Nietzsche’s Spider: Forging and Furnishing the Revolution of the Word

Abstract

Winter had scampered away and Spring was waiting at the gates. Strange things were stirring in the soil and in our hearts. We were made drunk with the vision of Krishna and Christ. The spiders of despair shook themselves out of our souls in a trace of fear. We bowed our heads before the magic of an awakened beauty and thrilled to life […] -Eugene Jolas (1924) 1 "The plain reader be damned." So ends the "Proclamation" of "The Revolution of the Word", a twelve-point manifesto printed in Eugene and Maria Jolas's seminal interwar modernist magazine, transition (1927)(1928)(1929)(1930)(1931)(1932)(1933)(1934)(1935)(1936)(1937)(1938). The 1929 documentfrontispiece to a new segment of experimental writing-heralded an age of new forms. Tired of what it called the "hegemony of the banal word", a striking emphasis of the provocation lay in its repeated insistence that "the literary creator" can "fashion" a new type of language. "Autonomous and unconfined", "disintegrat[ing]" the "primal matter of words", the Proclamation was a celebration of self-formation: an aspiration to an "a priori reality within ourselves alone". 2 Adorned with references to Blake, to Rimbaudean "hallucinations" in language, it also overlapped with the Francophone Surrealist movement, sharing a fascination with the unconscious "and its relation to the eternal mythos", as Jolas would later write. 3 Its fifteen signatories-Kay Boyle, Hart Crane, and Robert Sage among them-shone a light on a community of writers who often worked 1