Tristan Tzara Research Articles

Modernist Song: The Poetry of Tristan Tzara

Modernist Song: The Poetry of Tristan Tzara

Travesties: Tom Stoppard’s Joyce and Other Dadaist Fantasies, Or History in a Hat

The original impulse for this essay was to examine gaps between biographical fact and character in Travesties.1 I was then going to expose historical incongruities within play and argue that Tom Stoppard's redaction of lives and events was demanded by conditions of dramatic performance. Such an explanation would not ease anxieties of those who are literally minded, but then I remembered Oscar Wilde. In Stoppard's The Invention of Love, Wilde remarks that biography is the mesh through which our real life escapes. I was said to have walked down Piccadilly with a lily in my hand. There was no need. To do it is nothing, to be said to have done it is everything.2 A few lines earlier, Wilde corrects A. E. Housman's belief that a newspaper report of an inquest is truthful: On contrary, Wilde replies, it's only fact. Truth is quite another thing and is work of imagination (Love 93). Imagination's link to truth makes acceptable fissures and disruptions found in Travesties. In this context, Stoppard's realignment of habits and characteristics of James Joyce or Tristan Tzara or Vladimir Lenin, found in Richard Ellmann's James Joyce, Hans Richter's Dada: Art and Anti-Art, or Edmund Wilson's To Finland Station, bothers us less.3 Stoppard has never hidden his sources and, in fact, takes pride in listing his reading and origins of his ideas. But much remains out of sync in play that still nags audiences, alternately increasing their pleasure and calling into question play's success. The treatment of time is a starting point. The calendar of play and that of history do not match, and many have amused themselves by working out discrepancies. But facts and dates always mislead, and Stoppard himself dispenses with them in his work as well as in his life. He prefers to juggle history so that historical characters meet, although no actual record of such encounters exists. He thinks nothing of putting Lord Byron into a mysterious situation in Arcadia or depicting gatherings among a host of early Russian revolutionaries that may or may not have happened in The Coast of Utopia.4

The Gas Heart: Disfigurement and the Dada Body

This article explores the impact of facial injury and reconstructive surgery on Tristan Tzara's Dada play The Gas Heart. The European theatre of World War I saw an unprecedented number of facial injuries and other instances of physical mutilation, and their prevalence inaugurated a social crisis of appearance and representation. With its dramaturgy of fragmentation, Tzara's play provides a theatrical field of face and defacement, figure and disfiguration. The body to which it gives voice is a body deeply embedded in its historical, cultural, and artistic moment. In its giving and taking away of faces, it reflects—and transforms—a cultural anxiety over the destruction of the human form and the claims of identity, normality, and corporeal integrity to which it has been historically subordinated. While the brilliantly re-formed, constantly changing human body that emerges from The Gas Heart stands in opposition to the normalized body posited by reconstructive medicine, Tzara's body-in-pieces reveals the wider field of permutations and possibilities—material, subjective, aesthetic—that the shattered bodies of World War I helped open to view.

How We Are Untranslatable and How Nobody's There to Care

Review introductionto focus: Contemporary Romanian Poetry in Translation and in Interstitial English Andrei Codrescu, Focus Editor The idea of a "Focus" on Romanian literature in English translation in the US looked simple enough at first, until I started surveying the field. The field is strewn with a variety of products of varying quality and intent that will simply not sit under one umbrella, no matter how Romanian-sounding the authors' names. The Romanian presence in American letters is fairly substantial, but only some of it is literature, and the "some of it" is not always representative of Romanian literature. Worse, the translations of even the "some ofit" that may be representative are spotty at best and atrocious in many instances. In addition to bad translations of haphazard work, there is disagreement within the Romanian literary community as to what is and what isn't "representative." Before 1989 and the fall of the Ceau§escu regime, there was very little worthwhile Romanian work in English. Unlike their Czech, Polish , or Hungarian contemporaries, Romanians produced no earth-shaking dissident tomes. Romanians excused their absence from the Cold War literature ofprotest by pointing to the greatness oftheir poetry. In Romania, it was said, poetry carried the weight of the opposition, and it was mightily feared by the tyrant and much loved by the people. In the absence of decent translations, there was no way to verify its subversive efficacy, so that assertion remained mostly unproven. On the other hand, Tristan Tzara, Paul Celan, Ilarie Voronca, Benjamin Fondane, and Gherasim Luca were well-known poets in the West since before the Second World War. These Romanian-born, Jewish poets, writing for the most part in French, had been translated almost simultaneously into English. They had, in fact, created an international idiom for poetry , a kind ofur-ground hospitable to infinite poetic experiment. The nationalist and communist epochs severed the connection with this international avantgarde . Romanian poets within the Romanian borders condemned themselves (and were condemned by the official ideologues) to provincialism. After 1989, Romanian writers felt the urgent need to be heard outside their borders, and there was a stampede of traducing. Well-respected writers , whether pre- or post- 1989, felt that they had to be read on the "outside," hoping for recognition that the increasingly bitter internecine polemics made impossible. The Romanian literary scene is contentious , the heir of innumerable storms in teapots and art-hostile political ideologies. Needless to say, most fiction didn't make it this time around either, with the exception of Mircea Cärtärescu's work. Cärtärescu, however, is the exception among Romanian fictioneers : primarily a poet, his prose has more in common with the masters of the international dream idiom pioneered by Tzara. In Romania, it was said, poetry carried the weight ofthe opposition. The poets crossed over into American English in great numbers and in a variety of craft. At first, there was only a single boat, a canoe really, named Adam J. Sorkin. The canoe that is Sorkin brought to the US dozens, maybe over a hundred, Romanian poets. Sorkin translated indefatigably for over three decades, often with the help of the poets, sometimes with the help ofthe dictionary. Even as we speak, the sea-worthy craft of Sorkin's labor is being offloaded by small press publishers far and wide. In 2006, Carmen Firan and Paul Doru Mugur's anthology Born in Utopia inaugurated a whole new understanding of Romanian poetry. For the first time, a picture of an entire poetic culture became visible. Other poets crossed in their own vessels in the first decade of the new millennium when the Internet and the open border made it possible for some younger poets to begin writing directly in English. This English (American-flavored mostly) seems to me a new language, something I call "interstitial English," a language in which a great many foreign-born writers are becoming fluent. Some of these writers have learned their English from MTV and Animal Planet before actually and physically coming to the US. Others are practicing in the interstices between literary and pop-cultural English, mixing in a variety of accents from the ethno-enclaves of...

Marvelous encounters: surrealist responses to film, art, poetry, and architecture

The concept of poesie critique - poetry that possesses both a poetic and a critical function - has an extensive history in modern literature. Written in response to another work of art, be it a painting, a film, a poem, or a piece of music, the critical poem comments on the latter in various ways but refuses to abandon its poetic mission. Marvelous Encounters examines surrealist poets writing in French, Spanish, and Catalan who experimented with this intriguing genre. The first three chapters are concerned with the French surrealists, who began to cultivate critical poetry toward the end of World War I. Chapter 2 considers how Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault appropriated the critical poem, as they reviewed books of poetry and films starring Charlie Chaplin. Chapter 3, which examines how Benjamin Peret and Paul Eluard conceived of critical poetry, analyzes their response to poems by Tristan Tzara and paintings by Giorgio de Chirico and Joan Miro. Chapter 4 is devoted entirely to Andre Breton.

A Manifesto for a New Walking Culture: ‘Dealing with the city’

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Wrights & Sites would like to acknowledge support from the Centre for Creative Enterprise and Participation, Dartington College of Arts, the University of Exeter and the University of Winchester. Notes 1 See Tristan Tzara, Dada Manifesto 1918, originally read in the Salle Meise, Zürich, 23 March 1918 (1992 [1918] Tzara, Tristan. 1992 [1918]. Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries, London, Paris and New York: Calder Publications. trans. Barbara Wright [Google Scholar]: 13): ‘DADA; every hierarchy and social equation established for values by our valets’. 2 See Tzara (1992 [1918] Tzara, Tristan. 1992 [1918]. Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries, London, Paris and New York: Calder Publications. trans. Barbara Wright [Google Scholar]: 13): ‘DADA; the abolition of prophets’. 3 A reference to Lautréamont's oft-quoted, pre-Surrealist statement from Maldoror (1868–1869): ‘As beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella.’ 4 The rhyme goes as follows: How many miles to Babylon? Three score and ten. Can I get there by candlelight? Yes, and back again. 5 This text by Fiona Templeton was accompanied by a video extract of a research walk around Tbilisi (2005). 6 See Note 5 5 This text by Fiona Templeton was accompanied by a video extract of a research walk around Tbilisi (2005). , above. 7 See Tzara (1992 [1918] Tzara, Tristan. 1992 [1918]. Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries, London, Paris and New York: Calder Publications. trans. Barbara Wright [Google Scholar]: 13): ‘DADA; the abolition of memory’. 8 This text by Richard Layzell was accompanied by a video extract of Walking in Circles (research in Wargrave, UK, 1999). 9 This text by Richard Layzell was accompanied by a video extract of Sense Walk (Project IS, Bristol, UK, 2005). 10 This text by Richard Layzell was accompanied by a video extract of Talking to Tania 1 (Skyros, Greece, 2004). 11 See Tzara (1992 [1918] Tzara, Tristan. 1992 [1918]. Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries, London, Paris and New York: Calder Publications. trans. Barbara Wright [Google Scholar]: 13): ‘DADA; the abolition of archaeology’. 12 See http://www.planbperformance.net/dan/mapping.htm for further information. 13 This text by Fiona Templeton was accompanied by a video extract of a research walk around Tbilisi (2005). 14 See Tzara (1992 [1918] Tzara, Tristan. 1992 [1918]. Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries, London, Paris and New York: Calder Publications. trans. Barbara Wright [Google Scholar]: 13): ‘DADA; the absolute and indiscutable belief in every god that is an immediate product of spontaneity’. 15 See Tzara (1992 [1918] Tzara, Tristan. 1992 [1918]. Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries, London, Paris and New York: Calder Publications. trans. Barbara Wright [Google Scholar]: 13): ‘DADA; the abolition of the future’. 16 See Tzara (1992 [1918] Tzara, Tristan. 1992 [1918]. Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries, London, Paris and New York: Calder Publications. trans. Barbara Wright [Google Scholar]: 13): ‘DADA; protest with the fists of one's whole being in destructive action’. 17 See Tzara (1992 [1918] Tzara, Tristan. 1992 [1918]. Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries, London, Paris and New York: Calder Publications. trans. Barbara Wright [Google Scholar]: 13): ‘DADA; acquaintance with all the means hitherto rejected by the sexual prudishness of easy compromise and good manners’. 18 See Tzara (1992 [1918] Tzara, Tristan. 1992 [1918]. Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries, London, Paris and New York: Calder Publications. trans. Barbara Wright [Google Scholar]: 13): ‘DADA; abolition of logic, dance of those who are incapable of creation’. 19 See Tzara (1992 [1918] Tzara, Tristan. 1992 [1918]. Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries, London, Paris and New York: Calder Publications. trans. Barbara Wright [Google Scholar]: 13): ‘DADA; every object, all objects, feelings and obscurities, every apparition and the precise shock of parallel lines, are means for the battle of’.

The Delirium of Praise: Bataille, Blanchot, Deleuze, Foucault, Klossowski by Eleanor Kaufman (review)

218 Reviews Perry's study is not always easy to read: the extensive notes at times show a tangential digressiveness; at the same time discussion in the text itself is often delayed by the inclusion of qualifications or associative leaps that would have figured more ap? propriately in a note. Extended quotations of verse are given in French, with English translations, but quotations of prose and isolated lines of verse in the text appear only in a sometimes gallicized English, which does few favours to Noailles's tendency to gush. Perry reminds us that Cocteau found himself able to praise both Noailles and Tristan Tzara; she is an attentive and well-informed reader who should encourage others to dip into Noailles's poetry with a fuller awareness of its qualities. Southampton Peter Cogman The Delirium ofPraise: Bataille, Blanchot, Deleuze, Foucault, Klossowski. By Eleanor Kaufman. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2001. xii + 224 pp. ?26. ISBN 0-8018-6513-1. What happens when a writer?a thinker or essayist, say?writes in celebration of a friend or kindred spirit, when the detachment and measure associated with the critical function give way to complicity and excess? At times, as Eleanor Kaufman concedes in this ambitious and fascinating study, the result may resemble a faintlyembarrass? ing form of mutual adulation. But at others, as in the reciprocal tributes addressed to one another by such like-minded friends as Bataille, Blanchot, Foucault, Deleuze, and Klossowski, something more profound is at stake, reflectingwhat Kaufman, in effusive words of her own, describes as 'a new form of intellectual hospitality, a mode of being in common that is not a form of correcting, or out-mastering the other, but rather a way ofjoining with the other in language or in thought so that what is created is a community of thought that knows no bounds, a hospitality that liquidates identity, a community ofthe soul' (pp. 140-41). The argument is an appealing one; but it is not without possible pitfalls. Kaufman's main critical strategy is to argue that the form ofthe intellectual exchanges she studies is mirrored abysmally in their content. Pub? lished exchanges between Blanchot and Bataille, she argues, turn on issues of silence and chatter; Blanchot writing about silence and chatter in Des Forets's Le Bavard, then, in memory of Bataille, according to Kaufman, is writing primarily about his own relationship with Bataille. So far so good, one might say, and Kaufman shows astutely enough how the intellectual dialogues she studies are all inhabited by spectral presences of one kind or another. But her approach remains unhappily circular. Dif? ferences, not to say discord, covert polemic, mutual resistance, are all elided. Friends only come into relation with one another, according to Blanchot, if there is distance between them, but in Kaufman's analysis there is little evidence of this encounter with the other , or of the complex inflections or shifts of emphasis that are a feature of the exchanges she discusses. Her treatment of the friendship between Blanchot and Bataille is a case in point. While allowing that the two men were 'eminently distinct', she emphasizes their fusional identification with one another to the point of assimilating them to that famously canonical pair of friends that were Montaigne and Etienne de la Boetie. But in doing so she disregards Blanchot's reservations regarding Montaigne's description of friendship, which Blanchot voices in remembering his own friendship with Robert Antelme in an essay entitled Pour l'amitie. Kaufman seems unaware of that text. But elsewhere too, in a passage she does cite, Blanchot repeats the crucial point that to affirmthe other is precisely not to transform the other into a mirror image of the self. For if an affirmativeresponse to the other is possible, it is only in so far as differences are not annulled, but exacerbated. In this context, MLR, ioo.i, 2005 219 rather than welcoming community 'that knows no bounds', it becomes urgent rather to resist its allure?precisely in order that alterity may be affirmedat all. University of Warwick Leslie Hill Andre Malraux u: Malraux lecteur. Ed. by Christiane Moatti and Julien Dieudone . Paris and Caen: Lettres Modernes...

Surrealism and the Exotic

Louise Tythacott, Surrealism and the Exotic . London and New York, Routledge, 2003. ISBN 041–527637–3. 260 pp., 68 b. & w. illus. £60. ‘Part documentary and part sustained critique’, as the jacket text to Surrealism and the Exotic puts it, aptly characterizes the nature and content of the publication under review, as both components are intertwined in the nine dense but highly readable chapters of the book. The first chapter offers an ‘ethnography’ of the cult of Surrealism, demonstrating how Dada, itself a reaction to the horrors of the First World War, in turn led to Surrealism with the emergence of André Breton as the leader of the new Surrealist movement, who replaced Tristan Tzara, the key figure in Dada. Besides the organization and activities of Surrealism as a movement, including its fissures and excommunications, Tythacott demonstrates how its predilection for certain visual techniques – automatic drawing, collage, frottage and cadavres exquis – necessarily entailed a special relationship with the art of certain regions, such as the sand paintings of the Navajo or the hybrid masks of the northwest coast of North America. This in turn is reflected in the collecting habits of the Surrealists. Among the bric-à-brac they found in the shops and markets of Paris were exotic artefacts from Africa, Oceania and the Americas. When displayed in public exhibitions or in the privacy of the Surrealists' own domestic spaces, they revealed a penchant for the juxtaposition of the most incongruous objects.

Fictions de l’ipséité: essai sur l’invention narrative de soi (Beckett, Hesse, Kafka, Musil, Proust, Woolf) by Laurent Mattiussi (review)

280 Reviews Trollope's travel book, South Africa, for Laurent Bury presents Blacks as recyclable : 'A Kafir may be ground and baked into a Christian' (p. 109). When, however, Trollope, more liberal than many of his era, speaks of Kaffirs as being 'as naked as my heart could desire' (pp. 110-11), it is a toss-up whether such occidental wishes are not more naive than the supposedly ingenuous 'savages'. Trollope wants Blacks to replicate Whites (though not, of course, the 'boorish' Boers). Barge-pole kindness denies native peoples any history to call their own. For his part, Rider Haggard, in Yves Clavaron's view, singles out Zulus and places them at the top ofthe African tree, though, superb animals that they are, they are still up a tree. Monique Dubar tackles the dimly remembered Francois de Curel's play La Fille sauvage, where a female savage transported to Europe is remodelled by Christianity and colonialist values. She ends up a queen back in Africa, outdoing the White bosses in her programme for controlling the Blacks. Scandinavian primitivism switches the emphasis, according to Frederique Toudoire -Surlapierre, to environment, and to the far greater role of fauna and flora in human lives in those harsh climes. Dominique Peyrache-Leborgne provides a cinematic dimension to the total question in her study of the interrelated films of Pasolini and fiction of Elsa Morante. The more syncretistic of the two, Pasolini works to create a Third World ofthe mind melded with the Gospels. Both visions, however, grow increasingly pessimistic. Humour gets a brief look-in in Jean-Marc Maura's paper on Andre Breton and Tristan Tzara, and their cults of African and Oceanian art. Maura's effortsto read sense into Hugo Ball's poem in 'pseudo-African' do not convince, for this farrago sounds like a right-winger's attempt to burlesque those to whom it allegedly pays homage. Extremes meet: avant-gardes reach out longingly to the supposed privilege of the primitive. An anthropological slant is furnished by Emmanuel Lezy, who acknowledges that geographers are every bit as nervous about terms like 'primitive' as anyone else, apart from racists. He argues that too many observers do not, cannot, stay long enough with a community to register its long-term, cyclical variations, e.g. as between the proportions of hunting, gathering, and cultivating. He offers a sage analysis of the poser: how can we describe peoples apparently so differentfrom Western societies, without either infantilizingor worshippingthem? At the end, Jean Bessiere's overview sails abstractly above the foregoing discourse. Apart from relishing a stray formula like 'la vulgate de la critique postcoloniale' (p. 236), which Bessiere probably did not intend pejoratively, you end up hankering for some brass tacks to walk or sit on. Nevertheless, despite this incorporeal coda, the collection as a whole is rich, and taxing, just like the West. University of Reading Walter Redfern Fictions de Vipseite: essai sur I'invention narrative de soi (Beckett, Hesse, Kafka, Musil, Proust, Woolf). By LaurentMattiussi. (Histoire des ideeset critiquelitteraire, 399) Geneva: Droz. 2002. 340 pp. ISBN 2-600-00691-5. Opening with the contention that the invention of the self is one of the most fun? damental aims of literature in the modern period, this book sets out to show how fiction was used in the firsthalf of the twentieth century as a space for exploring the volatile boundaries of identity. A nineteenth-century text, Nerval's poem 'El Desdichado ', is used to establish the basic problem of a self which can be grasped only indirectly. Hermann Hesse invents and theorizes a new genre through which Ner? val's self-identification through distortion can be fullyrealized: fictiveautobiography. Beckett, Kafka, Musil, Proust, and Woolf join Hesse as the most daring pioneers MLRy 99.1, 2004 281 of the endeavour to find the self by first losing it. Through a series of detailed, subtle readings, the book traces the invention of the self through its abandonment, diffraction, metamorphosis, sacrifice, and death. The final chapter suggests that the musical model is most appropriate for capturing something of the self without fixing it in a rigid form, allowing for the permanence of a theme which binds together mul...

"Might be what you like, till you hear the words": Joyce in Zurich and the Contrapuntal Language of Ulysses

When the young American music student Otto Luening arrived in Zurich in early 1917, he had just barely avoided arrest by the German authorities. The Luenings had spent the first years of World War I in Bavaria, but now that Otto was of military age and had no passport, he had become subject to internment. Once in Zurich, he found himself in the cultural hub of Western Europe. Not only diplomats, war profiteers, spies, deserters, refugees, and political agitators had found a comparatively safe haven in neutral Switzerland: strolling down the Niederdorfstrasse after hearing C. G. Jung guest-lecture at the University, one could easily encounter Tristan Tzara in the Restaurant Tivoli, Igor Stravinsky at the Cafe Pfauen, and then Hermann Hesse at the Bar Odeon. Luening was enthralled by the city’s cosmopolitan atmosphere; he enrolled at the conservatory, where he became the student of another expatriate, Philip Jarnach. Jarnach, born in Nice of Spanish and German parentage, taught composition and counterpoint, and the two men quickly became friends. Luening, in his memoir The Odyssey of an American Composer, remembers how he first heard of another fellow exile: “Apropos of nothing in particular, Jarnach said in a music composition class, ‘And then, of course, there

The Sacramental Dada of T.S. Eliot

THE COMPAKATIST THE SACRAMENTAL DADA OF T. S. ELIOT Sean Cotter Eliot's baptism and confirmation in the Anglican Church in 1927 is usually taken to mark a conversion, not only in his spiritual life, but also in his aesthetics. This year divides the "early" from the "late" Eliot, the author of "Prufrock" and The Waste Land from the author ofAsh- Wednesday and Four Quartets, the ironic avant-garde ventriloquist from the dogmatic czar of letters. Helen Gardner's statement is exemplary: The change in Mr Eliot's poetry cannot be discussed without reference to the fact that the author ofAsh Wednesday is a Christian while the author of The WasteLandwas not. Nobody can underrate the momentousness for any mature person ofacceptance ofall that membership ofthe Christian Church entails. (103) While it is not clear what all is entailed, we can hear in "momentousness " the solemn tone reserved for this moment in Eliot's life, as though he has made a desperate and possibly fatal choice. I will argue that we are mourning a false sense ofrupture. We know from his Harvard notebooks (Gordon 537-8) and from poems such as "The Love Song of St. Sebastian" that Eliot wrestled with Christian belief throughout his life, and 1927 marks his public avowal of this commitment. Eliot's statement ofbeliefdoes not, however, mark his withdrawal from the avant-garde. In fact, this statement shows the depth of his involvement with that particular faction called Dada. Eliot was not a Dadaist in that he did not perform at the Cabaret Voltaire, he did not contribute to Dada journals, and he did not write or sign any of the many Dada manifestos. But we can understand the dynamics of his Anglican beliefs more accurately if we see them as an extension of this continental avant-garde tradition. As Ronald Bush and Denis Donoghue both argue, Eliot's poetry does undergo a change, beginning with Ash-Wednesday (1930), his first long poem published after 1927. This poem moves his aesthetics closer to, not further from, those of the Dadaists Hugo Ball and Tristan Tzara. In it Eliot employs the aesthetic nonsense ofDadaist goading as a structural technique, making his Christianity not into a solemn funeral but into a music-hall comedy. Eliot must have expected, when For Lancelot Andrewes was published , the overwhelmingly hostile reaction that his preface would evoke. For example, Eugene Jolas (the editor of transition, publisher ofJoyce's Work in Progress and Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons) called Eliot "senile" and assumed that he had given up literary creation: The gratuitous act ofthe creator having become apparently abhorrent to him, Mr. T.-S. Eliot constrains his reformatory forces into the straightjacket of political and religious dogma. Although I retain a profound Vol. 26 (2002): 69 THE SACRAMENTAL DADA OF T. S. ELIOT admiration for the great poet that he was, and although I try to have tolerance for another man's viewpoint, I cannot help feeling that Mr. Eliot has committed intellectual treason. (11) The extremity of this reaction, with its strange emphasis on allegiance to a cantankerous and factional avant-garde, was not confined to Jolas. The Times Literary Supplement called Eliot "a kind of traitor" (Gordon 226). Ezra Pound rhymed "psychosis" with an accusation that Eliot "abandoned the muses for Moses." Mark Van Doren summarized the Eliot "legend" a year later: Mr. Eliot[. . .]has withered into a triple faith, hardened into a three-headed dogma—turned a fastidious, tired back upon our glorious confusion and gone the easy, empty way ofabsolutism. The author of"The Waste Land," people say, has repudiated even his vision ofour contemporary intellectual desert—a vision which was useful at least in that it showed us what we are—in honor ofmeaningless formulas from old time which he alone mumbles, thinking thereby to achieve impossible certitudes. (590) Eliot was seen as isolating himself from the avant-garde: he is not part of"our" confusion but states formulas "he alone mumbles." Blind as these critics were to the fact that Eliot was not alone in a church which dated from the English Renaissance, they also missed the fact that he had not left the avant-garde...

Michel Houllebecq and the Pursuit of Happiness

Michel Houellebecq has emerged as one of the most powerful voices in contemporary French literature. His books of poetry, La Poursuite du bonheur (1992), Le Sens du combat (1996), Renaissance (1999), and his novels, Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994), Les Particules elementaires (1998) and Plateforme (2001), have received such prestigious awards as the Prix de Flore, the Prix Tristan Tzara and the Prix National des Lettres. His work has been championed by arguably the most important French press phenomenon of the nineties, Les Inrockuptibles, which has published many of his journalistic and theoretical articles. In the work of Michel Houellebecq, we find a backlash against contemporary concerns with textuality, and, in broader political and cultural terms, disaffection with Ie liberalisme, with its individualistic pursuit of happiness. Michel Houellebecq was born in 1958 in La Reunion, but soon moved with his parents to metropolitan France. His mother and father split up early in his childhood, and he was sent off to a boarding-school in Meaux. According to his official web-site, 'Son pere, guide de haute montagne, et sa mere, medecin anesthesiste, se desinteressent tres vite de son existence'. 1 At six years old, he was taken into the care of his paternal grandmother, whose surname he has adopted as his pseudonym. For Houellebecq, his parents were 'les precurseurs du vaste mouvement de dissolution familiale qui allait suivre'. While his parents indulged in sexual liberation and gauchiste spontaneity, 'I' image du bien, pour moi, c' etait mes grands-parents, qui m' elevaient'z: hard-working, monogamous, generous and Communist in politics representative of a world on the brink of extinction. Houellebecq trained as an agronomist, before working as a computer technician in the Assemblee Nationale. He was briefly married, from which he has a son. He divorced and intermittently was treated for depression in psychiatric clinics. As a poet, he was first published thanks to Michel Bulteau, director of La Nouvelle Revue de Paris. Houellebecq would join Bulteau on the editorial committee of another review, Digraphe, under the directorship of Jean Ristat, lover of Louis Aragon and prominent intellectual of the Communist Party. Houellebecq was also cinema critic for Ristat' s revived version of Les

Surrealist painters and poets: an anthology

In 1951 Robert Motherwell published a collection of writings called The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology. Conceived as a sequel to that volume, Surrealist Painters and Poets: An Anthology does for Surrealism what Motherwell's book did for Dadaism. The concept and contents were discussed with Robert Motherwell and met with his enthusiastic approval.The essays, manifestos, poems, and texts in this anthology offer a composite picture of the Surrealists -- their convictions, styles, and spirit -- from the movement's beginnings in France just after World War I to its second flowering in America after World War II. The book includes writers and artists from Belgium, Chile, Czechoslovakia, Cuba, Egypt, England, France, Germany, Guyana, Italy, Martinique, Mauritius, Mexico, Spain, Switzerland, Senegal, Uruguay, and the United States. Caws's main criterion for inclusion was that the works be the best and most representative of the different forms of Surrealism. Among others, the artists and writers include Andre Breton, Marcel Duchamp and Rrose Selavy, Max Ernst, Mina Loy, Francis Picabia, and Tristan Tzara.

The Artwork Caught by the Tail

If it were married to logic, art would be living in incest, engulfing, swallowing its own tail.… —Tristan Tzara, Manifeste Dada 1918 The only word that is not ephemeral is the word death…. To death, to death, to death. The only thing that doesn't die is money, it just leaves on trips. —Francis Picabia, Manifeste Cannibale Dada, 1920

Crisis and the Arts: The History of Dada. Hall. 1996-2002. Vol II: Dada Zurich: A Clown's Game from Nothing by Stephen C. Foster , Brigitte Pichon , Karl Riha Crisis and the Arts: The History of Dada. Vol. III: Dada Cologne Hanover by Charlotte Stokes , Stephen C. Foster (review)

MLR, 96. , 200I MLR, 96. , 200I threat. These expressionists are shown to have been Cassandra-figures,warning society of currentproblems. The book takes for granted that the progress man has wrung from nature will lead to eventual destruction.The reinterpretationofDoblin, Benn, and Einstein,at least in their earlier prose writings, allows for no final accommodation between nature and technology. There is little here that will surprise the specialist on German twentieth-centuryliterature, but confirmation of the prescience of these expressionists as doomwatchers will doubtless lead to further interest in the significanceof theirdevelopmentsin relatedfields. MELLEN UNIVERSITY, IOWA BRIAN KEITH-SMITH Crisis andthe Arts.TheHistory ofDada. Ed. By STEPHEN C. FOSTER. 8 vols. New York: Hall. 1996-2002. Vol II: DadaZurich: A Clown'sGamefrom Nothing. Ed. by BRIGITTE PICHON and KARLRIHA. 1996. xiii + 281 pp.; Vol. III: Dada Cologne Hanover. Ed. by CHARLOTTESTOKESand STEPHENC. FOSTER. I998. xv + 251 pp. $95 each. These books arepartof a uniqueproject,to be completed in a couple of years'time, which aimsto examine all aspectsof the Dada movement thatflourishedin the early twentieth centuryin Central,Westernand EasternEurope as well as in the US and in Japan. Editors and contributors approach Dada as an historical phenomenon and cover the movement in all its literary, artistic, philosophical, and political dimensions. At the same time, as the general title suggests, Dada is seen in the context of a profound crisis of modernism, and regarded as the first, and perhaps most incisive, expression of that crisis, which continues to influence our understandingof twentieth-centuryculture. DadaZurich containsthirteenessaysfromcontributorsbasedin Germany,the US, and the UK. They examine the social and political atmosphere that made Zurich the centre of the firstDada movement in Europe and look at individualDadaists as well as the art forms, performances, and manifestations associated with Zurich Dada. The emphasisis not so much on Dada as a radical,if now accepted, form of 'anti-art', but on Dada as a spectacle, which began as a cabaret act. As a result, Dada's theatricality, its loud and self-reflexive staging of culture, is highlighted throughout.The firstessay,by BrigittePichon, takesitscue fromDada's firstZurich address, 'Spiegelgasse'. Pichon contends that Dada's 'prismatic breaking-up of oppositional, antagonistic sense-making processes' (p. 30) was liberating, both aestheticallyand socially,forperformersand spectatorsalike.KarlRiha and Debbie Lewer, in the following two essays, give an account of the 'CabaretVoltaire', and chart Dada's nomadic moves across Zurich. The following six essays are shorter and devoted to the contributions made to Zurich Dada by Hugo Ball, his wife Emmy Hennings, Richard Huelsenbeck, Tristan Tzara, Hans Arp and Marcel Janco respectively. The concluding essays look at the role of 'bruitist' music in Dada; the paintings, drawings,and woodcuts, which came to dominate the second phase of ZurichDada; the visualexperimentsin abstractfilmundertakenby Viking Eggeling;and the periodicalsof ZurichDada, Cabaret Voltaire, Dada,and DerZeltweg, which contained contributions in German, French and other languages. Richard Sheppard's 'Dada Zurich in Zeitungen', a comprehensive collection of newspaper excerptsin Germanrelatingto Dadaist activitiesand publicitystunts,formsa useful and at times entertaining appendix. All contributions to the volume are solid and well-informed;where material has been published in German beforehand, it has threat. These expressionists are shown to have been Cassandra-figures,warning society of currentproblems. The book takes for granted that the progress man has wrung from nature will lead to eventual destruction.The reinterpretationofDoblin, Benn, and Einstein,at least in their earlier prose writings, allows for no final accommodation between nature and technology. There is little here that will surprise the specialist on German twentieth-centuryliterature, but confirmation of the prescience of these expressionists as doomwatchers will doubtless lead to further interest in the significanceof theirdevelopmentsin relatedfields. MELLEN UNIVERSITY, IOWA BRIAN KEITH-SMITH Crisis andthe Arts.TheHistory ofDada. Ed. By STEPHEN C. FOSTER. 8 vols. New York: Hall. 1996-2002. Vol II: DadaZurich: A Clown'sGamefrom Nothing. Ed. by BRIGITTE PICHON and KARLRIHA. 1996. xiii + 281 pp.; Vol. III: Dada Cologne Hanover. Ed. by CHARLOTTESTOKESand STEPHENC. FOSTER. I998. xv + 251 pp. $95 each. These books arepartof a uniqueproject,to be completed in a couple of years'time, which aimsto examine all aspectsof the Dada movement thatflourishedin the early twentieth centuryin Central,Westernand EasternEurope as well as in the...

The Artwork Caught by the Tail

If it were married to logic, art would be living in incest, engulfing, swallowing its own tail.…—Tristan Tzara, Manifeste Dada 1918The only word that is not ephemeral is the word death…. To death, to death, to death. The only thing that doesn't die is money, it just leaves on trips.—Francis Picabia, Manifeste Cannibale Dada, 1920

Tom Stoppard and the Invention of Biography

Tom Stoppard has always invented lives — including his own. From Rosencrantz and Guildenstem to Henry Carr and A.E. Housman, Stoppard has invented biographical facts and events that have never happened: James Joyce, Tristan Tzara, and Lenin never met in Zurich in 1917, although they were there; Byron never visited Sidley Park, but in Arcadia his stay is the likely cause of his surreptitious disappearance to the Continent; Housman and Wilde never exchanged words, although they have a long and sympathetic conversation at the end of The Invention of Love; Shakespeare, to our knowledge, never had a love affair that sparked Romeo and Juliet, although such an event defines the script Stoppard co-wrote for the movie Shakespeare in Love.

The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art 1909-1923

Early in this century, Futurist and Dada artists developed brilliantly innovative uses of typography that blurred the boundaries between visual art and literature. In this text, Johanna Drucker shows how later art criticism has distorted our understanding of such works. She argues that Futurist, Dadaist, and Cubist artists emphasized materiality as the heart of their experimental approach to both visual and poetic forms of representation; by mid-century, however, the tenets of New Criticism and High Modernism had polarized the visual and the literary. Drucker suggests a methodology closer to the actual practices of the early avant-garde artists, based on a re-reading of their critical and theoretical writings. After reviewing theories of signification, the production of meaning, and materiality, she analyzes the work of four poets active in the typographic experimentation of the 1910s and 1920s: Ilia Zdanevich, Filippo Marinetti, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Tristan Tzara.

Erik Satie's Ballet Mercure (1924): From Mount Etna to Montmartre

Mercure, a ballet in three tableaux with scenery and costumes by Pablo Picasso and choreography by Léonide Massine, created a scandal on a par with that of Parade (1917) when it was first performed at La Cigale Theatre in Montmartre on 15 June 1924 as part of the ‘Soirée de Paris’ season mounted by the wealthy Comte Etienne de Beaumont. Although Mount Etna, as it transpired, featured in the scenario but not in Picasso's stage sets, the première was certainly the scene of a volcanic eruption, a deliberate demonstration orchestrated by the Surrealists (led by the poet André Breton), who tried to drown Satie's music-hall score with their cries of ‘Long live Picasso! Down with Satie!’ The reasons behind this were complex and inseparable from Satie's enthusiastic support for the Dada movement and its founder, Tristan Tzara, from 1919 onwards. After the failure of the Congrès de Paris (convened by Breton to establish a Dada constitution and himself as leader), Satie took great delight in assuming the presidency of Breton's public trial at the Closerie des Lilas restaurant on 17 February 1922. Their enmity was further intensified by Satie's participation in the ‘happening’, known as La soirée du Coeur à barbe, which Tzara mounted at the Théâtre Michel on 6 July 1923. In what might be regarded as a dress rehearsal for Mercure, the newly founded Surrealists under Breton mounted a campaign in support of Picasso, which led to Breton being expelled by the police.

Elegies for Little Beings

Eugen Ionescu (Slatina, 1912-Paris, 1995) received his early education both in France and in Romania (Curtea de Arges; Bucharest). Although known as Ionesco and associated primarily with the history of modern French literature, he has a considerable body of work in his native Romanian, of which the selection of poems which follows is only a small part. At the time of Ionescu's first coming out in print, Romania was awash in religious and patriotic sentimentalism. (See Eugen Lovinescu's Istoria literatura Romane contemporane 1900-1937, Editura Libr?riei Socec & Co., Bucuresti, 1937). Like George Bacovia earlier in the century, Ionescu chose, in the midst of generalized grandiloquence, to speak quietly, in the low, rather scared tones of the rag-and-cardboard per son at the center of his poems, the sawdust doll of trampled feelings and no esthetic pretensions. Ionescu was not alone in adopting the chaplinesque personae of the suffering Pierrot and Pierrette. Tristan Tzara, the other famous Roma nian expatriate, had explored the tones of the sickly and depressed speaker already before World War I and would assemble and publish his poems in 1934 under the unassuming title Primele poeme (The First Poems), in tender homage, one might say, just like Ionescu's Elegies For Little Beings (1931), to the tradition of Jules Laforgue, Tristan Corbi?re, and Aloysius Bertrand.