1Questioning the relationship between Modernist magazines and politics provides an opportunity to try and demonstrate the value of a working hypothesis by the French poet and critic Jean-Marie Gleize on the question of the manifesto. Gleize was indeed among the first to suggest, in a short, insightful article published in the journal Littérature, that the extremely ambiguous nature of the manifesto qualified it as a fascinating form of fictional construct1. My intention is to test this approach with some of the manifestoes published in transition–a magazine which forcefully rejected any political affiliations and placed art, and particularly poetic writing, above politics–so as to uncover and discuss the complex editorial choices reflected in this apolitical posturing.

2 transition was an American expatriation little magazine founded by Eugene Jolas and Eliott Paul in Paris, in April 1927. The magazine was aimed at a wide international readership and one of its characteristics was the large amount of European literature and art it covered. From the beginning, transition published the works of European writers and artists such as Klee, Picabia, Gris, Gide, Soupault, Brancusi, Desnos, Braque and Jung along with those of the Americans Stein, McAlmon, McLeish, Boyle and Gillespie, among others. Yet, the true star of the magazine was James Joyce whose Work in Progress was serialized in 18 of transition’s 27 issues, from 1927 to 1938, before being published as Finnegans Wake, in 1939. From its inception, the magazine advocated a radical aesthetics revolt. In June 1927, in a manifesto entitled “Suggestions for a New Magic” Jolas and Paul publicized their poetic approach to language as relying essentially on a systematic hallucination of the word with a view to inventing a new collective mythology :

We believe in the ideology of revolt against all diluted and synthetic poetry. We believe that there is no hope for beauty unless there be disintegration first. We need new words, new abstractions, new hieroglyphics, new symbols, new myths. These values to be organically evolved […] must seek freer association. Thus there may be produced that sublimation of the spirit which grows out of the modern consciousness2.

3Five years later, in March 1932, the same agenda was taken up again in a manifesto entitled “Poetry is Vertical” which declared :

The final disintegration of the “I” in the creative act is made possible by the use of a language which does not hesitate to adopt a revolutionary attitude toward word and syntax, going on as to invent a hermetic language, if necessary3.

4In this five-year period, transition repeatedly distanced itself from the political stances taken by other magazines or groups. Jolas was highly critical of the democratic ideology in which he saw the threat of a victory of the masses. Hence, he ranted against Michael Gold’s venture with New Masses, which he dismissed as “proletarian philistinism”. On another front, transition had to defend itself against a violent attack carried out by Wyndham Lewis in the first and second issues of The Enemy. Lewis condemned what he considered to be a gratuitous aesthetics of political violence tainted by a romantic and “unrealistic” approach, calling transition “a political holiday-school” and its support for violent revolution “the spurious doctrine of fashionable revolt”. He also accused the magazine of being the hotbed of Neo-Dadaism (i.e. “Super-realism”) and stemming from Russian Bolshevism. Jolas and Paul challenged him with an editorial they ironically entitled “First Aid to the Enemy” in which they claimed their independence from Breton’s Surrealism as well as from Communism, and reiterated their belief in an aesthetic radicalism fraught with anarchic and romantic aspirations :

The editors of transition are not more Communists than they are fascists, for all forms of politics are outside the range of our interests. […] Contemporary society seems to us to be in an abysmally dark state and we are entertained intellectually, if not physically, with the idea of its destruction. […] In plain and direct words for the edification of Mr. Lewis, we believe in a new romanticism, more volatile than that of the past4.

5These few examples give an idea of the significant–not to say systematic–use the editors made of the manifesto in order to define or state their position vis-à-vis the political context. Yet, to conclude that transition was an apolitical magazine might be setting too much store by the documentary value of its manifestoes. On closer analysis, it does indeed appear that this form of speech also provides a means to decipher the review’s editorial position and point out its possible ambiguities.

6For more than thirty years, the manifesto has generated a variety of criticism, ranging from socio-historical approaches to generic point of views, and from pragmatic linguistics studies to philosophical investigations of its significance in the past century. Beyond these disciplinary differences, however, there is a general agreement among critics on the definition of the manifesto as a text of rupture, whose rhetoric crystallizes the problem of balancing what Alain Badiou has termed “the absolute will of the present” and “the announcement of an enigmatic future5”. This unstable, and often untenable, character of the manifesto is compensated by the doctrinal use of certain “speech acts” intended to assert its symbolic power. Within the larger framework of discussing the relationships between a revolutionary form of discourse advocating political change and the promotion of literary and artistic agendas declaring allegiance to the now and the new in the last three hundred years, several scholars have pinpointed the historical avant-garde’s crucial role as a crossroads between politics and aesthetics via the manifesto. As Janet Lyon has noted, this transitional period saw the emergence of a “singularly overdetermined form” articulating poetic or artistic principles with political aspirations6 and culminated in a ten-year period stretching from 1909, with Marinetti’s first Futurist manifesto, to 1919, with Popova’s statement on Non-Objective and Suprematist painting. Given the impact of this “great manifesto moment” (Caws xxii) on later avant-garde movements, including Surrealism, it will be worth examining whether transition’s apolitical stance indicates an actual break with this aesthetization of political concerns. To do so, I will discuss the magazine’s manifestoes in their fictional dimension.

7Indeed, the aesthetic programs issued between 1909 and 1919 relied on an intentionally exaggerated use of the "art of the manifesto’s" main devices as identified by Gleize : “programmatism”, intensive use of impulsive allusions, excessive assertions and careful erasing of evidence7. Even though this rhetorical artifice has often been mentioned, yet its importance for studying the manifesto may have been somehow understated by critics. On the one hand, it questions the manifesto’s vociferous claims to be new and original, and invites a counterpoint examination of its insistent repeating, affirming and consolidating existing facts. On the other hand, it offers, as Gleize suggests, an opportunity to enjoy manifestoes more fully and even start "playing" with them. Reflecting on a mischievous comment made by Tristan Tzara in the 1924 “Dada Manifesto on Feeble Love and Bitter Love” : “Even if I didn’t believe it, it’s the truth of the fact that I’ve put it on paper– because it’s a lie that I have FIXED like a butterfly to a hat”, the French critic concludes that one should not focus so much on “the lie” the manifesto “fixes” as on its fictional truth (what he calls its “vérité de mensonge” or “the truth of its lies”). With the aim of determining if there is more to this intriguing assumption than a mere mimicking of the rhetorical devices it denounces, I will now try and experiment it with transition’s self-proclaimed apolitical manifestoes.

8Interestingly, the purpose of those who signed the statements made by transition by using the strategies detailed above seems to have been first of all to create a present for themselves, which clearly places the magazine’s editorial venture within “the myth of the origin” that Rosalind Krauss has defined as central to the avant-garde’s preoccupations8. For instance, the persistent use of the word “new” in the June 1927 manifesto “Suggestions for a New Magic” – “We need new words, new abstractions, new hieroglyphics, new symbols, new myths” –clearly appears to be part of a rhetorical bluff aiming to present as novel a program which is in fact quite close to André Breton’s Surrealist agenda in its use of free association and the dream to explore impenetrable regions of the unconscious, as Jolas and Paul themselves indicate a few lines further down :

The poet must not forget that only the dream is essential […] Are not the working of the instincts and the mysteries of the shadow more beautiful than the sterile world of beauty we have known9 ?

9However, it is not Breton, whose name is casually listed among other pioneering figures of contemporary literature such as Stein, Aragon, Joyce, Arp or Fargue, that “Suggestion” chooses as transition’s forefather, but Rimbaud. Along with the retrospective invention of a break and an origin, this alleged genealogy seems to have been made up by Jolas not only to associate transition with a certain form of poetic modernity via the author of the Illuminations, but above all to avoid his magazine being swallowed up, both aesthetically and politically, by the movement led by Breton10. In A Boatload of Madmen, Dickran Tashjian has described Jolas’s attempts at distinguishing his agenda from Surrealism, while at the same time publishing Surrealist works and manifestoes in transition, a difficult, if not impossible task, especially so as Lewis attacked him from the Right by accusing him of being the henchman of both Surrealism and Communism, and Mathew Josephson from the Left by accusing transition’s contributors of being superficial cosmopolitans, more interested in bar-hopping in Paris than in literature or politics. According to Tashjian, this did not, however, prevent Jolas from persisting in his quest to find a personal political model :

Jolas would consistently distance himself from both the right and the left, though he waffled considerably in his attraction to anarchism, and he was hardly apolitical, as he liked to imply […]. [He] tried to work his way to the left in an independent fashion11.

10And indeed Jolas went on with this quest until he decided to give it a more radical turn in June 1929 by publishing what was to become the magazine’s most famous manifesto. With “Proclamation : the Revolution of the Word”, the gap between the agenda promoted by the manifesto’s discourse (the “manifested”) and the reality of its “manifestation” grew so wide as to become, quite paradoxically, an index to the profound originality of the magazine.

11The aesthetic agenda advocated by “Proclamation" leaves no doubt as to transition’s editors’ determination to enact a definitive break with the artists affiliated to the Communist Left. The second, third and twelfth statements in particular, “The imagination in search of a fabulous world is autonomous and unconfined”, “Pure poetry is a lyrical absolute that seeks an a priori reality within ourselves alone” and “The plain reader be damned" make it clear that the artist’s responsibility is not toward men but only toward art. The other statements put poetry and the written word at the center of a revolution which seems concerned only with aesthetics : ”The literary creator has the right to use words of his own fashioning and to disregard existing grammatical and syntactical laws” and “We are not concerned with the propagation of sociological ideas, except to emancipate the creative elements from the present ideology.” The dogmatic tone of these pronouncements is further emphasized by the manifesto’s layout. Neatly ordered, poster-like, within the limits of its rectangular frame, transition’s bill of rights forcefully demands the reader’s attention. The framing device graphically emphasizes both the self-contained and exclusionary nature of its content. As for the bold characters and capital letters, along with the choice of the term “proclamation”, they seem to indicate that this declaration is not only meant to be read, but also recited aloud to, or even shouted at, an audience. This implicit allusion to the way the manifesto should be performed–and conversely, received–as well as the somewhat dizzying exuberance of its pronouncements betray a strong affinity to early avant-garde manifestoes characterized by their theatrical use of the verbal and visual accoutrements of fulminating dissent, the best example of which is probably the “Dada Manifesto 1918” by Tzara. Yet, however convincing or seductive this avant-garde posturing may appear, it reads ambiguously when compared with the actual content of the magazine.

12As several critics have underlined, there is a genuine discrepancy between the avant-gardist gesticulation of “Proclamation” and transition’s conservative tendencies at the end of the 1920s. This discrepancy may be explained by the historical context : in the aftermath of the ten-year period of Modernist frenzy, the 1920s saw the disappearance of several of the early European avant-garde movements and, as Michael Levenson has noted, the maturing of Modernism toward cultural legitimacy, signaled by the proliferation of critical essays, anthologies and bibliographies12. A similar need to archive and commemorate can be felt in transition’s “spirit of synthesis” (the word is written across the June 1929 cover), as well as in its growing tendency to reprint older works by Schwitters, Arp, Benn or Einstein13. However, none of “Proclamation’s” pronouncements refer to the early Modernists whose works transition carefully compiled. Instead, as Jean-Michel Rabaté has observed14, the systematic appeal to Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell” (1793) anchors the manifesto in the Romantic search for a new lyrical and mystic “mythos”, an idea already put forward by Jolas in the “Notes” of the Fall 1928 issue :

We felt the importance of to problem of reality–the new reality of our twentieth century in relation to our own inner world. […] The facts of life persist. What is the poet to do with them ? Is there not a space between the subjective and the objective reality which ought to be filled ? This process would lead to a marriage of reason and instinct which, with the resultant breaking up of the traditional means of expression, would open an entirely new world. Thus the new realism synthesizing two realities should make us think in terms of both the supernatural and the natural15.

13This mythological trend in transition relates the 1929 manifesto to a declaration from 1796 entitled “Earliest System–Program of German Idealism” which was probably written by Hegel, Holderlin and Schelling. In this declaration, the three poets and philosophers claim that “poetry must again become what it was before–mankind’s teacher” and set themselves the task of creating a “new mythology” in order to find their true place in society16. Thus, despite its avant-garde gesturing intended to attract attention on its fictional origin, “Proclamation” bears little relation to the historical avant-garde’s view of aesthetics and politics. The real source of its political vision is to be found instead in enlightened German Romanticism.

14Another intriguing feature of the 1929 manifesto is its careful censoring of the connection between the literary experiments carried out in transition and certain visual theories having strong social and political implications. Dougald McMillan has described how the transition writers had moved away from Pound’s imagist precepts by the time they were writing for the review :

When they do wish to “present an emotional complex in an instant of time” (as the imagists defined the function of the image) their devices are more likely to be verbal–a pun or word used so as to play on its fullest etymological suggestiveness17.

15I would suggest that the transition revolution did more than restore “the word to a position of respectability it had relinquished to the image18” in the first quarter of the century. The manifesto’s exclusively pushing the idea of the written word as both the archè and telos of the revolution it manifests deliberately quashes a debate which is central to the Revolution of the Word : that of the tension between “written word” and “visual image”, which finds its theoretical expression in the writings of Carl Einstein, another major contributor to transition. For the German thinker, the revolution of the word only follows the revolution of the eye, as he writes in a letter dated April 1923 to his friend Daniel Henry Kahnweiler : “I have known for a long time, that not only a transformation of vision and hence of the effect of movement is possible, but also a transformation of the linguistic equivalent, and of perception19”. Einstein’s model for the written word is the new optical experience provided by Cubism, in which he sees a real revolutionary potential : “By looking, one changes people and the world”, he writes in Die Kunst des 20, in 1926. For him, the use of language thus needs a radical rethink. Only by de-conceptualising the linguistic hierarchies of the written word toward images can writers not remain “the prisoners of words”. According to this view, the visual image is both a model for the written word and what the word must sublimate itself into in order to reintegrate the experience of reading and seeing (or rather reading as seeing) into life praxis.

16From the launch of transition, Jolas and Paul demonstrated a keen interest in the visual by reproducing Cubist experiments and inviting comments on them, and by reviewing recent photographic and cinematographic developments by Man Ray, Moholy-Nagy, Eisenstein, Chaplin and Bruguière, whose works frequently illustrated the review. Over the years, the cinematic model became for Jolas the basis of a dynamic verbal montage, or “logocinema”, which he defined in the “Revolution of the Word” June 1929 issue : “Poetry using the word as mechanics, may, like the film, produce a metaphoric universe which is a sublimation of the physical world20”. The aim of this form of poetry was to find a collective means of communication bridging the gap between individuals :

Immensely the world lies before me, x-rayed in every fiber of its cosmic magic. I am no longer alone, for the electric signs paint the nocturnal screens of my visions, and the wireless strangles time and space21.

17In 1935, as the political situation in Europe worsened, Jolas reverted more and more to the use of multilingualism as “an inter-racial language… to express mankind’s collective inner vision.” The following verses provide an example of his “polyvocables” or “mots-frontières” :

malade de peacock-feathers
le sein blue des montagnes and the house strangled by rooks the tender entêtement des trees
the clouds sybilfly and the neumond brûleglisters ein wunder stuerzt ins tal with
eruptions of the abendfoehren et le torrentbruit qui charrie les gestes des enfants22…

18The true “archeology” (or “archeo-logie” to use the term forged by Rainer Rumold) of transition hence lies in the perception of the visual image as an engine creating image-words leading in turn to sound-poems somehow reminiscent of the sonorist experiments led by Arp, Ball and Schwitters earlier on and reprinted in the magazine. The main reason why Jolas chose not to acknowledge the influence of these early avant-garde experiments in "Proclamation" may have had to do with his determination to use the manifesto as a showcase for the neologistic and synesthetic experiments of Work in Progress which certainly had an oral/aural quality–as Joyce’s own readings famously demonstrated–but were essentially based on the written word. Nonetheless, the importance of the visual in the multilingual language of movement promoted by transition was crucial to the universal, collectivist vision it defended. This is demonstrated by some of the most original experiments published in the wake of the 1929 manifesto, which are concerned with a word-into-image process of transformation pointing at its possible reintegration into real life.

19In 1930, an occasional contributor to the magazine, Robert Carlton Brown, designed a “reading machine” meant to liberate words from the book and into life, carrying on with different technical means what others had intended before him, like for instance Apollinaire, with his book-records, or the Romanian Surrealist Voronca, with his book-posters. This reading machine was made of a ribbon on which entire books could be printed and of a lens in front of which the reader could activate the ribbon at a variable speed. The whole device drew on photographic composition, the modern cinematic qualities of the “talkies” and the moving electric advertising signs to “revitalize interest in the optical art of writing”, as Brown explains in transition, a year after “Proclamation” :

Literary language is Optical, speaking language Vocal, and the gap between them must spread till it becomes a gulf. My reading machine will serve as a wedge. Makers of words will be born ; fresh, vital eye-words will wink out of dull, dismal drooling type at startled smug readers. […] The Revolution of the Word will be won. […] Let’s have a new reading medium in time with our day, so that industrious delvers in the Word-Pile may be rapidly read and quickly understood by their own generation at least23.

20Although it was never built, Brown’s machine gave way to a new poetic form called “the readie” which immediately became the subject of enthusiastic experiments by several of transition’s contributors, including Pound, Williams and Stein, soon to be compiled into an anthology in 1931. As exemplified by this short “readie” by one Wambly Bald, the emphasis was on speed and sound : “Rain a de rain a de cold a de bang a de bang the train like hell.” In this other example presenting A. Lincoln Gillespie’s own view of the “readie”, the rapid paratactic shifts, puns, neologisms, abstract sounds and typographic devices read in some way as an anticipation of the later language poetry experiments :

READIEVICES

>>>small, clear, might be long-broader, better’n Hyphens at certspeeds they’ll be soakcepted)
<<<clausending, inclosures, tcreate passtress (supplant Underlines)---wherwhen Writer wishes Slowintake, marvellous Backfirade
SPACES for omission of notquitextlySuperfWords, Emphsilences
REPEATS for CinePaceStressling
DECOREMBELLDYNES ad intuilib
The Stockticonnectiv
………the Spacetwixt restpoints the Reader
HYPHENS tremain Textfunct (v.>>>, above)
DASHES Delayemphyphens, Musicologs
CAPITALS (entire syllable or word)limn accumajminor -unct-
points of now-unistreaming phrases-formerly-line24.

21On the content level, most “readies” celebrate the medium as a way to achieve effective international communication with a strong social and political potential, as in a piece by Norman McLeod entitled “Readie. Revelation” or in “One of the Many” by John A. Farrell and James T. Farrell. Other contributions by Kay Boyle or George Kent also show, as Craig Saper has noted in the afterword to his recent edition of The Readies, that Brown’s constraints was the “foundation for a politically engaged writing of the street25”. If this utopian belief remains subject to discussion26, the experiments initiated by Brown’s planned reading machine cast serious doubt on the magazine’s apolitical claim. They also tend to prove that it is in the gap between the doctrinal “purity” manifested in “Proclamation” and the creative “impurity” of the texts it calls for that transition manages, at the turn of the 1930s, to invent a new way of approximating reality through a language which fuses the particular and the universal, the conscious and the unconscious, the individual and the collective, which is to say to try and fulfil the programme designed by Jolas for giving a leading social and political role back to the poet. This observation leads to conclude, somehow paradoxically, that the greater the manifesto’s “vérité de mensonge”, the more inventive the attempts at conciliating aesthetics and politics, and thus at bridging the distance between art and life. To carry the demonstration a little further, I suggest we dwell an instant on the March 1922 manifesto entitled “Poetry is Vertical” which seems to provide further evidence.

22This declaration which again takes up, albeit in a much more subdued tone, the statements from the 1929 “Proclamation” seems to crystallize the idiosyncratic features of transition’s agenda, namely its pan-historical romanticism and mystic tendencies. Contrary to the other transition manifestoes, “Poetry is Vertical” does not seek to create an origin or a genealogy for itself. Rather, it reflects the magazine’s deliberate policy which Jolas engaged in more and more, what he calls its “mantic”, “romantico-mystic”, “vertigralist” and “hypnologic” dimension. Picking up on the tenets of the 1929 “Proclamation” (“autonomy of the poetic vision”, “revolutionary attitude toward word and syntax, “hegemony of the inner over the outer life”), the manifesto takes a clear turn toward the irrational and the hermetic :

The transcendental “I” with its multiple stratifications reaching back a million of years is related to the entire history of mankind, past and present, and is brought to the surface with the hallucinatory irruption of images in the dream, the daydream, the mystic-gnostic trance, and even the psychiatric condition27.

23While Jolas’s fascination for the “language of the night” does not encompass the review’s editorial preferences, yet it signals its major preoccupations. In the fall of 1936, when Jolas hired James Johnson Sweeney as co-editor, there was an immediate politicization of the debate in transition, along with a renewed interest in realism. Nonetheless, Jolas’s preference for open dialogue over militant propaganda and his overall interest in the “orphic forces” of the imagination seems to have contributed to deflate interest even among the most enthusiastic contributors to the review. In 1930, for instance, when publication of transition was temporarily interrupted, Williams, Boyle and McAlmon migrated to Front, the shortlived Communist magazine founded in The Hague by Norman McLeod. In the 1930s, Mathew Josephson, the coordinator of the “New York 1928” manifesto, also turned to Marxism. And after returning to the United States in 1932, Bob Brown contributed to New Masses and wrote a book on Communism. At the same time, true to the pronouncements of “Poetry is Vertical”, transition went on publishing and discussing Joyce’s Work in Progress, pondering about the function of intuition and the unconscious in art, and reprinting older material by Dada poets. This very absence of a discrepancy and a discontinuity between the manifesto and the actual experiments it calls for, indicates a risk and a danger.

24Here again, the name of Carl Einstein among the signatories of the manifesto should attract our attention. Indeed, if it may very well be possible that Einstein felt close to the Vertigralist manifesto in 1932, this acceptance was not to last long. In 1933, indeed, Einstein realized that the attempt to make art a means to integrate myth into reality represented a dangerous regression, for it was precisely the method used by the Nazis to legitimise their coming into power. Turning away from what he had written about the myth as a means to invent the future in his famous essay on Georges Braque, he now stated, in Die Fabrikation der Fiktionen, that art had to renounce its own “will to power” and accept the gradual dissolution of its mythical tendencies as a way to preserve democracy : “the distressing question is to know whether what is poetic is simply not a regression, an archaism”, he wrote in 193328. Jolas would nevertheless persist in the way defined by the 1932 manifesto by clinging to the idea that his Verticalist project might serve to fight the rise of Fascism. From 1932 to 1938, from issue to issue, and from editorial notes to manifestoes, transition kept on advocating this utopian ideal, from a more and more isolated position, while the Surrealists started activating an internationalisation of their movement and while others gradually shifted toward extremisms, either to the Right or to the Left of the political spectrum.

25This rapid exploring of transition stresses the manifesto’s crucial role in uncovering the intricacies of the magazine’s radical agenda and the interplay between doctrinal discourse and inventive experiment. Considering the manifesto in its “vérité de fiction” proves also effective in grasping the notions of avant-garde and modernism in their essentially complex, intricate and discontinuous nature, transition’s own venture lying between an avant-garde modernism and a cultural modernism whose boundaries still need to be clarified.