Talk:Édouard Dujardin

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Made an effort to wikify, since this article was tagged for that. Added a partial list of his works, which needs to be expanded. Hope I didn't step on anyone's toes with the editing... Akradecki 05:17, 25 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Celan and Dujardin, the first Surrealist, and an unclear clarification

Walter Höller wrote (Akzente, February 1994)

Als wir auf Wanderungen mit Celan von ihm, Celan, das Haus des >ersten Surrealisten<, Dujardin, gezeigt und erklärt bekamen.

As we [Günther Grass and I] went walking [through Paris] with Celan, we were shown by him, Celan, the house of the "first surrealist", Dujardin and received a clarification.

My translation of the German might be muddy, but there is no question that the exact nature of Celan's comment is unclear from this passage. It seems possible even that it was less than positive.

Whatever it was, it is clear that something is missing from this entry. (The German entry is even less expansive and there is no French entry!)

If Celan was simply calling Dujardin the "first surrealist" then surely that belongs here.

On the other hand, perhaps Celan clarified something about Dujardin's work on Judaism (e.g. The Source of the Christian Tradition: A Critical History of Ancient Judaism)? Does anyone know the nature of this work, whether it might have given Celan reason to criticize Dujardin (again, Höllerer's remark seems to my knowledge of German to be ambiguous)?

All I can find on the web is links to Wagner (for whom D. held a lifelong love), the most interesting of which I include here:

A reviewer of Elyane Dezon-Jones and Inge Crosman Wimmers, eds. Proust's Fiction and Criticism New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2003 in the International Fiction Review writes of

Proust's expanding on the technique of Edouard Dujardin's monologue intérieure, "conceived as a literary transposition of the Wagnerian leitmotiv"

http://www.lib.unb.ca/Texts/IFR/bin/get.cgi?directory=Vol.32/&filename=bookreview.htm

Of course this doesn't answer my question (though it probably belongs in D's entry): certainly a love of Wagner alone would not have caused Celan to dislike Dujardin.

To summarize: Celan admired Dujardin's literary accomplishments, or he was wary of his extraliterary proclamations, or, possibly, both.