The German Joyce by Weninger Robert K.;

Author:Weninger, Robert K.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Published: 2016-02-17T16:00:00+00:00

5

Joyce, DADA & Co.

Modernist ConInfluences

The opposite of (literary historical) genealogy—in the sense of a traceable and causal line of descent—is simultaneity, here understood as a form of non-causal co-incidentality. An often-cited example of literary historical simultaneity, illustrating, as it were, some form of common Zeitgeist, or spirit of the age, is Joyce writing his revolutionary Ulysses in Zurich during the heyday of the equally revolutionary anti-institutional art movement Dadaism, with Lenin living all the while literally just down the street, anticipating his Bolshevist version of a political revolution. This kind of Zeitgeist view is taken by Richard Ellmann in his biography of Joyce, notably in the passage I have highlighted in italics:

Although Joyce and Nora disliked the muggy Zurich climate, they could scarcely help finding Zurich interesting. It was crowded with refugees, some of them speculators in currency or goods, others political exiles, others artists. The atmosphere of literary experimentation braced Joyce for “Ulysses.” In 1915 at the Café Voltaire in the old city, the surrealist movement was fomented by Tristan Tzara, Hans Arp, and others, and this group, with which Joyce was sometimes mistakenly identified, was to move on like him to Paris after the war. There was political excitement, too. In the Café Odéon, where Joyce frequently went, Lenin was a constant customer, and on one occasion, it is said, they met. (James Joyce, 409)

Aside from the two minor infelicities, namely that no “Café Voltaire” existed in Zurich (the Café Voltaire being a Paris institution in the Fifth Arrondissement), but rather a “Cabaret Voltaire” that Hugo Ball had installed in the bar Die Meierei in Zurich’s Spiegelgasse no. 1 (just across the road from no. 14, where Lenin was tenant in 1917), and that the date for this “event” was not 1915, when Joyce moved to Zurich from Trieste, but rather 1916—early February 1916, to be precise1—the vignette is strangely telling in its want of detail. Here the biographer clearly found himself on thin ice. Not unlike the notion of “influence” in literary criticism, the biographical genre is premised by and large on rapports de fait and the biographer’s ability to factually verify and document all contacts between the person whose biography is being related and the people who surrounded him or her at any given moment in time (viz., the high frequency of such documentational footnotes in Ellmann’s biography). But we know of no material that documents either that the Dadaists were aware of Joyce’s grand undertaking, nor of Joyce remarking on the Dadaists’ even grander—at least in their estimate—undertaking. Thus no mention is made of Hugo Ball, one of the founders of the Dadaist movement, nor of his wife Emmy Hemmings, nor Marcel Janco or Richard Huelsenbeck, in Joyce’s letters or conversations during this period, or later for that matter. Nor does Joyce discuss Tristan Tzara, Dadaism’s co-founder, or Hans (Jean) Arp; both are referenced here by Ellmann largely, I suspect, because like Joyce they later moved on to Paris to join the burgeoning surrealist movement.

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