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

We received an unusually high degree of interest in The Posthuman Dada Guide. For this reason, we have decided to print two responses to Codrescu's book.

Andrei Codrescu, MacCurdy Distinguished Professor at Louisiana State University, is the editor of the journal Exquisite Corpse, a prolific prose and poetry writer, essayist, translator, and a well-known National Public Radio commentator. The present volume is the result of his lifelong brotherly affinity with dada. At the end of the 1960s, when he started publishing in the United States, Codrescu defined himself as "Comrade Past and Mister Present." An author now revered in the literary circles of his native Romania, he can afford to produce his own version of avant-garde in general and modern Romanian literary history in particular.

While it takes its cue from an imaginary game of chess, the book is in fact a witty pointer into the real fabric of contemporary art and politics. It is structured as a guide with entries ordered alphabetically "with a tip of hat to the kabbalah" (19). We are familiar with most of the names, concepts, and places but this is nothing like a dictionary of received ideas. According to its author, it works by answering questions about the story of dada, while each answer corresponds to Codrescu's view of it. Even if we do not necessarily buy into his all-inclusive framing, we can only appreciate the comprehensive quality of his project. Codrescu knows how to combine "Lenin," "Joyce," "Henri Michaux," "money," "negerdichte," "new year's resolution by my poetry students, 2008," and "waking up". An informed cicerone of the avant-garde, the author allows himself to be contaminated: his tone is witty, self-ironic, contradictory, entertaining, irreverent, and self-sufficient altogether. He makes a seamless epic collage out of first-hand accounts, traceable as Tristan Tzara's "Chronique zurichoise," Richard Huelsenbeck's Memoirs of a Dada Drummer, Hugo Ball's Flight out of Time, and The Dada Painters and Poets edited by Robert Motherwell. Some of the details about Jewish intellectual life in Eastern Europe conducive to avant-garde activities are tributary to Tom Sandqvist's Dada East: The Romanians of Cabaret Voltaire. Codrescu also accords rightful importance to the contribution made by women to avant-garde history including Mina Loy, the baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, and Emmy Hennings.

In Codrescu's opinion, the supposed encounter between Tristan Tzara and Vladimir Ilych Lenin is a symbol for the complex relationship between art and ideology in contemporary life. There are no spectators or kibbitzers in Lenin's revolution or in Tzara's performances, since everyone needed to be involved in their enterprise. This way, Codrescu opens the discussion about the function of public space, masses, and their role in revolutions or innovative artistic movements. In the world of today, when "borders are largely imaginary" and "will become wholly imaginary, soon to be replaced by aesthetic differences" (5), the notion of public space changes. According to the logic of the book, Tristan Tzara stands as the primordial example of an artist able to create anarchist "TAZ (Temporary Autonomous Zones)" (9, 18). Dada was the symbol of nihilism, encapsulating in its soirées in Zürich and later in Paris the mockery of any authority. Through a critique of language and by means of recycling the means of cabaret and revue, the movement became the locus of a revolution against aesthetic, moral, social, and political codes. As other cultural critics, such as Martin Püchner, have noted, the dadaists established a new socio-political order through direct contact with the public, privileging modes of expression that developed a group spirit and a larger concept of literarity.¹

In recreating himself as an early 21st century dadaist, Codrescu implicitly poses several questions that students and scholars of the avant-garde will likely find intriguing. Is there a dadaist style? Where does the timeless quality of dada reside? What qualifies someone as a dada writer...