Modernist Song: The Poetry of Tristan Tzara by Stephen Forcer

Abstract

MLR, 104.2, 2009 575 appear to have encouraged the perception of lifeas one of the early stages of death, itself figured as the fulfilment of Romantic yearnings for the immutable and the eternal. The good life could, to this extent, be measured by the good death, an assumption in part inherited from earlymodern piety. Yet the growing irreligion and scientism of the age inevitably called death's meaning into question, as demon strated by Barbara Giraud's revelatory essay on theGoncourts' Sceur Philomene and its early representation of death in a medical (as opposed to charitable) hospital. The nineteenth-century death ofGod also called intoquestion notions of order and harmony, including theorder and harmony of literaryforms.This point isbrilliantly developed byDavid Evans, who demonstrates how poems byMallarme and Banville, each commemorating the biological deaths of friends, also served to theorize the death of inherited forms of poetry, as well as their rebirth as a necessary illusion. The links between death and maternity are explored in two striking essays by Car men Mayer-Robin and Maria Scott. In the first, Mayer-Robin looks at Fecondite, Zola's pro-natalist response to the crisis of population he identifies.Mayer-Robin develops Carol Mossman's concept of gynocolonization, providing additional con text in order to demonstrate how Zola uses his novel to unwrite some of his own theses, particularly in relation to abortion and infanticide. In the second, Scott writes convincingly about Stendhal's views on the entombment ofwomen within nineteenth-century constructions ofmaternity. She goes on to provide a valuable reassessment of Le Rouge et le Noir and itsforegrounded opposition of thematernal Mme de Renal and Amazonian Mathilde de La Mole, turningmany a conventional assumption about the novel on itshead. Scott needs more space fully to address the problem ofMathilde's self-serving vanity that, from a Stendhalian perspective, appears toundermine her status as an exemplar?I eagerly await themonograph she is currentlypreparing on Stendhal's 'resistant' heroines, aswell as thepublication of furtherproceedings of the SDN's remarkably successful series of conferences. King's College London Francesco Manzini Modernist Song: The Poetry of Tristan Tzara. By Stephen Forcer. London: Le genda. 2006. x+146 pp. ?45. ISBN 978-1-904713-14-2. As Stephen Forcer indicates in the introduction to this compelling book, the cultural memory of Tristan Tzara is grossly limited to his role as the 'Father ofDada\ with criticism focusing almost exclusively on theperformances, exhibitions, reviews, and manifestos produced over a relatively brief period of Tzara's career. There is little recognition of the fact that for a significantly longer period?for four decades after theDada manifestos were published?Tzara's main careerwas as a poet. Thus Forcer sets out here to redress the balance, providing a close textual analysis of a selection of Tzara's poems from across thewhole of this period, examining how they evolve afterDada, and so problematizing Tzara's iconic function. This is effectivelyaided by Forcer's refusal to adopt a single predetermined theoretical agenda informinghis selection of poems, which frees up his enquiry and allows him to produce amore organic' reading. 576 Reviews And without doubt it ishis engagement with the detail of the poems that is the real strength of this book: taking one or two from each collection as paradigms for thewhole, this small but dense corpus of analysis communicates the vitality of Tzara's work.Writing with evident pleasure, Forcer starts from an accessible premiss to go on to explore exciting new ground, teasing out a surprising array of readings and styles. This exploration is for themost part both engaging and persuasive, but also controversial in parts: if the reader is of similar persuasion to Charles Chadwick (withwhom Forcer exchanged a series of commentaries in the French Studies Bulletin in 2006), s/hemay be less convinced by Forcer's argument for the hidden significance of individual letters inwhat are essentially typographically and phonetically unremarkable texts, finding thismeaning to be mere accident or fancy. Forcer suggests inhis response toChadwick that to dismiss such findingsbased on the question of authorial intent is facile in a world afterBarthes and Derrida, and contends that the signifying play may rather be less a question of intent...