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

© Caroline Levitt, 2011
Brassaï‟s photographs of graffiti can perhaps even provide us with an approximation of the type of
things that Apollinaire was observing. 2
Le Flâneur is both a late text and a neglected one within Apollinaire‟s oeuvre. A sense of
post-war nostalgia and a taste for the marginal are expressed in the first section, „Souvenir d‟Auteuil,‟
which recalls the tone of some of his earlier poems published in Alcools (1913): the autobiographical
„Zone‟ and „Le Pont Mirabeau‟ are especially pertinent examples. The urban peregrinations of
Apollinaire in these works combine the past and the present, the personal and the commercial in
ways that pre-empt Aragon‟s Le Paysan de Paris (1926) or Breton‟s Nadja (1928). 3 Apollinaire‟s
appreciation of graffiti in Le Flâneur is intrinsically connected with his proclamation in „Zone‟ that
advertisements and fragments of text are the poetry of today, and both graffiti and found ephemera
were of equal importance to the surrealists. In an article on film from the same year as Le Flâneur,
Aragon wrote of: „the haunting beauty of commercial inscriptions, of posters, of evocative capitals, of
very ordinary objects.‟ He praised painters and poets who had noted „hieroglyphs on the walls‟ and
stated that „these letters which vaunt the value of a bar of soap are worth as much as the characters
on obelisks or the inscriptions of a book of black magic: they speak of the fate of the era.‟ 4
Inscriptions, whether graffiti scratched into walls, typography on modern objects or
monumental or talismanic captions fill the poetry and imagery of the twentieth century avant-garde –
Aragon noted, amongst those who had introduced them, Baudelaire, the Cubists and, above all,
cinematographers. This article seeks in the first instance to demonstrate that Apollinaire and the
surrealists shared an interest in graffiti, viewing it as valuable in its own right, as more worthy even
than official-sounding „inscriptions.‟ The relationship between graffiti and inscriptions is an interesting
one that can be expanded by examining their etymological roots. The term „inscription‟ comes from
the Latin scribere, to write, whereas „graffiti‟ stems from the Italian graffio, to scratch. Writing is a
sophisticated practice, whereas scratching appears crude or perhaps even bestial. Inscribing tends to
involve the use of language, whereas graffiti can incorporate pictures of varied legibility. In turn,
inscriptions often refer to official dedications, perhaps in the front of a book or perhaps carved more
permanently into stone, whereas the implication of „graffiti‟ is that it has defaced something, possibly
even something that has been inscribed in such a way as to denote value and importance.
Inscriptions come to stand for high, monumental practices, whereas graffiti denote low, destructive
ones. It is to this linguistic irony that Apollinaire wittily refers when he describes the etchings in the rue
Berton as „inscriptions,‟ adding „or graffiti, as the antiquarians would say,‟ and thus implying that an
avant-garde appreciation of the marginal might go somewhat further than an antiquated disdain for all
that is not official or monumental. Apollinaire seems to overwrite a history of inscriptions with one that
is marginal, personal and ultimately far more exciting, and thus the relationship between graffiti and
inscriptions comes to stand for a dichotomy that will carry through to broader themes. Graffiti will be
shown to be emblematic of a variety of unofficial, playful and anti-monumental creative practices, all
of which are generally held to be at the heart of surrealism but that were equally present in the work of
Apollinaire. Writing was for both a means of transgression and liberation, a way of appreciating the
marginal and personal over the official and universal and a powerful signifier that could be at once
playful and marvellous.
Papers of Surrealism, Issue 9, Summer 2011 2