Show Trials and Collapsing Discourse at the Birth of Surrealism
“Far be it from me, even today, to set myself up as judge.”
ANDRÉ BRETON
“For me, the life of Barrès represents the history of France”
TRISTAN TZARA
I. The Rhetoric of the Avant-Gardes
While cultural historians may disagree about where the modernist period begins and ends, there is widespread consensus that, across the spectrum of the arts, the European modernist period is marked by a self-conscious exploration of the forms of artistic expression. If this exploration is the source of modernism’s most significant innovations, so too is it a signal of the pervasive sense of exhaustion that dominates the period—a sense that places innovation not as an end in itself but as an often desperate attempt to salvage extant cultural meanings from forms that seem no longer capable of sustaining them. In this respect, the staging of Western modernism was frequently tied to a fundamental search for untapped and fresh venues of theatrical expression, and staging modernism was thus consistently intertwined with a basic rethinking of the very language that constituted the stage. The serious interest that experimental artists developed in athleticism, and in circus, cabaret, and variety shows during the early decades of the twentieth century, for example, was as much a part of the rethinking of the language of the stage as it was an indication of a sense that the tropes of bourgeois theatre had become moribund, clichéd and vacuous, and that consequently they were no longer capable of serving as purveyors of truth—regardless of whether that truth was metaphysical, aesthetic, or political in nature, and regardless of whether, as a category, “truth” itself was ultimately suspect.
Great sources of theatrical revitalization emerged from the interest that experimental artists showed in these popular cultural venues, thus facilitating a kind of double-dipping that not only capitalized on what Christopher Innes has called “the theatre’s intrinsic connection to physical reality and social existence,”1 but that also moved performance toward the teeming immediacy of the social masses. But even here the staging of Western modernism was more than merely an exercise of theater thinking about itself. Characterized though modernism’s experimental stages may have been by the ideological guise of a forward-looking, self-reflective, and radical exploration of new modes of performance, those innovative explorations were almost always haunted by a conservative shadow. They were, in short, modernist precisely because they were engaged in a seemingly last-ditch effort to recover values that the exhausted structures of Western culture put at risk. Whether those values actually existed beneath, above, or somehow beyond the languishing wasteland of their current forms of expression was not the issue. The historical European avant-gardes staged modernism by appropriating unconventional theatrical venues in an attempt to secure values that the governing assumptions of the avant-gardes’ own rhetoric took for granted and perpetuated.
Generally speaking, these assumptions were more visible than the underlying contradictions that sustained them. But there are particular moments in which circumstances exposed the inner workings of the avant-gardes’ gestures at recovery and thereby offered a glimpse at contradictions buried beneath their powerful, forward-looking discourse. Indeed, such moments reveal a contradictory dynamic that, I want to suggest, was a defining—albeit sorely under-theorized—trope of the early twentieth-century, European and performative avant-gardes. The Paris staging of The Trial and Sentencing of Maurice Barrès by Dada2 at the Salle des Sociétés Savantes in May of 1921 arguably initiated such a moment. Appropriating as it did the legal structures of the courtroom in a gesture aimed at securing political and cultural values from a perceived corruption and demise, the Barrès Trial falls well within the parameters of the modernist stage, and it served as the point of departure for the fleeting infatuation with legal constructs that swept the Parisian avant-gardes in the early 1920s. This infatuation ran its course over the next two years, beginning with the Barrès Trial, continuing with the failed Congress of Paris and “the trial” of André Breton at the Closerie des Lilas, and culminating with a series of actual lawsuits that followed the production of Tristan Tzara’s Soirée du Coeur à barbe. Indeed, The Trial and Sentencing of Maurice Barrès by Dada marked the beginning of a circuitous chain of events that, rather than propelling the vanguards forward, served as the catalyst for a telling implosion of the avant-gardes’ rhetoric beneath the weight of contradictions they could no longer mask.
In the historical accounts of The Trial and other accounts of the events surrounding it, those contradictions tend to be overshadowed by a fascination with the bitter rivalry between Breton and Tzara that by 1921 had spilled over into the public sphere. In fact, by May of that year, the rivalry between Breton and Tzara was so pronounced that many critics cite The Trial as a breaking point between Paris Dada and an emerging Surrealist movement, and rightly, I think, critics argue that at one level The Trial was little more than a ruse for Breton to put Dada, and hence Tzara, on trial, and ultimately to put the antics of both to rest once and for all. But inasmuch as The Trial functioned as a ploy for Breton to break with Tzara and Dada, the mechanisms of that ploy were torn between the contradictory pull of two competing rhetorical strategies. The Trial was, I want to suggest, a project seeking to disguise a Janus face, looking backward and forward simultaneously in gestures that performed seemingly radical critiques of authority, while subtly and ironically re-inscribing it. On the one hand, The Trial was openly committed to a backward-glancing project of recovery and preservation, i.e., to a project of rescuing youthful, revolutionary ideas from the aging, increasingly reactionary, and nationalistic hands of the writer Maurice Barrès. In this respect, The Trial’s instigators singled out Barrès primarily as an example through which to illustrate a more general project of salvaging what they perceived to be valuable cultural and political ideals from forms or messengers deemed no longer capable of carrying out their mission.
On the other hand, The Trial was deeply embedded in the forward-looking, rectilinear narrative logic of the avant-gardes, i.e., in the ostensible project of breaking with tradition and heralding in the new. Yet inasmuch as this logic was directed against Tzara and Paris Dada, The Trial did little more than appropriate the vanguards’ anti-traditional rhetoric, employing it to justify a petty struggle within the ranks of the avant-gardes themselves. Rather than marking a grand rupture with the past, that struggle involved a rhetorical gesture from Breton that strategically placed notions of the past and tradition in much closer proximity, implying that in the short time since Tzara’s much-anticipated arrival in Paris after leaving Zurich in late 1919, Dada’s radical iconoclastic postures were already exhausted and old hat.
One measure of the profoundly seductive lure of that rhetorical gesture can be found in the resonance it has enjoyed among cultural critics and historians. A good explanation for that resonance is evident in Matthew Witkovsky’s recent characterization of the logic Breton employed in orchestrating The Trial:
The trial was [ . . . ] an ambitious attempt to isolate an issue that could potentially affect the avant-garde much more than rearguard turncoats such as Maurice Barrès. Having helped to steer Dada in Paris toward a street-level confrontation with society and aesthetic convention, Breton felt moved to ask whether this engagement was genuine or sustainable. What if one passed from revolutionary opposition to the forces of reaction, abandoning a posture that had no inherent constancy or force of impact in the world? What if one kept a facade of avant-gardism while changing one’s message, simply to retain an audience that was at bottom solidly nationalistic and bourgeois?3
Breton’s articulated fear of moving from revolutionary to reactionary sentiment, and his fear of having one’s message devolve into a mere “facade of avant-gardism” seem like legitimate concerns. But situated as they are within the temporal framework of such questions about whether a particular form can sustain, or will ultimately lose, its access to some vague presumption of authenticity (or genuineness), these same fears situate Breton’s break with Dada within the linear logic of a highly suspect modernist aesthetic. Simply put, this logic assumes a point at which “engagement was genuine” prior to its demise. It assumes a point of authenticity in which the forward-looking discourse of the avant-gardes is not always already a facade. It assumes a point at which the representational tropes of the avant-gardes actually connect in some essential way with their referents, rather than connecting and sustaining one another within a self-perpetuating economy of signs. In short, it assumes that the discourse of the avant-gardes actually represents rather than produces meaning. As profoundly seductive as this logic initially may be (and Witkovsky distills it into a powerfully intoxicating form), the specter of a lost authenticity is a potent call to arms that is almost always a ruse. It promises to reinstate not only what it cannot deliver, but a state that never existed in the first place. Indeed, this promise is simultaneously both the operative dynamic of the avant-gardes themselves and their ever-present facade. They are one and the same. With regard to the avant-gardes, there is nothing more genuine—so to speak—than the facade itself.
Understanding the avant-gardes pivots on a willingness to crack open the fissures in the facade in order to examine what it protects and accommodates. What, in this regard, is most amazing about Breton’s decision to abandon Dada in order to avoid “a facade of avant-gardism” is that this decision masked a fundamental contradiction. Breton’s clamorous admonishments to abandon Dada in order to remain “genuine” and in order not to succumb to the forces of reaction ultimately facilitated the embrace of a discourse that—far from being a step forward and away from reactionary sentiments—placed him, as we shall see, squarely within the parameters of sentiments that encouraged nationalistic and bourgeois proclivities. The significance of this contradiction, I want to suggest, is its revelation that behind the rhetorical facade the struggle between Breton and Tzara was, in fact, less about a genuine and sustainable vanguard than it was about dominance and authority. Despite pretensions to the contrary, the struggle was more about who would control the discourse of the avant-gardes as a valuable cultural commodity than it was about the illusory task of maintaining that discourse as an objective system of seemingly authentic representation. It was about usurping the means of representation, rather than about who was actually positioned at the front line of the vanguard, because “the front line” proved to be nothing more than a rhetorical construct, a product of the avant-gardes’ own discourse.
The influence of this construct has been profound, for it has largely dictated the reception that The Trial has enjoyed among cultural critics and historians. While this experimental bit of theatre certainly marked the factious divisions among the Parisian vanguards (and in particular the rift between Tzara and Breton), the tendency to view The Trial as a milestone in a forward evolution from Dada to Surrealism follows a narrative that Breton himself had a heavy and biased hand in constructing, and it overshadows some fundamental lessons that the Barrès Trial and its aftermath offer about the mechanisms of the avant-gardes more generally. Above all, the contradictory trajectories of The Trial itself (its forward and backward gestures), as well as the internecine struggles within the ranks of the avant-gardes that provided a context for the Barrès Trial, expose the ease with which the discourse of the early European avant-gardes lent itself to appropriation and manipulation. There is no small irony in this moment of exposure, especially given the acute sense of disillusionment with cultural expressions that swept the European avant-gardes after those expressions had been appropriated to motivate the senseless carnage of the First World War (captured best, perhaps, in the frequently-cited grotesque image of German soldiers going off to the front with works by Goethe in one hand and a rifle in the other). But the lesson here is that both cultural and anti-cultural expressions possess nothing inherent that counteracts or resists manipulation or appropriation in the public sphere.
Nowhere is that susceptibility to manipulation more evident than in the political aesthetic formula that heralds the advent of the new by strategically defining the old and defunct, and that positions certain artists at the vanguard through a calculated, and at times biased, delineation of what constitutes the front lines of experimentation, innovation, and progress. While there is nothing inherently pernicious about such ideological jockeying, neither is there anything particularly novel in Breton’s use of The Trial as a tool for purging the ranks of the vanguard according to the dictates of his own formulated orthodoxy for the cutting edge. All of us seek to define the terms of the debates in which we have something at stake, and Breton was no exception, particularly with regard to the personal ambitions that motivated his attempts to cast Dada as defunct and to use the Barrès Trial as a mechanism for casting himself both as the leading man and as Dada’s clear successor in an always forward-looking history of “the avant-garde.” What concerns me here, however, has less to do with Breton’s heavy-handed definition of the old and new vanguards than it does with the tendency of historians to uncritically absorb such calculated jockeying into their own discourse. The resulting uniform and linear notion of the history of avant-garde performance has since become an enduring myth. Indeed, I would suggest that we will only really begin to understand the avant-gardes when we recognize that concepts like “the cutting edge,” “front guard,” “rear guard” and “front lines” are merely metaphors generated by the rhetoric and ideology of the avant-gardes themselves.
Embedded in the very notion of “a vanguard,” this highly mystified baton-passing conception of the history of the avant-gardes has obscured recognition of a crucial dynamic that belies both the avant-gardes’ front-line pretensions and their often celebrated breaks with the past. Like the Janus-faced currents of The Trial, that dynamic is grounded in cultural contradiction, and despite the anti-authoritarian sentiments associated with the avant-gardes, their primary modes of expression center on notions of authority and control. The forward movement of which they speak is expansionist as much as it is innovative, and is propelled by an ideological performative that cloaks appropriation, usurpation, and recycling in the guise of originality.
Much of this book coalesces around the argument that the current of this dynamic runs though virtually all of the histories of the numerous Western avant-gardes that the twentieth century produced, particularly the European and American avant-gardes. But amid those histories we can find various moments where particular historical circumstances provide us with a fleeting glance at this dynamic laid bare. The rivalry in the early 1920s between Tzara and Breton, which ultimately splintered the Parisian avant-gardes into Dada and Surrealist camps, offers precisely such a moment. Beneath the apparent baton passing from Dada to Surrealism that historians have constructed around the rivalry between Tzara and Breton lies not a moment of linear progress, but of significant implosion—a moment that has yet to be theorized, particularly with regard to the way in which, amid Breton’s unsuccessful attempts to bury Dada, that implosion exposes not merely a self-perpetuating façade, but also an alarming susceptibility of the discourse of the avant-gardes to appropriation. That susceptibility is not only evident in Breton’s unsuccessful attempt to relegate Dada to the past in The Trial, but became even more pronounced in his subsequent effort to cast Dada aside while trying to convene what he called the Congress of Paris. Ironically enough, these two efforts were matched by what amounted to an inversion of their beginning in a raucous, impromptu, and symbolic trial of Breton at the well-known Parisian café, the Closerie des Lilas, and then finally, in the actual court filings that followed Tzara’s Soirée du Coeur à barbe a year later. Those events are the focus of this chapter.
II. Prosecuting Dada at The Trial of Maurice Barrès
Coming on the heels of a series of Dada provocations, The Trial and Sentencing of Maurice Barrès by Dada marked a significant shift in tone in the activities of the Paris vanguards of the early 1920s. The Barrès Trial was largely the brainchild of André Breton and Louis Aragon, while Tristan Tzara, who had spearheaded many of the Dada events in Paris up to that point, was a reluctant participant. Much to the audience’s bewilderment, The Trial was a mostly solemn affair and did not traffic in the wild irreverence that Parisians had come to expect from Dada events. Based upon a relatively simple conceit, The Trial was a staged show trial of the French nationalist writer Maurice Barrès. Ostensibly, the aim of this trial was to hold the now arch-conservative Barrès accountable for having abandoned the revolutionary ideas he espoused in his early writings. But the Barrès Trial had two other related objectives. The most important was an argument by analogy that sought to associate Dada and Tzara with Barrès’s shift from radical to reactionary, and to use this analogy to relegate Dada and its adherents to the past, thereby paving the way for what ultimately became Surrealism. From its very inception, the Barrès Trial was thus constructed in contradiction: adopting the role of defender of Barrès’s early revolutionary sentiments, it looked backwards in order to look forward. By implication, it did the same with regard to Dada, complimenting the Janus backward/forward glance with a rhetorical sleight of hand that equated Barrès’s conscious rejection of his revolutionary beginnings with what Breton tacitly suggested was Dada’s exhaustion of its revolutionary potential. By implication, conscious rejection and exhaustion of form were folded into a single idea. The question of whether Dada actually had exhausted itself was taken for granted and never addressed.
With its constructed analogy between Barrès and Dada, The Trial allowed Breton to position himself as defender of Barrès’s earlier revolutionary sentiments. By implication, though never explicitly stated, he was also positioned as the defender of what amounted to an essence of Dada that the movement’s current forms presumably could no longer sustain. This product of a modernist aesthetic set up a second level of contradiction within the Barrès Trial. The backward/forward glance heralded the new, ironically enough, as the defender of something that did not change. It was a peculiar bit of logic: if the new was thus not “the eternal,” at the very least it was, in a manner of speaking, a return to an unchanging “sameness.” Arguably, framing the entire proceedings as a trial gestured toward alleviating the strain of these contradictions, lending the argument by analogy an air of legitimacy, by framing it in a legal discourse whose chief governing assumptions included the notions of unbiased authority and objective truth.
Having appointed himself as president of the tribunal, Breton presided over The Trial with all the solemnity and detachment befitting the office of an actual tribunal president—a president who not only expected a guilty verdict against Barrès but who also expected to sanction the accused with the death penalty (even though that sanction would be carried out in name only). The symbolism here was hard to mistake: seeking a capital sanction against Barrès was, by extension, symbolically calling for the death of an avant-garde that stood in much closer proximity as a rival, and that stood in the way of what Breton believed to be the next wave of vanguard artists. This too had its own peculiar twist of logic, since it is not entirely clear why calling for the death of an avant-garde was necessary if it was already moribund and exhausted as a form. But apparently, Breton considered Dada to be a significant obstacle to the next wave because the unflattering analogy he drew between Barrès and Dada’s adherents was both insulting and vicious. A champion of the right, Barrès was a personification of pretty much all of what the leftist followers of the Parisian vanguard opposed. He was an easy target, and associating him with Dada bordered on libel.
An immensely successful literary figure, who leading up to the outbreak of the First World War had abandoned his early liberal convictions and become an influential arch-conservative, Barrès today has the infamous notoriety of having been a genuine proto-fascist. He openly described himself in the twenties as a “national socialist,” and was “rabidly anti-Semitic.”4 He embraced a brand of patriotism that was nothing short of belligerent, saber-rattling chauvinism. Yet as President of the League of Patriots, and as a respectable bourgeois, Barrès also had a large following, and many of his supporters showed up at the trial. Indeed, the announced trial completely filled the Salle des Sociétés Savantes. Yet there was one unmistakable absence: the defendant. Barrès was present at the trial in name only. Despite having “been summoned to appear at his ‘trial’”—a trial incidentally that had no legal authority whatsoever—Barrès left Paris suddenly at the time of the trial and under pretenses questionable enough that Breton and his circle could boast that “they were responsible”5 for his cowardly absence.
In his stead, Barrès was represented by a storefront mannequin that was literally vacuous and hollow, and thus was an ideal personification of established forms no longer capable of sustaining vital cultural meaning. Mannequins had often found their way into Dada events, suggesting the vacuity of all sorts of social institutions. The most famous example, perhaps, was John Heartfield and Rudolf Schlichter’s Preussischer Erzengel (Prussian Archangel), the mannequin with a pig’s head, which was dressed in a WWI German officer’s uniform and hung from the ceiling at the First International Dada Fair in Berlin in June 1920. Given The Trial’s argument by analogy, however, this time things were different. The association of Dada with Barrès and hence with his mannequin surrogate suggested that Dada itself was empty. Indeed, the suggestion, ironically enough, marked a significant reversal. It was not the anti-authoritarianism of the avant-gardes that indicted social institutions (like the military), but rather the appropriated structures of the judicial system that indicted an avant-garde. At the time, this reversal went largely unnoticed—except perhaps by Tzara himself. But considered in retrospect, it was a portent of what would become Breton’s repeated appropriation of conservative and even reactionary forms in his efforts to displace Dada and position himself at the head of the Parisian vanguards. It was thus the first clear omen of how susceptible the discourse or facade of avant-gardism was to appropriation. It was also the first indication of the increasingly reactionary undercurrents that would consume Breton’s efforts to position himself at the forefront of the Parisian vanguard. In this respect, the nationalistic and arch-conservative profile of Barrès functioned as a kind of smokescreen that distracted from the reactionary undercurrents to Breton’s own actions.
The vacuous image of the mannequin contrasted sharply with the unexpectedly grim and sober tribunal, which included a judge, two assistant judges, the prosecution, and two counsels for the defense—all of whom appeared in “white smocks and clerical caps (red for the defense and black for the prosecution)”6 and all of whom, following Breton’s lead as judge, treated the proceedings with the utmost seriousness. The tribunal was accompanied by “a phalanx of witnesses” who testified “to the public danger of the accused.”7 Among their ranks Benjamin Péret provoked outrage among Barrès’s supporters in the audience when he “appeared as the Unknown Soldier dressed in a German uniform”8 and testified in German. Aside from that provocation, which was a little too dark to be funny, Tzara stood as the lone sardonic voice in an otherwise somber evening. He mounted a spirited, if wildly unconventional, defense against the analogy that Breton sought to establish. Indeed, he challenged the entire proceedings.
In contrast to the other witnesses, Tzara ridiculed the process and its participants, hurling insults and invective with grand equity in all directions. Much to the chagrin of Breton, Tzara did not stop at denouncing Barrès, whom he described as “the biggest pig” and the most “antipathetic” piece of “rabble [produced] in Europe since Napoleon.” He followed this denunciation by appealing to Breton directly: “You will agree with me, Sir, that we are all nothing but a pack of fools and that consequently the little differences—bigger fools or smaller fools, make no difference.”9 To the delight of the audience, Tzara then suggested that he might be a little less of a “bastard”10 than all of the rest, and when—according to some accounts—Breton asked, exasperated, whether “there was anyone whom he respected,” Tzara replied, “Well, I myself am really a charming fellow.”11 More to the point, Tzara denounced the entire process. He told everyone to “shit” on the defense, and categorically stated that he had “absolutely no confidence in justice, even if that justice is enacted by Dada.”12 He proved impossible to pin down to serious answers, and joking through the rest of the questions, he ended his testimony with a song that admonished: “Eat chocolate / Wash your brain / dada / dada / Drink water.” After having made his way through the song’s three stanzas, Tzara sang the chorus one final time. Altering the final line, he told everyone to “Eat beef,” and then exited the stage with aplomb. Indeed, he marched entirely out of the theatre and into the streets, slamming the door behind him and stealing the show.
In his openly sarcastic resistance to the seriousness with which the trial progressed, Tzara (rivaled only by the vacuous dummy himself) may have been the lone person living up to the expectations of the audience who “knew Dada by reputation” and whose boisterous presence lent a certain redundancy to the banner that Péret had hung above the stage. The banner read, “No one is supposed to be unaware of Dada.”13 Yet in direct contrast to Tzara’s antics and to audience expectation, Breton, never departing from his self-appointed role as president of the tribunal, solemnly presented those on the stage and those in the audience with an eight-count indictment of Barrès. The result of this indictment came only as a partial surprise. As was to be expected, following the unflattering testimony of numerous witnesses, Barrès was ultimately convicted. He was sentenced in absentia to twenty years hard labor—in spite of the fact that both the presiding judge (André Breton) and the “counsel for the defense” (Louis Aragon) had called for the death of the defendant.14 Given the parallels that Breton had sought to establish between Barrès and Dada, there was, in fact, a certain consistency in this sentence. The Trial had hardly procured the death of Dada either. After all, when Tzara tired of the pretentiousness, he simply walked out the door.
What Tzara left behind was an event that, under the guise of breaking with the past and heralding the new, embraced a discourse grounded in tradition and precedent. Appropriating the discourse of the court in order to move the Parisian vanguards forward was once again to don the Janus face, and it skirted dangerously close to a path that ironically ran parallel to the one for which Barrès was now on trial. The charges against Barrès were vaguely stated as “crimes against the security of the mind” and Breton and Aragon in particular sought to prosecute Barrès for having implicitly renounced, in his shift to the far right, the revolutionary power that the young Surrealists attached to earlier works like Un Homme libre (A Free Man) and L’Ennemi des lois (The Enemy of Laws). Although Breton later claimed that his primary desire for the trial was “to determine the extent to which a man could be held accountable if his will to power led him to champion conformist values that diametrically opposed the ideas of his youth,”15 the charges themselves are telling. Vague though they may have been, they implicitly envision a world in which once-existent values are no longer secure—and in which, as Marx and Engels famously stated, “all that is solid melts into air” and “all that is holy is profaned.”16 In this context, the discourse of the court had a primarily conservative function. Allied here with a notion of “security,” it attempted rhetorically to enforce conformity to values situated in the past, rather than articulating new values that would direct the present toward the future. Beneath the facade of avant-gardism, The Trial was thus embedded in a discourse that cultivated conformity and that did so under the aura of establishing, indeed to securing, objective truth and order.
Whether this Trial was avant-garde or Dada in anything other than name is debatable. Whether the legal discourse of the court, upon which Breton relied, actually lived up to its mandate and delivered objective truth, order, and security is debatable as well—and not just because it was stripped of its state-sanctioned context. Indeed, with regard to the Parisian vanguards, this latter question, as we will see, would become increasingly debatable in the months that followed the event. But at a more immediate level, both of these questions address core issues about The Trial itself. The charges that Breton read against Barrès at The Trial directed similar questions at Barrès and ultimately at Dada. Among the laundry list of charges against Barrès, the central charge was that he had “failed to live up to his mandate.”17 In its most concise articulation, this was precisely the charge that Breton wanted to extend to Dada as well. But inasmuch as that charge referred to Barrès’s gravitation toward the more conservative institutional structures of French society, the charge was more applicable to the organizers of The Trial than it was to Tzara or to Dada more generally.
When all was said and done, and The Trial was concluded, Breton was left in the peculiar situation of having appropriated two opposing discourses for the single purpose of redirecting the Parisian avant-gardes on a course where he stood at the helm. Oddly enough, his appropriation of the discourse of the court was always already a facade, for without the authority of the state behind it, the legal pretensions of the Barrès Trial amounted to hollow symbolism. The case against Barrès was just so much talk, and the case against Dada was tenuous at best. Along the way, however, Breton had proven something else: the discourse of the avant-gardes not only lent itself to appropriation, but could also provide the semblance of radicalism for gestures that, in fact, embraced conformist values. Though this was not the case he made against Tzara, it ended up being the case that Breton’s case against Tzara finally made against Breton. Susceptibility to appropriations was not limited, of course, to the avant-gardes, and perhaps that is why it is still possible to hear Tzara slamming the door on the proceedings that he had denounced. If Tzara had no faith in justice, even Dada justice, it is not only Breton who proved in the years to come that he had a little too much faith in it, purging the ranks of the Surrealists time and again of artists whose heterodoxies might suggest if not the exhaustion of Surrealism then an unwelcome competition and rivalry. History is peppered with countless examples where the legal structures of the court, even when backed by the state, have not lived up to the court’s mandate.
III. Congressional Recess and Impromptu Café Courts: The Trial of André Breton at the Closerie des Lilas
Tzara’s exit from the theater into the streets and the open spaces of the public sphere was less a retreat than it was a pivotal provocation aimed, this time, at a very new target. Amid the legendary irreverent antics of Paris Dada, it is easy to miss the rather seismic shift in tactics that accompanied Tzara’s departure from the Salle des Sociétés Savantes, a shift from épater les bourgeois to épater les avant-gardes. Indeed, as a provocation, Tzara’s exit into the streets was as much a signature of the avant-gardes as it was a mark of the new divisions among their Parisian ranks. Moreover, that exit set the stage for the second act in the dramatic rivalry that had only begun to unfold at The Trial. For if no one else recognized the shift in tactics, André Breton certainly did. The close of The Trial, while leading to a vacuous but nonetheless guilty verdict against Barrès, had left Breton empty handed. At the sentencing not only did the tribunal inexplicably reject the death penalty in favor of a lesser sentence of twenty years of hard labor for Barrès—which, given the tribunal’s lack of real authority, made no more sense than a death penalty—but, more importantly, insofar as the death of Dada had been the actual target of the evening’s pretentious and somber events, Dada had escaped scot-free. It was very much alive in the streets, having dodged the rhetorical cutting edge of a self-appointed vanguard executioner’s guillotine.
In fact, for Tzara, the streets proved to be nothing short of a level playing field in which his uncompromising Dadaist stance set in motion what may very well have been the European avant-gardes’ first instance of self-reflective deconstruction. Outside of the confines of the Salle des Sociétés Savantes, Tzara not only escaped Breton’s staged attempt to associate him with the likes of a right-wing bellicose nationalist like Barrès. The escalating rivalry that emerged between Tzara and Breton also radically destabilized the vanguard/rearguard binary that had been the linchpin of Breton’s prosecutorial logic. That same logic undergirded the new set of tactics that Breton adopted in the months following The Trial. For if Dada proved to be too elusive to prosecute, then Breton sought instead to symbolically legislate the movement into relative irrelevance, heralding in the new vanguard by convening what he called the Congress of Paris. As Mark Polizzotti has noted, Breton’s planning of the Congress marked a more decisive and “conscious break” with his Dada affiliations than The Trial itself.18
While The Trial amounted to an attempt to usurp the reins of an event orchestrated under the auspices of Dada, the Congress of Paris, by contrast, was conceptualized as an event that would subsume Dada and every other contemporary movement or “ism” beneath a larger, forward-looking paradigm. So “on January 3, 1922, a note in [the journal] Comoedia announced an ‘International Congress for the Determination and Defense of the Modern Spirit,’ or ‘Congress of Paris,’ scheduled for late March,”19 and thus with no intentional irony in sight, Breton undertook plans for a Congress that un-apologetically positioned himself at the vanguard of the vanguards. There, “by grouping Dada with all the other ‘isms’ under study, he hoped both to explore new territory and to consign Dada—and Tzara—to the intellectual junkyard once and for all.”20
Although the announcement cited a long list of diversely inclined artists, groups, and movements, the Congress of Paris did not seek to unify them under a single reductive idea—at least ostensibly. The Congress organizers, according to Breton, had no intention of working “to create a new intellectual family and to tighten the bonds that many will judge illusory.”21 The goal of the Congress was not to plot a common direction forward; it was to identify what needed to be left behind. Under the leadership of Breton, the promoters of the Congress thus sought “to reactivate avant-garde solidarity against what the promoters [ . . . vaguely] designated as the ‘guardians of order’ and their ‘so-called return to tradition.’”22 It was a grandiose scheme. But there were two sides to these efforts to reactivate avant-garde solidarity. At one level, these efforts signified that the Congress’s objective was nothing more than to build a coalition united only in its forward-thinking opposition to moribund mainstream cultural traditions. At another level, however, the “defense of the modern spirit” had a wicked undercurrent that potentially threatened any and all participants. Beyond a general opposition to mainstream traditions, the defense of the modern spirit was also conceptualized as a defense against regression, retrenchment, and backsliding among the artistic communities that would participate in the Congress—a defense, in short, against a path that presumably followed the turncoat trajectory of Maurice Barrès’s own career. This meant that over the course of the Congress, any individual, group, or movement might be singled out for supposedly having lost its edge, and for having succumbed to regressive or reactionary proclivities.
If there were reservations about the Congress’s objectives—and Tzara’s reservations were profound—they centered on a legitimate concern about giving anyone the authority to serve as arbiter for the calculated reactivation of avant-garde solidarity the promoters called for in their announcement of the Congress. As the poet Georges Hugnet was to write a decade later, “as a matter of principle, what confidence could be placed in the members of this committee, so disparate and for the most part so unfriendly to Dada?”23 Smelling a rat, Tzara refused the invitation to participate outright, writing publicly to Breton:
I consider that the present apathy resulting from the jumble of tendencies, the confusing of styles, and the substitution of groups for personalities . . . is more dangerous than reaction . . . . I therefore prefer to do nothing rather than to encourage an action that in my opinion is injurious to the search for the new, which I prize so highly, even if it takes the form of indifference.24
It is not entirely clear whether Tzara calculated his decision as an attempt to sabotage the Congress as a whole. In his classic History of Surrealism, Maurice Nadeau was later to recall that for Tzara the Congress was “a stage already transcended: ‘Dada is not modern’, he had said, it being understood that Dada repudiated a modern art as well as traditional art, and art itself.”25 Whether this repudiation was a matter of philosophical principle or a personal jab at Breton is less important than the sequence of events that it set in motion. Nadeau suggests that “Tzara’s abstention caused the collapse of Breton’s attempt” to organize the Congress.26 For Breton, Tzara’s decision, like his earlier exit from the Salle des Sociétés Savantes at The Trial, amounted to a provocation. Breton immediately responded.
Fearing, somewhat irrationally, for the security of the Congress proceedings, he took measures against potential Dadaist sabotage of the event itself, “including the ‘strict regulation of the right to speak [and allowing] police intervention in the case of willful disturbance’.”27 Somewhere amid the paranoia that motivated these precautions, Breton and his cohorts failed to recognize the irony of using police protection to reactivate avant-garde solidarity against the “guardians of order.” That irony came back to haunt Breton. Above all, these gestures arguably opened Breton to charges very similar to those that he had orchestrated against Barrès. Inasmuch as the charge of “crimes against the security of the mind” pivoted, according to Breton, on “the extent to which a man could be held accountable if his will to power led him to champion conformist values that diametrically opposed the ideas of his youth,”28 Breton’s own will to power (i.e., his pursuit of a leadership position within the Parisian vanguards) had led him in very short order directly toward the kind of authoritarian and conformist proclivities for which he had criticized Barrès—proclivities that would become even more pronounced, as we shall see, when he used the machinery of the Congress to go after Tzara in particular. Second, these gestures gave Tzara a rather stunning license, which he utilized with a profoundly effective sense of irony. For they not only opened the door for a radical inversion that led directly from The Trial and Sentencing of Maurice Barrès by Dada to what in popular parlance was called “the trial of André Breton” at La Closerie des Lilas, but they also set a precedent for Tzara to use the police to forcibly expel Breton, Desnos, and Péret when they assaulted—indeed, broke the arm of—Pierre de Massot while he was participating in Tzara’s “Coeur à barbe, or ‘the evening of the bearded heart’ on July 6, 1923 at the Théâtre Michel.”29 In fact, the destructive pandemonium at the Théâtre Michel led to formal charges, and to Tzara’s taking Eluard to a real court of law.
The initial security measures taken by Breton in preparation for the Congress were really only the beginning of his adoption of decisively rearguard strategies in his frantic efforts to “reactivate avant-garde solidarity” in the name of a new vanguard. The telling moment in these strategies was to come in a slightly veiled public attack on Tzara shortly after he had rejected Breton’s invitation to participate in the Congress. Following Tzara’s rejection of Breton’s invitation, a statement appeared on February 7, 1922, in Comoedia, which, though signed by the Congress’s governing committee, was clearly instigated by Breton. The published statement specifically “denounced the intrigues of ‘a publicity-mongering imposter . . . A person known as the promoter of a “movement” that comes from Zurich, who it is pointless to name more specifically, and who no longer corresponds to any current reality’.”30 This attack on Tzara not only confirmed Tzara’s own suspicion that the Congress was a rhetorical set-up to relegate Dada to the past, but it also situated the Congress so squarely within the most reactionary sentiments of Parisian society that Barrès himself would now, conceivably, have been a welcome participant. The French press had long characterized Dada “as an empty mystification and a German-Jewish seditious plot,”31 and the echoes of this same xenophobic anti-Semitism in Breton’s statement were palpable enough to torpedo the Congress altogether. Indeed, such echoes in the statement generated a scandal that ultimately led to the Congress being supplanted by the impromptu trial of Breton at La Closerie des Lilas.
Perhaps some measure of just how dangerous that subtle anti-Semitic rhetoric was can be found in the fact that Tzara, who was Jewish, limited his own retort to the simple observation that “an ‘international’ Congress that reprimands someone for being a foreigner has no right to exist.”32 Other members of Paris’s artistic and intellectual community, who inclined toward leftist politics, were not as soft-spoken, and in this respect, they were following a major cultural precedent. Contemporaries like Matthew Josephson, for example, argued that the terms Breton used in “assailing Tzara (a Romanian Jew) as a foreigner [ . . . ] suggested the xenophobe and the anti-Dreyfusard.”33 It is hard to imagine that among Parisian intellectuals, Josephson was alone in thinking about Breton’s comments in relation to the lingering fallout from the infamous Dreyfus Affair.
The effects of that scandal loomed large over French politics. At the very least, Josephson’s argument highlighted the political minefield into which the latent anti-Semitism of Breton’s comments led him—a minefield that was still active. Two decades earlier, Paris had split into leftist and rightist factions amid the scandal that erupted when it was revealed that a young Jewish artillery captain by the name of Alfred Dreyfus was falsely accused and convicted of treason in a case largely motivated by a nationalistic anti-Semitism. Indeed, in one of those serendipitous quirks of history, the trumped-up charges against Dreyfus—as if setting the stage for the French press’s later characterization of Dada—implicated him in what it characterized as a German-Jewish seditious plot. At the time of his conviction, an anti-Semitic press fueled the case against Dreyfus, even after exonerating evidence emerged. It was not until Emile Zola published “J’accuse,” his famous open letter to French President Félix Faure, that this shameful act of injustice was brought to public light, discrediting the judicial system and the Faure government. Indeed, Zola’s letter ultimately caused the ruling government to collapse. It took a subsequent presidential pardon to free Dreyfus, since the courts proved incapable of exonerating him at a second trial, in which, despite the presentation of exculpatory evidence and despite having previously been denied due process, Dreyfus was found guilty a second time. Shortly after Zola published “J’accuse,” he had to flee to England to avoid being brought up on charges of libel against the military. He only returned to France after Dreyfus was finally pardoned.
At one level, this same narrative was being played out again within the Parisian vanguards. Not only did the Congress’s committee disassociate itself from Breton’s comments, but they also turned to the press, and in an open letter somewhat reminiscent of Zola’s open letter to Faure, they “now accused Breton of having issued his public statement assailing Tzara without their authorization, and of having done this in the spirit of a ‘narrow nationalist’ and ‘reactionary.’”34 In that same letter of accusation, the Congress committee members, which included the artists Fernand Léger, Robert Delaunay, and Amédée Ozenfant, Jean Paulhan and Roger Vitrac,35 withdrew their support for the Congress and “called for a general hearing to be held on February 17 at the Closerie des Lilas.”36 If this letter did not in itself signal the collapse of the Congress’s governing board and ultimately the collapse of the Congress itself, it at least set the stage for the event that did. The announced hearing at the Closerie des Lilas attracted wide attention among Parisian intellectuals, who saw in the event an important opportunity “to take a stand, quite literally, in public” and thus pass what Mike Sell has called “the true test of the active citizen after Dreyfus, particularly if he claimed to be in the vanguard.”37 The hearing was quickly dubbed “the trial of Breton,” since “Breton was invited to appear at this meeting, and in effect stand trial.”38 Although before going to the hearing, Breton reportedly told Picabia “that he would show his detractors ‘just who they are dealing with’,”39 he was hardly prepared for what awaited him at the Closerie des Lilas.
It was not just in his polemic against Tzara that Breton had misjudged his audience. He also misjudged the overwhelming mood of the roughly one hundred artists and intellectuals who awaited him on February 17th.40 It did not help that he arrived at the Closerie des Lilas with a prepared statement, which offered his accounting of “the previous weeks’ events, [and] which when presented ‘had the look and tone of a police report.’”41 Breton had dismissed the significance of his own comments as an “unfortunate circumlocution” that was “regrettably equivocal,” and in one of those peculiar instances of blaming the victim, he even implied that Tzara himself had orchestrated the hearing. “It goes without saying,” Breton argued, that Tzara “seized upon” the circumlocution in order “to accuse me (in circles that largely surpassed Dada’s, and included a number of elements that until then he had claimed to despise) of ‘nationalism’ and ‘xenophobia’.”42 Despite Breton’s continued efforts to vilify Tzara for a situation that was largely his own creation, what awaited him at the Closerie des Lilas was outrage, not at an “unfortunate circumlocution,” but at the kind of published assault that, when left unchecked, had cultivated an environment for instances of gross injustice similar to those suffered by Dreyfus and that, unbeknownst to those who were at the Closerie on February 17th, 1922, would bring a murderous sweep across Europe in the coming years as the dark shadow of fascism descended. The profound irony of the hearing was thus that it called Breton to account for a willingness to use (indeed, to encourage) a dangerous and reactionary rhetoric as a strategy for positioning himself at the head of the Parisian vanguards. This was the same Breton who, nine months earlier, had staged a mock trial of the once-radical Maurice Barrès, holding him accountable for championing conformist values in his own “will to power.”43
If Breton was caught off guard by the hearing, perhaps it was because it bore so little resemblance to the trial that he had orchestrated the previous spring. In contrast to the rather pretentious solemnity that governed The Trial and Sentencing of Maurice Barrès by Dada, the hearing at the Closerie was the site of pandemonium. “Never in my experience,” Matthew Josephson reported, “were words of such passion and flame hurled at each other by men without coming to blows. (If they had been Americans, they would have butchered one another.)”44 Indeed, the raucous hearing had all of the hallmarks of what might legitimately be described as the spontaneous eruption of the perfect Dada storm—a storm that, rather than disrupting the bourgeoisie, exposed the internal contradictions of the Parisian vanguards instead. In this respect, Breton’s attempts to hold Tzara responsible for the events at the Closerie were more of a signal of his growing animosity toward Tzara than a response to Tzara’s own actions. Tzara’s role in the hearing was primarily that of a provocateur who willingly and effectively rode a storm that erupted around him. Unlike Breton, Tzara was apparently at home in the chaos, and it was here that the contradictions in the Parisian vanguards surfaced. Just as the solemnity that marked The Trial contrasted diametrically with the pandemonium of the hearing at the Closerie, so too did the figures cut by Breton and Tzara. Josephson recalls that “Breton spoke in rolling periods in his own defense; while Tzara, leaping to the attack, fairly screamed in his high voice, talking so fast that I could not follow him.”45 On the surface the contrasting performances of these two forceful personalities suggest a struggle between the discourse of reason and the discourse of high-pitched revolt, if not of hysteria. But on the evening of February 17, at the corner of the Boulevard du Montparnasse and the Avenue de l’Observatoire, where the Closerie de Lilas stands, the contrast marked a wide “collision of opposites”46 at the point of a collapsing discourse.
Some seven months later in Germany, Tzara suggested as much in a lecture that he gave on Dada. Subtly referencing his earlier arguments against participation in the Congress of Paris, Tzara reaffirmed his sense that “Dada is not at all modern,” and that it is grounded in “indifference.”47 He spun the factious divisions of the previous months into the very essence of Dada, by arguing that a “characteristic of Dada is the continuous breaking off of our friends. They are always breaking off and resigning.”48 Most important of all, Tzara described Dada as “the point where the yes and the no and all the opposites meet, not solemnly in the castles of human philosophies, but very simply at street corners, like dogs and grasshoppers.”49 Roger Cardinal, in an insightful reading of this very passage from Tzara’s lecture, has suggested that the “collision of opposites” and “the image of the urban intersection” to which Tzara refers conjure up “the conditions of a certain avant-garde exploitation of the disruptive and the haphazard,” an exploitation that he suggests is typical of a broad range of avant-garde movements. “The startling inventions of Cubism, Dada, Surrealism and other later movements,” Cardinal argues, “have this in common, that they thrive upon the dismantling of the codes and divisions by which consciousness ordinarily regulates experience.”50
As intriguing as Cardinal’s reading of Tzara’s comments is, I would suggest a temporally more specific referent to “the yes,” “the no” and the meeting of opposites on “street corners.” I would suggest that the referent is “the most tempestuous verbal brawl” that Matthew Josephson had “ever seen,”51 the verbal brawl that was the hearing at the Closerie de Lilas. Not only does this suggestion bring Tzara’s meeting of “opposites” in line with the other historical registers of his lecture, but suspending Cardinal’s broad characterization of avant-garde movements also has the advantage of shifting focus away from the popular, generalized perception of the avant-gardes as code-breaking agents at the forward edge of culture and change. Consequently, it also presents the opportunity to consider more fully the implications of a historical moment in which, far from being aloof agents dismantling the codes that regulate experience, the avant-gardes displayed their own reliance on—indeed, their subservience to—a discursive code whose own legitimacy was contingent upon a set of oppositions that it represented as operative but that it proved incapable of sustaining.
If nothing else, the “verbal brawl” at the Closerie de Lilas exposed the constructed nature of those oppositions, and thus disrupted their ability to mask the contradictions seething beneath the surface of the discursive logic of the Parisian vanguards. Yet this exposure also has far-reaching implications for cultural criticism like that exemplified in Cardinal’s reading of Tzara’s “Lecture on Dada.” The disruption at the Closerie hearing exposes more than the contradictions in the discursive codes of the Parisian vanguards. Used as a standpoint from which to survey critical perceptions of the avant-gardes more generally, this disruptive historical moment brings into view the extent to which criticism like Cardinal’s otherwise insightful reading of Tzara’s lecture is entangled in the linear logic of the avant-gardes’ own rhetoric, and entangled particularly in the constructed front-and rearguard opposition that is as defining to the conception of an avant-garde as “yes” and “no” is to the conception of volition. Nowhere is this entanglement more evident than in Cardinal’s positioning of each of the vanguard movements that he cites (Cubism, Dada, Surrealism, etc.) both as the agent of and as the agent beyond the dismantling of the conceptual codes that regulate experience. Each movement is thus, by implication, always already at the forward position of a linear historical narrative.
While in one respect Cardinal’s characterization may be consistent with the stated forward-looking objective of the Congress of Paris, “to reactivate avant-garde solidarity against [ . . . ] the ‘guardians of order’ and their ‘so-called return to tradition,’”52 it is, in a far more important respect, fundamentally at odds with the events that transpired at the corner café where the “trial” of Breton took place, amid the screaming cacophony of participants and observers. Far from being an edifying example of forward-looking solidarity, the unruly hearing at the Closerie led Matthew Josephson to exclaim, “the Revolution is devouring its sons!”53 That exclamation found a perverse echo of its allusion to the French Revolution when, nine months later, in Spain, Breton, who was still stinging from the rebuke he had received at the Closerie, delivered a lecture to the Barcelona Dada Group, in which he “denounced Tzara’s actions during the Congress of Paris” and told the Barcelona Dadaists that “it would not be a bad thing to reinstate the laws of the Terror for things of the mind.” He proclaimed this without identifiable conscious irony, in what, like the Congress itself, was billed as “an overview of the ‘characteristics of modern evolution and what it consists of’.”54
If, in the early planning of the Congress of Paris, artists like Hugnet and Tzara had expressed legitimate concerns about giving any one person or group the authority to serve as arbiter for the calculated reactivation of avant-garde solidarity, such a proclamation from Breton—especially following the hearing at the Closerie—was close to a realization of their worst nightmares. For the laws of Terror precipitated the Reign of Terror during which the French Revolution devoured its sons. Though it is a bit of a stretch to see the Closerie hearing as a microcosm of that experience of late eighteenth-century carnage, Josephson’s exclamation is worthy of consideration if only because it stands in such marked contrast to the linear discursive logic of the avant-garde itself. A revolution that devours its own progeny obviously has lost sight of the future in its effort to sustain itself. Such self-destructive circularity and the image of stagnation it suggests is more than an apt metaphor for what the hearing at the Closerie exposed. It also signals a discourse collapsing beneath the weight of its own contradictions.
Breton’s biographer, Mark Polizzotti, has characterized the hearing at the Closerie des Lilas as “a distorted replay of the Barrès trial,” since “Aragon acted as defense council” to Breton, and since Tzara once again found himself as a witness for the prosecution.55 But given the air of redress that filled the hearing at the Closerie, particularly redress of a latent anti-Semitism, the hearing might more accurately be described as a kind of dissonant mash-up of the Barrès trial and the Dreyfus Affair. To be more precise, the event was caught in its own contradiction of attempting to be both trial and anti-trial. It was a replay of the Barrès trial against the backdrop of subtle, but unmistakable, contextual allusions to a public scandal that had indicted the very integrity of the judicial process—a scandal that had revealed the extent to which, far from working within the realms of referential objectivity, legal discourse, like the discourse of the avant-gardes, was susceptible to appropriation. On both counts (i.e., the Barrès Trial and the Dreyfus Affair), Breton stood under fire. Inasmuch as the hearing at the Closerie des Lilas replayed the Barrès trial, the distortions of that replay tended to vindicate Tzara’s earlier assertion that he had “absolutely no confidence in justice, even if that justice is enacted by Dada.”56 The lingering cultural residue from the Dreyfus Affair provided the rationale for that lack of confidence. Arguably, it also provided the rationale for the vote of no confidence that Breton received at the end of the hearing—a vote that ended his plans for the Congress of Paris then and there.
Ironically, the basis for that vote was both consistent with the indictment that Breton had previously leveled against Barrès, and consistent with the spirit of the Congress of Paris itself, combating, as it did in its repudiation of Breton, the social currents that the Congress was supposed to oppose. Breton had not lived up to his mandate. In this respect, effectively shutting down the Congress was tantamount to defending precisely that for which the Congress stood. To be forward looking was, in effect, to leave behind a project that, rather than furthering the cause of progressive ideas and countering “the guardians of order,” ultimately demonstrated how susceptible the rhetoric of “avant-garde solidarity” was to appropriation and manipulation. This was especially true for Breton and those in his closest circle. If The Trial had ended in disappointment, Breton’s plans for the Congress of Paris ended in disaster, positioning him not at the head of a grandiose defense of a progressive modern spirit, but rather, at a point of contradiction in which vying for a vanguard position was fueled by an unsuccessful defense of indefensible, reactionary sentiments. Arguably, the Congress of Paris collapsed thus under the strain of a vanguard/rearguard binary that Breton ultimately could only sustain by borrowing from the latter in order to secure his position at the former. The greater irony, however, lies in the implications of this untenable vanguard/rearguard binary. To be forward-looking is, in effect, to leave it behind. This may not position one at the vanguard, but it does open the possibility of understanding the avant-gardes beyond the frame of their own rhetoric.
IV. “Leaving Everything: Court Summons from a Bearded Heart”
The contradictions that the hearing at the Closerie des Lilas exposed continued to haunt the Parisian vanguards for almost a year and a half after the collapse of the Congress of Paris. These contradictions played out initially in subsequent polemical publications by Breton and Tzara. Polemic boiled over into physical altercation “on July 6, 1923 at the Théâtre Michel,” when Breton and his friends not only physically assaulted participants in Tzara’s Coeur à barbe (Bearded Heart) soirée, but also damaged the theatre as well.57 That moment of open warfare between the emerging Surrealists and the remaining Dadaists brought the rivalry between Breton and Tzara back to court—this time an actual court—with Breton’s friends held liable for the damage they had done to the Théâtre Michel. They answered the suits brought against them with countersuits, and the ultimate result was a stalemate.
These post-Congress events coincided with Breton taking every opportunity he could to discredit Dada, even pronouncing it dead. In Spain, he announced the death of Dada to the Barcelona Dada Group (whom he did not convince).58 Prior to his trip to Spain, Breton had attempted once again to cite the performance of The Trial as heralding Dada’s death. In a short polemic entitled “Après Dada” (After Dada) that Breton published just a month after the hearing at the Closerie des Lilas, he asserted that “Dada, very fortunately, is no longer an issue and its funeral, about May 1921, caused no rioting.”59 Such comments arguably qualify Breton as an early spokesman for what Mike Sell has aptly called “the Eulogist School of Avant-Garde Studies.”60 Although I will discuss this notion of “a Eulogist School” at some length in the seventh chapter of this book, some initial comments are warranted here. Not only is there a direct connection between Breton’s announcement of the death of Dada and his divisive manipulation of the Congress of Paris, but this combination—proclaiming the death of one avant-garde while ostensibly promoting “avant-garde solidarity”—reminds us of Sell’s basic point: “most eulogies of the avant-garde are ultimately eulogies for the unity of truth and art embodied, supposedly, by a specific moment or movement in avant-garde history.”61 While Sell’s comments can be understood as suggesting that eulogies for the avant-garde are a kind of lament for the passing of one form of experimental discourse at the cusp and birth of another—hence making any categorical pronouncement of the death of the avant-garde absurd—there is a more provocative reading of Sell’s claim. Breton’s actions suggest—and this is consistent with Sell’s argument—that eulogies for the avant-garde tend to be a ruse: they use a grand proclamation of the death of one form to mask the disunity and contradictions in the discursive economy of the very group that has appointed itself as the vanguard’s coroner.
When these pronouncements pit one faction of the avant-gardes against another, they may perpetuate the avant-gardes’ forward-looking rhetoric, but beneath that rhetoric disunity and contradiction are both a point of departure and a destination. Indeed, theorists like Paul Mann have argued that far from being part of a process of forward moving, linear evolution, “the death of the avant-garde is not its end but its repetition.”62 Nor does the pronouncement by one faction of the avant-gardes’ death position the pronouncers at the forward point of a progressive edge. In The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde, for example, Mann notes that while “Breton was [ . . . ] anxious to bury Dada so that the world could move on to surrealism,” Dada itself demonstrated that “the avant-garde is never so far en avant as at the moment of death, the moment when it catches up with and cancels its own future.”63 Tzara had argued as much in his “Lecture on Dada,” maintaining that Dada was characterized by friends “breaking off and resigning,” and claiming that he himself was “the first to tender his resignation from the Dada moment.”64 If Mann characterizes such moments of breaking off and resigning as “a kind of sepukku,” or contradictory suicide, that affirms Dada’s “negative spirit” and enacts “an anti-aestheticism so rigorous that it must destroy itself before it becomes an institution,”65 the counterpoint of Dada’s contradictory gesture was the self-inflicted death that Breton generated in his attempt to bury Dada. If the avant-garde died, Mann contends, “it put itself to death by continually articulating itself within the discursive economy of the cultures it claimed to subvert.”66 In this respect, Breton’s repeated assertions that Dada was dead not only did as much to resurrect Dada’s viability as to bury it, but these assertions also came from within a discursive economy that was itself fatal to the very notion of a vanguard.
In terms of aesthetics, that fatality was nowhere so pronounced as in Breton’s polemical essay, “After Dada” [“Après Dada”]. Despite the linear narrative suggested by its title, and despite Breton’s concluding assertion that he was positioning himself in “the fight [ . . . ] as far forward as possible,”67 the essay is remarkable for its embrace of a decisively conservative aesthetic posture in its assault on Tzara. Reading “After Dada” against the backdrop of the Barrès Trial and the failed Congress of Paris, one would be hard-pressed not to wince at the disingenuousness not only of Breton’s statement “far be it from me, even today, to set myself up as a judge,” but also of his characterization of Tzara’s opposition to the Congress of Paris as “wrongfully attacking one of the most disinterested undertakings ever put under way”68 (my emphasis). More remarkable still is Breton’s attempt to discredit Tzara by returning to aesthetic categories that the Parisian vanguards had eschewed under the influence of Dada.
Endeavoring to strike a substantial blow against Tzara, Breton claimed to have letters from “Schad and Huelsenbeck,” which allowed him to “inform the readers of Comoedia that M. Tzara had nothing to do with the invention of the word ‘Dada’,” and also that “he probably had very little to do with the writing of the Dada Manifesto 1918.”69 These were odd charges to bring against someone whose sense of authorship involved taking a pair of scissors, cutting words out of a newspaper, shaking them up in a bag, throwing them on a table, and calling the results a poem,70 and against someone who was not adverse to announcing a manifesto and then going on stage “merely [to] read a vulgar article taken out of some newspaper.”71 As to the word “Dada,” its “invention”—if that is what one would call it—was always so contested, with multiple figures taking credit for its coinage, that there is probably no single better example of how the avant-gardes challenged the bourgeois category of authorship to which Breton appealed in his opening salvo against Tzara. In fact, echoing the very notion of chance poetry, Tzara himself claimed only to have “found the word Dada by accident in the Larousse dictionary.”72 In Breton’s “Après Dada,” Tzara’s interest in spontaneity and chance were thus discarded in favor of a reassertion of cultural authority, authorship, and, oddly enough, a hint of traditional family values.
Amplifying the rhetoric of his attack, Breton claimed that “the paternity” of Tzara’s Dada Manifesto 1918 really belonged to “Max Serner” (his name was actually Walter Serner) and thus he, Breton, could no longer allow Tzara “to go on using with impunity the papers of those whom he robbed.”73 Not only did Breton’s claims prove to be incorrect,74 but also, ironically, he was now making accusations of theft against a figure whose work was largely significant for its provocative suggestion that literature was one big swindle. Breton’s accusations, particularly his reference to paternity, were met with scathing ridicule the very next month in the publication of Le Coeur à barbe by Tzara and Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, in which Ribemont-Dessaignes derided the recently collapsed Congress of Paris as the “modernisthmus of Panama” and characterized its committee members as “bandits” styled after “the American cinema,” who for fear of one another were running around with “guns in their pockets.” He mocked Breton’s “Après Dada” mercilessly, announcing with biting sarcasm that “Dada [was] searching for his father,” only then to ask whether this is all that Comoedia can come up with to say.75
Describing Ribemont-Dessaignes as “one of the most wickedly corrosive voices in the Le Coeur à barbe journal,” the art historian Arnauld Pierre also suggests that “alongside the contemporaneous Congrès de Paris project, the Coeur à barbe seems mischievously obstructionist.”76 Since plans for the Congress had already collapsed by the time the journal went to press, I would suggest that Ribemont-Dessaignes’s contributions to the journal were less obstructionist than they were indicative of a crucial strategy for engaging the factional divisions within the Parisian vanguards that the collapse of the Congress had brought to a head. The entire journal was laced with subtle but acerbic rebuttals to Breton’s attacks—even when those attacks appeared to take on the air of having risen above the vindictive fray, as was the case with Breton’s article “Lâchez tout” (“Leave Everything”), which was published shortly before Le Coeur à barbe.77 Polizzotti notes that Breton “had drafted a long diatribe against Tzara,” but at the last minute decided instead to publish “Lâchez tout,” which Polizzoti describes as “a celebrated call to arms” that took “an essentially personal quarrel to a higher, philosophical ground.”78 Ironically, that call to arms echoed Dada’s indifference, urging readers to:
Leave everything.
Leave Dada.
Leave your wife, leave your mistress.
Leave your hopes and fears.
Drop your kids in the middle of nowhere.
Leave the substance for the shadow.
Leave behind, if need be, your comfortable life and promising future.
Take to the highways.79
But for all its seeming ascent to a higher philosophical ground, “Lâchez tout” offered a prescription from which Breton exempted himself, having moved three months earlier into a two-bedroom studio with his wife Simone at 43 Rue Fontaine, the address he would keep for the rest of his life. Breton wasn’t leaving anything, except ostensibly Dada—and even here there were few statements more Dadaesque than a call to leave Dada behind. As Tzara himself had argued in his “manifesto on feeble love and bitter love”: “the true dadas are against Dada.”80 Indeed, the ironies of Breton’s call were not lost on Tzara and Ribemont-Dessaignes.
In the Le Coeur à barbe journal, they included a stinging rebuttal to Breton’s essay “Lâchez tout.” The rebuttal, which has largely been overlooked, took the form of a short poem. It also bore the title “Lâchez tout” and specifically targeted Breton’s new-found bourgeois domesticity, using it to expose the hollow rhetoric of his philosophical call to leave everything. Reducing Breton to an image of “bad breath” and “flowery hair” and identifying him with those “who cry of not being able to love,” the poem placed the sentiment of “Lâchez tout” right at his doorstep. It alluded to the brothels at the “Place Pigalle”81 nearby, and mocking Breton’s attempt to take the philosophical and moral high ground, the poem playfully suggested that one catches a cold moving from “hell to heaven”82—a vague but unmistakable reference to the “sordid staircase”83 leading from the cabaret “Le Ciel and L’Enfer” (Heaven and Hell) to Breton’s apartment, which was located four flights above the cabaret.
The poem “Lâchez tout” in Le Coeur à barbe was attributed mysteriously to “the Officer.” At one level, the reference to a guardian of order in this otherwise anonymous attribution played with the contradiction of asserting author-ity even as the vagueness of the author undermined author-ship. At another level, however, the image of an officer returning Breton’s admonishment (“leave everything”) to his own doorstep was not only a good example of the chickens coming home to roost; it was also a portent of things to come. Indeed, “the Officer” provided a subtle reminder of the police officers Breton had planned to employ as a safeguard against a potential Dada sabotage of the Congress of Paris, and this reminder surfaced once again in July of the following year, this time in physical form, when Tzara had police waiting in the wings at Paris’s final major Dada event, the Soirée du Coeur à barbe that he directed at the Théâtre Michel. Ruth Brandon has suggested that “evidently Tzara expected trouble. Before the show, he let it be known,” in what she describes as a “most un-Dada fashion, that anyone interrupting would be thrown out.”84 But I would suggest that this announcement, which carried a clear sarcastic echo of Breton’s own earlier announcement, was a quintessential Dada gesture of provocation, one directed at Breton himself and his friends from the Littérature Group—all of whom (including Breton) were further provoked by the fact that, while “free tickets were being handed out to ‘all the Americans [ . . . Tzara] knew’,” they had to pay 25 francs for their seats.85
The Soirée du Coeur à barbe started as a mixed media event that ultimately turned into a brawl. It began with musical works by Erik Satie and Darius Milhaud. It included films by Hans Richter and Man Ray. It also included poems by Philippe Soupault and Paul Eluard (the latter of whom was in the audience) that were used without permission and that, much to Eluard’s displeasure, were followed by poems from Jean Cocteau whom Breton and his friends viewed as an outright enemy. Concluding the evening’s program, Tzara staged a revival of his piece Le Coeur à gaz (The Gas Heart) with cardboard cylinder costume designs by Sonia Delaunay, but by that time the audience had what it had been waiting for. Provocations had given way to altercations, physical assault, and police intervention. Had it not been for one final climatic round of fights, Le Coeur à gaz would have been little more than an afterthought to the mayhem that Tzara’s Dada Soirée provoked. Interestingly enough, however, the trigger for the evening brawl did not come directly from Tzara but rather from a proclamation read by Pierre de Massot.
Having Massot on the stage was no insignificant bit of orchestration. Indeed, I would suggest that it was a provocation in and of itself, for Massot “had been Breton’s faithful lieutenant during the Congrès de Paris preparation” and “had recently written a slighting article about Tzara in the Belgian review Ça ira referring to him as ‘that little Rumanian Jew’.”86 In this respect, Massot was a physical reminder of all that went wrong with the Congress of Paris. His own anti-Semitic tendencies recalled the scandal created by Breton’s attack on Tzara, and since he originally had assisted in the planning of the Congress itself, his presence on the stage was a genuine reminder of all those who originally had lent their support to the Congress, only then to abandon the project and Breton at the Closerie hearing. If Massot’s presence on the stage was not reminder enough, then the not-so-subtle inversions in his proclamation proved to be incendiary enough to ignite the whole explosive situation.
Those inversions struck at the heart of Breton’s premature obituaries for Dada. Breton had conceptualized both The Trial of Maurice Barrès and the Congress of Paris so as to bury Dada. Massot’s proclamation turned those obituaries on their head. It systematically announced the death of prominent figures of the avant-gardes, citing them by name and then listing them “dead on the field of honor” (“mort au champ d’honneur”)87 Among others, the list included Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, André Gide, and Pablo Picasso. When Massot announced the death of Picasso (who was in the audience), Breton shouted “That’s enough” and rushed the stage. Using his walking stick as a weapon, he physically assaulted Massot, breaking his arm. Ostensibly, Breton was defending Picasso’s honor, but clearly the tumultuous history of the past year was at play in this moment and in those that followed.
True to his word, Tzara signaled to the police, and in a kind of forced inversion of Tzara’s own exit from the Salle des Sociétés Savantes at The Trial of Maurice Barrès, “the police arrived and threw Breton, Aragon and their accomplices out into the street.”88 Inasmuch as the ejection of Breton by the police gave a strong dose of his own medicine to the one person who was not only not adverse to using police security for his own events, but who in the years to come would make a habit of ejecting artists from the Surrealist movement, there was enough poetic justice in Tzara’s signal to the police that one could have called it an evening and gone home. But after the police had forcibly removed Breton, the show resumed, and when Le Coeur à gaz began, Eluard (still in the audience and still steaming about the unauthorized use of his poetry and about the ejection of Breton) decided to follow Breton’s earlier lead and pursued a thuggish course of his own. He created enough of a disruption that Tzara came out on the stage to restore order. Eluard then jumped onto the stage himself, where he slapped Tzara and René Crevel, “before he was grabbed in turn by a band of stagehands and severely beaten.”89 He ended up in the orchestra pit.
It is not entirely clear whether Eluard was thrown or fell into the orchestra pit, but when he landed, he broke a number of footlights (those symbolic markers of the modern stage). This not only added additional damage to a theater that had already been trashed amid the altercations provoked by Breton and his circle, but it also put Eluard in a position of liability that in short order ended the Parisian vanguards’ infatuation with legal discourse. It was left at a dead end and a stalemate. Tzara sued Eluard for 8,000 francs to cover the damages. Eluard in turn submitted a countersuit to the court, holding Tzara responsible for the beating he had received by the stagehands whom Tzara had employed. Polizzotti notes that both of these cases “lasted nearly a year, replete with lawyers and court dates, before ultimately fading away.”90 In fact, neither suit ever came to trial, for Tzara discovered that Eluard had taken Breton’s prescription to “leave everything” and departed, since the court costs alone would have financially ruined him and his wife, even if they had prevailed in court.91
Tzara left Paris as well, and in his own way called the bluff on Breton’s admonishment. At one level, this was not a problem, since by 1923 Dada was anything but dead. It had gained enough momentum to become an international movement, and Tzara moved freely in Dada circles across Europe. This situation has led critics like Matthew Witkovsky to argue that as an artistic form Dada is essentially nomadic and that the events surrounding The Trial show that “the lasting value of Dada [ . . . ] is that it keeps recurring in new places and unforeseen guises.”92 This characterization of Dada is fair enough. But what it never really considers is how the events surrounding the hearing at the Closerie des Lilas turned both Breton’s prosecutorial theatrics at the Barrès Trial and his quasi-legislative agenda for the Congress of Paris on their heads and revealed an authoritarian, reactionary undercurrent in his efforts to seize the vanguard baton. Far from heralding the advent of the new, these efforts recycled the all-too-familiar, echoing some of the most egregious sentiments for which Barrès had been singled out and symbolically prosecuted in May of 1921. In short, what Witkovsky leaves unaddressed are the implications that the conflict among the Parisian vanguard had for the discourse of the avant-garde. It is easy enough to recognize the nomadic quality of Dada. More difficult is to recognize how the events surrounding The Trial exposed the extent to which the discourse of the avant-gardes was in its own respect nomadic, floating so free that it could easily be appropriated to provide a facade of radicalism even for reactionary social currents.