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

© Caroline Levitt, 2011
It might be more accurate to consider Apollinaire‟s toothpaste tin in terms not of graffiti, but of
another form of instinctive mark-making: the doodle. Indeed Apollinaire‟s pictorially constructed
„ideogrammes‟ (many of which were included in Calligrammes) have been described dismissively by
Roger Little as „amusing doodles,‟ lacking in rhythm, a characteristic which, Little claims, is
fundamental to poetry. 28 However the very fact that Apollinaire‟s toothpaste tin is only one example
amongst many of actual doodling in his work suggests that, if the ideogrammes are in fact „doodles,‟
they should be regarded far from dismissively.
Copious marginal sketches are present in many of Apollinaire‟s manuscripts, including
Calligrammes and Le Poète assassiné. Some, particularly intricate, appear in the margins of „Le Roi-
Lune.‟ 29 A dancing figure with a thin body and large head is perhaps indicative of Apollinaire‟s thought
process in conjuring his description of the Moon King. On the following page a beaked face wearing a
fedora hat seems to recall the intrepid nature of the adventure and the strange metamorphosis of
objects, beings and concepts within the cave. Like many of Apollinaire‟s other manuscripts, that of Le
Poète assassiné is written on the reverse side of scrap paper, and Apollinaire‟s re-use of all kinds of
paper, from headed notepaper of the Radio France to geographical plans, suggests his own writing to
be in itself a form of overwriting that has greater significance than what it obscures.
Ernst Gombrich, writing on „The Pleasures of Boredom: Four Centuries of Doodles‟ considers
a series of doodles found in the 1727 ledger of the Neapolitan bank as „an expression of the play
instinct which never leaves us even when we grow up‟ and comments that „there are two kinds of
games which these scribes like to indulge in, one derived from writing, the other from imagemaking.‟
30 He explains that the images that the doodler produces can never equate to failure, for they
were never intended to be anything at all: they merely exist as the result of an instinctual process, and
„any face you scribble, however primitive or distorted, will impress you as a "creation".‟ 31 Such art is
required to conform to no set of rules or principles. Whether or not the doodler is deeply informed by
an innate knowledge of image-making conventions, founded in the history of western art, the marginal
scribble is perhaps the most authentic and direct record that can be found of an individual‟s impulsive
mark-making, and as such Gombrich sees the automatism advocated by Breton for surrealism as one
of the climaxes of the development of the doodle. Perhaps the collaborative cadavre exquis
(„exquisite corpse‟), itself a game, is the epitome of this, in which case Apollinaire‟s ideogrammes, be
they „amusing doodles,‟ can be viewed as a stepping stone to this surrealist practice.
Both the toothpaste tin and the poem that Apollinaire finds on the back of a list of prison rules
use the material to hand, however inappropriate it might be; they both respond to an impulse for
mark-making, undermining the everyday actions of tooth-brushing and conforming to rules. Gombrich
writes:
The doodle, like the graffito, is the fruit of opportunity … the doodle may be described as the
innocent brother of the graffito. While the vandal is tempted to disfigure a white wall with his
rude message or scrawl, mainly to exercise his power and get rid of his aggression, the
doodler normally wishes to remain private. 32
Brassaï, in a poem about graffiti, recognised that the purpose behind writing on walls or inappropriate
surfaces is not always vandalism:
To engrave one‟s name
Papers of Surrealism, Issue 9, Summer 2011 8