Here, the word [Dada] connotes neither anarchy nor anti-art nor any of the other things that so frightened the journalists* . . .
*I shall have passed through this world with a few people all graced with a quality of absolute purity, that same purity you may have had the fortune to glimpse in the sky one summer evening (André Breton, for example) scorned insulted, spat upon. But if one day my words become sacred—they are already—then let my laughter echo back from far away. My words will never serve your miserable ends, you who sneer at us, filthy creatures. And when I say journalist I always mean scum. To hell with you at L’Intran, Comaedia, L’Oeuvre, Les Nouvelles Littéraires, etc., morons, creeps, bastards, swine. All of you, without exception, glabrous bugs, bearded lice, burrowing your way into reviews, into dubious publications of all sorts, you’ll get what’s coming to you in the end. It all stinks. Ink. Squashed cockroach. Shit. Death to all of you who live off the lives of others, off their loves, their boredoms. Death to those whose hand is pierced by a pen, death to those who paraphrase what I say.
Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant (76).
