Modernist Song: The Poetry of Tristan Tzara (review)

Tristan Tzara's name is frequently paired with the qualifier, 'the Father of Dada', but that combination has become worn by usage, the three capitalised signifiers Tzara, Father and Dada bound together as cliché, emptied of meaning. It is the kind of statement that Tzara himself would have uttered ironically, as a performative gesture of self-proclamation and implicit manifesto against taking one's own status too seriously. Stephen Forcer's book Modernist Song: The Poetry of Tristan Tzara impresses in that it does not use the myth as a ready-made prop with which to proclaim it subject's importance. Instead, Forcer takes it as a starting point from which to tackle tropes and to flesh out the flat portraits of Tzara that have marooned him as poster boy for Dada, a face and name replete with slogans, but without substance. Forcer's book – incredibly, the first book-length study of Tzara's poetry in English – reminds us that Tzara was more than a zealous revolutionary figurehead and certainly other than a patriarch and also that, above all, he was a poet. Through close and detailed readings of a range of Tzara's texts, Forcer brings out the richness of linguistic innovation in work that has been too easily dismissed as nihilistic or nonsensical. Not only does he show it to be formally and intellectually innovative, but he probes beyond the difficulties inherent in the rejection of narrative to demonstrate that, semantically too, the words are heavy with possibilities. He makes innovative use of 'glossolalia' (or speaking in tongues) as a theme through the first half of the book to illuminate how meanings are encoded and generated by ostensibly nonsensical acoustic and visual combinations, and homes in on the dynamic relationships between the writer and text, and text and the reader. Forcer looks beyond Dada's lifespan to the entire four decades of Tzara's production, using cultural frameworks to illuminate his approaches over the years, rather than to contain them. Eschewing the word Dada altogether in his book's title, Forcer calls it 'Modernist Song', restoring the importance of rhythm and cadence to Tzara's oeuvre, as well as orality and performance. Even the choice of the cover photograph is a surprise, featuring Tzara not as the young, iconic Dada chief, but instead as aged, somewhere between serene or vulnerable, but certainly human. What distinguishes Modernist Song, above all, is Forcer's sustained and precise analysis of selected poems, his own interrogations of signifying play, which draw on a range of theoretical tools and critical references. In the latter chapters, he draws out themes of nationhood, selfhood, longing and ageing, to show that Tzara was a poet as well as a performer, a man as well as an icon and an intellectual more than a clown. Tzara's name is rightly linked to Dada, to one of the great -isms of the twentieth century, but where his name has been evoked principally as avant-garde agitator in the arts, Forcer restores it to the landscape of modernist writing, bringing out the startling pleasure as well as shock of his poetic work.