By Jan Baetens

Laurent de Sutter

Jack Sparrow. Manifeste pour une linguistique pirate

Bruxelles, Les Impressions Nouvelles, 2018, 1128 p., 12 euros

ISBN : 9782874496479

If popular culture is culture for the millions, entertaining and easy to understand, many great readers and critics are well aware of the fact that this fundamental openness is not to be confused with shallowness or lack of sophistication. Popular culture has a lot to tell –not always of course, but this also applies to high culture, many forms of which are equally dead matter. The truth of drawing is told by Hergé as well as Rembrandt. If you want to understand the unconscious, a Hitchcock movie proves no less useful than Un chien andalou. And for the mysteries of the heart, it is not forbidden to prefer a romance comic to Jane Austen.

The Pirates of the Caribbean may not be compulsory viewing in serious film classes (and to make things even worse: this is a Disney franchise, based on a Disney theme park attraction, catering to Disney fans, etc.) but this brilliant and crispy essay by Laurent de Sutter shows that it is time to put all prejudices aside.

A specialist of law theory and prolific author and lecturer (will he be called one day the Belgian Zizek?), Laurent de Sutter explores in Jack Sparrow the theme of piracy from a linguistic point of view. For to be a pirate is not only to make the choice of a way of life that rejects the ruling order, based on fixed rules imposed by a ruling class. Such a pirate choice is only possible thanks to a special use of language, which de Sutter calls the pirate use, based on the radical combination of the fireworks of verbal performance and the denial of language’s referential function. In Jack Sparrow, de Sutter analyzes this piracy in a permanent braiding of the Johnny Depp character and a wide range of cultural theories on the role and nature of language in society.

It should not come as a surprise that Baudrillard’s ideas on seduction and Lacan’s rethinking of the relationship between truth and desire occupy a key place in his argumentation. These high-cultural references, however, do not hinder the joyful anarchy Laurent de Sutter is defending. His book is a roller-coaster of intellectual provocations and exhilarating formulas, of language transformed into a sound and image spectacle as well as high philosophy mixed with fun and laughter. Serious readers will not be changed into pirates after having read this book, but Jack Sparrow is definitely a work they are in need of.

 By Jan Baetens

Écrire la révolution: De Jack London au Comité invisible

La Licorne, N° 131, 2018 (Rennes : Presses Universitaire de Rennes)

ISBN: 978-2753574960

Journal website: http://licorne.edel.univ-poitiers.fr/

History did not end after the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and since 9/11 many new forms of historical consciousness as well as experiencing time and history have emerged, sometimes rather slowly, in the wake of theoretical efforts to restore the focus on our ever changing world, but occasionally also very abruptly and unexpectedly. In this new historical paradigm, the notion of “revolution”, that is the radical event, often unplanned or unforeseen, that suddenly breaks the continuous chain of moments, situations, contexts and frameworks, has achieved once again a central position –next to, for instance, the apocalyptic stance of much ecocriticism or the ongoing nihilism of no future movements.

Well-known and much appreciated for its thematic issues on all aspects of literary studies, the French journal La Licorne presents an excellent overview of the ongoing debates. It takes as its starting points the two perspectives on revolution that have been defended by respectively Jacques Rancière (“how to prepare as well as produce a revolution?”) and Slavoj Žižek (“what to do once the revolution is there?”). However, this double question is not addressed in abstract or general terms. The 246 pages volume edited by Émilie Goin and Julien Jeusette opens with an excellent discussion of what is at stake in the recent return of the revolutionary sensibility and its interactions with a wide range of social transformations and dismays and ends with three interviews of key agents in the field (Nathalie Quintane, Ana Bertina, and Leslie Kaplan –a selection that crosses media as well as generations). Yet the central part of the book is made of excellent close readings of works and authors that illustrate the various and more than once contradictory meanings of revolution as a concept but in the very first place as a practice, be it a real one or an imaginary or utopian one.

Although the French Revolution and its afterlife continues of course to remain at the very heart of any reflection on the idea of revolution, and not only in France, and although the interpretation of this Revolution is currently once again more leaning toward the extreme left version of it, this collection of essays has the great merit of including a certain number of themes and topics that provide us with a much wider angle. Next to excellent readings of, for instance, the revolutionary rhetoric of “Le Comité invisible”, the collective pseudonym of a group of authors calling for an actual revolution, and inspiring interpretations of texts on May 68, the issue contains meticulous interpretations of works that are less easy to pigeonhole on the ideological spectrum, such as for instance Döblin’s unsentimental novelistic report on the failure of the German revolution in 1918 or Antoine Volodine’s postapocalyptic prose. In addition, it also tackles works and authors that are clearly anti-revolutionary, such as for instance the French writers who travelled to Germany in the Nazi period, before and during the war, in order to study and praise what they considered a necessary counter-revolution, or the nowadays forgotten novel by Paul Nothomb, Un délire logique (“A Logical Madness”), in which the author tries to justify the betrayal of his World War Two resistant friends.

In conclusion: an important collection, not only for its intrinsic scholarly qualities and the great diversity of themes and angles, but also for its courage to foreground the importance of writing and literature. Revolution may be made by ideas, but to perform it, one still needs words, and those made by writers are vital in this regard.

By Jan Baetens

Paul Nougé & Paul Colinet & Louis Scutenaire

Ideas Have No Smell: Three Belgian Surrealist Booklets

Edited, translated and facsimilized by Michael Kasper; introduced by Mary Ann Caws

Brooklyn, NY: Ugly Duckling Press

Box set of three booklets and fold-out poster
ISBN 978-1-946433-13-8

My apologies for the silly title of this review, which is the umpteenth variation on a worn-out cliché, but this time it perfectly does the job since the new book by Michael Kasper, a fascinating American book artist and essential middleman in the literary dialogue between Belgium and the US, is precisely anything but a translation. Like all great Renaissance artists, Kasper approaches translation as a comprehensive process, which entails careful editing, editorial comments, creative rethinking and rephrasing of well-crafted translations, and an exceptional commitment to typography, page layout, and book design.

Content-wise Kasper’s work offers the first English translation of three short essential Belgian Surrealist works: Transfigured Publicity, by Paul Nougé; Abstractive Treatise on Obeuse by Paul Colinet; and For Balthazar, by Louis Scutenaire, which gives an excellent overview of both the diversity and the unison of Belgian Surrealism, as committed and transgressive as its better-known French counterpart, but much less concerned by questions of the occult and the unconscious.

The combination of the words “short” and “essential” is no oxymoron: Modernity has a preference for short forms, and Surrealism, certainly in the case of Belgian Surrealism, tends to favor the (shock) effect of the text, which does not leave room for lengthy and distracting developments. The aphorism, the short poem and the appropriated publicity slogan but also the estranging title of an apparently academic painting are thus among the preferred formats of the Surrealists, helping them to turn their texts into real arms.

As a printed object, Ideas Have No Smell adopts a form that perfectly fits this strategy. The facsimile version of the original publications (some of them handwritten) gives a good idea of the DIY philosophy of most Surrealist publications (an author like Nougé tended to reject publication at all) and highlights the identity of nonmainstream writing formats and radical messages. Moreover, the small size of the booklets and the folded poster with a reproduction 1926 handwritten sign of Nougé’s visual poems and the introduction by Mary Ann Caws offers a playful and clever example of the interaction between the part and the whole, that is between the whole that refuses to be a closed unity (the box is “open” and contains various heterogeneous items, exactly as in the Duchamp boxes) and a series of parts that each try to become a world in themselves.

Surrealism has suffered a lot from its recuperation by the cultural establishment. In many cases, it appears as silly and stereotyped as the Impressionist paintings that used to appear on the annual calendar of the postal services. Ideas Have No Smell: Three Belgian Surrealist Booklets is the perfect opportunity to question the limits of this recuperation and to (re)discover a literary and political movement that is far from having lost its relevance.

By Jan Baetens

The publisher calls it an “introduction” to the works, the authors, the currents, and the contexts of the European avant-gardes in the period 1905-1935 (three decades that in Anglo-Saxon criticism are often called “High Modernism”, a powerful streamlining of the exceptional dynamism and diversity of these years). But this is really not the best word to qualify the “portable guide” proposed by one of the leading voices in the field. Granted, the book offers more than everything one would like to know about both the so-called historical avant-garde and the many –isms that have come to illustrate it. But reducing the book to its encyclopedic or toolkit function would definitely neglect the real stakes of an intellectual that goes beyond the careful and lavishly illustrated presentation of its material.

First of all, one should welcome the refreshing and innovative way of organizing the currently available knowledge of the European avant-gardes. The book finds the perfect balance between familiar and new ways of structuring the information: on the one hand, it does not reject the classification in –isms (it is important however to mention that each of them is systematically described in the plural: not “expressionism” but “expressionisms”, etc.); on the other hand, it succeeds in building a new architecture or intellectual design, easy to unpack as well as stimulating surprising montage effects, which foregrounds three major perspectives: first that of the concept (the relationship or tension between art and avant-garde), second that of the places where avant-gardes appeared or that were created or reinvented by them (this section makes us travel from the café to globalized cultures), third that of time, for past, present and future do no longer mean the same after the avant-gardes have revisited these traditional frameworks.

Second, the book does not only showcase the ambitions and failures as well as the meaning and importance of the European avant-gardes. It also reshapes our idea of the avant-garde. Key in this regard is the systematic use of the plural, which also makes room for the “non-avant garde” aspects of the avant-gardes, often much closer to the core of European culture than we generally assume. But also the properly European dimension is rightly underlined as a factor of diversity: linguistic plurality, context-sensitivity, unequal development in time and place appear to be at the heart of the various avant-gardes, which cannot be understood in homogeneous or teleological perspectives.

Third (but of course not finally), this book is not just a suitcase that one opens to find answers to specific queries (the very detailed index will prove dramatically useful in this regard), it is also a door that one can open to discover new or never thought-of questions, less known or never disclosed examples (and here the exceptional iconography is vital), and simply enjoy the writing, a perfect mix of intellectual sympathy and critical distance.

Homepage of the book:

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-european-avant-gardes-1905-1935.html

Homepage of the European network for Avant-Garde and Modernism studies:

http://www.eam-europe.be/