Andre Gide, Dada

In that languorous state in which man will be swept along by the course of events, he will have perhaps no other escape than that of a deluge that will plunge everything into ignorance again. (Senac de Meilhan)

The great misfortune for the inventor of Dada is that the movement he started upsets him and that he is himself crushed by his machine. This is a pity. I am told that he is a very young man. He is described as charming. (Marinetti likewise was irresistible.) I am told that he is a foreigner—I can readily believe it; that he is a Jew—I was on the point of saying so.

I am told that he does not use his real name, and I should be inclined to believe that Dada likewise is but a pseudonym.

Dada is the deluge, after which everything begins anew.

[Some will blame me for taking Dada too seriously. There are many authors, among the most highly considered, whom I take much less seriously than they are usually taken; but I have never regretted having taken seriously the youngest tendencies and movements, especially when they are anonymous. There is in youth much less determined resolution than youth thinks, much more submission and unconscious obedience; that is why I find so revealing these waves that lift it up and float it along. Those who seem the leaders, in this case, are only the first to be raised up by the wave, and the less apparent their particular reaction is, the better able they are to mark the heights and direction of the tide. I observe them assiduously, but what interests me is the tide, not the bobbing corks.]

It behooves foreigners to set little store by our French culture. Against them the legitimate heirs will protest, not interested in weighing what others have to gain at the expense of what they themselves have to lose. But for a moment I want to take the point of view of those others, granting them that perhaps, after all, what remains to be lost is not much, and even somewhat lost already—not much in contrast to the whole horizon it obstructs.

Yes, every form has become a formula and distills a nameless boredom. Every common syntax is disgustingly insipid. The best gratitude toward the art of yesterday and in the face of accomplished masterpieces is not attempting to imitate them. The perfect is what does not need redoing; and setting the past before us is raising an obstacle to the future.

It is a serious mistake to assimilate Dada to Cubism. It is possible to make this mistake; and I am not sure that even certain half-Cubists do not do so... But Cubism aims to build. It is a school. Dada is a venture of negation.

And it would really not be worth while having fought for five years, having so often endured the death of others and seen everything questioned in order to sit down again at one's writing table and pick up the thread of the old discourse that had been interrupted. What! While our fields, our villages, our cathedrals suffered so much, our style alone should remain untouched! It is essential that the spirit not lag behind matter; it has a right to ruin. Dada will see to this.

Already the edifice of our language is too undermined for anyone to recommend that thought continue to take refuge in it. And before rebuilding, it is essential to cast down what still seems solid, what makes a show of still standing. The words that the artifice of logic still lumps together must be separated, isolated. They must be forced to parade again before virgin eyes like the animals after the deluge, issuing one by one from the ark-dictionary, before any conjugation. And if, through some old and purely typographic convention, they are set end to end on a single line, take care to arrange them in a disorder in which they have no reason to follow one another—since, after all, it is at the antipoetic reason that you are railing.

And it is equally essential, perhaps even more so, after having separated words from one another—in the manner of typesetters who distribute the type before proceeding to new formations—it is essential to dissociate them from their history, from their past, which weighs them down with a dead weight. Each vocable-island on the page must present steep contours. It will be placed here (or there, just as well) like a pure tone; and not far away will vibrate other pure tones, but without any interrelationships so as to authorize no association of thoughts. Thus, the word will be liberated from all its preceding meaning, at least, and from all evocation of the past.

The trouble for every school is that possibility of exaggeration in which the disciple, more extremist than the master, compromises the school. But such annoying exaggeration is eluded by leaping suddenly to the extreme so that there is no way of going beyond. What an advantage to have to protect oneself only on the right! It was essential to invent what I hardly dare call a method that would not only not contribute to producing but would even make the work of art impossible...

Indeed, the day the word “Dada” was discovered, there remained nothing further to be done. Everything written subsequently seemed to me somewhat watered down. To be sure, there were still a few meritorious efforts; but the intention was too obvious; indeed, at times, a semblance of meaning, of wit. Nothing came up to “Dada.” Those two syllables had achieved the aim of “sonorous inanity,” an insignificant absolute. In that single word “Dada,” they expressed all at once everything they had to say as a group; and since there is no way of going further in absurdity, they must now either mark time, as the mediocre will continue to do, or else escape.

I attended a Dada meeting. It took place at the Salon des Indépendants. I hoped to have more fun and that the Dadas would take more abundant advantage of the public’s artless amazement. A group of prim, formal, stiff young men climbed onto the stage and, in chorus, uttered insincere audacities... From the back of the hall, someone shouted: “What about gestures,” and everyone laughed, for it was clear that, for fear of compromising themselves, none of them dared move a muscle.

In general, I consider it not good to cling too much to the past, or with too apprehensive a grasp. I believe that each new need must create its new form. I believe, finally, according to the wise word of the Gospel, that it is folly to try to pour “new wine into old bottles.” Yet I hope that in this new barrel the best wine of youth will soon begin to feel somewhat confined.