Futurism, Surrealism & Dadaism on Language
written late 2018
Language is forever-changing and malleable; it is a product of its time as much as it is a reflection of it. How a people use — and believe it should be used — demonstrates how language can be used as a historical vehicle to a society’s values and beliefs. The radically different attitudes to language — from Marinetti’s Italian Futurism and the Russian counterpart to Dada and Surrealism — all demonstrate what each country at that particular time held as important and, equally, what was unimportant. Yet, despite how each movement proposes a different approach, the language experiments presented all governed the same purpose: poetry.
In his Four Quartets, T.S Eliot wrote “For last year’s words belong to last year’s language / And next year’s words await another voice,” and this is the vein of thinking that Filippo Tommaso took to the extreme in his desire to be Modern. For Marinetti, Rimbaud’s “one must absolutely be modern” (Rimbaud 243) was a motto for life as he spear-headed the Italian-side to the coin that was the Futurist movement in the early 20th century. This was evident through how compared a car accident to a sense of rebirth, writing of a “maternal ditch” with a “face smeared with good factory muck,” and “celestial soot.” (Marinetti 21) The Modern age of technology was the ‘new voice’ of ‘this year’ and everything of the past must be ignored — destroyed even. He therefore disagrees with the Anglo-Saxon ideals of a ‘wholistic’ approach of literature; Eliot’s idea that a poet must write “write not merely with his own generation in his bones,” but with the “whole of literature… from Homer” up until the contemporary (37). For the Futurist’s, “art can be concerned only with the living, it cannot bother with the dead!” (Kruchenykh & Lawton 71) Italian Futurism wished to end the reign of the “aesthetic clique” that was Romanticism, as outlined by the Manifesto of the Futurist Painters 1910. The concluding remarks of the Manifesto announced how the past dead will be “buried in the earth’s deepest bowels!” and that the future will be “free of mummies.” The last tricolon emanates Rimbaud’s entire ideology, saying “Make room for youth, for violence, for daring!” (Boccioni, Carrà, Russolo & Severini) Therefore, the goal of Italian Futurism is to reject the past in favour of change, technology and innovation — and not only in the literature, but in every aspect of art and culture. Unlike in the Romantic era, “poetry” must be a reflection to the technological developments that were the “violent attack on unknown forces” (Marinetti 21). The beauty of poetry was the in the “struggle” for without it, there could be no such thing as a poem.
This differs to Russian Cubo-Futurism and Velimir Klebnikov’s exploration of the primordiality of the Word. This approach was focused on the sonic qualities of the word; its consonants, vowels, etc. Klebnikov’s poetry was revelatory due to its emphasis — and preference — of a poem’s verbal qualities, as opposed to its actual content. In direct contrast to Marinetti in Italy who wished to denounce the past and the obsession with passésim, Klebnikov’s interest in etymology saw to almost archaise language. In his own words, “the work of art is the art of the word,” thus the beauty of poetry is no longer in ‘the Modern struggle’ as Marinetti theorised, but in the actual sonic and visual manipulation of a single, pure Word. Russian Futurism demonstrates the malleable, ever-shifting nature of language and its relationship with the objects it is intended for. That is, the relationships between the signifier and signified. This ideal, whilst investigated by Klebnikov through his experimental poetry, was also brought to public attention through linguist Ferdinand de Saussure’s lectures in Geneva. For Saussure, language had a dual element — as he titled the article which described this, “De L’essence Double Du Langage.” In this article, Saussure examines how words both function “simultaneously as distinctive sounds and as meaningful sounds, or signs.” (J. Joseph) He describes that “there can exist no linguistic form apart from meaning, nor linguistic meaning apart from form.” The meaning of language, therefore, comes from the pure sounds of a word and how we, as a society, interpret these sounds: what he called “abstractions created by the imagination.” (J. Joseph) Therefore, language requires people and that a “a single ‘individual’ language would be useless” for a language is “made for communication with others like us.” (J. Joseph 569) It is important to note Saussure’ use of ‘with others like us’ for a collective must share all interpret the sound in a similar manner, for if they do not apply the same connotative meaning then miscommunication will occur and language will have failed its outlined purpose.
As he illustrates in his book on the linguist, John Joseph asks “is there anything more arbitrary than the words of a language?” (568) This is quite true as, upon reflection, it is hard to understand what gives language authority? What gives a word meaning? Why does the word ‘bottle’ mean a container with a narrow neck used for storing liquids, typically to drink? Or why the letters ‘r’ ‘e’ ‘d’ together signifies a colour at the end of the spectrum, next to orange and opposite violent? Russian Futurism did not care for the denotations of words, but the connotations — what do the sounds of the letters ‘r’ ‘e’ ‘d’ evoke? What do they evoke combined? This idea that “the work of art is the art of the word.” (Kruchenykh, Klebnikov & Lawton 55) was something that, Klebnikov through his poetry and other Futurists with their Manifestos, sought to demonstrate. For the Russian Futurists, a poem’s importance drew from its “phonetic composition of the word” and this is where “its living coloration” is derived from — the coloration that allows for “the word” to “keenly affect” the reader. (Kruchenykh & Lawton 71) It was not so much about poetry’s content and how it would impact readers — as in Romantic poetry which was all about a poem’s theme and subject — but the focus was now on the poem’s words and its exploration of the Word. It should also be noted how Saussure started lecturing his General Linguistics course in Geneva from 1907 (offering it three more times until the year 1911) and the artists of the Russian movement (formerly known as the Hylea movement) had started to come together a year later in 1908. Saussure Cours de Linguistique Générale was published after his death in 1916 so it is clear that society had shifted its attention to the history behind a word and its relationship with the object it describes. Thereby, we see how the attitudes towards language acts as a ‘historical marker’ for what a particular society held of importance: with Marinetti, it was the ‘new’ and with the Russian’s it was the historical sonic elements of a word. Alas, when Saussure said that language is for the collective, the “others like us” this could very well refer to the various approaches to language from Marinetti in Italty to Klebnikov and Kandinsky — the latter who would influence Hugo Ball, a cornerstone in the Dada movement.
The word, ‘Dada’ perfectly encapsulates the entire Dadaism/surrealism movement for the word itself has a “connotation rooted in the unofficial lexicon of contemporary sexual slang.” (Wilke 639) It was used in Alphonse Gallais 1903 book Les Paradis charnels, a book which explores ‘erotic enjoyment,’ with a chapter on erotic forms of art that “share the linguistic denomination ‘à dada.’” (Wilke 639) Thus, in utilising a “sexually charged” word, the Dadaists disturbed “public discourse and morals” through having it be the word that they would be known by and for. (Wilke 639) Not only this, Dada also reflects the international aspect of the movement and how it was not tied down to any one country. This is evident through how, depending on the language, ‘dada’ has a different meaning: in French, ‘hobbyhorse,’ in Romanian, ‘yes, yes’ and in German, an exclamation of joy. Therefore, the word is a perfect encapsulation of the movement’s focus on internationality over vicious nationalism that corrupted the very language Dada-ism seeks to purify. However, the purification is through “buffoonery” (Ball 56) and the mockery of how, as Hugo Ball reports, “man is swallowed up in the mechanistic process” and that “it shows the conflict of the human voice with a world that threatens, ensnares and destroys it.” (57) In rebellion against this, they favoured “the extraordinary and the absurd” (Ball 65) as demonstrated by their performance Cabaret Voltaire: fittingly named after the novella which mocked society. Hugo Ball stated that Dada was their “Candide against the times.” (Ball 67) Cabaret Voltaire was a “centre for artists” who could “give musical performances and readings… of all kinds.” (Ball 50) For example, Ball reported one of African chants and drumming. The reason for so was to bring language back to its purist form; Africa been understood to be the oldest continent with its tribal traditions, and “drum literature into the ground” (Ball 51) as a way of cleansing it from the materialistic modern.
Thus, Time and Word appear to be inextricably linked through how one affects the other. The purposes of these language experiments — living ‘Modern,’ purification through primordiality and international “requiem” (Ball 56) — demonstrates the attitudes of society and effects of technological developments or even historical events such as war. Poetry, the expression of language, adequately reflects these changes and acts as both the tool that allows for such experimentation, but the measure of history that allows us to look back and understand how preceding poets viewed the world and words around them. Despite the differences across these movements and the approaches to language, they still shared the common link in demonstrating how a poet cannot be separated from language, and that if language changes, then so do the poets.
Works Referenced / Consulted:
Apollonio, Umbro, ed. Documents of 20th Century Art: Futurist Manifestos. Brain, Robert, R.W. Flint, J.C. Higgitt, and Caroline Tisdall, trans. New York: Viking Press, 1973. 19–24.
Ball, Hugo. Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary. Edited by John Elderfield. Translated by Ann Raimes, University of California Press, 1996.
Boccioni, Umberto Boccioni, et al. “Manifesto of Futurist Painters.” 11 Feb. 1910.
Coquet, Jean-Claude. “Situation De Saussure.” Littérature, no. 121, 2001, pp. 117–119. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41704802.
De Saussure, Ferdinand. “De L’essence Double Du Langage.” Cahiers Ferdinand De Saussure, no. 50, 1997, pp. 202–205. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/27758541.
Eliot, T. S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Perspecta, vol. 19, 1982, pp. 36–42. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1567048.
Joseph, John E. “Ferdinand de Saussure.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics. June 28, 2017. Oxford University Press,. Date of access 4 Jun. 2019, https://oxfordre.com/linguistics/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.001.0001/acrefore-9780199384655-e-385
Joseph, John E. “Part V. Final Flourish: 1908–1909.” Saussure, Oxford University Press USA — OSO, 2012, pp. 568–596.
“La Pensée Et La Langue Ou Comment Concevoir Le Rapport Organique De L’individuel Et Du Social Dans Le Langage?” Cahiers Ferdinand De Saussure, no. 4, 1944, pp. 26–52. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/27757895.
Lawton, Anna. “Cubo Futurism: The Word as Such.” Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, 1912–1928, by A. Kruchenykh and V. Klebnikov, Cornell University Press, 1988, pp. 55–62.
Lawton, Anna. “Cubo Futurism: New Ways of the Word (the language of the future, death to Symbolism).” Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, 1912–1928, by A. Kruchenykh, Cornell University Press, 1988, pp. 69–72.
Lawton, Anna. “Cubo Futurism: Declaration of the Word Such.” Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, 1912–1928, by A. Kruchenykh, Cornell University Press, 1988, pp. 67–68.
Marinetti, F. T. The Founding Manifesto of Futurism. Paris: Le Figaro, February 20, 1909. Print.
Rimbaud, Arthur. Complete Works. Trans. Paul Schmidt. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008. Print.
