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

© 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