When taking up my position at the University of Abidjan in October 1972, my reputation had preceded me because a critic, Claude Roy, had cited me in an article in Le Nouvel Observateur reviewing the publication of Dada en verve. My colleagues had mainly retained the final quote: Dada=God=Shit! So when it came to composing a literary issue of the Annales de l'université, their director, Claude Perrot, a Jesuit ethnologist, asked me for a striking contribution. I could do no better than produce an unpublished essay on the 7 Dada Manifestos by Tristan Tzara, as I was then establishing the first volume of his Complete Works for Flammarion editions. The reader may find it perfectly incongruous to speak of Dada in African soil, a dozen years after Independence. It was not so in my eyes, and I persist in thinking the same thing: the poetry I was to teach has no homeland, no borders. It is international by definition, and my role was indeed to make it known to students of Modern Literature, whose degree was, at the time, valid in France as well as in Ivory Coast.

Article reprinted in: Henri Béhar, Littéruptures, Lausanne, L'Age d'Homme, 1988, pp. 78-89.

The morphological anomaly at the initial of this phrase that Tristan Tzara articulates during the Dada Manifesto 1918 has mysteriously imposed itself on my memory, to the point that before establishing his Complete Works, I had not noticed that he had corrected it in his edition of the Seven Manifestos in 1963. For me, Tzara will therefore always remain, against his will, a terrorist of language while he himself, transporting a Romanian term into French, believed he was expressing himself in complete conformity. What remains is the image of the raised fist, prefiguring the rallying sign of the Popular Front, announcing a violence that the matured poet did not want to disown. Thus, whatever the degree of grammaticality of the text, it clearly signified a truth, despite its apparent incoherence. This is the first postulate I will advance during this analysis, at the risk of shocking the admirers of the Discourse on Method alone: Tzara's Seven Manifestos enunciate a perfectly lucid program, moreover, under absurd, grotesque, and clownish appearances, differentiating themselves from the previous manifestos of expressionism, futurism, and even later surrealism.

I. The manifesto as discourse

Let us note, first of all, that our texts differ radically from all other more or less contemporary manifestos (decadentism, nunism, futurism, etc.): their primary object is to be said, uttered in public. These are manifestos not only by virtue of the message, the position they are charged with transmitting, but by virtue of their mode of enunciation by an author-actor, before a gathered crowd. It would therefore be appropriate to study the lexis (way of speaking) before scrutinizing the logos (what is said). Unfortunately, we do not have a recording of these famous sessions where Tzara managed to annihilate the intellectual faculties of his audience, according to the commentary he gives in his "Zurich Chronicle," regarding the first Dada evening, July 14, 1916: Before a compact crowd, Tzara manifests, we want we want to piss in various colors... New cries the bass drum, piano and cannons powerless, we tear the cardboard costumes the audience throws itself into puerperal fever interrupt. The dissatisfied newspapers simultaneous poem in four voices simultaneous in 300 definitively idiotized. If we had had such a recording, we could have applied the principles of phono-stylistics developed by the Yugoslav master, Petar Guberina. Failing that, we are forced to fall back on what has been transmitted to us, the typographed text, the logos, marking its originality. It is a discourse — in the sense where discourse opposes narrative. It carries all the marked and marking traits identified by Benveniste in his Problems of General Linguistics: discourse is the expression of subjectivity signaled by pronominal indicators (I, you); adverbial indicators (here, now); tenses (present, past perfect, future). As Gérard Genette says very well: "in discourse, someone speaks, and his situation in the act of speaking is the focus of the most important significations." Here, it is Tzara, and he alone, who signals himself to the audience's attention. But where I will depart from Genette is when he asserts that one never finds narrative or discourse in a pure state in a text. I will add: except in Tzara's Seven Manifestos which were all read in public before being published, and which are exclusively discourse, that is to say that one finds no relation, direct or indirect, of the actions or words of another individual than Tzara. So here is the second evidence I wanted to reach: Tristan Tzara's manifestos are indeed manifestos in the most concrete sense of the word: perfect form of discourse where the poet speaks directly in his own name, and without any intermediary such as the newspaper or the book. This is where the first scandal lies: Tzara reacts against an entire tradition that makes the poet an unknown on the margins of society; he assumes his own speech and overturns the Rimbaldian proposition. Here "I" is Tzara; he designates himself physically to the spectator's attention and, not content with embodying the speaker's ego, he proceeds to identify the anonymous crowd with himself. In other words, he wants to be at the same time one and multiple, reflection and mirror of the public of which he is, in some way, the acting consciousness (1). In doing so, the poet claims to reconquer his privileged place in our society, as in Plato's ideal Republic. This is also why, it seems to me, he does not leave it to others to say his text: especially not actors, professional reciters. Tzara refuses mimesis because poetry is direct creation and, third evidence, the Manifestos are a poetic act. (2)

II. The form of discourse

This is what I would like to show by studying the very form of discourse. It jumps to the eyes that in the Manifestos there are three levels, three types of languages: 1° the manifesto, which affirms a certain number of principles; 2° poetry, meaning drift, development, excrescence of vocabulary and figures; 3° metalanguage, reflection on the discourse in the course of enunciation, of the type: "I am against manifestos and yet I make a manifesto"... This is what René Loureau pointed out during a brief intervention at the Cerisy-la-Salle meetings in 1966. But this triple distinction seemed to lend itself to criticism insofar as it appeared to operate from a norm, especially for the second point (poetic writing, non-referential, as if all language were, by definition, integrally referential!) and it is Tzara himself who will give us the solution, the justification for this tripartition. Rather than referring to an illusory norm from which the manifestos would be deviation or difference, we must compare our texts to the Conference on Dada delivered in Weimar and Jena on September 23 and 25, 1922. Tzara says there everything he has already communicated during the manifestos, but in a language that remains on a single plane: I know that you expect explanations about Dada. I will give none. Explain to me why you exist. You don't know. You will tell me: I exist to create the happiness of my children. Deep down you know that's not true. You will say: I exist to safeguard my homeland from barbarian invasions. That's not enough. You will say: I exist because God wills it. That's a tale for children. You will never know why you exist but you will always let yourself be easily led to put seriousness into life. You will never understand that life is a play on words, because you will not be alone enough to oppose to hatred, to judgments, to everything that demands great efforts, a calm and serene state of mind where everything is the same and without importance. On the contrary, in the Manifestos we find:

1° Language of the manifesto which differs little from the conference: "To launch a manifesto one must want: A, B, C, thunder against 1, 2, 3" (p. 359). "But this need is also aged" (p. 359). Observations: "Cubism was born from the simple way of looking at the object"... (p. 361): "Art needs an operation" (p. 369). Definitions: "A manifesto is a communication made to the whole world" (p. 378): "There are people who explain because there are others who learn" (p. 383). But also particular traits of the manifesto that are not found in the conference: — reminder of the I/you or we/them opposition: "But we, Dada, we are not of their opinion" (p. 358). "I tell you: there is no beginning and we do not tremble, we are not sentimental" (p. 363). "Look at me well!... I am like all of you" (p. 373). — from there, one easily passes to the bitter: "Give yourself a punch in the face and fall dead" (p. 376). "Musicians, break your blind instruments on stage" (p. 369). — from order to invective: "You are all idiots." or else "You see with your navel — why do you hide from it the ridiculous spectacle we offer it?" (p. 373). — from simple exposition, the recipe: To make a Dadaist poem Take a newspaper Take scissors Choose from this newspaper an article having the length you plan to give to your poem. Cut out the article [...] (p. 382). One comes to rhetorical amplification, illustrating the theme one wants to treat: Chatter is encouraged by the post office administration, which, alas! is perfecting itself, encouraged by the tobacco monopoly, railway companies, hospitals, funeral companies, fabric factories. Chatter is encouraged by the pope's money... (p. 379). In the same order of ideas, Dada not taking on any recording mission, the manifesto tends toward the expression of simple spiel, made only to dazzle the audience, seduce it, in the etymological sense of the term: Ladies and gentlemen buy enter buy and don't read you will see the one who has in his hands the key to niagara the man who limps in a box the hemispheres in a suitcase the nose enclosed in a chinese lantern you will see you will see [...]. Here the verbose proliferation, absolutely gratuitous in appearance, is developed by reason of the parody of his own speech that Tzara constantly intends to submit to us.

2° Language of poetry The passage is imperceptible from one level of language to another, either in the same sentence, or in juxtaposed sentences "crazy enumerations, delirium, metaphors, in short a writing that will be quickly qualified as poetic" (Loureau). I will go a bit into detail, while maintaining that this notion of poetic language is subject to caution, that our examples must be put in relation to the Conference to be perceived as poetic. One will note first of all the small number of verbal creations: there are no absolutely new monemes, but some neologisms formed by coupling words: "crystal-bluff-madonna" (p. 359) "red-bellies" (p. 360) "speculative-system" (p. 364). Elsewhere, language ceases to be meaningful, in favor of a search for rhythm or even noise, by which the pleasant sounds that could emerge from verbal accumulation are denounced, as much as internal rhyme: "prostitutions, theaters, realities, sentiments, restaurants ohi, hoho, bang bang" (p. 352). One will notice that Tzara constantly seeks formulas of deceptiveness, on which we will refrain from making a value judgment. We will limit ourselves to noting the deception, without saying for all that that what is highly discordant is beautiful and poetic. But for us, the process properly belongs to the poetic domain, by the freedom it introduces into discourse. Tristan Tzara accentuates the constant paronomastic play in the French lexicon by establishing a phonic (and graphic) relationship between signifiers: "hypertrophic painters hyperesthetized and hypnotized by the hyacinths of hypocritical-appearing muezzins" (p. 368). If, as Tzara says, life is only a game, then everything is permitted, and all the more so the game with words! We will return to a problem sketched in the introduction, that of discordance, of which we said it has less importance than one would like to believe in the Manifestos. Indeed, one must make a distinction between the absence of meaning produced by the arbitrary bringing together of words like *art walk marsh locomotive, which we forge for the example, and the discordance established by Tzara. If classical rhetoric accepted this figure of style under the form of oxymoron "this obscure clarity that falls from the stars," nothing prevents modern poetics from deliberately and largely resorting to it, provided it is defined very precisely as a "contradiction between the conformity of syntax to the code and the non-conformity of semantic relationships, but syntax imposes a meaning on the mind" (M. Angenot). Let us reason on Tzara's formula "Art was a hazelnut game" (p. 358). One will note a perfect grammaticality of the sequence, only the semantics of the last term is not in close relationship with the first, we will say that it does not belong to the usual associative field. But there remains a meaning that does not make the whole totally absurd. This is due to the fact that the author respects one of the fundamental laws of articulated language, which is word order. A total perturbation of the sequence like / hazelnut a the art was game / will be a characterized nonsense, because contrary to the chronological principle of the spoken chain which imposes order, oriented, subject — verb — complement. In fact, discordance will increase with time in the manifestos, but there must always be a moment of reflection to spot it, so much are we guided by syntax: "Without the search for / I adore you / which is a French boxer" (p. 371). We have, in this case, a juxtaposition of correct and meaningful syntagms each for itself. It is their association that creates discordance, but one can affirm that in general Tzara respects syntax: to be convinced of this, it suffices to compare the cited examples to the result, provided by the poet himself, of the hat poem technique: "... Price they are yesterday agreeing then paintings," a recipe that, need we recall, the author of the Twenty-five Poems never retained for his own use, not even in the manifestos! Tzara giving flicks to language always maintains a minimum of meaning, either by suspensive effect that invites the listener to finish the sentence, "reimbursement will begin as soon as" (p. 371) or by unusual rapprochement of words: "Fan of cold examples" (p. 374), expression most eloquent and new, from which one cannot conclude to total absurdity. Let us say that the author puts his principles into practice, leaving free choice to the listener, not resolving the antitheses or open alternatives: "You are right idiot prince because I am convinced... of the contrary tartar" (p. 380). The result of all this is that one arrives at an unprecedented profusion of images, of the type defined by Reverdy and corrected by Breton, of which here is another example: "And the key of the kleptomaniac only works with crepuscular oil" (p. 372). If we stick to the plane of the signified, we can affirm that, in Tzara, poetic language is a language where denotation tends toward zero, connotation toward infinity. But, of course, poetic language, like that of the haymarket, includes a large part of metaphors. For lack of being able to examine them all, we will say that the metaphorical network established in the Manifestos is particularly dense, and statistically more important than that which one could count in the Conference. This is because here it is a matter of winning the adherence of some more than their reflected conviction. The dynamic tone of the young poet passes through, all his revolutionary faith: "We tear, furious wind, the linen of clouds and prayers, and prepare the great spectacle of disaster, fire, decomposition."

3° Metalanguage: By a slight deviation of meaning, we will call thus the set of propositions that serve, not to describe the language employed (what we are doing here) but which explicate the author's reflection on his text, on what he is in the process of saying, writing on the act of writing, discourse on discourse, which one finds essentially in the Dada Manifesto 1918 but also, in a more diffuse way, elsewhere. "I write a manifesto and I want nothing, I say nevertheless certain things and I am by principle against manifestos, as I am also against principles" (p. 359). "I always speak of myself since I don't want to convince, I don't have the right to drag others into my river..." (p. 361); "If there is a system in the lack of system — that of my proportions — I never apply it" (p. 375). "I maintain all conventions — to suppress them would be to make new ones, which would complicate our life in a truly repugnant manner" (p. 390). All this testifies to the lucidity of a speaker who knows very well where he is going, who knows the theoretical objections that could be made to his position and thereby prohibits any criticism of the manifesto placing itself on a plane other than his own. But what is capital in the ensemble submitted to our attention, is the presence and perfect fusion of these three levels of language in a single and unique emission. Contrary to the usage currently widespread among lecturers, we do not have the theory followed by illustration by example, the learned discourse to which succeeds the reward for the attentive and wise audience in the form of projection, but a practice of poetry as Tzara conceives it: a personal engagement, a way of living one's ideas, creation, finally, of a new poetry, made of theoretical reflection, lucidity and action. This is the second scandal perpetrated by Tzara. Not content with assigning a new place to the poet, he violates the rule of distinction of genres and mixes poetry with discourse. However, syntagmatic study does not exhaust its subject: one must see how these forms refer to themes, to a precise function of the manifesto.

III. Function

There is scandal insofar as Tzara mixes the different levels of language, in other words disappoints the listener perhaps accustomed to each of these languages separately, but not together. He obliges him to a mental gymnastics that is beyond his means in the time of speech (difference with the written: I go back, I can segment sentences or paragraphs). But, more serious fact, the third scandal will be in the content perceptible by the public. On the rhetorical plane, Tzara criticizes the previous systems, but refuses any balanced construction. He attacks the very foundations of society by leaving a gaping void that each must fill. Regarding art (let us not forget that he addresses preferably to art lovers, to a so-called avant-garde and self-proclaimed enlightened public), he reaffirms the relativity of beauty — this is an already old idea since it is enunciated by Fénelon before the Encyclopedists, but which always has its little effect: A work of art is never beautiful, by objective decree, for everyone. Criticism is therefore useless, it exists only subjectively, for each, and without the slightest character of generality. From there, one must reconsider all aesthetic values, privilege naive art, Negro art, etc. Particular case of art, the function of the poet. Tzara denounces in all his predecessors the taste for material comfort, their renunciation of poetry in favor of embourgeoisement. Rhymes sound the assonance of coins and inflection slides along the line of the belly in profile. All artists' groupings have resulted in this bank by riding on various comets. The door open to possibilities of wallowing in cushions and food (p. 361). Thus Tzara contributes to making art fall from the pedestal where it has been erected, denies it any necessity, any social function, he massacres all previous theories, all isms (cubism, futurism, modernism...) to which he opposes a magnificent name by its invariability: Dada. In an even more general way, Tzara draws up a failure report for all current philosophical theories, he denounces the a priori on which they are founded: — logic? "How does one want to order the chaos that constitutes this infinite variation, man?"; — morality? "Morality atrophies, like any scourge produced by intelligence" (p. 366). After which he has an easy time ironizing about writers who teach morality and discuss philosophy! This is where Tzara overturns all acquired ideas, institutes the clean slate: Ideal, ideal, ideal. Knowledge, knowledge, knowledge, Boumboum, boumboum, boumboum (p. 368). Let us note well that no new formula finds grace before his eyes: — psychoanalysis: "Psychoanalysis is a dangerous disease, lulls man's anti-real tendencies and systematizes the bourgeoisie" (p. 364); — Hegelian dialectic: The way of quickly looking at the other side of a thing, to impose one's opinion indirectly, is called dialectic, that is to say haggling over the spirit of french fries, dancing the method around (p. 364). He will say nothing else in clear language, in his Conference. In short, there is at the bottom of this general demolition a great despair (Tzara would say "Dadaist disgust"), the impression of having been constantly deceived, of having been launched into life with a blindfold over one's eyes. And when he tears off the blindfold, Tzara is seized by the madness of destruction: I destroy the drawers of the brain and those of social organization: demoralize everywhere and throw the hand of heaven into hell, the eyes of hell to heaven, reestablish the fertile wheel of a universal circus in the real powers and fantasy of each individual" (p. 363), or in another way: No pity, we have left after the carnage the hope of a purified humanity (p. 361). It will have been noted in passing: these two citations, if they translate the energy that Tzara intends to put into destroying, suggest that he is animated by a minimum of hope, of faith in the future. If he is nihilistic, Tzara is not so in an absurd, radical way, one sees him ready to reaffirm certain values, if only existence and the joy of living. I will return to this. Let us see first how Tzara goes about destroying the drawers of his listeners' brains. At the first stage, he enumerates a series of unresolved antitheses, that is, he affirms the equality of madness and wisdom, etc., in another way, he identifies Dada with the duck of doubt with vermouth lips "Dada places before action and above all: doubt, Dada doubts everything. Dada is TATOU. Everything is Dada. Beware of Dada" (p. 381)... "But the true dadas are against Dada." Dada is therefore absolute doubt, and Tzara does not hesitate to compare this initial principle to the creator in a very simple equation, which does not lack iconoclastic violence: Dada makes luxury, or Dada is in rut. God makes luxury or God is in rut (p. 386). Dada = God. This is what J.-C. Chevalier has shown very well in a purely linguistic Study: "Therefore God is, on the plane of linguistic theory at least, the only rival of Dada." 3 Shall I add that he is so on all planes? There, you will admit, a fine subject of scandal, no! Especially if this fundamental principle is supported by a deliberately violent context, where grossness and scatology rival in thickness. Dada remains within the European framework of weaknesses, it's still shit, but we want henceforth to shit in various colors to adorn the zoological garden of art with all the flags of consulates (p. 357). I am willing to grant to Prigioni4 that the German dadas show great complacency for the depreciative, and that Tzara may have imitated them on this point. But here again, I will remark that this fecal vocabulary does not remain within the framework of a text, it is pronounced in public and takes on, in some way, the same value of insult as the Word of Father Ubu, if not more. It's still more serious, because if we accept the identity Dada = God, we must complete it with the following equation Dada = God = Shit. In parallel, the spectator is constantly invited to contemplate the putrid rats, the blennorrheal discharge, the shit again of which it is made. The Seven Manifestos all place themselves at the same level of verbal violence increased by the derision of all things. Dada defines itself by absurdity, a nonsense, which disordered, demoralizes, disorganizes, destroys everything it touches. Another procedure of derision, which is not the least effective, is repetition. Tzara always repeats the same evidences, and he turns the wound in the knife by gently mocking the world, saying every two minutes: "Continue my children, humanity" (p. 364). "And you are all idiots" (p. 372). "That's why you will all croak" (p. 380) telling how he became "charming, sympathetic and delightful," clearly admitting his purpose "Dada works with all its forces for the establishment of the idiot everywhere. But consciously. And tends itself to become more and more so" (p. 384). However, when the audience is perfectly annihilated, it can glimpse some positive values defended by Dada despite its apparent disgust. But one must have gone through this intense cretinism cure, have, in some way, undergone a complete brainwashing to begin to perceive the beneficial, salutary effect of Dada. Tzara advocates a certain state of mind and situates Dada at the point of intersection of yes and no that is to say at the place of resolution of contradictories, Life. It is Life that Tzara defends, by refusing to impose rules on the Movement he animates (no statutes, no precise commitments, no oath, no established or pre-established theory). Everyone can be Dada provided one shares his "need for independence, distrust of the community," his disgust for all systems. From then on, the individual gives himself over to the forces of his creative spontaneity. "Thought is made in the mouth." Scraped the varnish of culture, forced the chains of tradition, it is the primitive man who appears, with his infinite power of creation. Let us note a fourth evidence: in the Manifestos, that is to say until 1922, Tzara envisages only one form of purification: art. But if life is a bad joke, without purpose or initial birth, and because we believe we must get out cleanly, in washed chrysanthemums, from the affair, we have proclaimed the only basis of understanding: art (p. 365). Certainly, let us repeat, it is not a question of privileging art as it is generally understood, that is to say an elite cultural principle, prized according to its market value, but all the same, it is the only terrain on which Tzara intends to place himself, the only activity he judges sufficiently creative. If there is question of revolution, it is not at the social but individual level that it is situated. Dada intends to change man above all, it offers itself as a holocaust, destroying within itself before carrying the fire elsewhere. In doing so, it discovers the joy, the enthusiasm there is not only in the act of destruction, but in the liberation that then manifests itself. Dada discovers the "fresh breath" uniting contradictories in the same breath. From there a completely new poetic experience, taking advantage of vital experience: fury is accompanied by laughter, by the immense burst of laughter particular to Tzara, reported by all contemporaries, which liberates a spontaneous expression, without interested purpose, this is what Dada calls "Poetry": Each page must explode... here is a staggering world that flees, betrothed to the bells of the infernal scale, here on the other side: numerous men, rough, bounding, riders of hiccups (p. 362).

I will limit myself, to conclude, to recalling the pertinent traits of Dadaist discourse: 1° Tzara's Manifestos are a discourse. 2° They always present a coherent meaning. 3° While calling into question the very foundations of humanity in what it holds dearest (reason, language...) the Manifestos remain on the whole on the intellectual plane and do not announce a social, material revolution. 4° The Manifestos constitute a poetic act.

Likewise let us record one last time the motives of scandal: 1° The author makes himself manifesto. 2° The Manifestos are disruptive in that they do not respond to the laws of the genre. 3° The author constantly insults the public with which he claims to identify. 4° The Manifestos shock any mind even slightly sensible by the paradigmatic chain they establish: Dada = God = Shit.

See: the Dada journal: La revue Dada (melusine-surrealisme.fr) Read: Tristan Tzara, Poésies complètes (melusine-surrealisme.fr)

(1) Tristan Tzara. Complete Works, vol.1 (1912-1924). Flammarion, 1975, 748 p. All references to the Dada manifestos are made in this edition.
(2) However, it will be said, these texts are not a spontaneous creation, insofar as they were written before being emitted in public. This is because there is, in our eyes, a capital difference between the fact of writing with a view to publication and that of preparing a discourse knowing that one will pronounce it oneself before an audience whose reactions one knows or presumes. Besides, it is always time to introduce some modification during the oral action: pause more or less long to let the assistance react, variation of intonation and power, which can go from whisper to cry, interpolation of certain passages, expressive miming..., all possibilities offered by the spoken chain to the detriment of the written.
(3) Jean-Claude Chevalier: "Dada, linguistic study of the function of a term that 'means nothing'." Cahiers Dada-Surréalisme, n° 1, 1966, p. 92. 4. Pierre Prigioni, intervention during the meetings on surrealism, Mouton, 1968, p. 372.