Hhhyy 53 DB

Secrets of Tristan Tzara
Author(s): DANIEL HELLER-ROAZEN

Source: October , Spring 2013, Vol. 144 (Spring 2013), pp. 25-48
Published by: The MIT Press
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Secrets of Tristan Tzara*
DANIEL HELLER-ROAZEN
On December 22,1959, Le Monde ran an article bearing the striking if tenta

title "New Findings about François Villon?"1 A subtitle explained that eni
question in more certain terms: "Tristan Tzara restores to the poet
'Testament' all the lines attributed to Jean Vaillant, discovering 1600 anagr
Villon's work, increasing 'Master François's' age by two years." The essay be
comparing the fifteenth-century poet's famously tumultuous life to a dark fore
concealed within it not only trees, but also "monks, archers, pickpockets, la
poachers, ambushes, and enchantments." "For three years now," the article repo
"Tristan Tzara has been walking in this forest. He has left it dazzled, with the f
of having grasped hold of something rare: a treasure, or a secret. In one mo
will publish—or perhaps one should say, he will detonate, since it will be more l
bomb—a book on Villon, chock-full of explosive material."2 The literary news qu
appeared elsewhere in the French press. Only a day later, on December 23,19
French weekly Les Lettres françaises published an article by Charles Dobzynski w
title proclaimed: "Five Centuries after the 'Testament,' Tristan Tzara Reve
Secret of François Villon."3 "In a few weeks, Fasquelle will publish a surprising boo
article related, "a kind of challenge to the passing of time and the myste
envelops certain poetic works, that draws away the depth of soul from atte
contemporary matters. The book is signed Tristan Tzara and is called The S
François Villon."4 Lest the readers mistake the identity of the author, Dob
recalled that the Tzara who would soon unveil the unknown secret of the fifteenth
century poet was the same who had once founded Dada.
Tristan Tzara is a man of surprises. Almost exactly half a century ago,

with Dada, he invented a terrible weapon, a kind of destructive ray,
* This text will appear in a slightly different form as a chapter of my forthcoming book, Dark
Tongues: The Art of Rogues and Riddlers (New York: Zone Books, 2013).
1. Jean Couvreur, "Du nouveau sur François Villon?," Le Monde, Dec. 22, 1959, p. 9. (Ail transla
tions are mine unless otherwise noted.)
2. Ibid.
3. Charles Dobzynski, "Le Secret de François Villon," Les Lettres fr
pp. 1-4.
4. Ibid., p. 1.
OCTOBER 144, Spring 2013, pp. 25-48. ©2013 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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26 OCTOBER
which gave poets the right of life and death over language. Words we
submitted to a strange fire that killed commonplaces and, at once, ob
erated meanings that had been on the map for centuries. For four ye
now, in the quiet of his study, which is filled with mementos of Surreali
and Oceanic masks, all competing with the Phoenix of the unusual
perpetual rebirth, Tristan Tzara, like a scientist in his laboratory,
been preparing to reveal one of the most vertiginous literary surprises of
the century. It will radically change our knowledge of the greatest poet o
the end of the Middle Ages, François Villon, whose "Testament" is,
fact, the birth certificate of modern poetry. This time, therefore, Trista
Tzara has not confronted language in order to destroy it, but to disco
within it, under the heavy ash of the centuries, the hidden sense, the fir
that burned under the cold appearance of enigmatic allusions and cry
tograms, encrusted in a text that has been studied a thousand time
interpreted, debated, in all its symbols.5
The Secret of Villon, however, was slow to be revealed to the public. The
not appear in 1960, as the two articles from 1959 promised. At the time
death in December 1963, the work had still not come to light. Christophe
author's son, would later recall that his father had been "correcting the ty
script in his last moments."6 Yet it was not printed in the immediate afterm
death. For further news of Tzara's final work, readers would have to wait unt
when Pierre Le Gentil, in a chapter of a monograph on Villon, related w
found in studying the manuscript of Tzara's last book.7 More information
Secret of Villon was disclosed eight years later in an article by Jean Dufourne
and the Anagrams of Villon."8 In the same journal in which Dufourn
appeared, Henri Béhar published a nine-page fragment from Tzara's boo
he titled "The Meaning of Anagrams."9 He also contributed to the issue
essay of his own in which he revealed that a complete edition of Tzara's
underway and that, "at a later date," The Secret of Villon would appear in pri
the reader could at last "form an exact and personal opinion" concerning
"decidedly innovative thesis."10 The "later date" turned out to belong t
more distant than one might have anticipated. Only in 1991 did the sixth
volume of Tzara's Complete Works appear, disclosing the aged but still new "n
ings" promised three decades earlier.
Tzara's interest in the medieval poet had long predated his last
early as 1949, he had graced Pierre Savinel's edition of Villon's poem
5. Ibid.
6. Henri Béhar, "A mots découverts," Europe 53: 555/556 (1975),
7. Pierre Le Gentil, Villon (Paris: Hatier, 1967), pp. 21-30.
8. Jean Dufournet, "Tzara et les anagrammes de Villon," in Nouve
Champion, 1980), pp. 249-73.
9. Tristan Tzara, "La signification des anagrammes," Europe 53: 5
10. Béhar, "À mots découverts," p. 96.

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Secrets of Tristan Tzara 27
prefatory essay in which he stated that modern poetry, as a whole, "finds one of
the elements of its functional mechanism in the poetry of Villon."11 "Some have
wished to see in Baudelaire the initiator of modern poetry," he wrote,
because of his recognition of the real world from which he draws his
poetry. In his sincerity, he represents a reaction against Romanticism.
In the same way, Villon is at the source of an equally modern current in
poetry: that which, in reacting against the Romantic and later conven
tional love of the troubadours and against the unrealistic religious for
malism of his time, announces the end of the Middle Ages. By this real
istic position, and by moving from the elements of his life to reach a
personal vision of the world, Villon bestows a new criterion on poetic
criticism. The authenticity of poetry, from this point on, will be a quali
ty residing in the variable and organic concordance between the
apprehended fact and its expressed transposition. Poetry will be true if
the sentiment that animates it has been intimately lived, not if it results
from some received formula. It will be necessary, in short, for the poet
to have lived it intensely enough for his poetic expression to be natural
ly adequate to it.12
In this sense, Tzara concluded, Villon's is not only a "poetry of circumstance"

{poésie de circonstance), marked by a particular historical setting; it is, more funda
mentally, "poetry of circumstance" {poésie, de la circonstance), drawing from the
world the materials of an image uniquely faithful to the poet's encounter with it.13
In his preface, "The Modernity of Villon," Tzara makes no mention of any
thing that the medieval poet might have sought to hide from his readership. The
Villon of 1949, it seems, possessed no secret or still kept it to himself. The revela
tion of The Secret of Villon would consist before all else in the disclosure of this one
fact: that there existed a "secret of Villon" that had lain concealed for centuries.
As the French press revealed, the cryptic thing in question consisted in an art of
writing that allowed Villon both to record and to conceal matters relating to the
circumstances of his poetry: allusions, suggestions, accusations, and statements
about contemporaries, signaled above all by the presence of proper names hidden
in a web of anagrams.
Tzara began his book by recalling that Villon's "Lais" (Legacy) presents itself
as a "romance" or "novel" {roman) of love that retells a major episode in the life of
the poet and, more precisely, the reasons that "forced Villon to flee Paris." "While
relating the continuation of his adventures, always in an ironic fashion, the
'Testament' completes this first work and retrospectively explains the origins of
his misfortunes."14 Villon loved a woman and would have continued to do so had
11. Tristan Tzara, "L'actualité de Villon," in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Henri Béhar (Paris: Flammarion,
1975-1991), vol. 5, p. 119.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Tristan Tzara, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 6: Le Secret de Villon, p. 9.

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28 OCTOBER
he not suffered the combined blows of fate and poverty. The twenty-fifth s
the "Testament" could not be more explicit:
Bien est verté que j 'ay aimé

Et amereoie voulentiers;
Mais triste euer, ventre affamé
Qui n'est rassasié au tiers
M'oste des amouereux sentiers.
Au fort, quelqu'ung s'en recompence,

Qui est ramply sur les chantiers!
Car la dance vient de la pance.15
It's very true I have loved

And willingly would love again
But a heavy heart and starved craw
Never full by more than a third
Drag me down from love's ways
By now someone else takes up the slack
Who's filled to the brim on the gantry
For the dance starts in the belly.16
Citing these lines, Tzara draws the reader's attention to the final two, w
follows the poet's allusion to the "someone else" who, having taken "up the
is "filled to the brim on the gantry." "Qui est ramply sur le chantier," he notes,
expression of the period, meaning 'Who has eaten well and drunk wel
chantier or gantry, the piece of wood supporting the barrel, being, by extension
cellar. The line Car la dance vient de la pance [For the dance starts in the bel
phrases a known expression. Here dance has the erotic meaning implied by
context."17 That commentary is supported by the scholarship on Villon's lan
which Tzara knew well.18 Quickly, however, Tzara passes from the poet's sta
to a level of the text that lies beneath that of the words that compose it. He
a reading of the passage proposed by the early-twentieth-century philolog
editor of Villon, Lucien Foulet.19 The penultimate line of the stanza, Foule
gested, contains four groups of sounds that, when combined, spell out the n
15. Ibid. The Middle French text cited here appears in the format given by Tzara. For a mor
edition of Villon's text, see François Villon, Poésies computes, ed. Claude Thiry (Paris: Librairie
française, 1991), p. 107.
16. François Villon, "The Testament," in The Poems of François Villon, trans. Galway Kinnell (
NH: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1965), p. 38.
17. Tzara, Le Secret de Villon, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 6, p. 10.
18. See, most recently, Claude Thiry's remarks in Villon, Poésies complètes, p. 106.
19. See Villon, Oeuvres, ed. A. Lognon, revised by Lucien Foulet (Paris: G. Crès, 1919)
Before being noted by Foulet, they were already observed by Jean Acher in a contribution th
most likely read: Jean Acher, review of Lognon, Oeuvres de Villon, Zeitschrift für frazösische Spr
Literatur SS, vol. 2 (1911), p. 22. See Béhar's notes, Oeuvres complètes, vol. VI, p. 539. The passage
as folio 124.

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a contemporary of Villon's evoked in both the "Lais" and the "Testament." It suf
fices to read "Qui est RAMplY sur les CHAN-TIERS" for the figure to appear,
concealed in an extended anagram: "Itiers Marchant."20 Foulet had drawn a simple
conclusion from this unexpected fact: Itiers Marchant must be the rival "someone"
whom Villon evokes, without explicitly naming, one line above.
Once noted in the line, the syllables of the name are difficult to deny. Being
audible, their presence, however dislocated, is almost apparent. A note contained
in Tzara's unpublished papers suggests that when he first encountered Foulet's
remark, he was immediately persuaded of its validity. Yet he also sought to take a
further step. He wondered whether there might not be other names hidden in
such a form in the syllables of Villon's lines.
The anagram of Ythiers Marchant [as Tzara here spells the name] is
perhaps not an isolated case. The analogy of certain lines of the Lais
with the stanzas of the "Testament," the nomenclature of the legatees,
arranged according to category or order of importance, the correspon
dence of the nature of the inheritance left to his tutor and his mother,
are in no way gratuitous. It is in this direction, it seems to me, that one
should pursue investigations.21
By the time he composed The Secret of Villon, however, Tzara admitted that this first
intuition had been mistaken. "Persuaded that there must be other revelations in
the work of Villon," he recounts, "I looked for anagrams formed as indic
above—without the shadow of success."22 Pierre Le Gentil later confirmed his con
clusion. "Anagrams analogous to the one cited by Foulet," he asserted, albeit

unequivocally, "apparently exist nowhere else in lines by Villon."23 Yet Tzara
us that in time, his failure led to one major linguistic discovery. He found th
the line commented upon by Foulet, the name "Itiers Marchant" could a
represented as present in a form different from the one suggested by the p
gist and according to anagrammatic rules more subtle, more exact, and
systematic than had ever been observed.
Tzara explains in his book that these rules, when conjoined, define a "p
dure" that Villon adopted in the composition of a number of his poems,
notably the "Lais." "The procedure consisted in including, in a line or in a port
a line involving the anagram, a word or several words whose letters are systematic
distributed with respect to a center, constituted by one or two alphabetic sign
spaces between words counting as null."24 Three points implicit in this summa
worth retaining. The first is that the anagrams detected by Tzara, unlike the cryp
figures that traditionally go by that name, cannot be restricted to the space of in
20. François Villon, Lais 81 (XI), in Poésies complètes, p. 67; Testament 970 (XCIV), p. 169.
21. Tzara, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 6, p. 539.
23. Le Gentil, Villon, p. 22.
24. Tzara, Le Secret de Villon, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 6, pp. 10—11.

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30 OCTOBER
ual words, being in each case distributed across a single line of verse or one of its
ments. The second point is that within such a textual extension, the white
between words can play no role. To recover the names hidden in Villon's lin
must begin by counting only letters. Implicitly, Tzara reasons in this sense
Mallarmé: for both, as suggested by the author of "Crise de vers," "from many e
sions, the line makes a total, new word, foreign to language" (Le vers, qui de plus
vocables refait un mot total, neuf, étranger à la langue)?5 Finally, within this new "w
center may be discerned: an "axis... constituted by one or two alphabetic signs," w
respect to which the letters of the hidden word or words are distributed in s
symmetrical positions to the left and to the right. For example, if a letter belon
to a secret expression can be discerned two positions to the left of the center, an
will be legible two positions to its right; if, by contrast, no such component lett
be observed one position to the left of the center, none may be considered to lie
position to its right. Tzara adds that when the hidden word is composed of a
number of letters, "the center is constituted by one or two letters; in the latter
the letters may or may not be used in the formation of the anagram." When the
cealed expression, instead, possesses an odd number of letters, "the center w
represented by a single letter, which must inevitably count among those that are
essary for the formation of the anagram."26
For the poetic procedure to function fully, a certain license is required. "Wh
the numeric disposition of these anagrams is strictly observed," Tzara exp
"Villon takes liberties, which concern only the spelling of words."27 Some reflect
ations in orthography that are commonly to be found in medieval F
manuscripts, not least those that transmit Villon's poems. For example, pauvre m
spelled as poirre, vieil as viel, vengeance as venjance28 Yet Tzara insists that one als
into account other types of divergences in spelling. Scholarship on Villon's lan
as it is recorded in manuscripts, suggested to him that the poet had taken as
lent certain written signs that in Middle French were otherwise held to be d
Louis Thuasne noted, for instance, that in some cases, Villon adds to words
nal s (or withholds it), without effecting any change in their meaning.29 Bu
argues that one must also admit further licenses in writing, many of which wer
remain today, generally unknown to specialists of Middle French scribal habits.
Tzara explains that to grasp the words secretly scattered across V
lines, one must always keep in mind a complex system of orthographic im
tives: suppress a t at the end of a word ending in -an or -en, replacing it, i
be, by an s; erase any s before t inside a word; remove I before x; replace
or x or by c before I, e, or a; take i, y, and j to be equivalent (or replace a y
25. Stéphane Mallarmé, "Crise de vers," in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Henri Mondor (Paris: Ga
1945), p. 368.
27. Ibid., p. 12.
28. See Dufournet, Nouvelles recherches sur Villon, p. 251.
29. Tzara refers (Le secret de Villon, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 6, pp. 292-95) to Louis Thuasne's "La rime
chez Villon," in Thuasne, Villon ä Rabelais: Notes et commentaires (Paris: Fischbacher, 1911), pp. 369-418.

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two i'is); exchange y and g-, rewrite any double consonants as a single consonant
or rewrite, instead, some single consonants by two consonants; treat any metri
cally elided or "mute" e as either possibly included in or excluded from the
anagram; consider o to be equivalent to a; take e as interchangeable with i;
write ou as oe or oue; eplace c, when necessary, with g; and take m to be equiva
lent to n and n as substitutable for m.30 Such rules enable the reader to find
certain words that for the purposes of anagrammatic analysis can be repre
sented in a number of different shapes. The priest Sermoise, whom Villon is
reported to have killed on June 5, 1455, for instance, appears in Tzara's read
ings in no fewer than twelve distinct forms: "Sarmoies," "Sarmoie," "Sarmoye,"
"Sermoye," "Sermoie," "Sermoies," "Cermoie," "Cermoye," "Cermoies,"
"Çarmoie," "Carmoie," and "Carmoies." Yet Tzara also admits that it is possible
that his orthographic principles are imprecise, in the sense that "more general
laws" concerning the proper spelling of Villon's manuscripts may still be found.
"I do not claim," he observes, "to have exhausted the question."31
The Secret of Villon suggests a graphic method for the illustration of this
procedure. It consists of tying individual letters on either side of the central
axis to each other by means of "curves" drawn below the printed text.32 The
publishers of Tzara's final work include no images of this method of represen
tation, of which Tzara offers an abbreviated description in his book. Yet one
can find an example of its form in an article published in 1960 in which Louis
Aragon announced that Tzara will soon unveil unseen anagrams in Villon's suc
cessor, Rabelais.33
The publishers of The Secret of Villon chose to present the anagrammatic pro
cedure by more traditional typographic means, which are easily described. First,
all the letters in a single line are set beside each other, without spaces, as if they
formed an entire word. Then, on two successive lines below, two more sets of signs
are printed. The first will indicate, by means of plus and minus signs, which letters
play a role in the hidden word. On the second line beneath the text, the func
tional letters of the concealed expression will then be numbered according to the
order of their appearance in the word or words that they evoke.
The first example printed in this form in The Secret of Villon is the line from
the "Testament" analyzed by Foulet, which appears as follows:34
QUIE ST R AM P LYSURLECHANTIER
+ + + + + + OO+ + OO+++++ +
4 614 9 12 7 1 5 101181323
30. See Tzara, Le Secret de Villon, in Oeuvres complètes, vol.

recherches sur Villon, p. 251.
31. Tzara, Le Secret de Villon, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 6, p. 16
32. Ibid., p. 11.
33. Louis Aragon, "Tristan Tzara découvre une oeuvre nouv
1000, Oct. 24,1963, p. 7.
34. Tzara, Le Secret de Villon, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 6, p. 11

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L ^ Vnr I OUIESTRAMPLYSURLECHANTIE R
*>* - v°" vtnv* t ?ooji?r?
V
ft**1 I QU1ESTRAMPLYSURLECHANTIER
) n ? 13 ? 3
2 _ETAMEROIESVOULLENTIERS
••••••••
" » I 2 3 6 7 5
o 3 SECELLEQUEJADISSERVOE
•oot.!
? ?6-«-» 3 v /i§8
x5l 4 QUELESLOUPSSEVIVENTDEVEXT
5 E TO UEONSETIENTENLAMAISON
3 r 1 <t<2l
Tristan Tzara. Combinatorial

analysis of François Villon poem.

202.92.128.104 on Wed, 21 Oct 2020 12:22:41 UTC
Here Tzara recovers the same anagram as did Foulet—Itiers Marchant—

without, however, admitting Foulet's implicit principle that the concealed
name be present in the line through the rearrangement of its constituent sylla
bles. Tzara reckons, in short, not in "anaphones," as did Saussure in his hidden
notebooks on poetry, but in grammata in the strict sense, letters distributed
across each line. For him, the words concealed in Villon's verse are composed
not from sound clusters but from graphic signs, which function as the indivisi
ble elements of words. It follows that the hidden term ceases to be perceptible
to the ear. The play of purely alphabetic units is too subtle and too complex to
be heard as such. A syllabic decomposition of one of Villon's lines will issue in
only eight or ten elements, depending on the verse form employed by the
medieval poet. Admittedly, one may fashion more units by extracting the occa
sional phonemic part from a syllable, as Foulet does in drawing a Y from ply in
ramplY. Yet as long as one counts in syllables, the set of functional units will
remain small in number. If one reckons in letters, at least twice as many ele
ments will appear. The possibilities of combination and recombination,
accordingly, will increase.
Tzara knew this well. More than once in The Secret of Villon, he argues that
several names could be found in the same words and phrases, being projected
across a single metric space and written, so to speak, upon each other.
Sometimes entire sentences could be recovered in the space of a line. In the
conclusion to the book, for instance, Tzara gives a thorough analysis of Villon's
"Ballade à s'amie," ending with an intense interpretation of its final address:
Prince amoureux des amans le greigneur

Vostre mal gré ne vouldroye encourir,
Mais tout franc euer doit, par Nostre Seigneur,
Sans empirer, ung povre secourir.35
Amorous prince and greatest lover

I don't wish to call down your disfavor
But every true heart must by the heavenly Father
Save a poor man before he sinks under.36
Applying the rules of the procedure to the first line of this envoi, one discov
ers the hidden name of the "prince": Charles d'Orléans, Villon's friend and fellow
poet. Yet one finds find six other names, which Villon has "ironically" written over
his: "Noé Jolis," "Pardryers," "Denise," "Itiers," "Perinnet," and "Sarmoie."37 In his
analysis of the penultimate line of the same envoi, Tzara goes further, finding
35. Villon, Testament, CXIII, 966-69, in Villon, Poésies complètes, p. 167; for Tzara's analysis, see Le
Secret de Villon, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 6, pp. 278-82.
36. Kinnell, The Poems of François Villon, p. 87.
37. For the name Charles d'Orléans, see Tzara, Le Secret de Villon, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 6, p. 254;
for the "ironie" names, see ibid., pp. 278-79.

202.92.128.104 on Wed, 21 Oct 2020 12:22:41 UTC
34 OCTOBER
seven names, among them that of the knight Jehan le Cornu, that all point
actors in the "drama" Villon cannot forget:38
MAISTOUTFRANCCUEURDOITPARNOSTRESEIGNEUR
+OO+O+O+ +O+O+OO+
6 1 3 5 8 7 4 2
=François
+ OOOOO+OOOOOOO + +O+O+ + OOOOOOOO+OOOOO +
9 5 34 6 12 7 8
=Pardriers
+OO+O+ +O+OO+
6 1 4 3 5 2
=Denise
++OOOOO+OOOO++
1 5 2 34
=Cornu
+ O + O O + + oo +o +
4 5 1 2 6 3
=Itiers
+OO+OO+++OO+OO+
1 5 736 4 2
=Perinet
+ OO + O + OOOO+OOOO + O+ OO +
4 1 5 2 7 3 6
= Sarmoie
38. See Tzara, Le Secret de

202.92.128.104 on Wed, 21 Oct 2020 12:22:41 UTC
Having revealed all the members of this company, Tzara explains that Villon
also encrypted in the line a "signature," "validating the authenticity of his ana
grams." It consists of a sentence, its letters symmetrically placed as if in a single
name:
+ +++o o o + + o + o + + + + o+o + +OOO++ + +
910158 17 1 3 135 6 7 16 2 4 14181211
= François m'a escripte, "François Wrote Me"
Personified, this final anagram writes of itself, comm

form on the reasons for its persistence. It is the proof,
conceived the entire "Lais" as a continuous roman à clef.
ble clé," he adds, "if one keeps in mind that the key th
domain of the drama and its characters is a function of
allows one to decipher the anagrams. Villon's rich and v
contained in the corset of a system of interpretation wh
rocally command each other."39
Learning of this late project, a reader familiar with the w
might think of that other polyphonic poetic form, the poèm
together with Richard Huelsenbeck and Marcel Janco, f
November 1916 before the public of the Cabaret Voltaire
lel" in French, German, and English, not successively but in
the poem "L'amiral cherche une maison à louer" consisted
of three distinct texts upon one another.40 In the e
Bourgeois" that accompanied the original publication of th
it responded, in its composition, to a particular pictorial
tion of objects and colors" in "Picasso, Braque, Picabia, Du
had prompted him to seek to "apply the same simultaneo
The resulting creation, he wrote, was conceived in such a
member of the public to link the disparate associations of th
characteristic for his own personality, mixing them, frag
remaining in the direction that the author channeled
cacophony, the poème, in this sense, was to be led by a cond
as to suggest different executions to its diverse listeners. "A
in Hugo Ball's words, it was to constitute a performance
voices simultaneously speak, sing, whistle, or do somethi
their encounters constitute the elegiac, humorous, or bizarre
39. Ibid., p. 282.

40. For Tzara's "simultaneous poems," see Tzara, Oeuxrres complètes, v
41. See the statement accompanying the poem, ibid., pp. 492-93.
42. Hugo Ball, cited in Hans Richter, Dada, Kunst und Anti-Kunst: Der
Jahrhunderts (Cologne: DuMont Schauberg, 1964), p. 28.

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36 OCTOBER
The simultaneity of text and anagram in The Secret of Villon is of an

nature. In the Dadaist poem, three tongues coincide in a temporal exte
sharing a single acoustical form: each is read aloud. Every language is ther
equally perceptible or imperceptible. Tzara presents Villon's poetry, by con
as animated by two formally distinct levels of enunciation that are "super
like images upon each other.43 Moreover, while the poème simultan prompt
who hear it to "mix, fragment, etc." its elements in possibly incompatible wa
two levels of the medieval work, for the late Tzara, necessarily comp
ordered and coherent whole. Villon's poetry "contains" its anagrams in
sense. Not only are the signs of the secret words literally present in those th
pose its lines; what is concealed in them also reinforces, as if in a secondary
what the text has openly said. "It will be observed," Tzara writes, "that the m
of the anagrams is often inscribed in the line that contains it, although nei
ing lines or parts of them may lend them a signification by implicat
Anagrams do not so much trouble the verse in which they can be discerne
offer them commentary: explanatory and revelatory notes for their interpr
Tzara repeatedly calls them "signatures" that point to the reality from whi
poems spring.45 Over the syllables of Villon's songs and ballads, they sound
as "a kind of echo" or "a voice in mute" ( une voix en sourdine).46
In several respects, the theory of this dark speech remains itself obscu
first ambiguity involves the relation that is to obtain, for Tzara, between
medieval poet and his hermetic linguistic and literary procedure. The Secr
Villon suggests several possibilities. At times, Tzara argues that the poet's
embedding words within words was never widely known. He reasons then
allowed the poet to escape censure when inculpating his contemporaries or
disclosing matters of an erotic nature, which medieval mores required him
keep concealed. The "secret," he suggests, was shared only with Villon's clo
friends, Catherine and Noël Joris, whom he "initiated" into the principle
art.47 This explains why "not one" of the medieval copyists who trans
Villon's poems "seems to have had any knowledge of the treasure hidden i
the verbal matter of his verse" and why it is that to recover the buried gold, sy
atic orthographic adjustments must be made.48 At other times, however,
suggests that the circle of those who knew of Villon's procedure was consid
wider than this summary would allow. Perhaps, he muses, Villon develope
technique with a view to the many friends who would be capable of detecti
recollections, thoughts, and reproaches encrypted in his verse. Tzara w
43. Tzara uses the term "superposition" at various points. See, for example, Le secret de V
Oeuvres completes, vol. 6, p. 18.
44. Ibid., p. 17.
45. Ibid., p. 519.
46. Ibid., p. 91.
47. Ibid., p. 91.
48. Ibid., p. 16.

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even if Villon's misfortunes may not be, at least in part, attributable to the reac
tions of contemporaries, who could and did perceive the provocations that he had
only faintly covered over in his poetry.49
Yet in the pages of Tzara's final work, one also encounters the possibility that
the poet's concealed communications may, in truth, be "secrets" only for us. Tzara
sought to show, in varying degrees of detail, that poets from the troubadours to
Charles d'Orléans and Rabelais all employed the "procedure." At the limit,
Villon's cryptographic method may have been transparent not to some, but rather
to all of his contemporaries. The content of the messages then would have been
common knowledge. "If the anagrams give us revelations," Tzara writes, "we must
nonetheless believe that in Villon's time, they were only ever 'open secrets' [secrets
de Polichinelle]. He wrote the anagrams much more for the amusement of his
friends than to unveil to them facts that they knew."50
The equivocation is of great consequence for Tzara's claims. Depending on
the status of the "secret" unveiled in the pages of his book, the procedure may or
may not be employed as an historical and philological tool. Repeatedly, Tzara sug
gests that the presence or absence of anagrams in the verse of Villon's epoch will
be a positive criterion for the determination of authorship. One of the more
provocative theses of his work, as the French press immediately grasped, was that
all poems attributed to the lesser fifteenth-century poet Jean Vaillant were, in fact,
Villon's work. Part of Tzara's demonstration consisted in his proof that Villon's
procedure could be detected in the poems of Vaillant: the names "François" and
"Catherine," in particular, as he showed, are often scattered there. Yet if Villon's
technique was a common one, the conclusion hardly holds, since any one of his
contemporaries could have woven those names into his own lines. A similar ambi
guity marks the substantial biographical assertions that Tzara sought to
demonstrate by means of his anagrammatic decipherments. At some times, it
seems that words found concealed in verse may be taken as biographical evidence
of an almost documentary kind. The most striking example, in this regard,
involves Tzara's treatment of Villon's alleged date of birth. On the basis of his
recovery of hidden names, Tzara maintained that Villon must have been born two
years earlier than had been thought.51 At other times, Tzara defends the perti
nence of the anagrams he has uncovered by anchoring them firmly in historical
facts that he takes to be certain. In certain passages of his book, finally, Tzara sug
gests both possibilities simultaneously, as if unaware of the vicious circle that such
a reasoning would imply. "One can only establish with certainty a point in the
biography of Villon," Tzara writes, "if the indications derived from the anagrams
confirm the facts, and reciprocally."52 Yet if the first proposition and its reciprocal
are both true, neither, strictly speaking, holds.
49. Ibid., p. 89.

50. Ibid., p. 17.
51. For a discussion, see Dufournet, Nouvelles recherches sur Villon, p. 264.

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38 OCTOBER
Perhaps the most perplexing ambiguity in the argument of The Secret of

involves the status of those elements most often treated as secrets: names. It cannot
be denied that Tzara's method of decipherment supposes that one knows, before
confronting Villon's poetry, which special words it may conceal. Unknown terms, as
Tzara himself admits, cannot be recovered by this method. One must draw the
name for which one searches, therefore, from Villon's own poetry, concealed names
being all, in this sense, recurrences of apparent ones. Yet there is more. Even if one
grants that the procedure consists in hiding what is known so that it may, in time, be
found anew, a troubling fact remains. It pertains to the identity of the secret names.
On the surface, Tzara would seem to accept a common premise in research into
anagrams that holds that only forms with definite alphabetic shapes may be hidden
and revealed in other expressions. Tzara can recover the distorted shapes of such
names as "Tabary" and "Perrinet," for example, since he knows the exact signs by
which these names are written. Yet the principles of his method also dictate that a
name possess no single form. Just as "Sermoie" can be written as "Sermoye" or
"Çarmoie," so "Tabary" can be spelled "Tabarye," "Tabarrie," or "Tabaries," and
"Perrinet," as Tzara's own analyses demonstrate, may appear as "Parynet," "Perenet,"
"Parrinet," "Perynet," or "Parrenet." An intractable difficulty follows, for a simple
reason: the very "liberties" that allow Tzara to recover certain names in Villon's work
are those that forbid him from recognizing them with certainty. Inevitably, the cru
cial element in Villon's hermetic art of language—the secret of the secret—cannot
but escape him.
In one of the earliest articles on Tzara's last project, Aragon wagered in 1960
that The Secret of Villon would, at a future date, provoke critical perplexity. "It will
one day be a great subject of astonishment and study how it is that he who, almost
half a century ago, founded the Dada Movement, has today become the
researcher who, in Villon and Rabelais, takes pains to show that the obscurity of
texts is essentially a result of our ignorance of both the social conditions and the
biography of writers."53 The exactitude of Aragon's prophecy is undeniable. Yet it
also raises several questions. It is indeed remarkable that the author who once
proclaimed that "there is a great destructive, negative task to accomplish" and
who called, in his Manifesto of 1918, for the radical "sweeping away" of atrophied
forms of artistic expression should have later devoted such attention to the recov
ery of an ancient art of writing for which he had to devote himself, over the
course of almost a decade, to mastering the philology of medieval French.54
Beyond that formal observation, however, other differences are worth not
ing. Beginning with his earliest work, Tzara defined "spontaneity" as the supreme
feature of future art.55 In the "Lecture on Dada" that he gave in Weimar and Jena
in 1922, he declared: "We have had enough of reflective movements that have
dilated, beyond all measure, our credulity in the benefits of science. What we now
53. Aragon, "Tristan Tzara découvre une oeuvre nouvelle de Rabelais," p. 7.

54. Tristan Tzara, "Manifeste Dada," in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1, p. 366.
55. Ibid., pp. 364-67.

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want is spontaneity. ... In art, Dada brings everything back to an initial, yet relative
simplicity."56 Again, the contrast with his later conception of Villon's metric lines
of words upon words seems sharp. "They are the fruit of a meticulous assembly of
disparate pieces, incessantly polished and polished anew so as to be able to follow
each other," The Secret of Villon explains.57 But it would be an error to infer that the
late Tzara abandoned the literary quality he once extolled. "Granting that the
term spontaneity has no meaning when referred to poetry," Tzara writes in his last
book, "one must admit that Villon has succeeded in keeping intact the freshness
of tone and the accents of his presence, despite the anagrams that lead their inde
pendent and swarming life on the inside of the lines that serve as their basis."58
The most profound tension between the projects of the early and the late
Tzara, however, lies elsewhere. It involves a force that the Dadaists, as perhaps
none before them, summoned in the fabric of their art: chance, or contingency.59
In the "Dada Manifesto on Weak Love and Bitter Love," first read in Paris in 1920,
Tzara offered this famous account of how "To Make a Dadaist Poem":
Take a newspaper.
Take a pair of scissors.
From the newspaper, choose an article of the length you would like your
poem to have.
Cut out the article.
Then cut out each of the words that compose the article and put them in
a bag.
Shake it softly.
Then remove each cut-out, one after the other.
Carefully copy them out
In the order in which they left the bag.
The poem will resemble you.
And thus you will be an infinitely original writer of charming sensibility,
although still unknown to the common crowd.60
These lines evoke a poetic practice in which the methodic destruction of a

given text goes hand in hand with a partially random process of composition. The
ultimate sequence of words in the "Dadaist poem" will be determined not only by
the initial choice of an article, with its length and lexicon, but also by the "soft
shaking" in a bag of its words, followed by the extraction of each cutout, "one
after the other," in an order that the poet cannot anticipate. The experiment has
been compared to practices of artists close to Tzara, not least the ones Hans Arp
56. Tristan Tzara, "Conférence sur Dada," in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1, pp. 419-24, p. 421.
58. Ibid., p. 220.
59. See Harrett Ann Watts, Chance: A Perspective on Dada (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1980).
60. Tristan Tzara, "Dada manifeste sur l'amour faible et l'amour amer," in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1,
p. 382.

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40 OCTOBER
named in his "law of chance" (Gesetz des Zufalls).61 As Hans Richter lo

remarked, of all the Dadaists, it was, however, Tzara who carried the princ
chance "to the most extreme point in literature."62
One might argue that Villon's procedure, as the late Tzara describes it, r
to a certain degree the poetic method proposed in the Manifesto of 1920. A
lous assembly of disparate pieces, incessantly polished and polished anew so a
able to follow each other," Villon's verse, which resembles him like no other
from the combination of minimal units, abstracted and "cut out," so to speak
chains of signifying sequences. They are more minimal even than the elemen
the Manifesto recommended as building blocks, being neither words nor even m
parts—syllables, rhymes, or vowels—but mere phonemes, transcribed, for t
part, in accordance with the graphic conventions of fifteenth-century France.
There, however, the similarities between the two literary practices end
Tzara of The Secret of Villon insists that the sequence of names hidden in V
verse could be no mere fruit of chance. It must be willed. Like Saussure before
him, Tzara could not, however, entirely exclude the possibility that certain sto
chastic processes might be at play in speech. The "keys" he had detected might
partake somehow in random realizations of some possible combinations among
others. "One cannot deny," he conceded in a fragment relating to his final work,
"that chance plays a relatively important part in the formation of anagrams made
of discontinuous letters. The question that arises is that of knowing whether
Villon and the other anagrammatists, conscious of this chance, employed, ampli
fied, or provoked it in intending to insert into their texts the greatest number o
anagrams and, furthermore, to place them in the places that best suited them."63
Tzara had not been led to the "question that arises" entirely on its own. In
July 1961, one M. Puisségur, teacher of mathematics in Nevers, happened, during
his summer holidays, to read a newspaper article announcing an extraordinary
cryptographic find: Tristan Tzara had discovered a forgotten method, once
employed by poets, for embedding the letters of names in verse.64 Few details of
the technique were offered, yet the indications sufficed to arouse the scholar's
curiosity. On the basis of the examples given, Puisségur began to devise a forma
method for calculating, as best he could, the probability that names of a certain
length might be present in lines of poetry, their letters distributed according to
the symmetrical form that Tzara had identified. "Something" in the announce
ment, he would later recall, "had rufïled me."65
Once he completed his computations, Puisségur wrote to Tzara through the
intermediary of the paper, acquainting him with the results of his findings. They
61. See Richter, Dada, Kunst und Anti-Kunst, pp. 51—65; and Watt, Chance, pp. 51-136.
62. Richter, Dada, Kunst und Anti-Kunst, p. 54.
63. Tristan Tzara, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 6, p. 525.
64. Jean-Loup Debardie, Candide, July 26, 1961.
65. M. Puisségur, "Rabelais, Dada, et les probabilités," Bulletin de l'Association des professeurs de mathé
matiques de l'enseignement public 277 (1971), p. 10.

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could be simply summarized: for the formation of discontinuous anagrams

spelling out names in poetry, "chance," he concluded, "needs no help." In short,
Puisségur took the postulate of a poetic procedure to be superfluous, because the
laws of probability alone suffice for lines to contain within them the letters of cer
tain names, distributed in strictly symmetrical patterns with respect to a central
axis. In an essay published in the Bulletin de l'Asssociation des professeurs de mathéma
tiques de l'enseignement public in 1971, eight years after Tzara's death, he
summarized the formal reasoning that had led him to these conclusions. He also
recounted how his first letter, years earlier, had met with a courteous reply. The
famous poet invited the young mathematician to visit him at home. "Tzara
received me in his rue de Lille apartment full of Picasso drawings and African
masks," Puisségur recalled. He presented Tzara with his calculations. "I brought
him no certitude," he would observe, "since to express a probability (unless it is
equal to 0 or to 1 ) is to make a figured confession of ignorance."
I simply came to say to him, "This is what is due to chance. Let us

decide." But faced with my figures, he responded with the conviction of
a man who, having discovered a treasure, is told that some of his pieces,
if not all, are counterfeit. To my doubts, he responded with his faith. It
was difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. But was there any
wheat? He, too, must have asked himself this question, and I believe
that for this charming, elderly man, I was the cause, that morning, of
some pain.66
Tzara's papers suggest that he took the mathematician's arguments seri

ously, at least with respect to Rabelais, who, having been the subject of the
newspaper article of 1961, was also their primary topic of conversation.
"Employing most ingeniously the calculus of probability," we read in a posthu
mously published note, "M. Puisségur has obtained interesting results concerning
the intrusion of chance in the formation of Rabelais's anagrams."67 Yet Tzara
maintained that such an "intrusion" could be curtailed—above all with respect to
Villon. The "authenticity" of the anagrams could be defended. "The proofs by
which I have sought to demonstrate the authenticity of the anagrams in Villon's
work are isolated and diverse, yet they are concordant."68 Tzara distinguished,
broadly speaking, two types demonstrations. The first involved a hermeneutic
principle: in each case, he held, what is hidden in verse responds semantically, in
some form, to what is explicitly said in it. That such a rule rests on readings that
would be difficult to verify is a point Tzara appears to have conceded: "One could
object," he admits, "that these meanings all reflect a hypothetical interpretation
that I give of the facts." Then he advanced his second proposition, whose implica
66. Ibid., p. 23.

67. Tristan Tzara, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 6, p. 526.
68. Ibid., p. 525.

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42 OCTOBER
tions far outstripped the interpretation of Villon, bearing on several cen

literary history in the Romance languages. "The second phase in my de
tion has consisted in situating Villon's own activity in a historical move
which the use of anagrams in poetry can be seen to stretch back to the
century. Leaving aside the question of the origin and the history of an
which I will, incidentally, take as a subject of study elsewhere," he con
have found the prolongation of this activity, whose principles are immut
when the meaning given to anagrams and the means of employing them
fer from poet to poet, all the way up to the work of Rabelais, who is one of t
writers to have used it."69 For Tzara, the two-part proof was sound. "It fo
concluded, "that the doubts concerning the authenticity of the anagram
work of Villon must be definitely set aside."70
But the doubts were to return. In 1976, Lynn D. Stults published an
in the journal Romania, "A Study of Tristan Tzara's Theory Concerning t
of Villon," in which she recalled that in 1959, it had been announced tha
literary-historical discovery would soon be revealed: "Apparently the ce
Dadaist poet, Tristan Tzara, had been spending his late years developing
concerning the writings of Villon. Tzara had intended to publish his find
two-volume work about Villon, but he died before his plans could be re
Stults recalled that Puisségur, in an earlier article, had subjected the hyp
"the celebrated Dadaist poet" to linguistic scrutiny based on the princip
mathematics of probability. Puisségur, she noted, devised a two-part fo
test Tzara's discoveries: "In the first part the number of possible symme
tions for an anagram of a given number of letters is calculated. In the se
the probability that the letters occupying those positions be identical wi
ters of a particular name is calculated.'"72 Although such reas
"mathematically sound," Stults wrote, "its application to French poetry
The reason is simple. Puisségur's formula accounts for the relative probab
which any letter will appear in the language (based, of course, on the s
frequencies of modern rather than medieval French). The formula cann
ever, account for the probabilities dictated by the interdependence of le
may, for example, calculate the relative probabilities that the letters F a
appear in the language, but the relative probabilities that an F will appea
R, or before it, or near it are another matter. The problem, Stults admit
strictly mathematical. Linguistic research would need to provide crucial
data about the relations of letters in the language. Yet "the science of lin
its present stage is not equipped to construct a comprehensive system of
dependence of letters in any natural language, let alone fifteenth-centur
69. Ibid.
70. Ibid., p. 530.
71. Lynn D. Stults, "A Study of Tristan Tzara's Theory Concerning the Poetry
(1975), p. 433.
72. Ibid., p. 453.

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Unfortunately such a system is a necessary component of any formula that could

be used to predict accurately the number of symmetrical anagrams that can be
expected to appear in a text by chance."73
Having renounced the possibility of determining the exact likelihood with
which hidden names might be lodged in Villon's poetry, the scholar chose to eval
uate Tzara's hypothesis by establishing a more modest literary fact: the frequency
of anagrams contained in the corpus of Villon's verse when compared with those
of two of his contemporaries. To this end, Stults availed herself of a computer pro
gram, specially designed by Robert Stults, named "Vilgram," that would search for
anagrams of forty-three names in Villon's "Lais," Vaillant's "The Debate Between
Two Sisters," and Charles d'Orléans' ballads.74 Stults tabulated the findings
reached by her computer, commenting that "from the breakdown of these results
one fact clearly emerges: while all but six of the forty-three names searched for do
appear in these six hundred lines of poetry, the majority of them do not appear
significantly more frequently in the lines by Villon than in the lines by Charles
d'Orléans.'"75
"One could perhaps argue," she conceded, "that Tzara's theory is strength
ened by the rare occurrence of a long anagram, as for example in stanza 65 of
'l'Embusche de Vaillant' [The Debate Between Two Sisters'], 'leurs faitz ne sont
point vicieux' (Tzara uses an alternate spelling of 'vicieux'):
LEURSFAITZNESONTPOINTVICIEULX
+ OO+++ + OOO + OO+ + OO + OOO + + + + OO + O
11 2 8 1 3 4 6 14 13 9 7 5 10 12
= François Villon
"On the other hand," she continued, "it

low the same logic and yet explain how th
United States crept into line 130 of 'Le Lais,'
REGNIERDEMONTIGNYTROISCHIENS
+ +OO + + +OOO O+O++O + OOOO+++OO+ +
4 2 7 1314 3 1012 5 8 6 1 11 9
= Henry Kissinger (c=k)76
Stults also noted a curious detail that Tzara seems not to have observed. "Often
when the letters needed to form the anagram are present in a line, several symmetri
cal anagrams of the same name appear in the same line.'"77 The name "Noé Jolis"
73. Ibid., pp. 453-54.

74. Ibid., pp. 445-46.
75. Ibid., p. 451.
76. Ibid., p. 454.
77. Ibid., p. 455.

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44 OCTOBER
thus appears not once but four times in the fifth line of the "Lais," an
revealed the appearance of no fewer than "twenty Perrenets in line 285."
It would be difficult to imagine that the appearances of all 20 symm

rical anagrams of the name Perrenet in line 285 of "Le Lais" was cau
by the manipulations of the poet, and yet it would be equally diffic
to determine which one of the twenty anagrams he intended to app
It seems more reasonable to attribute these multiple anagrams
chance rather than to the efforts of the poet.78
Stults could only conclude that although Puisségur's demonstration was

faulty, its conclusion was sound. "The results of my anagram search stro
gest that Tzara's theory is invalid.'"79
One might have thought the secret of The Secret of Villon dissolved. Mor
fifteen years later, however, another scholar, Michel Bernard, reopened t
in an article, " The Secret of Villon Put to the Test of the Computer," publish
pages of the same journal.80 Respectful of his predecessors in the math
study of linguistic regularities in poetry, he permitted himself noneth
restate Stults's criticisms of Puisségur. To them he now added that Stult
too, was, from both a technical and a literary perspective, unsound. Al
Stults's essay is "the more convincing of the two," he wrote, it "present
ings that call her conclusions into question."81 The first involved s
insufficient information had been given about the computer program,
since the exact algorithm that had been employed had not been specifi
a troubling doubt: "Can one be certain that the program is truly capable
ering all the symmetrical anagrams in a given verse?"82 The second criti
one of literary method. He recalled that Stults had compared the numb
grams of selected names in Villon's poetry with those in the work of t
medieval contemporaries, Charles d'Orléans and Jean Vaillant. Havin
that the quantities of hidden names were comparable in all three work
judged it unlikely that Villon possessed an anagrammatic art of his own
pointed out that such a line of reasoning was weak.
Charles d'Orléans is not only a contemporary but also a friend

Villon's, who could certainly have written under the name of t
prince, or have entered into a contest of virtuosity with him, in the
dition of the grands rhétoriqueurs. The second corpus is even more p
lematic, since L. D. Stults studies the anagrams in "The Debate
Between Two Sisters," which Tzara, precisely, attributes to Villon!
78. Ibid., pp. 457-58.

79. Ibid., p. 458.
80. Michel Bernard, "Le Secret de Villon à l'épreuve de l'ordinateur: Tzara et les an
Romania 113 (1992-1995), pp. 242-52.
81. Ibid., p. 245.
82. Ibid.

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theory, all three texts could therefore be written by the same author,
and when L. D. Stults shows that there are even more anagrams in the
works of Charles d'Orléans than in those of Villon, she does not neces
sarily demonstrate the falsehood of Tzara's theses.83
Bernard argued that a definitive refuta Béroul

Beroul
tion of Tzara's claims would need to involve JESUISLETENEBREUXLEVEUFLINCONSOLE
L BF
BR EU——O—
EU——0—
poems unrelated to the literary cultureBreton
of fif
teenth-century France. This he set out to
JESUISLETENEBREUXLEVEUFLINCONSOLE
JESUISLETENEBKEUXLEVEUFLINCONSOLE
T BR ON E
provide. Availing himself of a computer pro
Celine
Céline
gram whose technical specifications he JESUISLETENEBREUXLEVEUFLINCONSOLE
did not
conceal, Bernard presented a thorough analysis 1—E—N E—L—C
1—E—N E—I—C
Corneille
Comeille
of the combinatorial possibilities of a single line
JESDISLETENEBREUXLEVEUFLINCONSOLE
by the nineteenth-century poet GérardI-L
deN--R
I-L N—R EE L—C
L—C CHE
0-E
Nerval, "Je suis le Ténébreux, le Veuf, Courtel

Courteline
ine
l'Inconsolé." He showed that in that alexan
ET-NE-R
ET-NE-K U-LI-CO
drine, one may detect, arranged according Crevel the
secret procedure identified by Tzara, a star JESUISLETENEBREUXLEVEUFLINCONSOLE
L RE EV C
tlingly large set of distinguished authors: not Fenelon
Fénelon
least Breton, Corneille, Céline, Crevel, Ionesco, JESUISLETENEBREUXLEVEUFLINCONSOLE
E FL-N-ON E
Roussel, and Villon.84
Fontenelle
Yet Bernard also applied his program to JESUISLETENEBREUXLEVEUFLINCÖNSOLE
JESUISLETENEBREUXLEVEUFLINCDNSOLE
the medieval corpus Tzara had studied. In the TE-E—E—L F—N—N-OL
Ionesco
same 537 lines in which Tzara, by painstaking JESUISLETENEBREUXLEVEUFLINOONSOLE
analysis, had recovered 1,235 anagrams, I-CONSO-E
Bernard's program, working for twenty-four Roussel

hours, found almost three times as many: 3,359 S-E R—LR—L U U O-S
0-S
hidden names. "And not all Tzara's ortho Scove
Scève
graphic licenses," he added, "were even
—Sused."85
—S E—-E
E E VV C
0
Bernard had shown that the scholars who had
sought to dismiss the theses of The Secret of Villon

Michel Bernard.
were in part mistaken in their methods and, at
Combinatorial analysis of a
the limit, that they were unable to offer a firmline by Gérard de Nerval.
foundation for their claims. Yet their intuitions
were to be definitively confirmed when Tzara

failed his last statistical test.
Despite the differences between these various scholarly approaches to The

Secret of Villon, certain critical elements in the discussion have remained constant.
The question to be resolved, as Tzara himself, in the end, appears to have con
ceded, is not whether or not there are names hidden in the lines of the "Lais," but
83. Ibid., pp. 245-46.

84. See ibid., p. 249.
85. Ibid., p. 248.

202.92.128.104 on Wed, 21 Oct 2020 12:22:41 UTC
46 OCTOBER
to what degree it is linguistically probable that they are present there

infer from the research that has been conducted on Villon's poetry tha
cise likelihood of encountering the symmetrically placed letters of certa
in fifteenth-century manuscripts may remain unknown forever. What ca
mined, however, is the approximate degree of probability with which the
certain names may be distributed, according to the procedure, in octosy
decasyllabic lines in the language.
It is here that one reaches what may be the most curious element i
mathematically informed refutation of Tristan Tzara's last work. Expli
implicitly, all the critics of The Secret of Villon orient their arguments with
one unstated axiom in Tzara's investigation: the axiom, namely, that it is
that there will be names legible in Villon's verse, as the procedure wou
or, positively stated, that the presence of such names, if established, will
an inherently improbable occurrence. Tzara means his unlikely hypothe
Villon embedded the letters of certain names in his lines, beyond the th
auditory or visual perception—to be supported by this unlikely fact: the
truly there. The probability of an unlikely claim, in other words, is to b
by an improbable but true proof. To refute Tzara, then, it suffices to
validity of his evidence. If it is more likely than not that letters in a line
and placed in symmetrical positions, will spell out certain names,
improbable claim will be revealed to be no more than what it appears t
only improbable but, indeed, even arbitrary. Hence the curious form o
to which the critics ultimately submit Tzara's argument, which co
essence, in reasoning that the poet-scholar was mistaken to think that
recovered some 1,200 anagrams, because there are more than twice as ma
that he did not see. He was more right, in other words, than he ever d
hope. Therefore he was wrong.
Did the author of The Approximate Man anticipate such forms of re
"It seems that it exists," he had declared in 1920, "more logical; very lo
logical; less logical; illogical; truly logical; fairly logical."86 By choice, by
by chance, Tzara, at the end of his life, was still declining these variou
ties while also suggesting a field in which they might be tested. Anothe
however, also lies hidden in the revelation of Tzara's last work. A final m
to speak, remains concealed, although from 1959 to this day, it has never
lie in plain view. It consists in the simple fact that Tzara refused to co
possibility that the poet's treasure might lie buried in the one place in w
might, in all likelihood, have expected to find it. Villon, by all account
series of poems in a form of speech meant to conceal certain matters. Th
so-called "Ballads in Jargon," which evoke the obscure idiom of the me
dits known as the Coquillars, who plotted their unmentionable ac
authorities of fifteenth-century Dijon alleged, in "an exquisite languag
86. Tzara, "Dada manifeste sur l'amour faible et l'amour amer," Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1,

202.92.128.104 on Wed, 21 Oct 2020 12:22:41 UTC
other people cannot understand" {un langaige exquis, que aultres gens ne scevent
entendre). These ballads remain, to a significant degree, impenetrable to this day.
Tzara, a learned reader of Villon and the scholarship devoted to him, knew them
well. He had also read the critical essays published on the Coquillars' strange lan
guage. Yet as Henri Béhar, Tzara's editor, observes, "Curiously, none of his drafts
shows any trace of an anagrammatic investigation carried out on the ballads in jar
gon."87
At the beginning of The Sercet of Villon, Tzara appears to have anticipated that
his book might, for this reason, provoke some surprise. As if to dispel the possibil
ity of the reader's bewilderment or disappointment, he writes: "These inquiries do
not cover the domain of 'Jargon.' The presence of anagrams is all the more proba
ble there, since this language, being in part recreated by Villon, must have
rendered their formation easier."88 His statement is worth pondering. It suggests,
in truth, two propositions. First, the ballads will not be considered as belonging to
the corpus of poems containing anagrams; second, anagrams are most probably
present there. It is difficult not to pose the question of the logical link that is to
obtain between these statements. But Tzara offers another reason for the exclu
sion of jargon from his book. Raising the question of the opaque poems in a note
that was to accompany an unfinished edition of Villon's work, he comments:
"Despite the many more or less fantastical attempts that have been made at deci
pherment, one can only agree with Sainéan, the greatest specialist of jargon, that
'all things considered, most of the terms of the argot or jobelin will probable
remain a closed book for us, and that, forever.'"89
"The Ballads in Jargon," therefore, are probably hermetic and certainly
obscure. In both cases, they can have no place in The Secret of Villon. The conclu
sion may seem sudden, but the truth is that it is far from arbitrary. One may even
go so far as to define the object of Tzara's last book in punctual opposition to the
two characteristics that in these passing observations he attributes to the poems
composed in the bandits' cryptic tongue. In distinction from the obviously
"closed book" of "The Ballads in Jargon," the texts of the "Lais" appear to conceal
no hidden message. Their obscurity, if one grants it, is uncertain in the extreme.
Their secret, by that token, is unlikely. Faced with this fact, Tzara, in a sense, does
no more than respect a principle that one might well wish to grant: were the trea
sure likely, were its appearance obvious, it would be none at all. He takes a further
step when he effectively deduces the reality of a hidden thing from that of its
unlikelihood, inferring that Villon's poems exhibit a secret procedure not despite
but because of the improbability that such a possibility is real. The "explosive
material" contained in this most vertiginous of literary finds ensues. The mystery,
Tzara will then implicitly maintain, lies in the brightest language of all, its dark
87. Henri Béhar, in Tzara, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 6, p. 550 n. 4.

88. Tzara, Le Secret de Villon, in Oeuirres complètes, vol. 6, p. 17.
89. Ibid., p. 550.

202.92.128.104 on Wed, 21 Oct 2020 12:22:41 UTC
48 OCTOBER
ness dimly discernible in the speech that would seem most crystalline. Th
secret, like poetry for Breton, is there where one would least expect it.90
light of evidence, in words manifestly free of the artifice of jargon, there are s
names, and purposeful patterns, whispered in "a kind of echo" or by a "vo
mute," waiting quietly, below each line of verse, for their knowing reader. T
dictation from these unheard sources, to copy what had not been written,
silenced the doubts that his interpretation provoked and that he himself liv
part, to perceive. Diving ever deeper into the perilous waters of Villon's son
ballads, he would not abandon the image of the treasure he sought, even if
to be at the risk that the language he discovered lay on the crystal's surfa
that the secrets he uncovered were his own.
90. André Breton, in Roger Vitrac, "André Breton n'écrira plus," Le Journal du peuple, April 7, 1923,
reprinted in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Marguerite Bonnet et al., 4 vols. (Paris: Gallimard-La Pléiade,
1988-2008), vol. 1, p. 1215.

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Secrets of Tristan Tzara

Author(s): DANIEL HELLER-ROAZEN

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24586590

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On December 22,1959, Le Monde ran an article bearing the striking if tenta

Tristan Tzara is a man of surprises. Almost exactly half a century ago,

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In this sense, Tzara concluded, Villon's is not only a "poetry of circumstance"

14. Tristan Tzara, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 6: Le Secret de Villon, p. 9.

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Bien est verté que j 'ay aimé

Au fort, quelqu'ung s'en recompence,

It's very true I have loved

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clusion. "Anagrams analogous to the one cited by Foulet," he asserted, albeit

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30. See Tzara, Le Secret de Villon, in Oeuvres complètes, vol.

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Tristan Tzara. Combinatorial

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Here Tzara recovers the same anagram as did Foulet—Itiers Marchant—

Prince amoureux des amans le greigneur

Amorous prince and greatest lover

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+ OOOOO+OOOOOOO + +O+O+ + OOOOOOOO+OOOOO +

38. See Tzara, Le Secret de

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+ +++o o o + + o + o + + + + o+o + +OOO++ + +

910158 17 1 3 135 6 7 16 2 4 14181211

= François m'a escripte, "François Wrote Me"

Personified, this final anagram writes of itself, comm

39. Ibid., p. 282.

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The simultaneity of text and anagram in The Secret of Villon is of an

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49. Ibid., p. 89.

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Perhaps the most perplexing ambiguity in the argument of The Secret of

53. Aragon, "Tristan Tzara découvre une oeuvre nouvelle de Rabelais," p. 7.

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These lines evoke a poetic practice in which the methodic destruction of a

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named in his "law of chance" (Gesetz des Zufalls).61 As Hans Richter lo

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could be simply summarized: for the formation of discontinuous anagrams

I simply came to say to him, "This is what is due to chance. Let us

Tzara's papers suggest that he took the mathematician's arguments seri

66. Ibid., p. 23.

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tions far outstripped the interpretation of Villon, bearing on several cen

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Unfortunately such a system is a necessary component of any formula that could

+ OO+++ + OOO + OO+ + OO + OOO + + + + OO + O

"On the other hand," she continued, "it

+ +OO + + +OOO O+O++O + OOOO+++OO+ +

73. Ibid., pp. 453-54.

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