[In the following excerpt, Caws examines the emphasis that Tzara and other Dadaists placed on the reactions of their readers and argues that the audience is "a passenger in Dada's rite of passage."]

This text takes its starting point in the Dada temperament and in what it perceives, as well as the way in which it perceives it, moving from the double and two-way images of Duchamp and Tzara to an apparently closed door, in reality open.¹ The Dada temperament is opposed to closure of all sorts.

From "M. Antipyrine" to "M. AA I'Antiphilosophe," from "M. Anti-psychologue" to "M. Antitête" the antis have it: anti-aspirin, but also anti-head and anti-the-workings-of-the-head, philosophical and psychological: Tzara's approximate man, savage or not, will have none of the noble confessional about him. His self-portraiture is ironic and a put-down: He stutters: "Aa," or then "da-da," and he is given to odd stylistics, half-repetitions, ruptures, and incompletions: "Je me, en décomposant l'horreur, très tard" (Tz, 2:293; I myself, decomposing horror, very late), or, disguising his disorder in the reassuring cliché style of a proverb, even more offputting: "Quand le loup ne craint pas la feuille je me langueur" (Tz, 2:293; When the wolf does not fear the leaf I langor me). Tzara will write later about the "Automatism of Taste" and is, at the time of "M. AA I'anti-philosophe," preparing a one-up on haute couture, which is to say, an haute coupure, cutting and shaking up the elements in some hat or other, making a cutting for a transplant and a sample—a "Treatise on Language," in fact, but the fact is hidden within the body of the "Sluicegates of Thought," a brief manifesto in the Antitête about the "roundness of my half-language." About this language, we had scarcely to be told that it was "invertebrate." The intensity of the temper already stressed may be antipsychological, but there is clearly no question of forgetting the mental mechanism or what contains it. Tzara's incompleted novel is called Faites vos jeux (Place Your Bets) and the play does begin here, but in the head. The last four chapters are entitled "The Surprise Head," "The Tentacle Head," "The Head at the Prow," and, as a resumé, "Tête à Tête." The collection begins with the expression: "le coeur dans le coeur" (the heart in the heart) and ends not with a heart-to-heart chat but a head-to-head summary: this self-portrait is based on an intellectual self-mockery.

Now Dada is a self-regarding movement in moving opposition to its own image and self-image. That there should be a paradox of this kind available is all to the good, for, as we know, Dada and Surrealism flourish on the juxtaposition of contraries: yes and no meeting on streetcorners "like grasshoppers," according to Tzara, and, for Breton, the meeting of high and low, birth and death, absence and presence. Take, for instance, Tzara's "Static poem" (which transforms the words into individuals: "from the four letters 'bois' there appear the forest with the fronds of its trees, the forest-keepers' uniforms and the wild boar; perhaps also a Pension Bellevue or Bella Vista" (Tz, 1:726). Now whatever lovely view there is is enhanced by its own opposition, cheerfully and vigorously stated: "Long live Dadaism in words and images! Long live the world's Dadaist events! To be against this manifesto means to be a Dadaist" (Tz, 1:358). Self-regarding and self-negating, keeping its humor good, Dada keeps it well.

As for the regard of self, one of the most instructive texts "signed by" Rrose Sélavy, herself already the imagined female double of Duchamp as we know, was supposedly written in German by a girlfriend of Man Ray and translated into English, therein entitled, sardonically "Men before the Mirror." The text in this table-turning description is cruel, as one might expect: Rrose Sélavy's adopted text is not directed at a mirrored man, standing for all men, but at men, less general, more sex-specific:

Many a time the mirror imprisons them and holds them firmly. Fascinated they stand in front. They are absorbed, separated from reality and alone with their dearest vice, vanity…. There they stand and stare at the landscape which is themselves, the mountains of their noses, the humps and folds of their shoulders, hands and skin, to which the years have already so accustomed them that they no longer know how they evolved; and the multiple primeval forests of their hair. They meditate, they are content, they try to take themselves in as a whole.²

Already, of course, a woman writing about these men as they are mirrored—whereas in art the woman is usually mirrored—is retracing the gesture of the one and the other, herself and them, in opposition and in fascination; to complicate things further, a woman writer writes of Marcel Duchamp playing Rrose Sélavy playing at being a German girl playing at watching men watching themselves. The self-regarding game is right up Dada's alley, but only the sensitive reader will be bowled over by a direct hit: "The mirror looks at them. They collect themselves. Carefully, as if tying a cravat, they compose their features" (MS, pp. 195-196). The very act of looking as it is seen by the other her or himself creating that self in the act of its own self-regard and self-creation occupies the center of the fascinated gaze.

Since it is Duchamp who reminds us that "It is the OBSERVERS who make the pictures" (MS, p. 173), it is scarcely necessary to point out a certain possible super-sensitivity in the reaction of the female eye to some particularly aggressive images such as, for instance, the famous Mona Lisa inscribed by Duchamp to make a sort of Lady Lisa in hot pants ("L.H.O.O.Q." which is an abbreviation for "Elle a chaud au cul," or she has a hot seat).

As to this self-regarding self, it is rarely at ease: we remember the reflective despair of Jacques Rigaut already quoted: "I consider my most disgraceful trait to be a pitiful disposition: the impossibility of losing sight of myself as I act…. I have never lost consciousness."³ Dada, that ambivalent, bisexual, two-headed delight, contemplates its own visage in some of Ribemont-Dessaignes' artichauds, hot spots for art, or really hot plates, keeping them available on the burner, like a réchaud, to heat and reheat, looking and not looking, in one temper now, and now another: "Dada, o Dada, what a face! so sad as all that? so merry? Look at yourself in the mirror. No, no, don't look at yourself."⁴

Full of doubt, even as to the writing, the narrator of Faites vos jeux laments his inability to step outside the self, or to judge himself more independently. That alone:

is sufficient for me to detest myself, for me to despise my egoism. I am lacking a distance between the characters and the events they give rise to. My criticism is not objective. My readers will never be able to follow me.

(Tz, 1:284)

What is this but a contemplation in the mirror of his own writing? That the woman in the text should be called "Mania," a sort of transformation of a "manie" or obsession predicting Breton's own Nadja, whose obsessed vision inspires our reading of Breton, is not without its own obsessive interest. The entire text of the unentire novel is based on the substitution and the repetition of self and other, and on the fatigue of the reflective game, no matter how fascinating:

Although visibly false, this adventure excited me to such a degree (doubt had already substituted another self for my own) that I left to see her…. But distance had already withered my passion. For the first time I felt fatigue and boredom inhibiting the flow of my speech…. We, the knights of the double-self.

(Tz, 1:290)

This double self, here pictured as tragic, is referred to in an early passage of L Anti-tête (The Antihead) as a sort of Rimbaldian parody, without the tragedy:

Je m'appelle maintenant tu.
Je suis meublée et maison de Paris.
…
Maison de Paris, je suis très belle.
Bien imprimée.
…
Monsieur Aa l'antiphilosophe Je-Tu tue, affirme de
plus en plus que, sans ailes, sans dada, il est comme
il est, que voulez-vous …
(Tz, 1:399)

I am now called you.
I am furnished and a Parisian house.
…
A Parisian house, I am very lovely.
Well printed.

Mr. Aa the antiphilosopher I-You yous, kills,
affirms more and more that, without wings,
without her, without Dada, he is as he is,
What can I tell you …

And yet the knight of the double countenance here leads the game, just as Tzara did in his early role of circustamer. "De mes maux qu'on m'a fait subir" says the narrator of Faites vos jeux (Place Your Bets) which reads: "Of the sufferings I have had to undergo / I am the elegant inspirer"—or then, and I believe we should read it both ways: "Of my words I am the elegant lover," for that animateur, returning to us the "animal" with the "anima," is also an "amateur" (Tz, 1:284).

Amateur, chiefly, of the word and the eye: Ribemont-Dessaignes' "oeil verbe" or "eye word" in the strong sense of that world-creating word: it is on that globe, assuredly, that we should keep our eye. "Sous je," reads one of his titles, literally "Under I," if I may be allowed to profit from the English word play. The spirit of Dada includes plays in all senses and in the most slippery ones, including the game's denial as its own mirror image. Witness Ribemont-Dessaignes' Manifeste avec Huile (Manifest with Oil), a text at play at not-playing.

Dada is no longer a game. There is no longer a game anywhere…. There is one moment of the game when you play at not playing, and when it ends badly. That moment is now.

The street must be sad in your eyes when you go out into it. And there must be no more consolation for you in the pit of your stomach…. But DADA knows choreography and the way to use it…. For you have to love me right through the cancer of your heart, through the heart-cancer that I shall have given you.

Aragon's Le Paysan de Paris (The Peasant of Paris) is also a spreader of this other sort of social disease in the passages of Paris, the vertiginous poison and poisonous vertigo of "that vice," as he called Surrealism, destructive to the middle-aged mind. But Dada's choreography, subtle and unsubtle, is really supervisual, and metaphysical, superirritating, and superb, as well as upsetting. Tzara's repeated sounds that are to start the listener yelling, as Marinetti's did, put the reader's nerves also on end:

Verbal aggression, then, and visual too—the rrr on the page are irritating to the eye as they would be to the ear. The whole matter turns about the self-contemplation of the reader in the text as it frames the vision, self-conscious in its own exacerbation.

Tzara is in particular the poet of self-consciousness, of the man masked, and perpetually ambivalent, of the tragic hero, mirrored in his double role as narrator and actor. The main questions raised by this game of double perception are those of identity, of mask, and of approximate relation: Tzara's approximate man, who "laughs face on and weeps behind" (Tz, 2:102), as touching as he is brilliant—a mirror of the poem itself—confesses his doubts facing others, or on that place of passage that is the stair:

tu es en face des autres un autre que toi-même
sur l'escalier des vagues comptant de chaque regard la trame
dépareillées hallucinations sans voix qui te ressemblent
les boutiques de bric-à-brac qui te ressemblent
que tu cristallises autour de ta pluvieuse vocation—où tu découvres des parcelles de toi-même
à chaque tournant de rue tu te changes en un autre toi-même
facing others you are another than yourself
judging on the staircase of waves the texture of each look
dissimilar voiceless hallucinations that resemble you
that you crystallize around your rainy calling—where you find portions of yourself
at each turn of the road you change into another self.⁵

In the realm of the stair, the crossroads, or the circus ring, the page, or the game, around the window or the table, upon the canvas or in the mirror of a large glass and a Great Work, be it alchemical labor, epic poem, or lyric life, the animator of the circus leaves his mark on every passage, which is to say, at every threshold of perception and passion:

mais que la porte s'ouvre enfin comme la première page d'un livre
ta chambre pleine d'indomptables d'amoureuses coincidences tristes ou gaies
je couperai en tranches le long filet du regard fixe
et chaque parole sera un envoûtement pour l'oeil et de page en page
mes doigts connaîtront la flore de ton corps et de page en page
de ta nuit la secrète étude s'éclaircira et de page en page
les ailes de ta parole me seront éventails et de page en page
des éventails pour chasser la nuit de ta figure et de page en page
ta cargaison de paroles au large sera ma guérison et du page en page
les années diminueront vers l'impalpable souffle que la tombe aspire déjà.

but let the door open at last like the first page of a book
your room full of unconquerable loving coincidences sad or gay
I shall slice the long net of the fixed gaze
and each word will be a spell for the eye and from page to page
my fingers will know the flora of your body and from page to page
the secret study of your night will be illumined and from page to page
the wings of your word will be fans to me and from page to page
fans to chase the night from your face and from page to page
your cargo of words at sea will be my cure and from page to page
the years will diminish toward the impalpable breath that the bomb already draws in.
(AM, p. 155)

These pages of Tzara, themselves sufficient as a landscape, indicate the truest temper of Dada, and our truest text of that movement. That the "page" should be so plainly part of, and such an essential part of the "paysage" and that they should both be part of the "passage" as it is part of them, is an unmistakable truth identical to itself, in whatever mirror we might choose to see ourselves and our text: "De vastes paysages s'étendent en moi sans étonnement" (Tz, 1:349; Vast landscapes stretch out in me without astonishment), says Tzara in L'Antitête. Toward these interior landscapes Duchamp also directed himself, his thought, and his surest contemplation and art: "My aim was turning inward, rather than toward externals" (MS, p. 11); "Dada was a metaphysical attitude." Thus the closed door of his Etant donnés (Given …; figure 36), the great door of the given, as we might phrase it, imposes a frame on the eyes of the beholder, forced into the position of peeping-tom or peeping-reader, his view necessarily concentrated through the small holes pierced, upon the parts exhibited. It is itself an art related to the whole and raises the questions of identity, of perception and of passion—this door is the perfect example of what opens on an inner landscape and what frames a privileged inner seen.

Let us end our own scene here by a metaphysical paradox: what most hides is most revealing. Artaud's paradoxical description of a state outside ordinary life that we could see as equivalent to the Dada temper should be taken as sign and as sight, a reminder of the text as a liminal state for threshold experience, of the viewer as a passenger in Dada's rite of passage. "There are no words to designate it but a vehement hieroglyph designating the impossible encounter of matter and of spirit. A kind of vision inside" (Ar, p. 202). Here that quotation also may be left as incomplete, as our own architexture is ideally incomplete, its passage left forever open to the reader.⁶

NOTES

¹ Tristan Tzara. Oeuvres complètes, ed. Henri Béhar, vol. 1:1912-1924, vol. 2: 1925-1933 (Paris: Flammarion, 1975 and 1977), 1:409. Hereafter cited as Tz.

² Marcel Duchamp, Marchand du sel: Ecrits de Marcel Duchamp, ed. Michel Sanouillet (Paris: Le Terrain Vague, 1958), p. 95 (hereafter cited as MS): the text signed "Rrose Sélavy," the name of Marcel Duchamp's double, himself—like his text—in drag.

³ Jacques Rigaut, Écrits, ed. Martin Kay (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), p. 113.

⁴ Georges Ribement-Dessaignes, Dada: manifestes, poèmes, articles, projets (1915-1930), ed. Jean-Pierre Bègot (Paris: Projectoires/Champ Libre, 1974), pp. 15-19, for this and the following quotation.

⁵ Translation from Mary Ann Caws, Approximate Man and other Writings of Tristan Tzara (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1973), p. 53. Hereafter cited as AM.

⁶ For the term "architexture," already used in the introduction, see my "Vers une architexture du poème surréaliste," in Ethique et Esthétique de la littérature francaise du XX^e siècle, ed. Cagnon (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1978), pp. 59-68.