Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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.”
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,
HE
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.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Group Mu, eds. Collages, Revue d’Esthétique, nos. 3-4. Paris: Union
Genérale d’Editions, 1978.