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

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© 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
© Caroline Levitt, 2011 Fig. 2: Guillaume Apollinaire, Ah! Dieu que la guerre est jolie, 1916. Engraved image on toothpaste tin, dimensions unknown, former collection of Richard Anacréon, location now unknown. Photo held by the Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet, Paris, ref. 7213-54 (Photo: Suzanne Nagy). Reproduced with the kind permission of Gilbert Boudar. Bataille, in his „L‟Art primitif‟ sees graffiti as at once a violent act against the wall, and as a form of „alteration‟ of it, alteration suggesting a change from one state to another, which might be akin to either decomposition or transformation into something sacred and precious. Susan Harrow, writing on the objects created by Apollinaire during the war, comments that „The proliferation of small objects in the war poems speaks urgently of a need to imprint the world with private desire and longing, to alter its surface.‟ 26 If the surface of the world, that is to say what Harrow terms „the great narrative of history‟ can be altered through etching into that surface a very personal „micro-history,‟ then Apollinaire‟s toothpaste tin, whilst it may well have been conceived as an ephemeral and playful means of overcoming boredom, becomes something precious and telling that was deemed initially by Apollinaire and later by Richard Anacréon, its one-time owner, worthy of conservation and of safeguarding through a photograph. 27 The inconsequential becomes precious, litter is transformed into literature, and the distinction between the two is continually collapsed by the work of both Apollinaire and the surrealists. Papers of Surrealism, Issue 9, Summer 2011 7
Page 1 and 2: © Caroline Levitt, 2011 From the W
Page 3 and 4: © Caroline Levitt, 2011 Apollinair
Page 5: © Caroline Levitt, 2011 difference
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 and 16: © Caroline Levitt, 2011 of a perso
Page 17 and 18: © Caroline Levitt, 2011 The first
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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