Blog 3: Tzara and Dadaism -- Nicole Seifert

In Tzara's manifestos, a section that stuck out to me as contradictory is section VIII of "5. manifesto on feeble love and bitter love" (92). This passage provides clear and concise instructions on how to make a dadaist poem by shuffling words in a newspaper article. This contradicts both what Tzara conveys through the content and style of his writing (i.e. through what he says and what he does).

The function of this passage defies the function of dadaism. That is, it creates a formulaic method of creation and also defines dadaism, countering Tzara's claim of him being against systems (79) and also the idea of dadaism as a whole being indefinable. Additionally, he provides false information within the passage by stating that the word-scrambling method will cause the "writer" (which is also used in spite of the truth that nothing is actually being written, but merely rewritten in this process) to become "infinitely original". In fact, the writer who follows these instructions can only be finitely original, as they have a limited set of words and combinations (as opposed to writing directly from the human mind, which we can claim is infinitely original). There are also other odd moments in the instructions, such as "take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag" (how could one do otherwise?), "Copy conscientiously" (why would one need to focus carefully if the words are already chosen for them?), and finally, the statement "The poem will be like you" (because if it is created by a 'random' scrambling, how can it necessarily be like one person or another?).

There is also a contradiction in the example that follows the instructions, as it follows general patterns of English (or French, pre-translation) syntax. Although it is possible for a random generation to produce something close to coherence, it is hard for the reader to believe that a rearrangement of all words would result in having the right parts of speech in the right places.

Tzara is extending nonsense into the social world by purposely misrepresenting dadaism. He titles his work a manifesto, which presumably should convey his ideas accurately and provide outsiders with an introduction to what he stands for. Instead, his manifestos, and this passage in particular, are attempting to explain dadaism within the realm of dadaism and thus send mixed messages to the non-dadaist reader. When the unaccustomed reader classifies something as a "manifesto" and another thing as "instructions", they have ideas of how the text should be treated. Yet in this text, Tzara writes manifestos that are not manifestos and instructions that are not instructions, which makes these things (and reactions) from the social world into nonsense.