part 2. 1916–1930: dada and the heroic period of surrealism
Deuxième Aventure céleste de M. Antipyrine (The Second Celestial Adven-
ture of Mr. Aspirin) by simply standing behind the actor reciting the lines.
Standing behind, Warhol seemed to be saying, can be as important as
standing for.
Between 1916 and the early 1930s, French writers and intellectuals
developed an intense fascination with African cultures and the notion of
an exciting and novel primitive mentality: a√ective, wild, illogical, mys-
tical—what Marcel Mauss, lecturing at the École pratique des hautes
études, termed negrophilia. African art had a powerful influence on the
painters and poets Pablo Picasso, André Derain, and Guillaume Apolli-
naire. At that time, almost everyone involved in the arts was exploring
things African. The Anthologie nègre assembled by the Cubist poet Blaise
Cendrars was immensely influential.
Part of the novelty of the Dadaist experiments in language was Tzara’s
imitation of primitive languages that had a distinctly African resonance.
In 1916, he and Hugo Ball invented Negro chants. The conclusion of
Tzara’s early poem ‘‘Le Géant Blanc Lépreux du paysage’’ (White Giant
Leper of the Countryside) finishes with a deliberate insult to the reader,
likely to be seduced into Dada thereby, all the while flaunting its un-
French, un-Cartesian language:
car il y a des zigzags sur son âme et beaucoup de rrrrrrrrrrrrrr ici le
lecteur
commence à crier
..........................
il est mince idiot sale il ne comprend pas mes vers il crie(because there are zigzags on his soul and a lot of rrrrrrrrrrrrrr
here the reader
begins to shriek
..........................
he is thin idiotic dirty he doesn’t get my poems he shrieks)≤With time, the eccentricities of Dada gave way to the more organized
Surrealist movement; this momentous new poetic energy lasted a number
of years—in both its behavior in accord with ‘‘lyric values,’’ as Breton put
it, and its powerful poetry of the everyday marvelous.≥ The Surrealists,
believing, as did the philosophers Gaston Bachelard and Ludwig Wittgen-
stein, that the limits of our universe are determined by those of our
language, expanded the powers of writing and speech beyond the rational
and the ordinary—with a positive purpose. Eventually, the heroic epoch
of the movement came to an end, owing to the excommunication of
many of the Surrealists poets from the ‘‘chapel’’ run by Breton, the deser-
tion of Louis Aragon and Paul Éluard to the Communist Party, and the