Poetry for Students

28 Poetry for Students

Source:L. C. Breunig, “The Laughter of Apollinaire,” in

Yale French Studies, No. 31, 1964, pp. 66–73.

Anna Balakian

In the following essay, Balakian discusses

Apollinaire’s attempts to define and further the role

of the artist in the early twentieth century.

An unusual experience in historical self-

consciousness must have belonged to those who

reached the age of reason with the turn of the cen-

tury and felt compelled to express awareness of a

new era. Dates are arbitrary landmarks, and the

world does not change suddenly because a new fig-

ure appears on the calendar. Yet, a reading of the

more personal writings of those who turned the big

leaf from the eighteen hundreds to 1900 gives in-

dications of a psychological upheaval and of a con-

viction on the part of these writers that if things

had not changed they should,—an attitude not as

readily associated with the mid-century adult. The

writings of Guillaume Apollinaire, born in 1880,

show that he was not only conscious of a transition

but felt responsible to have a hand in heralding and

shaping a new world.

Nineteen-hundred brought to France an inter-

national exposition. One of the most important gad-

gets peddled there was the magical electric bulb; it

was also the year of the cinema, the Paris subway,

and liquid oxygen. It marked the advent of the su-

premacy of the scientist in the history of human

progress, not the pure scientist who dealt with the

abstract, but the man who applied the principles of

science and produced.Whatever else twentieth-

century man was going to possess in the way of

distinguishing traits, he seemed assured of a gen-

erous share of concrete intelligence, an inventive

spirit, which would provide unfathomable re-

sources to the activity of his imagination.

This development of technical imagination

seemed, however, to have no immediate parallel in

artistic activities. Art suddenly appeared a weak sis-

ter. Since the end of the nineteenth century a rift had

taken place between science and art which was

growing wider and wider. Art, after a shortlived al-

liance with positivism, had soon protested, revolted,

taken refuge in the dream, unsuspecting that soon

science was to claim the dream itself as one of its

legitimate domains of investigation. Science seemed

to be the destroyer of the marvelous and the myste-

rious. The resentment was not untouched by a cer-

tain amount of jealousy on the part of the artist in

regard to the strides made by the scientific inventor.

This conflict is vividly demonstrated by Apol-

linaire in his Le Poète assassiné(1916). Much of

this Rabelaisian novelette is autobiographical. We

trace the fantastically confused origin and interna-

tional upbringing of the poet-hero, Croniamantal,

which parallels closely the apocryphal data about

Apollinaire’s own early years; we see the poet mak-

ing ties with the vanguard painters of his time, like

Apollinaire’s relations with the cubists. We are ex-

posed to Croniamantal’s conception of an extraor-

dinary play containing in a one-paragraph

description the seeds of playful irrationality which

was to be more notoriously demonstrated the fol-

lowing year in the staging of Apollinaire’s play, Les

Mamelles de Tirésias,and was to reach fruition in

the works of the surrealists:

Close to the sea, a man buys a newspaper. From a

house on the prompt side emerges a soldier whose

hands are electric bulbs. A giant three meters high

comes down from a tree. He shakes the newspaper

vendor, who is of plaster. She falls and breaks. At

this moment a judge arrives on the scene. He kills

everyone with slashes from a razor, while a leg which

comes hopping by fells the judge with a kick under

the nose, and sings a pretty popular song.

Finally Croniamantal comes face to face with the

archenemy of poets, not the smug unimaginative

bourgeois, but the champion of the scientists, Ho-

race Tograth, who demands the killing of all poets

because they have been overrated and are con-

tributing nothing valuable to present civilization:

True glory has forsaken poetry for science, philoso-

phy, acrobatics, philanthropy, sociology etc. Today all

that poets are good for is to take money that they have

not earned since they seldom work and since most of

them (except for cabaret singers and a few others)

have no talent and consequently no excuse.... The

prizes that are awarded to them rightfully belong to

workers, inventors, research men...

Always