From the Walls of Factories to the Poetry of the Street: Inscriptions ...

© Caroline Levitt, 2011
Official monumental sculpture was scorned by both Apollinaire and the surrealists. Writing on
Raymond Duchamp-Villon (and on the relationship between sculpture and architecture) in Les
Peintres cubistes (1913), Apollinaire noted that „the whole world is covered with monuments more or
less devoid of any practical purpose.‟ 38 One function of monuments is to promote veneration, and
traditional monumental sculpture or memorials are optimistic in their nature (anti-naturalist),
representing the idealised qualities of their subject rather than their humanity. When monuments
become so prolific, then, they become commonplace, and thus their purpose of standing out to mark
something extraordinary is undermined. When the Oiseau de Bénin (the Bird of Benin), the character
representing Picasso in Apollinaire‟s autobiographical roman à clef „Le Poète assasiné‟ (1916) speaks
of the monument he will erect to his poet friend, it is not a marble or bronze allegory, but „a profound
statue made of nothing, like poetry and like glory.‟ 39 Ornamentation and large scale, two of the
characteristics that make typical official monuments so noticeable, stand in direct opposition to the
small scale and aesthetic banality of the personal ephemera discussed so far in relation to Apollinaire,
and to his idea of the perfect memorial.
However for Breton, too, the personal ephemera within Paris is of far greater importance than
the city‟s famous buildings and vistas. Breton comments in Nadja that not even „la très belle et très
inutile Porte S. Denis‟ (the very beautiful and very useless Porte St. Denis), again a monument at the
edge of Paris, could properly explain his attraction to that area of the city. He illustrates his comment
with a photograph of the Porte S. Denis, demonstrating the futility both of a gateway that stands alone
with no city wall through which it might serve as a thoroughfare, and of elaborate decoration that is
meaningless to the inhabitants of modern Paris and which cars and passers-by ignore. 40 The
gateway‟s lack of function does not seem to pose a particular problem to Breton (nor would one
expect it to, given his fascination with the dysfunctional and outmoded), rather the point is that he is
puzzled by the way he is drawn to the area, and the monument provides no explanation. Indeed,
Nadja is a novel in which official Paris is consistently overwritten by a highly personalised view of the
city.
As Simon Baker has noted, Breton begins his walk through Paris in Nadja facing the hôtel
des Grands Hommes, where he had lived for almost two years between September 1918 and the
Summer of 1920, and thus consequently with his back to that greatest of all humanist monuments: the
Panthéon. 41 The photograph included to illustrate this section of the narrative is taken, appropriately,
from inside the railings that surround the Panthéon, facing outwards. 42 Elsewhere, the St Ouen flea
market, the Sphinx Hotel and a luminous Mazda sign are what will photographically „remain‟ of Breton
and Nadja, although the text itself is set up equally as a remnant of their relationship. As Nadja had
put it, „everything fades, everything vanishes. Something must remain of us.‟ 43 What remains of
individuals, in the case of Nadja a retrospective account of an encounter that might otherwise have
proved insignificant, is fundamental to the concept of the monument and, according to Brassaï‟s poem
cited earlier, to graffiti.
If Breton‟s Nadja included photographs from the outset, it was not until 1926 that Apollinaire‟s
„Le Poète assassiné‟ was illustrated with a series of lithographs by Raoul Dufy; four hundred and
seventy illustrated copies were published by Les Éditions Au Sans Pareil. The release of Dufy‟s
Papers of Surrealism, Issue 9, Summer 2011 11