The Arcades Project - Operi

triumphs is the aquarium, the greenish, the submarine, the hybrid, the poisonous."
Paul Morand, 1900 (Paris, 1931), pp. 101-103. [S2a,6]
""This style of 1900, moreover, infects the whole of literature. Never was writing
more pretentious. In novels, the pm·ticule is obligatory for names: there is Madame
de Scrimeuse, Madame de Girionne, Madame de Charmaille, Monsieur de
Phocas; impossible names: Yanis, Damosa, Lord Eginard . ... The Legendes du
Moyen age, by Gaston Paris, which has just come out, plays to the fervent cult of
the neo-Gothic: it offers nothing but Grails, Isoldes, Ladies of' the Unicorn. Pierre
Louys writes "Ie throne/' with the older Latinate spelling; everywhere are found
abysses, ymages, gyres, and the like. The triumph of the y. " Paul Morand,
1900 (Paris, 1931), pp. 179-181. [S3,1]
"It seemed to me worthwhile to bring together, in an issue of the journal [Minotaure,
3-4,] containing several admirable specimens of Jugendstil art, a cert.ain
number of mediumistie designs . ... In fact., one is immediately struck by similarit.ies
between these two modes of expression. What is J ugendstil, I am tempted to
ask, but an attempt to generalize and to adapt mediumistic design, painting, and
sculpture to dwellings and furniture? We find there the same discordance in the
details; the same impossibility of repetition that guides the true, captivating
stereotypy; the same delight in the never-ending curve (whether it he growing fern,
or ammonite, or embryonic curl); the same profusion of minutiae, the cont.emplation
of which seduces the eye away from pleasure in the whole . ... It could be
maintained that these two enterprises are actually conceived tmder the same sign,
which might well be that of the octopus: the octopus," as Lautreamont has said,
'with the gaze of silk." From one part to another, in terms of plastic design, down
to the very smallest feature, it. is the triumph of the equivocal; in terms of interpretation,
down to the most insignificant det.ail, it is the triumph of t.he complex. Even
the borrowing, ad nauseam, of subjects, accessory or otherwise, from the plant
world is common t.o these two modes of expression (which respond, in principle, to
quite different needs for externalization). And both of them display, to an equal
degree, a tendency to evoke superficially ... certain ancient artforms of Asia and
the Americas." Andre Breton, Point du jour (Paris