Witkovsky Dada Breton

Dada BretonAuthor(s): Matthew S. WitkovskyReviewed work(s):Source: October, Vol. 105, Dada (Summer, 2003), pp. 125-136Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3397687 .

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Dada Breton*

MATTHEW S. WITKOVSKY

I'm not even sure that Dadaism is winning its case, at every moment I realize I am reversing my own opinion about it.

-Andre Breton, letter to Simone Kahn, August 31, 19201

Andre Breton wrote "Artificial Hells" ("Les Enfers artificiels") in May 1921, as one of a series of paid epistolary reports that he had been submitting to fashion designer and art patron Jacques Doucet since the previous December.2 The topic of this particular brief, a chronicle of Dada events and guiding ideas in 1920 and 1921, was especially familiar to him. Breton had helped organize Paris Dada in January 1920, after a full year of correspondence with the grand impresario of the movement, Tristan Tzara, while the latter remained in Zurich. Although Breton's participation in Dada was frequently stage-managed by Tzara, who came to Paris with significant experience at handling public controversy, and by the much older Francis Picabia, Breton articulated his own Dadaist identity as well. His plea, "For Dada" ("Pour Dada"), appeared in the Nouvelle Revue Francaise in August 1920; his resounding farewell, "After Dada" ("Apres Dada"), was published in March 1922.3 Throughout roughly two years of participation in Dada, and intense reflection on its meaning, Breton remained ambivalent about the value of this restless, avant-

* Thanks to Leah Dickerman andJanine Mileaf for comments on this text. Unattributed translations are by the author. 1. Cited in Andre Breton, Oeuvres completes, ed. Marguerite Bonnet, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), p. 41. Simone Kahn and Andre Breton were married in September 1921. 2. Jacques Doucet, a great bibliophile, solicited paid letters from a number of modernist writers (Pierre Reverdy, Max Jacob, Blaise Cendrars) on contemporary events in art and literature. Breton's first correspondence with him is dated December 20, 1920. In July 1921, some six weeks after writing "Artificial Hells," Breton began serving Doucet for a higher salary as a part-time librarian and a consultant on art purchases, for example the acquisition of Les Demoiselles dAvignon (1907) by Pablo Picasso. See Andre Breton, Oeuvres completes, pp. 42-43, and 1481, and Mark Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind: The Life of Andre Breton (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1995), pp. 146-47. 3. Both essays were collected in Les Pas Perdus (Paris: Gallimard, 1924), recently translated into English by Mark Polizzotti as The Lost Steps (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996).

OCTOBER 105, Summer 2003, pp. 125-136. ? 2003 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.



4 IX 1; A-A

Andre Breton at the Festival Dada, May 1920. Collection

Timothy Baum, New York. Courtesy Estate of Andre Breton.

garde formation for what he termed "the modern spirit." Yet, as his writings of that period make clear, Dada was both defining and formative for Breton, far more than the "interlude" in his creative life that it is commonly labeled.4

The reluctance to see Breton as more than a fellow traveler in Dada has its origin in his own retrospective judgments, most significantly those given in a series of scripted interviews in 1952, in which Breton characterized Dadaism in Paris as Surrealist in all but the name. Breton allowed that the two movements may have overlapped for a time: "Dada and Surrealism-even if the latter was still latent-can only be considered correlatively, like two waves that cover each other by turns." Yet even this modestly generous recollection was prefaced by an assertion that "the initial, all-important observations had been made" in 1919, before Tzara arrived in Paris. Furthermore, Breton summarized Dada in these same interviews as a creative dead end. "The Dada Manifesto 1918," he claimed, referring to the work by Tzara that had had greatest impact on him, "seemed to throw the doors wide open, but you discovered that these doors led to a corridor that turned around in circles."5

With the exception of Michel Sanouillet, who provocatively labeled Surrealism "the French version of Dada" in his 1965 study Dada in Paris, scholars

4. Bonnet calls 1920-22 "l'intermede Dada," in Oeuvres completes, p. 1280. Even Michel Sanouillet, despite his defiant arguments that placed Surrealism within a larger Dada orbit, equivocated regarding Breton's identity as a Dadaist. In the conclusion to Dada a Paris (Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1965), Sanouillet claims that Breton "took up fully the ideological content of the movement in 1920, or at least the conception he had of it" (pp. 426-27). At the moment he introduces Breton within his account, however, Sanouillet casts the young man with classical features and a "fundamental permanence" as someone "who could go through Dada without being affected by it except in his outer behavior" (p. 78). 5. See Andre Breton, Conversations: The Autobiography of Surrealism, trans. Mark Polizzotti (New York: Paragon House, 1993), pp. 43-47.



Dada Breton

have tended to follow Breton's lead.6 The situation in Paris prior to the first Surrealist Manifesto (1924) continues to be understood as one of cohabitation between an unofficially designated Surrealist movement and an official banner, Dada, that unified disparate personalities only through their more or less serious belief in the suasions of nihilism. Rather than consider Breton's reflections as tangential to Dada, it seems more useful to elucidate guides to a Dada Breton, greater perhaps than a narrow definition of that movement would allow, and distinct from Breton's more famous identity as the founder of Surrealism.

"Artificial Hells," which amounts to an intellectual history of Dada, demonstrates that Breton wanted from his earliest days to classify and systematize creative experience, to justify it morally and place it within a tradition of cultural rebellion. Dada, meanwhile, is usually identified with spontaneity and resistance to any form of regulation, particularly that imposed by artistic traditions. Breton's very willingness to sketch this history in mid-1921, even as he was publicizing further Dada incursions into Parisian society, appears to betray a lack of Dadaist commitment. In fact, however, several participants in Dada elaborated critical chronologies, privately or publicly, during the period of their Dada activities. These ranged from the diary kept by Hugo Ball, to Tzara's partly absurdist, partly normative "Zurich Chronicle," published in 1919 and enlarged in 1920, or the seemingly innumerable explanations of Dada as a word and a cultural movement offered with varying degrees of good faith by Dada's international membership. No doubt the most officious of the instant history-makers was Richard Huelsenbeck, whose accounts Dada Triumphs and En Avant Dada: A History of Dadaism both appeared in 1920.7 Nor would it be too many years beyond Dada's natural life before a number of collaborators set to writing memoirs, each one seeking to give meaning to events and elaborate a Dadaist worldview.8

If Andre Breton felt a need to take stock of the movement in medias res, then, he was by no means alone. Dada practices raised fundamental questions about artistic identity that prompted many participants to interrogate the movement for its lasting significance. In Breton's case, however, the reflections were guided by a pressing need to reconcile Dada with what he perceived as its legitimating antecedents: a French pattern of avant-garde revolt against societal and literary conventions initiated by Charles Baudelaire. By measuring Dada in this way, Breton constrained the movement within a fundamentally ethnocentric, historical

6. Sanouillet, Dada a Paris, p. 425. The statement is polemical and reductive in its own right, as evidenced by a more cutting phrase seven pages later: Surrealism, claims Sanouillet, is "Dada without the laughter." 7. Richard Huelsenbeck, Dada Siegt! Eine Bilanz des Dadaismus (Berlin: Malik-Verlag, 1920); Huelsenbeck, En Avant Dada: Eine Geschichte des Dadaismus (Hanover: Paul Steegemann, 1920). 8. These publications include Richard Huelsenbeck, Wozu war Dada da? ein Riickblick auf eine nun schon historisch gewordene Bewegung... (Berlin: Ullstein, 1927); Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, "Histoire de Dada. Fragments" (1931), offprint from Nouvelle Revue Franfaise, June-July 1931; Georges Hugnet, "Dada and Surrealism," essays commissioned for the Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art 4 (1936), pp. 2-3.

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structure. This limitation was also a strength, for it determined the particular character of Breton's Dadaist practice. The two principal elements of that practice were, first, a direct engagement with the spectacle of urban life, and second, the instrumentalization of art as a vehicle for moral criticism.

Breton's initial sincerity and fervor for a Dadaist rebellion are amply attested by his correspondence with Tzara in 1919, at a time when Breton had read the latter's writing and heard of his activities, but the authors had not yet met.9 Tremendously impressed by the devastating challenges to logic and literature in Tzara's "Dada Manifesto 1918," Breton wrote to introduce himself to his new idol in January 1919. "I am twenty-two years old," he stated parenthetically. "I believe in the genius of Rimbaud, Lautreamont, Jarry; I loved Guillaume Apollinaire infinitely, I have a deep tenderness toward Reverdy. My favorite painters are Ingres and Derain; I am very sensitive to the art of Chirico." Closing the parenthesis, Breton added with adolescent boldness: "I am not as naive as I seem."10

Replying in kind six weeks later, Tzara inflated his own age by five years- both men were in fact born in 1896-and adjusted his self-description to suit the mentoring role being accorded to him: "As this interests you, I am twenty-seven years old, and I see clearly, a question of habit and profession-the disgust of which I wrote [in the 1918 manifesto] is in some ways real, and I found myself after the greatest [disgust]: several wasted years in philosophy." In stark contrast to Breton, with his roster of models in literature and painting, Tzara professed an utter disregard for aesthetic hierarchies or forerunners: "I am very good in the way I look at works of poetry (you see that in [my journal] Dada) because I have

9. The surviving correspondence between Tzara and Breton from 1919 through 1922 is reprinted in Sanouillet, Dada a Paris, pp. 440-65. 10. Breton to Tzara, January 22, 1919, ibid., p. 440.

lockzwise from upper lefti: Breton, Rene Hilsum, Louis Aragon, Paul Eluard. 1919. Courtesy

Estalle of Andrf Breton.

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no criterion." Elsewhere in this letter, Tzara responded to news he had received about Breton's own proposed journal (Litterature, begun March 1919) with a comment that tellingly suggests the different attitudes they would have toward the Dada phenomenon: "It seems to me that you want to emphasize in your journal the passage between old and new literature, which is (very) necessary, but I believe that it is more a work of criticism and history. If you manage that without pretension I would be truly happy to count myself among your friends."ll Tzara, himself keen to make a lasting mark, was not indifferent to the historicizing dimension of Breton's enterprise, but he evidently thought such a dimension should be articulated by an admiring critical apparatus, not by the Dadaists themselves.

Tzara's expressed attitude masked a contradiction in his character, for even though he did not wish to explain Dada or situate it in a timeline of literary or artistic innovation, he energetically protected his own version of the "Dada story," promoting it to the press and soliciting compatible accounts from other participants for his journals. While not at all immune to the distorting pressure of personal vanity on critical acumen, Breton nevertheless took advantage of his assignment for Doucet to evaluate, as if from a distance, the formal and sociopolitical strategies of Dada that he had helped develop.

"Artificial Hells" thus begins by brushing aside competing, individual claims to the paternity of Dada-"I do not know who had the idea of the first Dada 'event'"-preferring instead to describe the context of wartime Zurich and of Paris around the time of the Armistice.12 Dada appeared in neutral Switzerland, writes Breton, as a more or less natural effusion of displaced, international talents responding to the "tensions" and "secret actions" common in wartime; in Paris, meanwhile, it arrived as a welcome relief from the inbred, stagnating literary scene. Cubism, free verse, and unorthodox syntax still incited "insignificant discussions" among "a bewildered public of half a dozen writers" in Paris in 1919. Breton welcomed Dada, as incarnated by Tzara and, from 1920, by Picabia, for its opening onto "current events" and "vast audiences." Dada thrilled Breton, but as with all thrills, it caused him anxiety and doubt as well. What if one became enslaved to topicality, or the chronic need for public aggression? As he wrote to Tzara inJune 1919: "Once again, I am as passionate as you to destroy, but shouldn't one keep it secret? Sooner or later you risk getting yourself disqualified."13

Dating the birth of Paris Dada to Tristan Tzara's unannounced appearance at a Litterature poetry reading in January 1920, Breton sketches the new symbiosis

11. Tzara to Breton, March 1 or 5, 1919, ibid., p. 442. 12. In its details, Breton's account of Zurich Dada derives from information supplied by Tzara, perhaps with the addition of Picabia's souvenirs from a brief stay in Switzerland in early 1919. Any information Breton may have had about Dada in Berlin (he mentions Germany very briefly at the end of this text, along with Holland and Italy) would likewise have been filtered through Tzara. Breton does not mention New York as a Dada centrale, despite his contact with Picabia, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray. Similarly, his support for "Dadamax" Ernst, exemplified in the catalog essay he prepared for Ernst's exhibition directly prior to the writing of "Artificial Hells," does not extend to the recognition of a "Dada enclave" in Cologne. 13. Sanouillet, Dada a Paris, p. 445.

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of performers and audience that Dada events fostered over the succeeding months. It is this interaction, in which a public energized by rudeness, vulgarity, and provocation develops a taste for shouting back, egging the performers to further outrageous activities, that Breton calls "Artificial Hells." The title operates a twist on Baudelaire's account of opium and hashish, Artificial Paradises (1860), and suggests by that allusion a deep ambivalence toward the moral healthfulness of Dada. Baudelaire stated his intention to analyze "the mysterious effects and morbid pleasures these drugs can produce, the punishment that invariably follows their prolonged use, and, finally, the immorality implicated in the pursuit of this false ideal."l4

Baudelaire was not an outside observer, however, but an active drug user, and resolutely opposed, moreover, to the world of conventional morality. 5 Breton was similarly invested in the transgressive value of the events he describes here, especially the new kind of public those events called forth. The intoxicating atmosphere fostered by Dada created what might be called a community of mutually alienated individuals, whose greatest source of common attraction was an impulse toward violent disagreement. The incitement to dissolve shared values came deliberately from the stage. "We are especially bound together by our differences," Breton emphasized in "For Dada," and he maintains in "Artificial Hells" that a will to public dissension underlay even those actions that seemed flagrant appeals to avant-garde solidarity, such as the Maurice Barr&s trial.16

As Denis Hollier has pointed out, incommunicability formed a mainstay of aesthetic experience for Breton, both in the early 1920s and later. Breton prized that which lacked exchange value, finding, as he phrased it in 1922, that a point of view "matters to me only insofar as I have not yet managed to make others share it."17 The mind-altering giddiness of Paris Dada emerged, however, from its ritualistic exhibition of nonsharing: a public display of private thoughts, deliberately bereft of explanation, that forged a perverse bond of mutual incomprehension between performers and audience.18 The run of Dada events in the first half of 1920 converted a formerly "silent auditorium" into a "rebellious public," Breton writes, one that "made itself increasingly our accomplice," and even became a live artificial stimulant: "One may say that this public is largely responsible for our audacities."

14. Charles Baudelaire, Artificial Paradises, trans. Stacy Diamond (New York: Citadel Press, 1996), pp. 33-34. 15. While awaiting trial on charges of immorality for Flowers of Evil, Baudelaire wrote his mother (August 20, 1857): "You know that I have never viewed literature and the arts in any other light than as pursuing an end foreign to morality" (Ibid., p. vii). 16. Breton, The Lost Steps, p. 56. 17. Breton, "Characteristics of the Modern Evolution and What It Consists Of," in The Lost Steps, p. 107 (translation modified); cited in Denis Hollier, "Surrealist Precipitates," October69 (Summer 1994), p. 113. 18. Leah Dickerman discusses this "crisis in the notion of the public" as a key component of international Dada, one that operated in parallel with a "nostalgia for older forms of community." See Dickerman, "Dada's Solipsism," Documents 19 (Fall 2000), pp. 16-19. My thanks to her for suggesting further reflection on this point.

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Dada Breton

In this way, the solipsistic withdrawal characteristic of much drug use, particularly opiates, was turned inside out; an experience that earlier generations interiorized now took place on public territory, and this move relocated the artist in society as well. His praise of chance operations notwithstanding, the coauthor of The Magnetic Fields (Les Champs magn6tiques, 1919) had mixed feelings about the cession of directorial control; "We were actually driven to make some sacri- fices on its behalf," Breton writes of the audience, as if improvisational interactions had occasioned a loss in aesthetic quality. Still, Breton recognized that fundamentally new possibilities had been opened for artistic identity, and he accordingly takes pains in "Artificial Hells" to characterize the first Dada interven- tions-absurd or incendiary speeches, campaigns of misinformation, piano pieces composed of randomly selected notes, plays devoid of causality, above all a persistent mockery of French nationalist values-in positive terms.

Those terms show a continuity with Breton's later preoccupations as a Surrealist, but they also relate closely to certain aspects of Dada, particularly as it developed in Zurich. For example, Breton defines Dada in express opposition to aesthetic transcendence: "Small matter if [we create] one more masterpiece-the point lies entirely elsewhere," and he offers instead that Dada events aim to "wrest the human spirit from some of its fetters." This goal of personal liberation was championed by most members of Zurich Dada, and, in their own ways, by Raoul Hausmann and Kurt Schwitters as well. In Zurich, it served as a rationale for the Post-Expressionist abstractions of Hans Arp, Sophie Taeuber, and Marcel Janco, as well as the disparate poems by Tzara, Arp, and others printed on the pages of Dada: "Don't look for analogies among the forms by which art shows itself: to each [form] its liberty its borders.... The will of the word: a standing being an image, a unique construction, fervent with color, dense-intensity, communion with life."19

Breton's particular contribution to Dada, in accord with his attention to audience dynamics and French antecedents, was his intervention in metropolitan life. As Breton describes them here, the first Paris Dada events introduced a frisson of contact with so-called ordinary people in a state of carnivalesque revolt, and this cross-class exchange was clearly inspiring for him. (This despite the fact that the one genuine encounter between Dadaists and blue-collar workers, at the Universit6 Populaire du Faubourg Saint-Antoine, in February 1920, resulted only in what Michel Sanouillet calls "tepid amazement" by the audience and long- winded clarifications by the performers.)20 Breton, who prior to the advent of Dada had already developed a Baudelairean taste for wandering throughout the city, locates the greatest reward of the first Dada events in "taking to the street" and "not losing one's footing," and he reproves the great men of yesteryear for isolating themselves from the vitality of human contact.

19. Tzara, "Note 14 sur la po6sie," Dada (Zurich) 4-5 (May 1919). 20. Sanouillet, Dada a Paris, pp. 158-60.

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Clearly, there is a continuity between this Romantic desire to commingle with society's "other half" and the Surrealist view of the city, celebrated for

example in Paris Peasant by Louis Aragon (Paysan de Paris, 1926) and in Breton's own Nadja (1928). Once again, however, it is one thing to register private states and another to perform in public. The transformative impact of Surrealist urban

experience is played out within the individual psyche, and its import is withheld from those who serve as its catalysts. In the public performances by Dadaists, encounter and confrontation are made plain, and the results are experienced by performers and audience simultaneously. Breton clearly laid great importance on that urban engagement, for he carefully explains the advances (in his view) made

by Paris Dada from 1920 to 1921 as a replication of the initial events, but now out in the city itself. "We imagined guiding our public to places," Breton writes, "where we could hold their attention better than in a theater, because the very fact of going there entails a certain good will on their part. The visits, of which Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre was the first in a series, had absolutely no other pretext." In fact, the long quote Breton provides from the manifesto he read out loud on that first "visit" suggests that city and theater have been conflated:

All that has happened until now under the sign of Dada was just a sideshow. You can have no idea, judging from that, of the spectacle inside. The curtain will rise shortly on a play fantastic in other ways.... Simply turn your heads. We are in the middle of Paris.... You are all

right here with us: how relaxing! And yet you have debts, a woman is

waiting for you at the hotel, you are on strike in England, you take tea at the Claridge, you are in the world.

Making a spectacle of the city was Breton's own idea, the first Dada perfor- mance in Paris not dictated or orchestrated by Tzara and Picabia. It is ironically fitting that inclement weather deterred the group from further activities outdoors, and Breton's report to Doucet evidences pride in the concept and disappointment at its realization, a common enough experience during these years.21 But even if the outing to Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre remained a one-time event-as did so

many Dada projects internationally-the gesture of a collective, dramatized engagement with the city is worth retaining. In a capital full of undisputed architectural gems, Breton picked a nondescript medieval relic set next to a rubble field, not only to mock religious monumentalism ("Here it is, the famous jewel of Gothic architecture"), but also to invest this site with the transgressive significance of a ritual gathering.

21. At the time of the visit to Saint-Julien, further outings were announced to the press: to the Louvre, the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, the Canal de l'Ourcq, and the Gare Saint-Lazare. It is not clear whether these additional sites were proposed by Breton or by others such as Tzara or Philippe Soupault (who announced them publicly). See Bonnet, notes to "Les Enfers artificiels," in Oeuvres completes, pp. 1483-84.

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Left: Visit to Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, Paris, April 1921. Collection Timothy Baum, New York. Right: Breton reading manifesto at Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, April 1921. Courtesy Estate of Andre Breton.

As an urban escapade, this is something different than Surrealist self-discovery at the flea market, or lone encounters on buses and in cafes. Subversion and liberation come not through projection onto objects, but by intervention in the

cityscape. That experience could be fostered in other ways as well. An editorial statement in the May 1921 issue of Litterature, for example-the very issue

announcing these visites et excursions-appealed for collaboration on a "mural

supplement" planned by the journal. Various public authors were asked to come to Dada headquarters at the bookstore Au Sans Pareil: "The anonymous individual who writes NO on borrowed posters. The unknown person who signs Edith Cavell on bathroom inscriptions. The artist who draws additions on tooth-

paste ads . . ."22 If the Surrealist experience of the street was largely deferred, converted into a structure of inspiration for literary and pictorial imaginings or a shorthand reference to proletarian revolution, the interaction with the city fostered

by these Dada propositions instead resembles a live broadcast.23 Nearly forty years later, that idea of outdoor anti-entertainment would be revisited and systemati- cally pursued, under the watchwords ddrive and situations.

The final event discussed by Breton in "Artificial Hells" is the mock trial of Maurice Barres, which took place on May 13, 1921, one week before he drafted his

report to Jacques Doucet. This project, also initiated by Breton, engendered famous splits within the group, among them Tzara's vulgar invective as a "hostile witness," and Picabia's exit, with a flourish, during the middle of the proceedings. Two days prior to these events, Picabia had declared himself finished with Dada in an article for Comoedia, a cultural magazine that carried frequent reports on the

group. "Mr. Picabia Breaks with the Dadas" articulated its own view of Dada's

22. George Baker cites this advertisement in his analysis of Francis Picabia's painting The Cacodylic Eye (L'Oeil Cacodylate, 1921), a canvas filled with signatures by fellow artists that resembles graffiti on a wall. See Baker, "The Artwork Caught by the Tail," October97 (Summer 2001), pp. 80-82. 23. Such are the valences of the street for Susan Suleiman, in her essay "Between the Street and the Salon: The Dilemma of Surrealist Politics in the 1930s," in Visualizing Theory, ed. Lucien Taylor (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 143-58. The salon, by contrast, denotes a space actually utilized by Surrealists.



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history and significance, and it is translated in this issue of October to counterbalance Breton's tirade against its author. Juxtaposing the texts, one sees that despite their mutual recriminations, the two doubting Dadaists shared important positions: their opposition to art as common currency, or the traffic in ideas; an insistence on constantly reinventing creativity; and a concomitant anxiety over the possibility of recuperation-an accommodation of originality to convention cloaked, like a specter, in the concept of fashionability.

Breton differed from Picabia, and from Tzara as well, in the "seriousness" with which he addressed the ethics of a Dadaist position. This was Picabia's bugbear: "Dada, you see, was not serious, and that is why it won over the world like wildfire. If some people take it seriously now, that's because it's dead!" A horror of death, indeed of all forms of stillness or fixity, rings out from his text, which claims to find certainty only in rootlessness. "What I am sure of," Picabia maintains, "is that it is impossible to stop movement." Breton greatly admired, perhaps even envied, Picabia for his philosophy of perpetual motion, but he himself was possessed by a stronger desire to stand his ground. In his parting reflections on the meaning of Dada, Breton accordingly returns to his main preoccupation, namely the need to define a moral constant to avant-garde subversion.

The Barres trial, as Marguerite Bonnet has explained, was conceived by Breton to interrogate the abandonment (or perhaps nonexistence) of moral principles on the part of a traitor to the cause of radical liberation.24 Barres, who as a young writer authored the libertarian trilogy collectively titled The Cult of the Ego (Le Culte du Moi, 1880-91), had changed his ideas during World War I to suit the times. He soon moved to the front ranks of a very different cult, the ultranationalist Cult of the Dead, which glorified the fighting and falsified the realities of trench warfare; at the time of his "court appearance," the defendant was in Aix-en-Provence to lecture on "The French Soul During the War." In 1920 and even early 1921, literary rebels such as Breton, Paul Eluard, and Philippe Soupault still courted Barres, addressing to him signed copies of their books (including The Magnetic Fields); in May of that year, however, Breton suddenly made this eminent reactionary his target. "The issue raised [by Barres]," he recalled in 1952, "which was of an ethical nature, might well have interested several others among us individually, but Dada, with its acknowledged commitment to indifference, [had] strictly nothing to do with it."25

The actual statement of charges against Barres, printed in Litterature in August 1921, concludes on a slightly different note: "The business of the generations that preceded ours was the passage from certainty to doubt: now it is a matter of passing from doubt to negation without losing all moral worth."26 This search for guidance within negation might seem to match the dialectic frequently described between Dada and Surrealism, whereby Dada primarily represents a force of

24. Marguerite Bonnet, L'Affaire Barres (Paris:Jose Corti, 1987). 25. Breton, Conversations, p. 53 (translation modified). 26. Breton et al., "Acte d'accusation," Litterature 20 (August 1921), reprinted in Bonnet, L'Affaire Barrres, p. 33.

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destruction, and Surrealism one of order or construction, in these years before the official founding of Surrealism in 1924.27 Certainly, that is how Breton himself came to explain it over time. But the question he posed in mid-1921 is of a piece with Dada preoccupations. Tzara, for instance, called repeatedly for "purity" in individual expression, while Arp and Taeuber equated their gridded abstractions and chance geometries with mystical struggles for truth. And Picabia asserts, in his article for Comoedia, that he has left Dada because of his "disgust" at the corruption of its idea(l)s by people with "ulterior motives," that is, those who hope to generate surplus value even on nothing. Dada bred a desire to pass judgment on all societal formations, including that of Dada itself.

The Barres trial evidently served Breton as a means to test the movement's precepts. In "Artificial Hells," he polemicizes at length with Picabia, fighting one printed statement with another. At the event itself, it was Tzara-the incarnation of that "declared commitment to indifference" from which Breton would take his distance-who became the greatest adversary, because he came armed with his own principles of public engagement and was prepared to advance them onstage. The brilliant debate between Breton, in the role of President of the Tribunal, and Tzara as a witness, makes clear the divide between them on questions of morality. "I have no confidence in justice, even if this justice is made by Dada," Tzara declared, and proceeded to call both the accused and his prosecutors "a bunch of bastards," adding "greater or lesser bastards is of no importance."28 One surmises

27. See Arturo Schwarz, "Paris 1918-1922. Breton-Tzara: Divergences et convergences," in Henri Behar, ed., "Chasse-croise Tzara-Breton," Melusine 17 (1997), p. 69: "Over the years, Dadaism was dominat- ed by nihilist tendencies, whereas Surrealism continued to be inspired foremost by romantic urges. Destruction is a manifestation of construction, and vice versa.... For a limited period, each of these two movements acted as a catalyst for the other, in a constructive or destructive direction." Many other examples could be cited here as well, all deriving, as stated earlier, from Breton's ownjudgments in 1952. 28. Bonnet, L'Affaire Barres, p. 38.

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that Tzara was exasperated above all by the form the proceedings took: lengthy, studied, self-important. Breton had clearly not lived up to his one-time mentor's advice to act "without pretension." Tzara therefore vigorously attacked the prescrip- tive lecturing that was Breton's weakest attribute, with phrases that recall the cautionary formula deployed in his "Manifesto of Mr. Antipyrine": "Dada remains within the European frame of weaknesses, it's shit after all, but from now on we mean to shit in assorted colors ... "29

The defense Breton provides to Doucet of the Barres trial idea-"our interest in this problem lay in the possibility of interpreting it variously, and ... we were inclined to nothing so little as cohesion"-does not rescue his project from its sententiousness and many inducements to boredom. But the trial was also an ambitious attempt to isolate an issue that could potentially affect the avant-garde much more than rearguard turncoats such as Maurice Barres. Having helped to steer Dada in Paris toward a street-level confrontation with society and aesthetic convention, Breton felt moved to ask whether this engagement was genuine or sustainable. What if one passed from revolutionary opposition to the forces of reaction, abandoning a posture that had no inherent constancy or force of impact in the world? What if one kept a facade of avant-gardism while changing one's message, simply to retain an audience that was at bottom solidly nationalist and bourgeois?

These were real questions for Dada, which like Cubism had been charged in the French press as an empty mystification and a German-Jewish seditious plot. The energy with which Breton tried to elicit answers in 1920 and 1921 suggests an embrace of Dada that is not reluctant, but thoroughly skeptical, in the spirit of Dada itself. Breton ends his report as he began it, with a historical sweep that turns now from the past to the future: "Perhaps in France, the era of Dada events, properly speaking, is drawing to a close (to begin in Italy and Holland)." Unable to pinpoint a Dada ethos for himself, Breton instead uses news of recent activities abroad to propose the basis of the movement as a peripatetic, international insight. The lasting value of Dada, then, is that it keeps recurring, in new places and unforeseen guises-much the argument made by Picabia as well. Despite their feud, Breton states his admiration for Picabia's enjoinder to live as an intellectual nomad, "traveling through ideas as one travels through countries and cities." But Breton (try as he might) could not live with such unfixed bearings. Now he closes with the words of a more searching wanderer, the protagonist of Arthur Rimbaud's "Vagabonds": "I, impatient to find the place and the formula."30 One thing Dada does not do is provide a home.

29. Tristan Tzara, "Manifesto of Mr. Antipyrine" (1916), trans. Ralph Manheim, in Robert Motherwell, ed., The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), p. 75. 30. Breton would pair these two citations as well in "After Dada" (1922), placing first the one by Rimbaud: "'The place and the formula' will elude me perhaps forever, but, this cannot be stated often enough, it is the search for them that is at issue and nothing else. Hence the great emptiness we must make in ourselves" (Breton, Oeuvres completes, p. 261).

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