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

© Caroline Levitt, 2011
edition was timed to coincide with the eighth anniversary of Apollinaire‟s death, on 9 November 1926,
a fact explicitly stated on the final page of the printed copies. Thus the book sets itself up as a sort of
monument to Apollinaire, the „assassinated poet‟ of the title, and whilst Dufy‟s lithographs remain little
known (they have not been included in subsequent re-editions of the text), they often depict
celebrated sites of remembrance and commemoration: the Panthéon, the Arc de Triomphe and the
Champs Elysées, the Eiffel Tower, the Sacré Cœur and St Peter‟s in Rome, to name but a few.
It is illuminating to consider Dufy‟s edition of „Le Poète assassiné‟ in relation to Nadja, which
Breton claimed was distinctly not a novel, but a record of a period in his life. Dufy‟s illustrations could
in many ways be set up in opposition to Breton‟s choice of photographs to accompany Nadja. If Dufy
depicts celebrated Parisian sites, Breton deliberately does not do so, including instead photographs of
his personal wanderings, „taken at the special angle from which I myself had considered them.‟ 44 It
may seem as though Breton is concerned with the everyday whilst Dufy is preoccupied with the
monumental. Indeed if, as we have seen, Apollinaire too was more interested in the private than the
public, in marginal areas such as Auteuil than in central Paris, Dufy‟s lithographs may seem also to jar
with Apollinaire‟s ideology. However the relationship between text and image in both Nadja and the
1926 edition of „Le Poète assassiné‟ seems to be more problematic.
The photographs in Nadja are included to suggest documentary reality and reliability, yet in
fact do no more than prove the existence of many of the places, people and drawings mentioned in
the text – the anecdotes surrounding them could be fiction or truth, and the two merge in the various
passages of the book. Meanwhile, Dufy wittily grounds Apollinaire‟s own suggestion of the poet‟s
affiliation with great figures of antiquity in contemporary Paris. Whilst Apollinaire uses pseudonyms
(albeit easily decoded ones) for his characters, Breton claims that he wants his book to be an entirely
transparent account, neglecting to take on the Latin or Arabic pseudonym that Nadja had suggested
for him. However Nadja‟s own real name and identity are never revealed through Breton‟s text and
she is one of the only characters of whom a photographic portrait is not included – the closest Breton
gets to portraying her is including the allegorical drawings she herself had made and, in the 1963
edition, introducing a photograph of her eyes. Thus Breton‟s anti-novel turns out to be a partially
mythologised account in spite of itself, whilst Dufy plays on Apollinaire‟s comic claim to mythological
greatness and brings the story back to the everyday.
Dufy‟s depiction of the Champs Elysées, with a view leading from the Place de la Concorde in
the foreground to the Arc de Triomphe in the distance is particularly intriguing in light of the
relationship between the personal and the universal, the real and the legendary [Fig. 4].
Papers of Surrealism, Issue 9, Summer 2011 12