READING GRAINS ET ISSUES

par Émilie Frémond

December 3, 2015

Tristan Tzara? Unreadable. It is with this initial judgment—cast like a decree, an act of ostracism—that I would like to begin, quite simply because this year I chose to include Grains and Issues in the syllabus of one of my courses. In doing so, and by adopting the perspective of a third-year student, I feared that this collection might not merely be filed away among the curiosities of literature, but shelved altogether—without ever having been read. Not because it’s difficult, but because it appears impossible to read.

A brief look at bibliographic databases confirms this: only 11 doctoral theses have been defended on Tzara’s work in over forty years (1972), and just two are currently in progress—one of which takes a rather generalist approach to Dadaist poetry. The critical corpus remains scant, and, as some may have noticed, Anglo-American criticism has engaged with Tzara’s work far more extensively than French-language criticism. This imbalance likely stems from the warmer reception the Dada movement received—particularly in the art world—in the United States 2, at a time when it was being rejected in France.

My goal here is not to undertake a full analysis of the critical reception of Tzara’s oeuvre, although such an inquiry might itself serve as a form of resistance—resistance not civic (though perhaps that too), but critical.

If Tzara’s work appears unreadable today, this unreadability does not seem to result from its having been uprooted from its original cultural soil—the 1930s—nor does it stem from any sense of obsolescence in this early twenty-first century, where neither “the anxiety of living” nor “the dream” can easily be dismissed as the somewhat dusty concepts of a bygone psychoanalysis—in contrast, for instance, with how “animal spirits” might be regarded as outdated in modern medicine.

Let us recall that, even upon its publication in 1935, the reception already lamented its difficulty—or, at the very least, expressed irritation, not only with the ideas developed within but also with the formal choices and style of the poet. André Rolland de Renéville articulated his discomfort with the structure of the collection—a “hybrid and disconcerting genre” in which utopia, dream narratives, reflections on memory and love alternate with versified passages. Meanwhile, Gaston Derycke, writing in the Cahiers du Sud, railed against the use of Freudian jargon and reduced Tzara’s style to caricature, turning Lautréamont’s phrase against his admirer: “tics, tics, and more tics!”

And so, I began to ask myself what lies behind this unreadability, as I immersed myself once more in a form of writing that continuously demands confrontation—a writing style that, by embracing imagistic thought, undirected thinking, or to put it differently, “the unravelling of the dream,” overwhelms the reader’s cognitive capacities. And yet, paradoxically, it also seeks to mend what culture, habit, and language have so “meticulously separated,” ultimately producing an effect of astonishment, perhaps the flip side of distaste.

It was, in fact, rather by chance that I came across these lines by Christian Prigent in the preface to his 1996 essay Une erreur de la nature :

Je suis de ces écrivains qu’on dit difficiles, voire illisibles. Ce n’est pas être en mauvaise compagnie. Compagnie disparate d’ailleurs. On y trouve aussi bien Pétrarque […] que Tristan Tzara (qui voulait faire « des œuvres fortes, droites, à jamais incomprises »).

Et Prigent de citer ensuite Rabelais, Rimbaud et Ducasse, les dadaïstes, Péret ou Cravan. Ainsi Tristan Tzara apparaît-il en deuxième position dans cette anthologie de l’illisible qui, comme l’Anthologie de l’humour noir de Breton, permet au poète de se constituer une famille, sinon un foyer et de s’y faire une place. On aura reconnu au passage une phrase du Manifeste Dada 1918 qu’il peut être intéressant de regarder avant d’entrer dans le vif du sujet.

L’art est une choses privée, l’artiste le fait pour lui ; une œuvre compréhensible est produit de journaliste » […] et l’on songe ici bien évidemment à « l’universel reportage » de Mallarmé fait avec « les mots de la tribu ». L’auteur, l’artiste loué par les journaux, constate la compréhension de son œuvre : misérable doublure d’un manteau à utilité publique ; haillons qui couvrent la brutalité, pissat collaborant à la chaleur d’un animal qui couve les bas instincts.

C’est alors, une fois déclarée l’expulsion du « penchant pleurnichard », que Tzara déclare : « Il nous faut des œuvres fortes, droites, précises et à jamais incomprises. La logique est une complication. La logique est toujours fausse. » Quoiqu’il s’agisse là du mot d’ordre de celui qu’on a définitivement figé dans son costume d’« inventeur de la révolution dada » ou encore dans sa tenue de « dompteur (des acrobates) », Grains et issues, écrit quinze ans plus tard, témoigne encore paradoxalement des mêmes refus, au moment même où Tzara entreprend pourtant de s’expliquer, de se livrer à un effort de théorisation et s’autorise en partie la confession lyrique. Grains et issues (désormais abrégé G&I) est-il donc de ces « œuvres fortes » et « à jamais incomprises » telles que les réclamait le Manifeste dada ? c’est à cette question que j’aimerais essayer de répondre en examinant quelques aspects du recueil.

Comment comprendre en effet que l’homme — si fermement engagé à transformer la société par les pouvoirs de la poésie, à penser simultanément l’homme (biologique, psychique, social) et le monde — ait pu choisir une forme qui suspend l’échange, le diffère ou le menace par la manière dont elle embrasse tous les genres, tous les savoirs et combine les discours ? La question de la lisibilité du recueil rejoint, on le voit, la question de l’unité du recueil. Le titre est à cet égard programmatique ou révélateur d’une volonté de ne pas choisir : tandis que les auteurs des Champs magnétiques donnaient congé à la littérature en se présentant comme les fournisseurs en « Bois et Charbons », spécialistes en combustibles, que l’Aragon du Traité du style se présentait en « bijoutier des matières déchues », en « sertisseur des déchets sans emploi », demandant aux bluteurs la paille, tandis que Tzara lui-même envisageait dans son « Essai sur la situation de la poésie », en 1931, de « séparer le bon charbon du mâchefer » en matière de poésie, il ne saurait être question de privilégier cette fois le fruit à l’enveloppe, le grain de blé au son grossier. Il est significatif, de ce point de vue, que le mot « résidu » soit employé pas moins de 15 fois dans le recueil : résidu irrationnel, résidu de désirs, résidu irréductible de la poésie, résidu d’homme ou de rêve. Or ces résidus ne cessent de se mélanger, il y a «enchevêtrement », « interpénétration », action réciproque. L’élément lyrique et l’élément logique sont d’emblée considérés comme des « matières interchangeables».

De ce refus de choisir entre penser non dirigé et penser dirigé, qui justifie que le lecteur soit confronté à toute une gamme de produits plus ou moins raffinés, à divers mélanges, résulte une œuvre-monde, totalisante, qui ne cesse donc de menacer ses conditions de lisibilité. Si le but était de consigner scrupuleusement les impressions de réveil d’un côté, mais d’exposer, de l’autre côté, une conception nouvelle, dialectique, de la poésie, on se demande quelle forme pouvait à la fois satisfaire la volonté de ne pas trahir le scrupule de l’archiviste et la volonté de convaincre du théoricien. La notion de cosmique, utilisée à plusieurs reprises dans les années vingt dans le discours critique du poète, fournit peut-être une partie de la réponse et nous permettra de mieux appréhender ce recueil, à vocation universelle, qui prolonge à de nombreux égards L’Homme approximatif. C’est au sujet de l’œuvre de Reverdy et du trio Rimbaud, Lautrémont, Jarry que Tzara emploie la notion de cosmique ou de « cosmique-divers ». Voici ce qu’il en dit : tout d’abord le cosmique consiste à « donner une importance égale à chaque objet, être, matériau, organisme de l’univers », ensuite à « grouper » autour de l’homme les « êtres, les objets », enfin la diversité cosmique serait selon Tzara « le suprême pouvoir d’exprimer l’inexplicable simultanément, sans discussion logique précédente, par sévère et intuitive nécessité» (Lampisteries, OC I, 398-399).

C’est donc à la lumière conjointe de l’illisible et du cosmique que l’on pourrait essayer de lire aujourd’hui G&I, en essayant de voir si la relation critique n’est pas commandée précisément par une œuvre cosmique qui donne « une importance égale à chaque objet, être, matériau, organisme de l’univers », une œuvre qui laisse se « manifester simultanément » tous les éléments et, jusque dans la syntaxe elle-même (Lampisteries, OC I, 400). L’hypothèse que je ferai est que, de l’épopée de l’Homme approximatif à G&I, la tentation de l’œuvre totale reparaît et s’accroît et ce, bien au-delà de l’anthropologie poétique qui était à l’œuvre dans le recueil de 1931. Avec G&I, on a affaire à une somme encyclopédique, une œuvre-monde, cosmique donc, diverse et ordonnée où, quel que soit l’échelle à laquelle on choisit de l’envisager — échelle des genres, du monde physique ou des mots au sein de la phrase — s’exprime l’ambition de croiser l’ensemble des connaissances et l’ensemble des règnes de la nature. J’organiserai donc mon propos en trois temps qui devraient permettre d’interroger l’unité du recueil sous trois angles : j’envisagerai d’abord la diversité-cosmique des genres à l’œuvre dans le recueil, puis l’homme nouveau qui apparaît comme un homme-paysage ou un homme-macrocosme et enfin la phrase, «diverse-cosmique », dont on pourrait dire ce que Tzara disait de l’œuvre de Reverdy, qu’elle est un « radiateur de vibrations [dont] les images […] se déchargent dans tous les sens » (Lampisteries, OC1, 398)

The Saturation of Genres and Discourses: A Poetics of Mixture and Interpenetration Let us begin by recalling what makes the collection so original—and what Tzara himself claims in the “Publisher’s Note” (Prière d’insérer). In a long, characteristically elaborate sentence that marks the poet’s style, Tzara, having distanced himself from all supposed norms of a surrealist work (Breton would long insist there is no set criterium for surrealist art), writes:

“The author attempts in this work, in poetic, narrative, and theoretical form, to articulate a few issues as they present themselves today to the current generation as a whole” (OC III, 511–512).

The mixing of genres is, then, clearly articulated—even embraced—as the best way to convey the interpenetration of directed and non-directed thinking, expressed through the alternation of what Tzara calls “experimental dreams” and “philosophical tales.” Within surrealist literature, such a work is a true outlier, and one might even wonder whether Grains and Issues can be compared to anything else at all 3. Why is that?

We know that Soluble Fish, the poetic and practical complement to the theoretical Manifesto, was intended to form a single whole, but in the end, the two were published separately—perhaps accentuating the literary character of the vignettes, which had originally been meant to illustrate the experimental approach outlined in the Manifesto.

The Immaculate Conception, published in 1930, perhaps marked a turning point. In it, a polemical anthropology emerged in an unprecedented form: “Man” (the first section) followed the logic of automatism; the sequence of “Possessions” and various pathological simulations reflected an experimental method aimed at rehabilitating primal instincts through deviant discourses; meanwhile, the “Meditations” obeyed the logic of collage and automatic procedures. However, in this work, there remained no voice of the authors themselves—Breton and Éluard—no articulated confession regarding the meaning of their method, aside from the preface to “Possessions.”

In that preface, Breton and Éluard admitted to having “discovered, within ourselves, reserves that until then we had not suspected,” through their temporary adoption of pathological discourse—that is, a method or technique. In Grains and Issues, by contrast, the mixing of genres goes much further and cannot be reduced to a succession of techniques, pastiches, or collages, because the anthropology it sets forth inherits the epic current already explored in The Approximate Man.

As schematic as it may first seem, the bipartite structure of Grains and Issues—between “experimental dream” and a series of theoretical notes—recalls more the tradition of philosophy than of surrealism (Kepler’s Dream [Songe], for instance, also consists of a fictional narrative accompanied by scientific commentaries). This combination remains entirely original in the surrealist corpus—especially considering that, in the first part, it is further complicated by constant shifts between narrative and discourse, poetry and essay. This kind of interweaving is quite foreign to Breton’s great lyrical prose works.

It may be appropriate at this point to say that Breton’s major prose texts—no matter how poetic—are, in the end, some of the most classical works in French literature: long, balanced periods; continual references to learned culture (there is Fantômas, Chéri-Bibi, Mack Sennett, yes, but also Theseus, Leonardo da Vinci, Lewis Carroll, Rimbaud, Père Enfantin…). When Breton theorizes surrealism in The Communicating Vessels, Mad Love, or Arcane 17, when he outlines a program for the liberation of humankind, whether moved by the awakening of Paris (Communicating Vessels) or a field of sensitive plants on the island of Tenerife (Mad Love), he always does so in a carefully orchestrated style. Though this style coexists alongside surrealism’s experimental dimensions, it never truly blends with them. On this point, the “communicating vessels” barely connect at all.

Tzara, by contrast, never shies away from embracing too much. Within the collection one finds, in succession or in alternation: a utopia, a new treatise on prosody, a dream narrative, an apologue (the tale of the lizard), a poem, an essay—and if not an epic in the traditional sense, then at least some passages with epic resonance. Change our lens to focus instead on the forms of discourse, and the diversity is no less striking.

The figure who describes a future world finally reconciled with the nocturnal side of consciousness speaks like a tribune, a rhetorician; The one who recounts his dream speaks like an uncertain, anxious observer; The one who examines his own writing speaks as both poet and critic; The one who lets the wind speak to denounce modern man speaks as prophet; And the one who explores human faculties—language, memory, or dreaming—speaks in the tongues of the botanist, the chemist, the craftsman, or the economist—who are, in turn, not far from the physicist, since the imagery of levers, equilibrium, and flow regulation borrows from mechanics.

Chemist’s language, for example:

“There could be no question of clouding one’s vision with veils of fog, but rather of dissolving the visible objects into something unbearable, pointedly opaque and acidic—a foundational bath so saturated, by its very extension, that it inundates the very processes of perception […]. One must compile an inventory of all known effective solvents for every domain. The structures of objective reality that appear to endure the strongest shocks consist only of gum filaments that have assumed the long, specific contours of a metal scaffolding, although, as evidenced by clay impressions, they were spun from the mouth of a child.” (On Nocturnal Realities…, 65)

(Botanist/Naturalist): “The fish follows waves and trails without concern for the time inscribed on a pediment of ice—always the same, always inviting and alluring—and which, without marking any distinction between dream and the transparency of water, also leads it along the path of a vegetative thrust, where each shift of the season expands the tree’s bark and inserts, between bark and core, yet another wondrous layer of fiber and sunlight, of that sunlight hardened, tanned under a thousand pressures—equal, strong, and soft—whose delight man no longer knows.” (On Nocturnal Realities…, 33)

(Fluid mechanics): The dream narrative leaves behind an “irrational residue of a lyrical nature” which “overflows the vessel assigned to it, submerges and floods […] the base, the foundation, the rational scaffolding of the narrative.” Dream is described as “a property of the release of forces which, under the action of a lever […] is capable of shifting certain phenomena from one state to another in pursuit of a synthesis.” (Note I, 101–102)

(Physics): “That which is relatively static is transformed into that which is relatively dynamic, and the inhibitory faculties of the dream are transmogrified into the exhibitory faculties of poetry. Dream and poetry would be, on different planes, the same pivot around which repressions might be objectified.” (Note V, 130)

Readers encountering the collection in 1935 were all, as I’ve said, troubled by its hybridity—but intriguingly, not all were troubled by the same aspects. André Rolland de Renéville complained of the absence of a “reference point in this heavy mass of prose,” one that might “allow [the reader] to adjust their thought, toward either discursive reflection or automatic associations.” Indeed, the syntax provides little stability, and Denis de Rougemont even points to outright errors that disrupt the reading experience and offers a psychoanalytic interpretation of them.

What Renéville sees as the surrealists’ great contribution—“having succeeded in isolating unconscious thought from waking thought” (was he forgetting about “the continual misfortune of automatism,” as Breton acknowledged in the Second Manifesto?)—becomes, through its impurity (too many drosses, too many “issues,” perhaps), a flaw in Tzara’s collection.

Ultimately, it is the deliberate mixing of genres and discourses that seems to unsettle critics: some find the book overly dogmatic or didactic; others take issue with the particular language Tzara uses to theorize surrealist doctrine. One of the collection’s most insightful commentators, Micheline Tison-Braun, refers to it as a “strange potpourri of free association, lyrical texts […] meditations and prophetic violence,” while regretting that it ends “unfortunately with a series of Notes in which the poet speaks as a theorist,” and dismissing the opening chapter as a bland exercise in facile revolutionary utopianism.

In short, not everyone draws the same flour from the same sieve. And it seems to me that what makes the text at times unreadable is not so much an overreliance on Marxist vocabulary or Freudian or Jungian concepts, but rather the way it is caught in a dense network of imagery—as we shall see in relation to the status of physical science.

Grains and Issues is a world-work in more than one sense, and I have chosen to begin with the utopia that opens the collection in order to highlight some of its elements. In issue no. 6 of Surrealism in the Service of the Revolution (Surréalisme au service de la Révolution, SASDLR), where the first chapter of Grains and Issues was first published, we find, just a few pages earlier, a group survey titled “On Certain Possibilities for the Irrational Beautification of a City.” This was an occasion for the surrealists to critique monumental cultural heritage, to mock the authorities of French history, and to engage in playful exercises in urban planning.

Tzara’s utopia in the opening chapter is in part an extension of this transformative drive applied to city, love, and objects alike—a collective surrealist gesture seen through manifestos, exhibitions, collaborative games—thus emancipated from the strict bounds of the notion of work.

One detail perhaps worth our attention here: Tzara closes the final issue of La Révolution Surréaliste in 1929 with the beginning of The Approximate Man; and it’s again Tzara who closes the final issue of the SASDLR, in 1933, with the beginning of Grains and Issues—as if each of these surrealist journals came to a close on the threshold of a new human epoch, a new world made in its image.

Yet the utopia Tzara proposes far exceeds what one finds in those collective journals by the way it envisions the human being in totality—cosmically, precisely. Like Charles Fourier, he imagines the transformation of all domains of life: not only new conditions of living through urbanism and social ritual, but also a new logic (one excluding causality), new feelings, new physiological needs (for hunger, for sleep), a new sense of time (cosmic, metaphysical), and the rejection of speech in favor of silence (“the crowd with stitched lips”) broken only by song. This new anthropology is inextricably linked to the reforestation of dreams.

Let me focus for a moment on how language is treated here—a complex question. While, as it’s stated, only the “survivors of the Alphabet” will be allowed to read or write, preserving moments of collective history, it may surprise readers that the abolition of spoken language, claimed in the name of surrealism, seems to contradict the movement’s stated aim of “return[ing] language to its true life” 4. After all, didn’t Breton write in 1924, “after you, my beautiful language”?

This contradiction, too, is destabilizing. But Tzara’s goal is understandable: the disappearance of verbal language—the language of alienation, of habit, of knowledge fossilized in words and constrained by the a priori categories of perception—is meant to liberate action through a transfer of forces. Thought in words is to be replaced by thought in images.

And yet, another ambiguity haunts the text: it also speaks of transforming words, not merely abandoning them. Rather than stopping at “the crowd with stitched lips,” dream would enable a return to poetry. As we read in Note IV, since “language [is] made for obsolete, outmoded stages,” and has “lingered within systems that have already been emptied of their content”—in short, since language is lagging behind knowledge—it follows logically that, after a phase of silence and ritualized song, language must itself be renewed.

Once again, the emergence of the physical sciences—as a recurring model across the book—seems to create unity, but their role differs fundamentally depending on whether they appear in poetic or theoretical discourse. On the poetic side: the reign of analogy, of imagistic thinking; words are moving material, they merge with nature —poetic usage:

“Thus words themselves, through their unexpected couplings—unregistered in any granite-bound dictionaries—may take on a new coloration of meaning, or of meaning loss, according to the principle of the overflow of a liquid at boiling point and the internal transformations it undergoes.” (48) Our emphasis.

It is almost Lautréamontesque… beautiful as the principle of the overflow of a liquid… On the other hand, in Note IV, we find again the idea of matter (thus it is the poet’s task to demonstrate ductility, the “softness in adaptation”, the “voluptuous laxity of linguistic matter”), but also language as a system of specifically cultural and historical signs—one that, far from obeying the laws of physics, reflects social mechanisms.

The physico-chemical model thus serves imagistic thought. The principles of physics are used analogically to describe the evolution of language (as well as that of biology, for that matter), since the creation of language is conceived as a reproduction “on another scale” of phylogenesis (a potential link with Jean-Pierre Brisset?). Language therefore appears to hesitate continually between a natural model—especially prevalent in poetic discourse—and a historicist model, one not so easily reconciled with the first.

Let us now consider how the anthropology that unfolds throughout the collection—the description of the human being, the exercise of their faculties, and their relation to the world, whether physical, social, or emotional—how this material anthropology, which invests the subject with “unprecedented cosmogonies” 5 and makes of them the site of a fundamental lack (“my hunger for lands and stars”, 47), illustrates the collection’s diverse-cosmic character… a term I have proposed as both a key to its unreadability and a source of its enduring fascination.

An Epic Anthropology: The Macrocosmic Man It is often said that the “new man,” whose formation was called for in the 1931 collection The Approximate Man, is nowhere better represented than in Grains and Issues, which retains—at least in some respects—an epic dimension. While the 1935 collection includes more personal elements, since the dreamer is now the subject of a writing experiment, it is still concerned essentially with a struggle: man’s struggle against an oppressive society, and the exploration of the unconscious. Through interior landscapes, this dual effort regains a distinctly epic resonance, even in the presence of theoretical discourse.

The line “I remained a stranger to everything / they left me out of everything,” which interrupts the prose passages of the chapter “From Top to Bottom, Clarity” (De fond en comble la clarté) and recurs like a refrain, echoes similar verses from The Approximate Man, with the enduringly tragic tone of the past tense: “I walked on the sky with the year infinitely” (Chant V, OC II, 98), or these brighter lines from the conclusion:

“and rocky in my clothing of schist / I entrusted my waiting / to the torment of the oxidized desert / and to the robust coming of fire” (Chant XIX, OC II, 167, 169, 170, 171).

The four ages of horticultural humanity, the wind's imprecation against the human condition, and the closing chant of the poet at the end of the “Experimental Dream” would suffice to show how deeply Grains and Issues draws from the epic tradition. I will quote only a few lines:

let the lances be broken / let man finally rise and grow in motion / to put man back in his place / in the true measure of his realm / let him be king of the domain he is / and which haunts him […] / so your shoulders will carry / a new man as yet invisible / but who will tremble / with the vertigo of the sky / and the purity / of a newborn, unsuspected flame (96).

Still, my aim is not merely to track epic motifs in the collection, but rather to show how the anthropological discourse, by absorbing both the constraints of the epic genre and a variety of technical bodies of knowledge, ultimately produces in Grains and Issues a vision of cosmic man.

Despite the proliferation of metaphorical networks, there are certain recurring constants that help contour the figure of this cosmic being: a “cleared being” who longs for the “reforestation of dreams”, and who, by night, ascends along “paths opening at the very center of the human body.”

The allegorical account of this ascent (From Nocturnal and Diurnal Realities, 1) unfolds in a

“landscape of tufts of death, of hedges of rhetorical caution and of wadding, of puffballs of opaque death opening before [the awakened dreamer] like a part in the carefully combed hair of a mound” (65).

It is as evocative of Michel Leiris’ The Cardinal Point as of The Divine Comedy. In The Cardinal Point, the dreamer, like in Leiris, moves toward a pole, a peak, that is none other than the site of thought itself. But gradually, the Dantesque echo grows stronger: the journey through an infernal, allegorical landscape, soon punctuated by the presence of a beloved woman, unmistakably recalls the pilgrimages of Dante.

Of course, the modern man’s descent into the inverted world of the unconscious differs radically from the Christian’s journey at the end of the Middle Ages—but a kind of residual memory lingers. No longer does he descend into the circles of hell, but rather follows inner paths that open “with no regard for heaven or earth,” clinging to “tangent circles” transformed into “translucent life buoys.”

The infernal circles have become concentric rings—those of a tree trunk, tracing the passage of time and guiding the seeker back toward the earth’s core (indeed, let us recall the meaning of Tzara’s pseudonym: earth). This is why the subject's journey into the dream is often linked to wood. Incapable of “peeling himself from the outside,” man, like the tree, consists of concentric layers that the dream experience allows him to traverse. Notably, Tzara was writing Character of Insomnia (Personnage d’insomnie) at the same time—the tale of the man with branches…

If only things were that simple. But the analogies—branches, circles, currents—begin to overlay one another, to proliferate. The lyrical surge of imagistic thought generates more complexity than clarity. What I aim to underline is precisely how the cosmic and totalizing ambition of the collection constantly threatens its legibility.

Consider again the concentric circles the dreamer traverses in the opening sequence of “From Nocturnal and Diurnal Realities”. The dreamer’s internal journey—following paths unfolding within the body, shaped like the spokes of a tree—connects vein networks to branchings, and from branchings to destiny (the fateful “crossroads”), and this passage itself becomes ramified.

A new character enters the scene—one whom the subject begins to follow: one of the beings man harbors within himself, reminiscent, in some ways, of the hermit crab evoked by the authors of The Magnetic Fields (Les Champs magnétiques).

Matter, time, and identity each appear as stratified: layered over with bark, split into segments, doubled. We move, quite naturally—if I may say so—from rings and branches to passengers of the night, since man, according to Tzara, houses another man within, and memory itself has a “multiple and extensible base.”

The “miserable passenger of the night” might be understood as the man of resignation, the wounded and anesthetized figure we all carry within, coexisting with other, more wondrous beings. He is the ghost that haunts each of us, an empty self subject to inertia and superstructures…

Gradually, by peeling inward, the subject encounters his nocturnal double and brings the theme of memory into play, after opening with that of the journey. And then, quite unexpectedly, Tzara introduces a fish—a fish that “follows [its] traces”.

Thus, we move from the dreamer, trailing his nocturnal double—his inner prisoner of night—to the fish swimming upstream. And from the waves traced by the fish returning to its origin, we fall back into the tree rings that likewise guide us toward life’s beginning. But what skillful grafting—art du bouturage—Tzara demonstrates in building this branching system, which seems to encompass all kingdoms of life.

After all, in his utopia, he announces the merging of kingdoms… (Impossible to quote the full sentence here—it runs twenty lines, an entire paragraph.)

"And more blithely than the fisherman emerging from the finite waters, the hour which has not yet extinguished its frantic resemblance with the one that preceded it or the one that will follow [...], the fish follows waves and trails, heedless of the hour etched above its head on a pediment of ice—always the same, always rich and enticing—and which, without drawing distinction between dream and the transparency of water, also leads it along a line of vegetative thrust, where each changing of the season causes the bark of the tree to dilate and inserts, between it and the core, yet another marvellous layer of fiber and sun—that hardened, tanned sun, pressed under a thousand equal, strong, and supple pressures, whose delight man no longer knows. The fish slips between seaweeds and swims against the current of its slow maturity, toward the eternal velvet of mothers and stones, of loves forsaken without rupture or suffering and rediscovered in blood and freshness at the junctions of rivers and the cracks in keeps." ("On Nocturnal Realities", 36–37)

The layer and the core are recurring images throughout the collection. This “marvellous layer of fiber and sun” evokes heartwood—the living wood beneath the bark (a thoroughly Bretonnian motif, even if the word aubier is absent from Tzara’s text, perhaps unfamiliar to someone not attuned to dawns). We find also a “layer of childhood, still intact amid the entanglement of locks,” or, by contrast, an “animal layer of ice.” These “successive grafts” must be removed one by one, like suffocating seals. For the society of the future, the challenge is that certain individuals—committed to the transformation of that world—might be able to “peel off their life like a layer of foam.”

The arboreal syntax—about which I will say a few more words before concluding—has something of a cumulative structure that mirrors precisely the image of intimacy built over the course of the collection: a physical image of a stratified world made up of layers, peelings, envelopes (intimacy, let us recall, from intimus, is “that which is most inward”).

Here, Tzara significantly renews the representation of the unconscious—far beyond the view of the subconscious held by Breton, who was influenced by F. W. H. Myers and Pierre Mabille. Though the metaphor of surface and depth remains, it now extends to the entire set of natural elements. From the concentric rings of the tree, we move to the striations of an agate, which appears later to evoke human life—with one key difference: the “cross-section” explicitly recalls the tree’s trunk, its aging pattern recorded in rings.

“Life appeared to me in cross-section, like an agate whose stains move in a perpetual flight of writhing worms brushing past one another only to avoid contact, constantly seeking, in dynamic balance, a roundabout path through oppositions, blockages, and prohibitions generated by movement itself.” (49)

Tzara discovers here a vision more reminiscent of atomic theory (“flight of writhing worms”), but the desire, expressed a few lines later, that “a breach might be opened in the structure”, and the comparison of darkness (the opposite of knowledge) to a “glass globe, a tumor,” which one needs only to shatter so that “light may invade memory,” belongs to the same conceptual framework: of a shell that blocks exchange between inside and outside—or a growth which, elsewhere, “obstructs the vital pathways.”

By constantly projecting the subject’s psychological history onto material processes—biological metaphors (fruit, bark, tree), chemical schemata (residues, deposits), or mechanical ones (circulation, locks and sluices)—Tzara appears very much to continue Lautréamont’s endeavor: to chart a new course for lyricism and the knowledge of human depths—far more impenetrable, as we know, than those of the ocean. Poetry indeed gains in scope, and this "forbidden zone promenade" described by Breton in the Second Manifesto has perhaps never been taken this far.

Tzara, too, opens “windows carved into [the] flesh”, but unlike in Magnetic Fields (“Tintless Glass”), where we peer into “a vast lake where dragonflies alight at midday, golden and fragrant like peonies,” here, the window opens on a landscape of devastation—closer to the heart of the clown who “drools at the stern” in Rimbaud, or to a histrionic acrobat performing a somersault:

“Let it be said once and for all that excursions do not begin at the skin’s surface to move outward, but beneath the layers of fat which, through the longest detour, lead to the deserted shores of the peacock’s plaintive heart.” (“From Top to Bottom, Clarity”, 85)

This linking to Magnetic Fields is perhaps less accidental than it seems... A few lines later, as Tzara describes the “ball of the four rages,” a swirling mix of Hesiod’s five ages of man and the classical theory of the four divine furies—offered as a grotesque bacchanale, a parody of the Grand Soir—we read:

“This is not yet the hour of the eye; this is not the skin’s portico, nor the threshold of some false dawn tapping at your flesh-bound windows, calling you back to the sudden wakefulness of a return, flat-footed in the wind, in a lawful joy of earth. These are ice shards clashing in their serpentine clarities.”

Poetry undoubtedly gains from this confluence of natural sciences, which transforms lyric feeling into organic symptoms, geographic reliefs, or chemical concretions. That the anguish of living might suddenly become a sea scene (“in the racket of ruptured hulls, in the whistling of cut moorings, in the terrible crashing of gutted ships,” 53); that psychic movements are transmuted into “crystallized formations on the surface of a poorly barked heart” (51) —is perhaps the kind of supplement that psychoanalytic image theory continues to lack.

Yet, even with its poetic rewards, this blending of discourse may limit the theoretical coherence Tzara aims for. By the time the reader closes the book, all that may remain is the trace of imagistic thought—especially when the theory itself demands familiarity with dialectical materialism, Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis, and the ability to leap from one scientific register to another without losing the thread.

The Radiating Sentence Losing the thread—from that figure of disorientation and straying, I would now like to turn to the final level I intended to examine: not that of genre or discourse, but of the sentence itself.

Denis de Rougemont once described Tzara’s sentence as progressing via "contagion." Personally, I would prefer the term radiating sentence, since it seems that the phrase begins from a center and constantly moves outward, while simultaneously scattering images along the way—images that both catch the eye and slow it down, sometimes to the point of blind saturation.

This may be the effect of what Rougemont criticized as a kind of “precious and soporific poetics.” The distinctiveness of Tzara’s collection lies in this prose—a continuation of the short, stand-alone forms found in L’Antitête. What’s at stake now is the lyrical sentence, and how it attempts to wrestle with the totality of the human.

Tzara’s readers will have noticed, naturally, that the signature complexity of his sentence lies chiefly in the pairing of abstraction (philosophical concepts, aspects of psychic, social, or poetic life) with concrete matter, textures, processes, and gestures—those drawn from sensory experience or technical knowledge.

This creates a first level of difficulty: an allegorical mode of writing that is, to borrow a musical metaphor, incapable of sustaining the note. Allegory is forever on the verge of rupture, splintering from its richness.

Should, for example, a "deposit of dream-like fervor" appear, it will not be followed by an orderly description of a dream river across some symbolic plain. When a thematic network can be reconstructed—as in the next example—terms like “sensory centers”, and “markers (like scattered seeds) planted along the borders of our awareness”, seem to initiate the depiction of an inner landscape, an imagined agrarian environment like so many others which course through the collection.

Already her sovereignty asserted itself within me, yet still hesitated—beneath delicate hands—to cross the sensory centers, the markers planted along the frontiers of our consciousnesses, like immortal seedings, palpable and massive, haunted from night to night, more transparent than silence, devouring autumn’s slow descent. All the gold that seeps from the peaks of dreams—within the softened awareness of death—resounds, heavily present in the haughty labor of water, and envelops you in fine vegetal errors and the solitudes of sloping olive groves, awakened between tears. Despair founded its hope of nesting like scattered embers, upon the persistence of a certain quality of warmth peculiar to piercing perfumes. As sole harvest, flint chooses its sling. Birds, like levers, watch the flocks of city dwellers and scatter a subtle leaven of destiny across their amorphous and carefree masses. (On Nocturnal Realities, 36)

The sentence that follows replaces the geographic space that was starting to form with a medium, a flow: dream is depicted as a current from which gold can rise—and it is this gold, happy residue, happy issue, that suddenly “envelops [us] in fine vegetal errors and the solitudes of sloping olive groves.” This passage clearly shifts into a zone where non-directed thinking overtakes dream-narration.

Notice how the text moves from a dream narrative in the imperfect tense to a generalizing discourse in the present, addressed to the reader and striving to describe a shared experience, however close it may come to the incommunicable. This transition from storytelling to analysis adds yet another layer of thematic complexity.

And yet, like sowing seeds again, Tzara continues to scatter echoes of agrarian imagery: “vegetal errors,” “olive grove solitudes,” the harvest, the birds. But here, paradoxically, it is despair that “nests,” not the birds, while the birds instead “scatter a subtle leaven of destiny.”

If coupling remains the dominant rhetorical figure throughout the work, what ultimately hinders the reader is the constant oscillation in syntactic genitives. If we could rely on all abstract nouns (like “errors,” “destiny,” “solitude”) appearing in fixed syntactic positions—acting either as the nucleus or the complement in a noun phrase (NP) structure—perhaps allegory could take hold. But here, for instance, “solitude of the olive groves” assigns the abstract to the head (N1), while “leaven of destiny” shifts the abstract to the object (N2).

If we add metaphors borrowed from entirely different semantic domains (like the labor of water or the lever), we’ll understand why reading Tzara is fundamentally different from reading Julien Gracq, who also invokes biological or chemical schemas to discuss poetry or emotion. Here, it seems, writing weaves and overlays tiny vignette-like scenes—almost like object lessons—onto a philosophical discourse on consciousness, dream, or fate, with such speed that the reader has no time to form stable representations. What remains, instead, are flashes—images that linger after the passage of reading has been sifted.

We ought also to speak of the syntax: the complexity of noun phrases yielding ontological shocks; the ambiguities provoked when phrases can retroactively or proleptically attach to different referents 6; the frequency of verbless clauses; and the collapse that sometimes follows when a long-delayed main clause finally arrives—demanding either that we let the current carry us or that we constantly circle back, at the risk of forgetting what we were searching for.

Consider this image, launching a sentence: “glass springs with leather legs” (81), placed in subject position, followed by a series of proliferating nominal subjects, whose predicate reads: “appear in the scattered limbs of a total disillusionment.” One may have to surrender the hope of ever locating where to fix this dismembered body of disillusion, and instead feel—rather than grasp—the links between these transparent, sheathed, constrained sources that drag the human, through density, into despair.

Grains and Issues, unreadable? That is the terse, insolent question I wished to begin with. One is tempted to borrow—and never mind the cultural clash—the line from the Herald in The Satin Slipper:

“Listen carefully, don’t cough, and try to understand a little. What you do not understand is what is most beautiful, what lasts the longest is what is most interesting, and what you don’t find funny is what is funniest of all.”

Perhaps it’s not about understanding these excursions beneath the skin, these metaphysical and organic landscapes, supplemented in the final notes by a practical discourse we’d rather read as a travel guide—a green Michelin telling us what vistas to admire—than a new Discourse on Method where Descartes has been replaced by Marx and Engels. Not to understand them, but to feel their glimmers, the detonations of image.

By coincidence—or not—Tzara appears to insert, in miniature, within this diverse-cosmic collection, a kind of reflection on readability itself, through the image of an imaginary book, hidden like a relic in a secret drawer.

This appears in the first chapter’s utopia, in an attempt at a phonetic transcription that borders on a phenomenology of sound. It refers to a mysterious book, described at length through the pronunciation of a syllable from the line:

“midnight bread on sulfur lips.”

Each syllable is marked by detailed instruction on how it ought to be sung by a “resistant voice”—that of a beautiful woman within the “crowd of stitched lips.” A series of experiments then attempts to give tone, duration, and volume to each syllable.

Here’s how the final syllable, -fre, should be pronounced in the future:

“-fre will be the terminal point of an elevator, cushioned by oiled pads inside bags of wool, imitating the feet of stuffed elephants for blond children preferably—not too long, nor too short, it will be a book being closed, but a book of velvet, whose page justification gives the illusion that regular poems are printed there, though needless to say nothing will be legible in this pseudo-book of velvet poems, and that the patient reader will see in it only inklings of beauty, of which he will be the momentary author, the publisher and the reader—and in whose abrupt closure one will glimpse the smile of a man content with a task fulfilled under fortunate conditions.” (18–19)

In this stream of imagery that seeks to embody language's weight, intensity, and form, an astonishing book emerges. It is, in effect, the only true “book” within the book—a silent metaphor, and perhaps an allegory of the very volume we’re reading.

Would not the “suspicions of beauty” that the patient reader temporarily authors be the very labor of criticism? An oralization—from sulfur to “souffle”—that is at once hermeneutics, pleasure, aesthetic distillation, and an experience of suspicion.

Notes

1 — All citations refer to the Flammarion edition of the Œuvres complètes, vol. III, unless otherwise noted. ↩

2 — See Cécile Bargues, doctoral thesis, Dada après Dada, defended under the supervision of Philippe Dagen (2012). A shorter edition has since been published: Raoul Hausmann. Après Dada, Brussels, Mardaga, 2015. ↩

3 — It is worth noting that Jude Stéphan appropriated Tzara’s title for one of his own works: Grains et issues. ↩

4 — André Breton, 1953. Retrieving language for its true life is a central aim of surrealism. ↩

5 — “To circumnavigate oneself is to see at each border point a rising horizon of uncertainty, a trembling wave of unprecedented cosmogonies.” (60) ↩

6 — See for example: “A sensation of reality, intoxicated by [tensions] and [the husks of wanderings] and [the unstable skein spun, around its smiling abandon, by the greed of capricious vigils], ended up dissolving the last bastions of supposed solar livability.” The abstract noun greed governs grammatically the attributes abandon and smile, but semantically it’s the vigils that command the action. The referent of its in “its smiling abandon” remains ambiguous. ↩