1913: The year of French modernism 9781526145031

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1913

1913 The year of French modernism Edited by Effie Rentzou and André Benhaïm

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2020 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN  978 1 5261 4502 4  hardback First published 2020 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Cover image: Sonia Delauney (1885–1979), The Prose of the Trans-siberian and or Little Jehanne of France, 1913. Gouache on parchment and stencil coloured pochoir with typography. Collection Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, The George Riabov Collection of Russian Art, acquired with the Avenir Foundation Endowment Fund. Photograph by Peter Jacobs (1998.0614.001-002) Cover design: riverdesignbooks.com

Typeset by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

Contents

List of figures Notes on contributors Acknowledgements

viii xii xvii

Introduction1 Effie Rentzou Part I: 1913, French modernism and historical time Introduction

29

  1 Prehistoric Proust André Benhaïm

33

 2 Fantômas and the shudder of history Jonathan P. Eburne

54

  3 Inventing, collecting and classifying in the margins: the work of Eugène Atget, a shift in photographic representation Guillaume Le Gall   4 The anxious centre Effie Rentzou

72 88

  5 1913, the year of the arrière-garde?109 William Marx

vi

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Part II: 1913, ‘French’ and ‘modernism’ in question

Introduction 

  6 A modernism that has not yet been: untimely Segalen Christopher Bush

123 127

  7 On situating French modernism: the strange location(s) of Le Grand Meaulnes145 David R. Ellison  8 Les Caves du Vatican and the real novel Gerald Prince   9 1913, between peace and war: Chagall’s Homage to Apollinaire and the European avant-garde Annette Becker

163

173

Part III: 1913, French modernism and intermediality

Introduction 

193

10 Camille Flammarion’s flash-forward: the cinematicization of French thought and aesthetics (1867–1913) Christophe Wall-Romana

197

11 How ‘simultaneous’ is it? Revisiting the Delaunay–Cendrars collaboration on La Prose du Transsibérien Marjorie Perloff

220

12 Mallarmé’s modernity in 1913 Virginie A. Duzer

237

13 Poetry displaced: Nijinsky, Delaunay, Duchamp Mary Shaw

252

14 Behind Picasso’s pins Lisa Florman

274

Part IV: Coda: on modernism, beyond France and 1913 15 1913, the future in the past Jean-Michel Rabaté

299



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16 The paradox and promise of the ‘new’ French Modernist Studies310 Susan Stanford Friedman Index325

Figures

Every effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce copyright material, and the publisher will be pleased to be informed of any errors and omissions for correction in future editions. 2.1 Cover of the first Fantômas novel, by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain, Paris, éditions Fayard, 1911. Cover design based on a painting by Geno Starace. Public domain. 55 2.2 Belle époque street scene. Still from Fantômas: Le Mort 57 qui tue (1913), dir. Louis Feuillade. Public domain. 2.3 The rooftops of the Palais de Justice. Still from Fantômas: Le Mort qui tue (1913), dir. Louis Feuillade. Public domain. 60 2.4 The disguises of Fantômas. Stills from opening credits to Fantômas – à l’ombre de la guillotine (1913), dir. Louis Feuillade. Public domain. 62 2.5 Still from Juve contre Fantômas, dir. Louis Feuillade. Public domain.66 3.1 Atget, Eugène, ‘Porte de Sèvres: Les fortifications, 1913; 15e arrondissement’, Bibliothèque Nationale de France. 73 3.2 Atget, Eugène, ‘Porte Dauphine: Les fossés des fortifications, 1913; 16e arrondissement’, Bibliothèque Nationale de France. 74 e 3.3 Atget, Eugène, ‘Porte de Choisy: Zoniers, 1913; 13 arrondissement’, Bibliothèque Nationale de France. 76 3.4 Atget, Eugène, ‘Porte d’Italie: Zoniers, 1912; 13e arrondissement’, Bibliothèque Nationale de France. 79



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3.5 Anonymous, Une fanfare militaire, Agence Rol, 1912, Bibliothèque Nationale de France. 80 3.6 Anonymous, Âne sur les fortifications, Agence Rol, 1913, Bibliothèque Nationale de France. 82 3.7 Atget, Eugène, Marché des Carmes, place Maubert, 1910–12, Bibliothèque Nationale de France. 85 11.1 Sonia Delaunay and Blaise Cendrars, La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France (Paris: Éditions des Hommes Nouveaux, 1913). Multicoloured inks and pochoir gouache on similar japan paper, 196.9 × 35.6 cm. The Mitchell Wolfson, Jr Collection, The Wolfsonian– Florida International University, Miami Beach, Florida. Other libraries that have copies of the book include the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. 221 11.2 Detail from Figure 11.1. Top-left panel with title page, La Prose du Transsibérien.222 11.3 Detail from Figure 11.1. Lower-left bottom panel with image of Eiffel Tower inside the wheel. 222 11.4 Detail from Figure 11.1. Upper-right panel with map of railway. 222 13.1 Vaslav Nijinsky in Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune. Photograph by Waléry, Paris, 1912. Bibliothèque Nationale de France. 255 13.2 Title page of L’Après-midi d’un faune, eclogue by Stéphane Mallarmé (with frontispiece, fleurons and cul-de-lampe by Édouard Manet), 1876. 257 13.3 La Plume, 1 April 1893, no. 95. p. 166, Xe banquet de 258 La Plume, Bibliothèque Nationale de France. 13.4 Sonia Delaunay, Deux mannequins autour de la voiture du journaliste Kaplan. Photo from 1925. All rights reserved, Fonds Delaunay, Pracusa Artisticas SA. 262 13.5 Autre éventail de Mademoiselle Mallarmé, circa 1884, Inf. 985.67.1, Collection Musée Départemental Stéphane Mallarmé, Vulaines-sur-Seine. © Yves Bourhis. 263 13.6 Marcel Duchamp, La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même (Le Grand Verre), 1915–23, Philadelphia Museum of Art. Bequest of Katherine S. Dreier, 1952–98–1. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Société des Auteurs dans les Arts Graphiques et Plastiques (ADAGP), Paris / Marcel Duchamp estate. 266

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13.7 Marcel Duchamp, Étant donnés: 1° la chute d’eau, 2° le gaz d’éclairage …, 1946–66. Accession no. 1969–41–1. Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of the Cassandra Foundation, 1969. © ARS, New York / ADAGP, Paris / Marcel Duchamp estate. 268 14.1 Pablo Picasso, Head (1913). Charcoal, pasted paper and pin, 62.7 × 47 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 275 14.2 Pablo Picasso, Landscape at Céret (1913). Chalk, charcoal, pasted papers and pins, 38 × 38.5 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © ARS, New York. 276 14.3 Pablo Picasso, Sheet Music and Guitar (1912). Pasted papers and pin, 42.5 × 48 cm. Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Bequest of Georges Salles, 1967. © ARS, New York. 277 14.4 Wineglass (1914). Pasted papers and pin, 27 × 25.5 cm. Musée de Grenoble. © ARS, New York. 278 14.5 Picasso, Still Life with Chair Caning (1912). Oil and oilcloth on canvas, 29 × 37 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © ARS, New York. 279 14.6 Georges Braque, Fruit Dish and Glass (1912). Charcoal and collaged paper, 62.9 × 45.7 cm. Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. © ARS, New York. 280 14.7 Robert Delaunay, Windows open Simultaneously, 1st Part, 3rd Motif (1912). Oil on canvas, 57 × 123 cm. Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice. © ARS, New York. 281 14.8 Henri Matisse, Harmony in Red (1908). Oil on canvas, 180 × 220 cm. Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg. 282 14.9 Pablo Picasso, Guitar and Wine Glass (1912). Collage and charcoal on board, 47.9 × 37.5 cm. Bequest of Marion Koogler McNay. McNay Art Museum, San Antonio. © ARS, New York. 283 14.10 Photograph of the Salon bourgeois, La Maison Cubiste. Salon d’Automne, 1912. Archives André Mare, Paris.284 14.11 Henri Matisse(?), fabric design for Paul Poiret / Atelier Martine (c. 1912–13). Museum of Modern Art, New York. © ARS, New York. 285



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14.12 Henri Matisse, Interior with Aubergines (1911). Distemper on canvas, 212 × 246 cm. Musée de Grenoble. © ARS, New York.286 14.13 Marcel Duchamp, Roue de bicyclette (1951; third version, after lost 1913 original). Metal wheel mounted on painted wood stool, 129.5 × 63.5 × 41.9 cm. Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection. Museum of Modern Art, New York. © ARS, New York. 290 14.14 Pablo Picasso, Guéridon with Wineglass (1913). Oil on canvas with paper and pins, 20.5 × 20.5 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © ARS, New York. 291 14.15 Picasso, Glass of Absinthe (1911). Oil on canvas, 38.4 × 46.4 cm. Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Mrs F. F. Prentiss Fund. © ARS, New York. 292

Notes on contributors

Annette Becker is Professor of History at the University of ParisNanterre and Deputy Director of the Historial de la Grande Guerre. Among her books are Les cicatrices rouges, 1914–1918, France et Belgique occupées (2010), Biographie de guerre d’Apollinaire, 1914–2009 (2009 and 2014) and Voir la Grande Guerre, un autre récit (2014). Her latest publication is Messagers du désastre, Raphaël Lemkin, Jan Karski et les génocides (2018), a history of the concept of genocide from the Armenian Genocide until today. A collection of her essays on writers and artists will appear in 2020 under the title, Rendre visibles les extrêmes de la violence: de la Grande Guerre au génocide des Tutsi du Rwanda et aux terrorismes contemporain. André Benhaïm is Associate Professor of French Literature at Princeton University. He is the author of Panim: visages de Proust (2006), and the editor of a collection of essays, The Strange M. Proust (2009). Benhaïm’s latest publications include a volume on Albert Camus and the everyday, Albert Camus au quotidien (co-edited with Aymeric Glacet, 2013), and Zoopoétique: Des Animaux en littérature de langue française (XXe–XXIe siècles) (co-edited with Anne Simon), Revue des Sciences Humaines, no. 328 (2017). His current book project is entitled Après Ulysse: Vers une poétique de l’hospitalité en Méditerranée. Christopher Bush is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University, where he is also an affiliate faculty in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures. He is co-editor of the journal Modernism/modernity and its Print Plus platform (modernismmodernity.org). Previous publications include Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media (2010); articles in such journals as



notes on contributors xiii

Comparative Literature, Comparative Literature Studies, and Representations; and a collaborative translation and critical edition of Victor Segalen’s Stèles (2007). He is currently completing The Floating World: Japoniste Aesthetics and Global Modernity for Columbia University Press and is also working on a book on the ‘global’ in the historical avant-gardes and co-editing a volume on French–Brazilian modernist connections. Virginie A. Duzer is Associate Professor of French at Pomona College, where she teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century French literature, art and culture. She is on the review committee of the journal MuseMedusa, and on the editorial board of the  Cahiers Benjamin Péret. Her first book, L’Impressionisme littéraire, was published in 2013, and focuses on dialogues and debates between text and image as between writers and painters. Her current book project, entitled Le Mobilier de la couleur, considers the relationship between colours, objects, paintings and literature at the end of the nineteenth century. Jonathan P. Eburne is Professor of Comparative Literature, English and French and Francophone Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. He is the Editor-in-Chief of ASAP/Journal, author of Outsider Theory: Intellectual Histories of Unorthodox Ideas (2018) and Surrealism and the Art of Crime (2008), and a co-editor of four additional books. Eburne has also edited or co-edited special issues of the journals Modern Fiction Studies, New Literary History, African American Review, Comparative Literature Studies and Criticism. He is the founder and acting President of ISSS (International Society for the Study of Surrealism) and an editor of the Refiguring Modernism book series at the Penn State University Press. David R. Ellison is Distinguished Professor in the Humanities Emeritus at the University of Miami. His books include: The Reading of Proust (1984), Understanding Albert Camus (1990), Of Words and the World: Referential Anxiety in Contemporary French Fiction (1993), Ethics and Aesthetics in Modernist European Literature: From the Sublime to the Uncanny (2001 and 2006), A Reader’s Guide to Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’ (2010) and Proust et la tradition littéraire européenne (2013). Ellison has published essays and articles on narrative theory, literature and psychoanalysis, Franco-German literary relations and Marcel Proust. Lisa Florman is Professor of Art History at Ohio State University. Her primary interests are in modernism, philosophical aesthetics and, especially, the intersection of the two in the early twentieth century.

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She is the author of Myth and Metamorphosis (2000), an examination of Picasso’s classicizing prints of the 1930s, and Concerning the Spiritual – and the Concrete  – in Kandinsky’s Art (2014), which explores the philosophical justifications underlying painting’s turn towards non-representation in the early twentieth century. She is currently working on two book-length projects, one on Kandinsky and Paul Klee, the other tentatively titled Cézanne’s Bathers and their Progeny. Susan Stanford Friedman is Hilldale Professor and Virginia Woolf Professor Emerita of English and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her most recent books are Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time (2015) and the volumes Contemporary Revolutions: Turning Back to the Future in 21st-Century Literature and Art (2018) and Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses (2013), co-edited with Rita Felski. Among her other significant publications are Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H.D. (1981), Penelope’s Web: Gender, Modernity, H.D.’s Fiction (1990) and Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter (1998). She is the founding co-editor of the journal Contemporary Women’s Writing (Oxford University Press), and is currently at work on a book provisionally e­ ntitled Sisters of Scheherazade: Religion, Diaspora, and Muslim Women’s Writing. Guillaume Le Gall is Maître de Conférence of Art History at Sorbonne University. He has curated many exhibitions, such as Fabbrica dell’immagine, at the Villa  Medici (Rome) in 2004, Eugène Atget, A Retrospective, Bibliothèque Nationale de France in 2007, and The Subversion of images, on surrealist photography, at the Centre Pompidou in 2009. More recently, he has worked on the relations between photography and conceptual art. His research also focuses on visual attractions in the nineteenth century. As such, he has published a book on the diorama, La Peinture mécanique: Le diorama de Daguerre (2013) and has just completed a manuscript on ­aquariums and the question of transparency in the nineteenth century. William Marx is Professor of Comparative Literature at the Collège de France in Paris. His work, which focused initially on the history of literary criticism and on modernism, Paul Valéry and T. S. Eliot, extends now to the evolution and variability of the conceptions and uses of literature since antiquity, and also to Gender Studies. His books, translated in many languages, include Naissance de la critique moderne: la littérature selon Eliot et Valéry (1889–1945) (2002), L’Adieu à la littérature: histoire d’une dévalorisation (XVIIIe–XXe siècle) (2005), Vie du lettré (2009), Le Tombeau d’Œdipe: pour une tragédie sans tragique (2012), La Haine de la littérature (2015) and Un savoir



notes on contributors xv

gai (2018). He is also the editor, among other collections of essays, of Les Arrière-gardes au XXe siècle (2004). Marjorie Perloff is Professor Emerita of English at Stanford University and Florence R. Scott Professor of English Emerita at the University of Southern California. She is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. She is the author of many books, among which are The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (1981), The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (1986), Poetic License: Studies in the Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric (1990), Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (1992), Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century (2011), Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire (2016). Gerald Prince is Professor of Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of several books, including Métaphysique et technique dans l’œuvre romanesque de Sartre (1968), A Grammar of Stories (1973), Narratology: The Form and Functioning of Narrative (1982), A Dictionary of Narratology (1987), Narrative as Theme (1992), Guide du roman de langue française: 1901–1950 (2002) and Guide du roman de langue française: 1951–2000 (2019) and many articles and reviews in the fields of (narrative) theory and modern (French) literature, and has been translated into sixteen languages. He is currently working on the theme of narrative in À la recherche du temps perdu. In 2013 he received the ISSN Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award. Jean-Michel Rabaté is Professor of English  and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, co-editor of the  Journal of Modern Literature, co-founder of Slought Foundation, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the author or editor of more than forty books on modernism, psychoanalysis, philosophy and literary theory. Recent titles include Rust (2018), Kafka L.O.L. (2018), Rire au Soleil (2019), and the collections After Derrida (2018), New Beckett (2019) and  Understanding Derrida / Understanding Modernism  (2019). Forthcoming are Beckett and Sade and Knots: Post-Lacanian Readings of Literature and Film.   Effie Rentzou is Associate Professor of French at Princeton University. She studies avant-garde and modernist literature and art, with a special interest in surrealism. Her first book, Littérature malgré elle: le surréalisme et la transformation du littéraire (2010) examines the construction of literary phenomena in the production of an anti-literary movement, surrealism.

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She recently completed her second book, titled Concepts of the World: The French Avant-garde and the Idea of the International, which explores the conceptualization of the ‘world’ in the work and activities of writers and artists within and around historical avant-garde movements during the period of 1900–1940. Mary Shaw is Professor of French at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. Along with such critical works as Performance in the Texts of Mallarmé (1993), The Spirit of Montmartre: Cabarets, Humor, and the Avant-Garde (co-edited with Phillip Dennis Cate), The Cambridge Introduction to French Poetry (2003) and Visible Writings: Forms, Cultures, Readings (co-edited with Marija Dalbello, 2011), she has edited and translated Entangled – Papers! – Notes, a bilingual volume of poetry by Claude Mouchard (2017). Poetries – Politics, a 2017 multilingual student-curated and designed exhibition of political poetry posters she developed and co-directed with artist Atif Akin will be edited by Jenevieve DeLosSantos for Rutgers University Press (2021). In 2020 she will be collaborating in various events that ­present poetry as a form of hospitality. Christophe Wall-Romana is Professor of French at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of Cinepoetry: Imaginary Cinemas in French Poetry (2012) and Jean Epstein: Film Philosophy and Corporeal Cinema (2013). He is currently at work on a book addressing the role of racial formation and astronomical ideas in the emergence of photography and cinema. He is also co-translating a book by Gilbert Simondon, Imagination and Invention (forthcoming from Univocal).

Acknowledgements

The editors would like to express their gratitude to the following Princeton University departments and programmes which have made this publication possible: the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, the Humanities Council’s David A. Gardner ‘69 Project Fund, the Office of the President, the Lewis Center for the Arts, the Center for French Studies, the Department of French and Italian, the Department of Comparative Literature, the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities and the Program in European Cultural Studies. In addition, we also wish to express our heartfelt gratitude to Lindsey Richter, Adeline Heck, and Chloé Vettier for their invaluable editorial help.

Introduction Effie Rentzou

‘

A

t last you’re tired of this elderly world’ (À la fin tu es las de ce monde ancien).1 This is the famous opening line of Guillaume Apollinaire’s ‘Zone’, the ground-breaking first poem of his 1913 collection Alcools.2 This first line, a beginning that oddly starts with an ending, is followed by another strange and lapidary statement: ‘The most modern European Pope Pius X it’s you’ (L’Européen le plus moderne c’est vous Pape Pie X).3 In a poem that many consider as a revolutionary moment in French poetics, in which innovative form and content come together to create an effervescent text that appears to fulfil Arthur Rimbaud’s demand that one become ‘absolument moderne’, Apollinaire declares that the most modern of all Europeans is none other than the Pope. Pope Pius X had indeed shown some indication of his modernity when he gave his blessing to the aviator André Beaumont in 1911, after he flew from Paris to Rome, and F. T. Marinetti had just sent Apollinaire his new, tellingly entitled novel Le Monoplan du Pape.4 Yet Pope Pius X is chiefly remembered today as a strong opponent of modernism, having instituted the ‘Oath against Modernism’ in 1910, mandatory for Catholic clergy and teachers up to 1967. Of course, the ‘modernism’ in question was the reform movement within the Catholic Church that sought to reconcile Christian dogma with modern science and philosophy, and the aforementioned Pope declared these attempted reforms heretical. Around 1913 in France, the term modernisme would have been largely understood within this religious context, together with its slightly derogative connotation, designating a text, work of art, style or activity that desperately tried to follow the latest trend, to be indeed ‘absolument moderne’ at all costs.

2

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Apollinaire was probably poking fun at the most traditionalist and vociferously anti-modernist Pope by calling him the most modern of Europeans. But this line might also show what being ‘le plus moderne’ or even ‘le plus moderniste’ – a phrase not explicitly used by Apollinaire but embedded in his portrayal of the figure of a pope deeply associated with a ­modernism – meant for Apollinaire in 1913. In a paradoxical declaration that introduces the tension between old and new which dominates the whole poem, Apollinaire seems to suggest that the most modern move in Europe at this point was to maintain a fragile equilibrium between the present – blessing the cutting-edge a­ viators – and valuing the past – c­ ondemning modernist dogmatic reforms. To be the most modern in 1913 one thus had to be simultaneously of the past and present. 1913 was a year that saw a series of declarations, implicit or explicit, about what it meant to be modern. Indeed, it was an annus mirabilis for French literature and the arts: Marcel Proust published Du côté de chez Swann; Guillaume Apollinaire, in addition to his Alcools, published the hugely influential Les Peintres cubistes; Blaise Cendrars and Sonia Delaunay produced the poem-book-painting La Prose du Transsibérien; Marcel Duchamp created his first ready-made and started his 3 Standard Stoppages along with The Box of 1914; Sergei Diaghilev’s Les Ballets Russes performed Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps; André Gide completed Les Caves du Vatican; Alain-Fournier published Le Grand Meaulnes; Louis Feuillade’s Fantômas began an illustrious career on the cinema screen that would capture the imagination of artists and writers; Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard was being prepared for its first publication as a book; and Eugène Atget put together the photographic album Les Zoniers. This storm of activity within the French context synchronized with an eruption of other significant events around the world, from the Armory Show in New York, to the publication of Marinetti’s Parole in Libertà in Florence, and from Osip Mandelstam publishing Stone in Saint Petersburg, to Fernando Pessoa beginning to write and collect what would become The Book of Disquiet in Lisbon. This was a year that accumulated so many landmarks of what would later be described as modernism, that it is impossible to ignore. 1913: The year of French modernism is a volume of essays that captures this moment of vibrant creativity in France, which also proved to be a crucial moment for modernism gaining traction throughout the world, and collectively produces a narrative of French modernism. The year 1913 is construed in the book not as a birth, nor as a beginning, but rather as the year in which French modernism both soared and congealed. There is, however, one small problem: French modernism does not exist. While French authors such as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé and



introduction 3

Proust are routinely cited as founders of and seminal to the modernist aesthetic, these and a handful of other luminous names seem to stand alone within the French cultural context, like the famous ‘Phares’ Baudelaire envisioned in his homonymous poem. They are the pillars who carry the heft of modernity, but no edifice is built to house it. Consequently, in scholarly accounts of modernism, one often has the strange impression that we jump from Charles Baudelaire to T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, or that Proust holds a French soliloquy with Virginia Woolf or James Joyce. There has yet to be a study of French modernism as a coherent phenomenon in which these and other writers and artists would find their position. Where it is mentioned, French modernism appears more like a hopscotch from one author to the next, without any sense of continuity, tension, context, antagonism, divergence or relational nodes. Modernism in France is approached by scholarship as if it were, like many of the works that comprise it, shattered into fragments of isolated authors, independently operating movements or schools and segregated genres or media, the elusive meaning of which does not offer a larger picture. This impression is also amplified by canonical art-historical narratives that have anchored modernism solidly in France, while drawing connections with developments and exchanges in other parts of Europe. There are, of course, compelling but partial accounts of the larger story, in which symbolism, for example, or various avant-garde movements, from futurism to surrealism, are developed in great and intricate detail in their historicity and their context and connections. But no narrative exists that would piece together all, or at least substantially more, actors of modernism in France, connecting Mallarmé with Proust, Apollinaire with Gide, the symbolists with Marcel Duchamp, or futurism with Paul Valéry. In other words, paradoxically and unexpectedly, French modernism does not exist as a category in scholarship. Here is the oddity then: it is the very existence of these paramount figures, along with their canonization as key authors of modernism in general, and the centrality of Paris as a real, imaginary and symbolic metropolis of modernity, that blinds us to the fact that the story of French literary modernism has not yet been told. French modernism stands symbolically as the black hole in the heart of the galaxy of global modernism: everyone acknowledges its inescapable gravitational pull, everyone knows it is there, but no one seems able to see it, much less describe it. Consider, for instance, how modernism in France is approached in two collective works on modernism as a global phenomenon. First, the monumental two-volume Modernism, edited by Ástráður Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska (2007) in which the chapter ‘French literary modernism’

4

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written by Kimberley Healey states: ‘French literary modernism per se does not exist. In fact, the term “modernism” has never really been applied to literature in France to designate a literary period, genre or movement.’5 Healey goes on to say why such a category cannot exist and does so by explaining first that traditional periodizations of modernism do not apply in the French case, and second, that the term modernism ‘does not connote the same relationship to newness or contemporaneity in a French context’.6 In a much more nuanced way, Maurice Samuels’s chapter ‘France’ from the ‘Core modernisms’ section of the 2011 Cambridge Companion to European Modernism, edited by Pericles Lewis, identifies the paradox: Paris might rightfully claim to be the capital of modernism. It was there that the first experiments in both poetry and the novel – as well as in painting, sculpture, architecture, and music – led to a rupture with the classical tradition … And yet modernism as a critical category has never played a particularly enabling role in French cultural history. Unlike in other national literatures, such as the Anglo-American tradition, modernism in France does not designate a school or a movement. Few French writers or artists labeled themselves modernists. Instead, the characteristics we associate with modernism elsewhere took on, in France, more specific or local designations: naturalism, impressionism, post-impressionism, symbolism, decadence, Dada, surrealism, the New Novel, etc.7

Samuels adds that his aim is to go ‘against the grain of traditional French cultural history’ by linking all these disparate groups under the common heading of modernism based on certain common features: formal experimentation, new subject matter inspired by modernity, self-­referentiality and a resistance to modernization.8 Interestingly, he remarks the following: These features have become so ingrained in French artistic and literary life, they so define what it means to be an artist or writer in France even today, that it might come as a surprise that such was not always the case – that they, too, have a history. Indeed, it seems likely that the reluctance of French critics to acknowledge modernism as a historical category stems from their refusal to see it as a movement with a beginning and an end, rather than as an eternal aspect of artistic and literary production.9

These two examples of France’s presence in collective works on modernism are, on the one hand, representative of the stunning void in current scholarship, that of delineating and theorizing French modernism. They also exemplify the few existing approaches to French modernism, which have adopted a logic of marginality, or even of ‘periphery’. This



introduction 5

peripheral position is de facto constructed, for instance, with arguments claiming that features supposed to define literary modernism outside of France cannot work in the French context. Such arguments seem to imply that modernism happened elsewhere – that is, not in France – missing precisely what happened in France and how it enters into the general consideration of modernism. On the other hand, what these two scholars remark as exceptional particularities of the French case – that is, the difficulties of periodization, of establishing the meaning of modernism especially in relation to innovation, modernity and modernization, and of delineating the outer limits of modernism especially in relation to contemporary creation – are in reality more general theoretical problems within modernist scholarship with which critics outside of French Studies have long grappled with and continue to face to this day. Nevertheless, these and other scholars see these issues as unique to France, creating a kind of French exception. The arguments deployed against the pertinence of modernism as a category in a French context can be roughly divided into historical and conceptual ones. Among the historical arguments, one of the most repeated claims is that modernisme or moderniste are terms that are not adequate in French, either because the artists themselves never used them or because their meaning is different in French and in English. Starting with the latter, the use of modernisme in French to designate an aesthetic movement is often seen as ‘un abus de langage’,10 a barbarism, a neologism or an import from English, since the term, in opposition to the English-language context, did not have this meaning during the period of the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century that is often designated as moderniste. A closer look, however, shows a somewhat different situation. The term modernisme was in fact in use to designate a specific modern aesthetic during this period, and not always in a pejorative way, a value that was probably established first by Joris-Karl Huysmans in his review of the Salon of 1879.11 This pejorative use is confirmed by the Trésor de la langue française, which quotes Proust in Sodome et Gomorrhe referring to Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande as an example of a ‘taste of modernism’ (goût de modernisme), thereby repeating the already determined value of modernisme/moderniste. This scornful use was to be retained until much later, as Gerald Prince points out in his chapter in this volume when he refers to André Gide’s dismissal of Jean Cocteau’s ‘desire for modernism’ (souci de modernisme). However, as with many other ‘-isms’ in circulation during the 1880s that were initially loaded with negative connotations and scorn, there were attempts in the nineteenth century to re-signify modernisme as a

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positive term. The short-lived journal La Revue moderniste: littéraire, artistique & philosophique (1884–86) might be the most telling example of this resignification process. Edited by a (now) mostly unknown group, the list of the journal’s collaborators included the names of Zola and Huysmans  –  Huysmans, moreover, contributed articles to the journal. The programmatic editorial in the first issue was entitled ‘Le modernisme’ and attempted to give a definition of the term along with the aesthetic direction of the journal. In the text, modernisme is associated first with contemporary creation that deviates completely from the past,12 and second with critical thought, specifically the philosophy of Kant, Schopenhauer and Spencer.13 Modernisme, the editors explain, is chosen over naturalisme as a more inclusive term that would not exclude works that do not entail pure observation,14 while, at the same time, it is described as an aesthetic movement that follows the principle of art for art’s sake (l’art pour l’art) and is addressed to the few, not the masses, since a ‘special education’ is needed to gain access to its intellectual scope.15 A similar, but more humorous, spirit animated Albert Aurier’s also shortlived journal, Le Moderniste illustré, published during a few months in 1889. This journal walked a fine line between satire and sincere admiration of the new art emerging from symbolist and post-symbolist circles in Paris – Aurier’s awe for the ‘magisterial canvases’ (toiles magistrales)16 of Gauguin and Van Gogh discovered in the gallery of Tanguy, which he described as ‘formidable in energy, intensity, sunshine’ (formidables de fougue, d’intensité, d’ensoleillement),17 is a good example of this reverence of the new. Modernisme as a concept was indeed circulating in French as much as in English during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – that is, a little – and, in both cultural and linguistic contexts, it had a similar pejorative and ambivalent signification.18 But despite this derogatory tint, it already harboured features we associate with modernism today: contemporaneity, a break with the past, an insistence on integrating theoretical approaches, obscurity, a polymorphous and ­non-homogeneous aesthetic. Moving forward from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, André Breton, the soon-to-be-founder of surrealism, declared in 1922 that ‘cubism, futurism and Dada are not, on the whole, three distinct ­movements … all three participate in a more general movement, the meaning and breadth of which we still do not precisely know’ (le cubisme, le futurisme et Dada ne sont pas, à tout prendre, trois mouvements ­distincts … tous trois participent d’un mouvement plus général dont nous ne connaissons encore précisément ni le sens ni l’amplitude).19 This was in a lecture given in Barcelona eloquently entitled ‘Characteristics of the



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modern evolution and its components’ (‘Caractères de l’évolution moderne et ce qui en participe’) and it was in this spirit that, during that same year, Breton, along with Georges Auric, Jean Paulhan, Roger Vitrac, Robert Delaunay, Fernand Léger and Amedée Ozenfant, tried to organize the ‘International Congress for the Determination of the Direction and the Definition of the Modern Spirit’ (Congrès international pour la détermination des directives et la définition de l’esprit moderne). The congress aimed at bringing together what we now call the historical avant-garde as well as artists and writers we have since come to associate with modernism, like Ozenfant and Paulhan. In an article published in 1922, the organizing committee stated clearly that: The signatories of this article have no intention, beyond the individual or even the group or school characteristics, of which we have the example in art of impressionism, symbolism, unanimism, fauvism, simultaneism, cubism, orphism, futurism, expressionism, purism, Dada, etc., to work to create a new intellectual family or to tighten the bonds that many will judge illusory.20

Instead, the goal was to ‘render for the first time an exact accounting of the present forces and [to] make clear the nature of their results’ (Ils suffit que … nous rendions pour la première fois un compte exact des forces en présence et puissions au besoin préciser la nature de leur résultante).21 The title of this never-realized congress is a transparent reference to Guillaume Apollinaire’s hugely influential ‘The New Spirit and the Poets’ (L’esprit nouveau et les poètes) and the substitution of ‘modern’ for ‘new’ is telling. The congress did not aim to create a ‘new intellectual family’ of a unified movement out of disparate groups, but rather to recognize that all these groups, dating back to the nineteenth century with impressionism and reaching up to the then-­contemporaneous Dada, were united by a common ‘modern’ spirit that had a certain directionality. And while the title of the congress opted for moderne over moderniste, elsewhere André Breton calls this modern spirit, ‘this will for modernism’ (cette volonté de modernisme).22 This failed congress that wanted to create connections within the fragmented ‘modern spirit’ of Europe brings up the second line of historical argument for the pertinence of the category of modernism in the French context: as Maurice Samuels points out, in France, authors did not themselves describe their groupings or creations as modernisme/moderniste, preferring a myriad of other denominations instead. Artists’ and ­ ­writers’ self-designation, however, has not stopped French criticism and ­historiography from using inclusive critical categories. A typical example

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would be that of the historical avant-garde. It is rare that the participants of what now are canonically designated as avant-garde movements  – futurism, Dadaism, surrealism and the like – used the generic term ‘avant-garde’ to talk about their endeavours, preferring to self-identify with their groups’ name instead. Nevertheless, the term ‘avant-garde’, despite its definitional ambiguities, is used in French criticism without hesitation as a descriptive and analytical category. Concomitant to this, French criticism points out that the more generic term used by artists and writers alike, from Charles Baudelaire onwards, was moderne and not moderniste. However, the same is true for the Anglo-American paradigm: ‘modern’ is how Anglophone modernist writers described their project. The vorticist ‘manifesto’ of 1914, for instance, speaks of ‘the modern movement’;23 Gertrude Stein in her 1926 lecture ‘Composition as explanation’ talks consistently about ‘the modern composition’;24 Mina Loy invokes ‘modern poetry’ in 1925;25 Virginia Woolf talks about ‘modern novels’ in a homonymous article in the Times Literary Supplement in 1919.26 This modern/modernist (pseudo)dilemma is even more salient in art history. The (heroic) narrative of ‘modern art’, or art moderne in French, has been established in French and Anglo-American academia alike as modernism, stretching usually from Manet through impressionism and post-impressionism, to cubism, the avant-garde, abstract expressionism, pop art and the neo-avant-garde. In art history, French modernism is richly fleshed out internally as such, with connections, genealogies, contrasts and antagonisms that synthesize ‘modern art’. French modernism in art exists as an analytical category and, as such, it has undergone revisions and expansions;27 at the same time, its importance within modern art in general has followed the ebb and flow of scholarship, from an absolutely central and dominant position to a relational one that, while not undercutting the significance of Paris as the creative hub for modern art, sees it in connection with the rest of the world.28 In the case of the visual arts, then, French modernism is not limited to a purely rhetorical existence and does not serve as a mere benchmark against which, say, American modernism after the 1940s, develops. French modernism is a functional category in art despite issues of periodization – does modern art start with Manet or, as T. J. Clark claimed, in 1793 with David’s Death of Marat?29 – of inclusions and exclusions – when did surrealist art become part of the modern art canon? – of conflicting styles, forms and ­orientations – Courbet coexists with Marcel Duchamp, Braque with Balthus, all as part of modern art – and despite the fact that the artists did not call themselves ‘modernists’ and were instead split in multiple groups and denominations: impressionists, fauves, cubists, orphists, Dadaists,



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s­urrealists, etc. Of course, in art, the prevailing adjective is ‘modern(e)’ and not ‘modernist(e)’, in both English and French, but can this be the reason for the ease of establishing a category in art but not in literature? In practice, ‘modernist’ and ‘modern’ are interchangeable in art history, since ‘modern(e)’ for the visual arts does not have just a temporal sense, but also harbours a deep theoretical stratification that has fluctuated from pure formalism to complex cultural considerations regarding modernity and modernization. This brief overview shows that what is presented as a French particularity and exception regarding the inadequacy of the term modernisme for describing a set of aesthetic phenomena – especially around literature in the French context – is also valid in the Anglo-American case and that, while the same particularities are true in the visual arts, establishing modernism as a category for French art does not appear to be as problematic. One obvious point here is that ‘modernism’ as a descriptive umbrella and analytical category is a post-facto term that emerged in Anglo-American academia from New Criticism and on, and, as such, it takes little account of the historical use of the word. A rather more interesting point is that French scholarship seems to be confronting issues that are very similar to those faced by scholars of modernism in general, including those working in an Anglo-American context, but French scholarship nevertheless approaches these issues as if they were completely unique and exceptional to the French case. This brings us to the conceptual arguments for the pertinence of the term modernism as a critical category for contemporary scholarship in French literature and culture, and the issue of periodization is an important part of it. Healey is not alone in arguing that French modernism does not fit in modernist timelines, which have been established based on the Anglo-American archive: if modernism occurred on or about 1910 and flourished in the 1920s, how do we account for Baudelaire, or even for the examples from the 1880s mentioned above? Leaving aside the narrowness of the perspective about what modernism’s features should be for the moment, questions about the periodization of modernism have been front and centre in scholarship from very early on. To quote Raymond Williams, one of the most insistent and recurring questions in the field is ‘when was modernism?’30 The answer to this question is ever-changing, ranging from a strict delimitation of a couple of decades during the interwar period,31 to pushing modernism’s origins back into the nineteenth century and finding a potential moment of birth in the works of Charles Baudelaire.32 The end of modernism is as problematic as its origins, ranging from an initial exclusion of periods even as early as

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the 1930s, characterized as ‘late modernism’, to an expansion of the outer limits of modernism to the 1950s and 1960s, and even to the late twentieth century. Periodization of modernism is so complex an issue that Susan Stanford Friedman in Planetary Modernisms, following Adorno’s insight that ‘modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category’,33 radically rethinks modernism as the aesthetic domain of a multiple modernity recurrent ‘for millennia and across the globe’34 and, as a result, extends modernism as a ‘planetary’ phenomenon even before 1500. These chronological revisions correlate the question of ‘when was modernism?’ with ‘where was modernism?’ Insofar as modernism and modernity are connected, a chronology that confines modernism to its Western European expressions implies that modernity is also defined by the temporality of the West. Whatever does not comply with this temporality lies outside the scope of modernity and thus of modernism. Or, in a variation of this argument, modernism was ‘invented’ first in Western Europe and its rules and norms are called to be applied in a context for which it was not initially meant – this line of thought is replicated in the chapter ‘France’ in Eysteinsson and Liska’s Modernism. This logic creates a centre/periphery model, with the ‘central’ modernism –  but which one? Where is this ‘centre’? – set as canonical, the measure for everything else. The result of this thinking has often been that ‘peripheral’ modernisms are deemed to be belated, deviant or not modernist enough when compared to the norms set by ‘central’ modernisms.35 The global turn of the ‘New Modernist Studies’36 radically changed this perspective by dramatically expanding the geographies of modernism to include works outside the limits of Western Europe. This spatial expansion inevitably changed the time of modernism, as it pushed for a revision of the temporality of modernity and modernization through the consideration of these processes outside the West and into a postcolonial world, thus making clear the ‘spatial politics of periodizing modernism’.37 Returning to the French context, we saw how the assumption that periodizations of modernism cannot apply to France leads to the conclusion that French modernism is also a deviant modernism, if it may even be qualified as modernism at all. Yet, whereas in the case of ‘peripheral’ modernisms, the implicit – or explicit – judgement is that there is a lack that precludes the specific ‘peripheral’ literary tradition from entering a prestigious world modernist canon, for French literary history the perceived non-conformity of French literature is understood as proof of a valorizing difference, of a French exception. In a way, then, French criticism adopts a ‘peripheral’ positioning within the concept of modernism, while France, and Paris in particular, have occupied a central position in



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the development of both Western modernity and modernist aesthetics, as praxis and as critical concept. Modernist scholars, most of them working overwhelmingly on the Anglo-American paradigm, explicitly but succinctly adopt the commonplace of the centrality of France and Paris in the development of modernism; scholars of French modernism recoil from the possibility of elaborating descriptively and theoretically on this allegedly central position of French, specifically literary, production, adopting instead an exceptionalist stance that excludes French literature as a whole from the network of modernism. A paradox of the eccentric centrality of French literary modernism – which, as we saw, directly clashes with the predominant narrative in the visual arts – is thus maintained, unwittingly or not, in scholarship. This unexpected cultural ‘peripheral’ positioning qualifies French literary history as different, non-categorizable and thus non-comparable to similar occurrences in other countries and contexts. Fears of homogenization, of losing French distinctiveness or of succumbing to an Anglo-American intellectual imperium can be detected behind such generalized beliefs. Whatever the motivation, we can see the blind spot of these arguments: they presuppose that modernism happened elsewhere. What they miss is obvious, namely, that modernism also happened in France and that whatever happened there needs to enter into the general consideration of modernism. But both these questions, ‘when was modernism?’ and ‘where was modernism?’, are ultimately avatars of the fundamental question of ‘what was modernism?’ As Geoff Gilbert has remarked on the conundrum of the origins of modernism, ‘that search for a solid and material starting point is doomed to failure: the only history that “modernism” has is an institutional history. This would not matter if the institutional history of “modernism” in the Anglo-American academy had arrived at an internal coherence.’38 Susan Stanford Friedman points precisely to this lack of coherence in scholarship by compiling a short anthology of various attributes of modernism, in a paratactic style that emulates Freudian ‘dream work’, which knows no contradiction and instead expresses desires that sometimes conflict: modernism is both chaos and organization, breaking illusions and creating grand narratives, radical destruction and conservative stasis.39 Repeated attempts to define, or at least describe, modernism have amounted to a cacophony of features that seem to annul each other. Ástráður Eysteinsson in The Concept of Modernism gives a useful synthetic overview of different definitional attempts of modernism: a chiefly formal approach, that of New Criticism, which insists on the formal experimentation of an ­autonomous text; a cultural approach that sees modernism as a r­ eflection of modernity and

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modernization, with Marshall Berman’s All That Is Solid Melts into Air being paradigmatic in this respect; and an approach that does not see in modernism ‘an aesthetic complement of social modernity, but rather … a vehicle of crisis within the “progress” of modernization’.40 This last perspective draws, as Marjorie Perloff has pointed out, from Theodor Adorno’s description of modernism as negative mimesis: ‘The true Modernist artwork, Adorno posits, refuses to engage in direct reflection of social surface; it does not “want to duplicate the façade of reality”, but “makes an uncompromising reprint of reality while at the same time avoiding being contaminated by it”.’41 Maurice Samuels’s important insight is that modernist principles, which include this negative mimesis as critique of modernity and modernization, are now so engrained in French cultural life that it is ­impossible to see them as historical phenomena with a beginning and an end: French writers and critics have remained so invested in certain modernist assumptions about art, especially the belief in art’s oppositional role, that they have been slow to acknowledge not only the eclipse of Paris, but that of modernism as well. Or perhaps modernism never really faded in France. The radical French rethinking of culture that took place after 1968, which helped to define postmodernism for Anglo-American critics, was in France anything but a radical break with the past. Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and their fellow post-structuralists celebrated modernist strategies and drew largely on modernist artists and writers for their case studies. Their critique of reason and decentering of the self had much in common with the revolts of Baudelaire and Flaubert against the smug positivism of the nineteenth century.42

What one can read in Samuels’s lines here is that the close identification of ‘French’ and ‘modernism’, which morphed from primary artistic creation to later theoretical appraisals of this creation in what we summarily call ‘French Theory’, does not allow one to consider the category of modernism as such. In his introduction to Modernism and Theory, Stephen Ross points out that this co-dependence of modernism and theory is generally true: ‘Modernist writing thinks theoretically and theory writes modernistically; they are not simply interestingly coincidental phenomena, but mutually sustaining aspects of the same project’43 – a point that, as I previously mentioned, was also made in 1884 in the mission statement of La Revue moderniste. In a way, Samuels indicates that this ‘same project’ is particularly pronounced in the French case and has resulted in such a symbiosis of modernism and critical thought that modernism cannot be extricated as an autonomous object of theorization and study.



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Modernism in France is too close to home, even now in the twenty-first century, to be understood as a defined field. Resistance to the term and the concept of modernism in the French case may be explained in similar terms as the quarrels over the meaning of modernism: it reveals a repressed ambivalence about modernity and our self-conception and self-positioning therein, proving that literary history is indeed an arena of historical struggle.44 The specificity of modernism, Eysteinsson remarks, is that ‘through the concept we are “constructing” our immediate past, we are creating a paradigm that we are not even certain we have surpassed’.45 Marjorie Perloff touches upon the same idea in her characterization of modernism, however much it may ‘now have the charm of history on its side’, being ‘at the end of the twentieth century, our Primal Scene’.46 Susan Stanford Friedman, when discussing the terminological confusion around modernism in general, uses another psychoanalytical metaphor to address its largest continuity and scope: ‘The terminological quagmire of modernist studies may be the result of a transferential process in which people become caught in a repetition of the unresolved contradictions present and largely repressed in modernity itself.’47 These comments seem to describe the present ghostly existence of French modernism as such a primal scene, both as possible fantasy and as a trauma that, though inevitably and inexorably present, linger in fragments that resist verbalization and analysis, explanation and attribution of meaning. Modernism in France today is such an experience: instead of a unified period of aesthetic production, it is shattered into pieces – isolated authors, schools (symbolism, decadents, cubism, etc.), segregated genres (poetry, prose, theatre, etc.), or media (literature, painting, music, cinema, etc.). And perhaps that refusal to verbalize, explain and interpret is indeed some kind of transferential process that reproduces France’s own ambivalent self-conception within modernity in general. Identifying the silence and the void would be the first step towards creating the conceptual space needed to accommodate the richness and ambiguities of French modernism. The title of this volume, 1913: The year of French modernism, seems to imply a certainty about, or at least a preliminary answer to, the chronology, location and meaning of modernism, a certainty at odds with the nebulous landscape I have outlined. Choosing a specific year – in our case 1913 – as a representative moment, point of origin or culmination of modernism seems to brush aside questions on modernism’s chronology, periodization and synchronicity. The pairing of ‘French’ with ‘modernism’ implies an assured stance on what is ‘French’ and what is ‘modernism’ and, moreover, on the utility of such a combination in the

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contemporary scholarly landscape. In other words, the title of our volume sounds like a lapidary statement in the midst of the many open questions pullulating within the study of modernism. And, to a large extent, French scholarship’s reluctance to adopt modernism as a category is a response to these questions that have been shaping the field of Modernist Studies, new and old. What would be the point of circumscribing a clear category of French modernism if we do not even know how to define modernism altogether, what we mean by the term and how it is related to modernity, its chronology and its limits? Why import the definitional – ultimately epistemological – conundrums of the Anglo-American context into the French cultural domain, if not but as a gesture of ‘academic imperialism’? Furthermore, in what has been coined the ‘transnational’ turn of Modernist Studies, a scholarly field that is now characterized by a growing geographical and chronological expansion of the archive, as well as an expansion of methods and approaches,48 what is the point of turning to a national iteration of modernism that seems to force it back to its canonical, Western European contours, after the exhilarating global consideration of the phenomenon? Indeed, in the present scholarly landscape, 1913: The year of French modernism may seem like a retrograde move, restricting modernism instead of expanding it, bringing it back to its scholarly origins, to Axel’s Castle, to Proust and Mallarmé, turning its back on today’s global perspective and enclosing once again modernism in a bracket of time defined by Eurocentrism. What can be more canonical and self-serving to a Western understanding of modernism than creating a Paris-centric narrative? And yet, why has this canonical story not been told? However slippery the term modernism might be, it is still bon à penser (good to think with), perhaps more so than the term ‘modern’, which is more bound to temporality than the necessarily theoretically and critically inflected modernism. The explosion of scholarly work on and around modernism after the 1990s, a reaction perhaps to the formulaic challenge of postmodernism that may have revealed the complexity and  multidimensionality of modernism rather than its paucity and rigidity,49 demonstrates precisely how ‘good to think with’ the term is. In recent years, Modernist Studies has produced an impressive amount of scholarship of great significance not only for the study of a bygone era, but also for understanding modernity and the present moment. Despite its definitional problems, modernism is an operative, functional term in academia. The dismissal of the term and the concept of modernism within the context of French literature has placed this important corpus – still to be defined – on the margins of the scholarly discussion around



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­ odernism. In this way, a whole literary tradition, one of the richest m within modernism, is made invisible. Moreover, the rejection of the term and concept of modernism in French criticism has made it extremely difficult to propose any kind of comparative approach. The (correct) turn of the study of modernism towards a global perspective entails that modernism cannot be understood as a whole outside a comparative frame. The absence of French modernism as an operative category means that it cannot enter into this comparative dialogue, which goes both ways: the French archive may illuminate global aspects of modernism, and modernism as a global phenomenon may shed light on what happened in France. Finally, the absence of the category of modernism in French criticism results in an absence of a modernist canon in French literature. There are, of course, the agreed-upon aforementioned ‘Phares’: there is Proust, and there is Gide, and other names have been ‘rediscovered’ and added throughout the twentieth century, thanks to the vigour of theoretical approaches, such as Julia Kristeva’s reading of Lautréamont or Jacques Derrida’s reading of Artaud. There is also a genealogy in poetry that draws a line going from Baudelaire, through Rimbaud, Verlaine and Mallarmé, to Apollinaire; but where do these writers stand in relation to each other, or in relation to Dada and surrealism, to Larbaud or Valéry, to Césaire or Céline – or, going back into the nineteenth century, to Huysmans or even Flaubert, or, after the Second World War, to Camus, Beckett or Ionesco? And where do these literary works stand in relation to other cultural production that is indeed qualified as modernist, such as the visual arts? Since there is not really an established canon in the first place, there have not been any sustained revisions of the canon that can bring forth voices that challenge monolithic accounts of ­modernism  – where are Anna de Noailles, Colette or Gabrielle Buffet in this puzzle, to name just a few female authors that are seldom considered along the more celebrated male ones, whose inclusion could raise issues of gender and sexuality, high and low culture, modernism and the avantgarde? Where do we place René Maran’s 1921 Batouala – a novel that he started in 1913 – in relation to 1930s négritude? How does Maran change our understanding of Cendrars, Milhaud, Léger and Börlin’s ballet La Création du monde, performed in 1923 by the Ballets Suédois, and how does he participate in an articulation of modernism and postcolonial thought along with poets such as Segalen? And furthermore, how do we understand French modernism as a ‘core’ modernism when we start to consider the trans­national lives, connections and aspirations of a great number of its actors, many of whom – Apollinaire, Cendrars, Delaunay,

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Picasso, Duchamp, Nijinsky, Segalen – are present in this volume, not as an exception but actually as the norm? The resistance to adopt modernism as a framework to approach French cultural production has indeed enclosed it in an ­ossified, non-renewable isolation. 1913: The year of French modernism suggests breaking this isolation by bringing a small fraction of this French cultural production into the conceptual frame of modernism. The book revisits what is considered to be old material in unexpected ways, reads works individually in novel manners, but also relates and thus contextualizes works that have not been seriously considered in tandem as part of a common elan. What this volume suggests is that decentring modernism away from the AngloAmerican paradigm and opening it into a consideration of  the global, which has been the dominant tendency of the transnational turn in Modernist Studies, may need to start with an examination of what Anglo-American modernism considers as its origin and point of reference: French modernism. Looking carefully at the unexpectedly eccentric position that France has acquired within the critical doxa might help us rethink how ‘core’ modernism operated, and how homogenous this ‘core’ was, while reconsidering its canonicity and impact. By adopting the productively reductive lens of the year 1913, we hope to provide a clearer physiognomy of French modernism, resituate it within the broader European and global modernist projects, and thereby help to understand modernism precisely as a global phenomenon. Choosing one specific year is, as I have said, at the same time productive and reductive. On the one hand, limiting our perspective to one year gives us  ­much-needed focus in a field – modernism – and a geo-cultural ­delimitation – France  – that are vast and vague. On the other hand, centring our view around 1913 dramatically reduces the scope of the volume, not allowing us, for instance, to venture back into the nineteenth century and discuss the formative moments of modernism, or to explore extensively the periods immediately following the two world wars. In other words, the advantage and disadvantage of a single-year focus is that it permits us to bypass, at least temporarily, discussions of periodization and classification with everything that they entail, as well as the impulse to define ‘French ­modernism’ once and for all. Conscious of the limitations but also of the liberties afforded by focusing on a single year, some of the chapters included in this volume approach 1913 in its historical making, as the culmination, or at least the turning point, of processes that were put in motion long before that date. This would be, for instance, Christophe Wall-Romana’s approach, which outlines the history of ‘the cinematic’ in the nineteenth century as



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the figure of intermedial thought in French philosophy, literature and art long before the advent of cinema, with 1913, as he eloquently says, representing ‘the mouth of a glacier from which intermedial cinema rushes out like a river that had been coursing for many years in hundreds of slow and disparate rivulets’ (Chapter 10). It is also the case with William Marx’s discussion of the push and pull between the avant-garde and the rear-guard in 1913, as the tipping point of the crisis in literature brought forth by symbolism (Chapter 5); or Virginie A. Duzer’s method in her reconstruction of the mosaic that was Stéphane Mallarmé’s reception in 1913, which filtered and reworked nineteenth-century perceptions of the poet and his modernism (Chapter 12). Other contributors approach 1913 in its ‘futurity’, as an anticipation of momentous developments still to come in literature and art: for instance, Gerald Prince in his discussion of Gide’s Les Caves du Vatican as the first draft of a modernist novel that would finally materialize in 1925 with Les Faux-Monnayeurs (Chapter 8), or Mary Shaw in her theorization of Mallarmé’s poetic principles as structuring features of Marcel Duchamp’s soon-to-come work (Chapter 13). For all of the chapters, 1913 is a pivotal point around which a narrative for French modernism can be spun, reaching back – sometimes, as André Benhaïm does (Chapter 1), even into prehistory – and forward in time. This tight chronological focus allows for a thick web of cross-references that connect the chapters and offer prismatic views and new connections with each new approach applied to the same work; in other words, these cross-references create a context for French modernism. Another common thread that runs through almost all the chapters is a direct or indirect questioning of what is ‘French’ in French modernism. As mentioned above, this volume does not run counter to the global turn of Modernist Studies, but rather aligns itself with it, taking into serious consideration the fact that traditional structures for thinking about ­modernism – but also modernity – in centre/periphery terms are obsolete. However, along with the consideration of the ‘periphery’ in this model that has largely occupied Modernist Studies in the transnational turn, we propose that thinking about the ‘centre’ and its validity as such is equally important. Deconstructing long-held preconceptions of a homogeneous and autonomous centre for modernism is vital if we want to rethink modernism globally – whether we choose to place this centre in ‘the West’, in ‘Europe’ or, as I consider in my own contribution to this volume (Chapter 4), in ‘Paris’. Indeed, at the end of the volume, Susan Stanford Friedman wonders where the study of French modernism will lead us, towards a Franco-centric, indeed Paris-centric model, akin to Pascale Casanova’s influential La république mondiale des lettres (The World

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Republic of Letters), or rather towards a decentred, relational model of creolization, following Édouard Glissant’s Poétique de la relation (Poetics of Relation). The chapters in 1913: The year of French modernism revolve around a notion of relationality and often approach ‘French’ as just such a relational term. As David Ellison remarks in his chapter on Alain-Fournier, ‘these texts are French, but they gesture to an outside’ (Chapter 7), and Annette Becker reconstructs some of this ‘outside’ by tracing the networks of the avant-garde in Europe circa 1913 (Chapter 9). Christopher Bush, in his parallel discussion of French and Chinese modernizing processes pivoting around Victor Segalen, proposes that looking into the scope of French modernism – with its intense transnational existence and the wide global circulation and influence of French texts – can provide a better optic to understand modernism in global terms (Chapter 6). ‘In this sense’, Bush remarks, ‘it is a question of restoring modernism, albeit in a form that has not yet defined a scholarly field.’ Far from the rehashed universalist hegemonic move proposed in Casanova’s pitch, the chapters in this volume invite us to consider how we have been approaching ‘French’ as a closed-in hexagonal homogenizer and how we can consider what is and who is deemed to be ‘French’ differently by unearthing the vibrant heterogeneity that the lens of 1913 permits us to see, a heterogeneity that cuts across notions of transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, internationalism, the Francophonie and ‘centre and periphery’. La Prose du Transsibérien, discussed in detail by Marjorie Perloff (Chapter 11) and one of the most quoted works in the volume, was composed by a Swiss and a Russian and was published by a Franco-German publishing house: what makes it French? Relationality runs through the chapters in other respects too, and the articulation of ‘high’ and ‘low’ is one of them. The conjugation of fine arts and popular culture is deployed, for instance, in Jonathan P. Eburne’s chapter (Chapter 2) on Fantômas in its pulp fiction and popular movie iterations, or in Guillaume Le Gall’s discussion (Chapter 3) of Atget’s photography in relation to news photography of the period, or, in a different way that focuses on industrial mass production, in Lisa Florman’s approach to Picasso’s papiers épinglés through the industrial history and signification of the humble pin (Chapter 14). This consideration of visual media – cinema, photography, visual arts – is not an exception in this volume, as nine out of the fourteen chapters included here discuss visuality and textuality in tandem, highlighting their intertwining in modernist aesthetics. Rather than reinforcing disciplinary contours that have confined modernism within a literary or at least a textual enclosure, we seek to establish a continuum among literary,



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­art-historical, p ­ erformance, cinema and media studies, following, precisely, the spirit of 1913. The book thus programmatically puts literature in dialogue with the other arts, and this reflects not only the kind of dialogues and exchanges that were taking place in 1913, but also a ­methodological decision on our part. Each of the chapters that follow discusses specific works, debates or issues that materialized one way or another around 1913 and addresses broader theoretical questions pertaining to modernism, its aesthetics, politics, history, geography, limits and limitations. The aim of the volume is not to be exhaustive – this is not a history of French modernism, nor even a complete snapshot of the effervescent creativity that occurred in 1913. Indeed, in his contribution Jean-Michel Rabaté gives us a glimpse of some of the topics – fashion, for instance – or works – like The Rite of Spring – that are absent from this volume, reminding us of the corrosive pervasiveness of the esprit de l’escalier and the regrets it brings. We are conscious of all that this volume leaves out. The vibrant modernism of the expat community in Paris and a subsequent discussion of the dialectics between French and Anglo-American modernism – there is no essay on Gertrude Stein, for instance, and her seminal role in the development of cubism. The colonial reality of France is mentioned in passing – Bush, Becker – but the narrow focus of the year does not really permit expansion on the topic – yet Aimé Césaire and Albert Camus were both born in 1913. The formidable circulation of French modernist texts throughout the world and their tremendous impact on local modernisms – how and when was Apollinaire read in Brazil, in Japan or in Greece? – is not discussed either. Questions of gender and sexuality are not in focus, and despite the persistent presence of Sonia Delaunay in many essays, most of the authors and the artists studied in the book are male. Although the formative power of the Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF ) is mentioned repeatedly, there is no essay dedicated specifically to magazines and journals and their role in shaping modernism. The list of omissions could go on. The chapters in 1913: The year of French modernism offer close readings of a wide range of genres and media – prose, poetry, criticism, painting, photography, dance and cinema – in dialogue with theoretical and methodological issues that have been fertilizing the study of modernism. The contributors to the volume do not necessarily share the same perspectives on what modernism is; yet what we do share is an understanding of modernism as a retrospective, historical, scholarly category that describes aesthetic phenomena that react to modernity; what we all agree on is that the term is indeed bon à penser.

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The book is divided into three parts, each prefaced by a short introductory text, which reflect our methodological preoccupations: ‘French modernism and historical time’, ‘“French” and “modernism” in question’, and ‘French modernism and intermediality’. The first brings together chapters that interrogate representations and conceptions of time and history and ultimately French modernism’s (self-)historization. The second questions the syntagm ‘French modernism’, examining the terms separately and asking what is and what is not modernist, as well as what is French in relation to the global or the foreign. True to our interdisciplinary commitment, we opted not to segregate literature from the other arts and instead emphasize precisely the intermediality of French modernism in 1913 in the third part. Finally, we asked two distinguished scholars who have been formative to our thinking on modernism, specifically in respect to 1913, to add brief chapters at the end of the volume. Jean-Michel Rabaté’s 1913: The Cradle of modernism outlined some of the guiding principles of the present volume, including the date, and his contribution offers a few additional thoughts on the scope and influence of that seminal year (Chapter 15). Susan Stanford Friedman’s impact on Modernist Studies cannot be overstated. Her contribution poses a series of paradoxes and challenges for the ‘new’ French Modernist Studies that she sees inaugurated in this volume (Chapter 16). Our hope is that 1913: The year of French modernism will begin to weave the story of French modernism. Like Apollinaire who claimed to be ‘tired of this ancient world’ but obsessively returned to it, we go back to this ‘ancient world’ of 1913 attempting to create a ‘zone’ for it, a space for French modernism that might include ambiguities, discordant temporalities and unresolved questions. Notes   1. Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘Zone’, in Œuvres poétiques, p. 39. Apollinaire, Alcools, p. 3.  2. Although it did appear as part of the poetry collection Alcools in 1913, ‘Zone’ was first published in December 1912 in Les Soirées de Paris.  3. Apollinaire, Alcools, p. 3. Apollinaire, ‘Zone’, p. 39.  4. See Willard Bohn, Reading Apollinaire’s ‘Alcools’, pp. 192–3.  5. Kimberley Healey, ‘French literary modernism’, p. 801.  6. Ibid.   7. Maurice Samuels, ‘France’, p. 13.  8. Ibid., p. 14.  9. Ibid.



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10. Yves Vadé, ‘Présentation’, p. 12.   11. Joris-Karl Huysmans, ‘Le Salon de 1879’, 9–95. 12. ‘Le Modernisme’, 3–6. On page 4: ‘De là, malgré notre admiration pour les chefs-d’oeuvre du passé, une divergence complète entre notre esthétique et celle des anciens.’ 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid., 5. 15. Ibid., 6. ‘Par son état intellectuel, il [le modernisme] reste isolé, c’est inéluctable, de ces fugaces sensations qui exigent, pour être perçues, les raffinements et les délicatesses apportés par une éducation spéciale.’ 16. Luc le Flaneur [Albert Aurier], ‘En quête de choses d’art’, Le Moderniste illustré, 7 (18 May 1889), 55. 17. Luc le Flaneur [Albert Aurier], ‘En quête de choses d’art’, Le Moderniste illustré, 2 (13 April 1889), 14. The description of the ‘moderniste’ in the first article of the first issue deserves to be quoted in its entirety: G. Albert Aurier, ‘Boniment initial’, Le Moderniste illustré, 1 (6 April 1889), p. 2: ‘Eh bien! Pour une fois, – mais pour une fois seulement, – le moderniste, ce tout juvénil débutant, dont personne au boulevard ne sait encore même le nom, le moderniste, ce paradoxal élégant, que nous vous présentons, ce preste Pierrot, hilare, splénétique, fumiste, macabre, logiquement incohérent, dont le frac azur et les culottes lèvres-de-pucelles sont élaborés, le moderniste, cet enragé chercheur d’artisteries rares, ce passionné dilettante des joailleries néo-­ byzantines d’après-demain, ce féroce contempteur des habiles pasticheries, des académies, des écoles frigorifiques, des casques héroïques, des cnémides démodées, des moyens âgeux bric-à-brac, des moules (dans le sens qu’il vous plaira), des copies et des Coppées, des conventions, des traditions, de toutes les ambiantes banalités, ce railleur plus superfinement sceptique que Montaigne, plus précieusement détraqué que Des Esseintes, le moderniste, cet astrologue des comètes du prochain siècle, condescendra jusqu’à obéir à l’Usage, jusqu’à se placarder sur sa poitrine le manifeste que voici: ‘Candide Public, ne t’avise point de contester mon utilité. Car, je veux être, car je serai le représentant consciencieux, et incontestablement très utile, de toutes les Inutilités Vitales … les Inutilités vitales, bon public, c’est tout ce qui différencie ou qui devrait différencier ton existence de celle des singes anthropomorphes, c’est l’Art, c’est la Poésie.’ 18. For a history of the term in English, see Sean Latham and Gayle Rogers (eds), Modernism: Evolution of an Idea, pp. 17–38. 19. My translation. André Breton, ‘Caractères de l’évolution moderne et ce qui en participe’, in Œuvres complètes, vol. 1, p. 297. 20. My translation. ‘Avant le Congrès de Paris – Un manifeste des revues d’avantgarde’, Comœdia (3 January 1922), p. 2: ‘les signataires de cet article n’ont nullement l’intention, par delà les caractéristiques individuelles, voire les caractéristiques de groupements ou d’écoles dont nous avons l’exemple en art avec l’impressionnisme, le futurisme, l’expressionisme, l’unanimisme, le ­fauvisme,

22

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le simultanéisme, le cubisme, l’orphisme, le futurisme, l’expressionisme, le purisme, Dada, etc., de travailler à la création d’une nouvelle famille ­intellectuelle et de resserrer des liens que beaucoup jugeront illusoires.’ 21. Ibid. 22. André Breton, ‘Distances’, in Œuvres complètes, vol. 1, p. 287. 23. ‘Manifesto–II’, 33. 24. Gertrude Stein, ‘Composition as explanation’, pp. 495–503. 25. Mina Loy, ‘Modern poetry’, pp. 157–61. 26. Virginia Woolf, ‘Modern novels’, The Times Literary Supplement, 10 April 1919, revised as ‘Modern fiction’, in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 4, 1925–1928, pp. 157–65. 27. For instance, the modern art narrative has gone from a modern(ist) canon created on strictly formalist criteria, spearheaded by Christian Zervos and his seminal Cahiers d’art in the 1930s and lionized after the war by Clement Greenberg, to a canon revisited through the lens of post-structuralism and a political/social approach to art as in October. Modernist narratives were further consolidated by such art institutions as the Museum of Modern Art, famously emblematized by Alfred Barr’s 1936 chart. 28. Serge Guilbaut’s How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, published in 1983, was a pioneering work in this respect; see also the book series Annotating Art’s Histories, edited by Kobena Mercer at the MIT Press, of which Mercer’s 2005 Cosmopolitan Modernisms is part; among other recent books, see Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, Les Avant-gardes artistiques: une histoire transnationale, 1918–1945, which recasts the centrality of Paris for the development of the avant-garde by shifting attention to other centres inside and outside of Europe. The revision of the centrality of French modernism for global modernism was reflected in the hang of the modern collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou, ‘Modernités plurielles’ from 2013 to 2015. 29. Timothy J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea, p. 15–53. 30. Raymond Williams, ‘When was modernism?’, in Politics of Modernism, pp. 31–35. 31. See the answers provided in such influential works as Peter Faulkner’s Modernism and A Modernist Reader or, with small variations, in Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, ‘The name and nature of modernism’, in Bradbury and McFarlane (eds), Modernism: A Guide to European Literature, 1890–1930, pp. 19–55. 32. Peter Nicholls, Modernisms. 33. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 218; also Paul de Man, ‘What is modern?’, pp. 137–44. See p. 137: ‘Although it is the nature of modernity to be without precedent, the phenomenon of modernity itself is by no means unique: “modern” movements, each with a distinctive content of their own, occur again and again, and become the very articulations of history.’ 34. Susan Stanford Friedman, Planetary Modernisms, p. 4.



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35. For an overview and a critic of this perspective, see Warwick Research Collective (WReC), Combined and Uneven Development. 36. Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, ‘New modernist studies’, 737–48. 37. Susan Stanford Friedman, ‘Periodizing modernism’, 425. 38. Geoff Gilbert, Before Modernism Was, p. xiii. 39. Susan Stanford Friedman, ‘Definitional excursions’, 495–7 and Planetary Modernisms, pp. 19–45. 40. Ástráður Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism, p. 26. 41. Marjorie Perloff, ‘The aura of modernism’, 3. 42. Samuels, ‘France’, p. 30. 43. Stephen Ross, ‘Introduction: The missing link’, p. 2. 44. Ástráður Eysteinsson, Concept of Modernism, p. 61. 45. Ibid., p. 52. 46. Marjorie Perloff, ‘Modernist studies’, p. 175. 47. Friedman, ‘Definitional excursions’, 499. 48. Mao and Walkowitz, ‘The new modernist studies’. 49. Ihab Hassan’s list of antithetical pairs characterizing modernism and postmodernism only shows the very narrow understanding of modernism in 1992. See Ihab Hassan, Dismemberment of Orpheus, pp. 267–8. For a very succinct overview of this reduction of modernism and the brief evangelizing of postmodernism through the lens of Harold Bloom’s logic of misprision, see Stephen Ross (ed.), Modernism and Theory, pp. 8–10; see also Jean-Michel Rabaté, ‘Introduction’, in J.-M. Rabaté (ed.), Handbook of Modernism Studies, p. 11: ‘This notion [postmodernism], which emerged in the 1980s, has surprisingly lost all of its purchase, in a sudden disaffection that some have found disappointing. This may be due to the new capaciousness discovered in modernism.’

Works cited Adorno, Theodor, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life (London: Verso, 2015). Apollinaire, Guillaume, Œuvres poétiques, ed. Marcel Adéma and Michel Décaudin (Paris: Nouvelle Revue Française/Gallimard, 1965). —, Alcools, trans. Donald Revell (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1995). Aurier, G. Albert, ‘Boniment initial’, Le Moderniste illustré, 1 (6 April 1889), 2. Bohn, Willard, Reading Apollinaire’s ‘Alcools’ (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2017). Bradbury, Malcolm, and James McFarlane (eds), Modernism: A Guide to European Literature, 1890–1930 (London: Penguin Books, 1976). Breton, André, Œuvres complètes, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1988). Clark, Timothy J., Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999).

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Eysteinsson, Ástráður, The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990). Faulkner, Peter, Modernism (London: Methuen, 1977). —, A Modernist Reader: Modernism in England 1910–30 (London: Batsford, 1986). Le Flaneur, Luc [Aurier, Albert], ‘En quête de choses d’art’, Le Moderniste illustré, 2 (13 April 1889), 14. —, ‘En quête de choses d’art’, Le Moderniste illustré, 7 (18 May 1889), 55. Friedman, Susan Stanford, ‘Definitional excursions: The meanings of modern/modernity/modernism’, Modernism/modernity, 8:3 (September 2001), 493–513. —, ‘Periodizing modernism: Postcolonial modernities and the space/time borders of Modernist Studies’, Modernism/modernity, 13:3 (2006), 425–43. —, Planetary Modernisms: Provocations of Modernity Across Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). Gilbert, Geoff, Before Modernism Was: Modern History and the Constituency of Writing (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Guilbaut, Serge, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). Hassan, Ihab, The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992). Healey, Kimberley, ‘French literary modernism’, in Ástráður Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska (eds), Modernism, vol. 1 (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007), pp. 801–17. Huysmans, Joris-Karl, ‘Le Salon de 1897’, in J.-K. Huysmans, L’Art moderne (Paris: P.-V. Stock, 1903), pp. 9–95. Joyeux-Prunel, Béatrice, Les Avant-gardes artistiques: une histoire transnationale, ­1918–1945 (Paris: Gallimard, 2017). Latham, Sean, and Gayle Rogers, Modernism: Evolution of an Idea (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Loy, Mina, ‘Modern poetry’, in Roger L. Conover (ed.), The Lost Lunar Baedeker (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996), pp. 157–61. ‘Manifesto-II’, BLAST, 1 (20 June 1914), 30–43. Man, Paul de, ‘What is modern?’, in Critical Writings 1953–1978, ed. Lindsay Waters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 137–44. Mao, Douglas, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, ‘The new modernist studies’, PMLA, 123:3 (2008), 737–48. ‘Le Modernisme’, La Revue moderniste: littéraire, artistique & philosophique (December 1884), 3–6. Nicholls, Peter, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (London: Macmillan, 1995). Perloff, Marjorie, ‘Modernist Studies’, in Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn (eds), Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Studies (New York: Modern Language Association, 1992), pp. 154–78. —, ‘The aura of modernism’, Modernist Cultures, 1:1 (May 2010), 1–14.



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Rabaté, Jean-Michel (ed.), A Handbook of Modernism Studies (Chichester: WileyBlackwell, 2013). Ross, Stephen (ed.), Modernism and Theory: A Critical Debate (New York: Routledge, 2009). Samuels, Maurice, ‘France’, in Pericles Lewis (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to European Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 13–32. Stein, Gertrude, ‘Composition as explanation’, in Ulla E. Dydo (ed.), A Stein Reader (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993), pp. 495–503. Vadé, Yves, ‘Présentation’, in Yves Vadé (ed.) Ce que modernité veut dire, vol. 1 (Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 1994), pp. 3–24. Warwick Research Collective (WReC), Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015). Williams, Raymond, Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists, ed. Tony Pinkney (London: Verso, 2007). Woolf, Virginia, The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4: 1925 to 1928, ed. Andrew McNeille (London: Hogarth Press, 1984).

Part I

1913, French modernism and historical time

Introduction

P

art I explores notions, perceptions and representations of time, timeliness and historicity in literature, criticism, photography and cinema. Assumptions that modernism was all about the ‘new’ as well as a radical and unrecoverable break with tradition and the past have long ceded to considerations of modernist works’ complex relation with history and historicity, time and timeliness. Modernism’s obsession with time and history is symptomatic of modernity’s acceleration and compression of time, the feeling of an ever-growing global synchronization, but also a sense of an irreparable loss of the past – a loss that Charles Baudelaire saw already in the nineteenth century and projected on the new urban bourgeois uniform, the black frock, which he interpreted as as a sign of mourning. The five chapters in this part flesh out prismatically different treatments of time and history around 1913 and question, explicitly or not, concepts that have been central to theoretical discussions of modernism: origin (Benhaïm), originality and repetition (Eburne), self-historization (Le Gall), centre/periphery and synchronicity (Rentzou), modernism and the avant-garde (Marx). André Benhaïm in ‘Prehistoric Proust’ discusses modernity’s fascination with prehistory as a cognitive and imaginary object, spurred by a series of palaeontological discoveries from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, as a way to cope with modernization by seeking an elusive point of ‘origin’. Benhaïm draws a parallel between this cultural reality circa 1913 and the ‘prehistory’ of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu – that is, the book’s ‘false starts’ with various other works and drafts before 1913 – but also similar creative processes of ‘false starts’ from other modernist writers and artists, like Valery Larbaud. Ultimately, the

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structure of the monumental Recherche, which was already put into place in 1913 with the composition of the first and the last volume completed, is seen as dominated by the new concept of ‘prehistory’, understood as a new relationship with time that escapes linear historicity and permits the coexistence of different temporalities. Similarly, Jonathan P. Eburne reflects on the modernist grappling with the linearity of historical experience in his consideration of seriality. Eburne, in his chapter ‘Fantômas and the shudder of history’, approaches the Fantômas book and film series as examples of modernism’s thinking through the problem of recording and assessing historical experience – a process parallel to Proust’s grand oeuvre also marked by a certain seriality. Pulp Fantômas is thereby put in dialogue with the work of Nietzsche, Freud and Bergson, all different modernist attempts to comprehend the special resonance of history, historical truth and time. Eburne ultimately argues that the seriality of the Fantômas novels and films strives to capture the radical otherness of historical experience in modernity, and they thus exemplify ‘the shudder of history’, that is, history and time in modernity as fundamentally unknowable in their vanishing effervescence. From the seriality of cinema to that of photographic albums, Guillaume Le Gall, in his chapter ‘Inventing, collecting and classifying in the margins: The work of Eugène Atget, a shift in photographic representation’, proposes Atget’s work as a visual representation not just of Paris but also of its historicity. Le Gall discusses two of Atget’s photographic albums in tandem, Les Fortifications de Paris and Zoniers, seeing them not only as part of Atget’s modernist photographic project, which aimed at exploring the medium’s documentary potential, but also as a project aiming at shaping history. The creation of a serial archive of a soon-to-disappear urban past, falling victim to the pressures of a rapidly changing modernity, also harbours a political dimension, as it documents the discontinuum between human life and urban environment, especially in the impoverished no-man-land’s exurban sites. Anxiety over time and history turns from a consideration of the rapidly disappearing historical experience in the previous two chapters to a consideration of synchronicity and timeliness in an ever-expanding modern world. Effie Rentzou, in ‘The anxious centre’, outlines perceptions of Paris, the cultural ‘centre’, in its own modernity and timeliness. The antagonism between British, Italian and French avant-gardes, often encoded in clear nationalist terms, culminated in a discussion of the 1913 debate around the term ‘simultaneity’, a term that became hotly contested, with bitter attacks over who invented it first. Denoting a specifically modern perception of time and synchronicity, s­ imultaneity



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seems to transcode ideological, political and economic issues on the ­representational and conceptual level, that of a perceived belatedness, and of a generalized sense of time’s unevenness. Rentzou shows that Paris, the alleged ‘centre’ of modernism, acts as anxiously as the ‘peripheries’ in measuring its own modernity, and thereby argues that a weak and uneven ‘centre’ discredits the logic of ‘centre/periphery’. This part ends with William Marx’s provocatively titled chapter ‘1913, year of the arrière-garde?’. Marx delineates cultural life in 1913 as a triangle with modernism, the avant-garde and the rear-guard as its apexes. Enclosed in this triangulation, different positions vis-à-vis literary history and tradition are at play. Marx argues that the crisis in literature and literary history brought about by symbolism, which led to a full-circle literary autonomy, allowed thereafter only two possible positions: either going backwards, to a literary moment before symbolism and romanticism, which in this case meant neoclassicism – this was the choice made by the rear-guard – or leap forward and consider literature in a radically new configuration with social praxis – which is what the avant-garde did. Marx shows that the dividing line between avant-garde and rearguard was porous, while the modernist landscape of 1913 was remarkably heterogeneous, with the newly founded La Nouvelle Revue Française an arbiter of this tug of war. This closing chapter raises issues of modernism’s place within literary history, but also interrogates modernism’s ­self-historization, as its protagonists and agents deliberately positioned themselves in relation to the past, the present and the future.

1 Prehistoric Proust André Benhaïm

I

n 1900, Paris is hosting the new World’s Fair, ‘L’Expo du Siècle’ (The Exhibition of the Century).1 The main access gate, in the shape of a monumental forty-metre-high arch designed by René Binet, towers over the Place de la Concorde with fifty-six counters letting in more than a thousand visitors per minute. With its huge cupola whose central dome rests on three arches, this enormous structure looks more like a temple than an entryway. Flanked by two minarets, it is decorated with ornate byzantine motifs and Persian ceramics. However, this exotic, multicultural dimension is far from the oddest part of the monument on top of which stands the huge female allegory of the ‘Parisian Woman’. The gate is in fact an immense cave of sorts, an open rock shelter. Binet, inspired by Jean Gaudry’s 1896 Essai de paléontologie philosophique, wanted his work to appear natural, even ancient. To be sure, each side of the central arch makes Binet’s intentions evident, albeit discretely, as they replicate dinosaur spines. In order to enter the 1900 World’s Fair and walk into the twentieth century, one must go through prehistory. But the twentieth century does not really start in 1900. It begins just before the Great War. In 1913, the century still awaits its dreadful birth. In fact, it is also a time when one looks back at the past with a new-found confidence; now, even cavemen looked modern. Be it by train or on aeroplanes, everyone rushes towards the dawn of humanity. This is how we meet the Man of Cro-Magnon: his bones are found on the construction site of the train tracks between Pau and Agen, in the south-west of France. Prehistory cannot escape the motions of the century. The poets of 1913 know it: Apollinaire imagines Christ and his predecessors as aviators in ‘Zone’ while Blaise Cendrars goes even further in his Prose du

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Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France, where the poet offers his travelling companion another kind of trip: If you want we’ll take a plane and fly over the land of the thousand lakes The nights there are outrageously long The sound of the engine will scare our prehistoric ancestors I’ll land And build a hangar out of mammoth fossils2

One (almost) does not believe any longer that the Flood divides human time into a before and an after. One does not believe any longer in the calculations of Renaissance scientists, like the archbishop James Ussher who, inspired by biblical chronology, had concluded that the World had been created in 4004 BC. This temporality as revealed by the Book did not convince everyone, and from Leonardo da Vinci to Buffon, the origins of humanity were pushed further and further, albeit with enduring uncertainty. A hundred years before the 1900 Fair, crowds gathered in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris to listen to Cuvier’s lessons on animal fossils. Thanks to the principles of comparative anatomy, Cuvier was able to reconstitute them so masterfully that he became a demiurge of sorts, and even, according to Balzac, the greatest poet of his time. A generation later, after spending years unearthing hundreds of fossils and working flints, Jacques de Crèvecœur de Boucher de Perthes became the proponent of ‘man’s antiquity’, claiming in his notorious 1860 discourse, De l’Homme antédiluvien et de ses œuvres (Of Antediluvian Man and his Work), that we once walked alongside great beasts who lived long before the Flood, but were now extinct. Despite the incredulity of many, prehistory as a concept and object of study came to be. The term préhistoire itself appeared in French in the 1870s, at a moment when archaeological sites are discovered in great numbers, like the site of Cro-Magnon where five sepultures were found in 1868, among which that of the emblematic ‘Old Man’. At the end of the nineteenth century, Man gets older and older, faster and faster – but also remains the same. At least, Cro-Magnon does, being depicted as wise and human, while poor Neanderthal, discovered ten years earlier, continues to be seen as Homo stupidus, and this will be true for a long time. In the twentieth century, while time flies and knowledge blossoms, humans keep crawling closer to animals. As Darwin’s ideas progress in leaps and bounds, the human family circle grows ever larger with monkeys and apes creeping in. Proof that they deserve this privilege comes from the island of Java where Anthropopithecus erectus was discovered in 1891 as the missing



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link. In  1900, visitors at the Paris World’s Fair, the exhibition of the century that celebrated the most ancient of times, gasped at the sight of Pithecanthropus erectus, as he would be known thereafter. Many twentieth-century authors gaze at the dawn of humankind, their number increasing as palaeontology grows richer. The 1940 discovery of the stupendous cave of Lascaux, the most emblematic example of parietal art, provides illuminating proof, as Georges Bataille puts it, that humans became human when they began painting. Man (Homo sapiens) was born an artist.3 In the text and film Les Mains négatives (1978), Marguerite Duras sees in this ancient form of art a call to humanity that lost its way, growing estranged to itself. In La Grande Beune, Pierre Michon understands prehistory as both the origin and the end of writing, the inspiration and the symbol of the extinction of the novel as we had come to know it.4 In this vein, Éric Chevillard, arguably one of France’s most modernist contemporary writers, has been the most prolific, starting with his 1994 ‘novel’ Préhistoire in which he defined prehistory as the time ‘before questions’.5 To be sure, at the turn of the century, in this period that will retrospectively be called the belle époque in contrast with the horrors of the Great War, many questions remain. What we now call modernism is in the making in the outrageous shapes cubists and others inflict on art. A few poets also boast that change has come. In prose, however, the questioning is perhaps more discreet. Of course, there is Marcel Proust who will eventually be hailed as the most modernist of French novelists, inventing new ways of writing time and subjectivity. But that image will reveal itself only much later. Proust will not become ‘Proust’, the ‘trademark’, until after the Second World War.6 Proust, the author of the beginning of the end of the novel, is a late bloomer. Time never seems to be on his side. Hence, perhaps, the circumspect yet relentless interest he took in prehistory, as a science and a new vision of humanity, but also as an inspiration for a new form of writing. À la recherche du temps perdu is a long book that took a long time to happen. Its origins are well documented, examined by countless literary historians and archaeologists, some of them geneticists. These studies show that Proust wrote between 1896 and 1900 a previous novel, Jean Santeuil, that he eventually abandoned still at a fragmentary stage, and which was not published until 1952. This largely autobiographical venture composed at the beginning of the belle époque is widely seen as the blueprint for La Recherche. One could call it its prehistory. It would take close to another decade and a few other works published or, again, discarded, before Proust fashioned his masterpiece, with the first real drafts and preparatory notes arising in 1908–9. What the manuscripts

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and letters reveal is that the narrative and its structure kept evolving for a longer time still and in unexpected ways. The book was first conceived as a diptych, with Le Temps perdu and Le Temps retrouvé (Time Lost, Time Regained) as the two parts of the novel Proust still entitled at this point Les Intermittences du cœur, and it will only become À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) in 1913, a few weeks before the publication of the first volume, Du côté de chez Swann (Swann’s Way). The beginning and the end, which were written simultaneously, drifted indeed away from each other, like continents pushed apart by the tectonic forces of thousands of new pages that will compose the five additional volumes. The world of La Recherche, which will change the world of literature, emerged slowly in between these two tectonic volumes. As it happens, in 1913 modernist experimentation erupts in a spectacular fashion with Apollinaire’s and Cendrars’ two concurring – and ostensibly rival – epic poems,7 however the birth of the French modernist novel coinciding with the tail end of the nineteenth century is more ­hesitant, if not ridden with doubt. Coincidentally, Proust’s false starts are oddly mirrored in one of the most fascinating cases of calculated subterfuge in the history of literature. Much remains to be said about the happenstance of Swann’s publication and the publication, a few weeks earlier, of Valery Larbaud’s A. O. Barnabooth. In some ways, Larbaud’s modernism seems to be much more radical than Proust’s. The coup he sought to make, despite its shortcomings, deserves more recognition. Larbaud’s bid emulated Proust’s project to ultimately create an all-encompassing work that would include prose, poetry, social and philosophical essays, self-reflection and ­autobiography – a project that Proust devised in his other failed work, Contre Sainte-Beuve, abandoned in 1908, the year he also worked adamantly on a now infamous notebook that would contain the primal formulas for La Recherche.8 The story of Larbaud’s book, a French modernist novel slowly born, like La Recherche, from a series of false starts occurring between 1908 and 1913 – still like Proust’s novel – ought to be retold, albeit succinctly. The story of the creation of Larbaud’s book is paralleled by the story of the creation of the Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF  ), the legendary journal founded to help French literature enter the modern age marked as well by a ‘false start’: its first issue was published in 1908, and it was followed by the first real issue in 1909, and eventually led to the birth in 1911 of the largest French publisher, the Éditions Gallimard.9 The story of Larbaud’s Barnabooth is one of both (self-)destruction and creation, a story of regeneration, evolution and revolution. The



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­revolution started – appropriately – on 4 July 1908, when Larbaud published two books at his own expense, each produced in fifty copies, and each with a distinct cover and title. The first of these books, intended for the press, was Poèmes par un riche amateur (Poems by a Rich Amateur). The other, released for public sale, was entitled Le Livre de M. Barnabooth: prose et vers, précédé de ‘Vie de M. Barnabooth’, de X.-M. Tournier de Zamble (Mr. Banarbooth’s Book: Prose and Verses, Preceded by ‘The Life of Mr. Barnabooth’ by X.-M. Tournier de Zamble). Both books, although different in content, actually amounted, when taken together, to one single work, the ‘rich amateur’ mentioned in the book destined to the press being none other than the Barnabooth evoked in the book released to the public. Of Valery Larbaud’s name, however, there was absolutely no sign on either covers. But it was under his name that the NRF published, on 15  July  1913, A. O. Barnabooth: Ses œuvres complètes, c’est-à-dire; un conte, ses poésies et son journal intime (A. O. Barnabooth, his Collected Works Consisting of his Tale, Poems and his Personal Diary). The subterfuge was finally revealed: Valery Larbaud was the inventor of Barnabooth. Or rather, Barnabooth was the former life, the previous state of Larbaud. This revelation, however, remained incomplete and amounted to yet another subterfuge.10 In the foreword to this 1913 edition, the ‘definitive’ version of the book, Larbaud presents himself only as the editor of Barnabooth’s ‘Complete Works’, not its author. In other words, what Larbaud signs in his own name is not his book but his self-invention. This deception that fuses fiction and reality, a ruse that at once erases the man who, in his writing, rebels against the wealth of his origins and gives rise to the artist, is not dissimilar to Marcel Proust’s own trajectory and his self-financing of the first publication of Swann’s Way. Both men risked self-ruin, privileged intellectual cosmopolitanism over blind patriotism, and operated with a palimpsestic aesthetics considering readers as virtual archaeologists in search of unsuspected vestiges.11 In 1913, with the publication of Du côté de chez Swann, the public can finally read the beginning of Proust’s novel. At first, the Proustian man – the Narrator who is not quite Marcel Proust – speaks of a time from which he remembered another, more ancient time. His first words evoke a space he has at once created, found like an archaeological site and guarded like a museum. But, by his own admission, he also finds himself a stranger in that place, or, at least, like a former stranger in this space-time in which the space is a bedroom and time an ancient night full of chaos and wild dreams.12 While sleeping, he would sometimes find that he had ‘drifted back to an earlier stage in [his] life’ (un âge à jamais révolu de [sa] vie primitive).13 He would wake up, utterly confused in the

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darkness, forced to mentally wander like an immobile nomad, looking for his room through his memories, like humans from ancient times would look for their dark shelters: But for me it was enough if, in my own bed, my sleep was so heavy as completely to relax my consciousness; for then I lost all sense of the place in which I had gone to sleep, and when I awoke in the middle of the night, not knowing where I was, I could not even be sure at first who I was; I had only the most rudimentary sense of existence, such as may lurk and flicker in the depths of an animal’s consciousness; I was more destitute than the cave-dweller.14

Thus the novel begins, with the strange powers of deep sleep – in a night that is profoundly prehistoric. Prehistoric Proust? It might sound peculiar. After all, he was not that old. Although in 1919, when he received the prestigious Prix Goncourt for A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, outrage erupted. ‘Make way for the elders!’ (Place aux vieux!), the newspaper L’Humanité railed, parodically inverting the popular expression ‘place aux jeunes!’, calling for opportunities to be given to younger generations. To be sure, the Prix Goncourt was created in 1903 in order to reward and promote young, promising authors. At forty-seven, Proust was not exactly ‘young’, and he had already published Du côté de chez Swann in 1913. Still, the Académie Goncourt recognized his novelty, but at the expense of Great War veteran Roland Dorgelès’s novel Les Croix de bois, which commemorated the sacrifice of an entire generation of young men. Proust, who did not fight in the war, held the highest respect for its soldiers and did not protest against the media campaign that aged him vertiginously. When he was said to have reached the age of fifty-six, he found it amusing to have aged nine years in five days, and did not correct the newspapers. Proust first told this fantastic story of sudden ageing to someone who could understand what getting older meant, since he bore the word ‘elder’ in his own name: J. H. Rosny, aka Rosny Aîné.15 One of the first members of the Académie Goncourt, Rosny the Elder was the only one who voted for Du côté de chez Swann when it was nominated in 1913, and in 1919 he was finally able to convince his colleagues that ‘Proust is something new’ (Proust, c’est du nouveau).16 But Rosny was also the author of Les Xipéhuz (1887), in which prehistoric men confront inorganic ‘aliens’, and his fame would reach its peak with the first full-fledged prehistoric novel, the 1911 bestseller La Guerre du feu (Quest for Fire). In other words, the father of the French modernist novel won his first official recognition thanks to the father of prehistoric fiction.



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La Guerre du feu first appeared in the monthly journal of scientific vulgarization, Je sais tout: magazine encyclopédique illustré from July to October 1909, and then as a book with Fasquelle in 1911, precisely during the period during which Proust began to conceive À la recherche du temps perdu. In 1912, Father Henri Breuil, a pioneer scholar of prehistoric cave art known as ‘the pope of prehistory’, published the first scientific study of palaeontology, Les Subdivisions du paléolithique supérieur et leur signification (The Subdivisions of the Upper Paleolithic and Their Meaning). By 1913, when the first volume of Proust’s novel appeared, cavemen ruled. Until almost the end of the nineteenth century, prehistoric men were known as exceptional hunters and outstanding artisans who had also ventured into symbolic representation. But in 1863, an extraordinary archaeological site was discovered in the south of France, with more than five hundred tools and artefacts decorated with a finesse unsuspected until then. This site, which revolutionized knowledge of prehistory and would give its name to the period of the upper palaeolithic corresponding to the apex of prehistoric art, is called La Madeleine.17 Of Proust’s iconic Madeleine everything has been said, except that it is in fact ‘Magdalenian’, in the prehistoric sense. The first real memory of La Recherche, which should be called the period, rather than the episode or the passage of la madeleine, shares at least two similarities with the Magdalenian period: from an ontological and narrative standpoint, la madeleine marks a fundamental moment in the story and chronology of the Proustian man, on which the entire novel hinges; from a climactic standpoint, it signals the end of the Ice Age, so to speak.18 Before the Madeleine, at the very beginning of À la Recherche du temps perdu, the man remembers the awesome power of unpredictable sleep that could pounce upon him without warning. He remembers that, while asleep, he would return to the world of his childhood, and would be completely disoriented once awakened, not knowing where or when he was. In the darkness, in an instant, his bedroom would expand in ‘shifting and confused gusts of memory’ (évocations tournoyantes et confuses) of all the bedrooms he had once inhabited. In order to know where and when he was, he had to go through all of his nocturnal refuges, starting with these ‘rooms in winter, where on going to bed [he] would at once bury [his] head in a nest woven out of the most diverse materials’ (Chambres d’hiver où quand on est couché, on se blottit la tête dans un nid qu’on se tresse avec les choses les plus disparates).19 First in the descriptions of the rooms of old, the winter bedroom, like the prehistoric cave with its sumptuous colours and animal silhouettes painted at the light of torches, appears as the primal bedroom. And in this bedroom, hides another one:

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1913, french modernism and historical time where, in freezing weather, [he] would enjoy the satisfaction of being shut in from the outer world … and where, the fire keeping in all night, [he] would sleep wrapped up, as it were, in a great cloak of snug and smoky air, shot with the glow of the logs intermittently breaking out again in flame, a sort of alcove without walls, a cave of warmth dug out of the heart of the room itself, a zone of heat whose boundaries were constantly shifting and altering in temperature as gusts of air traversed them to strike freshly upon [his] face, from the corners of the room or from parts near the window or far from the fireplace which had therefore remained cold.20

This bedroom, cavernous, primitive, ‘mobile’, will appear again at the other end of the book. For now, its hibernal nature announces the time of the Madeleine. The scene of the Madeleine begins thus: ‘one day in winter’ (Un jour d’hiver), the man, after having gone away who knows where or why, comes home to his mother overwhelmed by a gloomy day and the perspective of a sad tomorrow, and is also very cold. Like the prehistoric men described by Rosny Aîné and contemporary scientists, the Narrator appears as a mere survivor in a hostile environment, one who will not live long and therefore will have to age faster. To warm him up, his mother makes tea and merely forces him to eat one of those plump pastries known as ‘Petites Madeleines’. The rest of the anecdote is famous like an archetype. Tasting the pastry dipped in tea he feels elated, immortal, all of his childhood in Combray emerging within him. After the Madeleine’s taste is identified, the story transitions from ‘Combray I’, period of intermittent sleep and voluntary, incomplete memories, to ‘Combray II’, the time of full childhood remembrance. After the Madeleine, the ‘recherche’, the ‘search’ can finally begin. And indeed, the search begins with a revelation that happens like the discovery of the most extraordinary archaeological sites, by chance. ‘Combray’ defines modernism in the glorification of the role of randomness in art, while coalescing the dimensions of space, time and language. ‘Combray’, like the rest of the novel it anticipates and synthesizes, is built on and grows from reveries revolving around names. Of the name ‘Combray’ itself, whose magical fiction is so powerful that it has been attached to the real village of Illiers, not much is known. There is, of course, a real neighbouring village to Illiers called Combres, which might have to do with the word combre that designated a natural barrage on a river in Old French.21 Personally, I like to imagine that Combray is no stranger to the south-western cave of Les Combarelles, itself divided into two unequal galleries, discovered at two different moments: one, long and rich in artworks, in 1901, the other much shorter but with the same



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motifs, in 1909. Like Combray, it is also divided into two asymmetrical parts. Had Proust heard of Breuil’s research on prehistory? Did he know of the discovery of Les Combarelles? Was he aware of the paramount importance of the Madeleine’s shelter? The only certainty is that he lived at the same time as these discoveries. If the Madeleine is Magdalenian, could it mean that the Narrator is a parietal artist? At first sight, he seems to be a medieval artisan, a master glass-maker, creator of amazing stained-glass windows. This is what one could gather from the first memory told in detail in ‘Combray’, when the Narrator evokes the bedroom in which, to entertain him and assuage his anxiety, his parents placed a magic lantern that  ‘in the manner of the master-builders and glass-builders of gothic days it substituted for the opaqueness of the walls an impalpable iridescence, supernatural phenomena of many colours’ (à l’instar des premiers architectes et des maîtres verriers, substituait à l’opacité des murs d’impalpables irisations, de surnaturelles apparitions multicolores).22 While the Narrator first recalls that the magic lantern evokes the gothic art of stained-glass making, he chiefly insists on its more archaic aspect, as he remembers how the optic device projected motifs onto the room’s surfaces in the manner parietal painters would use natural wall reliefs for their own representations. Proust’s cave art is one made of colour. The ‘Combray’ bedroom illuminated by the magic lantern with its colours irradiating from the fireplace of the warm winter cave recalls the primitive room of the novel’s overture. Or earlier still, in the bedroom where the Narrator remembers he would wake up in the dead of night overwhelmed by the forces of some ancient sleep. Sometimes, he would reawaken ‘for short snatches only, just long enough to hear the regular creaking of the wainscot, or to open [his] eyes to stare at the shifting kaleidoscope of the darkness’ (Parfois, cela ne durait qu’un instant, le temps d’entendre les craquements organiques des boiseries, et d’ouvrir les yeux pour fixer le k­ aléidoscope de l’obscurité).23 That splendid darkness dwells also in the most Proustian of public spaces, the church – one that is more than a church. In Combray, the Narrator would observe the colours of the rose window as a child, which ‘quivered and rippled in a flaming and fantastic shower that steamed from the groin of the dark and stony vault down the moist walls, as though it were along the bed of some grotto glowing with sinuous stalactites’ (ondulait en une pluie flamboyante et fantastique qui dégouttait du haut de la voûte sombre et rocheuse, le long des parois humides, comme si c’était dans la nef de quelque grotte irisée de sinueuses stalactites).24 Church and cave are only one step apart. Combray anticipates Lascaux,

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its nave and its apse, Lascaux which Breuil called ‘the Sistine Chapel of prehistory’.25 Lascaux, however, is not canonically gothic. Its beauty stems from its unfinished character, its art sometimes apparently improvised, almost awkward. This awkwardness and incompleteness define the book(s) that Proust and his narrator aim to write. At the end of La Recherche, in Le Temps retrouvé, the Narrator invokes various analogies for his literary project. The final model comes as no surprise to the reader who remembers the paramount foundation that the Combray church provided in the narrative. The book is constructed like a cathedral: ‘In long books of this kind there are parts which there has been time only to sketch, parts which, because of the very amplitude of the architect’s plan, will no doubt never be completed. How many great cathedrals remain unfinished!’ (Et dans ces grands livres-là, il y a des parties qui n’ont eu le temps que d’être esquissées, et qui ne seront sans doute jamais finies, à cause de l’ampleur même du plan de l’architecte. Combien de cathédrales restent inachevées!).26 Imperfection appears as the main aesthetic mode of Proust’s modernist project. If incompletion – and its variants, laziness, procrastination, diversions, among others – constitutes its main quality, it is of course because the project also relies on and stems from a new conception of Time – at once vertical and horizontal. This new conception of time, defined by horizontal continuity and a verticality that is simultaneity, was experienced and conveyed through the very body of the author. Consider the writer’s creative posture: Proust composed La Recherche ‘horizontally’, as he lay in bed, writing ‘vertically’ on hundreds of paperoles, or makeshift scrolls made of sheets of papers glued together haphazardly, some of them two metres high. High enough to incite vertigo, in a verticality that recalls the final version of human time the Narrator has set himself to write. In the very last lines of À la recherche du temps perdu, he says he is tired and frightened to feel ‘tout ce temps si long’ through which he has lived, to which he is bound, and which is always present under him, a time so high as if he himself were, like all men, perched on living stilts (sur de vivantes échasses). This ­ultimate, precarious position will determine the writing process: If at least, time enough were allotted to me to accomplish my work, I would not fail to mark it with the seal of Time, the idea of which imposed itself upon me with so much force to-day, and I would therein describe men, if need be, as monsters occupying a place in Time … prolonged immeasurably since, simultaneously touching widely separated years and the distant periods they have lived through – between which so many days have ranged themselves – they stand like giants immersed in Time.27



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Proust’s text exposes us to problems of chronology akin to those encountered for prehistoric objects. In the vertiginous verticality of time it deploys with no apparent timeline, it is impossible to date the text with precision. In the end, what the Madeleine announced is confirmed – and that is what Raoul Ruiz showed beautifully in his film Le Temps retrouvé (1999). In the final scene of the film, the three ‘beings’ – or ‘stages’ – of the Narrator – as an old man first seen in bed browsing through photographs while reminiscing about the past, as the mature man present for most of the film, and again as a child whom we see in flashbacks – are reunited and roam peacefully over subterranean spaces, caves full of splendid ruins and eerie human faces carved into the walls. That is how far Proust takes his modernist vision of subjectivity: we are not one, at one place, at one time. Our past is still here, we walk in our own prehistory, we remain alongside the caveman, the caveman, our contemporary. These masks of stone, however, may be exceptional in the prehistoric realm. Human parietal representations are rare, and never as ‘realistic’ as those of animals. As Denis Vialou reminds us, there are no Magdalenian portraits.28 Be they zoomorphic faces, like in the cave of Niaux in the French Pyrenees, or grotesque ones, in the sense that they seem devised by the relief of the rock itself like in the cave of Altamira discovered in the north of Spain in 1868 whose sumptuous paintings were surpassed only by Lascaux, Magdalenian faces are rare, but bodies abound. Especially female bodies – like the ‘Venuses’ (of Lespugue, Brassempouy, Willendorf, etc.) – small statuettes sculpted, as the exaggerated shapes of breasts and buttocks would suggest, to celebrate maternity. Therein lies one of the least hidden secrets of Proust’s work. In Combray, the Madeleine, like the warm cavernous bedroom of the overture, proves to be mobile. Far from the original cup of tea, the Madeleine reappears underneath the church, in the crypt, on the tomb that bears a mark like a deeply fluted valve ‘like the bed of a fossil’ (une profonde valve rainurée – comme la trace d’un fossile).29 We know the origin of this mark, thanks to the Narrator who reminded us that the Petites Madeleines are pastries, ‘which look as though they have been moulded in the fluted valve of a scallop seashell’ (qui semblent avoir été moulés dans la valve rainurée d’une coquille de Saint-Jacques).30 This mark, in the end, confirms the prehistoric origins of the Madeleine – a fossil like the thousands of shells found in Magdalenian sepultures. A Magdalenian shell that can also bring Combray closer to CombeCapelle, another palaeolithic site in Dordogne where what is believed to be the oldest Homo sapiens was discovered in 1909.31 In his resting place, the Man of Combe-Capelle was adorned with seashells; like the five-year

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old boy that Denis Peyrony exhumed in the cave of La Madeleine in 1926. Combray is the site of memory that remains to be unearthed in order to show the boy and the (old) man as one. But the seashells help us also move away from the church. After all, Proust’s narrator stops short of making the cathedral a model for his book: ‘I should construct my book, I dare not say ambitiously like a cathedral, but quite simply like a dress’ (je bâtirais mon livre, je n’ose pas dire ambitieusement comme une cathédrale, mais tout simplement comme une robe).32 The ultimate analogy leaves no ambiguity. Proust’s work is feminine. His main editor, the saviour of his book really, is Françoise, the chambermaid, who helps him sort and sew the paperoles together. And Françoise’s real-life model was no different. Except she, too, was a palaeontologist of sorts. That is at least what one can read in Celeste Albaret’s testimony in her recounting of her first encounter with Proust, which instantly reminded her of a childhood experience when she wandered alone in the vast and dark galleries of a quarry in her native Lozère, and she could hear the voices of her friends slowly fade away as she walked on.33 That is what she experienced the first time she entered Proust’s bedroom lined with cork for sound insulation, the colour of which was the exact same one as the earthen honey beige of the quarry walls – a bedroom like a cave, full of fumes where Proust was barely visible in his bed. And indeed, in the uncanny chiaroscuro of Proust’s novel, only two faces remain unseen. The narrator’s and his mother’s.34 The Madeleine was never anything but maternal. The pastry is described as ‘a fluted valve of a scallop shell’ (la valve rainurée du gâteau), its barely disguised allusion to female sexual organs having been commented on at length.35 Vulvas, we should add now, are among the most common abstract signs in prehistoric art. Of the Narrator’s mother’s face, she who is at the origin of the Madeleine, at the origin of artistic creation and of a new art of memory, we know nothing except that it has a small defect under one eye; that it is beautiful; and that it is still young on the evening when the child narrator forces her to spend the night with him because he is so distressed, and that this violence imposed on his mother makes him feel like he has made her age dramatically, instantly. Of the assault of time on her face, however, we will see nothing. The face that will be devastated by time and illness is the grandmother’s. The grandmother is the one who, after having led a ‘prehistoric combat’ (combat préhistorique) against the fever ends up disfigured.36 First, when she suffers a stroke on the Champs-Élysées and finds refuge in the public restrooms, a subterranean space with hypogean (hypogéennes)



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doors, out of which she comes with a face slightly deformed, and then, as she is dying, disfiguration prevails: ‘her face, worn, diminished, terrifyingly expressive, seemed like the rude, flushed, purplish, desperate face of some wild guardian of a tomb in a primitive, almost prehistoric sculpture’ (Sa figure fruste, réduite, atrocement expressive, semblait, dans une sculpture primitive, presque préhistorique, la figure rude, violâtre, rousse, désespérée de quelque sauvage gardienne de tombeau).37 The grandmother’s ultimate visage is therefore prehistoric. And perhaps even more than prehistoric, if we are to believe what we were not supposed to read, the drafts of Sodome et Gomorrhe: ‘My grandmother’s face was written in a language that only we could understand, that was addressed to us only, in a tongue that was more than native’ (Le visage de ma grand-mère était écrit dans une langue que nous seuls comprenions, qui ne s’adressait qu’à nous, dans une langue plus que natale).38 ‘More than native …’ It is time to read again what the Narrator was telling us in the beginning. When he woke up, he felt his existence quiver ‘in the depths of an animal’ (au fond d’un animal) and ‘more deplete than a caveman’ (plus dénué que l’homme des cavernes). Ultimately, Proust always dreamt of becoming a beast again, always dreamt of the times before the native tongue, the times before cavemen – the times of the mother’s mother, the origins of the origin. For us, it is time to set out again in search of a cave, its host and a beast, a quest that we will undertake in three stages. First stage: The cave of the wolf The Narrator, as an adult, has arrived in Doncières to visit his friend Robert de Saint-Loup. In Saint-Loup’s apartment, the Narrator becomes distraught by noises, especially those coming from the bedroom, as if someone were there (although the place is deserted), noises that turn out to have been caused by the chimney fire. This bedroom inhabited by a fire sets the stage for one of the strangest scenes in La Recherche. In Saint-Loup’s bedroom, in front of the fire, Proust reveals how his imagination and aesthetics feed off a conflagration of the senses, when sight and hearing become inseparable. Just like in the bedroom of the overture where the Narrator remembered hearing ‘the regular creaking of the wainscot’ (les craquements organiques des boiseries) and opening his eyes ‘to stare at the kaleidoscope of the darkness’ (pour fixer le kaléidoscope de l’obscurité), Proust makes here noise visible. The Narrator muses on the man who would have become completely deaf, and, in an autobiographical delirium, stemming from his experience

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when he was sick with an ear infection, Proust expands on the condition of a man who would have to learn to hear with his eyes. He imagines a magical room where this newly deaf man would see the world inhabited by gesticulating, speechless beings, ‘so restful for those who have taken a dislike to the spoken tongue’ (si reposant pour ceux qui ont pris en dégoût le langage parlé): And for this stone-deaf man, since the loss of a sense adds as much beauty to the world as its acquisition, it is with ecstasy that he walks now upon an earth become almost an Eden, in which sound has not yet been ­created … Since sound was for him, before his deafness, the perceptible form which the cause of a movement assumed, objects moved soundlessly now seem to be moved without cause; deprived of the quality of sound, they show a spontaneous activity, seem to be alive. They move, halt, become alight of their own accord. Of their own accord they vanish in the air like the winged monsters of prehistory.39

Saint-Loup’s bedroom turns into the Grotte du Sourd (Deaf Man’s Cave).40 And even a more ancient one if the winged monsters refer to the pterodactyls of the Jurassic period before the apparition of humans. Proust meditates on the world before noises, the world, perhaps, before any tongue. Second stage: Facing the Giant Cat Proust contemplates prehistory until the end. Despite his exhaustion, his efforts, his shortness of breath, the incommensurable work that remains to finish his monumental book, he still takes the time to read. And on his bedside table lies Rosny Aîné’s Le Félin géant (The Giant Cat), the other Roman des âges farouches (Novels of the Wild Ages) and sequel to La Guerre du feu. As if between 1909 to 1920, from the Quest for Fire to The Giant Cat, from the time he began writing to just before his death, the composition of La Recherche had been framed and informed by prehistoric readings. Listen to him again writing to Rosny Aîné: Dear Sir and Master, After a few long weeks with a high fever, my very attentive reading of The Giant Cat has provided me with a ‘Time regained’ more interesting, to be sure, than my own. Scenes where such powerful beasts step back in front of weak men seen through a Fire they do not know …, but more than anything in this prehistory the budding friendship, the wounded beast that strikes an alliance … All of this retained my attention for a long time, and I would have liked to learn from you … what is certain, what has been demonstrated, what is scientifically known of these beasts, this race,



prehistoric proust 47 this mysterious life where at the most prodigious distance from our own already flourishes what is best in it.41

To the end, Proust wants to know prehistory, wants to retain the power of fire, and the lesson of the face-off, the corps-à-corps with the animal. Last stage: Out of the cave It is time to go to one last bedroom at the end of Le Temps retrouvé, the conclusion of La Recherche, the end of which is contemporaneous with its beginning, since Proust wrote both at the same time. In the magnificent mansion of the Guermantes, the unexpected memory of a poor little chambermaid’s bedroom, where as a child he would sometimes spend the night, provides the now mature Narrator with an aesthetic sensation infinitely superior to any fashionable soirées he ever experienced in high society, wasting his time. The only thing at all sad about this room of Eulalie’s was that at night, because the viaduct was so near, one heard the hooting of the trains. But as I knew that these were bellowings produced by machines under human control, they did not terrify me as, in a prehistoric age, I might have been terrified by the ululations of a neighbouring mammoth taking a free and uncoordinated stroll.42

The apparition of the mammoth in the last lines of La Recherche is stupefying. It could be explained by Proust’s recollection of his readings, having retained from La Guerre du feu, long before Le Félin géant, the formidable alliance between man and beast. The metaphor, this extraordinary likening of the train and the neighbouring mammoth, is nothing but uncanny. What is neighbouring here is, again, the beginning and the end of the immense work, with the nocturnal train that passed in the first lines of the novel returning at the end in the sonorous shape of a prehistoric pachyderm. But which prehistoric period is Proust talking about? Let us follow the passage of the mammoth: I had arrived then at the conclusion that in fashioning a work of art we are by no means free, that we do not choose how we shall make it but that it pre-exists us and therefore we are obliged, since it is both necessary and hidden … to discover it.43

As if it were the mammoth who, long after the Madeleine, should reveal the way of the artwork. Writing goes back to the Madeleine. Reading takes us to the mammoth. From Mama’s Madeleine to the mammoth’s call, the Narrator, as frightened as he is, must undertake his duty. This

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stroll, ‘free and uncoordinated’ (libre et désordonnée) recalls the bewildering wandering from one notebook to the next, on countless pages of drafts, before arriving to the machine of the printed text, a maladjusted machine, as extraordinary as a train that turned back into a mammoth – the book that had to be found. A vertical book with superposed and intermingled strata, defying any attempt to date it; a parietal book, where darkness illuminates colours, À la recherche du temps perdu tells the story before its own writing, like a proper pre-historic book. Like the ballad of the mammoth, its nomadic and oral writing invites us to wander and wonder from cave to cave. Elusive and unique, Proust reinvented the novel as a genre at once strange and familiar, as a cosmopolitan genre, not so much in the spatial sense as in the temporal sense: the subjectivity he redefined does not ask who or where ‘I’ is, but rather when. Unlike Cendrars, Segalen, Larbaud or Barnabooth, Proust did not travel the earth. He wrote like his man who suddenly dozed off in his magic chair, one that will subsequently make him travel in both time and space while he is truly sleep (fauteuil magique [that] le fera voyager à toute vitesse dans le temps et dans l’espace), that man who ‘has in circle round him the chains of the hours, the sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly host’ (tient en cercle autour de lui le fil des heures, l’ordre des années et des mondes), the confused man, ‘more bereft than a caveman’, infused with ‘the sense of existence as it may quiver in the depths of an animal’, Proust wrote like his mammoth roamed, out of Time, elsewhen.44 Notes  1. An earlier version of this text was originally published as ‘L’Âge de la Madeleine: La préhistoire de Proust’, in André Benhaïm and Michel Lantelme (eds.), Écrivains de la préhistoire (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2004), pp. 55–74.   2. Blaise Cendrars, Complete Poems, pp. 15–29. Cendrars and Sonia Delaunay, La Prose du Transsibérien (the original edition from 1913 contains no page numbers): ‘Si tu veux, nous irons en aéroplane et nous survolerons le pays des mille lacs, / Les nuits y sont démesurément longues / L’ancêtre préhistorique aura peur de mon moteur / J’atterrirai / Et je construirai un hangar pour mon avion avec les os fossiles de mammouth’.   3. Georges Bataille, La Peinture préhistorique. Translated by Austryn Wainhouse as Prehistoric Painting.   4. Pierre Michon, La Grande Beune. Translated by Wyatt Watson as The Origin of the World (L’Origine du monde was the title originally chosen by Michon before he cut his manuscript by more than two-thirds).



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  5. Eric Chevillard, Préhistoire. Translated by Alyson Waters as Prehistoric Times.  6. See Antoine Compagnon, ‘Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past’.    7. I am alluding of course to Apollinaire’s ‘Zone’ and Cendrars’s Prose du Transsibérien.  8. This notebook was so important to understand the genesis of La Recherche that it was published on its own as Le Cahier 1908, edited by Philippe Kolb, in 1976.  9. ‘False start’ (faux départ) is the term used by Gallimard’s official website to describe the ‘first’ 1908 issue: see www.gallimard.fr/Catalogue/ GALLIMARD/La-Nouvelle-Revue-Française (accessed 6 June 2020). On the place of the NRF in modernism, see Anna-Louise Milne, ‘La Nouvelle Revue Française in the age of modernism’. 10. This revelation was announced in the NRF, which had also published excerpts, signed by Valery Larbaud, between February and June 1913 under the title: A. O. Barnabooth: journal d’un milliardaire (A. O. Barnabooth: Diary of a Billionaire). 11. On Larbaud and Barnabooth, see Jean-Michel Rabaté’s section ‘Larbaud’s inner dialogics’ in his 1913: The Cradle of French Modernism, pp. 160–3. 12. Except where otherwise noted, Proust quotations in English are from Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, 3 vols., 1982. Citations will refer by short title to individual books and give page numbers within the volume in which the book appears. Volume I contains Swann’s Way and Within a Budding Grove; Volume II, The Guermantes Way and Cities of the Plain; Volume III, The Captive, The Fugitive and Time Regained. Quotations in French are from the Pléiade edition, 4 vols., edited by Jean-Yves Tadié, 1987–1989, and the same system applies: vol. 1, Du côté de chez Swann; vol. 2, Le Côté de Guermantes; vol. 3, Sodome et Gomorrhe; vol. 4, Le Temps retrouvé. 13. Swann’s Way, p. 4. Du côté de chez Swann, p. 4. 14. Swann’s Way, p. 5. Du côté de chez Swann, p. 5: ‘Il suffisait que, dans mon lit même, mon sommeil fût profond et détendît entièrement mon esprit; alors celui-ci lâchait le plan du lieu où je m’étais endormi, et quand je m’éveillais au milieu de la nuit, comme j’ignorais où je me trouvais, je ne savais même pas au premier instant qui j’étais; j’avais seulement dans sa simplicité première, le sentiment de l’existence comme il peut frémir au fond d’un animal; j’étais plus dénué que l’homme des cavernes.’ 15. See Proust’s letter to Rosny Aîné, around 23 December 1919, in Correspondance, vol. 18, p. 547. 16. George Painter, Proust: The Later Years, p. 296; Painter, Marcel Proust, les années de maturité, p. 369. 17. The rock shelter of La Madeleine was discovered by Édouard Lartet, founder of human palaeontology, in the Dordogne, near Tursac. He published the illustrated results of his findings with Henry Christy in Reliquiae aquitanicae between 1865 and 1875. The site was explored again in 1911 by

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Denis Peyrony who demonstrated the importance of the artefacts. The new period associated with the site was called the Magdalenian, 18,000 to 10,000 years before the common era. 18. In the history of climates, the Magdalenian corresponds to the Würm, the last glaciation of the Pleistocene. 19. Swann’s Way, p. 7. Du côté de chez Swann, p. 7. 20. Swann’s Way, p. 48. Du côté de chez Swann, p. 43: ‘Où, par un temps glacial le plaisir qu’on goûte est de se sentir séparé du dehors …, et où, le feu étant entretenu toute la nuit dans la cheminée, on dort dans un grand manteau d’air chaud et fumeux, traverse des lueurs des tisons qui se rallument, sorte d’impalpable alcôve, de chaude caverne creusée au sein de la chambre même, zone ardente et mobile en ses contours thermiques, aérée de souffles qui nous rafraîchissent la figure et viennent des angles ou éloignées du foyer, et qui se sont refroidies.’ 21. From the medieval Latin combrus. 22. Swann’s Way, p. 9. Du côté de chez Swann, p. 9. 23. Swann’s Way, p. 2. Du côté de chez Swann, p. 5. 24. Swann’s Way, p. 65. Du côté de chez Swann, p. 59. 25. Even though this nickname prevails, Breuil actually called Lascaux ‘the Sistine Chapel of the Perigord’, after the region where the cave is located, in reference to the expression used by Joseph Déchelette to describe the Spanish cave of Altamira, ‘the Sistine Chapel of the Magdalenian’. See Henri Breuil, ‘Découverte d'une remarquable grotte ornée, au domaine de Lascaux, Montignac (Dordogne)’, in Comptes rendus des séances de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 5 (1940), p. 390. 26. Time Regained, p. 1089. Le Temps retrouvé, p. 610. 27. Time Regained, p. 1113. Le Temps retrouvé, p. 625: ‘Aussi, pour accomplir mon œuvre, ne manquerais-je pas d’y décrire les hommes, cela dût-il les faire ressembler à des êtres monstrueux, comme occupant une place … prolongée sans mesure puisqu’ils touchent simultanément, comme des géants plongés dans les années à des époques vécues par eux si distantes, entre lesquelles tant de jours sont venus se placer – dans le Temps.’ 28. Denis Vialou, Prehistoric Art and Civilization, p. 63: ‘The depictions of humans in the Magdalenian caves are as varied as the portable art. Some of them have grotesque or animal features. The artists seem keen to portray animal figures – and indeed masks or strange faces – in an ambiguous way. The only human characteristics in some phantom-like outlines is that they are vertical. Faces and heads in profile are relatively common, but almost never realistic: there are no Magdalenian portraits’. Vialou, Au cœur de la préhistoire, p. 63: ‘Les représentations humaines pariétales dans les grottes magdaléniennes sont aussi polymorphes que les représentations mobilières. Une partie d’entre-elles ont des aspects grotesques, bestiaux. Une certaine ambiguïté avec les figures animales semble recherchée et trouve un redoublement dans les masques ou visages insolites. Certaines silhouettes fantomatiques n’ont



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d’humain que la verticalité. Les visages et les têtes de profil, relativement fréquents, ne sont pratiquement jamais réalistes: il n’existe pas de portraits magdaléniens!’ 29. Swann’s Way, p. 66. Du côté de chez Swann, p. 61. 30. Swann’s Way, p. 48. Du côté de chez Swann, p. 44. 31. The Man of Combe-Capelle is also known as Homo aurignacensis. The interpretations of the fossil were controversial. Its morphology was seen as an evolution of either Neanderthal or Cro-Magnon. 32. Time Regained, p. 1090. Le Temps retrouvé, p. 610. 33. See Céleste Albaret, Monsieur Proust. 34. See André Benhaïm, Panim. 35. See, for instance, Serge Doubrovsky, La Place de la Madeleine; Doubrovsky, The Place of the Madeleine. 36. The Guermantes Way, p. 310. Le Côté de Guermantes, p. 596. 37. The Guermantes Way, p. 33. Le Côté de Guermantes, p. 620. 38. Proust, Sodome et Gomorrhe, Esquisse XIII, p. 1040. 39. The Guermantes Way, p. 75. Le Côté de Guermantes, pp. 375–6: ‘Et pour ce sourd total, comme la perte d’un sens ajoute autant de beauté au monde que ne fait son acquisition, c’est avec délice qu’il se promène maintenant sur une Terre presque édénique où le son n’a pas encore été créé … Les objets remués sans bruit semblent l’être sans cause; dépouillés de toute qualité sonore, ils montrent une activité spontanée, ils semblent vivre; ils remuent, s’immobilisent, prennent feu d’eux-mêmes. D’eux-mêmes ils s’envolent comme les monstres ailés de la préhistoire.’ 40. La Grotte du Sourd is the nickname for the rock shelter of Font-de-Gaume near Les Eyzies de Tayac in Dordogne, a cave of the early Magdalenian period, discovered in 1901 by D. Peyrony, just a week after Les Combarelles. In 1910, Breuil published a repertory of its representations, some of which are contemporary and comparable to Lascaux. 41. Marcel Proust, letter to Rosny Aîné, 27 November 1920, in Correspondance, vol. 19, pp. 627–8, my translation: ‘Cher Monsieur et Maître, Après de longues semaines de 40 et 41 de fièvre, la lecture très attentive du Félin géant m’a livré un “Temps retrouvé” plus intéressant certes que le mien. Des scènes comme celle où les bêtes si puissantes reculent devant l’homme faible vu à travers un Feu qu’elles ne connaissent pas, … mais plus que tout dans cette préhistoire l’amitié naissant, la bête touchée qui fait alliance … Tout cela m’a longtemps retenu, j’aurais voulu apprendre de vous … ce qu’il y a de certain, de démontré, de scientifiquement connu, dans ces bêtes, cette race, cette vie mystérieuse où fleurit déjà à la plus prodigieuse distance de la nôtre ce qu’il y a de meilleur dans cette dernière.’ 42. Time Regained, p. 915. Le Temps retrouvé, p. 459: ‘La seule chose un peu triste dans cette chambre d’Eulalie était qu’on y entendait le soir, à cause de la proximité du viaduc, les hululements des trains. Mais comme je savais que ces beuglements émanaient de machines réglées, ils ne m’épouvantaient pas

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comme auraient pu faire, à une époque de la préhistoire, les cris poussés par un mammouth voisin dans sa promenade libre et désordonnée.’ 43. Time Regained, p. 915. Le Temps retrouvé, p. 459: ‘Ainsi, j’étais déjà arrivé à cette conclusion que nous ne sommes nullement libres devant l’œuvre d’art, que nous ne la faisons pas à notre gré, mais que préexistant à nous, nous devons, à la fois parce qu’elle est nécessaire et cachée, […] la découvrir.’ 44. Swann’s Way, p. 5; Du côté de chez Swann, p. 4.

Works cited Albaret, Céleste, Monsieur Proust (Paris: Laffont, 1973). Translated into English with same title by Barbara Bray (New York: New York Review Books Classics, 2003). Bataille, Georges, La Peinture préhistorique: Lascaux ou la naissance de l’art (Lausanne: Skira, 1955). —, Prehistoric Painting, Lascaux or the Birth of Art, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (Milan: Skira, 1955). Benhaïm, André, Panim: visages de Proust (Villeneuve-d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2006). Cendrars, Blaise, and Sonia Delaunay, La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France (Paris: Éditions des Hommes Nouveaux, 1913). —, ‘The prose of the Trans-Siberian’, in Cendrars, Complete Poems, trans. Ron Padgett (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 15–29. Chevillard, Eric, Préhistoire (Paris: Minuit, 1994). —, Prehistoric Times, trans. Alyson Waters (Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago, 2012). Compagnon, Antoine, ‘Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past’, in Pierre Nora and Lawrence D. Kritzman (eds), Arthur Goldhammer (trans.), Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, vol. 2 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), pp. 211–48. Doubrovsky, Serge, La Place de la Madeleine: ecriture et fantasme chez Proust (Paris: Mercure de France, 1974). —, The Place of the Madeleine: Writing and Phantasy in Proust, trans. Carol Mastrangelo Bové and Paul A. Bové (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986). Michon, Pierre, La Grande Beune (Paris: Verdier, 1996). —, The Origin of the World, trans. Wyatt Watson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013. Milne, Anna-Louise, ‘La Nouvelle Revue Française in the age of modernism’, The Romanic Review, 99:1–2 (January–March 2008), 3–8. Painter, George, Proust: The Later Years (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1965). —, Marcel Proust, les années de maturité (Paris: Mercure de France, 1965). Proust, Marcel, Le Cahier 1908, ed. Philipp Kolb, Cahiers Marcel Proust 8 (Paris: Gallimard, 1976). —, Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, 3 vols. (New York: Vintage, 1982).



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—, À la recherche du temps perdu, ed. Jean-Yves Tadié, 4 vols., Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1987). —, Correspondance, vol. 18, ed. Philipp Kolb (Paris: Plon, 1990). —, Correspondance, vol. 19, ed. Philipp Kolb (Paris: Plon, 1991). Vialou, Denis, Au cœur de la préhistoire, Découvertes ([Paris]: Gallimard, 1996). —, Prehistoric Art and Civilization, trans. Paul G. Bahn (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998).

2 Fantômas and the shudder of history Jonathan P. Eburne

L

ong out of copyright and free to circulate in the public domain, Gino Starace’s iconic depiction of the master-villain Fantômas (1911) has become a free-standing and even restless image of an imaginary Paris, remembered as the eminent domain for avant-garde experimentation in the decades since 1913. The image may since have come to evoke nostalgia rather than terror, yet the serial novels and films to which Starace’s illustration alludes nonetheless continue to make demands upon our sense of historicity. April 2013 marked the centenary of the Fantômas: In the Shadow of the Guillotine (Fantômas – à l’ombre de la guillotine) film serial, a series of five crime thrillers that follow the episodic cat-and-mouse drama between the death-defying villain Fantômas and his nemeses, the detective Juve and his comrade Fandor, a journalist. Directed by Louis Feuillade for the Gaumont production company, the films began appearing in April 1913 with the release of Fantômas – à l’ombre de la guillotine. The films came out even as new instalments of the novels on which they are based were still being churned out on a monthly basis. Written collaboratively in quick succession by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre beginning in 1911, roughly twenty-seven of the thirty-two Fantômas novels had been published before the release of the first Feuillade film; Allain later published five additional novels and several additional newspaper serials after Souvestre’s death in 1914.1 Rather than dwelling on this remarkable hyperproductivity – which, in the eyes of a surrealist writer such as Philippe Soupault, constituted a veritable form of automatic writing – I would like instead to begin retrospectively, from the point of view a hundred years ahead makes



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Figure 2.1  Cover of the first Fantômas novel, by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain, Paris, éditions Fayard, 1911. Cover design based on a painting by Gino Starace. Public domain.

possible. In hindsight, that is, what remains striking about the serials is less the allure of the eponymous villain alone than the persistence of the serial form. To the extent that the Fantômas novels and films provide an index of the cultural imaginary of the pre-war belle époque, with its bomb-throwing anarchists and innumerable faits divers, such documentary possibilities have as much to do with the insistent periodicity of its medium, I propose, as with the exploits of its eponymous villain or the investigative procedures of Juve and Fandor. Like the other periodical media with which the Fantômas serials are contemporary –  from daily newspapers to the grand-guignolesque entertainment serials we now watch on cable television –  the films and novels of 1913 offered a vehicle for parsing out the contemporary; they did so, moreover, with a regularity that seems limitless in its capacity for reproduction, a potentially infinite series. Correspondingly, the Fantômas fiction and film serials have

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­maintained their spectral presence in the global culture of the past hundred years, with a tenacity that rivals that of their more revolutionary peers. Fantômas, we might say, is the Fantômas of the twentieth century. Like its eponymous villain, the serials keep coming back in a virtually endless series of new disguises. The reception of the Fantômas serial over the past century occupies two distinct registers. The first and more concrete has to do with the numerous reprises and reincarnations of the Fantômas serials themselves: from Marcel Allain’s return to the series after the death of his writing partner Souvestre; to later French films of the 1930s, 1940s and 1960s; to the Mexican comic books that began appearing in the early 1960s; to the metafictional novella published by Julio Cortázar in 1975, Fantômas contra los vampiros multinacionales; to the experimental heavy metal group helmed by Mike Patton, and even to a long-rumoured but ultimately cancelled French adaptation by Christophe Gans.2 In each case, the name Fantômas denotes not only the titular villain but also the serial’s own persistence as an historical phenomenon whose effects can be witnessed periodically. Like other spectral forms, it both dramatizes and gives a name to the extent to which every reprise, every repetition, is haunted by the spectre of further haunting; yet, in particular, Fantômas also suggests how this hauntedness can be exercised as an active pursuit – that is, as a means to formalize but also invade the cultural landscape of the ever-changing present, whether experimentally or as a form of co-optation. Beyond providing a name for the insistent return of the recursive drama of real-life crime and punishment, Fantômas adaptations play out the artistic, commercial and conceptual possibilities of the serial function itself. The intermittently active noise-metal band Fantômas evokes this quality with playful self-consciousness; their 2001 album The Director’s Cut consists of iconic film scores hauntingly rearranged for voice and rock instruments. Like the thief from which it takes its name, the group invades rather than ‘covers’ or adapts film scores, its dark humour committed as much to co-optation and travesty as to stylistic differentiation. Patton’s singing voice, too, aspires to the plasticity and furtiveness of the titular villain, shifting from identifiable lyrics to mere sounds and noises as if roaming at large through the tonal landscape of the film score. In this sense, we might say that Fantômas – whether the villain or the serial – continues to be invoked for its radicalization of the serial function at work in any adaptation: Fantômas embodies, far more aggressively than either Oedipus or Harold Bloom, the anxiety of influence. But it is a prehensile anxiety, an anxiety of influence co-opted as a vehicle for e­ xperiment and reproduction alike.



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Second, and reciprocally, the artistic and critical reception of Fantômas has tended to focus on the affective, sensational particularity of the films and novels themselves: that is, this other reception history concentrates not only on their criminological subject matter, but also on their capacity for registering contemporary sensations and affects. Emerging from a belle époque Paris soon to be engulfed by war, the Fantômas series can be seen to waver between contrary documentary moods. We witness, on the one hand, a nostalgic Paris where individual acts of terrorism and theft seem almost quaint in comparison to the global wars that have since taken place. In Feuillade’s Paris, the automobile still competes with the horsedrawn cart. On the other hand, in the very same films and novels we find a retrospectively haunted Paris always pregnant with the disasters to come – disasters which, like the death of Souvestre in 1914, would in fact always take place, without ever exhausting the limitless stock of future disasters.3 Thus, even as new incarnations of the Fantômas series continue to appear today, the historical reception of the novels and films has centred on their retrospective ability to give voice to anxieties other than that of ‘influence’. Film critics Tom Gunning, Vicki Callahan, Nanette

Figure 2.2  Belle époque street scene. Still from Fantômas: Le Mort qui tue (1913), dir. Louis Feuillade. Public domain.

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Fornabai and others have examined, for instance, how Feuillade’s five Fantômas films acknowledge the new legal apparatuses of the Third Republic, particularly the use of anthropometrics and photography towards the identification of criminals and criminal ‘types’.4 In doing so, the films register not only the use and awareness of such apparatuses, but also exercises contemporary anxieties and fantasies about their inadequacy. By this logic, Fantômas – the character – becomes significant for his infinite transgression of such apparatuses and thus, through a kind of universal prosopopoeia, comes to stand for the inchoate and inhuman motive forces such apparatuses strive to measure and contain: social disorder, criminal instincts, the unconscious, the death drive, the spirit of revolution or historical causality writ large. The Fantômas stories offer, in turn, a history of modern consciousness, insofar as they archive a series of moments in the ever-retreating present of modern Paris in a way that highlights their contingency as historical moments. In accord with Walter Benjamin’s ideas about the dialectical image, admirers and critics of Fantômas have recognized the serials as offering an image of modernity itself, rather than for simply displaying evidence of its artefacts, inhabitants and obsessions.5 We might say that we thus encounter two parallel legacies of Fantômas, each attesting to something inexhaustible in a crime serial notable for, even definable by, the very predictability of its endless searches and escapes. As Vicki Callahan has argued, the historical resonance of the Fantômas serials extends as much from this predictability as a device for reproduction as from either its individual shock-effects or its genus loci.6 That is, the serial, episodic structure of the novels and films – itself an historical product of the belle époque –  establishes a metahistorical framework whose mechanical regularity overdetermines the archival function of its individual episodes: no longer simply an archive of the belle époque present, the serial incorporates anticipation and inevitability into its purview. The Fantômas serials are, by this logic, exemplary rather than exceptional. In spite of my own survey of its continual adaptation, I wish to extricate Fantômas from its reception as an artefact or documentary trace, the retrospectively constituted object of fascination for the interwar avant-garde. I propose instead to situate it among contemporary thinking about the problem of recording and assessing historical experience. Thus we might consider Fantômas less as an object for Benjaminian or surrealist analysis alone, than as a project contemporary with other ongoing efforts to comprehend the special resonance of historical truth, from the work of Nietzsche, Freud and Bergson, to the work of that



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other great serial writer of the belle époque, Marcel Proust. The corporate, nearly mechanical authorship of the Fantômas serials – in which, as I mention above, the surrealists recognized a kinship with automatic writing7 – ­corresponds to the nature of the Fantômas project itself as a formal ­apparatus through which the novels and films give involuntary expression to the radical otherness of historical experience; this is what I mean by the shudder of history. I adapt the notion of a ‘shudder’ from Theodor Adorno, who invokes it in his Aesthetic Theory as an updated version of Benjamin’s notion of ‘aura’ – that is, as a means for articulating a work of art’s capacity for self-transcendence. Like aura, the shudder refers to a ‘phenomenon of distance’ or chorismos that distinguishes an art object’s phenomenal retreat from the availability and self-presence of the commodity. For Adorno, the shudder derives from a primordial reaction of terror to the ‘overpowering wholeness and undifferentiatedness of nature’ that lies at the origin of this self-transcending quality of art.8 But this fear can only be accessed obliquely, through the material work of art. Moreover, for Adorno the shudder no longer corresponds simply to what ‘we’ fear in nature but to a fear to which we would not otherwise have access, an always prior experience of radical otherness that modernity threatens to obliterate. As Adorno writes: Because the shudder is past and yet survives, artworks objectivate it as its afterimage. For if at one time human beings in their powerlessness against nature feared the shudder as something real, the fear is no less intense, no less justified, that the shudder will dissipate. All enlightenment is accompanied by the anxiety that what set enlightenment in motion in the first place and what enlightenment ever threatens to consume may disappear: truth.9

The shudder, in other words, is the experience of a truth-effect, the disclosure of an historical truth not in its noumenal content but in its radical otherness, its unknowability. Though we might well resist certain of Adorno’s dialectical ­presumptions – such as the notion of a ‘primordial’ age upon which his formulation is based – it is significant that his idea of the shudder describes an affect proper to the work of art, rather than a subjective affect ascribable either to a spectator or reader, or to a generalized ‘structure of feeling’. In this respect, Adorno’s shudder resembles Benjamin’s ‘aura’ or Deleuze’s early notion of an ‘essence’ comprised of difference and repetition. In this context, the historical project of Fantômas – what I call the shudder of history – describes an impersonal and even involuntary

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form of historical inscription that discloses its truth-effects as a function of its unfolding structural logic. How does Fantômas approach the problem of historical experience? Film critics such as Tom Gunning, Richard Abel and David Bordwell have highlighted the documentary quality of Louis Feuillade’s mises en scène; ironically, the crime-fantasy vehicle of the villainous Fantômas offers a more sensitive lens for the cinéma vérité depiction of Parisian streets and interiors than Feuillade’s earlier ‘scenes of real life’ melodramas.10 The novels likewise feature the classic documentary conceits of the nineteenth-century roman-feuilleton: the recording – and often glossing – of criminal argot, the exploration of the city’s sewers and other subterranean passages, the keen eye for markers of class distinction, and so forth.11 In Le Mort qui tue, we watch Fandor ascend the Palais de Justice and traverse the rooftops of Paris; we witness the almost unbearable slowness of a steam-powered omnibus as it crosses the cinematic frame. The documentary nature of such cinematic and narrative effects is reflected, too, in the remarkably brief intervals between instalments; with an almost shutter-speed rapidity, the thirty-two volumes of the novel appeared

Figure 2.3  The rooftops of the Palais de Justice. Still from Fantômas: Le Mort qui tue (1913), dir. Louis Feuillade. Public domain.



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monthly between February 1911 and September 1913, and the five films appeared in quick succession from April 1913 into the following year. Yet even as this rapidity guarantees the contemporaneity of the Fantômas series – and thus perhaps its status as a ‘snapshot’ of belle époque life – it also suggests the extent to which the serial quality of the Fantômas stories governs, even overwrites, its more concentrated moments of reportage. While sustained by its documentary and criminological attention, that is, the immanent archival capacity of the Allain and Souvestre novels and Feuillade films is contingent upon a repertoire of machinations and metanarrative structures proper to its serial form: that is, a formula. Marcel Allain himself describes this formula in a 1932 reflection on the authors’ narrative repertoire: Fantômas attacks and commits an incredible crime (exposition); Juve arrives to parry him (crux). Fantômas, pursuing crime with the highest degree of audacity, [makes us wonder:] will he escape? No. Juve brings him in (new development). Is this triumph definitive? Not at all. Fantômas, at the last second, escapes (dénouement as coup de théâtre), and escapes through a trick that he has anticipated, worked out, and conspired about, and which neither Juve nor the spectator could ever guess (this is what prevents Juve from seeming totally inept). There is no way out of this.12

As Allain attests, the serial logic of this formula is inscribed within the very design of the Fantômas project –  as is the case with many of its contemporaries. The formula is intrinsic to the serial as a sequential medium; and as Allain later wrote, it was carefully managed. It would thus be a mistake, I am suggesting, to approach this seriality according to the logic of the Hollywood blockbuster or prestige television series: that is, as an original film with four sequels, or as an original novel followed by thirty-one sequels and a litany of subsequent adaptations and remakes. For one, in its construction and conception alike, Fantômas is never anything other than a serial: we know from the opening credits of the first film that the actor René Navarre will play Fantômas throughout an open-ended series of disguises. We likewise know from the very opening of the first novel the very structure of the narrative will be comprised of ‘mini-enigmas’ that follow one another sequentially and recursively. Indeed, the films and novels are themselves composite; we might consider the basic unit of this serial form to be less the novel or the four-reel film than the individual episode or set piece. Punctuated throughout by ellipses and exclamation points, the Fantômas novels betray their Grand-Guignol roots in their

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Figure 2.4  The disguises of Fantômas. Stills from opening credits to Fantômas – à l’ombre de la guillotine (1913), dir. Louis Feuillade. Public domain.

tendency towards such episodic ‘situation horror’, proceeding as an ever-­ protractible series of intrigues and machinations rather than as a definitive structure of narrative – and epistemological – closure, as tends to be the case in, say, locked-room detective novels. In the début Fantômas film, we find the cinematic equivalent of such episodic machinations in the opening scenes, which play out according to the opening and closing of a hotel’s elevator door: the camera follows the elevator up and down from lobby to guest floor, with each destination yielding a surprise occupant as the elevator door opens. The elevator, as much as the cinematic frame or the theatre, becomes the apparatus and mise en scène for sequential action. As a consequence of this restriction of the serial’s periodicity – a molecularization, we might say, of its episodic scale – the Fantômas novels and films distinguish themselves from earlier nineteenth-century city-mystery feuilletons in the relative self-containment of their episodes. They likewise distinguish themselves from the so-called classic detective story in the concomitant frequency of their successive episodes. While still rehearsing the technologies of evasion, concealment, and legibility exercised throughout such earlier fictions, Fantômas is governed as much by the relentless persistence of the series itself, as by the particularity of its revelations – It was Fantômas in disguise again! The tension and interplay between these two narrative registers – the episodic drama of interpretation and the metaepisodic pattern of seriality – constitute the formal logic shared by Allain and Souvestre’s novels and by Feuillade’s films. This tension was recognizable enough as a compositional strategy for Allain to describe it in an essay criticizing a later Fantômas film directed



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by Paul Féjos, which appeared in 1932. As Allain writes, ‘Without inspiring terror – in my opinion – the [Féjos] film nonetheless shows images that bear tragic pretentions. A killing. A re-killing. A re-re-killing. But between these dramatic images there is no interval [entr’acte]’ (Sans inspirer de terreur – selon nous –, le film montre néanmoins des images à prétentions tragiques. On tue. On retue. On reretue. Or entre ces images dramatiques il n’y a aucun entr’acte).13 By contrast, Allain’s own ideas about the serial form demanded that this interval be incorporated within the sequence of events, as part of its formal logic. ‘A spectator needs to be allowed to “sit back” between horrific or tragic images’, Allain continues, whereby ‘either the spectator, left to shudder, will start to yawn, or, what is worse, will laugh regardless or in spite of everything’ (Le spectateur, cependant, a besoin de se détendre. C’est dans ce but que tout ouvrage tragique fait par un homme de métier comporte des scènes drôles où on donne à rire … Leur absence expose à un terrible danger: ou le spectateur, lassé de frémir, se met à bâiller, ou, ce qui est plus grave, il rit quand même et en dépit de tout).14 Rather than the conceptual abstraction towards for which the filmic apparatus strives, seriality in Fantômas remains an immanent concern of its narration. The possibility for inducing a ‘shudder’ – whether as the affective response of an audience or as an autopoietic function of the serial – relies equally upon what Allain calls the ‘dreadful and realist struggle’ between Fantômas and the detective Juve as well as on the ‘intervals’ of humour and documentary that punctuate it. This formal logic pervades even the most grand-guignolesque scenes of criminal ingenuity in the films and novels. Most telling are the moments of  entrapment and escape that close each film, which become almost comic in their predictability and curiously understated acting. At the close of Feuillade’s Le Mort qui tue, for instance, Juve apprehends Fantômas, who has been disguised as a banker named Nanteuil. Tearing off a glove made from the skinned hand of an earlier victim, Juve exposes how Fantômas had been misleading forensic experts by leaving behind a dead man’s fingerprints at crime scenes. His crime spree had been attributed to the ill-fated former owner of the fingerprints, the titular ‘murderous corpse’ (mort qui tue). Yet this very act of exposure also creates the conditions for Fantômas’s escape: in brandishing the human glove before its wearer, Juve releases his grasp of the villain’s actual hand, and Fantômas escapes through a secret panel embedded in the wall behind him. ‘Once more’, the title card reads, ‘the elusive Fantômas, master of crime, was free’. The scene is at once completely preposterous and oddly compelling, enacting a sudden foreclosure of the careful procedural logic of the

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film’s police investigations. The coup de théâtre yields not only a revelation but an escape as well, opening up yet another interval in the inevitable series of further episodes. In Juve contre Fantômas (1911), the second novel in the series, we find a similar play on the locked-room mystery premise, which likewise accelerates the dialectic of entrapment and escape almost to the point of a mechanical function. In an early scene –  which did not find its way into the later film adaptation – Juve and the police attempt to locate an attempted murder suspect who remains at large inside the Lariboisière, a working hospital. The hospital setting already marks a telling shift from the traditional ‘locked room’ of generic detective stories: in contrast to the relative confinement of a bourgeois household, a hospital is, as Allain and Souvestre put it, a world in itself, a microcosm of public space whose self-containment is inversely proportional to the likelihood of sequestering its inhabitants. The scenes that unfold dramatize the competing innovations of the police, who seek to interrogate the hospital’s occupants systematically, and the suspect, who seeks to elude them. During the police search for the criminal, the narrative pauses to reflect on Juve’s methodology, in a manner that registers both the vicissitudes of hospital life and the priorities of Bertillon-era police methods: A hospital is a world unto itself. Juve was bent on examining not only the employees of the Lariboisière, but anyone, whether man or woman, nurse or student, patient or even visitor, who might have found himself in the vicinity of the hospital at the moment the crime took place. In spite of the admirable clarity of mind with which Juve, in the hope of finding the man with the wounded index finger, had immediately organized every last detail of the meticulous examination to which each detainee would submit, this examination was bound to progress no less slowly.15

A world in itself, the hospital setting raises the stakes for any systematic investigative procedure. Yet the ingenuity of Juve’s method is trumped, in the end, by the inevitably greater ingenuity of the villain’s means of escape. Based on having discovered traces of blood on the curtains in the room where the murder was attempted, Juve has determined that the suspect wounded his or her index finger in the act of shooting; the tangential nature of this evidence is, however dubious, merely a sleight of hand. For the criminal – who is, of course, Fantômas in disguise as a certain Dr Chaleck – eludes Juve not through a gap in the detective’s questionable empiricism, but on account of the limitations of his presumptions about the occupants of a hospital. The suspect eludes Juve,



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that is, by impersonating a corpse in the hospital morgue. The ingenuity of this impersonation – if we can really call it that – is highlighted in the moments of narrative tension that immediately precede Chaleck’s decision about his hiding place. Chaleck first tries to enter the surgical gallery in order to evade Juve’s team, but is barred from entering the operating theatre; he then considers infiltrating the patients before this angle, too, becomes impossible. It is thus with Chaleck’s dwindling set of options in mind that we witness Juve casting an impassive eye across the bodies laid out on slabs and under cold water taps in the refrigerated morgue. When the ensuing scene reveals a corpse ‘shivering with cold, chattering its teeth, chilled to the bone, [who] threw off the waterlogged shroud that enveloped him, and set to work shaking his legs and arms and bending at the waist’,16 it is not only with a sense of wonder at either the macabre resourcefulness of the fugitive, or the naivete of the detective, that we consider this scene. Rather, we read it also in terms of its suspended place in the series of other such episodes of concealment and escape. For it is only through another set of subterfuges that Chaleck manages to escape the hospital in turn, and only by chance that Juve realizes that he has eluded his grasp. Yet, regardless of the immanent causality, we know that at every turn Fantômas will continue to evade Juve’s impenetrable dragnet. The morgue episode is followed, moreover, by three complementary moments of entrapment and escape in which it is no longer only Fantômas, but now also Juve and Fandor, who find themselves trapped: the first of these takes place in a elevator that fills with sand, a scene that once again gestures towards the devices of the locked-room mystery story. The second moment, reprised in the Feuillade film, takes place in a fiery warehouse in Bercy, which they escape by climbing into an empty wine cask and rolling themselves into the Seine. And perhaps most iconic is a third moment, also included in the film, in which the blackclad Fantômas eludes the police – who have him totally surrounded – by ­slipping into a giant cistern. Such scenes are parallel in structure – each apparatus of entrapment is doomed, as they so often are, by an inevitable engineering flaw, as well as by the no less inevitable combination of foresight of its prey. Indeed, the presence of escape devices emerges as the modern version of a deus ex machina, a diegetical intervention exercised on behalf of the story’s very medium. Rather than suggesting that such episodes hinge primarily on the subversion of the certainty and epistemic closure to which Juve’s investment in modern forensic methods might allude, however, I maintain that it is precisely in producing a kind of meta-episodic certainty that

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Figure 2.5  Still from Juve contre Fantômas, dir. Louis Feuillade. Public domain.

their carefully measured repetitiveness takes effect. Chaleck – or virtually any mysterious personage – is bound to be Fantômas; the villain and detectives are bound to escape, and it is the virtual inevitability of such conclusions that the serial discloses as its fundamental law. It is here that the epistemic drama of the Fantômas serials exercises its exemplary mode of historicity: we know that the determining logic for any escape, any imposition or breakdown of order, lies not only in the objective details of a situation but in the ordering logic of the series itself as well. This repertory structure overwrites every scene in ways that the characters themselves acknowledge intra-diegetically. In The False Magistrate (Le Faux magistrat), the final film in Feuillade’s series, the detective Juve helps Fantômas escape from a Belgian prison, since he knows that his nemesis will inevitably escape; he plans instead to lure him back to France so he can be sentenced to death by guillotine. Yet, even as the guillotine becomes the only imaginable means of closure for Juve’s pursuit, we know it is a doomed enterprise – not only is the plan itself ludicrous, but, more importantly, Fantômas has already foiled the swift  finality of the guillotine in the very first instalment of the serial, Fantômas – à l’ombre de la guillotine. The guillotine marks the very opening



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of the serial, rather than its closure. Needless to say, the Faux magistrat ends with another escape: Fantômas’s final act before being arrested was, it turns out, to write a letter in his capacity as the (false) magistrate, demanding his own release. The synoptic logic of the Fantômas serials, in both their literary and cinematic incarnations, lies within this predicative quality. This law, this capacity for anticipation, reaches its uncanny point of hypostasis – the procedural shift from metanarrative to meta-history, we might say – at the point where we come to recognize this seriality as a material and conceptual determinant, rather than as the apparatus that reproduces and thereby compromises the documentary trace of an ever-receding present.17 However grounded in a profit-driven model of futurity the novels and films might be – whether to string along images or to string along customers – I maintain that their serial production is no less sensitive a medium for the truth-effects of historical experience. The serial apparatus is bound up in the very project that the films, like the novels, undertake. As I have been suggesting, the sense in every episode that the narrative devices of concealment and recognition, of capture and escape, are rigged, and are rigged to explode – whether in gasps of real surprise or in groans of bathos –  hardly proscribes their evacuation of meaning. On the contrary, the serial logic of Fantômas demands the continual exercise and imaginative enhancement of such episodes as reverberative elements. The films and novels rehearse their microcosmic epistemic dramas, as well as their affective dialectic of anticipation and disclosure – or foreclosure – in virtual perpetuity. It is in this sense that Fantômas can be approached as the contemporary of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. Itself a serial work published in instalments from 1913 to 1927, Proust’s novel unfolds as a series of episodes that function as an apparatus for approaching historical truth synoptically rather than either purely descriptively or abstractly. Governed by a robust formal logic of its own, Proust’s serial outlived Proust himself by five years. In his 1964 book on Proust, Gilles Deleuze articulates the procedural logic of Proust’s serial fiction in language that mirrors the continual employment and subversion of anthropometry in Fantômas. ‘A literature is disappointing’, he writes, ‘if it interprets signs by referring them to objects that can be designated (observation and description), if it surrounds itself with pseudo-objective guarantees of evidence and communication (causerie, investigation), and if it confuses meaning with intelligible, explicit, and formulated signification (major subjects)’ (Est décevante, par nature, une littérature qui interprète les signes en les rapportant à des objets désignables (observation et description), qui s’entoure

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des garanties pseudo-objectives du témoignage et de la communication (causerie, enquête), qui confond le sens avec des significations intellig­ ibles, explicites et formulées (grands sujets)).18 Yet this disappointment is rehearsed time and again rather than absolved or abandoned, Deleuze continues, in order to produce means for compensating for it; this mechanism of objective disappointment and subjective compensation functions continuously in Proust’s Recherche as a form of apprenticeship, through which the novel sorts out its temporally governed ideas about truth, and through which Deleuze, in turn, works out his ideas about difference and repetition, not to mention his later theories of film. The serial machinations of Fantômas operate no less antithetically to the logic of naturalism and empiricism that provide the manifest thematic content for each episode; it is precisely because of this tirelessly rehearsed paradox that the serials open themselves up to the shudder of history, becoming an apparatus through which we might come to know the force of historicity in all its otherness and contingency. What I refer to as the shudder of history has to do not with the identification of some ultimate causality – whether material conditions, the criminal mind, authorial genius or a guiding concept – but to the serial’s function as an historical reaction-formation in its own right. I propose that the Fantômas serials engineer such a shudder in the contemporaneity of their unfolding serial continuity, in the stutter of its episodic machinations. Corresponding to a discrete set of formal, conceptual and material procedures, the general ‘law’ of metanarrative of even meta-history exercised through the episodes of Fantômas yields no singular definitive insight about historical causality, as I have suggested, but instead gives over to the absolute otherness of historical experience – no longer simply in the shadow of the guillotine, but in the fore-shadow of the Great War. It is the project of the Fantômas series to become, to function as, the shudder of history. It is no longer a modern work of art redemptively haunted by some primordial fear, as for Adorno, but the material and formal resonance of history itself as something terrifyingly unknowable. This project, as in the case of Proust, or even Freud, is an epistemological one – an investigation into the experience and archive of modernity, the vicissitudes of historical experience. Indeed, rather than thinking of the serials as either merely a symptom or product of French modernity – or, for that matter, of thinking of the villain as the prosopoetic figure for this modernity, its ever-changing face – I propose that we instead consider the Fantômas serials in terms of its project: to bear, to become, the shudder of modernity itself. This shudder becomes our own, in turn, at the moment we recognize our own continuity with and



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participation in this serial effect – as Julio Cortázar does in his remarkable Fantômas contra los vampiros multinacionales. Notes   1. On the Fantômas serials and their cultural resonance, see esp. Robin Walz, Pulp Surrealism, pp. 42–75; Annabel Audureau, Fantômas: un mythe moderne; Daniel Gercke, ‘On the eve of distraction’.   2. See ‘Le torchon brûle entre les “héritiers” de Fantômas et Thomas Langmann’, BFM Business, 28 September 2016, https://bfmbusiness.bfmtv.com/entre​ prise/le-torchon-brule-entre-les-heritiers-de-fantomas-et-thomas-lang mann-1041104.html (accessed 6 June 2020). Thanks to Adeline Heck for bringing this article to my attention.   3. John Ashbery incorrectly notes that Souvestre died during the Spanish influenza epidemic; he died of pulmonary congestion in 1914. John Ashbery, ‘Introduction to Fantômas’, p. 3.   4. See, in particular, Vicki Callahan, Zones of Anxiety, esp. pp. 45–72; Nanette Fornabai, ‘Criminal factors’; Tom Gunning, ‘Tracing the individual body’.   5. See Mary Ann Doane’s discussion of Siegfried Kracauer’s notion of ‘shuddering’ in Emergence of Cinematic Time, p. 23. See also Siegfried Kracauer, ‘Photography’; Walter Benjamin, ‘Little history of photography’.   6. Callahan, Zones of Anxiety, pp. 64–5; see also Ashbery, ‘Introduction to Fantômas’.   7. That is, the truth-effect of Fantômas has less to do with the expression of unconscious or uncanny desires – concerns so often misattributed to ­surrealism – than with the historical function of seriality itself. On the surrealist interest in Fantômas, see esp. Walz, Pulp Surrealism, as well as my own Surrealism and the Art of Crime.  8. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 51.  9. Ibid., p. 80. 10. See David Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light, esp. pp. 43–82; Richard Abel, The Ciné Goes to Town, pp. 372–80; Tom Gunning, ‘From kaleidoscope to X-ray’. 11. In his preface to the English translation of the debut Fantômas novel, John Ashbery praises the authors’ ‘uncanny sense of genus loci’ as one of the ‘principal ingredients of the novels’ potent charm’, in spite of their otherwise clunky prose. Ashbery, ‘Introduction to Fantômas’, pp. 7–8. For a thorough reconstruction of site-specific scenes in the Fantômas series, see Roland-François Lack’s ‘Fantômas over Paris’ series, www.thecinetourist.net/fantomas-overparis-episode-1.html (accessed 19 June 2019). 12. Marcel Allain, ‘Pas d’accord avec Paul Féjos’, p. 1209, my translation, original emphasis: ‘Fantômas attaque et commet un vol inouï (exposition), Juve arrive à la parade (nœud). Fantômas poussant le crime au dernier degré de l’audace va-t-il s’échapper? Non. Juve le prend (rebondissement). Est-ce le triomphe définitif? Nullement. Fantômas, à la dernière seconde,

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s’échappe (dénouement en coup de théâtre) et s’échappe par le jeu d’un truc qu’il a prévu, combine, machine, et que ni Juve ni le spectateur-lecteur n’ont pu devenir (ce qui évite à Juve de faire figure de maladroit). Il n’y a pas à sortir de là.’ 13. Ibid., p. 1216, my translation. 14. Ibid., my translation. 15. Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre, Juve contre Fantômas, pp. 423–4, my translation: ‘Un hôpital est un monde. Juve tenait à examiner, non point seulement les employés de Lariboisière, mais bien tous ceux, hommes ou femmes, infirmiers ou étudiants, malades ou même visiteurs, qui pouvaient s’être trouvé dans les murs de la maison au moment du crime. Bien qu’avec une netteté d’esprit admirable, Juve eût immédiatement organisé dans ses détails l’examen minutieux qu’il voulait faire subir à toutes les personnes retenues ainsi, dans l’espoir de trouver parmi elles l’homme à l’index blessé, cet examen n’en devait pas moins être fort long.’ Incidentally, this passage is not included in the English translation of the novel. 16. Ibid., p. 431. 17. Tom Gunning has characterized the success of Feuillade’s film serials in instituting the ‘continued appearances’ of its villain ‘in a succession of films even when [his] mortality appeared to have been tested to the limits’; in the case of Fantômas, Gunning explains, this is due to the villain’s particular facility ‘at disappearing under assumed identities’, a facility grounded in the material concerns of the cinema itself: that is, the demands of ‘popularity and profitability’ to keep bringing the characters back. Tom Gunning, ‘Intertextuality of early cinema’, p. 135. 18. Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs, p. 33. Deleuze, Proust et les signes, p. 42.

Works cited Abel, Richard, The Ciné Goes to Town: French Cinema 1896–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Adorno, Theodor, Aesthetic Theory, ed. and trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). Allain, Marcel, Juve contre Fantômas, in Fantômas, vol. 1 (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1961). —, ‘Pas d’accord avec Paul Féjos’, in Fantômas, vol. 2, ed. Francis Lacassin (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1988), pp. 1206–20. — and Pierre Souvestre, Fantômas (New York: Morrow, 1986). Ashbery, John, ‘Introduction to Fantômas’, in Fantômas by Allain and Souvestre, pp. 1–9. Audureau, Annabel, Fantômas: un mythe moderne au croisement des arts (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2010). Benjamin, Walter, ‘Little history of photography’, in Selected Writings, vol. 2: 1927–1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith,



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trans. Rodney Livingstone et al. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 507–30. Bordwell, David, Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). Callahan, Vicki, Zones of Anxiety: Movement, Musidora, and the Crime Serials of Louis Feuillade (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004). Cortázar, Julio, Fantômas contra los vampiros multinacionales (Mexico City: Excelsior, 1975). Deleuze, Gilles, Proust et les signes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1970). —, Proust and Signs, trans. Richard Howard (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). Doane, Mary Ann, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). Eburne, Jonathan P., Surrealism and the Art of Crime (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008). Fornabai, Nanette L, ‘Criminal factors: Fantômas, anthropometrics, and the numerical fictions of modern criminal identity’, in ‘Crime Fictions’, ed. Andrea Goulet and Susanna Lee, special issue, Yale French Studies, 108 (2005), 60–73. Gercke, Daniel, ‘On the eve of distraction: Gaumont’s Fantômas’, Sites, 1:1 (Spring 1997), 157–69. Gunning, Tom, ‘From the kaleidoscope to the X-ray: Urban spectatorship, Poe, Benjamin, and Traffic in Souls (1913)’, Wide Angle, 19:4 (1997), 25–61. —, ‘The intertextuality of early cinema: A prologue to Fantômas’, in Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo (eds), A Companion to Literature and Film (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 127–43. —, ‘Tracing the individual body: Photography, detectives, and early cinema’, in Vanessa R. Schwartz and Leo Charney (eds), Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 15–45. Kracauer, Siegfried, ‘Photography’, in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, ed. and trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 47–63. Walz, Robin, Pulp Surrealism: Insolent Popular Culture in Early Twentieth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

3 Inventing, collecting and classifying in the margins: the work of Eugène Atget, a shift in photographic representation Guillaume Le Gall

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n 1913, Eugène Atget photographed Les Fortifications de Paris; collected in an album, these photographs show a place and an architecture condemned to imminent demolition.1 These images make visible the tension inherent in a deserted area that combined military ­organization –  defence architecture – with chaos –  unoccupied buildings. In this sense, the Fortifications series can be compared to the Zoniers album, which focuses on Parisian dwellings cast outside city limits and located between the fortifications and the suburbs.2 These two albums both oppose and complement each other: one shows an empty space, while the other is full of activities taking place at the margins of a big city’s economy. Far from presenting picturesque or globalizing representations, these two albums introduce a new photographic approach to the city: they show how Atget invented new photographic motifs and new objects of history. In considering these new places, new faces, new objects, Atget marked a huge historic shift in photographic ­representation and became a model for many photographers that followed. In and of itself, the album Les Fortifications de Paris is one of the great landmarks of modernity, first, in its photographic compositions marked by large voids and close-ups, and second, in its structure. To be clear, Atget did not take random photographs; he was in fact guided by a specific ambition that defined all of his work, that is, to collect visual traces of the old Paris before it was bound to disappear. Knowing that, Atget’s modernity thus lies in this creation of a large project built through a specific and systematic method. The now forgotten fortifications of Paris were a defensive wall built between 1841 and 1844 at the request of Adolphe Thiers, the French



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Figure 3.1  Atget, Eugène, ‘Porte de Sèvres: Les fortifications, 1913; 15e arrondissement’, Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

­ olitician, in order to protect Paris from attacks, especially from the p Prussian enemy. While they were intended as a defensive wall, they also marked a physical boundary with the suburbs to the point that they came to define the morphology of Paris. From a military perspective, however, these fortifications proved to be quite inefficient and the idea of demolishing them was first expressed in 1883.3 By the time that Atget had decided to photograph them in 1910, their fate was already sealed. The war of 1914–18 definitively confirmed their obsolescence, as they did not protect the city against German attacks. The album Les Fortifications de Paris contains sixty photographs taken between 1910 and 1913 and is situated in the middle of the artist’s career. In fact, 1913 was the year during which Atget produced the greatest number of images documenting these military fortifications, which seems to suggest that he wanted to finish the project as soon as possible – no doubt because their demolition was set to start the same year. The First World War, however, put an end to nearly all of Atget’s artistic output and his production declined significantly after 1918. The album was ultimately assembled and sold to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in 1915.

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Figure 3.2  Atget, Eugène, ‘Porte Dauphine: Les fossés des fortifications, 1913; 16e arrondissement’, Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Atget had already taken one picture of the fortifications in 1900. The image, which we might describe as picturesque or at least anecdotal, shows how Parisians used the fortifications during their leisure time. Indeed, on paintings, such as the 1887 drawing Les Fortifications by Van Gogh with its lone female character walking along the walls, or in ­literature, as on the front cover page of Auguste Leymarie’s 1905 book Le Tigre et le coquelicot where we can see several couples lounging around the walls, the fortifications were shown to be conducive to promenade and rest. Atget’s album, however, shows us something entirely different and suggests a much more complex approach to the site and the purpose of the fortifications. The album does not have a topographical logic but rather a typological one, with Atget defining the fortifications in at least four ways: as markers of spatial boundaries between the city and the suburbs; as empty spaces in which chaos contrasts with Parisian urban planning; as a specific form of architecture and defence structure against the enemy; and as passageway between the city and the suburbs.



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More than any other photographer, Atget captured both the centripetal and the centrifugal character of Paris. To represent the city accurately, he also sought to show its boundaries, defined by the so-called ‘zone’ – that is, the territorial zone, several hundred metres wide – s­urrounding Paris at the time. This zone was a buffer between Paris and its suburbs, a blank space in which nature was free to develop and expand its reach. The album of fortifications allowed Atget to explore not only the physical boundary of Paris but also the other forms that this boundary took. It was for the photographer a way to define a territory, to mark a fundamental opposition between nature and a built environment. It was also an opportunity for him to create innovative landscapes, almost as if he had found the image of nature contained by the city in the fortifications to be sublime, which led him to produce images that were entirely new in the history of photography. During the same period that Atget made the fortifications his object of study, he also worked on the Zoniers album. The two albums are indeed intertwined, in the sense that they are bound together by the two complementary realities they depict: the fortifications marking a limit that gave rise to a ‘zone’ in which a marginal population resided. Indeed, the ‘zoners’, the inhabitants of the area – or ‘zone’ – who lived on the margins of the city, was a population whose photographic representation highlighted the specificities of the organization of urban space at the time. Just as Atget was interested in photographing the ‘petits métiers’ or small trades, just as those jobs were to disappear with the rise of modern commerce, so too the photographer was able to capture the area’s inhabitants at the very moment when the fortifications were about to be demolished. In Atget’s eyes, these small trades were embodied by the inhabitants of the zone, the locals he ­photographed, and showing them in situ was a way to situate menial street jobs in their intimate environment, in the proper setting to which they belonged. In his photographic series on ‘petits métiers’, Atget showed itinerant activities associated with life in the old Paris. By focusing on the ‘zone’, Atget created a portrait of its population inscribed within a marginal environment. Unlike the Fortifications album, Zoniers demonstrates a more analytical approach due to its focus on the specific architecture of the zone, on its dwellings and their interiors, on the representation of the human figure and, more generally on the particular physiognomy of the place. This documentary approach necessitated core stylistic prin­ ciples, such as the non-emphatic representation of objects, a focus on the details and the ability to convey the feeling of space. The photographs thus turn into still lifes composed with the waste discarded from the city

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Figure 3.3  Atget, Eugène, ‘Porte de Choisy: Zoniers, 1913; 13e arrondissement’, Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

centre while the dwellings’ interiors become a vast collage that replicates the collage-like character of the modern city. The Fortifications and Zoniers albums, therefore, complement one another and, in fact, were sold together to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. They were the last albums in a series of seven comprised of images taken between 1910 and 1915. These seven albums represented important moments for Atget, as shown by Molly Nesbit in her remarkable book that compellingly situates them within their precise political and social context.4 The albums are important for several reasons. First, they are collections of photographs, that is, an assemblage of about sixty photographs thoroughly illustrating a subject defined programmatically by Atget: art in old Paris; Parisian interiors; horse-drawn carriages, trades, shops and stalls of Paris; signs and old boutiques of Paris; zoners; and finally, the fortifications. Second, all of these albums were purchased by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France during Atget’s lifetime not because they were compendia of documentary photographs, but rather as artworks in their own right. With the exception of the album Art in Old Paris, which evokes the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tradition of ornamental treatises, Atget’s albums offer a very original approach to



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photography. In these albums, Atget is not merely the photographer but the actual inventor of objects worthy of being considered as historical artefacts. Atget’s project can thus be divided into two stages: the first centring on old Paris and the necessity to preserve the city through the recorded image, while the second elaborates on the definition of new historical objects. But this project cannot be fully understood without taking into account its historical context.5 In a letter written to the then-Minister of Culture, Atget explained what he had in mind, presenting himself as an archaeological photographer who had built up a rich collection of all the vestiges of old Paris: Dear Sir, For more than twenty years, I have gathered, through my work and on my own initiative photographic glass negatives, 18/24 format, from all of the old streets of Old Paris, artistic documents showing the beautiful civil architecture from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries: old mansions, historic or interesting houses, beautiful facades, lovely doors, beautiful panellings, door knockers, old fountains, stylish staircases (wood and wrought iron), and interiors of all the churches in Paris, etc, etc). This enormous documentary and artistic collection is now finished. I can say that I possess the entirety of Old Paris.6

This letter, which reads like a testament, confirms the importance of collecting for the development of the project. Here, the word ‘collection’ refers as much to the photographed objects as to the negatives taken by Atget. The photographer ‘collected’ these objects not by purchasing them, but rather by taking shots and placing the resulting images in his albums. When Atget declared that he did in fact ‘possess the entirety of Old Paris’, he meant that he had succeeded in preserving the old city in his own photographs. Much like an archaeologist, Atget established typologies to classify his prints by genre and by subject. And it is indeed the sorting of historical objects into categories that forms the basis of the organization of his work, the architecture of his project. In fact, many parallels can be drawn between Atget’s activity and that of a historian, in terms of both procedure and methods. Like a historian, the photographer organized his work according to principles of differentiation and exclusion, to borrow Michel de Certeau’s terminology.7 In other words, by defining his subject in strict terms and by excluding all traces of modernity from it, the photographer worked within spatial and temporal limitations: the old Paris, for example, was constructed as an entity defined by both geography and time. And like a ­nineteenth-century

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historian ‘preoccupied by the dream of a totalizing taxonomy’,8 the photographer assembled a collection of documents. According to Michel de Certeau, a technical operation is required to gather a collection, an operation that used to be synonymous with ‘manufacturing objects: copying or printing, binding, classifying’.9 Defining the old city as the subject of a large project provided Atget with the opportunity to impose geographical and temporal limitations to his work and to address specific historical issues. Photography was thus construed as a means of safeguarding a visual archive of vestiges. With his albums, Atget invented new historical objects. Horse-drawn carriages were soon to be replaced by the automobile, old boutiques by big department stores, the fortifications were later supplanted by the ‘périphérique’, and the ‘zone’ by modern urbanism. Atget’s photographs thus became historical documents in an era when virtually no one was interested in such objects. What was new about Atget’s (archival) methods was the fact that he used the photographic medium to develop a new approach that defined itself in opposition as much to a picturesque vision as to a fantastical one. Atget’s photographs of the fortifications and the zoners are not images taken at random; they are evidence of Atget’s greater aim, which was to photograph every single part of the city threatened by disappearance. In order to better understand this, it would be useful to compare Atget’s photographs with the ones taken at the same time by professional photographers employed by news agencies. In 1912 –  two years after Atget began his study of the fortifications – photojournalists started showing interest in the imminent demise of the fortifications and the resulting disappearance of zoners. Their work was, in some sense, a response to the news of a tumultuous time where military architecture became a subject of concern. So how did these professional photographers proceed? We can distinguish several categories of images they took. The first emphasizes information with images aiming to reveal the characteristics of the photographed object; in the case of military structures, this meant focusing on the spatial organization specific to the site.10 The second category is more picturesque, staging the different ways in which the site was used in everyday life, be it for military fanfares11 or for animals walking along the fortification walls.12 The presence of the donkey and the goat in these images is fascinating, as they seem to bestow upon these photographs a sense of fantasy. As visual reminders of the countryside, they are also hearkening back to another time, a pre-industrial era when Paris still resembled a village. It seems that the presence of these animals was of particular interest to the



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Figure 3.4  Atget, Eugène, ‘Porte d’Italie: Zoniers, 1912; 13e arrondissement’, Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Rol photography agency, as the donkey appears again in other images, this time of the zoners. In those photographs, although the zoners appear to be socially disadvantaged, the style is largely picturesque and reassuring, thus responding to the public’s fear of the ‘zone’ as a place that housed abject working classes. The photographs of these news agencies were therefore another way of conveying a representation of the end of a world, a world condemned to disappear. Although Atget was also motivated by this idea of capturing a world as it vanishes, it is important to note that he would never have photographed the fortifications in this picturesque manner. For Atget, the picturesque must be understood at face value, that is to say, as something that is worth being painted or represented as part of a predetermined project. What differentiates Atget’s images from news photographs then? In what ways is Atget situated on

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Figure 3.5 Anonymous, Une fanfare militaire, Agence Rol, 1912, Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

the margins of official representations? More broadly, why can we speak of modernity when we speak of these two albums and not when we look at news photographs? First of all, Atget developed a project that was much larger and more ambitious than a simple news report, taking great care to define his subject and treat it in a complete, structured and complex manner. Atget used photography to construct a corpus of images articulating a discourse on history. His documentary approach differed from that of professional photographers in the same way he distinguished himself from pictorialists and other art photographers who exhibited in the official Salons. Simply put, he used photography for what it truly is: a tool for capturing reality. This is a view corroborated by Walter Benjamin, who was the first to point out that Atget, with his use of photography, ‘remov[ed] the makeup from reality’.13 Indeed, according to Benjamin, Atget was one of the first photographers to represent space in a systematic way, distinct from official representations – that is, from the images of ‘fin de siècle’ Paris and the pictorialist and photographic Salons of his era. In this respect, we must consider Atget’s work as a coherent project with a political dimension that is as much a statement about an oeuvre as it is about the redefinition of the city.



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What exactly is Atget’s project? It is the representation of the signs of a disappearing world through a complex system of visual memory. Without this systematization, his work would have been merely one of the many plaintive gazes among other nostalgic endeavours undertaken by amateur photographers of Old Paris. Defining the old city through a large photographic project, as Atget did, amounted to creating a temporal and geographic demarcation, questioning the definition of the historical object, and redistributing these objects according to specific typologies. That is how he remarkably managed to include subjects excluded from previous attempts at representation. In this manner, as Benjamin notices, his work is a way of confronting reality, trying to find nothing other than the reality presented to him, the camera being used for its direct recording function without attempting to embellish or darken what it captures. In other words, Atget’s photography is about producing documents that have immediate historical significance. To what extent can we say that such a project is modern? One possible answer once again lies in Benjamin’s analysis of Atget’s work, which appears in two different texts. According to the German philosopher, Atget is indeed modern because his work embodies a political gesture. He makes this point first in ‘A short history of photography’, published in 1931, and again in ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’, published in 1936, then in a revised edition in 1939. In ‘Short history’, Benjamin seeks to retrace the history of the medium and grasp its importance. In order to do so, he cites several books, including Atget’s monograph, Atget, photographe de Paris, published in 1930 in German, French and English.14 From the outset, Benjamin not only sees Atget as someone who liberated photography from its commercial impasse, but also as a precursor of surrealist photography. What are these layers that Atget eradicated to arrive at the truth of the photographic object? What is this ‘make-up’ that he removed from reality and what truth was Atget attempting to discover and lay bare? According to Benjamin, it is the ‘stifling atmosphere generated by conventional portrait photography in the age of decline’.15 Pursuing the metaphor further, Benjamin also writes that ‘[Atget] initiates the emancipation of object from aura, which is the most signal achievement of the latest school of photography’.16 Truth, for Benjamin, is therefore situated in the liberation of objects from their aura. Atget photographed objects in all of their simplicity and got to the heart of their true meaning. Oftentimes, for him, this meaning was no more and no less than what these objects really are. This may sound simple or obvious, but it is, indeed, the magic of Atget’s work; he shows things as they are.

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If we again compare the work of Atget to the pictorialist style, we can immediately appreciate the difference between those two projects and better understand what Benjamin means when he refers to the ‘emancipation of object’. Atget is at the origin of the development of photography as a medium that accepts its own components: a simple mechanism for reproducing reality that allows for the multiplication of the object represented by the image. This development entails, among other things, the use of photography in a manner we might characterize as documentary photography or pure photography, that is to say, photography that does not try to mimic the aesthetics of painting, but rather follows the conditions of its own specificity as a medium. It is a photography that shows the object as it is, one that necessitates ‘the peeling away of the object’s shell’,17 that destroys its ‘aura’ through reproduction. Here, Benjamin has Atget’s images in mind, but also the pictures of Karl Blossfeldt, August Sander, or of Albert Renger-Patzsch. Hence this remark by Benjamin: Atget almost always passed indifferently by the ‘great sights and so-called landmarks’,18 but was unable to ignore a long row of boots at the Marché des Carmes on Maubert Square. We might add that Atget would not miss the piles of debris that he photographed in the zone either. Atget unfailingly shows us things as they are.

Figure 3.6 Anonymous, Âne sur les fortifications, Agence Rol, 1913, Bibliothèque Nationale de France.



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Significantly, Benjamin relates this ‘process’ of capturing reality to the emptiness in Atget’s photographs. While, in fact, not all of Atget’s images are empty, far from it, Benjamin clings to this particular dimension of Atget’s work to better support his own interpretation. If we are to follow Benjamin’s argument, Atget’s photographs are a political act, a view he argues in two ways. First, because Atget destroys the aura of the objects he photographs and second, because he photographs Paris when it is empty, or rather when the city has been emptied out, as in René Clair’s 1923 movie Paris qui dort (Paris Asleep). For Benjamin, ‘all these pictures are empty. Empty is the Porte d’Arcueil by the fortifications, empty are the triumphal steps, empty are the courtyards, empty, as it should be, is the Place du Tertre.’19 Not only are these pictures empty, but ‘the city in these pictures looks cleared out, like a lodging that has not yet found a new tenant’.20 This emptiness is not accidental, it is the result of Atget’s decision to show the emptiness caused by the departure of the working class and therein lies his political gesture. In ‘Work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’, Benjamin makes Atget the witness to a crime – that of expropriation, of the displacement of Paris’s population to the outskirts of the city. But Atget is not a passive witness who winds up in this marginal area by chance; he deliberately goes against the mainstream photographic tendencies of his time, which consisted of shooting the big boulevards as evidence of modernity and the Parisian belle époque. As Benjamin famously wrote, ‘It has quite justly been said of him that he photographed [the streets] like crime scenes. The scene of a crime, too, is deserted; it is photographed for the purpose of establishing evidence. With Atget, photographs become standard evidence for historical occurrences.’21 Although Benjamin does not directly mention the Zoniers album, if one follows his logic it becomes clear that the residents of the zone are either a reflection of those who were expelled from the city centre or a metaphor for that exclusion. The Zoniers album, once again, must be read in conjunction with the Fortifications de Paris album, as if the two were mirroring one another, one containing the answer of the enigma that the other poses, and vice versa. More precisely, the Fortifications album is the topographic counterpart to the Zoniers album, which is more interested in the landscapes of intimacy and the inhabitants of the zone. The two albums thus offer a ‘politically informed’ vision that breaks with the photography of the era. For Benjamin, it is clear that Atget’s photography is modern because it is political. Can we consider Atget modern in the same sense, say, as Picasso, Braque or the Italian futurists? What distinguishes Atget from such quintessential artists of modernity is

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the desire to be, or the consciousness of being, part of the avant-garde without having to inform the public of his allegiance. In a famous episode cited by Man Ray, when Man Ray asked Atget’s permission to publish his images in La Révolution surréaliste, the latter replied: ‘Do not mention my name. These are simple documents that I make.’22 The modernity of Atget lies therein. To say, as Man Ray later would in 1937, that photography is not art, is equivalent to being, perhaps without even knowing it, an actor of modernity. Whether Atget was fully aware of being part of the avant-garde or whether he was in the avant-garde in spite of himself does not prevent his images from bearing similarities to the art of Picasso or the avantgarde more generally. Indeed, do the photographs of waste in Zoniers not remind us of Picasso’s collages? Does the emphasis on insignificant details in the ditches of the fortifications not evoke the avant-garde’s interest in marginality and insignificance? On the one hand, we might say that, objectively speaking, these images break with the traditional means of representing the world. On the other hand, these images were not assimilated by the avantgarde of Atget’s own will. These two statements are not contradictory, as both invite a comparison between Atget and an artist like Douanier Rousseau. Like Atget, Henri Rousseau, or the Douanier Rousseau, is part of a long list of artists who, because of their naivete, were designated as precursors of the avant-garde and surrealism. Like Atget, Rousseau was interested in marginal subjects, including fortifications. His nickname, ‘le douanier’, or ‘the customs officer’, derives from his work collecting taxes at the city limits. The surrealists were certainly not mistaken in noticing a connection, as they themselves dubbed Atget ‘the Rousseau of photography’.23 Artists from the avant-garde would thus take the work of Atget as a model of photography that had rid itself of the weight of the art. Atget’s work then becomes a succession of simple documents that allowed a fresh look at the world. A whole generation of artists would begin to take his work as an example and historicize a new approach for photography. The proponents of the New Vision saw Atget as the one who had returned to the sources of photography using only the specificities of the medium to produce an image; the artists of the New Objectivity ­movement could rely on a corpus of images devoid of artifices that showed the objects of the world as they are. With the new celebrity of Atget, the avant-garde did find an emblematic and unifying figure of modernity.



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Figure 3.7  Atget, Eugène, Marché des Carmes, place Maubert, 1910–12, Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Notes   1. These photographs are kept in the album Les Fortifications de Paris, which can be found at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France under the reference: RES PHOTO VE-235-PET FO.   2. The Zoniers album can also be found at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France under the reference: RES PHOTO OA-173 (C)-PET FOL).   3. See Jean-Louis Cohen and André Lortie, Des fortifs au périf.   4. Molly Nesbit, Atget’s Seven Albums.   5. See Guillaume Le Gall, ‘Un photographe archéologue’; Le Gall, ‘Eye of the archaeologist’.  6. Excerpt from a letter by Atget dated 12 November 1920 addressed to Monsieur Paul Léon, director of the Beaux-Arts (National School of Fine

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Arts), reproduced in Jean Leroy’s Atget, magicien du vieux Paris en son époque, p.  30, my translation: ‘Monsieur, J’ai recueilli, pendant plus de vingt ans, par mon travail et mon initiative individuelle, dans toutes les vieilles rues du Vieux Paris, des clichés photographiques, format 18/24, documents artistiques sur la belle architecture civile du XVIe au XIXe Siècle: Les vieux hôtels, maisons historiques ou curieuses, les belles façades, belles portes, belles boiseries, les Heurtoirs, les vieilles fontaines, les escaliers de style (bois et fer forgé); les intérieurs de toutes les églises de Paris (Ensembles et détails artistiques: Notre-Dame, St Gervais et Protais, St Séverin, St Julien le Pauvre, St Etienne du Mont, St Roch, St Nicolas du Chardonnet, etc, etc). Cette énorme collection, artistique et documentaire est aujourd’hui terminée. Je puis dire que je possède tout le Vieux Paris.’   7. Michel de Certeau, Writing of History, p. 75.  8. Ibid., p. 74.  9. Ibid., p. 73. 10. Anonymous, Zone à la porte de Versailles, Agence Rol, 1913, Bibliothèque Nationale de France EI-13, p. 232. 11. Anonymous, Une fanfare militaire, Agence Rol, 1912, Bibliothèque Nationale de France EI-13, p. 211. 12. Anonymous, Âne sur les fortifications, Agence Rol, 1913, Bibliothèque Nationale de France EI-13, p. 292. 13. Walter Benjamin, ‘Little history of photography’, p. 284. 14. Eugène Atget, Atget, photographe de Paris. The German is titled E. Atget, Lichtbilder. 15. Ibid., p. 285. 16. Ibid. 17. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings: Volume 2 1927–1934, p. 519. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 226. 22. Man Ray cited in Paul Hill and Tom Cooper, ‘Interview: Man Ray’, p. 40. 23. George Waldemar, ‘Photographie vision du monde’, Arts et Métiers graphiques, 16 (March 1930), p. 134.

Works cited Atget, Eugène, Atget, photographe de Paris, intr. Pierre Mac Orlan and Henri Jonquières (New York: E. Weyhe, 1930). —, E. Atget, Lichtbilder, intr. Camille Recht (Leipzig: Verlag Henri Jonquières, 1930). Benjamin, Walter, Selected Writings, vol. 2: 1927–1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith, trans. Rodney Livingstone et al. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999).



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—, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2007). —, ‘Little history of photography’, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter, in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 274–98. Certeau, Michel de, The Writing of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). Cohen, Jean-Louis, and André Lortie, Des fortifs au périf: Paris, les seuils de la ville (Paris: Picard/Éditions du Pavillon de l’Arsenal, 1991) Hill, Paul, and Tom Cooper, ‘Interview: Man Ray’, Camera, 54 (February 1975), 37–40. Le Gall, Guillaume, ‘Un photographe archéologue’, in Atget, une rétrospective, realized by Mathilde Jamain, under the direction of Anne Zali (Paris, Éditions Hazan/Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 2007), pp. 34–50. —, ‘The eye of the archaeologist: Eugène Atget and the forms of the old city’, in Eugène Atget: Old Paris, by Atget (Madrid: Fundación MAPFRE, 2011), pp. 14–29. Leroy, Jean, Atget, magicien du vieux Paris en son époque (Paris: Paris Audiovisuel/ Pierre-Jean Balbo, 1992). Nesbit, Molly, Atget’s Seven Albums (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). Waldemar, George, ‘Photographie vision du monde’, Arts et Métiers graphiques, 16 (March 1930), p. 134.

4 The anxious centre Effie Rentzou

T

he new spirit which will dominate the poetry of the entire world has nowhere come to light as it has in France’ (L’esprit nouveau qui dominera le monde entier ne s’est fait jour dans la poésie nulle part comme en France).1 This is the opening line of Guillaume Apollinaire’s ‘L’esprit nouveau et les poètes’, pronounced in November 1917 at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in Paris and published after the poet’s premature death, in December 1918. This first sentence contains almost all the building blocks of Apollinaire’s argument in this seminal text, which was written and perceived as a manifesto. Apollinaire evangelizes the new spirit in poetry that will sweep over the world after its birth in France. In envisioning the new lyricism that will do justice to modern life, his horizon is the entire world and his vantage point is that of his adoptive nation, France. The conviction of the centrality of France for this world-dominating spirit gathers strength as the text progresses, culminating in the declaration, towards the end, that ‘the French bring poetry to all people’ (les Français portent la poésie à tous les peuples).2 This declaration is followed by a list of countries and regions enlightened by the new French poetry: Italy, England, Spain, Russia, Latin America, North America. Apollinaire’s opening up towards an international community of poets is intertwined with a deeply nationalist stance. One could imagine that this nationalist position was formed by three years of violent war; however, the conjugation of nationalism and worldliness marked the European avant-garde already before the war, and certainly Apollinaire’s writings. In 1917 Apollinaire appears certain of Paris’s pivotal role in the creation and propagation of this new spirit, the modern spirit: Paris

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teaches, the rest of the world learns. But so he was in 1913. And indeed, in 1913, Paris, as the centre of what Apollinaire would call the new spirit and what we call modernism, was fiercely contested and defended in polemical exchanges within the European avant-garde. These heated public debates were, however, shadowed by the poetry of the period that reveals a somewhat different image: Paris as a shaky and uncertain centre of a modernity that persistently recalls belatedness and backwardness. In what follows, I will try to unpack perceptions of Paris as an imagined centre of modernism in the poetry and the theoretical texts that appeared around 1913 and thereby reflect on the concept and usefulness of a ‘centre’ in considerations of modernism in its global existence. The First World War did not exactly come as a surprise. Longbrewing wars in the Balkans as well as the Austrian annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908 were preludes to this war of nations and nationalisms. Within this international climate of escalating violence, the emergence of futurism in Italy via France in 1909 was marked by excessive patriotism and by a clear desire to promote and advertise an art that would be truly Italian. F. T. Marinetti’s declaration in October 1911, spurred by the Italo-Turkish war in Libya, is characteristic of this spirit: ‘Proud to feel that the war-like fervour which animated the whole country equals our own, we incite the Italian government, finally become Futurist, to magnify all national ambitions, scorning the stupid accusations of piracy and proclaiming the birth of Pan-Italianism.’3 The political, and specifically the ultra-patriotic, aspirations of futurism were indeed evident from its very beginning. A few weeks after the publication of the founding manifesto of futurism, Marinetti published in March 1909 a ‘Political manifesto for futurist voters’, in which he advocated patriotism and military expansion for Italy.4 The 1911 manifesto in support of the war in North Africa was a confirmation of the irredentist, patriotic programme of 1909, combined with a rejection of tradition in anticipation of a new era in Italy: ‘The fastidious memory of Roman grandeur must be erased by an Italian grandeur one hundred times greater’, declared the ‘Italian Tripoli’ manifesto.5 This vocal political positioning would continue throughout 1913 and 1914, and would include, among other things, activities and performances pushing for the entry of Italy into the war on the side of France. The unambiguous nationalist and patriotic postures of Marinetti and gradually of the other futurists rode, however, from the beginning on an intense international campaign, inaugurated with the founding manifesto of futurism. Before its famous publication in French in Le Figaro on 20 February 1909, the manifesto had already been sent to newspapers and venues throughout

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Italy, but also to Germany, England, Poland, Russia, Spain and other countries.6 As Christine Poggi remarks, this publicizing agenda reflected Marinetti’s understanding of modernity in general as simultaneously ‘nationalist and cosmopolitan’.7 The period between 1909 and 1914 is marked by a series of declarations and public debates among the various manifestations of the European avant-garde as they strive to prove their national preponderance on an increasingly unified international scene. Italian, British and French were locked in a race of demonstrating who was the most ‘avantgarde’, in clear national terms marked by aggressive statements, but also by a lot of anxiety from all fronts. Indeed, the intertwining of futurism with Italian nationalist politics was not an isolated occurrence. Paul Peppis shows convincingly how the English avant-garde formed itself to a large extent as a response to the futurists’ nationalist and cultural imperialist agenda. He argues that in Britain the Italian futurists were seen as synergizing with the Italian imperial policy of expansion and domination: in the same manner that the Italians were invading North Africa as part of Italian imperial endeavours, the futurists were invading Europe and its capitals to put ‘Italy on the map culturally’.8 The English avant-garde responded with a pronounced patriotism in an effort to revive and impose English literature and art on the international sphere. The prevailing sense of provincialism that dogged English cultural life was, according to Peppis, commensurate with a general consensus about Britain’s declining international status as an imperial power. The avantgarde responded forcefully to this cultural provincialism, espousing the logic and discourse of imperial political power. The examples of the vorticist movement and the short-lived magazine BLAST are in this respect telling. The vorticist ‘manifesto’ in the first issue of BLAST in June 1914 was the terrain on which external pressure from Italian futurist tactics met the general climate in Britain, that of discontent concerning its artistic vigour and innovation. Peppis pithily summarizes the goals of the vorticists as follows: ‘to publicize their movement as England’s – and possibly Europe’s – premier art group; to revitalize a declining empire as a defense against foreign competition and encroachment – especially the Futurists’ efforts to “occupy” the English art market; and to place England’s art and literature on a level commensurate with its status as the world’s “greatest” power’.9 Paul Peppis’s explanation for the intense nationalist, and specifically imperialist, antagonism between the Italian and British avant-gardes hinges on his use of the concept of uneven development. Transferring the term from the economic and technological sphere to the cultural



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one, Peppis claims that both England and Italy at the beginning of the century ‘shared an acute sensitivity to evidence of uneven development in the cultural sphere’, compared to other European countries. As a result, their avant-gardes overcompensated with ‘competitive short-cuts’ so that they would not be left behind.10 These shortcuts, for example Marinetti’s adoption of advertising techniques for aggressive publicizing, or the tactics of shock and scandal, bypassed traditional modes of (international) cultural consecration and attracted a large public. Furthermore, Peppis claims, the avant-garde responded to this perceived ‘cultural inequality in much the same way that European governments responded to perceived economic, industrial, and military inequalities: they would bring nationalism to the aid of advanced art’.11 We see that in this compelling analysis, which deploys economic terms to establish a power dynamic of inequality, Peppis actually adopts a logic of ‘periphery’ and expands it to include Italy and, in a seeming paradox, even Britain. Italy’s and Britain’s perceived inequality or belatedness on the cultural level delegates them to a periphery from which they now want to escape. At least in the case of Britain, this culturally peripheral position clashes with its economic and political centrality. This approach offers an expanded vista of what may have constituted the ‘periphery’ in Europe just before the war, but raises the question: if the periphery can be ever expanded to include what logically would be the centre – Britain – then where was the centre? And furthermore, was this centre exempt from the notions of perceived inequalities, of an anxiety of belatedness on the cultural level that supposedly motivated nationalist stances in the periphery? To answer this question, we should begin with what is missing in Peppis’s account of this race for domination between Italian and English avant-gardes: France. Included in the BLAST vorticist manifesto are two lists, things to be ‘Blasted’ and things to be ‘Blessed’. England is the first thing to be ‘Blasted’, but what immediately follows is France – the only other country mentioned by name: Oh blast France pig plagiarism belly slippers poodle temper bad music sentimental Gallic gush sensationalism fussiness. Parisian parochialism. […] Paris. Clap-trap heaven of amative German professor. Ubiquitous lines of silly little trees. Arcs de Triomphe. Imperturbable, endless prettiness. Large empty cliques, higher up. Bad air for the individual. Blast Mecca for the American because it is not other side of Suez Canal, instead of an afternoon’s ride from London.12

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The list of contemptible things about France appears endless, but is complemented by all the commendable things that France has to offer, in the ‘Bless’ section that follows: Bless France for its bushels of vitality to the square inch. Home of manners (the best, the Worst and interesting mixtures). […] Modesty and humanity of many there. Great flood of life pouring out of the wound of 1797. Also bitterer stream from 1870. Staying power, like a cat.13

The ‘staying power’ of France in these manifestos, ‘like a cat’, shows the importance of French and specifically Parisian cultural production for the BLAST group. This becomes even clearer when in the second ‘Manifesto’ they declare: 1. We have made it quite clear that there is nothing Chauvinistic or picturesquely patriotic about our contentions. 2. But there is violent boredom with that feeble Europeanism, abasement of the miserable ‘intellectual’ before anything coming from Paris, Cosmopolitan sentimentality, which prevails in so many quarters.14

Here, the robust British spirit that the new avant-garde claims to represent is defended against accusations of chauvinism by its opposition to a brand of cosmopolitanism and Europeanism that stems from Paris. The ‘Parisian parochialism’ of the ‘Blasted’ list, seemingly in contradiction with a European cosmopolitanism, actually merges with it: the most parochial feature of the Parisian intelligentsia would be its professed cosmopolitanism, while cosmopolitanism might as well be another word for ‘French’. Against this trend of cosmopolitanism, devoid of any real substance and in fact no more than the Parisian or Paris-bred intelligentsia’s disguised insularism, the avant-garde of BLAST proposes a ‘universality … found in the completest English artists’15 and based on the seafaring character of the British nation. The true universalism of the English spirit, as opposed to the fake cosmopolitanism of the French, is a recurrent dichotomy in the ‘Manifesto’, and reveals some of the motivation behind it. In an attempt to define the new English art as that of the North – and not of the South, of the ‘Latins’, in a denomination and division that will be widely used and propagated during the war in France – this vorticist manifesto establishes a comparison between English and French art. The common points between the two are brought forth as prerequisites for defining the new



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English ‘necessary native art’,16 and also show the ambiguous place held by the French in this cultural geography. Not fully ‘Latin’, as the Italians are – enthralled by their ‘Futuristic gush over machines, aeroplanes, etc.’17 – the French do share some characteristics with the English. ‘At the freest and most vigorous period of England’s history, her literature, then chief Art, was in many ways identical with that of France’,18 claims the ‘Manifesto’, adding that ‘Shakespeare and Montaigne formed one literature’.19 For this reason, this section of the text concludes: 12. No great English Art need be ashamed to share some glory with France, tomorrow it may be Germany, where the Elizabethans did before it. 13. But it will never be French, any more than Shakespeare was, the most catholic and subtle Englishman.20

This is a contrast that runs through the ‘Manifesto’ and is confirmed by the last principle: ‘The nearest thing in England to a great traditional French artist, is a great revolutionary English one.’21 Whether the BLAST ‘Manifesto’ was a satirical one or not – a product of what Martin Puchner calls the ‘rear-guard’, a defensive and reactive form of the avant-garde prompted by the cultural belatedness of the English with regard to the Continental avant-garde22 – what is certainly noticeable in the text is the reaction and defensiveness towards the French, despite the fact that this ‘Manifesto’, and the magazine BLAST in general, are usually read as a reaction to Italian futurism. What the British are measuring themselves against is the French, both despised and admired, similar and different. The same could be maintained for the Italian futurists. Futurism’s roots in and debt to French literary tradition are well established: Marinetti’s symbolist affiliations, his contact and friendship with Gustave Kahn, his early symbolist work, as well as his admiration for Alfred Jarry, are parts of his thoroughly French literary upbringing.23 It is through painting, however, and not literature that the competition of the Italian avant-garde with the French avant-garde manifested itself. The first exhibition of futurist painters in Paris, Les Peintres futuristes italiens, took place in February 1912 at the Galerie Bernheim to much fanfare and scandal. This was the first comprehensive exhibition of futurist art that was designed to travel to other European capitals. In the catalogue of the exhibition a text with the title ‘Les exposants au public’ makes clear that this European tour started in Paris as a ‘défi’ launched at the French avant-garde, and specifically the contemporaneous cubist movement. Boccioni, Carrà, Russolo, Balla and Severini write:

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1913, french modernism and historical time Thanks to our research and our work that have already attracted toward us many gifted imitators as well as many plagiarists without talent, we are now leaders of the European painting movement by following a route different, but somewhat parallel, to the one taken by post-impressionists, synthetists and the cubists in France … Although we admire the cubists’ heroism, who showed a laudable scorn for artistic mercantilism and a powerful hatred for academic painting, we feel and we declare ourselves to be absolutely opposed to their art … Without any doubt, many aesthetic positions of our French friends show some kind of hidden academism.24

What the futurist painters explain is that Italy is at the forefront of world avant-garde painting basically because the Italians have surpassed the French. By acknowledging the admirable heroism of the cubists the futurists, in a very patronizing way, boldly declare them to be an academic movement, which from an avant-garde point of view means dead. The rivalry of futurism with cubism over their revolutionary originality was further intensified by the intervention of Apollinaire and his promotion of orphism as a division of cubism that included futurism. This pushed Boccioni to declare in Lacerba in April 1913 that futurist ideas were ‘our ideas, created by us, which have sprung forth from our pure and inexhaustible Italian genius’.25 Such statements were not simply expressions of rivalry over revolutionary form; they also clearly showed the Italians’ defiance of the preponderance of the French avant-garde. The declarations and reactions of the Italian and English avant-gardes just before the First World War could be seen as proofs of Paris’s dominance, of its status as the ‘literary Greenwich meridian’ against which everyone else measured themselves.26 It is also reasonable to claim that perceptions of ‘uneven cultural development’ pushed the avant-gardists to deploy nationalism, following the model of national economic, technological and military competition of the time.27 However, this picture becomes more complicated once we look closer at the self-perceptions of the dominant culture evoked, namely the French avant-garde. The cultural superiority projected upon the French by the Italians and English alike was already feeling shaky during the first years of the twentieth century. The barnstorming of Paris by the futurists certainly played a role. Apollinaire’s reaction to the futurist Italian invasion is telling. In the article ‘La peinture nouvelle’, published in Les Soirées de Paris a few months after the 1912 futurist show in Paris, he claims the autochthonous origin of the new, modern art, which is to say that modern art is exclusively French: ‘Today’s French art was born spontaneously on French soil. And this proves the vitality of the French nation and that it is far from decadent’ (L’art français d’aujourd’hui est né spontanément sur le



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sol français. Et cela prouve la vitalité de la nation française et qu’elle est loin de la décadence).28 Apollinaire’s defensive tone with regard to the value and rigour of French cultural production transmits an anxiety that seems strange coming from what was widely thought to be the forefront of the international avant-garde, the ‘centre’ for the cultural peripheries of Italy and Britain. Indeed, this anxiety found perhaps its most paradigmatic and symptomatic expression in a debate between French and Italian avant-gardes over the term simultanéité.29 In wide circulation between 1911 and 1914 in its various forms – simultanéité, simultanéisme, simultanisme – the term connotes a perception of space inflected by time and based on contrasts. The philosophical roots of the notion should be sought in Bergson’s theories of time, very popular especially among the avant-garde,30 while the influence of recent scientific breakthroughs such as Einstein’s theory of relativity is also palpable.31 In 1913 simultanéité became a hot term of contention between the French and Italian avant-gardes, with  bitter attacks that reveal more than a simple quarrel over artistic forms. In the catalogue of the 1912 futurist exhibition in Paris, mentioned above, the group of Italian painters had insisted that the aim of their painting was ‘the simultaneity of states of mind in the work of art’ (La simultanéité des états d’âme dans l’œuvre d’art), in clear distinction from the cubists who were interested only in visual perspectives, like engineers.32 Here, simultaneity was used to describe a synergy of the dynamism and speed of modern life with the multiple and simultaneous perceptions and subsequent psychological alterations that this new reality entails. The fusion of images from memory and of present images, ‘the synthesis of what one remembers and of what one sees’ (La synthèse de ce dont on se souvient et de ce que l’on voit)33 that results in a representation of serial stages of motion, is the futurist version of simultaneity. Their understanding of the term and its all-encompassing embrace of modernity becomes even clearer in the 1914 manifesto ‘Futurist painting and sculpture (plastic dynamism)’ by Umberto Boccioni: Simultaneity is the condition in which the various elements that comprise DYNAMISM appear. It is the result of this great cause which is universal dynamism. It is the lyrical aspect of the modern conception of life, based on the speed and the contemporaneity of knowledge and communications. If we consider the various manifestations of futurist art, we see everywhere the violent affirmation of simultaneity.34

Simultanéité was thus branded by the futurists as a fundamental aspect of their aesthetic vision.

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This futurist perception differs from Robert Delaunay’s use of the term simultanéité, which connotes a theory of colour. Delaunay himself specifies that around 1912–13 he invented a kind of painting based on colour contrasts that would develop simultaneously over time, though perceived in a single moment.35 He used the term ‘simultaneous contrast’ to describe it, borrowing from an 1839 treatise by Eugène Chevreul, De la Loi du contraste simultané des couleurs. The result of this idea was his series of paintings Fenêtres, while this shift to simultanéité marked Delaunay’s dissociation from cubism, both as a group – especially Salon cubism – and as a mode of representation. ‘It was a reaction of colour to the chiaroscuro of cubism’ (C’était la réaction de la couleur au clair-obscur du cubisme), Delaunay notes in 1913, and continues: The art of today is the art of profoundness. The word ‘simultaneous’ is a term of the trade. Delaunay uses it when he works with everything: harbour, house, man, woman, toy, eye, window, book; when he is in Paris, in New York, in Moscow, in bed or up in the air. ‘The simultaneous’ is a technique. The simultaneous contrast is profoundness seen – Reality – Form – Construction, representation. Profoundness is the new inspiration. We live in profoundness, we travel in profoundness. I am there. The senses are there. And the spirit!36

For Delaunay as well, simultanéité was a way to describe and represent the multilayered texture of modern life, albeit in different terms than those the futurists used. Delaunay’s use of the term simultanéité, however, and the sanctioning of Delaunay’s method by Apollinaire in Les Peintres cubistes with his coining of the term ‘orphism’ or ‘orphic cubism’, did not sit well with the Italian futurists. ‘Orphism … is nothing but an elegant disguise of the fundamental principles of futurist painting’,37 states Umberto Boccioni in an article from March 1913, eloquently titled ‘The futurists plagiarized in France’. ‘This is how our colleagues in France pay back the solidarity, the sincerity, and the sympathy that we always had towards them. They copy us and then they pretend to ignore us!’38 For the Italians it is clear that the French avant-garde is derivative, that it arrogantly copied them and refuses to acknowledge their value and originality. The futurists were somewhat vindicated when a few months later Apollinaire, reporting on the first Salon d’Automne in Berlin organized by the magazine Der Sturm – although downplaying the futurists’ influence by claiming that Paris was the capital of the new artistic movements39 – attributed the paternity of simultaneity to them: ‘Delaunay, who by his insistence and his talent appropriated the term “simultaneous” which he borrowed



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from the vocabulary of the futurists, merits that we call him from now own with the name he signs with: the Simultaneous’ (Delaunay qui par son insistance et son talent a fait sien le terme simultané qu’il a emprunté au vocabulaire des futuristes, mérite qu’on l’appelle désormais ainsi qu’il signe: le Simultané).40 The response of the futurists was swift; in an article first published a month later in French in Der Sturm and then in Italian in Lacerba, they reclaim their dues: We see with pleasure that the influence of our powerful DISCOVERIES is spreading, mainly in France and in the work of M. Delaunay, who, obsessed with simultaneity, specializes in it, as if it were his own discovery. In addition, we are happy to note that our great friend and ally Guillaume Apollinaire – the audacious poet of Alcools – vindicates us on this topic, in his beautiful magazine Les Soirées de Paris.41

This would solicit more responses from Delaunay and Apollinaire, with the latter maintaining the dominance of France in matters of the avantgarde, as in the following article, again in 1913: However, there are not futurist painters in France in the sense of the manifestos published in Milan. I have published one manifesto that was not particularly futurist, exalting various new undertakings, by publishing it the futurists simply showed that they are determined not to be excluded from the general endeavour of modernity that has sprouted all over the world, but most particularly in France. … From an artistic point of view, [futurism] is a testimony to the impact of French painting, from impressionism to cubism included, on the entire world.42

Apollinaire makes clear that the general quest for modernity is that of one country, France, and that whoever does not want to be left behind should jump on the French bandwagon. Simultanéité thus triggered, for a few months, an international quarrel that was highly symptomatic of the ideas, hopes and fears underlying the feeling of ‘being modern’. The fight over simultanéité, peppered with very explicit national references, with questions of national dominance and of preponderance, of copying and originality, but chiefly of timeliness, epitomizes the state of antagonism between national avant-gardes in 1913. And the term in dispute is not accidental. Denoting a specifically modern perception of time and synchronicity, simultaneity seems to transcode, on the representational and conceptual level, an ideological, political and economic issue, that of a perceived belatedness, of a generalized sense of unevenness and of potential inequalities. The question of who invented simultaneity first, the French or the Italians, thus becomes not only an issue of innovation in art, but an issue of modernization, and most

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c­ rucially, a symptom of an angst over falling behind. Simultanéité as a concept brings together space, time, perceptions and affects, and compresses the feeling of synchronization that the various European avant-gardes shared with that of mutual annulation because of this very proximity. The collapse of space and time embedded in simultanéité was readily transferred into the content of the quarrel: questions of territoriality – is simultanéité French? Is it Italian? – were transposed onto questions of timeliness. The agitation over the ownership and best representation of simultanéité betrays a shared anxiety, both on the French – ‘central’ – side and on the Italian – ­‘peripheral’ – one, over their modernity. Whoever is the most simultané is the most modern, keeping ahead of all others in a very close cultural race, but perennially dogged by the fear of being left out. The one who wins this race wins a position as the metronome of modernity. David Harvey famously outlines the ‘time and space compression’ of modernity and the crucial importance of the rationalization of time, but also of international time synchronization, for the development of world capitalism and its spaces.43 A unified time was as important as the sense of a unified space for the smooth and swift operation of capitalism. It was in Paris in 1912 that President Raymond Poincaré hosted the International Conference on Time, which determined, after a long period of world confusion, a uniform method for keeping accurate time and transmitting it throughout the world.44 It was the radio antenna of the Eiffel Tower that sent on 1 July 1913 the first time signal to be transmitted simultaneously around the world, which made Paris, as one journalist remarked, ‘the watch of the universe’.45 Harvey remarks that the pervasive presence of clocks in De Chirico’s paintings is a manifestation of this new, universal, public time that supplanted private and local time.46 In fact, clocks appear quite often in literary works of the period, and specifically in poetry. Along with the visual arts, simultanéité also structured the poetry of 1913, and clocks function in certain iconic poems as concrete material symptoms of the ambivalence packed into the term. Apollinaire’s revolutionary opening poem in his 1913 collection Alcools, ‘Zone’, is structured on a principle of simultaneity: the poet recounts incidents of his life scattered across different times and places, sewn together by the continuity of the poem and its eternal present. One of these incidents stems from his visit to Prague in 1902, which also produced the fiction ‘The passerby of Prague’ (‘Le passant de Prague’). In both the poem and the story a clock on a tower in the Jewish ghetto makes a prominent appearance. Its main feature is its backward-moving hands, because the clock face is marked in Hebrew. In the poem, this backward clock is associated with rather negative feelings:



the anxious centre 99 Appalled you see yourself reproduced in the agates of Saint Vitus You were sad near to death to see yourself there You looked as bewildered as Lazarus In the Jewish ghetto the clock runs backwards And you go backwards also through a slow life47

This strange incident of unexpected self-recognition in the reflective walls of the Church of Saint Vitus in Prague leads the poet to a kind of rebirth, but a rebirth ridden with agony.48 As a time-measuring device going seemingly awry, the clock triggers more memories to be accumulated in the space of the poem. The proximity of the scene of self-recognition in a reflection to the reference to the clock might suggest that the poet experiences a second self-recognition in the Jewish clock, one that points to his own time and timeliness.49 The clock in this context seems to prompt the poet to contemplate the possibility of his own untimeliness, backwardness and unsynchronicity. Indeed, the whole poem can be read as an exploration of deregulated time, of conflict between old time – with constant reference to antiquity – and new time, measured by technology, but also as an experience of the jarring juxtaposition of personal and public perceptions of time. Personal time is expressed as the simultaneous existence of all past experiences in the present of the poem – marked by the abundance of time indicators of the now: ‘now’ (maintenant), ‘today’ (aujourd’hui), ‘here you are’ (te voici), and so forth. Public time is measured by the comings and goings of factory workers four times a day or the sirens calling them to work. It seems that these conflicts between private and public, but also between old and new, antique stasis and modern dynamism, converge upon the paradoxical dial of the Jewish clock. The specific agony created by the Jewish clock is amplified in Blaise Cendrars’s contemporaneous long poem, La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France. The epic poem, which appeared in a form of long sheet of paper that folded like an accordion – or a train schedule – and bore on its left side the dazzling abstract illustrations of Sonia Delaunay, was considered to be Le Premier livre simultané. Simultaneity here is that of the text and image, of perceptions of the visual and the verbal. The poem, however, is largely structured on notions of time and timeliness. Cendrars pays tribute to ‘Zone’ in different ways, and its reference to the clock in Prague is one of them: She’s asleep And she hasn’t taken in a thing the whole way All those faces glimpsed in the stations All the clocks

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Paris time Berlin time Saint Petersburg time all those stations’ times And at Ufa the bloody face of the cannoneer And the absurdly luminous dial at Grodno And the train moving forward endlessly Every morning you set your watch ahead The train moves forward and the sun loses time Its’ no use! I hear the bells The big bell at Notre-Dame The sharp bell at the Louvre that rang on Saint Bartholomew’s Day The rusty carillons of Bruges-the-Dead The electric bells of the New York Public Library The campaniles of Venice And the bells of Moscow ringing, the clock at Red Gate that kept time for   me when I was working in an office And my memories The train thunders into the roundhouse The train rolls along A gramophone blurts out a tinny Bohemian march And the world, like the hands of the clock in the Jewish section of Prague,   turns wildly backwards.50

This passage might describe the chaotic situation ruling train travel before the imposition of standard time, with the conflict of various local times and various railway times – in 1899, for instance, Saint Petersburg used a local time that was 2 hours, 1 minute and 18.7 seconds ahead of Greenwich51 – but it also evokes an angst over a synchronized world that does not yet seem to have taken shape. The sounds of timekeeping, different for each country, create the simultaneous soundscape of modernity. The train effects the spatial unification of the modern world, and is the technological symbol of the new worldwide simultaneous space. However, the train’s apparently seamless flow from one place to the other – ‘the train rolls along’ (le train roule) – is undermined by the jerky dissonances of different times. The cacophony of clocks around the world amplifies the disjunction between a train time which is always ahead and the sun which stays behind. Varying times, unsynchronized and relentless, break the continuum of modern space, to finally create an image of the world much like the backward clock in Prague: ‘And the world, like the hands of the clock in the Jewish section of Prague, turns wildly backwards’ (Et le monde, comme l’horloge du quartier juif de Prague, tourne éperdument à rebours). The world goes backwards despite all the formidable forward thrust of modernity – a thrust that Cendrars poignantly emulates in this breathless epic poem – and one can feel only disarray. The adverb ‘éperdument’ succinctly captures the sense of disorientation



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and dishevelment over the loss of, and quest for, synchronicity – the elusive simultanéité. A similar image is conveyed in Apollinaire’s poem ‘Chains’ (‘Liens’) chosen to open the collection Calligrammes, and published for the first time in 1913 in the journal Montjoie!  In the poem, a series of images materialize the idea of the title, either as positive links or as stifling chains. The first of these images is the sound of bells throughout Europe: Cords made of cries Sounds of bells across Europe Hanging centuries Rails binding the nations 52

As in Cendrars, the stringent bells, most likely counting time, unite Europe in the rhythmic movement of the pendular time implied by ‘hanging centuries’ (siecles pendus), at the same time that the chain of railways binds nations together. To this ominous image of bonds and bondages within Europe is juxtaposed the idea of a few free men who lend their hands: We are only two or three men Free of all chains Let’s join hands 53

A contrast between social, technological ties, increasingly modern – trains, submarine cables, bridges – and personal links – friendship, the ties of lovers – structures the poem and leads to the ambivalent conclusion: I write only to exalt you Oh senses oh cherished senses Enemies of memory Enemies of desire Enemies of regret Enemies of tears Enemies of all I still love 54

In a world that is highly interlinked in a simultaneity of time and space, the senses are overstimulated, and the poet’s task becomes to enhance this stimulation. This realm of heightened senses is the antidote for regret, longing, nostalgia and tears, in accordance with a familiar avant-garde and specifically futurist anti-sentimentality. However, the poet confesses that all these are things he still loves, and ends his poem – beginning his collection – with this line: ‘Enemies of all I still love’ (Ennemis de tout ce que j’aime encore). The key word here might be ‘still’ (encore), the last word of the poem. Residue of a different time and temporality, ‘encore’ yanks the poet away from the simultaneity of the poem and of his epoch

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and brings him back to an old temporality, in a move that might even betray some guilt. These varying times, conflicted and disjointed, together with the ghost, materialized in the Prague clock, of a failure to keep up with the time of one’s epoch, reveal a disquietude about what it means to be timely, modern and synchronized with the rest of the world, in the vast new international space of simultanéité. Even if the nationalist fervour of the Italian futurists and the English reaction to them is to be explained by an alleged realization of their own national cultural uneven development and belatedness, their main yardstick of comparison being France, it seems that the French avant-garde at the period just before the outbreak of the war was not devoid of similar anxieties. Paris would have liked to be the metronome of modernity, though it appears to be more, in the words of Cendrars, like a ‘Main station where desires arrive at the crossroads of restlessness’ (Gare centrale débarcadère des volontés carrefour des inquiétudes).55 Here in this image, the metaphor of the train station – hypothetical home for the Trans-Siberian, nesting place for the itinerant’s fantasy, seed of the possibility of voyages around the world, but also the first space where time became modern, or simultané – makes Paris a virtual place of transition. Paris is a crossroads of Europe’s anxieties, just as a train station is a crossroads of trains travelling across the world. Paris as crossroads of avant-gardes and anxieties amplifies the main anxiety of the European avant-garde at this moment: an anxiety over being timely, over being modern. The quarrel over simultaneity reveals angst on all sides, from ‘centre’ to ‘periphery’. And while the ‘peripheral’ anxieties, those of the Italian futurists, can and have been explained as a result of their perceived inequality, the anxieties of the ‘central’ Parisians cannot be explained in the same manner. It could be argued that French anxiety had more to do with the maintenance of the cultural superiority of Paris over the rest of the world, threatened by the Italians – and perennially by the Germans, more overtly so during the war. The antagonism could be summed up as a desire not to fall behind, and the ‘prize’ would be dominance on a ‘universal’ level; the winning nation sets the tone for the whole world. While the polemical texts we have read seem to confirm this description, the literary texts of such leading poets as Apollinaire and Cendrars – note that both were foreigners, both to be naturalized French thanks to their voluntary participation in the war, both to be severely wounded in the war – reveal a somewhat different story. What their antebellum poems emanate is a deeply rooted uncertainty and disorientation projected from the personal onto the public, and onto the whole world. This uncertainty



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seems to contradict the polemic assertiveness of their various paratexts as far as an unproblematic French world dominance is concerned, and unfold instead a perception of the whole world, Paris included, as a unified space but also as a disjointed place. They reveal a conflict between the ‘world’ as a projected, continuous space provided by technology and modern communications, and the ‘world’ as an experienced place, disorienting, jerky and contradictory. Both their polemics and their poetics speak ultimately for a pervasive sense of backwardness, of being late. In the polemics, they defensively refute it; in the poems, they reluctantly embrace it. Poets speak indeed for a perceived unevenness, measured against ‘others’ who threaten to be more advanced, or measured against a modern reality that seems always to be ahead. The sweeping power of this anxiety may require a questioning of assumptions about Paris’s ‘centrality’ in a core/periphery dominance model. These ‘central’ anxieties might suggest that perceptions of unevenness and inequality, and the power dynamics that ensue, cut through and across the ‘centre/­periphery’ model. Within modernism, the ‘centre’ is bound up in the anxiety of timeliness and thus perceived as unstable, even dispersed. Reliance on a nationalist perspective should supposedly disperse this anxiety and subsequently strengthen the aspirations of an imperial-like dominance that would launch the French avant-garde confidently onto the world scene. However, the poetry and the debates, read in parallel, show that as the concept of the world as a projection of a unified, ‘simultaneous’ space invades, faith in one’s position within a specific place (Paris), time (modernity’s now) and imagined community (nation) becomes uncertain. Paris, blessed and blasted by the rest of Europe, proves to be an anxious centre at the moment of its projected superiority, uncertain about its own modernity, sitting uneasy within an increasingly unified world. Taking one step back, and facing Paris and 1913 from the distance afforded by the present and the habitual scholarly approaches, France, England and Italy would seem unified as the ‘West’ or ‘Europe’, the ‘centre’ to the rest of the global ‘periphery’, that of Asia, the Americas and Africa. But this ‘centre’ is itself a site of extraordinary and productive heterogeneity, whether we see it located in Europe, or even in Paris. Paris as such a ‘centre’ is multiple and ambivalent; it perceives itself already as a ‘periphery’, projecting the ‘centre’ always elsewhere. In the modern simultané world, all nations, ‘central’ or ‘peripheral’, are perpetually ridden with angst over their relevance. The poetry and the debates of 1913 point to an imaginary in which perceptions of timeliness and synchronicity reveal a modernity that is uneven everywhere. The alleged

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and coveted centre is but a crossing of disquieting routes that ultimately link an anxious centre with an equally anxious periphery into the nexus of modernity. Notes   1. Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘The New Spirit and the Poets’, in Selected Wrtings of Guillaume Apollinaire, Roger Shattuck (trans.), p. 227, ‘L’esprit nouveau et les poètes’, in Œuvres complètes, vol. 2, p. 943.   2. Apollinaire ‘The New Spirit and the Poets’, p. 236, ‘L’esprit nouveau et les poètes’, p. 952.   3. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, ‘Italian Tripoli’, quoted in Paul Peppis, Literature, Politics, and the English Avant-Garde, p. 188.   4. Christine Poggi, Inventing Futurism, p. 1.   5. Peppis, Literature, Politics, and the English Avant-Garde, p. 188.   6. Poggi, Inventing Futurism, p. 5.  7. Ibid.  8. Peppis, Literature, Politics, and the English Avant-Garde, p. 82.  9. Ibid., p. 85. 10. Peppis, quoting Nairn, ibid., p. 5. 11. Ibid. Peppis’s argument recasts in a detailed and well-documented manner the international politics of culture as they were played out in pre-war Europe, in a much more convincing way than, for instance, in Pascale Casanova’s account in La République mondiale des lettres – an account that significantly and often ahistorically underplays the conjunction between political international developments and cultural ones. See Pascale Casanova, La République mondiale des lettres. 12. Richard Aldington et al., ‘Manifesto’, BLAST, 1 (20 June 1914), 13–14. Quoted without typography. 13. Ibid., p. 27. 14. Ibid., p. 34. 15. Ibid., p. 35. 16. Ibid., p. 27. 17. Ibid., p. 41. 18. Ibid., p. 27. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., p. 38. 21. Ibid., p. 42. 22. Martin Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution, p. 107ff. 23. See for instance Shirley Vinall, ‘Marinetti, Soffici, and French Literature’, pp. 15–38. 24. My translation. Umberto Boccioni et al., ‘Les exposants au public’, pp. 1–3: ‘Par nos recherches et nos réalisations qui ont déjà attiré autour de nous



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de nombreux imitateurs doués et d’aussi nombreux plagiaires sans talent, nous avons pris la tête du mouvement de la peinture européenne, en suivant une route différente, mais en quelque sorte parallèle à celle que suivent les Post-impressionistes, Synthétistes et Cubistes de France … Tout en admirant l’héroïsme de ces peintres de très haute valeur qui ont manifesté un louable mépris du mercantilisme artistique et une haine puissante pour l’académisme, nous nous sentons et nous nous déclarons absolument opposés à leur art … Il est indiscutable que plusieurs affirmations esthétiques de nos camarades de France révèlent une sorte d’académisme masqué.’ 25. Lacerba, 1:7 (1 April 1913), 66–68. Quoted in Vinall, ‘Marinetti, Soffici, and French Literature’, p. 18. 26. Casanova, La République mondiale des lettres, p. 127ff. 27. Peppis, Literature, Politics, and the English Avant-Garde, p. 5. 28. My translation. Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘La Peinture nouvelle’, 114. 29. See Ester Coen, ‘Simultanéité, simultanéisme, simultanisme’, pp. 52–57. 30. See Mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson, chap. 2: ‘Du Cubisme between Bergson and Nietzsche’, pp. 39–66, and chap. 5: ‘From Bergson to Bonnot: Bergsonian anarchism, futurism, and the Action d’Art Group’, pp. 135–67. 31. Coen, ‘Simultanéité, simultanéisme, simultanisme’, p. 54. 32. My translation. Boccioni et al., ‘Les exposants au public’, p. 4: ‘La simultanéité des états d’âme dans l’œuvre d’art: voilà le but enivrant de notre art.’ 33. Ibid., p. 6. 34. My translation. Umberto Boccioni, Dynamisme plastique, pp. 265–6: ‘La simultanéité est la condition dans laquelle apparaissent les différents éléments constituant le DYNAMISME. C’est dans l’effet de cette grande cause qui est le dynamisme universel. C’est l’aspect lyrique de la conception moderne de la vie, basée sur la rapidité et la contemporanéité de la connaissance et des communications. Si nous considérons les différentes manifestations de l’art futuriste, nous voyons partout s’affirmer violemment la simultanéité.’ 35. Robert Delaunay, Du Cubisme à l’art abstrait, p. 81. For a discussion of Delaunay’s simultaneity see Gordon Hughes, ‘Envisioning abstraction’. 36. My translation. Delaunay, Du Cubisme à l’art abstrait, pp. 108–9: ‘L’art d’aujourd’hui est l’art de la profondeur. Le mot simultané est un terme de métier. Delaunay l’emploie quand il travaille avec tout: port, maison, homme, femme, joujou, œil, fenêtre, livre; quand il est à Paris, New York, Moscou, au lit ou dans les airs. “Le simultané” est une technique. Le contraste simultané, c’est de la profondeur vue – Réalité – Forme – Construction, représentation. La profondeur est l’inspiration nouvelle. On vit dans la profondeur, on voyage dans la profondeur. J’y suis. Les sens y sont. Et l’esprit!’ 37. Umberto Boccioni, ‘I futuristi plagiati in Francia’, 67. 38. Ibid. 39. My translation. Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘Chronique mensuelle’, 2: ‘Les futuristes y ont pris part, mais les futuristes ressortissent aussi au mouvement artistique qui a Paris comme capitale.’

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40. Ibid., p. 3. 41. My translation. Umberto Boccioni, ‘Simultanéité futuriste’, 151: ‘Nous voyons avec plaisir se propager partout l’influence de nos puissantes DÉCOUVERTES, surtout en France et dans l’œuvre de M. Delaunay, qui, obsédé par la simultanéité, s’y spécialise, comme s’il s’agissait d’une découverte à lui. Nous sommes heureux en outre de constater que notre grand ami et allié Guillaume Apollinaire – l’audacieux poète des Alcools – nous rend entièrement justice à ce sujet, dans sa belle revue Les Soirées de Paris.’ 42. My translation. Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘Le salon d’automne’, 46: ‘Or, il n’y a pas, en France, de peintre futuriste au sens des manifestes publiés au Milan. J’en ai publié un qui n’était pas spécialement futuriste, exaltant différentes tentatives nouvelles et, en le publiant, les futuristes ont simplement montré qu’ils tenaient à n’être pas mis à l’écart de l’effort général de modernité qui s’est manifesté dans le monde entier, mais plus particulièrement en France. … Au point de vue artistique il [le futurisme] est un témoignage de l’action exercée dans le monde entier par la peinture française de l’impressionnisme au cubisme inclusivement.’ 43. David Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, pp. 201–83. 44. Stephen Kern, Culture of Time and Space, p. 13. 45. Ibid., p. 14. 46. Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, p. 267. 47. Guillaume Apollinaire, Alcools, p. 9: ‘Epouvanté tu te vois dessiné dans les agates de Saint-Vit / Tu étais triste à mourir le jour où t’y vis / Tu ressembles au Lazare affolé par le jour / Les aiguilles de l’horloge du quartier juif vont à rebours / Et tu recules aussi dans ta vie lentement’ (Apollinaire, ‘Zone’, in Œuvres poétiques, p. 42). 48. The elements of self-recognition and mirroring in the poem complicate simplistic interpretations of the backward-running clock as a way of exoticizing Bohemia by severing it from contemporary European space and sequestering it in a premodern timelessness. See Derek Sayer, Coasts of Bohemia, p. 6. 49. Apollinaire’s self-identification with and aversion towards the Jews, as well as his Dreyfusard position, are others issue to consider. See Annette Becker, Guillaume Apollinaire, pp. 174–8, who relates the common description of Apollinaire as a ‘fat Polish Jew’ (gros juif polonais) and Apollinaire’s violent reaction to it – Apollinaire was Roman Catholic. 50. Cendrars, Complete Poems, pp. 24–25. Cendrars and Delaunay, La Prose du Transsibérien, p. 1: ‘Elle dort / Et de toutes les heures du monde elle n’en a pas gobé une seule / Tous les visages entrevus dans les gares / Toutes les horloges / L’heure de Paris l’heure de Berlin l’heure de Saint-Pétersbourg et l’heure de toutes les gares / Et à Oufa, le visage ensanglanté du canonnier / Et le cadran bêtement lumineux de Grodno / Et l’avance perpétuelle du train / Tous les matins on met les montres à l’heure / Le train avance et le soleil retarde / Rien n’y fait, j’entends les cloches sonores / Le gros bourdon de Notre-Dame / La cloche aigrelette du Louvre qui sonna la Barthélémy / Les



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carillons rouillés de Bruges-la-Morte / Les sonneries électriques de la bibliothèque de New York / Les campagnes de Venise / Et les cloches de Moscou, l’horloge de la Porte-Rouge qui me comptait les heures quand j’étais dans un bureau / Et mes souvenirs / Le train tonne sur les plaques tournantes / Le train roule / Un gramophone grasseye une marche tzigane / Et le monde, comme l’horloge du quartier juif de Prague, tourne éperdument à rebours’. 51. Kern, Culture of Time and Space, p. 13. 52. Guillaume Apollinaire, Calligrammes, p. 23. Apollinaire, ‘Liens’, in Œuvres poétiques, p. 168: ‘Cordes faites de cris / Sons de cloches à travers l’Europe / Siècles pendus / Rails qui ligotez les nations’. 53. Apollinaire, Calligrammes, p. 23. Apollinaire, ‘Liens’, p. 168: ‘Nous ne sommes que deux ou trois hommes / Libres de tous liens / Donnons-nous la main’. 54. Apollinaire, Calligrammes, p. 25. Apollinaire, ‘Liens’, p. 168: ‘J’écris seulement pour vous exalter / Ô sens ô sens chéris / Ennemis du souvenir / Ennemis du désir / Ennemis du regret / Ennemis des larmes / Ennemis de tout ce que j’aime encore’. 55. Cendrars, Complete Poems, pp. 28. Cendrars and Delaunay, La Prose du Transsibérien, p. 1.

Works cited Aldington, Richard, John Arbuthnot, Lawrence Atkinson, et al., ‘Manifesto’, BLAST, 1 (20 June 1914), 11–43. Antliff, Mark, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). Apollinaire, Guillaume, ‘La peinture nouvelle: notes d’art’, Les Soirées de Paris, 4 (May 1912), 113–15. —, ‘Chronique mensuelle’, Les Soirées de Paris, 23 (November 1913), 2–5. —, ‘Le salon d’automne’, Les Soirées de Paris, 19 (December 1913), 46–49. —, Œuvres poétiques complètes, ed. Marcel Adéma and Michel Décaudin (Paris: Gallimard, 1965). —, Calligrammes: Poems of Peace and War (1913–1916); A Bilingual Edition, trans. Anne Hyde Greet, intr. S. I. Lockerbie, comm. Anne Hyde Greet and S. I. Lockerbie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). —, Œuvres en prose complètes, vol. 2, ed. Pierre Caizergues and Michel Décaudin (Paris: Gallimard, 1991). —, Alcools, trans. Donald Revell (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1995). Becker, Annette, Guillaume Apollinaire: une biographie de guerre, 1914–1918–2009 (Paris: Tallandier, 2009). Boccioni, Umberto, ‘I futuristi plagiati in Francia’, Lacerba, 7 (1 April 1913), 66–8. —, ‘Simultanéité futuriste’, Der Sturm, 4:190–191 (15 December 1913), 151. —, Dynamisme plastique: peinture et sculpture futuristes (Lausanne: L’Âge d’Homme, 1975).

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—, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla and Gino Severini, ‘Les exposants au public’, in Les Peintres futuristes italiens: exposition du lundi 5 au samedi 24 février 1912 (Paris: Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, 1912), pp. 1–3. Casanova, Pascale, La République mondiale des lettres (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1999). Cendrars, Blaise, Complete Poems, trans. Ron Padgett (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). Cendrars, Blaise, and Sonia Delaunay, La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). Coen, Ester, ‘Simultanéité, simultanéisme, simultanisme’, in Didier Ottinger (ed.), Le Futurisme à Paris: une avant-garde explosive (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2008–9), pp. 52–7. Delaunay, Robert, Du Cubisme à l’art abstrait: les cahiers inédits de Robert Delaunay (Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N, 1957). Harvey, David, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Social Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). Hughes, Gordon, ‘Envisioning abstraction: The simultaneity of Robert Delaunay’s “First disk”’, The Art Bulletin, 89:2 (June 2007), 306–32. Kern, Stephen, The Culture of Time and Space: 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). Peppis, Paul, Literature, Politics, and the English Avant-Garde (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Poggi, Christine, Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). Puchner, Martin, Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Garde (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). Sayer, Derek, The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). Vinall, Shirley, ‘Marinetti, Soffici, and French literature’, in Günter Berghaus (ed.), International Futurism in Arts and Literature (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2000), pp. 15–38.

5 1913, the year of the arrière-garde? William Marx

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as 1913 the year of the arrière-garde? For literary historians, such a provocative question may be useful. After all, if one is to remember at all the year 1913 in the history of art and literature, is it not because that year revealed those impressive landmarks of European modernism, The Rite of Spring, Swann’s Way, Apollinaire’s Alcools or Cendrars’ La Prose du Transsibérien, to the whole world? There is no use denying such a list of achievements, of course, but this should not keep us from remembering that 1913 was also the year of Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes, Paul Géraldy’s Toi et moi and Maurice Barrès’ La Colline inspirée, which cannot in any way be described as examples of progressive art. What are we supposed to do with such a heterogeneous landscape? The history of art and literature is not just about going forward: what about those who not only are left behind, but choose to go backwards and sometimes do so willingly? There is a whole world hidden behind the luscious front window of avant-gardes, and we should be able to inspect that back room of history. However, we will never be able to do so if we scholars do not want to in the first place. For there is a kind of blind spot in our history of ideas and the arts: the attention justly devoted to the avant-garde has often made us oblivious to everything else, and this threatens to distort our perception of history by dangerously unbalancing our point of view. We should be reminded of the example of Thomas Pavel, who precisely regretted the way literary history grants excessive prominence to advanced and precursive signs at the expense of remnants and continuities.1 This is the kind of balance I would like to restore here and this restoration will give us an opportunity to reflect in a general way upon

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the complex relationship, more ambiguous and consanguineous than is usually believed, of avant-gardes and arrière-gardes (rear-guards) in early twentieth-century French literature. The dividing line between the two is much more porous than one would think.2 Let us start with another forgotten landmark of 1913 – a landmark, I mean, of arrière-gardes:3 Henri Clouard’s Les Disciplines. Henri Clouard’s name is not likely to ring a bell today, unless you have come across his 1931 translation of Lucretius’ De natura rerum, which was still widely available in France in the 1990s in the Garnier-Flammarion paperback edition.4 Or you may even have read his Histoire de la littérature française du symbolisme à nos jours, published by Albin Michel for the first time in 1947 and revised in 1962.5 Clouard was born in 1889, and worked as a literary critic until his death in 1974. But he also occupied himself with the task of writing academic handbooks – for financial reasons, I presume – his most successful one being his Composition française préparée: plus de 800 sujets prêts à traiter sur les auteurs du programme, which was published by Classiques Larousse and could still be found on the shelves of high school pupils in the late 1950s.6 I always find these time collisions quite surprising, and all the more so since Clouard started his career with a real critical feat: his first book, Les Disciplines, was one of the first overviews of the Renaissance classique movement and played a pivotal role in the controversy surrounding the issue of a return to classicism during the first decade or so of the twentieth century. Interestingly, the book was published by the Librairie Marcel Rivière, a notable socialist publishing house, whose catalogue included authors like Daniel Halévy and William James while the series in which Les Disciplines appeared was called ‘Études sur le devenir social’ (‘Studies on Social Evolution’), featuring no less than the economists Georges Sorel and Vilfredo Pareto.7 The subtitle for Les Disciplines, nécessité littéraire et sociale d’une renaissance classique (Literary and Social Necessity of a Classical Renaissance) may provide some explanation for this seeming anomaly, while also testifying to the fact that, like his master Charles Maurras, Clouard professed a real admiration for the leftist Anatole France. Les Disciplines was a very optimistic work: Clouard noticed a ‘renouveau français’ (French renewal) in 1912 in every field, ‘intellectuel, politique et social’,8 and wanted to back it with an aesthetic renewal. That ‘renouveau français’ of 1912 seemed to echo the new nationalist government of Raymond Poincaré, which came to power precisely on that year. Poincaré became Président de la République in 1913, and would lead the French Republic during the First World War. Also in 1912, the Treaty of Fez was signed, by which Germany recognized the French protectorate



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of Morocco. 1912 could thus well appear to be the year of revenge for a nationalist like Clouard. And revenge was also what Clouard wanted for literature: a revenge not on Germany, but on symbolism and romanticism. In this regard, it is no coincidence that romanticism was supposed to have come from Germany. The classical reform Clouard wished for French literature also had a political meaning: it would signify the triumph of a supposedly French aesthetic and morals against a Germanrooted ideology. So did Clouard belong to the arrière-gardes? He did, beyond any doubt, on an aesthetic level, but not on a political one since, politically, his display of patriotism looked rather like he was anticipating the martial rhetoric of the war to come – unless we qualify such patriotic outbursts as remnants of the Franco-Prussian War and, thus, as typical of rear-guard fighters. This combativeness certainly did not make him part of the aesthetic avant-garde either; rather, it should be taken as a cautionary example to warn us off the temptation of applying clear-cut labels. Here another fact should be kept in mind: however paradoxical it may seem, Clouard’s enemies were not in the aesthetic avant-garde, of which he did not say a word in his polemical works. Clouard’s real enemy was André Gide and this fact may need some extended explanation and for us to travel back in time before returning to the question asked at the beginning of this chapter. We have indeed to go back a few years in order to see that avantgardes and arrière-gardes were born nearly on the same year: 1909. It was the year that Le Figaro published Marinetti’s famous ‘Manifesto of futurism’. But if we are to believe Clouard’s testimony, 1909 also ‘was completely full of the sound of controversies around neoclassical theories’ (L’année 1909 retentit tout entière des polémiques engagées autour des thèses néoclassiques).9 Two literary reviews had been founded in order to defend the classical renaissance: the Revue critique des idées et des livres in 1908, and Les Guêpes in 1909. Such a vigorous promotion of neoclassicism was bound to provoke some resistance and as a result 1909 also became the year of the anti-neoclassical reaction. According to Clouard, in La Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF  ) and L’Occident, contributors such as Francis Viélé-Griffin, André Gide, Henri Ghéon and Adrien Mithouard launched ‘a general attack against literary nationalism, the tradition of the seventeenth century and Greco-Latin humanism’ (Une attaque générale contre le nationalisme littéraire, la tradition du xviie siècle et l’Humanisme gréco-latin).10 The fact that the birth of the avant-garde coincided perfectly with the controversy around neoclassicism had nothing to do with chance. There

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were many responses to the ‘crisis of literature’ in the early twentieth century. The emergence of the avant-garde was obviously one of them, but we should not neglect the crucial role of rear-guard movements and, in particular, of the classical renaissance in such responses. For, paradoxically enough, the arrière-gardes attempted to solve the same problems as the avant-garde, even if their solutions were not similar. Arrière-gardes and avant-gardes were two complementary aspects of the same issue: both felt that literature had come to a historical dead end. This was the end of a story that had begun one century earlier, for the birth of literature at the end of the eighteenth century could not be separated from the belief that literature had a history, that it followed some development and that it contributed to the progress of the human mind. Somehow, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century, this belief collapsed. Symbolism represented the fullest development of the romantic ideal of literature: it severed radical poetic language from common language, professed to penetrate the innermost secrets of the universe and exiled the artist from society. By bringing the romantic project to its highest point, symbolism put an end to the process that romanticism had started one century earlier. Few were as aware of this as Paul Valéry: according to him, symbolism had brought the literary evolution of the nineteenth century to its logical conclusion, that is, the demonstration of the true nature of poetry. ‘Our desire made us touch the very essence of our art’, he wrote. ‘We truly deciphered the global meaning of our ancestors’ work’ (Nous touchions par notre désir à l’essence même de notre art, … nous avions véritablement déchiffré la signification d’ensemble des labeurs de nos ancêtres).11 Since symbolist poetry was able to express the very essence of all poetry, Valéry proposed nothing less than a properly Hegelian reading of literary history: symbolism materialized the absolute; history – and by that, I mean the history of literature – was finally abolished. But the end of the history of literature had two consequences. First, that it was now possible to be retrospectively aware of that history, and so everyone, from Brunetière to Lanson, from Maurras to Clouard and Valéry, could get a very precise idea of how literature developed during the nineteenth century. The well-known fact that Gustave Lanson founded the academic and scientific discipline of literary history at the end of the nineteenth century was only one aspect of the growth of a general historical conscience. The second consequence is that when you arrive at the essence of literature, you also arrive at its end and its very existence becomes endangered. ‘According to the principle that it is only in the burning house that the problem of the architectural foundations becomes



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visible for the first time’, Giorgio Agamben writes, ‘so art makes visible its original project only after reaching the extreme point of its destiny’.12 With the end of symbolism, it became possible to measure the limits of the romantic literary project, and when symbolism disappeared, literature itself disappeared. Everyone felt that something had ended. So was it really possible under these conditions to continue on the same path, as if nothing had happened and as if the path had not already been explored till its very end? The feeling of the end of history required drastic decisions, since the whole relationship between literature and time had changed while this end meant that the new century opened with a deep trauma: roughly speaking, these reactions took the form of two antithetical and radical positions. Two, because at the end of a road you have little alternative but to either go back on your steps or to jump over the fence facing you. The rear-guards made the first choice: if symbolism had failed, they had to turn back and return to the previous crossroads; that is, to the point before the fatal junction that had led precisely to symbolism. Since before the romantic junction there was only classicism, against which romanticism had defined itself, they then had to go back to classicism and become neoclassical: this was the birth of the classical renaissance movement, whose principles Clouard wanted to highlight in Les Disciplines. Pierre Lasserre had given the neoclassical movement the starting signal in 1907 with his doctoral dissertation on French romanticism, which summarized all the grievances previously accumulated by Charles Maurras against romanticism.13 Then the dispute was taken up by various literary journals: Eugène Montfort’s Les Marges, Jean-Marc Bernard’s Les Guêpes, and also the Revue critique des idées et des livres and Henri Martineau’s Le Divan, two literary reviews with which Clouard collaborated actively. This classical renaissance movement was not a unified school, but rather a nebulous group in which, despite internal disputes, they adhered to similar key principles: they promoted literature with a national and regional inspiration; they wanted to return to the classical tradition of the seventeenth century, that is, to regular poetic forms and to clarity; they were fiercely anti-symbolist. Although the Renaissance classique as a movement disappeared more or less in the turmoil of the First World War, we can find echoes of it throughout a large part of the century, from Charles Péguy to Albert Camus, from Jacques Rivière to Jean Paulhan, and in Valéry, Jean Cocteau and Jean Giraudoux. It was no coincidence then that, at the time that the classical renaissance appeared, an antagonist movement arose from those who chose to jump over the obstacle rather than to retreat. The avant-garde

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was the alternative solution to the problem of the end of the history of literature, and it was exactly symmetrical to the arrière-garde’s proposal. The ‘Manifesto of futurism’, which was published in Le Figaro on 20  February  1909, clearly defined the issues at stake. On the one hand, the impasse of history was declared complete, and the rear-guards would all agree on that point: ‘We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries! … What is the use of looking behind at the moment when we must open the mysterious shutters of the impossible? Time and Space died yesterday’ (Nous sommes sur le promontoire des siècles! … À quoi bon regarder derrière nous, du moment qu’il nous faut défoncer les vantaux mystérieux de l’Impossible? Le Temps et l’Espace sont morts hier).14 On the other hand – and this was the main difference with the arrière-gardes – futurism said that it was impossible to turn back; the past was not to be used as a last resort: We want to demolish museums and libraries … we want to deliver Italy from its gangrene of professors, archaeologists, tourist guides, and antiquaries. Italy has for too long been the great second-hand market … We want to rid Italy of the innumerable museums that cover it with innumerable cemeteries.15

Marinetti did not publish his manifesto in Paris by chance: if the literature born with romanticism found its highest achievement in France, then the solution was to come from France. The avant-gardes that came after futurism – Dada and ­surrealism – did not bring out fundamentally different solutions: all of them gave primacy to the ‘vital praxis’ (Lebenspraxis) over the artistic sphere, in Peter Bürger’s words,16 so that they could reverse completely the romantic scale of values, according to which creation and the order of the spirit should prevail over life forces and material existence. This was a brutal rupture. And indeed, the avant-garde promoted in history the same rhetorical figure that gave so much delight to the surrealists, that is, discontinuity or an abrupt change of subject: they wanted a history that would advance by ruptures; they wanted, so said a surrealist pamphlet, ‘to break the ridiculous sequence of facts’ (rompre l’enchaînement dérisoire des faits).17 The surrealist praise of coincidence entailed the abolition of literary history as a consistent syntagmatic chain. The arrière-gardes had a similar conception of history. They saw in historical processes no system, no hidden logic, no linear development at all: they agreed with the avant-garde that literary history was the triumph of chance, which was in itself the necessary condition for a resurrection



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of the past. ‘All of history’, wrote Charles Maurras in his Enquête sur la monarchie, ‘is a succession of accidents … For future events, expected or unexpected, we can only predict the unpredictable’ (L’histoire entière est une suite d’accidents … Pour les événements prochains, n’attendons que l’inattendu, ne prévoyons que l’imprévu).18 The only philosophy of history that was openly supported by the classical renaissance was a system of nudging, of an impulse that, no matter how slight, could at the right moment change the course of history, or even reverse its direction, in a way that was entirely unpredictable. Clouard said exactly this at the beginning of Les Disciplines: ‘According to a modern prejudice, the history of literature is led by fate’ (Un préjugé moderne veut que l’histoire des lettres soit conduite par une fatalité)19 while it is only the reign of the ‘unexpected’ (imprévu).20 Thus, despite appearances, avant-gardes and arrière-gardes fought the same battle against the course of literary history, since supposedly it had gone astray and they proposed to nudge it into unexpected directions. This is why the relationship with the past created so much anxiety in twentieth-century literature. The literary work that came after the supposed end of literature ought to demonstrate that it had taken that end into account. One way or another, it had to offer itself as both the result of literary history and its abolition, the result because it could not but take its place in a literary evolution since romanticism, the abolition because it had also to reject this very history that was now dead. These two antinomic positions, history’s result and history’s abolition, functioned as a source of anxiety but also of creative energy. The apparent resolution of this tension was brought forth by an aesthetic strategy: new works were to emphasize either one of these two functions, result or abolition, and to mothball more or less the other. Both arrière-gardes and avant-gardes made the conspicuous choice of abolition: the arrière-gardes promoted the aesthetics that reigned before the onset of romantic literature, the avant-gardes exploded the established literary order and tried to invent a radically unpredictable future. In fact, both refused the history from which they came and wished to create other temporal references. This is quite clear with the arrière-gardes, which disrupted the normal course of history. But it is equally clear with the avant-gardes, since the tensions introduced by the avant-garde, tensions that were both political and aesthetic, imposed a powerful but partly fictional orientation on a history that seemed to have lost any meaning. By forcing a way to the future, the avant-garde sought to overcome the crisis of literature and get out of history. Vincent Kaufmann has put it in his own way: the avant-garde authors did not have any other ambition

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than ‘the project of a total book: the Book, that is the end of the book, in every sense of the word end’ ([les auteurs d’avant-garde ne se sont] jamais mesurés à autre chose qu’à un projet de livre total: au Livre en tant qu’il représente la fin du livre, dans tous les sens du terme).21 Although the aesthetics of abolition, whether in the arrière-gardes or in the avant-gardes, were much more radical than the aesthetics of result, they were also much easier to maintain, and more obviously consistent, even if their radical nature alienated a large part of the public and confined them to the margins of the literary field. The aesthetics of result, however, were less stable ideologically. This instability was particularly obvious at the beginning of the twentieth century on the subject of the legacy of symbolism. The relationship to this movement became one of the most pressing issues of literary life. The problem was as follows: if one claimed the legacy of symbolism, was it possible to propose at the same time its abolition? This problem appeared nowhere more clearly than in the famous anecdote of the bungled start of the NRF, an event shedding a fascinating light on Clouard’s hatred for André Gide, which also explains why Gide was his only real enemy. One must remember that the inaugural issue of the NRF, in November 1908, contained an attack against Mallarmé in the guise of praise for an essay that the neoclassicist Jean-Marc Bernard had recently published against the symbolist poet. Interestingly enough, Bernard’s harsh rejection of Mallarmé was actually in his own words a rejection of the whole nineteenth century and of the modern idea of literature: according to him, ‘Parnassians and symbolists were only the tail end of romanticism’ (Parnassiens et Symbolistes ne sont que la queue du Romantisme).22 This positive review of Bernard’s essay provoked a sudden rupture between the two sides that had founded the NRF: Eugène Montfort’s group on the one hand, and Gide’s and Schlumberger’s friends on the other. Gide and his friends published a new first issue a few months later, in February 1909, which cancelled in some way the previous one. Beyond the question of Mallarmé, the debate was in reality about the place that should be reserved for symbolism within the NRF: was the review going to reclaim its symbolist heritage or was it to take up the banner of newness, so clearly advertised in its title, through the refusal of symbolism, which had become rather cumbersome? A comparison of the two editorials is very instructive from this point of view. In November 1908, the first unsigned editorial emphasized the end of the symbolist movement: The writers who gather today in the Nouvelle Revue Française belong to the generation that followed directly symbolism in literary history.



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[The founders want to highlight] the new contribution that should distinguish today’s writers from yesterday’s. Though this review is not precisely, as one can see, a ‘review of young people’, it is nevertheless a young review now open to the rising generation.23

This 1908 inaugural issue explicitly wanted to differentiate itself from the symbolist generation. The NRF was then on the side of abolition. On the contrary, in February 1909, Schlumberger’s editorial insisted on the ‘filial dependence’ (dépendance filiale) on Mallarmé and on the ‘admiration’ (admiration) for his work.24 Most of all, Schlumberger wanted to distance himself from the neoclassical arrière-garde, which he called a ‘retrograde reaction’ (réaction rétrograde): We should be thrilled with the ever-growing enthusiasm towards our seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but only after some reservations. For too many people, this movement is but a sign of vertigo and dread. Whether some repudiate systematically our whole romantic literature, or some others, out of ignorance, dismiss everything strong and exquisite that the end of the nineteenth century has left us, for all of them this is because of an anxiety of feeling lost, of being separated by an empty chasm from the solid glories of French culture.25

In short, for the new NRF of 1909, the movement towards abolition ought not to prevail over the acceptance of the result: one had first to accept the romantic and symbolist heritage if one wanted to get over it. The question had been resolved: the complex and ambiguous classicism defended by the NRF saw in symbolism a useful experiment, one which had been worth trying and from which much could be learned. This is exactly what Clouard blamed Gide for in 1913: ‘Mr André Gide has been the master of ceremonies in the wedding of modernity and traditionalism … His work as a critic is woven, so to say, with antinomies’ (M. André Gide a conduit les cérémonies du mariage de la modernité avec le traditionalisme … son œuvre critique est comme tramée d’antinomies).26 Gide and the NRF demonstrated that another way was possible, a way that was neither the one of the avant-garde nor of the arrière-garde. It was neither the way of a pure aesthetics of result, which would not be sustainable under the regime of modernity. The NRF wanted instead to preserve a precarious balance between result and abolition, as the only serious alternative to those who had made the choice of radical abolition: it was the classical modern, or what we call now, modernism. Clouard’s hostile reaction to the NRF ’s stance in 1913 calls into question the apparent antagonism of the avant-garde and the arrière-garde. It

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shows that the fundamental literary problem in the early twentieth century was that of post-symbolism, which could be phrased as follows: who would dig with most efficiency the grave of symbolism?27 On this point, the attitude of the avant-garde and the arrière-garde was relatively simple, as they both proposed the same solution: the abolition of literary history altogether. On the contrary, the NRF undertook to reconcile two apparently antithetical positions: result and abolition. The existence of the NRF thus demonstrates that another way was possible, the way of synthesis, which was neither avant-garde nor arrière-garde, and which was further from both the avant-garde and the arrière-garde than the avant-garde itself was from the arrière-garde. For the avant-garde and the arrière-garde formed merely the complementary sides of the same abolitionist response to the post-symbolist crisis. And so we have the answer to the question I asked at the beginning: was 1913 the year of the arrière-garde? If it was the year of the avant-garde, it could not but be the year of the arrière-garde too. This symbiotic relationship of the avant-garde and the arrière-garde as reactions to symbolism, but also as visions of history, was absolutely crucial for the physiognomy of French modernism as it was being shaped in 1913, and it is the key element that helps us understand the central role the NRF would play in the following decades. Notes   1. Thomas Pavel, La Pensée du roman, pp. 27–31.   2. On the arrière-gardes, see William Marx (ed.), Les Arrière-gardes au XXe siècle; Marx, ‘20th century: Century of the arrière-gardes?’.   3. Henri Clouard, Les Disciplines.   4. Lucretius, De la nature.   5. Henri Clouard, Histoire de la littérature.   6. Henri Clouard, La Composition française préparée.   7. Some books published by the Librairie Marcel Rivière before 1913: Daniel Halévy, Luttes et problèmes: apologie pour notre passé, un épisode, histoire de quatre ans (1911); William James, Précis de psychologie (Psychology, 1900), trans. E. Baudin and G. Bertier (1909). In the ‘Études sur le devenir social’: Georges Sorel, Les Illusions du progrès (1908); Sorel, Réflexions sur la violence (1910); Vilfredo Pareto, Le Mythe vertuïste et la littérature immorale (1911). On the Librairie Marcel Rivière, see Richard Lebaron, ‘La librairie Marcel Rivière’.   8. Clouard, Les Disciplines, p. 2.   9. Editor’s note in Jean-Marc Bernard, Œuvres, vol. 2, p. 210, n. 1. The author of this note is either Henri Clouard or Henri Martineau. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.



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10. Ibid. 11. Paul Valéry, ‘Avant-propos à Connaissance de la déesse’, p. 1275. 12. Giorgio Agamben, L’uomo senza contenuto, p. 176: ‘Secondo il principio per cui è solo nella casa in fiamme che diventa visibile per la prima volta il problema architettonico fondamentale, così l’arte, giunta al punto estremo del suo destino, fa diventare visibile il proprio progetto originale.’ 13. Pierre Lasserre, Le Romantisme français. 14. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, ‘Manifeste du futurisme’, pp. 152–3. 15. Ibid. ‘Nous voulons démolir les musées, les bibliothèques … nous voulons délivrer l’Italie de sa gangrène de professeurs, d’archéologues, de cicérones et d’antiquaires. / L’Italie a été trop longtemps le marché des brocanteurs … Nous voulons débarrasser l’Italie des musées innombrables qui la couvrent d’innombrables cimetières’. 16. Peter Bürger, Theorie der Avantgarde, p. 67. 17. La Révolution d’abord et toujours! (1925). 18. Charles Maurras, Dictionnaire politique et critique, vol. 2, p. 227. 19. Henri Clouard, Les Disciplines, p. 7. 20. Ibid., p. 9. 21. Vincent Kaufmann, Poétique des groupes littéraires, p. 11. 22. Jean-Marc Bernard, ‘Stéphane Mallarmé et l’idée d’impuissance’, 191. 23. La Nouvelle Revue Française, 1 (November 1908), 1: ‘Les écrivains que réunit aujourd’hui ‘la Nouvelle Revue Française’ appartiennent à la génération qui dans la chronologie littéraire suivit immédiatement le symbolisme … En rapprochant les énergies précédemment éparses des romanciers et des poètes ayant débuté depuis dix ou douze ans, c’est l’espoir des fondateurs de cette revue qu’ils aideront à se dégager plus tôt, tant à leurs propres yeux qu’à ceux de la critique, l’apport nouveau qui doit distinguer les écrivains d’aujourd’hui de ceux d’hier. Si cette revue, on le voit, n’est pas précisément une “revue de jeunes”, elle n’en est pas moins une jeune revue dès à présent ouverte à la génération qui s’élève.’ 24. Jean Schlumberger, ‘Considérations’, 6. 25. Ibid., 10: ‘S’il faut se réjouir d’un élan toujours plus marqué vers nos dixseptième et dix-huitième siècles, ce n’est qu’après réserves faites. Ce mouvement n’est, chez un trop grand nombre, qu’une marque de vertige et d’effroi. Que les uns renient par système toute notre littérature romantique, ou que les autres, par ignorance, négligent tout ce que la fin du dix-neuvième siècle nous a laissé de fort et d’exquis, chez tous c’est l’anxiété de se sentir perdus, séparés par un gouffre vide, des sûres gloires de la culture française.’ 26. Clouard, Les Disciplines, pp. 135, 140. 27. On the problems of literary memory in the twentieth century, see my article ‘Transmission et mémoire’.

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Works cited Agamben, Giorgio, L’uomo senza contenuto (Milan: Rizzoli, 1970). Bernard, Jean-Marc, ‘Stéphane Mallarmé et l’idée d’impuissance’, La Société nouvelle, 2:2 (August 1908), pp. 177–95. —, Œuvres, 2 vols, ed. Henri Clouard (Paris: Le Divan, 1923). Bürger, Peter, Theorie der Avantgarde (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974). Clouard, Henri, Les Disciplines: nécessité littéraire et sociale d’une renaissance classique (Paris: Librairie Marcel Rivière, 1913). —, La Composition française préparée: plus de 800 sujets prêts à traiter sur les auteurs du programme (Paris: Henri Didier, rev. edn, 1956). First published in 1935. —, Histoire de la littérature française du symbolisme à nos jours, 2 vols (Paris: Albin Michel, rev. edn, 1959–62). First published in 1947–49. Kaufmann, Vincent, Poétique des groupes littéraires (avant-gardes 1920–1970) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997). Lasserre, Pierre, Le Romantisme français: essai sur la révolution dans les sentiments et dans les idées au XIXe siècle (Paris: Mercure de France, 1907). Lebaron, Richard, ‘La librairie Marcel Rivière, entre science, économie et politique’, Les Cahiers du Centre de recherches historiques, 31 (2003), https://doi. org/10.4000/ccrh.295 (accessed 6 June 2020). Lucretius, De la nature, trans. Henri Clouard (Paris: Flammarion, 2nd edn, 1991). First published by Librairie Garnier Frères in 1931. Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, ‘Manifeste du futurisme’, in Giovanni Lista (ed.), Le Futurisme (Lausanne: L’Âge d’Homme, 1979). First published by Le Figaro on 20 February 1909. Marx, William, ‘The 20th century: Century of the arrière-gardes?’, in Sascha Bru et al. (eds), Europa! Europa? The Avant-Garde, Modernism and the Fate of a Continent (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009), pp. 59–71. —, ‘Transmission et mémoire’, in Jean-Louis Jeannelle, Marielle Macé and Michel Murat (eds), L’Histoire littéraire des écrivains (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2013), pp. 125–37. —, (ed.), Les Arrière-gardes au XXe siècle: l’autre face de la modernité esthétique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004). Maurras, Charles, Dictionnaire politique et critique, vol. 2, ed. Pierre Chardon (Paris: À La Cité des Livres, 1932). La Nouvelle Revue Française, 1 (November 1908). Pavel, Thomas, La Pensée du roman (Paris: Gallimard, 2003). Schlumberger, Jean, ‘Considérations’, La Nouvelle Revue Française, 1 (February 1909), pp. 9–11. Valéry, Paul, ‘Avant-propos à Connaissance de la déesse’, in Œuvres 1, ed. Jean Hytier (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), pp. 1269–80.

Part II

1913, ‘French’ and ‘modernism’ in question

Introduction

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his section considers French modernism in its dimension as ‘French’ – what does the term actually mean? In the French language? Produced in France? Created by French nationals? – and also in its dimension as ‘modernist’ – what qualifies a work as modernist and what does not? How is the modernism litmus test passed or failed? For the latter set of questions, two novels, Le Grand Meaulnes and Les Caves du Vatican, are measured against their own modernist ambitions and interlocutors, to suggest that the line dividing a modernist from a nonmodernist aesthetic is thin and elusive. On the other hand, the meaning of ‘French’ is discussed in relation to transnational practices in 1913, as well as contemporary conceptualizations of global modernism. The four chapters that follow raise questions around national, transnational, global and coeval modernisms (Bush), networks, circulation and antagonisms (Becker), but also challenge the definition of modernism (Ellison and Prince). Christopher Bush, in his chapter, ‘A modernism that has not yet been: Untimely Segalen’, takes his cue from Victor Segalen’s collection Stèles and its close connection to China, to consider French modernism in global terms. Segalen’s literary and historiographic indeterminacy reveals the extent to which standard literary histories rely on a spatial imaginary of geopolitical unevenness that articulates itself along the terms of ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’. Bush argues in a way complementary to Rentzou in Chapter 4: Segalen is neither here nor there, his work is in French but not ‘of France’ as a closed-off nation, and is one of many ‘multipolar’ actors of modernism. Framing French modernism as largely and already transnational and global in its scope, practice, circulation

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and impact, Bush proposes French-language modernism – distinct from the French nation-state or the Francophonie – as a lens through which to think modernism in global terms that is more effective than Anglophone modernism. Similarly, David Ellison starts his chapter ‘On situating French modernism: the strange location(s) of Le Grand Meaulnes’ with questions about the ‘Frenchness’ of French modernism and the validity of the category altogether. Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes is thereafter discussed as a limit case for modernism, but also as a text that is both French and in some peculiar ways non-French. Like Bush, who discusses the uncategorizable character of Segalen’s and others’ modernism, which falls between the cracks of existing national or even transnational categories, Ellison argues that Le Grand Meaulnes is one of those texts that seems not to be contained by either the category of ‘modernist’ or ‘French’. Ellison concludes that although Alain-Fournier’s novel shares many characteristics with other seminal modernist texts by Mann, Rilke and especially Proust, it is not itself a modernist text. In the same vein, Gerald Prince discusses André Gide’s work, and specifically Les Caves du Vatican, which he finished writing in 1913, as the author’s first attempt to innovate and push the contours of the novelistic genre. Prince’s chapter, ‘Les Caves du Vatican and the real novel’, follows Gide’s efforts to go beyond symbolist abstractions, naturalist minutiae or psychological descriptions in order to invent the modernist novel. Prince concludes that Les Caves du Vatican fails to accomplish this and proves to be another limit case of modernism, especially compared to Gide’s next novel, Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1925), which achieves what Les Caves did not. Ellison and Prince engage in a discussion that extends Benhaïm’s analysis of the ‘false starts’ of modernism in Chapter 1 of this book, and pose questions pertaining to the categorization and critical evaluation of modernist works. Finally, the last chapter in this part presents a panorama of the European avant-garde just before the outbreak of the First World War. In her chapter, ‘1913, between peace and war: Chagall’s Homage to Apollinaire and European avant-garde’, Annette Becker considers the network of the avant-garde in Europe, ridden with conflict and antagonism, almost as a prefiguration of the war to come. This chapter discusses the painting Homage to Apollinaire, by Marc Chagall, as a synthesis of the above dynamics, real, virtual and occult, tying together the European avantgarde. Marked by the military metaphor of its denomination, the avantgarde evolves at a time of continuous war, the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5, the Balkan Wars in 1912–13 and the First World War in 1914–18.



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Artistic exchanges map a world marked by competition, imitation, insults exchanged face to face or at a distance conjointly with the strong impulse to create and promote universal and humanist art beyond national borders. This precarious balance of contrasting tendencies concludes a part of the book largely dedicated to exploring tensions, often unresolved, within French modernism.

6 A modernism that has not yet been: untimely Segalen Christopher Bush

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o many of the wonders said to make the year 1913 wondrous are emphatically untimely, resisting identification with any single date: begun earlier, finished later, or belatedly discovered, to speak nothing of the more enigmatic ways in which their time is lost and found again. To say this untimeliness is a mark of their ‘modernity’ merely begs the question, or rather a series of questions. Whose modernity and whose modernism? How can we benefit from the heuristic specificity of 1913 as an historical marker? In what senses are all works with that date contemporaries? And what is at stake in the term ‘French modernism’? The self-consciously exploratory character of the term ‘French modernism’ in relation to which these works of 1913 are here gathered should be taken as a provocation to rethink what modernism as a whole was, what it is for us today, and what it might still, in the future, be. In what follows, I will try to demonstrate the value of thinking about both the rubric of French modernism and the specificity of 1913 in global terms – more specifically that the periodization of any modernism is inseparable from the geopolitical imaginaries that have denied the coevality of contemporaneous forms of modernist cultural production.1 I take as my point of departure a formally inventive work from circa 1913 that was programmatically not of its time and place and is rarely described as modernist: Victor Segalen’s Stèles, a collection of French and Chinese prose poems first published privately in Beijing in 1912 and then in an expanded edition in 1914. The dates are right and the emphasis on formal experimentation also right, so it is revelatory that his work, and others like it, have so infrequently been included in the story of modernism. Evoking the inscriptive surface of the Chinese stone ­monuments

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after which they are named (‘steles’ translates beī 碑), each poem is framed by a cartouche, the upper right-hand corner of which features a sort of epigraph in Classical Chinese. These epigraphs –  generally excerpts from ancient Chinese sources, from one to a dozen or so characters in length – have various relationships to the French below them: summarizing maxim, ironic commentary, false lead. There is much to be said about the complex intertextual, sometimes interlingual play between the epigraphs and the prose poems themselves.2 Here I will focus on the choice of the ‘stele’ as a model for a work resistant to history. The dense, Mallarméan preface elaborates on the meaning of the work’s formal elements, most strikingly the Chinese texts that project a haughty autonomy and timelessness: ‘They disdain being read. They do not call for voice or music … They do not express; they signify, they are’ (Ils dédaignent d’être lus. Ils ne réclament point la voix ou la musique … Ils n’expriment pas; ils signifient; ils sont).3 The written words may not express, but their form signifies, making them of a piece with the monumental form that might ordinarily be understood as merely their material support: the stele. Indeed, the Chinese stele functions not as subject matter but as formal model (une sorte de genre poétique), with the literary form allegorizing the numerous functions of the monumental form: memorial, funereal, ritual, geographic, horological. The stele’s historical function as a kind of sundial, for example, is retained by each poem to the extent that each ‘still measures a moment; but no longer a moment of the sun, projecting its finger of shadow. The light that marks it falls not from the Cruel Satellite and does not turn with it … the star is intimate and the instant perpetual’ (mesure encore un moment; mais non plus un moment du soleil du jour projetant son doigt d’ombre. La lumière qui le marque ne tombe point du Cruel Satellite et ne tourne pas avec lui … l’astre est intime et l’instant perpétuel).4 The literary stele still marks time, but not that of hours and days, nor even, it seems, a time in which there can be any change at all. Typically, such formalist uses of China are interpreted as truly disconnected from history: either something to be critiqued as an orientalist evacuation of the original content or, less commonly these days, the triumph of form over history. In many respects, Stèles encourages a formalist reading and indeed in his notebooks Segalen is quite explicit that China does not, at the end of the day, interest him very much: ‘It is not at all a matter of saying what I think of the Chinese (to be honest, I don’t think anything of them at all), but of what I imagine about them … in a living and real form beyond all reality, that of the work of art’ (Il ne s’agit point de dire ce que je pense, des Chinois –  (je n’en pense à vrai dire



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rien du tout) – mais ce que j’imagine d’eux-mêmes … sous la forme vive et réelle, au-delà de toute réalité, de l’œuvre d’art).5 What significance, then, can we give to the cultural and historical particularity of a form used to figure, precisely, the negation of these particularities? As should already be apparent, this assertion of aesthetic autonomy has a very strong cultural-historical accent. Why, after all, a Chinese stele and not, for example, a Grecian urn? What is the difference? Segalen’s work opens with a peculiar statement about where and when the poems belong, foregrounding the question of their own time and place, their origin and destination. ‘Sans Marque de règne’, the first poem of the first section, evokes the idea of founding a dynasty but explicitly refuses to be of a particular historical moment: ‘Let this, therefore, be marked with no reign … with no date and no end’ (Que ceci donc ne soit point marqué d’un règne … sans date et sans fin).6 The poem’s speaker vows to be ‘attentive to what has not been said; obedient to what has not been promulgated; bowed down before what has not yet been’ (Attentif à ce que n’a pas été dit; soumis par ce qui n’est point promulgué; prosterné vers ce qui ne fut pas encore). The poems to follow, we are told, will ‘declare reigns without year, dynasties without accession, names without people, people without names’ (dénoncer des règnes sans années, des dynasties sans avènements, des noms sans personnes, des personnes sans noms).7 Yet something interesting emerges towards the end, when, in order to define the un-dynasty his own text now founds, the speaker catalogues the dynasties he will not describe: ‘Let this, therefore, be marked with no reign; – neither that of the founders Xia, nor the legislators Zhou, nor the Han, nor the Tang, nor the Song, nor the Yuan, nor the Great Ming, nor the Qing, the Pure, whom I serve with passion, Nor the last of the Qing whose glory named the Guangxu period’ (Que ceci donc ne soit point marqué d’un règne; – ni des Hsia fondateurs; ni des Tcheou législateurs; ni des Han, ni des Thang, ni des Soung, ni des Yuan, ni des Grands Ming, ni des Tshing, les Purs, que je sers avec ferveur, / Ni du dernier des Tshing dont la gloire nomma la période Kouang-Siu).8 The conclusion explicitly identifies the work’s true subject as that great Segalenian theme, the Self – that ‘unique era … which every man founds in himself and salutes’ (cette ère unique … que tout homme instaure). But although the text’s lyric-I will, in many respects, only talk about himself throughout the collection, he always does so by means of China. It is not just the opening poem’s explicit conclusion that matters, then, but also how the poem gets there. While each of the particular Chinese dynasties is negated, each also persists in the text as negated  –  and this negated material is, of course, the most

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important part of any such recusatio, as when a political spokesperson says, ‘I’m not going to talk about our opponent’s numerous scandals. Neither his numerous infidelities, nor the frequent DUI arrests, nor …’, and so on. Although Segalen formulates his poetic project through a negation of China, he does so, it is worth noting, in ways that continue to testify to that empire’s particularity, here expressed in terms of its own historical logic – a series of dynastic names rather than the pseudo-universal numbers of the Western calendar – 1913, for example. The formulation of the negation is also crucial: the subject of this text is not not China, but is rather a China that never was (qui ne fut pas).9 The predicate of nonexistence does not imply that China is therefore insignificant and might be replaced with something else – much less just anything else; rather, we have a specific subject – China – with a specific quality – having not existed, or having not yet been (qui ne fut pas encore). A book that was so extensively not about Puritan New England, Augustan Rome or 1950s Algeria, for example, would be not about China in a very different, and much more straightforward, sense. Here China is inscribed in the work: to be read, like the Chinese atop the page, legible with just a little effort. Critics have largely read Segalen’s relationship to China either in a straightforwardly historical way – how much did he actually know about China and what did he get right? – or in a dehistoricizing, allegorical mode in which China is merely the vehicle of the tenor of the Self. This latter approach is justified by, for example, the author’s own admission to his friend Henry Manceron that in this book ‘the transfer between the Empire of China and the Empire of the Self is constant’ (le transfert de l’Empire de Chine à l’Empire du soi-même est constant).10 The instructions for the reader would seem to be, in effect: ‘wherever you see “China”, read “Self”’. But this again raises the question, ‘Why China?’ If Segalen had, for example, composed a collection of poems that opened by negating a series of Canadian prime ministers, we would read the text quite differently. Just as the lyric-I of Stèles is constituted by China, in however negated a form, so too its programmatically formalist aesthetic requires history. Stèles consistently demonstrates its author’s scholarly knowledge and direct experience of Chinese history. One of the few European modernists to have studied Chinese in any meaningful sense, Segalen was in China for three extended stays, the first from 1909 to 1913, during which time he wrote or began numerous literary and scholarly works. These included not only Stèles, but also his best-known novel, René Leys, published posthumously in 1922 but written mostly in 1913, drawing on both extensive research about and Segalen’s own experience of the 1911–12



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Xinhai Revolution.11 1913 was the year Sun Yat-sen fled to Japan, part of the shift in power that allowed Yuan Shikai to become the first president of China (1912–15) and then, briefly, the self-declared ‘emperor’ ­(1915–16). Segalen was hardly removed from these events, given the fact that he served as the personal physician to one of Yuan’s sons starting in 1912.12 The first edition of Stèles was published that same year, but the earliest versions of the opening poem were written in 1910, the year Segalen was part of a delegation to the Xuantong Emperor – Puyi, ‘the last emperor’, who would abdicate in 1912. Thus, although the poet of Stèles writes as an emperor who never was and about an empire that never was either, the accession and succession of Chinese emperors was, for Segalen, anything but the stuff of fairy tales. The Guangxu Emperor, for example, is not a random illustrious name taken from history, but someone who had died just two years before Segalen wrote ‘Sans Marque de règne’. Segalen’s China is unreal neither in the sense that it is wholly fabricated nor that it is stitched together from orientalist clichés, but rather because it is a programmatic and precise negation of – perhaps a kind of aesthetic counter-revolution against – a specific history, some of which he had witnessed first hand. I have elsewhere dwelt on the function of China as negated example, the ways in which even ostensibly formalist uses of China draw texts back into history, specifically the history of the West’s relationship to China.13 Here I want to expand on the ways in which the cultural particularity of examples, even in their negated or formalist uses, have consequences for the periodization and the mapping of Segalen’s work, but also ‘French modernism’ more generally. There are three obvious ways in which Segalen’s untimeliness might be historicized. The first is to think of Segalen as a kind of late symbolist, a contemporary of Paul Claudel and Paul Valéry, rather than of Tristan Tzara or Max Jacob. The overtly Mallarméan qualities of Segalen’s writing and his regular references to Jules de Gaultier, Remy de Gourmont, Joris-Karl Huysmans and Claude Debussy could be used to reinforce a reading of him as an essentially fin-de-siècle figure. The second possibility is to describe all the ways in which Segalen ‘anticipates’ postcolonial discourses, most extensively in the unfinished Essai sur l’exotisme. Support for this approach has been found in the admiration of such writers as Abdelkebir Khatibi and Édouard Glissant. The third and least common possibility is to read him in the context of contemporaneous modernists, typically Ezra Pound and Guillaume Apollinaire.14 Admirers of Segalen’s work might be tempted to argue for its ‘modernity’. That is, to argue that it has missed out on the honour of being

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­considered modernist because it has mistakenly been read as late symbolist or proto-postcolonial. This is true as far as it goes, but rather than arguing for Segalen’s admission to the club of modernism I want to consider what his exclusion tells us about the criteria for membership. His work’s untimeliness is largely an effect of displacement and is therefore best understood in terms other than those of historicism – too late, too soon or right on schedule. Each of these historicizing gestures – Segalen’s work as belonging to an over-living past, anticipating a future or contemporaneous with a familiar modernism – translates the uncertainty of that work’s location and culture into pseudo-historical terms that deny the c­ oevality – more on that term below – of other parts of the world circa 1913. That is, rather than using 1913 France as a context for thinking about Segalen’s work, I would instead like to take Segalen’s work as a point of departure for rethinking 1913 as a moment that might define a ‘French modernism’. 1913 means something different in a geographically expanded field. This expanded field should not be a contentless gesture of moral largesse, but something with specific interpretive consequences. For example, it becomes more difficult to treat China as just a timeless fairyland whose relationship to French literary modernity can only be allegorical or ironic when one considers the meanings of 1913 with respect to China. To begin, there is the extent of French connections to East Asia by this time. Paul Claudel had been in China from 1895 to 1909 and Saint-John Perse would arrive in 1916, both of whose diplomatic work was related to the ongoing colonial project of ‘Indochina’ – Marguerite Duras was born in Saigon in 1914. 1913 was also the year that Tsuguharu Fujita – later known as Léonard Foujita – arrived in Paris, where he quickly fell in with Matisse and Léger as well as fellow émigrés Picasso and Gris. And so on. More to the point, China was itself undergoing its own revolutions in literature, art and politics. 1913 was the year that Hu Shih read ‘A few don’ts by an imagiste’ in Chicago, subsequently making it the template for his own ‘Some modest proposals for the reform of literature’ (1917), one of the major documents of Chinese literary modernity.15 1913 was the year Liu Haisu founded the Shanghai Academy of Pictorial Arts (Shanghai Meizhuan), which art historian Michael Sullivan has called ‘the true birthplace of modern art in China’.16 It was in 1913 that the newly formed Chinese Ministry of Education issued a communique that included one of the first uses in Chinese of the word meishu –  a reverse loan from the Japanese bijutsu, coined in 1872 to translate les beaux arts. That communique was written by Lu Xun, who had only recently begun publishing fiction but would soon emerge as the most



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important i­ntellectual of his generation and who is today broadly considered the most important Chinese writer of the century. It was in March of 1913 that Yuan Shikai – for whom Segalen was working at the time – ­welcomed to Beijing Ariga Nagao, best known in Japan as the pre-eminent legal scholar of his era, but generally known in the West only as a former student of Ernest Fenollosa whose name appears on the cover page of Pound’s Cathay – based on manuscripts Pound would receive from Fenollosa’s widow in 1913. Finally, it is important to emphasize the extent to which East Asian cultural modernity was not simply about the reception of Western modernism, but included diverse and innovative reinventions of tradition, just as in the West.17 As it happens, Segalen’s time in China coincided with several of the most important moments in the history of what is known as the Stele School of calligraphy (beixuepai). Defined by an emulation of pre-Tang calligraphic styles associated with inscriptions and ­monuments – as opposed to the elegant styles of ink on paper – the Stele School dates from the mid-Qing period. The school’s stylistic preference for the archaic reflected a growing interest in pre-Tang Chinese inscriptions and was therefore tied, on the one hand, to debates about the distant origins of ‘Chinese’ culture, and, on the other hand, to the latest discoveries of what we would today call archaeology. An important bridge between the calligraphic practice of the Stele School and this scholarly field of ‘antiquarianism’ – as jinshi, literally ‘metal and stone’, is often translated – was Wu Changshuo (1844–1927), whose major work, Stone Drum Script (shiguwen), based on a ninth century BCE inscription on stone, was produced in 1915 and who had had his first one-man show just a year earlier, in a Shanghai restaurant.18 As Shana Brown writes in her study of jinshi, ‘in China as well as in many parts of the world nothing was so modern as antiquity’.19 Indeed, the late history of the Stele School is inseparable from debates about Chinese modernity in China and beyond. The author of ‘the most systematically elaborated theory on the Stele School ever attempted’, Extended Paired Oars for the Boat of Art (Guang yizhou shuang zi, 1891) was Kang Youwei.20 A monarchist, Kang would later be understood as conservative by May Fourth writers, but at the turn of the century he was very much a reformer, one whose aesthetic arguments on the value of making the old new again were widely understood as charged with political implications. Since he was supported by the above-mentioned Guangxu Emperor, Kang had to flee China when the ‘One Hundred Days Reform’ movement failed and the Empress Dowager Cixi effectively came to power in 1898.

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Kang’s first stop was Japan, where he discovered a group of artists sympathetic to the Steles School’s stylistic innovations and theories, a group whose influence would peak precisely in the early decades of the twentieth century.21 The major critical monument of this trend is the 1914 Discourse on Six Dynasties Calligraphy (Rikuchō shodō ron), a kind of translation of Kang’s 1891 work, by Ideo Reizan (1859–1935) and Nakamura Fusetsu (1866–1943). Fusetsu had studied art in France from 1901 to 1904 with Jean-Paul Laurens and is today most widely remembered as one of the pioneers of Western-style painting in Japan, but he was also an important advocate of calligraphy, specifically the archaizing style of the Steles School, at a time when calligraphy was being pushed out of the category of art altogether by new definitions of art derived from European beaux arts –  the bijitsu/meishu neologism referred to above.22 It was in 1912 that Fusetsu founded the Ryūminkai (Sleeping Dragon Society) – which took its name from his 1908 masterpiece ‘Ryūminjō’ – and in 1913 that Fusetsu, together with Kojika Seiun, published History of Chinese Painting 支那繪画史, Shina Kaigashi, ‘the first book-length general history of Chinese painting produced in Japan’.23 As Aida Yuen Wong has extensively argued, Fusetsu’s goal in advocating for the steles style was not to preserve tradition unchanged, but precisely to give calligraphy the status of art (bijutsu), in a sense for the first time. In this light, Fusetsu’s advocacy for an archaic style of calligraphy is consonant with his advocacy of Western-style painting and his influence on modernizing trends in haiku, including the work of Shiki, whose aesthetic ideal of shasei (roughly, ‘drawing from life’) was taken from Fusetsu. In sum, considering the East Asian context indicates not only that China was very much engaged in its own literary modernity and that this involved extensive interactions with the West – which one would expect – but also that this modernity involved complex recuperations of tradition, including some of the very material and styles with which Segalen was involved at the same time. Segalen was not a solitary traveller at the frontiers of exploration, encountering an otherwise slumbering dragon, but one of many, many writers, artists and intellectuals circulating between East Asia and Europe, actively reinventing what China, including traditional China, might mean.24 In the particulars, this tells us something about Segalen and China, but it also raises broader questions about what might be included in the French part of French modernism. After all, Segalen spent little of his adult life in France; Stèles was neither written nor initially published there, and almost none of his numerous and varied works are set in or are about France. Nor can the work be considered Francophone in any



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c­ onventional sense. What are the broader historiographic consequences of including someone like Segalen in the formation of a French modernism? Who are his contemporaries? More broadly, rather than thinking of Segalen’s travels as an exception, we might instead think of them as a French doubling of the extensive patterns of cosmopolitan circulation and exchange that are now readily associated with ‘other’ modernisms, but should also be recognized as central even to the already canonical literature of the period. This is not to deny the existence or even the importance of strongly localized ­modernisms – Woolf ’s London or Hughes’s Harlem – but is to deny them normative status. As Effie Rentzou writes in Chapter 4 of this volume, with respect to Paris, ‘the ‘centre’ is itself a site of extraordinary and productive heterogeneity’. We can start with Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki, Samuel Rosenstock or Frédéric-Louis Sauser – the last a Swiss who began writing in Russia, wrote his breakthrough work in New York, and whose contribution to the canon of 1913 is a collaboration with Sarah Ilinitchna Stern, born in what is now Ukraine and moving to France only at the age of twenty. None are natives of France and three of the four are not native speakers, but none would be considered Francophone by most definitions. What of Fabian Avenarius Lloyd, born in Switzerland, died in Mexico? Is the work he wrote in French, ‘French’? France’s historical avant-gardes are not entirely immigrant movements, but neither are they the pure products of Paris only belatedly adopted by those on or from the periphery. If this is true of such pioneers as Apollinaire, Tzara, Cendrars, Delaunay and Cravan, then it clearly becomes even more the case through the 1920s and 1930s as the avant-garde movements with French connections became increasingly international. Rather than starting with the alignment of language, citizenship and site of production as the implicit norm, we might instead define French literature circa 1913 as including all literature written in French at that time. We then get a picture of French modernism as having always been transnational, in a variety of senses. Mafarka le futuriste (1909), for example, is just one of Marinetti’s early works that was originally written and published in French and it was arguably the 1912 Galerie Bernheim-Jeune exhibition in Paris that launched futurism as an international art movement. Indeed, the ‘futurist manifesto’ circulated primarily in French, starting with the 1909 publication on the front page of Le Figaro, which is still often referred to as the first publication.25 Ruben Dario’s critical April 1909 review of the manifesto, ‘Marinetti and futurism’, refers to its author as ‘an Italian poet writing in French’.26 It was as a reporter for

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the anti-Dreyfusard L’Intransigeant that Marinetti witnessed the bombing of Adrianople –  during the First Balkan War, November 1912–March 1913  – which would become the subject of Zang Tumb Tumb, not published as a book until 1914, but in journals in pieces before that. I am not suggesting that futurism be relabelled a French rather than an Italian movement, but simply that much of ‘Italian’ futurism took place in French and that this was indispensable to its becoming an international movement. Without broadcasting itself in the international language of art and literature, the futurist founding might otherwise have remained a car crashing into a drainage ditch with no one there to hear it. French was, if anything, more important as a medium of communication for Latin American writers, from modernismo through the avantgarde. Mariano Siskind has recently offered a important discussion of some of the ways in which, for modernistas, French culture represented less a particular national culture – to which they might have a more or less admiring, fetishizing relationship – than the form of universal civilization. For them, being modern, civilized and cosmopolitan sometimes involved acting French, but only contingently so. Guatemalan Francophile Enrique Gómez Carillo, for example, wrote extensively in French and even some of his Spanish-language writings were published in Paris. He was ultimately feted by the Académie Française and awarded the Legion of Honour. More famously, the Chilean Vincente Huidobro arrives in Paris in 1916, publishing L’Horizon carré the next year, ‘Tour Eiffel’ in 1918, indeed continuing to compose in French through the 1920s and beyond, even after leaving for Madrid and eventually returning to Chile. But there are also many less well-known works, such as 1922s Haikais, a collection of vertically printed haiku by Mexican poet Rafael Lozano. A bit further afield for most scholars of European literature would be the essays in French by Japanese surrealist Takiguchi Shūzō and the early essays on the phenomenology of time by Kuki Shuzo – who shared his ideas with – and wrote a letter of introduction to Martin Heidegger for – his French tutor, a young normalien named Jean-Paul Sartre.27 Two decades later but still well within the conventional dates of modernism, Chinese modernist Dai Wangshu published original French poetry in the Cahiers du Sud.28 Such a perspective can also help recover works that are in almost any sense indisputably French and yet are seldom brought into broader discussions about modernism, for example Jean Paulhan’s 1913 Les HainTenys merinas, a translation of 153 of the more than 3,000 Malagasy proverbs he collected while in Madagascar from 1908 to 1910. Paulhan’s work has ties to many of the figures I have already mentioned. In his



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correspondence from Madagascar, Paulhan regularly waxed enthusiastic about Segalen’s first publication Les Immémoriaux – published under the pseudonym ‘Max Anély’ in 1907. More importantly, we know that the work was read and admired by numerous figures of the Parisian avantgarde, including Apollinaire and Breton, no later than 1918 and later by Duhamel, Jacob and Supervielle, among others.29 The book was also praised by the leader of the French haiku movement of the 1910s and 1920s, Paul-Louis Couchoud, who corresponded with Paulhan and played an important role in the 1920 special issue of the Nouvelle Revue Française on haiku, which included original haiku by Paulhan, PierreAlbert Birot and Paul Éluard, among others. A whole corpus of French-language modernist literary production thus risks falling between the cracks because it is neither ‘French’, nor Francophone, nor does it belong to some other nation. My point here is not to chide the gatekeepers of the canon – real or imagined – but rather to highlight the character of this specific form of exclusion and, more importantly, to begin concretely imagining what the consequences of an expanded field would be. In terms of my own point of departure, such an expanded field provides a very different context for thinking about Segalen’s work. Rather than thinking in terms of an essentially binary logic in which France somehow, extraordinarily, encounters China, it would be more productive –  and indeed more accurate – to think of Segalen’s work as one iteration among many of a multipolar global modernism. So, yes, it is useful to think of Segalen in relation to Claudel or Saint-John Perse, for example, or, in different ways, in relation to Apollinaire or Pound. But it is also important to recognize Segalen as a contemporary of Hu Shih and Nakamura Fusetsu. The label ‘exoticism’ is not sufficient to explain what it meant for a French writer to be deploying Chinese on or about 1913. Segalen’s work was neither late nor early, but it was also not on time with respect to the 1913 of the literary histories we have. Rather, it is of a moment that is not explained by, but helps to explain, a category like ‘French modernism’. In sum, rather than understanding ‘modernism’ as a primarily AngloAmerican category that might be extended to or imposed on French literary history, I understand it as a tendentially global phenomenon that certainly included a lot of things written in English – and French – but not in such a way that the Anglophone need have absolute definitional force. Worries about doing violence either to a French corpus or to the integrity of an Anglophone critical concept become less serious if we consider modernism a more widespread phenomenon. To me, calling this larger field ‘modernism’ is the simplest solution, even if one subject

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to misunderstandings. I have used words like ‘expanded’ or ‘extended’ here and there, but they are somewhat misleading in that my point is not to extend the Anglophone sense of ‘modernism’ to encompass the whole world – and then situate ‘French’, for example, within that. Rather, I am making a case for an historically supported recognition of the extent to which Anglo-American modernism – so often treated as modernism tout court – was constituted by chronological and geographic segregations that were very often defence mechanisms designed to fend off the recognition of simultaneities, similarities and even direct connections that were there all along. In this sense, it is a question of restoring modernism, albeit in a form that has not yet defined a scholarly field. Indeed, far from subordinating modern French literature to an Anglo term, I would suggest that the Francophone – in the sense I am suggesting here – provides a better optic than the Anglophone for viewing modernism in more global terms. It could not all have been in one language, of course, but it was surely French that was, historically, the international language of modernism. I am not implying that it was a ‘universal’ language in any strong sense, simply a very widely used one, the linguistic medium most often shared by, say, Turkish, Cuban and Japanese modernists. It is in and around the French language that one would have to look for anything like a working consensus definition of modernism in, for example, East Asia, in Southern, Central and Eastern Europe, or the Caribbean and Latin America –  including Brazil – as well as much of the Ottoman and Arab world – and no doubt elsewhere. What is common to these places is not H. D., D. H., T. S. or even E. P., but a far more Continental, mostly French, corpus.30 To be clear, the goal of such a claim is not to capture modernism for French patrimony, but precisely to dis-identify French-language literature from the French nation-state –  or  even the institution of Francophonie.31 Emphasizing the idea of French as a modernist medium of communication should not entail being naive about how and why French spread, but neither can a strictly colonialism-based account of French’s travels account for works like Stèles, much less Japanese surrealism, or Mexican poets writing haiku in French.32 Such an understanding of the ‘French’ in French modernism raises corresponding issues about contemporaneity and periodization. In the specific case of Segalen, I argued for the productivity of considering his work as part of a global French-language corpus, but also emphasized how this should provoke a different sense of Segalen’s contemporaries. Similarly, it is worth thinking about separating the French-language corpus more generally from ‘the Hexagon’ only if we also work on the



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historiographic challenges of thinking not just in terms of chronological contemporaneity –  already no small thing! – but with a richer – and more accurate – sense of coevality. Dates are important, but one must also be open to changing the spatio-temporal valences inflecting how they are read, the charges that cause them to be labelled as ahead of their time or behind the times, peripheral or central, cosmopolitan or provincial. The point, after all, is not to enter new data into the spatiotemporal spreadsheet of the modernism we know, but to construct new layouts. I have turned to the idea of coevality to demonstrate that thinking about literature in more global ways is not primarily a matter of quantitative inclusion – a larger canon or a longer period – but rather of qualitative interpretive changes.33 Simply accepting historical simultaneity as contemporaneity – in the most empirical, straightforward sense, even – changes the picture of 1913, for example.34 As we have seen, in China, 1913 – beginning in the year of the Rat, ending in the year of the Ox – is not exclusively or even primarily the year before the Great War. 1913 was, in Japan, Taisho 2. It was the year that, in a coup d’état, Ismail Enver came to power in the Ottoman Empire – without which presumably no Balkan Wars, no bombing of Adrianopolis (present-day Edirne, Turkey) and therefore no Zang Tumb Tumb. Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize for Literature. It was also an important turning point in the Mexican Revolution, which Apollinaire’s first published calligram, ‘Lettre-Océan’, repeatedly references, not as a curiosity, but as a source of immediate personal concern since his brother was in Mexico at the time – hence the need for the ‘Ocean Letter’.35 Such events exert a strong gravitational pull on historicization, figuring a cultural artefact as early, late or of its time. It is this sense of historical pull and push, I argue, that makes these various references to the global events of 1913 neither just discrete facts of chronological ­simultaneities – a list of world-historical trivia – nor simply a recognition that, for example, non-European cultures have a different sense of ­history – it is hardly news that 1913 means something different in India or Peru than in France. My point, rather, is to take seriously the possibility that these ‘other’ histories might provide relevant contexts, and have meaningful interpretive consequences, for familiar material. Recognizing coevality upsets the centre/periphery distinction because it suggests that ‘other’ perspectives are not trivial or optional, that Tagore’s Nobel Prize, the Taisho political crisis or the Natives’ Land Act might be essential to thinking of 1913 as an historical moment, even if one’s research is not particularly focused on India, Japan or South Africa.

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As with the example of Segalen and China, then, it is less a question of including the non-West in the story of modernism and more of including European –  including French  – modernism in the world. That is, the ultimate agenda of this kind of approach is not the inclusion of the non-European in the story of modernism, but rather the development of ways to read even Europe in less Eurocentric ways. In conclusion, I want to reassert that we should be thinking about modernism in more global terms not so that we can reinvent it into something more politically correct or to align with some contemporary obsession with the ‘global’, but because this is what it was all along. While the provincialization of Europe is in a sense a political project attempting to create a future that does not yet exist, it is also an act of historical recovery. It is as much a matter of being correct as of being right; indeed the latter depends on the former. And yet it is a strange project, this preservation of something that does not yet exist, this dual imperative to be creative and faithful, what Segalen might have called a ‘trahison fidèle’. For if in many respects the modernist era knew itself to be global in ways that have largely been downplayed, if not ignored, by scholars until relatively recently, surely there are other senses in which modernism’s global character was unknowable to itself, capable of being revealed only with historical distance and with ways of knowing alien to 1913. If, echoing Langston Hughes, we wish to let modernism be modernism again, this is at the same time to wish for a modernism that has not yet been (qui ne fut pas). ‘French modernism’ will have been global or it will not have been. Notes   1. I discuss the term ‘coevality’ in greater detail through the chapter. As for ‘global modernism’, I use ‘global’ simply to indicate the dramatically transnational scale and interconnectedness of modernism, of which the field of Modernist Studies has only recently begun to take stock in a serious way. ‘Global’ is thus meant to indicate not the inclusion of everything everywhere, but rather that no place is to be excluded a priori simply because ‘we [sic] can’t do everything’.   2. For detailed annotations and a more thorough account of the layout and physical production of the book, including the status of the Chinese as ‘epigraph’, see Victor Segalen, Stèles, available at www.steles.org/ (accessed 6 June 2020).   3. Victor Segalen, Stèles, pp. 60–1. It is worth recalling here that the Chinese appears untranslated in every edition Segalen approved, so a certain deliberate opacity is built into the text. Segalen kept careful lists of exactly who



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would receive each copy of the limited first edition and almost none of these dozens of anticipated readers knew a word of Chinese. The dual page numbers here and in subsequent citations refer to the en face French/English pagination of the Billings and Bush edition.  4. Segalen, Stèles, pp. 58–9.  5. Victor Segalen, Œuvres complètes, vol. 1, p. 942.  6. Segalen, Stèles, pp. 74–77. ‘Steles Facing South’, i.e. the direction the emperor traditionally faces; all the poems in this section are in the mode of imperial decrees.   7. Ibid., pp. 74–5. Timothy Billings has translated the epigraph as: ‘Promulgation of the heart of the dynasty without dynastic accession’, pp. 292–3.  8. Ibid., p. 77 and p. 76 (French original). See pp. 75–7 and pp. 74–6 in the original French for the whole poem.  9. From the earliest notes, the project of Stèles is described in terms of a desire to write about both an empire and an emperor that have not (yet) been. See Christopher Bush, Ideographic Modernism. 10. Victor Segalen, Correspondance, vol. 1, p. 1246.   11. Segalen collected extensive materials on the revolution and imagined various projects related to them; these can be found in the Revolution dossier of the critical edition of René Leys. For a brief, readable overview of the complex events of the period, see the relevant chapters in Spence. 12. In July of 1913, Segalen returned to France to make preparations for an archaeological expedition, then went back to China in October of that same year, via the Trans-Siberian railway. In 1914, he again returned to France to fight in the Great War, making his final trip to China in 1917–18. 13. See Bush, Ideographic Modernism, pp. xiii–xxxi. 14. Pound’s ‘In a station of the metro’, his first statement about haiku, and his discovery of the Noh were all in 1913, the year he received Ernest Fenollosa’s manuscripts from the latter’s widow, Mary Fenollosa. See David Ewick, www.themargins.net/ (accessed 6 June 2019). 15. For more information, see Kirk Denton, Modern Chinese Literary Thought. 16. Quoted in Tang Xiaobing, Origins of the Chinese Avant-Garde, p. 22. 17. Thanks to Stephanie Su (University of Colorado, Boulder) for suggesting several of the secondary sources touched on in this section of the chapter. 18. See Aida Yuen Wong, Parting the Mists, pp. 80–1. 19. Shana Brown, Pastimes, p. 9. 20. Aida Yuen Wong, ‘Reforming calligraphy’, p. 135. 21. The style had initially been brought to Japan in the 1880s by Yang Shoujing, one of whose Japanese pupils, Kusakabe Meikaku (1838–1922), is generally considered the founder of the Japanese stele school. Meikaku corresponded with Wu Changshuo from the 1890s through the 1920s. 22. Indeed, as Wong notes, in the 1914 Taishō Exhibition, ‘calligraphy was shown together with a miscellany of “industries”, including a gas bathtub, the first escalator, and several live geishas’ (‘Reforming calligraphy’, p. 131).

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23. Wong, Parting the Mists, p. 45. It was as a correspondent in China during the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–95) that Fusetsu began actively collecting rubbings and other antiquities, which would later form the core of the first Chinese calligraphy museum in the world. Among these were fragments of the ‘Twenty works of Longmen’, stone inscriptions among the most famous works of Chinese calligraphy and which he copied for many years, including while in France. 24. On Segalen’s theory of exoticism as a critique of modernity, see Harootunian, preface to Victor Segalen. 25. A tract version had circulated in both Italian and French in December 1908 and January 1909. 26. Ruben Dario, Selected Writings, p. 465. 27. On Taniguchi, see Linhartová, Dada et surréalisme. On Kuki Shuzo and Sartre, see Light, Shuzo Kuki and Jean-Paul Sartre. 28. See Gregory Lee, Dai Wangshu; Michelle Loi, Poètes chinois. 29. See Michael Syrotinski, Defying Gravity. 30. This is not to deny the international importance of Anglophone writers, just their definitional status. 31. I am proposing something akin to ‘littérature-monde’ only in the sense of imagining ‘la langue libérée de son pacte exclusif avec la nation’, but I do not accept the historical narrative according to which the postcolonial be understood as the emergence of a twenty-first century cosmopolitanism and am, similarly, less sanguine about ‘l’esprit’ being beyond all concern about centre and periphery. Similarly, as my examples suggest, I do not embrace its emphasis on the novel as a universal form. The manifesto-like ‘Pour une “littérature-monde” en français’ was first published in Le Monde in 2007; see www.lemonde.fr/ livres/article/2007/03/15/des-ecrivains-plaident-pour-un-roman-en-francaisouvert-sur-le-monde_883572_3260.html/ (accessed 6 June 2020). 32. For an accessible overview of the history of French, see Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow, Story of French. 33. Times are ‘coeval’ when they are understood as both (a) happening at the same time, chronologically, and (b) of the same historical moment. If coevality is denied, non-Western modernisms become almost an oxymoron: either they come before modernism proper (for example, Japanese woodblock prints as an inspiration for some of the innovations of impressionism) or they come after, in which case they are belated and derivative (Japanese impressionism). 34. For a similar but more extended discussion of 1919, see Christopher Bush, ‘Context’. 35. See Gallo’s brilliant reading of ‘Lettre-Océan’ in Mexican Modernity. The poem might also serve to remind us of Apollinaire’s later friendships and encounters with Mexican writers and artists in Paris (including Diego Rivera and haiku poet Lozano; see Willard Bohn, Apollinaire). This was all decades before the 1936 and 1938 trips to Mexico of Artaud and Breton, respectively, which are more easily incorporated into narratives of diffusion.



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Works cited Bohn, Willard, Apollinaire and the International Avant-Garde (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997). Brown, Shana J., Pastimes: From Art and Antiquarianism to Modern Chinese Historiography (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2011). Bush, Christopher, ‘Context’, in Eric Hayot and Rebecca Walkowitz (eds), A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), pp. 75–95. —, Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). Dario, Ruben, Selected Writings, ed. Ilan Stevens (New York: Penguin, 2005). Denton, Kirk, Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893–1945 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996). Dussert, Eric (ed.), Au fil de l’eau, suivi de Haikais (Paris: Mille et Une Nuits, 2011). Ewick, David, www.themargins.net/ (accessed 6 June 2019). Fabian, Johannes, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). Gallo, Ruben, Mexican Modernity: The Avant-Garde and the Technological Revolution (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). Harootunian, Harry, preface to Victor Segalen, Essay on Exoticism, trans. Yaël Rachel Schlick (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). Lee, Gregory, Dai Wangshu: The Life and Poetry of a Chinese Modernist (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1989). Light, Stephen, Shuzo Kuki and Jean-Paul Sartre: Influence and Counter-Influence in the Early History of Existential Phenomenology (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007). Linhartová, Vera, Dada et surréalisme au Japon (Paris: Publications Orientalistes de France, 1987). Loi, Michelle, Poètes chinois d’écoles françaises (Paris: Librairie d’Amérique et d’Orient, 1980). Marx, William, ‘The 20th century: Century of the arrière-gardes?’, in Sascha Bru et al. (eds), Europa! Europa? The Avant-Garde, Modernism and the Fate of a Continent (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009), pp. 59–71. Nadeau, Jean-Benoît, and Julie Barlow, The Story of French (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2006). Paulhan, Jean, Cahiers Jean Paulhan: Jean Paulhan et Madagascar; (1908–1910) (Gallimard: Paris, 1982). Rabaté, Jean-Michel, 1913: The Cradle of Modernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007). Segalen, Victor, Œuvres complètes, vol. 1, ed. Henry Bouillier (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1995).

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—, Stèles, eds and trans. Timothy Billings and Christopher Bush (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan, 2007). —, René Leys: édition complète (Paris: Chatelain-Julien, 2009). —, Correspondance, 3 vols, ed. Henry Bouillier (Paris: Fayard, 2004). Siskind, Mariano, Cosmopolitan Desires: Global Modernity and World Literature in Latin America (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014). Spence, Jonathan, The Search for Modern China (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991). Syrotinski, Michael, Defying Gravity: Jean Paulhan’s Interventions in Twentieth-Century French Intellectual History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998). Tang Xiaobing, Origins of the Chinese Avant-Garde: The Modern Woodcut Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). Wong, Aida Yuen, Parting the Mists: Discovering Japan and the Rise of National-Style Painting in Modern China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006). —, ‘Reforming calligraphy in modern Japan: The six dynasties school and Nakamura Fusetsu’s Chinese “stele” style’, in Joshua Fogel (ed.), The Role of Japan in Modern Chinese Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), pp. 131–53.

7 On situating French modernism: the strange location(s) of Le Grand Meaulnes David R. Ellison

Prelude (or possibly Postlude: the reader will decide) In what follows, I have attempted to read Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes (1913) as one of the numerous texts appearing shortly before World War I, which one cannot classify as modernist. Throughout my discussion of the novel, I have tried to situate it aesthetically and historically, with a strong emphasis on what the text itself says. For this purpose, I have not branched out into biographical considerations or what the French would call la petite histoire. The temptation to do so is always there for the literary critic, all the more so in this case since Henri Fournier – whose pseudonym as a writer was Alain-Fournier – was one of Jacques Rivière’s best friends. They met at the lycée Lakanal in Sceaux, just outside of Paris, in ‘khâgne’ class. Henri’s sister, Isabelle, ended up marrying Jacques. Henri and Jacques remained close until the former was killed at the beginning of the First World War, on 22 September 1914. Jacques Rivière is known today not so much for his writings as for the fact that he was the general editor of the Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF  ) during its initial heyday, a person who, along with André Gide, could be called, with reason, le contemporain capital. That he knew and sponsored the important writers of his day can be surmised by a quick look at the sixty-ninth volume of the review (1  June  1919), which contained excerpts from the following: André Gide, Paul Claudel, Marcel Proust, Paul Valéry, Léon-Paul Fargue, Georges Duhamel, Henri Ghéon, Albert Thibaudet and André Lhote. In his valuable but gossipy overview of Rivière’s work and contributions to the NRF, Jean Lacouture does not hesitate to assert, in writing of Henri Fournier and Jacques Rivière,

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that these men ­witnessed ‘the germination of modern art and modern sensitivity’.1 But here resides the problem, at least as regards the current volume of collected essays. What is the relationship between the word ‘modern’ and the word, used more often in the English-speaking world than in France, ‘modernist?’ I am not sure my own chapter answers this question, but if there is some thread linking Baudelaire to Proust to Beckett, it probably has something to do with the rise and eventual decline of what we call modernism. My own contribution is modest: I am only focusing on Le Grand Meaulnes. But, as I try to demonstrate in my reading, there is no way, in literary studies, to focus on one thing without going beyond boundaries towards broader horizons. This moving beyond unites readers more than anything else, and justifies an investigation into whether there was such a thing as French modernism. The question of a specifically French modernism Neither of the two words that unite this collection of essays – ‘French’ and ‘modernism’ – can be considered clear and unambiguous. Of course, we think we know what ‘French’ is: it relates to the country of France, which has a long history and which schoolchildren learn to draw as a hexagon. In the recent, sad burning of the roof of Notre-Dame in April 2019, French billionaires stepped in to finance the rebuilding of the cathedral. No doubt they were motivated, at least in part, by patriotism, and thought that their gesture would be understood by other French people. Yet, at the same time, Notre-Dame is internationally known and prized, and not only by Roman Catholics. That which is quintessentially French, that which stands at ground zero of French culture, is at the same time part of a larger whole, part of what, for lack of a better term, we can call Western civilization. Something similar can be said of what the contributors to this volume will try to define as French modernism: the texts that fit, or do not fit, the mould, are both essentially French and also defined by the borders surrounding them. These texts are French, but they gesture to an outside. Perhaps they cannot be completely contained by either the term ‘French’ or certainly ‘modernist’. In other words: the very juxtaposition of the words ‘French’ and ‘modernist’ is not an easy one, not something we can take for granted. Let us begin with what appears to be a simple example: the beautiful artists’ book entitled La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France (1913), an extensive work meant to be unfolded in which word and image force the reader into a difficult but fruitful back-and-forth movement.



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This combination of text and image can be said to be modern in its design and in its conception, but a great deal more labour would be necessary to call it modernist. And its authors are described as: ‘Sonia Delaunay (French, from Russia) and Blaise Cendrars (French, from Switzerland)’. Are these artists ‘French’, or did they come to France, become part of and become subsumed within a larger whole we call, for purposes of convenience, ‘French culture?’ Is France, and is that which is French, an identifiable landscape, or could it perhaps be thought of, in Proustian terms, as a point of convergence, the kind of star the Proustian narrator refers to in the concluding pages of Le Temps retrouvé when he describes Gilberte’s daughter, Mlle de Saint-Loup, not so much as an identifiable person with distinctive character traits, but rather as a crossroads in which the paths of multiple destinies come together? Could we possibly replace the expression ‘human beings’ in the passage that follows with ‘artists’ or ‘works of art’ and think of ‘France’ and that which is French as the kind of crossroads in which artists and artistic works, themselves conceived of as moving, travelling, metamorphosing, come together via multiple paths: ‘Was she [Mlle de Saint-Loup] not, as indeed most human beings are, like one of those “stars” in forests, crossroads where roads converge which have come, as they do in our lives, from the most diverse starting-points? They were numerous enough, in my case, the roads leading to Mlle de Saint-Loup and radiating out again from her’ (‘Comme la plupart des êtres, d’ailleurs, n’était-elle [Mlle de Saint-Loup] pas comme sont dans les forêts les ‘étoiles’ des carrefours où viennent converger des routes venues, pour notre vie aussi, des points les plus différents? Elles étaient nombreuses pour moi, celles qui aboutissaient à Mlle de Saint-Loup et qui rayonnaient autour d’elle’).2 In my treatment of Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes, I shall be considering the notions of ‘France’ and ‘Frenchness’ in this vein while I consider the question of this work’s place – or lack of place – within a modernist aesthetic. But first, a few words on the notion of ‘modernism’ itself, along with a disclaimer and an explanation. The most ambitious attempt to date to grasp modernism across various art forms and geographical spaces is doubtless that of Peter Gay, in his 2007 book Modernism, The Lure of Heresy: From Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond. Gay’s elegant and readable account of modernism will probably enchant the general reader and exasperate the specialist, but I think the two criteria he chooses according to which a work of art may be considered modernist are worthy of our attention: ‘the lure of heresy’ on the one hand, and ‘the commitment to a principled self-scrutiny’ on the other.3 If one takes these two criteria seriously, one wonders

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whether Le Grand Meaulnes qualifies as a modernist work. On the surface, perhaps not, in that it is a sometimes awkward combination of traditional adventure novel and late romantic lyrical subjectivity. Hence my disclaimer. In what follows, I will be devoting my attention to a work that may not ‘fit’, that one may decide not to locate within the landscape of French modernism. Especially in contradistinction to Proust, whose novel certainly fits the second criterion – ‘a principled self-scrutiny’ – and whose textual praxis, despite its foundation in nineteenth-century aesthetics  –  Baudelaire, Wagner, Balzac, Flaubert – has been considered ‘heretical’ enough by writers as intelligent and inventive in their own right as Samuel Beckett to merit that adjective as well. But I am going to write about Le Grand Meaulnes nevertheless, in part because I think it worthwhile to consider the fateful year of 1913, when both AlainFournier’s novel and the first volume of Proust’s Recherche appeared, as a threshold year, a year in which some works crossed, and others did not cross that threshold. Although I shall be concentrating on Le Grand Meaulnes, Proust’s vast novel and its aesthetics will always be in the ­background of my analyses. After the disclaimer, the explanation. Some years ago, I wrote an article, initially published in a French journal, entitled ‘La “Belle âme”: Le Grand Meaulnes et l’esthétique du romantisme’, which I later translated and included as a chapter in a book of mine called Ethics and Aesthetics in European Modernist Literature: From the Sublime to the Uncanny. When invited to contribute to the present collection, I reread myself and found that I agreed with my general thesis up to a point, but could no longer completely espouse that thesis now. For this reason, I propose to take up the salient points of the book chapter first, then move on to a self-critique in which what is primarily at stake is the problem of situating Alain-Fournier’s novel, in part because its ‘Frenchness’, being a bit too obvious, or excessively foregrounded, coexists with references to a cultural otherness that, in my opinion, needs to be taken seriously – especially if one is willing to consider Le Grand Meaulnes as a serious work of art – serious, especially in its dramatization of the overlap and commingling of ethical and aesthetic dimensions within its pages. But before moving on to Le Grand Meaulnes per se, I should like to make a strategic digression – the significance of which should appear clearly by the end of my chapter – via a canonical text of European modernism which originally appeared in 1912, just one year before Alain-Fournier’s novel: Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, which is woven – but more skilfully and more masterfully – on the same skein of ethical and aesthetic issues that underlies, in my view, AlainFournier’s apparently more modest novel of adolescence.



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Beauty and morality at the dawn of the twentieth century And has not form two aspects? Is it not moral and immoral at once: moral in so far as it is the expression and result of discipline, immoral – yes, actually hostile to morality – in that of its very essence it is indifferent to good and evil, and deliberately concerned to make the moral world stoop beneath its proud and undivided sceptre?4

In the second chapter of Death in Venice, when describing the artistic evolution of the protagonist, Gustav von Aschenbach, the narrator emphasizes the increasing importance of formal rigour and discipline in the writings of an author who has been canonized before his time by an admiring public. This meditation on the creative act not only establishes the foundation of our future appreciation of Aschenbach’s psychodrama – the protagonist will undergo a progressive undermining of the aesthetic order he has imposed on his life – but merits, in itself, the scrutiny of the reader. In the passage quoted above, Thomas Mann raises a question which stands at the centre of modernist aesthetics: namely, what is the relation between the work of art viewed as formal construction and the focus of that same work on moral or ethical matters? In Mann’s metaphorical formulation, form has a Janus-like ‘double face’. As the result of the labour of transformation which the artist imposes on his materials, form seems to express or incorporate a certain discipline. At the same time, however, the narrator of Death in Venice affirms that it is in the very nature of form to be ‘indifferent’ to the moral ideas that it envelops and encloses in beautiful semblance, that it forces to bow under its all-powerful ‘sceptre’. The rhetoric of the passage makes clear that literary art can be considered dangerous insofar as it can tend or turn towards the ‘second face’, that of moral indifference. This observation has prophetic value in the specific case of Death in Venice, a cautionary tale that carries within its formal elegiac beauty a story of complex moral significance. This work, whose surface mirrors the brilliant light of the Venetian cityscape, rests on an interior drama, a darkly illumined stage where Apollo and Dionysus struggle over the mastery of the protagonist’s mind and body. Of special interest is the fact that the content of Aschenbach’s story, the evolution of his life in Venice, consists of the revenge of the subterranean moral drama over the beautiful forms he had previously imposed on his carefully choreographed existence. In other words, one might wonder whether it is in the nature of form to master only apparently – that is, by the trompe-l’oeil of beautiful appearance – that force emerging in the combat between the moral and the immoral, and whose principal quality

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is to always return, to call into question the aesthetic stability of the text. One must ask whether the moral as such – the force of moral ideas in their difficulty, their complexity – allows itself to be subsumed within the aesthetic. This question will be at the centre of the reading I originally proposed of Le Grand Meaulnes and to which I return now. Reading and interpreting Le Grand Meaulnes in the shadow of romanticism For those readers who do not know the text, or who have not opened Le Grand Meaulnes recently, just a few words of clarification or reminder before proceeding to my analysis. Alain-Fournier’s novel is set in the region of Sologne, an isolated area of central France best known for its hunting and fishing, at the antipodes of Parisian culture – in much the same way that Proust’s Beauce stands in stark contrast to the capital, with its aristocratic salons. The story begins with the arrival of Augustin Meaulnes at the country schoolhouse which is also the home of François Seurel – the narrator – and his parents. Meaulnes and François are depicted as opposites throughout the narrative: Meaulnes is active and adventurous; François is the passive observer. In part one, Meaulnes has his most important adventure. Purely by chance, he discovers an old chateau in which a curious festivity is taking place. It is in this ‘Mysterious Domain’ that Meaulnes meets not only Yvonne de Galais, the woman he will eventually marry, but also, fleetingly, Frantz de Galais, her eccentric brother, whose fiancée – Valentine – is strangely absent from the carefully orchestrated fête étrange. The two loose strands of the narrative – Meaulnes’s pursuit of Yvonne, and Frantz’s pursuit of Valentine – do not come together until the third and final part of the novel, when the reader discovers retrospectively that Meaulnes, in his search for Yvonne, encounters Valentine and has an amorous liaison with her. This relationship is described by the narrator as sordid and disillusioning. When Meaulnes finally marries Yvonne towards the middle of part three, his happiness is interrupted by Frantz, who, appealing to an oath made by the friends during their adolescence, asks Meaulnes to leave his wife and domestic tranquillity in order to find Valentine. Meaulnes does so, no doubt in expiation of his ‘sin’. When he returns, having accomplished his mission, he finds that his wife has died in childbirth, leaving behind a daughter, who then becomes Meaulnes’s companion for possible future adventures. The central interpretive difficulty of Le Grand Meaulnes, from 1913 until the present day, is that of the considerable stylistic differences between



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part one – the daydream atmosphere of the Mysterious Domain, its melancholy charm, which owes much to Gérard de Nerval’s Sylvie – and parts two and three – a ‘fall’ into commonplace reality. The novel seems to change from romantic quest to mere adventure: the modal identity of the work vacillates; the story divides itself into two apparently irreconcilable sections. In my original book chapter, I examined three critical readings of the novel which, despite their considerable differences in tone and methodological approach, converged in disparaging this modal incompatibility – readings by André Gide, Léon Cellier and, more recently, Alain Buisine. For the purposes of the present chapter, I shall limit myself to Gide and Cellier, and shall begin with an entry from Gide’s Journal, or Diary. Rereading the novel twenty years after its ­publication, Gide sums up the problem concisely: One loses interest in Le Grand Meaulnes, which extends over too many pages and too much time, whose design is uncertain and whose most exquisite qualities exhaust themselves within the first hundred pages. The remainder of the book strives in vain to recapture this first virginal ­emotion … I know that this vain striving is the very subject of the book; but it is also its fundamental weakness, so that it was not, perhaps, ­possible for the novelist to achieve a greater ‘success’ in his project.5

Fifty years after the publication of the novel, Léon Cellier was, if anything, even harsher than Gide in his assessment. Coming to the text with his considerable specialized knowledge of French romanticism, Cellier, in his short book ‘Le Grand Meaulnes’ ou l’initiation manquée, concluded: As concerns the novel’s romanticism, it is of the cheapest sort. How can the reader not be disappointed at the conception of romanticism the novel implies? Le Grand Meaulnes’s Frantz is but a caricature of the author of Sylvie; infantile behaviour is not equivalent to a childlike spirit; the extravagance of Frantz has nothing in common with moral complexity; the hero of Sylvie does not marry Sylvie. As far as Meaulnes is concerned, who would confuse this perverted, parvenu peasant with a romantic hero?6

According to Gide and Cellier, therefore, a critical reading of AlainFournier’s text necessarily passes through and acknowledges the fault line that divides it at its centre. Unlike Proust’s novel, which appears to unfold or uncoil itself from the initial concentrated knot of the petite madeleine episode, Le Grand Meaulnes is divided, disjointed, dismembered: its two sections can never meet. On the one hand there is the momentary, aesthetically beautiful and ephemeral image of Meaulnes’s encounter with Yvonne de Galais in the Mysterious Domain, characterized by an atmosphere of purity and perfection; on the other hand we have the

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desperate travels of the protagonist, his impossible quest to repair what he considers to be his moral failure. There is one passage in Le Grand Meaulnes which dramatizes the opposition between aesthetic beauty and moral abjection in a particularly poignant way, and which uses the vocabulary of European romanticism to highlight this opposition. It occurs in the penultimate chapter of the novel, when the reader learns, from François’s transcriptions of Meaulnes’s schoolboy notebooks, the nature of Meaulnes’s adventures during his absence from the text – essentially, his liaison with Valentine, the young woman he encountered while searching for Yvonne de Galais, a liaison which is at the origin of the protagonist’s remorse. In the pages that immediately precede the passage we learn that Meaulnes, having discovered the letters from Frantz in Valentine’s possession, and having thus learned that she is the ‘fiancée’ from the Mysterious Domain who was unable to believe in Frantz’s extravagant projects and hopes, separates himself from her and, in a certain sense, sends her to her ruin. In his desire to find Valentine after this brutal separation, Meaulnes rents a bicycle and rides to Bourges, but his efforts are in vain. He does not find her, and returns home, discouraged: The long voyage that remained for him was to be his last recourse against his suffering, his last forced distraction before succumbing to unending anguish. He departed. Next to the road, in the valley, he saw lovely farmhouses between the trees, at the edge of the water, which exhibited their pointed gables decorated with green trelliswork. No doubt, over there [làbas], on the lawns, attentive young girls spoke of love. One could imagine, over there [là-bas] beautiful souls [de belles âmes] … But for Meaulnes, at that moment, nothing existed except one particular love, the unsatisfied love that had just been extinguished so cruelly, and the young woman among all others [Valentine] whom he should have protected, saved, was precisely the one he had sent to her ruin.7

This passage concentrates or distils the essence of the text’s fundamental conflict at the very moment that the narration reaches its conclusion. There can be no more ‘distractions’ for Meaulnes, since his spirit hesitates between two visions of the world that share no common element: either he can think of these young women discussing love in an atmosphere of reflective calm, or he is condemned to relive the remorse of his dalliance with Valentine. It is evident that the jeunes filles en fleurs of Alain-Fournier, in their virginal simplicity, repeat, in an ironic mode, the founding image of Yvonne de Galais as she appeared in the Mysterious Domain. The fact that the young women are properly inaccessible to the



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protagonist is rendered by the repetition of the expression ‘over there’ (là-bas) – which emphasizes the distance between Meaulnes and these daydream-creatures. But it is important to dwell on one detail in the text that gives it a particular historical resonance: the use of the term ‘beautiful soul’ (belle âme) to designate the young girls. This term is not a simple variation or substitution for the phrase ‘attentive young girls’. One should say, rather, that the passage from ‘attentive young girls’ to ‘beautiful souls’ constitutes what one would call, in German, a Steigerung, a tonal amplification through the use of a parallel, but stronger expression. Now the notion of the beautiful soul is historically and culturally marked, and carries with it the historical baggage of romanticism – or, as I suggested in my original book chapter, of the period that immediately precedes and makes possible the romantic movement per se. In the book chapter, I surveyed the use of the term ‘beautiful soul’ (schöne Seele) as it was theorized and put into textual practice by Schiller, Goethe and Hegel. I emphasized the ways in which both Goethe and Hegel, having allegorized the Beautiful Soul and made it into an aesthetically pleasing but evanescent and abstract form, condemned it for its distance from concrete reality. I then returned to Le Grand Meaulnes and found: that the novel is characterized by solipsism and by a remorseful regret for an impossible love; that it cannot manage to disengage itself from the contemplation of an unreal, if haunting, figuration of aesthetic perfection. This led to the following conclusion: Le Grand Meaulnes, a novel published in 1913 just before World War I and the social, political and artistic upheavals of that period, remains firmly attached to a certain romantic aesthetic – that of melancholy, of nostalgia for a beautiful and irrecoverable past. But it must be noted, at the same time, that Alain-Fournier’s novel does not participate (as do the most lucid works of the romantic period) in a serious examination of the theoretical presuppositions on which it is constructed and the lovely figures it employs to seduce its readers. The fault-line at the center of the novel which preoccupied Gide and Cellier is not merely some lack of compositional talent on the part of the author, but rather a line of absolute separation between the domains of the aesthetic and the moral, and this separation undermines both areas equally. The beauty of the book masks its existential immobility; and the issue of moral complexity, the problem of choices and responsibility, as well as the passage to adulthood, are all eluded, bypassed. Poetic imagery (das Bild ) covers up and stifles moral progress (die Bildung).8

In the perspective of modern literary theory, a second conclusion ­ ostalgic imposes itself: Le Grand Meaulnes, in being anchored to a merely n

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romanticism, does not participate in the renewal brought about by European modernism, which, in its strongest moments, enacts what Proust, in writing about the chronological distortions of the dream world, called ‘the extraordinary tricks it [the dream] plays with Time’ (le  jeu formidable qu’il [le rêve] fait avec le Temps).9 What appears already in Du côté de chez Swann, published, like Alain-Fournier’s novel, in 1913, is the transformation of memory from the handmaiden of ­impotent regret into a method of knowledge and a primary motor in the c­ onstruction of narrative order. And the progression of the Recherche reveals that the content of memory – and of specific memories – is not always tinged with the alternation of euphoria and melancholy. The path of the novel’s interiorized Bildung is punctuated by the revelations concerning Albertine, revelations that destroy the linear temporality of the work and reveal its hidden and deviated byways. This twisting of time has as its essential result an illumination of the complexity of human relations, which is made not by the elaboration of a new aesthetic form, but in an analysis of the moral labyrinth. Proustian memory is, in its deep structure, simultaneously aesthetic envelope and moral content. Returning now to the passage I quoted earlier from Death in Venice, I would like to offer a concluding comment on Thomas Mann’s remarks concerning the interaction of the aesthetic and moral realms. It is certainly in the nature of artistic form to tend towards moral ‘indifference’, since form includes the moral question by thematizing it. But one should add that it is in the nature of the moral question, when it is strongly problematized –  for example, in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister and in À la recherche du temps perdu, but not in Le Grand Meaulnes –, to undo all efforts at aesthetic mastery, to return to the surface of the text at the precise moment of the greatest narrative transparency – as in the Proustian ‘intermittences of the heart’, and as in the Sinntrieb, or ‘life drive’, which Rainer Maria Rilke puts into action in the third Duino Elegy, written also, ‘by chance’, in 1913. What Rilke evokes in this poem dedicated to Neptune, ‘the blood’s River-God’, is the force of chaotic ancestral drives that reside below all formal constructions, all aestheticizing of life, all beautiful flowerings. In a manner emblematic of modernism, Rilke no longer shows aesthetic form modelling life, he no longer imagines a possible variation on the ‘beautiful soul’, but traces the portrait of a man being thrust into ­existence – we are very close here to Heidegger’s notion of Geworfenheit – who, since time immemorial, is ‘entangled’ (verstrickt) in his destiny. The human being is no longer the one who controls form from the outside, the one



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who dreams of an immobile perfection, but he or she who, living on the ‘fallen and mute ruins’ of Time, is hurdled into the dynamism of figures, a novice participating in the deployment of images (  jagende Formen) which model his reality and constitute the inner space of his moral drama – the luminosity of his ‘heart’: So young and shy, how he entangled himself In the spreading roots of events inside him, Twisted patterns, strangling tendrils, shapes Of preying animals. How he surrendered –. Loved. Loved his interior world, the jungle in him, that Primal inner forest where his pale green heart stood Among the fallen and mute ruins.10

Coda: ‘On German Roads’ As a reader of Le Grand Meaulnes, but coming more than one hundred years after the fact rather than twenty (Gide) or fifty (Cellier), and as a rereader of myself – and despite the efforts at rehabilitating Alain-Fournier I made in my earlier essay by attaching him to a long thread of meditation on the notion of the ‘beautiful soul’ –, I am obliged to conclude, in a general sense, that Le Grand Meaulnes, for the reasons I have mentioned, does not cross the threshold into modernism. This said, and to add a short coda to the current chapter, I think it is also possible to assert that Le Grand Meaulnes resembles À la recherche du temps perdu, as a strange and perhaps incomplete Doppelgänger or sosie. It does so in various ways, as I will adumbrate below, but especially in its reference to a foreign, or non-French, substratum, to an otherness that harks back in time but announces, prophetically, the upcoming conflict of 1914. Before getting into the crux of my argument, I should note, in passing, that there are strange resemblances between certain details of Le Grand Meaulnes and the Recherche that might appear, at first, to be simply  ­superficial: the chapter title in Alain-Fournier’s novel, À la recherche du sentier perdu (In Search of the Lost Path); the role of ‘direction changer’ played by Meaulnes in François’s life, which resembles the role played by Swann vis-à-vis the Proustian narrator; or, in a curious sense, the way in which Alain-Fournier describes Meaulnes’s presence as a kind of aesthetic superposition not unlike the effects produced by the magic lantern at the beginning of Combray. Indeed, François Seurel can no longer remember his life without Meaulnes, a fixture who acts as a ‘shadow’ on the wall and on his existence. From the first pages of the novel, we have:

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And if I try to imagine the first night which I spent in my room, in the middle of the attic rooms on the second floor of the house, already I remember other nights; I am no longer alone in this room; a long, disquieting but friendly shadow moves along the walls and paces back and forth. The entire landscape – the school, the field owned by old man Martin, with its three walnut trees, the garden invaded each day at four o’clock by women ­visiting – is, forever in my memory, agitated and transformed by the presence of the young man who unsettled our entire adolescence and whose very flight left us no pause.11

But I think that it is within the chapter ‘À la recherche du sentier perdu’ that we need to look for something both more profoundly Proustian and also dislocating – something that sends us beyond the ‘Frenchness’ of ‘the school, the field owned by old man Martin’ and the indubitable rustic charms of the Sologne. In the ninth chapter of part one, Meaulnes has disappeared, and the students of François’s father, including François himself, are trying to locate him, following his traces as best they can. Responding to what he describes as a nightingale’s ‘delicious invitation to a voyage amid the alder trees’ (invitation délicieuse au voyage entre les aulnes – my emphasis), François imagines, much like the Proustian narrator in the wake of Ruskin and the Arabian Nights, that at the precise moment all hope seems to be lost, a pathway opens up revealing the sought-after object. Alluding to the ancient world of knights and of difficult quests, the narrator writes: It is the passage alluded to in books, the ancient obstructed path, the one whose entrance the prince, weighed down by fatigue, has not been able to find. One finds it at that lost moment in the morning when one has long forgotten that it will soon be eleven o’clock, or noon … And suddenly, when one opens up the branches in the deep foliage, with a hesitating movement of the hands, right at the level of one’s face, one sees it like a long dark passageway, whose endpoint is a very small flicker of light.12

But where does this ‘ancient obstructed path’ lead? As I conclude, I shall suggest that the path lying beyond the obstruction of brambles and obstacles is one leading backwards, in the direction of German literature, and of things German. Alain-Fournier imitates, in rather precise fashion, Gérard de Nerval, in including, in the penultimate section of his novel, an allusion to Frantz de Galais’s peregrinations in Germany  –  the phrase ‘sur les routes d’Allemagne’, or ‘on the roads of Germany’, is repeated, on pages 222 and 243 of Le Grand Meaulnes – echoing the section of Sylvie in which the narrator departs France for



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Germany – ‘j’étais sur la route d’Allemagne’ is Nerval’s phrase.13 The hiatus of the German sojourn offers the Nervalian narrator the opportunity to reassess his f­eelings for the principal female protagonist, Aurélie, and to write a play in which she will occupy the central role. In the cases of Alain-Fournier and of Nerval, Germany lies beyond but also behind France, as a shadow, as a place to which one is drawn or impelled to go. And of course, in the case of Alain-Fournier, we have the phonetic presence, within the name ‘Meaulnes’, of ‘aulnes’ (alder trees), and behind this name, the figure of Goethe and his poem ‘Le roi des aulnes’ (‘Erlkönig’ or ‘The Alder-King’).14 Whether Alain-Fournier gained access to Goethe directly or through Nerval – one should remember that, at the end of Sylvie, when le grand frisé (the tall curly-haired lad) has married Sylvie, leaving the narrator on the sidelines, the latter has the idea of superimposing his own love triangle, Narrator/Sylvie/grand frisé, on the similar triangle of Werther/Charlotte/Albert in The Sorrows of Young Werther15 – I would like to suggest that the country of Sturm und Drang and of early European romanticism, the same country that will enter into a Great War with France one year after the publication of Le Grand Meaulnes, is that other place we need to take into account in attempting to situate Alain-Fournier’s novel, in which the coming to terms of imagination in its freest form and an attempt to trace and to situate one’s inner ­emotions, mimics the central dilemma recounted in the poem ‘Erlkönig’. The ballad that follows is a dialogue between a father and a son which takes place on horseback as the two ride through the haunting and haunted woods. The dialogue is interrupted by a third, phantom-like voice, that of the Alder-King. The father tries to explain away the awful figure of the Alder-King which his son, in fact, sees, and which eventually kills the young boy. The son, who has imagination, is right. The imagination, which gives us poetry, is a close cousin to madness, and can take away life: The Alder-King Who rides so late through the night and wind? It is the father with his child; He has the boy safe in his arm, He holds him safely, he holds him warm. ‘My son, why do you hide your face in fear?’ – ‘Father, don’t you see the Alder-King? The Alder-King with crown and train?’ ‘My son, it’s a streak of fog’. –

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‘You dear child, come along with me! Such lovely games I will play with you; Many colourful flowers are on the beach. My mother has many a golden gown’. – ‘My father, my father, and do you not hear What the Alder-King promises me softly?’ – ‘Be quiet, stay quiet, my child; In the parched leaves the wind is rustling’. – ‘Won’t you come along with me, my fine boy? My daughters will attend to you nicely. My daughters lead the nightly dance, And they will rock you and dance and sing you to sleep’. – ‘My father, my father, and do you not see over there The Alder-King’s daughters in their gloomy place?’ – ‘My son, my son, I see it clearly; It’s the willow trees appearing so grey’. –  ‘I love you, I’m charmed by your beautiful form; And if you are not willing, then I will use force’. – ‘My father, my father, now he is seizing me! The Alder-King has done me harm!’ – The father shudders, he rides swiftly, He holds in his arms the moaning child. He reaches the farmhouse with effort and distress. In his arms the child was dead.16

It is through his coming to terms with Goethe’s cruel insight – that the poetic imagination has an all-too-close kinship with madness and death – and through his examination of the shifting boundaries between love and jealousy, happiness and anxiety, life and the death-like, that Proust crosses a threshold uncrossed by the author of Le Grand Meaulnes. Alain-Fournier, a not very well remembered writer who, in his recreation of the melancholy charms of France, was nevertheless haunted by that country’s strange-but-familiar other – one of those territories, both of geography and of the imagination, against which any specifically French modernism must measure itself in order to find its ‘own’ place. Notes   1. Jean Lacouture, Une adolescence du siècle, p. 60. My translation.   2. Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again, vol. 6 of In Search of Lost Time, pp. 338–9. Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, vol. 4, p. 606.



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  3. Peter Gay, Modernism: The Lure of Heresy, pp. 5–6.   4. Thomas Mann, Death in Venice, p. 13. Mann, Der Tod in Venedig, p. 514: ‘Und hat Form nicht zweierlei Gesicht? Ist sie nicht sittlich und unsittlich zugleich, – sittlich als Ergebnis und Ausdruck der Zucht, unsittlich aber und selbst widersittlich, sofern sie von Natur eine moralische Gleichgültigkeit in sich schließt, ja wesentlich bestrebt ist, das Moralische unter ihr stolzes und unumschränktes Szepter zu beugen?’   5. My translation. Gide’s journal entry dates from January 1933. The original French reads: ‘Le Grand Meaulnes dont l’intérêt se dilue; qui s’étale sur un trop grand nombre de pages et un trop long espace de temps; de dessin quelque peu incertain et dont le plus exquis s’épuise dans les cent premières pages. Le reste du livre court après cette première émotion virginale, cherche en vain à s’en ressaisir …  Je sais bien que c’est le sujet même du livre, mais c’est aussi le défaut, de sorte qu’il n’était peut-être pas possible de le ‘réussir’ davantage’ (quoted in Daniel Leuwers’s introduction to Le Grand Meaulnes (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1983), p. iii). All further original French quotations from Le Grand Meaulnes are from this edition.   6. Léon Cellier, ‘Le Grand Meaulnes’ ou l’initiation manquée, p. 41, my translation: ‘Quant au romantisme du roman, il nous semble du plus mauvais aloi. Comment ne pas être déçu par la conception du romantisme que le roman implique? Le Frantz du Grand Meaulnes n’est qu’une caricature de l’auteur de Sylvie; l’infantilisme n’est pas l’esprit d’enfant; les “folies” de Frantz n’ont rien du mal sacré; le héros de Sylvie n’épouse pas Sylvie. Quant à Meaulnes, qui s’amuserait de prendre pour un héros romantique ce paysan parvenu ou ce paysan perverti?’  7. Le Grand Meaulnes, p. 272, my translation and emphasis: ‘Le long voyage qu’il lui restait à faire pour rentrer devait être son dernier recours contre sa peine, sa dernière distraction forcée avant de s’y enfoncer tout entier. Il partit. Aux environs de la route, dans la vallée, de délicieuses maisons fermières, entre les arbres, au bord de l’eau, montraient leurs pignons pointus garnis de treillis verts. Sans doute, là-bas, sur les pelouses, des jeunes filles attentives parlaient de l’amour. On imaginait, là-bas, des âmes, de belles âmes … Mais pour Meaulnes, à ce moment, il n’existait plus qu’un seul amour, cet amour mal satisfait qu’on venait de souffleter si cruellement et la jeune fille entre toutes [Valentine] qu’il eût dû protéger, sauvegarder, était justement celle-là qu’il venait d’envoyer à sa perte.’   8. David R. Ellison, Ethics and Aesthetics, pp. 130–1.   9. Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again, p. 208. Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, vol. 4, p. 490, my translation. 10. The English translation quoted above is by A. Poulin, in Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus, pp. 21–3. Here is the original German: Er, der Neue, Scheuende, wie er verstrickt war, Mit des innern Geschehns weiterschlagenden Ranken Schon zu Mustern verschlungen, zu würgendem Wachstum, zu tierhaft

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11. Alain-Fournier, Le Grand Meaulnes, pp. 146–7, my translation and emphasis: ‘Et si j’essaie d’imaginer la première nuit que je dus passer dans ma mansarde, au milieu des greniers du premier étage, déjà ce sont d’autres nuits que je me rappelle; je ne suis plus seul dans cette chambre; une grande ombre inquiète et amie passe le long des murs et se promène. Tout ce paysage paisible – l’école, le champ du père Martin, avec ses trois noyers, le jardin dès quatre heures envahi chaque jour par des femmes en visite – est à jamais, dans ma mémoire, agité, transformé par la présence de celui qui bouleversa toute notre adolescence et dont la fuite même ne nous a pas laissé de repos.’ 12. Ibid., my translation: ‘C’est le passage dont il est question dans les livres, l’ancien chemin obstrué, celui dont le prince harassé de fatigue n’a pu ­trouver l’entrée. Cela se découvre à l’heure la plus perdue de la matinée, quand on a depuis longtemps oublié qu’il va être onze heures, midi … Et soudain, en écartant, dans le feuillage profond, les branches, avec ce geste hésitant des mains, à hauteur du visage, inégalement écartées, on l’aperçoit comme une longue avenue sombre dont la sortie est un rond de lumière tout petit.’ 13. Gérard de Nerval, Sylvie, p. 135. 14. Written in 1782, the ballad ‘Erlkönig’ is a dramatic poem set to music by Schubert in 1815. The German word ‘Erle’ means alder tree, which is related to the birch, and which thrives in wet, humid environments. The French ‘aulne’ is a direct translation of ‘Erle’. But since Goethe’s poem was suggested by Herder’s translation of a Danish ballad entitled ‘Ellerkongen’ (‘The Elf King’), many English translations of Goethe’s ballad render the title, incorrectly, as ‘The Elf-King’. In 1970 the French writer Michel Tournier (who failed the agrégation in German) wrote Le Roi des aulnes, in partial homage to Goethe. Le Roi des aulnes won the Goncourt prize. 15. Nerval, Sylvie, p. 139. 16. My translation. Here is the original German in Ronald Gray, Poems of Goethe, pp. 106–7. Erlkönig Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind? Es ist der Vater mit seinem Kind; Er hat den Knaben wohl in dem Arm, Er faßt ihn sicher, er hält ihn warm. ‘Mein Sohn, was birgst du so bang dein Gesicht?’— ‘Siehst, Vater, du den Erlkönig nicht? Den Erlenkönig mit Kron und Schweif?’— ‘Mein Sohn, es ist ein Nebelstreif ’.—



situating french modernism 161 ‘Du liebes Kind, komm, geh mit mir! Gar schöne Spiele spiel ich mit dir; Manch bunte Blumen sind an dem Strand, Meine Mutter hat manch gülden Gewand’. ‘Mein Vater, mein Vater, und hörest du nicht, Was Erlenkönig mir leise verspricht?’— ‘Sei ruhig, bleibe ruhig, mein Kind; In dürren Blättern säuselt der Wind.’— ‘Willst, feiner Knabe, du mit mir gehn? Meine Töchter sollen dich warten schön; Meine Töchter führen den nächtlichen Reihn, Und wiegen und tanzen und singen dich ein’. ‘Mein Vater, mein Vater, und siehst du nicht dort Erlkönigs Töchter am düstern Ort?’— ‘Mein Sohn, mein Sohn, ich seh es genau: Es scheinen die alten Weiden so grau.’— ‘Ich liebe dich, mich reizt deine schöne Gestalt; Und bist du nicht willig, so brauch ich Gewalt’. ‘Mein Vater, mein Vater, jetzt faßt er mich an! Erlkönig hat mir ein Leids getan!’— Dem Vater grausets, er reitet geschwind, Er hält in Armen das ächzende Kind, Erreicht den Hof mit Müh und Not; In seinen Armen das Kind war tot.

Works cited Alain-Fournier, Le Grand Meaulnes, ed. Daniel Leuwers (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1983). Cellier, Léon, ‘Le Grand Meaulnes’ ou l’initiation manquée (Paris: Minard, 1963). Cendrars, Blaise, and Sonia Delaunay, La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France (Paris: Éditions des Hommes Nouveaux, 1913). Ellison, David R., Ethics and Aesthetics in European Modernist Literature: From the Sublime to the Uncanny (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd edn, 2006). —, ‘La “Belle âme”: Le Grand Meaulnes et l’esthétique du romantisme’, Poétique, 97 (February 1994), 81–101. Gay, Peter, Modernism: The Lure of Heresy; From Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008). Gray, Ronald (ed.), Poems of Goethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966). Lacouture, Jean, Une adolescence du siècle: Jacques Rivière et la NRF (Paris: Gallimard, 1994).

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Mann, Thomas, Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Vintage, 1989). —, Der Tod in Venedig, in Frühe Erzählungen 1893–1912, ed. Terence J. Reed (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 2004) 501–92. Nerval, Gérard de, Sylvie, in Les Filles du feu, Les Chimères (Paris: GarnierFlammarion, 1965) 109–91. Proust, Marcel, À la recherche du temps perdu, 4 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1987–89). —, In Search of Lost Time, 6 vols (London: Penguin Books, 2002). Rilke, Rainer Maria, Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. A. Poulin, bilingual edn (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977).

8 Les Caves du Vatican and the real novel Gerald Prince

A

ndré Gide, who composed the bulk of Les Caves du Vatican (Lafcadio’s Adventures) in 1912, finished the novel in 1913 and published it in 1914, had started to think about it twenty years earlier. He told Charles Du Bos that ‘[t]he first idea [about this work] goes back to Paludes, that is, to around 1893’ (La première idée de celui-ci remonte à Paludes, c’est-à-dire vers 1893)1 and mentioned in his diary how Paul Laurens had reminded him that they had talked about Les Caves du Vatican that same year, when they were in Biskra together.2 It seems that, from the beginning, Les Caves du Vatican, the first written outline of which dates from 1898, was conceived as a novel and – so Gide’s musings of 21 January 1902 suggest – as a ‘real novel’, a vrai roman, depicting the links between several characters and, as such, different from ‘narratives’, from récits like L’Immoraliste or La Porte étroite.3 A real novel and a modern one, which would rescue the genre from the stagnation, the swamps, the paludes into which it had sunk: symbolism’s dull abstractions, naturalism’s subordination to the little facts of life, the thesis novel’s conventional psychology and the straitjacket of various rhetorics. Gide was most probably influenced by the theory of the roman d’aventures (the adventure novel) that Marcel Schwob had developed in the early 1890s on the basis of his reading of Robert Louis Stevenson, that he had defined as ‘the novel of crises in both the internal and the external world’ (le roman des crises du monde intérieur et du monde extérieur) and that,4 according to Francis de Miomandre, Gide envisaged as ‘a book of action and intrigue …, something analogous to what the collaboration of Meredith and the author of The Brothers Karamazov might have yielded’ (un livre d’action et d’intrigue …, quelque chose d’analogue à ce qu’aurait pu

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produire la collaboration de Meredith et de l’auteur des Frères Karamazov).5 Gide was also, no doubt, affected by the interest that this possible kind of book aroused in French literary circles and, more particularly, among his associates and friends –  Henri Ghéon, Jacques Copeau or Jacques Rivière. Ghéon, like Schwob a Stevenson admirer, wished for a novel consisting of adventure and nothing but adventure. Copeau too had high praise for the great Scottish writer and felt that the recounting of adventures constituted the essence of the novel genre. As for Rivière, in 1913 he would publish his famous articles on the roman d’aventure, which basically reflected the ideals of the Nouvelle Revue Française. There he invoked The Ebb-Tide as well as The Possessed and called for a novel where ‘every state, every impression, every musical moment … will be transformed into facts, into acts, into utterances’ (tous les états, toutes les impressions, tous les moments musicaux … seront résolus en faits, en actes, en paroles).6 No doubt, too, Gide was inspired by his own contact with and admiration for Stevenson, whom he regarded as a master storyteller and user of indirection, for Defoe and Fielding, for Conrad, Dickens or Meredith. Indeed, in the ten or twenty years preceding the publication of Les Caves du Vatican, Gide is as enamoured of the English tradition of the novel as he is of Dostoevsky and his exploration of psychological depths, mysteries, inconsistencies, contradictions. By contrast, he seems rather unenthusiastic about the French novelistic tradition. In ‘Les Dix Romans français que [je préfère]’ (‘The ten French novels that [I prefer]’) – one of Gide’s very few publications in 1913 – he has so much difficulty finding ten novels that even though, in order to complete the list, he includes a work he has not read (Marivaux’s La Vie de Marianne), he comes up with only nine titles.7 He most definitely likes La Chartreuse de Parme and Les Liaisons dangereuses. He would even count them among the ten best novels in the world. But Stendhal himself is not perfect: he lacks ‘ultraviolet tones’ (tons ultraviolets) and Laclos may be overvalued. La Princesse de Clèves? Sure! But it is a text that harbours no secret. Manon Lescaut? Yes, although it smacks of sentimentality and does not compare with Moll Flanders. Fromentin’s Dominique? Certainly, though it is not sublime – and, besides, it is a récit. What about Balzac? One should really read the entire Comédie humaine. Still, La Cousine Bette can be dipped into with profit. There is also Flaubert, of course, and Madame Bovary, even if it is not above criticism. And there is Germinal. But, rather than literature, Germinal is ‘an annex to literature’ (une annexe à la littérature).8 No, the real novel that Gide has been envisioning is undoubtedly different. If not a roman d’aventures, it is a roman aventureux, an adventurous novel, and a modern one.



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Though he initially misjudged Proust’s great work (out of inattentiveness and purism: Proust simply did not write in good French), though he had little to say about Apollinaire’s Alcools (in spite of the fact that, a few years before its publication, he had been very much ‘amused and seduced’, amusé et séduit, by the man and that he may have been thinking of him when portraying Lafcadio himself ), though he reduced Dada to ‘Dada’ (in part because Tzara was Jewish) and though he never was quite taken with surrealism (even if the Nouvelle Revue Française found a job for André Breton), Gide was definitely modern and André Rouveyre was right to salute him, in 1924, as the ‘contemporain capital’.9 Gide was modern in his exploration – as early as Paludes (1895) – of the possibilities of fiction – or anti-fiction –, in his rehabilitation of desire and sensation, in his critique of puritanical conventions and in his relentless self-exploration. Les Caves du Vatican was modern too and certainly befuddled many of Gide’s contemporaries. Paul Valéry, for instance, wrote: ‘Myself, I do not have one opinion [about the book]. I have lots of them and, now, I blame the why and approve the how, now, I feel the opposite’ (Moi-même je n’ai pas un avis. J’en ai des tas et tantôt je blâme le pourquoi, j’approuve le comment; tantôt je sens le contraire).10 Les Caves was even modernist, which Gide was not inclined to be. If he was attracted by the modern, he was equally attracted by the classical. To him, literature, real literature, is always new and he wants his work always to be viewed as contemporary, ‘d’aujourd’hui’. He believes that what will seem most oldfashioned is what first seemed most modern. ‘Nothing is more alien to me’, he writes, ‘than this preoccupation with modernism that one feels governing all of Cocteau’s thoughts and revolutions [of course, he has other reasons for disliking Cocteau] … I do not seek to be of my time’, he adds; ‘I seek to transcend my time’ (Rien ne m’est plus étranger que ce souci de modernisme qu’on sent incliner toutes les pensées et toutes les révolutions de Cocteau … Je ne cherche pas à être de mon époque; je cherche à déborder mon époque).11 Still, Les Caves du Vatican exhibits many of the traits associated with modernism. True, the novel does not experiment with radically – or not so radically – new techniques. Some of its interior monologues could probably figure in La Princesse de Clèves. Nor does it feature bold stylistic innovations, even as it multiplies and mixes to good effect rare expressions, technical terms, archaic turns, contrived phrasings and puns, the most notable of the latter involving the word ‘cave’. The word refers, of course, to the cellar, the basement, the space beneath the Vatican where the real pope is supposedly held prisoner following the actions of the freemasons and of a coalition of cardinals. But the word also serves as one of

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the many names adopted by Protos – the abbé Cave – who tells Amédée Fleurissoire that it is ‘a Latin term that also means: BE CAREFUL’ (un mot latin qui veut aussi dire: PRENDS GARDE).12 Finally, it designates those who, like Fleurissoire, are made to be tricked and fleeced, the caves as opposed to the affranchis, the crustacés as opposed to the subtils – to use another contrast from Gide’s novel –, the squares and not the hipsters, or, since we are talking about Gide, the straights and not the queers. But if Les Caves du Vatican is not very striking stylistically, it does espouse many points of view and exhibit multiple story lines – around Anthime ArmandDubois, the scientist and atheist, Julius de Baraglioul, the representative of bourgeois values, Amédée Fleurissoire, the religious fool, Protos, the Mille-Pattes, the masters of disguise and deceit, and, of course, Lafcadio Wluiki, who could be freedom incarnate.13 Moreover, Les Caves du Vatican, which mixes genres –  satirical farce, philosophical tale, detective story, novel of adventure, roman sentimental, roman-feuilleton –  and which blurs generic boundaries, prefers indirect rather than direct presentation. It favours an episodic plot, a decentralized structure, a loose composition, with many digressions, interruptions and holes. It is an open work and an open-ended one, as its last sentences emphasize: ‘What! Is he going to renounce life? And, for the sake of Geneviève’s esteem (whom he esteems a little less now that she loves him a little more), does he still think of giving himself up?’ (Quoi! Va-t-il renoncer à vivre? Et pour l’estime de Geneviève, qu’il estime un peu moins depuis qu’elle l’aime un peu plus, songe-t-il encore à se livrer?).14 Featuring unpredictable characters, it puts deterministic causality into question and rejects conventional motivation. Perhaps its most famous element is Lafcadio’s acte gratuit, the seemingly unmotivated, gratuitous, profitless act which has been discussed by countless commentators, including Gide himself who wrote: Oh! No, I do not believe at all in an acte gratuit, an unmotivated act. Indeed, I find it perfectly impossible to conceive, to imagine. There always is a motivation for everything; but, by acte gratuit, I mean an act the motivation of which is not apparent and one which displays the features of disinterestedness. An act which is not performed for a given profit or reward but which corresponds to a secret drive, in which what is most singular in an individual gets revealed, given away.15

Les Caves du Vatican itself, which abounds in mirrors and mirrorings, uses – through Julius de Baraglioul’s remarks on the novel – a kind of mise en abyme to comment in very similar ways on the acte gratuit.16 Selfreflective and reflexive, Gide’s novel, like so much contemporary and later fiction, makes ample room for the theory of the novel.



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In spite of Les Caves du Vatican’s modernity or modernism, it did not prove to be the novel that Gide had wanted to write and had been expected to write by such close relations as Du Bos or Rivière.17 It may be ‘a stupefying book’ (un livre ahurissant), as the author wrote Jacques Copeau, ‘full of holes, of gaps, but also of diversions, of bizarreness, and of partial successes’ (plein de trous, de manques, mais aussi d’amusement, de bizarrerie et de réussites partielles) but it is certainly not Dostoevskian, and Lafcadio is not Raskolnikov.18 With its puppet-like characters, its parodic quest, its corrosive irony, it is not an adventure novel either, nothing like Barnabooth or like Le Grand Meaulnes, which, to Gide, seem worthy of the name.19 Indeed, it is not even a novel. Like Paludes, twenty years earlier, it is a sotie, a theatrical form that goes back to the Middle Ages. On 26 June 1913, having practically finished Les Caves du Vatican, Gide writes in his Journal: ‘It sometimes seems to me that I have not written anything serious until now; that I have only presented my thinking ironically and that, if I disappeared today, I would only leave of myself an image in terms of which even my angel itself would not be able to recognize me’ (Il me semble parfois que je n’ai rien écrit de sérieux jusqu’ici; que je n’ai présenté qu’ironiquement ma pensée et que, si je disparaissais aujourd’hui, je ne laisserais de moi qu’une image d’après laquelle mon ange même ne pourrait me reconnaître).20 On 10 July, he further says: ‘Rivière’s article on the “adventure novel”, which I read this afternoon, adds to my disarray’ (L’article de Rivière sur le ‘roman d’aventures’, que je je lis cet après-midi, ajoute à mon désarroi).21 A year later, on 30 June 1914, just after Gide’s text is published in book form as Les Caves du Vatican: sotie par l’auteur de ‘Paludes’, the author noted in his Journal: ‘Récits and soties, up to now I have written only ironic books – or critical ones, if you prefer, of which [Les Caves] is probably the last one’ (Récits et soties, je n’écrivis jusqu’à présent que des livres ironiques – ou critiques si l’on préfère, dont sans doute voici le dernier);22 and, on 29  August, in a dedicative letter to Jacques Copeau which was to have served as a preface, he remarks: ‘Why do I call this book Sotie? Why récits the three earlier ones [L’Immoraliste, La Porte étroite, Isabelle]? It is to make clear that they are not, strictly speaking, novels’ (Pourquoi j’appelle ce livre Sotie? Pourquoi récits les trois précédents? Pour bien marquer que ce ne sont point là des romans).23 No, the novel, the real novel, the modern novel that Gide wants to write is still ahead of him. It seems to him that all he has done up to this point is only a preparation for what is to come and that the most important things remain to be said. On 15 June 1914, he notes in his Journal: ‘At times, when I think of the importance of what I have to say, of my

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Christianisme contre le Christ, of Corydon and of my book on Chopin, of my novel, or simply of my little Traité des Dioscures – I tell myself that I am crazy to delay and temporize in this way’ (Par moments, lorsque je songe à l’importance de ce que j’ai à dire, à mon Christianisme contre le Christ, à Corydon, et même à mon livre sur Chopin, à mon roman, ou simplement à mon petit Traité des Dioscures, –  je me dis que je suis fou de tarder et de temporiser ainsi).24 In the 1914 editions of Gide’s books, the novel envisioned is said to be ‘en préparation’ and announced as ‘Le Faux-Monnayeur [The Counterfeiter], roman’. Now, the similarities between what became, tellingly, Les FauxMonnayeurs (The Counterfeiters), the only one of his texts that Gide regarded as a novel, the similarities between Les Faux-Monnayeurs and Les Caves du Vatican, which turned out to be a mere sotie, are many and, as a matter of fact, until August 1921, Gide considered Les Faux-Monnayeurs to be a kind of sequel that featured Lafcadio prominently. Apart from their shared thematic interest in homosexuality, counterfeiting, thefts and break-ins, or violent death – by murder or suicide –, both texts reject the homodiegetic narrator and confessional mode characteristic of Gide’s récits and feature an intrusive and self-conscious heterodiegetic narrator that is sometimes endowed with privileges approaching omniscience but sometimes functions as a limited observer and judge. Both texts favour a decentralized construction with a multiplicity of varied narrative lines. In Les Caves, as indicated by the five books making up the text – Anthime Armand-Dubois, Julius de Baraglioul, Amédée Fleurissoire, The Mille-Pattes, Lafcadio – different characters occupy centre stage in turn and each book develops in a largely autonomous fashion. In Les Faux-Monnayeurs, Gide wanted ‘[a] perpetual surge; each new chapter must pose a new problem, be an opening, a direction, an impulsion, a casting forward – of the mind of the reader’ (Un surgissement perpétuel; chaque nouveau chapitre doit poser un nouveau problème, être une ouverture, une direction, une impulsion, une jetée en avant – de l’esprit du lecteur).25 In addition, both texts are open-ended and include a mise en abyme. Both use large doses of irony and subvert novelistic illusion. Both provide a kind of theory of the novel and feature several characters who are potential or actual writers and critics: Édouard, Passavant, Bernard, Olivier, Lucien, Armand, Strouvilhou, for example, in Les Faux-Monnayeurs26 and, in Les Caves du Vatican, Julius de Baraglioul, his father, Protos, and Lafcadio himself. Lafcadio may not like to read very much, never finished Moll Flanders, and burns it along with his only other book, Grazzini’s Novelle; but he prizes Robinson Crusoe as well as Aladdin, keeps a diary, and has interesting ideas about Julius’s characters –  contrary to them, he is an ‘inconsistent creature’ (un être



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d’inconséquence) – and about writing in general – contrary to life, it can indefinitely be altered and touched up.27 But there are also some differences between Les Caves du Vatican and Les Faux-Monnayeurs that may partly explain the generic distinction Gide made between the two texts. Gide knew that the classic French novel – of the kind he was trying not to write – is more like a novella or an inflated short story: les Français n’ont pas la tête romanesque (the French are not a fiction-minded people). In the French novelistic tradition, his favourite works were, as we saw, La Chartreuse de Parme and Les Liaisons dangereuses rather than the much shorter La Princesse de Clèves and Manon Lescaut. Like Baudelaire, he prized ‘luxe’, luxury, luxuriousness, which he defined as ‘disciplined abundance’ (abondance disciplinée), and he faulted Flaubert for his lack of ‘abundance’.28 If Les Caves du Vatican is twice as long – or more – as L’Immoraliste, La Porte étroite and Isabelle (which came out in 1911), it is only about two-thirds of the length of Les Faux-Monnayeurs. A related difference pertains to the handling of abundance, profusion and variety. Although both Les Caves and Les Faux-Monnayeurs have a decentralized, ‘deconcentrated’ structure and feature several important characters and story lines, the sotie reaches this goal by dividing itself up into five relatively independent acts – Anthime Armand-Dubois does not know Lafcadio, Julius de Baraglioul does not know Protos, Geneviève does not know him either – whereas Les Faux-Monnayeurs succeeds better at evoking unity in diversity by setting up relations among its various actors, as Gide had been envisioning since the turn of the century: ‘I think a lot about or, at least, I picture and feel the vague shape of the novel I am dreaming of, that is, the relations between a dozen characters’ (Je pense, ou du moins j’imagine beaucoup, et sens se dessiner enfin l’indécis roman que je rêve: c’est-à-dire: les relations entre une douzaine de personnages).29 More important, I think, Les Caves du Vatican does not always manage to convey eventfulness. To be sure, we find break-ins, thefts, murders, love affairs as well as many other incidents in the sotie and Henri Massis was certainly unfair when he wrote in his review: ‘we want something to happen. But, in spite of several narrative embryos, nothing happens in Les Caves du Vatican’ (nous voulons qu’il arrive quelque chose. Or, en dépit de plusieurs embryons de récits … il n’arrive rien dans Les Caves du Vatican).30 Still, Massis was not totally off the mark. It is not so much that irony and parody rob events of their force, or that Gide reports many more words than actions, or that Lafcadio himself gets tired of adventure: ‘He no longer thought about setting out. He reluctantly admitted that Borneo did not attract him at all and that the same went for the rest of

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Italy. He was even losing interest in the consequences of his actions’ (Il ne songeait plus à s’embarquer, reconnaissait à contrecœur que Bornéo ne l’attirait guère; non plus le reste de l’Italie: même il se désintéressait des suites de son aventure).31 Rather, it is that much of the work consists of background information – on Anthime Armand-Dubois, for instance, on Lafcadio’s youth and his ‘uncles’, on Arnica, Amédée and his friend Blafaphas, on Carola’s disappointments with Lafcadio or Protos – and that many events, from Amédée’s epic encounters with bedbugs and fleas to Protos’s touching up and concealing Lafcadio’s crime or to the circumstances leading to his own arrest – are told after the fact. Above all, and as opposed to Les Faux-Monnayeurs, Les Caves du Vatican is a mere critical work. I have already mentioned that, just after its publication, Gide had suggested that he was done writing such works. François Mauriac confirmed Gide’s determination to try something different: ‘He told me that, until now, he … has written only ironic books: even La Porte étroite is, to him, an ironic work. Les Caves du Vatican has closed this series. We now will have from him only works of affirmation’ (Il m’a dit qu’il … n’a écrit jusqu’à présent que des livres ironiques: même la Porte Etroite est à ses yeux une œuvre ironique. Les Caves du Vatican ont clos cette série. Nous n’aurons plus de lui que des œuvres d’affirmation).32 If, in Les Caves, Gide nothing affirmeth, not even Lafcadio, Les Faux-Monnayeurs proves more nuanced. It does not eschew irony and critique, by any means, and it is no less lucid or free than the sotie. But Édouard, Bernard, Olivier, Vincent, Lady Griffith, contrary to Anthime, Arnica or Amédée, are not caricatures; and when, towards the end of the novel, Bernard raises with Édouard the question of how to live, the latter suggests a positive line of conduct that reconciles Gide’s most fundamentally conflicting drives: ‘It is good to follow one’s slope provided that it is by going up’ (Il est bon de suivre sa pente pourvu que ce soit en montant).33 For Gide, a modern novel must be affirmative. Le roman moderne sera affirmatif ou il ne sera pas. Notes   1. ‘La première idée de celui-ci remonte à Paludes, c’est-à dire vers 1893’ (Alain Goulet, ‘Les Caves du Vatican’ d’André Gide, p. 12). As is the case with quotations throughout my text, translations are mine. I have profited a great deal from Alain Goulet’s work as well as from Christopher Bettinson, Gide: ‘Les Caves du Vatican’; Peter Broome, Gide: ‘Les Caves du Vatican’; and Kevin O’Neill, André Gide and the roman d’aventure.   2. See André Gide, Journal, vol. 1: 1887–1925, p. 750.



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 3. Ibid., p. 333.   4. Marcel Schwob, Spicilège (Paris: Mercure de France, 1896), quoted in O’Neill, André Gide and the roman d’aventure, p. 15.  5. Francis de Miomandre, ‘André Gide et l’inquiétude philosophique’, Le Mercure de France, 42 (April–June 1902), 361–71, quoted in André Gide, Romans et récits, vol. 1, p. 1465.   6. Jacques Rivière, ‘Le Roman d’aventure’, p. 322. Originally published in La Nouvelle Revue Française, 1 May, 1 June and 1 July 1913. See also O’Neill, André Gide and the roman d’aventure, p. 20, p. 40, p. 42 and passim.  7. In a letter to Jacques Rivière of 16 March 1913 (Gide’s essay appeared in April of the same year), he writes that this ‘gives my final couplet the appearance of a sham. Let us, however, leave it as is; if someone notices the miscalculation, it will be good for entertainment’ (donne à mon couplet final une allure de fumisterie. Laissons cela pourtant tel quel; si quelqu’un s’aperçoit du mécompte, ce sera pour s’en amuser). Quoted in André Gide, Essais critiques, p. 1059.   8. André Gide, ‘Les dix romans français que …’, 533–41 (repr. Essais critiques, pp. 268–73).   9. See André Rouveyre, ‘Le Contemporain capital’. On Gide and Apollinaire, see Gide, Journal, vol. 1, p. 589. 10. See the 2 July 1914 letter from Paul Valéry to Gide, quoted in Goulet, ‘Les Caves du Vatican’ d’André Gide, p. 194. 11. André Gide, Journal, vol. 1, p. 1063. 12. André Gide, Les Caves du Vatican, in Romans et récits, vol. 1, p. 1101. Further citations are from this edition. 13. See Robert Faurisson, ‘Les Caves du Vatican, essai d’explication’. 14. André Gide, Les Caves du Vatican, p. 1176. 15. See the letter by Gide cited in Broome, Gide: ‘Les Caves du Vatican’, p. 71: ‘Mais non, je ne crois pas du tout à un acte gratuit. Même je tiens celui-ci pour parfaitement impossible à concevoir, à imaginer. Il y a toujours une motivation à toute chose; mais j’entends par ‘acte gratuit’ un acte dont la motivation n’est pas apparente, et qui présente les caractères du désintéressement. Un acte qui n’est pas accompli en vue de tel profit ou récompense, mais qui répond à une impulsion secrète, dans lequel ce que l’individu a de plus particulier se révèle, se trahit.’ 16. Gide, Les Caves du Vatican, pp. 1142–4. 17. See Goulet, ‘Les Caves du Vatican’ d’André Gide, p. 182. 18. Cited in Ibid., p. 25. 19. See O’Neill, André Gide and the roman d’aventure, p. 47. 20. Gide, Journal, vol. 1, p. 746. 21. Ibid., p. 749. 22. Ibid., p. 799. 23. Ibid., p. 808. 24. Ibid., p. 790.

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25. André Gide, Journal des Faux-Monnayeurs, in Romans et récits, vol. 2, p. 551. Further citations are from this edition. 26. See Gerald Prince, ‘Personnages-romanciers’. 27. Gide, Les Caves du Vatican, pp. 1047, 1055. 28. See Gide, Journal, vol. 1, p. 1085; O’Neill, André Gide and the roman d’aventure, p. 52. 29. André Gide, Journal, vol. 1, p. 333. 30. See Alain Goulet, ‘Les Caves du Vatican’ d’André Gide, p. 210. 31. Gide, Les Caves du Vatican, p. 1151. 32. See Goulet, ‘Les Caves du Vatican’ d’André Gide, p. 138. 33. André Gide, Les Faux-Monnayeurs, p. 436.

Works cited Bettinson, Christopher, Gide: ‘Les Caves du Vatican’ (London: Edward Arnold, 1972). Broome, Peter, Gide: ‘Les Caves du Vatican’ (London: Grant & Cutler, 1995). Faurisson, Robert, ‘Les Caves du Vatican, essai d’explication à l’usage des élèves et des étudiants’, L’Information littéraire, 18 (1966), 124–30. Gide, André, ‘Les dix romans français que …’, La Nouvelle Revue Française (April 1913), 533–41. Reprinted in Essais critiques, pp. 268–73. —, Essais critiques, ed. Pierre Masson (Paris: Gallimard, 1999). —, Journal, vol. 1: 1887–1925, ed. Eric Marty (Paris: Gallimard, 1996). —, Romans et récits: Œuvres lyriques et dramatiques, 2 vols, ed. Pierre Masson (Paris: Gallimard, 2009). Goulet, Alain, ‘Les Caves du Vatican’ d’André Gide, étude méthodologique (Paris: Larousse-Université, 1972). O’Neill, Kevin, André Gide and the roman d’aventure: The History of a Literary Idea in France (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1969). Prince, Gerald, ‘Personnages-romanciers dans Les Faux-Monnayeurs’, French Studies, 25 (1971), 47–52. Rivière, Jacques, ‘Le Roman d’aventure’, in Etudes: L’Œuvre critique de Jacques Rivière à ‘La Nouvelle Revue Française’ (1909–1924), ed. Alain Rivière (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), pp. 303–50. Rouveyre, André, ‘Le Contemporain capital: André Gide’, pts. 1–3, Les Nouvelles Littéraires (25 October 1924), 4; (8 November 1924), 4; (22 November 1924), 4.

9 1913, between peace and war: Chagall’s Homage to Apollinaire and the European avant-garde1 Annette Becker

T

he 1912 painting Homage to Apollinaire was the work of a Russian artist who lived in Paris, Marc Chagall, and stands out in art history as a synthesis of the links – real, virtual and concealed – tying together the European avant-garde, what Apollinaire termed ‘the most radical’ of artistic movements.2 The term ‘avant-garde’,3 which arose in military discourse, enabled artists to appropriate a culture of conflict, of ‘progress’, of innovation, of a break with conventional artistic tradition and the academy. It entailed a move towards utopia, as preparation for a destructive order taking place in the future. Everything had to be opened up: art and nations, religions and temporalities, the primitive and the popular. Multiple languages had to be compressed into one, which was to be, as another Russian living in Germany, Wassily Kandinsky, put it, the language of ‘humanity’.4 Homage to Apollinaire is one of the most imposing, self-consciously innovative paintings of the years 1912–13, in part because of its dimensions – it is almost two metres square – in part because of its technique, its sense of colours, and its wish to theorize through its evocation of ­spirituality, mysticism and primitivism. Herewith Apollinaire:5  Above all, artists are men who wish to become inhuman. They painstakingly search for traces of inhumanity, traces which are nowhere encountered in nature. Such traces are the truth, and beyond them we know no reality … The new artists need an ideal beauty which proudly expresses not only the human race but also the universe, in so far as it has been humanised in light.6

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Obviously, Chagall aimed at illustrating Apollinaire’s ideas in Méditations esthétiques, repeated in part in an article in the Berlin art magazine Der Sturm: ‘I love the art of young painters because I love light above all. And since all human beings love light above all, they invented fire’ (J’aime l’art des jeunes peintres parce que j’aime avant tout la lumière. Et comme tous les hommes aiment avant tout la lumière, ils ont inventé le feu).7 The concepts of innovation and universality were in the air, they were discussed and disputed. Furthermore, the avant-garde practised internationalism not just on a theoretical level, but also on a personal one, as many artists chose not to reside in their home country and moved to others. But we should avoid overstating the intellectual and artistic harmony of the avant-garde, encompassing French, German, Italian, British and Belgian artists, as well as Russian, Polish, Spanish and Swiss, in the year 1913. From Paris to New York, at the Armory Show of 1913,8 we can find traces of these artistic exchanges, marked by competition, imitation, hints and insults exchanged face to face, or at a distance. While the arguments among the avant-garde artists were primarily artistic, intellectual and religious, national tonalities never faded away fully, with the Balkan Wars of 1912–13 giving a foretaste of the ‘real’ war to come. The avant-garde presented a chiasmus between the impulse to create and promote universal and human art and the persistence and progressive resurgence of nationalist sentiments and identities. Let us picture Chagall’s painting once more, with its clock-like multi­ coloured circle in the background seemingly representing the notion of circulation of bodies and ideas before the First World War. The year 1913 was indeed a time of massive international activity: exhibitions, travel, publication of articles and books, lectures, correspondences from core to periphery. The force of these artistic relations can be seen in these international, bilateral, multilateral and crossing networks that resulted in reconfigurations, alliances, hatreds, polemics, affiliations or rejections, bestowing – or withholding – legitimation to works of art.9 Franz Marc’s cri du cœur, which he expressed to Delaunay in March 1913, ‘truly, there are only artists’  (il n’y a que les artistes, vraiment),10 was typical of the time. For all the artists, beyond their differences, their disputes, their quarrels and their reconciliations, what mattered was art, ‘pure art’. Here is Apollinaire again: ‘these young painters are giving us works which are more cerebral than sensual … in order to express the grandeur of metaphysical forms. That is why today’s art, while not flowing directly from particular religious beliefs, does nevertheless present several characteristics of great art, in other words of religious Art’ (les jeunes peintres nous offrent des œuvres plus cérébrales que



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s­ ensuelles … pour exprimer la grandeur des formes métaphysiques. C’est pourquoi l’art actuel, s’il n’est pas l’émanation directe de croyances religieuses déterminées, présente cependant plusieurs caractères du grand art, c’est-à-dire de l’Art religieux).11 Paradise lost or recovered by the avant-garde? The central motif in Chagall’s painting is indeed religious, the Garden of Eden, paradise lost and undoubtedly recovered. From a single hermaphroditic body in its centre, Adam and Eve announce the new man/ woman, the new social and cultural man/woman which the avant-garde calls into being. Is this bi-cephalic being inspired by pre-Colombian art? Is it an allusion to the ‘primitives’ in art and in religion? Both ­redemption – Adam’s rib, Eve – and the fall – the hermeticism of the serpent – are present in the painting. Furthermore, the ‘ouroboros’, the circle formed by the serpent devouring its tail, symbolizes cyclical time and the continuity of life. Chagall developed in this painting a line of thought through esoteric references to the omniscience and ubiquity of God. His contemporaries would have perceived that this painting was pointing the way towards a very different future, to the occult, to ­theosophy and to a renewed – and revised – Christianity. Chagall started from the Hebrew notion of ihud, that is, union or unification. The two bodies are fixed on a target which is also, as I did mention earlier, a clock. In the Kabbalistic version of creation, each stage lasts for one of the twelve hours of the day. Chagall painted the hours nine, ten and eleven as the time of original sin – hence the presence of the apple and the serpent. The expulsion happened in the twelfth hour, where Chagall places his name in Latin and Hebrew script above a third headless neck created alongside Adam and Eve. The geometric centre of the painting is Adam’s sexual organ, serving as the hand of the clock. Time is indeed cyclical, a complicated space-time measure for a complicated man. Perhaps ‘Apollin.r’ in French? It is in this way that Chagall writes the name of his friend, as a play on ‘air’ amplified by two missing vowels – ‘a’ and ‘i’ – in the manner of Hebrew grammar. The name Apollinaire is also inscribed alongside that of the German Herwarth Walden,12 the founder of Der Sturm, of the Swiss poet Blaise Cendrars and the Italian Ricciotto Canudo.13 Chagall was certainly well informed: Apollinaire and Walden had become friends in Berlin at the time of the Robert Delaunay exhibition of January 1913. Apollinaire’s aptly titled poem ‘A travers l’Europe’,14 which he dedicated to Chagall, vividly illustrates the artists’ relationships and

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i­nteractions at this time. What is most striking in the poem is the speed of things, as if the pace of technology, which fascinated or worried the artists, had become a metaphor for their hyperactivity. To understand 1913, we have to recall this incredible speed: Marc and Kandinsky met only on 1  January  1910, a year to the day before the closure of the first Blaue Reiter exhibition.15 Immediately, their ties with ‘French’ ­artists like Delaunay, Derain and Picasso multiplied and ‘French’ works appeared everywhere in exhibitions taking place in Germany. And yet the ‘French’ did not respond to the invitation to write for the Blaue Reiter  Almanac, although the call was written in French, perhaps by virtue  of their supposed cultural superiority over Germany. After all, if it were true, as they believed, that everything important happened in Paris, why join those who insisted on staying far away from the centre? And yet it was in writing about Delaunay’s orphism that Apollinaire emphasized the relation of French art with Kandinsky, Marc, and the Blaue Reiter, and clearly articulated that the birth of abstract art was a European process.16 Here is the sole reference to German painting in all  Apollinaire’s critical works, and it is when he speaks about orphism: This movement, I believe, is closer than others to the sensibility of several modern German painters. … The most interesting German painters instinctively still belong to this movement: Kandinsky, Marc, Meidner, Macke, Jawlensky, Münter, Otto Freundlich, etc. The Italian futurists also belong to this Orphism, the ones who, coming from fauvism and cubism, believed it unfair to abolish all perspectival and psychological conventions … We are drunk with enthusiasm. Here we elevate ourselves to plastic lyricism … This creative tendency now extends itself to the universe at large … With these movements, orphist and cubist, we arrive into the full poetry of light.17

Apollinaire’s critical writings confirm the notion of a French superiority, and, his – and their – intellectual curiosity notwithstanding, a tendency among the French to forgo their solidarity and adopt a kind of patriotic pictorial sensibility, which in 1914 easily turned into contempt towards the Germans. While Apollinaire generally spared the Slavs, he could not resist showing his claws in the case of Kandinsky.18 Kandinsky, however, was not amused. He wrote to Delaunay that Apollinaire, in his French disdain, completely misunderstood his work and ignored the importance of his research.19 It is doubtful if Apollinaire ever really understood Kandinsky, despite their affinities. Nevertheless, at Herwarth Walden’s invitation,



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Apollinaire was persuaded to see the importance of the artistic work taking place in Germany and went to Berlin in January 1913 at the time of the exhibition Delaunay, Ardengo Soffici, Julie Baum at the Sturm gallery. The French poet generally enjoyed his stay and accepted the hospitality of August Macke in Bonn during his return voyage.20 But does that mean he truly converted to the merits of German art? In this mock sword play between Apollinaire and the founders of the Blaue Reiter and other artists residing in Germany, there were both artistic and intellectual matters at stake. Kandinsky and Marc, for example, disliked what they termed ‘unhealthy’ art critiques and critics. In their eyes, Apollinaire represented both evils. Kandinsky rightfully saw him as a kind of ‘official’ critic, not a pioneer, and indeed this was his position since Apollinaire wrote the preface to the catalogue of Delaunay’s Der Sturm exhibition in 1913, as well as a poem, ‘The windows’, based on Delaunay’s homonymous work, which was at the centre of the exhibition. In these texts Apollinaire celebrated the wedding of colours and musicality and Delaunay’s pictorial opening to abstraction. Delaunay did not want to portray light and its effects but to reproduce the exact moment of seeing. That is why he invented the rotating circles and the grids, always with the Eiffel Tower present. Here are the final four lines of the poem ‘The windows’: From red to green all the yellow dissolves Paris Vancouver Hyères Maintenon New York and the Antilles The window opens like an orange Lovely fruit of light21

No wonder Delaunay was very happy with the poem, as the dedication to Apollinaire on his own exhibition catalogue shows: ‘To the one who invented a mere nothing a clean anti-hygienic language and a truly sensual poetics what lives everywhere and for everyone distracts us a little from epidermic modern anxiety to you r d’ (A celui qui a inventé un rien une langue propre antihygiénique et vraiment sensuelle poétique ce qui vivant partout et pour tous nous change un peu de l’inquiétude moderne de l’épiderme à toi r d).22 There were, obviously, great elective affinities in 1913, but also a return of nationalism. From sharing art to suspicious nationalism Since the nineteenth century, a certain number of artists cultivated a profound interest in primitivism and popular art, becoming somewhat like anthropologists dedicated to renewing culture and the arts. This

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engagement was extremely fertile for such artists as Matisse,23 Derain, Picasso and others. The Russian painter Mikhail Larionov went further still. From 1906 onwards Larionov was ‘adopted’ by the French avant-garde, among them Cézanne, Derain and Matisse, but he was not interested in cutting off his Russian roots, and he continued cultivating a private archive of ‘primitive’ art from his home country. In 1913, Larionov organized an exhibition in Moscow of ‘the icons of Loubki’ (popular prints), which inspired him to create unexpected connections through time and space: During the reign of the Assyrian emperor Hammerabi, there was an exhibition of Russian loubki, alongside Chinese, Japanese, French etc. of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They provoked such an upheaval of artistic sentiment that time was killed by the extra-temporal and the extra-spatial. This new sentiment reigned supreme like an autonomous eternity … Paul Cézanne  lived in the reign of Ramses II. The scribe Héavad Randai lived, worked and died in Aix-en-Provence. Precise historical information thereby informed the clarity of vision essential to a work of art, since the value and purpose of a work of art cannot be judged through the angle of time. The definition and analysis of art concerns only itself, and in all other cases, those around it.24

Here we are, humour and all, in the sphere of ‘synthetic relationships’ extolled by all artists, in a dialogue between different styles and different epochs, thumbing through continents and genres over the centuries. In France, ‘Douanier Rousseau’, who died in 1910, provided a bridge between popular and modern art. Everyone shared a passion for Rousseau’s work, whom his friend Apollinaire praised to the skies. Apollinaire went as far as to attribute to Rousseau the recovery of popular art in modern art. Derain and Dufy followed Rousseau’s lead in their wood carvings, a popular arts medium they used in their illustrations of Apollinaire’s writings. Dufy, who felt close to the art of Albrecht Dürer, drew inspiration too from provincial nativity sculptures and from Epinal prints, for which he had a genuine passion. For Delaunay, Rousseau’s popularity and widespread recognition were proof of the universality of art: ‘In his time and place, my friend Rousseau sang in tune. His melody is now universally recognized in the great newspapers and in New York he has found visionary defenders who champion his genius’ (Mon ami Rousseau dans son époque pour son milieu a chanté juste. Sa mélodie est maintenant universellement reconnue dans les grands journaux et de New-York il trouve des défenseurs visionnaires qui proclament son génie).25 Fortified by his visit to Berlin where he had seen and appreciated



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‘a real passion for true painting’, Delaunay found universalism in the ‘archaism’ of Rousseau. Above all, everyone visited ethnological museums: Apollinaire, Picasso, Delaunay, Derain, all purchased tribal art. Apollinaire liked to hunt bargains among the dealers in flea markets. He stood up for the aesthetic and spiritual qualities of this kind of art and knew how deeply the so-called ‘primitive’ arts had influenced modern art during this epoch of colonization and exploitation of the ‘other’ – it is worth noting that in the collections of the African wing of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, there is a sculpted elephant tusk which represents a white photographer having placed his camera in front of ‘natives’, a fascinating way of turning the world upside down. Apollinaire did not hesitate to plead for a real history of this primitive art, requiring aesthetic, anthropological, geographic and archaeological research necessary for a true appreciation of this ‘profound decorative and impassioned art’ (cet art profond décoratif et passionné)26 which he rated equally to the so-called primitives of Western art. He had a deep knowledge of the philosophical debates of the period, and made reference to the ideas of Arthur de Gobineau ‘who attributed to the children of Shem a preponderant role in the birth of artistic sentiment within the history of human progress’ (qui faisait jouer aux descendants de Cham un rôle prépondérant en ce qui, dans l’histoire des progrès humains, concerne la naissance et le développement du sentiment artistique).27 But Apollinaire resisted the particularist ideas of Gobineau regarding race. ‘As French as he was despite the “Gobineauvereine”, Gobineau would not be in fashion today in a civilized country’ (tout Français qu’il ait été en dépit des Gobineauvereine, Gobineau ne saurait être à la mode aujourd’hui dans un pays civilisé).28 Gobineau’s contempt for African intelligence, his insistence on African sensuality as Africa’s contribution to civilization, revolted Apollinaire. On the contrary, he thought that the study of African artefacts would yield proof of their originality in the context of a global art in which there would be no real divisions in time or space linking African and Oceanic primitivism, European primitivism, the avantgarde, popular art, children’s art or the art of the mad. For Apollinaire, the expressive distortion found in popular prints, children’s drawings and Orthodox icons alike was the expression of a vibrant spirituality. In New York, exactly at the same time, modern art was paired with African Art: Alfred Stieglitz bought a few of Constantin Brâncuși’s works and exhibited them in 1913. Picabia, who was in New York for the Armory Show in 1913, remembered listening to jazz for the first time in a club while visiting his great friend Marcel Duchamp, who was

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making his first ready-made. 1913, a year so far away in time and space from 1914. In April 1912, Delaunay had written to Kandinsky, feeling entranced by the Russian painter’s submissions to the Salon des Indépendants: Your works were discussed several times by a very small elite … The most important problem, at the moment, is the search for pure p ­ ainting … I do not know painters in Paris who have been able to provide results, the cubist group you mentioned only searches for the line and reserves to colour a secondary and non constructive role … Apollinaire has started to believe in us and to like my research, which have become of particular interest to him, and this year he has become officially the defender of this rare form of art.29

In 1912, Delaunay believed that the supremacy of Paris in the discovery of abstract painting – between cubism and ‘his’ colours – was far from established. But, the next year, in 1913, he finally agreed with Apollinaire who thought the opposite, despite the fact that their positions clouded the personal relations they both had with non-French artists: In truth, this movement is not exclusively French but European. There are English artists like Constable and Turner, German artists like Marées, a Dutchman like Van Gogh, a Spaniard like Picasso: they all play a large part in this movement, which is not so much a manifestation of French genius as of universal culture. Nevertheless, this movement emerged first in France … It is possible to say that France is playing the part that Italy played in painting in earlier times.30

Apollinaire continued to affirm the central role played by France in housing the greatest artists of the day, even if, like the Spaniard Picasso, they were not French. When he referred to Germany, though, Apollinaire did distinguish more and more between Germans and Slavs. It is as if the Slav Guillaume Apollinaire wanted to show that the principle of jus soli operated on this level in France, that assimilation through geography and language worked in France but not in Germany. Could Kandinsky have imagined that Apollinaire, whose roots were Polish and Slavic, would accuse him of Slavic tendencies? That would be to misunderstand the poet, who resented the failure of his application for naturalization in 1911 and who consistently refused to use his Polish name de Kostrowitsky, preferring his nom de plume instead. In November 1913, Apollinaire wrote a review of the first autumn exhibition in Berlin organized by Der Sturm. If he had wanted to speak of these works as representing ‘the new trends in the plastic arts’, why then did he speak of them, not in terms of art, expression, colour, forms, but



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solely in terms of nationality, understood in ethnolinguistic terms? Above all, he celebrated French painting, Gleizes, Metzinger, Duchamp-Villon, Jacques Villon, on top of Delaunay, Braque and Picasso. And if Marc Chagall and Archipenko also attracted his attention, they were Russians who lived in France after all.31 However, for all of its international ties and its simultaneous impact on the European artistic scene, we should not overestimate the influence of this avant-garde and believe that it epitomized the era’s whole artistic life. This was the trap in which the critic Roger Allard fell, although he was neither a conservative nor a partisan of ‘the arrière-garde’.32 He wrote in December 1913 about the Salon d’automne: I am somewhat under the impression that the separation between public and artists has never been as absolute. It is a whole era of painting with its trends, its formulas, its research, developing in hot greenhouses without contact with the outside world. This art, in which only artists and the rare initiated take an avid interest, strangely resembles the experience of being in a vacuum … With the aid of press articles, skilfully organized exhibitions with contradictory lectures, polemics, manifestos, proclamations, prospectuses and other futurist publicity, we launch one painter or a group of painters; in Boston or in Kiev or in Copenhagen, this cacophony creates an illusion and foreign lands make commissions and breed numerous disciples.33

And Roger Allard, by far, was not the art critic most hostile to cubism.  Towards the world war, avant and arrière-gardes together In 1913, many avant-garde artists conjured up an imaginary war that they hoped would lead humanity to a purer and more modern world. In their work, one could find traces of a frightful apocalypse, terrifyingly prescient in light of what happened just one year later. It is striking to see how frequently they used warlike rhetoric, a language of violent confrontation, with a certain zest for images and metaphors of violence, combat, triumph and defeat. And yet, at the same time, they praised solitude, asceticism, contemplation, spirituality and the expression in art of ‘internal desire’.34 But did they truly mean to speak metaphorically? After all, real war, atrocious war, was waged far away between Russians and Japanese, in Siberia in 1904, and made its way to French newspapers in the early part of the century. Blaise Cendrars – and Sonia Delaunay – represented its totalizing horror, its wounds, trauma and manifold deaths in a work that has since come to define modernism:

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In Siberia the artillery rumbled—it was war Hunger cold plague cholera And the muddy waters of the Amur carrying along millions of corpses In every station I watched the last trains leave That’s all: they weren’t selling any more tickets And the solders would far rather have stayed … An old monk was singing me the legend of Novgorod […] At Talga 100,000 wounded were dying with no help coming I went to the hospitals in Krasnoyarsk And at Khilok we met a long convoy of soldiers gone insane I saw in quarantine gaping sores and wounds with blood gushing out And the amputated limbs danced around or flew up in the raw air 35

Then, war caught to Europe, via the Balkans. In chronological order, this new way of waging war was first understood by the futurists, whose brutal ‘Manifesto of futurism’ against the corrupt art of the time had appeared in Paris in 1909. The futurists’ response to the Balkan Wars showed how militant they had become. In a radio spiral calligram, Marinetti depicted an antenna announcing the battle of Adrianopolis, Zang Tumb Tuum.36 Luigi Russolo, inventor of ‘Bruitism’ quoted one of Marinetti’s letters from 1913: patatraack splash manes winnying iiiiiii tohu-bohu ringing three Bulgar battalions on the march crook croak (slow tempo in double time) Choumi Maritza or Karvavena officers’ cries clattering copper plates pam here (fast) pac there Boum-pam-pam-pam-pam here and there and further out and above very high attention the name of God on his head chaak marvelous! flammes flammes flammes flammes flammes flammes flammes in the ramp of the forts there 37

The Balkan Wars, colours and sounds, jumbled together, noise, avantgarde music. Kandinsky subtitled his Improvisation 30, ‘Canons’,38 and The Wolves by Franz Marc pointed to the Balkan Wars in an interesting way. Marc subtitled his painting ‘Balkan War’ and depicted wolves crossing the countryside, a representation of animal life symbolizing man’s lost harmony with the forces of nature … Horses, wolves, all strikingly similar to the ones found in the Chauvet Cave, which Marc could not have seen since it was only discovered eighty years after his death, in 1994. Marc was very impressed by Delaunay’s technique of faceting – reminiscent of Apollinaire’s ‘The windows’ –, but decided to abandon it in favour of a more dramatic composition scheme. The cosmic scale of his paintings has often been linked to the war to come, in a manner similar to Ludwig Meidner’s anticipations in his series of ‘Apocalyptic Landscapes’, with



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Marc himself claiming that his inspiration came from the fact that he was rooted in Germany and was exposed to current events.39 Some cubist collages demonstrated a similar vision of the current wars in the Balkans. Apollinaire, again, knew: ‘Et pour la prose il y a les journaux’.40 For politics also? Nobody could believe that Juan Gris, Braque, Picasso, were just cutting or painting cuts of newspaper randomly; for example, Picasso’s Guitar Sweet Music and Glass is perfectly transparent in its references to current events.41 In the lower left-hand corner, a newspaper cutting reads ‘LE JOU’ with its headline being ‘CONSTANTINOPLE LA BATAILLE EST ENGAGE [sic]’. Obviously, Picasso chose this reference to the Balkan Wars while ridden with anxiety about the war, maybe also motivated by anti-militarism; probably, at this date we could interpret this reference to the beginning of a battle (la bataille est engagée) as an allusion to his rivalry with his collaborator – and fellow inventor of cubism – Braque, as critics have shown rightly. A cartoon adapted from Abel Faivre in Le Figaro appeared in The Century, during the Armory Show in New York, in April 1913. A very bourgeois couple, ‘At an Exhibition of “cubist” or “futurist” Pictures’ are looking at a modern painting, very sceptical; she comments: ‘Perhaps it is a map of the Balkan Mountains?’ Kandinsky said that his ‘canons’ found their way into his painting Improvisation 30 in 1913 because ‘at the time, there was speaking about war’; likewise the anti-modernist cartoon by Faivre recalls that the ‘Balkans’ were on everyone’s mind. And it is probably the painting by Franz Marc, The Wolves, the Balkan War that seems to illustrate the special place held by the Balkans in the Western European unconscious in 1913 since the title underlines the hostility that was so palpable at the time with the animals eerily looking like cannons.42 Was this foreshadowing due to the prescience of artists? All of the avant-garde, both in Europe and the world at large, would soon be engulfed by war; Braque would become an officer on the battlefront and be seriously wounded at the head, while Picasso, as a neutral Spaniard, did not fight in the war. Marc would die in Verdun in 1916. After the great exhibition in Berlin in January 1913, Walden and his wife went to Paris in March, where they met many avant-garde artists through Delaunay and Apollinaire, including Chagall. ‘At Apollinaire’s house, we had many conversations. In a corner of the room a little man is seated … Do you know what we should do, Mr. Walden? We must organize an exhibition featuring this young man’s works. Do you not know him? Monsieur Chagall’ (Chez Apollinaire on discutait beaucoup. Dans un coin un petit bonhomme est assis … Savez-vous ce qu’il faut

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faire, M. Walden? Il faut organiser une exposition d’œuvres de ce jeune homme. Vous ne le connaissez pas? Monsieur Chagall).43 This artistic and literary life was interrupted only by the real European war that would soon turn into a much wider conflict, starting in August 1914. The last letter of Walden to Apollinaire is dated 20  June  1914: ‘Seeing that you want to come to Berlin for the Picabia exhibition, I would like you to give a public reading of some of your poems … Your evening event in January would take place Thursday 28 January.’44 That day, 28 January 1915, Apollinaire was at the barracks in Nimes, ready to leave for the fight against the Germans at the front. Friendships, engagements: everything was fractured in the summer of 1914. Notes  1. A previous version of this chapter took the form of a talk presented at the Jeffrey Rubinoff Sculpture Park (on Hornby Island, British Columbia, Canada) in May 2011. The French text was translated into English by Jay Winter, who also provided some English translations for the French quotes used in this text. For a detailed contextualization of 1913–18, see Annette Becker, Voir la Grande Guerre.   2. See Guillaume Apollinaire, Cubist Painters, p. 13; Apollinaire, Méditations esthétiques: les peintres cubistes, in Œuvres en prose complètes, vol. 2, p. 10. See also Annette Becker, Apollinaire, une biographie de guerre.   3. For Felix Fénéon who created the concept in 1886, Seurat and Signac were at ‘the avant-garde of impressionism’. See Annette Becker and Rémi Labrusse, introduction to Marine Branland (ed.), 1914: Guerre et avant-gardes, p. 9.  4. ‘Tapuscrit’ (n.d.), quoted in Christian Derouet (ed.), Catalogue Kandinsky, p. 327.   5. I paraphrase Nietzsche whose work was fundamental for both Kandinsky and Apollinaire. See Wassily Kandinsky, Du Spirituel dans l’art, p. 61 or Apollinaire, Méditations esthétiques, p. 11.   6. Apollinaire, Cubist Painters, pp. 9, 27. Apollinaire, Méditations esthétiques, p. 8, pp. 16–17: ‘Avant tout, les artistes sont des hommes qui veulent devenir inhumains. Ils cherchent péniblement les traces de l’inhumanité, traces que l’on ne rencontre nulle part dans la nature. Elles sont la vérité et en dehors d’elles nous ne connaissons aucune réalité … Il faut aux nouveaux artistes une beauté idéale qui ne soit plus seulement l’expression orgueilleuse de l’espèce, mais l’expression de l’univers, dans la mesure où il s’est humanisé dans la lumière.’   7. English translation by Adeline Heck. Apollinaire gave a talk on 18 January 1913 in Der Sturm gallery in Berlin, which was published in February at the same time he completed his Méditations esthétiques which appeared in March 1913. ‘La peinture moderne’, which was the title of the talk, had the



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a­ dvantage of being shorter, as it was meant for a German audience and repeated the same ideas in order for Apollinaire to ge this point across, which is apparent in the sentence I quoted above. See Apollinaire, ‘La Peinture moderne’, in Œuvres en prose, vol. 2, pp. 500–5).   8. Marilyn Satin Kushner et al. (eds), The Armory Show at 100.   9. For a very interesting example, see Delphine Bière-Chauvel, Le Réseau artistique de Robert Delaunay. 10. Marc to Delaunay, 2 March 1913, in Franz Marc, Ecrits et correspondances, 2006), pp. 480–1. Original spelling given in the French text. 11. Apollinaire, Cubist Painters, p. 18. Apollinaire, Méditations esthétiques, p. 12. 12. The opening on 12 March to 19 April in the Herwarth Walden’s gallery Der Sturm in Berlin of the Blaue Reiter exhibition had an unmistakable international character. In the same month, there was also an exhibition of ‘Italian futurists’ at the same gallery – which came from Paris and brought with it its own polemics – and an exhibition of ‘French expressionists’ in August. The term ‘expressionists’ was first used in March 1912. Walden (the pseudonym of Georg Lewin) who had founded the Der Sturm review in 1910 with Karl Kraus, championed Berlin as the centre of modern art; and Chagall acknowledged Walden’s efforts by inscribing his name on the painting. 13. In the last issue of Montjoie! (a newspaper founded by Canudo) in April 1914, Cendrars published on the same page two parallel poems, ‘Canudo’ and ‘Apollinaire’, both of which he wrote while in New York, regretting their absence. 14. Poem dedicated to Marc Chagall, published in Les Soirées de Paris in 14 April 1914 and Der Sturm 14 May 1914, the previous titles had been ‘Rotsoge’ or ‘Prophétie et Vision’. See Œuvres poétiques complètes, p. 201. ‘Mais tes cheveux sont le trolley / A travers l’Europe vêtue de petits feux multicolores’. 15. It was a coup for the Bavarian capital to house the two Blaue Reiter exhibitions in December 1911 and February–April 1912. Munich was the mid-point between Paris (Delaunay, Rousseau, Picasso) and Moscow (Kandinsky, Larionov …). 16. A term he invented to emphasize the role of light and colour, which paralleled form in cubism. 17. English translation by Adeline Heck. Apollinaire, ‘La Peinture moderne’, p. 505: ‘Ce mouvement je crois est plus proche que les autres de la sensibilité de plusieurs peintres allemands modernes … A ce mouvement appartiennent instinctivement encore les plus intéressants des peintres allemands: Kandinsky, Marc, Meidner, Macke, Jawlensky, Münter, Otto Freundlich, etc. A cet orphisme appartiennent également les futuristes italiens qui, issus du fauvisme et du cubisme, estimaient injuste d’abolir toutes les conventions perspectivistes ou psychologiques  … Nous sommes ivres d’enthousiasme. Nous élevons ici vers le lyrisme plastique … Cette tendance créatrice s’étend maintenant à l’univers … Avec ces mouvements, orphistes et cubistes, nous arrivons en pleine poésie de la lumière.’

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18. ‘Kandinsky displays his Improvisations, which are not without ­interest, since they represent more or less alone the influence of Matisse. But Kandinsky pushes to the extreme the theory of Matisse on the need to follow instinct, and thereby winds up obeying chance alone.’ ‘Kandinski expose les  Improvisations  qui ne sont pas sans intérêt, car elles représentent à peu près seules l’influence de Matisse. Mais Kandinski pousse à l’extrême la théorie de Matisse sur l’obéissance à l’instinct et il n’obéit plus qu’au hasard’ (L’Intransigeant, 25 March 1912, reprinted in Œuvres en prose, vol. 2, p. 430). 19. See Christian Derouet, ‘Kandinsky–Delaunay’. 20. In May 1914, Apollinaire reviewed an exhibition of Rhineland expressionist artists, and said of Macke: ‘August Macke who lives in Bonn and who is perhaps the only one of them [the Rhine expressionists] who is truly interesting.’ ‘August Macke qui vit à Bonn et qui est peut-être le seul vraiment intéressant [des expressionnistes rhénans] (Paris-Journal, 20 May 1914, in Œuvres en prose, vol. 2, p. 715). 21. Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘The windows’, in Selected Poems, p. 107. Apollinaire, ‘Les fenêtres’, in Oeuvres poétiques complètes, pp. 168–9. ‘Du rouge au vert tout le jaune se meurt / Paris Vancouver Hyères Maintenon New York et les Antilles / La fenêtre s’ouvre comme une orange / Le beau fruit de la lumière’. 22. English translation by Adeline Heck. This is the dedication to Apollinaire written by hand by Robert Delaunay, on the first page of the catalogue of the exhibition, which is kept in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. 23. Henri Matisse quoted by Philippe Dagen, Le Peintre, p. 300: ‘The revelation came to me from the East. It was only later that this art touched me and that I understood Byzantine painting, in the icons of Moscow … Giotto is for me the height of my desires … With what pleasure I discovered Japanese prints. What a lesson I learned in the purity of harmony.’ 24. Two epigraphs by Mikhail Larionov preceding his introduction to ‘Exposition d’icônes originales et de Loubki organisée par M.F. Larionov’, in Larionov, Manifestes, p. 41: ‘Au cours du règne de l’empereur assyrien Hamourabi fut organisée une exposition de loubki russes, chinois, japonais, français, etc. des dix-neuvième et vingtième siècles. Ils suscitèrent un tel sursaut du sentiment artistique que le temps fut tué par l’extratemporel et l’extraspatial. Le sentiment ainsi surgi régna comme une éternité autonome. … Le peintre Paul Cézanne vivait sous Ramsès II. Le scribe Héabad Randai vécut, travailla et mourut à Aix-en-Provence. Renseignement historique précis dont bénéficie la clarté du regard qui s’intéresse directement à l’œuvre d’art, car la valeur et le but d’une œuvre d’art ne se jugent pas sous l’angle du temps. La définition et l’analyse de l’art ne regardent que lui-même, et dans tous les autres cas, celui qui l’entoure.’ 25. Delaunay to Marc, 12 January 1913, Ecrits et correspondances, p. 477. 26. Apollinaire, ‘Art nègre’, originally published in Paris-Journal, 17 July 1914, reprinted in Œuvres en prose complètes, vol. 2, p. 833.



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27. Ibid., p. 2. 28. Apollinaire, ‘A propos de l’art des Noirs’, in Paul Guillaume, Sculptures nègres, p. 2. 29. Delaunay to Kandinsky, 25 April 1912, in Derouet ‘Kandinsky–Delaunay, pp. 74–83: ‘Vos œuvres ont été discutées dans une toute petite élite à plusieurs reprises … Cette recherche de la peinture pure c’est le problème actuel. Je ne connais à Paris de peintres qui donnent des résultats dans cette recherche le groupe cubiste dont vous parliez ne cherche que dans la ligne réservant à la couleur une place secondaire et non constructive … Apollinaire commence à croire en nous et à aimer mes recherches l’intéressent particulièrement et cette année il est officiellement le défenseur de cet art si rare.’ 30. Apollinaire, ‘La Peinture moderne’, p. 501: ‘En réalité, ce mouvement n’est pas exclusivement français, mais européen. Des Anglais comme Constable et Turner, un Allemand comme Marées, un Hollandais comme Van Gogh, un Espagnol comme Picasso ont tous joué un grand rôle dans ce mouvement qui n’est pas tant une manifestation du génie français que de la culture universelle. Néanmoins ce mouvement a pris pied tout d’abord en France … on peut affirmer que la France joue le rôle que l’Italie a joué pour la peinture ancienne.’ 31. Originally published in Paris-Journal, 2 July 1914, reprinted in Apollinaire, Œuvres en prose complètes, vol. 2, p. 804. 32. Many thanks to William Marx. See Marx (ed.), Les Arrière-gardes au XXe siècle. 33. English translation by Adeline Heck. Roger Allard, ‘Le salon d’automne’, 62. ‘J’ai un peu l’impression que jamais la séparation ne fut plus absolue entre le public et les artistes. C’est toute une période de la peinture, avec ses modes, ses formules, ses recherches, qui se développe en serre chaude sans nul contact avec l’extérieur. Cet art, pour lequel les seuls artistes et de rares initiés se passionnent, ressemble singulièrement à une expérience en vase clos … A l’aide d’articles de presse, d’expositions savamment organisées avec conférences contradictoires, polémiques, manifestes, proclamations, prospectus et autres publicité futuriste on lance un peintre ou un groupe de peintres; A Boston ou à Kiew ou à Copenhague, ce tintamarre fait illusion et l’étranger adresse quelques commandes et de nombreux disciples.’ 34. Catalogue of the first exhibition of the Blaue Reiter at the Thannhauser Gallery in Munich. See Kandinsky and Marc, Der Blaue Reiter. 35. Blaise Cendrars, Complete Poems, p. 16/27. The French original in Cendrars, La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France (Paris: Éditions des Hommes Nouveaux, 1913) goes: ‘En Sibérie tonnait le canon, c’était la guerre / La faim le froid la peste le choléra / Et les eaux limoneuses de / l’Amour charriaient des millions de charognes. / Dans toutes les gares je voyais partir tous les derniers trains / Personne ne pouvait plus partir car on ne délivrait plus de billets / Et les soldats qui s’en allaient auraient bien voulu rester / […] A Talga 100.000 blessés agonisaient faute de soins / J’ai visité

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les hôpitaux de Krasnoïarsk / Et à Khilok nous avons croisé un long convoi de soldats fous / J’ai vu, dans les lazarets, des plaies béantes, des blessures qui saignaient à pleines orgues / Et les membres amputés dansaient autour ou s’envolaient dans l’air rauque’. Thanks to Effie Rentzou and the Princeton Art Gallery for showing this wonderful original piece and others during the conference on 1913 that sparked this volume. 36. Marinetti, in Gérard-Georges Lemaire, Les Mots en liberté futuristes, p. 13. 37. Letter by Marinetti, cited in Luigi Russolo, L’Art des bruits: ‘patatraack éclaboussements crinières hennissement iiiiiii tohu-bohu tintements trois bataillons bulgares an marche crook croak (lentement mesure à deux temps) Choumi Maritza o Karvavena cris d’officiers s’entrechoquant plats de cuivre pam ici (vite) pac là-bas Boum-pam-pam-pam-pam ici et là plus loin tout autour très haut attention nom de Dieu sur la tête chaak épatant! flammes flammes flammes flammes flammes flammes flammes rampe des forts là-bas.’ 38. Munich Staatsgalerie. 39. See Viola Hildebrandt-Schat, ‘Formes combattantes: pressentiments et réalité de la guerre chez Franz Marc et August Macke’, in Branland (ed.), 1914: Guerre et avant-gardes, pp. 167–75. 40. Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘Zone’, Alcools, in Œuvres poétiques complètes, p. 39. 41. McNay’s Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas (end of 1912 or early 1913). Painting reprinted in William Marx (ed.), Picasso et la guerre, p. 56. 42. Painting located in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York. 43. English translation by Adeline Heck. Marc Chagall, Ma vie, p. 158. 44. Cited in Philippe Rehage, Correspondance, p. 96.

Works cited Allard, Roger, ‘Le Salon d’automne’, Les Ecrits français (5 December 1913), pp. 62–8. Apollinaire, Guillaume, Œuvres poétiques complètes, ed. Marcel Adéma and Michel Décaudin (Paris: Gallimard, 1956). —, Œuvres en prose complètes vol. 2, ed. Pierre Caizergues and Michel Décaudin (Paris: Gallimard, 1991). —, The Cubist Painters, trans. with commentary by Peter Read (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). —, Selected Poems, trans. Martin Sorrell (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 2015). Becker, Annette, Guillaume Apollinaire, une biographie de guerre, 1914–2008 (Paris: Tallandier, 2009). Re-edited as La Grande Guerre d’Apollinaire, 1914–1918 (Paris: Tallandier, 2014). —, Voir la Grande Guerre, un autre récit (Paris: Armand-Colin, 2014). Bière-Chauvel, Delphine, Le Réseau artistique de Robert Delaunay (Aix-en Provence: Publications de l’Université de Provence, 2005). Branland, Marine (ed.), 1914: Guerre et avant-gardes / 1914: War and the Avant-Gardes (Nanterre: Presses Universitaires de Paris Ouest, 2016).



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Cendrars, Blaise, Prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France, in Édition complète, vol. 1 (Paris: Denoël, 1963), pp. 20–33. Originally published 1913 by Éditions des Hommes Nouveaux. —, Complete Poems, trans. Ron Padgett (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). Chagall, Marc, Ma vie (Paris: Stock, 1993). Dagen, Philippe, Le Peintre, le poète, le sauvage, les voies du primitivisme dans l’art français (Paris: Champs-arts, 2010). Derouet, Christian, ‘Kandinsky–Delaunay, un échange de lettres en avril 1912’, Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne, 73 (Autumn 2000), 74–83. Derouet, Christian (ed.), Catalogue Kandinsky (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2009). Guillaume, Paul, Sculptures nègres, sculptures d’Afrique, d’Amérique, d’Océanie (New York: Hacker Art Books, 1973). First published as Sculptures nègres (Paris: Paul Guillaume, 1917). Kandinsky, Wassily, Du Spirituel dans l’art (Paris: Denoël, 1969). —, and Franz Marc, Der Blaue Reiter (Munich: R. Piper, 1912). Kushner, Marilyn Satin et al. (eds), The Armory Show at 100: Modernism and Revolution (New York: New-York Historical Society, 2013). Larionov, Mikhail, Manifestes (Paris: Allia, 1995). Lemaire, Gérard-Georges, Les Mots en liberté futuristes (Paris: Jacques Damase, 1986). Marc, Franz, Ecrits et correspondances (Paris: École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts, 2006). Marx, William (ed.), Les Arrière-gardes au XXe siècle: l’autre face de la modernité esthétique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004). —, Picasso et la guerre (Paris: Gallimard, Musée de l’Armée, 2019). Rehage, Philippe, Correspondance Guillaume Apollinaire–Herwarth Walden (Der Sturm), 1913 (Caen: Lettres Modernes Minard, 2007). Russolo, Luigi, L’Art des bruits, ed. Giovanni Lista (Lausanne: L’Âge d’Homme, 1975).

Part III

1913, French modernism and intermediality

Introduction

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his last part presents a fraction of the extraordinary intermedial aesthetic production that flourished around the year 1913. The interpenetration of genres and media took different forms, from collaboration that resulted in mixed media objects, like La Prose du Transsibérien, to conceptualizations of one medium through another, as is the case of cinema, which may function as a theoretical frame for aesthetics in general. Mallarmé rises as a central figure in this dynamic moment of cross-fertilizations, as his poetry and his poetics inspired a series of innovative works in dance, music and the visual arts. The chapters thus instigate questions of high and low (Wall-Romana, Florman), old and new media (Perloff, Duzer), authorship (Perloff, Shaw) and new modes of perception. The first chapter, Christophe Wall-Romana’s ‘Camille Flammarion’s flash-forward: The cinematicization of French thought and aesthetics (1867–1913)’, takes 1913 as the year during which cinema as an intermedial theoretical concept burst into artistic creation, a moment that was years in the making. Wall-Romana reconstructs the slow percolation of conceptualizing cinema and cinematic thinking in France from 1867 onwards, as French philosophy, although rarely using the words ‘cinema’ or ‘cinematograph’, talked about it obliquely but intensely, indeed obsessively. The new medium raised crucial intersecting issues concerning time, memory, the nature of light and motion, point of view, perception, panoramic vision, spectatorship, image production, imagination, will, thought and movement, all of them key concepts for modernist aesthetics, thus offering a remarkably versatile frame for thinking through the aesthetic object and its creation.

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Some of the issues raised by cinema, such as panoramic vision and perception, are also central in one of the monuments of 1913, La Prose du Transsibérien. Marjorie Perloff, in her chapter ‘How “simultaneous” is it? Revisiting the Delaunay–Cendrars collaboration on La Prose du Transsibérien’, reconsiders this seminal work through a discussion of its intermedial character, as a remarkable fusion of the verbal and the visual, already present in its description as the first livre simultané. Perloff argues that it is precisely that intermediality that creates an object challenging habitual modes of perception and ultimately producing a differential text, one that exists in more than a single incarnation. In this respect, La Prose in its changing forms expresses perfectly the ethos of uncertainty and contradiction that characterized the avant-guerre, as Becker outlined in the previous section. Mutability is approached in a different manner by Virginie A. Duzer in her chapter on ‘Mallarmé’s modernity in 1913’. Duzer discusses the consecration of Mallarmé as a modernist icon through a careful unpacking of a series of mediatized events that led to the 1914 book edition of Un coup de dés. Journal articles, essays, public commemorations, music and ballet performances, aimed at celebrating or commemorating Mallarmé, transformed for a new generation the legacy of the poet from an obscure symbolist to the quintessential modernist icon. Echoing Marx’s chapter (Chapter 5), Duzer highlights the Nouvelle Revue Française’s (NRF  ) central role in this orchestrated campaign, as an alternative to the rear-guard’s and the avant-garde’s reaction to the symbolist ‘end of literature’. In so doing, the NRF reinvented symbolism and from the tail end of romanticism, it turned it into the beginning of the modern. Similarly, Mary Shaw in her chapter ‘Poetry displaced: Nijinsky, Delaunay, Duchamp’, turns to Mallarmé but this time as generative of concepts, principles and forms that spilled over from his ‘closed’, ‘purist’ framework of arcane writings into the radically open nature of multimedia artworks around 1913. Shaw identifies these principles, articulated in Mallarmé’s theoretical texts and performed in his poetic ones, as simultaneity, supplementarity, identity-in-difference, chance determinism and the disappearance of the author within the collective. Shaw sees these principles at work in the structure of three landmarks of 1913: Vaslav Nijinsky’s ballet Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, Delaunay’s and Cendrars’ La Prose du Transsibérien, and Marcel Duchamp’s La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même. The impact of Mallarmé’s poetics continues to be strong much longer, though, as seen in Duchamp’s last work, Étant donnés (1946–66), read by Shaw as a recasting of the Large Glass, like Un coup de dés was a recasting of Igitur, in a chain of influences



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and references that project modernism into a post-Second World War timeline. The final chapter of this section, Lisa Florman’s ‘Behind Picasso’s pins’, turns to Picasso’s use of pins in his papiers collés to illustrate some of the tensions and divisions that not only structure the pasted paper works themselves, but also characterize the field of the visual arts as it existed in France in 1913. By bringing mass-produced industrial objects, the pins, into the representational space, Florman argues, Picasso’s papiers épinglés epitomize questions around art and mass industrial production, also prefigure the ready-made as the end of painting, and make apparent the tensions between pure painting and figurative painting, decorative and fine arts. Like these pins that pierce through materials joining them together in a new whole, which still displays its discrete and sometimes clashing parts, this section showcases how artistic and literary creation in 1913 experimented with stitching together, combining and superimposing genres and media that used to be distinct.

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Camille Flammarion’s flash-forward: the cinematicization of French thought and aesthetics (1867–1913) Christophe Wall-Romana

Surprisingly, I even saw [Remy] de Gourmont several times, quietly sitting in a small cinema place Saint-Michel, at the time of Bout-de-zan and Max Linder. Édouard Deverin, 19131 I feel in [Du côté de chez Swann] as though in a drawing room covered with mirrors getting larger in all directions, and on which images multiply to infinity and get smaller all at once. Mr. Proust has not written a journal, but treated himself to a kind of cinema, the episodes of which he reconstitutes, where he himself poses as several characters, throwing willy-nilly one person’s coat on the shoulders of another, or on his own. Jacques-Émile Blanche, 19142

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he year 1913 was marked by the massive emergence of new works of literature and art that collectively remediated or integrated aspects of cinema. Examples are numerous: Guillaume Apollinaire’s invocation of cinema in his ‘Manifeste anti-futuriste’ as well as his first Calligramme, ‘Petit Paysage animé’, inspired by Émile Cohl’s animated films; Sonia Delaunay-Terk and Blaise Cendrars’s La Prose du Transsibérien, a long ‘simultaneous’ strip of coloured shapes intertwined with text providing an example of the ‘cinematographic sketches’ Cendrars mentioned as an artistic desideratum in his 1912 germinal text ‘New York in Flashlight’; or Proust’s magic lantern shows in Combray, clearly a palimpsest of contemporary cinema with which La Recherche as a whole explicitly vies.3 We could also mention the painted studies of Leopold Survage for an abstract film he tried selling to Louis Gaumont in 1914; the 1912–13 colour film of Corra adapting Mallarmé’s ‘Les Fleurs’; or the epochal Nu descendant les escaliers

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no. 2 of Marcel Duchamp.4 As for Ricciotto Canudo’s ‘La Naissance d’un sixième art, essai sur le cinéma’, from October 1911, it marks the beginning of film theory.5 We might note, finally, that Louis Feuillade’s 1913 Fantômas was received with such enthusiasm by the avant-garde that Apollinaire, Raynal and Picasso launched a Fantômas admiration society. Both the immediacy of their reaction and the choice of an open-ended film work – a crime serial – typify the new cinephilia of 1913. To account for this sudden emergence, historians of cinema, art and thought routinely juxtapose Duchamp’s stroboscopic paintings with the chronophotographic series of Étienne-Jules Marey. Henri Langlois’s 1963 exhibition on Marey at the Cinémathèque was the first to make that connection, and it has since become a well-rehearsed cliché.6 Yet  this parallel explains precious little: indeed, it brackets the more than twentyyear period between the late 1880s and the 1913 moment, as if it were a perfectly empty gestation period when cinema failed to register on the intellectual and aesthetic landscape. In this view, only Bergson addressed cinema during those years in a chapter from his 1907 Creative Evolution entitled ‘The cinematographic mechanism of thought and the mechanistic illusion’, and moreover, solely to argue that it chops up time into equal slices, giving us a spatial and thus falsified sense of duration analogous to the error in Zeno’s analysis of movement. Deleuze made Bergson’s position famous by brilliantly turning it on its head and crafting his own philosophy of the cinema. Yet when he writes that Bergson’s approach to duration in Matter and Memory –  published in 1896 but begun in 18937 – ‘prefigures the future and essence of cinema’ (Qui pressentait [de manière prophétique] l’avenir et l’essence du cinéma), the paradoxical implications are that cinema was slow to become a conceptual object in intellectual history, even though it was possible to intuit cinema before its actual implementation as ‘pre-cinema’.8 This chapter will confirm and deepen Deleuze’s second implication, and thoroughly disprove his first, by showing that: (1) cinema, defined as the synthetic projection of chronophotographs, was a speculative object from at least 1867 onwards; (2) the constituted cinema apparatus was a techno-conceptual object from the early 1890s onwards; (3) 1913 signals the overt leap of cinema into avant-garde art from other domains in which it and pre-cinema had been covertly addressed for over forty years: cosmology, psychology, philosophy, and littérature d’anticipation or science fiction. The year 1913 is the mouth of a glacier from which intermedial cinema rushes out like a river that had been coursing for many years in hundreds of slow and disparate rivulets under a thick epistemological blanket, rendering it all but imperceptible.



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Cinema as cosmorama It is a truism that the ideology of the Third Republic was founded on substituting for religious allegiance, with its ties to monarchism, a state-centred ‘religion of the homeland’.9 What has received much less emphasis is that this process of secularization was accompanied by an existential shift from a biblical cosmogony to a much more scientific cosmology. In this transition, astronomy played a new and decisive role.10 In the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, for instance, astronomy had its own pavilion called Cosmorama – which included a ‘cinematographic panorama’.11 As astronomer Camille Flammarion –  a torchbearer for secular science – wrote in the first issue of L’Astronomie, revue d’astronomie populaire (1882): ‘[Astronomy] alone teaches us where we are and what we are’ ([l’astronomie] seule nous enseigne où nous sommes et ce que nous sommes).12 Léopold Bresson, an intellectual trained at the École Polytechnique, made it even plainer in his 1880 opus linking cosmology to politics: ‘The discovery of the rotation of the Earth on itself and around the sun was certainly the most dangerous blow against Catholic dogma. … Hence … astronomy is first among the sciences, the basis of any positive knowledge, and consequently of any rational education’ (La découverte du mouvement de rotation de la terre sur elle-même et autour du soleil, a été certainement le coup le plus dangereux porté aux dogmes catholiques … Ainsi … l’astronomie est la première des sciences, la base de toute connaissance positive, et par suite de toute éducation rationnelle).13 In other words, the political success of secular reason as binder for the nation ultimately rested on astronomy’s authority to explain anew the origin and end of the universe, and substitute scientific solidarity with the world and the nation for individual fate and the dream of salvation. A number of popular science journals bear the mark of this epistemological revolution in their titles. The socialist Catholic abbé François Moigno edited L’Univers in the 1840s before joining forces with vulgarizer Benito de Montford, who launched the science publication La Lumière in the early 1850s, replaced by Cosmos in 1852, and finally renamed Cosmos –  les mondes in 1874. Meanwhile, in 1867, André Gill launched the caricature weekly, La Lune, and after it was suppressed by imperial censorship, he republished it with a wink under the name L’Éclipse in 1872.14 Astronomy was thus not a pure and recluse science, as we would see it today, but part and parcel of fundamental cultural shifts touching on issues such as public education, the role of observation against dogmatism, science as a new national discourse, and literary and artistic freedom.15

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It is during this key period straddling the Franco-Prussian War that Camille Flammarion wrote Lumen in 1866, a novel in which a dead man, who has become a universal soul, bestows upon his former friend the full knowledge of the cosmos. In the course of a series of mind experiments, the dead man’s soul called Lumen – the logos – has Quaerens – his friend, the querier – explore time, space and light. Developing the theory of cosmic memory borne away by light in images, Flammarion s­ tumbles – far beyond Deleuze’s ‘prefiguration’ – on the cinematic apparatus: Now suppose that you leave Earth at a speed superior to the speed of light. What will happen? You will catch up, as you move away into space, to the light rays that left before you, that is to say, the successive photographs which, second after second, instant after instant, fly out into the void. If, for example, you left in 1867 at a speed equal to the speed of light, you will eternally keep the year 1867 with you. If you go faster, you will rediscover the rays that left in earlier years and carry with them the photographs of these years.16

For Flammarion, since the universe is awash in the photographic flux streaming out of all things at the speed of light, he reasons that at a speed faster than light, one could move back in time, swimming optically up the temporal stream. Lumen continues: It is not impossible that these images encounter a dark celestial body in these vast spaces … whose surface … would be sensitive and able to fix the image of a faraway world. Hence terrestrial events would be painted upon a dark globe. And if this dark globe rotates on itself … it will present successively its various zones to the terrestrial images and thus record the continuous photography of successive events. … Imagination could then suppose that this world is not spherical but cylindrical, thus seeing in space an imperishable column on which the greatest events of Earth history would engrave and wind themselves.17

Beneath this fantastic description of a cosmic cinema, we easily recognize the rotating-cylinder devices used by experimentalists in the 1850s and 1960s, such as Marey’s myograph, the 1857 phonautograph of ÉdouardLéon Scott de Martinville and, of course, Charles Cros and Thomas Edison’s later 1877 phonograph, and ultimately the latter’s cylindrical Kinetoscope of 1888 – the first working animated-photography machine. Apart from scale, there is no rigorous conceptual difference between the device Flammarion calls the ‘chrono-télé-scope’ and Edison’s Kinetoscope developed twenty years later.18 Indeed, Edison followed the same path as Flammarion in extrapolating cinema from the phonograph’s continuous sound stream registered on a cylinder. Moreover, the



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last component of cinema still missing in Edison’s Kinetoscope, namely, the projection of moving chronophotographs, is achieved by Flammarion’s giant chronotelescope.19 Chaperon indicates that Lumen includes scenes of freeze frame, slow and accelerated motion, and, of course, reverse motion.20 Thus Flammarion, she insists, bridges the gap between Marey’s analytical and scientific chronophotography and the Lumières’s – or Edison’s – synthetic entertainment cinema, even before it arose. She adds: It is thus capital to acknowledge that the formulation of an epistemological project bearing on the totality of the visible existed historically long before the inventions that stemmed from it. In other words, Marey and the Lumière, in spite of cinema history’s certainties, are not in some originary opposition: they share a field that was already circumscribed.21

This early circumscription of the totality of the visible by cinema as an imaginary medium should give us pause at the epistemological and philosophical level. It appears indeed, as we will now see, that most of the thinkers of the Third Republic took this epistemologically cosmic scale of the visible for granted. Bergson would be the obvious example. In Time and Free Will (Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, 1888), the bad object that is pitted against duration throughout the book is astronomical prediction, that is, time flattened into space, with the ‘astronomer’ as the vilain.22 Moreover, one of the signal enigmas at the start of Matter and Memory is Bergson’s decision to translate the world into a set of images because they constitute a midpoint between a thing and its mental representation. Explaining this choice in the foreword to the seventh edition, he writes: ‘We place ourselves at the point of view of a mind unaware of the disputes between philosophers. Such a mind would naturally believe that matter exists such as it perceived, and since it is perceived as an image, the mind would make of it, in itself, an image.’23 Lumen is indeed such a pure mind or spirit, as he explains to his mortal friend: ‘The mode of existence of the soul … is a spiritual mode’ (Le mode d’existence de l’âme est essentiellement différent de celui de la vie. C’est un mode spirituel).24 Lumen later teaches him ‘the metaphysical theory of images’ (la théorie métaphysique des images) which culminates in the cosmic mind experiment of cinema.25 Lumen and Matter and Memory, in other words, share a similar epistemic universe in which images are the central actors, and in which a materially disinvested observer faces the totality of the visible in space and time. Some of Bergson’s later texts even refer to what Chaperon calls Flammarion’s ‘celestial cinematograph’ quite explicitly.

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In Creative Mind, Bergson writes for instance: ‘Suppress the conscious and the living … and you obtain in fact a universe whose successive states are in theory calculable in advance, like the images placed side by side along the cinematographic film, prior to its unrolling’ (Supprimez le conscient et le vivant … vous obtenez en effet un univers dont les états successifs sont théoriquement calculables d’avance, comme les images, antérieures au déroulement, qui sont juxtaposées sur le film cinématographique).26 Flammarion and Bergson agree –  albeit with opposite conclusions – that the total film of the cosmos ends up doing away with time altogether: ‘we can now conceive the omnipresence of the world in all its duration: events vanish from the place where they were born, but they remain within space. This successive and endless projection of all facts accomplished on each of the worlds takes place in the realm of Infinite Being whose ubiquity thus holds each thing within an eternal permanence’ (La réalité métaphysique de ce vaste problème est telle que l’on peut concevoir maintenant l’omniprésence du monde en toute sa durée, les événements s’évanouissent pour le lieu qui les a fait naître, mais demeurent dans l’espace, Cette projection successive et sans fins de tous les faits accomplis sur chacun des mondes s’effectue dans le sein de l’Être infini dont l’ubiquité tient ainsi chaque chose dans une permanence éternelle).27 This view is, of course, anathema to Bergson’s thought for which human duration and quality must trump the inhumanity of space and quantity. Flammarion’s celestial cinema is thus the obverse of – and perhaps the tacit impulse for – Bergson’s theory of image, duration, perception and memory. Let us recall that as a sixteenyear old science-loving high school student, Bergson received the second prize in geometry and cosmography at the Concours général in 1872, a year after the publication of Lumen’s second edition. Whether, as is more than plausible, Bergson had closely read Lumen, or not, it is plain that his book shares the latter’s conceptual staging of a foundational confrontation between human duration and spatial projections played out through images and within a totality of the visible: non-spatial memory for Bergson, infinite space for Flammarion.28 Cosmorama vs. psychorama: Pre-cinema in philosophical debates, 1880–1913 A number of debates animating Third Republic philosophy carry the imprint of Flammarion’s extreme cinematic cosmology, often quite explicitly. Hence one of Bergson’s followers, Alphonse Chide, wrote in 1905 in his book L’Idée de rythme:



cinematicization of french t hought and aesthetics 203 The cinema aims to become a modern Proteus … Some already dream of a day when all will be submitted to measure, when king-­cinematograph will concretely realize what mathematical deduction does in the abstract  … the universe will unfold on screen, without a single false note, like a self-propelled theorem … The extension of measurability, especially cinematographic, has contributed to bringing back [among philosophers] Hegel’s mystical adoration for human reason.29

Cinema, as in Flammarion, signals the imposition of an absolute metric on human variable duration, and it is reason itself, excessively valued in a manner ultimately deemed non-French, that is to be faulted. We see here what I would call the primitive scene of free will in French philosophy in the Third Republic. It has three components: (1) the totality is given as a visual whole, and it points to two opposite assessments; (2) the infinite cosmos stills time through spatialization as dramatized by cinematicization (Flammarion); (3) human inner rhythm/mobilism/duration dispels any pre-ordained spatial representation through improvising, acting and thus freedom (Bergson/Chide).30 As another illustration, we can mention one of Bergson’s teachers, the philosopher Gabriel Tarde, who wrote a short science fiction text, published in 1896, in which the future of civilization leads to global catastrophe precisely because too much is entrusted to ‘a combined phonograph and cinematograph apparatus’ (le phonographe et cinématographe combinés) that substituted for the flow of nature and blocked human inventiveness all at once.31 The text was begun in 1879, yet I would argue that cinema is already epistemologically inscribed within its fundamental problematics of objectively spatialized time vs. duration’s mobile inner freedom. Another earlier proponent of mobilisme – as the Bergsonian doctrine became known as –, Émile Boutroux, was limning a similar originary scene in his major opus, On The Contingency of Natural Laws (1872): ‘As for natural laws, they would have no absolute existence and would merely express a given phase, a stage, as if a moral and aesthetic degree of things. They would be the artificially obtained and fixed image of a model that is by essence alive and mobile’ (Quant aux lois de la nature elles n’auraient pas une existence absolue, elles exprimeraient simplement une phase donnée, une étape et comme un degré moral et esthétique des choses. Elle seraient l’image artificiellement obtenue et fixée, d’un modèle vivant et mobile par essence).32 Rejecting positivist assumptions of immutable laws, Boutroux proposes a metaphysics of cosmic becoming. What is interesting for our purposes is that he depicts scientific theorization as mere photographic snapshots of the universe, fully within the logic of Flammarion’s light as infinite flux of photographic images,

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but now on an epistemological level. Thus, the cinematographic cosmorama shifts imperceptibly towards a psychorama, as though the ‘big world’, as Samuel Beckett calls it, were directly linked to the ‘little world’ of our inner selves.33 This problematic shift from outer cosmos to inner microcosmos, whether in perception, cognition, imagination or action, also summons pre-cinema and cinema as quasi-automatic conceptual intermediaries. Léon Brunschvicg, who attempted to reconcile positivism and idealism, stumbled in 1905 upon psycho-cinema when he encountered an X – an unknown in his system: We know the consciousness of others only through what is reflected in us, as a sort of projection on a screen; we may imagine that to this reflection or projection corresponds a light source outside of us, but this imagination affects only us, and we cannot establish it on a sure principle, so long as we remain within the bounds of individual consciousness. […] Hence thought can no longer be a mere passive copy of things, a mute representation like a painting on a wall surface; it posits itself as an activity. This activity cannot be confused with exterior movement whose conditions can be found in a series of anterior movements implicitly contained in them; it is an original activity … it adds something to them … a certain kind of unity … it is a radical spontaneity.34

For Brunschvicg, the problem of other minds is akin to a movie-viewer illusion, while cognition as an activity, a spontaneous putting into motion of representations, becomes a kind of meta-camera, which he explicitly contrasts with mechanized causality or automatic movements in the film apparatus as did Bergson. In psychology, Alfred Janet addressed the issue of representational translation head-on, also in 1905. He pointed out that our ability to imagine what goes on in the little world of the mind is impaired by our naive realism about some kind of impossible cinematic translation from the big world: The mental form, that is, a form that would exist separately and independently from the properties of matter, is thus an impossibility. To admit it means affirming material properties and negating them all at once: what would this mental world in a material form be, and what would its different parts become, if they were not ruled by material laws? If we but try to represent to ourselves a mental landscape where there would be no wind, no humidity, no light, no gravity, no cellulose; how could it exist, and above all be alive? The analogy, drawn from a photographic or cinematographic image is not really sufficient to have us understand this.35



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Already in 1897, Binet showed an interest in using cinema in psychological experiments about time, while in 1903 he referred to the ‘mental cinematograph’, the very expression he rejected in 1905.36 Yet the notion that the cinematograph and its conceptual precursors provide a new range not merely of analogies but of potent ‘intuition pumps’ – as Denett puts it – pervades French thought from the 1880s onwards. Marey’s 1884 book, which refocused his well-known graphic method on chronophotography, certainly amplified, or revived, whatever was still reverberating from Flammarion’s chronotelescope in the intellectual landscape. ‘Chronophotography contains the solution to all problems of physiology, physics or mechanics for which a body’s position at different points in space must be determined at equal intervals’ (La chrono-photographie contient la solution de tous les problèmes de physiologie, de physique ou de mécanique dans lesquels il faut déterminer, à des temps égaux, la position d’un corps en différents points de l’espace), wrote Marey.37 It is clear that philosophers wished they too could rely on such a powerful skeleton key. Perhaps for this reason, precursor technologies prepare for and inform a general ‘pre-cinematicization’ of French thought before the 1890s. Hence Paul Souriau’s 1889 The Aesthetics of Movement, which proposes a broad overview of the interactions of sensation and motion in the arts, refracts chronophotography at every turn.38 Starting from the hard-wired premise that ‘mobile objects exert a true fascination on the eye’ (les objets mobiles exercent sur l’œil une véritable fascination), Souriau crystallizes our aesthetic cathexis into ‘this luminous trail that images of mobile subjects leave behind them’ (cette traînée lumineuse que laissent derrière elles les images des objets mobiles).39 Such a poetic emblem focuses already on the issue of retinal persistence of images that would later plague explanations of filmic perception. But it is as if we were, here in 1889, at the threshold between the composite photograph model – Galton, Muybridge, Marey, Londe, Janssen, etc. – and the truly cinematographic synthesis of serial photographic shots. Together with motion, it is also time – no doubt under the impulsion of Bergson – and more specifically temporal succession as such that became central objects of study. Jean-Marie Guyau’s 1890 The Genesis of the Idea of Time – written in 1886 –, with a long introduction by Alfred Fouillée, aims in the words of the latter, to ‘conceive of succession’ in a way that is ‘wholly other than the immobile contemplation of immobile eternity’ (concevoir la succession [comme] tout autre que la contemplation immobile de l’immobile éternité) – the view of time that ultimately underpins Flammarion’s chronotelescope.40 Guyau’s thesis at that time is, foremost, a perspectival experience, that is, a certain cathexis on directional and

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structural elements within the flux of what we live. This cathexis, literally ‘desire’, is ‘a triggered movement’ corresponding to ‘the stream of images unfolding, the procession of scenes in space and of successive positions’ (Le désir, d’ailleurs, est un mouvement commencé, et le mouvement commencé, c’est le défilé d’images qui se déroule, le défilé de scènes dans l’espace et de positions successives).41 Guyau is careful to discard obsolete machine analogies with the mind (he mentions Spencer’s mechanical pianos and Taine’s printing press), especially photographs since ‘in the brain there are no real images, only virtual ones’ (dans le cerveau, pas d’images réelles, mais seulement des images virtuelles).42 But he readily adopts a suggestion by Delboeuf that memory is like a phonograph’s traces, and proposes that in the same way that the speed at which a phonograph is cranked alters the sound recorded on a cylinder, our recollection can speed up or slow down images to render memory more or less acute, dense or detailed. ‘From this purview’, Guyau concludes, ‘it would be neither inexact nor too odd to define the brain as an infinitely perfected phonograph – a conscious phonograph’ (A ce point de vue, il serait ni trop inexact ni trop étrange de définir le cerveau un phonographe infiniment perfectionné, un phonographe conscient).43 The difference, however, is that it deals with ‘a phenomenon of inner optics, the perspective of images’ (un phénomène d’optique intérieure, une perspective d’images), rather than sounds.44 Again, we return to Flammarion’s chronotelescope cylinder, but ad reductio, and within consciousness. Because of this internalism, the chronotelescope now becomes also a more pliable vision machine, a kind of inner projector of memory rushes of which the subject is less the director than the shaper of any given montage: the editor. When C. S. Peirce developed his theory of ‘phaneroscopy’ as an examination of mental images during the 1890–1900 period, invoking all at once ‘composite photograph’ (1893), ‘moving picture’ (1903) and finally ‘a moving picture of the action of the mind in thought’ to define a so-called existential graph, we witness a similar shift from pre-cinema to modes of inner projection of signification and free will.45 Subjective projection: Bovarysme and post-symbolism In this epistemic shift from Flammarion’s macrocosmic chronotelescope to pre-cinematic models of subjective internalism, imagination plays a crucial role. Guyau’s positing that the import of situatedness on duration amounts to ‘an effect of imaginative optics’ (un effet d’optique imaginative) makes this plain.46 Now, the status of the imagination during the 1870–1910 period is very much in question, partly for disciplinary reasons.



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As Stéphan Roulié and others have shown, French academic philosophy of the 1890s was especially unsettled regarding the boundaries separating it from other disciplines such as psychology, sociology or the history of scientific concepts (known in France as épistémologie).47 A case in point is Théodule Ribot, who founded La Revue philosophique de France et de l’étranger in 1876 and was to become the champion of German psychophysiology, a nascent field that, to a large extent, shaped the scope of Bergson’s Matter and Memory.48 Ribot’s 1901 Essai sur l’imagination créatrice attempts to clarify imagination’s constructive function from an interdisciplinary purview ranging from the arts to the sciences. Yet underneath his deductive approach, Ribot in fact develops a tacitly inductive model of imagination resting on the cinematic apparatus. ‘Creative imagination’, he writes ‘has its origin and main source in the natural tendency of images to objectivate t­hemselves –  or more simply, in the motor elements inherent to the  image’ (l’imagination créatrice … a son origine et sa source principale dans la tendance naturelle des images à s’objectiver, – plus simplement, dans les éléments moteurs inhérents à l’image).49 He specifies further: ‘the motor element of the image tends to cancel its purely interior character, to objectivate it, exteriorize it, and project it outside of ourselves’ (l’élément moteur de l’image tend à lui faire perdre son caractère purement intérieur, à l’objectiver, à l’extérioriser, à la projeter hors de nous).50 To summarize this position, we might say that subjective images become objective insofar as they are projective, so that in the human world ‘all objects are … condensed imagination’ (tous les objets … sont de l’imagination condensée).51 We could pun on the French for telelens, ‘­téléobjectif ’ – prosthetic objectivity at a distance – all the more so in that the word was coined in 1893 and belongs to the same discursive layer.52 Imagination is then a matter of projection relying on a specific mode of interaction among images: ‘[the image] does not resemble a photographic snapshot … [images] are not solitary, in reality they belong to a chain, or rather a weave, a network, since because of their multiple relationship they can radiate in all directions. Yet dissociation also applies to series, truncating, mutilating and demolishing them, reducing them to a state of ruin’ (elle ne ressemble pas à un cliché photographique  … les représentations ne sont pas solitaires; dans la réalité, elles font partie d’une chaîne ou plutôt d’une trame, d’un réseau, puisqu’en raison de leurs multiples rapports, elles peuvent rayonner en tous sens. Or, la dissociation agit aussi sur les séries, les tronque, les mutile, les démolit, les réduit à l’état de ruine).53 So, on the one hand, imaginary images are not photographic, because of their cinematic,

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shape-changing potential, but on the other hand, they are not akin to film continuity either because their seriality involves parallel development and savage ‘slash’-editing. Still, in both cases, the regulative ­template appears to be none other than cinema. Since the phenomenological novelty of cinema must be sought in the novel experience of projected serial photographic images –  since both serial photographic images (Edison, Marey, Demenÿ) and projected serial images (Reynaud) were experienced before, but not simultaneously – it makes sense that projection would become the crucial nexus for the phase following internalism in the percolation of (pre-)cinema in philosophy. In Le Bovarysme, Essai sur le pouvoir d’imaginer, published in 1902, Jules de Gaultier rejects the positivist premise of an autonomous and sovereign subject, by making Emma Bovary into a new philosophical type. We are all Emma Bovarys, he claims, in that we live in the world that we imagine, fascinated by the imaginary spectacle of our fulfilled desires, because ‘the power of being human means to conceive of ourselves as other than we are’ (le pouvoir départi à l’homme de se concevoir autre qu’il n’est).54 Confronted with ‘the flux of phenomena’ (le flux phénoménal) of the world, we construct what he calls our ‘world-spectacle’ (le spectacle du monde) by seeking ‘to transform our emotions into spectacles’ (transformer en spectacles des émotions).55 In other words, as desiring subjects we are projective machines. On se fait du cinéma, as the French have it – on a deep psycho-phenomenological level. While Bergson condemns cinema because its speed alterations threaten to distort the revelation of duration, Gaultier locates our sovereignty precisely in motion alteration. In 1903, he writes: ‘Objective reality consists in a certain state of slowed down movement’ (La réalité phénoménale apparaît donc comme un certain état de ralentissement du mouvement).56 Our freedom lies in a dynamic negotiation between our wish to stop the world and enjoy our universal fiction, as he calls it, and our sheer inability to exit the flux of time. He concludes La Fiction universelle on the following crucial passage, taking to task ‘[the domain of psychology] where all is mere reflection, where the mind only captures the projected shadows of intangible realities metamorphosed through the intervention of consciousness in images, sensations, ideas – in the mysterious projection that is the intelligible’ (le domaine de la psychologie, c’est-à-dire dans un domaine où tout n’est que reflet, où l’esprit ne saisit que les ombres portées de réalités intangibles métamorphosées par l’entremise de la conscience en images, en sensations, en idées, en cette projection mystérieuse qu’est l’intelligible).57 For Gaultier, receptive internalism and realism are only half of the story since they place external reality in an excessive position of authority



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over the self: in this view, the mind is a camera registering the real and projecting it as the intelligible. Gaultier continues: We thus need to see the other side of the loom on which [the philosophies of appearance] have woven their mythological landscapes, in order to unveil the artifice of language that was used. … For their definition: truths are apparatuses on which movement is articulated, the reader will gladly substitute the following: truths are the shadows on which the motion mechanism within the evolution of life reflects itself for consciousness.58

Gaultier’s rather straightforward point that the subject projects himself/ herself as a universal takes here a rather abstruse metaphorical turn in which, conspicuously, the subject qua apparatus of moving projection is the ultimate point. He concludes: ‘the successive play of associations and dissociations of ideas in order to tie and untie truths will take the appearance of the moving shadow projected on a road by the progress of an invisible traveller, through which it is possible to get an idea of the rhythm of his run’ (le jeu successif de la dissociation et de l’association des idées pour nouer et dénouer des vérités apparaîtra comme l’ombre mouvante portée sur une route par la démarche d’un voyageur invisible, et où il est possible de se faire une idée du rythme de sa course).59 Again, the obscure metaphorical or allegorical register for a new model of subjectivity would seem to dilute Gaultier’s conceptual thrust. Unless, that is, we decipher the hidden reference to one of the first novels that mentions cinema: Alfred Jarry’s Le Surmâle. Published in 1902, it features in one of its key chapters a human–machine contest between a five-rider tandem and a locomotive. But the race is ultimately won by a third party, a shadowy figure referred to both as ‘this shadow [cette ombre]’ and ‘a fantastic racer [fantastique coureur]’ who wins only because the locomotive somehow caught his back wheel and he is so powerfully under the delusion that he alone is activating his –  chainless! –  bicycle – the very illustration of Bovarysm – that he ends up passing both vehicles.60 This episode also affords us a first foray into the year 1913, since the race occurs along the Trans-Siberian railway line, and Le Surmâle is directly alluded to in Cendrars’s La Prose du Transsibérien.61 The conceptual drift of this projective cinema of the imagination from Ribot (1901) to Gaultier (1902–3) via Jarry (1902) and thence to Cendrars (1913) represents a final moment in the progression of cinematic conceptualism in French thought under the Third Republic. For, during the 1905–8 period, cinema progressively mutated into too conspicuous a cultural, industrial, moral, educational, legal and political object to keep up its productive valence on an axis going from the epistemological to the

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metaphorical or symbolic.62 In other words, cinema’s cryptic conceptual provocation disappeared within fundamental debates of ideas in the sciences. What took over in its stead was the new status the cinema industry aimed for – that of an art during the years 1909–11. This shift is what directly opened cinema to questions of aesthetics and poetics. As Mark Antliff has masterfully demonstrated, Tancrède de Visan was the key theoretician in the reformulation of post-symbolist poetic theory in the years immediately preceding 1913.63 His main thesis in the 1911 essay L’Attitude du lyrisme contemporain, indebted to both de Gourmont and Bergson, was that what united late symbolist poets was ‘a consciencious effort to place oneself back within flowing time’ to access ‘a central vision that becomes the very changing and lived rhythm of things, objects, landscapes’ (un consciencieux effort de se replacer dans le temps qui s’écoule  … sorte de vision centrale qui devient le rythme même changeant et vécu des choses, des objets, des paysages).64 He s­ummarizes: ‘Symbolism or the contemporary poetic attitude makes use  of successive  or accumulated images to exteriorize a lyrical intuition’  (Le symbolisme ou attitude poétique contemporaine se sert d’images successives ou accumulées pour extérioriser une intuition lyrique).65 The models of image serialism and self-projection developed by Ribot and Gaultier are here just as palpable as the cinema apparatus itself. In fact, I would argue that these thirty-odd years of conceptual sedimentation of cinematic language within French thought allow de Visan to deploy a hyper-cinematic register without ever referring to cinema directly, as when he writes for instance that ‘multiple screens are interposed between reality and our consciousness’ (De multiples écrans s’interposent entre la réalité et notre conscience)66 or ‘language is an abstracting apparatus fixing movement’ (Le langage est un appareil abstracteur qui fixe les mouvements).67 De Visan’s new theory amounts to defining poetry as (1) a psycho-optical encounter with the world resulting in a set of mobile images, (2) the analytical recording of image movements in language without stilling them, (3) the synthesis of these images into a new aesthetic object helping us to access the flowing world. In this, it represents a final instantiation of the primal scene of thought under the Third Republic by reconciling time (Bergson) and space (Flammarion). Conclusion De Visan’s rhetoric of optics, motion, projection and image synthesis may not strike us today as conspicuously filmic. The parallel was obvious to



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critics of post-symbolist Bergsonian art. Hence, in 1913 the ­curmudgeon Julien Benda dismisses Bergsonian followers such as de Visan because of their ‘wish for an “installation” inside things – the thirst of a kind of sexual inveighing within things’ (volonté d’une ‘installation’ à l’intérieur des choses, la soif d’une sorte d’envahissement sexuel des choses).68 Such a sense of telepresence seems impossible to experience without the conceptual facilitation of film editing, ‘phantom rides’ subjective camera shots and close-ups.69 De Visan’s 1911 treatise on contemporary poetry, equally cinephilic and Bergsonian, shows that aesthetic thinkers created new hybrid theories no longer abiding by the terms of space/time and cinephilia/cinephobia oppositions. This is the case with Gaston de Pawlowski’s 1912 Voyage au pays de la quatrième dimension, republished in 2004 with an introduction by Jean Clair because of its crucial effect on Marcel Duchamp’s ideas of time, stoppage and simultaneity. It is a fantastic-scientific novel about a parallel realm on which the narrator stumbles and which he explains as a paradox: ‘The fourth dimension should not be considered as a fourth measure added to the other three, but rather … as a means of escape allowing us to understand things in their eternal and immutable aspect and to free ourselves of motion as quantity so as to reach only the quality of all facts’ (on ne saurait considérer en effet la quatrième dimension comme une quatrième mesure ajoutée aux trois autres, mais plutôt … comme une méthode d’évasion permettant de comprendre les choses sous leur aspect éternel et immuable et de se libérer du mouvement en quantité pour ne plus atteindre que la seule qualité des faits).70 The binary bad quantity/good quality is of course Bergson’s, while the fourth-dimensional cosmos, ‘eternal et immutable’, is Flammarion’s – now as though accessible through a Bergsonian super-intuition. That combination nonetheless proves disastrous for the inhabitants of the fourth dimension who undergo a very strange catastrophe: ‘They suddenly saw before their eyes all past sensations, all the vibrations accumulated in the air for centuries, all the unnecessary words uttered, all the noxious influences, the desires or hatreds, the ghostly apparitions of the ideas and souls of the past and their terrible consequences for the future’ (ils voyaient brusquement surgir à leurs yeux toutes les sensations passées, toutes les vibrations accumulées dans l’air depuis des siècles, toutes les paroles inutiles prononcées, toutes les influences mauvaises, les désirs ou les haines, les apparitions fantomatiques des idées et des âmes d’autrefois et leurs conséquences terribles dans l’avenir).71 This tsunami of images literalizes Flammarion’s cosmic cinema by causing a big bang of all the memory of the world, including the most inane films ever recorded – the

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cosmic dross of daytime television! Yet cinema itself remains unmarked in the novel that mentions in passing, ‘innumerable films shot on the fly’ (d’innombrables films, pris au vol) and ‘the cinematography of microbes’ (cinématographie des microbes) while inventing imaginary image-capture apparatuses such as the ‘aphanoscope’ (aphanoscope), which can film the invisible.72 Thus, by 1912, cinema no longer represents a threat against vitalism or the cosmological order of time, and need not incarnate any specific valence. Between 1867 when Flammarion invented literary cinema, and 1913 when actual movies became transformable components of ‘L’esprit nouveau’ aesthetics, cinema informed a vast spectrum of philosophical and aesthetic positions. It was, in turn, a potential cosmological archive of human memory (Flammarion, Tarde, de Pawlowski), the absolute limit of the human (Bergson), a model for perception, vision, cognition and imagination (Guyau, Brunschvicg, Binet, Ribot), the catalyst for heightened debates on movement and images (Bergson, Souriau, de Visan), and an apparatus revealing a new aesthetic philosophy of subjectivity (Bergson, Gaultier, Cendrars). In 1917–18, Cendrars wrote La Fin du monde filmée par l’ange N.-D., a poem-scenario critiquing the military-industrial complex of the First World War which had left millions like him physically and mentally maimed. The text is superficially based on a catastrophic novel by Camille Flammarion, La Fin du monde (1894), though its central conceit of temporal reversibility comes straight out of the astral cinema of Flammarion’s Lumen. Cendrars’s twist consists in reversing temporal reversibility, in order to lead us back to the present. He stages this through a malfunction of the projector that was showing the cosmic film backwards, but now suddenly reverts itself again. In so doing, Cendrars suggests that for all its ­prosthetic, counterfeit and oneiric appeal, cinema proves far less monstrous than humans, and even offers a new site of origin for post-war traumatic temporality.73 Notes  1. Édouard Deverin, ‘Visite à Remy de Gourmont’, 18: ‘Non sans étonnement, je l’avais même aperçu, à plusieurs reprises, sagement assis dans un petit cinéma de la place Saint-Michel, au temps de Bout-de-Zan et de Max Linder.’ Deverin dates this episode to one morning in 1913 (un matin de 1913). Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.   2. Cited in Remy de Gourmont [R. de Bury], ‘Les Journaux’, 171: ‘Je m’y sens comme dans un salon aux parois de glace, qui s’élargit dans tous les sens, où



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les images se multiplient à l’infini et se rapetissent en même temps. M. Proust n’a pas tenu un journal, mais s’est donné le plaisir d’une sorte de cinéma dont il reconstitue les épisodes, où il pose lui-même pour plusieurs personnages, jette à son gré le manteau de l’un sur les épaules de l’autre, ou sur les siennes.’     3. For Apollinaire and Cendrars, see Christophe Wall-Romana, Cinepoetry, pp. 12, 36–8, 177–80. For Proust, see Sara Danius, Senses of Modernism, pp. 22, 118–23, 141–5.    4. Giovanni Lista, Le Cinéma futuriste, pp. 17–26.     5. Ricciotto Canudo, L’Usine aux images, pp. 32–40.   6. Laurent Mannoni, Histoire de la cinémathèque française, p. 327. See, for instance, Siegfried Zielinski, Audiovisions, p. 58.      7. Philippe Soulez and Frédéric Worms, Bergson, p. 92.   8. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1, p. 3, translation modified. Deleuze, Cinéma, I, p. 12.    9. The expression is by Célestin Bouglé, see Gilbert D. Chaitin, ‘Politics of culture’, esp. p. 6. 10. See also David Aubin, ‘Eclipse politics’, esp. pp. 109–11.   11. Danielle Chaperon, Camille Flammarion, p. 8. 12. Camille Flammarion, ‘A nos lecteurs’, 1. 13. Léopold Bresson, Idées modernes, p. 57. 14. Robert Fox, Savant and the State, pp. 192–3. 15. See Charlotte Bigg, ‘Staging the heavens’. For Flammarion’s hatred of astronomer Le Verrier who discontinued the popular astronomy courses of François Arago – who significantly refused to pledge allegiance to Napoleon III – see Chaperon, Camille Flammarion, p. 19. 16. Camille Flammarion, Lumen, p. 108: ‘Supposez maintenant que vous vous éloigniez de la Terre avec une vitesse supérieure à celle de la lumière. Qu’arrivera-t-il? Vous retrouverez, à mesure que vous avancerez dans l’espace, les rayons partis avant vous, c’est-à-dire les photographies successives qui, de seconde en seconde, d’instant en instant, s’envolent dans l’étendue. Si, par exemple, vous partez en 1867 avec une vitesse égale à celle de la lumière, vous gardez éternellement l’année 1867 avec vous. Si vous allez plus vite, vous retrouverez les rayons partis aux années antérieures et qui portent en eux la photographie de ces années.’ 17. Ibid., pp. 135–7: ‘Il n’est pas impossible que ces images rencontrent dans ces vastes espaces, un astre obscur … dont la surface … serait sensibilisée et capable de fixer sur elle-même l’image du monde lointain. Ainsi viendraient se peindre les événements terrestres sur un globe obscur. Et si ce globe tourne sur lui-même … il présentera successivement ses différentes zones à l’image terrestre et prendra de la sorte la photographie continue des événements successifs. … L’imagination pouvait maintenant supposer que ce monde n’est pas sphérique mais cylindrique, et voir ainsi dans l’espace une colonne impérissable sur laquelle se graveraient et s’enrouleraient d’eux-mêmes les grands événements de l’histoire terrestre.’

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18. Ibid., p. 244. 19. In the realm of media archaeology it is tricky to assert prototypes, whether real or imaginary. Yet Flammarion’s 1866 chronotélescope seems to be the prototype for George du Maurier’s 1878 telephonoscope reprised by Albert Robida’s 1883 téléphonoscope. See François Albera, ‘Projected cinema’, pp. 47–51. 20. Chaperon, Camille Flammarion, p. 62. 21. Ibid., p. 63 : ‘Il est donc capital de constater que la formulation d’un projet épistémologique portant sur la totalité du visible a existé historiquement, bien avant les inventions qui en découleront. Autrement dit, Marey et Lumière, malgré les certitudes de l’histoire du cinéma, ne s’opposent pas originairement: ils se partagent un champ déjà exprimé.’ 22. It is not excluded that Bergson is referring directly to Flammarion’s Lumen in the following passage that posits a hypothetical ‘consciousness’ that would experience how an astronomer envisions the trajectory of a cosmic body. Bergson, Essai sur les données immédiates, p. 149: ‘On conçoit même que cette conscience pût vivre d’une vie assez lente, assez paresseuse, pour embrasser la trajectoire entière du corps céleste dans une aperception unique, comme il nous arrive à nous-mêmes quand nous voyons se dessiner, sous forme d’une ligne de feu, les positions successives d’une étoile filante. Cette conscience se trouverait alors réellement dans les mêmes conditions où l’astronome se place imaginairement; elle verrait dans le présent ce que l’astronome a­ perçoit dans l’avenir. À vrai dire, si celui-ci prévoit un phénomène futur, c’est à la condition d’en faire jusqu’à un certain point un phénomène présent, ou du moins de réduire énormément l’intervalle qui nous en sépare.’ 23. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. viii. 24. Flammarion, Lumen, p. 10. 25. Ibid., p. 83. 26. Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind, p. 75. Bergson, La Pensée et le mouvant, pp. 117–18. 27. Flammarion, Lumen, p. 143. 28. A 1908 letter by Bergson to William James confirms that the rejection of astronomical time was the eureka of his philosophy. It reads: ‘Je m’aperçus, à mon grand étonnement, que le temps scientifique ne dure pas, qu’il n’y aurait rien à changer à notre connaissance scientifique des choses si la totalité du réel était déployée tout d’un coup dans l’instantané.’ He adds: ‘Ceci fut le point de départ d’une série de réflexions qui m’amenèrent, de degré en degré à rejeter presque tout ce que j’avais accepté jusqu’alors, et à changer complètement de point de vue.’ Henri Bergson, Mélanges, p. 766. 29. Alphonse Chide, L’Idée de rythme, pp. 16–17: ‘Le cinématographe est braqué sur le Protée moderne … Le jour luit déjà dans les rêves où tout sera soumis à la mesure, où le cinématographe-roi fera, dans l’ordre du concret, ce qu’opère la déduction mathématique dans l’ordre de l’abstrait … l’univers



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se déroulera sur un écran, sans qu’il y ait la moindre anicroche, comme un théorème en marche … L’extension du mesurable, et surtout la cinématographie ont contribué à [leur] rendre [aux philosophes], pour la raison humaine, l’adoration mystique de Hégel [sic].’ On page 18, Chide also mentions Marey’s chronophotographs used for the deaf. 30. This is the leitmotiv of Bergson’s allusions to cinema. Cf. Bergson, Creative Mind, p. 7. 31. Gabriel Tarde, Fragment d’histoire future, p. 51. 32. Émile Boutroux, De la Contingence, p. 169. 33. Beckett stages the movement from the big world to the little world via cinema. Samuel Beckett, Murphy, p. 183: ‘Between him and his stars no doubt there was correspondence … He had been projected, larval and dark, on the sky of that regrettable hour as on a screen, magnified and clarified into his own meaning. But it was his meaning. The moon in the Serpent was no more than an image, a fragment of vitagraph.’ 34. Léon Brunschvicg, ‘La Méthode’, pp. 79, 83: ‘Nous ne connaissons des autres consciences que ce qui s’en reflète en nous, une sorte de projection sur un écran; nous pouvons bien imaginer qu’à ce reflet ou à cette projection correspond au dehors un foyer de lumière, mais c’est là une imagination qui n’affecte que nous, et que nous ne pouvons fonder sur un principe assuré, tant que nous demeurons dans les bornes de la conscience individuelle […] Aussi la pensée ne peut-elle plus être une copie passive des choses, une représentation muette comme un tableau sur une muraille; elle se pose elle-même comme une activité. Cette activité ne saurait être assimilée à un mouvement extérieur dont les conditions se trouvent dans une série de mouvements antérieurs et qui est implicitement contenus en eux; elle est une activité originale … elle leur ajoute quelque chose … un certain genre d’unité … elle est une spontanéité radicale.’ 35. Alfred Binet, ‘Pour la philosophie de la conscience’, 135–6: ‘La forme mentale, c’est-à-dire une forme qui existerait séparément et indépendamment des propriétés de la matière, est donc une impossibilité; l’admettre, c’est en même temps affirmer des propriétés matérielles et les nier: que serait en effet ce monde moral, à / forme matérielle, et qu’en deviendraient les différentes parties si elles n’étaient pas régies par des lois matérielles? Qu’on essaye seulement de se représenter un paysage moral, où il n’y aurait ni vent, ni humidité, ni lumière, ni pesanteur, ni cellulose; comment pourrait-il exister, et surtout vivre? L’analogie, tirée d’une image photographique ou cinématographique ne suffit vraiment pas à le faire comprendre.’ 36. Alfred Binet, ‘Comptes-rendus, E. W. Scripture, 696–7’; Binet, ‘La Création littéraire’, 2 (see ‘A few traces of mental cinematograph’). 37. Étienne-Jules Marey, Développement de La Méthode graphique, p. 47n1. 38. Paul Souriau, L’Esthétique du mouvement. Marey is mentioned on pp. 63, 151, 157, 243 and passim. For a discussion of Souriau informed by cinema, see Laurent Guido, L’âge du rythme, pp. 31–33.

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39. Ibid. Quotations on p. 255 and p. 245. 40. Alfred Fouillée, introduction to La Genèse de l’idée de temps, by Jean-Marie Guyau, p. xxxv. 41. Guyau, La Genèse, p. 47. 42. Ibid., p. 50. 43. Ibid., p. 57. 44. Ibid., p. 85. 45. Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen, ‘Peirce and the logic of image’, 251–61. 46. Guyau, La Genèse, p. 106. 47. Stéphan Soulié, Les Philosophes en république, pp. 213–49. 48. François Azouvi, La Gloire de Bergson, p. 43. 49. Théodule Ribot, Essai sur l’imagination créatrice, p. vi. 50. Ibid., p. 2. 51. Ibid., p. 230. 52. H. Fournier, ‘La téléphotographie’. 53. Théodule Ribot, Essai sur l’imagination créatrice, p. 16. 54.  Jules de Gaultier, Le Bovarysme, p. 13. 55. Ibid. Quotations on pp. 271, 269, 77. 56.  Jules de Gaultier, La Fiction universelle, p. 360. 57. Ibid., p. 396. 58. Ibid., pp. 396–7: ‘Il était donc nécessaire de retourner le métier où l’on a tissé ces paysages mythologiques et de dévoiler l’artifice de langage dont on a fait emploi. … A cette définition: les vérités sont des appareils où le mouvement s’articule, le lecteur aisément substituera celle-ci: les vérités sont les ombres où se reflète pour la conscience le mécanisme du mouvement dans l’évolution de la vie.’ 59. Ibid., pp. 396–7. 60. Alfred Jarry, Le Surmâle, pp. 122, 133. For the role of cinema in this chapter, see Maria Tortajada, ‘L’Ombre projetée de la vitesse’. 61. Blaise Cendrars and Sonia Delaunay-Terk, La Prose du Transsibérien, n.p. ‘Le train retombe toujours sur ses roues’ and ‘J’ai vu les trains silencieux les  trains noirs qui revenaient de l’Extrême-Orient et qui passaient en fantômes / Et mon œil, comme le fanal d’arrière, court encore derrière ces trains’. 62. For instance, the exam for a master’s in literature in 1908 included a question on the theories of visual illusions in movement ‘realized through instruments such as the cinematograph’. See ‘Chronique de la faculté’. For mutations of cinema as industry and as legal and artistic object, and its changing place within French culture, see Richard Abel, Ciné Goes to Town. 63. Mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson, pp. 463–4. 64. Tancrède de Visan, L’Attitude du lyrisme contemporain, pp. 463–4. 65. Ibid., p. 459–60. 66. Ibid., p. 375. 67. Ibid., p. 457. 68. Julien Benda, Belphégor, pp. 117.



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69. Ibid., p. 118. 70. Gaston de Pawlowski, Voyage au pays, p. 84. 71. Ibid., pp. 151–2. 72. Ibid. Quotations on pp. 150, 124, 170. 73. Blaise Cendrars, La Fin du monde filmée.

Works cited Abel, Richard, The Ciné Goes to Town: French Cinema 1896–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). Albera, François, ‘Projected cinema (a hypothesis on cinema’s imagination)’, in François Albera and Maria Tortajada (eds), Cinema Beyond Film: Media Epistemology in the Modern Era (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010), pp. 45–58. Antliff, Mark, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). Aubin, David, ‘Eclipse politics in France and Thailand, 1868’, in Aubin, Bigg and Sibum (eds), Heavens on Earth, pp. 86–117. —, Charlotte Bigg and H. Otto Sibum (eds), The Heavens on Earth: Observatories and Astronomy in Nineteenth-Century Science and Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012). Azouvi, François, La Gloire de Bergson (Paris: Gallimard, 2007). Beckett, Samuel, Murphy (New York: Grove Press, 1957). Benda, Julien, Belphégor, essai sur l’esthétique de la présente société française (Paris: Émile Paul Frères, 4th edn, 1918). First published in 1913. Bergson, Henri, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1908). —, La Pensée et le mouvant (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2013). —, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (London: George Allen, 1913). —, Mélanges (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972). —, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Mabell L. Andison (New York: Dover Books, 2012). Bigg, Charlotte, ‘Staging the heavens: Astrophysics and popular astronomy in the late nineteenth century’, in Aubin, Bigg and Sibum (eds), Heavens on Earth, pp. 305–24. Binet, Alfred, ‘Comptes-rendus, E. W. Scripture, The New Psychology’, L’année psychologique, 4:4 (1897), 696–7. —, ‘La Création littéraire, portrait psychologique de M. Paul Hervieu’, L’année psychologique, 10 (1903), 1–62. —, ‘Pour la philosophie de la conscience’, L’année psychologique, 12 (1905), 113–36. Boutroux, Émile, De la Contingence des lois de la nature (Paris: Félix Alcan, 3rd edn, 1898).

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Bresson, Léopold, Idées modernes, cosmologie, sociologie (Paris: C. Reinwald, 1880). Brunschvicg, Léon, ‘La Méthode dans la philosophie de l’esprit’, in L’Idéalisme contemporain (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1905). Canudo, Ricciotto, L’Usine aux images, ed. Jean-Paul Morel (Paris: Séguier/ ARTE, 1995). First published in Les Entretiens idéalistes, 61 (25 October 1911), pp. 169–79. Cendrars, Blaise, La Fin du monde filmée par l’ange N.-D. (Paris: La Sirène, 1918). —, and Sonia Delaunay-Terk, La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France (Paris: Éditions des Hommes Nouveaux, 1913). Chaitin, Gilbert D., ‘The politics of culture’, in Gilbert D. Chaitlin (ed.), Culture Wars and Literature in the French Third Republic (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), pp. 1–19. Chaperon, Danielle, Camille Flammarion, entre astronomie et littérature (Paris: Éditions Imago, 1998). Chide, Alphonse, L’Idée de rythme (Digne: Chaspoul et Barbaroux, 1905). ‘Chronique de la faculté, 1908–1909’, Annales de Bretagne, 24:1 (1908), 5–78. Danius, Sara, The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception, and Esthetics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002). Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and  Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). —, L’Image-mouvement. Cinéma 1 (Paris: Éditions de minuit, 1983). Deverin, Édouard, ‘Visite à Remy de Gourmont’, Les Marges, 210 (10 June 1934), 18–20. Flammarion, Camille, ‘A nos lecteurs’, L’Astronomie, 1 (March 1883), 1–5. —, Lumen (Paris: C. Marpon et E. Flammarion, 1887). Fouillée, Alfred, introduction to La Genèse de l’idée de temps, by Jean-Marie Guyau, pp. 9–35. Fournier, H., ‘La téléphotographie’, La Nature, 1062 (7 October 1893), 291–4. Fox, Robert, The Savant and the State: Science and Cultural Politics in Nineteenth-Century France (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012). Gaultier, Jules de, La Fiction universelle: eeuxième essai sur le pouvoir d’imaginer (Paris: Mercure de France, 1903). —, Le Bovarysme: essai sur le pouvoir d’imaginer (Paris: Mercure de France, 1921). Gourmont, Remy de [Bury, R. de], ‘Les Journaux’, Mercure de France, 109 (1 May 1914), 171. Guido, Laurent, L’âge du rythme: cinéma, musicalité et culture du corps dans les théories françaises des années 1910–1930 (Lausanne: Éditions Payot, 2007). Guyau, Jean-Marie, La genèse de l’idée de temps (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1890). Jarry, Alfred, Le surmâle, roman moderne (Paris: La Revue Blanche, 1902). Lista, Giovanna, Le cinéma futuriste (Paris: Paris Expérimental, 2008). Mannoni, Laurent, Histoire de la cinémathèque française (Paris: Gallimard, 2006). Marey, Étienne-Jules, Développement de la méthode graphique par l’emploi de la photographie (Paris: G. Masson, 1884).



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Pawlowski, Gaston de, Voyage au pays de la quatrième dimension, intr. Jean Clair (Paris: Éditions Images Modernes, 2004). Pietarinen, Ahti-Veikko, ‘Peirce and the logic of image’, Semiotica, 192 (2012), 251–61. Ribot, Théodule, Essai sur l’imagination créatrice (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1901). Soulez, Philippe, and Frédéric Worms, Bergson (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002). Soulié, Stéphan, Les Philosophes en république (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2009). Souriau, Paul, L’Esthétique du mouvement (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1889). Tarde, Gabriel, Fragment d’histoire future (Paris: V. Giard et E. Brière, 1896). Tortajada, Maria, ‘L’Ombre projetée de la vitesse: Le cinématographe et la course des dix mille milles dans Le Surmâle d’Alfred Jarry’, in Danielle Chaperon and Philippe Moret (eds), ‘On a touché à l’espace!’: 1900–1930, pertubations de la dimension spatiale dans les sciences et les arts en France; actes du colloque interdisciplinaire tenu à l'Université de Lausanne les 3 et 4 Juin 1999, Études de lettres 1–2 (Lausanne: Payot, 2000), pp. 109–33. Visan, Tancrède de, L’Attitude du lyrisme contemporain (Paris: Mercure de France, 1911). Wall-Romana, Christophe, Cinepoetry: Imaginary Cinemas in French Poetry (Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 2013). Zielinski, Siegfried, Audiovisions: Cinema and Television as Entr’actes in History, trans. G. Coustance (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999).

11 How ‘simultaneous’ is it? Revisiting the Delaunay–Cendrars collaboration on La Prose du Transsibérien Marjorie Perloff

I

n the annals of the early twentieth-century avant-garde, La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France (see Figure 11.1), published by Sonia Delaunay-Terk and Blaise Cendrars in 1913, is regularly referred to as ‘the first simultaneous book’.1 After all, Delaunay and Cendrars had themselves declared, ‘The simultaneism of this book resides in its simultaneous and non-illustrative presentation. The simultaneous contrasts of colours and the text form depths and movements of new inspiration’ (Le Simultanisme de ce livre est dans sa présentation simultanée et non illustrative. Les contrastes simultanés des couleurs et le texte forment des profondeurs et des mouvements qui sont l’inspiration nouvelle).2 And Apollinaire, as Matthew Affron reminds us in his 2013 essay for the Museum of Modern Art exhibition catalogue, Inventing Abstraction 1910–1925,3 hailed the Delaunay–Cendrars collaboration as creating a new kind of reading experience: Blaise Cendrars and Mm. Delaunay-Terck [sic] have made A FIRST ATTEMPT AT WRITTEN SIMULTANEITY where contrasts of colors train the eye to read in ONE GLANCE the whole of a poem, the way a conductor reads in one glance the notes stacked up on a score, [or] as one reads in an instant the visual and printed elements of an advertising poster.4

‘In terms of the history of the experimental book’, Affron adds, ‘La Prose du Transsibérien was a milestone comparable to Marinetti’s Parole in Libertà (Words in Freedom) of 1914 and the graphic inventions of Russian  futurist artists and poets in 1912–16 (though most of these books were handmade rather than typeset)’.5 But can one really absorb



rev isiting the delaunay–cendrars collaboration 221 Figure 11.1  Sonia Delaunay and Blaise Cendrars, La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France (Paris: Éditions des Hommes Nouveaux, 1913). Multicoloured inks and pochoir gouache on similar japan paper, 196.9 × 35.6 cm. The Mitchell Wolfson, Jr Collection, The Wolfsonian–Florida International University, Miami Beach, Florida. Other libraries that have copies of the book include the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris.

Cendrars’s poem, with its almost 500 lines, in one glance? Does it have the spatial form of Marinetti’s Parole in libertà? And is it a collaborative work in the sense that Mirskontsa was the collaboration of the artists Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov, working with the poets Velimir Khebnikov and Alexei Kruchenykh? Consider, to begin with, the history of the book’s production. In April 1913 Cendrars, a close friend of Robert and Sonia Delaunay, brought his finished poem to their studio, and Sonia immediately decided to make a colour composition in response. As Cendrars put it in his manifesto for the September 1913 issue of Herwath Walden’s avant-garde Berlin periodical Der Sturm: I have a fever. And this is why I love the painting of the Delaunays, full of sun, of heat, of violence. Mme Delaunay has made such a beautiful book of colours that my poem is more saturated with light than is my life. That’s what makes me happy. Besides, I think that this book should be two meters high! Moreover, that the edition should reach the height of the Eiffel Tower!6

The poem was thus clearly finished when Sonia Delaunay decided to make an ­accompanying artwork for it. Cendrars saw their visual collaboration as a wonderful opportunity, and

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indeed, the poem’s September 1913 publication was preceded by a flurry of leaflets, subscription forms and prospectuses. Published by the small press and radical journal Les Hommes Nouveaux, it was subtitled ‘Poems, simultaneous colours by Madame Delaunay-Terk’ (Poèmes, couleurs simultanées de Mme Delaunay-Terk).7 Abandoning the concept of the  bound  book, it takes the form of a vertical sheet over six feet tall –  to  make it, four smaller leaves were joined together – and foldable like an accordion into twenty-two panels. The height of the Eiffel Tower was to be attained by lining up 150 copies of the text vertically. Unfortunately, far fewer than this desired number of copies was printed. On the left, the panel containing the title page (see Figure 11.2) initiates the passage of the eye downward, through a sequence of abstract, predominantly circular and oval shapes rendered in brilliant primary colours like floating balloons descending down to the final panel (see Figure 11.3), which contains an abstracted red tower shape, penetrating an incomplete orange circle with a green centre. Although Sonia Delaunay made a number of oil paintings from the stencils of La Prose,8 the technique of the original model is watercolour applied through pochoir, a stencil process. On the right (see Figure 11.4), the top panel contains a Michelin railway map of the Trans-Siberian journey from Moscow to the Sea of Japan. Cendrars’s poem follows, panel by panel, rendered in a variety of linear patterns and typefaces of different sizes and colours; the text is surrounded by Delaunay’s colours, bleeding

Figure 11.2  Detail from Figure 11.1. Topleft panel with title page, La Prose du Transsibérien.

Figure 11.3  Detail from Figure 11.1. Lower-left bottom panel with image of Eiffel Tower inside the wheel.

Figure 11.4  Detail from Figure 11.1. Upper-right panel with map of railway.



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in from the left but now in delicate shades of pastel. The right-hand column culminates in the poem’s dramatic conclusion, rendered in red against a transparent blue-grey background: the ‘O Paris’ strophe climaxes in the poet’s invocation of Paris in the concluding line transcribed in bold red: Paris City of the incomparable Tower the great Gibbet and the Wheel (Ville de la Tour unique du grand Gibet et de la Roue)9

By couleurs simultanées, Sonia Delaunay was referring to something quite specific: M. E. Chevreul’s 1839 treatise The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colors (De la loi du contraste simultané des couleurs), from which Robert Delaunay derived his doctrine of ‘simultaneism’ as the dynamic counterpoint of otherwise dissonant colours when observed in complementarity.10 Again, La Prose is a ‘simultaneous’ artwork in that, seen on a wall, as it usually is today, rather than as the small accordion book, the viewer-reader does take in text and image simultaneously. Third, the  poem itself avoids linearity, cutting back and forth between different time frames and breaking spatial boundaries, so as to emphasize a continuous present. But Affron takes it quite a bit further: he finds ‘simultaneity’ in the immediate opposition and attraction of the visual and verbal: The type shifts back and forth between roman and italic, and between uppercase and lowercase; it grows and shrinks in font size; it changes color. Delaunay-Terk’s design  …  presents a rhythmic interpretation, rather than an illustration, of the sensations and emotions in Cendrars’s words. The only direct thematic connection between the book’s verbal and visual tracks comes at its bottom or end, where Cendrars evokes the Eiffel Tower and Delaunay represents the same structure as a bright red shape juxtaposed with the circle of the great Ferris wheel that then stood opposite the tower on Paris’s Champ de Mars.11

That last sentence must give any reader of poetry pause. For in order to make a thematic comparison between the endings of the pochoir and the poem, Affron is forced to omit what is surely one of the key words of the final line – gibet, meaning gallows, the Grand Gibet being none other than the Guillotine. To call Paris the city of the unique Tower, the Guillotine and the Wheel gives both the first and third nouns rather different connotations. The tower is of course, strictly speaking, the Eiffel Tower, beloved by Cendrars and Robert Delaunay, but in the context of the poem it also brings to mind towers as dungeons like the

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‘unique’ Tower of London. And for someone as attuned to violence as is Cendrars, the wheel, far from being simply the Ferris Wheel is also, the wheel as rack, an instrument of torture. And Mars (Champ de Mars) is of course the God of War. In their conclusions, then, painting and poem could hardly be further apart. Delaunay’s charming, childlike red phallic tower, penetrating the orange circle, surely here a female form, celebrates the beauty of colour, speed and interpenetration that characterizes what Cendrars saw as Delaunay’s sun-drenched painting. True, there are some black oval planes intersecting the bright coloured ones, but these, like the large whitish plane, function primarily as backdrop that sets off the red, green and orange. The poem, by contrast, becomes in its last strophe, increasingly violent and dark. Affron, aware of the non-illustrative nature of Delaunay’s abstract text, finally concludes that the ‘underlying theme’ of the collaboration is ‘the productive relationship between painting and poetry’.12 This seems too vague to be helpful, and neither is the earlier reference to Delaunay’s ‘rhythmic interpretation’ of Cendrars’s moods and emotions. One feels here – and this has become par for the course in treatments of La Prose as visual artwork – that the critic – here presumably an art historian – simply has not read the poem. Like Apollinaire, whose relationship with Cendrars was by no means cordial,13 and hence did not want to give too much attention to the text itself, Affron contents himself with those elements that enhance and are enhanced by Delaunay’s mise en page. I want here, then, to reconsider the relationship of text to image in this seminal artwork of 1913. In The Futurist Moment –  to recapitulate just briefly here – I remark on the parallel situations of Cendrars and Delaunay. Both ‘French’ artists are, to begin with, not from France: Cendrars, born Freddy Sauser in Switzerland, adopted the name Blaise Cendrars, combining ‘braise’ (ember) and ‘cendres’ (cinders): ‘Well, one may adore fire’, he wrote in an autobiographical fragment, ‘but not indefinitely respect the ashes; that’s why I make up my life and exercise my heart (and my mind and my balls) with the poker. The flame shoots forth’ (Or, on peut adorer le feu, mais non point respecter indéfiniment les cendres; c’est pourquoi j’attise ma vie et travaille mon coeur (et mon esprit et mes couilles) avec le tisonnier. La flamme jaillit).14 Cendrars ran away from home when he was seventeen, worked his way through a series of journeys abroad, visiting, for example, St Petersburg and New York. He had arrived in Paris only in 1912. As for Sonia Delaunay, she was born Sarah Ilinitchna Stern in Ukraine, adopted by her uncle Henri Terk and then, as Sonia Terk, came to Paris to study art in 1905 and



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marry the gallery owner William Uhde. Amicably divorced a few years later, she married Robert Delaunay, a great friend of Cendrars. It was, of course, Robert Delaunay’s painting – of the Eiffel Tower – and especially Hommage à Blériot that provides the background to Sonia Delaunay’s own, more abstract compositions. In Hommage à Blériot, the aviator’s flight represented a triumph –  and a French triumph at that – for the new technology of speed. In response to Blériot’s feat, Delaunay created a semi-abstract colour field of overlapping and interlocking disks,  based on ‘simultaneous contrasts’. Delaunay referred to his landscape as the ‘constructive mobility of the solar spectrum; dawn, fire, evolution of airplanes’.15 Into this vibrant prismatic field, he placed recognizable images of aeroplanes, propellers, wheels, birds and a miniature Eiffel Tower. The actual scale of these objects is curiously distorted: the big red plane in its purplish cartoon-like frame etched against an open sky, painted in bright rainbow colours, sits above what looks like a toy Eiffel Tower. Another plane, this one bright orange, hovers on approach in the darker sky above it, and in the left foreground, we see a large orange-red propeller against a black round disk, framed by white and yellow wheel shapes. On the right, the overlapping disks form the backdrop for birds in flight, the counterpart of the planes above. Apollinaire, who was a great admirer of Delaunay’s chromatic painting, called the mode of the Hommage à Blériot orphism – an allusion to its intense lyricism, so different from the more subdued browns and greys of Picasso and Braque.16 Delaunay’s colourful celebration of those biplanes that, in Blaise Cendrars’s words, ‘circled around [the Eiffel Tower] and saluted it’ (Les premiers avions tournaient autour d’elle et lui disaient bonjour),17 seems curiously devoid of any inkling that the aeroplane might have uses quite different from those of transport or spectacle. And indeed, within a year, aeroplanes were being used to drop bombs on the enemy. Cendrars the outsider, the self-invented patriotic French poet, produced a voyage poem in the great tradition of Baudelaire’s ‘Le Voyage’ and Rimbaud’s ‘Bateau ivre’. But in the oppositional spirit of 1913, Cendrars titles his lyric poem The Prose and uses loose paratactic free verse strophes, more reminiscent of Whitman than of Baudelaire. Its seemingly autobiographical narrative, moreover, dislocates space and time, even as it carefully juxtaposes seemingly unrelated objects. Then, too, this disjunctive poem, with its remarkable tonal and perspectival shifts, announces itself as prose and is dedicated ‘aux musiciens’ so as to stress its defiance of the conventional verbal text: interestingly, the typography used in the pochoir does give the poem the look of a ­musical

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score –  a look reproduced in the first published edition in book form of the poem itself by Pierre Seghers (1913).18 But subsequent editions normalize the poem’s typography, as do its English translations – even Timothy Young’s booklet accompanying the Beinecke facsimile of the accordion book. Here is the first eleven-line strophe, as printed in the Denoël edition (Paris) and the Ron Padgett bilingual text, whose English version I use here: Back then I was still young I was barely sixteen but my childhood memories were gone I was 48,000 miles away from where I was born I was in Moscow, city of a thousand and three bell towers and seven train  stations And the thousand and three towers and seven stations weren’t enough   for me Because I was such a hot and crazy teenager That my heart was burning like the Temple of Ephesus or like Red   Square in Moscow At sunset And my eyes were shining down those old roads And I was already such a bad poet That I didn’t know how to take it all the way.19

It is the immediacy, the jauntiness, the energy and seeming candour of these lines that distinguishes Le Transsibérien from other poems of the period –  even Apollinaire’s ‘Zone’, which may have been its model. Repetition, refrain, hyperbole and the cataloguing of proper names and specific images are the key stylistic features, giving continuity to what is otherwise a fairly free-form narrative. The rhythm of that narrative – the story of Blaise’s train journey from Moscow to Kharbin with the little Montmartre prostitute Jehanne, a parodic Joan of Arc, who suddenly disappears from the scene two-thirds of the way through the poem and is not heard from again – is designed to capture the motion of the moving train: its forward thrust horizontally does match the vertical movement of Delaunay’s painting, with its interlocking circles, ovals and crescents, although the fluid visual ‘journey’ has none of the fits and starts or shifts of register that characterize Cendrars’s narrative. The pochoir exhibits none of the violence that becomes so central to the poem. At first, violence is equated with sexual energy, to the heart that burns like the temple of Ephesus or Red Square in Moscow when the sun is setting. But by the third stanza, the wild fantasies of our ‘mauvais poète’ are becoming hyperbolically destructive:



rev isiting the delaunay–cendrars collaboration 227 I was hungry And all those days and all those women in all those cafes and all those  glasses I wanted to drink them down and break them And all those windows and all those streets And all those houses and all those loves And all those carriage wheels raising swirls from the broken pavement I would have liked to have ground up all their bones And ripped out all those tongues And liquefied all those big bodies naked and strange under clothes that   drive me mad … I foresaw the coming of the big red Christ of the Russian Revolution … And the sun was an ugly sore Splitting apart like a red-hot coal.20

Here the desire to devour, break, tear up, destroy, makes way for the dream of revolution, the terrible rupture, heralded by the wounded sun, that anticipates the Great War soon to come. The tone is still jaunty – an adolescent’s comic-book dream of wild adventures –  but, as the poem progresses, the sounds and sights of battle – the literal reference is to the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5 – become explicit. At first war is still far away: In Siberia the artillery rumbled – it was war Hunger cold plague cholera And the muddy waters of the Amur carrying along millions of corpses In every station I watched the last trains leave That’s all: they weren’t selling any more tickets And the solders would far rather have stayed … An old monk was singing me the legend of Novgorod.21

The young poet, boarding the train with his boss, the jewel merchant, surveys the goods to be delivered to the East – cases of alarm and cuckoo clocks, stovepipes and Sheffield corkscrews, canned goods and sardines – and tries to avoid the impending sense of war and doom. The mood is one of Jules Verne science fiction novels or of ‘Ali Baba and the forty thieves’, what with fantasies of brigands, ‘les rats d’hôtel’ (cat burglars) and ‘les petit Mongols due Grand-Lama’. The journey unfolds in a series of filmic images accompanied by the rhythms of the screeching train. But – and there is no parallel in Delaunay’s pochoir – discordant and ominous images set the stage. The merchandise includes ‘des cercueils de Malmoë’ (coffins from Malmo), and the poet finds himself unnerved by the appearance of a ‘man in blue glasses nervously pacing up and down the corridor and glancing in at me’ (l’homme aux lunettes bleues qui se

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promenait nerveusement dans le couloir et qui me regardait en passant). Who is this sinister stranger and what does his presence prefigure? Throughout the night, as Blaise alternately daydreams and tries to entertain Jeanne with hyperreal tall tales of mysterious islands, nature is always seen through the lens of technology and industrial detritus. ‘The sky is like the torn tent of a rundown circus in a little fishing village / in Flanders / The sun like a smoking lamp / and way up on the trapeze a woman does a crescent moon’ (Le ciel est comme la tente déchirée d’un cirque pauvre dans un petit village de pêcheurs / En Flandres / Le soleil est un fumeux quinquet / Et tout au haut d’un trapèze une femme fait la lune). Jeanne’s refrain, ‘Blaise, dis, sommes-nous bien loin de Montmartre?’ is punctuated by increasingly menacing images: even in his tale about Fiji with its eternal spring, ‘The lovers swoon in the high grass and hot syphilis drifts among the banana trees’ (L’amour pâme les couples dans l’herbe haute et la chaude syphilis rôde sous les bananiers). And ‘The telegraph lines they hang from / The grimacing poles that reach out to strangle them’ (Les fils télégraphiques auxquels elles pendent / Les poteaux grimaçants qui gesticulent et les étranglent). When Jeanne finally falls asleep, lulled by Blaise’s absurd endearments, the poet is haunted, as in the 2010 Christian Marclay film The Clock, by ‘All the clocks / Paris time Berlin time Saint Petersburg time all those stations’ times’ (Toutes les horloges / L’heure de Paris l’heure de Berlin l’heure de Saint-Pétersbourg / et l’heure de toutes les gares). And a whole catalogue of clocks and bells from around the world follows. ‘I’m scared’ (J’ai peur): it is here, five strophes before the end,22 that the note of acute fear comes to the fore. The train is approaching Mongolia and the poem, in an echo of Rimbaud’s ‘Bateau ivre’, turns to ­recapitulation and lassitude: I saw I saw the silent trains the black trains returning from the Far East and   going by like Phantoms And my eyes, like tail lights, are still trailing along behind those trains At Talga 100,000 wounded were dying with no help coming I went to the hospitals in Krasnoyarsk And at Khilok we met a long convoy of soldiers gone insane I saw in quarantine gaping sores and wounds with blood gushing out And the amputated limbs danced around or flew up in the raw air Fire was in their faces and in their hearts Idiot fingers drumming on all the windowpanes And under the pressure of fear an expression would burst like an abcess



rev isiting the delaunay–cendrars collaboration 229 In all the stations they had set fire to all the cars And I saw I saw trains with 60 locomotives streaking away chased by hot horizons  and Desperate crows Disappearing In the direction of Port Arthur.23

This hallucinatory sequence, with its burning trains, its narrator’s eye transformed into rear signal lights and its dance of amputated limbs, eerily prefigures the war of which Cendrars could as yet know nothing, a war in which he was, in 1915, to lose his own right arm. In Au Coeur du monde (1917), the fantasy of La Prose is translated into a more visionary image of the lost hand: ‘Ma main coupée brille au ciel dans la constellation d’Orion’ (My cut off hand shines in the sky in the constellation of Orion).24 This strophe is, in any case, the turning point of the poem. As the journey now continues, Jeanne has mysteriously disappeared, there is talk of another girl (M. Iankéléwitch’s daughter), and the sweet memory of the poet’s mother at the piano, early in the poem, gives way to the recognition that ‘Maintenant c’était moi qui avais pris place au piano, et j’avais mal aux dents’ (Now I was the one playing the piano, and I had a toothache). Toothache: like that of Vronsky in Anna Karenina, it is the emblem of everyday reality in its dreariest state. Drunkenness and sleep follow, and at Kharbin, ‘la dernière station’, the poet gets off the train, just as the Red Cross office is being set on fire. The end of the line: the fade-out dissolves all further talk of travel and trains: instead, the scene shifts abruptly back to Paris, and, in the final turn, to the poet’s apostrophe to his city, a city that, it now seems, he may never have left. The voyage narrative is framed as dream, a dream turned into nightmare. The address to Paris, in any case, begins on a positive note: O Paris Great warm hearth with the intersecting embers of your streets and your   old houses Leaning over them for warmth Like grandmothers And here are posters in red in green all colors like my past in a word  yellow Yellow the proud color of the novels of France25

Paris, great hearth with the intersecting embers of its streets and its lovely red and green multicolour posters and proud yellow of illicit novels: here

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is a thread Delaunay could and did no doubt pick up on. But now, look at what follows: O Paris Main station where desires arrive at the crossroads of restlessness26

Paris, central station where desires arrive, the crossroads of unrest, of anxiety. Haunted, in the end, by spectres of the women he has known, his lost loves including the mothers of his children, and unnerved by the siren cries in the night, the poet concludes: I wish I wish I’d never started traveling Tonight a great love is driving me out of my mind And I can’t help thinking about little Jeanne of France It’s through a sad night that I’ve written this poem in her honor Jeanne The little prostitute I’m sad so sad I’m going to the Lapin Agile to remember my lost youth again Have a few drinks And come back home alone Paris City of the incomparable Tower the great Gibbet and the Wheel27

I wish I’d never started traveling! (Je voudrais n’avoir jamais fait mes voyages!) It is the Baudelairean and Rimbaldian theme carried to its logical conclusion. Lonely and sad, the poet will go have a few drinks and, like the ‘I’ of Apollinaire’s ‘Zone’, return home alone. In the final recapitulation of Paris, we have ‘la Tour unique’, which can mean either the incomparable or the only one, ‘le Gibet’, the great gallows or guillotine, and the ever-turning wheel. La Prose du Transsibérien ends on a note of lassitude, sorrow, failure: the fancy cannot cheat so well as she is famed to do. And for all those who came to this great poem of 1913 only after the Great War, the knowledge of what is to come colours the entire ­spectacle. And the colours are hardly those of Sonia Delaunay. It should be clear by now that the trajectory of Cendrars’s poem is quite unlike that of Delaunay’s vertical pochoir, with its culminating image of the little red tower inside the orange wheel. The energy of Delaunay’s beautiful colour spirals is matched by the energy of Cendrars’s poem, but whereas the poem moves from youthful fun and pleasure to the darkness of the Paris night, Delaunay’s visual counterpart does not change emotionally or tonally. Its vertical appearance is illusory,



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its thrust being spatial as an elaborate construction. Indeed, when we talk of the collagiste aspect of Cendrars’s poem, of its fragmented narrative and shifts in register, we must be careful not to impose Delaunay’s formal drive onto Cendrars. The fact is that, its dislocations and time shifts notwithstanding, the poem’s narrative is pretty straightforward. It begins with ‘Back then’ (en ce temps-là), when the poet is a carefree adolescent in Moscow and takes him, via the train journey, to a maturity no longer so insouciant or fun-loving. Again, the poem moves from the bright sunshine of a summer day in Moscow to the dark night of Paris. A pre-war poem of uncanny predictive powers, it begins by celebrating sexual excess only to conclude, at journey’s end, that the sirens’ grating sounds tear up the soul. But now comes the difficult question. Why, if we who read the poem cannot help seeing how different it is from its visual analogue, do we still love the Cendrars–Delaunay collaboration, as it is always called? Why do Delaunay’s couleurs simultanées seem so appropriate for the poem and vice versa? In their penetrating analysis of the collaboration, Renée and Judd Hubert admit that ‘Delaunay-Terk’s sunlit chromatics evoke the very opposite of Cendrars’s somber writing dominated by disease and death’. But they make a strong case for affinities. For one thing, they point out that the text does attain ‘a kind of simultaneity by constantly turning back on itself in space as well as time. After all the return to Paris coincides with the arrival at Kharbine’. This is an important point: the poem does come full circle to end where it began – but with the central difference that the poet is no longer the same. It is also true, as the Huberts note, that Cendrars includes many references to painting and to bright colours in his poem, as if anticipating Delaunay’s pochoir. For example, ‘And here are posters in red in green all colours like my past in a word yellow’ (Et voici des affiches, du rouge au vert comme mon passé bref du jaune).28 The Delaunay pochoir, the Huberts conclude, which is probably the first abstract work ever used to ‘illustrate’ a poem, can be considered ‘the other of the text, as its positive and happy complement. Together, text and graphics create a simultaneous spectacle where the negative and positive sides of human existence contrast and combine’.29 I am not wholly convinced by this argument. True, the poem’s opening, with its childlike catalogues and transpositions, its absurdist and hyperbolic account of the train journey, does meet its match in Delaunay’s rendition. True as well that the poem repeatedly alludes to painting – ‘If I were a painter I would splash lots of red and yellow over the end of this trip’ (Si j’étais peintre je déverserais beaucoup de rouge,

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beaucoup de jaune sur la fin de ce voyage)30 – and thus sets up real links to Delaunay’s pochoir. But suppose the artist had taken her cue from the imagery of carnage and dismemberment found in the latter half of the poem? Perhaps, in that case, the ‘abstract’ complement would have been in line with, say, the painting of Franz Marc, which Sonia Delaunay certainly knew, having begun her career as a student of German expressionism and the ‘simultaneous’ book would have been entirely different. Again, the typography used in the pochoir – so expressive in its treatment of boldface, different fonts, mimetic spacing, and so on – is, as I noted earlier, not used in the print versions of the poem, even in its authorized Denöel edition. So the link between avant-garde typography and visual image, appealing as it is, does not apply to the poem as most readers will know it. Perhaps, then – and this is characteristic of avant-garde production – we must talk of more than one Transsibérien. Far from being a ‘simultaneous book’ – or in most of its current incarnations even a book – we have, to my mind, a differential text, its production incorporating wall painting, accordion book and printed poem in ‘normal’ format. The digital versions now accessible would constitute a fourth variant. Which of these best represents ‘l’esprit de 1913’? If Delaunay’s wall painting conveys the utopian vision of the period, in all its charm and ‘colour’ potential, the accordion book reminds us of its relative modesty and poverty, the materials used being inexpensive, the images unobtrusive. But to understand the psychology of the darker side of the avantguerre, its ethos of contradiction and uncertainty, we can profitably turn to Cendrars’s own text. His poem, as we have seen, cannot remotely be ‘taken in’ at a single glance; it is, after all, not an advertising poster. Rather, La Prose du Transsibérien is an ominously prophetic poem dramatizing the intersection of voyage – a trip in search of happy adventure and love – with the war that cuts off the train in its very tracks. The Paris to which the poet returns in the end (and which perhaps he has never left) is a totally changed city. And nothing in Delaunay’s lovely painting is quite comparable. As for the iconic Prose du Transsibérien, which was a central feature of the Inventing Abstraction exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, and, which we contemplate with such pleasure at other museums, like the Zimmerli Art Museum in Rutgers, New Jersey, or the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, this work is not ‘by’ Sonia Delaunay and Blaise Cendrars: it is a brilliant pochoir, inspired by Cendrars’s poem, but made by Delaunay. As such, it belongs, quite rightly, on the wall of a museum.



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Notes   1. In a rather different form, this chapter appeared in the online Australian Journal of Poetic Research, 7 (2017). The editor John Tranter introduced many other images into the text: for example, Marinetti’s visual poems, and so on, which are not included here.  2. Blaise Cendrars and Sonia Delaunay-Terk, letter to André Salmon, 12 October 1913, in Blaise Cendrars, Inédits secrets, p. 364, my translation.   3. Matthew Affron, ‘Contrasts of colors’, pp. 82–5.   4. Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘Simultanisme-Librettisme’, Les Soirées de Paris, 26–7 (15 June 1914), cited in English in Affron, ‘Contrasts of colors’, p. 83. ‘Blaise Cendrars et Mme Delaunay Terck [sic] ont fait une première tentative de simultanéité écrite d’un seul regard où des contrastes de couleurs habituaient l’œil à lire l’ensemble d’un poème, comme un chef d’orchestre lit d’un seul coup les notes superposées dans la partition, comme on voit d’un seul coup les éléments plastiques et imprimés d’une affiche.’   5. Matthew Affron, ‘Contrasts of colors’, pp. 82–3. Cf. Marjorie Perloff, Futurist Moment, chap. 4 passim.   6. Cendrars, Inédits secrets, p. 361, my translation and emphasis: ‘J’ai la fièvre. Et c’est pourquoi j’aime la peinture des Delaunay, pleine de soleils, de ruts, de violences. Mme Delaunay a fait un si beau livre de couleurs, que mon poème est plus trempé de lumière que ma vie. Voilà ce qui me rend heureux. Plus encore, que ce livre ait deux mètres de long! – Et encore, que l’édition atteigne la hauteur de la Tour Eiffel!’   7. A facsimile of the original fold-out accordion book, accompanied by a booklet with a new translation by Timothy Young, was published by the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library for Yale University Press in 2008. The dimensions are 18.4 cm × 10.5 cm (folded), 196.9 cm × 35.6 cm (flat). The painting is on the recto, the poem the verso (corresponding to left and right of the pochoir on the wall).  8. See, for example, the oil painting in the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris, as reproduced in Affron, ‘Contrasts of colors’, p. 86.  9. Blaise Cendrars, Complete Poems, pp. 15–29 and p. 29. 10. Gordon Hughes, in ‘Abstraction chez Delaunay’, p. 75, explains: ‘simultaneous contrast occurs when two or more contiguous colors of sufficient size and saturation mutually influence the viewer’s perception. The placement of a patch of red net to a patch of blue, for example, will alter how we see both colors.’ 11. Affron, ‘Contrasts of colors’, p. 83. 12. Ibid., p. 84. 13. See, for example, Jay Bochner, Blaise Cendrars, pp. 58–60; Katherine Schingler, ‘Visual and verbal encounters’. 14. Blaise Cendrars, Une Nuit dans la forêt, p. 140, my translation. Cf. Perloff, Futurist Moment, chap. 1 passim.

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15. See Robert and Sonia Delaunay, New Art of Color, p. 14. For discussion of Chevreul’s theory, see pp. 11n, 23, 31, 52. 16. See Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘Modern painting’ (1913), in New Art of Color, p. 101; Delaunay himself didn’t care for the term because it was too ‘literary’: see ‘Two notes on orphism’ (1930), ibid., pp. 104–5. 17. Blaise Cendrars, ‘The Eiffel Tower’ (1924), in New Art of Color, p. 75. 18. Note that on the title page of Seghers’ book, the date is given as 1912. Seghers later admitted this was a mistake, based on Cendrars’s own misleading account of his composition. 19. Blaise Cendrars, Prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France, in Édition complète, vol. 1, pp. 20–33, see p. 20. All further references are to this edition, but since readers will have different editions, I won’t give further page numbers for the French. For the English, see Cendrars, Complete Poems, pp. 15–29. ‘En ce temps-là j’étais en mon adolescence / J’avais à peine seize ans et je ne me souvenais déjà plus de mon enfance / J’étais à 16.000 lieues du lieu de ma naissance / J’étais à Moscou, dans la ville des mille et trois clochers et des sept gares / Et je n’avais pas assez des sept gares et des mille et trois tours / Car mon adolescence était si ardente et si folle / Que mon cœur, tour à tour, brûlait comme le temple d’Éphèse ou comme la Place Rouge de Moscou / Quand le soleil se couche. / Et mes yeux éclairaient des voies anciennes. / Et j’étais déjà si mauvais poète / Que je ne savais pas aller jusqu’au bout’. 20. Cendrars, Complete Poems, pp. 15–16. ‘J’avais faim / Et tous les jours et toutes les femmes dans les cafés et tous les verres / J’aurais voulu les boire et les casser / Et toutes les vitrines et toutes les rues / Et toutes les maisons et toutes les vies / Et toutes les roues des fiacres qui tournaient en tourbillon sur les mauvais pavés / J’aurais voulu les plonger dans une fournaise de glaives / Et j’aurais voulu broyer tous les os / Et arracher toutes les langues / Et l­iquéfier tous ces grand corps étranges et nus sous les vêtements qui m’affolent … / Je pressentais la venue du Grand Christ rouge de la révolution russe … / Et le soleil était une mauvaise plaie / Qui s’ouvrait comme un brasier’. 21. Ibid., p. 16. ‘En Sibérie tonnait le canon, c’était la guerre / La faim le froid le peste le choléra / Et les eaux limoneuses de l’Amour charriaient des millions de charognes / Dans toutes les gares je voyais partir tous les derniers trains / Personne ne pouvait plus partir car on ne délivrait plus de billets / Et les soldats qui s’en allaient auraient bien voulu rester … / Un vieux moine me chantait la légende de Novgorode’. 22. Prose du Transsibérien, p. 30. 23. Cendrars, Complete Poems, p. 27. ‘J’ai vu / J’ai vu les trains silencieux les trains noirs qui revenaient de L’Extrême-Orient et qui / passaient en fantômes / Et mon oeil, comme le fanal d’arrière, court encore derrière ces trains / A Talga, 100.000 blessés agonisaient faute de soins / J’ai visité les hôpitaux de Krasnoïarsk / Et à Khilok nous avons croisé un long convoi de soldats fous / J’ai vu dans les lazarets des plaies béantes des blessures qui saignaient



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à pleines orgues / Et les membres amputés dansaient autour ou s’envolaient dans l’air rauque … / Et j’ai vu / J’ai vu des trains de 60 locomotives qui s’enfuyaient à toute vapeur pourchassées par les horizons en rut et des bandes des corbeaux qui s’envolaient désespérément après / Disparaître / Dans la direction de Port-Arthur’. 24. Blaise Cendrars, Poésies complètes, vol. 1, p. 196. 25. Ibid., p. 28. ‘O Paris / Grand foyer chaleureux avec les tisons entrecroisés de tes rues muettes vieilles maisons qui se penchent au-dessus et se réchauffent / Comme des aïeules / Et voici des affiches, du rouge du vert multicolores comme mon passé bref du jaune / Jaune la fière couleur des romans de la France à l’étranger’. 26. Ibid., p. 28. ‘O Paris / Gare centrale débarcadère des volontés carrefour des inquiétudes’. 27. Ibid., p. 29. ‘Je voudrais / Je voudrais n’avoir jamais fait mes voyages / Ce soir un grand amour me tourmente / Et malgré moi je pense à la petite  Jehanne de France / C’est par un soir de tristesse que j’ai écrit ce poème en son honneur / Jeanne / La petite prostituée / Je suis triste je suis triste / J’irai au “Lapin agile” me ressouvenir de ma jeunesse perdue / Et boire des petits verres / Puis je rentrerai seul / Paris / Ville de la Tour unique du grand Gibet et de la Roue’. 28. Ibid., p. 28. 29. Renée Riese Hubert and Judd D. Hubert, ‘La Prose du Transsibérien’, pp. 59–82, see pp. 60, 70, 78–9. This important essay should be reprinted in a more accessible collection or put on the Internet. 30. Cendrars, Complete Poems, p. 70.

Works cited Affron, Matthew, ‘Contrasts of colors, contrasts of words’, in Dickerman (ed.), Inventing Abstraction 1910–1925, pp. 82–87. Apollinaire, Guillaume, ‘Modern painting’, quot. and trans. in Arthur A. Cohen, Sonia Delaunay, p. 101. —, ‘Simultanisme-Librettisme: Les Soirées de Paris 26–27, June 15, 1915’, quot. and trans. into English in Matthew Affron, ‘Contrasts of colours’, in How a Radical Idea Changed Modern Art, p. 83. Bochner, Jay, Blaise Cendrars: Discovery and Re-creation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978). Cendrars, Blaise, Le Transsibérien, ed. Pierre Seghers (Paris: Denoël, 1912). —, Une Nuit dans la forêt (1927), vol. 6 of Œuvres complètes, ed. Raymond Dumay and Nino Frank (Paris: Le Club Français du Livre, 1968–71). —, Inédits secrets, ed. Miriam Cendrars (Paris: Denoël, 1969). —, ‘The Eiffel Tower’, in Delaunay and Delaunay, New Art of Color, p. 75. —, Œuvres complètes, ed. Raymond Dumay and Nino Frank, 8 vols (Paris: Denoël, 1987).

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—, La Prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France, in Œuvres complètes, vol. 1, pp. 20–33. —, Complete Poems, trans. Ron Padgett (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). —, La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France, trans. Timothy Young (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, 2008). Cohen, Arthur A., Sonia Delaunay (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1975). Damase, Jacques, Sonia Delaunay: Rhythms and Colours (London: Thames and Hudson, 1972). Delaunay, Robert, and Sonia Delaunay, The New Art of Color: The Writings of Robert and Sonia Delaunay, ed. and intr. Arthur A. Cohen, trans. David Shapiro and A. A. Cohen (New York: Viking, 1978). Dickerman, Leah (ed.), Inventing Abstraction 1910–1925: How a Radical Idea Changed Modern Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2003). Hubert, Renée Riese, and Judd D. Hubert, ‘La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France’, in Khalfa (ed.), Dialogue between Painting and Poetry, pp. 59–82. Hughes, Gordon, ‘Abstraction chez Delaunay’, in Dickerman (ed.), Inventing Abstraction 1910–1925, pp. 74–81. Khalfa, Jean (ed.), The Dialogue between Painting and Poetry: Livres d’artistes 1874–1899 (Cambridge: Black Apollo Press, 2001). Perloff, Marjorie, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, rev. edn, 2003). Schingler, Katherine, ‘Visual and verbal encounters in Cendrars and Delaunay’s La Prose du Transsibérien’, e-France 3 (2012), www.reading.ac.uk/web/files/ modern-languages-and-europeanstudies/Katherine_Shingler_Visual_ Encounters_in_Cendrars_and_Delaunays.pdf (accessed 17 June 2019).

12 Mallarmé’s modernity in 1913 Virginie A. Duzer

In essence, I consider our present day as an interregnum for the poet, who should not mingle with it: the epoch has fallen into oblivion and preparatory turmoil too much for him to do anything other than to mysteriously work towards later or never.1

S

téphane Mallarmé’s peculiar brand of avant-gardism mixed the ‘later’ and the ‘never’, as his letter to Paul Verlaine dated 16 November 1885 stipulated: the poet was to reign in a space disconnected from his own contemporaneity. Maybe this very ‘inactuality’ explains why, as Georges Duhamel noted on 1 April 1913 in a review of a new edition of Mallarmé’s poems, the poet’s work seems everlasting: ‘[Mallarmé] appears to have interminably survived himself ’ ([Mallarmé] donne l’impression de s’être interminablement survécu).2 It could be that 1913 – annus mirabilis – brought this prolongation of survival to Mallarmé’s own concept of eternity.3 Claiming (and disclaiming) Mallarmé in 1913 In the preface to his Mallarmé in the Twentieth Century, the editor Robert Greer Cohn reminds his readers of the influence Mallarmé had ‘on all sorts of moderns, from Proust and Valéry to Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, Faulkner, Picasso, Apollinaire, Matisse and Boulez’, adding that the poet had ‘a central role in the formation of the twentieth-century mindset altogether’ although Mallarmé’s difficulty kept him remote from ‘literate masses’: few are equipped to appreciate the plenitude of his vision, which seems to follow Pascal’s prescription for genius: ‘Touch both extremes

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s­imultaneously’ and involves a globe-shaped (‘multipolar’) nexus of polarity dimensions criss-crossing in every direction, that is, complex and simple, totally lucid and naive, transcendent and volcanically sensual (like his Faun); free and obedient (in the Nietzsche sense); sacred and profane (echoing Leonardo), male and female, right brain and left (artistic-intuitive and rational – ‘scientific’, à la Dante, Donne, Goethe), deeply and demonically late-Romantic and still sanely classic, dark and light, warm and cold, mobile and static, continuous and discontinuous, tragic and comic, musical and literary.4

Cohn’s complete description of Mallarmé’s complexity goes perfectly along with what might first appear as inconsistencies in the way the poet was seen in the year 1913. And these extreme variations in scope, public, shape and theme constitute Mallarmé’s peculiar modernism. Similarly to the way he was criticized for his ‘obscurity’ during his lifetime, the poet was still being blamed by Léon Bloy in 1913 for what the pamphlet-writer defined as Mallarmé’s laughable craziness in the delayed publication of some late nineteenth-century writing of his.5 And the anti-Semitic critic Adolphe Retté held Mallarmé responsible for corrupting French literature, and for poisoning both the French language and national intelligence.6 Both of these virulent critiques published in 1913 share a sort of nostalgia for a lost era. While they demonstrate a longing for a certain past, they indirectly acknowledge the presence of Mallarmé’s aura in their contemporaneity. That is to say that their remarks can constitute proof of the poet’s authority in 1913. Yet, as Jean-Jacques Thomas has shown, even such a devoted disciple as Paul Valéry was sceptical that his beloved Mallarmé was to have any impact on the following generation.7 In one of the letters he sent to Albert Thibaudet some time in 1912 – after the publication of Thibaudet’s La Poésie de Stéphane Mallarmé – Valéry went so far as to profess that Mallarmé’s influence was nowhere to be found in contemporary poetry.8 Such a puzzling statement can only be understood if we recontextualize Valéry’s – and the whole Nouvelle Revue Française’s (NRF  ) – fascination for Mallarmé. Re-edited in 1914, the poem Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard, one of Mallarmé’s creations that had the greatest impact on both poetry and the visual arts, is of course the most perfect example of the poet’s uniqueness.9 According to Marjorie Perloff, it is then that Mallarmé would suddenly be seen ‘as the father of the “typographical revolution”’.10 Claimed as a possible ancestor by various avant-garde groups, from the Futurists,11 to the Dadaists and the Surrealists, it is also possible that Thibaudet’s 1912 mention of the Un coup de dés may have influenced the 1913 paradigm of simultaneism.



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Mallarmé’s presence in 1913 When Blaise Cendrars looked back at the period that is of interest to us here, he placed Mallarmé on the same level as most of the key words evoking modernity: ‘clear break. New direct departure on the steel line.  … Tango, Russian ballet, cubism, Mallarmé, intellectual bolshevism, ­insanity’ (brisure nette. Nouveau départ direct sur la ligne d’acier … Tango, Ballets russes, cubisme, Mallarmé, bolchevisme intellectuel, insanité).12 However, the NRF, whose anti-modernism has been underlined by Antoine Compagnon, was paradoxically at the very root of Mallarmé’s return to modernity. On the one hand, we can invoke the example of the 1913 edition of poems discovered by chance by the young pre-surrealist Benjamin Péret on the benches of a railway station right before enlisting in the French army’s Cuirassiers. And it also seems that Marcel Duchamp fell in love with Mallarmé’s poetry during that same time period. But, on the other hand, Arthur Cravan’s July 1913 issue of Maintenant, infamously devoted to André Gide, is testimony to the philosophical and aesthetic gaps separating the pre-surrealists from the NRF group. That is to say that Mallarmé’s kaleidoscopic poetics could appeal to extremes and nemeses – without reconciling them. Was his marginality itself not central to symbolism? One year earlier, in 1912, the list of participants attending the commemoration of Mallarmé’s 1842 birth actually shows that artists as different as Rachilde, Apollinaire, Ravel, Redon, Romains and Nadar met on that day to listen to celebratory readings of Mallarmé’s poems. The Mercure de France dated 16 June 1912 summarized the event, and dutifully transcribed the talks and the poems that were read: ‘On Sunday, June 9, at eleven a.m., there was a crowd in front of the house numbered 89 on the Rue de Rome, awaiting the inauguration of the commemorative plaque that had just been affixed there’ (Le dimanche 9 juin, à onze heures, il y avait foule devant la maison portant le numéro 89 de la rue de Rome pour assister à l’inauguration de la plaque commémorative qu’on venait d’y apposer).13 The journalist even goes so far as to ask for an official yearly Mallarmé bank holiday: ‘We are suggesting from now on that we perpetuate it [the holiday celebrating Mallarmé]: the loving tribute of a yearly commemoration is well worth a marble statue somewhere in the city. The holiday could be set on the Sunday the closest to 18 March, Stéphane Mallarmé’s birthdate’ (Nous proposons dès maintenant qu’on la perpétue [la fête en la mémoire de Mallarmé]: l’hommage vivant d’une commémoration annuelle vaut bien un marbre dans quelque coin de la cité. La fête pourrait être fixée

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au dimanche le plus voisin du 18 mars, date de la naissance de Stéphane Mallarmé).14 In 1912, the majority of those present at the commemoration had actually encountered Mallarmé and tended to value the man (l’homme) above his works (l’Œuvre).15 In his 1913 Préférences, Paul Escoube explains that many of his contemporaries could not read Mallarmé’s text without recalling his Mardis: There is still the small number of privileged ones who knew the Master and his seducing conversation. Old conversations help them in their love. When they get closer to the work, it is transfigured, as it borrows from such gesture or such intonation, springing from memory, with a charm and light that it cannot reveal to a reader who knows nothing but the book.16

It is not unlikely that Escoube considered the NRF group as among those ‘privileged’, still capable of re-enacting Mallarmé’s long lost voice and gestures. Was it due to a similar fear of the loss of an essential part of his poetic persona that Apollinaire had his voice recorded some time around 1913? What is certain is that after 1914 Paul Valéry often related Mallarmé’s rather dull and accent-less reading of Un coup de dés, and that other mardistes described a soft-spoken poet, magically capable of playing with silences.17 Going back to the NRF, it is worth underscoring the fact that many in the editorial team of the very recently created NRF were in shock when in the first issue of 1908, Léon Bocquet published ‘Contre Mallarmé’, an article praising Jean-Marc Bernard’s 1907 controversial essay ‘Mallarmé et l’idée d’impuissance’. As a result, Eugène Montfort and his friends had to leave the editorial team that would, from then on, include only Gide’s friends and collaborators. Hence, Mallarmé remained the common denominator of the group, and in March 1909, for instance, Jacques Copeau defended Mallarmé against Bernard’s accusation of sterility: ‘He knew … how to defy the commodities of an over-mellowed culture. He teaches us to find in ourselves enough restrictions so that the artistic expression remains to us, despite everything, the most difficult thing that there is’ (Il sut … tenir en défiance les commodités d’une culture trop assouplie. Il nous enseigne à trouver en nous-mêmes assez de restrictions pour que l’expression artistique demeure à nos yeux, malgré tout, ce qu’il y a de plus difficile).18 No wonder then that an analysis of the names featured in the NRF between 1908 and 1914 reveals that Mallarmé is quoted no less than forty-seven times and is ranked fifteenth in frequency of mention.19 Other numbers show that at the beginning of 1913, the NRF had 720 subscribers



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and a print run of 1,600. One and a half year later, in the summer of 1914, 1,400 had subscribed and 3,000 issues had been printed.20 That is to say that the advertisement strategies had worked – and that Mallarmé had also proven himself marketable. These re-editions of Mallarmé could indeed be seen as an editorial ‘coup’: ‘It seems that the Mallarmé will sell really well’ (On sent que le Mallarmé va très bien se vendre) Jacques Rivière wrote simply to André Gide on 15 January 1913.21 These publications actually prompted a return to the text aimed at a readership that had not been able to meet the poet in person. In fact, they did fulfil a need, as it was very unlikely that the generation born after 1890 and coming of age around 1913 with newly acquired ‘buying power’ would have had access to the older 1890s editions of Mallarmé’s poems, let alone his 1897 Cosmopolis article. The critic and then unusual academic Albert Thibaudet was the one who, simply by chance, would write and publish the essay that hooked readers on Mallarmé in 1912, La Poésie de Stéphane Mallarmé.22 Unlike Gide or Valéry, Thibaudet, who started the book in 1907 and finished it in 1911, was among the rare NRF participants who had not been part of Mallarmé’s Salons. As a result, he came to the text from the outside, his reading relying mostly on his personal understanding of Mallarmé’s poetry and aesthetics. His text was perhaps the first one to show that Mallarmé’s true importance for posterity was detectable in the poems themselves without need for the poet’s body to interfere: ‘Mallarmé’s influence exerted a hold not on the content of literature, but on the manner of putting the literary problem’ (L’influence de Mallarmé ne s’est pas exercée sur le contenu de la littérature, mais sur la manière de poser le problème littéraire).23 Literature was now to be seen in a new light and Mallarmé’s peculiar 1913 modernity lay there. A letter Claudel sent to Gide on 27  January  1913 reveals that Thibaudet’s book, published the very same year that Mallarmé was officially commemorated by his friends, triggered the later re-edition of Un coup de dés: His book [Thibaudet’s] explains to me the following sentence that Mallarmé said to one of us: ‘I am a desperate person’. As, in fact, Mallarmé was a mystic, he stayed prisoner behind this cold and naked window that he never managed to break down – Why wouldn’t the NRF print Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard? [sic] Do you know that I own one of its proofs?24

Along with Thibaudet’s book, Gourmont’s 1913 Promenades littéraires on Mallarmé also mentioned Un coup de dés and would soon initiate its

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r­ e-evaluation. As a result, 1913 saw the re-edition of Mallarmé’s poems, and it is in 1914 that Un coup de dés would finally become accessible to a larger readership. The NRF ’s 1913 success also had to do with the Théâtre du VieuxColombier, where twenty-four ‘matinées poétiques’ were established in order to create a sense of cohesion among the new audience and maybe also among its recent shareholders like Marcel Proust.25 The communal aspect of reading was emphasized: ‘Public readings are responding to a need of our time; they help fight the prevailing chaos’ (Les lectures publiques répondent à un besoin de notre époque; elles tendent à lutter contre le tumulte ambiant).26 Ghéon argued that poetry should be subordinated to drama, and presented the readings as ‘polyphoniques’: ‘These are the concerts of the great French poetry, of all of French poetry, from its first cry to its latest modulation’ (Ce sont les concerts de la grande poésie française, de toute la poésie française depuis son premier cri jusqu’à sa dernière modulation).27 These public lectures could certainly be seen as pedagogical since they created a sort of genealogy of poetry, establishing to what extent contemporary poets had been influenced by Mallarmé, Verlaine and the symbolists. But they were also a marketing tool, helping to sell the still rather unknown poets of 1913. As Maurice Kurtz remarks, poets were indeed the main attraction of these events: ‘These well-attended gatherings, inaugurated by Copeau for the first time in any theater, were conducted informally by him and the company. Whenever possible the poets themselves came to recite their work.’28 André Gide actually devoted the first conference of the series to Verlaine and to Mallarmé. Taking the time to describe what the then rather unknown Un coup de dés was about, Gide introduced it to the public as an ideal book poetically composed both as a painting and as a symphony.29 That same autumn, at the Théâtre Antoine, Édouard Dujardin attempted to revive the ‘Mardis Mallarmé’. Music, poetry and dance were on the menu and the first of these morning performances was introduced by a talk from Dujardin. We should add that Mallarmé was also present in the programmatic ironic dialogue of the emblematic doves imagined by Copeau for his Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, which was in fact borrowed from Mallarmé himself: ‘Do you attend the theater? – No, almost, never’ … ‘Moreover, nor do I!’ (Allez-vous au théâtre? – Non, presque jamais’ … ‘Au reste, moi non plus!).30 Architecturally, the theatre of the Vieux-Colombier was not built from scratch, since money was initially scarce. Yet Francis Jourdain, the architect, was able to create a black stage frame with movable side panels. There was no real set except for a green curtain, such basic staging seemingly befitting the



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NRF ­editorial board’s desire for simplicity.31 But it was also an effect of Copeau’s personal philosophy of the theatre. Indeed, in one of the chapters of his Manifesto published by the NRF in September of 1913, he wrote: We cannot overstudy this mise en scène, which concerns interpretation. To the other one, which focuses on decors and props, we do not want to give too much credit … To take one decorative formula or another as is, still, about finding interest in the side aspects of theatre. Developing a craze for what engineers or electricians create is still giving a usurped place to the canvas, to the painted cardboard, to the disposition of lights; it is always opting, in one way or the other, for the tricks. Old or new, we repudiate all of them. Good or bad, we plan on negating the importance of all machinery … May all the other distinctions vanish, and, for the new work, may we be left with naked boards!32

And such simplicity had again to do with Mallarmé, one of Copeau’s self-admittedly favourite writers. Let us remember that when Mallarmé described his friend Manet’s Le Linge – in a 1876 article whose French original got lost – he emphasized the importance of plein-air and nature (or the natural): The complexion, the special beauty which springs from the very source of life, changes with artificial lights, and it is probably from the desire to preserve this grace in all its integrity that painting – which concerns itself more about this flesh-pollen than any other human attraction – insists on the mental operation to which I have lately alluded, and demands daylight – that is space with the transparence of air alone.33

Of course, the theatre designed by Copeau was not one set on the street, but because the mise en scène was nearly absent, the text itself – as well as the actors’ performance –, was placed at the centre of the piece, in a very Mallarméan way. Mallarmé is actually connected to another theatre – even if indirectly: on 2 April 1913, the new Théâtre des Champs-Élysées was inaugurated with Debussy conducting his Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune. That is to say that Mallarmé was as the very core of two major choreographic and musical events. 1913 is also the famous year during which, without consulting each other, Ravel and Debussy decided to set three of Mallarmé’s poems to music. In a hasard objectif of sorts, they both worked on ‘Soupir’ and ‘Placet futile’, composed in that order. Debussy called the event ‘a phenomenon of autosuggestion worthy of communication to the Academy of Medecine’.34 It is very likely that the newer e­ dition of Mallarmé’s poems explains why the two composers went back to his poetry, but it also shows to what extent the poet was then ‘à la

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mode’. That same year, Debussy’s composition was used as background music for Loie Fuller’s dance performance Les Sirènes; the dance was also performed at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, where Nijinsky had returned to the stage as the faun. Valentine de Saint-Point also danced her Metachorus that year, and the futurist-like dance took Mallarmé’s famous text on Loie Fuller as a point of reference as well as a model. In short, Stéphane Mallarmé was to be found everywhere in 1913, he was evoked and quoted in various shapes and media – and this might well be the ultimate proof of his extreme modernism. If we come back to the commercialization of Mallarmé by the NRF, Thibaudet’s 1912 essay constituted the first step towards what could be call a mallarméisation of the public that would occur in 1913 with poetry, followed by the 1914 editions of the mysterious Un coup de dés. As a result, the price of Mallarmé’s original editions plummeted.35 In 1913, Remy de Gourmont himself seemed surprised by the fact that Poésies were such an editorial success, something that would sell ‘enormously’ in Parisian bookstores: How does it sell? I asked a bookstore assistant while pointing to the recent Poésies volume. Enormously was his answer. We should not discourage such a willing crowd. Mallarmé: these syllables are exactly what you will find there, but you have to search on your own. He is himself, he is unique, he is divine, he has composed assemblages of nuanced words similar to the most exquisite gemstone necklaces, necklaces that no one had ever made before, that no one will ever make again.36

Far from the notion of symbolist ‘obscurity’ that was so often used to describe the poet at the turn of the twentieth century, Mallarmé had become an author with a broader readership, one whose writings also asked for willpower and work on the part of the reader. Since he was everywhere to be found, Mallarmé once again became a potentially laughable cliché, just like he had previously been for many newspapers at the end of the nineteenth century. But while the fin de siècle underscored the so-called problem of ‘obscurity’, it was Mallarmé’s syntax that ended up being mocked in the twentieth century – which means that he had finally been read, or that Thibaudet’s analysis had been efficient. For instance, the characters in Jules Romains’s 1913 Les Copains imitate Mallarmé’s poems as a form of satire:37 Flowing, sweating of naked sea-spray That a sieve Kill! Yet if the All-Issoire has not managed to get it Progressing on one foot admitting camembert



mallarmé’s modernity in 1913 245 By the horror of being concluded there Hot! That’s Ambert! 38

Mixing a Mallarméan frame with the topic of ‘camembert’ in such a Pre-Oulipo exercise could of course only be efficiently comic if the initial poem were easily recognizable – the parody thus being a tangible sign of Mallarmé’s 1913 popularity. Because several concepts of modernity ended up merging in 1913, Mallarmé also lost his uniqueness, as demonstrated in a short story by Henry Lascourrèges entitled ‘Un drôle de bon type’ (A funny guy) and published on 20 May 1913 in La Lanterne: Timon [Talence] was a kind of symbolist, decadent and futurist poet all at once. He had adopted the colourful theories of Mallarmé, Péladan and Marinetti … He had just … launched a literary review despite his twenty years of age … Two days before, in a public conversation … Timon had presented his ideas that were in fact still a little bit unclear, on the poet and on his art. … But that evening, still inebriated by his success, he went where the wind took him, his heart singing and his soul unperturbed, when a pretty, oh, yes, truly pretty peripatetic lady of the sidewalk found herself in his path. And as she had very nicely asked him to come along, they had just crossed together the doorstep of a hotel … Then, slowly, tenderly, he pulled this hand towards him, and put his lips on it. Woman is an angel, he added after a brief moment of silence. She is the daughter of the Muses and the sister of the Nymphs with golden wings. She is nearly as beautiful as a poem from the divine Mallarmé. Do you love Mallarmé? – Of course, responded the fair one; I personally love everybody! – How you are right to love him! His imprecision is a field wide open to the artists’ imagination; it is also the bay window through which the prisoner can become intoxicated by the colour of the sky and the racing of the clouds … – Do you want me to recite a poem to you?39

This short story – in which the twenty-year-old Timon publishes his own literary review and mixes Mallarmé’s, Péladan’s and Marinetti’s ­theories – concludes rather abruptly when the two characters say goodbye to each other on a sidewalk, in front of their hotel. While Timon does decide to spend the night with the beautiful prostitute –  whose charms he rewards monetarily in the end – all he does is to simply digress into a discussion of beauty and poetry and read to her some of Mallarmé’s poems. And of course, to the prostitute’s surprise and slight disappointment, the Mallarméan hero, ‘drôle de bon type’, refuses any kind of carnal encounter. Quite ironically, right below this short story, an ­advertisement against impotence has been carefully framed.

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The ultimate pirouette of destiny found within the ‘universal reporting’40 (universel reportage) of a newspaper since ‘no one can truly avoid journalism’ (nul n’échappe décidément, au journalisme),41 press and advertisement appear to triumph in 1913. Here, modernity prevails as Mallarmé’s famous sterile ‘Impuissance’ (impotence) has simply been turned into a potent commercial pharmacopeia. Yet it seems as if such a mercantile inclusion of the poet’s name into ‘the fame of the time’ had been announced by Stéphane Mallarmé himself, two decades before, in his Étalages: The individual who arouses our concern (or at least we insist that he exists somewhere or other, far off and not immediately accessible) can be  intuited: he demands no ordinary skill, nothing easily achieved, his name whirls about or soars aloft through a force that is his alone and never corresponds to mercantile schemes. An age knows, automatically, that a Poet exists.42

Notes   1. Stéphane Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes (eds. Henri Mondor and G. JeanAubry), p. 664: ‘Au fond je considère l’époque contemporaine comme un interrègne pour le poète qui n’a point à s’y mêler: elle est trop en désuétude et en effervescence préparatoire pour qu’il ait autre chose à faire qu’à travailler avec mystère en vue de plus tard ou de jamais’. Unless otherwise noted, all translations in this chapter are mine. Tiffany Mi, my research assistant, is to be thanked for her keen native rereading eye.   2. Georges Duhamel, ‘Les Poèmes’, 579.  3. The adjective ‘éternelles’ appears precisely thirteen times in Quentin Meillassoux’s reading of Mallarmé’s 1898 Un coup de dés, see Quentin Meillassoux, Le Nombre, p. 241.   4. Robert Greer Cohn (ed.), Mallarmé in the Twentieth Century, p. 11.   5. Léon Bloy, ‘Sur la tombe de Huysmans’, pp. 336–7: ‘Never mind if delirious gullible fools such as Mallarmé are adulated in the desert by this Hebrew in exodus, while Barbey d’Aurevilly is supposedly a sadist and rambling sacrilege.’ / ‘Qu’importe que des Jocrisses déments tels que Mallarmé soient adorés au désert par cet hébreu en plein Exode, tandis que Barbey d’Aurevilly est prétendu sadique et divagateur sacrilège?’   6. Adolphe Retté, Au pays des lys noirs, p. 207: ‘But also, what confusion in the minds, what anarchy of which many Jewish scribblers took advantage in order to sabotage our language, to hang our literature and to distort the French intelligence!’ / ‘Mais aussi quelle confusion dans les esprits, quelle anarchie dont maints écrivailleurs juifs profitaient pour saboter notre langue, pour faisander la littérature et pour fausser l’intelligence française!’



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  7. Jean-Jacques Thomas, ‘Mallarmé’, 35.   8. Paul Valéry, Ecrits divers, p. 159: ‘Regarding Mallarmé’s influence, my point of view briefly. It is nearly non-existent. That some results of this work of precision quickly ended up moving to the industry, we can all point to it. Nothing is more curious than the variation of this effect in the ways of many. The curve of imitation abruptly climbs up and, after a stage of a few years, goes down.’ / ‘Sur l’influence de Mallarmé, mon avis brièvement. Elle est comme nulle. Qu’il y ait certains résultats de cette œuvre de précision qui n’aient pas tardé à passer dans l’industrie, nous le montrons tous. Rien de plus curieux que la variation de cet effet dans la manière de plusieurs. La courbe de l’imitation monte brusquement et, après un palier de quelques années descend’.   9. For a thorough and extremely well documented analysis of Un coup de dés, see Thierry Roger, L’Archive du Coup de dés. 10. See Marjorie Perloff, Futurist Moment, pp. 253–354. In fact, Remy de Gourmont had coined the wording the year before, in 1913, while attempting to describe Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés. Gourmont, ‘L’exégèse de Mallarmé’, p. 252: ‘One day, Mallarmé felt that the typographic sensitivity was obsessively emphasizing in him …, the “typographic obsession”’ (Mallarmé sentit un jour s’exagérer en lui, jusqu’à la manie, le sentiment typographique … la ‘manie typographique’). 11. On 15 November 1913, Marinetti would in fact declare a kind of war to Mallarmé’s aesthetics, and claim that the typographic revolution was his. Quoted in Roger, L’Archive du Coup de dés, p. 104: ‘I am fighting Mallarmé’s decorative and precious aesthetic, as his search for the rare word, the unique, definitive, elegant, suggestive, exquisite adjective … I am also fighting Mallarmé’s static ideal, with this typographic revolution that allows me to print the words (already free, dynamic and striking) in all their possible speeds’ (Je combats l’esthétique décorative et précieuse de Mallarmé, comme sa recherche du mot rare, de l’adjectif unique, définitif, élégant, suggestif, exquis … Je combats aussi l’idéal statique de Mallarmé, avec cette révolution typographique qui me permet d’imprimer aux mots (déjà libres, dynamiques et percutants) toutes les vitesses). 12. Quoted in Serge Fauchereau, Avant-gardes du XXème siècle, p. 1014. 13. ‘Commémoration Stéphane Mallarmé’, 888. 14. Ibid., 893. 15. For instance, in October 1912, Charles Chassé attempted to document Mallarmé’s carrier as a professor of English by transcribing several letters and testimonies from his former students and colleagues and by quoting elements of his academic dossier. 16. Paul Escoube, ‘La Femme’, p. 151: ‘Il y a encore le petit nombre des privilégiés qui connurent le Maître et sa conversation séduisante. D’anciennes causeries les aident dans leur amour. Quand ils s’approchent de l’œuvre, celle-ci, transfigurée, emprunte à tel geste ou telle intonation, évoqués par

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le souvenir, un charme et une lumière qu’elle peut ne pas révéler au lecteur étranger à toute autre chose qu’au livre.’ 17. Paul Valéry, Ecrits divers, p. 15. ‘And he began reading in a low, even voice, without the smallest “effect”, nearly to himself.’ / ‘Et il se mit à lire d’une voix basse, égale, sans le moindre “effet”, presque à soi-même.’ 18. Jacques Copeau, ‘Brisson contre Becque’, 225. 19. Maaike Neeltje Koffeman-Bijman, ‘Entre classicisme et modernité’, p. 269. 20. Ibid., p. 85. 21. Quoted in Roger, L’Archive du Coup de dés, p. 88. 22. Gourmont, ‘L’exégèse de Mallarmé’, p. 248. 23. Albert Thibaudet, Réflexions sur la littérature, p. 158. 24. Quoted in Roger, L’Archive du Coup de dés, p. 89: ‘Son livre [celui de Thibaudet] m’explique ce mot que Mallarmé a dit à l’un de nous: “Je suis un désespéré”. Car au fond Mallarmé était un mystique, il est resté prisonnier de cette vitre froide et nue qu’il n’a jamais pu rompre – Pourquoi la NRF n’imprimeraitelle pas Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard? [sic] Vous savez que j’en possède une épreuve?’. 25. Koffeman-Bijman, ‘Entre classicisme et modernité’, p. 119. 26. Henri Ghéon, ‘Introduction aux matinées de poésie’, 963. 27. Ibid., 964. 28. Maurice Kurtz, Jacques Copeau, p. 21. 29. André Gide, ‘Conférence sur “Mallarmé et Verlaine”’, p. 426. 30. Mary Ann Caws, Mallarmé in Prose, pp. 105–6. Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, eds. Mondor and Jean-Aubry, p. 297. 31. Koffeman-Bijman, ‘Entre classicisme et modernité’, p. 119. 32. Jacques Copeau, quoted in Liliane Brion Guerry (ed.), L’année 1913, pp. 482–3: ‘A cette mise en scène là, qui concerne l’interprétation, nous ne saurions apporter trop d’étude. A l’autre, qui a trait aux décors et aux accessoires, nous ne voulons pas accorder d’importance … Tenir pour telle ou telle formule décorative, c’est toujours s’intéresser au théâtre par l’à-côté. Se passionner pour des inventions d’ingénieurs ou d’électriciens, c’est toujours accorder à la toile, au carton peint, à la disposition des lumières une place usurpée; c’est toujours donner, sous une forme quelconque, dans les trucs. Anciens ou nouveaux, nous les répudions tous. Bonne ou mauvaise, nous entendons nier l’importance de toute machinerie … Que les autres prestiges s’évanouissent, et, pour l’œuvre nouvelle, qu’on nous laisse un tréteau nu!’ 33. Charles R. Lyons, ‘Mallarmé and representation’, p. 99. 34. Quoted in Robert Gronquist, ‘Ravel’s “Trois Poème”’, 508. 35. No wonder then that, in 1913, Adolphe van Bever and Paul Léautaud’s 1900 Poètes d’Aujourd’hui, where Mallarmé was quite present, got re-edited. It is worth mentioning that the 1897 Un coup de dés was not forgotten in this publication: ‘Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard, a prosaic poem unique both because of its content and its typographic dispositions, was published in Cosmopolis in May 1897’ (Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard, poème en prose



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singulier autant par sa teneur que par ses dispositions typographiques, paru dans Cosmopolis en mai 1897). Van Bever and Léautaud, Poètes d’Aujourd’hui, p. 346. 36. Gourmont, ‘L’exégèse de Mallarmé’, p. 256: ‘Comment cela se vend-il? demandais-je à un commis libraire en désignant le récent volume des Poésies. Enormément, ce fut sa réponse. Il ne faut pas décourager tant de bonnes volontés. Mallarmé: il y a exactement sous ces syllabes ce que vous y trouverez, mais il faut chercher vous-même. Il est lui, il est unique, il est divin, il a composé des assemblages de mots nuancés comme le plus exquis des colliers de pierres précieuses, colliers qu’on n’avait jamais fait, qu’on ne refera jamais.’ 37. Note that Jean-Michel Rabaté has also analysed these pastiches in 1913: The Cradle of Modernism, p. 52. 38. Jules Romains, Les Copains, p. 48: ‘Fluant, suant de nue embrun, / qu’une passoire / Tue! Or si ne l’a pu saisir le Tout-Issoire / Évoluant d’un pied s’avouant camembert, / Par l’horreur d’être là conclu / Chaud! / C’est Ambert!’. 39. Henry Lascourrèges, ‘Un drôle de bon type’, 3: ‘Timon [Talence] était une façon de poète à la fois symboliste, décadent et futuriste. Il avait adopté les théories bigarrées de Mallarmé, de Péladan et de Marinetti … il venait de … lancer une revue en dépit de ses vingt ans … L’avant-veille, dans une causerie publique … Timon avait exposé ses idées un peu confuses à la vérité, sur le poète et sur son art … Mais, ce soir, encore enivré de son succès, il allait à l’aventure, le cœur chantant et l’âme sereine, lorsqu’une jolie, oh! oui, bien jolie péripatéticienne du trottoir s’était trouvée sur son chemin. Et, comme elle l’avait prié très gentiment de l’accompagner, ils venaient de franchir ensemble le seuil d’un hôtel … Ensuite, doucement, tendrement, il attira cette main vers lui et la toucha des lèvres. – La femme est un ange, poursuivit-il après un petit instant de silence. Elle est fille des Muses et sœur des Nymphes aux ailes d’or. Elle est presque aussi belle qu’un poème du divin Mallarmé. Est-ce que tu l’aimes, Mallarmé? – Bien sûr répondait la belle; j’aime tout le monde, moi! – Comme tu as raison de l’aimer! Son imprécision est un champ ouvert à l’imagination de l’artiste; elle est encore la baie par où le prisonnier peut se griser de la couleur du ciel et de la course des nuages … – Veux-tu que je te récite un poème?’ 40. Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes (eds. Mondor and Jean-Aubry), p. 368. 41. Stéphane Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes (vol. 2, ed. Bertrand Marchal), p. 82. 42. Caws, Mallarmé in Prose, p. 29. Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, eds. Mondor and Jean-Aubry, p. 377: ‘Le personnage, de qui l’on a souci (du moins on exige qu’il soit quelque part, loin et ne l’entendît-on pas immédiatement) se fait deviner: il ne recherche de facilité ordinaire ou à la portée, son nom tourbillonne ou s’élève par une force propre jamais en rapport avec les combinaisons mercantiles. Une époque sait, d’office, l’existence du Poëte.’

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Works cited Bernard,  Jean-Marc, ‘Mallarmé et l’idée d’impuissance’, L’Occident, 11 ­(  January– June 1907), 242–8. Bever, Adolphe van, and Paul Léautaud, Poètes d’Aujourd’hui: 1880–1900 (Paris: Mercure de France, 1913). Bloy, Léon, Sur la tombe de Huysmans, in Œuvres, vol. 4 (Paris: Mercure de France, 1965), pp. 329–60. Bocquet, Léon, ‘Contre Mallarmé’, NRF (November 1908), 77–81. Brion Guerry, Liliane (ed.), ‘Théâtre’, in L’année 1913: Les formes esthétiques de l’œuvre d’art à la veille de la première guerre mondiale, vol 3 (Paris: Klincksiek, 1973), pp. 482–3. Caws, Mary Ann (ed. and trans.), Mallarmé in Prose (New York: New Directions, 2001). Chassé, Charles, ‘Mallarmé universitaire’, Mercure de France (1 October 1912), pp. 449–74. Cohn, Robert Greer (ed.), Mallarmé in the Twentieth Century (London: Associated University Presses, 1988). ‘Commémoration Stéphane Mallarmé’, Mercure de France, 360:97 (16 June 1912), 888–94. Copeau, Jacques, ‘Brisson contre Becque’, Nouvelle Revue Française (March 1909), 224–6. Cravan, Arthur, ‘André Gide’, Maintenant, 2 (July 1913). Duhamel, Georges, ‘Les Poèmes’, Mercure de France (1 April 1913), 576–9. Escoube, Paul, ‘La Femme et le sentiment de l’amour chez Mallarmé’, in Préférences: Charles Guérin, Remy de Gourmont, Stéphane Mallarmé, Jules Laforgue, Paul Verlaine (Paris: Mercure de France, 1913), pp. 149–74. Fauchereau, Serge, Avant-gardes du XXème siècle (Paris: Flammarion, 2010). Ghéon, Henri, ‘Une édition complète des Poésies de Mallarmé’, Nouvelle Revue Française (1 February 1913), 291–4. —, ‘Introduction aux matinées de poésie du Théâtre du Vieux Colombier’, Nouvelle Revue Française (December 1913), 961–5. Gide, André, ‘Conférence sur “Mallarmé et Verlaine” au Vieux-Colombier le 22  novembre 1913’, in Œuvres complètes, vol. 7 (Paris: Nouvelle Revue Française, 1934), pp. 420–35. Gourmont, Remy de, ‘L’exégèse de Mallarmé’, in Promenades littéraires, cinquième série (Paris: Mercure de France, 1913), pp. 248–57. Gronquist, Robert, ‘Ravel’s “Trois Poème de Stéphane Mallarmé”’, The Musical Quarterly, 64:4 (October 1978), 507–23. Guerry, Liliane Brion (ed.), L’année 1913: les formes esthétiques de l’ œuvre d’art à la veille de la Première Guerre Mondiale, vol. 3 (Paris: Klincksiek, 1973). Koffeman-Bijman, Maaike Neeltje, ‘Entre classicisme et modernité: La Nouvelle Revue Française dans le champ littéraire de la belle époque’ (PhD dissertation, University of Utrecht, 2003).



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Kurtz, Maurice, Jacques Copeau: Biography of a Theater (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999). Lascourrèges, Henry, ‘Un drôle de bon type’, La Lanterne: Le Supplément (20 May 1913), 3. Lyons, Charles R., ‘Mallarmé and representation in the theater’, in Cohn (ed.), Mallarmé in the Twentieth Century, pp. 92–103. Mallarmé, Stéphane, Poésies (Paris: La Nouvelle Revue Française, 1913). —, Œuvres complètes, ed. Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry (Paris: Gallimard, 1945). —, Œuvres complètes, vol. 2, ed. Bertrand Marchal (Paris: Gallimard, 2003). Meillassoux, Quentin, Le Nombre et la sirène (Paris: Fayard, 2011). Perloff, Marjorie, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). Rabaté, Jean-Michel, 1913: The Cradle of Modernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007). Retté, Adolphe, Au pays des lys noirs: souvenirs de jeunesse et d’âge mûr (Paris: P. Téqui, 1913). Roger, Thierry, L’Archive du Coup de dés: étude critique de la réception d’un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard de Stéphane Mallarmé, 1897–2007 (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2010). Romains, Jules, Les Copains (Paris: Nouvelle Revue Française, 1922). Thibaudet, Albert, La Poésie de Stéphane Mallarmé (Paris: La Nouvelle Revue Française, 1912). —, Réflexions sur la littérature (Paris: Gallimard, 1938). Thomas, Jean-Jacques, ‘Mallarmé: Journal’, in ‘Mallarmé, Theorist of Our Times’, ed. Steven Winspur, special issue, Dalhousie French Studies, 25 (Fall– Winter 1993), 35–45. Valéry, Paul, Écrits divers sur Stéphane Mallarmé (Paris: Nouvelle Revue Française, 1950).

13 Poetry displaced: Nijinsky, Delaunay, Duchamp Mary Shaw

N

o reason to defer the question or create suspense. The poet gone missing from my title is Stéphane Mallarmé. I hope to show that this ‘elocutionary disappearance’ of my subject makes sense: first, because the traces and trajectory of this giant’s historical influence on the scene of modernism in 1913 are equivocally marked; and second, because his presence, though hidden, does not need to be announced, but rather suggests itself in all sorts of ways.1 Mallarmé has been at the core of many critics’ perspectives on modernism.2 The present chapter is just one more chance to see what thinking about the symbolist ‘Master’ in relation to important artists associated with 1913 produces. But before proposing some analogies between Mallarmé’s poetics and the practices of the three figures mentioned in my title, I should briefly summarize what my thoughts on his aesthetics have been. Long ago, I argued that one of the most striking features of Mallarmé’s works – the frequent marking of a presence-in-absence of music, dance and theatre within them – was related to his loss of faith in the Christian notion of god, with its corollary conception of a unified human subject; and to his ambition to design modern rites – ritualistic performances supplementing texts – to compensate for that loss.3 That Mallarmé, early in his development, experienced a personal crisis leading to the discovery of a void at the centre of his being is well known and expressed in one way or another in many of his texts. A famous 1867 letter describes the disappearance of his individual self, which becomes instead ‘an aptitude of the Spiritual Universe to see itself and to develop itself through what was once me’ (une aptitude qu’a l’Univers Spirituel à se voir et à se développer, à travers ce qui fut moi).4 And we see an inkling of the compensatory role



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that Art as Ritual might play for the loss of god in another famous letter, from 1866: ‘we are but vain forms of matter’ (nous ne sommes que de vaines formes de la matière) that somehow managed to invent ‘God and our soul’ (Dieu et notre âme), but we (and those inventions) are so sublime that the poet wants to give himself the ‘spectacle of matter … fervently throwing itself into Dream’ (spectacle de la matière … s’élançant forcenément dans le Rêve), ‘singing of the Soul … and proclaiming glorious lies before the Nothingness that is truth’ (chantant l’Âme … et proclamant devant le Rien qui est la vérité, ces glorieux mensonges).5 For some critics, what Mallarmé sought to offer as a substitute for religion in modernity was a self-sufficient ‘fictional’ world, created through the means of self-reflexive poetry.6 For others, he was elaborating a theoretical aporia exposing what is impossible for literature to do.7 And for most readers, throughout the twentieth century, it seemed evident that Mallarmé was aware of the world outside the text, but unconcerned with operating or directly acting on it. This view has been strongly and variously challenged in recent years;8 and for me, it has always been clear that Mallarmé’s notes for the ideal Book (which he explicitly also conceived as a multimedia theatrical work), along with several of his earlier texts, manifest a brilliant poet’s hands-on grappling with ways through which to preserve the autonomy of poetry and yet also annex means provided by other art forms, so as to forge a new set of rites for modern society to engage in. This is not to say that the texts and rites Mallarmé pointed to in his notes for the Book, or the conceptions of relations among art forms that he realized to some extent in his occasional verse inscribed on objects – fans, Easter eggs, envelopes delivered to countless friends in Paris – or in such major poetic works as Hérodiade, L’Après-midi d’un faune or Un coup de dés  –  none of which have come to us in definitive versions9 – were completely worked out. Further, I do not think that they point the way towards a new and stable Gesamtkunstwerk, a modern ‘système des arts’. In my view, Mallarmé’s works remain heavily melancholic; as apt to project an end to human culture as its renewal – so that even the Book of godless modernity was conceived as a kind of secular millenary Jubilee, a celebration of the end of Time. Be this as it may, the question I would like to ask in the present context is simply whether the principles and problems informing relationships among the arts in Mallarmé’s poetic texts – ­simultaneity, supplementarity, identity-in-difference, chance determinism and the withdrawal of the author into the collectivity – might also be central to the structure of multimedia artworks that appeared on the Parisian scene around 1913. I should add that I will not be dealing in this chapter

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with the verbal or scriptural dimensions of my examples, though they have been shown to be of crucial importance: my arguments here, which aim to make a point about displacement, will not rest on such elements as Nijinsky’s score for the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune;10 or Cendrars’s Prose du Transsibérien in relation to Sonia Delaunay’s art;11 or Duchamp’s notes about the Large Glass, gathered by him in the ‘Green Box’.12 Rather, my experiment will be to draw analogies between the non-verbal elements of those works and what unfolded in Mallarmé’s texts. It is well known that Nijinsky’s 1912 ballet, which prefigures much of his work for the following year’s Sacre du Printemps, marks a huge advance towards modernism in the very nature of the language of dance, just as Debussy’s 1894 Prélude marks an advance in music through the loosening of harmonic structure and Mallarmé’s poem of twenty years before fractured the alexandrine and loosened its internal metrics, thereby anticipating the ‘liberation’ of verse that occurred in the late 1880s. Countless specialists have made fascinating arguments regarding the relations between those works.13 But, however one may choose to describe those parallels, few would dispute that a decisive feature of Nijinsky’s choreography was the temporal paradox inherent in its style – the fact that its modernity was tied to its ostensible primitivism or archaism – this would happen again, with a Russian cultural slant, in The Rite of Spring. Anne Hutchinson Guest quotes Nijinsky’s own comments on this matter: he wanted ‘to move away from the Classical Greece’ that inspired Fokine, and use ‘archaic Greece’ instead – or, even better, the bas-reliefs of Assyria; but he aimed to use these models in ‘[his] own way’.14 Without denying that Nijinsky was trying to create the effect of an animated frieze or relief, Jean-Michel Nectoux –  who curated a crucial 1989 Musée d’Orsay exhibition on the avatars of the Faune – found a likely model in an early classical – rather than archaic – Greek vase painting, presenting a stunning rapprochement between the stance of one figure on it and a famous pose of Nijinsky’s ‘Faune’.15 What we see then is the idea of a somewhat abstract, composite return to ‘origins’ and the primitive through the negation of what is ‘current’, rather than a strict adherence to an ancient source. In Nijinsky’s picture we also note the striking angled thumb position, which frequently recurs in his choreography – and suggests archaism but is not in fact typical of Greek vase paintings – nor Assyrian reliefs, nor Egyptian paintings, as far as I know. This photo is also interesting in that it shows how well Nijinsky managed to embody in the person of his ‘Faune’ all the flatness and angularity also disseminated throughout the ballet by the other dancers’ positions and other visual means. What is achieved in this way is an



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Figure 13.1  Vaslav Nijinsky in Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune. Photograph by Waléry, Paris, 1912. Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

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effect of simultaneity akin to what cubist painters attempted by showing different sides of an object at once on a flat plane. Nijinsky’s unique body suggests these disparate sides all at once, while at the same time a similar effect is achieved by the decor and other dancers through repetition and duplication. Tableaux from the 1912 ballet on the stage of the Théâtre du Châtelet show that such effects were also well in accord with Léon Bakst’s two-dimensional set design – which itself drew on the aesthetic of symbolist and nabi painters from Puvis de Chavanne to Gauguin – as well as with antique frieze-like compositions which lent a linear narrative drive to sculpture or painting. Just as those ancient plastic forms – some of which could represent dance – created an effect of movement in place, Nijinsky’s choreography, the other way around, created a quality of stasis through precise, intensely demanding movements and postures, interwoven in equally precise sequences. The dancer appears relatively still from the spectator’s point of view, but this effect is achieved through hard-to-maintain rotations of many different parts of the body – swift pivots in place, which the dancer feels in his or her bones.16 In what sense does Mallarmé’s Faune convey these same features – the identity-in-difference of modernity and archaism; the conflation of different perspectives on a flat plane; the paradoxical effects of movement in place and mobile stasis? I will start with a small detail from the poem’s presentation,17 namely the remarkable Latin capital ‘U’ – the ‘V’, if you will – in the middle of its title, which to my eye foreshadows the angles of Nijinky’s choreography. This particular letter, which first appeared in the livre d’artiste produced with Manet’s engravings in 1876, is evidently a typographical flourish important to Mallarmé, as he retains it in all later presentations of the poem.18 This antique-looking ‘U’ in the form of a ‘V’ could of course appear in nineteenth-century inscriptions, but we do not find it in any of the Faune’s neoclassical sources, such as Théodore de Banville’s Diane au Bois.19 There can be many reasons for this emphasis: like Nijinsky’s hand gesture, it suggests a syncretic, approximate archaism in a modernist context, since the ‘V’ can still be deemed formally and etymologically appropriate in the capitalized French word ‘FAVNE’ (Latin faunus), but becomes entirely arbitrary in the lower-case word ‘églogve’ (Latin ecloga, Greek ekloge) which follows. We might think that Mallarmé is underlining the difference between writing and speech, insisting on the letter as pure graphic form – were it not for the fact that the poem also makes striking use of the sound /v/, which is linked to the expression of a virginity that is central to the protagonist’s hybrid being as ‘half animal, half god’ – Mallarmé himself, in



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Figure 13.2  Title page of L’Après-midi d’un faune, eclogue by Stéphane Mallarmé (with frontispiece, fleurons and cul-de-lampe by Édouard Manet), 1876.

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Figure 13.3  La Plume, 1 April 1893, no. 95. p. 166, Xe banquet de La Plume, Bibliothèque Nationale de France.



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fact, was keen to be represented in this way, as happened in this 1893 invitation to the ‘8e banquet de la Plume’,20 which curiously announces Nijinsky’s stance, and where we find again the Latin ‘V’ mixed with pseudo-Greek lettering. In the poem, the Faun wishes but fails to resolve his hybrid nature in the present through an attempt at simultaneously taking possession of two intertwined virgin nymphs – a paradox underlined by the heavy aural and graphic presence of the /v/ sound in the last line of each version of the text: first ‘Adieu, femmes: duo de vierges quand je vins’ (Farewell women: duo of virgins when I came); then ‘Couple, adieu: je vais voir l’ombre que tu devins’ (Couple, farewell: I’ll go see the shade that you became).21 Mallarmé’s poem, though syncretically ancient in its inspiration, is thus decidedly modern in its abstract proliferation of inextricable yet irreconcilable dualities, which the person of the Faun embodies. The nymphs themselves represent music and poetry, water and wind, fantasy and reality, past and present; the Faun recounts a dualistic version of Pan’s attempted rape of Syrinx, where every element harks back to a primitive identity-in-difference of everything which cannot be synthesized or resolved; recalling that the ideal unified artwork itself is, for Mallarmé, a ‘Monstre-Qui ne peut Être’, a chimera that cannot be.22 All of which explains why the poet distances himself from the Wagnerian model of synthesis, and from recreated legends where ‘everything bathes in the primitive river, but not in its source’ (Tout se retrempe au ruisseau primitif: pas jusqu’à la source), as he puts in in his Rêverie on Wagner.23 Simultaneity in Mallarmé’s texts, in the general senses of an unresolved juxtaposition, an oscillation between past and present, a confusion of disparate voices, can be visually emphasized by typographical effects, as in this passage, where, following the capitalized command ‘Contez’, quotation marks made more remarkable by italics suggest a passage from indirect to direct discourse, which in fact never takes place. O Sicilian banks of a tranquil marsh That my vanity ravages as suns would, Tacit beneath the flowering sparks, RECOUNT ‘That I was here cutting the hollowed reeds conquered By talent; when, on the murky gold of far-off greeneries dedicating their vines to fresh springs, An animal whiteness undulates at rest: And hearing the slow prelude where pipes are born, That flight of swans, no! of naiads flees Or dives in’

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  Everything burns, inert, in the tanned hour Without marking by which art did bolt in unison Too much hymen wished by whoever seeks the la …24

The Faun realizes eventually that his flute, his lyric, has not managed the perfect, undifferentiated union he is after, with the natural world, with the nymphs, or even with music: such is the effect of the desired ‘Trop d’hymen’ associated with the ‘la’, wherein the la, italicized, clearly refers to the tuning note while also suggesting –  albeit without accent – that which should be ‘there’ (but is not). Those are traces of the poem’s original –  but paradoxical – destination for the theatre, ambiguously compressed to suggest yet prevent the illusion of presence. Mallarmé had initially wanted his Faune ‘absolutely scenic, not possible in the ­theatre, but requiring the theatre’ (absolument scénique, non possible au théâtre, mais exigeant le théâtre);25 and in fact every version of the poem conveys the simultaneous need for and impossibility of theatrical representation, of an unfolding of the text in time as well as in three-dimensional space. Similar tensions were at work in Mallarmé’s notion of dance. We know that he was attracted to the decidedly non-angular, swirling ballet forms of his time, and even more to the veils of Loie Fuller;26 but when he actually fantasized a dance that would be equivalent to his poetry, the result proved much closer to the future choreography of the Faune. Mallarmé conjoins dance to his writing not just on the basis of an analogy, but also because of its direct presentation of the human body. Thus, it is not surprising that the only sketch or design of a dance that we find in his work implies the lack of a veil, and a constrained movement in which the body demonstrates its own identity-in-difference by exposing one side of a symmetry, then the other: wholeness can only be shown via a mirror-like processing of parts. This description appears in notes posthumously published with Les Noces d’Hérodiade. As displaced into the actual poem  –  which thus substitutes for it – the dance becomes an absent complement, the hidden sign of the poem’s finale, and could not be more different from traditional representations of Salome shedding her veils as the ultimate seductive dancing figure: she leans from one  side – to the other –    showing one  breast – the other  and scission    without gauze



poetry displaced: nijinsky, delaunay, duchamp 261  like this breast, that one    identity.  

      *

 and that done – on  one foot the other,  themselves    on [a] rug   blood  a kind of dance  horrifying sketch  – and in place, without  moving

 – null site27

This general pattern of supplementation, where the addition of one art to another always results in a separation and substitution rather than a completion and synthesis, is verified by the history of the Faune’s avatars: if, for example, Nijinsky’s choreography implies a paradoxical – at once distant and connected – relation to Debussy’s music, the same is true of the relation of Debussy’s music to the poem it transposes, and of Mallarmé’s own art’s relation to itself. And however little direct knowledge Nijinsky may have had of the poem, his Faun’s scandalous substitution of a veil for the nymphs in the final moment of the dance perfectly repeats Mallarmé’s own Faun’s lonely return to his dreams at the end of all versions of the piece.28 It seems to me that similar arguments about the conundrum of supplementation can be made about Sonia Delaunay’s design for Cendrars’s Prose du Transsibérien.29 Billed as the first ‘simultaneous’ book, the Prose was radically different from the livres d’artistes that Mallarmé produced with Manet, insofar as it offered an over-spilling of Delaunay’s colours into the domain of the text. This two-metre-high poem – tall enough to mask a standing person – shares certain basic features of simultaneity and varied typographical play with Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés – in that it presents us with an arrangement that severely disrupts our reading habits and engages us far more than usual in an active reading performance. It can be shown, however, as I have tried to do elsewhere,30 that the impact the design of the Prose has on the reading process is in fact the opposite of what happens with Un coup de dés. I will not review this argument here, but suggest, rather, that what is analogous about Delaunay’s approach to

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painting and Mallarmé’s approach to writing is that each artist sets out to annex or take over the world with their art. In the Prose, despite the seeping of somewhat pallid colours into the poem field and the polychrome typography, Delaunay’s art on the poem side is necessarily restrained: it is only allowed to deploy itself fully in its own half of the work. Yet restraint and space-sharing were not Delaunay’s style. On the contrary, it seems that her objective was usually to cover things in their entirety – including the books that inspired her bindings, and the one for the Prose itself.31 Delaunay’s goal was not to be a ‘book artist’ in the usual sense; it was to cover the world with glorious and carefully structured colours – a process that began with her own baby’s blanket.32 She covered everything from boxes to clothing to automobiles,33 and in so doing helped to demonstrate the identity-in-difference of high and low art. Delaunay’s essential premise was that colour is the ‘skin of the world’, as Arthur Cohen phrased it,34 and her approach to art consisted in adding her own colourful skins everywhere, so as to conceal natural skin from our sight – as happens most explicitly in her simultaneous dresses. Delaunay’s painting on poetry had the same motivation and thrust as her painting on other objects, whether things or people. And the very fact that the 150 planned copies of her book stretched out were

Figure 13.4  Sonia Delaunay, Deux mannequins autour de la voiture du journaliste Kaplan. Photo from 1925. All rights reserved, Fonds Delaunay, Pracusa Artisticas SA.



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Figure 13.5  Autre éventail de Mademoiselle Mallarmé, circa 1884, Inf. 985.67.1, Collection Musée Départemental Stéphane Mallarmé, ­ Vulaines-sur-Seine. © Yves Bourhis.

to add up to the height of the Eiffel Tower also evokes the immensity of her symbolic effort to ‘colour’ the modern world. A similar tendency is quite pronounced in many of Mallarmé’s texts, but in his case it is writing, in black and white, that draws the world in: recall his axiom, ‘everything, in the world, exists to end up in a book’ (tout, au monde, existe pour aboutir à un livre).35 We see it in La Dernière mode, a fashion magazine he wrote singlehandedly in the 1870s, where women’s fashion is equated with what is most central to literary texts; in the inscription of his poems on many festive, decorative objects, fans – this famous one for his daughter36 – Easter eggs or sugared chestnuts; and in the address-quatrains which he used to deliver messages to his Parisian friends, yet also took pain to collect as part of his œuvre.37 Such poems maintain the reflexivity of his style, and yet connect it inextricably with the objects they inscribe and refer to. Finally, Mallarmé’s notes for the Book present to a vertiginous degree the same type of numerical calculations and correspondences – involving the material aspects of the book, and its public readings38 – that would later determine the dimensions and print number of Delaunay’s Prose. Intrinsic to Delaunay’s innovations is the idea that the spectator’s complicity is required to put her static works in motion. In 1961, she created the sixth of her Poésie de mots, Poésie de couleurs stencil print series,39 inspired by Mallarmé’s Crise de vers: once the poet has vanished, words left to themselves ‘light each other up with reciprocal reflections’ (s’allument de reflets réciproques).40 Here it is the colours that do it. A few years

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earlier, she herself had formulated the analogy between her own work and Mallarmé’s: The theater of color must be composed like a verse of Mallarmé, like a page of Joyce: perfect and pure juxtaposition, exact sequences, each element apportioned its correct weight with absolute rigor. Beauty resides in the power of suggestion. It is the juxtaposition of the colors that will set our imagination in motion.41

In this manner, abstract as her colours may be, they remain viscerally attached to the human subject, on whose perception their movement depends. This happens also, of course, and superlatively so, when they cover a person, be it in the form of a simultaneous dress or in the disks of colour behind which a dancer has to move. In fact, the analogy Delaunay articulates between her own art and that of Mallarmé was inspired by an evening organized in 1923 by the poet Iliazd and featuring Lizica Codreano. Delaunay writes that the latter ‘magnificently danced the color’,42 thanks to a costume made of cardboard disks and half-circles fastened around her, masking most parts of her body. This dance, with its precise oppositional colour patterns, also suppressed, like Nijinsky’s did, the kind of fluidity we expect from dancing: The rigidity of the costume imposed its obedience. The dancer was obliged to move frontally and her movements had to respect the plane. With great feeling, while altering the position of the plane, Codreano created and transformed unceasingly the relations of the colors. In this manner a new language of color was achieved from which all description had been banished. The imagination played free.43

From the most exacting constraint, a new freedom is born. A parallel can indeed be drawn between Delaunay’s idea that the rigorous structuration of colours, organized within one plane as abstract formal elements, opens up the viewer’s mind by unhinging it from referential obviousness, and Mallarmé’s dictum on the conditions of poetic suggestion: ‘To name an object, is to suppress three quarters of the pleasure of the poem, which consists of guessing bit by bit: to suggest it, that is the dream’ (Nommer un objet, c’est supprimer les trois quarts de la jouissance du poëme [sic], qui est faite de deviner peu à peu: le suggérer, voilà le rêve).44 I will conclude with a few rapprochements between Mallarmé and Duchamp, who salutes the poet as ‘a great figure’, a primary influence, insofar as his work points towards ‘intellectual’ rather than ‘animal expression’.45 Duchamp’s work, like Mallarmé’s, subjects the experience of beauty to an abstract, enigmatic staging that prevents immediate



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access to it, and also seeks to accomplish the artist’s ‘disappearance’ even while insisting on the mystery of human presence as a condition for art. Indeed, it could be and has been argued that all of Mallarmé’s and Duchamp’s works seek to reveal an order of chance central to the enigma of materiality.46 For Mallarmé, chance determines the unknowable void intrinsic to being – in the poet’s words: that ‘drop of nothingness missing from the sea’ (goutte de néant qui manque à la mer)47 – which allows consciousness through an endless, self-generating process of reflexivity, and thus the development of language and other forms of self-expression that determine our perception of the world. In Mallarmé’s early tale Igitur, the young Hamlet-like hero, who is but the personification of a linguistic and logical conjunction, descends the stairs of human consciousness and asks, ‘Do I still have to fear chance, that antique foe who divided me into created darkness and time?’ (Dois-je encore craindre le hasard, cet antique ennemi qui me divisa en ténèbres et en temps créés?),48 and lies down on his deathbed after a ceremonial throw of the dice. To put an end to chance, by fixing it in an artwork or in any other way, would be to put an end to time, and to life as we know it. Duchamp, whose Nude Descending a Staircase, The King and the Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes and Sad Young Man in a Train constitute a last effort to directly portray humanity in movement, similarly evolved towards an aesthetic suicide. Fortunately, those early attempts to put an end to art within the confines of art did not succeed. Perhaps what binds Duchamp the most to Mallarmé is the extreme length to which each of them continued to pursue paradoxical attempts to overcome chance by allowing it to enter the game of art, or, conversely, to maintain the possibility of art, of artistic experience, while giving play to all that divides or disrupts it. I am referring of course to Duchamp’s Large Glass, La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même, with its written supplement, the notes of the ‘Green Box’  – negating the manner in which a stained-glass window reveals the truth inherent in images of god and man; and to Mallarmé’s Book – at once ‘a Theatre, whose performances will be the true modern cult’ (un Théâtre, dont les représentations seront le vrai culte moderne) and ‘a Book, explanation of man, sufficient to our most beautiful dreams’ (un Livre, explication de l’homme, suffisante à nos plus beaux rêves)49 –, which consists only of notes alluding to multiple modern myths and to complex calculations regarding the manner and mode of their representation in textual and performative forms, note fragments announcing those of Duchamp – such as a series showing how the Book would be read twice, first in one order, then in the opposite order, to different sides

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Figure 13.6  Marcel Duchamp, La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même (Le Grand Verre), 1915–23, Philadelphia Museum of Art. Bequest of Katherine S. Dreier, 1952–98–1. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Société des Auteurs dans les Arts Graphiques et Plastiques (ADAGP), Paris / Marcel Duchamp estate.



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of an audience in a stair-shaped ‘lacquered cabinet’ (meuble de lacque).50 The principles of difference, supplementarity and chance were  to be demonstrated in these reading performances, notably in one of the ‘myths’, where the poet, who presents himself as an impersonal ‘operator’, freed of his individuality by the ‘trick of the death from hunger’ (truc de la mort de faim) – denying both food and sexual reproduction – and responding to an ouvrier’s dream to ‘set the great machine in motion’ (mettre en branle la grande machine),51 is invited to a city for the purpose of exposing the crowd to its own allegorical mystery, even while conserving the mystery of his own identity and presence, as symbolized by the bourgeois/prestidigitator’s top hat, the ‘chapeau’ to which everything is ultimately reduced.52 Duchamp’s Large Glass may appear less metaphysically ambitious than Mallarmé’s Book, and less dependent on framing within itself a chancedetermined human presence; but it is not, since this work remains fragmentary, at once finished and unfinished by its fracturing, inevitably drawing us into its frame and revealing, albeit obscurely, a negation of the union it alludes to. While displaying our separation from nature through mechanization, the work represents the impossibility of ­solving – whether via reconciliation or extrication – the identity-in-difference of interdependent contraries. The lone bride and the multiple bachelor apparatus, for example, communicate with each other – although separated by panels – due in part to our very efforts to understand what is going on –: their interpenetration partly trumps their isolation. The Large Glass had its origin in the idea of representing an agricultural machine, emblematizing the paradox of natural technology. It reveals the mystery of human development, which appears to light its own way, but does not seek to resolve it. Similarly, Duchamp’s last work, Étant donnés – these being the ‘chute d’eau’ – associated with woman and the bride figure – and the illuminating gas associated with the bachelor apparatus – is a recasting of the Large Glass,53 in much the same way that Un coup de dés and Le Livre recast Igitur’s early tale of self-destruction. With its glaring, hyper-realistic representation of a naked woman’s body illuminated by an electric gaslight which she herself holds, Étant donnés only deepens the mystery of art, though it may pretend to put an end to it. For this obscene image of a clearly fake, partially seen nude is contrived so as to be observed – at least in its original setting – only by drawing to itself a viewer’s actual presence, which engages with it, however, by blinding itself, via the two peepholes in the door, to any sense of his or her own wholeness, and then perceives nothing but an artificial nature – the waterfall and its surroundings – along with the woman’s

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Figure 13.7  Marcel Duchamp, Étant donnés: 1° la chute d’eau, 2° le gaz d’éclairage …, 1946–66. Accession no. 1969–41–1. Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of the Cassandra Foundation, 1969. © ARS, New York / ADAGP, Paris / Marcel Duchamp estate.



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incomplete and exposed body illuminating itself. Thus the experience of beauty ends up requiring a unique – celibate – perspective, forced to trigger and imprison an illusion for a moment, through bodily contact with a door and a solitary, separate gaze. ‘One proves only in relation to others’ (On ne prouve que quant aux autres),54 says one of Mallarmé’s notes for the book, whose primary purpose was to draw multiple human presences to itself through its reading, thus simultaneously masking and revealing the void as the core of beauty at the centre of modern life. I hope to have shown how the composite artworks of 1913 variously repeat this ambition, displacing some of the Master’s poetic formulations into the disparate worlds of visual and performed arts. Notes  1. A French translation of this chapter, originally written for Princeton University’s 1913: The Year of French Modernism conference, appears in the French journal Romantisme 184:2 (2019), 87–99.   2. This is equally true of postmodernism, of course, as volumes of criticism on Mallarmé’s importance for contemporary theory have shown.   3. See my Performance in the Text of Mallarmé: The Passage from Art to Ritual (1993) for this argument, which was extended in other essays published soon after, such as ‘Apocalypse et modernisme: le Livre de la fin’ in Alain Buisine and Vincent Kaufmann’s Le Livre total (1994). For more recent poetic texts on Mallarmé, see ‘dreamscapes: a Mallarmé fan suite’ (2017).   4. Stéphane Mallarmé Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 1, p. 714. Unless otherwise marked all translations from French to English are mine.  5. Ibid., p. 696.  6. The critical masterpiece that establishes the existence of this ‘fiction’ (in the sense of creation, not illusion) and takes it seriously, opening the way to many ensuing perspectives on the poet, is Bertrand Marchal’s 1988 La Religion de Mallarmé.   7. The first to persuasively make that argument was Maurice Blanchot in his 1959 Le Livre à venir.  8.    Jacques Rancière makes a powerful argument affirming and defining Mallarmé’s engagement with the world in La Politique de la sirène (1996), which builds on Marchal’s research in La Religion de Mallarmé, as does Anna Sigrídur Arnar, from a different angle, in The Book as Instrument (2011). Arnar also gives a useful overview situating many works of Mallarmé criticism over several decades with respect to this question.  9. All of these texts can be found with extensive critical apparatus in the two-volume ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’ edition, by Bertrand Marchal, of Mallarmé’s Œuvres complètes, vol. 1 and vol. 2. 10. The score is reproduced and analysed in detail in Anne Hutchinson Guest

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and Claudia Jeschke, Nijinsky’s Faune Restored. 11. See, to begin, Perloff ’s Futurist Moment. 12. Michel Sanouillet first edited and published these notes in collaboration with the artist in 1959, see Duchamp and Sanouillet, Marchand du sel. 13. See Jean-Nicolas Illouz’s 2012 essay ‘L’Après-midi d’un faune et l’interprétation des arts’. See also Pascal Caron’s vast study of this topic, Faunes: poésie, corps, danse de Mallarmé à Nijinski. 14. Guest and Jeschke, Nijinsky’s Faune Restored, p. 4. 15. For an English version of his commentary, see Nectoux, ‘Portrait of the artist as a faun’, esp. pp. 20–21 where the juxtaposition between the ancient Greek vase and the photo of Nijinsky appears in fig. 1. 16. For a detailed description of the groundbreaking choreography of the ballet, see the ‘Study and performance notes’, in Guest and Jeschke, Nijinsky’s Faune Restored, pp. 17–56. 17. Front cover of Mallarmé and Manet’s original artist’s book, the 1876 edition of L’Après-midi d’un faune. 18. These versions are presented along with ample critical commentary in Marchal’s dossier for the work in Œuvres complètes, vol. 1. 19. Théodore de Banville, Diane au bois. 20. This amusing invitation featuring Mallarmé with Paul Verlaine is the work of Montmartre writer and illustrator Frédéric-Auguste Cazals. It appeared at the end of the 1 April 1893 edition of La Plume, p. 166. 21. Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, vol. 1, p. 156 and p. 25, my emphasis. 22. Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, vol. 2, p. 153. 23. Ibid., p. 157. 24. Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, vol. 1, p. 23. Ô bords siciliens d’un calme marécage Qu’à l’envi des soleils ma vanité saccage, Tacites sous les fleurs d’étincelles, contez « Que je coupais ici les creux roseaux domptés Par le talent; quand, sur l’or glauque de lointaines Verdures dédiant leur vigne à des fontaines, Ondoie une blancheur animale au repos: Et qu’au prélude lent où naissent les pipeaux, Ce vol de cygnes, non! de naïades se sauve Ou plonge … » Inerte, tout brûle dans l’heure fauve Sans marquer par quel art ensemble détala Trop d’hymen souhaité de qui cherche le la … 25. Emphasis Mallarmé’s, Ibid., p. 1167. 26. Mallarmé wrote two essays on Fuller in his theatre criticism of the 1890s, collected in Divagations in Œuvres complètes, vol. 2, pp. 174–178. 27. These notes are presented in Marchal’s ‘Transcriptions’ of Les Noces



poetry displaced: nijinsky, delaunay, duchamp 271 d’Hérodiade in Œuvres complètes, vol. 1, pp. 1084–5. se penche-t-elle d’un   côté – de l’autre – montrant un   sein – l’autre –   et scission sans gaze   selon ce sein, celui-là identité.

 *

  et cela fait – sur   un pied l’autre,     eux-mêmes sur tapis sang   une sorte de danse   effroyable esquisse   – et sur place, sans   bouger   – lieu nul 28. See Baron de Meyer’s 1912 photograph of Nijinsky with the nymph’s leftbehind veil en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nijinsky_crouching_with_scarf_B​a​r​ on_de_Meyer_1912.jpg (accessed 6 June 2020). 29. Blaise Cendrars and Sonia Delaunay, La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France, 1913. 30. See ‘Un coup de dés and La Prose du Transsibérien’. 31. Arthur A. Cohen, Sonia Delaunay, p. 27. 32. Ibid., p. 51. 33. Ibid., plate 147. This photograph of Jacques Heim mannequins modelling ensembles designed by Sonia Delaunay and posing with a Citroën B 12 painted after the artist’s design (Paris, 1925) is also featured in Cohen’s Sonia Delaunay. 34. Ibid., p. 84. 35. Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, vol. 2, p. 224. 36. For a critical edition of the published poem ‘Autre éventail de Mademoiselle Mallarmé’, see Œuvres complète, vol. 2, p. 31. 37. See, for example, the quatrain addressed to the Belgian writer Georges

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Rodenbach in 1893. Collection Universités de Paris, http://apn92.overblog.fr/article-mail-art-et-philatelie-90933594.html (accessed 6 June 2020), also selected for publication in the 1894 Chap Book project to be published in London, arranged through his friend Whistler. See the Récréations postales in Œuvres complètes, vol. 1, p. 254. 38. See Marchal’s ‘Transcriptions’ of the Notes en vue du ‘Livre’, in Œuvres complètes, vol. 1, especially pp. 1014, 1032–33, 1043–45. 39. Poésie de mots, poésie de couleurs, 1961. 40. Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes vol. 2, p. 211. 41. Aujourd’hui, 17:19 (May 1958), quoted in Arthur Cohen, Sonia Delaunay, p. 83. I am citing here Arthur A. Cohen’s English translation of these remarks as reproduced in Cohen, Sonia Delaunay (pp. 83–84) because it is thanks to this translation that I became aware of this text. Cohen offers the following information as the source for the original French version: ‘La Couleur dansée. 50 ans de recherches’. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid., pp. 83–84. 44. Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, vol. 2, p. 700. 45. See discussion of this remark (made by Duchamp to James Sweeny in 1946) in André Gervais’s thorough presentation of the relations between Mallarmé and Duchamp in ‘L’Intertexte Mallarmé-Duchamp’ (1989), pp. 78–79. 46. For a rich selection of Duchamp criticism, see the essays by Richard Hamilton, Octavio Paz and others in Anne d’Harancourt and Kynaston McShine (eds), Marcel Duchamp. This volume is also the source of the Duchamp images ­featured in this essay. 47. Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, vol. 1, p. 842. 48. Ibid., p. 850. 49. Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, vol. 2, p. 657. 50. Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, vol.1, pp. 1043–46. 51. Ibid., p. 962. 52. Ibid., p. 1032. 53. See Octavio Paz’s beautiful essay proposing this argument in d’Harancourt and McShine (ed.), Marcel Duchamp. 54. Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, vol. 1, p. 1042.

Works cited Arnar, Anna Sigrídur, The Book as Instrument: Stéphane Mallarmé, The Artist’s Book and the Transformation of Print Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). Banville, Théodore de, Diane au bois: comédie héroïque (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1864). Blanchot, Maurice, Le Livre à venir (Paris: Gallimard, 1959).



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Caron, Pascal, Faunes: poésie, corps, danse de Mallarmé à Nijinski (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2006). Cohen, Arthur A., Sonia Delaunay (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1975). d’Harancourt, Anne, and Kynaston McShine (eds), Marcel Duchamp (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1973, re-edited in 1989). Duchamp, Marcel, and Michel Sanouillet, Marchand du sel (Paris: Le Terrain Vague, 1959). Gervais, André, ‘L’Intertexte Mallarmé-Duchamp’, Études littéraires, 22:1 (1989), 77–90. Guest, Anne Hutchinson, and Claudia Jeschke, Nijinsky’s Faune Restored: A Study of Vaslav Nijinsky’s 1915 Dance Score and His Dance Notation System (Philadelphia: Gordon and Breach, 1991). Illouz, Jean-Nicolas, ‘L’Après-midi d’un faune et l’interprétation des arts: Mallarmé, Manet, Debussy, Gauguin, Nijinski’, Littérature, 168 (December 2012), 3–20. Mallarmé, Stéphane, Œuvres complètes, vols 1/2, ed. Bertrand Marchal, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1998/2003). —, and Édouard Manet, L’Après-midi d’un faune, Eglogue (Paris: Alphonse Derenne, 1876). Marchal, Bertrand, La Religion de Mallarmé: Poésie, mythologie, et religion (Paris: José Corti, 1988). Nectoux, Jean-Michel, ‘Portrait of the artist as a faun’, in Nijinsky, Prélude à L’Après-midi d’un Faune (London: Thames and Hudson, 1990), pp. 7–42. Paz, Octavio, ‘*water writes always in* plural’, in Anne d’Harancourt and Kynaston McShine (eds), Marcel Duchamp (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1973, re-edited in 1989), pp. 143–58. Perloff, Marjorie, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). Rancière, Jacques, Mallarmé, La Politique de la Sirène (Paris: Hachette, 1996). Shaw, Mary, Performance in the Texts of Mallarmé: The Passage From Art to Ritual (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1993). —, ‘Apocalypse et modernisme: le Livre de la fin’, in Alain Buisine and Vincent Kaufmann (eds), Le Livre total, Revue des Sciences Humaines 236 (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Université Charles-de-Gaulle Lille III, 1994), pp. 35–46. —, ‘Un coup de dés and La prose du Transsibérien: A study in contraries’, in Marija Dalbello and Mary Shaw (eds), Visible Writings: Cultures, Forms, Readings (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011), pp. 135–50. —, ‘dreamscapes: a Mallarmé fan suite’, in ‘On Mallarmé, Part 2’, ed. Kari Hukkila, special issue, Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, 10:1 (Winter 2017), 219–42.

14 Behind Picasso’s pins Lisa Florman

D

uring the spring of 1913, Pablo Picasso produced a series of papiers collés in which we find, in addition to the pasted papers that are the works’ principal component, something even more unconventional: metal straight pins, each of them passing beneath the surface of the paper, only to re-emerge a short distance away. The series includes three compositions of heads (see Figure 14.1), all of them apparently male, and a lone landscape, the Paysage de Céret, now in the Musée Picasso in Paris (see Figure 14.2). However, the other seven works from the series, as well as the single ‘papier épinglé’ produced in 1912, and the other three dating from 1914 (see Figures 14.3 and 14.4), are all still lifes – which is to say that the majority of Picasso’s pins appear within a genre traditionally dedicated to the contemplation of things.1 I will return to this point in due course. First, however, I want to acknowledge that my interest in Picasso’s pins was originally piqued by a 1992 essay by Yve-Alain Bois on the contemporary French artist Christian Bonnefoi. According to Bois, if others had noticed the straight pins in some of Picasso’s papiers collés, Bonnefoi was the first to really consider what was at stake in their appearance: ‘Picasso’s pin collages dissociate the preconceived unity of the surface’, Bonnefoi had written in a note to himself. ‘To a syntagmatic division of the surface (according to the lateral and extensive mode of space), they oppose a paradigmatic division, that of one layer on another (intensive mode …)’.2 Bois glossed these observations by saying that ‘the standpoint of the pin is that of a division of the surface on the basis of its thickness – material depth –; it involves a lamellar stratification’, which effectively opens ‘a space between the recto and the verso’.3



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Figure 14.1  Pablo Picasso, Head (1913). Charcoal, pasted paper and pin, 62.7 × 47 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

My ambition in this chapter is simply to elaborate on these insights and perhaps add one or two of my own, principally through the historical contextualization of Picasso’s pins and the papiers collés in which they appear. I hope that, along the way, I might also make visible some of the tensions and divisions that not only structure the pasted paper works

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Figure 14.2  Pablo Picasso, Landscape at Céret (1913). Chalk, charcoal, pasted papers and pins, 38 × 38.5 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © ARS, New York.

themselves, but that also characterize the field of the visual arts as it existed in France in 1913. My title, then, should be heard as a double – perhaps even triple – entendre: the goal is to discern what it is that – historically, physically and conceptually – lies behind the straight pins of Picasso’s papiers épinglés. We should perhaps begin by sketching in a bit of the art-historical background. In the spring of 1912, Picasso produced what is generally taken to be the very first collage, his Still Life with Chair Caning (see Figure 14.5), for which he wrapped a length of rope around the external edge of an oval-shaped canvas, glued down a piece of oilcloth commercially printed to resemble cane or wickerwork, and then painted alongside and overtop the pasted fragment. Later that year, in September, Georges Braque would pick up the thread of Picasso’s invention (see Figure 14.6). The



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Figure 14.3  Pablo Picasso, Sheet Music and Guitar (1912). Pasted papers and pin, 42.5 × 48 cm. Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Bequest of Georges Salles, 1967. © ARS, New York.

story, as the French artist later recounted it, was that he and Picasso were painting together in Sorgues, when, on a trip into the nearby town of Avignon, Braque spied a roll of faux-bois imprinted wallpaper displayed in a shop window. He immediately had the idea of using the paper in a collage of his own, but delayed the purchase until Picasso’s departure for Paris a few days later.4 Certain that the Spaniard would soon appropriate the idea for himself, Braque wanted to ensure that he had at least a brief period in which to explore the new terrain on his own. The timing of these inventions – first collage and, shortly thereafter, the subgenre of papier collé – seems significant in that both coincided fairly closely with the publication of Apollinaire’s very first essays on cubism. In his chapters on Picasso and Braque in Les Peintres cubistes, Apollinaire would declare that ‘you can paint with whatever you like’, with ‘pieces of oilcloth, … wallpaper or newspaper’, and he asserted that ‘we should not look down on things that appear new, or are grubby or utilitarian, such

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Figure 14.4  Wineglass (1914). Pasted papers and pin, 27 × 25.5 cm. Musée de Grenoble. © ARS, New York.

as the simulated wood or marbling used by housepainters’.5 The book’s sections devoted to modern painting, which were written earlier, tell a rather different story, however. There, Apollinaire had insisted that the cubist painters were aiming at nothing less than the purification of their medium: ‘We are moving towards an entirely new art’, he wrote, ‘which will be to painting, as hitherto understood, what music is to literature. It will be pure painting, just as music is pure literature’.6 Neither Picasso nor Braque could have been terribly pleased with Apollinaire’s ‘purist’ rhetoric. The terms of his analogy suggested that painting was then in the process of turning essentially inwards, making itself out of those things unique to the medium, thus divesting itself not



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Figure 14.5 Picasso, Still Life with Chair Caning (1912). Oil and oilcloth on canvas, 29 × 37 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © ARS, New York.

merely of narrative content but even of any representational function. Such claims accorded far better with the work of Robert Delaunay (see Figure 14.7) than they did with the cubism of Braque and Picasso.7 Again, it seems to me significant that Picasso and Braque each began interjecting pieces of oilcloth or bits of wood-grained paper into the purportedly ‘pure’ field of cubist painting just a few months after Apollinaire’s essay ‘Du Sujet dans la peinture moderne’ was published in Les Soirées de Paris.8 Picasso’s straight pins appeared on the scene shortly thereafter, and then began proliferating – with a vengeance, one might even say – in the spring of 1913, shortly after the essay’s republication in Les Peintres cubistes. The pins not only add an especially conspicuous element of ‘impurity’ to Picasso’s papiers collés, they also open up, as Bois notes, a differential ‘intensive’ space within the very surface of the work. Earlier analytic cubism, including Delaunay’s so-called ‘orphic cubism’, had been preoccupied with the canvas’s lateral or ‘extensive’ division, the gridding of the surface underscoring its typical rectangularity and fundamental flatness. Even among analytic cubist works, however, there were i­mportant

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Figure 14.6  Georges Braque, Fruit Dish and Glass (1912). Charcoal and collaged paper, 62.9 × 45.7 cm. Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. © ARS, New York.



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Figure 14.7  Robert Delaunay, Windows open Simultaneously, 1st Part, 3rd Motif (1912). Oil on canvas, 57 × 123 cm. Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice. © ARS, New York.

­spatial differences. In Delaunay’s Window paintings, for example, the pictorial surface was meant to appear coincident with the glass pane of the window, the forms of the outside world having been drained of their substantiality so that they registered on that surface as an immaterial, purely two-dimensional play of light and colour. Contrast that with Picasso’s Still Life with Chair Caning (see Figure 14.5): the forms within Picasso’s collage appear similarly flattened, but it is not at all clear whether their flatness is to be understood as spread out at some distance in front of us – our line of sight perpendicular to our upright bodies – or if we instead are meant to be looking down upon a cafe table, its surface covered with objects that, however schematically rendered, still feel proximate, at least potentially within our grasp. This fundamental undecidability –  which Christine Poggi has nicely described as an ambiguity between the horizontal plane of the table and the vertical tableau – animates any number of Picasso’s cubist still lifes, including, I would argue, several of the papiers épinglés.9 Their pins’ ‘intensive’ investigation of the surface further complicates its ambivalent spatiality by reminding us of the unseen substrate to which the visible elements adhere. In passing beneath the surface of the paper, then re-emerging into view, Picasso’s straight pins suggest that even the flattest of pictorial surfaces contains depths that had gone entirely unplumbed in earlier works of art. Much of the interest in and rhetoric surrounding flatness in early twentieth-century French painting was bound up with notions of the ‘decorative’, itself a highly contested term. Henri Matisse, Picasso’s great

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Figure 14.8  Henri Matisse, Harmony in Red (1908). Oil on canvas, 180 × 220 cm. Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.

rival, openly embraced it, believing the ‘decorative’ carried connotations of the integration of line and colour that he regarded as fundamental to his art (see Figure 14.8). We have no direct testimony concerning Picasso’s views on the matter, yet the secondary evidence suggests his relation to ‘decoration’ was rather more ambivalent. On the one hand, DanielHenry Kahnweiler tells us that Picasso was openly contemptuous of the term, equating it with paintings made simply ‘to “adorn” the wall’.10 On the other hand, wallpaper – the very epitome of mural ­decoration – was a standard element in many of Picasso’s papiers collés. While Braque remained faithful to the roll of faux-bois paper that had provided his initial inspiration, Picasso opted instead for floral patterns – in general, the tackier the better. Guitar, Sheet Music, and Glass (see Figure 14.9), from November of 1912, is thought to be the first of Picasso’s papiers collés, and its timing, too, seems significant. The Salon d’Automne ran that year from 1 October through early November, and it included, in addition to the usual sculpture and painting galleries, a suite of rooms collectively referred to as La Maison



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Figure 14.9  Pablo Picasso, Guitar and Wine Glass (1912). Collage and charcoal on board, 47.9 × 37.5 cm. Bequest of Marion Koogler McNay. McNay Art Museum, San Antonio. © ARS, New York.

cubiste (see Figure 14.10), intended to model the interior of a bourgeois home.11 Displaying furniture and wallpaper patterns by a group of young designers led by André Mare, the Maison also showcased the paintings of Fernand Léger, Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger and many of the other

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Figure 14.10  Photograph of the Salon bourgeois, La Maison Cubiste. Salon d’Automne, 1912. Archives André Mare, Paris.

so-called salon cubists. It seems a striking fact – surely more than merely coincidental –  that Picasso’s inclusion of explicitly decorative elements within his cubist papiers collés followed almost immediately upon cubism’s own very public inclusion in such an explicitly decorative context.12 The insertion of Picasso’s pins seems to adhere to a similar pattern. Insofar as those pins are the sort used by dressmakers and tailors, they point towards the world of textiles and fashion, a world that, like that of interior design, was increasingly encroaching upon the territory of the avant-garde. We might take, as an example of this trend, the case of Paul Poiret. As Nancy Troy has argued, Poiret’s ‘meteoric rise as a couturier in the years just before the [First World War] depended not simply on the distinctive character of his clothing and fabric designs but also, and perhaps more crucially, on his ability to project an aura of originality in the face of mass production’.13 ‘I am not commercial’, Poiret replied indignantly to a New York Times reporter in 1913. ‘Women come to me for a gown as they go to a distinguished painter to get their portraits put on canvas. I am an artist, not a dressmaker.’14 Alongside his innovations in costume style and construction, Poiret also developed a number of finely honed marketing strategies, which included both the purchasing and promotion of fine art. When, in 1909, he relocated his business to



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Figure 14.11  Henri Matisse(?), fabric design for Paul Poiret/Atelier Martine (c. 1912–13). Museum of Modern Art, New York. © ARS, New York.

the avenue d’Antin, he also bought the adjoining property on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, a building which already housed the commercial Galerie Barbazanges. As the new proprietor, Poiret retained the right to organize one or two shows himself each year, and in late February 1912, for example, he exercised his option by mounting an exhibition of the work of Robert Delaunay and Marie Laurencin; it was the first really significant show for either artist.15 It is perhaps also relevant in this context to mention that the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York has in its collection a fabric sample (see Figure 14.11) whose pattern, according to the museum’s records, was designed by none other than Henri Matisse. Although the attribution has been disputed by the Matisse estate, MoMA continues to list the design as the work of the artist, and specifically as work done – sometime in 1912 or 1913 – for Paul Poiret’s Atelier Martine. Even if the attribution is eventually withdrawn, there is plenty of evidence linking Matisse to an interest in fabric design during these years. Relatively early in his career, Matisse began amassing what would with time become an enormous collection of textiles, which he referred to as his ‘working library’ and often used as inspiration for the richly patterned surfaces of his painted interiors (see Figure 14.12).16 It is surely no mere coincidence that Matisse’s greatest patron, the Muscovite collector Sergei Shchukin, was the head of one of Russia’s largest textile manufacturers. Between 1906 and 1914, Shchukin bought or commissioned an extraordinary number of Matisse’s most radically experimental paintings; quite probably the quasi-­abstraction of fabric design had prepared him for the artist’s ­simplified forms and

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Figure 14.12  Henri Matisse, Interior with Aubergines (1911). Distemper on canvas, 212 × 246 cm. Musée de Grenoble. © ARS, New York.

unconventional palette. Shchukin’s patronage is further indication, should we need it, of the ever-narrowing distance in these years between the fields of painting and the commercial or ‘decorative’ arts. Once more, I would contend that both the wallpaper fragments and the sewing pins of Picasso’s papiers collés explicitly call our attention to this fact. The works in which they appear seem to have the structure of an acknowledgement –  ‘acknowledgement’ here being understood as distinct from either acceptance, on the one hand, or denial, on the other. The papiers collés testify to the increasing proximity – indeed, the all but total imbrication – of fields that had once seemed considerably more removed. And yet, insofar as the works never allow themselves to be simply or wholly identified with either the wallpaper fragments or the straight pins included within them, they manage to preserve some distance or difference, however minimal. In the case of the wallpapers, I would argue, we are dealing with an instance of détournement: the decorative, in one of its more insidious forms,



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is employed explicitly against itself. The papers Picasso chose for these works are superficial, ingratiating, even banal. If the papiers collés themselves are not, it is because they have managed to make those materials over into things of surprising depth and difficulty.17 Importantly, they have also managed to impart to those mechanically reproduced patterns a bit of the aura and texture of the handmade. The pins are different in that regard –  less transformed by their incorporation within the work. If they evoke associations of clothing custom-made by dressmakers and tailors, they themselves are identical, mass-produced items. In fact, within a certain political-philosophical tradition, they are the very epitome of such machine-made objects. Adam Smith, writing in 1776, at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, began the first chapter of his Wealth of Nations with an extended description of a pin factory, whose intricate division of labour he championed as a model of efficient productivity: A workman not educated to this business (which the division of labour has rendered a distinct trade), nor acquainted with the use of the machinery employed in it (to the invention of which the same division of labour has probably given occasion), could scarce, perhaps, with his utmost industry, make one pin in a day, and certainly could not make twenty. But in the way in which this business is now carried on, not only the whole work is a peculiar trade, but it is divided into a number of branches, of which the greater part are likewise peculiar trades. One man draws out the wire, another straightens it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on is a peculiar business, to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands, though in others the same man will sometimes perform two or three of them. I have seen a small manufactory of this kind where ten men only were employed … [T]hough they were very poor, and therefore but indifferently accommodated with the necessary machinery, they could, when they exerted themselves, make among them about twelve pounds of pins in a day. There are in a pound upwards of four thousand pins of middling size. Those ten persons, therefore, could make among them upwards of forty-eight thousand pins in a day. Each person, therefore, making a tenth part of forty-eight thousand pins, might be considered as making four thousand eight hundred pins in a day.18

Although Smith was clearly touting the advantages of mass production and the division of labour, subsequent writers returning to his

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e­ xample have tended to take a rather more jaundiced view. For example, in his Jena Lectures of 1805, Hegel argued that the distinctiveness of the modern economy was exemplified by the fact that ‘ten men can make as many pins as a hundred’ did formerly, and he went on to consider the broader social implications of such an economy.19 In modern society, Hegel wrote, each satisfies the needs of many, and the satisfaction of one’s own many particular needs is the labour of many others. Since [a man’s] labour is abstract in this way, he behaves as an abstract I  …  not as an all-­ encompassing Spirit, rich in content, ruling a broad range and being master of it; but rather, having no concrete labour, his power consists in analysing, in abstracting, dissecting the concrete world into its many abstract aspects. Man’s labour itself becomes entirely mechanical, the more he himself is mere abstract activity.20

Similarly, Alexis de Tocqueville, in his 1840 Democracy in America, asked: ‘What is one to expect from a man who has spent twenty years of his life making heads for pins? … While the workman confines his intelligence more and more to studying one single detail’, Tocqueville observed, ‘the master daily embraces a vast field for his vision, and his mind expands as fast as the other’s contracts. … The former becomes more and more like the administrator of a huge empire, the latter more like a brute’.21 For Tocqueville, class struggle was a very real, if unintended, psychosocial consequence of the organization of work typified by the pin factory. Karl Marx’s views were, unsurprisingly, similar. In Das Kapital (1867), Marx used the example of pin manufacture and its division of labour to talk about the numbing effects of factory work. Such work ‘confiscates every atom of freedom’, he wrote, ‘both in bodily and intellectual activity. The lightening of the labour even becomes a sort of torture’, Marx added, ‘since the machine does not free the labourer from work, but deprives the work of all interest’.22 All of this was more than mere theoretical speculation in France in 1913. Then as now, the largest pin manufacturer in the country was Bohin, its factory located just outside l’Aigle in Lower Normandy. A fire in 1901 had destroyed much of the existing machinery, but the company turned misfortune to its advantage by seizing the opportunity to further modernize its means of production. Largely as a result of its greater efficiency thereafter, Bohin was able in 1912 to buy out its competitor, Caliste Marquis fils, thereby becoming the sole manufacturer of pins and needles in France. In fact, the period between 1908 and the outbreak of the First World War was in many ways the company’s heyday; after that, the



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automation of clothing production would lead to a decline in demand for both needles and pins.23 If Bohin has survived into the present, it is mostly because it has both expanded its product line and reduced its workforce from the nearly 600 employees it boasted in the early twentieth century to the roughly four dozen on its payroll today.24 It has also begun appealing to the tourist trade: one of the company’s former factory buildings, recently added to the French National Registry of Historic Places, reopened its doors as a museum of pin and needle manufacture in 2014. I have entertained this digression concerning pin production in the hope that, turning once again to Picasso’s papiers épinglés, we might be better able to see how issues of mechanization and the division of labour are firmly embedded within them. If the scraps of newspaper, wallpaper and oilcloth that Picasso had been using since 1912 were also products of mechanized production – and if the structure of collage itself evoked the assembly of prefabricated components and the modern division of labour – then none of those components carried the same connotations, or had the same pointed presence, as the straight pins that surfaced in 1913. Those pins give much more concrete form to the pressures industrialization was then exerting on the field of the visual arts. According to Thierry de Duve, it was precisely these felt pressures that led Marcel Duchamp to stop painting altogether and to register that cessation in and as the ready-mades.25 ‘It may well be’, de Duve writes, ‘that in industrialized society the specialized craft called painting has become useless in the face of mechanization and [the] division of labour, as they replace the craftsman in most of his social and economic functions, and that it must be felt as impossible by whoever has the ambition to push art beyond those functions and have it carry on a meaningful tradition’.26 By December 1912, with his Standard Stoppages and Erratum musical, Duchamp had started to rely on chance as a substitute for craftsmanship. By the end of 1913, he had introduced his first ready-made, the Roue de bicyclette (see Figure 4.13), whose mass-produced, utilitarian components were rendered functionally useless in the process. For Duchamp the painter, de Duve argues, the ready-mades were a way of marking the fact that, with industrialization, the context for art had radically and irrevocably changed. If modernist abstraction was addressing the situation in its own way – in part by advancing a parallel model of progressive, rational refinement, in which conventions deemed inessential to the medium were cast aside as o­ bsolete –  Duchamp’s Fontaine and Roue de bicyclette raised the spectre of the obsolescence of painting itself. Given the temporal coincidence of their own emergence within the field of painting, it may be tempting to regard Picasso’s straight pins

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Figure 14.13  Marcel Duchamp, Roue de bicyclette (1951; third version, after lost 1913 original). Metal wheel mounted on painted wood stool, 129.5 × 63.5 × 41.9 cm. Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection. Museum of Modern Art, New York. © ARS, New York.



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as so many ready-mades. Certainly it is possible that Duchamp saw them that way – if he in fact saw them. But, of course, the pins’ most immediate contexts are the individual papiers collés in which they appear. And one of the more salient features of those works is their insistent handmade-ness, their wilful imprecision, which stands in such sharp contrast to the manifestly mechanical production of both the wallpapers and the pins, even as it also distances itself from any association with polished, artisanal craft. We might also want to notice that in many of the papiers épinglés the pins are placed off to the side of the depicted objects, and those objects themselves seem deprived of any real solidity or depth (see Figure 14.14). In my estimation, the situation is a variation on the state of affairs in Picasso’s earlier analytic cubist paintings, where most of the highly

Figure 14.14  Pablo Picasso, Guéridon with Wineglass (1913). Oil on canvas with paper and pins, 20.5 × 20.5 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © ARS, New York.

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Figure 14.15 Picasso, Glass of Absinthe (1911). Oil on canvas, 38.4 × 46.4 cm Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Mrs F. F. Prentiss Fund. © ARS, New York.

nuanced – and so seemingly descriptive – passages of chiaroscuro, as well as the densest areas of facture, appear less often in conjunction with the represented objects than with the otherwise empty spaces surrounding them. In Picasso’s 1911 Le Verre d’absinthe (see Figure 14.15), for example, density and specificity seem to have been displaced from the everyday things of the still-life arrangement onto the painting itself – as if the only things still capable of sustaining our attention, and perhaps also our unalienated sense of belonging to the world, were works of art. Specificity of that sort is not really at issue with the pins of the papiers épinglés. On the contrary, the pins are generic, each to all intents and purposes equivalent to any other.27 The main contrast in the papiers épinglés is instead between the flimsiness and flatness of the depicted objects and the pins’ greater three-dimensionality. Because they typically serve no depictive function, they do not belong to the space of representation. Rather, they are a literal part of the work itself, and their primary function is, as Bois said, to open up a space between the recto and the verso, thereby



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calling our attention to the surface’s previously unseen depths. If in the earlier papiers collés, surfaces were also layered one upon another in a kind of ‘lamellar stratification’, their uppermost layers – in many cases, pieces of ‘decorative’ wallpaper – often all but obscured our awareness of the sheet below. In the papiers épinglés, by contrast, although the sustaining ground remains covered over, out of sight, its thickness is explicitly called forth through the pin’s insertion. The irony that it is a ready-made, mass-produced object performing this role should not escape us. I take it that the point of the pins is precisely to create a space –  and so to establish some difference –  between the work of art and the things of industrial production. The pins also make it plain, however, that such a difference can never be absolute. As I argued earlier, Picasso’s collages take the form of an acknowledgement; it might even be said that their glue literalizes that form, insofar as it is both what physically separates the bits of newspaper or wallpaper from the ground and the condition of their adhesion. In that sense, the glue simultaneously attests to the new-found proximity of the quotidian or ‘decorative’ to Picasso’s concerns and to the difference on which his art is staked. The pins of the papiers épinglés function similarly, except that they also evoke the picture’s unseen depths, everything literally and figuratively underpinning the work. They make visible the various tensions and rifts then dividing the field of modern French painting –  the pressures both ‘internal’ and ‘external’ that threatened its very continuation. No less importantly, ­however, they also gestured towards the hidden reserves that I think Picasso felt the work of art, even in 1913, still had at its disposal. Today, a hundred years on, it is perhaps time to start attending to those pins. Notes   1. It seems likely that the pins first found their way into Picasso’s papiers collés as an expedient, a means of provisionally positioning the papers until the final arrangement had been determined, at which point the pieces could be glued in place. Judging from the small holes still visible in some of his compositions, Braque engaged in the practice too. Unlike him, however, Picasso occasionally chose to leave the pins as a permanent feature of the work – their intentionality (and the work’s completion) attested in some cases by the artist’s signature, in others by the fact that the collage was sold years before Picasso’s death. Indeed, it seems quite possible that the series of papiers épinglés was originally larger than we know, some pins having been removed by conservators confused as to their status. For a brief discussion of Picasso’s pin collages, see Elizabeth Cowling, ‘Fine art of cutting’.

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 2. Christian Bonnefoi, unpublished note (November 1990), quoted in YveAlain Bois, ‘The pin’, p. 14.  3. Ibid., p. 15.  4. On this history, see Pepe Karmel, Picasso and the Invention of Cubism, p. 152.  5. Guillaume Apollinaire, Cubist Painters, pp. 39, 42.  6. Ibid., p. 12. Presumably Apollinaire had instrumental music in mind, so that the contrast with literature was intended as a contrast between a temporal art form that is normally narrative and represents or refers to people, things or events in the world and another that typically does not.  7. Picasso’s abhorrence of abstraction would become legendary, and Braque was hardly more sympathetic.  8. The essay first appeared in Les Soirées de Paris, 1 (February 1912).  9. See Christine Poggi, ‘Frames of reference’, 311–22, which was republished with some modification as chapter 3 in her In Defiance of Painting. To my knowledge, Rosalind Krauss was the first to call attention to the ambivalent orientation of Picasso’s Still Life with Chair-Caning; see her review ‘The cubist epoch’. 10. Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, The Rise of Cubism, trans. H. Aronson (New York: Wittenborn, 1949), p. 7, quoted in Rosalind Krauss, Picasso Papers, p. 181. 11. For a discussion of the Maison Cubiste within the history of the French decorative arts, see David Cottington, Cubism in the Shadow of War, pp. 169–79; Nancy Troy, Modernism and the Decorative Arts in France, pp. 79–102. 12. For more on the Maison Cubiste and Picasso’s use of wallpaper, see my essay, ‘Flattening of “collage”’, esp. pp. 76–8. 13. Nancy Troy, introduction to Poiret, p. 17. 14. Ibid., p. 19. 15. It may be worth noting, too, that later in the year Poiret would purchase all four of the paintings by Laurencin that were hung in the Salon d’Automne’s Maison Cubiste. 16. For more on Matisse and fabric design, see the essays from the exhibition catalogue, Matisse, His Art, and His Textiles, edited by Hilary Spurling and Ann Dumas, esp. Spurling’s ‘Material world: Matisse, his art, and his textiles’. 17. For more on these works and their underlying logic, see ‘Flattening of “collage”’, esp. pp. 74–84. 18. Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, p. 10. 19. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel and the Human Spirit, p. 121. 20. Ibid. 21. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. G. Lawrence, pp. 555–6, quoted in Imraan Coovadia, ‘Brief history of pin-making’, 96. 22. Karl Marx, A Critique of Political Economy, p. 462; Marx’s specific discussion of pin-making occurs on p. 378. 23. Elizabeth Cowling has discussed Picasso’s pin collages in relation to the vicissitudes of the home sewing industry; see her article, ‘Fine art of cutting’.



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24. This information comes from Bohin’s website, www.bohin.fr (accessed 10 May 2019). 25. Thierry de Duve, ‘The readymade and the tube of paint’. 26. Ibid., 115. 27. Evidently, the material specificity of the pins is regarded as so inconsequential to conservators that they have felt free to replace them at will; as a result, relatively few of the pins in Picasso’s collages seem to be original, since many are unmarked by rust or any other signs of age.

Works cited Apollinaire, Guillaume, ‘Du Sujet dans la peinture moderne’, Les Soirées de Paris, 1 (February 1912): 1–4. —, The Cubist Painters, trans. Peter Read (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). First published in 1913 as Les Peintres cubistes by Eugène Figuière. Bois, Yve-Alain, ‘The pin’, in Bonnefoi: La Stratégie du tableau / The Strategy of the Picture / La Estrategia del Cuadro (Madrid: Alfredo Melgar Ediciones, 1992), pp. 9–15. Coovadia, Imraan, ‘A brief history of pin-making’, Politikon: South African Journal of Political Studies, 35:1 (April 2008), 96. Cottington, David, Cubism in the Shadow of War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). Cowling, Elizabeth, ‘The fine art of cutting: Picasso’s papiers collés and constructions in 1912–14’, Apollo, 11/18:14 (November 1995), 10–18. Duve, Thierry de, ‘The readymade and the tube of paint’, Artforum, 24:9 (May 1986), 110–21. Florman, Lisa, ‘The flattening of “collage”’, October, 102 (Autumn 2002), 59–86. Hegel, G. W. F., Hegel and the Human Spirit: A Translation of the Jena Lectures on the Philosophy of the Spirit, trans. Leo Rauch (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1983). Karmel, Pepe, Picasso and the Invention of Cubism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), 2003. Krauss, Rosalind, ‘The cubist epoch’, Artforum, 9:6 (February 1971), 32–8. —, The Picasso Papers (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998). Marx, Karl, Capital, Volume One: A Critique of Political Economy, ed. Friedrich Engels, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York: Dover Publications, 2011). Poggi, Christine, ‘Frames of reference: “Table” and “tableau” in Picasso’s collages and constructions’, Art Journal, 47:4 (Winter 1988), 311–22. —, In Defiance of Painting: Cubism, Futurism, and the Invention of Collage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 58–89. Smith, Adam, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. Charles Jesse Bullock (New York: Collier & Son, 1909).

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Spurling, Hilary, and Ann Dumas, Matisse, His Art, and His Textiles: The Fabric of Dreams (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2004). Troy, Nancy, Modernism and the Decorative Arts in France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991). —, ‘Introduction’ to Poiret, by Harold Koda and Andrew Bolton (New York and New Haven, CT: Metropolitan Museum of Art/Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 9–15.

Part IV

Coda: on modernism, beyond France and 1913

15 1913, the future in the past Jean-Michel Rabaté

N

o sooner had I published my book 1913: The Cradle of Modernism in 2007 than I started noticing data I had forgotten to include, texts that had eluded my research, important visual details that I should have inserted. Friends and colleagues joined in the fray, suggesting countless additions and revisions for which I thanked them profusely but helplessly. I had discovered that it is impossible to recreate a whole year without leaving out a lot. However, for a while, pursued by a modernist esprit de l’escalier, I collected in a folder the stray facts, dates, names, bypassed titles, that I thought indispensable to the publication of a revised edition. A little later, returning to my old university in Dijon after having spent a decade abroad, I had the surprise to be complimented on my youthful air: as people in the audience told me afterwards, I looked rather good for someone born in 1913! Working on ‘yearbooks’ may be a good cure against ageing … Now that thirteen years have elapsed since the book’s publication, and that I have realized I will not revise it, I can highlight important features that I regret having neglected. One has become a topic for classes that I regularly teach: modernist fashion. The other is linked to one author I knew of but I was not sure I fully understood: James Huneker. Because I started working systematically on Huneker after 2007, I was led to write a book that took his concept as a point of departure: Huneker had pub­ ublishing my lished his Pathos of Distance in 1913, and I followed suit by p Pathos of Distance in 2016. I wish to mention another missed opportunity. I was invited to participate in a Cerisy décade entitled ‘1913, cent ans après: enchantement et désenchantement’ (1913, one hundred years later: Enchantment and

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­isenchantment) organized by Marie-Paule Berranger and Colette d Camelin. It was held in the prestigious abbey that I know well, but on those dates (8–15 July 2013), I had other commitments. I could not join my French colleagues. The proceedings were published by Hermann in 2015. I was intrigued by the emphasis placed on the sciences, and the beginning of a divergence between Bergson and Einstein, which became the topic of an excellent conference held recently at the Collège de France – then, the historical focus had shifted, it was 1922, which is a different story.1 Einstein startled the world of science in 1905 with his famous five papers, and then achieved universal notoriety in 1922 when his views seemed to bury Bergson’s idealistic philosophy of time. The date of 1913, although situated at the median point between the two dates, did not bring crucial discoveries. In between, I had watched Jan Kouen’s 2009 film Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky. I had not neglected discussing the famous scandal created by the premiere of the Rite of Spring at the Théâtre des ChampsÉlysées but had not given enough importance to the beginnings of Coco Chanel’s career. I had thought that her work was typical of the post-war years, but I should have heeded Valerie Steele’s accurate ­assessment. Steele describes the revolution in fashion that took place between the years 1907 and 1913 and insists that the war did not play a major role: Within only a few years, roughly between 1907 and 1913, a fashion world dominated by the corset, frou-frou skirts, and pastel shades turned into one where women increasingly wore brassieres and high-waisted ‘Empire’ frocks or ‘Oriental’ fantasies in bright, ‘barbaric’ colors. They sometimes even wore trousers. This is not to say that World War I had not impact, but the cultural factors leading to change were already influencing fashion before 1914. The war itself primarily accelerated changes that were already happening.2

Indeed, if excellent books and essays have been written on modernist fashion and Paul Poiret – Poiret who initiated a new look and kept asserting that he had been the first to wage war on the corset in his ‘Art Deco’ creations – his creations, in retrospect, look rather dated. Both Mario Fortuny and Madeleine Vionnet claimed that they had abolished the corset by 1907, before Poiret even declared he was responsible for this iconic gesture of modernity. Moreover, in 1903 already, the famous actress Gabrielle Réjane told an interviewer that she had no need for a corset. At the same time, Leon Bakst’s designs for the Ballets Russes became fashionable in 1910, after the first Paris performance of



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Schéhérazade. Bakst gave rise to a mixture of exoticism and eroticism as he displayed naked male and female torsos. Chris Greenhalgh had the wonderful idea of making Igor Stravinsky and Coco Chanel glimpse at each other not after the war, when they became lovers for a brief time, but in 1913, at the premiere of the Rite of Spring. Indeed, as her biographers have noted, Chanel attended that eventful performance. Greenhalgh describes her costume in opposition to rich society women who came to the performance wearing lush Poiret dresses: They regard her, these women, with disapproval, without quite knowing why. It’s not as if she’s more decorative. Quite the opposite. If anything, the cut of her clothes is austere. The simplicity of her gown, its restrained elegance, makes them seem almost gaudy by comparison. And her silhouette is intimidatingly slim. It is this quality of understatement, this nonchalance de luxe, they find disrespectful. The impression she gives is that she’s not even trying. It seems so effortless, they feel undermined. To Coco, conscious of the disdainful glances she’s attracting, these others seem ridiculous in their plumes and feathers, their taffeta gowns and heavy velvet dresses. If they want to look like chocolate boxes, that’s their affair, she reasons. As for her, she prefers to look like a woman.3

Here is no projection or anachronism – if the ‘little black dress’ was created by Chanel in 1926 and launched by Vogue as a garment comparable to Ford’s Model T, Chanel opened her first boutique at the famous address of 21 rue Cambon in 1910, where she specialized in hats. And in 1913 she opened her first fashion boutique in Deauville. She had the idea of combining high fashion and casual clothing more suitable for sports and leisure. Her creations in Deauville from the summer of 1913, just after having witnessed The Rite of Spring riot, announced a simple style that clashed with the sumptuous extravagance of Fortuny and Poiret outfits. The new simplicity was quite artful though, but has been wrongly interpreted as a consequence of the austerity created by the Great War – in fact, as with the other arts, fashion anticipated these radical changes that Lisa Chaney evokes aptly in her description of the Deauville boutique: In Gabrielle’s boutique, with its stripped awning proudly bearing the name ‘Gabrielle Chanel’, she offered clothes and hats based on simplified elements. There were open-collar blouses; simple sweaters; loose, belted jackets and long skirts for relaxed and outdoor living. Most famously, Gabrielle had taken familiar items of men’s practical clothing and turned them to her advantage. The fisherman’s shirts, turtlenecks and oversize sweaters, the polo sweater … all these she modified for women. The polo shirt, for example, became an open-necked, belted tunic with sleeves

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rolled up. Borrowing from those workaday wardrobes, she amazed and delighted her audience by demonstrating that the practical and the everyday could be the sources of high style, until then invariably rooted in luxury and the exotic.4

Greenhalgh’s superb conceit was to link this new simplicity with the primitivism unleashed by Stravinsky’s fierce rhythms and shocking dance style. What is the most laudable effort in Kouen’s film Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky is his decision to film the accurate historical reconstitution of the original performance of the Rite of Spring. There was indeed, as another film states it, a ‘Chanel before Chanel’. The fascination exerted by Chanel’s fierce independence and driven creativity would require another book; before I dare attempt to write it, I have to make amends for my second omission. It has to do with an aspect of modernism I was not so sure about, namely how the radically ‘new’ was received in the United States. This leads me to the second author I left out from my Cradle of Modernism, James Huneker. From the American angle, one book exemplifies the spirit of 1913, this unstable mix of the new and the old, Huneker’s The Pathos of Distance.5 This collection of essays has been forgotten, as has the considerable output of its author. James Gibbons Huneker was born in Philadelphia in 1857 and died in New York in 1921. A reputed music critic, journalist and short-story writer, he published a double autobiography, Steeplejack and Painted Veils in 1920. Arnold Schwab has given us a more reliable biography.6 Born in a Catholic family of German and Hungarian descent on the father’s side, Irish on the mother’s side, Huneker married early and moved to Paris in 1878. He studied piano with Léopold Doutreleau and took classes with Frédéric Chopin’s pupil Georges Mathias. He became an authority on Chopin and Liszt and wrote countless essays on modern composers. In 1885, Huneker came back to America, remarried and settled in New York City. An untiring writer of reviews for varied periodicals, Huneker lived by his pen, which explains the evanescent quality of his essays. He was a conveyor of new ideas, familiarizing educated Americans with the new schools and trends of European artistic movements. His contemporaries were struck by his vivid style full of jokes, metaphors and witty asides. Huneker went to Europe twenty times in his career, each time staying anywhere from a few months to a year. His endorsement of novelty knew some limits. Thus, in January 1913, he presented Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire in hedging terms: ‘In the welter of tonalities that bruised each other as they passed and repassed, in the preliminary grip of enharmonies that almost made the ears bleed, the



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eyes water, the scalp to freeze, I could not keep a central grip on myself. It was new music, or new exquisitely horrible sounds, with a vengeance. The very ecstasy of the hideous!’7 The startled musicologist honestly stated a certain dismay, adding even that this music destroyed his psychological balance! Nevertheless, he ended up stating that he could be persuaded to like it. Typically, Huneker resorts to terms such as ‘ugly’ or ‘hideous’ to record the truly new. These were adjectives he also used to report on new paintings by Picasso. Unlike Guillaume Apollinaire, who applauded the new no matter what or by whom, Huneker could be guarded. His cultural taste having been formed in the second half of the nineteenth century, he had a hard time accepting some cutting-edge innovations in the arts of the 1910s. However, his passion and verve, allied with an unsparing honesty, make him a privileged witness of the emergence of the new in 1913. Huneker spoke and read French and German fluently; he was knowledgeable about literature, philosophy and the visual arts. He introduced to the United States painters like Gauguin and Van Gogh, philosophers like Nietzsche and Bergson, writers like Ibsen, de Gourmont and George Moore. His fondness for the Irish scene allowed him to document the birth of the Irish Renaissance, and he presented writings by Synge, Yeats and Moore to the American public. He could be fierce in his criticism, and once wrote that a bad musical show he had heard was just ‘Art with a capital F’.8 In the 1913 Pathos of Distance, he discusses paintings by Matisse, Picasso and Whistler while presenting a competent overview of Bergson’s philosophy of Time. Abstract considerations are interspersed with personal reflections, autobiographical vignettes and bibliographical advice. The last section provides a belated theoretical preface to the 1909 Egoists: A Book of Supermen.9 If a common theme runs through Egoists and The Pathos of Distance, it is the concept of egotism. Huneker traces it back to Stendhal whose Souvenirs d’égotisme he discusses before establishing an egotist genealogy by linking Stendhal to Joris-Karl Huysmans via Max Stirner and Friedrich Nietzsche. Huneker allows us to make sense of the connection between modernism and decadence recently explored by Vincent Sherry.10 He praises the work and personality of those he calls ‘supermen’: William Blake, Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Flaubert, Anatole France, Maurice Barrès, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henrik Ibsen and Max Stirner. Huneker had a dual ambition: first, he wanted to rewrite positively what Max Nordau – whose real name was Simon (Simcha) Maximilian Südfeld – had famously called Entartung in 1892, this sweeping concept

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of a ‘degeneration’ that allowed Nordau to offer a synthetic survey of the new tendencies in European art, literature, and philosophy, from Baudelaire to Nietzsche and Ibsen. Nordau, an exact contemporary of Huneker, indicted the modernist ‘degeneration’ in which he saw a disease of the will infecting fin de siècle Europe. Thus Nordau had pilloried Baudelaire, Wilde, Nietzsche, Wagner, Ibsen, all the ‘moderns’, in the name of a waning ‘health’ he wanted to recapture in Zionist dreams of a utopian Palestine. Nordau became a bête-noire for Huneker who attacked him in 1907 by making fun of his schematic pathologization of great men. Huneker’s second enemy was Wagner, and here he was a disciple of Nietzsche – Wagner embodies what was wrong with the ‘music of the future’ and the temptation of anti-Semitism. Huneker was not Jewish but often evinces philosemitic tendencies, which is why he senses a wry solidarity with Nordau, whose Zionism followed from the general denunciation of modernist degeneration. Huneker combined an appreciation of the French literary avant-garde that comprised accurate and original readings of Stendhal, Baudelaire and Flaubert, with a German genealogy of philosophical anarchism that went from Max Stirner, the radical Left-Hegelian, to Nietzsche, Huneker’s favourite philosopher. He reconstituted a systematic doctrine of egoism: ‘Nietzsche is the poet of the doctrine, Stirner is its prophet, or, if you will, its philosopher.’11 In 1913, Huneker, who had been criticized for lacking a clear philosophy, felt the need to define his doctrine rigorously. He alluded to Remy de Gourmont, saying that he did not believe in general ideas, and only practised ‘dissociations of ideas’.12 Following Nietzsche, Huneker accused sentimentalism of being the root of all the evils of contemporary thought. In an insight he shared with T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, he presented Rousseau as the originator of the mistakes of humanism – ‘he invented that lying legend: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’.13 Egoists attempted to dissociate Stirner from the anarchists and socialists. Stirner was the philosopher read most closely and attentively by Huneker who summed his Ego and His Own competently. Stirner’s attack on abstract values and systems that were not reducible to his ‘ego’ entailed that there was no difference between being a moralist or an immoralist – a notion that had been developed by André Gide in his 1902 novel The Immoralist. Huneker stated in 1909: Unlike his great contemporary, Joseph Proudhon, Stirner is not a constructive philosopher. Indeed, he is no philosopher. A moralist (or immoralist), an Ethiker, his book is a defense of Egoism, of the submerged rights of the Ego … His doctrine is the Fourth Dimension of ethics. That his



the future in the past 305 book will be more dangerous than a million bombs, if misapprehended, is no reason why it should not be read.14

Here was a new ethics, not a new aesthetics, in which the early modernism of 1910–13 invested itself. One could describe this earlier modernism as a conflicted and even an ironic Egoism, an egoism that owes everything to Stirner and Nietzsche, even if, as Huneker remarks in passing, the impact of Meredith’s quasi-feminist novel The Egoist was not negligible.15 Huneker’s true master is Nietzsche, and he applied to history itself Nietzsche’s analysis of the creation of values. Here lies the meaning of the ‘pathos of distance’ of his title. European literature and culture have been durably shaped by the forceful personalities of these innovative authors, but one needs to take more distance to assess the true value of what they brought us: ‘[The supermen] made history and anyone who can run and is not blind may read this history. No doubt when the corridor of time lengthens between them and newer generations the pathos of distance will again operate and fresh critical perspectives form.’16 A chapter entitled ‘The pathos of distance’ quotes Nietzsche’s famous phrase again and again: ‘The pathos of distance! It is a memorial phrase. Friedrich Nietzsche is its creator, Nietzsche who wrote of the drama and its origins in a work that is become a classic.’17 Nietzsche uses the phrase in The Genealogy of Morality to describe the process by which values were created outside any morality. In his account, values were created by noble people who deemed their actions ‘good’, as opposed to the low-minded and plebeian crowd. The ‘pathos of distance’ arises because the gap between the two will never be bridged.18 Soon, Huneker tweaked the phrase, and made it a mantra that referred to simple nostalgia: ‘Distance lends pathos, bathes in rosy enchantments the simplest events of a mean past; is the painter, in a word, who with skillful, consoling touches disguises all that was sordid in our youth, all the once mortified or disgusted, and bridges the inequality of man and man.’19 This ‘equalizing’ property of memory distorts Nietzsche’s meaning, transforms the theory of radical inequality presiding over the birth of values into an awareness of the future in the past. Huneker, who knew Nietzsche well, glossed over the original meaning; his recurrent use of the expression is symptomatic of the hesitations of the mindset that we can call ‘modernist’ in 1913. Thus Huneker appeared conflicted in his wish to be ‘modern’, and would use Nietzsche’s phrase as a talisman: ‘The last plays of a Hauptmann or a Maeterlinck give me more of a thrill than all the musty memories of the days that are no more, and of the dust on forgotten tombs. To-day is more than a million yesterdays or to-morrows! Let the

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theatrical dead bury the theatrical dead! Yet here I am circling about the past like a fat moth in a lean flame. The pathos of distance!’20 Pleasant reminiscences of his youth in Philadelphia could not be erased. The ‘pathos of distance’, a phrase that is repeated throughout, reminds him that the ghosts of the past cannot be laid to rest easily. In other words, Huneker felt that he was still half-way between Philadelphia and New York, or between Paris and Berlin. When describing cities, Huneker makes room for nostalgia, as we see in his romantic evocation of old Cassel.21 However, the city that allegorizes the new is New York, a city to which he gives an impassioned homage. For him, New York reconciles the new with the ‘pathos of distance’: ‘New York is not beautiful in the old order of aesthetics. Its beauty often savours of the monstrous, for the scale is epical. Too many of our buildings are glorified chimneys. But what a picture of titanic energy, of cyclopean ambition, there it is if you look over Manhattan from Washington Heights.’22 Typically, the modernism defined by Huneker blends traditional canons of beauty and the sublime moment defining the American now. Huneker perceived that what was at stake in the new arts was not a quest for beauty but a search for expression: ‘There is no absolute in beauty; expression, not beauty, is the aim of art. All the rest is mere illustration. Beauty is relative.’23 Huneker thus defended the art of Matisse, but unhappily had to miss the Armory Show in New York and Chicago, for at the time he was in Berlin. He left his two friends, John Quinn and Frederick James Gregg, to defend the values of the new in New York.24 Before the war, Quinn, Huneker and Gregg, united by common Irish family ties, were called the ‘Three Musketeers’.25 The American taste for modern art was aided by the energy and fortune of John Quinn who collected works by Matisse, Picabia and Picasso and bought manuscripts by Pound and Joyce. Quinn had been first advised by Huneker; he then allowed Pound to take over his quest for rare items. The Pathos of Distance evokes visits of Berlin and Paris galleries, and a section entitled ‘Matisse, Picasso, and others’ documents the period from 1910 to 1912, discussing the ‘Post-Impressionism’ show presented by Roger Fry at the Grafton Galleries in London. This exhibition struck Virginia Woolf so strongly that she later declared that ‘human character’ had changed on that date. Huneker reviewed the 1912 Autumn Salon in Paris; he also mentioned visits to Stieglitz’s 291 gallery in Manhattan when Matisse was exhibited there in 1908 and 1910. If in 1913 Huneker appears knowledgeable about the cubists, futurists and post-impressionists, if he recognizes Cézanne as the undisputed master behind the efforts of the younger artists, his judgement is not so



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sure when it comes to Picasso and the cubists. Above all, he craves some kind of representation, even if he admits that these artists’ aim was ‘not to represent, but interpret’.26 He praised Matisse who, he said, had great talent because ‘you can always tell a human figure of his from a cow, and the same can’t be said of the extraordinary productions of Picasso or Picabia’.27 Huneker confesses to being half-shocked, or slyly pretending to be: ‘Matisse is at his best – also at his most terrific. One nude sits on a chair drying herself with a bath-towel. You look another way. Degas at his frankest never revealed so much. Nothing occult here.’28 Huneker praises Matisse and attacks Picasso for the wrong reasons: he loves the line in Matisse, thinks he would turn into a classic, whereas he sees only destruction in Picasso. As always, he is not above providing cheap laughter: ‘The Woman and the Mustard Pot is emotional enough, for the unhappy creature is weeping, no doubt, because of the mustard in her eyes; certainly because of the mustard smeared over her dress. A pungent design, indeed.’29 Huneker’s sallies reveal the resistance with which new art forms were met in the United States, even from enlightened, cosmopolitan and cultured viewers. Huneker was not Fry or even Gregg, who had more sympathy for Picasso. If he reversed the judgement of Gertrude Stein who had decided that Picasso was a genius – as she was – while Matisse was not, Huneker understood that the new in art would not necessarily aim at establishing a new aesthetic. As with Coco Chanel’s early work, the main struggle was ethical: a striving for freedom and simplicity that did not discard beauty or even luxury. In spite of these limitations, the impact of Huneker on American modernism cannot be exaggerated. It was not a coincidence that in 1909, when he was a student at Harvard, the young T. S. Eliot reviewed his Egoists in The Harvard Advocate. Eliot duly praised the style of the conversationalist and lauded his capacious culture. Later on, Eliot would reminisce that Huneker taught him more by the copious lists of names that he dropped than by the strength of his analyses.30 Nevertheless, this was the manner in which Huneker brought modernism to American students and managed almost single-handedly to bridge a cultural gap between Old Europe and the New World. The role of privileged translator or interpreter would be continued by Eliot when he became the editor of The Egoist in London, relaying Pound and Dora Marsden. This is another story,31 which entails relays like Dora Marsden who exemplified the move from British suffragism to Stirnerian anarchism, and it exceeds the limits of 1913. Meanwhile, modernist egoism became more artistic thanks to Pound and Eliot. The Egoist published the first novels of James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis. Its pages welcomed avant-garde

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poetry sponsored by Ezra Pound. Huneker was the missing link in that complex chronicle of modernism. Huneker’s modernist egoism created a living bridge between a nineteenth-century tradition containing Stendhal, Stirner, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Huysmans and the younger Yeats, and what we know better, the high modernism of Pound’s and Eliot’s London before and during the First World War. Notes  1. See my introduction to 1922: Literature, Culture, Politics, pp. 1–14, and the conference ‘Einstein au Collège de France’ (11–12 June 2018), www.collegede-france.fr/site/antoine-compagnon/symposium-2018–06–12–17h30.htm (accessed 30 May 2019).  2. Valerie Steele, Paris Fashion, p. 193.  3. Chris Greenhalgh, Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky, pp. 16–17.  4. Lisa Chaney, Coco Chanel, p. 92.  5. James Huneker, Pathos of Distance. The book was republished in 1922, just one year after his death. It is also available as an e-book (2012, Forgotten Books, facsimile reprint of the 1922 edition).  6. See Arnold Schwab, James Gibbons Huneker.  7. New York Times (19 January 1913), secs. 5, 9.  8. Quoted by Schwab, James Gibbons Huneker, p. 254.  9. James Huneker, Egoists. 10. Vincent Sherry, Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence. 11. Huneker, Egoists, p. 352. 12. Huneker, Pathos of Distance, ‘A Belated Preface to Egoists’, p. 386. 13. Ibid., p. 391. 14. Huneker, Egoists, p. 359. 15. Ibid., p. 6. 16. Huneker, Pathos of Distance, p. 393. 17. Ibid., 332. 18. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, p. 12. 19. Huneker, Pathos of Distance, p. 332. 20. Ibid., p. 336. 21. Ibid., pp. 161–71. 22. Ibid., pp. 1888–9. 23. Ibid., p. 132. 24. See Kenyon Cox et al., For & Against. 25. See Schwab, James Gibbons Huneker, p. 224. 26. Ibid., p. 151. 27. Ibid., p. 150. 28. Ibid., p. 155. 29. Ibid., p. 155.



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30. Ibid., p. 197. 31. See my ‘Gender and modernism’.

Works cited Chaney, Lisa, Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life (New York: Viking, 2012). Cox, Kenyon, et al., For & Against: Views on the Infamous 1913 Armory Show (Tucson, AZ: Hol Art Books, 2009). Greenhalgh, Chris, Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky (New York: Riverhead Books, 2002). Huneker, James, Egoists: A Book of Supermen (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909). Reprinted in 1918. —, The Pathos of Distance (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913). Nietzsche, Friedrich, On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Nordau, Max, Degeneration (1892), Degeneration by Max Simon Nordau, free e-book at Project Gutenberg, www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/51161 (accessed 2 June 2019). Rabaté, Jean-Michel, ‘Gender and modernism: The Freewoman, The Freewoman (1911–12), The New Freewoman (1913), and The Egoist (1914–19)’, in Peter Brooker  and Andrew Thacker (eds), The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 269–89. —, (ed.), 1922: Literature, Culture, Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Schwab, Arnold, James Gibbons Huneker: Critic of the Seven Arts (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1963). Sherry, Vincent, Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Steele, Valerie Steele, Paris Fashion: A Cultural History (New York: Bloomsbury, rev. edn, 2017).

16 The paradox and promise of the ‘new’ French Modernist Studies Susan Stanford Friedman

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his book, 1913: The year of French modernism, ably edited by Effie Rentzou and André Benhaïm, simultaneously constellates French breakthroughs in a range of artistic media around the year 1913 and announces the formation of a new field: French Modernist Studies. The volume demonstrates the vibrancy of this new scholarly formation by the interdisciplinary confluence of scholars working on a wide range of genres and media joined by their connection to France –  especially Paris – and the year 1913. Criticism produced in relative isolation coalesces here into a shared discourse – whether on Marcel Proust or Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky or Guillaume Apollinaire, Marcel Duchamp or Stéphane Mallarmé. And the writers, artists, film-makers, musicians and dancers, who never thought of themselves as a part of a single school or movement, are also brought into a common cultural field of aesthetic production by a volume that appears just over one hundred years later. This, I want to emphasize, is quite an achievement, and an important one. But as a site of great promise, it is also filled with paradox. While applauding the volume’s significance, I also want to sound a cautionary note by raising some questions which the newly coherent field of French Modernist Studies might want to address in future work. Paradox 1: Is France central or peripheral to Modernist Studies? The first paradox is that French Modernist Studies is only coming into existence long after the field of Modernist Studies in general has recognized the generative impact of French artists and writers and of Paris itself



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on the formations of modernism in the early twentieth century. Paris, as a great cultural magnet of avant-gardism, drew aspiring artists and writers from many parts of the world into its vortex of c­ reativity – Pablo Picasso from Spain; James Joyce and Samuel Beckett from Ireland; Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, H. D. and Josephine Baker from the United States; Tristan Tzara from Romania and Switzerland; Igor Stravinsky from Russia; Aimé Césaire from Martinique; and so forth. There were, of course, other cities that became sites of radical aesthetic ­transformations – Malcolm Bradbury calls them the great ‘culture capitals’ of modernism. But as Cyrena N. Pondrom’s The Road from Paris: French Influence on English Poetry, 1900–1920 documented long ago, in 1974, the centrality of French literature and art on the formations of modernism, especially on writers working in English, was foundational. Within standard histories of modernism, the year 1913 has no special status. Indeed, the trajectory of modernism is often said to begin with Charles Baudelaire in the 1850s and 1860s, especially Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil) and Le Peintre de la vie moderne (The Painter of Modern Life).1 For some, Gustave Flaubert’s fiction represents the beginning of the modernist novel; for others it was the radical break with realism in painting produced by the impressionists’ experiments with representing light, to be followed by fauvism, then cubism. Virginia Woolf ’s oft-cited assertion that ‘on or about December 1910 human character changed’ coincided with the Post-Impressionist Exhibition in Paris in 1910, a significant influence on Woolf, especially through the art criticism of her Bloomsbury friend Roger Fry.2 Long before 1913, then, writers and artists located in France constituted an avant-garde of what came to be called modernism –  at least in the minds of the scholars who named something called ‘modernism’ long afterwards. Given the propensity of many in Modernist Studies to date the beginnings of modernism to the second half of the nineteenth century, centred in France and spreading beyond its borders, the call for a French Modernist Studies based in the annus mirabilis of 1913 seems odd. Beyond focalizing through the year 1913, it is worth asking what might be an effective and useful narrative of French modernism that engages with the origins of French modernity and its aesthetic expressions, at least from the mid-nineteenth well into the early twentieth century? Paradox 2: Does the focal year 1913 open or close doors? The second paradox centres on the mode and methods of literary history that 1913: The year of French modernism represents. The attractions of using a

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single, richly productive year to open up a whole range of writers, artists and intellectuals breaking the boundaries of conventional representation are compelling. Certainly, Michael North in Reading 1922: Return to the Scene of the Modern (2001) effectively examined 1922, the year that produced Ulysses and The Waste Land, along with the opening of King Tut’s tomb in Egypt and the flowering of the Harlem Renaissance in the United States. A magnetic year, like 1922 in Anglo-modernism, or 1913 in French modernism, has the great benefit of a strong focal point to begin discussions that can go far afield. 1913: The year of French modernism accomplishes this centripetal/centrifugal mode of literary and aesthetic history beautifully, circulating around as the volume does the generative figures of Proust and Apollinaire, for example, and offering more systematic and coherent narratives of the evolving French scene – rather than what the editors have termed a ‘hopscotch’ approach jumping from isolated figure to figure. Especially admirable is the volume’s reach beyond the literary into the visual arts – painting, film, photography and dance – an achievement not evident in North’s single-authored book or in any number of edited volumes and introductions to modernism in which literature takes the main stage.3 And yet there are dangers in this intense focalization of space and time into a single year, 1913, and a single space, France – even, Paris. French Modernist Studies comes into being at a time when the national paradigm for literary study has been fading, even in its institutional forms, as language departments merge, as the reformulated field of world literature gains momentum, and as nation-state fields morph into regional and global studies – for example, American Studies encompassing the Atlantic, the Hemispheric, Pacific Rim and most recently the Archipelagic in the Caribbean and Oceania –  and as global linguistic fields expand into such areas as Francophonie, Lusophone, Sinophone, and Anglophone as a result of the achievements of postcolonial studies. A special issue of PMLA opened the twenty-first century with a call for literary studies to respond to the new age of globalization,4 while Paul Jay finished the first decade with a map of the new transnationalism in Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies. Pascale Casanova’s La République mondiale des lettres (1999) (The Republic of Letters, 2004) examined the far-flung writers of the Francophone world. Haun Saussy’s Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization (2006) moved far afield from comparative literature’s origins in European literature to engage with postcolonialism, terrorism and the all-too-often ignored literatures of the so-called periphery.



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Question 1: Is French Modernist Studies ‘transnational’? Modernist Studies, as a field that grew exponentially after the formation of the US-based Modernist Studies Association (MSA) in 1999, has increasingly reflected the impact of the new global approaches to literature and the arts, even as it has been heavily focused on the Anglophone literary world from about 1890 through the 1940s.5 This new work has transformed the ‘old internationalism’ with which modernism was long associated with new transnational approaches influenced by postcolonial studies, the global turn across the fields of cultural studies, and the intensified globalization linked to the digital revolution of the late twentieth century. Drawing on new anthropological and geographical concepts of global circulation, transnational cultural traffic, conjuncturalism and network theory, volumes such as Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity (Doyle and Winkiel) and Geographies of Modernism (Brooker and Thacker) paved the way in 2005 for the massive Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms (Wollaeger) in 2012 and The Modernist World in 2015 (Ross and Lindgren). French modernism, it should be noted, has had little visibility in these volumes, as the main effort was dedicated to moving beyond the national paradigm and the exclusively European focus of such early seminal volumes as Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane’s Modernism: A Guide to European Literature, 1890–1930 (1976) or Marshall Berman’s All That Is Solid Melts into Air (1982). In a widely cited 2009 essay in PMLA, Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz characterized ‘the new modernist studies’ as having expanded along three axes: the spatial, the temporal and the vertical.6 They dubbed the spatial expansions ‘the transnational turn’ in Modernist Studies.7 Where is the newly named French Modernist Studies in the context of this transnational turn? Christopher Bush’s chapter in this volume, ‘A modernism that has not yet been: Untimely Segalen’, provides an important model for a transnational turn in French Modernist Studies. As he points out, Victor Segalen raises key questions of what constitutes ‘French’ in French modernism.8 In a transnational and colonial/postcolonial context, does ‘French’ signify the language of French modernism? Or, does it signal an ethnicity? A citizenship? Does it assume ‘the Hexagon’ or does it incorporate French colonies and post-­colonies – the some fiftyseven member states and governments that constitute the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie? What about the various forms of creole French, or even non-standard French, such as Aimé Césaire’s deliberate play with different Frenches in his Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1939)? What about Archipelagic French cultures in the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean or Oceania? What exactly does ‘Francophonie’ connote

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and how might worldwide Francophone arts and letters relate to ‘French modernism?’ What happens to French Modernist Studies if figures like Césaire (Martinique), Léopold Senghor (Senegal) and Frantz Fanon (Martinique) are placed at the centre instead of the periphery? Or, for that matter, what impact do the national cultures of origin have on the formation of French modernism for such key Parisian figures as Pablo Picasso (Spain), Tristan Tzara (Romania), Sonia Delaunay (Ukraine) and Marc Chagall (Lithuania)? Recognizing ways in which French post-structuralist theory of the 1960s to 1980s represents early twentiethcentury modernism flowing into the discourse of philosophy, what is ‘French’ about Jacques Derrida (Algeria), Hélène Cixous (Algeria) and Julia Kristeva (Bulgaria)? Transnationalizing French Modernist Studies does not mean abandoning such key figures as Proust, Apollinaire, Duchamp, Bergson or Braque in favour of people born outside the Hexagon. I have suggested instead four different methods for developing a planetary approach to Modernist Studies: re-vision; recovery; circulation; collage.9 By re-vision, I mean a return with new eyes – new questions – to the familiar figures of Modernist Studies. In the case of French modernism, Proust would of course be central, as he is in 1913: The year of French modernism, along with Apollinaire, Mallarmé and Duchamp. As with figures like Joyce and Woolf, Pound and Eliot in Anglophone Modernist Studies, these well-studied French figures can be approached anew, with questions of how the global is always already implicated in the local. Baudelaire’s The Painter in Modern Life provides a telling example. Typically, attention to this essay focuses on his famous observation about modernity, based on the ‘modern’ artist’s observations wandering through Paris: ‘Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable’ (La modernité, c’est le transitoire, le fugitif, le contingent, la moitié de l’art, dont l’autre moitié est l’éternel et l’immuable).10 But why not pay serious attention to Baudelaire’s fascination with the modern painter’s extensive sketches of soldiers in the Crimea, the battle scenes of Scutari and Balaclava, the Turkish hospitality in the residence of Omar Pasha at Shumlaor, the festivals of Bairam, or the Turkish women with veiled faces? Baudelaire found in these sketches an odd disjuncture between the European and ‘the oriental’, an artistic sensibility of clashing worlds that also embodied for him ‘modernity’.11 Recovery is an archaeological methodology, one that could dig up figures from inside or outside France who have been forgotten, ignored or not read in relation to French modernism: not only Segalen, but writers and artists from within the Hexagon – e.g. women – and around the



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Francophone cultural landscape. Françoise Lionnet, for example, has put Francophone writers from the Indian Ocean in dialogue with writers from France – especially Baudelaire – and the Francophone Caribbean in two 2012 books published in Mauritius.12 Circulation is a method based in mobility – the movement of the creators and their creations as they interact with, influence and are influenced by others. Concepts of global cultural traffic (Appadurai), transculturation (Clifford; Tsing), networks (Deleuze and Guattari; Glissant), hybridity (Bhabha), enmeshment (Ramazani) and indigenization (Friedman) have been adapted to Modernist Studies to trace large-scale cultural flows and specific instances of adaptations based on the mobility of peoples and cultural forms. David Damrosch’s What Is World Literature? (2003) adapted these circulation theories to the study of global literatures throughout history, but his approach is usable for a focus on Modernist Studies, particularly if aesthetic travels are more broadly contextualized historically. With some significant integration of Francophonie, Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih’s Minor Transnationalism (2005) and The Creolization of Theory (2011), provide excellent examples of the circulation method, as do Eric Hayot’s Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel (2003) and Christopher Bush’s Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media (2010). Collage involves a comparative methodology itself influenced by early twentieth-century art, including especially Dadaism. It involves juxtaposing artists or writers from very different locations in the world to see what kind of new theories or perspectives might emerge, as I did, for example, in reading Césaire’s Cahier alongside Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée.13 Francophonie figures centrally and ambivalently in both long poems; read together, the collage produces a new concept of diasporic modernism in which the return ‘home’ to a painful past is a precondition of rebirth, a pattern at odds with the exilic modernism represented by so many expatriates like Joyce, Pound, Tzara and Picasso.14 Question 2: Will the literary history methods of French Modernist Studies be ‘old’ or ‘new’? Transnationalizing Modernist Studies is but one of the newer methods that have transformed the field. As the ‘new’ French Modernist Studies continues to develop, I would urge even more broadly that it avoid reproducing the older methodologies of literary history that have come under such critique in the past thirty years. I refer especially to the way Modernist Studies was initially established based in many forms of exclusion. Bradbury and McFarlane’s Modernism, for example, included only

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three women writers –  Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson – in its twenty-seven-page glossary of key modernist figures. They chastised Stein for ‘falsifying central modernist principles’ and ‘for her underlying simplicity’, and Woolf for her ‘domesticated modernism’ with ‘shrill undertones of disturbance and terror, dark insights undoubtedly related to her suicide’.15 The Harlem Renaissance had no significant presence at all in Modernist Studies until the publication of Houston Baker’s Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (1987), a path-breaking book that helped to establish the pluralization of modernisms emerging out of divergent modernities, especially after Paul Gilroy’s influential The Black Atlantic (1993) articulated the different temporalities of racially inflected modernities. Where do women figure in 1913: The year of French modernism? What about race and figures from French colonies around the world? Why are they largely absent? At the very least, Stein and Josephine Baker, as expatriates living and working in Paris, could be included, introducing the complexity of what constitutes ‘French’ in French modernism: language? citizenship? birth? residence (intermittent or permanent)? cultural sensibility? I am suggesting, in other words, that French Modernist Studies resist some of the common pitfalls of literary history based on the principles of inclusion/exclusion that I have characterized as the binary, the circle and the metonym.16 Binary literary history establishes a fixed border between inside and outside the modernist canon: writers, artists or texts as ‘modernist’ versus those ‘not modernist’. Such definitions reflect the hermeneutic circle whereby the archive with which the literary historian begins functions as the basis for a definition of modernism, a circularity that produces the kind of exclusions that kept so many women, racial minorities and far-flung colonial subjects out of the modernist canons. The metonymic method gravitates to a select few great figures who come to stand for modernism itself –  a Joyce or a Proust, for example. The undeniably generative and forever fascinating greatness of such figures makes it very tempting to define a whole era through their work. But doing so ignores the heterogeneity of modernisms, both within the West and beyond. For all that many introductions to modernism resort to these limiting definitional approaches – binary, circular, metonymic17 – the field itself of Modernist Studies is much more eclectic today. As far back as the 1970s, feminist critics interjected women, gender, sexuality, race and class into Modernist Studies, evident in Bonnie Kime Scott’s anthologies The Gender of Modernism (1990) and Gender in Modernism (2007) and most recently in the formation of a vibrant new journal, Feminist Modernist



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Studies (2018–). Like the various anthologies of global modernisms, Mao and Walkowitz’s Bad Modernisms (2006) exhibits the creative variety of modernisms widely under discussion – vernacular, working class, queer, popular, red, and so forth. The dynamically diverse annual MSA conferences adapt many cutting-edge fields to Modernist Studies –  from environmental studies, animal studies, sexuality and trans studies, and disability studies, to popular culture, mass and media studies. Sean Latham and Gayle Rogers’s Modernism: Evolution of an Idea (2015) updates Ástráður Eysteinsson’s The Concept of Modernism (1990) with a narrative of the changes in the field that casts a very wide net. New introductions to the field like Laura Winkiel’s Modernism: The Basics (2017) avoid the absence or ghettoization of women, racial and sexual minorities, and post/colonial modernists with integrated and diverse archives. Journals like Modernism/Modernity (with an additional print/plus platform), Modernist Cultures and Feminist Modernist Studies reflect the expansive ‘new’ Modernist Studies; all, I wager, would benefit greatly by contributions from the new French Modernist Studies.18 As Modernist Studies has become more transnational and diverse methodologically, the field has moved ever further away from the earliest definitions of modernism as a recognizably experimental aesthetic style within a clearly delineated historical period. Paul Saint-Amour’s special issue of Modernism/Modernity on Weak Theory (2018) – along with the many iterations of print/plus commentary on the issue (2018–2019) – ­demonstrates the oceanic drift of the field beyond its narrow origins. Where, I wonder, will the new French Studies position itself within this shifting and fluid field, especially given the undeniably central role that Paris played in early twentieth-century European modernism? For sure, the ‘crisis of representation’ that Pericles Lewis designated as an early twentieth-century phenomenon produced styles that ruptured conventional modes of narrative, poetic and visual representation associated with avant-garde movements like cubism, imagism, vorticism, futurism, Dadaism, surrealism, and so forth. Experiments in fiction and film introduced new modes of narrative still with us today. But the aesthetic forms now coming under the rubric of modernism are far more varied than the experiments often called ‘high modernism’ of the early twentieth century. Increasingly, it is the varied forms of ‘modernity’ – in the plural – that provide the framework for the study of the different aesthetic forms of multiple and global modernisms. The periodizing bookends of early Modernist Studies were never fixed or consistent in any case. As I have argued, the invocations of Baudelaire as the starting point of modernism existed uneasily side by side with start dates of 1914 or 1890 and the tendency to see modernism

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as an early twentieth-century phenomenon. The end dates of 1930 or 1940 or 1945 have also blurred, with scholars in Modernist Studies now conceiving the period as ‘the long twentieth century’, seeing continuities across the decades, especially as the term postmodernism has faded in significance in the face of the new modernities of the twenty-first century. Would, I wonder, the Nouveau Roman of the 1950s, especially with Alain Robbe-Grillet and Marguerite Duras, find a home in the new French Modernist Studies? What continuities would be traced –  as François Lyotard does in The Postmodern Condition – between early twentiethcentury avant-gardes and the post-structuralist philosophies of Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray? The rise of postcolonial studies also changed Modernist Studies profoundly, as critics began realizing that consideration of colonial and postcolonial modernities was an integral part of the story of early ­twentieth-century European modernisms. By 2017, Aarthi Vadde in Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism Beyond Europe, 1914–2016 could uncontroversially identify modernist forms over a hundred-year period – from Joyce, Claude McKay and George Lamming to Michael Ondaatje and Zadie Smith. I have argued that positing the end date of modernism in 1940 is like trying to hear one hand clapping.19 Colonialism was centrally constitutive of European and American modernities before the First World War; the emergence of the colonized in the wake of the Second World War is part of the same story. What kind of modernisms emerged out of the colonized and newly liberated parts of the world? Césaire invented the term Négritude in Cahier, published in 1939 after he left Paris for good and based himself permanently in Martinique. But his years in Paris and  ­ association with André Breton and surrealism were woven into his poem, which constitutes a declaration of independence from France, written in his brand of modified French. For sure, the intellectuals and artists of the Caribbean, including, of course, Fanon, are central to the story of French modernism. How will French Modernist Studies encompass the multiple modernities and their modernisms in French Indochina, Algeria, West Africa or the Indian Ocean archipelagos? Question 3: What theoretical frameworks might be the most productive for French Modernist Studies? As French Modernist Studies continues to develop, I would urge the field to consider the implications of different theoretical frameworks for



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doing literary history. Two opposing models closely tied to French or France are those of Casanova in La République mondiale des lettres (1999) and Édouard Glissant in Poétique de la relation (1990) (Poetics of Relation, 1997). Although French language and culture figure centrally in their work, and although both cast a wide, transnational and relational net, they could not be more different. Casanova’s influential and exhaustive discussion of global twentieth-century literature posits a ‘world literary space’ in which all roads lead into and out of Paris. She presumes a ‘republic of letters’ that is ‘independent of political boundaries’, that operates on a Wallersteinian centre/periphery model of power but one that is distinct from economic and political forces outside the realm of literature. Drawing on a wide panoply of writers in and outside France, she identifies ‘the laws that govern this strange and immense republic [of letters] – a world of rivalry, struggle, and inequality’, a kind of literary survival of the fittest in which Paris is the undisputed winner.20 ‘The key to understanding how this literary world operates’, she insists, ‘lies in recognizing that its boundaries, its capitals, its highways, and its forms of communication do not completely coincide with those of the political and economic world’.21 In her ‘republic of letters’, ‘Paris became the capital of the literary world, the city endowed with the greatest literary prestige on earth’.22 Just as Wallerstein posits post-1500 Europe as the centre of the world-system, to which the periphery and semi-periphery are bound, so Casanova names Paris the defining centre of world literature in the twentieth century. In contrast, Édouard Glissant, based in Martinique, theorizes relationality entirely differently. He challenges what he sees as a ‘stubborn resistance’ of French to recognize its desire to ‘discover the world and dominate it’.23 He identifies French modernity –  and specifically Baudelaire – with a ‘poetics of depth’ that moves not ‘out into the world but toward the abysses man carries within himself ’.24 In opposition, he draws on his Caribbean experience to posit an archipelagic model of relationality, one in which creolization replaces the dominance of a single language, one in which poetics is always imbricated into the general history of power. He advocates a rhizomic, planetary ‘aesthetics of the earth’, a créolité that represents the principle of linguistic differences in mixture: the contact zones of encounter, linkages, interconnections – a poetics of multilingual relation based in the continual play of multiple vernaculars.25 Instead of seeing Paris or French as the defining centre of the world’s peripheries, Glissant asks for a planetary consciousness that traces the vast networks of multiple centres and their interconnections: the aesthetics of relation within the broader patterns of history,

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especially the history of violence, enslavement and liberation. Instead of the ‘single root’ of nationalist histories, Glissant asks for recognition that ‘the whole world is becoming an archipelago and becoming creolized’.26 ‘Modernity’ for him includes not only the suffering of victimization but also ‘the knowledge of other civilizations that enriches our own … the knowledge of foreign languages, which bends and changes our way of using our native language … an enormous magma of possibilities for the artist and the writer’.27 For the new French Modernist Studies, which relationality will be the most fruitful? The Gallocentrism of Casanova or the planetary créolité of Glissant? Notes  1. See Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, pp. 4–5; Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air, pp. 131–71; Ástráður Eysteinsson, Concept of Modernism, p. 166; Dilip Parameshwar Goankar, ‘On alternative modernities’, pp. 3–6; Pericles Lewis, Cambridge Introduction to Modernism, p. 2; Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide, pp. 1–47.  2. Virginia Woolf, ‘Character in fiction’, p. 421.  3. See, for example, Peter Brooker et al. (eds), Oxford Handbook of Modernisms; Mark Wollaeger (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms; Lewis, Cambridge  Introduction to Modernism; Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide; among many others. Bonnie Kime Scott’s Gender in Modernism and Stephen Ross and Allana C. Lindren’s The Modernist World are exceptions, including substantial essays on other media, although literature remains the central focus.  4. Giles Gunn (ed.), ‘Introduction: Globalizing Literary Studies’.  5. MSA has worked hard to make its journal and annual conferences incorporate other literary languages, arts and interdisciplinary approaches. Other modernist studies associations formed in Britain (BAMS: British Association for Modernist Studies), Europe (EAM: European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies) and Australia (AMSN: Australian Modernist Studies Network).  6. Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, ‘The new modernist studies’.  7. See Jessica Berman’s ‘Practicing transnational feminist recovery work today’, a trenchant critique based on the erasure of what might be called ‘the gender turn’ in Mao and Walkowitz’s discussion of changes in the field.  8. For an important discussion of what is ‘French’, see Charles Forsdick, ‘What’s “French” about French studies?’  9. See Susan Stanford Friedman, Planetary Modernisms, pp. 76–8. 10. Charles Baudelaire, The Painter in Modern Life, in Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Artists, p. 403.



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11. Ibid., pp. 409–18. 12. Françoise Lionnet, Ecritures féminines et dialogues critiques; Lionnet, Le Su et l’incertain. 13. Friedman, Planetary Modernisms, pp. 283–309. 14. I use this strategy of collage in reading other modernist pairs –  Joseph Conrad and Tayeb Salih; E. M. Forster and Arundhati Roy; the Tagores and Virginia Woolf (Friedman, Planetary Modernisms, pp. 215–82). For other transnational comparative methodologies in Modernist Studies, see, for example, Berman and Christopher GoGwilt, Passage of Literature. 15. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (eds), Modernism: A Guide to European Literature, 1890–1930, pp. 636, 639. 16. See Friedman, Planetary Modernisms, pp. 38–44. 17. See, for example, Nicholls’s Modernisms (1995), which sequesters most women writers into a chapter called, ‘At a tangent: other modernisms’; the second edition (2009) of his useful guide adds a chapter on ‘African-American modernism’, but both women and blacks remain basically segregated from his account of different movements within modernism. 18. I stress here the newer methods of literary history, but I have also written about the tendencies in the field to hold on to older, more restrictive approaches, especially in the periodization of modernism. See Friedman, Planetary Modernisms, pp. 47–80 and ‘Alternatives to periodization’. For particularly insistent defences of conventional periodization, see David James and Urmila Seshagiri, ‘Metamodernism’; Richard Begam and Michael Valdez-Moses (eds), Modernism, Postcolonialism, Globalism. 19. Friedman, Planetary Modernisms, pp. 88–91. 20. Pascale Casanova, World Republic of Letters, p. 4. 21. Ibid., p. 11. 22. Ibid., p. 24. 23. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, p. 23. 24. Ibid., p. 24. 25. Ibid., p. 73. 26. Édouard Glissant, ‘Concusion: Unforeseeable diversity’, p. 290. 27. Ibid., p. 295.

Works cited Appadurai, Arjun, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). Baker, Houston A., Jr, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Baudelaire, Charles, The Painter in Modern Life, in Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Artists, trans. P. E. Charvet (London: Penguin, 1972), pp. 390–435. —, The Flowers of Evil, trans. Richard Howard (Brighton: Harvester, 1982).

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Begam, Richard, and Michael Valdez-Modes (eds), Modernism, Postcolonialism, Globalism: Anglophone Literature, 1950 to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). Berman, Jessica, Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics, and Transnational Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). —, ‘Practicing transnational feminist recovery work today’, Feminist Modernist Studies, 1:2 (2018), 9–21. Berman, Marshall, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin, 2nd edn, 1988). Bhabha, Homi K., The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). Bradbury, Malcolm, ‘The cities of modernism’, in Bradbury and McFarlane (eds), Modernism: A Guide to European Literature, 1890–1930, pp. 96–104. Bradbury, Malcolm, and James McFarlane (eds), Modernism: A Guide to European Literature, 1890–1930 (London: Penguin Books, 1976). Brooker, Peter, and Andrew Thacker (eds), Geographies of Modernism: Literatures, Cultures, Spaces (London: Routledge, 2005). —, et al. (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Bush, Christopher, Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Calinescu, Matei, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2nd edn, 1987). Casanova, Pascale, La République mondiale des lettres (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1999). Translated into English as The World Republic of Letters by Malcolm B. De Bevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). Césaire, Aimé, ‘Notebook of a return to the native land’, in Aimé Césaire: The Collected Poetry, trans. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 34–85. Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung, Dictée (Berkeley, CA: Third Woman, 1982). Clifford, James, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). Damrosch, David, What is World Literature? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Colan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). Doyle, Laura, and Laura Winkiel (eds), Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005). Eysteinsson, Ástráður, The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990). Forsdick, Charles, ‘What’s “French” about French studies?’ Nottingham French Studies, 54:3 (2015), 312–27. Friedman, Susan Stanford, ‘Alternatives to periodization: Literary history, modernism, and the “new” temporalities’, Modern Language Quarterly, 8:4 (2019), 379–402.



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—, Planetary Modernisms: Provocations of Modernity Across Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). Gilroy, Paul, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). Glissant, Édouard, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). First published as Poétique de la relation in 1990. —, ‘Conclusion: The unforeseeable diversity of the world’, trans. Haun Saussy, in Elisabeth Mudimbe-Goyi (ed.), Beyond Dichotomies: Histories, Identities, Cultures, and the Challenge of Globalization (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), pp. 287–95. Goankar, Dilip Parameshwar, ‘On alternative modernities’, in Dilip Parameshwar Goankar (ed.), Alternative Modernities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), pp. 1–23. GoGwilt, Christopher, The Passage of Literature: Genealogies of Modernism in Conrad, Rhys, and Pramoedya (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Gunn, Giles (ed.), ‘Introduction: Globalizing Literary Studies’, in ‘Globalizing Literary Studies’, special issue, PMLA, 116:1 (January 2001), 16–31. Hayot, Eric, Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003). James, David, and Urmila Seshagiri, ‘Metamodernism: Narratives of continuity and revolution’, PMLA, 129:1 (2014), 87–100. Jay, Paul, Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010). Latham, Sean, and Gayle Rogers, Modernism: Evolution of an Idea (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Lewis, Pericles, The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Lionnet, Françoise, Ecritures féminines et dialogues critiques: Subjectivité, genre et ironie / Women Writing and Critical Dialogues: Subjectivity, Gender and Irony (Mauritius: L’Atelier d’écriture, 2012). —, Le Su et l’incertain: Cosmopolitiques créole de l’océan Indien / The Known and the Uncertain: Creole Cosmopolitics of the Indian Ocean (Mauritius: l’Atelier d’écriture, 2012). — and Shu-mei Shih (eds), Minor Transnationalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). —, The Creolization of Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). Lyotard, Jean-François, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). Mao, Douglas, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, ‘The new modernist studies’, PMLA, 123:3 (2008), 737–48. — and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (eds), Bad Modernisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). Nicholls, Peter, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2nd edn, 2009).

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North, Michael, Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Pondrom, Cyrena N., The Road from Paris: French Influence on English Poetry, ­1900–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974). Ramazani, Jahan, A Transnational Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). Ross, Stephen, and Allana C. Lindren (eds), The Modernist World (London: Routledge, 2015) Saint-Amour, Paul (ed.), ‘Weak Theory’, special issue, Modernism/Modernity, 25.3 (September 2018). Saussy, Haun (ed.), Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). Scott, Bonnie Kime (ed.), The Gender of Modernism: An Anthology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990). —, Gender in Modernism: New Geographies, Complex Intersections (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007). Tsing, Anna L., Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). Vadde, Aarthi, Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism Beyond Europe, 1914–2016 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). Wallerstein, Immanuel, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). Winkiel, Laura, Modernism: The Basics (London: Routledge, 2017). Wollaeger, Mark, with Matt Eatough (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Woolf, Virginia, ‘Character in fiction’, in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3: ­1919–1924, ed. Andrew McNeille (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988).

Index

Note: with the exception of periodicals, literary and artistic works can be found under authors’ names; ‘n.’ after a page reference indicates the number of a note on that page. abstract art see abstraction abstraction 44, 63, 99, 124, 163, 176, 177, 180, 197, 222, 224, 225, 231, 232, 254, 259, 264–5, 285, 289, 294n.7 Adorno, Theodor W. 10, 12, 59, 68 Agamben, Giorgio 112–13 Alain-Fournier 18 Le Grand Meaulnes 2, 109, 123, 124, 145, 146, 148, 150–8, 167 Allain, Marcel 54, 56, 61, 62–3, 64 see also Fantômas Apollinaire, Guillaume 1–2, 3, 7, 15, 19, 94–5, 96–7, 98–9, 102, 131, 135, 137, 173–84, 197, 198, 220, 224, 225, 237, 239, 240, 279, 303, 310, 312, 314 Alcools 2, 3, 109, 165 ‘Zone’ 1, 20, 33, 36, 98, 183, 226, 230 Calligrammes 101–2, 139, 197 Les Peintres cubistes 2, 96, 173–5, 277–9 ‘L’esprit nouveau et les poètes’ 7, 88–9, 212 arrière-garde 17, 31, 93, 109–8, 181, 194 Artaud, Antonin 15, 142n.35 Atget, Eugène 18, 72–85 Les Fortifications de Paris 30, 72–7, 83 Les Zoniers 2, 30, 72, 75–7, 83, 84

Auric, Georges 7 Aurier, Albert 6 avant-garde 3, 7, 8, 15, 17, 18, 22n.28, 29, 30, 31, 54, 58, 84, 88–103, 109–18, 124, 135, 173–4, 175, 178, 181, 183, 194, 198, 220, 221, 232, 238, 284, 304, 307–8, 311, 317, 318 see also arrière-garde; neo-avant-garde Baker, Josephine 311, 316 Bakst, Léon 256, 300–1 Balzac, Honoré de 34, 148, 164 Banville, Théodore de 256 Barrès, Maurice 109, 303 Barthes, Roland 12, 318 Baudelaire, Charles 2, 3, 8, 9, 12, 15, 29, 146, 148, 169, 225, 303, 304, 308, 311, 314, 315, 317, 319 Beckett, Samuel 15, 146, 148, 204, 311 belle époque 35, 55, 57, 58, 59, 61, 83 Benda, Julien 211 Benjamin, Walter 58, 59, 80–3 Bergson, Henri 30, 58, 95, 198, 201–3, 204, 205, 207, 208, 210, 211, 212, 300, 303, 314 Bernard, Jean-Marc 113, 116, 240 Binet, René 33, 205, 212

326

index

Birot, Pierre-Albert 137 BLAST 90–3 Blaue Reiter 176–7 Bloy, Léon 238 Boccioni, Umberto 93, 94, 95, 96 Bocquet, Léon 240 Boulez, Pierre 237 Boutroux, Émile 203–4 Brâncuși, Constantin 179 Braque, Georges 8, 83, 181, 183, 225, 276–9, 282, 293n.1, 314 Breton, André 6–7, 137, 142n.35, 165, 318 Breuil, Henri 39, 41, 42, 51n.40 bruitism 182 Brunschvicg, Léon 204, 212 Camus, Albert 15, 19, 113 Canudo, Ricciotto 175 Cendrars, Blaise 15, 36, 48, 135, 175, 212, 229, 239 Prose du Transsibérien 2, 33–4, 99–102, 109, 146–7, 181–2, 193, 194, 197, 209, 220–32, 254, 261–3 centre/periphery 4–5, 10–11, 17–8, 22n.28, 29, 30–1, 88–91, 94–5, 102–4, 123–4, 135, 139, 142n.31, 174, 310–11, 314, 319–20 Césaire, Aimé 15, 19, 311, 313, 314, 315, 318 Cézanne, Paul 178, 306 Chagall, Marc 124, 173–5, 181, 183–4, 314 Chanel, Coco 300–2, 307 Changshuo, Wu 133, 141n.21 Chavanne, Puvis de 256 Chevillard, Eric 35 Chevreul, Michel-Eugène 96, 223 Chide, Alphonse 202–3 Clair, Jean 211 Clair, René 83 classical renaissance see renaissance classique classicism 110, 113, 117 Claudel, Paul 131, 132, 137, 145, 241 Clouard, Henri 110–18 Cocteau, Jean 5, 113, 165 Codreano, Lizica 264 Copeau, Jacques 164, 167, 240, 242–3

Cortázar, Julio 56, 69 see also Fantômas cosmopolitanism 18, 37, 90, 92, 135, 139, 142n.31 see also internationality; provincialism; transnationalism Couchoud, Paul-Louis 137 Courbet, Gustave 8 Cravan, Arthur 135, 239 Cros, Charles 200 cubism 6, 7, 8, 13, 19, 35, 93–4, 95, 96, 97, 176, 180, 181, 183, 185n.16, 239, 256, 277–81, 283–4, 291, 306–7, 311, 317 orphic cubism 96, 279 orphism 7, 8, 94, 96, 176, 225 Cuvier, Georges 34 Dada see Dadaism Dadaism 4, 6, 7, 8, 15, 114, 165, 238, 315, 317 Debussy, Claude 5, 131, 243–4, 254, 261 De Chirico, Giorgio 98 decadence 4, 13, 245, 303 Delaunay, Robert 7, 15, 96–7, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178–9, 180, 181, 182, 183, 223, 225, 279–81, 285 Delaunay-Terk, Sonia 2, 19, 99, 135, 147, 181, 194, 197, 220–5, 226, 227, 230–2, 254, 261–4, 314 Deleuze, Gilles 59, 67–8, 198, 200, 315 Der Sturm 96, 97, 174, 175, 177, 180, 185n.12, 221 Derain, André 176, 178, 179 Derrida, Jacques 12, 15, 314, 318 Diaghilev, Sergei Les Ballets Russes 2, 239, 300–1 Dorgelès, Roland 38 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 163, 164 Du Bos, Charles 163, 167 Duchamp, Marcel 2, 3, 8, 15, 17, 179–80, 194, 197–8, 211, 239, 254, 264–9, 289–91, 310, 314 Dufy, Raoul 178 Duhamel, Georges 137, 145, 237 Dujardin, Édouard 242 Duras, Marguerite 35, 132, 318 Dürer, Albrecht 178



index 327

Edison, Thomas 200–1, 208 Einstein, Albert 95, 300 Eliot, Thomas Stearns 3, 237, 304, 307, 308, 312, 314 Éluard, Paul 137 expressionism 7, 185n.12, 186n.20, 232 abstract expressionism 8 Faivre, Abel 183 Fanon, Frantz 314 Fantômas 18, 30, 54–69, 198 Fargue, Léon-Paul 145 fauvism 7, 176, 311 Féjos, Paul 62–3 see also Fantômas Fenollosa, Ernest 133 Feuillade, Louis 2, 54, 57–8, 60, 61, 62, 63, 65, 66, 70n.17, 198 see also Fantômas fin de siècle 80, 131, 244, 304 Flammarion, Camille 193, 199, 200–3, 205, 206, 210, 211–12 Flaubert, Gustave 12, 15, 148, 164, 169, 303, 304, 311 Fokine, Michael 254 France, Anatole 110, 303 Freud, Sigmund 30, 58, 68 Fujita/Foujita, Tsuguharu 132 Fuller, Loie 244, 260 Fusetsu, Nakamura 134, 137 futurism 3, 6, 7, 8, 83, 89–90, 93–7, 101, 102, 111, 114, 135–6, 176, 181, 182, 183, 185n.12, 220, 238, 244, 245, 306, 317 Gans, Christophe 56 see also Fantômas Gauguin, Paul 6, 256, 303 Gaultier, Jules de 131, 208–9, 210, 212 Géraldy, Paul 109 Ghéon, Henri 111, 145, 164, 242 Gide, André 3, 5, 15, 111, 116–17, 145, 151, 153, 155, 239, 240, 241, 242, 304 Les Caves du Vatican 2, 17, 123, 124, 163–70 Les Faux-Monnayeurs 124, 168–70 Giraudoux, Jean 113 Gleizes, Albert 181, 283

Glissant, Édouard 18, 131, 315, 319–20 Gobineau, Arthur de 179 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 153, 154, 157–8, 238 Gómez Carillo, Enrique 136 Goncharova, Natalia 221 Gourmont, Rémy de 131, 197, 210, 241, 244, 303, 304 Gregg, Frederick James 306, 307 Gris, Juan 132, 183 Guêpes (Les) 111, 113 Guyau, Jean-Marie 205–6, 212 haiku 134, 136, 137, 138, 141n.14 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 153, 203, 288 Heidegger, Martin 136, 154 Hughes, Langston 135, 140 Huidobro, Vincente 136 Huneker, James 299, 302–8 Huysmans, Joris-Karl 5, 6, 15, 131, 303, 308 Ibsen, Henrik 303, 304 imagism 132, 317 impressionism 4, 7, 8, 97, 142n.33, 184n.3, 311 abstract impressionism 8 post-impressionism 4, 8, 94, 306, 311 Ionesco, Eugène 15 internationality 88, 89, 90, 95, 97, 102, 104n.11, 135–6, 138, 174, 181, 185n.12 internationalism 18, 174, 313 see also cosmopolitanism; transnationalism Jacob, Max 131, 137 James, William 3, 110, 214n.28 Jarry, Alfred 93, 209 Jourdain, Francis 242 Joyce, James 3, 237, 264, 306, 307, 311, 312, 314, 315, 316, 318 Kahn, Gustave 93 Kandinsky, Wassily 173, 176–7, 180, 182, 183 Kant, Immanuel 6

328

index

Khatibi, Abdelkebir 131 Khebnikov, Velimir 221 Kristeva, Julia 15, 314, 318 Kruchenykh, Alexei 221 Laclos, Choderlos de 164, 169 Lafayette, Madame de La Princesse de Clèves 164, 165, 169 Larbaud, Valery 15, 29, 48 A.O. Barnabooth 36–7, 167 Larionov, Mikhail 178, 185n.15, 221 Lascourrèges, Henry 245 Laurens, Jean-Paul 134 Laurens, Paul Albert 163 Lautréamont, Comte de 15 Léger, Fernand 15, 132, 283 Leymarie, Auguste 74 Lhote, André 145 Lozano, Rafael 136, 142n.35 Lumière, Auguste and Louis 201 Lyotard, François 318 Macke, August, 176, 177 Mallarmé, Stéphane 3, 14, 15, 17, 116–17, 193, 197, 237–46, 252–69, 310, 314 L’Après-midi d’un faune 253, 256–60 Un coup de dés 2, 194–5, 238–42, 244, 253, 261, 267 Man Ray 84 Manet, Édouard 8, 243, 256, 261 Mann, Thomas 124, 148–50, 154 Maran, René 15 Marc, Franz 174, 176, 177, 182–3, 232 Marey, Étienne-Jules 198, 200, 201, 205, 208 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 1, 2, 89–91, 93, 111, 114, 135–6, 182, 220–1, 245, 247n.11 Marsden, Dora 307 Martinville, Édouard-Léon Scott de 200 Matisse, Henri 132, 178, 186n.18, 237, 281–2, 285, 303, 306–7 Mauriac, François 170 Maurras, Charles 110, 112, 113, 115 Meidner, Ludwig 176, 183 Metzinger, Jean 181, 283 Michon, Pierre 35 Milhaud, Darius 15

Mithouard, Adrien 111 Montfort, Eugène 113, 116, 240 Nadar 239 nationalism 30, 88–91, 94, 102, 103, 110, 111, 177–81, 320 see also internationality; patriotism naturalism 4, 6, 68, 124, 163 neo-avant-garde 8 neoclassicism 31, 111, 113, 116, 117, 256 Nerval, Gérard 151, 156–7 New Objectivity 84 New Vision 84 Nietzsche, Friedrich 30, 58, 184n.5, 238, 303, 304, 305–6, 308 Nijinsky, Vaslav 16, 194, 244, 254–9, 261, 264 Nordau, Max 303–4 Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF) 19, 36, 37, 111, 116–18, 137, 145, 164, 165, 194, 238–44 Ozenfant, Amédée 7 Parnasse 116 patriotism 37, 89–90, 92, 111, 146, 176, 225 see also nationalism Patton, Mike 56 see also Fantômas Paulhan, Jean 7, 113, 136–7 Pawlowski, Gaston de 211, 212 Péguy, Charles 113 Peirce, Charles Sanders 206 Péret, Benjamin 239 Picabia, Francis 179, 184, 306, 307 Picasso, Pablo 15, 18, 83, 84, 132, 176, 178, 179, 180, 181, 183, 195, 198, 225, 237, 274–87, 289–93, 303, 306, 307, 310, 311, 314, 315 Poincaré, Raymond 98, 110 Poiret, Paul 284–5, 300, 301 post-structuralism 12, 22n.27, 314, 318 Pound, Ezra 3, 131, 133, 137, 304, 306, 307–8, 311, 314, 315 prehistory 17, 29–30, 33–5, 38–9, 43, 46–7 caves 35, 41–8, 182



index 329

Prévost, Antoine François Manon Lescaut 164, 169 primitivism 173, 175, 177, 178, 179, 254, 302 Proust, Marcel 2, 3, 5, 14, 15, 48, 59, 124, 145, 146, 158, 165, 237, 232, 310, 312, 314, 316 À la recherche du temps perdu 29–30, 33–48, 67–8, 109, 148, 150, 151, 154, 155, 197 Du côté de chez Swann 2, 36, 37–8, 39–42, 43, 44–5, 48, 109, 148, 154, 155, 197 Le Temps retrouvé 36, 42, 46, 47–8, 147 madeleine 39–40, 43–4, 47, 151 provincialism 90, 139, 140 see also centre/periphery; cosmopolitanism Quinn, John 307 Rachilde 239 Ravel, Maurice 239, 243 Raynal, Maurice 198 realism 311 rear-guard see arrière-garde Redon, Odilon 239 renaissance classique 110–13, 115 see also neoclassicism Renger-Patzsch, Albert 82 Revue critique des idées et des livres 111, 113 Ribot, Théodule 207, 209, 210, 212 Richardson, Dorothy 316 Rilke, Rainer Maria 124, 154–5 Rimbaud, Arthur 1, 2, 15, 225, 228 Rivera, Diego 142.n35 Rivière, Jacques 113, 145, 164, 167, 241 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 318 Romains, Jules 239, 244–5 romanticism 31, 111, 112–13, 114, 115, 116, 117, 148, 151–4, 157, 194, 238 Rosny, J.-H. 38–9, 40, 46–7 Rousseau, Henri (Douanier) 84, 178–9, 185n.15 Russolo, Luigi 93, 182 Saint-John Perse 132, 137 Saint-Point, Valentine 244

Sander, August 82 Sartre, Jean-Paul 136 Schiller, Friedrich 153 Schlumberger, Jean 116, 117 Schopenhauer, Arthur 6 Schwob, Marcel 163 Segalen, Victor 15, 16, 18, 48, 123, 124, 127–40, 313, 314, 315 Senghor, Léopold 314 seriality 30, 55–6, 58, 59, 61–3, 67–9, 208, 210 Severini, Gino 93 Shchukin, Sergei 285–6 Shih, Hu 132, 137 Shuzo, Kuki 136 Shūzō, Takiguchi 136 simultaneism 7, 95, 220, 223, 238 simultaneité 30–1, 42, 95–102, 194, 211, 220, 223, 231, 253, 256, 259, 261 simultaneity see simultanéité Souriau, Paul 205, 212 Soupault, Philippe 54 Souvestre, Pierre 54, 56, 57, 61, 62, 64 see also Fantômas Spencer, Herbert 6, 206 Starace, Gino 54 Stein, Gertrude 8, 19, 307, 311, 316 Stendhal 164, 169, 303, 304, 308 Stevenson, Robert Louis 163, 164 Stieglitz, Alfred 179, 306 Stirner, Max 303, 304–5, 307, 308 Stravinsky, Igor 109, 310, 311 Le Sacre du Printemps 2, 19, 109, 254, 300–2 Supervielle, Jules 137 surrealism 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 15, 59, 81, 84, 114, 136, 138, 165, 238, 317, 318 Survage, Leopold 197 symbolism 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 13, 17, 31, 93, 111, 112–13, 116–18, 124, 131, 132, 163, 194, 210, 239, 242, 244, 245, 252, 256 anti-symbolism 113 post-symbolism 6, 118, 206, 210, 211 Tagore, Rabindranath 139 Tarde, Gabriel 203 Thibaudet, Albert 145, 238, 241, 244

330

index

Thiers, Adolphe 72–3 transnationalism 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 123, 124, 135, 140n.1, 312, 313–15, 317, 319 see also cosmopolitanism; internationality Tzara, Tristan 131, 135, 165, 311, 314, 315 universalism 18, 92, 102, 125, 136, 174, 178–9, 180 Valéry, Paul 3, 15, 112, 113, 131, 145, 165, 237, 238, 240, 241 Van Gogh, Vincent 6, 74, 180, 303 Verlaine, Paul 15, 237, 242, 270n.20 Verne, Jules 227 Viélé-Griffin, Francis 111 Visan, Tancrède de 210–11, 212 Vitrac, Roger 7 vorticism 8, 90, 91–3, 317 Wagner, Richard 148, 259, 304 Walden, Herwarth 175, 176, 183–4, 221 Wangshu, Dai 136

war Balkan Wars (1912–13) 89, 136, 139, 174, 182–3 First World War (1914–18) 33, 35, 38, 57, 68, 73, 88, 89, 91, 92, 94, 102, 110, 111, 113, 124, 139, 141n.12, 145, 153, 157, 174, 183–4, 212, 227, 230, 284, 288, 300–1, 306, 308, 318 Franco-Prussian war (1870–71) 111, 200 Great War see First World War Italo-Turkish War (1911–12) 89 Russo-Japanese War (1904–05) 124, 181–2, 227 Second World War (1939–45) 15, 35, 318 Woolf, Virginia 3, 8, 135, 306, 311, 314, 316 Yeats, William Butler 237, 303, 308 Youwei, Kang 133–4 Zola, Émile 6, 164 zone 20, 75–9, 82, 83