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1. Cacophony, Abstraction, and Potentiality: The Fate of the Dada Sound Poem
- The University of Alabama Press
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1 Cacophony, Abstraction, and Potentiality The fate of the Dada sound Poem First let me offer a necessary prolegomenon. This chapter relies heavily upon quotations from Ball’s diary—which was published posthumously (in abridged form) as Flight Out of Time—for precisely the same reason as Ball’s fellow Dadaist Hans Richter relied upon it. As Richter elucidates: I shall often quote from Ball’s diaries, because I know of no better source of evidence on the moral and philosophical origins of the Dada revolt which started at the Cabaret Voltaire. It is entirely possible that any or all of the other Dadaists . . . went through the same inner development, but no one but Ball left a record of these inner conflicts. And no one achieved, even in fragmentary form, such precise formulations as Ball, the poet and thinker. (14–15) Notwithstanding Richter’s trust, Flight Out of Time presents an interpretative challenge in being both compiled retroactively and published posthumously. Taking his personal diary entries between 1910–21, Ball started revising them in 1924 (after the emotions and incidents described had settled into a reflective distance) and Die Flucht aus der Zeit (Flight Out of Time) was finally published in 1927. A second edition appeared in 1946 with a forward by Ball’s wife Emmy Ball-Hennings. It is important to emphasize the fact that Die Flucht aus der Zeit was assembled from the controlling, executive viewpoint of Ball’s new conversion to Catholicism (Michel 1). For the earlier Ball, during his Zurich days (the focus of this chapter), God was not dead but reified in the profiteering plunder of German capitalism and supported ideologically by a state apparatus that included religion. Ball had already launched a scathing attack on the conflation of Christianity and capitalism in his pre-Dada poem “Der Henker” (The Hangman) 12 Chapter 1 where Christ is born as “the god of Gold” and lives as “the god of lustful greed” (der Christenheit Götzplunder) (quoted in Steinke 79). I. Prelude No sound is dissonant that tells of Life. —Coleridge The sound poem is the last of three rapid developments within the performative poetics of Zurich Dada that appeared between late March and June 1916. Marcel Janco, Richard Huelsenbeck, and Tristan Tzara introduced the simultaneous poem (a genre invented by Henri Barzun and Fernand Divoire) at the same time as Huelsenbeck inaugurated his quasi-ethnographic “negro songs.”1 Both types were launched at Hugo Ball’s newly established Cabaret Voltaire on March 30, 1916 along with Ball’s own contribution (some poems without words) on June 23, 1916. In the simultaneities, such as Tzara’s inaugural “The Admiral is Looking for a House to Rent,” sound, text, discrepant noises, whistles, cries, and drums interweave in a sonic version of collage. Interlocution collapses into a texture of promiscuous parlance and polylogue at the same time as linguistic fragments , in French, German, and English, intersect and combine into efficacious new amalgams. (It’s surely no coincidence that the three languages utilized are respectively those of the three combatants in the Great War and most fitting to a performance in quadrilingual Switzerland.) Although, as a collective manifestation , the simultaneity attains the status of a gesamtkunstwerk only by way of a parodic valence, it nonetheless brings about that desired confluence and border blur of song, noise, music, and dance that Dick Higgins christened “intermedia ” in the 1960s.2 Ball has left a succinct definition of the simultaneous poem: “a contrapuntal recitative in which three or more voices speak, sing, whistle, etc., at the same time in such a way that the elegiac, humorous, or bizarre content of the piece is brought out by these combinations” (Ball 57). Ball is also sensitive to the more somber, existential implications of this cacophonous, combinatorial genre. To his mind it represents “the background—the inarticulate, the disastrous , the decisive [expressing] the conflict in the vox humana with a world that threatens, ensnares, and destroys” (ibid.)3 Huelsenbeck conceived his chants nègre as whimsical abstractions designed to evoke the rhythms and “semantics” of African songs. As stereotypical and racist as Vachel Lindsay’s 1914 poem “The Congo” (Huelsenbeck’s versions mix phrasesof calculatednonsense,eachrefrainendingwiththephrase“umbaumba”), [3.230.128.106] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 14:29 GMT) Cacophony, abstraction, and Potentiality 13 they gained limited authenticity when Huelsenbeck substituted an authentic African song for happy senselessness (retaining, however, his beloved end-refrain). The chant nègre took on a genuinely ethnopoetic dimension when...