JAUSS Apolinnaire
JAUSS Apolinnaire
JAUSS Apolinnaire
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HANS-ROBERT JAUSS
Apollinaire's lyrical production of the year 1912 marked the threshold to a new
wave of modernism, which would henceforth be characterized by the concept
of the avant-garde;' this concept designated a significant departure from the
centuries-old "Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes." At the end of 1912
Apollinaire inserted the programmatic poem Zone as a preface into the galley
proofs of his collection Alcools. In December of that year, however, the poem
Les Fenetres also appeared as the first piece of Ondes, a sequence of "poems in
diverse voices" (or "poemes-conversations"),2 whose style differs entirely
from that of Zone: Ondes, composed between 1912 and 1914, would form the
first section of the later collection Calligrammes. As if focused in the lens of
lyric form, the genesis of an "art nouveau" can be discerned far more accurately
in the divide that separates these two recueils (or more specifically, Zone from
Les Fenetres) than in the so-called "about-face" so widely and ambiguously
proclaimed in the countless theoretical manifestos of the period. The procla-
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40 Yale French Studies
mation of the new generally begins with theoretical assertions; these reveal
reckless and often contradictory expectations, which are best clarified by poet-
ic praxis. The change of horizon that occurs in the modern lyric (which genre
can be considered with reason as the avant-garde of aesthetic modernism) may
be explicated in an exemplary fashion by a contrastive interpretation of Zone
and Lundi Rue Christine. The latter poem takes the new principle of simul-
taneity one step further than Les Fenftres3 by a transgressive movement to-
wards the contingent reality of a familiar and yet unrecognized speech-the
alien voice of the other.
The initial verses of Zone immediately proclaim, in a solemn gesture far from
all elegiac farewell, the renunciation of the Old World of the entire Western
past: is Greek and Roman antiquity not more antique than ever when even the
recently invented automobile can already appear "old"? The bucolic spirit of
antiquity, ironically cited by addressing the Eiffel tower as a shepherdess
amidst a herd of bellowing bridges, announces what will subsequently, as "la
grace de cette rue industrielle" (1. 23), be elevated as the very essence of a
modern avant-garde lyric: the city as aesthetic landscape, as the production
site of a poetry which renews itself daily in "loudly singing" hand-bills, cata-
logues, and posters, and has its prosaic counterparts in the newspapers, penny-
pamphlets, pin-ups, and in a "thousand different headlines" (11. 11-14).
Baudelaire had already elevated Paris as capital of the nineteenth century into
the lyric paradigm of modernite, while at the same time conceiving modernity
as the poetic experience of alienation. The kaleidoscope of urban imagery in
Zone leaves Baudelaire's experience behind: the tone of the Tableauxparisiens
3. W. Wehle has given a remarkable interpretation of "Les Fenktres," (in UTB 1191, 381-420),
which I would like to recommend as a companion piece to the following.
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HANS ROBERT JAUSS 41
of 1912 is set, not by a Spleen which, even in the most daring evocation of an
artificial paradise (as in Reve parisien) still registers an anxiety that threatens
to rupture experienced but by a naive wonder at the swift and continually self-
surpassing accomplishments of a technological civilization, and a frankly
gullible faith in its even grander future. It is not enough provocatively to
discover Beauty amid the working masses at day's end, in the "grace" of a new
street in the industrial district. The euphoric affirmation of the world escalates
into a phantasmagoria of the modem, in which the opening verse, "La religion
seule est restee toute neuve, " is realized by means of a vision of the twentieth
century ascending like an airplane. The Christ of this modernity, at first
praised in a litany recalling the features of traditional worship, now breaks all
altitude records in his new ascension and opens the horizon of a new heaven:
here, as in the sermon of Saint Francis, birds from all over the earth and from
the oldest myths fraternize with the flying machine (11. 42-70).
Nevertheless such profanization of Catholic belief in the reckless move-
ment of the modern is hardly intended blasphemously. What takes place in the
dialectical images and phantasms is rather the return of the monde ancien
repudiated at the opening. Remote antiquity, renounced at first with a flat
negation, now returns, albeit in a mythic rather than historical form. What in
the zero-hour of the present should have been left behind in toto as the horizon
and authority of the past, continues to populate the modern world with count-
less figures of unquestioned validity: the old and the new Adam, the prophets,
Simon Magus, Lazarus, and not least of all the tower of Babel and the experi-
ence of Pentecost. Thus everything modern in Zone enters into the light of
mythical perspectives. The "hidden centers" of these perspectives, however,
can be found in "the myth of Babel as the primal myth of alienation, and in
Pentecost as the myth of the sublation of alienation."5 This is the basic theme
of the death and rebirth of the universe, which the earlier poetry of Apollinaire
had already worked through. There the mythic singer Orpheus, the ancient
precursor of the Christ of Zone, discovers poetry as the possibility of the resur-
rection and rebirth of the lost world.6 Even the pronounced modernism of Zone
has not been able to abrogate entirely this primal model. Apollinaire's new,
ungrounded confidence in the beauty and happiness of a modem world just
begun appears to be grounded in his orphic poet-myth, except that it is no
longer the lyric subject that accomplishes the renewal of the world. In the
earlier Bestiaire it was Orpheus who knew how to name and reinterpret the
animal forms; or in Alcools the Mal-Aime who claimed to have at his disposal
all the tones of poetry, which can transform everything and can even banish
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42 Yale French Studies
danger.7 The lyric subject of Zone, however, is itself afflicted by the very
alienation it refuses to acknowledge as the stigma of the modern world.
Admittedly, the flaneur in Zone is everywhere able, on his walk through
Paris, to discover and praise the poetry of technology and the beauty of "indus-
trial art." Yet to the extent that he succumbs to the fascination of the metropo-
lis-from the early morning of the working masses to the stale nightly plea-
sures of the poor-he must also undergo the experience of having his own self
elude him, even as he seeks, in both the "I" and the "You" of his changing
voices, to call it to account.8 The subject that roams the city, and, amid the
streaming crowds, euphorically records and relishes every emphatic aspect of
contemporary life, seems doomed to encounter every remembered moment of
his past life as an alien "I".9 The high price paid for the unanticipated expan-
sion of limits in the modern experience of the world is the loss of the identity-
guaranteeing Anamnesis. The repressed Weltangst of Baudelaire's Spleen de
Paris returns in Zone as the "anxiety about love" ("Comme si tu ne devais
jamais etre aime," 1. 74), which "makes one choke." The experience of the
"I's" dismemberment in space and time, the curse of the dispossession of the
self, expels the euphoric experience of existence in the anonymous crowd: now
the "anxiety about love" causes women to appear to the flaneur "immersed in
blood" (1. 81), and makes their idyllic counterparts, the poor Jewish emigrants,
seem unattainable (1. 121); love itself becomes "une maladie honteuse" (1. 86),
which the flaneur finally desires to atone for with a "pauvre fille au rire horri-
ble" (1. 143). When he returns home after a night of carousing, seeking sleep
among his oceanic fetishes, there appears to him, instead of the modern Christ
in the utopian form of a flyer, an unrecognized god dismembered into a great
multitude ("Ce sont les Christ inferieurs des obscures esperances, " 1. 154); the
opening vision of the modern world's flight through the heavens is contrasted
to the macabre final image of the old, beheaded sun: "Adieu Adieu / Soleil cou
coupe" [Farewell Farewell / Sun slit throat].
The experience of dismemberment thus ends in the lyrical "I's" loss of its
own self and climaxes in a vision of dismembered nature. So even Zone appears
to take note of the high price to be paid for the emphatic affirmation of the
triumphant technological procession of modernity. On the other hand, Apol-
linaire has given aesthetic form to the dismemberment of the subject in its
7. The following strophe from "La Chanson du Mal-Aim" praises these tones in the style of
the "vanto joglaresco" (the last verse alludes to Orpheus): "Moi qui sais des lais pour des reines / Les
complaintes de mes annees / Des hymnes d'esclave aux murenes / La romance du mal-aim6 / Et des
chansons pour les sirenes" [I who know praises for queens / The laments of my youth / Hymns of
sea-slaves to the moray / The ballad of the poorly-loved / And songs for sirens].
8. Culminating in: "J'ai vecu comme un fou et j'ai perdu mon temps / Tu n'oses plus regarder
tes mains et a tous moments je voudrais sangloter / Sur toi sur celle que j'aime sur tout ce qui t'a
epouvante" (11. 1 18-20) [I have lived like a fool and wasted my youth / You no longer dare examine
your hands and at any moment I could weep / Over you over her whom I love over all that has
frightened you].
9. As Peter Szondi has shown, in Schriften 2 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 198-), 414ff.
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HANS ROBERT JAUSS 43
experience of space and time, and this aesthetic form will, by means of the
modern poetic procedures demonstrated in Zone, bring on an epoch-making
change in the history of aesthetic perception. There is, first of all, the "vers
libre," freed from all punctuation, which can now play off against each other
the multitude of possible (or even intentionally deformed) verses, rhythms,
and rhyme relations, and can thus revive even classical verse patterns or lyrical
"tones" for the orchestration of hitherto unprecedented polyphony. To this
may be added a new aesthetic of simultaneity, of continuous fragmentation
and amimetic montage, in which aspects of reality, citations, and bits of mem-
ory can all be included. As if E. A. Poe's maxim, "Epic intention ... is based on
an imperfect sense of Art," were only now to be fully realized,'0 the reader
finds himself confronted with a text whose novel obscurity no longer springs
from encoded or ambiguous meaning, but from the abrupt shifting (often indi-
cated by an unmediated "now") of appearances, visions, and memories, as well
as of the subjects that experience them so directly. Since the occasion deter-
mining the kaleidoscopically changing foci of the poem remains hidden from
the reader, he is now a "third person," in the role of an alien, as it were, for
whom the event evoked is entirely unfamiliar. An unusual labor of aesthetic
perception is thus required of him: he must now constantly produce for him-
self hypotheses of meaning, and reorder the irritating actuality of the text in
everchanging arrangements. In these different readings or "parcours" through
the text the reader catches sight of the new experience of modern life as it
springs up in unexpected places.
The required labor of reading, in which the dialogue structure of the clas-
sical lyric with its focus on the addressee is sublated, is analogous throughout
to the observation of a cubist image. Since "the aesthetics of cubist painting
rest essentially on the concept of ideal or categorical models which dismember
the represented object and rebuild it from perspectives immanent to the image,
it thus constitutes a new aesthetic object. Nevertheless, by means of its cate-
gorical model, it makes the idea of its object become transparent."" The new
aesthetic object can only arise in the eye of the beholder if his active, and
analytic,-ordering and reordering observation takes up and completes the work
of the artist. For this reason, the new, poi-etic labor expected of the reader
cannot be accomplished merely in the perception of a kaleidoscopic plurality
of appearances in the modern big city. It requires, in addition, that the reader
abandon the conventional contemplative focus and become productive him-
self, reconstructing a modern experience of the whole through the destruction
of his usual expectations. A reconstruction, that is, of the aesthetic idea of the
world that makes the immemorially old recognizable once more in the abso-
10. Quoted by Baudelaire, in Notes Nouvelles sur Edgar Poe, Oeuvres completes de Charles
Baudelaire, ed., F.-F. Gautier (Paris NRF, 1928), 29.
11. K. Stierle, in UTB 1191, following M. Imdahl, "Cezanne-Braque-Picasso: Zum Ver-
haltnis zwischen Bildautonomie und Gegenstandsehen" in Wallraff-Richartz Jahrbuch. 36 (197
325-65, and in UTB 1191, 528ff.
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44 Yale French Studies
lutely new. In the discontinuous lyrical movement of Zone, and in the praise of
the unprecedented ascendency of modernity-in which is inscribed, as a coun-
tercurrent, the experiences of the dismembered, alienated self-the contradic-
tion between the initial vision and the closing image can remain unresolved.
The contradiction, however, corresponds abundantly to the modern "feeling of
the sublime that permits mankind to give order to chaos," as Apollinaire
himself expected from the Esprit nouveau of the avant-garde poetry and
painting. 12
II.
V 15 Je partirai a 20 h 27.
16 Six glaces s'y d6visagent toujours
17 Je crois que nous allons nous embrouiller encore davantage
18 Cher monsieur
19 Vous etes un mec a la mie de pain
20 Cette dame a le nez comme un ver solitaire
21 Louise a oubli6 sa fourrure
22 Moi je n'ai pas de fourrure et je n'ai pas froid
12. Apollinaire, Les Peintres cubistes (1913), in OC 4,33. He himself once sought, in reference
to Braque, to explicate and legitimate the genesis of a new "idea of the object" by means of an older
and apparently irreplaceable aesthetic concept, the sublime: "The work .. . contains a multitude of
aesthetic elements whose novelty is always in accordance with the sentiment of the sublime which
allows man to order the chaos. One must not despise that which seems new, that which is soiled or
is useful, the fake wood or fake marble of housepainters. Even if these phenomena appear trivial,
when the action demands a man, he must start from these trivialities."
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HANS ROBERT JAUSS 45
In Lundi Rue Christine the poetic resources of Zone are, in a daring trans-
gression of the limits of poetry, surpassed in order to inaugurate an entirely
new aesthetic. The poem begins immediately with a scene in a small street
cafe, in a present no longer put into relief with any historical or private past, 13
and which has even put the worlds of myth, phantasmagoria and dreams be-
hind it. The simultaneity of an isolated moment of modern life has itself
*The numbering, as well as the separation of the last line of the poem, conform to the German
version of this essay. [Editor's note] An English translation of this poem will be found below on p
285-86.
13. The sole indication of a recollection is 1. 45, "The last time I was in China / That was eight
or nine years ago"; as a banal scrap of conversation, it merely points back to an empty past.
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46 Yale French Studies
become the aesthetic idea of the poem. We have here the prototype of the
"poeme-conversation" in which, as Apollinaire once put it, "the poet, placed
in the middle of life, records whatever the poetry of things and of voices brings
to him."'4 But the second, and no less bold innovation is that the poet himself
is now no longer quite tangible as a stable reference point or as a privileged
perspective. If the lyrical "I" in Zone was already dismembered and dispersed
in the transitoriness of a wandering, erratic point-of-view, the subject still
remained for the reader the origin of a glance directed both inside and outside.
He is both the flcineur who makes his way progressively through the Parisian
day and finishes in returning home, as well as the one who seeks his own lost
identity in the flashing and tormenting moments of memory and who thus
always meets his own lost self only as an alien being. In Lundi Rue Christine,
with the renunciation of this degree-zero of perspectival orientation, the lyri-
cal subject has become absolutely indeterminate. Now it is up to the reader to
search for the lost subject, dissolved in the pure contingency of an alien speech.
This means that each utterance poses for the reader the question, which is not
always a very simple one, of who speaks to whom here and with what intent? Is
it just the poet recording what he hears, or is he speaking for himself? Is it a
friend who speaks, or are there other, anonymous subjects? Do two or more
sequential verses, or do the quasi strophes, each of a different length, form a
semantic unity, or are they to be decoded in different registers with different
meanings? Is a statement to be perceived as a quasi-objective perception, or as a
humorous commentary, or as the thoughts of other people-and if so, of
whom? 15
From the multiple indeterminancy of the "lyrisme ambiant" [peripatetic
lyricism] it follows not only that the reader can interpret the poem in various
perspectives, but that he must do so, seeking possible consistencies and repeat-
edly forming different shapes out of the "broken images," in order to achieve
more thoroughly the irritating, inconclusive aggregate impression of a life
simultaneously here and now. "Simultaneity in literature can be achieved by
the use of contrasting words": 16 the new principle of simultaneity must prove
itself in the incessant movement of an aesthetic perception which is con-
stantly searching, destroying, and reconstructing. The aesthetic perception no
longer terminates in a subsuming sense of a represented reality after a sequence
of meaning-hypotheses derived from different perspectives; and this is pre-
cisely what enables the present here-and-now, the simultaneity and ubiquity
of the euphorically affirmed modern life in its unceasing movement, to be
experienced in a self-producing synchrony.
14. "le poete au centre de la vie enregistre en quelque sorte le lyrisme ambiant," quoted from
Renaud, 314.
15. See the detailed analysis by Renaud, 314ff.
16. Delaunay, Du cubisme a 1'art abstrait (Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N., 1957), 112; M. Imdahl, "Die
Rolle der Farben in der neueren franz6sischen Malerei," in Poetik un Hermeneutik 2 (Munich: W.
Fink, 1966), 477.
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HANS ROBERT JAUSS 47
Apollinaire himself pointed out that this novel literary effect, at the time
the modern trend par excellence, is entirely analogous to the concept of orphic
painting his friend Delauney used to move from cubist to abstract painting.
With the complete departure from perspective, the simultaneous contrasts of
colors are set so free that "the form of the image and the stimulation of the eye
fall together.... The image is, more immediately than ever before, a develop-
ment of seeing in general.... The eye sees simul et singulariter. . . . In this
way," according to Delauney, "the vitality of the world necessarily reveals
itself to the eye in color vision not sequentially but in the simultaneous action
of contrast and coordination."'17 The play of simultaneous contrasts in paint-
ing which unfold "like sentences in color,"' 8 as well as the analogous play of
semantic contrasts of words in a poem is not however a goal in itself, not the
final act of an understanding newly put to the test, but the conditions under
which an aesthetic idea can be formed in synchronic movement: "This syn-
chronic action thus designates the Subject, which is the representative harmo-
ny."'9 For Delauney, light itself is the only enduring reality: "I paint the sun
which is pure painting,"20 for Apollinaire it is the "lyrisme ambiant" of an
orphic Urpoesie or, if one likes, his redemption of the modern significance of
the sublime.
It is not enough however, to say that it is left up to each reader to give the
poem its sense, which could not then be "objective" and valid for other read-
ers,21 or to reduce the overall impression of an irreal Boulevard scene to the
formula "that the poem both invites and denies unification," on account of
which all understanding would have to rest with each new laying down of the
cards of a game of Patience.22 Even Lundi Rue Christine with its pronounced
modernism would not qualify as a poem were it merely a matter of "rejecting
and disqualifying every hermeneutical approach."23 In this case too, the re-
quirement that Dieter Henrich established during an interpretation of Arbre
applies: "It is not enough to specify the structural principle and to describe the
poetic technique. A sequence of ambiguities is hardly a compelling whole. If
this whole, on the grounds of the technique with which it is carried out, always
invites renewed interpretation, then this is neither indiscriminate in detail nor
free from a fundamental orientation which is made mandatory by the structure
of the text."24 If Apollinaire's conversation poem appears fragmented in such
an unusual way that its elements can no longer be decoded through apre-given
whole, it nevertheless contains a basic orientation which enables the reader, in
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48 Yale French Studies
III
Apollinaire has, however, only taken up the classical principle of the tripartite
unity of time, place, and action in order to renew it radically. The single day
and the unchanging scene, which become fate for the characters, are here
retracted to the smallest, momentary unity, in order to bring to light in the here
and now the occurrence of the immediately contemporary in all its irritating
25. As Renaud shows (317), if in the consecutive verses "La fontaine coule / Robe noire comme
ses ongles, "robe noire" is read in apposition to "la fontaine coule, " a daring "surrealist" metaphor
ensues (the flowing water at night as black dress), which the next verse ("c'est complktement
impossible") immediately denies ironically.
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HANS ROBERT JAUSS 49
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50 Yale French Studies
By projecting for a future moment (such and such a day, hour and minute), the inscrip-
tion of a Ready-made.-The Ready-made may then be looked for (with all its details).
The important thing is this adherence to the clock, this instantaneous quality, like a
speech commemorating any occasion whatsoever but beginning at exactly such and
such a time. It is a kind of rendez-vous-to inscribe this date, hour, minute naturally on
the Ready-made as relevant information. Thus the exemplary aspect of the Ready-
made.28
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HANS ROBERT JAUSS 51
cannot be repeated by the observer. Not having been there, the observer can no
longer grasp the instant in its historical evidence; he can only imagine it.
The information of this inscribed date must be inconclusive in order to
produce the provocation that it is precisely what is not fictional (such as the
factual moment of its elevation to an aesthetic object-an authentic moment,
therefore in a double sense) that seems to advertise its meaning while denying
it to the observer, who was not himself an eyewitness. The paradox of this new
aesthetic experience interprets best Adorno's postulate of a "second alienation
from an alienated world," inasmuch as it is precisely what was not unique-
such as the bicycle-post as a reproducible piece from a mass production, or the
stereotypical, everyday flourishes of the indifferent talk of a conversation
poem-which is bound to receive the distinction of something unique and
authentic through the inscription of the moment of its elevation to the aesthet-
ic "objet ambigu,"29 including with itself as it does so the spontaneous experi-
ence of the observer. And, as if the author wanted to challenge the intractibility
and contrariness of reality, Duchamp makes known his intentions of "inscrib-
ing a Ready-made" in some future point in time, a point arbitrarily related to
the project itself but nevertheless specified to the minute. Likewise the title
Lundi Rue Christine can be understood as the date for a future event, or even as
an appointment for a duel (although not on biographical grounds,30 but as a
"duel with reality").
That Apollinaire published3l at the same time the authentic transcrip-
tions of two actual conversations, with exact statements of time and place but
without further commentary, supports the thesis that his conversation poem
and Duchamp's Ready-made can be considered as analogous experiments of
the literary and artistic avant-garde of 1912. Apollinaire's experiment poses
however the question of whether Lundi Rue Christine is completely given
over to the task of elevating a piece of daily reality ex abstracto as "objet pur"
to the paradox of aesthetic experience. It seems to me that Apollinaire did not
with this step abandon his fundamental orphic conviction, but sought rather to
realize it under more difficult conditions, discovering in the prosaic here and
now of a conversation poem the latent poetry of the simultaneous. One can
certainly see in the Ready-made, as has Ph. Renaud, the reverse of "peinture
pure": the "objet pur," and understand the antinomy of both avant-garde gen-
res as a response to the experience of the extreme alienation of a consciousness
in a reified world.32 Nevertheless, would it not then be obvious that Apol-
linaire pursued the avant-garde experiment of his friend Duchamp a step fur-
ther by seeking to bridge the gulf between orphic painting, which had released
29. I have elsewhere explicated Valery's paradox of the Objet ambigu (from his Eupalinos
(1923)) with reference to the changing significance of poiesis since the avant-garde of 1912. See
Aesthetische Erfahrung, 117ff.
30. As Renaud thinks, 304.
31. Cf. Renaud, 258.
32. Ibid., 259.
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52 Yale French Studies
the pure play of colors from all objectivity, and the Ready-made, which pre-
sented in an isolated object a reality become contingent and senseless? In fact,
Lundi Rue Christine presents the reality of the dismembered conversation
emptied of all meaning only prima vista as a play of accidents: in the form of a
poem, it produces for the reader, simul et singulariter registering and interpret-
ing, a secondary unity which consolidates from verse unit to verse unit and
which comes to light in the "horlogisme" of the celebratory final verses-the
unity of a fulfilled, emphatically registered moment, which in the contingent
here and now33 illustrates the unperceived multiplicity of the simultaneous
modern life.
"L'Honneur tient souvent a l'heure que marque la pendule." Announced
by the clock striking in 1. 12, the appointed hour comes to consecrate the
synchronic events as a "harmonie representative" and retroactively to poet-
icize the prosaic scraps of conversation, with all their semantic contrasts. The
poem begins provocatively (11. 1-6) with the most shocking piece of everyday
prose: two thieves arranging a burglary. After this opening, which is unam-
biguously intelligible as the poem's only coherent conversation, begins the
fragmented conversation, which leaves to the reader the work of decoding, of
playing through the different possibilities of interpretation and reinterpreta-
tion. This work yields appreciation and understanding to the extent that the
reading begins to notice, as resisting its attempts at unification, the contrasting
effects of the verse sequence (e.g., 11. 29ff.: "Voici Monsieur / La bague en mala-
chite / Le sol est seme de sciure"), the arrangement of verses (e.g., when di-
rectly after strophe II, which even in its content is entirely "unrhymed" and in
which every line suggests a different referent, there is placed the one line
strophe 3: "ca a l'air de rimer," and the sequence of meanings (e.g., in the
short-range focus on the miserable furniture and the banal talk of the pub,
strophes 4, 5, and the long-distance focus on the alluring destination, 1. 9,
strophe 9, 11. 42/43). Such a reading cannot be produced here in its entirety; a
poetizing undercurrent in the "bold metaphors" of everyday speech would
already have been noticed (e.g., "Cette dame a le nez comme un ver solitaire,"
1. 20), in the faits divers which are drawn together in a single verse ("La
serveuse rousse a ete enlevee / par un libraire," 1.37) and in the background
humor of many expressions (e.g., "Vous etes un mec a la mie de pain," 1. 19),
before the high tone of poetry is invoked in the final verse bombastically and
ironically at the same time, in order to mark the hour, which both comprises
and designates the simultaneously fluctuating life as aspects of the solitary
stage and as a shading of the one moment: "L'Honneur tient souvent a l'heure
que marque la pendule / La quinte major."
33. The following biographical anecdote testifies that an equally contingent "here" is meant to
correspond to the contingent "now". One day Apollinaire sought to surprise a group of friends
whom he wanted to lead to a quiet spot: "Ce chemin en zigzag devait nous amener a la Rue
Christine oa, pour que soit sauvee la noble face de notre ami, se proposait une brasserie dont rien ne
1'empechait de soutenir qu'il l'avait reconnue." (in Renaud, 305).
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HANS ROBERT JAUSS 53
IV
"The year 1912 is a highpoint in European art. What began in many separate
places and in different ways came to similar or analogous resolutions. The
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54 Yale French Studies
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HANS ROBERT JAUSS 55
likewise dismisses the intimate connection between the modern and the fash-
ionable, as a mere "mask of death" like the myth of the future of the Italian
futurists. The "monster of the beautiful," with which the painter of modernity
seeks to give himself "a vision of his own divinity" is no longer eternal, but is
like a flame that destroys the world in order to transform it. It is "a breath
without beginning or end," as well as a knowledge that will stretch out over
creation and the end of the world for time immemorial ["que nous concevons
avant toute la creation et la fin du monde"].
This last formulation echoes an anticipatory consciousness that at the
turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century was attested to frequently in
the literary public. "Everything serious was included in the violent general
social collapse, which began at the latest around the year 1900 and which
would renew the world," reported, among others, the chronicler in
Hauptmann's Der Narrin Christo Emmanuel Quint.39 Hans Hinterhiiuser and
Viktor Zmegac have recently and appropriately analyzed the mood of the out-
going nineteenth century as one that "feared or hoped the fin de sihcle might
become the fin du monde."40 This remarkable "illusion, which found its em-
bodiment in the magical date of the turn of the century,"'41 was transformed in
the following decade from a disappointed apocalyptic expectation to a new
aspiration that anticipated a change instead of an end. With its Weltangst,42
and all the privileged themes that arise from it-the dead city, dandyism, the
femme fatale, and the Liebestod; the fascination with science, which the
theory of heredity, the doctrine of neurosis, and psychopathology made popu-
lar; the vision of the burning of the world (Wagner, Zola), and the apocalyptic
phantasies (Ernest Hello, Leon Bloy), its millenarian or socialist expectations
of salvation, and not least of all, Nietzsche's philosophy of the Superman and of
the eternal return-the fin de si'cle of the nineteenth century, with its atmo-
sphere of the end-of-time, whose seriousness is soon put into question by its
free-floating aestheticism, seemed as worn out to the avant-garde modernists
of 1912 as it seems topical again to the present current of postmodernism. The
analogies and differences between the atmospheres of a fin de sihcle at the end
of both the last and the present century would certainly merit consideration on
their own. Here it can only be specifically emphasized that for the contempo-
rary "Spirit of the Time" Nietzsche's statement "God is dead" and its counter-
part in Barres's: "Tous les dieux sont morts ou lointains" [All the gods are dead
or far away] evoke publicly the desire for compensation, which found ex-
39. G. Hauptmann, Das gesammelte Werk 1 Abt., vol. 6 (Berlin: S. Fischer 1943), 443.
40. H. Hinterhauser, Fin de Siecle-Gestalten und Mythen, (Munich: W. Fink, 1977), 15.
41. Quoted from Musil's portrait of the epoch, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (part, I, ch
which provides a point of departure for V. 2mega6, "Zum literarischen Begriff der Jahrh
wende (um 1900)" in Deutsche Literatur der Jahrhundertwende, ed., V. 2mega6 (Konigstein
naum, Hain, Scriptor, Hanstein, 1981), ix.
42. Hinterhauser quotes from Stefan George's Der siebente Ring (Berlin: 1914), 203: "The dark
fear of pitch and sulfur / the foreboding that the end is waiting at the gate." Hinterhauser, 19.
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56 Yale French Studies
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HANS ROBERT JAUSS 57
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58 Yale French Studies
marking the advance of music into modernity, occurs around 1912. In this year
as well Kandinsky's first abstract paintings became known and his theory of
Grossen Abstraktion and Grossen Realistik appeared, which would be for
future painting the two constitutive polarities of experience, as the most ex-
treme reification of the abstract and the objective.5' And while the esoteric
aesthetics of this modern age took leave of mimetic art and all realism fell
henceforth under the suspicion of the naive affirmation of what existed, the
new, entirely exoteric medium of film undertook the contrary function of a
"redemption of physical reality," as Siegried Kracauer's controversial thesis
finds here its historical profile. According to Walter Benjamin, this redemption
of physical reality will be the function of "profane illumination," which would
once again make the collectivity at home in the materialism of its alienated
world.52
If one wanted to grasp this period of change, which after the empty expecta-
tions of the fin de siecle involved an authentic experience of the new pos-
sibilities of modern art in the simultaneity of its diverging movements, and if
one also wanted to come up with something like a general term for what was so
variously understood as the new, the metaphor of a "threshold period" pres-
ents itself. It permits us to grasp the unsynchronized nature of what coexisted
in the hermeneutic difference between the not yet and the no longer, that is, as
a progressive change of horizons. It must also, consequently, not presuppose an
"objective Spirit" or the hypothetical unity of a historical period.53 Considered
from the perspective of Apollinaire, the experience of the new, which marks a
transition between the "not yet" of Zone and the "no longer" of Lundi Rue
Christine, could then be defined as an experience that makes apparent a
changed concept of reality-a problematic that produced the various develop-
ments of the avant-garde. Taking up once again Blumenberg's thesis from
Poetik und Hermeneutik 1, it is this specifically modern understanding of the
world that experiences reality, interior as well as exterior, in its alienating
recalcitrance, as "unaccommodating to the subject, "54 and that begins hence-
forth to work out with aesthetic means this experience of a double alienation
51. Following G. v. d. Osten (1lff.) and M. Imdahl, "Is it a flag or is it a painting? Uber
moglische Konsequenzen der konkreten Kunst," in Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch 31 (1969), 222.
52. Feature films more than an hour in length began to appear in 1912; Griffith's first "art
film," Birth of a Nation, dates from 1915 (I owe this reference to Heinz Buddenmeier). See also S.
Kracauer, Theory of Film-The Redemption of Physical Reality (London: D. Dobson 1960), and
Walter Benjamin, "Der Stirrealismus" in Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980), 2:1,
310.
53. Cf., Poetik und Hermeneutik 12: Epochenbewuf3tsein und Epochenschwelle, ed., R.
Herzog and R. Koselleck (Munich: W. Fink, 1985).
54. H. Blumenberg, "Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Moglichkeit des Romans," in Poetik und Her-
meneutik 1, 13.
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HANS ROBERT JAUSS 59
between the world and the "I." The modern concept of reality as the re-
calcitrance experienced in the given emerges, in Apollinaire as in Duchamp,
most significantly in the paradox that it is precisely the authentic "objet
trouve" or fragment of everyday reality, which the Ready-made and the conver-
sation-poem first made available to art, that eludes the usual process of under-
standing when presented in aesthetic mediation. By this means the concept of
a recalcitrant reality critically sublates the old concept of a "guaranteed" real-
ity, which since Augustine, and not even excepting Descartes, has required the
guarantee of a divine sign or of a metaphysical procedure (as in the hypothesis
of the "genius malignus") in order to guarantee the reliability of human knowl-
edge of a given reality.55 With the work of Duchamp and Apollinaire, the
extension of the pictorial arts and of poetry into a reality previously considered
inartistic makes the recalcitrance of reality evident. The newly discovered
fullness of the simultaneous drives forth into the here and now the pure con-
tingency of the chosen moment, which, because it is in the arbitrary control of
the artist, is not at the disposal of the observer or of the reader.
The poetic procedure that Apollinaire inaugurated with Lundi Rue
Christine will be developed wholesale by a future classical figure of this mod-
ernity, James Joyce: not only does his Ulysses destroy the epic plot of the
realistic novel in the here and now of a single Dublin day by means of the
modern sense of the unity and transience of the simultaneous as first realized
by Apollinaire, but Joyce also dates his own paradigmatic work with the con-
tingent date of 16 June 1904. Ezra Pound spoke in corresponding fashion for the
modern lyric in Blast 1 (1914): "An image is that which presents an intellectual
and emotional complex in an instant of time."56 The modern concept of real-
ity, formed in the experience of the recalcitrance of a senseless reality, might
even throw a new light on the procedure of montage, which Adorno saw as the
specific signature of modernity. In the literary as well as in the pictorial mon-
tage the interspersed and pasted-on shreds of newspaper are ennobled, as an
"objet trouve," to the aesthetic "objet ambigu" while being promoted to a
hermeneutic paradox as representatives of a reality no longer at one's disposal.
This applies as much to the first collages of Braque and Picasso in 1912 as to the
later Pisan Cantos of Ezra Pound. Whether or not the dating demanded at the
outset, the signature of an inaccessible contingency, is soon given up, and
whether or not the experience of a recalcitrant reality is consequently reduced
to a cruder kind of montage, which sought the latent harmony in everyday
objects so that it could thrive as a modern variant of the still life-this is a
question that should be directed to the art historian.
In the threshold period the same concept of reality seems to define not just
the external but an equally unavailable inner reality, which becomes apparent,
and not just in Apollinaire, in the decentered and zero-grade nature of the
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60 Yale French Studies
57. "The assumption of a single subject is perhaps not necessary; it may be just as good to
assume a plurality of subjects, whose interplay and conflict underlies our thought and even our
consciousness. A sort of aristocracy of "cells," in which lies sovereignty? Of "equals," certainly,
accustomed to rule together and understanding how to command. My hypothesis: the subject as
plurality." (Fragment from the Nachlaf, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed., G. Colli/M. Montinari,
(Berlin: de Gruyter, 1967) vol. 7:3, 382.
58. Blumenberg, 11.
59. Ibid., 12.
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HANS ROBERT JAUSS 61
confirms in its restorative tendency that the transition period before 1914
cannot just be thought of in terms of the modern concept of an intractable
reality, but must also be considered in light of the discovery of the "plurality of
the subject." The corollary to this is the destruction of a central perspective
that is univocal because it is centered in the subject, as occurs in painting after
cubism and in the thematization of polyphony in the lyric of Apollinaire, Ezra
Pound, and T. S. Eliot, as well as in the novels of James Joyce and Virginia
Woolf. We thus come to the Anglo-American avant-garde, which, having
marked the beginning of a new epoch of "modernism" (their coinage) with
Pound's motto "Make it new!", believed it possible to recognize retrospec-
tively that "in or about December 1910 human character changed," and pur-
sued the declared goal of "making the modern world possible for art."60 One
conceives the modernism of these authors inadequately if one merely in-
terprets the decentering of the subject that finds its paradigm here only under
the category of loss, or as the epoch-making system of an inescapable dis-
possession of the self in the progressive reification of the modern world. To the
contrary, Gabriele Schwab has recently shown6l how these various "Classics
of Modernity" in the course of their dissolution of the limits of speech, have at
the same time widened and reconstituted the borders of subjectivity. In the
aesthetic processes of deconstruction and reconstruction, the subject can pro-
ceed beyond the loss of its Cartesian self-sufficiency to new forms, and aesthet-
ic experience can compensate for the supposedly irremedial loss of the world.
VI
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62 Yale French Studies
principle of the organic work of art is considered not just in terms of aesthetic
production (as in the modern principle of montage) but in terms of its aesthetic
reception as well, in its break with the classical ideal the calm, disinterested
contemplation. Postauratic art frees aesthetic reception from its con-
templative passivity by involving the reader, the observer, or onlooker himself
in the concretization of the aesthetic object. He becomes, after a fashion, a
fellow creator of the work, and as such abandons the classical illusion par
excellence of an expectation of a closed form filled with meaning, and under-
stands that the foundation of meaning in interpretation, like artistic activity
itself, is always only a possible development of an interminable task. I have
already sketched elsewhere this period of transition in the history of poiesis in
the development of modern pictorial art from Duchamp's Ready-made to Pop
Art and Optical Art, and have traced back its theoretical beginnings to the
Leonardo essay (1895) of Valery, who, incidentally, recommenced his own long
interrupted poetic production in 1912 with La Jeune Parque. After what we
have seen, Valery's famous and controversial statement that "Mes vers ont le
sens qu'on leur prete" [My verses mean what people take them to mean] only
gives the most condensed formulation to the turn towards the postauratic art
of the modern age.63
VII
The first wave of the aesthetic avant-garde stood, without realizing it, before
the historical threshold of the First World War. This makes the euphoria of its
outbreak, the sense of standing not at the end of art, but at its rebirth, with its
great hope, "to transform our arts and our way of life from top to bottom in the
universal atmosphere of gaiety,"64 now appear to us post festum, illusionary,
almost macabre. The citation is taken from the program of Parade (1917), a
piece by the choreographer Massine, the painter Picasso, and the composer
Satie, that sought to realize for the first time an "alliance of painting and dance,
modelling and mime," that is to say a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk. Apollinaire
saw in this undertaking the sign of the rise of a "more complete art, " and gave it
the name, soon so significant, of Le Sur-realisme. Here, for the first time in
Apollinaire, the often affirmed sublation of art in the praxis of life is publicly
announced. Nevertheless, Apollinaire will remain distant from the intention
of Marinetti and of the later surrealists of setting up a revolutionary reality
through the subversive demolition of all art. The sought-after alliance of the
arts hitherto isolated would now bring about, as if on its own, the pacific state
of an "allegresse universelle"; notwithstanding the catastrophe of the World
War which had since begun and which ostensibly removed the grounds for this
auf Peter Burgers Bestimmung von Kunst und biirgerlicher Gesellschaft, ed., M. LUdke (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1976), 90ff. (Compare M. LUdke's article in the same volume, 1 1ff.).
63. H. R. Jauss, Asthetische Erfahrung, 11 7ff.
64. Apollinaire, Oeuvres completes 4, 44.
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HANS ROBERT JAUSS 63
hope. This escapism for Apollinaire went hand in hand after 1914 with the fact
that his belief in the aesthetics of modernity-like that of Marinetti-had
become an affirmative aesthetic of war. As an "indirect, non-extreme
Gesamtkunstwerk," the great "authorization of illusion," it anticipated in
miniature the "directly negative Gesamtkunstwerk"65 of the second avant-
garde wave. It is certainly no accident that this second avant-garde of French
surrealism, dadaism, and Soviet productionist art set in after the catastrophe of
history, and, as is frequently argued, it is certainly by no accident that it col-
lapsed into a naive sublation of art into political praxis. Apollinaire was still
satisfied in 1917 with unifying the isolated arts, seeking to justify aesthetically
the modern world in the wonderful achievements of its industrial civilization.
After the war this program degenerated with the next wave of avant-gardists
into the seemingly revolutionary attempt to sublate altogether the separation
of the aesthetic from reality in an action directe. Nevertheless, neither under-
taking finally proved to bring any progress in the realization of the unfulfilled
project of modernity. They were, instead, a regression from the threshold of
1912, from the concept of an alienated, antagonistic reality, which could not
simply be blown up, but which could only be worked out aesthetically as the
experience of modern art.
This observation can be supported through recent analyses of the prehisto-
ry of the historical appearance of the Gesamtkunstwerk, which again came to
light in a new form after the threshold of 1912 as a subliminal tendency.
Werner Hofmann has shown that the step towards autonomous art at the
height of the bourgeois era induced a separation of the arts into autonomous
genres: "the autonomous work of art has its necessary flip side in isolation."
Going against this from the beginning, however, is the desire to overcome the
isolation of the arts and their separation from the praxis of life by means of the
transitory idea of a Gesamtkunstwerk, which is represented in the nineteenth
century in the "stagings in public space" that extend from "the 'aesthetic
churches', the museum of the romantics, through Runge's Tageszeiten Projekt
to the synaesthetic performance in which the world exhibitions both awake
and satisfy the public desire to stare."67 Odo Marquard has traced the propen-
sity towards Gesamtkunstwerk, which totalizes the autonomous individual
arts while erasing the border between art and reality, back to its unrecognized
beginnings in the "aesthetic system of German idealism, the Identitatssystem
of Schelling, " and has shown that the transformation of this system from the
Gesamtkunstwerk of Wagner to the aesthetically staged Party days of the
twentieth century rests upon a twofold return of the repressed: the repressed
distinction takes revenge for its repression "through its precarious return: as
the esoteric, " and repressed history "through its own precarious return: as the
mythic."68 The return of History which was denied by the aesthetic avant-
65. Following 0. Marquard in his essay "Gesamtkunstwerk und Identitatsystem," (see note
44) 24.
66. W. Hofmann, "Gesamtkunstwerk Wien," in Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk, 84.
67. Ibid.
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64 Yale French Studies
gardists can hardly be proven more impressively in this threshold period than
through the theoretician and prophet of the general strikes, Georges Sorel. In
his Reflexions sur la violence of 1908 Sorel had already seen through the
illusions of progress that Apollinaire and Marinetti were to fall prey to, and
anticipated the catastrophe that they did not see coming, but fell in turn prey to
another illusion, regarding it and affirming it as the programmable apocalypse
of a revolution that would renew everything.69 I have already gone into this
matter in a different context and would like finally to return once more to
Apollinaire.
VIII
The bell that tolled for the first wave of the aesthetic avant-garde of the twen-
tieth century was the quinta major of 1914. "What is honorable depends on the
moment"-the pathos of this sentence proved true, in an ironic sense, in the
later fate of Apollinaire. How much he misjudged the questionable nature of
the historical hour, fell victim to the fascination with the extraordinary, as in
the collective and national myth of the "war-experience, " and abandoned the
honor of the poet while believing that he was saving it in his war poetry, is
shown by almost all the late lyrics of the engage artilleryman, who continued
to compose poetry unflinchingly right up to the end, his death in 1918: in no
text would he condemn the war itself. The reception history, after an initial
sharp criticism (above all from Andre Breton),70 soon extended the merciful
cloak of oblivion over this "fall of Icarus" (Ph. Renaud) of the avant-garde of
1912. The war poetry of Apollinaire is thus instructive as evidence of an ideo-
logical confusion, of how genuine poetry can degenerate when it is compelled
to serve in the naive affirmation of an evil, fatefully accepted reality: the orphic
tones of Calligrammes would glorify what was not to be glorified.
This thesis has been countered by Claude Debon with arguments that it
would be worthwhile finally to discuss here.71 A proper judgment would not
blame Apollinaire for what, to an astonishing degree, happened to his entire
generation: the war befell them like a great psychic shock, which put their
aesthetic existence radically into question, and could not be overcome through
poetry and art. Such a shock would have redeemed reactions that tend to
disturb us as flights into engagement, into stoicism, into the imaginary, into
silence, or even into speechlessness, but which in the end sprang from the
deepest needs for self-preservation, which post festum could not be easily
sorted out. Examples of such a critical distance which would permit the experi-
ence of war in its meaningless reality to be expressed (as in Blaise Cendrar's J'ai
tue of 1918) are achieved only with great difficulty and are very rare, and not
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HANS ROBERT JAUSS 65
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66 Yale French Studies
poetry with the modern "imagistic" means and orphic tones, and-the tenden-
cy towards sublimation notwithstanding-can be made effective as a shock-
experience, is proven by the example of Georg Heym's poem Der Krieg, for
which I know of no counterpart in Apollinaire. That Heym's poem appeared
three years before the outbreak of the First World War does not detract from its
exemplary rank. Rather, in this connection, it indicates that the future-pathos
of the avant-garde around 1912 contained not just the illusion of an unending
progress but also, however disjointedly, the foreboding of an immanent histor-
ical catastrophe:
War
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