Placing Max Jacob within the literary sphere is no straightforward task. If he is usually (rightly) considered a prominent figure of European high modernism, and one of the pre-First World War bohemian Montmartre set, this position nonetheless remains ambivalent because of the highly idiosyncratic nature of his writing, which points in other directions than those usually associated with his literary era. Jacob was active during the emergence of the distinctive early twentieth-century avant-garde movements — Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, Dada, Surrealism — and yet his relationship to these movements is not clear-cut; he always remained on their margins. The ‘haziness’ surrounding...

Jacob’s aesthetic ideas are presented in the preface to the Cornet à dés (1916), in Art Poétique (1922),¹ Conseils à un jeune poéte (1945), and in his substantial correspondence.² The Préface to the Cornet à dés gives his theory of the prose poem, a genre for which Jacob is most celebrated, and one which he considers to be an art like any other, and which should therefore submit to the ‘laws’ of art. This chapter will presently follow Jacob’s argument through as it appears in the preface, a method which sometimes also reveals incongruities, a factor that suggests a certain...

Wordplay is a prominent feature of many of the poems in the Cornet à dés, and it stems from what has been discussed in chapter 1, namely that the poem is constructed, as it were, from the inside out rather than from the outside in; language is treated as a starting point, rather than just a means to express subjectivity. Jacob’s playfulness has at its heart the premise that the reader and poet must meet in a space beyond the personal, and that the reader should be transplanted to this space. Consciously allowing language to direct the poem is one...

Pastiche is a prominent aspect of play in the Cornet à dés, and of course a key feature of modernism and later postmodernism.¹ In the poems examined in this chapter, pastiche often has a parodic effect, where the style of a particular author or a general writing style is imitated to comic or satirical effect. Or pastiche may be employed purely as a linguistic or narrative mimicking game, which may incorporate textual word and sound play, becoming a self-reflexive rather than objectively motivated text. Often these two aspects of pastiche overlap in Le Cornet à dés, and a poem may...

The significance of the title, Le Roi de Béotie, is perhaps not immediately obvious. In fact it is only upon reading the work as a whole that an idea of its full implications is gauged. Suggestions arise initially, however, from a description of the ancient Hellenic region of Boeotia (of which Thebes was its dominant city):

To the Athenians particularly the Boeotians seemed dull and thick-witted, a condition which Cicero and Horace ascribed to the dampness of the atmosphere. […] but their contribution to music and literature was considerable: Hesiod, Pindar and Plutarch were all Boeotians […]¹

As one reads...

Composed two years after the event, but crafted from notes taken while there, the second part of Le Roi de Béotie traces the psychological impact of the period Jacob spent at Lariboisière hospital following a serious accident early in 1920, as Pierre Andreu relates it:

Le 27 janvier 1920,¹ Max Jacob était renversé, place Pigalle, par une voiture alors qu’il se rendait à l’Opéra pour la seconde représentation du Tricorne, le ballet de Manuel de Falla, dont Picasso avait peint les décors: ‘J’avais descendu la rue des Martyrs qui, du Sacré-Cæur, mène un pêcheur au Siècle et le ramène vers...

…ce poème épique, ailé, inspiré et qui […] nous emporte dans un vertige immobile

Cocteau¹

Like Le Roi de Béotie, Le Terrain Bouchaballe² (published 24 May 1923) is suffused with ironic play, both in the ‘traditional’ sense where the narrator is omniscient observer and ironist of what he sees, but also in a more reflexive way whereby the irony boomerangs back on himself, where the nature of writing is questioned, and the narrator appears to speak through his own characters. These various modes of irony will be discussed, from ironic narrative in the third person, to irony through dialogue, to...

In many ways Jacob was not fully recognized in his time — apart from by the ‘greats’. Picasso was one of these, one of the few who followed his funerary cortege upon his burial at Ivry, a man with whom Jacob had a complex yet profound relationship all his life. In 1919 Jacob wrote:

Mon parrain m’a fait cadeau d’une imitation de J.C. avec dédicace. Cher P…, ce nouveau titre à mon affection pour toi ne l’augmente pas. Tu es bien ce que j’aime le plus au monde après Dieu et les Saints qui te regardent déjà comme un des...