Midwest Modern Language Association

The Poetics of Revolution Author(s): Roger Shattuck Reviewed work(s): Source: The Bulletin of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Vol. 2, Papers of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Number 1. Poetic Theory/Poetic Practice (1969), pp. 67-76 Published by: Midwest Modern Language Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1314737 . Accessed: 26/06/2012 18:24
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The

Poetics

of

Revolution

Roger Shattuck 1 Two of the most wrong-headed books of criticism our century has produced appeared in 1925, the one pedestrian, the other intermittently brilliant, both influential. The first is Henri Bremond's La Poesie pure, a belated attempt to assimilate to Roman Catholicism the transcendent aspirations of the art for art's movement and to revive a literary controversy that was already moribund when Valery salvaged the term poesie pure in 1920.1 The second book has enjoyed a more vigorous life because of the prominence of its author. It has also had a second career since its translation into English in 1948: Ortega y Gasset's essay, The Dehumanization of Art. Ortega tells us that the "spirit of our age" jettisons the human or natural element in favor of metaphor in an attempt to become "pure". Toward the end of his short text, however, Ortega has begun to speak about self-irony in art as a "suicidal" tendency. His conclusion is the opposite of Bremond's; instead of spiritual transcendence, Ortega sees in the art of his day a kind of fated triviality, a "thing of no consequence."2 Writing in the mid-Twenties, both men were discussing as "new" a movement in poetry and painting that lay at least a quarter of a century astern. Around them was gushing up a variety of movements in the arts that stood for a far different and more complex situation. True, art for art's sake and purity of esthetic value had not disappeared entirely from Dada and Surrealism, from Ultraism in Spain, or from Ego-Futurism in Soviet Russia. Symbolism and Cubism had left a deep mark. Nevertheless, the direction of the arts in the Twenties and Thirties ran not so much away from the human as back toward it, toward daily life and the quality of the environment and caustic questions about who should own and run things. Let us look at three specific cases in Berlin, in Moscow, and in Paris. 2 Berlin, February 1919. Germany had come close to restaging the Soviet Revolution of 1917. November 11, 1918, a date that the rest of the world celebrated as the signing of the Armistice, came just as workers' and
1"Avant-propos a la Connaissance de la deesse" 2 For a fine preliminarycriticism of Ortega's confused position, see Joseph Frank's essay in The Widening Gyre.

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The Poetics of Revolution

soldiers' councils were taking control of the larger German cities. If the Minority Socialists had held off elections for a few months, they might have swung the country far to the left. As it was, the Police chief, Noske, of the Majority Socialists had to seize and murder Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, the Spartacist leaders, just four days before the January 1919 elections in order to enforce "law and order." Three days after the elections, which crushed the Minority Socialists and the Communist elements, the Versailles peace conference opened. Permitting no oral negotiations, the Allies put forward unthinkably onerous terms. Riots and street fighting broke out in the larger German cities, most intensely in Berlin and Munich. Having set up shop officially in February 1918 as a kind of elite club that demonstrated openly against the military and the government, the Berlin Dadaists went into a paroxysm of protest and fly-by-night publication in early 1919. Among them was only one card-holding communist, John Heartfield, who had Anglicized his name out of admiration for the United States. Yet no one was apolitical. The key figure, whose drawing sparked everyone else to action, was George Grosz. Inevitably his work fills the four-page newspaper-leaflet, Jederman sein eigner Fussball, dated 15 February 1919. Its one number, carrying savage attacks on the regime, was peddled through the working quarter of Berlin behind a horse-drawn bandwagon playing pop marches and sentimental songs. The little street company was arrested on its way home; Everyman was confiscated. Stories conflict about the arrest and trial of the editors and authors. Walter Mehring, in the most complete account, confesses that he had written the "obscene piece of anti-militarism" which gave the police a case against them. He had been an active Berlin Dadaist for the past two years. "Der Coitus im Dreimiiderlhaus" is a "Dada song" whose title picks up the name of a pseudo-Schubert opera that had just reached its 1000th performance in Berlin. The forty-nine irregular and unrhymed lines of the poem lie parallel and docile on the page, yet they really fly off in all directions and observe the montage principle that seems to dominate all artistic experiments of the era.
Hab Dir nich Kleene Immer feste druff (Sprach Prinz Eugen der edle Ritter Pour le merite vom Gardekorps) Und Zieten aus dem Busch Auch die Republik braucht Soldaten (Noske lachelt verschamt Wenn der Deutschnationaleschwarz-weissflaggt) Cacile mein Engel

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The Poetics of Revolution

Lufte das Hemd, Heute ist Kaisers Geburtstag Wir machen 'ne Extratour Nach Amerongen Hintenrum Alte 175er Ich rechne auf Euch! Don't hold back Keep plugging (Quoth Prince Eugene the noble knight Pour le merite of the Imperial Guard) And Zieten out of the underbrush Even the Republic needs soldiers (Noske smiles shame-faced When the German nationals run up a black-and-white flag) Cecelia my angel Hoist your skirt a bit, today's the Emperor'sbirthday We'll take an extra trip To Amerongen From behind You old queers I'm counting on you!

A few lines later Mehring throws in the boy scout motto: Allzeit/Schussbereit (Be prepared-to shoot). The seamy side of life, including lice, prostitution, and pederasty, provides the setting for a short history of military cowardice, cliche expressions, song titles, and clear allusions to contemporary events. But there's nothing aleatory here. The meaning comes through as ponderously as in a rebus: Germany has been buggered. Screw the government. Montage is too fragile a form to live long under such heavyhanded treatment. Nevertheless, "Coitus im Dreimaderlhaus" had a substantial half-life as a famous poem. At the trial, Mehring tells us, Dr. Gottfried Benn gave expert medical testimony and cited two books, one on the Marquis de Sade and the other on sexual deviations. He may have been trying to cloak politics in pornography. 3 In October 1919 the Soviet government was desperately pressed by famine, civil war, intervening armies (including U.S. Marines) on several fronts, and dissentions over policy. To the rest of the world, the two-year old government represented either the breakdown of civilization itself or the promise of a new society. There had been no time yet for nuances. Most Russian writers hung back, unwilling to participate in the revolution, but an organization called Proletcult was trying to organize the beginnings of a true proletarian culture in towns and villages across the country. The Futurists, though they would be condemned before long as representatives of "the last period of bourgeois imperialistic culture," took

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The Poetics of Revolution

an active part in Proletcult and even supplied ministers for the Plastic Arts section of the People's Commisariat of Education. Their poetics had complex origins in French and Russian Symbolism, abstract painting, film, and Italian Futurism. No one knew just how to combine this new art with an anti-military, utopian ideology. They rejected genius and inspiration as "twaddle" and affirmed art as action. They meant it. For them, art was not an imitation of reality or even of earlier art; it was charged with the "direct material creation of things . . . human things . . . reality itself." The most dynamic and assertive of the Futurists was Mayakovsky. In 1919 he was touring indefatigably, acting the role of himself in his own plays, reading to factory workers, and founding "comfuts"-not a kind of candy but a name for communist-futurist cells. His was one of the principal voices on the futurist literary review called, significantly, The Art of the Commune. But the military situation had made one commodity desperately scarce: paper. At this juncture Mayakovsky's autobiography reads: "Head filled with 150,000,000. Propaganda work in ROSTA." Rosta, the future Tass News Agency, began printing daily posters for display in towns all over Russia. The posters replaced newspapers. For two years Mayakovsky produced copy and drawings and layout for ROSTA in Moscow, often working thirty-six hours at a stretch and sleeping in the office. Seven years earlier, aged nineteen, he had collaborated with Burlyuk and Khlebnikov on the Futurist manifesto, "A Slap at Public Taste." Eleven years later, after a turbulent career in which he could never come to terms with the Party, he killed himself in his last game of Russian roulette. Mayakovsky's early poems had displayed a Whitmanesque egoism that he made no effort to temper. Now, at the moment of his most complete identification with the revolution, he wrote his first major work that nearly dispenses with the first person singular. "150,000,000 speak with my lips . . .The press of feet on the cobblestones printed this edition . . . This poem has no one person for author." And he proceeded accordingly as his autobiography records. "Published it without my name. Wanted anyone who was so inclined to continue it and improve it. Nobody did, but everyone knew who wrote it, all the same." It was hard not to be recognized as Mayakovsky with that gravel voice. But he wanted to be collective-or thought so. When Lenin read the work and heard it had been printed in an edition of 5000 copies, he protested to Lunacharsky, who had authorized the publication: "Nonsense, stupid, double-dyed tommy-rot and pretentiousness." Lenin also called it "hooligan Communism." Pasternak recounts his disappointment.
While [Mayakovsky]existed creatively, I spent four years getting used to him and

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did not succeed. Then I got used to him in two hoursand a quarter, whichwas the time it took to read and examinethe uncreative150,000,000. Since then, critics have stubbornly disagreed: is this Mayakovsky's best propaganda or his worst poem? "150,000,000" runs to a total of 1705 lines in seven parts or chapters. Printed at first in tight columns-probably because of the paper shortagethe work appeared in 1924 in a signed edition with the lines broken up and arranged in stepped indentations down the page. This format was to become his own, and its declamatory purposes have been revived recently by Charles Olsen in his manifesto on "Projective Verse." The poet who reads in public wants a visible script; the private reader benefits from the clues, as in looking through a musical score. The first two parts sketch out a kind of proletarian pep rally: "Go get Woodrow Wilson." Wilson is holed up in his Chicago headquartersChicago, the electric city where everyone has the rank at least of general. Ivan strides dryshod across the Pacific to meet the President in hand-tohand combat. The battle is described in terms that hover between the Iliad and Superman. After cataclysmic destruction, Wilson is reduced to ashes and the new world begins, with flags and choirs-and no rank. In its imagery and action, 150,000,000 is as much of a poster as anything Mayakovsky was turning out for ROSTA. As Trotsky says of Mayakovsky's work in general, the poem is always in motion, but its dynamism never reaches a climax. Apocalypse and utopia crowd each other very hard. But we
not only have to dream up a new order but also to dynamite the old one.

(Here, a section on how electricity and steam will replace romanticism.)

In the wild rout the old disappeared, around the world thunders a new myth. On our own feet We'll slam through the time-barrier.

It's closer to Futurism than to Socialist Realism. The Russian freeverse original is shot through with rhymes and off rhymes, with puns and alliteration, and with patches of regular meter. And this is the man who has become the institutionalized national poet of the Soviet Union. School children learn his verses by heart. Adults remember-or try to forgetthat in 1935 Stalin called him "the best and most talented poet of our Soviet epoch." In the passage quoted, one can feel him trying to combine

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his Futurist esthetics (he wrote of himself aged seven: "After seeing electricity, lost interest in nature. Not up to date enough."), with proletarian politics, and with a lingering and increasingly suppressed attention to dream consciousness. One of the results is that a poem intended as a virulent attack on the United States begins to sound covertly admiring in the mock-epic descriptions of Chicago street sounds, of trucks chasing millionaires around a hotel room, and of Wilson's six-shooters and sixtybladed sabers. Mayakovsky carried the Russian folk tale about mighty Ivan to the threshold of Surrealism. 4 In 1919 the revolution was alive in Russia and Germany. It did not seem so close in France. But the Stalinist freeze institutionalized the revolution in Russia after Lenin's death in 1924. In Germany and Italy, the Communist Party was harassed and driven underground. Through these defaults, France became the principal arena in the Twenties and Thirties for open international debate on ideology and for the Byzantine strategies of Communism, anarchist revisionism, anti-Fascism, rightist reaction, and the whole repertory of cultural and political poses. Furthermore, there was a semi-official theory that placed the intellectuals alongside the laboring proletariat because they too had been mercilessly exploited by capitalist society. Most French political thinkers found a way to reconcile the thought of Marx with the French revolutionary tradition, from the Jacobin Committee of Public Safety through the June days of 1848 to the Commune of 1871. The history of communist thought in France during the twenty-year intermission between wars is a complex and fascinating subject. The astonishing thing about those years is that the intensity of political debate and demonstration failed either to affect the course of events that was leading toward another war, or to bring about a reasonably accurate understanding of what really was happening in the Soviet Union. Only a few men, like Victor Serge and possibly Vaillant-Couturier, came through with their integrity untarnished. Men as stalwart as MerleauPonty and Malraux had either been duped or compromised. Poetry was deeply troubled. Unlike its German counterpart at precisely the same moment in 1919, French Dada was politically innocent and uncommitted. Five years later, with the Surrealist manifesto and the founding of the review called, The Surrealist Revolution, things sounded very different. But "revolution" meant not so much Marx and Lenin and Communism as Freud and the freedom to dream one's life, to make love, and to commit suicide. It was not long, however, before Marx and Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, entered the Surrealist canon. The Surrealists had, in fact, organized themselves

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into cells and ideological sects and used techniques of agitation all of which closely paralleled those of the Party. Moreover, the Communist leaders were not working-class types at all, but rather educated bourgeois thinkers many of whom were writers and even publishing poets. It was not totally naive of the Surrealists to think that they might have an influence on Communist ideology in its social and utopian aspects. L'Humanite in the Twenties and Thirties makes remarkably stimulating reading -the literary page at least. The ironic aspect of this flirtation is that the Surrealists approached the Party just at the moment of its greatest inflexibility in the late Twenties. For six or seven years it policed itself strenuously against any taint of Trotskite infection. Everyone was suspect, especially the Surrealists with their independent ideas about the individual and society. One key chapter in that story concerns Aragon, a principal founder and flamboyant exponent of Surrealism in its most unbridled forms. In 1924 and 1925 he had publicly insulted the Soviet government and mocked communist doctrine. Then, with four other Surrealists, he joined the Party in 1927. In 1928, his increasing embitterment with bourgeois society and his natural gift for polemics was reinforced by his meeting Elsa Triolet, sister of Lili Brik, Mayakovsky's lifetime unrequited love. Aragon traveled to Russia with Elsa Triolet in 1930 and found himself invited to Karkhov for the Second Soviet Congress of Revolutionary Writers. Though he promised his friends to defend Surrealist ideas there, he signed a statement of selfdenunciation and affirmed his faith in dialectical materialism. During the Russian visit, Aragon composed the poem "Front Rouge," which appeared during November 1931 both in the official Soviet publication, Litterature de la Re'volution mondiale, and in his own collection, Persecute Persecuteur. The police seized the former edition and a few weeks later Aragon was charged "with inciting military personnel to disobedience and with provocation to murder, for purposes of anarchist propaganda." The hue and, cry lasted over a year. Andre Breton found himself forced into the position of double agent, on the one hand castigating Aragon for betraying Surrealism, and, on the other, defending his old companion in arms from conviction. Breton's defense took the dubious form of affirming that Aragon should no more be held responsible for the content of this piece of propaganda than for an "automatic" text dictated by his unconscious. Aragon wavered and finally broke definitively with the Surrealists in order to accept an important role in the cultural affairs of the Party. The Surrealists were bitter and disenchanted. Their self-inflicted collaboration with Communism and the Party was nearing an end. In a long footnote to What is Literature?, Sartre dredges up the whole Aragon affair somewhat out of context in 1948 in order to castigate the

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Surrealists with it. One wonders today if anyone, even the judge, read the poem itself. (I have discovered no account of a trial.) The ten pages of unrhymed and unpunctuated free verse that make up "Front Rouge" convey little sense of direction. Aragon never had much use for automatic writing; his wildest prose works, Paysan de Paris and Traite de Style, have a discernible structure. "Front Rouge" however seems to abandon sustained composition. The political title leads into a heavily sarcastic section about the padded, corrupt world "Chez Maxim's." References to recent street demonstrations (Juares and Sacco and Vanzetti provided the occasions) prepare the line that must have offended the censors: "Descendez les flics." "Shoot the cops." Soon an obsessive auditive element begins to dominate.
Les yeux bleus de la Revolution brillent d'une cruaute necessaire SSSR SSSR SSSR

And finally the message comes through loud and clear.

The whole universe must hear a voice shouting the glory of materialistdialectic which walks on its feet on its million feet all in military boots on feet as magnificentas violence itself holding out its multitude of weapons toward the image of victorious communism Glory to materialist dialectic and glory to its incarnation the Red Army

"Front Rouge" ends with a renewed chant of SSSR SSSR. It's pretty crude stuff and wouldn't stir many consciences (or censors) today. Only at the start do the images show some life. Aragon has not reprinted the poem in any of his recapitulatory collections. Yet it's fate is sealed. Maurice Nadeau carries the text among the "documents" in his book on Surrealism. The poem belongs to history. 5 I have disenterred for you this evening three historic poems on a dismally low level of literary quality. To what purpose? Why not pick the winners and let the clinkers die their natural death? These texts do, however, make certain revelations behind their barefaced tendentionsness. All three use a resolutely open form. Their second-hand structural innovations belong to the era of early film when it was discovering its syntax, of photomontage presented as a new form around 1919, and of such a key work of art and politics as John Reed's Ten Days that Shook the World.

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Put together in the heat of battle, the three poems assert themselves as acts unrelated to the tradition of recollection in tranquility. Their punning and sprung rhythm and sound effects appeal less to the lyric or epic mode than to effective performance. Mayakovsky, with his mighty voice, commanding stage presence, and capacious memory, published his poems during the crucial revolutionary years by declaiming them to the assembled people. All we have left is scripts-and, I am told, one useless wax record. The poetics of revolution in our century seeks the pacing of montage and the privilege of the platform. It makes for a very transitory product. Furthermore, I remain convinced that we often wear blinders when we look back at the Twenties and Thirties and that we fail to see how far politics and social concerns had encroached on the domain of poetrypoetry as, say, Rilke and Mallarme represented it. Bremond's thesis about purism in poetry was truly misguided. Yet there is something to say here that is more important and closer to us. Last spring when I submitted the title of this talk, I felt certain that I could demonstrate the dynamic connection between revolution and poetry. In historical terms, it can be done, and in such a way as to show that poetry as well as other arts has humanized itself. It has not moved increasingly toward dehumanization and triviality as Ortega argued. But what disturbs me is that the literary and even the rhetorical quality of revolutionary poetry is so low. It was true of the Twenties and Thirties. It is true of what I read today. The best of it-for example several selections in a recent paperback called Poems of Protest-retreats constantly to the lyric, or to the obscene, or to pastiche. Thus it avoids strident propaganda. But are there no other options? Is poetry so individual a matter that it can, at most, yield to coterie and school, yet inevitably perish if it exposes itself to the collective? Edmund Wilson, after reading Trotsky on literature and revolution, suggests glowingly that the poet can take society itself as his material. But how? From the platform? By running for office? Mayakovsky's suicide must have been an act as poetic as it was political in motive. Is there nothing left but bigger and wilder posters to link our politics with our poetics? Or more elaborate festivals? Paradise Now is an unwritten text. But I find it very hard to give up the search. Listen to what Antonin Artaud wrote when his fellow Surrealists took the plunge into the Communist Party in 1927. "What difference does the whole world's revolution make to me if I know that I remain eternally stricken with misery and grief in this poor carcass of mine. ... From any absolute standpoint, how could there be the slightest interest in changing the social structure of the world or in seeing power pass from the bourgeoisie to the proletariat?" The evidence of history supports him. Artaud was the man in whom, to

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modify what he said about Van Gogh, society itself committed suicide. I admire Artaud and find he is in error. But, as you can see, I have found it difficult, in spite of my title, to document the thesis that if we ever reach a better society, poetry will have helped us find it. Scholarship must not be twisted. Faith remains. University of Texas

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