Word: shattuck
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...just a banquet; it was "one of the landmarks of the pre-World War I era." That is the thesis of Author Roger Shattuck, Fulbright scholar and assistant professor of Romance languages at the University of Texas. In his breathlessly complicated period study, Shattuck takes as true a highly debatable line written in 1913 by Poet Charles Péguy-"The world has changed less since Jesus Christ than it has in the last thirty years"-and discusses the nature of the change as expressed in French art. Author Shattuck has chosen four French men of the arts to exemplify...
...when he woke up in the morning, he could "smile a little at his paintings." His now famed works suggested the bright but prim world of a precocious child, its whims ranging from shaggy liona to mustached men stiffly springing as they play "le football." With Rousseau, thinks Author Shattuck, begin "the childlike tendencies" of modern art, as it starts from scratch again after centuries of traditional maturity...
...like Rousseau, turned instinctively to the Hans Christian Andersen world in which fairy stories are meant less for children than for "unbelieving adults." Dismissing Richard Wagner's work as "sauerkraut," Satie spent his life creating tiny musical gems. To Rousseau's mannered childlike-ness, says Author Shattuck, he added a formal naughtiness that made his works almost "a fragile fabric of inanity." For Parade, a ballet on which Diaghilev, Cocteau, Picasso, Massine and Satie collaborated, he wrote a score including parts for typewriters, sirens, airplane propellers, Morse tickers and lottery wheels. An eccentric in his personal life...
...inventor of a tongue-in-cheek philosophy named 'Pataphysics ("the science of the realm beyond metaphysics") and creator of the famed fictional character Doctor Faustroll, who is "born full-grown at the age of 63, navigates unendingly across dry land in a sieve." Author Shattuck sees Jarry as a comedian and wizard whose farcical wand-waving expressed a world in which Nietzsche's famed dictum-"God is dead"-was translated into a scandalous joke. Jarry enthusiastically drank absinthe and, near the end of his life, ether (he died at 34). At the theater he wore a dirty white...
What emerges if these four types are added together? Dadaism, surrealism, stream-of-consciousness-ism and many another esthetic "ism" spring, obviously. from sources akin to those of Rousseau, Satie, Jarry and Apollinaire. Author Shattuck tries hard-and on the whole unsuccessfully-to cram all these tricks into a single bag. Despite the hearty, festive ring of the title, the "Banquet Years," says Author Shattuck, were essentially morbid. In his view they show the connection between modern art and a world that had lost its God and sprawled on the earth with many a gaping hole knocked through it. While...