| I. Introduction: The Depth of Trifles
and the Status of Puns
The Duchampian pun that covered each piece of candy at the
opening of Bill Copley's 1953 Parisian show might, in its richness and
ambiguity of meaning, suggest Churchill's famous description of Soviet
Russia as "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." Duchamp designed the square tinfoil wrappers, and inscribed each
little gift to the invitees with a simple and original phrase that may
well be regarded as his deepest and richest play on words: A Guest + A
Host = A Ghost.
At face value, adding only the most obvious and minimal
interpretation, the pun seems gentle and harmless enough at a few evident
levels that might catch anyone's interest and mild appreciation:
1. The single resultant (ghost) arises as an amalgamation
of the two inputs - the initial consonants of each word in sequence (g
of guest followed by h of host), the final two consonants shared by both
words (st), and the vowel of one (the retained o of host) used instead
of the vowels of the other (the eliminated ue of guest).
2. At a first level of meaning (definitional) behind the
amalgamation of letters, the joining of these paired and opposite words
(the host who provides hospitality and the guest who receives it) leads
to their annihilation (ghost). This curiosity merits at least a smile,
and must have intrigued Duchamp.
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Marcel Duchamp,
A Guest + A Host = A Ghost, 1953
© 2000 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. |
3. At a second level of meaning (contextual), the phrase
seems even more humorous when inscribed on a candy wrapper - for after
one eats the candy, the wrapper remains as a shroud or ghost, the former
and now empty covering of an annihilated substance.
4. At a third level (functional), the people were guests
at a host's exhibition - and they left with a ghost generated by the gift
of a host followed by receipt and intended usage of a guest.
These levels of meaning might be deemed sufficient to warrant
notice and minimal commentary, but scarcely complex or interesting enough
to inspire any scholarly exegesis or artistic appreciation. I would like
to argue, on the contrary, that Duchamp's extensive and pervasive wordplays
in general (appearing throughout his career, in all formats from offhand
remarks, to the titles of most of his works, to explicit publications
spanning a full spectrum from single items to extensive lists, and also
to large chunks of his posthumous notes) - and the 1953 ghost pun in particular
(as perhaps the most complex and revealing example of all) - occupy a
vital and central place in the totality of his life's work. Moreover,
with the conspicuous exception of André Gervais's book, very little commentary
or explication has ever been devoted to Duchamp's verbal creations, while
most of his visual creations have been analyzed to a level of detail and
argument usually reserved for sacred writ. (Gervais's own book uses a
pun for its title, for La raie alitée d'effets speaks both of the
homophonic "reality' and the literal "line confined to its bed' (raie
alitée).)
Any analysis of puns and wordplays must begin by acknowledging
the discouraging fact that the entire genre has been relegated to a particularly
low status by self proclaimed intellectuals. Many classic deprecations
could be cited, but James Boswell's famous damning with faint praise (from
his celebrated life of Dr. Johnson, first published in 1791) will suffice
as an example:
| I think no innocent species of wit or pleasantry
should be suppressed; and that a good pun may be admitted among
the smaller excellencies of lively conversation. |
How, then, can this lowest form of humor, representing the
most neglected (and presumably most minor) aspect of Duchamp's oeuvre,
possibly merit any extensive analysis or be regarded as potentially replete
with insight?
Duchamp himself, however, seemed to rank his verbal punning
as important, at least as a source for his own inspiration and an embodiment
of his general procedures - so perhaps we should take him at his (admittedly
always cryptic) word and explore the issue further. Interestingly, Duchamp
himself quoted one of the standard indictments of puns ("a low form of
wit") in his most forthright statement on their importance in his work
(as cited by Gervais from a 1961 interview with Katharine Kuh):
| I like words in a poetic sense. Puns for me are
like rhymes. ... For me, words are not merely a means of communication.
You know, puns have always been considered a low form of wit, but
I find them a source of stimulation both because of their actual
sound and because of the unexpected meanings attached to the interrelationships
of disparate words. For me, this is an infinite field of joy - and
it's always right at hand. Sometimes four or five different levels
of meaning come through. |
II. Duchamp's Verbal Creativity: Big Oaks and Little Acorns
I shall not, in this article, try to explicate all of Duchamp's
verbal creations, or to present a synthetic account of the intrigue or
utility of wordplays in general. But this topic surely transcends nitpicking
or particularism because most, and perhaps nearly all, of Duchamp's verbal
constructions - again, with the ghost pun as the best and richest example
I know - embody a guiding principle that also illuminates his lifetime
of visual work, and underlies his general concept of the nature of creativity
itself. I shall present four Duchampian categories of wordplay, each explored
across a full range of potential meanings as illustrated by three modes
in four categories. But all these usages proceed from the single principle
that tiny variations - whether of sound or of orthography, and often so
small as to pass beneath our discernment in the usual human style of lazy
or passive reading - can generate enormous, and wonderfully interesting,
differences in meaning. This central principle corresponds with the basic
definition of "pun," as given in the Oxford English Dictionary:
| The use of a word in such a way as to suggest two
or more meanings or different associations, or the use of two or
more words of the same or nearly the same sound with different meanings,
so as to produce a humorous effect; a play on words. |
As an opening example, and to show the long pedigree and
pervasive importance of punning in Duchamp's own conception of his work,
a rarely explicit comment in one of his interviews with Pierre Cabanne
seems especially revealing. (I thank Charles Stuckey of the Kimbell Art
Museum for pointing out this passage to me.) Here, Duchamp discusses the
title that he gave to one of his most important early works, the predecessor
(in a sense) to his Nude Descending a Staircase - Sad Young
Man on a Train, or, in the relevant French original, Jeune homme
triste dans un train.
Duchamp said to Cabanne: "The 'Sad Young Man on a Train'
already showed my intention of introducing humor into painting, or, in
any case, the humor of word play: triste, train . . . "Tr"
is very important." But why should the simple alliteration of "tr" for
both the man (in his adjectival designation as sad, or "triste")
and the vehicle ("train") represent anything more than a tiny bit
of elegant care introduced to make a title just a bit more melodious,
salient, or agreeable to the ear?
In the immediately preceding comment to Cabanne, Duchamp
spoke of his attempts to depict "the successive images of the body in
movement" in both the Sad Young Man, and in Nude Descending.
He particularly emphasized how he wished to display the parallel movement
of the train and the man walking down the train's corridor. He spoke of
the Sad Young Man, completed in December 1911: "First, there's
the idea of the movement of the train, and then that of the sad young
man who is in the corridor and who is moving about; thus there are two
parallel movements corresponding to each other."
At an evidently basic level, Duchamp's verbal alliteration
emphasizes the parallel movement of both train and man in the same constrained
direction - the train on its track, and the man along the same path, now
represented by the corridor of the elongated car. We need no more depth
of meaning to understand Duchamp's alliteration of the triste man on the
long train as a small and careful integrative touch, the kind of "God
(or devil) in the details" (different sources for this common quotation
cite either the Lord or Lucifer) that permeates the work of nearly all
creative people (however much they may deny the concept and speak only
of spontaneity, or even of randomness).
But I suspect that here, as with nearly all
Duchamp's punning, several additional, and probably conscious, levels
of meaning can also be specified (after all, Duchamp himself spoke of
four or five levels of meaning in the quotation cited previously). First,
why is the young man "sad" at all; I see nothing in the painting that
intrinsically suggests any particular emotional state for the gentleman
involved. Perhaps he became "sad" primarily to create the integrative
alliteration of triste and train.
We may then continue this line of thought, both situationally
and etymologically: Perhaps he is sad because his options are so restricted,
for he must walk (within the corridor) the same line - that is, the same
one-dimensional route of truly minimal flexibility for directional motion
- that the train on the track must also follow. Such phrases as "one-track
mind" and "straight and narrow" (in the pejorative rather than the original
theological sense) indicate the frequent metaphorical linkage of limitation
and one-dimensional movement. Moreover, the man cannot, by his walking
(or even his running), add more than a small increment to the sum total
of man plus train in the same direction.
Finally, as I learned from Le Robert (the French
equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary), several current usages
of "train" - and, even more relevant, the original meaning as well - reinforce
an equation with sadness and limitation. We tend to think of trains as
rapid facilitators of our motion (at least where they work well in Europe
or Japan). But the word long antedates our modern era of fast transport,
and most of the original meanings suggest forced motion in a line. In
fact, the etymology harkens back to the Latin trahere, to draw
- that is, with the implication of entrained, or being pulled along (against
one's preferences), rather than a primary meaning of voluntary enhancement
or acceleration! Robert begins its entry by stating (my translation):
"In the earliest texts . . . it means 'to force to go somewhere' or 'to
pull someone along.'"
Finally, and this curiosity must have caught Duchamp's fancy
- for Duchamp loved and pored over dictionaries, so he probably encountered
the example - an old French phrase, originally spelled tran-tran,
arose as an onomatopoetic representation of a hunting horn, and acquired
the meaning of a dull or enforced routine ("ya gotta get up, ya gotta
get up, ya gotta get up in the morning" - as the common "translation"
of an army bugler's reveille). Interestingly, the spelling then shifted
to the homophonic train-train (beginning in the 1830's),
probably, or so Robert speculates, by transference to a new image
of enforced motion suggested by the invention of the railroad. How could
Duchamp have resisted this verbal version of his favored double
"tr" - especially as imposed by a quirky linguistic shift to a visual
metaphor, based on public fascination with a newfangled invention, after
the old aural context had faded from memory.
III. A Classification For the Richness and Extent of
Duchamp's Word Games
The four categories that I shall discuss in a more systematic
way - before treating the ghost pun as a summary of all the strategies
for extracting large differences and striking conjunctions from small
disparities (or from identities with alternate meanings) - include a wide
range of bases for their common generation of humor. I claim no expertise
in the extensive literature on the nature and sources of humor, but perhaps
the most widely cited principle of "punch lines" invokes a sudden shift
of expected context - as in the riddle: "What do you do to an elephant
with three balls?" Answer: "Walk him and pitch to the rhino." This joke
rests upon a visual and functional shift (enhanced, of course, by some
old fashioned sexual ribaldry, which, as they say, never hurts) - from
a pitiful and anomalous elephant with an extra item of anatomy, to a worthy
batsman recast as a runner on first base with a less fearsome hitter at
the plate. The usual verbal counterpart of this "sudden shift" principle
works by disparity between the minimal difference of sounds or letters
and the maximal consequence of a quirky outcome or an extensive change
of meaning generated by such a tiny alteration of input - as in the answer
(a lame joke in this case, but illustrative of the principle) to: "What's
another name for a New York wine cellar?" "A Knickerbocker liquor locker."
Each of Duchamp's four categories generates its humor
by this principle of small difference cascading to large, quirky and unexpected
effect. The categories span a wide range of linguistic possibilities - from
visual rearrangement of letters, to aural likeness, to plays on differences
between the names and sound values of letters, to the use of common verbal
roots for generating an extensive range of meanings along numerous routes
of minor change. I will illustrate the potential range of each category
by presenting Duchampian examples in three widely varying modes: interesting
conjunctions yielding more than the sum of parts; direct contradictions
between the two tiny differences; and "annihilations" (a special intensification
of the second mode), where one member of the contradiction annihilates the
other, directly and causally.
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Marcel Duchamp,
Note 208, from Paul Matisse, Marcel Ducahmp: Notes, 1980
© 2000 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. |
1. Anagrams, or extracting different
meanings from the same letters rearranged in alternate sequences. This entirely
spatial and visual category (for generating differences) represents a staple
for fans of crossword puzzles and literary games. The sophisticated British
style of crossword puzzle generally goes by the title "puns and anagrams,"
thus validating my separation of categories - for two types of punning,
or aural differences, will follow this visual category.
Mode
One: Interesting Conjunction. As an obvious example of a fruitful anagram
that juxtaposes two arrangements of the same letters into an unexpected
union and quirky context that Duchamp then exploited in a major work of
his career - by turning the odd name into an actual product. Anemic
Cinema may be reckoned as either puerile or powerful in execution,
but the title is objectively anagrammatic.
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Marcel Duchamp,
Note 237, from Paul Matisse, Marcel Ducahmp: Notes, 1980
© 2000 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. |
Mode Two: Opposition. Silent et listen (P.N. number
208) .
Just rearrange the letters, and we can only do the latter in vain when
the condition of the former reigns.
Mode Three: Annihilation. I particularly like the following
example as a resident in two categories: both a perfect anagram and a
pun based on small aural differences between the two parts (category 2B
to follow). Etrangler l'étranger (P.N., 237) - to strangle the
stranger. Just move the "l" from the verb and make it the definite article
for the noun. The action of the verb will then annihilate the noun. But
the two parts of speech remain alike both visually (as a perfect anagram)
and aurally (as a good pun).
2A. Puns as homonyms. If anagrams produce their large
differences in meaning from spatial rearrangement of identical components
(leading to a visual joke), then homonymic puns operate as a strict analog
in the aural dimension - for the joke now arises from oddly disparate
meanings generated by the same sounds (usually spelled differently or
parsed into different words). The poor reputation of punning can largely
be ascribed to childish efforts in this category, as in the American schoolboy's
joke: "What's the difference between a place to drink and an elephant's
fart?" "A place to drink is a bar room, and an elephant's fart is barroooooom!"
Most "knock-knock" jokes also reside here, and their "ouch" records their
status - as in "Who's there?" "Petunia." "Petunia who?" With the answer
then given in song: "Petunia old grey bonnet . . ."
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Marcel Duchamp,
Note 232, from Paul Matisse, Marcel Ducahmp: Notes,
1980
© 2000 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris.
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Marcel
Duchamp,
Note 241, from Paul Matisse,
Marcel Ducahmp: Notes, 1980
© 2000 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris.
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Mode One: Interesting Conjunction. Duchamp created many
puns in this most widely exploited category within the entire genre of
wordplays. I confess that I don't grasp the depth in some examples that
must have pleased Duchamp because he repeated them so frequently, but
I may be missing some interesting innuendoes that would be apparent to
a native speaker of French. "Un mot de reine; des maux de reins" (P.N.,
241) contrasts "a word of the queen" with, literally, "kidney diseases,"
but more generally and commonly, "backaches," under a virtually identical
pronunciation. (Perhaps, as a sexist crack, the pun means to identify
forceless pronouncements from the boss's subsidiary with "oh, my aching
back." Or perhaps as Sarah Skinner Kilborne, Toutfait's Senior
Editor, suggested to me, backaches correspond to the queen's word because
pain speaks to us by giving us a word about body parts in trouble, while
any statement from the queen also represents a word from the back -- either
negatively from the king's annoying subsidiary, both literally and figuratively
behind him, or more positively from his second in command, or backup.)
Similarly, "my niece is cold because my Knees are cold" (P.N., 232) puzzles
me as an apparently meaningless conjunction of different significations
with nearly identical sounds, but perhaps our thoughts should turn to
unconsummated incest (and perhaps they shouldn't on the sensible principle
that cigars and bananas are often just cigars and bananas. But why does
Duchamp often capitalize only the word "Knees" of the male body part?).
I regard "head tax thumb tacks" (P.N., 272) as more satisfying
(or perhaps only more personally comprehensible) because the use of a
different body part as an adjectival modifier to the exact same sound
(albeit represented by two distinct words of different spelling) yields
such an interesting contrast of meanings - a form of taxation (popular
in many European countries) based on fixed amounts per person (also, called
a "capitation" from the Latin caput, or head), versus a humble
bit of hardware pushed in by the stated body part.
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Marcel Duchamp,
Note 272, from Paul Matisse, Marcel Ducahmp: Notes, 1980
© 2000 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. |
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| Marcel Duchamp,
Nous Nous Cajolions, 1943
© 2000 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. |
The potential richness of this otherwise somewhat
limited category of homonyms can be enhanced, as Duchamp so often does throughout
his catalogue of wordplays, by combining both visual and aural versions
of the same image. In a lovely example, far more complex than I first realized,
Duchamp drew a rebus in 1925 (Schwarz, number 412) for one of his oft-repeated
homonymic puns: nous nous cajolions. Here, he breaks this full phrase
("we flatter (or pet) each other") into two visual parts - a woman caring
for a child, representing a nanny (nounou in French, with the exact
same pronunciation as nous nous), followed by the more obvious lion
behind bars (cage au lion, or lion's cage, pronounced exactly as
cajolions).
I only appreciated the depth
of Duchamp's construction when I studied the etymology of cajoler
in Robert. The probable origin of this verb, meaning to flatter
or to wheedle, can be traced to the singing of birds in a cage. Moreover,
the derived noun cajolerie specifically identifies the condescending
tone that men often adopt in trying to influence women or children. Hence,
both images of the rebus specify a historical source for the full phrase
thus represented - the woman and child of the first part, followed by
the caged animal of the second part.
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Marcel Duchamp,
Objet-Dard, 1951
© 2000 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. |
Mode two: Opposition. I suspect that Duchamp called his
late and evidently phallic structure "Objet dard" because the piece both
looks like a dart (or just to mark the word's membership within the large
set of nicknames for a penis), and also stands in opposition to the retinal
style of conventional "fine art" that perpetually strives to fashion an
"objet d'art" of the same pronunciation. However, for Duchamp's best products
in this mode, I nominate, for first prize, "do shit again and douche it
again" (P.N., 232) as truly identical soundings with opposite meanings
(foul it again vs. wash it again); and, for second prize, the delicious
bilingual homonym (P.N., 229) "coup de gueule / good girl" (a smack in
the face and a well behaved lass - pronounced almost identically, with
the first sounding like the second spoken with a French accent, despite
the difference in meaning and orthography in the two languages).
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Marcel Duchamp,
Note 229, from Paul Matisse,
Marcel Ducahmp: Notes, 1980
© 2000 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. |
Mode Three: Annihilation. Duchamp frequently split
"literature," the aspiration of all wordplaying, into three separate words
of nearly the same pronunciation "lits et ratures" (P.N., 224).
But these words would annihilate any pretense to creating great written
works, for we use our beds ("lits") for the two most frequent activities,
sleep and sex, that steal time from our literary struggles - while "ratures"
are erasures!
2B. Puns as transpositions (near homonyms). This
category encompasses the more subtle and systematic near homonyms (large
differences in meaning generated by small alterations in sound) that generally
win more respect than truly homonymic puns because they often originate
by careful and thoughtful construction, rather than by the sheer accident
of an unconsidered alternative meaning for a chosen statement (or a consciously
forced and painful likeness in the "ouch" mode of knock-knock jokes).
However, some puns in this category, while also systematic in their structure,
do arise unintentionally, and even win their humor for the embarrassment
thus created as a lapsus linguae (or slip of the tongue). The classics
of this subgenre are called "spoonerisms" for their hapless eponym, The
Reverend William Spooner (1844-1930), who apparently couldn't help himself.
Some spoonerisms have been traced to the source himself - as when the
good Reverend confidently responded to a parishoner's praise for his sermons:
"many thinkle peep so." Others, one suspects, have been purposely devised
by legions of "admirers" and then attributed to the poor man - as in "a
half warmed fish" masquerading as an imperfectly conceptualized desire.
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Marcel Duchamp,
Note 224, from Paul Matisse, Marcel Ducahmp: Notes, 1980
© 2000 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. |
I don't know any common English distinction between these
two types of puns (homonymic and transpositional), but the French language,
while using "jeu de mots" (word game) as the vernacular term for
puns in general, does make a formal separation with two less common words
that also attribute greater value to the transpositional category. Robert
defines calembour as a "witticism based on words that have a double
meaning, or an ambiguity of words [forming] phrases that are pronounced
in an identical manner." But Robert then specifies the lower status
of a calembour by recognizing an expansion of meaning that began
in the early 19th century: "By extension, it means a poor pun (un mauvais
jeu de mots)."
By contrast, Robert defined a contrepèterie
as "an inversion of two sounds (vowels or consonants) between two words
transforming the meaning of a phrase, generally in a scatological direction."
From this original 15th century meaning, Robert then reports an
extension of sense to the full category that I have called "transpositional"
- with a clear implication of higher value: "The word designates a permutation
of sounds, letters, or syllables in a phrase, in such a way as to obtain
another phrase with a droll meaning." Interestingly, Robert gives
two hypotheses for the derivation of contrepèterie: either from
the verb péter (to make a blast, more specifically to fart - as
in a common phrase that many English speakers use in ignorance of its
etymology - to be hoist by one's own petard), thus meaning, literally,
a backfire; or from pied (a foot) in reference to the "counter
foot" or other meaning of the phrase. In any case, Duchamp uncorked a
set of eminently worthy contrepèteries in all three modes:
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Marcel Duchamp,
Note 231, from Paul Matisse, Marcel Ducahmp: Notes, 1980
© 2000 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. |
Mode One: Interesting Conjunction. Among several that
could be cited, two Duchampian concoctions especially intrigue me for their
complexity of difference obtained by transposing a single sound between
two words in a phrase. In the first example, Duchamp asks why a baby at
the breast may be compared with first prize in a vegetable contest (P.N.,
232): "Le premiere est un souffleur de chair chaude et le second un chou-fleur
de serre chaude" - literally, "the first is a blower of warm flesh and the
second a cauliflower from a hothouse." The contrast in meaning is wonderfully
absurd, but not without some amusing similarity in the great difference
- as both cited items are round and warm (the baby's head and the hothouse
cauliflower). But the pronounced alteration of meaning arises entirely from
a small reciprocal shift in a pair of similar sounds - "s" and "ch" (pronounced
"sh") - in two words: for souffleur becomes chou-fleur, changing
s to ch, while, later in the phrase, chair becomes
serre, changing ch back to s.
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Marcel Duchamp,
Disk Inscribed with Pun, from Anémic Cinéma, 1926
© 2000 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. |
If the first example links two entirely different phrases
by a similarity in form (warm round objects), the second describes a functional
union in the sexual mode favored by contrepèteries. Duchamp labels
this pun as a "question of intimate hygiene": "Faut-il mettre la moelle
de l'épée dans le poil de l'aimée" (from the 1939 pamphlet of Duchampian
aphorisms, Rrose Sélavy, and in P.N., 231 in a slightly different
version) - an interesting and partly metaphorical description of copulation
from a male point of view: "is it necessary to put the pith of the sword
into the fur of the (female) beloved." Again, the change of meaning arises
from a single reciprocal transposition - m for p - between
two words: "moelle de l'épée (pith of the sword) and "poil
de l'aimée" (fur of the beloved).
Interestingly, Duchamp improved the pun (both in sound,
objectively, and in meaning, in my opinion) when he changed poil
(fur) to poêle (oven, and a better rhyme with moelle) in
recycling this phrase on an anemic cinema disc (Schwarz,
number 421).
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Marcel Duchamp,
Note 249, from Paul Matisse, Marcel Ducahmp: Notes, 1980
© 2000 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. |
Mode Two: Opposition. The same kind of simple transposition
can also yield two phrases of opposite meaning. In one example, the transposition
of c and l converts an order to cease singing into a command
to permit this particular song (P.N., 249):
| cessez le chant (stop the song)
laissez ce chant (leave this song) |
In another case, number 254 of the Posthumous Notes,
and labeled a "devinette" (riddle) by Duchamp, a more complex rearrangement
of four syllables or combinations of syllables (rien, de, véné, and rable)
highlights an opposition between something both honorable and persistent
(venerable) and a mode of destruction in disgrace (râble de vénérien).
André Gervais notes that we may also consider this form of wordplay as
an anagram of syllables rather than letters:
"He has nothing venerable, but a back of a person
with a venereal disease."
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Marcel Duchamp,
Note 225, from Paul Matisse, Marcel Ducahmp: Notes, 1980
© 2000 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. |
Mode Three: Annihilation. In a wonderfully complex
transposition, involving both sounds and letters (P.N., 225, and as a
slight variant, appearing in the form cited here, in the 1939 booklet,
Rrose Selavy, that collected 43 Duchampian aphorisms, most published
previously and singly), Duchamp inverts the cr-s of a word in the first
phrase (crasse) into s-cr in the corresponding word of the second
phrase (Sacre). He then inverts the t-m and p-n of a word in the
first phrase (tympan) into p-n followed by t-m for a word in the
second phrase (Printemps). The result becomes a mordant comment
about a famous incident in the long history of public opposition to avant-garde
works of art - the angry crowd reaction (including prolonged catcalling
and even some throwing of chairs) that followed the premiere of Stravinsky's
Rite of Spring in 1913: "La crasse de tympan et non le Sacre de
Printemps" - "The filth of the eardrum and not the Rite of Spring." The
mocking crowd annihilates Stravinsky's piece by transposition to an ultimate
affront upon their aural receptors; (an opponent might also nullify the
composition by plugging up his ears so completely that no sound can get
through).
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| Marcel
Duchamp,
L.H.O.O.Q., 1919
© 2000 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. |
3. Alternatives. In a quite different concept
for producing humor by the same effect (the drawing of two disparate
meanings from identical or highly similar starting points, either visual
or aural), Duchamp sometimes exploited the dual possibilities of a word's
orthography - first, the usual mode of assigning sound values to each
letter and reading the resulting word or combination; and second, the
generally unintended, but fully sensible, strategy of pronouncing the
names of the letters sequentially to form a sentence or statement -
a clever play on the very notion of literacy, for our visual representations
of speech (at least in alphabetical systems) must both possess names
concretely (or we couldn't identify them to teach spelling) and represent
sounds symbolically (or we couldn't use them to read words). At least
two of Duchamp's works bear titles that exploit this duality: most notably
the L.H.O.O.Q. (1919) inscribed at the bottom of his mustachioed
Mona Lisa, and suggesting the near English reading of "look" but obviously
intended primarily to designate the meaning rendered by the names of
the letters in their French pronunciation: el-hache-o-o-ku, or "elle
a chaud au cul" (she has a hot ass). Another
piece, entitled M.E.T.R.O. and done as a prospective cover for
an architectural magazine named "Metro" (for public transportation),
also honors brave men - "aimer tes héros," (to
love your heroes). Although these uses have been well recorded, Duchamp's
larger exploration of this category has not been extensively reported
because he published few of his other efforts, and most remain as jottings
in the Posthumous Notes.
| Click to enlarge |
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Marcel Duchamp,
Aimer tes héros, 1963
© 2000 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. |
(I also suspect that he felt less satisfied with his
products in this difficult category, and refrained from publishing most
of his jottings because he remained unhappy with their only approximate
renditions of the intended dualities, as several of the following examples
will show. I also admit that some of my own interpretations in this category
must be regarded as more tentative and conjectural than the clear meanings
of most cases in the other three categories).
Mode One: Interesting Conjunction. I will confess upfront
to a conjectural reading in this case, but I was intrigued by a statement
in the Posthumous Notes (number 248) linking the Mona Lisa to a
striking visual image:
| LHOOQ
Elle a chaud au cul comme
des ciseaux ouverts |
(LHOOQ / she has a hot ass like / open scissors).
| Click to enlarge |
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Marcel Duchamp,
Note 248, from Paul Matisse, Marcel Ducahmp: Notes, 1980
© 2000 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. |
Perhaps Duchamp intends nothing more than the conjunction
of two visual images of female sexuality - a hot ass and the obvious comparison
of open scissors to a woman with legs spread apart. But I wonder - especially
since Duchamp wrote LHOOQ, the letter version of the famous Mona Lisa statement,
in the first line - whether he also wished to suggest the closest letter
approximation to "des ciseaux ouverts," the admittedly imperfect (but not
so bad) DCOUVR (close to découvrir, or discover (or, better yet, uncover),
and missing only the "z" sound from ciseaux). If so, the conjunction's
double meaning becomes reinforced in both comparisons - the hot ass and
spread legs of the full phrases, and the "look" and "uncover" of the corresponding
letters read as single words.
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Marcel Duchamp,
Note 240, from Paul Matisse, Marcel Ducahmp: Notes, 1980
© 2000 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. |
Mode Two: Opposition. Duchamp played extensively with bilingual
puns. Among his many jottings in this category of alternatives (letters
read as a single word vs. letters read individually by their names), I
note several, probably not accidental given his evident pleasure in the
duality (as best shown in the M.E.T.R.O. piece), that work as examples
of opposition in two senses of meaning and language (read as a single
word in one language vs. read as a sequence of letters in French). Two
of these (Latin vs. French) appear together (among other items) in number
240 of the Postumous Notes, thus reinforcing my conjecture of common
intent:
Click to enlarge |
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Marcel Duchamp,
Note 266, from Paul Matisse, Marcel Ducahmp: Notes, 1980
© 2000 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. |
The first, "to erase" by letters read sequentially
in French states the opposite command "make" ("fac") as a single
Latin word; while the second, "enough" in French reading, asks for more
as an opposite Latin word ("ac" meaning "and").
I would also add an English example from the Posthumous Notes (number
266): "j'ai été and GET" - or "I have been" in a French statement about
something already done, contrasted with the English command to do something
now, or "get."
Mode Three: Annihilation. I make my biggest stretch in this
case (P.N., 266), but the following jotting intrigued me:
The comparison is admittedly imperfect (for one must move
the "v" from second to fourth position as AKQVIT) - but if one drinks
too much schnapps (aquavit, literally water of life), he will annihilate
all potential for functioning with precision (avec acuité).
4. Generations and Compressions. My final category
of wordplay evokes yet another, and quite different, principle used for
the same purpose of constructing major disparities from homonyms or minor
differences. Many words embody great potential for spinning out a wide
range of meanings from a common source - both because the word itself
may bear several alternative definitions, and also because the same word,
in different combinations or used in different parts of speech, attains
several contrasting significances. For example, an old English joke displays
the full range for one of our most flexible and pungent words: A ship's
captain asks a sailor with no great mechanical expertise to go below and
find out why the engine has stalled. The man descends, and finally emerges
from the engine room with the following fully comprehensible diagnosis
made of an exclamation, an adjective, a noun and a verb: "Fuck, the fucking
fuck is fucked."
For this category, I identify two different modes (from
those cited in my discussion of the other categories), each linked to
the most obvious physical structure of the wordplays:
Click to enlarge |
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Marcel Duchamp,
Note 252, from Paul Matisse, Marcel Ducahmp: Notes, 1980
© 2000 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. |
Mode One: Generations to Expand Meaning. The nonsense
phrase of posthumous note number 252 provides an excellent, albeit nonsensical,
example of this conceit in wordplays - four oddly conjoined and very different
meanings (a verb linked with three unrelated nouns for a person, an object
and a place), but all represented by virtually the same sound: "Le Sommelier
a sommeillé sur un sommier lié de Somalie" - the wine steward (sommelier)
napped (sommeillé) on a tied spring mattress (sommier lié)
from Somalia (Somalie).
More significantly, Duchamp made a lovely conjunction between
this verbal play in generating several meanings from a single source,
and the visual action in one of his most interesting optical creations
- the Rotary Demisphere (now on display in working condition at
MOMA) that produces the appearance of an outwardly cascading spiral
as the device turns. (Interestingly, this effect is an optical illusion, for the actual
piece consists entirely of concentric black and white circles. But the
varied spacings and widths of these circles yields a spiral effect in
rotation). On the edge of this rotary disc, carefully inscribed in elegant
industrial perfection, Duchamp wrote one of his favorite, and oft repeated,
generative puns: "Esquivons les ecchymoses des Esquimaux aux mots exquis"
- let us avoid the bruises of the Eskimoes in exquisite words. The text
may sound ridiculous, but the pun becomes complex and clever through its
union of similar sounds with different spellings. In the four generated
phrases of nearly identical sound (esquivons, ecchymoses,
Esquimaux and, with inverted syllables, mots exquis),
the common sound moze receives different spellings in each of the
three words (moses, maux, and mots); while the other
nearly common sound of all four words uses three permutations of the first
part (es, ek, and eks) with a constant second part
(key) - Esquimaux as es-key, ecchymoses as
ek-key, and exquis as eks-key. Moreover, and to show
Duchamp's care in detail, moze becomes the identical sound of three words
only because, in two cases, an elision to the following word (Esquimaux
aux, and mots exquis) triggers the voiced "z" of moze
in a word that would, if standing alone, be pronounced moe.
| Click images
for videos (QT 0.3MB) |
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| Marcel
Duchamp, Rotary Demisphere,, 1925
© 2000 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. |
| Click to enlarge |
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Marcel Duchamp,
La Bagarre d'Austerlitz, 1921
© 2000 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. |
Finally, expansions can be constructed in a
more subtle manner to accrete meaning by simply adding a few letters to
the first meaning, and not by generating an entirely new word. The two phrases
may then achieve an intriguing and meaningful conjunction - as in Duchamp's
clever title (not always fully appreciated) for one of his better known
works: Bagarre d'Austerlitz (also in P.N., 272). A bagarre
is a brawl - and Napoleon won one of his most important battles at Austerlitz.
Moreover, a major Parisian railroad station (gare) honors this victory
- so the station (officially named Gare d'Austerlitz) commemorates
the slightly longer battle, or bagarre d'Austerlitz. (The pacifist
in me then yearns to add the Scroogian "bah, humbug" to all the vainglories
of military honorifics). Truly finally, and looking forward to the next
category, expansions of this kind can also be read in reverse as contradictions
- the reduction of a great victory (sardonically called a brawl, or bagarre,
in this case) to a memory embodied in a railroad terminal (a gare).
Mode Two: Contractions to Compress and Enhance
Meaning (portmanteau words, in Lewis Carroll's famous coinage). We
have seen, throughout this catalogue of examples, how Duchamp loved to
combine the visual and aural significance of his creations. This fourth
category embodies the most explicit use of this principle, as a visual
geometry of expansion or contraction becomes linked with the verbal significance
of extended and compressed meanings. In the first, more obvious, mode
of this category, we have just noted how visual expansions if a single
word (shown even more dramatically in motion as an enlarging spiral in
the Rotary Demisphere) can generate a growth in meaning as well.
The opposite mode of contraction - overlapping two phrases into one by
sharing several letters - need not join the two ideas conceptually. But
Duchamp's clearest examples of this more subtle mode do link visual compression
with conjoined meaning. For example, he signed a letter, written in November
1921, soon after creating his feminine alter ego Rrose Sélavy, "Marsélavy"
- obviously fusing his male and female personae by sharing the middle
three letters "sel" (pronounced, at least without the accent aigu,
just as the "cel" of his masculine name). In another more subtle example
from the Posthumous Notes (number 241), Duchamp combines a diminutive
testicle (orchidée) with a familiar French expression for inflexibility
in thought - idée fixe, or fixed idea. The shared letters
(idée) allows us to read the combined statement as a "fixed small
testicle," thus merging two images for impotence - a small ball and an
unchangeable idea into an undersized nonworking sexual organ.
IV. The Ghost Pun as a Brilliant Epitome of All Categories
Click to enlarge |
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| Marcel
Duchamp,
Cover for "S.M.S.", 1968
© 2000 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. |
The preceding classification of Duchamp's wordplays
in four categories allows us to explicate the richness of the 1953
ghost pun. In short, and summarizing why I regard this deceptively
simple statement as the richest of all Duchampian literary creations,
the ghost pun resides in all four categories simultaneously, each
adding a level of significance and expanding the scope of an apparently
trivial scribbling on a candy wrapper. (Duchamp evidently liked this
creation, for he wrote the phrase again as the only entry on the otherwise
entirely white back cover of his S.M.S. portfolio design of 1968 (Schwarz,
number 654).
| A Guest + A Host = A Ghost |
In category one (visual as opposed to aural), this wordplay
may be explicated as an anagram of a complex kind - combining selected
letters (some common to both and others unique to one) of two words, while
rejecting others, to form a new and distinctive word that continues the
process of elimination in a different conceptual sense by turning the
two inputs, conjoined in a reciprocal relationship, into their negation.
I will return to Category 2A of homonymic puns, for this
meaning flows from something that I first noticed, and that served as
the inspiration for this article. (Please forgive my conceit of saving
my own contribution and potential discovery for a last word).
In Category 2B of transpositional puns (contrepèteries),
we now encounter the verbal counterpart for the visual anagram of the
first category. (Such wordplays often, and inevitably, feature both a
visual anagram and an aural pun - as in Duchamp's "étrangler l'étranger,"
discussed above). The sound of the resultant "ghost" represents a small
aural transposition of both inputs - guest by altering just one
vowel sound (eh to oh), and host by changing the
sound of the initial consonant (h to g, taking one step
backwards in the alphabet).
In Category 3 of alternatives in reading words and sounding
their letters, I confess my weak ground in the following conjecture, but
I could not help wondering if Duchamp enjoyed the power that he gained
in removing the "ue" of guest - that is, by taking these
letters away in reading their French pronunciation (UÉ or, admittedly
approximately, "away") - and then substituting, with an exclamation of
surprise ("oh"), the emptiness of zero or "o" to turn his living
invitee into a shroud. (Or perhaps, having taken the ue of guest
away, leaving g__st as a surrounding shell, Duchamp then followed a common
instruction of commercial cooking products: "just add water." Water, in
French, is eau, pronounced just as the added letter "o."
Water, chemically, is H2O - exactly the added letters
to "ghost," with "h" in the second position).
But when we consider Category 4 of Generations and Contractions,
we can finally grasp the depth and interest of this otherwise trivial
construction. With some admitted envy, I must credit André Gervais for
recognizing, a long time before I discovered the same point ignorantly
and independently (see page 208 of his book, La raie alitée d'effets),
the status of this wordplay as both an initial expansion and a later contraction
when considered etymologically. (Incidentally, this etymological point
probably explains why Duchamp wrote the ghost pun in English for an exhibition
held in Paris. The etymological argument doesn't work in French, where
neither of the two main words for guest will permit the wordplay - for
hôte means both "guest" and "host" in French, so no duality arises
from a single sound, whereas the other common term for "guest" (invitée)
derives from a source with no etymological relation to the word for "host."
In my previous discussion of Category Four, I argued that
most contractions flaunt their meaning by intensifying the two fragments
thus combined. But can an opposite significance - what I called "annihilation"
in providing examples for each of my three other categories - ever be
drawn, albeit paradoxically (for a cementing together would then destroy
rather than reinforce the result), from a wordplay wrought by contraction?
Classical portmanteau words always cement the two meanings - as in "smog"
for smoke plus fog.
Click to enlarge |
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A statement page from
the advertising pamphlet for the ROSEWOOD HOTEL & RESORTS |
The ghost pun represents the only example I know of a Duchampian
creation in this deliciously paradoxical mode - but this added exegesis
now requires a bit of scholarly sleuthing into the etymology of the three
components. In modern usage, guest and host represent opposite
aspects of a common functional pairing. One might even say that each word
has little meaning without the other. (Interestingly, I spent a night
in a Dallas hotel just after I had begun to write this article. An advertising
pamphlet in my room quoted a statement from the honorary chairman of the
board of Rosewood Hotels and Resorts, my hosts for the evening. The statement
read in full: "Someone once told me that there are two kinds of people
in the world - hosts and guests. Hosts take pleasure in making other people
comfortable. Guests enjoy and appreciate what a good host has to offer.")
We may, indeed, regard guest and host as a duality that can achieve completion
only by interaction.
We can now grasp the malicious irony of Duchamp's
verbal creation. By conjoining the words in a purely physical way, rather
than by linking their meanings in a definitional manner, he produces an
opposite result. Now the guest and host interact to annihilate each other
(that is, to produce a ghost in their joining) rather than to fulfill
their shared destiny in interaction! In other words, Duchamp has created
a contraction where the definitional result (a ghostly output that annihilates
the two living inputs) reinforces the eliminations of letters required
to construct the physical result - whereas most contractions yield the
opposite effect of compressing two parts into a mutually intensified
meaning.
The etymological observation now brings the irony to full
realization. (And I assume that Duchamp - an inveterate and careful student
of dictionaries - must have encountered this point, which probably provided
his initial impetus for inventing this wordplay in the first place). "Guest"
and "host" not only sound and look alike, but they also share the same
etymological root, despite their later evolution to contrasting aspects
of the same concept. Both words originated from the Latin root hospes,
from which we also derive such words as hospitality (the shared
concept uniting a guest and a host) and hospital. Thus, the ghost
pun runs through a full life cycle - beginning as an expanding generation
in the first mode of my fourth category, as the original and common root
branches (from its birth, perhaps in the hospital of its etymological
origin) and then growing in two directions to generate guests and
hosts. Duchamp then brings the life cycle to its close in death
- thus infusing the entire design with a lovely and dynamic symmetry -
by fusing the two words together again (a contraction in the second mode
of my fourth category, achieved by a physical amalgamation of letters
rather than by a functional union of meaning), and killing both parts
in the ghostly conjunction!
Let me then, and finally, return to my category 2A of homonymic
puns, and to my own addition to this expanding exegesis, now extended
to all categories. The most interesting and confusing of all linguistic
ambiguities may well reside in the category of perfect homonyms - that
is, identical words of exactly the same spelling and sound, but derived
from different roots, and expressing different meanings. (Biologists like
myself refer to this phenomenon of striking similarity, evolved independently
from entirely different sources, as "convergence." But we then acknowledge
that we can only identify convergences by the inevitable small differences
persisting between the two versions of such striking similarity - the
hair, rather than the feathers, on a bat's wing, otherwise aerodynamically
indistinguishable from a bird's wing, for example. But how can we identify
a convergence so perfect and complete that the two independent products
become absolutely identical - as in homonymic words of the same spelling
and pronunciation? Now, we simply cannot make the distinction from the
products themselves. We can only recognize the difference if we find enough
historical evidence to trace the identical products back down their independent
lineages to their distinct origins.)
My favorite example of a complex and perfect set of homonyms
derives from a mnemonic poem found, along with so many others, in schoolbooks
for teaching Latin to past generations of students. The thrust of this
example has been greatly enhanced by Benjamin Britten's setting of the
verse as the dominant leitmotif (with a stunningly sweet but utterly
eerie tune) for his masterful chamber opera based on Henry James's famous
story: The Turn of the Screw. (For example, the tune sounds one
last time to end the opera as the boy Miles falls dead on the stage).
The verse teaches students four completely independent meanings (and derivations)
for the single Latin word malo:
| Malo: I would rather be
Malo: in an apple tree
Malo: than a naughty boy
Malo: in adversity |
The poem rhymes and scans well, but its (admittedly minor)
cleverness lies mainly in the fact that each set of words following "malo"
provides a fully accurate translation for one distinctive root and meaning
of this multiply convergent perfect homonym - malo as the first
person singular of the verb malle, to prefer; malo as the
ablative of the noun malus, an apple tree; malo as a masculine
singular form of the adjective malus, meaning bad; and finally,
malo as the ablative of the noun malum, or misfortune.
As noted by Gervais, and as argued further above, the cleverest
features of the ghost pun must be exemplified within the contraction principle
of category four - that, by their conjunction, the host annihilates
the guest to generate the resulting emptiness of a ghost.
The etymological argument - that Duchamp's physical conjunction closes
a life cycle of birth, growth, decline and death, by mimicking the original
status of the two words as descendants of a single root - strongly intensifies
the irony of annihilation.
As a final argument for the richness of Duchamp's little
conceit, I now add, from the homonymic category 2A, the additional etymological
observation that the English word host includes, under its umbrella
of identical spelling and sound, three entirely distinct words
of fully independent origin - and that an aspect of each independent host
annihilates a guest into a ghost! The meaning that ties
host to guest in true etymological and evolutionary union must be regarded
as primary (as discussed above), but the two additional definitions and
origins for host could not have eluded, and must have delighted,
Duchamp as well.
1. An entirely different word host derives from the
Latin hostis, and may designate a crowd or, usually and more specifically,
an army - not a friendly bunch, as the most common cognate "hostile" suggests.
Most native speakers of English probably do not realize that several common
usages of "host" - ranging from such vernacular phrases as "a host of
troubles" to two common biblical sources described in the next sentence
- derive from this distinctively different meaning, and not from the host
who grants hospitality to a guest. In the King James Bible,
host sometimes designates a crowd in neutral fashion (usually applied
to angels and other astral beings in the "heavenly host") - as in Luke's
nativity story (2:13): "And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude
of the heavenly host." But the most common Biblical invocation - the frequent
translation of one of God's Old Testament names as "Lord of Hosts" (an
English version of the Hebrew Yahweh Ts'baoth) - specifically designates
the leader of a fighting force, the God of armies or battles (translated
in the Latin Bible, the Vulgate, as Dominus exercituum,
literally Lord of the armies).
In short, this second kind of host designates an
opposing army that will certainly, and with maximal efficiency, turn any
guest of the other side into a ghost.
2. Yet a third meaning of host derives from another completely
independent word - hostia, meaning a victim or a sacrifice. An
archaic English usage applied the word to Jesus, for obvious reasons reflected
in the gospel stories of his death. This meaning persists in modern theological
usage as the bread or wafer taken at communion, and regarded by Catholics
(Duchamp's background, of course) as the transubstantiated body of Christ,
representing his sacrifice for us. If a guest at my church takes
the host at communion, he achieves closer contact with the Holy
Ghost who is one (in the trinity) with God the Father and Christ
the Son.
V. A Closing Thought
The richness of the ghost pun, still imperfectly tapped,
epitomizes Duchamp's fascination with wordplays, or verbal creations,
not only for their unity in concept and execution with his visual productions,
but also for explicating his integrative ideas about human creativity
in general, as best embodied in his concept of the infrathin -
that effectively invisible plane of separation, through which all products
of human brilliance must pass in their transition and promotion from the
tiny and palpable into wondrously diversifying realms of ever expanding
meaning and signification. What better illustration than the humble and
neglected wordplay that transforms a tiny and almost risible difference
into a marvelously evocative cascade of ever diversifying meanings?
In this important sense, I think, the wordplay joins the
readymade to fuse the central principle of Duchamp's art, and of intellectual
life in general: seek the richness that the human mind can extract from
every item in our endlessly complex universe, even from things so apparently
coarse or trivial - the mass-produced industrial tool or the crude and
silly wordplay - that they pass beneath the notice, or fall under the
active contempt, of most people. Keep your eyes and ears - and your mind
- open, for the world does lie exposed in a grain of sand, and heaven
in a flower. One might even make the principle more practical and partisan
by privileging the humble and the despised as even more worthy than the
showy and mighty - the belief of all revolutionaries, both in politics
and art. For the last shall be first, as Jesus said, while Mary's great
effusion of thanks to God (the Magnificat of Luke, chapter 1) praised
him most for this geometric and moral reversal: deposuit potentes de
sede et exaltavit humiles (he hath put down the mighty from their
seats, and exalted them of low degree).
I have read (but not been able to confirm) that the candy
wrappers bearing the ghost pun at its original appearance in 1953 surrounded
a chunk of caramel. If so, then even the first version gave each recipient
an inside essence to chew on, something to sink one's teeth into.
And so the ghost of Marcel Duchamp, the ultimate (and arrogant) Cartesian
rationalist, covering his consummately intellectual ass in a nihilistic
shroud of Dada, laughs at us as he urges both his fans and enemies to
envelop his sweet little jokes in sharp and multiple layers of meaning.
Notes
 1.
To avoid inevitable confusion, I need to state up front that I am using
the term "pun" in the expanded and generic sense now most frequent in
vernacular American speech - that is, as a synonym for wordplays of
any sort - and not in the original, restricted and more technical meaning
of a particular form of wordplay based on different meanings from the
same (or very similar) sounds of words. Webster's Third New International
Dictionary lists both meanings in sequence, with my general usage
following the more specific sense: "the humorous use of a word in such
a way as to suggest different meanings or applications or of words having
the same or nearly the same sound but different meanings: a play on
words." In particular, by referring to the featured item in this article
as "the ghost pun," I obviously intend the generic meaning, as I attempt
to show how Duchamp's single phrase includes aspects of all major styles
of wordplay.
2.
Duchamp presented most of his wordplays in several different places (and
sometimes in different versions), both in publications and private notes.
I have not tried, in this article, to list and collate all the uses. In
most cases, I will only cite the version first presented in the most comprehensive
source, the Posthumous Notes (abbreviated P.N., followed by the
number of the note as given and reproduced in Marcel Duchamp, Notes,
arranged and translated by Paul Matisse (although I will work from the
French originals), with a preface by Pontus Hulten, and published in 1980
by the Pompidou Center in Paris. When another source is relevant to my
arguments (the Schwarz Catalogue Raisonné, for example), I will
cite this version in my text as well.
3.
In his review of my first draft, André Gervais argued that "lits et
ratures" should not be classed as a homonym because the full phrase,
read in French, adds a "z" sound in eliding the first two words. I appreciate
and acknowledge this point, of course, but continue to regard the splitting
of "literature" into three words as nearly homonymic because I'm not sure
that Duchamp wants us to read the three words as a coherent phrase. He
is telling us, I think, that "beds" and "erasures," as separate and unconjoined
items, destroy literature. But Gervais also makes the fascinating point
that the full phrase of three words, read in French, sounds like "lisez
ratures," or "read the erasures." So perhaps he was also telling us to
decipher the various crossings out of his notes, an effort recently accomplished,
with remarkable results and new insights, by Hector Obalk and André Gervais.
4.
My praise, once more, to André Gervais, who always sees further into the
richness of Duchampian wordplays. In his comment on my first draft, he
points out that, in inverting tympan to Printemps, Duchamp
adds a sound as well -- the letter "r," pronounced "air" and meaning
"aria" or added music. What a lovely expansion of my suggested meaning:
one adds music to the plugged eardrum that cannot hear, and one obtains
Stravinksy's great and challenging piece.
5.
Another brilliant addition from André Gervais: if one follows the French
instruction and erases the first letter from FAC, one still has AC, or
"enough" ("assez") -- all of which reminds me of the famous French
and English pun about the sufficiency of single things: un oeuf is enough
("one egg is enough").
| Click to enlarge |
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Marcel Duchamp,
Cover for "Le Dessin dans l'Art Magique", 1958
© 2000 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. |
6.
In another combination of verbal and visual expansions (Schwarz, number
561), Duchamp drew a device for generating a bevy of French words by affixing
different prefixes to the common ending mages (including images,
cheeses (fromages) and injuries (dommages)). He depicts
the prefixes as an ellipse surrounding the central mages - meaning
"Magi" (wise magicians) when standing alone, and a fitting image for his
catalogue cover to a show entitled Le dessin dans l'art magique.
7.
Duchamp's second use of the ghost pun (on the back cover of the 1968 S.M.S.
portfolio) indicates that he conceived the major meaning of this wordplay
as a contradiction in my fourth category - and that I am not forcing my
own interpretation upon his concept in this exegesis. I am confident that
he regarded wordplays in expansion and contraction as opposite modes of
a common category - for he placed a reproduction of the anemic cinema
disc with his favorite expansion pun ("esquivons les ecchymoses des Esquimaux
aux mots exquis," as discussed in Section III) on the front cover, while
inscribing the back cover with his ghost pun: an expansion pun for the
opening of a portfolio (to presage a forthcoming generation of a plethora
of items from a single source), and a contraction pun (with the added
meaning of annihilation) for the closing on the back cover!
8.
As another example of correspondence between Duchamp's verbal and visual
creations, and as a further argument for the centrality of the ghost pun,
I couldn't help noticing that, in my fourth category of contractions,
the resultant "ghost" represents a complex portmanteau word, as an anagrammatic
amalgam of "guest" and "host." In French, a portmanteau word is a "mot
valise" - and Duchamp called the epitome of his life's visual work a "boîte-en-valise."
So ghost, as a mot valise may be the verbal analog to his
mostly visual boîte-en-valise. Two modes of immortality: a concrete
and portable summary, and a permanent haunting by the most brilliant spirit
of twentieth century art. Yes - pack all your work and troubles in your
old kit bag (your verbal and actual valise), and smile, smile, smile!
9.
Again, and one last time, my enormous thanks to the grand master of interpretation
for Duchamp's wordplays - André Gervais, who, in his very kind and lengthy
review of my first draft, again caught something I had missed: caramel
also yields the deliciously relevant anagram à Marcel, or "to Marcel."
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