Talking to Strangers

by Paul Auster

  The book he has created from this struggle is difficult to define, but it should not be dismissed as a therapeutic exercise, as yet another document of mental illness to be filed on the shelves of medical libraries. Gallimard, it seems to me, has made a serious error in bringing out Le Schizo et les langues as part of a series on psychoanalysis. By giving the book a label, they have somehow tried to tame the rebellion that gives the book its extraordinary force, to soften “the moment of rage” that everywhere informs Wolfson’s writing.

  On the other hand, even if we avoid the trap of considering this work as nothing more than a case history, we should still hesitate to judge it by established literary standards and to look for parallels with other literary works. Wolfson’s method, in some sense, does resemble the elaborate wordplay in Finnegans Wake and in the novels of Raymond Roussel, but to insist on this resemblance would be to miss the point of the book. Louis Wolfson stands outside literature as we know it, and to do him justice we must read him on his own terms. For it is only in this way that we will be able to discover his book for what it is: one of those rare works that can change our perception of the world.

  1974

  Dada Bones

  Of all the movements of the early avant-garde, Dada is the one that continues to say the most to us. Although its life was short—beginning in 1916 with the nightly spectacles at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich and ending effectively, if not officially, in 1922 with the riotous demonstrations in Paris against Tristan Tzara’s play Le Coeur à gaz—its spirit has not quite passed into the remoteness of history. Even now, more than fifty years later, not a season goes by without some new book or exhibition about Dada, and it is with more than academic interest that we continue to investigate the questions it raised. For Dada’s questions remain our questions, and when we speak of the relationship between art and society, of art versus action and art as action, we cannot help but turn to Dada as a source and as an example. We want to know about it not only for itself, but because we feel that it will help us toward an understanding of our own, present moment.

  The diaries of Hugo Ball are a good place to begin. Ball, a key figure in the founding of Dada, was also the first defector from the Dada movement, and his record of the years between 1914 and 1921 is an extremely valuable document.1 Flight Out of Time was originally published in Germany in 1927, shortly before Ball’s death from stomach cancer at the age of forty-one, and it consists of passages that Ball extracted from his journals and edited with clear and partisan hindsight. It is not so much a self-portrait as an account of his inner progress, a spiritual and intellectual reckoning, and it moves from entry to entry in a rigorously dialectical manner. Although there are few biographical details, the sheer adventure of the thought is enough to hold us. For Ball was an incisive thinker; as a participant in early Dada, he is perhaps our finest witness to the Zurich group, and because Dada marked only one stage in his complex development, our view of it through his eyes gives us a kind of perspective we have not had before.

  Hugo Ball was a man of his time, and to an extraordinary degree his life seems to embody the passions and contradictions of European society during the first quarter of this century. Student of Nietzsche’s work; stage manager and playwright for the Expressionist theater; left-wing journalist; vaudeville pianist; poet; novelist; author of works on Bakunin, the German intelligentsia, early Christianity, and the writings of Hermann Hesse; convert to Catholicism: he seemed, at one moment or another, to have touched on nearly all the political and artistic preoccupations of the age. And yet, despite his many activities, Ball’s attitudes and interests were remarkably consistent throughout his life, and in the end his entire career can be seen as a concerted, even feverish attempt to ground his existence in a fundamental truth, in a single, absolute reality. Too much an artist to be a philosopher, too much a philosopher to be an artist, too concerned with the fate of the world to think only in terms of personal salvation, and yet too inward to be an effective activist, Ball struggled toward solutions that could somehow answer both his inner and outer needs, and even in the deepest solitude he never saw himself as separate from the society around him. He was a man for whom everything came with great difficulty, whose sense of himself was never fixed, and whose moral integrity made him capable of brashly idealistic gestures totally out of keeping with his delicate nature. We have only to examine the famous photograph of Ball reciting a sound poem at the Cabaret Voltaire to understand this. He is dressed in an absurd costume that makes him look like a cross between the Tin Man and a demented bishop, and he stares out from under a high witch doctor’s hat with an expression on his face of overwhelming terror. It is an unforgettable expression, and in this one image of him we have what amounts to a parable of his character, a perfect rendering of inside confronting outside, of darkness meeting darkness.

  In the Prologue to Flight Out of Time Ball presents the reader with a cultural autopsy that sets the tone for all that follows: “The world and society in 1913 looked like this: life is completely confined and shackled … The most burning question day and night is this: is there anywhere a force that is strong enough and above all vital enough to put an end to this state of affairs?” Elsewhere, in his 1917 lecture on Kandinsky, he states these ideas with even greater urgency: “A thousand-year-old culture disintegrates. There are no columns and no supports, no foundations anymore—they have all been blown up … The meaning of the world has disappeared.” These feelings are not new to us. They confirm our sense of the European intellectual climate around the time of the First World War and echo much of what we now take for granted as having formed the modern sensibility. What is unexpected, however, is what Ball says a little further on in the Prologue: “It might seem as if philosophy had been taken over by the artists; as if the new impulses were coming from them; as if they were the prophets of rebirth. When we said Kandinsky and Picasso, we meant not painters, but priests; not craftsmen, but creators of new worlds and new paradises.” Dreams of total regeneration could exist side by side with the blackest pessimism, and for Ball there was no contradiction in this: both attitudes were part of a single approach. Art was not a way of turning from the problems of the world, it was a way of directly solving these problems. During his most difficult years, it was this faith that sustained Ball, from his early work in the theater—“Only the theater is capable of creating the new society”—to his Kandinsky-influenced formulation of “the union of all artistic mediums and forces,” and beyond, to his Dada activities in Zurich.

  The seriousness of these considerations, as elaborated in the diaries, helps to dispel several myths about the beginnings of Dada, above all the idea of Dada as little more than the sophomoric rantings of a group of young draft-dodgers, a kind of willful Marx Brothers zaniness. There was, of course, much that was plainly silly in the Cabaret performances, but for Ball this buffoonery was a means to an end, a necessary catharsis: “Perfect skepticism makes perfect freedom possible … One can almost say that when belief in an object or a cause comes to an end, this object or cause returns to chaos and becomes common property. But perhaps it is necessary to have resolutely, forcibly produced chaos and thus a complete withdrawal of faith before an entirely new edifice can be built up on a changed basis of belief.” To understand Dada, then, at least in this early phase, we must see it as a vestige of old humanistic ideals, a reassertion of individual dignity in a mechanical age of standardization, as a simultaneous expression of despair and hope. Ball’s particular contribution to the Cabaret performances, his sound poems, or “poems without words,” bears this out. Although he cast aside ordinary language, he had no intention of destroying language itself. In his almost mystical desire to recover what he felt to be a prelapsarian speech, Ball saw in this new, purely emotive form of poetry a way of capturing the magical essences of words. “In these phonetic poems we totally renounce the language that journalism has abused and corrupted. We must return to the innermost alchemy of the word…”

  Ball
retreated from Zurich only seven months after the opening of the Cabaret Voltaire, partly from exhaustion, and partly from disenchantment with the way Dada was developing. His conflict was principally with Tzara, whose ambition was to turn Dada into one of the many movements of the international avant-garde. As John Elderfield summarizes in his introduction to Ball’s diary: “And once away he felt he discerned a certain ‘Dada hubris’ in what they had been doing. He had believed they were eschewing conventional morality to elevate themselves as new men, that they had welcomed irrationalism as a way toward the ‘supernatural’, that sensationalism was the best method of destroying the academic. He came to doubt all this—he had become ashamed of the confusion and eclecticism of the cabaret—and saw isolation from the age as a surer and more honest path toward these personal goals…” Several months later, however, Ball returned to Zurich to take part in the events of the Galerie Dada and to deliver his important lecture on Kandinsky, but within a short while he was again feuding with Tzara, and this time the break was final.

  In July 1917, under Tzara’s direction, Dada was officially launched as a movement, complete with its own publication, manifestos, and promotional campaign. Tzara was a tireless organizer, a true avant-gardist in the style of Marinetti, and eventually, with the help of Picabia and Serner, he led Dada far from the original ideas of the Cabaret Voltaire, away from what Elderfield correctly calls “the earlier equilibrium of construction-negation” into the bravura of anti-art. A few years later there was a further split in the movement, and Dada divided itself into two factions: the German group, led by Huelsenbeck, George Grosz, and the Herzefelde brothers, which was predominantly political in approach, and Tzara’s group, which moved to Paris in 1920 and championed the aesthetic anarchism that ultimately developed into Surrealism.

  If Tzara gave Dada its identity, he also robbed it of the moral purpose it had aspired to under Ball. By turning it into a doctrine, by garnishing it with a set of programmatic ideals, Tzara led Dada into self-contradiction and impotence. What for Ball had been a true cry from the heart against all systems of thought and action became one organization among others. The stance of anti-art, which opened the way for endless provocations and attacks, was essentially an inauthentic idea. For art opposed to art is nevertheless art; you can’t have it both ways at once. As Tzara wrote in one of his manifestos: “The true Dadaists are against Dada.” The impossibility of establishing this as dogma is obvious, and Ball, who had the foresight to realize this contradiction quite early, left as soon as he saw signs of Dada becoming a movement. For the others, however, Dada became a kind of bluff that was pushed to further and further extremes. But the real motivation was gone, and when Dada finally died, it was not so much from the battle it had fought as from its own inertia.

  Ball’s position, on the other hand, seems no less valid today than it did in 1917. Of what we have come to realize were several different periods and divergent tendencies in Dada, the moment of Ball’s participation, as I see it, remains the moment of Dada’s greatest strength, the period that speaks most persuasively to us today. This is perhaps a heretical view. But when we consider how Dada exhausted itself under Tzara, how it succumbed to the decadent system of exchange in the bourgeois art world, provoking the very audience whose favor it was courting, this branch of Dada must be seen as a symptom of art’s essential weakness under modern capitalism—locked in the invisible cage of what Marcuse has called “repressive tolerance.” But because Ball never treated Dada as an end in itself, he remained flexible, and was able to use Dada as an instrument for reaching higher goals, for producing a genuine critique of the age. Dada, for Ball, was merely the name for a kind of radical doubt, a way of sweeping aside all existing ideologies and moving on to an examination of the world around him. As such, the energy of Dada can never be used up: it is an idea whose time is always the present.

  Ball’s eventual return to the Catholicism of his childhood in 1921 is not really as strange as it may seem. It represents no true shift in his thinking and in many ways can be seen as simply a further step in his development. Had he lived longer, there is no reason to believe that he would not have undergone further metamorphosis. As it is, we discover in his diaries a continual overlapping of ideas and concerns, so that even during the Dada period, for example, there are repeated references to Christianity (“I do not know if we will go beyond Wilde and Baudelaire in spite of all our efforts; or if we will not just remain romantics. There are probably other ways of achieving the miracle and other ways of opposition too—asceticism, for example, the church”) and during the time of his most serious Catholicism there is a preoccupation with mystical language that clearly resembles the sound poem theories of his Dada period. As he remarks in one of his last entries, in 1921: “The socialist, the aesthete, the monk: all three agree that modern bourgeois education must be destroyed. The new ideal will take its new elements from all three.” Ball’s short life was a constant straining toward a synthesis of these different points of view. If we regard him today as an important figure, it is not because he managed to discover a solution, but because he was able to state the problems with such clarity. In his intellectual courage, in the fervor of his confrontation with the world, Hugo Ball stands out as one of the exemplary spirits of the age.

  1975

  Ideas and Things

  John Ashbery is a poet who speaks to us intimately, from an almost incalculable nearness; we recognize his world as our world, and his language is that of our everyday experience. Yet few poets writing today have such an uncanny ability to undermine our certainties, to articulate so fully the ambiguous zones of human consciousness. We are constantly thrown off guard as we read his work, and because we are lulled by the flatness and familiarity of his tone, our sense of dislocation is all the more troubling. The ordinary becomes strange, and things that a moment ago seemed clear are suddenly cast into doubt. Everything remains in place, and yet nothing is the same.

  The whole is stable within

  Instability, a globe like ours, resting

  On a pedestal of vacuum, a ping-pong ball

  Secure on its jet of water

  Ashbery stands to the side of most recent American poetry, and because of this many critics have seen his work as willfully obscure or abstract. What they fail to understand is that his work is conceived within a different frame of reference from that of most contemporary poets. In general, American poetry continues to be written from the bias of an undaunted empirical faith, and it embodies what can be called a “common sense” view of the world. No matter what the range of possibilities within this scheme—and it is vast—the starting point is the world of things. William Carlos Williams’s famous dictum, “no ideas but in things,” was not a solitary call for a new kind of poetry but a manifestation of a widespread tendency in twentieth-century American thought and literature. In Ashbery’s work, however, the emphasis shifts. Although he, too, begins with the world of perceived objects, perception itself is problematical for him, and he is never able to rely on the empirical certitudes that nearly all our poets seem to take for granted. At times, in fact, it is as if he has set out to reverse the Williams formula.

  What is writing?

  Well, in my case, it’s getting down on paper

  Not thoughts, exactly, but ideas, maybe:

  Ideas about thoughts.

  Reality for Ashbery is elusive, and things are never what they seem to be. They cannot be separated from one another, isolated into component parts, but overlap, intersect, and finally merge into an enormous and constantly changing whole. “All things seem mention of themselves / And the names which stem from them branch out to other referents.” Ashbery’s manner of dealing with this flux is associative rather than logical, and his pessimism about our ever being able to know anything results, paradoxically, in a poetry that is open to everything. “For where a mirage has once been, life must be.” Things lead to other things and disappear into one other, and from moment to moment our sens
e of the whole is altered. Ashbery maintains coherence in all this potential confusion by keeping an extremely close watch on himself, and his greatest talent, it seems to me, is his utter faithfulness to his own subjectivity.

  I know that I braid too much my own

  Snapped-off perceptions of things as they come to me.

  They are private and always will be.

  There is a faint echo here of the French Symbolists of the late nineteenth century. We are made to think of Baudelaire’s notion of synesthesia, Rimbaud’s systematic derangement of the senses, and an important sentence in a letter written by Mallarmé at the age of twenty-two: “Paint, not the thing, but the effect that it produces.” But there are, nevertheless, certain instructive differences between Ashbery and these earlier poets. Whereas the Symbolists sought escape from the drabness of the quotidian and strained toward an evocation of the mysterious essence of things by means of a highly distilled language, it is the quotidian itself that Ashbery is after, happiness in the heart of ordinary life, and his language is discursive, rhetorical, and even occasionally long-winded in its lyrical flights, a kind of obsessive talking around things, suggesting a reality that refuses to come forth and let itself be known.

  Now approaching fifty, Ashbery has become a poet of loss and nostalgia, and in his best work he displays signs of a new maturity and a deepening awareness of his own direction as an artist.

  But it is certain that

  What is beautiful seems so only in relation to a specific