Shattuck R. (1969) the Poetics of Revolution

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Midwest Modern Language Association

The Poetics of RevolutionAuthor(s): Roger ShattuckReviewed work(s):Source: The Bulletin of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Vol. 2, Papers of theMidwest Modern Language Association, Number 1. Poetic Theory/Poetic Practice (1969), pp.67-76Published by: Midwest Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1314737 .

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T h e P o e t i c s o f RevolutionRoger Shattuck

1Two of the most wrong-headed books of criticism our century has pro-duced appeared in 1925, the one pedestrian, the other intermittentlybrilliant, both influential. The first is Henri Bremond's La Poesie pure, abelated attempt to assimilate to Roman Catholicism the transcendent

aspirations of the art for art's movement and to revive a literary contro-versy that was already moribund when Valery salvaged the term poesiepure in 1920.1 The second book has enjoyed a more vigorous life becauseof the prominence of its author. It has also had a second career since itstranslation into English in 1948: Ortega y Gasset's essay, The Dehumani-zation of Art. Ortega tells us that the "spirit of our age" jettisons thehuman or natural element in favor of metaphor in an attempt to become"pure". Toward the end of his short text, however, Ortega has begun tospeak about self-irony in art as a "suicidal" tendency. His conclusion isthe opposite of Bremond's; instead of spiritual transcendence, Ortega seesin 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" amovement in poetry and painting that lay at least a quarter of a centuryastern. Around them was gushing up a variety of movements in the artsthat stood for a far different and more complex situation. True, art forart's sake and purity of esthetic value had not disappeared entirely fromDada and Surrealism, from Ultraism in Spain, or from Ego-Futurism inSoviet Russia. Symbolism and Cubism had left a deep mark. Neverthe-less, the direction of the arts in the Twenties and Thirties ran not so muchaway from the human as back toward it, toward daily life and the qualityof the environment and caustic questions about who should own and runthings. Let us look at three specific cases in Berlin, in Moscow, and inParis.

2Berlin, February 1919. Germany had come close to restaging the SovietRevolution of 1917. November 11, 1918, a date that the rest of the worldcelebrated as the signing of the Armistice, came just as workers' and1"Avant-proposa la Connaissancede la deesse"2 For a fine preliminarycriticismof Ortega'sconfused position, see Joseph Frank'sessay in The WideningGyre.

67 The Poetics of Revolution


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soldiers' councils were taking control of the larger German cities. If theMinority Socialists had held off elections for a few months, they mighthave 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 andRosa Luxemburg, the Spartacist leaders, just four days before the January1919 elections in order to enforce "law and order." Three days after theelections, which crushed the Minority Socialists and the Communist ele-ments, the Versailles peace conference opened. Permitting no oral nego-tiations, the Allies put forward unthinkably onerous terms. Riots andstreet fighting broke out in the larger German cities, most intensely inBerlin and Munich.Having set up shop officially in February 1918 as a kind of elite clubthat demonstrated openly against the military and the government, theBerlin Dadaists went into a paroxysm of protest and fly-by-night pub-lication in early 1919. Among them was only one card-holding com-munist, John Heartfield, who had Anglicized his name out of admirationfor the United States. Yet no one was apolitical. The key figure, whosedrawing sparked everyone else to action, was George Grosz. Inevitablyhis work fills the four-page newspaper-leaflet, Jederman sein eignerFussball, dated 15 February 1919. Its one number, carrying savage at-tacks on the regime, was peddled through the working quarter of Berlinbehind a horse-drawn bandwagon playing pop marches and sentimental

songs. The little street company was arrested on its way home; Everymanwas confiscated. Stories conflict about the arrest and trial of the editorsand authors. Walter Mehring, in the most complete account, confessesthat he had written the "obscene piece of anti-militarism"which gave thepolice a case against them. He had been an active Berlin Dadaist forthe past two years."Der Coitus im Dreimiiderlhaus"is a "Dada song" whose title picks upthe name of a pseudo-Schubertopera that had just reached its 1000th per-formance in Berlin. The forty-nine irregular and unrhymed lines of thepoem lie parallel and docile on the page, yet they really fly off in all direc-tions and observe the montage principle that seems to dominate all artisticexperiments of the era.

Hab Dir nich KleeneImmer feste druff(SprachPrinz Eugen der edle RitterPour le merite vom Gardekorps)Und Zieten aus dem BuschAuch die RepublikbrauchtSoldaten(Noske lachelt verschamtWenn der Deutschnationaleschwarz-weiss laggt)Cacile mein Engel



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Lufte das Hemd, Heute ist KaisersGeburtstagWir machen 'ne ExtratourNach AmerongenHintenrumAlte 175erIch rechne auf Euch!Don't hold backKeep plugging(Quoth PrinceEugene the noble knightPour le merite of the ImperialGuard)And Zieten out of the underbrushEven the Republicneeds soldiers(Noske smiles shame-facedWhen the German nationalsrun up a black-and-whitelag)Cecelia my angelHoist your skirt a bit, today'sthe Emperor'sbirthdayWe'll take an extra tripTo AmerongenFrom behindYou old queersI'm counting on you!

A few lines later Mehring throws in the boy scout motto: Allzeit/Schuss-bereit (Be prepared-to shoot). The seamy side of life, including lice,prostitution, and pederasty, provides the setting for a short history ofmilitary cowardice, cliche expressions, song titles, and clear allusions tocontemporary events. But there's nothing aleatory here. The meaningcomes through as ponderously as in a rebus: Germany has been buggered.Screw the government. Montage is too fragile a form to live long undersuch heavyhanded treatment. Nevertheless, "Coitus im Dreimaderlhaus"had a substantial half-life as a famous poem. At the trial, Mehring tellsus, Dr. Gottfried Benn gave expert medical testimony and cited two books,one on the Marquis de Sade and the other on sexual deviations. He mayhave been trying to cloak politics in pornography.

3In October 1919 the Soviet government was desperately pressed byfamine, civil war, intervening armies (including U.S. Marines) on severalfronts, and dissentions over policy. To the rest of the world, the two-yearold government represented either the breakdown of civilization itself orthe promise of a new society. There had been no time yet for nuances.Most Russian writers hung back, unwilling to participate in the revolu-tion, but an organization called Proletcult was trying to organize the be-ginnings of a true proletarian culture in towns and villages across thecountry. The Futurists, though they would be condemned before long asrepresentatives of "the last period of bourgeois imperialistic culture," took



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an active part in Proletcult and even supplied ministers for the Plastic Artssection of the People's Commisariat of Education. Their poetics hadcomplex origins in French and Russian Symbolism, abstract painting, film,and Italian Futurism. No one knew just how to combine this new art withan anti-military, utopian ideology. They rejected genius and inspirationas "twaddle" and affirmedart as action. They meant it. For them, art wasnot 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 hisown plays, reading to factory workers, and founding "comfuts"-not akind of candy but a name for communist-futurist cells. His was one ofthe principal voices on the futurist literary review called, significantly,The Art of the Commune. But the military situation had made one com-modity desperately scarce: paper. At this juncture Mayakovsky's auto-biography reads: "Head filled with 150,000,000. Propaganda work inROSTA." Rosta, the future Tass News Agency, began printing dailyposters for display in towns all over Russia. The posters replaced news-papers. For two years Mayakovsky produced copy and drawings andlayout for ROSTA in Moscow, often working thirty-six hours at a stretchand sleeping in the office. Seven years earlier, aged nineteen, he had col-laborated with Burlyuk and Khlebnikov on the Futurist manifesto, "ASlap at Public Taste." Eleven years later, after a turbulent career in whichhe could never come to terms with the Party, he killed himself in his lastgame of Russian roulette.

Mayakovsky's early poems had displayed a Whitmanesque egoism thathe made no effort to temper. Now, at the moment of his most completeidentification with the revolution, he wrote his first major work that nearlydispenses with the first person singular. "150,000,000 speak with my lips. . .The press of feet on the cobblestones printed this edition . . . Thispoem has no one person for author." And he proceeded accordingly as hisautobiography records. "Published it without my name. Wanted any-one who was so inclined to continue it and improve it. Nobody did, buteveryone knew who wrote it, all the same." It was hard not to be recog-nized as Mayakovsky with that gravel voice. But he wanted to be col-lective-or thought so. When Lenin read the work and heard it had beenprinted in an edition of 5000 copies, he protested to Lunacharsky, whohad authorized the publication: "Nonsense, stupid, double-dyed tommy-rotand pretentiousness." Lenin also called it "hooligan Communism." Paster-nak recounts his disappointment.

While [Mayakovsky]existed creatively, I spent four years getting used to him and



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did not succeed.ThenI got used to him in two hoursand a quarter,whichwasthetime it took to read and examine he uncreative150,000,000.Since then, critics have stubbornly disagreed: is this Mayakovsky's bestpropagandaor 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 shortage-the work appeared in 1924 in a signed edition with the lines broken upand arranged in stepped indentations down the page. This format was tobecome his own, and its declamatory purposes have been revived recentlyby Charles Olsen in his manifesto on "Projective Verse." The poet whoreads in public wants a visible script; the private reader benefits from theclues, as in looking through a musical score.The first two parts sketch out a kind of proletarian pep rally: "Go getWoodrow Wilson." Wilson is holed up in his Chicago headquarters-Chicago, the electric city where everyone has the rank at least of general.Ivan strides dryshod across the Pacific to meet the President in hand-to-hand combat. The battle is described in terms that hover between theIliad and Superman. After cataclysmic destruction, Wilson is reduced toashes 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 any-thing Mayakovsky was turning out for ROSTA. As Trotsky says ofMayakovsky's work in general, the poem is always in motion, but itsdynamism never reaches a climax. Apocalypse and utopia crowd eachother very hard.

But wenot only have to dreamup a new orderbut also to dynamitethe old one.(Here, a section on how electricity and steam will replace romanticism.)

In the wild routthe old disappeared,around the worldthundersa new myth.On our own feetWe'll slam throughthe time-barrier.

It's closer to Futurism than to Socialist Realism. The Russian free-verse original is shot through with rhymes and off rhymes, with puns andalliteration, and with patches of regular meter. And this is the man whohas become the institutionalized national poet of the Soviet Union. Schoolchildren learn his verses by heart. Adults remember-or try to forget-that in 1935 Stalin called him "the best and most talented poet of ourSoviet 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 seeingelectricity, lost interest in nature. Not up to date enough."), with prole-tarian politics, and with a lingering and increasingly suppressed attention todream consciousness. One of the results is that a poem intended as avirulent attack on the United States begins to sound covertly admiring inthe mock-epic descriptions of Chicago street sounds, of trucks chasingmillionaires around a hotel room, and of Wilson's six-shooters and sixty-bladed sabers. Mayakovsky carried the Russian folk tale about mightyIvan to the threshold of Surrealism.

4In 1919 the revolution was alive in Russia and Germany. It did notseem so close in France. But the Stalinist freeze institutionalized the revo-

lution in Russia after Lenin's death in 1924. In Germany and Italy, theCommunist Party was harassed and driven underground. Through thesedefaults, France became the principal arena in the Twenties and Thirtiesfor open international debate on ideology and for the Byzantine strategiesof Communism, anarchist revisionism, anti-Fascism, rightist reaction, andthe whole repertory of cultural and political poses. Furthermore,there wasa semi-official theory that placed the intellectuals alongside the laboringproletariat because they too had been mercilessly exploited by capitalistsociety. Most French political thinkers found a way to reconcile thethought of Marx with the French revolutionary tradition, from the JacobinCommittee of Public Safety through the June days of 1848 to the Com-mune of 1871. The history of communist thought in France during thetwenty-year intermission between wars is a complex and fascinating sub-ject. The astonishing thing about those years is that the intensity of politi-cal debate and demonstration failed either to affect the course of eventsthat was leading toward another war, or to bring about a reasonably accu-rate understanding of what really was happening in the Soviet Union.Only a few men, like Victor Serge and possibly Vaillant-Couturier, camethrough with their integrity untarnished. Men as stalwart as Merleau-Ponty and Malraux had either been duped or compromised. Poetry wasdeeply 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, TheSurrealist Revolution, things sounded very different. But "revolution"meant not so much Marx and Lenin and Communism as Freud and thefreedom to dream one's life, to make love, and to commit suicide. It wasnot long, however, before Marx and Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, enteredthe Surrealist canon. The Surrealists had, in fact, organized themselves



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into cells and ideological sects and used techniques of agitation all ofwhich closely paralleled those of the Party. Moreover, the Communistleaders were not working-class types at all, but rather educated bourgeoisthinkers many of whom were writers and even publishing poets. It wasnot totally naive of the Surrealists to think that they might have an in-fluence on Communist ideology in its social and utopian aspects. L'Hu-manite 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 theParty just at the moment of its greatest inflexibility in the late Twenties.For six or seven years it policed itself strenuously against any taint ofTrotskite infection. Everyone was suspect, especially the Surrealists withtheir independent ideas about the individual and society. One key chapterin that story concerns Aragon, a principal founder and flamboyant expo-nent of Surrealism in its most unbridled forms. In 1924 and 1925 he hadpublicly 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 giftfor polemics was reinforced by his meeting Elsa Triolet, sister of Lili Brik,Mayakovsky's lifetime unrequited love. Aragon traveled to Russia withElsa Triolet in 1930 and found himself invited to Karkhov for theSecond Soviet Congress of Revolutionary Writers. Though he promisedhis friends to defend Surrealist ideas there, he signed a statement of self-denunciation and affirmed his faith in dialectical materialism. During theRussian visit, Aragon composed the poem "Front Rouge," which appearedduring November 1931 both in the official Soviet publication, Litteraturede la Re'volution mondiale, and in his own collection, Persecute Per-secuteur. The police seized the former edition and a few weeks laterAragon was charged "with inciting military personnel to disobedienceand with provocation to murder, for purposes of anarchist propaganda."The hue and,cry lasted over a year. Andre Breton found himself forcedinto the position of double agent, on the one hand castigating Aragon forbetraying Surrealism, and, on the other, defending his old companion inarms from conviction. Breton's defense took the dubious form of affirm-ing that Aragon should no more be held responsible for the content ofthis piece of propaganda than for an "automatic" text dictated by hisunconscious. Aragon wavered and finally broke definitively with theSurrealists in order to accept an important role in the cultural affairs ofthe Party. The Surrealists were bitter and disenchanted. Their self-in-flicted collaboration with Communism and the Party was nearing an end.In a long footnote to What is Literature?, Sartre dredges up the wholeAragon 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 thepoem 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 muchuse for automatic writing; his wildest prose works, Paysan de Paris andTraite de Style, have a discernible structure. "Front Rouge" howeverseems to abandon sustained composition. The political title leads intoa heavily sarcastic section about the padded, corrupt world "Chez Max-im's." References to recent street demonstrations (Juares and Sacco andVanzetti provided the occasions) prepare the line that must have offendedthe censors: "Descendez les flics." "Shoot the cops." Soon an obsessiveauditive element begins to dominate.Les yeux bleus de la Revolutionbrillent d'une cruaute necessaireSSSR SSSR SSSR

And finally the message comes through loud and clear.The whole universemust heara voice shoutingthe glory of materialistdialecticwhich walks on its feet on its million feetall in military bootson feet as magnificentas violence itselfholding out its multitudeof weaponstoward the image of victorious communismGlory to materialist dialecticand glory to its incarnationthe RedArmy

"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 notreprinted the poem in any of his recapitulatory collections. Yet it's fateis sealed. Maurice Nadeau carries the text among the "documents" inhis book on Surrealism. The poem belongs to history.5

I have disenterred for you this evening three historic poems on a dis-mally low level of literary quality. To what purpose? Why not pick thewinners and let the clinkers die their natural death? These texts do, how-ever, make certain revelations behind their barefaced tendentionsness. Allthree use a resolutely open form. Their second-hand structural innova-tions belong to the era of early film when it was discovering its syntax, ofphotomontage presented as a new form around 1919, and of such a keywork 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 asacts unrelated to the tradition of recollection in tranquility. Their punningand sprung rhythm and sound effects appeal less to the lyric or epic modethan to effective performance. Mayakovsky, with his mighty voice,commanding stage presence, and capacious memory, published his poemsduring the crucial revolutionary years by declaiming them to the assembledpeople. All we have left is scripts-and, I am told, one useless wax rec-ord. The poetics of revolution in our century seeks the pacing of montageand the privilege of the platform. It makes for a very transitory product.Furthermore, I remain convinced that we often wear blinders when welook back at the Twenties and Thirties and that we fail to see how farpolitics and social concerns had encroached on the domain of poetry-poetry as, say, Rilke and Mallarme represented it. Bremond's thesisabout purism in poetry was truly misguided.Yet there is something to say here that is more important and closerto us. Last spring when I submitted the title of this talk, I felt certainthat I could demonstrate the dynamic connection between revolution andpoetry. In historical terms, it can be done, and in such a way as to showthat poetry as well as other arts has humanized itself. It has not movedincreasingly toward dehumanization and triviality as Ortega argued. Butwhat disturbs me is that the literary and even the rhetorical quality ofrevolutionary 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 selec-tions in a recent paperback called Poems of Protest-retreats constantlyto the lyric, or to the obscene, or to pastiche. Thus it avoids stridentpropaganda. But are there no other options? Is poetry so individual amatter that it can, at most, yield to coterie and school, yet inevitablyperish if it exposes itself to the collective? Edmund Wilson, after readingTrotsky on literature and revolution, suggests glowingly that the poet cantake society itself as his material. But how? From the platform? Byrunning for office? Mayakovsky's suicide must have been an act as poeticas it was political in motive. Is there nothing left but bigger and wilderposters 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 thesearch. Listen to what Antonin Artaud wrote when his fellow Surrealiststook the plunge into the Communist Party in 1927. "What difference doesthe whole world's revolution make to me if I know that I remaineternally stricken with misery and grief in this poor carcass of mine. ...From any absolute standpoint, how could there be the slightest interest inchanging the social structure of the world or in seeing power pass fromthe 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. Iadmire Artaud and find he is in error. But, as you can see, I have foundit difficult, in spite of my title, to document the thesis that if we ever reacha better society, poetry will have helped us find it. Scholarship must notbe twisted. Faith remains.University of Texas


Documents

Shattuck R. (1969) the Poetics of Revolution