‘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). IJFrS 16 (2016) 190 GILADI 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). THE OTHER IN BLAISE CENDRARS 191 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). 192 GILADI 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. THE OTHER IN BLAISE CENDRARS 193 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.