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Anti-Oedipus? Dada and Surrealist Theatre, 1916–35

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

Peter Nicholls
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Abstract

In a sequel to his essay ‘Sexuality and Structure in Expressionist Theatre’ in NTQ26, Peter Nicholls here explores a very different set of developments in the French avant-garde drama of the period. Arguing that Dada and Surrealist theatre have a strongly marked ‘anti-oedipal’ tendency, he suggests that their polemics against the family and paternal law contrast with the increasing prominence given to Freud's masterplot in Expressionism. Peter Nicholls teaches English and American Literature at the University of Sussex: his publications include Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics, and Writing, and articles on postmodernism, contemporary poetry, and French cubism. His Modernisms: a Literary Guide will be published by Macmillan in 1992.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 7 , Issue 28 , November 1991 , pp. 331 - 347
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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References

Notes and References

Special thanks (again) to Rachel Bowlby for her comments on this piece. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.

1. Kaiser, Georg, Five Plays, trans. Kenworthy, J. et al. (London: Calder, 1971), p. 168–9.Google Scholar

2. Gay, Peter, Weimar Culture: the Outsider as Insider (London: Secker, 1968), p. 102–18Google Scholar. Sokel, Walter H., in The Writer in Extremis: Expressionism in Twentieth-Century German Literature (Stanford; Stanford University Press, 1959), p. 217Google Scholar, finds Werfel's play typical of this shift in emphasis.

3. Toller, Ernst, Seven Plays, trans. Crankshaw, E. et al. (London: Lane, 1935), p. 102.Google Scholar

4. Toller, Ernst, ‘My Works’, trans. Goetz, Marketa, in Cole, Toby, ed., Playwrights on Playwriting (New York: Hill and Wang, 1961), p. 222Google Scholar; Masse-mensch (1920), trans, as Masses and Man, in Seven Plays, p. 150.

5. See Richard, Lionel, ‘Sur l'expressionisme allemand et sa réception critique en France de 1910 à 1925’, Arcadia, IX, 3 (1974), p. 266–89.Google Scholar

6. ‘A Man’, Little Review, IX, 4 (Autumn-Winter 1923–24), p. 20–1. Compare Kafka's comment, that ‘Dramas and tragedies are written about [the revolt of the son against the father], yet in reality it is material for comedy’, quoted in Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, trans. Polan, Dana (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 10–11.Google Scholar

7. Des Dispositifs pulsionnels (Paris: Union Générate d'Editions, 1973) p. 95.

8. Culler, Jonathan, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (London: Routledge, 1981), p. 174.Google Scholar

9. Barthes, Roland, The Pleasure of the Text (1973), trans. Miller, Richard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), p. 47Google Scholar. Barthes continues: ‘Today, we dismiss Oedipus and narrative at one and the same time: we no longer love, we no longer fear, we no longer narrate.’ Compare Davis, Richard Conn, ‘Critical Introduction: the Discourse of the Father’, The Fictional Father: Lacanian Readings of the Text (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981), p. 13Google Scholar: ‘the father is a “no” that initiates narrative development by enfranchising one line of continuity over other possibilities.…’

10. Letter to His Father, 1919 (New York: Schocken Books, 1953), p. 69.

11. Compare Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, p. 12: ‘The judges, commissioners, bureaucrats, and so on, are not substitutes for the father; rather, it is the father who is a condensation of all these forces that he submits to and that he tries to get his son to submit to.’

12. Léger, F., ‘The Spectacle’ (1924), in Functions of Painting, ed. Fry, Edward (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), p. 40Google Scholar. Deleuze and Guattari, in Kafka, p. 50, note that ‘The theatre in Amerika is no more than an immense wing, an immense hallway, that has abolished all spectacle and all representation.’

13. Quoted in Jelavich, Peter, Munich and Theatrical Modernism: Politics, Playwriting, and Performance 1890–1914 (Cambridge; London: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 224.Google Scholar

14. For the relation between Father and text, and for a discussion of Derrida's unravelling of the connection, see my ‘Sexuality and Structure in Expressionist Theatre’, New Theatre Quarterly, VII, No. 26 (1991).

15. See Jarry's, famous ‘Letter to Lugné-Poë’, in Selected Works of Alfred Jarry, ed. Shattuck, Roger and Watson-Taylor, Simon (London: Eyre Methuen, 1980), p. 67–8Google Scholar, and especially his view that ‘a descriptive placard has far more “suggestive” power than any stage scenery’.

16. Selected Works, p. 83.

17. See, for example, Selected Works, p. 79.

18. Translated in Modern French Theatre: the Avant-Carde, Dada, and Surrealism, ed. Benedikt, Michael and Wellwarth, George E. (New York: Dutton, 1966), p. 56–91Google Scholar. Further references to this volume, as MFT, will be given in the text.

19. Quoted in Esslin, Martin, The Theatre of the Absurd, third ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), p. 362.Google Scholar

20. Béhar, Henri, Etude sur le théâtre dada et surréaliste (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), p. 51Google Scholar. The myth of the androgyne also exercised an attraction for the later Surrealists. See, for example, Breton, André, Manifestoes of Surrealism [sic], trans. Seaver, Richard and Lane, Helen R. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), p. 301–2Google Scholar: ‘it is essential … to undertake the reconstruction of the primordial Androgyne that all traditions tell us of…’. See Gauthier, Xavière, Surréalisme et sexualité (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), p. 72 and 79Google Scholar, on the narcissistic and anti-Oedipal implications of this myth for the Surrealists.

21. See, for example, Apollinaire on Art: Essays and Revieius 1902–1918, ed. Breunig, Leroy C., trans. Suleiman, Susan (New York: Viking), p. 265Google Scholar: ‘Simultaneity is life itself, and in whatever order the elements of a work succeed each other, it leads to an ineluctable end, which is death; but the creator knows only eternity.’

22. ‘The Unconscious’ (1915), in Freud, Sigmund, On Metapsychology, Penguin Freud Library, Vol. 11 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985), p. 190.Google Scholar

23. For Albert-Birot's involvement with the Mamelles project, see, for example, Melzer, Annabelle Henkin, Latest Rage the Big Drum: Dada and Surrealist Performance (Ann Arbor: UMI Press, 1980), p. 125–8.Google Scholar

24. Quoted in Béhar, Etude, p. 55.

25. See Fowlie, Wallace, Dionysus in Paris: a Guide to Contemporary French Theater (New York: Meridian Books, 1960), p. 16.Google Scholar

26. Preface to ‘Le Boeuf sur le toit, or The Nothing-Doing Bar’, trans. Nes, Nancy E., Drama Review, XVI, No. 3 (09 1972), p. 34.Google Scholar

27. In Motherwell, Robert, ed., The Dada Painters and Poets: an Anthology (Cambridge; London: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 78Google Scholar. Melzer, op. cit., p. 78, n. 4, observes that ‘Tzara only discovered Freud after having joined André Breton in Paris’.

28. Tzara, , Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries (London: John Calder, 1977), p. 90.Google Scholar

29. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Hurley, Robert et al. (London: Athlone Press, 1984), p. 24.Google Scholar

30. Seven Dada Manifestos, p. 109.

31. See Tzara, Dada Manifesto 1918, in Motherwell, op. cit., p. 81: ‘Every product of disgust capable of becoming a negation of the family is Dada…’.Sheppard, Richard, in ‘Dada and Expressionism’, Publications of the English Goethe Society, XLIX (1979), p. 54Google Scholar, observes that here ‘The father-figure [of early Expressionism] is no longer needed as a detested support within the flux of Nature, since the flux itself is found to be obscurely patterned, reliable, and liberating.’ It might be noted parenthetically that neither Tzara nor Breton was slow to dispute the ‘paternity’ of Dada.

32. See Tzara, ‘Zurich Chronicle’, in Motherwell, op. cit., p. 238.

33. Sanouillet, Michel, Dada à Paris (Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1965), p. 167Google Scholar. This performance, says Sanouillet, ‘initiated the reign of the actor-as-object’.

34. Tzara, , ‘Memoirs of Dadaism’, in Wilson, Edmund, Axel's Castle (New York: Fontana, 1979), p. 242Google Scholar. The text of the play is appended to Corvin, Michel, ‘Le Théâtre Dada existe-t-il?’, Revue d'Histoire du Théâtre (1971), p. 288–93Google Scholar. Further references will be given in the text.

35. Sanouillet, p. 167.

36. His Poèmes nègres had appeared in the magazine Dada in 1917.

37. Seven Dada Manifestos, p. 35.

38. Quoted in Corvin, op. cit., p. 223.

39. See Corvin, op. cit., p. 257.

40. Translated in Seven Manifestos, p. 2 (translation modified).

41. On other dualistic aspects of Expressionism, see Sheppard, ‘Dada and Expressionism’, p. 56–7.

42. See Blachère, Jean-Claude, Le Modèle nègre: aspects littéraires du mythe primitiviste an XXme siècle chez Apollinaire, Cendrars, et Tzara (Dakar: Nouvelles Editions Africaines, 1981), p. 155.Google Scholar

43. For the association of language with materiality and excrement, see, for example, Seven Dada Manifestos, p. 1: ‘we want to shit in different colours’, etc. Derrida, Jacques, in Writing and Differance, trans. Bass, Alan (London: Routledge, 1981), p. 182–3Google Scholar, examines the more complex development of the theme in Artaud's writings.

44. Durand, Régis, ‘The Disposition of the Voice’, in Benamou, Michel and Caramello, Charles, eds., Performance in Postmodern Culture (Milwaukee: Center for Twentieth Century Studies, 1977), p. 101Google Scholar. See also Erickson, John D., Dada: Performance, Poetry, and Art (Boston: Twayne, 1984), p. 65–7.Google Scholar

45. Corvin, op. cit., p. 261.

46. See, for example, Zinder, David G., The Surrealist Connection: an Approach to a Surrealist Aesthetic of Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1980), p. 8Google Scholar, and Matthews, J. H., Theatre in Dada and Surrealism (Syracuse University Press, 1974), p. 278.Google Scholar

47. Erickson, op. cit., p. 75; Corvin, op. cit., p. 259.

48. Erickson, op. cit., p. 131, n. 40, suggests a connection to the lyre à gaz, a gaslight fitting.

49. Corvin, op. cit., p. 282.

50. Interview transcribed in Melzer, op. cit., p. 183.

51. Barthes, Roland, S/Z: an Essay, trans. Richard, Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), p. 75.Google Scholar

52. Blanchot, Maurice, ‘The Narrative Voice or the Impersonal “He”’, trans. Rabinovitch, Sacha, in The Siren's Song: Selected Essays by Maurice Blanchot, ed. Josipovici, Gabriel (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982), p. 219.Google Scholar

53. Quoted in Melzer, op. cit., p. 183.

54. Manifestoes of Surrealism, p. 34.

55. Ibid., p. 35. Tzara had already rejected ‘dialectics’: see, for example,Seven Dada Manifestos, p. 9.

56. Manifestoes of Surrealism, p. 158.

57. Letter to Breton, André (1937), in Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings, trans. Weaver, Helen, ed. Sontag, Susan (Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), p. 406.Google Scholar

58. Manifestoes of Surrealism, p. 300. Breton is recalling the phase of automatic writing.

59. Quesnoy, Pierre-F., Littérature et Cinéma (Paris: Le Rouge et Le Noir, 1928), p. 29.Google Scholar

60. See Alquié, Ferdinand, The Philosophy of Surrealism, trans. Waldrop, Bernard (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965), p. 52–3.Google Scholar

61. In Motherwell, op. cit., p. 308.

62. Michael Benedikt, ‘Introduction’ to Modern French Theatre, p. xix.

63. Nadja, trans. Howard, Richard (New York: Grove Press, 1960), p. 40Google Scholar. This comment, however, precedes Breton's extended account of Palau's play Les Détraquées. The account omits the ending of the play, thereby emphasizing its enigmatic ‘centre’. Suleiman, Susan Rubin, in Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Carde (Cambridge; London: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 103Google Scholar, connects this ‘de-narrativizing’ of the play to Breton's voyeuristic intent (the play ‘has to remain two-dimensional, lacking psychological motivation and depth’).

64. Writing and Differance, p. 249.

65. For Vitrac's critical response to Pirandello's play, see Béhar, Henri, Roger Vitrac: un réprouvé du surréalisme (Paris: A. G. Nizet, 1966), p. 76–7.Google Scholar

66. ‘The Secrets of Love by Roger Vitrac’, trans. Corti, Victor, in Antonin Artaud: Collected Works, Vol. 2 (London: Calderand Boyars, 1971), p. 137.Google Scholar

67. ‘The Alfred Jarry Theatre and Public Hostility’, in Collected Works, Vol. 2, p. 33 (my emphasis).

68. Collected Works, Vol. 2, p. 137.

69. Béhar, Roger Vitrac, p. 264.

70. Quoted in Mathews, op. cit., p. 128.

71. Victor, ou Les Enfants ait pouvoir, in Vitrac, Roger, Théâtre, Vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1946), p. 43.Google Scholar

72. See Salacrou, Armand, ‘Preface’ to La Boule de Verre, in his Théâtre, two vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), Vol. I, p. 226.Google Scholar

73. ‘A Propos de Cenci’, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard), V, p. 309 (my emphases).

74. ‘The Theater and its Double’, in Selected Writings, p. 236.

75. Quoted in Derrida, Jacques, ‘Forcener le subjectile’, in Thévenin, Paule and Derrida, Jacques, eds., Antonin Artaud: dessins et portraits (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), p. 63.Google Scholar

76. ‘Mise en Scène and Metaphysics’, Selected Writings, p. 228 (further references to this essay will be given in the text).

77. Letter to Paulhan, Jean (1932), Selected Writings, p. 285Google Scholar; Oeuvres complètes, V, 74. The italicized phrase is Artaud's correction to the published version of the essay.

78. Letter to Manson, Anne (1937), Selected Writings, p. 404.Google Scholar

79. ‘The Theater and Its Double’, Selected Writings, p. 220.

80. Letter to Gide, André (1935), Selected Writings, p. 341.Google Scholar

81. ‘Ce que sera la tragédie Les Cenci aux FoliesWagram’, Oeuvres Complétes, V, p. 48.

82. ‘Les Cenci’, Oeuvres Completes, V, p. 45.

83. Writing and Differance, p. 249.