' the Place of the Other in Blaise Cendrars's Â
‘Je suis l’autre!’ The Place of the Other in Blaise Cendrars’s Œuvre
Amotz Giladi
Introduction
On 5 May 1912, young Frédéric Louis Sauser drew a self-portrait under which he wrote a famous phrase of Gérard de Nerval: ‘Je suis l’autre!’ As Claude Leroy notes, this aspiration to become the Other, his own Other, was linked to Sauser’s wish to dedicate himself to writing and to reinvent himself as ‘Blaise Cendrars’.1 Highly reveal- ing of his vision of identity and Otherness, this motto resonated through his life’s work and his trajectory as a writer. Born in Switzerland in 1887, Sauser grew up among both French and German-speaking cultures. The young writer settled in Paris in 1912 and began moving in local avant-garde circles, in which other foreign artists played a large part. But after the Great War, the arrival of Dadaists and Surrealists into the Parisian avant-garde alienated Cendrars. As well as attacking both the literary establishment and the avant-garde writers of the 1910s, Dadaists and Surrealists strongly censured ex-servicemen who wrote about their battlefield experiences. With his story J’ai tué (1918), Cendrars was to them a writer guilty of idealizing militarism.2
______1. Blaise Cendrars, Poésies complètes: Avec 41 poèmes inédits, ed. by Claude Leroy (Paris: Denoël, 2005), p. ix. This new name, which evokes the words ‘braise’ and ‘cendre’, refers to the myth of the phoenix and to the idea of perpetual rebirth. The writer adopted this name for good in 1913. 2. Michèle Touret, ‘L’Avant-garde selon Cendrars, réflexions sur un “malentendu” et ses suites’, in Blaise Cendrars au vent d’Est, ed. by Henryk Chudak and Joanna Żurowska (Warsaw: Uniwersytet Warszawa, 2000), pp. 115–30 (pp. 120–24).
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Abandoning avant-garde poetry, Cendrars wrote several novels which met with considerable commercial success: L’Or (1925), Moravagine (1926), Le Plan de l’Aiguille (1929), Les Confessions de Dan Yack (1929) and Rhum (1930). The print runs of these works trace Cendrars’s transition from marginal avant-garde poet to successful, well-known author. While 1100 copies of Dix-neuf poèmes élastiques (1919) were printed, many of which had not sold by 1930, the print runs of Le Plan de l’Aiguille and Les Confessions de Dan Yack were, in 1929, 16,200 and 11,600 copies respectively.3 His new status as a successful novelist introduced Cendrars to several major right-wing newspapers with whom he sympathized ideo- logically, and soon he began writing for them. In the light of these changes, I shall study the way in which three figures of Otherness emerged in Cendrars’s writings: the Jew, the German and the non-European Other. The Other is, in fact, sometimes inseparable from Cendrars’s poetic or narrative ‘I’, and sometimes rejected by that same narrator. This apparent contradiction has its roots in the poet’s constant reinvention of the Self, as one who changed his name and tried to blur his own ancestral line. This tendency emerges, for example, in the poem ‘Au cœur du monde’ (1919), in which the poet-narrator creates a symbolic and mythical biography for himself and claims: ‘Je ne suis pas le fils de mon père.’4 Commenting on the shifting Self of Cendrars’s work, the critic Christine Le Quellec Cottier notes: ‘Ce “soi” ne se fixe jamais en une identité déterminée, mesurable. Il est composite, fragmenté, multiple. […] Écrire est donc le mode d’exploration d’une identité sans cesse différée.’5
______3. Pascal Fouché, Au Sans Pareil (Paris: Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine, 1989), pp. 9, 263–66, 284–85. 4. Cendrars, Poésies complètes, p. 129. 5. Christine Le Quellec Cottier, ‘Cendrars et ses “écrits autobiographiques”: Une autofiction avant la lettre?’, in L’Autofiction: Variations génériques et discursives, ed. by Joël Zufferey (Louvain-la-Neuve: Harmattan-Academia, 2012), pp. 17–31 (p. 19).
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The attitude towards the Other is also rooted in Cendrars’s personal ideology, which was partly made up of Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch, and the vitalist anarchism of the late nineteenth century. In the political and literary context of early twentieth-century France, this kind of vitalism was defined by a general mistrust of intellectuals which at times verged on anti-Semitism, as in the case of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, since the Jew was perceived as the incarnation of the well-read man. 6 While anti-Semitic motifs did appear in Cendrars’s work, his representations of the Jewish Other were rather fluid, moving between rejection and fascination. This same ambiguity appeared in Cendrars’s representations of the German Other in those works which evoked his experiences as a French soldier in World War I. Having thoroughly assimilated French patriotism and Germanophobia, Cendrars sketched a demonic image of the German enemy which simultaneously served as a mirror for the narrative ‘I’. Regarding Cendrars’s perception of the non-European Other, one must bear in mind the colonialist context of the early twentieth century. Colonialism engendered a wide range of perceptions and representations of the non-European Other among European writers, which were formed mainly by European concerns and had little to do with real native populations. Cendrars both demonized and glorified the non-European Other: after his rupture with avant-garde circles, idealizing the non-European Other as the savage double of the European Self became a way to maintain his image as a subversive writer during the 1920s and 30s.
______6. Michèle Touret, Blaise Cendrars: le Désir du roman (1920–1930) (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1999), pp. 87–128, 348–49; Jérôme Meizoz, L’Âge du roman parlant (1919–1939): Écrivains, critiques et pédagogues en débat (Geneva: Droz, 2001), pp. 287–89; Jérôme Meizoz, ‘Posture et poétique d’un bourlingueur: Cendrars’, Poétique, 147 (2006), 297–315 (pp. 307–08).
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The Jewish Other
The notion of Otherness is felt in Cendrars’s early poems, such as Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France (1913), in which a Jewish jeweller serves as the speaker’s guide: ‘Et je partis moi aussi pour accompagner le voyageur en bijouterie qui se rendait à Kharbine.’7 This is an allusion to the Polish-Jewish character known as Rogovin, a creation of Cendrars which surely came out of his interest in the figure of the Wandering Jew.8 Despite this character’s appearance in Prose du Transsibérien, Rogovin is only explicitly mentioned in some of Cendrars’s auto-fictional ‘memoirs’ from the 1930s onward: Vol à voile: Prochronie (1932), Bourlinguer (1948) and Le Lotissement du ciel (1949).9 In these works, Cendrars plays on the similarity between ‘Rogovin’ and ‘Rogozhin’, the name of the main character’s evil double in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. Cendrars deeply admired this novel, considering its protagonist as the ultimate stranger.10 Still, the presence of Otherness in Prose du Transsibérien goes well beyond the character of Rogovin. As Katherine Shingler notes, the poem is
one in which the young poet-narrator sets out on a journey of discovery, in search not just of new, unknown people and spaces, but of himself, and his identity as a poet. The travelling self may learn from those it encounters –– it may even absorb some of their characteristics –– but it also emerges from the encounter with the foreign other with a ______7. Cendrars, Poésies complètes, p. 21. 8. According to the legend, the Wandering Jew was condemned to walk eternally for having refused to allow Jesus, carrying his cross, to rest in front of his house. 9. On Cendrars’s ‘autobiographical’ works as a precursor form of auto-fiction, see Le Quellec Cottier, ‘Cendrars et ses “écrits autobiographiques”’, pp. 17–31. 10. Cendrars claimed in Le Lotissement du ciel that he read this novel in Russian once a year. See Blaise Cendrars, Œuvres autobiographiques complètes, ed. by Claude Leroy, Jean-Carlo Flückiger and Christine Le Quellec Cottier, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 2013), II, 649.
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firmer sense of his own identity, reinforced through knowledge of what he is not.11
The typographical variations in the original edition, printed in four different coloured inks and several different typefaces, allows Cendrars to further enhance the complexity of his poetic identity. As a result of these variations, the poetic ‘I’ appears under and is fractured into many different guises. Moreover, the original edition contains Sonia Delaunay’s stencilled ‘couleurs simultanées’. In the complex dialogue between the text and the painting, the two artists seem to emphasize both the similarities and the differences between their respective modes of expression. 12 On several occasions, the speaker underlines the superior ability of painting to express the intensity of visual experience, as in the following verse: ‘Autant d’images associations que je ne peux pas développer dans mes vers.’13 Another allusion to poetry’s inadequacy next to painting is found in an explicit reference to Cendrars’s friend Marc Chagall: ‘Comme mon ami Chagall je pourrais faire une série de tableaux déments/ Mais je n’ai pas pris de notes en voyage.’14 Like Chaim Soutine and Ossip Zadkine, Chagall was an Eastern European Jewish painter who worked in Paris and with whom Cendrars had a strong intellectual friendship. In addition to his general fascination with painting, Cendrars seems to have been particularly interested in the imagery of the Jewish-Russian world as portrayed in the works of Chagall. Referring to the latter in the poem ‘Portrait/Atelier’, originally published in 1914 and later included in the collection Dix- neuf poèmes élastiques, he attributes a dimension of subversive
______11. Katherine Shingler, ‘Visual-Verbal Encounters in Cendrars and Delaunay’s La Prose du Transsibérien’, e-France: An on-line Journal of French Studies, 3 (2012), 1–28 (p. 11)
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sexuality to the painter’s art that seems impossible in an excessively civilized France: ‘Il peint avec toutes les sales passions d’une petite ville juive/ Avec toute la sexualité exacerbée de la province russe/ Pour la France/ Sans sensualité.’15 In the following poem from the same collection, ‘Ma danse’, also published in 1914, the speaker draws a parallel between the roving poet and the Wandering Jew: ‘Platon n’accorde pas droit de cité au poète/ Juif errant.’16 Similarly, in Le Panama ou les aventures de mes sept oncles (1918), through which the poetic ‘I’ roams between different figures of identification –– represented by the ‘seven uncles’ –– the speaker mentions Ahasuerus, one of the names of the Wandering Jew of legend. This speaker calls Ahasuerus an ‘idiot’, undoubtedly an allusion to Dostoevsky’s Idiot, revealing Cendrars’s interest in the Jew as a figure of strangeness.17 The same epithet is attributed to Moravagine, protagonist of the eponymous novel on which the writer was working between 1913 and 1925. Indeed, the common denominator between Moravagine and the Jewish Ahasuerus is their idiocy, that is to say, their strangeness and Otherness. The dimension of alterity is essential for understanding the protagonist of Moravagine, since Cendrars conceived this character as a sort of second Self. In the text ‘Pro domo: Comment j’ai écrit Moravagine’, added to the novel’s 1956 edition, Cendrars reconstructs the genesis of this work, using auto-fictional elements, and tells us how its protagonist accompanied him mentally during his military service, giving him the strength to endure the horrors of war:
Durant deux ans de présence sous les drapeaux je ne pensais pas à autre chose qu’à Moravagine, idiot. […] Ni de jour ni de nuit Moravagine ne m’a jamais quitté dans la vie anonyme des tranchées. C’est lui qui m’accompagnait en patrouille et qui m’inspirait des trucs de Peau-Rouge pour tendre une embus- ______15. Cendrars, Poésies complètes, p. 72. 16. Cendrars, Poésies complètes, p. 75. 17. Cendrars, Poésies complètes, p. 42.
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cade, un piège. Dans les marais de la Somme et durant tout un triste hiver, c’est lui qui me réconfortait en me parlant de sa vie d’aventurier alors qu’il courait les pampas détrempées par le terrible hiver de la Patagonie. Sa présence illuminait ma sombre cagna. […] Il était à côté de moi à l’attaque et c’est peut-être lui qui m’a donné le courage physique et l’énergie et la volonté de me ramasser sur le champ de bataille en Champagne. Je le retrouvai dans mon lit d’hôpital après l’amputation.18
Through this savage double, Cendrars also expressed anti- Semitic ideas, as well as associated misogynistic notions.19 In the eleventh chapter, which revolves around the character of Mascha, the protagonist’s Jewish-Lithuanian lover, Cendrars associates oriental Judaism with subversive sexuality, already hinted at in the Dix-neuf poèmes élastiques, and links femininity, masochism and Judaism. These passages are largely based on the text Aus Golgothas Philosophie (The Philosophy of Golgotha) written in 1906 by the Czech anarchist Franz Blazek.20 Cendrars began translating this fic- tionalized autobiographical text in September 1912.21 Like Blazek’s narrator, the narrator of Moravagine sees masochism as the foundation of nature: he asserts that nature is masochistic because the
______18. Blaise Cendrars, Moravagine (Paris: Grasset, 2002), p. 254. 19. While the woman appears as another figure of alterity in Cendrars’s writings, the framework of this study did not enable me to analyse her as such. 20. On this text, see Irène Cagneau, Sexualité et société à Vienne et à Berlin, 1900–1914: Discours institutionnels et controverses intellectuelles dans ‘Die Fackel’, ‘Die Aktion’, ‘Der Sturm’, ‘Pan’, ‘Die Zukunft’ (Villeneuve D’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2014), pp. 111–12. On The Philosophy of Golgotha as a source of inspiration for Moravagine, see Christine Le Quellec Cottier, Devenir Cendrars: les Années d’apprentissage (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2004), pp. 196–200, 274–89; Oxana Khlopina, Moravagine de Blaise Cendrars (Bienne/Gollion: Association pour une collection d’études littéraires/Infolio, 2012), pp. 8–9, 53–54. 21. This translation was published only in 2006. See Franz Blazek, ‘La Philosophie de Golgotha’, trans. by Blaise Cendrars, Continent Cendrars, 12 (2006), 19–52.
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fundamental factor of life –– love — and that factor’s supposed incarnation — woman — are masochistic.22 The chapter dedicated to Mascha seems, furthermore, to reference the famous 1903 book of Otto Weininger, Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character). Weininger claims in this text that woman’s existence, dominated by sexuality and reproduction, is devoid of moral and spiritual value, and that only men have ethical, political and artistic faculties.23 In an apparently direct reference to Sex and Character, the narrator of Moravagine pushes Weininger’s ideas even further, combining them with Blazek’s views on masochism and attributing a deadly dimension to woman’s sexual instinct.24 Moravagine’s narrator again seems to follow the argument of Sex and Character in that Weininger too, in a chapter entitled ‘Judaism’, likens the Jew to a woman. Describing the Jew as an effeminate and lustful creature, Weininger expresses the same contempt towards Judaism that he showed towards femininity. He claims that given his materialistic nature, the Jew is inherently irreligious.25 Moreover, he deplores the noxious influence of Judaism on modern Christian society, and argues that ‘our present age shows Judaism at the highest peak it has climbed since the days of Herod’.26 The narrator of Moravagine adds to this a masochistic dimension borrowed from Blazek’s text, describing Judaism as a harmful human element:
Mascha était masochiste, et, en tant que juive, elle l’était doublement; car y a-t-il eu un peuple au monde plus profondément masochiste qu’Israël? Israël s’était donné un Dieu d’orgueil, à seule fin de le bafouer. Israël avait accepté ______22. Cendrars, Moravagine, p. 76. 23. Otto Weininger, Sex and Character: An Investigation of Fundamental Principles, trans. by Ladislaus Löb, ed. by Daniel Steuer and Laura Marcus (Bloomington, IN.: Indiana University Press, 2005), p. 79. 24. Cendrars, Moravagine, pp. 75–77. 25. Weininger, Sex and Character, pp. 272–300. 26. Weininger, Sex and Character, p. 299.
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une loi rigide, à seule fin de la transgresser. Et toute l’histoire d’Israël est l’histoire de cet outrage et de cette transgression. On voit le peuple élu trahir et vendre son dieu, puis marchander la loi. Et l’on entend les menaces et les malédictions tomber du ciel. Les coups pleuvent. Les calamités s’abattent. Israël souffre, pleure, gémit, se plaint en exil et se lamente en captivité. Oh, quel amour! La main du Seigneur s’appesantit sur lui et l’écrase. Israël se contorsionne, Israël verse des larmes de sang. Mais Israël jouit de sa bassesse et se délecte de son avilissement. Quelle volupté et quel orgueil! Être le peuple maudit, être le peuple frappé jusque dans sa dernière génération, être le peuple dispersé par les verges mêmes du Seigneur Dieu, et avoir le droit de se plaindre, de se plaindre à haute voix, de chercher chicane et de crier son infamie, et avoir la mission de souffrir, d’adorer son mal, de le cultiver et de contaminer secrètement les peuples étrangers. Cette perversité et ce raffinement de toute une nation expliquent la grande diffusion des juifs et leur étrange fortune dans le monde, bien que leur action soit partout délétère.27
Under Weininger’s and Blazek’s influence, then, Cendrars linked the Jewish mentality to the alleged masochistic sexuality inherent in women. That subversive sexuality which Cendrars attributed to Jews in Dix-neuf poèmes élastiques, indeed, became perverse and pathological in Moravagine. However, despite this demonization of the Jew, Cendrars’s treatment of the Jewish Other was at other times almost positive, reflecting his contradictory and ambiguous attitude towards that Other. In his auto-fictional ‘memoirs’ of the 1940s, the Polish Jew Rogovin appears again as the mythical ‘guide’ of the narrator’s youthful adventures. But while he remains, as in the early writings, valorized as a fascinating figure of wandering and strangeness, Rogovin is now also a figure from whom the narrator must flee to be ______27. Cendrars, Moravagine, p. 78.
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free. The ‘vieil-orthodoxe ou marrane’, in fact, tries to force the narrator of Bourlinguer to marry his eleven-year-old daughter.28
World War I and the German Other
Aboard a ship which took him back to Europe in 1912, after his unsuccessful attempt to settle in New York, the poet represented himself in his diary notes as one of the passengers ‘fatigués d’Amérique’. Expressing solidarity with the European immigrants disillusioned with the New World, he wished to mingle with all national and ethnic groups: Russians, Poles, Germans, Italians and Jews. At the same time, he attributed a national identity to himself that was different from the others: ‘Je suis le seul Français.’29 Feeling French among the foreigners, Sauser returned from America in order to find his place in the Parisian literary circles. However, being completely unknown in Paris upon his arrival in the summer of 1912, he integrated himself more easily into a circle of Bohemian German- speaking intellectuals and artists, including the sculptor August Suter and the poet Siegfried Lang (both Swiss like him), the Hungarian writer-painter Emil Szittya (of German origin) and the German philosopher and psychoanalyst Johannes Nohl. Only in December, a few months after Sauser –– or Cendrars, as he now called himself –– arrived in France, was he introduced to a larger circle of Parisian avant-garde artists by Guillaume Apollinaire, who had read his first long poem, Les Pâques, published that November.30 The outbreak of World War I caused a brutal rupture between Cendrars and his German cultural background. Assimilating French patriotism, he published a text in July 1914 in several Parisian newspapers which exhorted foreigners to enlist in the French army. He did so himself and was sent to the front where, after a year, he was ______28. Cendrars, Œuvres autobiographiques, p. 74. The same threat is evoked in Le Lotissement du ciel. See Cendrars, Œuvres autobiographiques, p. 646. 29. Cendrars, Œuvres autobiographiques, p. 863. 30. Le Quellec Cottier, Devenir Cendrars, pp. 172–74, 179–224.
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badly wounded and lost his right arm. In the story J’ai tué, published as a booklet in 1918 and later included in the collection Aujourd’hui (1931), he represents the German enemy as the ultimate Other, dehumanized and despised. Adopting the vocabulary of French nationalism, Cendrars began using the term ‘Boche’, an insulting name for a German. Remembering his arrival at an enemy position, the narrator of J’ai tué refers to the particularly cruel practice of ‘trench cleaning’: ‘Il faut nettoyer ça. Je revendique alors l’honneur de toucher un couteau à cran.’31 After he has fought the German war machinery, presented as a sort of mythological Hydra with many voracious heads, he is proud to face the enemy in person: ‘J’ai bravé la torpille, le canon, les mines, le feu, les gaz, les mitrailleuses, toute la machinerie anonyme, démoniaque, systématique, aveugle. Je vais braver l’homme.’32 The battle against the German machine of destruction is first represented in terms of defending liberty, to which the narrator refers by identifying his weapon with the knife of Bonnot, the famous French anarchist: ‘Me voici l’eustache à la main. […] L’eustache de Bonnot. “Vive l’humanité!”’33 But once the face-to-face fight begins, the narrator and his enemy are reduced to mere ‘apes’. Indeed, the animal character of the fight to survive is a point of similarity between them, as they engage in a barbarous struggle governed by archaic laws:
Je vais braver l’homme. Mon semblable. Un singe. Œil pour œil, dent pour dent. À nous deux maintenant. À coup de poing, à coup de couteau. Sans merci. Je saute sur mon antagoniste. Je lui porte un coup terrible. La tête est presque décollée. J’ai tué le Boche.34
______31. Blaise Cendrars, Aujourd’hui (Paris: Denoël, 2005), p. 15. 32. Cendrars, Aujourd’hui, p. 16. 33. Cendrars, Aujourd’hui, pp. 15–16. 34. Cendrars, Aujourd’hui, p. 16.
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The fight is no longer anonymous: the narrator struggles against his own kind, as if he were fighting his own reflection. He almost decapitates his adversary, erasing the face that the enemy has finally assumed. This destruction of the Other implies a certain loss of the Self, because the war, initially conceived as a heroic struggle, eventually loses all meaning for the narrator. This loss of meaning can also be observed in Moravagine, in which the narrator, hospitalized in a neurological centre after his left leg is amputated, reflects:
Y a-t-il une pensée plus monstrueuse, un spectacle plus probant, une affirmation plus patente de l’impuissance et de la folie du cerveau? La guerre. Les philosophies, les religions, les arts, les techniques, les métiers aboutissent à ça. […] Aujourd’hui comme il y a mille ans; demain comme il y a cent mille ans. Non, il ne s’agit pas de ta patrie, Allemand ou Français, Blanc ou Noir, Papou ou singe de Bornéo. C’est de ta vie. Su tu veux vivre, tue. Tue pour t’affranchir, pour manger, pour chier.35
Here, the differences between French and German, Self and Other, are erased. The war becomes a primitive fight for survival, but this animal condition, in which national identity is annihilated, leads back to the heroic and anarchist vision of J’ai tué, in which the Self initially faces a monster all alone. In Moravagine, this monster is no longer the ‘Boche’ with his machine of destruction, but the political and social system underlying warfare in all countries:
Ce qui est honteux, c’est de tuer en bande, telle heure, tel jour, en l’honneur de certains principes, à l’ombre d’un drapeau, sous le regard des vieillards, d’une façon désintéressée ou passive. Sois seul contre tous, jeune homme, tue, tue, tu n’as pas de semblable, il n’y a que toi de vivant, tue jusqu’à ce que ______35. Cendrars, Moravagine, p. 233.
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les autres te raccourcissent, te guillotinent, te garrottent, te pendent. Avec ou sans tra-la-la, au nom de la communauté ou du roi.36
In these passages from J’ai tué and Moravagine, two stages of representing identity and Otherness in relation to war emerge. In the first, the German enemy is demonized as the ultimate Other which uses modern technology with all its means of mass killing, in contrast to the narrator, who prefers ‘Bonnot’s knife’. This adversary is part of an inhuman extermination machine which the narrator opposes in the name of freedom. But in the second stage of representation, that of the face-to-face fight of J’ai tué, the differences between the narrator and his enemy are blurred. Moravagine’s narrator evokes the same human and moral vacuum created by a merciless struggle for survival, which obliterates identity. National rivalries fade to irrelevance and absurdity. Still, the Self emerges intact from this void, and must confront not only the German enemy, but the entire machine of mass warfare.
The Non-European Other
As mentioned above, the publication of J’ai tué was one reason why Cendrars distanced himself from the new generation of Parisian avant-garde writers, who accused him of idealizing militarism. Moving away from these circles, Cendrars won commercial success in 1925 with L’Or, his first novel. The novels he published in the subsequent years also achieved public success and allowed him to reach a much larger readership than was possible for avant-garde poetry. Furthermore, he was now read by more conservative intellectual circles, which opened their presses to him.37 Thus, like other writers of this period –– Francis Carco, Jean Cocteau, Philippe Soupault, Georges Simenon and Joseph Kessel –– Cendrars began ______36. Cendrars, Moravagine, p. 233. 37. Le Quellec Cottier, Devenir Blaise Cendrars, pp. 182–83.
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writing in newspapers and contributed to the development of French reportage in the 1930s.38 Cendrars’s journalism, published by right- wing newspapers like Le Jour, Paris-Soir and Candide, conveyed values associated with anti-conformism and heroism, in accordance with his vision of vitalist anarchism.39 As we shall see in this section, some of Cendrars’s journalistic texts focus on the figure of the non- European Other. One article published by Le Jour in February 1935, called ‘La Dernière Chevauchée des Peaux-Rouges’, concerns peyote –– a small cactus widespread in Mexico and the southern United States, from which several alkaloids can be extracted –– and the mystical experience of Indians who use it. Apparently, Cendrars never visited these regions, and his article is thus based on an imaginary journey, as well as on a monograph on peyote, published by Alexandre Rouhier in 1927. 40 This practice of travelling through reading permitted Cendrars freely to imagine the non-European Other. In his vision, Indians represent the subversive power of ecstasy, lost by modern Western civilization. The speaker expresses his wish that Indian ‘prophets’, illuminated by peyote, would devastate the North American civilization, as the ancient Huns had devastated Europe.41 Moreover, the article’s evocation of Moravagine,42 which is partly set in America among an Indian tribe,43 is not a complete coincidence: Moravagine, ‘le seul descendant authentique du dernier roi de Hongrie’,44 is himself an offspring of Huns, with whom he identifies as part of his rejection of European civilization:
______38. Myriam Boucharenc, L’Écrivain-reporter au cœur des années trente (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2004). 39. Blaise Cendrars, Histoires vraies, ed. by Claude Leroy (Paris: Denoël, 2003), pp. xii– xiv. 40. Blaise Cendrars, Panorama de la pègre; À bord de ‘Normandie’; Chez l’armée anglaise, ed. by Myriam Boucharenc (Paris: Denoël, 2006), pp. 196, 396. 41. Cendrars, Panorama de la pègre, p. 202 42. Cendrars, Panorama de la pègre, p. 195. 43. Cendrars, Moravagine, pp. 166–211. 44. Cendrars, Moravagine, p. 33.
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Je ne suis pas de votre race. Je suis du clan mongol qui apporta une vérité monstrueuse: l’authenticité de la vie, la connaissance du rythme, et qui ravagera toujours vos maisons statiques du temps et de l’espace, localisées en une série de petites cases. Mon étalon est plus sauvage que vos engrenages poussifs, son sabot de corne plus dangereux que vos roues de fer. Entourez-moi des cent mille baïonnettes de la lumière occidentale, car malheur à vous si je sors du noir de ma caverne et si je me mets à chasser vos bruits.45
Cendrars’s fascination with Huns and Indians seems to stem from an avant-garde interest in non-European cultures, perceived as a reservoir of vitality which had not yet been repressed by Western civilization. Indeed, European avant-garde artists and writers had inherited the abhorrence of the European ‘here and now’, and the wish to escape to distant lands, from nineteenth-century poets such as Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, many avant-garde writers and artists were interested in the art forms of Africa, Asia and Oceania, with an emphasis on Otherness and Primitivism in their thought and creations. 46 One can observe this in Pablo Picasso’s ‘Negro’ period (around 1907), or in Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s novel Mafarka le futuriste (1909).47 Cendrars himself had a passion for African culture, as evidenced by his ‘poèmes nègres’ (1922) and by his collections of African tales: Anthologie nègre (1921), Petits
______45. Cendrars, Moravagine, p. 60. 46. Elza Adamowicz, Ceci n’est pas un tableau: les Écrits surréalistes sur l’art (Lausanne: L’Âge d’Homme, 2004), pp. 113–30; Colin Rhodes, Primitivism and Modern Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994); Philippe Dagen, Le Peintre, le poète, le sauvage: les voies du primitivisme dans l’art français (Paris: Flammarion, 2010). 47. The Italian poet wrote this novel in French and published it in Paris in 1909, the year in which his manifesto of Futurism came out in Le Figaro. The protagonist of this work is a cruel African king, involved in savage wars. See Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Mafarka le futuriste (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1984).
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Contes nègres pour les enfants des Blancs (1928) and Comment les Blancs sont d’anciens Noirs (1930). In fact, non-European lands and people appear in Cendrars’s poems as early as the 1910s, as in ‘Mee Too Buggi’, originally published in 1914 and later included in the Dix-neuf poèmes élastiques.48 Another example is Prose du Transsibérien, in which the Pacific Islands are represented as a place of subversive sexuality (similar to the evocation of Chagall’s Jewish-Russian imagery in ‘Portrait/Atelier’):
Aux Fidji règne l’éternel printemps La paresse L’amour pâme les couples dans l’herbe haute et la chaude syphilis rôde sous les bananiers Viens dans les îles perdues du Pacifique! Elles ont nom du Phénix, des Marquises Bornéo et Java Et Célèbes à la forme d’un chat.49
In the 1920s and 30s, the paradoxical idealization of the non- European Other as the wild and demonic double of the European Self became an important element in Cendrars’s work as he settled into his new position in the French literary field. Although now a successful novelist and journalist, Cendrars wished to maintain the non- conformist image which he had shared with other avant-garde writers at the beginning of his career. Continuing, then, the manner of his poetry, presented as the fruit of ‘real’ travels, 50 Cendrars was ______48. Cendrars, Poésies complètes, pp. 90, 366. Like ‘La Dernière Chevauchée des Peaux- Rouges’, this poem is based on a sort of plagiarism: it is drawn from a book published in 1817 by the Briton John Martin and translated into French the same year: An Account of the Natives of the Tonga Islands in the South Pacific Ocean, with an Original Grammar and Vocabulary of Their Language. 49. Cendrars, Poésies complètes, p. 27. 50. Regarding Prose du Transsibérien, Claude Leroy notes that ‘aucun document n’atteste que Freddy –– et surtout dans une période aussi troublée –– ait pu entreprendre un voyage aussi long et risqué’. Thus, the representation of travelling in this poem consists
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apparently a risk-taking wayfarer, a connoisseur and admirer of distant lands and their inhabitants, especially those who represented, for him, the antithesis of European civilization.51 As we have seen above, Cendrars’s literary interest in the non- European Other is also evident in his journalistic writings. His journalism was in line with the tradition of French reportage, which, since its emergence in the mid-1800s, developed as a genre situated between investigation and literature. This mixture is visible in the way Cendrars transformed his two article series ‘Les Gangsters de la Maffia’ and ‘Hollywood 1936’ –– published respectively in 1934 and 1936 by the newspapers Excelsior and Paris-Soir –– into the books Panorama de la pègre (1935) and Hollywood: la Mecque du cinéma (1936).52 Now, the genre of reportage was not so different from that of travel writing; in both genres, authors tended to create the non- European Other through a series of imaginary representations which reflected European concerns rather than the reality of those countries.53 The blend of reporting and storytelling, and the tendency to project a European vision on non-European populations, are palpable in a series of journalistic texts which Cendrars called ‘true stories’. Many of these ‘true stories’ took place in Brazil, a country he visited three times. His most recent visit had been in 1927/1928, while the texts themselves were written in the late 1930s. This did not prevent the newspapers from presenting some of the stories as
of an epic transposition of certain events experienced by ‘Freddy’ Sauser during his first stay in Russia, between 1904 and 1907. See Cendrars, Poésies complètes, p. 344. 51. Jérôme Meizoz, ‘Cendrars, Houellebecq: Portrait photographique et présentation de soi’, COnTEXTES, 14 (2014)
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journalistic articles, with Cendrars’s consent. The temporal gap between his last visit to Brazil and the publication of those stories no doubt reinforced Cendrars’s idealized perception of the country, which he considered his ‘second spiritual homeland’.54 In ‘Fébronio’, a 1938 story published in Paris-Soir and presented as reportage, Cendrars projects the same kind of barbaric and demonic forces on the non-European Other that characterized Moravagine’s protagonist. Indeed, Cendrars seems to consider the Afro-Brazilian criminal Febrônio, the story’s protagonist, a reincarnation of Moravagine.55 By linking Febrônio to Moravagine, explicitly mentioned in the story, Cendrars elongates the chain of representations linking the Self and the Other, in which the Other constitutes the dark side of the Self as a maleficent and demonic entity. Febrônio’s blackness allows Cendrars to reflect on the destructive energies unleashed by the encounter between European and non-European elements in the context of colonial oppression:
La criminalité des gens de couleur, pour ne pas dire des primitifs qui sont en contact quotidien ou aux prises avec la civilisation moderne et qui ont plus ou moins, de gré ou de force, subi, adopté, imité, appris, singé, et souvent jusqu’à l’inhibition de leurs instincts et de leurs réflexes les plus naturels, la mentalité et les préjugés de leurs maîtres ou de leurs patrons blancs, m’a toujours très vivement intéressé car je la considère comme un court-circuit, un retour de flamme, un choc en retour.56
Cendrars’s fascination with the non-European Other, and the supposedly dark forces emanating from it as a reaction to oppressive Western civilization, led him to cite Arthur de Gobineau, who disparagingly attributed the invention of poetry to black people.
______54. Cendrars, Histoires vraies, pp. xii–xiii, 476. 55. Cendrars, Histoires vraies, pp. 229, 491. 56. Cendrars, Histoires vraies, p. 236.
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Cendrars adopts and inverts this idea; in his argument, the assertion of the Black origins of poetry becomes an idealization of the Other.57 Like the Indians in ‘La Dernière Chevauchée des Peaux-Rouges’, who represent the subversiveness of mystical ecstasy, Blacks in ‘Fébronio’ have the power to undermine the Western order, whether through criminality or poetry.
Conclusion
Cendrars’s literary trajectory began with a fascination with Otherness. Appropriating Gérard de Nerval’s famous phrase, his wish to become his own Other was realized through writing. As we have seen, representing the Other was a way of exploring the contours of the Self for Cendrars. In a fluid and contradictory dynamic, he constructed the Jew, the German and the non-European Other as highly ambiguous figures which alternately become objects of identification and rejection for his poetic and narrative ‘I’. We have seen that despite Cendrars’s presence in the Parisian German-speaking circles of intellectuals, World War I pushed him to reject German culture and to adopt the anti-‘Boche’ vocabulary of French nationalism. Nevertheless, in J’ai tué, the German enemy, first represented as the ultimate Other, became a reflection of the Self in its animal struggle for survival. As for the Jewish Other, we have observed that the poetic ‘I’ of Cendrars’s early works is attracted to the figure of the Wandering Jew, and fascinated with the crude eroticism of the East European Jewish town. But in a twist, the figure of the Jew then takes on a harmful and malevolent form, characterized by pathological sexuality, in Moravagine. However, one cannot point to a strictly linear evolution in this respect, since Cendrars’s fluidity in representing the Jewish Other may be observed as late as the 1940s, in his auto-fictional ‘memoirs’.
______57. Cendrars, Histoires vraies, p. 272.
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The ambiguous attitude towards the Jewish or German Other was not a unique phenomenon in the French literary field of the early twentieth century. We observe similar tendencies in the œuvre of Guillaume Apollinaire, a central figure in Parisian avant-garde circles. Though his stay in Germany between 1901 and 1902 proved important for his formative years, he ultimately assimilated French nationalism and anti-German sentiment at the outbreak of World War I, adopting far-right discourse about the divide between ‘Latin’ civilization and German barbarism. This discourse also contained anti-Semitic elements, in contrast with Apollinaire’s early fascination with Judaism and his pro-Dreyfus position during that affair.58 As for Cendrars’s idealization of the non-European ‘savage’, we have seen that he shared this approach with other avant-garde writers and artists. His fascination with Huns, Indians and Blacks as embodiments of an antithesis to European civilization was originally part of the avant-garde’s Primitivist stance, though in the 1920s and 30s it became a way to express his anti-conformism in spite of his mainstream popularity. As an indicator of his evolving position in the French literary field, and as a reflection and a shadow of his poetic and narrative ‘I’, the Other is omnipresent in Cendrars’s work and in his trajectory as a writer.
CERMOM, Paris
______58. Michel Décaudin, Apollinaire (Paris: Librairie générale française, 2002), p. 9; Laurence Campa, Guillaume Apollinaire (Paris: Gallimard, 2013), pp. 54–57, 96–129; Annette Becker, Guillaume Apollinaire: Une biographie de guerre, 1914–1918–2009 (Paris: Tallandier, 2009), pp. 174–78; Amotz Giladi, ‘Guillaume Apollinaire et la “latinisation” des avant-gardes parisiennes durant la Première Guerre mondiale’, COnTEXTES (2012)