Notes
notes Introduction 1. To hypothesize a reiterative history is not novel; Marx discusses its anachronistic construction in his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte where he proposes a reiterative model with a changed valence: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great events and historical personages occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce,” (Marx and Engels 115). Similarly the circular model of historic epochs has been presented variously by Vico and Spengler; it has appeared as well as the trope of the second coming, which forms the foundation of much Christian thinking. 2. I take the phrase “Archeology of the New” from the Irish poet Fergal Gaynor who mentioned it in conversation on the topic of this book. 3. The implications of palindromic time are taken up in Stewart Home’s anthology Plagiarism: Art as Commodity and Strategies for its Negation. 4. Canguilhem offers a discerning discussion of anomaly in the context of the biological sciences. See 125–149 (especially 131–37). Chapter 1 1. Ball himself supplies the evidence for Barzun’s and Divoire’s precedence in his summary of the first cabaret at his new club. “And, at Mr Tristan Tzara’s instigation, Messrs Tzara, Huelsenbeck and Janco performed (for the very first time in Zurich and in the whole world) simultaneous verses from Messrs Henri Barzun and Fernand Divoire, as well as a simultaneous poem of his own composition.” (See Ball, “Cabaret Voltaire,” 20.) In actual fact Barzun’s “Chants Simultanés” were first performed in 1912. 2. See Higgins, Horizons: The Poetics and Theory of the Intermedia). 3. T. J. Demos interprets the poem politically as an attack on military authority and, while noting that the theme of homelessness articulates onto the poem’s use of multiple and mutually invasive languages, fails to note in this an important antecedent to both The Waste Land and Finnegans Wake. See Demos, “Zurich Dada: The Aesthetics of Exile ,” 7–29. Although the poem clearly alludes to the Great War (then in progress), I do not concur with Demos’ interpretation but see instead a more local cause, a veritable coterie joke. Huelsenbeck recalls that the Cabaret Voltaire took over the premises of the former Cabaret Pantagruel at Spiegelgasse I, a century-old building, owned at the time by the ex-sailor Jan Ephraim, “now berthed in Zurich” (Huelsenbeck 4). 4. It seems Huelsenbeck incorporated genuine language following a felicitous discussion with the proprietor of the Cabaret Voltaire, Jan Ephraim, who was familiar with the South Pacific and African coasts as a sailor where he had acquired knowledge of some authentic African songs. Ephraim supplied Huelsenbeck with this brief passage: 212 notes Trabadya La Modjere Magamore Magagere Trabadja Bono (Huelsenbeck 8–9) According to Huelsenbeck when his authentic negro poems were presented at the Cabaret Voltaire “the audience thought they were wonderful” (9). Why Huelsenbeck refers to them in the plural is somewhat puzzling because he only mentions the three lines above. Moreover, evidence from Ball indicates that Huelsenbeck performed only two such songs on March 30. A Maori song “Toto Vaco” was included, however, in his 1920 anthology Dada Almanach and was probably supplied to him by Ephraim. 5. Morgenstern’s pithy description of his song, as well as both poems are reprinted (in their entirety) in Rasula and McCaffery, 104–5. Scheerbart’s text first appeared in his 1900 novel Ein Eisenbahnroman, ich liebe dich (A Railway Novel, I Love You). While both poems utilize question and exclamation marks, Morgenstern complicates a purely phonetic reading by adding unreadable “passages,” such as a semicolon enclosed in parentheses (;) and a blank space within brackets [ ]. It is interesting to note that Morgenstern’s own spiritual and mystical propensities (he was strongly influenced by Rudolph Steiner’s theosophical thinking) cannily accord with those of Ball. I discuss Scheerbart’s poem “Kikakoku” in relation to Ball’s own “gadji beri bimba” in Prior to Meaning, 166–67. 6. Ball volunteered to enlist in the German army but was turned down because of ill health. He did, however, personally travel to observe the war in Belgium, and his reactions are discussed later in this chapter. 7. Yeats’ plans for revising Irish Theater along the lines of Japanese Noh theater leads him to remark in 1916 that “[t]he human voice can only become louder by being less articulate, by discovering some new musical sort of roar and scream” (Yeats iv). This remarkable congruence of Yeats’ emerging theatrical...
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