Dadaism and surrealism in american literature

CHAPTER II. Dadaism and surrealism in American literature
2.1. Surrealism in Literature: Characteristics
Surrealism as an art movement is not an extension of Dadaism, though in the timeline it follows Dadaism without any significant lapse of time between the cessation of Dadaism and the beginning of Surrealism. While Dadaism represented the mockery of rules and shared knowledge and propagated meaninglessness and absurdity, surrealism was about finding a bridge between the subconscious and the reality.
Surrealism was never anti-art or its idea of autonomy never had the same meaning as to what chance’ had for Dadaism. Surrealists were more occupied with the idea of the unconscious and their art was often inspired by dreams, as they felt dreams were some kind of link to the unconscious. They were inspired by Freud; Dadas were not.
Surrealism is much easier to grasp as it is mainly a pursuit of understanding the subconscious and what lies there. It is more of psychoanalysis, dreams, and a liberal association. It involves experimentation’s for a better understanding of the subconscious and the dreams.
Many Dadaists converted to surrealism and the best way to differentiate between their works, as to whether they are Dadaist or Surrealist, is to look at the timeline of their creation. If certain work is considered both Dadaist and Surrealist and if it has been created after 1926, it’s more likely to be Surrealist.
Surrealism was a cultural movement which developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I and was largely influenced by Dada. The movement is best known for its visual artworks and writings and the juxtaposition of distant realities to activate the unconscious mind through the imagery. Artists painted unnerving, illogical scenes, sometimes with photographic precision, creating strange creatures from everyday objects, and developing painting techniques that allowed the unconscious to express itself.^[2] Its aim was, according to leader André Breton, to «resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality», or surreality.
Works of Surrealism feature the element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur. However, many Surrealist artists and writers regard their work as an expression of the philosophical movement first and foremost (for instance, of the «pure psychic automatism» Breton speaks of in the first Surrealist Manifesto), with the works themselves being secondary, i.e. artifacts of surrealist experimentation. Leader Breton was explicit in his assertion that Surrealism was, above all, a revolutionary movement. At the time, the movement was associated with political causes such as communism and anarchism.
The term «Surrealism» is said to have been coined by Guillaume Apollinaire as early as 1917. However, the Surrealist movement was not officially established until October 15, 1924, when the French poet and critic André Breton published the Surrealist Manifesto in Paris. The most important center of the movement was Paris, France. From the 1920s onward, the movement spread around the globe, impacting the visual arts, literature, film, and music of many countries and languages, as well as political thought and practice, philosophy, and social theory.
The word’surrealism’ was first coined in March 1917 by Guillaume Apollinaire. He wrote in a letter to Paul Dermée: «All things considered, I think in fact it is better to adopt surrealism than supernaturalism, which I first used» [Tout bien examiné, je crois en effet qu’il vaut mieux adopter surréalisme que surnaturalisme que j’avais d’abord employé].
Apollinaire used the term in his program notes for Sergei Diaghilev‘s Ballets Russes, Parade, which premiered 18 May 1917. Parade had a one-act scenario by Jean Cocteau and was performed with music by Erik Satie. Cocteau described the ballet as «realistic». Apollinaire went further, describing Parade as «surrealistic»:
This new alliance—I say new, because until now scenery and costumes were linked only by factitious bonds—has given rise, in Parade, to a kind of surrealism, which I consider to be the point of departure for a whole series of manifestations of the New Spirit that is making itself felt today and that will certainly appeal to our best minds. We may expect it to bring about profound changes in our arts and manners through universal joyfulness, for it is only natural, after all, that they keep pace with scientific and industrial progress. (Apollinaire, 1917)
The term was taken up again by Apollinaire, both as subtitle and in the preface to his play Les Mamelles de Tirésias: Drame surréaliste, which was written in 1903 and first performed in 1917.^[15]
World War I scattered the writers and artists who had been based in Paris, and in the interim many became involved with Dada, believing that excessive rational thought and bourgeois values had brought the conflict of the war upon the world. The Dadaists protested with anti-art gatherings, performances, writings and art works. After the war, when they returned to Paris, the Dada activities continued.
During the war, André Breton, who had trained in medicine and psychiatry, served in a neurological hospital where he used Sigmund Freud‘s psychoanalytic methods with soldiers suffering from shell-shock. Meeting the young writer Jacques Vaché, Breton felt that Vaché was the spiritual son of writer and pataphysics founder Alfred Jarry. He admired the young writer’s anti-social attitude and disdain for established artistic tradition. Later Breton wrote, «In literature, I was successively taken with Rimbaud, with Jarry, with Apollinaire, with Nouveau, with Lautréamont, but it is Jacques Vaché to whom I owe the most.»
Back in Paris, Breton joined in Dada activities and started the literary journal Littérature along with Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault. They began experimenting with automatic writing—spontaneously writing without censoring their thoughts—and published the writings, as well as accounts of dreams, in the magazine. Breton and Soupault continued writing evolving their techniques of automatism and published The Magnetic Fields (1920).
By October 1924 two rival Surrealist groups had formed to publish a Surrealist Manifesto. Each claimed to be successors of a revolution launched by Appolinaire. One group, led by Yvan Goll consisted of Pierre Albert-Birot, Paul Dermée, Céline Arnauld, Francis Picabia, Tristan Tzara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Pierre Reverdy, Marcel Arland, Joseph Delteil, Jean Painlevé and Robert Delaunay, among others.^[17] The group led by André Breton claimed that automatism was a better tactic for societal change than those of Dada, as led by Tzara, who was now among their rivals. Breton’s group grew to include writers and artists from various media such as Paul Éluard, Benjamin Péret, René Crevel, Robert Desnos, Jacques Baron, Max Morise,^[18] Pierre Naville, Roger Vitrac, Gala Éluard, Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, Man Ray, Hans Arp, Georges Malkine, Michel Leiris, Georges Limbour, Antonin Artaud, Raymond Queneau, André Masson, Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Prévert, and Yves Tanguy.
As they developed their philosophy, they believed that Surrealism would advocate the idea that ordinary and depictive expressions are vital and important, but that the sense of their arrangement must be open to the full range of imagination according to the Hegelian Dialectic. They also looked to the Marxist dialectic and the work of such theorists as Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse.
Freud’s work with free association, dream analysis, and the unconscious was of utmost importance to the Surrealists in developing methods to liberate imagination. They embraced idiosyncrasy, while rejecting the idea of an underlying madness. As Dalí later proclaimed, «There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad.»
Beside the use of dream analysis, they emphasized that «one could combine inside the same frame, elements not normally found together to produce illogical and startling effects.» Breton included the idea of the startling juxtapositions in his 1924 manifesto, taking it in turn from a 1918 essay by poet Pierre Reverdy, which said: «a juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities. The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image will be−the greater its emotional power and poetic reality.»
The group aimed to revolutionize human experience, in its personal, cultural, social, and political aspects. They wanted to free people from false rationality, and restrictive customs and structures. Breton proclaimed that the true aim of Surrealism was «long live the social revolution, and it alone!» To this goal, at various times Surrealists aligned with communism and anarchism.
The first Surrealist work, according to leader Brêton, was Les Chants de Maldoror; and the first work written and published by his group of Surréalistes was Les Champs Magnétiques (May–June 1919). Littérature contained automatist works and accounts of dreams. The magazine and the portfolio both showed their disdain for literal meanings given to objects and focused rather on the undertones, the poetic undercurrents present. Not only did they give emphasis to the poetic undercurrents, but also to the connotations and the overtones which «exist in ambiguous relationships to the visual images»
Because Surrealist writers seldom, if ever, appear to organize their thoughts and the images they present, some people find much of their work difficult to parse. This notion however is a superficial comprehension, prompted no doubt by Breton’s initial emphasis on automatic writing as the main route toward a higher reality. But—as in Breton’s case—much of what is presented as purely automatic is actually edited and very «thought out». Breton himself later admitted that automatic writing‘s centrality had been overstated, and other elements were introduced, especially as the growing involvement of visual artists in the movement forced the issue, since automatic painting required a rather more strenuous set of approaches. Thus such elements as collage were introduced, arising partly from an ideal of startling juxtapositions as revealed in Pierre Reverdy‘s poetry. And—as in Magritte’s case (where there is no obvious recourse to either automatic techniques or collage)—the very notion of convulsive joining became a tool for revelation in and of itself. Surrealism was meant to be always in flux—to be more modern than modern—and so it was natural there should be a rapid shuffling of the philosophy as new challenges arose. Artists such as Max Ernst and his surrealist collages demonstrate this shift to a more modern art form that also comments on society.
Surrealists revived interest in Isidore Ducasse, known by his pseudonym Comte de Lautréamont, and for the line «beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella», and Arthur Rimbaud, two late 19th-century writers believed to be the precursors of Surrealism.
Examples of Surrealist literature are Artaud’s Le Pèse-Nerfs (1926), Aragon’s Irene’s Cunt (1927), Péret’s Death to the Pigs (1929), Crevel’s Mr. Knife Miss Fork (1931), Sadegh Hedayat‘s the Blind Owl (1937), and Breton’s Sur la route de San Romano (1948).
La Révolution surréaliste continued publication into 1929 with most pages densely packed with columns of text, but also included reproductions of art, among them works by de Chirico, Ernst, Masson, and Man Ray. Other works included books, poems, pamphlets, automatic texts and theoretical tracts.
2.2. Principles of Dadaism found in American literature
Dadaism was an art movement of the European avant-garde in the early 20th century, with early centres in Zürich, Switzerland, at the Cabaret Voltaire. New York Dada began c. 1915, and after 1920 Dada flourished in Paris. Dadaist activities lasted until c. the mid 1920s.
Developed in reaction to World War I, the Dada movement consisted of artists who rejected the logic, reason, and aestheticism of modern capitalist society, instead expressing nonsense, irrationality, and anti-bourgeois protest in their works. The art of the movement spanned visual, literary, and sound media, including collage, sound poetry, cut-up writing, and sculpture. Dadaist artists expressed their discontent toward violence, war, and nationalism, and maintained political affinities with radical left-wing and far-left politics.
There is no consensus on the origin of the movement’s name; a common story is that the German artist Richard Huelsenbeck slid a paper knife (letter-opener) at random into a dictionary, where it landed on «dada», a colloquial French term for a hobby horse. Jean Arp wrote that Tristan Tzara invented the word at 6 p.m. on 6 February 1916, in the Café de la Terrasse in Zürich. Others note that it suggests the first words of a child, evoking a childishness and absurdity that appealed to the group. Still others speculate that the word might have been chosen to evoke a similar meaning (or no meaning at all) in any language, reflecting the movement’s internationalism.
The roots of Dada lie in pre-war avant-garde. The term anti-art, a precursor to Dada, was coined by Marcel Duchamp around 1913 to characterize works that challenge accepted definitions of art.^[13] Cubism and the development of collage and abstract art would inform the movement’s detachment from the constraints of reality and convention. The work of French poets, Italian Futurists and the German Expressionists would influence Dada’s rejection of the tight correlation between words and meaning. Works such as Ubu Roi (1896) by Alfred Jarry and the ballet Parade (1916–17) by Erik Satie would also be characterized as proto-Dadaist works. The Dada movement’s principles were first collected in Hugo Ball‘s Dada Manifesto in 1916.
The Dadaist movement included public gatherings, demonstrations, and publication of art/literary journals; passionate coverage of art, politics, and culture were topics often discussed in a variety of media. Key figures in the movement included Jean Arp, Johannes Baader, Hugo Ball, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, George Grosz, Raoul Hausmann, John Heartfield, Emmy Hennings, Hannah Höch, Richard Huelsenbeck, Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Hans Richter, Kurt Schwitters, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Tristan Tzara, and Beatrice Wood, among others. The movement influenced later styles like the avant-garde and downtown music movements, and groups including Surrealism, nouveau réalisme, pop art and Fluxus.
Dada was an informal international movement, with participants in Europe and North America. The beginnings of Dada correspond with the outbreak of World War I. For many participants, the movement was a protest against the bourgeois nationalist and colonialist interests, which many Dadaists believed were the root cause of the war, and against the cultural and intellectual conformity—in art and more broadly in society—that corresponded to the war.
Avant-garde circles outside France knew of pre-war Parisian developments. They had seen (or participated in) Cubist exhibitions held at Galeries Dalmau, Barcelona (1912), Galerie Der Sturm in Berlin (1912), the Armory Show in New York (1913), SVU Mánes in Prague (1914), several Jack of Diamonds exhibitions in Moscow and at De Moderne Kunstkring [es], Amsterdam (between 1911 and 1915). Futurism developed in response to the work of various artists. Dada subsequently combined these approaches.
Many Dadaists believed that the’reason’ and’logic’ of bourgeois capitalist society had led people into war. They expressed their rejection of that ideology in artistic expression that appeared to reject logic and embrace chaos and irrationality. For example, George Grosz later recalled that his Dadaist art was intended as a protest «against this world of mutual destruction».
According to Hans Richter Dada was not art: it was «anti-art.» Dada represented the opposite of everything which art stood for. Where art was concerned with traditional aesthetics, Dada ignored aesthetics. If art was to appeal to sensibilities, Dada was intended to offend.
As Hugo Ball expressed it, «For us, art is not an end in itself ... but it is an opportunity for the true perception and criticism of the times we live in.»
A reviewer from the American Art News stated at the time that «Dada philosophy is the sickest, most paralyzing and most destructive thing that has ever originated from the brain of man.» Art historians have described Dada as being, in large part, a «reaction to what many of these artists saw as nothing more than an insane spectacle of collective homicide».
Years later, Dada artists described the movement as «a phenomenon bursting forth in the midst of the postwar economic and moral crisis, a savior, a monster, which would lay waste to everything in its path... [It was] a systematic work of destruction and demoralization... In the end it became nothing but an act of sacrilege.»
To quote Dona Budd’s The Language of Art Knowledge,
Dada was born out of negative reaction to the horrors of the First World War. This international movement was begun by a group of artists and poets associated with the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich. Dada rejected reason and logic, prizing nonsense, irrationality and intuition. The origin of the name Dada is unclear; some believe that it is a nonsensical word. Others maintain that it originates from the Romanian artists Tristan Tzara’s and Marcel Janco‘s frequent use of the words «da, da,» meaning «yes, yes» in the Romanian language. Another theory says that the name «Dada» came during a meeting of the group when a paper knife stuck into a French–German dictionary happened to point to‘dada’, a French word for’hobbyhorse‘.
The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature, poetry, art manifestos, art theory, theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a rejection of the prevailing standards in art through anti-art cultural works.
The creations of Duchamp, Picabia, Man Ray, and others between 1915 and 1917 eluded the term Dada at the time, and «New York Dada« came to be seen as a post facto invention of Duchamp. At the outset of the 1920s the term Dada flourished in Europe with the help of Duchamp and Picabia, who had both returned from New York. Notwithstanding, Dadaists such as Tzara and Richter claimed European precedence. Art historian David Hopkins notes:
Ironically, though, Duchamp’s late activities in New York, along with the machinations of Picabia, re-cast Dada’s history. Dada’s European chroniclers—primarily Richter, Tzara, and Huelsenbeck—would eventually become preoccupied with establishing the pre-eminence of Zurich and Berlin at the foundations of Dada, but it proved to be Duchamp who was most strategically brilliant in manipulating the genealogy of this avant-garde formation, deftly turning New York Dada from a late-comer into an originating force.
Dadists used shock, nihilism, negativity, paradox, randomness, subconscious forces and antinomianism to subvert established traditions in the aftermath of the Great War. Tzara’s 1920 manifesto proposed cutting words from a newspaper and randomly selecting fragments to write poetry, a process in which the synchronous universe itself becomes an active agent in creating the art. A poem written using this technique would be a «fruit» of the words that were clipped from the article.
In literary arts Dadaists focused on poetry, particularly the so-called sound poetry invented by Hugo Ball. Dadaist poems attacked traditional conceptions of poetry, including structure, order, as well as the interplay of sound and the meaning of language. For Dadaists, the existing system by which information is articulated robs language of its dignity. The dismantling of language and poetic conventions are Dadaist attempts to restore language to its purest and most innocent form: «With these sound poem, we wanted to dispense with a language which journalism had made desolate and impossible.»
Simultaneous poems (or poèmes simultanés) were recited by a group of speakers who, collectively, produced a chaotic and confusing set of voices. These poems are considered manifestations of modernity including advertising, technology, and conflict. Unlike movements such as Expressionism, Dadaism did not take a negative view of modernity and the urban life. The chaotic urban and futuristic world is considered natural terrain that opens up new ideas for life and art.