Anicet is, as its cover proclaims, a Dadaist novel, reissued on the centenary of its composition. Louis Aragon would doubtless have been delighted to learn that it is almost impossible to review.
An art critic, with his ‘little gadgets… called criteria’, is satirised in these pages as a kind of ‘policeman’, whose
mission is in fact to seek out artists whose theories and works might disturb the peace… At the slightest threat of disorder the critic must set things right by exposing fraud and anarchy.
Here, in pre-emptive defiance, is a ‘novel’ which is nothing but ‘fraud and anarchy’: a work in which there is no coherent plot, no illusion of character, written in a style riddled with self-mockery.
The extraordinary root-and-branch nihilism of the Dadaist and Surrealist movements makes sense as a reaction to the extreme horrors of the first world war — though one can imagine the howls that would have greeted such a statement, since the movements proclaimed that nothing ‘makes sense’.
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