DADA / USA. Connections Between the Dada Movement and Eight American Fiction Writers
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TESIS DOCTORAL Título DADA / USA. Connections between the Dada movement and eight American fiction writers Autor/es Rubén Fernández Abella Director/es Carlos Villar Flor Facultad Facultad de Letras y de la Educación Titulación Departamento Filologías Modernas Curso Académico DADA / USA. Connections between the Dada movement and eight American fiction writers, tesis doctoral de Rubén Fernández Abella, dirigida por Carlos Villar Flor (publicada por la Universidad de La Rioja), se difunde bajo una Licencia Creative Commons Reconocimiento-NoComercial-SinObraDerivada 3.0 Unported. Permisos que vayan más allá de lo cubierto por esta licencia pueden solicitarse a los titulares del copyright. © El autor © Universidad de La Rioja, Servicio de Publicaciones, 2017 publicaciones.unirioja.es E-mail: [email protected] UNIVERSIDAD DE LA RIOJA Facultad de Letras y de la Educación Departamento de Filologías Modernas PHD THESIS DADA / USA CONNECTIONS BETWEEN THE DADA MOVEMENT AND EIGHT AMERICAN FICTION WRITERS Rubén Fernández Abella Supervisor: Dr. Carlos Villar Flor 2016 Contents Acknowledgements 4 1. Introduction 1. 1. Purpose and Structure 5 1. 2. State of the Art 11 1. 3. Theoretical Framework 19 2. A Brief History of Dada 2. 1. The Birth of Dada 28 2. 2. New York Dada 36 2. 3. Paris Dada: The Demise of the Movement? 42 2. 4. Dada and Surrealism 45 3. Dada, Language, and Literature 3. 1. Dada’s Theory of Language 49 3. 2. Dada and the Novel: A Survey of Dadaist Fiction 52 3. 2. 1. Hugo Ball: Flametti oder vom Dandysmus der Armen and Tenderenda der Phantast 55 3. 2. 2. Kurt Schwitters: “Die Zwiebel” and Franz Müllers Drahtfrühling 60 3. 2. 3. Louis Aragon: Anicet ou le Panorama, Les Aventures de Télémaque, and Le Libertinage 64 3. 2. 4. Francis Picabia: Caravansérail 68 3. 2. 5. George Ribemont-Dessaignes: Céleste Ugolin and Le Bar du Lendemain 70 3. 2. 6. Blaise Cendrars: Moravagine 73 3. 2. 7. Philippe Soupault: Les dernières nuits de Paris 74 3. 2. 8. André Breton: Poisson soluble 76 4. Dadaist Playfulness in Robert Coates’ The Eater of Darkness 79 5. Djuna Barnes’ Fiction and the Dark Side of Dada 98 6. “Language is in its January”: Dada and William Carlos Williams’ Early Prose 117 7. Violence, Murder, Suicide, and the “Unmotivated Crime” in Dada and Laurence Vail’s Murder! Murder! 142 8. Dadaist Art and Poetry in John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer 156 9. “I am that I am”: The Dadaist Anti-Fiction of E. E. Cummings 174 10. Dadaist Disgust in Nathanael West’s The Dream Life of Balso Snell 196 11. Gertrude Stein: The Mama of Dada? 214 12. Conclusions 229 Appendixes Appendix A. Hugo Ball: “Dada Manifesto” 239 Appendix B. Tristan Tzara: “Dada Manifesto 1918” 241 Appendix C. Richard Huelsenbeck: “Collective Dada Manifesto” 252 Appendix D. André Breton: “Dada Skating” and “Dada Geography” 257 Appendix E. Francis Picabia: “Dada Manifesto” 260 Appendix F. George Ribemont-Dessaignes: “The Pleasures of Dada” and 262 “To the Public” Appendix G. Marsden Hartley: “The importance of Being Dada” 266 Appendix H. Tristan Tzara: “Lecture on Dada” 272 Bibliography 279 List of Figures 297 Acknowledgements My thanks are due to the following persons, without whose assistance this thesis could have never been written: to my supervisor, Dr. Carlos Villar Flor, for encouraging me to start this adventure and accompanying me along the way; to Rosa Jiménez for her patience and invaluable theoretical insights; to the staff of the University of La Rioja for their generous help throughout my candidature; and to my sister María for her unfailing support. This work is dedicated to the memory of my beloved mother, Lola Abella, who would have been so proud of my achievement. 1. Introduction 1. 1. Purpose and Structure The Dadaists had little faith in the novel as a viable means for the expression of their ideas. In their view, the genre had become a bourgeois pastime whose goal was to glorify the life of the middle classes. Besides, its traditional reliance on causality and coherence was in direct contradiction with Dada’s belief that “[l]ogic is a complication.” “Logic,” affirms Tristan Tzara in his “Dada Manifesto 1918,” “is always false. It draws the superficial threads of concepts and words towards illusory conclusions and centers. Its chains kill, an enormous myriapod that asphyxiates independence” (see Appendix B 249). The Dadaists’ misgivings about the novel were not only ideological, but technical also. By definition, writing a Fig. 1. Theo van Doesburg with Kurt Schwitters. Kleine novel required a sustained effort, which Dada Soirée. 1922. seemed to preclude Tzara’s precept that, in true literature, “[e]very page should explode” (see Appendix B 245). Accordingly, the Dadaists were eager to relinquish fiction in favor of other literary genres more suitable to their aims, such as poetry, drama, or Dada’s own form of literary criticism: the critical synthesis. It must be noted, however, that despite their abhorrence of the mores and self- contentedness of the bourgeoisie—their riotous public manifestations were primarily aimed at insulting and mystifying the middle classes—most Dadaists came from well- 5 to-do families. Tzara’s father and grandfather were entrepreneurs in the forestry business in Romania. Hugo Ball, the founder of the movement, was raised in a middle- class Catholic environment in Pirmasens, Germany. Kurt Schwitters’ father was an affluent rentier in Hanover. Equally bourgeois were the family backgrounds of Louis Aragon, Max Ernst, Marcel Janco, Francis Picabia, and Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, to name a few prominent Dada members. This fact is hardly surprising since, understandably, given the general economic precariousness that followed World War I, only by being financially independent could one devote all of one’s time and energy to the promotion of a, on the face of it, marginal artistic movement. To complete the paradox, despite their bombastic rejection of fiction as an apt vehicle for the conveyance of their ideas—Aragon proclaimed the death of the novel in the early 1920s (Josephson 114)—the Dadaists did write novels and short stories. Yet, in conformity with Dada’s official creed, which unequivocally regarded success as a disgrace, an unwanted restriction in the creative life of the artist, they made no effort to get their work published nor, when they did get it published, to disseminate it. As will be explained below, this programmatic—and, to be sure, not always sincere—attitude towards public recognition has had a great impact on the writing of this thesis. My first academic contact with Dada was through the reading of Malcolm Cowley’s 1951 memoirs Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s. Prior to that reading my knowledge of the movement had been admittedly rather fragmentary. I was familiar with Marcel Duchamp’s readymades and Hugo Ball’s momentous 1916 performance at Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire, and sympathized with Tzara’s grandiloquent attempts to turn the art world topsy-turvy. Yet I was ignorant of Dada’s true intent and of its profound repercussions on the culture of the 20th century. Cowley’s book proved instrumental at three different levels. Firstly, although Dada is not its main topic—the book tells the 6 story to 1930 of the so-called Lost Generation of American writers—its fifth chapter, “The Death of Dada,” provides an authoritative 33-page elucidation of the movement. Secondly, in that same chapter Cowley discusses at some length Dada’s attitude towards success as well as the movement’s contribution to the art and literature of its time. He recounts, among other things, how Louis Aragon once threatened to give a beating to any critic who reviewed his books (153). Surprisingly, given Dada’s official distrust of fiction, Cowley also mentions a Dadaist—whose name he does not reveal—who “simultaneously wrote novels, conducted four love affairs and a marriage, [and] plunged into the wildest business ventures” (154). There were new subjects waiting to be described, states Cowley: “[M]achinery, massacre, skyscrapers, urinals, sexual orgies, revolution—for Dada nothing could be too commonplace or novel, too cruel or shocking, to be celebrated by the writer in his own fashion” (154). Or, Cowley continues, the writer might abandon subject entirely: [I]f he was writing a novel about modern Paris, he need not hesitate to introduce a tribe of Redskins, an octopus, a unicorn, Napoleon or the Virgin Mary. It suddenly seemed that all the writers of the past had been enslaved by reality: they had been limited to the task of copying the world, whereas the new writer could disregard it and create a world of his own in which he was master. (154) Thirdly, Cowley’s book offers a compelling, albeit sketchy, account of the connections between Paris Dada and a number of expatriate American writers and artists, including Robert M. Coates, Man Ray, Laurence Vail, Matthew Josephson, Jack Wheelwright, John Dos Passos, Robert McAlmon, and E. E. Cummings. 7 In short, Exile’s Return was a pivotal reading in that it: a) provided me with a lucid, overall clarification of Dada; b) brought my attention to the fact that, despite their programmatic repudiation of fiction and success, which they expressed unambiguously in their manifestos, group gatherings and public performances, the Dadaists did write— and sometimes published—novels and short stories; and c) provided me with the first intimation that the work of some of the expatriate American writers who lived in Paris during the 1920s might have benefited from their contact with Dada. These three discoveries ignited my fascination with the subject and prompted me to embark on the three lines of research that, over the years, have led to the writing of this thesis, namely: Dada as a crucial movement in the cultural history of the 20th-century; Dadaist fiction; and the influence of Dada on modern American fiction.