The Will to Chance: Necessity and Arbitrariness in the Czech Avant-Garde

Introduction

Introduction We are all too ready to forget that in fact everything to do with our life is chance, from our origin out of the meeting of spermatozoon and ovum onwards... _ Sigmund FreudI The historical avant-garde has long been thought of, and thought of itself as, the special advocate of the aleatory in all realms-a chance encounter of sewing machine and ocean, words in a hat that fall upon a page, separate drawings communing through the spell of folded paper, montage, "coincident" erotic encounters, unpredictable but necessary. Perhaps because of the trauma of war and revolution, perhaps as a manner of explication in the face of such catastrophes and such horrifying visions, the sense that there are "secret meanings hidden behind so-called coincidences ," reasons for happenstance, reigns supreme in the avant-garde's hopes and deliria. Of all the movements in art and literature, the avantgardes from Dada through to surrealism have celebrated aleatoric composition above all else. Marcel Duchamp insisted: liThe idea of 'chance,' which many people were thinking about at the time, struck me too. The intention consisted above all in forgetting the hand, since, fundamentally, even your hand is chance. Pure chance interested me as a way of going against logical reality.,,2 The Czech poet Vib~zslav Nezval, who figures prominently in this book, once said of Dada that the movement's primary accomplishment was to mess up the room of poetic art so that he could come in and do what he pleased. Dadas are furniture movers. They have thoroughly dismantled the modern bourgeois' living room. Window sills are collapsing and breaking into pieces. On the sofa there lies a clock, side by side with comforters and Monet's paintings. Fragments of cups and vases cover the bottom of the moving van. Laces stick out from the dust, 1 Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74), 11: 137; quoted in Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 3l. 2 Marcel Duchamp, quoted in Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. Ron Padgett (1971; repr., New York: Da Capo Press, 1987),46. 6 THE WILL TO GlANCE accompanied by a couple of shoes. Having created this charming mess, the Dadas ran away. We can love them. Out of hatred for well-groomed tradition they began to smash everything. They kicked out the landlord. And then and there, their rage produced marvelous coincidences. A broken vase, a soccer ball and a sunshade make a beautiful new still-life. We have taken a lesson from it. We are now standing in this demolished room. It is necessary to make a new order.3 The same spirit of liberal reconfiguration celebrated here in Nezval's tract, can be said to pertain to the avant-garde as a whole, and of its constitutive historical moment. However, critics who portray the avantgarde as mirthfully nihilistic, and whose definition of the avant-garde hinges on such determinations, may fail to apprehend that the avantgarde "regarded the destruction of the divine work of art that had been the world as an accomplished and irreversible fact whose consequences had to be interpreted as radically as possible if any compensation were to be made for the 10ss.,,4 For example, note the sweeping tone of such statements as "[Sur_ realists] felt themselves to be on the verge of a new age that would be more exciting. More promising, more inspiring than any preceding one";5 and more recently: In keeping with their anti-bourgeois sentiments and the emphasis they placed on creativity, Surrealism and the movements that preceded it embraced the twin goals of revolution and revelation. Although the first goal encouraged numerous people to engage in provocation and subversion, these were not their only objectives. The individuals who subscribed to the Surrealist cause, and to its 3 As cited and translated by Jindfich Toman, "Now You See It, Now You Don't: Dada in Czechoslovakia with Notes on High and Low," in Crisis and The Arts: The History ofDada, vol. 4 of The Eastern European Dada Orbit: Russia, Georgia, Ukraine, Central Europe and Japan, ed. Stephen C. Foster (New York: G. K. Hall and Co., 1998), 11-40. In the original Czech: "Dada jsou stehovaa ruibytku. Rozebrali dUkladne pokoj moderniho burZoy. Rrmsy padaji a roztfiSfuji se. Na otomanu lezi hodiny vedle penn a Monetova obrazu. Strepy kofHku a vaz pokryvaji...