially those who, like many of Cummings’ New York
friends, had sympathized with the socialist ideals during the 1920s. On the other hand,
there were also disappointed reactions to the Soviet State. Morrie Werner, with whom
Cummings had planned to visit Russia in 1929, returned from Moscow horrified by “the
dismal and barbaric conditions that he had seen in the Soviet Union” (Kennedy, Dreams
307). What Cummings found in the USSR “amounted to the direct antithesis of the
values he held most dear: those of individuality and free artistic expression” (Huber 2).
He discovered that the all-powerful communist government nullified the individual and
enslaved artistic expression for the sake of propaganda. By the time he published Eimi,
he had adopted a definitely anti-Soviet stance, envisioning the USSR as an enormous
prison of a country, “where men are shadows and women are nonmen;the preindividual
marxist unworld. This world is Hell” (Cummings, Eimi xv).
189 Like [No Title], Eimi is a difficult read. In it, as Madison Smartt Bell says in his
preface to the 2007 Liveright edition—the first, it must be noted, since 1958—
Cummings “gives us a language completely unfettered, romping through episodes of
fair and faithful figuration, cubistic fracturing of the episode and scene, flights of pidgin
Russian and utterly unorthodox French, phonetic renditions of dialect that would spin
the head of Mark Twain—and more”
(xiii). Grammar, syntax, punctuation and
vocabulary are radically manipulated.
Borrowing from the montage of the
cinema and the formal experiments of the
visual arts, Cummings creates his very
own aesthetics of novelty and surprise in
order
to
convey
the
fragmented
impressions of the traveler caught against
the background of a strange country.
Reading Eimi, says Frank Bures, is “a
long, slow slog (like taking a train
Fig. 69. 2 + 2 = 5. Russian propaganda poster. 1931. through the Soviet Union!) that requires tiresome mental gymnastics to understand each
sentence. Much of it is impenetrable. Other parts are incomprehensible. Some parts, I
have to admit, I read really, really fast” (2).
According to Rajeev Kumar Kinra, Eimi is heavily indebted to Louis Aragon’s
Dadaist novel The Adventures of Telemachus, which provided Cummings with a
“playful” and “inebriated” example of the modern epic and a “precedent for the
dismantling and eventual reshaping of epic conventions” (125). Certainly, Eimi’s epicpoetic tone seems to echo that of Aragon’s work. “The blend of doubt, faith, fracture,
190 paradox, profundity, verbal disruption, satire, allusion, wit, punning and general
nonsense are similar in both texts,” agrees Huber. Also, he asserts, in both of them
meaning is subordinate to poetic effect, logic is subordinate to nonsense, and
ideology—for all his abhorrence of the Soviet system, Cummings was not a politically
inclined writer—is subordinate to experience (10).
There are, to be sure, some differences between them. The Adventures of
Telemachus is a dark, nihilistic Dada fable upholding nothing but destruction and chaos,
whereas, despite its outraged irreverence, Eimi is essentially a feisty celebration of the
individual. Verbal experimentation, in the form of garbled syntax, modified punctuation
and neologisms, seems to serve no particular purpose in Aragon’s work. Cummings,
however, alters language deliberately in order to achieve specific effects. Take, for
example, this short passage from Eimi:
Left.
Left.
Left! right! left! Tiddledy-AH-Dee : Die-dy ; Doe-dy ,
Dummm… Parade,rade,rade;parade,rade,rade. The uniformly moving
monotonously uniform comrades imply vision in which dreamless Virgil
unwishfully and wishfully my dreaming self swim , through dreamed
uniform wishless monotonously walkers &
“here” pointing , giggling “is the terror of Europe.
Look at it”
“I am.” (56)
The wide gaps between the initial repetitions of the word “Left” symbolize the absence
of the corresponding “right” as well as the long length of the Russian soldiers’ marching
steps (Sample 40). The sequence “Parade,rade,rade;parade,rade,rade” is an evident
onomatopoeia of the sound of the passing army. The rest of the paragraph, with its
191 profusion of adverbs and its rolling prosody, emulates the mind-numbing, soul-killing
effect of the Soviet regime. As Norman Friedman affirms in his afterword to the 2007
edition of Eimi, Cummings’ experimental prose, which contains abbreviations, multiple
typographical devices, compounds, grammatical-syntactical shifts and word coinages,
aims to “embody his sense of timelessness in the midst of time, a vision which may
properly be seen as a form of transcendentalism” (455).
Cummings and Aragon also differ in their political attitudes. Aragon’s Dadaist
acceptance of randomness and chaos as the governing principles of the universe
eventually led him and other Dada members to believe in the redemptive power of the
communist revolution. In contrast, Cummings’ hope lies in individuality attained
through art. In this sense, Eimi—which, explains Cummings in his “Sketch for a
Preface” to the book’s 1958 edition, “stands
for the Greek word ειµι,” meaning “am” and
suggestive of Exodus III, 14: “I am that I am”
(xv)—can be viewed as “a monument” to the
individual’s ability to assert himself “over and
against both the concept of a meaningless
universe, and the oppressive political systems
that attempt to manufacture meaning in the
midst of this universe” (Huber 14), be they
left or right-wing. In other words, in Eimi
Fig. 70. Joan London and E. E. Cummings in
Moscow. 1931. Cummings remains faithful to free individual
expression and the self-sufficiency of art, the very principles of modernism that Aragon
came to reject when he embraced communism. At the end of The Adventures of
Telemachus there is destruction and nothingness. In Eimi, Cummings defies both
192 existential angst and collective idealism by proclaiming the indestructibility of the
individual and vociferously shouting: “I am.”
Yet, these differences, distinct as they may be, are not significant enough to conceal
how much Eimi owes to The Adventures of Telemachus and Dadaism. Eimi’s
protagonist is, characteristically, a young male artist/poet immersed in a heavily
distorted reality. There is no fictional plot as such, and the flow of the text is constantly
disrupted by parenthetical insertions, lists of words, shocking juxtapositions and all
sorts of verbal and typographical experiments. This is, for example, how Cummings
describes his arrival, bearing gifts, at a socialist family’s home in Moscow:
Battle into number 34 tram.
Un(having
allowed
others
to
cut
the
forward
swath)torn,descend(smothered in dismay—for we found no kopecks;then
the outraged tickettakeress bawled Comrades,pass your change:a Rouble has
arrived!)near oasis,trudge dimly to Kropotkin perioolok;dimly left, along
shady little streetless, past 3 smirking striplings;and without care enter a
positively black courtyard.
Now of these portals which might harbor a certain socialist family?—Not
here!(this unold nonman washing these Nfaded thinglesses recoils:terrified,
when I pronounce dimly the name—Not here!(that’s all she can say)
& carelessly beat retreat;overturning almost that “cultivated”looking(that
not young)nonman—who points,wordless,across the yard to a cleaner than
others(newer)portal
knock.
A child opens
193 “yah americanitz”
he semisomersaults with joy!(rushes ecstatically crying Come in)down a
short(The American is here!)hall. Returns,joyous;beckons
2 nonmen adorn a sunful porchless. 1(Hausfrauish,ample)=larger version
of Jill—1(tranquil,grandmothery)=something from my past? White ample
sit-bulges in a spicandspan frock. Neatandclean grandmother smile-rocks in
a black shawl. Both greet myself cordially. (208)
Like
most
Dadaist
fiction, Eimi is an urban
narrative, most of the action
taking place in Moscow,
Kiev, Odessa and Istanbul. Its
aesthetics is that of the
modern city, an industrialized
setting shaped by machines
Fig. 71. Margaret Bourke-White. Apartment buildings. Moscow. 1931. and crisscrossed by automobiles, trams, utility poles and locomotives. Like Dadaist
fiction, also, Eimi flouts literary propriety and subverts the conventions of the novelistic
genre through humor, playfulness, obscurity, incoherence and laughter. Perhaps as a
way to acknowledge Eimi’s debt to Dada, Cummings makes a nod to the movement
within the text. Early during his visit in Moscow, on Wednesday, May 13, he and his
guide, Virgil—also referred to as “mentor” in clear allusion to Telemachus’ tutor—visit
a “pseudonightclub” wherein Cummings, prodded by beer, goes on a “tirade against
collectivity” that attracts the attention of a Russian political policeman (Eimi xviii). A
potentially dangerous argument ensues—the policeman is listening—with Cummings
194 advocating the supreme distinctiveness of the artist while loudly praising the free
expression of the individual above collectivism, and Virgil defending the USSR,
questioning Cummings’ sanity and encouraging him to try to understand the communist
system better before criticizing it. “Da [yes in Russian],” says Virgil at one point of the
exchange, “(if I may interrupt)but what has this tirade to do with our present
circumstance.” “[D]ada,” replies Cummings. “Nothing—or the unthing which
everyone(except impossibly the artist)must become nearly by going to sleep” (48-49).
The scene comes Dadaistically to an end with Cummings bursting into laughter.
Cummings was not an “official” Dadaist. He didn’t experience New York protoDada first-hand. Neither did he take part in the movement’s foundation in Zurich nor in
its subsequent flourishing and demise in Paris. Yet, he was fully cognizant of its
principles, which, all in all, were naturally convergent with his own. More than any
other artistic tendency of the time, Dadaism offered Cummings the congenial context
and the formal means he needed to create his idiosyncratic, antagonistic poetry. Thanks
to Dada, and, more specifically, to the near-infinite aesthetic trails it blazed for modern
artists and writers, Cummings was able to compose two of the most disconcerting and
thus far most neglected pieces of American anti-fiction.
195 10. Dadaist Disgust in Nathanael West’s The Dream Life of Balso Snell
The beginnings of Dada were not the beginnings of
an art, but of a disgust. Disgust with the
magnificence of philosophers who for 3,000 years
have been explaining everything to us (what for?),
disgust with the pretentions of these artists-God’srepresentatives-on-earth . . . disgust with all the
catalogued categories, with the false prophets who
are nothing but a front for the interests of money,
pride, disease, disgust with the lieutenants of a
mercantile art made to order according to a few
infantile laws, disgust with the divorce of good and
evil, the beautiful and the ugly . . . Disgust finally
with the Jesuitical dialectic which can explain
everything and fill people’s minds with oblique and
obtuse ideas without any psychological basis or
ethnic roots. (From Tzara’s “Lecture on Dada,” see
Appendix H 277)
While in the past four decades there has been a profusion of in-depth critical studies of
Nathanael West’s last three novels—Miss Lonelyhearts (1933), A Cool Million (1934),
and The Day of the Locust (1939)—only cursory attention has been paid to his first
venture into full-length fiction writing. This chapter will show that The Dream Life of
Balso Snell (1931), arguably West’s most imaginative and experimental novel, reflects
not only the author’s natural Dadaist disposition, but also his enthusiastic adoption of
Dadaist principles resulting from his early reading of Dadaist literature and his personal
association with some members of the movement during his brief sojourn in Paris in
1926-27.
Since his high school years at New York’s De Witt Clinton, West showed an
inclination to emphasize the bizarre and the unusual of any subject. Although partly a
pose shared with many other self-proclaimed “decadent” young writers and artists of the
time, West’s relish for the abnormal and the grotesque was on the whole an unfeigned
one. He was fascinated by cruelty and its limits, and thought, if the recollection of one
196 of his early acquaintances is to be trusted, “in violent
terms and in terms of violence” (Martin, Art 32). His
fascination with witchcraft, occultism, mysticism,
insanity, and the world of dreams was conspicuous
years prior to his meeting with the French Dadaists and
early Surrealists.
In a time when success in the United States was
measured in terms of economic wealth exclusively,
West, who always regarded education as “social
behavior” (Martin, Art 37), took his firm stance against
conventionality by refusing to take school and college,
the sure passport to affluence and social prestige,
seriously. Determined not to follow the well-trodden
avenues to orthodox prosperity, but at the same time
eager to achieve some sort of non-institutionalized
Fig. 72. Nathanael West.
recognition, West became a satirist. It can be said that
his rebellious temperament, his urge to affront the bourgeois, and his early commitment
to the irrational and inexplicable derived from his opposition to a society he intuitively
despised, which endeavored to mould him and press worn-out values upon him. Sharply
aware that most aspects of American life touched on the grotesque, and, as Jay Martin
has put it, “almost unbearably sensitive to the paradoxes of his time” (Art 39), West was
resolved to make the American Dream run the gantlet of his morbid satire.
Like the Dadaists, West believed in what his friend Robert M. Coates described as a
“metaphysics of the accidentalness of doom” (Martin, Art 9), a chance world to be taken
as lightly as possible. It is in the random combination of circumstances, West believed,
197 in the unexpected and fortuitous that the true beauty of life resides. The allurement of
art—art being indistinguishable from life—can only be found in the chance
rearrangement of elements, in the spontaneous, free-flowing creative process. (It cannot
be left unsaid, however, that although the notion of the extemporariness of art was
fervently supported by both West and the Dadaists, it is a well known fact that West’s
novels were the result of a painfully slow process that entailed almost never-ending
writing, rewriting, editing, revising, and proofreading. The same, as discussed in
previous chapters, is true of the Dadaists, many of whom spent weeks or months in
improving their poems.)
West took great pleasure in indulging his predisposition to the Dadaist hoax as a
means of expressing his individuality and his rejection of prevailing rules of behavior.
In his high school years, he and his friends, to the bewilderment and annoyance of the
rest of the patrons, enjoyed crying at Chaplin’s comedies and laughing at tear-jerking
melodramas. On several occasions, during Prohibition, he is known to have taken his
friend Brae Rafferty to the synagogue and, introducing him as Mr. Fisher, purchased
port wine, which they drank with quantities of pistachio nuts. One night he became so
captivated by the symbolism of a medallion printed on the cover of a book of Oriental
philosophy that he carried the book to a tattoo parlor and had it copied on his arm. As
late as 1931, West thought of committing a purely Dadaist act in order to promote the
advancement of avant-garde writing. Theodore Dreiser had buffeted Sinclair Lewis’
face after Lewis had accused him of plagiarism. While this controversy was taking
place, West, an ardent admirer of Lewis’ work, told Martin Kamin, his editor as well as
the owner of a bookstore specializing in experimental modern writing: “I think I can get
a good deal of publicity for the movement by going up to court and slapping Dreiser’s
face” (Martin, Art 112).
198 West’s natural availability to Dada was reinforced by his vast, although untutored,
reading. In 1921, while West was a student at Brown University, the Booke Shop
opened at 4 Market Square in Providence. It specialized in modern literature and sold
American and English “little” magazines and the newest books by American, English,
and European authors. West, then the fortunate recipient of a $20 weekly allowance,
bought more books and magazines than he could read. By the time he graduated from
Brown (where he had been admitted because Tufts, the first university he attended, had
mistakenly submitted the much more
satisfactory transcripts of a namesake of
West’s), he had read classics like
Petronius, Suetonius, and Apuleius,
moderns such as Eliot, Pound, Joyce,
Yeats, Max Beerbohm, James Branch
Cabell,
and
Arthur
Machen,
and
admired the Dadaists “as comic writers
and experimentalists” (Martin, Art 68).
He was fascinated by the French
symbolists, was familiar with the life and
Fig. 73. George Grosz. Plate VII from Ecce Homo. 19221923. work of proto-Dadaist Alfred Jarry, and expressed continuing affection for
Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror, Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir (copies of both
of which Aragon had lent to Matthew Josephson as part of his Dadaist education),
Apollinaire’s Calligrammes, and Radiguet’s Le Bal du Comte d’Orgel. He admired
Schwitters’ Franz Müllers Drahtfrühling and the poetry of Hans Arp, and was a
habitual reader of the French Dadaist journal Littérature. His early satirical cartoons,
which he soon gave up to dedicate himself entirely to fiction, drew rather heavily on the
199 works of George Grosz, whose Ecce Homo—a portfolio of satirical lithographs and
color reproductions published in 1923, though many of the original drawings had been
completed some years before—West held in high respect and imitated in the drawings
he contributed to The Paradoxian in Camp Paradox—a summer camp in the
Adirondacks he attended in his teens—and later to Brown’s Casements and Brown Jug.
West’s admiration of the Dadaists and their works was not a passive one. Martin
holds that at least from the time he managed to leave Tufts on false credentials—this,
Cowley has remarked, “was the ethics of Dada” (Martin, Art 49)—he had been
interested in the literary hoax. While in
Brown, Jeremiah Mahoney remembers that
West was once accused by a classmate of
having made a poem by amalgamating two or
three Dadaist pieces. West next tried a similar
hoax in prose. For years he had read tales of
the outdoors in Field and Stream and Western
magazines,
and
was
aware
of
the
interchangeability of many of their episodes.
Following Tzara’s recipe to make Dadaist
Fig. 74. Field and Stream. December 1922. poems almost to the letter, he decided to write
tales of the outdoors by picking elements from different stories and recombining them
according to formula. He later explained to a woman in Hollywood how he had written
them: “He had gone,” she remembers, “to a secondhand bookstore and bought about a
hundred copies of outdoors magazines;” he then had cut them up and “blended and
spliced several stories together” (Martin, Art 108). He even managed to have one of the
stories, ironically entitled “A Barefaced Lie,” printed in the Overland Monthly in 1929.
200 In
1932,
shortly
after
the
publication of The Dream Life of Balso
Snell, West associated with editor
Alexander King to found Americana, a
journal of pictorial satire. In the fourth
issue Grosz and Gilbert Seldes became
associate editors and the magazine
found
its
style.
In
a
manifesto
expressing the policy of the magazine,
King, West, Grosz and Seldes, after
excoriating
republicans,
democrats,
socialists and communists in the best
Fig. 75. Americana. March 1933. Dadaist fashion, declared: “We . . . believe that our civilization exudes a miasmic stench
and that we had better prepare to give it a decent but rapid burial. We are the laughing
morticians of the present” (Madden 13). The magazine contained works by West, E. E.
Cummings, S. J. Perelman and Seldes, and consistently expressed the editors’ Dadaist
disgust with modern leaders and institutions, which is obvious in the above Dada-like
statement of purpose.
Jay Martin has explained West’s Dadaism in the following terms:
The malaise which produced dadaism [sic] in Europe in 1916 bloomed in
America to give West, in New York, Boston, and Providence, the same
evidence of modern absurdity that Malcolm Cowley, E. E. Cummings, and
Robert M. Coates found in Paris. West, a few years younger than they,
watched the spirit of Dada spring from native soil. He did not need to read
201 descriptions of the Paris scene published in Broom by Matthew Josephson
or in Vanity Fair by Edmund Wilson; he by no means formulated Dadaist
principles himself. But he made, on his own, the same decisive rejection of
society as his contemporaries. (Art 46)
That West’s Dadaist spirit was inborn and accentuated by his keen observation of the
absurdities of modern American life is unquestionable. Yet, the way he expressed his
vision of the world in his novels was greatly affected not only by the Dadaist literature
he applauded, but also by the forms of Dadaist literary and artistic expression he
discovered during his visit to the French capital. Need it or not, West did go to Paris “to
touch, however lightly, the literary scene” (Martin, Art 863), and to meet Louis Aragon,
Philip Soupault, Paul Éluard, and Max Ernst among others. His short stay in Paris from
October 1926 to January 1927 (in later accounts to his friends he sometimes extended
this period to several years) served West’s work in two ways. On the one hand, it
consolidated his naturally Dadaist stance and helped him find its adequate expression in
writing. On the other, by emphasizing and at times exaggerating the impact of his
Parisian stay on his writing, West found a way of validating his Dadaist literary
inclinations and of presenting himself as a non-political aesthete in a depression-ridden
America infested with politically-committed writers.
Begun before graduation from Brown, partially written in Paris, and not published
until 1931, The Dream Life of Balso Snell is Dadaist in form and content. West
acknowledged some of his Dadaist sources of inspiration in the leaflet “Through the
Hole in the Mundane Millstone,” printed to promote the novel by publishers David
Moss and Martin Kamin of Contact Editions, the same house which under the
management of Robert McAlmon had published Coates’ The Eater of Darkness in 1926
202 and Williams’ Spring and All in 1923. In this text West describes himself as “vicious,
mean, ugly, obscene and insane,” and compares himself in his use of “the violent
disassociated, the dehumanized marvelous, the deliberately criminal and imbecilic” to
Apollinaire, Jarry, Ribemont-Dessaignes, and Raymond Roussel (Wisker 153).
When he submitted the first manuscript of the novel to Kamin, West had as his
epigraph a quotation from Schwitters which succinctly summarized the novel’s import
as an attack against art: “Tout ce’que l’artiste crache, c’est l’art” [Everything the artist
expectorates is art]. Today Schwitters is best remembered for his Merzkunst collection
of Dadaist collages. By freely rearranging on
the canvas bits and pieces collected in the
city streets, Schwitters went beyond the
merely aesthetic aspirations of most of his
cubist precursors and succeeded in elevating
the expectorations of Western civilization to
the quality of art. The artistic value of his
compositions derived not solely from the
ornamental results obtained, but from the
alluring effect caused by the contemplation
of residual elements extracted from their
Fig. 76. First Edition of The Dream Life of Balso Snell.
Contact Editions. 1931. original functions and contexts.
West translated the Dadaist visual collage into an intertextual literary collage in The
Dream Life of Balso Snell by liberally naming, quoting and misquoting disparate writers
and artists of the past and present and by placing their words, the literary miasma of the
obsolete literary/artistic worlds, outside of their original context. In his attitude towards
art and literature, West seems to agree with Tzara that “art needs and operation. Art is a
203 pretension” (Tzara 16). The Trojan horse—a symbol of the world of art, modern
society, and the dreams of Western civilization—is West’s fictional canvas on which
the decontextualized debris is spread. Forced to enter the wooden horse of the Greeks
by the posterior opening of the alimentary canal because “the mouth was out of his
reach” and “the navel proved a cul-de-sac,” Balso, a middle-age bourgeois poet,
comically alludes to John Dryden’s poem “Annus Mirabilis” by exclaiming: “O Anus
Mirabilis!” (3). Upon discovering Nero’s last dying words—“Ah! Qualis . . . Artifex . . .
Pereo”—engraved “along the lips of the mystical portal,” Balso, “not to be outdone by
the actor-emperor,” carves with his penknife: “O Byss! O Abyss! O Anon! O Anan!”
(4). Stephen Dedalus’ final petition to God in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man—
“Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead” (Joyce 228)—is
mangled into: “O Beer! O Meyerbeer! O Bach! O Offenbach! Stand me now as ever in
good stead” (4). Some of the artists and writers mentioned in the novel are Daudet,
Picasso, George Moore, Ingres, Nietzsche, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, and Chekov.
The crime journal of the 12-year-old, tellingly named John Raskolnikov Gilson, entitled
The Making of a Fiend, smacks of Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground, while
Balso and the guide he meets inside the wooden horse bear obvious overtones of
Dante’s Divine Comedy. Structurally, The Dream Life of Balso Snell is a Dadaist
collage made up of fragments salvaged from what West looked upon as the wreckage of
the artistic/literary world. It is West’s way of thumbing his nose at the traditions of
Western art and literature.
Furthermore, the novel establishes a complex, multilayered dialogue with Dadaism
in general and with the Dadaist novel in particular, as well as with the commonly
accepted notions of literary genre. Literary biography, epistolary narration, journalism
and the crime novel are all present—and thoroughly dismantled and reconfigured—
204 within the text. As a consequence, Jason R. Marley has pointed out, readers are
“instigated to reconsider the manner in which we perceive literary conventions by
rethinking and reconsidering the boundaries that separate different genres” (160).
Generally dismissed by critics as juvenile, chaotic, incoherent, uneven, scatological, and
shapeless (Wyrick 356), The Dream Life of Balso Snell—like Coates’ The Eater of
Darkness and Vail’s Murder! Murder! with which it is intimately related—can be read
as a self-reflective, intertextual, Dadaist anti-novel.
Although West did not keep Schwitters’ quotation in his final draft—he replaced it
with Bergotte’s sentence: “After all, my dear fellow, life, Anaxagoras has said, is a
journey” (West 2)—the notion of art as refuse expressed in it and in Schwitters’ Merz
collages was retained and elaborated on in the guide’s voicing of George Moore’s
assertion that “art is a sublime excrement” (8). Books are the excrements of writers,
who in their turn feed on the feces of other writers. Literature feeds on its own fecal
matter. The books in the public library where John Raskolnikov Gilson used to spend
eight hours a day “smelt like the breaths of their authors; the books smelt like a closet
full of old shoes through which a steam pipe passes” (17). The people who frequent the
great libraries feed on the stultifying refuse of the past. They are the people “who search
old issues of the medical journals for pornography and facts about strange diseases; the
comic writers who exhume jokes from old magazines; the men and women employed
by the insurance companies to gather statistics of death” (17). The literary world is a
cesspool running over with rotting words, the excreta of authors. Miss McGeeney, one
of the bizarre characters Balso encounters on his odyssey along the horse’s bowels, is
writing the biography of Samuel Perkins, a man of whom “it has been said that he could
smell an isosceles triangle” (35). Perkins, in his turn, is the biographer of E. F.
Fitzgerald, who wrote the biography of D. B. Hobson, who wrote the biography of
205 Boswell. Miss McGeeney is proud to become another link in the symbolic literary
chain, and it seems to her “that someone must surely take the hint and write the life of
Miss McGeeney, the woman who wrote the biography of the man who wrote the
biography of the man who wrote the
biography of the man who wrote the
biography of Boswell. And that, ad
infinitum, we will all go rattling down the
halls of time, each one in his or her turn a
tin can on the tail of Doctor Johnson”
(33).
Mahoney the Aeropagite is a catholic
mystic who, when his suffering is not too
severe, composes verses in imitation of
Notker Balbus, Ekkenard le Vieux, and
Fig. 77. Nokter the Stammerer (c. 840-912). 11th century
manuscript. Hucbald le Chauve. He confides to Balso
that he has decided to write the biography of Saint Puce, “a great martyred member of
the vermin family” (10), a flea that was born, lived and died in the armpit of Jesus
Christ. In his prime, Saint Puce wandered far from his birthplace:
He roamed the forest of God’s chest and crossed the hill of His abdomen.
He measured and sounded the fathomless well, the Navel of our Lord. He
explored and charted every crevasse, ridge, and cavern of Christ’s body.
From notes taken during his travels he later wrote his great work, A
Geography of Our Lord. (10)
206 The notion of art and literature as unyielding waste matter is reinforced by the
novel’s ending, Balso’s involuntary seminal ejaculation as, in his dream, he makes
rapturous love to his old sweetheart, Mary McGeeney. The task of the Dadaist
artist/writer is to transform the ugly materials provided by the modern world into a
shocking, new, and thus attractive composition. “Dada,” wrote Tzara, “still is a bunch
of excrement, but we want to shit in different colors to ornament the zoo of art” (1).
Under this light The Dream Life of Balso Snell can be viewed as a colorful, fruitless
literary self-pollution.
West’s Dadaist disgust is not only directed against art and literature. The Dream
Life of Balso Snell is also a frontal attack on religion, philosophy, literary scholarship
and criticism, courtly love, bourgeois prudery and good taste, logicality, and, ultimately,
Western civilization and the artificiality of human existence.
West flouts the Old Testament by having the guide, a man with the word “Tours”
embroidered on his cap, tell Balso his blasphemous version of the story of Moses and
the burning bush. Moses, he assures him, had rebuked the bush by quoting the proverb,
“Good wine needs no bush,” to which the bush insolently replied: “A hand in the bush
is worth two in the pocket” (6). When Balso runs into Mahoney the Aeropagite, the
catholic mystic is naked except for a derby hat in which horns are sticking, and is
attempting to crucify himself with thumb tacks. Judaism also comes in for its share of
scatological satire. “The Semites,” Balso chants, quoting an oft cited passage from C.
M. Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta, “are like to a man sitting in a cloaca to the
eyes, and whose brows touch heaven” (8). Ironically, the eccentric and absurd Mahoney
is one who abides staunchly by the teachings of Saint Hildegarde, and who follows in
the intellectual footsteps of old sages and philosophers such as Marie Alacoque, Suso,
Labre, Lydwine of Schiedam, and Rose of Lima. The wisdom of the past, West seems
207 to be saying, has been masticated, digested and
defecated so many times that today only a watery
pulp remains.
After reading two letters written by Miss
McGeeney, which form part of a novel she is
writing in the manner of Richardson—another
master of the past—Balso, who thinks she is “a
fine figure of a woman” (56) and wants to please
her, praises her work by reeling off the following
Fig. 78. St. Margaret Mary Alacoque (16471690).
cliché-ridden piece of criticism:
A stormy wind blows through your pages, sweeping the reader breathless…
witchery and madness. Comparable to George Bernard Shaw. It is a drama
of passion that has all the appeal of wild living and the open road. There’s
magic in its pages, and warm strong sympathy for an alien race. (56-57)
West’s contempt for the bourgeois, to which his novels were addressed and,
paradoxically, his own family belonged, is made evident in the description of the play
John Raskolnikov Gilson intends to write. It will constitute his revenge against the type
of philistine, bourgeois audience his lover, Saniette, represents: “smart, sophisticated,
sensitive yet hardboiled, art-loving frequenters of little theatres” (30). The play will be
staged in a theatre patronized by the discriminating few: “art-lovers and book-lovers,
school teachers who adore the grass-eating Shaw, sensitive young Jews who adore
culture, lending librarians, publisher’s assistants, homosexualists and homosexualists’
assistants, hard-drinking newspaper men, interior decorators, and the writers of
208 advertising copy” (30). After flattering the audience and congratulating it on its good
taste, the entire cast will walk to the footlights and shout Chekov’s advice: “It would
prove more profitable for the farmer to raise rats for the granary than for the bourgeois
to nourish the artist, who must always be occupied with undermining institutions” (30).
In case the audience should misunderstand the message and align itself on the side of
the artist, the ceiling of the theatre will be made to open and “cover the occupants with
tons of loose excrement.” “After the deluge, if they so desire,” Gilson concludes, “the
patrons of my art can gather in the customary charming groups and discuss the play”
(31). Gilson and West knew, however, that such unsavory gesture will only raise the
temper of the audience. Like Gilson in his play, in The Dream Life of Balso Snell West
employed all the weapons at his disposal to affront the public. The world and the public
remained, for West and Dada, as “a hostile force to be fought, insulted or mystified”
(Cowley, Exile’s Return 149).
Courtly and romantic love is ridiculed in the last and longest section of West’s
novella, which is concerned with Balso’s dalliance with Janey Davenport, a “beautiful”
and “extraordinarily hunched” (149) crippled woman he meets in a dream within the
dream-frame of the novel. The line between dream and reality, diffuse from the first
page, is now rubbed out entirely as the reader is ushered into what West later termed the
“American super-realism” (Martin, Art 146). Janey, for whom Balso becomes “sick
with passion” (37), suffers from hydrocephaly, is endowed with one hundred and fortyfour teeth in rows of four, and carries the unborn child of a former lover in her hump.
When Balso makes a passionate attempt to seduce her, she fends him off and promises
she will yield up her “white and pink” (39) body to him only if he kills her former lover,
Beagle Darwin, who has betrayed her. Then she will commit suicide. To help him
accomplish his mission, Janey shows Balso two letters written to her by Beagle, in
209 which he explains in dramatic terms his reasons for not having taken her with him to
Paris. Balso is awakened from his dream within a dream by Miss McGeeney’s question:
“Well, what do you think of them?” (56). As it turns out, Beagle’s missives are part of
Miss McGeeney’s new novel. Of a sudden, Balso recognizes in Miss McGeeney his
former girlfriend, Mary McGeeney, and immediately steers her behind a clump of
bushes, where Mary lies down on her back with her hands behind her neck and her
knees wide apart. Against all the rites of polite and dignified courting, Balso delivers a
speech in which he, obviously unnecessarily, advocates the practice of sex with rather
preposterous political, philosophical, artistic, and temporal arguments before getting
down to business.
Ignoring an absurd comment made by Balso as he enters the horse—“If you desire
to have two parallel lines meet at once or even in the near future . . . it is important to
make all the necessary arrangements beforehand, preferably by wireless” (5)—the guide
welcomes Balso as an “ambassador from that ingenious people, the inventors and
perfectors of the automatic water
closet” (6) to the people who are the
heirs of Greece and Rome. Offended
by
such
civilization,
effrontery
Balso
to
Western
retaliates
by
naming what he deems its most
stupendous achievements: the Grand
Central Station, the Yale Bowl, the
Fig. 79. Hal Morey. Grand Central Station. c. 1930. Holland Tunnel, and the Madison Square Garden. The maximum realizations of modern
Western society, West seems to be saying, are sophisticated constructions designed to
host the faceless, grey masses of humanity without making any allowances for
210 individual expression. Individuality has been suppressed by society to such a degree that
the lives of men and women have become mere theatrical performances directed by
society. “How shall I receive the devastating news?” (52), Beagle Darwin asks himself
as he imagines the suicide of Janey Davenport. How does society expect him to react?
How is he supposed to act in order to satisfy the demands of the surrounding world?
Spontaneity, freedom, subjectivity, emotions, instinctual behavior are no more.
The Dream Life of Balso Snell is a sally of Dadaist disgust against everything
commonly held in respect, salted with liberal doses of gratuitous violence and off-color
or scatological humor. Gilson’s relationship with Saniette is akin to that of the artist
with the audience, which entails, Gilson believes, the infliction of violence upon the
latter. Accordingly, he abuses and beats up Saniette regularly. His killing of the idiot, a
mentally retarded dishwasher who “never smiled, but laughed continually” (18),
represents a paradigmatic Dada geste gratuite. Because he wants the police to believe
his motives, he will say that he had to cut his throat “in order to remain sane” (20), since
he fears that if he told his real motive, that he killed the idiot because the shape and
color of his throat, his laugh, and the fact that he did not wear a collar irked him, he
would not be believed. The pages of the novel are filled with anuses, excrement,
bowels, inflamed prostate glands, atrophied piles, hernias, warts, tumors, pimples,
sebaceous cysts, hard and soft chancres, cold sores, sties, and salt-encrusted nostrils,
aimed to affront the aesthetic sensibility of the reader.
The message the novel conveys is one of nihilism and destruction. Gerald Lockin
has argued that West’s nihilism is unique and thus different from Dada’s in that it
“encompassed not only 3,000 years of history, but all the possibilities of life itself.” For
West, “the future offered no hope.” On the contrary, Lockin opines, Dada was
“destruction, but it was a destruction with a better future in mind” (Madden 53). Lockin
211 draws upon Ribemont-Dessaignes to support his contention: Dada, the French Dadaist
thought, was aimed “at the liberation of the individual from dogmas, formulas and
laws” (Motherwell 102). However, while the streak of ontological optimism is intrinsic
in Ribemont-Dessaignes’ pronouncement (as it is, it must be noted, in any apology of
anarchic destruction), the idea of the possibility of a better future was never explicitly
expressed by any of the Dadaists. “[T]here is great destructive, negative work to be
done. To sweep, to clean,” wrote Tzara (see Appendix B 249). Dada did not look to the
future. Both West and Dada shared the notion that a thorough cleaning job must be
done. What was to be done when the job was finished did not occur to them until later
in their careers as they both, although in dissimilar ways, became allured by the
potentialities of communism. The Dream Life of Balso Snell is, like all Dadaist
literature and art, a time bomb in the living room of Western civilization, intended to
cause all-encompassing, indiscriminate destruction.
West’s Dadaist disgust towards art, literature, society, and life expressed in The
Dream Life of Balso Snell continued to manifest itself, albeit sporadically, in his next
three novels: in Miss Lonelyhearts’ “smile of an anarchist sitting in the movies with a
bomb in his pocket” (West 83), or in the “inanimate” exhibit of A Cool Million, which
featured among other Duchampesque sculptures “a Venus de Milo with a clock in her
abdomen, a copy of [Hiram] Power’s ‘Greek Slave’ with elastic bandages on all her
joints, a Hercules wearing a small, compact truss” (239). However, in Miss
Lonelyhearts, A Cool Million, and The Day of the Locust—novels all, as West said in an
interview, “of quite a different make, wholesome, clear, holy, slightly mystic and inane”
(Wisker 49)—the preoccupation with the self and its dreams explored in the first novel
gave way to social awareness and political side-taking. After the self-consciously
Dadaist effort of The Dream Life of Balso Snell, West “sought to imbue Dada’s
212 anarchic style of rebellion with a more focused, socially conscious orientation” (Veitch
17). As a result, his subsequent fiction has more to do with the politicized activities of
Surrealism than with the brilliantly ineffectual Paris Dada from which he had taken
inspiration. In that sense, argues Jonathan Veitch, one might say of West what Aragon
said of John Heartfield: “As he was playing with the fire of appearances, reality took
fire around him . . . John Heartfield was no longer playing. The scraps of photographs
that he formerly manoeuvred for the pleasure of stupefaction, under his fingers began to
signify” (17). West was no longer playing either. In his following novels, concludes
Veitch, he would “take the signifying practices of Depression-era America as his
subject” (17).
Written, West claimed in the same interview, as “a protest against writing books”
(Wisker 49), The Dream Life of Balso Snell reads like an intertextual anthology of
Dadaist disgust, and can be looked upon not only as the purest manifestation of West’s
literary Dada, but, due to the late date of its publication, as the kaleidoscopic cap to fulllength Dadaist fiction writing both in Europe and in America.
213 11. Gertrude Stein: The Mama of Dada?
And while we put on a show of being facile, we are
actually searching for the central essence of things,
and are pleased if we can hide it. (From Tzara’s
“Monsieur Antipyrine’s Manifesto,” Tzara 1)
No study of the American expatriates in Paris in the 1920s is complete without a section
dedicated to the “Sibyl of Montparnasse.” For more than forty years Gertrude Stein
managed, with no ostensible effort, to keep up with the latest tendencies in art and
literature and to forge, often to her distress, her own myth by projecting to the public the
image of the eccentric champion of
Modernism. From 1903, when she and
her then inseparable brother Leo settled
in the French capital, until shortly before
the outbreak of World War II, her atelier
at 27 rue de Fleurus was the first port of
call
of
most
new-come
American
expatriates and a haven of avant-garde
painters and writers. One can say with
no fear of exaggerating that Stein knew
“everybody who was anybody”—to use
Fig. 80. Alvin Langdon Coburn. Gertrude Stein. 1913.
the title of Janet Hobbouse’s biography of the author—in the Paris artistic/literary world
during the first four decades of the twentieth century.
Despite her desire to be duly recognized as a creative writer, her literary projects
were greatly overshadowed by her early association with Picasso’s Cubist coterie, her
renowned Saturday soirées, and her growing reputation as a pontifical matron of the
214 arts. It was not until Three Lives was published in 1909 that many of her
acquaintances—and not a few of her closest friends—learned that she was writing at all.
She was to remain mostly unread until the straightforward, public-oriented The
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas appeared in 1933.
The childish tone and impenetrable nonsensicality of most of her works caused
opposing responses among Stein’s limited readership. Those who professed they
understood what she was up to considered her the greatest innovator of modern
literature; those who could not make head or tail of it thought her the perpetrator of a
rather humorless literary joke. She was either not taken seriously or all too seriously,
worshipped or ridiculed, highly respected or referred to as the “sacred cow” of modern
literature and a “literary idiot” (Hoffman, M. J., Essays 76). Only after her death did her
works begin to receive proper critical
attention, and dispassionate attempts
were made to separate her writings
from
her
extremely
idiosyncratic
personality. Yet, it is my perception
that the sedulous insistence of most
Stein scholars on associating her
novel literary ways with the Cubist
Fig. 81. Man Ray. Gertrude Stein next to her portrait by
Picasso. 1922. pictorial innovations has led to a lopsided understanding of her work and of her position
in relation to Modernism in general and to specific manifestations of the European
avant-garde in particular. This chapter concerns itself with Stein’s connections with one
of such manifestations: Dada.
The interrelationship between Stein and Dada has been mentioned in passing by
various critics but never duly investigated. By the time Four Saints in Three Acts was
215 staged in the United States in 1934, Clifton Fadiman had given Stein the title of “The
Mama of Dada” (Hobbouse 173), and as such she was famous to reviewers and the
general public alike. In his 1920 article “The Disciples of Gertrude Stein,” Richard
Aldington considered Apollinaire “the first French apostle of Steinism,” and said of
Cendrars’ poetry that, although not “out-and-out Steinist,” it was “tainted” with the
same quality of unintelligibility (38). He also regarded Ribemont-Dessaignes, Soupault,
Aragon, Breton, Radiguet, Buffet-Picabia, J. Pérez Jorba, Pierre Albert-Birot, Paul
Dermée, and Céline Arnaud as Stein’s French “disciples” (40). Norman Weinstein has
felt “the connection between Tzara’s Dadaism and Gertrude Stein’s work tenuous but
worth considering” (105). Malcolm Brinnin has refused to recognize even a tenuous
connection. He has categorically asserted that “the Dadaists, led by Tzara, appeared
noisily in Paris in 1920, but Gertrude would have nothing to do with them,” and has
dismissed Fadiman’s phrase as a “mildly clever epithet . . . notable mainly for its total
inaccuracy” (228). Surprisingly, Dickran Tashjian does not even address the issue in his
Skyscraper Primitives, where he mentions Stein only once to clarify a reference to her
Tender Buttons in E. E. Cummings’ Harvard graduation lecture (166). More recently,
Sarah Bay-Cheng has explored the connections of Stein’s plays and theories with those
generated by Dadaism, Surrealism and Futurism. Yet, the primary goal of Bay-Cheng’s
notable Mama Dada: Gertrude Stein’s Avant-Garde Theater (2005) is not to illuminate
Stein’s relationship with Dadaism but to examine her dramatic production within the
history of the theatrical and cinematic avant-gardes and to establish a relationship
among the histories of avant-garde drama, cinema and homosexuality.
Stein was cognizant of Dada, and even had her own, rather imprecise, theory about
its birth: “Picabia had found him [Tzara] in Switzerland during the war and they had
together founded Dadaism and out of Dadaism, with a great deal of struggle and
216 quarreling came Surréalism” (Autobiography 264). However, as it was the case with
most of her relationships with the avant-gardists, Stein was interested in the Dadaists as
individuals rather than as writers and artists. She was particularly fond of René Crevel,
a Dadaist and early practitioner of Surrealism, whom she described as “young and
violent and ill and revolutionary and sweet and tender.” Her attitude towards him was
characteristically condescending: “he wrote her most delightful english letters, and she
scolded him a great deal.” Crevel and Duchamp, she thought, were the best examples of
“the french charm” (Autobiography 318). Apollinaire, Satie, Aragon, Hartley, Man Ray,
Picabia—whom she dubbed “the Leonardo da Vinci of the movement” (Autobiography
180)—and Tzara—with whom she became friendly for a period, “but never felt the
stimulation others professed to find
in his fiery career” (Brinnin 229)—
were habitual visitors to Stein’s
home.
The Dadaists, however, seem to
have had no tangible impact on
Stein’s ways and work. At the time
they irrupted in Paris in 1920 Stein
was a middle-aged woman with a
Fig. 82. Man Ray. Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein in their
atelier at 27, rue de Fleurus. 1922. conservative “taste for the old-fashioned amenities of daily existence” (Brinnin 229).
For almost twenty years she had managed to accommodate to the ever-changing flow of
the European avant-garde without participating in her contemporaries’ tendency to
spend half of their time—all of it in the case of the Dadaists—looking for new ways to
épater la bourgeoisie, of which, in any case, she was a member. Also, Stein did not like
to read or write French (although she enjoyed speaking it immensely), which made her
217 unavailable not only to Dada but to most of the contemporary French literary coteries.
Furthermore, a few years prior to Dada’s arrival in Paris Stein had already achieved the
maximum realization of her literary theories. The process towards abstraction that had
begun with Three Lives had continued in The Making of Americans (in which she did
away with plot, chronology, and logical causality in order to investigate the “bottom
nature” of all the human beings who ever were, are, and will be), and concluded In
Tender Buttons, in which the literary work became an entity in itself, independent of the
constraining conventions of mimesis and linguistic denotation. During the rest of her
career, Stein’s works would be elaborations on these experiments with no major
qualitative changes and very little attention to the works of other writers.
Despite her never having been a Dadaist of program or of spirit, a number of
similarities between Stein and Dada are easily identifiable. They were both bent on
making a clean sweep of the past, on, to use Stein’s own words, “killing it dead, quite
like a gangster with a mitraillette” (Hobbouse 1). The obliteration of the past entailed
the destruction of reason, mimesis, one-point perspective, and linguistic denotation, all
of which had become inoperative in a century in which “nothing is in agreement, neither
the round with the cube, neither the landscape with the houses, neither the large quantity
with the small quantity” (Stein, Selected Writings 142). Stein and Dada stood at the
front of a general attack against logic. They set out to turn conventional language inside
out in order to upset the public’s apprehension of the world and to lead them into a
realm of aesthetic values foreign to their practical, everyday life. Syntax, irretrievably
grounded on laws of direct causality and linear time, was no longer able to express the
spirit of the time. In their breakaway from traditional literary mores, Stein and Dada
ridiculed the use of literary genres in which reality has been customarily encapsulated.
Stein wrote short plays with no characters divided in dozens of acts, novellas without a
218 plot, and poems in prose. Her works, like Dada’s, were “visual and fragmented,” using
none of the techniques valued by literary tradition (Bay-Cheng 37). Both Stein and
Dada chose to conceal themselves behind a child-like attitude in an attempt to become
immune to the harsh contradictions of modern reality. Stein’s childish naïveté was
egoistic and self-indulgent; Dada’s mischievous and self-destructive. Stein and Dada
sought to cause the reader to experience a qualitative leap beyond meaning, leaving
behind the triviality of the printed word. In her very insightful, although somewhat
emotionally biased, article entitled “Speculations, or Post-Impressionism in Prose”
(1913), Mabel Dodge referred to this transcendent quality in Stein’s work:
In one part of her writing she made use of repetition and the rearranging of
certain words over and over, so that they became adjusted into a kind of
incantation, and in listening one feels that from the combination of repeated
sounds, varied ever so little, that there emerges gradually a perception of
some meaning quite other than that of the contents of the phrases. Many
people have experienced this magical evocation, but have been unable to
explain in what way it came to pass, but though they did not know what
meaning the words were bearing, nor how they were affected by them, yet
they had begun to know what it all meant, because they were not indifferent.
(Hoffman, M. J., Essays 28)
Thus, through repetition of words, phrases, and sentences, Stein’s prose acquires an
almost-indefinable incantatory quality very much in tune with what the Dadaists
struggled to achieve in their poetry. On June 23, 1916 Ball premiered his “Verse ohne
Worte” [poems without words] and “Lautgedichte” [sound poems] at the Cabaret
219 Voltaire. It was his intention to renounce an adulterated linguistic system built upon
trite associations. In order to do this he returned to the elements of poetry, the noise and
articulated sound, which are fundamental to all languages. His appearance on the stage
(see fig. 23, p. 58) was a most shocking one. His legs were in a cylinder of shiny blue
cardboard that came up to his hips. Over the cylinder he wore a huge coat collar cut out
of cardboard, scarlet inside and gold outside, which hardly allowed him to raise and
lower his arms. He began, solemnly:
gadji beri bimba
glandridi lauli lonni cadori
gadjama bim beri glassala
glandridi glassala tuffm i zimbrabim
blassa galassasa tuffm i zimbrabim. (Ball 70)
Gradually, “the stresses became heavier, the emphasis was increased as the sound of the
consonants became sharper” (Ball 70), until the heavy vowel sequences and the
stomping rhythm gave him a crescendo that led him into an incantatory chant. The
method, contrived by Ball and later employed by Schwitters, Hausmann and other
Dadaists, was that of repetition and slight alteration of “words” and sounds “accessible
to all five senses” (Motherwell xxviii), very similar to the iterative variations used by
Stein in her word portraits, the only difference being that Stein used existing words,
only to empty them of their meaning:
This one was working and something was coming then, something was
coming out of this one then. This one was one and always there was
220 something coming out of this one and always there had been something
coming out of this one. This one had never been one not having something
coming out of this one. This one was one having something coming out of
this one. This one had been one whom some were following. This one had
been one was one whom some were following. This one was one whom
some were following. This one was being one whom some were following.
This one was one who was working. (From Stein’s “Picasso,” Selected 294)
László Moholy-Nagy has compared Stein’s techniques with Schwitters’. Without
“trying to define Schwitters’ peculiar poetic quality,” he has written,
it can be said that most of his
writing is emotional purgation,
an outburst of subconscious
pandemonium . . . His verbal
‘collages’ are good examples
of this. There the current of his
thoughts
is
mixed
with
seemingly random quotations
from newspapers, catalogues
Fig. 83. Kurt Schwitters. Merz 94 Grunflec. 1922. and advertising copy. With this
technique—like Gertrude Stein—he uncovers symptoms of social decay
known to all, but neglected or dodged in a kind of self-defense. (Motherwell
xxviii)
221 Absurdity and lack of meaning are characteristics shared by Stein and the Dadaist
writers. In an experiment contrived with the purpose of disparaging Stein’s nonsensical
work, Stuart Pratt Sherman wrote down about one hundred words on a sheet of paper,
cut them apart, separated them into piles according to parts of speech, shuffled them,
aligned them, and added punctuation. The result, truly similar to many of Stein’s
compositions, not only demonstrated how much the executor of the test disliked Stein’s
work, but also came to illustrate the shocking similitude between her literary
productions and Tzara’s, regardless of their dissimilar methods of composition and
underlying intentions (Stein’s revolution was strictly intellectual and literary, whereas
most of the literature by Tzara and the Dadaists represented an act of revolt against the
world and an attack on literature itself):
Real stupidity; but go slowly. The hope slim. Drink gloriously! Dream!
Swiftly pretty people through daffodils slip in green doubt. Grandly fly
bitter fish; for hard sunlight lazily consumes old books. Up by a sedate
sweet heart roar darkly loud orchards. Life, the purple flame, simply
proclaims a poem. (Pratt Sherman’s experiment in Reid, B. L. 12)
Best to shut in broken cows with mud and splinters and little pieces of gain
and more steel doors a better aches and a spine and a cool school and
shouting, early mounting and a best passion and a bliss and a bliss and a
bliss. No wide coal gas. (“Shout,” from Stein’s IIIIIIIIII, in Geography and
Plays 198)
Prices they are yesterday suitable next pictures / appreciate the dream era of
222 the eyes / pompously that to recite the gospel sort darkens / group
apotheosis imagine said he fatality power of colours / carved flies (in the
theatre) flabbergasted reality a delight / spectator all to effort of the no more
10 to 12 / during divagation twirls descends pressure / render some mad
single-flesh on a monstrous crushing stage. (From Tzara’s “when dogs cross
the air in a diamond like ideas and the appendix of the meninx tells the time
of the alarm programme,” Tzara 39)
Stein’s contribution to Dada was in the form of word portraits, a link between the
early narrative notions developed in Three Lives and The Making of Americans, and the
abstract illogicality of Tender Buttons. From her early days as a writer, Stein had shared
with the naturalists the belief that character, the essence of a human being, was not
likely to change and thus remained unaltered during a person’s lifetime. She held that
character manifested itself in repetitions of speech. The innermost psychological
subtleties of human behavior were conveyed to others not through actions but through
utterances reiterated with slight variations over and over in the course of somebody’s
life. Since, it was her contention, the aim of the writer was to disclose the character of
his/her subjects to the reader, “what is themselves inside them” (Stein, Lectures 173),
and given that character was unaffected by external circumstances, Stein felt free to
ignore plot, action, context, and chronological time in her narratives and word-portraits.
The “bottom nature” of her subjects, “the rhythm of anybody’s personality” (Stein,
Lectures 174), can only be conveyed in the present. Only by remaining in the present
can the reader “catch the intensity of movement” inside the subjects and understand
“what is moving inside them” (Stein, Lectures 183), which confronted Stein with the
difficulty of prolonging the present time in her portraits. She solved this problem by
223 resorting to cinema techniques. Like a film, her portraits are made of sentences that
differ ever so little from the sentences preceding them. Like every single photogram in a
moving picture, each of Stein’s slightly changed sentences obliterates the past and
becomes a continuous starting over, thus eliminating the notions of beginning, middle
and end paramount in conventional narrative. Stein’s portraits are a tail-swallowing
process the aim of which is to make the reader have an all-at-once, ever-present
experience. In most cases the words that form the word portraits bear no resemblance to
the subject they portray. They are chosen at the moment of writing for their power to
suggest what Stein felt to be the essence of the subject. She tried to do what
Shakespeare had done in the forest of Arden when “he had created a forest without
naming the things that make the forest” (Stein, Lectures 236), for, she thought, if you
name something, “why write about it?” (Stein, Lectures 210).
In 1912, Mrs. Knoblauch, an old friend of Stein’s from her Johns Hopkins’ years,
determined to find a publisher for Stein’s work in America, turned to Alfred Stieglitz,
who, with his Photo-Secession Gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue in New York—familiarly
known as 291—had already
established
himself
as
a
recognized champion of new
notions in art and literature.
On
February
26,
1912,
Stieglitz wrote Stein a letter
offering to publish her wordFig. 84. Henri Matisse. Blue Nude (Souvenir de Biskrà). 1907. Printed as a
half-tone reproduction in the August 1912 Special Number of Camera Work. portraits
of
Picasso
and
Matisse in a special number of Camera Work which he intended to accompany with
reproductions of paintings by her subjects to illustrate the texts. Stein, he opined, had
224 “undoubtedly succeeded in expressing Matisse and Picasso in words” (Gallup 57-58).
The publication of “Picasso” and “Matisse” in Camera Work in August 1912 was
followed by a reprint in its June, 1913 issue of the “Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa
Curonia,” which had been originally printed in Florence in October 1912. Both events
had a strong impact on the works of Marsden Hartley and Francis Picabia and were
instrumental to the origination and development of their pictorial object-portraits.
The object-portrait (also called machine-portrait) attempted to capture the essence
of the subject by rearranging the outer world into unsuspected new associations. Like
Stein’s word-portraits, it repudiated likeness and substituted in its place a “new
symbolic associative language” (Mellow 189). It was born among the artists of the
Stieglitz’ and Arensberg’s groups in New York (Picabia, Hartley, Morton Schamberg,
Charles Demuth, and Marius de Zayas among others). Its practice extended from around
1915 till the late 1920s, its formal resources having been drawn from Cubism (collage)
and the machinist aesthetics of New York’s proto-Dada. By the time the object-portrait
gained currency among the Dadaists (it was introduced to the Zurich and Paris Dadaists
by Picabia), its original source of inspiration, Stein’s portraits of Picasso, Matisse and
Mabel Dodge, had fallen into oblivion.
That Picabia was familiar with Stein’s work we know from Mabel Dodge. He had
been invited to her salon as soon as he had arrived in New York in early 1913 and
immediately presented with Stein’s “Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia.” The
portrait would appear four months later in Camera Work together with one of Picabia’s
preliminary manifestos of what was to become the New York branch of Dada and
Company. In a letter dated February 13, 1913, Mabel Dodge told Stein about the
painter: “Picabia the painter is here and very intelligent and understands it all [the
portrait] perfectly. I asked him to write down what he said and will send it to you. I will
225 give him a letter to you as you and
Leo will both (strangely enough)
like him” (Gallup 74-75). Although
there is no evidence that Picabia ever
got around to writing and sending to
Stein his opinion of the portrait, a
chronological study of his paintings
reveals the significant fact that his
most consistent development of the
object-portrait began around 1915,
soon after his first meeting with
Stein. It was in that year that he
Fig. 85. Francis Picabia. Portrait pour rire de Max Jacob. 1915. produced his most representative object-portraits, of which Volilà Haviland (a portable
lamp copied from an advertisement), Gabrielle-Buffet She Corrects Manners
Laughingly (an automobile windshield), and Portrait pour rire de Max Jacob (a
flashlight) are examples. That Stein’s literary invention, the abstract word-portrait,
provided the inspiration for the equally innovative object-portraits of Picabia seems
unquestionable. Michael J. Hoffman’s contention (51) that the literary portrait was
already in vogue in France in the late seventeenth century, particularly at the salons of
Mlle. Montpensier and Madeleine de Scudéry, is not detrimental to Stein’s seminal role
in her own time as she was not familiar with them and her portraits stemmed from
visual techniques rather than literary.
Hartley had first visited Stein on his inaugural trip to Europe in the spring of 1912.
During the fall of the same year he wrote Stein from Germany asking her if he “might
have the privilege of again seeing the paintings you have which I enjoyed seeing in the
226 spring” (Gallup 64). He also commented on Stein’s portraits on Camera Work: “It
seems to me a very worthy presentation of your interpretation of the two artists
concerned. I think your articles very interesting. They seem to get as close to the
subjects in hand as words can go” (Gallup 65). The following year segments of Stein’s
“play” IIIIIIIIII were printed in the catalogue for Hartley’s exhibition at 291 which
opened in January 1914. These segments included three speeches extracted from what
was intended to be a word-portrait of the painter, followed by “Points,” which
incorporated a few more of Hartley’s
isolated lines, and “The Wedding.” About
the complete play, of which Stein had sent
him a copy before publication, Hartley
wrote: “It seems to have another kind of
dynamic power—a kind of shoot to it and I
feel my own color very much in what I
say—my own substance” (Mellow 187). In
a later letter he expressed his enthusiasm
Fig. 86. Marsden Hartley. One portrait of One Woman
(Gertrude Stein). 1916. and indebtedness to Stein’s work: “I have
always liked very much what I have read of yours because it always had for me a new
sense of depth and proportions in language—a going into new places of
consciousness—which is what I want to do also—to express a fresh consciousness of
what I feel and see around me—taken directly out of life and from no theories and
formulas as prevails so much today” (Gallup 259). Hartley’s adoption of the objectportrait was an early one and had direct links with Stein.
The genre went full circle when Dada’s object-portrait found its literary counterpart
in the “critical synthesis,” Dada’s own form of literary criticism, the point of which, as
227 Albert-Birot’s widow has explained, was to give an impression of the work in question
without the critic intervening or talking directly about it (Tzara 67). This new form of
literary review was intended to be a form of digest in which the intelligent reader could
surmise the critic’s opinion of the work. This is a fragment of a critical synthesis written
by Tzara on Albert-Birot’s Trente et un poèmes de poche:
Irregular necklaces of houses, green fir trees. Each notion in its own box: an
atmosphere in a box of matches and speed captured; insects, trams, crawling
up towards a glass head. To say: futurism for young ladies, an explosion in a
convent school and, squashed under soft pillows, new landscapes? (Tzara
67)
From all the above evidence, it can be concluded: that the title of Mama of Dada,
although an appropriate one to suggest the age difference between Stein and the
Dadaists and her patronizing rapport with them, is inaccurate in terms of her actual
impact on the movement; that, consequently, the Dadaists were not Stein’s disciples in
the strictest sense of the word; that, despite her not being a Dadaist, Stein shared with
Dada a number of significant characteristics which place them both in the same creative
tidal wave that spread over the world in the beginning of the twentieth century under the
names of Futurism, Vorticism, Expressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Dadaism, and
Surrealism; and that Dada’s own pictorial genre, the object- or machine-portrait,
originated from Stein’s word-portraits and later developed into Dada’s own form of
literary criticism—the critical synthesis. Contrary to Weinstein’s and Brinnin’s
contentions (see p. 216), Stein’s connections with Dada were much more than tenuous
and definitely worth considering.
228 12. Conclusions
Compared with other artistic movements of the twentieth century, such as
Expressionism, Cubism, or Conceptual Art, Dada was a short-lived phenomenon. A
mere six years separates its spontaneous birth in Zurich in 1916—a century ago as I
write these lines—and the controversy over Breton’s Paris Congress in early 1922,
which triggered Dada’s official—albeit not practical—demise and the subsequent
takeover of Surrealism as the leading creative force in Paris and, soon after, around the
globe. Also ephemeral were most of Dada’s activities and output. The corpus of Dadaist
magazines, poems, plays, novels, memoirs, manifestos, and art pieces available for
study today is but the miniscule, tangible tip of the enormous, unrecorded and, thus,
forever irretrievable iceberg of exuberant creative fermentation that was Dada during
the late 1910s and throughout the 1920s. Dada’s true legacy, I believe, is not so much
what the Dadaists achieved, but what, through the dissemination of their spirit and
ideas, they enabled others to achieve.
Without Dada, says Jed Rasula, “modern
life as we know it would look very, very
different—in fact, barely even modern”
(xvii).
Among the groups that acknowledged
a debt to Dada after World War II are
Gutai in Japan, Fluxus in New York, and
the Nouveaux Réalistes in Paris. Later on
Dada cleared the ground for artists, writers, intellectuals and groups as diverse as Joseph
Fig. 87. Saburo Murakami. Passing Through. 1956.
Beuys, William S. Burroughs, Oulipo, Jasper Johns, Marshall McLuhan, the Beatles,
229 Walter Benjamin, Samuel Beckett, Andy Warhol, Monty Python, Robert Coover,
Talking Heads, Robert Rauschenberg, David Bowie, and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
“Without Dada,” affirms Rasula, “we would have no mash-ups, no samplings, no
photomontages, no happenings—not even Surrealism, or Pop art, or punk” (xvii). There
would be no installation art without Dada, no performance art, no postmodernism “as
we know it.” Without Dada, none of the
novels and short stories examined in this
thesis would have been written.
The Dadaists believed fiction had
become a bourgeois pastime and thus
rejected it as a means for the expression of
their tenets. However, in a characteristic
Dadaist paradox, some Dadaists—namely
Hugo Ball, Kurt Schwitters, Louis Aragon,
Francis Picabia, Philippe Soupault, George
Fig. 88. Jean-Michel Basquiat. Untitled (Skull). 1981. Ribemont-Dessaignes, and André Breton—did write novels and short stories. Recurrent
themes in Dada fiction are violence, erotic perversion, action for action’s sake,
revolutionary destruction, praise of the machine, suicide, gratuitous crime, and a passion
for primal ways of thought. The Dadaist fiction heroes are unhinged men on the verge
of insanity or young male artists/poets eager to fulfill their creative potential who
engage in activities that are either inherently nonsensical or blatant distortions of reality.
Plot is either abolished or heavily disrupted. Most Dadaist works of fiction are set in the
city. A new, Dadaist beauty exists in cars, street signs, subways, skylines, neon lights,
sirens and mechanical devices. Dadaist fiction—including the American novels and
short stories mentioned below—attacks society, morality, art, literature, reason, culture,
230 and the past. It conveys a message of nihilistic anarchism enveloped in morbid humor
and neurotic laughter. Like Dadaist art, theater and poetry, Dadaist fiction celebrates
irreverence, parody, and chance.
Robert M. Coates saw a great deal of the Dadaists during the six years he spent in
France in the 1920s. Although, like the other American writers examined in these pages,
he never became an official member of the group, he felt naturally attracted to its
lighter, playful side. By writing The Eater of Darkness (1926), he enthusiastically
joined Dada’s scheme to mock human existence and its implications—love, hate, sex,
social mores, reason—which he depicted as one big senseless hoax that must not be
taken seriously but healthily ridiculed. True to its Dadaist inspiration, The Eater of
Darkness reads like a tongue-in-cheek manifesto against the conventions of fiction
writing—it can be viewed, in fact, as an irreverent catalog of Dadaist narrative themes
and techniques—and, ultimately, like a full-blown parody of Dada itself.
As opposed to Coates, who was mostly interested in Dada’s impish side, Djuna
Barnes drew inspiration from the group’s darker, despondent attitude towards modern
existence. Her short story “The Little Girl Continues” (1925) describes the death of
young French Dadaist Raymond Radiguet, whom Barnes had met in Paris through the
offices of Man Ray. Barnes knew the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven well—a
manuscript found in 1979 shows that she had intended to write a fictionalized account
of the Baroness’ life, but the project was never completed. She also kept a long-term
correspondence with Laurence Vail, considered by Tzara one of the fathers of Dadaism.
The mark of Dada is visible in four of Barnes’ short stories dealing with some of the
group’s main concerns: “The Perfect Murder” (1942)—gratuitous violence; “The
Doctors” (1921)—suicide; “The Terrorists” (1917)—destruction and revolution; and “A
Night Among the Horses” (1918)—the tensions between instinct and civilization.
231 William Carlos Williams’ attitude toward Dadaism was ambivalent. On the one
hand he regarded it as a decadent European phenomenon that he did not understand but,
he felt, should be ignored by American artists. On the other, he admitted its impact on
his work by candidly stating that, although he had not originated Dada, he had it in his
soul to “write it” (Imaginations 48). Despite this conflicting stance, Williams made
ample use of the radical strategies of Dadaism—which he had admired since he first
met Duchamp in New York in 1915—in order to compose four of his more
experimental and less studied texts, namely: Kora in Hell (1920), Spring and All (1923),
The Great American Novel (1923), and the purely Dadaist A Novelette (1932). More
than any other avant-garde movement of the time, Dadaism provided Williams with the
techniques (illogicality, collage, parody, contradiction, playfulness, confrontation,
automatic writing, chaos) and the conceptual scaffolding he needed to pursue his selfappointed—and intrinsically Dadaist—mission to wipe out and revive American
literature.
A popular figure among the artistic coteries of Montparnasse during the 1920s,
Laurence Vail was the natural embodiment of the Dada Spirit as well as the author of a
quintessentially Dadaist novel, Murder! Murder! (1931), whose protagonist, Martin
Asp, seeks to liberate himself from dogmas, laws and morality through the exertion of
violence and the commitment of an unmotivated crime. By killing someone without a
reason, Asp, in line with Dada’s radical notions on violence and destruction, aspires to
affirm his own existence in a stifling, soul-killing society. As his attempts to turn
himself in to the police and, thus, make his gratuitous act effectual, meet with failure,
his torrential jocularity turns into deep ontological despondency. Ultimately, murder
and violence become as ineffective in Murder! Murder! as Dada itself in the cultural
life of its time.
232 Although, as per his own account, he felt “squeamish” (Best Times 160) about
Dada’s riotous public manifestations, a careful reading of John Dos Passos’ works from
the mid 1910s to the mid 1920s reveals the presence of a number of Dadaist poetic and
pictorial techniques (juxtaposition, nonlinear structure, multiple perspectives,
fragmentation, chance, simultaneity) that Dos Passos absorbed in part through his
appreciation of collages by Duchamp, Arp, Ernst, Schwitters, Picabia and other artists
associated with Dada, in part through his friendships with, and admiration of, the works
of Dadaists Louis Aragon and George Grosz, and proto-Dadaist Blaise Cendrars. Such
techniques became particularly evident in his first mature novel, Manhattan Transfer
(1925), which represents Dos Passos’
attempt to come to grips with the
contradictions of modern urban life and to
keep up with the latest developments in
literature and the arts.
E. E. Cummings was well aware of
the principles of Dadaism, which, in a
general way, were naturally convergent
with his own. As it was the case with
Williams, Dada offered Cummings the
congenial context and the formal tools he
Fig. 89. Poster for the Dada Universal exhibition at the
Zurich National Museum. 2016. needed to create his highly idiosyncratic
poetry. Thanks to Dada, also, to the innumerable new paths it opened for modern
writers and artists, Cummings was able to compose two of the more perplexing and, to
this date, less studied pieces of American anti-fiction: [No Title] (1929), the most
Dadaist of his works, consisting of eight plotless, undecipherable short stories whose
233 main purpose seems to be to destroy the conventions of short story writing and
challenge the reader’s sense of narrative; and Eimi (1933), a complex, radically
experimental account of Cummings’ five-week journey to Russia in 1931, heavily
indebted to Louis Aragon’s Dadaist novel The Adventures of Telemachus, which
provided Cummings with a precedent for the undoing and revamping of the epic genre.
Nathanael West took great pleasure in indulging his predisposition to the Dadaist
hoax as a means of expressing his individuality and his disgust at the prevailing rules of
behavior. Like the Dadaists, he believed in what his friend Robert M. Coates called a
“metaphysics of the accidentalness of doom” (Martin, Art 9), a world dominated by
chance which should be taken as lightly as possible. The Dream Life of Balso Snell
(1931), West’s first and arguably most imaginative novel, reflects the author’s inborn
Dadaist inclinations and his eager acceptance of Dadaist beliefs resulting from his early
reading of Dada literature (he was a habitual reader of the French Dadaist journal
Littérature and admired Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, Lautréamont’s Les Chants de
Maldoror, Radiguet’s Le Bal du Comte d’Orgel, the poetry of Hans Arp, and Kurt
Schwitters’ incomplete novel Franz Müllers Drahtfrühling), from his admiration of
George Grosz’ satirical drawings, and from his personal association with some
members of the group—Aragon, Soupault, Éluard, Ernst, etc.—during his brief sojourn
in Paris in 1926-27.
Gertrude Stein was familiar with the Dadaists, and even had her own, rather
inaccurate theory about the foundation of the movement. She was very fond of René
Crevel who, together with Duchamp, Satie, Aragon, Man Ray, Picabia, Tzara, and
others, was a habitual visitor to her Parisian home. Yet, Stein was interested in the
Dadaists as individuals rather than as writers and artists, and they seem to have had no
influence on her literary work, which, by the time they irrupted in Paris in 1920, had
234 already achieved its maximum level of experimentation. In fact, it was she who had an
influence on the Dadaists. Dada’s own pictorial genre, the object- or machine-portrait,
as practiced by Picabia, Marsden Hartley, and others, originated from Stein’s subjective
word-portraits of Picasso, Matisse and Mabel Dodge, later developing into Dada’s own
brand of literary criticism: the critical synthesis.
In addition to their Dadaist nature, the novels and short stories analyzed in this
study have in common that they are intrinsically intertextual. In her 1966 essay “Word,
Dialogue and Novel,” Julia Kristeva, working from Bakhtinian terms such as dialogue
and ambivalence, affirms that “any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any
text is the absorption and transformation of another” (37). During the last five decades,
Kristeva’s theory of intertextuality has been revised and elaborated upon by a number of
authors, such as Harold Bloom (1973), Tzvetan Todorov (1981), Gérard Genette (1982),
George P. Landow (1992), and Omar Calabrese (1992). Intertextuality, it must be
understood, is not a rigid doctrine but a flexible set of interconnected theoretical
proposals. Theorists of intertextuality, however, agree with Kristeva on the fundamental
premise that texts cannot exist as autonomous unities. Texts are made possible by prior
texts which they take up, repeat and challenge. Since writers are readers of texts before
they are creators of texts, their work is inevitably interspersed with influences of every
kind. Likewise, the act of reading involves not only the actual textual material, but all
the texts—in the broader sense—the reader has read before (Worton and Still 1-2). In
Kristeva’s words: “[E]ach word (text) is an intersection of words (texts) where at least
one other word (text) can be read” (37).
The fiction works with which this thesis is concerned are intertextual at three
different—and often overlapping—levels. Firstly, they are built upon previous “texts;”
that is, they cannot be fully comprehended without a knowledge of the numerous
235 cultural discourses they allude to, parody, quote from, plagiarize, refer to, or
appropriate. In order to appreciate in all their depth Gertrude Stein’s word-portraits of
Picasso and Matisse, the reader must be familiar with the life and work of both artists.
Coates’ The Eater of Darkness is a travesty of the detective and romantic novels in
vogue at the time—which anticipates the anti-detective novel of postmodernism—as
well as a spoof of the stylistic idiosyncrasies of some contemporary writers such as
Waldo Frank, E. E. Cummings, Sherwood Anderson, Jean Toomer, Max Bodenheim,
Frank Harris, Ben Hecht, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. In one scene of the novel, as
Mr. Constantin’s deadly laser beam seeks out its first victim, the narrative is interrupted
by a three-page record of the objects and persons through which it travels, including
actual writers, critics, literary theorists, magazine editors, and art collectors such as
Laurence Vail, Theodore Dreiser, H. L. Mencken, Malcolm Cowley, Kenneth Burke,
Arthur Moss and Peggy Guggenheim. Written as “a protest against writing books”
(Wisker 49), West’s The Dream Life of Balso Snell is peppered with references and
allusions to, and quotes and misquotes from, disparate writers and artists such as John
Dryden, Daudet, Picasso, James Joyce, George Moore, Ingres, Nietzsche, Van Gogh,
Dostoyevsky, C. M. Doughty, Gauguin, Cézanne, and Chekov. The same can be said of
Williams’ The Great American Novel, whose parodic intent and paradoxical
dependence on history and tradition to create a fresh American literature convert it into
a paradigmatic intertextual artifact and, as a result, into a distinguished precursor of
postmodern American fiction.
Secondly, the texts analyzed in these pages are, to a greater or lesser extent, selfreflective. They are about fiction itself, about writing novels and short stories, about the
difficulties of depicting human experience through the conventions of fiction writing.
Cummings’ elusive [No Title] constitutes a playful parody of short story writing, a
236 Dadaist prank aimed at confronting the reader’s idea of narrative and deriding the
conventions of the genre. Williams’ The Great American Novel—like A Novelette,
Spring and All, and Kora in Hell—is a self-conscious work whose main purpose seems
to be to brood over its own construction and, ultimately, over the nature of fiction. What
exactly is fiction? Williams seems to wonder. Where are its sources? What is the
function of language? West’s The Dream Life of Balso Snell establishes a dialogue with
Dadaism in general and with the Dadaist
novel in particular, as well as with the
commonly accepted notions of literary genre.
In this sense, the text is an anti-novel, an
avant-la-lettre postmodern reevaluation of
the boundaries of fiction.
Thirdly, and more importantly, none of
the works included in this exploration would
make full sense without the existence of
Dadaism, the large, unifying umbrella—or
hypotext, to use Gérard Genette’s term (5)—
under which they all function and with which
Fig. 90. Hans Arp, Tristan Tzara and Hans Richter.
Zurich, 1917-18. they all dialogue. Cummings’ Eimi is heavily indebted to Louis Aragon’s Dadaist novel
The Adventures of Telemachus which, in its turn, is a reworking of Fénelon’s 1699
didactic epic prose poem of the same title. Coates’ The Eater of Darkness and West’s
The Dream Life of Balso Snell are, at bottom, parodic comments on Dada. One cannot
fully grasp the literary and cultural implications of Vail’s Murder! Murder! or Djuna
Barnes’ “The Perfect Murder,” “The Doctors,” “The Terrorists” and “A Night Among
the Horses” without a cognizance of Dada’s advocation of murder, gratuitous violence,
237 destruction, suicide, revolution, primal action and the unmotivated crime. Likewise, the
resonance of Barnes’ “The Little Girl Continues” is greatly diminished if one is not
familiar with the circumstances of Radiguet’s death. Both Dos Passos’ Manhattan
Transfer and West’s The Dream Life of Balso Snell can be construed as literary
adaptations of the Dadaist collage, which, in turn, is a translation onto canvas of
Lautréamont’s poetic—and inherently intertextual—chance meeting of a sewing
machine and an umbrella on a dissection table (Rubin 95).
As a movement, Dada didn’t last long. The inner destructive forces that fuelled it
could only lead to its self-obliteration. Its impact on the shaping of our cultural history,
however, has been momentous. One hundred years after its birth in the back room of a
Zurich tavern, Dada—its legacy, its spirit—is still very much alive in the work of
countless artists, writers, and intellectuals. Scholarship on Dada continues to grow,
discovering new approaches to the movement, revealing new connections. This thesis is
my contribution to that effort.
238 Appendixes
Appendix A. Hugo Ball: “Dada Manifesto”
Ball read this manifesto at the first public Dada soirée in Zurich’s Waag Hall on July
14, 1916. Although he remained an active Dadaist for another six months, this was his
final contribution to his first Dada period, which had begun with the founding of the
Cabaret Voltaire in February of the same year. His opposition to Dada becoming an
organized movement created friction with his fellow Dadaists, particularly Tristan
Tzara.
Source: Hugo Ball. Flight Out of Time. 219-221. Translated by Ann Raimes.
_______________
Dada is a new tendency in art. One can tell this from the fact that until now nobody
knew anything about it, and tomorrow everyone in Zurich will be talking about it. Dada
comes from the dictionary. It is terribly simple. In French it means "hobby horse.” In
German it means “Good-bye,” “Get off my back,” “Be seeing you sometime.” In
Romanian: “Yes, indeed, you are right, that’s it. But of course, yes, definitely, right.”
And so forth. An international word. Just a word, and the word a movement. Very easy
to understand.
Quite terribly simple. To make of it an artistic tendency must mean that one is
anticipating complications. Dada psychology, dada Germany cum indigestion and fog
paroxysm, dada literature, dada bourgeoisie, and yourselves, honored poets, who are
always writing with words but never writing the word itself, who are always writing
around the actual point. Dada world war without end, dada revolution without
beginning, dada, you friends and also-poets, esteemed sirs, manufacturers, and
evangelists. Dada Tzara, dada Huelsenbeck, dada m'dada, dada m'dada dada mhm, dada
dere dada, dada Hue, dada Tza.
How does one achieve eternal bliss? By saying dada. How does one become
famous? By saying dada. With a noble gesture and delicate propriety. Till one goes
239 crazy. Till one loses consciousness. How can one get rid of everything that smacks of
journalism, worms, everything nice and right, blinkered, moralistic, europeanized,
enervated? By saying dada. Dada is the world soul, dada is the pawnshop. Dada is the
world’s best lily-milk soap. Dada Mr. Rubiner, dada Mr. Korrodi. Dada Mr. Anastasius
Lilienstein. In plain language: the hospitality of the Swiss is something to be profoundly
appreciated. And in questions of aesthetics the key is quality. I shall be reading poems
that are meant to dispense with conventional language, no less, and to have done with it.
Dada Johann Fuschgang Goethe, Dada Stendhal. Dada Dalai Lama, Buddha, Bible and
Nietzsche. Dada m'dada. Dada mhm dada da. It’s a question of connections, and of
loosening them up a bit to start with.
I don’t want words that other people have invented. All the words are other people’s
inventions. I want my own stuff, my own rhythm, and vowels and consonants too,
matching the rhythm and all my own. If this pulsation in seven yards long, I want words
for it that are seven yards long. Mr. Schulz’s words are only two and a half centimeters
long. It will serve to show how articulated language comes into being. I let the vowels
fool around. I let the vowels quite simply occur, as a cat miaows… Words emerge,
shoulders of words, legs, arms, hands of words. Au, oi, uh. One shouldn’t let too many
words out. A line of poetry is a chance to get rid of all the filth that clings to this
accursed language, as if put there by stockbrokers’ hands, hands worn smooth by coins.
I want the word where it ends and begins. Dada is the heart of words. Each thing has its
word, but the word has become a thing by itself. Why shouldn’t I find it? Why can’t a
tree be called Pluplusch, and Pluplubasch when it has been raining? The word, the
word, the word outside your domain, your stuffiness, this laughable impotence, your
stupendous smugness, outside all the parrotry of your self-evident limitedness.
The word, gentlemen, is a public concern of the first importance.
240 Appendix B. Tristan Tzara: “Dada Manifesto 1918”
Tzara read this manifesto at the Dadaist Soirée at the Saal zur Meise in Zurich on 23
July 1918. The text was first published in Dada 3 (December 1918) and subsequently
reprinted in Sept Manifestes Dada [Seven Dada Manifestos] (Paris 1924).
Source: Tristan Tzara. Seven Dada Manifestos. 3-13. Translated by Barbara Wright.
_______________
The magic of a word—DADA—which for
journalists has opened the door to an
unforeseen world, has for us not the slightest
importance.
To launch a manifesto you have to want: A.B. & C., and fulminate against 1, 2, & 3,
work yourself up and sharpen you wings to conquer and circulate lower and upper case
As, Bs & Cs, sign, shout, swear, organize prose into a form that is absolutely and
irrefutably obvious, prove its ne plus ultra and maintain that novelty resembles life in
the same way as the latest apparition of a harlot proves the essence of God. His
existence had already been proved by the accordion, the landscape and soft words. 
To impose one’s A.B.C. is only natural—and therefore regrettable. Everyone does it in
the form of a crystalbluff-madonna, or a monetary system, or pharmaceutical
preparations, a naked leg being the invitation to an ardent and sterile Spring. The love of
novelty is a pleasant sort of cross, it’s evidence of a naive don’t-give-a-damn attitude, a
passing, positive, sign without rhyme or reason. But this need is out of date, too. By
giving art the impetus of supreme simplicity—novelty—we are being human and true in
relation to innocent pleasures; impulsive and vibrant in order to crucify boredom. At the
lighted crossroads, alert, attentive, lying in wait for years, in the forest.  I am writing a
manifesto and there’s nothing I want, and yet I’m saying certain things, and in principle
I am against manifestos, as I am against principles (quantifying measures of the moral
value of every phrase—too easy; approximation was invested by the impressionists). 
241 I’m writing this manifesto to show that you can perform contrary actions at the
same time, in one single, fresh breath; I am against action; as for continual
contradiction, and affirmation too, I am neither for nor against them, and I won’t
explain myself because I hate common sense.
DADA—this is a word that throws up ideas so that they can be shot down; every
bourgeois is a little playwright, who invents different subjects and who, instead of
situating suitable characters on the level of his own intelligence, like chrysalises on
chairs, tries to find causes or objects (according to whichever psychoanalytic method he
practices) to give weight to his plot, a talking and self-defining story. 
Every spectator is a plotter, if he tries to explain a word (to know!) From his padded
refuge of serpentine complications, he allows his instincts to be manipulated. Whence
the sorrows of conjugal life.
To be plain: The amusement of redbellies in the mills of empty skulls.

DADA DOES NOT MEAN ANYTHING
If we consider it futile, and if we don’t waste our time over a word that doesn’t mean
anything… The first thought that comes to these minds is of a bacteriological order: at
least to discover its etymological, historical or psychological meaning. We read in the
papers that the negroes of the Kroo race call the tail of a sacred cow: DADA. A cube,
and a mother, in a certain region of Italy, are called: DADA. The word for a hobby
horse, a children’s nurse, a double affirmative in Russian and Romanian, is also:
DADA.
Some
learned
journalists
see
it
as
an
art
for
babies,
other
Jesuscallingthelittlechildrenuntohim saints see it as a return to an unemotional and noisy
primitivism—noise and monotonous. A sensitivity cannot be built on the basis of a
word; every sort of construction converges into a boring sort of perfection, a stagnant
242 idea of a golden swamp, a relative human product. A work of art shouldn’t be beauty
per se, because it is dead; neither gay nor sad, neither light nor dark; it is to rejoice or
maltreat individualities to serve them up the cakes of sainted haloes or the sweat of a
meandering chase through the atmosphere. A work of art is never beautiful, by decree,
objectively, for everyone. Criticism is, therefore, useless; it only exists subjectively, for
every individual, and without the slightest general characteristic. Do people imagine
they have found the psychic basis common to all humanity? The attempt of Jesus, and
the Bible, conceal, under their ample, benevolent wings: shit, animals and days. How
can anyone hope to order the chaos that constitutes that infinite, formless variation:
man? The principle: “Love thy neighbor” is hypocrisy. “Know thyself” is utopian, but
more acceptable because it includes malice. No pity. After the carnage we are left with
the hope of a purified humanity. I always speak about myself because I don’t want to
convince, and I have no right to drag others in my wake, I’m not compelling anyone to
follow me, because everyone makes his art in his own way, if he knows anything about
the joy that rises like an arrow up to the astral strata, or that which descends into the
mines strewn with the flowers of corpses and fertile spasms. Stalactites: look
everywhere for them, in crèches magnified by pain, eyes as white as angels’ hares. Thus
DADA was born*, out of a need for independence, out of mistrust for the community.
People who join us keep their freedom. We don’t accept any theories. We’ve had
enough of the cubist and futurist academies: laboratories of formal ideas. Do we make
art in order to earn money and keep the dear bourgeoisie happy? Rhymes have the
smack of money, and inflexion slides along the line of the stomach in profile. Every
group of artists has ended up at this bank, straddling various comets. Leaving the door
open to the possibility of wallowing in comfort and food.
*
In 1916 at the CABARET VOLTAIRE in Zurich.
243 Here we are dropping our anchor in fertile ground.
Here we really know what we are talking about, because we have experienced the
trembling and the awakening. Drunk with energy, we are revenants thrusting the trident
into heedless flesh. We are streams of curses in the tropical abundance of vertiginous
vegetation, resin and rain is our sweat, we bleed and burn with thirst, our blood is
strength.
Cubism was born out of a simple manner of looking at objects: Cezanne painted a
cup twenty centimeters lower than his eyes, the cubists look at it from above, others
complicate its appearance by cutting a vertical section through it and soberly placing it
to one side (I’m not forgetting the creators, nor the seminal reasons of unformed matter
that they rendered definitive).  The futurist sees the same cup in movement, a
succession of objects side by side, mischievously embellished by a few guide-lines.
This doesn’t stop the canvas being either a good or a bad painting destined to form an
investment for intellectual capital. The new painter creates a world whose elements are
also its means, a sober, definitive, irrefutable work. The new artist protests: he no longer
paints (symbolic and illusionistic reproduction) but creates directly in stone, wood, iron,
tin, rocks, or locomotive structures capable of being spun in all directions by the limpid
wind of the momentary sensation.  Every pictorial or plastic work is unnecessary,
even if it is a monster which terrifies servile minds, and not a sickly-sweet object to
adorn the refectories of animals in human garb, those illustrations of the sad fable of
humanity.—A painting is the art of making two lines, which have been geometrically
observed to be parallel, meet on a canvas, before our eyes, in the reality of a world that
has been transposed according to new conditions and possibilities. This world is neither
specified nor defined in the work, it belongs, in its innumerable variations, to the
spectator. For its creator it has neither case nor theory. Order = disorder; ego = non-
244 ego; affirmation = negation: the supreme radiations of an absolute art. Absolute in the
purity of its cosmic and regulated chaos, eternal in that globule that is a second which
has no duration, no breath, no light and no control.  I appreciate an old work for its
novelty. It is only contrast that links us to the past.  Writers who like to moralize and
discuss or ameliorate psychological bases have, apart from a secret wish to win, a
ridiculous knowledge of life, which they may have classified, parceled out, canalized;
they are determined to see its categories dance when they beat time. Their readers laugh
derisively, but carry on: what’s the use?
There is one kind of literature which never reaches the voracious masses. The work
of creative writers, written out of the author’s real necessity, and for his own benefit.
The awareness of a supreme egoism, wherein laws become significant.  Every page
should explode, either because of its profound gravity, or its vortex, vertigo, newness,
eternity, or because of its staggering absurdity, the enthusiasm of its principles, or its
typography. On the one hand there is a world tottering in its flight, linked to the
resounding tinkle of the infernal gamut; on the other hand, there are: the new men.
Uncouth, galloping, riding astride on hiccups. And there is a mutilated world and
literary medicasters in desperate need of amelioration.
I assure you: there is no beginning, and we are not afraid; we aren’t sentimental. We
are like a raging wind that rips up the clothes of clouds and prayers, we are preparing
the great spectacle of disaster, conflagration and decomposition. Preparing to put an end
to mourning, and to replace tears by sirens spreading from one continent to another.
Clarions of intense joy, bereft of that poisonous sadness.  DADA is the mark of
abstraction; publicity and business are also poetic elements.
I destroy the drawers of the brain, and those of social organization: to sow
demoralization everywhere, and throw heaven’s hand into hell, hell’s eyes into heaven,
245 to reinstate the fertile wheel of a universal circus in the Powers of reality, and the
fantasy of every individual.
A philosophical questions: from which angle to start looking at life, god, ideas, or
anything else. Everything we look at is false. I don’t think the relative result is any more
important than the choice of patisserie or cherries for dessert. The way people have of
looking hurriedly at things from the opposite point of view, so as to impose their
opinions indirectly, is called dialectic, in other words, heads I win and tails you lose,
dressed up to look scholarly.
If I shout:
Ideal, Ideal, Ideal
Knowledge, Knowledge, Knowledge
Boomboom, Boomboom, Boomboom
I have recorded fairly accurately Progress, Law, Morals, and all the other
magnificent qualities that various very intelligent people have discussed in so many
books in order, finally, to say that even so everyone has danced according to his own
personal boomboom, and that he’s right about his boomboom: the satisfaction of
unhealthy curiosity; private bell-ringing for inexplicable needs; bath; pecuniary
difficulties; a stomach with repercussions on to life; the authority of the mystical baton
formulated as the grand finale of a phantom orchestra with mute bows, lubricated by
philters with a basis of animal ammonia. With the blue monocle of an angel they have
dug out its interior for twenty sous worth of unanimous gratitude.  If all of them are
right, and if all pills are only Pink, let’s try for once not to be right.  People think they
can explain rationally, by means of thought, what they write. But it’s very relative.
Thought is a fine thing for philosophy, but it’s relative. Psychoanalysis is a dangerous
disease, it deadens man’s anti-real inclinations and systematizes the bourgeoisie. There
246 is no ultimate Truth. Dialectics is an amusing machine that leads us (in banal fashion) to
the opinions which we would have held in any case. Do people really think that, by the
meticulous subtlety of logic, they have demonstrated the truth and established the
accuracy of their opinions? Even if logic were confined by the senses it would still be
an organic disease. To this element, philosophers like to add: The power of observation.
But this magnificent quality of the mind is precisely the proof of its impotence. People
observe, they look at things from one or several points of view, they choose them from
amongst the millions that exist. Experience too is the result of chance and of individual
abilities.  Science revolts me when it becomes a speculative system and loses its
utilitarian character—which is so useless—but is at least individual. I hate slimy
objectivity, and harmony, the science that considers that everything is always in order.
Carry on, children, humanity… Science says that we are nature’s servants: everything is
in order, make both love and war. Carry on, children, humanity, nice kind bourgeois and
virgin journalists…  I am against systems; the most acceptable system is that of have
none on no principle.  To complete oneself, to perfect oneself in one’s own pettiness
to the point of filling the little vase of oneself with oneself, even the courage to fight for
and against thought, all this can suddenly infernally propel us into the mystery of daily
bread and the lilies of the economic field.
DADAIST SPONTANEITY
What I call the I-don’t-give-a-damn attitude of life is when everyone minds his own
business, at the same time as he knows how to respect other individualities, and even
how to stand up for himself, the two-step becoming a national anthem, a junk shop, the
wireless (the wire-less telephone) transmitting Bach fugues, illuminated advertisements
247 for placards for brothels, the organ broadcasting carnations for God, all this at the same
time, and in real terms, replacing photography and unilateral catechism.
Active simplicity.
The incapacity to distinguish between degrees of light: licking the twilight and
floating in the huge mouth filled with honey and excrement. Measured against the scale
of Eternity, every action is vain—(if we allow thought to have an adventure whose
result would be infinitely grotesque—an important factor in the awareness of human
incapacity). But if life is a bad joke, with neither goal nor initial accouchement, and
because we believe we ought, like clean chrysanthemums, to make the best of a bad
bargain, we have declared that the only basis of understanding is: art. It hasn’t the
importance that we, old hands at the spiritual, have been lavishing on it for centuries.
Art does nobody any harm, and those who are capable of taking an interest in it will not
only receive caresses, but also a marvelous chance to people the country of their
conversation. Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible
work is the product of a journalist, and because at this moment I enjoy mixing this
monster in oil paints: a paper tube imitating the metal that you press and automatically
squeeze out hatred, cowardice and villainy. The artist, or the poet, rejoices in the venom
of this mass condensed into one shopwalker of this trade, he is glad to be insulted, it
proves his immutability. The author or the artist praised by the papers observes that his
work has been understood: a miserable lining to a coat that is of public utility; rags
covering brutishness, horse-piss collaborating with the heat of an animal incubating the
baser instincts. Flabby, insipid flesh multiplying itself with the aid of typographical
microbes.
We have done violence to the sniveling tendencies in our natures. Every infiltration
of this sort is macerated diarrhea. To encourage this sort of art is to digest it. What we
248 need are strong straightforward, precise works which will be forever misunderstood.
Logic is a complication. Logic is always false. It draws the superficial threads of
concepts and words towards illusory conclusions and centers. Its chains kill, an
enormous myriapod that asphyxiates independence. If it were married to logic, art
would be living in incest, engulfing, swallowing its own tail, which still belongs to its
body, fornicating in itself, and temperament would become a nightmare tarred and
feathered with protestantism, a monument, a mass of heavy, greyish intestines.
But suppleness, enthusiasm and even the joy of injustice, that little truth that we
practice as innocents and that makes us beautiful: we are cunning, and our fingers are
malleable and glide like the branches of that insidious and almost liquid plant; this
injustice is the indication of our soul, say the cynics. This is also a point of view; but all
flowers aren’t saints, luckily, and what is divine in us is the awakening of anti-human
action. What we are talking about here is a paper flower for the buttonhole of gentlemen
who frequent the ball of masked life, the kitchen of grace, our white, lithe or fleshy girl
cousins. They make a profit out of what we have selected. The contradiction and unity
of opposing poles at the same time may be true. IF we are absolutely determined to utter
this platitude, the appendix of a libidinous, evil-smelling morality. Morals have an
atrophying effect, like every other pestilential product of the intelligence. Being
governed by morals and logic has made it impossible for us to be anything other than
impassive towards policemen—the cause of slavery—putrid rats with whom the
bourgeois are fed up to the teeth, and who have infected the only corridors of clear and
clean glass that remained open to artists.
Every man must shout: there is great destructive, negative work to be done. To
sweep, to clean. The cleanliness of the individual materializes after we’ve gone through
folly, the aggressive, complete folly of a world left in the hands of bandits who have
249 demolished and destroyed the centuries. With neither aim nor plan, without
organization: uncontrollable folly, decomposition. Those who are strong in word or in
strength will survive, because they are quick to defend themselves; the agility of their
limbs and feelings flames on their faceted flanks.
Morals have given rise to charity and pity, two dumplings that have grown like
elephants, planets, which people call good. There is nothing good about them. Goodness
is lucid, clear and resolute, and ruthless towards compromise and politics. Morality
infuses chocolate into every man’s veins. This task is not ordained by a supernatural
force, but by a trust of ideas-merchants and academic monopolists. Sentimentality:
seeing a group of bored and quarrelling men, they invented the calendar and wisdom as
a remedy. By sticking labels on to things, the battle of the philosophers we let loose
(money-grubbing, mean and meticulous weights and measures) and one understood
once again that pity is a feeling, like diarrhea in relation to disgust, that undermines
health, the filthy carrion job of jeopardizing the sun. I proclaim the opposition of all the
cosmic faculties to that blennorrhea of a putrid sun that issues from the factories of
philosophical thought, the fight to the death, with all the resources of
DADAIST DISGUST
Every product of disgust that is capable of becoming a negation of the family is dada;
protest with the fists of one’s whole being in destructive action: DADA; acquaintance
with all the means hitherto rejected by the sexual prudishness of easy compromise and
good manners: DADA; abolition of logic, dance of those who are incapable of creation:
DADA; every hierarchy and social equation established for values by our valets: DADA;
every object, all objects, feelings and obscurities, every apparition and the precise shock
250 of parallel lines, are means for the battle of: DADA; the abolition of memory: DADA; the
abolition of archaeology: DADA; the abolition of prophets: DADA; the abolition of the
future: DADA; the absolute and indiscutable belief in every god that is an immediate
product of spontaneity: DADA; the elegant and unprejudiced leap from one harmony to
another sphere; the trajectory of a word, a cry, thrown into the air like an acoustic disc;
to respect all individualities in their folly of the moment, whether serious, fearful, timid,
ardent, vigorous, decided or enthusiastic; to strip one’s church of every useless and
unwieldy accessory; to spew out like a luminous cascade any offensive or loving
thought, or to cherish it—with the lively satisfaction that it’s all precisely the same
thing—with the same intensity in the bush, which is free of insects for the blue-blooded,
and gilded with the bodies of archangels, with one’s soul. Liberty: DADA, DADA,
DADA; —the roar of contorted pains, the interweaving of contraries and of all
contradictions, freaks and irrelevancies: LIFE.
251 Appendix C. Richard Huelsenbeck: “Collective Dada Manifesto”
Having been active in Zurich Dada, Huelsenbeck returned to Germany in January 1917
and delivered this manifesto at the I. B. Neumann Gallery in Berlin in February 1918.
The text mounts an attack on the failure of Expressionism, and allies Dada with “the
new medium,” that is, collage and montage. It was originally published in Der
Zweemann, Hanover, 1919; reprinted in Huelsenbeck (ed.) Dada Almanach, Berlin,
1920; and then reissued in 1920 as “Collective Dada Manifesto” signed by:
Huelsenbeck, Tzara, Franz Jung, George Grosz, Marcel Janco, Raoul Hausmann, Hugo
Ball, Pierre Albert-Birot, Hans Arp, and others.
Source: Robert Motherwell. The Dada Painters and Poets. 242-246. Translated by
Ralph Manheim.
_______________
What did Expressionism want?
It “wanted” something, that much remains characteristic of it. Dada wants nothing,
Dada grows. Expressionism wanted inwardness, it conceived of itself as a reaction
against the times, while Dadaism is nothing but an expression of the times. Dada is one
with the times, it is a child of the present epoch which one may curse, but cannot deny.
Dada has taken the mechanization, the sterility, the rigidity and the tempo of these times
into its broad lap, and in the last analysis it is nothing else and in no way different from
them. Expressionism is not spontaneous action. It is the gesture of tired people who
wish to escape themselves and forget the present, the war and the misery. To this end
they invented “humanity,” and walked versifying and psalmodyzing along streets on
which the escalators rise and descend and the telephones ring shrilly. The Expressionists
are tired people who have turned their backs on nature and do not dare look the cruelty
of the epoch in the face. They have forgotten how to be daring. Dada is daring per se,
Dada exposes itself to the risk of its own death. Dada puts itself at the heart of things.
Expressionism wanted to forget itself, Dada wants to affirm itself. Expressionism was
harmonious, mystic, angelic, Baaderish-Superdadaist—Dada is the scream of brakes
and the bellowing of the brokers at the Chicago Stock Exchange. Vive Dada!
Art in its execution and direction is dependent on the time in which it lives, and
252 artists are creatures of their epoch. The highest art will be that which in its conscious
content presents the thousandfold problems of the day, the art which has been viably
shattered by the explosions of last week, which is forever trying to collect its limbs after
yesterday’s crash. The best and most extraordinary artists will be those who every hour
snatch the tatters of their bodies out of the frenzied cataract of life, who, with bleeding
hands and hearts, hold fast to the intelligence of their time. Has expressionism fulfilled
our expectations of such an art, which should be an expression of our most vital
concerns?
No! No! No!
Have the expressionists fulfilled our expectations of an art that burns the essence of
life into our flesh?
No! No! No!
Under the pretext of turning inward, the expressionists in literature and painting
have banded together into a generation which is already looking forward to honorable
mention in the histories of literature and art and aspiring to the most respectable civic
distinctions. On pretext of carrying on propaganda for the soul, they have, in their
struggle with naturalism, found their way back to the abstract, pathetic gestures which
presuppose a comfortable life free from content or strife. The stages are filling up with
kings, poets and Faustian characters of all sorts; the theory of a melioristc philosophy,
the psychological naïveté of which is highly significant for a critical understanding of
expressionism, runs ghostlike through the minds of men who never act. Hatred of the
253 press, hatred of advertising, hatred of sensations are typical of people who prefer their
armchair to the noise of the street, and who even make it a point of pride to be swindled
by every smalltime profiteer. The sentimental resistance to the times, which are neither
better nor worse, neither more reactionary nor more revolutionary than other times, that
weak-kneed resistance, flirting with prayers and incense when it does not prefer to load
its cardboard cannon with Attic iambics—is the quality of a youth which never knew
how to be young. Expressionism, discovered abroad; and in Germany, true to style,
transformed into an opulent idyll and the expectation of a good pension, has nothing in
common with the efforts of active men. The signers of this manifesto have, under the
battle cry:
Dada!!!!
gathered together to put forward a new art, from which they expect the realization of
new ideals. What then is DADAISM?
The word Dada symbolizes the most primitive relation to the reality of the
environment; with Dadaism a new reality comes into its own. Life appears as a
simultaneous muddle of noises, color and spiritual rhythms, which is taken unmodified
into Dadaist art, with all the sensational screams and fevers of its reckless everyday
psyche and with all its brutal reality. This is the sharp dividing line separating Dadaism
from all artistic directions up until now and particularly from FUTURISM which not
long ago some puddingheads took to be a new version of impressionist realization.
Dadaism for the first time has ceased to take an aesthetic attitude toward life, and this it
accomplishes by tearing all the slogans of ethics, culture and inwardness, which are
merely cloaks for weak muscles, into their components.
254 The Bruitist poem
represents a streetcar as it is, the essence of the streetcar with the yawning of Schulze
the coupon clipper and the screeching of the brakes.
The Simultaneist poem
teaches a sense of the merrygoround of all things; while Her Schulze reads his paper,
the Balkan Express crosses the bridge to Nish, a pig squeals in Butcher Nuttke’s cellar.
The Static poem
makes words into individuals, out of the letters spelling woods, steps the woods with its
treetops, liveried foresters and wild sows, maybe a boarding house steps out too, and
maybe it’s called Bellevue or Bella Vista. Dadaism leads to amazing new possibilities
and forms of expression in all the arts. It made cubism a dance on the stage, it
disseminated the BRUITIST music of the futurists (whose purely Italian concerns it has
no desire to generalize) in every country in Europe. The word Dada in itself indicates
the internationalism of the movement which is bound to no frontiers, religions or
professions. Dada is the international expression of our times, the great rebellion of
artistic movements, the artistic reflex of all these offensives, peace congresses, riots in
the vegetable market, midnight suppers at the Esplanade, etc, etc. Dada champions the
use of the
new medium in painting.
Dada is a CLUB, founded in Berlin, which you can enjoy without commitments. In
this club every man is chairman and every man can have his say in artistic matters.
Dada is not a pretext for the ambition of a few literary men (as our enemies would have
you believe), Dada is a state of mind that can be revealed in any conversation whatever,
255 so that you are compelled to say: this man is a DADAIST—that man is not; the Dada
Club consequently has members all over the world, in Honolulu as well as New Orleans
and Meseritz. Under certain circumstances to be a Dadaist may mean to be more a
businessman, more a political partisan than an artist—to be an artist only by accident—
to be a Dadaist means to let oneself be thrown by things, to oppose all sedimentation; to
sit in a chair for a single moment is to risk one’s life (Mr Wengs pulled his revolver out
of his pants pocket). A fabric tears under your hand, you say yes to a life that strives
upward by negation. Affirmation—negation: the gigantic hocus-pocus of existence fires
the nerves of the true Dadaist—and there he is, reclining, hunting, cycling—half
Pantagruel, half St. Francis, laughing and laughing. Blast the aesthetic-ethical attitude!
Blast the bloodless abstraction of expressionism! For Dadaism in word and image, for
all the Dada things that go on in the world! To be against this manifesto is to be a
Dadaist!
256 Appendix D. André Breton: “Dada Skating” and “Dada Geography”
“Dada Skating” and “Dada Geography” were read at the Salon des Indépendants, the
Club du Faubourg, and the Université Populaire of Fabourg Saint-Antoine on February
5, 6, and 19, 1920, respectively—soon after Tzara’s arrival in Paris—together with
“Dada Mugs,” not included here, and twenty other Dada manifestos by Picabia,
Aragon, Tzara, Arp, Eluard, Soupault, Serner, Paul Dermée, Ribemont-Dessaignes,
Arnault, and W. C. Arensberg. Both texts were published three months later in
Littérature No 13 (May 1920), and republished in the spring of 1924 under the common
title of “Two Dada Manifestos” in Breton’s collection of essays Les Pas Perdus [The
Lost Steps].
Source: Dawn Ades. The Dada Reader. 186-87 and 192. Translated by Joel Agee.
_______________
Dada Skating
We read the papers like other mortals. Without wishing to make anyone unhappy, it is
perfectly acceptable to say that the word DADA lends itself readily to puns. That’s even
part of the reason we adopted it in the first place. We haven’s the faintest idea how to
treat any subject seriously—least of all this subject: us. So everything that’s written
about DADA is doing its best to please us. We’d swap the whole of art criticism for any
news item whatsoever. Certainly the wartime press never stopped us taking Marshall
Foch for a phoney and President Wilson for a fool.
We ask for nothing better than to be judged on appearances. It’s reported all over
the place that I wear glasses. If I told you why you’d never relieve me. It’s in
remembrance of this grammatical model: “Noses were made to wear glasses; also I
wear glasses.“ What is it they say? Oh yes, this brings home the fact that we’re not
getting any younger.
Pierre is a man. But there is no DADA truth. You’ve only got to say a thing for the
opposite to become DADA. I once saw Tristan Tzara in a tobacconist’s unable to
muster up the voice to ask for a packet of cigarettes. I don’t know what was the matter
257 with him. I can still hear Philip Souppault asking an ironmonger most insistently for
some live birds. As for me, it’s perfectly possible that I am dreaming at this very
moment.
A white eucharistic host is equal to a red one after all. DADA makes no promises
about getting you to heaven. It would be ludicrous, in principle, to anticipate a DADA
masterpiece in the fields of literature and painting. Naturally we have absolutely no
belief in the possibility of social improvement either, even if we do hate conservatism
more than anything and pledge our full support for any revolution whatsoever. “Peace at
any time” was DADA’s slogan during the war just as “War at any price” is DADA’s
slogan in times of peace.
Contrariness remains nothing more than the most flattering form of posturing. I’m
not aware of a hint of ambition in myself: yet it seems to you that I’m getting all worked
up: why doesn’t the idea that my right side is the shadow of my left and vice versa
render me utterly incapable of movement?
We pass for poets in the most general sense of the word because we target the worst
conventions in language. You can be terribly familiar with the word “hello” and still say
“good bye” to the woman you’ve just met up with again after being away for a year.
DADA attacks you through your own powers of reasoning. If we reduce you to a point
where you maintain you’re better off believing than not believing what all religions of
beauty, love, truth and justice teach, then we’ll know you’re not afraid of putting
yourselves at the mercy of DADA, by agreeing to meet us on our chosen territory…
which is doubt.
258 Dada Geography
Historical anecdotes are not enormously important. It’s impossible to determine when
and where DADA came into being. The name itself, all the better for being perfectly
ambiguous, was just something one of us came up with.
Cubism was a school of painting. Futurism a political movement: DADA is a state
of mind. To compare them is patently either ignorant or pretentious.
Free thinking in religious matters is nothing like a church. DADA is free thinking in
artistic terms.
As long as prayers are forcibly recited in schools under the guise of museums visits
and textual analysis, we will rail against despotism and seek to disrupt the ceremony.
DADA devotes itself to nothing, neither love nor work. It is unthinkable that a man
should leave any trace of his existence on the Earth.
DADA, acknowledging only instinct, condemns explanation in principle. According
to Dada we should exercise no control over ourselves. Have done with those dogmas,
morality and taste: have done with them forever.
259 Appendix E. Francis Picabia: “Dada Manifesto”
This manifesto appeared on the cover of the nº 12 issue of 391 in March 1920, next to a
reproduction of Duchamp’s L. H. O. O. Q. (see fig. 4). After this issue, Picabia left 391
to one side for a few months, turning his attention to a new publication, Cannibale. 391
appeared again in July 1920.
Source: Francis Picabia. “Dada Manifesto.” 391. Web. 2 Jan. 2016. Translated by
Michelle Owoo.
_______________
The Cubists want to cover Dada with snow; it may surprise you, but it is so, they want
to empty the snow out of their pipe on to Dada.
Are you sure?
Perfectly, the facts speak for themselves from great grotesque mouths. They think
that Dada wants to stop them in their hateful trade: selling pictures at a high price.
Art is dearer than sausages, dearer than women, dearer than anything.
Art is as easy to see as God (see Saint-Sulpice).
Art is a pharmaceutical product for idiots.
Tables turn, thanks to the spirits; pictures and other works of art are like strongbox-tables, the spirit is within them and gets more and more inspired as the prices rise
in the salerooms.
Comedy, comedy, comedy, comedy, comedy, dear friends.
Dealers do not like painting, they know about the hidden spirit…
Buy reproductions of signed pictures.
Don't be snobbish; having the same picture as your neighbor doesn't make you any
less intelligent. No more fly-specks on the walls.
There will be some, all the same, but not quite so many.
Dada will certainly get more and more hated, for its wire-cutters allow it to cut
processions singing "Come Darling", what a sacrilege!
260 Cubism represents total famine in ideas.
They cubed primitive paintings, cubed Negro sculptures, cubed violins, cubed
guitars, cubed picture magazines, cubed shit and girls' profiles and now they want to
cube money!!!
Dada, on the other hand, wants nothing, absolutely nothing, and what it does is to
make the public say "We understand nothing, nothing, nothing".
"The Dadaists are nothing, nothing, nothing and they will surely succeed in nothing,
nothing, nothing."
Francis Picabia
who knows nothing, nothing, nothing.
261 Appendix F. George Ribemont-Dessaignes: “The Pleasures of Dada” and “To the
Public”
Like Breton’s “Dada Skating” and “Dada Geography,” Ribemont-Dessaignes’ “The
Pleasures of Dada” and “To the Public” were read at the Salon des Indépendants, the
Club du Faubourg, and the Université Populaire of Fabourg Saint-Antoine on February
5, 6, and 19, 1920, respectively, together with other Dada manifestos by Picabia,
Aragon, Tzara, Arp, Eluard, Soupault, Serner, Paul Dermée, Arnault, and W. C.
Arensberg. The texts appeared in Littérature No 13 in May of the same year.
A painter, poet, playwright and novelist, Ribemont-Dessaignes was one of the most
active members of the group. In addition to these and other Dada manifestos—his
“Manifeste à l’Huile” was read at the Soirée du Théatre de la Maison de l’Ouvre on 27
March, 1920, and published in Mecano in 1922—he published History of Dada in La
Nouvelle Revue Française in 1931.
Source: Dawn Ades. The Dada Reader. 187-88 and 192-93. Translated by Joel Agee.
_______________
The Pleasures of Dada
Dada has pleasures just like everyone else. Dada’s principal pleasure is to see itself in
others. Dada provokes laughter, curiosity or fury. Since these are three most agreeable
things, Dada is very happy.
What makes Dada all the happier is if people laugh at it spontaneously. Since Art
and Artists are extremely serious inventions, especially when their roots are in comedy,
people go to comedies at the theatre when they wish to laugh. Not us. We don’t take
anything seriously. People do laugh, but only to mock us. Dada is very happy.
Curiosity is awoken too. Serious-minded men, who know, deep down, how miracles
are arranged—miracles such as Père la Colique or the Virgin’s tears—realise that it
would be much more fun to have fun with us. They have no wish to bring about the
collapse of the great cathedral of Art, but look how they rub up against us trying to get
our recipe. Dada doesn’t have any recipes but is always hungry. Dada is very happy.
And now for fury, adorable fury. This is the way great love affairs start. Concerns
for the future? Only about being loved too much. Certainly there would always be the
262 option of swapping roles, taking it in turns to laugh, yearn or fly into a fury. But
expecting some sort of benefit to arise. The gorgeous gob of somebody vomiting insults
is wide open and Dada is very good at basse-boule. Dada is very happy.
Dada also likes tossing stones into the water, not to see what happens but to
stupidly contemplate the ripples. Anglers don’t like Dada.
Dada likes ringing on doorbells, striking matches and setting light to hair and
beards. It puts mustard in chalices, urine in fonts and margarine in artists’ tubes of paint.
It knows you and knows the ones who lead you. It likes you and doesn’t like them.
You can be fun. You probably enjoy life. But you’ve got some bad habits. You’re too
fond of what you’ve been taught to be fond of. Cemeteries, melancholy, the tragic lover,
Venetian gondolas. You shout at the moon. You believe in art and respect Artists.
You could easily become friends with Dada—it would be enough to demolish all
your little card castles and redeem every iota of your freedom. Mistrust your leaders.
They exploit your ill-considered affection for the fake and the famous to lead you by the
nose and make things even better for themselves.
You cling to your chains as if you want to be used with impunity like bears in a
sideshow—do you? They flatter you and call you Wild Bears. Carpathian bears. They
talk of freedom and magnificent mountains. But that’s just to rake in the bourgeois
spectators’ wads of cash. You dance for an old carrot and a whiff of honey. If you
weren’t so cowardly, sinking under the weight of all those lofty thoughts and nonexistent abstractions you’ve been forced into, all that nonsense dressed up as a dogma,
you’d stand up straight and play the massacre game, just like we do. But you’re too
scared of no longer believing and of bobbing about like corks on the surface of a twogallon barrel with nothing but the memory of fizzy lemonade. You don’t understand
that one can be attached to nothing and be happy.
263 If you ever manage to pull yourself together Dada will clack its jaws as a sign of
friendship. But if you rid yourself of lice only to keep your fleas Dada will bring its
insecticide spray into play.
Dada is very happy.
To the Public
Before I come down there among you to tear out your rotten teeth, your scab-filled ears,
your canker-covered tongue.
Before shattering your putrid bones —
Slitting open your diarrhoea-filled abdomen and removing from it your overfattened liver, your ignoble spleen and your diabetic kidneys to be used as fertiliser on
the fields —
Before I rip off your ugly, incontinent and cheesy little dick —
Before I thus extinguish your appetite for beauty, orgasms, sugar, philosophy,
pepper and metaphysical mathematical and poetical cucumbers —
Before disinfecting you with vitriol and thus making you clean and passionately
buffing you up —
Before all that —
We’re going to have a big bath in antiseptic —
And we’re warning you —
It’s us who are the murderers —
Of all your little newborn babes —
And to end her’s a song
Ki Ki Ki Ki Ki Ki Ki
264 And here’s God with a nightingale for a horse
He’s handsome, he’s ugly —
Madam, your gob sticks of pimp’s come.
In the morning —
‘Cos in the evening it’s more like the arse of an angel in love with a Lily.
Nice, huh?
Cheerio, mate.
265 Appendix G. Marsden Hartley: “The importance of Being Dada”
On 1 April 1921, at a soirée organized by the Société Anonyme in New York entitled
“Do You Want to Know What a Dada is,” Hartley gave a lecture called “Explaining
Dadaism.” The text was published later that year under the title “The importance of
Being Dada,” as the afterword to Hartley’s Adventures in the Arts: Informal Chapters
on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets.
Source: Marsden Hartley. Adventures in the Arts. 246-254.
_______________
We are indebted to Tristan Tzara and his followers for the newest and perhaps the most
important doctrinary insistence as applied to art which has appeared in a long time.
Dadaism is the latest phase of modernism in painting as well as in literature, and carries
with it all the passion for freedom of expression which Marinetti sponsored so loudly in
his futuristic manifestoes. It adds likewise an exhilarating quality of nihilism, imbibed,
as is said, directly from the author of Zarathustra. Reading a fragment of the
documentary statement of Dadaism, we find that the charm of the idea exists mainly in
the fact that they wish all things levelled in the mind of man to the degree of
commonplaceness which is typical of and peculiar to it.
Nothing is greater than anything else, is what the Dada believes, and this is the first
sign of hope the artist at least can discover in the meaningless importance which has
been invested in the term ART. It shows best of all that art is to betake itself on its own
way blandly, despite the wish of its so ardent supporters and suppressors. I am greatly
relieved as artist, to find there is at least one tenet I can hold to in my experience as a
useful or a useless human being. I have always said for myself, I have no office, no
obligations, no other “mission,” dreadfullest of all words, than to find out the quality of
humor that exists in experience, or life as we think we are entitled to call it. I have
always felt the underlying fatality of habit in appreciation, because I have felt, and now
actually more than ever in my existence, the fatality of habit indulged in by the artist.
266 The artist has made a kind of subtle crime of his habitual expression, his emotional
monotonies, and his intellectual inabilities.
If I announce on this bright morning that I am a “Dadaist” it is not because I find
the slightest need for, or importance in, a doctrine of any sort, it is only for convenience
of myself and a few others that I take up the issue of adherence. An expressionist is one
who expresses himself at all times in any way that is necessary and peculiar to him. A
dadaist is one who finds no one thing more important than any other one thing, and so I
turn from my place in the scheme from expressionist to dadaist with the easy grace that
becomes any self-respecting humorist.
Having fussed with average intelligence as well as with average stupidity over the
various dogmatic aspects of human experience such as art, religion, philosophy, ethics,
morals, with a kind of obligatory blindness, I am come to the clearest point of my
vision, which is nothing more or less than the superbly enlightening discovery that life
as we know it is an essentially comic issue and cannot be treated other than with the
spirit of comedy in comprehension. It is cause for riotous and healthy laughter, and to
laugh at oneself in conjunction with the rest of the world, at one's own tragic vagaries,
concerning the things one cannot name or touch or comprehend, is the best anodyne I
can conjure in my mind for the irrelevant pains we take to impress ourselves and the
world with the importance of anything more than the brilliant excitation of the moment.
It is thrilling, therefore, to realize there is a healthy way out of all this dilemma of habit
for the artist. One of these ways is to reduce the size of the “A” in art, to meet the size
of the rest of the letters in one's speech. Another way is to deliver art from the clutches
of its worshippers, and by worshippers I mean the idolaters and the commercialists of
art. By the idolaters I mean those whose reverence for art is beyond their knowledge of
it. By the commercialists I mean those who prey upon the ignorance of the
267 unsophisticated, with pictures created by the esthetic habit of, or better to say, through
the banality of, “artistic” temperament. Art is at present a species of vice in America,
and it sorely and conspicuously needs prohibition or interference.
It is, I think, high time that those who have the artistic habit toward art should be
apprised of the danger they are in in assuming of course that they hold vital interest in
the development of intelligence. It is time therefore to interfere with stupidity in matters
of taste and judgment. We learn little or nothing from habit excepting repetitive
imitation. I should, for the benefit of you as reader, interpose here a little information
from the mind of Francis Picabia, who was until the war conspicuous among the
cubists, upon the subject of dadaism.
“Dada smells of nothing, nothing, nothing. It is like your hopes: nothing. Like your
paradise: nothing. Like your idols: nothing. Like your politicians: nothing. Like your
heroes: nothing. Like your artists: nothing. Like your religions: nothing.”
A litany like this coming from one of the most notable dadaists of the day, is too
edifying for proper expression. It is like a window opened upon a wide cool place where
all parts of one's exhausted being may receive the kind of air that is imperative to it. For
the present, we may say, a special part of one's being which needs the most and the
freshest air is that chamber in the brain where art takes hold and flourishes like a bed of
fungus in the dark.
What is the use, then, of knowing anything about art until we know precisely what
it is? If it is such an orchidaceous rarity as the world of worshippers would have us
believe, then we know it must be the parasitic equivalent of our existence feeding upon
the health of other functions and sensibilities in ourselves. The question comes why
worship what we are not familiar with? The war has taught us that idolatry is a past
virtue and can have no further place with intelligent people living in the present era,
268 which is for us the only era worth consideration. I have a hobby-horse therefore—to
ride away with, out into the world of intricate common experience; out into the arena
with those who know what the element of life itself is, and that I have become an
expression of the one issue in the mind worth the consideration of the artist, namely
fluidic change. How can anything to which I am not related, have any bearing upon me
as artist? I am only dadaist because it is the nearest I have come to scientific principle in
experience. What yesterday can mean is only what yesterday was, and tomorrow is
something I cannot fathom until it occurs. I ride my own hobby-horse away from the
dangers of art which is with us a modern vice at present, into the wide expanse of
magnanimous diversion from which I may extract all the joyousness I am capable of,
from the patterns I encounter.
The same disgust which was manifested and certainly enjoyed by Duse, when she
demanded that the stage be cleared of actors in order to save the creative life of the
stage, is the same disgust that makes us yearn for wooden dolls to make abstract
movements in order that we may release art from its infliction of the big “A,” to take
away from art its pricelessness and make of it a new and engaging diversion, pastime,
even dissipation if you will; for all real expression is a phase of dissipation in itself: To
release art from the disease of little theatre-ism, and from the mandibles of the octopuslike worshipper that eats everything, in the line of spurious estheticism within range,
disgorging it without intelligence or comprehension upon the consciousness of the not
at all stupid public, with a so obviously pernicious effect.
“Dada is a fundamentally religious attitude, analogous to that of the scientist with
his eyeglass glued to the microscope.” Dada is irritated by those who write “Art,
Beauty, Truth” with capital letters, and who make of them entities superior to man.
“Dada scoffs at capital letters, atrociously.” “Dada ruining the authority of constraints,
269 tends to set free the natural play of our activities.” “Dada therefore leads to amoralism
and to the most spontaneous and consequently the least logical lyricism. This lyricism is
expressed in a thousand ways of life.” “Dada scrapes from us the thick layers of filth
deposited on us by the last few centuries.” “Dada destroys, and stops at that. Let Dada
help us to make a complete clearance, then each of us rebuild a modern house with
central heating, and everything to the drain, Dadas of 1920.”
Remembering always that Dada means hobby-horse, you have at last the invitation
to make merry for once in our new and unprecedented experience over the subject of
ART with its now reduced front letter. It is the newest and most admirable reclaimer of
art in that it offers at last a release for the expression of natural sensibilities. We can ride
away to the radiant region of “Joie de Vivre,” and find that life and art are one and the
same thing, resembling each other so closely in reality, that it is never a question of
whether it shall or must be set down on paper or canvas, or given any greater degree of
expression than we give to a morning walk or a pleasant bath, or an ordinary rest in the
sunlight.
Art is then a matter of how one is to take life now, and not by any means a matter of
how the Greeks or the Egyptians or any other race has shown it to be for their own
needs and satisfaction. If art was necessary to them, it is unnecessary to us now,
therefore it is free to express itself as it will. You will find, therefore, that if you are
aware of yourself, you will be your own perfect dadaist, in that you are for the first time
riding your own hobby-horse into infinity of sensation through experience, and that you
are one more satisfactory vaudevillian among the multitudes of dancing legs and flying
wits. You will learn after all that the bugaboo called LIFE is a matter of the tightrope
and that the stars will shine their frisky approval as you glide, if you glide sensibly, with
an eye on the fun in the performance. That is what art is to be, must come to in the
270 consciousness of the artist most of all, he is perhaps the greatest offender in matters of
judgment and taste; and the next greatest offender is the dreadful go-between or
“middleman” esthete who so glibly contributes effete values to our present day
conceptions.
We must all learn what art really is, learn to relieve it from the surrounding
stupidities and from the passionate and useless admiration of the horde of false
idolaters, as well as the money changers in the temple of success. Dadaism offers the
first joyous dogma I have encountered which has been invented for the release and true
freedom of art. It is therefore most welcome since it will put out of use all heavy hands
and light fingers in the business of art and set them to playing a more honourable and
sportsmanlike game. We shall learn through dada-ism that art is a witty and entertaining
pastime, and not to be accepted as our ever present and stultifying affliction.
271 Appendix H. Tristan Tzara: “Lecture on Dada”
Tzara delivered this lecture at the Weimar Dada-Constructivist Congress of September
1922, and later in Hanover, Jena, and other European cities. It is, probably, his most
articulate attempt to explain Dadaism.
Source. Robert Motherwell. The Dada Painters and Poets. 246-48. Translated by Ralph
Manheim.
_______________
Ladies and Gentlemen:
I don't have to tell you that for the general public and for you, the refined public, a
Dadaist is the equivalent of a leper. But that is only a manner of speaking. When these
same people get close to us, they treat us with that remnant of elegance that comes from
their old habit of belief in progress. At ten yards distance, hatred begins again. If you
ask me why, I won't be able to tell you.
Another characteristic of Dada is the continuous breaking off of our friends. They
are always breaking off and resigning. The first to tender his resignation from the Dada
movement was myself. Everybody knows that Dada is nothing. I broke away from Dada
and from myself as soon as I understood the implications of nothing.
If I continue to do something, it is because it amuses me, or rather because I have a
need for activity which I use up and satisfy wherever I can. Basically, the true Dadas
have always been separate from Dada. Those who acted as if Dada were important
enough to resign from with a big noise have been motivated by a desire for personal
publicity, proving that counterfeiters have always wriggled like unclean worms in and
out of the purest and most radiant religions.
I know that you have come here today to hear explanations. Well, don't expect to
hear any explanations about Dada. You explain to me why you exist. You haven't the
faintest idea. You will say: I exist to make my children happy. But in your hearts you
know that isn't so. You will say: I exist to guard my country, against barbarian
272 invasions. That's a fine reason. You will say: I exist because God wills. That's a fairy
tale for children. You will never be able to tell me why you exist but you will always be
ready to maintain a serious attitude about life. You will never understand that life is a
pun, for you will never be alone enough to reject hatred, judgments, all these things that
require such an effort, in favor of a calm level state of mind that makes everything equal
and without importance.
Dada is not at all modern. It is more in the nature of a return to an almost Buddhist
religion of indifference. Dada covers things with an artificial gentleness, a snow of
butterflies released from the head of a prestidigitator. Dada is immobility and does not
comprehend the passions. You will call this a paradox, since Dada is manifested only in
violent acts. Yes, the reactions of individuals contaminated by destruction are rather
violent, but when these reactions are exhausted, annihilated by the Satanic insistence of
a continuous and progressive “What for?” what remains, what dominates is
indifference. But with the same note of conviction I might maintain the contrary.
I admit that my friends do not approve this point of view. But the Nothing can be
uttered only as the reflection of an individual. And that is why it will be valid for
everyone, since everyone is important only for the individual who is expressing
himself.—I am speaking of myself. Even that is too much for me. How can I be
expected to speak of all men at once, and satisfy them too?
Nothing is more delightful than to confuse and upset people. People one doesn't
like. What's the use of giving them explanations that are merely food for curiosity? The
truth is that people love nothing but themselves and their little possessions, their
income, their dog. This state of affairs derives from a false conception of property. If
one is poor in spirit, one possesses a sure and indomitable intelligence, a savage logic, a
point of view that cannot be shaken. Try to be empty and fill your brain cells with a
273 petty happiness. Always destroy what you have in you. On random walks. Then you
will be able to understand many things. You are not more intelligent than we, and we
are not more intelligent than you.
Intelligence is an organization like any other, the organization of society, the
organization of a bank, the organization of chit-chat. At a society tea. It serves to create
order and clarity where there is none. It serves to create a state hierarchy. To set up
classifications for rational work. To separate questions of a material order from those of
a cerebral order, but to take the former very seriously. Intelligence is the triumph of
sound education and pragmatism. Fortunately life is something else and its pleasures are
innumerable. They are not paid for in the coin of liquid intelligence.
These observations of everyday conditions have led us to a realization which
constitutes our minimum basis of agreement, aside from the sympathy which binds us
and which is inexplicable. It would not have been possible for us to found our
agreement on principles. For everything is relative. What are the Beautiful, the Good,
Art, Freedom? Words that have a different meaning for every individual. Words with
the pretension of creating agreement among all, and that is why they are written with
capital letters. Words which have not the moral value and objective force that people
have grown accustomed to finding in them. Their meaning changes from one individual,
one epoch, one country to the next. Men are different. It is diversity that makes life
interesting. There is no common basis in men’s minds. The unconscious is inexhaustible
and uncontrollable. Its force surpasses us. It is as mysterious as the last particle of a
brain cell. Even if we knew it, we could not reconstruct it.
What good did the theories of the philosophers do us? Did they help us to take a
single step forward or backward? What is forward, what is backward? Did they alter our
forms of contentment? We are. We argue, we dispute, we get excited. The rest is sauce.
274 Sometimes pleasant, sometimes mixed with a limitless boredom, a swamp dotted with
tufts of dying shrubs.
We have had enough of the intelligent movements that have stretched beyond
measure our credulity in the benefits of science. What we want now is spontaneity. Not
because it is better or more beautiful than anything else. But because everything that
issues freely from ourselves, without the intervention of speculative ideas, represents us.
We must intensify this quantity of life that readily spends itself in every quarter. Art is
not the most precious manifestation of life. Art has not the celestial and universal value
that people like to attribute to it. Life is far more interesting. Dada knows the correct
measure that should be given to art: with subtle, perfidious methods, Dada introduces it
into daily life. And vice versa. In art, Dada reduces everything to an initial simplicity,
growing always more relative. It mingles its caprices with the chaotic wind of creation
and the barbaric dances of savage tribes. It wants logic reduced to a personal minimum,
while literature in its view should be primarily intended for the individual who makes it.
Words have a weight of their own and lend themselves to abstract construction. The
absurd has no terrors for me, for from a more exalted point of view everything in life
seems absurd to me. Only the elasticity of our conventions creates a bond between
disparate acts. The Beautiful and the True in art do not exist; what interests me is the
intensity of a personality transposed directly, clearly into the work; the man and his
vitality; the angle from which he regards the elements and in what manner he knows
how to gather sensation, emotion, into a lacework of words and sentiments.
Dada tries to find out what words mean before using them, from the point of view
not of grammar but of representation. Objects and colors pass through the same filter. It
is not the new technique that interests us, but the spirit. Why do you want us to be
preoccupied with a pictorial, moral, poetic, literary, political or social renewal? We are
275 well aware that these renewals of means are merely the successive cloaks of the various
epochs of history, uninteresting questions of fashion and facade. We are well aware that
people in the costumes of the Renaissance were pretty much the same as the people of
today, and that Chouang-Dsi was just as Dada as we are. You are mistaken if you take
Dada for a modern school, or even for a reaction against the schools of today. Several of
my statements have struck you as old and natural, what better proof that you were a
Dadaist without knowing it, perhaps even before the birth of Dada.
You will often hear that Dada is a state of mind. You may be gay, sad, afflicted,
joyous, melancholy or Dada. Without being literary, you can be romantic, you can be
dreamy, weary, eccentric, a businessman, skinny, transfigured, vain, amiable or Dada.
This will happen later on in the course of history when Dada has become a precise,
habitual word, when popular repetition has given it the character of a word organic with
its necessary content. Today no one thinks of the literature of the Romantic school in
representing a lake, a landscape, a character. Slowly but surely, a Dada character is
forming.
Dada is here, there and a little everywhere, such as it is, with its faults, with its
personal differences and distinctions which it accepts and views with indifference.
We are often told that we are incoherent, but into this word people try to put an
insult that it is rather hard for me to fathom. Everything is incoherent. The gentleman
who decides to take a bath but goes to the movies instead. The one who wants to be
quiet but says things that haven't even entered his head. Another who has a precise idea
on some subject but succeeds only in expressing the opposite in words which for him
are a poor translation. There is no logic. Only relative necessities discovered a
posteriori, valid not in any exact sense but only as explanations.
The acts of life have no beginning or end. Everything happens in a completely
276 idiotic way. That is why everything is alike. Simplicity is called Dada.
Any attempt to conciliate an inexplicable momentary state with logic strikes me as a
boring kind of game. The convention of the spoken language is ample and adequate for
us, but for our solitude, for our intimate games and our literature we no longer need it.
The beginnings of Dada were not the beginnings of an art, but of a disgust. Disgust
with the magnificence of philosophers who for 3,000 years have been explaining
everything to us (what for?), disgust with the pretensions of these artists-God'srepresentatives-on-earth, disgust with passion and with real pathological wickedness
where it was not worth the bother; disgust with a false form of domination and
restriction en masse, that accentuates rather than appeases man's instinct of domination,
disgust with all the catalogued categories, with the false prophets who are nothing but a
front for the interests of money, pride, disease, disgust with the lieutenants of a
mercantile art made to order according to a few infantile laws, disgust with the divorce
of good and evil, the beautiful and the ugly (for why is it more estimable to be red rather
than green, to the left rather than the right, to be large or small?). Disgust finally with
the Jesuitical dialectic which can explain everything and fill people's minds with
oblique and obtuse ideas without any physiological basis or ethnic roots, all this by
means of blinding artifice and ignoble charlatans promises.
As Dada marches it continuously destroys, not in extension but in itself. From all
these disgusts, may I add, it draws no conclusion, no pride, no benefit. It has even
stopped combating anything, in the realization that it's no use, that all this doesn't
matter. What interests a Dadaist is his own mode of life. But here we approach the great
secret.
Dada is a state of mind. That is why it transforms itself according to races and
events. Dada applies itself to everything, and yet it is nothing, it is the point where the
277 yes and the no and all the opposites meet, not solemnly in the castles of human
philosophies, but very simply at street corners, like dogs and grasshoppers.
Like everything in life, Dada is useless.
Dada is without pretension, as life should be.
Perhaps you will understand me better when I tell you that Dada is a virgin microbe
that penetrates with the insistence of air into all the spaces that reason has not been able
to fill with words or conventions.
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296 List of Figures
Fig. 1. Theo van Doesburg (Christian Emil Marie Küpper) with Kurt Schwitters. Kleine
Dada Soirée [Small Dada Evening]. 1922. Lithograph. 30.2 x 30.2 cm. Museum
of Modern Art, New York. MoMA. Web. 10 Oct. 2015. <www.moma.org/learn/m
oma_learning/2562-2>.
Fig. 2. Jean (Hans) Arp. Plastron et fourchette [Shirtfront and Fork]. c 1922. Painted
wood. 58 x 70.6 x 5.9 cm. National Gallery of Australia, Camberra. National
Gallery of Australia. Web. 18 April 2016. <www.nga.gov.au/International/Catalo
gue/Detail.cfm?IRN=89673>.
Fig. 3. André Breton, Tristan Tzara and Philippe Soupalt reading a manifesto at a Dada
demonstration. Saint Julien le Pauvre. 1921. Gelatin silver print. 10 x 16 cm.
Archives Dada. Web. 7 Nov. 2015. <www.archives-dada.tumblr.com/post/384656
12585/manifestation-dada-%C3%A0-saint-julien-le-pauvretirage>.
Fig. 4. Sylvia Beach at her bookstore Shakespeare and Company. Paris. 1920s. Gelatin
silver print. Lanza Digital. Web. 12 Oct. 2016. <http://www.lanzadigital.com/new
s/show/teresa-ibanyez/shakespeare-and-company-de-sylvia-beach/78427>.
Fig. 5. Marcel Duchamp. L. H. O. O. Q. (Mona Lisa With Moustache). 1919. Pencil,
ready-made. 19.7 x 12.4 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Wikiart. Web. 2 Nov.
2015. <www.wikiart.org/en/marcel-duchamp/l-h-o-o-q-mona-lisa-with-moustache
-1919>.
Fig. 6. Raoul Hausmann. ABCD. 1923-1924. Collage and photomontage on paper. 40.4
x 28.2 cm. Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Dada Companion. Web. 23 Oct.
2015. <www.centrepompidou.fr/cpv/resource/cAneAg6/rbyankK>.
Fig. 7. Francis Picabia. Natures Mortes: Portrait de Cézanne, Portrait de Renoir,
297 Portrait de Rembrandt [Still Lifes: Portrait of Cézanne, Portrait of Renoir, Portrait
of Rembrandt]. 1920. Toy monkey and oil on cardboard. Dimensions and
whereabouts unknown. Reproduced in Cannibale, Paris, nº 1, April 25, 1920.
Henri Art Magazine. Web. 23 Oct. 2015. <www.henrimag.com/?p=6627>.
Fig. 8. Guillaume Apollinaire. “Reconnais-toi” [Recognize Yourself]. 1915. Calligram
dedicated to Louise Colligny-Chantillon. Chanel News. Web. 14 Feb. 2016.
<www.chanel-news.chanel.com/es_ES/home/2013/05/apollinaire_s-calligram-n-5
culture-chanel-exhibition.html>.
Fig. 9. Marcel Janco. Cabaret Voltaire. 1916. Photographic reproduction of disappeared
oil on canvas painting. Archives Dada. Web. 14 Feb. 2016. <www.archives-dada.
tumblr.com/post/16968285967/anonyme-photographie-decabaret-voltaire-1916>.
Fig. 10. Cover of Der Dada nº 2. Berlin. December 1919. Edited by Raoul Hausmann.
International Dada Archive. The University of Iowa Libraries. Web. 8 Nov. 2015.
<www.sdrc.lib.uiowa.edu/dada/derdada/2/pages/00cover.htm>.
Fig. 11. Adolf Hitler and other Nazi officials (Hoffmann, Willrich, Hansen, and Ziegler)
standing by the Dada wall at the Degenerate Art Exhibition. July 16, 1937.
Published in the Nationalist Observer, South German (Süddeutsche) issue, nº 199,
July 18, 1937. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz,
Berlin. bpk, Berlin, Art Resource, NY. The Guardian. Web. 3 Dec. 2015. <www.
theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/mar/13/degenerate-art-attack-modern-art-nazi
-germany-review-neue-galerie>.
Fig. 12. Alfred Stieglitz. Duchamp’s Fountain photographed at 291 Gallery in front of
Marsden Hartley’s painting The Warriors. Reproduced in The Blind Man nº 2,
May 1917. Caption read: “The exhibit refused by the Independents.” The Cabinet
Magazine. Web. 3 Dec. 2015. <www.cabinetmagazine.org/27/duchamp.php>.
298 Fig. 13. Cover of New York Dada nº 1, April 1921. Collection New York Public
Library. Dada Companion. Web. 5 Dec. 2015. <www.dada-companion.com/journ
als/per_new-york.php>.
Fig. 14. Man Ray. The Coat-Stand. 1920. Gelatin silver print. 41 x 28.6 cm.
Reproduced in New York Dada nº 1, April 1921. Musée National d’Art Moderne.
Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal.
Tout-Fait. Web. 5 Dec. 2015. <www.toutfait.com/popup/articles/Bahtsetzis/popup
07.htm>.
Fig. 15. Man Ray. Tristan Tzara. 1924. Gelatin silver print. 22.8 x 17.6 cm. Howard
Greenberg Gallery, New York. Christies. Web. 5 Dec. 2015. <www.christies.com
/lotfinder/photographs/man-ray-tristan-tzara-1924-5733995-details.aspx>.
Fig. 16. The Maurice Barrés trial. 1921. Getty Images. Web. 9 Dec. 2015. <www.gettyi
mages.es/detail/fotograf%C3%ADa-de-noticias/surrealism-barr%C3%A8s-trial-f
rance-fotograf%C3%ADa-de-noticias/535783395#surrealism-barrs-trial-france-pi
cture-id535783395>.
Fig. 17. Cover of the first issue of La Révolution Surréaliste. 20 x 29 cm. Private
collection. Via Libri. Web. 29 April 2016. <www.vialibri.net/552display_i/year_1
924_0_722278.html>.
Fig. 18. Raoul Hausmann. Mechanischer Kopf (Der Geist unserer Zeit) [Mechanical
Head (The Spirit of Our Time)]. c. 1920. Assemblage: wood, metal, leather and
cardboard. Height: 32.5 cm. Musée National d’Art Moderne. Centre Georges
Pompidou, Paris. Dada Companion. Web. 3 Jan. 2016. <www.centrepompidou.fr/
cpv/resource/cGzAKG/rBAMyB5>.
Fig. 19. Cover of the June 1929 issue of Transition: An International Quarterly for
Creative Experiment (nº 16-17), containing the “Revolution of the Word
299 Proclamation.” Harry Ransom Center. The University of Texas. Web. 8 Jan. 2016.
<www.hrc.utexas.edu/exhibitions/beckett/career/beginnings/publications.html>.
Fig. 20. Francis Picabia. Portrait d'une jeune fille américaine dans l'état de nudité
[Portrait of a Young American Girl in the State of Nudity]. 1915. Ink on paper.
Reproduced in Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 magazine, nº 5-6, July-August 1915. Musée
d’Orsay, Paris. Dada Art. Web. 3 Sept. 2015. <www.musee-orsay.fr/en/collection
s/index-of-works/notice.html?no_cache=1&nnumid=136507>.
Fig. 21. George Grosz and John Heartfield. Leben und Treiben in Universal-City, 12
Uhr 5 mittags [Life and Work in Universal City, 12:05 Noon]. 1919. Arty
Factory. Web. 8 Sept. 2015. <www.artyfactory.com/art_appreciation/art_moveme
nts/dadaism.htm>.
Fig. 22. Tal R. Illustration for the Harpune Verlag limited edition (30 signed and
numbered copies) of Hugo Ball’s Flametti. The vignette also appears on the cover
of the Wakefield Press edition. 2014. Woodcut and etching. Harpune Verlag.
Web. 16 Feb. 2016. <www.harpune.at/flametti.html>.
Fig. 23. Hugo Ball reciting his Verse ohne Worte at Cabaret Voltaire. 1916. Photo taken
by an unknown photographer for a publicity postcard. 71.5 x 40 cm. DadaSammlung. Kunsthaus Zurich. Frieze Magazine. Web. 1 Sept. 2015. <www.frieze
.com/article/artistic-self-exposure>.
Fig. 24. Kurt Scwitters. Merzbild (Rossfett). 1918-1919. Assemblage. 20.4 x 17.4 cm.
Private collection. Scala Archives. 20 Jan. 2016. <www.scalarchives.com/web/det
taglio_immagine.asp?idImmagine=WH39089&posizione=47&inCarrello=False&
numImmagini=57&>.
Fig. 25. Louis Aragon in 1919, during the writing of Anicet ou le Panorama.
Maremurex. Web. 20 Jan. 2016. <www.maremurex.net/anicet.html>.
300 Fig. 26. Man Ray. Francis Picabia. 1921. Gelatin silver print. 17 x 23.5 cm. Centre
Georges Pompidou, Paris. Fondation Beyeler. Web. 20 Jan. 2016. <www.fondatio
nbeyeler.ch/en/exhibitions/surrealism/biographies>.
Fig. 27. George Ribemont-Dessaignes. Grand musicien [Grand Musician]. 1920. Oil on
cardboard. 75 x 57 cm. Private collection. Art Net. Web. 17 Oct. 2015. <www.artn
et.com/artists/georges-ribemont-dessaignes/grand-musicien-HjudJLXMP4K_HHk
W1gS5JQ2>.
Fig. 28. Facsimile dust jacket of Philippe Soupault’s Last Nights of Paris. Macaulay,
1929. Facsimile Dust Jackets. Web. 18 Oct. 2015. <www.dustjackets.com/pages/
books/7042/philippe-soupault/last-nights-of-paris>.
Fig. 29. Erich Hartmann. Robert M. Coates. n.d. Gelatin silver print. The Passing
Tramp. Web. 9 Sept. 2015. <www.thepassingtramp.blogspot.com.es/2015/01/putti
ng-carnage-into-crime-fiction.html>.
Fig. 30. First edition cover of Robert M. Coates’ The Eater of Darkness. Contact
Editions, 1926. L. W. Currey, Inc. Web 9 Sept 2015. <www.lwcurrey.com/pages/
books/9837/robert-coates/the-eater-of-darkness>.
Fig. 31. Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain. Cover illustration for the first volume of
Fantômas. Éditions Fayard. 1911. La France pittoresque. Web. 10 Sept 2015.
<www.france-pittoresque.com/spip.php?article3299>.
Fig. 32. Raoul Hausmann. Der Kunstkritiker [The Art Critic]. 1919-1920. Lithograph
and printed paper on paper. 31.8 x 25.4 cm. Tate Modern. Tate. Web. 29 Sept.
2015. <www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/hausmann-the-art-critic-t01918>.
Fig. 33. First October issue of Ranch Romances. 1927. Owens Valley History. Web. 3
Oct. 2015. <www.owensvalleyhistory.com/cowgirlmagazines03/cowgirlmagazine
s03.html>.
301 Fig. 34. Francis Picabia. Fille Née sans Mère [Girl Born without a Mother]. 1916-1917.
Medium gouache and metallic paint on printed paper. 50 x 65 cm. The Scottish
National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. National Galleries. Web. 5 Oct.
2015. <www.nationalgalleries.org/collection/artists-a-z/p/artist/francis-picabia/obj
ect/fille-nee-sans-mere-girl-born-without-a-mother-gma-3545>.
Fig. 35. Berenice Abbot. Djuna Barnes. 1926. Gelatin silver print. Dalkey Archive.
Web. 1 Feb. 2016. <www.dalkeyarchive.com/page/2/?s=Barnes+Djuna>.
Fig. 36. Djuna Barnes. “After All, One Must Be Faithful to One’s Bracelets.” Satirical
drawing of a dandyish Village resident. Published in the New York Morning
Telegraph (26 November 1916) accompanying Barnes’ article “How the Villagers
Amuse Themselves.” Source: Poe’s Mother: Selected Drawings of Djuna Barnes.
Edited by Douglas Messerli, Sun & Moon Press, 1996. p. 101. Atticus Review.
Web. 1 Feb. 2016. <www.atticusreview.org/after-all-one-must-be-faithful-to-ones
-bracelets/>.
Fig. 37. Photograph of the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. n. d. Unknown
photographer. Gelatin silver print. Bridgeman Art Library, London. Daily Mail.
Web. 3 Feb. 2016. <www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-3221552/The-weir
dos-ideas-changed-lives-alternative-unothodox-history-individualism-20th-centur
y.html>.
Fig. 38. Man Ray. Raymond Radiguet. 1922. Gelatin silver print. Man Ray Photo. Web.
3 Feb. 2016. <www.manrayphoto.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=16
84&osCsid=ebc854bcfc581c87faeb7df4698948ed>.
Fig. 39. George Grosz. Selbstmörder [Suicide]. 1916. Oil paint on canvas. 100 x 77.5
cm. Tate Modern. Tate. Web. 10 Feb. 2016. <www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/groszsuicide-t02053>.
302 Fig. 40. Hannah Höch. Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser durch die letzte Weimarer
Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands [Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through
the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany]. 1919. Collage of pasted
papers. 114 x 90 cm. Nationalgalerie. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Art Resource.
Web. 3 Feb. 2016. <www.artres.com/C.aspx?VP3=CMS3&VF=ARTHO1_3_VF
orm>.
Fig. 41. Marcel Duchamp. Nu descendant un escalier (nº 2) [Nude Descending a
Staircase (No. 2)]. 1912. Oil on canvas. 147 x 89.2 cm. Philadelphia Museum of
Art. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Web. 19 Feb. 2016. <www.philamuseum.org/co
llections/permanent/51449.html>.
Fig. 42. Passport photograph of William Carlos Williams. 1921. Gelatin silver print. 5.1
x 4.4 cm. Photographer unknown. Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.
Yale University. Yale University. Web. 19 Feb. 2016. <www.brbl-dl.library.yale.e
du/vufind/Record/3549530>.
Fig. 43. William Carlos Williams with his sons, Paul Williams, 2 (left), and William
Eric Williams, 4, outside of his home pediatric care office on Ridge Road in
Rutherford. 1918. Photographer unknown. North Jersey. Web. 19 Feb. 2016.
<www.northjersey.com/news/calling-all-babies-delivered-by-the-poet-who-gavepaterson-life-1.1370019>.
Fig. 44. First edition cover of Kora in Hell, with a sketch by William Carlos Williams.
The Four Seas Company, 1920. The Brick Row Book Shop. Web. 19 Feb. 2016.
<www.brickrow.com/pages/books/21556/william-carlos-williams/kora-in-hell-im
provisations>.
Fig. 45. Marcel Duchamp. Roue de bicyclette [Bicycle Wheel]. 1951 (third version,
after lost original of 1913). Metal wheel mounted on painted wood stool. 129.5 x
303 63.5 x 41.9 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York. MoMA. Web. 19 Feb. 2016.
<www.moma.org/collection/works/81631>.
Fig. 46. Man Ray. Gift. 1958 (replica of lost 1921 original). Painted flatiron and tacks.
15.3 x 9 x 11.4 cm. Archives Dada. Web. 20 Feb. 2016. <archives-dada.tumblr.co
m/post/21555501829/man-ray-gift-c-1958-replica-of-1921-original>.
Fig. 47. George Grosz, John Heartfield Dada-merica. 1919. Photographs, typography,
hair, matches and other objects. 26 x 19 cm. Archives Dada. Web. 20 Feb. 2016.
<www.archives-dada.tumblr.com/post/45024295555/george-grosz-john-heartfield
dada-merica-1919>.
Fig. 48. Laurence Vail. c. 1920. Spartacus Educational. Web. 22 Feb. 2016. <www.spar
tacus-educational.com/SPvail.htm>.
Fig. 49. First Edition of Vail’s Murder! Murder! Peter Davis, 1931. Dust jacket
designed by Imrie M. Spine. Peter Harrington. Web. 22 Feb. 2016. <www.peterh
arrington.co.uk/rare-books/peter-harrington-catalogue-144/murder-murder/>.
Fig. 50. Laurence Vail with Peggy Guggenheim and their son Sinbad. c. 1925. The Red
List. Web. 22 Feb. 2016. <www.theredlist.com/wiki-2-24-883-view-tribes-profileguggenheim.html>.
Fig. 51. Laurence Vail and Kay Boyle with their daughter Sharon. Early 1930s. Angry
Filmmaker. Web. 22 Feb. 2016. <www.angryfilmmaker.com/dangerous-kay-boyl
e/a-brief-biography/>.
Fig. 52. George Grosz as Dada Death. 1918. The artist wore this mask as he walked up
and down Berlin’s Kurfurstendamm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York. Gift of Priscilla A. B. Henderson. Tate. Web. 22 Feb. 2016. <www.tate.org.
uk/context-comment/articles/you-nourish-yourself-everything-you-hate>.
Fig. 53. Raoul Hausmann. Selbstbildnis als dadasoph [Self-Portrait of the Dadasoph].
304 1920. Photomontage and collage on handmade Japanese paper. 36.2 x 28 cm.
Private collection. Archives Dada. Web. 22 Feb. 2016. <www.archives-dada.tumb
lr.com/post/16466433008/raoul-hausmann-selbstbildnis-als-dadasoph>.
Fig. 54. Jacques Vaché. c. 1914. The photo is dedicated to Vaché’s friend, the actor and
writer Jean Sarment. France Culture. Web. 22 Feb. 2016. <www.franceculture.fr/
emissions/une-vie-une-oeuvre/jacques-vache-le-detonateur>.
Fig. 55. John Dos Passos. 1927. Printed in the Hungarian monthly Literatura. Christmas
Album. 1927. Wikimedia. Web. 22 Feb. 2016. <www.commons.wikimedia.org/wi
ki/File:John_Dos_Passos_Hungarian_Literatura_1927_Christmas_Album.jpg>.
Fig. 56. Juan Gris. Moulin à café, tasse et verre sur une table [Coffee Grinder, Cup and
Glass on Table]. 1915-1916. Black chalk, pencil, collage and oil on paper. 46 x 29
cm. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid. Museo Reina Sofía.
Web. 22 Feb. 2016. <www.museoreinasofia.es/coleccion/obra/moulin-cafe-tasseet-verre-sur-une-table-molinillo-cafe-taza-copa-sobre-mesa>.
Fig. 57. Max Ernst. Frucht einer langen Erfahrung [Fruit of a Long Experience]. 1919.
Collage, oil and wood. 45.7 x 38 cm. Private collection. Art Experts. Web. 22
Feb. 2016. <www.artexpertswebsite.com/pages/artists/ernst.php>.
Fig. 58. Jean (Hans) Arp. Rectangles selon les lois du hazard [Rectangles Arranged
According to the Laws of Chance]. 1916. Collage, paper on cardboard and
pavatex. Kunstsmuseum Basel. Centre Pompidou. Web. 22 Feb. 2016. <www.me
diation.centrepompidou.fr/education/ressources/ENS-dada/popup04.html>.
Fig. 59. Kurt Schwitters. Merzbild 410. Irgendsowas [Merz Picture 410. Something or
Other]. 1922. Collage, material, paper, and feather on cardboard. 18.2 x 14.5 cm.
Sprengel Museum, Hanover. Art & Education. Web. 22 Feb. 2016. <www.artand
education.net/announcement/kurt-schwitters-color-and-collage/>.
305 Fig. 60. Kurt Schwitters. Merzbild 46 A. Das Kegelbild [Merz Picture 46 A. The Skittle
Picture]. 1921. Collage. 55 x 43.8 cm. Sprengel Museum, Hanover. Tate. 23 Feb.
2016. <www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/schwitters-britain>.
Fig. 61. Blaise Cendrars and Sonia Delaunay. Prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite
Jehanne de France [The Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jeannie of
France]. Editions des Hommes Nouveaux, 1913. Gouache and ink on printed text.
Melville House. Web. 23 Feb. 2016. <www.mhpbooks.com/the-first-simultaneous
-book-on-display-at-moma/>.
Fig 62. George Grosz. Grauer Tag [Grey Day]. 1921. Oil on canvas. 115 x 80 cm.
Staatsliche Museen zu Berlin. ABC Gallery. Web. 23 Feb. 2016. <www.abcgaller
y.com/G/grosz/grosz9.html>.
Fig. 63. George Grosz. Kriegsverwendungsfähig [Fit for Active Service]. 1918. Ink on
paper. 50.8 x 36.5 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York. MoMA. Web. 23 Feb.
2016. <www.moma.org/collection/works/35441>.
Fig. 64. George Grosz. Querschnitt [Cross Section]. 1919-1920. Off-set lithograph on
wove paper. 27.94 x 15.88 cm. The Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German
Expressionist Studies. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. LACMA. Web. 23
Feb. 2016. <www.collections.lacma.org/node/181435>.
Fig. 65. J. Sibley Watson. E. E. Cummings. c. 1930. Gelatin silver print. Houghton
Library. Harvard University. Harvard Magazine. Web. 25 March 2016. <www.ha
rvardmagazine.com/2005/03/the-rebellion-of-ee-cumm.html>.
Fig. 66. Lachmann. Costume by Picasso for Parade, a Massine ballet with libretto by
Cocteau, music by Satie, staged by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1917. Gelatin
silver print. The Red List. Web. 25 March 2016. <www.theredlist.com/wiki-2-20881-1399-1161-235972-236038-view-1910-1920-1-profile-1917-parade-b.html>.
306 Fig. 67. Broom, vol. 2, nº 2, May 1922, containing E. E. Cummings’ “Three United
States Sonnets.” Archives of American Art. Smithsonian Institution. Archives of
American Art. Web. 25 March 2016. <www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/bro
om-vol-2-no-2-13656>.
Fig. 68. E. E. Cummings. The Garden of Eden … before the dawn of history … 1929.
Ink on paper. Reproduced in E. E. Cummings. A Miscellany Revised, edited by
George J. Firmage, October House, 1965. Brain Pickings. Web. 25 March 2016.
<www.brainpickings.org/2015/02/09/cummings-miscellany-agony-of-the-artist/>.
Fig. 69. 2 + 2 = 5. Russian propaganda poster. 1931. The text reads: “The arithmetic of
an industrial-financial counter-plan: 2 + 2 plus the enthusiasm of the workers = 5”
[Trans. Steve Dodson]. Source: Mike Webster’s home page at Grand Valley State
University. Eimi Notes. GVSU. Web. 25 March 2016. <www.faculty.gvsu.edu/we
bsterm/cummings/Eimi.htm>.
Fig. 70. Joan London and E. E. Cummings in Moscow. 1931. Photographer Charles
Malamuth. Gelatin silver print. Source: Mike Webster’s home page at Grand
Valley State University. Eimi Notes. GVSU. Web. 25 March 2016. <www.faculty.
gvsu.edu/websterm/cummings/Eimi.htm>.
Fig. 71. Margaret Bourke-White. New unidentified apartment buildings. Moscow. 1931.
Gelatin silver print. The Charnel House. Web. 25 March 2016. <www.thecharnelh
ouse.org/2015/12/16/margaret-bourke-white-in-the-ussr-1931/margaret-bourke-w
hite-new-unident-apartment-buildings-moscow-1931/>.
Fig. 72. Nathanael West. Source: Jay Martin. Nathanael West: The Art of His Life. New
York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970. David Lavery. Web. 2 March 2016. <www.
davidlavery.net/grotesque/Site%20Images/West/west1931.JPG>.
Fig. 73. George Grosz. Plate VII from Ecce Homo. 1922-1923 (reproduced drawings
307 and watercolors executed 1915-1922). 34.8 x 25 cm (page). 35.5 x 26.2 x 3.3 cm
(overall). Malik Verlag, Berlin. Museum of Modern Art, New York. MoMA. Web.
2 March 2016. <www.moma.org/collection/works/15162>.
Fig. 74. Field and Stream. December 1922. Artist: Henry S. Watson. The Antique Shop.
Magazine Art. Web. 2 March 2016. <www.magazineart.org/main.php/v/sports/fiel
dandstream/Field+and+Stream+1922-12.jpg.html>.
Fig. 75. Americana. March 1933. Ed. Alexander King, Nathanael West, George Grosz
and Gilbert Seldes. 22.86 x 30.48 cm. PBA Galleries. Web. 2 March 2016.
<www.pbagalleries.com/view-auctions/catalog/id/376/lot/116458/ldquo-America
na-7-issues-of-rare-1930s-left-wing-Magazine-of-Pictorial-Satire-rdquo-GeorgeGrosz-E-E-Cummings-James-Thurber-Nathanael-West-et-al>.
Fig. 76. First edition of Nathanael West’s The Dream Life of Balso Snell. Contact
Editions, 1931. Burnside Rare Books. Web. 2 March 2016. <www.burnsiderarebo
oks.com/pages/books/141121005/nathaniel-west/the-dream-life-of-balso-snell>.
Fig. 77. Nokter the Stammerer. 11th century manuscript. Bistum St. Gallen. Web. 3
March 2016. <www.bistum-stgallen.ch/de/342/Notker_neu.htm>.
Fig. 78. St. Margaret Mary Alacoque. Devotional postcard. Delcampe. Web. 2 March
2016. <www.delcampe.net/en_GB/collectables/postcards/religions-beliefs-christia
nity-saints/sainte-marguerite-marie-alacoque-religieuse-de-l-ordre-de-la-visitation
-220472844.html>.
Fig. 79. Hal Morey. Grand Central Station. c. 1930. Gelatin silver print. 77.47 x 110.49
cm. Restoration Hardware. Web. 3 March 2016. <www.restorationhardware.com/
catalog/product/product.jsp?productId=prod2140207>.
Fig. 80. Alvin Langdon Coburn. Gertrude Stein. 1913. Platinum/palladium print.
Cropped image dimension approx. 30 x 23 cm. George Eastman House
308 Collection. 31 Studio. Web. 4 Sept. 2015. <www.31-studio.com/alvin_langdon_c
oburn_volume_5_31_studio.html>.
Fig. 81. Man Ray. Gertrude Stein next to her portrait by Picasso. 1922. Gelatin silver
print. 24 x 30 cm. Man Ray Photo. Web. 5 Sept. 2015. <www.manrayphoto.com/c
atalog/product_info.php?products_id=458&osCsid=22045277bc5f2acb7641eea5c
a61c33f>.
Fig. 82. Man Ray. Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein in their atelier. 1922. Gelatin
silver print. Art Value. Web. 5 Sept. 2015. <www.artvalue.com/auctionresult-man-ray-radnitsky-emmanuel-189-gertrude-stein-and-alice-b-tok-2344455.htm>.
Fig. 83. Kurt Schwitters. Merz 94 Grünflec. 1920. Collage. Eduard Neuenschwander
Collection, Zurich. Modern Art 2013. Web. 5 Sept. 2015. <www.modernart2013.b
logspot.com.es/2013/03/merz-94-grunflec.html>.
Fig. 84. Henri Matisse. Nu bleu: Souvenir de Biskra [Blue Nude (Memory of Biskra)].
1907. Oil on canvas. 92.1 x 140.3 cm. Cone Collection. Baltimore Museum of
Art. Printed as a half-tone reproduction in the August 1912 Special Number of
Camera Work. Ed. Alfred Stieglitz. Art Net. Web. 5 Sept. 2015. <www.artnet.com
/artists/henri-matisse/nu-allong%C3%A9-study-for-le-nu-bleu-souvenir-de-tnsPV
6hH9sZz3eVxEyuzXw2>.
Fig. 85. Francis Picabia. Portrait pour rire de Max Jacob. 1915. Photogravure.
Reproduced in the Dec. 1915/Jan. 1916 issue of 291. Ed. Alfred Stieglitz. Musée
d’Orsay,
Paris.
Musée
d’Orsay.
Web.
5
Sept.
2015.
<www.musee-
orsay.fr/fr/collections/catalogue-des-oeuvres/notice.html?no_cache=1&zoom=1&
tx_damzoom_pi1%5Bzoom%5D=0&tx_damzoom_pi1%5BxmlId%5D=136647&
tx_damzoom_pi1%5Bback%5D=%2Ffr%2Fcollections%2Fcatalogue-des-oeuvre
s%2Fnotice.html%3Fnnumid%3D136647>.
309 Fig. 86. Marsden Hartley. One portrait of One Woman (Gertrude Stein). 1916.
Weisman Art Museum. University of Minnesota. Biddington’s. Web. 7 Sept.
2015. <www.biddingtons.com/content/bentleyconnecticut.html>.
Fig. 87. Saburo Murakami. Passing Through. Performance view at the 2nd Gutai Art
Exhibition. Ohara Kaikan, Tokyo. c. 11-17 October 1956. Museum of Osaka
University. Hyperallergic. Web. 7 March 2016. <www.hyperallergic.com/66520/t
he-alchemical-art-innovators-of-postwar-japan/>.
Fig. 88. Jean-Michel Basquiat. Untitled (Skull). 1981. Acrylic and mixed media on
canvas. 207 x 175.9 cm. Broad Collection. Los Angeles, CA. Art Experts. Web. 8
March 2016. <www.artexpertswebsite.com/pages/artists/basquiat.php>.
Fig. 89. Poster for the Dada Universal exhibition at the Zurich National Museum. 2016.
National Museum Zurich. Web. 29 Oct. 2016. <https://www.nationalmuseum.ch/e
/zuerich/ausstellungen.php?aus_id=6397&show_detail=true>.
Fig. 90. Hans Arp, Tristan Tzara, and Hans Richter in Zurich, c. 1917-18. Archives
Dada. Web. 8 March 2016. <www.archives-dada.tumblr.com/search/Tzara+Richt
er+Arp>.
310 UNIVERSIDAD DE LA RIOJA
Facultad de Letras y de la Educación
Departamento de Filologías Modernas
TRADUCCIÓN AL ESPAÑOL DE LA INTRODUCCIÓN, LAS CONCLUSIONES
Y EL ÍNDICE DE LA TESIS DOCTORAL:
DADÁ / EEUU
CONEXIONES ENTRE EL MOVIMIENTO DADAÍSTA
Y OCHO NARRADORES NORTEAMERICANOS
Rubén Fernández Abella
Director: Dr. Carlos Villar Flor
2016
1. Introducción
Objetivo y estructura
3
Estado de la cuestión
8
Marco teórico
13
2. Conclusiones
20
3. Índice
27
!
2
1. INTRODUCCIÓN
Objetivo y estructura
Los Dadaístas creían que la novela no era un vehículo viable para la expresión de sus
ideas porque, según ellos, se había convertido en un pasatiempo burgués cuyo principal
finalidad consistía en glorificar la vida de la clase media. Además, la tradicional
dependencia del género de la causalidad y la coherencia chocaba frontalmente con la
noción Dadaísta de que “la lógica es una complicación”. “La lógica”, afirma Tristan
Tzara en su “Manifiesto Dadaísta 1918”, “es siempre falsa. Empuja las hebras
superficiales de conceptos y palabras hacia núcleos y conclusiones ilusorias. Sus
cadenas matan, un enorme miriápodo que asfixia la independencia” (ver Apéndice B
249). Las dudas de los Dadaístas con respecto a la novela no eran solo de carácter
ideológico, sino también técnico. Por definición, escribir una novela requería un
esfuerzo mantenido, lo cual parecía contradecir el precepto de Tzara según el cual, en la
literatura verdadera, “cada página debe explotar” (ver Apéndice B 245). En
consecuencia, los Dadaístas se mostraban dispuestos a abandonar la narrativa en favor
de otros géneros literarios más apropiados para la consecución de sus metas, tales como
la poesía, el teatro, o la versión Dadaísta de la crítica literaria: la síntesis crítica.
Debe tenerse en cuenta, sin embargo, que pese a su aversión a las costumbres y a
lo que ellos consideraban el satisfecho ensimismamiento de la burguesía —sus
escandalosas manifestaciones públicas iban dirigidas principalmente a insultar y
confundir a la clase media—, la mayoría de los Dadaístas pertenecía a familias
acomodadas. El padre y el abuelo de Tzara fueron empresarios del sector forestal en
Rumanía. Hugo Ball, el fundador del movimiento, fue educado en un entorno católico
de clase media en Pirmasens, Alemania. El padre de Kurt Schwitters era un acomodado
rentista de Hanover. Igualmente burguesas eran las familias de Louis Aragon, Max
Ernst, Marcel Janco, Francis Picabia y Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, por nombrar
algunos Dadaístas prominentes. Esto no es de extrañar ya que, dada la precariedad
económica resultante de la Primera Guerra Mundial, solo siendo independiente
económicamente podía uno dedicar todo su tiempo y energía a la promoción de un
movimiento artístico aparentemente marginal. Para completar la paradoja, pese a su
ruidoso rechazo de la narrativa como un medio apto para la transmisión de sus ideas —
Aragon proclamó la muerte de la novela a principios de los años 20 (Josephson 114)—
!
3
los Dadaístas sí escribieron novelas y relatos breves. Sin embargo, de acuerdo con el
credo Dadaísta oficial, que de forma inequívoca consideraba el éxito como una
ignominia, una restricción no deseada en la vida creativa del artista, no hicieron
esfuerzo alguno por publicar su trabajo y, cuando sí llegaron a publicarlo, por
promocionarlo. Como se explicará más adelante, esta actitud programática —y, a todas
luces, no siempre sincera— hacia el reconocimiento público ha tenido un gran impacto
en la escritura de esta tesis.
Mi primer contacto académico con el Dadaísmo fue a través de la lectura de
Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s, las memorias de Malcolm Cowley de
1951. Antes de esa lectura mis conocimientos acerca del Dadaísmo eran más bien
fragmentarios. Conocía los readymades de Marcel Duchamp, había leído descripciones
de la famosa actuación de Hugo Ball en el Cabaret Voltaire de Zurich en 1916, y
simpatizaba con los grandilocuentes esfuerzos de Tristan Tzara por volver del revés el
mundo del arte. Sin embargo no era consciente de las verdaderas intenciones del
Dadaísmo ni de las profundas repercusiones que sus ideas tuvieron en la cultura del
siglo XX. El libro de Cowley fue decisivo por tres razones fundamentales. En primer
lugar, aunque el Dadaísmo no es su tema central —el libro cuenta la historia hasta 1930
de la denominada Generación Perdida de escritores norteamericanos—, su quinto
capítulo, titulado “La muerte del Dadaísmo”, ofrece una documentada explicación de
treinta y tres páginas del movimiento. En segundo lugar, en ese mismo capítulo Cowley
explora en bastante profundidad la actitud del Dadaísmo hacia el éxito, así como su
contribución al arte y la literatura de su tiempo. Cuenta, entre otras cosas, cómo en una
ocasión Louis Aragon amenazó con propinar una paliza a cualquier crítico que reseñara
sus libros (153). Sorprendentemente, teniendo en cuenta la aversión oficial del
Dadaísmo hacia la narrativa, Cowley también menciona a un Dadaísta, cuyo nombre no
revela, que “simultáneamente escribía novelas, mantenía cuatro relaciones amorosas y
un matrimonio y se embarcaba en las más descabelladas aventuras empresariales”
(154). Había nuevos temas esperando a ser tratados literariamente, afirma Cowley: “Las
máquinas, las masacres, los rascacielos, los urinales, las orgías sexuales, la revolución.
Para el Dadaísmo nada era demasiado ordinario o novedoso, demasiado cruel o
chocante, como para no poder ser descrito y celebrado por los escritores” (154) O,
continúa Cowley, los escritores tenían libertad para no ceñirse a un tema concreto en sus
narraciones:
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Si escribían una novela sobre el París moderno, no tenían por qué vacilar a
la hora de introducir una tribu de Pieles Rojas, un pulpo, un unicornio, a
Napoleón o a la Virgen María. De pronto parecía que todos los escritores del
pasado habían estado esclavizados por la realidad: se habían limitado a la
tarea de copiar el mundo, mientras que los nuevos escritores podían obviarlo
y crear un mundo propio sobre el cual eran soberanos” (154)
En tercer lugar, el libro de Cowley ofrece una descripción muy interesante, aunque
incompleta, de las conexiones que hubo entre el Dadaísmo parisino y algunos escritores
y artistas norteamericanos, entre los que se incluyen Robert M. Coates, Man Ray,
Laurence Vail, Matthew Josephson, Jack Wheelwright, John Dos Passos, Robert
McAlmon y E. E. Cummings.
Resumiendo, Exile’s Return fue una lectura crucial porque: a) me proporcionó
una clarificación lúcida y global del Dadaísmo; b) me ayudó a entender que, pese a su
rechazo programático de la narrativa y el éxito, que expresaban sin ambigüedad en sus
manifiestos, reuniones y actuaciones públicas, los Dadaístas sí escribieron —y en
ocasiones publicaron— novelas y relatos breves; y c) me ofreció la primera pista de que
el trabajo de algunos de los escritores norteamericanos que vivieron en París durante la
década de 1920 podría haberse visto influido por su contacto con Dadá. Estos tres
descubrimientos encendieron mi fascinación con la materia y me llevaron a embarcarme
en las tres líneas de investigación que, con los años, han conducido a la escritura de esta
tesis: la importancia del Dadaísmo en la historia cultural del siglo XX; la narrativa
Dadaísta; y la influencia del Dadaísmo en la narrativa norteamericana moderna.
El propósito de esta tesis es investigar las conexiones entre Dadá y ocho
narradores norteamericanos e ilustrar el impacto el movimiento sobre su trabajo. Para
conseguirlo, he desenterrado un corpus prácticamente olvidado de textos narrativos
escritos por autores franceses, alemanes y norteamericanos. El capítulo 2 contiene una
breve historia del Dadaísmo y describe la presencia en la ciudad de Nueva York, hacia
la cual gravitaron la mayor parte de los artistas y escritores norteamericanos antes de
viajar a Francia a finales de la década de 1910 y principios de los años 20, del Espíritu
Dadá y lo que se ha dado en llamar proto-Dadaísmo. El capítulo 3 contiene una
descripción de la teoría Dadaísta del lenguaje, así como un estudio —el único publicado
hasta la fecha— de las obras narrativas más representativas escritas por autores
Dadaístas franceses y alemanes. El análisis de estas obras subraya sus características
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comunes así como sus claras similitudes con las novelas y relatos breves
norteamericanos incluidos en los siguientes capítulos. Las distintas formas en que el
Dadaísmo influyó sobre Robert M. Coates, Djuna Barnes, William Carlos Williams,
Laurence Vail, John Dos Passos, E. E. Cummings y Nathanael West, y fue influido por
Gertrude Stein, se examinan en los capítulos 4 a 11. Cada capítulo explora la relación
que cada autor individual tuvo con el grupo, centrándose en un aspecto del Dadaísmo
especialmente visible en su trabajo: el juego en The Eater of Darkness de Coates; el
desaliento existencial en los relatos breves de Barnes; la destrucción y la renovación en
la prosa temprana de Williams; la violencia, el asesinato, el suicidio y el “crimen
inmotivado” en Murder! Murder! de Vail; las técnicas pictóricas y poéticas Dadaístas
en Manhattan Transfer de Dos Passos; la repugnancia en The Dream Life of Balso Snell
de West; la experimentación formal en [No Title] y Eimi de Cummings; y el retratoobjeto como la contribución de Stein al Dadaísmo.
A algunos lectores les resultará extraño encontrar a Dos Passos, Barnes o West
en una tesis dedicada al Dadaísmo. Sin embargo, no hay razones para sorprenderse. El
Dadaísmo, más que ningún otro movimiento vanguardista de la época, fue el resultado
directo de la profunda insatisfacción de sus miembros ante la guerra y ante lo que ellos
consideraban como el ensimismamiento auto-indulgente de la sociedad moderna. Fue
una explosión juvenil de furia y energía creativa, un foro perfecto para la expresión
artística de los jóvenes norteamericanos que, cansados del erial cultural en el que creían
inmerso a su país, habían decidido exiliarse a Europa. De este modo, los productos
artísticos y literarios del Dadaísmo y algunos de los primeros textos de la Generación
Perdida pueden interpretarse como una exaltada reacción común que poco o nada tiene
que ver con lo que los mismos escritores y artistas habrían de producir más tarde. De
hecho, la mayoría de los Dadaístas avanzaron en nuevas direcciones después de que el
movimiento se extinguiera, y algunos (por ejemplo George Grosz) incluso llegaron a
negar haber tenido cualquier relación con el movimiento. Louis Aragon, un fervoroso
enemigo de la guerra y de la política durante sus años Dadaístas, acabó alistándose en el
ejército y siendo condecorado por su valor en la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Matthew
Josephson fue convertido al Dadaísmo por Aragon durante sus años de exilio en
Francia. Firmó manifiestos Dadaístas, escribió poesía Dadaísta, y se convirtió en un
portavoz incondicional del Dadaísmo tras su retorno a los Estados Unidos a principios
de los años 20. En años posteriores, sin embargo, rechazó el movimiento y se convirtió
en un exitoso escritor de biografías literarias. La mayor parte de las obras estudiadas en
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esta tesis, incluidas las de Dos Passos, Barnes y West, fueron escritas cuando sus
autores estaban en la veintena, bajo la poderosa influencia del Dadaísmo, y por lo
general guardan poca relación con lo que estos autores habrían de escribir —o pensar—
después de que los fuegos artificiales del Dadaísmo se extinguieran.
La inclusión de William Carlos Williams y E. E. Cummings en un estudio
dedicado a narradores puede también resultar sorprendente. Sin embargo, no conviene
olvidar que, aunque son más conocidos por su poesía, ambos autores cultivaron otros
géneros literarios. Williams también escribió ensayos, piezas teatrales, improvisaciones
de prosa poética, un libro de viajes —A Voyage to Pagany (1928)—, una autobiografía
(1951), varias colecciones de cuentos —The Knife of the Times (1932), Life Along the
Passaic River (1938), The Farmers’ Daughters (1961)—, una heterodoxa novela breve
—incluida en A Novelette and Other Prose (1932)—, y cuatro novelas —The Great
American Novel (1923), White Mule (1937), In the Money (1940) y The Build-Up
(1952). Además de sus numerosos libros de poemas, Cummings es autor de cuatro
obras de teatro, una colección de cuentos sin título y dos novelas autobiográficas —The
Enormous Room (1922) y Eimi (1933)—.
El Dadaísmo fue más allá de los dominios de la literatura y las artes. Era una
forma de vida, un estado mental, un espíritu —hoy conocido como el Espíritu Dadá—
cuyo objetivo, como escribió George Ribemont-Dessaignes, era “la liberación del
hombre” de las cadenas de la existencia moderna (Motherwell 105). El arte y la
literatura siempre jugaron un papel secundario dentro del movimiento. Las ideas
Dadaístas surgían y tomaban forma en las vibrantes reuniones del grupo en el parisino
Café Certâ y se propagaban no tanto a través de sus escritos, que nunca alcanzaron una
gran audiencia, ni mediante sus efímeras obras de arte, como a través de sus
provocativas manifestaciones públicas. Uno no solo se convertía en Dadaísta en virtud
de sus creaciones literarias o artísticas. El arte y la literatura Dadaístas surgían de forma
natural si uno vivía el Dadaísmo; y, para poder vivir el Dadaísmo y, como resultado,
crear arte y literatura Dadaístas, uno debía estar personalmente involucrado con los
Dadaístas y participar en sus actividades. Por esa razón en los capítulos dedicados a los
escritores norteamericanos he prestado considerable atención a la relación que
mantuvieron con el grupo y a sus conexiones personales con sus miembros, para así
poder medir su nivel de implicación con el movimiento y la naturaleza Dadaísta de sus
obras.
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Estado de la cuestión
El Dadaísmo no duró demasiado. Se fundó oficialmente en 1916 y llegó a su fin en
1925, cuando el Surrealismo, el primer y más conservador sucesor del Dadaísmo, optó
por el compromiso político. Durante muchos años después de su desmantelamiento, los
críticos y estudiosos prestaron muy poca atención al movimiento. Cuando trataban
sobre él, como ha señalado Mark A. Pegrum, “rara vez lo consideraban como una
entidad independiente, sino como un apéndice del Expresionismo en Alemania, o un
apéndice del Futurismo en Italia, o un predecesor del Surrealismo en Francia y en los
países anglosajones, cuyo estamento crítico seguía en gran parte las pautas marcadas
por París” (1). Varios factores podrían explicar esta ausencia de interés académico en el
Dadaísmo. Como parte de su programa intelectual, el Dadaísmo promovía la
destrucción y proclamaba a voz en grito la muerte de la literatura y el arte. Como
resultado, produjo una cantidad relativamente pequeña de obras tangibles, si se compara
con otros ismos artísticos, por la que ser juzgado por la posteridad. “Cualquiera que lea
sobre el movimiento Dadaísta”, dice Malcolm Cowley, “quedará impresionado por la
absurda y casi trágica desproporción existente entre su rico y complejo trasfondo
cultural y sus pobres resultados” (Exile’s Return 152). La naturaleza estridente y, en
cierto modo, juvenil del Dadaísmo actuó en detrimento de su prestigio, amortiguando en
gran parte sus repercusiones inmediatas. Durante las décadas de 1930 y 1940 los
estudiosos vacilaban a la hora de prestar atención a un movimiento que consideraban
secundario y superficial, un efímero juego de artificio sin ningún efecto significativo
sobre la historia cultural moderna. La insistente negación por parte de André Breton de
la influencia que el Dadaísmo tuvo sobre el Surrealismo tampoco ayudó a promover el
estudio del movimiento.
Publicado por primera vez en 1951, The Dada Painters and Poets, de Robert
Motherwell, constituye la primera tentativa seria de crear un mapa crítico completo del
movimiento. Compilado por Motherwell con la colaboración de Marcel Duchamp, Hans
Arp, Marx Ernst y otras figuras Dadaístas, el libro contiene estudios retrospectivos,
memorias personales y ejemplos significativos de literatura y arte Dadaístas firmados
por, entre otros, Hugo Ball, Erik Satie, Richard Huelsenbeck, Kurt Schwitters, Arthur
Cravan, Tristan Tzara, George Ribemont-Dessaignes, André Vaché, Paul Éluard,
Georges Hugnet, Hans Richter, André Breton y Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia. Catorce años
más tarde, Dada à Paris, de Michel Sanouillet, volvió a acercar el movimiento a un
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público que, según los editores de la versión inglesa de 2009, “lo había ignorado u
olvidado” (contracubierta). Monumental en su ambición compiladora, el libro contiene
una masiva colección de documentos inéditos, incluidas más de doscientas cartas de
líderes Dadaístas de la talla de Tristan Tzara, André Breton y Francis Picabia.
Aunque siguen siendo indispensables para comprender el Dadaísmo en su
globalidad, las compilaciones de Motherwell y Sanouillet no ofrecen un examen
exhaustivo de sus manifestaciones artísticas y literarias. Ese hueco lo han llenado textos
más recientes, como The Poetry of Dada and Surrealism de Mary Ann Caws (1970),
Theatre in Dada and Surrealism de J. H. Matthews (1974), Dada and Surrealist Art de
William S. Rubin (1969), y Languages of Revolt: Dada and Surrealist Literature and
Film de Inez Hedges (1983). Dickran Tashjian ha documentado la influencia del
Dadaísmo en la poesía y el arte norteamericanos modernos (William Carlos Williams y
E. E. Cummings se encuentran entre los poetas incluidos en su influyente ensayo
Skyscraper Primitives: Dada and the American Avant-Garde). Además ha sido el
primer estudioso en reconocer y analizar las inclinaciones Dadaístas de algunas revistas
norteamericanas como The Soil, Contact, Broom y Secession. Sin embargo, pese a estos
y otros estudios académicos del Dadaísmo —Dada/Dimensions de Stephen C. Foster
(1985), German Dadaist Literature de Rex W. Last (1973), Dada de Serge Lemoine
(1987), The Dada Market: An Anthology of Poetry de Willard Bohn (1993), Dada
Turns Red: The Politics of Surrealism de Helena Lewi (1990), Destruction Was My
Beatrice: Dada and the Unmaking of the Twentieth Century de Jed Rasula (2015), From
291 to Zurich: The Birth of Dada de Ileana B. Leaven (1983), Dada and After:
Extremist Modernism and English Literature de Alan Young (1981), Dada Culture:
Critical Texts on the Avant-Garde de Dafydd Jones (2006), Challenging Modernity:
Dada Between Modern and Postmodern de Mark A. Pegrum (2000), A Companion to
Dada and Surrealism de David Hopkins (2016), y Women in Dada. Essays on Sex,
Gender, and Identity de Naomi Sawelson-Gorse (1998)—, no ha habido hasta ahora
ningún intento de estudiar la narrativa Dadaísta. La creencia Dadaísta de que la
narrativa no era un medio viable para la expresión de sus ideas y la limitada circulación
de las obras narrativas que escribieron no pueden justificar semejante ausencia de
interés académico en la materia.
American Writers in Paris, 1920-1930 (1980) de Karen Lane Rood y Geniuses
Together: American Writers in Paris in the 1920s (1988) de Humphrey Carpenter han
facilitado mucho la tarea de elucidar quién estuvo en París y cuándo. Published in
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Paris: American and British Writers, Painters, and Publishers in Paris, 1920-1939
(1975) de Hugh Ford es un texto esencial porque ofrece información detallada relativa a
la publicación de trabajos escritos por autores norteamericanos en París durante las
décadas de 1920 y 1930. Aquellos que tengan interés en investigar en mayor
profundidad el ambiente artístico y literario que había en París en esa época y las
circunstancias que precipitaron el exilio de los artistas y escritores norteamericanos del
momento a Europa encontrarán de especial utilidad las ya citadas memorias de Malcolm
Cowley — Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s (1951)—, así como las de
Matthew Josephson —Life Among the Surrealists (1962)—, Samuel Putnam —Paris
Was Our Mistress: Memoirs of a Lost and Found Generation (1947)— y Sylvia Beach
—Shakespeare and Company (1959)—. También de gran interés es el revelador libro de
Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank, Paris 1900-1940 (1987).
Los críticos e historiadores apenas han prestado atención a la figura de Laurence
Vail a pesar de su importante contribución a la vida, el arte y la literatura de su
generación. Las referencias académicas a su vida y obra son poco significativas y en
general tienen que ver con su papel como bon vivant y exuberante agitador cultural —
Matthew Josephson dijo de él que “escribía y también pintaba un poco, pero su
verdadera actividad parecía consistir en revolucionar la orilla izquierda del río Sena”
(86)— o con a las tormentosas relaciones que mantuvo con sus dos esposas: Peggy
Guggenheim, conocida por su faceta de celebridad social y coleccionista de arte, y la
escritora, educadora y activista política Kay Boyle. Se puede encontrar valiosa
información sobre Vail en los libros mencionados en el párrafo anterior (Cowley hace
un interesante retrato de Vail en Exile’s Return y Rood dedica un capítulo de American
Writers in Paris, 1920-1930 a su vida y obra), así como en Mistress of Modernism. The
Life of Peggy Guggenheim (2004) de Mary V. Dearborn, The Passionate Years (1953)
de Caresse Crosby, Peggy Guggenheim: The Shock of the Modern (2015) de Francine
Prose, Kay Boyle: A Twentieth-Century Life in Letters (2015) de Sandra Spanier, y Out
of this Century: Confessions of an Art Addict (1980), la autobiografía de Peggy
Gugghenheim.
Durante su vida Robert M. Coates fue conocido principalmente por su bestseller
Wisteria Cottage (1948) —un éxito comercial excepcional dentro de su discreta carrera
literaria— y por su larga colaboración con The New Yorker como columnista y critico
de libros. Su vanguardista narrativa gozaba de la admiración de algunos amigos y
escritores contemporáneos como Ford Madox Ford, Gertrude Stein y Malcolm Cowley.
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Sin embargo tras su muerte en 1973 su obra cayó en un olvido casi absoluto que hubo
de durar hasta 1999, cuando Mathilde Roza publicó el ensayo “Robert Myron Coates in
the 1920s and Early 1930s: The Impact of Dada and the Development of a Distinctive
City Fiction”. A este trabajo le siguieron “Lost in ‘The Dada City’: The New York City
Fiction of Robert M. Coates” (2001); “American Modernism, Popular Culture and
Metropolitan Mass Life: The Early Fiction of Robert M. Coates” (2004); “Collecting
Robert M. Coates” (2007), publicado en colaboración con Jack Mearns; y Following
Strangers: The Life and Literary Works of Robert M. Coates (2011). La obra crítica de
Mathilde Roza ha rescatado el trabajo de Coates del olvido y ha sentado las bases para
toda investigación futura sobre el autor.
A lo lago de los últimos cincuenta años las vidas y los trabajos literarios de
Djuna Barnes, William Carlos Williams, John Dos Passos, E. E. Cummings, Nathanael
West y Gertrude Stein han sido objeto de innumerables estudios académicos,
demasiados, como para ser detallados aquí. Sin embargo se han investigado muy poco
las conexiones entre el Dadaísmo y las obras de ficción de estos autores. Deborah
Wyrick ha explorado el interés de West por las artes visuales en “Dadaist Collage
Structure and Nathanael West’s The Dream Life of Balso Snell” (1979). Las conexiones
entre la prosa de Cummings y el Dadaísmo han sido parcialmente exploradas en tres
estudios recientes: “The Enormous Room: A Dada of One’s Own” (2006) de Michael
Webster; “Eimi and Louis Aragon’s The Adventures of Telamachus” (1999) de Rajeev
Kumar Kinra —cuya idea central, que Cummings escribió Eimi bajo la influencia de la
novela Dadaísta de Aragon, es revisada y expandida por Joshua D. Huber en su tesis de
máster Marvelous Whirlings: E. E. Cummings’ Eimi, Louis Aragon, Ezra Pound, &
Krazy Kat (2015); y “The Dadaist Prose of Williams and Cummings: A Novelette and
[No Title] (2011) de Antonio Ruiz, que, como el propio título indica, se centra también
—y es el único estudio académico que lo ha hecho hasta ahora— en la influencia del
Dadaísmo sobre la prosa temprana de Williams. La interrelación existente entre Stein y
el Dadaísmo ha sido mencionada y estudiada por algunos críticos —Richard Aldington
en “The Disciples of Gertrude Stein” (1920), Norman Weinstein en Gertrude Stein and
the Literature of the Modern Consciousness (1970), John Malcolm Brinnin en The
Third Rose: Gertrude Stein and her World (1968), Sarah Bay-Cheng en Mama Dada.
Gertrude Stein’s Avant-Garde Theater (2005)—, pero nunca ha sido explorada en
profundidad. La insistencia de la mayoría de los estudiosos de Stein en asociar su prosa
experimental con las innovaciones pictóricas de los Cubistas ha puesto en un segundo
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plano sus conexiones con el Dadaísmo. Lo mismo puede decirse de Dos Passos, cuya
novela Manhattan Transfer está sin duda vinculada al collage Dadaísta y, como se
demostrará en el capítulo 8, va mucho más allá de, en retrospectiva, los tímidos logros
de los Cubistas. A través de Michel Sanouillet sabemos que Barnes entró en contacto
con los Dadaístas a través de Man Ray a principios de los años 20. Sorprendentemente,
teniendo en cuenta el prestigio de Barnes dentro de la literatura norteamericana del siglo
XX, las consecuencias de ese contacto sobre el trabajo de Barnes no han sido
examinadas hasta la fecha.
La composición de esta tesis ha requerido la cuidadosa lectura de una gran
cantidad de fuentes primarias y secundarias en inglés, francés y, en menor medida,
alemán, solo las más relevantes de las cuales han sido incluidas en la bibliografía. El
resultado de esta investigación es una doble contribución a la literatura académica
existente sobre el Dadaísmo y a la narrativa norteamericana. Como se indicó con
anterioridad, la tesis ofrece el primer estudio global sobre narrativa Dadaísta jamás
publicado. Debido a las dudas que los Dadaístas tenían sobre la narrativa y a su aversión
al éxito, la tarea de desenterrar las novelas y relatos breves de los Dadaístas ha sido
ardua. La mayor parte de esas obras fueron publicadas por editoriales humildes,
tuvieron una limitada distribución y apenas recibieron atención crítica, cayendo en el
olvido al poco tiempo de su publicación. Francis Picabia no hizo esfuerzo alguno por
llevar a imprenta su novela de 1924 Caravansérail, que apareció póstumamente, y de
forma muy discreta, en 1974. La falta de atención crítica que el libro ha experimentado
desde esa fecha queda evidenciada por el hecho de que no se incluyera en la traducción
definitiva al inglés de los escritos del artista, I Am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose
and Provocation, publicada por MIT Press en 2012. El relato breve de Kurt Swchitters
“Die Zwiebel” apareció por primera vez en la revista Der Sturm en 1919 y no volvió a
recibir atención alguna hasta 1973, cuando Rex W. Last lo incluyó en su antología
German Dadaist Literature. A pesar del éxito del que disfrutó en el circulo intelectual
del autor, Flametti oder von Dandysmus der Armen de Hugo Ball permaneció casi
olvidado durante un siglo desde su publicación en 1918 hasta comienzos de la década
de 2010. La segunda novela de Ball, Tenderenda der Phantast, escrita entre 1914 y
1920, no se publicó hasta 1967. A pesar de la traducción al inglés de 2002 de Jonathan
Hammer, Tenderenda sigue siendo hoy una rareza literaria. Localizar, investigar,
interpretar e interconectar estas y el resto de las obras narrativas de los Dadaístas
incluidas en esta tesis ha resultado ser una tarea laboriosa y muy gratificante.
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Lo mismo puede decirse del proceso de rastrear la influencia del Dadaísmo en la
narrativa norteamericana moderna, que, dada la escasez de literatura académica sobre la
materia, requirió la lectura de cientos de documentos. Tras una cuidadosa
consideración, ese proceso dio como resultado el presente catálogo de ocho autores
norteamericanos. En ese sentido —el número de escritores estudiados— esta
exploración tiene una naturaleza exhaustiva en el sentido de que, en vez de centrarse en
un autor en particular, incluye todos los narradores norteamericanos cuyas novelas y
cuentos, según los hallazgos realizados durante la fase de investigación, muestran la
marca palpable del Dadaísmo. Esto es así por dos razones. En primer lugar, al tratarse
del primer estudio académico realizado sobre la materia, me pareció más apropiado
ofrecer una visión complete y abarcadora en lugar de una visión parcial, más restrictiva.
En ese sentido, esta tesis ha sido concebida como una piedra de toque, una puerta hacia
futuras exploraciones. En segundo lugar, exceptuando a Gertrude Stein, que está en una
categoría propia pero sin cuya presencia ningún ensayo sobre los escritores
norteamericanos en París en los años 20 estaría completo, los autores norteamericanos
estudiados en las páginas que siguen comparten tantos rasgos —todos nacieron a finales
del siglo XIX y principios del XX, eran creativamente inquietos y estaban
profundamente insatisfechos con el espíritu filisteo dominante en Estados Unidos,
escribieron obras narrativas experimentales, pasaron tiempo en París, entraron en
contacto con el Dadaísmo y se dejaron influir por sus radicales principios—, que pese a
sus naturales diferencias es razonable, en el contexto de esta tesis, considerarlos como
un sujeto único y coherente de investigación académica.
Marco teórico
A nivel teórico, los contenidos de esta tesis están sustentados por las premisas generales
de la intertextualidad. Julia Kristeva —quien acuñó el término en su ensayo de 1966
“Word, Dialogue and Noel”— y otros teóricos recientes —Tzvetan Todorov en Mikhail
Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle (1981), Gérard Genette en Palimpsests: Literature in
the Second Degree (1982), George P. Landow en Hypertext: The Convergence of
Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (1992), Harold Bloom en The Anxiety of
Influence: A Theory of Poetry (1973), Omar Calabrese en Neo-Baroque: A Sign of the
Times (1992)— coinciden en afirmar que los textos se construyen, usando las palabras
de Kristeva, como “un mosaico de citas” (37); es decir, se construyen a partir de otros
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textos, son posibles gracias a otros textos previos que los nuevos textos adoptan, repiten
o cuestionan. Un texto existe siempre dentro de otros textos, a través de su relación con
ellos. Leer algo como literatura implica considerarlo como un “evento lingüístico que
tiene significado en relación con otros discursos” (Culler, Literary Theory 34-35).
La teoría de la intertextualidad insiste en que un texto no puede existir como una
unidad autosuficiente o hermética, y por lo tanto no funciona como un sistema cerrado,
autónomo. Esto es así por dos razones. En primer lugar, los escritores son lectores de
textos —en el sentido amplio de la palabra— antes que creadores de textos. En
consecuencia, su trabajo contiene inevitablemente —y a menudo conscientemente—
referencias, citas e influencias de todo tipo. En segundo lugar, los textos solo son
accesibles a través de un proceso de lectura. Lo que se produce en el momento de la
lectura es resultado de la fertilización del material textual concreto —un libro, por
ejemplo— por parte de todos los textos —de nuevo, en el sentido amplio— que el lector
ha “leído” en el pasado (Worton and Still 1-2).
Al subrayar que los textos no son entidades únicas e independientes sino partes
de un corpus más grande de representaciones, la intertextualidad pone en tela de juicio
el concepto de originalidad en la literatura y el arte. Nada es verdaderamente singular,
único. Lo interesante es las formas en las que las historias, los temas y las ideas son
alterados y reelaborados. Esta negativa a considerar cualquier texto como “original”
ayuda a explicar por qué buena parte de la escritura posmoderna parece fragmentaria y
autorreferencial, y por qué los artistas y escritores posmodernos le han dado la espalda
de forma unánime a una serie de “narrativas maestras” —tales como las nociones de
que el arte emana del genio individual, que existe una “verdad” única y universal, que la
ciencia conduce al conocimiento objetivo— en su intento por darle un sentido a una
cultura inconexa centrada en los bienes de consumo.
Pese a la impresión que puedan haber dado los párrafos previos, la
intertextualidad no es una doctrina fija, sino un conjunto flexible de discursos
interrelacionados. A lo largo de las últimas cinco décadas ha habido un vertiginoso
aumento en el número de propuestas teóricas vinculadas de forma directa con la
intertextualidad y/o que intentan aportar respuestas dentro de los varios campos donde
la intertextualidad se aplica. Según Kristeva, “investigar el estado de la palabra es
estudiar sus articulaciones . . . con otras palabras dentro de una frase, y luego buscar las
mismas funciones o interrelaciones a nivel articulatorio o en secuencias más amplias”
(36). Basándose en los conceptos bakhtinianos del diálogo (el eje horizontal del espacio
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textual, consistente en el objeto de la escritura y el receptor) y ambivalencia (el eje
vertical, que incluye el texto y sus contenidos), Kristeva arguye que “cualquier texto es
la absorción y transfiguración de otro. La noción de intertextualidad reemplaza la de
intersubjetividad, y el lenguaje poético se lee al menos como doble” (37). Según
Tzvetan Todorov, la literatura es una larga cadena cuyos eslabones son los géneros
literarios. “Todo género que es un género esencial” dice Todorov, “es un complejo
sistema de formas y medios para la aprehensión de la realidad con el objeto de
completarla comprendiéndola” (83). A un nivel primario, los géneros son intertextuales
debido a su conexión con la literatura. Dado que se caracterizan por la repetición de
ciertos elementos característicos, los géneros también son intertextuales porque los
textos que agrupan están, en virtud de esos elementos compartidos, intertextualmente
relacionados.
La intertextualidad de Harold Bloom se centra en la creatividad en el arte.
Bloom coincide con William Blake en que “estar esclavizado por el sistema de
cualquier precursor . . . significa verse inhibido de la creatividad por un obsesivo
proceso de razonamiento y comparación, presumiblemente del trabajo propio con el del
precursor” (29). Los poetas se sienten constreñidos e impotentes cuando se enfrentan al
trabajo de los grandes poetas del pasado, como si al hacerlo estuvieran condenados a
repetir siglo tras siglo lo que otros ya han dicho antes. Esto impide que surja su propia
originalidad y, como resultado, les causa angustia. Según Bloom:
La influencia poética —cuando implica a dos poetas auténticos y potentes—
siempre sucede mediante una lectura equivocada del poeta previo, un acto
de corrección creativa que es de hecho y necesariamente una interpretación
errónea. La historia de la influencia poética fructífera, que es como decir la
principal tradición de la poesía occidental desde el Renacimiento, es una
historia de ansiedad y de caricatura, marcada por la distorsión y un perverso
y decidido revisionismo sin el cual la poesía moderna como tal no podría
existir. (30)
El concepto de transtextualidad de Gérard Genette constituye en el fondo una
definición genérica de la intertextualidad: la capacidad de los textos de hablar sobre
otros textos. Para ilustrar este concepto, Genette se vale del palimpsesto, un documento
antiguo cuya escritura original ha sido parcialmente obliterada y reemplazada por
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nuevas capas de texto; es decir, un texto que ha cambiado con el tiempo y que muestra
vestigios de ese cambio. La transtextualidad se subdivide en cinco subcategorías. El
primer tipo de transtextualidad es la intertextualidad, que Genette define como “la
presencia de un texto dentro de otro texto” (2). La intertextualidad de Genette incluye la
cita, el plagio y la alusión. El segundo tipo de transtextualidad —la paratextualidad— se
centra en aquellos elementos ubicados a la entrada de un texto que ayudan a dirigir y
controlar la recepción del texto por parte de los lectores. Esos elementos son el peritexto
(que incluye aspectos internos del texto: título, prefacio, anotaciones, ilustraciones y
dedicatorias) y el epitexto (que incluye factores externos al texto como entrevistas,
publicidad, reseñas, cartas y otros discursos relacionados con el autor y la edición). El
tercer tipo de transtextualidad es la metatextualidad, que “une un texto dado a otro, del
cual habla sin necesariamente citarlo (sin convocarlo), de hecho a veces sin siquiera
nombrarlo” (Genette 4). La hipertextualidad es el cuarto tipo de transtextualidad e
implica, dice Genette, “cualquier relación que vincule a un texto B (que llamaré
hipertexto) con un texto previo A (al que, por supuesto, llamaré hipotexto), sobre el cual
se graba de una forma que no es la del comentario” (5). Por ultimo, la architextualidad
considera los textos como parte de un género o géneros. La naturaleza architextual de
los textos incluye expectativas temáticas y figurativas sobre los textos. Genette admite
que los cinco tipos de transtextualidad no pueden separarse del todo los unos de los
otros, debido a su relación de reciprocidad o a su inevitable solapamiento.
La versión de la intertextualidad de George P. Landow gira en torno al
hipertexto, es decir, el enlace entre dos textos en internet, un concepto clave para
comprender sociedad de la información. Landow defiende la implementación del
hipertexto electrónico en las humanidades en general y en la literatura en particular, ya
que, mantiene, el hipertexto “muestra muchos puntos de convergencia” con “los debates
contemporáneos de la teoría crítica, en particular los de los posestructuralistas” (87). La
noción de intertextualidad preconizada por Landow resulta especialmente pertinente
hoy dado que examina las conexiones entre la teoría social y literaria actual y los
últimos avances en software informático en una época en la que el libro electrónico está
en tela de juicio debido a su incapacidad para ofrecer una experiencia lectora
intertextual.
Según el semiólogo Omar Calabrese, que considera el gusto cultural dominante
en la actualidad “neo-barroco”, la masiva cantidad de narrativa que se produce hoy en
día ha llevado a un aparente callejón sin salida en el que “todo ya se ha dicho y ya se ha
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escrito” (38). El único modo de evitar la saturación ha sido recurrir a las poéticas de la
repetición. Como en el teatro kabuki, argumenta Calabrese, “puede que la variación más
minúscula sea la que produzca placer en el texto” (38). Como resultado, un cierto tipo
de citación, que solo puede describirse como intertextual, ha asumido una enorme
importancia que habría sido inconcebible hace solo unos años.
En la práctica, la intertextualidad emplea una serie de figuras (la alusión, la cita,
el calco, el plagio, el pastiche, la parodia, la apropiación), todas las cuales están
presentes de una forma otra en las obras literarias y artísticas producidas por el
Dadaísmo. La irreverente obra de 1919 de Duchamp, L. H. O. O. Q —pronunciado en
francés, el título suena como “elle a chaud au cul”, libre y educadamente traducido por
el propio Duchamp en una entrevista como “hay fuego ahí abajo” (Schwarz 477)—,
carecería de significado sin la previa existencia de la Mona Lisa de Leonardo da Vinci,
a la cual Duchamp añade un bigote y una perilla. Lo mismo puede decirse del resto de
sus readymades, cuyo impacto depende casi enteramente del reposicionamiento y ligera
modificación de “objetos encontrados” tales como una pala, una rueda de bicicleta o un
orinal de porcelana; es decir, “textos” culturales con los que el publico está
familiarizado. La intertextualidad también está presente en la yuxtaposición de
elementos dispares (anuncios de periódico, ilustraciones de novelas populares, tiques de
transporte, mapas, envoltorios de plástico, billetes) característicos del arte del collage
Dadaísta, o en el proyecto Merz de Kurt Schwitters, donde los artículos de deshecho se
juntan y montan sobre dibujos, cuadros o instalaciones.
La literatura Dadaísta en general (y la narrativa Dadaísta en particular) es
profundamente intertextual tanto en cuanto se construye en gran parte sobre textos
previos. La novela Les Aventures de Télémaque de Louis Aragon es una reelaboración
del poema épico en prosa de 1699 de Fénelon, del mismo título. John Raskolnikov
Gilson, el álter ego de Balso en The Dream Life of Balso Snell de Nathanael West, toma
su nombre del protagonista de Crimen y castigo de Dostoievski, mientras que el propio
Balso y el guía con el que se encuentra dentro del caballo de Troya —otra referencia
cultural— presentan obvias similitudes con la Divina Comedia de Dante. The Eater of
Darkness de Robert M. Coates puede entenderse como, entre otras cosas, una parodia
de la novela detectivesca. Los ejemplos de intertextualidad son abundantes y se
facilitarán en los capítulos correspondientes. La literatura Dadaísta no puede apreciarse
en toda su profundidad sin tener conciencia de los textos que ésta parodia, alude, cita o
plagia.
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Dado que, según las premisas generales de la intertextualidad, leer una obra de
ficción —o un poema, o una pieza teatral— implica relacionarla con otras obras de
ficción, comparar la forma en que comunica su sentido con la forma en que lo hacen
otras, es posible leer narrativa como, a cierto nivel, sobre la narrativa en sí misma. En
ese sentido, todas las novelas y cuentos analizados en los capítulos siguientes son autoreferenciales; es decir, en parte tratan sobre escribir novelas y cuentos, sobre los
problemas y dificultades de representar y dar forma —o significado— a la experiencia
humana a través de las convenciones de la narración literaria. Bajo este prisma, A
Novelette de William Carlos William, “Die Zwiebel” de Kurt Schwitters, Manhattan
Transfer de John Dos Passos, Les dernières nuits de Paris de Philippe Soupault, [No
Title]de E. E. Cummings, Moravagine de Blaise Cendrars, o “The Perfect Murder” de
Djuna Barnes, por nombrar algunos ejemplos, pueden leerse como exploraciones de los
límites de la narrativa tradicional y, en algunos casos, como anti-narrativa.
Podría argumentarse que The Dream Life of Balso Snell de West, The Eater of
Darkness de Coates y Murder! Murder! de Vail constituyen parodias del Dadaísmo en
lugar de ejemplos representativos de la literatura Dadaísta. Dicho argumento puede
refutarse sobre la base de que el Dadaísmo y la parodia son indistinguibles. Gallimard,
la editorial que publicó la mayor parte de los escritos Dadaístas en París, anunció Le
Bar du Lendemain de Ribemont-Dessaignes como la novela más significativa del
Dadaísmo y, al mismo tiempo, como una parodia del movimiento. El Dadaísmo es una
parodia de la locura de una época, de la guerra, de la sociedad, del arte y, finalmente, de
sí mismo. Si las novelas anteriormente citadas son parodias del Dadaísmo, entonces son
Dadaístas porque el Dadaísmo es siempre y sobre todo una parodia de sí mismo. Un
nuevo nivel de intertextualidad se añade a esta tesis al reconocer que, como la parodia
de Duchamp de la Mona Lisa, que precisa para ejercer su efecto que el espectador esté
familiarizado con la pintura de Leonardo da Vinci, ninguna de las novelas y relatos
breves incluidos en las próximas páginas tendría verdadero sentido sin la presencia
unificadora del Dadaísmo, el discurso común —o hipotexto, por usar el término de
Genette (5)— con el que todas esas obras dialogan.
–––––
Recapitulando, el propósito de esta tesis es explorar las conexiones entre el Dadaísmo y
ocho narradores norteamericanos e ilustrar el impacto del movimiento sobre su obra.
Los capítulos están organizados del siguiente modo. El capítulo 2 ofrece una
descripción de lo que significó el Dadaísmo tanto en Europa como en Estados Unidos
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entre mediados de la década de 1910 y mediados de los años 20. El capítulo 3 delimita
más el tema de la tesis al describir las nociones Dadaístas sobre el lenguaje y ofrecer el
primer estudio de narrativa Dadaísta publicado hasta la fecha. Este estudio, además de
las novelas y cuentos mencionados antes, incluye: Anicet ou le Panorama, Les
Aventures de Télémaque y Le Libertinage de Louis Aragon; Céleste Ugolin y Le Bar du
Lendemain de George Ribemont-Dessaigne; Moravagine de Blaise Cendrars; Les
dernières nuits de Paris de Philippe Soupault; y Poisson soluble de André Breton.
Soy consciente de que el presente estudio, pese a su exhaustividad, no agota la
materia. A pesar de los esfuerzos de Tashjian —dedica un capítulo entero de Skyscraper
Primitives a The Soil y Contact—, aún queda mucho que decir sobre las pequeñas
revistas americanas que florecieron tanto en Europa como en los Estados Unidos en los
años 20 y 30 del pasado siglo y sobre sus conexiones con el Dadaísmo. Pese a la
meticulosidad de mi investigación, puede que los narradores en los que se centran los
siguientes capítulos no sean los únicos que recibieron la influencia del Dadaísmo.
Además, dada la tendencia de los Dadaístas a rechazar toda forma de publicidad y a
destrozar sus manuscritos o dejarlos sin publicar, podría haber otras obras Dadaístas de
ficción aún por descubrir. En los años 60 el Dadaísmo experimentó un resurgimiento en
Estados Unidos: las manifestaciones literarias de este Neo Dadá —una denominación
que incluye el Pop Art, los Happenings, el Arte Medioambiental o el Arte Conceptual—
merecen una exploración a fondo. Algunos críticos han investigado las conexiones entre
Dadá y el posmodernismo. En Modernism–Dada–Postmodernism, Richard Sheppard
sitúa el Dadaísmo “como un enlace fundamental entre el modernismo y el
posmodernismo” (xi). Más específicamente, Laura P. Rice-Sayre ha vinculado el
Dadaísmo con la corriente posmodernista en el arte y la literatura en su esclarecedor
ensayo “The Fabula Rasa of Dada” (1978). Con todo, el impacto del Dadaísmo sobre la
generación de narradores posmodernos norteamericanos no ha sido estudiado con la
profundidad que merece. Espero que esta tesis anime a otros estudiantes de literatura
moderna a investigar y arrojar más luz sobre esta fascinante materia.
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2. CONCLUSIONES
Si se compara con otros movimientos artísticos del siglo XX, como el Expresionismo,
el Cubismo o el Arte Conceptual, el Dadaísmo fue un fenómeno fugaz. Solo seis años
separan su nacimiento espontáneo en Zúrich en 1916 —hace ahora un siglo— de la
polémica que rodeó al Congreso de París de Bretón a principios de 1922 y que precipitó
la muerte oficial —aunque no real— del Dadaísmo y la consiguiente toma de relevo del
Surrealismo como principal fuerza creativa en París y, poco tiempo después, en todo el
mundo. También fugaces fueron la mayor parte de la producción y las actividades del
grupo. El conjunto de revistas, poemas, obras teatrales, memorias, manifiestos y obras
de arte Dadaístas disponibles para el estudio en la actualidad es la minúscula punta
tangible del gigantesco, no registrado y, por lo tanto, para siempre irrecuperable iceberg
de exuberante fermento creativo que fue el Dadaísmo desde finales de la década de
1910 y a lo largo de los años 20. El verdadero legado del Dadaísmo no es, en mi
opinión, tanto lo que los dadaístas consiguieron, como lo que, gracias a la propagación
de su espíritu e ideas, permitieron conseguir a otros. Sin el Dadaísmo, dice Jed Rasula,
“la vida moderna tal y como la conocemos parecería muy distinta; de hecho, apenas
parecería moderna” (xvii).
Entre los grupos que han reconocido su deuda con el Dadaísmo después de la
Segunda Guerra Mundial están Gutai en Japón, Fluxus en Nueva York y los Nouveaux
Réalistes en París. Más tarde el Dadaísmo allanó el camino para escritores, artistas,
intelectuales y grupos musicales tan distintos como Joseph Beuys, William S.
Burroughs, Oulipo, Jasper Johns, Marshall McLuhan, los Beatles, Walter Benjamin,
Samuel Beckett, Andy Warhol, Monty Python, Robert Coover, Talking Heads, Robert
Rauschenberg, David Bowie y Jean-Michel Basquiat. “Sin el Dadaísmo” afirma Rasula,
“no tendríamos mash-ups, ni samplings, ni fotomontajes, ni happenings, ni siquiera
Surrealismo, ni Pop Art, ni punk” (xvii). No habría instalaciones sin el Dadaísmo, ni
performances, ni posmodernismo “tal y como lo conocemos”. Sin el Dadaísmo, ninguna
de las novelas estudiadas en esta tesis se habría escrito.
Los Dadaístas creían que la narrativa se había convertido en un entretenimiento
burgués y por tanto la rechazaban como medio para la expresión de sus ideas. Sin
embargo, en una paradoja típicamente Dadaísta, algunos miembros del grupo —en
concreto Hugo Ball, Kurt Schwitters, Louis Aragon, Francis Picabia, Philippe Soupault,
George Ribemont-Dessaignes y André Breton— sí escribieron novelas y relatos breves.
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Los temas más recurrentes de la narrativa Dadaísta son la violencia, la perversión
erótica, la destrucción revolucionaria, la máquina, el suicidio, el crimen gratuito y la
pasión por las formas primitivas de pensamiento. Los héroes de la narrativa Dadaísta
son hombres desencajados o al borde de la locura, o jóvenes poetas o artistas ansiosos
por explotar su propio potencial creativo que se involucran en actividades que son o
bien absurdas o bien distorsiones delirantes de la realidad. En la narrativa Dadaísta la
trama no existe o se encuentra drásticamente interrumpida. La acción de la mayor parte
de las obras narrativas Dadaístas tiene lugar en la ciudad. En ellas se retrata una nueva
belleza que se halla en los coches, las señales urbanas, el metro, los edificios, las luces
de neón, las sirenas y los artefactos mecánicos. La narrativa Dadaísta —incluidas las
novelas y relatos breves de autores norteamericanos estudiados en esta tesis—
representa un ataque frontal contra la sociedad, la moralidad, el arte, la literatura, la
razón, la cultura y el pasado. Transmite una mensaje de anarquismo nihilista envuelto
en humor mórbido y carcajadas neuróticas. Como el arte, el teatro y la poesía Dadaístas,
la narrativa Dadaísta celebra la irreverencia, la parodia y el azar.
Robert M. Coates tuvo mucho contacto con los Dadaístas durante los seis años
que pasó en Francia en los años 20 del pasado siglo. Aunque, al igual que los demás
escritores norteamericanos estudiados en estas páginas, nunca llegó a ser un miembro
oficial del grupo, se sentía atraído de forma natural a su faceta más ligera y lúdica. Al
escribir The Eater of Darkness (1926), entró a participar de forma entusiasta en el plan
Dadaísta de ridiculizar la existencia humana y sus implicaciones —el amor, el odio, el
sexo, las costumbres sociales, la razón—, que describió en su novela como una broma
absurda que no debe tomarse en serio, sino ridiculizarse. Fiel a su inspiración Dadaísta,
The Eater of Darkness puede leerse hoy como un irreverente manifiesto contra las
convenciones de la narrativa. Puede interpretarse, de hecho, como un humorístico
catálogo de los temas y técnicas del Dadaísmo y, por ende, como una parodia del propio
Dadaísmo.
A diferencia de Coates, que estaba interesado sobre todo en el lado más lúdico e
irreverente del grupo, Djuna Barnes tomó inspiración de la actitud más oscura y
desalentada que el grupo tenía hacia la vida moderna. Su relato “The Little Girl
Continues” (1925) describe la muerte del joven Dadaísta francés Raymond Radiguet, a
quien Barnes había conocido en París a través de Man Ray. Barnes conoció muy bien a
la baronesa Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. Un manuscrito hallado en 1979 muestra que
tuvo la intención de escribir un relato en clave de ficción de la vida de la baronesa, pero
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el proyecto nunca se hizo realidad. También mantuvo una duradera correspondencia con
Laurence Vail, considerado por Tzara uno de los padres del Dadaísmo. La huella del
Dadaísmo es visible en cuatro de las historias de Barnes en las que la autora explora
algunas de las preocupaciones recurrentes del grupo: “The Perfect Murder” (1942) —la
violencia gratuita—; “The Doctors” (1921) —el suicidio—; “The Terrorists” (1917) —
la destrucción y la revolución—; y “A Night Among the Horses” (1918) —las tensiones
entre el instinto y la civilización—.
La actitud de William Carlos Williams hacia el Dadaísmo fue ambivalente. Por
un lado lo consideraba un decadente fenómeno europeo que él no comprendía del todo
pero que, en su opinión, debía ser ignorado por los artistas norteamericanos. Por otro,
admitía el impacto que había tenido en su trabajo diciendo que, aunque el no había
creado el Dadaísmo, le salía del alma “escribirlo” (Imaginations 48). Pese a esta
paradójica postura. Williams hizo uso de las radicales estrategias del Dadaísmo —que
había admirado desde que conoció a Duchamp en Nueva York en 1915— para
componer cuatro de sus textos más experimentales y menos estudiados por la crítica:
Kora in Hell (1920), Spring and All (1923), The Great American Novel (1923) y la
puramente Dadaísta A Novelette (1932). Más que cualquier otro movimiento artístico de
la época, el Dadaísmo puso a su disposición las técnicas (la sinrazón, el collage, la
parodia, la contradicción, el espíritu lúdico, la confrontación, la escritura automática, el
caos— y el andamiaje conceptual que él necesitaba para cumplir con la misión auto
exigida e intrínsecamente Dadaísta de destruir y regenerar la literatura norteamericana.
Muy conocido en los círculos artísticos de Montparnasse durante la década de
1920, Laurence Vail fue la encarnación natural del Espíritu Dadaísta, además del autor
de una novela paradigmáticamente Dadaísta —Murder! Murder! (1931)—, cuyo
protagonista, Martin Asp, trata de liberarse de los dogmas, las leyes y la moralidad
mediante el uso de la violencia y la comisión de un crimen inmotivado. Al matar a
alguien sin motivo, Asp, de acuerdo con las radicales nociones Dadaístas sobre la
violencia y la destrucción, aspira a afirmar su propia existencia en una sociedad
asfixiante y desmotivadora. Cuando sus intentos de entregarse a la policía y, de ese
modo, hacer efectivo su acto gratuito, fracasan, su torrencial entusiasmo se convierte en
desánimo existencial. Al final de la novela, el asesinato y la violencia resultan ser tan
inefectivos como lo fue el propio Dadaísmo en la vida cultural de su tiempo.
Aunque, según sus propias palabras, las manifestaciones públicas de los
Dadaístas le producían “aprensión” (Best Times 160), una cuidadosa lectura de las obras
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de John Dos Passos desde la mitad de la década de 1910 hasta mediados de la siguiente
revela la presencia de una serie de técnicas poéticas y pictóricas Dadaístas
(yuxtaposición, estructura no lineal, perspectivas múltiples, fragmentación, azar,
simultaneidad) que Dos Passos absorbió en parte a través de su admiración por los
collages de Duchamp, Arp, Ernst, Schwitters, Picabia y otros artistas asociados con el
Dadaísmo, y en parte a través de sus amistades con los Dadaístas Louis Aragon y
George Grosz y el proto-Dadaísta Blaise Cendrars, cuyo trabajo admiraba. Estas
técnicas se hicieron particularmente evidentes en su primera novela de madurez,
Manhattan Transfer (1925), que representa el intento por parte de Dos Passos de
comprender las contradicciones de la vida urbana moderna y de mantenerse al día con
los últimos avances en literatura y arte.
E. E. Cummings era conocedor de los principios del Dadaísmo, que, en general,
convergían de forma natural con los suyos. Como en el caso de Williams, el Dadaísmo
proporcionó a Cummings el contexto ideal y las herramientas formales que necesitaba
para crear su idiosincrásica poesía. Gracias al Dadaísmo, también, Cummings pudo
componer dos de las más sorprendentes y, hasta la fecha, menos estudiadas obras de
anti-narrativa en los Estados Unidos: [No Title] (1929), el más Dadaísta de sus trabajos,
consistente en ocho indescifrables relatos breves, carentes de trama, cuya meta principal
parece ser destruir las convenciones de la narrativa breve y cuestionar la noción de
narrativa de los lectores; y Eimi (1933), un relato complejo y radicalmente experimental
sobre el viaje de cinco semanas que el autor hizo a Rusia en 1931, claramente influido
por la novela Dadaísta de Louis Aragon The Adventures of Telemachus, que facilitó a
Cummings un precedente válido para la destrucción y regeneración del género épico.
Nathanael West disfrutaba en gran manera de su predisposición a la broma
Dadaísta como forma de expresar su individualidad y su repugnancia existencial hacia
las reglas dominantes de comportamiento. Como los Dadaístas, él creía en lo que su
amigo Robert M. Coates llamaba “la metafísica del azar de la fatalidad” (Martin, Art 9),
un mundo dominado por el azar que debería tomarse lo más a la ligera posible. The
Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931), la primera novela de West y probablemente la más
imaginativa, muestra a las claras las inclinaciones Dadaístas del autor y su entusiasta
aceptación de las creencias Dadaístas resultantes de su lectura temprana de la literatura
Dadaísta (era un lector asiduo de la revista Dadaísta francesa Littérature y admiraba
Ubu Roi de Alfred Jarry, Les Chants de Maldoror de Lautréamont, Le Bal du Comte
d’Orgel de Radiguet, la poesía de Hans Arp, y la novela inconclusa Franz Müllers
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Drahtfrühling de Kurt Schwitters), de su admiración por los dibujos satíricos de George
Grosz, y de su asociación personal con algunos miembros del grupo —Aragon,
Soupault, Éluard, Ernst, etc.— durante su breve estancia en París en 1926-27.
Gertrude Stein estaba familiarizada con el Dadaísmo, incluso tenía su propia
teoría, bastante imprecisa, sobre el nacimiento del grupo. Sentía especial afecto por
René Crevel quien, junto con Duchamp, Satie, Aragon, Man Ray, Picabia, Tzara y
otros, era un visitante habitual en su casa de París. Sin embargo, Stein estaba más
interesado en los Dadaístas como individuos que como escritores o artistas, y no parece
que los Dadaístas tuvieran influencia alguna sobre su obra literaria, la cual, cuando el
grupo irrumpió en París en 1920, ya había alcanzado su nivel máximo de
experimentación. De hecho, fue ella quien influyó sobre el Dadaísmo. El género
pictórico propio del Dadaísmo —el retrato-objeto o retrato-máquina—, tal y como lo
practicaron Picabia, Marsden Hartley y otros, surgió a partir de los retratos en palabras
de Picasso, Matisse y Mabel Dodge escritos por Stein, que más tarde darían también
lugar a la versión Dadaísta de la crítica literaria: la síntesis crítica.
Además de su naturaleza Dadaísta, las novelas y relatos analizados en esta tesis
tienen en común que su intrínseca intertextualidad, que se manifiesta en tres niveles
distintos, aunque a menudo solapados. En primer lugar, los textos estudiados están
construidos sobre “textos” previos; es decir, no pueden comprenderse del todo sin un
conocimiento de los numerosos discursos culturales a los que aluden, parodian, citan,
plagian, o de los que se apropian. Para poder apreciar en toda su complejidad los
retratos-palabra que Stein hizo de Picasso o Matisse, el lector debe estar familiarizado
con la vida y obra de ambos artistas. The Eater of Darkness de Coates es una parodia de
las novelas románticas y detectivescas que estaban de moda en esa época —en lo que se
adelanta a la novela anti-detectivesca del posmodernismo—, así como una burla de las
idiosincrasias estilísticas de algunos autores contemporáneos como Waldo Frank, E. E.
Cummings, Sherwood Anderson, Jean Toomer, Max Bodenheim, Frank Harris, Ben
Hecht, James Joyce y Gertrude Stein. En una escena de la novela, mientras el letal rayo
láser del señor Constantin busca a su primera victima, la narración se ve interrumpida
por un registro de tres páginas de los objetos y personas a través de los cuales viaja,
entre los que se incluyen escritores, críticos, teóricos de la literatura, editores de revistas
y coleccionistas de arte reales como Laurence Vail, Theodore Dreiser, H. L. Mencken,
Malcolm Cowley, Kenneth Burke, Arthur Moss y Peggy Guggenheim. Escrita como
“protesta contra la escritura de libros” (Whisker 49), The Dream Life of Balso Snell de
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West está salpimentada con referencias, alusiones y citas —tanto correctas como
erróneas— de autores y artistas tan diversos como John Dryden, Daudet, Picasso, James
Joyce, George Moore, Ingres, Nietzsche, Van Gogh, Dostoievski, C. M. Doughty,
Gauguin, Cézanne, y Chejov. Lo mismo sucede en The Great American Novel de
Williams, cuya intención paródica y cuya paradójica dependencia de la historia y la
tradición para crear una nueva literatura estadounidense la convierten en un artefacto
intertextual paradigmático y, por ende, en un distinguido precursor de la narrativa
posmoderna estadounidense.
En segundo lugar, los textos analizados en estas páginas son, en mayor o menor
medida, auto-referenciales. Tratan sobre la propia narrativa, sobre la escritura de
novelas y cuentos, sobre las dificultades inherentes a la descripción de la experiencia
humana a través de las convenciones de la narrativas. [No Title] de Cummings
constituye una humorística parodia de la escritura de relatos breves, una broma Dadaísta
cuya meta es cuestionar el concepto de narrativa de los lectores y ridiculizar las
convenciones del género. En The Great American Novel —como en A Novelette, Spring
and All y Kora in Hell—, Williams reflexiona sobre la construcción de las propias obras
y, en última instancia, sobre la naturaleza de la narrativa. ¿Qué es exactamente la
narrativa?, parece preguntarse. ¿Cuáles son sus fuentes? ¿Cual es la función del
lenguaje? En The Dream Life of Balso Snell, West establece un diálogo con el
Dadaísmo en general y con la novela Dadaísta en particular, así como con las nociones
comúnmente aceptadas de lo que representan los géneros literarios. En este sentido, el
texto es una anti-novela, una reevaluación avant-la-lettre de los límites de la narrativa.
En tercer lugar, ninguna de las obras incluidas en esta exploración tendrían
sentido completo sin la existencia del Dadaísmo, la gran estructura unificadora —o
hipotexto, según la terminología de Genette— dentro de la cual funcionan y con la cual
todas dialogan. Eimi, de Cummings, le debe mucho a The Adventures of Telemachus, la
novella Dadaísta de Louis Aragon, que a su vez es una reelaboración del poema épico
didáctico de Fénelon del mismo título, de 1699. Tanto The Eater of Darkness de Coates
como The Dream Life of Balso Snell de West son, en el fondo, comentarios paródicos
del Dadaísmo. No se pueden comprender las implicaciones culturales y literarias de
Murder! Murder! de Vail o de “The Perfect Murder”, “The Doctors”, “The Terrorists” y
“A Night Among the Horses” de Barnes sin un conocimiento de la apología que el
Dadaísmo hacía del asesinato, la violencia gratuita, la destrucción, el suicidio, la
revolución, las acciones primarias y el crimen inmotivado. Del mismo modo, la
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resonancia de “The Little Girl Continues” de Barnes disminuye considerablemente si no
se está familiarizado con las circunstancias de la muerte de Radiguet. Tanto Manhattan
Transfer de Dos Passos como The Dream Life of Balso Snell de West pueden
interpretarse como adaptaciones literarias del collage Dadaísta, que, a su vez, es una
traslación al lienzo del casual encuentro poético —e inherentemente intertextual— de
una máquina de escribir y un paraguas sobre una mesa de disección imaginado por
Lautréamont (Rubin 95).
–––––
El Dadaísmo no duró demasiado. Las fuerzas destructivas interiores que lo pusieron en
marcha solo podían conducirlo la autodestrucción. Su impacto sobre nuestra historia
cultural, sin embargo, ha sido trascendental. Cien años después de su nacimiento en una
taberna de Zurich, el Dadaísmo —su legado, su espíritu— sigue vivo en el trabajo de
innumerables artistas, escritores e intelectuales. La literatura académica sobre el
Dadaísmo sigue creciendo, descubriendo nuevas facetas del grupo, revelando nuevas
conexiones. Esta tesis es mi contribución a ese proyecto.
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3. ÍNDICE
Reconocimientos
4
1. Introducción
1. 1. Propósito y estructura
5
1. 2. Estado de la cuestión
11
1. 3. Marco teórico
19
2. Breve historia del Dadaísmo
2. 1. El nacimiento del Dadaísmo
28
2. 2. Dadá en New York
36
2. 3. Dadá en París: ¿La muerte del movimiento?
42
2. 4. Dadá y el Surrealismo
45
3. Dadaísmo, lenguaje y literatura
3. 1. Teoría Dadaísta del lenguaje
49
3. 2. Dadá y la novela: La narrativa Dadaísta
52
3. 2. 1. Hugo Ball: Flametti oder vom Dandysmus der Armen and
Tenderenda der Phantast
55
3. 2. 2. Kurt Schwitters: “Die Zwiebel” y Franz Müllers
Drahtfrühling
60
3. 2. 3. Louis Aragon: Anicet ou le Panorama, Les Aventures de
Télémaque, y Le Libertinage
3. 2. 4. Francis Picabia: Caravansérail
64
68
3. 2. 5. George Ribemont-Dessaignes: Céleste Ugolin y Le Bar du
Lendemain
70
3. 2. 6. Blaise Cendrars: Moravagine
73
3. 2. 7. Philippe Soupault: Les dernières nuits de Paris
74
3. 2. 8. André Breton: Poisson soluble
76
4. Juegos Dadaístas en The Eater of Darkness de Robert Coates
79
5. La narrativa de Djuna Barnes y el lado oscuro del Dadaísmo
98
6. “Language is in its January”: Dadá y la prosa temprana de William Carlos
117
Williams
7. La violencia, el asesinato, el suicidio y el “crimen inmotivado” en Dadá y en
Murder! Murder! de Laurence Vail
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8. El arte y la poesía Dadaístas en Manhattan Transfer de John Dos Passos
156
9. “I am that I am”: La anti-narrativa Dadaísta de E. E. Cummings
174
10. Repugnancia Dadaísta en The Dream Life of Balso Snell de Nathanael West
196
11. Gertrude Stein: ¿La madre de Dadá?
214
12. Conclusiones
229
Apéndices
Apéndice A. Hugo Ball: “Manifiesto Dadaísta”
239
Apéndice B. Tristan Tzara: “Manifiesto Dadaísta 1918”
241
Apéndice C. Richard Huelsenbeck: “Manifiesto Dadaísta colectivo”
252
Apéndice D. André Breton: “Patinaje Dadá” y “Geografía Dadá”
257
Apéndice E. Francis Picabia: “Manifiesto Dadaísta”
260
Apéndice F. George Ribemont-Dessaignes: “Los placeres de Dadá” y
262
“Al público”
Apéndice G. Marsden Hartley: “La importancia de ser Dadá”
266
Apéndice H. Tristan Tzara: “Conferencia sobre el Dadaísmo”
272
Bibliografía
279
Lista de ilustraciones
297
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