Translation, Typography, and the Avant-Garde's Impossible Text
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUPThis essay considers a typographical illustration in Tristan Tzara's Le Coeur à Gaz as a kind of perverse theatrical text, one that defies translation into performance and thus undermines the integrity of theatrical embodiment. Drawing on translation theory, the article argues that Tzara's seemingly unperformable, typographical mode of dramatic writing both raises and subverts the translation of textual bodies of the page to the performing bodies of the stage, and fundamentally breaks down the division between reader and performer, text and performance, paper and theatre. This breakdown suggests that avant-garde drama and performances may not only have been antitextual, as has been widely argued, but also profoundly anti-body—a direct attack on the performing body even within the milieu of the theatre itself.
Tristan Tzara's Typographical Dance
Click for larger view | Figure 1 Original image position, reprinted from Tzara's Le Coeur à Gaz (Paris: G. L. M., 1946), 33. |
Contained within Tristan Tzara's Dada drama Le Coeur à Gaz (The Gas-Heart, 1923) is an odd illustration, without explanation or apparent function. In the middle of act 3, at the conclusion of a soliloquy by the character of Mouth, Tzara demarcates a section of the text with the title "DANSE" and describes it in a parenthetical note: "(du monsieur [End Page 467] qui tombe de l'entonnoir du plafond sur la table)" (DANCE of the gentleman who falls from a funnel in the ceiling onto the table).1 Following this description, Tzara places a series of letters that recreate the dance described in the stage direction. The dance appears as the letters "Y," "V," and an italicized "r" scatter down the page (fig. 1). The reader initially confronting the image may be unclear as to how the letters correspond to the stage direction that precedes them. At the top of the illustration, one sees four small capital Ys positioned on top of a larger capital Y; at the bottom, a series of Ys descend both in position and in size into a capital V. At first glance, the static image appears to contradict the previous stage direction. If the letters are meant to echo the objects described—the funnel, the gentleman, the table—then the large Y at the top of the illustration appears to correspond to the table. There is no funnel present, however, unless the reader of the text rotates the page, such that the V appears inverted at the top of the page (fig. 2).
Click for larger view | Figure 2 Original image position. |
Read upside-down from top to bottom, the now-inverted V becomes the funnel in the ceiling, and the series of Ys suggests a figure falling out of the funnel, growing larger as he moves closer to the viewer or more fully into the textual frame of the action. In the center of the illustration, the letter appears to move across the page randomly, changing size and shape by transforming into an italicized r. This letter r resembles the small Y, suggesting the same letter now embellished. The close approximations of size between the r and Y suggest at least an affinity between them, if they do not represent the same character changing as he moves through his falling dance from the funnel. To complete the dance, the reader again must rotate the image to propel the dancing figure (Y) from the open center of the page to the top of the largest Y (fig. 3). It is surely no coincidence that the largest V and Y are exactly the same size. Both serve as static [End Page 468] set pieces to frame the smaller, active letters in motion. Once the rotation is complete, the little Y appears to flip over twice on top of the larger Y, as if concluding the fall with the dance on the table described above. Both the composition of the illustration itself and the movement of the...
