“COLLAGE AND POETRY”

Marjorie Perloff
for Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. Michael Kelly, 4
vols. (New York: Oxford U Press, 1998), Vol 1, 384-
87; Stein, Vol. 4, 306-10.

The word collage comes from the French verb coller and refers literally to
“pasting, sticking, or gluing,” as in the application of wallpaper. In
French, collage is also idiomatic for an “illicit” sexual union, two
unrelated “items,” being pasted or stuck together. This undertone of
illicitness is actually germane to the meaning of the word, for collage
does not just apply to any paste-up. “Si ce sont les plumes qui font le
plumage,” as Max Ernst wittily put it, “ce n’est pa la colle qui fait le
collage.” In her monumental study of the subject (1968), Herta
Wescher made clear that although, strictly speaking, collaging diverse
elements is hardly a new idea, such familiar items as lace and paper
valentines, or the trompe l’oeil pictures of vases made from tiny postage
stamps, popular in nineteenth century America, or, say, the feather
mosaic pictures made by the Aztecs of Mexico, are not quite collages in
our sense of the word, for collage always involves the transfer of
materials from one context to another. As the authors of the 1978
Group Mu manifesto put it: “Each cited element breaks the continuity or
the linearity of the discourse and leads necessarily to a double reading:
that of the fragment perceived in relation to its text of origin; that of the
same fragment as incorporated into a new whole, a different totality.
The trick of collage consists also of never entirely suppressing the
alterity of these elements reunited in a temporary composition.”

It is this oscillation or doubleness that makes collage such a distinctive

Modernist invention–perhaps, as Gregory L. Ulmer suggests, “the single
most revolutionary formal innovation in artistic representation to occur in
our century.” When, in the spring of 1912, Picasso pasted a piece of
oilcloth printed with a trompe l’oeil chair-caning pattern to the surface of
a small, oval canvas representing a still life on a café table, and then
“framed” the composition with a piece of coarse rope, he was challenging
the fundamental principle of Western painting from the early
Renaissance to the late nineteenth century–namely, that a picture is a
window on reality, an imaginary transparency through which an illusion
is discerned. For collage typically juxtaposes “real” items–pages torn
from newspapers, color illustrations taken from picture books, letters of
the alphabet, numbers, nails–with painted or drawn images so as to
create a curiously contradictory pictorial surface. For each element in
the collage has a kind of double function: it refers to an external reality
even as its compositional thrust is to undercut the very referentiality it
seems to assert. And further: collage subverts all conventional figure-
ground relationships, it generally being unclear whether item A is on top
of item B or behind it or whether the two coexist in the shallow space
which is the “picture.”
It is customary to distinguish between collage and montage: the former
refers, of course, to spatial relationships, the latter to temporal; the
former to static objects, the latter, originally a film term, to things in
motion. But it may be more useful to regard collage and montage as
two sides of the same coin, in view of the fact that the mode of
construction involved–the metonymic juxtaposition of objects (as in
collage) or of narrative fragments (as in montage)– is essentially the
same. Both, moreover, are inconceivable without the technological
revolution of the late nineteenth century: the mass production of paper
and textile products, with the attendant possibilities for splicing film,
photographs, and printed materials.
Given its origins in the Cubist collage of Picasso and Braque of 1912-
1913, collage is a term primarily used with reference to visual
composition. There are, as I have argued in The Futurist Moment,
significant family resemblances between Cubist and Futurist (both Italian
and Russian) collage. In Cubist collage, the objects, though disparate,
are drawn from the same radius of discourse: usually domestic or
everyday items like wine glasses, bottles, apples, calling cards,
newspaper bits, vases of flowers, guitars, and so on. And the larger
scheme into which these fragments are drawn is still that of a unified
pictorial composition. Futurist collage–for example, Carlo Carrà’s great
Interventionist Manifesto of 1914–is similar, although it tends to have a
more overtly polemic thrust, relying on the juxtaposition of words and
phrases as well as bold color planes to create an “agitprop” effect.
Dada and Surrealist collage deviate significantly from this paradigm. In
Dada collage, pictorial composition gives way to a new emphasis on the
materials assembled themselves. Kurt Schwitters, one of the greatest
collagists, uses banal items like ticket stubs, buttons, advertising flyers,
playing cards, bits of cloth and pieces of metal, and juxtaposes these so
as to create subtle formal and material as well as semantic tensions. In
his Merzbilder (the title alludes to Kommerz as well as to merde [shit])
the fragments aren’t absorbed into the larger composition as they are in
Picasso or Braque or Juan Gris; they retain their separate identity.
Surrealist collage is different again: here cut-ups from different sources
are most frequently used to produce a fragmented narrative, rich in
sexual puns and double entendre, as in Max Ernst’s La Femme 100 têtes.
All these variants on early modernist collage have been documented
frequently, as have such verbal variants of Futurist collage as Marinetti’s
Parole in Libertà (those innovative free-word compositions of the late
1910s in which giant letters, mathematical symbols, onomatopoeic
verbal representations and schematic visual forms produce dynamic
depictions of warfare, violent action, and so on). But what is less well
understood is that collage aesthetic plays a major role in all the
modernist art forms, perhaps most notably in poetry.
As a mode of juxtaposition, David Antin has observed, “collage involves
suppression of the ordering signs that would specify the ‘stronger logical
relations’ among the presented elements. By ‘stronger logical relations’
I mean relations of implication, entailment, negation, subordination and
so on. Among logical relations that may still be present are relations of
similarity, equivalence, identity, their negative forms, dissimilarity,
nonequivalence, nonidentity, and some kind of image of concatenation,
grouping or association.” This is an important point. Take the famous
conclusion to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land:
I sat upon the shore

Fishing, with the arid plain behind me

Shall I at least set my lands in order?

London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down

Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina

Quando fiam uti chelidon– O swallow swallow

Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie

These fragments I have shored against my ruins

Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.

Dadda. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

Shantih shantih shantih

The first two lines might have appeared in a nineteenth century dramatic
monologue: the speaker has evidently found the resolve to begin a new
life, to turn his back on his stultefying, arid past which the poem has so
graphically presented and prepare to “set [his] lands in order.” But
whereas Browning would have had his protgagonist continue logically or
at least sequentially in this vein, in The Waste Land, the protagonist’s
question is followed by a series of seemingly unrelated fragments–from
nursery rhyme (“London Bridge is falling down…”), to Dante’s account in
the Purgatorio of Arnaut Daniel’s entrance into the purgatorial fire, to the
plaintive song of the anonymous Latin poet of the Pervigilium Veneris,
who wonders when spring will return (“O swallow swallow”), which here
comes together with the cry of Philomela, raped by Tereus, and longing
for the transformation her sister Procne has already undergone, to
Gerard de Nerval’s Romantic lyric of dispossession (“Le Prince
d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie”), and Hieronymo’s decision, in The Spanish
Tragedy, to participate in a grisly revenge plot to kill his enemies.
When the words of redemption (“Give. Sympathize. Control”) finally
come, they are in the most esoteric and remote of languages–Sanskrit–
as is the final “Shantih,” the “Peace which passeth understanding” from
the Upanishads.

What hope, then, for the Wastelanders? Much ink has been expended
on this question. Take the London Bridge line. It sounds very negative,
especially in conjunction with the “Unreal City” passage in Part I: “A
crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death
had undone so many.” On the other hand, the destruction of the bridge
(the song actually refers to the Gunpowder Plot) may lead to rebirth. In
the same vein, Arnaud Daniel is purged of the sin of lust, and Philomela
will be reborn as a nightingale. But Hieronymo’s “Why then Ile fit you”
leads to nothing but the grisly death of all concerned, and Nerval’s Prince
of Aquitaine is cut off from his birthright as well as from possible
transcendence. It is never clear, then, what the ‘fragments I have
shored against my ruins” add up to. And no doubt Eliot wanted it that
way. Coordination rather than subordination, likeness and difference
rather than logic or sequence or even qualification–here are the
elements of verbal collage. The things described exist: the poet puts
them before us without explicit comment or explanation.

Ezra Pound’s Cantos carry this collage principle even further. Here is a
typical sequence from the Pisan Cantos:

“Such hatred”

wrote Bowers,

and la Spagnuola saying:

“We are perfectly useless, on top,

but they killed the baker and cobbler.”

“Don’t write me any more things to tell him

(scripsit Woodward, W.E.)

“on these occasions

HE

TALKS.” (End quote)

“What” (Cato speaking) “do you think of

murder?” (Canto LXXXVI)

In what Pound himself referred to as the “ply over ply” method, he

collages the words of Claude Gernade Bowers, the Ambassador to Spain
between 1933-39, who wrote Pound a letter about “the atmosphere of
incredible hate” in Spain, with the comments of an unidentified Spanish
woman, with the historian William E. Woodward’s wry reference to
Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s response to Pound’s economic “advice” from
abroad, and then with an allusion to Cato’s equation (according to
Cicero’s De Officilis) of money-lending to murder. In the space of
twelve lines, the poem uses lineation, spacing, typeface and font (note
the giant “HE,” which gets a line to itself) to convey the economic
anarchy and decay of the Spanish Civil War and the pre-World War II
years. But rather than providing an actual analysis of this historical
vector, the poem works by comparison and contrast: the deprecating
reference to Roosevelt (“HE / TALKS”) contrasted to the wisdom of Cato,
and so on. Notice that Pound’s effect depends on ellipsis and the denial
of disclosure of key information.. “‘What (Cato speaking) do you think of
/ murder?’” belongs at the end of a sequence where Cato is asked what
he thinks the most profitable feature of an estate and replies that it is
raising cattle. After a few such questions, he is asked “What do you
think of money-lending?” And it is then that the cited response comes.
In omitting the context, Pound both arouses the reader’s curiosity and
heightens the Roosevelt/ Cato contrast. Then, too–and this is how
collage works–juxtaposition replaces exposition, a convenience given
that a reasoned account of Roosevelt’s economic decisions might not
produce the conclusions that Pound wants.

In its refusal of unity and coherence, of what Eliot himself called “the
aura around a bright clear centre,” collage has been open to criticism,
both from the Right and from the Left. For his fellow-poets as for the
New Critics of the 40s and 50s, Pound’s Cantos were simply incoherent.
“He has not, Yeats declared, “got all the wine into the bowl.” For a
Marxist critic like Fredric Jameson on the other hand, the collage-
composition of Wyndham Lewis (and, by implication, of Pound as well)
“draws heavily and centrally on the warehouse of cultural and mass
cultural cliché, on the junk materials of industrial capitalism, with its
degraded commodity art, its mechanical reproduceability, its serial
alienation of language.” Collage, in this scheme of things, is a
“degraded” or ‘alienated” version of earlier (and presumably superior)
genres, an index to to the aporias of capitalism.

Whether or not this is the case, one thing that does seem certain is that
the mode of detachment and readherence, of graft and citation, which is
collage is a way of undermining the authority of the individual self, of the
“transcendental signified.” As such, it has become, in the later
twentieth-century, an important mode of theorizing and model building
as well as art-making: witness Derrida’s Glas or Barthes’s Empire of
Signs, or, in a different vein, John Cage’s change-generated mesostic
compositions like Duchamp. Satie.Joyce or Jackson Mac Low’s The
Pronouns. Whole “textbooks”–for example, bp nichol and Steve
McCaffery’s Rational Geomancy (1992)–have taken on a collage form.

Ironically, however, even as collage has entered the critical-theoretical

domain, it is beginning to withdraw from the aesthetic realm. What was
once a revolutionary technique is now the staple of advertising and
greeting cards. At the same time, postmodern artworks tend to be at
once less “cut up” and yet, paradoxically more equivocal than their
modernist counterparts. In the poetry of John Ashbery, for example,
the technique of juxtaposing citations or fragments of conversations has
given way to what looks like a more seamless and continuous discourse–
often a narrative–but which, on inspection, cannot be decoded as
yielding any sort of coherent meaning. It is as if the individual units are
“always already” collaged to begin with. Similarly, Jasper Johns number
or alphabet series operate, not by collage principles (each canvas will
have one letter or number, the textures of the encaustic itself producing
the complexity and indeterminacy of meaning) but by the disruption of
the “normal” contract between artist and viewer. Even in Robert
Raushenberg’s famed “combine” paintings, the separate object layers
remain starkly separate: they do not undergo the sort of transfer from
one context to another that, we find in Picasso or Schwitters.

The shift in such “post-collage” works is from the juxtaposition of

carefully chosen citations or statements (as in the shift in The Waste
Land from “O swallow swallow” to “Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie)
to a focus on the inherent poetic and artistic possibilities of the
“ordinary,” the “everyday” as in the contemporary poetry and fiction
deriving from Gertrude Stein, herself by no means a collagist. But for
the better part of the century–in Joyce’s Ulysses as in Pound’s Cantos, in
Joseph Cornell’s boxes as in Malevich’s Girl at Poster Column, in Satie’s
“furniture music” as in Cage’s Europeras, collage has been the most
important mode for representing a “reality” no longer quite believed in
and therefore all the more challenging.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Antin, David. “Some Questions about Modernism,” Occident, 8 (Spring

1974): 7-38.

Aragon, Louis. Les Collages. Paris: Hermann, 1980.

Group Mu, eds. Collages, Revue d’Esthétique, nos. 3-4. Paris: Union
Genérale d’Editions, 1978.

Jameson, Fredric. Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist

as Fascist. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1979.
Krauss, Rosalind. The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other
Modernist Myths. Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1985.

Perloff, Marjorie. The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and

the Language of Rupture. Chicago and London: University of Chicago
Press, 1986.

Poggi, Christine. In Defiance of Panting: Cubism, Futurism, and the

Invention of Collage. New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
1992.

Seitz, William C. The Art of Assemblage. New York: Museum of Modern

Art, 1968.

Ulmer, Gregory L. “The Object of Post-Criticism,” in The Anti-Aesthetic:

Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal foster. Port Towsend: Wash: Bay
Press, 1983. pp. 83-110.

Wescher, Herta. Collage. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. 1968.