DADA IS A EUROPEAN PHENOMENON IGNORED by Europeans or at least minimized, if not reduced to its simplest expression, to a kind of explosion confined to a neutral state during the First World War. In other words, an event without consequence. I want proof of this in a European Letters manual developed in France (Benoit-Dusausoy 1992: p. 124). Its objective is perfectly laudable, since it proposes to react against the nationalist tendencies of each literary history and, consequently, to offer a panorama of literary trends that have managed to transcend border barriers. The preface writers even go so far as to write, quite rightly:

We know that humanism is indebted to Erasmus, a native of Rotterdam, we remember that the Romanian Tzara launched Dadaism. But we would like to know a little more about Dutch literature and Romanian literature (Benoit-Dusausoy 1992: p. 13).

Indeed, what is progress compared to other histories of literature declined in each country, the work devotes five pages to Erasmus (of whom it is not said that he writes in Latin, the European language of the time), and there is indeed, a few pages apart, a passage devoted to the Netherlands, of which it is said that they experienced an engaged lyricism expressing itself, one must suppose, in Dutch. But then what relationship to establish between Erasmus's enunciation and that of the ardent Catholic Anna Bijns? It is up to the reader to decide. On the other hand, we will find nothing about Romanian literature at the time of Tzara, and nothing tells us what the founder of Dada owes to it, if indeed he owes it anything! The Dada Movement is entitled to half a page, crushed, so to speak, between futurism (1 p. ¼), expressionism (2 p.), surrealism (1 p. ½) and Russian constructivism (1/2 p.). The space of such articles being necessarily measured, one could console oneself by saying that the proportions are preserved. But this is without counting on the national feeling or patriotic localization that emerges through the writing: Italy for futurism and Russia for cubo-futurism; Germany composing with Flanders, Bohemia, the Balkans for expressionism; France and Belgium for surrealism; USSR for constructivism. One wonders if these different "isms" don't take a different name depending on the country where they raged, their common denominator being Dada! I'm joking, of course, but the height of it, for the notice devoted to Dada, is that there is no mention of its establishment in France. Just as there is no treatment of the convergence between the arts, of the extraordinary creativity of this movement, on all aesthetic levels. In fact, this European manual is representative of the fate made in each country to Dada, which must be recognized that it bothers historians of literature and, to a lesser degree, of the plastic arts. The Dada Movement has been hijacked by national movements of the same appearance: by futurism in Italy, expressionism in Germany, surrealism in France. If it is true that some are prior to it, this is not a reason to hijack its own reality. I particularly accuse surrealism of having, in France at least, monopolized everything that was innovative in Dada, of having diverted it to its own ends by theorizing what was, at the start, only experimentation, play, spontaneous discovery. About forty years ago, a historian of Dadaism had the misfortune to say that surrealism was the "French form of Dada" (Sanouillet 1965). One can imagine what recriminations it aroused, coming first from the surviving surrealists, and from historians linked to this movement. It is true that his formulation was a bit expeditious, but his opponents were no more objective. I must therefore resituate Dada, give it back its properly European dimension (not to say international), restore it to its historical truth before determining its most striking contribution in the field of writing the unconscious. I wrote in 1962 that, in Dada, the practice of incoherence opened the doors of the unconscious (Béhar 1962), and I don't retract today, quite the contrary.

I. Methodological difficulties

The history of literary movements of the 20th century is confronted with new problems, stemming both from the nature of the objects it analyzes and also from the limits of its own discipline. If we want to talk about certain Literary Schools of the past, we have no (or little) difficulty in determining the members of the group in question, the text and the organ through which it asserted itself in the eyes of the public, the person responsible for the whole thus formed, or at least its spokesperson. Thus of the Pléiade, founded by Du Bellay and his friend Ronsard, whose defense and illustration of the French language is the reference program. The same goes, with some variants, for romanticism, naturalism, symbolism, etc. But things get complicated with Dada, insofar as this movement is not purely literary – it radically rejects the idea of literature – insofar as it also transcends national and linguistic borders. So much so that our science of literature is the least equipped to study such complex objects, which require trans-linguistic and trans-artistic skills, to put it quickly, because it is the nature of our science that is here at stake by such experiments. To stick here to the sole case of Dada, we will emphasize the international character of this movement, observed by all.

The presence of Dada is attested in many points of the European continent, and even in South America: rare are, at first glance, the literatures which, before and after 1916, knew how to shelter from its subversive activities (Thomas 1989: p. 109).

The problem is to know how the same movement spread, between 1916 and around 1924, in countries with diverse and contrasting cultural, political, historical situations, without there having been, apparently, a central federating and disseminating system of instructions, unlike what could happen for futurism, for example. But, is it really the same Dada Movement or several variable forms – which would be called "The Dadaisms" (Dachy 1994)? Are we sure that, like Bolshevism, whose hand the Parisian newspapers of the twenties saw everywhere, there was not, occult or manifest, a great manipulator, methodically executing a determined strategy? In a first time, we will recall the necessity of approaching Dada as an international phenomenon, if we want not to caricature its deep nature. It suffices to see the letterhead composed by Tzara at the beginning of 1920 to apprehend this international dimension and understand how such an affirmation must have shocked the Europe of the treaties of Versailles and Saint-Germain, which was resurrecting the homelands. Berlin, Geneva, Madrid, New York are indicated there as the various branches of the Movement, with an impressive enumeration of the seven Parisian reviews published simultaneously by Dada which was itself, let us not forget, a foreign body grafted to Zurich. However modest it may be, this letterhead illustrates the multiplicity of the centers lit by Dada and their (relative) simultaneity. For practical reasons, it is customary to retrace the history of Dada according to the various places where it raged, so that the chronology is mistreated. Conversely, if we adopt a strictly chronological point of view, we run into other impasses: what are the marks of the beginning and end of the movement? (Some will speak of an American "proto Dada", others will invoke "ancestors" or "precursors" with Jarry etc.) how to solve the problem of geographical borders and aesthetic categories that I initially evoked? From the outset, Dada appears to us as a group stronger than the sum of its components, where authority belongs to no one in particular. It suffices to proclaim oneself Dada, to recognize oneself in the Movement, to be a full member of it. At the limit, Kurt Schwitters, eliminated by the Berlin group, nevertheless continues, individually, under his own commercial reason, Merz, an activity now considered as Dadaist, and he will himself recover the veterans of Dada in 1923-1924, as well as I. K. Bonset [Van Doesburg] in Mecano. On the other hand, what complicates the task of historians considerably, double belonging is possible, on the artistic level as on other levels. Thus, in Berlin, one can affirm, without being taxed with confusionism, that there were Dada-Marxists as well as Dada-expressionists; and the same Van Doesburg, holder of constructivism, will sign I.K. Bonset his contributions to Dada!

Unlike what we usually do when we talk about literature or arts, in this case, we must take into account individual dissimilarities rather than similarities: this is what makes the originality of the Movement, its richness. In his journal, The Flight Out of Time, Hugo Ball observes with interest, not to be surprised but to mark the productivity of such a process, that, according to the days, rapprochements are made sometimes with some, sometimes with others, the essential being that all maintain a minimum of understanding between them, a common will to identify with Dada, which, in return, identifies with them:

We are five and the remarkable fact is that we are never really in perfect agreement, even if we agree on the main objectives. The constellations change. Sometimes Arp and Huelsenbeck agree and seem inseparable, sometimes Arp and Janco unite their forces against H. then H. and Tzara against Arp, etc. There is a perpetual movement of attraction and repulsion. An idea, a gesture, a certain nervousness is enough to modify the constellation without however upsetting the small group (Ball 1917).

The same back and forth reproduces itself at the international level, constituting a set of nodes of relations over the borders, in other words a network, with loose and mobile meshes. From the publication of Cabaret Voltaire, in July 1916, this internationalist will manifests itself, expressly opposing chauvinistic bellicism. Throughout its too brief existence, this review glorifies itself, against its detractors, of a fruitful mixture of cultures for the future. When, in Paris, Rachilde, who was more inspired when she defended in her youth Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi, wanted to launch a campaign of silence against this movement that she claimed was of "Boche" origin, Picabia had an easy time answering her: "I am, myself, of several nationalities and Dada is like me" (Picabia 1920: p. 4), ironizing on a patriotism that foments war. Internationalism is not only linked to the origin of the members of Dada, it is an affirmed position, which is found in the messages (contained both in the reviews and the paintings or manifestations), against the depressing and harmful idea of national art. Certain groups recognize themselves in Dada, a posteriori: the Russian "nitchevoki", Iliazd and his 41°, Clément Pansaers with the review Ça ira, the Spaniards Guillermo de Torre, Rafael Lasso de la Vega, Jacques Edwards... Better still, the presence of late centers in Antwerp, Amsterdam, in Hungary with the review Ma, in Poland etc. is reported. Historians discuss this point: they wonder if it is legitimate to apply, today, a label that was not claimed at the time. But, I think, we must take into account the great confusion maintained and wanted by Dada, which makes it very difficult for us to catalog, to designate the characteristic traits, the invariants of such or such movement. To the point that this confusion, each time we encounter it, associated with other constants, legitimizes the Dada appellation. The international presence of Dada, its various ramifications, go hand in hand with a systematic refusal of institutions, which complicates its atypical aspect. By its very origins, Dada rises against all the powers of establishment, which have led peoples, individuals, to chaos. But, original approach, it does not limit itself to denouncing war, dominant ideologies, by a discourse reproducing ideology. This is why, despite their apparent convergence of views, in Switzerland during the war, it opposes Romain Rolland and Yvan Goll, pacifists who wanted to be "above the fray". Vomiting of European civilization and bourgeois values; enterprise of demoralization; scandal, destruction, negation: Dada embodies revolt, on all levels. Everything that hinders its own flourishing is condemned. Needless to enumerate, whether they are social institutions: School, Army, Church or those of literature and art (like, for example, Academies or exhibition selection committees). In short, everything that takes the form of an organization. In Berlin, observes Louis Janover (Janover 1989: p. 39), radical intellectuals adopt an original position with respect to the revolutionary movement, likely to worry engaged intellectuals, working in the sphere traditionally delimited as political. Refusal of borders, of established categories, Dada borrows what seems good to it here and there, rejects labels, constraints and proclaims with Tzara: "a single basis of understanding, art", at the same time that it accepts everything that rejects art. It is important to emphasize this: this ambiguity is constitutive of the Movement which poses, jointly, affirmation and negation, without resolution of opposites. This is what confuses our logical habits, our systems of thought. Such an approach, paradoxical, illogical, inscribed on the margins of established philosophies, of any institutional organization (in the broad sense) is explained by a fundamental conception: it is the uprising of life, the irrepressible will to find life again, to reintegrate art into life. In this regard, parodying Descartes, Dada could affirm: "I create, therefore I am". It considers, indeed, creation as a primary activity of man, as necessary and vital as breathing or excretion. This initial datum, by which the individual would find himself in his totality, is not separable from the hope he places in a humanity purified by the radical shock, reconciled with itself. Phenomenon of international scope, rebelling against any institution, would not Dada be, however, a more subtle variant of the institutions evoked previously, under the literary form in particular? There are so many academicisms that hide in their attacks against the Academy that, experience helping, one comes to imagine Dada as a counter-institution which, to achieve its ends, would be obliged to model itself on the organizations it was fighting. Dada as a European phenomenon Should we therefore subscribe to the analysis of Perniola (1977) taken up by Jacques Dubois:

This leads to the paradox of an attitude like that of Dada which, at the same time, translates with violence the desire to rejoin life and the spontaneous, and cuts itself off from social exchange because it operates with means of expression more or less foreign to the communication of all. This is explained to a certain extent by the fact that the Dadaist writer can only take a position from and in the terms of his institutional status? (Dubois 1978: p. 108).

This reasoning seems specious to me. In the form of a vicious circle, it takes the effect for the cause. In fact, the Dadas did not want to explain themselves "like everyone else", but they were quite capable of doing so, as evidenced, in 1922, by Tzara's conference in Weimar and Jena (Tzara 1975: p. 419). They were aware of the impasses where the institutional scheme would have led them, that of the Communist International for example, which they did not fail to copy by proclaiming the dictatorship of the spirit. So they preferred to stick to the minimum of organization: the network woven by friendship, without any other commitment than fidelity to the given word, a certain reciprocity in the exchanges between partners of the same age and the same condition. Considered from the angle of the sociology of institutions, what could this collective minimum be? The virtue of a name-label, first of all. Absurd name, made to designate anything. Ambiguous name, since it is a double affirmation in Slavic languages (and also in Romanian), while its semantic content carries negation. Label without content, covering all sorts of activities: reviews, exhibitions, cabaret programs, editions. No leader, no "President", or rather, everyone is president, as Tzara indicates to Man Ray when the latter asks him for permission to entitle New York Dada the review he wishes to found in the United States. No Bureau, no structured organization, but source-men, and what I would willingly call passers-by. Tzara, who makes it a point to organize exhibitions in Zurich for artists belonging to belligerent countries (and he succeeds!), who can enter into contact with Germans, French, Italians and even Americans... Huelsenbeck, returned to Berlin at the end of 1916, communicates the good news to the avant-garde youth and ends up organizing the Dada Club... Picabia, who jumps over meridians and puts some in contact with others. No programs, but key texts, proclamation-manifestos, which drain a whole public, such as the famous Dada Manifesto 1918 by Tzara. He affirms there that he wants nothing, but says it so well that he leads to Breton's adherence and with him the whole Littérature group. Same for the Dada Manifesto in German, proclaimed by Raoul Hausmann, parody of President Wilson's thirteen points, where Louis Janover nevertheless perceives some positive options: Under the creed with Ubu-esque accents, the measures and "abolitions" proposed, sprinkled with frankly comical demands, can be heard as a limit exaggeration of demands by no means delirious in themselves: "international and revolutionary association of creators and intellectuals of the whole world on the basis of radical communism", "progressive introduction of unemployment by the generalized mechanization of all activities", "immediate abolition of all property", struggle against "the bourgeois spirit hidden", but still active in cultural circles, of expressionism notably, "abolition of the concept of property in the new art" etc. (Janover 1989, p. 43). Dada gives back its primacy to the individual, which does not exclude collective action. By refusing the institution in favor of direct action on the public (still mediated by the press), it runs the double risk: 1- of exhaustion in the constant renewal to reconstitute a network with indefinite contours; 2- of freezing in repetition, which would have led it to become an institution by itself. Don't we say of a famous and aged individual that he is "an institution"? Dada has known both dangers, it quickly understood that it was running to its loss, hence its brevity and voluntary death.

II. An international circuit, in space-time

Many French readers (but such is not your case) do not have access to this dimension of space-time due to the language barrier, the relative contempt in which Dada has been held and still is – considered as a minor current for very French reasons – contrary to what happened in other countries (with rich collections in the United States and an astonishing bibliography in Germany), and except for the Schools of art which have been obliged to take into account the decisive influence of Dada plastic on the history of art and contemporary imagination. This leads me to make a digression on the "misunderstanding" of which Dada has been a victim in France. Let's not insist on the "German" connotation of the movement, which partially harmed it, the same phenomenon having played for expressionism. But this misunderstanding came especially from the fact that the literary dimension was overrepresented there compared to other countries, and that Dada, covered by "the surrealist wave" (Breton 1969: p. 62), was the victim of an ostracism that is explained by the Tzara/Breton conflict and the ambiguity of the links between these two movements. The second wanted to be constructive while the first would have been only inhabited by an iconoclastic and destructive rage. Dada, which still occupies a minor place in our literary manuals today, is often considered there only as an antechamber of surrealism, and Tzara as the author of the Dadaist Poem with scissors. Paradox: one of the countries most historically involved by Dada has tended to "repress" it. However, we must not minimize the role of the French "precursors" of Dada (Vaché, Cravan) and the animators of avant-garde currents or directors of reviews such as Sic or Nord-Sud who, very early in relation with Tzara, were indispensable links to ensure its promotion in France. The fact that Tzara corresponded, even before 1920, with Apollinaire, an essential figure of modernity, Albert-Birot, Reverdy, Breton, Soupault, Aragon, Éluard, shows to what extent Dada is rooted in the literary history of France. Geographically, Dada invades all continents: the United States from the first decade of the 20th century, and, at the other extreme, Russia, with the cubo-futurists Khlebnikov or Kroutchenykh, historical neighbors of Dada. We now have knowledge of certain texts which, once translated, open onto less known spheres: Russia, Japan, Yugoslavia, Finland. On the historical level, we must consider Dada from the "proto-Dada" (in Barcelona, in France, in Romania, in New York). All the great poles of "historical Dadaism" must be considered (Zurich, Paris, Berlin, Cologne, etc.). The task is all the more complicated as a certain bias of artistic eclecticism is consubstantial with the very spirit of Dada – multiple and proteiform both in the plastic arts, poetry, dance, cinema, theater, etc. – responding to Tzara's famous formula: "abolish the drawers of the brain". We must therefore consider Dada in all its dimensions as a European phenomenon. I will go even further by extending the exploration to the two ends of the Dadaist chain, before and after. "Dada is more than Dada" and it existed before Dada. Didn't Duchamp say that Rabelais was Dada (Dachy 1994: p. 372)? Dada is a state of mind. Writers or artists who were not strictly speaking Dadaists announced it by their works, the extravagance of their behavior, their nihilism, their spirit of derision and revolt against logic and established order. In the wake of Jarry, often cited, eccentrics like Cravan or Vaché existed everywhere. Such as this Urmuz in Romania, master of the absurd, of whom Tzara may have had knowledge in his youth in Bucharest (but I doubt it). Isolated and ephemeral manifestations occurred, such as Paavolainen's artistic evenings (1920) evoked in a text about Finland. Let's not forget the sequels, extensions and descendants of Dada. A writer of today tells us about Schwitters' stay in a prisoner of war camp in England, where he remained Dadaist against all odds. A university specialist in Raoul Hausmann analyzes the French becoming of a Berlin Dadaist in Limoges, with a work testifying to the continuation of Dada (Palissandre et Mélasse, 1957-1959). Several works take a critical look at the heirs of the movement and the "neo-Dada" phenomena: members of Pin or Fluxus, lettrists or situationists, in Spain, in France, in the United States. A non-negligible place must be made for current artists who have provocative practices closely resembling the first Dadaism of Zurich, such as the "ultra" representatives of contemporary Russian avant-garde (Pimenov, Osmolovski, Mavromatti or Alexandre Brener, etc.) engaged in political and iconoclastic protest in the proper sense. We will cross paths with artists who still write or create today in the style of Dada. Villeglé, author of poster lacerations, is interested in Baader who used similar techniques. J.-F. Bory composes an "AbracaDada" in visual and phonetic poetry. P. Beurard-Valdoye, who traveled across Europe on the traces of Schwitters in exile, is sufficiently impregnated with his subject – on which he is preparing a book – to practice poetic collages. We must revisit Dada in Germany which covered three currents (Berlin, Cologne, Hanover) from which emerged "giants" who largely overflow its contours (Schwitters, notably). Its aesthetic imagination (from Kandinsky's abstraction and synthesis of the arts to Max Ernst's Dada-surrealism) as well as its innovative techniques (caricature, collage, photomontage, cinema, etc.) have had an unequaled influence on contemporary art. But Dada in Germany is also the symbol of an exceptional historical commitment – pacifist internationalism of 1914-1918 and revolt against Weimar – which aroused after the Second World War the revival of a movement condemned as "degenerate art" by Hitler. Its exiled artists have prolonged its memory (Schwitters in Sweden, in England and in the United States, Huelsenbeck in the United States, Hausmann in France, etc.). The particular practices of German Dadaism, of cabaret (Mehring), of the press, of the poster, of the street, its figures at the borders of Dada, of politics, of art and of anarchy (Grosz, Dix, Toller, Piscator) have had repercussions on the movements of the 1960-1970s and have inspired recent artists (W. Fassbinder in cinema). Conversely, I often regret that Spain is not included in the extension of the Dada struggle domain. If it is true that Vicente Huidobro or Guillermo de Torre benefit from specific publications, we should go further and research what classicism on the one hand, Francoist ideology on the other, have occulted. I would say the same for the countries of Eastern Europe, victims of the same phenomenon of occultation, for reasons perhaps inverse, leading to the same result. Yugoslavia and Russia are representative of the particular problems of Eastern avant-gardes. Leaving the European framework, we must turn to New York (I don't believe that Dada touched all of America), rich in avant-gardes and constellations from 1903, around Arensberg or Stieglitz. The ground was propitious there to welcome the ambassadors of dissident art that were Duchamp and Picabia. But it is significant that the New York Dada grouping turned to Tzara to consolidate its formation. A figure in itself, the Baroness Else von Freytag-Loringhoven, nevertheless produces multiple facets. Once the whole Dada circumscribed in all the amplitude of space-time (what Bakhtin calls the chronotope), and after having made all the inventory, one can then approach one of its principal actions, which is the inscription of the unconscious in the literary domain.

III. The irruption of the unconscious in literature

This subtitle will have something to surprise you. Familiar with the histories of French literature, you know perfectly well that it is André Breton and Philippe Soupault who applied, so to speak, the Freudian discoveries to literature by offering us The Magnetic Fields (1920), "this book by which everything begins", as Aragon said, this book from which Breton elaborated the theory of automatism that he will expose in the Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, this book by which he dates the birth of surrealism. I will not enter here into the historical quarrel (which only interests historians and Spanish teachers, Arp would have said) of knowing if by this work surrealism had already been discovered before the installation of Dada in Paris. Note however that this is Breton's thesis, to which everyone seems to subscribe today, despite the obvious anachronism it contains. To avoid such a debate, I will stick to the Dada texts written and read in public in Zurich during the war, even before the birth of the group and the Littérature review, and more particularly to these collective texts called "simultaneous poems". A posteriori, Hans Arp declares:

Tzara, Serner and I wrote at the Terrasse café a poetic suite entitled "The hyperbole of the crocodile hairdresser and the cane". This kind of poetry will later be baptized "automatic poetry" by the surrealists. Automatic poetry springs directly from the entrails and other organs of poets who have accumulated the appropriate reserves (Arp 1957: p. 94).

At the date of this declaration, Arp, who was part of both movements without ever knowing rupture or eviction, cannot be suspected of bias towards one camp or the other. What must be retained from his remarks is not its (involuntarily) polemical aspect towards surrealism, but the organic character of this composition, as sprung from the body of those who have made themselves poets. For automatic writing cannot be reduced to the canonical model produced by the authors of The Magnetic Fields. There is a second form of automatism, less subject to inner discourse, closer to waking dream, that Tzara will call the "experimental dream", of which his Grains et issues are the best example (Tzara 1979: p. 5). We see there the scriptor in his context of enunciation, starting from the circumstances, the familiar objects that surround him, gradually won over by his oneiric visions, which he rewrites, resumes, transforms indefinitely, until giving them the perfect form he intended for them. Tzara starts from a hypnagogic vision or a phrase perceived in half-sleep and, very lucidly, deploys all its possibilities. In this kind of writings, what matters most is the latent content of the message, anguish or, on the contrary, joy born of new encounters. Finally, a third form of automatic writing comes from collage, from the assembly of pre-established verbal material, chance playing the role of creator, opening new spaces, new combinations. The trouble is that these automatic simultaneous poems with several scriptors produced in Zurich are in several languages and predominantly or solely in German, like the poem below. Ignoring this language, I resolve to borrow a translation, at the risk of losing certain traits, of phonic origin notably:

THE HYPERBOLE OF THE CROCODILE HAIRDRESSER AND THE CANE

the saint-elme fire rages around the beards of the anabaptists
they take out the mining lamps from their nipples
and they sink their rumps into the puddles
he sang a meatball nailed to the floating ice
and he whistled it so softly around the corner the scoundrel
that a cast grate slipped
4 eugenes on scandinavian tour millovitch blue box
it's a resounding success
between the hair cream of the walker of the sleeve
the blessed silly canary climbs the stake pâté
of a butter purse in the leaden plumage
fatal race on steep wall
this dear father dives
his tomahawk in the summit
the accomplished mother pushes
her ultimate quack
the children go in a round
towards the sunset
the father climbs bowing
in a gunboat
the jam strap
of sparkling immature fools
whirl around the evening meal
vocables of viennese customs back office full of horror
hostile to the circus the keel
suspends the profile
in the canals
international
communion of marshals
quartet of mephisto
scandals scanned
(Arp and Tzara, in Dachy 1994: p. 343-44).

We don't know how this poem was elaborated, nor at what speed. It seems that the first of the scriptors traced a word, a sequence, immediately pursued by the second, and so on. In this sense, there would have been simultaneity of attitudes, subject to the rule of consecutivity of language. In the present case, nothing distinguishes Arp's contribution from Tzara's, and I would be quite incapable of indicating to you the alternation of voices. In fact, we are dealing with a mix, a mixture in nascent state (as we say of oxygen) of these three forms of automatism, favored by collaboration. Practically without control of reason, sound associations succeed each other, a dialogue of echoes; tics, clichés, elements of ready-made phrases, ready for use; a referential language, coming from the immediate environment of the authors (the newspaper, the table, the window as well as the paintings hanging on the walls); finally an expression of the unconscious, the words springing from the deepest part of the body, in contempt of logic, of the concern to communicate ideas. If there is still simultaneity, it can only be found in the common attitude adopted by the scriptors, welcoming what, in them, only asks to be formulated. The image of the Saint-Elme fire, this light due to static electricity discharges that can appear at the mast of a ship during a storm, is very beautiful when it applies to bearded anabaptists. Let's recognize that it has no logical relevance. In the same way, the mind lingers on the family anecdote: a comic strip father, a mother in agony, a brood of children at the beak... I could try to give meaning to what apparently has none. But who doesn't see that I would only express my need for coherence, my culture, my own associations of ideas, so true is it, as Freud said, that one cannot interpret a dream (here the verbal associations of two emitters) outside the dreamer. The strangest thing is that, in translating this text into French, one notices a singular homogeneity of the poetic discourse. If it is impossible to extract obsessive forms, it is no less certain that none of the collaborators imposes his voice, nor his particular thematics. We are indeed witnessing this fusion of minds, this pooling of thought of which André Breton will speak in the Surrealist Manifesto. Remarkable homogeneity, which is not the least contribution of this initial form of automatism where passes the vocabulary of the body and nature dear to Dada. Still, we must know where this voice comes from. I see no other origin than the unconscious of each, seeking to express itself under this incoherent form. To conclude this brief analysis of a production of the Anonymous Society for the exploitation of Dadaist vocabulary, we must emphasize the experimental character of all the texts produced under this label, in relation to the bellicose context of the time. Here, Hugo Ball's warning in Cabaret Voltaire, taken up by Tzara in the "Dada dialogue between a coachman and a lark" is worth more than ever: the review "has no relation to the war and attempts a modern international activity" (Tzara 1975: p. 494). This does not mean that the artists gathered in Zurich are indifferent to the international conflict and that they do not suffer, in a certain way, its human consequences. But they also think about the future, about this purified humanity that they will embody, announced in Tzara's Dada Manifesto 1918, and implement their program of destruction (the clean slate) and, simultaneously, of creation, thus manifesting, concretely, their ideals, by breaking taboos, by opening the door to new artistic practices: "Thought is made in the mouth" affirms Tzara. The simultaneous poems provide an immediate example. Some present a new form of interpretation in public, proposing a kind of basso continuo of which each listener seizes as he pleases, according to the language he practices, to transform it as he hears and make it render the desired sound. Others provide a more compact, more homogeneous and less penetrable matter, where the reader only perceives certain springboard words, unless he is himself polyglot and gives meaning to what is a concrete verbal matter. But, on the symbolic level, he is like the traveler who would seek his way in an unknown country. In both cases, the law of simultaneous perception formulated by Chevreul for sight finds its equivalent for the ear and, a fortiori, for the mind. The contrast of tone is perceptible in the simultaneous spectacle, while the bilingual automatic poem offers a contrast of color. By drawing inspiration from painting, the poets believed they had discovered a kind of concrete poetry, made of words borrowed from the languages they practiced (I have only recorded one neologism, and even then it is by agglutination of two existing words: "bonbonmalheur") and which led to a specific practice of verbal automatism, from which they carefully refrained from drawing a theory, since, for them, the source of language could not be elsewhere than in their body. Yet if the Dadaists have not developed any theory from their exercises of incoherence and their automatic practice, this is not a reason to deprive them of their invention and especially of the attention they have paid to the individual and collective unconscious. This is not the place to comment on the relations of Zurich artists with psychoanalysis. Suffice it to know that they were not unaware of the works of Freud and Jung, which moreover they did not deprive themselves of taking to task. Their poetic material proves it sufficiently.

Henri Béhar "Dada as a European phenomenon. The irruption of the unconscious in literature", RiLUnE, n. 6, 2007, p. 13-28.

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