TZARA COLLOQUIUM 1999

par Catherine Dufour

Tristan Tzara, Surrealism and the Poetic International (1), such was the title of the "poetic spring of Villetaneuse" organized in May 1999 at the University of Paris 13 by Jacques Girault and Bernard Lecherbonnier. The colloquium took place under the good auspices of Madame the cultural counselor at the Romanian Embassy and of Monsieur the Ambassador himself, judging his presence in these places... very "dada." It will be understood that Romania was honored, with some social events, since it was a matter of awarding the Tristan Tzara prize to its laureate of the year, the young poet Olivier Barbarant. The debates were partly devoted to Tzara's Romanian origins, and to questions that he himself, devoted to a cosmopolitan destiny, had hardly posed. Was Tzara a Romanian, French writer, or a Romanian writer of French expression? Did he deserve the label of francophone? Bernard Lecherbonnier (2) tried to answer these questions, recalling that the French language and Romanian culture are historically so closely intertwined that they end up merging, making classifications difficult. Should one seek a specifically Romanian influence in Tzara? Yes, if one believes Petre Raileanu (3), describing the two sides of Romanian literature, one that still resonates with the lamentations of the chorus of Greek tragedy (Cioran), and the other impregnated with absurd, derision, deconstruction and tragi-comic. This Romanian Absurd, which goes back to folkloric cosmogonies, runs through the great burlesque epics of the 18th century, inhabits the off-beat characters of Caragiale, the unheard-of ferocity (Ionesco) of Eminescu and the ubuesque phantasmagorias of the pre-surrealist Urmuz, would be at the origin of Tzara's existential boredom.

In the chapter of play and alliterative passion, Bernard Lehembre (4) leads us toward the whimsical Isidore Isou who, in 1945, thirty years after Tzara, Jewish and multilingual like him, left Romania for a Europe ravaged for the second time by war, in which he was going to, in Dada's footsteps, sow the terror of his letter poetry. Isou the imprecator accused dadaism of being a white revolution, and Tzara a lukewarm one, who had remained at word poetry, refusing the integral assassination of meaning. But Isou was grateful to Tzara for having demonstrated the uselessness of words, and for having scuttled his movement before approaching the dry lands of dogmatism.

Little inclined to nostalgia, Tzara practiced the French language with jubilation, without knowing linguistic uprooting. This was not the case with Ghérasim Luca, evoked by Jean-Louis Joubert (5), animator of the Romanian surrealist group at the end of the war, producer of book-objects, poem-drawings, and other bizarre objects, nomadic spirit to whom Gilles Deleuze accorded the true merit of style, that of stammering in one's own language, in the manner of Beckett or Kafka. Unable to inhabit an intimately foreign language, which he tried to exorcise with slips of the tongue, word games, layerings, thicknesses, networks or rhizomes, Luca threw himself into the Seine. His compatriot Cioran, the Diogenes of the Carpathians, whose obstinate enterprise of deterritorialization (Deleuze) Jacques Lecarme (6) describes to us, was more skillful. Resigned to living in universal discomfort, ruminating on exile, he ensured a very long career on an interminable meditation on suicide. Haunted by the complex of the provincial from a small nation, obsessed with a language purified to academicism, he found some remedies to the inconvenience of being Romanian, becoming according to circumstances the least anti-communist of Romanian fascists, but not the least anti-Semitic at the end of the 1930s.

Tzara, meanwhile, was a foreigner without regret, despite the ambient xenophobia. Henri Béhar (7) recalls that his famous dada epic makes us too often forget that it represents only one-sixth of his work, and that Tzara made a major contribution to French surrealism, with whom he maintained complex relationships. Norbert Bandier (8), in the light of Pierre Bourdieu, analyzes a crucial stage, the dark year 1924, date of publication of the Seven Manifestos, but also of Tzara's ostracism, at a moment when the symbolic and editorial capital that was being woven around the surrealists and the growing visibility of their practices and productions invaded the literary field, and contributed to isolating him in his radical individualist demand. Accused of having sold himself to a worldly aristocracy frequented by Cocteau, excluded from the young surrealist guard despite his notoriety in the international avant-garde and his publications in reviews throughout Europe, Tzara had no other way out, once again, than cosmopolitan, turning his gaze toward Belgium and the dadaist Mesens. History was to provide him with a second wind: his thirst for revolt, brutally confronted with the triumph of fascism in Europe, transformed him into a Marxist revolutionary. Alain Cuenot (9) retraces the vicissitudes of his militancy, from his engagement alongside the anti-Francoists and the French Resistance. Theorist of the relationships between Poetry and Revolution, bard of assassinated poets, ally of the oppressed against American imperialism, Tzara became alas a communist intellectual in the service of the Party, warring against the surrealists, armored with certainty, victim of spontaneous revolutionism, of an instinctive and generous proletarian idealism, devoid of real doctrinal bases. The break of 1956, at the time of the invasion of Hungary, was at the origin of a moral crisis that rallied him to progressive intellectuals against the communists, and incited him to reconnect with the surrealists, during the "manifesto of 121" notably, then to withdraw definitively from the public scene. An enigmatic silence accompanied the last ten years of his life, devoted to the meticulous deciphering of Villon's anagrams, whose riches, but also indisputable weaknesses, Jacques Verger (10) has explored.

Meanwhile Tzara had devoted a large part of his work to commenting on the artists of his time. Was he therefore an art critic? Taking the fierce opposite stance to René Lacôte's essay on Tzara in 1952 and an article by Daniel Leuwers in the review Europe in 1975, Gérard Durosoi (11) considers that Tzara was content to comment on works likely to confirm the status he accorded, in general, to the work of art. This status, defined from the Dada Manifesto 1918, would have produced only poetic equivalents of the works evoked, by Arp, Man Ray, Schwitters or Ernst. Tzara was to refine his aesthetic criteria in two articles from 1928 and 1929 devoted to pre-Columbian art and Oceania, where he recognized in primitive art the essential qualities of a work. These criteria took on a Marxist coloration in 1933, up to the reductive drifts and conceptual slippages in which Tzara often became mired, prisoner of a rigid ideology.

Romanianness, primitivism, dada cosmopolitanism, international communism, perhaps what was missing from this panorama was a more precise evocation of what the Poetic International really was - didn't the title announce it? -, this insane activity of Tzara between 1915 and 1925, corresponding and collaborating with the greatest writers and artists of all Europe, Italian futurists, German expressionists, French cubists, in the mad attempt to constitute an anti-art, beyond wars and borders, territorial and aesthetic?

(1) The proceedings have just been published by Harmattan editions, with the support of the center for comparative francophone literary studies of the University of Paris-13, in the collection "Itineraries and Contacts of Cultures" 108p.

(2) "Identity of Franco-Romanian Literature," pp. 65-68

(3) "The Absurd in Romanian Literature or Salvation through Style," pp. 93-98

(4) "Tzara and Isou" pp. 69-73

(5) "Situation of Ghérasim Luca," pp. 73-83

(6) "The Fortune of Cioran," pp. 13-19

(7) "Tzara, Dada and Surrealism" pp. 13-19

(8) "Tristan Tzara and the Surrealist Group from 1924 to 1929," pp. 21-27

(9) "The Political Engagement of Tristan Tzara 1944 to 1966," pp. 39-54

(10) "Tristan Tzara, Reader of Villon" pp. 55-61

(11) "Tristan Tzara and the Visual Arts," pp. 31-38