POETIC SPONTANEITY IN TZARA

par Marius Hentea

August 28, 2017

What can we learn from a frustrated philosopher?

What have the theories of philosophers served us? Have they helped us take a step forward or backward? Where is "forward" where is "backward"? ... What we want now is spontaneity. Not because it is more beautiful or better than anything else. But because everything that comes freely from ourselves without the intervention of speculative ideas represents us1.

In this intervention given in Weimar in 1922, which serves as a funeral oration for the Dada movement, Tristan Tzara designates spontaneity as the central element of the Dada movement, as he did in his famous 1918 manifesto. Furthermore, he affirms in 1923:

Dada was a purely personal adventure, the materialization of my disgust. Perhaps it had results, consequences. Before it, all modern writers held to a discipline, a rule, a unity. ... After Dada, active indifference, current "I don't give a damn" attitude, spontaneity and relativity entered life2.

One of Tzara's most famous contributions to literature, "How to Make a Dadaist Poem," consists of a series of detailed instructions that resemble a recipe: cut up a newspaper article, put the cut-up words in a hat and pull them out one by one to assemble a poem that, in the end, "will resemble [you]3." This game of chance produces a "spontaneous" result, if we consider the etymology of the term, derived from the Latin sponte, which means "by oneself, according to one's own will" and which is close to spondeo, which means "to guarantee, to commit to" but also to pendo ("to weigh"), all sharing the Indo-European root spen (at the origin of the English verb to spin, which means "to make turn"). These etymologies are not insignificant: when Tzara asks the poet to copy the words "conscientiously," he implies that the result obtained by the fruit of chance must be respected and not modified to correspond to a pre-established aesthetic.

However, spontaneity as a poetic doctrine remains problematic, especially since it is certainly not the first term that comes to mind to describe Tzara's poetry, who never wrote poetry spontaneously, and even less by applying his famous recipe. In fact, what he implies by proposing the most arbitrary way possible to write a poem is that all poetic doctrines amount to the same thing. Even in a simultaneous poem like "The Admiral Seeks a House to Rent," Tzara carefully composes and precisely adapts the tone of the discourse he puts in the mouths of different characters (Janco in a melodic mode and Huelsenbeck more pompous). As for the evenings organized by Dada, they certainly gave an impression of chaos and tumult, as Tzara himself summarizes about the Tristan Tzara Evening at the Zunfthaus zur Meisen in July 1918: "Manifesto, antithesis thesis antiphilosophy, Dada Dada Dada Dada Dadaist spontaneity Dadaist disgust laughter poem tranquility sadness diarrhea is also a feeling war business poetic element4." However, this type of event was subject to rigorous organization, to the point that other Dadaists complained that all evenings tirelessly repeated the same formula.

To return to Tzara's recipe, let's focus on what he means by "the poem will resemble [you]5," an idea also present in the quote at the beginning of this article, when Tzara affirms that "everything that comes freely from ourselves without the intervention of speculative ideas represents us." The idea that spontaneity "will resemble" the reader and/or the potential poet is crucial in that it allows us to understand why spontaneity held such a great place in Tzara's poetic theory from the Dada years until the end of his life. We think, for example, of Tzara's most substantial critical essay on poetry, "Essay on the Situation of Poetry," published in the December 1931 issue of the journal Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution: Tzara there implies that "poetry-means of expression" is linked to "directed thinking" and affirms that "poetry-activity of the mind" is itself the product of "non-directed thinking," which consists of "an apparently arbitrary chain of images: it is supra-verbal, passive, and it is in its sphere that dream, fanciful and imaginative thinking as well as daydreams are placed6." If Tzara borrows from Carl Jung the categorization "directed thinking / non-directed thinking," we already find its application in poetry in Dada's attacks on the organization of the senses and the rationalism of "poetry-means of expression," which hinders spontaneity and reduces language to an expression for social ends.

The categories that Tzara uses imply a certain simplicity: "there are only two genres ... the poem and the pamphlet7," affirms M. Aa. However, "Essay on the Situation of Poetry" cannot be reduced to a simple theoretical exposition: it is also an attempt to understand the emergence of a certain type of poetry through historical episodes, which leads Tzara to date the beginnings of poetry-activity of the mind from the Romantic period. For Tzara, poetry is not so much a literary form as a mode of being, as evidenced by this retrospective look at Dada:

Language, from the angle of human relationships, was for Dada a problem and a constant concern. Through this tentacular and dispersed activity that was Dada, poetry is harassed, insulted and despised. A certain poetry, it must be specified, art-poetry, based on the principle that beauty is static. Dada opposed to it a state of mind which, despite its anti-dogmatic principle, was able to demonstrate that everything is movement, constant alignment on the flight of time.

...

If Dada did not know how to escape language, it nevertheless noted the malaise that it caused and the obstacles it put to the liberation of poetry. Disorganization, disorientation, demoralization of all accepted values were for Dada indisputable directives. Disgust and spontaneity became the guiding principles of artistic creation. For Dada, poetry has no end in itself8.

Thus, for Tzara, poetry is not an end in itself: it lives as long as it weaves an intimate link with a public and a broader social context. We also note in Tzara a desire to suppress boundaries between different types of artistic creation, insisting on the fact that poetry is everywhere: "It is perfectly accepted today that one can be a poet without ever having written a verse, that there exists a quality of poetry in the street, in a show, anywhere9." In other words, poetry resides in "daily life" and not in "static and immutable beauty10." It is individualism and the spirit of competition that characterize modern capitalist society that have distanced poetry from life itself, and poets were wrong to think that formal innovations, which remain superficial, could override this state of affairs.

If the above reflections stick to a relatively abstract vision of poetic spontaneity, the notion takes on its full ambivalence if we consider that Tzara's most significant poetic corpus was produced in a second language, which he only mastered in adulthood. As a child and young adolescent, Tzara was exposed to a number of languages, including Romanian, his mother tongue, Yiddish, which his co-religionists spoke in the streets of his hometown of Moinești, Hebrew, the language of instruction alongside Romanian in the first school he attended, modern languages such as French, German and Italian, not to mention classical letters in Latin and Greek. French was at the time the language of choice for Romanian elites. Thus, Benjamin Fondane observes that Romania was, intellectually, "only a province of the French landscape11," which needed French culture to pass "from the instinctive, almost unconscious life of the mind, to the life of intelligence12," as a Romanian intellectual of the end of the century writes in a doctoral thesis for the École Normale Supérieure. However, the young Tzara's school reports reveal him to be a better Germanist than French speaker (some years, he barely passed his French exams).13 At the University of Bucharest, he took a course in modern Italian literature, which he did not, however, pass the final exam, convinced that the professor had insulted him and one of his classmates.14 In Zurich, it was in German (and not in Swiss-German dialect, in contrast to the locals) that Tzara communicated with other Dadaists. If multilingualism was an integral part of Tzara's mode of operation and constituted one of the characteristics of Dada texts and performances, Tzara nevertheless lacked a reservoir of unconscious (or spontaneous?) linguistic associations in French to draw from, which makes linguistic spontaneity a quasi-unattainable horizon. If most of Tzara's poetry in Romanian bears traces of French influence (the poem "Soră de Caritate" for example directly derives its title from Rimbaud's "Sœurs de Charité," and we find entire stanzas in French in other poems by Tzara), French was a foreign language that he had consciously learned and that his brain had classified in a separate space:

the house with golden nostrils

is filled with correct phrases15

If the poem constitutes a critique of bourgeois houses, the archives of the Bibliothèque Doucet contain a number of documents dating from the Zurich period in which we can see that Tzara had copied "correct" French phrases. These words and expressions, constituted in lists and set aside to be used later, undoubtedly particularly struck Tzara. The list format, with a priori disjointed elements, which no syntax connects to each other, seems to have inspired several poems by Tzara, including "Raccroc," of which here is an extract particularly revealing of the pseudo-spontaneous mode of operation of Tzara's poetic writing:

the larynx man alone

with fixed gaze

put on the flower

the circumflex accent16

In the absence of punctuation and syntactic coherence, the different semantic and grammatical elements of the poem can be understood and composed or recomposed at will by the reader: the ambiguity around the mood (indicative or imperative) and the subject of the verbal form "mets" allows us to construct images that all say something about poetic creation itself: is the larynx (literal organ of speech) the metonymy of this man alone with fixed gaze, variation on the stereotypical figure of the romantic poet, who contemplates a field of flowers (daffodils, at random, to take up Wordsworth's topos)? What about the ornamentation of the flower by the circumflex accent? Should we read there a will to transform nature by the verb or a simple playful variation on French words that struck, by their very strangeness, the imagination of the Romanian poet? These questions remain of course open, but if we look at the whole of Tzara's Dada poetry, the impression that emerges does not betray spontaneity so much as a "disorganized" disorder in a calculated and conscious way.

At the origin of Tzara's interest in spontaneity, we undoubtedly find the idea that it constitutes the only way to escape a culture that has become deadly, sick, unhealthy, as Hugo Ball says:

Our cabaret is a gesture. Every word that is spoken and sung there says at least this: that this age of humiliation has not succeeded in winning our respect. And what does it possess that could be respectable or admirable? ... The grandiose massacres and cannibal exploits? Our spontaneous stupidity and our enthusiasm for illusion will destroy them17.

Out of the question, therefore, to write according to rules imposed by the proponents of a dead culture. Writing must emerge freely from the very body of the poet, as Tzara affirms in an interview with René Crevel: "I have always thought that writing was, fundamentally, without control, whether one had the illusion of this control or not, and I even proposed in 1918 Dadaist spontaneity, which was to apply to the acts of life18." It is a literal cleaning up of the remains of this dead culture that Tzara proposes in his 1918 Manifesto ("sweep, clean" are terms he uses), in which "Dadaist spontaneity" is posed as a founding principle of Dada on the same level as "disgust." Spontaneity like disgust are anchored in corporeality, and all the references that Tzara makes to spontaneity are intimately linked to disgust and reaffirm the primacy of the body, either in the hands that cut up the newspaper article or shake the hat, or in the idea that spontaneity is something that "flows freely," or in the very action of sweeping. The link between spontaneity, disgust and corporeality jumps out at us the first time Tzara applies his paper-scissors-word recipe before a Parisian audience during the First Friday of Literature on January 23, 1920. When Tzara goes on stage during the second half of the evening, he applies his recipe to a speech delivered at the Assembly by Léon Daudet, far-right deputy and co-editor of Action française. Spontaneous in appearance, the gesture is perfectly calculated to stage the foreign body (Tzara) who literally tears apart Daudet's nationalist rhetoric. Tzara had understood that it was his own body that would capture the audience's attention. Rather than thinking of spontaneity as an abstract poetic principle, Tzara intimately links it to the body's reaction to the deformations and deformities of culture. This body is not without connection to a broader social context: in his 1931 essay, Tzara rejects any idea of poetic autonomy by affirming that "the so-called work of art, at any time, reflects a historical fact which is engendered by social and economic relations19."

This emphasis on the physical body but also on the broader social context brings us back to the formative years of the young Tzara, and leads us to question the social discipline that was applied to Tzara's body to integrate into one or more cultures. What can remain spontaneous when it comes to integrating into a culture that defines itself in opposition to other cultures perceived as dominant? What then to do with spontaneity within a cultural field that struggles to define itself? What does it mean for a poem to be considered as an emanation of the poet's body rather than a linguistic corpus?

If there is one central fact in Tzara's childhood, it is that he was born (and identified as) Jewish. Even belonging to a non-practicing family (his father registered as "atheist" when he obtained his passport in the 1920s) and speaking Romanian at home, being born Jewish nevertheless implied a wide range of administrative, legal and cultural consequences. Less than a chosen religious affiliation (and in the case of Tzara and his family, even without spiritual allegiance), Jewishness was considered a racial characteristic: it was enough for the "body" to be considered Jewish for the state to dispossess it of the rights and privileges of citizenship. In 1896, the year of Tzara's birth, only three of the children born in a Jewish family in Moinești were Romanian citizens; the others, like Tzara, were "under the protection of no foreign state20." In other words, floating bodies, without attachments, or at least not attached to a single state. However, this lack of attachments did not bring true freedom either, given that being thus isolated from the dominant social body entailed a certain vulnerability. In Romania, a very restrictive legislative apparatus at the time prevented non-citizens (and therefore, Jews) from acquiring rural land or attending free public schools, among other discriminatory measures. Pogroms took place, some near Moinești, and the 1907 peasant revolt (during which nearly 10,000 people were killed by the authorities) originated from dissatisfaction caused by a Jewish agricultural manager (Tzara's grandfather also managed a forestry operation). The rapid demographic growth of the Jewish minority was a source of tension, particularly due to its concentration in cities (in a country still 90 percent rural population) and the cultural specificity of the "people of the book" in a country characterized by mass illiteracy. One of the popular sentiments at the time was that urban Jews were "foreign to the culture of the land" and therefore did not have the capacity to properly represent "authentic" Romanian culture21, essentially peasant. The influential literary journal Convorbiri literare went so far as to assert that "foreign infiltration" constituted "the capital problem of contemporary Romanian history22." A. C. Cuza, professor at the University of Iași, in the East of the country, did not mince words either: "Eliminate Jews from the domain of culture – that is the existential question for us23." The journal Critica, edited by Jews, moreover noted that a "wall" of "disarming hatred24" had been erected between Romanian culture and Jewish writers.

Thus, it was almost indispensable for Romanian Jewish authors to conceal their identity to reach a wider audience. In this context, it is hardly surprising that Samuel Rosenstock had adopted an international pseudonym like Tristan Tzara. In "Sister of Charity," he plays in a way at not being Jewish:

I am the Orthodox Christian

I am lying in my bed and I wonder if it is nice outside

My suffering is ordered in rows

Divided into images that will become thoughts

This night if it were like yesterday's

I will cry softly in my pillow, perhaps I will die and

suffer25

The conclusion of the poem (the image of the poet transformed into a sort of Hamlet who sobs silently in his pillow) demonstrates that this conversion is impossible. In other words, we could say that the young poet's first attempts to liberate himself through his art were spoiled by his awareness that the Parnassian poetic ideal could in no way apply to a young Jew in Romania, because his poetic production would always be read in light of an odious cultural policy denying any status to Jews in Romania, and first and foremost that of Romanian citizens. Tzara's first foray into the domain of lettered culture (the journal Simbolul, which he created in high school with Marcel Janco and Ion Vinea), was treated as "ridiculous" and even "frankly odious" by the nationalist-leaning magazine Viața romaneasca: "There is a lack of human solidarity, a guilty strangeness [instrăinare]... a form of moral abandonment which we, in this country, do not want to believe can be excused by originality26." This will not be the last time that Tzara is accused of being a foreigner who seeks to harm the integrity of a national culture: the term instrăinare, formed from the word străin, which means "foreigner," designates the fact of becoming foreign. But it is precisely this type of controversy that the young editors of Simbolul seemed to seek: the first issue of the journal published an article signed by Emil Isac (who began his career in a Hungarian journal) proudly declaring his own decadence and violently attacking the most prominent intellectual of the time and patron saint of nationalists, the historian Nicolae Iorga27. Tzara was therefore already ready to stir up controversy in the name of art, art that was moreover politicized from the beginning and solidly anchored in a context of heated cultural debates. Here spontaneity and originality are supplanted by the need to create scandal; however, the final result was only read through the prism of the physical body (Jewish or Hungarian) of the creators.

Another facet of corporeal spontaneity at this time: cultural autonomy. The presence of Jews in Romania was considered such a problem because it was linked to another broader question: how could a small, underdeveloped country characterized by generalized illiteracy create its own culture? If in Western Europe modernism is associated with the alienation of the artist from society as well as a distance and feeling of superiority born of mass democracy and the market economy, in Romania literature was necessarily political because culture itself was politicized. As A.C. Cuza notes: "Nations exist only through their culture28." As for Nicolae Iorga, he writes in Sămănătorul: "A new cultural era must begin for us. It must, otherwise we will die29." This type of declaration led a literary critic to comment thus on the disproportionate stakes of cultural policy: "Culture and acculturation have become the pillars of an entire policy, a potential panacea for all social and national problems30." In "Sister of Charity," a sarcastic Tzara writes: "My heart rises, and I read a book of wisdom31." Even if these stakes and their dramatization seemed ridiculous to a young poet, it remains that literature and literary criticism did not content themselves at the time with reflecting society, but constituted active agents of social change, thus creating a curious dynamic in the Romanian literary field, where every text was systematically instrumentalized by one side or the other. In other words, no text could be read alone, and all calls to liberate literature from the tyranny of the social (of which Tzara could not have failed to be aware, so virulent were some of these manifestos, thus prefiguring in some respects the Dada period) were themselves totally anchored in the national grid of cultural signification of literature.

One of the key arguments advanced by all participants in the debate during this period is that foreign cultural models have ended up stifling everything that is Romanian, making any spontaneous or original contribution impossible, not only in literature, but also in all aspects of social organization. We can thus read in 1905 in a magazine from Bacău:

We Romanians, we content ourselves with doing everything that others do. Thus our laws, our liberal professions and our businesses are only imitations of others. We do nothing new ourselves. We have not profited from our experience and we have ignored it. We have only sought to imitate and we value everything that is imitation because it comes from others, who are more intelligent than us: foreigners. This is an erroneous and very harmful belief for Romanian innovation.32

In other words, no originality is possible if one follows a model established by others. This is a point on which all participants in the Kulturkampf agree: conservatives considering that any foreign model, particularly French, stifles national culture, while even modernizers are ready to admit that foreign models need to be adapted to the Romanian context.

Despite the fact that culture was in many ways a second-hand culture, entirely imported from abroad and therefore devoid of autonomy, there were innovators who sought originality at all costs. In 1908, the first issue of the journal Revista celorlalți ("The Journal of Others"), which included an article on Lautréamont (at a time when his texts were difficult to find in France), called for "abandoning the formulas we have learned from our elders" to go towards "what is new, strange, bizarre even33." For some critics, this type of declaration is problematic:

We have played too much with aesthetic formulas. We have estimated that it was enough to borrow a dogma from an artist or thinker and launch it as a novelty in this country, because at that moment, by a magic wand or by spontaneous generation, poets, storytellers, playwrights and novelists, an entire literature would finally be born from this new formula34.

Here spontaneity is linked to a "new formula" that would inspire an entire literary school, but with the disadvantage of ending up being transformed into dogma. This is undoubtedly why Tzara has always categorically refused that the Dada movement be reduced to a series of codes, maxims or principles and insisted that Dada remain a "state of mind," or, to put it his way, that true Dadaists were fundamentally anti-Dada. If it has been said here and there that Tzara was in truth the most influenceable of all the members of the Cabaret Voltaire, he had in truth already been exposed to the diverse and varied pressures of literary life in Bucharest. And in Romania, literary schools enjoyed certain social prestige, and were the subject of sharp criticism from Tzara's close friends. In a March 1914 article on simultaneism, a doctrine that would come to play an important role in Zurich Dadaism, Ion Vinea, a close friend of Tzara, thus affirms that literary movements are hostile to art, which should only be a matter of "individualism" and "talent35." This was also the point of view of another collaborator of Simbolul, Emil Isac, who writes that "Futurism is not Marinetti's disease alone; it is the disease of all contemporary literature. Today, there is no respect for individuality in literature, because it has been replaced by promotion and 'schools' ... the artist's consciousness disappears, because in its place appear movements X or Y36..."

"Thought is made in the mouth": with this aphorism, Tzara testifies to the organic link in him between corporeality (the only possible seat of spontaneity?) and poetic creation. However, it is impossible to ignore the cultural and political context that informed the young Tzara's intellectual formation. In the Romania of his youth, poetic spontaneity was forcibly channeled, in the Romanian context, to create literary schools. It emerged from a pre-established aesthetic, in the same way that literary texts emerged from pre-existing cultural models. If Tzara abhorred these schemes, he nevertheless had a double desire for Dada: to be both the expression of the artist's individual spontaneity and to constitute itself as an artistic movement. This is why Dada, for Tzara, could never be defined or constrained, as he writes in "The Underside of Dada": "One day or another we will know that before Dada, after Dada, without Dada, towards Dada, for Dada, against Dada, with Dada, despite Dada, it's always Dada37." Dadaism was therefore indeterminate and infinitely variable, in that it reacted to a repugnant culture as well as transformed it while transforming itself.

Translated by Elise Trogrlic

1 Tristan Tzara, "Conference on Dada," Complete Works, ed. Henri Béhar (Paris, Flammarion, 1975-1991), 1: 421.

2 "Tristan Tzara will cultivate his vices," OC, 1: 624.

3 "Dada manifesto on weak love and bitter love," OC, 1: 382.

4 "Zurich Chronicle 1915-1919," OC, 1: 565.

5 "Dada manifesto on weak love and bitter love," OC, 1: 382.

6 "Essay on the situation of poetry," OC, 5: 16.

7 "Proselyte at fixed price," L'Antitête, OC, 2: 268.

8 "Essay on the situation of poetry," OC, 5: 18, 20.

9 "Essay on the situation of poetry," OC, 5: 9.

10 "Essay on the situation of poetry," OC, 5: 12, 9.

11 Cited in Ovid S. Crohmălniceanu, Evreii în mișcarea de avangardă Românească, ed. Geo Șerban (Bucharest: Editura Hasefer, 2001), p. 56.

12 Pompiliu Eliade, De l'influence française sur l'esprit public en Roumanie (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1898), p. 11.

13 On Tzara's institutional education, see my article "The Education of Samuel Rosenstock, or How Tristan Tzara Learned His ABCs," Dada/Surrealism, vol. 20 2015: web.

14 This episode is the subject of detailed treatment in the biography of Tzara that I wrote, TaTa Dada: The Real Life and Celestial Adventures of Tristan Tzara (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014).

15 "A beautiful morning with closed teeth," OC, 1: 217.

16 "Raccroc," OC, 1: 234.

17 Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary, ed. John Elderfield, trans. Ann Raimes (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974), p. 61.

18 René Crevel, "Here is Tristan Tzara and his memories of Dada," Les Nouvelles Littéraires, October 25, 1924, p. 5.

19 "Essay on the situation of poetry," OC, 5: 21.

20 See Direcția Județeană Bacău a Arhivelor Naționale, inventar Stare Civila (Moinești), vol. 2 1896.

21 A.C. Cuza, Naționalitatea in artă: Principii, fapte, concluzii: Introducere la doctrina națiponalistă-creștină, (Bucharest: Editura Cartea Romȃnească, 1927), pp. viii-ix.

22 "Notes regarding the history of Romanian culture," Convorbiri literare, March 1910, p. 1.

23 Cuza, Naționalitatea in artă, p. 103.

24 "The Jewish question," Critica, April 10, 1910, 2.

25 "Sister of Charity," OC, 1: 60.

26 Cited in Constantin Ciopraga, Literatura română între 1900 și 1918 (Bucharest: Editura Junimea, 1970), 122-3.

27 Emil Isac, "Protopoii familiei mele," Simbolul, no. 1 (October 25, 1912), pp. 2-4.

28 Cuza, Naționalitatea in artă, p. 4 (author's emphasis).

29 Sămănătorul, May 18, 1903, cited in Z. Ornea, Sămănătorismul, 2nd ed. (Bucharest: Minerva, 1971), p. 67.

30 Ornea, Sămănătorismul, p. 33.

31 OC, 1: 60.

32 "Romanians' lack of initiative," Răsăritul: Journal for people and school, October 1905, p. 105.

33 Cited in Geo Șerban, "Preludes to the avant-garde among Romanians," Euresis: Romanian Journal of Literary Studies, nos. 1-2 1994, p. 13.

34 Dimitrie Karnabatt, "Poezia Noua," Seara, October 18, 1910, p. 1.

35 Ion Vinea, "O Școala nouă: Simultaneismul," Facla, March 1, 1914; in Publicistică literară, ed. Constantina Brezu-Stoian (Bucharest: Editura Minerva, 1977), p. 109.

36 Emil Isac, "Probleme," Noua Revistă Romȃnă, September 29, 1913, p. 237.

37 OC, 1: 588.