A Brief History of Portable Literature

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Toward the end of the winter of 1924, on the enormous, towering rock where the concept of eternal recurrence first came to Nietzsche, the Russian writer Andrei Bely suffered a nervous breakdown as he experienced the irremediably ascending lavas of the superconscious. On the same day, at the same time, a short distance away, the musician Edgar Varèse fell from his horse when, parodying Apollinaire, he pretended to set off for war.

For me these two scenes seem to be the pillars on which the history of portable literature is built: a history European in its origins and as light as the “desk-case” Paul Morand carried with him on luxury trains as he traveled the whole of an illuminated, nocturnal Europe. This moveable desk was the inspiration for Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise, indisputably the most brilliant bid to exalt portability in art. Duchamp’s box-in-a-suitcase — which contained miniature reproductions of each his works — soon became an “anagram” for portable literature and the symbol by which the first Shandies* would come to be recognized.

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