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The Gas Heart: Disfigurement and the Dada Body

This article explores the impact of facial injury and reconstructive surgery on Tristan Tzara’s Dada play The Gas Heart. The European theatre of World War I saw an unprecedented number of facial injuries and other instances of physical mutilation, and their prevalence inaugurated a social crisis of appearance and representation. With its dramaturgy of fragmentation, Tzara’s play provides a theatrical field of face and defacement, figure and disfiguration. The body to which it gives voice is a body deeply embedded in its historical, cultural, and artistic moment. In its giving and taking away of faces, it reflects—and transforms—a cultural anxiety over the destruction of the human form and the claims of identity, normality, and corporeal integrity to which it has been historically subordinated. While the brilliantly re-formed, constantly changing human body that emerges from The Gas Heart stands in opposition to the normalized body posited by reconstructive medicine, Tzara’s body-in-pieces reveals the wider field of permutations and possibilities—material, subjective, aesthetic—that the shattered bodies of World War I helped open to view.