From Number 4, Rue de Savoie, Paris to Siberia and back again:Travelling with Blaise Cendrars in 1913 along several lines of European modernism.

AbstractThe 1913 publication of La Prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France (Prose) at No.4, Rue de Savoie, Paris provocatively presents its reader with a map-book and begins with aninstance of cartographic inscription: a prominently displayed red and white map of theTranssiberian Railway route. This essay plays with the idea of Blaise Cendrars’ poem as anattempted map for modernity which engages various types of inscribing lines (poetic, cartographic,and locomotive) to problematise modernist attempts to pursue expanding teleological lines ofpersonal, artistic and technological progress. Paying close attention to the work’s materialdimensions, its 1913 Parisian publication, and its narration of a journey to the very edge of Paris-centred European modernity (Siberia), I examine how Cendrars uses various inscribing practices tocritique attempts to assimilate alterity within the self’s representational models. A close reading ofCendrars’ poem reveals a political encounter between a European lyric voice and a vast Siberianlandmass initially presumed blank, and awaiting inscription by an Orientalist discourse. However,while Prose certainly employs the Orientalist construction of a passive, exoticised Siberian Other, italso stages the deflation of this fantasy by an ethical moment of seeing brought about by travelwhereby the self reluctantly confronts the casualties as the edge of its totalising ambitions. Finally, Iconclude by reflecting on Prose’s 1913 poetic subject torn between a persistent dreaming of theability to master experience by way of inscribing poetic, cartographic and technological lines, and agrowing acknowledgement of the violent underside to the increasingly untenable dreams of self-expansion and totalising aesthetics.Keywords: Blaise Cendrars; cartography; European modernism; politics of travel; Transsiberian

In 1913, Blaise Cendrars and Sonia Delaunay-Terk publish a singular work of art at No. 4, Rue deSavoie, Paris which resists any one all-encompassing critical description, for the work presentsitself simultaneously as poem, prose, painting and pleated book. Titled La Prose du Transsibérien etde la Petite Jehanne de France (Prose), Cendrars’ poem—narrated by an eponymous poet(“Blaise”) and presenting an adolescent voyage on the Transsiberian Railway in the historicalcontext of the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese war—first appeared in the milieu of 1913 Paris in astunning display of artistic and typographic experimentation. When unfolded, Prose is a two-metrelong accordion-pleated canvas rife with contrasts as intimated in the vertical delineation ofDelaunay-Terk’s coloured pochoir forms on the left and Cendrars’ provocatively visual text on theright. However, when folded, Prose is transformed into a book. One the one hand, we might thinkof Prose as a luxury livre d’artiste with a limited 150 planned editions intended for the printingpress. However, we might also approach Prose as a more prosaic, helpfully pocket-sized guidebook.It is Prose’s appearance as a map-book which concerns us here, and the work might be said to beginwith a provocative instance of cartography: folded into a book, a red and white map of theTranssiberian Railway route is prominently displayed on one of the two panels forming the frontand back of the work; unfolded, Prose’s railway map is once more prominently located at the top ofthe work. Furthermore, the work is saturated with horizontal and vertical axes joining to suggest acartographic grid deeply inscribed in Prose’s narrative and material dimensions. Blaise’s narrativebegins in the city of Moscow which stretches out with the horizontal lines of stations and verticallines of towers (“des sept gares et des mille et trois tours”1), and the horizontal imaginary line of the

1 All translations are my own unless otherwise specified and take the British Library’s online reproduction of Prose as their French source. All images of the work used here also derive from the British Library’s high-resolution, zoomable digital reproduction of Prose. This reproduction is easily accessible at the British Library’s online gallery which is located at http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/features/breakingtherules/btrtranssiberienz.html.

narrative’s central train motif combines with the physical vertical line of its two-metre length;similarly, when unfolded into a canvas, we notice a stark grid-pattern deeply inscribed into thepaper stock by the visible creases resulting from its folded book-form2. Finally, even when folded,Prose is conveniently pocket-sized in dimensions comparable to the numerous guides de voyagewhich saw increasing popularity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century3. Indeed, thework’s titular figure Jehanne even entertains an allusion to the popular Guide Joanne series of travelbooks published by Hachette4. If Prose invites us to read it and perhaps use it as a map, then this essay plays with the possibilitythat Cendrars’ poem is itself an attempted poetic map for modernity; specifically, a guide suggestinga totalising means of making sense of modern experience by bringing it within the modern subject’ssphere of knowledge. The permeation of various types of inscribing lines (poetic, cartographic, andlocomotive) in Prose problematises a Cendrarsian preoccupation with attempts to realise an idealmastery of the modern world by pursuing teleological lines of personal, artistic and technologicalprogress. Train-line, poem-line, map-line: each plays with questions of travel, knowledge anddifference. it is thus the potential impossibility of realising this ideal which underpins Blaise’sanxious repeated cry of not knowing how to go all the way to the ‘end’ (“jusqu’au bout”). Prose,then, is suggestively an attempt to employ aesthetic practices of inscription to acquire the requisiteknowledge of how to proceed to the supposedly happy forever of a utopian ideal—that is, as per itspoetic refrain, to learn how to go “jusqu’au bout”.

However, if Prose is a map, it is certainly not a static one. Instead, it presents an activecartography participating in the historic completion of the railway’s construction, with Blaiserecalling being aboard the first train to circle Lake Baikal (“Nous étions dans le premier train quicontournait le lac Baïkal”). The inauguration of this final notoriously difficult section of the railwayon September 25, 1904 symbolically marked the capacity of the Transsiberian to go “jusqu’au bout”from the familiar Western regions of Europe to the ‘Far East’ of Russia, and ultimately, to reach thesea at Vladivostok5. The modern engineering feat of the railway’s construction participates in awell-established discourse of Enlightenment desires to discover the unknown and map the world,and the train’s penetration into the vast Siberian landmass inaugurates an unprecedented ability tomove across the region’s notoriously inhospitable territory.

The construction of the railway thus itself suggests a physical process of mapping: the railwaywrites previously scattered or non-existent towns into a bold horizontal line, realising an Imperialdream of learning how to expand its Tsarist self “jusqu’au bout”. Furthermore, this type of mappingis a solipsistic process assimilating alterity within the self’s epistemic embrace by way of a sharpbinary representation of known and unknown—terra (in)cognita. In Prose, this process isrepresented by the map’s binary aesthetic with vast swathes of cartographic white to the north andsouth of a central red, horizontal iron thread:

2 Pierre Caizergues similarly notes the work’s contrasting central horizontal and vertical axes, seeing the contrast between vertical form and the narrative’s horizontal themes as a type of paradox (Caizergues in Perloff 27).

3 See Kory Olson’s study for a discussion of the development of guidebooks around the turn of the century.4 A well-known travel guide of the time, “Hachette’s Guide Joanne series, one of the most prominent [guides de

voyage], released more than two hundred titles between 1860 and 1909” (Olson 208).5 With the completion of the track at Lake Baikal, “for the first time, the Atlantic shores of Europe were joined to the

eastern coast of Asia by uninterrupted rails” (Tupper 339–340).

As a cartographic process, the Transsiberian’s construction brings the distant edges of Siberia andthe Oriental Far East6 into the firmer physical and epistemic reach of the self: Russia totalised intothe autocratic figure of the Tsar. Accordingly, we find a visual correspondence between the railwayand Imperial expansion, with the broad capitalised lettering of “EMPIRE RUSSE” stretching outparallel to the railway.

Although Blaise’s narrative of an adolescent journey from Moscow to Harbin certainly lendsitself to interpretation as a tale of adolescent escape and the personal-poetic initiation of a “mauvaispoète”, the cartographic presentation of the work encourages a reading of Blaise’s journey as anallegory of expansion at both personal and nationalistic (Imperial) levels. Blaise’s voyage thusparticipates in two resonating articulations of projects of self-expansion and their correspondingconstructions of self and Other: the expansion of the Imperial self as the Tsarist autocracyconsolidates its hold on Siberia, and a modern adolescent subject (speaking as the poem’s lyric je)attempting to develop a mature aesthetic body.

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We proceed by proposing an equivalence between two different types of mapping practices:cartographic transformations of the Other into solipsistic representation by way of the map’stotalising logic, and the narrative transformation of the Other into its highly fantasisedrepresentation by the self.

Prose abounds with references to regions at the edge of European cartographic imaginations—Patagonia, Fiji, lost Pacific islands and the North Pole all make an appearance. The binary logic ofthe map, Prose’s distinctions between Russia’s European west and Asiatic Siberian east, andBlaise’s narrative fantasies of exotic distant lands are exemplary of an Orientalist discourse as perEdward Said’s seminal theorisation of “a style of thought based upon an ontological andepistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident’” (2).The cartographic and fantasy processes at work within Prose are deeply engaged in an attempt toconsolidate the self’s containment of the alterity it finds alienating and threatening.

Blaise’s voyage begins cloaked in the adolescent fantasy of a Jules Verne adventure story as ouryoung poet leaves the city en route for Harbin, in the company of merchants, sleeping on coffersfilled with gold:

I was very happy carefreeI thought we were playing at brigandsWe had stolen the treasure of GolcondaAnd we were going thanks to the Transsiberian to hide it on the other side of the

worldI had to defend it against the thieves of the Urals who had attacked the saltimbanks

of Jules VerneAgainst the Tunguz the Boxers of ChinaAnd the rabid little Mongols of the Great LamaAlibaba and the Forty ThievesAnd the faithful of the terrible Old Man of the MountainAnd above all, against the most modernThe hotel ratsAnd specialists of international expresses.

While Siberia was previously flatly evoked as a distant place of war (“En Sibérie tonnait le canonc’était la guerre”), the narrative is quick to engulf such dark evocations of Russia’s Far East in ahighly Orientalist construction of the Siberian Orient as an exotic place of both treasure andviolence. Any unsavoury realities of the “bout” of this journey, the frontier between West and East,

6 We might also recall its more provocative French designation as l’Extrême-Orient.

are contained within the thrill of an adventure romance fantasised as a bold spiriting away of thelooted treasure of Golconda. Blaise thus aligns his journey with an image of the Transsiberianfamiliar to Prose’s original Parisian readers from the 1900 Exposition Universelle7 where apublicity campaign aiming to dispel unfavourable accounts of the route promoted an image of theTranssiberian as a luxury experience of the exotic Orient8. We find Blaise’s fantasy overtlyparticipating in long-held European constructions of the Orient as both a place of cruelty andviolence; and a place of softer fantasies—as Said puts it, “a place of romance, exotic beings,haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences” (1). Harbin figures as the destinationof the jewellery merchant whom Blaise accompanies, and it is a destination invested with thepossibility of making one’s fortune (like the merchants, Blaise leaves Moscow “aller tenter fairefortune”), of exploiting the Orient and mastering it through the expansion of the self with therailway. As a city freshly minted alongside the Transsiberian Railway, Harbin is an openimaginative site which might easily be subsumed into the self’s fantasies of a rich Orient ripe forexploitation9. The romance of an Oriental Siberian adventure, its happy insouciance, is thusintertwined with a clear desire for dominion, and Blaise imagines his voyage as a militantengagement with a medley of caricatured Oriental villains—Ural thieves, Chinese Boxers, andenraged Mongol hordes are all blithely included. A profusion of historical and fictional referencesserves to highlight a distinction between the heroic European subject, Blaise, and an Oriental Otherneeding containment within the self’s ideological constructions; Otherness is overwritten by anOrientalist fantasy.

For Blaise, pursuing an adolescent project of self-mastery, Siberia’s allure is the ease with whichits vast space might be erased and re-written within poetic fantasies. Direct descriptions of Siberiaare strangely absent in the first half; it is not until we are almost half-way through the poem thatSiberia is directly described and this first description immediately deflates the earlier hopes of aland of romantic adventure and riches:

Paris has disappeared and its enormous blazeThere is nothing but continuous ashesRain which fallsPeat which swellsSiberia which turnsThe heavy spreads of snow which rise back up

Prior to this first description of a disenchanted Siberia of ominous ashes and a dismal mix ofturbulent rain, peat and snow, Siberia had remained contained and romanticised within itsOrientalised constructions; previously, mentions of war and death were blithely brushed away withBlaise attributing them to mere rumour (“On disait qu’il y avait beaucoup de morts”). Until thedistance between self and Other is spatially breached and the travelling subject forced to account foremerging disparities between fantasy constructions and a resistant exterior world, Blaise thrives onhis ability to master Siberian alterity within his poetic lines—that is, the ability to subsume Siberiainto the self’s representative models is celebrated. A key early opaque description of the land ismarked by Blaise rejoicing (“Pas de nature !”) in the train’s successful erasure of any threateningalterity Siberia might present; frosted train windows permit him to fetishise Siberia’s apparent

7 Prose alludes to the Exposition in its final panels where Delaunay-Terk’s painting visually represents a red Eiffel Tower and an orange wheel which evoke La Grande Roue de Paris (a structure built for the 1900 Exposition and located near the base of the Eiffel Tower); Cendrars’ penultimate line similarly alludes to the Exposition (“Paris / City of the unique Tower the great Gibbet and the Wheel”).

8 The Transsiberian section of the Exposition included maps and photographs of Siberia, various Oriental objets d’artand, most famously, the International Sleeping-Car Company’s display of luxury train carriages—a stylised view ofthe Transsiberian evoked in the poem’s final panel where Blaise describes the company’s prospectus as “the most beautiful church in the world”. As Tupper describes the display, it was characterised by an aesthetic contrast between the “French Empire period” and a “vivid Chinese style” (274).

9 Harbin’s dominant image was that of an “Aladdin City” popping up from what had been a decidedly rural Siberian setting at the turn of the century (Tupper 348).

mystery and silence:

The windows are frostedNo nature !And beyond, the Siberian plains the low sky and the great shadows of the Taciturns

which rise and which fall

Unable to see the world beyond the train’s frosted windows, Blaise is free to maintain solipsisticfantasies of Siberia as a taciturn land: a great, silent land which, passively lying under the self’sclassification as ‘unknown’, might be subsumed into poetic and cartographic inscriptions.

This conception of the Russian Far East as immense and insistently unknown is a dominant onein literary and cultural imaginations. With seemingly endless inhospitable swathes of steppe, tundraand taiga, the Siberian land resists easily being known or mapped and is easily fetishised. We find avivid imagining of Russia’s incomprehensible space described two years previously in JosephConrad’s 1911 Under Western Eyes as his protagonist’s, Razumov, Russian “inheritance of spaceand numbers”:

Under the sumptuous immensity of the sky, the snow covered the endless forests, thefrozen rivers, the plains of an immense country, obliterating the landmarks, theaccidents of the ground, levelling everything under its uniform whiteness, like amonstrous blank page awaiting the record of an inconceivable history. (33)

A “passive land”, Conrad’s narrator imagines Russia as a blank surface yet unwritten by historicalrecord. While its blankness is “monstrous” in its formlessness, Conrad’s Russia (a virgin land filledwith “the resplendent purity of the snows”, 33) nonetheless attests to the land’s great reserves of, asTupper puts it, “illimitable potential” (23). The fetishising of the land as Conrad’s unformed“monstrous blank page” and Cendrars’ unformed turning space of voiceless shadows (“the greatshadows of the Taciturns which rise and which fall”) both imply that it is a land whose visual-verbalblankness might passively be made intimately familiar through the self’s inscribing processes. Thisis precisely the modern secular trinity of mastery suggested early on in the work’s remarkablecolophon10 with the homonymic simultaneity of the male subject’s train-directed path (“sa voie”),poetic voice (“sa voix”) and totalising knowledge (“savoir”):

The desire of Blaise of “savoir aller jusqu’au bout” thus emerges as a utopian project to transcendthe limited condition of being a “fort mauvais poète” and become an ideal homme nouveau, thewould-be redeemer of all the problems of a dissatisfying present of modern (adolescent) experience.More specifically, it is a project attempting realisation by way of a totalising artistic body birthed atthe Parisian ‘centre’ of European modernity—the singular publishing address of 4, rue de Savoie, 4.

10 It is compelling to read the colophon as providing much more than simply publication details. Firstly, the name of the publisher, Cendrars’ own small press Les Hommes Nouveaux, is emphasised in orange colour, larger point size and wide tracking which particularly differentiates it from the surrounding text; secondly, the unusual formatting of the publisher’s address draws attention to the street-name sandwiched oddly between a pair of comma-delineated, Arabic numeral fours: “4, rue de Savoie, 4”. We might thus liberally translate this remarkable colophon in several ways: Homme(s) Nouveau(x), rue de sa(voi)(e)(r)(x); New men, road to knowledge; new man, road of the railway; modern man, road of his voice.

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If Prose presents a central dialogue between solipsistic fantasy and its disenchantment, thenCendrars’ poem also stages the increasing difficulty of Blaise’s attempts to maintain his fantasies.The dialogic oscillations11 intensify as the narrative and train progress further into Siberia until themomentum of the train, which had been driving the narrative forward in its quest of self-expansion,suddenly slows down:

From Irkutsk onwards the journey became far too slowFar too longWe were on the first train to circle Lake BaikalWe had decorated the locomotive in flags and lanternsAnd we had left the station to the sad strains of hymns to the Tsar.

While the completion of the railway symbolically marks the success of a Tsarist ambition to expandthe Imperial self and bring its East more firmly into a Western embrace, it also doubles in Prose as amoment when the Tsarist regime encounters a puncturing moment of instability with the “sadstrains of hymns to the Tsar” and “The mad strains and sobs / Of an eternal liturgy” alluding to thecritical event of Bloody Sunday which symbolically marked the destabilisation of Tsarist authorityby the 1905 Revolution. Rather than consolidating the self’s totalising vision, the ostensiblecompletion of projects of self-expansion and mastery of the Other surprisingly emerges as adestabilising crisis which upsets the self’s faith in the possibility of attaining an ultimate idealtotalisation by expanding “jusqu’au bout”. Further, this doubling of ostensible mastery (with thecompletion of the railway) and Blaise’s disillusionment (for the journey is now painfully slow) isalso associated with an encounter with Siberia; the slowing down of the train signals the finalIrkutsk-Harbin stage of the journey and the narrative is quickly filled with descriptions of a war-torn Siberia of wounded soldiers and madness as dreams of totalising self-expansion unravel:

I sawI saw silent trains black trains which came back from the Extreme Orient and which

passed as phantomsAnd my eye, like the rear light, still runs behind these trainsAt Talga 100 000 wounded dying from lack of care

I visited the hospitals of KrasnoïarskAnd at Khilok we crossed a long convoy of mad soldiersI saw in the lazarettos the gaping wounds the injuries bleeding full organAnd the amputated limbs were dancing around or flying off in the raucous airThe blaze was on all the faces in all the heartsIdiot fingers were drumming on all the windowsAnd under the force of fear gazes burst like abscessesIn all the stations they burned all the carriagesAnd I saw

I saw trains of 60 locomotives running away at full steam pursued by rutting horizons and bands of crows flying off hopelessly after them

DisappearingIn the direction of Port-Arthur.

11 As Jean-Michel Rabaté has noted, an “obdurate dialogism” (62) is central to the poem’s structure.

Rather than an affirmation of any mastery of Siberia’s white alterity, the “bout” of Blaise’sTranssiberian lines of poem, train and map is saturated with the flat tone of “I saw” and a subjectconfronted by the horrors and casualties of war. There is an abruptness in the opening disyllabic line(“I saw” / “j’ai vu”) which conveys a sense of trauma; we keenly feel the absence of a grammaticalobject and this lingering absence suggests a subject unable to verbalise what he has seen orinternalise external experiences. Earlier Siberian fantasies are sliced through by the relentless litanyof a speaker whose poetic gaze has succeeded in seeing yet encounters not the desired visions of aparadisaical ‘bout du voyage’ but, rather, a world drunk and delirious, burning with thedisorientation of war. “I saw” emerges as the self’s fantasy of Siberia as a space ripe for materialand imaginative exploitation is punctured; Siberia subversively bursts with resistant gazes attestingto the casualties populating the frontier of avaricious desire. A subliminal anxiety of being looked atemerges in Blaise’s haunting descriptions of eyes and faces: at Oufa he recalls the bloodied face of agunner; the mad fire of war is revealed on all the passing faces; and at the pressurised moment whenthe self encounters the Other, “under the force of fear”, gazes burst open like abscesses. It is ananxiety that was introduced early on in the voyage by the disquieting mention of a man with blueglasses and intensifies with the descent into Siberia as Blaise increasingly senses the capacity ofexternal presences to actively gaze back at the self.

Given that Blaise’s travels seem to perform a certain politics of seeing, might a latent politicalvalue of travel be found in Prose? For our analysis suggests that travel destabilises rather thanreinforces hegemonic discourses such as Orientalism, at least at the personal level, by catalysing anencounter with an Other who proves resistant to the self’s attempts to subsume alterity into thesolipsistic fantasies maintained by narrative and cartography. In this sense Cendrars hardly seems tobe advancing an unqualified “new exoticism” as Jean Cocteau once praised him for (145). IfCendrars does suggest travelling enables a privileged moment of seeing, it is a seeing of the self, its“heart of darkness” (Conrad, Heart of Darkness 22), rather than the penetration of an unveiledexotic Other12. The fetishised moment of illumination and decipherment thus emerges unexpectedlynot as an intimate knowing of the Other (for such a ‘knowing’ might inevitably remain within thedomain of solipsistic projection), but rather as a self-reflexive seeing of the sordid underside oftotalising ambitions.

There is thus a latent sense that the shock underpinning Blaise’s repetition of “I saw” is the resultof a subject no longer able to tenably fantasise Siberia as a place passively ripe for ‘making one’sfortune’ or suitably white for mastering inscriptions. At this late stage of the journey, the illusion ofa non-resistant empty land (previously maintained by the train’s frosted windows) is no longerpossible. While the image of “idiot fingers” drumming on windows might evoke the tedium of along journey with restless passengers, it also suggests the more sinister presence of alien fingerstapping on the exterior of the train as it passes through a noisy land bursting with returned glancesand sounds. If Cendrars suggest that travel can engender an ethical acknowledgement of the Other—that there remain glances, tapping fingers and presences beyond the self’s fantasy andcartographic constructions—then this emerges only when the self leaves the familiar enclosures ofits writing practices: when it abandons the totalising desires of train, map and poetic line. Yet it isonly when the train slows down and relents the visual erasure and homogenisation of Siberia(possible only when a fast-paced express hurtles unforgivingly past) that solipsistic fantasiesbecome untenable. Blaise’s visit to Krasnoiarsk’s hospitals significantly marks the first mention ofdisembarking the train in a sequence which also poignantly reveals the dark outcomes of the war;the impossibility of maintaining earlier fantasies reaches maturity as Blaise abandons his ensconcedposition within the train for a disenchanted Siberian exterior. This ethical moment of a reflexiveseeing of the self thus coincides with the abandonment of the train which has symbolised anadolescent desire to assimilate alterity; train carriages are burnt and the voyage culminates inBlaise’s active abandonment of the train at Harbin as Siberia appears to go up in flames:

12 In this sense, Cocteau convinces with his articulation of Cendrars’ ability to provide an ethical travelling poetics of witnessing. Cocteau articulates it memorably in paratactic phrases evocative of Cendrars’ own flat litany of “I saw”:“[Cendrars] has travelled. He has seen. He bears witness.” (145–146).

TsitsiKa and KharbineI go no furtherIt’s the last stationI disembarked at Harbin just as they set fire to the offices of the Red Cross.

The work thus ultimately attests to the breaking up of a totalising Imperial body with the onset ofrevolutionary fire, and Blaise’s earlier presentiment of “la venue du grand Christ rouge de larévolution russe” finds maturity in the setting alight of the “bureaux de la Croix-Rouge” as redmotifs of revolution and religious redemption intertwine at this critical and ambiguous moment.

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Prose ends in the quietness and indeterminacy of approaching night with an enigmatic final imagethat might be interpreted as representative of a 1913 subject torn between a persistent dreaming ofthe ability to master experience by way of inscribing poetic, cartographic and technological lines,and a growing knowledge of the violent underside to those increasingly untenable dreams: “Paris /City of the unique Tower of the grand Gibbet and of the Wheel”. Paris is simultaneously evoked asa city bursting with the bright promises of modern technology and as a mediaeval place of torture. Itis both a 1319 Paris filled with the torture chambers of the Bonbec Tower, the Gibbet ofMontfaucon, and the (Catherine) Wheel, and a contemporary 1913 Paris hopeful with the utopianpromises manifested in the symbol of the Eiffel Tower and the Great Wheel—structures whosecreation as a result of the 1889 and 1900 Expositions Universelles imbues this modern Paris with aturn-of-the-century faith in technology. It is a powerful image which invites re-readings of Prose asa text filled with meditations on the hopeful promises of self-affirming totalising practices and thetorturous underside painfully apparent at the frontier of all leading lines of avaricious self-expansion. The countervailing movements of the rising tower and the turning wheel perfectlycapture Prose’s torn texture between dreaming to go “jusqu’au bout” and persistently returning tothe broken earth to reluctantly but necessarily acknowledge its failure.

When Prose boldly erupted in the Parisian art milieu in 1913 with the ambition of attaining theheight of the Eiffel Tower, it openly acknowledged its fantasy with the tower’s mythic “simpleline”—the mythic line Roland Barthes would discuss decades later in his reading of the EiffelTower. That is, at least in Prose’s context, the line which underpins all utopian projects oftransforming present experience into an ideal totalising vision. Prose thus seemingly began inpursuit of the adolescent utopian hope to write the mythic lines which join “base and summit, oragain, earth and heaven” (Barthes 124). And yet ultimately we find that Prose is exemplary as aTour in both its senses: its material ambitions inscribe it with both the hope of being a tower (unetour) promising to rise to totalising scopic heights, and its inbuilt capacity to turn and fall back onitself (un tour) returning thus to face the dark practices of inscription so often found at the heart ofthe self: the totalising tendencies of a lyric voice, European Paris still steeped in Orientalistdiscourses, the adolescent poet’s desire to master all within chains of poetic verse. It is in thismovement of flight and return, rising tower and falling wheel, that the work recognises theimpossibility and failure of its solipsistic, expansionist project, and, of even greater political import,attests to the casualties of its ambition—all that can but be flatly intoned at the frontier with ashocked succession of visions emerging as the result of the self’s inscribing regimes: “And I saw / Isaw…”. It is therefore the poem’s final evocation of an enigmatic “great Gibbet” which mostvividly captures the poignancy of Prose’s revision of the poetic self and its totalising ambitions; forit is the sense of a noose which our analysis of Prose ultimately finds pervading the anxiousoscillations of the text as we persistently return with Blaise to question the failure and perversity ofthe self’s ambitions. Having travelled with Cendrars to a defiantly present Siberian Other, we mightnow return upwards, on our own, through two metres of vertiginous artistic inscriptions until weencounter the map once more. However, as the more well-travelled readers we might now claim to

be, we no longer find it to be a long grandiose line stretching out from Moscow to the sea, but morestrikingly, the strangling noose of a train, map and poem initially invested with unqualified dreamsof self-expansion and totalising aesthetics.

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