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Tate Papers SPRING 2006

Military Avoidance: Marcel Duchamp and the 'Jura-Paris Road'

KIERAN LYONS

Fig.21. Planche 7: Chasseurs à pied (la fanfare) (Plate 7: Light Infantry) [composition of the regimental fanfare]
Illustration from Jean Augé, L'Armée française d'Août 1914, Paris 1935. Photography: K. Lyons

Drawing on his language experiences as a conscript, Duchamp developed his conceptions of the enfant-phare, an illuminated child, which in the original French is also phonically caught in a military-mystical aura. The rhythms and regular repetitions of the phrase ‘enfant-phare’ in the ‘Jura-Paris Road’ echoes the military term le fanfare that alludes to the position and the function of the infantry band (fig.21).

⁴⁰ Marching infantry columns were headed by formations of buglers or fanfaristes who, when attached to regimental drummers, formed a unit known as la clique going ahead of the main marching columns, their music fanning out ahead of them like the tail of a reversing comet:

This headlight child could graphically, / be a comet, which would have its / tail in front, this tail being an / appendage of the headlight child.⁴¹

The phonic slippage between ‘enfant-phare’ and the French ‘fanfare’ does not easily work in an English translation but nevertheless, suggests a reference to the mystical aura that arises from the combinatory form of the two nouns ‘enfant’ and ‘phare’. ‘Enfant-phare’ has been mechanistically translated into English as the ‘headlight-child’, taking its lead from the automotive experience of the journey from where the term arose. 

Marcel Duchamp, La boîte verte.

Cet enfant-phare pourra, graphiquement, être une comète, qui aurait sa queue en avant, cette queue étant l’appendice de l’enfant phare, appendice qui absorbe en l’émiettant (poussière d’or graphiquement) cette route Jura-Paris

Marcel Duchamp, tonsure. 1919. Radnitzky Emmanuel, Man Ray (dit)