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

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© Caroline Levitt, 2011 fountains of flames on his forehead next to which the figure 1 was placed just above the figure 5. I was faced with a rebus … I noticed that all the letters of the alphabet had been inscribed on the paper, except R, that the man with two horns of fire on his forehead represented Moses, and that the 1 over 5 suggested sufficiently, due to its position on the right of the Hebrew legislator, that it meant the first book of the Pentateuch, and the rebus obviously read in the following way: R n’est là, genèse [R is not there, Genesis], which signified without a doubt: Ernest La Jeunesse. 46 Having thus decoded the rebus, Apollinaire goes to visit, for the first time, the author Harry Caën, whose pseudonym was Ernest La Jeunesse. From the event that surrounds the discovery of the note, Apollinaire constructs a narrative that recounts the start of his friendship with the author, two of whose books, Cinq ans chez les sauvages (1901) and Le Boulevard: roman contemporain (1906) can be found in Apollinaire‟s library, each with the inscription „À Guillaume Apollinaire, son ami Ernest La Jeunesse.‟ 47 The rebus is a form of shorthand that relies on the combination of words and images; it belongs either to casual, playful mind-games, or to the need for encryption and secrecy. It formed the basis for Breton‟s later „poem objects,‟ such as one from 1937 [Fig. 7]. Fig. 7. André Breton, Madame… (Poem-Object), 1937. Dated at lower right 17-1-1937. Mixed media, 28.3 x 19.8 cm. New York, Collection Timothy Baum. Reproduced with the kind permission of Aube Elléouët-Breton. Thanks to the inclusion of objects, the first line reads as follows: Madame Vous m‟êtes apparue pour la premi [ermine] Papers of Surrealism, Issue 9, Summer 2011 16
© Caroline Levitt, 2011 The first two letters of the word that describes the added object complete the word that precedes it, a pun that fortuitously also works in English: Madame You appeared to me for the fir [stoat] The reader is left to substitute the end of the word „ermine‟ or „stoat‟ for the missing word, „fois‟ or „time.‟ Apollinaire views the rebus that leads him to Ernest la Jeunesse as powerful, distinct from the insignificant puzzles found in contemporary newspapers, and descending from a tradition of hidden meanings both for the sake of secrecy and for the sake of the illiterate. Apollinaire refers to the letters on the paper as „signs,‟ a reminder that writing is at base simply a visual means of communicating meaning. An apparently insignificant piece of paper inscribed with a significant combination of signs thus has the power to change the course of Apollinaire‟s day and to lead him to a meeting with the Symbolist author with whom he would remain acquainted until his death in 1917 from cancer, as we learn in the latter part of Apollinaire‟s narrative. The scrap of paper described in Le Flâneur would perhaps have been considered valueless and left to float in the wind by someone other than Apollinaire, yet it turns out to be of great significance, leading him into an apparently real but rather strange and unexpected series of events. In Mes Prisons, discussed at the start of this article, the only potential writing surface to hand (a list of prison rules) had apparently been taken from its mundane purpose, used for the writing of a poem, and then left to chance in the cell, to be found almost six months later, coincidentally by a poet, and then published in a newspaper. Whether these anecdotes are factual or fictive, the values of objects and of creativity are thus questioned and the status of objects fluctuates, being one moment apparently valueless, everyday and ephemeral, but the next valuable, notable and preserved. Such is the status of graffiti and this oscillation was essential to the surrealists‟ concept of the marvellous. Found, ephemeral traces can, then, be on the one hand playful and on the other hand significant in more profound ways. When Aragon wrote of „hieroglyphs on the walls‟ and claimed the words on everyday objects to be as important as „the inscriptions of a book of black magic,‟ he both recognised the same power that Apollinaire had found in linguistic fragments and anticipated the magical or talismanic properties that Brassaï would also see in graffiti, relating it to both cave art and psychological cures: Everything is magical for the child … fairies, devils, monsters are for him so real that he is scared of them … Art alone can exorcise these phantasms. For it is indeed the power of magic that is at the origin of the power of art. To trace a line, a figure, gives to the child a sense of power and domination that belongs only to the magician. It is only through art that he can bend the world to his will … the power that the prehistoric hunter wanted to exercise on his game by tracing its „simulacrum‟ at the back of caves still works on walls of another type. 48 The concept of the artist as magician goes back to Romanticism, and the notion of art as simulacra or effigy emulates Freud‟s description of magic in „primitive‟ cultures in Totem and Taboo (1913). 49 In this sense, we might suggest that a wall full of graffiti is effectively a wall of simulacra that might function much as the voodoo doll: „for to act on the simulacrum is to act on the person themselves.‟ 50 Papers of Surrealism, Issue 9, Summer 2011 17
Page 1 and 2: © Caroline Levitt, 2011 From the W
Page 3 and 4: © Caroline Levitt, 2011 Apollinair
Page 5 and 6: © Caroline Levitt, 2011 difference
Page 7 and 8: © Caroline Levitt, 2011 Fig. 2: Gu
Page 9 and 10: © Caroline Levitt, 2011 one‟s lo
Page 11 and 12: © Caroline Levitt, 2011 Official m
Page 13 and 14: © Caroline Levitt, 2011 Fig. 4: Ra
Page 15: © Caroline Levitt, 2011 of a perso
Page 19 and 20: © Caroline Levitt, 2011 It seems p
Page 21 and 22: © Caroline Levitt, 2011 12 Apollin
Page 23 and 24: © Caroline Levitt, 2011 44 Ibid.,

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