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

© Caroline Levitt, 2011
Rediscovering the libertine residents of the cave, the narrator is disconcerted by their
pornographic practices and obscene orgies. However, as a result of an invention that holds and
recounts frozen moments in time, he finds himself holding the body of a woman, which he imagines to
be Leda warding off Zeus in the form of a swan. Affected by the experience, and even though
disgusted by the „sotadic graffiti,‟ the narrator nevertheless feels compelled to add to them by writing
„J‟ai cocufié le cygne‟ (I cuckolded the swan), presumably claiming to have slept with Leda, and thus
to have cuckolded Zeus. 23 The attempted freedom of the libertines from social constraint, epitomised
in the work of the Marquis de Sade, is related here to the practice of writing obscenities on walls,
which in turn is defined as an impulsive practice that results from strange and intense experiences.
Making to leave this strange underworld, the narrator finds that he is, once again, lost.
Instead of the cave‟s exit, he finds the „caverne de sorcellerie‟ (the cave of sorcery), where he is
confronted by the Moon King. Whilst the narrator recognises the figure to be the mad King Louis II de
Bavière, he is also an obvious parody of Louis XIV, the Sun King. Using a system of minutely
regulated microphones, he takes the narrator on a world tour before realising that he is not wearing a
mask in his presence and therefore calling for guards to cut off his testicles. At once a personification
of insanity and inversion, the king turns out to be a tribal, primitive sovereign who is free from logic
and reality, and therefore, like the narrator of „Onirocritique,‟ powerful. He is creative, his inventions
being at the heart of the adventure in the cave, and once again madness and transgression are held
to be both productive and means of overcoming limits. The narrator‟s experience takes place at night,
and when the morning comes he manages to find his way once more and reach Werp, telling no one
of his adventure for some time. The narrator escapes the domain of the Moon King through returning
to daylight, or perhaps through exiting the dream world of which the king may well have been a
fabrication, although this is never explicitly stated and the narrator is reluctant to attribute his
adventure to an „origine surnaturel‟ (a supernatural origin). In „Le Roi-Lune,‟ cave art and graffiti, the
walls of the cave and the walls of modern Paris (including the rue Berton), are explicitly brought
together, and the boundaries between the real and dream worlds are blurred.
Trapped within a prison of a very different kind, this time the trenches in 1916, Apollinaire
scratched a crude caricature of soldiers into the lid of his toothpaste tin [Fig. 2]. 24 The caption, „Ah!
Dieu que la guerre est jolie‟ (Oh! God, this war is lovely), is a quotation (with the exclamation marked
moved) from the poem „L‟Adieu du cavalier,‟ in which „Ah Dieu!‟ in the first stanza is a pun on the
dying soldier‟s farewell (Adieu) in the second. The poem was originally written in August 1915, whilst
Apollinaire was some way from the trenches in the Ardennes forest, but his repetition of the phrase
here transforms it from a distant image of a soldier‟s death to something far more imminent, that
Apollinaire deals with through humour and irony. 25 The scratching of the caricature, a momentary
release from boredom, is not public in the same way as the graffiti in the rue Berton, nor is it
destructive of someone else‟s property as at La Santé prison. Rather, it is a creative use of an
unimportant surface, which would likely have been discarded had it not been for Apollinaire‟s
inscription.
Papers of Surrealism, Issue 9, Summer 2011 6