Fictions of Arthur Cravan

The legendary poet and boxer Arthur Cravan, a fleeting figure on the periphery of early twentieth-century avant-gardism, is frequently invoked as proto-Dada and Surrealist exemplar. Yet he remains an insubstantial phenomenon lost through historical interstices, clouded in perpetuated errors and drifting untruths. So much of what we 'know' compromises the attempt to register significance for this freeloader and risks his dismissal from the canon; in response, the present study proposes a practical recovery processing philosophical positions, together designed to yield sense from apparent nonsense.

Ranging subjectivity, metaphor, representation and multiplicity, The fictions of Arthur Cravanassembles a presentation of new readings from previously undocumented correspondence and literary forays. Cravan's first published prose is now revised as a manifesto of simulation; the final contributors to his Paris review Maintenant are revealed as satirical impostures for the Delaunays; the scandalous specimen in New York is positioned as author by proxy of the iconic mustachioed Mona Lisa, and reconfigured as a Duchampian readymade; a full elegiac reading is given for the first time of Picabia's experimental film Entr'acte, and the book concludes with the appropriated poet-boxer's casting off into what would become the Surrealist legacy.

The remaining Cravan is a vibrant and unceasing dispersal of names and fictions, whose disappearance in 1918 constitutes a multiple death that can now only be expressed in the infinitive.