The Dadaist Prose of Williams and Cummings: A Novelette and [No Title]

One of the most famous and polemic catalogues in postmodern theory was proposed by Ihab Hassan in his study of postmodernism:

Modernism	Postmodernism
Romanticism/Symbolism	Pataphysics/Dadaism
Form (conjunctive, closed)	Antiform (disjunctive, open)
Purpose	Play
Design	Chance
Hierarchy	Anarchy
Mastery/Logos	Exhaustion/Silence
Art Object/Finished Work	Process/Performance/Happening
Distance	Participation
Creation/Totalization	Decreation/Deconstruction
Synthesis	Antithesis
Presence	Absence
Centering	Dispersal (Dismemberment 267–68)

These often quoted dichotomies have always attracted my attention, particularly the first one, as it represents a Damocles sword constantly threatening the claim of originality promoted by the high priests of postmodernism. Even Hassan himself has recognized the avant-garde spirit of the concept he is trying to define: “But if much of modernism appears hieratic, hypotactical, and formalist, postmodernism strikes us by contrast as playful, paratactical, and deconstructionist. In this it recalls the irreverent spirit of the avant-garde, and so carries sometimes the label of neoavant-garde” (Postmodern Turn 121).

The case of Dada’s inclusion in the cataloguing of postmodern traits is significant. Dada was a movement of reaction against the rationalist tradition of Western thought (Rubin, 1967). Tzara said that “Dada doubts all” (Tzara 92). Similarly, deconstructive postmodern thought is seen by some as nihilistic: “it partakes of uncertainty and doubt, and accepts ambiguity” (Sanouillet 226). Like Dada, postmodernism is defined by rejection: “The rejection of all-encompassing, teleological theories of human and social change associated with Enlightenment ideas about reason and progress” (Locher, 1999). Postmodernism also strives to achieve other major goals: “linking claims about social life, human nature, and criteria of truth and validity with strategies of power; and replacing the emphasis on subject and consciousness with an emphasis on language as intersubjective” (Locher, 1999). Like David Locher, I also claim that these goals were previously proposed by Dada. The Dadaists, for example, believed that meaning was arbitrary. As language signified nothing, it could be manipulated in any way desired (Richter, 1965). They also believed that there is no absolute truth and abolished the distinction between the concepts of high and low (or popular) art and culture. As a matter of fact, most of the features assigned to postmodernism can also be applied to Dadaism (paraphysics/Dadaism, chance, antiform, play, anarchy, exhaustion/silence, performance, participation, deconstruction, antithesis, absence, dispersal, combination, against interpretation . . .).¹ My intention in proposing these parallels is not to suggest the lack of originality of prior proposals in the field of postmodernist theory but rather to reflect upon the debt that postmodernism, as also modernism, owes this avant-garde movement.

Dada “was neither a school nor a movement but rather an essentially chaotic phenomenon that cut across art forms and national boundaries” (Tashjian xii). Zurich, Berlin, Cologne, Paris, and Hanover are some of the cities that are usually mentioned in relation to Dadaism. However, “even before the highly publicized activities at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916, a loosely organized collection of New York avant-garde artists offended the New York critics with their antics and their suspiciously foreign names—Benjamin de Casseres, Jean Crotti, Marius de Zayas, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia—” (Schmidt 92).² These artists were associated with Walter Arensberg’s circle and connected with Stieglitz’s gallery and his magazine Camera Work. Eventually they founded several short-lived little magazines, including Picabia’s 391, de Zaya’s 291, Man Ray’s TNT, and Man Ray and Duchamp’s The Blind Man and New York Dada. These magazines preceded the release of other publications, edited by Americans, that flirted with Dadaism. I refer, for example, to Broom and Secession. In these magazines, writers like E. E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, and Mina Loy found an ideal forum in which to publish their most radical writing.

The relation of Williams and Cummings with Dadaism is complex, replete with curiosities and contradictions. In the case of Williams—although it can also be said of Cummings—the desire to affirm his American identity—Whitman’s “barbaric yawp”—led him to take on the anti-art Dadaist attitudes and use them to break from structures and conventions...