This book-length poetic work was published in the same year that Tristan Tzara’s critical Essay on the Situation of Poetry (Essai sur la situation de la poésie) ran in the Marxist journal Surréalisme au service de la révolution (Surrealism in the Service of the Revolution).

In this essay, which stirred much debate among the contemporary Parisian literati, Tzara proposes that the primary contribution of surrealist art to communist struggle is surrealist art’s ability to transcend the conventions and judgments that enslave the mind in bourgeois modes of thought. Surrealist art, according to Tzara, does not express or represent a material reality, but rather disrupts such expectations and representations through surprising and spontaneous images that do not adhere to accepted modes of logic.

In the essay, Tzara distinguishes poetry as a means of expression (poésie-moyen d’expression) from poetry that is an activity of the mind (la poésie-activité de l’esprit). Such poetry as mental activity is not purely aesthetic, Tzara insists, but rather supra-aesthetic; the laws of aesthetics no longer apply. He writes: “It is not the recent lubrications concerning poésie pure that will situate the debate.” What results from such spontaneous mental activity, Tzara believed, was a shift from a focus on quality—i.e., categorical judgments and classifications by the “qualified” critics of the bourgeoisie—to a focus on quantity, as the “poetry-activity of the mind increases quantitatively and progressively over time” (Harris 97).

The poem Approximate Man represents the kind of creative evolution Tzara advocates, as he wrote it over a six-year period and published several excerpts at different times before finally publishing it as a book in 1931. (One such excerpt appeared in Surréalisme au service de la révolution in 1930.) The poem comprises 19 separate parts, designated by Roman numerals, and in its 1931 book form fills 158 pages. (The poem was reissued in book form in French in 1968, published in English translation in 1973, and reissued in English in 2006.)

The poem’s considerable length, its liberal use of refrains to provide cohesion within individual parts and throughout the poem as a whole, and its allegorical function of creating the new man have drawn comparisons with the modern narrative epic, such as Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855) or T. S. Eliot’s “anti-epic” The Waste Land (1922). Similarly to Whitman’s poem, which narrates the story of an entire people (America) through the voice of a single poet-speaker, Tzara’s poem features a speaker whose individual struggles represent those of all humanity.

But the comparisons to Whitman and Eliot end there, as Tzara does not attempt to narrate the human condition, but rather to illuminate it in flashes of constantly shifting images and sounds. Tzara’s poetry does not recognize established rules of grammar and punctuation and instead links words primarily by their sound—a process that scholar Mary Ann Caws describes as “knotting”—in order to produce spontaneous, illogical, and “associative” (non-dirigé) images. Thus, sound and image take the place of grammatical structures in propelling poetry forward in an interrupted and often chaotic stream.

Because the internal creative force of both man and poetry are constantly in motion, Tzara believed, it can be sensed only in fleeting and spontaneous moments. This is why man, like poetry, is always “approximate,” since the motion of this creative life force never pauses long enough to declare any of its rapidly evolving forms finished. In the poem’s seventh part, Tzara writes: “words are spinning / leaving a faint trail majestic trail behind their meaning scarcely a meaning”; and in the ninth part, he says: “oh powers I have glimpsed only in rare flashes / and that I know and feel in the tumultuous encounter.”

Tzara’s poetry remains stubbornly committed to the perpetual independence of individual elements, which join with other elements only for an instant and never long enough to form a pattern.

Where patterns appear in Approximate Man, they represent the banality and monotony of everyday life, in which Tzara believed humans unthinkingly rejoice, rather than forge a desired unity. One pattern that pervades the opening three parts of Tzara’s poem and establishes the seductive monotony of everyday life is the ringing of the church bells that summon people to Sunday services. Tzara’s poem begins:

“the bells ring for no reason and we too /
ring bells for no reason and we too /
we rejoice at the sound of the chains /
that we set ringing in us with the bells.”

Such repetition both creates and disrupts the ringing of the bells. The repetition of the words for “bells” and “sound” in French—cloches and sonnent/sonnez—produces both the sound and the image of a bell swinging in a church tower.

The bells ring “for no reason”: They serve a practical purpose, but that purpose is to summon human beings to partake in a hollow ritual that does not lead to enlightenment. The people ring along with the bells (“and we too”). The speaker constructs ironic distance between the speaking self and the observed self, which are both contained in the collective “we,” representing humans generally.

This ironic distance opens up a moment of resistance in which “we” can consider whether we really should be rejoicing in the unity of sound between our “chains” and the “bells,” but rather rattling them in noisy rage as a defiant prisoner would. This brief moment of sensing the bells’ activity embodies Tzara’s idea that while the central functions of language are to organize, assimilate, and enslave, language’s individual elements—words, sounds, and images—can force open spontaneous sites of resistance that propel both creator and audience (conjoined in “we”) beyond the limits of language and into the liberating realm of poetry.

Bibliography

Harris, Steven. Surrealist Art and Thought in the 1930s: Art, Politics, and the Psyche. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Tzara, Tristan. Approximate Man and Other Writings. Translated by Mary Ann Caws and Peter Caws. Boston: Black Widow Press, 2006.

Categories: British Literature, European Literature, Literature

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