SOURCE: "Tristan Tzara and Decomposition: 'Le géant blanc lépreux du paysage,'" in Dada/Surrealism, No. 4, 1974, pp. 27-34.

In the following essay, Browning argues that the structure of "Le géant blanc lépreux du paysage" was designed to subvert or sabotage the experience of reading this poem, as well as the poetic experience in general.

Explicating Tzara's "Le Géant blanc lépreux du paysage'" can be risky, since Tzara put the reader's efforts in the poem: "Here … the reader begins to scream … he is skinny, idiotic, dirty—he does not understand my poetry." Yet this portrait is itself comprehensible, and, as such, highlights the paradoxical aspect of Tzara's Dada poetry, in which intelligible statements announce the unintelligibility of the text, an imagery rich in creative suggestion prepares its own negation, and the implicitly poetic elements of pattern, movement, and vision reveal a poetics of...