Tristan Tzara’s Poetical Visions: Ironic, Oneiric, Heroic

Tristan Tzara is most often associated with Dada, a movement whose influence has often been overlooked. However, Tzara stands out among his peers because of his extensive production of poetical works associated not only with Dada but surrealism and beyond. In all of these texts we see a constant refusal to be complacent about artistic endeavor or the world around us. His Dada texts launch an attack on language by the use of irony and a tension of the text against itself. This internal tension becomes the struggle depicted in his surrealistic epic, L’Homme approximatif, an unfulfilled search for a cosmic language. Tzara’s postwar poetry reflects Tzara’s continuous political commitment as well as his ongoing use of irony and dream imagery in order to attempt to redefine the human situation. His critiques of war, commercialism, language and our relation to the natural world are still relevant in the twenty-first century. This article is available in Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol36/iss1/9 Tristan Tzara’s Poetical Visions: Ironic, Oneiric, Heroic Ruth Caldwell Luther College Tzara and Dada: the two names are linked even phonetically and indeed, anyone who begins to research Tzara finds his name inextricably linked to one of the most powerful artistic movements of the twentieth century. Dada burst upon the European literary scene during World War I in Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire with performances, readings and spectacles designed to shock bourgeois mentalities and question all definitions of literature and art. Its influence has continued today, beyond war protests through happenings, streaking, rock concert histrionics and neo-dada art to a contemporary advertising agency based in Australia called Dada. Surrealism, often seen by linear historians as the successor to Dada, likewise permeates our daily visual and verbal spaces. Many television and print advertisements capitalize on the absurd, unexpected or dream-like imagery of surrealist paintings and texts. The expression “It was surreal” regularly appears in daily news items as the reaction of people to various events. Yet, despite the strong albeit largely unacknowledged influence of these movements on popular culture, the works of Dada and surrealist poets remain relatively in the margins of French literary study. If read at all, these texts are folded into courses on modernism, along with other movements such as expressionism, futurism and cubism. Whereas Tzara followed the same trajectory as many twentieth century poets influenced to varying degrees by all of these movements as well as World War II and its aftermath, he nevertheless rose to a distinctive position. As Mary Ann Caws has pointed out in Approximate Man and Other Writings, Tzara is the only poet who left us a considerable body of both Dada and surrealist texts (6). He is not only one of the founders of Dada, he also authored a 1 Caldwell: Tristan Tzara’s Poetical Visions: Ironic, Oneiric, Heroic Published by New Prairie Press 118 ST&TCL, Volume 36, No. 1 (Winter 2012) recognized surrealist masterpiece (L’Homme approximatif ‘Approximate Man’) and continued publishing poetry until 1961. Authors as varied as Samuel Beckett and Allen Ginsburg or even the group Radiohead have acknowledged his influence.1 While the present article cannot account for all of Tzara’s extensive work, a sampling will highlight a quality that still speaks to us in the twenty-first century: his constant refusal to be complacent, either about artistic endeavor or the world around us. Undeniably, Tzara’s early Dada poetry can be disconcerting. Strings of meaningless syllables, only some of which may be construed to be onomatopoetic, sounds from African languages, arcane scientific and exotic words, which, when taken out of context, lose their meaning, words and images from advertising, and the cacophony produced by simultaneous readings at early Dada manifestations all contributed to a loss of orientation on the part of the reader or spectator. Although Caws has emphasized the circus-like quality of these texts, one might question how amusing they really were. Tzara was reacting violently against long-held values in western civilization and art. Thus his poetry is double-edged: he may be comic, but he also wants to shock and make us uncomfortable with our ways of seeing. His famous recipe for a poem in Dada manifeste sur l’amour faible et l’amour amer (1920) ‘Dada manifesto about weak love and bitter love,’ which involves cutting up random words from a newspaper, refutes all notions of genre and authorship (Oeuvres completes 1: 382).2 One of his poems in Vingt-cinq poemes (1918) ‘Twenty-five poems,’ pays voir blanc ‘country see white,’ (Oeuvres completes 1: 112), is an ironic attack against traditional sonority. The poem begins with a verse whose succession of vowels recalls the play of assonance in the style of Verlaine: “les ors des 10 heures ont brise la mort.” The line could be translated: ‘the golden tints of ten o’clock have broken death.’ However, if ors is taken as a plural conjunction rather than a noun and dix heures is a pun on diseurs, the text becomes: ‘the nows of monologuists [or humorists] have broken death.’ Meanwhile, the rest of the poem shows the destruction of this sonority, particularly in the poem’s ending: “et poursuis les petits hommes dans leur voyelle / poursuis les petits les petits hommes dans leur voyelle” ‘and pursue the little men in their vowel, pursue the little the little men in 2 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, Vol. 36, Iss. 1 [2012], Art. 9 http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol36/iss1/9 DOI: 10.4148/2334-4415.1774