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Made in France: the World Wars and the 'other' avant-garde tradition
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Made in France: the World Wars and the 'other' avant-garde tradition
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MADE IN FRANCE: THE WORLD WARS AND THE ‘OTHER’ AVANT-GARDE
TRADITION
by
M. Marie Smart
____________________________________________________________________
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)
August 2013
Copyright 2013 M. Marie Smart
ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Figures iii
Acknowledgments iv
Abstract v
Introduction: Made In France: The World Wars and the ‘Other’ Avant-Garde Tradition 1
Chapter 1: Éloignement: Marcel Duchamp and the Aesthetics of War 27
Chapter 2: Conceptualizing the Great War: Duchamp’s Apolinère Enameled, Stein’s 61
“Guillaume Apollinaire”
Chapter 3: Having Nothing To Say and Saying It: Stein And Beckett In Vichy France 99
Chapter 4: New Novel, Old Tune: Beckett, Radio, and Postwar France 126
Conclusion 152
Bibliography 168
iii
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1. VVV 2-3, ed. David Hare (New York, March 1943) 1
Figure 2. Henri Rousseau (Le Douanier, 1844-1910) 6
Figure 3. Detail of La Boîte-en-valise 27
Figure 4. La boîte-en-valise (Box in a Valise), 1936/1968. Paris (1936) – 28
New York (1941).
Figure 5. Marcel Duchamp, front cover for View magazine, vol. 5, no. 1 (March 1945) 36
Figure 6. Marcel Duchamp, back cover for View magazine, vol. 5, no. 1 (March 1945) 38
Figure 7. Marcel Duchamp, Apolinère Enameled. [1916] 61
Figure 8. 1972 Dolmen Press edition of “Zone,” with Beckett translation, cover by 105
Liam Miller
Figure 9. Yoko Ono, “Play It By Trust” 1966/1999 152
Figure 10. Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The 154
Large Glass). 1915-23
Figure 11. Stills from Samuel Beckett, Quad (1981) 162
iv
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This dissertation is dedicated to Marjorie Perloff, who introduced me to the avant-garde,
and without whose guidance this project would not exist. I am deeply thankful to Susan
McCabe, my dissertation chair, who shaped this project at every stage. I am grateful to both of
them, my mentors in the true sense of the word.
My heartfelt appreciation goes out to Marjorie Perloff and the entire Perloff family: to
Marjorie for her endless wisdom and everlasting care, to Joseph Perloff for his faith in my work
and his constant encouragement, to Nancy Perloff who inspired me throughout, and to Alexandra
Perloff-Giles, who brought me to the Pompidou archives where I made an amazing discovery
about Duchamp’s Box in a Valise.
The University of Southern California gave me generous funding for research and travel
as well as multiple fellowships. I presented portions of these chapters at international
conferences, including the Moving Modernisms conference at Oxford University (March 2012),
the Modernist Studies Association conference (2011), and the Interventions conference at the
Banff Centre (2010).
I give heartfelt thanks to my family, to Sally and Bill, and to Amy, my sister. I would not
be where I am today without you.
v
ABSTRACT
Made in France is a comparative study of the war aesthetics of Marcel Duchamp, Samuel
Beckett, and Gertrude Stein. These artists are seminal figures of what Marjorie Perloff (using a
phrase coined by John Ashbery) calls the ‘other tradition’ of the avant-garde: a tradition which
rejects figurative and symbolic meaning, giving way to minimalistic, experimental aesthetics
which often transgress the boundaries of visual, textual, and sound-based art. All three of these
artists lived in Paris in the decades following World War I, and they were in France to witness
the beginning of the Nazi Occupation during World War II. This is the first study which brings
these important figures of the avant-garde together through their shared French contexts. This
dissertation illustrates that Beckett, Stein, and Duchamp—despite their antithetical political and
national identities—developed ‘other’ war aesthetics which pitted their conceptual sensibilities
against the political mobilizations of the avant-garde in Europe.
1
INTRODUCTION
MADE IN FRANCE: THE WORLD WARS AND THE ‘OTHER’
AVANT-GARDE TRADITION
While living in New York City at the height of the Second World War, Marcel Duchamp
was asked to design a cover for the Surrealist magazine VVV. Duchamp had long been known as
a provocateur within the art world, but never before had he created a piece which seemed so
historically relevant (figure 1).
Figure 1. VVV 2-3, ed. David Hare (New York, March 1943)
Cover design by Marcel Duchamp
2
His cover for VVV, featuring the archetypical figure of death with the year “1943”
prominently displayed, had obvious historical allusions to the ongoing conflicts. Duchamp,
however, was hardly the typical war artist. “I left France during the war, in 1942,” he once
explained in an interview, “when I would have had to have been part of the Resistance.”
1
Apropos to Duchamp’s ambiguous political stance, this wartime piece seems curiously
impersonal, a horrific symbol of the ongoing conflicts too abstract to convey nationalistic
sentiment or specific events. As if to underscore his historical objectivity, Duchamp appropriated
this image from an anonymous etching, reminiscent of his famous method of creating
readymades from found objects. It is precisely this affectation of objectivity, however, which
lends the cover of VVV its horrific message, reminding us that there was no escaping the
omnipresence of the war – not even for the seemingly indifferent Duchamp.
1943: This was the year in which Gertrude Stein worked on her autobiographical Wars I
Have Seen and Samuel Beckett began composing his novel Watt. Similar to Duchamp, Beckett
and Stein spent a significant portion of their artistic careers in interwar Paris, a milieu which had
been profoundly shaped by the aftermath of the Great War and the rise of the Nazi Party in 1930s
Europe. Each of these artists was living in France in June 1940 at the beginning of the Nazi
Occupation when Philippe Pétain, a World War I hero of the Battle of Verdun, was elected to run
the new French government based in the town of Vichy. Duchamp and Beckett, incredibly
enough, spent the summer of 1940 together in the French town of Arcachon (Beckett and his
wife Suzanne were offered refuge by Duchamp’s long-time partner, Mary Reynolds). Stein
retreated to the French countryside and remained in her house in Bilignin for the duration of the
Occupation.
3
Made in France is the first study which brings Duchamp, Stein, and Beckett together
through their French contexts. Although their experimental aesthetics seem implicitly aligned –
especially in light of their mutual influence on conceptual art and related movements of the
postmodern era – no study has attempted a comparative study of Duchamp, Beckett, and Stein
which treats them as war artists. All three are seminal figures of what Marjorie Perloff (using a
phrase coined by John Ashbery) refers to as the ‘other tradition’ of the avant-garde: a tradition
which rejects both figurative and symbolic meaning, giving way to radical experimentations
which often transgress the boundaries of visual, textual, and sound-based art.
2
Perloff has already
illustrated that these artists have more in common with each other than major avant-garde
traditions, such as Dada and Cubism, with which they routinely associated. This dissertation
argues that these three major figures of the 20
th
century developed comparable war aesthetics
which pitted their conceptual sensibilities against the mobilizations of the avant-garde in Europe.
Before introducing the common attributes of their war aesthetics, it is necessary to
acknowledge first and foremost that Beckett, Duchamp, and Stein come from entirely different
politico-national backgrounds. Other than the fact that they worked, at least intermittently, within
the same cultural milieu of interwar France, there is little biographical information which unites
their respective war experiences. In brief:
1. Beckett, who came of age later than Duchamp and Stein, was still a teenager at the
end of the First World War. During the interwar period he moved to Paris, where he
befriended the likes of Joyce and began his writing career. At the outbreak of the
Second World War, he bravely volunteered to work for the French Resistance even
though as an Irish citizen he could have returned home to safety. When his network
was discovered by the Nazis he was forced to spend the rest of the war in hiding.
4
Despite being a war hero, Beckett never became too deeply involved in the political
arena; he did not take part in the political engagements of French Existentialism in the
postwar years nor was he moved by the nationalistic discourse of fellow Irish writers.
2. Stein, in contrast to Beckett, was an outspoken patriot, and national identity (as
discussed throughout Stein scholarship) was germane to her understanding of
individual subjectivity.
3
During the First World War in 1916 she volunteered as an
ambulance driver for the American Fund for French Wounded. Decades later, during
the Second World War, she chose to remain in France, her home of the past three
decades, rather than leave the country for Switzerland or the United States. As a
lesbian of Jewish background she was highly reliant on the protections of her friend
Bernard Faÿ,
4
a high-ranking official within the Vichy regime, to ensure her own
safety; throughout the first two years of the Occupation she worked on translations of
the speeches of Pétain, a project she abandoned, perhaps (as scholars speculate)
because the atrocities of the Nazi Occupation became more apparent.
5
Stein’s support
of Pétain is often compared to outspoken fascist writers such as Pound; this project
offers a new perspective on this controversial topic by placing Stein’s war aesthetics
in dialogue with the politically ambiguous figures of Duchamp and Beckett.
3. Duchamp is widely known as one of the most politically aloof artists of the twentieth
century. “I don’t understand anything about politics,” he once quipped to his
interviewer Pierre Cabanne, “and I say it’s really a stupid activity, which leads to
nothing.”
6
A native Frenchman, he left for the United States during the First World
War rather than enlist; during the Second World War he once again left France,
opting to escape to the émigré art scene in New York rather than join the Resistance
5
alongside several of his fellow artists. As opposed to Beckett and Stein, Duchamp has
never been considered as a war artist – this despite losing a brother in the First World
War and very nearly losing his longtime partner, Mary Reynolds (who, as it happens,
worked in the same Resistance network as Beckett) in the Second World War. Thus
far, the World Wars have not been a major concern within Duchamp studies, a
scholarly bias this study seeks to correct.
From the early years of the Great War through the aftermath of the Second World War,
the mainstream avant-garde in Europe formed several revolutionary and reactionary movements:
Dada, most famously, responded in large part to the cultural illogic elicited by war’s destruction;
later, Dada evolved into Surrealism, which in turn identified itself with Marxist ideology
beginning in the 1920s. The figures at the center of this study are singular examples of the war
generation, artists who worked alongside the continental avant-garde without participating in its
outspoken public life: Beckett was a Resistance hero with an aversion to for political activism,
Stein identified herself as a patriotic American and later supported the Vichy regime, without
becoming a card-carrying member of any political movement, while Duchamp, a refugee of both
World Wars with personal connections to family and friends involved in the conflicts, refused
any opportunity to become involved in political matters. Made in France suggests that all three
of these artists – despite their antithetical backgrounds – practiced ‘other’ aesthetics which
similarly resisted contemporary notions of what it meant to be a wartime artist.
Consider, for example, how Duchamp’s 1943 cover of VVV functions as a subtle critique
of the war genre. Scholars have yet to note that his design was likely inspired by a pre-World
War I painting entitled War by the amateur artist Henri Rousseau (figure 2).
6
Figure 2. Henri Rousseau (Le Douanier, 1844-1910)
War [Circa 1894]
Paris, Musée d’Orsay, © RMN (Musée d’Orsay) / DR
Rousseau had been discovered decades earlier by Alfred Jarry, a hero of Duchamp’s (it
was likely Jarry’s enthusiasm for the art naïf of Rousseau which sparked Duchamp’s interest in
displaying amateur art at the Society of Independent Artists show in 1917). Whether or not
Duchamp’s cover for VVV references this painting in particular, the echo between these two
works is an instructive example of Duchamp’s ironic posture within the avant-garde tradition of
aestheticizing war. Duchamp’s symbol of war is similar to Rousseau’s in its iconic depiction of
an apocalyptic rider, but unlike Rousseau, he refuses to embellish the scene of battle. From the
Duchampian anti-art perspective, the ‘retinal’ tradition of wartime art becomes nothing more
than standard cliché and repetitive device.
7
Duchamp’s conceptual response to the Second World War comes closer to the
dispassionate mien of works such as Stein’s Wars I Have Seen and Beckett’s Watt – how, then,
do their conceptual war aesthetics collectively relate to the Anglo modernist tradition? At first, it
would seem that modernist war writing, with its own political ambivalences, would offer better
counterparts to their conceptual war aesthetics. Countless studies address the links between
Anglo modernism and war – a topic as expansive as modernist scholarship itself – and it is more
than apparent that within modernist war writing there is much variance and nuance to speak of,
especially when moving from the Great War through the aftermath of the Second World War. I
offer these passages, spanning British and American war writing from the early to mid twentieth
century, as apt points of comparison:
I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark; for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now . . .
— Wilfred Owen, “Strange Meeting” [1918]
I think it better that in times like these
A poet’s mouth be silent, for in truth
We have no gift to set a statesman right;
He has had enough of meddling who can please
A young girl in the indolence of her youth,
Or an old man upon a winter’s night.
— W.B. Yeats, “On Being Asked for a War Poem” [1919]
I had to think myself out of the room, back into the past, before the
indeed, and to set before my eyes the model of another luncheon
party held in rooms not very far distant from these; but different.
Everything was different. . . . Before the war at a luncheon party
like this people would have said precisely the same things but they
would have sounded different, because in those days they were
accompanied by a sort of humming noise, not articulate, but
musical, exciting, which changed the value of the words
themselves.
— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own [1929]
8
ruin everywhere, yet as the fallen roof
leaves the sealed room
open to the air,
so, through our desolation,
thoughts stir, inspiration stalks us
through gloom.
— H.D. “The Walls Do Not Fall” [1944]
Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word--the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages,
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.
— Philip Larkin, “MCMXIV” [1964]
I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane,
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
The news would pour out of various devices
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.
— Muriel Rukeyser, “Poem” [1968]
These modernist voices of the 1910s and 1920s – Wilfred Owen’s haunted soldier,
Woolf’s contemplative observation that “Everything was different” after the war – bear a family
resemblance to the postwar trauma expressed by later writers such as Rukeyser, with her “more
or less insane” way of life. Compare this to major avant-garde movements on the European
continent from the 1910s through the 1960s – traditions more oriented to a cultural zeitgeist than
the inner turmoil of artist-as-individual: the bombastic nationalism of Italian Futurism, the public
provocations of European Dada movements, the communist activities of Surrealism during the
interwar years, and the outspoken protests of Existentialist writers after the Second World War.
Modernist war writing, roughly speaking, is a tradition which diverges from the continental
avant-garde in its tendencies to exhibit psychological trauma and individual angst. Within the
9
modernist paradigm, the principles of formalism repeatedly come under question. Yeats would
write “that in times like these / A poet’s mouth be silent”; a conflicted sentiment, indeed, coming
from a poet who held political office and wrote some of the most powerful war poems in
Ireland’s history. Joyce, another example of a politically ambiguous modernist writer, was never
involved in political life; nonetheless, his work is infused with references to the Irish struggle for
independence, and his story “The Dead,” partially autobiographical, involves a writer’s
discomfort with facing the political pressures of Irish nationalism. As opposed to these and other
Anglo writers, avant-garde leaders in France such as Breton and Sartre, nuanced in their own
ways, would not amble as excessively over questions of political engagement. At the same time,
of course, significant figures blur such boundaries – Wyndham Lewis, for example, had fascist
sympathies and outrageous effronteries which could be compared to Marinetti, and Picasso, with
his famous Guernica, created anti-war imagery as horrific as the verses of Wilfred Own.
Over the past decade, important scholars have reexamined the social consciousness of
Anglo modernism, paying particular attention to the political ambivalence of modernist writers
in relation to the World Wars; Vincent Sherry’s The Great War and the Language of Modernism
and Tyrus Miller’s Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts between the World Wars are
notable examples. Like these critics, I reject the notion that modernism should be defined as a
privileged realm, setting itself against what Adorno called the culture industry, and conversely, I
resist categorizing modernism as the mere extension of a populist élan. By grouping Stein and
Beckett with Duchamp, this study focuses specifically on previously unconsidered intersections
between the revolutionary avant-garde and the oblique politics of Anglo modernisms. Scholars
have yet to fully explore how reactionary movements such as Dada, Surrealism, and Futurism
may have influenced the ambiguous political stances of expatriate Anglo modernists such as
10
Beckett and Stein. Additionally, Duchamp’s apolitical turn is rarely, if ever, aligned with the
political ambivalence of the modernist tradition, despite the fact he was a life-long resident of
New York who never participated in the revolutionary revolts of Dada. In this study, I cast
Beckett, Stein, and Duchamp as artists deeply concerned with central questions of modernist
debate: to what extent can we separate an artist from his or her own time? Where does one draw
the line, as T. S. Eliot so famously put it, between “the man who suffers and the mind which
creates”? In the face of total war, can ethical arguments be made for formalism? Their works pull
at threads from the historical fabric of the World Wars, providing us with conceptual allegories
of the impossible conundrums of aesthetic autonomy.
These modernist parallels, however, can be taken only so far. Beckett, Duchamp, and
Stein did not respond to the wars in manners as poignant as Wilfred Owen’s “I knew you in this
dark; for so you frowned / Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed,” nor did they attempt
to give specific utterance, as did Woolf, to the melancholy of postwar life. Their works lack the
pathos of the war-ravaged modernist psyche. Neither do their conceptual sensibilities compare
with the war writings of experimental modernists such as Barnes. The dehumanized characters of
Barnes’s narratives are certainly comparable to Beckett’s – but Barnes’s response to the war was
too symptomatic, linked too overtly to the grand narrative of cultural trauma, to be confused with
Beckett’s radical decontextualizations.
The artists central to this dissertation are three of the most important precursors of the
postmodern era. It is surprising, then, how little they have in common with writers who
reminisced about the wars in the postwar decades. Rukeyser’s plaintiveness about living “in the
first century of world wars” runs parallel to Larkin’s melancholy war lyric (“Never such
innocence, /Never before or since”) also published in the 1960s. Charles Reznikoff’s Holocaust,
11
an epic sourced from testimonies recorded at the Eichmann trial and the trials at Nuremberg, is a
particularly striking point of comparison:
The Jews in the ghetto were swollen with hunger
or terribly thin;
six to eight in a room
and no heating.
Families died during the night
and when neighbors entered in the morning—
perhaps days afterward—
they saw them frozen to death
or dead from starvation.
— Charles Reznikoff, Holocaust [1975]
Reznikoff’s found aesthetics is just as experimental, in terms of technique, as the readymade
approach of Duchamp. His willingness to confront the horrors of the war, however, seems closer
to the miasma of modernists writing after the First World War. While Beckett would seem to fit
within the rubric of postwar lament, his techniques of abstraction are more relevant to the
emotional vacuity of Duchamp’s cover for VVV, or the unflappable approach of Stein’s Wars I
Have Seen, than the histrionic bent of the modernist tradition.
The Historical Perspective of the ‘Other’ Avant-Garde Tradition
The conceptual avant-garde has never been regarded as a tradition with its own war
aesthetic – perhaps because historical narrative rarely embraces political uncertainty. Important
historians including David Cottington and Kenneth Silver have recounted how a great number of
artists working in the 1910s and 1920s recoiled from associating their aesthetics with the
destructive effects of the Great War. Picasso is a prime example; although he would later create
his famous Guernica as a protest piece during the Spanish Civil War, the work he produced in
the wake of the First World War abandoned earlier experimental techniques in favor of neo-
classicism and a return to figuration. Duchamp, Stein, and Beckett, by contrast, are more
12
resolutely ambivalent about their political status, constantly hesitating at the thresholds between
ahistorical aestheticism and their respective identities as war artists: none had a Guernica
moment.
The mainstream avant-garde, in the early period of the 1910s, willingly participated in
the mobilizations of the Great War. Gaudier-Brzska, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Raymond
Duchamp-Villon, Duchamp’s own brother, are among the numerous artists who died as a result
of their voluntary military service. In Italy, Marinetti epitomized avant-garde glorification of war
at its most extreme. “War is beautiful,” he wrote in one of his manifestos, “because it establishes
man’s dominion over the subjugated machinery by means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones,
flame throwers, and small tanks.” Duchamp and Stein were at peak stages of their early careers
at the outbreak of the Great War, and they were notable exceptions to the spirit of mobilization
pervading the avant-garde. “I do not go to New York, I leave Paris”: this was Duchamp’s way of
explaining to Walter Pach in 1915 that he wished to escape the wartime climate for a more
peaceful setting. Soon after the United States entered the conflicts, he continued to move out
from under the shadow of war, going from New York to Buenos Aires. He wrote to the
Arensbergs in 1918: “Il y a bien l’odeur de paix qui est épatante à respirer et un tranquilité
provinciale qui me permettent et forcent même à travailler”
7
[“There is really an air of peace here
that is liberating to breathe and a provincial tranquility that allows and even forces me to work.”]
In this letter he declares his new Argentinian setting ‘allows’ and ‘forces’ him to work and he
confirms that he has no intention of leaving until the conflicts are over. His plans, he explains to
the Arensbergs, are to return to Paris in June or July “si la guerre se termine”
8
[“If the war
ends”].
13
Stein is well known for her work as an ambulance driver during the First World War.
However, her war experience was not altogether different from that of Duchamp. What is often
overlooked is the fact that Stein spent a great part of the Great War living in neutral locations
outside France (first as a guest of the Whiteheads in England, and then as part of the refugee
culture in Palma de Mallorca), returning to Paris in the later stages of the conflicts. The war
aesthetics of Duchamp and Stein during the 1910s are poised within their similar geographic
retreats. Their approaches to the Great War did not entirely adhere to the anarchistic nihilism of
the Dada movement, the aggressive violence of Futurism, or the Cubist return to neo-classicism.
Despite being as deeply affected by the war as other European-based artists, neither Duchamp
nor Stein bid a grand ‘adieu’ to the prewar years, nor, like T.S. Eliot in Britain, did they
dramatically brood upon the devastation they had witnessed.
Although this project spans both World Wars, the 1930s and 1940s are of primary
importance, as it was during this later period that the war aesthetics of Stein, Duchamp, and
Beckett came to maturation. By the Second World War, the avant-garde scene had shifted from
Paris to New York City. Charles Henri Ford, editor of the influential View magazine in the
1940s, made this perfectly clear:
I’ve said before that nothing inspiring was happening in New
York. Everything was Paris, so I picked up on Paris when that was
the avant-garde really. Because there was Cocteau, there were the
surrealists. All that was prewar. What was happening in New
York? Nothing...everything was happening in Paris.
9
“Everything was Paris,” Ford reminisced, but “[a]ll that was prewar.” He was not the only one to
think that the Parisian scene was in a state of decline; Andre Breton, writing a brief testimonial
on Duchamp’s work in 1945, used the words “obsolete and vain” to describe the “greater part of
recent artistic production (including what could be revealed in America of Paris wartime artistic
14
activity).”
10
During the interwar period, a majority of French artists, including Breton, developed
a political consciousness shaped by their commitment to Marxist doctrine. During the 1920s, the
Surrealist movement aligned itself with the French Communist Party. However, once the horrors
of Stalin came to light, Surrealism and the wider intellectual culture in France distanced itself
from the Communist Party in favor of earlier forms of Marxism (Breton, for his part, spent time
in Mexico and became a Trotskyite). As Raymond Spiteri and Donald LaCross perceptively
note, the political ambivalence of the Surrealist movement did not detract from its ability to take
action:
On the one hand, the Surrealists attempted to engage in ‘politics’:
they issued tracts and statements on current political crises, sought
out radical political groups that appeared sympathetic to their goals
and objectives, and even constituted groups such as Conre-Attaque
(1935-36) with the deliberate aim of participating in political
action. On the other hand, Surrealism was unwilling to forsake
‘the political’, which for Surrealism may best be described as an
experience of freedom grounded in the imaginative possibilities
revealed through creative endeavor.
11
In the postwar decades, intellectuals in France developed their own interpretations of Marxist
thinking, placing themselves in the position of identifying the equal threats of Stalinism, Western
imperialism, capitalism, and totalitarianism – in sum, rhetoric of the individual versus society.
Breton, a committed Marxist, could very well have judged Duchamp’s apolitical, capitalist-
friendly aesthetic to be just as “obsolete and vain” as the work of his contemporaries; instead,
like most artists in France of the younger generation, he worshipped Duchamp as a legendary
figure of Paris’s avant-garde past. Duchamp, although French and not considered an outsider,
was not considered as an active member of the political landscape.
From 1940 until the Liberation in 1944, Paris became the administrative center of the
German Occupied Zone, or the zone occupée. Since the groundbreaking historical work of
15
Robert Paxton – an American scholar who in the 1970s rocked French intellectual circles by
going into German archives to debunk commonly accepted Occupation myths of German
oppression and massive underground opposition – there have been many revisionary histories
written in France about the Vichy era. For some time in Paris, many such books have been
featured in major libraries as part of their displays of recent publications (it is not uncommon for
major bookstores in Paris, such as La Hune at the Place Saint-Germain des Prés, to have tables
dedicated to new publications about the Vichy regime) – not to mention the work that has been
done in film in the last twenty years, most notably Claude Chabrol’s epic 1993 documentary
L’Oeil de Vichy. What these archive-based studies and first-person accounts have arrived upon is
that the categories of resistance and collaboration – a dichotomy especially germane to scholarly
discussions of Beckett and Stein – present a terribly inaccurate picture of Occupied France. The
French government, for example, took actions against Resistance activists but also hunted and
prosecuted German spies in the South of France.
12
Robert Paxton’s description of public opinion during the Vichy years merits quoting at
length:
After the midsummer of 1941, most Allied successes seemed in
France to involve French losses. First, there was the British
invasion of Syria in June 1941 and the loss of that area of ancient
French influence to the ancient colonial rival. Franco-British
conflicts at sea over the blockade reached their peak in the spring
and summer of 1941. The Allies could be blamed for food and fuel
shortages. On 3 March 1942 the bombing began, with a raid on the
Renault works in the Paris suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt that
caused a large number of civilian casualties. Between the blockade
and the bombing, it was clear that hostility to Britain was
increasing no less than hostility to Germany in 1942. . .
Under these conditions, response to Gaullism was even less
enthusiastic in 1941 and 1942 than it had been in 1940. . .
16
The United States, too, supplier of food and possible arbiter to end
the war, lost some of its appeal to neutralist French opinion after it
also became a belligerent in December 1941.
Public opinion, then, offered a broad basis of acquiescence within
which active participation in the Vichy regime was made
legitimate.
13
The French public was more concerned with the general question of war than the specific
policies of the Nazi regime. Between collaboration and resistance there were countless shades of
gray, as seen in the case of Jean Paulhan who had been displaced as the editor of La Nouvelle
Revue française by the pro-fascist Pierre Drieu la Rochelle. Paulhan was one of the few early
activists of the Resistance, and later he teamed up with Sartre in publishing anti-German political
tracts – but this didn’t prevent him from encouraging writers to publish in the NRF simply
because he wanted it to flourish, even though after the war involvement with the NRF was
deemed a collaborationist activity. One of the most powerful stigmas of French culture in the
postwar period – collaboration – was a hopelessly ambiguous concept.
During the Occupation, De Gaulle called his supporters the ‘Free French.’ In actuality, a
rhetorical crisis surrounded the Resistance and De Gaulle’s movement was far from a massive
mobilization. Paxton has noted that “the number of active Résistants was never very great, even
at the climactic moment of the Liberation.”
14
Moreover, “[i]t was with an act of assassination
that active resistance first thrust itself upon French public consciousness.”
15
With this act, the
shooting of a naval cadet on a subway platform on August 21, 1941, “active resistance to the
German occupation stepped upon the stage firmly linked to the Bolshevik menace.”
16
The French
public, still shell-shocked by World War I and disgusted by the horrors of technological warfare,
at large supported the Vichy regime not out of direct sympathy for the Nazis, but “an instinctual
commitment to public order as the highest good,”
17
a deep desire to minimize violence and
17
uphold peace within France. In November 1942, “a return to war was no more palatable to many
Frenchmen than before...the values and priorities that had recommended the armistice in June
1940 seemed more compelling than ever”
18
– the fact that this sentiment remained in late 1942
when the Vichy regime was enacting some of its strictest anti-Semitic laws reveals that
“instinctual commitment to public order” reached a level of utter myopia. Pétain’s rhetoric can
be summarized by the phrase that he recycled repeatedly, to “keep France from becoming a
battleground.”
19
The pacifist propaganda of Vichy was regarded as the country’s official stance
during the war,
20
and the unmasked Bolshevism of early activists often cast the Resistance itself
as Communist terrorism – de Gaulle’s broadcast’s from London were not as openly received
within the French population as previously thought.
During the Occupation, what remained of the once-burgeoning literary scene in Paris fell
mainly within three general categories, represented by the famous examples of Céline,
Nemirovsky, and Sartre respectively: pro-Vichy (and often anti-Semitic) writings, accounts of
tragic persecution, and the littérature engagée of résistants. “There is a sort of link today
between journalism and literature that is, I believe, rather new”; such was Sartre’s vision of
“committed literature” as he described it in his radio address at the end of World War II. “If, as
Camus would say, the world were not absurd, the literature of the Resistance would by rights be
the best of that era,” but, Sartre concluded, “in the end it amounts to relatively little.”
21
Sartre, no
different than Breton, felt that the avant-garde spirit had become “obsolete”; he advocated for a
literary culture grounded in radical politics and radical aesthetics, declaring that “literature in
sum has a stake in democracy.”
22
Purposefully echoing Enlightenment rhetoric,
23
Sartre declared
that intellectuals should be “both committed and metaphysical.”
24
18
Stein, Beckett, and Duchamp developed aesthetic resistances to the Nazi Occupation
which never took the shape of ‘the’ Resistance. It was within the political climate of Vichy
France that Beckett wrote Watt, Duchamp assembled for the first time his portable museum, La
Boîte-en-valise, and Stein composed wartime texts including Wars I Have Seen, Mrs. Reynolds
25
and Brewsie and Willie. Beckett risked his life as a Free French operative, but his efforts were
decidedly un-literary; he never joined Sartre and other intellectual résistants in the pursuit of
“committed literature.”
26
Oddly enough, the famously detached Duchamp created various works
with overt references to the conflicts; his cover for the 1945 edition of View magazine, appearing
in New York City at the height of the war craze, featured a smoking wine bottle with his World
War I military service card displayed as the label. How Stein survived the war in France as a
well-known avant-gardist of Jewish background is still a topic of great controversy; recent
scholarship has focused on her long-suppressed history with the Vichy regime, including her
relationship to Bernard Faÿ and her translations of the speeches of Philippe Pétain.
Chapter Overview
I begin this study with a careful examination of Duchamp’s war aesthetics. Duchamp, of
course, rejected Sartre’s model of littérature engagée; as he told his interviewer, Pierre Cabanne,
in the 1960s, “That’s the danger in Paris. They want you to sign petitions, to get involved,
engagé, as they say.”
27
However, his apolitical stance does not amount to an ahistorical
indifference. In the first chapter, I focus on La Boîte-en-valise (“The Box in a Suitcase”), the
‘portable museum’ dating from the 1940s containing ‘original’ reproductions of his own works.
Scholars have not yet discussed the connection between the 1945 “Duchamp” edition of View
magazine, published in New York City at the height of the war, and La Boîte-en-valise. La Boîte-
en-valise is symbolic of the political pressures that had closed in around him during the Two
19
World Wars. In response to such pressures, Duchamp manipulated the commercial art market,
using the process of self-commodification as an ironic means to achieve his ambivalent distance
from wartime politics.
Duchamp’s disillusionment with wartime culture sets the foundation for my comparison
of the early war aesthetics of Duchamp and Stein. In the second chapter, I move back in time to
the 1910s, placing Stein’s prose poem “Guillaume Apollinaire” alongside Duchamp’s readymade
Apolinère Enameled, created in 1913 and 1916 respectively. These works allow me to examine
how Duchamp and Stein responded to Apollinaire’s French patriotism and avant-garde culture in
Paris circa the First World War. Through Apollinaire, I illustrate how their techniques of
abstraction negotiate the conflicting impulses of prewar nostalgia and avant-garde mobilization.
Within the scope of this study, I position Stein as a war artist who belongs alongside the
politically ambivalent examples of Duchamp and Beckett. I compare her provocative, yet
oblique, political rhetoric as shades of Duchampian paradox and Beckettian absurdity. The
chapters of this study are arranged accordingly: the second chapter examines Stein’s early war
aesthetics in relation to Duchamp, followed by a third chapter which places Stein alongside
Beckett within the contexts of the Nazi Occupation. The third chapter focuses on Stein’s Wars I
Have Seen and Beckett’s Watt, both initiated in 1943, in order to examine their similar
preoccupations with the wartime domestic sphere.
It is within the third chapter that I address the controversies surrounding Stein’s political
leanings. With the publication in 2012 of Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ,
and the Vichy Dilemma,
28
Barbara Will’s meticulous study of the Stein-Faÿ relationship, there
has been much renewed interest in Stein’s relationship to the Vichy regime. Although Will is
careful not label Stein as a Nazi collaborator, her study has had the unfortunate effect of
20
propagating misunderstanding about Stein’s Vichy activities. When the exhibition “The Steins
Collect” was moved to the Met in 2012, the museum was asked to mention Stein’s
“collaborationist activities” (a request the museum subsequently denied, but not without making
some concessions).
29
According to Emily Greenhouse of The New Yorker, “The Met agreed on
Wednesday to add a few sentences to the text on the wall, and to direct patrons to Barbara Will’s
Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma.” Greenhouse
reported Will’s comments for the article as follows:
Will pointed out that the exhibit focusses [sic] on art collected
before the First World War. Though, “if one asks how and why
this art survived the war,” and “specifically, the art in Gertrude’s
collection—then the issue of Gertrude Steins’s Vichy
commitments becomes very important indeed. Why was Stein’s
apartment, where most of the art was stored, left undisturbed
during the war? The only firm answer we have—with documented
proof—is that Bernard Faÿ kept his eye on the apartment and
intervened when it looked like the seals on the doors were going to
be broken and the Nazis were going to seize the art works.”
Renate Stendhal, Charles Bernstein, Joan Retallack, and Perloff are among the scholars who
have come to Stein’s defense. As Stendhal writes:
The suspicious questioning of how Stein and Toklas were able to
survive the war as Jews reveals a considerable ignorance of the
conditions in Vichy and Occupied France, and a troubled
confusion of France with Germany. In Germany, half of the
German Jews were trapped after 1938, and almost every one of
them was murdered. In France, three quarters of the Jewish
population survived in the same way Stein and Toklas did, with the
help of friends and neighbors, and often with the help of local
French officials who quietly resisted German orders.
Stendhal’s point that Stein and Toklas survived no differently from the rest of the French
population is an important one. I would also add that Stein’s enthusiasm for Pétain was also quite
common; in the first year of the Occupation, French citizens, grown frustrated with the
21
irreparably dysfunctional Third Republic, showed gratitude for the armistice and the appointment
of Pétain to the government – Mitterrand, a future French president, supported Pétain’s
administration the beginning of the Vichy regime, as did Roosevelt’s administration in the
United States.
30
Throughout the Occupation, Pétain was largely considered a hero not to be
blamed for the atrocities committed by the Germans or his own Vichy government.
31
Many
French citizens were anti-German
32
while remaining fully supportive of Pétain and his National
Revolution
33
; such was the paradox of the Vichy government.
34
Rather than approach Stein
through the lens of her conservatism, fascist leanings, and her hotly debated relationship to
Bernard Faÿ – those flowers of friendship would bloom in her later career – I defend Stein’s
wartime aesthetics as a radical rhetorical practice, a Beckettian mode of paradox and constraint
which dismantles the ideological coherence of political dogma.
As for Beckett, he has always been perceived as something of an apolitical activist; as
Knowlson observes, many “have written about his lack of political involvement after the Second
World War” but “his engagement in the struggle against Nazism cannot be challenged.”
35
Beckett’s reaction to the political upheaval in France in the early 1960s is a case in point: he
went through great lengths to help his friends Jérôme Lindon, Roger Blin and Jean Martin who
were being threatened with violence and legal prosecution for protesting the French army’s
torture practices in Algeria. Beckett had already helped prevent the seizure of Henri Alleg’s
banned book on the topic by convincing friends to hide copies of it in their apartments. When the
“Manifeste des 121” was circulated in support of Lindon, “Beckett once again showed himself
willing to help directly by sending the text...to John Calder...and to Harold Hobson, intending
that they should sign it.”
36
“[I]n addition to the moral support and the practical steps that he took
to back Lindon,” Knowlson recounts, “Beckett worried constantly about the personal safety of
22
his friend and his family” and “[h]e probably also helped Roger Blin financially at this time, as
he did on a number of other occasions.”
37
However, Beckett never signed the “Manifeste des
121”; such a gesture simply “was not worth the risk involved” since it would have put him in
danger of deportation.
38
“He considered himself an Irishman who should not take up an official
public position on what did not concern him directly” – a moral pragmatism set apart from
political ideologies.
The final chapter focuses upon Beckett’s relationship to the French New Wave and
Nouveau Roman movements following the Second World War. I explore Beckett’s translation of
Robert Pinget’s radio play La Manivelle (The Old Tune). Scholars have not yet noted that The
Old Tune, which features two aged veterans of the First World War, may be interpreted as a
direct parody of Waiting for Godot. This obscure piece for radio, I argue, reflects a fundamental
rift between Beckett, whose imagination seemed caught within memories of the war, and the
forward-looking momentum of the postwar generation.
Made in France attempts to provide a new perspective about the political identities of
Beckett, Stein, and Duchamp – a better understanding of how their war aesthetics subvert the
ethos of political engagement surrounding them as they worked alongside the revolutionary
avant-garde.
23
NOTES
1. Marcel Duchamp, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp (New York: Da Capo Press, 1971;
reprint, 1987), 85.
2. As we already know from the extensive Duchamp criticism, works such as Fountain
and Tender Buttons uniquely reject figurative as well as symbolic meaning; Marjorie Perloff
calls this a “refusal of metaphor,” a turn away from “the figure of similarity, of analogy, of
likeness.” Recently, Perloff has explored a number of connections between Duchamp and Stein
critics have tended to overlook, including Stein’s portrait of Duchamp, called “Life and Letters
of Marcel Duchamp,” along with Duchamp’s little-known translation of a segment of Stanzas in
Meditation. Through her investigations of these works, Perloff comes to the conclusion that
“[Stein’s] compositions resemble Duchamp’s ‘objects’ in their wholesale rejection of the
mimetic contract” – “a rejection,” she explains, that “goes well beyond Cubist distortion and
dislocation of what are, after all, still recognizable objects and bodies.” “A Cessation of
Resemblances: Stein/Picasso/Duchamp,” The Battersea Review 1, no. 1 (2012),
http://marjorieperloff.com/stein-duchamp-picasso/a-cessation-of-resemblances-stein-duchamp-
picasso/.
3. See in particular Jessica Berman, “Steinian Topographics: the Making of America,” in
Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism, and the Politics of Community (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001), 157-178.
4. There is a vast amount of scholarship on Stein and the Vichy years. Barbara Will has
published a useful article of Stein’s translations of Pétain (“Lost in Translation: Stein’s Vichy
Collaboration,” Modernism/modernity 11, no. 4 (November 2004): 651-668) and since then has
released a book on Stein’s relationship with Fäy. Ulla Dydo’s Gertrude Stein: the Language that
Rises offers information pertaining to the Occupation, particularly Stein’s relationship to Bernard
Faÿ. Dana Cairns Watson’s Gertrude Stein and the Essence of What Happens pays particular
attention to Stein’s critique of totalitarianism and aesthetics of resistance in Mrs. Reynolds.
5. When Stein’s translation project was discovered in the Beinecke archives in the 1990s,
there was a flurry of scholarly activity surrounding Stein’s politics; writing at the peak of these
debates in 1996, Marianne DeKoven noted that “current controversy and critique call [Stein’s]
politics into question, especially the racial-ethnic-religious-national politics of both her work and
her life.” Marianne DeKoven, A Different Languag : Gertrude Stein’s Experimental Writing
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 471.
6. When Cabanne pursued the topic further, asking “What do you think of Charles de
Gaulle?” Duchamp’s response was simple: “I don’t think about him any more.” As dismissive as
these remarks may seem, Duchamp’s choice of words – “I don’t think about him any more” –
implies that there was a time when he did think about de Gaulle. He ends his remarks, in fact,
with surprising insight: “There were times when he [de Gaulle] was a hero, but heroes who live
too long are doomed to a downfall,” adding quite perceptively, “That happened to Pétain.” With
24
his typically detached sense of irony, Duchamp implies that de Gaulle’s handling of the Algerian
war tarnished his reputation as a Resistance hero, just as Pétain’s leadership during the
Occupation destroyed his reputation as the hero of Verdun – radical and topical, to be sure, but
his commentary falls short of making a political commitment. See Dialogues With Marcel
Duchamp, 102-103.
7. Marcel Duchamp, Affect. Marcel: The Selected Correspondence of Marcel Duchamp,
ed. Francis Naumman and Hector Obalk (Ghent-Amsterdam: Ludion Press, 2000), 64.
8. Ibid., 65.
9. Charles Henri Ford, Bomb 18 (Winter 1987),
http://bombsite.com/issues/18/articles/868.
10. André Breton, “Lighthouse of the Bride,” in View, Parade of the Avant-Garde: An
Anthology of View magazine (1940-1947), ed. Charles Henri Ford (New York: Thunder’s Mouth
Press, 1991), 121. This comment was no doubt aimed at Breton’s sometime rival Jean Cocteau –
Cocteau was very productive during the war, producing some of the era’s most popular ‘escapist’
works.
11. Raymond Spiteri and Donald LaCross, Introduction, Surrealism, Politics and Culture,
edited by Raymond Spiteri and Donald LaCross (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 9.
12. See Bertram M. Gordon, “Pétain, Vichy, and the Hunt for Nazi Spies: Another
View,” Society for French Historical Studies (April 21, 2006), http://www.h-
net.org/~diplo/reports/SFHS2006/SFHS_Gordon_Paper.pdf.
13. Robert Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944 (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2001), 239-240. Emphasis mine.
14. Ibid., 294.
15. Ibid., 292.
16. Ibid., 292.
17. Ibid., 286.
18. Ibid., 288.
19. Ibid., 289.
20. The Vichy regime made rampant use of pacifist rhetoric. In November 1942, at the
height of the Occupation, General de la Port du Theil wrote the following in the periodical
25
Chantiers de la jeunesse: “Violence leads to nothing durable. No outsider will help us for our
own reasons: a dangerous illusion fostered by softness and lethargy of too many Frenchmen.
Only we can make some place for ourselves in the Europe which will have to be reconstructed
some day. Whatever way you turn the problem, there are peoples of 30 to 80 millions who
cannot simply be removed from the map or reduced to slavery without sowing the causes of
future wars.” As cited in Robert Paxton, Vichy France, 288.
21. Jean-Paul Sartre, Radio-Canada, Montreal, March 10, 1946, in Collaboration and
Resistance, ed. Olivier Corpet and Claire Paulhan (Five Ties Publishing, 2010), 351-352.
22. Sartre, Radio-Canada, Collaboration and Resistance, 353.
23. The Marquis de Condorcet, one of the grand French philosophes, had written in the
late 18th century that “progress in politics and political economy was caused primarily by the
progress in general philosophy and metaphysics,” referring of course to thinkers such as Locke,
Leibniz, Voltaire and Montesquieu. He believed it was because “[t]his metaphyscial method
became virtually a universal instrument” that men were able to appreciate the notion of liberty
and unite in the cause of revolution.
24. Sartre, Radio-Canada, Collaboration and Resistance, 353.
25. I have seen no evidence that suggests that Stein took the name of Mrs. Reynolds
character from Duchamp’s partner, Mary Reynolds, who volunteered as a Resistance fighter.
However, the fact they were both American women who chose to remain in France during the
Occupation makes for a fascinating connection.
26. Perloff argues that Beckett’s aesthetic comes from the lived history of the
Occupation, rather than his universal response to the terrors of the Holocaust as Adorno so
famously suggested; “Adorno’s reading of the Beckett text as symptomatic of a doomed
capitalist culture,” Perloff writes, “reduces the text to a level of abstraction similar to that found
in the readings of Mayoux or Bentley. The Beckett character as victim of capitalist
commodification: it is an image too universal to be useful.” Beckett’s historical references – the
mention of the Pyrenées in Godot, as a single example – are never irretrievably oblique. See
Perloff, “In Love With Hiding: Samuel Beckett’s War.”
27. See Dialogues With Marcel Duchamp, 103.
28. Emily Greenhouse, “Gertrude Stein and Vichy: The Overlooked History,” The New
Yorker, May 4, 2012, http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/05/gertrude-stein-
vichy-regime-the-met.html.
29. Museum officials made slight changes to the text of “The Steins Collect” and offered
Will’s book for sale, however, they did not mention Stein’s relationship to the Vichy regime
within the exhibit itself.
26
30. On January 21, 1941, when U.S. Ambassador Leahy met with Admiral Darlan, the
most prominent member of the Vichy administration next to Pétain, he commented that Darlan
was a “well-informed, aggressive, courageous naval officer” – well into the first year of the
German Occupation, American concern with France was limited to “assurances that fleet and
empire would remain neutral.” Historical studies have indicated that this was most likely the
reason why Hitler did not acquisition any of the French fleet when he signed the armistice with
Pétain – French neutrality was one of Hitler’s most successful military strategies, a stronghold
marking the height of his success in the war. See Paxton, Vichy France, 112.
31. Even when other key figures in the French government were blamed for collaboration
with the Germans, Pétain himself was generally not associated with these acts; “[t]he most
striking feature of public opinion about Vichy was the clear distinction most people drew
between Pétain and his ministers.” Paxton, Vichy France, 235.
32. Archives show that clandestine Resistance publications featured quotations from
Pétain as late as 1942.
33. One of the many results of this National Revolution was the construction of France’s
public transportation system, the RATP.
34. “A few highly placed figures [in the Vichy government] began to join the Allied
cause after November 1942”; their strong resistance against Germany in North Africa shows how
“a large number of loyal Vichy officers and civil servants switched to the Allied side in perfect
legality and without abandoning the National Revolution.” See Paxton, Vichy France, 282-283.
35. James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove
Press, 1996), 440.
36. Ibid., 441.
37. Ibid., 442.
38. Ibid., 442.
27
CHAPTER 1
ÉLOIGNEMENT: MARCEL DUCHAMP AND THE AESTHETICS OF WAR
Figure 3. Detail of La Boîte-en-valise
de l’ensemble: Mur de l’atelier André Breton 1935 / 1941 / Série B, assemblée pendant la guerre
à New York par Joseph Cornell, Xenia Cage et Patricia Matta. Pompidou Research Archives.
Photograph by Alexandra Perloff-Giles.
“MADE IN FRANCE”: in one of the versions of Marcel Duchamp’s La boîte-en-valise
this phrase appears, in English, placed at the back of his sheets of puns by what seems to be a
standard inked stamp. La boîte-en-valise (translated as ‘The Box in a Suitcase,’ or ‘The Box in a
Valise’) dates from the mid-1930s
1
when Duchamp began creating miniatures of his own works
which later were collected inside a display case he called a ‘portable museum.’ These boxes,
assembled by Duchamp and by others under his direction, came out in several series from the
1940s through the 1960s, including a limited edition ‘deluxe’ version containing a unique work
of art created by the artist himself. Critics have approached the Box as a closed Duchampian
network, his way of establishing a system of display independent of museum-based
institutionalization. “Gathering his objects around him,” Jerrold Seigel claims, “he took up
28
residence in his own kind of Rousselian locus solus, an enclosure beyond time and space whose
contents were all illuminated by the intricate logic of his imagination.”
2
According to most
scholars, the importance of the reproductions rests mainly in their relative placement within the
Box (Fountain, for example, holding a place of eminence next to the Large Glass
3
), and in the
way each replica refers back to its ‘original.’
4
Since the collection consists of copies of works
already familiar to us, this ‘portable museum’ is often treated like a readymade rather than the
box that it is; while his other boxes (the Green Box of 1934 and the White Box of 1917, for
example) need to be opened and their contents read, the Box (similar to the Stieglitz image of
Fountain) is often analyzed through staged photographs depicting its overall display.
5
Figure 4. La boîte-en-valise (Box in a Valise), 1936/1968. Paris (1936) – New York (1941).
A cardboard box covered in red leather containing miniature replicas of works, 69 photos, and
painting facsimiles or reproductions, glued onto black folders. Red leather, cardboard, red fabric,
paper, rhodoid (or mica). Dated in 1968. Signature inside the box on the red fabric: Marcel
Duchamp. On the back: of or by MARCEL DUCHAMP / or / RROSE SELAVY.
© Succession Marcel Duchamp / Adagp, Paris 2007.
29
This “MADE IN FRANCE” stamp is an example, however, of how these representative
images of La boîte-en-valise are in a certain sense misleading. The Box hinges between the logic
of reproduction and the original work of art; its components were crafted through advanced
printing and construction techniques, such as collotype, which allowed each ‘copy’ to be unique.
Compared to the readymades, which exist in identical copies, this poses a unique kind of
challenge: one can either physically examine a single example at a time, missing what is unique
to other versions, or refer to photographs of different versions (as in Ecke Bonk’s incredibly
expansive study), creating an endless chain of reproduction. Thus, the Box seems to resist
museum culture by overwhelming the traditional mechanisms of documentation and display –
but, ironically enough, this ‘portable museum’ was more mobile, and was perhaps even more
resistant to institutionalization, in its pre-assembled state. Duchamp wrote to Walter Pach that his
reproductions were constantly at his disposal, ready for assembly if and when a purchase was
made; thus, the Box was neither “ready-made” nor “definitely unfinished”
6
but, it seems, a
product always ‘ready-to-be-finished.’ This, I think, is the crucial aspect of La boîte-en-valise:
despite its apparent autonomy, every photograph of it serves as an historical document, tied to a
particular moment of exchange.
The seemingly hermetic universe of the Box was constructed, I shall argue, not simply to
resist the institutionalization of Duchamp’s art, but to respond more generally to the historical
pressures that had slowly closed in on his aesthetic. This study will build upon the work of T.J.
Demos and Dalia Judovitz, who have already challenged traditional interpretations of the Box as
an ahistorical realm. As they both discuss (and, as this “MADE IN FRANCE” stamp reminds
us), the German Occupation of France is intimately tied to the story of the Box’s inception.
7
Duchamp left for Arcachon about a month before Hitler’s army arrived in Paris, leaving behind
30
the reproductions he had been working on since the mid 1930s. Posing as a cheese merchant in
order to gain an Ausweis, the Marchand du sel (to use one of the puns on his name that he loved
so much) turned himself into a marchand du fromage in order to smuggle these pieces into the
unoccupied zone, eventually putting them on a boat with Peggy Guggenheim’s recent art
acquisitions.
But it is the mobility of the Box – its very ability to escape institutional and political
pressures – which emphasizes the wartime conditions in which it was created. Demos has
explored how new technologies of reproduction (with particular emphasis on photography) were
aligned with modernist anxieties of displacement, and he illustrates how various artists of the
entre-guerres period developed aesthetics of mobility and travel that resisted fascist emphasis on
home and nation. He argues that Duchamp was an extreme case within this panorama of exile,
and in his careful study of the political contexts of Duchamp’s later work, he points out that
“[t]his redefinition of homelessness suggests why it was only in 1941, in the state of
displacement, that Duchamp first conceived of placing the Box in a leather suitcase.”
8
Like
Demos, Judovitz has approached the political dimension of Duchamp’s work primarily through
his allusions to travel. She describes the Box as a work “[m]arked by traumatic dislocation”
which “affirms the vulnerability of art in the face of catastrophic change.”
9
According to
Judovitz, the Box should be understood “not just as mere replication of his past works, but as a
new strategy for making that can no longer be assimilated to art”; Duchamp turned to
craftsmanship as an “affirmation of freedom”
10
that allowed him to continue “making” despite
the fact he faced an epic scale of trauma, a war that had completely dissolved traditional notions
of art as refuge.
31
In this chapter I will further explore how the geopolitical forces of World War II
influenced Duchamp’s artistic practice. The art market provided an absurdly welcoming refuge
of indifference where artistic value relied neither on ideological nor aesthetic meaning; here I
will discuss how the Box uses commodification as a parodic ‘solution’ for achieving aesthetic
autonomy in times of war and political upheaval. It was by adopting the pretenses of the
marketplace that Duchamp, disguised as a cheese seller, was able to retain his typical veneer of
lighthearted detachment throughout his World War II experience. It is no wonder that this
MADE IN FRANCE stamp – a tongue-in-cheek reference to the quality of French-made goods,
or perhaps a nod to Duchamp’s own French-born wit
11
– relates to his typically humorous
methods of self-commodification
12
as well as his complicated resistance to national identity.
13
The unfinished components for La boîte-en-valise, after all, were treated as luxury items
purchased by a wealthy American tourist; by being labeled as ‘household goods,’ they were
easily shipped off to New York City.
The history of La boîte-en-valise is a compelling example of how the commercial
marketplace (and the geographic center of consumerism, the United States) afforded Duchamp a
means of detachment upon which he was able to capitalize throughout his lifetime. This chapter
will explore how Duchamp, at play within the charged atmosphere of 1930s and 1940s France,
created a willed aesthetic that resisted the dichotomy of political/apolitical, bringing forth the
manufactured brand of autonomy to which the Box is testament.
“Hivernage du sang”
After boarding ship with the components for his Box in tow, Duchamp made his easy
voyage to New York City and arrived there in 1942. He was greeted by a burgeoning expatriate
art scene, dominated for the most part by the French surrealists. In 1945, Andre Breton (who was
32
known to admire Duchamp to the point of worship) encouraged View magazine to honor him
with a special retrospective issue. It has not yet been observed that this edition of View magazine
seems to be closely related to La boîte-en-valise; appearing shortly after the first Box was fully
assembled in 1941, it seems that this ‘Duchamp edition’ functions as a companion piece (similar,
one could say, to the relationship between the Large Glass and the 1934 Green Box). View
served the same retrospective function as the Box itself; several of the essays it included had
been written or published years before, such as Breton’s “Lighthouse of the Bride,” and thus
most of its contents could be described as ‘reproductions.’
The essays collected in View, dating all the way back to the 1910s and 1920s, comment
upon Duchamp’s progression from the readymades to the Large Glass, his methods of repetition,
his commitment to craftsmanship, and so forth. In other words, by the mid-1930s when
Duchamp began working on his reproductions, much had already been presumed about the
overall logic of his oeuvre. There is perhaps no better evidence of this than Gabrielle Buffet’s
claim, found in the essay she contributed to View, that the reproductions in the Box “constitute
the best means of investigation for a study of that evolution which, branching off at first only
from the plastic arts, went later beyond the limits of purely aesthetic research and developed
finally into Dada and surrealism.”
14
If Duchamp set up the reproductions in the Box in a manner
that made perfect sense in terms of his artistic “evolution,” then it seems he fulfilled the
imagination of his critics just as much as his own; there is little in this ‘portable museum’ that
had not already been suggested by his admirers. Thus, the Box not only reflected Duchamp’s
personal desire to see his work archived in one place (in his letters, we see that he explicitly
asked for his major pieces to be housed in a single museum), but also his lack of determination to
introduce radically new concepts to critics who had already commented upon the logic of his
33
work as a whole. This is precisely the reason, as I shall soon explain, that View magazine
provides crucial insight into the project of the Box: here we have two complementary archives of
Duchamp’s oeuvre released at the late but important juncture of the Second World War, both of
which reveal his not-so-subtle sleight of hand in treating his own art as a precarious wartime
refuge.
Like the Box, View magazine was available in a limited, special edition. As Ecke Bonk
explains, the issue was offered in “[o]ne hundred numbered copies of a deluxe edition, numbered
and signed by all the contributors”
15
in addition to its regular print run. The “deluxe edition” of
View came with a special cover, for which Duchamp replicated an early, minor readymade called
Pharmacie. Here we have a direct link between View and his ‘portable museum’; the cover was,
as Ecke Bonk describes, “a replica of a replica,” derived “not from the original but from the print
[of Pharmacie] made for the Boîte.”
16
Pharmacie, a dismal drugstore print of a winter scene (to
which Duchamp enigmatically added a green and a red dot), was an interesting choice. It was, in
Duchamp’s terminology, an ‘assisted readymade,’ created in 1914 during his short stay in Paris
during World War I. Considering the timing of View and the Box during the Second World War,
it does not seem a coincidence that Duchamp would pick a somber wartime piece to connect the
two projects. While he could have chosen “Fresh Widow” if he had wanted to allude to the war
more directly, Pharmacie was nonetheless highly resonant with the desperate situation of France;
as Beckett would write in his draft radio broadcast “The Capital of the Ruins,” access to “the
elixirs of Burroughs and Welcome” was a central concern at the time, especially in the war
ravaged sections of the country. And in retrospect, this piece surely reminded Duchamp of the
loss of his brother Raymond, who had served as a soldier and died from typhoid fever in 1916.
17
34
View illustrates, I believe, why it is difficult to understand the late Duchamp without
looking at his own history with the military and his experiences during World War I. In 1905,
when he was only 18 years of age, new legislature was passed in France that required all young
men to join the army; he decided to become trained as an ouvrier d’art, an engraver and
typesetter, in order to reduce his mandated term to only one year. At the outset of World War I,
Duchamp had been summoned for the draft in France but was excused from service due to a
minor heart condition revealed in his physical examination.
18
“J’ai passé le conseil de réforme,”
he wrote to Walter Pach on January 19, “et je suis condamné à rester civil pendant toute la durée
de la guerre. Ils m’ont trouvé trop malade pour être soldat. Je ne suis pas fâché de cette décision:
vous le savez bien.” [“I went through the Medical Board and am doomed to remain a civilian for
the entire duration of the war. They said I was too sick to be a soldier. I am not too unhappy
about this decision, as you’ll well imagine.”]
19
“Doomed to remain a civilian,” he seemed
convinced that he could sit out the war in calm isolation, the Bibliotheque St. Geneviève and his
work there providing the relative peace he needed.
20
He did his best to treat the situation with
levity, insisting that “A Paris, la vie est toujours aussi bête.” [“In Paris, life is still as silly as
ever.”]
21
Despite claiming that he had patiently adapted to wartime Paris – “Moins d’impatience:
une sorte d’hivernage du sang” [“Less impatience, a sort of hibernation of the blood”]
22
as he
described it – it soon became impossible for him to mask the bleakness of his situation. He may
have been indifferent to the rhetoric of war, but he was also keenly aware of the political
situation and the threats it posed. “Toujours la lecture des communiqués de guerre 2 fois par
jour” [“Still reading war communiqués twice a day”]
23
he wrote to Walter Pach on January 19.
Checking these updates twice per day must have posed a significant strain, knowing that his two
35
brothers were in the trenches; he reveals his detailed knowledge of their whereabouts by telling
Pach that his brother Jacques “est toujours vers Amiens” and more precisely “au repos. c-à-d. à
20 km. en arrière des tranché,” while Raymond “est toujours à St Germain.” As the war dragged
on he began to see that life was no longer “aussi bête”; it was impossible, in Paris, to wait out the
conflicts with any kind of disinterested ease. “De la guerre, des nouvelles insignifiantes. Pas
d’avance importante, pas de recul. Un équilibre désespérant” [“About the war, no important
news. No significant steps forward, or backwards. An exasperating equilibrium”]
24
he wrote to
Pach on April 2. He spent only a few short months in France during the First World War before
deciding he would leave for New York. “Hivernage du sang” indeed.
It has already been suggested that Duchamp, despite his disengagement with
contemporary affairs, was profoundly influenced by these early experiences. In research
conducted for Tate Papers, Kieran Lyons has created an impressive history of Duchamp’s
military influences; one of the best examples comes from the iconic “Chocolate Grinder,” which,
Lyons reminds us, uses the handle of an épée-baïonette (the turn of the century standard issue
bayonette for the French army) as its axis.
25
View, then, can be described as a late example of
Duchamp’s tendency to weave military references into his work. In addition to coming up with
the Pharmacie frontispiece for the “deluxe edition” of the magazine, he also designed the cover
for the regular edition. As with “Chocolate Grinder,” the army reference is hidden in plain sight:
the cover depicts a smoking wine bottle, with Duchamp’s pre-World War I military service
certificate used as the label.
36
Figure 5. Marcel Duchamp, front cover for View magazine, vol. 5, no. 1 (March 1945).
© 2000 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS/N.Y., ADAGP/Paris.
37
Here we have a symbol of French culture as smoking gun, with a Certificat de bonne
conduit emblazoned upon it, appearing in New York City – an epicenter of refugee artists – at
the height of World War II. In the photograph used for this cover design, the wine label is set at
an angle, creating a clever reveal-and-conceal effect that allows the military allusion to be
absorbed into Duchamp’s enigmatic universe. The smoke coming out of the bottle makes it seem
as though the cork had just been popped; this phantom sound, like that of a gun or perhaps a
cannon, reinforces the image’s ambiguous reference to the war. The potential violence of this
smoking ‘gun’ is contrasted, however, by the serenity of the ‘Milky Way’ background. Of
course, a political statement can be imposed upon this juxtaposition if one is so inclined; the
smoke escaping into the void could easily symbolize the meaninglessness of war, for example.
But the potentially somber mood of this composition takes another, quite literal, turn when one
flips to the back cover of the magazine, where Duchamp placed the following inscription:
“Quand la fumée de tabac sent aussi de la bouche qui l’exhale, les deux odeurs s’épousent par
infra-mince.”
As if to completely deflect and neutralize any notion of seriousness, this phrase is printed in a
playful typeface; the smoke coming from the bottle becomes equated with “la fumée de tabac,”
and reference to the war is trumped by Duchamp’s silly humor and his conceptual fascination
with the “infra-thin.”
38
Figure 6. Marcel Duchamp, back cover for View magazine, vol. 5, no. 1 (March 1945).
© 2000 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS/N.Y., ADAGP/Paris.
39
Despite this mock seriousness, the cover retains its subtle acknowledgment of the
significance of Duchamp’s military service. Within the magazine there is an article by Peter
Lindamood explaining how Duchamp created the cover; “every hole-boring expert in the glass
manufacturers’ almanacs dampened any hopes of tubing the smoke through the bottle,” he
explains.
26
The article then describes how Duchamp “rigged up a smoke pipe (now invisible)
under the bottle” by “calling upon thirty years of art-plumbing expediency.”
27
What is referenced
here is Duchamp’s reputation as a fine artist who was also a consummate ouvrier d’art, someone
who had pulled off feats such as repairing the Large Glass and constructing his boxes. By
placing his certificate on the cover, he was subtly acknowledging that the military was the reason
he had become an ouvrier d’art in the first place. Right before entering his training, Duchamp
had failed the entrance exam for the Ecole des Beaux-Arts; had he been admitted to this
prestigious École, he would not have qualified for the reduction of military service by becoming
an engraver and typesetter. It seems unlikely that the irony of the situation would have escaped
him.
In any case, Duchamp served his year in the military from 1905 to 1906, and seemingly
gave his time there little to no thought – unless one considers the following note which became
part of his 1914 Box:
Deferment
Against compulsory military service: a “deferment” of each limb,
of the heart and the other anatomical parts; each soldier being
already unable to put his uniform on again, his heart feeding
telephonically, a deferred arm, etc.
Then, no more feeding: each “deferee” isolating himself. Finally a
Regulation of regrets from one “deferee” to another.
40
Here, the machine-based imagery provides a layer of indifference typical of Duchamp, yet his
emphasis on the words “one ‘deferee’ to another” lends suggestive weight. Indeed, the machine
metaphor, far from making light of this battle imagery, heightens the horrific message of this
note: “each soldier being already unable to put his uniform on again,” the fighting nonetheless
continues, leading to severed limbs (“a deferred arm”), and “Then, no more feeding.” Finally, we
have a “Regulation of regrets from one ‘deferee’ to another,” presumably after many of these
soldiers have been injured or killed. Duchamp’s composition can be described as willfully
indifferent, but not entirely neutral – these images of violence, the “deferment” of each limb, the
“instinct which sends men marching out to cut down other men,” reveal a marked revulsion for
militarism and the war.
The cover of View illustrates Duchamp’s acquiescent ambivalence in the face of such
wartime calamity. The certificate of his military service, resurfacing after forty years, was a
subtle reminder that the First World War had shaped the course of his entire artistic career. The
training he received as an ouvrier d’art became one of his defining traits; without his knowledge
of advanced printing and engraving techniques such as collotype, construction of the Large Glass
and his boxes would not have been possible. By referencing his nearly forgotten “compulsory
military service,” the image also served as a slightly sarcastic response to Breton’s efforts to
absorb Duchamp into the Surrealist movement. Not coincidentally, the wine bottle itself was one
he had saved from a dinner with Breton years prior (although Duchamp refused to elaborate on
the importance of this dinner, one can imagine that discussion turned to Surrealism). The cover
of View, then, shows how he equated the military with the various kinds of institutional
entrapment imposed upon the artist, a kind of draft that cannot be avoided.
41
The best expression of this complex attitude of willful indifference comes from the
original French title of the “Deferment” note from the Box of 1914: “Éloignement” – a word that
loses its connotation of ‘distancing’ in its English translation. Demos has also picked up on the
verb s’éloigner as it appears in a letter Duchamp wrote from Buenos Aires. “The French—Je
m’éloigne encore,” Demos writes, “is undoubtedly more suggestive than the English translation,
expressing a distancing of the self and suggesting an internal mobility that travel may bring in its
most transformative capacity.”
28
He also points out that unlike the typical exile, Duchamp
“refused the facile regression to a vicarious home”;
29
well aware that modernist sitelessness was
only an “abstract freedom,” Demos contends, Duchamp “realized that institutional co-optation
and reification were not so easily overcome.”
30
In a situation where war, art, and personal life
were separated only by ‘infrathin’ boundaries, the accomplishment of distance – much easier to
achieve in the geographical sense than the aesthetic one – became an uneasy substitute for
autonomy.
“What an absurd thing such a conception of patriotism is!” These are the words of a
youthful Duchamp being interviewed in 1915 shortly after his arrival in the United States, known
only as “The-Nude-Descending-a-Staircase-Man” to the New York art scene.
31
Still, Duchamp’s
identity as a citizen of a country at war was not one he could easily avoid. Consider, for example,
the following comment from the same interview: “From a psychological standpoint I find the
spectacle of war very impressive. The instinct which sends men marching out to cut down other
men is an instinct worthy of careful scrutiny... Personally I must say that I admire the attitude of
combatting invasion with folded arms.”
32
Thanks to the early support of Walter Pach and the
success of Nude Descending a Staircase at the 1913 Armory Show, Duchamp had arrived in
New York in 1915 as a ‘readymade’ minor celebrity. The painting had been rejected for
42
inclusion in the Salon des Indépendants by his own brothers, only to become a New York
sensation – and here we have Duchamp, freshly arrived in the United States, dismissing the
“instinct” which had sent his brothers “marching out.”
Rather than reflecting Duchamp’s ironic detachment, these comments seem fueled by
frustration; Duchamp’s barbed sarcasm is all too suggestive of his anxiety over the safety of
Raymond and Jacques, among the men in the trenches who could be “cut down.” Indeed,
Duchamp’s tone seems linked to his personal attachments in France as much as his inclination
toward indifference. Looking at war “[f]rom a psychological standpoint” may have made sense
to the American audience to whom he was speaking, for the most part geographically and
emotionally removed from the conflicts, but for him such an impersonal perspective was hardly a
possibility. And, as he would have well known, it was the contrast between his national identity
and his indifference that made his comments newsworthy and slightly controversial. The United
States was still two years away from entering the war, and at this time few Americans would
have described their isolationism as “combatting invasion with folded arms”; by making such a
comment, Duchamp was speaking from the perspective of a French citizen responding to the
anticipated German invasion.
Through his feigned impartiality, Duchamp marked himself as a Frenchman with intimate
ties to the conflicts. He may have spent much of his life avoiding the military and political
affairs, but this avoidance itself would profoundly shape the artistic paths he would take. His
relationship to the war thus follows the same kind of counter-intuitive logic invoked in critical
interpretations of the Box itself. The readymades pose the question “Can one make works which
are not works of ‘art’?” At the same time, the Box acknowledges that the museum is a perfectly
adaptable institution that will eventually absorb art and non-art alike; even copies of non-art will
43
find their way into their own ‘portable museum.’ In other words, resistance and dependence are
always absurdly reconciled.
However, a curious issue remains. If it was indeed impossible to resist the strictures of
national identity and the historical enormity of the war, then how do we explain Duchamp’s
notoriously detached reputation? How does one get away with placing a military service card on
the cover of a magazine during World War II, while maintaining a reputation as one of the most
enigmatic, apolitical artists of the 20
th
century? The answer, I think, lies in Duchamp’s aesthetic
manipulation of the commercial realm of exchange.
“Engagé, as they say”
As historian Robert Paxton has observed of the Vichy years, “[s]ome writers remained
detached, despite the era’s powerful current of engagement.”
33
“The best-attended film of the
period,” Paxton tells us, “was Cocteau’s abstractly modernist resetting of the Tristan/Isolde
legend L’Éternal Retour...A writer or artist could legitimately believe that his or her most
important mission, especially in ugly times, was the pursuit of aesthetic perfection.”
34
On the
other end of the artistic spectrum was Jean-Paul Sartre, who held hope in a politically
‘committed literature,’ what he called littérature engagée; in 1946 he declared there was ‘no
exit’ from a writer’s political responsibility, claiming that “today’s literature offers far fewer
means of escape than the literature of four or five years ago.”
35
Clearly, Duchamp belonged to
neither camp. The Box cannot be categorized as part of the imaginative “escapism” that took
place during the Occupation, and a particular comment Duchamp made nearly twenty years after
the war illustrates how removed he was from the literary résistants: “That’s the danger in Paris,”
he explained to Pierre Cabanne, “They want you to sign petitions, to get involved, engagé, as
they say.”
36
44
Much like his reaction to the first Great War, Duchamp had responded to the outbreak of
the Second World War by giving the impression that he could easily isolate himself, and he
attempted to wait out the political situation with disinterested ease. During that first summer of
the Occupation Duchamp wrote to Walter Arensberg somewhat nonchalantly: “Arcachon est
dans la zone occupée, mais la vie civile continue sans que les Allemands ne s’en mêlent trop…Je
peux même travailler...j’ai un bon imprimeur et j’avance mon album.” [“Arcachon is in the
occupied zone, but civilian life goes on without too much interference from the Germans...I am
even able to work. I have a good printer and am making headway on my album.”]
37
This slack
indifference about the political situation in Europe was atypical for a Frenchman, especially once
the Occupation began, but this attitude was far from being unique to Duchamp. Whether or not
he was consciously doing so, he seemed in this letter to be mirroring the point of view of
Americans, who had not yet involved themselves in the conflicts (indeed, a deliberate parody is
entirely possible, since he was writing to his American patron).
The United States, in fact, had remained notoriously detached from the political situation
in Europe as the Nazis rose to power. An excellent example comes from Lewis Mumford, a
regular contributor to the New Yorker throughout the 1930s. As one of the most popular art
critics in the United States, Mumford – who, it so happens, was also close friends with Alfred
Stieglitz
38
– may have served as a one of Duchamp’s points of reference for his parodies of
consumer culture, most notably for the Box itself. Some years earlier, in one his typically tongue-
in-cheek pieces called “Tips for Travellers,” he wrote:
Despite the Nazis, I understand, some of the public museums in
Germany still show degrading, meaningless, defeatist, foreign,
non-Aryan art. You will probably enjoy it all the more keenly in
such a hostile setting. (In certain circumstances, a bowl of fruit by
Braque might feel like the Statue of Liberty.)
39
45
In Germany, modern art had been removed from museums and the Ministry of Propaganda had
taken over cultural life, imprisoning and banning artists whose work or racial background was
deemed impure.
40
Determined to convince the public of the immoral character of modern
artworks, Hitler later ordered an exhibition of ‘Entartete Kunst’ (Degenerate Art) in Munich in
1937. Through Mumford’s articles, we are given a vivid illustration of how this situation was
perceived from the other side of the Atlantic, where the impending war in Europe seemed a
distant absurdity, taking place far away from home.
In 1936, at the height of his popularity, Mumford published a New Yorker entitled “On
Reproductions.” Thinking back to the economic boom of 1920s when “every well-to-do
American increased the number of bathrooms in his dwelling,” he suggested that “[m]aybe
Marcel Duchamp was a social diagnostician rather than a mischievous playboy when he offered
a toilet bowl for exhibition at the Independent Artist’s Show in 1917.”
41
Americans had become
so crazed with collecting prints that their homes had become overrun with art. Mumford
suggested the following:
The American house must have special print racks and picture
closets and print boxes….To begin with the smallest unit, you must
have a portfolio, and as soon as your collection grows, a box for
holding prints. So far as I have been able to find, there is no box on
the market.”
42
It was around the time of this New Yorker piece that Duchamp decided to create a box (originally
called an “album”) that would contain replicas of his major works. It is uncertain whether or not
he saw this article in which he was mentioned, but it does seem that La boîte-en-valise was
designed to meet a similar need within the commercial market.
However, the Box was certainly not the kind of mass manufactured product that Mumford
imagined, which would have been suitable for storing the work of any artist. Instead of storing
46
worthless commercial prints, the Box seemed similar to a vault housing a valuable collection.
Ecke Bonk has claimed that “Duchamp’s elaborate reproduction process had resulted in
authorized new versions of his most important paintings; and in the cases of Mariée and Nu
descendant un escalier No. 2 the reproductions had been signed and notarized like stock
certificates: the ironic implication is that Duchamp’s ‘equity’ had a new ‘market quotation.’”
43
Duchamp assigned aesthetic ‘equity’ by displaying his readymades in relation to his other major
works; Linda Dalrymple Henderson, echoing the readings of other scholars,
44
has noted that “a
close relationship...exists between the three Readymades mounted vertically in the Box and their
counterparts in the Glass.”
45
Placing the Box in the context of the war, however, I believe it is
more beneficial to follow up on Judovitz’s suggestion that “Duchamp’s commercial
ventures…emerge as mechanisms that reveal the shared social and ideological subtext of both
commercial and artistic exchange.”
46
During the Occupation, the realm of commercial exchange
was far from being detached from the politics of the time – what kind of autonomy, then, was
Duchamp expecting for his own art?
To answer this question one must weigh the complexity of Duchamp’s wartime situation.
It is not entirely certain why he remained in Occupied France for a year and a half – the reasons
were most likely both logistical and lackadaisical – but it is likely that Mary Reynolds, his long-
time partner, delayed his departure. Despite his efforts to convince her to leave the country, she
stubbornly remained in France to work for the Resistance; less than a year after Duchamp left for
New York City, her network (the same as Samuel Beckett’s) was discovered by the Germans and
she was forced to make her escape, by foot, across the Pyrenées. Through his attachment to
Reynolds, one can see much hiding under Duchamp’s blithe attitude toward the war. “I left
France during the war, in 1942, when I would have had to have been part of the Resistance,”
47
he
47
later told Pierre Cabanne. Sarcasm aside, Duchamp’s apolitical stance was in conflict with his
personal sympathies, which, if his desire to remain uninvolved had not been so resolute, would
have led him to work for the Resistance.
Demos’s The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp stands out as the only study that has attempted
an extended theoretical approach to the politico-historical contexts of the war, and within it TJ
Demos has pointed out something of great importance – namely, that issues of nationalism and
exile are most prevalent in the later work. Demos has suggested that “[t]his redefinition of
homelessness suggests why it was only in 1941, in the state of forced displacement, that
Duchamp first conceived of playing the Boîte in a leather suitcase” (39). He also points out a
“striking historical correspondence” between the story of the Boîte and the tragic one of Walter
Benjamin; “on the one hand, there is Duchamp’s suitcase, obsessively filled with reproductions
of his whole life’s work, and on the other, Benjamin’s suitcase, containing complex meditations
on history and homesickness.”
48
He comments that “the coincidence mixes the tragic and the
farcical: the story of Benjamin’s desperate attempt to escape the clutches of the Nazis as a
German Jew in stark contrast to Duchamp’s repeated and even playful masquerades as a cheese
merchant at the Nazi borders.”
49
In comparison to the tragedies that plagued the entire literary
scene of France during these years, Duchamp’s escapades indeed seem “in stark contrast” –
however, the “farcical” nature of his experiences during the war needs to be revisited.
Compared to wartime New York City or even London during the bombings, Occupied
France was a particularly trying climate in which to be an artist. First, there was the paper
commission headquartered in Paris – “composed, of course, entirely of friends of the Germans”
(CR 351) – tasked with rationing limited supplies to publishers during the war years. This cast a
heavy shadow across any publication activities: “to accept to write was to accept his complex
48
and rather sinister system; it was to declare that it was altogether just to submit to being under
the thumb of the paper commission” (CR, 351). In addition to the restrictions set by the paper
commission, the Propaganda-Staffel and Propaganda-Abteilung had been set up in Paris in order
to enact strict censorship laws, including the ‘Otto Lists’ and ‘Bernhard List’ of banned books
and prohibitions against the publication of Jewish authors.
During the years when Duchamp was working on his Box, the artistic climate in France
was growing increasingly intolerant, echoing the discriminatory policies of Nazi Germany; in the
1940s this public sentiment grew more restrictive as the Vichy regime began enforcing an
official system of censorship. SURcenSURE, a lesser known text Duchamp composed in 1939,
relates to this culture of censorship:
Nous approuvons d’avance......
…............qu’il ordonne.............
…........................................ ….
nous sommes convaincus que...
….....inspirés par la plus haute
raison.
[…]
Mais attention!
***
We agree in advance…………….
…………..He commands………..
we are convinced that…………..
………...inspired by the highest
Reason
[…]
But beware!
50
49
Duchamp’s text echoes the style of the popular humor magazine L’Os à Moelle – on December
16, 1938 a few months prior to Duchamp’s composition of SURcenSURE, the magazine
published the following political spoof:
Sensationnelles déclarations du chancelier Hitler
...Dans son cabinet de travail de Berchtesgaden, M. Adolf
Hitler, la mèche toujours souriante, m’accueille.
Et la conversation suivante s’engage:
-
-
-
[. . .]
Nos lecteurs apprécieront comme il convient l’effort
gigantesque que nous avons fait.
Le lumineux exposé du chancelier a dissipé bien des
malentendus, a précisé bien des obscurités, et il n’appelle aucun
commentaire.
***
Sensational declarations of chancellor Hitler
...In his study in Berchtesgarden, M. Adolf Hitler, always
smiling, welcomes me.
And we engaged in the following conversation:
-
-
-
[. . .]
51
L’Os à Moelle was an hebdomadaire founded and run by Pierre Dac, a radio personality who
was the most popular comedian in France in the years leading up to the Second World War.
Designed to resemble the ‘serious’ news and political journals of its day, L’Os à Moelle
contained fictionalized articles, interviews, cartoons and chronicles. Upon its launch, L’Os à
50
Moelle became a sensation of unprecedented proportion, reaching a print run of 400,000 for its
first edition alone. According to the introduction found in the recently published collection of Le
meilleur de L’Os à Moelle, “[c]e défoulement est indiscutablement lié à la peur des Français face
à la montée en puissance de Hitler et des nazis” (5). Published between May 1938 and June
1940, the month of the German takeover of Paris, it is one of the best surviving testaments of
popular sentiment during the years leading up to the Occupation. Given Duchamp’s interest in
humor and periodicals, it is unlikely that he would be unfamiliar with Dac’s satires. In any case,
surCENsure is close in spirit to Dac’s satirical “déclarations du chancelier Hitler”; both pieces
parody tyrannical behavior, reminiscent of Jarry’s Ubu Roi. Duchamp mocks anonymous
reportage (“Nous approuvons d’avance...”) of what seems to be the orders of an unnamed ruler
(“...qu’il ordonne...”). Pierre Dac takes the same tack, providing useless news coverage filled
with aporia (“Et la conversation suivante s’engage...”). Both texts mimic the rants of a tyrant –
“le père Ubu” – suggesting that public discourse has reached the level of parody.
While one would assume that the commercial exchange and public display of art suffered
under the oppressive conditions of Occupied France, nothing could be further from the truth.
With the passage of Hitler’s Möbel-Aktion (Furniture Plan) in 1941, the looting of Jewish homes
flooded the galleries with new acquisitions. In his cultural study of Nazi Occupied France, Alan
Riding explains that “Jewish-owned art of no interest to the Germans was to be sold to benefit
French war widows and orphans,” but “in practice, these works simply fed the booming art
market”; in addition to the sale of confiscated works, Riding tells us, “[t]here was also a good
market for art that had not been stolen from Jews.”
52
The Occupation offered ample
opportunities to artists willing to support national identity; although Vichy policy was generally
biased against modern works of art, the government sponsored exhibitions of avant-garde works
51
perceived as being part of the French tradition. In 1942, the year that Duchamp left for the
United States, the Galerie de France held a Vichy approved retrospective of his brother Jacques
Villon; other artists on display that year included his other brother, Raymond Duchamp-Villon,
who had died for his country, as well as their brother-in-law Jean Crotti.
53
Duchamp’s ambivalence about the war can be detected in “Mile of String,” the
installation he created for the opening of the First Papers of Surrealism, an exhibition which took
place shortly after he arrived in New York City in 1942. “Mile of String” created a web
throughout the gallery that made the artworks virtually inaccessible to visitors; this barrier called
attention to what was supposed to be a neutral, or at least accessible, artistic space. The point,
although light-hearted, seemed to be partially derived from lessons learned during the war. In
addition to posing as a cheese merchant, he had witnessed the panicked attempts by Peggy
Guggenheim to save her newly acquired art collection from the advancing Germans, finally
finding a way to ship them to the States by labeling them as “household items.”
54
It is no wonder
that when Duchamp was asked to create an installation upon his return to New York he thought
of the exhibition space as more surreal than the artworks themselves. The installation provided
symbolic protection from the artificiality, the kitsch effect, of the gallery.
55
By creating reproductions for his Box, Duchamp escaped the politics of display
altogether, working within a neutral realm of commodification more relevant to American
consumer culture than the censored artistic environment of Occupied France. Immediately after
France was defeated, when modern works of art were in danger of being destroyed or confiscated
by the German army or the Vichy regime, Duchamp quickly went about arranging purchases for
Peggy Guggenheim – again, the United States provided his means of escape. However,
Duchamp’s treatment of art as commodity does little to distance his aesthetic from the heated
52
political environment of the Occupation. To the contrary, his reproductions seem to purposely
allude to Vichy rhetoric; as the historian Laurence Dorléac tells us, one of the most convincing
appeals Pétain made to the public during these years was his emphasis on craftsmanship:
The theme of craftsmanship appealed to the majority of the
population, even to certain modern artists nostalgic for the
handmade object.... Consistent with its social and economic policy,
the state hastened to initiate a wide-scale movement in support of
craftsmanship, setting up a vast propaganda campaign as well as
the Ecole des hautes études artisanales. Praise for fine
craftsmanship proliferated.
56
“Although a French artist, Marcel Duchamp, had first sensitized society to the possibility of art
without craftsmanship, foreigners were accused of lowering the standards of art by attracting
attention to ‘what is strange and new’ rather than (by implication) to the beautifully crafted,”
57
writes Michèle Cone. The significance of La boîte-en-valise, then, is that it ironically positions
the readymades within the Vichy ideal of “the handmade object” and “fine craftsmanship” – in
typical Duchampian fashion, he had reconciled a seemingly impossible contradiction.
Even by managing to keep out of the fray and attempting to remain neutral, Duchamp’s
actions during the Occupation were inscribed with significance by those surveying the literary
scene. On a card addressed to Paul Éluard in 1942, the Belgian Surrealist Christian Dotremont
provided a chilling list of several crossed-out names:
Rimbaud (mort)
Lautrèmont (mort)
Breton (Amerique)
And further on:
Simone (disparu)
Duchamp (zone libre)
58
53
Duchamp left for New York City shortly after this list was created, but unlike his escape
to New York (and then Buenos Aires) during World War I, this time his travels would bring him
to the exiled heart of the wartime literary scene – like Breton and a score of French intellectuals
and artists, he went to “Amerique.” Demos has observed that “from the first the readymade
represented a recognition of the acculturation and reification of the art object in the commercial
market. Yet the readymade itself as an artistic object had yet to succumb to its own paradoxical
institutionalization, which opens up to the project of La boîte-en-valise.”
59
Along with the
“paradoxical institutionalization” of the readymade, already quite evident by the 1930s,
Duchamp also had to deal with the paradoxical politicization of his own exiles and methods of
detachment. During the Occupation, Duchamp’s proclaimed indifference – his tendency to seek
out neutral ground – was forced into a political category of its own.
Zone Libre
Despite this seemingly insurmountable pressure placed on Duchamp during both World
Wars, his art has remained almost completely depoliticized. For example, the artist Gianfrance
Baruchello, Jerrold Seigel tells us, was “deeply engaged in radical politics, which made him
resist the suggestion that so apolitical a predecessor [as Duchamp] might have something
important to teach him” (Seigel 235, emphasis mine).
A telling example of this was the 2010 exhibition “On Line: Drawing Through the
Twentieth Century” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Staging nearly three
hundred works from 1897 to 2010, the entire show told a convincing story of the ‘evolution’ of
drawing in modern art, or more specifically, the experimentation and abandonment of drawing
by various 20
th
century avant-gardes. Peter Schjeldahl, in his review for the New Yorker,
described “On Line” as an exhibit that “dramatically tracks a crisis, for artists, that attended
54
collage’s surfeit of liberty” (85). “You feel it nearly at the start,” explained Schjeldahl, “in
Duchamp.” The MOMA exhibit delivered a familiar narrative of “crisis” which places the
readymades at the crux of 20
th
century art; there is perhaps no better evidence of this than
Schjeldahl’s observation that Fountain “is not in the show but haunts it” (85).
To counter the “surfeit of liberty” found in collage, the exhibit pieced together a history
of avant-garde practice in which artists abandoned the expressive line in favor of self-imposed
limits and rules. The exhibit chose to display 3 Standard Stoppages (created by Duchamp when
he supposedly dropped three meter-length strings to the ground and traced their shape exactly as
they fell) in order to illustrate his influence on the avant-garde abandonment of traditional
drawing methods. Duchamp turned art into a game, and in the contexts of this exhibition we are
meant to see that artists such as Richard Tuttle and Agnes Martin are his “apostles of limits,
pinning art down with rigid concepts” (85). These later artists, says Schjeldahl, “no longer
sought freedom,” but instead, “wanted to be bulletproof.” It is precisely this term – ‘bulletproof’
– that provides an apt metaphor for Duchamp’s legacy, reflected continually in criticism that
tends to connect his work of the 1910s and 1920s with the conceptual art movements that began
in the 1950s, skipping over the aesthetic and historical contexts of the wars altogether.
Schjeldahl, when he mentions movements contemporary to the 3 Standard Stoppages such as
Russian Constructivism, states very matter-of-factly that these “[o]ther audacities were political”
(85). Duchamp, seemingly ‘bulletproof,’ seems to live on, looming over an exhibit of works
more contemporary than his own. This creates a biographical artifice, emptied of historical
context, which allows Duchamp to be defined by his independence within the contexts of his
own era so his work can be absorbed within postmodern utterance.
55
Duchamp’s Box invokes a blithe sense of commercialism, when in fact it is a
meticulously constructed aesthetic project that survived the perils of Occupied France. How does
one define such a work? In examining Duchamp’s reproduction methods for his boxes, Marjorie
Perloff has noted that “each image and note was altered by its context.”
60
This suggests, as she
has explained, that “Duchamp understood, of course, that such ‘zero degree’ nominalism could
not exist, that a relationship between a discrete a and b always occurs, whether merely
grammatical (“ate” / “eat”), or temporal.”
61
“In practice,” says Perloff, “nominalism can only
present itself as differential identity, as infrathin.”
62
So fleeting and difficult to manage, such an
aesthetic is akin to “the relation of the noise from the detonation of the bullet and the appearance
of the bullet hole.”
63
It was precisely the background of the wars, I would argue, that diminished
the possibilities of Duchamp’s “differential identity,” reducing the possibilities of the creative act
to an ambivalent space that cannot be defined by escapism, nationalism or resistance. Instead, the
ability to be perceived as apolitical, the ability to create the presumption of being ahistorical,
despite obvious references to the war, became an aesthetic test of the tenuous boundaries of
autonomy. Not quite ‘bulletproof,’ but, going back to the cover of View, where a smoking wine
bottle stands in for a gun, an aesthetic separated by the war only by an “infrathin” boundary.
56
NOTES
1. The dates provided for La boîte-en-valise are inconsistent throughout the scholarship,
resulting from the impossibility of assigning an exact date to the origin of the project. The
Pompidou, for example, provides the dates of 1936-1968 – 1936 being presumably the year that
Duchamp began collecting the reproductions, and 1968 the year that the last box was created.
(http://centrepompidou.fr/education/ressources/ens-duchamp.htm, accessed May 1, 2011). The
Museum of Modern Art in New York City labels its copy with the dates of 1935-1941
(http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=80890, accessed May 1, 2011).
However, in his definitive biography of Duchamp, Calvin Tomkins states that work began not in
1935 or 1936 but “sometime in 1938” (Tomkins, 316). Many other sources provide a date of
1941, the year Duchamp fully assembled the first of the boxes.
2. Jerrold Seigel, The Private Worlds of Marcel Duchamp: Desire, Liberation, and the
Self in Modern Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 233.
3. As Thierry de Duve has explained, La boîte-en-valise “is a monograph on Duchamp’s
oeuvre in its totality, presented as if it were a museum object or a collector’s item. Fountain only
exists as the lost referent of a series of ostensive statements (photograph in the Stieglitz case,
miniatures in that of the Boîte-en-valise, full-size replicas in that of museums)...” (Kant after
Duchamp, 417).
4. According to Martha Buskirk, the reproductions in the Boîte are “stand-ins” which
allowed Duchamp “not only to organize and shape his oeuvre, but also to secure the existence of
the readymades.” “Thoroughly Modern Marcel,” in The Duchamp Effect: Essays, Interviews,
Round Table, ed. Martha Buskird and Mignon Nixon (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996),
194. Dalia Judovitz applies Max Kozloff’s definition of reproduction to La boîte-en-valise,
claiming that its replicas are “a way of ‘demoting the uniqueness of objects’ in order to reactivate
them conceptually.” She goes on to explain that “[t]he reduction in scale of the objects and prints
in The Box in a Valise adds a tactile dimension to what was previously a visual experience,”
thus, they “can no longer be perceived as autonomous objects, but rather as text and texture of an
artistic corpus.” Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1995), 122-123.
5. The work of Rhonda Roland Shearer and Stephen Jay Gould is a notable exception.
Together they have spent much time studying the material history and details of works such as
Apolinère Enameled and the notes of the Green Box, also making a number of interesting
discoveries about the Box. The point they raise is that Duchamp’s claims often contradict
historical and archival evidence. I mention this because the “MADE IN FRANCE” stamp found
in the Box is another example of how material inspection can drastically alter one’s approach to
Duchamp’s work. “Marcel Duchamp: A readymade case for collecting objects of our cultural
heritage along with works of art,” Tout-Fait 1, issue 3 (December 2000).
57
6. These are words Duchamp used to describe his Large Glass, left “definitely
unfinished” in 1923.
7. I discovered this “MADE IN FRANCE” stamp while inspecting an original version of
the Box archived at the Pompidou; I am uncertain whether or not this stamp appears in other
copies within Series B. However, I have compared the Pompidou’s version to an original Box in
the archives at the Getty Center, part of Series C, and I found no evidence of the stamp
whatsoever.
8. T.J. Demos, The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2007),
39.
9. Dalia Judovitz, “Duchamp’s ‘Luggage Physics’: Art on the Move,” Postmodern
Culture 16, no. 1 (September 2005), par. 3.
10. Judovitz, “Duchamp’s ‘Luggage Physics,’” par. 17.
11. The stamp is placed in the back of Duchamp’s selected aphorisms and puns, which he
had placed on blank sheets of music paper. As a mark of commodification, it reinforces Carol
James’s argument that these musical bars, used as a visual gimmick, give Duchamp’s language
“a form of plastic significance” (119).
12. See in particular Thierry de Duve, “Marcel Duchamp, or The Phynancier of Modern
Life,” October 52 (Spring 1990).
13. Demos has argued that Duchamp “discovered the means to define an antinational
political commitment and, more broadly, an ethical exigency to reject modernity’s systems of
regimentation at the levels of representation, subjectivity, and collective belonging” (2).
14. Gabrielle Buffet, “MagiCircles,” in View: Parade of the Avant-Garde 1940-1947, ed.
Charles Henri Ford (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1991), 134.
15. Ecke Bonk, The Box in a Valise, de ou par Marcel Duchamp ou Rrose Sélavy:
Inventory of an Edition, trans. David Britt (New York: Rizzoli, 1989), 168.
16. Ecke Bonk, The Box in a Valise, 168.
17. It had been a devastating blow. As he wrote to the Arensbergs, “C’est une chose
affreuse car vous savez combien il m’était proche et cher” [It’s a really dreadful thing, for you
know how close we were and how dear he was to me.] Marcel Duchamp to Louise and Walter
Arensberg, November 8, 1918, Buenos Aires. Affect. Marcel: The Selected Correspondence of
Marcel Duchamp, ed. Francis Naumman and Hector Obalk (Ghent-Amsterdam: Ludion Press,
2000), 64, 66.
58
18. See Tomkins, 140.
19. Marcel Duchamp to Walter Pach, January 19, 1915, Paris. Affect. Marcel, 29-30.
20. As he states somewhat sarcastically in his letter of January 19: “Je vous écris de la
Bibliothèque où la vie est encore plus large qu’en temps de paix. C’est vous dire qu’on a peu de
choses à faire.” [I’m writing to you from the library where life is even more extravagant than in
peacetime. By which I mean how little we have to do.] Marcel Duchamp to Walter Pach, January
19, 1915, Paris. Affect. Marcel, 29-30.
21. Ibid., 29-30.
22. Ibid., 29-30.
23. Ibid., 29-30.
24. Marcel Duchamp to Walter Pach, April 2, 1915, Paris. Affect. Marcel, 33-34.
25. Lyons also points out that “les moulins à café” had become the term for the
cumbersome, heavy machine-guns that were issued but largely unused by the French infantry.”
Kieran Lyons, “Military Avoidance: Marcel Duchamp and the ‘Jura-Paris Road,’” Tate Papers 5
(Spring 2006).
26. Peter Lindamood, “I Cover the Cover,” Marcel Duchamp Issue (1945), in View,
Parade of the Avant-Garde: An Anthology of View magazine (1940-1947), ed. Charles Henri
Ford (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1991), 119.
27. Ibid., 119.
28. Demos, The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp, 74.
29. Ibid., 64.
30. Ibid., 62-63.
31. Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt and Company,
1996), 150, 153.
32. Ibid., 152-153.
33. Robert O. Paxton, Introduction to Collaboration and Resistance: French Literary Life
under the Nazi Occupation (Brooklyn, NY: Five Ties Publishing, 2010), 9.
34. Paxton, Collaboration and Resistance, 9.
59
35. Jean-Paul Sartre, excerpt of radio lecture (1946) in Collaboration and Resistance:
French Literary Life under the Nazi Occupation (Brooklyn, NY: Five Ties Publishing, 2010),
353.
36. Interview with Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. Ron Padgett
(New York: Da Capo Press, 1987), 102.
37. Marcel Duchamp to Louise and Walter Arensberg, July 16, 1940, Arcachon. Affect.
Marcel, 220-221.
38. Duchamp’s relationship with Stieglitz dated back to his early days in the Arensberg
salon during the 1910s. In 1917, Stieglitz photographed the original version of Fountain; he also
contributed to the famous issue of The Blind Man, published in the same year, which defended
the appearance of Fountain in the Society of Independent Artists exhibit.
39. Lewis Mumford, Mumford on Modern Art in the 1930s, ed. Robert Wojtowicz
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 125.
40. See Michèle Cone, Artists under Vichy: A Case of Prejudice and Persecution
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 7.
41. Mumford on Modern Art, 225.
42. Ibid., 224-225.
43. Ecke Bonk, The Box in a Valise, 154.
44. Martha Buskirk notes that the “remade readymades” found in the Boîte-en-valise
“draw attention to the shifting interdependent relationship between painting and readymade in
Duchamp’s oeuvre.” See “Thoroughly Modern Marcel,” 200.
45. Linda Dalrymple Henderson, Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the
Large Glass and Related Works (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 176.
46. Dalia Judovitz, Unpacking Duchamp, 164.
47. Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, 85.
48. T.J. Demos, The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp, 17.
49. Ibid., 17-18.
60
50. Duchamp, SURcenSURE, in Duchamp du Signe (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), 275.
Translation mine.
51. Pierre Dac, L’Os à Moelle No. 32, in Le meilleur de L’Os à Moelle: 13 Mai 1938-7
Juin 1940 (Paris: Points, 2010), 67-68. Translation mine.
52. Alan Riding, And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 171.
53. See Cone, Artists under Vichy, 41.
54. When Mary Reynolds finally joined Duchamp in New York the year after “Mile of
String” was created, she had a story even more extreme – she arrived with a roll of Man Ray’s
paintings that she had carried on her dangerous and excruciating trip, by foot, through the
Pyrenées. See Man Ray, Self Portrait (Boston: Little, Brown, 1988), 210.
55. General conceptions of Duchamp, especially in light of his readymades, hold that he
embraced everyday objects of no aesthetic value as part of his challenge of ‘art as institution.’
One of the goals of this chapter is to consider how Duchamp, who had witnessed the horrors of
two World Wars and lived in the propaganda-laden environment of Vichy France, regarded
everyday objects as inherently infused with political meaning.
56. Laurence Bertrand Dorléac, Art of the Defeat: France 1940-1944, trans. Jane Marie
Todd (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 2008), 201.
57. Cone, Artists under Vichy, 81.
58. Reprinted in Collaboration and Resistance, 93. Boldface mine.
59. Demos, The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp, 27.
60. Marjorie Perloff, 21st Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics (Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers, 2002), 116.
61. Ibid., 116.
62. Ibid., 117.
63. Ibid., 116-117.
61
CHAPTER 2
CONCEPTUALIZING THE GREAT WAR: DUCHAMP’S APOLINÈRE ENAMELED,
STEIN’S “GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE”
Give known or pin ware.
Fancy teethe, gas strips.
Elbow elect, sour stout pore, pore Caesar, pour stare at.
Leave eye lessons I. Leave I. Lessons. I. Leave I lessons, I.
— Gertrude Stein, “Guillaume Apollinaire” [1913]
Figure 7. Marcel Duchamp, Apolinère Enameled. [1916]
Inscription (bottom left): [from] MARCEL DUCHAMP, 1916-1917; Inscription (bottom right):
Any act red by her ten or epergne, New York, U.S.A.
62
L’Esprit Nouveau et les Poëtes
In 1913 and 1916 respectively, Gertrude Stein and Marcel Duchamp dedicated works to
their mutual friend Apollinaire. Here we have one of the only instances where these two famous
artists, working in their signature genres – Stein with her prose portrait, Duchamp with his
readymade – happened upon the very same subject. Scholars have not yet examined the
suggestive echoes between these two tributes. In Stein’s portraits, for instance, we are
accustomed to seeing little to no reference to proper names, as in her famous description of
Picasso as “One whom some were certainly following,” but with this little piece she begins with
a line that plays upon the intonations of the name ‘Guillaume Apollinaire’: “Give known or pin
ware.”
1
Apolinère Enameled, Duchamp’s ‘assisted readymade’ which he created out of an
advertisement for Sapolin paint, is equally playful in its treatment of the poet’s name. Doing
away with the “S” in “Sapolin” provided the requisite A-P-O-L-I-N, which, of course, results in
a slight misspelling; Duchamp, however, pushed the phonetic approximation further, writing
‘Apolinère’ with a diacritically marked ‘e.’ The gestures of these two tributes are not so different
in their intent: while Stein transposes ‘Guillaume Apollinaire’ into what it might sound like to an
English speaker, Duchamp seems to mimic the attempt of someone vaguely familiar with French
orthography to write ‘Apollinaire’ down on paper (similar, perhaps, to the types of spelling
mistakes he would have seen while giving French lessons to American students).
These tributes to Apollinaire reflect the mutual sensibilities (and shared social circles) of
Duchamp and Stein, already discussed extensively in the scholarship. As Marjorie Perloff writes,
“[Stein’s] compositions resemble Duchamp’s ‘objects’ in their wholesale rejection of the
mimetic contract” – “a rejection,” she explains, that “goes well beyond Cubist distortion and
dislocation of what are, after all, still recognizable objects and bodies.”
2
“Guillaume Apollinaire”
63
and Apolinère Enameled are examples of what Perloff calls a “rejection of the mimetic contract”;
rather than distort the poet’s likeness as a Cubist or Dada composition likely would, these
tributes employ non-figurative techniques and conceptual language games (evoking
Apollinaire’s French identity, for example, by playing with the sounds in his name). Both
‘portraits’ seem to pick up on the fact that Apollinaire, born Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz
Apolinary Kostrowicki, had adapted his name in accordance with his native French tongue.
Indeed, Duchamp’s ‘Apolinère’ is a whimsical misspelling which takes this process of
‘Francification’ absurdly too far.
Apollinaire is an interesting point of convergence between Stein and Duchamp, this
chapter proposes, because as a war hero and outspoken patriot, he symbolized the nationalistic
milieu enveloping the avant-garde around the First World War. Scholars have described the early
1910s as a watershed of cultural tensions in Europe: Perloff calls this the “The Futurist Moment”
while Rabaté points to the year 1913 as “The Cradle of Modernism.” Paris was an important hub
of international activity, the avant-garde capital where Marinetti published his Futurist manifesto
on the front page of a major newspaper, Le Figaro, in 1909, and where Stravinsky premiered his
scandalous opera Rite of Spring in 1913. The effects of World War I created a fundamental rift in
avant-garde culture, prompting artists such as Picasso to eventually return to neo-classicism,
while provoking nationalistic responses from Marinetti, Apollinaire, and several others. Using
their treatments of Apollinaire as a touchstone, it is possible to trace Duchamp and Stein
similarly resisted the polarities of major movements such as Dada, Cubism, and early Surrealism,
opting for methods of minimalism and abstraction as a means to achieve a certain distance from
the revolutionary activities of major avant-garde movements. By comparing their reactions to the
64
First World War, I wish to illustrate that Stein, no less than Duchamp, was committed to an
aesthetic of ambivalence.
Apolinère Enameled and “Guillaume Apollinaire” are not only similar in conceptual
technique, but also relatable in historical outlook; both works date from a period of social
upheaval when it would have been difficult not to think of Apollinaire’s growing nationalism and
the transformation of the bohemian art world as the new spirit of wartime took hold. Stein’s
American patriotism could certainly be aligned with Apollinaire’s zeal for France, placing the
indifferent Duchamp
3
in a different camp altogether. Interestingly, however, their comparable
aesthetics break down such political logic: Duchamp and Stein lived through the 1910s and
1920s with their sense of autonomy evidently intact, creating some of their most abstract and
celebrated works in the wake of the First World War. Despite being as deeply affected by the
war as other European-based artists, neither bid a grand ‘adieu’ to the prewar decades, nor, like
T.S. Eliot in Britain, did they dramatically brood upon the devastation they had witnessed. It is
worthwhile to question why, despite their antithetical backgrounds, Duchamp and Stein crafted
works during these years which seem so relevant to each other.
“Fancy Teethe” / Apolinère Enameled
Apollinaire was one of many artists and civilians who supported the French war effort,
caught up in what Modris Eksteins has described as the ‘rites of spring’ of Europe’s prewar
years. In 1914, he joined the French army even though as a Polish citizen he could have avoided
enlistment. Jay Winter has described the poet as “an iconoclast with a flair for tradition, an artist
who never questioned his patriotism, wore his uniform with dash, but did not ignore the ugliness
of war.” “Paradox,” explains Winter, “was his métier.”
4
Apollinaire was one of the most
profoundly conflicted writers in the French literary landscape during World War I, someone who
65
truly embraced the apparent contradictions between nationalistic propaganda and the inevitable
horrors of battle. His ambivalence about the war is the main trope of his famous Calligrammes,
his “poèmes de la paix et de la guerre,” where he expressed his desperate hope that “Après après
/ Nous prendrons toutes les joies / Des vainqueurs qui se délassent.”
5
Tragically, however, the
postwar period was not one of délassement nor would he be around to witness it; in 1916, the
very year of Duchamp’s Apolinère Enameled, he was seriously wounded in the trenches and
eventually succumbed to the Spanish flu as a result of his weakened immune system. Before his
death, he found one final outlet for his patriotism, a lecture he called L’Esprit Nouveau et les
Poëtes. In this final statement he declared his love for France, “the guardian of the whole secret
of civilization…a seminary of poets and artists who daily increase the patrimony of
civilization.”
6
Like most French writers, Apollinaire considered Paris – “Bergère ô tour Eiffel”
7
– to be
the center of the modern world. In the years leading up to the war, he was a central figure of
major avant-garde movements, bringing together an otherwise dispersed group of international
artists working in Paris. As Francis Steegmuller vividly describes it, he recognized in his fellow
artists “a group of sympathetic personalities: artists of his own age, with talent or genius, who
gave him stimulus and the courage to recognize in himself the only living poet he knew with a
vision as fresh as theirs.”
8
For a brief period, he was involved with the civic-minded naturism
movement which gained popularity in France in the prewar years.
9
Duchamp, by contrast, was
never attracted to the notion of artistic communion, while Stein always remained resolutely
committed to the idea of individual genius. Despite their personal relationships with Apollinaire,
they had little to do with their friend’s efforts to spearhead movements such as Cubism,
Orphism, and early Surrealism.
66
According to Kenneth Silver’s historical account of the Parisian avant-garde during the
First World War, “artists and critics of almost every persuasion in wartime Paris were soon in the
embrace of prevailing social doctrines, not the least of which was the denigration of
‘individualistic’ pursuits in favor of collective action.” Duchamp and Stein stood in opposition to
this pervasive spirit of artistic collectivism. From the onset of French mobilization, Duchamp
ardently rejected the nationalistic rhetoric which compelled his brothers, alongside artists such as
Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars, to volunteer for the French army. Living in England and
Mallorca, Stein became acutely aware of her own status as a neutral party to the war; within her
writings, we bear witness to her obsession over the lyric “I,” as in the Mallorca piece she simply
entitled “IIIIIIIIII.” Their responses to the Great War are best described as individually rather
than culturally subversive; as in their tributes to Apollinaire, Duchamp and Stein tend to affirm
their own iconoclasm without presuming (as Pound, Lewis, and other modernists typically did)
that their own art could play a significant role in this new wartime landscape.
Despite Duchamp’s individualistic tendencies, Apollinaire attempted to keep him within
the avant-garde fold. Apollinaire declared in Les Peintres Cubistes that Duchamp was among the
most exciting of the new generation of painters, a painter who would merge art and ‘the people.’
When asked about this commentary decades later, Duchamp, of course, dismissed it all as so
much nonsense.
10
Apolinère Enameled, created only three years after the publication of Les
Peintres Cubistes, can be interpreted as the young Duchamp’s clever response to Apollinaire’s
favorable attentions. This would explain why Duchamp, whimsically stepping into the role of
‘critic,’ misspelled his friend’s name and added a hand-drawn sketch in the mirror placed at a
skewed angle: Apolinère Enameled is a visual allegory of what Harold Bloom would call
‘creative misprision.’
67
Dalia Judovitz has provided a compelling analysis of Apolinère Enameled, noting that
this piece “suggests that authorship is not fixed referentially, since it cannot be contained by the
identity of the artist.” Judovitz goes on to explain – and here is where Duchamp makes a
departure from Apollinaire’s nationalistic worldview – that “[c]onsidered in these terms,
authorship emerges as a process of engenderment, a commercial and erotic affair, which sets the
author into motion as a relay of personas, thereby delaying, and thus postponing, the author or
artist from attaining a proper or fixed identity.”
11
Duchamp seems to remind us that Apollinaire’s
own identity was not as “proper or fixed” as the poet would have it; in Apolinère Enameled, we
see a little girl painting a bed in alternating colors, perhaps a reminder of Apollinaire’s colorful
origins – an illegitimate son of an aristocratic Polish mother, his father was rumored to be a
cardinal. As Duchamp likely intended, the central trope of this readymade, enameling, works
well as a metaphor for Apollinaire’s reputation as a critic; by 1916, he had become a prominent
figure of the avant-garde, well known for his tendency to apply his own attractive ‘polish’ to the
artists and movements he promoted. The readymade, taken from a print ad, reminds us of the
poet’s reputation as a dogged promoter, ironically implying that Apollinaire had created his own
‘brand’ of paint. Apolinère Enameled applies the critical process of self-promotion and creative
misprision to Apollinaire himself; while the title seems to imply that Apollinaire is to be given a
flattering new look, this tribute – inscribed “[from] MARCEL DUCHAMP” in the lower left
corner – bears the distinctive Duchampian trademark.
Like Duchamp, Stein makes a point of prioritizing her own aesthetic interests in her
homage to Apollinaire. Apollinaire’s famous Alcoöls, with which she was surely familiar, was
published in the same year as her portrait of the poet. Alcoöls, we must remember, gained
immediate notoriety because Apollinaire had decided to eliminate all punctuation from his verse;
68
not unlike Stein’s pronouncements in How to Write, he declared his language had a rhythm
which rendered commas and periods unnecessary. It was not lost upon Parisian circles that
Apollinaire’s radical techniques were reminiscent of Stein’s own. Nearly two decades later, in
1930, when Éditions de la Montagne published a collection of Stein’s prose portraits
12
translated
into French,
13
the poet/critic Pierre de Massot opened his introduction to Stein’s work by taking
an excerpt from Apollinaire’s Calligrammes:
O bouches l’homme est à la recherché
d’un nouveau langage
auquel le grammairien d’aucune lan-
gue n’aura rien à dire.
Through the use of this epigraph, de Massot suggests a link between Stein’s methods and
Apollinaire’s commitment to creating “un nouveau langage” – “la langue de Mademoiselle
Stein,” he writes, “est quasiment intraduisible” (“the language of Mademoiselle Stein…is
practically untranslatable”).
14
Stein’s portrait of Apollinaire, “avec ses mots, écrits de la façon
dont pourrait les prononcer une bouche pâteuse” (“With its words, written in the way one would
pronounce slurred speech”),
15
is described by de Massot as a piece deserving of special praise.
The purpose of de Massot’s essay, it seems, was to use Stein as an example of the recent decline
of the French literary establishment itself: “Si l’œuvre de Mademoiselle Gertrude Stein accomplit
des progress considérables en Amérique et en Angleterre,” he writes, “on deplore que la France
en méconnaise l’importance, et que, par ailleurs, tant de français s’en tiennent à leur seule
langue, et qu’ils renoncent à tant de trésors” (“If the work of Mademoiselle Gertrude Stein
makes considerable progress in America and in England, it is deplorable that its importance
remains unknown in France, and moreover, that there are so many French people who keep to
their language and miss such treasures”).
16
Whether or not de Massot was right to critique French
69
writers so generally about their lack of interest in literature outside “leur seule langue,” what his
commentary reveals is that the postwar generation was in fact quite willing to hold up figures
such as Stein and Apollinaire as emblems of a lost bohemian spirit.
By invoking the Calligrammes, de Massot implies that the relationship between Stein and
Apollinaire is reminiscent of a time when France was alive with a global art scene; such
nostalgia may have been warranted, but it certainly did not lead to a proper understanding of the
relationship between Apollinaire and Stein. Evidence suggests, in fact, that Apollinaire himself
gave little thought to Stein’s textual experiments. In an article from Mercure de France dating
from 1907, he wrote the following about Stein and her brother Leo:
Their bare feet shod in sandals Delphic
They raise toward heaven their brows scientific.
Those sandals have sometimes done them harm. Caterers and
soft-drink vendors are especially averse to them.
Often when these millionaires want to relax on the terrace of a
café on one of the boulevards, the waiters refuse to serve them and
politely inform them that the drinks at that café are too expensive
for people in sandals.
But they could not care less about the ways of waiters and
calmly pursue their aesthetic experiments.
17
It is difficult not to notice hints of Apollinaire’s anti-Semitism in this description, which seems
very close to the stereotype of the wandering Jew. This sketch reveals how Apollinaire made
light work of such cultural bias, but it also shows how his avant-gardism differed from the
destructive impulses of revolutionary movements such as Futurism and Dada. As opposed to a
figure such as Marinetti, Apollinaire envisioned an art world which would co-exist with societal
tradition, and his appreciation of Stein had less to do with her radical language than her
affirmative place within the landscape of French culture. A “Delphic” oracle with “bare feet” and
“scientific” brow, Stein is painted as an exotic patron of the arts; Apollinaire effortlessly nods to
70
her sexual ambiguity by grouping her with Leo (‘they’ in French being the masculine ils). What
Apollinaire truly admired in Stein was the fact that she enjoyed a mundane, seemingly
comfortable, form of individuality. Challenging conventionality is daily routine for a
‘millionaire’ expatriate living in Paris; never mind living openly living as a lesbian or writing
avant-garde texts – one need only wear sandals to a café. Against such a backdrop of French
manners, Stein is presented as a magus comically out of place.
18
“Guillaume Apollinaire” is Stein’s deconstruction of the presumed reciprocity between
herself and Apollinaire, her way of establishing the fact that it was Apollinaire, not she, who fell
in love with the materiality of the page.
19
“Despite the parallel technical experiments one finds in
both their writings at a similar period,” Mellow writes, “neither Gertrude nor Apollinaire
mentioned any discussion they might have had about their creative efforts.”
20
Mellow speculates
that Apollinaire and Stein echo each other because “each had a highly developed aural sense of
language” which rendered punctuation “superfluous.”
21
Their similarities may have been purely
“coincidental” as Mellow suggests, but it seems no coincidence that in the last line of her portrait
“Guillaume Apollinaire,” Stein uses punctuation quite prominently: “Leave eye lessons I. Leave
I. Lessons. I. Leave I lessons, I.” Here, the periods and commas are anything but “superficial”
since they force pauses and breaks that would not otherwise be present in the language itself. As
the line progresses, the pronoun “I” becomes its own ‘sentence’ (“I.”), and then separates itself
through the insertion of a comma: “Leave eye lessons I” becomes “Leave I lessons, I.” With this
punctuation in place, we have the effect of a struggle: the “I” wedges its way to independence
and is finally left to stand alone. This carefully paced syntax serves as a demonstration of how
Stein’s techniques differ from those of Apollinaire. Although this line is visually striking – the
“I” has the appearance of a dividing line, a boundary – Stein ultimately veers away from the
71
“lessons” of Apollinaire’s visual poetics (“Leave eye lessons I”). In Alcools, the absence of
punctuation emphasizes the aural dimension of language: in Stein’s prose portrait, punctuation is
applied as a sonic device, inserting pauses which lend authority to the phrase (“Leave I lessons,
I.”).
As scholars often discuss, it is difficult to mine such language for biographical facts:
“The way to enter a Stein portrait,” Ulla Dydo reminds us, “is through the words, not through
what we know of the subject.”
22
At first, “Guillaume Apollinaire” would seem to follow this
Steinian logic. “Fancy teethe, gas strips” could certainly be compared to lines such as “A bird is
for more cookcoo,” to be found in her portrait of Erik Satie, or “A bottle that has all the time to
stand open is not so clearly shown when there is green color there,” from “Portrait of Mable
Dodge at the Villa Curonia.” It is typical of Stein’s language, after all, to blur the realms of pure
abstraction and obscure detail: Is Satie a cuckoo, or “cookcoo,” bird because he reversed
tradition, creating what he liked to call ‘furniture music’? Did he once compliment Toklas on her
cooking? And what of the green-colored open bottle in the portrait of Mabel Dodge – to what
biographical detail could this refer, if to anything at all? As with the radical language of Tender
Buttons, Stein’s prose portraits resist attempts to extract concrete meaning.
“Guillaume Apollinaire” is a distinctive piece because it comes closer than many of
Stein’s other portraits to providing a physical impression of its chosen subject; while the text by
no means offers a traditional description, Stein’s references are nonetheless easily relatable to the
poet’s familiar persona. In particular, “Fancy teethe, gas strips” brilliantly conveys Apollinaire’s
well-known flair for conversation. Recalling Pierre de Massot’s comment that “Guillaume
Apollinaire” must be read with “un bouche pâteuse,” or slurred speech, the phrase “gas strips” no
longer seems an image at all, but rather a transcription of a French speaker’s intonation and non-
72
idiomatic word choice. This snippet of a French accent – “gas strips” – seems an especially
apropos homage for the author of “La Petite Auto,” a famous poem which was, after all, based
on one of Apollinaire’s beloved automobile trips, or ‘gas trips.’
Not unlike Duchamp’s metaphor of enameling, Stein’s “Fancy teethe” reminds us of
Apollinaire’s “Fancy” origins and eccentric manners; with his “Elbow elect,” he possessed an
aristocratic bearing which made him a perennial favorite at her salon. With this in mind, the line
“Elbow elect, sour stout pore, pore Caesar, pour stare at” already appears less cryptic – the
language here could easily refer to the pouring of stout, or perhaps the pouring of wine for the
stout Apollinaire; such meals, when they were a success, would go on for hours (pore Caesar
when said aloud plays upon pour six heures). “Caesar,” moreover, is a loaded symbol in the
Steinian universe; “[i]nitially a scientist,” Susan McCabe explains, “Stein assumed the incipient
transgender role of ‘Caesar,’ a nickname she dons that diversely alludes to her imperious bodily
presence, to the epidermal act of ‘caesarean section’ as alternative to conventional childbirth, and
to a cinematic cutting and scissoring of words.”
23
Apollinaire was one of Stein’s prototypical
Caesars; to borrow from McCabe, he possessed an “imperious bodily presence” matched by
genius, a figure not unlike Stein herself. Always the witty conversationalist, he was something of
a marvel – one to watch, or “pour stare at.”
For the generation of artists who came of age in 1910s Paris, Apollinaire epitomized the
spirit of La Belle Époque. Even the reticent Duchamp, not one to wax nostalgic, once
commented that Apollinaire “lived like writers of the Symbolist period, that is, around 1880.”
24
With Apolinère Enameled and “Guillaume Apollinaire,” Duchamp and Stein present Apollinaire
as he would be remembered, a symbol of the lost bonhomie of the prewar years. By downplaying
the poet’s nationalism, these tributes anticipate the aesthetic appropriation of Apollinaire’s
73
legacy which would become increasingly common during the interwar years. Picasso in
particular fought to preserve his own vision of Apollinaire, reviled at the thought that his friend
might be remembered as nothing more than a soldier. From the 1920s through the 1950s –
concurrent with Stein’s writing of Alice. B. Toklas – he designed several commemorative
sculptures, many of which were rejected for public installation. Contrary to the popular
sentiment that Apollinaire was “the national poet whose verses should be chanted like those of
the ancient Greeks,”
25
Picasso proposed memorials which he thought remained true to the avant-
garde proper. He designed, for example, an eroticized, abstract sculpture to be installed at
Apollinaire’s tomb; this ‘defilement’ of the Père Lachaise cemetery was intended to represent the
way Apollinaire had shaken up the stately Parisian art scene.
Picasso was acutely aware of how the avant-garde had been politically mobilized;
“Guernica” (1937), a protest piece against the atrocities of the Nazi regime, is his own famous
example. In several of his other works, however, he steered away from such politicized gestures,
taking various turns toward abstraction and neo-classicism. In an important essay, Benjamin
Buchloh points out that such regressions and repetitions of experimental methods were typical in
the avant-garde works of the interwar period. Buchloh sees this as evidence that the art world
abdicated its historical relevancy in favor of recycled, commodified styles; the resulting passivity
and ineffectuality of the avant-garde is still apparent, Buchloh argues, in the contemporary art
world. He calls this evolution a “transformation of the subversive function of aesthetic
production to plain affirmation”; “[l]ike senile old rulers who refuse to step down,” he writes,
“the stubbornness and spite of the old painters increase in direct proportion to the innate sense of
the invalidity of their claims to save a cultural practice that had lost its viability.” Although
Picasso had radical intentions, his struggles with the Comité Apollinaire ultimately reflect the
74
“innate sense” of “invalidity” which took hold of the revolutionary avant-garde; he became one
of the “old painters” who stubbornly tended the dying embers of the prewar era.
It was not uncommon to regard Apollinaire’s death as a sign that an important era had
passed. “The death of Guillaume Apollinaire,” Stein writes in her Autobiography of Alice B.
Toklas,
made a very serious difference to all his friends apart from their
sorrow at his death. It was the moment just after the war when
many things had changed and people naturally fell apart.
Guillaume would have been a bond of union, he always had a
quality of keeping people together, and now that he was gone
everybody ceased to be friends.
“Guillaume would have been a bond of union”: the use of Apollinaire’s first name here is
especially poignant. Moreover, Stein’s choice of words – “bond of union” – seems a wistful echo
of Apollinaire’s exuberant style, a sad reminder that in his presence Paris did indeed resemble a
“seminary of poets and artists.” This passage illustrates how memories of Apollinaire had turned
into the stuff of nostalgia, how his poetic voice had become entwined with the war’s melancholy.
Duchamp too exhibited a tendency to associate Apollinaire with the war, as in this brief
exchange he had with Pierre Cabanne in 1967:
Cabanne: You lived in Buenos Aires for nine months, and it
was during this stay that you learned of Duchamp-Villon’s death,
and of Apollinaire’s.
Duchamp: Apollinaire’s was in November 1918, and my
brother Raymond’s was, I think, earlier, around July 1918. From
that moment on, I wanted to go back to France. I tried to find a
boat, etc.... My brother’s death hit me hard. I knew he was very
sick, but one never knows how sick [....] I wasn’t briefed on the
details.
26
Duchamp “wasn’t briefed on the details” of his brother Raymond’s passing, yet he immediately
recalls that Apollinaire died “in November 1918.” He treats Apollinaire’s death as a benchmark,
75
an historical event, which indeed it was; the poet’s funeral parade was a grand spectacle which
drew thousands into the streets of Paris. Duchamp was acutely aware, no less than Stein, that
Apollinaire had been transformed into a public symbol.
With Apolinère Enameled and “Guillaume Apollinaire,” Duchamp and Stein allow their
individual perspectives – their respective “I lessons” – to prevail: so too would Picasso, a decade
later, when he decided that in his sculptures Apollinaire would no longer be the French war hero,
but the impresario of the avant-garde. At first, it would seem that the tributes of Duchamp and
Stein resonate with the aesthetic, retrospective treatments of Apollinaire exemplified by artists
such as Picasso and de Massot in the postwar decades. It is important to keep in mind, however,
that Duchamp and Stein did not create their works in the mourning period of the interwar years,
but while Apollinaire was still alive. Although the tributes of Duchamp and Stein have all the
trappings of nostalgia, it is necessary to explore how these pieces operate within the
contemporary cultural milieu of 1910s France.
“Nous dîmes adieu à toute une époque”
At first, there seems to be little to suggest that Stein’s “Guillaume Apollinaire” and
Duchamp’s Apolinère Enameled were created in a decade when scores of artists, Apollinaire
prominently among them, were caught up in the frenzied escalation of the Great War. However,
Stein’s portrait indirectly references Apollinaire’s desire to fight for pour l’état with the phrase
“pore Caesar, pour stare at”; Caesar was one of Stein’s prototypical ‘great men,’ a figure who
stood in for military triumph. Duchamp’s readymade likewise makes no direct reference to the
political tensions of 1913, but here too the wartime climate may be indirectly implied; he added
black bars to the top and bottom of Apolinère Enameled, perhaps to symbolize the fact that
Apollinaire had been recently wounded in the trenches. The historical meanings embedded
76
within these works are not to be dismissed as insignificant due to their subtlety. An important
facet of Apolinère Enameled and “Guillaume Apollinaire,” and of the early output of Stein and
Duchamp in general, is that these works anticipate how the war would require the avant-garde to
operate within a new realm, one which we now associate with abstraction, aesthetic formalism,
conceptualism, postmodernism, and the like. At this historical juncture, two separate versions of
Apollinaire were coming into view: the patriot, and the aesthete. Duchamp and Stein were
unique in that they attempted to portray Apollinaire’s duality in a way which sublimated his
patriotism beneath an aesthetic patina – “Give known or pin ware,” Apolinère Enameled.
Although artists such as Picasso and de Massot would commemorate Apollinaire in ways
that downplayed his involvement with the war, Apollinaire himself made several efforts, through
his Calligrammes and other works, to make his work seem relevant to the historical events at
hand. In 1917, he premiered his famous Les Mamelles de Tirésias, complete with a new prologue
apropos to the recent conflicts:
Ecoutez ô Français la leçon de la guerre
Et faites des enfants vous qui n’en faisiez guère
On tente ici d’infuser un esprit nouveau au théâtre...
Le grand déploiement de notre art moderne
Mariant souvent sans lien apparent comme dans la vie
Les sons les gestes les couleurs les cris les bruits
La musique la danse l’acrobatie la poésie la peinture
Listen O Frenchman to the lesson of the war
And begin making children which you make no more
We will try here to introduce a new spirit in theater
The great conduit of our modern art
27
Apollinaire called for procreation and a revival of the modern arts to bring France back to its
former glory; such rhetoric was hardly as destructive and bombastic as the violent outcries of
Marinetti, and it seems unlikely that Apollinaire would have involved himself with fascism. Still,
77
it seems Apollinaire would have been primed to implicate himself with the French political scene
had he survived the war; his belief in the ‘deployment’ of modern art and the replenishment of
the French race certainly seems to anticipate French revanchisme. Apollinaire did not, however,
bear witness to the rise of the fascist movement in France (the ascendancy of Charles Maurras
and the cercle Proudhon had only just begun while he was alive), nor would he live to see
Breton and other Surrealists commit to their communist beliefs. Due to his early passing, his
nationalism was destined to remain in the realm of idealism, or at least of political ambiguity.
The Surrealists, for example, considered Les Mamelles de Tirésias as one of their foundational
texts; the play’s relevance to the Great War was never their particular concern.
Strangely enough, the reticent Duchamp seems to have made a conscious effort to point
out the irony that Apollinaire’s nationalism was aesthetically and personally motivated rather
than politically ideological. With its image of a child’s bed and its slightly eroticized imagery
(scholars have described the bed post as a phallic image), Apolinère Enameled emphasizes the
central message of the poet’s war rhetoric: “Ecoutez ô Français la leçon de la guerre / Et faites
des enfants vous qui n’en faisiez guère.” In the bottom right corner of Apolinère Enameled, we
find the following inscription: “any act red by her ten or epergne.” The word epergne – a
decorative vessel, usually old-fashioned and overly wrought – seems an ironic substitute for
famous chamberpot featured Les Mamelles de Tirésias. One can imagine the “act” performed,
the lines ‘read’, groups of “ten” in the audience, or perhaps a gathering at ten o’clock in the
evening (a typical late hour for Parisian nightlife). Moreover, the dates provided in the bottom
left corner – “1916-1917” – reminds us that this piece was created around the time Les Mamelles
de Tirésias premiered. With “red” serving as a homophone for ‘read,’ Duchamp evokes
78
Apollinaire’s visual aesthetics and his flamboyant style of reading and performance; this is a
‘portrait’, like Stein’s, that provides a vivid image of “pour Caesar, pore stare at” Apollinaire.
“Apolinère,” “or pin ware”: Duchamp and Stein engage in an appropriately playful form
of wordplay, each capturing Apollinaire’s infectious playfulness and his reputation as impresario
to the French avant-garde. At first, their light parodies of Apollinaire’s name would seem to have
little to do with the upsurge of French nationalism during the 1910s. Turning Apollinaire’s
adopted French identity into a language game was, nonetheless, a significant gesture. In 1913,
the important year in which Stein wrote her prose portrait, the critic Georges Duhamel – minor
member of the Puteaux Cubists, a group which happened to be led by Duchamp’s brother,
Jacques Villon – published a scathing review of Apollinaire’s Alcoöls. He compared the book to
a “slum” maintained by a “secondhand furniture dealer,” the work “of the Levantine Jew, the
South American, the Polish gentleman, and the facchino”
28
– an inferior language, in other
words, produced by a racial ‘other.’ Walter Adamson describes how horrific these criticisms
were for Apollinaire:
There it all was: the wandering life of his Polish mother…the fact
that his mother had lived for years out of wedlock with a Jewish
man, Jules Weil; that he himself was often mistaken for a Jew…;
that he was uncomfortable enough with his apparently immigrant,
Jewish, and ‘southern’ background to drop his foreign-sounding
name; that he had famously been arrested and humiliatingly
incarcerated on suspicion of stealing the Mona Lisa from the
Louvre; that his life had been full of expediencies and shady
dealings; that he was, in short, as French xenophobes of the time
called him, a métèque, and an illegitimate one at that.
29
In the decades following the Franco-Prussian War and the Dreyfus Affair, French culture became
intensely xenophobic and revanchist; strangely, however, Paris was also home to an eclectic,
international artistic community the country thought of as its own. As scholars such as Kenneth
79
Silver, Mark Antliff, and David Carroll have thoroughly discussed, the avant-garde scene in
Paris became deeply embedded within such political and cultural tensions. Apollinaire was a
native French speaker and a patriot committed to France, but he was also a serious target of
ethnic bias due to his Polish background: a symbol, in other words, of the dialectic nature of
French culture, split between xenophobia and bohemianism.
The phrase “pore Caesar” appears in Stein’s 1913 portrait of Apollinaire; perhaps we are
to pity Apollinaire as a ‘poor Caesar,’ falsely accused of burglarizing the Louvre because of his
ties to Italy. Jean-Michel Rabaté has already pointed out that Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q, the famous
readymade featuring the Mona Lisa with a hand-drawn moustache, was most likely inspired by
the Louvre scandal involving Apollinaire.
30
The title for this readymade may be deciphered only
through the French language – L.H.O.O.Q when sounded out becomes “elle a chaud au cul”
(‘she has a hot ass’) – implying the French had developed a national fetish for their adopted
Mona Lisa. Keeping in mind L.H.O.O.Q dates from the year following Apollinaire’s death,
Duchamp’s absurdity in fact becomes somewhat pointed: La Gioconda, an Italian masterpiece,
was easily integrated into French culture, while Apollinaire, an Italian-born Frenchman, was
forced to fight in the war to earn his own place in the public’s sympathies. Later, in The
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein would write from a similar perspective, calling
Apollinaire “a foreigner” whose “mother was a pole, his father possibly an Italian.” Although “it
was not at all necessary that he volunteer to fight,” she wrote, “[h]e had really been heroic.”
Susan McCabe is the first scholar to note that Stein’s “A Movie,” a little-known vignette
composed in the years following First World War, was most likely inspired by Apollinaire. With
its madcap plot, McCabe explains, Stein’s film scenario “injects comedy into the war’s lexicon
of somatic trauma and dissociation.”
31
McCabe establishes the fact that Apollinaire was an
80
important symbolic presence within Stein’s war aesthetic; Stein’s prose portrait of the poet can
be read in a similar light. Within “Guillaume Apollinaire” there is a subtle clue that, as early as
1913, Stein recognized the role Apollinaire was to play in the French national consciousness. In
fact, it seems quite possible that this prose portrait, with its suggestive image of “sour stout
pore,” refers to one evening in particular: the legendary banquet held in 1908 for Henri
Rousseau, a working-class customs agent who came to be known Le Douanier. Later, in The
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein described this night as an event that happened on a whim
(one of her own, of course) which then spiraled into hours of late-night revelry:
Everybody sat down and everybody began to eat rice and other
things, that is as soon as Guillaume Apollinaire and Rousseau
came in which they did very presently and were wildly acclaimed.
How well I remember their coming. Rousseau a little small
colourless frenchman with a little beard, like any number of
frenchmen one saw everywhere. Guillaume Apollinaire with finely
cut florid features, dark hair and a beautiful complexion.
Stein’s retelling of the Rousseau banquet in Alice B. Toklas created a minor scandal; writing in
the 1930s about an evening that occurred over two decades prior, she was attempting to stake a
significant claim to what had already become a sacred era of Parisian history. The old guard
would have none of it. André Salmon and others produced a “Testimony against Gertrude Stein”
for a supplemental edition of transition, just to set the record straight:
32
“What incomprehension
of an epoch!” they fumed, “Fortunately there are others who have described it better.”
33
These
critics were likely thinking of Apollinaire,
34
or perhaps Maurice Raynal, someone whom
Apollinaire had brought into Picasso’s inner circle, as some of these “others who have described
it better.” Decades prior, Raynal had written about the Rousseau evening in majestic prose:
81
The appearance of the Douanier . . . made a tremor of emotion run
through the gathering; it was, certainly, one of the most touching
pictures of Rousseau. As he looked about, the gleaming Chinese
lanterns charmed him, and his old face broke into a smile.
35
Stein had committed something of a blasphemy within the art world; not only did she claim to
have orchestrated this gathering of French luminaries, she also had the audacity to diminish the
provincial ‘charm’ of Rousseau
36
while gossiping about Marie Laurencin’s drunken behavior
along with other minor scandals. According to Alice B. Toklas, the “tremor of emotion” did not
occur, as Raynal would have it, upon the entrance of Rousseau, but when “Guillaume
Apollinaire got up and made a solemn eulogy.” “I do not remember at all what [Apollinaire]
said,” Stein’s Alice says, “but it ended up with a poem he had written and which he half chanted
and in which everybody joined in the refrain, La peinture de ce Rousseau.” However, Stein
agreed with Raynal’s account on one important point: both remembered the banquet Rousseau as
one of Apollinaire’s finest moments.
Stein claims she did “not remember at all” what kind of tribute Apollinaire read at the
banquet – but it is worthwhile to reconstruct the scenario. Apollinaire’s tribute to Rousseau
gushed with national pride: “The scenes you paint, you saw them in Mexico… / And you, worthy
soldier, you exchanged your tunic / For the blue dolman of the good customs officers.” His
embellishment of Rousseau’s past (Rousseau most likely did not serve in the French army during
the Mexico campaign) accurately reflects the spirit of Paris before La Grande Guerre: this was a
time when revanchism prevailed throughout the Third Republic, and there was still room in the
French imagination for the romanticizing of military exploit. Through a convenient lapse of
memory, Stein avoids discussing Apollinaire’s admiration of Rousseau; this was certainly a
matter of aesthetic taste, as she did not relish the painter’s art naïf as Picasso and others did.
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However, this also serves as evidence that Stein, not unlike Apollinaire, submitted her patriotism
to her aesthetic preferences; as I will address in the following chapter how, in her later war
writings, she carefully separates her own patriotic sensibilities from the kind of nationalism
which romanticizes modern violence.
It was equally impossible for Duchamp to separate Apollinaire from his memories of the
war. Duchamp migrated to the United States the year preceding the creation of Apolinère
Enameled, and at this crucial juncture, Apollinaire certainly would have reminded him of
wartime Paris, a stifling atmosphere – as discussed in a previous chapter – from which he had
been glad to escape. This historical backdrop makes it all the more significant that Duchamp’s
readymade, “made in New York, U.S.A,” makes use of an American advertisement rather than a
Parisian playbill or something taken from a French publication. Apolinère Enameled is a
reminder that he was living in New York during the war
37
– a postcard, if you will, sent by an
expatriate to one of the central figures of the former French art scene. Duchamp would designate
several of his works with a time and place, but in this case, the inscription which “from
MARCEL DUCHAMP, 1916-1917” can also be read as a subtle reminder of the geographical
and ideological distance between himself and Apollinaire; during these years, Apollinaire was
recovering from the battle wound that would become fatal to him, and his nationalism was at its
peak. If Apolinère Enameled is properly placed within its wartime contexts, this piece takes a
subtle yet somber turn; the black bars Duchamp added across the top and bottom introduce a tone
of mourning while the empty bedframe takes on the appearance of coffin, reminding us that
Duchamp had recently lost his brother.
In 1912, Duchamp and Apollinaire went to the Jura Mountains, traveling by car with
Francis Picabia; this car trip would bring their prewar perspectives to an interesting counterpoint.
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One of the results of the Jura-Paris trip was, of course, Apollinaire’s famous “Zone” – he read
this poem upon their arrival in the Jura mountains, to the delight of all present:
Maintenant tu marches dans Paris tout seul parmi la foule
Des troupeaux d’autobus mugissants près de toi roulent
L’angoisse de l’amour te serre le gosier
Comme si tu ne devais jamais plus être aimé
Si tu vivais dan l’ancien temps tu entrerais dans un monastère
Vous avez honte quand vous vous surprenez à dire une prière
Tu te moques de toi et comme le feu de l’Enfer ton rire pétille
Les étincelles de ton rire dorent le fonds de ta vie
C’est un tableau pendu dans un sombre musée
Et quelquefois tu vas la regarder de près
Looking at the imagery of the poem as well as the rhyming couplets, it would seem that “Zone”
poses an irreconcilable difference between the emotive gestures of Apollinaire and the seemingly
indifferent Duchamp. This forlorn description of a heartbroken lover, metaphorically entrapped
in a museum where he looks at an image of a lover he can never touch, can be compared, for
example, to Duchamp’s ‘sculpture’ of a breast called Prière de Toucher: the loneliness of
Apollinaire’s speaker in the crowd, lost within his own romantic disappointment – nothing could
be further from Duchamp’s detached, erotic humor.
Duchamp’s own response to the Jura trip can be found in a note he included in the Green
Box of 1934. While Apollinaire’s speaker in “Zone” locates himself within Paris, global capital
of the modern world – “I love the charm of this industrial street / Located in Paris somewhere
between the rue Amont-Thiéville and the avenue des Ternes”
38
– Duchamp uses geographic
setting as little more than a technical detail in his Jura-Paris note:
1. 1912
The machine with 5 hearts, the pure child, of nickel and platinum
must dominate the Jura-Paris road.
On the one hand, the chief of the 5 nudes will be ahead of the 4
other nudes towards this Jura-Paris road. On the other hand, the
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headlight child will be the instrument conquering the Jura-Paris
road.
39
The perfunctory tone here is best contrasted to Apollinaire’s “La Petite Auto,” one of the famous
poems from his wartime Calligrammes:
Le 31 du mois d’Août 1914
Je partis de Deauville un peu avant minuit
Dans la petite auto de Rouveyre
Avec son chauffeur nous étions trois
Nous dîmes adieu à toute une époque
Des géants furieux se dressaient sur l’Europe
***
31
st
August 1914
I left Deauville a little before midnight
In Rouveyre’s little car
Counting the chauffeur there were three of us
We said farewell to an entire epoch
Angry giants stood up on Europe
40
In Apollinairian fashion, “La Petite Auto” begins as many interesting stories do: “Le 31 du mois
d’Août 1914,” or as one might say in English, ‘The 31
st
of August, 1914: a day I will never
forget.’ In the next line of the poem, the speaker assumes a tone more literary than
conversational by using “je partis” in the passé simple, a verb tense reserved for formal writing;
the language also takes a poetic turn with an internal rhyme, “Je partis de Deauville un peu avant
minuit.” The next line, “Dans la petite auto de Rouveyre,” is a retreat from this lyric crescendo;
with this simple description of ‘the little car,’ the speaker avoids using colorful adjectives,
leaving the reading to anticipate what will come next. The line that follows seems equally
straightforward, but within it there is a subtle yet significant change when the first-person ‘je’
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suddenly becomes the plural “nous étions trois” – for now, the “nous” refers simply to the three
who loaded themselves into the car (much like Duchamp, Apollinaire, and Picabia had done for
their Jura trip two years prior). In the next couplet, however, this ‘we’ symbolically expands
when the reader comes to realize that the escalation of the Great War has completely militarized
the French countryside. Exploding with grandiosity, the poem shifts its tone from occasional to
historic; with nations preparing themselves like ‘furious giants,’ this is clearly the end of an era.
The writings of Duchamp and Apollinaire differ in terms of perspective, imagery, and
affect, but the two artists were certainly responding to this same prewar climate. The Jura trip –
close in time to the trip described in “La Petite Auto” – took Duchamp, Apollinaire, and Picabia
through towns with army barracks and regional military headquarters. Moreover, their voyage
coincided with the Manoeuvres d’Automne, an annual training period of the French army which
took place across the section of France between Paris and the Jura mountains.
41
Despite its
apparent abstraction, Duchamp’s Jura-Paris note reflects the fact that he was no less concerned
than Apollinaire with anticipations of the coming war. Much like the opening of Apollinaire’s
“La Petite Auto,” he begins his Jura-Paris note by naming the year – in this case, 1912 – and his
imagery, the “machine” which “must dominate the Jura-Paris road,” turns out to be more direct
in its military connotations than Apollinaire’s abstract metaphors such as “géants furieux.”
Lyons has pointed out that Duchamp makes explicit references to the French army in some of the
unpublished notes, as in this example translated by Paul Matisse: “the chief of the 5 nudes
manages little by little the annexation / of the Jura-Paris road. The chief of the 5 nudes annexes
to his estates, a battle / (idea of colony).”
42
These lines, as Lyons suggests, seem to allude to the
prominent public debates over French colonialism.
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It is important to keep in mind, however, that although his note is anti-colonialist in
sentiment, Duchamp was careful to leave such a direct reference to French politics out of the
boxes he compiled; clearly, his wish was to obscure his own preoccupations with the military.
Looking at the Jura-Paris note that was chosen for the Green Box, we see that Duchamp’s point,
rather, was to treat nationalism in a more oblique manner. France itself could be “[t]he chief of
the 5 nudes,” and its citizens, unwittingly naked to the elements, are headed “towards” their
national destiny; like the “headlight child,” perhaps, they are about to see into the darkness
ahead. Duchamp’s Jura-Paris note is certainly open to several other interpretations, but it seems
difficult to deny that his language evokes haunting messages related to the war. He provides a
machine-based image that subtly reflects how inconsequential nationalistic concerns would seem
in the face of inhuman, mechanized violence; Apollinaire’s lyric voice, by contrast, gives us a
vivid image of the blinding patriotism which swept over France before such technological
horrors became fully apparent.
From the Jura-Paris note, it seems evident that Duchamp bristled against the modern
glorification of violence and speed, crucial components of Futurism, or what Ezra Pound and
Wyndham Lewis derisively referred to as automobilisme. Stein too would assume an
oppositional stance to Futurism once the movement became ensconced in bombastic nationalistic
rhetoric; her early piece “Marry Nettie” (titled, of course, after the famous leader of Italian
Futurism, Marinetti) ends with the line “Oh shut up.” Apollinaire’s nuanced position in the face
of the war was appealing to Duchamp and Stein – more appealing, I would argue, than the
polemics of an artist such as Marinetti. Despite the backdrop of the war, Apolinère Enameled and
“Guillaume Apollinaire” establish a tone of vibrancy, fondness, and appreciation for a friend and
fellow artist. Stein’s comparison of Apollinaire to Caesar, for example, is an acknowledgement
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that despite their differences, Apollinaire was a welcome figure within her circle. Indeed,
Duchamp and Stein seemed to have recognized that there was a unique quality to Apollinaire,
even when the poet turned became an outspoken patriot.
Mallorcan Stories
For the first years of the war, Stein followed a path not unlike that of Duchamp; she spent
some time in Britain, away from Paris, then lived for a year in the neutral location of Palma de
Mallorca. However, her reaction to the differed in important ways from Duchamp’s impervious,
dispassionate mien; in her writing she often refers directly to the conflicts, expressing fear,
anticipation, and anxiety – albeit with her trademark unflappability. This excerpt from “A
Collection (My Dear Miss Carey: A Story),” a piece written Mallorca, is an example of her
occasionally frank style:
WILL THEY CRUSH GERMANY
They will crush Germany. There is no doubt about it.
Scholars have already pointed out that Stein seems less inclined to experiment with radical
syntax in her work dating from the First World War, which is certainly the case here. However,
as Cyrena Pondrom has rightly observed, Stein’s “completed sentences,” even when they are
highly readable, “do not form coherent narratives.” Pondrom describes the Mallorca writings as
“a relaxed hybrid of her previous experiments”
43
; Stein’s repetitions lack “the insistence of her
early work,” explains Pondrom, while her “selection of surprising words” no longer achieves
“sustained deconstruction of grammar and logic.”
44
James Mellow likewise describes these
works as “cryptic and readable, by turns.”
45
“A Collection” is an example of this “cryptic and
readable,” “hybrid” style; although it resembles Tender Buttons in form, the language of this
piece seems to lack Stein’s semantic deviance:
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WILD FLOWERS
We collected wild flowers. We enjoyed it very much. In a window
we saw exhibited the things that can be found in the country.
Collecting wildflowers was a favorite activity of Stein and Toklas in Mallorca, and it was during
their stay there, Mellow tells us, that Stein discovered her love of tuberoses. By placing the
passages “WILD FLOWERS” and “WILL THEY CRUSH GERMANY” in succession, she
emphasizes the contrasts of wartime life, picking flowers one moment and worrying about the
German army the next; in her later war writings, as discussed in the following chapter, Stein
would return again and again to such anxiety-riddled domestic scenes.
Unlike her later war narratives, Stein’s World War I compositions are decidedly
experimental in form, even when her historical references are quite concrete:
Mallorcan Stories
Romanonos no.
Maurer see.
Sun never sets.
Napoleon the third, cathedral.
McKinley’s eagle.
Pope’s prayers for peace.
Pins and needles ship.
Mallorcan stories.
This short poem functions as a montage, a collection of images from which it is possible to
vaguely piece together a picture of the Great War as experienced from Mallorca. These lines
evoke global tensions, mainly related to the rise and fall of modern empires: the decline of the
Romanov family (the year Stein wrote this poem would be last of their reign),
46
the reign of
British colonialism (an empire, it was once said, on which the “Sun never sets”), the regime of
“Napoleon the third” along with France’s recent defeats (the “cathedral” is mostly likely Notre
Dame, which had burned in 1914), the emergence of U.S. global military power (as symbolized
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by its takeover of Fort McKinley in the Philippines), and the failed efforts of Pope Benedict XV
to mediate peace (the “Pope’s prayers”). These lines also hit a personal register; Alfy Maurer
was a favorite at Stein’s salons in Paris (“Maurer see” perhaps refers to a visit), while the “Pins
and needles ship” is the Fangturm (“a german ship…which sold pins and needles to all the
Mediterranean ports before the war,” we learn in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas). This is
an idiosyncratic historical account that treats narrative function as secondary to lyric form. The
language is rife with alliteration (the ‘n’ of “Romanonos no,” the ‘p’ of “Pope’s prayers for
peace,” the repeated ‘s’ of “Maurer see / Sun never sets”) as well as other wordplay (the phrases
“cathedral” and “McKinley’s eagle,” for example, form a slant rhyme). Appropriately titled,
“Mallorcan Stories” represents the fragmented realism of Stein’s writing during this period was a
continuation of her non-narrative style, newly set within a specified historical context.
Stein’s Mallorca plays often approach difficult subjects in an elliptical manner, as in the
opening of Act Two in “What Happened”:
ACT TWO
(Three.)
Four and nobody wounded, five and nobody flourishing, six
and nobody talkative, eight and nobody sensible.
One and a left hand lift that is so heavy that there is no way of
pronouncing perfectly.
A point of accuracy, a point of a strange stove, a point that is so
sober that the reason left is all the chance of swelling.
47
Stein was slightly more willing in her earlier writings to evince the horrors of battle. As scholars
have pointed out, Stein’s later war narratives tend to shy away from imagery related to the
trenches; even in a text such as Brewsie and Willie, the conversations the soldiers have with each
other take precedence over the horrific sights of battle. “What Happened” reminds us that in the
year she composed her portrait of Apollinaire, Stein was utterly preoccupied with the impending
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certainty of a global war. “What Happened” is a strange scene of home life, where people seem
to be “talking” and it appears that someone’s hand may have been burned while working at the
stove. The imagery, however, is out of proportion with mundane dinner conversation and a
simple household accident. Strangely, the language creates a sense of dread related to serious
bodily harm, or perhaps even mutilation – “a left hand lift that is so heavy that there is no way of
pronouncing perfectly,” “a point that is so sober that the reason left is all the chance of swelling.”
As we learn from the later Wars I Have Seen, Stein often related her experiences of one war to
the next. The foreboding atmosphere of “What Happened” can be read as a portrayal of how it
must have felt to anxiously anticipate a major global conflict that would most likely hit home.
Having lived through wartime before, Stein was already familiar with the cruelty of numbers:
“four,” “five,” “six,” and finally, after “eight” battles, there will be “nobody sensible.” As too
many soldiers would experience, it would take “One” moment, “A point of accuracy” on the part
of an enemy, to bring about loss of life or the direst tragedy. Stein’s drama creates the mood of a
wartime household: in the final act, we read: “A regret a single regret makes a door way. What is
a door way, a door way is a photograph” – a photograph, perhaps, of a son sent off to war. The
very next year, she would be staying with the Whiteheads, witnessing first-hand what it was like
to live for news of ‘what happened.’
Although readers of Stein tend to focus upon her work as an ambulance driver in the last
years of the war, which Stein herself talked about profusely, Stein’s Mallorca writings provide a
different perspective. Using dialogue wrought with a mixture of ignorance and discomfort,
Stein’s Mallorca plays capture the ambivalence of living in a neutral zone, of the psychological
torment one experiences even when living in safe zone. In “Do Let Us Go Away,” for example, a
troubled character named Henry proclaims that “Individual cases do not bring the war home to
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me.” But, explains Henry, “I suddenly remember and I rest in it. I am ashamed. I have patient
and earnest feeling.... Oh I am disgusted. This is not the conversation.” Henry’s nauseous disgust
with polite conversation seems more compatible to the sensibility of T.S. Eliot than Duchamp.
At other points, however, Stein ruminates over the war’s ridiculous abstraction of suffering and
violence, and in moments such as these, her imagination seems close kin to Duchamp’s Large
Glass, with its “malic moulds” and “oculist witness”:
More Witnesses.
Put the patient goat away, put the patient boat away, put away
the boat and put it, the boat, put it, put away that boat. Put away
the boat.
Single Witnesses.
(3). An army of invincible and ever ready mustaches and all the
same mind and a way of winding and no more repertoire, not any
more noise, this did increase every day.
Such passages can be related to the war in the same way one could claim that Duchamp’s Large
Glass, among its many possible meanings, takes on the symbolism of battle: the helpless witness
and the soldiers are found below, in the trenches, all fighting for the same bride (recalling that in
popular culture, the French nation was often depicted as a blushing young woman). Like
Duchamp, Stein crafts an aesthetic of indirect allusion, evocative of wartime moods and
situations, but one that ultimately hesitates at the threshold of recognizable allegory or emotional
expression.
However, Stein’s language often has an added layer of concreteness which one rarely
discovers in Duchamp. In the passage above from “White Wines” [1913], for example, Stein’s
historical references are fairly obvious. As recounted by biographers, a retired German war ship
named The Fangturm was docked in the bay of Mallorca: “put away the boat,” Stein writes, “and
put it, the boat, put it, put away that boat.” “[T]hat boat” was an obsession of those living in
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Mallorca during the war, an eerie reminder of the threat of the Germans, with their “army of
invincible and ever ready mustaches.” The Mallorca plays as a whole are written upon the
palimpsest of Stein’s conflicted vulnerability: one moment she is overwhelmed by the human
tragedy of the war, at another, she treats such tragedy as a mundane topic of daily conversation –
and in her moments of frustration, Stein finds herself objectifying and hating the enemy, as
though she has been taken in by the propaganda of the war machine itself.
Stein and Duchamp had a similar way of depicting wartime trauma: too painful, too ugly,
to deal with directly, the subject of the war is treated through obscure language and oblique
imagery. Although Duchamp would avoid Stein’s brand of direct historical allusion, there are
several parallels between his subtle references to the Great War and the “cryptic” elements of
Stein’s Mallorca period. Certain readymades created by Duchamp after the outbreak of the war –
most notably, Fresh Widow [1920] – reference violence and loss in a remarkably overt manner
for Duchamp. The inscription of Comb [1916] is another example: “3 OU 4 GOUTTES DE
HAUTEUR N’ONT RIEN À FAIRE AVEC LA SAUVAGERIE.” The ‘3 or 4 drops of height’
likely refers to his Three Standard Stoppages, and Duchamp may be implying that his mode of
anti-art has nothing to do with ‘savagery.’ As with all of Duchamp’s conceptual language, this
line lends itself to multiple meanings, and given the wartime context of this piece, the
connotation of bombing should not be overlooked. Comb, with its jagged teeth, seems similar in
sentiment to Stein’s “Mallorca Stories,” in that both pieces subtly communicate wartime anxiety
(feelings of being on “pins and needles,” of wanting to tear out one’s hair). It is doubtful that
Duchamp was allegorizing the war directly, yet, as Kieron Lyons has demonstrated through
brilliant research, such military allusions seem unmistakably present throughout Duchamp’s
oeuvre.
48
93
Although the First World War has never been regarded as a major influence upon the
conceptual aesthetics of Duchamp and Stein, their methods of abstraction became their means of
exhibiting uncertainty about the historical situation at hand. Apolinère Enameled, with its subtle
interplay of reflection and deflection, is a primary example. The little girl’s hair reflected in the
mirror above the dresser – a hand-drawn sketch added by Duchamp – breaks the laws of
geometric space. Despite the skewed line of perspective, we presume the long, brown hair in the
mirror belongs to the girl we see painting the bed, and not to some other figure – a twin sister,
perhaps? – standing elsewhere in the room. Seldom do we wonder: what should be reflected in
the mirror? What might this contrived reflection be hiding from our view? Why do we accept as
a given that there is nothing else, no one else, in the room, or that the room is as small as its
skewed perspective makes it seem? With these principles of substitution, deflection, and
displacement in mind, Apolinère Enameled becomes a symbol of what it meant to conceive of
‘other’ reactions to the Great War: creating works which only seem ahistorical, Stein and
Duchamp turned to the conventions of aesthetic formalism in order to express their own
positions of political ambivalence.
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NOTES
1. See Ulla Dydo, The Language that Rises: 1923-1934 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press, 2003), 298.
2. Marjorie Perloff, “A Cessation of Resemblances: Stein/Picasso/Duchamp,” The
Battersea Review 1, no. 1 (2012), http://marjorieperloff.com/stein-duchamp-picasso/a-cessation-
of-resemblances-stein-duchamp-picasso/. In her earlier work on Duchamp, Perloff calls this a
“refusal of metaphor,” a turn away from “the figure of similarity, of analogy, of likeness.”
Marjorie Perloff, 21st Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics (Malden, MA: Blackwell
Publishers, 2002), 117.
3. In the late 1960s, Pierre Cabanne (thinking no doubt of the situation in Algeria) asked
Duchamp if he was interested in politics. The answer was clear: “No, not at all,” he told
Cabanne, “Let’s not talk about it. I don’t know anything about it, I don’t understand anything
about politics, and I say it’s really a stupid activity, which leads to nothing.” Marcel Duchamp,
Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp (New York: Da Capo Press, 1971; reprint, 1987), 103.
4. Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998), 216.
5. “Guerre,” in Selected Writings of Guillaume Apollinaire, trans. Roger Shattuck (New
York: New Directions, 1971), 175.
6. “The New Spirit and the Poets,” in Selected Writings, 235-236.
7. The Eiffel Tower was a national symbol of cultural and technological progress. Similar
to Aragon and Benjamin, Apollinaire celebrated Paris as an urban triumph and he equated the
city’s labyrinthian layout, cut through with grand boulevards, with the birth of modernity.
8. Francis Steegmuller, Apollinaire: Poet Among the Painters (New York: Penguin
Books, 1963), 138.
9. See Walter Adamson, Embattled Avant-Gardes: Modernism’s Resistance to
Commodity Culture in Europe (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007),
122-123.
10. Duchamp explained to Pierre Cabanne in 1967 that he knew Apollinaire only “very
little.” “It wasn’t easy to know him well,” Duchamp mused, “unless you were his intimate.”
Cabanne, 24.
11. Dalia Judovitz, Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1998), 109.
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12. The volume included “Guillaume Apollinaire” (1913) and selected later portraits such
as “Erik Satie” (1922), “If I told him / a completed portrait of Picasso” (1923), “Christian
Berard” (1928), and “Bernard Faÿ” (1929).
13. The translation was done by two of Stein’s most loyal followers at the time, Georges
Hugnet and Virgil Thomson. Dix Portraits was the second effort by Hugnet to make Stein’s
work available to French audiences. The first was Morceaux Choisis de La Fabrication Des
Américains (1929), also published by Editions de la Montagne. Stein insisted to Hugnet that the
translations for Morceaux Choisis and Dix Portraits should be absolutely literal (for a full
discussion of the translation process of these texts, see Dydo, 290-301). When it came time for
Stein to translate Hugnet’s verse into English a short time later, Stein completely changed the
translation process, creating her own poems that had little to do with Hugnet’s original text.
Eventually, these ‘translations’ would end her friendship with Hugnet. For a full account of her
disagreement with Hugnet and Stein’s publication of Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded
Friendship Faded, see Dydo, The Language That Rises, 301-323.
14. Stein, Dix Portraits, texte Anglais accompagné de la traduction de G. Hugnet et de V.
Thomson. Préface de Pierre de Massot (Paris: Éditions de la Montagne, 1930), 12. Translation
mine.
15. Ibid., 12. Translation mine.
16. Ibid., 12. Translation mine.
17. Quoted from Mellow, Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company (New York:
Praeger, 1974), 97-98.
18. One is reminded of Gaudier-Brzeska’s Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound sitting in Violet
Hunt’s garden in Kensington where it offended the neighbors for sixteen years. There is much
about Stein, in fact, to suggest a comparison to Pound, and he is increasingly becoming the
example critics turn to when discussing her distasteful politics. Stein and Pound, however,
should not be placed in the same de facto category because they had fascist tendencies and
conservative beliefs. Pound being another case altogether, I will briefly mention here that it is
within the areas of historic monumentality and political upheaval that Stein becomes
significantly more ambivalent and less revolutionary. As this chapter attempts to illustrate, her
belief in a strong adhesion of national identity alongside complex cultural difference has a
stronger precedent with Apollinaire than with Pound’s iconoclasm.
19. As early as 1914, Apollinaire intended to publish his first examples of concrete poetry
– later to be called his calligrammes – in a pamphlet bearing the title “Et Moi Aussi Je Suis
Peintre.” “Forging a link between the visual aesthetics of the Cubist painters and the literary
works of writers of the early years of the twentieth century in France,” Johanna Drucker writes,
“Apollinaire demonstrated his capacity to develop an aesthetic in which the features of a visual
art practice might be applied to poetry in particular and to the development of an aesthetic
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practice in general.” Johanna Drucker, The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern
Art, 1909-1923 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 146.
20. Mellow, Charmed Circle, 97.
21. Ibid., 97.
22. Ulla Dydo, Headnote to “Portrait of Constance Fletcher,” in A Stein Reader
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 260.
23. Susan McCabe, Cinematic Modernism: Modernist Poetry and Film (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005), 80.
24. Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. Ron Padgett (New York:
Viking Press, 1971), 24.
25. Roch Grey, “Guillaume Apollinaire,” L’Esprit Nouveau, no. 26 (October 1994).
26. Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, 61.
27. Guillaume Apollinaire, Les mamelles de Tirésias: opéra-bouffe en deux actes et un
prologue (Kindle Edition, Amazon Media). [1903/1917]. Translation mine.
28. Quoted from Walter Adamson, Embattled Avant-Gardes: Modernism’s Resistance to
Commodity Culture in Europe (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007),
121.
29. Adamson, Embattled Avant-Gardes, 121-122.
30. See Jean-Michel Rabaté, 1913: The Cradle of Modernism (Oxford: Blackwell
Publishing, 2007), 56.
31. Susan McCabe, Cinematic Modernism, 63. McCabe convincingly illustrates that
Stein’s comedic sensibility can be compared to the bodily antics of Charlie Chaplin, whose work
she greatly admired; both played out cultural obsessions with hysterical behavior and broken
bodies which the war brought to pass.
32. For a full account, see Mellow, Charmed Circle, 139.
33. Salmon, quoted in Mellow, Charmed Circle, 144.
34. In 1914, Apollinaire devoted an entire issue of Les Soirées de Paris to Rousseau. He
wrote his own article for the occasion, which made no mention of the famous banquet. Instead,
Apollinaire reminisced about being a modest guest at the soirées hosted by Rousseau himself,
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where “everyone would drink a glass of wine and go home, completely happy at having spent a
few hours in the company of a fine man.” There is a great contrast between Apollinaire’s humble
admiration for Le Douanier and Stein’s unflattering description written years later in Alice B.
Toklas – but the irony here is that Apollinaire and Stein, in a certain sense, share the same
motivation. Les Soirées de Paris is but one example of how Apollinaire put much of his energy
into mythologizing ‘his’ Paris; indeed, his work as an editor and art critic was not altogether
different than Stein’s Alice B. Toklas. It seems evident that Stein noticed the parallel between
herself and Apollinaire. In her own version of the banquet Rousseau in Alice B. Toklas, Stein
shifted all attention toward herself and Apollinaire – her way of subtly acknowledging that she
found in Apollinaire a counterpart to her own efforts of self-aggrandizement. It’s possible, in
fact, that Apollinaire’s strategic use of Raynal during the 1910s could have been one of the
inspirations for her wholesale appropriation of Alice’s voice; after all, Stein’s Alice did a better
job than Apollinaire’s Raynal in turning the banquet Rousseau into myth. In any case, Stein and
Apollinaire played the same part especially well, each the genius artist accompanied by their
acolytes.
35. Quoted from Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years, 68.
36. Clearly, Stein thought of Rousseau as a ‘nobody,’ “like any number of frenchmen one
saw everywhere” – this despite the fact he was greatly admired by several prominent artists, most
notably Picasso and Jarry, for his exotic, colorful landscapes. Within Stein’s purview,
Apollinaire’s poise as a bohemian socialite was far more noteworthy than Rousseau’s naïve art,
which never attracted a great deal of her interest.
37. As in the cases of most artists, Stein, Apollinaire, and Duchamp had individually
nuanced ideologies in regards to nationalism. Walter Adamson explains that Apollinaire’s
definition of French character was itself inherently paradoxical: “Apollinaire generally did not
define as a foreigner anyone who falls outside the French ‘race’” but he was not “entirely
consistent in this regard and occasionally utilized a concept of “Latinity” which, from its
association with Edouard Drumont and Charles Maurras, had ethnic-nationalist and even anti-
Semitic overtones.” “All that is certain,” Adamson writes, “is that the naturist view that art and
its capacity for social redemption must always be connected with the concrete national
conditions of a people remained fundamental for him.” See Embattled Avant-Gardes, 126-127.
Those familiar with Stein scholarship will recognize that Stein and Apollinaire were similarly
ambivalent in their constructions of individual and collective identity; their respective patriotic
beliefs failed to fully comply with either civic or ethnic models of the nation. Both held “the
naturist view” that art “must always be connected with the concrete national conditions of a
people” and their nationalistic belief systems were likewise “ethnic-nationalist and even anti-
Semitic” – but they also shared an autobiographical impulse to reconfigure the possibilities of the
nation and their own ‘otherness’ within it. Duchamp, by contrast, veers far from Apollinaire’s
naturist tendencies, as he did not concern himself with racial or geographical constructions of
identity as Stein was wont to do.
38. Apollinaire, “Zone,” in Selected Writings, 116-117.
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39. Marcel Duchamp, The Writings of Marcel Duchamp (New York: Da Capo, 1973), 26.
40. Guillaume Apollinaire, “La Petite Auto” (“The Little Car”), in The Self-Dismembered
Man: Selected Later Poems of Guillaume Apollinaire, trans. Donald Revell (Middleton, CT:
Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 68-69.
41. According to Tate papers, “[l]arge sections of the army were involved in these
combined operations.” See Kieran Lyons, “Military Avoidance: Marcel Duchamp and the Jura-
Paris Road,” Tate Papers 5 (2006), http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-
papers/military-avoidance-marcel-duchamp-and-jura-paris-road.
42. Lyons points out that the notes “contain allusions to dimensional space and to
‘communication at a distance.’” He suggests that Duchamp was critiquing the communication
strategy of the French army, an argument which is, as he admits, somewhat ‘fanciful.’ Lyons
argues that “Duchamp was making a point” that “[t]he army lacked a communications system
that could function across the fluctuating terrain of total warfare.” I see it as unlikely that
Duchamp had any interest in critiquing military strategy; rather, one could see this as evidence of
his concern for his brothers, frustrated by the poor communications he was receiving about the
advancements of the army. See Lyons, “Military Avoidance.”
43. Cyrena N. Pondrom, Introduction, Geography and Plays (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1993, pp. vii-lv), li.
44. Ibid., li.
45. James R. Mellow, Charmed Circle, 222.
46. This was a suggestion of Marjorie Perloff’s during a conversation with her on August
26, 2012.
47. Gertrude Stein, “What Happened,” in Geography and Plays, 206.
48. As I mention in a previous chapter, Duchamp used as the axis of his Chocolate
Grinder [1913] the handle of a standard issue French bayonet; this became one of the main
elements of the Large Glass and one the many works recreated for La Boîte-en-valise. Lyons
points out that “les moulins à café had become the term for the cumbersome, heavy machine-
guns that were issued but largely unused by the French infantry. An immediate contextual
resonance was provided by the fact that these denigrated and ineffective weapons were made in
the local arsenal at Puteaux.” Building upon the military implications of Chocolate Grinder,
Lyons also reminds us of the semblance of the Nine Malic Moulds [1914-1915] to soldiers (an
observation endorsed by other scholars). See Lyons, “Military Avoidance.”
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CHAPTER 3
HAVING NOTHING TO SAY AND SAYING IT:
STEIN AND BECKETT IN VICHY FRANCE
Like most of the artistic community in France in the period following the First World
War, Gertrude Stein believed the avant-garde would never recover from the loss of Guillaume
Apollinaire: “Guillaume would have been a bond of union,” Stein wrote in The Autobiography of
Alice B. Toklas, “and now that he was gone everybody ceased to be friends.” Her nostalgic tone,
however precious it may seem, belies the fact that the war had ravaged the Parisian art scene;
these “friends” were some of most important artists of the 20
th
century, an international grouping
which included Picasso, Picabia, Braque, and Gris. During the interwar period, Apollinaire’s
legacy was revived by the French Surrealists, who had been particularly influenced by his Les
Mamelles de Tirésias. Few would question that Apollinaire, who coined the term surréalisme,
had built the foundation for this new movement – except perhaps Stein, who loathed André
Breton and outwardly rejected the Surrealist movement. Clearly unimpressed with how the
avant-garde had evolved from its Dada and Cubist roots, Stein insisted in Alice B. Toklas that
“[t]he surrealistes are the vulgarisation of Picabia as Delaunay and his followers and the futurists
were the vulgarisation of Picasso.”
1
Breton “admires anything to which he can sign his name,”
she would later write in Everybody’s Autobiography, “and you know as well as I do that a
hundred years hence nobody will remember his name you know that perfectly well.”
2
As scholars have widely discussed, Stein found little interest in Surrealism’s excavations
of the unconscious mind
3
– what she called their “higher flights”
4
– intent as she was on
dissembling rather than assembling meaning. However, few if any critics have considered how
Stein’s critique of Surrealism moves beyond the framework of psychoanalysis to pertain to the
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historical contexts of interwar France. Consider, for example, her comparison of Surrealism to
Futurism: “[t]he surrealistes are the vulgarization of Picabia as…the futurists were the
vulgarization of Picasso” – a parallelism so deliberate as to be underscored by the echo of
Picasso and Picabia. Stein frames this as an aesthetic commentary; she means us to understand,
of course, that Surrealism is the “vulgarization” of Picabia’s techniques. Yet the common thread
between these particular movements introduces political connotations almost impossible to
ignore. Unlike Dada and Cubist artists, who for the most part remained politically unidentifiable
(or, as some scholars have argued, implicitly aligned with anarchism), the Surrealists and
Futurists joined the ranks of a specific ideology – Surrealism with its commitment to
Communism, and Futurism with its fascist allegiances. It is no coincidence that when Stein made
her remarks about Surrealism in Alice B. Toklas, the movement was at the height of its
involvements with the French Communist Party.
5
Later, writing in her World War II-era memoir
Paris, France, Stein wrote that the Surrealists “missed their moment of becoming civilized, they
used their revolt, not as a private but as a public thing, they wanted publicity not civilization, and
so really they never succeeded in being peaceful and exciting…This does bring me back to Paris
from 1900 to 1939.”
6
The Surrealists made their “revolt” a “public thing,” and the movement had
become a political animal. Breton had steered a major faction of the avant-garde into serving a
social cause – another way, certainly, that Stein regarded Surrealism as the “vulgarisation” of
Dada.
Samuel Beckett’s relationship with Surrealism has likewise been examined almost
primarily through the lens of psychoanalysis,
7
with scholars paying little attention to how he may
have reacted against the political dimensions of the Surrealist movement. Unlike Stein, Beckett
was interested in the creative application of psychoanalysis; from 1929 to 1932, he translated
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texts by Breton, Eluard, and others, making a significant contribution to the spread of Surrealism
into the English-speaking world. Beckett’s letters from the early 1930s indicate he held these
translations in high regard; anticipating the arrival of “some Breton & Eluard MSS”
8
being sent
to him by Nancy Cunard, he wrote to Thomas McGreevy in December 1932 that he would take
“real pleasure [in] transposing them.”
9
While psychoanalysis is indispensable to Beckett’s early
development, what is rarely discussed by scholars is the fact that Beckett’s attitude towards
Surrealism grew somewhat hostile in the years following the Second World War. In a 1950 letter
to Georges Duthuit, Beckett made the following comments about Breton:
…Read with wonderment Breton, Patri, Peret in Combat. What
flowery stuff.
Noted in Breton the singularly powerful image of the ship of
humanity cast adrift by its navigator on to the “definitive reefs”. To
wait until the atomic age before feeling really worried, that is
indeed surrealist. And that certainty of spring that did his heart
good in the worst moments of the Occupation. Lucky thing.
10
Regardless of the fact that Breton, like Beckett, had been a Nazi dissenter, Beckett saw it fit to
mock Breton’s rhetorical flourishes (“the singularly powerful image of the ship of humanity”),
his silly clichés (“that certainty of spring that did his heart good”) and his asinine commentary
about the atomic bomb (“that is indeed surrealist”). Beckett’s sarcasm about the fact that Breton
spent most of the war in comfortable refuge in New York – “Lucky thing” – is reminiscent of the
contempt Stein expressed about the public profile of the Surrealists. Even though Breton was a
natural political and aesthetic ally, Beckett was in fact more attuned to Stein’s feeling that the
Surrealists had “missed their moment of becoming civilized.”
Regardless of their similar attitudes towards Surrealism, the political identities of Beckett
and Stein are drastically counterpoised: Beckett, a recipient of the Croix de Guerre, has long
102
been celebrated as a hero of the French Resistance, while Stein has been branded both as a Vichy
sympathizer and a traitor to her Jewish identity due to her admiration of Philippe Pétain and the
protection extended to her by his regime. While I do not seek to defend or excuse Stein, I do
think it is important to point out that her war aesthetic is in a sense no different from Beckett’s,
in that she makes a radical wager of political ambivalence. Beckett, according to his biographer
James Knowlson, had a “lack of political involvement after the Second World War”
11
; despite
his association with the Resistance, he was in fact equally repelled by the engagée spirit of Sartre
as he was by the postwar rhetoric of Breton. Stein never became a card-carrying member of any
political group despite her idiosyncratic commentaries on the Vichy regime and other
contemporary affairs; neither did she sympathize with Futurism during the interwar period
regardless of the fact that she shared some of their fascist beliefs.
Consider one of Stein’s most controversial remarks made in a 1934 interview with
Lansing Warren of The New York Times Magazine: “Hitler should have received the Nobel
Peace Prize…because he is removing all elements of contest and of struggle from Germany.”
Exhaustively quoted a reflection of Stein’s fascist sympathies, Stein’s flippant remark has
prompted endless speculation about her intended political message. However, Stein’s other
commentary in this interview more accurately reflects the point she was attempting to make:
“I always say that intellectuals are not suited to be the directors of
government,” said Miss Stein. “They have a mental obliquity. By
that I mean that they are diverted by their intellects, by their ideas
and their theories, from responding to the instincts which ought to
guide practical rule.”
The logic here goes in both directions; if “intellectuals” are incapable of being “directors of
government,” then “directors of government” are also incapable of being “intellectuals.”
However much Stein is guilty of distasteful humor, her facetiousness brings home a cogent
103
point: just as she thought a painter like Picasso should never become a writer, Stein also believed
that artists should keep their hands out of politics. “Though decidedly an intellectual herself,” her
interviewer Lansing Warren comments, “she has a poor opinion of intellectuals who intervene in
practical affairs.” Unlike Breton, who was ousted from the French Communist Party because he
did not contribute to their “practical affairs,” Stein never attempted to operate her political
opinions. If scholars have yet to parse her meaning about Hitler, it is largely because she
perfectly expected that her remarks would cause such confusion. For Stein, “mental obliquity” is
par for the course when the creative process makes an attempt at political activism.
As Barthes once remarked, “the avant-garde is threatened by only one force, which is not
the bourgeoisie: political consciousness. The surrealist movement was not broken up by
bourgeois attacks but by the insistent representation of a political problem.” Stein’s
commentaries about 18
th
century American democracy and her admiring portraits of ‘great men,’
hardly qualify as “the insistent representation of a political problem” in the manner of Sartre or
Breton. Whether or not she deserves condemnation for her “intellectual” fascism, Stein’s writing
stands alongside Beckett’s as an aesthetic that deconstructs the ethos of political engagement.
“C’est nous qui avons fait ça”
Not unlike Stein, Beckett became disenchanted with Surrealism but never seemed to
waiver in his admiration for Apollinaire. Beckett mocked Breton for writing “flowery stuff,” but
had no trouble embracing the grandiloquence of Apollinaire, as evidenced by his remarkable
translation of “Zone” undertaken in 1950:
Je suis malade d’ouïr les paroles bienheureses
L’amour dont je souffre est une maladie honteuse
Et l’image qui te possède te fait survivre dans l’insomnie
et dans l’angoise
C’est toujour près de toi cette image qui passe
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Beckett’s version of this melodramatic passage reads as follows:
I am sick with hearing the words of bliss
The love I endure is like a syphilis
And the image that possess you and never leaves your /
side
In anguish and insomnia keeps you alive
Beckett’s translation faithfully renders Apollinaire’s idiosyncratic sense of rhythm (above, the
slant rhyme of l’angoise/passe becomes the similar vowel echo of side/alive). “Zone,” however,
also lent itself to Beckett’s macabre inflections; in place of Apollinaire’s romantic “maladie
honteuse,” for example, he rhymes “syphilis” with “bliss.”
It has been estimated that up to 10% of Allied soldiers were carrying syphilis during the
First World War; while it is impossible to tell whether or not this influenced Beckett’s choice,
“syphilis” is a powerful image which alludes to Apollinaire’s tragic passing after being wounded
in the trenches. As I explored in the previous chapter, Apollinaire was a paradox of the avant-
garde’s political mobilizations in the period surrounding the war: too committed to national
identity to be aligned with the anarchist stance of Paris Dada, too committed to cultural tradition
to participate in the destructive impulses of Futurism, he embraced the French war effort without
abandoning his free-thinking bohemianism, or what he called L’Esprit Nouveau. Apollinaire’s
aesthetic runs curiously parallel with Beckett’s political ambivalence; consider, for example, the
strangeness Beckett must have felt while translating lines such as these:
Weeping you watch the wretched emigrants
They believe in God they pray the women suckle their infants
They fill with their smell the station of Saint-Lazare
Like the wise men from the east they have faith in their star
…
They are mostly Jews the wives wear wigs and in
The depths of shadowy dens bloodless sit on and on
105
In the years following the Occupation, Apollinaire’s image of “bloodless” Jewish emigrants
waiting in a train station surely hit a horrific nerve. In 1972, when Dolmen Press published a
stand-alone edition of Beckett’s translation of “Zone” alongside the original text, the flap copy
brought these war-related anxieties to the fore:
…Alcools, published in 1913, foreshadows the dislocated
consciousness of the 1914-1918 war. Beckett, one of the greatest
and most compassionate of twentieth-century writers, has produced
a perfectly balanced translation which captures the tone of the
French original and is a fine poem in its own right….
12
The design for the jacket, credited to a Liam Miller, featured an abstract shape resembling black
smoke – this represented the obliteration of a bomb, or perhaps a lingering cloud of mourning
(figure 8). The overall effect was particularly suggestive of the connection between Apollinaire’s
1913 “Zone” and more recent memories of the Occupied Zone:
Figure 8. 1972 Dolmen Press edition of “Zone,” with Beckett translation, cover by Liam Miller
106
Beckett returns us to Stein’s comment about the “mental obliquity” of intellectuals; his version
of “Zone” is linked to the cultural memory of the war by way of vague association and historical
hindsight. As Ingeborg Bachmann would write of postwar Austria, “War is no longer declared, /
but rather continued” – so too does Beckett’s melancholy seem to be a continuation of
Apollinaire’s.
Beckett was not the only artist who steered clear of the bombastic rhetoric of the French
avant-garde after the war; Camus resisted identifying himself as a political intellectual, and there
are several examples of writers such as Francis Ponge who were influenced by Surrealism and
Existentialism without becoming pledged to the Communist doctrine of these movements.
Beckett, however, radically refused to acknowledge any aspect of the contemporary intellectual
climate, remaining completely reticent about subjects that drew thinkers such as Sartre, Adorno
and Badiou to his work – the Second World War, postwar anxieties about the atom bomb, and
the dehumanizing effects of modern existence. As Marjorie Perloff writes, “Beckett’s poetic war
fictions fuse a curious literalism with the Mallarmean principle that to name is to destroy. To use
words like war, Vichy, Resistance, Auschwitz, atom bomb would inevitably be to short-circuit the
complexity of the experiences in question.”
13
It was in the wake of the Second World War that Beckett fully developed his trademark
minimalism, writing for first time in French rather than English. Instead of contemplating how
his newfound aesthetic had been shaped by his war experience, Beckett chose instead to frame
his breakthrough in relation to Joyce:
I realized that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of
knowing more, [being] in control of one’s material. He was always
adding to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I
realised that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of
knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than in
adding.
14
107
After surviving the Occupation, and with the atrocities of the Nazi regime fresh in memory,
Beckett still seemed primarily occupied with Joyce – it is a proposition which seems all the more
absurd because it is likely true. Beckett answered not to Sartre, but to Irish forebears such as
Joyce and Yeats, and his methods of abstraction were inspired by earlier figures including
Mallarmé and Apollinaire rather than postwar contemporaries such as Camus. Beckett was well
aware that his “way” of “subtracting” revisited familiar aesthetic terrain. In Watt, his minimalist
approach to words hardly appears as a revelation:
For Watt now found himself in the midst of things which, if they
consented to be named, did so as it were with reluctance. And the
state in which Watt found himself resisted formulation in a way no
state had ever done. . . .Looking at a pot, for example, or thinking
of a pot, at one of Mr Knott’s pots, of one of Mr Knott’s pots, it
was in vain that Watt said, Pot, pot. Well, perhaps not quite in
vain, but very nearly. For it was not a pot, the more he looked, the
more he reflected, the more he felt sure of that, that is was not a
pot at all.
15
Compare this to Stein’s famous poem “Susie Asado,” written decades earlier in 1913:
A pot. A pot is a beginning of a rare bit of trees. Trees tremble, the
old vats are in bobbles, bottles, which shade and shove and render
clean, render clean must.
Marjorie Perloff describes “Susie Asado” as a Cubist composition lending itself to simultaneous
metonymic readings. “We can, if we choose, focus on the homoerotic theme of Susie
Asado…But it all depends,” says Perloff, “on our angle of vision,” for “the roasted susie erotic
code can be just as easily construed as a pretty Japanese tea ceremony.” Perloff interprets the
passage above as one would a Cubist painting, where “carafe shapes will repeat, in some
variation,” the tea in this case appearing to be poured from a “pot” into “a larger receptacle like a
vat.” Watt, by contrast, seems caught in infant stages, his “Pot, pot” a baby-talk version of
108
Stein’s earlier and more sophisticated methods of Cubist construction. Elsewhere, we witness
Watt’s reaction to an abstract picture hanging in one of the bedrooms of the house where he is
working as a servant. In complete stupefaction, as though seeing an abstract painting for the very
first time, “he wondered what the artist had intended to represent (Watt knew nothing about
painting), a circle and its centre in search of each other, or a circle and its centre in search of a
centre and a circle respectively, or a circle and its centre in search of its centre and a circle
respectively…” That this is meant to be a Cubist painting seems obvious not by Watt’s
description of the composition, but by the way it forces Watt to think: “Watt did not of course
wonder all these things at the time, but some he wondered at the time, and the others
subsequently.” Watt’s thought process is juvenile and ridiculous, especially as he begins to hold
the picture upside-down, but he does stumble upon a successful method of deconstructive
reading.
Curiously, Watt does know one thing for certain, “that the picture had not been long in
the house, and that it would not remain long in the house, and that it was one of a series.”
16
For a
writer in Beckett’s position, accessibility and display of modern art had obvious political
implications. He had traveled through Germany in the mid-1930s where he witnessed the
suppression of modern art, which the Nazis had labeled as ‘degenerate.’ Beckett’s viewings of
abstract paintings mainly took place in private homes and in the storage rooms of galleries and
museums; during his trip to Germany in 1936 he wrote to Mary Manning Howe that “the modern
pictures are in the cellars.”
17
Watt has unquestionable parallels to these and other historical realities of the Nazi era,
but it is also a novel which returns with child-like wonder and awkwardness to the experimental
techniques of the 1910s avant-garde. Apolitical yet profoundly historical, Beckett’s war aesthetic
109
is perhaps best described as an uncanny sense of déjà-vu, as though the war meant waking up to
a reality turned stranger than a Cubist composition. Stein had the same sense of déjà-vu, as she
explains in Alice B. Toklas in a story involving Picasso. “The first year of the war,” Stein’s Alice
remembers,
Picasso and Eve, with whom he was living then, Gertrude Stein
and myself, were walking down the boulevard Raspail a cold
winter evening…All of a sudden down the street came some big
cannon, the first any of us had seen painted, that is camouflaged.
Pablo stopped, he was spell-bound. C’est nous qui avons fait ça, he
said, it is we that have created that, he said. And he was right, he
had. From Cezanne through him they had come to that. His
foresight was justified.
Picasso had not invented the military’s technique of camouflage, but it did seem that he had
precipitated it: “he first emphasized the way of building in Spanish villages, the line of the
houses not following the landscape but cutting across and into the landscape, becoming
undistinguishable in the landscape by cutting across the landscape. It was the principle of the
camouflage of the guns and the ships in the war.” As with Apollinaire, who anticipated that Paris
was evolving into a “Zone” of cultural alienation, Picasso’s Cubism seemed to predict a reality
that would soon come to pass. Picasso’s early paintings responded not to the war but to the
human figure and the natural landscape, and the military certainly had not copied Cubist
techniques per se. Rather, it seemed that Cubism resembled military camouflage through a
vaguely shared “principle.” “C’est nous qui avons fait ça”: Picasso’s utterance links the avant-
garde to the war, not through any kind of recognizable logic, but as though his genius was
mysteriously usurped by a reality he could not have expected.
In a recent study of the influence of totalitarianism within literary modernism, Leon
Surette points out that most of the major figures of the modernist era were artists who “believed
110
that historical forces were combining to bring about a new political and cultural dispensation,
and that it was their destiny to play a role in that new dispensation.”
18
Despite her sympathies
with fascism, Stein did not think it was her “destiny to play a role” in the same manner. Annalisa
Zox-Weaver, who has carefully explored Stein’s relationship to fascism, notes that Stein’s
“writings repeatedly return to great men” as “intersubjective clusters into which she inevitably
inserted herself”
19
; however, these ‘great men,’ as Zox-Weaver points out, are “inexhaustible
sources of meaning whose precise qualities are never fully articulated.”
20
Much like Picasso at the beginning of the First World War, or Beckett with his nod to
Apollinaire in the wake of the Second World War, Stein was prepared to accept her connection
to the political situation with which she was confronted, but it was not a connection she could
necessarily enlighten. In Alice B. Toklas, we read about one evening during the First World War
when Stein was staying with the Whiteheads and Bertrand Russell had been invited to dinner.
Whitehead was worried about his son serving in the military and could not bear to hear Russell’s
proselytizing about politics. Stein (eccentric American that she was) had a solution to the
problem of dinnertime conversation:
Gertrude Stein, to divert everybody’s mind from the burning
question of war or peace, introduced the subject of education. This
caught Russell and he explained all the weaknesses of the american
system of education, particularly their neglect of the study of
greek. Gertrude Stein replied that of course England which was an
island needed Greece which was or might have been an island. At
any rate greek was essentially an island culture, while America
needed essentially the culture of a continent which was of
necessity latin. This argument fussed Mr. Russell…
The comedy mounts as Russell becomes “fussed” by Stein’s absurd abstractions and delivers a
logical précis on the merits of classical education. Stein takes on a nonsensical, absurdist tone
that serves as a contrast to Russell, but surprisingly, her discussion of “island culture” is not
111
altogether removed from pressing concerns about the war. A bit further on, she remembers how
she responded to British apprehensions about whether the United States would side with
Germany – impossible, Stein explained to her British friends, because the United States is
“completely a republic and a republic can have everything in common with France and a great
deal in common with England but whatever its form of government nothing in common with
Germany.” Although Russell could not see it, Stein was surreptitiously making the very same
point in her discussion with him about American education: the United States “was of necessity
latin” – a republic, like Rome, that had “a great deal in common with England” just as Rome had
“a great deal in common” with Greece. Stein cleverly diverts Russell’s attention away from the
war by talking to him about concepts she considered to be very much relevant to the war, quite
satisfied to lose her audience in the process.
“a mystic number, a number that pleases”
During the Vichy period, Beckett and Stein lived in separate towns in the French
countryside where they worked on two very different projects; Beckett composed Watt, his
experimental novel obliquely connected to the war, and Stein wrote Wars I Have Seen, her
autobiographical memoir. There are countless examples of novels and memoirs written during
the Occupation which serve as testimonials of resistance, collaboration, or oppression, including
Nemirovsky’s Suite Française and Bloch’s Strange Defeat, two well-known examples. It is
difficult to catalog Beckett’s Watt among such texts – a difficulty which equally applies to
Stein’s Wars I Have Seen.
In Watt, historical reference to the Occupation is pervasively ambiguous, as in this
strange encounter between Watt and a woman named Lady McCann:
… she picked up a stone and threw it, with all her might…at
Watt….the stone fell on Watt’s hat and struck it from his head, to
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the ground. This was indeed a providential escape, for had the
stone fallen on an ear, or on the back of the neck, as it might so
easily have done, as it so nearly did, why then a wound had
perhaps been opened, never again to close, never, never again to
close, for Watt had a poor healing skin…And he still carried, after
five or six years, and though he dressed it in a mirror night and
morning, on his right ischium a running sore of traumatic origin.
21
This is a typical Beckettian scene stripped of psychological depth, individual agency, and
narrative context; we never find out who Lady McCann is, or why she decides to attack Watt as
he walks down the street. However, the historical subtext is more than apparent; Watt (who is
about to go into hiding) seems to be the victim of anti-Semitism, perhaps the source of his
“running sore of traumatic origin.” Unlike his well-known works for theater such as Endgame or
Waiting for Godot, which present scenarios which segue easily into universal meanings, Watt
presents absurd incidents suggesting a specific history.
Beckett’s methods of abstraction are a significant contrast to Stein’s documentary
approach to the war. Even in fictional war narratives such as Mrs. Reynolds and Brewsie and
Willie, Stein’s historical references are quite apparent, and in Wars I Have Seen she exhaustively
relays her thoughts about the political situation in Europe. On the topic of anti-Semitism she
writes: “it was first made real for me by the Dreyfus trial and now from Germany who is so
desperately clinging to any past century…they have thus to keep themselves together, and so
anti-semitism which has been with us quite a few centuries is still something to cling to.” Stein
here is going over the tack of French nationalists and the fascist group Action Française, who
pushed anti-Semitism as a platform to create national unity in the postwar years. She responds to
this prejudice with an offensively lackluster argument, claiming that “financially there is no
sense in anti-semitism” because “all the Jewish money in the world is only a drop in the bucket
and all of it together could never buy anybody to make war or make peace.”
22
Stein would never
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forcefully protest anti-Semitism, and she showed more favor to Christian saints than her own
Jewish identity; Barbara Will claims that Stein’s behavior “created a bubble of protection about
her that spared her, in most instances, the shaming and ostracizing label of ‘Jew.’”
23
Following the scholarship of important Stein critics such as Marianne deKoven and Lisa
Ruddick, Wars I Have Seen can be interpreted through a feminist framework; Stein upends
patriarchal norms of telling history by presenting the war through the cyclical experience of daily
routine. Stein’s domestic life seems protective and calmative, something which keeps the
potential dangers of the war at bay; “we have the terror of the Germans all about us,” Stein
writes, but “we have our dog, we have the radio, we have electricity, we have plenty to eat, and
we are comfortable.” Liesl Olson in particular concludes that Stein’s “reaction to the twentieth-
century’s worst crimes illuminates an extremely problematic escapism, cloaked as pacifism and
anchored in habit.”
24
Beckett, on the other hand, gets no such comfort from living at home
during the war; “[a]gainst Stein,” Olson rightfully observes, “Beckett’s presentation of material
and bodily needs is indeed grim.”
25
These points are well taken, for Stein’s ambiguity is certainly
“problematic” and self-serving in comparison to Beckett’s. However, despite their contradictory
ethical implications, Stein and Beckett present pictures of Occupied France which are not as
incompatible as they may at first seem. Take, for example, Stein’s description of tending to her
farm animals, parts of which could be lifted from the pages of Watt:
In these days we have to have animals around us because we have
to have milk and eggs and there is no way to buy them so we have
chickens and a goat, and I take care of them August 1943. And I
have been struck by the fact that do what you like that is what they
like and what they are but they always must have five toes,
chickens and goats, and dogs and everything. Now there is no
reason it it is just what you might say a mystic number, a number
that pleases but having been made it is there, five is there
everywhere when there are toes.
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In opposition to the dependency and confusion embodied in Beckett’s fictional narratives, Stein
speaks in the first-person in a tone which seems self-reliant and well-adjusted. However, there is
a family resemblance in their senses of absurdity. Watt is a novel filled with mystic numbers, and
numbers that please, especially as Watt goes about household duties such as preparing meals for
his master, for “[i]t fell to Watt to weigh, to measure and to count, with the utmost exactness, the
ingredients that composed this dish, and to dress for the pot those that required dressing, and to
mix them thoroughly together without loss, so that not one could be distinguished from another,
and to put them on to boil”
26
; Watt proceed to wonder how such a strange dish was created, and
why Mr. Knott prefers it at the very same time each day.
What, we may ask, seems more absurd – counting the “toes” of chickens, or
contemplating the strange whims of one’s master? Stein’s wartime experience may appear to be
a realm of relative domestic normality, suggested by multiple scholars as a woman’s perspective
of the war, but the irony is that Watt does more feminized tasks such as cooking and cleaning
than Stein ever would. Stein bemoans the fact that “[a] vegetable garden in the beginning looks
so promising and then after all little by little it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing, nothing
but vegetables,” and longs for “those happy days” when “vegetables grew not in the ground but
in tins.” Stein’s domestic comfort, felt only “in the beginning,” merely becomes a façade for her
Godot-like existence.
“Everything is dangerous,” Stein writes, “Life and death and death and life.”
27
Instead of
confessing her fears of Nazi internment, as scores of other authors did in their private writings,
Stein treats the war as a communal experience; “In these days January forty-four, here where we
are, we are once more as we were in nineteen forty,” Stein reports, “we have the terror of the
Germans all about us…we are completely isolated and rumor follows rumor…and we none of us
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know why, why this little corner of France which is so very peaceable should be harassed.”
28
Stein’s use of “we” and “none of us” presents the war as an omnipresent danger while deflecting
her personal fears.
Beckett and Stein similarly used domestic life as a trope in order to emphasize the
passivity and vulnerability of their positions during the war. In their wartime writings, the home
symbolizes a sphere of disorientating isolation and displaced communication. In Stein’s Wars I
Have Seen, the media is a constant reminder of the breakdown of civilized society. Stein
continually mentions that they are without a telephone or telegraph,
29
which has altered her
existence so much she compares it to being in the Middle Ages; “[t]hey must have been
lonesome in the middle ages,” she muses, because “they were pretty well cut-off from
communication with everything and it is kind of lonesome in this present war which is so much
like that.”
30
Even for the Germans, things seem hopelessly confused, “communications being so
interrupted they were not able to get new orders.”
31
Stein frets about having “no newspapers any
more and no trains no mail no telephone,”
32
and complains of tedious radio reports, the “series of
Tuesdays in which Paul Reynaud in a tragic voice told that he had something grave to
announce…always in the same voice.”
33
With “no trains no mail no telephone” there seems to be
no interaction or connection with the outside world; radio broadcasts only give the impression of
days repeating in an endless “series.” According to Stein, “the long slow days passed away,” but
“[t]hey did not really pass”
34
– the war more plodding than plot. This description from a
historical study of Vichy-era radio describes what it was like to experience the war through these
broadcasts:
la radio d’Etat lasse par son traitement austère de l’information et
par la censure qui règne sur ses ondes, donnant à l’auditeur le
sentiment d’être pris pour un enfant......l’habitude est prise de
capter d’autres stations comme formation, ou encore Radio
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Sottens, en Suisse. D’autres se branchent plus dangereusement sur
Radio Rome ou les postes allemands comme Radio Stuttgart ; qui
donnent les informations dont les Français ne disposent pas.
35
The drone of government-sanctioned radio was interrupted by conflicting war reports on
clandestine stations run by the Resistance. Uncertainty about the war’s events, even about which
side was really winning, was all too common. Accordingly, Stein accepts that her role within the
war is inevitably limited to that of a passive listener. Writing a war memoir gives her no sense of
authorial control or serving as a witness to a greater cause; “[a]nd now this is a spy story,” Stein
decides, “there is no answer to it, but it is a spy story.”
Stein’s analogy of a “spy story” seems an apt designation for Beckett’s Molloy, a novel
about a spy who can barely remember his mission. Although tasked to find a man named Molloy,
the narrator has no idea what Molloy looks like – “I had no information as to his face”
36
; can
barely remember Molloy’s name – “Of these two names, Molloy and Mollose, the second
seemed to me perhaps the more correct. But barely…”; and doesn’t know what he is supposed to
do if he does find Molloy – “I also tried to remember what I was to do with Molloy, once I had
found him.”
37
He gets his assignments from Gaber, who “understood nothing about the
messages he carried,”
38
leaving him to piece together little more information. Beckett’s depiction
is no doubt inspired by his own experience working as a spy for the Resistance; as Perloff has
already noted, “[t]he language of Resistance must be one of extreme deviousness – a language
game, in fact, ‘understood’ only by the players, but perhaps not even by them.”
39
In addition to this system of subterfuge, the Resistance had its own radio propaganda
campaign run from Radio Londres, a station based at the BBC. It was difficult to rally support
for the Resistance in the early years of the war; Pétain was a well-known and trusted figure from
World War I, whose photo was widely distributed for display in peoples’ homes, while Charles
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de Gaulle, on the other hand, was a complete unknown. Resistance broadcasters attempted to
give the public reassuring descriptions:
J’ai eu l’honneur de recontrer ce superbe soldat qui se nomme de
Gaulle. Il paraît que ses camarades le nommaient le Connétable.
C’est bien trouvé. Je ne suis pas petit car je mesure six pieds [1,80
m]. Eh bien! Il a presque une tête de plus que moi, et un long nez
comme François Ier. Il fait vraiment penser à un connétable de
France de la période héroïque.
40
A tall constable resembling François I – rhetoric not unlike Stein’s descriptions of Pétain and
Washington. As with Picasso’s Cubist techniques, the war blurs the boundaries between reality
and what was once experimental or imaginative. In turn, radical methods of narration and
description seem perfectly suited to the war experience. For months, Watt works for a master he
does not know and has not yet seen – an analogy of what it must have felt like working for the
Resistance under a mysterious figure named de Gaulle.
There is no pretending that Beckett and Stein responded to the war with the same ethical
priorities or political sensibilities. Immediately following the Allied victory they each gave a
speech over radio addressed to their own countrymen. Stein spoke as a proud American who
stood alongside the French:
….Yes I knew France in the last war in the days of their victories
but in this war in the days of defeat they were much greater. I can
never be thankful enough that I stayed with them all these dark
days, when we had to walk miles to get a little extra butter a little
extra flour...
...I am so happy to be talking to America today so happy.
41
Beckett’s radio script, read on Radio Éireann in 1946, struck an entirely different chord. After
spending some time in Ireland after the war, he had volunteered as an ambulance driver for the
Irish Red Cross in order to gain entry back into France. After spending several weeks working in
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St. Lô, one of the most devastated towns in the French countryside, Beckett broadcasts about the
worst of what the war had left behind. Stein and Beckett were attracted to two entirely different
postwar moods; Stein, celebrating the Liberation, merrily welcomes the American soldiers, while
Beckett looks upon the endless task of rebuilding and proposes an abolition of the social
constructs of national identity altogether. For Stein, the “dark days” are over, whereas for
Beckett they seem to continue without end, “a vision and sense of a time-honoured conception of
humanity in ruins.”
42
The differences between Beckett and Stein, however, may not be as important as the
differences they share. In their own way, Stein and Beckett embraced an authorial voice which
radically departs from the political mobilization of the mainstream avant-garde. From its early
days, radio was considered a medium for artists to practice authoritarian aesthetics and fascist
politics; in Italy, Gabriele D’Annunzio gave “the first political radio messages” and “suggested
that aesthetics and politics were, in fact, very closely connected and that the poet could work
directly to make radical and fundamental changes in government.” In 1921, Velimir Khlebnikov,
one of the major artists of the Russian avant-garde, wrote that “[t]he main Radio station, that
stronghold of steel, where clouds of wires cluster like strands of hair, will surely be protected by
a sign with a skull and crossbones and the familiar word “Danger,” since the least disruption of
Radio operations would produce a mental blackout over the entire country, a temporary loss of
consciousness.” In Germany, Bertolt Brecht echoed this admonition, warning that the “radio is
one-sided when it should be two.” However, if speaking on radio fed illusions of grandeur for
artists such as Marinetti and Pound, it did much the opposite for Stein and Beckett. To
paraphrase John Cage, they had nothing to say and they were saying it; in distinct contrast to
119
totalitarian aesthetics, they speak from the point of view of witnesses who can hope for, but
cannot influence, political change.
Stein and Beckett had drastically different tunes, but they were equally indifferent to the
political biases being touted by the anti-capitalist left. Andre Breton, who adopted Marxism’s
demonization of the United States, came out of the war with vocal anti-American opinions (no
doubt fed a source of Stein’s ire towards him). In 1949, Breton proudly declared that “[e]veryone
who knows me is aware that I have the most serious grievances against the USA, less personal
than extrapersonal, to the point where in five years over there, I did not strike up a single
friendship.”
43
In the Stein/Beckett lexicon, the “extrapersonal” always reaches a point of
ambiguity and ambivalence. The irony, perhaps, is that with his apolitical aesthetics, Beckett did
a better job than Breton of exploring the surreal nature of the war experience. In Breton’s 1950
article in Combat (the very article Beckett described to George Duthuit as “flowery stuff”) there
appears a line which serves as an interesting contrast to Beckett’s radio speech written from St.
Lô: “En ces premiers jours de printemps, me revient à l’esprit une des rares idées secourables à
quoi je parvins à m’accrocher aux pires jours de la dernière guerre: tant de devastations ne
pourraient rien contre le retour du printemps, assez grand magician pour prêter un sourire aux
ruines.”
44
Breton’s “smile among the ruins” seems a terrible cliché compared to Beckett’s earlier
description of “the smile deriding, among other things, the having and the not having, the giving
and the taking, sickness and health” – what it means to hope in the absence of gain.
In Wars I Have Seen, Stein reaches for elements of surrealism in a way that values
political ambiguity over appeal: “hands and faces are hands and faces, and dreams when one is
dancing and falls asleep are real, and all this has to do with anti-semitism that it is true and not
real and real and not true.” Stein’s equivocation about anti-Semitism, as distasteful as it was, is
120
not tantamount to Nazi collaboration or the anti-Semitic ravings of a figure like Céline. The
labeling of Stein as a Vichy supporter is valid mark upon her legacy, but it leaves beside the
point that in her war writing, her experimental aesthetics seem less fascist than utterly
ambivalent. Scholars have not yet suggested that the timing of Stein’s Pétain translations may
provide a key to understanding her motivations behind the project itself. As Paxton explains,
“The United States, possible arbiter to end the war, lost some of its appeal to neutralist French
opinion after it also became a belligerent in December 1941”
45
– Stein began her translations of
Pétain shortly after this turn of events, when it became public knowledge that the relationship
between the United States and France was beginning to sour. Stein’s translations, then, could
well have been her attempt to rekindle the camaradie between the Americans and the French. At
the time she worked on the translation project, the possibility of increased hostility between the
United States and France was one of the most horrifying prospects on the horizon. Thus far,
Pétain had maintained friendly relations with Roosevelt; conflict with the United States possibly
meant that the Vichy government would play itself even further into the influence of the Nazis.
One must also consider Stein’s history as a translator. When she attempted a translation of
George Hugnet’s poetry back in 1930, it had ended in a bitter breakup of their friendship
46
because she had taken too many liberties with the original text: her translations of Pétain were
hyper-literal, even by traditional translation standards – Stein, known for her superstitions,
perhaps thought that this would portend a mending of the U.S.-France relationship. In her
introduction to Pétain’s speeches, Stein takes political commentary only so far:
Then came the time when the French people practically came to
feel what they did feel, what they always do feel that they do not at
all think alike all of them about anything. As a Frenchman
explained it to me it is not only that they do not think alike with
their neighbors but they do not think alike within themselves. As
121
he said, You take any one French one, that one French one has
quite logically perhaps four points of view.
Stein’s point is that it requires an intellectual point of view to understand the war enigma. Unlike
her male modernist counterparts, who granted themselves positions of insight or authority, she
illustrates that her own “mental obliquity” is a common thing after all.
“Do not forget,” wrote Wittgenstein, “that a poem although it is composed in the
language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information.” If Adorno’s
dictum that one cannot write poetry after Auschwitz is interpreted to mean that poetry cannot
master the language of Auschwitz, it is a lesson Beckett and Stein learned early on. Stein was too
hypothetical and ironic for her opinions to take part in political discourse (“Hitler should have
received the Nobel Peace Prize”), while Beckett’s approach to the political climate was too
ambiguous to openly engage with the Marxist rhetoric of artists such as Sartre or Breton.
Although composed in the language of the political, the war aesthetics of Beckett and Stein do
not take part in the language-game of politics.
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NOTES
1. Despite her critiques of Surrealism and Futurism, Stein’s aesthetic was not entirely
distinguishable from these movements; her references to her own body, for example, could
certainly be compared to the Surrealist imagination. Additionally, Stein was not averse to
showmanship; like Marinetti, she craved the status of being a public figure. Stein, we must
recall, was not entirely opposed to the “vulgarisation” of her own work, as long as it contributed
to her public profile; in Alice B. Toklas, we learn that “many newspapers had taken up the
amusement of imitating Gertrude Stein’s work and making fun of it.” Stein’s opposition to
Surrealism and Futurism, in other words, is based less in her aesthetic sensibility than her
disapproval of their cultural ethos.
2. Stein, Everybody’s Biography, 36.
3. In 1934, the behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner contributed an article to the Atlantic
Monthly suggesting that Stein’s experimental texts had been created by means of automatic
writing. Skinner’s theory, although flatly refuted by Stein, sparked a debate about the connection
between Stein’s experimental texts and the automatic writing techniques championed by Breton;
by and large, Stein critics have come to the consensus that works such as Tender Buttons lack the
psychological framework essential to Surrealist automatic writing experiments. One of the most
useful discussions of the differences between Stein and Breton appears in Tim Armstrong’s
Modernism, Technology, and the Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). As
Armstrong explains, Stein employed automatic writing as a “conceptual framework” allowing
her to reject traditional 19th century models of authorial intention, while Breton, by contrast,
“describes automaticity in terms of attention, interference, echolalia, and other psychological
terms.” See Armstrong, 201-202.
4. Stein offers a brief explanation of why she did not consider Surrealism to be a
legitimate avant-garde; “[t]he surrealistes,” she claims, “accept the line as having become vibrant
and as therefore able in itself to inspire them to higher flights.”
5. The journal Le Surréalisme au service de la revolution, which ran from 1930 to 1933,
was one of the many Surrealist publications in circulation around the time Stein was working on
the manuscript for Alice B. Toklas.
6. Gertrude Stein, Paris, France (New York: Liveright Publishing, 1996 reprint, original
publication 1940), 59.
7. Scholars routinely discuss Beckett’s fascination with Jung and his period of
psychoanalytic treatment with Wilfrid Bion in the mid-1930s.
8. Samuel Beckett to Thomas McGreevy, October 18, 1932, Cooldrinagh, Foxrock. The
Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929-1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 135.
123
9. Samuel Beckett to Thomas McGreevy, December 12, 1932, TCD, MS 10402/40. The
Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929-1940, 146, n. 6.
10. Samuel Beckett to Georges Duthuit, Thursday [? March 30 or April 6] 1950, Ussy.
The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 196.
11. James Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 440.
12. Flap copy excerpt, emphasis mine.
13. Perloff, “In Love with Hiding: Samuel Beckett’s War,” Iowa Review 35, no. 2 (2005):
76-103.
14. James Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 319.
15. Samuel Beckett, Watt (New York: Grove Press, 1953), 81.
16. Ibid., 131.
17. Beckett to Mary Manning Howe, December 13, 1936. Beckett, The Letters of Samuel
Beckett 1929-1940, 397.
18. Leon Surette, Dreams of a Totalitarian Utopia: Literary Modernism and Politics
(Québec: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011), 4.
19. Annalisa Zox-Weaver, Women Modernists and Fascism (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2011), 76.
20. Ibid., 76. Emphasis mine.
21. Beckett, Watt, 32.
22. Gertrude Stein, Wars I Have Seen (New York: Random House, 1945), 55-56.
23. Barbara Will, Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy
Dilemma (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 128.
24. Liesl Olson, Modernism and the Ordinary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009),
113.
25. Ibid., 110.
26. Beckett, Watt, 87.
124
27. Stein, Wars I Have Seen, 121.
28. Ibid., 145.
29. Stein, A Picture of Occupied France, in Selected Writings of Gertude Stein (New
York: Vintage, 1990), 645.
30. Ibid., 648.
31. Ibid., 669.
32. Ibid., 647.
33. Ibid., 619.
34. Ibid., 625.
35. [State radio was wearisome in its austere treatment of information and its subjugation
to the censorship which governed the airwaves, giving the listener the feeling of being taken for
a child...it became habit to pick up on other stations meant for training, as well as Radio Sottens
in Switzerland. Others risked further danger by connecting to Radio Rome or the German
broadcasts like Radio Stuttgart which provided information withheld from the French.]
Translation mine. Radio Londres, 50-51.
36. Beckett, Molloy, 114.
37. Ibid., 148.
38. Ibid., 106.
39. Perloff, Wittgenstein’s Ladder, 138.
40. [I’ve had the honor of meeting this superb soldier named de Gaulle. It seems that his
comrades call him the Constable. That’s fitting. I’m not short because I’m 1.8 meters tall...and
well! He’s almost a foot taller than me, and he has a long nose like François the First. He truly
makes one think of an historic French constable.] Translation mine. Jacques Pessis, ed., Les
Français parlent aux Français 1940-1941, Tome 1: 18 juin 1940-18 juin 1941 (Paris: Omnibus,
2010), 148.
41. Gertrude Stein Remembered, 188-189.
42. Samuel Beckett, “The Capital of the Ruins,” in As The Story Was Told (London: John
Calder, 1990), 27-28.
125
43. André Breton, “Allocution au meeting du 30 avril 1949,” quoted from Philippe
Roger, The American Enemy: The History of French Anti-Americanism (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2005), 408.
44. [In these early Spring days, I am reminded of one of the few helpful ideas that I
contrived to hold on to in the worst days of the last war: the many devastations could do nothing
to stop the return of Spring, a magician great enough to lend a smile to ruins.] Original text and
translation taken from n. 11 of Samuel Beckett to Georges Duthuit, Thursday [? March 30 or
April 6] 1950, Ussy. The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 198-199.
45. Vichy France, emphasis mine.
46. There is another friendship turned disaster which should be mentioned here. In the
introduction to her translations, Stein compared Pétain to George Washington, which seems to be
an inexplicable expression of support for his Nazi collaboration. The last time Stein claimed that
someone had acted like George Washington, it was herself, and she used the comparison as self-
criticism (even though she paints her flaws as being ruggedly admirable) – in the Autobiography
she wrote: “When Gertrude Stein was quite young her brother once remarked to her, that she,
having been born in February, was very like George Washington, she was impulsive and slow-
minded. Undoubtedly a great many complications have been the result” (Selected, 186). The
specific “complications” being referenced here were the disagreements that Stein had with
Robert McAlmon over the printing of The Making of Americans; Stein’s decision to order a few
hundred more copies without consulting McAlmon helped drive his publishing business into
bankruptcy – another examples of the flowers of friendship which had faded.
126
CHAPTER 4
NEW NOVEL, OLD TUNE:
BECKETT, RADIO, AND POSTWAR FRANCE
“Flaubert, Dostoevski, Proust, Kafka, Joyce, Faulkner, Beckett....” According to Alain
Robbe-Grillet, this was the lineage of the Nouveau Roman, the literary branch of the French New
Wave following World War II. “Far from making a tabula rasa of the past,” Robbe-Grillet
wrote, “we have most readily reached an agreement on the names of our predecessors; and our
ambition is merely to continue them. Not to do better, which has no meaning, but to situate
ourselves in their wake, now, in our own time.”
1
In 1961, the year this commentary was written,
Beckett was widely considered to be at the forefront of the avant-garde: why, then, did Robbe-
Grillet place Beckett in the “wake” of what was happening “now”?
Robbe-Grillet’s presumption that Beckett’s time had passed was pronounced in an earlier
essay he published in 1957, “Samuel Beckett, or Presence on the Stage.” Here he made the
following prediction – one that now seems cannily accurate:
And if, after Godot and Endgame, there now comes a third play, it
will probably be The Unnamable again, third panel of the trilogy of
novels. Hamm already enables us to imagine its tone, by the novel
he makes up as he goes along, creating sham situations and
manipulating phantoms of characters into action. Since he is not
there himself, there is nothing left for him now but to tell himself
stories, to operate marionettes, in his place, to help pass the time...
2
Robbe-Grillet’s comments reveal much about Beckett’s position within the landscape of the
postwar generation. There was a sense among the Nouveau Roman group that Beckett’s writing
was set on a self-determined path, that there was (as Beckett himself often felt) “nothing left for
him” but to ‘go on.’ Beckett was not a modernist-turned-New Novelist, nor was he expected to
create a ‘new’ aesthetic that would trump the French New Wave. This image of Beckett, one that
127
makes him seem slightly passé and out of touch with his contemporary moment, differs greatly
from the forward-thinking, postmodern ethos with which he is normally associated. It would be a
mistake, however, to presume that the nouvelle vague was dismissive of Beckett’s work; to the
contrary, Robbe-Grillet was one of the earliest writers to claim him as a major influence. Rather,
what we have here is evidence of a divide in the artistic culture of postwar France. Robbe-Grillet
often publicly denounced Sartre’s existentialism as well as the Theater of the Absurd – and he
was certainly opposed to the notion that Beckett could be aligned with the metaphysical and
social agendas of these movements. By invoking Beckett as part of an avant-garde past, Robbe-
Grillet accomplished multiple goals: he moved Beckett away from contemporary absurdist
theater, he established Beckett as one of his own influences, and perhaps most importantly, he
maintained crucial distance from the philosophical malaise Beckett himself seemed to represent.
Critics have yet to fully explore Beckett’s associations with the New Wave and how his
relationship to this movement reflects his ambivalent place within the aesthetic and political
debates occurring throughout the postwar decades. In this chapter, I argue that the complex
dynamic between Beckett and the New Wave is the impetus of The Old Tune, one of his most
disregarded plays. The Old Tune, Beckett’s only direct collaboration with any Nouveau Roman
writer, was a translation of Robert Pinget’s radio play La Manivelle. Pinget was originally part of
Suzanne Descheveux-Dumesnil’s intimate circle; after she married Beckett in 1961, the two men
became close friends, sharing works in progress and occasionally working together on
translations (Pinget was the translator of Beckett’s Embers).
3
Over the years, Beckett made
several efforts to advocate on his friend’s behalf. He once told his biographer James Knowlson
that “Pinget was a writer equally worthy of biographical attention,”
4
and his testimonial for
Pinget’s The Inquisitory – “One of the most important novels of the last ten years” – still appears
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on the novel’s cover in reprints and translations. Archival reports indicate that Beckett’s
admiration of Pinget is well documented in unpublished letters; “according to Ludovic Janvier”
explains Martin Mégevand, “the letters to Pinget constitute the largest source of correspondence
Beckett addressed to another French writer and perhaps even to any other writer.”
5
Considering
the fact the New Wave was one of the most prominent movements in France, it is somewhat
surprising that The Old Tune has received such little attention. This is a reflection not only of the
niche status of the radio plays within Beckett’s oeuvre, but also of the fact that Pinget, despite
Beckett’s efforts, is not considered a major figure in French letters.
Beckett’s collaboration with Pinget on The Old Tune at first seems to support the notion
that Beckett’s media plays, as multiple scholars have suggested, align his aesthetic with the New
Wave. Jonathan Kalb, for example, has described Film as “a work of its time, displaying many of
the same formal obsessions as the French New Wave,”
6
while Clas Zilliacus has noted that the
avant-garde radio productions of the BBC, notably those written by Beckett, reflected “the
radiogenic nature of many ‘New Wave’ plays.”
7
The technological comparison seems sensible
enough; Nouveau Roman writers were largely inspired by film and other media, several of them
(most famously, Robbe-Grillet himself) becoming filmmakers and radio dramatists themselves.
Indeed, Beckett shared many “formal obsessions” with writers such as Nathalie Sarraute, who
wrote “radiogenic” plays, and Robbe-Grillet, who used film to experiment with non-narrative
techniques. What critics often fail to mention, however, is the fact that Beckett’s own use of
technology was somewhat unimportant to New Wave artists. Robbe-Grillet, who wondered if
Beckett would ever produce any “new surprises,” would never recognize the accomplishments of
works such as Film or Eh Joe.
8
129
It was a strange position Beckett was in, yet one oddly suited to his own aesthetic, to be
regarded as a predecessor to a ‘new’ wave of artists while at the height of his own career.
According to Anthony Cronin’s biographical accounts, Beckett “would assent to and even
encourage the association of his name with the nouvelle vague in the novel and would become
friendly with other members of the movement,” but “the public association with Ionesco,
Adamov and the ‘theater of the absurd’ would always annoy him and he would discourage it in
every way possible short of public dissociation.”
9
Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor, Robbe-Grillet
and others in the Nouveau Roman group were linked to Beckett through their publisher, Jérôme
Lindon of Éditions de Minuit, and it was most likely out of respect for Lindon’s long-standing
support that Beckett was willing to associate himself with the movement. That he welcomed his
affiliation with Nouveau Roman writers certainly reflects Beckett’s personal character; he was
notoriously generous and supportive of his writer friends, sometimes at great personal cost, and
he never was a seeker of attention. More importantly, his amenable attitude towards the New
Wave shows he was significantly more sympathetic to its aesthetic stance – Robbe-Grillet once
wrote that “the novel is not a tool…[i]it does not express, it explores, and what it explores is
itself”
10
– than Sartre’s littérature engagée. Beckett was, however, in an impossibly ambiguous
position. During the war, he had risked his life as a Free French operative, but his political
efforts had always been decidedly un-literary; he never joined Sartre and other intellectual
résistants in the pursuit of politically “committed literature.” Robbe-Grillet had anticipated in
1957 that Beckett would have difficulty finding a way out of this conflicted morass: Beckett’s
philosophical bent did not belong to existentialism or the Theater of the Absurd, but he also
could not dismiss metaphysical and ethical considerations related to artists such as Sartre. What I
call for in this essay is a revaluation of Beckett’s relationship to the postwar generation at large: I
130
explore how the medium of radio symbolized Beckett’s tendency to simultaneously invoke and
resist the political dimensions of postwar life.
The image of Krapp, burdened with his spools of tape, is central to Beckett’s
technological imagination. It bears reminding that the recording device to be used in Krapp’s
Last Tape was so new to Beckett that he had to write to Donald McWhinnie for instructions on
how to use it. Significantly enough, in the play itself this equipment seems outdated, a
technological relic Krapp has been using for much of his long life: an apt symbol of the
ambiguous position occupied by Beckett, whose proper place in the postwar scene seemed
neither with the old nor with the new. Daniel Albright has described Beckett as an artist
decidedly opposed to the thrills of media experimentation. “Just as Krapp struggles to find the
right passage of tape, and eventually throws away a tape in disgust,” Albright writes, “so Beckett
wrote for radio, film, television in deliberately awkward ways.”
11
Beckett’s hesitance towards
technology also comes through in his personal correspondence. One of Beckett’s most loyal
stage directors, Alan Schneider, wrote to him in 1960 (this was, we must recall, around the time
Beckett was acting as grandfather to the New Wave) that “Every time I watch [Krapp’s Last
Tape], I think of what a well-handled camera would do to get the subtleties and nuances which
the last rows are bound to miss. I know how you feel about film, but I wish you’d think about
this – not on a commercial basis but something experimental, or at least a record of what the
show looked like.”
12
Schneider knew Beckett was not particularly enthused by modern
technology: “something experimental, or at least a record of what the show looked like.” This is
not what one could call a springboard for a manifesto.
By the time Schneider wrote this letter to Beckett, the BBC had already broadcast
Beckett’s first radio play, All That Fall, and the later plays for radio and television would follow
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soon after.
13
Beckett, however, had always remained somewhat conservative in his commitments
to technology, even at the height of his media experimentations. The broadcast premiere of All
That Fall seemed to please him no more nor no less than his other dramatic debuts, and although
he was generally satisfied with what the BBC had done, he critiqued certain aspects of the
production in the same way he would often complain to Schneider and other directors of bad
decisions made for the stage. In any case, he was hardly convinced that modern media
represented ‘new’ or ‘better’ possibilities for the literary arts. As he once told Charles Juliet in an
interview, “I am up against a cliff wall and yet I have to go forward. It’s impossible, isn’t it? All
the same, you can go forward. Advance a few more miserable millimeters”
14
– for Beckett, new
technology helped him advance, one could say, another miserable millimeter or two.
Beckett’s use of radio serves less to affirm his postmodern filiations than his inability to
gain the same kind of forward momentum as artists like Robbe-Grillet. Beckett’s radio plays
were brilliant examples of technical innovation, but they also reveal, even at their highest points
of abstraction, that he was entirely unlike other artists of the 20
th
century who experimented with
modern technology; he approached new media neither with a fervor to create something ‘new,’
nor with a desire to get beyond the “commercial,” as Schneider would have put it, but as a writer
forced to create in the shadows of modernism and war. Although Beckett is typically treated as
modernism’s ultimate pessimist, such an approach to his use of technology is less common than
one would think; for the most part, we have come to understand his media plays mainly through
their formal achievements. Scholarly discussions of Beckett’s use of technology are tinged with
rhetoric of progress, and radio in particular has always been viewed as the medium that helped
him break new ground. Stanley Richardson and Jane Alison Hale, for example, have noted that
“[r]adio allowed Beckett to control the perceptual input and existence of his characters further
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than he had been able to do before,”
15
which “played a pivotal role in Beckett’s development as
an artist.”
16
In a much earlier study, Martin Esslin had also observed that “Beckett’s experience
with broadcasting, and above all radio, has played a significant and little-known part in his
development as an artist”
17
; the fact that these statements are remarkably similar, despite being
separated by over 40 years, shows how consistently the radio plays have been treated as
platforms for Beckett’s creative maturation. At the point when All That Fall was submitted to the
BBC in the mid 1950s, Beckett was working through what Clas Zilliacus describes as “a new
impasse”; “the novel...was an exhausted form,” while “plays were still possible, ‘mais toujours
dans la même direction.’”
18
According to several scholars, Beckett’s experimentations with radio
helped him discover new paths for his art. Zilliacus summarizes it best:
It has been suggested, by John Spurling, that whenever Beckett
makes the test of a new medium, he always seems to take a few
steps backward in the direction of conventional realism. Then he
moves forward again, probing, abstracting. At least as far as his
radio works are concerned this is no doubt true. There is a gradual,
consistent development from All That Fall onward. All That Fall
tells a story; Embers portrays a storyteller; Words and Music and
the Esquisse still have remnants of character and milieu; these are
discarded in Cascando which, instead of focussing [sic] on a story,
focusses [sic] on the storytelling condition.
19
Critical treatments of the plays for radio have been quick to point out that the medium
emphasized all of Beckett’s growing fascinations: abstraction, minimalism, the power of silence,
and the dysfunctional relationship between body and mind were all easily explored in audio
drama, a genre that stripped the stage to pure sound. According to several accounts, the short
period of experimentation with radio was a direct segue to Krapp’s Last Tape, and in turn, led to
the extreme abstraction seen in the later drama and prose. Everett Frost, one of the important
commentators on these works, has written that “the invitation to write for radio altered the
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trajectory of Beckett’s development at a crucial moment. In the opportunity to write for the BBC,
Beckett found not only a new venue, new audiences, and a source of much-needed income, but
also a fruitful context for the formal and conceptual issues being addressed in his work.”
20
Scholars have yet to point out that The Old Tune interrupts Beckett’s linear evolution
from realism to abstraction. Like Beckett’s first play for radio, All That Fall, which featured Dan
and Maddy as husband and wife, The Old Tune contains distinctly Irish banter. Written towards
the end of Beckett’s radio career, which concluded with the extreme minimalism of Words and
Music and Cascando, The Old Tune comes from a world perhaps even more concrete than that of
Maddy Rooney. Considering the relationship between Beckett and Pinget and the timing of these
works (La Manivelle was broadcast in 1960, just two years following All That Fall, and The Old
Tune was completed shortly after in 1961), it is not inconceivable that Pinget composed The Old
Tune with Beckett in mind. Indeed, The Old Tune contains humorous parallels to Beckett’s work
that seem to suggest light parody: one of the main tropes of the play, for example, is the well-
timed rise and fall of street noises, which seems all too suggestive of Beckett’s innovative
technique of orchestrating farm animal noises for the opening scene of All That Fall.
In The Old Tune, two aged men named Toupin and Pommard (in Beckett’s translation,
Gorman and Cream) meet each other by chance on a street corner, and soon begin to talk about
their memories of the First World War. As a piece for radio, The Old Tune utilizes dialogue, in
turn both wistful and cantankerous, to lend these characters an aged appearance:
CREAM. – Ah in our time Gorman this was the outskirts you
remember, peace and quiet.
GORMAN. – Do I remember, fields it was, fields, bluebells, over
there, on the bank, bluebells. When you think... (Suddenly
complete silence. 10 seconds. The tune resumes, falters, stops.
Silence. The street noises resume.) Ah the horses, the carriages,
and the barouches, ah the barouches, all that’s the dim distant past
Mr. Cream.
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CREAM. – And the broughams, remember the broughams, there
was style for you the broughams.
Pause.
21
“Ah the horses,” “Ah in our time,” “ah the barouches” – ‘Ah, les beaux jours!’ It is possible to
read Happy Days and The Old Tune, written in the same year, as two Beckett plays in
conversation with each other. Like Winnie, Cream and Gorman of The Old Tune are not without
their ‘happy days’; they reminisce about Gertie Crumplin, a “great bit of skirt,” and gossip about
the unvirtuous Nelly Crowther, who “came to a nasty end.”
22
It is likely that Beckett was well
aware that Toupin and Pommard were characters who parodied the French literary tradition; their
labored efforts to recall the past create a mockery of Proustian memory, but perhaps more
importantly, their pedestrian identities comically mimic the elaborate, exotic imagination of New
Wave writers. Take, for example, Robbe-Grillet’s explanation of his novel Jealousy, which he
claimed was “made in such a way that any attempt to reconstruct an external chronology would
lead, sooner or later, to a series of contradictions, hence to an impasse.”
23
As Cream and Gorman
disagree about the names of places and people, they present “a series of contradictions” that
could potentially result in a surrealistic “impasse,” but it is impossible to doubt the presence of
an “external chronology” – rather, we are merely witnessing the faulty workings of aged
memories.
Happy Days, a play Robbe-Grillet never discussed at length, takes a subtle step in the
direction of The Old Tune, moving away (ever so slightly) from the disorientations typical of the
New Wave. Winnie, Beckett’s first major female character for the stage, was not the kind of
Beckett character to which his audience had become accustomed. Unlike Beckett’s earlier
protagonists, Winnie is engaged in the process of voluntary self-recollection, dwelling over
memories of happier times; thus, the ambiguous suggestion of trauma, for which Beckett had
135
become so famous, was less present in the dialogue itself. Previously, Robbe-Grillet had written
that Endgame was “without past, without place elsewhere,” a universe that “excludes any idea of
direction as well as any signification.”
24
“Hamm and Clov, successors to Gogo and Didi” he
quipped, “have again met with the fate of all Beckett’s characters: Pozzo, Lucky, Murphy,
Molloy, Malone, Mahood, Worm, etc.”
25
One cannot say of Winnie, however, that she expresses
a similar kind of fatalistic erasure; she would never claim, as Hamm does to Clov, that she was
“never there,” that “[i]t all happened without me.” She is neither “without past” nor “without
place elsewhere”; she knows her life once had direction, and her memories, although incomplete,
are both blissful and vivid. Through Winnie, Happy Days becomes a chiaroscuro composed of
shades of realism and abstraction; I would argue that from Beckett’s perspective, the play
qualifies as an experimental work, regardless of the fact that Winnie is, to use Robbe-Grillet’s
phrasing, a Beckettian ‘marionette’ set on a traditional stage. The fact that Happy Days fulfills
Beckett’s definition of the ‘new’ is reinforced by certain parallels between this play and his first
experiment with radio, All That Fall. Winnie’s suffering is the physical, visible counterpart of
the psychological horror brought upon Maddy Rooney in All That Fall. Beckett’s use of radio in
All That Fall seems no more innovative than his use of the stage in Happy Days, but in each
play, the medium itself creates new forms of torment and relationship dysfunction – Winnie’s
husband, a constant presence on the stage, is mute rather than blind like Maddy’s Dan.
Winnie seems a realistic housewife stuck, quite literally, on the kind of stage audiences
had come to expect of Beckett, and at times, Cream and Gorman seem to be in an inverse
situation, Beckettian characters comically dropped on a Dublin street corner:
GORMAN. – The first car I remember well I saw it here, here, on
the corner, a Pic-Pic she was.
CREAM. – Not a Pic-Pic, Gorman, not a Pic-Pic, a Dee Dyan
Button.
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GORMAN. – A Pic-Pic, a Pic-Pic, don’t I remember well, just as I
was coming out of Swan’s the bookseller’s beyond there on the
corner, Swan’s the bookseller’s that was, just as I was coming out
with a rise of fourpence ah there wasn ‘t much money in it in those
days.
CREAM. – A Dee Dyan, a Dee Dyan.
GORMAN. – [. . .]Ah yes eight o’clock as I was coming out of
Swan’s there was the crowd gathered and the car wheeling round
the bend.
CREAM. – A Dee Dyan Gorman, a Dee Dyan, I can remember the
man himself from Wougham he was the vintner what’s this his
name was.
26
What The Old Tune has to show us is that in many ways, Happy Days is a play that Beckett
could not have written until he had realized that his own work had slipped into familiar cliché
and convention. “Pic-Pic” and “Dee Dyan”: the consonance in this passage, aptly transcribed
into English by Beckett, is distinctly reminscinent of “Gogo” and “Didi” banter. In The Old
Tune, it seems almost as though Waiting for Godot had itself become, like the radio or an old-
fashioned car, a contemporary relic. Imagine Vladimir and Estragon as two familiar old men,
stripped of their avant-garde setting, and here you have it:
GORMAN. – One way or t’other, Mr. Cream, one way or t’other
no matter it wasn’t the likes of nowadays, their flaming machines
they’d tear you to shreds.
CREAM. – My dear Gorman do you know what it is I’m going to
tell you, all this speed do you know what it is it has the whole
place ruinated, no living with it any more, the whole place
ruinated, even the weather. (Roar of engine.) Ah when you think
of the springs in our time remember the springs we had, the heat
there was in them, and the summers remember the summers would
destroy you with the heat.
27
By translating La Manivelle into The Old Tune, Beckett was able to parody his most famous
trope, recasting Vladimir and Estragon as two old men who act as though they were in the barren
landscape of Waiting for Godot – “the whole place ruinated, even the weather.” As an audience
137
familiar with Godot, we are meant to laugh at these two Beckett characters as they tolerate these
flashy cars which roar by and interrupt their dialogue. Indeed, Cream and Gorman would most
likely prefer to come across Pozzo, passing by with Lucky on his leash, as though riding in a
barouche. “Ah when you think of the springs!”
If Beckett saw his translation of The Old Tune as a form of self-parody, and it seems
evident to me that he did, Pinget was the perfect partner in crime. Mégevand’s archival research
has revealed that Beckett once confided to Pinget “that they are ‘a bit like doubles.’”
28
In Notre
Ami Samuel Beckett, an unfinished tribute to Beckett, Pinget describes a moment that vividly
depicts their friendship. “One day I was invited to Lindon’s place for a cocktail party,” Pinget
recalls – his story continues:
Before getting to his apartment I stopped for a beer at the corner
bistro to get myself in shape. I must have had more than one
because all of a sudden I see Sam arrive and I hurry to meet him. I
smack my nose against a mirror. Sam was arriving from the
opposite side.”
29
In his excellent assessment of Pinget’s manuscript, Mégevand has observed that “[a] mirror
effect…fed both poles of the relationship.”
30
The Old Tune is the only piece Beckett ever
referred to as an adaptation, indicating that he thought of the piece as something more than a
translation. Behind this seemingly innocuous play is a biting wit to which Beckett could indeed
make claim. To understand the ironic stance of The Old Tune, it is necessary to consider the play
against the backdrop of the triumphant resurgence of the avant-garde in the postwar decades.
Pierre Taminiaux has described this era quite well:
L’immédiat après-guerre, en France, a été marqué par de grands
bouleversements intellectuels et esthétiques, avec l’apparition,
entre autres, de la philosophie existentialiste et du structuralisme
ou le développement du théâtre de l’absurde, et on a pu, à
l’époque, être emporté par un vent de nouveauté qui soufflait
138
partout dans la vie publique. Avec le recul du temps, cependant, il
paraît nécessaire de relever ce qui, au cœur de démarches
considérées comme modernes, témoigne d’une connaissance
approfondie des textes classiques ou d’une ressemblance
inconsciente à ceux-ci.
31
While Robbe-Grillet and other writers of the Nouveau Roman were eager to name Beckett and
other prewar artists as their predecessors, connecting their own work to surrealism and earlier
avant-gardes, “[l]e cas Pinget, par contraste, s’avère difficile à aborder, dans la mesure où cet
auteur affirme une radicalité à première vue irréductible.” “Il est pratiquement impossible,”
Pierre Taminiaux goes on to explain, “de relier immédiatement sa démarche à celle d’un génie
littérraire non contemporain.”
32
Like Beckett, Pinget had struggled to find his own form of
‘radicalité irréductible.’ However, their aesthetic sensibilities reflect each other in comically
distorted ways, since their works tend to arrive at abstraction through entirely separate avenues.
Pinget’s masterpiece L’Inquisitoire, for example, operates on the tropes of a crime story,
providing the reader with a wealth of detail as the main character answers questions being posed
to him by a police detective. In contrast to Beckett’s techniques of minimalism and abstraction,
which shroud the entire narrative in mystery, Pinget’s narratives give the reader a distinct sense
of setting, a vivid impression of characters’ lives, and a central riddle to ponder. It is not
difficult, however, to see how Beckett and Pinget thought of themselves as doubles;
L’Inquisitoire was, like Watt, a novel about a a servant recalling his term in the house of his
master. The Old Tune, I think, was an acknowledgement of the close relationship between Pinget
and Beckett, a chance for these two friends to acknowledge their place in the shade of the
postwar era’s sweetness and light – indeed, the cranky nostalgia of Cream and Gorman is an
amusing contrast to the energy of the literary scene in 1950s and 1960s France.
139
Even though Pinget wrote many of his works before he had any knowledge of Beckett,
critics have tended to name Beckett as Pinget’s main influence. The significance of their
relationship, however, was not in how Beckett functioned as a predecessor to Pinget, but in the
way that Pinget, caught up with Beckett in the “vent de nouveauté” of postwar France, seemed to
be the only writer in whom Beckett saw his own sensibilities reflected. Although Beckett never
sought affiliation with any group or ‘movement,’ his relationships with individual artists, as we
see in his German diaries of the 1930s and his earlier writings on Geer and Bram van Velde,
were always of the utmost important to him. Robert Henkels, who has written one of the only
studies of Pinget in English, describes his work as “a self-conscious search for an aesthetic” that
“builds – thanks to the alternation between parody and invention, the banal and the romanesque –
a precious bridge between old forms and new.”
33
As a peripheral member of the New Wave,
Pinget’s self-appointed role was to question the earnestness of the movement’s commitment to
‘making it new.’
The New Wave was never as cohesive a movement as I am making it seem here. In 1962,
Jérôme Lindon commented in an interview that the New Novelists were “profoundly original and
different each from the others.” “If they have anything in common,” he explained, “it is to be
found more in their refusal of certain attitudes about literature than in any true program.”
34
The
phrase used as the heading for Lindon’s interview – “Littérature degagée” – pitted the New
Wave quite obviously against Sartre. However, one cannot simply label the New Wave as an
entirely apolitical aesthetic. Thanks to Lynn Higgins’s insightful New Novel, New Wave, New
Politics, we can see that the New Wave was highly implicated in the history of the Vichy years
and the politics of postwar France.
35
The discourse of New Novelists, as Higgins aptly puts it,
“can best be described as literally postwar” where “World War II is never far below the
140
surface.”
36
Artists of the postwar generation took radically different approaches to the political,
especially as the situation in Algeria escalated. Robbe-Grillet commented upon this in 1971,
when he discussed a disagreement between himself and Resnais during the making of Last Year
at Marienbad:
Now the New Novel was generally seen as deliberately detached
from politics, whereas Resnais was considered extremely involved
politically. [. . . ] He would have particularly liked the
conversations in the hotel to refer to the Algerian war, and, while
preserving the form I chose, that they have for their subject the
issues with which everyone was preoccupied. I was categorically
opposed. I preferred not to make the film at all rather than to utter
even once the word Algeria and this precisely for political
reasons.
37
This logic is presented by Higgins as follows: “Robbe-Grillet, whose oeuvre is more purely
formalist than Resnais’s, is, paradoxically, more interested than the filmmaker in problems of
politics and art, and his approach is characteristically more theoretical.”
38
For the first time since
the war ended, writers could boldly claim detachment from political or cultural commitments,
insisting on a past which consisted only of “textes classiques.”
“[I]f there is any unity of continuity” within the New Wave, Higgins posits, “it is to be
found in the self-conscious and paradoxical search for the new, reaffirming the project of
modernism described by Baudelaire as striving for ‘du nouveau.’ The New Novelists and the
New Wave filmmakers continue that project in their desire to be oppositional, confrontational,
sometimes unpleasant, always stubbornly contestaire”
39
– it was precisely this “self-conscious
and paradoxical search for the new” that Pinget parodied in several of his works, detecting
perhaps the aesthetic irony of defending formalist practice through methods considered to be
politically “confrontational.” Higgins never discusses Beckett and does not comment upon
Pinget at length, but her study is an important reference for thinking about how Beckett’s
141
priorities differed from those of the New Wave. Unlike Robbe-Grillet, Beckett was not interested
in “reaffirming the project of modernism” nor in artificially contriving a sense of autonomy.
“[T]hough he tries to separate aesthetics from politics and history,” James MacNaughton says of
Beckett’s German diaries, they “disclose a growing awareness that aesthetic decisions engage the
narrative challenges presented by shoddy histories and ideological propaganda.”
40
While Robbe-
Grillet reserved the right to keep historical references from tainting the integrity of his artistic
practice, Cream and Gorman, two elderly men caught up in their memories of World War I,
trudge through a minefield of potentially controversial topics. This, I would argue, is precisely
the point of Pinget’s irony: despite its relevance to contemporary political debates about France’s
military past, The Old Tune is in no danger of submitting to “ideological propaganda.” As a case
in point, I turn to the following passage, where Cream and Gorman recall a scandal involving
Nelly Crowther, a girl from their town who had an affair with an “army man”:
CREAM. – Principles, Gorman, principles without principles I ask
you. (Roar of engine.) Wasn’t there an army man in it.
GORMAN. – In the car?
CREAM. – Eh?
GORMAN. – An army man in the car?
CREAM. – In the Crowther blow-up.
Roar of engine.
GORMAN. – You mean the Lootnant St John Fitzball.
CREAM. – St John Fitzball that’s the man, wasn’t he mixed up in
it?
GORMAN. – They were keeping company all right. (Pause.) He
died in 14. Wounds.
41
In the original version of the play, Toupin concludes this conversation by stating quite simply,
“Il est mort en 14.”
42
“Wounds”: this phrasing is entirely Beckett’s, and one can imagine the
word being drawn out in the same way Krapp relishes the similar sound of ‘spooooooool.’ The
light buffoonery of this scene – evidenced by the name “Lootnant St John Fitzball” – seems a
142
deliberate contrast to the somber mood in France following World War II. Nelly Crowther’s
affair with an “army man,” after all, would surely remind a French audience of the women who
had their heads shaved for having illicit affairs with German soldiers during the Occupation. As
Higgins describes, New Wave artists did not fully acknowledge the public memory of World
War II until the 1980s; The Old Tune exemplifies why Beckett’s reaction to the Occupation was
not as belated as his New Wave contemporaries. Although several critics (most notably, Adorno)
have emphasized World War II as the historical source underlying the trauma of plays such as
Endgame and Waiting for Godot, it is also true that Beckett was in a certain sense a generation
removed from this way of thinking – The Old Tune is a vignette which cuts into the skewed
perspective of an audience more comfortable with memories of World War I. The lesson here, I
would argue, is that Beckett’s own imagination seems abstract because of its historical
specificity; he was an artist who layered memories of World War I and World War II.
Higgins’s perspective of the New Wave is especially interesting because she shows that
one of its defining features appeared only after the movement had all but ended. The most
“radical break of all,” she convincingly argues, happened after the transition from de Gaulle to
Mitterand in 1981, when filmmakers suddenly exhibited “a swing from formal experimentation
(or the thematizing of aesthetic problems) and systematic suspicion toward a desire to write
personally and to create an illusion of referentially [sic].”
43
This shift is represented by Louis
Malle, Higgins illustrates, with Lacombe Lucien (1974) and Au revoir les enfants (1987); in the
former, acts of collaboration “remain in the sphere of spectacle,” while the latter brings to the
forefront an “[a]wareness of the contagious nature of guilt about collaboration and an attempt to
take responsibility for it.”
44
As time passed after the Vichy years, artists eventually began to
piece together their wartime narratives by tapping into current political issues, referencing their
143
personal experiences to challenge national myths of collaboration and resistance. This is what
Higgins calls the “ongoing project” of “construction of memory”;
45
such a construction occurs in
Au revoir les enfants when the protagonist realizes, years later as an adult, that one of his
innocent childhood acts resulted in the discovery of his Jewish friend by the Vichy government.
In Freudian terms, Higgins suggests, this impulse is one of ‘belatedness’ or nachträglichkeit
where “sense is progressively made of the past and its effect on the present.”
46
This is not how memory works in The Old Tune. Recollections of World War I are both
absurd and somewhat irrelevant to the war itself:
GORMAN. – The mobilisation have a heart it’s as clear in my
mind as yesterday the mobilisation, we were shifted straight away
to Chesham was it, no, Chester, that’s the place, Chester, there was
Morrison’s pub on the corner and a chamber-maid, Mr. Cream, a
chamber-maid what was her name, Joan, Jean, Jane, the very start
up of the war when we still didn’t believe it, Chester, ah those are
happy memories.
CREAM. – Happy memories, happy memories, I wouldn’t go so
far as that.
GORMAN. – I mean the start up, the start up at Chatham, we still
didn’t believe it, and that chamber-maid what was her name it’ll
come back to me...
47
Ironically, even as Cream and Gorman swap war stories, it becomes impossible to focus on the
war; recalling the name of a chambermaid or the pub he frequented while a young soldier seems
just as important to Gorman as remembering the city where the mobilization occurred.
Thousands of Irishmen had volunteered for the British forces in World War I, still considered by
many to be a cruel blow to Irish nationalism – but we have no hint of that here. In The Old Tune
there is no ideology of right or wrong, no ethical dilemma, but merely a series of disagreements
over names, places, and times. Cream and Gorman, in other words, exhibit a lack of ideological
engagement atypical of the postwar ethos. The comic treatment of World War I in The Old Tune
144
is almost Duchampian in its clever method of detachment: the play resists current politics and the
complicated history of World War II, while also refusing the act of resistance – the topic of war
is breeched in a comic manner at a time when the New Wave was avoiding any reference to war
for its own “political reasons.”
For the French, World War I represented national victory, while the Second World War
was shrouded in denial and shame; it became de Gaulle’s mission to ensure that the French
national identity would remain rooted in the First World War, when war still meant victory and
heroes such as Pétain had not yet been tainted. In his radio script written at St. Lô, Beckett
emphasized the human tragedy of war, and on several occasions he denounced the base instincts
of nationalism. His trans-national perspective is subtly reinforced in his translation of Pinget’s
radio play, where the names of French cities involved in World War I were also involved in
World War II, and the substitution of British cities for French cities, Irish soldiers for French
soldiers, makes little difference in Cream and Gorman/Toupin and Pommard’s individual
experiences. In Beckettian style, The Old Tune reaches universality by way of the trivial; the
play offers an absurdly personal point of view where the name of a corner pub is an integral part
of the war experience. Pinget was not a French citizen, but Swiss, and strangely enough, it was
because he had not been in France during the Occupation that he was able to share the same
perspective as Beckett, who had lived in Vichy France and worked for the Resistance. Like
Beckett, Pinget could still look at the war without navigating the murky waters of collaboration
and resistance or sorting through the complexities of French national guilt. Still, the war looms.
“Happy memories”? “I wouldn’t go so far as that.”
145
In February 1961, the very year that Beckett translated The Old Tune, he had an
encounter with Adorno. This account of their interaction comes from Dr. Siegfried Unseld of
Surhkamp publishing house, Beckett’s German publisher:
…Adorno insisted that “Hamm” [in Endgame] derives from
“Hamlet.” He had a whole theory based on this. Beckett said
“Sorry, Professor, but I never thought of Hamlet when I invented
this name.” But Adorno insisted. And Beckett became a little
angry…
48
Adorno’s comparison of Hamm to Hamlet reflects his certainty that universality was the core of
Beckett’s art – he felt that Beckett’s drama, like Shakespeare’s, provided an ahistorical, yet
historically rendered, revelation of the condition humaine.
49
Beckett, however, did not feel his
writing should be interpreted through historical sources or that his critics should attach abstract
symbols to his work; Adorno’s opinion that Endgame represented the trauma of the Holocaust
was, of course, not endorsed by Beckett. In closing, I would like to suggest that the clash
between their ways of thinking is symbolized by Adorno’s reaction (or rather, lack thereof) to
Beckett’s use of radio. Despite having studied radio programming extensively during his
research at Princeton, Adorno never took an interest in Beckett’s forays into this pervasive
medium of the culture industry. It is impossible to say for certain whether Adorno thought
Beckett’s works for radio fit within, or perhaps failed to fulfill, his modernist paradigm; it is
entirely possible he respected Beckett’s radio aesthetic as he did the innovative experiments of
Weimar cinema. It is unlikely, thought, that Adorno would have rejected Beckett’s radio plays
on the basis of the technology alone. Adorno picked apart Benjamin’s argument about the merits
of reproductive media such as film and radio, not because these media lacked potential for
aesthetic accomplishment, but because Benjamin was willing to accept a Chaplin film as avant-
garde without making the proper Marxist associations; such popular films, Adorno proscribed,
146
were part of the capitalist suppression of the working class, entertaining distractions which posed
as a danger to the revolution. Adorno approved of Beckett’s overall aesthetic because, in his
view, works such as Endgame attacked the cultural myths of commodity culture, revealing the
ugly truth of our dehumanized, industrialized existence. A majority of Beckett’s radio plays, in
fact, would support Adornian readings of trauma, from the horrific train accident at the end of All
that Fall to the torture scenes of Rough for Radio. Here is where The Old Tune becomes
especially significant, for it is a piece which provokes an Adornian farce – like a skipping record,
this play never gets past the stage of historical materialism. The Old Tune is a piece which dwells
on the radio as cultural commodity and the history of the wars, but it also short circuits any
possibility for universal gravitas.
The Old Tune, best described as a vaudeville radio routine, redirects the recent memory of
World War II through World War I; thus, it is a piece which allows Beckett to confront, and yet
refuse to resolve, the inevitable links between his work and wartime trauma. Through the radio
medium, Beckett could leave intact the theoretical and historical aporia left behind by the war.
Although I do not wish to underplay the theoretical dimensions of sound, which Ulrika Maude in
particular has explored so well, I do think the rubrics of postmodernism and modern media
overlook important historical aspects of radio which pertain to Beckett’s overall aesthetic. One
cannot say, after all, that by the 1950s and 1960s radio broadcasting was still regarded as a ‘new’
aesthetic medium or that its dramatic possibilities had remained unexplored, especially
considering the revolutionary work of Luigi Russolo, Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Artaud. Ezra
Pound had already experimented heavily with music in his BBC radio operas of the 1930s, and
around the same time, the writer Carlos Larronde, a well-known radio dramatist in France, had
broadcast his play “Les Douze Coups de Minuit” with a score commissioned by the composer
147
Arthur Honegger. The wave of experimentation inspired by wireless technology in the 1920s and
1930s abruptly ended when broadcasting was taken over by wartime propaganda – radio entered
public life during the entre-guerre period of high modernism, and by the 1940s, the medium
itself had become synonymous with the lived memories of World War II.
50
This sudden change
from aesthetic outlet to instrument of war was just as apparent in France, where Beckett was
located, as in the rest of Europe. According to historical accounts, “L’Occupation marque, du
point de vue radiophonique, une rupture profonde avec l’avant-guerre, à la fois dans les modes
d’organisation de la radio, dans ses programmes, dans sa technique.”
51
For one who was highly
attuned to such transitions, as Beckett would have been, the radio itself was a symbol of “une
rupture profonde avec l’avant-guerre.”
148
NOTES
1. Alain Robbe-Grillet, “New Novel, New Man,” in For A New Novel: Essays on Fiction,
trans. Richard Howard (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1989; originally published
by Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris, France, as Pour un nouveau roman, 1963), 136.
2. Robbe-Grillet, “Samuel Beckett, or Presence on the Stage,” in For a New Novel, 125.
3. Pinget’s comments on this translation are especially insightful: “...it concerns places so
dear to his memory that the slightest mistake on my part would have been a disaster for him. I
have, for the first time, the impression of being at the heart of his drama, which is probably
constituted from sensations and feelings of morbid intensity. [...] I think that Sam lost control of
himself, focusing not on the possibility of a mistake on my part but involuntarily on the painful
memories that tormented him.” (Pinget, 1960–1961, quoted in Mégevand 9). The fact that
Beckett would work with Pinget on a translation so personal to him is testament to the
significance of their friendship.
4. Martin Mégevand, “Pinget seen by Beckett, Beckett according to Pinget,” Journal of
Beckett Studies 19 (2010): 3-14, p. 12.
5. Ibid., 5.
6. Jonathan Kalb, “The Mediated Quixote: The Radio and Television Plays, and Film,” in
The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett, ed. John Pilling, 124-144 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994), 136.
7. Clas Zilliacus, Beckett and Broadcasting (Abo: Abo Akademi, 1976), 13.
8. Robbe-Grillet once called Last Year at Marienbad “a perpetual present which makes
all recourse to memory impossible” (Robbe-Grillet, 152); in a similar manner, he described
Waiting for Godot as a play about two men “who do nothing, who say virtually nothing, who
have no other quality than to be present” (114, emphasis mine). It was in Beckett’s stage drama,
rather than Beckett’s work in film, that Robbe-Grillet drew connections to his own work as a
filmmaker – if he did consider parallels between Marienbad and Beckett’s films, it is still
unlikely he considered these works as being any more significant than Godot.
9. Anthony Cronin, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist (New York: Da Capo Press,
1999), 424-425.
10. Robbe-Grillet, “From Realism to Reality,” in For a New Novel, 160.
11. Albright, Daniel. Beckett and Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003), 1.
149
12. Schneider to Samuel Beckett, April 9, 1960, in No Author Better Served: The
Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider, ed. Maurice Harmon (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1998), 67-68.
13. Broadly stated, these plays place Beckett within the history of technological
innovation that defined the course of the 20th century avant-garde. Most studies have focused on
Beckett’s role in the evolution of the BBC, although scholars have also compared his work to
Rudolf Arnheim’s radio experimentations in Germany.
14. Charles Juliet, Conversations with Samuel Beckett, trans. Tracy Cooke and Axel
Nesme (Champaign and London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2009), 17.
15. Stanley Richardson and Jane Alison Hale, “Working Wireless: Beckett’s Radio
Writing,” in Samuel Beckett and the Arts: Music, Visual Arts, and Non-Print Media, ed. Lois
Oppenheim, 269-294 (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1999), 285-286.
16. Ibid., 272.
17. Martin Esslin, Mediations: Essays on Brecht, Beckett, and the Media (New York:
Grove Press, 1982), 125.
18. Zilliacus, Beckett and Broadcasting, 30.
19. Ibid., 143.
20. Everett Frost, “Mediating On: Beckett, Embers, and Radio Theory,” in Samuel
Beckett and the Arts, ed. Lois Oppenheim, 314.
21. Pinget, “La Manivelle,” in La Manivelle suivi de Lettre Morte, texte anglais de
Samuel Beckett (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1960), 15.
22. Ibid., 53.
23. Robbe-Grillet, “Time and Description,” in For a New Novel, 154.
24. Robbe-Grillet, “Samuel Beckett, or Presence on the Stage,” 123-124.
25. Ibid., 125.
26. Pinget, trans. Beckett, 15.
27. Ibid., 19.
150
28. Mégevand, “Pinget seen by Beckett,” 8. According to Mégevand, this comment
comes from an unpublished letter dated September 3, 1958.
29. Pinget, 1960–1961, cited in Mégevand, “Pinget seen by Beckett,” 8.
30. Mégevand, “Pinget seen by Becket,” 8.
31. Pierre Taminiaux, Robert Pinget (Seuil; Contemporains edition, 1997), 95. “The
period following the war in France was defined by intellectual and aesthetic movements, with the
appearance, among other things, of existential philosophy and structuralism or theater of the
absurd, and one could, at the time, be transported by a wind of change that carried through public
life. With the passing of time, however, it becomes necessary to recognize that at the heart of
these approaches considered to be modern was a profound knowledge of classic texts or an
unconscious resemblance to past traditions.” Translation mine.
32. Ibid., 96. “The case of Pinget, by contrast, is difficult to address, in the sense that this
author exhibits a radicality which seems at first irreducible…It is practically impossible to link
his approach to any form of genius which is not contemporary.” Translation mine.
33. Robert M. Henkels, Robert Pinget: The Novel as Quest (Tuscaloosa: University of
Alabama Press, 1979), 217.
34. Jérôme Lindon, “Littérature degagée,” New Morality 2, nos. 2-3 (1962): 112, quoted
in Lynn Higgins, New Novel, New Wave, New Politics: Fiction and the Representation of
History in Postwar France (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 13.
35. Higgins defines New Wave novels and films as being “radically ‘caught between’…
socialist and Balzacian realism and between commitment to ideas and the forging of an aesthetic
avant-garde. They struggle between the pressure to move forward and an impulse to look
backward. Striving toward the ‘new,’ they are haunted by the past. (12)
36. Ibid., 213.
37. Quoted in Higgins, New Novel, New Wave, New Politics, 102. Emphasis mine.
38. Ibid., 102.
39. Ibid., 14-15.
40. James McNaughton, “Beckett’s ‘Brilliant Obscurantis’: Watt and the Problem of
Propaganda,” in Samuel Beckett: History, Memory, Archive, ed. Seán Kennedy and Katherine
Weiss (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009), 48.
41. Pinget, “La Manivelle,” trans. Beckett, 57.
151
42. Ibid., 58.
43. Higgins, New Novel, New Wave, New Politics, 9.
44. Ibid., 193.
45. Ibid., 211.
46. Ibid., 210.
47. Pinget, “La Manivelle,” trans. Beckett, 31.
48. Quoted in James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (New
York: Grove Press, 1996), 428.
49. Adorno wrote in his notebook: “B[eckett]’s genius is that he has captured this
semblance of the non-historical, of the condition humaine, in historical images, and thus
transfixed it.” “Notes on Beckett,” Journal of Beckett Studies 19, no. 2 (2010): 157–178, p. 161.
50. As Clas Zilliacus explains, “In [Donald] McWhinnie’s phrase, an articifical state of
society – war – had created an artificial situation which made radio ‘a millionaire before it was
thirty.’ Radio had proved capable, in very trying conditions, of catering to the very real needs of
unprecendented millions” (16).
51. Cécile Méadel, Histoire de la radio des années trente; du sans-filiste à l’auditeur,
pref. Jean-Noël Jeanneney (Paris: Diffusion Economica, 236). “The Occupation marks a
profound rupture created by the war, affecting the organization, programming, and technique of
radio broadcasting.” [translation mine]
152
CONCLUSION
In 2009, Francis Naumann organized an exhibition entitled “Marcel Duchamp: The Art
of Chess.” The show included chess-themed artworks by contemporary artists inspired by
Duchamp, a highlight of which was Yoko Ono’s Play It By Trust (figure 9).
Figure 9. Yoko Ono, “Play It By Trust” 1966/1999
White pieces on white board
Photo taken on October 21, 2009.
Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mickeyono2005/4539801430/in/set-72157623900724946/
According to the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis, where a life-size version of Play It By
Trust was staged in 2011,
Yoko Ono’s Play it by Trust (1966/2011) is an all-white,
interactive chessboard that functions as a metaphor for the futility
of war and extends the artist’s interest in the expressive potential
of chance. By eliminating the color-based opposition of one side
versus another, Ono dooms any attempt to successfully “play” the
game beyond a series of initial moves to ultimate failure.
1
153
Ono affirms these war-related messages in her own explanation of the piece:
The players lose track of their pieces as the game progresses;
Ideally this leads to a shared understanding of their mutual
concerns and a new relationship based on empathy rather than
opposition. Peace is then attained on a small scale.
2
Play It By Trust seems to parallel Duchamp’s chess aesthetic quite nicely; much of Duchamp’s
time was spent on theoretical problems unrelated to strategies of winning
3
and the chess book he
co-wrote with Vitaly Halberstadt, in 1932, was entitled Opposition and Sister Squares are
Reconciled. Nonetheless, Ono’s stance as an anti-war artist entirely contradicts Duchamp’s
apolitical sensibilities. Play It By Trust functions as “a metaphor for the futility of war”; chess
becomes a vehicle for the tenors of “empathy” and peace “attained on a small scale.” Duchamp,
by contrast, was fascinated by the concept of stalemate in chess, called pat in French, a condition
in which the game reaches a definitive impasse. Within the Duchampian lexicon, the metaphor of
chess has different semantic value, emphasizing senselessness over understanding, irresolution
rather than conciliation – Duchamp’s chess aesthetic lends itself to an another kind of war
metaphor altogether.
As multiple scholars note, chess themes are prominent in Duchamp’s masterpiece, The
Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (also known as The Large Glass), in the way this
piece separates in two opposing halves, giving the impression of a conceptual game where the
objective is to capture the queen-like figure of the Bride (figure 10).
154
Figure 10. Marcel Duchamp. The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large
Glass). 1915-23. Oil, varnish, lead, wire, lead foil, mirror silvering, and dust on two glass panels
(cracked), each mounted between two glass panels, with five glass strips, aluminum foil, and a
wood and steel frame. 109 ¼ x 69 ¼ in. overall.
155
The Large Glass is not only a conceptual chess game but also a wartime piece; Duchamp began
working on it during the Great War shortly after he left Paris for New York City, finally leaving
it “definitely unfinished” in 1923. Duchamp wrote a series of notes about The Large Glass which
he later compiled in The Green Box of 1934; in these companion notes, we learn that the Glass
is, imaginatively speaking, a conceptual blueprint. The bachelors, which Duchamp named the
Nine Malic Moulds, occupy the mechanical realm in the bottom half of the Glass, linked together
in a complex bachelor-machine; caught in perpetual, masturbatory motion, the bachelors are
unable to consummate their desires for the Bride who occupies the ethereal realm above. The
Large Glass unifies the themes of chess and war more directly than any of Duchamp’s other
works: the Nine Malic Moulds, as scholars have already discussed, not only resemble chess
pieces
4
but also uniformed soldiers. The military analogy, in fact, makes more sense than
scholars have yet acknowledged; it had been common since the 18
th
century to depict the French
Republic as a female figure (commonly referred to as Marianne). If the bachelors are read as
soldiers, the Bride could be interpreted as their Lady Liberty. In this way, the Large Glass offers
a war metaphor not entirely incompatible with the anti-war message of Yoko Ono’s Play It By
Trust; Duchamp was, as he wrote in another of his boxes, “Against compulsory military
service.” However, The Large Glass makes a war statement more disturbing and ambivalent than
Ono’s placatory message of peace. As bachelor-soldiers, the Nine Malic Moulds are cogs in a
senselessly repeating machine, blindly driven by their masculine desires, pro patria mori.
Duchamp’s equanimity would at first seem more amenable to the peace protests of Yoko
Ono than to the patriotic, fascist-leaning sentiments of Gertrude Stein. Nonetheless, Stein’s
ambivalent language would give fair expression to Duchamp’s critiques of the war’s
senselessness and rampant masculinity; the Nine Malic Moulds, for example, can be compared to
156
Stein’s World War II narrative Brewsie and Willie, in which two soldiers engage in tedious,
repetitive war dialogue as they go out on the town to flirt with women, one of the only
distractions available to them during their monotonous time of service. It is not her war
narratives, however, but Stein’s experimental, abstract language which lends the most insight
into the Duchampian function of her war aesthetics. In An Elucidation, a piece written in the
interwar period, Stein likened her experimental language to the alternating squares of a
checkerboard:
I know the difference between white marble and black marble.
White and black marble make a checker board and I never mention
either...
I think I won’t
I think I will
I think I will
I think I won’t.
I think I won’t
I think I will
I think I will
I think I won’t.
5
Stein’s An Elucidation, although written about her radical writing technique and having little to
do with her political identity, is nonetheless informative of how she approached the political
arena. Stein’s political commentaries resist and deconstruct political ideologies, just as her
radical texts dismantle traditional rules of grammar and semantic meaning. During the Second
World War, the time when Stein became most vocal about matters pertaining to politics, she was
more informed than most of the American public about the political situation in Europe; she had
spent much of the 1930s debating politics with Bernard Faÿ, listening to his lectures, and reading
French newspapers. “White and black marble make a checker board,” as Stein would say, but “I
never mention either” – so too does her political language engage in alternating forms of logic.
157
Stein’s circular aesthetics – her logic of “I will / I won’t,” fruitless repetitions reminiscent of
Duchamp’s Malic Moulds – apply to her stance about the war, a war aesthetic which makes
action seem more irrational than inaction. In her introduction to her translations of the speeches
of Pétain, Stein attempted to deconstruct the political reasons for the French armistice in terms
her American audience would understand:
We in the United States until just now have been spoiled children.
Since the civil war until today, when the action of Japan has made
us realize the misery the grief and the terror of war…we did not
understand defeat enough to sympathize with the french people
and with their Maréchal Pétain, who like George Washington, and
he is very like George Washington because he too is first in war
first in peace and first in the hearts of his countrymen, who like
George Washington has given them courage in their darkest
moment…
6
Stein’s comparison of Pétain to George Washington has been a sticking point for scholars; too
often her support of Pétain is misunderstood as a form of Vichy collaboration or Nazi sympathy.
Stein, in fact, was strongly anti-German in her political outlook and never condoned the anti-
Semitic policies of the Vichy regime.
7
She would have been aware of the statut des Juifs passed
by Pétain’s administration, but Stein praised Pétain, as did a majority of the French public,
because she believed in the conservative values of his National Revolution and she regarded him
as the only person in power who could possibly keep the occupying forces under control. Despite
the fact it was Pétain’s administration which enforced the statut des Juifs, a policy which led to
the oppression of Jews in public life, and eventually mass deportations, the public, it was widely
presumed that Pierre Laval, Pétain’s minister of state, was mainly responsible for these
collaborationist actions. Although Stein’s admiration of Pétain may seem idiosyncratic and
contradictory, she agreed with the majority public opinion in France; according to historians,
158
public opinion was favorable towards Pétain even as late as 1942. Stein’s war aesthetic is infused
with the ambivalences of a lived political experience.
Stein is distinct from Duchamp, and from Beckett, in that she did express overt opinions
about the war situation. Most notably, she chose to defend Pétain for agreeing to the armistice
with Germany during the Second World War; he was a noble and sensible leader, she argued,
“very like George Washington because he too is first in war first in peace.” Americans, she
critiqued, “did not understand defeat enough to sympathize with the french people.” Stein’s point
of view, although anti-war, is fundamentally different from the activist spirit embraced within
the postwar decades. In the face of an interminable war situation, Stein embraces neutrality as
the best approximation of peace: a political opinion less interested in certainties than
Duchampian ambiguity. In Wars I Have Seen, written in 1943, Stein uses the Washington
analogy in her description of the French Resistance; the war, she writes, “was a kind of a Valley
Forge with no General Washington but each little band had to supply itself with its own food its
own plans and its own morale. We who lived in the midst of you salute you.” Keeping in mind
Stein’s comparison of Pétain to George Washington, her admiration of the Resistance would
seem to be a contradiction. Here is where it is important to keep in mind the complex web of
sympathies which defined wartime life under the Nazi Occupation. In contrast to 1960s
counterculture, the Occupation was a period in which it was common to feel utter ambivalence
and confusion about the political situation at hand.
By the same token, Duchamp’s stance about the war was more Steinian, more politically
motivated, than it may at first appear. In February 1943, the same year Stein began working on
Wars I Have Seen, the art director of Vogue took it upon himself to commission Duchamp for the
cover of the magazine’s “Americana” issue. The intention, no doubt, was to celebrate the United
159
States as the new home of the European-based avant-garde with all its accoutrements of
international chic. Duchamp seemed to be an excellent choice, particularly because the United
States could stake a large claim in his career; it was in New York City where, decades before, he
had found his first major success with Nude Descending a Staircase, and by the Second World
War he felt more at home there than in Paris. However, the “Americana” piece he submitted to
Vogue, entitled Allégorie de Genre (Genre Allegory), left the editors completely aghast: he
created a profile of George Washington from wrinkled gauze nailed through with gold stars, and
to make matters worse, the entire composition was painted with stripes of red that resembled
blood. Vogue reimbursed him $50 for his expenses and sent him on his way. “What Duchamp
was up to with this little bombshell,” Calvin Tomkins muses, “is anybody’s guess.”
8
Indeed, what was Duchamp “up to”? Genre Allegory could easily be interpreted as an
anti-American piece, a critique perhaps of capitalist consumer culture exemplified by Vogue.
However, as Tomkins and other critics have affirmed, anti-Americanism was simply not in
Duchamp’s makeup. Offering his own interpretation, Tomkins has tentatively suggested that the
grotesque imagery of Genre Allegory comments upon the sordid ‘marriage’ of art and fashion
(Vogue had thought the wrinkled gauze “suggested used sanitary napkins”).
9
Demos provides an
interpretation that does a better job than Tompkins’s of accounting for the shocking nature of
presenting such a piece to Vogue within the political climate of World War II; such an act was a
manifestation, he argues, of Duchamp’s intense resistance to the concept of patriotism. Genre
Allegory, then, seems to function as somewhat of an abstract gesture, a resistance to the
ideologies of nation, art, fashion – or, perhaps, all of the above.
With Genre Allegory, Duchamp created a work of art likely to be rejected for display:
this was a maneuver he had performed before, most famously with Fountain in 1917. Here,
160
however, the logic of aesthetic rejection is cleverly inverted: while Fountain became significant
because it created a controversy, Genre Allegory is remarkable precisely because it did not.
Fountain was offensive to the exhibition committee and therefore it was judged not to be art, and
on the other, Genre Allegory did not offend the Vogue editorial committee (or at least, it
offended only to a degree) and therefore it was regarded inappropriate for a commercial market.
Genre Allegory, by any other artist, would have been deemed anti-war and critical of the United
States, and a radical political affront to Vogue. Duchamp’s apolitical tendencies must be weighed
against this gory abuse of George Washington’s profile at the peak of a global war: the result is a
draw, an anti-war piece which has done little to change Duchamp’s reputation for political
indifference.
Beckett too was an anti-war artist whose work exhausts itself in a political standstill. The
metaphor of the chess enters several of Beckett’s writings, offering a way to connect his war
aesthetics with Duchamp as well as Stein. In the summer of 1940, during the first year of the
Nazi Occupation, Beckett and Duchamp lived together in the village of Arcachon, where the two
mean would sometimes play chess together. Little documentation exists about their interactions.
We can turn to Beckett’s Quad, however, as an example of how he and Duchamp make similar
use of chess metaphors. In Quad, the stage is divided into sections, similar to a chessboard, and
the silent actors move about, like chess pieces, according to a set of preordained rules. The play
contains no dialogue, only a set of specific instructions, which begin as follows:
The players (1, 2, 3, 4) pace the given area, each following his
particular course.
Area: square. Length of side: 6 paces.
161
Course 1: AC, CB, BA, AD, DB, BC, CD, DA
Course 2: BA, AB, DB, BC, CD, DA, AC, CB
Course 3: CD, DA, AC, CB, BA, AD, DB, BC
Course 4: DB, BC, CD, DA, AC, CB, BA, AD
10
The play also contains Beckett’s martinet stage notes, which dictate how the actors are to be
dressed and how they are to walk. The result is a visual uniformity which strips the figures on
stage of any signs of individual identity, save differently colored cloaks. The actors in Quad lack
the subtle military imagery of the Nine Malic Moulds. Thus, their dehumanized motions have
different semantic value; unlike the Large Glass, Quad seems more disturbing than ironic (figure
11).
Chess themes arise elsewhere in Beckett’s work. Waiting for Godot, Daniel Albright
writes, “is like the chess game in Murphy, an investigation of the botched symmetries that arise
when you move the pawns and rooks and knights without any intent to capture your opponent’s
pieces – indeed without any goal at all.”
11
Unlike the scenario presented by Play It By Trust, the
Beckettian chess game does not end when the players decide it is time to stop. Rather, Beckett’s
chess scenes seem more similar to Duchamp’s Large Glass, with its perpetual and senseless
motion, its aesthetics of constraint and irresolution.
162
Figure 11. Stills from Samuel Beckett, Quad (1981). Teleplay directed by Samuel Beckett. First
transmitted in Germany by Süddetscher Runkfunk in 1982 under the title Quadrat 1+2.
163
In the decades following the war, Stein, Beckett and Duchamp were celebrated as three
early precursors of postmodern abstraction, associated with the traditions of Language Poetry,
conceptual art, Pop Art, Existentialism, Found Art, Situationism, minimalism, and the postwar
avant-garde at large. All three of these artists are credited with practicing ‘anti’ aesthetics
deemed as culturally significant: anti-industrial, anti-institutional, anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchal,
and more generally, anti-regime. Duchamp teaches us that ‘anything can be art,’ from Stein we
learn that ‘language can be more free’ and Beckett supposedly frees situations from recognizable
contexts in order to show us the universality of the human condition. Dana Watson, for example,
observes of Stein that “[t]he failure of syntax is both a symbol of freedom and a means to it”;
12
Watson argues that Stein’s deconstructive grammar functions in the same manner as her social
interactions, both providing a means to resist institutionalized discourse. Compare this to
Apollinaire’s statement that “[i]t will perhaps fall to an artist as free of aesthetic considerations
and as concerned with energy as Marcel Duchamp to reconcile Art and the People.”
13
And
Adorno said of Beckett: “Playing with elements of reality without any mirroring, taking no stand
and finding pleasure in this freedom from prescribed activity, exposes no more than would taking
a stand with the intent to expose.”
14
For Adorno, Beckett’s work was the expression of ineffable cultural truths:
What is today called a “message” is no more to be squeezed out of
Shakespeare’s great dramas than out of Beckett’s works. But the
increasing opacity is itself a function of transformed content. As
the negation of the absolute idea, content can no longer be
identified with reason as it is postulated by idealism; content has
become the critique of the omnipotence of reason, and it can
therefore no longer be reasonable according to the norms set by
discursive thought. The darkness of the absurd is the old darkness
of the new. This darkness must be interpreted, not replaced by the
clarity of meaning. (Aesthetic Theory, 35)
164
Adorno had famously written that “[t]o write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” In his Negative
Dialectics he revised this dictum, acknowledging that “it may have been wrong to say that after
Auschwitz you could no longer write poems”; what Adorno held on to, was the notion that
postwar poetry must express “[p]erennial suffering.”
15
Beckett’s refusal of “the clarity of
meaning” was, for Adorno, was the perfect expression of this “darkness.” However, if Beckett’s
war aesthetics are similar to Duchamp and Stein, as I have been arguing throughout this project,
Adorno’s reading seems less applicable. Stein died shortly after the end of the war, and
Duchamp’s later work cannot be seriously interpreted in relation to the Holocaust in the way that
Adorno interprets Beckett. Stein and Duchamp
16
are not immediately thought of as being part of
Adorno’s Modernist canon and they have little to do with his notions of “[p]erennial suffering”;
their modes of political ambivalence in the interwar years shift the ground away from the
“absolute negativity” of Adornian theories of modernism.
Peter Bürger’s landmark theory of the avant-garde is similar to Adorno’s modernist
aesthetics, in that places the power of the artwork in its ability to self-critique its struggle for
autonomy. Bürger posits that “social ineffectuality stands revealed as the essence of art in
bourgeois society, and thus provokes the self-criticism of art.” “It is to the credit of the historical
avant-garde movements,” Bürger writes, “that they supplied this self-criticism.”
17
For Bürger,
the avant-garde functions within a realm of heightened consciousness: awake to its own “social
ineffectuality,” the artwork critiques its own “institutional status” – Duchamp’s Fountain, by
way of example. By comparing Beckett, Stein, and Duchamp through the historical framework
of interwar France and the Occupation, I hope to have illustrated that their techniques of
minimalism and abstraction have less to do with capitalist culture, Marxist doctrine, and
“bourgeuois culture” – considerations of postmodern thinkers – than their lived experiences of
165
the World Wars. During the World Wars, and in the interwar years, historical periods in which
scores of artists became engagé, collabo, neo-classical aesthetics, and anarchistic reactionaries,
Duchamp, Beckett, and Stein practiced ‘other’ aesthetics which blur the distinctions between
‘political’ and ‘apolitical’ art – pointing to the failures of activism and aestheticism alike.
Duchamp, Beckett, and Stein were out of tune with the revolutionary avant-gardes of the
1910s and 1920s, as well as the engagée spirit of the avant-garde in the 1930s through the 1960s.
They did not take part in the reactionary rhetoric of Dada, did not create political messages in the
way of Ono’s Play It By Trust, and despite the theorizations of postmodern thinkers, their works
cannot be interpreted as reactions to bourgeois capitalism. During the World Wars, France was
not a “democratic and liberal-bourgeois society” nor did it provide an “apartness from the praxis
of life.” The Second World War, in particular, proved that ‘social ineffectuality’ was not only
“the essence of art” but also “the “praxis of life.” As the art world succumbed to the censorship
and propaganda of the Nazi regime in the 1930s and 1940s, it became impossible to believe in
aesthetic autonomy and social agency – impossible to believe that the artist really had such
choices to ‘escape’ or to ‘speak.’ As Beckett once wrote in his journal: “I am not interested in a
‘unification’ of the historical chaos any more than I am in the ‘clarification’ of the individual
chaos, and still less in the anthropomorphisation of the inhuman necessities that provoke the
chaos. What I want is the straws, flotsam, etc., names, dates, births and deaths, because that is all
I can know.”
18
A commitment to “ineffectuality” unites the war aesthetics of Duchamp, Stein,
and Beckett: a radical rejection of political agency, a self-effacement of the cultural value of their
own artistic perspectives. The conceptual avant-garde is perhaps the only artistic tradition to
mine such depths of political ambivalence.
166
NOTES
1. “Yoko Ono: Play It By Trust (September 9, 2011-October 9, 2011).” Contemporary
Art Museums, St. Louis. http://www.camstl.org/exhibitions/front-room/yoko-ono-play-it-by-
trust/.
2. Yoko Ono, quoted in Arthur Coleman Danto, Unnatural Wonders: Essays from the
Gap Between Art and Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 75.
3 As scholars have noted, his chess book examines a rare endgame scenario, making the
entire study of little practical use. David Joselit calls it an “arcane chess treatise” and “an
indulgently specialized book” but says that “[p]recisely this utopian quality, however, brings the
metaphorical dimension of the book into focus” (Joselit, 174). Francis Naumann notes that “most
of the individuals who have bothered to assess this book have repeated these very aspects of its
impracticality” but he, too, sees a “metaphorical dimension” in its utopian approach; “none (so
far as I know) have noted the significance of its central treatise, clearly announced by its title,”
(DUMD, 58) Naumann says.
4. Bradley Bailey has written a focused study arguing for the likeness of the Nine Malic
Molds to chess pieces. He explores this particular element of The Large Glass and puts forth the
likely possibility that the molds were “inspired by pawns from chess history” (Bailey, Tout-Fait
online), showing that there is a strong link between Duchamp’s study of uniforms and the
medieval chess moralities. Bailey points out that the most famous of the chess moralities, written
by Jacobus de Cessolis, used the pawns to represent the occupations of common people and that
these medieval pawns were, like the Nine Malic Molds, depicted in distinctive uniforms: “[a]s
with Duchamp’s Cemetery of Uniforms and Liveries [which was a preliminary study for the
molds], Cessolis’s strict guidelines for illustrating the various pawns indicate that the figures, or,
more specifically, the bodies of the figures, were of less importance than the attributes of the
pawn’s respective profession,” Bailey explains (Bailey, Tout-Fait online).
5. Gertrude Stein, “An Elucidation,” in A Stein Reader, ed. Ulla Dydo (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 1993), 436.
6. Gertrude Stein, “Introduction to Pétain’s Paroles aux français,” quoted from Ulla Dydo
and Edward Burns, Appendix IX, “Gertrude Stein: September 1942 to September 1944,” in The
Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996),
406.
7. See Barbara Will, Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy
Dilemma (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 119.
8. Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt and Company,
1996), 341.
167
9. Ibid., 341.
10. Samuel Beckett, “Quad,” in Collected Shorter Plays (New York: Grove Press, 1984),
291.
11. Daniel Albright, Beckett and Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003), 46.
12. Dana Cairns Watson, Gertrude Stein and the Essence of What Happens (Vanderbilt
University Press, 2005), 189. Italics mine.
13. Guillaume Apollinaire, The Cubist Painters, trans. Peter Read (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2004), 75. Italics mine.
14. Theodor W. Adorno, “Trying to Understand ‘Endgame,’” in Can One Live After
Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 267. Italics
mine.
15. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Seabury Press,
1973), 362.
16. Gerald Bruns has argued that Duchamp would be Adorno’s “nemesis,” but I believe
that Duchamp can be reconciled with Adorno’s revulsion of kitsch in the same way that Thierry
de Duve has reconciled Duchamp with the aesthetics of Clement Greenberg (I will expand more
on this in the chapter dedicated to Duchamp). See Gerald L. Bruns, “On the Conundrum of Form
and Material in Adorno’s Aesthetics,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 66, issue 3
(July 2008): 225-235.
17. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Manchester: University of Manchester
Press, 1984), 27.
18. Beckett, notebook entry of January 15, 1937, as quoted in James Knowlson, Damned
to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 1996), 228.
168
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Abstract (if available)
Abstract
Made in France is a comparative study of the war aesthetics of Marcel Duchamp, Samuel Beckett, and Gertrude Stein. These artists are seminal figures of what Marjorie Perloff (using a phrase coined by John Ashbery) calls the ‘other tradition’ of the avant-garde: a tradition which rejects figurative and symbolic meaning, giving way to minimalistic, experimental aesthetics which often transgress the boundaries of visual, textual, and sound-based art. All three of these artists lived in Paris in the decades following World War I, and they were in France to witness the beginning of the Nazi Occupation during World War II. This is the first study which brings these important figures of the avant-garde together through their shared French contexts. This dissertation illustrates that Beckett, Stein, and Duchamp—despite their antithetical political and national identities—developed 'other' war aesthetics which pitted their conceptual sensibilities against the political mobilizations of the avant-garde in Europe.
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University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
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Asset Metadata
Creator
Smart, M. Marie
(author)
Core Title
Made in France: the World Wars and the 'other' avant-garde tradition
School
College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Degree Program
English
Publication Date
07/30/2015
Defense Date
05/29/2013
Publisher
University of Southern California
(original),
University of Southern California. Libraries
(digital)
Tag
avant-garde,Gertrude Stein,Marcel Duchamp,modernism,OAI-PMH Harvest,Samuel Beckett,World War I,World War II
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English
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Electronically uploaded by the author
(provenance)
Advisor
Mccabe, Susan (
committee chair
), Perloff, Marjorie (
committee chair
), Flick, Robbert (
committee member
), Kemp, Anthony (
committee member
)
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mariesmart@rocketmail.com,ricesripps@gmail.com
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https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-307287
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etd-SmartMMari-1892.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-307287 (legacy record id)
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307287
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Smart, M. Marie
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The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...
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Tags
avant-garde
Gertrude Stein
Marcel Duchamp
modernism
Samuel Beckett