APOLLINAIRE AND THE AVANT-GARDE

1. GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE CALLS ON THE PLAYWRIGHT ALFRED JARRY

"Monsieur Jarry?"

"On the third floor and a half," answered the concierge.

The answer astonished me. But I climbed up to where Jarry lived–actually on the third floor and a half. The ceilings of the building had appeared wastefully high to the owner and he had doubled the number of stories by cutting them in half horizontally. This building, which is still standing, had therefore about fifteen floors; but since it rose no higher than the other buildings in the quarter, it amounted to merely the reduction of a skyscraper.

It turned out that Jarry's place was filled with reductions. This half-floor room was the reduction of an apartment in which its occupant was quite comfortable standing up. But being taller than he, I had to stay in a stoop. The bed was the reduction of a bed; that is to say, a mere pallet. Jarry said that low beds were coming back into fashion. The writing table was the reduction of a table, for Jarry wrote flat on his stomach on the floor. The furniture was the reduction of furniture–there was only the bed. On the wall hung the reduction of a picture. It was a portrait, most of which he had burned away, leaving only the head, which resembled a certain lithograph I know of Balzac. The library was the reduction of a library, and that is saying a lot for it. It was composed of a cheap edition of Rabelais and two or three volumes of the Bibliotheque rose. On the mantel stood a large stone phallus, a gift from Felicien Rops. Jarry kept this member, which was considerably larger than life size, always covered with a violet skullcap of velvet, ever since the day the exotic monolith had frightened a certain literary lady who was all out of breath from climbing three and a half floors and at a loss how to act in this unfurnished cell.

"Is that a cast?" the lady asked.

"No," said Jarry. "It's a reduction."

2. PARIS: BOHEMIA AND THE AVANT-GARDE

Why Paris? Modernist art often seems to emerge out of situations of displacement and marginality, and Paris has always attracted not only ambitious characters but displaced and marginal ones as well. Especially students and artists–the student tradition goes back to Abelard and Villon in the Middle Ages. Whereas in England (until recently) the universities have been far from the capital, in France they are at its center. Student poverty mingling with the ferment of the town yields the will to epater le bourgeois, and there is a direct link between Villon's humor and that of modern bohemians like Baudelaire and Apollinaire. The term bohemian, however, is an invention of the mid-nineteenth century, and it's contemporaneous with the phenomenon of the "dandy" imported from Regency England. The dandy adopts an image of aristocratic fastidiousness above the urban crowd; the bohemian on the other hand looks downward rather than upward along the social scale for models of deportment. (Baudelaire, by the way, somehow contrived to be both a dandy and a bohemian.) The bohemian life is an artist's or intellectual's version of the gypsy image (gypsies were supposed to have originated in Bohemia)–a community of self-selected outcasts, claiming the spontaneous gift of creativity and the martyr's will to undergo privation in order to preserve it. The key to bohemianism, Jerrold Seigel has argued, is the appropriation of marginal or eccentric life-styles by young renegade bourgeois to dramatize their ambivalence toward bourgeois identity. Bohemianism is the theatrical expression of a willed marginality.

Late nineteenth-century Paris had undergone modernization and was more a magnet than ever, drawing ambitious young people from all over the Continent. This new Paris, with its grand boulevards and monuments, was a commercial rather than an industrial city. In dominating the life of the provinces and becoming the main center for every sort of interest from politics and journalism to business and entertainment, Paris was bound to attract not only the upwardly mobile, but also many people whose existence was essentially improvised and unconventional.

And there were new spaces to accommodate these people. From the 1830s Parisians had used the street to blur distinctions between outside and inside, public and private: sidewalk cafes and entertainments, pavement stall, and arcades (ancestors of the shopping mall). The cafe and the boulevard became stages that turned everday life into spectacle and tied pleasure to consumption. First the Impressionists and then the Cubists painted these new spaces and spectacles, fascinated by the social ambiguity of the new kinds of commercialized entertainment.

The bohemian style was aggressively plebeian. In the late nineteenth century the headquarters of Bohemia shifted to Montmartre, the hilly region that had escaped the redevelopment of the western part of Paris. Montmartre was an area of small workshops, tenements, little houses and pleasure gardens, circuses, laundries, dance-halls, and cabarets, frequented by artists, workers, gangsters, prostitutes, and people of all classes who came there to be amused and shocked. When Montmartre became too commercialized, artists and writers migrated back to the Left Bank, to Montparnasse,

in particular to the intersection of the boulevard Montparnasse and the boulevard Raspail, where there were four great cafes–the Dome and the Select, the Rotonde and the Coupole–and cheap artists' studios nearby. Here writers and artists could mix with painters. Another constant was that the rich and the poor, the bourgeois and the working classes, shared a common night life here. The city was tolerant of the pursuit of pleasure in all of its forms: music, theater, gambling, dancing, drinking, dining, and of course sex.

Meanwhile bohemians developed ever more ingenious techniques of social provocation, an etiquette of nonconformism, eccentricity, and exhibitionism. The painter Pelletier went on walks accompanied by a pet jackal. De Nerval took a lobster on a leash through the Tuileries gardens: "It does not bark," he said, "and knows the secrets of the deep." At the Lapin Agile, a group of Montmartre artists concocted the celebrated hoax of a canvas, brushed entirely by the twitching, swishing tail of Lolo, the proprietors unhousebroken donkey. The resulting work, "impressionist" in style, was hung at the Salon with the title "And the Sun Went Down Over the Adriatic," signed Joachim-Raphael Boronali, and praised by a number of critics. Bohemians tended to be fascinated by the grotesque, the absurd, and by deadpan humor.

Avant-garde is another important term in the lexicon of modern art: its origins go back to 1925, when the Saint-Simonians appropriated it from the military vocabulary to distinguish artists as captains of the new consciousness of a modern century. Avant-gardists aggressively reject conventions and consign previous art traditions to the dustbin of history. Shock and surprise are typical strategies of the avant-garde, the goals being to expode the complacent consensus of realism or tradition, to clear the senses of compositional sludge, to make possible freshness of vision and response. Like bohemians, they often develop techniques of provocation to alienate the wider society while enjoying an intense form of sociability with each other. Apollinaire was the impresario of the avant-garde (Roger Shattuck's designation), the link between the poets and the painters, the central figure, with Picasso, in the bar-hopping sociability of early twentieth-century artists.

The term intellectual was also born in Paris in this period. The Dreyfus Affair was the great political event of the fin-de-siecle period in Paris, and the intellectuals who rallied around the unjustly imprisoned Dreyfus became known as the parti intellectuel. The word soon became a noun, and took on its modern meaning: the public intellectual as someone who not only does creative work but also serves as the conscience of his or her society, insisting on the importance of a comprehensive critique of its deficiencies. The French sociologist Emile Durkheim and his followers were active in the Dreyfus case: Durkheim's "Individualism and the Intellectuals" is a document of the period. Intellectuals in this sense, with their sense of engagement with the public issues of their time, might seem to be far removed from the bohemians and the avant-gardists, who tended to withdraw from what they perceived as a hopelessly corrupt public sphere. There is in fact a tension between engagement and secession or withdrawal throughout our period. But there are also times when the two impulses fuse, when the avant-garde becomes politicized, as we'll see when we examine the series of crises that follow the great catastrophe of the First World War. Paris is so important in modern intellectual history because this culture capital is also a place with a long tradition of radical politics reaching back to the revolution of the late eighteenth century.

3. THE IMPRESARIO OF THE AVANT-GARDE

The poet was born out of wedlock in Rome, and baptized Wilhelm Albert Wladimir Alexandre Apollonaire de Kostrowitzky in 1880. His mother, Angelica de Kostrowitzky, was the daughter of a minor member of the Polish nobility who had settled in Rome and become a papal chamberlain. There was some mystery about Apollinaire's paternity, and at one point Apollinare suspected that the Pope was a candidate, but his real father was a gambler, and Apollinaire was brought up in Monte Carlo. What is clear is that he lacked the security of identity that most people develop in childhood, and perhaps it's not surprising that he became so fond of the theme of metamorphosis in his poetry. As a young man Apollinaire developed an obsession with medieval legend and magic rituals, cabala and demonology, and also became learned in another body of lore, eighteenth-century erotica. After an unhappy love affair with an English governess, he began to write poetry in the Symbolist style and moved to Paris.

In 1903, at age 23, he began editing his own magazine, publishing poetry, gossip, and sketches by Jarry. Obsessed by the works of the Marquis de Sade–"the freest spirit that ever existed"–he had no difficulty converting his friend Picasso to the cult of that philosopher, and to his definition of art as "the perpetual subversion of the existing order." He encouraged Picasso to picture himself in different roles: the strolling player or circus performer, the picturesque outcast at odds with conventional society; or the role of harlequin, the player of tricks that alarm and mystify as well as entertain. Picasso in turn painted Apollinaire as a sailor, a full-bellied coffee-pot, the bullfighter Don Guillermo Apollinaire, an up-to-date pope wearing a new-fangled wristwatch and a triple tiara, an academician with a cocked hat and a pipe stuck in his ear, an artilleryman brandishing a saber, and a naked bodybuilder.

4. CALLIGRAMMES

By 1908, Roger Shattuck tells us, Apollinaire was writing in supple free verse, often interspersed with traditional stanzas, yet tending increasingly toward the visionary manner of Whitman and Rimbaud. He composed "peripatetic poems" recording his walks across Paris and his real or imaginary travels across Europe. He put together "conversation poems" in a fragmentary style closely related to Picasso's experiments with collage. In 1912 a mixture of audacity and exasperation over printer's errors drove him to delete all punctuation from the proofs of his first volume of poetry.

From the middle of the 1880s French poetry had been moving toward the rhythm and diction of common speech, permitting unconventional arrangements of lines on the printed page. Apollinaire's elimination of punctuation offered even more freedom and it was a logical step for him to give his lines schematic shapes. He was inventing "simultaneism": the opposite of narrative in poetry, an insistence that all parts of the poem interpenetrate and interact with each other simultaneously rather than sequentially. His change of mood stemmed in part from the rapid technological advances of the period and the general widening of horizons brought about by the revolution in communications: automobiles, airplanes, radio, cinema. Modern consciousness is global, alert through newspapers and photography to developments across continents and oceans, while in the streets and cafes the senses are assailed by a kaleidoscopic multiplicity of sights, sounds, and sensations.

To be able to mirror such a multiple form of consciousness the work of art, Apollinaire believed, had to abandon linear and discursive structures. The simultaneist vision short-circuits the normal discursive process of reading and requires the reader to reassemble the fragments of the work in a new order that is independent of the flow of time and is experienced in a "global" act of consciousness. Apollinaire also realized that one of the most potent features of the "calligram" is the heightening effect it has on the words from which it is made, and thus it lent itself to his constant endeavor to restore expressiveness to language and to extend the range of poetic expression. He began to formulate the concept of surprise as a key element of the modernist aesthetic and to suggest that magical and superstitious interpretations of reality have their own validity: the marvellous is an integral part of everyday experience. It's a short step to surrealism: in fact Apollinaire coined the term. He was always fascinated by magic, the marvellous aspects of every day objects, the unlimited potentialities of machines, and the exciting possibilities of modernity. But however modern he was in his formal experiments, he still believed what he saw as the traditional mission of poetry: to re-enchant the world through language.

5. THE CLASS OF 1915

Apollinaire began his career as a Symbolist writer, adopting the persona of the lonely wanderer, but his true subjects are friendship and love and loss. "The Little Car" is typical of his love of friends and comrades. Ultimately his ambition is ubiquity, to be everywhere and to experience everything, and to share those extensions of himself with others. Even war, he thought, could multiply his imaginative powers: death-dealing shells are transformed in his poetry into swift and beautiful birds of prey. "Calligrammes," Roger Shattuck has written, "is full of poems which discover an astonishing beauty in the operations and accoutrements of war: the sight and sound of artillery, the quaking of the earth from marching troops, the slow encroachment of trenches upon the countryside, the fascination of no man's land, and the heart-breaking ascent of an airplane into a sky which it alone investigates. These things were not just illustrations of a fresh attitude toward war; through his gift of metamorphosis, Apollinaire made of them a new vision of the earth's beauty and man's dignity..." And sometimes the poet's self is mythologized so that he sees beyond the cataclysm to the transfigured future that will be born from it. He mixes styles: the lyrical and the vulgar. And moods: tragedy and gaiety. And places: the local and the exotic. How different from the British response to the horrors of the Great War, as we'll see next week.

RECOMMENDED:

Roger Shattuck, introduction to Selected Writings of Guillaume Apollinaire (New Directions, 1948); The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France (New York: Vintage, 1968); "Apollinaire's Great Wheel," The Innocent Eye: On Modern Literature and the Arts (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1984).

Francis Steegmuller, Apollinaire: Poet Among the Painters (Penguin, 1986).

Jerrold Seigel, Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life 1830-1930 (New York: Viking, 1986).

S.I. Lockerbie, introduction to Calligrammes: Poems of Peace and War, trans. Anne Hyde Greet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).