Jefferson Everest Crawford
Book Review
A review of The Hashish Films of Customs Officer Henri Rousseau and Tatyana Joukof Shuffles the Cards (A Novel against Psicho-Analise), written by Emil Szittya, translated by W. C. Bamberger (Wakefield Press). Purchase the novel directly from the publisher here.
Imagine, if you can, a painting. All broken up, colors smearing, shapes all turned around, things recognizable but in their wrong places; is there meaning? You’re inside it, seeing all the scattered pieces from another perspective. Not finding a grand secret message, perhaps, but seeing anew.
How about a novel? Can we imagine a novel if all its component parts were strewn wildly about? (As if in the wind?) What might that look like, read like? Is there meaning? How radically might we change the form before what we see resembles something else? As in, not a novel, or no longer a painting.
This ambition, to prove a new form for the novel, wasn’t central for Emil Szittya (nom de plume of Hungarian born Adolf Schenk)—who “vigorously denied being an expressionist, a Dadaist, or even a proto-surrealist”—but its consequences are often felt while reading his “Novel against Psicho-Analise.” The Hashish Films of Customs Officer Henri Rousseau and Tatyana Joukof Shuffles the Cards, the first of Szittya’s writings to be translated into English, arrives in a slim and neat edition from Wakefield Press. The elaborate and elusive title rejects easy comprehension just as the text itself rejects classification. A novel-in-verse? Prose poetry? An experimental novel? Precursor to Andre Breton, Max Ernst and others? Szittya himself titled them “films,” a telling clue toward new formal ends. These “films” are, in fact, short elliptical bursts of jig-sawed linguistically and poetically charged phrases, stitched together with an artistry not unlike that of naive painter Henri Rousseau.
I have stolen myself from a film. Now I am strolling along the ocean shore. And I still have not spliced my paragraphs into the proper order.
The pulse of the text is cyclical, tracing the inward, outward oscillations of the mind. Searching, perhaps, for a new way of dissecting, examining, or more to the point, accepting, the mysteries of the human psyche. Szittya objected to psychoanalysis “because it wants to bring too much into consciousness.” Few mysteries can survive being displayed, as the film goes. Stretched across a blank canvas, hung out in an etherized sky—the poking and prodding of Szittya’s pinprick prose aligns with the unconscious surgery of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and Eliot’s Prufrock. An attempt to embalm the mind neither waking nor asleep.
Someone hurts themselves through wickedness. Someone has escaped their thoughts. The green teases by means of the mussels. The winged goblet is broke. I have also changed my mind, in vain. Mixed colors fashion themselves to the red roofs. The stone bench is empty and for a long while there has been no praying beneath the water tank. The tired hand lulls itself to sleep on the keys. Only a few eat from loaded plates. The black dress is gathered into a light one. I know nothing of my morose pleasure.
The picture is a painting subdivided, twisted round. Humanity, in the vision of Szittya, seems alienated among globs of wet paint, “vermillion-painted houses” and “Indian yellow,” “Italian blue” and the “red apples of a pregnant cat.” We are hallucinations in an evil game! The catalyzing anxiety of modernity, that constant bugbear of the surrealists, seems to be pressing down on the perceived innocence of humanity—that “innocence” exemplified in the paintings of Rousseau and the rural folkways of a pre-modern Europe. And we were all pale and carried the Seine in our narrow hands. And no longer were we farmers. It is the “stinking hanky” of the city, presumably soaked in noxious ether, which makes us hallucinate; has ripped us from our innocence, forced us into a hell more comic—clownish, even—than Dante’s. Szittya characterizes the city via brothels, barrel organs (that knout in Buddha’s words), masks of Bordeaux silk and “the lowest depths of the skyscrapers in which emaciated dogs are barking.” How better to describe the fritz and scramble of modern thinking, charged as we are with the knowledge of ages, the intricate and infinite geographies of everything, than: maps are stuck to my nerves. In his prosaic, clipped style Szittya masters the uncanny instability of our 21st century bearings. Through his artistry forecasting both the joyous despair of existentialism and the humdrum drudgery of our post-criticism age.
In my mind, ruined as it is by modernity, Nuremberg means a pub that Hans Sachs lyricized.
The only salve, if one can call it that, is isolation. Once again I am the hunchback vagrant, on whose brow the moon peddles a yellow cross. Szittya’s speaker (it’s never entirely clear if it is or isn’t Henri Rousseau) adopts the role of the loner, the outsider, the schizophrenic saint high on hashish, high in the lonely mountains. And outside the mountains neigh. But, unfortunately, for his speaker, and for Szittya himself (and for us), we will never arrive at nonexistence.
Translator W.C. Bamberger’s introduction is an essential starting point for English language readers who are likely unfamiliar with Emil Szittya. He was a somewhat obscure outsider, at times literally a vagabond, who mixed with the key figures of European modernism in Zurich, Munich, and Paris. Especially close with Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings, he is sometimes credited as a co-founder of the famous “Cabaret Voltaire,” launching pad of Dada (a claim Szittya would most likely refute). His best remembered work, writes Bamberger, is the “gossipy and sensational” Kuriositäten-Kabinett (Curio Cabinet) published in 1923. A survey of, in Szittya’s own words, “strange occurrences, vagrants, criminals, artists, religious madmen, sexual oddities, socialists, unionists, communists, anarchists, politicians, and artists.” Szittya also wrote the first major work on Marc Chagall, a study of Henri Rousseau (not the Hashish Films), and a history of suicide. He was involved with a range of magazines and small presses, including Le Hommes nouveaux with Blaise Cendrars, and Der Mistral with Hugo Kersten. Not only is the majority of Szittya’s writing untranslated, it’s also rather rare. Bamberger reports that only two archived copies of The Hashish Films have been found. This is in part because many of the copies were seized by police immediately after publication. This English translation was made from Emmy Henning’s personal copy.
The Hashish Films of Customs Officer Henri Rousseau and Tatyana Joukof Shuffles the Cards (A Novel Against Psicho-Analise) is surely an oddity. It might be difficult to find a place for it on your bookshelf—novel? Or poetry?–as Bamberger (and Walter Benjamin) admit. Yet it is arguably essential for anybody interested in studying the breadth of European modernism in the early 20th century. Or, if you’re looking for a particularly intoxicating beach read.
Somewhere in a garden, black roses.
The Hashish Films of Customs Officer Henri Rousseau and Tatyana Joukof Shuffles the Cards (A Novel against Psicho-Analise)
Emil Szittya
Wakefield Press
80pp
$13.95
Jefferson Everest Crawford
