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

© Caroline Levitt, 2011
difference all the same, on account of the grating sound of a key turning in a lock, or the wretched
view of the garden, the cheek of the people who question you when you don‟t want them to.‟ 17 Breton
aligns the deprivation of freedom with madness itself, seeing it not as a cure but as something to be
overcome.
If the surrealists were, for the most part, locked in social and mental constraints rather than
physical ones, one of their particular heroes, the Marquis de Sade, had been subject to extensive
physical imprisonment and had found a source of freedom in his subversive writing. In 1909, the
same year as L’Enchanteur appeared, Apollinaire published an edition of the works of the Marquis de
Sade. In his preface, he explained that Sade had spent twenty-seven years of his life in eleven
different prisons, had died in the asylum of Charenton and had his books banished to the enfer
(„underworld‟) of the Bibliothèque nationale. Yet, he claimed, Sade loved freedom above all else and
was „the freest [spirit] that ever lived.‟ 18 Sexual perversions and distorted morality characterise Sade‟s
writing, and Apollinaire summarised Justine and Juliette, two of the stories included in the volume he
edited, by quoting one of Juliette‟s lines: „I have followed the route of vice, my child, and I have never
met with anything except roses.‟ 19 Such an inversion of morality, a parody of society‟s hypocritical
values, was both a fundamental element of Sade‟s appeal to Apollinaire and the surrealists, and the
reason for which Apollinaire described him as „free‟ in spite of the censorship and imprisonment
imposed on him: a society mocked by its victims can only ever, Apollinaire suggests, be shown to be
weak, demonstrating, conversely, its victims to be in a position of power and consequently of
freedom.
Transgression of a Sadean nature is linked to graffiti in a little-known short story by
Apollinaire, set not in the streets of Paris this time, but in an underground cave in the forest. On his
way to Werp, the narrator of „Le Roi-Lune‟ („The Moon King‟) loses his way and decides to seek
shelter from the weather and the dark in the entrance to a cave. 20 On hearing music, he goes further
in and discovers a network of passageways and caverns, at the heart of which a banquet is taking
place. Living food serves itself to the guests, who sit at tables without legs on inflatable rubber chairs,
tended to by a Negro slave. 21 The banquet over, the lights are turned off and the cave‟s inhabitants
adjourn. The narrator, following their voices, discovers „the most extraordinary obscene graffiti‟ on the
walls of a dark, narrow passageway. The various etchings parody the values of France‟s monarchy,
the Catholic faith and artistic tradition. One phrase reads „I would like to make love to the abbess of
Gandersheim,‟ the Abbey of Gandersheim being a German convent from the Middle Ages, and
another „I want Madame de Pompadour,‟ the official mistress of Louis XV. Elsewhere, Michelangelo is
claimed to have „given great pleasure to Hans von Jagow,‟ and the words are supported with a
drawing of an enormous phallus. 22 The techniques of the various inscriptions are described, some
having been undertaken in pencil, others in chalk or charcoal and others scratched into the surface of
the wall with a metal point. Pierced hearts, phalluses and winged Cupids make up „tout un blason
indécent et capricieux‟ (a whole indecent and capricious blazon), the graffiti body-parts subverting the
courtly, romantic blazon and making up a low, crude one that recalls the walls of the factories that
Brassaï wrote about.
Papers of Surrealism, Issue 9, Summer 2011 5