Antonio Ruiz, The Dadaist Prose of Williams and Cummings

The Dadaist Prose of Williams and Cummings: A Novelette and[No Title]

Antonio Ruiz

William Carlos Williams Review, Volume 28, Number 1-2, Spring/Fall2008, pp. 101-115 (Article)

Published by Texas Tech University PressDOI: 10.1353/wcw.2011.0013

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101William Carlos Williams Review, vol. 28 no. 1–2, Spring / Fall 2008 © Texas Tech University Press

The Dadaist Prose of Williams and Cummings: A Novelette and [No Title]

Antonio RuizU N I V E R S I D A D D E C ó R D o b A

One of the most famous and polemic catalogues in postmod-ern theory was proposed by Ihab hassan in his study of postmodernism:

Modernism Postmodernism

Romanticism/Symbolism Pataphysics/Dadaism

Form (conjunctive, closed) Antiform (disjunctive, open)

Purpose Play

Design Chance

hierarchy Anarchy

Mastery/logos Exhaustion/Silence

Art object/Finished Work Process/Performance/happening

Distance Participation

Creation/Totalization Decreation/Deconstruction

Synthesis Antithesis

Presence Absence

Centering Dispersal (Dismemberment 267–68)

These often quoted dichotomies have always attracted my attention, particularly the first one, as it represents a Damocles sword constantly threatening the claim of originality promoted by the high priests of postmodernism. Even hassan himself has recognized the avant-garde spirit of the concept he is trying to define: “but if much of modernism appears hieratic, hypotactical, and formalist, postmodernism strikes us by contrast as playful, paratactical, and deconstructionist. In this it recalls

102 William Carlos Williams Review

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the irreverent spirit of the avant-garde, and so carries sometimes the label of neo-avant-garde” (Postmodern Turn 121).

The case of Dada’s inclusion in the cataloguing of postmodern traits is signifi-cant. Dada was a movement of reaction against the rationalist tradition of Western thought (Rubin, 1967). Tzara said that “Dada doubts all” (Tzara 92). Similarly, deconstructive postmodern thought is seen by some as nihilistic: “it partakes of uncertainty and doubt, and accepts ambiguity” (Sanouillet 226). like Dada, post-modernism is defined by rejection: “The rejection of all-encompassing, teleologi-cal theories of human and social change associated with Enlightenment ideas about reason and progress” (locher, 1999). Postmodernism also strives to achieve other major goals: “linking claims about social life, human nature, and criteria of truth and validity with strategies of power; and replacing the emphasis on subject and consciousness with an emphasis on language as intersubjective” (locher, 1999). like David locher, I also claim that these goals were previously proposed by Dada. The Dadaists, for example, believed that meaning was arbitrary. As lan-guage signified nothing, it could be manipulated in any way desired (Richter, 1965). They also believed that there is no absolute truth and abolished the distinc-tion between the concepts of high and low (or popular) art and culture. As a mat-ter of fact, most of the features assigned to postmodernism can also be applied to Dadaism (paraphysics/Dadaism, chance, antiform, play, anarchy, exhaustion/ silence, per for mance, participation, deconstruction, antithesis, absence, dispersal, combination, against interpretation . . . ).1 My intention in proposing these paral-lels is not to suggest the lack of originality of prior proposals in the field of post-modernist theory but rather to reflect upon the debt that postmodernism, as also modernism, owes this avant-garde movement.

Dada “was neither a school nor a movement but rather an essentially chaotic phenomenon that cut across art forms and national boundaries” (Tashjian xii). zurich, berlin, Cologne, Paris, and hanover are some of the cities that are usually mentioned in relation to Dadaism. however, “even before the highly publicized activities at the Cabaret Voltaire in zurich in 1916, a loosely or ga nized collection of New york avant-garde artists offended the New york critics with their antics and their suspiciously foreign names—benjamin de Casseres, jean Crotti, Marius de zayas, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia—” (Schmidt 92).2 These artists were as-sociated with Walter Arensberg’s circle and connected with Stieglitz’s gallery and his magazine Camera Work. Eventually they founded several short-lived little magazines, including Picabia’s 391, de zaya’s 291, Man Ray’s TNT, and Man Ray and Duchamp’s The Blind Man and New York Dada. These magazines preceded the release of other publications, edited by Americans, that flirted with Dadaism. I refer, for example, to Broom and Secession. In these magazines, writers like E. E.

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R U I z — The Dadaist Prose of Williams and Cummings 103

Cummings, William Carlos Williams, and Mina loy found an ideal forum in which to publish their most radical writing.

The relation of Williams and Cummings with Dadaism is complex, replete with curiosities and contradictions. In the case of Williams—although it can also be said of Cummings—the desire to affirm his American identity—Whitman’s “barbaric yawp”—led him to take on the anti-art Dadaist attitudes and use them to break from structures and conventions inherited from Europe. This contradiction provoked Wil-liams to adopt Dada attitudes at the same time as he denounced them (Tashjian, 1975). In the case of Cummings, the effect is subtler, though I believe it is percepti-ble in his meaningful silence with regard to his debt to Dadaism.

both Williams and Cummings felt the attraction of Dadaist radicalism, but si-multaneously they experienced a certain vertigo before the nihilist abyss toward which Dadaist work may lead. Moreover, Williams, unlike Cummings, was very cautious about abstract and experimental typography, typical in Dadaist writing.

Williams recalls in his Autobiography that Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude De-scending a Staircase is too hackneyed for me to remember anything clearly about it now. but I do remember how I laughed out loud when first I saw it, happily, with relief” (A 134). The doctor saw in Dadaism an ally in his fight against the conception of art as something anchored in either the past, conventionalism, or in the stupidity of the present.3 As a radical gesture, Williams adopted a global de-sign in some of his works in order to break the lineal logic. Kora in Hell, for ex-ample, is structured in twenty-seven sections divided in three parts each. The different sections do not follow any lineal order, and they do not bear a central unifying theme. Actually, the book is the fruit of Dadaist improvisation techniques in which hazard and chance are motors of the creative process. Destruction and creation, Williams asserted, are necessary components of art.

Williams recognized the influence of Dadaism: “I didn’t originate Dadaism but I had it in my soul to write it. Spring and All shows that” (IWWP 48). The book, dedicated to Charles Demuth, is written in prose and verse. Williams plays with the typographical conventions of the edition: “chapter headings are printed up-side down on purpose, the chapters are numbered all out of order with a Roman numeral, sometimes an Arabic, anything that came in handy” (IWWP 37). It is significant to note that the sections in prose, described by Williams as “a mixture of philosophy and nonsense,” are more experimental than those in poetry.

Williams scholars have also drawn attention to the presence of Dadaism in A Great American Novel. “It was joyce with a difference,” claims the narrator, “The difference being greater opacity, less erudition, reduced power of perception [ . . . ]. Amounts to a total occlusion of intelligence. Substitution of something else. What? Well, nonsense. Since you drive me to it” (I 167).


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A Novelette, the most Dadaist work by Williams, surprisingly remains unex-plored by criticism. The author returns in these pages to Dada and to his previous experiments with automatic writing in Kora in Hell: “The pieces in this book show the influence of Dadaism,” he commented years later (IWWP 48). For Williams, Dada’s anger, its nihilism, excitement, idealism, and black humor offer the mod-ern artist a good set of tools with which to undermine the forms and conventions inherited from literary tradition.

The Autobiography relates that the practice of medicine left Williams little time for writing, and certainly A Novelette seems to be written on the run. Family and professional duties were for Williams a permanent source of stress. Several references in the book convey that anxiety: “The rush that simplifies life, compli-cates it. There is no time to stop the car to write when only the writing that comes of an intense simplification would be actual” (I 275). Chapter 2 begins: “ring, ring, ring, ring! There’s no end to the ringing of the damned—The bell rings to announce the illness of someone” (I 275). The lack of time and his fatigue seem to set him on the brink of defeat: “The hundred pages have become twenty-five. I can do no more just now. I simply cannot” (I 290).

These and other references may encourage us to see the chaos of A Novelette as the consequence of Williams’s tiredness after his long work sessions and the haste to write something before going to sleep. yet it would be more appropriate to see the disorder and opacity of this work as the result of Williams’s conscious and determined assumption of several Dadaist premises. This radical experimen-tation is based on an open syntax that joins parts of sentences irrationally by multiplying and misusing connectives. The work seems at times to suggest the mind of the author as it works, but numerous asides interrupt this illusion. The chaotic nature of the narration is also emphasized by the use of collage and by its traditional techniques: fragmentation and juxtaposition.

Williams’s collage here is closer to the Dadaist collage than to the cubist. Un-like the cubist collage, in the Dadaist collage,

the presence of a unifying, individualistic consciousness must not be

strongly felt. The associations that the collage’s objects evoke are schizo-

phrenic and cryptic, with no sense of order derived from the unities of

place, time, subject matter, and private memory. In a Cubist work the

controlling intention of the artist sooner or later must emerge as the

dominant factor in the composition. Thus, as the Dadaists understood,

the Cubist artist celebrates analysis, invention, revision, balance and

wit. Cubist works are indeed “laboratories of formal ideas,” not the

bomb factories the Dadaists wanted. (Schmidt 146; quoting Tzara 77)5

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Given the distinction made by Roger Shattuck, we can rightly say that Wil-liams adopts a Dadaist collage in A Novelette—a design that displays no plot and shows no central, unifying topic. It is necessary to be somewhat familiar with Wil-liams’s life to be able to relate the different thematic lines in this work, for exam-ple: (1) his marital relationship, (2) his concern with the influenza plague, (3) several dialogues with his patients, and (4) descriptions of landscapes and scenes of everyday life. These and other topics interweave with numerous reflections on literature, art, and aesthetics. There are also several comments on what seem to be the process of the work:

better to learn to write and to make a smooth page no matter what the

incoherence of the day, no matter what erasures must be sacrificed to

improve a lying appearance to keep ordered the disorder of the pageless

actual. (I 274–75)

This sounds transcendental. one must come to the point. I begin, finally,

to sound like an American. (295)

This is the second paragraph of the second chapter of some writing on

the influenza epidemic in the region of New york City, january 11,

1929. (276)

Sometimes, the narrator seems to be reaching definite conclusions:

Speak of the lack of general ideas—jesu! in the writing. It is the writing.

This is the theme of all I do. It is the writing. Speak of a flight by plane to

Europe, of the two hundred inch telescopic reflector that discover the neb-

ula on the obscure outskirts of the milky way travelling at the incredible

speed—away from the earth—of 2500 miles a second: it is the actual writ-

ing that embodies it, as the king in a chair of—or a flea on a cat. (I 291)

In other cases, the texts show unusual coherence and clarity, as for example, in the long digressions on plants (297–98) or the eternal conflicts regarding art, philosophy, and science (305). Even so, the numerous changes of voices, topics, and perspec-tives prevent us from achieving a structural coherence to somehow unify the dif-ferent fragments.

In A Novelette Williams drastically applies two premises from the Dadaist and surrealist concept of automatic writing: write fast and never revise. The result is a radical and schizophrenic text: the most Dadaist work by Williams, more than


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Kora in Hell. The latter displays a slight necessity of coherence, for example, in the use of the formula AbA. Moreover, behind the chaos of the poetic narration a central topic finally seems to arise: the celebration of the power of imagination. In the highly experimental Spring and All, we also find poems with a rather tradi-tional structure as well as prose with highly coherent passages. In A Novelette, Williams momentarily drops his crusade for the American idiom in poetry, openly embracing European avant-garde experimentalism in his search for renewal. “The pieces of this book show the influence of Dadaism,” he wrote years later:

Paris has influenced me; there is a French feeling in this work. I returned

to a more placid style than in Spring and All but it was still a tremendous

leap ahead of conventional prose. An American reader would have been

lost entirely. I had abandoned all hope of getting American readers of a

special sort. I wrote for personal satisfaction. This was automatic writing.

I sat and faced the paper and wrote. The same method as in the IMPRo-

VISATIoNS but the material has advanced; it is more sophisticated.

(IWWP 48–49)

If Williams wrote about A Novelette that “An American reader would have been lost entirely,” Cummings was not less of a skeptic with respect to [No Title]. The preface to this work, where the author is at times on the defensive, reflects the rebellious Dadaist spirit, but also a certain anxiety regarding the public’s response:

PUblIShER: [ . . . ] —it’s all AbSolUTEly CRAzy!

AUThoR: I should call it hyperscientific.

PUblIShER: “hyPERscienTIFic”?

AUThoR: Why not? The title is inframicroscopic—the frontispiece is

extratelescopic—the pictures are superstereoscopic—the meaning is

postultraviolet—the format is preautoerogenous.

. . . . . . . . .

PUblIShER: And if this bAbyISh NoNSENSE boRES ME STIFF?

AUThoR: If this babyish nonsense bores you stiff, you have “civi-

lization.”

Cummings’s fears were not unfounded: [No Title] was forgotten by the critics and unknown to the general public. only Norman Friedman, the most significant specialist in Cummings’s work, dedicates a few lines to it, but with little enthusi-asm. Friedman confesses his perplexity before Cummings’s prose, in which he

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finds no sense: “There are limits to the fun of pure nonsense [ . . . ] the nonsense in Him almost always had a point, whereas here, if there is a point, I have com-pletely failed to grasp it” (99).

[No Title] is composed of eight stories, each headed by a drawing that holds no relation to the text. The book was published in 1930, though it appeared, with-out the drawings, in the magazine The American Caravan. [No Title] is without a doubt the most Dadaist of Cummings’s works, and perhaps for that reason the most forgotten. If the relation of Cummings to avant-garde movements such as cubism, futurism, or even surrealism has been thoroughly studied by critics, that is not the case with Dadaism.6 We cannot say that Cummings is a Dadaist, but there are important parallels between some of his aesthetic conceptions and ex-periments, and Dada.

one of these parallels was established by Dickran Tashjian between Cum-mings’s radical typographical experimentation and abstract Dadaist writing, which attempts to liberate the word from the imposed restrictions of its linear syntactic nature, as well as underlining acoustic characteristics of the verse (168–71). Mil-ton Cohen does not agree with Tashjian: “Even were his logic persuasive, Tashji-an’s facts are not, since he dates Cummings’ poems by their publication rather than their composition—which preceded publication by as much as a decade—” (248). In any case, Cummings seems to have flirted with Dadaism on more than one occasion. he contributed, for example, to the Dada spirit of the cultural mag-azine Broom with five poems portraying prostitutes, and also with a zany piece of prose that he passed off as a poem (“Will i ever forget?”). Not only did Cummings break with literary genre conventions (a poem that is in fact a piece of prose), but he also broke with the typographical conventions of the edition of this book Is 5 (for example, poem XXXIV is printed vertically in the middle of the page).

Cummings’s play Him was influenced by surrealism, but also shows certain connections with Dadaism, especially in Him’s attacks against the bourgeois con-ception of art, his engagement in nonsense, and his desire to break the barriers between art and life.7 It is interesting to confirm how many of Cummings’s opin-ions are quite close to the antiartistic attitude that Dadaists cultivated. Take, for example, his notion that the destruction of traditional values is a necessary step toward any type of creation. In one of his essays on modern art, Cummings wrote, “absurdity does not in any way impair the value of the experiment” (Miscellany 28). This will not be the only occasion where the author relates the absurd to art, or where he will adopt antiartistic attitudes. In one particular instance, he went as far as to define his occupation as a “shabby idiotic disease,” an opinion some-how ratified in the poem “mr youse needn’t be so spry.” occasionally Cummings even took part in a Dada gesture, as when he urinated on Malcolm Cowley’s


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library in Paris, after setting it on fire, along with louis Aragon, Dos Passos, and jim butler.8

Cummings met louis Aragon and other Dadaists in Paris, a city that he visited several times. he even translated Aragon´s poem “le Front Rouge” (“The Red Front”) into En glish. back in the United States years later, after the death of Dada, he intones an elegiac chant for that artistic movement:9

workingman with hand so hairy-sturdy

you may turn o turn that airy hurdysturdygurdy

but when will turn backward o backward Time in your no thy flight

and make me a child,a pretty dribbling child,a little child.

In thy your ear:

en amérique on ne boit que de jingyale.

things are going rather kaka

over there,over there.

yet we scarcely fare much better—

what’s become of(if you please)

all the glory that or which was Greece

all the grandja

that was dada?

make me a child,stout hurdysturdygurdyman

waiter,make me a child. So this is Paris.

i will sit in the corner and drink thinks and think drinks,

in memory of the Grand and old days:

of Amy Sandburg

of Algernon Carl Swinburned.

Waiter a drink waiter two or three drinks

What’s become of Maeterlinck

now that April’s here?

(ask the man who owns one

ask Dad,he knows) (Complete Poems 231)

Cummings’s relation to Dadaism may well be summarized in the observation by Richard kennedy that he adopted “the Dada principle to destroy the accepted and the traditional in order to discover something new and surprising in artistic

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effect, or in order to seek some hidden truth that lies beyond the rational” (Dreams in the Mirror 71). Indeed the destruction of all convention seems to be the main, almost only objective of [No Title]. Friedman refers to this work as a “total rejection of categories,” and Cummings himself describes the prologue as “crazy text.” The work can be considered a “capriccio,” or divertimento, though perhaps it is more appropriate to see it as a Dadaist attack on the story genre and its conventions.

Reading [No Title] is certainly a difficult task. The stories do not have a clear plot, and all of them display a high degree of experimentation. There are numerous absurd statements that provide a burlesque tone that defies interpretation. In his ex egetical work on the text, Norman Friedman reflects on the difficulty of interpreting it:

Chapter III: . . . I cannot tell what the text is about.

Chapter IV: . . . I cannot say what the text is about.

Chapter VI: . . . The story is not paraphrasable.

Chapter VII: . . . The text is obscure. (98–99)

The same can be said of [No Title] as Williams said about The Great American Novel: “It was joyce with a difference. The difference being greater opacity, less erudition, reduced power of perception” (I 167). Cummings’s work also reflects the influence of the Irish writer, to which is added the excess and irreverence of Dadaism. There are many resources in Cummings’s text that remind us of joyce’s experimentation, especially the “Circe” chapter in Ulysses. The first chapter, for example, is essentially a journalistic chronicle conveying a series of catastrophes. yet its hyperbolic and absurd remarks and sentences destroy the realistic and de-scriptive style of the chronicle:

A dog, stepped on, bit in the neck a beautiful high-strung woman who

had far some time suffered from insomnia, and who—far too enraged to

realize, except in a very general way, the source of the pain—instantly

struck a child of four, knocking its front teeth out. Another woman, prof-

iting by the general excitement, fainted and with a hideous shriek fell

through a plate glass window. on the outskirts of the throng, several

octogenarians succumbed to heart trouble with grave internal compli-

cations. A motorcycle ran over an idiot. A stone-deaf night-watchman’s

left eye was exterminated by the point of a missing spectator’s parasol.

Falling seven stories from a nearby office building, james Anderson

(colored) landed in the midst of the crowd absolutely unhurt, kill ing

eleven persons including the ambassador to Uruguay. At this truly un-

fortunate occurrence, one of the most prominent business-men of the


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city, Aloysius k. Vanderdecker, a member of the harvard, yale, and Ra-

quet Clubs, swallowed a cigar and died instantly. ([No Title] 165).

The humorous tone and bizarre description is also evident in the use of numbers throughout the text:

— A Chinese, Mi Wong, who exercises the profession of laundryman at

686 868th St. and Signor [ . . . ]

— A hook-and-ladder, driven by Abraham Abrahams at a speed of

(a+b)a+b miles an hour

— In seventeen minutes from nine hundred decimal point three to deci-

mal point six zeros four five [ . . . ]

The use of initials and abbreviations also

—Desinterested spectator R.F.D.

—Ask your grandfather, S.V.P.D.Q.

—lars Porsena in A, b.C.

—old Dr. F.’s

—yoUNG g.look. S. Amer., sér. high éduc.g. danc. And sports l.

one of the most striking features of the text is the use of names:

—Signor Alhambra

—Abrahan Abrahams

—henry holt

—The Anvil Chorus and Donna e Mobile

—Count Cazazza

—Ike Isinglass

As in Williams’s A Novelette, though in a more radical fashion, the open syn-tax expands the sentences almost endlessly, making the reading of the text very difficult. Actually, Cummings’s text represents another turn of the screw regarding Williams’s experimentation in A Novelette. The changes of tone, subject, and per-spective are constant. Also, he uses different styles, such as parody—of medical language (174) or of romantic styles of romance (182). Perhaps the most important difference from Williams’s text is Cummings’s boasting of incongruence and the absurd. Nonsense, every where in [No Title], is rendered mainly through surrealistic images, absurd statements, illogical affirmations, and hyperbolic descriptions:

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Taking a sea-lion out of a watermelon he first deposited it in the goldfish-

bowl bottomside up, causing an explosion which changed the color of

everyone’s eyebrows, and next, to the delight of all present, caused an

angleworm to appear on the janitor’s instep, but guffaws fairly rang out

when seven six-hundred pound fairies began coming five by five slowly

out of the graphophone horn, waving furious the Stars and Stripes and

chewing colossal home-made whisperless mince-pies. Desperate as was

the situation, Captain Dimple was not a man of anyone else’s word, no.

In a trice Edward had unfurled the tricolor and drawn his Spanish rapier

clear to the nozzle, only to be seized by a stupendous octopus and dis-

appear magnetically with a winsome splash. (171)

The few critics who have pointed out Cummings’s relation to Dadaism share the view that there are important differences between Cummings’s art and Dada’s aesthetics. Milton Cohen wrote, “It is possible, though, that Cummings briefly flirted with Dadaist aesthetics, both in his ‘machinerish’ drawings reminiscent of the Mechnomorphism of Duchamp and Picabia in the midteens, and in such non-sequitur poems as ‘Will I ever forget that precarious moment?’ [ . . . ] [but he] did not practice artistic destruction for its own sake, as the Dadaists had” (25). In E. E. Cummings Revisited, Richard kennedy maintains that “there is occasional evi-dence that the Dada movement had made an impact on Cummings while he was in Paris in 1921–22”; but he later disconnects the characteristic literary nonsense of Cummings’s poetry from this European avant-garde movement: “It is heartening to see Cummings’ taste for irrationality veer away from Dadaesque absurdities and turn to the tradition of nonsense, with its origins in folk literature [ . . . ]” (E. E. Cummings Revisited 70, 107). For his part, Dickran Tashjian, the most vehement supporter of the Dadaist presence in Cummings’s work, seems to have no prob-lem in stating, “[d]espite an extensive exposure to Dada, Cummings did not en-gage in typographical experimentation simply for the sake of shock alone, as many Dadaists had originally done [ . . . ]. Nor he did undergo the violently anar-chic or destructive phase endemic to Dada” (165).

Certainly, Cummings’s aesthetics do not share the nihilism and radicalism of Dadaism. Still, [No Title] proves to be an exception, occupying a problematic position in Cummings’s canon. Tashjian has rightly written that “Unlike the Dada-ists [ . . . ] Cummings did not engage in ritualistic destruction” (182). yet [No Title] is a clear example of Dadaist ritualistic destruction. Every page and paragraph of this short work strives to break our expectations and deconstruct the very process of reading. A Dadaist work always strives to have no meaning, and certainly [No Title] achieves no stable, final, or clear meaning. Dada always intends to offend,


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and indeed [No Title] does not leave the reader indifferent. In fact, it tries the pa-tience of even the most enthusiastic of readers—as, for example, Norman Fried-man, who prefers the magic of surrealism in Him to the Dadaist nonsense in [No Title]:

Thus, one of the most attractive qualities about Him is that it presents

such a varied and lively appearance to the audience, while at the same

time suggesting meanings and significances. They may keep eluding our

grasp, but suggest them it surely does. They are hard to define and para-

phrase, which is as it should be, but we know they are there. No such

suggestions appear in [No Title] to tease us on, and without them we

may (alas!) find ourselves on the side of Cummings’ harassed publisher

whose anxiety makes him speak mostly in capitals: “And if this babyish

nOnsense bOres me stiFF?” Maybe this is not a book about something, but

does that necessarily make it a book? (102)

As stated earlier, the relation of Williams and Cummings to Dadaism is a com-plex one. The interest of the two writers in the movement was motivated to a great extent by their interest in painting. Williams frequented Walter Conrad Arens-berg’s circle, where he was able to meet with Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Man Ray, and the baroness Elsa von Freytag-loringhoven. Cummings, for his part, dived into the avant-garde on his numerous trips to Paris, meeting louis Aragon, a leader of the Dadaists in this city.

Many of Williams’s poems, such as “A Red Wheelbarrow” and “This Is just to Say,” owe a great deal to the Dadaist concept of “readymade.”10 For Dickran Tashjian, there is a clear parallel between experimentation with typography and the simultaneousness in Cummings’s poetry and Dadaist abstract poetry. In all, Williams and Cummings are both more con ser va tive in their poetry than their Dadaist colleagues. This may be a consequence, in Williams’s case, of his nation-alist crusade in favor of what he called the American idiom, which kept him from breaking the rhythm of speech and the denotational quality of words. In this aspect, Cummings was more daring, as his raptures of experimentation with typography and sound well prove. yet his organicist view of the poem and its transcendental/romantic background freed him from the excess of Dadaism.

Curiously enough, in prose Williams and Cummings can be more closely linked to Dadaism. Perhaps their conception of themselves as mainly poets led them to proceed with greater caution in experimenting with poetry. In any case, works such as Kora in Hell, A Novelette, and [No Title] display an unusual mod-ernism that could be called “radical modernism,” closer to categories used to de-

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fine postmodernism: antiform (disjunctive, open), play, chance, anarchy, dispersal, antinarrative, irony, indeterminacy. If postmodernism, as some thinkers state, is not a compilation of techniques, but rather a condition of reading, then we can read A Novelette and [No Title] in a postmodern way and say that they anticipate postmodernism by several decades. yet I would rather see them as a clear exam-ple of the great debt postmodernism and modernism owe Dadaist’s proposals.

Notes

1. For example, play and chance are clearly present in the Dadaist concept of automatic

writing. Process/per for mance and happening were widespread practices among the Dada-

ists, who conceived poetry as something to be performed, as shown by several recordings in

the cafés of zurich, berlin, or Paris. “our cabaret is a gesture. Every word that is spoken and

sung here says at least this one thing: that this humiliating age has not succeeded in winning

our respect” (ball 61).

2. Susan Platt maintains that “Dada, unlike Cubism, had a distinct development in New

york. Although the artists were influenced by European developments and were primarily

emigré Europeans, the display of proto-Dada and Dada works in the teens in New york

made some primary sources of Dada art available to New york critics from its inception”

(240). “The group in New york did not distribute revolutionary pamphlets at factory gates,

they did not provoke large audiences in concerts hall or cabarets [ . . . ]. yet the New york

group, despite its less militant stance, has had an incomparably greater impact on American

artists and writers than, for example, zurich Dada had on the Swiss” (kuenzli 1).

3. The most important study on Williams’s relation to Dadaism is Skyscraper Primitives:

Dada and the American Avant-Garde, 1910–1925, by Dickran Tashjian. Also relevant, espe-

cially in relation to automatic writing, is William Carlos Williams, the Arts, and Literary Tradi-

tion by Peter Schmidt. other studies that deal with this subject, though less profoundly, are

bram Dijkstra’s The Hieroglyphics of a New Speech: Cubism, Stieglitz, and the Early Poetry

of William Carlos Williams; William Marling’s William Carlos Williams and the Painters,

1909–1923; Marjorie Perloff’s The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (109–54);

henry M. Sayre’s The Visual Text of William Carlos Williams; and Mike Weaver’s William

Carlos Williams: The American Background.

4. Williams used a picture by Stuart Davis for the frontispiece to Kora in Hell.

5. This definition was originally made by Shattuck (19–22).

6. There are brief references to Dadaism in Richard kennedy’s E. E. Cummings Revisited

(70–77, 107) and Dreams in the Mirror: A Biography of E. E. Cummings (244–45, 253, 270).

Regarding the relationship between Cummings and louis Aragon, see Charles Norman’s

E. E. Cummings: A Biography (143) and Sawyer-lauçanno’s E. E. Cummings: A Biography

(212–13).

7. Him, a three-act play, was first produced in 1928 by the Provincetown Players in New

york City. For criticism on Him, see En glish, “Aristophanic Comedy in E. E. Cummings’


2nd Pass Pages

him,” and Wagner-Martin, “Cummings’ him—and Me” (emphasis on autobiographical as-

pects). There are also two dissertations written on Him: bast, “New light on E. E. Cummings’

Drama, Him” (special emphasis on Freudian and jungian aspects), and bradley, “E. E. Cum-

mings’ Him: An Annotation with Analysis and Production history.” E. E. Cummings com-

ments on act 1, scene 2 of Him in I; Six Nonlectures (8).

8. This anecdote was referred to in the memoirs of harold loeb, The Way It Was

(167–69).

9. For comments on this poem, see Michael Webster’s “Notes on the Writings of E. E.

Cummings.”

10. on this subject see henry M. Sayre’s “Ready-Mades and other Measures: The Poet-

ics of Marcel Duchamp and William Carlos Williams.” A different approach is offered by

Thaddeus Michael ziolkowski in “The Poetics of the Found in the Early Work of William

Carlos Williams.”

Works Cited

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bradley, Mark jonathan. “E. E. Cummings’ Him: An Annotation with Analysis and Produc-

tion history.” Diss. U of Minnesota, 1984.

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Wayne State University Press, 1987.

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right, 1991.

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———. [No Title]. The New American Caravan: A Yearbook of American Literature. Ed.

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Literature: A Quarterly 24.2 (2004): 79–99.

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UP, 1964.

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———. The Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture. Christchurch,

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———. E. E. Cummings Revisited. New york: Twayne, 1994.

2nd Pass Pages


kuenzli, Rudolf E. Introduction. New York Dada. Ed. Rudolf E. kuenzli. New york: Willis

locker & owens, 1986.

locher, David. “Unacknowledged Roots and blatant Imitation: Postmodernism and the

Dada Movement.” Electronic Journal of Sociology. 4 jan. 1999. Scholarly Exchange.

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Texas at Austin, 1981.

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New york, 1967.

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States.” Crisis and the Arts: The History of Dada. Ed. Stephen Foster. New york:

G. k. hall and Co., 1996.

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2004.

Sayre, henry M. “Ready-Mades and other Measures: The Poetics of Marcel Duchamp and

William Carlos Williams.” Journal of Modern Literature 8.1 (1980): 3–22.

———. The Visual Text of William Carlos Williams. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1983.

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siana State UP, 1988.

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1925. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1975.

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ziolkowski, Thaddeus Michael. “The Poetics of the Found in the Early Work of William

Carlos Williams.” Diss. yale University, 1994.

Antonio Ruiz, The Dadaist Prose of Williams and Cummings

Documents

Transcript of Antonio Ruiz, The Dadaist Prose of Williams and Cummings