Introduction

Elke Mettinger, Margarete Rubik and Jörg Türschmann Introduction The Parisian twenties – the années folles – are a perfect example of the Bak- htinian chronotope: a neatly defined period starting with the post-war opti- mism of creating something radically new, and ending with the American stock market crash. In between Paris witnessed an unequalled decade of artistic and creative achievements that was – according to the American ex- patriate Archibald MacLeish – part of the “greatest period of literary and artistic innovation since the Renaissance” (qtd. in Fitch, Beach 12). Paris – as Gertrude Stein famously remarked – “was where the twentieth century was” (11). But why did Paris, of all cities in the world, attract so many artists from all over the globe and offer such a fruitful ground on which the avant-garde could develop and prosper? From the late 19th century onwards Paris had been a congenial site for the needs of bohemian life. Between 1910 and 1920 the Montparnasse began to replace the Montmartre as the heart of intellectual and artistic Paris. It was above all Picasso who transferred modern art from the Montmartre to the Montparnasse. Impoverished painters, sculptors, photographers, novelists, poets, composers, dancers from all over the world chose to live in cheap studios and work in the creative atmosphere of literary and artistic cafés around the Carrefour Vavin, later renamed Place Pablo Picasso. The English journalist Sisley Huddleston (in Fitch, Cafés 16) living in Paris characterized the French cafés of the 1920s and 1930s like the Dôme, the Sélect, the Cou- pole or the Rotonde as the matrix for art and literature. And if the artists could not pay cash, they painted something on the walls instead that would be worth millions today. La Rotonde was the favourite place of an international group of artists such as Picasso, Derain, Max Jacob, Modigliani, Nina Ham- nett. But the rudeness of the owner soon made the artistic scene change to the Café du Dôme, which was described in a large number of literary works, Hemingway’s Fiesta and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer being the most prominent. In La Closerie des Lilas Hemingway wrote his short stories, sometimes being joined by Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Archibald MacLeish or other American expatriates. He also frequented La Coupole, where he quarrelled with Robert McAlmon, whose Contact Editions pub- lished Hemingway’s first book in 1923 despite their enmity. Kay Boyle and Henry Miller here either found new partners or drowned their marriage prob- lems in alcohol. Louis Aragon met Elsa Triolet in the Coupole, although the 8 Elke Mettinger, Margarete Rubik and Jörg Türschmann French avant-garde writers like Léon-Paul Fargue or François Coppée also assembled in the Café François Coppée or in Le Jockey, where Cocteau, Duchamp or Aragon and others witnessed Kiki’s seductive performances on the small stage. Claire Goll in her Chronique scandaleuse confirms that you had to take just a few steps around the Coupole in the evening to meet people like Cendrars, Darius Milhaud, Aragon, Man Ray, Derain or Fernand Léger (87). Hemingway and Fitzgerald were also often to be found in the Dingo Bar where Picasso had a drink or two with Jean Cocteau (Fitch, Cafés 41-57; “Montparnasse”). One could see the particular conditions that combined to make Paris and the 1920s such a fruitful symbiosis for the artistic production in a Bakhtinian light. The destabilization of social, cultural and artistic forms in Modernist Paris has something carnivalesque about it. The Left Bank community in the 1920s seems to have a great deal in common with what Bakhtin describes as carnivalesque collectivity bound together by ‘unofficial’ ways of living and of creativity. Bakhtin speaks of the marketplace crowd, and interestingly enough the Left Bank community is also referred to as “The Crowd” for instance by Sylvia Beach in her memoirs Shakespeare & Company (112). The Left Bank with its bars, literary cafés, salons and studios and its bohemian way of life in some ways reminds us of the medieval marketplace with its music, dancing, drinking, feasting, its rejection of conformity, its related- ness to transition, metamorphosis and renewal, its peculiar interrelation of reality and fiction. It is not only Paris itself that evokes comparison with the Bakhtinian carnival, but also the Paris that is depicted in the literature of the time, the well-known novels by Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stein, but also less- known works that have a voice in this volume. The avant-garde that left the old-world order behind and led to the modern era is related to the carnivalesque renewal, spring, transition or even a turning of things upside down. Hemingway calls the city a moveable feast in his memoirs of the same title. And his first major novel Fiesta was later renamed The Sun Also Rises but retained its original title in most other languages. The idea of the feast is constantly touched upon by Bakhtin. Even the aspect of (self-)performance that is so crucial to the Parisian avant-garde, is taken up by Bakhtin who mentions “all ‘performances’ [...], from loud cursing to the organised show” (153) of the marketplace. For almost all artists of the rive gauche, no matter what their nationality, being avant-garde was a matter of spectacular self- performance through scandal, provocation, deconstruction of gender. Just as gender is not an expression of what one is, but what one does, the 1920s avant-garde artists constructed themselves as a bohemian provocation .

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