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The Ready-Made: Duchamp's Thing, Daniel J. Naegele

Daniel J. Naegele

Marcel Duchamp fully appreciated the twentieth century's proclivity for certainty and classification and this attitude became an essential component of his art. In this he was not unlike Freud or Einstein or, in his immediate artistic milieu of belle ipoque Paris, Stravinsky or Raymond Roussel. Of the playwright Roussel, Duchamp once noted with admiration that "starting with a sentence ... he made a word game with kinds of parentheses ... His word play had a hidden meaning ... It was an obscurity of another order. Roussel had economically undermined the totalizing tendency of word order, throwing all of its accepted …