Eugene Jolas and the Revolution of Language

The chapter examines the concept of universal language of the American-French avant-garde poet, literary critic, and publisher Eugene Jolas. Universal language was a project aimed at an “interracial synthesis” of all the languages “being spoken in America today.” In this conception, Jolas goes beyond multilingualism as an integration of languages to a transformation of the very basis of language. Central to this transformation is Jolas’s theory of the universal language as a “mantic compost,” that is constantly changing and developing at all linguistic levels. The study focuses on such issues as the images of language in Jolas’s works; the “revolution of language” as the dominant feature of his linguistic theory; the transformation of the linguistic and communicative aspects of his aesthetic program in the process of transition from the concept of “vertical poetry” to a new understanding of creative communication between individuals, which he called “vertigralism.”