Collage in Twenty-First-Century Literature in English

Art of Crisis

Wojciech Drag

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000760675
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Collage in Twenty-First-Century Literature in English: Art of Crisis considers the phenomenon of the continued relevance of collage, a form established over a hundred years ago, to contemporary literature. It argues that collage is a perfect artistic vehicle to represent the crisis-ridden reality of the twenty-first-century. Being a mixture of fragmentary incompatible voices, collage embodies the chaos of the media-dominated world. Examining the artistic, sociopolitical and personal crises addressed in contemporary collage literature, the book argues that the 21st Century has brought a revival of collage-like novels and essays.

1 Theory and Practice of Collage

Although collage is widely regarded as an invention of Cubist painters Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, it was the Surrealist poet Guillaume Apollinaire who used the term for the first time – in reference to his own play Les mamelles de Tirésias (1903) (Cran 1, 21). “Collage” is derived from the French verb coller, whose primary meaning is to “paste,” “glue” or “adhere.” However, in colloquial French the word can also mean “having an affair” or “living in sin,” which suggests a parallel with Cubist collages based on a daring cohabitation of words and images (Frascina). Among the coexisting elements one usually finds “photographs, pieces of paper, newspaper cuttings [and] string,” which are all “placed in juxtaposition and glued to the pictorial surface” (Montgomery et al. 177). As Scarlett Higgins observes, collage denotes both a “process of working with textual materials,” which is a “formal strategy,” and a “presentational mode that invites specific reader/viewer expectations,” which makes it akin to “genre” (2).

One of the earliest and most often cited definitions of collage was formulated by another Surrealist, Max Ernst, who called it “the noble conquest of the irrational, the coupling of two realities, irreconcilable in appearance, upon a plane which apparently does not suit them” (qtd. in Cureton 106). The incongruity of constitutive elements has been emphasized by a number of critics. Budd Hopkins defines the “collage aesthetic” as “the presence of several contradictory systems in a work of art, and the absence of a single controlling system” (7), whereas David Antin argues that the absence of “explicit syntactical relations” between the work’s “disparate materials” is the key characteristic of collage (106). Beata Śniecikowska stresses that a collage-like juxtaposition is not merely a combination of different elements; it needs to generate some tension (115), which, according to Ryszard Nycz, can appear on the syntactical, stylistic or semantic level (257). Lance Olsen states boldly that “collage is the quintessential art of the non-sequitur” (Architectures 89).

An aspect of collage which is not mentioned by any of the above definitions but which nonetheless remains central to this study is the incorporation of appropriated material. From the very beginning, collages – such as Picasso’s Bottle, Glass and Violin (1912–13) and Braque’s Glass Carafe and Newspapers (1914) – employed “real objects, such as bits of newspaper or other mass-produced images” (Kostelanetz 124). Such objects are called ready-mades and can take the form of any external material – two- or three-dimensional, verbal or visual – which the artist chooses to include in their work. In literary texts, the ready-made usually takes the form of an unintegrated and often unacknowledged quotation or a photograph.¹ Since collage is based on appropriation, it is always vulnerable to the accusations of copyright infringement and plagiarism. As Joshua Clover pithily remarks, there is “no collage without theft” (93).

As noted before, the use of appropriated material is not considered a necessary condition by all critics. In Collage in Twentieth‑Century Art, Literature, and Culture (2014), Rona Cran proposes a very accommodating understanding of collage as “the experimentation with and the linking of disparate phenomena: democratically, arbitrarily, even unintentionally” (4). She cites Marjorie Perloff’s observation that there is more to collage than merely cut and paste, which is “only the beginning” (Cran 3). A similarly open conception of literary collage – retaining the need for a ready-made, yet understanding it very liberally – has been adopted by Agnieszka Karpowicz in Kolaż: Awangardowy gest kreacji (2007). In this book, however, I shall adhere to a stricter idea of collage, which requires the following criteria to be met: the use of heterogeneous, fragmentary and conflicting components; the absence (or serious disruption) of linear plot development; and the incorporation of a sizeable proportion of appropriated material. In the essay “Fourteen Notes Toward the Musicality of Creative Disjunction, Or: Fiction by Collage,” Lance Olsen distinguishes between two understandings of collage in literature – the narrower and the broader:

The notion of collage can be used literally or it can be used metaphorically in fiction composition. That is … collage fiction can be deeply appropriative in nature, cutting up previous texts to create new ones, as in, say, the work of Eliot and William S. Burroughs. But it also can be used as a structuring principle for new textual units – not only as a juxtapositional combination of ready-mades, then, but of justmades, as in, say, the work of Milorad Pavíc or Julio Cortázar.

(Olsen, “Fourteen” 187)

In this book, I shall use the term “literary collage” in the first meaning. I agree with Śniecikowska that it is often used too broadly as a critical tool and that it is important to be precise in its application so that its scope does not overlap with that of several other related concepts such as mosaic, assemblage and montage (112).

Mosaic has been defined as a composition of “a multitude of small (usually multicoloured) pieces of glass, marble or other suitable materials in a bed of cement or plaster” (“Mosaic” 425). Although its origins date back to antiquity, it was most extensively practised in the Middle Ages, particularly in Italy, the Byzantine Empire and Mexico (425). Despite evident similarities with collage – assembling a picture out of smaller components, using materials not necessarily manufactured by the artist – mosaic remains a distinct technique. In Collage Culture (2013), David Banash argues that “the brutal difference” between collage and earlier mosaic-like practices is that “twentieth-century fragments come readymade” – they have been “worked over, shaped, formed, completed” by “human hands” and cannot be taken directly from nature (like pieces of rock) (18–19).

“Assemblage” is a term coined by Jean Dubuffet to account for two- and three-dimensional compositions of “natural or preformed materials, such as household debris” (Seitz 150). Like collage, it is a technique relying on the juxtaposition of incongruous material, including ready-made objects. Whereas The Oxford Dictionary of Art notes that the category is rarely “employed with any precision” (“Assemblage” 29), William Seitz and Thomas P. Brockelman see it as a master term for all kinds of composite art, such as collage, montage and photomontage (Seitz 150, Brockelman 190).

Ultimately, montage – a method deriving from film and first theorized by Sergei Eisenstein in 1929 – is a notion which, nowadays, is frequently used interchangeably with collage. However, even those critics who insist on treating them as distinct categories differ in their understanding of what they denote. Perloff, Nycz and Banash consider “montage” as a narrower term than “collage,” while Karpowicz sees it as broader. Perloff regards “collage” as “the master term” and “montage” as an “offshoot” (Futurist Moment 246). Nycz, in turn, accords “the superior status of a method of constructing an artistic expression” to collage; montage is viewed as a “technique” (11). For Banash, collage is a wider notion because it may incorporate “all sorts of readymade material,” whereas the latter usually concentrates on the photograph (132–33). Conversely, Karpowicz sees montage as the superior category, insofar as it combines “any heterogeneous or non-heterogeneous elements” and does not need to employ ready-mades (63). The idea that montage does not require the use of appropriated material is not shared by all critics. On the contrary, The Oxford Dictionary of Art defines it as a “pictorial technique” in which “ready-made images alone are used” (“Montage” 338–39, italics added).

A common way of differentiating between collage and montage is using the former to refer to spatial relationships and the latter – to temporal ones (Perloff, Futurist Moment 246). Brockelman observes that “whereas collages demand that the viewer relate elements spatially next to or in front of each other, montage demands a reading of images presented sequentially,” particularly in the case of watching a film (190). The last difference frequently noted by critics lies in the compatibility of constituents parts. According to Jean-Jacques Thomas, collage tends to emphasize the “heterogeneous nature of diverse components,” while montage “aims at the integration of the diverse combinatory constituents and, as such, provides unity” (85). Perloff agrees with Thomas that collage highlights “fragmentation” rather than “continuity,” which is the domain of montage (Futurist Moment 246). Monica Tavares, likewise, pits the former – understood as a “dissemination of texts in conflict of meanings” – against the latter’s “assimilat[ing]” and “centralizing project” (194).

In this study the notions of mosaic and assemblage will not be used, as their scope, I believe, should be restricted to the visual arts. Both collage and montage, on the other hand, can easily be applied to literary texts and will be used here: collage, as a category meeting the earlier outlined criteria of a non-harmonious arrangement of heterogeneous material, non-linear plot and the use of appropriation, and montage, as a similar yet distinct technique, involving a smoother organization of various components and the lack, or scarcity, of appropriated elements.

Historical Outline

Collage is regarded, by many artists and critics, as one of the quintessential art forms of the twentieth century. American painter Robert Motherwell announced, somewhat bombastically, that “collage [was] the twentieth century’s greatest innovation” (qtd. in Judkins). Hal Foster, similarly, argued, in 1983, that it was “the single most revolutionary formal innovation in artistic representation to occur in our century” (84). American authors Donald Barthelme and Pierre Joris went so far as to assert that all of twentieth-century art was to some degree inspired or affected by the principle of collage (Hoffmann 203, Cran 40).

Although it is generally acknowledged that collage emerged in France at the beginning of the previous century, critics indicate its numerous antecedents. Whereas Foster calls it an “ancient technique” (without providing any examples), others tend to attribute its origins to the late Middle Ages. Among the many precursors of collage scholars list Italian mosaics, Japanese calligraphic poems, Persian leather-bound books of images, paintings of Giuseppe Arcimboldo, silva rerum chronicles and Comte de Lautréamont’s Les chants de Maldoror (1869) (Cran 11–12, Karpowicz 46–50). The credit for composing the first collage proper is usually given to Picasso and his 1912 work Still Life with Chair Caning, an oval Cubist still life incorporating a scrap of oilcloth and framed by a piece of rope (Hopkins 5). Other Cubist practitioners of collage around that time were Braque and Juan Gris, the former being occasionally seen as the actual founder of the method, who should have received more recognition for his contribution (Harris and Zucker). Their interest in collage hinged on its “hybridization of painting and sculpture” and its liminal status between a two- and a three-dimensional work (Jennifer A.E. Shields 2), as well as on its inherently non-figurative orientation (Brockelman 4). Brockelman argues that what clearly distinguishes Cubist collage from all the earlier listed antecedents (and justifies the idea of the “invention” of collage in the twentieth century) is its primary aim to “represent the intersection of multiple discourses” rather than to build an artwork out of various components (2). Banash examines the novelty of collage through the prism of its use of fragmentation. He contends that although “material cultures have always produced a flotsam and jetsam of fragments,” collage is the first method of reusing those fragments while exposing them as “ripped, torn, and broken readymades” and underlining “the seams equally with the glue” (42).

According to A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes, collage was introduced by the Cubists but “extended” by the Surrealists, Dadaists and Futurists (Kostelanetz 43). The Surrealists, who were keen to explore Freudian territories such as dreams and the unconscious, embraced collage as a vehicle for conveying what Max Ernst called an “eruption of the irrational” (Banash 25). Even though they did not invent the method as such (only its name), the Surrealists today are more closely associated with collage than the Cubists (or any other group) because their engagement with it was more “ostentatious” and “controversial” (Cran 21). Besides coining the term, their most notable contribution to the development of collage was applying its principle to literature. Ernst’s La femme 100 têtes (1929) was the first collage novel – a book-length narrative composed of nonsensical woodcuts accompanied by scant subtitles. The emerging pictures, characteristically Surrealist in their poetics, were seamlessly arranged juxtapositions of arbitrary objects, such as human figures, birds, butterflies, bottles, severed limbs and cacti. Among the practitioners of Surrealist collage were the representatives of the so-called Young Group (later known as the Independent Group), which flourished in post-war Britain: Eduardo Paolozzi, William Turnbull and Richard Hamilton. The latter is the author of possibly the most iconic British collage Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? (1956) (Taylor 133–34).

The last of the modernist groups which were instrumental in the rise of collage were the Futurists and the Dadaists. The former saw in collage a potential for launching an “attack on tradition and the museum status of works of art” by incorporating various “nonaesthetic materials” (Poggi xii). John Heartfield, Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann contributed to the development of collage by artfully combining manipulated photographs (which had been in use for almost a hundred years) with words. The Berlin Dadaists, as they came to be known, were the first to subject collage – or photomontage, as they preferred to call it – to political uses.² They believed in the “supremacy of the message” rather than in the primacy of the aesthetic (Ades 19). Heartfield became the most important Dada propagandist and agitator against capitalism, militarism and Nazism. Among his best known, and most bluntly political, works are Adolf the Superman Swallows Gold and Spouts Junk (1932), showing Hitler’s spine as made of gold, and Through Light to Night (1933), which juxtaposes the figure of Joseph Goebbels, the Reichstag and a stake of burning books. Dadaists, such as Marcel Duchamp and Kurt Schwitters, also introduced the use of ready-mades in their works, including discarded objects found in the street. The earliest and most iconic of them – Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel (1913) and Fountain (1917) – are not collages as such but their role in establishing this art form is indisputable. By putting forward the ready-made, they lay the foundation for what Banash calls “collage culture” (29).

In many ways, collage was the product of the social, economic, aesthetic and philosophical context of the early twentieth century. For Banash the socio-economic grounding of collage is essential to grasping its politics and poetics. He sees it as an artisti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Madly in Love With Crisis: Collage Literature Today
• 1 Theory and Practice of Collage
• Part I Art in Crisis
• Part II Society in Crisis
• Part III The Self in Crisis
• Index