The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara & Lenin Play Chess (review)

When I was in high school, my art gang and I swore by Hans Richter's Dada: Art & Anti-Art. This tome was full of tales, a swashbuckling old artist spinning anecdotes— yet in a scholarly way—about fascinating characters. My classmate was inspired by it to make a short Super 8mm film biography of prizefighter Arthur Cravan, that (in his movie's title) "Dada Bantamweight Rascal." The Posthuman Dada Guide makes for a similarly useful handbook on dadaism for a student's backpack, thin enough to poke out of a jeans pocket like a travel guide.

Andrei Codrescu is a poet who early in his career was recommended to us teenage dadapuppies by one of our hippest high school teachers. More recently, Codrescu is known as an intelligent National Public Radio commentator, a sage with an accent reflecting Romanian roots similar to those of his countryman Tristan Tzara. Being of the generation that grew up with— or under—Communism, then having watched it crumble from North American exile in his middle years, Codrescu cannot help but also be fascinated by the figure of Lenin. The author seems to feel an affinity with Tzara on many levels, whereas Lenin may embody socially minded censors, editors and college deans who have policed him throughout his lifetime. Consequently, Codrescu celebrates dadaists, who

meant to induce collective delirium, joy, hopefully, but rage if there was no choice, and to drive the maddened collective to either an orgy or arbitrary destruction, "arbitrary" being the operative word. "Nonarbitrary" destruction was what the political mobs had been doing forever and what, unbeknownst to the dadas of 1916, they were going to do to much more sinister effect in the coming decades

(p. 91).

Tzara was born Sammy Rosenstock, while Lenin was born V.I. Ulyanov. Codrescu reveals how names are a slippery thing, as are many of the concepts, tropes and personalities whirling in the historical constellation of dada, whose parts he seizes and fishes out from the maelstrom for examination. The alphabetical organization of this book serves this process, though at times (when so much is packed in under several dates in 1915), it seems like a slightly lazy one. As a creative artist, Codrescu witnessed many of the most radical aesthetic

ideas of the century tamed into fashion and commodity and academic curricula.

Today, almost everything you're wearing or thinking that gives you the slightest bit of subversive pleasure comes from a dead dadaist. Janco's costumes for Huelsenbeck, for instance, have been recycled by fashion so many times, there are now real bishops wearing them

(p. 95).

There is wit here, which is essential for dada (though too often not for the humorless surrealists). There are some nice passages of poetical imagery-hurling, which would only look precious if quoted out of context but enliven the chapters in which they appear, often at their conclusive and climactic endings. And, in the spirit of the dandy gossipmonger Hans Richter, Codrescu tosses out parenthetical asides that maddeningly cry for unpacking over a pitcher of mojitos: a linkage of dadaism and vampirism elicits "'Wherever there is cable, there I am,' Grampa Munster [Al Lewis] said to me in Havana, 1996." Was Cuban dadaist Francis Picabia also at the table, Andrei? Lily Munster on Fidel's arm?

Any reviewer in Michigan takes pleasure, although reservedly, in Codrescu's references to dada in our rustbelt. He conflates two years worth of events that include a Living Theater university performance, an urban anarchists' disinformation project an hour away, and a student reviewer's opportune, zeitgeist-grabbing "Paul is Dead" college newspaper hoax . . . but Codrescu's seamless fabric does weave it—normalize it—all into a jolly, fast-moving story.

Because (snicker) after all, Dada is Normal, and Normal is Nice.