A Companion to Dada and Surrealism by Hopkins David;

Author:Hopkins, David;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2016-06-07T00:00:00+00:00

These lead to the key line, printed in upper-case letters: “ON POURRAIT COMPRENDRE.” Were this so, argues the poetic voice, then death would be, if not meaningful, then at least a more acceptable state, merely an extension of life: “la mort serait un beau long voyage.”

Arp’s and Tzara’s respective eulogies to lost friends, imagined and real, capture vividly the dizzying sense of a generation traumatized by the experience of lives wasted on a massive scale. Their words are therefore not only lucid testimonies to the first global war, but point ahead with macabre precision to the second one that both would experience only two decades later.

Critical attention continues to shed light on the contribution to Dada of its women members such as Hannah Höch, Emmy Hennings, Sophie Taeuber, and Céline Arnauld (Caws et al. 1991; Conley 1996; Barnet 1998; Colvile 1999; Hemus 2009). Arnauld’s journal Projecteur, with its unusual landscape format and its absence of illustrations, appeared in just one number in May 1920. Her poems, which appeared in other dada publications, including Dadaphone, 391 and Littérature, produce startling imagery that anticipates the surrealist uncanny. A case in point is her poem “Mes trois péchés dada,” which appeared in Cannibale in May 1920. Structured in three parts, the poem neither follows any obvious chronological order nor suggests a sequence of cause and consequence, but rather it creates subtle resonances by repeating certain images at different points; these have a cumulative effect that creates a measure of unity and circularity. Indeed, circular forms proliferate (roue cassée, tournesol, prunelle, ombrelle, yeux) and these accentuate the visual sense while also pointing towards a continuity built on the recurrence of similar forms.

As much as this is a poem about a given theme, it is, first and foremost, about language and its power to create new realities. In the line, “Les yeux des perroquets sont des billes billevesées,” the expression “billes billevesées” seems to have suggested itself independently of meaning, growing out of the phonetic affinity that seems to lend these two unrelated words an air of connectedness. In linguistic terms it is curious: “billevesées” resembles an adjective qualifying “billes,” but in fact both words are substantives. “Billevesées” is an archaic word meaning frivolous or vain talk, but etymologically it points back to a leather container used to hold liquids. In this sense, the line makes perfect sense as a description of the parrots’ eyes.

Throughout the poem language functions simultaneously as a vehicle of meaning and as a conveyer of “pure” sound, such as these lines: “Vous êtes l’amphitryon d’Amphion sans lyre / Sire se mirant sans lyre” (You are the host of Amphion without a lyre / Sire gazing at himself without a lyre). The play on names “amphitryon” / “Amphion” and the internal rhyme created with the combination “Sire / se mirant / lyre” brings phonetic effects to the fore, while also perhaps suggesting metatextually other creative processes besides making music (lyre/ lire; lyre is a homophone of lire, to read). The poem’s

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