Their Art Belongs to Dada

...And they made no attempt to rebuild on the ruins...

...and the farthest-out of these poems, Gilbert-Lecomte's The Odyssey of Ulysses the Palmiped and Daumal's En Gggarrrde!, were composed not for staging but for reading...

...And succeeded...

...In this connection, it is worth noting that Freud is supposed to have perversely told Salvador Dali, "What interests me in your art is not the unconscious, but the conscious...

...They set out to demolish language, logic, and literature, unsystematically, of course...

...They won't touch off riots today, as Tzara's The First Celestial Adventure of Monsieur Antipyrine (described by the author as "a boxing match with words") did in 1920, but they still pack a wallop and in some cases a couple of flying kicks...

...Only in the best sense of the word was it irresponsible...

...The 17 plays in this collection are the first open-handed sampling in English of the forerunners of the "absurd" theater, and as reading matter they make their descendants look like dated, if not tame, specimens...

...Hence (7) no moral tone, specifics, messages, or implications...

...That was their limitation, and when they kept instinctively within it they turned out their most satisfying work...

...episodes can and do strike off in any direction at the author's whim...

...Hence (2) a serial or aleatory development, akin to that of some modern music...

...has a prologue that begins, "The set represents the field between the poles of an electromagnet...

...The editors come well-equipped...

...In practice Dada and Surreal plays look so much alike that I see no reason to split them up...

...Hence (4) nonsensical behavior equated with reality, especially in the political references...

...Even so, this is not one of Ionesco's strongest plays...

...While En Gggarrrde...

...Salacrou, on the evidence of this 1922 play, might have made himself into the link between Dada and a new tradition of verse comedy, but he went on to less exhilarating accomplishments, such as L'Archipel Lenoir, and has sadly remained out of sight of non-French audiences...

...The cast of this four-page effort lists A Toothbrush, Some Snails, A Cigar, pure Havana ("Romeo and Juliet"), A Leech, A Sociologist, A Pernod With Sugar, Cleopatra, The Author, and Napoleon who says at one point, "To die for one's country is not so good, after all is said and done, as a good pipe...

...In Tzara's The Gas Heart the actors are asked "to treat the author—who is not a genius—with no respect and to note the levity of the script which brings no technical innovation to the theater...

...Perelman in top form, and the Evelyn Waugh of Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies...

...ON STAGE By Albert Bermel Their Art Belongs to Dada In Martin Esslin's The Theatre of the Absurd which in 1961 combed out and anointed the tangled strands of postwar drama, there is an eloquent chapter that harks back to the influences of the Surrealists, the Dadaists, Strindberg, Lewis Carroll, and sundry other irrational and oneiric phenomena...

...The work ends with The Author falling from Limbo, fireworks, overturned paintpots, the sound of trombones in the wings, and A Gentleman In The Audience saying to his eight-year-old son, "Let that teach you, Arthur, to always follow the right road...

...And the fourth act of If You Please by Breton and Soupault reads very simply: "Note: The authors of // You Please do not want the fourth act printed.' In comparison with such freewheeling capers, Ionesco's The Painting, the last play in the book, appears labored...

...Aims are one thing, achievements another...

...Valéry once remarked, "That writer is classical who bears within him a critic whom he associates intimately with his work...

...The Dadaists were a wrecking crew...

...Now Michael Benedikt and George E. Wellwarth, whether prompted by Esslin's account or for some other good reason, have assembled an anthology entitled Modern French Theatre: The Avant-Garde, Dada and Surrealism (Dutton, 406 pp., $6.95...

...Among the latter are some already-translated items, such as Jarry's King Ubu, Cocteau's The Wedding on the Eiffel Tower, Artaud's The Jet of Blood, and Anouilh's Humulus the Mute, as well as a new and sensitive poetic rendering by Louis Simpson of Apollinaire's The Breasts of Tiresias...

...Wellwarth, a teacher and former actor, produced a sprightly volume of dramatic criticism earlier this year, The Theater of Protest and Paradox (N.Y.U...

...It is certainly inferior as comedy to the brilliant little farce One Way for Another by Jean Tardieu, and as dramatic invention to Armand Salacrou's The Circus Story...

...In fact, most of them must be regarded as poems in dialogue form (or, in the case of La Piace de L'Etoile by Desnos, "an antipoem"), which make a mockery of accepted theatrical techniques...

...In Artaud's The Jet of Blood "an army of scorpions comes out from under The Nurse's dress and swarms over The Knight's sex [organ], which swells up and bursts, becoming glassy and shining like the sun...

...Benedikt, a poet and art critic, has translated or co-translated 11 of the plays (Wellwarth did five), and written an introductory essay that necessarily overlaps with Esslin's chapter as a synopsis of the movements, but provides in addition careful notes on the individual plays...

...Apart from poetry and brevity, the broad characteristics of the Dada-Surreal plays seem to me to be: (1) Arbitrary plotting...

...Press, 315 pp., $6.00), which included the most persuasive sorting-out job I have seen of modern American and British plays...

...For the Dadaists were shortwinded...

...So much unorthodoxy at once: No wonder the early Dada playpoems were deplored as mere youthful excesses...

...The reason is not so much Ionesco's deficiency as his habit of writing in the cadences of a playwright, not a poet, developing variations on each theme instead of introducing a new theme with each line...

...Eventually they decided to demolish their own association...

...The word "surrealist," coined by Apollinaire in 1917, was flaunted later by others as a rubric for works conceived by the process — or antiprocess — of what Breton called "psychic automatism," comparable to free association in psychoanalysis and intended "to express the real functioning of thought without any control of reason...

...In assailing commercial theater at a time when its merchandise and values went unchallenged by any French dramatists of the first rank—Giraudoux found his stride only in 1929-30 — they were unconcerned, and probably unable, to search out a new threeact formula...

...he moves toward an explosion instead of setting off squibs along the way...

...From a nearby garden, the wailing of a newborn child is heard...

...For convenience, I have talked about the works in the anthology as plays...

...True, the Dadaists thumbed their noses at boulevard theater but they also smirked at themselves...

...It isn't difficult to separate the aims of Dada from those of Surrealism...

...The Dada poets may have been young, destructive, brash, amoral, and self-centered...

...But Gide, that cleverest of old-guard critics, chose rather to damn them with faint praise by claiming they were not wild enough: "The day the word 'Dada' was discovered there remained nothing further to be done I attended a Dada meeting A group of prim, formal, stiff young men climbed onto the stage and, in chorus, uttered insincere audacities " But Gide was reproaching the manner, not the matter, and writing in April 1920 before Dada had had the chance to make good on its boasts...

...One striking exception is Apollinaire's preface to Tiresias, a genuinely historic document, which Benedikt and Wellwarth have wisely reprinted as the sole example of Surrealist criticism in their book...

...and the pure critic who wrote about his work in manifestoes, diatribes, and pronunciamenti, some of them sedentarily dull and humorless...

...Hence (3) no "characters," those phony concoctions of quirks, tag phrases, and absolute psychological drives...

...A few of them may since have been outdistanced in other media by the likes of Harpo Marx, S.J...

...But even accidentally Dada did uncover new comic possibilities for the theater to redeem a generation later...

...To which The Public, promoted to the dramatis personae, retorts, "Enough...

...Hence (5) unreal settings, situations, and stage directions, writtenin at random for the sake of laughs and surprises...

...In the name of artistic freedom, then, the Surrealist tried to tap his unconscious resources, exerting as little deliberate restraint as he could manage...

...The less familiar plays are far from being rescued corpses...

...I regret the absence from the book of Roussel, Torma, Picasso (whose Desire Caught by the Tail is out of print), Audiberti, and Gatti, but there may have been trouble with permissions and, anyway, this is a solidly entertaining selection...

...Like Aragon and other advanced poets of the '20s, he was a master at traveling in quick bursts but brought no distinctive art to the long play...

...The Surrealists, though, did have constructive aims of a sort...

...Or rather, he divided himself into two men: the pure poet who jettisoned the critic and became all inspiration, energy, and nerve ends...

...The Dada or Surreal practitioner, who was at the opposite end of the scale from classicism, began by casting out the critic in himself...

...Hence (6) the atmosphere of a transcribed dream or, equally often, a comic nightmare...

...In the former, written in 1924 and extending over one page and a half, the hero "sticks his index finger in his nose, then with a sudden thrust inserts his arms to the shoulder in his appendix while shouting: 'It is I the Stupefied Mystic...