What stood out to me was how Dadaism was described as taking scraps of magazines, placing them in a hat, and scattering them on the ground to create art and poetry. This sort of style of unconventionally creating images through a string of seemingly unrelated words together pushes the boundary of art and poetry that both Dadaism and Richter's poems possess.
In the poem "The Guest Expulsed" by Hans Arp, words are seemingly strung together as if the words were written down on scraps of paper and then tossed down to create phrases and sentences. For example, the first line says "Their rubber hammer strikes down the sea". In a very strict sense, this is nonsensical because there is no appropriate context to who "their" is referring to, and it is strange to picture someone taking a rubber hammer and hitting sea water with it. The entire poem continues in this manner, a rag tag conglomerate of strange images that all together create a single poem.
Their rubber hammer strikes the sea/Down the black general so brave./With silken braid they deck him out/As fifth wheel on the common grave
All striped in yellow with the tides/They decorate his firmament./The epaulettes they then construct/Of June July and wet cement.
That is the beauty of it, that working against structure by working within structure can create a poem that is created by chance. Very similar to what we have seen before in previous texts, Richter's poems do work within the conventional forms and grammatical usage of words in order to create poems of random words.
This random placement of words, this chance, is what Dadaism is trying to get at. Dadaism works against order and against any kind of structure, but the paradox is that the first principle of Dadaism is to have no principle. Dadaism implies that there is a structure to create no structure, that there is a systematic way to work and write against the system. This chance allows the artist to disregard logic, which Tzara writes "Logic is a complication. Logic is always wrong. It draws the threads of notions, words, in their formal exterior, toward illusory ends and centers." Dadaism says to throw away logic in order to create art that is simple, artistic, and clean. In a way, it is to disregard meaning altogether, all previous notions and concepts of the words, and simply just appreciate the existence and the sounds of the words together. This is seen a very basic sense in another poem of Richter's:
gadji beri bimba glandridi laula lonni cadori/gadjama gramma berida bimbala glandri galassassa laulitalomini/...
This is a very drastic example of the active simplicity of Dadaism. Literally, the sounds of letters put together defies any and almost all logical sense. It creates words within the conventional ways of making words with letters and allows the reader to see the appreciation of pure sounds. The principle to writing or reading this poem is that there is no principle. This poem, to me, epitomizes the idea of Dadaism, throwing random letters together by chance to create unconventional words that forces the reader to throw away any notions of meaning in order to appreciate the simplicity of chance, unconventionality, and disorder.
While dada writing and surrealism writing are very similar in a number of ways, they are also very different in many ways as well. To some extent, it seems as though the latter is a continuation of the former and works on heightening the ideas found there and taking them to a new and more extreme level. This idea is exemplified by what Matt wrote in his post as well as through general ideas relating to Dadaism and surrealism, which we have learned about through Tzara, Richter, and Breton and their writing.
ReplyDeleteThe main difference between Dadaism and surrealism is that the former makes more of an attempt to question norms and reality whereas surrealism accepts and takes on a whole new reality and seems to almost disregard true reality. Dadaism, on the other hand, focuses on working against reality while still remaining a part of it. There are a number of examples from the above-mentioned works that depict this idea.
As Matt points out in his first paragraph, the way Richter describes Dadaism is by taking a poem; ripping it up and gluing it back together in any way that chance scatters the words. In many ways, this idea is similar to how one might understand surrealism, which is also related to chance and fate and how those ideas relate to one’s control of the world and specifically reality. However, part of the reason why surrealism and Dadaism are different is because surrealism takes this idea to another level. Richter clearly puts a lot of energy and thought into this action and almost focuses too much on it and how it is different than how one might normally write a poem. In this way, he is focused on comparing the reality of dada to normal reality. If one looks at Richter’s idea of ripping up the poem to let chance make a new one, it is very much in line with reality and warping it to become nonsense. However, surrealism would simply remove all touch of reality and what would normally be considered “sense” to make a new kind of sense and reality.
Matt’s blog post focuses on the idea of stringing random words or letters together to create a new meaning, which is a great example of dada writing. Compared to Dadaism, surrealism is different in this regard. In many ways, it seems that dada writers try too hard to have readers question reality and conventional understanding of what nonsense is compared to what sense is. Surrealism on the other hand seems to focus more on the content and understanding of reality rather than the words themselves. One can see this clearly in Breton’s writing, especially in regards to the character Nadja. She is the epitome of surrealism and a surrealist character. She has her own reality and is often found disregarding norms of society and what one could consider “normal” reality. Breton focuses on her throughout the novel as a means to portray what surrealism is in the context of society and reality. This idea is very much in contrast to the dada writing we have read in class, which seems to be less of a story than Breton’s novel and more focused on warping reality into nonsense.
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed reading this post Matt made because he made an interesting point of the relationship between structure and the meaning of the poem. Matt’s examination of structure was not similar to that I had made before in my post, but I can definitely see where his point of view is coming from. The examples of phrases such as, “Down the black general so brave. With silken braid they deck him out,” provide the reader with a better idea of this structural play the author is constructing. Matt describes this playful contextual make up as separate images coming together to create a single poem. I think that the idea of contradiction can still be arising in Richter’s creation of the poem, because he is trying to go against structure, but it also allows for a change in meaning. There is definitely a mutual relationship between both in which can be seen as a random replacement, or insertion of words that is very heavily reliant on chance. Dadaism’s concept is to not accept any sort of order of form, but it is also centralized in contradiction. So therefore, there can be a structure to get around structure, which I believe Richter was getting at and Matt was pointing out. By sticking with a sentence structure, the author is going against the rules of Dadaism, but at the same time keeping them by creating different meanings with different selections of words. In my post from last week, I talked further about the idea of rambling and writing whatever comes to mind. This idea can also be related to Matt’s comments on taking words and after having them all down, finally compiling a sufficiently understandable and deeply meaning piece of poetry.
Sari dove into analyzing the differences between Dadaism and surrealism very well by describing how both can play with nonsense factors, but there are differences, which may place this piece of writing specifically closer to Dadaism than surrealism. Reality in Dadaism is not necessarily viewed and used the same way as it is in surrealism. Surrealism tries to take present reality and works to morph and almost exaggerate certain aspects of it in order to generate nonsense with an overall, underlying understanding. Dadaism on the other hand, just as Sari put it, is able to keep reality and work to contradict it so much that reality is questioned. In our current readings focusing more on surrealism, structured images and concepts are not exactly what convey reality and meaning. Instead, the construct of reality gets played with more than structure, producing a varied type of nonsensical literature. Dadaism and surrealism share the idea that both can be seen as logically confusing and misleading. There is a change in reality, but the way these different movements create the change varies among authors and creators of both types of art and literature.