A History of the Surrealist Novel 1316514153, 9781316514153
A History of the Surrealist Novel offers a rich, long, and elastic historiography of the surrealist novel, taking into c
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A HISTORY OF THE SURREALIST NOVEL
A History of the Surrealist Novel offers a rich, long, and elastic historiography of the surrealist novel, taking into consideration an abundance of texts previously left out of critical accounts. Its twenty thematically organized chapters examine surrealist prose texts written in French, English, Spanish, German, Greek, and Japanese, from the emergence of the surrealist movement in the s and s, through the postwar and postmodern periods, and up to the contemporary moment. This approach extends received narratives regarding surrealism’s geographical locations and considers its transnational movement and modes of circulation. Moreover, it challenges critical biases that have defined surrealism in predominantly masculine terms, and which tie the movement to the interwar or early post-war years. This book will appeal both to scholars and students of surrealism and its legacies, modernist literature, and the history of the novel. is Associate Professor of English at Linköping University, Sweden. She is the author of Angela Carter and Surrealism: ‘A Feminist Libertarian Aesthetic’ (), editor of Surrealist Women’s Writing: A Critical Exploration (), and on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Surrealism and The International Society for the Study of Surrealism (ISSS).
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A HISTORY OF THE SURREALIST NOVEL ANNA WATZ Linköping University, Sweden
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Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge , United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, th Floor, New York, NY , USA Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC , Australia –, rd Floor, Plot , Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – , India Penang Road, #–/, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/ : ./ © Cambridge University Press & Assessment This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ Books Limited, Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Watz, Anna, editor. : A history of the surrealist novel / edited by Anna Watz. : Cambridge ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, . | Includes bibliographical references and index. : (print) | (ebook) | (hardback) | (paperback) | (epub) : : Surrealism (Literature) | Fiction–th century–History and criticism. : .S (print) | .S (ebook) | ./–dc/eng/ LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/ LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/ ---- Hardback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
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In memory of Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron
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Contents
List of Figures List of Contributors Acknowledgements
page ix x xvi
Introduction Anna Watz
. .
Autobiography Katharine Conley
.
Diverging Genealogies of the Surrealist Unconscious
Jean-Michel Rabaté
.
Automatism, Autobiography, and Thanatography in the Surrealist Novel
Abigail Susik
.
Urban Nature: The City in the Surrealist Novel
Effie Rentzou
.
Nostalgia and Childhood in the Surrealist Novel
David Hopkins
.
Surrealist Collage Narrative Elza Adamowicz
. .
The Surrealist Novel and the Gothic
Neil Matheson
.
Surrealism’s Anti-Bildungsroman Natalya Lusty vii
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Contents
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. The Mother Figure in the Surrealist Novel
Anna Watz
.
British Surrealism at War
Jeannette Baxter
.
Surrealist Narratives of Trauma
Patricia Allmer
. , , .
Surrealism and the Science Fiction Novel
Gavin Parkinson
.
Pataphysics
Donna Roberts
.
Alchemical Narratives
Victoria Ferentinou
.
Animals and Ecology in the Surrealist Novel
Kristoffer Noheden
. .
Nature and Surrealism in the Latin American Novel of the Tropics
María Clara Bernal
.
Surrealism, Existentialism, and Fictions of Blackness
Jonathan P. Eburne
.
Social Critique in the Japanese Post-War Surrealist Novel
Felicity Gee
.
The World of the Surrealist Novel
Delia Ungureanu
.
Feminist-Surrealism in the Contemporary Novel
Catriona McAra
Afterword: Novels Eclipsed by the Sun of Poetry?
Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron
Index
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Figures
. Michel Leiris, Ma vie par moi-même, . Pencil drawing. © Jean Jamin pour les œuvres de Michel Leiris / Photo Archives Gallimard. page . Unica Zu¨rn, Ein Märchenbuch fu¨r Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern (A Fairytale Book for Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern), . Ubu Gallery, New York. © Brinkmann & Bose Berlin, Germany. . Unica Zu¨rn, Ein Märchenbuch fu¨r Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern (A Fairytale Book for Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern), . Ubu Gallery, New York. © Brinkmann & Bose Berlin, Germany. . René Magritte, Je ne vois pas la (femme) cachée dans la forêt, . © C. Herscovici / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, . Photo credit: Banque d’Images, ADAGP / Art Resource, New York. . Dorothea Tanning, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, . Oil on canvas. Tate Collection. © ADAGP, Paris, and DACS, London, .
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Contributors
Elza Adamowicz is Professor Emerita of French Literature and Visual Culture at Queen Mary, University of London. She has published widely on surrealism and she is the author of André Breton: A Bibliography (–) (), Surrealist Collage in Text and Image: Dissecting the Exquisite Corpse (Cambridge University Press, , ), Ceci n’est pas un tableau: Les écrits surréalistes sur l’art (), Bunuel/Dali: Un chien andalou (), Dada Bodies: Between Battlefield and Fairground (), and The Eye of the Poet: André Breton and the Visual Arts (), editor of Surrealism: Crossings/Frontiers (), and co-editor of Dada and Beyond, vols. and (, ), Back to the Futurists (), and Masculin-féminin, special issue of Melusine, (). Patricia Allmer is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Edinburgh. Her books include The Traumatic Surreal: Germanophone Women Artists, Surrealism, and the Second World War (), Lee Miller: Photography, Surrealism, and Beyond (), René Magritte: Beyond Painting (), the biography René Magritte (), and the edited volume Intersections: Women Artists/Surrealism/ Modernism (). She has curated exhibitions including Taking Shots: The Photography of William S. Burroughs (The Photographers’ Gallery, ) and Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism (Manchester Art Gallery, ). Her most recent exhibition catalogue essays are on ‘Magischer Realismus, Neue Sachlichkeit, and Surrealism in Germany’, in Surrealism Beyond Borders (), ‘Fantastic Visions – Women Photographers and Surrealism’, in Fantastic Women: Surreal Worlds from Meret Oppenheim to Frida Kahlo (), and ‘Transitions: Surrealism, Exile, and Art of This Century’, in Peggy Guggenheim: The Last Dogaressa ().
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Contributors
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Jeannette Baxter is Reader in English Literature at Anglia Ruskin University. She has published widely in the field of modern and contemporary literature, presenting her work regularly to international academic and non-academic audiences, and editing Contemporary Critical Perspectives, a critically acclaimed book series on contemporary writing (Bloomsbury). Baxter is the author of J.G. Ballard’s Surrealist Imagination: Spectacular Authorship (), editor of Contemporary Critical Perspectives: J.G. Ballard (), and co-editor of Visions and Revisions: Essays on J.G. Ballard (), A Literature of Restitution: Critical Essays on W.G. Sebald (), and Contemporary Critical Perspectives: Andrea Levy (). María Clara Bernal is Associate Professor of Art History at Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. She received her MA and PhD in Modern Art History and Theory from the University of Essex in the UK. Her publications include Más alla de lo real maravilloso: El surrealismo y el caribe (, ), Displaced: Arte contemporáneo de Colombia (), Traducir la imágen: El arte en la esfera transcultural (), Latin America beyond Lo real maravilloso: Lam, surrealism and the Créolité Movement (), and Redes intelectuales: Arte y política en América Latina (). Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron was Emerita Director of Research of CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique), Paris. Her monographs and edited books include Surréalisme et le roman, – (; expanded, revised, and re-released under the title Inventer le réel: Surréalisme et le roman (–), ), Le surréalisme (), Du surréalisme et du plaisir (), ‘Il y aura une fois’: Une anthologie du surréalisme (), and Surréalismes: L’esprit et l’histoire (). In , she co-curated the exhibition L’Invention du surréalisme – Des Champs magnétiques à Nadja at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris. Katharine Conley is Professor of French and Francophone Studies at William & Mary. She is the author of Surrealist Ghostliness (), Robert Desnos, Surrealism, and the Marvelous in Everyday Life (), and Automatic Woman: The Representation of Woman in Surrealism (). She is co-editor, with Pierre Taminiaux, of Yale French Studies: Surrealism and Its Others (), with Marie-Claire Dumas of Robert Desnos pour l’an (), and, with Georgiana M.M. Colvile, of La femme s’entête: La part du féminin dans le surréalisme (). She is
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also the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters on surrealism and its legacies. Jonathan P. Eburne teaches at Penn State University, where he is a Professor of Comparative Literature, English, and French and Francophone studies. He is the author of Outsider Theory: Intellectual Histories of Unorthodox Ideas (), which received the James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association, and Surrealism and the Art of Crime (); he is co-editor of four other books. He is founding co-editor (with Amy J. Elias) and former Editorin-Chief of the award-winning ASAP/Journal, and founder and acting Past President of ISSS: the International Society for the Study of Surrealism. He is also the series editor of the ‘Refiguring Modernism’ book series at the Pennsylvania State University Press. Victoria Ferentinou is Assistant Professor at the University of Ioannina where she teaches art theory and history of art. She was the recipient of a research grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council of Great Britain and a CHS-CCS research fellowship from the University of Harvard. Ferentinou is a co-editor of the books Surrealism, Occultism, and Politics: In Search of the Marvellous () and The Dance of Moon and Sun: Ithell Colquhoun, British Women and Surrealism (). She is the organizer of the international symposium Visual Ecotopias: History, Theory, Criticism (st Biennale of Western Balkans, ) and the author of numerous publications on surrealism, including essays on Leonora Carrington, Ithell Colquhoun, Pierre Mabille, Valentine Penrose, Nanos Valaoritis, Remedios Varo, and Marie Wilson. She is currently working on a book on women artists, surrealism, and myth. Felicity Gee is Senior Lecturer in Modernism and World Cinema at the University of Exeter. She is the author of the monograph Magic Realism, World Cinema, and the Avant-Garde (), and has published widely on surrealist literature and film, affect theory, and avant-garde cinema. Her current research project is focused on the oeuvre of surrealist poet and artist Valentine Penrose, positioned within a wider interest in modernist women travellers and exilic artists. Gee’s research is resolutely interdisciplinary, straddling literary studies, art history, film-philosophy, and critical theory. David Hopkins is Professor Emeritus of Art History at the University of Glasgow. His books include Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst: The Bride Shared (), Dada and Surrealism: A Very Short Introduction (),
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Dada’s Boys: Masculinity after Duchamp (), Virgin Microbe: Essays on Dada (co-edited with Michael White, ), A Companion to Dada and Surrealism (edited, ), and After Modern Art – (second edition, ). His latest book is Dark Toys: Surrealism and the Culture of Childhood (). Natalya Lusty is Professor of Cultural Studies and an ARC Future Fellow (–) at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (, ), Dreams and Modernity: A Cultural History (with Helen Groth, ), and the co-edited volumes Photography and Ontology: Unsettling Images () and Modernism and Masculinity (Cambridge University Press, ). Most recently, she was the editor of Cambridge Critical Concepts: Surrealism (Cambridge University Press, ). Neil Matheson is Senior Lecturer in Theory and Criticism of Photography at the University of Westminster. Following doctoral research in surrealism and masculinity he has published widely on photography, surrealism, and contemporary art, including a major sourcebook, The Sources of Surrealism (). More recent publications include the jointly edited The Machine and the Ghost () and Surrealism and the Gothic: Castles of the Interior (). His most recent research has focused on Japanese photography and literature. Catriona McAra is Lecturer in Art History at the University of Aberdeen. She is a specialist in modern and contemporary art history, and a leading authority on the work of Dorothea Tanning and Leonora Carrington, with particular interests in revisionary historiography and feministsurrealist legacies in early twenty-first-century art and literary practices. McAra is author of A Surrealist Stratigraphy of Dorothea Tanning’s Chasm () and The Medium of Leonora Carrington (). Kristoffer Noheden is Research Fellow in the Department of Media Studies, Stockholm University. He has published extensively on surrealism across the art forms, in relation to film theory, ecology, and occultism. Gavin Parkinson is Professor in European Modernism at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, and was editor of the Ashgate and Routledge series ‘Studies in Surrealism’. He has published numerous essays and articles, mainly on surrealism. His books are Robert Rauschenberg and Surrealism: Art, ‘Sensibility’ and War in the s (), Enchanted
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Contributors
Ground: André Breton, Modernism and the Surrealist Appraisal of Fin-deSiècle Painting (), Futures of Surrealism (), Surrealism, Art and Modern Science (), The Duchamp Book (), and the edited collection Surrealism, Science Fiction and Comics (). Jean-Michel Rabaté, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, co-editor of the Journal of Modern Literature, co-founder and senior curator of the Slought Foundation, is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and author or editor of more than forty books on modernism, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and literary theory. Monographs include Rust (), Kafka L.O.L. (), Rire au soleil (), Beckett and Sade (Cambridge University Press, ), Rires prodigues: Rire et jouissance chez Marx, Freud et Kafka (), and James Joyce, Hérétique et Prodigue (). He has edited After Derrida (Cambridge University Press, ), The New Samuel Beckett Studies (Cambridge University Press, ), Understanding Derrida, Understanding Modernism (), Knots: PostLacanian Readings of Literature and Film () and, with Angeliki Spiropolou, Historical Modernisms: Time, History and Modernist Aesthetics (). Effie Rentzou is a Professor of French Literature in the Department of French and Italian at Princeton University. She studies avant-garde and modernist literature and art, and particularly poetics, the relation between image and text, politics and literature, and the internationalization of the avant-garde. She is the author of Littérature malgré elle: Le surréalisme et la transformation du littéraire (), which examines the construction of literary phenomena in the production of an anti-literary movement, surrealism; and co-editor of the volume : The Year of French Modernism (). Her newest book, Concepts of the World: The French Avant-garde and the Idea of the International (), explores the conceptualization of the global in the work and activities of writers and artists within and around futurism, Dada, and surrealism. Donna Roberts is a Researcher at the University of Helsinki. Her PhD from the University of Essex was on the relations between the ideas of the Grand Jeu group and the painting of the Czech artist Josef Šima. Her main areas of publication have focused on various aspects of the writings of the Grand Jeu group, Czech surrealism, the writings of Roger Caillois, surrealist periodicals, and the theme of surrealism and
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nature. She is currently completing a monograph titled ‘A Feeling for Nature’: Surrealism, from Natural History to Ecology. Abigail Susik is Associate Professor of Art History at Willamette University and Faculty Curator at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art in Oregon. She is the author of Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work (), and coeditor of Surrealism and Film after : Absolutely Modern Mysteries () and Radical Dreams: Surrealism, Counterculture, Resistance (). Susik is a founding board member of the International Society for the Study of Surrealism. Delia Ungureanu is Associate Director of Harvard’s Institute for World Literature and a tenured Associate Professor of Literary Theory in the Department of Literary Studies at the University of Bucharest. She is the author of From Paris to Tlön: Surrealism as World Literature (), and of Poetica Apocalipsei: Războiul cultural în revistele literare românești (–) (The Poetics of Apocalypse: The Cultural War in Romanian Literary Magazines, –, ). She has published essays on canon formation, modern poetry and poetics, Shakespeare, and Nabokov, and has co-edited with Thomas Pavel Romanian Literature in Today’s World, a special issue of the Journal of World Literature. Her most recent book, Time Regained: World Literature and Cinema (), redefines the artistic object beyond disciplinary borders with major filmmakers including Andrei Tarkovsky, Akira Kurosawa, Martin Scorsese, Raúl Ruíz, Wong Kar-wai, Stephen Daldry, and Paolo Sorrentino. Together with Gisèle Sapiro she has co-edited a special issue of the Journal of World Literature dedicated to the memory and legacy of Pascale Casanova, which has recently come out in book form with Brill (). With Michael Wood, she has co-edited a special issue of the Journal of World Literature dedicated to the organic relation between literature and cinema. Anna Watz is Associate Professor of English at Linköping University, Sweden. She is the author of Angela Carter and Surrealism: ‘A Feminist Libertarian Aesthetic’ () and editor of Surrealist Women’s Writing: A Critical Exploration (). She has also published extensively on the art and writing of Dorothea Tanning and Leonora Carrington, and she is currently completing a monograph titled Surrealism and Feminine Difference.
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Acknowledgements
I am immensely grateful to all the contributors, without whose intellectual vigour, dedication, and enthusiasm this volume would not have come to fruition. Extra special thanks to Jonathan P. Eburne for his exceptional insight, encouragement, generosity, and guidance. I also want to thank Katharine Conley, Natalya Lusty, and Kristoffer Noheden, who have offered invaluable intellectual support during various stages of this project, as well as the anonymous reviewers of the volume. At Cambridge University Press, warm thanks to Ray Ryan for his encouragement and belief in the project and to Edgar Mendez and Thomas Haynes for support during the preparation of the book. I gratefully acknowledge the Swedish Research Council (-) for supporting my editorial and scholarly contribution to this volume. As the manuscript of this book is progressing through the final stages of production, I have been reached by the sad news that Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron has passed away. Jacqueline, who has written the Afterword to this collection of essays, was a world-leading authority on surrealist writing – and on the surrealist novel in particular. Her book Le surréalisme et le roman, –, published in a revised edition as Inventer le réel: Le surréalisme et le roman (–) in , is essential reading for anyone working on surrealist literature and constitutes the intellectual foundation upon which many essays in this collection build their arguments. In a letter to me, Jacqueline described her two major research interests to be the surrealist novel and the work of surrealist women. And indeed, Jacqueline’s role in promoting surrealist women’s literature cannot be stressed enough. For instance, she was instrumental in the publication of the writing of Leonora Carrington in French in the s and s. She also encouraged Greta Knutson to start publishing her literary work in the s; in addition to including Knutson in the trailblazing special issue of xvi
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Obliques, La femme surréaliste, in , Jacqueline also served as a link between the artist and the literary journal Le nouveau commerce. It saddens me that Jacqueline will not be able to see the material, published version of her Afterword and the book that it closes. This book is dedicated to her memory. Anna Watz September
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Introduction Anna Watz
André Breton, in his first Manifesto of Surrealism (), famously rejects novelistic description because of its ‘vacuity’, and acerbically states that he despises ‘the realistic attitude . . . which today gives birth to these ridiculous books’ and which is ‘hostile to any intellectual or moral advancement’. ‘I loathe it’, he continues, ‘for it is made up of mediocrity, hate and dull conceit.’ Yet, this harsh appraisal of the genre of the novel, issued at the very dawn of the emergent surrealist movement, did not stand in the way of the rich corpus of surrealist novels that would be written and published in subsequent years. Writing in , the Breton of the first Manifesto had yet to experience the poetic registers and playful narrative excesses of surrealist writers such as Michel Leiris, Philippe Soupault, Robert Desnos, Georges Bataille, Julien Gracq, Vítězslav Nezval, Valentine Penrose, Joyce Mansour, André Pieyre de Mandiargues, Leonora Carrington, Ithell Colquhoun, Dorothea Tanning, Leonor Fini, Nanos Valaoritis, and Rikki Ducornet – all of whom chose the novel form for some or all of their creative writing. Their novels are intricately woven into the surrealist project, serving both as a vehicle for its political and aesthetic concerns and as a medium actively shaping surrealist thought and creative production. Despite Breton’s early condemnation, the novel form appealed to members of the surrealist movement, many of whom published at least one novel during their lifetime. Even Breton himself published three texts – Nadja (), L’amour fou (), and Arcane () – which are often referred to as novels.
André Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism (), in Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ), pp. , . Scholars have debated whether these texts should be read as poetry, autobiography, or fiction, and, if the latter category is adopted, whether they should be approached as novels or as examples of the French récit. For the purposes of this book, I will refer to them as surrealist novels. For further discussion of the categorization of Nadja in particular, see Carlos Lynes, ‘Surrealism and the Novel: Breton’s Nadja’, French Studies, / (), –.
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As scholars of the surrealist novel, such as Jacqueline ChénieuxGendron and J.H. Matthews, have rightly noted, Breton’s indictment in his first Manifesto is directed less at the novel as a medium than at the ‘realistic attitude’ that he identifies as an intrinsic feature of the late nineteenth-century French novel, or at the tendency to want ‘to make the unknown known, classifiable’ that he sees as the characteristic feature of the psychological novel. In addition to these apparent flaws of certain strands of nineteenth-century prose fiction, Breton is provoked by what he feels is literary realism’s fundamental failure to activate the reader’s imagination: I am spared not even one of the character’s slightest vacillations: will he be fairheaded? what will his name be? will we meet him during the summer? So many questions resolved once and for all, as chance directs; the only discretionary power left me is to close the book, which I am careful to do somewhere in the vicinity of the first page.
The kind of writing Breton describes here might be compared to what Roland Barthes later referred to as the ‘readerly text’, which casts the reader as nothing more than a passive consumer: ‘instead of functioning himself, instead of gaining access to the magic of the signifier, to the pleasure of writing’, Barthes states of the consumer of the readerly text, ‘he is left with no more than the poor freedom either to accept or reject the text’. Breton, who ostensibly chooses to reject this type of text, remarks that such a ‘purely informative style’ amounts to ‘nothing but so many superimposed images taken from some stock catalogue.’ ‘The circumstantial, needlessly specific nature’ of this type of writing, in which characters are ‘readymade’ and plots as predictable as ‘A simple game of chess’, ‘leads me to believe’, Breton concludes, ‘that [these authors] are perpetrating a joke at my expense’. Instead espousing narrative hybridity, lyricism, black humour, and open-endedness, Breton would go on to assert in Nadja () that he is only interested in ‘books left ajar, like doors’. Breton here gestures towards what Barthes describes as the writerly text, or the text of bliss, which ‘imposes a state of loss, [it is] the text that discomforts . . . unsettles
Ibid., p. . See J.H. Matthews, Surrealism and the Novel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ), pp. –; see also Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron, Le surréalisme et le roman, – (Paris: L’Age d’homme, ), and the revised edition, Inventer le reel: Le surréalisme et le roman (–) (Paris: Éditions Honoré Champion, ). Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism, p. . Roland Barthes, S/Z (), trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill & Wang, ), p. . Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism, p. . André Breton, Nadja (), trans. Richard Howard (London: Penguin, ), p. .
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Introduction
the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistence of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language’. Barthes’s text of bliss shares many characteristics with the surrealist vision of literature as potentially transformative and revolutionary. Rather than instructing the reader in how to think and feel, surrealist texts invite us to make our own associations; rather than dealing in detailed descriptions, they create sparks that seek to ignite our imagination and provoke our unconscious desires to surface. They are less interested in resolving narrative threads than in retaining a kernel of unknowability and opacity. Typically rejecting the logic of cause and effect, surrealist writing, moreover, is distinguished less by what Denis Hollier terms ‘the lack of knowledge of its final destination’ than by ‘the identical position in which this lack places both the reader and the author in the face of a text whose unfolding neither one nor the other controls, and about which both of them know neither the future nor the ending’. And as Chénieux-Gendron aptly notes, surrealist novels, like surrealist poetry, involve the reader in a liberatory project: ‘the provocative emotions aroused by the beauty of these texts compel the reader . . . to live poetically according to the myths they bring to life’. Scholarly accounts often lock the origins of the novel genre in relation to the style and epistemology of realism. Ian Watt’s classic study, The Rise of the Novel (), posits the thought of humanist philosophers such as René Descartes and John Locke as essential for the emergence of the English novel in the early eighteenth century; the novel’s pervasive realism, in Watt’s argument, reflects the Enlightenment urge truthfully and objectively to represent reality, from the empirical perspective of the individual. In Fredric Jameson’s Marxist analysis in The Political Unconscious (), furthermore, the realist nineteenth-century novel reproduces ‘the construction of the bourgeois subject in emergent capitalism’, thus both mirroring and re-enforcing the class structures and individualist underpinnings of the Victorian era.
Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (), trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill & Wang, ), p. . Denis Hollier, ‘Surrealist Precipitates’, October, (Summer ), – (at p. ). Hollier is referring specifically to Breton’s Nadja in this discussion. Chénieux-Gendron, Inventer le réel, p. . Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (; Berkely and Los Angeles: University of California Press, ). Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, : Cornell University Press, ), p. . However, the nineteenth century did not only produce realist and naturalist novels; as will be noted below, popular fiction in the form of, for example, serialized adventure stories and erotic and pornographic writing flourished during the Victorian and Belle Époque eras.
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With the advent, around the turn of the century, of the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and others, the view espoused by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century realist traditions of the subject as sovereign and autonomous began to be fundamentally unsettled. Drawing on these theories, the nascent modernist movement regarded realism as an inadequate form with which to represent the complexities of twentiethcentury modernity and urban everyday life. In his essay ‘The Crisis of the Novel’, Walter Benjamin describes this clash between the established realist novel and the new modernist text. Breton and the surrealists, therefore, were hardly alone in attacking the bourgeois literary forms that had emerged out of the previous centuries. What Breton did not know when he penned his renunciation of novelistic description in , was that the novel, true to its etymology, was to become, in the course of the next few decades, a key instrument for innovative, experimental, and groundbreaking forms of writing. As Guido Mazzoni observes, the novel, being ‘the first important literary form to be born outside the age-old norms, both written and unwritten, that governed ancient and classicist poetics’, is characterized by its formal malleability and adaptability: ‘it is devoid of rules, it changes constantly, and absorbs the other genres’. As we have established thus far, the surrealist novel breaks with the harshly realist or naturalist style of novelists such as Stendhal, Honoré de Balzac, and Émile Zola, or the psychological narratives of Fyodor Dostoevsky (whom Breton overtly mocks in the first Manifesto). As Matthews rightly notes, however, to find an adequate and allencompassing definition of the surrealist novel is impossible; what marks surrealist prose fiction is rather an ‘instinctive antipathy’ towards literary realism than a set of fixed or unifying characteristics. Indeed, surrealism, whether in painting or writing, could never be reduced to a ‘style’. As David Gascoyne declared as early as , ‘Surrealism is by no means simply a recipe, or “specific method of creation”. Rather it is a starting point for works of a most striking diversity, capable of almost infinite variation and development.’ Thus, A History of the Surrealist Novel
See Walter Benjamin, ‘The Crisis of the Novel’ (), in Benjamin, Selected Writings: –, vol. , ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, : Harvard University Press, ), pp. –. Guido Mazzoni, Theory of the Novel (), trans. Zakiya Hanafi (Cambridge, : Harvard University Press, ), p. . Mazzoni’s definition builds on the critical writing of German Romantic Friedrich Schlegel. Matthews, Surrealism and the Novel, p. . David Gascoyne, A Short Survey of Surrealism (; London: Routledge, ), p. .
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Introduction
does not seek to establish a categorical theory of the surrealist novel or provide a set of classificatory or stylistic criteria determining what belongs to this genre. The texts discussed in this volume, in fact, sometimes fit rather uneasily with established definitions of the novel genre. For example, while a novel is generally considered to be a mostly fictional text of a certain length written in prose, many surrealist novels are not only comparatively short, they also often blur the boundaries between fiction, autobiography, and the self-conscious récit. Prose, moreover, is too constrictive a term to describe the intensely poetic and defamiliarizing narratives contained in surrealist novels and novellas. This tense relation between surrealist narrative and established definitions of the novel form did not, however, hamper the production of surrealist novelistic writing. Indeed, the medium of the novel clearly was, and remains, capable of accommodating and nurturing the creative energies unique to the surrealist project. Moreover, as this volume will showcase, the dialogue between surrealism and the novel also impacted on the development and redefinition of the latter in the second half of the twentieth century. This book thus sees the novel as a medium defined by malleability and plasticity and capable of change and expansion. Indeed, the very collocation ‘surrealist novel’ simultaneously eschews narrow and traditional definitions of the novel genre and troubles strict distinctions and separations between literary forms such as poetry, fiction, and autobiography. Breton’s evocative characterization of surrealist prose narratives as open doors opens out to multiple meanings and associations; it signals, at once, the reader’s invitation into the text as active cocreator and visionary, the text’s resistance to closure and resolution, the free passage it forges between dream and wakefulness, unconscious and conscious, as well as its refusal to submit to absolute generic categorizations and boundaries.
I thus disagree with Paul C. Ray, who argued in that surrealism is fundamentally incompatible with the novel form. Following a strict, traditional definition of the genre, he states that: ‘The novel, by its very nature, needs time in which to unfold and therefore postulates the reality of time, even when its object is to destroy that reality . . . The surrealist . . . by means of his images and of his ‘encounters’ – which are essentially, surrealist images projected onto another dimension – wants to short circuit the long Proustian process.’ He concludes: ‘The novel, then, unless it attempts the large-scale “mythic” effect, must be content with surrealist effects on a small scale – that is, with surrealist or quasi-surrealist images or situations produced for purposes other than surrealist ones.’ Paul C. Ray, ‘Some Notes on Surrealism in the Novel’, Romance Notes, / (Autumn ), – (at pp. –).
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Surrealism and the Novel: Genealogies and Revisions Breton’s famous list of past writers who ‘could pass for Surrealists’ in the first Manifesto includes a host of novelists: from eighteenth-century writers Jonathan Swift and the Marquis de Sade, via Romantic novelists Victor Hugo and Marceline Debordes-Valmore, to turn-of-the-century authors Alfred Jarry and Raymond Roussel. Breton makes it clear that writers who valued the marvellous rather than heeding Cartesian, positivist frameworks of logic and reason were in fact exempted from his renunciation of the novel genre, stating that ‘only the marvelous is capable of fecundating works which belong to an inferior category such as the novel.’ Matthew Lewis’s Gothic novel The Monk, for instance, ‘is an admirable proof of this . . . this book, from beginning to end, and in the purest way imaginable, exercises an exalting effect only upon that part of the mind which aspires to leave the earth’. Indeed, the Gothic novel was to exert a profound influence on many members of the surrealist movement, with writers such as Sade, Lewis, Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, and Emily Brontë regularly being invoked as key sources of inspiration. Moreover, Decadent and Symbolist novelists, such as Comte de Lautréamont (Isidor Ducasse), Auguste de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, and J.K. Huysmans, also left a clear mark on surrealist writing; so, too, did novel authors playing with black humour and language, such as Swift and Lewis Carroll. Moreover, echoes of various forms of nineteenth-century popular fiction, such as erotic and pornographic narratives and mass-market adventure stories, make themselves known in surrealism; indeed, the co-authored series of crime novels Fantômas, described by Guillaume Apollinaire as ‘one of the richest works of literary imagination ever produced’, served a pivotal role in inspiring early surrealist writing. As Robin Walz notes, the surrealists valued Fantômas for ‘operat[ing] outside logic and deduction and [offering] no moral or social restitution’. ‘Instead’, he continues, ‘it was a récit impossible, an impossible story of displaced identities, detours, paradoxes, and violence.’ Thus, the philosophy and aesthetics of surrealism emerged
Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism, p. . Ibid., pp. –. See André Breton, Anthology of Black Humor (; rev. edns and ), trans. Mark Polizzotti (San Francisco: City Lights Books, ). James Cannon, The Paris Zone: A Cultural History, – (London and New York: Routledge, ), p. . Robin Walz, Pulp Surrealism: Insolent Popular Culture in Early Twentieth-Century Paris (Oakland: University of California Press, ), p. . For more on surrealism and Fantômas, see Dominique Kalifa, The Belle Époque: A Cultural History, Paris and Beyond (), trans. Susan Emanuel (New York: Columbia University Press, ).
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Introduction
in a close dialogue with a cultural legacy of which (non-realist) novelistic writing was a crucial part. Breton and Philippe Soupault’s jointly written, automatic text Les champs magnétiques (The Magnetic Fields, ) is generally considered to be the first surrealist work of literature (even though ‘surrealism’ would not be adopted as the name for the group of writers and thinkers until ). Louis Aragon’s novel Anicet ou le panorama (Anicet or the Panorama) followed shortly after, in . The rest of the decade of the s gave birth to a wealth of surrealist novels in French, such as René Crevel’s Détours (Detours, ) and Mon corps et moi (My Body and I, ); Aragon’s Le paysan de Paris (Paris Peasant, ) and Le con d’Irène (Irene’s Cunt, ); Breton’s Nadja (); Soupault’s Le bon apôtre (The Good Apostle, ) and Les dernières nuits de Paris (The Last Nights in Paris, ); Robert Desnos’s La liberté ou l’amour! (Liberty or Love!, ); Michel Leiris’s Aurora (written –; pub. ); and Georges Bataille’s Histoire de l’œil (Story of the Eye, ). The final year of the decade of the s saw the publication of Max Ernst’s first collage novel, La femme têtes (The Hundred Headless Woman, ). This diverse corpus of texts is loosely united by its challenge to traditional realism through techniques such as automatism and collage and through paradigms such as the marvellous or psychoanalysis. True to the crossdisciplinary and genre-bending underpinnings of surrealism, many of these novels blur the boundaries between fiction, poetry, documentary, and autobiography; the multimodal collage novel, moreover, further complicates traditional and fixed definitions of the novel. Eschewing the law of cause and effect, these texts, in the words of Elizabeth Brereton Allen, claim ‘no need for any sort of logic or rational justification for action outside of desire itself’. Even though surrealist writing in the s was predominantly francophone, the movement was from its inception embedded in transnational literary networks, indicated already in Breton’s list of surrealist predecessors,
The illustrations provided by surrealist artists such as Hans Bellmer and Leonor Fini for works such as Sade’s Juliette () and Pauline Réage’s Histoire d’O () further bespeak the entanglement between surrealism and the novel form. For more on this, see Alyce Mahon, The Marquis de Sade and the Avant-Garde (Princeton University Press, ), pp. –, and Renée Riese Hubert, Surrealism and the Book (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, ). It is important to note, however, that for the early surrealists, ‘literature’ was a contested term. Indeed, the ironic title of the surrealist journal Littérature, founded by Breton, Soupault, and Louis Aragon in , was meant to signal their contempt for the established institution of ‘Literature’. Elizabeth Brereton Allen, ‘Surrealist Novel’, in Paul Schellinger (ed.), Encyclopedia of the Novel, vol. (London and New York: Routledge, ), p. .
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many of whom were anglophone writers. Indeed, noting that Breton, from early on, was actively promoting surrealism’s spread across the globe, Delia Ungureanu posits that ‘Surrealism’s international character is inborn in the movement’ and ‘contributed to its duration and lasting impact’. The s were a decade of expansion and wide dissemination of surrealist ideas, with surrealist groups emerging in, for example, Czechoslovakia, Britain, Scandinavia, Greece, Egypt, Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Japan. The Parisbased circle around Breton also garnered many new members in the s. Breton himself published his exploration of surrealist love and desire, L’amour fou (Mad Love) in , a novel that in many ways functions as a sequel to Nadja. The s and World War II brought further geographic dispersion, exile, and forced migration for many Europe-based surrealists. As a result of this, as well as the continued international spread of surrealist ideas, new surrealist constellations formed in, for example, the United States, Mexico, and Martinique. In , Breton, soon to be back in Paris after spending the war years in New York, published the final instalment in his trilogy of interconnected novels, Arcane – a text which bears the mark of the traumatic experience of war. British-Mexican artist and writer Leonora Carrington similarly worked through the horrors of war and fascism in her memoir Down Below () and her novel The Stone Door (written in the mid-s but not published until ). Both Breton’s and Carrington’s texts also register the deepened surrealist interest in alchemy, hermetic traditions, magic, myth, and the occult, which had been consolidated with the publication of Pierre Mabille’s Mirror of the Marvelous in . The ripples of surrealism’s investment in esoteric traditions would be a shaping force on the movement’s novelistic production for decades to come. If we examine surrealist publications from the s, like Littérature and La révolution surréaliste, it might look as if the Paris-based surrealist group at this point consisted exclusively of men; yet many women writers, such as Lise Deharme, Denise Lévy, Simone Breton, and Valentine Penrose, were active participants in the movement’s writerly pursuits despite the fact that their work does not appear in its official publications. However, the s and s recorded a significant shift as many more women artists and writers became affiliated with the movement and their work began to enjoy more visibility and inclusion. This trend continued in the s and s, decades that produced numerous surrealist novels
Delia Ungureanu, From Paris to Tlön: Surrealism as World Literature (London: Bloomsbury, ), p. .
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Introduction
and novellas by women writers, many of which elaborated and extended surrealism’s forays into alchemy and the occult. Carrington’s masterpiece, The Hearing Trumpet, written in the s (but not published until ), and Ithell Colquhoun’s Goose of Hermogenes () are paragons of the surrealist esoteric novel. Echoes of the Gothic novel, which are visible in texts from the two previous decades – such as Julien Gracq’s Au château d’Argol (The Castle of Argol, ) and Czech surrealist Vítězslav Nezval’s Valerie a týden divů (Valerie and her Week of Wonders; written in ; published in ) – continue to mark novels and novellas written in the s and s. Joyce Mansour’s Les gisants satisfaits (The Satisfied Recumbent Statues, ) and Valentine Penrose’s Erzsébet Báthory: La comtesse sanglante (The Bloody Countess: The Atrocities of Erzsebet Bathory, ) stand out for their elaboration of a darkly Gothic and Sadeian erotic universe. The hallucinatory fictions of André Pieyre de Mandiargues and Unica Zu¨rn, also written in the s, similarly explore such perilous and sado-erotic territories. Despite the fact that surrealist writer Jean Schuster had announced the official end of the movement in , three years after the death of Breton, surrealist activities continued to flourish around the globe throughout the s and onwards, many of which resulted in novels. The Paris-based artist Leonor Fini, who had become associated with the surrealist movement in the s, and who had up until then mainly focused her energies on visual art, published three novels in quick succession in the s. American surrealist Dorothea Tanning, who had similarly previously devoted most of her time to painting, drawing, and sculpture, wrote and self-published a novel, Abyss, in the late s (revised and republished in under the title Chasm: A Weekend). Czech surrealist Eva Švankmajerová’s highly experimental novella Jeskyně Baradla (Baradla Cave) was first released in the s (as an underground Samizdat publication), and subsequently republished in . The poet Gellu Naum, who had founded the Romanian surrealist group in , published a novel, Zenobia, in , and Greek surrealist poet Nanos Valaoritis published a string of novels in the s and s. American artist and writer Rikki Ducornet, who became involved with the Chicago Surrealist Group in the s, began a prolific literary career in the s and continues to publish surrealist fictions; her most recent novel, Trafik, which blends science fiction and surrealism, was released in .
Jean Schuster, ‘Le quatrième chant’, Le Monde, October , www.lemonde.fr/archives/article/ ///le-quatrieme-chant__.html (accessed May ).
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Literary forms inevitably register cultural paradigm shifts. One such turn, as indicated above, occurred around the turn of the last century, when the novel form transitioned from ‘a genre with more or less codified rules . . . to a protean écriture combining lyricism, testimony, confession, essay, and manifesto, forms that were better suited to examine the mind thinking and the hand writing than to create characters or describe “slices of life”’. Another paradigm shift can be located in the post-second-worldwar period, characterized as it was by globalization, decolonialization, the Cold War, and the rise of neoliberalism. Moreover, during this time the emergence of critical theory started making a distinct mark on the novel. John Barth’s essay, ‘The Literature of Exhaustion’, famously suggested that the emergent postmodern era had rendered the novel form obsolete. ‘Literary forms certainly have histories and historical contingencies’, he claimed, ‘and it may well be that the novel’s time as a major art form is up, as the “times” of classical tragedy, Italian and German grand opera, or the sonnet sequence came to be.’ Marked by an aesthetic of citation and performance, the postmodern text, written by ‘an author who imitates the role of Author’, could, for Barth, only ‘imitate the form of the novel’. Yet, despite cultural debates regarding the putative ‘death of the novel’ in the ensuing years, the novel survived this crisis too, by once again proving its generic and formal plasticity and by renegotiating its terms and definitions. Techniques, modes, and ideas originating from surrealist art and writing had an integral part to play in this renewal of the novel in the post-war era. French authors associated with the nouveau roman in the s, such as Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute, followed in the footsteps of surrealist novelists in their rejection of realism, the traditional omniscient narrative perspective, and conventional plot structures. Nineteen-fifties science-fiction writers such as Michel Carrouges and Richard Matheson worked surrealist themes into their novels. Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier’s magic-realist classic Los pasos perdidos (The Lost Steps, ), furthermore, engages intimately with the surrealist marvellous. American author William Burroughs’s s and s cut-up novels are clearly indebted to techniques such as Dada découpé and surrealist collage. B.S. Johnson, Alan Burns, and other members of the British experimental circle in the
Allen, ‘Surrealist Novel’, p. . John Barth, ‘The Literature of Exhaustion’ (), in Barth, The Friday Book: Essays and Other Non-Fiction (Baltimore, : Johns Hopkins University Press, ), p. . Ibid., p. .
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Introduction
s, drew heavily on surrealism and other avant-garde predecessors. The oneiric and absurdist s fictions of Japanese novelist Abe Kōbō are steeped in French as well as Japanese surrealist traditions. Anglophone postmodernist novelists such as J.G. Ballard, Angela Carter, and Kathy Acker have overtly acknowledged their indebtedness to surrealist aesthetics and politics, and their writings often engage intertextually with surrealist art and literature. A critical dialogue with surrealism, moreover, can be traced in novelistic dramatizations of colonial violence by, for example, Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé and Cameroonian writer Calixthe Beyala. These surrealist legacies extend into the new millennium, with writers such as Ali Smith, Heidi Sopinka, Chloe Aridjis, China Miéville, and Helen Oyeyemi regularly citing surrealist art and writings as having had an impact on their work.
Previous Criticism: Surrealism, the Novel, and the Surrealist Novel Recent years have witnessed a dramatic increase in both popular and academic interest in surrealism. In the autumn of , the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York hosted a major exhibition, Surrealism Beyond Borders (October to January ; the exhibition subsequently travelled to Tate Modern, London, February to August ), which aimed to showcase the international scope and transnational networks informing the movement. There has also been a proliferation of book-length overviews of surrealism in the last few years; Natalya Lusty’s edited volume Cambridge Critical Concepts: Surrealism was published in (Cambridge University Press), and the ambitious three-volume International Encyclopedia of Surrealism (Bloomsbury), edited by Michael Richardson, Dawn Ades, Krzysztof Fijalkowski, Steven Harris, and Georges Sebbag, was released in . A Companion to Dada and Surrealism, edited by David Hopkins (Blackwell), and Surrealism: Key Concepts, edited by Michael Richardson and Krzysztof Fijalkowski (Routledge), both came out in . The growing interest in surrealism is, furthermore, demonstrated by the numerous recent studies on specific surrealist artists and writers, surrealist themes, or surrealist genres. While
Monographs and edited collections from the last five years include: David Hopkins, Dark Toys: Surrealism and the Culture of Childhood (New Haven, : Yale University Press, ); Karla Huebner, Magnetic Woman: Toyen and the Surrealist Erotic (University of Pittsburgh Press, ); Victoria Carruthers, Dorothea Tanning: Transformations (London: Lund Humphries, ); Mahon, Marquis de Sade; Susan Laxton, Surrealism at Play (Durham, : Duke University Press, ); Gavin Parkinson, Enchanted Ground: André Breton, Modernism and the Surrealist Appraisal of
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some of these are interdisciplinary and focus on visual art, literature, as well as film, the majority are framed primarily through an art-historical perspective. The predominant art-historical focus in surrealism studies of the past fifty years has produced a body of criticism that jars somewhat with the origins of the movement, which were distinctly textual and poetic. A History of the Surrealist Novel, therefore, seeks to redress this imbalance and contribute to a more composite and multi-genre narrative of the movement. Scholarship on the novel has also proliferated in the last few decades. A key focal point in world literature studies, the novel has functioned as a lens through which to understand the dissemination and mode of circulation of literature across the globe. A world-literature perspective, in the words of Lorna Burns, ‘reveals an attentiveness to the transnational circulation of texts, and, as such, gestures towards an expanded canon that bears signs of hybridity, born from internationalization and the meeting of diverse cultures’. The publication of Franco Moretti’s five-volume reference work Il romanzo in – signalled a thoroughgoing reassessment of the novel from a multilinguistic, transhistorical, and transnational perspective. A slightly abridged (but nevertheless monumental) English translation, The Novel (Stanford University Press), appeared in two volumes in . The twelve-volume Oxford History of the Novel in English (–) similarly investigates worldwide English-language prose fiction from the late fifteenth century to today.
Fin-de-Siècle Painting (London: Bloomsbury, ); Kristen Strom, The Animal Surreal (London and New York: Routledge, ); Neil Matheson, Surrealism and the Gothic: Castles of the Interior (London and New York: Routledge, ); Victoria Clouston, André Breton in Exile: The Poetics of ‘Occultation’, – (London and New York: Routledge, ); Patricia Allmer, Lee Miller: Photography, Surrealism, and Beyond (Manchester University Press, ); Kristoffer Noheden, Surrealism, Cinema, and the Search for a New Myth (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, ); Catriona McAra, A Surrealist Stratigraphy of Dorothea Tanning’s Chasm (London and New York: Routledge, ); Kristoffer Noheden and Abigail Susik (eds.), Surrealism and Film: Absolutely Modern Mysteries (Manchester University Press, ); Anna Watz (ed.), Surrealist Women’s Writing: A Critical Exploration (Manchester University Press, ); Jonathan P. Eburne and Catriona McAra (eds.), Leonora Carrington and the International Avant-Garde (Manchester University Press, ); Tessel M. Bauduin, Victoria Ferentinou, and Daniel Zamani (eds.), Surrealism, Occultism and Politics: In Search of the Marvellous (London and New York: Routledge, ); Patricia Allmer (ed.), Intersections: Women Artists/Surrealism/Modernism (Manchester University Press, ). Lorna Burns, Postcolonialism after World Literature: Relation, Equality, Dissent (London: Bloomsbury, ), p. . For an excellent overview of both foundational and recent scholarship on the novel, see Patrick Parrinder, Andrew Nash, and Nicola Wilson, ‘Introduction’, in Patrick Parrinder, Andrew Nash, and Nicola Wilson (eds.), New Directions in the History of the Novel (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, ), pp. –.
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Introduction
This current double boom in scholarship on surrealism and on the novel form has, somewhat surprisingly, not yet resulted in any substantial (re-) consideration of the surrealist novel. This is remarkable given that the existing studies on the subject are, by contemporary standards, largely outmoded in focus and strikingly incomplete in scope. To date, only two book-length studies and a handful of short essays or handbook entries on the topic have been published. The pioneering critical appraisal of the surrealist novel in English was Armand Hoog’s brief essay ‘The Surrealist Novel’, published in a special issue of Yale French Studies devoted to the question ‘What’s Novel in the Novel’. Situated among articles with titles such as ‘The Young Novelists’ and ‘Is There a New Ethic in Fiction?’, as well as pieces focusing on specific French authors (André Malraux, Raymond Queneau, Noël Devaulx, Roman Gary, Roger Nimier, Maurice Blanchot, Jean Genet, Albert Camus, Georges Bernanos, and Jean Cayrol), Hoog’s overview deftly frames Breton’s rejection of the novel genre not merely in relation to nineteenth-century realism but more specifically to the literary climate in Breton’s contemporary France. Hoog explains that in , when Breton wrote the Manifesto of Surrealism, A novel by the lamentable Thierry Sandre had just received the Goncourt prize. The French Academy was bestowing its literary award on Abel Bonnard’s affected descriptions. An amusing reporter, who for a long time imagined himself a novelist, Paul Morand, had been granted the Prix de la Renaissance. Anatole France, and Barres, and Loti had just died at the height of their fame; three enemies of surrealism, really three number one enemies, since they were of equal importance. It would be difficult to think that Breton’s condemnation of the novel was not more especially directed against certain novelists.
Thus anchoring Breton’s rebuttal in its historical context, Hoog makes a case for considering the novel form as a crucial vehicle for the surrealist project, after which he proceeds to offer a series of examples of surrealist novels that ‘are directed toward rediscovery of new innocence, the golden age, and the hymns of liberated humanity’: Aragon’s Anicet and Le libertinage (The Debauchery, ), Leiris’s Aurora, and Julien Gracq’s Au château d’Argol and Un beau ténébreux (A Dark Stranger, ) are dealt with in some depth, whereas writers such as Gisèle Prassinos, Louis Scutenaire, Georges Limbour, André Pieyre de Mandiargues, René Roger,
Armand Hoog, ‘The Surrealist Novel’, Yale French Studies, (), – (at p. ). Ibid., p. .
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Marcel Schneider, and Maurice Fourré are mentioned in passing. The essay’s date of publication () and the limited francophone focus of the journal for which it was designed now make Hoog’s overview of the surrealist novel appear narrow and inadequate, despite his insightful analysis of what provoked Breton’s exasperation with the genre. Breton’s condemnation of the novel genre would continue to haunt scholarship on the surrealist novel. Like Hoog, Matthews opens his Surrealism and the Novel – the first and, to this date, only anglophone book-length piece of scholarship on the surrealist novel – with a reappraisal of Breton’s repudiation, interpreting his statements as an attack on ‘the realist attitude for flattering public opinion in its lowest taste’. ‘What Breton depreciates above all’, Matthews concludes, ‘are the limitations imposed upon the writer’s ambitions by the “style of pure information” he associates with realism.’ In a series of perceptive close readings of works by René Crevel, Robert Desnos, Giorgio de Chirico, Gracq, Leiris, Joyce Mansour, Fourré, and Alain Jouffroy, Matthews’s study successfully carves out a space in surrealist studies for the novelistic genre. However, from a contemporary perspective, Matthews’s Surrealism and the Novel can be seen to suffer from the same limitations as Hoog’s early piece. One profound problem with these truncated and linguistically circumscribed historiographies is that most surrealist novels by women were published after the mid-s – and many of these were written in languages other than French. Thus, in addition to its obvious datedness, the foundational anglophone scholarship on the surrealist novel also appears outmoded in terms of its profound and problematic masculine, white, and francophone focus. Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron’s rigorous Le surréalisme et le roman, – (; rev. edn , titled Inventer le réel: Le surréalisme et le roman (–)) expands the critical field of the surrealist novel by substantially considering the writing of women surrealists such as Carrington, Colette Peignot, and Gisèle Prassinos. Breton’s views on the novel genre hold sway over Chénieux-Gendron’s study too; indeed, the book is framed as a negotiation of Breton’s rejection of the novel form and an attempt to ‘understand the significance, the simultaneously uncertain
Matthews, Surrealism and the Novel, p. . Whereas Hoog’s account is altogether based on male authors, Matthews does discuss one text by a woman surrealist, Joyce Mansour’s Les gisants satisfaits. For an analysis that largely rehearses the narratives set out by Hoog and Matthews, see Allen, ‘Surrealist Novel’, pp. –.
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Introduction
and profound pertinence’ of the surrealist novel. Even though the novelistic canon the book rehearses is rather narrow (in its focus on the period between and ), the study’s philosophical exploration of the way in which the concerns of surrealist prose fiction intersect with certain strands of twentieth-century philosophy, particularly the philosophy of language, has made a strong imprint on contemporary conceptions and definitions of the surrealist novel, specifically, and on surrealist scholarship more broadly. In line with Chénieux-Gendron’s philosophical probing, the present volume aims to contribute to a richer understanding of surrealism as a movement by investigating the ways in which the novel medium shaped and was shaped by surrealism’s various intellectual, aesthetic, psychological, and political concerns. Moreover, it seeks to move away from the Eurocentric and largely francophone definition of surrealism which dominated in early appraisals of the movement, instead advocating a conception of surrealism as at core transnational, multilingual, and multicultural, and as stretching across the whole of the twentieth century and into the new millennium. The texts explored in the following chapters recast the surrealist novelistic canon along precisely these lines. In order to be able to access such an inclusive corpus of texts, we must briefly consider the way in which the novel, as a literary form, circulates in the world not just as a container of ideas, but as a commodity. As material objects, novels are carefully designed to appeal to audiences’ aesthetic tastes and stamped with critical accolades in order to secure their cultural capital. Such economic interests clearly have an impact on the formation and sustainment of any novelistic canon. The majority of surrealist texts remain outside the global market; they were typically published in small print-runs, and are now only available in specialized libraries or rare second-hand bookshops (and usually very highly priced). If we were to construct a surrealist novelistic canon based on what remains in print, it would consist mainly of the well-known male surrealists from the original group (e.g. Breton, Aragon, Leiris), most of whose novels have been reissued many times and are currently published by Gallimard, France’s most established literary publishing house. Many of these have appeared in English translation; typically, however, in limited print-runs published by university presses or highly niched publishing houses. Three novels stand out by their status as international ‘best-sellers’, having been published in
Chénieux-Gendron, Le surréalisme et le roman, p. .
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Penguin’s Twentieth Century Classics series: Breton’s Nadja, Bataille’s Story of the Eye, and Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet. Although there are overlaps, the history of the surrealist novel as commodity is thus not entirely consistent with the surrealist novelistic canon established in previous scholarship. A History of the Surrealist Novel maintains a critical approach to both these canonical narratives, seeking to offer a history that explicitly addresses texts that were left out of earlier studies on the topic, and also by excavating texts that have been rendered obscure by their limited print-runs and narrow circulation. It also explicitly seeks to expand the Eurocentric focus of much previous scholarship. By examining surrealist novels, by men and women, written in French, English, Spanish, German, Greek, and Japanese, from the emergence of the surrealist movement in the s and s, through the post-war and postmodern periods to its contemporary iterations, the chapters in this book effect a much-needed revision of the historiography of the surrealist novel. This revision seeks to challenge critical biases that have defined surrealism in predominantly masculine and European terms, and which tie the movement to the interwar or early post-war years.
Rewriting the Surrealist Novelistic Canon Although following a loosely chronological structure, the book is organized in a way that seeks to tease out themes and concerns that resonate between surrealist novels, and texts of related novelistic traditions, across both time and space. Furthermore, the volume seeks to investigate and interrogate the surrealist novel from a vast set of perspectives, framed in relation to questions of form, history, politics, geography, and genre. The first part, entitled ‘Marvellous Beginnings’, focuses on surrealist novels written (primarily) in the s and explores the ways in which these texts challenge literary realism or the traditional novelistic form. As such, this section revolves to a great extent around the ‘canon’ of novels established in the accounts of Hoog, Matthews, and Chénieux-Gendron. In the volume’s first chapter, Katharine Conley examines the autobiographical underpinnings of much surrealist novelistic writing. Focusing on texts by Breton, Desnos, Aragon, Carrington, Tanning, and Kay Sage, Conley demonstrates that the use of the autobiographical mode in these works is aimed not merely at capturing the self but at unveiling previously unsuspected commonalities within the self; to bring to light previously unknown inner knowledge buried in the psyche. Jean-Michel Rabaté, in Chapter , investigates the ways in which Breton and Aragon, in both their
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Introduction
philosophical tracts and their s novels, actively engage with Freud’s work. However, Rabaté shows, despite their shared source material, the two authors display radically different understandings of psychoanalysis and of the workings of the unconscious. Abigail Susik’s Chapter probes the question of surrealist automatism – the attempt to record, in writing, ‘the actual functioning of thought’ – paying close attention to the way in which this technique intersects with the autobiographical impulse in many surrealist novels. Focusing in particular on Leiris’s Aurora, Susik highlights how a combination of automatism, documentary, and autobiography becomes a deconstructive surrealist technique for challenging the traditional novel and its ambition to portray supposedly objective characters. Effie Rentzou, in Chapter , examines Aragon’s quest, in Le paysan de Paris, to find a modern mythology in the city. Focusing on the paradoxically integral role of nature in Aragon’s account of urban life, Rentzou argues that the natural functions here as the unrepresentable unconscious of modernity. Contrasting with the depiction of the city in realist narratives, the modern city in the surrealist novel is not entirely separable from nature, nor is it possible fully to capture in representational language. In Chapter , David Hopkins examines surrealism’s celebration of childhood in Giorgio de Chirico’s Hebdomeros () and Leiris’s L’âge d’homme (Manhood, ). Framing his analysis of these two novels in relation to Svetlana Boym’s recent work on nostalgia, Hopkins investigates the fine line between critically productive nostalgia and narcissistic self-indulgence. Elza Adamowicz, in Chapter , addresses the collage novels of Max Ernst, in which the logical flow of conventional narrative, grounded in spatio-temporal relations, is replaced by the elliptical mode of juxtaposition, designed to prompt the reader/viewer into forging new links between disparate elements or to recall past or repressed memories. Considering the way in which previous analyses of these oblique texts have been conducted through the interpretive frameworks of psychoanalysis and alchemy, Adamowicz instead suggests that they are better approached as narratives of possibility and liberation. Whereas the first section of the book centres primarily on early surrealist efforts to challenge the formal and narrative conventions of the novel, the remaining three sections of the book take a transhistorical view, reading surrealist novels from different eras through a number of thematic prisms. The five chapters in Part II, ‘Transgression and Excess’, read the surrealist novel in relation to some of its key literary influences and discourses of
Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism, p. .
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engagement or contestation (the Gothic, the dark eroticism of the Marquis de Sade, the Bildungsroman, and the Freudian narrative of gendered and sexual development) as well as its exploration and processing of violence and traumatic historical events. In Chapter , Neil Matheson considers the formative influence of the Gothic tradition on a selection of post-war women surrealist novelists: Ithell Colquhoun, Valentine Penrose, and Joyce Mansour. Demonstrating how these writers reinterpret surrealist eroticism from the standpoint of the female body and through the framework of the Gothic, Matheson argues that they enable the articulation of hitherto unwritten forms of female interiority. Natalya Lusty, in Chapter , traces the antiBildungsroman tradition under the influence of surrealism in novels by Georges Bataille and Kathy Acker. While both writers, Lusty agues, simultaneously mine and disrupt the traditional form of the Bildungsroman, Acker recasts Bataille’s fascination with violence and transgression through a feminist, punk, and post-structuralist prism which generates new forms of narrative possibility for the experience of feminized trauma and psychic dislocation. My own Chapter considers the role of the mother figure, who in much surrealist art and writing is violently attacked as a custodian of bourgeois propriety and repressive sexual morality. Focusing on the way in which Fini’s Mourmour () and Tanning’s Chasm () actively rewrite Freud’s account of the Oedipal process, I trace an alternative history of surrealist representations of the mother, one in which this figure is represented positively and invested with revolutionary potential. Jeannette Baxter’s Chapter focuses on two hitherto relatively unknown British surrealist texts: the darkly allegorical novels Over the Mountain () by Ruthven Todd and The Aerodrome () by Rex Warner. Situating these texts in the context of international surrealism’s broader interrogation of the physical and psychological horrors of war and fascism, Baxter argues that they advance allegory’s historiographic function to rupture the smooth, homogenizing forces of fascist historicism and to expose its lethal revisionist ambitions. While also focusing on narratives marked by war, Patricia Allmer, in Chapter , more specifically considers expressions of trauma in the post-war novels of German artist and writer Unica Zu¨rn. Thus, by problematizing the prevailing autobiographical focus in scholarship on Zu¨rn, Allmer instead reads her fictions through a historical set of crises and argues that the question of individual and cultural ‘guilt’, central to much post-war German art and literature, exerts a constant pressure in Zu¨rn’s novels.
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Introduction
The four chapters collected under the heading ‘Science, Alchemy, Nature’ examine the ways in which the surrealist novel explores alternative ways of viewing and engaging with the world, for example through occult knowledges, pataphysics, science fiction, and non-anthropocentric discourses. Several of these chapters pick up on the recent focus in surrealist scholarship on ecology. The ecological impulse, intrinsic in surrealism from the start and subsequently sharpened by the Chicago Surrealist Group and others, consolidates surrealism’s contemporary pertinence. In Chapter , Gavin Parkinson investigates the cross-pollinating relationship between surrealism and science fiction. The chapter explores surrealism’s and science fiction’s shared literary precedents from Jules Verne to Cyrano de Bergerac and Jonathan Swift, and examines the surrealist interest in the genre of science fiction in the s and s; furthermore, it details the integral presence of surrealist themes in post-war science-fiction novels by Michel Butor, Michel Carrouges, J.G. Ballard, and others. Donna Roberts, in Chapter , examines novelistic engagements with pataphysics, defined by Alfred Jarry as ‘the science of imaginary solutions’. Focusing in particular on René Daumal’s novel Le mont analogue (Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic NonEuclidian Adventures in Mountain Climbing; published posthumously in ), Roberts teases out two hitherto critically overlooked themes: sacred geography and ecology. Chapter , written by Victoria Ferentinou, traces alchemical themes in the novels of Ithell Colquhoun, Leonora Carrington, and Nanos Valaoritis. Ferentinou shows that these writers use diverse strands of alchemical discourse in order to transgress the dominant Enlightenment concept of the unified rational subject, and conceptualize subjectivity as an open-ended, non-teleological, and performative process. Kristoffer Noheden, in Chapter , examines ecological and animal themes in Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet () and Ducornet’s Phosphor in Dreamland (). Reading these texts through contemporary ecocritical theory, Noheden establishes a surrealist ecology in which intersubjective communication with the non-human world is an inherent component. The final part, ‘Transnational Surrealism’, exhibits surrealism’s potential as a political and intellectual force, through investigations of different ways in which the surrealist novel elaborates social and decolonial critique and of how it circulates across the globe as world literature. Widening its
Alfred Jarry, Exploits & Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, Pataphysician, trans. Simon Watson Taylor (Boston: Exact Change, ), p. .
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outlook compared to the previous sections, which centred on European and Anglo-American writing, this section considers the integration of surrealist themes in texts (and films) produced in East Asia, West Africa, the Caribbean, and South America. María Clara Bernal’s Chapter considers the integration of surrealism in Latin American novels of the tropics, such as Carpentier’s Los pasos perdidos, Álvaro Mutis’s La mansión de Araucaima (The Mansion of Araucaima, ), and Daniel Maximin’s Soufrières (). Bernal demonstrates that these novelists employ natural landscapes to signify portals opening onto alternative realities, a trope by which they signal their proximity and indebtedness to surrealism. Jonathan P. Eburne, in Chapter , explores the intersecting histories of surrealism, existentialism, and the Black radical tradition. Showcasing how surrealist writing chimes with the work of key mid-century Black writers and thinkers, such as Richard Wright, C.L.R. James, Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, and Léopold Sedar Senghor, as well as with contemporary novelists, such as Maryse Condé and Calixthe Beyala, Eburne’s chapter argues that surrealism itself is unthinkable without heeding its relation to race, diaspora, and the thought and cultural production of Black intellectuals. In Chapter , Felicity Gee examines surrealist echoes in the Japanese post-war novel, with a particular focus on the novelist and philosophical essayist Abe Kōbō. By establishing Abe’s surrealist approach to social reality, via the animate and inanimate subjects of his novels, Gee illuminates how French surrealism took root in the Japanese avant-garde, moving through poetry to the novel. Delia Ungureanu, in Chapter , considers Breton’s Nadja and L’amour fou from a world-literature perspective, investigating how these texts engage with the earlier narratives of Dante, Marcel Proust, Gérard de Nerval, and the proto-surrealist filmmaker Georges Méliès, and, moreover, how their legacy extends into the future, inspiring world writers and filmmakers from Italo Calvino to the Chilean filmmaker Raúl Ruiz and the Italian Paolo Sorrentino. Catriona McAra, in Chapter , explores feminist-surrealist legacies in contemporary novels by Kate Bernheimer, Chloe Aridjis, Ali Smith, and Heidi Sopinka. Detecting the presence of Dorothea Tanning and Leonora Carrington’s novelistic output in the work of this younger generation of writers, McAra proposes that the latter group produces striking revisionary histories of surrealism from a decidedly feminist angle. Framing surrealism in relation to the novel genre, and extending the perspective beyond the s and beyond the borders of Europe, yields several fresh perspectives on the movement and its aesthetic production.
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Introduction
Keeping in mind that any attempt to provide a full history of the surrealist novel will always be incomplete – because of the plasticity of both the concept of surrealism and the limits of the novel form – this volume seeks to offer a composite picture, taking into consideration an abundance of texts previously left out of critical accounts. Together, the individual chapters in the volume provide a rich, long, and elastic historiography of the surrealist novel, one which does not dwell on its surface but plunges deeply into its multifarious fantastic worlds. While offering new readings of so-called canonical surrealist novels, the chapters in the volume also make visible the contributions of non-French writers to the surrealist novel genre as well as to surrealism as a whole. In addition to this, the volume unearths hitherto relatively unknown and/or understudied writings by well-known surrealist visual artists, such as Leonor Fini, Dorothea Tanning, and Giorgio de Chirico. The volume, moreover, seeks to extend the frames of surrealism to incorporate writers on its margins, or by considering texts by authors who never belonged to a surrealist group, but who nevertheless engaged with surrealism actively in their novelistic writing. This move breaks open received narratives regarding surrealism’s geographical locations and offers a consideration of its transnational movement and modes of circulation. My hope is that this book will spark conversations, inspire new readings, and perhaps prompt further histories of the surrealist novel to be written. Finally, I hope this collection will nourish an appreciation of the surrealist novel not as a closed canon but as a genre still in process, ‘left ajar’, like a door.
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Marvellous Beginnings
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Autobiography Katharine Conley
Surrealism began with automatism, a foundational practice involving group efforts to reach deep into the psyche to uncover buried truths that was fundamentally autobiographical. As André Breton recorded in ‘The Mediums Enter’, what emerged in the first automatic sessions in the fall of was ‘a magic dictation’ amounting to ‘revelation’ while in a trance, which was at times deeply unsettling. This disturbing quality conforms with Denis Hollier’s description of the autobiographer’s task: ‘he has to surprise himself penetrating himself, he has to penetrate himself by surprise, has to penetrate an interior where, the further he goes, the less he knows his way around, the less he recognizes it as his own’. Alain Jouffroy noted in his memoir that surrealist automatism inspired ‘the invention of a writing of life, of a life of writing.’ For Dorothea Tanning, the autobiographical act in painting and writing is akin to a door, as she explained in a interview with Jouffroy: ‘In the first years, I was painting our side of the mirror – the mirror for me is a door – but I think that I’ve gone over to a place where one no longer faces identities at all. One looks at them somewhat obliquely, slyly. To capture the moment, to accept it with all of its complex identities.’ This image of the mirror-door opening onto the unknown while simultaneously capable of revealing one’s own complex identity to oneself through art resonates with Breton’s assertion in Nadja that a book should be left ‘ajar, like
André Breton, ‘The Mediums Enter’, in Breton, The Lost Steps (), trans. Mark Polizzotti (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, ), p. . Denis Hollier, Absent Without Leave: French Literature under the Threat of War, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, : Harvard University Press, ), p. . Alain Jouffroy, La fin des alternances (Paris: Gallimard, ), p. (my translation). ‘Interview with Dorothea Tanning’, Dorothea Tanning, retrospective exhibition catalogue (Malmö Konsthall, ), pp. , , . Originally published as ‘Questions pour Dorothea Tanning, entretien avec Alain Jouffroy, mars ’, in Dorothea Tanning Oeuvre, retrospective exhibition catalogue (Paris: Centre National d’Art Contemporain, ).
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a door.’ As a book that functions like a mirror-door, surrealist autobiographical writing is rooted in everyday lived reality within which surreal experiences may surge. The star of those early experiments with automatism in Breton’s apartment in was Robert Desnos, who wrote automatic texts that illustrate the strange autobiographical experience of the self’s encounter with the self that resulted from automatic practice. While not exactly a novel, Mourning for Mourning’s episodic structure generated a paradigm that would be followed by others. Published by Desnos in December , the same month as Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism, Mourning for Mourning launched the autobiographical tradition in mainstream surrealism with a first-person narrator equated with the author, a narrator for whom dream and reality overlap. Subsequent autobiographical writing became the dominant surrealist mode with Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant, partially written in and published in , and Breton’s release of preliminary sections of Nadja in in La Révolution Surréaliste, prior to its publication as a book in . Both follow the episodic structure of Mourning for Mourning. Also written in but not published until , Desnos’s novel Liberty or Love! fully established the surrealist novel as autobiographical. Breton’s Mad Love (), Michel Leiris’s Manhood (), Leonora Carrington’s Down Below (), and Breton’s Arcanum (), confirmed surrealist writing as autobiographical. Carrington had already published the autobiographical story The House of Fear in , followed by her autobiographical collection The Oval Lady in , and later published her one true novel, The Hearing Trumpet, in . More explicitly autobiographical surrealist writings were published by Dorothea Tanning in , with Birthday, and Kay Sage in , with the posthumous publication of China Eggs, originally written in . Dated April , when Desnos was three months short of his twentyfourth birthday, Mourning for Mourning begins this sequence of autobiographical texts. The twenty-four segments are steeped in dreams and open with an apocalyptic vision of Desnos’s native Paris in ruins over which the Eiffel tower looms. The first-person narrator finds himself caught between dreaming and waking, a surrealist state established by Breton as quintessential in the Manifesto with his definition of surreality as ‘the future
André Breton, Nadja (), trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, ), p. . Robert Desnos, Mourning for Mourning (), in Terry Hale (ed. and trans.), The Automatic Muse: Surrealist Novels (London: Atlas Press, ), p. . For more on Desnos see Katharine Conley, Robert Desnos, Surrealism, and the Marvelous in Everyday Life (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, ).
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Autobiography
resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory’. Threaded throughout the playful text are stand-ins for the narrator and the woman he loves, most notably a skeleton and a pirate wearing a light-blue military jacket who undertake numerous adventures with a blond virgin, who, in one segment, dips her hair into the narrator’s coffee. The deeper the narrator’s dream, the stranger the exploits of these two characters, who travel from the mines of Baikal to the Sahara desert, from a shipwreck to a deep forest, from death to rebirth, confirming Hollier’s vision of autobiography as the penetration by an author into ‘an interior where, the further he goes, the less he knows his way around’. Only the ‘woman I love’ in the penultimate segment, who looks out the window as the narrator sleeps, bears a resemblance to a real person, just as the street sounds of taxis, overheard when the narrator briefly awakes, contrast with the fantastic rushing water bubbling through city pipes he overhears in an earlier segment, while dreaming. The ‘woman I love’ establishes a reallife connection between characters in the novel and the author-narrator, Robert Desnos, whose body becomes transmogrified into paper in the final segment: ‘a body which has perhaps been turned into paper . . . perhaps even the paper on which I am writing’, lying pressed by a granite tombstone ‘paper-weight’ on a cliff’s edge. Mourning for Mourning ends as a cliffhanger, literally, accompanied by ‘a terrible peal of satanic laughter’. With a narrative voice that survives only as a manuscript, Desnos’s automatic text reflects Philippe Lejeune’s definition of autobiography: ‘retrospective prose narrative written by a real person concerning his own existence, where the focus is his individual life, in particular the story of his personality’. What Desnos’s narrator-poet discovers through writing his automatic dreams are his ambitions realized – the manuscript-body exists – and thwarted through a self that has become dissipated by fitful dreaming. Desnos identifies himself by name in the opening segment of Liberty or Love!: ‘I. ROBERT DESNOS, Born in Paris, July . Died in Paris, December, , the day on which he wrote these lines.’ As in
André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ), p. . Desnos, Mourning for Mourning, pp. , , . Ibid., pp. , ; Hollier, Absent Without Leave, p. . Desnos, Mourning for Mourning, pp. (translation modified), –. Ibid., p. . Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography, trans. Katherine Leary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), p. . Robert Desnos, Liberty or Love! (), trans. Terry Hale (London: Atlas Press, ), p. .
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Mourning for Mourning, the culmination of autobiographical writing is death, whereby only the novel remains as the materialization of the poet’s body’s dreams. Desnos alternates between the ‘I’ identified as himself and a swashbuckling hero, Corsair Sanglot, who succeeds in joining with the glamorous heroine Louise Lame. Unlike Corsair, the ‘I’ is unlucky in his yearning for his ‘beloved’, a music-hall singer who winds up together with Sanglot and Lame in a shipwreck on the final page. The singer, the ‘you’ paired with the autobiographical ‘I’, begins in the poet’s waking reality only to merge with his dreamlike fictional characters when she flies with them ‘out of the still night of the inkwell’ while the poet is engaged in ‘the magical phenomenon of writing’. With ink-stained fingers destined ‘for leaving fingerprints on the painted walls of dreams’ in ‘the stupid hope of transmuting paper into a mirror’, the poet-narrator seeks through writing to transform his dreams into reality, as a strategy for joining with ‘the woman that I love!’ Again, the poet-narrator’s ambitions are both realized – his manuscript indeed holds a mirror to his imagination – and thwarted, since the poet is even farther from the union he seeks than he was before. Unlike Tanning in later life, he was unable to transform his dream-mirror into a door. His beloved remains fixed on the opposite side of the mirror, inaccessible, whether caught in his dream life or free to wander at those times when he himself finds that he is trapped in his dreams. If Desnos’s approach to surrealist autobiographical writing was rooted in dream and romantic love, Aragon’s Paris Peasant begins in what initially appears to be a more grounded reality with a ‘Preface to a Modern Mythology’, in which Aragon philosophically espouses a desire for the indefinite prolongation of ‘this sense of the marvelous suffusing everyday existence’, a sense of living fully in the present. Aragon follows this preface with the more explicitly autobiographical ‘Passage de l’Opéra’, written in . In ‘Passage’, a paean to the pleasure of wandering freely through the glass-covered passages in central Paris slated for demolition and containing old-fashioned shops, cafés, the run-down Théâtre Moderne, and a bordello, Aragon provides realistic depictions of actual places and people. Desnos, for example, is characterized as having ‘strange ships moored in each fold of his brain’ and a facility with ‘words that are
Ibid., pp. –, . Ibid., p. . Ibid., pp. , . Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant (), trans. Simon Watson Taylor (Boston: Exact Change, ), p. . Mark Polizzotti’s biography of Breton covers a lot of Aragon’s history: Revolution of the Mind (Boston, : Black Widow Press, ).
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Autobiography
mirrors, optical lakes’, in an apparent reference to Mourning for Mourning, whereby one thing can mean another and both meanings can co-exist. Real events are punctuated by dream-inspired flights of fancy stemming from the sensual ‘shiver’ he feels on the ‘shores of the unknown’ he discovers in the ‘double tunnel’ of the Passage, marked, as it is, by ‘semidarkness’ that ‘at odd intervals’ becomes infused with light, allowing all things to ‘mingle in the mind’. Like Desnos, Aragon describes his writing experience in magnified terms: ‘I have the impression of seeing the hand I am writing with in exaggerated close-up’, he writes, ‘the smallest object I look at appears to be of enormous proportions’. The most salient autobiographical moments in Paris Peasant are those in which Aragon falls into dreamy enthralment outside the shop windows housed within these ‘human aquariums’. For example, he suddenly sees nothing but colour in the blond hair dressed by a stylist in the Passage and effusively exclaims: ‘Blond as hysteria, blond as the sky, blond as tiredness, blond as a kiss.’ His desires are enflamed by womanhood rather than a specific woman. In another example, he stands transfixed in front of a cane shop window one evening after a drink as the electrical lights are being switched off, and believes he notices a ‘greenish, almost submarine light’ emanating from within the display itself, as if the ‘whole ocean’ had suddenly surged within the Passage de l’Opéra: ‘The canes floated gently like seaweed. I had still not recovered from my enchantment when I noticed that a human form was swimming among the various levels of the window display.’ What he initially sees as a ‘siren’, whom he retrospectively recognizes as a woman he once met, turns and stretches ‘out her arms’ towards him until the entire window appears suddenly to be ‘seized by a general convulsion’ and the brightness dies away ‘with the sound of the sea’. Reverie and reality converge until he returns the next morning and finds everything back to normal, except for a broken meerschaum pipe ‘whose bowl depicted a siren’. The merging of dream and reality in Aragon’s mind serves as a ‘source of vertigo – Surrealism, offspring of frenzy and darkness’. He calls upon his readers to similarly ‘Follow your inclinations boldly’, in order to experience a comparable ‘shiver’ in discovering the unknown within the self, as described by Hollier, which for Aragon involves a flooding of the conscious
Aragon, Paris Peasant, pp. –. The Passage was demolished in , as Aragon explains, pp. , . See also www.francegenweb.org/wiki/index.php?title=Passage_de_l%Op%C%Ara (accessed January ). Aragon, Paris Peasant, pp. , , . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., pp. , –. Ibid., pp. –. Ibid., p. . Ibid., pp. –.
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mind with this ‘great vertigo, where consciousness is aware of nothing more than a stratum of unfathomable depths’. Balanced between dream and reality, Aragon the narrator becomes disembodied, a mere ‘transition from darkness to light’, ‘a limit, a bearing’: ‘It is my own self that flashes through my mind. And vanishes’, he notes. His autobiographical impulse is fully aligned with the surrealist principle of chance, as he explains early in ‘Passage’: ‘chance is my only experience, hazard my sole experiment’. For Aragon the autobiographical unfolds as an episodic sequence of intensely present moments provoked by chance, instances of deep reverie, followed by ordinariness found in daylight. The decrepit Théâtre Moderne described at the end of ‘Passage’ appears again as one of the realistic descriptions of favourite Paris locations by Breton. In Nadja, Breton rationally explores philosophical aspects of surrealism through the prism of his personal experiences. Gone are the dreams and daydreams characteristic of Desnos’s and Aragon’s autobiographical writing, although Aragon’s episodic rhythm tied to city walking remains a hallmark of Breton’s story. Surrealism’s most definitive autobiographical text opens with a question, ‘Who am I?’, which Breton rephrases as ‘whom I “haunt”’. His exploration of identity is anchored in his reallife network of friends whom he ‘haunts’ in the sense of ‘frequents’, including those whose photographs appear in lieu of description throughout the book – of Desnos, Paul Éluard, Benjamin Péret, an actress who resembles Nadja, a seer he consults, even himself. Breton’s autobiographical ‘I’ is presented as another identity he seeks to understand. He records his walks through Paris the way Aragon recorded his wanderings through the Passage de l’Opéra, culminating in his chance encounter with the woman who called herself Nadja. In Nadja, Aragon appears linked to examples of chance, which is defined by Breton as revelatory for its capacity to unveil ‘an almost forbidden world of sudden parallels, petrifying coincidences’. Nadja matters to Breton because of her uncanny ability to articulate intuitive versions of his own thoughts, to mediate his own insights and mirror them
Ibid., pp. –, . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Breton, Nadja, p. . For a comprehensive critical biography of Breton see Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind. Breton, Nadja, p. . Breton explains in his preface to the edition in French that the photographs are meant to ‘eliminate descriptions’ as a way of distancing Nadja from a novel or a traditional autobiography (my translation). André Breton, Nadja (Paris: Gallimard, ), p. . Breton, Nadja, trans. Howard, pp. , , .
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Autobiography
back to himself. Yet the mental illness at the root of her unconventional behaviour eventually repulses Breton, after initially charming him, leading to her exit from the narrative, which folds back upon Breton. What he discovers in his surprise penetration of himself is the way chance can be a viscerally jolting experience, which prompts him to see beauty as intensely physical, leading to his announcement in the final sentence that: ‘Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be.’ What he finds in the inner mirror Tanning identifies as part of her autobiographical process is the power beauty holds for him, revealed to him through his relationships – with his wife, initially, then Nadja, and culminating with the unnamed ‘you’ at the end of the book. This autobiographical mirror the book provides Breton functions like Tanning’s mirror-door, because, as he states clearly in Nadja, he is ‘interested only in books left ajar, like doors’. What he discovers on the other side of that mirror-door is a vision of beauty caused by coincidence that can ‘make you see, really see’, and sheds light onto that interior self he yearns to illuminate and understand. The ‘convulsive’ shock beauty can provoke is what it takes to push open the book-mirror-door within the self. In Mad Love, published in segments starting in and finished in , Breton returns to ‘convulsive’ beauty as a physical sensation, a ‘real shiver’ aroused by beauty found in nature or a person such as Jacqueline Lamba, whom he meets and marries while writing the book. By coincidence he discovers that he had anticipated their encounter in a poem published in . In ‘Sunflower’, Breton describes the woman he would meet in person only eleven years later abstractly, as ‘the ambassadress of saltpeter / Or of the white curve on black ground we call thought’. She is not yet fully embodied, which intensifies the thrill he feels the first time she enters a restaurant where he is dining as a shiver of delight. He sees her almost mythically, as though she were literally made of gunpowder set to detonate, ‘swathed in mist – clothed in fire’, signalling ‘the presence of the beautiful’. She is not fully real, even though Lamba was the one who approached him, having sent him a letter, because, as a painter, she had the desire to meet the man who was writing books about surrealism. Instead, Breton depicts her as a soul-sister to himself, a vehicle for reflecting his own desires and thoughts back to him: ‘Reciprocal love, such as I envisage
Ibid., p. (translation modified). Ibid., p. . André Breton, Mad Love (), trans. Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, ), p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. .
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it, is a system of mirrors which reflects for me, under the thousand angles that the unknown can take for me, the faithful image of one I love, always more surprising in her divining of my own desire and more gilded with life.’ Lamba is never named in Mad Love; the book remains fundamentally autobiographical, not the story of a reciprocated love. It is only in , after their divorce, that Breton writes Arcanum under the aegis of his new love, Elisa Claro, whom he grants full presence when he identifies her by name in the first sentence. Moreover, he cedes the stage to someone other than himself when he declares that ‘the time has come to value the ideas of woman at the expense of those of man’. Arcanum , named for the seventeenth card of the Tarot deck representing ‘the early morning star’ of rebirth, love, and intuition, is the first narrative in which Breton is fully partnered with another person. Nonetheless, the emphasis remains firmly focused on his own rebirth through self-discovery unleashed by new love. Love and desire are similarly life-changing for Michel Leiris in Manhood, written between and and published in . Despite his break with Breton in , Leiris remained an important fellow traveller to surrealism throughout his life. In Manhood, a more traditionally autobiographical text than Desnos’s, Aragon’s, or Breton’s, Leiris tells the story of his life from childhood through ‘manhood’ at the age of thirty-four, based on how he experiences people, events, and works of art. He describes, for example, how he ‘still gets dizzy’, thinking about his first exposure to the concept of infinite regression discovered as a child through the image of a ‘farm girl’ on the can of Dutch cocoa in his family kitchen, in which the ‘girl in a lace cap’ holds ‘in her left hand an identical tin, decorated with the same image’. He renders this highly personal vertiginous experience as though he were describing someone else; his autobiography reads much like a biography. Leiris takes the beauty in life that Breton finds ‘convulsive’ and relocates it in works of art. He depicts his imagination as inflamed by paintings of women, in particular paintings of Judith, who decapitated Holofernes, and Lucretia, whose rape lay at the origin of her suicide and the subsequent
Ibid., pp. , . André Breton, Arcanum (), trans. Zack Rogow (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, ), p. . Ibid., p. . For a study of Leiris see Seán Hand, Michel Leiris: Writing the Self (Cambridge University Press, ). Michel Leiris, Manhood (), trans. Richard Howard (University of Chicago Press, ), p. .
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Autobiography
overthrow of the Roman monarchy by her relatives. His fears and fantasies connected to these two historical figures before whom he feels abject dominate the narrative. The psychoanalysis he recounts at the end of Manhood allows him to come to terms with his fears, finally releasing him from the morbid fascination that Judith and Lucretia had long aroused: ‘the question for me is to escape this dilemma by finding a way in which the world and myself – object and subject – confront each other on an equal footing, as the matador stands before the bull’. More like Breton than Desnos or Aragon, Leiris seeks to understand his longings and fears through writing, as Breton sought to explain his vision of beauty in writing. Leiris’s psychoanalysis transforms the interior mirror inherent to self-discovery into a door that he leaves open by writing this book. The power of Manhood lies in his willingness to lay bare his most intensely embarrassing desires and to allow strangers to read him as though looking backwards at him through this mirror-book and glimpsing his face. Leonora Carrington published her first two books of short stories in French when she was living in the south of France with Max Ernst, whom she initially sought to meet after seeing a reproduction of his Two Children Menaced by a Nightingale (). The House of Fear came out in when she was twenty-one years old, the same year her paintings were included in the Exhibition of Surrealism in Paris, followed, in , by The Oval Lady. Accompanied by a collage and a preface by Ernst, The House of Fear instantly entered the surrealist canon, one year after Breton published Mad Love. In The Oval Lady, Carrington’s unnamed first-person narrators blur the distinction between her characters and herself as the author. In her most famous short story, ‘The Debutante’, a young girl required by her mother to attend a debutante ball, as Carrington herself was at age seventeen, sends a hyena in her place. The first-person heroine shows little remorse at the hyena’s decision to eat her maid in order to be able to wear the maid’s face as a disguise, only to rip it off at the end and eat it. The rebellious narrator’s rationale is simply that the ball is ‘a bloody nuisance’ that she had no desire to attend: ‘I’ve always detested balls, especially when they are given in my honour.’ Carrington normalizes talking animals and
Ibid., p. . La maison de la peur (The House of Fear) (Collection “Un divertissement”) was published in . Carrington published La dame ovale (The Oval Lady), a collection of stories. a year later with G.L.M. (). For an authoritative study on Carrington see Susan L. Aberth, Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art (London: Lund Humphries, ). Leonora Carrington, The House of Fear: Notes from Down Below, trans. Kathrine Talbot and Marina Warner (New York: Dutton, ), p. .
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extraordinary events with nonchalance as a form of social commentary about the absurdity of conventions that limit freedom and autonomy for women, privileges that men enjoy unimpeded. Just as her paintings do, her stories illustrate how readily fantasy and reality can co-exist, especially in a surrealistic world that looks and sounds oddly familiar, disconcertingly domestic. Like Leiris in Manhood, Carrington focuses on moments of distress, probing the discomfort of her various narrators as a way of revealing their inner lives, the interior terrain of surrealist autobiographical writing. Examples include the silence suggesting shock of the narrator in ‘The Oval Lady’ when she visits a young woman whose father burns her beloved wooden rocking horse in an act of cruelty during the narrator’s impromptu visit; the similarly shocked narrator of ‘The Royal Summons’ comforts herself with the thought that the Queen would ‘never have a headache again’, after pushing the Queen to her death in a lion’s cage at the Prime Minister’s direction. These stories reveal what it felt like to be female growing up in traditional British society between the wars, raised to maintain polite silence regardless of the circumstances, and just how absurdly confining such social expectations could be. Breton included Carrington’s ‘Debutante’ in his Anthology of Black Humor because her humour met his criterion of writing that is ‘the mortal enemy of sentimentality’. Her sense of humour undergirds the authorial voice in Down Below, her most clearly autobiographical work, first published in VVV in English translation by Victor Llona in in New York, from the French transcription of the story she told Jeanne Megnen in . Down Below exemplifies Lejeune’s ‘autobiographical pact’ because author and narrator have the same name and the story relates real and harrowing experiences that Carrington had while interned at her father’s behest in a sanatorium in Santander, Spain. She describes being subjected to convulsive therapy for her mental breakdown, a drug-induced alternative to electro-shock. For Carrington, ‘convulsive’ was not a way
Ibid., pp. –, . André Breton, Anthology of Black Humor (), trans. Mark Polizzoti (San Francisco: City Lights Books, ), p. xix. The Anthology was completed in but only distributed in . The English translation is from the ‘definitive’ edition. ‘Down Below’ was first published in VVV, (), –. Carrington herself revised the translation for the edition, Down Below (New York Review of Books, ). See ‘Note on the Text’, p. . See John Paul Eakin, ‘Philippe Lejeune and the Study of Autobiography’, Romance Studies, / (), – (at pp. –).
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Autobiography
to describe beauty but an intensely painful lived experience: ‘With a convulsion of my vital centre, I came up to the surface so quickly I had vertigo.’ Carrington infuses her autobiographical narrative with surrealism, beginning with her description of the suitcase she had with her, identified by a name tag with one word on it: ‘REVELATION’. Reality intermixes with her vertigo-laced experience of mental illness, provoked by the trauma Carrington underwent when Ernst, as a German citizen, ‘was taken away to a concentration camp for the second time’ by French soldiers in May , when France was briefly at war with Germany before surrendering in June. Carrington’s story illustrates what it feels like to penetrate oneself ‘by surprise’, and answers the question of what happened to the real Nadja after she disappeared from Breton’s narrative and was interned in an asylum in the south of France. Carrington explains what it was like to live inside a sanatorium. She turns a narrative of victimhood into one of self-emancipation when she concludes with her successful departure on her own terms and escape to New York City. Her interior mirror reflects back an artist seeking release from constraining social expectations for her sex. She depicts the living consciousness at her root as an artist who had been idealized for her beauty by male surrealists and shows that consciousness to be resourceful and funny. Like Desnos, Aragon, Breton, and Leiris, she transforms intimate, often psychologically painful experiences into art, successfully rendering surrealism fully in a female voice. While living in New York before settling in Mexico, Carrington participated in the surrealist group, which had been displaced by World War II, and included Ernst, Breton, and others she had known in France. She met fellow surrealists Kay Sage, who had found and furnished Breton’s New York apartment, and Dorothea Tanning, who would eventually marry Ernst and move with him to Arizona. Sage, best known for her largely empty landscapes, wrote poetry throughout her life, as well as an unfinished autobiography written in , when she was fifty-seven years old, the year her husband, fellow surrealist painter Yves Tanguy, died unexpectedly of a cerebral haemorrhage. Published posthumously as China Eggs in , Sage focuses on memorable moments from her childhood and coming of age that shaped her as a painter and led to her decision in
Carrington, Down Below, p. . Ibid., . For more on Down Below see Katharine Conley, Automatic Woman: The Representation of Woman in Surrealism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, ). Carrington, Down Below, p. . Hollier, Absent Without Leave, p. .
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to move from Italy, where she had married an Italian prince, to Paris to live independently and become a surrealist. Sage begins with the risk involved in penetrating the self through autobiographical writing: ‘I am walking very fast on a thin sheet of ice. I can either keep on walking or I can stop. If I stop, the ice will break.’ The absent interlocutor who appears sporadically throughout the text responds with encouragement: ‘Keep on walking. You could get to the other side . . . You don’t need to know how to write. You only have to know how to think.’ Like Carrington, Sage describes her experience as a young woman in conventional society at the beginning of the twentieth century as confining. Also like Carrington, she deploys black humour when she relates incidents from her life. For example, she recounts how the entire household in her childhood, including the dog and the cat, were heartbroken when a pet chicken they loved had had his necked ripped ‘wide open’ by a stray cat so that they took him to the drugstore to be chloroformed only to find the drugstore ‘full of people who thought it was very funny’. Just as Carrington’s heroines in The House of Fear make their way through various improbable situations with good manners, Sage describes surviving her childhood by acting like a ‘chameleon’ as she followed her newly divorced mother across Europe: ‘I was told that when I was little, I could always be whatever anyone wanted or expected me to be.’ She describes removing bullets from the revolver on her mother’s bedside table and, at age ten, being asked by her mother ‘to give her a hypodermic of morphine’. Sage’s interior life similarly shows an artist seeking escape from social expectations for her sex. She breaks off the narrative just before her visit to the gallery in Paris where she first saw surrealist paintings, including Tanguy’s I Am Waiting for You (). Art captured Sage’s imagination: ‘I started drawing as soon as I could hold a pencil. All children draw but I drew better.’ Her life was dominated by her desire to paint. When she was not painting, she was ‘thinking about it’ if not speaking about it: ‘Never try to explain the truth.’ The title China Eggs came from her attention to forms: ‘As long as there is an egg in the world, what do we need of sculptors?’ The last
Kay Sage, China Eggs (Charlotte: Starbooks, ), p. . For more on Sage see the indispensable Kay Sage: The Biographical Chronology and Four Surrealist One-Act Plays, by Stephen Robeson Miller (New York: Gallery of Surrealism, ) as well as Stephen Robeson Miller and Jonathan Stuhlman, Double Solitaire: The Surreal Worlds of Kay Sage and Yves Tanguy (Katonah Museum of Art, ). Sage, China Eggs, p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. .
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Autobiography
fragment, labelled ‘END’, explains to the interlocutor: ‘Then, you see, I put all my eggs in one basket – and I lost . . . But you were forever putting eggs in baskets. I know, but those were only china eggs.’ In Birthday (), Dorothea Tanning also begins in painterly terms, in ‘the middle distance’, as she begins the story of her life with Max Ernst with their meeting in New York in , when she was thirty-two years old and he had come to see her painting Birthday () for possible inclusion in an exhibition on the work of ‘ Women’ organized by his then wife Peggy Guggenheim for her gallery, Art of This Century. Like Sage, Tanning centres her autobiography on art. She opens with ‘that dot on my drawing in a class perspective lesson’ where the lines, ‘instead of converging, open to reveal a middle distance where we contend, Max and I, with all kinds of ardent ferment’ and proceeds to promise a ‘banquet’, a Platonian symposium of thought and exchange that encapsulates surrealism, which was a welcoming place for her: ‘You needn’t make excuses for putting on a banquet and inviting one and all’, she explains. She starts the story of her life with her childhood. Like Breton in Nadja, she portrays her life as intensely experienced alongside others, most importantly Ernst. Birthday is as much about Ernst as it is about herself, except for painting. She makes explicit how both painting and writing are important to her, how they are both autobiographical, and how both can serve as a mirror that can be transformed into a door, with a clear reference to Breton: ‘there are plenty of doors ajar for us all. Enter! Enter I did – the painted door. Could I push the written one?’ Towards the end of Birthday, Tanning describes the experience of penetrating her innermost self through the automatic trance she falls into when painting: ‘The beginning is uneasy. Only witness: the studio where an event is about to take place . . . you play with the light, although there is no need, so filled is your inner vision with promise, the kind that shifts behind your eyes in and out of focus’. She hears street sounds and dismisses them. ‘You coax the picture out of its cage’, she continues. Tanning came to surrealism the way Lamba, Carrington, and Sage did – through the discovery of
Ibid., p. . Dorothea Tanning, Birthday (San Francisco: Lapis Press, ), p. . In , she published an updated version: Between Lives: An Artist and Her World (New York: W.W. Norton, ). For recent studies of Tanning and her work see Alyce Mahon (ed.), Dorothea Tanning: Behind the Door, Another Invisible Door (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia with the collaboration of Tate Modern, ), and Victoria Carruthers, Dorothea Tanning: Transformations (London: Lund Humphries, ). Leiris, Manhood, p. ; Tanning, Birthday, p. . Tanning, Birthday, p. . Ibid., pp. –. Ibid., pp. , , .
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surrealist ideas and painting. She vividly relates feeling ‘the real explosion, rocking me on my run-over heels’, at the Museum of Modern Art’s Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism exhibition in , where she encountered ‘the infinitely faceted world I must have been waiting for’. The autobiographical mode allowed Tanning to represent her life experiences fully, with Ernst and on her own, while immersed in the quintessential surrealist work of making art. The surrealists embraced the autobiographical because surrealism was a way of life. The exploration of the surprising interior layers of the self described by Hollier as the work of the autobiographer, described as a door by Tanning, was inherent to the automatic experiment with which surrealism began. Autobiographical writing allowed the surrealists to express their experiences directly, as dreams and reveries by Desnos and Aragon, complemented in the same text, for Aragon, by more realistic depictions of actual locations in s Paris. Breton continued with realistic depictions of actual locations in his multiple autobiographical texts, in which he mixed lived experience with philosophical discovery. For Leiris, the autobiographical was a means to reveal his deeply personal psychological obsessions through art. Carrington uses the autobiographical to illustrate an interior life infused with social awareness and magnified by her life experience as a woman. She reverses the gaze of male surrealists upon female beauty by revealing the glimmer of black humour at surrealism’s heart, initially adopted by her as a survival mechanism. Sage and Tanning also deploy humour as they link their autobiographical impulses to the drive to make art. Only the autobiographical mode could encompass these multiple voices, which, together, vividly render the interior life animating surrealism’s collective goals throughout the twentieth century. Surrealist autobiographical writing provides readers with continuous opportunities to rediscover surrealist principles as they were discovered by the surrealists themselves, in their effort to define a movement that drew them because of its promise of self-realization through self-knowledge and the potential they hoped their insights had to change society by realizing fully and deeply Rimbaud’s injunction to ‘change life’.
Ibid., pp. –.
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Diverging Genealogies of the Surrealist Unconscious Jean-Michel Rabaté
One can ascribe a double origin to surrealism by reading André Breton’s first Manifesto of Surrealism and Louis Aragon’s A Wave of Dreams side by side: both texts from function as a double-headed manifesto. They exhibit common features like lists of names and a bifurcation between the past and the future. They recapitulate previous experiments and launch a programme. They also betray a divergence, which would soon lead to rupture. If the reasons for the rupture were political, Aragon having found his place in the Communist Party while Breton left it after a half-hearted attempt to comply, I would argue that there is an aesthetic rationale for the split between Aragon and Breton that can be located in opposed conceptions about the role of the novel and the function of prose. Can prose explore the unconscious as well as poetry in automatic writing? Can literary writing approximate the Freudian cure in its injunction of saying it all, without any censorship? These questions brought about a broadening chasm separating the two founders of the movement. Here was a dispute about the nature of ‘reality’ allied with disagreements about the collective unconscious and a mythology of modernity, these being terms deriving from Walter Benjamin’s critical assessment of surrealism. If Benjamin saw the pitfalls of a surrealist mythology of the unconscious, he also understood what could be gained from a writing capable of exploring reality and surreality alike. Following his prompts, I will first focus on the genre of the novel as a contested site within surrealism itself before looking more closely at the genre’s ability to reformulate psychoanalytically inflected motifs and concerns. When one speaks of surrealist novels to students who have dipped into the literature, they think of Nadja () and Paris Peasant (), those icons of the movement. These books fare better than the surrealist poems of the period even when these are well translated and glossed. If it were not for its main prose texts, French surrealism would remain of historical interest only. The same students are surprised when they learn that these
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were not originally considered as novels by their authors. Aragon placed Paris Peasant in the group of poems he arranged for his collected works; it is in the authoritative Pléiade edition. The collection of Aragon’s Œuvres poétiques complètes places Paris Peasant after the first poems of Feu de joie (), the quasi-manifesto of Une vague de rêves (), and the series of Elsa poems. Meanwhile, the Pléiade volume of Œuvres romanesques complètes begins with Anicet (), continues with Les aventures de Télémaque (), Le libertinage of , and the aborted La défense de l’infini (–). Moreover, we remember that Aragon had excluded Les aventures de Télémaque from his own Œuvres romanesques croisées (–). The editors of Breton’s collected works in La Pléiade begun in had an easier time of it, as the organization chosen by Marie Bonnet is chronological: Nadja comes after the first manifesto and collections of essays like Les pas perdus (). Even there, we are none the wiser about generic categories. In the preface to Nadja from , Breton keeps insisting on the non-literary nature of his text, in spite of the praise it had garnered for its brilliant style and innovative use of photographs. Breton still thinks that Nadja was a ‘document pris sur le vif’ (a live document), whereas we know how much he toiled, rewrote, and distorted facts, even if he did not aim at ‘style’. But the text survives thanks to its amazing command of language. Breton is on safer ground when he boasts of his consistency; Nadja follows his own guidelines by ‘eliminating all descriptions’. They are rendered redundant given all the reproductions of photographs and documents. But he provides no portrait of Nadja; one has to find her picture in websites to understand why this waif with longing and soulful eyes could seduce Breton. It comes as a relief to have at least one text that trumpets its status as a novel. What in English is Anicet or the Panorama, a book superbly translated by Antony Melville in , was titled Anicet ou le panorama, roman when it was published at the end of with a date of March . Some reissues deleted the term ‘novel’. One might argue that much in the same way that the surrealists had chosen Littérature as an ironical title for their journal, the term ‘novel’ may be a disclaimer. However, many features of the book prove that Aragon was self-consciously inscribing himself in the genre of the novel, perhaps with a view to subvert it from
André Breton, Œuvres complètes, vol. , ed. Marguerite Bonnet (Paris: Gallimard, ), p. . All translations from this edition are mine. Ibid., p. . They have been disseminated in to launch the play Pourquoi dis, pourquoi m’as-tu pris mes yeux, staging the ‘tragic’ encounter between Breton and Léona Delacourt, a.k.a. Nadja.
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Diverging Genealogies of the Surrealist Unconscious
within, when he wrote Anicet. The book was begun when its author was at the front in the lethal Chemin des Dames, and much of its abundant verve derives from the possibility of it being testamentary. But the flights of imagination were to be contained by orthodox rules, as we see in the opening sentence in which Aragon posits a tension between a rapid reference to traditional canons of aesthetics and the new Einsteinian worldview: ‘All Anicet had retained from his years at secondary school was the rule of the three unities and the relativity of time and space: that was the limit of his knowledge of art and life.’ By echoing the main tenet of French classical theatre, the rule of the unity of action, time and place, Aragon inscribes his narrative in a tradition; he also destabilizes it thanks to a principle of generalized relativity. The question about the genre of the text – novel, essay, memoir, or prose poem in the manner of Lautréamont – recurs in the internal dialogism of the text. It comes to the fore after Breton’s alter ego is introduced in the plot. Aragon explains that he gave his friend the nickname of Baptiste Ajamais to echo a line in ‘Façon’, Breton’s first poem in Mont de piété. Breton’s inaugural poetic collection was published in , just when Aragon was completing Anicet. The poem, printed in italics, has the following lines: ‘un fond, plus que d’heures mais, de mois? Elles / font de baptiste: À jamais! – L’odeur anéantit / tout de même jaloux ce printemps.’ It would be wrong to think that Aragon was making fun of his friend’s juvenile preciosity, of post-Symbolist affectation hinging on the theme of fashion, when he penned those lines. When Breton sent ‘Façon’ to Paul Valéry, the latter liked the poem because he could not reconstruct the rules governing its composition. This opacity appears even in this quote, given its inner rhymes and uncanny repetitions. If Aragon had wanted to point to weak echoes from Mallarmé in Mont de piété, he would have chosen another poem. The coining of ‘Baptiste Ajamais’ is a homage to Breton seen as a poetic mentor, not mere satire. As soon as Ajamais intervenes in Chapter (‘Movements’), even though rivalry between the two men is ruled out in the name of ‘emulation’, he starts a quarrel with Anicet. Their disagreement bears on ‘genres’. In a
Louis Aragon, Anicet or the Panorama (), trans. Antony Melville (London: Atlas Press, ), p. . Breton, Œuvres complètes, vol. , p. . The poem has been translated by Zack Rogow and Bill Zavatsky as ‘a foundation, more than hours but, months? The girls / are making baptiste: Forever ! – Anyway the smell annihilates / this jealous spring’, in Mark Polizzotti (ed.), André Breton: Selections (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), pp. –. Aragon, Anicet, p. .
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discussion of film as opposed to the theatre, Anicet states his delight in the pure speed evinced by the mindless plots of American action films; he contrasts this amoral freedom with the morality he sees dominating in the theatre. This speech, only pertaining to showcase personal preferences, attracts the ire of Ajamais who lashes furiously at his friend’s passivity in terms that anticipate later criticism: ‘You talk and never do anything; in the street you read all the posters, you get excited by shop signs, you do lyrical, and what does it amount to? Fake, facile, conventional.’ We recognize a recurrent reproach made by Breton to Aragon, whose poetic virtuosity he admired, while deploring his surrendering to the solicitations and seductions that he would never refuse. Indeed, the attitude of being perpetually seduced remained a constant feature for Aragon, as we see in a revealing aside: ‘Everything (publicity posters, newspapers, philosophy, poems. . .) is equally speech [parole] for me.’ This is exactly the attitude that Ajamais attacks: all the objects of the world displayed in their rich tapestry ‘speak’ to Anicet who then responds, takes off, extemporizes. This unfailing ability to rhapsodize about anything was seen like a deep moral flaw by Breton. Ajamais proposes a surprising counter-model, Harry James: a thinly veiled embodiment of Jacques Vaché. James is presented as all the more active, paradoxically, as he is either ready to commit suicide or kill someone – one never knows with him. Indeed, at the close of the novel, a distraught Ajamais announces that Harry James has killed himself, as we know Vaché did in January . Aragon’s absurdist plot is nevertheless meant to show Anicet capable of action. Here lies one justification for the novel as a genre: Anicet is a Dadaist hero lost in a picaresque novel who engages in dubious adventures like shooting a rival for the affections of Mire, the femme fatale he idolizes. Anicet dispatches Professor Omme with a gun shot. Later, he plans to kill Mire’s husband who, ruined and abandoned by her, kills himself in front of Anicet. Anicet had threatened him and then taken his gun, so he is accused of murder. He accepts his condemnation to death, even insists on his guilt. Meanwhile, Ajamais keeps an ambiguous course of action. He does not betray Anicet sexually, for he rejects the offer of the seductive Mire. Ajamais uses his power to require that she should save Anicet. All the same, he writes a letter denouncing Anicet to the public prosecutor. Obviously, if psychology is totally absent from this parody of popular
Ibid., p. . Notes on Paris Peasant quoted in Louis Aragon, Œuvres poétiques complètes, vol. , ed. Olivier Barbarant (Paris: Gallimard, ), p. . All translations from this edition are mine.
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melodramas, Ajamais remains a mysterious character in the gallery of stooges. He often interacts with disguised friends of Aragon like Jean Cocteau and Pablo Picasso. Surprisingly, Breton was pleased with his own portrayal, which explains why he defended Anicet against the attacks of fellow Dadaists. Tensions and misgivings were brewing. Aragon’s ‘Critique’ of Paris Peasant states that after he had written the Introduction and a few pages of ‘Passage de l’Opéra’ Breton asked him to read them to the newly formed surrealist group. Aragon performed despite his awareness that he was still looking for a formula. His reading was met with hostility: he was asked whether he had time to waste. The surrealists could not understand his intention when hearing sentences like: ‘Future mysteries will arise from the ruins of today. Let us take a stroll along this Passage de l’Opéra, and have a closer look at it. It is a double tunnel, with a single gateway opening to the north on to the rue Chauchat, and two gateways opening to the south on to the boulevard.’ The hyper-realism deployed adds a layer of referential truth to the novel’s fantasmatic core. In , Aragon gives Breton a positive role: Breton is said to have insulted his comrades and insisted that Aragon should continue writing. However, in , three years after Breton’s death, Aragon offers a totally different version. Breton instead thundered on him from above, letting a divine ‘bolt’ fall, leaving him mute, humiliated and thunderstruck. ‘It is a double tunnel, with a single gateway opening to the north on to the rue Chauchat . . .’ The sentence occurs in chapter of Anicet, when the eponymous hero responds to Arthur (Rimbaud), the mythical poet. We are told that the action of the novel will take place in one of those ‘bustling arcades which lead from pleasure to commerce, from the boulevards to the business district’. What follows is a hyper-realistic description of the shop windows listing the objects displayed, exotic goodies, striped trousers, corsets, sewing-machines, wax dummies, until we reach vignettes of onehour shady hotels. Anicet has baptized the place ‘Passage des Cosmoramas’, and surveys the scene with a philosophical gaze: ‘Under the glass roof protecting the arcade from the weather, a sentimental man about town can feel far enough removed from the world to indulge his
See Louis Aragon, Critique du ‘Paysan de Paris’, in Œuvres poétiques complètes, vol. , p. . Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant (), trans. Simon Watson Taylor (Boston: Exact Change, ), p. . Louis Aragon, Je n’ai jamais appris à écrire, ou les Incipit (Geneva: Skira, ), pp. –. I thank Jaqueline Chénieux-Gendron for mentioning this important point to me. Aragon, Anicet, p. .
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fantasies, yet close enough to draw from the industry the grounds for a quite singular enthusiasm.’ Indeed, he lets his fantasy roam, transforming everyday objects into mythical beings. Wild images teem under his eyes, animals and vegetal life shaping an urban jungle as a playground for the imagination. The key is given early: objects, once invested with desire, become Things. Anicet lets himself be swept away in a frenzied jig with one of the dummies in the tailor shop who has a knack for French can-can; she provides the rationale for the young man’s intoxication: ‘Although you cannot define it, the feeling you are inspired and borne along by, which has taken possession of you, is called désir in French, which translates into Latin as the name of love itself . . . For desire is no more than the anticipation of sensual pleasure coupled with our expectant representation of the object of our excitement.’ The conclusion of the dance is an evocative sexual act with an orgasmic climax, an eerie anticipation of the erotic fantasia of texts like Le con d’Irène (). One can say that Aragon’s mode of entry into psychoanalytical discourse was sexual desire, not the pathology of shell-shocked soldiers, as was the case for Breton, as we will see. Sexual desire is a key for Paris Peasant, with one major qualification: if the text pays homage to Freud, the Viennese master quickly turns into a cliché. Freud is almost an object of ridicule, not the purveyor of a new method to unlock the unconscious: What I forgot to say is that the Passage de l’Opéra is a big glass coffin, and like that same whiteness deified since the times when people worshipped it in Roman suburbs, still presides over the double game of love and death (L’Amour versus La Mort) played by Libido whose temple, these days, is built of medical books and who recently has taken to strolling around with the little puppy-dog Sigmund Freud at his heels.
Nevertheless, the fluctuations of Aragon’s and Breton’s attitudes towards Freud himself, to which I will return, cannot rule out the huge impact that his theories had on them. While Aragon’s Paris Peasant anticipates attempts at ‘exhausting’ Parisian streets or arrondissements, Georges Perec’s bland listings of places, drinks, dishes consumed in one year, the Situationists’ immersion in any random area, we should not forget that his ‘realism’ is always on the verge of exploding and opening itself to phantasmagoria. Aragon invents a Freudian ‘realism’ in which each object culled from real-life incidents takes on oneiric properties.
Ibid., p. .
Ibid., p. .
Aragon, Paris Peasant, p. .
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Diverging Genealogies of the Surrealist Unconscious
Aragon’s objects function like weird items analysed by Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams (). For example, a ‘table d’hôte’ in a dream with a woman praising the dreamer’s ‘beautiful eyes’ generates endless disquisitions on their multiple meanings. A similar method was discovered during the writing of Anicet, a novel that balances the conventions of the novel and moments of pure phantasmagoria. We see this in chapter , entitled ‘Decease’, when Anicet, much like Fantomas, breaks into the studio of Bleu (Picasso). The progression of the would-be burglar armed with two guns, banging into easels and dummies as he progresses in the dark, is that of a sleepwalker. In order to regain possession of his mind, Anicet resorts to a Freudian technique of interpretation pertaining to archaic childhood memories: ‘At this point Anicet lost himself in early childhood memories of when dogs opened huge jaws, and the Earth was peopled with very gentle giants.’ This could come from Freud’s essay on ‘Screen Memories’ from . We then witness a pre-surrealist exercise in automatic writing: Like wanting to speak when you’re asleep, Anicet resigned himself to having to voice this problematic thought . . . When he made a big effort so the words could escape like breaths, they had lost their meaning along the way, and were no longer recognizable. Or other phrases came out, crazy exhalations of the mind, betrayals disguised as intimate secrets: ‘The fuchsias have been propositioned me again’, or ‘I would like to eat coloured women.’
Paris Peasant is contained in nuce in Anicet insofar as its first section develops the evocation of the Arcades. The amplification is achieved less by a narrative expansion than by a repositioning within the combined discourses of psychoanalysis and philosophy. Freud is relayed by Kant, Schelling, Hegel and Schlegel, which inscribes the text within the genre of the philosophical novel, next to Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (), Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (), Samuel Beckett’s Watt (), or William Gass’s On Being Blue (). In order to grasp the philosophical meaning of Paris Peasant, one has to ‘pass’ through the passage before encountering Nature itself, Nature in the city functioning as a collective unconscious in the second half of the novel, which describes a visit to the Buttes-Chaumont park: this philosophical teleology is underpinned by a narratological principle.
Sigmund Freud, On Dreams (), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. , ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, ), pp. –. Aragon, Anicet, p. . Ibid., p. .
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Writing Paris Peasant, Aragon could not avoid responding to Breton’s strictures against descriptions. In the Manifesto of Surrealism, Breton ranted against ‘the realist attitude’ deemed ‘hostile to any intellectual or moral advancement’. His ‘loathing’ is exemplified with an excerpt from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (). The room into which the hero enters is made up of clichés, details put together because of a lazy and immature fascination for the external world. Any idea of a ‘reality effect’ is rejected; for Breton the metonymic principle of the realist novel that Roman Jakobson was busy establishing at the same time did not exist. It would be rash to scream at Breton’s lack of literary sensibility. He does not believe naïvely that descriptions can be skipped because they are borrowed from guides or catalogues and ‘boring’. What he attacks is the narratological principle according to which descriptions contribute to the psychology of characters and build the atmosphere of a novel. Breton repudiates psychology, making fun of it in sentences hard to render in English: ‘Cette description de chambre, permettez-moi de la passer, avec beaucoup d’autres. / Holà, j’en suis à la psychologie, sujet sur lequel je n’aurai garde de plaisanter’ (literally: ‘This chamber/room description, allow me to pass, as I’ll do with many others. / Not so fast! I’ve come to psychology, a topic I would be loath to joke about’). The phrase ‘de chambre’ insists on the limited frame, as in ‘chamber music’. The verb passer has ironical overtones since this was a key term for Aragon. Aragon presented himself as walking through ‘passages’ (arcades) until he becomes a passage himself, as we see in the ending of the ‘Passage de l’Opéra’ section: ‘What traverses me is the flash of lightning of myself. Fleeting. I won’t be able to neglect anything for I am the passage from shadow to light; I am at the same time occident and dawn. I am a limit, a line. Let all things mingle with the wind, here come all the words in my mouth. And what surrounds me is a ripple, the apparent swell of a shudder.’ In Breton’s first Manifesto, we glimpse Argon already leaving: ‘he only has time to say hello’. Aragon was apparently the passant par excellence. Breton was sceptical facing the psychology upon which novelistic characterization rests because it presupposes that human life can be reduced to pre-inscribed paradigms: a cluttered bedroom reveals a miser’s haunt, a
André Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism’(), in Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ), p. . Ibid., p. . Breton, Œuvres complètes, vol. , p. . Aragon, Œuvres poétiques complètes, vol. , p. . My translation. See Paris Peasant, p. for a very different rendering. Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism, p. .
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Diverging Genealogies of the Surrealist Unconscious
haggard face betrays a criminal, etc. This technique predicated on readymade analyses reduces writing to being a sort of chess game with stable pawns. To the trite psychology founded upon novelistic verisimilitude, Breton opposes Freud’s depth psychology, which is introduced as an antidote: ‘It was, apparently, by pure chance that a part of our mental world which we pretended not to be concerned with any longer – and in my opinion by far the most important part – has been brought back to light. For this we must give thanks to the discoveries of Sigmund Freud.’ Breton had begun his career as a medical student in psychiatry, serving in this function during World War I. He read Freud when French psychiatry ignored him. Sent to the neuro-psychiatric ward of SaintDizier in August , he devoured psychoanalytic literature, while observing psychotic patients, using them for early poems. This exposure to war psychosis was followed by an encounter with hysteria when he was transferred to Doctor Babinski’s service in . Babinski was Charcot’s successor and critic on the vexed issue of hysteria’s imitative nature. Freud’s impact led Breton to trust the production of language as a key to the unconscious. Spontaneous utterances of hysterics allow access to the mechanism of psychic production derived from Freud: Quite busy as I was then with Freud at that time, and having been familiarized with his examination methods that I had somehow used with patients during the war, I decided to obtain from myself what one tries to seek to obtain from them, that is a monologue flowing as fast as possible and upon which the critical mind of the subject makes no judgment whatever, letting it be unhampered by any reticence so that it may render as exactly as possible spoken thought.
Freud dominates as a thinker in the Manifesto. The practice founded upon the fundamental rule of letting patients speak without any censorship generated surrealist experiments abolishing the borders between sleep and waking life and also between art and life. Breton wanted to meet Freud, which he did in October , but he was disappointed, as documented in ‘Interview with Professor Freud’ (). In this account of the meeting, symptomatically, Breton resorts to physical description – quite a bad sign! Freud appears as ‘an old man without elegance’. He welcomes him ‘in the poor consulting room one would expect from a local doctor’. Breton concludes ironically by quoting Freud’s tepid endorsement: ‘Happily, we do count a lot upon the young.’
Ibid., p. .
Breton, Œuvres complètes, vol. , p. .
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Ibid., p. .
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The discrepancy between the physician who has no patience for artistic experiments and the innovative clinician weighed heavily on Breton’s attitude in the following years. While Breton would still extol Freud’s discovery in , Aragon proceeded differently; he attempted a broader synthesis moving from descriptions of objects to the apprehension of reflexive concepts. Hence we cannot avoid the question of descriptions. Surprisingly, in Anicet, the rejection of description is not voiced by Ajamais but by Jean Chipre, an alias for poet Max Jacob. Chipre instructs Anicet in an art of sparseness deriving from Christian mysticism: ‘Abundance is damaging. Above all avoid description; it is fussy and too comfortable, unhealthy richness. We have known for some time that all trees are green. Kill description. You must not be animated by the wish to shine.’ In Paris Peasant, some of these lessons have been accepted. However, Aragon can never resist a wish to ‘shine’, blaming his irrepressible urge to describe on his innate faculty for observation. Such a wish to remain myopic and close to the ground anticipates Georges Bataille – like him, Aragon wants to observe all the given without any preselection, and even finds some pleasure in touching and smelling gross matter: ‘In everything base there is some quality of the marvelous which puts me in the mood for pleasure.’ We are not spared the explicitly sexual encounter with a prostitute. The main principle is posited in Une vague de rêves – Aragon’s attempt to combine Hegel and Freud does not entail reducing Freud to speculative idealism because of the materialist philosophy of language deployed. If in the Dada period he could ironize and debunk the cliché that the Oedipus complex has become, in his surrealist manifesto itself, when analysing less the wave (vague) than the vogue of dreams, to avoid a merely fashionable confusion between reality and hallucination, he sends us to the hinge of the unconscious: ‘It was as if the mind, having reached a turning point [charnière] in the unconscious, lost all control over where it was drifting. Images which existed in the mind took physical forms, became tangible reality. Once we were in touch with them they expressed themselves in a perceptible form, taking on the characteristics of visual, auditory and
Aragon, Anicet, p. . Aragon, Paris Peasant, p. . Ibid., p. . See ‘Un Monsieur’, which begins with ‘It is better to kill one’s father than eat nuts’ (Aragon, Œuvres poétiques complètes, vol. , p. ) before swerving into critique: ‘Today one would not even find vaudeville in the topic of Oedipus: if an author were to attempt this, he would be hooted and whistled out of the room’ (ibid., p. ).
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Diverging Genealogies of the Surrealist Unconscious
tactile hallucinations.’ The positioning of the unconscious not as a dark hole or a fountain of mystical truth but as a material hinge between language and body ushers in the principle put forward by Une vague de rêves: ‘There is no thought but in words.’ Or again: ‘Absolute nominalism was dazzlingly exemplified in surrealism and it gradually dawned on us that the mental substance described above was, in fact, vocabulary itself. There is no thought outside words.’ This linguistic logic follows Hegel. Aragon demonstrates how to negate and keep both reality and non-reality in an exercise of Aufhebung or ‘sublation’. But when listing those who have given birth to surrealism, he begins with Saint-Pol-Roux and ends with Sigmund Freud as the main ‘president’ of the ‘Republic of dreams’. Freud has been enlisted in a programme beginning with German Romanticism and ending with surrealism. The aim is to let the Infinite appear in the world and the text ends with a bold invitation: ‘let in the infinite!’ This explains why the sentence on Libido, Love, and Death already quoted was followed by a paragraph from Hegel’s The Science of Logic (–) about sexual difference. Aragon quotes Hegel stating that the subject turning into self-consciousness can be understood both generically and as gendered, male or female. The issue of the difference between the sexes that plays a momentous role in The Phenomenology of the Spirit (), a text unfortunately not available in French at the time, was perceived presciently by Aragon, who once more attempts to splice Hegel and Freud here. The infinite can be reached by a poetic subject freed of all constraints once understood as propelled by a desire that we can call Wunsch with Freud and Begierde with Hegel. A literary desire for banal objects transfigured by language is the main quest of Paris Peasant. In the analysis Breton provided in , he writes that ‘Passage de l’Opéra’ attempted to provide ‘concrete knowledge’ by blurring the distinction between sensory perception, reason and the imagination, which corresponds to what Hegel had launched, that is, a ‘trial [procès] of reality’. This turns into a whole programme: ‘It is under those conditions that from a point of view that for the first time confronts the Hegelian method and the psychoanalytic method, surrealism can
Louis Aragon, A Wave of Dreams (), trans. Susan de Muth, Papers of Surrealism, (), p. , www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/files//surrealism_issue_.pdf (accessed September ) (translation modified). Aragon, Œuvres poétiques complètes, vol. , p. . Aragon, A Wave of Dreams, p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Aragon, Paris Peasant, p. . Aragon, Critique du ‘Paysan de Paris’, p. .
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be interpreted as the individual’s defense against reality.’ Schelling, Hegel, and Freud merge in a mathesis singularis or ‘concrete knowledge’ thanks to which Aragon keeps blending psychoanalytic methods and Hegelian concepts. This is how he brings to bear the Freudian theory of parapraxis sketched in Psychopathology of Everyday Life () on the psychology of characters (‘One false step [un faux pas], one slurred syllable together reveal a man’s thoughts’) before generalizing the idea of a revealing symptomaticity to the whole of reality. Here is where the arcade ends and its ‘passage’ begins: At the level of the printer who prints cards while you wait, just beyond the little flight of steps leading down into the Rue Chaptal, at that point in the far north of the mystery where the grotto gapes deep back in a bay troubled by the comings and goings of removal men and errand boys, in the farthest reaches of the two kinds of daylight which pit the reality of the outside world against the subjectivism of the passage, let us pause a moment, like a man holding back from the edge of the place’s depths, attracted equally by the current of objects and the whirlpools of his own being, let us pause in this strange zone where all is distraction [lapsus], distraction [lapsus] of attention as well as of inattention, so as to experience this vertigo. The double illusion which holds us here is confronted with our desire for absolute knowledge.
Aragon links a Hegelian meditation on ‘absolute knowledge’ reached at the end of the Spirit’s progression in history with a Freudian vocabulary: perceived reality itself turns into a lapsus, a slip of the tongue or the pen. Placing himself at the hinge between the inner world of the arcade and the outer world of the street, he perceives how a ‘double illusion’ pits the world of appearances in all their variety and the world of the mystical spirit against each other. Thus when Aragon muses on a possible divine point of view, he concludes that God’s main devices are just absurdity and banality. Hence the long section devoted to Nature identified as the poet’s unconscious. For human consciousness is contained in the unconscious, much as the City is contained in Nature. If Nature is ontologically from the realm of a Freudian unconscious, it can never be fully unveiled, and it will appear mostly in our dreams. But what about history, then? Where do we place the ‘nightmare of history’ from which Stephen Dedalus wanted to awake? Some of Aragon’s ‘philosophemes’ were faulted as glib or hasty by
Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. .
Aragon, Paris Peasant, p. . Ibid., p. .
Ibid., p. .
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Ibid., p. .
Diverging Genealogies of the Surrealist Unconscious
Benjamin: ‘While in Aragon there remains an impressionistic element, namely the “mythology” (and this impressionism must be held responsible for the many vague philosophemes in his book), here it is a question of the dissolution of “mythology” into the space of history. That, of course, can happen only through the awakening of a not-yet-conscious knowledge of what has been.’ Benjamin believed that he could strip from Aragon’s mythology its reactive, archaic, and non-dialectical features by adducing another mythology, the myth of awakening, which triggered Theodor Adorno’s reproach that Aragon never left the world of myth. Adorno thought that the solution was to be more dialectical. Aragon’s solution was to hystericize dialectics – a linguistic hysteria to be sure, a form of hysteria that only a novel can tolerate. One senses that the objects described in Paris Peasant are not evoked for themselves but in view of a certain hystericization. Its best example is the ‘blonde like’ development, not to be reduced to an imitation of Lautréamont’s ‘beau comme’ generating countless jarring images. Like a hairdresser transforming the colors of women’s hair, Aragon riffs on a single word, ‘blond’, in two pages of equivalents that proliferate until they include memory: ‘Memory: memory is truly blond.’ The mechanism is given in the sentence evoking hysteria: ‘hair pulsing with hysteria. Blond as hysteria.’ This calculated hystericization announces a text written by Breton and Aragon in , when they praised the ‘Invention of Hysteria’ and celebrated the ‘fiftieth anniversary of the invention of hysteria’, named ‘the greatest poetic discovery of the latter part of the century’. Breton and Aragon rejected the medicalization of hysteria: instead, they saw it as a supreme vehicle of expression. Hysteria excludes ‘systematic delirium’, which refers to paranoia, while leading to mystical and erotic ecstasies. Freud was not spared in that pamphlet. His bourgeois conservatism contrasts with what was found admirable, the fact that medical interns of La Salpêtrière hospital spent their nights with their beautiful hysterical patients: ‘Does Freud, who owes so much to Charcot, remember the time when, according to the survivors’ account, the interns of La Salpêtrière refused to separate their professional duty and their taste for love, and when night fell, the patients would either visit them outside or they would
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (), trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, : Harvard university Press, ), p. . See Adorno’s letter of – August to Benjamin, in Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence, –, ed. Henri Lonitz, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge, : Harvard University Press, ), p. . Aragon, Paris Peasant, pp. , . Breton, Œuvres complètes, vol. , p. .
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meet the patients in their beds?’ Freud would have been horrified by the insinuation that he had been part of a scene of female patients and young interns sleeping together, like the ‘passionate attitudes’ photographed by Charcot’s assistants, images of half-undressed women taking poses, all announcing a new ‘convulsive beauty’. Nadja concludes with a forceful call heralding this new beauty. When co-writing this paean to hysteria four years after the publication of Nadja, Breton may have been reconsidering his egregious clinical mistake facing the young woman he had memorialized so beautifully and movingly. Indeed Breton first took Nadja for a pure hysteric, missing the fact that she was closer to what one would call a ‘borderline’ state. Even when writing Nadja, he worried about his responsibility in her sudden depression after they broke up and she fell more deeply into psychosis. The memoir rehearses Breton’s attacks on normative psychiatry, but a singular blindness marks the narrator’s role facing the young woman’s psychic state. He concludes drily: ‘I was told, several months ago, that Nadja was mad’, before attacking the institution of psychiatry with vehemence. The flurry of invectives cannot hide an embarrassment: ‘My general contempt for psychiatry, its rituals and its works, is reason enough for my not yet having dared investigate what has become of Nadja.’ Was the book a mere ‘seducer’s diary’, a poetic journal documenting the intense attraction between Nadja and the poet between and October , after they had spent one night together in a Saint Germain hotel? Breton kept seeing Nadja until February when he abandoned her to the powers that be. Nadja was certified insane in March . The book is an oblique confession written by a man who could not respond to romantic passion and was unable to act poetically when facing psychotic delirium, hence its pathos and its haunting sense of wasted possibilities. The ending overlaps with the announcement of a more serious love affair to come; it seems that the very entanglement with Nadja has precipitated his commitment to a new love. In this flight forward, Breton retains the position of the master facing a hysteric. Nadja had told him: ‘You are my master’, but a master who runs away from the beautiful hysteric who has inspired him.
Ibid., p. . The catalogue of the exhibition L’invention du surréalisme: Des champs magnétiques à Nadja, shows a letter to Breton by Nadja from March testifying to her mental confusion. Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron, Isabelle Diu, Bérénice Stoll, and Olivier Wagner (eds.), L’invention du surréalisme: Des champs magnétiques à Nadja (Paris: BnF Éditions, ), pp. –. André Breton, Nadja (), trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, ), p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. .
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Diverging Genealogies of the Surrealist Unconscious
From a psychoanalytical point of view, the affair between poet and muse was a matter of diagnostic mistake. Taking Nadja for a gifted hysteric, Breton misread the signs of psychosis, learning the hard way that there is no deciphering of a clinical text without an immersion into the symptoms produced. Indeed Nadja initiated a delirious process of reading signs. Among her shady adventures that did not stop at prostitution and drugpeddling, once she had ‘wandered all night long in the Forest of Fontainebleau with an archeologist who was looking for some remains which, certainly, there was plenty of time to find by daylight’. Her desperate quest for signs ended up aligning her with Pynchon’s distraught Oedipa Maas in The Crying of Lot (). Breton did not understand that Nadja had replaced the reality principle of Freudian lore not with the pleasure principle as he imagined but with what Lacan calls the Real, a Real outside the Symbolic of shared language and social signs. Her Real both resisted interpretation and requested some form of hermeneutics, given the proliferation of mysterious signs, joint hallucinations, mental hieroglyphics, and ESP coincidences. Such a Real would challenge mere reality: ‘Who were we, confronting reality, that reality which I know was lying at Nadja’s feet like a lapdog?’ Yet, one of the paradoxes of Nadja is that the very photographs that were supposed to abolish the need for novelistic descriptions shine today in their uncanny aura, they radiate endlessly, full of a para-textual mystery that nothing can fully explain. In fact, Nadja taught Breton that he could not explain anything, or even teach her anything. At the beginning, Breton thought that he could educate the young woman by giving her his books to read. Nadja was a good reader in that she would get lost. She made abrupt links between texts and her life, a wild interpreter roaming the streets of Paris. At the end, the memoir rebounds, transforming the dead-end of the love affair into a new aesthetic, much like Paris Peasant ends with the announcement of a new love lying in store for Aragon. In spite of this parallelism, Breton’s ethical and aesthetic mistakes were avoided by Aragon. Believing in a fusion of myth and philosophy, a mixture of hysteria and rationality, his Real welcomes a writing reached by way of a collective unconscious thanks to a materialist nominalism, a position close to Benjamin’s practice in the Arcades Project. According to Benjamin, Aragon understood psychoanalysis in its strengths and limitations because he was aware of the myth it contained. The ‘Notes for the
Ibid., p. .
Ibid., pp. –.
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Exposé of ’ highlight the possibility of combining individual and collective dreams: ‘Efforts to shed light on the dreams of the individual with the help of the doctrine of the historical dreams of the collective. (We teach that, in the stratification of the dream, reality never simply is, but rather that it strikes the dreamer. And I treat of the arcades precisely as though, at bottom, they were something that has happened to me).’ Benjamin took awakening as the outcome of the dream so as to avoid being stuck in dreamland, a child in thrall to the world of adults. If the collector ‘interprets dreams of the collective’, there remains a hesitation about the ontological status of dreams: are they natural or historical phenomena? ‘Freud’s doctrine of the dream as a phenomenon of nature. Dream as historical phenomenon.’ Benjamin echoes Aragon’s hesitation between a man-made arcade soon to be destroyed and an Edenic garden taken as site for the collective unconscious of a whole historical period. This hesitation led Benjamin to voice criticism: ‘Opposition to Aragon: to work through all this by way of the dialectics of awakening, and not: to be lulled, through exhaustion, into “dream” or “mythology”! What are the sounds of the awakening morning we have drawn into our dreams? “Ugliness”, the “old-fashioned” are merely distorted morning voices that talk of our childhood.’ Yet we can wonder: have we truly woken up from these noisy, naïve, but ultimately rejuvenating dreams of perpetual childhood? If a novel can be defined as the continuation of a dream by other means, should these dreams not be accompanied by other genres like, for instance, the essay capable of positing a radical political critique, or the poem, seemingly best suited to embodying opaque allegories in words? Or should it become just a photograph, a pure snapshot of the present? Here, Benjamin should be relayed once more by his old friend and adversary Adorno. In a text from , Adorno strongly criticizes the wish to ascribe a psychoanalytic genealogy to surrealism: If in fact surrealism were nothing more than a collection of literary and graphic illustrations of Jung or even Freud, it would not just be replicating unnecessarily what the theory itself already states, without any metaphorical garb, but would also be so innocuous as to leave no room for the scandale that surrealism intends and that is its vital element. To reduce surrealism to the level of psychological dream theory already subordinates it to the ignominy of the official.
Benjamin, Arcades Project, p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Surrealism Reconsidered’, in Adorno and Elisabeth Lenk, The Challenge of Surrealism, trans. Susan H. Gillespie (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), p. .
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Diverging Genealogies of the Surrealist Unconscious
Adorno has a strong point here – surrealism is nothing if it is defanged and loses its abrasive or subversive qualities. These qualities would be found less in psychoanalytical theories that have stopped shocking people than in two themes that had also been developed by Benjamin in conjunction with surrealism: the moment of awakening and the photograph. Adorno writes: ‘As a freezing at the moment of awakening, surrealism is akin to photography. It may be imaginings that it captures, but not the invariant, ahistorical ones of the unconscious subject, which conventional opinion, in neutralizing them, confers.’ These imaginings convey to subjects their most intimate interiority as well as the intimation of ongoing social and historical processes. Thus Adorno’s last sentence condenses the exact load of paradoxical wisdom bequeathed to us by a movement that has never finished dying. Let us not deny its precarious survival as a still contemporary ‘Ajamais’: ‘But if surrealism itself now seems obsolete, it is because people already deny themselves the consciousness of denial that is preserved in surrealism’s photographic negative.’
Ibid., p. .
Ibid., p. .
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Automatism, Autobiography, and Thanatography in the Surrealist Novel Abigail Susik
Although it might seem counterintuitive to link the development of surrealist automatism to the history of the surrealist novel, it is important to remember that, following the publication of André Breton and Philippe Soupault’s Magnetic Fields (), automatic prose was prominently featured in several important proto-surrealist and surrealist novels. Authors such as Louis Aragon, Robert Desnos, Benjamin Péret, and Michel Leiris, for example, each experimented in distinctive ways with combinations of surrealist automatism and novelistic tropes during the s. Why was this the case, and what role did automatism play in relation to the surrealist engagement with the modalities of narrative fiction? Likewise, how did the novel complement, activate, or even serve as a foil to automatism? Michel Leiris’s Aurora (written –; pub. ), for instance, demonstrates a particularly adventurous fusion of the novel format with surrealism’s pure psychic automatism. Aurora was the only book by Leiris that ever came close to the status of a conventional novel, and yet it was also the culminating text of his surrealist years. Aurora nevertheless squarely positions itself in conversation with the novelistic tradition of the fantastic adventure romance. Readers may be surprised to encounter there a sadistic Egyptian priest with a necrophiliac fetish for cold stone, a hapless intellectual vagabond who meets an unfortunate end when struck by lightning, and a doomed love affair with a supernaturally beautiful woman. Certain moments in Aurora are more evocative of pulp scenes from a movie like Karl Freund’s pre-Motion Picture Code horror, The Mummy (), than precedents in contemporary surrealist novels such as Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant (). Writing a letter to his friend Adrienne Monnier, Leiris confirmed that he indeed had American popular cinema in mind when he fashioned the bombshell character of Aurora.
Michel Leiris, ‘Lettre à Adrienne Monnier à propos d’Aurora’, in Adrienne Monnier, Souvenirs de Londres: Petite suite anglaise (Paris: Mercure de France, ), pp. –. Also see Michel Leiris, Aurora (; Paris: Gallimard, ).
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Automatism, Autobiography, and Thanatography
Such an investment in the distracting pleasures of burlesque entertainment comes as something of a surprise when the arc of this author’s career is considered. After distancing himself from André Breton’s surrealist group in , Leiris subsequently devoted the rest of his life to forging a ruthless style of ethnographical-autobiographical writing. In books such as Manhood () and the four-volume The Rules of the Game (–), wherein unforgiving details like the author’s predilection for scratching his arse were given pride of place, there was little room for the kind of magical storytelling combined with automatism that we see in Aurora. Yet, this post-surrealist turn toward the naked and unsparing nature of the memoir or confessional tale was not so much a question of Leiris’s personal distaste for fiction as a narrative form. Rather, he later claimed he was simply incapable, as a writer, of creating the necessary psychic distance needed to sustain the extensive character development that fiction demanded. For this reason it seems all the more unlikely that surrealism, with its vehement foundational protest against naturalistic literature, its distrust of the psychological novel as a bourgeois form, and its commitment to the empirical practice of automatic writing as a type of rote transcription, would provide the ground for Leiris’s sole foray into novelistic narrative constructions such as those in Aurora. Yet, following his extended development of a Rousselian procedural wordplay in some of his publications for the journal La révolution surréaliste (Glossary: My Glosses’ Ossuary, ), and his initial deployment of a durational ilk of psychic automatism in Cardinal Point (; pub. ), it is precisely an engagement with fiction that Leiris consummates in Aurora. As Maurice Nadeau noted, Aurora is an ‘obsessional’ and heavily Maldororian text, fundamentally shaped by the Gothic novel and Romanticism. Joëlle de Sermet links Leiris’s text to the French ‘frenetic’ literary school of the s and s. For J.H. Matthews, Aurora is most indebted to the oeuvres of Joris-Karl Huysmans and Raymond Roussel. According to Seán Hand it is a ‘surrealist transformation of a typical roman d’amour’. Jacqueline
Madeleine Gobeil, Michel Leiris, and Carl R. Lovitt, ‘Interview with Michel Leiris’, SubStance, / – (), – (at pp. –). Maurice Nadeau, Michel Leiris et la quadrature du cercle (Paris: Julliard, ), pp. , . Author’s translation for all following French selections. Joëlle de Sermet, Michel Leiris, poète surréaliste (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, ), p. . J.H. Matthews, Surrealism and the Novel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ), pp. –. Seán Hand, Michel Leiris: Writing the Self (Cambridge University Press, ), p. .
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Chénieux-Gendron reminds us that Leiris pointedly subtitled Aurora ‘roman’ (novel). Leiris himself spoke of the ‘astonishing mélange of styles’ deployed in the text. The mythic, supernatural, alchemical, and occult aspects of Aurora were inspired by the scholarly study of the modern aesthetic category of ‘the marvellous’ that Leiris had commenced but never finished under the employ of Jacques Doucet in . Novel after novel was listed in his notes for Doucet, from Gothic tomes to the novellas of Romanticism. Leiris was invested in the magical and mystical aspects of a modern marvellous to such a degree that Aurora might be considered a predecessor of another avant-garde spiritual quest novel: René Daumal’s World War II-era Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic NonEuclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing (written –; pub. ). Leiris was by no means alone among his surrealist peers in this integration of aspects of the typical dime store page-turner with more esoteric strains of fiction. The surrealist novel is a distinctive prose genre, one that tends to make use of certain aspects of the novel and various romance genres even while it jettisons the greater part of that form’s traditional baggage. Ever since the publication of Louis Aragon’s proto-surrealist novel Anicet, or the Panorama (), which ingeniously combined the oneiric rhythms of automatism seen emerging in works such as Breton and Soupault’s Magnetic Fields () with the autofictional inflections of the roman à clef and aspects of the crime fiction genre, surrealism had made its libertine appropriation of the novel form unabashedly evident (recall Breton’s mention of surrealist ‘false novels’ in the Manifesto). How, then, can Leiris’s experimental approach to fiction in Aurora, nearly a decade after Aragon’s Anicet (which was also subtitled ‘roman’, and featured another femme fatale anti-heroine, Mirabelle), be understood in relation to the rest of Leiris’s non-fictional oeuvre? In what ways does Aurora illuminate or modulate our conception of the surrealist novel at large, and the role that psychic automatism plays therein? The fictional components of plot, setting, and character operating in Aurora do so in tandem with a generous interspersion of non-fictional textual material, such as dream fragments, psychic automatism, and the interjection of embellished autobiographical elements. Aurora can
Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron, Le surréalisme et le roman, – (Lausanne: L’Âge d’Homme, ), p. . Michel Leiris, ‘Michel Leiris ou le réalisme du surréalisme’, interview with Jean Paget, La table ronde, (May ), p. . Michel Leiris, Le merveilleux, ed. Catherine Maubon (Brussels: Didier Devillez Éditeur, ).
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Automatism, Autobiography, and Thanatography
therefore be seen in one regard as a counterpart to Aragon’s earlier juxtaposition of genre fiction with automatist passages and autofiction in the Armistice-era Anicet. Leiris himself confirmed as much, although he also listed several other texts as influences upon Aurora, including Marcel Schwob’s fantastical collection of portraits of historical figures, Imaginary Lives (). As other scholars have argued, Aurora provides Leiris with an early avenue of exploration for what would soon become his distinctive adaptation and amalgamation of the non-fiction genres of journal writing, dream logging, travelogue, confession, memoir, essay, and autobiography. According to Marie-Claire Dumas, Aurora is Leiris’s debut sortie into the realm of autobiography, but a paradoxically surrealist one – as a result of its mythic and sensational themes, if not so much in the descriptive novelistic mode in which it was written. In , Leiris explained that Aurora was his initial autobiographical work. It was ‘a mythological novel’, that explored a certain species of auto-myth rooted in the realm of his own personhood. Aurora was composed quickly over the course of a few months shortly after he was married. Between April and September , Leiris embarked upon a five-month trip to Egypt and Greece in an attempt to recover from a major psycho-sexual crisis in his married life. Upon returning to France after his journey, wracked with a case of malaria, Leiris underwent extended psychoanalytic treatment, eventually breaking with Breton and joining the staff of Georges Bataille’s magazine, Documents. Although he ultimately grew apart from certain surrealist associates, such as Breton, Leiris insisted that he never rejected surrealism as such. The discoveries of surrealism had gradually prepared him for the stark arena of self-confrontation, what he later termed the bullfight or corrida of le moi
Annie Pibarot, ‘Aurora-roman’, in Francis Marmande (ed.) Michel Leiris: Le siècle à l’envers (Tours: Éditions Farrago, ), pp. , . Marie-Claire Dumas, ‘Commencer et finir: Le manuscrit d’Aurora’, in Béatrice Didier and Jacques Neefs (eds.), Manuscrits surréalistes: Aragon, Breton, Éluard, Leiris, Soupault (Saint-Denis: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, ), p. . Hand, Michel Leiris, pp. , . Paul Chavasse, ‘Entretiens avec Michel Leiris ()’, in Philippe Lejeune, Claude Leroy, and Catherine Maubon (eds.), Michel Leiris, ou de L’autobiographie considérée comme un art: Colloque international, et décembre (Nanterre: Université Paris X, ), p. . Michel Leiris, Journal, –, ed. Jean Jamin (Paris: Gallimard, ), pp. –. Aliette Armel, Michel Leiris (Paris: Fayard, ), pp. –. Armel, Michel Leiris, pp. –. Sally Price and Jean Jamin, ‘A Conversation with Michel Leiris’, Current Anthropology, / (), – (at p. ).
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(the self ) with itself in the space of the text – even while these writerly tendencies only fully emerged after his departure from Breton’s group. But what exactly was Leiris’s concept of the surrealist novel and its purposes, and the role of automatism therein? Some insight into this question can be gained from understanding his views about surrealism as a whole. Scrutiny of a short set of notes that Leiris penned in in preparation for a lecture he gave to a group of students called ‘Le surréalisme et l’unité’ that year prove enlightening. There, he emphasizes the notion of ‘unity’ evoked in his lecture title, asserting that surrealism is a revolutionary project intending to abolish the ‘profound dissociation’ suffered in the human condition as lived under the constrictions of advanced capitalism in Western nations. Leiris writes, ‘In our hypertechnical world, where the division of labor is taken to the extreme, humankind is lost, not only in its relations with other humans but also in its orientation to the objective sphere.’ Class hierarchy follows the division of labor, and humans are ‘cut off from one another by a multitude of social screens’. The experience of temporality is also riven by the distinction between work and leisure, Leiris states. The rest of civilization’s values and institutions follow this artificial model of specialization and compartmentalization. Surrealism is allied with ‘an attempt to rupture the power of these imposed silos over our lives.’ Following André Breton’s lecture and subsequent pamphlet of the same title, ‘What Is Surrealism?’, Leiris contends that surrealism is a tireless effort towards ‘the unification of the personality’. Leiris quotes directly from Breton’s earlier text, which reads: ‘It [surrealism] has provoked new states of consciousness and overthrown the walls beyond it which it was immemorially supposed to be impossible to see; it has – as is being more and more generally recognized – modified the sensibility, and taken a decisive step towards the unification of the personality, which it found threatened by an ever more profound dissociation.’ Although, as we have seen, Leiris ceased participating in Breton’s group in , his notes for the conference nevertheless remain in agreement with Breton’s ideas about the necessity of overcoming the ‘antinomy between subject and
Michel Leiris, ‘Afterword: The Autobiographer as Torero’, in Leiris, Manhood: A Journey from Childhood into the Fierce Order of Virility (San Francisco: North Point Press, ), pp. –. Michel Leiris, ‘Le surréalisme et l’unité’, in Leiris, Zébrage (Paris: Gallimard, ), p. . All further translations from Zébrage are by the author. Ibid., p. . Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. . André Breton, ‘What Is Surrealism?’, in Breton, What Is Surrealism? Selected Writings, ed. and trans. Franklin Rosemont (New York: Monad Press, ), p. .
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Automatism, Autobiography, and Thanatography
object’, as had been expressed in Breton’s Communicating Vessels (), and in ‘What Is Surrealism?’ two years later. The radical, allencompassing liberty that surrealism seeks is a liberation from both internal and external alienation. Leiris stresses that surrealism strives to bring humans into agreement with themselves by refusing the limitations promoted by religion, wage labor, bourgeois sexuality, ideological fixity, and so on. The possibility of internal psychic agreement for individual humans is therefore also predicated upon an external rupture with the social and moral structures of contemporary Western civilization. Leiris’s notes for ‘Le surréalisme et l’unité’ demonstrate that for him, the process of bringing individuals into agreement with themselves was rehearsed within the very space of surrealist writing. While adumbrating the ways in which surrealism invests in various cultural concepts or activities in pursuit of a total transformation of modern life, Leiris states that in surrealism we see a ‘usage de divers procédés, sur le plan poétique’ (deployment of various poetic methods). On the one hand there is surrealist automatic writing, which ‘liberates the unconscious’, and on the other there is the energetic disintegration of language by surrealist writers like Desnos (and by Leiris himself, he indicates in his notes) who ‘dismantle logic, upset speech patterns’ in order to ‘obtain a revelation’. Like the broad cultural task of the surrealist movement, which aims to dissolve existing social structures in pursuit of a new psychic unity for humans, surrealist writing often deconstructs language so as to emancipate communication systems and instigate revolutionary renewal. The surrealist novel, we can thus infer from Leiris’s notes, will also work to bring both the reader and the writer into a state of internal agreement between themselves and the outside world. Could Leiris’s surrealist appropriation and détournement of the adventure romance in Aurora have been a part of this attempt to work towards psychic unification precisely through the systematic dismantling of the novel and the disruption of its descriptive narrative flow? In that case, might we come to see Leiris’s Aurora not so much as a final surrealist foray into an anti-naturalistic game of undermining the conventional novel, but rather another step towards a lifelong project that would take the study of the self as its object? It is this interpenetration of autobiographical and automatist elements in Aurora that crucially links the text to the whole of Leiris’s extensive post-surrealist oeuvre. The promise of psychological
Leiris, ‘Surréalisme et l’unité’, p. . Leiris, ‘Surréalisme et l’unité’, p. .
Hand, Michel Leiris, pp. –. Ibid.
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plentitude or character transparency that the naturalistic novel in late nineteenth-century Europe had offered through narrative paradigms such as an omniscient narrator was a hoax for the surrealists in comparison to their encounter with automatism’s recording of living consciousness in the immediate aftermath of the Great War and the – pandemic. In Aurora, Leiris understood that the insertion of a subtle combination of surrealist documentary with automatism would deliver a definitive blow to the false construction of supposedly objective characters in the novel form. The veil separating subjective and objective would be torn – in the space of the text at least. The notion that the surrealist novel is in essence a deconstruction of the novel form, and, as such, a variation on the surrealist attack on logic and the instrumentality of language, is by no means a revelation. But, understanding the way in which such collective deconstruction co-exists with the movement’s goal of personal and superstructural reunification offers certain insights about how and why surrealist novels like Aurora often combine techniques of automatism and elements of autobiography with fictional narrative. The novel form is retained in surrealism because, in one regard, it offers a highly effective framework for the demonstration of the multiplicity of the self, a textual self that can bifurcate, perish, and resurrect at will. Working in conjunction with the indexical operations of psychic automatism, which is the earnest attempt at a documentary record of thought as it moves in real-time through consciousness – and the denotative nature of the autobiographical, which functions in essence as a roster of prior lived phenomena – fictional iterations of the self emphasize the riven nature of the psyche through exaggerated character differentiation. In other words, narrative fiction can tinker with the unifying potential of omniscient consciousness through the unchallenged volition of a narrator. Again, however, a paradox poses itself. Why would surrealism desire the multiplicity of the self in its prose experiments if the reunification of the personality, following the disruption of the bourgeois psycho-social edifice, is the ultimate goal? Why deploy components of naturalistic fiction if the eradication of the false totality of bourgeois identity construction is desired? In the ‘What Is Surrealism?’, Breton had spoken of the need for a systematic analysis of both the ‘interior reality’ and ‘external reality’ of human experience as separate phenomena. Only after such focused analyses of each sphere in succession could the two then be compared, he stated. For Breton, these parallel forms of awareness and existence must be understood individually before they can homogenize on the same plane:
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we have attempted to present interior reality and exterior reality as two elements in process of unification, or finally becoming one. This final unification is the supreme aim of surrealism: interior reality and exterior reality being, in the present form of society, in contradiction (and in this contradiction we see the very cause of man’s unhappiness, but also the source of his movement), we have assigned ourselves the task of confronting these two realities with one another on every possible occasion, of refusing to allow the pre-eminence of the one over the other, yet not of acting on the one and on the other both at once, for that would be to suppose that they are less apart from each other than they are (and I believe that those who pretend that they are acting on both simultaneously are either deceiving us or are a prey to a disquieting illusion); of acting on these two realities not both at once, then, but one after the other, in a systematic manner, allowing us to observe their reciprocal attraction and interpenetration and to give to this interplay of forces all the extension necessary for the trend of these two adjoining realities to become one and the same.
Twelve years later, Leiris internalized Breton’s stipulations in the ‘What Is Surrealism?’ Surrealism cannot instantaneously trigger the desired ‘restoration’ of ‘total liberty’, as Leiris expressed it in his notes for the conference on surrealism. Such a reconstitution is understood to be a collective process requiring individual participation in the painstaking process of analysis and integration. Moreover, although surrealism agitates for a future reunification of the personality, following on the heels of a revolution in the economic and social structure of society that must first occur, this process of psychic restitution in no way reduces the psyche to a monolithic singularity. Breton explains that the ontological rift between mind and matter will meld into a whole, and the subject–object divide will topple, but solely as the result of stages of systematic analysis and subsequent integration. Before any such undividedness arrives, this operation has the potential to amplify the dizzying heterogeneity of consciousness and the mercurial nature of the ego. Such an apparent contradiction within the framework of resolution is reminiscent of the emptying and othering of the self that Maurice Blanchot sees as one of the key mechanisms operating in the dream accounts that Leiris gathered in his collection Nights as Day, Days as Night (). The distance between the dreaming self and the waking self (the Cogito) is only accentuated in a ‘nightless night’ of active dreaming, when ‘even as we sleep’, some part of ourselves allows us no sleep.
Breton, ‘What Is Surrealism?’, p. (italics original). Leiris, ‘Surréalisme et l’unité’, p. . Maurice Blanchot, ‘Dreaming, Writing’ (), in Michel Leiris, Nights As Day, Days As Night, trans. Richard Sieburth (Los Angeles: Spurl Editions, ), p. .
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How does such a surrealist analysis of the self as multiple selves – sleeping, perpetually awake, living, dead, or dying – and yet unified in the framework of the narrative, operate in Aurora? The phantasmagoria of the romance novel is retained in Aurora because it allows Leiris to investigate the dismantling and recombination of the ‘self’ beyond the limits of both psychic automatism and documentary account or autobiography. Fiction can prototype death and manufacture a glimpse into the afterlife in a manner that exceeds the capabilities of surrealist automatism or documentary. Such an interrogation of the nature of death is important to surrealism because of the movement’s ultimate commitment to surpassing of the boundaries of the waking self, if only in a projected postrevolutionary future society. Psychic automatism, an authentic imprint of the movement of consciousness as verbal or visual thought, offers the primary avenue for this surrealist inquiry. The surrealist self is split into conscious and unconscious, and yet these two modalities ever interpenetrate and commingle in a manner that exceeds the control of the will. Automatism demonstrates that the self is divided and yet also whole, and that consciousness cannot be summarized through fictional exercises that demonstrate the success or failure of human intentions, or the passivity of humans in the face of fate. Whereas automatism attempts to trace the minutest activities of the unconscious, surrealist documentary accounts, whether travelogues, confessions, memoirs, or combinations thereof, etc., establish a complementary log of the ego’s waking pursuits. Both these areas of investigation, that of the unconscious and conscious, the cognitive and the existential, presume that the self can only be understood through a record of the life of a specific individual, that of the writing self, a self who can, after all, only accomplish automatic and documentary writing while alive. Surrealist automatism and documentary are in that way epistemological demonstrations, via the words of the writer who is writing, of the mere fact of being alive. In Aurora, these approaches are experimentally combined with fiction in an attempt to explore both the limits and the fluid expanses of the writing self and the paradoxical lack of an integral self, the connection of the act of writing to the state of being alive or the termination of the writing consciousness in death, and the impossibility of a writer composing their own thanatography, or account of one’s death. It is the intertwining of the seemingly conflicting impetuses of surrealist automatism and intimate documentary with fiction that effectively accentuates the assertion of both the limits and the revolutionary infinity of phantasmal selves, and the traumatic dissolution of those selves in the
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Automatism, Autobiography, and Thanatography
project of surrealist reunification of the psyche. Strangely in this configuration, it is the elasticity of character development in fiction that allows for the furthering of the surrealist project, or perhaps better said, its reframing in a different light. In Aurora, as with other surrealist books such as Aragon’s roman à clef Anicet, automatist passages, dream components, and documentary elements pierce and disrupt the story’s progression. They temper the novel’s structural tendency towards totality by allowing the evidence of actual lived or dreamed life to interfere with the suspension of disbelief in fiction, fiction’s world-building premise. But at the same time, it is the creative envisioning of forbidden love, violent death, and consciousness beyond the grave on the part of le romancier that shows surrealism a path that leads away from the strictly evidential nature of the living self. When surrealists engage in fictional or poetic auto-thanatography, or the writing and rewriting of their own imagined death experience, as Leiris does via different characters in Aurora, they recall the movement’s intention to deconstitute the present self/selves in the process of reconstituting a future self/selves. (In chapter of Aurora, Leiris also writes about the death of the beloved as an eradication of the self, quoting from Gérard de Nerval’s poem ‘Les Cydalises’ from Odelettes, , in an epigraph, ‘Where are our sweethearts? They are in the grave.’) Such instances of surrealist auto-thanatography thus have the potential to become the third step in what might be called surrealism’s autoécriture (self-writing): the self writing about itself in search of other selves. Such surrealist autoécriture constitutes a textual world made with the written evidence of the life of both the living (automatism) and the lived self (autobiography), but also potentially the self as eradicated in death or other kinds of transformation. As J.B. Pontalis observed in , it is in Aurora that ‘we see most clearly that death and the ego are two sides of a single obsession’. Pontalis echoes Maurice Blanchot’s earlier musings about the ‘vertiginous suspension between living and dying’ in his discussion of Aurora, a ‘story of the metamorphoses by which the I changes itself into the He and the He tries in vain, through more and more exhausting transformations, to plunge beneath the That to attain a true nothing’. More recently, Charles
Michel Leiris, Aurora, trans. Anna Warby (London: Atlas Press, ), p. . Hand, Michel Leiris, pp. –. J.B. Pontalis, ‘Michel Leiris, or Psychoanalysis Without End’, trans. David Macey, Yale French Studies, (), – (at p. ). Maurice Blanchot, ‘Glances from Beyond the Grave’, trans. Hilari Allred, Yale French Studies, (), – (at pp. , ).
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Palermo, citing authors such as Charles Juliet, has discussed Aurora as a text that struggles with a desire for the absolute continuity of the self beyond the limit of death through the reproductive transmission of writing and reading. Projecting the possibility of one’s permutations beyond the lifespan of the body is indeed a kind of fiction – albeit one infused with a peculiar kind of authenticity – especially when such fantasizing takes place ironically within the framework of burlesque adventure romance, as is the case in Aurora. If surrealism is notable for its rhetorical homage towards the act of suicide and the way in which that homage overshadows the death of several of its adherents by their own hand, experimental thanatography fiction such as Aurora should be understood as an echo of these autodestructive phenomena, a reckless textual breakdown that Seán Hand has described in terms of the ‘hysterical dynamics of surrealist narrative’. According to Catherine Masson, the coterminous ‘horror’ (as seen in Leiris’s text, Aurora=Horrora) of both life and death is a malaise that turns the author’s own body into a repulsive and embarrassing costume that can never be removed, a fatal perception of the self as repulsive other, akin to the self-destruction of suicide and other forms of auto-castration. Already in the initial ‘semi-automatic’ pages of Aurora, this desperate attempt to depart introspection for new horizons of consciousness and experience is described in a tone of despair and revulsion. The self, which in Aurora also figures as the body of the text, is recast in the book’s prologue (which was written after the rest of the text was composed) as an ancient and labyrinthine house filled with staircases and piles of rejectamenta. To begin the writing of the book, the narrator must find a way out of his hypnagogic ‘house-body’, as Gaston Bachelard calls it when contemplating Aurora. We are guided through a first-person account of immense psychosomatic effort as the narrator crawls on his hands and knees down the
Charles Palermo, ‘Michel Leiris on Knowing’, MLN, / (), –; Charles Juliet, ‘La littérature et le thème de la mort chez Kafka et Leiris’, Critique, (November ), –. On this subject, also see Denis Hollier, ‘Under the Heading of Holofernes (Notes on Judith)’, in Hollier, Absent Without Leave: French Literature under the Threat of War, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, : Harvard University Press, ), pp. –. Hand, Michel Leiris, p. . Catherine Masson, L’autobiographie et ses aspects théâtraux chez Michel Leiris (Paris: L’Harmattan, ), pp. –. Jeffrey Mehlman, A Structural Study of Autobiography: Proust, Leiris, Sartre, LéviStrauss (Ithaca, : Cornell University Press, ), pp. –. Chénieux-Gendron, Le surréalisme et le roman, p. . Dumas, ‘Commencer et finir’, pp. –. Gaston Bachelard, Earth and Reveries of Repose: An Essay on Images of Interiority (), trans. Mary McAllester Jones (Dallas Institute Publications, ), p. .
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Automatism, Autobiography, and Thanatography
stairs of his attic abode for the first time in twenty years, into a ‘sinister antechamber’ suggestively ‘hung with old etchings and suits of armour’. The narrator records his paranoid perceptions in a passage riddled with automatist phrases: ‘The wooden boards turn to mud and there my feet take root, my legs wither and soon nothing will remain of my body, since it bears no mark of greatness or immortality.’ Once he has dragged himself into the forbidden antechamber, just beyond the boundaries of his house-self, he contemplates the strange objects accumulated there, launching into a reverie populated by brutal fantasies. Finally propelling himself out of the building and onto the city street, the narrator switches into second-person, describing how your descent from the attic is also the painful moment of your birth, your departure from your mother’s body, and also the transformation of food into excrement through your innards. ‘And all your life you will be going down this staircase’, the protean narrator warns. ‘The poems you will write, the stupid things you will say, everything which will or will not happen to you, the pleasures you will enjoy and the tortures you will suffer: all this will be no more real to you than any one of the different phantoms which at this very moment dwell in the darkness of the staircase, whose slope alone is bloody and real’, he continues. The impetus towards suicide emerges for both the narrator and the protagonist, two sides of one self. We are told that ‘all intellectual output is merely foolish literature composed after the event’ of this descent. It is only after this exodus from confinement in the self that Aurora unfolds, triggered by the engendering of romantic love for an unobtainable anti-heroine, the adulation of her increasingly ideated image, and the ceaseless desire for her presence even after death: the unbounded feminine entity named Aurora. In search of this inchoate and immortal beloved, the narrator, already doubled into first and second persons in the prologue, further splinters into multiple characters inhabiting the linguistic space of the third person, a process that Chénieux-Gendron calls the ‘tearing apart of the narcissistic moi’. He becomes the man in the white suit, the ghost of the evil Egyptian high priest Damoclès Siriel (Siriel being an inversion of ‘Leiris’), the doomed vagabond, etcetera. Automatist passages, some of them pages long, are frequently interspersed, often set apart from the rest of the text with quotes.
Leiris, Aurora, pp. –. Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid. Eric van der Schueren, ‘Aurora: Les palingénésies de l’aura’, Revue de l’Université de Bruxelles, – (), –. Chénieux-Gendron, Le surréalisme et le roman, p. . Guy Poitry, ‘Le je autobiographique’, Magazine littéraire, (September ), pp. –.
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Although the narrator ultimately escapes the house of the self, further journeys must be undertaken to arrive at the dawning of fictional or paraselves. Echoing the journal that Leiris kept during his travels in Greece and Egypt at the time of the book’s writing, a fearful sea voyage is undertaken in Aurora, on a boat constructed of automatic language. After travelling so far in an attempt to escape himself, the narrator nevertheless winds up in a grotesque bar called ‘The Parts of the Body’, where he succumbs to drunkenness and nearly perishes when he realizes that for every minute he stays, he is in greater danger of being subsumed as an organ into a metabody made up of multiple, individual corpuses. It is only when the ship sinks and the narrator is washed onto an island that ‘the first person singular is no longer of prime importance’. This fictional death of the self and paradoxical persistence or mutation of that consciousness after death is the first of many such thresholds crossed in Aurora. The narrator confides, ‘It is only in relation to myself that I am, and if I say “it is raining” or “the sea is rough”, these are merely circumlocutions which convey that a part of me has resolved into fine droplets or that another part is swollen with dangerous eddies. The death of the world equals the death of myself.’ The self is multitudinous and at the same time allencompassing. ‘For here am I, sabre-rattling swashbuckler, prophet, pimp, and many other men besides!’ In Aurora death is not the end of consciousness nor the termination of the self’s continual metamorphosis into other selves. The narrator concludes at the end of Chapter : ‘For here I have come to cathedral Death, to this third-person singular which a moment ago I crossed out with one stroke of my pen – Death, that grammatical pitchfork which imposes its ineluctable syntax on the world and on myself, that rule which makes all discourse nothing but a miserable mirage masking the nothingness of objects, whatever the words I utter and whatever this “I” which I have put forward.’ The text becomes a staging ground for the ceaseless and strangely deathless demise of the self and its radical liberty from the constraints posed by body and identity. As expressed in the title of a cryptic pencil drawing featuring a pyramid, a self-portrait silhouette, and a sketch of a female visage that was included in Leiris’s journal for the year , Leiris was interested in the creation and recreation of Ma vie par moi-même (My life, by myself) (Figure .).
Leiris, Aurora, pp. –. Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. (italics original). Ibid. Ibid., p. . Leiris, Journal, frontispiece. Anna Warby, ‘Introduction: the Dawning of Aurora’ in Leiris, Aurora (), p. ; Armel, Michel Leiris, p. .
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Automatism, Autobiography, and Thanatography
Figure .
Michel Leiris, Ma vie par moi-même, . Pencil drawing. © Jean Jamin pour les œuvres de Michel Leiris / Photo Archives Gallimard.
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An extended journal entry from May illuminates the nature of this drawing and some of Leiris’s ideas at this time about the nature of automatism and its goals. Leiris expresses both admiration and frustration with surrealist automatism. The movement was preoccupied with Rimbaud’s disorientation, according to Leiris, yet it only took so far the experiments with mystical techniques that produce states of ecstasy and exaltation. Automatism remained ‘too rudimentary’ as a ‘rule of construction’ for it to become a viable ‘technique for inspiration’. In , the year of his withdrawal from Breton’s group, Leiris was looking for a new means of achieving heightened levels of awareness that fixated upon neither experimental methods nor any literary output. Aurora, finished a year earlier, was already a part of this in-process attempt to find a means for entering into a state of mind through writing that cultivated the ‘concentration of the exterior world dans le moi [within the self]’. One way of understanding Aurora, Leiris asserts, is as a surrealist magnum opus, or account of the alchemical striving towards the creation of the philosopher’s stone recast as the surrealist path to greater awareness of a fundamentally unknowable, unbounded, and unstable self. Cardinal Point was the first iteration of such a quest, Leiris explains, and Aurora expanded upon this agenda by equating the search for the philosopher’s stone with the desperate drive for absolute romantic love, truth, and concrete knowledge. By , this symbolic quest was also explicitly an autobiographical one for Leiris. Leiris classifies all of his surrealist works, including Aurora, and also his initial writings about his travels in Africa, as a form of ‘autocritique’, which takes as its method a complex negotiation between the interior life of the individual and the symbols that one makes of one’s personal life. With autocritique, one enters into a state of ‘clairvoyance’ in order to be in touch with the impersonal currents of humanity. The drawing Ma vie par moi-même is an early schema for such an interpenetrative project of autocritique as a method explicitly based in the interchange between the paradigms of autobiography, psychic automatism, and experimental auto-thanatography. Leiris’s autocritique would be grounded in the documentation and conceptualization of vast networks of shifting subject–object interrelations. The negotiation and enunciation of the self as selves, others, and as dead, depended upon the constant play
Leiris, Journal, p. . Leiris, Journal, p. . Leiris, Journal, p. .
Ibid., p. ; Matthews, Surrealism and the Novel, pp. –. Ibid., p. . Matthews, Surrealism and the Novel, p. . Ibid., pp. –. Leiris, Journal, pp. –.
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Automatism, Autobiography, and Thanatography
between internal and external realities, even while separation between subject and object ultimately remained an impassable rift. The artist’s silhouette gazes at the pyramid (the philosopher’s stone), a key to internal luminescence, just as the feminine form contemplates the artist’s quest, thereby igniting a ceaseless chain of desire for reunification.
Michel Leiris, Biffures: La règle du jeu I, ed. Denis Hollier and Nathalie Barberger (Paris: Gallimard, ), .
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Urban Nature: The City in the Surrealist Novel Effie Rentzou
It was on a spring evening in , after dessert had been served, that Louis Aragon, Marcel Noll, and André Breton decided to step outside Breton’s house for a walk. Wandering through the th arrondissement, Montmartre, very close by, ‘made of spangles’ with ‘a glimmer in its eye almost the colour of kohl’, did not seem to offer much adventure, nor did Montparnasse, proposed by Noll. Instead, the three of them jumped in a taxi and Breton had the idea of going to the Buttes-Chaumont park. Immediately, any residual sense of boredom and stagnation dissipated: The Buttes-Chaumont stirred a mirage in us, one with all the tangibility of these phenomena, a shared mirage over which we all felt we had the same hold. Our black mood evaporated in the light of a huge, naïve hope. At last we were going to destroy boredom, a miraculous hunt opened up before us, a field of experiment where it was unthinkable that we should not receive countless surprises and who knows? A great revelation that might transform life and destiny.
This is the promise, that of a big revelation, and the premise of ‘A Feeling of Nature in the Buttes-Chaumont’ (‘Le sentiment de la nature aux ButtesChaumont’), the third part of Louis Aragon’s Le paysan de Paris, published in . The book is divided into four sections. The first one, ‘Preface to a Modern Mythology’, gives the tone for the whole narrative that will follow as a treatise of modern mythology, to be sought in the city, and specifically in places that channel myth as Aragon understands it. The second and best-known section of the book is ‘The Passage de l’Opéra’ and refers to the homonymous Parisian arcade, built in and demolished
Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant (), trans. Simon Watson Taylor (Boston: Exact Change, ), p. . Ibid., p. . The ‘Préface’, ‘Le passage de l’Opéra’, and ‘Le sentiment de la nature aux Buttes-Chaumont’ sections of the book had been published, almost as a serial, in La revue européenne between and .
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Urban Nature: The City in the Surrealist Novel
in . The third section is ‘A Feeling for Nature at the ButtesChaumont’, while the fourth and last one is ‘The Peasant’s Dream’, a sort of philosophical envoi after this voyage through the city, which crystallizes some of the ideas explored throughout the work. A generically ambiguous text, Le paysan de Paris has been described as a collage, alternating meticulously realistic or even scientific descriptions with highly poetic passages, or dramatizations of states of mind, but it is generally approached as a surrealist novel. It features prominently in Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron’s monumental study Le surréalisme et le roman, and, along with André Breton’s Nadja () and L’amour fou (), it forms a trilogy of ‘Parisian novels’. Indeed, the two middle sections referring directly to Parisian landmarks are the ones which usually attract critical attention, and ‘The Passage de l’Opéra’ in particular, in large part because of Walter Benjamin’s focus on it in his essay on surrealism in . Benjamin was enthralled with Le paysan de Paris, as he mentioned in a letter to Adorno in : ‘Evenings, lying in bed, I could never read more than two to three pages by him because my heart started to pound so hard that I had to put the book down.’ He admired surrealist narratives such as Breton’s Nadja and Aragon’s book in which Paris becomes almost the necessary place for bringing ‘the immense forces of “atmosphere” . . . to the point of explosion’. ‘At the center of this world of things’, claimed Benjamin, talking about the surrealists, ‘stands the most dreamed-about of their objects: the city of Paris itself.’ Benjamin’s reading of surrealism has largely oriented contemporary critical discourses, and one result of this is the invocation of an unbreakable association between surrealism and
Haim Finkelstein, The Screen in Surrealist Art and Thought (Farnham: Ashgate, ), p. ff. See also Eliane Kotler, ‘Sens et sensations: Regards sur les collages et la typographie dans Le paysan de Paris’, Les Mots La Vie, (), –. Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron, Le surréalisme et le roman, – (Lausanne: L’Age d’homme, ). Interestingly, the book is not featured in the earlier study by J.H. Matthews, Surrealism and the Novel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ). The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin –, trans. Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (University of Chicago Press, ), p. . Vaclav Paris explains the strong influence of Aragon on Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk, noting that, among everything else, the title Das Passagen-Werk is almost a reprise of the title ‘Le passage de l’Opéra’, reminding us that the Latin root for ‘opera’, ‘opus’, actually means work. See Vaclav Paris, ‘Uncreative Influence: Louis Aragon’s Paysan de Paris and Walter Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk’, Journal of Modern Literature, (Fall ), – (at p. ). For a detailed discussion of Benjamin and Aragon, see also Johanna Malt, Obscure Objects of Desire: Surrealism, Fetishism, and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, ), pp. –. Walter Benjamin, ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia’, in Benjamin, Selected Writings: –, ed. Michael Jennings, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, : Belknap Press, ), p. . Ibid., p. .
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the city. It has become a commonplace to insist on the urbanity of surrealism, precisely because of its dedication to Paris as the space for exploring the possibilities of surreality. Whether as the site of potential political revolution or as a more benign dreamlike backdrop for the exploration of the marvellous, usually through some version of flânerie, Paris and, by synecdoche, the city, have become the place for surrealism to be. Le paysan de Paris is considered as the paradigmatic text of surrealist urban mythologizing, within the frame of surrealism as a quintessentially urban phenomenon with Paris at its centre. Yet, a prominent rural figure looms over this archetypal urban narrative: the peasant. How can we read this paradoxical and programmatically adopted agrarian trope associated with nature in an urban novel? In this Parisian quest for mythical moments of revelation, is the peasant the necessary persona through which unconscious significations can be unveiled? Does the book plead for the return of the repressed ‘peasant’ kernel of the Parisian? And Le paysan de Paris is not an exception in its unexpected meshing of city and nature. In an early article, Armand Hoog identified this trend in the surrealist novel in general and described it as an impulse to ‘change the conditions of existence’ in the throes of what sometimes looks as a total destruction. He spelled out this destruction as an erasure of the boundaries between urban and natural, conceptualized as a theme of ‘geographical overthrow’: from Aragon’s Anicet, in which a forest suddenly springs up near the Paris Opera, to Pierre Mabille’s Miroir du merveilleux, where lava rivers inundate cities, and Julien Gracq’s Un beau ténébreux, in which trees invade the suburbs surrounding the city with an impenetrable forest, or Pieyre de Madriargues’s Musée noir, where, again, a jungle swallows up the city, the surrealist novel often stages an urban order annulled by the incontrollable disorder of nature. Gavin Parkinson also remarks that in surrealist novels that are routinely associated with the urban, the metropolis is only half of the story. He rightly points out that the second part of one of Breton’s ‘urban’ narratives, L’amour fou, is set outside of the city, in the natural environment of Tenerife, and goes on to state that ‘the distribution of city and nature in Paris Peasant and
The bibliography on surrealism and Paris is very long. Margaret Cohen’s Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, ) and Hal Foster’s Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, : MIT Press, ) provided readings of surrealism’s representation of Paris inflected by Benjamin’s political reading and set the tone for subsequent studies on surrealism and the city. Armand Hoog, ‘The Surrealist Novel’, Yale French Studies, (), – (at pp. –). Ibid., pp. –.
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Urban Nature: The City in the Surrealist Novel
Mad Love, also gestured at in the title of the former and photographs of the latter, suggest that a relationship between the two spheres animated Surrealism’s outlook’. While Parkinson insists on the importance of nature in surrealist textual and especially visual production to ultimately argue for a ‘natural history of Surrealism’, with nature standing for an avatar of ‘primitive’ unrepressed desire and ‘the bestial forces antithetical to the habits, customs, restrictions, and laws that characterized modern Western society’, what is most interesting in this account is precisely how the surrealists represented, and ultimately conceptualized, the dynamic between the urban and the natural, especially in their novels. The opposition of ‘city’ versus ‘country’ is a long-standing antithetical pair upon which another pair, that of ‘culture’ versus ‘nature’, is often overlaid. Together, these polarities have fueled the modern imaginary and served as an interpretational matrix for understanding modernity as well as modernism and the avant-garde. Modernity is classified on the city/urban side of this scheme, in opposition to the Romantic sensibility of the natural sublime; in literature, realism in prose and Charles Baudelaire in poetry clearly mark this transition from nature to city imposed by industrial modernity. By the same token, turning to nature or the countryside is often contrived as a nostalgic gesture reflecting anti-modern tendencies and, especially from the late nineteenth century and on, reactionary politics. In the realist novel, the modern paradigm shift from nature to urbanity is often thematized by the hero’s actual, physical move from the country to the city. Peter Brooks explains: It is impossible to think of realism without the city, and vice-versa. The city is the condition of the kind of novel Sainte-Beuve in the s referred to as ‘industrial literature’, and the kind of struggle for survival as a writer
Gavin Parkinson, ‘Emotional Fusion with the Animal Kingdom: Notes Toward a Natural History of Surrealism’, in Barbara Larson and Fae Brauer (eds.), The Art of Evolution: Darwin, Darwinisms, and Visual Culture (Hanover, : University Press of New England, ), p. . Ibid., p. . Again, the bibliography on the city and modernism and the avant-garde is vast. The formative power of Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, ) cannot be overstated; the same is true of Marshall Berman’s All that is Solid Melts into Air (London: Verso, ) for establishing the city, and specifically Paris, as modernism’s ‘primal scene’. The inclusion of a chapter on the city in any compendium on modernism over the last forty years, from Bradbury and McFarlane’s classic Modernism (New York: Penguin, ) to The Cambridge History of Modernism (Cambridge University Press, ), and the parallel absence of any consideration of the ‘countryside’ or the ‘rural’, is characteristic in this respect. Maurice Barrès’s Les déracinés (Paris: E. Fasquelle, ) has come to exemplify the association between rural and reactionary politics.
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dramatized by Balzac in Illusions perdues and then, half a century later, reprised by George Gissing in his New Grub Street. It is in particular the movement from country to city that might be said to trigger the realist impulse: the impulse, and the need, to describe, to account for, to perform a kind of immediate phenomenology of one’s new surroundings . . . Encounter with the city is perhaps first of all a semiotic crisis: the discovery that there is a whole new sign-system that needs to be deciphered, and that it points to a social code yet to be learned.
This semiotic crisis that the city provokes is nothing other than the crisis of modernization, the shock that modernity brought to traditional ways of life, perception, communication, and representation. The modern metropolis exemplifies this modernization, which is even more jarring when witnessed by an ‘outsider’, a provincial who goes to Paris for the first time, like Eugène de Rastignac in Balzac’s Le père Goriot. On a textual level, what this semiotic crisis seems to generate is endless descriptions of the city in realist novels, often through the eyes, metaphorical or not, of an observer who sees this new world, and meticulously conveys it. In realist but also modernist accounts, the city emerges as a constructed object made out of different versions of panoptical gazes – which turn it into a spectacle – or of flickering montages of mobile gazes – chiefly that of the flâneur. Description, scorned for the longest time as ancilla narrationis in classical rhetoric, as nothing more than a fluffy amplificatio, becomes central in the realist novel: ‘The descriptive is typical – sometimes maddeningly so – of these novels’, remarks again Peter Brooks, ‘And the picture of the whole emerges – if it does – from the accumulation of things. In fact, to work through the accumulation of things, of details, of particularities, could be considered nearly definitional of the realist novel.’ The scopic pleasure of embracing the world with one’s gaze and thus understanding it, or having the impression of understanding it and controlling it, is channelled into descriptions, which create a thick linguistic web paralleling the world of real things. Description, Roland Barthes reminds us, is what makes the real feel real; it is what anchors the narration of the novel into the reality of the world to which it claims to belong.
Peter Brooks, Realist Vision (New Haven, : Yale University Press, ), pp. –. Ibid., p. . Roland Barthes, ‘L’effet de réel’, Communications, (), –. On description, see Philippe Hamon, Du desciptif (Paris: Hachette, ); Algirdas Julien Greimas, Du sens II (Paris: Seuil, ); Jean Michel Adam and André Petitjean, Le texte descriptif (Paris: Nathan, ); Jeffrey Kittay (ed.), Towards a Theory of Description, special issue of Yale French Studies, ().
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Urban Nature: The City in the Surrealist Novel
On first view, Aragon’s Le paysan de Paris seems to conform to these realist and then modernist tropes: in another historical moment of influx of provincials from the devastated, post-World War I countryside into the French capital, the book seems to somehow stage the country bumpkin (the peasant) who sees Paris, describes it, and through this description creates a modern mythology of the city. However, the book works largely against these topoi, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. To begin with, Aragon’s imaginary peasant does not go towards the unfolding modernist city-spectacle taking place in the hubs of Montparnasse or even Montmartre, but instead to two weird parts of the city, the Passage de l’Opéra and the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, both outcomes of the first modernization of Paris, its Haussmannization. The park and the Passage de l’Opéra are far removed from the usual itineraries covered in the literature of the time. The Rive Gauche was the interwar core for the emerging Parisian modernist mythology, with writers like Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Djuna Barnes, and Henry Miller using it as the backdrop for their narratives in Paris France (), The Sun Also Rises (), Nightwood (), or in The Tropic of Cancer (). Montparnasse had become the unofficial intellectual capital of modernism, with Montmartre and its jazz nightclubs as modernism’s playground. Johanna Malt explains Aragon’s unconventional choice of these unusual places through the Benjaminian idea of ‘obsoleteness’ as a powerful revolutionary tool, pointing out that the soon-to-be-demolished Passage de l’Opéra was a relic of the nineteenth century’s almost utopian conceptions of capitalism and industrial abundance. Aragon himself, when he introduces the Passage de l’Opéra, talks about specific places in the city as guardians of certain memories, places which deserve, nevertheless, to be regarded as the secret repositories of several modern myths: it is only today, when the pickaxe menaces them, that they have at last become the true sanctuaries of a cult of the ephemeral, the ghostly landscape of damnable pleasure and professions. Places that were incomprehensible yesterday and that tomorrow will never know.
I would argue that these places, incomprehensible and unknowable, exemplify the urban semiotic shock that Brooks identifies in the realist novel, but this time confronted on surrealist terms. While in the realist novel the modern city is to be deciphered, interpreted, and understood through
This is the vast modernization project of public works in Paris overseen by the Prefect of the Seine, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann between and . Malt, Obscure Objects of Desire, pp. –. Aragon, Paris Peasant, p. .
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meticulous descriptions which mitigate, tame, and organize modern reality, the surrealist novel seems to intensify the shock that is urban modernity and deliberately confuse comprehension and interpretation through the same rhetorical means: description. In Le paysan de Paris, reality and its description do not fit with each other as they do in realism, but instead collide. In a similar manner, categories like ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ are eroded. Different than the modernist urban phantasmagoria, the Paris of Aragon’s narrative emerges as the unremitting jolt between conflicting epistemological distinctions which cannot be smoothed over through the seemingly continuous surface of the urban spectacle. The arcade and the park metonymically stand for the modern city as unknowable and incomprehensible, because they confuse the very categories that were deployed to conceptualize and represent the city in modernity. While for the arcade these categories might be understood along the lines of ‘obsoleteness’ versus ‘progress’, which call on modernity’s conception of history, past, and present, the park brings forth the distinction of ‘city’ versus ‘nature’, which challenges modernity’s distribution and evaluation of space. The Buttes-Chaumont park arises then as the ideal place to explore the semiotic shock of modernity, as well as the conjugation of city and nature – after all, it is ‘le sentiment de la nature’ that is sought after in this park. Aragon describes the Buttes-Chaumont as ‘this crazy area [cette aire folle] born in the head of an architect from the conflict between Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the economic conditions of existence in Paris’. Indeed, this mad endeavour – or this mad ‘threshing floor’ as the word ‘aire’ may signify – was inaugurated in , in tandem with the Exposition universelle. One of the most splendid accomplishments of the ongoing urban redesign during the Second Empire, because of its engineering innovations the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont cost almost twice as much to construct as the Bois de Boulogne, despite being only a fraction of its size. When the works envisioned by Haussmann started in the capital, the quarries that had been established on the Buttes since the French Revolution were extended and provided much of the limestone and gypsum for Parisian buildings. J.S. Adolphe Alphand was called to design the park, and he created four grass hills and a lake, complete with a rock island, from the cavities and tunnels which previously made
Ibid., p. . See Ulf Strohmayer, ‘Urban Design and Civic Spaces: Nature at the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont in Paris’, Cultural Geographies, (), –. Ibid., p. .
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Urban Nature: The City in the Surrealist Novel
up the quarry. Alphand did not completely obliterate the previous landscape of the park, but instead sculpted it into an artificial nature that concealed its own artificiality: the famous grotto morphed the limestone quarry hole into a cave, with replicas of stalagmites made out of concrete. The resulting garden ‘à l’anglaise’ stood as an ersatz remaking of nature, a sort of reinvention of nature, that successfully hid its artificial origins. Rousseauian fantasies of a primordial nature, seemingly untouched by humans, are played out in this park meant to look ‘natural’ and to provide a hygienic environment for the less privileged arrondissements of the capital. Louis Aragon characterizes this artificiality as one of those ‘arbitrary reductions of nature’ that the city-dweller likes because, still drunk with the alcohol of Romanticism, ‘He plunges into this illusion, perfectly prepared to recite to the Buttes-Chaumont Lamartine’s The Lake, which sounds so charming when set to music.’ And Aragon concludes: Once he has plunged in, it is not the sound of the torrents which capsizes his spirit: the outer-circle railway is there, and the gasping of the streets marks the horizon’s boundary. Great cold lamps rise above all this modern machinery, including what is pliable, including also the rocks, the hardy perennials and domesticated streams. And in this place of confusion, man is horrified to come across, once more, the monstrous imprint of his body, and his gaunt face. Each step he takes, he runs full tilt into himself.
In the Buttes-Chaumont rural nature is not to be found, as this is a kind of hyper-park, ‘forerunner to the contemporary theme park’, spiked by technology hiding behind the natural-looking rocks and waterworks, but also invading the park with the rails of the ‘small belt railway’ (‘petite ceinture’) and the trains going through it. The artificiality of the park dispenses with Romantic visions of nature and ultimately only brings the visitor face to face with his own imprint, that of human intervention and moulding of ‘nature’ through technology. The Buttes-Chaumont, an overtly artificial staging of nature within an urban, industrialized environment, confronts the visitor with confusion, as they expect the natural only to realize they are encountering what can only be a construction.
See also Elizabeth K. Meyer, ‘The Public Park as Avant-Garde (Landscape) Architecture: A Comparative Interpretation of Two Parisian Parks, Parc de la Villette (–) and Parc des Buttes-Chaumont (–)’, Landscape Journal, (), – (at pp. –). Strohmayer, ‘Urban Design and Civic Spaces’, p. . Aragon, Paris Peasant, p. . Louise Wyman, ‘Landscape Architecture: The Dialogue between Society and Ideological Vision’, Architecture + Urbanism, (), – (at p. ), quoted in Strohmayer, ‘Urban Design and Civic Spaces’, p. .
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The confusion of these basic categories that the place imposes on its visitors is performed textually through the extensive and varied descriptions of the park. Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron explains in detail how surrealism’s ambivalence towards the novel as a genre was based chiefly on its distrust and aversion towards description, since the real could never be captured through a descriptive mode. This, of course, is in accordance with one of surrealism’s main tenets, that representation cannot be a surrogate for reality and vice versa, and its aim to establish a new relation between the two that would not be hierarchical but instead formative in a reciprocal way. Concerning description specifically, surrealism’s answer varies from one author to another, and Chénieux-Gendron identifies in Aragon a ‘descriptive pleasure’, which invariably dissolves meticulous descriptions into lyrical explosions. There is indeed a consistent dissolution of description in Le paysan de Paris, but not necessarily into a lyrical outburst. In the case of the park specifically, Aragon thematizes its illusionistic aspect and the fact that, since its inception, the park has always been a representation, through descriptions that overtly disclose their generic identity and their non-coincidence with the real. The first description of the park is characteristic in this respect. After a detailed account of the taxi’s itinerary in the streets of Paris on the way to the park’s entrance, there then follows a meticulous topographic and geographic description that opens with a view of the park from above and likens it to a ‘nightcap’. This bird’s-eye view, along with an exact and detailed cardinal localization of the park and a vocabulary borrowed from geographical and cartographic terminology, betrays the description’s reliance on a map. The park is rendered in long enumerations of surrounding streets and neighbourhoods, with cartographic representational conventions bleeding into the text, as in the following example, when the three friends are still in the taxi, racing through the th arrondissement: ‘Coming level with the rue de Meaux we failed to notice the little red dotted line which traces the border between the Quartier de la Villette and the Quartier du combat.’ The ‘little red dotted line’ refers to the demarcation line on a map that indeed separates the two quartiers from each other at the rue de Meaux. Aragon points out that reality falls short of its cartographic representation – much like the expectation of finding ‘nature’ in the park is betrayed by its overt artificiality; the familiar red map-line was nowhere to be seen on the real street as the car passed it.
Chénieux-Gendron, Le surréalisme et le roman, pp. –. Aragon, Paris Peasant, p. . Ibid., p. .
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Ibid., p. .
Urban Nature: The City in the Surrealist Novel
The second detailed description of the park follows a similar logic. It is triggered by the discovery of a bronze column, an ‘indicator-obelisk’ (‘obélisque-indicateur’) that is a combination of a thermometer, a barometer, and a clock, with a list of statistical data engraved on it valid for July , the date that the column was installed. Schools, police stations, hospitals, public buildings, cardinal positions, and the population and number of houses in the th arrondissement are all inscribed on the obelisk and then studiously copied by Aragon in the text. The column stands as the oracle of the park, as its hidden meaning, and the three friends are described as modern ‘Champollions’ that decipher it. The obelisk thus functions as a synecdoche of the park and its mystery, while also standing as a codified description of the whole th arrondissement. The column in the heart of Buttes-Chaumont, a park ‘in which nestles the town’s collective unconscious’ in the heart of the th arrondissement, an arrondissement in the heart of Paris, create a chain of metonymic displacements that zoom out from the inscriptions to the city. The city, however, is absent, or at least non-representable; on the engraved list of data, two frames stay empty: the map of the th arrondissement and the map of Paris. In this instance, it is representation that falls short of reality; the map, and subsequently the text, cannot represent the city – the relevant quadrant stays vacant. Scrupulously copying data cannot replicate the world they are meant to organize and explain. Layered upon these cartographic and statistical representations of the park are a series of non-starter descriptions that seem to self-sabotage: an evocation of the ‘grande illusion’ that is the night, which obscures the park rather than offering a view of it; a reference to all the couples finding an amorous refuge in the park that exhausts itself in the description of their positions; a monologue of Marcel Noll who meditates on garden architecture in general, but not on this garden; the discovery of a statue which starts speaking and brings all the statues of Paris, the ‘statuomanic’ capital of the Third Republic, into the nocturnal illusion of the park. Other descriptions are self-consciously set up as representations. When a specific path in the park chosen by the friends is mentioned, its description is predicated on what seems like a series of extensive analogies – the path seen as a scientist’s abandonment of a hypothesis, or as André Breton’s sculpted
Ibid., p. . The reference here is to the philologist Jean-François Champollion (–) who is famous for deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs. Ibid., p. . Ibid., pp. , . See Raymond Spiteri, ‘Surrealism and the Irrational Embellishment of Paris’, in Thomas Mical (ed.), Surrealism and Architecture (London and New York: Routledge, ), p. .
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walking cane, or as a dog in an empty provincial town. All these predicaments end with a ‘Thus. . .’ (‘Ainsi. . .’) that promises to conclude the analogies into a meaningful image, but which instead is turned into a missile against the reader’s expectations: Ah I’ve got you, there’s the thus that your need for logic was frantically awaiting, my friend, the satisfying thus, the soothing thus. This whole long paragraph was finally drawing its huge uneasiness along behind it, and the shadows of the Buttes-Chaumont were floating somewhere in your heart. Thus puts this dismal gloom into flight, thus is a gigantic sweeper.
Speaking directly to the reader, Aragon mocks us for waiting for a conclusion in this description. The confusion provoked by the meandering, inconclusive paragraphs that obfuscate the topic, the Buttes-Chaumont, is likened to the nocturnal darkness over the park, while the ‘thus’ that should guide the reader’s understanding, instead leads the reader astray. Continuing to deride the reader’s habits, Aragon offers four different options to follow ‘thus’, the logical articulation that could permit the description to come to a closure and would finally ensure passage into the park. As a result, the reader is lost in this purposefully bifurcated narrative of multiple choices, much like a stroller at night would have been in the park. The description here refuses to describe the park, opting rather to replicate the disorientation felt in the park at night. In a similar vein, seemingly realistic descriptions are often short-circuited when they are overtly encoded as already a representation, as a painting or a film. The description of the lake, for instance, emulates the label of a painting in a gallery: ‘The lake, with electric moonlight, painted by Arnold Böcklin, and the subject is continued in the frame, which is the City of Paris; the whole printed in three colours. And three young men contemplating it. For sale.’ Likewise when the friends need to retrace their steps, Aragon describes this backtrack as ‘run[ning] the film backwards’, while one of the views of the park is described as an illustration from Lewis’s novel The Monk (). The park is thus discursively approached as a threshing floor of confusion, not only a confusion between artificial and natural, but one between an object and its representation, the reality of the city and its descriptive approach. Aragon makes this point clear in his very aggressive conclusion to the description of the park, when, again, he addresses the reader to, in fact, abuse him:
Aragon, Paris Peasant, p. .
Ibid., p. .
Ibid.
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Ibid.
Urban Nature: The City in the Surrealist Novel
You think, my boy, that you have an obligation to describe everything. Fallaciously . . . You are sadly out in your calculations . . . All these people who are wondering what on earth you are driving at may as well get lost in the details, or in the garden of your bad faith . . . I shall never finish this book which you are rather beginning to like. You will simply have to imagine this sort of Siberia, these Urals which skirt the Rue de Crimée where the outer-circle railway passes . . . Everything I say, everything I think is too good for you, will always be perfectly adequate . . . Shut up, the lot of you.
The description is an illusion and the readers have to accept it, whether they want to or not. The park is a product of words, of imagination: ‘Yes, I began to mingle the landscape with my words’, Aragon admits. The revelation in the Buttes-Chaumont is that the real, no matter how painstakingly pinpointed, cannot be seized; that representations will not attain reality, but also that reality pales next to representation. To this effect, layers of representation are accumulated in a complicated mise-en-abyme: the real Parc des Buttes-Chaumont is a representation of nature; the map is a representation of the real park; the literary description is a representation of the map; the painting label is a representation of the literary description. . . and so on. The Buttes-Chaumont becomes, indeed, a locus amoenus of illusion and confusion. Peeling back these layers of representation cannot lead to an object that is concrete. Proceeding backward, from label, to description, to map, to park, to nature, we find that this last link of the chain, nature, the sentiment of which motivates the night walk in the park, is absent. Nature cannot be described and is not to be found in the Buttes-Chaumont – and metonymically, cannot be found in Paris or anywhere else in the world either. But the main element associated with ‘nature’ in the book, the ‘paysan’, is also nowhere to be found in the text. He is curiously obscured by the narrative, except in the title of the last section, ‘The Peasant’s Dream’. Claudine Raynaud remarks that the peasant ‘is never described for he is so to speak virtual, a narrative and poetic hypothesis, the gaze which allows and legitimates a description of certain parts of the city, or rather certain parts of the city in a certain way’. And this is the usual interpretation of the meteoric presence of the ‘paysan’ in the title of the book: the peasant stands for the gaze of the outsider, the marginal, the one who does not belong to the city, it is the gaze of the naïf, of the one that is a stranger to a
Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Claudine Raynaud, ‘The Residual Rural: The Town’s Nostalgia for the Countryside and the Peasant’s Gaze’, L’esprit créateur, (Fall ), – (at p. ).
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given culture and can, for this reason, see it critically. This insistence on a scopic function, consistent with the modern topoi mentioned before, also incites the conflation of the ‘paysan’ with the ‘flâneur’ in critical literature, and Le paysan de Paris is often likened to Breton’s urban flânerie in Nadja. Aragon, however, does not choose to name his book after the flâneur, but strikingly after the peasant. Let us recall here that Pierre Bourdieu draws a distinction precisely between these two viewpoints on nature, the ‘promeneur’ and the ‘paysan’, explaining that the former casts a distant gaze that produces nature as landscape, as décor, while the latter works nature and ultimately structures it; the first is a figure of dispossession, the second is a figure of lived experience. The stroller, the bourgeois flâneur produces ‘landscapes without peasants’ (‘paysages sans paysans’) insists Bourdieu, a ‘structured structure without structuring work’, an effortless work of art as a product of detached bemusement. The peasant works and shapes nature and has his hands dirty with the work of the land; the flâneur, meanwhile, is a walking gaze that reproduces the kind of ‘sentiment de la nature’, characterized by an urge to create landscapes, that Aragon wants to undo. In Aragon’s version, the peasant, as the privileged inhabitant of nature as well as its shaper, seems to be the form of subjectivity appropriate for mediating his understanding of ‘sentiment’ and channelling it symbolically. This starts already with the title. Most readings of Aragon’s book interpret it as if the title were ‘Le paysan à Paris’, similar to various guide-books for Paris in the nineteenth century that would often include a (condescending) chapter on ‘Les paysans à Paris’, capitalizing on the country-dweller’s candour. These readings focus on the trope of the stranger coming into the city as a complete outsider, much like the ones in the realist novel. However, the title is famously Le paysan de Paris, implying that for Aragon the peasant is not an outsider coming in from the sticks, but that he is of Paris – he is its dweller and its citizen. This suggests that Paris is indeed some kind of threshing floor, a vast natural enclave that is constantly laboured on. The Parisian peasant thus emerges as the opposite of a ‘gaze’ taking in the city as a spectacle, conforming to the general modern aesthetic ideal of the spectacular city. The peasant is the one who works nature and shapes it productively; the Parisian peasant works the city, what is ‘nature’ for him, and shapes it. The peasant narrator
Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Une classe objet’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, – (November ), – (at pp. –). Ibid. See for instance Madame Juliette Lamber, ‘Les paysans à Paris’, in Paris guide par les principaux écrivains et artistes de la France, vols. (Paris: A. Lacroix, ), vol. : La vie, pp. –.
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Urban Nature: The City in the Surrealist Novel
seems to offer detailed descriptions that imply a careful and discerning gaze, much like the descriptions in realist novels, only to constantly point out that these are just descriptions, the real is not in them. As such, the peasant narrator does not report the city or even think that the city is an objective entity that can be reported. He makes and remakes the city through his labour – which in this case is a description-obsessed text that keeps undoing and undermining itself. Against landscape and cityscape – and Aragon’s efforts to create them through descriptions fail – what finally arises in Le paysan de Paris is not a phantasmagoria of the city. Instead, what the book offers are microscopic and telescopic visions of ambiguous urban spaces, in which the real arises but cannot be described. The two sites visited, the Passage de l’Opéra and the Buttes-Chaumont, stand for the whole urban experience, and make apparent that reality and representation do not fit neatly together, that they are misfits. This surrealist novel deliberately intensifies the semiotic shock of urban modernity, an exploration of which was initiated in the realist novel. This intensification includes a ruralization of the urban, which, however, cannot be construed as a nostalgic or conservative gesture of the likes that abounded in post-World War I French literature and art. Nor does Le paysan de Paris fall on the other side of the critical commonplace that opposes such nostalgia to a heroic, forward-leaping and progressive modernity. Aragon’s ruralization of the urban rather than a rejection of modernity’s most neuralgic point, the urban center, is a subtle repositioning of categories that have come to be perceived as mutually exclusive in modernity’s epistemology. Le paysan de Paris transcends deeply entrenched dichotomies such as culture against nature, city-dweller versus peasant. Nature and city do not fall into neat categories, no more than reality and its representation. Nature and the peasant are ultimately deployed as the unconscious of modernity, not so much because they are the wilderness and instincts repressed by modernity, but rather because of their non-representability. Aragon states that ‘nature is my unconscious’, understood here as the boundary of his own mind: as the unconscious lies outside the limits of his conscious mind, so does nature. Like the unconscious, nature cannot really be known or represented. This stands in contrast to the aspiration of
On agrarian tropes in art, see Romy Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France between the Wars (New Haven, : Yale University Press, ), p. ; see also Shanny Peer, France on Display: Peasants, Provincials, and Folklore in the Paris World Fair (Albany: State University of New York Press, ), p. . Aragon, Paris Peasant, p. .
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representability and thus of full comprehension entertained in the realist novel and exemplified in its description of the city. For the realist novel, the city appears as the ultimate obliteration of nature’s resistance to representation, since it is already a ‘forêt des symboles’: realism recognizes in the city a vast semiotic system, which, as such, can be deciphered and understood. For the surrealist novel, the city appears as perhaps the most enticing semiotic system of modernity, and as such, consistent with the surrealist premise, it cannot be fully possessed. If the illusion of modern progress is tackled with the Passage de l’Opéra, the modern illusion of commanding and controlling space, exemplified in the city, is challenged by the park. The modern city emerges in the surrealist narrative not as the semiotic triumph over nature as the realist novelists would have it, but rather as a welcome semiotic confusion, lending thus to the urban the unfathomable that nature is.
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Nostalgia and Childhood in the Surrealist Novel David Hopkins
Childhood, and adult attitudes towards it, arise frequently as issues in accounts of surrealist art and literature, yet rarely occasion analysis of any depth. Childhood is largely accepted as a given of surrealist interest; after all the psychoanalytic grounding of the adult psyche in the child’s unconscious is a central assumption of much surrealist production. However, the problem with following the surrealists in privileging Freud is that, in the end, it is the adult psyche (or rather its origins) that becomes the focus of attention; the child disappears from view. Admittedly the surrealists frequently placed a rather abstract idea of the child at centre stage, invoking the closeness of childhood to the ‘marvellous’. Hence Breton, in the first manifesto, famously talked of childhood as ‘the state closest to one’s “real life”’. But this kind of Romantic equation between childhood and the state of enchantment tends to be registered and then passed over in the critical commentaries. How, then, might we carry out analytical work on surrealist writing that attends to this attitude of wonder and at the same time offers something different from the well-worn psychoanalytic emphasis of the literature? One way is to make new use of concepts that seem applicable to childhood, and to retrospection more generally, and yet have rarely informed academic study to date, possibly because they seem to lack the necessary gravitas: ideas like kitsch, nostalgia, sentimental longing. Fortunately new theoretical approaches on such topics are beginning to emerge. To take the case of nostalgia: up until recently, academics have tended to consider
André Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism (), in Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ), p. . This is one of the concerns of my book Dark Toys: Surrealism and the Culture of Childhood (New Haven, : Yale University Press, ). However, although I talk extensively there about kitsch and nostalgia, my deployment of Boym’s ideas on nostalgia are unique to this essay. An important predecessor was Susan Stewart, On Longing (Durham, : Duke University Press, ).
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it a rather effete, unproductive state – the polar opposite of the progressivist, future-orientated point of view widely encouraged in Western cultures. As such it appears to lead nowhere; to solipsism and introspection. But a highly original study by Svetlana Boym has turned it into a much more sophisticated mode of interpretation. The term was originally coined by the Swiss doctor Johannes Hofer in where it designated a very specific state of mind arising in troops stationed in foreign lands: ‘the sad mood originating from the desire to return to one’s native land’. Over time, and particularly via nineteenthcentury Romanticism, it came to become a defining feature of modern sensibility. In her study Boym teases out its ability to mediate complex emotions of temporal instability and loss, arguing that, in modernity, the present itself is frequently experienced nostalgically as replete with unfulfilled (or unfulfillable) possibilities. Hence she quotes Walter Benjamin on the notion of the ‘fan of memory’: ‘He who had once begun to open the fan of memory, never comes to the end of its segments. No image satisfies him for he has seen that it can be unfolded, and only in its folds does the truth reside.’ Nostalgia, rather than just covering the notion of ‘homesickness’, is thus shown to be inseparable from modernist consciousness. Boym’s argument, however, goes further when she differentiates two modalities of nostalgia, which, although overlapping to some degree, can be seen as possessing differing political implications. The more negative of these is ‘restorative’ nostalgia. This, Boym argues, thrives on the idea that the past can somehow be re-created; it ‘proposes to rebuild the lost time and patch up the many gaps’. Nostalgics of this kind do not ‘think of themselves as nostalgics; they believe their project is about truth’. Reflective nostalgia, by contrast, ‘dwells in algia, in longing and loss, the imperfect process of remembrance’. It does not attempt to reconstruct the past but is ‘enamoured of distance, not the referent itself’. The political associations of restorative nostalgia are perhaps clearest: it is fundamentally conservative, possessing a dogged faith that an idealized past can somehow be reconstructed. It lends itself, Boym argues, to nationalist tendencies. Reflective nostalgia, which is obviously aligned with the introspective modernist nostalgia of Boym’s dominant account, is
Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, ). Johannes Hofer, ‘Dissertatio medica de nostalgia’ (), as cited by Boym, Future of Nostalgia, p. . Walter Benjamin, ‘Berlin Chronicle’ (), in Reflections, trans Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken, ), p. , as cited by Boym, Future of Nostalgia, p. . Boym, Future of Nostalgia, p. . Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. . She is actually quoting Stewart, On Longing, p. .
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Nostalgia and Childhood in the Surrealist Novel
capable of taking various political forms but is playful and self-aware about its melancholic obsession with the past. Its dreams of the past may therefore fuel constructive visions of the future. Boym’s conception of nostalgia is largely directed towards questions of political and social exile and she has remarkably little to say about nostalgia for childhood. Using her methodology as a touchstone, my concern in this essay will therefore be to see how nostalgia and childhood are figured in the novels of two highly dissimilar figures of surrealism: the painter Giorgio de Chirico and the poet, ethnographer, and writer Michel Leiris. Both writers produced novels which have strong autobiographical elements, and, of course, in turning their attention to memories of the past, and to childhood in particular, they risk what any autobiographical enterprise risks: the dangers of narcissistic self-indulgence – or nostalgia. My overriding question, then, in line with Boym’s concept of ‘reflective nostalgia’, is how productive might such nostalgia actually be? De Chirico’s novel Hebdomeros was originally published as Hebdomeros: Le peintre et son génie chez l’écrivain in French in and was not translated into de Chirico’s native Italian until . On its first appearance, it was understood as very much a ‘surrealist’ novel. Never properly part of the surrealist group, although enormously influential on the movement’s early visual aesthetic via his Metaphysical paintings, de Chirico’s reputation with the surrealists had begun to decline in the later s in the wake of his exhibition at the Galerie Léonce Rosenberg which was heavily criticized by the group on the grounds that the Italian had seemingly abandoned the ‘inspiration’ of his pre- canvases and returned to classicism and the example of the Old Masters. However, Hebdomeros was seen as a refreshing return to form in a medium not previously connected with the artist. It caused a minor stir among the surrealists at a time when they were actually in disarray, with Breton’s divisive Second Manifesto of Surrealism appearing in . As Max Ernst would assert, in an unpublished essay on de Chirico of : ‘There is one special enigma in the contradictory fact that, at the time he made very low class paintings he wrote a very beautiful book in which all his ideas revive in a terribly strong and fantastic way. This book . . . was called “Hebdomeros”’.
Max Ernst, ‘De Chirico’ (unpublished), Walter and Louise Arensberg Archives, Philadelphia Museum of Art, as reprinted in Michael R. Taylor, Giorgio de Chirico and the Myth of Ariadne (Philadelphia Museum of Art/Merrell, ), p. .
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In terms of plot – at least in the conventional novelistic terms of plot development or progression – there is very little to be said. The text, which is one continuous flow, without chapter divisions, narrates how the youthful Hebdomeros, supported by three unidentifiable companions, moves restlessly from place to place, his journey punctuated by peculiar locations and bizarre incidents, whilst, from time to time, he embarks on ruminations of a broadly philosophic nature. Like the surrealists themselves, commentators on the book have tended to see it as closely linked to de Chirico’s early pictures. The American poet and critic John Ashbery, writing in , regarded it as the ‘finest’ surrealist novel and noted that the ancestry of the eponymous hero at the centre of the book could be traced back to ‘Maldoror, Manfred and Melmoth via Nietszche whom de Chirico passionately admired and with whom he shared an enthusiasm for the city of Turin – its arcades, public statuary and agoraphobia-inducing piazzas . . . common . . . in his early paintings’. Likewise Margaret Crosland notes that, although the links to the early paintings are never emphatic, ‘the outlines are nevertheless there’ in, for example, ‘the statues . . . which appear at the least expected moments’. She adds: Again, recalling the early paintings and as though exemplifying Picasso’s remark that his younger contemporary was ‘a painter of railway stations’, there are allusions to trains, stations and factories that materialise in the distance from time to time, while a locomotive appears in the middle of the street, and a ship sails out into a sea of flower-studded fields.
One could multiply examples of allusions to the themes and scenography of de Chirico’s early Metaphysical pictures. At one point in the novel there is a lengthy account of the return of a young man to his father’s house where he is greeted as a prodigal son. De Chirico had actually produced an important drawing titled The Prodigal Son in along with further paintings on related themes. It is important to note that there is a pronounced autobiographical element in this; in his later Memoirs, published in , the artist would talk of melancholy returns to his place of
John Ashbery, ‘The Decline of the Verbs’ (), published as ‘Introduction’ to Giorgio de Chirico, Hebdomeros, unknown translator (Cambridge, : Exact Change, ), p. x. This edition of Hebdomeros is a republication of an obscure version of the book, published by the New York Book Society in an edition of , in . For an account of the strange origins of the Book Society version see the ‘Publisher’s Note’, p. vii. Margaret Crosland, ‘Introduction to Giorgio de Chirico’, in Giorgio de Chirico, Hebdomeros: A Novel, trans. Margaret Crosland (; London: Peter Owen, ). Ibid. See Paolo Baldacci, De Chirico: The Metaphysical Period – (Boston: Little Brown, ), p. , pl. D .
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Nostalgia and Childhood in the Surrealist Novel
birth and of his poignant relations with his father. Indeed, in many respects, the character of Hebdomeros reads as a self-heroizing portrait of de Chirico himself. As Margaret Crosland observes, certain episodes in the book also relate to real-life anecdotes about the painter André Derain, and this suggests that, in a sense, the novel should be characterized as a roman à clef. As already noted by Ashbery, Hebdomeros has its roots, in terms of surrealist taste, in the Comte de Lautréamont’s Maldoror, and as we accompany Hebdomeros on his wanderings, the author’s use of long convoluted sentences and audacious similes recalls Lautréamont’s prototypical surrealist novel: Then came the endless journey, the long and inexplicable halts at small, deserted stations lost in the middle of the countryside. Butcher’s boys slept, face down, their heads covered with their bloodstained aprons to keep off the flies that attacked them ferociously, as if they were carcasses . . . Now and then a soldier with parched throat would search the dried-up riverbeds for a last drop of water; and when fate was kind he crouched like a panther to slake his thirst eagerly; and then he filled his helmet with water and holding it with great care, like the newest maidservant carrying a soup tureen, he climbed from the gully to rejoin his fellows.
But it is Nietzsche, de Chirico’s favourite author, whose Thus Spake Zarathustra (–) is most surely echoed in the way Hebdomeros places himself at a distance from the pettiness and tumult of the world, as well as the prophetic tenor of his thought: ‘But’, thought Hebdomeros . . . ‘Could it be that life is nothing but an immense lie? Nothing but the shadow of a fleeting dream. Is it nothing but the echo of the mysterious blows that resound on the rocks of the mountain over there, whose opposite side has apparently never been seen, and on whose summit can be seen by day dark masses, with an irregular profile, that are probably forests and from which at night comes sighs and stifled groans as though a giant were chained up there and suffering without hope under the great, shimmering star-filled sky?’ Thus spoke Hebdomeros to himself, and in the meantime night had once more fallen over the metropolis. People passed by him in a regular, continuous flow, as if they were riveted to a chain in perpetual motion.
The self-consciously portentous timbre of voice employed here – which reflects de Chirico’s own high opinion of himself – is relieved, elsewhere in
Crosland, ‘Introduction’, p. . Ibid., pp. –.
De Chirico, Hebdomeros (), p. .
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the novel, by the unexpectedness, humour, and proto-surrealist quality of the writer’s juxtapositions of imagery. For instance, in the opening sequence of the book, Hebdomeros shows his companions around a strange building. In one corner of a room stands an impressive grand piano with its top raised: ‘without standing on tiptoe you could see its complicated entrails and clear-cut internal anatomy: but you could easily imagine what a catastrophe it would have been if one of those chandeliers had fallen into the piano with all the candles lit’. In other places, the writer’s extended similes are very close to surrealist poetics: ‘as he [Hebdomeros] made his way to the hotel for his evening meal he was blushing like a pure young girl who, chasing a playful butterfly as it flutters behind a bush, suddenly comes upon a male adult with his trousers down, squatting to satisfy a need as natural as it was urgent’. Arguably, it is this emphasis on striking and utterly unexpected imagery that best characterizes the book but it might equally be asserted that Hebdomeros is suffused with what Boym, in her work on nostalgia, characterizes as a modernist ‘anxiety with the vanishing past’. Invocations of childhood often provide de Chirico with a means of evoking this overwhelming sense of loss. Although by no means the book’s dominant subject, childhood provides the book with some of its most compelling passages of writing, which are clearly based on de Chirico’s early memories. In the aforementioned section in which Hebdomeros and his friends explore a building, the ascent of the stairs suddenly plunges Hebdomeros into a remembrance of childhood dreams in which ‘in a state of anguish he would be climbing a staircase bathed in a dim light’ and he recalls one particular related fantasy: ‘the apparition of the bear, the frightening relentless bear that follows you on the stairs and along the corridors, its head lowered, and looking as if its thoughts were elsewhere; the headlong flight through rooms with complicated exits’. Of course, such dream episodes fascinated the surrealists, and de Chirico, despite the fact that he largely rejected Freudian readings of his paintings by them, seems fully aware of the lexicon ascribed by psychoanalysts to unconscious imagery; the escape from the bear leads to a ‘leap through the window into empty space’ which is followed by the explanatory note: ‘(suicide in a dream)’. Elsewhere in the book Hebdomeros/de Chirico talks, almost matter-of-factly, about the faculty of seeing ghosts as something derived from childhood.
Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Boym, Future of Nostalgia, p. . De Chirico, Hebdomeros (), p. . Ibid., pp. –.
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Nostalgia and Childhood in the Surrealist Novel
A mood of reversion dominates the entire book, whether or not childhood is literally at stake. When Hebdomeros muses most intensively on childhood it is actually not so much his own as that of his father that is at stake, which compounds the sense of loss by pushing it further back in time: My dear friends, you have probably noticed as much as I that special Stimmung [atmosphere] which is felt when, on coming out into the road at sunset . . . one smells the scent of freshly watered streets . . . My father was an unusual man . . . The town where he had passed his childhood was the favourite subject of his memories . . . ‘I believe I can see it’, he said in a low and trembling voice . . . ‘I seem to live again those late afternoons in the summer after the heat. The engineers, having finished their work on the railway line under construction, returned to their furnished rooms, covered with dust and harassed with fatigue.’
Once again, one should be aware of the autobiographical overtones of the passage: as in the prodigal son episode, de Chirico’s own father is invoked here: he had been an engineer who worked on the construction of the Italian and Thessalian railways. De Chirico does not so much evoke the past as a sense of ‘deep time’. In doing this, he relies very much on ‘pictorial’ effects. The art historian Ara Merjian has demonstrated that, in his visual work, de Chirico actually drew on book illustrations by the likes of Édouard Riou recalled from his childhood. He was particularly drawn to illustrations to Jules Verne’s novels, and scenarios akin to those we might find in, say, Vingt mille lieues sous les mers () also crop up in Hebdomeros. At one point early in the novel, as Hebdomeros and his companions stare at a scene in front of them (actually the interior with the grand piano mentioned earlier), they imagine they are ‘passengers in a highly advanced submarine, looking through the portholes and watching unobserved the mysterious plant and animal life of the deep’. Sometimes, therefore, it is precisely via modes of illustration linked to childhood reading that de Chirico imagines Hebdomeros’s world. A kind of pictorial nostalgia seems to pervade everything. This mode of vision, when translated into verbal language, results in rhetorically overblown passages in which nostalgia is directly
Ibid., pp. –. See Ara H. Merjian, Giorgio de Chirico and the Metaphysical City (New Haven, : Yale University Press, ), pp. –. De Chirico, Hebdomeros (), p. .
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appealed to (as it is in the titles of certain de Chirico paintings of his Metaphysical period): Nostalgias, nostalgias without end, hands clenched at the end of arms stretched out of windows whose tritely patterned white curtains blew slightly from the intermittent breath of a warm breeze that came from the fields, these fields that stretched out elbowing one another, all alike except for slight variations of colour that counted for little in the monotone symphony of grays.
De Chirico’s self-conscious embrace of nostalgia returns us, of course, to Boym’s sense of the pre-eminence of ‘reflective nostalgia’ as a component of modernist sensibility which is ‘contradictory, critical, ambivalent and reflective on the nature of time’ and ‘combines fascination for the present with longing for another time’. This reflective mood surely fits with de Chirico in broad terms, but it might be countered that his surrender to nostalgia lacks the degree of self-reflexivity specified by Boym. Admittedly, he betrays no hint of the self-deluding restorative impulse that constitutes Boym’s alternative to reflective nostalgia. This is significant since a restorative drive was actually being manifested as part of the ‘return to order’ evident in areas of modernist painting of the s. De Chirico’s own classical revivalism in his paintings of the later s can be seen as tying in with this trend (hence the surrealists’ distaste for his volte face as an artist.) But, whilst Hebdomeros has a self-reflexive dimension – and possibly speaks of modernist instability in the face of change (hence the perpetual shifts of scene) – nostalgia is something luxuriated in for its own sake. The passing landscapes and scenarios of the novel are so swamped with melancholy, that one gets swept along in the regressive stream of consciousness rather than compelled to enter a mood of critical selfreflection. Where, then, might we find a more reflexive nostalgic position, and a more robust attitude to childhood, in surrealist novel-writing? Here, I want to turn to my second case study: Michel Leiris. To begin with, of course, Leiris belongs to a very different moment in the history of surrealism. An adherent, in the early years of surrealism, to the Bretonian notion that a poetic revolution was underway whereby ‘words were making
For example, The Nostalgia of the Infinite (La nostalgie de l’infini, ), Museum of Modern Art, New York. De Chirico, Hebdomeros (), p. . Boym, Future of Nostalgia, p. . See Elizabeth Cowling and Jennifer Mundy (eds.), On Classic Ground: Picasso, Léger, de Chirico and the New Classicism (London: Tate Gallery, ), and Remy Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia (New Haven, : Yale University Press, ).
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Nostalgia and Childhood in the Surrealist Novel
love’, Leiris published a series of elaborate poetic word-plays in La révolution surréaliste in –. These, in line with the psychoanalytic sympathies of the surrealists, made manifest the proto-structuralist conviction that subjectivity does not precede language; rather identity is formed out of the metaphorical and signifying functions of language insofar as these structure both conscious and unconscious development. In February , dismayed, like several other poets and artists attached to surrealism, with Breton’s increasingly authoritarian stance, Leiris left the group and, a short time later, joined the staff of the journal Documents, the mouthpiece of the so-called ‘renegade’ surrealists grouped around Georges Bataille. In this context, in which precedence was given to the newly developing discipline of ethnography, Leiris began to concentrate even more rigorously, in his prose writings of the s, on the formation of selfhood. Whilst his first fully fledged novel, Aurora (written –), had explored autobiographical material in a fantastical mode that was more indebted to Breton’s movement, by Leiris had produced a very different kind of autobiographical writing in the form of Manhood () in which his psychoanalytic and ethnographic interests fused in an account of the evolution of his identity out of a variety of sexual (sadomasochistic) impulses and cultural (religious, mythological) influences. The novel is thus structured as a series of meditations on literary figures (Lucrece, Judith, Holofernes) relating to Leiris’s adult psycho-sexual obsessions, which are interspersed with recollections of the childhood experiences that formed the psychic matrix for these identifications. Childhood is thus at the very centre of Manhood. However, in marked contrast to de Chirico’s Hebdomeros, it is not overtly idealized or romanticized. In his prologue to the novel Leiris stated that its main concern was to show how the hero (i.e. Leiris himself in the guise of Holofernes) ‘leaves . . . the miraculous chaos of childhood for the fierce order of virility’. There is, of course, a similarity here: de Chirico’s Hebdomeros similarly functions, at one level, as a (disguised) autobiographical account of its author as hero-figure. But Leiris’s mention of the ‘fierce order of virility’ makes it clear that he is charting concerns that de Chirico’s hero never thinks twice about; namely gendered self-awareness and male bodily identity. Just as Leiris’s writing style is drier and far less florid than that of de Chirico, so his childhood memories are framed in a dispassionate,
La révolution surréaliste, nos. , , and , –. These were later published, with other texts, in Glossaires j’y serre mes gloses (Paris: Éditions de la Galerie Simon, ). Michel Leiris, Manhood (), trans. Richard Howard (University of Chicago Press, ), p. .
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confessional mode. As he once asserted: ‘I intended to rid myself for good of certain agonizing images . . . as much for my own use as to dissipate any erroneous sense of myself which others might have.’ In one of the most insightful critical essays on Manhood, the American writer Susan Sontag saw it as part of a very specific species of French confessional literature: One may think of Leiris’s book as an especially powerful instance of the preoccupation with sincerity peculiar to French letters. From Montaigne’s Essays and Rousseau’s Confessions through Stendhal’s journals to the modern confessions of Gide, Jouhandeau, and Genet, the great writers of France have been concerned to a singular extent with the detached presentation of personal feelings, particularly those concerned with sexuality and ambition. In the name of sincerity, both in autobiographical form and in the form of fiction (as in Constant, Laclos, Proust), French writers have been coolly exploring erotic manias.
She adds, however, that the novel is much harsher than this lineage might indicate, largely because, rather than being motivated, as in the case of the classic confessional novels, by self-love, it is ‘unredeemed by the slightest tinge of self-respect . . . Leiris loathes himself . . . Manhood is an exercise in shamelessness – a sequence of self exposures of a craven, morbid, damaged temperament.’ From a contemporary point of view, what is particularly fascinating is the way that Leiris constructs an account of the formation of his gendered identity, grounded in childhood experience, which, working against the dominant normative image of a ‘virile’ masculine heterosexuality, dwells on a wounded or traumatized male subjectivity. The wound or cut is in fact one of the ruling tropes of the novel; hence the significance of Lucrece and Judith/Holofernes at its symbolic centre: women who can be defined in terms of the way they inflict fatal wounds on both themselves (Lucrece) and the (male) other (Judith/Holofernes). Again and again, Leiris presents us with childhood memories in which his body is placed in jeopardy: I should never be finished if I tried to enumerate all the stories of injuries with which my childhood is strewn . . . a barley stick sucked to a dagger point and run into a knee . . . an eye blackened by a medicine ball, a deep cut made by a pocketknife that had managed to slice off a fingertip instead of a pencil point.
Michel Leiris, ‘Afterword: The Autobiographer as Torero’, in Manhood, p. . Susan Sontag, ‘Foreword’ to Leiris, Manhood, pp. viii–ix. Sontag’s essay initially appeared as ‘Michel Leiris’ Manhood’ in her Against Interpretation (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ). Ibid., p. ix. Leiris, Manhood, pp. –.
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Nostalgia and Childhood in the Surrealist Novel
Most striking are the threats delivered to his phallic integrity: I suffered from a disease . . . known as balanitis . . . ‘an inflammation of the mucous membrane covering the glans of the penis’ . . . I am incapable of distinguishing this morbid turgescence from my earliest erections, and I believe that initially the erection frightened me because I took it for another outbreak of the disease . . . The first conscious manifestations of my erotic life therefore occur under the sign of the inauspicious . . . For a long time, I believed, for instance, that a man’s loss of virginity necessarily involved pain and bloodshed, as is true of women.
It should be clear from all this that Manhood offers a diametrically opposed account of childhood to that offered in Hebdomeros; the child is embodied, gendered, and sexualized rather than turned into a figure of metaphysical reflection and loss. However, although nostalgia for the past might be thought the very least of Leiris’s concerns, he does in fact allow himself to dwell on the details of childhood fantasies with a fondness that comes close to nostalgia: One of the greatest enigmas from my earliest years . . . was the means by which the Christmas toys got down the chimney. I evolved a Byzantine rationale to account for how the larger toys could logically get down the chimney if Father Christmas dropped them from above. Apropos of a large model sailboat . . . I solved the problem by accepting the following hypothesis: since God is omnipotent, he creates the toys just where I find them, without their having to pass through the chimney.
This memory comes in the prologue to the book when, wrestling with an idea that would not have been alien to de Chirico, Leiris talks of wishing to plumb ‘the metaphysic of my childhood’. Given, then, that Leiris did not solely conceive childhood in terms of trauma, how, one might ask, was he able to avoid capitulating to the lyricism of loss – not just for the passing of childhood but for the past as an absolute principle – that we have discerned in de Chirico? What rationale did Leiris develop to supply gravitas to his childhood memories – such that they might yield up a sense of the ‘metaphysical’? Leiris did not confront this question to any degree in Manhood itself. At the time he was writing the book, however, he was involved in a small research group – the ‘Collège de sociologie’ – consisting mainly of himself,
Ibid., pp. –.
Ibid., p. .
Ibid., p. .
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Bataille, and Roger Caillois, which, building on the ethnographic interests of the renegade surrealists, was concerned with a kind of ‘sacred sociology’ of modern social structures. In his main research paper for this shortlived formation, ‘The Sacred in Everyday Life’ of January , Leiris defined his own sense of the titular concept in terms of ‘that mixture of fear and attachment, that ambiguous attitude caused by the approach of something simultaneously attractive and dangerous, prestigious and outcast – that combination of respect, desire and terror that we take as the psychological sign of the sacred’. One of his fundamental concerns was to show that ‘the sacred’ resides in ‘little things’ – in the seemingly minor details of daily life. His childhood memories were therefore mined once again to yield up their anthropological significance. Talking of the ‘sacred places’ of his childhood, for instance, he elaborated the way the parental home had, for him, been divided, symbolically, into zones. Having talked about the safe ‘right hand pole’ represented by his parents’ bedroom which ‘assumed its full meaning only at night when my father and mother were sleeping there – with the door open’, he writes: The other sacred pole of the house – the left hand pole, tending towards the illicit . . . was the bathroom. There every night my brother and I would shut ourselves in, out of natural necessity, but also to tell each other animal stories that went on like serials from one day to the next . . . That was the place we felt most like accomplices, fomenting plans and developing a quasi-secret mythology . . . animals who were soldiers, jockeys, airline or military pilots, launched into contests of war or sports, or detective stories . . . The invention of instruments of warfare, underground passages, snares, and traps (sometimes even a pit concealed with leaves, its sides provided with very sharp blades and spiked with stakes, to pierce whoever fell in and cut him to bits): many battles . . . after each battle detailed statistics with the exact number of prisoners, wounded, and dead for each of the opposing sides.
What is noticeable in reading this text is that, however convincingly Leiris establishes the structural logic of childish rituals, in accordance with psychoanalytic and ethnographic principles, he cannot resist anecdotal
For Bataille’s inaugural lecture defining ‘Sacred Sociology’ see Georges Bataille and Roger Caillois, ‘Sacred Sociology and the Relationship between “Society”, “Organism”, and “Being”’, (), trans. Betsy Wing, in Denis Hollier (ed.), The College of Sociology (–) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), pp. –. Michael Leiris, ‘The Sacred in Everyday Life’ (), trans. Betsy Wing, in Hollier (ed.), College of Sociology, p. . Ibid., pp. –.
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Nostalgia and Childhood in the Surrealist Novel
details that have all the hallmarks of nostalgia. Continuing his discussion about the bathroom, he focuses as follows on the toilet: As if in a ‘men’s house’ of some island in Oceania . . . we [Leiris and his brother] endlessly elaborated our mythology in this room, our clubhouse . . . and never tired of seeking answers to the various sexual riddles that obsessed us . . . Seated on the throne like an initiate of higher rank was my brother; I, the youngest, sat on an ordinary chamber pot that served as the neophyte’s stool. The flushing mechanism and the hole were, in themselves, mysterious things, and even actually dangerous. (Once, when I ran around the opening, pretending to be a circus horse, didn’t my foot get stuck in it, and then didn’t my parents, called to my rescue, have a terrible time getting it out?)
Of course, this nostalgia for familial rituals is different in kind from de Chirico’s more abstract worldweary evocations, but the slippage from proto-structuralist analysis into sentiment suggests that, in Leiris’s autobiographical practice, the ‘sacred’ virtually functions as the flip-side of nostalgia. There is no space in this essay to discuss Leiris’s final monumental work of autobiography – the four-volume The Rules of the Game (La règle du jeu, –) – but it is here that he fully reconciles ‘the Sacred’ with the narcissistic impulse to trawl through memories. A few points are worth making in relation to its first part, Scratches (Biffures, ). For one thing, Leiris returns, in a sense, to his early surrealist poetic concerns. The idiosyncrasies of the childish understanding of the world are convincingly brought out via a forensic attention to linguistic transpositions and displacements. Leiris had already outlined this project in his essay on ‘the Sacred’: ‘I want to speak of certain events in language, of words rich in themselves in repercussions, or words misheard or misread that abruptly trigger a sort of vertigo at the instant in which one perceives that they are not what one had thought before.’ The whole of the opening chapter of Scratches is devoted to explaining how, at an early age, he had accidentally dropped one of his beloved toy soldiers onto the floor of his parents’ ultrabourgeois living room and how, on retrieving the miraculously intact object, he had uttered the made-up word ‘reusement!’, only to be corrected by his parents that he must have meant ‘heureusement’ (‘happily’). Leiris sees this as a pivotal moment of identity formation. He would now have to give up the signifiers that he had habitually used in his private world and accept the social role of language.
Ibid., p. .
Ibid., p. .
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It is interesting that it is the figure of the toy that features at this revelatory moment. The fall of the precious object seems to suggest nothing less than the fall from the paradise of The Imaginary Order – in Lacanian terms – to The Symbolic Order. But Leiris’s attention to the materiality of the toy (‘It was part of this marvelous, separate world whose elements, through their shape and colour, contrast so strongly with the real world’) suggests that it is as much the object-world of childhood as language acquisition that galvanizes him. However convincingly he establishes that language forms identity, it is via the world of concrete, material objects that he anchors his memories of his childhood self. (Scratches incidentally ends with another chapter on a toy or rather toy instrument: the ‘Trumpet-Drum’.) This fascination with the sensory and phenomenological experience of childhood is something Leiris shares with de Chirico. It was argued earlier that, to a certain extent, the nostalgic episodes of Hebdomeros are imagined via the lens of children’s novels or picture-books. By the same token, if we return to Manhood, Leiris makes much of the role that cheap children’s book illustrations and prints – as well as theatrical performances – played in his early psychic life. They remained active mnemonic agents as he became an adult. We learn, for instance, about the cover of an album printed in Épinal titled ‘The Colors of Life’, which Leiris had pored over as an infant. It had borne a set of illustrations according a dominant colour to each of the stages of life. Leiris assures us that these colours became inseparable from the way he would subsequently imagine his fate as it unfolded. The retrieval of revelatory moments prior to language acquisition is at the centre of Leiris’s enterprise, and toys and pictorial imagery are clearly privileged triggers for this remembering. Such a process of retrieval might be considered nostalgic in the best possible sense. Leiris’s affinity with de Chirico in this respect is not in the end surprising; both, in their very different ways, were respondents to surrealism. To generalize, it might be asserted that the historical transition in literary surrealism represented by the shift from de Chirico to Leiris (bearing in mind that Hebdomeros appeared in and Manhood in ) is indicative of the movement’s doctrinal development from the ‘interior model’ and the primacy of the image of the mid-to-late s to the social/political obligations of the
Lacan first discussed his notion of the Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real orders in his pivotal Rome Discourse (). For a useful summary see Bice Benvenuto and Roger Kennedy, The Works of Jacques Lacan (London: Free Association Books, ), pp. –. Michel Leiris, Scratches (), trans. Lydia Davis (New York: Paragon House, ), p. . Leiris, Manhood, pp. –.
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Nostalgia and Childhood in the Surrealist Novel
s. Yet what unites them is possibly greater than what separates them. The material ‘thingness’ of objects, over and above the way words codify their identities, is a shared preoccupation, and this, as already noted, entails a peculiarly visual form of nostalgia. But what, in the end, might distinguish Leiris from de Chirico in terms of Svetlana Boym’s theoretical model of nostalgia? Arguably, Leiris’s novels possess the framework, in terms of his various psychoanalytic and anthropological interests, to more obviously qualify as exercises in ‘reflective nostalgia’. The positive spin Boym gives to nostalgia, as a species of ironic modernist consciousness, is particularly applicable to Leiris, since, as suggested, his childhood memories are rarely self-affirming. His vision of his child-self is of a proto-structuralist ‘subject in process’, never fully at one with the world, always spiritually, if not geographically, exiled. This offers something more graspable than de Chirico/Hebdomeros’s restless journeyings and longings for the past. In her book on nostalgia, taken as a whole, Boym is actually less concerned with the solitary or private nature of modernist nostalgia than with social or communitarian forms of longing or ‘cultural memory’. But, even in these terms, Leiris’s construal of his childhood memories in terms of ‘the Sacred’ can be seen as mobilizing nostalgia in the service of an ethnographically informed self-knowledge. His work speaks, unusually for its period, of the precarity of male identity, as formed by and through Western ritual structures.
See Boym, Future of Nostalgia, pp. –.
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Surrealist Collage Narrative Elza Adamowicz
A figure in a long cloak and a tall astrologer’s hat, holding a glass vessel, stands in front of a telescope. A blindfolded female figure in Renaissance dress faces him. Both figures are enclosed by a railing, while outside a disembodied female hand, the head of a male figure, and a baby are superimposed in the left foreground. Max Ernst’s collage, Nostradamus, Blanche de Castille et le petit Louis, was reproduced in the last issue of La révolution surréaliste (), one of three collages intended for an illustrated history of France, Morceaux choisis de l’histoire de France (Selections from the History of France). In this satirical rewriting of French history, which was never completed, historical figures – the astrologer-alchemist Nostradamus (–), Blanche de Castille (–), and her son, the future Louis IX (–) – have been redistributed with a playful disregard for chronology, undoing familiar historical narratives. The collage’s puzzling conjunction of protagonists entices the reader-viewer to imagine a story that would link its figures, creating coherence out of apparent incoherence and rewriting history as fantasy. Favouring simultaneity over sequentiality, chance over causality, the immediacy of the shock encounter over a sustained diegetic development, surrealist collage would seem to contradict the possibility of a coherent or cohesive narrative. The model of short-circuited imagery, whether defined as spark (André Breton) or cataclysm (Louis Aragon), has informed a surrealist aesthetic based on the fragment where the effect of dépaysement or disorientation is created by incongruous juxtapositions. The local epiphanies thus created can however infer a form of suspended narrative, a past, arrested, or future event, in the fusion of movement and stasis that is characteristic of the surrealist concept of beauté convulsive or convulsive beauty. This suspension is exemplified in the recurrent motif of a
André Breton, Manifeste du surréalisme (), in Breton, Œuvres complètes, vol. (Paris: Gallimard, ), p. ; Louis Aragon, Traité du style (; Paris: Gallimard, ), p. .
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Surrealist Collage Narrative
locomotive halted in a forest, in a poem by Breton (‘Ce qui reste du moteur sanglant est envahi par l’aubépine’, ‘What remains of the bloody engine is invaded by hawthorn’), or the photograph of a locomotive come to a standstill in the jungle, illustrating an article by Benjamin Péret. In these micro-narratives – fragmented, embryonic, elliptical – time is suspended and space arrested. In his first Manifeste du surréalisme () Breton launched an attack on the realist or psychological novel, based on the principles of (chrono)logical structures. Echoing him, Aragon writes scathingly of ‘silly bourgeois anecdotes’ in his Traité du style. Yet the surrealists did not totally reject the novel; they simply preferred the Romantic and Symbolist traditions, Horace Walpole and Matthew Lewis’s Gothic novels, the fantastic tales and hallucinatory visions of Achim von Arnim and E.T.A. Hoffmann, to realism’s allegedly restricted forms. They were also fascinated by sensational fait divers stories and the illustrations of popular serial novels, freezeframes of violent action and dramatic intensity and suspense. For their collages they freely plundered and recycled these elements, ‘the splendid illustrations of popular works and children’s books’, from cliffhanger to romantic fantasy, Fantômas to Nick Carter. Isolated from their original contexts, such images were freed to be appropriated and regenerated through their integration into new narratives. To these was added the influence of the silent cinema’s story-telling devices: montage techniques, word–image juxtapositions, dramatic tableaux.
From Micro-Narratives to the Collage Novel In his catalogue essay for Ernst’s first collage exhibition in Paris, La mise sous whisky marin (), Breton argued that the invention of photography had rendered traditional mimetic codes of pictorial expression redundant, and that these had been replaced, consequently, by collage as a critique of realism and a radical means of image creation. He defined collage as ‘the marvellous faculty, without going beyond the domain of our experience, of
André Breton, ‘Privé’, Clair de terre (), in Œuvres complètes, vol. , p. ; Benjamin Péret, ‘La nature dévore le progres et le dépasse’, Minotaure, (), – (at p. ). Aragon, Traité du style, p. : ‘les niaises historiettes bourgeoises’. Faits divers or sensational news items were published in the journal Le surréalisme au service de la révolution. André Breton, ‘Avis au lecteur de La Femme têtes’ (), in Breton, Œuvres complètes, vol. (Paris: Gallimard, ), p. : ‘la splendide illustration des ouvrages populaires et des livres d’enfance’.
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bringing together two distant realities and creating a spark from their encounter’. He was here outlining an embryonic poetics (which would be developed in his Manifeste du surréalisme), founded on the language of chance and the irrational, thereby subverting the coherence of traditional aesthetics. Elaborating on Breton’s definition, Max Ernst referred to the collage mechanism as ‘the exploitation of the chance encounter of two distant realities on an unfamiliar plane (paraphrasing and generalizing Lautréamont’s famous phrase: Beautiful as the chance encounter on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella)’. The (con)sequential links of conventional narrative, which ground spatio-temporal relations, are replaced in collage by the elliptical mode of juxtaposition, resisting easy interpretation. Yet such incongruous and seemingly arbitrary juxtapositions also tantalize the viewer into forging new links between disparate elements, recalling past stories (like moments of an almost forgotten dream) or imagining potential narratives (as yet unknown dramas). Mediating between discrete elements, narrative is an effective mode of ordering data, an interpretive strategy that seeks to reduce incongruity and incoherence by forging links between apparently divergent elements. The many interpretations of Lautréamont’s meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine as an archetypical model for collage testify to the mind’s ability to forge narrative links, sometimes melodramatic, often erotic, where none are actually explicit. For Breton, for instance, the imaginative power of Lautréamont’s image derives from an implicit erotic narrative: ‘this power stems from the fact that the umbrella represents the man, the sewing machine the woman . . . and the dissecting table the bed, spaces shared by life and death’. For Ernst, more bluntly, ‘umbrella and sewing machine will make love’. Even a unit as small as the collage-poem, whose varied typography and layout on the page would seem to privilege visuality, foregrounding the cut-and-paste processes and working as an active counterforce to a linear
Breton, Manifeste du surréalisme, p. : ‘la faculté merveilleuse, sans sortir du champ de notre expérience, d’atteindre deux réalités distantes et de leur rapprochement de tirer une étincelle’. Max Ernst, ‘Comment on force l’inspiration’, Le surréalisme au service de la révolution, (), – (at p. ): ‘l’exploitation de la rencontre fortuite de deux réalités distantes sur un plan nonconvenant (cela dit en paraphrasant et en généralisant la célèbre phrase de Lautréamont: Beau comme la rencontre fortuite sur une table de dissection d’une machine à coudre et d’un parapluie)’. André Breton, ‘L’objet fantôme’, Le Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution, (), – (at p. ): ‘cette force tient à ce que le parapluie ne peut ici représenter que l’homme, la machine à coudre que la femme . . . et la table de dissection que le lit, commune mesure lui-même de la vie et de la mort’. Ernst, ‘Comment on force l’inspiration’, p. : ‘parapluie et machine à coudre feront l’amour’.
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Surrealist Collage Narrative
reading of the text, invites the active participation of the reader-viewer. To take a single example, one of Breton’s early collage-poems which includes the following lines, made up from fragments of advertisements: MADAME, une paire de bas de soie n’est pas (Madame / a pair / of silk stockings / is not)
Mocking the fetishistic appeal of what might have been an advertising message, the sequence is composed of words that both solicit and resist meaning. Yet its very fragmentation and incompleteness generate suspense and anticipation. The reader-viewer, inhabiting the spaces between the collaged fragments, imagines a narrative, a moment in the unveiling of a woman’s body, thus creating the delay central to the notion of convulsive beauty or the discourse of desire. Similarly, in Benjamin Péret’s poem ‘Hier en découvrant l’Amérique’, composed of newspaper clippings of sensational news items spread across the page, micro-narratives intervene: LE ‘COUP DU FRIGORIFIQUE’ Une porte s’ouvre deux coups de revolver (The ‘case of the refrigerator truck’ / A door opens / two gun shots)
Fragments of random faits divers are reassembled in telegraphic style, materials for nascent stories. English surrealist Roger Roughton also resorted to newspaper material for his text ‘Final Night of the Bath’, composed of words and phrases cut out from the Evening Standard dated June and reassembled in a short story. The opening sentence reads: ‘Over two thousand people had taken tickets for this season’s murder’, turning a banal news item into a thrilling performance. In a similar fashion the incongruity of elements assembled in collage-like paintings – ‘collages entirely painted by hand’ according to René Magritte –
Breton, Manifeste du surréalisme, p. . Roger Roughton, ‘Final Night of the Bath’, Contemporary Poetry and Prose, (), . Max Ernst (on paintings by Magritte and Dalí), Beyond Painting (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, ), p. .
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stimulates the viewer to imagine links where none are explicit. For example, a painting like Magritte’s L’assassin menacé () depicts what first appears to be a stereotypical murder scene – female corpse, murderer, two policemen, witnesses – but on a closer look it raises a number of questions: Who is the victim? Why does the murderer linger on the scene of the crime listening to music? Who are the three figures seen through the window? A banal murder scene and its conventional relations are thus transformed into an enigma where deduction is inoperative, meaning is suspended, and mystery reigns. The juxtaposition of disjunctive images in paintings by Giorgio de Chirico, such as The Child’s Brain or The Philosopher’s Conquest (both dated ) – cannon, artichokes, book, clock, train – provokes Breton into imagining a solution to the mystery of their encounter: ‘It is then . . . at the time scheduled for the train’s arrival . . . It is only then that the import . . . of our intervention will become clear in blinding signs.’ The mysterious juxtapositions remain suspended in the present, yet open to future meanings. Indeed, Breton preferred present mystery to future decipherment. When envisaged in terms of transgression of the sign, collage storytelling lends itself not only to the rewriting of melodramatic themes but also to the topoi of eroticism, favoured in particular by Czech surrealists. Among them Jindřich Štyrský (–), editor of the Edition press and the Erotiká revue (–), published Emilie přichází ke mně ve snu (Emilie Comes to Me in a Dream, ), an erotic text and ten photomontages whose elements were drawn from pornographic magazines. In his postscript Boruslav Brouk attacks ‘the supercilious psyches of the ruling peacocks’ and celebrates ‘pornophilic art’ as the expression of our animal nature, disrupting moral order. Štyrský’s erotic collages also illustrate Vite˘zslav Nezval’s Sexualni nocturno (Sexual Nocturne), a fragmented text part dream memoir, part autobiography, recounting memories and fantasies of adolescent sexuality, voyeurism, masturbation, and loss.
André Breton, Le surréalisme et la peinture (), in Breton, Œuvres complètes, vol. (Paris: Gallimard, ), p. : ‘C’est là même . . . à l’heure prévue pour l’arrivée de ce train . . . C’est seulement alors qu’en signes fulgurants se précisera pour tous le sens . . . de notre intervention.’ By way of counter-example we might mention Louis Aragon’s Paysan de Paris (), a prose text with collaged sections – adverts, newspaper extracts, theatre programmes – fragments that anchor the text in the real, extending the concept of the realist novel through the elaboration of a ‘mythologie moderne’, a mix of the real and the surreal. See also Louis Aragon’s Les aventures de Télémaque (), where he uses intertextuality as a limit-form of collage. Boruslav Brouk, ‘Postscript’, in Edition (Prague: Twisted Spoon Press, ), p. .
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Surrealist Collage Narrative
Collage here becomes a medium to destabilize not only aesthetic norms but also moral certainties, through the development and exploration of uncensored material.
Max Ernst’s Collage Novels The collage stories discussed so far vary from a single image to a short sequence of images or a developed narrative. The most accomplished works of collage narrative were produced by Max Ernst in what he termed ‘collage novels’: La femme têtes (), Rêve d’une petite fille voulant entrer au Carmel (), and Une semaine de bonté (). The visual material was retrieved from both high and popular cultural sources: nineteenth-century feuilletons or serial novels (for example, Jules Mary’s Les damnés de Paris, serialized in Le feuilleton illustré in ), popular journals (La nature, Le magasin pittoresque), and reproductions of artworks (by artists such as William Blake or Gustave Doré). By opting to use wood-engraving, Ernst ensured the material homogeneity of the image, enhanced by reworking the engraver’s plate to conceal the seams, thus offsetting the iconographic disjunctions. In fact, he saw his original collages simply as maquettes, while the reproductions were deemed to be the finished work. In his introduction to La femme têtes, Breton defines collage as both familiar and alienating, based on ‘our will for total disorientation’ and illustrating the definition with the example of the détournement of a statue: ‘a statue is less interesting on a square than in a ditch’. Aragon, for his part, highlights the dramatic qualities of Ernst’s collages: ‘The actors play a role on a stage where the props of several possibilities have been placed. I have often thought that an immense and marvellous drama resulted from the arbitrary succession
Another example of collage as a means of expressing transgressive narratives is Valentine Penrose’s celebration of lesbian love, Dons des féminines (), composed of twenty-four short poems in English and French and twenty-seven collages. See Andrea Oberhuber and Sarah-Jeanne Beauchamp Houde, ‘Dons des féminines, un recueil-collage de Valentine Penrose’, in Le livre surréaliste au féminin, https://lisaf.org/project/penrose-valentine-dons-feminines (accessed April ). Max Ernst, La femme têtes (Paris: Carrefour ; Paris: Prairial, ), The Hundred Headless Woman, trans. Dorothea Tanning (New York: Georges Braziller, ); Max Ernst, Rêve d’une petite fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel (Paris: Carrefour, ), A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil, trans. Dorothea Tanning (New York: Georges Braziller, ); Max Ernst, Une semaine de bonté (Paris: Jeanne Bucher, ; Jean-Jacques Pauvert, , ), Une Semaine de Bonté: A Surrealistic Novel in Collage (New York: Dover, ). Breton, ‘Avis au lecteur’, p. : ‘notre volonté de dépaysement complet de tout’; ‘une statue est moins intéressante à considérer sur une place que dans un fossé’.
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of these images.’ The following pages will examine how Ernst’s collage novels both subvert and renew the novel genre: through parody of traditional story-telling techniques; the fragmentation and irrationality of dream accounts; and melodrama’s rhetoric of excess.
La femme têtes: Narrative Subverted ‘La femme têtes will be par excellence the picture book of our day’, wrote Breton in his introduction to Ernst’s work. Composed ‘with violence and method’, it is made up of collages, loosely structured as an initiatory search, an explorer’s logbook, or a pastiche of the Bildungsroman. It recounts the protagonist’s (triple) birth and childhood, his Dantesque journey through cataclysms, explosions and floods, shipwreck, torture, and revolution, in his unsuccessful search for the secret of the hundred headless woman: ‘The eyeless eye, the -headless woman keeps her secret.’ While traditional stories progress from enigma to suspense, followed by (re)solution and, finally, order restored, Ernst’s collage narratives are characterized by suspense repeated and mysteries unsolved. A number of strategies – circularity, repetition, variation, hallucination – impede or interrupt diegetic development, upsetting and mocking the linearity deployed in standard story-telling. For example, the first plate, a naked male figure plunging downwards (drawn from William Blake’s frontispiece to Robert Blair’s The Grave), netted by a crowd of people on the ground, is repeated in the last plate. Furthermore, the last caption, ‘Fin et suite’ (End and continuation), an inversion of the concluding ‘Suite et fin’ found in serial novels, contradicts development and withholds closure. Narrative development is further blocked by repetition, of captions for example: ‘L’immaculée conception’ (‘The Immaculate Conception’), ‘Le paysage change trois fois’ (‘The landscape changes three times’) or,
Louis Aragon, ‘Max Ernst peintre des illusions’ (), in Aragon, Les collages (Paris: Hermann, ), p. : ‘Les acteurs jouent un rôle sur une scène, oú sont plantés les portants de plusieurs possibilités. J’ai souvent pensé qu’il y avait un drame immense et merveilleux qui résultait de la succession arbitraire de tous ces tableaux.’ Breton, ‘Avis au lecteur’, p. : ‘La Femme têtes sera, par excellence, le livre d’images de ce temps.’ Max Ernst, Écritures (Paris: Gallimard, ), p. : ‘avec acharnement et méthode’. Robert Desnos, ‘La femme têtes, par Max Ernst’, Documents, / (), . Ernst, La femme têtes, n.p.: ‘L’oeil sans yeux, la femme têtes garde son secret.’ For Janse Van Rensberg, the circular structure of La femme têtes materializes the Nietzschean concept of the ‘eternal return’. ‘Max Ernst: “The Hundred Headless Woman” and the Eternal Return’, Suid-Afrikaanse Tydskrif vir Kunsgeskiedenis, /– (), –.
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ironically, the word ‘suite’ (repeated ten times), which functions as an empty coordinator, announcing continuity between images but actually foregrounding discontinuity. Moreover the reprise over several collages of iconographic motifs such as flying figures, part-bodies, corpses, or round objects (sphere, globe, wheel) gives the work a deceptive sense of cohesion. Variations in the protagonists’ names also destabilize the story’s coherence. Like Mathilda in Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk (), characters are unstable, ‘a continuous temptation’. The male protagonist – or protagonists? – is given a shifting identity ranging from baby to Titan, Loplop the swallow or Bird Superior, echoing the multiple guises of the master villain Fantomas. The name of the main female character, for her part, is based on word-play: she is hundred-headed (cent), headless (sans), but also obstinate (la femme s’entête), or bloodsucking (sang tète); she is variously identified with ‘Germinal, ma soeur’, ‘Perturbation, ma soeur’, ‘La Belle Jardiniere’, or a phantom; and she is often depicted as a double figure. Even more disorienting, the ‘hallucinatory succession of contradictory images’ disrupts narrative logic. Disruptions can occur within a single image: ‘Le Père Éternel’ is placed in a cage, Titans fall into a restaurant or a laundry, a giant serpent appears in a forge, statues of naked females hover unnoticed above scenes of carnage or Victorian interiors. Inconsistencies can also occur between image and caption, when the latter fails to fulfil its normal role of anchoring the image: the scene of a sinking ship in a storm bears the counter-caption ‘La mer de la sérénité’ (‘The sea of serenity’), while a similar image with a couple in the foreground is captioned, enigmatically, ‘Leçons obscures’ (‘Obscure lessons’). Throughout, non sequiturs govern the succession of images: a shipwreck scene is immediately followed by the scene of a crowd in a city street, a classroom brawl shifts inexplicably to a scene in a cave. Shifts in style can also be a source of disruption: from dialogue reminiscent of popular serial novels (‘Défais ton sac, mon brave’, ‘Open your bag, my good man’) to the parody of biblical language (Loplop ‘s’est fait chair sans chair et habitera parmi nous’, ‘became flesh without flesh and will dwell among us’).
Ernst, ‘Comment on force l’inspiration’, p. : ‘Qui sait si . . . nous ne nous préparons pas quelque jour à échapper au principe d’identité?’ Breton, Manifeste du surréalisme, p. : ‘une tentation continue’. Ernst, ‘Comment on force l’inspiration’, p. : ‘succession hallucinante d’images contradictoires’. Robert Desnos argues on the contrary for the materiality of the collages: ‘Pour le poète il n’y a pas d’hallucinations. Il y a le réel. Et c’est bien au spectacle d’une réalité plus étendue que celle communément reconnue telle que nous convie l’inventeur des collages.’ Desnos, ‘La femme têtes, par Max Ernst’.
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The circular construction of La femme têtes, its repetitions and variations, the disjunctions of individual images and their succession, tip the narrative into poetry. Indeed, while Aragon recognizes in Max Ernst’s collage novels a dramatic structure, for Breton La femme têtes recalls Rimbaud’s poetry, which he quotes in his introduction to the book: ‘it will be more and more apparent that every living-room has sunk ‘to the bottom of a lake’ . . . with its chandeliers of fishes, its gilded stars, its dancing grasses, its mud bottom and its raiment of reflections’. Beyond poetry, however, a dream narrative is suggested via the repetitions and variations, the shifts in style, the aleatory, incongruous, or enigmatic images. Breton actually draws an analogy between the irrational juxtapositions of collage and Freudian manifest dream content when he compares Ernst’s work to a dream sequence, ‘the meticulous reconstruction of a crime witnessed in a dream, without our being in the least concerned about the name or motives of the assassin’.
Rêve d’une petite fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel: Dream Narrative While it can be said that all three collage novels suggest a dream account, Rêve d’une petite fille is presented explicitly as a dream. Its eighty collage plates unfold over four chapters (‘La ténébreuse’, ‘La chevelure’, ‘Le couteau’, ‘Le céleste fiancé’), each corresponding to a fragment of the dream of an adolescent girl about to enter the Carmelite order. In his introduction to the work Ernst quotes Thérèse de Lisieux’s autobiography Histoire d’une âme (The Story of a Soul, ) as a source for the narrative. The captions, made up mainly of dialogue, enhance the dramatic atmosphere of the work, while their frequent disjunctive relation to the image heightens the work’s mystery. The very elements that impede the coherent development of standard narrative are also the characteristics of the alternative logic of the dream. The repetitions, incongruities, non sequiturs, and free associations recreate dream processes. Thus the frequent instances of repetition can be interpreted as mimicking the discourse of obsession; the hybrid human–animal
In Ernst published Le poème de la femme têtes (Paris: Jean Hugues), composed solely of the captions from the original edition. Breton, ‘Avis au lecteur’, p. : ‘il va de plus en plus apparaître que chaque salon est descendu “au fond d’un lac” et cela, il convient d’y insister, avec ses lustres de poissons, ses dorures d’astres, ses danses d’herbes, son fond de boue, et ses toilettes de reflets’. Ibid., pp. –: ‘la reconstitution incroyablement minutieuse d’une scène de crime à laquelle nous assisterions en rêve, sans nous intéresser le moins du monde au nom et aux mobiles de l’assassin’.
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figures can be read as a manifestation of the surfacing of the repressed; and collage’s spatio-temporal disjunctions and its familiar elements in unfamiliar contexts recreate the unheimlich of dreams. Breton describes the auratic appeal of Ernst’s collage images in terms of ‘the strange power to touch us’, alluding to the ambivalence of oneiric images, poised between the memory of half-forgotten events and the potential for future dramatizations. The dreamlike is further evoked through strategies of displacement and condensation, consciously exploited by Ernst who parodies Freudian processes. Art historian Samantha Kafky, for instance, analyses the first plate of the book as an example of displacement. It represents an incestuous embrace between father and daughter, their faces partly obscured by a hand holding a glass of water with a spoon, both (literally) masking and (symbolically) revealing the sexual significance of the image. The caption reads: ‘Father: “Your kiss seems adult, my child. Coming from God, it will go far. Go, my daughter, go ahead and. . .”’, revealing the oedipal desires and promise of religious sensuality of the young girl. To this we could add the frequent slippages from the sacred to the erotic as forms of displacement, as in Marceline-Marie’s quest for the ‘Fiancé Céleste’ where she appears in the role of bride: at the foot of the cross, where a grotesque Christ in a skirt is being pecked by vultures; doubled as bride and halfnaked dancing female before a crucifix; naked, fondling Christ’s loincloth; or as a double figure, swooning in the midst of a Catholic ceremony. For Charlotte Stokes, the female protagonist Marceline-Marie combines Freudian hysteric and Catholic mystic. Her composite name and multiple identities invoke the split self of the hysteric, as studied by Freud and Breuer (). She repeatedly questions her identity: ‘Tell me who I am, myself or my sister’, young girl or old nun, ‘indecent amazon in her private little desert’ or a beetle? Mystic and hysteric are both treated in parodic mode thanks to the use of hyperbole: not only in the repeated variations of
Ibid., p. : ‘un singulier pouvoir de frôlement’. Ernst, Rêve d’une petite fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel, n.p.: ‘Le Père: “Votre baiser me semble adulte, mon enfant. Venu de Dieu, il ira loin. Allez, ma fille, allez en avant et. . .”’ Samantha Kafky, ‘Dream Work: Ernst’s Rêve d’une petite fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel’, Notes in the History of Art, /– (), – (at p. ). See also David Lomas, The Haunted Self: Surrealism, Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity (New Haven, : Yale University Press, ), pp. –. Charlotte Stokes, ‘Surrealist as Religious Visionary: Max Ernst’s Rêve d’une petite fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel ()’, in Donald E. Morse (ed.), The Fantastic in World Literature and the Arts (New York: Greenwood Press, ), pp. –. Ernst, Rêve d’une petite fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel, n.p.: ‘Dites-moi qui je suis, moi-même ou ma sœur’; ‘indécente amazone dans son petit désert privé’.
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the main protagonist’s splitting of the self, but also in the many scenes treating the theme of Christ as ‘Celestial Fiancé’ as noted above. Anticlerical satire and the parody of Freudian psychoanalysis merge in a provocative dream.
Une semaine de bonté Hyperbole also characterizes Une semaine de bonté ou les sept éléments capitaux (A Week of Kindness or the Seven Deadly Elements), Ernst’s third collage novel. First published in in five paperbound booklets, like popular serial novels, it is composed of collage plates, divided into seven chapters, each chapter linked to a colour, a day of the week, an element (mud, water, fire, blood, sight, ‘unknown’), and an ‘example’ (place or character). For instance, Tuesday is linked to the colour red, the element fire, and the example ‘La cour du dragon.’ Although some logic is provided by character (the Lion de Belfort in chapter , a lion-headed male decorated with medals, the incarnation of political and social authority), by theme (water pervading chapter as a destructive power, flooding the streets of Paris, destroying bridges, and drowning people), or by context (a bourgeois salon in chapter invaded by dragons, serpents, and ladies sporting batlike wings), the structure is illusory and global cohesion unattainable. As in the other two collage novels the material homogeneity of the images is offset by spatial and temporal disparities within and between images. For example, bestial apparitions and the figure of (Gustave Doré’s) Satan invade cluttered bourgeois salons; hybrid figures proliferate, including Oedipus represented with a bird-head, or a male figure in formal dress sporting an Easter Island head. The relation between images is once again largely defined by non sequiturs: one of the collages in chapter stages the popular cliffhanging scenario, a young woman bound with a rope who has been lowered over the edge of a cliff by two men and now hovers above a large wave; the following plate, instead of resolving the action, presents a variation of the same scene, leaving both victim and story hanging. Other collages present figures hanging in mid-air (as in La femme têtes), the laws of gravity and coherence suspended. Melodramatic elements abound throughout the work: a host of familiar characters (villain, seducer, murderer, thief, women bound, gagged, seduced), and a quick succession of equally familiar melodramatic actions
The title alludes to a social welfare campaign created in Paris in or to the seven days of creation in Genesis.
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Surrealist Collage Narrative
(chase, bondage, seduction, shooting, skewing, evisceration, guillotining). Such an accumulation of apocalyptic events, cyclones, shipwrecks, floods, volcanic eruptions, are here presented as isolated dramatic moments, incomplete, unexplained, suspended – sometimes literally, as in the cliffhanger scenes, the image of a figure leaping out of a window, or the hysterical female figures in the last section. Scenes recall the illustrations of popular detective novels that fascinated the surrealists, among them Desnos: ‘I should like to label with the stamp of poetry the covers of certain popular novels’, he wrote about the images that depicted an ‘impending dramatic event’. For Renée Riese Hubert, ‘we are apparently viewing a visual translation of the most poignant sentences cited from an imaginary novel’. Melodrama’s topoi are present (crime, assassination, corpse, sentimental couple), but now without its syntax or (chrono)logical links. Sequence thus collapses into an accumulation of non sequiturs and ellipses, undermining the possibility of narrative progression. Mary Ann Caws also reads Une semaine de bonté as ‘a parody of narrative structures, notably of the codes of melodrama’. It is the very proliferation of melodramatic moments, themes, characters, a rhetoric of excess pushed beyond the limits of a genre already characterized by excess, which highlights the parody behind the use of melodramatic elements. Not only do the mechanisms of excess disrupt the formal structure of the novel, it is also a means of disturbing moral and social order; and here the use of melodramatic processes suggests the dream. For Hal Foster, ‘melodrama is a genre already given over to the unconscious, a genre in which repressed desires are hysterically expressed’. Its stereotypical props and signs, presented here in fragmented form, those very elements that impede a smooth narrative development, evoke the alternative structure of the dream, simulating its compositional processes, as was explored in the earlier collage novels. Thus repetition and hyperbole reprise the discourse of obsession; the elliptical events and absence of overt causal relations can be equated with processes of condensation, while the invasion of hybrid human– animal figures in a bourgeois salon suggests the surfacing of the repressed.
Robert Desnos, ‘Imagerie moderne’, Documents, (), – (at p. ). ‘Je voudrais marquer du poinçon poétique certaines couvertures de romans populaires.’ Renée Riese Hubert, ‘The Fabulous Fiction of Two Surrealist Artists: Giorgio de Chirico and Max Ernst’, New Literary History, / (), – (at p. ). Mary Ann Caws, The Art of Interference: Stressed Readings in Verbal and Visual Texts (Cambridge: Polity Press, ), p. . See also Elza Adamowicz, Surrealist Collage in Text and Image: Dissecting the Exquisite Corpse (Cambridge University Press, ), pp. –. Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, : MIT Press, ), p. .
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Like the fragments of a dream recalled, each scene is (almost) familiar yet their combination is enigmatic. As Marguerite Bonnet observes, the flux of images and the disjunctive narrative echo the structure of dreams. Not only does Ernst subvert realism’s novelistic structures in all three works through the processes, explored above, that impede diegetic development and disrupt narrative (and causal) logic, on a more general level official or well-known narratives – historical, mythical, biblical, anthropological, religious – are debased. Thus, with a cavalier disregard for something as conventional as historical accuracy, Jules Verne, Fantomas, and Dante meet in a hot-air balloon; the Lion of Belfort, symbol of a siege during the Franco-Prussian war, is depicted as a military officer now sporting medals of the Mérite Agricole and l’École de Coiffure. Myths, too, are given short shrift: Prometheus hangs limply from a tree, enveloped by a giant eagle; Titans tumble headlong into laundries and restaurants; the piercing of Oedipus’s ankles is replayed as a rather ridiculous torture scene of a naked female by a bird-headed man; and a rat-infested Sphinx appears through a train window. Anthropological discourse is also a target, debased in the recurrent image of an Easter Island head doubling as seducer. Elsewhere religious bliss is equated with sexual ecstasy: the Celestial Fiancé becomes the object of improper behaviour on the part of the Bride and, in an open shift from religious to sexual fetish, the emblem of the Sacred Heart is used as a cache-sexe. Not only is Ernst involved in an ‘overall de-signifying and demythifying enterprise’, as Margot Norris argues, but old stories are dismantled and recycled as new.
Reading the Collage Novel ‘It remained for us to examine these illustrated pages that . . . represent an enormous number of disturbing and precious speculations.’ Do these fragmented references to various discourses – myth, history, or religion – belong to a story already told, cut up and reassembled, or are they the raw material for a future story? How does the viewer-reader read the collage novel: as an enigma (leading to a (re)solution) or as a mystery (remaining in undecidability)? The viewer’s position is ambivalent, as a detective – avatar of the critic as interpreter – reconstituting the scene of the crime,
Marguerite Bonnet, André Breton: Naissance de l’aventure surréaliste (Paris: Corti, ), p. . Margot Norris, Beasts of the Modern Imagination (Baltimore, : Johns Hopkins University Press, ), p. . Breton, ‘Avis au lecteur’, p. : ‘Il restait à interroger . . . ces pages dessinées qui . . . représentent pour nous une somme de conjectures tellement déroutantes qu’elles en sont précieuses.’
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Surrealist Collage Narrative
deciphering the enigma; or as a dreamer-voyeur, experiencing the mystery. We are confronted with the paradox of a genre that subverts, suspends, suspects narrative, yet calls for a reading strategy which is itself a form of narrativization, that mediates between the incongruous and the incoherent, shifting from the aleatory to the causal, in an attempt to explain or conjure away the work’s incongruities. Like isolated fragments of a dream partly reconstituted on awakening, the viewer imagines connections between disjunctive elements, seeking to create from the casual juxtaposition of signs a coherent succession. Critics have searched for a hermeneutic key that might offer a global interpretation of Ernst’s collage novels. Among these are alchemical readings, where collage’s transformation of reality is seen as analogous to alchemical transmutation. In his Second manifeste du surréalisme () Breton draws an analogy between the surrealist quest for the ‘point de l’esprit’ – the surreal defined in dialectical terms as the resolution of opposites – and the alchemical search for the philosopher’s stone. In a similar vein, Ernst defines collage as ‘something like the alchemy of the visual image’. This leads M.E. Warlick to argue that there is a logical narrative order derived from an alchemical intertext in La femme têtes and, especially, Une semaine de bonté: ‘Despite a few changes in sequence, the development of Ernst’s novel progresses systematically and faithfully to its completion.’ Warlick’s reading encourages detailed analogies between each of the chapters of Une semaine de bonté and the stages in the alchemical process (putrefaction, purification, conjunction). Another global interpretive strategy is that of psychoanalysis. Hal Foster has interpreted surrealism in light of the uncanny, considered as the overarching principle of the movement, ‘a principle of order that clarifies the disorder of surrealism.’ He thus argues that the significance of Une semaine de bonté lies in ‘an implicit mise-en-scene of the unconscious’; and he relates the historically outmoded (Victorian interiors, popular novel illustrations) to the repressed, arguing that the collages stage fantasies of primal scenes of castration or seduction. Psychoanalytical or alchemical interpretations, hermeneutic models that profess to erase local disruptions and proffer global coherence, however attractive they may appear to the reader in her role as detective or
Ernst, Écritures, p. : ‘quelque chose comme l’alchimie de l’image visuelle’. M.E. Warlick, ‘Max Ernst’s Alchemical Novel: “Une Semaine de bonté”’, Art Journal, / (), – (at p. ). Foster, Compulsive Beauty, pp. –.
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psychologist, are confronted by Ernst’s deliberate manipulation of such codes. Werner Spies resists the temptation, highlighting instead both the impulse and failure to interpret the collages, and developing the idea of the inchoative, defined as the promise of meaning at once repeated and broken. For Margot Norris, too, ‘the collage novels plunge the reader into an oxymoronic “delirium of interpretation” that yields only fractured sense, uncertain meaning, and conflicting affects.’ This contrasts with the reading logic of the traditional novel, based on (chrono)logical development and coherence. It is arguable that the reference to alchemy provides less a hermeneutic key than a structural analogy between surrealism and the gestation stage of the alchemical process, in which elements are suspended between base matter and their transmutation into gold, resisting closure. Breton recognized this when he observed about Ernst’s collages: ‘Everything is searching for a new form of expression’, as in the manifest dream content. Elsewhere, rejecting the concept of the book as closed, Breton imagined it ‘like a door ajar’, knowing no dénouement: ‘We enjoy imagining novels that can’t end, just as there are problems that can’t be solved.’ This equates collage with the discourse of desire.
Fin et suite Rather than considering collage as the (regressive) site of a lost wholeness, as in the psychoanalytical and alchemical readings outlined above, it can be seen as a figure of possibility. ‘He diverts each object from its meaning in order to awaken it to a new reality’, wrote Aragon in his discussion of Ernst’s collages. In La femme têtes and, above all, in the last chapter of Une semaine de bonté, where images representing women flying, leaping, floating, suspended in mid-air in poses drawn from nineteenth-century engravings, or photographs of hysterical women in Charcot’s Leçons du
Werner Spies, Max Ernst: Les collages: Inventaires et contradictions (Paris: Gallimard, ), p. . Norris, Beasts of the Modern Imagination, p. . André Breton, ‘Max Ernst. Œuvre graphique’ (), Le surréalisme et la peinture, p. : ‘Tout se cherche et est en voie d’articulation nouvelle.’ André Breton, Nadja (), in Œuvres completes, vol. , p. : ‘battant comme des portes’. André Breton, Second manifeste du surréalisme, in Œuvres complètes, vol. , p. : ‘On se plaît à imaginer des romans qui ne peuvent finir, comme il est des problèmes qui restent sans résolution.’ For Ivanne Rialland, the reader-viewer of Ernst’s collages is kept in a ‘dynamisme du désir’. ‘Le romanesque surréaliste: Les romans-collages de Max Ernst’, Roman –, (), – (at p. ), www.cairn.info/revue-roman---page-.htm (accessed April ). Aragon, Les collages, p. : ‘Il détourne chaque objet de son sens pour le réveiller à une réalité nouvelle.’
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Surrealist Collage Narrative
mardi de la Salpêtrière (–), Ernst has replaced a narrative of constraint by one of freedom, thus transforming the conventional notion of hysteria as pathological into a liberatory force. Although hysteria had been largely discredited by the s, it was considered by the surrealists, not as a diseased state, but as ‘a supreme means of expression’. The hysterical woman signified for them freedom from the rigid laws not only of gravity but of patriarchal rationality and social constraints. In the final plates of Une semaine de bonté the repeated images of hysterical women, infusing new energy into defunct images, subvert the old stories, in a shift to an erotic narrative, as evoked by Breton: ‘Praise be to hysteria, Aragon and I have said, and to its train of naked young women gliding along the roofs.’
André Breton and Louis Aragon, ‘Le cinquantenaire de l’hystérie’, La révolution surréaliste, ( March ), –. Breton, Manifeste du surréalisme, pp. –: ‘Gloire, avons-nous dit, Aragon et moi, à l’hystérie et à son cortège de femmes jeunes et nues glissant le long des toits’.
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Transgression and Excess
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The Surrealist Novel and the Gothic Neil Matheson
In Prague Castle, I read, a room had been walled up and forgotten for centuries; one day someone detected its presence, opened it up and found it filled with paintings, including a good-sized Rubens . . . Yves Bonnefoy, Rue traversière ()
Surrealism and the Gothic Novel Emerging initially as a literary movement deeply rooted in Romanticism, surrealism’s antipathy towards the novel is articulated at the outset in André Breton’s first Manifesto of Surrealism (), both as part of the movement’s assault on ‘the reign of logic’, as well as on writing as commerce: ‘To write false novels . . . all you have to do is set the needle marked “fair” at “action” and the rest will follow naturally’ – ‘you will be rich’. Breton’s hostility, though, is aimed more specifically at the realist novel as a product of the ‘realistic attitude’ and immediately exempts the Gothic novel as a manifestation of the surrealist ‘marvellous’, adding ‘only the marvelous is capable of fecundating works that belong to an inferior category such as the novel’. Hailing Matthew Lewis’s The Monk () as ‘infused throughout with the presence of the marvelous’, Breton is particularly aroused by the book’s perverse eroticism – embracing fetishism, rape, and necrophilia – as embodied in Mathilda, ‘less a character than a continual temptation’. And to which we could add that the Gothic, in its fascination with the excesses of the Catholic Church, also served surrealism’s anticlericalism. If Breton brandishes the word ‘liberté’ – ‘the only one that still excites me’ – the same demand runs through his wartime proclamations, echoed
André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ), pp. , –. Ibid., p. . Ibid., pp. –.
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in the catalogue Le surréalisme en . We find there the continued celebration of Sade as beacon of desire and imagination, posed by Maurice Nadeau as having ‘painted the night through which we’re living’, an emblem of ‘permanent insurrection’. Eros qua subversive force runs throughout the history of the movement, pervading post-war surrealism and shaping landmark exhibitions such as that of and the EROS show. New adherents such as Julien Gracq, Maurice Fourré, and André Pieyre de Mandiargues expanded the range of the surrealist novel in the direction of the occult, erotic, and Gothic, but I want to consider here the contributions of three women: Ithell Colquhoun’s Goose of Hermogenes () is alchemical-erotic, Valentine Penrose’s Erzsébet Báthory: La comtesse sanglante () is a poetic-imaginative reinterpretation of historic events, while Joyce Mansour’s Les gisants satisfaits () extends her poetry into the long tale format. In the wake of the horrors of the Holocaust and death camps, with surrealism’s post-war celebration of ‘desire’, its championing of ‘liberty’ and its embrace of the work of Sade as guarantor of such liberty, the female body becomes the battleground upon which these issues were played out. The Gothic novel originates in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (), flourishes in Ann Radcliffe’s writings – the Mysteries of Udolpho (), The Italian () – and culminates in such surrealist favourites as Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (). A highly formulaic genre, the Gothic novel is often structured around the journey or quest, deploys a range of stock figures and Gothic motifs – the outcast, the persecuted woman, monks, underground tunnels, supernatural events – and is located in convents, castles, and mansions. Affecting a reversion to a premodern mentality, the Gothic embraces the irrational, the spectral, and the fantastic, in a pastiche prefigured in Walpole’s own faux Gothic castle at Strawberry Hill. Denouncing the ‘bad taste’ of his time, Breton detects the marvellous in ‘romantic ruins’, musing that ‘today I think of a castle, half of which is not necessarily in ruins’ – albeit ‘frightfully restored’. As Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron observes, in rejecting the prolix description of the realist novel, surrealism instead substitutes a focus on the metaphoric import of place, such that those spaces figure more as ‘anchoring points for a reality that belongs to the imaginary order’. The castle thus constitutes
Ibid., p. . Maurice Nadeau, ‘Sade’, in Le surréalisme en (Paris: Éditions Pierre à Feu, ), p. . Breton, Manifestoes, p. . Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron, Inventer le réel: Le surréalisme et le roman (–) (; Paris: Éditions Honoré Champion, ), p. .
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for surrealism the archetypal psychic space, allowing ‘free rein’ to fantasy and the imagination, where the ‘fantastic’ becomes the real – signalled in Breton’s collage poem ‘The Mysterious Corset’ by the line: ‘A CASTLE INSTEAD OF A HEAD’. But the castle is also the bastion, site of confinement, excess, and this aspect comes to dominate in the work of Sade, Mandiargues and others, as with Gracq’s Au château d’Argol (), where the woman (Heide) becomes the sacrificial object in the rivalry of two men. I therefore want to focus here on the reinterpretation of surrealist eroticism effected in the work of Colquhoun, Penrose, and Mansour from the standpoint of the female body and to consider their reworking of the novel format – more specifically the Gothic – to enable the articulation of hitherto unwritten forms of female interiority.
Ithell Colquhoun’s alchemical Goose Ithell Colquhoun trained in painting at the Slade during the late s and was briefly a member of the Surrealist Group in England before her abrupt expulsion by E.L.T. Mesens in . Colquhoun’s exclusion was the result of her deep immersion in occult, arcane, and alchemical phenomena, and of her refusal to relinquish membership of such groups – ironic insofar as Breton had announced the group’s ‘occultation’ as early as the Second Manifesto of , likening surrealism’s quest to that of the medieval alchemists, with occultism and magic becoming central preoccupations during the post-war era. Colquhoun went on to develop a parallel practice rooted in automatism and occultism and has been situated within a neoRomantic strand of English modernism as an artist rooted in a mystical conception of the land, influenced by Celtic, pagan, and Eastern thought. It was the occultist Aleister Crowley and his ‘sex-magick’ that first attracted Colquhoun to occultism as an adolescent, after reading – to her mother’s ‘fury’ – the scandalous reports of Crowley’s sex rites at Thelema in the Sunday Express. She attempted to join the Golden Dawn while at the Slade and during the fifties was a member of the Ordo Templi Orientis, led by Crowley until his death in . While her publisher, Peter Owen, claims that Crowley – the ‘wickedest man in the world’ – tried to seduce
André Breton, Earthlight (), trans. Bill Zavatsky and Zack Rogow (Los Angeles, : Sun and Moon Press, ), p. . See the catalogue The Dark Monarch: Magic and Modernity in British Art (Tate St. Ives, ). Ithell Colquhoun, Sword of Wisdom: MacGregor Mathers and the Golden Dawn (London: Neville Spearman, ), p. .
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her, Colquhoun herself writes that she encountered him only once, in a bookshop, dressed in tweeds and knee-breeches, camp and rather theatrical. Clearly strongly influenced by his ideas, Colquhoun produced a book draft on Crowley that was rejected by a publisher, while what she characterizes as his ‘indispensable’ Liber – a book of Kabbalistic tables – heads her booklist. Colquhoun was more sceptical of surrealism’s cult of Sade, writing of it in an undated essay, ‘The Divine Marquis and the Myth of Liberty’, as ‘indeed a myth, even a chimaera’, observing the obvious threat that his insistence upon his own unconstrained liberty posed particularly to women. In her essay ‘Water Stone of the Wise’, Colquhoun insists ‘we must have liberty’, rejecting phallocentrism, Sade, and Sacher-Masoch, and instead proposes the model of ‘the hermaphrodite whole, opposites bound together in mitigating embrace’ – a new myth rooted in alchemy and astrology. This has also been read as a response to Breton’s wartime Prolegomena to a Third Surrealist Manifesto () where he insists that gender relations ‘must be gone over from top to bottom’, calling for a return to the ‘accursed sciences’ of the Middle Ages and a ‘new myth’. Richard Shillitoe views Colquhoun as seeking ‘a profounder understanding of our relationship with the natural environment’ where such understanding was ‘often sexual’, while Owen recalls the ‘bleak landscapes’ he encountered in her studio, ‘the majority of which incorporated some sort of phallic symbol’. Whitney Chadwick observes how many of the women associated with surrealism turned away from the surrealist conception of ‘woman’, and instead invoked their own reality, ‘firmly rooted in their experience of their own bodies and in their acceptance of their own psychic reality’ – a pattern we find repeated with Colquhoun. Of her first book, The Crying of the Wind: Ireland (), the TLS observed ‘the authentic touch of the Gothic novelist’, as evidenced in Colquhoun’s atmospheric descriptions of psychically charged ‘darkling’
Ithell Colquhoun, The Living Stones: Cornwall (London: Peter Owen, ), pp. –. Eric Ratcliffe, Ithell Colquhoun (Oxford: Mandrake, ), pp. , . Ithell Colquhoun, ‘The Divine Marquis and the Myth of Liberty’, undated MS, Tate Archive, TGA////. Ithell Colquhoun, ‘The Water Stone of the Wise’, from New Road (), cited in Whitney Chadwick, Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement (London: Thames & Hudson, ), p. . Breton, Manifestoes, p. . Richard Shillitoe, Ithell Colquhoun: Magician Born of Nature (s.l.: Richard Shillitoe, ), p. ; Peter Owen, ‘Foreword’, in Ithell Colquhoun, Goose of Hermogenes (London: Peter Owen, ), n.p. Chadwick, Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement, p. .
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landscapes. The book opens with an acquaintance’s recollection of a visit to a greyhound breeder in ‘one of those dilapidated country houses’: ‘When he entered the vast central hall, where swarms of bats were flittering among the rafters and rain dripping in through numerous leaks, he found his hostess lying in a drunken stupor beside the embers of a turf fire.’ Recovering herself, she takes him out to meet the hounds, where ‘hunks of horseflesh and half-flayed bullocks’ heads hung from the surrounding trees’, and soon after, Colquhoun explicitly evokes Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho, a clear influence on her subsequent Goose of Hermogenes. As with other of her fictional writings, Colquhoun’s Goose is based upon the dream diaries that she kept throughout much of her life, directly incorporating her own night-life. Goose is also an alchemical text whose title references the many terms used to signify the philosopher’s stone, structured according to the phases of the ‘Great Work’ as set out in Basil Valentine’s Twelve Keys – Solution, Separation, Conjunction, etc. – which aims to reconcile opposites through a process of purification. In line with the teachings of hermetic groups such as the Golden Dawn, alchemy was approached by Colquhoun in an allegorical sense, as a path towards the perfection of self, rather than as any literal transformation of metals. Crowley had been a senior member of the Golden Dawn before his acrimonious departure in to develop his own system of sex-magick and his writings exercised an influence upon Colquhoun’s own approach to occultism. The androgyne played a key role in that system, and as Victoria Ferentinou has observed, mercury figures in Colquhoun’s Goose as referring to androgyny, since ‘it contains in itself both the male and female seeds of metals’. And as Xavière Gauthier observes, the myth of the Androgyne haunted Breton too – albeit understood by surrealism in a ‘truncated’ and therefore ‘distorted’ form – posed by him in terms of the reunification of the severed parts in a ‘coup de foudre’ of perfect heterosexual complementarity. M.E. Warlick too points to the centrality of sexuality to alchemical symbolism, in the conjunction of king and queen, in Philosophic Sulphur and Philosophic Mercury, sun and moon, etc., which ‘make love in the alchemical vessel’.
Cited by Eric Ratcliffe, ‘Introduction’, in Colquhoun, Goose of Hermogenes, n.p. Ithell Colquhoun, The Crying of the Wind: Ireland (London: Peter Owen, ), pp. –. Ibid., p. . Victoria Ferentinou, ‘Ithell Colquhoun, Surrealism and the Occult’, Papers of Surrealism, (Summer ), – (at p. ). Xavière Gauthier, Surréalisme et sexualité (Paris: Gallimard, ), pp. –. M.E. Warlick, Max Ernst and Alchemy: A Magician in Search of Myth (Austin: University of Texas Press, ), p. .
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In relation to the Gothic novel, Goose – significantly prefaced by Keats’s ‘Thou still unravished bride of quietness!’ – echoes Radcliffe’s model of a menaced female protagonist in search of some hidden knowledge. This quest entails confrontation with her scientist-uncle at his isolated mansion, with its ‘crepuscular’ lighting, where he is carrying out experiments that will overcome death, opposing male science against female occult wisdom. The narrator has to wait outside his laboratory until a shutter eventually opens, where, ‘illuminated from within by a glow faintly rose-coloured, appeared my uncle’s hands’, holding ‘a few leaves from some rare booklet’. When they finally meet the following morning, her uncle is described as ‘tall, with a white and skeletal head . . . and garbed in a purple silk dressing gown’, clearly suggestive of Bram Stoker’s Dracula () and again rooting Colquhoun’s narrative in the Gothic. This is confirmed when we’re told his figure ‘passed noiselessly behind a curtained door’ and that ‘so faint was the apparition and so shadowy the air that I could be certain of nothing, not even if it were my uncle, nor any being of human flesh and blood’. The uncle is in pursuit of her ‘jewels’, a standard genital motif that reflects the Freudianism of the period, and amongst which is a heart with an arrow that we’re told is ‘a phallic symbol’. The air of sexual menace assumes the form of a ‘disagreeable sensation’ that her uncle is attempting to ‘explore’ her psychically in a form of ‘psychic attack or invasion’, but which she resists, adding that he finds her ‘impenetrable’. We’re later told that ‘For more than a year now I have had on my throat the mark of a vampire’s tooth’ and that ‘a bat flew at my bedroom window’, while the theme of blood is further developed when Colquhoun writes: ‘I open my veins to the east . . . Blood pours out . . . ’till it reaches the sea . . .’. In an oneiric exchange, the uncle warns that ‘this place is not what at first sight it seems’: ‘Do not be deceived by the port, the strand, the square . . . The real village is not there. But look inland, up the valley; there you will find . . . the more persistent counterpart, like a reservoir defended by a well.’ Colquhoun’s protagonist responds with what is surely another dream account, describing a trip to a ‘poor and slummy quarter’, where in a shop selling masks she encounters ‘cards, with erotic messages and symbolic designs; also herbs, love-philtres, aphrodisiac books and prints’, adding that ‘there must be eerie brothels on nearly all of these premises’. Similarly
Colquhoun, Goose of Hermogenes, p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., pp. , . Ibid., p. . First published as ‘The Double Village’ in the London Bulletin (December ). Ibid., p. .
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The Surrealist Novel and the Gothic
eccentric shop displays of silk stockings with a clearly sexual undercurrent are described by Breton in his Communicating Vessels, while musing on the Gothic novel: ‘this ultra-romanesque, hypersophisticated literature’. There’s a strong sense of disjuncture in the narration of the novel, reflecting its origins in loosely connected dream scenarios, tied together by the structure of the narrative and the alchemical work. In this Colquhoun retains the element of the arbitrary that Breton insisted on retaining with automatic texts, rejecting the imposition of narrative coherence. More specifically, Breton affirms Walpole’s Otranto – based upon a dream that was then rapidly transcribed – as approaching ‘nothing less than the surrealist method’. Colquhoun’s loose assemblage of dreamlike fragments also suggests the influence of Max Ernst and the collage novel, particularly Une semaine de bonté (), with its many scenes of eroticized cruelty, and Warlick has demonstrated the broadly alchemical structure of that book, organized around male and female archetypes, the process of purification, and the ultimate fusing of ‘king’ and ‘queen’ in the figure of the androgyne. With Colquhoun the landscape is anthropomorphized, rendered Gothic, as in her The Living Stones: Cornwall (), where a stretch of landscape is posed as a vast female body, ‘a female sex in place of the well’, while similarly in Goose her narrator becomes convinced of her uncle’s madness and sexual menace becomes expressed through the night-time landscape itself. Described as ‘a monstrous country’ of ‘tortured oaks’, where ‘even the parklands were alive with beings earlier than man’, scarred by ‘some tempestuous force’, Colquhoun characterizes this as a ‘convulsive’ destruction, reinscribing Breton’s concept of ‘convulsive beauty’ within the Gothic sublime. And this convulsion culminates in the discovery of a ‘gigantic, phallic quill feather that stands in the landscape’, something she is both drawn to, yet also fears. We might see in this echoes of the symbolism of Walpole’s Otranto, which opens with Manfred’s son discovered crushed beneath a gigantic helmet, frustrating the anticipated bridal union and launching the raging patriarch’s own incestuous pursuit of the bride, resumed in the later arrival of an enormous phallic sword.
André Breton, Communicating Vessels (), trans. Mary Ann Caws and Geoffrey T. Harris (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, ), p. . Chénieux-Gendron, Inventer le réel, p. . André Breton, ‘Limits Not Frontiers of Surrealism’, in Herbert Read (ed.), Surrealism (London: Faber and Faber, ), p. . M.E. Warlick, ‘Max Ernst’s Alchemical Novel: Une Semaine de bonté’, Art Journal, / (), – (at pp. –). Colquhoun, Ireland, p. . Colquhoun, Goose of Hermogenes, p. . Ibid., p. .
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Culminating in a further psychic assault, the narrator is overcome by a ‘dizzying perfume’, recovering only to discover herself naked and the focus of a sexual magic ritual within a ‘phantasmagoria’ of shadowy figures. In a scene recalling a Kenneth Anger movie, she is lifted onto the armless torso of a Silenus and whipped to a frenzy by her uncle – ‘every lash sent a shudder of delight through me’. The book ends in a final scene of exultant liberation, where Colquhoun’s narrator is first reconciled with her dead father before heading towards the ‘mountainous east’ as it is touched by the ‘first auroral glow’. Alchemical, Gothic, and erotic, Colquhoun’s book of collaged dreams expands the conceptual foundation of the surrealist novel while eschewing many of the gendered formulas found in male surrealist writing.
Valentine Penrose and the ‘Pale Vampire’ Known as a poet and a writer, Valentine Penrose, though an intimate of the surrealists, moved on the fringes of the movement, marrying Roland Penrose in , then travelling with him to Egypt, Spain, and India. The couple met the Spanish ‘guru’ Vicomte Galarza in Egypt in , where Penrose developed her ‘passion for alchemy and the esoteric’, going on to study oriental philosophy at the Sorbonne. They later joined Ernst in the south of France, while he was working on Une semaine de bonté, which included blood as one of the base elements in place of air. Ernst’s novel is awash with scenes of sadistic, eroticized violence set within a hermetic framework, and the process of purifying those base elements is characterized as ‘stripping the lion to its bones and blood’. Warlick observes how Breton describes Flamel’s image of the ‘Massacre of the Innocents’ in his Second Manifesto of Surrealism – an image that symbolizes that process – where the blood of the massacred children is poured into a vessel. Blood is a recurring motif in Ernst’s collages, whether implied in scenes of vampirism, torture, and flagellation, or more directly, as when a young couple stand over a pool of blood that Warlick suggests is representative of the alchemical stage of ‘rubification’ or ‘conjunction’. Like Mansour, Penrose is known principally as a poet and produced few prose texts, including the short epistolary novel Martha’s Opera (), which
Ibid., p. . Ibid., pp. –. Ibid., pp. –. Roland Penrose, Scrap Book (London: Thames & Hudson, ), pp. –. Warlick, ‘Max Ernst’s Alchemical Novel’, p. . Ibid., p. . Breton, Manifestoes, p. . Warlick, ‘Max Ernst’s Alchemical Novel’, p. .
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opens at a chateau amid a gathering storm and traces a fatal lesbian relationship replete with Gothic elements: a mysterious elixir, secret doors, a graveyard. Penrose’s Erzsébet Báthory: La comtesse sanglante () both reconstructs and reimagines the Gothic tale of Erzsébet Báthory (–), cousin of the kings of Poland and Transylvania, and unbridled ruler of Csejthe castle during her husband’s absence on continual military campaigns. Exercising absolute power within a feudal society pervaded by superstition, Báthory is claimed to have staged the torture and murder of hundreds of young girls, both for sexual pleasure as well as in the belief that bathing in their blood would preserve her youth. Like Colquhoun and reflecting her own intense interest in the occult, Penrose draws on the reading of horoscopes in determining both Báthory’s tendency to lesbianism and her sadism. Based partly on the account of a Jesuit priest, László Turóczi, Penrose’s book again deploys various stock Gothic elements: rediscovered texts, the Catholic Church, and the wall of portraits in the castle at Forchtenstein, from which ‘the Báthorys emerge like emanations of madness’. Karen Humphreys situates Penrose’s text in relation to a number of others treating transgressive themes around that time, including Georges Bataille’s Procès de Gilles de Rais (), the republication of Roger Caillois’s L’homme et le sacré, and Foucault’s essay ‘A Preface to Transgression’. Humphreys deploys Bataille’s conceptualization of transgression in L’érotisme () as ‘fundamental to the experience of eroticism’, where Penrose embraces transgressive tropes including insanity, lesbianism, transvestism, and witchcraft. For Humphreys, Penrose’s novel supports Bataille’s analysis of eroticism as dependent upon ‘the interplay of prohibitions and transgressions’, pointing to eroticism ‘as the origin of power relations, as the well-spring of transgressive behaviours’, and for Bataille, as ‘essential to life up to the point of death’. What also strikes us with Báthory, though, is her essential isolation, and Bataille also insists on our primal status as discontinuous beings, where a ‘gulf’ separates one from the other, but where, through erotic activity, we can experience that gulf together and re-establish a lost ‘primal continuity linking us with everything that is’. In this, eroticism as transgression figures as a breach
Valentine Penrose, Erzsébet Báthory: La comtesse sanglante (Paris: Mercure de France, ), p. . Ibid., p. . Karen Humphreys, ‘The Poetics of Transgression in Valentine Penrose’s La Comtesse sanglante’, French Review, / (March ), – (at p. ). Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Georges Bataille, Eroticism (), trans. Mary Dalwood (London and New York: Marion Boyars, ), pp. , .
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of prohibitions and boundaries, as a breakdown of ‘the regulated social order . . . basic to our discontinuous mode of existence’. But not, Bataille insists, to the point of death, observing that ‘De Sade’s aberration exceeds that limit’ – as, we could add, does that of Báthory, whose pursuit of continuity assumes the form of an obsession with eternal youth and a ‘desire for immortality’. At the core of this ‘exclusively female universe’ was the castle of Csejthe itself, with its towers, vast cellars, and ‘walls that muffled all sounds’, situating the novel firmly within the Gothic tradition of Otranto – but also of Sade’s Silling. Penrose adds that, in order to ensure abundance and succession, the stonemasons would wall up a young woman, alive, in the cellars of a castle, such that for centuries, ‘the castle rested upon such a frail skeleton’. As Chénieux-Gendron observes with Breton, such a striking element figures in a ‘catalysing’ role and as ‘a blind point that haunts a given space’, where with Báthory it anticipates her ultimate fate, walled into her own castle. While Breton, in his fantasied chateau, includes five walled-in rooms, containing ‘the finest specimens of mannequins and wax figures’, where ‘the radical unknown of the condemned room materializes the silence of the future’. Of Báthory, Penrose observes that ‘perhaps she found there the security that sorcery and crime always require’, recalling the insistence of Sade’s debauched libertines in Days of Sodom, upon ‘a remote and isolated retreat’. Sade’s reputation grew with the publication of biographies by Maurice Heine () and Gilbert Lely (–) and of his Œuvres complètes in , becoming for post-war surrealism a towering figure. More critically, Simone de Beauvoir links the declining power of the aristocracy to a compensatory desire to reassert sovereign power in the bedroom, citing Sade’s dictum that ‘every man wants to be a tyrant when he fornicates’, adding that ‘the intoxication of tyranny leads directly to cruelty’. In many respects Báthory embodies Sade’s philosophy as summarized by Maurice Blanchot, as ‘one of self-interest, of absolute egoism’, in which ‘Each of us must do exactly as he pleases, each of us is
Ibid., p. . Ibid., pp. , . Penrose, Erzsébet Báthory, pp. , . Ibid., p. . Chénieux-Gendron, Inventer le réel, p. . Ibid., p. ; Breton, Earthlight, pp. –. Penrose, Erzsébet Báthory, p. ; Marquis de Sade, The Days of Sodom and Other Writings, trans. Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver (London: Arrow, ), p. . Simone de Beauvoir, The Marquis de Sade (London: John Calder, ), p. .
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bound by one law alone, that of his own pleasure.’ And one, we could add, loosely shared by Crowley in his credo of ‘do what thou wilt’. The consequence, Blanchot concludes, is a morality of ‘absolute solitude’ – one embodied in Báthory herself and quite literally enacted in her eventual immurement. Penrose portrays Báthory as a precursor to Stoker’s Dracula, postulating that ‘the ghosts and vampires, they’re still there, and in a corner of the cellars, the earthenware pot that contained the blood ready to be poured on the shoulders of the Countess’. And she adds that ‘the bloody Countess’, too – the ‘pale vampire’ – ‘still shrieks at night’ in her walledin room. But like Colquhoun, Penrose connects blood – particularly that associated with virginity – with the primary elements of the alchemists, ‘the mysterious fluid’ where the alchemists had sought the secret of gold, situating Báthory’s Vienna residence in Blutgasse, site of the massacre of the Knights Templar in . Nearby were curious shops like those found in Colquhoun and Breton, ‘where plants, magic stones, and desiccated animals were sold’. We also discover echoes of Bellmer in the sinister ‘Iron Virgin’ – ‘absolutely naked, made up like a pretty woman’ – that Penrose speculates Báthory had constructed, whose mouth opened into ‘an idiotic and cruel smile’, before impaling its victim. But there’s also a certain provocation here in Penrose’s writing strategy that recalls Lautréamont, as when fantasizing on a desire to snatch a boy ‘brutally from his bed . . . sink your long nails into his tender breast’ and then ‘drink his blood’. The intensely sensorial quality of Penrose’s poetic style aligns with what Chénieux-Gendron identifies in Breton as a prioritizing of the senses, where even ideas and the imagination are engaged via the sensory: ‘We will never have done with sensation.’ Penrose’s text is intensely corporeal in its depiction of suffering – piercing of the body with pins, torture and deprivation, freezing and dismembering, the smell of bodily corruption – and the sensory imagination similarly inflamed through a plethora of exotic minerals such as amethyst and salmordine, plants such as mandragora and jasmine, and exotic creatures like the auroch and zibeline. There
Maurice Blanchot, ‘Sade’, in Marquis de Sade, Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom and Other Writings (New York: Grove Press, ), p. . Penrose, Erzsébet Báthory, p. . Ibid., pp. , . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Comte de Lautréamont, Maldoror (Cambridge, : Exact Change, ), p. . Chénieux-Gendron, Inventer le réel, pp. –; Breton, Mad Love (), trans. Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, ), p. .
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are again affinities with the work of Mandiargues, who, while accepting poetry as the higher form, nonetheless rejects surrealism’s critique of the novel, describing his own L’anglais décrit dans le château fermé () – with its sealed dungeon echoing Sade’s Silling and its frantic, zoophilic sexual activity – as a ‘surrealist novel’. Penrose devotes an entire chapter to Gilles de Rais, who, until his arrest in , similarly tortured and murdered hundreds of children at Machecoul Castle, both for sexual gratification and in occult rites. Penrose curiously concludes him redeemed by the manner of his death – ‘polished, elegant, and lyrical’ – while judging Báthory’s ‘lechery’ as ‘more unfathomable and savage’. In fact his repentance to obtain a church burial contrasts starkly with Sade, dying unrepentant and requesting only that his ashes be scattered where acorns would grow out of his remains. This document was transposed into a performance by Jean Benoît, Exécution du testament du Marquis de Sade, staged in Mansour’s Paris apartment in December on the eve of the EROS exhibition. This also included Meret Oppenheim’s Cannibal Feast installation, staged on a woman’s naked body, recalling the cannibalism that figures in Sade’s Days of Sodom, while anticipating that in Penrose’s gory account of Báthory’s victims being ‘made to eat the grilled flesh of their dead companions’. This all attests the continued importance of Sade and I therefore want to turn finally to the writing of Mansour, to consider her relationship with surrealist eroticism and the Gothic novel.
Joyce Mansour and the Honour of Serving With a background spanning England and colonial Egypt, Mansour became attached to surrealism following an enthusiastic response in the group’s journal Médium to Cris (), her first collection of poems, and as she herself observed, prose was for her more a ‘means of expression’, while ‘it’s always poetry that I’ve aimed for’. While often qualified as
André Pieyre de Mandiargues, L’anglais décrit dans le château fermé (; Paris: Gallimard, ), p. . Penrose, Erzsébet Báthory, pp. , . Marquis de Sade, ‘Last Will and Testament’, in André Breton, Anthology of Black Humor (), trans. Mark Polizzotti (San Francisco: City Lights, ), pp. –. See Alyce Mahon, Surrealism and the Politics of Eros, – (London: Thames & Hudson, ), pp. –. Penrose, Erzsébet Báthory, p. . Mansour in Stéphanie Caron, ‘Réinventer le lyrisme: Joyce Mansour poète-femme du surréalisme’, L’information littéraire, (–), – (at p. ).
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The Surrealist Novel and the Gothic
incendiary, obscene, scandalous, Mansour’s writing, as Stéphanie Caron insists, is also intensely introspective, ‘visceral’, probing the interior self, in ‘the search for an identity’. Mansour’s Jules César () – dedicated to Breton and with engravings by Bellmer – recounts the life of a pair of feral twins raised by their black nurse Jules César, in Sodom, where ‘sperm flowed in the streets’: ‘it was a family like all families’. Mansour has insisted that the things in the book are what she had felt and known, and as with Colquhoun, ‘most are dreams’. Les gisants satisfaits followed in , illustrated by Max Walter Svanberg, whose line drawings unfold across the entire text, constituting a vast, morcellated female body across which Mansour’s characters rampage, signalling what Marie-Claire Barnet characterizes as ‘the polymorphous expression of feminine desire’. The book swarms with a frenzied sexuality and violated bodies, both developing Mansour’s own interior concerns, while also reflecting surrealism’s model of eroticism as inflected through Sade. That model is first defined in Robert Desnos’s De l’érotisme, originally written in for the collector Jacques Doucet and published only in , where he characterizes eroticism as a ‘spiritual mirror’ in which the author never registers anything other than ‘an exact image of himself’. For Desnos, the work of Sade figures as the first philosophical manifestation of the ‘modern spirit’, in which sexuality is first accorded a central role in a full and intelligent life, and we can see in Mansour the reinterpretation of that spirit for a new post-war generation. ‘Marie, ou l’honneur de servir’, the first of the book’s three texts, is set in a sea-view hotel for North Africans, in the heat of the south, just as Desnos situates eroticism in tropical oceans, far from the sterile ‘frozen ponds’ of conventional literature. Updating the Gothic chateau in ‘Il y’aura une fois’, Breton imagines acquiring a property near Paris – ‘rather than a hotel or inn . . . more a coach house’, and we should read Mansour’s hotel as such a contemporary equivalent. Like Jules César, the book opens with a biblical parody – ‘In the beginning, when God dwelt in a hole . . .’ – and deploys the family unit to provocatively expand surrealism’s attack on
Stéphanie Caron, Réinventer le lyrisme: Le surréalisme de Joyce Mansour (Geneva: Droz, ), pp. , . Joyce Mansour, Histoires nocives. Jules César. Iles flottantes (Paris: Gallimard, ), pp. , . Mansour in Caron, Réinventer le lyrisme, p. . Marie-Claire Barnet, La femme cent sexes ou les genres communicants (Bern: Peter Lang, ), p. . Robert Desnos, ‘De l’érotisme’, in Desnos, Nouvelles Hébrides et autres textes, – (Paris: Gallimard, ), p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., pp. –. Breton, Earthlight, pp. –.
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religion, the family, and morality. With echoes of Lautréamont’s Maldoror, attracted by ‘the intense odour he gave off’, Marie greets the arrival on camelback of her nemesis – ‘the murderer’ – recognizing at once ‘the beast hidden within this man’, as condors soar overhead. Echoing the rescue of Heide in Gracq’s Argol, Marie almost drowns at sea – but rather than saving her, the murderer’s hands ‘wandered over her body like crabs’ and they agree a pact whereby Marie will live as his servant, concluding that one day ‘I’ll kill you’, and at which ‘Her sex lit up the shifting sands.’ Thereafter the two cohabit together: ‘For entire days the murderer would chase Marie between the zebra-striped walls of the room. She, gagged, quivering, her sex swollen like an over-ripe pear, howled with joy and pain.’ Barnet points to a ‘Sadean and masochistic voice’ in Mansour, that, ‘through the violence of its “self-contradictions”, disturbs and displaces certainties’, disrupting binaries in its expression of diverse and violent desires – as with gender binaries, rendering women ‘phallic’ or giving men breasts. Gauthier observes how Mansour’s protagonist breaks with the passive surrealist models of femininity (femme-enfant, nature, veneration, etc.), while elsewhere Mansour identifies with the predatory surrealist ‘praying mantis’. Citing Dalí’s critique of surrealism’s narrowminded ‘horror’ of the perversions, Gauthier observes their proliferation in Mansour: onanism, zoophilia, necrophilia, fetishism – again an expansion of the genre. Mansour’s book can be qualified as ‘Gothic’ in a number of important respects, including the theme of the persecuted woman, the updated chateau, stock motifs such as insanity, religion, and incarceration, or scenes such as Jeremy and Anne in a graveyard gathering barrowloads of bones from open coffins. There are again affinities with the work of Mandiargues, whose ‘The Nude Among the Coffins’, where a woman is raped by an undertaker amongst a row of coffins, is dedicated to Mansour. There are also echoes both of Báthory and Maldoror, as with the murderer’s abduction and murder of children in jute sacks, where Marie – both ‘victim and accomplice’ – ‘administered kicks or needle-pricks when the sack stirred and she sang to drown their screams’, while the murderer mutilated and planted them in the ground.
Mansour, Les gisants satisfaits (Paris: Pauvert, ), p. . Ibid., pp. –. Ibid., pp. –. Ibid., p. . Barnet, La femme cent sexes, pp. , . Gauthier, Surréalisme et sexualité, p. . Ibid., p. . André Pieyre de Mandiargues, Blaze of Embers (), trans. April Fitzlyon (London: Calder & Boyars, ). Mansour, Les gisants satisfaits, pp. , .
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The Surrealist Novel and the Gothic
Alongside transgression, the theme of sacrifice pervades the novel, most obviously with Marie as sacrificial object, with the sacrificed children, or as with the murderer in the slaughterhouse, amid ‘The bloodless corpses of decapitated cattle . . . the walls sticky with the blood of sheep’. For Bataille, sacrifice is to be understood, as with religious eroticism, as similarly attempting to establish continuity and reflects the fundamental human ‘desire for immortality’. Following Marie’s sacrificial death at the hands of the murderer, the tale’s concern with the theme of death and religion emerges yet more clearly, in a pastiche of Christian values and rites. Jeremy, Marie’s grandfather, confronts a crowd dragging through snow a corpse that they intend to eat, where ‘The cottony whiteness covered their traces and the gods gathered like flies around a sacrifice.’ In a nearby church he devours the host and commits blasphemy in a parody of the Christian sacrament of the Eucharist, approvingly watched by the ‘effigies’ of the book’s title. Again, this could be read in terms of Mansour’s own intense involvement in death within her immediate family, while Madeleine Cottenet-Hage has argued that Mansour’s characters are ‘inhabited by a nostalgia for a lost continuity, to which only death can restore them’. There are also echoes of Lewis’s Monk, where, just as the cathedral collapses around him amid cries of blasphemy in Lorenzo’s reverie, so too does the church collapse behind Jeremy, ‘in a rustling of tears’. The second tale, ‘Les spasmes du dimanche’, returns to the clifftop graveyard, recalling Gracq’s Argol, where the ritual sacrifice of Heide is prefigured in her name inscribed on a gravestone. The plot again revolves around transgression and sacrifice, focused now on the character Job, a solitary wanderer in the Gothic tradition, as when, naked and sexually aroused, he kills a fabulous creature (Venus) on a mountainside, then burns and eats the flesh, declaring that: ‘This sacrifice fulfils my dearest desire, this fresh blood ensures me a minor existence without rupture.’ Again this reaffirms the conception of sacrifice found in Bataille, where ‘the continuity of existence is independent of death and is even proved by death’. The book’s final tale, ‘Le cancer’, relates the voyeuristic obsession of its mute young protagonist with the ‘monstrous boss’ on the back of Clara, who is dying of cancer amid the ‘ardent perfume of rotting and death’. On her
Ibid., p. . Bataille, Eroticism, pp. , . Mansour, Les gisants satisfaits, p. . Madeleine Cottenet-Hage, ‘The Body Subversive: Corporeal Imagery in Carrington, Prassinos and Mansour’, in Mary Ann Caws, Rudolf Kuenzli, and Gwen Raaberg (eds.), Surrealism and Women (Cambridge, : MIT Press, ), p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., pp. –. Bataille, Eroticism, p. . Mansour, Les gisants satisfaits, pp. –.
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death he attacks the ‘parasite’ with a knife, tearing apart her ventouse and creating a ‘rain of blood’, after which he recovers his speech. This might be associated with the death of Mansour’s mother and husband to cancer, after which she discovered her own voice through her writing; or again as when Anne, thinking of her sister Marie, ‘devoured by worms’, insists that: ‘I want to live . . . I prefer love to honour.’ And it was cancer that would finally claim Mansour herself in .
Conclusion: Gothic liminal space If the novel form, as Chénieux-Gendron argues, enabled surrealist writers to define the edges of their powers of invention, it could be claimed that the three texts considered here similarly occupy that liminal creative space. The Gothic novel provided both formulaic constraints as well as the vehicle for the imagination demanded by Breton, through which surrealist eroticism could be questioned and reconfigured. Colquhoun’s alchemicalerotic, Penrose’s probing of anguish and suffering, and Mansour’s frenzied perversion all take surrealist eroticism in the direction of death and the concern with continuity, particularly in terms of the body and intense sensorial experience. And as culturally dense, metaphoric spaces, these imaginary locations – often rooted in dreams – served as a means through which these women could give expression to both a ‘polymorphous’ feminine desire and a post-war ‘modern spirit’ within surrealism.
Ibid., p. .
Ibid., p. .
Chénieux-Gendron, Inventer le réel, p. .
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Surrealism’s Anti-Bildungsroman Natalya Lusty
Introduction The resurgence of interest in Kathy Acker’s work since the publication of Chris Kraus’s intellectual biography in has precipitated a new generation of readers and a renewed critical appreciation of her work. Kraus positions Acker as one of the most innovative writers of her generation, all the while dispelling the intense mythologizing that has accompanied critical and biographical accounts of Acker since her untimely death in Mexico in . Those mythologizing accounts and the divisive critical reception of her work have perhaps hindered a thorough appreciation of Acker’s experimentation with form and language alongside the modernist avant-garde legacy that she both drew on and extended. Like many of the avant-garde writers she turned to for inspiration, Acker’s writing was attuned to the political and social conditions of art, often working through competing political and aesthetic allegiances: punk, feminism, postmodern theory, conceptual and performance art in addition to the subcultural practices of s/m, tattooing, and bodybuilding. All inform the prose and stylistic form of her writing in idiosyncratic ways. For many years, Acker has been pigeon-holed as a quintessentially postmodern author (incorporating strategies of pastiche, intertextuality, deconstructive resignification, and so on) in ways that sometimes overlook the indebtedness of her work to the experimental aesthetics of the historical avant-garde. Equally lacking has been a queer appreciation of how form in her novels is closely tied to the affective registers of the body in ways that foreground the chaotic excesses of bodies and texts alike. Elizabeth Freeman’s concept of ‘temporal drag’ is useful for reframing Acker’s relationship to the historical avant-garde precisely because Freeman offers a lucid account of how the past ignites new revolutionary moments in the present in ways that allow us to move beyond a straightforward
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framing of Acker as a postmodern author. Similarly, while surrealism’s influence on French theory and post-structuralism has been welldocumented, in particular the dissident surrealism of Georges Bataille and its significance for the Tel Quel generation of writers and intellectuals, what is less pronounced is the influence of surrealism on feminist experimental writing, with some notable exceptions. Acker became familiar with Bataille’s work via David Antin who was formative in introducing her to the European avant-garde in addition to conceptual art and ‘improvisation as a mode of literary composition and writing as a performance form’, which, as Peter Wollen argues, continued to influence Acker ‘through every twist and turn of her career’. It is through the idea of improvisation as literary method that I want to argue Acker rethinks language and form, and it is in the plagiarism trilogy (Great Expectations, ; Blood and Guts in High School, ; Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream, ) that Acker most decisively disrupts the Bildung form. As such, Georgina Colby identifies Acker as a significant figure in the American post-war avant-garde, locating in her work a critical negation that chimes with a post-war ethos that attends to art as much as politics. The question remains, however, does Acker’s work deliberately disrupt the very idea of lineage or indeed an overtly masculinized anxiety of influence, given its enactment of a deliberate plagiarism fused with homage? As a writer, Acker set herself the task of both continuing the European and American avant-garde traditions whilst inserting the feminine and feminized voice and experience into its very core. Turning to Acker’s Great Expectations and Bataille’s Story of the Eye (), I want to examine how internal life in these novels is shaped via an affective intensity fused with a deep philosophical cast. In combining intimate personal disclosure with literary sampling and pastiche (and indeed intentional plagiarism), Acker simultaneously mines and disrupts
Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, : Duke University Press, ). See chap. . Critical studies on surrealism’s influence on contemporary feminist experimental literary and visual aesthetics include Susan Rubin Suleiman, Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (Cambridge, : Harvard University Press, ); Natalya Lusty, Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (Aldershot: Ashgate, ; London and New York: Routledge, ); Anna Watz, Angela Carter and Surrealism: ‘A Feminist Libertarian Aesthetic’ (London and New York: Routledge, ); Catriona McAra, ‘A Nonagenarian Virago: Quoting Carrington in Contemporary Practice’, in Jonathan P. Eburne and Catriona McAra (eds.), Leonora Carrington and the International AvantGarde (Manchester University Press, ), pp. –. Peter Wollen, ‘Kathy Acker’, in Peter Wollen, Amy Scholder, Carla Harryman, and Avital Ronell (eds.), Lust for Life: On the Writings of Kathy Acker (London and New York: Verso, ), p. . See Georgina Colby, Kathy Acker: Writing the Impossible (Edinburgh University Press, ).
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Surrealism’s Anti-Bildungsroman
the traditional form of the Bildungsroman. Similarly, Story of the Eye, through its various textual versions, speaks to the cleavage between autobiography and fiction or between fantasy and analytic case history. True to the tradition of the Bildungsroman, these works explore the self, albeit within the impossible limits of language and knowability, and against the transcendent claims and normative telos of the traditional Bildungsroman. By bringing Acker directly into conversation with Bataille, I want to explore how Acker’s use of form continues the legacy of the dissident surrealist novel but also pushes it further through the use of non-sequential forms of narrative time and logic. Acker’s parasitical style combined with a method of improvisation works to emphasize the materiality of language while also revealing the obsolescence of the self as a biographical or literary category. In this way, I suggest, Acker offers us a queer feminist literature that mines the historical avant-garde and the literary canon not merely as an act of demystification but to find new forms of narrative possibility for the experience of feminized trauma and psychic dislocation.
Bildung and the Anti-Bildungsroman In her essay on why the traditional Bildungsroman no longer works for modern readers or authors, Nancy Armstrong, drawing on Franco Moretti’s analysis of the Bildungsroman as a once dominant but now obsolete form, contends that Dickens’s novel Great Expectations () lays bare the tension between newer forms of economic success (in an industrialized imperial economy such as Great Britain) and older forms of social responsibility. As Armstrong notes, ‘the Bildungsroman replaced the hero of the earlier mode of adventure story with a youth who had to qualify as a citizen-subject before he could assume a commensurate position within the reigning social hierarchy’, reflecting the flux of social and economic opportunities that defined nineteenth-century industrialized Europe. The Bildungsroman then is premised on what Armstrong defines as ‘a field of possibilities’ which contrasts to what she calls ‘the rise of the flat protagonist’, which she examines through a reading of Tom McCarthy’s Remainder (). For the modern reader and author, immersed in a new technological revolution, the question now posed is how does the modern novel ‘rethink the struggle between inner and outer
Nancy Armstrong, ‘Why the Bildungsroman No Longer Works’, Textual Practice, / (), – (at p. ).
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worlds’ and ‘does the end of the traditional protagonist bring an end to the individual tout court or simply mean the end of the rounded and layered character as we know it?’ While Armstrong, akin to Fredric Jameson and Moretti, understands the novel form itself as ‘a work in progress’, she defines the emergence of the flat character for whom our fascination rests on ‘their distinctive disfiguration of the traditional individual’ so that ‘rounded normalcy seems less interesting’. While Armstrong’s analysis hinges on a selection of contemporary authors heavily influenced by an information age that renders indistinguishable the private and public self, including McCarthy, J.M Coetzee, Kazuo Ishiguro, and W.G Sebald, I am interested in an earlier provenance of the ‘damaged’ protagonist as it is loosely developed via the dissident surrealist novel, reaching back to Bataille and extending through to Pierre Guyotat and later Acker’s plagiarism trilogy, beginning with Great Expectations. The damaged protagonists in the novels of these authors sustain what I see as not merely a modification of the Bildung structure but the testing of its very limits by virtue of the impossibility of representing traumatic experience in traditional narrative form. Acker takes this further by interrogating the sequential models associated with the Bildungsroman while her use of a deliberate plagiarism thwarts the novel as a form of private intellectual property linked to the rise of the printing press under capitalism. Bataille’s semi-autobiographical Story of the Eye in striking ways writes against the wandering surrealist’s heroic urban quest, exemplified by André Breton’s Nadja () and Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant (). While Breton and Aragon certainly transformed the novel form under the guise of a surrealist urban poetics, Bataille’s contribution, beginning with Story of the Eye, uses violence and transgression to chart the erotic quest as a series of ‘obscene spectacles’. Finding in the language of pornography a way in which to decondition the humanist subject, Bataille aligns the repetition of the sexual act in pornography with the repetition of childhood traumatic event. Similarly, Acker’s approach to the Bildungsroman in Great Expectations is both an obsession and an irritation insofar as Acker repeatedly opens the wound of childhood trauma and abandonment only to refuse the seamless acculturation of a coherent life story: all we have in the novel is the repetition compulsion of trauma emanating from the Oedipal structure of the family and the gendered forms of violence that it produces.
Ibid., pp. –. Ibid., p. . Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye (), trans. Joachim Neugroschal (London: Penguin, ), p. .
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Surrealism’s Anti-Bildungsroman
While the novel ‘copies’ the Bildung form, the copying process itself reveals the failure of the novel form to articulate what Margaret Henderson calls ‘an adequate imago for the punk girl’. Rather, the novel’s use of nonsequential narrative and fragmented prose counters transparency and meaning, with the resulting disorientation serving to break through the stolid forms of identity and desire: ‘Any action, no matter how off-thewall – this explains punk – breaks through deadness’ asserts the narrator in Great Expectations. As Avital Ronell argues, Acker may have ‘scrambled’ the codes of literary form and language, but she could never escape them entirely. Her work we might say is always bound up in the twin pull of complicity and resistance: ‘[Acker] wrote at the borders of a metaphysical tradition, ever negotiating at the limits, without ever thinking for a second that she could bail. There was no outside or mystified Elsewhere to our literary inheritance.’ Ronell concludes that Acker was loyal to the end in the way she revered literature, but she also wanted to stand that tradition on its head ‘by reinscribing, regendering, profaning, desecrating, shattering the source and adjusting reference in a constant, loyal, determined way’. Surrealist transgression, in other words, involves a distinctive dialectic with literary traditions. If Dickens’s novel works through ‘a field of possibilities’ for the self, endemic to the exploitations and opportunities of an intensifying market economy, the self in Acker’s novel is a distorted copy (of Acker herself as well as the form of the Bildungsroman) grappling with a language in which to represent the shattered promises of the bourgeois subject and the Oedipal and capitalist structures that inform it.
The Scene of Trauma in Story of the Eye The principal focus of Bataille’s novel is adolescent sexuality but rather than present us with a coming-of-age tale, we are locked into a world of fantasy and obsession, what Barthes referred to as in essence a world of ‘impure make-believe’. Bataille himself called Story of the Eye ‘juvenile’ in a preface he later penned for a reprinting of the novel. While Part I, ‘The Tale’, immerses us into the pornographic imagination of an adolescent
Margaret Henderson, Kathy Acker: Punk Writer (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, ), p. . Kathy Acker, Great Expectations (; London: Penguin Classics, ), p. . Avital Ronell, ‘Kathy Goes to Hell: On the Irresolvable Stupidity of Acker’s Death’, in Wollen et al. (eds.), Lust for Life, pp. –. Roland Barthes, ‘Metaphor of the Eye’ (), trans. J.A. Underwood, in Bataille, Story of the Eye, p. .
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young man, Part II, ‘Coincidences’, composed at some point after ‘The Tale’, traces the analytic origin of the fantasy in Part I, bringing us into the world of Bataille’s analysis with Adrian Borel and the adolescent memories presumably disclosed in the analytic session. If, as Armstrong contends, the Bildungsroman effectively replaced the adventure story, Bataille returns to this early form in ‘The Tale’, coming at times close to the confessional nature of Elizabethan rogue literature, with its emphasis on exaggerated vice and wrongdoing, and a genre supremely antithetical to the heroic quest. But as Sontag reveals, it also borrows from the pornographic literary imagination in giving us ‘an all-engrossing sexual quest that annihilates every consideration of persons extraneous to their roles in the sexual dramaturgy’, although what distinguishes Bataille’s pornographic imagination is the link between eroticism and death which Sontag describes as ‘an erotics of agony’. The novel’s opening passages establish the erotic as a form of intense intimacy that propels the story beyond a shallow titillation: ‘I grew up very much alone, and as far back as I recall I was frightened of anything sexual.’ This confession is followed by an account of the narrator and Simone masturbating together after Simone sits naked in a saucer of milk. The narrator informs us that this episode instigated ‘a love life . . . so intimate and so intense’, establishing from the outset the story’s unusual mix of naïve trepidation and calculated escapade. The tale thus unfolds as a series of erotic quests and spectacles that are variously described as hallucination and nightmare as they build towards the climactic scene of sexual debauchery, enucleation, and death. Central, of course, to the erotic machinations of the narrative are a series of ovoid objects, principally the eponymous eye of the story which morphs into other spherical objects (namely eggs and testicles) so that the ubiquitous surrealist strategy of displacement or dépaysement that came to underscore the status of the surrealist object (if not surrealist aesthetics more broadly) is rendered linguistically throughout the novel. In the chapter titled ‘Simone’ the narrator draws our attention to the linguistic transgressions that mirror both the use of word association in the analytic session and the strategies of condensation and displacement that came to define surrealist aesthetic practice: Upon my asking [Simone] what the word urinate reminded her of, she replied: terminate, the eyes, with a razor, something red, the sun. And egg?
Susan Sontag, ‘The Pornographic Imagination’ (), in Bataille, Story of the Eye, p. . Bataille, Story of the Eye, p. . First published as Lord Auch, Histoire de l’Oeil (). Ibid., p. .
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Surrealism’s Anti-Bildungsroman
A calf’s eye, because . . . the white of the egg was the white of the eye, and the yolk the eyeball . . . She played gaily with words, speaking about broken eggs, and then broken eyes, and her arguments became more and more unreasonable.
Here linguistic dépaysement accentuates the allure of evacuation and death (urinate, terminate) as key to the erotic obsessions in play. But as Judith Surkis reminds us, what is striking about this chain of signifiers (eyes, eggs, testicles) is the way ‘analogous spheres cross the limits of their “normal” positions: the testicle is intruded, the eye is extruded. Boundaries between the inside and the outside are visibly disrupted.’ If, for Bataille, eroticism opens the body up to forms of vulnerability and violence, eroticism is unimaginable without the haunting shadow of death, making anguish and desire almost indistinguishable. The boundaries between inside and outside also structure the two parts of the novel, marking the porous boundaries between imagination (or fantasy) and reality. If Part I of the novel serves as the imaginative core of fantasy (a world of make-believe according to Barthes) that propels the narration of the erotic quest, Part II (tellingly titled ‘Coincidences’) offers an autobiographical or analytical frame that renders real life experience as the origin of the tale’s fantasy: ‘While composing this partly imaginative tale, I was struck by several coincidences, and since they appeared indirectly to bring out the meaning of what I have written, I would like to describe them.’ What follows is the narration of a series of traumatic childhood experiences (perhaps uncovered under analysis with Borel) that precipitate the fantasies of the tale. The recollection of childhood trauma centres around memories of the narrator’s blind, syphilitic father and his depressed, suicidal mother, against the backdrop of World War I and imminent invasion. These narrated events recall the narrator’s description of erotic transgression in the tale as an ‘hallucination’ that mirrors the boundlessness of ‘the total nightmare of human history’. In other words, Bataille’s exploration of eroticism, violence, and bodily excess reveals the irrational, dark side of humanity, privileging limit experience as a form of negativity that does not necessarily negate the human subject and its community but interrogates the epistemological certainty that reduces experience to forms of philosophical or aesthetic transcendence. If traumatic experience refuses
Ibid., p. (italics in the original). Judith Surkis, ‘No Fun and Games until Someone Loses an Eye: Transgression and Masculinity in Bataille and Foucault’, Diacritics, / (), – (at p. ). Bataille, Story of the Eye, p. . Ibid., p. .
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assimilation into the structuring narrative of maturity that is indicative of the Bildungsroman, the two parts of Story of the Eye unfold the glissement (sliding) of imagination and experience and a refusal of dialectical synthesis.
Great Expectations: ‘A narrative is an emotional moving’ Rather than simply identifying Acker’s work as straightforwardly ‘postmodern’, a category that risks flattening the specificity of her mode of experimentation, I want to draw attention to its peculiar hybrid of the historical avant-garde’s experimental forms (in particular Bataille’s use of trauma as a thematic and structuring device) and the appropriation and montage strategies of the feminist conceptual artists of the New York downtown scene. Great Expectations, like Acker’s other work from this period, borrows from conceptual art ‘the phenomenological effects of repetition, disjunction, patterning, chance, and grids’ to disrupt the conventional codes of literary representation and authenticity. According to Kraus, the novel’s influences include the Beat poets William S. Burroughs and Alexander Trocchi, as well as the French avant-garde authors Georges Bataille and Pierre Guyotat, all of whom explored, in semi-autobiographical narrative form, the psychic dimensions of interior life as exemplary of a traumatized human condition. Acker’s interest in and indeed fascination with Bataille’s work intensified in the period leading up to writing the novel. A special issue on Bataille appeared in Semiotext(e) in just before Acker and Sylvere Lotringer became close, between and . Great Expectations was penned following this period and in stealing its title and theme from Dickens, the peculiar irony of Acker’s novel rests on its story of an ‘I’ for whom ‘great expectations’ are continuously thwarted. Instead Acker uses the spiralling effects of grief coupled with the repetition of childhood trauma to render the temporal dislocations of thought and feeling: ‘Time versus timelessness’ is a repeated refrain throughout the middle section of her novel, titled ‘The Beginnings of Romance’, whereby distorted details of Acker’s family history are spliced together with events in real time and snippets of a tableau vivant taken from Raymond Roussel’s novel Locus Soulus (). The promiscuous style of Acker’s language (which includes plagiarized fragments of other authors, including Raymond Roussel, Bataille, Charles Dickens, Pierre Guyotat, Ben Jonson, Propertius, among others) serves to liberate
Chris Kraus, After Kathy Acker: A Biography (London: Penguin, ), p. . Acker, Great Expectations, p. .
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Surrealism’s Anti-Bildungsroman
(or make redundant) the subject’s temporal continuity in the here and now. Instead it charts the self moving through various worlds, the world of family drama, the world of real time as Acker moves from New York to Seattle, San Francisco, and then back again to New York, where she takes possession of a comfortable inheritance, and the world of reading and reflection. As such the tripartite form of the novel refuses a stable protagonist or indeed central point of view, offering instead a ‘tapestry’ of different narrative voices and moods that swirl around maternal suicide and scenarios of trauma and victimization that emerge in its wake. As the first of Acker’s books to use plagiarism in a deliberate and formal way, the text’s promiscuous style is at once subservient and irreverent: ‘I am only an obsession’, says the narrator, alluding to both the novel’s formal plagiarism and the splintered narratorial voice that records its own journey through plagiarized textual excerpts as a process in and of itself. This flagrant refusal to define the protagonist at the centre of the novel extends the idea of the split subject in Story of the Eye, a subject that, as we have seen, is split between adolescent fantasy/trauma and mature analytic case history, or between pornography and memoir. Working within the formal experimentations of the historical avant-garde, Acker’s novel makes palpable the historical and social conditions of art, tracing the idea of Bildung as it mutates across various historical conditions: from Dickens and the golden age of industrial capitalism to the trauma of World War I and the loss of meaning haunting Bataille’s novel, to her own moment of late capitalism and the flattening of character. Acker, nevertheless, also works across art-historical traditions as much as histories of the novel, alluding to the way in which different compositional strategies allow us to see different things. As the narrator in Great Expectations declares: Cezanne allowed the question of there being simultaneous viewpoints, and thereby destroyed forever in art the possibility of a static representation or portrait. The cubists went further. They found the means of making the forms of all objects similar. If everything was rendered in the same terms, it became possible to paint the interactions between them.
If Dickens in Acker’s eyes represented ‘the father’ of the modern novel, Cezanne we might say represents ‘the father’ of modern painting, alluding to Acker’s broader concern with paternal inheritance and disinheritance, artistic and familial. On one level, the novel shifts between the idea of representation bequeathed to us by Cézanne through its multiple shifting
Ibid., pp. –.
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viewpoints and the appropriation strategies of conceptual art, whereby the copy bequeaths an opportunity to understand intertextual interactions in decidedly feminist ways. If the mother’s suicide is the catalytic event that propels the narrative journey across various worlds, leading to the return to home and the possession of a modest inheritance, it is the reinvention of the orphaned daughter as a great avant-garde writer that drives the novel’s experiments with language and form. If there is a continuous thread in Great Expectations it is the grief that launches the narrative: ‘The day after my mother committed suicide I started to experience a frame. Within this frame time was totally circular because I was being returned to my childhood traumas totally terrifying because now these traumas are totally real: there is no buffer of memory.’ The family drama which unfolds the repetition of victimization and revictimization simultaneously centres and decentres the novel in the way that it communicates the structures and processes of thought and emotion, rather than consequential action. Indeed, the hollowness of grief that permeates the novel insists on emptying out the logic of causation in either narrative or biographical terms. Instead, we are given the logic of the frame which allows Acker to lay out the competing possibilities of thought and emotion as they play out across the multiple worlds of the narrative. For Robert Gluck this means the reader is ‘pitched between the true version of the appropriated work, its theft, the facts of Acker’s life, and the truth of her psychic life (the “case history” of extremity that writers since de Quincey have been reporting)’. Gluck’s astute observation here allow us to see the interpretive frames that render the traditional Bildungsroman inadequate for the interpretive frames that collide up against each other. The ‘case history’, as we have seen, is fundamentally reworked in Story of the Eye to give us the sliding effects of imagination and experience. In Acker’s Great Expectations, however, the trauma of psychic life is rendered as a hyperfeminized emotional masochism that tilts towards nihilism. But like Bataille, Acker offers us an intellectual violence, albeit one shaped through a feminized and feminist frame. According to Kraus, Acker gives us ‘an investigation into the structure of consciousness – the sort of investigation that defined conceptual art – with extreme pornography, diatribe, parody, gossip, and trash, which had become the staple diet of New York’s new guard downtown art crowd’. Acker was
Ibid., pp. –. Robert Gluck, ‘The Greatness of Kathy Acker’, in Wollen et al. (eds.), Lust for Life, p. . Kraus, After Kathy Acker, p. .
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Surrealism’s Anti-Bildungsroman
particularly taken with the New York writer and conceptual artist, Bernadette Mayer, whose multimedia immersive project, Memory, was first exhibited in a Greene St Gallery in New York City in . Memory combined over , colour snapshot photographs and an audio recording of Mayer’s journal entries documenting daily life for a whole month, capturing both the bustling world of the streets of New York City and the domestic detail of Mayer’s life as a mother. By concentrating on the details of the everyday over an extended period of time, Mayer brings a sensorial, intimate dimension to conceptual art’s more abstract exploration of extended duration even as it atomizes the autobiographical self that records those details. What we are left to experience in Memory is a voracious desire to document dailiness as a political act, revealing how the accretion of detail challenges the conceptual boundaries of authorship as singular and stable, offering instead a feminist temporality that displaces a central spatial viewpoint. What would have fascinated Acker is the way in which Mayer captures everyday real time through dizzying run-on sentences that record the actions and conversations of those around her, snippets of dreams, experiments with automatic writing, as well as the thought process of the project itself. In Great Expectations, Acker borrows many of these experimental approaches but takes them further. Acker’s narrative does not merely rupture the coherent boundaries of authorship and genre, but in creating a non-sequential, stop-and-start narrative, it moves in several directions at once. After delivering snapshots of her former life with her now-deceased mother, the narrator abruptly breaks into self-conscious reflection on the writing process: There is just moving and there are different ways of moving. Or: there is moving all over at the same time and there is moving linearly. If everything is moving-all-over-the-place-no-time, anything is everything. If this is so, how can I differentiate? How can there be stories? Consciousness just is: no time. But any emotion presupposes differentiation. Differentiation presumes time, at least BEFORE and NOW. A narrative is an emotional moving.
Capturing the frenzied giddiness of narrative formation alive to the thought process, Acker’s uses of repetition, abrupt syntax, and forms of punctuation such as hyphens and colons convey the disjointed process of living and feeling as well as the experience of trying to write about living
See ibid., p. .
Acker, Great Expectations, p. .
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and feeling. But for Kraus, it is Acker’s use of the colon that works to dramatically summon the reader: ‘the colon functions as a slap, a jolt, an epinephrine shot that yanks the sentence – and by extension, us – from grief’s downward drift into the present time’. While the catalyst for Great Expectations is maternal loss, the visceral materiality of Acker’s prose prevents a solipsistic detour into the emotional world of the newly orphaned protagonist. Instead, Acker uses grief to provide a self-interrogation that spins out from an indictment of the gendered deformities inimical to the family romance. The early influence of feminist conceptual art on Acker’s writing means that she is more interested in conceptual experimentation and process rather than the end-product of ‘good writing’ or a predominately male obsession with authorial originality. This of course has been one of the bones of contention for some of her readers, that her writing is just an extension of her reading, or in the words of David Foster Wallace, ‘artistically pretty crummy and actually no fun to read at all’. But what Wallace misses is the seriousness of ignominy as central to the emotional depth of Acker’s prose let alone the innovations of form and language. Acker’s Great Expectations, as we might imagine, reminds us of the loss of character and self-respect so central to Dickens’s tale of orphanhood even as it exposes the gendered and classed fictions that bolster the Bildungsroman’s pretensions to moral authority. While recent critical work on Dickens’s Great Expectations argues that his treatment of the Bildungsroman makes it a less stable form than Moretti or others have implied, Acker’s acerbic parody of Dickens similarly reveals an ambivalence at the heart of her plagiarism. Acker memorably drew attention to her love-hate relationship to Dickens’s novel: ‘I wanted to destroy this book I absolutely loved’ not merely to shock but to break through ‘the reader’s habits and perceptual blinders’. If parody works by knowing the object well enough to be able to reveal both a complicity of attachment and a resistance to that attachment, Acker’s aesthetics of piracy creates an
Kraus, After Kathy Acker, p. . David Foster Wallace, ‘Review of Portrait of an Eye: Three Novels by Kathy Acker’, Harvard Review, (Spring ), – (at p. ). For example, Matthew Taft sees ‘Dickens’s disfigurations of the [Bildungsroman] form as the novel’s response to an aspirational middle-class pursuing not only economic value but the fulfilment of their desire to embrace and care for those they exploit.’ See ‘The Work of Love: Great Expectations and the English Bildungsroman’, Textual Practice, / (), – (at p. ). Larry McCaffery, ‘An Interview with Kathy Acker’, Mississippi Review, /– (), – (at p. ).
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Surrealism’s Anti-Bildungsroman
outlaw space that defies borders (of genre), rules (of syntax), and claims to intellectual property, while revealing the impossibility of freedom, liberation, or dialectical synthesis. While Wallace contends, dismissively, that Acker’s achievement amounts to applying a Marxist-Feminist gloss to the traditional novel, this is rather limiting in its analysis if not altogether misguided. Acker’s work is deeply informed by the political, intellectual, and aesthetic ethos of the various milieus or movements in which she found herself; conceptual art, feminism, punk, and deconstruction are all present in her work in ways that expose the limitations of existing narrative forms and draw attention to what is prescient for the modern-day avant-garde author. In projecting details of her life onto familiar forms and genres, Acker acknowledges the crisis of form and language readily attributed to the avant-garde endeavour, even as she affords the intensity of experience and emotion a new formal expression, what Acker referred to many years later as ‘the language of the body’. I want to end by drawing some tentative connections between Acker’s anti-Bildungsroman and what Jack Halberstam has described as the queer art of failure, noting how failure here is tied to both political and aesthetic ends. In striking ways Acker’s novel and indeed her entire oeuvre represents what Halberstam identifies as the connection between punk and the politics of failure, which he outlines through a reading of Irvine Welsh’s classic punk novel, Trainspotting (). For Halberstam, Welsh’s novel refuses ‘a normative model of self-development’ as a potent ‘critique of the liberal concept of choice’, but ultimately its rage and politics of failure stem from being excluded from ‘a legacy of patriarchal and racial privilege’. In contrast to the unqueer masculinized tenor of the punk novel Trainspotting, Acker’s punk aesthetic in Great Expectations takes us to the hyperfeminized visceral heart of failure in ways that not only queer failure itself as heroic resistance, but punk as a quintessentially masculinized reality. Signifying the chasm between feeling and the world already given that lies at the heart of a politics of failure, the narrator informs us, ‘I don’t think I’m crazy. There’s just no reality in my head and my emotions fly
See Natalya Lusty, ‘Women Modernists and the Legacies of Risk: An Introduction’, Australian Feminist Studies, / (), – (at p. ). Kathy Acker, ‘Against Ordinary Language: The Language of the Body’, in Acker, Bodies of Work (London and New York: Serpent’s Tail, ), pp. –. Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), pp. –. Ibid., p. .
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all over the place.’ As Margaret Henderson astutely argues, ‘Just as punk music emerged as a critique of the overblown excesses of rock music’, Acker’s ‘feminist use of Artaud, Bataille, and Sade produces a militant and disturbing critique of gender in late capitalism, specifically the gender regime post sexual liberation’.
Conclusion It is perhaps no coincidence that in both Story of the Eye and Great Expectations an absent father and a suicidal mother constitute the familial trauma that drives much of the narrative logic, albeit as a surface thread. For Bataille, severing the bonds of paternity, through the use of a pseudonym, enabled a surrender of all claims of propriety and transcendence. Acker, however, takes this one step further: ‘She gave up the mystical foundations of authorship, the capital claims, looting and vandalizing legally protected stores of knowledge . . . Most authors conceal such evidence of a hijacked corpus . . . [Acker] stole everything in sight and pissed on propriety.’ If the repressive forces of religion and the Oedipal family play a central role in Story of the Eye, capitalism and the Oedipal family romance constitute the repressive force at the heart of Great Expectations, against which forms of art hold out only a glimmer of redemption. Through a language of excess, both writers carved out a new intellectual space for the novel to represent the non-rational shapes of desire and the unredeemable exigencies of experience. In so doing they helped to shape surrealism’s distinctive contribution to the dissident novel form in ways that were indebted to the Bildungsroman even as they exploded what Halberstam (referencing Eve Sedgwick) calls ‘the stifling reproductive logics of oedipal temporality’. Writing pre and post Holocaust respectively, Bataille and Acker ‘pushed the inner world to its limit’ as a way to rethink the novel as a social and political form. But Acker is not so much indebted to Bataille (or any other male author for that matter) but is interested in the process of recuperation as a conceptual tool that lays bare the blind spots (gendered or otherwise) of male literary insemination and the Bildungsroman as a form associated with the
Acker, Great Expectations, p. . Margaret Henderson, ‘Kathy Acker’s Punk Feminism: A Feminism of Cruelty and Excess in More Liberated and Liberal Times’, Contemporary Women’s Writing, / (), – (at p. ). Ronell, ‘Kathy Goes to Hell’, p. . Halberstam, Queer Art of Failure, p. . Armstrong, ‘Why the Bildungsroman No Longer Works’, p. .
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development of an inner self in the service of self-improvement. If Michel Foucault claimed Bataille to be one of the most important writers of his century, William Burroughs lauded Acker’s work for ‘its power to mirror the reader’s soul’, reminding us of the visceral discomfort that Acker’s writing provokes.
Cited in Kraus, After Kathy Acker, p. .
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The Mother Figure in the Surrealist Novel Anna Watz
In a pivotal scene in Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel’s L’âge d’or (), the mother of the female protagonist unexpectedly receives a punch in the face, provoked only by having spilt a few drops of liquor on the hand of the man who assaults her. Having witnessed the attack, the visibly elated and aroused daughter escapes with the assailant into the garden, a venture that ends in the iconic scene in which she performs what looks like fellatio on the toe of a marble statue. The mother figure here serves as an exemplar of bourgeois propriety and repressive sexual morality, values against which Dalí, Buñuel, and the rest of the surrealists railed. In their revolt against the state, the Church, and the family, the mother figure became a key target, both as custodian of bourgeois-patriarchal values and as symbol of Catholic doctrine. Dalí’s drawing Sacred Heart, which features the outline of a haloed Jesus with the Catholic symbol of the flaming heart and cross at the centre, epitomizes such blasphemy predicated on the maternal; written across the drawing in swirling handwriting are the words ‘Sometimes I Spit with Pleasure on My Mother’s Portrait’, implicating the revered Virgin Mother in the act of sacrilege. The blasphemy of Dalí’s drawing echoes the motif of Max Ernst’s almost contemporary The Blessed Virgin Chastises the Infant Jesus before Three Witnesses (), in which we see Mary spanking a naked Jesus, whose halo has fallen to the ground. The defilement of the image of the Virgin Mother in both cases functions as a rallying cry against the repressive doctrine of sexual purity propagated by the Catholic Church. Violent attacks on the mother figure as symbol of bourgeois morality and sexual repression also feature frequently in surrealist literature. In Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye (), for example, the character Marcelle bites her mother’s face off when the parents intrude on a scene of post-orgiastic delirium. The mother figure in Joyce Mansour’s novella Jules César () suffers an even worse fate: she has her entire head bitten off. A hatred of the maternal function pervades Unica Zu¨rn’s abject
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The Mother Figure in the Surrealist Novel
account of childbirth in the novella The Trumpets of Jericho (). ‘My breasts are hard and heavy, filled with milk’, the narrator states: My breasts hurt, but I would rather die than let this hated bastard drink from them . . . Should you, o Reader, recall the dreadful day or uncanny night of your own birth, then you will feel comforted when you think of the overwhelming tenderness with which your mother pressed you, freezing inhabitant of Earth, to her warm heart. Know that I would rather die than perform the slightest gesture of kindness toward my humpbacked son.
These scenes clearly seek inspiration from the fictional world of the Marquis de Sade, where the maternal body is the primary site of violence. As the British novelist Angela Carter aptly notes, the mother in Sade’s writing functions as ‘a shrine of reproductive sexuality’ and ‘a concrete denial of the idea of sexual pleasure since her sexuality has been placed at the service of reproductive function alone’; hence she must be attacked, tortured, and destroyed. Sigmund Freud’s groundbreaking theories about dreams and the unconscious were foundational to surrealism, and his views regarding the role of the mother in the sexual development of the child also inflected surrealist representations of the maternal. Surrealism’s frequent allusions to the Oedipal dynamic are imported directly from a Freudian lexicon, where the mother often figures as the embodiment of castration. As Hal Foster has convincingly argued, surrealist art and literature abound with what ‘appear as symbolic acts of sadistic vengeance exacted on the figure of woman as representative of castration’. The mother, as the coordinate representing castration in the Oedipal scenario, becomes the ultimate object of such violence and disavowal. The eroticized figure of the femme-enfant, by contrast, is often configured as a daughter engaged in an act of rebellion against the repressive morality of the mother. Like the transgressive Eugénie of Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom, the typical surrealist daughter will do everything in her power not to become like her mother. From the s, when the surrealist movement was initiated, through the interwar era and beyond, the social realities of motherhood in the Western world were often perceived as incommensurable with artistic or intellectual life. As Adrienne Rich has aptly demonstrated, the patriarchally
Unica Zu¨rn, The Trumpets of Jericho (), trans. Christina Svendsen (Cambridge, : Wakefield Press, ), pp. , . Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History (; London: Virago, ), pp. –. Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, : MIT Press, ), p. .
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circumscribed ‘institution’ of motherhood has served to ‘[alienate] women from our bodies by incarcerating us in them . . . for most of what we know as the “mainstream” of recorded history, motherhood as institution has ghettoized and degraded female potentialities’. It is perhaps no wonder then, as Whitney Chadwick observes, that many ‘[surrealist] women who were striving to liberate themselves from conventional lives and become artists had little inclination toward domestic life with children’. As we have seen, in the examples from Zu¨rn’s and Mansour’s texts above, some women surrealists cast their artistic rejection of maternal life as a ‘revolt’, in the words of Susan Rubin Suleiman, ‘against the conventional female roles prescribed by their middle-class backgrounds, at a time when a woman who wished to pursue a full-time career, not to mention an artistic career, outside the bounds of wifehood and motherhood, was still considered a dangerous anomaly’. Yet not all mother figures in surrealist art and literature are portrayed in such unequivocally negative terms. This chapter will trace an alternative history of surrealist representations of the mother, one in which this figure is rendered more ambiguous and at times even invested with revolutionary potential. In this tradition, maternity becomes a symbol or metaphor used to challenge and rewrite patriarchal, nationalist, anthropocentric, or psychoanalytic grand narratives. For example, in some art and writing of Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Ithell Colquhoun, and Leonor Fini, which draw overtly on the work of Carl Jung and Erich Neumann, the revisionist theology of Robert Graves, as well as esoteric traditions and ancient myths, the mother appears as a personification of divinity, spirituality, and female creativity. Carrington’s novel The Hearing Trumpet (written in the s, but not published until ), stands out among these works for its critique of patriarchy represented by the figure of the mother goddess, as well as for casting, as Suleiman points out, ‘a mother (albeit a rather untypical one) as a heroine, not only positive but self-consciously playful’. Following a different line of engagement, some works by Fini and Dorothea
Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (), in Adrienne Rich, Culture, Politics, and the Art of Poetry: Essential Essays, ed. Sandra M. Gilbert (New York: W.W. Norton, ), p. . Whitney Chadwick, Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement (; London: Thames & Hudson, ), p. . Susan Rubin Suleiman, ‘Playing and Motherhood; or, How to Get the Most out of the AvantGarde’, in Donna Bassin, Margaret Honey, and Maryle Mahrer Kaplan (eds.), Representations of Motherhood (New Haven, : Yale University Press, ), p. . See also Chadwick, Women Artists, pp. –. Suleiman, ‘Playing and Motherhood’, p. .
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The Mother Figure in the Surrealist Novel
Tanning, produced in the s and onwards, elaborate representations of maternity in critical dialogue with Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. As such they resonate to some extent with the (largely contemporaneous) work of French feminist theorists such as Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Hélène Cixous, in which the concept of maternity becomes configured as an alternative to the phallocentric symbolic order. This chapter focuses on this latter category of surrealist works, and offers an analysis of representations of mothers in Fini’s Mourmour: Conte pour enfants velus (; Mourmour: A Tale for Furry Children) and Tanning’s Chasm: A Weekend () (earlier versions of which were published in and , under the title ‘Abyss’/Abyss). As my reading will demonstrate, both these texts embody a critique of the psychoanalytic notion of feminine passivity and inferiority, and propose striking revisions of Freud’s Oedipal narrative in which the mother is neither sacrosanct nor abject and threatening castration.
Maternal Eroticism: Leonor Fini’s Mourmour Leonor Fini (–) was born in Buenos Aires, but moved with her mother to Trieste when she was only a year and a half. As a teenager she read a substantial number of Freud’s works; when she relocated to Paris in the mid-s and met the surrealists, she was already well acquainted with the psychoanalytic theories they espoused. Fini disliked labels and never wanted to claim surrealism as an identity, but her work resonates deeply with the aesthetic and epistemological concerns of the movement, and she remained close to figures such as Max Ernst, Leonora Carrington, Paul Éluard, Salvador Dalí, Man Ray, Dorothea Tanning, and Georges Bataille. Although Fini is mainly known for her painting and costume design, in the s she published three novels in quick succession: Mourmour, Rogomelec (), and L’oneiropompe (). As she herself stated: ‘If everyone knows that I love to paint, fewer are aware that I also love to write.’ These texts have unfortunately remained marginalized
Although working contemporaneously with the emergence of Anglo-American feminist art predicated on maternal experiences, epitomized by Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (–), Fini’s and Tanning’s writing cannot be subsumed under this rubric (indeed, neither of them choose to become mothers). Their symbolic approach to the notion of motherhood rather aligns them with s feminist-theoretical revisions of psychoanalysis, as I will argue below. See Xavière Gauthier, Leonor Fini (; Paris: Le musée de poche, ), p. , and Peter Webb, Sphinx: The Life and Art of Leonor Fini (New York: Vendome Press, ), pp. , , –, . Quoted in Webb, Sphinx, p. .
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both in criticism of Fini’s oeuvre and in historiographies of surrealist literature. Only one of her novels, Rogomelec, has been translated into English – and only very recently (). Mourmour tells the story of the eponymous Mourmour, son of a cat mother and an unknown human father. The plot certainly has a surrealist flavour; the descriptions of human–animal hybrids and of perversely erotic adventures echo written and visual works by other surrealists, such as Leonora Carrington, Dorothea Tanning, Remedios Varo, and Max Ernst. To a large extent, the text hinges on its most shocking plot element: its depictions of maternal incest. Here, Fini clearly embraces surrealism’s penchant for shock and scandal, engaging, perhaps, in an intertextual dialogue with other surrealist representations of incest, such as Ernst’s Rêve d’une jeune fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel (). The first-person narrative begins as Mourmour and his mother, Belinda, decide to leave their home village in order to ‘join [their] own people’ on a secret island. This narrative escape has autobiographical allusions; as Jonathan P. Eburne observes, ‘The novel’s principal conceit involves mythologising the journey Fini and her household – her human companions [Stanislao] Lepri and [Constantin] Jelenski, as well as her seventeen cats – took each summer to Corsica, where they took up in a ruined Franciscan monastery Fini first visited in ’, and made her permanent summer home in . Fini’s real-life cats, furthermore, feature as characters in the novel; both Belinda and Mourmour, for example, were names of her own pets. As such the novel may be read, as Eburne aptly notes, as ‘a tongue-in-cheek parody of the daily lives and habits of the artist’s own menagerie of cats’. As my analysis will demonstrate, Fini’s novel also engages in a deep critique of Freud’s theory of the Oedipal complex, and the subsequent bifurcation into masculine and feminine subject positions. Against Freud’s conceptualization of the maternal body as castrated and passive, Mourmour depicts an eroticized mother figure that pushes against conventional ideas around femininity and female sexuality, the implications of which are simultaneously scandalous and deconstructive.
One significant exception is Jonathan P. Eburne’s recent essay ‘Leonor Fini’s Abhuman Family’, in Anna Watz (ed.), Surrealist Women’s Writing: A Critical Exception (Manchester University Press, ). See Leonor Fini, Rogomelec (), trans. William Kulik and Serena Shanken Skwersky (Cambridge, : Wakefield Press, ). Leonor Fini, Mourmour: Conte pour enfants velus (Paris: Éditions de la différence, ), p. . All translations from the French original are my own. Eburne, ‘Leonor Fini’s Abhuman Family’, pp. , ; Webb, Shpinx, p. . Eburne, ‘Leonor Fini’s Abhuman Family’, p. .
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The Mother Figure in the Surrealist Novel
Although his precise age is never revealed, the narrative makes it clear that Mourmour is a young child/cat, still in need of his mother’s nurture and protection. Although he is driven by curiosity to discover the sensory pleasures of eroticism and adventure, the narrative repeatedly underscores Mourmour’s trepidation and immaturity when faced with new and unknown situations. The island refuge, populated by cats, sphinxes, fairies, witches, and other mythological creatures, offers Mourmour a rite of passage; through its depiction of sensory – and often sexual – experiences, the narrative posits Mourmour as an Oedipal child going through the process of sexualization that is constitutive of subjectivity. Almost immediately after mother and son have arrived on the island, Mourmour experiences a sexual awakening; in a dreamlike scene, he is first seduced by a young unnamed cat girl, and then an adult cat, the sultana Rinfignina (the name of another of Fini’s real-life cats). Rather than obscuring the age difference between Mourmour and the other cats, the episode foregrounds it; the scene begins as Mourmour childishly plays by himself while surreptitiously watching a group of adult cats from a distance and wishing that he was old enough to ‘possess . . . and be possessed’ by them. The ensuing erotic encounter reads as a form of marvellous wish fulfilment, in which Mourmour and the other cats are fantastically transported from the outdoor landscape into the sumptuous sacristy of an abandoned monastery. Mourmour’s experiences in the monastery serve as a kind of foreplay to the actual climax of his sexual initiation, which takes place in the next chapter: an erotic encounter with his own mother, Belinda. Through Mourmour’s pre-Oedipal narrative voice, the scene of maternal incest lacks any implication of taboo. However, even though the scandalous overtones of this act are downplayed in the narrative they do not go unnoticed by the reader. Mourmour lyrically relates how a luxuriously bejewelled and perfumed Belinda lavishes him with delicious food and sweets and proceeds to make love to him, surrounded by a large group of other cats and a choir of demon cats, who have been ‘invited for the occasion’. Again, the narrative underscores Mourmour’s young age; he is initially worried about his small shape next to his ‘enormous’ mother, but he soon forgets ‘about his small size and start[s] nibbling at her mouth’, putting his ‘tongue in her beautiful, arched nostrils’ in response to which Belinda laughs and exclaims: ‘You really are a child.’ ‘This phrase’, the narrative voice adds, ‘I heard on different occasions afterwards.’
Fini, Mourmour, p. .
Ibid., p. .
Ibid., p. .
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Significantly, Belinda performs the role of lover without ever abandoning her mothering function. The ecstatic Mourmour narrates: I was drunk with joy, I swam on my mother and in my mother, for she was like the air and the water to me – meowing was not enough to express how I felt –. The marvellous thing soon happened: . . . she made my sex very large, almost as large as herself and she slid it into her body with a roar of triumph. The room around us began to spin . . . I felt myself lifted up by my mother as if on a gigantic wave. Then I howled louder than all the others and found myself enveloped by Belinda’s hair. She said softly, ‘little chilly kitten, do you want to sleep now.’
The depiction of the eroticized Belinda, moreover, disturbs the received cultural idea of the mother as a chaste being, whose only sexual function is reproductive. Belinda’s sexual pleasure has nothing to do with reproduction; yet, her eroticism does not conflict with her maternal feelings, as she lulls her son to sleep in her arms after intercourse. Fini’s portrayal of the eroticized mother breaks the dividing line between motherhood and eroticism, categories that Western culture has construed as dichotomous and incommensurate. Eburne reads this scene as an analogue to Fini’s own polyamorous lifestyle and her claim that she had voluntarily ‘exiled [herself] from the [human] species’. ‘In the face of compulsory heterosexuality and the presumption of reproductive sexuality’, Eburne writes, Fini chose ‘incest’, an index for the polyamorous, queer, and multi-species intimacies she cultivated . . . What Fini described – and, I maintain, allegorised – as non-human incest voiced the artist’s abiding commitment to sustaining a practice of artistic and amorous life, which she cultivated in the name of the ‘abhuman’ intimacy and inter-species commingling her midcentury painting depicted in figural form.
However, despite the fact that Fini’s literary and artistic depictions of eroticism seemingly veer away from the human, and thus also from the strictures imposed by culture (cats do, after all, sometimes engage in incestuous sexual activity), they still have a deeply unsettling effect on the norms that sustain Western cultural narratives. Indeed, Fini’s deep knowledge of Freud reverberates through the pages of Mourmour; his theory of the process of sexualization is written into and contested, I propose, in every facet of the novel’s description of maternal incest.
Ibid. Eburne, ‘Leonor Fini’s Abhuman Family’, p. . Ibid. According to Webb, Fini preferred the ideas of C.G. Jung to those of Freud; yet, I maintain that in Mourmour, the most significant intertext is nevertheless the work of Freud. See Webb, Sphinx, p. .
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The Mother Figure in the Surrealist Novel
In Freud’s account, the Oedipal phase for the boy is initiated when he realizes that the mother does not have a penis and hence must have been ‘castrated’. The father demands that the boy give up his mother as object of desire; if he fails to accept the law of the father, he too will suffer the fate of the castrated, inferior, mother. If he follows his father’s edict, however, he will instead gain access to the masculine, superior position in society and eventually possess a woman of his own. The mother’s body is from now on circumscribed by the strictest taboo. In Mourmour, by contrast, the sensual and sexual nature of the mother is confirmed rather than repudiated. Belinda’s sex is not portrayed as a wound, void, or lack – as in the Freudian narrative – but as an all-encompassing sensuality that offers Mourmour sexual jouissance as well as maternal containment. The deliberate linguistic play on the words mère (mother) and mer (sea) in the original French works to reinforce the erotic charge of Fini’s mother figure; she is the life-sustaining air and water in which Mourmour ‘swims’ as well as the ‘wave’ that brings him to sexual climax. The ecstasy resulting from Mourmour’s sexual encounter with his mother obviously alludes to a pre-Oedipal space, before any separation from the mother’s body – a state which can only be fantasized by the subject in retrospect. As Eburne notes, the portrayal of Mourmour fits Freud’s description of the polymorphously perverse, pre-Oedipal child, whose indiscriminate impulses for pleasure have not yet been shaped by social norms. Indeed, Mourmour’s subsequent quest for pleasure not only involves sexual encounters with female as well as male creatures, but a kind of synaesthetic jouissance as he luxuriates in luscious scents, sumptuous textures, and awe-inspiring sights. Significantly, however, in the novel this polymorphous perversity becomes the model not merely for the preOedipal child but for adult sexuality too. Fini’s rewriting of the Oedipal complex resolves in a masculine sexuality and subjectivity that does not construe the feminine as a castrative threat. Mourmour’s journey of initiation ends, in the final chapter of the novel, in another sexual encounter with his mother, which reads as a parody of Freud’s analysis of the primal scene. In his famous essay on the ‘Wolfman’, Freud describes how the child upon witnessing parental intercourse misconstrues it as an act of paternal aggression on the body of the mother. This scene – simultaneously disturbing and titillating – crucially posits the child on the outside, as an excluded, passive spectator. Fini’s recasting of the Freudian scenario instead integrates the child as a participant in the
Ibid., p. .
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parents’ sexual union. Mourmour’s erotic escapades on the island have resulted in him falling in love with an adult cat-demon, Mourko, who performs the double function of parent and lover. Mourko is also Belinda’s lover, which underscores his association with the father figure. The novel’s final episode depicts Belinda and Mourko engaged in intercourse in front of an initially distressed Mourmour, who although ‘afraid of [Belinda and Mourko] as of a cataclysm’, decides to join in their orgasmic climax: Belinda’s cries once again tore through the air; she crawled, making herself flat and fragrant, and we formed a rolling sphere without contours that glowed like embers . . . Now I could no longer identify as a child cat, and was overcome by a strange languor . . . Belinda, half asleep, pulled gently on my ear, and Mourko put my paw to his mouth to show me that he was smiling.
Mourmour’s journey of sexualization now seems complete; as he states, he has ceased to be a child. The mother–child dyad has been broken up, as Freud maintains it must be, but instead of a placing a taboo on the mother’s body and threatening castration, the father figure, or the third term, here affirms the continued corporal bond with the mother. There are resonances between Fini’s depiction of the sexualized mother and the feminist critiques of Freud and Lacan found in the work of contemporary theorists, such as Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous. Although these post-structuralist feminists focus primarily on the mother–daughter relationship, rather than the mother–son dyad, their critiques of Freud’s theories of femininity and of male castration anxiety intersect in resonant ways with Fini’s depiction of maternal sexuality in Mourmour. A key project in Irigaray’s and Cixous’s work is enabling a language of representation that does not depend on the phallus as the transcendental signifier. However, as they make clear, such a ‘feminine’ symbolic cannot be established as long as the Oedipal drama keeps playing out across the body of the sacrificed mother. In ‘The Bodily Encounter with the Mother’, Irigaray unpacks the dynamic by which the mother must be rejected for the child to assume a speaking position in the linguistically structured symbolic order. This matricide, Irigaray states, is the fundament of Western patriarchal culture. The maternal body is thus positioned outside the phallocentric symbolic order, and can only be understood as an uncontainable excess which must be ‘denied, disavowed,
Fini, Mourmour, pp. –.
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The Mother Figure in the Surrealist Novel
sacrificed to build an exclusively masculine symbolic world’. The memory of this repressed excess renders the mother’s body (as well as the female sex more generally) into an imagined threat of castration: ‘a devouring mouth, a cloaca or anal and urethral outfall, a phallic threat, at best reproductive. . . . There are no words to talk about it, except filthy, mutilating words. The corresponding affects will therefore be anxiety, phobia, disgust, a haunting fear of castration.’ Irigaray’s theoretical project hinges on finding a non-phallic language of representation for the mother figure, women, and their sexual desire: ‘We must give her new life, new life to that mother, to our mother within us and between us. We must refuse to let her desire be annihilated by the law of the father. We must give her the right to pleasure, to jouissance, to passion, restore her right to speech, and sometimes to cries and anger.’ Although Fini’s rewriting of the Oedipal process and depiction of the eroticized mother in Mourmour tentatively gesture towards such a nonphallic language of representation, the novel’s most significant feminist contribution is its deconstructive negotiation of Freud’s theory. At the same time, Mourmour, like most of Fini’s work, resists straightforward recuperation into a feminist framework. It might be argued that the subversive effect of Fini’s representation of the sexualized mother is compromised by the fact that the narrative is focalized exclusively through Mourmour’s perspective, which means that we never experience the mother’s sexual pleasure from her own point of view. This one-sided narrative perspective might be seen to suggest that Belinda’s sexual availability to her son perpetuates the cultural myth of the mother as ‘everbountiful, ever-giving, [and] self-sacrificing’; someone who ‘lovingly anticipates and meets the child’s every need’, while having no needs and interests of her own. However, such maternal self-sacrifice is never suggested by the novel. Instead, I believe the external view of the sexualized mother in Fini’s narrative must be understood through her engagement with Freud, whose Oedipal theory is also developed from the point of view of the (boy) child. According to Jane Gallop, Freud’s writings describe a ‘Universal ambivalence towards the mother . . . made up of a universal primary attachment to the mother as nurturer and universal disappointment with the mother’. This disappointment has a double
Luce Irigaray, ‘The Bodily Encounter with the Mother’ (), trans. David Macey, in Margaret Whitford (ed.), The Irigaray Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, ), p. . Ibid. Ibid., p. . Donna Bassin, Margaret Honey, and Meryle Mahrer Kaplan, ‘Introduction’, in Bassin et al. (eds.), Representations of Motherhood, pp. –.
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origin: it is, on the one hand, the result of a frustrated demand for exclusive possession of the mother, and, on the other, of the ‘discovery of the absence of the maternal phallus [which] causes a devaluation of the mother who is thus considered incomplete, mutilated’. Fini’s rendition of the maternal body rejects both these scenarios. Mourmour does not have exclusive access to Belinda’s body; she has many lovers throughout the novel. And most significantly, Belinda’s body, as seen through Mourmour’s perspective, does not signify lack or mutilation; nor is it phantasmagorically endowed with a phallus. Yet, the one-sided narrative perspective does mean that the mother remains a mere coordinate in the child’s journey towards sexualization, rather than a subject in her own right. Fini’s representation of motherhood thus operates on a symbolic level and should not be read as an idealization or celebration of actual maternity; as she made very clear in a letter to Xavière Gauthier in : ‘I have never been attracted by fertility . . . Physical maternity instinctively repulses me.’ It should be remembered, moreover, that Fini never described her art or her writing as feminist or political in any other sense; on the contrary, she stated that: ‘I am not a feminist. I hate being claimed as a feminist.’ While this statement must be read historically, in the context of s French debates when theorists we now consider to be feminist (e.g. Cixous, Kristeva, and Antoinette Fouque) similarly rejected the feminist label because of its perceived reliance on humanist and rationalist paradigms, it would be both erroneous and fruitless to attempt to force Fini’s work to align neatly with any political camp or ideological framework. If the feminist implications of Mourmour’s representation of maternity appear ambivalent, it is because of the refusal inherent in Fini’s work to be reduced to any one creed or unequivocal system of thought.
The Name of the Mother: Dorothea Tanning’s Chasm Although Dorothea Tanning (–), like Fini, is known chiefly for her visual art, she too published a novel in the s. This novel has a long material history, beginning as a short story, ‘Abyss’, published in the magazine Zero: A Quarterly Review of Literature and Art in . In Tanning self-published the novel-length Abyss, and in she released a revised and expanded version of the novel under the title
Jane Gallop, Thinking Through the Body (New York: Columbia University Press, ), p. . Quoted in Gauthier, Leonor Fini, p. . Quoted in Webb, Sphinx, p. .
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The Mother Figure in the Surrealist Novel
Chasm: A Weekend, with Virago in Britain and The Overlook Press in the US. Abyss/Chasm relates the events of a deadly weekend at Windcote, a fictional California ranch owned by the morally corrupt Raoul Meridian, step-father to the novel’s motherless protagonist, the seven-year-old Destina. At the end of the weekend, Meridian is dead, stabbed by his jealous lover Nelly. Two of his guests for the weekend, Nadine and Albert, have also met a deadly fate; one has fallen down a deep crevice in the desert and been impaled by a juniper branch while the other has been eaten by a mountain lion. The wonderous, surrealist-flavoured childhood perspective of Destina functions throughout the narrative as an alternative and antidote to the bourgeois, self-serving, and overly rationalistic sensibility represented by many of the novel’s adults. Tanning’s version of the text, Abyss, does not reveal anything about Destina’s mother or why she is absent; it seems as if the only parental figure Destina has ever known is her father, Meridian. In the revised Chasm, however, Tanning reveals that Meridian is not Destina’s real father; not only is he her step-father, but as it turns out, her stepgrandfather too. In a newly written preface and an added final chapter, we find out that Meridian married Destina’s grandmother when she was already pregnant with another man’s child, and, after her death seventeen years later, married her pregnant daughter (father unknown) in order to avoid scandal. Here we also learn that Destina is the last in a long line of eponymous foremothers. I have argued elsewhere that Chasm dramatizes a quest for a new ‘feminine’ language of representation, akin to what feminist philosophers such as Irigaray and Cixous theorized as écriture féminine. The desert chasm itself is the text’s main metaphor for symbolizing the ‘feminine’ excesses that, in Irigaray’s and Cixous’s writing, represent that which has been repressed by the masculine symbolic order. In this chapter I instead focus on the figure of the mother, whose introduction in Tanning’s version of the text, I posit, performs a critique of the phallocentricism implicit in the psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Lacan.
See Anna Watz, ‘Surrealism and écriture féminine’, in Natalya Lusty (ed.), Cambridge Critical Concepts: Surrealism (Cambridge University Press, ), pp. –. Like Fini, Tanning rejected the label ‘feminist’; as I argue in the above essay, however, her ‘seeming aversion to feminism has less to do with the activities of French psychoanalytic/post-structuralist feminists than with s Anglo-American efforts to create a specifically female art-historical canon – efforts that Tanning felt were problematically reductive’ (p. n). Tanning’s visual oeuvre abounds with oil paintings, water colours, and drawings that bear titles alluding to motherhood. Although her most well-known of these, the early Maternity (–),
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Chasm’s preface, titled ‘Destina Descending’, chronicles the fates of eleven of Destina’s foremothers, dating back to the late seventeenth century when the first Destina was burnt at the stake as a witch for writing poetry. This original Destina’s seven-year-old daughter, also named Destina, is rescued from the scene by a kind neighbour and whisked away from danger in a ragged caravan. The primal matricide is echoed in reverse when the present-day Destina (also seven years old) at the end of Chasm is introduced to her previously lost great-grandmother, who, it is revealed, is the rightful owner of the ranch that Meridian had usurped when he married her daughter (Destina’s grandmother). As I have suggested elsewhere, the murder of the first Destina, the poet-mother who was accused of witchcraft, can be interpreted as a metaphor for the inception of patriarchy. As such, this matricide can productively be read through the lens of Irigaray’s analysis of the symbolic order as founded on the sacrifice of the mother; the phallocentric symbolic order, which dictates that the mother’s body is castrated and forbidden, is ‘superimpose[d] upon the archaic world of the flesh’. For Irigaray, finding a way of symbolizing this forbidden bodily relationship with the mother, repressed by the symbolic order, would interfere with the Oedipal narrative that destines women to be seen as castrated and inferior versions of men. Contrary to Freud’s and Lacan’s theorizing, Irigaray maintains, feminine subjectivity needs to be reconceptualized without the phallus as the organizing principle. One such alternative to the Oedipal model is presented by ‘The relationship between mother/daughter, daughter/mother’, which ‘constitutes an extremely explosive kernel in our societies. To think it, to change it, amounts to undermining the patriarchal order.’ The maternal genealogy that is uncovered in the preface and last chapter of Chasm goes some way towards recreating the repressed bond with the mother and to illustrate the possibility of such a non-phallic symbolic. As Irigaray writes:
depicts the state of motherhood as fraught with alienation and distress, the ones Tanning produced from the mid-s onwards portray maternity in a more positive light. Rather than foregrounding isolation, these mid-career works pivot around the boundary-defying and sensual intimacy between a mother figure and a child. For more on this, see my article ‘Maternities: Dorothea Tanning’s Aesthetics of Touch’, Art History, / (), –. See Watz, ‘Surrealism and écriture féminine’, p. . Irigaray, ‘Bodily Encounter with the Mother’, p. . Luce Irigaray, quoted in Margaret Whitford, Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine (London and New York: Routledge, ), p. .
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The Mother Figure in the Surrealist Novel
It is . . . necessary, if we are not to be accomplices in the murder of the mother, for us to assert that there is a genealogy of women. There is a genealogy of women within our family: on our mothers’ side we have mothers, grandmothers and great-grandmothers, and daughters. Given our exile in the family of the father–husband, we tend to forget this genealogy of women, and we are often persuaded to deny it. Let us try to situate ourselves within this female genealogy so as to conquer and keep our identity. Nor let us forget that we already have a history, that certain women have, even if it was culturally difficult, left their mark on history and that all too often we do not know them.
When Destina’s great-grandmother, in the final chapter, tells the girl about their shared family history, she symbolically resurrects this maternal bond: They used the word. Witch. . . . But you rode away while they watched the flames and raised their hysterical voices to sing green poison. You were seven years old, and when they looked around for you it was too late. As the years vanished one by one and ten by ten you began our journey, you found us our carts, our wagons, our trains, our boats, our silvery cars, our horses; and we moved over the earth before the wind that brought us here.
This lyrical account, harking back, perhaps, to the poetry of the first poetmother Destina, embeds the present-day child in a previously obscured history; ‘our journey’ is the shared narrative of all the Destinas, binding them together as one. In patriarchal culture, such maternal narratives are under perpetual threat of erasure; the custom of bestowing the husband’s name upon women in marriage eclipses maternal genealogy, a symbolic sacrifice that is repeated in every new generation. As Lacan theorized, the symbolic order is structured by the Name-ofthe-Father – the Law that determines subjectivity and each subject’s position in the social symbolic. As Judith Roof notes, the patriarchal custom of giving a child the father’s name symbolically echoes this Law: Historically, we have never been able to tell with complete certainty who the father of a child is. That niggling doubt generates a symbolic apparatus that seals that gap in knowledge by substituting a name for what is not known. This substitution – the name in the place of no knowledge – is the progenitive metaphor of Law. The Name-of-the-Father, coming from outside the mother–child duo, not only pretends to seal the relation between father and child, it also works as a term of symbolic separation, becoming the Law that says that the child and mother must separate, that the mother’s desire is forever fixed elsewhere. The father’s name also locates
Irigaray, ‘Bodily Encounter with the Mother’, p. . Dorothea Tanning, Chasm: A Weekend (London: Virago, ), p. .
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the child within the larger social symbolic, the system of names and generations by which we discern familial relations, determine the devolution of property, and define the right of identity.
The recovery, in Chasm, of the maternal genealogy, hidden underneath the symbolically sanctioned paternal one, hinges on the name Destina, which has passed from mother to daughter throughout the centuries. This alternative lineage reinstates a mother–daughter relationship that is no longer symbolically erased, in every generation, by the phallic Name-of-the-Father. ‘We must . . . find, find anew, invent the words’, Irigaray writes, ‘the sentences that speak the most archaic and most contemporary relationship with the body of the mother, with our bodies, the sentences that translate the bond between her body, ours, and that of our daughters.’ In enveloping a maternal genealogy and confirming the mother–daughter bond, the name Destina, I propose, gives form to the idea of such a new, non-phallic language. The name Destina is also richly symbolic; Tanning is here of course alluding to the word ‘destiny’. In psychoanalysis, the destiny of each subject is to pass through the Oedipal phase and sever the bond with the mother’s body. But instead of disavowing the mother, Destina discovers her. By thus breaking with the Freudian script that the Oedipal girl must accept her own as well as her mother’s castration, Destina suggests that a different ‘destiny’ and a different symbolic order might be possible. It is significant Tanning introduces Destina’s female genealogy in the very first portion of the novel, prefacing the events to come. The structure of the novel thus mirrors the genealogical history itself, which of course predates the novel’s plot. Tanning’s narrative strategy here, I propose, functions to remind the reader that when Destina’s great-grandmother, in the last chapter of the novel, takes Meridian’s place at the head of the diningroom table, ‘so easy in the big chair and so obviously in charge’, she does not appropriate his masculine position of power, but represents a different symbolic grammar altogether. The narrative underscores that patriarchal dominance depends on the repression of the mother, whose body becomes configured as the formless chaos against which both identity and language are articulated, but who cannot herself be represented. The mother’s symbolic, as well as literal, return, at the end of Chasm, signals that a different configuration of sexuality and gender, predating the phallic cutting of the maternal bond, might be about to assume shape.
Judith Roof, Reproductions of Reproduction: Imaging Symbolic Change (New York: Routledge, ), pp. –. Irigaray, ‘Bodily Encounter with the Mother’, p. . Tanning, Chasm, p. .
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The Mother Figure in the Surrealist Novel
Leonor Fini’s and Dorothea Tanning’s aesthetic reconfigurations of feminine sexuality are not confined to their novels only; their visual oeuvres are indeed ripe with images that fundamentally undermine patriarchal notions of feminine passivity and subservience and that inscribe a non-phallic, and sometimes maternal, female sexuality. Yet, it is significant that both artists also turned to the novel form in their efforts to symbolize an alternative Oedipal process that was not predicated on the sacrifice of the mother’s body. Fini’s Mourmour takes advantage of the temporality of the coming-of-age or Oedipal process, a strategy that allows the reader clearly to identify the points at which the narrative diverges from the culturally accepted script. Tanning’s novel hinges on a strategy of excavation – of a maternal past eclipsed by patriarchal historiography. The uncovering of this maternal lineage results in a forceful rewriting of the daughter’s present and future, which had previously seemed set in stone. The temporal dimension afforded by the narrative form of the novel allowed both artists compelling ways in which to challenge and revise Freud’s theory of female castration and maternal repression. The relative obscurity of these novels, compared to the continued fame of early surrealist films, artworks, and texts such as Dalí and Buñuel’s L’âge d’or, Ernst’s The Blessed Virgin Chastises the Infant Jesus before Three Witnesses, and Bataille’s Story of the Eye, has resulted in a reductive view of the representation of mothers in surrealism. This chapter has sought to redress this dominant narrative, by showing that Fini’s and Tanning’s novels envision a different role for the mother than as an avatar of sexual repression and religious morality (and thus as a target for hatred and violence); their mother figures are indeed enlisted with the surrealists in their revolt against bourgeois normativity, while simultaneously subverting patriarchal aspects of psychoanalytic doctrine.
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British Surrealism at War Jeannette Baxter
The surrealist imagination is an imagination at war. Born out of the horrors of the European trenches and catapulted into the nightmares of fascism, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the Holocaust, surrealism has always responded to the historical violence that has shaped and energized it. At the same time, however, surrealist responses to war are all too aware of their struggle to articulate their political nature. How can surrealism write war? What is the political import of surrealism’s indirect aesthetics? And how might surrealist writing advance our understanding of the complexities of wartime subjectivity? This chapter explores these questions by uncovering a particular, and particularly neglected, form of British surrealist writing: the dark allegorical novel. To date, discussions of British surrealist writing have confined themselves to the aesthetic and political contexts of interwar and wartime poetry. This is not unreasonable given that poetry was the main mode of surrealist literary production at home and abroad during the s and s. Even the briefest of glances at small magazines that promoted surrealism in Britain, such as transatlantic review, transition, New Verse, Experiment, This Quarter, Contemporary Poetry and Prose, London Bulletin, and Arson, convey the voluminous and varied nature of British surrealist poetic production by the likes of David Gascoyne, Herbert Read, Roger Roughton, Humphrey Jennings, Emmy Bridgwater, Hugh Sykes Davies and Ithell Colquhoun, amongst others. But there is a need to complicate this literary history if we are to better understand the diversity of British surrealist writing before, during, and after the Second World War. Whilst the novel was very much a marginal practice in s and s surrealist circles – we can think of Gascoyne’s Opening Day (), Read’s The Green Child (), and Sykes Davies’s Petron () – it nevertheless emerged in the wartime period as an identifiably dark form of literary political enquiry; one that, coming through from the counter-Enlightenment impulses of the Gothic,
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British Surrealism at War
dared to pose disquieting questions about wartime human appetites for violence, corruption, and absolute power. The seeds for this assertion lie in ‘Limits Not Frontiers of Surrealism’, a lecture first given by André Breton at the International Surrealist Exhibition at London’s Burlington Galleries, which was co-organized by members of the London- and Paris-based groups. In ‘Limits Not Frontiers’, Breton stresses the aesthetic and political use-value of the British Gothic imagination, evident in the novels of Horace Walpole (The Castle of Otranto, ), Matthew Lewis (The Monk, ), Ann Radcliffe (The Mysteries of Udolpho, ), and Charles Maturin (Melmoth the Wanderer, ), for international surrealism’s wartime agenda. Against the escalating violence of Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia (–), the Spanish Civil War (–), Hitler’s remilitarization of the Rhineland, and the rise of French nationalism in the form of the right-wing Third Republic, that is, Breton highlights the Gothic’s potential for bringing the irrational forces underlying contemporary political reality into view. Any ‘useful’ work of politicized art, he maintains, has to move beyond recording just the ‘manifest content of an age’ in order to interrogate its ‘latent’ contents. For it is only by ‘fathoming the secret depths of history which disappear beneath a maze of events’, and by scrutinizing them in relation to manifest historical realities, that one might emerge better equipped to respond to the exigencies of the contemporary moment. Whilst art historians acknowledge the import of the British Gothic imagination in the development of Continental surrealism’s politics and poetics, no attempt has been made to explore how British writers turned to the Gothic as part of international surrealism’s wartime efforts. This chapter responds to that gap by focusing on two dark allegorical novels: Over the Mountain () by Ruthven Todd and The Aerodrome () by Rex Warner. As a member of the London British Surrealist group, Todd was immersed in international surrealist circles before, during, and after the Second World War: as well as co-organizing the London exhibition, he worked on the surrealist-inspired Mass Observation Project, and collaborated with the exiled Joan Miró in post-war New York. Warner, in contrast, was not an official member of any surrealist group or network. But, as Breton observed in the first Manifesto of Surrealism (), many artists and writers were producing work beyond official groupings that was
André Breton, ‘Limits Not Frontiers of Surrealism’, in Herbert Read (ed.), Surrealism (London: Faber and Faber, ), p. . Ibid., p. .
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identifiably surrealist in ‘spirit’. By the mid-to-late s, of course, this expansive view of surrealism had taken on renewed political significance. Beyond its turn to the Gothic, that is, ‘Limits Not Frontiers’ did an important job of re-positioning surrealism on the international stage. At a time when aggressive nationalist politics were asserting themselves across Europe, Breton celebrated surrealism as the ‘only intellectual effort at present extending and co-operating at an international scale’, manifesting itself as a constellation of political ideas and aesthetic practices that were alive and in process. Over the Mountain and The Aerodrome are better understood within these expanding contexts of surrealist wartime production. Over the Mountain tells the story of a young man, called Michael, who conquers an ‘unconquerable’ mountain and finds himself in an unnamed, totalitarian country where he is welcomed by an insidious regime keen to exploit him for political ends. What follows is a series of failed escape attempts whereby Michael ascends and descends the mountain only to find himself back where he started, a circuitous journey that leads to a nightmare realization: the strange country is in fact Michael’s homeland, for he has not crossed the mountain at all, but repeatedly climbed and descended the same slope. Whilst Over the Mountain is little more than a footnote in critical accounts of British wartime literature, the first part of this chapter makes a better case for it by opening its allegorical dimensions up to the writings of two key figures associated with surrealism: Walter Benjamin and Franz Kafka. Across the s and s, Benjamin produced a body of writings that explored the junctures of surrealism, allegory, and the writing of history. Over the Mountain engages intertextually with these writings, I argue, in its crafting of a dark form of surrealist allegorical historiography; one that exploits the relational dynamic of allegory in order to stage critical encounters with the physical and psychological horrors of war. Of specific importance in this respect is Todd’s turn to Kafka, a significant protosurrealist figure, whose negative aesthetics courted praise from Breton in a issue of Minotaure and in his Anthology of Black Humor. As we shall see, Todd reimagines the oneiric, maze-like landscapes of Kafka’s novels in order to bring Europe’s traumatic geopolitical histories into view. Furthermore, he turns to the convulsive energies of Kafka’s black surrealist humour to pose serious questions about the intersections of politics, ideology, and subjectivity in an increasingly administered world at war.
André Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism (), in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ), p. . Breton, ‘Limits Not Frontiers’, p. .
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British Surrealism at War
Rex Warner wrote three allegorical novels across the late s: Wild Goose Chase (), The Professor (), and The Aerodrome, all of which have been very loosely labelled ‘surrealist’. The second part of this chapter focuses on The Aerodrome in order to account more precisely for the nature and extent of Warner’s dark allegorical surrealism. During the composition of The Aerodrome, for instance, Warner collaborated with international surrealist artists, including Gascoyne, Vítězslav Nezval, and George Seferis, on the journal Daylight, which John Lehmann initiated to give voice to exiled Czech writers in London. Moreover, in his wartime essay, ‘The Allegorical Method’ (not published until ), Warner aligned allegory’s critical ambitions with those of surrealism: ‘It is the art of expressing a relation between things which is not ordinarily perceived; it is the art of throwing a strong light on aspects of the world which are ordinarily disregarded’, he writes, ‘or of placing what is familiar in an atmosphere which will reveal something unexpected and unknown in the most unlikely of places.’ The Aerodrome puts these probing critical ambitions to the test with its chilling vision of a full-scale militaristic takeover of Britain by a pseudo-Nazi regime. On the one hand, Warner’s novel draws on the historiographic function of allegory to rupture the smooth, homogenizing forces of fascist historicism and so expose their lethal revisionist ambitions. On the other, it follows Over the Mountain’s exploitation of allegory’s relational dynamic to further interrogate manifest and latent structures of fascism at home and abroad. On this note, Warner also turns to Kafka, a major influence – as ‘The Allegorical Method’ makes clear – for the British author. But in so doing, he produces a very different form of dark allegorical surrealism to Todd. As we shall hear, The Aerodrome is terrifying for how it seeks to sound the dark logic of war and fascism and, in turn, voice stark warnings about the consequences of complicity and ‘coldness’ in creating the dehumanizing conditions of war.
Over the Mountain and the Dark Politics of War Over the Mountain is replete with histories of wartime violence. This is signalled immediately in an anonymous setting that alludes to the contested and shifting geopolitical landscapes of Europe after the First World
See Gary William Crawford, Robert Aickman: An Introduction (Baton Rouge, : Gothic Press, ), p. ; and Janet Montefiore, Men and Women Writers of the s: The Dangerous Flood of History (London: Routledge, ), p. . Rex Warner, ‘The Allegorical Method’, in The Cult of Power: Essays by Rex Warner (London: Bodley Head, ), p. .
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War. As Tait Keller notes in Apostles of the Alps: Mountaineering and Nation Building in Germany and Austria, – (), various ideologies ‘altered the physical topography and discursive geography of the mountains’ between the wars. ‘Pressures that had formed the contours of the modern state – political fights, social conflicts, culture wars, and environmental crusades – shaped the peaks’, he continues: but these ‘borderlands did not reflect the struggles occurring at the centre; they were the centre of nation-building struggles’. Given the fluctuating geopolitical realities that underpin Over the Mountain – the violent transformation of political borders, the formation and deformation of nation states, the expansion and contraction of imperial territories – any move to situate the reader in a secure, realist setting would be wholly inappropriate and historically irresponsible. Instead, the novel’s deliberately unsettled – and unsettling – topography allows Todd to construct a complex snapshot of the geopolitical present with all of its ambivalences intact and all of its restless histories pressing through. This becomes further apparent as Michael’s dreams of conquering the ‘unmapped and unmappable’ mountain descend into a nightmare of Gothic excess. Battling against adverse weather conditions, exhaustion, and vertigo, Michael experiences terrifying visual and acoustic hallucinations, involving disembodied voices, the secret police, the frozen corpse of Marlin (the last man to have died trying to conquer the mountain, who is also a monstrous double for Michael), and a cast of benevolent and malevolent figures from his past. Any notion of temporal and historical coherence immediately comes undone in the face of these spectral presences and memory traces. Indeed, evoking the labyrinthine settings of Kafka’s The Castle () and Amerika (), Todd’s shifting landscape refuses all unities of time and space: Michael is repeatedly lost (his compass fails) and frustrated by the oneiric laws of maze-like space and subjective time. Moreover, with every step towards the summit, Michael experiences the most hideous forms of bodily disintegration: his legs fall off leaving painful, bleeding stumps; bits of his ears and nose disintegrate; his arms and hands become distorted; sections of skin rot and peel; and his face – described as a ‘particoloured monstrosity’ – becomes hideously disfigured.
Tait Keller, Apostles of the Alps: Mountaineering and Nation Building in Germany and Austria, – (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), p. . Ibid., p. . Ruthven Todd, Over the Mountain (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, ), p. . Ibid., p. .
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British Surrealism at War
Given its wartime contexts of production, Over the Mountain’s biohorror aesthetic boasts a double impulse. Across the s and s, surrealist artists and writers, including the likes of Salvador Dalí, André Masson, Míro, and Leonora Carrington, created horrific biomorphic forms as pictorial and poetic allegories of a European body politic ravaged by war and fascism. Over the Mountain extends the formal diversity of this surrealist wartime production and, in so doing, generates a mode of reading that is also a form of historical witnessing. Michael’s physical and psychological disintegration, for instance, evokes a series of traumatic wartime histories that lie concealed within Europe’s vast mountain ranges. Just as World War I saw multiple conflicts across the Carpathian Mountains, the Caucasus, and the high Alps and the Dolomites as nations battled for territories and political power, so the horrors of the Spanish Civil War were played out across the hostile terrains of the Guadalupe and the Cantabrian mountain ranges. It is far from coincidental, then, that Todd’s mountain landscape is haunted by a ‘battalion of ghosts’ and littered with wounded bodies, all of which bear the distortions of violent historical and political forces. In this respect, Todd’s dark surrealist allegory, which comes through from Benjamin’s contemporaneous thought and practice, has an important historiographic function as it seeks to connect violent events in ways that resist a straightforward unfolding of history. As Benjamin noted in ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (), ‘every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably’. Just as Todd’s traumatized landscape pulsates with violent energies from the recent past, so it transmits the contemporaneous disfigurement of Europe’s mountain ranges under fascism. The early s saw the National Socialists propagandize traditional mountaineering rhetoric of conquest and struggle, and with the annexation of Austria in , the Alps became ‘a monument to Hitler’s new order . . . Irreconcilable ideologies battled on the heights where despotic fantasies challenged democratic aspirations.’ Political extremism, culture wars, and anti-Semitism transformed the meaning of Europe’s mountain ranges just as much as armed conflict (Benjamin would, of course, perish by his own hand on the Spanish–French border in , having just crossed the Pyrenees). And
Ibid., p. . Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (), in Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Pimlico, ), p. . Keller, Apostles of the Alps, p. .
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this is a terrifying political history in process that Michael’s physical and psychological experiences allude to: ‘I thought that whatever terrors the unknown land held for me, they could not be possibly worse than the terrors I had already been through.’ As we shall see, however, the nightmare has only just begun as Michael’s crossing into the unknown country immerses him in an even darker landscape of cruelty and exploitation. It is in this context that Todd’s developing bio-horror aesthetic has its second significance. On arrival in the ‘foreign’ country, Michael is without memory and identity: ‘Who I was and what made me decide on a singlehanded invasion of a foreign land completely escaped me’, he confesses; ‘I was as much lost mentally as I was physically, and that meant I was very badly lost indeed.’ Alarmingly, the Doctor tasked with carrying out cosmetic surgery on Michael greets him with bald laughter and a menacing hint at his own history of medical malpractice: ‘You’re news, you know, and it’s the finest advertisement that I could ever have had and one that the Medical Association can’t pounce on me about, either.’ The Doctor’s eagerness clearly has nothing to do with fulfilling his Hippocratic responsibilities and everything to do with Michael’s potential for ideological refashioning. Indeed, Michael’s ‘recovery’ is little more than a callous bio-political experiment conducted by the Doctor, the power-hungry Father Podmore, and Colonel Roscoe, the head of the fascistic secret police. Just as his body is surgically enhanced ahead of his various media appearances and lecture tours, so his story of heroism is re-engineered to transmit a conformist ideology endorsing the interventionist powers of God and the fascist state: ‘It will sweep like fire through the minds of the people and . . . result in the biggest religious revival for over two centuries’, Father Podmore boasts. Over the Mountain’s attention to the role of ideology in the construction of political reality places it in dialogue with numerous late interwar and wartime surrealist manifestoes, which called for closer analysis of the physical and psychological forces of fascism. These include the oftneglected tracts issued by members of the London Surrealist Group – including Todd – as part of the international surrealist anti-fascist effort. ‘We Ask Your Attention’, for instance, which was distributed at the First British Artists’ Congress and Exhibition in , indicted the British government’s policy of non-intervention in the Spanish Civil War before accusing it of exhibiting fascistic tendencies: ‘Non-Interventionists stand as
Todd, Over the Mountain, p. .
Ibid., p. .
Ibid., pp. –.
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Ibid., p. .
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the allies of fascism in international politics’, the manifesto stated: ‘this is the end of democracy and representative government; it is a FASCISM which uses deceit instead of violence’. ‘To the Workers of England’ (), meanwhile, which was distributed inside an issue of the British surrealist periodical the London Bulletin, incited its readers to fight ‘FASCIST IDIOCRACIES [and] AGGRESSION wherever it may occur’. In contrast to the more performative, public-facing manifesto form, the novel admittedly demands an extended act of private and contemplative reception. But that is not to deny its interventionist potential. Over the Mountain’s use-value, that is, lies in its formal capacity to advance the manifestoes’ warnings against fascism’s ideological forces through a form of imaginative critical engagement. Todd interrogates the idea of ‘fascism by deceit’, for instance, through first-person narrative, an ambiguous device that refuses to cast Michael as an unwitting victim, and instead immerses him – and by implication the reader – in a disturbing narrative of coercion and complicity. The horror of Michael’s predicament may lie partly in the fact that the nefarious agents managing him are uncannily familiar: ‘They seemed to be emphasised versions of the sort of people that I could vaguely remember in my country.’ But it also lies in his willingness to relinquish agency in exchange for power and status: ‘I was [their] puppet . . . expected to move according to them, not according to my own wishes.’ At this stage in the narrative, Michael has been reduced to a mere mouthpiece for the violent cultural and social policies that lie concealed beneath the regime’s totalizing narratives of continuity and progress. With the rise of wartime fascism, the reproduction of ideologically regulated subjects became a pressing concern for many surrealist artists and writers, including the likes of Hans Bellmer, who gave hideous form to fascism’s complex bio- and psychodynamics in ‘Die Puppe’ (–). Over the Mountain advances this line of enquiry in a key passage in which Colonel Roscoe reveals the origins of the secret police: at school age [they] were removed from their homes and parents and taken into the state barracks. There they were trained to obey orders implicitly and their childlike minds learned to look upon their job as a vast amusing game. They learned to shoot and loved the noise of their revolvers firing and the sight of their victims being blown over backwards by the force of
London Surrealist Group, ‘We Ask Your Attention’, in Michel Remy (ed.), On the Thirteenth Stroke of Midnight: Surrealist Poetry in Britain (Manchester: Carcanet Press, ), p. . London Surrealist Group, ‘To the Workers of England’ (), repr. in Remy (ed.), Thirteenth Stroke of Midnight, p. . Todd, Over the Mountain, p. . Ibid.
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large-calibre bullets. One of the great difficulties apparently was to prevent them greeting their masters by firing at them, but this inconvenience was surmounted after a few fatalities, by the masters always going in bulletproof clothing and heavily punishing any budding police-man who fired at them.
As Breton observed in the Anthology of Black Humor, humour noir had particular relevance for wartime surrealists, searching as they were for an aesthetic of provocation and intellectual ‘revolt’. At first glance it is easy to dismiss Todd’s infantile secret police who speak in a childlike manner and murder anyone for fun, ‘sweeties’, and praise from their paternalistic leader, Roscoe. Todd’s point is deadly serious, however, alluding as it does to the construction of the fascist ‘New Man’, a collectively organized human being, who was politically and ideologically engineered across a range of national contexts, from Britain and mainland Europe, to as far afield as Argentina, Brazil, and Japan, to make real fascism’s palingenetic thrust. By the time of Over the Mountain’s publication, for instance, membership of the fascist youth movement, the Hitler Youth, had reached . million, and the outbreak of war saw its indoctrinated members graduate to the ranks of the SS, that ruthless paramilitary agency that would go on to administer the Final Solution, amongst many other wartime atrocities. Towards the end of Over the Mountain, Todd further advances the political use-value of black humour in a bid to expose the dark logic that underpins its progressively violent world. Michael’s eventual resistance, for instance, leads to arrest and the formulation of bizarre charges, including ‘assault, battery, attempted murder, incitement to rebellion, incitement to murder, theft of an automobile, and violation of traffic regulations’. With echoes of Kafka, Todd’s black humour highlights the absurd yet absolute nature of state power. Just as in Kafka’s nightmare worlds, to follow Breton, the ‘human individual struggles within a play of forces whose meaning he has generally given up trying to unravel’, so Michael is exposed to a legal system that has nothing to do with justice or truth, only obfuscation and dehumanization. Todd’s surrealist black humour is distinctly – and disquietingly – timely, then, as it directs its wartime reader’s gaze to the increasingly serious, and senseless, administration of
Ibid., p. . André Breton, ‘Lightning Rod’ (), in Breton, The Anthology of Black Humor, trans. Mark Polizzotti (San Francisco: City Lights Books, ), p. xvi. Todd, Over the Mountain, p. . Breton, Anthology of Black Humor, p. .
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violence across fascist Europe: ‘They wouldn’t let up till they’d got you shut up safe in a concentration camp’, Michael is told by a fellow resistor, ‘They can put you there without a name and without a trial.’ Whilst the Holocaust would not officially come into being until , Todd’s dark allegorical novel bears early, important witness to its brutal history in process, as tales of selections, torture, medical experiments, and executions circulate throughout its closing pages. In this respect, Over the Mountain emerges as an urgent allegorical critique of the unfolding horrors of war and fascism across Continental Europe. Yet, its potency also resides in its refusal to treat fascism as a distinctly foreign problem. The final confrontation between Michael and Colonel Roscoe, who is revealed to be a projection of Michael’s powerdesiring psyche, is all the more disturbing in this context: ‘Have you ever ordered a man to be killed? No? Well, until you have done that, you don’t know what power is’, Michael/Colonel Roscoe asserts. ‘You say a word and a living man becomes just so much cold meat. To end lives is the ideal power.’ Writing to the moment, and in sharp awareness of the dangers of fascism at home and abroad, Todd could not have imagined the resonance of these words. Europe was subjected to a series of manifest militaristic power struggles that would, once more, violently reconfigure its political borders and nation states, leaving millions of people dead or displaced. But alongside these determinate agencies of wartime violence, the novel warns, lies the threat of indirect, ideological forces, including the power of language to facilitate and explain away the horrors of war and genocide. As we shall see below, it is precisely these dangerous intersections of language, power, and violence that preoccupy Warner’s dark allegorical novel, The Aerodrome, as it dares to imagine a Britain that has become physically and psychologically complicit with fascism.
The Aerodrome and the Horrors of Absolute Power If Over the Mountain pulsates with restless times, memories, and histories, The Aerodrome imagines a world in which history, time, and memory are under ruthless erasure. This is evident in the opening sections of the novel when Roy, our first-person narrator, recalls how the Aerodrome first insinuated itself into the physical and psychological landscapes of his home village through an unnatural process of naturalization. Its institutional architectures, we learn, were ‘so disposed and camouflaged that even from
Todd, Over the Mountain, pp. –.
Ibid., pp. –.
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Ibid., p. .
quite close at hand they appeared merely as rather curious modifications of the natural contours of our hills’, whilst other buildings created the illusion of heritage: ‘Many . . . where visible, resembled older landmarks. One of the main depots for the storage of arms had been constructed so as to appear indistinguishable from a country church.’ Beyond the Aerodrome’s encroaching physical and psychological presence, what is at stake here is its additive historicist ambitions, which seek to dehistoricize the lived experience of the village and its inhabitants by stealth. Through an aesthetic of mimicry, that is, the Aerodrome creates the false semblance of historical continuity, progress, and connectedness. That the villagers initially fail to notice these injurious historicist practices can partly be explained by their messy and chaotic lives. If the Aerodrome is a barren edifice of perfection, the village is home to human imperfection in all of its forms: alcohol, sex, lies, gossip, infidelities, secrets, friendships, and enmities are all experienced to excess. In this respect, the Aerodrome and the village function as thinly veiled metaphors for wartime fascism and liberal democracy, respectively. Like Todd, however, Warner refuses to regard these communities as wholly distinct, and he instead dares to open up disturbing points of convergence. Take this early revelation: ‘There had been, too, some cases of rape and abduction of young girls carried out by aircraftsmen or junior offices; but as these occurrences were common enough amongst ourselves, no great importance was attached to them.’ Coming through from Kafka’s flat allegorical renderings of human exploitation, the horror of Roy’s confession lies not just in its shocking content, but in its neutral register, and in the tension between the two. As Warner put it in ‘The Allegorical Method’, the power of allegory lies in its facility to ‘imagine and somehow embody those forces in consciousness, which are not immediately evident to ordinary observation, to find new relations among them’. Textual jolts such as these function, therefore, to provoke the reader into a mode of critical enquiry that is also an active form of critical listening as our attention is drawn to the gap between the heinous content of Roy’s revelations and their horribly neutral tone. Warner advances this mode of critical listening through an aesthetic of apathy centred on Roy. In contrast to the villagers, who begin to develop a callous curiosity towards the Aerodrome’s nefarious activities, Roy becomes complicit through inattention; a sign not only of the efficacy of
Rex Warner, The Aerodrome (; London: Vintage, ), p. . Warner, ‘Allegorical Method’, p. .
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Ibid., p. .
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the institution’s insidious ideological powers, but also of our narrator’s disturbing capacity for disinterest: ‘the subjection of our village to a different organisation would, not long ago, have angered me’, he confesses; ‘Now I smiled to think that they left me wholly indifferent.’ In part, Roy’s attitude is a worrying measure of the success of the Aerodrome’s vulgar historicism: its eradication of the historicity of lived experience through smooth, homogenizing forces not only engenders a lack of critical distance, but a lack of critical engagement. Roy offers up little resistance to the Air-Vice-Marshall-cum-fascistic-leader, for instance, when he demands that adherents to the Aerodrome sever all ties to the past, including family and friends who, from his extremist perspective, have remained ‘servile to historical tradition’. Roy also fails to show interest in the cold-blooded execution of his adoptive father, the Rector, an event that the murderous Flight Lieutenant laughs off as an accident. Neither does Roy intervene at the Rector’s funeral, which the Air Vice-Marshall (who we later learn is Roy’s biological father) transforms into a spectacle of fascist power when he takes to the pulpit to announce an aggressive takeover of the village, its resources, and civic structures. Warner’s contribution to the collaborative Anglo-Czech issue of Daylight was an important wartime essay called ‘The Cult of Power’ (). Written against the rising tide of political and cultural isolationism, the essay offers a series of critical insights into the dynamics of European power relations, including the rise of authoritarian rule in Italy and Germany, the cult of the fascist leader, and the intersections of fascism and anarchy. ‘It is suggested here that at the root of this whole cult of power and violence, including fascism’, Warner writes, ‘is the philosophy of moral anarchy, of the individual asserting himself against standards that seem too weak to be able to restrain him.’ Even though Warner clearly recognized the interventionist potential of the essay as form, he was also aware of its inevitable limitations. In ‘The Allegorical Method’, for instance, he stresses the need to recognize imaginative prose writing as a legitimate mode of political thought and practice: ‘It is becoming clear that if pure fantasy unrelated to reality is dangerous, lunatic and irresponsible’, he argued, ‘pure observation undirected by imagination or moral impulse is almost meaningless.’ Whilst The Aerodrome reads in many ways like a
Warner, Aerodrome, p. . Ibid., p. . Rex Warner, ‘The Cult of Power’, in Daylight: European Arts and Letters, Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow, vol. (London: Hogarth Press, ), pp. –. Warner, ‘Allegorical Method’, p. .
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fictional blueprint for the political ideas that galvanized ‘The Cult of Power’, it is precisely the novel’s aesthetic capacity to make space for those all-important modes of imaginative and moral engagement that ensures its political significance. Listen to the following: I did not think of our purpose as a conspiracy, but rather as a necessary and exciting operation. We constituted no revolutionary party actuated by humanitarian ideals, but seemed to be an organisation manifestly entitled by its own discipline, efficiency, and will to assume supreme power. Outside us I could see nothing that was not incompetent or corrupt.
Once more, the horror of this passage lies in Roy’s flat declarations of the Aerodrome’s absolute power. Moreover, his cold, mechanistic language, coupled with his seamless oscillations between first person singular and first person plural, signals an alarming erasure of autonomy and a diminished capacity to identify with the other. In this respect, we can hear Kafka’s negative aesthetic pressing through: only his early twentiethcentury warnings against the dark forces of modernity – the erosion of humanity in an administered society, the advancement of technological violence, and the rise of totalitarianism – are updated by Warner to respond to a very specific set of wartime horrors. The novel’s detached and calculating register, that is, draws our attention to the lethal role of language in creating the social conditions of war and fascism. As Theodor Adorno would go on to argue in the immediate post-war, post-Holocaust period, ‘coldness’ functioned as a precondition for fascist violence as it signalled, amongst other things, the historical and psychological failure of the subject. Like Todd, Warner looks to the inherent ambiguities of first-person narrative to further interrogate the intersections of wartime politics, ideology, and subjectivity. Consistent with The Aerodrome’s cold Gothic aesthetic, however, Warner gives a different face – and voice – to the fascist New Man. Indeed, Roy is far removed from the infantile, trigger-happy agents of Over the Mountain. But that does not make him any less dangerous: we had an aim which was nothing less than to assume ourselves the whole authority by which men lived, and that we had a power that was not an affair of cyphers, but was real and tangible . . . the whole spirit of our training . . . cut us off from the mass of men; and to be so cut off was, whether we realised it or not, our greatest pleasure and our chief article of pride.
Warner, Aerodrome, p. .
Ibid., pp. –.
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British Surrealism at War
Taking his place amongst the ‘new and more adequate race of men’ at the Aerodrome, Roy is a terrifying embodiment of the fascist New Man: disciplined, vital, and wholly committed in his rejection of a failed past and his embrace of a hard, aggressive modernity. In this respect, the import of Warner’s dark allegorical novel lies in its challenge to orthodox readings of fascism as an aberration of modernity. As Roger Griffin has argued, it is only in the last decade or so that historians and political scientists have begun to ‘recognize in fascism a sustained drive towards an alternative modernity and towards a revolutionary futurity’. Even the ‘genocidal destructiveness of Nazism’, he continues, ‘was in the mind of its most convinced followers not the expression of nihilistic barbarism, but of a creative, cathartic destruction, the necessary precondition of, and prelude to, palingenesis’. Warner’s dark surrealist allegory anticipates and explores this idea through a radical reimagining of the Gothic trope of the haunted locale. If the haunted house, castle, or ruin is a place of unquiet histories, memories, and times, the Aerodrome is a nightmare utopia in which history, time, and memory have undergone methodical – and murderous – erasure. As the Air Vice-Marshall insists, adherence to the Aerodrome’s cult of absolute power is dependent on a ruthless process of historical effacement: ‘To be freed from time, Roy. From the past and from the future. From shapelessness’ is the regime’s ultimate revisionist ambition. As early as , Benjamin’s ‘Theories of German Fascism’ was warning against fascism’s emerging drive to exploit the present without grasping the importance of the past. At the core of fascist historicism, he realized, was a refusal to understand history and, specifically, the conditions of historical violence; a refusal that would, in turn, further enable the conditions of historical violence. The Aerodrome advances these critical concerns through the construction of a nightmare utopian structure that, in its drive towards order, rationality, and productivity, has excluded all appeal to the evidence of lived (and living) experience, including contingency, diversity, and difference. Yet, it is precisely these heterogeneous energies that begin to reassert themselves towards the end of Warner’s novel. Against the faceless structures of the Aerodrome, the villagers join forces in various acts of collective
Ibid., p. . Roger Griffin, ‘Modernity, Modernism, & Fascism: A “mazeway resynthesis”’, Modernism/ Modernity, / (January ), – (at p. ) (emphasis in original). Ibid., p. . Warner, Aerodrome, p. .
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resistance, ranging from insubordination and slackness, to vandalism, assault, and murder. Whilst these transgressions are met with physical punishments, trials under military law, and deportation to unknown parts of the country, the Aerodrome’s claim to absolute power progressively ruptures under the pressure of dissent. Subsequently, these ruptures make room for the return of memory, desire, and feeling. This is Roy: We had abolished inefficiency, hypocrisy, and the fortunes of the irresolute or the remorseful mind; but we had also destroyed the spirit of adventure, the sweet and terrifying sympathy of love that can acknowledge mystery, danger, and dependence.
Given its wartime moment of production, it is hardly surprising that The Aerodrome ends on a note of resistance. But that is not to say that Warner seeks to reassure his wartime readers by neatly explaining the novel’s political concerns away. Roy’s response to the Air Vice-Marshall’s assassination and subsequent collapse of the Aerodrome, for instance, gestures to their enduring legacy: ‘no corner of the country that had felt the force of his ideas could afterwards relapse wholly into its original content’, he reflects; ‘I, least of all, could remain indifferent to his memory.’ Moreover, the closing tone of the novel is decidedly ambiguous: ‘I remember that night as we looked over the valley in the rapidly increasing darkness that we were uncertain of where we would be or what we would be doing in the years in front of us.’ With Britain plunging into the darkness of war and the Holocaust, the political use-value of The Aerodrome lies not just in its refusal to voice propagandistic certainties at a time of deep political unrest, but in voicing uncertainty and compromise as disquieting conditions of war. By bringing two very different British experiments in dark surrealist allegory into view, this chapter has opened up a new set of questions about what wartime Gothic surrealism looks like, how it operates, and who produces it. In general terms, Todd and Warner turn to the Gothic, I have argued, as part of international surrealism’s broader interrogation of the physical and psychological horrors of war and fascism. Drawing in particular on Benjamin’s contemporaneous politico-historical writings and the dark poetics of Kafka, both novelists craft richly theoretical and intertextual novels that function, in part, to counter any wartime move towards national and cultural isolationism. More specifically, I have suggested, Todd and Warner advance allegory’s historiographic function to
Ibid., pp. –.
Ibid., pp. –.
Ibid., p. .
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rupture the smooth, homogenizing forces of fascist historicism and to expose its lethal revisionist ambitions. As we have seen, allegory’s relational dynamic allows both novelists to ask disturbing questions about the intersections of wartime politics, ideology, and subjectivity, both at home and abroad. It is in this respect, therefore, that the dark allegorical novel emerges as a politically and ethically charged form of wartime surrealist production, as it dares, through the ambivalent energies of first-person narrative, to set up close imaginative encounters with manifest and latent forms of fascism. By , of course, Oswald Mosley and his dedicated followers had been interned without trial by the British government for fear that the British Union of Fascists would collude with German Nazism in the invasion of Britain. Yet, the immediate and enduring import of Over the Mountain and The Aerodrome lies in their willingness to interrogate the existence of fascist tendencies within democracy, as well as their existence against democracy; a critical trajectory that Adorno would famously develop in his post-war, post-Holocaust writings. In so doing, these dark innovations in surrealist allegorical historiography deserve to be taken seriously for how they probe the blackest forces at work within humanity in order to better understand the complex nature of wartime subjectivity.
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Surrealist Narratives of Trauma Patricia Allmer
Two narratives, two versions of an event; like in the film Rashomon, which Unica Zu¨rn held in such high esteem.
Art-historical narratives of modernism frequently recount how surrealism evolved in the s as a set of aesthetic responses to the enduring traumas of the First World War. Less familiar is the continuation of this response in the latter half of the twentieth century, in aspects of surrealism’s experimentation that are expressed in artistic engagements with historical traumas that developed in the years immediately after the Second World War. The sequence of short, experimental narratives written by Unica Zu¨rn from the late s until her death by suicide in exemplifies one of these post- afterlives of surrealist narrative forms, persisting as fractured mutations ruptured by historical trauma, marked by the damaged temporalities consequent on a variety of subjective and historical experiences. These writings adapt many familiar surrealist narrativeaesthetic traits and practices in their mapping of Zu¨rn’s precarious psychic states as she experienced a series of breakdowns during this period. In short novellas and prose pieces, often decorated with her characteristic intense, spidery illustrative designs, she deploys strategies of automatism, cryptography, anagrammatic, and other phantasmagorical techniques, and embeds into the narratives fairytale, literary, cinematic, and other allusions, all within formally experimental, densely polysemic, and allegorically autobiographical structures. This adaptation of the extensive archive of resources provided by surrealist techniques enables Zu¨rn to produce narratives focused on representing and navigating the damaged durational temporalities of traumatic experience, encountered as simultaneously
Unica Zu¨rn, Gesamtausgabe in Bänden, ed. Gu¨nter Bose and Erich Brinkmann (Berlin: Brinkmann & Bose, –), vol. ., p. (hereafter referred to by volume number): ‘Zwei Erzählungen, zwei Versionen einer Begebenheit; wie in dem Film “Rashomon”, den Unica Zu¨rn so schätzte’. Translations my own unless otherwise indicated.
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Surrealist Narratives of Trauma
subjective (and thus rooted in problematically autobiographical narratives) and social (and thus grounded in shattering historical events and their disastrous psychological impacts). Criticism of her work has tended to focus on the autobiographical elements, which are increasingly foregrounded in her later narratives. I want in this chapter to problematize this autobiographical focus by considering Zu¨rn’s works as responses to a historical, rather than simply personal, set of crises, before shifting attention to some of her earlier narrative and para-narrative writings, and in particular to reframe her interest in anagrams (conventionally posited by critics as beginning in , when she met Hans Bellmer), by considering the influence of wartime and post-war German historical experience on some of her formal and processual choices. Zu¨rn’s emphasis on dating her works offers one initially suggestive negotiation of the distinct but interlinked temporalities of personal and historical trauma. Das Haus der Krankheiten (The House of Illnesses, ) is structured into sequences of days (‘Wednesday to Friday’, ‘Saturday, Sunday’, etc.) and concludes with a meticulous memorial dating of the text – ‘I have finished this book on the st day of my illness: on Friday the th of May, ’ – which fixes the narrative within a specific autobiographical frame, to which critics have responded by reading the text autobiographically. Der Mann im Jasmin (The Man of Jasmine) locates its action in ‘, in the village of Ermenonville’; and Die Trompeten von Jericho (The Trumpets of Jericho) opens with a dream-rendition telescoping into a few pages the nine-months duration of a monstrous, fantasized pregnancy. Most of these works were unpublished in Zu¨rn’s lifetime, and several have subsequently been published again in translation (Der Mann im Jasmin, for example, was eventually published in German in and in English translation in ), adding further levels of dating to their textual histories. The insistence of dating in Zu¨rn’s works testifies, perhaps, to a desire to anchor the self via an objective structure of temporal organization that both conflicts with and grounds the internal sense of time experienced by the subject. A palimpsestic page from Ein Märchenbuch fu¨r Friedrich SchröderSonnenstern (A Fairytale Book for Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern, ) illustrates the obsessive potentials of this tendency, mentioning the year and date of its production (..) no less than five times in an apparently talismanic process of emphasis (Figure .). Zu¨rn made this Märchenbuch while an inmate of the La Fond psychiatric clinic in La
Unica Zu¨rn, The Man of Jasmine and Other Texts, trans. Michael Green (London: Atlas Press, ), p. .
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Figure . Unica Zu¨rn, Ein Märchenbuch fu¨r Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern (A Fairytale Book for Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern), . Ubu Gallery, New York. © Brinkmann & Bose Berlin, Germany.
Rochelle, after spending the summer months on Île de Ré. She returned to Paris four days later, on September. The insistent dating thus apparently documents a moment of psychological trauma (during this summer she also
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Surrealist Narratives of Trauma
met her daughter Katrin for the first time since , suggesting a familial dimension to the experience). But the date also resonates externally, being the seventy-second birthday of the work’s dedicatee, the German Art Brut painter Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern (..–). The date .. thus specifically commemorates an external event – a friend’s birthday – as well as potentially acting as a register of internal trauma. Another page from the same manuscript (Figure .), dated the next day (..), indicates another kind of historical registering. It graphically represents and names, alongside an autobiographical statement, an atomic explosion: ‘Irren-Anstalt [Madhouse] La Rochelle Frankreich.’ The Hungarian-American physicist Leo Szilard’s ‘eureka moment’, in which he realized the potential for the atom bomb, occurred in London on September , thirty-one years to the day before Zu¨rn’s ‘Atom Bombe’ picture. Szilard, a Hungarian Jew, had fled to London from Germany two months after Hitler’s assumption of power in . He died on May , a few months before Zu¨rn made her picture marking his ‘eureka moment’, of which she probably read in an obituary. Combining these allusions to the genesis of the atom bomb, Szilard’s status as exilic Jew fleeing Nazism, and Zu¨rn’s own traumatized hospitalization, this Märchenbuch page indicates some of the rich complexities of Zu¨rn’s works and their dating processes when considered outside their conventional autobiographical reference. Historical trauma is integral to both frames of reference, and Zu¨rn’s post-war writings clearly relate to key aspects of post-war German culture’s complex processes of forgetting and remembering – processes impacting directly on pivotal moments in her biographical experience, and ramifying across different dimensions of her works. In reading these works in relation to questions of trauma alongside the better-known significance of her mental illness, a pathography emerges in which social and bodily spaces intersect productively with the space of the image-text as well as with psychic territories, offering an aesthetic register of the traumatic resonances of historical events through which Zu¨rn lived. Christina Svendsen, one of Zu¨rn’s translators, has written in particular of the artist’s ‘deep psychic distress and projected guilt at the atrocities of the Nazis as revealed in the post-war period, an undistanced suffering that caused one of her breakdowns’. The question of individual
The seventy-second birthday may have held deeper numerological significance for Zu¨rn, as +=, a number she invested with totemic value. Christina Svendsen, ‘Translator’s Introduction’, in Unica Zu¨rn, The Trumpets of Jericho (Cambridge, : Wakefield Press, ), p. xii.
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Figure . Unica Zu¨rn, Ein Märchenbuch fu¨r Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern (A Fairytale Book for Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern), . Ubu Gallery, New York. © Brinkmann & Bose Berlin, Germany.
and cultural ‘guilt’, central to much post-war German art and literature, exerts a constant pressure in Zu¨rn’s art, and its negotiation clearly dogged her subsequent writing and drawing.
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In Der Mann im Jasmin (, published in French translation in ), a narrative deeply haunted by memories of wartime horror, Zu¨rn recounts her periods of treatment for mental illness in the early s, in passages where fragmented, traumatic memories intrude damagingly into the present, registering the effects of historical events as a series of disrupted flows and leakages: Back in her bed she begins to think of things from the past – including the war. Of the bright spring day when hundreds of bombers had cast their fire on to the city, until the sky had been so darkened by black smoke it had seemed like night. In the evening, after this chaos, when the streets had smelt of gas from the broken pipes, she walked past the freshly destroyed, still-smoking ruin of a house and heard a loud, uncanny gurgling noise coming from the charred, decimated walls. Water gushed from a broken pipe into the infinitely sad and despairing evening. She thought that in this solitary noise she could hear the life of her city trickling away, slowly but surely.
Smoke, gas, and water leak out in memories of the city’s shattered body, the solid urban space becoming fluid, just as memories of the past continuously leak into the present of the narrative. In the narrator’s disordered imagination, the body of the city merges with her own, collapsing past and present, human and urban in a violent image of traumatic memory in which one kind of incineration clearly substitutes momentarily for another: ‘the image appears inside her of an enormous oven belching clouds of black stinking smoke’. Fragments of memory slot into the narrative of contemporary psychiatric disorder, suggesting a narrative that offers a diagnostic reading of Berlin’s history in which personal and cultural disorders merge uncannily. Walls and what they conceal recur as symbols of the collapsing barriers between past and present: ‘She appears to be conjuring up age old days, past events which have occurred here behind the walls of Wittenau mental hospital.’ By naming the mental hospital ‘Wittenau’ the text asserts the persistence of historical memory despite contemporary efforts to revise or erase it. Wittenau had been renamed the Karl Bonhoeffer Nervenklinik in . The hospital functioned in the mid-s as a transit station for the deportation of ‘prisoners’ to the camps and, later, as a child euthanasia centre where the Nazis experimented with infectious diseases on juvenile Auschwitz inmates and performed forced sterilization of Jews
Zu¨rn, Man of Jasmine, pp. –.
Ibid., p. .
Ibid., p. .
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and other minorities (the narrator of Der Mann im Jasmin interprets the phrase ‘squashed fruit’ ‘As if this were a memory of an abortion or a sterilisation’). Zu¨rn’s experience in Wittenau in the early s becomes in her narrative an insistent raking over of historical ashes through ‘the shattering experiences of hallucinations’. The Nazi past of Berlin’s medical institutions intrudes into the distorted realities of the present as a constant parallel, in which the narrator’s private experiences offer uncanny repetitions of historical events repressed from German public consciousness. The word ‘Wittenau’ furthermore suggests an anagrammatic echo of ‘Auschwitz’, a word that resonates throughout Zu¨rn’s works. The tendency of critics to date Zu¨rn’s emergence as an artist to has the double effect of deflecting attention from a significant portion of her innovative work and subsuming everything else to the overshadowing influence of Bellmer. Her involvement in the post-war Berlin cabaret group Die Badewanne (the Bathtub) and her four-year relationship with its cofounder Alexander Camaro (–), who had been condemned by the Nazis as a ‘degenerate’ artist, receives less attention, but predates by several years her meeting with Bellmer, and crucially influenced the development of her aesthetic. Camaro, who introduced Zu¨rn to drawing and painting, had exhibited in at the Galerie Gerd Rosen, the first art gallery to open (in August ) in post-war Berlin, and had been a troop entertainer on the Russian front during the war before going into hiding after conscription to the German army in . After her divorce from her first husband Erich Laupenmu¨hlen in , Zu¨rn lived with Camaro for several years up to . In a letter of April to Rudolf Springer, Zu¨rn described Camaro as ‘my unforgettable lover of ½ years’. The Badewanne, an artist cabaret, ran for six months from July in the cellar of the Femina-Bar, a former puszta cellar of the dance palace Femina in Nu¨rnberger Straße – in west Berlin. Echoing French surrealist responses to the aftermath of World War I, it hybridized French café and Berlin cabaret culture, merging surrealism with the more Berlin-centred aesthetics of expressionism to forge a characteristically
‘[T]here is significant evidence to indicate that an unknown number of patients were killed in Wittenau itself either by lethal doses of medication, starvation, or a combination of the two’. Melvyn Conroy, Nazi Eugenics: Precursors, Policy, Aftermath (New York: Columbia University Press, ), p. . See also Nicholas Wachsmann, Hitler’s Prisons: Legal Terror in Nazi Germany (New Haven, : Yale University Press, ), p. . Zu¨rn, Man of Jasmine, p. . Ibid., p. . Erich Brinkmann in Zu¨rn, Gesamtausgabe, vol. ., p. . Zu¨rn, Gesamtausgabe, vol. , p. : ‘[meinen] unvergesslichen, ½ jährigen Liebhaber’.
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Surrealist Narratives of Trauma
modernist aesthetic practice that found expression across a wide variety of media despite (like the earlier Berlin and Zu¨rich Dada performances) a desperate post-war shortage of artistic materials. Where French surrealism had reacted to the devastation of war by exploring its effects on the human body, the Badewanne responded to the urban devastation of Berlin, mapping the architectural, civic, and cultural chaos of the early post-war period and providing some of the earliest coherent artistic responses to the immense traumas accompanying the emergent post-Nazi era. Isabel Fischer notes that in Badewanne activities, ‘The engagement with Surrealism is not only theoretical, but also practical.’ Victoria Applebe has argued that ‘Unica Zu¨rn first came to Surrealism in when she was already thirty-seven’, and Zu¨rn’s later meetings (via Bellmer) with key surrealists have been well-documented by other critics, but it is clear that her involvement in the Badewanne and her affair with Camaro introduced her to surrealist aesthetics and their contemporary German relevance in or possibly earlier. Their relationship certainly influenced her development as a writer. Quick, the fictionalized version of Camaro in ‘Katrin’, Zu¨rn’s unpublished (c.) fictionalautobiographical account of her writerly progress, offers paternal advice to Katrin to ‘think and dream. You will try to get some order in your thoughts.’ The encounter with Badewanne’s assimilation of French surrealism into post-war Berlin provided her with a context that was simultaneously international and avant-garde, and firmly local, domestic, and German in its focus, in relation to which she could begin to define her own artistic practice. Notably, Badewanne artists deliberately adapted surrealist aesthetics to respond directly to Holocaust and other traumatic post-war imagery. Waldemar Grzimek’s lithograph Buchenwald (c.), for example, offers
Zu¨rn notes in her narrative ‘Katrin’, a fictionalized autobiography, that one motivation of the Badewanne (which she renames Langer Egon) was the economic need to employ artists who were otherwise struggling amid the reconstruction of post-war Berlin: ‘Es ist entstanden, weil wir nicht wollen daß hier weitergehungert wird’ (‘It was established because we didn’t want continual starvation’). Zu¨rn, ‘Katrin – Die Geschichte einer kleinen Schriftstellerin: Ein Jugendbuch’, Gesamtausgabe, vol. , p. . Isabel Fischer, ‘Das Surreale surrealisieren: Wie die Berliner Nachkriegsku¨nstler der Badewanne an den Französischen Surrealismus anknu¨pften’, in Isabel Fischer, Agnes Kern, and Dagmar Schmengler (eds.), Berlin Surreal: Camaro und das Ku¨nstlerkabarett Die Badewanne (Berlin: Nicolai, ), pp. –. Victoria Applebe, ‘“Du wirst dein Geheimnis sagen” (“You will reveal your secret”): Anagrams in the work of Unica Zu¨rn’, in Martine Lusardy (ed.), Unica Zu¨rn (Paris: Halle Saint Pierre/Éditions du Panama, ), p. . Zu¨rn, ‘Katrin’, p. .
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a grim iconography of violence and suffering expressed by human figures facing dangling nooses while a wolf leans hungrily across the image. Grzimek (–) had served in the German Navy during the war, and later designed Holocaust memorials for Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen. The Badewanne’s explorations of dreams and nightmares in diaries and drawings as well as in other works such as Wolfgang Frankenstein’s performance Selbstmordnummern (Suicide Numbers), contributed to ‘nightmarish scenes which refer to the real trauma of the time’. A key figure in the group, the painter Werner Heldt (–), was ‘the most important painterly chronicler of Berlin after the war’ according to the publisher Wolf Jobst Siedler: ‘His views of the ruins with their empty window cavities convey a picture of the city as rubble, which he called “Berlin am Meer” [Berlin on the Sea].’ Heldt made works using fragments of rubble and junk, as in Tu¨r (Door, c.), a depiction using wax crayons and face-paints of the shattered city landscape with human faces looming in the foreground like tombstones, painted on a door which was itself an object retrieved from that landscape. ‘Here’, writes Fischer, ‘the postwar ruin is not only integrated into the picture as an object, but the picture itself is painted on part of a ruin . . . this door comes from the rubble . . .’. Tu¨r operates in dialogue with other works by Badewanne artists such as Jeanne Mammen’s more pessimistic painting Tu¨r zum Nichts (Door to Nothing, c.). Heldt’s Tu¨r self-referentially recycles material and content. Medium and message collapse into a single object, embodying within the materiality of the work both its solidity as matter and its transitoriness as displaced rubbish, repurposed as a surface for representation rather than as a functional object, but also bearing the trace of its former usefulness as a historical reminder of a lost, shattered, domestic past. Plagued by alcoholism and a persistent foreboding of his own death, Heldt died of a stroke in . A year later, Zu¨rn produced a short anagram-text (dated ‘Berlin, ’), two lines of seven syllables and one of eight, from the sentence Werner Heldt ist mein Bruder:
Isabel Fischer, Agnes Kern, and Dagmar Schmengler, ‘Rundgang durch die Ausstellung’, in Fischer et al. (eds.), Berlin Surreal, p. . Wolf Jobst Siedler, Wir waren noch einmal davongekommen (Munich: Pantheon Verlag, ), p. . Fischer, ‘Das Surreale surrealisieren’, p. . The door belonged to the art collector Max Leon Flemming (–), one of the founders of the Galerie Gert Rosen, along with Heinz Trökes and Gert Rosen.
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Werner Heldt ist mein Bruder der Windmuehlen, Sirre-Brett der Nebel. Er ruht erst im Wind. (Werner Heldt is my brother of the windmills, Sirre-board of the mist. He rests only in the wind.)
Adapting and repurposing her experience of the Badewanne, this haiku-like poem, which commemorates Heldt in gentle pastoral imagery, cements her close, even familial, affinity with a central figure of the group through a linguistic version of the group’s aesthetics of constrained recycling, a creative procedure that potentially generated from initial material a variety of potential new works. Just as the Badewanne’s Berlin surrealism took and reworked a constrained field of available historical experience and materials as the ground of its art, so Zu¨rn’s anagrams would manipulate fragments of language and texts in articulating her responses to the historical circumstances in which she found herself working – the shattered (but, by the early s, already rapidly regenerating, their fragments recombined into new buildings and streets) urban and cultural landscapes of post-war Germany. This process of linguistic fragmentation and manipulation began in the stories Zu¨rn published between and in a variety of newspapers and magazines, narratives that deal with inconclusive, apparently inconsequential events. They are characterized by their fractured, paratactic grammatical style that contrasts markedly with the complex, highly co-ordinated sentences of classical German prose. In the major publication carrying new German writing in the early post-war years, the Munich-based journal Der Ruf, Gustav René Hocke had called for ‘a new, honest, and realistic prose style suited to the times’, while the journal’s editor Hans Werner Richter argued for a style he termed Kahlschlag, ‘a spontaneous and unambiguous style which prunes away tricks and decorativeness and avoids imitation of earlier German authors’. Zu¨rn may have developed her own version of this style partly in imitation of stylistic features evident in other prominent post-war German literary texts, such as the notably paratactic prose style of one of the best-selling novels of the post-war years (and one of her favourites), Ernst Kreuder’s Die Gesellschaft vom Dachboden
Zu¨rn, ‘Werner Heldt ist mein Bruder’ (), Gesamtausgabe, vol. i, p. . Siegfried Mandel, Group – The Reflected Intellect (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, ), pp. , . Zu¨rn seems to have had no formal connection with Gruppe , the loose collection of post-war German writers organized by Richter and surveyed in Mandel’s book.
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(, translated as The Attic Pretenders), or the fragmented-mosaic style adopted by Gu¨nther Weisenborn in his memoir Memorial. The opening of Zu¨rn’s story ‘Nach der Vorstellung’ (‘After the Performance’, published in January in Der Telegraph) exemplifies her adaptation of such fragmented style: Pierrot left the cloakroom door open behind him. Then he fell on the stone floor. The tip of his brightly coloured cap ruffled his eyes. He was drunk.
Short sentences delineate a series of actions and descriptive details whose sequential connectivity is minimally indicated (in the original German by the word ‘Dann’ at the beginning of the second sentence). The effect is of a staccato rendering of experience as a series of events that may actually be unconnected, but which are nevertheless linked (as in the modernist techniques of collage and montage) by proximity and juxtaposition. In ‘Er zauberte mit Holz und Feuer’ (‘He Conjured with Wood and Fire’, published in early ) Zu¨rn writes: Arndt was a thin, tough figure. In summer, copper-red like the wood of the pine when the last sun shines on it. He wore an old, green suit, like a hunter, and a hat that he pulled down over his forehead, fibrous like moss.
The ellipsis of the second sentence momentarily erases the protagonist from the action, leaving only an image and a broad, seasonal sense of temporality (‘Im Sommer . . .’). The insistent similes render the world of the narrative as a sequence of image-comparisons, repeatedly shifting the reader away from what is represented through a repetition of tropes that compresses language and narrative. In the radio play ‘Die Flucht der Häuser: Ein Funkmärchen’ (‘The Flight of the Houses: A Radio Tale’, broadcast on RIAS Berlin on July ), Zu¨rn allegorizes her experience of bombed-out Berlin, presenting a surreal narrative in which sentient houses eventually abandon their inhabitants, including the office staff of the ‘Bombastic-Werke’ who set up their business in the street: ‘As long as the houses are away, we will work here in the street! Typewriters on the right – office tables and filing cabinets on the left – in the service of the Bombastic-Werke we can work everywhere.’ Zu¨rn’s focus on the absurdity of administrative labour continuing
Zu¨rn, ‘Nach der Vorstellung’, in Gesamtausgabe, vol. , p. . Zu¨rn, ‘Er zauberte mit Holz und Feuer’, Gesamtausgabe, vol. , p. . Zu¨rn, ‘Die Flucht der Häuser: Ein Funkmärchen’, Gesamtausgabe, vol. , p. (emphasis original).
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Surrealist Narratives of Trauma
amid the chaos of homelessness clearly embodies memories of immediately post-war Berlin. In other narratives, her stenographic training mobilizes explorations of how post-war German language, written, typed, and spoken, has broken down. In ‘Das Stenogramm’ (‘The Stenogram’, a narrative published in Der Kurier in and clearly resembling passages from the later ‘Katrin’ discussed below), the protagonist, Ingeborg Preßler, attends an interview and typing test: She drew the bow, put her fingers on the keys as she had learned to: ASDF – JKLÖ – – and her thumbs on the space bar, she sat up straight, looking at the shorthand pad next to her – and apart from one – I – for – that – and – she couldn’t read a single word in it . . . She tried to remember what the head of personnel had actually dictated, but she felt as if he hadn’t said anything at all the whole time – what had actually happened in the weather house: door open, door closed, one liveried messenger, one elegant lady, in, out, and blue glass eyes almost rolled out of a fat face. Mechanically she began to type lines and this sound gave her courage. Then she types ooooooo, then lllllll, then . . ., and the sound mingled in beautiful harmony with the clatter around her.
In this narrative the act of dictation leads to a breakdown of communication; sentences collapse into single words, grammar into the incoherent stutter of repeated letters and the ‘Geklapper’ (‘clatter’) of the surrounding office, an environment of bureaucratic power from which Ingeborg finally exits, as the narrative ends, walking ‘very upright out of the room’. The result resembles what Fredric Jameson describes in his diagnosis of schizophrenic postmodern narrative: ‘the relationship [of signifiers to each other] breaks down, when the links of the signifying chain snap, then we have schizophrenia in the form of a rubble of distinct and unrelated signifiers’. Paratactic style in this short narrative becomes a form of (female) resistance to the power exercised by (male) dictation, combining the wider relation of the surface disruptions of syntactic coherence as a stylistic response to a shattered reality (Jameson’s ‘rubble’ of signification) with a more coded analysis of language as the damaged terrain of a struggle of gender imbalance. The ‘dictatorial’ logic of this relation resonates historically, suggesting an allegorical reading of a mechanically repetitive German language, void of syntax or sense, in which words and their meanings have been fatally disconnected by the disruptive force of historical trauma.
Zu¨rn, ‘Das Stenogramm’, Gesamtausgabe, vol. , p. . Zu¨rn, ‘Das Stenogramm’, p. . Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, ), p. .
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The recycling of fragments of found material, then, is the fundamental strategy of Zu¨rn’s first major innovative works, her anagrams, which constitute an extended procedural response to the post-war shattering of the German body politic and language, while simultaneously demonstrating her assimilation and adaptation of elements of French surrealist aesthetics of assemblage and juxtaposition. In December Springer gallery published a limited-edition pamphlet of ten anagrams and ten drawings by Zu¨rn under the title Hexentexte (Witches’ Writings). Anagrams depend upon processes of fragmentation and recombination; with their reliance on latent significance and their suggestion of encrypted or concealed meanings, they invite psychoanalytic interpretation. The tendency of the anagram to lean towards repetition constructs, furthermore, a labyrinthine reading experience in which the same combinations, syllables, and words steer the reader insistently backwards to the point of origin. In the context of post-war German literature, the anagram can also be read as a suggestively strategic response to the condition of the German language specifically, and the German body politic more generally, in the wake of Nazism, which exerted (many commentators felt) a distorting effect on the language that severely if not irreversibly damaged it, with disastrous cultural consequences. George Steiner’s important essay ‘The Hollow Miracle’, published in , offered an early diagnosis of a nearfatal historical wound to the German language after World War II: ‘Something immensely destructive has happened to it. It makes noise. It even communicates, but it creates no sense of communion.’ In , Gu¨nter Grass delivered a lecture in China addressing the wartime destruction of the German language: In , Germany was not only militarily defeated. Not only the cities and industrial plants had been destroyed. Worse damage had been done: National Socialist ideology had robbed the German language of its meaning, had corrupted it and laid waste whole fields of words. In this mutilated language, writers, handicapped by its injuries, began to stammer more than write.
A similar, if wider, diagnosis is offered by Geoffrey Hartman’s critique of post-Holocaust poetics: ‘The hurt inflicted on appearances – on a (harmonious) correspondence between outer and inner – is so acute that it
George Steiner, ‘The Hollow Miracle’, in Steiner, Language and Silence (Harmondsworth: Penguin, ), p. . Gu¨nter Grass, Headbirths, or the Germans Are Dying Out (), trans. Ralph Mannheim (Harmondsworth: Penguin, ), p. .
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Surrealist Narratives of Trauma
leads to a stutter in the representational faculties.’ ‘Stammering’ and ‘stuttering’ describe interruptions of flow, failures to articulate (literally, to join together) or to complete verbal sounds, the elements of speech. For philosopher Gilles Deleuze, the stutter is a symptom of systemic disorders, and language itself ‘stutters’ at the moment the writer is forced to represent its failure to communicate: ‘And what language did Kleist awaken deep within German by means of grimaces, slips of the tongue, screechings, inarticulate sounds, extended liaisons, and brutal accelerations and decelerations . . .’. When Zu¨rn anagrammatically transforms the sentence ‘Der eingebildete Wahnsinn’ into ‘Weh! Deliria sind Gebete. N-N-N-’ and ‘DEHI, bewegtes Deliria-N-N-N-N-’ we read something of the ‘fragmented visions’ Deleuze describes, but also see an example of what JeanJacques Lecercle has called délire, ‘a perversion which consists in interfering, or rather taking risks, with language’. Lecercle later offers as a description of délire the metaphor of ‘writing a text in a foreign language’ so as to settle accounts with the mother tongue. Elsewhere he writes, specifically of this anagram-text by Zu¨rn, ‘Intention gives way to possession, skill to symptom, the master of the subject to the free play of the virtualities of meaning which language contains. There is always something grammatical about delirium, there is always something delirious about language.’ This linguistic delirium is also implicitly subversive, particularly in relation to the authoritarian drive of totalitarian thought. The fragment (the basic element of the anagram) embodies the potential subversion of the totality, as Theodor Adorno argued: ‘The category of the fragmentary . . . is not to be confused with the category of contingent particularity: the fragment is that part of the totality of the work that opposes totality.’ If, as Kurt Reinhardt and Gerhart Hoffmeister argue, ‘a central theme [of post-war German literature] remained the inability to integrate the traumatic events of to into the lives of
Geoffrey Hartman, ‘Poetics after the Holocaust’, in The Geoffrey Hartman Reader, ed. Daniel T. O’Hara (Edinburgh University Press, ), p. . Gilles Deleuze, ‘He Stuttered’, in Essays Clinical and Critical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (London: Verso, ), p. . Unica Zu¨rn, ‘Der eingebildete Wahnsinn’ (), Gesamtausgabe, vol. , p. . Deleuze, ‘He Stuttered’, p. . Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Philosophy through the Looking-Glass: Language, Nonsense, Desire (London: Hutchinson, ), p. . Ibid., p. . Jean-Jacques Lecercle, The Violence of Language (London: Routledge, ), p. . Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (), trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Continuum, ), p. .
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protagonists and, by inference, bring the Nazi past within the grasp of authors’, Zu¨rn’s anagrams constitute one response to this traumatized situation of post-war German language and literature, one effort to explore the shattering, traumatic effects on both German and Germany of the nation’s recent totalitarian history. Zu¨rn’s anagram-texts present fragmented, deliriously subversive distortions and rearrangements of pre-existent German and French sentences from which fragments of other, sometimes invented, languages emerge, traceable in the broken-down units of semi-intelligible speech that result from her procedures. At their core resides the implication of a kind of encrypted meaning, the concealment of a secret, as if the anagram-text was a riddle to which its source line is the answer. The breakdown of linguistic signification forces attention to the characters constituting words. Renée Riese Hubert steers us towards Zu¨rn’s drawings when she reads the anagrams as ‘a concatenation of secret images addressed to invisible interlocutors’. Victoria Applebe notes that ‘like most Surrealist works of art, [Zu¨rn’s anagrams] are never inclined to completely reveal their secret’. Other critics like Pierre Joris have explored the problems such texts pose to translation, noting that their transposition into a different language can either mimic the constraint (i.e. use the same letters to produce texts with equivalent constraints) or the semantic content (attempt to reproduce in the target language the effects of meaning created in the source text). Fragments of text are further reduced to the bare rubble of language – phonemes, diphthongs, units of sound – which are then rebuilt, with resulting random but productive effects on semantics which are nevertheless constrained, limited by the materials available, claustrophobically prone to repetition and circularity. Writing of the anagrams in The Man of Jasmine, Caroline Rupprecht expresses some of the critical frustration such texts present: ‘It seems difficult to interpret these anagrams any further, since they mainly repeat, on a very reduced level, what can be found in all of Zu¨rn’s text.’ One response to this critical despair has been to connect Zu¨rn’s anagrams to the works of her partner Hans Bellmer,
Kurt Reinhardt and Gerhart Hoffmeister, Germany: Years, vol. : From the Nazi Era to German Unification (London: Bloomsbury Press, ), p. . Renée Riese Hubert, Magnifying Mirrors: Women, Surrealism, and Partnership (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, ), p. . Applebe, ‘Anagrams’, p. . Pierre Joris, ‘A Note on Translating Unica Zu¨rn’s Anagrammatic Poems’, SULFUR, (Fall ), –. Caroline Rupprecht, Subject to Delusions: Narcissism, Modernism, Gender (Evanston, : Northwestern University Press, ), p. .
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Surrealist Narratives of Trauma
whose contorted female dolls offer a parallel exploration of reconfiguration located on the female body rather than the corpus of language. ‘The anagram is the key to all my work’, Bellmer asserted; ‘The body is like a sentence that invites us to rearrange it.’ Hal Foster’s reading of Bellmer’s dolls, informed by Freudian and Bataillean versions of sado-masochism, posits them as ‘an attack on fascist father and state alike’. Zu¨rn’s anagrams work, I suggest, in different ways, mapping not responses to the distortions of fascist art on the (implicitly male) body but, instead, registering the wider impact of Nazism and its consequent devastation on the dual corpus of (German) nation and language. The anagram figures not the armoured totality of the male figure (which, Foster argues, Bellmer seeks to disrupt by mangling the female figure), but the shattering effects of history on the body politic and its figuration in language. Zu¨rn’s anagrams invite and are susceptible to a variety of interpretive strategies, not least in what they reveal by their provenance or their reference to contemporary historical events. Most of the anagrams are non-referential exercises using fragments of text – cryptically selfreferential lines from the Bible (Toenendes Erz und klingende Schelle, from Corinthians : ‘Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or clanging cymbal resounding in the wind’; or from dates, hotel addresses, book titles, poems by the French poet Henri Michaux (–, a writer on whom Zu¨rn developed a complex fixation), and from German and other literary traditions. Sometimes she chose lines in French, reflecting her reading in surrealist literature (e.g. the anagram derived from ‘Les chants de Maldoror’, which yields a four-line poem). ‘Es liegt in allen Dingen’ (‘It Lies in all Things’) is a line from the novelist Herman Hesse (–), while ‘Wenn die Wildgaense schreien’ (‘When the Wild Geese are Crying’) adapts a line from a poem by the Japanese poet Ohozuno Ozi, and ‘Es war ein Kind das wollte nie. . .’ (‘It was a Child which never wanted. . .’) is from Goethe’s poem ‘Die wandelnde Glocke’ (‘The Wandering Bell’, set to music by Schumann in ). ‘Das ist ein Anagrammgedicht’ (‘This is an Anagram-poem’, ) offers an extreme
Cited in Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, : MIT Press, ), p. . Foster, Compulsive Beauty, p. . Zu¨rn, ‘Toenendes Erz und klingende Schelle’ (), Gesamtausgabe, vol. , p. . Zu¨rn, ‘Les chants de Maldoror’ (), Gesamtausgabe, vol. , p. . Zu¨rn, ‘Es liegt in allen Dingen’ (–), Gesamtausgabe, vol. , p. . Zu¨rn, ‘Wenn die Wildgaense schreien’ (–), Gesamtausgabe, vol. , p. . Zu¨rn, ‘Es war ein Kind das wollte nie . . .’ (), Gesamtausgabe, vol. , p. .
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example of self-referential infolding. These works offer over nearly two decades a continuous textual register of the convolutions, repetitions, and processes of dismantling and reconfiguration, suggesting an extended response to Zu¨rn’s experiences of traumatic historical and personal events. Occasionally the anagram-texts offer fragments of information about Zu¨rn’s relation to her past or to contemporary political events. ‘Wasserstoff-Bombe wir beten dich an’ (‘Hydrogen Bomb we Worship You’, written in Berlin in ) responds to the American hydrogen bomb tests over Bikini Atoll on March . Zu¨rn’s involvement in German anti-nuclear protests has received little critical attention – the jaundice that provided the context for Das Haus der Krankheiten developed after she attended an anti-nuclear meeting in March . ‘Das Spielen der Kinder ist streng untersagt’ (‘Children Playing is Strictly Forbidden’) comes from signage on residential flats in Berlin. In she makes anagrams of her name and childhood address – ‘Ruth Zuern, BerlinGrunewald, Dunckerstrasse zwei’. Dunckerstrasse, less than two kilometres from Grunewald station, had since been named after the leftwing political thinker and publisher Franz Duncker (–), who corresponded with Marx and Engels and established a union for skilled workers in . The Nazi regime renamed the street Seebergsteig, after the recently deceased evangelical theologian Reinhold Seeberg (–), author of numerous works including, in , the coauthored Der Weg zur Volksgesundung (The Way to Recovering the Health of the People). Zu¨rn’s anagram thus recalls a Berlin street name erased by the Nazis in , a tiny fragment of the city’s past that, in the post-war years, was gradually being reinstated as history. Many anagram-texts find their way into Zu¨rn’s prose writings, where they constitute nodes of centrifugal intensity, moments of discursive convulsion that (as Deleuze would argue) cause language itself to ‘stutter’. The editors of Zu¨rn’s collected writings, Gu¨nter Bose and Erich Brinckmann, describe Die Trompeten von Jericho as ‘the biggest working over and transformation of her complete anagram collection, the work of ten years. It is the opening of the hermetic form of the anagram, and half of it, exactly anagrams, are cited and inserted as individual lines
Zu¨rn, ‘Das ist ein Anagrammgedicht’ (), Gesamtausgabe, vol. , p. . Zu¨rn, ‘Wasserstoff-Bombe wir beten dich an’ (), Gesamtausgabe, vol. , p. . Zu¨rn, ‘Das Spielen der Kinder ist streng untersagt’ (–), Gesamtausgabe, vol. , p. . Zu¨rn, ‘Ruth Zuern, Berlin-Grunewald, Dunckerstrasse zwei (die Adresse meiner Kindheit)’ (), Gesamtausgabe, vol. , p. .
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Surrealist Narratives of Trauma
or paraphrasings.’ The closed, hermetic forms of the anagrams (which yet signify outwards to their textual sources in the historical reservoirs of German and French writing, and thus connect Zu¨rn’s texts to traditions shattered by the history that has generated them) are verbal equivalents of the enclosed, restrictive, carceral spaces that populate her narratives, spaces pregnant with historical significance that provide a series of allegories of the subject’s confinement within damaged historical narratives. They figure the disordering of perceptual reality consequent on traumatic experiences that are simultaneously individual (personal guilt and shock) and general (the shattering of German social, cultural, and linguistic traditions, the political fragmentation of post-war Berlin into zones). The fracturing of language provides a provisional ground for its reconstruction in the climax to Zu¨rn’s unpublished narrative ‘Katrin – Die Geschichte einer kleinen Schriftstellerin: Ein Jugendbuch’ (‘Katrin – the Story of a Young Writer: A Book for Young People’, ), her contribution to the German vogue for ‘youth literature’ in the s, famously exemplified by the Swedish writer Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Långstrump (translated into German as Pippi Langstrumpf in ). In Zu¨rn’s fictionalized autobiography Katrin, a fifteen-year-old version of Zu¨rn’s daughter of the same name, wants to become a writer. Like Zu¨rn (and Ingeborg Preßler in ‘Das Stenogramm’), Katrin reluctantly studies stenography and typewriting, and inhabits a world wholly circumscribed by male figures – she helps her father (also, like Zu¨rn’s father, a writer) to produce his masterpiece, and, on his death, joins an artists’ colony and is ‘adopted’ by Quick (a version, as we’ve seen, of Alexander Camaro), the editor of a children’s newspaper. ‘Katrin’ allegorizes Zu¨rn’s development from a writer of conventional prose to one of avant-garde ambition, her writing destructured by the shattered language and social reality of post-war Germany. The final paragraphs of the narrative, repeating but redirecting the short story ‘Das Stenogramm’ discussed earlier, enact the stuttering or stammering of linguistic break-up, as Zu¨rn’s prose fractures and fragments, breaking away from the conventional narrative of teenage fiction on its final page, at the moment the character of Katrin symbolically encounters her younger self and re-encounters her mother, sewing, her needle rhythmically striking the thimble, onomatopoeically rendered as ‘“zirps – zirps – zirps” –’, the three dashes echoing across these closing lines. The tale becomes writing, as the mother attempts to speak, but her speech is replaced by the typewritten dashes of an ellipsis, simultaneously the lines
Erich Brinkmann in Zu¨rn, Gesamtausgabe, vol. ., pp. –.
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of sewn thread and the stuttering beginning of the line of drawing (‘– die Mutter sagte – – –’). The staccato typewritten dashes, echoes of Zu¨rn’s stenography training, are the connection point between the fictional figure of Katrin, and Zu¨rn (Katrin’s mother) as the narrative’s author. At this moment, when the thread of narrative dissolves into repeated lines, Katrin/ Zu¨rn begins to write: Katrin, deep in the garden of her childhood – secretly saw these two on the lawn – no rain, no October wind – no more presence. She stood hidden behind old, familiar trees, and saw and listened – – – And then she started to write.
The connection here between containment and secrecy or concealment, and the inauguration of the act of writing delineate Zu¨rn’s aesthetic engagement with the traumas of history. Many of her subsequent works operate within similar paradigms, exploring different forms of confinement and constraint – versions of the constrained linguistic space of the anagram-text – which are allegorized in images of disease and disorder both mental and physical and which, in different but related ways, offer textual registers of the seismic cultural effects of historical trauma and its influence on the personal crises Zu¨rn endured.
Zu¨rn, ‘Katrin’, p. .
Ibid.
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Science, Alchemy, Nature
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Surrealism and the Science Fiction Novel Gavin Parkinson
The relationship between surrealism and science fiction registers at various levels of affinity, influence, and reception, yet it has barely been explored in any depth. This is surprising given, firstly, that it is well known that the earliest inductions into the fantastic of the first French surrealists included their childhood acquaintance with the tales of Jules Verne, and, secondly, that it is at least noteworthy that both the self-definition of surrealism in France through the Manifesto of Surrealism () and the arrival of SF as a distinct genre in anglophone countries took place in the mid-s. This chapter explores shared literary precedents beyond Verne as means of linking surrealism and the SF novel. From there, it catalogues the farsighted advocacy within the surrealist orbit during the Second World War of mainly anglophone SF stories and the equally prescient evaluation and theorization of the genre by surrealists and those close to the movement from the early s. Finally, it engages in a closer interpretation of the ambivalent attitude struck by the surrealists towards the themes of SF literature and the selective means by which they assessed the subject matter of the genre in the s and s.
For the observation that ‘there currently exists no in-depth study of SF and Surrealism’, see Robert Bozzetto and Arthur B. Evans, ‘The Surrealistic Science Fiction of Serge Brussolo’, Science Fiction Studies, / (November ), – (at p. n). This point was made again by Philippe Curval, ‘Surréalisme et science-fiction’, Europe: Revue littéraire mensuelle, / (October ), – (at p. ). For some initial attempts at rectification, see Gavin Parkinson, Futures of Surrealism: Myth, Science Fiction and Fantastic Art in France – (New Haven, : Yale University Press, ) and Gavin Parkinson (ed.), Surrealism, Science Fiction and Comics (Liverpool University Press, ). Terry Hale and Andrew Hugill, ‘The Science Is Fiction: Jules Verne, Raymond Roussel, and Surrealism’, in Edmund J. Smyth (ed.), Jules Verne: Narratives of Modernity (Liverpool University Press, ), pp. –; Christian Robin, ‘Jules Verne et le surréalisme’, in Le rêve d’une ville: Nantes et le surréalisme (Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, ), pp. –; Abigail Susik, ‘Surrealism and Jules Verne: Depth of Subtext in a Collage by Max Ernst’, in Parkinson (ed.), Surrealism, Science Fiction and Comics, pp. –.
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It has been quite commonplace for historians of the genre to trace the beginnings of the SF novel to imaginative writing long preceding the romans d’anticipation of Verne and H.G. Wells, as far back as classical antiquity and the first examples of utopian fiction. Some of this scholarly work was carried out by surrealists, ex-surrealists, and writers close to them, partly motivated by their recognition of a literary heritage shared with surrealism. So important to surrealism from its beginnings, the cultural fantastic in Europe is deeply rooted in the travels recorded by Cyrano de Bergerac and Jonathan Swift, which have frequently been designated proto-SF by surrealists, anthologists, and historians of the genre since the early s (mid-s in the case of Swift). This interpretation rests on the way Cyrano initiated interplanetary travel and even the ‘ancient astronaut hypothesis’ or Paleo-SETI in Other Worlds of (Adam, he tells us, whose home was the moon, came to Earth to hide from God, soon followed by Eve), and Swift introduced lost or forgotten islands into literature with Lemuel Gulliver’s various voyages in Gulliver’s Travels () as a response to the endless travel publications stemming from the exploration of the Americas. The third distant initiator of the genre before Verne and Wells was Edgar Allan Poe who was credited by editor Hugo Gernsback in when he launched the first SF magazine in the United States, Amazing Stories, subtitled The Magazine of Scientifiction, a term meant to define a new kind of literature both visionary and educational: By ‘scientifiction’ I mean the Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe type of story – a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision . . . Edgar Allan Poe may well be called the father of ‘scientifiction’. It was he who really originated the romance, cleverly weaving into and around the story, a scientific thread.
For the term ‘fantastic’ in and close to surrealism from the s, see Tessel Bauduin, ‘Fantastic Art, Barr, Surrealism’, Journal of Art Historiography, ( December ), n.p. Cyrano de Bergerac, Other Worlds: The Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon and Sun (), trans. Geoffrey Strachan (London: New English Library, ), p. . For the ‘ancient astronaut hypothesis’ or Paleo-SETI (after the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence carried out by NASA), see Jason Colavito, The Cult of Alien Gods: H.P. Lovecraft and Extraterrestrial Pop Culture (Amherst, : Prometheus, ), p. . To my knowledge, the first concrete association made between SF and Swift’s novel took place in the context of surrealism: Robert Allerton Parker, ‘Such Pulp as Dreams Are Made On’, VVV, – (March ), – (at p. ). Hugo Gernsback, ‘A New Sort of Magazine’, Amazing Stories: The Magazine of Scientifiction, / (April ), p. .
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Surrealism and the Science Fiction Novel
In fact, Scientifiction was the title planned for the magazine for which Gernsback unsuccessfully sought subscriptions in , the year of the publication of André Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism where Swift (‘Surrealist in malice’) and Poe (‘Surrealist in adventure’) are two of only three English-language writers included in the famous list of precursors to the new movement. Elsewhere in the Manifesto, Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk () is lauded as a novel ‘infused throughout with the presence of the marvelous’, at the beginning of the surrealists’ absorption in the Gothic novel, perhaps the main historical genre that augured SF. There was no reported interest shown in the genre by the surrealists over the twenty years or so that followed the publication of the Manifesto at the tail end of what has been retrospectively dubbed the ‘golden era of French SF’ – from the middle Jules Verne period of the s up to , reaching a publishing peak between and – nor in the spectacular, techno-interplanetary genre, as it evolved in the US, which across those years was little known to surrealists or to the French generally. During that period, the pioneering French novelist Jacques Spitz emerged, a contemporary of the surrealists who drew specifically upon the ‘scientific romances’ of Verne and Wells that predated the definition of SF as a fullyfledged genre. Spitz would later be designated the best representative of French SF in the years between the world wars, even though that term had yet to find currency. Until recently, only the pessimistic L’agonie du globe of – in which the Earth splits in two and one half crashes into the moon – had been translated into English, as Sever the Earth, and that was the year after its publication and it has never been reprinted. Other novels by Spitz that appeared under Wellsian titles like Les évadés de l’an
John Klute and Peter Nicholls (eds.), The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (New York: St. Martin’s Press, ), p. ; André Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism (), in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ), pp. , . Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism, pp. –. See the longer treatment of the Gothic novel in André Breton, ‘Nonnational Boundaries of Surrealism’ (), in Free Rein (), trans. Michel Parmentier and Jacqueline d’Amboise (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, ), pp. –. Also see Patrick Brantlinger, ‘The Gothic Origins of Science Fiction’, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, / (autumn ), – (at p. ). Arthur B. Evans, ‘Science Fiction in France: A Brief History and Selective Bibliography’, Science Fiction Studies, / (), – (at pp. , ); Roger Bozzetto, ‘Intercultural Interplay: Science Fiction in France and the United States (As Viewed from the French Shore)’, trans. Arthur B. Evans, Science Fiction Studies, / (March ), –; Klute and Nicholls (eds.), Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, p. . See Jean-Marc Gouanvic, La science-fiction française au XXe siècle (Amsterdam: Rodopi, ), pp. –.
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(), L’homme élastique (), and La guerre des mouches () remain inaccessible to non-French speakers and not exactly easily available even to the French. Largely forgotten in France, unknown elsewhere, Spitz’s novels represent a site upon which surrealism and a form of SF truly meet, since Spitz was close to the surrealists in Paris in the s. As well as reviewing in the Nouvelle revue française the then-recent book by Léon-Pierre Quint, Le comte de Lautréamont et Dieu (), devoted to perhaps the most important pre-surrealist writer, he published an article on quantum theory in June in the one and only number of Inquisitions, edited by recently disaffected ex-surrealists Louis Aragon, Roger Caillois, Jules Monnerot, and Tristan Tzara. That journal was given over largely to questions about science, philosophy, and literature, and recent scientific concerns of the surrealists are present in Spitz’s SF novels of the time. In L’expérience du Dr. Mops () for example, the eponymous villain accelerates the activity of what he calls his victim’s ‘memory cells’, so that his eyes see the future while his body exists in the present. Such speculations are precisely in keeping with esoteric ones within surrealism of the period, notably in Pierre Mabille’s essay in the surrealist-dominated journal Minotaure on the painter Victor Brauner’s loss of an eye, where Mabille conjectures that it might be possible to free oneself from the restrictions imposed by the five senses, and ‘rise beyond visual Euclidean dimensions’. During the high period of Spitz’s productivity in the late s, French SF was on the decline. Only sixteen new titles were published in , from which year Spitz’s career would wind down as he was drawn into the Second World War, fighting for the allies. Ironically, this was the
Spitz’s work has been gaining greater recognition in English-language scholarship, partly for what one author calls its ‘post-Surrealist irony’. Arthur B. Evans, ‘The Apocalyptic Science Fiction of Jacques Spitz’, Science Fiction Studies, / (July ), –. Jacques Spitz, ‘Lautréamont, par Léon-Pierre Quint’ (book review), NRF, / ( August ), –; Jacques Spitz, ‘La théorie quantique et le problème de la connaissance’, Inquisitions, (), –. Also see Jacques Spitz, ‘Les quanta et l’individu’, NRF, / ( December ), –. Pierre Mabille, ‘L’oeil du peintre’, Minotaure, – (), – (at p. ). Likewise, the suicidal protagonist of the poignant L’oeil du purgatoire (), similarly titled to Mabille’s text, is tricked into injecting himself with a genus of bacteria that enables him to see the future state of objects presently to hand, including humans, meaning that at first he lives among what he perceives as the dead (including himself in the mirror) until even the dead disappear from view leaving only the perception of a future wasteland in the physical present. See Jacques Spitz, The Eye of Purgatory (), trans. Brian Stableford (Tarzana, : Black Coat Press, ). All translations from French original are my own unless otherwise indicated.
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beginning of the Golden Age of Anglo-US SF, which extended throughout the s and s and would have a massive impact on culture in France. Early evidence of its relevance to surrealism, tied initially to the related genre of weird fiction, is easy to find. At the time of the major exhibition held in New York in titled First Papers of Surrealism, organized mainly by surrealists displaced from Europe by the war, the US journalist and critic Robert Allerton Parker lamented the lack of a collection of Clark Ashton Smith’s work in the essay titled ‘Explorers of the Pluriverse’ that introduced the catalogue of the show: Clark Ashton Smith writes of interplanetary exploration – the common matter of such publications – but he possesses a power to transmute this base material into an imaginative and humorous allegory of human aspirations. Three explorers of the outer universe rocket through space so swiftly that they seem not to be moving at all. Overcome by the monotony of the speedless speed which seemed to be motionless, two of these adventurers murder their companion, and cast the body from the rocket-plane. There it floats and follows them with accusing immobility – since the plane itself is the only body exerting any gravitational pull in that vast emptiness!
He does not cite it directly, but Parker was slightly inaccurately partrecalling a detail of Smith’s story ‘Master of the Asteroid’, which had appeared in in Gernsback’s Wonder Stories, a Martian exploration, isolation-in-space tale told largely in diary format by one Edmond Beverly and set between and , in which a group of three breaks away from the main party of fifteen on board the Selenite. Smith’s story is not really concerned with men exploring the universe but with ‘the dangers that lurk in [men] themselves’, as it was put in the abstract in Wonder Stories. Along with Parker’s declared predilection for such tales in which the conventions of interplanetary exploration acted chiefly as a new means for exploring the human mind, this would become the narrative and theoretical guise under which a form of SF was acceptable to surrealism. In the following year, Parker expanded on his admiration for Smith, whom he venerated even more than he did Smith’s own mentor H.P. Lovecraft, in a more general introduction to SF in the article ‘Such Pulp as Dreams are Made On’, published in the surrealists’ own periodical VVV. By an odd coincidence, the hoped for collection of writings by Smith
Robert Allerton Parker, ‘Explorers of the Pluriverse’, in André Breton (ed.), First Papers of Surrealism (New York: Coordinating Council of French Relief Societies, ), n.p. Clark Ashton Smith, ‘Master of the Asteroid’, Wonder Stories, / (October ), pp. –, . Ibid., p. .
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had almost immediately followed Parker’s text for First Papers of Surrealism, titled Out of Space and Time (footnoted incorrectly by Parker in VVV as Out of Time and Space), and his esteem for Smith is expressed partly with reference to the ‘flights from “the real”’ accomplished by featured tales ‘The End of the Story’ (), ‘The Uncharted Isle’ (), and ‘The City of the Singing Flame’ (). Parker situated these in the larger pulp context of action stories, Westerns, aviation adventures, and narratives driven by sexual encounters in satisfying ‘the subconscious craving for purely physical derring-do’, expressing his own preference for a form of SF that would be returned to by surrealists in later years: Most fascinating, perhaps, are those pulps devoted to super-realistic ‘wonder’, – to the weird, the horrendous, the pseudo-scientific, the resurrection of ancient myths and folklore. In these we discover a wild, undisciplined jailbreak from the concentration camp of the mundane, a carefree defiance of all the physical laws of the universe, a flight from the penury of life in three or four dimensions. Here is explosive volatilization of repressed imaginations, wrenching off the manacles of Time and Space!
Lovecraft was the initiator of such fiction, according to Parker, who was writing at a time in which SF in the sense of interplanetary narratives possessed only a short and immature critical tradition. This shows through in Parker’s self-conscious uneasiness with its new and undeveloped vocabulary, set within a futuristic scenography that was nevertheless influenced by the detective novel and inflected by news of the current war: These ‘scienti-fictions’ catapult the reader (by ‘spaceship’) to the remotest reaches of the solar system . . . Some of these ‘interplanetaries’ (the technical name for such tales) transport you in the twinkling of an eye to any one or other of the (or is it ?) planets, asteroids, or planetoids, of our own solar system. You find yourself, perhaps, in some ‘hot spot’ in Io City, megalopolis of the planet Jupiter. There, (in surreptitious defiance of the interplanetary Gestapo) ‘spacefarers’ and ‘space-rats’ carouse and plot. You, reader, are really the hero – a right guy, a regular fellow, a prince among your comrade star-rovers. You pick up bits of startling information from ‘slender snake-like Venusians’, lepidopterous Mercurians, or good-natured Brobdingnagian Jovians. You plot the downfall of the Hitlerian dictator of the solar system; and from the sidereal double-talk of five planets you inadvertently learn of a colossal snatch-racket: a gangster-star from the other side of infinity is plotting to kidnap our Brother the Sun!
Parker, ‘Such Pulp’, pp. n, .
Ibid., p. .
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Ibid., p. .
Surrealism and the Science Fiction Novel
Logically extrapolating the pulp possibility of Swiftian giants on Jupiter or ‘Brobdingnagian Jovians’, Parker’s text still uses the term ‘scienti-fiction’ derived from Amazing Stories, just about in vogue but not for long, and still in use by Lovecraft and Smith in their correspondence in the thirties. In the midst of Parker’s take-up of the new fiction in the catalogue of First Papers of Surrealism and VVV appeared Breton’s ‘new myth’ of ‘Les grands transparents’, originally translated as ‘The Great Invisibles’ when it was first aired bilingually in the inaugural number of VVV, previous to the one that carried Parker’s essay on the pulps, as the final section of Breton’s ‘Prolegomena to a Third Manifesto of Surrealism or Else’ (). Breton speculated that ‘Man is perhaps not the centre, the focus of the universe’, going on to consider him as a creature known by, yet incidental to, camouflaged animal-beings ‘escaping his sensory frame of reference’, an idea which ‘tends to reduce man, as an interpreter of the universe, to a condition as modest as the child conceives the ants to be in when he has overturned the ant-hill with his foot’. Although Parker had made special mention of tales by Lovecraft such as ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ () and ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ (), it is unlikely that Breton read Lovecraft either then or later, yet ‘The Great Invisibles’ share elements in common with Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos and the ficto-mythology of the ‘Old Ones’, namely that humans might be the accidental outcome, offshoot, or subject of an older and more powerful, unfamiliar, and hidden race. More to the point, not only did Breton cite in the ‘Prolegomena’ the same literary precursors for ‘The Great Invisibles’ as those that have since been claimed for SF, notably Cyrano and Swift, but the concept of ‘The Great Invisibles’ is strikingly similar to the ‘parasitic mastery’ tale of the genre. Rooted in Guy de Maupassant’s feverish and paranoid fantastic/ horror story ‘The Horla’ (/) (cited by Breton in the catalogue of First Papers of Surrealism on the page devoted to ‘The Great Invisibles’, and also an inspiration for Lovecraft), this subgenre circulated in the anglophone SF that was inspired by the writings of Charles Fort (eulogized as the
André Breton, ‘Prolégomènes à un troisième manifeste du surréalisme ou non’ / ‘Prolegomena to a Third Manifesto of Surrealism or Else’, VVV, (June ), –. André Breton, ‘Prolegomena to a Third Manifesto of Surrealism or Else’ (), in Breton, What Is Surrealism? Selected Writings, ed. and trans. Franklin Rosemont (London: Pluto, ), p. . Ibid., p. . See the collage-album by Breton, ‘De la survivance de certains mythes et de quelques autres mythes en croissance ou en formation’/’On the Survival of Certain Myths and on Some Other Myths in Growth or Formation’, in Breton (ed.), First Papers of Surrealism, n.p.; S.T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, An H.P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia (Westport, : Greenwood Press, ), p. .
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‘Socrates of the Bronx’ by Parker in ‘Explorers of the Pluriverse’) from at least in stories by Edmond Hamilton (‘The Space Visitors’ of and ‘The Earth Owners’ of ), Eric Frank Russell (Sinister Barrier of , repub. , ), and H.J. Campbell (Beyond the Visible of ). The apparently close relationship between the surrealism of the early s and the emerging popular fiction of SF did not really lead to crossover novels of surrealo-SF, certainly not from within surrealism. Rather, various individuals within the larger surrealist circle engaged in an enthusiast’s historico-theoretical response from the mid-s, intensifying up to the early s as anglophone SF began to flood into France. From this point, broad-ranging analysis and discussion ensued close to and within the surrealist group as to its origins and merits. After the war, in the thick of what one author calls the ‘great age of the paperbacks’ that extended from the thirties to the sixties in France and the US, the rapid increase in SF novels published in the US up to along with the initiation of the Marshall Plan (–) and subsequent escalation of enthusiasm for US culture generally in Europe led to the genre becoming better known in France, even though it was accompanied by suspicion in some quarters according to the history given near the time by a Belgian SF writer on the border of surrealism, Jacques Sternberg. Others were deeply enthusiastic, such as ex-surrealist Raymond Queneau and the writer and musician Boris Vian who construed the proliferation of SF in the US itself since as the requirement to express a ‘personal utopia’ in the face of political and moral censure led by the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
Parker’s text (titled after the volume by William James, A Pluralistic Universe of , which was acknowledged elliptically by Breton as an inspiration for ‘The Great Invisibles’), was clearly prompted in part by the appearance of the thick omnibus The Books of Charles Fort (), which had harvested an abundance of ‘surrealist’ imagery from the newspapers, cited by Parker: ‘snowflakes the size of saucers, of black rains, red rains, the fall of a thousand tons of butter, of jetblack snow, pink snow, blue hailstones, of hailstones with the flavour of oranges’. Parker, ‘Explorers of the Pluriverse’, n.p.; Breton, ‘Prolegomena to a Third Manifesto of Surrealism or Else’, p. . For more on ‘The Great Invisibles’ and its literary accomplices, see my ‘We Are Property: The “Great Invisibles” Considered Alongside “Weird” and Science Fiction in America, –’, The Space Between: Literature and Culture, –, (autumn ), n.p. Steven Roger Fischer, A History of Reading (London: Reaktion, ), p. . Jacques Sternberg, Une succursale du fantastique nommée science-fiction (Paris: Le Terrain Vague, ), pp. –. Boris Vian, ‘Aimez-vous la science-fiction?’ (), in Vian, Cinéma, science fiction (Paris: Christian Bourgois, ), p. .
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Surrealism and the Science Fiction Novel
Literary SF buffs Jacques Bergier and François Le Lionnais had tried unsuccessfully to persuade Gallimard to begin a collection devoted to the genre as early as but such publishing ventures only became possible in France in the years –, which saw a massive influx of translated US SF novels of the Golden Age of the s and s by Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein, Clifford D. Simak, Theodore Sturgeon, and A.E. van Vogt. These were put out through collections that placed emphasis on the established and growing genre of the fantastic, such as ‘Les horizons fantastiques’ published by Le Sillage (from –); ‘Le rayon fantastique’ (–) overseen jointly by Hachette and Gallimard, co-directed by Georges H. Gallet (who had been directly inspired by the pioneering article in Le Figaro littéraire by Claude Elsen titled ‘La science-fiction remplacera-t-elle le roman policier?’) and the journalist, translator, and SF enthusiast Michel Pilotin, who had been involved with the surrealist-influenced Martinican students’ journal Légitime défense in ; and, perhaps most importantly, ‘Présence du future’ by Denoël (–), which translated Bradbury, Lovecraft, and van Vogt, as well as Fredric Brown and Astounding Science Fiction editor John W. Campbell alongside French SF authors, and was directed by Robert Kanters who was a specialist in the occult and a great admirer of Breton. The market for SF magazines in the US had reached a high by the end of the s following the launch of Amazing Stories, the first of its kind, and after the slump caused by the war it recovered dramatically between and . This period saw the appearance of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction () and Galaxy Science Fiction () aimed at adult audiences, followed in late by French versions of both, titled Fiction and Galaxie. Whereas the latter was almost entirely devoted to translations of US writers recently published in Galaxy Science Fiction, the monthly, digest-sized Fiction supplemented these under publisher Maurice Renault with reprints of French SF and fantastic fiction from the s and s, publication of new stories by French authors, and pages of reviews and discussion of the genre. Appearing soon after (and promoted and advertised in) the semi-surrealist journal Bizarre (which promised ‘Contes fantastiques – Documents insolites’), Fiction did not simply devote itself to SF as Galaxie did, frequently displaying uncertainty as to its literary identity by changing its descriptors to
Jacques Sadoul, Histoire de la science-fiction moderne (Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont, ), p. . Evans, ‘Science Fiction in France’, p. ; Gouanvic, Science-fiction française, pp. –; Sadoul, Histoire de la science-fiction moderne, pp. –; Bozzetto, ‘Intercultural Interplay’, p. . See Clute and Nicholls (eds.), Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, p. .
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accommodate its contents for the month. Surrealist writings and opinions were only very occasionally acceptable in Fiction, apparently, since in its first twenty years it published just a few short stories by Belen (Nelly Kaplan), Michel Carrouges, and Lise Deharme, as well as articles, reviews, or interviews on, by, or with Robert Benayoun, Ado Kyrou, Gérard Legrand, and André Pieyre de Mandiargues, and discussions or exhibition reviews of surrealist or near-surrealist artists routinely associated with the fantastic such as Hans Bellmer, Paul Delvaux, Max Ernst, Leonor Fini, and René Magritte. The stories of Kaplan and de Mandiargues that appeared in Fiction from to are, in fact, in the style of the Gothic fantastic not SF. Nevertheless, Kaplan’s friend and admirer Philippe Soupault reluctantly acknowledged her association with SF, while rather generously comparing her supernatural, erotic fairytales to Arthur Rimbaud’s poetry, in the lengthy, gushing blurb he wrote on Kaplan’s behalf for the double-page Terrain Vague promotion of her book La géométrie dans les spasmes (), which appeared twice in the surrealist periodical Bief: Jonction surréaliste. The new translations, collections, and magazines inevitably prompted scholarly interest, and it is usually the articles and reviews by Queneau and Vian that are cited by historians as the earliest favourable commentary on Anglo-US SF in France by writers or intellectuals. Queneau had been an on-off frequenter of the surrealist group in Paris between and . Even after his departure, he was sensitive to Breton’s anti-novel or antinarrative statement ventriloquized through Paul Valéry in the Manifesto – ‘The Marquise went out at five o’clock’ – and might have been attracted to SF stories for their abolition of Marquises and other representatives of the typical content of the nineteenth-century realist novel, along with its ‘mythic’ possibilities, even as the humanist, ‘Balzacian’ structure of realism was usually retained by the genre in the consistency of its use of past tense, first and third person, characters motivating the plot and, usually, predictable trajectory of the emotions and absolute temporality. Queneau’s reading record shows that his earliest venture into a kind of SF (if we discount his reading in June of Cyrano’s Voyage dans la lune et aux états du soleil) was probably in March when he read JeanAntoine Nau’s Force ennemie (), the first winner of the Prix Goncourt, in which our unreliable narrator is either mad or inhabited by Kmôhoûn of
Anonymous, ‘Fiction’, Bizarre, (‘Cent-cinquantenaire de J.I. Grandville’) (), p. . See, for instance, Peter Fitting, ‘SF Criticism in France’, Science Fiction Studies, / (spring ), – (at p. ); Sadoul, Histoire de la science-fiction moderne, p. ; Evans, ‘Science Fiction in France’, p. . Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism, p. .
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Surrealism and the Science Fiction Novel
the staggeringly brutal planet Tkoukra that orbits the red star Aldebaran. In March , he read the translation of the Hungarian Frigyes Karinthy’s ‘sixth travel book of Gulliver’, the misogynistic and frequently repellent Voyage à Capillaire (). Queneau’s reading surged from –: Henry Kuttner’s Fury (), Russell’s Sinister Barrier, the Lovecraft/August Derleth ‘collaboration’ The Lurker and the Threshold (, written mostly by Derleth), Jack Williamson’s uneven yet, at times, mesmerizing time travel tale featuring square-jawed youth of principle John Star, The Legion of Space (/), Williamson’s novella ‘Gateway to Paradise’ (published in Startling Stories in July ), van Vogt’s The World of Null-A (/), and ‘The Players of Null-A’ (–/). His immersion in the genre sparked a brief essay in a special number of Cahiers du Sud in where Queneau gave a synopsis of the pioneering, idiosyncratic ‘space opera’ Star, ou Psi Cassiopea () by Charlemagne Ischir Defontenay, which he had discovered while rummaging around in the Bibliothèque Nationale with nothing better to do after his stint with the surrealists. More important is his groundbreaking review for Georges Bataille’s journal Critique of the collections The Best of Science Fiction () by restless SF anthologizer Groff Conklin (called ‘Graff-Conklin’ here) and Beyond Time and Space () by Lovecraft protégé and editor at Arkham House, Derleth, where he commends the two anthologies as the best produced to date. Queneau’s review-essay in Critique stands for many as the initial attempt by a French intellectual to analyse and assess positively what was being regarded as a ‘new genre’. In fact, Queneau acknowledged the precursor-creating subtitle of Derleth’s collection, ‘A Compendium of Science Fiction Through the Ages’, along with the heritage of Verne and Wells, but regarded the predecessors indicated by Derleth going back to Plato as writers of utopias and ‘romans d’anticipation’, and therefore as creators of ‘archaic forms’ of SF. The adventures these forerunners described were preceded by lengthy explanations of
Raymond Queneau, Journaux –, ed. Anne Isabelle Queneau (Paris: Gallimard, ), p. . Raymond Queneau, ‘Defontenay’, in Francis Dumont (ed.), Les petits romantiques français (Marseille: Cahiers du Sud, ), p. . For his post-surrealist thumb twiddling, see Raymond Queneau, ‘Conversation with Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes’ (), in Queneau, Letters, Numbers, Forms: Essays, –, trans. Jordan Stump (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, ), p. . Raymond Queneau, ‘Un nouveau genre littéraire: Les science-fictions’ (book review), Critique, / ( March ), –. Ibid., p. .
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preparation and research – what amounted to realist measures taken to make ‘excusable’, as Queneau put it, the unbelievable journeys ultimately undertaken. By contrast, technical or scientific elucidation was dispensed with by writings representative of the new genre, such as Williamson’s fastmoving Legion of Space, Asimov’s layered, scientifically proficient vision of Earth’s radioactive future, Pebble in the Sky (), and Murray Leinster’s collection The Last Space Ship (), in which the reader is pitched into a future society and technology without necessarily receiving full explanation of its historical development. This lack of realism that was brazenly extolled by US pulp SF was precisely what irked Lovecraft, causing him to insist that ‘a strict following of scientific fact in representing the mechanical, astronomical, and other aspects of the trip is absolutely essential’ for the success of ‘interplanetary fiction’ as he called it. In spite of Lovecraft’s own impatience with the genre, Queneau was right to give Derleth’s mentor credit for shaping SF, as much as he did for continuing the Gothic strand of literature that he and the surrealists so admired: In addition, science fiction authors seeking new themes, swept away by their immoderate imaginations, move towards the extra-scientific and cross the imprecise borders separating SF from the genre termed ‘weird’, the heir of the fantastic novel and ghost stories. H.P. Lovecraft is thus, at once, one of the creators of contemporary science fiction and one of the most celebrated representatives of what in Anglo-Saxon countries is called the Gothic tradition.
Queneau’s knowledge of SF and weird pulp fiction came from the circle of enthusiasts he was entering, which included Bergier, Le Lionnais, and Vian whom Queneau read in manuscript form in – while working at Gallimard before befriending and supporting him at the publishing house. Fluent in English like Queneau and Bergier, Vian was one of the most fanatical readers of US pulp magazines in France, among the first in that country to discuss its importance in print, and a writer whose stories contain strange contraptions such as the ‘pianocktail’ and
Ibid., p. . The importance of this defining passage was consolidated when it was quoted from at length the following year by Maurice Renault, ‘Qu’est-ce que la science-fiction?’ Rapports FranceÉtats-Unis (October ), p. . H.P. Lovecraft, ‘Some Notes on Interplanetary Fiction’ (), in Lovecraft, Collected Essays, vol. : Literary Criticism, ed. S.T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, ), p. . Queneau, ‘Nouveau genre littéraire’, p. . François Billetdoux, ‘Boris, le bon vian’, Arts, (– April ), p. . For more on Queneau’s SF reading in the early s and his role at Gallimard, see Michel Lécureur, Raymond Queneau: Biographie (Paris: Les Belles Lettres/Archimbaud, ), pp. –.
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Surrealism and the Science Fiction Novel
‘heartsnatcher’ (arrache-cœur) that are less like the half-described technogadgets we find in SF of the period than imaginary surrealist objects, which is perhaps why his novels could be so highly valued by surrealists such as Legrand. The genre of the ‘scientific romance’ was being reassessed at the time, no doubt piloted by what one author called the ‘virtual tidal wave of Anglo-US SF into postwar France’. Verne’s return to favour was signalled by a special ‘homage’ issue of the periodical Arts et Lettres in , for which surrealism provided a context for one of the two lead essays that provoked the most discussion. That was by the young and barely known Michel Butor, who gave a reading of Verne that demonstrated his immersion at the time in the culture of surrealism, comparing Verne’s poetic prose in his opening passages with the art of Ernst and the poetry of Paul Éluard and the Comte de Lautréamont. From there, he went on to evaluate ‘a mythology of singular structure’ across two domains of ‘the imagined and the known’ through focus on the polar exploration so often found in Verne, which Butor viewed as a metaphor for the Golden Age and directly analogous to ‘the definition of a certain point set forth in the Second Manifesto of Surrealism’ of . The other main essay in the Verne issue of Arts et Lettres is by the emerging Carrouges, sidling up to surrealism at the time yet giving it no mention in his text. However, Carrouges would soon turn determinedly to the topic of SF and surrealism when he contributed with Butor and
See the high praise for Vian’s Froth on the Daydream (), in Gérard Legrand, Puissances du Jazz (Paris: Arcanes, ), pp. –. Evans, ‘Science Fiction in France’, p. . Michel Butor, ‘The Golden Age in Jules Verne’ (), trans. Richard Howard, in Butor, Inventory: Essays, ed. Richard Howard (London: Jonathan Cape, ), pp. –. See Michel Butor, ‘Le point suprème et l’âge d’or: À travers quelques œuvres de Jules Verne’, Arts et Lettres, / (), –. Butor, ‘Golden Age in Jules Verne’, pp. , , . Famously, Breton defined surrealist activity as the search for that ‘certain point in the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions’. Breton, Second Manifesto of Surrealism (), in Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, p. . In interview, Butor recalled that before ‘I had already written plenty of poems . . . which were Surrealist in technique. I was very close to Surrealist people, though I was never inside the Surrealist group . . . I knew Breton, for instance. I liked him very much and we were almost close friends.’ G. Almansi and Stephen Bann, ‘Interview with Michel Butor’, th Century Studies, (December ), – (at pp. , ). Michel Carrouges, ‘Le mythe de Vulcain chez Jules Verne’, Arts et Lettres, / (), –. Although never a surrealist, Carrouges had been very interested in surrealism since the end of the war, then became quite well known due to a book that was warmly received by the surrealists: Michel Carrouges, André Breton and the Basic Concepts of Surrealism (), trans. Maura Prendergast (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, ).
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Pilotin among others to the large section of the issue of Cahiers du Sud given over to SF on the initiative of Pilotin. Butor argued in his essay that the supposedly ‘new’ genre lauded by Queneau and Vian had much in common with the oldest mythological literature of European civilization but that SF was ‘fragile’ and already in crisis. That was partly because its typical lack of specialist, technical, scientific knowledge made SF unable or reluctant to imagine into print other or future worlds with precision and therefore led to a powerlessness within the genre to discover a unity across its many worlds; a lack of narrative co-ordination, that is, leading to ‘an infinity of variously sketched futures, all independent of one another and generally contradictory . . . an infinity of Venuses, each of which diminishes the plausibility of the rest’. For his part, Carrouges attempted in Cahiers du Sud to position SF in the ongoing history of Romantic, modern, avant-garde, fantastic, and utopian writing since by creating the category of ‘littérature d’anticipation’ as the written transcription of ‘modern folklore’. Leading up to Verne and Wells, the canon of their visionary predecessors, argued Carrouges, extended from the writings of Renaissance utopian prophets through the inevitable travels of Cyrano and Swift to Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket () and Auguste Villiers de l’Isle Adam’s Future Eve (), entering the twentieth century with Alfred Jarry’s Supermale (). At the end of this great chain, wrote Carrouges, are popular novels for adults that also anticipate the society, world, or technology of the future, including Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (), George Orwell’s (), and Adolfo Bioy Casares’s SF fantasy The Invention of Morel (). To these, Carrouges contrasted the texts of surrealism, similarly forward-looking, as those of a movement that ‘unfurls the flag of the future’ in its rhetoric and revolutionary ambition, aiming to remake society and change the human race. However, alongside surrealism’s anticipatory orientation, he argued, came a questioning of science and attraction to the past, evident in its preference for the ‘fantastique romantique’ of the
Michel Butor, ‘The Crisis in the Growth of Science Fiction’ (), trans. Richard Howard, in Butor, Inventory, p. . See Michel Butor, ‘La crise de croissance de la science-fiction’, Cahiers du Sud, / (), –. Butor, ‘Crisis in the Growth of Science Fiction’, p. . Carrouges, ‘Le spectroscope des anticipations’, Cahiers du Sud, / (), – (at p. ). Carrouges’s citation of the utopias imagined by Tommaso Campanella, Thomas More, and Francis Bacon demonstrates his familiarity with Derleth’s anthology as reviewed two years earlier by Queneau who had referred to all three. Queneau, ‘Nouveau genre littéraire’, pp. –. Carrouges, ‘Spectroscope des anticipations’, pp. –. Ibid., p. .
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Surrealism and the Science Fiction Novel
Gothic novel, a tradition that was currently continued in the group by Julien Gracq and Pieyre de Mandiargues. SF could sometimes succeed in a comparable way as anticipatory art, according to Carrouges, naming James Morgan Walsh’s Vandals of the Void (/) and José Moselli’s little known, extraordinarily violent Illa’s End (/) as examples, the first with intergalactic rockets drawn from aviation imagery of the past (and weakened by its literalism for Carrouges) and the second infused by an anticipatory, visionary grandeur even though the memoir in the tale is purportedly discovered in and set in a historically distant epoch. For Carrouges, past and future went hand in hand, which he saw as a feature within or close to surrealism in the writings of Raymond Roussel and the art of Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, and Giorgio de Chirico. This assertion would form the bedrock of Carrouges’s most highly respected book, the far-reaching Les machines célibataires () in which his authors Poe, Villiers, Jarry, and Roussel reappear as case studies. Published close to surrealism by Eric Losfeld’s company Éditions Arcanes, it was advertised in the surrealists’ periodicals Médium: Communication surréaliste and Bief, even claimed as an ‘ouvrage surréaliste’ in the second of these, though not all surrealists were enthusiastic about the religious theories and convictions espoused by book and author. Elsewhere, in an assessment of Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles () made around the same time, the indefatigable Carrouges drew heavily upon Breton’s writings to contend that the roman d’anticipation performed the same role in the twentieth century as that of the Gothic novel in the eighteenth. Meanwhile, Carrouges had taken an interest in the phenomenon of UFOs and would later go so far as to brandish Breton’s ‘fantastic hypothesis’ of ‘The Great Invisibles’ as a divinatory forecast of extra-terrestrials.
Ibid., p. . See the similar argument about surrealist continuity in Michel Carrouges, ‘Le surréalisme mort ou vif?’ Monde nouveau, / (), –. Michel Carrouges, Les machines célibataires (Paris: Arcanes, ). Carrouges’s methodology is attacked in the very journal that advertised his book by René Alleau, ‘Des fictions et des jeux’, Médium: Communication surréaliste, (January ), –. An unflattering, two-part response to the study from within surrealism discovers evidence of its author’s ‘religious monomania’: Jehan Mayoux, ‘Les machines célibataires’, Bizarre, (May ), – and (October ), –. Michel Carrouges, ‘Ray Bradbury, les Martiens et nous’, Monde nouveau, / (May ), – (at p. ). Michel Carrouges, ‘La dynamique de l’occultation’, in Henri Béhar (ed.), Mélusine, (‘OcculteOccultation’) (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, ), p. . At the time, he was also embarking on a still little-known career as an author of fantastic novels and stories that would see him published in Fiction in and , but would not outlast the fifties: see the one-edition-only novels Les portes dauphines () and Les grands-pères prodiges ().
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The writings of Carrouges and Butor on SF in Cahiers du Sud received direct response from Benayoun, the post-war surrealist with perhaps the greatest interest in the genre and a related one in the writings of Fort. This took place in the same inaugural issue of Médium: Communication surréaliste in where he and Legrand introduced Lovecraft to a surrealist audience. In his text titled ‘La science est-elle une fiction?’ Benayoun objected to Butor’s call for the limitation and unification of SF with the hoped-for aim, expressed by the Nouveau Romancier, of ‘acquiring over the individual imagination a constraining power comparable to that of any classical mythology’. For the surrealist, by contrast, ‘To impose on a man a prefabricated future is to forget, somewhat, the rights he possesses over his own future.’ Benayoun drew upon the ‘very relevant article’ by Carrouges in the same issue of Cahiers du Sud to argue that surrealism had always looked to eruptions of the future in the present as means of casting doubt on the temporal logic that separated absolutely past, present, and future. Alongside his assertion of the relevance of surrealism’s precursors such as Cyrano, Jarry, Roussel, and Duchamp to a contrary strand to the scientific futurity of SF, Benayoun added new names to the roster of pre-surrealists and fellow travellers of surrealism, namely Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. Rider Haggard, and Smith, all of whom had contributed to a ‘lost continent’ genre of fantasy close to SF without being typical of it. Against the stories of van Vogt, C.S. Lewis – called ‘Lewis le petit’ by Benayoun to distinguish him the revered author of The Monk – and Butor’s prescription of a modern mythology for SF through a ‘collective dream’, ‘collective work’, and ‘single city’, he paid tribute to their individual generation of golden ages, incidents of eternal love, and alternative worlds. Smith’s novellas are certainly fantastic and he even published interplanetary narratives, as we saw, in Amazing Stories, Astounding Stories, and Wonder Stories in the s, when he was also the most important
See Robert Benayoun, ‘Le chandail d’Einstein’, Médium: Communication surréaliste, (January ), ; and his translation: Charles Fort, Le livre des damnés, trans. Robert Benayoun (Paris: Deux Rives, ). Robert Benayoun and Gérard Legrand, ‘H.P.L. et la lune noire’, Médium: Communication surréaliste, (November ), . For a translation, see Robert Benayoun and Gérard Legrand, ‘H. P. L. & The Black Moon’, in Franklin Rosemont (ed.), Surrealism & Its Popular Accomplices (San Francisco: City Lights Books, ), p. . Butor, Inventory, p. . Robert Benayoun, ‘La science est-elle une fiction?’ Médium: Communication surréaliste, (November ), pp. , . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Butor, Inventory, p. .
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Surrealism and the Science Fiction Novel
contributor alongside Lovecraft to Weird Tales, but these tend to turn on episodes of the sinister, macabre, and grotesque. One peculiarity of Smith’s tales that produces rather a dull clang on the mind of the modern reader is their iconography of knights, castles, and forests redolent of Arthurian myth. However, a good example of this kind of legend, ‘The End of the Story’, located in Smith’s fictional French territory of Averoigne (and mentioned by Parker in VVV where Benayoun probably first read about Smith), is set not in the medieval period but in , the era of the Gothic novel. This strange strategy of situating the Middle Ages in the period that stereotyped it in its literature – as though history and fiction were inseparable – was appealing to Benayoun and the surrealists. The same can be said of Smith’s use of themes like dual dimensionality and ancient yet advanced civilizations in ‘The City of the Singing Flame’, vampires and the supernatural in ‘A Rendezvous in Averoigne’ (), serendipitous discovery of lost islands containing ‘intimations of a dark and prehistoric antiquity’ in ‘The Uncharted Isle’ and even invisible beings in ‘The Invisible City’ (). Benayoun’s response to Butor and Carrouges took place at a very early stage in the arrival and translation of anglophone SF in France when the surrealist had probably little real knowledge of individual novels. He would return briefly and somewhat cantankerously to the subject in a statement responding to the enquête on SF in the French weekly cultural newspaper Arts in , criticizing the very existence of a category under that ‘terme stupide’ while finding surrealist virtue in writers such as Bradbury, Brown, and Lewis Padgett and expressing particular admiration for Richard Matheson’s reboot of literary vampirism and invention of the zombie genre, I Am Legend (), translated in Denoël’s ‘Présence du future’ in and reviewed by Claude Ernoult in Bizarre. Matheson’s account, set in Los Angeles in the s, of Robert Neville’s plight as, apparently, the lone survivor of a pandemic that has destroyed part of the human race and transformed the remainder into vampires, constitutes an original extension and renewal of a genre that surrealism since its inception had virtually elevated to the level of a new myth in its various incarnations in
Clark Ashton Smith, ‘The End of the Story’ (), in Smith, Out of Space and Time (; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, ), pp. –. Smith, Out of Space and Time, p. . His contribution to the two-part enquête arranged by Sternberg appears as Robert Benayoun, ‘Je crois à l’imagination féroce et subversive’, Arts, ( June– July ), p. ; Claude Ernoult, ‘Je suis une légende par Richard Matheson’ (book review), Bizarre, (December ), .
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fin-de-siècle painting, Lautréamont’s Chants de Maldoror (), Louis Feuillade’s film series Les vampires (–), Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s movie Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (), and many more instances. Years later, in an interview with Fiction promoting the release of his ‘time travel’ movie Paris n’existe pas (), Benayoun clarified and amplified the critical position he had taken on SF in the fifties in Médium and Arts with reference to Golden Age authors: I have always been hostile to some authors, such as Asimov, Frederick Pohl, van Vogt, Heinlein. And I have always preferred to them Lewis Padgett, Bradbury, John Wyndham, Fredric Brown, or William Tenn. What I prefer above all are voyages in time and histories of parallel worlds, when they break a path onto the fantastic and onto legends: so, vampirism attracts me enormously . . . On the other hand, because I am coming from surrealism, I am interested in the fantastic, the marvellous, in its everyday aspects . . .
Elucidating his earlier admiration for I Am Legend, Benayoun’s remarks promulgate a critical selectivity towards a genre that the surrealists suspected. A similar position can be discerned in the attitude of Legrand who in had acclaimed in Bizarre the elements of the imaginary-made-real in Sturgeon’s accomplished debut novel The Dreaming Jewels (), about facsimiled organisms including humans living alongside ‘real’ ones, yet voiced hostility towards SF in the s. This retrieval of certain authors insofar as they repurpose long-standing concerns of the surrealists linked to folklore, dreams, the animation of the inanimate, and the relationship between eroticism and death, themes frequently favoured by the Gothic novel, emerged from a deeper attitude towards knowledge, civilization, science, and modern history that took the form of a nonprogressivist anti-evolutionism. It has been characterized by the literary historian and Lovecraft specialist Michel Meurger who saw it as an inclination in their periodical Médium, especially where the ‘primitivistoccultist tendencies’ demonstrate that surrealism’s interest in ‘“primitive”
See, for instance, early texts by Louis Aragon, ‘Entrée des succubes’, La révolution surréaliste, ( March ), –; and Robert Desnos, ‘Journal d’une apparition’, La révolution surréaliste, – ( October ), –. Also see Neil Matheson, Surrealism and the Gothic: Castles of the Interior (London and New York: Routledge, ), p. . Bernard Cohn, ‘Un entretien avec Robert Benayoun’, Fiction, / (June ), – (at p. ). Gérard Legrand, ‘Retour de miroirs’, Bizarre, (), p. n. Gérard Legrand, ‘Une apparence de soupirail (. Miroir aux alouettes)’, in L’écart absolu (Paris: Galerie de l’Oeil, ), n.p.
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Surrealism and the Science Fiction Novel
societies corresponds with its rejection of rationalism and the idea of technological progress’. As Meurger writes, ‘To the ideology of progress, which sees perfection in the future, the occultist ideology opposes original perfection. The quest of occultists is thus that of a recuperation of lost powers.’ This dialectic of a ‘regressive futurity’ goes far beyond a simple taste for the ‘outmoded’, and for surrealists and those close to them from the s it united the best authors of SF and weird fiction, as explicitly stated by Carrouges. In , Benayoun revisited the surrealism-friendly mini-canon of SF novelists that he recalled reading while Paris n’existe pas was in preparation: In my relentless preoccupation with the subject, I had reread all the works of science fiction that treated it from near or far, in order, of course, to distance myself from it. I had devoured Wells, Rider Haggard, Maurice Renard, Jack London (the superb Star Rover), Bradbury, William Tenn, Lewis Padgett, Henry Kuttner, J.G. Ballard, John Wyndham, Clifford Simak, etc.
The presence of Ballard in the list is striking because the English author would only become widely received in France after the publication of Crash in . But it is not surprising that Benayoun knew his work earlier since it was published in Fiction from . Ballard was the youngest author in Benayoun’s litany, so he was the one whose stories were written with the longest perspective on surrealism; and Benayoun must have been aware of the profound impact that surrealist themes had on Ballard’s fiction and his many cordial allusions to the movement in book reviews, interviews, and tracts since the early sixties. Ballard’s interest lay less in surrealist poetry than in the psychoanalytically informed writings of the movement and in the painting of surrealist artists such as Salvador Dalí, Oscar Domínguez, Ernst, and Yves Tanguy. Yet it is remarkable how Ballard intuited from the Manifestoes and paintings the latent, linked themes of deep time, the recovery of ancestral memory, noncontradiction of supposed opposites, and the dialectic of regression and anticipation, as they were theorized in SF by Benayoun and others from the
Michel Meurger, Lovecraft et la S.-F./, in Cahiers d’études Lovecraftiennes III (Amiens: Encrage, ), p. . Ibid., pp. –. See Michel Carrouges, ‘Lovecraft et l’anticipation régressive’, Monde nouveau, / (January ), –. Robert Benayoun, Alain Resnais: Arpenteur de l’imaginaire (Paris: Éditions Stock, ), p. . See Jeannette Baxter, J.G. Ballard’s Surrealist Imagination: Spectacular Authorship (Farnham: Ashgate, ).
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s, to shape the plots, events, and dialogue of truly visionary novels set in futures past such as The Drowned World (), The Drought (), and The Crystal World (): [Bodkin] pointed to the ascending rim of the sun through the groves of gymnosperms. ‘The innate releasing mechanisms laid down in your cytoplasm millions of years ago have been awakened, the expanding sun and the rising temperature are driving you back down the spinal levels into the drowned seas submerged beneath the lowest layers of your unconscious, into the entirely new zone of the neuronic psyche. This is the lumbar transfer, total biopsychic recall. We really remember these swamps and lagoons.’ These latent elements in Lomax and Miranda were already appearing. Curiously, Lomax was less frightening than Miranda. Her white hair and utter lack of pity reminded him of the spectre that appeared at all times of extreme exhaustion – the yellow-locked, leprous-skinned lamia who had pursued the Ancient Mariner. Perhaps this phantom embodied archaic memories of a time, whether past or future, when fear and pain were the most valuable emotions, and their exploitation into the most perverse forms the sole imperative.
In these passages and others in Ballard’s fiction, the routine separation of past and future into uncomplicatedly separate zones (as though, indeed, it were possible to spatialize them) is being explored and questioned, just as it had been by Breton in his writing on Tanguy whose tableau Days of Slowness/Lingering Day () gave Ballard the environmental model for the dusty, sandy, smoky world of The Drought. His simultaneous wielding and adaptation of surrealist concerns in his renewal of the genre of SF from the s demonstrates that Ballard’s grasp of the movement’s core themes for his own fiction was far from the superficial or overly literal interpretation that has traditionally hindered writers of the genre. Examples include Russell’s Sinister Barrier, in which Paul Nash’s surrealist painting Landscape from a Dream (–) awkwardly acts as one of the props for the plot, William Sloane’s The Edge of
J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World (; London: Harper Perennial, ), p. . J.G. Ballard, The Drought (; London: Harper Perennial, ), p. . ‘We are behind the scenes of life, in that very place to which Gérard de Nerval had conducted us, where the figures of the past and those of the future “all co-exist, like the various characters in a drama with a still unformulated plot . . .”’. André Breton, ‘Yves Tanguy: What Tanguy Veils and Reveals’ (), in Breton, Surrealism and Painting (), trans. Simon Watson Taylor (New York: Harper & Row, ), p. . For more on Ballard and surrealism, see my ‘Surrealist Painting as Science Fiction: Considering J.G. Ballard’s “Innate Releasing Mechanism”’, in Parkinson (ed.), Surrealism, Science Fiction and Comics, pp. –.
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Surrealism and the Science Fiction Novel
Running Water (), Fredric Brown’s What Mad Universe? (), where Dalí’s imagery performs simplistically as shorthand for an idea of the grotesque, as well as laboured contemporary efforts such as Lisa Goldstein’s time travel novel The Dream Years (), which has the first surrealists themselves transported from the twenties to May ’, and China Miéville’s informed but heavy-handed and often preposterous, surrealistobjects-gone-bad yarn The Last Days of New Paris (), where surrealist art comes to life to threaten the population and an animated collective surrealist ‘exquisite corpse’ collage, no less, acts as the Godzilla of the piece. Ballard’s long dedication to surrealism, his precise understanding and extrapolation of its searching critique of civilization and sometimes desperate message for humankind, and his refusal to present them in their most obvious forms for entertainment as lesser writers do, have an exemplary pitch. They give cause for optimism that, indeed, one future for the SF novel lies in the past achievements of surrealism.
See William Sloane, The Edge of Running Water (; London: Panther, ), p. ; and the suggestion by protagonist Keith Winton of Dalí as potential SF magazine cover illustrator in Fredric Brown, What Mad Universe? (; London: Grafton, ), p. . Recalling the s in his final book, Ballard declared: ‘I felt strongly, and still do, that psychoanalysis and Surrealism were a key to the truth about existence and the human personality, and also a key to myself.’ J.G. Ballard, Miracles of Life (London: Harper Perennial, ), p. .
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Pataphysics Donna Roberts
In Exploits & Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, Pataphysician, Alfred Jarry defined pataphysics as ‘the science of imaginary solutions’. In an era of scientific positivism, when French scientists like Marcellin Berthelot declared the triumph of a world ‘without mystery’, Jarry’s pataphysics – nurtured in the environs of symbolism – ran against the grain of contemporary rationalism. With its aim to ‘examine the laws governing exceptions’ and to ‘explain the universe supplementary to this one’, pataphysics has been a source of influence for generations of radically inventive writers, poets, and artists. Exploits & Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, Pataphysician, subtitled on publication in a ‘neo-scientific novel’, is a genre-defying narrative about the travels of the eponymous doctor and his two companions, Bosse-de-Nage (a baboon who knows no human words but ‘Ha ha’) and Monsieur René-Isidore Panmuphle, a bailiff who has confiscated much of Faustroll’s library. They travel through Paris in a bed, which is also a twelve-metre copper-mesh skiff, or really a sieve coated in an oil that enables it to float, arriving at various destinations which represent figures from the contemporary art world, including Henri Rousseau in charge of a mechanical painting machine known as the Clinamen. Although Faustroll dies along the way, he is still able to communicate telepathically with Lord Kelvin on the subject of pataphysics, ‘the science of all things’. Faustroll was published four years after Jarry’s death at the age of thirtyfour from a combined effect of alcoholism and tuberculosis. With his absurdist humour and eccentric personality, Jarry was much lauded by the surrealists; André Breton cited him in the Manifesto of Surrealism () as
Alfred Jarry, Exploits & Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, Pataphysician, trans. Simon Watson Taylor (Boston: Exact Change, ), p. . Hereafter referred to as Faustroll. Marcellin Berthelot quoted in Robert Fox, The Savant and the State: Science and Cultural Politics in Nineteenth-Century France (Baltimore, : Johns Hopkins University Press, ), p. . Jarry, Faustroll, p. . Ibid., p. .
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Pataphysics
one of the key precursors of surrealism – ‘Jarry is surrealist in absinthe.’ Breton admired Jarry not only for his outrageous satire and anti-positivist invective, but also because he appeared to have fused art and life, notably through his identification with Père Ubu, the grotesque pot-bellied protagonist of his numerous plays. Although it was the performance of Jarry’s play Ubu Roi in that introduced Ubu to the Paris avant-garde, Jarry had created an incarnation of the character a year before in the script Caesar-Antichrist, to which he refers in Book of Faustroll in a way that pertains to surrealism. In the Faustroll dialogue on sacred geometry between Mathetes and Ibicrates, in which he satirizes the traditional confabulation of mathematical logic and metaphysics, Jarry refers to ‘a great tome entitled Caesar Antichrist’ written by Ubu, ‘in which is to be found the sole practical demonstration of the identity of opposites, by means of the mechanical device called physick-stick’. Despite the satirical, metaphysical, and esoteric implications of the identity of opposites as the aim of pataphysics, the notion of the reconciliation of apparent contradictions came to guide Breton’s definition of surrealism in his Second Manifesto of Surrealism. The spelling of the term pataphysics seems to depend on the orthodoxy of the text. In Faustroll, Jarry stipulates that the orthography of the word should be preceded by an apostrophe: ’pataphysics, ‘so as to avoid a simple pun’ (i.e. patte à physique – the paw of physics). According to the poet and historian of pataphysics, Christian Bök, the apostrophe aims to question scientific autonomy: ‘The apostrophe denotes that, while wordplay in the sciences is absent by edict, it is still present by proxy, since even the search for truth is a language-game that can never efface its status as a language-game.’ Taking on a life of its own throughout the arts and literary criticism, the influence of Jarry’s pataphysics has been detected in the work of creative figures as diverse as Marcel Duchamp, Jorge Luis Borges, and the Beatles. Definitions of pataphysics are as diverse as its influence, and often highly contested by its initiates. Bök has described it as an ‘avant-garde pseudo-science’, and historian of pataphysics Andrew Hugill as ‘not so much a movement as a collection of ideas’: ‘pataphysics is
André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ), p. . Jarry, Faustroll, p. . Ibid., p. . Christian Bök, Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science (Evanston, : Northwestern University Press, ), pp. –. Ibid., p. .
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subjective, privileging the particular above the general, the imaginary above the real, the exceptional above the ordinary, the contradictory above the axiomatic’. In pataphysical terms, René Daumal’s novel Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidian Adventures in Mountain Climbing achieves a Jarryesque exceptionalism through its fusion of symbolic art and life: Daumal’s attempt to complete a story about an attempt to climb a symbolically unclimbable mountain was cut short by his death from tuberculosis, aged thirty-six, in May . Unfinished, Mount Analogue was published posthumously in . The pataphysical character of Daumal’s writings was quickly recognized by the Collège de ’Pataphysique, which published his Treatise on Patagrams () in the Cahiers du Collège de Pataphysique no. in September . Both the Treatise and the column that Daumal frequently wrote for the Nouvelle Revue Française between and , titled ‘Pataphysics this Month’, reveal Daumal’s acute pataphysical wit and up-to-date knowledge of modern science. These texts read as satirical and absurdist elaborations upon scientific ideas that appear so reified by impenetrable jargon as to seem like examples of an unconscious pataphysics at work within the scientific world. As Thomas Vosteen has observed, Daumal’s writings reveal an ‘attempt to demonstrate that the science of his time was already striving to be pataphysical’. Daumal’s pataphysical texts of the s contain many allusions to modern physics and geometry that the author would imaginatively adapt for the logic of Mount Analogue. Daumal’s keen grasp of developments in contemporary science was recognized by the editors of the new Encyclopédie française, who in the early s commissioned him to write numerous entries on mathematics and the sciences. Daumal’s knowledge of the mathematical logic behind non-Euclidean geometry, as much as his grasp of what it implied for new topological models for the fictional imagination, thus informs much of the pataphysical dimension of Mount Analogue. Essentially, the non-Euclidean element of the novel concerns the navigational calculations made by Sogol to make the ocean crossing to find the hidden island of Mount Analogue. Until the mid-nineteenth century, the geometrical axioms of Euclid’s Elements of Geometry had held fast. Visually epitomized by the linear perspectival frame of Renaissance artists,
Andrew Hugill, Pataphysics: A Useless Guide (Cambridge, : MIT Press, ), p. . Thomas Vosteen, ‘Translator’s Introduction’, in René Daumal, Pataphysical Essays, trans. and ed. Thomas Vosteen (Cambridge, : Wakefield Press, ), pp. ix–xx (at p. xviii).
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Pataphysics
Euclid’s fifth axiom – the parallel postulate concerning the continuous equidistance of two parallel lines at any right angle – was challenged in the s by numerous mathematicians and termed ‘non-Euclidean’ by Carl Friedrich Gauss. With the development of hyperbolic and elliptic geometries, the parallel lines of Euclidean geometry are calculated as no longer necessarily equidistant at any right-angled point, curving also into concave and convex formations. Arguably, in Mount Analogue, the group’s discovery of the mysterious island is more explicable by a combination of the mysteries of the sacred calendar and a pataphysical sleight of hand known as the clinamen. Nonetheless, think of the non-Euclidean discovery of the fictional island as occurring via some kind of Gaussian curvature of space. Exact mathematical formulae are less important to the novel than an acknowledgement of the leap of imagination that propelled modern physics into the fictional world of the twentieth century. In fusing the narrative of a voyage with allusions to modern theories of the curvature of space, Daumal follows the orientation of science fiction while aligning the metaphors of the journey and navigation with an ancient analogy of the physical journey as spiritual quest. In an era when everything terrestrial seemed to have been charted, Daumal wanted to create a fable of the continual possibility for discovery, of the self, and of truths about being human.
Daumal, the Grand Jeu, and Experimental Metaphysics Along with Reims school friends Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, Roger Vailland, and Robert Meyrat, Daumal established in an initiatory society called the Simplistes. Sharing influences with surrealism, Jarry’s influence was clear in the group’s totemic mascot called ‘Bubu’. In , Daumal, Gilbert-Lecomte, and Vailland transformed the group into the Grand Jeu and established the eponymous periodical which engaged on the margins of surrealism for just three issues between and . While sharing mutual poetic influences with surrealism, along with a critical disdain for the privileging of logical positivism in the modern West, the members of the Grand Jeu distinguished their thinking with an explicit interest in Hindu and Buddhist philosophies and in Henri Bergson’s renewed
For a more detailed account of non-Euclidean geometries and their influence on the modern and surrealist imagination, see Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton University Press, ); Gavin Parkinson, Surrealism, Art, and Modern Science: Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Epistemology (New Haven, : Yale University Press, ).
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validation of metaphysical enquiry. Nourished by his interest in nondualistic Hindu philosophy and poetics, Daumal began serious study of Sanskrit as a teenager, and by the early s would turn away from the surrealist milieu and the intellectual environment of Paris towards the guidance of Alexandre de Salzmann and his wife Jeanne, practitioners of the body-mind teachings of George Gurdjieff. Mount Analogue continues to pursue many of the concerns of the Grand Jeu yet augmenting them with Daumal’s extra years of intense physical experiences of yoga, mountain climbing, and fatal illness. The novel tells a deceptively simple tale which integrates a relatively complex web of philosophical, poetic, and symbolic concerns. In the first English translation (), Roger Shattuck presented a view of Mount Analogue as characteristic of the scope and ambition of Daumal’s thought: ‘The poems, the philosophical and literary essays, the symbolic tales, the letters, all head back to a mind – unquenchable, fearless, full of human sympathy, devoted to seeking and teaching truth.’ Other interpretations of Mount Analogue have tended to focus on the influence of Hindu thought on Daumal’s work, such as Jean Biès () and Kathleen Ferrick Rosenblatt (). In collections of essays on the Grand Jeu () and Daumal (), respectively, Anne-Élisabeth Halpern and Emmanuel Rubio have discussed Mount Analogue in relation to non-Euclidean geometry, pataphysics, and the science-fiction genre. More recently, Samuel McAuliffe () has given the novel a more philosophical reading, focusing on the relation of the mountain to the Kantian sublime. What I aim to add to the literature on Mount Analogue is to provide further explication of the pataphysical dimension of the novel to the English-language reader and to introduce two thus far undiscussed themes: sacred geography and ecology. I wish to emphasize that Daumal’s sense for pataphysics was idiosyncratic in maintaining a contentious metaphysical dimension. Daumal’s pataphysics in this novel tends less towards a mockery of scientific ideas and more to an appropriation of their imaginative potentiality; here flipping geometrical theories metaphorically to inspire not positive knowledge but experiential knowledge. This is not a satirical novel that pataphysically derides unanswerable questions about human experience but, rather, a story about acknowledging the absurdities of the positivist pursuit of certainty as well as the abstractions of Homo mathematicus and the proof-seeking metaphysicians; none of which alleviates the
René Daumal, Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidian Adventures in Mountain Climbing (), trans. Roger Shattuck (Boston: Exact Change, ), p. .
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Pataphysics
unavoidable realities of the condition of the human body-mind, caught between base matter and yearning spirit. Daumal creates in Mount Analogue a novel about how a life of acceptance of these realities – which might otherwise lead to simply absurd laughter or nihilism – can still entail value and meaning, particularly in terms of the immersive experience of the natural world and its laws, collective endeavour and co-operation, and the human capacity for wisdom and teaching. Daumal’s particular use of the term metaphysics, however, needs some clarification. In a special issue of Hermès (), Jean Richer insists that metaphysics for Daumal ‘was not an object of debate or written discourse, but of lived experience or self-induced experimentation’. In an essay titled ‘The Limits of Philosophical Language and Traditional Knowledge’ (), Daumal rejected the idea of metaphysics as based on a transcendent divide between this world and a ‘beyond’: ‘This “elsewhere” must not be understood as a transcendental plane, a mysterious metaphysical real; this “elsewhere” is “here”, in the immediacy of real life.’ The land of Mount Analogue, then, is symbolic and yet firmly fixed within the terrestrial sphere. As a lived experience, Daumal’s understanding of metaphysics should be seen in terms of the Grand Jeu’s notion of ‘experimental metaphysics’. Through this seemingly paradoxical notion, the Grand Jeu sought not only to push at experiential limits, but also, and in general accord with the surrealists’ concerns with reconciling apparently dualistic opposites, to challenge philosophical dualisms and general assumptions concerning the utilitarian necessities of life. Nonetheless, in his ‘Open Letter to André Breton’ (Le Grand Jeu, no. , ), Daumal argued that the Grand Jeu were taking experimentation further than the surrealists by actively seeking lived, experiential means of overcoming what they saw as particularly stubborn oppositions that prevailed in Occidental thought, for example between body and mind, multiplicity and unity, or even life and death. Daumal said of Mount Analogue that he wanted ‘to do for metaphysics what Jules Verne had done for physics’. It is possible that Daumal was here drawing on Jarry’s reference to metaphysics in chapter of Faustroll, where he declared that pataphysics ‘is the science of that which is superinduced upon metaphysics, whether within or beyond the latter’s
Jean Richer, ’Sur le sentier de la montagne: René Daumal conteur’, Hermès, (), – (at p. ). René Daumal, The Powers of the Word: Selected Essays and Notes, –, ed. and trans. Mark Polizzotti (San Francisco: City Lights Books, ), p. . Roger Shattuck quoted in Hugill, Pataphysics, p. .
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limitations, extending as far beyond metaphysics as the latter extends beyond physics’. Daumal’s combination of metaphysics and pataphysics, however, was contentious for some, notably, Daumal’s friend Julien Torma in an exchange of letters in the late s. The deeply sceptical, if not nihilistic, Torma had refused to join the Grand Jeu because of his rejection of the group’s interest in mysticism and metaphysics. Torma argues that pataphysics denies metaphysics, for keeping a window open to transcendence: ‘Put metaphysics behind pataphysics and you make it merely the façade for a belief. Now the essence of pataphysics is that it is a façade of a façade, behind which there is nothing.’ According to Bök, pataphysics subsumes metaphysics and goes beyond it: ‘’Pataphysics represents a supplement to metaphysics, accenting it, then replacing it, in order to create a philosophic alternative to rationalism.’ Quite possibly, Torma was correct in his criticism of Daumal’s need to hold onto the spirit of metaphysical inquiry as incompatible with any ‘proper’ position of pataphysics. Alongside his pataphysical acknowledgement of the existential absurdity of human life, Daumal maintains – apparently unacceptable for Torma – a sympathy for the impossible yearning to move beyond one’s individual material circumscription. It is, however, this sympathy which roots the pataphysics of Mount Analogue within a deeply human sensibility towards the most searing paradoxes of human life. Daumal’s narrative of mountain ascent is not about striving to become superhuman or otherworldly but merely a more lucid, less dependent, less destructive person, and one who has at least attained as coherent a state of resignation to the human condition as is within her/his powers. Daumal’s position has not gone undefended. In a text titled ‘Superliminal Note’ (), Shattuck affirms Daumal’s intention to create a metaphysical parallel to Verne: ‘’Pataphysics, then, entering the great beyond in whatever direction it may lie, offers us a voyage of discovery and adventure into what Jarry called “ethernity”. That, of course, is where we all live.’ Ethernity, Shattuck adds, is what Jarry calls the unknown dimension where Faustroll, surviving his own death, continues his travels. Shattuck is here suggesting that the ‘beyond’ – which traditionally has been
Jarry, Faustroll, p. . Julien Torma, Letter to René Daumal (), in Pataphysical Letters: Correspondence between René Daumal and Julien Torma, trans. Dennis Duncan and Terry Hale (London: Atlas, ), p. . Bök, Pataphysics, p. . Roger Shattuck, ‘Superliminal Note’, Evergreen Review, / (May–June ), repr. in Gerald Guinness and Andrew Hurley (eds.), Actor Ludens: Essays on Play in Literature (Philadelphia and Amsterdam: John Benjamins, ), p. .
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Pataphysics
understood in terms of a transcendent continuation of existence – can only mean an imaginary and therefore infinite dimension, stretched out across endless subjectivities, such as that achieved in literature. Daumal’s ambition, then, to create a kind of pata-metaphysics/metapataphysics is pursued in Mount Analogue by transposing age-old metaphysical problems – such as the reconciliation of multiplicity and unity or the immanent and the transcendent – onto the plane of a terrestrial adventure that in some ways mimics Verne’s transposition of positivist questions onto a fantastical plane. Daumal thereby creates an evocative fable that roots human aspiration for supra-material values within the everyday and as attainable through individual and collective effort. This possibility is symbolized in something as concrete as collective endeavour to find and to climb a mountain, albeit one very difficult to find and impossible to climb: ‘For a mountain to play the role of Mount Analogue . . . its summit must be inaccessible, but its base accessible to human beings as nature has made them. It must be unique and it must exist geographically. The gateway to the invisible must be visible.’
Sacred Geography and Non-Euclidean Navigation As an adventure story, Mount Analogue is playfully intertextual, alluding to the voyage of Doctor Faustroll and Faustroll’s own genealogy in the voyages of François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel. It also carries echoes of the mythos of Jules Verne’s scientific romances, H.G. Wells’s science fiction, and the proto-pataphysics of Lewis Carroll, whose brilliant play with nonsense-logic and mathematical laws finds resonance in Mount Analogue. In both Daumal’s and Carroll’s fictional works we find humour and imaginative leaps hinged upon the confounding of common-sense logic and linear space implied by non-Euclidean logic. Daumal, like Jarry and Carroll, grasped how the implications of the shift in non-Euclidean thinking away from the paradigm of a supposedly fixed and objectively verifiable space created a scientific basis for perspectivalism and relativism which could open up in imaginative fiction the possibilities of worlds ‘supplementary to this one’.
René Daumal, Mount Analogue: A Tale of Non-Euclidian and Symbolically Authentic Mountaineering Adventures, trans. Carol Cosman (Woodstock and New York: Overlook Press, ), p. . Other than the quotes from Shattuck’s introductory essay, all references to Mount Analogue are from the translation by Carol Cosman.
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Daumal intended the novel to incorporate different genres, describing thus in a letter his plans: ‘It will be an adventure novel based on the scientific fantastic à la Wells – ideas approximate of course – with nautical, detective novel and, above all, alpine scenes.’ Mount Analogue was Daumal’s second novel, first published in and in in the English translation by Shattuck. Although not published until , his first novel, La grande beuverie (published in in English translation as A Night of Serious Drinking) was written in at a time deeply marked by the final dissolution of the Grand Jeu group and Daumal’s orientation towards de Salzmann. Daumal, like many of the surrealists, grew up on the absurdist black humour of Jarry and Rabelais, and the journeys of Faustroll, Gargantua, and Pantagruel constitute some of many referential layers within this richly polysemic text. Viviane Barry has defined the humour in both Daumal’s novels as a mix of ‘Rabelaisian, Ubuesque or Voltairesque, ludic or corrosive’, and points to the critical use of humour throughout a range of Daumal’s writings: ‘an effective tool for destabilising daily routine, it has the function of revealing the absurdity of the society in which we live and that of our human condition’. The story of Mount Analogue is of a group of disparate characters brought together in Paris through a spiritual mentor, inventor of pataphysical devices, expert climber, and quantum-navigator called Père Sogol (the name implying stone, father, and logos backwards). In a kind of mise-enabyme, the narrator, Theodore (Daumal’s avatar), has combined his scholarly interest in ancient symbolism with his passion for mountain climbing and published an article in a journal called the Revue des Fossiles on the subject of ‘the symbolic significance of the mountain in ancient mythologies’. The article draws the attention of Sogol, who recognizes in its author a fellow believer in the existence of the legendary Mount Analogue: ‘the symbolic mountain par excellence’ which is inaccessible ‘by ordinary human means’. According to the logic of the novel, which is both analogical and pataphysical, the existence of a symbol proves that its equivalent exists in the positively verifiable world, as Père Sogol exclaims: ‘We know, though, a priori, by virtue of the laws of analogy, that [Mount Analogue] must exist.’ Daumal bases the symbolic logic of the mountain on an account of the sacred mountain in world myths by the
Emmanuel Rubio, ‘Écrire et défaire Le Mont Analogue’, in Basarab Nicolescu and Jean-Philippe de Tonnac (eds.), René Daumal ou le perpétuel incandescent (Cahors: Le Bois d’Orion, ), p. . Viviane Barry, ‘D’Ubu à Voltaire, le rire daumalien’, Europe: Revue littéraire mensuelle, – (June–July ), – (at p. ). Ibid., p. . Daumal, Mount Analogue, p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. .
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Pataphysics
historian of esotericism, René Guénon, as found in his book, Le roi du monde (The Lord of the World), to which Sogol directly refers in the second chapter. In a line echoed by Daumal, Guénon describes how the sacred mountain of traditional thought ‘has become inaccessible to ordinary humanity’, and poses the question which Daumal sought to address in Mount Analogue: ‘Should its setting in a definite location now imply that this is literally so, or is it only a symbol, or is it both at the same time?’ With his typically syncretic interpretation of world myths, Guénon writes here about ‘an area of traditional science which one could call “sacred geography”’, specifically concerning the recurrence of mountain symbolism in the sacred texts of different cultures, such as ‘the Hindu Meru, the Persian Alborj, and the Montsalvat of Western Grail legend’. The journey on the yacht Impossible, from La Rochelle to the South Pacific, where the mysteriously hidden island of Mount Analogue is discovered, is based upon one of the oldest motifs in mythical narrative. The island is arrived at only by a difficult passage, as Guénon writes: ‘Accordingly, it is necessary to cross the “sea of passions” in order to reach the “Mount of Salvation.”’ In a draft of Mount Analogue, Daumal emphasized the mythical resonance of the mountain, narrating a story by one of the guides of the mountain being ‘at the junction of our humanity and a superior civilisation, where an established truth is perpetuated’. While the relative inaccessibility of the island is a familiar trope from both historical and fictional exploration and esoteric symbolics, Daumal gives it a twist of science fiction with non-Euclidean navigation. In the aforementioned essay from , Daumal had written about myth as a form of living knowledge which is constantly adapted according to the ideas of the time: ‘Every man’, he acknowledged, ‘who has wished to convey a lived knowledge to his fellows has used images latent in the collective thought of his time.’ The status of non-Euclidean geometry in Mount Analogue, then, is a narrative device which exploits the spatial theories of contemporary science as part of a spiritual analogy. Daumal had already written about ‘patageometry’ in the July entry of ‘Pataphysics This Month’, hinting towards the unconventional navigation that would structure Mount Analogue with reference to the science of topology – the study of how properties of an object are preserved even when continuously
René Guénon, The Lord of the World (), trans. Anthony Cheke and Anthony Blake (Moorcote: Coombe Springs Press, ), p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Daumal, Mount Analogue, p. . Daumal, Powers of the Word, p. .
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deformed: ‘For in the era of topology, one can no longer move across the surface of the Earth by following as closely as possible the loxodromics of the old navigators.’ Sogol’s team consists of the Englishman Arthur Beaver, a wealthy expedition veteran and plant-hunter; Theodore’s wife Renée, an ethnographer of the sacred; Judith Pancake, a ‘high altitude painter’; Ivan Lapse, a linguist; and two brothers Hans and Karl, the former a student of physics, the latter of metaphysics. Various characters have dropped out of the expedition, including Benito Ciccoria, the ‘Hegelian’ tailor of the ‘German School’ of mountaineering, presumably because mountain climbing requires that one cannot progress according to a fixed theory but only through constant improvisation and receptivity to chance. As Samuel McAuliffe suggests, this analogy relates climbing to a flexible mode of thought: ‘Conversely, to take up a position in knowledge and cling to it irrespective of the traps that lay littered across a particular field of action amounts to an idealism that would prove, in reality, fatal.’ Sogol, however, is a man of exceptionally open method whose mode of thought encapsulates Jarry’s definition of pataphysics as the ‘science of imaginary solutions’. Accordingly, Sogol plans to reach a symbolic and yet very real landmass, setting out his case for the existence of Mount Analogue like one of Jules Verne’s confidently positivist heroes: First, Mount Analogue must be much higher than the highest mountains presently known. Its summit must be inaccessible by means presently known. But second, its base must be accessible to us, and its lower slopes must be already inhabited by human beings like us, since it is the path that effectively links our present human domain to the upper regions. Inhabited, therefore habitable. Therefore presenting a set of conditions of climate, flora, fauna, cosmic influences of all sorts not so different from those of our continents.
If there are resonances of Verne’s stories in Mount Analogue, they are, however, more like meta-pataphysical inversions of Verne’s nineteenthcentury positivist spirit. Sogol is no misanthropic Captain Nemo, nor the ship Impossible any kind of Nautilus, that microcosmic container of a confident technological European worldview. While not wishing to entirely concur with Roland Barthes’s criticisms of Verne’s novels, his
Daumal, Pataphysical Essays, p. . Daumal, Mount Analogue, p. . Samuel McAuliffe, ‘Precarious Ascent: Trace and Terrain in René Daumal’s Mount Analogue’, MLN, / (September ), – (at p. ). Jarry, Faustroll, p. . Daumal, Mount Analogue, p. .
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Pataphysics
essay ‘The Nautilus and the Drunken Boat’ is useful as a point of reference in relation to Mount Analogue. If Verne’s adventures, according to Barthes, represent aspects of ‘a general enslavement of Nature’, then Daumal’s adventure reflects a respectful and anti-anthropocentric and ecological view of nature. If Barthes’s Verne ‘in no way sought to enlarge the world by romantic ways of escape or mystical plans to reach the infinite’, then Daumal, in contrast, indeed sought exactly something akin to that. Even though the general position of the island is located with Sogol’s calculations, entrance to it, however, is not guaranteed. The boat languishes at anchor, waiting for an anticipated but indeterminate moment of grace. Daumal again follows here a law noted by Guénon that all sacred centres of the world possess ‘certain topographical peculiarities’ which have ‘irrefutable symbolic value that must correspond to those laws through which “spiritual influences” operate’. In this case, Sogol’s timing of the voyage is crucial. Arriving in the South Pacific in November (spring in that region, and halfway between Equinox and Solstice) and expecting to wait a month or two for the auspicious circumstances that will allow them access to the island, Sogol has timed their entrance according to the solar calendar. There is certainly a sense that the crew is aided in their mission by ‘spiritual influences’. Entrance to the island is, therefore, true to Guénon’s account of the exclusivity of access to sacred centres, which he says are ‘inaccessible and invisible to all except those possessing the necessary qualifications for entry’. There is, nonetheless, a sense that, in spite of Sogol’s non-Euclidean calculations and his honouring the sacred calendar, something like chance has played a part. We might also suspect that Daumal is borrowing a little of Rabelais’s imagination from the fifth book of Gargantua and Pantagruel, notably the sea journey that led to ‘The Queendom of Whims or Entelechy’ (meaning, the actualization of potential or a vital force which directs an organism towards self-fulfilment). The access granted to Impossible has much in character with the elusive causality that enables Panurge and Pantagruel to embark at the port of Mateotechny: ‘For our only way to arrive safe at the queendom of Whims was to trust to the whirlwind and be led by the current.’ Daumal would also have been
Roland Barthes, Mythologies (), trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Noonday Press, ), p. . Ibid., pp. –. Guénon, Lord of the World, pp. –. Ibid., p. . François Rabelais, Master Francis Rabelais. Five Books of the Lives, Heroic Deeds and Sayings of Gargantua and His Son Pantagruel, vol. , trans. Thomas Urquhart and Peter Antony Motteux (London: Lawrence and Bullen, ), p. .
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aware of Jarry’s reference to the clinamen in chapter of Faustroll. The notion of the clinamen originates with the Roman philosopher Lucretius’s De rerum natura and refers to a swerve of atoms. It has a genealogical importance within the discourse on whether nature is predictable and determined by fixed laws or whether it maintains a level of indeterminate freedom. I suggest that the ultimate logic behind the discovery of Mount Analogue is in fact this kind of swerve; the ultimate recourse to chance in pataphysical fiction. Whether it is achieved by non-Euclidean logic or the clinamen, Daumal’s unconventional navigation is fundamentally a means to shift perspective. Commenting on this altering experience of space and place, as well as the departure from normal navigational methods, Emmanuel Rubio states: ‘The changing of geometric perspective . . . corresponds perfectly to the function of a decentred vision, as if outside habitual norms.’ By discombobulating general assumptions about navigation and more generally what is valuable in human life, Daumal opens up a space for possibility and reconsideration of what we thought we knew. With his idiosyncratically meta-pataphysical version of non-Euclidean logic, whereby the spatial register is transposed into a spiritual register, Daumal thus turns the quantitative into the qualitative, measurement into value. As Rubio notes, Daumal’s non-Euclidean fable enables ‘an entire revision of terrestrial values’.
An Ecological Fable of Life in the Mountains For the final section of this chapter, I would like to move away from the pataphysical wit to present another side to Mount Analogue. Although paradoxical, given the imaginative freedom and humour of much of the novel, there is an aspect of great sincerity to Mount Analogue, and one that reveals the author’s respect for natural laws. When writing Mount Analogue, Daumal had undergone a distinct change of perspective and living conditions which undoubtedly fed into the novel. After fleeing Nazioccupied Paris in June , René and his Jewish wife Vera Milanová spent much of their time living in remote mountain regions in the Alps, the Pyrénées, and the hills east of Marseilles. Mountains, then, were not merely symbolic phenomena for Daumal but were the site of extreme existential and physical experience. In a series of letters written from the mountains to family and friends, Daumal wrote of the physical hardship
Rubio, ‘Écrire et défaire Le Mont Analogue’, p. .
Ibid.
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Pataphysics
he lived through in the final years of his life: hunting for dry firewood, trying to make his own cheese, being so weak from his illness he could barely lift a pen. What makes these letters from the mountains so moving, however, is how Daumal adapts himself to his circumstances, how attentive he becomes to the tiniest detail of his environment, from the colours of little mountain birds and flowers to daily observations about the thickness of the ‘quilt’ (edredon) of snow cloaking the mountain peak visible from his room. ‘I am here’, he writes in July to Jean Paulhan, ‘between sickness and nature.’ When he cannot climb, he is nonetheless uplifted by the freshness and simple sensory wonders of the mountains, especially after giving up smoking, after which his nose reveals to him a ‘new world’ in which the ‘violent sun simmers an olfactory soup of resin, juniper, absinthe, these odours that the subterranean waters force from the depths of the schist’. In spite of Daumal’s lifelong attempts to overcome the physical limitations of his species, we gain from these letters a wonderfully vivid picture of a physically vulnerable and highly sensory being, taking pleasure in the modest hospitality of neighbours, the ‘cocktailperfumes’ created by a fire of juniper, beech, and pine wood, and the repetitive bells of the Angelus in a mountain village. The humility of the author behind Mount Analogue, the respect for nature and its laws and the cultural traditions of the mountain people which are conveyed in these letters reveal much about the background to the imaginary world of the novel. Daumal had taken up mountain-climbing with his brother Jack in but was forced to abandon the activity on diagnosis of his lung condition in . After his training in the yogic-influenced body-mind practices developed by the de Salzmanns, Daumal experienced mountain climbing as another, albeit riskier, form of physical and spiritual training; it was at once a highly disciplined technical activity and a means of expanding the boundaries of physical experience: ‘one conquers one’s body by conquering rock and ice’. According to Mark Polizzotti, Daumal considered climbing ‘a physical obstacle to be conquered by force of will and as a spiritual revelation’. In one of his letters from the mountains, he expressed to Vera this sense of revelation in the high mountains that would shape the symbolism of Mount Analogue: ‘On the peaks, thought is substantial or is not at all . . . I understand why the Chinese sages,
René Daumal, ‘Lettres de la montagne’, Argile, – (spring–summer ), – (at p. ). Ibid. Ibid., p. . Daumal, Mount Analogue, p. . Daumal, Powers of the Word, p. xiv.
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Christ, Moses, the followers of Shiva and others went up to the summits to think.’ It is thus through his intense experience of the mountains combined with his readings in traditional thought and poetics that Daumal developed the symbolism at the heart of Mount Analogue. One of the striking features of Mount Analogue, and one which has been little commented upon in the literature, is the natural environment of the island and the mountain itself, which Daumal represents as initially marvellous but ultimately unforgiving to those who do not abide by its laws. Throughout the novel, there are vivid references to the natural world and the study of it, starting in the first chapter with Sogol’s workshop – presented as a cross between a laboratory and a living cabinet of curiosities – and developing with descriptions of the extraordinary flora and fauna of the island. Daumal’s sensibility for nature is conveyed with inflections of both the surrealist marvellous and the wonders of fairytale: It is true that our attention was constantly captured by a blue squirrel or a red-eyed ermine standing like a column in the middle of an emerald clearing splashed with orange agaric, or by a herd of unicorns which we had first taken for chamois, that leaped across a treeless outcropping on the other side, or the flying lizard that hurled itself ahead of us from one tree to the next, its teeth chattering.
In other passages, Daumal brings to mind the strange landscapes of Verne or Wells, and the absurd creatures of Lewis Carroll’s stories with his descriptions of fabulous plants, fungi, and insects. On exploring the natural habitat of the island, Arthur Beaver gives an account of ‘the most curious’ natural phenomena, including a ‘tree-like bindweed’ that grows so fast it is used ‘like slow dynamite’ for terracing the land; a fat puffball mushroom called the ‘incendiary lycopodium’ which explodes in flames shortly after sporing; ‘the rare talking bush, a sensory plant whose fruits form sound boxes of various shapes capable of producing all the sounds of the human voice when rubbed by its own leaves’; a ‘cyclops-lizard’, and two very Carrollian caterpillars, one over two metres long which rolls into a ball and hurtles down hillsides, the other an ‘aeronautic’ species: ‘a kind of silkworm which in good weather produces light gases in its intestines and in a few hours inflates an enormous bubble that carries it into the air’. A prominent feature of Mount Analogue, then, is not only what Emmanuel Rubio has called a ‘fantastic anthropology and a marvellous geography’, but also its fantastical natural history.
Ibid. Daumal, Mount Analogue, p. . Ibid., p. . Rubio, ‘Écrire et défaire Le Mont Analogue’, p. .
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Pataphysics
The paucity of discussion of nature in interpretations of Mount Analogue is somewhat surprising, especially given that Daumal’s text ends abruptly at a dramatic point in the story in which the laws of nature are imposed at the cost of human tragedy and environmental catastrophe. The focus of the fifth and final chapter is the story of the head porter, Bernard, who guides the group up the mountain. On coming across a burial mound, Bernard explains that it is the grave of his brother, whose death was one consequence of an ecological ‘butterfly effect’ which occurred after Bernard had transgressed an inflexible mountain law. Bernard had rashly attempted an ascent when he was not sufficiently prepared, physically or psychologically, and had been driven by hunger to kill an old rock rat at an altitude in which hunting was prohibited. As well as being punished by the chief guides, losing his ‘peradems’ – the precious transparent stones which represent a kind of spiritual currency – and forbidden to climb for three years, Bernard is punished by the mountain itself. Although he carries out his civic punishment by replacing the rat he killed on his return to the mountain heights, it turns out that the rat served an important ecological function by catching disease-carrying insects. Consequently, this fatally damages a species of wasp which ensures the pollination of flowers that prevent the erosion of the slopes, resulting in a huge rockslide that kills Bernard’s brother. The final sentence of Mount Analogue is unfinished: ‘Without [the wasps], a great many plants that played an important role in stabilising the shifting earth’, leaving the reader stranded on a narrative cliff-edge, never knowing how or if the group achieve the ascent. Arguably, then, despite all its inventive and pataphysical wit, Mount Analogue carries a powerful ecological message, and one that does not simply represent ecological relations in terms of a nature of connections external to the human species but, rather, which depicts an advanced understanding of ecology as an all-encompassing reality of unifying conditions, internal-external-real-symbolic-logical-analogical-spiritual-natural: a pata-metaphysics of ecology and a true wisdom of connection.
Daumal, Mount Analogue, p. .
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Alchemical Narratives Victoria Ferentinou
Alchemy may be many things . . . To-day . . . [it] often takes the form of psychology or of metaphysics. Ithell Colquhoun
Words are treacherous because they are incomplete.
Leonora Carrington
The so-called occultation of surrealism and the movement’s appropriation of esoteric tropes is no longer a desideratum in surrealist scholarship. Yet, the impact of such discursive loci on the development of the surrealist novel has not been explored to a great extent. This chapter aims to shed light on the uses of modern alchemical discourse by authors who were affiliated with surrealism and defied the literary canon by producing hybrid narratives. Within the surrealist context, alchemy has been likened to artistic creativity and the mechanisms mobilizing the gestation of poetic, visual, and literary practice; it has also been reconfigured as an alternative epistemology probing the nature of subjectivity and as a subversive discourse replete with transformative possibilities. The chapter will be concerned with three case studies: British artist, writer, and occultist Ithell Colquhoun (–); British-born artist and author Leonora Carrington (–); and Greek poet, collagist, and critic Nanos Valaoritis (–). All three writers experimented with the potentialities of alchemical language, writing novels premised upon
Ithell Colquhoun, ‘Surrealism and Hermetic Poetry’, p. in Tate Gallery Archive ///. Leonora Carrington, The Stone Door (; London and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, ), p. . See notably M.E. Warlick, Max Ernst and Alchemy: A Magician in Search of Myth (Austin: University of Texas Press, ), chap. ; Celia Rabinovitch, Surrealism and the Sacred: Power, Eros and the Occult in Modern Art (Oxford: Westview Press, ); Tessel M. Bauduin, Surrealism and the Occult: Occultism and Western Esotericism in the Work and Movement of André Breton (Amsterdam University Press, ); Tessel M. Bauduin, Victoria Ferentinou, and Daniel Zamani (eds.), Surrealism, Occultism, Politics: In Search of the Marvellous (London and New York: Routledge, ).
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Alchemical Narratives
esotericism and myth in terms of imagery, plot, and sensibility and published later in their careers: Goose of Hermogenes () and I Saw Water () by Colquhoun; The Stone Door () and The Hearing Trumpet () by Carrington; Από τα κόκκαλα βγαλμένη (From the Bones Rising, ) and Ο Θησαυρός του Ξέρξη (Xerxes’ Treasure, ) by Valaoritis. What underpins their novels, albeit different in many respects, is the negotiation of notions of corporeal subjectivity. Influenced by diverse strands of alchemy, Colquhoun, Carrington, and Valaoritis resorted to tropes corroborating the transgression of the dominant Enlightenment concept of the unified rational subject, such as disembodiment, ghostliness, hybridization, duplication, and fragmentation. In their revision of hegemonic body politics, identity constitution was conceptualized as a process that is open-ended, non-teleological, and performative, providing alternative cartographies of subjectivity.
Alchemical Novels and Surrealism In his Deuxièume manifeste du surréalisme (Second Manifesto of Surrealism, ), André Breton explicitly paralleled the alchemical quest with the surrealist endeavour. In his analogy, the philosopher’s stone signifies the transformative power of the imagination through which one could use ‘completely new objects, or objects considered completely obsolete’ for ‘the recreation of a state which can only be fairly compared to that of madness’. In other words, for Breton it was through the materialization of unconscious mental activity and the ensuing transmutation that surreality could be accomplished. Alchemy as an avant-garde mode of countercultural efficacy pervades the oeuvre of several surrealists, most notably Max Ernst who deployed collage to construct his alchemically indebted novels in the early s. Alchemy was a favoured trope among the surrealists in the interwar years but it was mainly from the s onward that it informed the surrealist novel. In novels written from the s to the s, alchemy offered the structure for the narrative, an ambivalent, evocative imagery, and a
My understanding of the performativity of identity owes much to Judith Butler’s work on gender/ sexuality as performative. See Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (London and New York: Routledge, ). See also Marsha Meskimmon, Women Making Art: History, Subjectivity, Aesthetics (London and New York: Routledge, ), pp. –. André Breton, Second Manifesto of Surrealism () in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ), pp. –. Ibid., p. . See Warlick, Max Ernst and Alchemy, pp. –.
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platform for the interrogation of authorship, identity, and otherness. It is often the theme of the alchemical quest as a form of wandering, a nonlinear journey challenging fixed boundaries and preconceived notions of selfhood, which is appropriated to extend Breton’s opening question of ‘Who am I?’ in Nadja (). This quest functions as a psychological exploration informed by post-Enlightenment alchemical works promoting a spiritual model of alchemy. Although dissimilar, occultism and psychology shared a fundamental interest in the exploration of self, revitalizing a climate of esoteric inquiry in the first half of the twentieth century. Several surrealists, among them Colquhoun, Carrington, and Valaoritis, were acquainted with such alchemical sources as well as the work of the psychoanalyst Herbert Silberer and the founder of analytical psychology Carl G. Jung, who saw alchemy as psychology. It is from this angle that Kurt Seligmann wrote in : ‘According to Jung the alchemic process is mainly of a psychic nature; and this makes it even more analogous to the artist’s labour.’ Similarly, Colquhoun and Carrington recast the artist as an alchemist projecting a psychic content upon matter, thus transforming it into an artwork. Valaoritis also espoused this creative paradigm using language as a matter to be transmuted for his literary ends. Filtered through a psychologized lens, alchemy was revised within surrealism as a form of self-research and as a non-static cultural schema filled with abundant potentialities of artistic and poetic value. It was most specifically utilized as a model for the questioning of personal identity. This model was not singular but multifaceted, privileging the malleability and fluidity of the discursively conceived oppositions constituting the Cartesian ego. This questioning was enacted through the body as an object of examination and metamorphosis, thus revealing the multitude and hybridity of subjectivity as well as a symbiotic paradigm of selfhood. This enactment entailed strategies of performativity to dissolve the idea of monolithic, monadic individuality and to rethink embodiment as intercorporeality. As shall be shown, alchemy enriched the surrealist novel, offering a non-binary transformational ontology and an alternative language to articulate its various reimaginings.
For the connection between occultism and psychology, see Brian J. Gibbons, Spirituality and the Occult from the Renaissance to the Modern Age (London and New York: Routledge, ), chap. ; Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (University of Chicago Press, ), chap. . Kurt Seligmann, ‘Magic Circles’, View, /– (February–March ), p. . Ithell Colquhoun, ‘The Mantic Stain’ (), in Penelope Rosemont (ed.), Surrealist Women: An International Anthology (London: Athlone Press, ), p. ; Leonora Carrington, ‘On Magic Art: A Conversation’ (), in Rosemont (ed.), Surrealist Women, p. .
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Alchemical Narratives
Ithell Colquhoun As early as , Colquhoun argued that the alchemical quest is rather ‘a poetical conception in the mind of the sage than a sober hypothesis in the mind of a scientific investigator’. She went so far as to posit alchemy as an example of the imaginative genre and of ‘poetical metaphysics’. This poetics entails the use of evocative phrases such as ‘stone of wisdom’, ‘carbuncle of sun’, or ‘virgin water’ in which imagination and empirical knowledge are merged to formulate meaning. For Colquhoun, this poetics recalls the Gothic genre with its ‘revelling in the grotesque and macabre, even in the savage and violent’. Colquhoun’s revisionist appreciation of alchemy was not restricted to aesthetics but also encompassed its reappraisal as ‘psychologized spirituality’. In this, she was influenced by modern alchemical authors such as Mary Anne Atwood, Arthur Edward Waite, and Edward Langford Garstin, and by Israel Regardie’s book, The Middle Pillar (), which propounded that magic and psychology shared the same object of study, the human mind. As a means of exploring her own unconscious, Colquhoun probed dream symbolism from the s, documenting her own dreams in diaries she later used as a springboard for her literary practice, and underwent psychotherapy with the Jungian psychiatrist Alice E. Buck in the s. Heavily influenced by this discourse, Colquhoun wove together surrealism and occultism, creating in the s a series of alchemical watercolours and related poems, and her first novel Goose of Hermogenes. The latter is predicated upon alchemical vocabulary and dream material tied together through the juxtaposition of incongruous elements and framed within the deviant atmosphere of Gothic narratives. The story revolves around the adventures of an unnamed heroine who visits her uncle on a
Ithell Colquhoun, ‘The Prose of Alchemy’, The Quest, / (April ), –. Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . For the psychologization of esotericism in the modern era see Wouter Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press, ), pp. –. Her knowledge of alchemy came via the work of Sir George Ripley, Paracelsus, Salomon Trismosin, John Dee, Michael Maier, Basil Valentine, Nicholas Barnaud Delphinas, Thomas Vaughan, Eirenaeus Philalethes, Antoine-Joseph Pernety, and others. She laid particular emphasis on Aurea Catena Homeri () by alchemical writer Anton Joseph Kirchweger, whose work she prized highly. Ithell Colquhoun, Goose of Hermogenes (; London: Peter Owen, ). See Victoria Ferentinou, ‘“The Iconography of Coniunctio Oppositorum”: Visual and Verbal Dialogues in Ithell Colquhoun’s Oeuvre’, in Peter Forshaw (ed.), Lux in Tenebris: The Visual and the Symbolic in Western Esotericism (Leiden: Brill, ), pp. –.
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desolate island only to discover that he is an alchemist versed in occult experiments, and she is imprisoned in his mansion because of her invaluable alchemical jewels. Organized according to the twelve-stage subdivision of the alchemical opus, the heroine’s journey parallels the alchemist’s quest for the philosopher’s stone. In her quest, she is compelled to explore not only her uncle’s land and its secret life, but also her own psyche, until her escape in the ‘projection’ chapter. The story may be read as an allegorical account of the attainment of self-consciousness and ‘psychic androgyny’, and casts light upon Colquhoun’s lifelong pursuit of personal transformation as integral to woman’s emancipation and empowerment. The protagonist’s advancement is mobilized by reading a fairytale on the ‘natural’ blending of two youths, Oriole and Corolla, meant to complement each other into a whole androgynous being, which arouses her desire for a soulmate. In her search, it is the encounter with manifestations of the Great Goddess, such as the alchemists’ Nature and the White Goddess, that supplies the incentive for woman’s investigation of both nature and subjectivity, perceived as continuous, intersecting categories. Aware of her special connection to female divine power, the heroine confronts her other in alchemical scenes connected to the opposition and reconciliation of male and female genders, such as her nightmarish decomposition and fusion with an unknown male in the graveyard (putrefaction); her erotic union with her beloved, Innocencio (congelation), and her participation in a ritual sex-act conducted by her uncle (exaltation). The unification of gendered opposites is rendered as a form of coalescing into a single entity in which different substances are intermingled in a state of constant polarization and exchange, simultaneously dislodging and embracing otherness. In one instance, Colquhoun evokes this kind of convergence by discarding punctuation marks to convey the opening up of the body to the natural elements and the eroticized other:
The number of stages of the alchemical process recalls the subdivision of Twelve Gates by the English alchemist Sir George Ripley, but Colquhoun herself reveals her reliance upon Basil Valentine’s Twelve Keys. See Ithell Colquhoun, Sword of Wisdom: MacGregors Mathers and the Golden Dawn (London: Neville Spearman, ), p. . This interpretation was first propounded and elaborated at length in Victoria Ferentinou, ‘Women Surrealists and Hermetic Imagery: Androgyny and the Feminine Principle in the Work of Ithell Colquhoun, Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Essex (), chap. ; see also Victoria Ferentinou, ‘Ithell Colquhoun, Surrealism and the Occult’, Papers of Surrealism, (Summer ), – (at pp. –). See Victoria Ferentinou, ‘The Quest for the Goddess: Matriarchy, Surrealism and Gender Politics in the Work of Leonora Carrington and Ithell Colquhoun’, in Bauduin et al. (eds.), Surrealism, Occultism, Politics, pp. –.
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Alchemical Narratives
I open the veins of my arm with the cut of a sliver of silicon. Blood pours out from the left flows out till it reaches the sea goes on flowing pours inexhaustible through the inexhaustible sea without chafe or pause till it surrounds the island a line veining marble a red line in the green sea taut from my arm making a long arm to his home circling the island a ribbon of stain in the foam unmixing like a rusty chain to bind him in binding his home so he never can go nor a boat’s prow cut through a crown renewed without end of mercurial metal from far-away gap whence it flows only his tooth could mend the gap whence it flows only his tongue lick up the stream at its source only his tooth and his tongue.
The material exposure of oneself to the surrounding environment is seminal in understanding Colquhoun’s dialogue with alchemy’s boundary-crossing corporeal philosophy. In this rendition, the novel might be seen as harbouring androgynous idealism. Yet, the repetition of such encounters in the next chapters alludes to the alchemical work as a never-ending, circular process in which the end provides the substratum for a new beginning, thereby challenging the linear thinking of positivist ideologies. It is through cyclicity that the protagonist is subjected to multiple transmutations, while nevertheless retaining her essence. The novel closes with the heroine at last liberated, reaching the top of a hill from where she ‘could see the mountainy country to the east . . . [whose] penciled summits were touched by the first auroral glow’. Colquhoun deploys the East as a symbol of regeneration, which is effected through the power of the Goddess as the source of life. In this way, she rewrites masculinist versions of the androgynous myth which promote male dominance and instead offers a viable identity for the female subject. It is through a critical appropriation of alchemical imagery that she ultimately exposes the duplicitous nature of patriarchal discourse and constructs a counter-world of freedom and dissidence. Colquhoun’s revisionist strategy expands most of these threads in a second novel she wrote in the mid-s after she published her Goose of Hermogenes. Entitled I Saw Water, the text remained unpublished until because it was deemed inaccessible by the publishers. Informed by a bricolage of spiritual practices from witchcraft to alchemy and the Kabbalah as well as Roman Catholicism, Theosophy and druidry, the novel follows Ella de Maine’s arrival at Ménec island, the abode of the dead, to enter the Ianua Vitae Convent, and her progression as Sister
Colquhoun, Goose of Hermogenes, p. . Ibid., p. . Ferentinou, ‘Quest for the Goddess’, pp. –. Ithell Colquhoun, I Saw Water: An Occult Novel and Other Selected Writings, ed. Mark S. Morrisson and Richard Shillitoe (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, ), p. .
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Brigid (an allusion to the Celtic Triple Goddess) through a series of ritualized ordeals. Although Colquhoun initially thought to use the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, or the Stations of the Cross, to structure the heroine’s spiritual advancement, she employed geomancy, a form of divination based on markings on the ground. It is through divinatory symbolism that all stages of the character’s journey towards a second death (that leads to rebirth to a higher plane or physical reincarnation) are articulated. For the heroine, accomplishment of this stage marks the loss of individual identity and her overflowing into the world and thus complete freedom: ‘Everything is free and I am free of everything.’ Freedom entails the transgression of the experiencing self through disembodiment, a concept drawn from theosophical discourse. It is, however, the transformational body politics of alchemy that shapes Colquhoun’s negotiation of the quest trope as a search for the possibilities of alternative notions of consciousness and subjectivity. Throughout the novel, the heroine is engaged in a series of trials while she is a nun of the Parthenogenesist Order. The mission of the Order is to restore the loss of primordial androgyny through the fertilization of ‘the lunar soul . . . by rays from its own hidden sun, to bring forth at last the radiant Child’. In this context, parthenogenesis evokes androgyny as a psycho-spiritual enterprise for the female subject. It is the androgynous alchemist-priestess Sister Mary Paracelsus who instructs Sister Brigid, facilitating her access to ‘knowledge of the fundamentals of life, the unconscious, dreams and the soul’s incarnate states’. Through the challenges of communal life and religious ascetism, the heroine recasts her relationship with the natural world, other beings, and her own self. At the end, she flees the Convent, finding refuge on a shore where ‘she felt the old dichotomies fall away from her – opposition between body and spirit, or the differentiations of time and space no longer had a meaning’. In other words, the heroine moves from individualism to a condition of the dissolution of contraries into an undifferentiated, androgynous state of being, what she calls ‘impersonality’. In this state, she discards her personality and it is only her sense of being that is ascertained: ‘“But who am I that am here?” . . . “I am,” was enough to her.’ Appropriating occult language, Colquhoun critically reconfigures an initiatory exploration of the self, endowing her characters with fluctuating, multiple identities. The narrative lacks linearity and resembles a collage of
Ibid., pp. –. Ibid., p. .
Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. .
Ibid., p. .
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Ibid., p. .
Ibid., p. .
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abruptly changing ethereal locations and mysterious events in which characters are cast as both benevolent and villains (such as Sister Brigid’s lover, Nikolaz). Grounded upon dream records she assembled over a twenty-year period blended with personal experience from her occult pursuits, the novel evokes the qualities of a dream through a disjunctive succession of plotlines. As in Goose of Hermogenes, Colquhoun propels a cross-over between fiction and reality, bypassing the borders of rational modes of interpretation. The novel is replete with obscure imagery, perhaps intended to impact the reader on an unconscious level, spurring the free flow of thought. This lens offers a different evaluation of the novel that cannot be close-read but rather experienced as a locus in which a fragmented self interacts with its polymorphous others. This dispersal showcases the performativity of subjectivity and addresses problems of dualism, stasis, and singular individuality to shed light on an alternative concept of reality. In this reconceptualization, Colquhoun fruitfully interweaves alchemical narrativity with surrealist methods to afford her readers open-ended and multivalent readings. I Saw Water may be thus viewed as a more experimental reiteration of the narratological and aesthetic devices already in use in Goose of Hermogenes, an eerie emptying out of selfidentity. This effacement is not however to be understood rationally, but as she believed: ‘one cannot understand an alchemical text by trying to translate it into everyday language . . . it needs some faculty analogous to poetic appreciation’.
Leonora Carrington Carrington’s textual production equally features fascinating reworkings of alchemy. Carrington perused her first alchemical books while she was studying art at Ozenfant’s academy in where she could buy many second-hand reprints in used bookstalls. In the late s, her romantic relationship with Ernst fostered her own preoccupation, especially during their sojourn in Saint-Martin-d’Ardèche from to . In Paris, her fascination had already grown and she became familiar with French texts popularizing occultism, such as E.-J. Grillot de Givry’s Le museé des sorciers, mages et alchimistes (). Her engagement with alternative
Colquhoun, Sword of Wisdom, p. . Whitney Chadwick, Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement (London: Thames & Hudson, ), p. . See Warlick, Max Ernst and Alchemy, pp. –.
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epistemologies fully flourished from onward, when she settled down in Mexico City and began developing an art clearly dependent on an iconography drawn from occultism, paganism, Eastern spirituality, psychoanalysis, and studies of comparative mythology. Carrington’s fiction draws eclectically from these spiritual traditions. Alchemy, in particular, permeates her first novel, The Stone Door, written in the s but published in the s. The novel centres around the quest for the ‘other-half’, conceived as the complementary opposite engaged in the alchemical opus. Multifarious manifestations of two ‘opposites’ play the lead roles in the story. Discovering each other in the world of dreams and visions, they traverse layers of time and space in their search for their soulmate. Presented by a polyphonic speaking subject, the narrative alternates between the life stories of a male and a female protagonist and culminates in the moment the male arrives in front of the Stone Door – set as the frontier between the country of the living and the underworld. The male character manages to open the Stone Door, letting his beloved enter into life. In the form of ‘five hundred white sheep’, she pours ‘into the Earth like a deluge of curdled milk’. The two protagonists are not united happily ever after, but the male ‘rowing with all his might, follow[s] the sheep west’, initiating a new quest. Inspired by Carrington’s second marriage to the Hungarian Jewish photographer Emérico (Chiki) Weisz in , the novel has been viewed as a celebration of the attainment of totality through fusion with the beloved. Although the story is seemingly concerned with the attainment of unity as encapsulated in the image of the alchemical androgyne, it denounces the idea of the individual as a knowable, independent, and
Her work was specifically informed by Gnosticism, the Kabbalah, alchemy, witchcraft, the Tarot, Tibetan Buddhism, Theosophy, the philosophies of Russian holistic philosophers George Gurdjieff and Peter Ouspesnsky, the magical corpus of Aleister Crowley, Jungian psychology, shamanism, Celtic, Greek, Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and pre-Columbian myths. See Gloria Feman Orenstein, ‘Manifestations of the Occult in the Art and Literature of Leonora Carrington’, in Frank Luanne (ed.), Literature and the Occult: Essays in Comparative Literature (Arlington: University of Texas Press, ), p. ; Whitney Chadwick, ‘Pilgrimage to the Stars’, in Andrea Schlieker (ed.), Leonora Carrington: Paintings, Drawings and Sculptures – (London: Serpentine Gallery, ), p. ; Susan L. Aberth, Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art (Aldershot: Lund Humphries, ), passim. Leonora Carrington, The Stone Door (; London and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, ). Ibid., p. . Ibid. Peter G. Christensen, ‘The Flight from Passion in Leonora Carrington’s Literary Work’, in Mary Ann Caws, Rudolf E. Kuenzli, and Gwen Raaberg (eds.), Surrealism and Women (Cambridge, : MIT Press, ), pp. –; Deborah B. Gaensbauer, ‘Voyages of Discovery: Leonora Carrington’s Magical Prose’, Women’s Studies, / (), – (at p. ).
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complete entity in fanciful and disturbing ways. Carrington’s strategy in deconstructing biological determinism is the deployment of alchemy to convey the hybridization, mutability, and polyvalence of the self. Her revision reveals her reading of the alchemical work not as conclusive and finite but as a process. It is through alchemical metaphors that she restages the ‘unification’ of the self with the other: the chemical fusion of ‘two Ivory bodies’ that used to be ‘one whole body’ orchestrated by an Artisan in a laboratory; the ‘cooking’ of two carcasses in a lamb stew in a Mexican kitchen; the sacrifice of a ‘black ram’ by two children who conduct a magical ritual to unite with each other: ‘Open, Open great stone door, You are the black ram, I am the black ram It is dead so I am no longer I but you are I and I am you.’ Carrington embraces diverse material bodies, genders, and species in a constant reformulation of identity caught ‘in suspended reciprocal exchange with the surrounding universe’. This is a process conveyed as a juxtaposition that is not reducible to the binary self-other since each character signifies a multiplicity that incorporates and confronts otherness. For example, the girl is variously identified as a woman, a ram, fire, an errant angel, Amagoya, a wolf, and a partridge and the boy as a man, the scales, air, the dead Hebrew king, Zacharias, the White Child, a green beetle, and so on. As Katharine Conley notes, this is a ‘changeable hybridity’ premised upon the surrealist idea of metamorphosis as a metaphor for a ‘physical transformation in which new physical identities, not merely voices, could become manifest’. Carrington’s interrogation of selfhood expands the parameters of the multiplicity of oneself and of the symbiotic relationship or overlapping among its heterogeneous elements. Through this expansion, the elusiveness of subjectivity becomes her only certainty, disclosing the performative enactment of identity. The very performativity of the act is enhanced through the non-linearity and multiple framing of the story that transforms the quest into a wandering in
For an analysis of Carrington’s (proto)feminist appropriations of alchemy and occultism and her reuse of occult images to renegotiate gender identities, see Ferentinou, ‘Women Surrealists and Hermetic Imagery’, pp. –, –; see also Victoria Ferentinou, ‘Surrealism, Occulture and Gender: Women Artists, Power and Occultism’, Aries, / (Spring ), – (at pp. –). Carrington, Stone Door, p. . Ibid., pp. –. Ibid., p. . Katharine Conley, Automatic Woman: The Representation of Woman in Surrealism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, ), p. . Katharine Conley, ‘Carrington’s Kitchen’, Papers of Surrealism, (), – (at pp. , ).
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Maurice Blanchot’s words, that is, a form of ‘research, discovery, mental process, learning’. From this angle, travelling is employed as a vehicle for self-discovery without a final destination. It is this open-endedness that anticipates post-structuralist renditions of fiction and lays the groundwork for Carrington’s second novel, The Hearing Trumpet, written in the s. A hybrid in terms of genre, the text revolves around the adventures of the nonagenarian Marian Leatherby, shortly after her close friend Carmella gives her a hearing trumpet that serves, in the words of Gloria Feman Orenstein, as an organ of ‘extra-sensory perception’. Marian is sent by her family to an Institute for old ladies where she commences a psychic communication with the androgynous witch/Abbess Doña Rosalinda. Marian becomes acquainted with the Abbess’s life story through a scroll that relates the latter’s efforts to recover the Holy Grail, ‘the original chalice which held the elixir of life’, from the followers of the vengeful Father God. It is Marian’s reading of Doña Rosalinda’s biography that functions as a springboard for a series of incidents that lay the ground for self-realization and the surfacing of a topsy-turvy world: she and her inmates revolt against Dr. Gambit, the Institute’s oppressive director; a reversal of poles and the beginning of a new ice age occur as a consequence of the abusive power imposed by masculinist governments over humans and animals; Marian descends into a cavern/kitchen, ‘the Womb of the World’, where she experiences a transformation supervised by her doppelganger and emerges united with herself, Queen Bee, and the Abbess. The latter scene marks the culmination of the narrative in which Carrington deploys the theme of psychic rebirth and the construction of a multifaceted identity in a whimsical blend of Jungian psychology and Celtic mythology. The heroine’s transformation is meaningfully cast as an alchemical transmutation in which everything is dissolved but her essence, with each one of her selves symbolizing the successive stages of the
Maurice Blanchot, The Book to Come (), trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford University Press, ), p. xii. See Victoria Ferentinou, ‘Trespassing Boundaries: Liminality, Hybridity and the Quest for Identity in Leonora Carrington’s The Stone Door’, in Patricia Allmer (ed.), Intersections: Women Artists/ Surrealism/Modernism (Manchester University Press, ), pp. –; Anna Watz ‘“A language buried at the back of time”: The Stone Door and Poststructuralist Feminism’, in Jonathan P. Eburne and Catriona McAra (eds.), Leonora Carrington and the International Avant-garde (Manchester University Press, ), pp. –. Orenstein, ‘Manifestations of the Occult’, p. . Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet (. San Francisco: City Lights, ), p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. .
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alchemical process. It is Marian’s transformed self that ultimately leads an expedition to recover the Holy Grail aided by ‘an army of bees, wolves, [five] . . . old women, a postman, a Chinaman, a poet, an atom-driven ark, and a werewoman’.As in Colquhoun’s Goose of Hermogenes, the heroine recognizes her inner powers through her identification with a transgressive, ambiguous Goddess. It is knowledge of the polymorphous nature of subjectivity that triggers the rupture in rational perception to expand the bounds of everyday reality and consolidate a revisionist reconfiguration of corporeal identities encompassing post-human categories. This poly-focal perspective is expressed through a multilayered, non-linear, ever-shifting narrative rich in esoteric allusions and images that prevents us from forming a coherent reading. With a plot in frenetic motion that undoes Christianity, patriarchal culture, and masculinist versions of history, The Hearing Trumpet comically binds together Robert Graves’s The White Goddess (), Gerald Gardner’s Witchcraft Today (), and Jesse Weston’s The Quest for the Holy Grail (), all three interweaving Goddess worship, witchcraft, and matriarchy. Playfully deconstructing her sources through a disturbing intertextual practice, Carrington sets out to offer an alternative, corrective model for the co-existence of humans and non-humans and ultimately delves into a more rigorous investigation of identity that unfolds in a postapocalyptic, dystopian setting. It is in this liminal landscape in which everything is liable to metamorphosis that Carrington touches upon questions of gender, sexuality, subjectivity, and collectivity, problematizing hegemonic politics of being and becoming. Alchemy as the site par excellence of mutation informs the novel to provide multiple emanations of reality and discourse and betray the performative character of selfidentity and otherness. As in The Stone Door, the end involves a vision for a new beginning since the ice age has not yet passed but the heroine assumes that ‘someday grass and flowers will grow again’. Her quest for a transformed self and a regenerated planet is rendered as plausible yet inconveniently non-finite, as a stage in a series of unsettling displacements, crossings, overlappings, and juxtapositions to map out the uncharted trajectories of the imagination in its interface with the world. For Carrington, the novel genre becomes a
Ibid., p. . Ferentinou, ‘Quest for the Goddess’, pp. –. Carrington, Hearing Trumpet, p. . Susan Rubin Suleiman, Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (Cambridge, : Harvard University Press, ), p. .
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melting pot in which she intermingles, decomposes, defamiliarizes, and refigures texts, myths, images, and motifs to fruitfully engage in a subversive surrealist and feminist writing practice. Quite tellingly, when interviewed in , Carrington reflected: ‘alchemy is a form of magic, so the transformation of images, or bodies, in art acts on dream/psychic substance . . . The Athanor is my Body-Psyche and the Stone is finding the right place.’ Both her novels are exemplary of her conception of alchemy as a navigational tool in her reimagining of the world as a place of constant change and metamorphosis filled with an infinitude of potentialities for the woman author.
Nanos Valaoritis Although Valaoritis never met his female colleagues and came from a different cultural background, he concurred that esotericism is ‘a poetic form of thought’ with immense artistic potential. It was chiefly Breton’s recourse to magic and alchemy in the s that had an impact on Valaoritis, who experimented with the ‘alchemy of the word’ in Terre de diamant, an anthology of lithographs and accompanying prose he coauthored with his partner Marie Wilson in and in theatrical plays he wrote in the late s. Central to his plays was the exploration of identity, thus laying the foreground for his two alchemically influenced novels, From the Bones Rising, written in , and Xerxes’ Treasure, written between and . Valaoritis called the latter ‘anti-novels’, which in his words are defined as ‘post-surrealist novels’ or as ‘metanarratives’, a genre initiated in his view with James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and surrealists such as Breton, Louis Aragon, and Raymond Queneau. Weaving together disparate motifs, tropes, genres, Valaoritis situates his texts ‘in the interstices of the fantastic, the allegorical and the realist genres in a Bakhtinian dialogical relation between modes of writing’. This definition is comparable to the surrealist marvellous but Valaoritis is very quick to situate himself in dialogue but also at a distance from surrealist
Carrington, ‘On Magic Art’, p. . Interview with Nanos Valaoritis, April . Victoria Ferentinou, ‘Marie Wilson and Nanos Valaoritis in Conversation: Surrealism, Imagetext, and Occult Aesthetics in Terre de Diamant’, in Tessel M. Bauduin and Henrik Johnsson (eds.), The Occult in Modernist Art, Literature, and Cinema (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, ), pp. –; Vassiliki Rapti, Ludics in Surrealist Theatre and Beyond (Farnham: Ashgate, ), pp. –, –. Nanos Valaoritis, Από τα κόκκαλα βγαλμένη (; Athens: Nefeli, ), p. i. Henceforth this novel will be referred to, in English, as From the Bones Rising. Ibid., p. iii.
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principles. As is equally evident in his theatrical plays, he experiments with the transmutation of language through the exploration of its imagistic qualities and their effect in everyday life. Valaoritis’s narratives are disruptive, defying standard plot devices, and it is often through language that the protagonists embark upon an exploration of self-identity and otherness. Identity is then configured in relation to endless identifications recalling Breton’s Nadja, a text Valaoritis knew very well and prefaced in the s for the Greek translation. In his ‘Introduction’, Valaoritis argues that in Nadja everyday life is conflated with a mental reality that transgresses the limits of the sensible. He concludes that Breton’s text is an example of anti-narratives that dislodge normative conceptions of reality and investigate forbidden mental territories. It comes as no surprise that when he wrote his first two novels, after his ‘discipleship’ near Breton in the s, he characterized them in the same vein. Valaoritis’s primary concern in both novels is the exploration of identity through the quest trope. Valaoritis treats the theme as archetypal and traces it back to Greco-Roman fiction and seventeenth-century picaresque novels. Both From the Bones Rising and Xerxes’ Treasure relate the protagonist’s search for a treasure that designates the pursuit of selfhood, challenging in the process the boundaries between self and other, male and female, animate and inanimate, in a proliferation of hybrid configurations of a mutable and multiple subject. As I have argued elsewhere, ‘these crossings posit a semantic, carnivalistic ambiguity that in turn invites the reader to playfully contribute to the production of meaning. Valaoritis’s anti-novels can be thus read as sites of psychic and intersemiotic transmutation for both the author and the reader.’ Most specifically, in From the Bones Rising the quest takes place in the enchanted cityscape of Athens and remains inconclusive, closing with the protagonist embarking in a taxi to escape his capturers. Valaoritis uses a polyphonic narrator who constantly changes in terms of ‘person, number, gender, substance, and identity’. The novel opens with the fortuitous encounter of the protagonist with a monstrous being called ‘the bilingual’,
See Nanos Valaoritis, ‘Εισαγωγή στη ‘Νάντια’ [Introduction to Nadja]’, in André Breton, Νάντια (Athens: Ypsilon, ), pp. –. Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Victoria Ferentinou, ‘The Quest for the Marvellous: Pierre Mabille’s Le miroir du merveilleux (), Surrealism and Art Theory’, in Harri Veivo, Jean-Pierre Montier, Françoise Nicol, David Ayers, Benedikt Hjartarson, and Sascha Bru (eds.), Beyond Given Knowledge: Investigation, Quest and Exploration in Modernism and the Avant-gardes (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, ), p. . Nicole Ollier, ‘Nanos Valaoritis: Métamorphose et surréalisme’, Annales du Centre de Recherches sur l’Amérique Anglophone, (), – (at pp. –).
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a signifier of double language current in Greece at the time, the καθαρεύουσα (puristic language) and the δημοτική (popular or vernacular language). According to Valaoritis, the novel is predicated upon this double language that becomes the point of departure for the ensuing explorations of collective and individual identities. This symbolism is embedded in the title itself, ‘from the bones rising’, actually a verse from the Greek national anthem that refers to the freedom earned by the Greeks in the revolution against the Ottomans. Valaoritis parodies nationalist discourses, positing language as both the actual battlefield and the great obstacle in the Greeks’ search for identity. In his own hands, however, this gap between spoken and written Greek brings to the surface a bricolage of neologisms, slang, colloquialisms, and incomprehensible phrases creatively deconstructing the rational function of language. Dwelling on the plot devices of Lucian’s The Ass and Apuleius’ Golden Ass, the imagery of post-Enlightenment alchemical works, and Queaneau’s experimental writing, Valaoritis configures a repertoire of endlessly emerging characters engaged in fantastic ordeals through which he critiques contemporary Greek society, its institutional discourses, and bourgeois stereotypes. His novel, in his own words, resembles a ‘panorama’ of fluid ideas, events, and relationships occurring unexpectedly in an intertextual practice that challenges the single-voiced, linear narrative. This mutability is articulated through the alchemical appropriation of both language and plot, namely as alembics in which the main character(s) emerge through constant corporeal migration and metamorphosis from fragmentation to duplication and disfigurement, thus invoking infinite interpretations of subjectivity. This openness discloses the constructedness of identity through language and the performative character of the process. This close alignment between identity and language is further explored in Xerxes’ Treasure in which the search is gradually transformed into a more esoteric exploration of psychological landscapes. Valaoritis revisits the quest trope through the lens of spiritual alchemy and Jung’s analytical psychology. The author had read alchemical books circulating in Paris in the s, such as the work of Fulcanelli, René Alleau, and Eugène Canseliet, as well as Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy (), and recasts the theme of the treasure as ‘an intertextual image for subjectivity – albeit
Valaoritis, From the Bones Rising, p. iii. Nanos Valaoritis, Ο Θησαυρός του Ξέρξη (; Athens: Angyra, ). Henceforth this novel will be referred to, in English, as Xerxes’ Treasure. Interview with Nanos Valaoritis, April .
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one that disrupts fixed borders allowing an endless moving back and forth between self and other, or self and the world’. Valaoritis borrows the sensibility and imagery of these discourses, further reconstructing his alchemical novel as a network of communicating subplots that constitute an uncanny, multilayered cosmos. As in From the Bones Rising, Xerxes’ Treasure investigates this textual world through an ambiguous, polyphonic, dispersed narrator who assumes multiple guises to shatter the certainty of the integrated person: he is identified with a traveller embarking on a journey, with alchemical mercury imprisoned in the alembic, or with a scientist-alchemist seeking to transmute base matter into gold. Significantly, his torments, which mimic stages of an incessant alchemical opus, are situated in a constantly changing reality in which boundaries collapse, bringing forth marvellous realms and contradictory figurations of the main characters. In all cases, it is the search for the treasure, variously identified with the elixir of life, the philosopher’s stone, liberation, social revolution, and love, that moves the quest one step forward. Lacking a teleological ending, the novel closes with a sardonic revelation: the osmosis of the quester with the author and the latter’s cannibalization and disintegration in a ritual banquet by the characters of the book. This is an unsettling ending that counters the very notion of authorship in line with surrealist revisions of poetic agency, and posits the anti-novel as a site for the exploration of language and of an indefinable identity. The aforementioned novels are unique by Greek standards as they share more affinities with European surrealists’ dynamic and intellectualized apprehension of alchemy and in particular Colquhoun’s multidimensional representations. But for Valaoritis, language comprises a form of reality that is clearly independent from its author, engendering curious associations, utterances, readings. In this light, the novel genre, radically revisited and subverted within surrealism, offered him the vehicle to investigate the slippery meaning and transformative power of linguistic experiments by subsuming alternative epistemologies, such as alchemy, to frame the narrative. In this reformulation, he leaned on both Greco-Roman literary tradition and modernist fiction as topoi of reversal in which metamorphosis, affectivity, and fluidity disrupt our normalized conception of reality and our faith in the representational capability of language. Identity and its performative nature lie at the heart of Valaoritis’s textual renderings, laying the groundwork for his idiosyncratic engagement with language-centred poetics in the s.
Ferentinou, ‘Quest for the Marvellous’, p. . Ferentinou, ‘Marie Wilson and Nanos Valaoritis in Conversation’, pp. –.
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In Conclusion As has been shown, alchemy was central to the reconfiguration of the novel within surrealism and enabled the blurring of boundaries between plausible fact and the world of dreams in a constant mobility between different realities. Authors familiar with alchemy, such as Colquhoun, Carrington, and Valaoritis, emulated the flexible, fluid, and non-hierarchical character of alchemical experiments, constructing overlapping, overflowing, seamless narratives that counter the realist genre, exploring through textual materializations the unmapped territories of the self. In their re-envisioning, they deployed the alchemical quest as a trope to designate writing as an inquiry into language that brings forth mental images, unearthing myriad reimaginings of subjectivity. Thus, language served as the starting point for the revelation of an expanded reality of the self and the world, a form of epistemological investigation of otherness and self-definition. The chapter has charted these corporeal cartographies, showing that the alchemical genre primarily functioned as an avenue for the exploration of performative manifestations of identity, and contributed to fecund redefinitions of the novel as a hybrid genre open to interpretation and intertextuality. It also suggested divergences in terms of appropriation; Valaoritis’s reuse of the alchemical narrative deviates from Colquhoun’s and Carrington’s refigurations: as gendered subjects, his female colleagues pursued the construction of an alternative authorial persona refashioning discourse from a feminine angle, while Valaoritis purported to unleash unconscious thought through the unbound play of language, effacing the (male) author as controller of meaning in the process. It is the reinterpretation of alchemy as a non-binary, disruptive, immensely transmutative schema that fertilized the surrealist novel and struck a chord in both male and female authors, highlighting alternative trajectories for the literary endeavour.
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Animals and Ecology in the Surrealist Novel Kristoffer Noheden
Surrealism’s imperative to change life and transform the world is wideranging. Alongside the movement’s assaults on capitalism, Christianity, the family, the state, logic, and colonialism, surrealists have also formulated an incisive critique of anthropocentrism, or the notion that humans are the most significant component of the world. ‘Man is perhaps not the centre, the cynosure of the universe’, André Breton exclaimed in his ‘Prolegomena to a Third Surrealist Manifesto or Not’. Throughout the movement’s long history, many surrealists have held an attendant interest in the natural world. The anti-anthropocentrism espoused by Breton and the surrealist fascination with nature contribute to the formation of an increasingly explicit ecological awareness in the movement. This chapter examines ecological themes in two surrealist novels: Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet () and Rikki Ducornet’s Phosphor in Dreamland (). Both novels are marked by the permutations of surrealism’s approach to animals and ecology following World War II. Written in the s, The Hearing Trumpet narrates the sudden onset of a new ice age under the looming threat of the atom bomb. Carrington, however, uses the apocalyptic scenario as a pretext to envision a new society purged of patriarchy, Christianity, and human separation from nature – in their place emerges a new community under the spell of ancient Goddess worship and predicated on the co-existence of humans, animals, and mythological beings. Composed some four decades later, Phosphor in Dreamland reconstructs a segment of the history of the fictive Caribbean island Birdland, as told by a shy narrator in letters to a friend. Focused on the seventeenth-century inventor and poet Phosphor,
André Breton, ‘Prolegomena to a Third Surrealist Manifesto or Not’ (), in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ), p. . See Donna Roberts, ‘The Ecological Imperative’, in Krzysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson (eds.), Surrealism: Key Concepts (Oxford: Routledge, ), pp. –.
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Ducornet zooms in on the period’s epistemological tensions in relation to the transition from faith in a divine order to an emerging scientific naturalism, with a keen eye to their respective effects on the human approach to nature. Phosphor’s discovery of love and the poetic mysteries of nature is bound up with an ecological insight. The Hearing Trumpet and Phosphor in Dreamland alike take the shape of ecological initiation tracts, in which the protagonists, undergoing a series of trials, develop from a state of ignorance to an increased awareness of their own position in the world and how to act in ways that are attentive to its non-human aspects and their inherent poetry. Changing life, here, is not a distraction from transforming the world, but, as surrealism insists, a prerequisite for it. The use in surrealism of the novel form to narrate such entwined transformations of self and world can be related to Pierre Mabille’s book The Mirror of the Marvelous. A significant influence on both Carrington and Ducornet, Mabille’s expansive definition of the surrealist concept of the marvellous looks to its expression in fairytales, alchemical texts, myths, modern poetry, and magical incantations. For Mabille, these stories of the marvellous depict rites of passage that are at one and the same time exterior and interior: the marvellous can only be reached via a perilous path, the trials offered by which effect a transformation of the self as well as of the world. My likening of Carrington’s and Ducornet’s novels with initiation tracts is a reference to Mabille’s statement that ‘a book on the marvelous ought to be an initiation tract’. Indeed, for Mabille the ontological transformation effected by a sustained encounter with the marvellous is akin to an initiation ritual, much like those practised in esoteric contexts and tribal societies. The insight in the entwinement of self and world that results from such an initiation is bound up with Mabille’s monist belief that ‘everything is in everything’, meaning that mind and matter are not separate but conjoined, and that the human is a microcosm reflecting and structured by the laws that govern the
See also my earlier essays: Kristoffer Noheden, ‘The Grail and the Bees: Leonora Carrington’s Quest for Human–Animal Coexistence’, in Harri Veivo, Jean-Pierre Montier, Françoise Nicol, David Ayers, Benedikt Hjartarson, and Sascha Bru (eds.), Beyond Given Knowledge: Investigation, Quest and Exploration in Modernism and the Avant-Gardes (Berlin: De Gruyter, ), pp. –; Kristoffer Noheden, ‘Magic Language, Esoteric Nature: Rikki Ducornet’s Surrealist Ecology’, in Anna Watz (ed.), Surrealist Women’s Writing: A Critical Exploration (Manchester University Press, ), pp. –. See Kristoffer Noheden, ‘Leonora Carrington, Surrealism, and Initiation: Symbolic Death and Rebirth in Little Francis and Down Below’, Correspondences, / (), –; interview with Rikki Ducornet, January . Pierre Mabille, Mirror of the Marvelous: The Classic Surrealist Work on Myth (), trans. Jody Gladding (Rochester: Inner Traditions, ), pp. , –. Ibid., p. .
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Animals and Ecology in the Surrealist Novel
macrocosm, or the universe itself. Human and nature interpenetrate, and they are connected through intricate correspondences. Extending such a metaphysics and poetics of interrelation between mind and matter, human and nature, into an explicitly ecological approach, The Hearing Trumpet and Phosphor in Dreamland propose an ethics of intersubjective, loving encounters with nature and animals. With an expression from environmental philosopher Freya Mathews, I call this approach the Path of Eros. In her study For Love of Matter, Mathews diagnoses the ongoing ecological catastrophe as an effect of the lingering Cartesian view of the world as mechanistic and predicated on a dualism of mind and matter. If humans alone are believed to possess an interior dimension, and with it qualitative experience, the rest of the world appears inert and void of inherent meaning, and so becomes an easy target for ruthless exploitation. Such ingrained patterns of thinking and acting, Mathews claims, need to be undone if modern humans are to cultivate an ecologically sustainable relation with the world. Seeds of such an ecology are strewn around waiting to be cracked. For Mathews, fairytales and similarly fantastic lore have an innate potential to break the Cartesian spell: the fairytale’s living rocks, talking plants, and cunning animals evoke a world that is teeming with myriad non-human subjectivities, and the quest for love that often propels the narratives can be read as an erotic engagement with reality itself. In light of Mathews’s view of such tales of spirited nature as opening the Path of Eros, Mabille’s explication of the surrealist marvellous as predicated on negating the dualism of mind and matter holds a central proto-ecological insight. For Mathews and Mabille alike, this attunement to the world can only be attained through an arduous transformation of the self. Such an ecological seed germinates in Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet and Ducornet’s Phosphor in Dreamland.
Surrealism and Ecology ‘I hope that man will be able to adopt with respect to nature a less haggard attitude than simply passing from adoration to horror’, Breton writes in his
Remy Laville, ‘Pierre Mabille ou la route vers l’Âge d’Homme’, in Henri Béhar and Pascaline Mourier-Casile (eds.), Mélusine VIII: L’âge ingrat (Paris: L’Âge d’Homme, ), p. ; André Breton, ‘Drawbridges’ (), in Mabille, Mirror of the Marvelous, p. xi. See also Noheden, ‘Leonora Carrington, Surrealism, and Initiation’, p. . Freya Mathews, For Love of Matter: A Contemporary Panpsychism (Albany: State University of New York Press, ), pp. , , –, . Ibid., pp. –. Ibid., pp. –.
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essay Mad Love. Surrealism itself has had its moments of both adoration of nature and Gothic horror in response to it. But the movement has also cultivated a more nuanced and inquisitive register of responses to the natural world. Some of the most well-known surrealist writings from the s are famous primarily for their explorations of the modern metropolis. But just as Paris, as it is evoked in Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant () and Breton’s Nadja (), is riddled with marvellous passages and ripe with the potential of chance encounters, so urbanity is shot through with remnants of the natural world. In the poem ‘Sunflower’ (), Breton likens nocturnal despair with calla lilies and writes of a farm prospering ‘in the heart of Paris’; in Aragon’s Paris Peasant, the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont prompts a ‘feeling for nature’. While these eruptions of nature are moulded for human purposes – sites of agriculture and commerce, and leisure time, respectively – such ironically tinged glimpses of the natural world co-exist with a persistent surrealist interest in less domesticated aspects of nature. Automatism, for instance, frequently seeks to replicate organic growth. Max Ernst invented frottage to coax images from matter. Placing a piece of paper or canvas on wood or other materials and rubbing it with a pencil, he elaborated upon the transferred patterns to lure from them floras and faunas previously unknown. Under the rubric of Histoire naturelle (), these indexical traces of the material world functioned as fertile soil for the germination of an imaginary wilderness. A different form of automatism calling on the forms of nature can be seen in André Masson’s automatic drawings. His undulating lines are energized by a frenzied desire; just as his motifs call up fragments of animals alongside human body parts, so his style is in itself redolent of natural growth. Indeed, automatism, art historian Ralph Ubl claims, was predicated on a foundational similarity between natural processes and surrealist pursuits, since for surrealists ‘the writing of nature also proceeds according to automatism’. Such pursuits gained further and broader traction in the s. In the mid-s, surrealism developed an increased fascination with nature accompanied by an immersion in esoteric lore relating to the
André Breton, Mad Love (), trans. Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, ), p. . Ibid., pp. –; Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant (), trans. Simon Watson Taylor (Boston: Exact Change, ), p. . Ralph Ubl, Prehistoric Future: Max Ernst and the Return of Painting between the Wars, trans. Elizabeth Tucker (University of Chicago Press, ), p. .
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Animals and Ecology in the Surrealist Novel
natural world, including alchemy and Romantic Naturphilosophie. In the same period, animals – photographed, drawn, discussed, and imagined – frequented the pages of the surrealist journal Minotaure (–). The surrealist attraction to speculative nature philosophy as well as to nature itself animates Breton’s Mad Love. In it, he lauds natural phenomena such as crystals and coral as examples of the aesthetics of convulsive beauty he advances. Compared with these shuddering instances of beauty in nature, human pretensions to aesthetic artifice appear stilted and contrived. Organic growth and non-willed creation trump polished artistry. Breton also pursues links between the exterior world and the human mind throughout Mad Love, which come together in the surrealist concept of objective chance. Objective chance posits a mysterious reciprocity between natural necessity and human desire, a surrealist undermining of the Cartesian separation of mind and world. ‘Nothing that surrounds us is object to us, all is subject’, as Breton says elsewhere. Mad Love anticipates the encounters, riven with desire, driven by love, with nature in Carrington’s and Ducornet’s novels. During World War II, Breton and other surrealists started to approach nature in new ways. In , fleeing Nazi-invaded France and en route to the US, Breton and Masson arrived at the Caribbean island Martinique, where they recorded their impressions of the island’s abundant vegetation in their ‘Creole Dialogue’. Coupled with Masson’s frantic drawings of encroaching plant life, in the dialogue the two surrealists are prompted by the marvels of the jungle to launch into an aesthetic discussion. Reality, verdant and sprawling, appears more tolerable to them than back in dreary Europe. Says Breton: ‘One really doesn’t need to add anything to this place to make it perfect. Of course, I am not seeking to rehabilitate the art of representation, but it seems to me it would be less offensive here than in other places.’ In Martinique the lianas themselves appeared to him to be ‘ladders to dreams’, while the canna was ‘emblematic of the reconciliation we are seeking between the obtainable and the wild beyond, between life
See Paul Hammond, Constellations of Miró, Breton (San Francisco: City Lights, ), pp. –. See Effie Rentzou, ‘The Minotaur’s Revolution: On Animals and Politics’, L’ésprit créateur, / (), –. Breton, Mad Love, pp. –. Ibid., pp. , –. André Breton, Surrealism and Painting (, ), trans. Simon Watson Taylor (Boston: MFA Publications, ), p. . Published in André Breton with André Masson, Martinique: Snake Charmer (), trans. David W. Seaman (Austin: University of Texas Press, ), pp. –. Ibid., p. .
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and dream’. This Caribbean nature is not only teeming with its own immanent poetry, but in itself embodies that resolution of the real and the imaginary, subject and object, that Breton pursued. His transformative time in Martinique would resound in his writings. It was the following year that Breton renounced anthropocentrism in his ‘Prolegomena to a Third Surrealist Manifesto or Not’, and he did so as part of an effort to envision an antidote to the disasters ravishing the world. His proposed solution is the creation of a new myth to counter the destruction wrought not just by national socialism, but by an entire civilization predicated upon narrow rationalism and human hubris. Seeking routes out of this impasse, Breton lauds the possibility of utopian and fantastic narratives, such as those of Jonathan Swift and Cyrano de Bergerac, to provide an insight into non-human worlds. His conception of such renditions of fantastic adventures as anti-anthropocentric myths, also resonates with Breton’s later statement that the fracture humanity believes separates it from the world calls for re-establishing ‘contact with nature via poetic, and, dare I say, mythic routes’. The perilous journeys encoded in myths are poised to reignite ‘the primordial links’ between human and world. Later generations of surrealists have elaborated a more explicit ecological awareness. In the s, the Surrealist Group of Chicago joined forces with radical environmental activists Earth First! in their practice of an ‘ecology of the marvelous’, attuned at one and the same time to the pressing threats to wildlife, captive animals, and the environment, and to the surrealist belief in the need to counter instrumental reason and narrow realism with dream and the marvellous. In Prague, following the fall of the totalitarian regime, the artist and filmmaker Jan Švankmajer asserted that the time had also come for humanity to ‘renounce the leading role’ and leave room for other species to flourish. Similarly, in the s the Surrealist Group of Stockholm touched on possibilities of a noir ecology, as exemplified by tracts calling on the weird and the wild as much as by Aase Berg’s early poems, which evince a Gothic revulsion as they revel in nature’s teeming, messy materiality. Here, nature is a source of gleeful
Breton, Surrealism and Painting, ; Breton with Masson, Martinique, pp. , . André Breton, Conversations: The Autobiography of Surrealism (), trans. Mark Polizzotti (New York: Paragon House, ), p. (italics removed). André Breton, ‘Ascendant Sign’ (), in Breton, Free Rein, trans. Michel Parmentier and Jacqueline d’Amboise (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, ), p. . For these approaches to ecology in later international surrealism, see Kristoffer Noheden, ‘Seven Surrealist Animals: Ecology in International Surrealism’, in Charles Cannon and Joan Hawkins (eds.), Wounded Galaxies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, forthcoming).
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horror, Berg cynically eschewing all adoration; yet, in their clinging, cloying, visceral messiness these poems eat away at the human objectification of nature. Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet and Ducornet’s Phosphor in Dreamland need to be read in the light of this extended surrealist development. Both novels resonate with Breton’s luxuriating in the oneiric and poetic qualities of nature, and they take the shape of fantastic narratives descending directly from Swift, Bergerac, and Romantics such as Novalis, as much as from the expansive tradition of the marvellous outlined with such sensitivity by Mabille.
The Hearing Trumpet Leonora Carrington wrote The Hearing Trumpet in Mexico City in the s, but the novel was not published until , first in French translation and then, two years later, in the original English. The novel has a labyrinthine, Gothic-Lewis-Carroll-at-a-séance sense of twists and turns through an everyday world transforming into a vivid myth, but it is nevertheless a more conventionally structured narrative than Carrington’s second novel, the even more unabashedly esoteric The Stone Door (). In The Hearing Trumpet, ninety-two-year-old protagonist Marian Leatherby finds herself in an unexpected and transformative adventure when she is placed in an institution for the elderly, equipped with a hearing trumpet that allows her to overcome her encroaching deafness. Among friends and foes in the institution, Marian becomes increasingly fascinated with the dining-room portrait of a winking nun; delving into the story of the Abbess, Doña Rosalinda Alvarez Cruz della Cueva of the Convent of Santa Barbara of Tartarus, Marian unravels an old Christian conspiracy to steal the Holy Grail from the ancient Goddess. In the meantime, the world enters a new ice age, and in the midst of the turmoil Marian and her elderly friends join forces with manifestations of the Goddess and swarms of bees to capture the Grail and restore it to the Goddess, so ending the millennia-long reign of patriarchy. Under the sign of the horned Goddess, Marian and her companions form a new interspecies community comprising crones, cats, goats, and werewolves. As the world is covered in snow and ice, patriarchal institutions crumble, anthropocentrism is displaced, and a new ecological order arises. The Hearing
Swift is present as a recurring intertextual element in Phosphor in Dreamland, and Bergerac occupies a similar role in Ducornet’s earlier novel Entering Fire.
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Trumpet draws heavily on Carrington’s life-changing discovery of Robert Graves’s study The White Goddess, which excavates a repressed tradition of Goddess worship. Carrington refracts the Goddess through the mischievous nun, Doña Rosalinda, and the mythical figures of Hecate and Anubeth, as well as the underworld region of Tartarus, while also showing how Marian and her friends discover that they, too, are manifestations of the Goddess, ready to usher in a new society devoid of anthropocentric exploitation. Born in in Lancashire, Leonora Carrington initially participated in surrealist activities in Paris in the second half of the s, but kept in touch with European surrealists including Breton and contributed to surrealist exhibitions and publications. Moving to Mexico City in , she spent much of the next seven decades in the company of other émigré surrealists, including Remedios Varo, Pedro Friedeberg, and Alan Glass. In the late s and s, Leonora Carrington resided on and off in Chicago, where she participated in local surrealist activities and protests. Chicago surrealist Penelope Rosemont describes how Carrington was particularly drawn to the most radical aspect of the group’s environmental activities: ‘that our aim should be not only to preserve existing wilderness, but also to expand wilderness, by dismantling a lot of highways, malls and other cement-blighted areas and letting wilderness take over’. Although, says Rosemont, Carrington read books on wildlife, it seemed that ultimately her ‘sense of ecology probably owes more to mythology than science’, and she ‘expressed a deep interest in the “special knowledge” possessed by birds and other wild creatures, and wondered how we might learn to share that knowledge’. Carrington’s sympathies for environmentalism alongside the idea that non-human animals have a richer inner life than modern thought has tended to believe, should come as no surprise to those familiar with her art and writings. Ever since her early paintings and short stories, Carrington has conjured up a world in which humans and animals are in a relation of communicative exchange rather than lopsided exploitation. The condescending human view that other animals are void of subjectivity and agency, not to
Penelope Rosemont, ‘A Revolution in the Way We Think & Feel: Conversations with Leonora Carrington’, in Ron Sakolsky (ed.), Surrealist Subversions: Rants, Writings & Images by the Surrealist Movement in the United States (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, ), p. . Ibid. See Susan Aberth, ‘Animal Kingdom’, in Tere Arcq and Stefaan van Ray (eds.), Leonora Carrington: Magical Tales (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes & Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, ), pp. –.
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Animals and Ecology in the Surrealist Novel
mention a proclivity for play, is displaced by imaginative renderings of human–animal relations marked by savage humour, affectionate intimacy, and a ferocious revolt against oppression. As much is evidenced by Carrington’s renowned early short story ‘The Debutante’, in which a young woman befriends a hyena in the zoo, and the two teach each other their respective languages. The debutante persuades the hyena to take her place at an upcoming coming-out ball, but wearing her friend’s clothes and with a servant’s torn-off face as a disguise, the hyena is soon betrayed by her pungent smell. Tearing off her mask and devouring it, the hyena leaps out the window with a howl. The animal, ultimately, refuses to inhabit the human order. In later images and narratives, Carrington develops more numinous depictions of human–animal co-existence. Engaged in mysterious rituals, dwelling in vast chthonic spaces, or inhabiting wondrous rooms, humans and animals constantly appear to be transmitting that particular secret knowledge of which Carrington speaks. The Hearing Trumpet conjoins Carrington’s belief in the possibilities of communication and collaboration across species with her attraction to the prospect of civilization perturbed by the unpredictable behaviour of nature. The Hearing Trumpet narrates an individual, collective, planetary, and metaphysical process of transformation. As indicated by Carrington’s earlier writings and by Rosemont’s comments, like many other surrealists she was keenly aware of the detrimental effects wreaked by humans on nature and enabled by the human sense of separation from and superiority to other animals, and here it is shaped by the particular historical circumstance of the Cold War. As winter sets on Mexico, Carmella says, ‘It is all the fault of that dreadful atom bomb they were so proud of.’ Following World War II, the spectre of the bomb had a significant effect on surrealism, prompting Breton to a dark rumination on humanity finding itself in a ‘foul corridor’ at the end of which awaits a ‘quite possible nonuniverse’. Carrington’s emphasis on the rejected legacy of Goddess worship also chimes with the way in which Breton and other surrealist friends turned to myth and various occult systems in their pursuit of new means to change the world and, now, evade its total destruction. The Hearing Trumpet also recalls Carrington’s friend Pierre Mabille’s view of the marvellous as an initiatory passage, but with a marked
Leonora Carrington, ‘The Debutante’ (–), in Carrington, The House of Fear: Notes from Down Below (New York: E. P. Dutton, ), pp. –. Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet (; London: Penguin, ), p. . André Breton, ‘The Lamp in the Clock’ (), in Free Rein, p. .
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ecological emphasis. Mabille posits that the mythical journey through the marvellous, fraught with tribulations, is also a journey inwards in which the protagonist experiences dissolution followed by a reconstitution, or a symbolic death and rebirth. When Carrington wrote Down Below (), her harrowing memoir of her time incarcerated in a mental institution in Spain in , she refracted her experiences through Mirror of the Marvelous in order to make sense of them and distil from them a healing Knowledge. Such a process of initiation through death and rebirth into a new state of awareness, a transformation of the self, recurs in The Hearing Trumpet. Marian’s journey through The Hearing Trumpet reflects Mabille’s notion that there are direct links between inner and outer, mind and matter, human and universe. At the outset, Marian is cut off from the world surrounding her through her deafness, and even as she is empowered with the hearing trumpet, she is unable to resist her son’s decision to place her in an institution for the elderly. It is the move there, however, that sets her on a path of transformation. Marian’s fascination with the portrait of the leering nun leads to her learning about a male, Christian plot to keep the Grail hidden away from the Goddess. As Marian is introduced to the myth of the Goddess, the world is turning colder and darker and the new ice age arrives. However, through their newly acquired knowledge, Marian and her friends find a way to transform the disaster into the foundation of a new society. This transformation of the world is bound up with an ontological transformation of the self. If, in Down Below, Carrington narrated a traumatic experience of dissolution and identity loss that was akin to a symbolic death, the initiatory process in The Hearing Trumpet is considerably more benign. It culminates with Marian entering a cavern in the underworld, in which her own double is stirring a cauldron. When the other Marian pushes her into the boiling broth, Marian herself becomes the one stirring the stew. When she looks into an obsidian mirror, she first sees the abbess, then the Queen Bee, and finally her own reflection. She now comprises one facet of the Triple Goddess about whom Graves writes. With these transformations come a set of new abilities, which emphasize Marian’s proximity to animals: she is spry as a mountain goat and sees in the dark like a cat. This initiation is a shedding of constrained humanity, Marian emerging as more-than-human. Marian and her elderly friends are now equipped to assist the Queen Bee in recovering the Grail from men and their churches and governments. Civilization has crumbled and a cohort of crones
See Noheden, ‘Leonora Carrington, Surrealism, and Initiation’.
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Animals and Ecology in the Surrealist Novel
collaborates with animals and mythological creatures to set up a new, noncoercive society. Conceived as an initiation tract, The Hearing Trumpet centres on an elderly woman demonstrating that it is never too late to acquire knowledge and rebel against an oppressive order, but that doing so entails a fundamental ontological transformation. This initiatory trajectory, I suggest, is similar to what Freya Mathews calls the Path of Eros. For Mathews, the Path of Eros is predicated on a recognition of the world as teeming with subjectivities and an attendant will to engage in communicative congress with them. No longer experienced as a flat, inert mass of objects, the world now requires an ethical response of recognition and respect. It requires love. Michael Richardson points out that surrealist narratives are predicated on the writer relinquishing any pretension to master the world described; instead, ‘the world itself [is] given the opportunity to assert itself through the writer’. Since the Cartesian view of the human as uniquely privileged in having a proper subjecthood, including an interior dimension of thought and experience, is so entrenched in Western modernity, Mathews suggests that we turn to different sources to locate narratives that provide an intimation of this fundamental liveliness of the world. Fairytales abound with such perspectives, since they are replete with wise animals, talking stones, and sentient rivers that on a symbolical level may help us see that nature is responsive, demanding, and animated by the pulsations of eros. The Hearing Trumpet responds to a similar necessity. It sets out on the Path of Eros and encounters the possibility of intersubjective relationships with goats and cats and werewolves. It postulates a surrealist ecology that is as loving as it is fierce.
Phosphor in Dreamland Born in , Rikki Ducornet started participating in surrealist exhibitions in the early s, before encountering the Surrealist Group of Chicago in . Throughout the ensuing decades, she has continued to take part in surrealist activities through international exhibitions, publications, and collaborations, while developing a body of work that consistently draws on dreams and a rigorous exploration of the inventive powers of the creative
Mathews, For Love of Matter, pp. –. Michael Richardson, ‘Afterword’, in Michael Richardson (ed.), The Myth of the World: The Dedalus Book of Surrealism (Sawtry: Dedalus, ), p. . Mathews, For Love of Matter, pp. –.
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imagination. The author’s fifth novel, Phosphor in Dreamland follows upon a tetralogy of novels devoted to the four elements – The Stain (; earth), Entering Fire (; fire), The Fountains of Neptune (; water), and The Jade Cabinet (; air) – to which it relates as the alchemical quintessence, variously described as ether and dream. Like the books in the tetralogy preceding it, Phosphor in Dreamland displays Ducornet’s influence from self-reflexive writers including Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges, and is bursting with allusions to literature, history, and forms of knowledge both scientific and heterodox. Much like Borges, Ducornet unsettles the border between encyclopedistics and imagination through renditions of historical events and past beliefs that teeter on the brink of the documentary and the fantastic. As I have argued elsewhere, these novels, alongside much of Ducornet’s art and writings in general, are ripe with intimations of a surrealist ecology. This ecology takes shape through a persistent critique of domination and exploitation of humans as well as non-humans, combined with a minute attention to the natural world, including its forms, behaviour, and inherent poetry. Ducornet indeed describes herself as a ‘frustrated natural historian’. Ever since her early work, her drawings and paintings have alluded to the conventions of natural history illustrations. But she evokes botany, zoology, and mineralogy only to allow the imagination to transform often minutely rendered specimens into new beings undergoing metamorphosis. The presumed border between life and inert matter becomes porous as mineral elements merge with fleshy tendrils, and human bodies sprout from rocks. The world’s mutability animates Ducornet’s writings, too. Many of the horrors that befall the worlds she conjures can be traced to a human incapacity to accept change; as she puts it in an essay, the roving and ignorant human eye ‘faults and punishes the world for its mutabilities, its sprawl of forms . . . the enigmatic nature of creatures . . . as we rush to pave the planet over with graves and extinguish the stars’. Against the prevalent human incapacity to embrace Eros as the fundamental impulse of the world, seeding it with incessant change, Ducornet demonstrates that close attention to nature is conducive to poetry, which in turn incites its own marvellous transformations. Her novels and essays evince a wideranging appetite for knowledge of many kinds, from alchemy to animal
M.E. Warlick, ‘Rikki Ducornet: An Alchemy of Dreams and Desire’, Cauda Pavonis, / (), – (at p. ). See Noheden, ‘Magic Language, Esoteric Nature.’ Interview with Rikki Ducornet, January . Rikki Ducornet, The Deep Zoo: Essays (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, ), p. .
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Animals and Ecology in the Surrealist Novel
cognition, from Pierre Mabille’s Mirror of the Marvelous to evolutionary biology, from Gaston Bachelard’s books on the material imagination to the intricate world of mushrooms. Phosphor in Dreamland evokes many of these interests and takes on the tension between naturalism and metaphysics, reality and poetry. Set during the Renaissance transition from a faith-based to an empirical worldview, the novel utilizes that context to lambast the way in which repressive types of different stripes direct their puritan ire at scientific inquisitiveness as much as at dream, eroticism, and the sensuous knowledge of the body. In line with how surrealism has always insisted on the proximity between dream and revolution, so in Ducornet’s fiction the carnal and the oneiric are entwined in revolt against strictures imposed on both human and natural freedom. Phosphor in Dreamland is composed as a long letter from an unnamed narrator to his friend Ved Krishnamurti, in which the narrator pieces together a decisive episode in his home island Birdland’s history. This rendition of the Caribbean island’s history centres on the seventeenth century, a time when the genocide of Birdland’s indigenous population is but a few generations away, while the native animal, the lôplôp, is all but extinct, but the island has not yet been fully explored and charted; as a ghastly backdrop, the island’s wealthy white masters are attempting to import slaves from Africa. The picaresque reconstruction of the island’s history centres around a journey intended to document the island’s wildlife funded by the ruthless nobleman Fantasma, eager to lay the land under his feet just as, he proudly declares, his ancestors ‘subjugated this island’. The expedition is prompted by Phosphor’s invention of an ocularscope, capable of capturing images in three dimensions, in which Fantasma sees a great potential to finally control the teeming nature that encroaches upon him. Assisted by his brute strongman Yahoo Clay, Fantasma enlists both Phosphor and his estranged, elderly stepfather Fogginius to set out on a journey into the unknown depths of Birdland. Through these characters, Ducornet plays out a conflict between superstition and knowledge, exploitation and love of nature, violence and care, over which hovers the spectre of the Church and the local Inquisition, ever alert to transgressions of the accepted doctrine. In a similar way as Carrington sets Marian Leatherby on a path of initiation, so Ducornet uses Phosphor’s character trajectory to sound out the possibility of an ecological and erotic approach to the world.
Rikki Ducornet, Phosphor in Dreamland (Normal: Dalkey Archive Press, ), p. .
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At the heart of Phosphor in Dreamland is a conflict between metaphysical belief and empirical knowledge. This conflict is personified by the aged eccentric Fogginius and his stepson, the eponymous Phosphor, both of whom are eager to understand and inventory the world. Fogginius, a former priest expulsed from the Church for his espousal of unconventional doctrine, used to be the island’s sole scholar, before rivals arrived in the form of a Professor Tardanza and the prodigious Phosphor. Fogginius’s learning, though, is inseparable from his superstition. For all his curiosity about the surrounding world, he is also in the thrall of believing in an invisible, divine order: ‘a madman determined by magical thinking’. Phosphor however, by dint of being born cross-eyed, cultivates a different perception of the world, his tilted stereoscopic vision enabling him to see beyond his stepfather’s errant teachings in which observation is perverted by superstition. Struggling against Fogginius’s sticky webs of odd lore, Phosphor grows up to be a perceptive inventor and observer of nature. Eschewing his step-father’s cloying God, he fashions himself a staunchly materialist empiricist. There is a charged intimation in Phosphor in Dreamland that the mania for understanding and ordering the world, whether believed to be shaped by the divine or by material mechanism, is fraught with the risk of destruction. Early in the novel, we learn that Fogginius combines his belief in hidden machinations with his own empirical mania. Having taught himself the art of taxidermy, but failing to acquire any of the necessary artfulness of this pursuit, his snakes ‘did not diminish towards the tail, but instead . . . grew progressively fatter’. But his taxidermic specimens are not only wanting in terms of naturalism. Fogginius’ attempts at cataloguing the animals are ‘so thorough that all the living creatures within three kilometers of his hovel had utterly vanished’. His skewed preservation of the animals’ bodies leads to their extinction. Ultimately, though, Fogginius’ murderous taxidermy may only be marginally different from the workings of Phosphor’s ocularscope as it is wielded first by Fantasma, and then by the expedition. For Fantasma, the early three-dimensional camera promises to subdue a natural world that he finds intolerably occupied with ‘generative functioning’. Much like he first pays to have a young beauty captured by the camera only to then force his way on her, so Fantasma later seeks to capture nature only to still its incessant eroticism. When his strong man Yahoo Clay encounters the last surviving lôplôp, a species with humanoid bodies but the heads and giant beaks of a bird, his immediate impulse is to kill it. But in spite of being aided by both Yahoo Clay’s brute force and the
Ibid., p. .
Ibid., p. .
Ibid., p. (italics removed).
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Animals and Ecology in the Surrealist Novel
ocularscope as visual trap, Fantasma eventually succumbs to the teeming messiness of nature. Losing his mind when confronted with its sprawling life, he shouts in exasperation, ‘Why did I inflict this detour in chaos upon myself?’ Phosphor, in contrast, undergoes a transformation throughout the novel, which ends with him arriving at a view of the world that is accepting of its mutability and cognizant of its reciprocal eroticism. When Phosphor first elopes from Fogginius and starts travelling the world, he becomes an atheist, shunning all things smacking of mystery, wanting, above all, to profit by the real and so to understand the mechanisms that – as hidden gears animate a music box – cause the world to spin. But, inevitably, such close investigation of the natural world led him back to ineffable mystery. Phosphor then turned to poetry to satisfy a need . . . that mirrored his mind’s acute hunger for gnosis.
The idea of hidden gears animating the world is a characteristic of the mechanical worldview that was elaborated during the seventeenth century. But whereas the notion of the world as governed by a predictable mechanism contributed to strike a decisive blow to the tyranny of Christianity, mechanistic materialism also threatened to empty the world of meaning. Matter, now, was conceived as inert, and non-human beings as machines, humans the only thing in the world possessing mind, experience, and subjectivity – not to mention thought, imagination, and dream. The mercurial Phosphor, as seen in the quote above, inevitably realizes that the wonders of the natural world cannot be explained away as a consequence of the movement of cogs in machinery. His investigations into nature are instead buoyed by his intuition that ‘form is matter dreaming’. Ducornet here evokes Gaston Bachelard’s works on the imagination of matter, in which he expounds on the ways in which poets, philosophers, and alchemists cultivate a love for the material world predicated on a metaphysics in which matter is shot through with reverie. The ancient doctrines of hylozoism (living matter) and panpsychism (all things being enminded), all but eliminated with the rise of the mechanical worldview, reverberate in the unconscious and, for Phosphor, appear to rise to the
Ibid., p. (italics removed). Ibid., p. . David Skrbina, Panpsychism in the West (Cambridge, : MIT Press, ), pp. –, . Ducornet, Phosphor in Dreamland, p. . See e.g. Gaston Bachelard, Earth and Reveries of Repose: An Essay on Images of Interiority (), trans. Mary McAllester Jones (Dallas Institute, ).
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surface through close encounters with nature. He comes to unite his attentiveness to the marvels of matter with an empirical curiosity freed from the spectre of God. Still, in spite of his receptivity to nature’s poetry, the poetry Phosphor himself composes is stilted. It is only when he discovers love through his marriage to Professor Tardanza’s daughter Extravaganza that he realizes his poetic potential. Tellingly, his eroticism needs to be liberated for his poetic genius to blossom. At first, Phosphor is intimidated by Extravaganza’s beauty, shying away from his new wife and her corporeality, as confounded by it as Fantasma is by that generative nature he beholds in horror. Then, one night as Phosphor sits by the pool in the garden, his eyes meet the gaze of a carp, in which he suddenly recognizes the look of his beloved. His detection of a deep similarity between the carp and Extravaganza sets in motion a series of insights about his own corporeality, which culminates when Phosphor watches how ‘the fish excreted a surprisingly thick string of filth’, forcing him to ‘reflect upon physicality and to accept the nature of the world in its entirety’. Now fully aware of his own embodied dependence on the natural world, Phosphor embraces Extravaganza and the two discover the joy and beauty of eroticism, while his poems are no longer contrived but effortlessly animated by eros. Phosphor’s upbringing at the mercy of the erratic Fogginius, his restless inquisitiveness, and the arduous expedition through the interior of Birdland now appear to have formed the first part of an initiatory journey. The culmination of Phosphor’s journey when he looks in the eyes of the carp and then falls into the arms of Extravaganza is that moment of gnosis for which he has longed. The event conjures up another central element in Mabille’s topography of the marvellous: that love prompts new knowledge about the world and that amorous intersubjectivity alone allows real contact not just with another person, but also ‘with the rest of the cosmos’. Phosphor’s development, then, leads him on to the Path of Eros, upon which he becomes aware of the interrelations between himself, nature, and eroticism, no longer trying to capture the mystery of the world but co-existing with it. Ducornet extends this ecological gnosis beyond any one individual perspective, when she allows the withdrawn narrator himself to plunge into the joy of love as he observes eros in nature. Together with Polly, a curator at Birdland’s natural history museum, the narrator, much like the indigenous people as well as the lôplôp before him, observes the ceremonial interaction between a starfish and a scallop: ‘And when the
Ducornet, Phosphor in Dreamland, p. .
Mabille, Mirror of the Marvelous, p. .
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Animals and Ecology in the Surrealist Novel
starfish coaxed the scallop’s valves apart, we exhaled simultaneously and turned to one another. I felt my byssal anchors snap as for the first time those salmon-colored lips parted.’ This, again, resounds with Freya Mathews’s idea that the Path of Eros engages the world through a fundamental erotic impulse that enables a deep and reciprocal relation with other beings and with matter itself. Those who take the Path of Eros are stricken by orexis, or an appetite for the world that is not about consumption, but about communication and congress with all that surrounds them. In Phosphor in Dreamland, such a communicative, erotic appetite that is attuned to the perspectives of others, is contrasted with the destructive appetites of exploitation and subordination, bent only on satisfying the urges of a dominant self. Marian Leatherby and Phosphor alike undergo trials that evoke Mabille’s description of the encounter with the marvellous as a transformative journey. The surrealist imperative to change life and transform the world takes on the quality of an initiatory process. As I have argued, there are similarities between Mabille’s notion that there is no fundamental distinction between mind and matter and the anti-Cartesianism in the strand of environmental philosophy that is here represented by Mathews. Through their combination of narrating encounters with the marvellous with a strong focus on animals and nature, The Hearing Trumpet and Phosphor in Dreamland evince possibilities of a surrealist ecology predicated on the notion that poetry may be immanent in the world and that intersubjective communication with the non-human world is a concrete possibility.
Ducornet, Phosphor in Dreamland, p. .
Mathews, For Love of Matter, pp. –.
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Transnational Surrealism
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Nature and Surrealism in the Latin American Novel of the Tropics María Clara Bernal
In some of the most important Latin American novels of the twentieth century, natural landscapes are often a portal opening onto alternative realities, a trope by which their authors signalled their proximity to surrealism. There is, of course, a long-lasting and ongoing debate about the extent to which surrealism can be said to have taken root in Latin American soil, and many have argued that Alejo Carpentier’s concept of magic realism provides a more accurate categorization of the aesthetic preoccupation with the marvellous in the subcontinent. Nonetheless, it is certainly possible to find specific examples of Latin American works that were produced in conversation with the ideas of André Breton, Benjamin Péret, and other European surrealists. In Latin American literature and visual arts the surrealist notion of the marvellous has been received and taken up in myriad ways, without adhering to any individual normative conception of its significance or mode of figuration. For this reason, the following pages will not attempt an exhaustive account of the impact of surrealism on the Latin American novel of the post-war period; instead, I will examine the complex assimilation of the surrealist sensibility by isolating the role of nature as a prominent character with narrative agency in these novels. There was already a precedent in Latin America for this kind of literary device. In the genre that would come to be known as novela de la selva (jungle novel), which emerged in the s, nature was often invested with psychological overtones. The novela de la selva was inspired by the Romantic vision of landscape promoted by Alexander von Humboldt in the nineteenth century, a vision that undergirded an effort to domesticate natural phenomena. Rómulo Gallego’s Doña Bárbara () introduced a new inflection
I am referring here to novels like Alejo Carpentier’s The Lost Steps, Alvaro Mutis’s The Snow of the Admiral (or his short story ‘The Mansion of Araucaima’), and Daniel Maximin’s Soufrières, amongst others.
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to the genre by shifting away from the image of Latin America as a location where raw nature prevailed, conceiving it instead as the mythical site of an originary sense of culture. Through this shift it was possible to re-establish a form of cultural authority, no longer grounded on Western knowledge, but attained through the creation of a discourse that would be capable of containing and expressing those myths. In turn, this search for a ‘new myth’ would come to function as a crucial point of convergence between European and Latin American surrealism. While the French surrealists were looking for this myth in the Americas with the hope of reconnecting with the mystery of their world, now destroyed by the war, Latin American intellectuals regarded it as a vehicle for the reaffirmation of their identity. As Carpentier put it, nature was a central component of this new mythology, and even today characters of Latin American popular folklore, like El Moán (the moaner) or La Bola de Fuego (the ball of fire), are associated with features of the landscape such as rivers and plains. In the literary works that I will examine below, natural landscapes mediate a unique experience of the marvellous in moments of profound disenchantment and personal crisis. In the following pages I will argue that Latin American novelists engaged with surrealism precisely through the use of environmental motifs – the tropical forest, the sea, the volcano, and the river – as metaphors for processes of mental and social upheaval.
Surrealism in Tropical Latin America Surrealism was a cosmopolitan movement from the moment of its inception, but it would be inaccurate to read its expansion as that of a European aesthetic exerting an influence over writers and artists outside of Europe. Instead, we might say that surrealism proliferated outside of Europe to the extent that it functioned as a catalyst for drives that took on different nuances in different locations. As I have noted, its relevance to the development of Latin American literature in the post-war period was and remains a topic of debate. Latin American writers, artists, and intellectuals responded to European surrealism in a variety of ways, through assimilation, adaptation, and even opposition. Some authors, like Carpentier and Juan Larrea, strongly resisted the idea that certain strains of Latin American literature could be described as local epigones of surrealism, an interpretation that struck them as enforcing a kind of aesthetic colonialism. Others who were less committed to the affirmation of autochthonous languages, openly instrumentalized surrealist devices in order to express the continent’s own collective psyche.
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Nature and Surrealism in the Latin American Novel
Although for many intellectuals surrealism had come to an end in the s, when several of its members were exiled in the American continent, Latin American authors like Suzanne Césaire and Julio Cortázar stood for its continued relevance and vitality. Cortázar, for instance, when challenged about the validity of surrealism, declared: [It] pays to remember that from the first surrealist game with the little pieces of paper this verse was born: ‘The exquisite cadaver will drink the new wine.’ Be careful with this dead man who is very much alive, who wears the most dangerous of suits, that of false absence, and who – present as never before, there where no one suspects it – rests his enormous hands on time in order to keep it from moving on without him, the one who gives it meaning.
The Guatemalan poet Miguel Ángel Asturias also stated that his first books, Leyendas de Guatemala (Legends from Guatemala, ) and El señor presidente (Mister President, ), had relied on the resources of automatic writing and bore the imprint of his encounters with the surrealists in Paris. In spite of the undeniably surrealist sympathies of these and other authors from different generations, there is no clear example of something that could be called a surrealist novelist in Latin America. To describe Carpentier, Cortázar, Octavio Paz, or Jorge Luis Borges as fullfledged surrealists would undoubtedly be an unproductive simplification of their work. It is nonetheless possible to say that in some of their works they all approach the methodologies, problems, or themes of surrealism. Scholars who have studied the relationship between surrealism and the subcontinent often mention the fascination that the landscapes of Latin America and the Caribbean exerted over artists like André Masson, Breton, and Péret. For them, these landscapes were much more than a trove of metaphorical possibilities, since their incredible power suggested an experience of nature that could not be reduced to the contemplative sphere. The art historian Martica Sawin argues that, to some extent, this encounter with America compelled European surrealists to engage in a process of renewal: ‘the vastness and natural spectacles of this continent impelled [them] to broach new subject matter, to invent new forms, and to deal with space in a multiperspectival way’. Texts like Breton and Masson’s
Julio Cortazar, ‘Un cadáver viviente’, quoted in Melanie Nicholson, Surrealism in Latin American Literature: Searching for Breton’s Ghost (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, ), p. . Ángel Rama, La novela en América Latina: Panoramas – (Bogotá: Colcultura, ), p. . Martica Sawin, Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New School (Cambridge, : MIT Press, ), p. .
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‘Creole Dialogue’ () give voice to their dazzling encounter with tropical nature in Martinique, experienced by the two artists as a space for the projection of their desires: The forest surrounds us; we knew of it and its sorcery before we arrived. Do you remember the drawing I called Délire végétal []? The deliriousness is here, we touch it, we experience it, we are one with these layered trees, bearing in the elbows of their branches miniature swamps with parasitic vegetation grafted to their supporting trunk: rising, falling back down, active, passive festooned from top to bottom with garlands of star like blooms.
Two things stand out in this dialogical fragment: on the one hand, Masson and Breton claim to understand their own earlier work as a premonition of what they would later find in the Caribbean; on the other, they describe tropical nature as delirious, an adjective that for the surrealists entailed a specific kind of potentiality. For their part, Latin American intellectuals creatively embraced various aspects of the language and some of the methodologies expounded by European surrealism, although, as Paz stated, what appealed to them the most was the revolutionary spirit of the movement: we weren’t interested in the language of surrealism, nor in its theories about ‘automatic writing’: we were seduced by its uncompromising affirmation of certain values that we considered – and that I still consider – the most beautiful of all: imagination, love, and freedom, the only forces capable of consecrating the world and transforming it into something truly ‘other’.
Paz is among the authors who assessed the presence of surrealism in Latin America favorably, as an occasion for creating bridges rather than as the arrival of an influence that needed to be resisted. Many shared this point of view, including authors who played a crucial role in the anticolonial debate, like Aimé Césaire, who invented the concept of miraculous weapons to account for poetical modes of resistance against French colonialism in the Caribbean (Breton would embrace a similar stance, arguing for the political potential of poetical acts). Other Caribbean authors like Suzanne Césaire (née Roussi), Daniel Maximin, and Maryse Condé recurrently addressed the theme of local nature as a vehicle for accessing aspects of inner life, and as a representation of the struggle for social freedom, both of which concerns were dear to French surrealism.
André Breton and André Masson, Martinique: Snake Charmer (), trans. David W. Seaman (Austin: University of Texas Press, ), p. . Quoted in Nicholson, Surrealism in Latin American Literature, p. . Translation modified.
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Nature and Surrealism in the Latin American Novel
In two texts published in the journal Minotaure towards the end of the s – ‘La nature dévore le progrès et le dépasse’ (‘Nature Devours Progress and Exceeds It’) and ‘Ruines: Ruine de ruines’ (‘Ruins: Ruins of Ruins’) – Péret had openly proclaimed his aversion to the understanding of progress deployed by France to justify its colonial campaigns. Here Péret evokes the image of a voracious nature eager to overcome any obstacle that may block its path, arguing that in ‘Equatorial America’, as he calls it, nature is endowed with an intrinsic force that allows it to prevail, driven by a capacity for renewal unchecked by any rules: ‘in Equatorial America the rifle chases the bird that it fails to kill, and the serpent crushes the rifle like a rabbit’. Péret stages a critical struggle, pitting nature against progress, and sees the former as charged with a vitality that surpasses all rationality: ‘Once, twice, he will resist the temptation that will chase him all along the path . . . but one day he will hear the call of the enchantress.’ In these texts Péret aims to capture the innate urge of every human creation to return to nature through a kind of entropy, as if everything were destined to return to the condition of landscape. He foregrounds nature’s capacity to overtake human-made structures, which seems to put everything under a spell: ‘The machine will stop. . . . From then on the slow absorption begins: rod after rod, lever after lever, the locomotive returns to the forest bed.’ It is not absurd to think that Péret’s poetics may be regarded as a key source for our understanding of the relationships between surrealism, nature, and the Latin American landscape; indeed, his work was significantly impacted by the years that he spent living in the subcontinent (he lived in Brazil between and , and in Mexico between and ). In Péret set to work on a compilation of myths, legends, and popular tales that would eventually be published in with the title Anthologie des mythes, légendes et contes populaires d’Amérique (Anthology of Myths, Legends and Popular Stories from America). In these texts, features of the landscape such as volcanoes, jungles, and rivers often function as metaphorical counterparts for bodily and mental conditions. However, Péret’s experiences in Latin America are only one of many points of entry into the field of associations between the French and Latin American
Benjamin Péret, ‘La nature dévore le progrès et le dépasse’, Minotaure, (), –. Benjamin Péret, ‘Ruines: Ruine de ruines’, Minotaure, – (), –. Péret, ‘La nature’, p. . By ‘Equatorial America’ Péret meant the areas of Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, and the Guyanas characterized by humid weather and high rainfall. All translations from French are the author’s own unless otherwise specified. Ibid., p. . Ibid.
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incarnations of the avant-garde movement. Although surrealism was known in Latin America from the moment of its inception (the manifestoes were translated and published in Latin America and the Caribbean almost as soon as they were written), it was after that surrealism established itself as a way to regain contact with nature and myth in the post-war period. At that time, Latin American literature embraced a somewhat unorthodox understanding of the French model, leading to what Nicholson calls the ‘second wave’ of Latin American surrealism. The novels to be discussed below can be said to belong to that second wave; they are texts in which the encounter between civilization and nature generates a metonymic space shaped by the violent encounters that have defined the history of the American continent and by the internal struggles that nourish the symbolic universe of its inhabitants. Their narratives are placed against the background of telluric clashes between peoples and races, the campaign to seize control of nature, efforts to define a local identity, and many other issues that oscillate between the political and the psychological. In these novels, indomitable nature is, in that sense, a protagonist, and its botanical description often gives way to a mode of depiction that is rooted in the sensory and the timeless; here, water torrents and dense thickets convey the affective interaction of atmospheres, states of mind, and political struggles. If the creation of mental images is the most apt vehicle for expressing the marvellous, the kind of surrealist image most often deployed in the Latin American tropics was the dream image, which mimics the visual textures and signifying mechanisms of dreams in order to achieve a synthesis of objective reality and subjective imagination. Such images engage the reader through affect even in the absence of a clear representation of the material world. Likewise, these texts conceive nature as a repository of the marvellous, and understand both of these terms in connection to the sacred. In conformity with the surrealist framework, the transcendent emerges from the banality of everyday existence and reveals itself to the mind that gains insight at an unexpected moment, although here the natural world is the crucial space of contact between the layers of reality.
Landscape and the Unconscious After this brief look into the historical background and some of the key ideas that will provide us with our frame of analysis, I would now like to
Nicholson, Surrealism in Latin American Literature, p. .
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Nature and Surrealism in the Latin American Novel
explore a few case studies by following the thread of three natural figures: the river, the volcano, and the swamp (la manigua). In the s the Austrian artist Wolfgang Paalen coined the expression ‘totemic landscape’ to denote a kind of space constituted by the inextricable entwinement of a natural setting and its inhabitants. In Paalen’s view, such landscapes were not simply experienced by their inhabitants as a useful storage of resources, but rather enabled a transcendental connection with plants, bodies of water, and mountains. Paalen’s concept may shed some light on the way in which Latin American novels construct a landscape endowed with a psychic life of its own, a landscape that has intentionality and emotions, and that is both worshipped and feared. The way in which humans may come to terms with these environments is accordingly mediated by the ominous.
The Subterranean River In the literature to which I am referring, bodies of water are typically used as metaphors for an overflowing freedom. The river is often depicted as a subterranean stream that leads the characters towards an encounter with themselves. At times it is a turbulent torrent, and at others it is described as a calm surface hiding something underneath. It is worth recalling, in this context, that the French writer Philippe Soupault had compared surrealism itself to a subterranean and powerful river: Surrealism is after all not a literary school or a religion, it is the expression of an attitude, a state of mind and especially an open indication of freedom. All the formulas, definitions, and masks that people have tried to impose on it have not been able to diminish its power. Historically, we could claim that it has got lost in the sands; but, like a river, its subterranean bed continues to cut deep.
Carpentier’s novel Los pasos perdidos (The Lost Steps, ) offers a clear example of the way in which Latin American writers drew a link between water and the unconscious. Carpentier’s affinities with surrealism are evident in this work, which even borrows its title from one of Breton’s books, Les pas perdus (), although the two works have very little in
La manigua is a term used in some Spanish-speaking areas of the Caribbean to refer to a swampy and impenetrable thicket densely populated by wild bushes and vines. When he published ‘Paysage totémique I’ in the first issue of his own journal, Dyn, (), –, Paalen was in the process of distancing himself from orthodox surrealism to find a second life for the movement in the Americas. Quoted in Nicholson, Surrealism in Latin American Literature, p. .
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common as to their content. Los pasos perdidos reads as a fable that portrays Western culture as decadent and inhuman, and Latin America, the locus of ‘marvellous reality’, as an alternative space of renewal. The narrative follows the journey of a nameless ethnomusicologist who, coming from France, sails along the Orinoco river in search of a primitive musical instrument. Throughout his journey the protagonist undergoes a process of cleansing from the madness caused by Western civilization, a process that is prospectively hinted at in a quote from the Chilam Balam that Carpentier uses as an epilogue for the book: ‘it will be the time when he will travel the path, unveil his face and speak and vomit what he swallowed and be rid of his excess load’. It is by coming into contact with primordial nature that this purification is achieved. Carpentier’s novel takes on the style of an ethnographic report, a decision that may have been informed by the surrealists’ interest in the exploration of cultural alterity as a source of renewal for an exhausted Western culture. The narrative follows a search for the origin through the protagonist’s crafting of a new set of values and beliefs in an effort to recover the space of mythical life. There are obvious echoes of surrealism in Carpentier’s depiction of the portal that leads into this zone of rediscovery: the entrance to the mythical world is signalled by a tree branded with the letters VVV and leads to Santa Mónica de los Venados, a primordial city built on a valley where time has stopped, where all sense of orientation and balance has been lost, and where the novel’s main character will undertake a journey of self-knowledge. Summarizing the plot of the novel, Carpentier stated that his main character travels along the Orinoco river
When Carpentier’s novel was translated into French in , the title used was Le partage des eaux. Breton’s book, published in , collected a series of essays written by the surrealist poet between and , when he was transitioning from Dadaism to surrealism. See André Breton, The Lost Steps, trans. Mark Polizzotti (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, ). Breton’s ‘lost steps’ referred to his straying from the path of Dadaism at that time, while Carpentier’s refer to the idea of retracing one’s path in order to recover something that has been lost and which ultimately proves to be irretrievable. Alejo Carpentier, Los pasos perdidos (; Madrid: Alianza, ), p. . All translations from Spanish are the author’s own unless otherwise specified. The surrealist journal VVV was published in New York in and featured contributions by the likes of Breton, Marcel Duchamp, and Max Ernst, and by a group of anthropologists who were very close to the avant-gardes, including Claude Lévi-Strauss. The journal also welcomed new voices into the movement, among them Braulio Arenas from Chile and Aimé Césaire from Martinique. Carpentier was aware of this connection and used it as a nod to the surrealist group. Carpentier would again include a secret allusion to this group of artists and anthropologists, and to the journal VVV, in his novel La consagración de la primavera ().
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Nature and Surrealism in the Latin American Novel
looking for the roots of life, only to find that he cannot go back because he has lost track of the door that opens onto authentic existence. In Los pasos perdidos Carpentier attempted to find a narrative form that would allow him to test the theoretical framework that he had outlined years before, according to which the aesthetic principle of the Americas is that of ‘marvellous reality’. His essay ‘De lo real maravilloso americano’ (‘On the Marvellous Real in America’) begins as follows: ‘Là-bas tout n’est que luxe, calme et volupté. The invitation to the journey. The remote. The distant, the distinct.’ In the ensuing pages Carpentier develops an interpretation of the singularity of the Latin American experience of the marvellous as it unfolds through nature, time, space, culture, and history. According to Carpentier, Latin American artists and writers developed a new language as a response to the singularity of an environment determined by the dynamic codependence of reality and the marvellous, which led to a form of aesthetic innovation that follows entirely different parameters from those of the European avant-gardes. Carpentier regarded Latin American nature as a prodigious layer of reality that surpassed all apprehension and gave rise to a sense of wonder and amazement. This, he argues, is due to the fact that, unlike European nature, Latin American nature remains untamed, wild, and savage. These ideas were inspired by Carpentier’s own journey into the inner regions of Venezuela: ‘this country is like a compendium of the continent: there you find its great rivers, its endless plains, its enormous mountains, the jungle. For me, the Venezuelan land was a way of coming into contact with the soil of America and of entering its jungle to meet the fourth day of Creation.’ All of these components of the natural world are intensified, according to Carpentier, by what he calls the ‘contexts of illumination’, the peculiar way in which the light can alter the semblance of things in Latin America. In Los pasos perdidos and other novels Carpentier portrays Latin American nature not only as the source of the infinite and the strange, but also as the lost paradise sought by European primitivism. The shared expectation was that this primordial spatiality could be rediscovered, that it would be possible to return to a pristine past in which contact with nature
Gerald Langowski, El surrealismo en la ficción hispanoamericana (Madrid: Gredos, ), p. . Alejo Carpentier, ‘De lo real maravilloso americano’, in Carpentier, Ensayos (Habana: Letras Cubanas, ), p. . Quoted in Klaus Muller-Berg, ‘Alejo Carpentier: autor y obra en su época’, in Fernando García Cambeiro (ed.), Historia y mito en la obra de Alejo Carpentier (Buenos Aires: Estudios Latinoamericanos, ), p. .
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had not been lost. However, in the novel this expectation soon gives way to disenchantment and impotence, as the main character discovers that innocence has been irretrievably lost. Carpentier thus understood the marvellous as a moment in a revelatory process that he schematized as a one-way path: owner of the direction that is denied to the others – one day he makes the irreparable mistake of walking back the path that he had travelled, believing that the exceptional may be so twice, and upon returning he finds that the landscapes have been disrupted, the landmarks have been swept away, and the informers have changed their appearance.
Thus, in Carpentier’s writings nature is perceived as a dimension that may allow human beings to find themselves by leading modern individuals, trapped by the idea of progress in the disheartening age of the machine, to recover the experience of wonder in their lives, an experience whose intensity is nonetheless a function of its ambiguity.
La Manigua as Unstoppable Sensuality The last issue of the journal La révolution surréaliste, published in December of , included a photomontage titled Je ne vois pas la femme cachée dans la forêt (I Do Not See the Woman Hidden in the Forest). The composition features a reproduction of René Magritte’s painting La femme cachée (The Hidden Woman, ) surrounded by a group of photo-booth photographs of several members of the surrealist group (Breton, Louis Aragon, Luis Buñuel, Paul Éluard, and Salvador Dalí, among others), all of them captured with their eyes closed. The first photo booth had been installed in Paris in , so when the surrealists took these portraits they would still have registered as a novelty. The group was fascinated by this machine, which produced what they perceived as a kind of automatic photography linked through the montage to automatic literature. The image also illustrates the surrealist concept of an interior model, allowing the viewer a glimpse of what the surrealists see when they close their eyes to sleep or to dream. The figure of the woman at the center of the image embodies the hidden vision in the forest that may be interpreted as standing for the subconscious. Thus, the montage functions as a collective
Quoted in Lydia de León Hazera, ‘Los pasos perdidos de Alejo Carpentier: un viaje mítico a la selva’, in Hazera, La novela en la selva hispanoamericana: Nacimiento, desarrollo y transformación. Estudio estilístico (Bogotá: Instituto Caro y Cuervo, ), p. .
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portrait, with the surrealists gathering in an imaginary space to which they gain access through an act of collective invocation. In the Latin American context the forest takes on another nuance with the figure of la manigua, a tropical swamp area that is rendered impenetrable by thickly intercrossing and overlapping layers of vines and brush. Although, of course, there are considerable differences between the tropical jungle and the French forest, the two images do evoke similar resonances. Accordingly, la manigua was also used in the Latin American novel as a metaphor for mental and sensory states. By virtue of the unbridled form of growth that characterizes its vegetation, la manigua served as an intuitive stand-in for the subconscious and the ominous. Moreover, the way in which its plant life pushed towards the light independently of all human intervention embodied the power of automatism as a form of agency and the titanic struggle between destruction and life. The subject must dissolve in the waters of chaos or be consumed by the embrace of the vines in order to be reborn, reincarnated in a being that lies outside of time and space. La manigua, understood as an unknown space, uncontrolled and mysterious, appears recurrently in Latin American novels and works of visual art close to surrealism. The Cuban painter Wifredo Lam was one of the first to embrace the theme of vegetation as a realm of magical form. In a similar direction Suzanne Césaire played with the figure of the human plant as a telluric force whose vibrations inspired black people. Like her, many other Caribbean intellectuals creatively elaborated this sensory premise of a space devoured by nature, where the proliferation of weeds functions as an image for the psychic life of characters who are often on the brink of losing their sanity. In his brief study of the surrealist novel, published in , Armand Hoog offers a comprehensive account of the figure of a threatening nature in surrealist narrative, noting that in some novelists from what he refers to as the second generation ‘the jungle attacks the cities . . . because the cities must return to the jungle’. The same may be said about several of the Latin American novels that place themselves in the vicinity of surrealism, where constructions often appear compelled to return to nature. We find an example of this in Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad (A Hundred Years of Solitude, ), when the house of the Buendía family in the fictional town of Macondo is invaded by ants that undo the structure and carry its inhabitants back to the wilderness; in another episode, reminiscent of Péret’s depiction of a locomotive devoured by
Armand Hoog, ‘The Surrealist Novel’, Yale French Studies, (), – (at p. ).
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vegetation, a Spanish galleon appears in the middle of the jungle, ‘surrounded by ferns and palm trees, white and dusty in the silent morning light . . . with scrawny sail scraps hanging from its intact spars, amidst riggings adorned by orchids. The helm, covered by a smooth shell of remora and tender moss, [was] firmly enclaved on a stone floor.’ The writings of Álvaro Mutis can also be understood as the result of a creative dialogue with surrealism. In his work La mansión de Araucaima (The Mansion of Araucaima), published in , this is visible in the use of free association and in the irrational structure of its images and metaphors. In an interview Mutis explained that La mansión de Araucaima was first inspired by a conversation with Buñuel, to whom he had mentioned that he would like ‘to write a Gothic novel, but one that takes place in warmer climates, right on the tropics’, to which Buñuel had replied ‘that it could not be done, that it was a contradiction, since for him the Gothic novel had to be located in a Gothic environment’. Mutis conceived La mansión as a way of proving Buñuel wrong: ‘For me evil exists everywhere; and what the Gothic novel strives for is the passage of the characters through absolute evil . . . So, this mansion is a place where evil resides, it is the kingdom of evil; its walls are not used up, they are not worn down, time doesn’t pass around there.’ La mansión, described by its subtitle as a ‘Gothic tale in war climate’, has been classified as an instance of the ‘tropical Gothic’ genre. It is set in a humid environment where, as in Magritte’s painting discussed above, woman metonymically stands for a torrential nature that is constantly overflowing its boundaries. According to Mutis himself the narrative is crucially structured by Gothic tropes that approximate his aesthetic to that of surrealism: a house in ruins, weeds in the process of taking over everything, and a woman who acts as a catalyst for these forces. The narrative begins by describing the inhabitants of the house and recounting how each of them got to be there. Significantly, Mutis also retells a dream by each one of these protagonists, among which ‘The Friar’s Dream’ and ‘Machinche’s Dream’ are particularly relevant to our topic. While in the first the reader follows the friar through infinite and labyrinthine corridors from which he can exit only to re-enter, in the second dream we follow Machinche as she rips out the weeds that grow uncontrollably through the cracks in the floor tiles of a hospital’s operating room; the woman cries
Gabriel García Márquez, Cien años de soledad (; Madrid: Alfaguara, ), p. . Álvaro Mutis, ‘La irresponsabilidad del viajero’, El papel literario de El Nacional, December , n.p.
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inconsolably as she realizes that no matter how fast she works she cannot keep the plants from invading the space. Nature here appears as a sinister presence that takes over a house located in a marginal space and an atemporal state, something invested with a terrifying lifeforce and a capacity to devour the structures created by humans, a capacity that is nonetheless experienced as a manifestation of the marvellous: The mansion stood at the confluence of two stormy rivers that crossed the valley planted with orange, lemon, and coffee. The high range, with its deep vegetable blue, kept the valley in shadows in a secret intimacy surveyed by the large trees with their sparse tops and profuse purple flowers, never absent from the crowned heads that spilled over the coffee plantations.
Exuberance is a fundamental constituent of the mystery of this location, and of the inner life of the characters as well.
The Volcano: The Expectant Magma and the Revolution As with Soupault’s image of a subterranean river stream that conveys the latent presence of surrealism, the movement also attributed a strategic symbolism to volcanoes and magma. In the Chilean painter Roberto Matta created a series of paintings inspired by the idea of an earthly explosion brought on by the violent surfacing of subcontinental energies. Volcanic eruptions evoked for surrealism the sense of beauty’s convulsed potentialities, of a matter that was experienced as both beautiful and dangerous in its hidden presence, looking for cracks through which to bloom, shapeless but capable of solidifying and reconfiguring the landscape. Across Latin America the volcano was likewise embraced as a metaphor of revolution by artists and authors. During his time in Mexico, Péret became aware of its power to symbolize both inner and social upheaval: ‘the fire, draped in mourning, flares out of all its pores / the spray of sperm and blood veils its face tattooed with lava’. In the Caribbean landscape, volcanoes like the Soufrière also gave rise to meditations on the idea of violent transformation. In Daniel Maximin’s novel Soufrières the volcano is an expectant presence ever on the brink of explosion (Maximin, who is from Guadeloupe, borrowed his chapter titles from paintings by Lam,
Álvaro Mutis, La mansión de Araucaima y otros relatos (Barcelona: Seix Barral, ), p. . For an in-depth study of these themes, see Mario Barrero, Viaje a la tierra caliente de Álvaro Mutis (Bogotá: Ediciones Uniandes, ). Quoted in Sawin, Surrealism in Exile, p. .
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which inspired his approach to the postcolonial condition). The novel narrates the reactions of a group of Guadeloupeans when the Soufrière volcano erupted in , an event that is portrayed as a catalyst for revolutionary change: ‘The words that I offer you imagine that you dream. The word that I hold back dreams that you imagine it and the leaf takes flight putting its greenness at risk.’ Speaking during a meeting of the Association of Writers from the Caribbean, Maximin claimed that all of his literary work was based on a mode of poetic writing through which he hoped to relay the rhythms of the Caribbean, to ‘paint the genesis of new worlds, with no here and no there, with exile and shipwreck at the point of departure’. In Soufrières, as in other works, Maximin develops this premise by elaborating a new creation myth. At first sight the novel is an account of the moments of expectation that precede the volcanic eruption, but Maximin disruptively begins the narrative by placing the reader at the heart of the event: ‘The eruption begins with this long tremor that heralds the underwater rise of magma no more than two kilometers away, no doubt only a few minutes ahead of the burning cloud.’ The novel also features an epilogue that clearly suggests that the text aspires to be more than a chronicle, preparing the reader for something that seems closer to an inner journey: In the middle of the path that trembles before the burning horizon, your whole heart struggles to remain inside your body, daughter of such a fire and such a land, who worry about those of their children who mistake what is coming for the simple future, and refuse to see that because of this challenge tomorrow here can only be fabulous.
The volcanic eruption is thus an ordeal that sets the stage for a process of renewal and liberation: At the end, nothing will remain of the island but your tree, the sea now at ease, and the volcano now calm. The traces of human steps will have stopped
The novel’s chapters are entitled: ‘Défilé antillais (mai)’ (‘West Indian Parade (May)’), ‘La jungle ( juin)’ (‘The Jungle ( June)’), ‘Quand je ne dors pas, je rêve ( juillet, Cahier d’Adrien)’ (‘When I Do Not Sleep, I Dream ( July, Adrien’s Notebook)’), ‘La rumeur de la terre ( juillet)’ (‘The Murmur of the Earth ( July)’), ‘Apostroph’apocalypse ( août)’ (‘Apostroph’apocalypse ( August)’), and ‘L’oiseau du possible (septembre)’ (‘The Bird of Possibility (September)’). Lam himself rarely titled his own paintings; for the most part the titles were conceived by the Cuban anthropologist Lydia Cabrera and by Breton. Daniel Maximin, http://ecrivainsdelacaraibe.com/archives/fiches-auteurs/maximin-daniel.html (accessed December ). Ibid. Daniel Maximin, Soufrières (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, ), p. . Ibid., p. .
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at the end of the beaches and the edge of the craters. Afterwards, we will have to imagine the birth of days free from the parodies of a true life.
In his book Miroir du merveilleux (Mirror of the Marvelous, ) Pierre Mabille devotes a chapter to the theme of catastrophe, inspired by Pompeii: ‘Cities swallowed up during a night, the slow descent of lava, in the distance the oncoming tidal wave. . .’ In Maximin’s novel, true life can only begin after such catastrophe, when the thorough absorption of the ruin gives way to the birth of a ‘new myth’, as Breton would call it. In that interstitial moment the human being is the artificer of her own freedom. As the literary theorist Chris Bongie has phrased it in his analysis of the role of intertextuality in Maximin’s novels, in Soufrières the ‘apocalyptic explosion . . . clearly functions as a metaphor for revolutionary change’. The novel anthropomorphizes the volcano and the sea, suggesting that the freedom in question is also a freedom from the assumed confinement of human beings within their own produced environments: ‘You seize your volcano’s hand, much too warm, and the hand of your Caribbean sea, much too cold, and the hand of your chosen land, much too light.’ The volcano even takes on the position of the narrator in the fourth chapter, ‘Apostroph’apocalypse’, and the characters recognize in its roar the voice of their inner yearnings, forging a vital interconnection between man and landscape reminiscent of Paalen’s totemic landscape. More generally, it may be said that the forms of politico-cultural resistance developed in the Caribbean by authors and artists like Lam, Suzanne and Aimé Césaire, Fernando Ortiz, and, some time later, Édouard Glissant, were all marked by a sustained dialogue with surrealism. These intellectuals refused to read this dialogue in terms of influence, and instead recruited the surrealist sensibility as part of a tool kit that could allow them to challenge exoticization as a mode of representation. Through this strategy they were able to create the new conceptual frameworks of transculturation and creolization to re-present and reinvent themselves through an uncompromisingly complex understanding of their landscape and its history. The group of Latin American intellectuals who led this shift in perspective was, and remains, close to surrealist precepts such as the quest for the marvellous and a commitment to the revolutionary potential of art. As I have shown, nature played a crucial role in the
Ibid., p. . Pierre Mabille, Le miroir du merveilleux (Paris: Sagittaire, ), p. . Chris Bongie, ‘The (Un)Exploded Volcano: Creolization and Intertextuality in the Novels of Daniel Maximin’, Callaloo, / (), – (at p. ). Maximin, Soufrières, p. .
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constitution of this open-ended aesthetic regime. In writers like Maximin, Mutis, and Carpentier, nature is not a placid and passive space, but rather a symbol of a revolutionary scream that still demands to be heard. Surrealism has traditionally been understood as a French avant-garde movement that generated an international appeal, but this conception is now being re-evaluated. In light of the productive kinds of resonance that it created in contexts like Latin America, surrealism can now be determined more accurately as a sensibility to certain issues and aesthetic strategies that gained strength and visibility in different corners of the planet, at different times and under different conditions, in the absence of any hierarchical structure or any grounding on the precepts of the three manifestoes. We can now understand surrealism as a movement that was, and remains, crucially constituted by its capacity to reincarnate – or, as Cortázar suggested, as a very living corpse.
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Surrealism, Existentialism, and Fictions of Blackness Jonathan P. Eburne
Since the Caribbean writer no longer lives in the great white mirage and no longer models his writing on European lines, doesn’t a work that manages to subvert the form of the Western novel in its narrative strategy and structure also deserve to be called revolutionary – perhaps more so than any other? Isn’t the fundamental issue to make a specific contribution to the world of literature? All these questions are still being hotly debated.
— Maryse Condé ()
Rejected by its publisher in , Richard Wright’s follow-up to his massively successful novel Native Son () was titled The Man Who Lived Underground. The title was a Dostoyevskian gesture that would later come to bolster Wright’s reception by French existentialist writers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in post-World War II Paris. Wright’s novel drew its plot from a fait divers published in True Detective magazine in the summer of , which recounted the curious tale of a man (with the surname Wright) who lived for nearly a year in the Los Angeles sewer system. Wright’s novel eventually saw publication in altered form as a short story in a anthology, appearing again in Wright’s posthumous collection Eight Men (). It was only in that the novel-length version of The Man Who Lived Underground came to be published in its entirety. This new edition includes an essay Wright drafted around the time he sent the manuscript to his publisher, which reflects on the novel’s inspiration and intellectual and political genealogy. In this
Maryse Condé, ‘Sketching a Literature from the French Antilles: From Negritude to Creolité’, Black Renaissance, / (), – (at p. ). See, for instance, Dale E. Peterson, ‘Richard Wright’s Long Journey from Gorky to Dostoyevsky’, African American Review, / (Autumn ), –. Richard Wright, The Man Who Lived Underground (New York: Library of America, ), p. . The article was ‘‘The Crime Hollywood Couldn’t Believe’, published in True Detective in the August issue. See also J. F. Gounard, ‘Richard Wright’s ‘“The Man Who Lived Underground”: A Literary Analysis’, Journal of Black Studies, / (March ), –.
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previously unpublished essay, ‘Memories of my Grandmother’, Wright notes that The Man Who Lived Underground was unique among his writing to date on account of the ‘far-reaching, complex, ruling ideafeeling’ that compelled the novel’s creation. As he notes, ‘I have never written anything in my life that stemmed more from sheer inspiration, or executed any piece of writing in a deeper feeling of imaginative freedom, or expressed myself in a way that flowed more naturally from my own personal background, reading experiences, and feelings than The Man Who Lived Underground.’ Wright likens these feelings to American blues and jazz music as well, notably, as to surrealism. Invoking surrealism as part of the author’s artistic and political imagination, Wright’s posthumously published essay represents a proleptic confirmation of thinkers such as Jean-Claude Michel, Robin D.G. Kelley, Brent Hayes Edwards, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Gary Wilder, Phyllis Taoua, and, more recently, Terri Francis and Rochelle Spencer, who have insisted on the continuities between surrealism and Black diasporic writing and thought. The point of such assertions is hardly to smuggle surrealism into the intellectual and political genealogy of transnational Black literature; rather, it is to propose that the history of surrealism cannot be thought without a full consideration of its intersections with the work of writers, artists, and intellectuals of the African diaspora. In his ‘Memories of my Grandmother’, Wright admits that the comparison might appear counterintuitive at first: ‘the Negroes of Mississippi, Texas, Arkansas have never heard, perhaps, of surrealism’, he admits, adding, however, that this ‘does not negate the strong surrealistic structure and function of many of their folk utterances in song and music’. The notion that ‘surrealism’
Wright, ‘Memories of My Grandmother’, in The Man Who Lived Underground, p. . See esp. Jean-Claude Michel, The Black Surrealists (Amsterdam: Peter Lang, ); Robin D.G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, ); Brent Hayes Edwards, ‘The Ethnics of Surrealism’, Transition, (), –; Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, : Harvard University Press, ); T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Negritude Women (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ); Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (University of Chicago Press, ); Phyllis Taoua, Forms of Protest: Anti-colonialism and Avant-Gardes in Africa, the Caribbean, and France (London: Heinemann, ); Terri Francis, ‘Introduction: The No-Theory Chant of Afrosurrealism’, Black Camera, / (), –; Rochelle Spencer, AfroSurrealism: The African Diaspora’s Surrealist Fiction (London: Routledge, ). See also my ‘Afrosurrealism as a Counterculture of Modernity’, in Elliott King and Abigail Susik (eds.), Radical Dreams: Surrealism, Counterculture, Resistance (University Park: Penn State University Press, ). Wright, ‘Memories of My Grandmother’, p. .
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Surrealism, Existentialism, and Fictions of Blackness
described a political as well as aesthetic attunement to everyday phenomena, experiences, and cultural forms was an insistence Wright shared with other diasporic and European writers and thinkers, including those directly affiliated with the Bretonian surrealist group centred in Paris. I begin this chapter with Wright’s recently published early essay because it testifies to a number of striking and largely counterintuitive juxtapositions, which this chapter will examine at greater length: first, it proposes that surrealism shared many of the formal, epistemological, and political imperatives at work in Black diasporic writing and art throughout the anglophone, francophone, hispanophone, and lusophone worlds, particularly in exploring the affordances of ‘imaginative freedom’ through polyphony, linguistic and cultural creolization, and anticolonial politics. Second, Wright’s genealogy suggests the extent to which European avant-garde movements such as surrealism and existentialism, as well as transnational artistic movements such as négritude, magical realism, and créolité, are far more porous and interconnected than the conceptual and geographical distance between such movements might otherwise suggest. Writing about surrealism and the francophone Caribbean, for instance, J. Michael Dash proposes that the aesthetics ‘of the fortuitous and unpredictable’ describes the very intersection of cultures and histories in the Carribean as scenes of colonial modernity and legacies of the Middle Passage. This ‘poetics of the crossroads’, which rhymes with Wright’s account of surrealism and the Blues tradition, accounts for ‘the composite cultures of modernity’ in a way that distinguishes this multiplicity from the by-product of a singular, coherent artistic or imperial enterprise or, for that matter, the wellspring of a ‘timeless primitivism’. The Martinican poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant (–) famously refers to this interconnectedness as a ‘poetics of relation’. Like Dash and Wright, Glissant is describing both a set of literary or cultural relations and a set of geopolitical relations: diasporic writing does not owe its legitimacy to some European origin, any more than the lands and people themselves. Instead, Glissant outlines a conjectural and open-ended mode of thinking that resists the imperial faith in certainty, linear time, direct influence, and ‘the comfortable assurances linked to the supposed excellence of a language’. This poetics of relation acknowledges the reality of historical violence, while resisting the ‘conquering linearity’ that would render that violence irremediable,
J. Michael Dash, ‘Le Je de l’autre: Surrealist Ethnographers and the Francophone Caribbean’, L’esprit créateur, / (Spring ), – (at p. ).
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and thus instead remaining defiantly ‘latent, open, multilingual in intention, directly in contact with everything possible’. For Wright, this relational poetics describes the shared qualities of the Blues tradition and surrealism, qualities that would animate his own fictional writing and political activism in turn. Surrealism, Wright explains, delineates ‘a manner of looking at the world, a way of feeling and thinking, a method of discovering relationships between things’. As a phase of the creative process, surrealism inaugurates ‘a certain psychological distance – even when it deals with realistic subject matter – from the functional meanings of society’. This distance, this ‘obliqueness of vision’, characterizes the African American blues tradition and surrealism alike. Commenting on the manner ‘in which Negro blues songs juxtapose unrelated images’, Wright explains that The next experience that opened up a whole array of subject matter to me . . . was the advent of surrealism on the American scene. I know, of course, that to mention surrealism in terms of Negro life in America will strike some people like trying to mix oil and water; but the two things are not so widely separated as one might suppose at first glance. It seems that there has grown up in people’s minds a concept of just what the Negro is, and anything that smacks of something which they do not want to associate with the Negro, for one reason or another, they will brand as alien. There is an unjustified but powerful tendency to regard the Negro as simple, unspoiled, childish, distantly removed from the debilitating experiences or art products of the city sophisticate, so says one school of the ‘friends’ of the Negro. Therefore, they say, do not mix the Negro with any such thing as surrealism. There is no such connection, they assert, and if you insist that there is, then it exists only in your own mind, meaning, of course, the mind of the fellow who declares the contrary.
Wright’s invocation of surrealism and the African American blues tradition is characterized, in other words, by the same qualities of objective chance and juxtaposition he identifies within both practices. Wright’s very juxtaposition of surrealism and Black life is itself notable for the extent to which it denaturalizes the imperial certainties that might otherwise claim to presume their incommensurability. By contrast, surrealism and the blues tradition are predicated on formal operations that broach fundamental discontinuities or psychological distance within the real. Wright’s surrealism in this regard is no more – nor no less – demotic than the surrealisms
Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (), trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ), pp. , . Wright, ‘Memories of My Grandmother’, pp. , . Ibid., p. .
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described by many of his French contemporaries. Maurice Blanchot (–), for instance, famously characterized the extent of surrealism’s place in post-war culture as a fundamental haunting by such discontinuity. To the extent that surrealism ‘calls forth the unknown through chance and play’, Blanchot writes, it ‘invites a relation that is foreign to the ideology of continuity’. In Wright’s case, such ‘continuity’ referred not only to the structural violence of colonial and white supremacist régimes, but also to the psychic, epistemological, and existential structures they enforced and normalized as real. As an irruption of discontinuity within such structures, the surrealist aesthetic Wright invokes outlines what Fred Moten would later describe as the ‘erotics of the cut’, of Black radical aesthetics: ‘submerged in the broken, breaking space-time of an improvisation. Blurred, dying life; liberatory, improvisatory, damaged love; freedom drive’. Though hardly the first person to refer to surrealism and the blues tradition in the same breath – as Wright himself notes – his insistence on likening his artistic process to surrealism is notable for at least two reasons: first, it documents Wright’s interest in the surrealist movement well before his emigration to France in and his reception by and collaboration with the editors of Les temps modernes – and thus his emergence as a leading figure in the existentialist movement and the global discourse on decolonization that gained momentum throughout the s. More substantively, it serves as one of the many subtle but marked points of convergence between surrealism and the Black radical tradition, as well as transnational Black and African diasporic writing and art more broadly. This chapter traces the intersecting histories of surrealism, existentialism, and the Black radical tradition through the production of fiction. In doing so it attends to the politics of literary activism – as well as the vexed histories of racism, cultural appropriation, exploitation, and erasure – in the work of Black writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, heeding the intersections between diasporic cultural production, avantgarde movements, and the evolving priorities of the international left. While attentive to the shift from an appropriative ‘negrophilia’ in the Parisian s to the evolution of the negritude and pan-Africanist movements, this chapter also beckons to the multifarious genealogies of
Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation (), trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), p. . Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), p. .
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contemporary Afrosurrealism, a heuristic term for experimental Black cultural production that both includes and radically exceeds the extent to which Black writers have been ‘influenced’ by or explicitly affiliated with vanguard movements such as surrealism. This chapter proposes not only that surrealism be understood as a significant coordinate in the Black radical tradition (as Robin D.G. Kelley and others have demonstrated), but also that the surrealist movement is inconceivable without an appraisal of its relation to race, diaspora, and the thought and cultural production of Black intellectuals. In this regard ‘surrealism’ names an archive of intellectual and cultural ferment whose heterogeneity runs counter to the dominant geopolitical coordinates established during the Cold War era, which concentrated on the Manichean opposition between Soviet and US superpowers, that is, between communism and capitalism, as well as between the dominant literary and philosophical modes they normalized. A significant number of Black poets participated directly in the surrealist movement or have been associated with surrealism throughout the movement’s history, from US writers Jayne Cortez (–), Ted Joans (–), Bob Kaufman (–), and Will Alexander (–) to francophone poets Aimé Césaire (Martinique, –), Paul Laraque (Haiti, –), Léon Gontran Damas (French Guiana, –), Léopold Sédar Senghor (Senegal, –), and René Depestre (Haiti, –), among numerous others. Yet the participation of Black novelists
See Petrine Archer-Straw, Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the s (London: Thames & Hudson, ). See Kelley, Freedom Dreams, esp. pp. –. The recourse to surrealism in this manner echoes Njoroge Njoroge’s approach in his musical history Chocolate Surrealism. The title, Njoroge writes, ‘is taken from a recording by the Bay Areabased band the Broun Fellinis. Following some of the aural clues in their music and their representations of blackness, I am attempting to use the notion of surrealism in an extremely capacious (if slightly unorthodox) sense. My use of this term is less to reference the early-twentiethcentury art movement, though it is clearly related, and more to denote both a method of exposition and analysis that attempts to both evoke and involve the musical unconscious through strategies of heterogeneous juxtaposition, rhythmic counterpoint, multiple cultural modalities, spontaneity, and disjunctive, creative approaches to the analysis of black expressive culture. The surrealist strategies have always characterized the cultural productions of the African diaspora. From Cachao to Claude McKay, from Romare Bearden to steel drums, from Jayne Cortez to Jimi Hendrix, Pixiguinha to double-dutch, Sun Ra to bacalao, the musical, philosophical, literary, visual and everyday representations of “chocolate surrealism” abound.’ Njoroge Njoroge, Chocolate Surrealism: Music, Movement, Memory, and History in the Circum-Caribbean (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, ), p. . See esp. Michel, Black Surrealists; see also Franklin Rosemont and Robin D.G. Kelley (eds.), Black, Brown, & Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora (Austin: University of Texas Press, ).
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in surrealism – or the fictional writings of poets such as Depestre – have been far less visible. Moreover, the convergences of diasporic Black intellectuals with the surrealist movement were often temporary, provisional, underrecognized, disavowed, or marginalized by critics and authors alike, with the result that the place of Black novelists, thinkers, and political figures in the evolution of surrealism as a global movement has only been partly illuminated. Echoing Kelley, this chapter proceeds from the insistence that surrealism occupies a minoritarian yet resonant place in the transnational circuits of Black postcolonial writing, radical thought, and experimental fiction that gained traction throughout the twentieth century. More fundamentally, perhaps, it also proposes that the foundational role of ‘blackness’ in the surrealist imaginary extends beyond the primitivisms and phastasmatic projections of white European subjects to include the reflections on race, diasporic belonging, and pan-Africanism articulated by non-white and non-European writers and thinkers in dialogue with the surrealist movement. Surrealism may have originated in the West, as Kelley notes, but it shares with Black, anticolonial, and Third World radicalisms the imperative to be ‘rooted in a conspiracy against Western civilization’. Even so, surrealism’s minoritarian position is significant in itself, I propose, on account of its political as well as artistic distance from canonical accounts of post-World War II intellectual life. As key cultural voices and political leaders in independence struggles and the development of the Third World movement, mid-century Black writers such as Wright (–), C.L.R. James (Trinidad, –), Césaire, Senghor, and others sought to articulate forms of political and intellectual solidarity that resisted the domination of imperial
Depestre’s novel Hadriana dans toutes mes rêves (Hadriana in All My Dreams) opens, for instance, with an instance of ‘surréalisme quotidien’. See René Depestre, Hadriana in All My Dreams, trans. Kaiama Glover (New York: Akashic Books, ), pp. , . One of the most significant recent anthologies of surrealism, Black, Brown, & Beige, edited by Franklin Rosemont and Robin D.G. Kelley – two leading members of the Chicago Surrealist Group – has gone far to remedy this. See, for instance, Archer-Straw, Negrophilia; Elizabeth Ezra, The Colonial Unconscious: Race and Culture in Interwar France (Ithaca, : Cornell University Press, ); and Louise Tythacott, Surrealism and the Exotic (London: Routledge, ). Kelley, Freedom Dreams, p. . Whereas intellectual historians such Tony Judt have tended to disavow surrealism’s place in European – and global – intellectual life after World War II, studies such as Michel Surya’s La révolution rêvée: Pour une histoire des écrivains et des intellectuels révolutionnaires, – (Paris: Fayard, ), Bruce Baugh’s French Hegel: From Surrealism to Postmodernism (London and New York: Routledge, ), and Suzanne Guerlac’s Literary Polemics: Bataille, Sartre, Valéry, Breton (Stanford University Press, ) assert the intimate ties between surrealism and experimental philosophy during the interwar and post-war periods.
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nation-states; to this end, the Pan-African conference of sponsored in Paris by the journal Présence africaine presented itself as a ‘cultural Bandung’ that reflected the Third World principles of the Asian-African Conference that took place in Bandung, Indonesia, in . Drawing from intersecting political traditions and practices of cultural survival, such organized concentrations of Black diasporic writers forwarded a position that rhymed with that of many surrealist writings without ever drawing on them directly. Cedric Tolliver describes this position as bearing two essential claims that animated the pan-Africanism of the s and after: first, that cultural work is a form of politics; and second, that culture, while distinct from the political domain, existed as a resource for politics. At the same time, such declarations manifested an intellectual heterogeneity that likewise ran counter to the kinds of literary and artistic lineages that the Cold War division of superpowers helped to reproduce – such as the privileging of national literatures and the categorical distinction between ‘movements’ such as surrealism and existentialism, Beat writing and Tel Quel philosophy, négritude and magical realism, as well as, in particular, the identitarian separation of Black writing from Anglo-European forms and ideas. From Claude McKay (Jamaica, –) to Toni Morrison (USA, –), from Maryse Condé (Guadeloupe, –) to Nalo Hopkinson (Jamaica, –) and Calixthe Beyala (Cameroon, –), to name only a handful of of major figures, the practice of Black diasporic writing has both drawn from and contributed to the global evolution of surrealism as a ‘permanent readiness for the Marvelous’, as Suzanne Césaire (Martinique, –) put it in . What Césaire describes is a surrealism for which the ‘most urgent task was to free the mind from the shackles of absurd logic and so-called Western reason’, a living practice
For an illuminating account of this conference within the framework of African diaspora literary culture, see Cedric R. Tolliver, Of Vagabonds and Fellow Travelers: African Diaspora Literary Culture and the Cultural Cold War (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ). Tolliver, Vagabonds and Fellow Travelers, p. . This is neither a definitive list nor a complete survey of diasporic Black authors who have been associated with surrealism. On McKay’s inclusion in the surrealist journal Légitime défense, see Michael Richardson and Krzysztof Fijalkowski (eds. and trans.), Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean (London: Verso, ), and Aliko Songolo, ‘Surrealism and Black Literatures in French’, French Review, / (May ), –. On Hopkinson and surrealism, see Spencer, AfroSurrealism, esp. pp. –; see also Leif Sorensen, ‘Dubwise into the Future: Versioning Modernity in Nalo Hopkinson’, African American Review, /– (Summer/Fall ), –. See also Karen Lord’s formulation in conversation with Hopkinson and Leone Ross at the Toronto International Festival of Authors, : www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQkMXUrvgo (accessed January ). On Morrison and surrealism, see esp. Amiri Baraka’s essay on Henry Dumas, discussed below.
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that was as invested in autochthonous and vernacular knowledges as in philosophy or experimental literature. As part of the ‘conspiracy against the West’ to which Kelley alludes, surrealism both draws from and takes part in the extensive global archive of experimental thought and imagination within which Black diasporic writing likewise participates, both drawing from and adding to an archive that includes immanent strategies of resistance to racial capitalism as well as knowledge traditions broken by, restored after, and remembered in spite of the Middle Passage. Wright’s claim to surrealism becomes all the more legible in this context, particularly insofar as he describes surrealism as neither an art form nor even a historical movement – ‘a product of decadent Paris’ – but instead as a kind of critical apparatus that ‘makes its appearance when certain social relations are manifested in society’. Not coincidentally, Wright’s aggregation of surrealism and Black American music anticipates the US poet Amiri Baraka’s coinage of the term ‘Afro-Surreal Expressionism’ some decades later to delineate a genealogy of ‘black mythological lyricism, strange yet ethnically familiar!’ that undergirded the Black Arts Movement of the s and beyond. This genealogy includes African American writers and artists from the Harlem Renaissance through the present, for whom ‘Africa, the southern U.S., black life and custom are motif, mood and light, rhythm, and implied history’. Baraka (–), like Wright, does not claim a surrealist influence on transnational Black arts so much as a shared or analogous way of experiencing the world, the name for an aesthetics of strangeness that uses a ‘language of exquisite metaphorical elegance’ that could signify as powerfully as it could directly communicate: ‘The symbols sing’, Baraka explains, and ‘are cymbals of deeper experience, not word games for academics.’ The poetic appeal of, and to, such ‘deeper experience’ invokes the historical violence that animates transnational Black arts as well as the deep archive of strategies for survival and resistance. Baraka describes how ‘the very broken quality’ of this surrealist-expressionist writing, ‘almost to abstraction, is a function of change and transition. It is as though the whole world we inhabit rests on the bottom of the ocean, harnessed by memory, language, image to that “railroad of human bones” at the bottom of the
See Suzanne Césaire, ‘Surrealism and Us’, in Césaire, The Great Camouflage: Writings of Dissent (–), ed. Daniel Maximin, trans. Keith Walker (Middletown, : Wesleyan University Press, ), p. . On the ‘practice of diaspora’, see Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, : Harvard University Press, ). Amiri Baraka, ‘Henry Dumas: Afro-Surreal Expressionist’, Black American Literature Forum, / (Summer ), – (at p. ).
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Atlantic Ocean.’ Significantly, Baraka’s genealogy includes novelists as well as painters and jazz musicians; he cites Zora Neale Hurston (USA, –), Jean Toomer (USA, –), Henry Dumas (USA, –), and Toni Morrison as ‘the giants of this genre of African American literary Afro-Surreal Expressionism’, counting as well ‘Jacob Lawrence, Vincent Smith, and Romare Bearden in painting; and Duke, Monk, Trane, Sun Ra in music’. Much like Wright nearly half a century earlier, Baraka’s ‘Afro-Surreal Expressionism’ pairs jazz and the blues tradition with surrealism as creative modes that explore ‘motif, mood and light, rhythm, and implied history’ in ways that fundamentally disrupt the legacies of historical erasure, political marginalization, and structural violence leveraged against Black people – as well as Indigenous people and people of colour – since the colonial era. In an essay on Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground, philosopher Kathryn Belle (formerly Kathryn T. Gines) extends this work of historical rectification to the genealogies of modern Black and European thought more broadly. Belle argues that Wright’s ‘existentialism’ was not a derivative of European existentialism, as some philosophers presume; on the contrary, Wright’s fiction bore existentialist leanings well before his selfexile to Paris after World War II. Drawing on literary-historical evidence and philosophical history alike, Belle not only demonstrates that Wright was a philosopher in his own right before coming into contact with Sartre, Beauvoir, and company, but also proposes that existentialism itself be understood as a transnational and pluridisciplinary discourse rather than a European or Eurocentric philosophy of existence. ‘The subtlety, power, and complexity of Richard Wright’s literary works are lost’, Belle insists, ‘if readers fail to see that his existentialist orientation is principally derived from, and deepened by, his own concrete existence and experience, not from his conversations with and reading of more widely recognized existentialists.’ Pivoting on the same work Belle situates as the focal point of her study, my own reflections on surrealism in this chapter follow Belle’s understanding of existentialism. I propose, in other words, that Wright’s recourse to ‘surrealism’ in his novel-length version of The Man Who Lived Underground and its companion essay likewise trace a practice of cross
Ibid., pp. –. Ibid., pp. –. Ibid., p. . Kathryn T. Gines (Kathryn Belle), ‘“The Man Who Lived Underground”: Jean-Paul Sartre and the Philosophical Legacy of Richard Wright’, Sartre Studies International, / (), –, esp. pp. –. Gines’s article addresses the short-story version of Wright’s text, though she and other scholars had long been aware of the existence of the novel-length manuscript in Wright’s papers prior to its publication in .
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media invention that characterizes the multifarious intersections between surrealism, diasporic Black writing, and Black conceptions of liberation. Such intersections comprise neither a token of influence nor a sign of cosmopolitan derivation, but as Kelley puts it, ‘an injunction, a proposition, perhaps even a declaration of war’. The remaining portions of this chapter examine the history of Black diasporic fiction in the Atlantic world in the extent to which it both draws from and responds to the artistic and geopolitical coordinates of the surrealist and existentialist movements. From the surrealist interest in and appropriations of blackness in jazz-age Paris through the post-World War II development of pan-African and Third World movements and into the present era of #BlackLivesMatter, the writing and cultural production of African, Afro-Caribbean, African American, and Afro-European intellectuals fuelled the global development of leftist and anticolonial politics. So too did Black writing and art both inform and, in part, constitute the proliferation of aesthetic radicalism throughout the Atlantic world.
Fictions of Blackness The notion of ethnic familiarity to which Baraka refers as ‘Afro-Surreal Expressionism’ ostensibly beckons to the metaphysical ballast ascribed to negritude and other pan-Africanisms – themselves informed by figures such as Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, Senghor, René Ménil (Martinique, –), and Paulette Nardal (Martinique, –) and Jeanne Nardal (Martinique, –), who were in dialogue or at least familiar with surrealism. I propose, however, that such notions of Blackness or ‘Black soul’ appeal less to a set of essential racial characteristics than to a historical fiction perpetrated over the course of four hundred years, an ‘invention’ that emerges through the real spatial-geographical operations of slavery and colonialism that many white colonial appropriations of diasporic culture tended to mythologize or erase entirely. By ‘fictions of
Kelley, Freedom Dreams, . On the belatedness of public and critical recognition of Paulette Nardal in particular, see esp. Brent Hayes Edwards, ‘Editor’s Column: Unsettled Legacies’, PMLA, / (October ), –. On the important discourse of ‘ethnographic surrealism’, see esp. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, : Harvard University Press, ), esp. chap. ; see also Brent Hayes Edwards, ‘The Ethnics of Surrealism’, Transition, (), –. See, for instance, Patrick Lozès, ‘The Invention of Blacks in France’, in Tricia Danielle Keaton, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, and Tyler Stovall (eds.), Black France/France Noire: The History and Politics of Blackness (Durham, : Duke University Press, ), pp. –. See also, most
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blackness’, I refer less to such romanticized portrayals of Black men and women in jazz-era Paris, than to the production and circulation of Black fiction across the diaspora – as well, most broadly, as to the notion of blackness itself as a fiction. To refer to blackness as a fiction is to heed the political and existential exigency of fiction itself, rather than to presume its unreality or its distance from the political sphere. In his epoch-defining essay on ‘The Fact of Blackness’(‘L’expérience vécue du noir’), first published in , Frantz Fanon (Martinique, –) describes the crisis in ontology experienced by Black people under conditions of white supremacy. This ‘fact’, Fanon proposes, refers to the dialectical construction of racialized selfhood in relation not only to a Black person’s own body, history, and culture, but also to the cultural imaginary of white people. ‘For not only must the black man be black’, Fanon writes, ‘he must be black in relation to the white man.’ ‘Blackness’ in this regard, is a surplus formation of colonial modernity, the epidermalization of political relations of domination. This condition – a structural condition historically particular to colonial modernity – means that the very ‘fact’ of blackness is constituted as a fiction: a ‘historico-racial schema’ generated less by tactile or other immediate sensory data than ‘by the other, the white man, who had woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories’. As Michelle Wright has written in a similar vein, these fictions are ‘narratives of knowledge that are taught, learned, relayed, exchanged, and debated in discussions on the “facts” of Blackness’. Such fictions are thus also factual insofar as they undergird and reproduce racialized relations of power: the French title of Fanon’s article, in fact, describes not ‘fact’ but ‘lived experience’ (expérience vécue). Dismantling such narratives involves an intervention on the order of experiential facts and fictions alike: the creation and dissemination of counter-strategies for cultural survival, organized resistance, and the recuperation of eradicated memory. Fanon’s own discourse on the fact of Blackness is mediated through his dialectical engagement with the writing of the negritude movement, from
canonically, V.Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, ). Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (), trans. Charles Lam Markman (New York: Grove Press, ), p. . The original essay ‘L’expérience vécue du noir’ appeared in Esprit, Nouvelle Série, / (May ), –. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. . Michelle M. Wright, Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), p. .
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which he distances himself on account of its hyperbolic primitivism; what Fanon challenges in the poetics of negritude – particularly in the work of Aimé Césaire, Senghor, and Damas – is the extent to which it embraces the ‘thousand details, anecdotes, stories’ of white-supremacist fictions as the fundamental components of Blackness itself. By this logic, Fanon argues, a Black person becomes ‘not a Negro but the Negro, exciting the fecund antennae of the world, placed in the foreground of the world, raining his poetic power on the world, “open to all the breaths of the world”’. Both citing and parodying the ecstatic language of his fellow Martinican and former teacher Césaire, it is important to note that Fanon does not so much reject this work as dismantle its rhetorical appeal to essentialism. What this means is that Fanon situates negritude and corresponding European literary movements such as surrealism and existentialism historically, within transnational discourses about race, anticolonialism, and poetry, rather than interpolating such discourses as the very essence or ‘soul’ of Blackness itself. Fictions of blackness, like the fact of blackness, are historical and dialectical, not static. What this illuminates, I propose, is the extent to which Fanon’s critiques of negritude, surrealism, and existentialism form the very fabric of his cultural analysis of colonial relations of race: they are not themselves ‘surrealist’, but instead evolve in a dialectical relationship with surrealism. As Robert J.C. Young has noted, Fanon’s own early literary experiments, as well as his library of annotated books, disclose his own extensive investment in surrealism and existentialism alike, as well as in the writings of Césaire. Moreover, Young characterizes the two plays Fanon wrote in , The Drowning Eye (L’œil se noie), and Parallel Hands (Les mains parallèles), as developing ‘what amounts to a distinctive form of surrealist existentialism . . . projecting a view of the world as an irresolvable paradoxical dualism that is either absurd or tragic’. Young documents Fanon’s attention to surrealism in a medical context as well, noting Fanon’s reading of Henri Ey’s La psychiatrie devant le surréalisme () as part of his psychiatric training, a study which, much like Richard Wright nearly a decade beforehand, conceptualizes surrealism as a form of consciousness that deploys the characteristic marvellous ludic qualities of experimental language in a struggle against normative reality.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. . Robert J.C. Young, ‘General Introduction’, in Frantz Fanon, Alienation and Freedom, ed. Jean Khalfa and Robert J.C. Young, trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Bloomsbury, ), p. . See also Henri Ey, La psychiatrie devant le surréalisme (Paris: Centre d’Éditions Psychiatriques, ). André Breton also owned a copy of this book, inscribed by the author; see www.andrebreton.fr/ work/ (accessed January ).
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This notion of a ‘surrealist existentialism’, understood as a worldview bearing a hybrid and fundamentally dialectical literary, political, and philosophical genealogy, is useful for describing the multifarious networks and associations through which surrealism informs the writing and thought of the Black diaspora, particularly in the decades after World War II. Perhaps more importantly still, it also offers an indication of how the surrealist movement itself might be considered from this perspective, that is, in terms of the ‘obliqueness’ (to use Wright’s term) of its adaptation as a medium for fictions of Blackness. By this logic, the early decades of the surrealist movement might be loosely characterized according to two intertwining stories: the first story is that of a largely white, male core of European poets and artists affiliated with the surrealist journals in Paris during the s and s, in the heady days of ‘jazz-era’ Paris. This is the story of a group that became increasingly politicized around the praxis of revolution and anticolonial insurgency in the wake of the Rif War in Morocco, and which formed allegiances with Black poets, thinkers, and visual artists from around the world in the s, s, and beyond. This story is a well-documented one. But there is a second, contrapuntal story to tell here as well, which is that of a heterogenous array of intellectuals from around the world for whom ‘surrealism’ signified an articulation of consciousness, a reserve of experimental thought – or ‘a method of discovering relationships between things’, as Wright puts it – that could be variously adapted or transformed in the interest of anticolonial and abolitionist needs. Alongside the field of literary production itself, an important critical discourse in postcolonial and Black diasporic thought centres on the very plasticity of such methods, often in opposition to the tendency for publishers, prize committees, critics, and literary historians to categorize experimental Black authors according to their implicit or explicit adhesion to recognizable international movements. This discourse is far too extensive to summarize here, except to highlight the extent to which it has persisted in interrogating the politics and aesthetics of cultural ‘influence’, hybridity, and inventiveness across the contact zones and borderlands of colonial modernity. In her writing on the Congolese novelist Sony Lab’ou Tansi (Democratic Republic of the Congo, –), Lydie Moudileno meditates on what she refers to as the ‘intricacies of postcolonial authorship’ in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, particularly regarding the benefits and limits of terms such as ‘surrealism’, ‘existentialism’,
See, for instance, Richardson and Fijalkowski (eds.), Refusal of the Shadow.
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‘negritude’, or ‘magical realism’, which might appear to prescribe discrete genealogical or ideological affiliations but which often instead disclose viable genealogical and ideological continuities. While undeniably important for the literary visibility of Black authors – especially non-anglophone authors – within the global literary marketplace, Moudileno argues that such lineages and claims to affiliation be understood neither as an identification nor as evidence for ‘the specter of a dominating influence’, but instead as a kind of alternative ‘third space’ or ‘third tradition’ that blurs the boundary between colonizing (European) and colonized (nonEuropean) forms of cultural expression. Moudileno extends this argument to recent critical attention to Afrofuturism and Afrosurrealism as designators of various modes of speculative fiction, film, and poetry; one might add Young’s ‘surrealist existentialism’ and Baraka’s ‘Afro-Surrealist Expressionism’ to this list. Moudileno argues that such new labels both illuminate and reflect consciously on the ‘entanglement of labels’ already at work within decolonial literature and criticism. Speaking as a Caribbean writer of science fiction, for instance, Nalo Hopkinson notes in a interview that ‘if you look at Caribbean history, Caribbean reality, and you try to write about it, you get very quickly and easily to the fantastic, because trying to make sense of all those ideas and make them make some kind of sense, you go into the surreal, real fast’. Caribbean authors ‘have traditions for recognizing this’, she continues, and for putting it in our writing; what one calls it matters less than what one says. ‘We’re not so fussy about genre’, Hopkinson concludes. This is not a position of indifference, nor – for that matter – a dissolution of the historical, political, or aesthetic distinctions between artistic groups and movements. Rather, as Maryse Condé notes in a scholarly essay, the creolization of languages throughout the Black diaspora (as well, more specifically, as throughout the Caribbean) means that its fiction is already shot through with European, African, and indigenous polyphony and historical memory. Such writing is ‘not claimable by any singular
Lydie Moudileno, ‘Magical Realism, Afrofuturism, and (Afro)Surrealism: The Entanglement of Categories in African Fiction’, in Richard Perez and Victoria A. Chevalier (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Magical Realism in the Twenty-First Century (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, ), p. . See also Moudileno, ‘Magical Realism: “Arme miraculeuse” for the African Novel?’, Research in African Literatures, / (Spring, ), –. Moudileno attributes this idea of a third space or ‘third literary tradition’ to Françoise Lionnet’s book Minor Transnationalism (Durham, : Duke University Press, ). Moudileno, ‘Magical Realism, Afrofuturism, and (Afro)Surrealism’, p. . Nalo Hopkinson in conversation with Karen Lord and Leone Ross in , www.youtube.com/ watch?v=QQkMXUrvgo (accessed January ).
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movement, be it surrealism or négritude or Antilleanism or even “créolité”’; rather, what créolité describes predates these movements and ‘is multiform, plural and polyphonic. It has spoken and continues to speak through the mouth of every Creole writer throughout the ages and wherever the tribulations of life sweep it along.’ Two contemporary francophone novels suggest how this hybridized, polyphonic, and dialectical understanding of diasporic cultural relations might serve as scaffolding for attending to the continuities between surrealism and decolonial politics in Black diasporic fiction. Published two years apart in the s, Calixthe Beyala’s novel Tu t’appelleras Tanga (Your Name Shall be Tanga) and Condé’s novel Moi, Tituba, sorcière (I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem) stage historical reflections through a relational framework that fuses unrecorded historical experience with an explicitly fictional, even fantastic, conceit. Echoing the I-thou dialecticism of Fanon’s surrealist existentialism while recalling also the intertextuality and psychological fugue-states of Parisian surrealist fiction, Beyala’s novel plays out as an extended act of mediumistic transmission, with the white Parisian ‘madwoman’ Anna-Claude giving voice to the life story of the dying West African woman, Tanga. The novel’s dialogue – whether spoken or unspoken – dwells self-reflexively on both the literalness and the outlandishness of this fictional premise; locked together in a West African prison cell, the voice of Tanga ‘speaks’ through Anna-Claude, even questioning the French woman about her doubts: ‘“Why are you questioning yourself?” Tanga suddenly says. “You refuse to believe that I am inhabiting you, and yet I am inside you.”’ Literalizing the Fanonian ‘fact’ of Blackness as a projected fiction, the dying Tanga is at once spoken for and, paradoxically, the speaker herself. Is Beyala’s gesture an ‘existentialist’ one, or a ‘surrealist’ one, or a ‘magical realist’ one? Tanga’s story-telling through and as Anna-Claude explicitly refuses characterization according to any such claims of methodological or literary-historical affiliation: AnnaClaude is ‘a long way from using the kind of pseudo-intellectual speech in which terms ending in -ism are tossed about, all those chopping black terms that divide people and remove them from life’. The world is too busy burning, the novel explains, to warrant a concern for literary or sectarian political convictions.
Condé, ‘Sketching a Literature’, p. . Calixthe Beyala, Your Name Shall be Tanga (), trans. Marjolijn de Jager (London: Heinemann, ), p. . Ibid., pp. –.
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Surrealism, Existentialism, and Fictions of Blackness
What takes priority instead in the novel’s literal recourse to racial impersonation is its capacity to narrate unvoiced or unvoiceable histories of racialized trauma and violence, as well as to dramatize the nuances of difference and intimacy rendered possible by Anna-Claude’s transmission of the words ‘breathed by Tanga’s body into her own flesh’. At once medium and double, interloper and surrogate, Anna-Claude’s mad whiteness registers the history of (white, European) literature’s presumptive recourse to Black stories and lives, while recasting this appropriation as a gift – the mortal transmission of Tanga’s life story. In doing so, Your Name Shall be Tanga both extends and disrupts this history through its profound redoubling of the dialectics of alienation and identification, at once absurd and tragic. The affordances of such a recasting are explored substantively in Maryse Condé’s Moi, Tituba, sorcière, whose first-person fiction of a ‘moi’ can bear narrative witness to Tituba’s own violent conception during the Middle Passage, and can likewise transcend the character’s physical death. As a self-consciously metafictional novel, Tituba is, as Condé notes, the opposite of a historical novel, giving fabular form to a historical figure whose life yielded few documentary traces. Midway through the novel, moreover, this metafictional existence comes fully into relief as Tituba meets the (fictional) heroine of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne, in a jail cell. As in Beyala’s prison novel, Condé’s narrative premise enables the enslaved and imprisoned Tituba and the shunned and imprisoned Hester to stage an ‘impossible’ conversation across and through the medium of fiction. Speaking anachronistically in the language of contemporary feminism, Tituba and Prynne discuss experiences of motherhood, sexuality, and longing – as well as friendship and pleasure; the anachronism of this dialogue is significant insofar as its ‘revolutionary’ power derives not from its capacity to resist structural violence and historical erasure, but from its capacity to persist in spite of it. The critical fabulation of Condé’s writing extends, I propose, from an obliquity of vision – as Wright puts it – that is not, in fact, ocular or cognitive but linguistic, poetic, and meta-historical: a distance effected through the folds, ruptures, and short-circuits of Caribbean language, which Condé likened both to surrealism and to vernacular experience alike. ‘[Aimé] Césaire the Surrealist realized’, she writes, ‘that for the writer and the poet all languages are foreign, that there is no mother tongue. It is
Maryse Condé, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (), trans. Richard Philcox (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, ), p. .
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.
by dynamiting the forest of established signs, markers, and beacons that the poet blazes his trail.’ In the case of a twice-enslaved, seventeenthcentury Caribbean woman of African descent, the signs of Tituba’s historical existence had long since been dynamited already, recorded only in the transcripts of the Salem witch trials. Much like Tanga’s testimonial embodiment through and as Anna-Claude, it is through the dynamited forest of broken language, of redoubled alienation and distance, that Tituba’s existence can speak. Such refractive iterations of ‘surrealism’ throughout the fiction of the contemporary African diaspora need not be aggregated to a singular lineage or definition of surrealist techniques or works; their polyphone refers instead to the global dissemination and reception of surrealism as an historical movement. Neither Wright’s nor Condé’s understanding of surrealism represents an abstraction or distortion of some true ‘ism’ – indeed, Beyala vituperates against the ‘grim and hateful’ eyes of pseudointellectuals who ‘splutter under their tattered flag’ about the importance of staying true to such categorical convictions. Rather, they heed the extent to which contacts with surrealism are necessarily diffracted, pluralized, hybridized, and even pre-empted in the fictions of Blackness, mutually shaped by racial capitalism and the trenchant histories of colonialism, Middle Passage, and anticolonial resistance. I propose that such fictions be considered as a necessary discursive field for understanding ‘surrealism’ in terms of its multifarious reception and reimagination by diasporic Black writers and thinkers in West Africa and the Caribbean, as well as throughout the Americas and Europe.
Condé, ‘Sketching a Literature’, p. .
Beyala, Your Name Shall Be Tanga, pp. –.
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Social Critique in the Japanese Post-War Surrealist Novel Felicity Gee
The philosophical and aesthetic impact of French surrealism in early twentieth-century Japan was subject to varying degrees of uncertainty, (mis)interpretation, and contingency. Surrealism arrived at a time when debates on the novel, on the role of art in society, and the question of authenticity (in artistic expression and politics) were heated and often contradictory, involving manifold movements, groups, and collaborations. ‘Although the seismic upheaval of the Great Kantō Earthquake that levelled much of Tokyo and Yokohama on September , , is invariably cited as the metaphorical marker for the eruption of a modernist consciousness in Japan’, William J. Tyler notes that, ‘such stirrings predated the earthquake by a decade or more’. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto (translated by Mori Ōgai in Subaru journal in ) inspired Dadaisto Shinkichi no shi (Poems by the Dadaist [Takahashi] Shinkichi), and radical performances by the amorphous MAVO art movement, which ‘championed the reintegration of art into the social (and political) practice of everyday life’. A celebration of shin and shinkō (the new and the modern) fuelled an ‘indigenous modernism’ that responded to social conservatism with an explosive and often antagonistic force designed to shock. The history of this period is complex, but despite their differing allegiances and affiliations, young artists were united in forging a new voice which sought to erase traditions of the past, including
William J. Tyler, ‘Introduction’, in William J. Tyler (ed.), Modanizumu: Modernist Fiction from Japan – (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, ), p. . All Japanese names, including those appearing in bibliographic references, will be written in the Japanese order of surname first unless presented otherwise in the source. Founded in and nominally led by Tomoyoshi Murayama, MAVO borrowed heavily from Dada and Constructivism, but ultimately lacked the genuine expansion and innovation of Japanese surrealism. Gennifer Wild, MAVO: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde, – (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), p. . Ibid., p. .
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the structures of imperialism with their sponsored art academy and literary establishment (bundan). Futurism, Dada, surrealism, and European philosophy such as existentialism, proved of vital inspiration to Japanese artists in their efforts to bring about abrupt and absolute change. However, rather than a supplanting of Western culture, this was a point of departure, a dialogue and not mimicry. The European avant-gardes provided a spark for Japanese artists of the s and s but were digested ‘more individualistically and idiosyncratically’, producing creative work that was often a radical departure focused on the horrors of their immediate cultural environment. As such, Japanese surrealism – chōgenjitsushugi – could be likened to a collage of parts derived from snippets, cuttings, and augmentations of original texts and ideas, combined with a cultural and political fervour focused on instantaneity, provocation, and rebellion. Chōgenjitsushugi was the term coined by anarchist poet Muramatsu Masatoshi in the article ‘Genjitsushugi to chōgenjitsushugi’ (‘Reality and Surreality’) for Bungei Nihon (Literary Japan). A tautological synthesis of the principle of reality (genjitsushugi) with its transcendence or transgression (chō), this term came to designate literary surrealism, prior to its dissemination in the plastic and visual arts. André Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme found an audience in Japan thanks to its publication alongside other surrealist poetry (by Paul Éluard, Pierre Reverdy, Benjamin Péret, and others) in such journals as Bara. Majutsu. Gakusetsu. (Rose. Magic. Theory, ) and Shi to shiron (Poetry and Poetics, , edited by Haruyama Yukio). Frequently, however, much was lost in translation with abridged versions of the original often omitting crucial details, such as Kitagawa Fuyuhiko’s translated summary of Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme which entirely overlooked the section containing key definitions and aims. For many there was also confusion as to the definition of fantasy in a surrealist sense. Chinghsin Wu describes how several avant-garde artists and writers interpreted French surrealism as escapism from, rather than direct engagement with, reality. Kanbara Tai’s ‘The Downfall of Surrealism’ () accused
It is significant that Futurism rather than Cubism paved the way for the dissemination of surrealist philosophy, as a formal introduction to Cubism did not occur in the Japanese art scene until reports of the Salon d’Automne and Société des Artistes Indépendants exhibitions were published later in the s. Chinghsin Wu, ‘Reality Within and Without: Surrealism in Japan and China in the Early s’, Review of Japanese Culture and Society, (December ), – (at p. ). See Jelena Stojovic, Surrealism and Photography in s Japan: The Impossible Avant-Garde (London: Routledge, ), p. .
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Social Critique in the Japanese Post-War Novel
‘surrealists’ of ‘[covering] up and beautify[ing] the flight of those who lack the sincerity, justice, power, and courage to face reality’. Similarly, poet Nishiwaki Junzaburō believed that the roles of automatism and the Freudian unconscious in surrealist practice were overstated: ‘The majority of [surrealist] commentators on Rimbaud insist that his poetry is born from the unconscious or from dreams . . . It is true that the surrealist technique of the joining of idées creates the extraordinary and projects oneiric forms of the unconscious. But poetry is not a dream. It is the joining of utterly conscious images.’ Nishiwaki’s first essay collection Chōgenjitsushugi shiron (Surrealist Poetics, ), offers three treatises on poetry and the extinction of tradition, illuminating a practice that is resolutely Japanese, but which nonetheless does draw on principles found in Breton’s manifesto: ‘The reality of human existence itself is banal. To sense this fundamental yet supreme banality constitutes the motivation for poetry. Poetry is a method of calling one’s attention to this banal reality by means of a certain unique interest (a mysterious sense of exaltation).’ These statements align clearly with the surrealist état d’attente (state-ofreadiness), alluding to the marvellous as a means of finding inspiration in the banal, repeated habits and customs of the everyday. Despite individual students of Nishiwaki’s, such as Shūzo Takiguchi, taking up the mantle of surrealism in earnest (publishing his translation of Breton’s ‘Surrealism and Painting’ in ), the term chōgenjitsushugi was eclipsed by homegrown anti-imperialist, proletarian art movements. Overall, as Yuko Ishii and Michael Richardson observe, ‘The feature that most distinguished surrealism in Japan from elsewhere is that it was shaped by individual engagements rather than through the establishment of any sort of collective consciousness.’ The subject of this chapter, the novels of Abe Kōbō (–), emerges out of this shifting landscape, moving into a post-war era of continued dialogue with surrealism, albeit framed through anti-imperialist concerns and workers’ rights in the Japanese context. Abe, alongside Mishima Yukio and Murakami Haruki, is one of the most translated of Japan’s modern authors, with three of his novels (and a screenplay) adapted into cult films
Wu, ‘Reality Within and Without’, p. . Nishiwaki Junzaburō, ‘Surrealist Poetics (Chōgenjitsushugi shiron)’, trans. Hosea Hirata, in The Poetry and Poetics of Nishiwaki Junzaburo (; Princeton University Press, ), p. . Ibid., p. . Yuko Ishii and Michael Richardson, ‘Japan: Introduction’, in Michael Richardson, Krzysztof Fijalkowski, and Dawn Ades, (eds.), The International Encylopedia of Surrealism, vol. (London: Bloomsbury, ), p. .
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by avant-garde filmmaker Teshigahara Hiroshi: Otoshiana (Pitfall, ), Sunna no onna (Woman in the Dunes, ), Tanin no kao (The Face of Another, ), and Moetsuku chizu (The Man Without a Map, aka The Ruined Map, ). If you look through the digital repository on the Japan Times website, you will see Abe’s novels referred to as: surrealist; absurdist; existentialist fantasy; and resplendent with surreal imagery. Repeated recourse to Abe as ‘the Japanese Kafka’ is evidenced in numerous articles and on the dust jackets of most of the English-language translations of his novels. This chapter contends that while elements of the existential and absurd can undoubtedly be found throughout the Japanese post-war avant-garde and in Abe’s writing, the links to surrealism and surrealist philosophy are clearer, and align more closely with Abe’s social critique and perspective on the prismatic human realities of twentieth-century Japan, where existence is mutable, transient, and marvellous. Abe’s prose explores the horrors of the atomic blasts in , student revolts, government negligence, trade union disputes, discrimination, and human migrancy, not as historical allegories, but as events and attitudes uncovered through moments of black humour and magic-circumstantial inspiration. This chapter asserts Abe’s surrealist approach to social reality. His novels do not wander through a dehumanization of the human subject, but, conversely, thrill in the convulsive beauty of metamorphosis and the potential for revelation. Abe’s encounter with surrealism and one of its key advocates, surrealist painter Okamoto Tarō, begins in the late s when he joins the literary group Yoru no kai (Night Assembly, or Night Association), founded in by Okamoto and newspaper editor Hanada Kiyoteru. The timing of his interest in surrealism is significant. Born in Tokyo, he moved to Mukden in Manchuria (now Shen-yang, Liaoning Province, China), where his father was stationed as a doctor during the Fifteen Year War (–). His engagement with surrealism coincides with his graduation from Tokyo Imperial University with a medical degree. As a young writer in his twenties (never having practised medicine), Abe was drawn to surrealism as a language through which to explore and express the colonial atrocities and military violence that he had experienced living within proximity of the occupying forces. This language translates into the biting geopolitical critique that threads through his oeuvre. A champion of the outsider, the oppressed, and the powerless, for Abe, ‘the self-confessed man
See www.japantimes.co.jp/search-results/?q=kobo+abe&submit=Search (accessed November ).
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Social Critique in the Japanese Post-War Novel
without a hometown’, communism and surrealism became significant philosophical ballasts. Abe felt cut off from official chronologies and cartographies of history, and his famous declaration, ‘I myself had changed greatly three times both philosophically and methodologically – from existentialism to surrealism to communism’, illustrates his personal investment in the art of metamorphosis as a new realism. Prior to his return to Tokyo, and the fortuitous encounter with Hanada and Teshigahara, Abe witnessed horrors that changed his writing course, forever. The shock paved the way for his transition to surrealist practice: I was an existentialist during the war, I suppose. That is why, perhaps, I wrote Marking the Road I Have Come [ – his first story]. The idea is based on the thesis ‘Existence preceded essence’, but that is extremely selfnegating. The more I tried to grasp it, the more I failed. It was from my postwar experience that my belief in existentialism started to crumble. I remained in Manchuria for a year and a half after the war and witnessed the complete destruction of social order there. That made me lose all trust in anything stable. It was really a fortunate thing for me.
Writing from a position of traumatic dislocation, surrealism seemed to present a new kind of artistic freedom that evoked the potential rebirth of society. Part of the act of destruction (whether actual or formal) is the opportunity for renewal. Abe accords with Hanada, who ‘believed it was the future which created and affirmed the self . . . Because we live in the future, that is, because the future is the process of “becoming”, the traces of the past are to be extinguished.’ To become, rather than to be, seems to address a surrealist marvellous, an ‘optimism’ that clearly distinguishes it from neighbouring theories of existentialism and the absurd. Take, for example, poet Kitasono Katue, who describes in his rhetorical essay ‘Chōgenjitsushugi no tachiba’ (‘The Surrealist Position’, ) a mode of writing that privileges nothingness, the void: ‘Surrealism, as a literary movement, defines “vacuum tube” [shinkūkan] as “the vacuum tube that is
Abe quoted in Devon A. Cahill, ‘The Work of Abe Kobo in the s: The Struggle for Identity in Modernity; Japan, the West, and Beyond’, MA thesis, Seton Hall University (), p. , https:// scholarship.shu.edu/theses/ (accessed January ). This statement appears in the postscript to Abe’s essay collection, Mōjū no Kokoro ni Keisanki no Te wo (The Hand of a Calculator with a Beast’s Heart), quoted in Motoyama Mutsuko, ‘The Literature and Politics of Abe Kōbō: Farewell to Communism in Suna No Onna’, Monumenta Nipponica, / (), – (at p. ). Quoted in Motoyama, ‘Literature and Politics of Abe Kōbō’, p. . Ogawa Toru, Hanada Kiyoteru no shōgai (Tokyo: Shisō no kagakusha, ), p. . Quoted in Timothy Iles, Towards a New Community: Abe Kôbô: An Exploration of His Prose, Drama, and Theatre, PhD thesis, University of Toronto (), p. .
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nothing at all” . . . As for being: “nothing at all”, this “nothing at all” is a result of . . . nothing at all. The work that leads to this “vacuum” is the essence of art.’ Here the skill of surrealist art is reduced to an absence, or nothingness, where human creativity and imagination become a double, nihilistic negative. Both a parodic slight in its critique of Japanese surrealism as lacking in political resistance, and an amalgamation of the marvellous and the absurd, Kitasono’s concept of the vacuum is partially responsible for the confusion between existentialism and surrealism in the post-war avant-garde novel. As far as Abe’s novels are concerned, the emphasis is not on being, but on becoming, and the frustrations of dead ends and incomplete identities are a means of laughing at the social order, rather than being trapped by it (Abe considered Jean-Paul Sartre’s writing to lack humour). In ‘Interview with Jean Duché’, which appeared in Le Littéraire ( October ), Breton reorients the Sisyphean myth to illustrate a key distinction between existentialism and surrealism. When asked by Duché about surrealism’s perceived ‘pessimism’, Breton responds that it has been ‘fully superseded by an anticipatory surrealist optimism . . . The Rock of Sisyphus? The surrealists differ from Camus in that they believe that if not today then tomorrow it is going to burst, abolishing as if by magic both the mountain and the torment.’ An end to ritual, Sisyphean torment is achievable via a marvellous turning towards the world, which emphasizes sensory and associative resonances between human interior and natural and cultural exteriors. Certainly Abe’s social critique embraces this marvellous, optimistic turning. It is not a stretch to imagine the opening pages to Louis Aragon’s Une vague de rêves (A Wave of Dreams, – an artist whose ‘acquired dialectical knowledge’ influenced Abe’s writing greatly) in one of his novels: a ‘washed up’ human figure sits musing on the potential liberatory energy of surrealism: ‘I lived in the shadow of a great white building adorned with flags and uproar. The castle was Society and I was not allowed to escape.’ Escape, and the ‘illusion of true Freedom’, is not achieved simply through automatism, but through the self-conscious pursuit of the marvellous in the face of futility: ‘the
Quoted in Miryam Sas, Fault Lines: Cultural Memory and Japanese Surrealism (Stanford University Press, ), p. . Nancy Shields, Fake Fish: The Theater of Kōbō Abe (New York: Weatherhill, ), p. . Quoted in André Breton, What Is Surrealism? Selected Writings, ed. and trans. Franklin Rosemont (New York: Pathfinder Press, ), pp. –. See Abe Kōbō, ‘Theory and Practice in Literature’, The Frontier Within: Essays by Abe Kōbō (; New York: Columbia University Press, ), p. . Louis Aragon, A Wave of Dreams (), trans. Susan de Muth (London: Thin Man Press, ), p. .
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Social Critique in the Japanese Post-War Novel
hermit carves an inscription on the walls of his cell and this makes the sound of wings on the stone . . . For he is dreaming . . . I do not know what will come of this new undertaking of dreams. I dream at the edge of the world and the night.’ Abe’s protagonists, too, dream at the edge of the world and the night, modern hermits trapped within labyrinthine social structures. Abe theorizes the ‘rise of surrealism’ through a literary contradiction: (a) the principle of realism ‘which approaches its objects by virtue of transparency of expression’ is at odds with (b) the ‘unprincipled state of overflow’ in perception that characterizes avant-garde re-evaluations of ‘naturalism’. A lack of manipulation – ‘transparency’ – in realist literature, which assumes a controlled and detailed ontological representation, contrasts with the images and languages of the unconscious present in surrealism – the ‘state of overflow’. However, what at first seems to be a contradiction, is the marvellous potential arising from the meeting of social realism and ‘unprincipled’ perception ‘Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern’. Thus he arrives at a definition of surrealism whereby, as per Breton’s dictate, the surreal is conjoined with the real and not separate from it; an ‘overflow’ that troubles the very notion that reality can be ontologically transparent simply because it is rendered faithfully (as René Magritte’s oeuvre so convincingly illustrates). For Mark Gibeau, Hanada’s influence accelerated Abe’s shift from literary realism to surrealism, noting a non-anthropocentric perspective that emphasized animal, mineral, and natural entities. Themes of metamorphosis, transformation, and transgression dominate Abe’s oeuvre. They stem from the surrealist practice of setting opposing forces into a new union, which neither completely removes nor upholds the boundary between them (humans and the universe; dreams and reality; interior and exterior). Hanada dug deeper into the dynamism of surrealist objects such as the mannequin, and in the following passage taken from his essay ‘Don fan ron’ (‘On Don Juan’, ) he considers the need to dismantle hierarchies arising from a human-centred perspective, reversing the animate and inanimate qualities of objects: ‘We must purify ourselves of this humanism and maintain a fierce interest in the non-living. Moreover, insofar as we do not make the shift to “mineralism”, we cannot possibly hope to overcome the difficulties
Ibid., p. . Abe, ‘Theory and Practice in Literature’, p. . André Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism (), in Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ), p. .
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of the age.’ Hanada’s ‘mineralism’ echoes Breton’s commentary in the Second Manifesto of Surrealism () on surrealist experimentation being unafraid “to make for itself a tenet of total revolt, complete insubordination’. Abe responded to the ideas expressed among Yoru no kai members in the short stories and fables that he published in the group’s collection Atarashii Geijutsu no Tankyū (The Search for New Art, ). In ‘Dendorokakariya’ (‘Dendrocacalia’, ), ‘something plantlike began to take hold’ in the mind of a man named Common (Mr Komon), which transforms him into ‘something soft and thin, greenish brown, neither tree nor grass’ but with a face that ‘twisted and squirmed like a live fish, doing its best to slip out of his grasp’. The narrative expands and twists, positing the possibilities of hallucination, but ultimately settles on the conjoining realities of plant and human consciousness, which, in true Abe fashion, are tempered with a black humour, as Common searches for answers in Greek mythology: ‘while the transformation of Narcissus into a flower may have been an expression of the gods’ sympathy, all it accomplished in the end was to give him the freedom to die. In his transformation lay nothing but the freedom of despair itself.’ Motoyama Mutsuko finds that a kind of ‘irony’ ‘unifies the two worlds of reality and fantasy’ in Abe’s fiction, and, in ‘Dendrocacalia’ specifically, she argues that ‘in his attempt to revolutionize the conventional view of the world, he creates a new myth through Mr Komon’s saga, conveying the equation between the human and the vegetable as a challenge to humanism for the future of the world’. Abe shares a surrealist wryness, black humour, and self-reflexivity with artist and author of metamorphic short stories, Leonora Carrington. Neither gets tangled in the negativities and doubts that attack a solidity of human experience, but each chooses to see possibility in a freedom from others’ gazes, from socially inhabited roles, or the loss of human corporeal form. Christopher Bolton in his analysis of ‘Dendrocacalia’ insists, with good reason, that the most striking transformation in the story is:
Quoted in Mark Gibeau, ‘Transformation of the Self: Surrealism in the Early Works of Abe Kōbō’, CUHK Journal of Humanities, (), – (at p. ). André Breton, Second Manifesto of Surrealism (), in Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, p. . The story, also published in monthly literary magazine Hyōgen, bore the subtitle ‘Komon Kun ga Dendorokakariya ni natta Hanashi’, or ‘The Story of Mr Common and how he turned into a dendrocacalia’. Abe Kōbō, ‘Dendrocacalia’, in Abe, Beyond the Curve, trans. Juliet Winters Carpenter (; Tokyo: Kodansha International, ), pp. –. Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Motoyama, ‘Literature and Politics of Abe Kōbō’, p. . Ibid., p. .
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that rational language (which one sort of communication must be) pins down and defines both the sender and receiver – that humans are enveloped in and defined from the words around them . . . In this light, the botanist’s rather mysterious line equating plants with language begins to make sense: ‘Plants are the very roots of Logos . . . The very word banned, alas from our everyday speech, is the high beating of their hearts.’ Later, Common incinerates the letter and hopes the flames will constitute a new ‘Promethean’ fire of freedom, but in this he simply retreats again into the mold of mythology, burning one text only to cross into another.
Motoyama compares Abe’s short stories of the s and s to his novels of the s, judging the novels to be less surrealist, despite traces of his engagement with Yoru no kai and subsequent interest in surrealism persisting. In Sunna no onna (The Woman in the Dunes, ), for example, ‘Abe’s employment of desert imagery relates to Hanada’s advocacy for an all-inclusive art. Sand does not represent a single object, but simply evokes ideas, situations, and feelings.’ I believe that any attempt to periodize Abe’s surrealism is futile; its spirit courses through each work at a different intensity, and with shifting focus. Surrealism, for him, was always linked to politics, and his ‘main concern lay in articulating a notion of the social in which individuals are not co-opted or appropriated strictly as parts within a unified and comprehensive whole but are rather granted a measure of freedom through which to explore the world and others (including, significantly, the self as other) in all their alterity’. Surrealist artists are liberated by a practice which, while it draws on psychoanalytic language, esotericism, superstition, or ethnography, is not dominated or constrained by answers and solutions. Abe harnesses a state of alterity, blurring the lines separating perception and representation, ‘reconciling dialectically these two terms which are so violently contradictory’. In this way, as Richard F. Calichman suggests, ‘The borders that determine such accepted categories as gender and race or ethnicity . . . are routinely violated, their parameters redrawn by a vastly more general force of
Christopher Bolton, Sublime Voices: The Fictional Science and Scientific Fiction of Abe Kōbō (Cambridge, : Harvard University Press, ), p. . Ibid., p. . Richard F. Calichman, ‘Introduction’, in The Frontier Within: Essays by Abe Kōbō, ed. and trans. Calichman (New York: Columbia University Press, ), p. xi. Abe was drawn to communism via his interests in surrealism, but in time became alarmed at the party’s ideological manipulation of the masses, not to mention the turn towards Stalinism, and he was expelled from the Japanese Communist Party in . Nevertheless, his own political beliefs – anti-racism, anti-nationalism, and anti-bourgeoisie – remained at the heart of his writing. André Breton, ‘Preface’, in The International Surrealism Exhibition (Ex. Cat.), trans. David Gascoyne (London: Women’s Printers, ), p. .
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identification that at any time potentially places apparently disparate things together while also differentiating those things that are typically seen to be similar.’ In Abe’s novels, the representation of creeping anxieties held by individual characters multiplies into invisible, imagined ‘others’ awakened simultaneously within the self and in the exterior environment. These themes propagate and flourish in his short stories, such as those in the collection published by Minzen, Mitsu no gūwa: Akai mayu, Kōzui, Mahō no chōku (Three Fables: Red Cocoon, The Flood, and The Magic Chalk). Exploring themes of selfhood and social rebellion, human form transmutes into ‘other’ forms, as Abe tests the limits of perception and inhabitation of shape, structure, mass, and sensation. A stranger’s smile turns from hope into a wall, and a man looking for a home transforms into a cocoon of thread coloured red by the evening sunset and reimagined as a child’s plaything. Representing the strangeness of the thing is not the objective, the dialectical movement of the transformation is. The shape-shifting subject/object is a recurrent motif across Abe’s novels. Particularly arresting is the titular figure of Hakootoko (The Box Man, ), who, categorized socially as a ‘vagrant’, lives inside a box, as vulnerable as a hermit crab: A box man can’t very well take off his box and simply return to the ordinary world. When he takes it off it is to emerge into another world just as an insect metamorphoses . . . Even the human chrysalis that is the box man, Even I know not What kind of living being will issue forth.
Such surreal social critique is typical of Abe. The box man – lower in rank, perhaps, even than the beggars of central Tokyo – occupies his space through the life streams of desire and dreams. His box facilitates a voyeurism dependent upon a semi-dream state in which the limit that divides the ‘ordinary world’ from the constraints of the box is a mirror. It is significant that the box man’s former career was as a photographer. The self-reflexive narrative structure finds in every path and cul-de-sac a reflected self, of whom the narrator is suspicious, jealous, and, at times,
Richard F. Calichman, ‘Introduction’, in Abe Kōbō, Beasts Head for Home: A Novel, ed. and trans. Calichman (New York: Columbia University Press, ), p. xviii. Abe Kōbō, The Box Man (), trans. E. Dale Saunders (New York: Vintage, ), pp. –.
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sympathetic. Reflection is most frequently articulated through metaphors of water – the sea, stagnant pools, and fluid-filled containers – but also in windows and a scavenged vehicular rear-view mirror. Additional to the expansion of Tokyo through metaphorical feats of reflected duplication, is an ever-present conjoinment of body and exterior object world: ‘The water was much darker than the sky. A deep black like an elevator falling . . . I could hear the sea. I could see the inside of my own cranium . . . There was a front and back to the successive waves, and the front part glinted slightly. As I leaned forward, trying to see through them, my right and left eyeballs popped out, and dropped straight down. And from where they had fallen a wisp of smoke came wafting up.’ The act of seeing, or of staying awake with one’s eyes open, involves the crepuscular nausea of never quite having slept. On such a threshold, everything is real, a fact that Abe plays with, inserting newspaper clippings, missing persons notices, and photographs into the text. In the passage above, the surreality emerges from the incongruity of landscape and sensation. Human figures rely on objects (an elevator, a box, a body) and the malleable boundaries presented in dreams and hallucinatory desires to transition more deeply between the self and the natural or social order. In interview Abe explains: ‘there is a tendency toward poetry in my works . . . It is the function of the eye of the novel to observe the area between those things which are poetic and nonpoetic’ – in other words, the marvellous. In the same interview, he emphasizes that the photographs littered through The Box Man are poems – they create meaning in and of themselves, not necessarily connected to the narrative facts at hand, to be completed by the reader, an embedded surrealist poetics. In The Woman in the Dunes entomologist Niki Jumpei imagines the grains of sand that engulf him as tiny insect colleagues. Their ‘behaviour’ (determined by wind, or moisture) provides his means to transform: ‘The change in the sand corresponded to a change in himself.’ Conceits comprised of shifting surfaces, crevices, paths, gaps, and hidden depths necessitate active, participatory readers. As Teshigahara notes: ‘lines written by Kobo Abe [sic] are not always on the same surface as the situation. Vernacular words and abstract speech appear together to manifest the
Ibid., p. . Nancy S. Hardin and Abé Kobo (sic), ‘An Interview with Abé Kobo’, Contemporary Literature, / (Autumn ), – (at p. ). Abe Kōbō, The Woman in the Dunes (), trans. E. Dale Saunders (London and New York: Penguin, ), p. .
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theme in an inductive way.’ Conventions of hierarchical order and logic are upended, and new ways of being unfold. Readers are encouraged to align with protagonists for whom dreams, contingencies, and beforeunnoticed details emerge from the backdrop of the everyday, altering and deepening their/our experience of the seemingly limitless exterior world. This process involves myriad instances of slippage, which destabilize the boundaries between the (usually male) protagonist and that which he pursues. The nameless detective searching for missing sales executive Mr Nemuro in The Ruined Map () is, like most of Abe protagonists, alert to the environment and its affective and marvellous aspects. To see, to really see, involves a surrealist dépaysement of the environment: ‘The dark street . . . too dark. . . The street, which until a short while ago had been too white, linked as it had been with the milky sky, was now a street in the depths of a gorge, sunk at the bottom of a sky stained with street lights. I stepped off ten paces from the light, groping for the manhole cover with the tip of my shoe – the place where the husband had, so she said, vanished.’ The detective traces his steps over and over, noting clues, characters, and anomalies in Mr Nemuro’s disappearance until the line between the two men starts to seem incidental and his thoughts turn to the life of insects: But I was the one standing here now. There was no mistake, I was the one. I thought I was following the husband’s map, but I was following my own. I wanted to follow in his steps and I followed my own . . . Although it was dead winter a huge green bottlefly, slipping and sliding, was buzzing as it tried to crawl up the shade over the electric light; it kept circling around but there was no need to worry: flies know the seasons better than humans, and their wisdom is great.
Earlier in the novel, the detective experiences an intensity that grows like moth larvae in his chest. He imagines the moths hatching and making a dash for the lemon-yellow curtains of the room central to his investigation, their fangs penetrating the glass. Remembering that moths don’t have fangs, he fantasizes them visiting the dentist to acquire some. In a later scene, he senses his body fusing with a bus, which allows him to enter a hidden/forbidden space: ‘The window glass emitted fire. The headlights of a bus licked at the pane. In their light the slender branches of the trees
Quoted in Dore Ashton, The Delicate Thread: Teshigahara’s Life in Art (Tokyo and New York: Kodansha International, ), p. . Abe Kōbō, The Ruined Map (), trans. E. Dale Saunders (New York: Vintage, ), p. . Ibid., pp. , .
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along the street appeared like a ragged net . . . Immediately I began to be able to feel it vividly as if it were all an extension of my body.’ These scenes of surrealist metamorphosis ‘can be perceived only by the actant in his transformative actions, passing from one dimension to the next in the course of his unfolding’; characters and readers united in waves of observational revelry. The novels are radical in that they confuse, or complicate, the strict order of each fictionalized representation of Japanese society by not being useful: neither fulfilling a purpose, nor reaching a fixed position or synthesis. If ‘the emergence of a mass market for creative fiction in Japan in the s encouraged the popularizing of avant-gardism’, as Tyler argues, Abe’s oeuvre stands in defiance of any softening of what was considered by some critics as ‘the sharp edge of the surrealist mode and the theme of alienation that bulked large in European modernist prose’. These are not examples of the ‘I-novel’, following a stream-of-consciousness narrative fixated on the dehumanizing aspects of twentieth-century modernity, but the poetic expression of mutable, metamorphosing realities held by an engaged, political backbone. The act of re-establishing links to the natural and cultural worlds requires an openness that rejects fixity and internalized state apparatuses. Abe self-reflexively counters what Calichman calls the ‘domestication of alterity’ in literary convention by inviting the reader to consider the division within the self, which is already ‘other’ and therefore proceeds as split, doubled, multiplied in perspective: As I wrote in my novel Tanin no kao [The Face of Another], the notions of ‘other’ and ‘neighbor’ coexist within us. We regard those people within the community as ‘neighbours’ and those outside us as ‘others’. The ‘other’ is the enemy and the ‘neighbor’ an ally . . . [W]e must attempt to communicate directly with the other by effacing the idea of the neighbor that exists within us. This might throw people into a state of extreme solitude . . . How can we overcome this image of the neighbor – that is, the sense of solitude we feel when surrounded by others?
Here, to multiply, transmute, or transform, means to move beyond the frontier, far beyond the parameters of the singular. At the beginning of his career as a writer, the activities of Yoru no kai fostered an artistic practice where Abe could experiment, honing his social critique. His early works
Ibid., p. . Abe Kōbō, ‘Poetry and Poets (Consciousness and the Unconscious)’ (), in Abe, Frontier Within, p. . Tyler, ‘Introduction’, p. . Calichman, ‘Introduction’, in Beasts Head for Home, p. xiv. Abe Kōbō, ‘Beyond the Neighbor’ (), in Abe, Frontier Within, pp. –.
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imagine the inhumanities of imperial rule and its auspices through anthropological, ethnographical, and surrealist approaches to place and space. These themes find greater expansion in the virtual realities of interior experience in his post-war novels, where the concept of tanin (the other – deployed in a play with self and/as outsider) functions as a means to explore local particularities in urban and rural settings. However, regional/national specificities are always enfolded within wider questions of capitalist, geopolitical flows of power and oppression. He is a writer particularly attuned to the suffering of the poor, the displaced, and those racially discriminated against: zainichi (ethnic Koreans living in the Japanese diaspora), burakumin (a feudal term denoting those who live in hamlets or villages, which also has a discriminatory usage pertaining to a caste system for those descended from families working in industries considered unclean, such as abattoirs or tanneries), and the unemployed, wounded, or sick. His novels explore themes of the ‘other’ (both within and without), adrift in their neighbourhood, region, or country. They challenge Japan’s monocultural myopia through the philosophical concept of the present moment: ‘Today we must shift from a regionally shared sensibility to a shared sensibility based on contemporaneity’, Abe states; ‘If we try to accomplish this and learn about our shared sensibility with others, we must discover not distinctions and discriminations so much as essential commonalities.’ This emphasis on temporality, as opposed to fixed place, brings the possibility of mutuality and recognition through a shared moment in time, rather than the non-synchronous drive of imperial or colonial development. This echoes Okamoto’s position: ‘the most urgent task of contemporary art is to synthesize the global (seaki-sei) and the particular (koyū-sei); to understand the particular in a global perspective; and to achieve a global perspective that is based on the particular’. Abe builds worlds through formal experimentation with language, assembling a collage of ideas that allows for both literal and metaphysical metamorphosis to take place. Conceptually his writing is adjacent to the collage work of Max Ernst (whom Abe much admired), where the simultaneous presentation of similarities and differences in humans, animals,
Abe Kōbō, ‘The Frontier Within, Part II’ (), in Abe, Frontier Within, p. . The concept of ‘contemporaneity’ seemed useful to Abe in his goal to thread popular culture from across the globe through his art. As an outsider inside Japan, he was less concerned with national specificity. For a discussion of ‘international contemporaneity’ in Japanese modernism, see Reiko Tomii, Radicalism in the Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and s Art in Japan (Cambridge, : MIT Press, ). Quoted in Ishii and Richardson, ‘Japan: Introduction’, p. .
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and objects originating from disparate locations, can exist in the same visual and perceptual reality. Abe’s contextual backgrounds – sand dunes, coal mines, crowds in metropolitan Tokyo, underground tunnels, abandoned rural villages – like Ernst’s forests and repurposed illustrations (cut from a multitude of sources), create a limitless horizon for revolutionary, transformative possibilities to exist: ‘The wonderful sense . . . Of being simultaneously outside and in, free and imprisoned’. Abe’s ordinary (yet extraordinary) characters emerge on the page, like the subjects in a surrealist collage. The formal qualities of his writing require dislocation and dépaysement, but simultaneously offer a seamless permeability (such as the invisible joins between disparate images, or ‘worlds’) drawing the reader into strange, non-rational, and Carrollian trajectories and evolutions. If Ernst’s forest is ‘a supernatural insect’, Abe’s spatial topographies are a series of social petri dishes crammed with seaweed, insect eggs, radish sprouts, or garbage, all of which assume human qualities or aspects. Having studied, but never practised, medicine, a surreal science is nevertheless essential to Abe’s novels, with doctors’ offices and hospitals serving as liminal zones. In Face of Another, K’s High-Molecular Chemistry Institute (so surreally reimagined in Teshigahara’s exhilarating film adaptation Tanin no kao, The Face of Another, ) is where Okuyama, the engineer disfigured in an industrial accident, creates a mask to cover his keloid scars (a reference to atomic radiation). Dr K’s laboratory houses replicas, copies, photographic evidence of disfigurement and correction, and as he sits and waits, Okuyama considers the stupidity of racism, and ‘the intercourse between human beings . . . stereotyped by too much dependence on the habit of faces’. The epistolatory nature of the novel (Okuyama’s letters to his wife), as well as notes, and marginalia, are deeply comical and contain a grotesque level of biological as well as emotional detail designed to intrigue and repulse the reader: ‘for one must . . . desire subjective and perceptual liberation through emotion’. As well as gratuitous bodily description, coincidence and chance are heightened. Signs as constituted by billboards, newspapers, a fortune-telling machine, or even
Max Ernst, ‘Les mystères de la forêt’, Minotaure, (), quoted in Ernst, Life and Work: An Autobiographical Collage, ed. Werner Spies (New London: Thames & Hudson, ), p. . Much of the fascination that surrealists had for certain writers of the past overlaps with Abe’s instinctive preferences: ‘I like Lewis Carroll very much, perhaps next to Edgar Allan Poe.’ Hardin and Abé, ‘Interview with Abé Kobo’, p. . Ernst, Life and Work, p. . Abe Kōbō, The Face of Another (), trans. E. Dale Saunders (London: Penguin, ), pp. –. Abe, ‘Theory and Practice in Literature’, p. .
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art-historical references to Paul Klee’s painting ‘Fake Face’ and an exhibition of Noh masks guide Okuyama on his sinister quest to become other, to inhabit the world behind the mask. Intoxicated by the power of the mask, he follows his wife undetected but for a moment of thrilling hesitation. In his marginalia he describes a ‘distortion in the magnetic field’ upon the threshold of being discovered: ‘Perhaps I had had a dim premonition of the grave significance of this instant.’ The erotic chase through the crowds of Tokyo, led by superstition and chance, recalls those equally selfreflective (although less self-critical) steps taken by the Breton-character in Nadja (). Repressed desire, duplicity, and intense observation are realized in the pursuit of the other that is not one, but by the time The Ruined Map was published in , Abe felt that, ‘having exhausted his enquiry into the “other”, he must focus on “the you who must live inside others, the self that has become another”’. The self has no fixed status or perspective, in time, space, or human cultural evolution, and this makes Abe’s novels impactful and uncanny. Citing Alain Robbe-Grillet’s ‘method’ of opposing time and space as inspiration, he explains how: ‘Gazing at static space very carefully, so that it seems as if no time is going on, is a process that deeply concerns me. For example, take this white wall. I must be able to gaze steadily at this white wall – that is, look at it with a special eye – if I want to make a single book about it.’ This is a slow surrealism, of being ready and open to the changes in your environment, allowing a strange realization to creep under your skin and bring you closer to the marvellous truth that nothing stands still. Abe’s methodological approach to uncovering the injustices and inequalities of modern Japan is to play with established language systems that fail to challenge or innovate. The language of avant-garde cinema or photography assists in his endeavour to liberate words, with abstract and ‘unknown’ images serving the same purpose that they do for surrealist practice across mediums: Upon encountering the visual image in all its destructiveness as the ahistorical, accidental, and violent pure object that refuses all established language . . . [m]an would try to invent or create a new system capable of
Most likely a reference to Paul Klee’s Senecio (), also called Head of a Man Going Senile, and thematically like Actor’s Mask (). Abe, Face of Another, p. (italics in original). Abe Kōbō, Abe Kôbô Zenshū, vols. –. (Tokyo: Shinchôsha, ), p. , quoted in Yuji Matson, ‘The World and the Image: Collaborations between Abe Kōbō and Teshigahara Hiroshi’, MA thesis, University of British Columbia (), pp. –. Hardin and Abé, ‘Interview with Abé Kobo’, p. .
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absorbing and taming that unknown image . . . Regardless of genre, artistic creation naturally takes a scalpel to the extremely close relationship between language and reality – the safety zone of stereotypes enclosed by the walls of language – thereby creating a fundamentally different linguistic system (which of course also leads to a new discovery of reality).
Novelists, he says, ‘have an obligation to participate in the making of dynamite so as to ensure the destruction of language’, and this aim is aligned with the aim in surrealist literature to make space for unconscious, irrational, and discordant flows of narrative. Abe’s novels are surrealist in numerous ways: in their aim of liberation, inhabiting thresholds between realms and states of being; in allowing material objects, light, lenses, things, natural states to supersede the human figure; in their objection to state apparatuses, national patriotism, and perceived moral order. If ‘Poe is Surrealist in adventure’, Abe is surrealist in social horror.
Abe Kōbō, ‘Does the Visual Image Destroy the Walls of Language?’ (), in Abe, Frontier Within, pp. –. Ibid., p. . Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism, p. .
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The World of the Surrealist Novel Delia Ungureanu
On July , the visionary young poet André Breton wrote to his future wife, Simone Kahn: ‘I’d like to see fairytales inspired by the future, without fairies, only for children.’ He would live not just to see but also to write them. Breton’s Nadja () and L’amour fou () are two revolutionary texts that challenge the limits of the genre of the novel by bringing in a new type of imagination traditionally associated with poetry. These fairytales are inspired both by the past – Dante, Marcel Proust, Gérard de Nerval, but also the proto-surrealist filmmaker Georges Méliès – and by the future, when world writers and filmmakers not typically associated with surrealism would find in them a structural and poetic principle of their works, from Italo Calvino to the Chilean filmmaker Raúl Ruiz and the Italian Paolo Sorrentino. Part of a volume dedicated to the history of the surrealist novel, this chapter reveals the deep history of Breton’s Nadja and L’amour fou considered here as a single poem following Breton’s own notion of love as the ultimate poetic truth. This history branches into the past and future: Breton descends from a long line of visionary poets who understood love as the ultimate prophetic revelation capable of changing the world (Dante and Gérard de Nerval) and anticipates revolutionary writers and filmmakers (Italo Calvino and Paolo Sorrentino). My comparative literature approach is inspired by Breton’s understanding of the deep history of love as poetic truth whose visionary power manifests in any form of art irrespective of medium and genre: Where poetry was concerned, [surrealism] also marked the culmination of a long line of speculation, which apparently goes back to the middle of the
André Breton, Lettres à Simone Khan –, ed. Jean-Michel Goutier (Paris: NRF Gallimard, ), pp. –. All translations in this chapter are mine unless otherwise noted. André Breton, ‘On Surrealism in Its Living Works’ (), in Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ), p. .
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eighteenth century . . . in Sade, in Laclos, in Monk Lewis – a completely different conception of woman, who now represents man’s greatest chance and demands, in the opinion of Goethe toward the end of his life, that man consider her the keystone of the edifice. This idea follows a path, albeit a very rough one, that leads through German and French Romanticism (Novalis, Hölderlin, Kleist, Nerval, the followers of Saint-Simon, Vigny, Stendhal, Baudelaire).
Towards the end of his life Goethe also put forth the concept of Weltliteratur (), which would be at the heart of the mid-twentiethcentury comparative literature as practised by comparatists like Denis de Rougemont and René Étiemble who joined Breton’s literary magazine VVV in New York as surrealism spread internationally in the s and s. Thinking like a true comparatist, Breton knows that the line of visionary poets didn’t begin with the German Romantics, but went back to Ancient Greece and the late Middle Ages: From that point Surrealism needed only to go back even further than I have said – to the letters of Héloise or the Portuguese Nun – in order to discover how wondrous the stars that spangled its heart line were . . . It was woman who in the end reaped the glory, whether her name was Sophie von Kuhn, Diotima, Kätchen von Heilbronn, Aurélia, Mina de Wanghel, the ‘black’ Venus or the ‘white’ one, or the Eva of Vigny’s ‘Maison du Berger’.
This chapter reveals the deep history of which Breton’s Nadja and L’amour fou are part, following David Damrosch’s advice for comparatists today to look beyond the presentism that haunts the discipline as scholars limit their understanding of literary history to the twentieth century or venture only as far as two centuries ago, ignoring the early modern and premodern history. Breton himself thought no different: These works, which today in poetry are those of Nerval, Baudelaire, Lautréamont, and Jarry . . . remain above all else messengers and their influence ceaselessly increases . . . Not only can literature not be studied outside the history of society and the history of literature itself; it also cannot be written . . . unless the writer reconciles . . . the history of society up to his time, and the history of literature up to his time.
Ibid., p. . Ibid., pp. – (Breton’s emphasis). David Damrosch, Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age (Princeton University Press, ), p. . André Breton, ‘Speech to the Congress of Writers’ (), in Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, p. .
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He also reconciles literary and artistic genres, which are much more hybrid than theory would have them, and this is why the history of Nadja and L’amour fou brings together visionary poets like Dante, Nerval, and Proust while opening new possibilities for contemporary filmmakers like Sorrentino. Maurice Blanchot believes that ‘A book no longer belongs to a genre; every book stems from literature alone.’ ‘[I]n the practice of almost all writers of our time genre distinctions matter little’, adds René Wellek; ‘boundaries are being constantly transgressed, genres combined or fused, old genres discarded or transformed, new genres created, to such an extent that the very concept has been called in doubt’. The novel is no exception. As Franco Moretti writes in his introduction to the impressive collective two-volume project The Novel, ‘in the two thousand years of its history one encounters the strangest creations . . . as the borders of literature are continuously, unpredictably expanded. At times, this endless flexibility borders on chaos. But thanks to it, the novel becomes the first truly planetary form.’ The first planetary form transgresses not only literary genre borders, but also media borders. This is why Mariano Siskind’s advice is timely: ‘We need a new conception of genre as a contingently bound, heterogeneous discursive constellation that provides world literary readers with a ground for comparison.’ As Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron has argued, the logic of poetry lies at the heart of the surrealist novel, reinventing the logic of reality and consequently of story-telling. Seen beyond our prejudices about borders set between genres, texts like Breton’s contradict Emily Apter’s Against World Literature and the recent Cambridge Companion to World Literature’s bemoaning poetry’s loss in the face of the hegemonic capitalist form of the
Maurice Blanchot, The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford University Press, ), p. . René Wellek, Discriminations: Further Concepts of Criticism (New Haven, : Yale University Press, ), p. . Franco Moretti (ed.), The Novel, vol. (Princeton University Press, ), p. ix. Mariano Siskind, ‘The Genres of World Literature’, in Theo D’haen, David Damrosch, and Djelal Kadir (eds.), The Routledge Companion to World Literature (London and New York: Routledge, ), p. . Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron, Le surréalisme et le roman (–) (Lausanne: Éditions L’Age d’Homme, ), p. . Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (London and New York: Verso, ). Ben Etherington and Jarad Zimbler (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to World Literature (Cambridge University Press, ).
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novel in world literary studies. Breton’s revolution of the novel as a genre is embedded within the larger criticism of nineteenth-century ideas of reality that he shared with Marcel Proust. Both Proust and Breton turn poetry into the architectural structure of their stories. Proust’s Recherche (–) is an immense analogy: an ark-cathedral that travels in time to save the world’s beauty. Breton’s Nadja and Mad Love are not two separate texts and should be read as one, forming together a giant poem. Critics have largely missed this similarity of vision between Proust and Breton: ‘Breton may appear to come close to sympathy for the Proustian “privileged moment”. But his expressions of contempt for the psychological novel soon rule out the hypothesis that he might see any value at all in À la Recherche.’ Proust’s correspondence with Breton and Philippe Soupault in the early s, Breton’s letters to Simone Kahn, and a comparative reading of Breton and Proust show differently. Breton’s critique of nineteenth-century realism in his first Manifesto and in his ‘Introduction to the Discourse on the Paucity of Reality’ was first formulated in almost identical terms by Proust himself: the kind of literature which contents itself with ‘describing things’, with giving of them merely a miserable abstract of lines and surfaces, is, in fact, though it calls itself realist, the furthest removed from reality and has more than any other the effect of saddening and impoverishing, since it abruptly severs all communication of our present self both with the past, the essence of which is preserved in things, and with the future, in which things incite us to enjoy the essence of the past a second time. Yet it is precisely this essence that an art worthy of the name must seek to express.
For Breton, a ‘purely informative’ style ‘is virtually the rule rather than the exception in the novel form . . . And the descriptions! There is nothing to which their vacuity can be compared; they are nothing but so many superimposed images taken from some stock catalogue.’ ‘It seems to me to ask too much of a faculty that . . . prevents my access to the real, to what we vulgarly understand by real . . . The object itself places there the true force of its provocation.’ ‘[T]his surreality, neither superior nor exterior, would be contained within reality itself.’
J.H. Matthews, Surrealism and the Novel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ), p. . Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vols., trans. Andreas Mayor and Terence Kilmartin; rev. D.J. Enright (New York: Modern Library, –), vol. : Time Regained, pp. –. André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, p. . André Breton, Le surréalisme et la peinture (; Paris: Gallimard, ), p. . Ibid., p. .
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Breton’s rejection of the novel isn’t of the genre as a whole, as Armand Hoog notes, but of any project that is confined to the mastery of a single genre. For Breton, Nadja and L’amour fou aren’t just novels. They are part of his existential project that ultimately reveals the poetic truth underlying his life. Everything he ever wrote comes from ‘surrealism, this capricious voice I’m trying to force from time to time’.
Poetic Intuition: Breton’s New Realism ‘[Poetic] intuition’, Breton writes, ‘finally unleashed by Surrealism, seeks not only to assimilate all known forms but also boldly to create new forms – that is to say, to be in a position to embrace all the structures of the world.’ At the heart of Breton’s projects – be they art objects, poems, installations, or what we would conventionally call novels like Nadja and L’amour fou – lies a visionary intuition expressed through ‘a lyric behavior such as it is indispensable to everyone, even if for only an hour of love, such as surrealism has tried to systematize it, with all possible predictive force.’ The true nature of reality – la sous- or la sur-réalité – can be accessed only through involuntary memory and chance encounter. These two ideas Breton found in Un amour de Swann, a volume he quotes several times in in his letters to Simone. Voluntary memory ‘preserve[s] nothing of the past itself’, Proust writes. There is a large element of chance in these matters . . . I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object . . . which forms their prison . . . and as soon as we have recognised them . . . they have overcome death and return to share our life. And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) of which we have no inkling. And it depends on chance whether or not we come upon this object before we ourselves must die.
Armand Hoog, ‘The Surrealist Novel’, Yale French Studies, (), – (at p. ). Breton, Letter dated March , in Lettres, p. . Breton, ‘On Surrealism in Its Living Works’, p. . André Breton, Mad Love (), trans. Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, ), p. (Breton’s emphasis). Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vol. : Swann’s Way, pp. –.
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It’s chance that reveals the true pattern hiding underneath our habitual perception of reality, through parallelisms revealed by art, as when Swann hears Vinteuil’s petite phrase played on the piano. Using these images, Breton rewrites Swann’s revelation of the hidden pattern through Vinteuil’s petite phrase that becomes a marvellous manifestation of the invisible around us, a goddess who is incarnated in the beloved: I intend to mention, in the margin of the narrative I have yet to relate, only the most decisive episodes of my life . . . and only insofar as it is at the mercy of chance . . . temporarily escaping my control, admitting me to an almost forbidden world of sudden parallels, petrifying coincidences, and reflexes peculiar to each individual, of harmonies struck as though on the piano, flashes of light that would make you see, really see, if only they were not so much quicker than all the rest.
One such flash of light that makes us see the invisible in our reality is incarnated in Breton’s oldest dream, which carries with it the poetic intuition of the marvellous: the apparition of a white naked woman in the dark. I have always, beyond belief, hoped to meet, at night and in a wood, a beautiful naked woman . . . Imagining such an encounter is not, after all, so fantastic: it might happen. It seems to me that everything would have stopped short – I would not even be writing what I am writing. I adore this situation which of all situations is the one where I am most likely to have lacked presence of mind . . . At the end of one afternoon, last year, in the side aisles of the ‘Electric Palace’, a naked woman, who must have come in wearing only her coat, strolled, dead white [très blanche], from one row to the next.
One night, he meets her: ‘I saw a young, poorly dressed woman walking toward me . . . And she looked so delicate she scarcely seemed to touch the ground she walked.’ This encounter with the marvellous incarnated is always an encounter with one’s self and the beginning of a vita nuova: ‘She told me her name . . . “Nadja, because in Russian it’s the beginning of the word hope, and because it’s only the beginning.” Just then she thinks of asking who I am.’ ‘Who are you?’ a puzzled Breton asks this strange apparition. ‘I am the soul in limbo’ comes the response that uncannily echoes Nerval’s Aurélia. The old dream of the Dame Blanche, recounted in a letter to Simone in , is the first particle of concentrated light that
André Breton, Nadja (), trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, ), p. (Breton’s emphasis). Ibid., p. (Breton’s emphasis). Ibid., p. . Ibid., pp. –. Ibid., p. .
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will explode into the world of surrealism four years later and into Breton’s prophetic poems, and would in turn be set at the heart of his single mirrored narrative Nadja and L’amour fou. Breton’s ghostly, statuesque phantom-object becomes his version of Proust’s réalité cachée. She is the black and white Venus Breton finds behind Héloise, and we could add Dante’s Beatrice. Raúl Ruiz makes this connection in his film of Le temps retrouvé, when he shows in close-up the statue of Callipygian Venus as Proust speaks to Albertine of Thomas Hardy’s stonecutters. Breton’s ‘Dame Blanche’ is the gate to the real world. She is instantly associated with the image of a poem, because she embodies the poetic logic that for Breton, as for Proust before him, can reinvent the notion of reality. This goddess appears in Breton’s writings for the first time in a letter dated August to Simone Kahn: You’re the white woman [la Dame blanche] . . . a profile cut out from foliage and the astonishing tennis poem. Few things touch me like photography and I’m prompted to think of something Gide said: the eyelids move imperceptibly when we pretend to be asleep and this children’s game when we leaf quickly between our thumb and index finger a minuscule notebook that shows on successive pages the successive stages of this movement. We usually see a man skipping a rope several times. I have no control over these associations.
La Dame Blanche is not just a ghostly woman: she is the hidden negative of reality that the mind retains buried somewhere inside at unfathomable depths. Superimposed and flipped, multiple negatives (white, like the woman) bring a dead body to life, through movement, and we are in the realm of film. Breton’s description of an athlete skipping a rope is very close to Eadweard Muybridge’s series of photographs that recorded movement. The rapid eye movement during sleep that signals the sleeper’s deepest stage of dreaming is the first image Breton freely associates with La Dame Blanche, and it’s a perfect analogy for the camera’s eye that imprints the negative. This makes La Dame Blanche into a negative captured on film by the dreamer’s eye in the deepest stage of dreaming. From there, she becomes the protagonist of his dreaming mind’s film. ‘La Dame Blanche’ reappears almost a decade later in the pages of L’amour fou that tell the story of the surrealist chance encounter with the woman who incarnates all the previous women Breton loved and who would become his second wife, the love of his life, the painter Jacqueline
Breton, Letter dated August , in Lettres, p. .
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Lamba. This time, she is the ‘beauté . . . explosante-fixe, magique-circonstancielle’ that made a first apparition in the last words of Nadja as ‘la beauté convulsive’. Now, she resurfaces as the incarnation of a poem, ‘Tournesol’ (‘Sunflower’), from Breton’s collection Clair de terre (Earthlight), whose title was inspired by an iconic scene from Georges Méliès’s film Le voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon), where the earthlings who have landed on the moon watch in awe a beautiful earthlight rising in the sky. ‘Tournesol’, an automatic poem, is retrospectively revealed as prophesying Jacqueline’s entering his life. Breton reproduces this poem in full when he realizes its ‘brilliant and uninterrupted suite of discoveries’, as a traveller walking through the Halles has a vision of a young woman: The lady with no shadow knelt on the Pont-au-Change Rue Gît-le-Coeur the stamps were no longer the same Nighttime pledges were kept at last Homing pigeons helping kisses Met with the breasts of the lovely stranger Pointing through the crepe of perfect meanings A farm prospered in the heart of Paris And its windows looked out on the Milky Way But no one lived there yet because of the chance comers Comers more devoted still, we know, than ghosts Some of them seem to swim like that woman And in love there enters a bit of their substance She interiorizes them I am the pawn of no sensual power And yet the cricket singing in the ashen hair One evening near the statue of Étienne Marcel Gave me a knowing look André Breton it said go on
‘This poem always presented itself to me as really inspired’, Breton states. For his predecessor Dante, La vita nuova () was a collection of poems that told the miraculous love story between him and Beatrice through visions, reveries, and dreams that inspired these poems, which Dante then rationally explains and analyses, but for Breton the entire process is reversed. ‘Tournesol’, written a decade before he would meet Jacqueline, is retrospectively revealed as prophetic and broken down into its major
André Breton, L’amour fou (; Paris: Gallimard, ), p. . André Breton, Nadja (; Paris: Gallimard, ), p. . Breton, Mad Love, pp. –. Ibid., p. .
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visionary images which he then explains individually following the transcription of his poem in L’amour fou. Two are of particular interest for the object-phantom ‘La Dame Blanche’, the poetic vision that embodies Breton’s notion of the marvellous: ‘The two hypotheses about the passerby, the meaning of her intervention . . . did the temptation which I felt in regard to her coincide with the still greater one toward danger? Doesn’t it still sparkle, moreover, like phosphorous, with all the particular intentions my mind is hiding?’ Embodying the flashes of surreal light from the ending of Nadja, this beauty emerges again with renewed force. These apparitions of the marvellous configure the true nature of reality by making the invisible visible, following the method of Leonardo da Vinci: ‘A person will know how to proceed when, like the painter, he consents to reproduce, without any change, what an appropriate grid tells him in advance of his own acts. This grid exists . . . Everything humans might want to know is written upon this grid in phosphorescent letters, in letters of desire.’ But the real key is held by the phrase ‘le bal des innocents’ that sparks a series of free associations for Breton: The Ossuary of the Innocents, later made into a market and now evoked concretely only by the central fountain, with Jean Goujon’s water nymphs . . . serves here to introduce Nicolas Flamel, who had the famous arcade there built at the end of the fourteenth century, with his initials (on this arcade we know he had had a black man painted [un homme tout noir], turned toward a gilt plaque on which Venus or Mercury was represented with an eclipse of the sun and of the moon; this man was holding at arm’s length a scroll covered with the inscription: ‘A marvel I see which astonishes me greatly’ [Je vois merveille dont moult je m’ébahis]).
Breton’s ‘La Dame Blanche’ begins as a dream image that later enters his real life as Simone Kahn and then turns into a short Lautréamont-inspired philosophical poem that was first expanded into text from Soluble Fish (), which Breton describes to Simone in a letter as a ‘novel’ even though it’s only eight pages long: ‘I’ve always wanted to call my novel L’année des chapeaux rouges [The Year of the Red Hats].’ It expands further still in Nadja and then in L’amour fou. In Soluble Fish, he identifies obliquely with the fourteenth-century alchemist Nicolas Flamel who contemplates in awe a golden Venus in darkness: ‘Still, I had come to Paris,
Ibid., p. . Ibid., pp. – (Breton’s emphasis). Breton, Lettres, p. .
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Ibid., pp. –.
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and a great flame [une grande flame = Flamel] escorted me, as I have said, with its forty blond feet.’ In the opening of L’amour fou we see several versions, in time, of la Dame Blanche: ‘[A] row of seated women in pale clothes [en toilettes claires] . . . A man enters . . . and recognizes them: one after another, all at once? They are the women he has loved, who have loved him.’ Through them, one unique being is expressed, and only by abolishing the notion of time one would be able to encounter her, writes Breton in a language that echoes Proust’s hors du temps: ‘To glide like water into pure sparkle – for that we would have to have lost the notion of time.’ ‘My madness is wanting to abolish time’, writes Breton to Simone in a letter dated September . The recurrence of the same surreality, the same marvellous idea, manifested throughout time in the women or men one has loved, is an idea that Proust and Breton share with their common predecessor, the visionary Gérard de Nerval: ‘the examples of Shelley, Nerval, Arnim illustrate in a striking way the conflict which will be progressively more bitter until our time, for the mind chooses to believe that the loved object is a unique being’. Everything Breton ever wrote is an expansion of this visionary, poetic core that incarnates the concept of the marvellous at the heart of surrealism’s revolution of our impoverished notion of reality. Its roots go back to Lautréamont’s Poésies. For Breton, the art of the novel is the reinvention of story-telling through photographic or filmic images and the logic of surrealist poetry that associates images based on their dissimilarity and irrational connection rather than their similarity. For Breton, the true story of one’s life can be told in a form of concentrated poetry. Nadja and L’amour fou are an expanded poem of the kind that makes a narrative out of one of the philosophical poems or maxims that Lautréamont had taken word for word or sometimes only turned upside down from the French moralists. He quotes Lautréamont (by his real name, Isidore Ducasse) in a letter to Simone: Ducasse: ‘Order dominates the human species. Here, reason and virtue aren’t the strongest’ . . . the profound interest of this contradiction: it’s through it that Ducasse reaches this angelic truth [vérité angélique] . . . Although I’m not myself a writer, I totally approve of this book’s method: – Isidore Ducasse’s Poésies or Earthly Paradise.
André Breton, Soluble Fish (), in Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, p. . Ibid., p. . Breton, Letter dated September , in Lettres, p. . Breton, Mad Love, p. (Breton’s emphasis). Breton, Letter dated August , in Lettres, pp. – (Breton’s emphasis).
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009082648.024 Published online by Cambridge University Press
Ibid., p. .
Earthly paradise is a reality that incorporates the invisible. Many poets have sensed this spiritual reality, and this is why ‘a good number of poets could pass for Surrealists, beginning with Dante and, in his finer moments, Shakespeare’, Breton writes in the first Manifesto. ‘Our past and our future are intertwined’, wrote the visionary poet Gérard de Nerval, who ‘possessed to a tee the spirit with which we claim a kinship’. Perhaps the life of Breton’s Nadja and L’amour fou as a single organic text should be deciphered as a cryptogram where its past and its future are intertwined. Its past lives include Dante’s Vita nuova, Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (), Nerval’s Aurélia (). Its future lives include Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, but also films: Raúl Ruiz’s Temps retrouvé () and Paolo Sorrentino’s La grande bellezza (). ‘The essence of the circulation of texts into the ambient of world literature’ is ‘the coming together from separate worlds’, writes David Damrosch. These worlds are not only different cultures, but also different media.
The Poetic Truth of Dreams: Dante and Nerval’s New Life Breton was not the first poet to open a book to read retrospectively his current present prophesied there. His direct predecessor was Dante, whose spiritual autobiography La vita nuova tells his love story with Beatrice prophesied by dream visions which turned into poems. Dante’s book opens with the medieval metaphor of the book of memory, which is part of a larger book written by God as the Ancient of Days in the Book of Daniel. Whereas Breton found his present prophesied in the automatic poem ‘Tournesol’, Dante finds his own life written in God’s hand, which he can only partially transcribe: ‘In my book of memory [libro de la mia memoria], in the early part where there is little to be read, there comes a chapter with the rubric: Incipit vita nova. It is my intention to copy into this little book the words I find written under that heading – if not all of them, at least the essence of their meaning.’ Made entirely out of poems that came ‘knocking on his window’ (as Breton would write of the first surrealist sentence), Dante’s Vita nuova is a
Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, p. . Gérard de Nerval, Selected Writings, trans. Richard Sieburth (London: Penguin, ), p. . Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, p. . David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton University Press, ), p. . Mark Musa, Dante’s Vita Nuova: A Translation and an Essay (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ), p. .
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story told through poems that are often inspired by dreams, reveries, or visions. Vita nuova is both a very medieval but also a very modern book. On the one hand, Dante is a medieval poet inspired by God, who manifests himself in his life through love, embodied by Beatrice, who is at the heart of both Vita nuova and The Divine Comedy. On the other hand, Dante is a very modern poet who no longer writes in Latin but in his Tuscan dialect, this collection of poems being written in the spirit of the dolce stil nuovo movement that Dante and his friend Guido Cavalcanti represented. The only voice who speaks in Latin in Vita nuova is God himself. Vita nuova thus stands both for Dante’s renewed life and perception of reality through his love for Beatrice, but also for the new life of poetry in the vernacular rather than Latin. Nadja and L’amour fou also speak of the manifestation of the marvellous in our immediate reality through love. Falling in love with Simone Khan, his future first wife, Breton experiences a vita nuova: ‘What week I’ve had! I’ve seen everything: the end of the world and its beginning. I was the last man and the first.’ Love changes the way we look at things, because it teaches us to see with a poet’s eye. The lover’s eye sees the marvellous in reality. ‘But what does love do, Simone’, writes Breton, ‘if not radically transform all values?’ If Breton’s Nadja and L’amour fou emanate from the same visionary dream image of ‘la Dame Blanche’, Dante’s Vita nuova has a symmetrical, chiastic construction. The love story with Beatrice is framed with two prophetic dreams that turn into a sonnet and a canzone respectively. They both speak of a marble white woman whose light breaks through the darkness. She is a manifestation of God for Dante and of the marvellous for Breton. Beatrice’s first apparition is followed by a dream vision that anticipates their as yet unfolded love story: ‘there appeared before my eyes the now glorious lady of my mind [la gloriosa donna de la mia mente], who was called Beatrice even by those who did not know what her name was’. Love’s power lies in imagination: ‘from that time on, Love governed my soul [Amore segnoreggiò la mia anima], which became immediately devoted to him, and he reigned over me with such assurance and lordship, given him by the power of my imagination’. ‘[T]he miraculous lady appeared, dressed in purest white.’
Breton, Letter dated September , in Lettres, p. . Breton, Letter dated October, in Lettres, p. . Musa, Dante’s Vita Nuova, p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. .
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I fell into a sweet sleep, and a marvelous vision [una meravigliosa visione] appeared to me. I seemed to see a cloud the color of fire and, in that cloud, a lordly man, frightening to behold . . . I seemed to see in his arms a sleeping figure, naked but lightly wrapped in a crimson [sanguigno] cloth . . . I recognized the lady of the greeting . . . his happiness gave way to bitterest weeping, and weeping he folded his arms around this lady, and together they seemed to ascend toward the heavens.
Following this vision, Dante decides ‘to compose a sonnet addressed to all of Love’s faithful subjects; and, requesting them to interpret my vision [la mia visione], I would write them what I had seen in my sleep [mio sonno]’ in a sonnet. ‘The true meaning of the dream I described was not perceived by anyone then, but now it is completely clear even to the least sophisticated.’ This first dream vision that tells of the beginning of their love includes the ominous sign of their sufferings and of Beatrice’s death. Love’s visionary force will later become central to Breton’s notion of the surrealist object – be it a dream, a word, or a person – that prophesies the future. Shortly before Beatrice’s untimely death, Dante has another prophetic dream vision of her death: And I seemed to see the sun grow dark, giving the stars a color that would have made me swear that they were weeping . . . and in the intensity of my hallucination I saw this lady dead. And it seemed that ladies were covering her head with a white veil, and her face seemed to have an expression of such joyous acceptance that it said to me: ‘I am contemplating the fountainhead of peace.’ At the sight of her in this dream I felt such a serenity that I called upon Death and said: ‘Sweet Death, come to me . . . for I already wear your color.’
The canzone Dante reproduces following this vision speaks of a nameless beauty, a solar apparition, as in René Magritte’s collage Je ne vois pas la (femme) cachée dans la forêt (; Figure .), where the only missing word is the one designating the woman, who is shown, but not named. With eyes wide shut, the members of the surrealist group frame this apparition of the marvellous: ‘Let the night continue to fall on the orchestra and let me keep my eyes open, my eyes closed – it’s full day – for my silent contemplation’, writes Breton. Clearly she is seen only in their mind’s eye, as is Dante’s Beatrice: ‘la gloriosa donna de la mia mente.’
Ibid., pp. –. Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Breton, Le surréalisme et la peinture, p. .
Ibid., pp. –.
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Figure .. René Magritte, Je ne vois pas la (femme) cachée dans la forêt, .
© C. Herscovici / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, . Photo credit: Banque d’Images, ADAGP / Art Resource, New York.
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‘[I]n a place unknown to me, / I was the witness of unnatural things’, writes Dante. The light of the invisible is, for Dante, God himself whose face one can see only in dreams. ‘When the last rites were done, I left that place, / and when I was alone, / I raised my eyes toward Heaven, and declared: / “Blessed is he who sees you, lovely soul [anima bella]!”’
Nerval Dreams are a new life for the visionary follower of Dante and precursor of surrealism, the poet Gérard de Nerval. Written in doctor Émile Blanche’s Passy Clinic, Aurélia (–) is an uncanny account of Nerval’s visions that forced him into repeated hospitalizations. Aurélia is at the same time a diary of dream visions, a book of mystical theology in the spirit of Emanuel Swedenborg, and a spiritual autobiography modelled on Dante’s Vita nuova, but first and foremost it is a poetic vision about the truth of what reality is. Dream is a second life . . . Little by little, the dim cavern is suffused with light, and emerging from its shadowy depths, the pale figures who dwell in limbo come into view, solemn and still . . . Swedenborg called these visions his Memorabilia; they came to him more often in reverie than in sleep. Apuleius’ Golden Ass and Dante’s Divine Comedy are the poetic models of such studies of the human soul . . . This Vita nuova was divided into two phases in my case . . . A woman I had long ago loved and whom I shall call Aurélia was lost to me.
Nerval seeks this woman through a series of individually written stories of love with different women including Sylvie (that Proust praised as a model for his own book in Time Regained), Angélique, Octavia, Pandora, all published in a single volume, Les filles du feu (). Aurélia is the summa of all the different incarnations of the idea of love. Although different over time, they are one in spirit; this idea that opens Breton’s L’amour fou is found in the pages of Aurélia: ‘I saw an unbroken chain of men and women to whom I belonged and yet all of whom were myself . . . a spatial phenomenon analogous to the temporal concentration of an entire century of action into a single moment of dream.’ Aurélia should come with a warning: this is no book; who touches this touches a man. On the morning of January , Nerval was found hanged by the bar of a cellar window on the Rue de la Vielle-Lanterne
Musa, Dante’s Vita Nuova, p. . Ibid., pp. –.
Ibid., p. .
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Nerval, Selected Writings, p. .
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(Street of the Old Lantern), still carrying the last pages of Aurélia in his pocket. This text becomes Nerval’s bridge toward a vita nuova. A vita nuova that’s described in his last letter to his aunt written on January as a blinding light piercing the darkness: ‘Don’t wait up for me tonight, for the night will be black and white.’ The marvellous never hides in the shadow, but in the most blinding light, writes Breton in a letter to Simone: ‘they say there’s more mystery in a plate with apples by Cézanne than in the whole New Testament . . . I despise somehow those who find shadow more mysterious than light.’
‘The magical river that flows from man’s eye’: Paolo Sorrentino’s La grande bellezza On September , a young André Breton, fascinated with the new medium of film, dreamed of seeing his love story with Simone shown in a slow-motion film: ‘I’m thinking of this marvelous invention that’s the slow-motion film . . . what secret of fabulous elegance lies there . . . Simone, I’d love to relive our story like this.’ Breton’s wish would be granted by the Italian filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino in his Oscar-winning poetic film La grande bellezza (). Set in contemporary Rome, La grande bellezza tells the story of the writer Jep Gambardella, a socialite who hasn’t written anything since his very successful early novel L’apparato umano and who works as a cultural journalist. Following his sixty-fifth birthday party, Jep receives the news of the death of the only woman he ever loved, Elisa de Santis. Like Proust at the Guermantes’ party at the end of La recherche, Jep has the revelation of the irreversible passage of time. This sets Jep on an inner journey to regain the time lost and his own self. The film has a double tempo: the infernal beat of the nightlife Jep gradually moves away from and Jep’s slow-motion feeling whenever he retires in his own room. Contemplating the ceiling as he lies on his back, Jep sees the endless sea from when he was young and in love with Elisa, and he plunges back into dreams and visions of the past that haunt him. With Jep, the slow-motion is no longer a cinema effect, but the pacing of the film of his memory, an effect doubled by the slow-pace music chosen by Sorrentino from a series of composers of liturgical music indebted to the Gregorian chant: David Lang, Arvo Pärt, Vladimir Martynov, Zbiegniew Preisner, and John Tavener.
Ibid., p. . Breton, Letter dated September , in Lettres, p. . Breton, Letter dated September , in Lettres, p. .
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Visionaries like Breton and Sorrentino don’t think of art in terms of genre or medium and they respond to very different stimuli. Just as Breton was fascinated by the world of film, so was Sorrentino with the world of literature, to the point of identifying himself as a writer rather than a filmmaker. More than a pale remake of Federico Fellini’s La dolce vita, as film scholars usually describe it, La grande bellezza is in dialogue with world writers like Marcel Proust, Gustave Flaubert, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, André Breton. Some directly cited, others only internalized in the logic of the story or of the editing, they inhabit structurally the world of Sorrentino’s film that becomes much more than a film. It’s a form of poetic truth that is always the sign of visionary art. In Bramante’s small temple in Rome, a confused Jep hears the voice of an invisible little girl asking him ‘Who are you?’ in an echo of the opening of Breton’s Nadja, as Jep points out later: ‘“Who am I?” – this is how one of Breton’s novels opens.’ This is no passing reference for Sorrentino. This is the sign of Sorrentino’s structural engagement with Breton’s vision that goes far beyond Nadja. Raúl Ruiz believes that ‘Proust thinks immensely in cinematographic terms.’ So does Sorrentino of Breton, as his creative reading of Breton’s writings shows. In , Breton dreamed of a new way of writing poetry influenced by film. ‘Yesterday I had a strange idea for writing poetry by copying a film’s intertitles. This makes language incredibly picturesque . . . the poem can benefit greatly from this [lack of visual action]’. Conversely, Sorrentino rediscovers the visionary power of language in cinema: ‘In general, there’s a lack of preoccupation with language and its style, which should be essential . . . My preoccupation with language comes from obsessive research into the other arts.’ Appearing first in several letters to Simone, Breton’s opening question from Nadja is an existential one: Who am I? If this once I were to rely on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount to knowing whom I ‘haunt’ [qui je hante] . . . Such a word means much more than it says, makes me, still alive, play a ghostly part [le rôle d’un fantôme], evidently referring to what I must have ceased to be in order to be who I am.
Paolo Sorrentino, La grande bellezza (Milan: Skira, ), Kindle edition. Stéphane Bouquet and Emmanuel Burdeau, ‘Dans le laboratoire de La Recherche. Entretien avec Raoul Ruiz’, Cahiers du cinéma, (May ), – (at p. ). Breton, Letter dated August , in Lettres, p. . Dario Zonta, ‘Paolo Sorrentino: La scena del potere’, in Emiliano Morreale and Dario Zonta (eds.), Cinema vivo: Quindici registi a confronto (Rome: Edizioni dell’Asino, ), pp. –. Breton, Nadja, p. (Breton's emphasis).
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Jep haunts the streets and art galleries of Rome at night as well as his own past. One night, led by his friend Stefano who has the keys to all the galleries, Jep visits an art museum. At the end of these dark halls, there is a room that is darker than the rest, where Jep is alone. A single round light, as if from a lantern, reveals gradually Raphael’s portrait of his beloved Fornarina, a woman he was engaged to but whom he never married. A naked beauty whose surreal light pierces through the darkness: this is Jep’s own ‘Dame Blanche’ who haunts his dreams. This is no museum where tourists come during the day. This is Jep’s museum of memory that keeps the image of his beloved Elisa, his Fornarina, impressed on her lover’s heart. ‘For time to come, men will feel the need to go back to the real source of the magic river that flows from their eyes, bathing in the same light, in the same hallucinatory shadows the things that are and the things that aren’t.’ It’s from here that the construction of Sorrentino’s film emanates. But this vision belonged first to Breton: ‘How much I admire those men who decide to be shut up at night in a museum in order to examine at their own discretion, at an illicit time, some portrait of a woman they illuminate by a dark lantern . . . Perhaps life needs to be deciphered like a cryptogram . . . we may imagine the mind’s greatest adventure as a journey of this sort to the paradise of trapdoors’. The portrait of the beloved is such a trapdoor: ‘It’s impossible for me to see a painting as anything else than a window and my main concern is what it looks on.’ In Jep’s museum – or cemetery – of memory, the only light comes from the only precious memory that lies hidden at unfathomable depths, which he brings to light at the end: his Elisa, bearing her breasts in the surreal moonlight. Sorrentino draws on Breton’s Nadja, and in his turn, Breton draws on Nerval’s Aurélia, where the dreamer, walking along ruined walls as Jep walks at night in the ancient ruins of Rome, finds in a visionary dream ‘the sculpted bust of a woman. Picking it up, I was convinced it was hers . . . I recognized the features I adored, and as I glanced around me, I saw that the garden now looked like a graveyard. Voices were saying: “The Universe lies in night!”’ Dante and Beatrice never died; they waited for Nerval, then Breton, and now Sorrentino to come to life once more. ‘I was now certain that there existed a world where loving hearts met up again’, writes Nerval. On paper, in film, or in our dreams, this world exists.
Breton, Le surréalisme et la peinture, . Breton, Le surréalisme et la peinture, p. . Ibid., p. .
Breton, Nadja, p. . Nerval, Selected Writings, p. .
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Feminist-Surrealism in the Contemporary Novel Catriona McAra
Here’s an old story so new that it’s still in the middle of happening — Ali Smith ()
Over the last decade, the attention to surrealist work by women has increased exponentially, and they are now considered iconic for younger generations of artists and writers. This burgeoning interest in a feministsurrealism seems to have ignited in the wake of Dorothea Tanning (–) and Leonora Carrington (–), the last senior figures connected to the first generations of the surrealist movement. Significantly, both are acknowledged for their novel writing and broader literary output (in addition to extensive visual corpuses, including painting, printmaking, theatrical designs, and forays into sculpture). Both are widely recognized as English-language writers, although Tanning also wrote in French during her mid-career living in France, as did Carrington in her early career before turning to Spanish after making Mexico her home. Tanning worked on her one novella, Chasm: A Weekend (henceforth Chasm), from to , almost the span of her entire career, publishing it in various forms under the title Abyss in and , before reissuing it with Virago in . Carrington likewise has a curious publishing history, writing her now widely acclaimed novel, The Hearing Trumpet (), and her relatively lesser-known novella, The Stone Door (), in the s and s but not finding publishers for them until the s.
Ali Smith, Autumn (London: Penguin, ), p. . See my A Surrealist Stratigraphy of Dorothea Tanning’s Chasm (New York: Routledge, ). Natalya Lusty, Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (Aldershot: Ashgate, ), p. ; Anna Watz, ‘“A Language Buried at the Back of Time”: The Stone Door and Poststructuralist Feminism’, in Jonathan P. Eburne and Catriona McAra (eds.), Leonora Carrington and the International AvantGarde (Manchester University Press, ), p. ; Jeannette Baxter, ‘Recasting the Human: Leonora Carrington’s Dark Exilic Imagination’, in Anna Watz (ed.), Surrealist Women’s Writing: A Critical Exploration (Manchester University Press, ), pp. –.
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Feminist-Surrealism in the Contemporary Novel
By way of overview, Tanning’s Chasm contains a fictional genealogy which, unlike traditional family trees, privileges the female protagonist’s first name, Destina, as in destiny. The opening prologue traces this dynasty from the Salem witch trials () until the present day (), and reads as a history of Western women’s struggles to usurp patriarchal domination. The mysterious Baroness turns out to be Destina’s great-grandmother, and therefore a Destina herself, living evidence of an intergenerational approach. Carrington’s novels similarly feature elderly women and childhood worlds. The Hearing Trumpet’s ninety-two-year-old Marian Leatherby is gifted an antique hearing trumpet, discovering her family’s intention to institutionalize her in a nursing home before embarking on a quest to overthrow authority and seek the Holy Grail. Carrington’s The Stone Door meanwhile fictionalizes the childhood of her husband, the Hungarian photographer Chiki Weisz, including an orphanage in a parallel universe crammed with esoteric symbolism, during which the author makes a cameo appearance as a little girl riding a Shetland pony. Each novel utilizes plot devices borrowed from other genres and media such as the Gothic novel, western film, and surrealist object. Chasm includes a memory box that behaves like a curiosity cabinet; the contents of this seemingly innocent ‘cherub-painted tin box’ surprise when opened; Destina’s ‘memories’ comprise an array of desert finds: reptilian skins, ‘bits of fur’, and wet specimens. The box is housed within an unlikely nursery: ‘There was nowhere anything to suggest that this was the home of a child: no dolls, no toys, no diminutive furniture of the sort that generally delights the heart of a little girl.’ Both box and nursery subvert bourgeois expectations of feminine pastimes, an idea which might be extended to the writing and reading of the feminist-surrealist novel itself. The narrative object in The Hearing Trumpet is similarly endowed with magical properties akin to a found object from a flea market: ‘The trumpet was certainly a fine specimen of its kind, without being really modern. It was, however, exceptionally pretty, being encrusted with silver and mother o’pearl motives and grandly curved like a buffalo’s horn.’ Comparable to Tanning’s memory box assemblage, Carrington’s anti-modern plot device offers an anachronistic
Dorothea Tanning, Chasm: A Weekend (London: Virago, ), p. . Ibid., p. . Anna Green highlights the transgressive act of reading, using Gustave Flaubert’s realist novel, Madame Bovary (): ‘a young woman whose excessive attachment to fiction since girlhood leads to her adulterous downfall’. French Paintings of Childhood and Adolescence, – (Aldershot: Ashgate, ), p. . Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet (; London: Penguin, ), p. .
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dimension, a counter-modernist celebration of the outmoded. This is further borne out in Marian’s view that ‘Surrealism is no longer considered modern today . . . Even Buckingham Palace has a large reproduction of Magritte’s famous slice of ham with an eye peering out.’ Each novel thus performs the function of a surrealist museum, self-reflexive metacommentaries by primary spokespeople for the remnants of an avant-garde movement. Moreover, the titular settings themselves perform important roles – the topographic chasm becomes a character that swallows masculinity whole, while the stone door is a legendary portal, a focal point for pseudoarchaeology, alchemical symbolism, and alternative knowledge banks. Meanwhile, the nursing home in The Hearing Trumpet comprises ‘Pixielike dwellings shaped like toadstools’ with ‘walls . . . painted with furniture that wasn’t there’. Such descriptions are likely borrowed from the fantasy literature of these authors’ early twentieth-century childhoods – Tanning and Carrington were both voracious readers and prime age brackets for the so-called Golden Age of children’s literature where fairytales were accompanied by elaborate illustrations by Maxfield Parrish or Arthur Rackham due to new technologies in colour printing. Such intertextuality has, in turn, had an effect on new generations of novelists, an uncanny project of déjà vu. The lyricality and narrative excess, which Tanning proudly termed her ‘purple prose’, sets these novels apart from the typical repertoire of surrealist techniques. There is certainly ‘mad love’ and juxtaposition but the detached dérive becomes a dramatic medieval quest. All three novels could be said to celebrate as well as challenge the conventions of the late surrealist contexts from which they emerge, each seeking to revise surrealist principles as well as working within them. Susan Suleiman terms this tendency a ‘double allegiance’ within avant-garde literature by women, a
Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, : MIT Press, ), pp. xii, xvii. Carrington, Hearing Trumpet, p. . Marion Endt-Jones, ‘Beyond Institutional Critique: Mark Dion’s Surrealist Wunderkammer at the Manchester Museum’, Museum and Society, / (), –. Carrington, Hearing Trumpet, p. . The illustrated gift book became a popular phenomenon in Britain and North America –. Rodney Engen, The Age of Enchantment: Beardsley, Dulac and Their Contemporaries – (London: Scala, ), p. . See also Susan L. Aberth, Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art (Aldershot: Lund Humphries, ), pp. –; Marina Warner, ‘Leonora Carrington’s Spirit Bestiary; or the Art of Playing Make-Believe’, in Andrea Schlieker (ed.), Leonora Carrington: Paintings, Drawings and Sculptures – (London: Serpentine Gallery, ), pp. –. Foster, Compulsive Beauty, pp. –, . Grateful thanks to Brenda Shaughnessy for this insight.
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simultaneous acknowledgement and critique of historical surrealism. Anna Watz has identified a further overlap that occurred in the s between the primary histories of surrealism and the secondary historiography of its feminist critiques. In writing on the intertextual appropriation of surrealist legacies by English novelist Angela Carter, Watz notes: ‘Carter’s feminist-surrealist aesthetic can arguably be seen as contributing to a revisionary history of the avant-garde, one that considers certain strands of s experimental feminist writing as a continuation and an elaboration of what we have come to think of as the historical avant-garde.’ Natalya Lusty also reflects on such intersections concerning The Hearing Trumpet: ‘It is in the context of a feminist revisionist approach to the history of modernism that Carrington’s novel was resurrected as a lost classic of Surrealism. But, as a late work of the movement, one which satirically inverts many of its formal and thematic concerns, it was also hailed as an important precursor to feminist revisionist fiction.’ Both draw on the ‘feminist intertextuality’ of Suleiman, her chief example being The Hearing Trumpet and how it debunks the myth of the mother into a playful entity, closely related to Hélène Cixous’s ‘laughing Medusa’. The novels of Carrington and Tanning might be characterized posthumously as examples of a feministsurrealism, certainly as instigators of this approach which is now experiencing waves of commonality. Watz defines a feminist-surrealism via Carter as ‘an active, feminist rewriting of surrealist imagery’. How do such feminist-surrealist exemplars manifest in the contemporary novel? Prior to the turn of the millennium, Angela Carter (–), Marina Warner (b.), and Rikki Ducornet (b.) had already laid significant revisionary ground in their novels of the early s such as Carter’s Wise Children (), Warner’s Indigo (), and Ducornet’s The Jade Cabinet () which rewrite existing cultural narratives from Shakespearean drama to the Victorian milieu of Lewis Carroll. While Carter, Warner, and Ducornet reveal their allegiances to post-war surrealism in a variety of illuminating ways, here the focus will be on a slightly
Susan Suleiman, Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (Cambridge, : Harvard University Press, ), p. . Anna Watz, Angela Carter and Surrealism: ‘A Feminist Libertarian Aesthetic’ (London and New York: Routledge, ), p. . Lusty, Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, p. . Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, Signs, / (), –. Watz, Angela Carter and Surrealism, p. . Penny Slinger has defined her practice this way since participating in Patricia Allmer, Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism (Manchester Art Gallery, ); the term has also become the masthead for The Debutante, ed. Rachel Ashenden and Molly Gilroy (January ).
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younger generation of feminist writers, born during a period of countercultural liberation (–), and now entering an established, mid-career moment in the s: Ali Smith (b.), Kate Bernheimer (b.), Chloe Aridjis (b.), and Heidi Sopinka (b.). Although these authors write in distinctive cultural contexts, they all developed within progressive literary circles that championed historical surrealist production. Each has declared their allegiance to a range of surrealist precursors, all of them women. Their lifespans also overlap with these primary surrealists of advanced age. For example, Aridjis and Sopinka both knew Carrington – Sopinka interviewed Carrington in for Believer, and Aridjis was a long-term family friend in Mexico City. Meanwhile, Smith wrote a foreword for a edition of The Hearing Trumpet which appeared during Carrington’s lifetime: ‘Fifty-five years on, at the time of writing this introduction, Leonora Carrington is now almost the age of Marian Leatherby.’ Prior to this, Bernheimer was already reproducing artworks by Tanning (including Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, , and Musical Chairs, ) in her Complete Tales trilogy around the same millennial moment that Tanning herself was reissuing Chasm. This chapter explores such literary overlaps, namely the sheer range of techniques that Aridjis, Bernheimer, Sopinka, and Smith have inherited from surrealist novels by women. Although these contemporary novelists are not surrealists, I propose that there is a critical lineage that draws on the writing and visual material by Carrington and Tanning. Much of their literary imagery involves dovetailing representational concerns with self-reflexive questions on the structure of the novel itself. Ultimately, I argue that this generation of contemporary novelists uses fiction to produce convincing revisionary histories of surrealism from a decidedly feminist angle.
Transcribing the Marvellous It strikes one as noteworthy that both protagonists in the debut novels of Kate Bernheimer and Chloe Aridjis should be transcriptionists. In Book of Clouds () by Aridjis, Tatiana is a young Mexican woman living in
Although I do not have space in this chapter to discuss work by male contemporary novelists, two examples of fictional surrealist histories include China Miéville’s Last Days of New Paris (), which collages select surrealist artworks into a dystopian vision of French Resistance, and Rupert Thomson’s Never Anyone But You (), a fictional biography of Marcel Moore and Claude Cahun and their resistance campaign on Jersey. Felicity Gee describes the latter as ‘surrealist fan-fic [tion], or spin-off surrealism’ (@fiandshoegaze, May , Twitter). Ali Smith, ‘Introduction’, in Carrington, Hearing Trumpet, p. xv.
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Berlin who goes to work for an elderly historian called Doktor Weiss (a fictional friend of Carrington’s husband), transcribing the ‘timbre and serenity’ of his ‘mesmeric’ words from a dictaphone for a phenomenological history of Berlin. In The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold () by Bernheimer, Ketzia works for a discreet detective unit, partly as an income generator but more as a way of managing the complexity of her emotional landscape. The practice of transcription may at first appear an unlikely inheritor of surrealist principles given its uniform mundanity and association with secretarial work, too often misgendered as feminine. From the very inauguration of the surrealist movement, a woman was positioned at the heart of transcribing the unconscious – think of Man Ray’s photographic group portrait, Séance (), with Simone Breton at the centre typewriting and surrounded by her suited male colleagues. Yet feminist readings of the movement challenge the intentions of such male-authored imagery featuring muse-like apotheosis. Tanning’s much later painting Stanza (), featuring an abstract ‘witness’ with a typewriter and never-ending scroll, offers a more nuanced, embodied view of the woman as writer. Given the compulsive, backwards/forwards motions of checking and rewriting, the work of the transcriptionist can be seen as uniform yet anachronistic, shifting repeatedly between moments in time. The rhythmic activity of typing liberates the unconscious, enabling daydreaming or fantasy to come to the fore. In ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (), Freud reminds us that repetition can be used to ‘strengthen the mastery’ as a soothing binding mechanism to protect the subject from traumatic memories, and even ward off death. Freud’s examples of repetition-compulsion include child’s play and recurrent dreams but transcription would appear to operate along similar lines. The transcriptionist also offers a literal mode of saccades – in Tanning’s unpublished ‘Author’s Note’ for Abyss (an earlier draft of Chasm) she imagines a fictional editor called Reading Eyes who allows manuscripts in brown envelopes to pile up on their desk, suggesting the critically selfconscious idea of becoming lost in the eccentricity of her writing.
Chloe Aridjis, Book of Clouds (London: Vintage, ), p. . For a compelling reading of this image, its connections to automatism, and resistance to feminine secretarial labour, see Abigail Susik, Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work (Manchester University Press, ), pp. , . Tanning confirms this figure as a transcriptionist in her unpublished notes () when she describes them as ‘a witness’. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (), trans. James Strachey (New York: Dover, ), p. . Dorothea Tanning, Unpublished Journals and Notes No. (n.d.), courtesy The Dorothea Tanning Foundation.
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Both Aridjis and Bernheimer have revealed in interview the productive aspects of daydreaming, solitude, and ennui within the writing process. Their protagonists often operate as extensions of themselves. Bernheimer’s character Ketzia asserts that: ‘You may think the life of a transcriptionist rather dull and small in this modern, visual time. But I find it leaves the mind free to roam hither and thither.’ Aridjis echoes this sentiment in her own view that boredom is ‘underrated’, ‘a necessary state for interesting thought to emerge’. Bernheimer’s Ketzia even claims transcription has an underlying erotic dimension: ‘this is not widely known, but there are few things more erotic than typing’. After business hours, Ketzia continues to practice her typing skills on a typewriter in bed at home, alongside her related passion of reading fairytales: Then I go inside, put on a ratty t-shirt and jeans and read for a couple of hours in bed. Recently, I’ve been reading fairy tales. But before I go to sleep, before I forget to remember, I make a list of the day’s events . . . To make my list I drag my typewriter into the bed . . . this is very good practice for word processing, my field. Working with a variety of equipment improves one’s understanding of the variations among mechanisms – and organisms, I would hazard to say.
Here, the diaristic equipment suggests a fetishism as well as an orderly function, a substitute for the erotic encounters which might otherwise occur in the bedroom. Elsewhere, Bernheimer has emphasized the sense of rapture and latent eroticism she has long associated with her favourite narrative form: ‘fairy stories were bedtime stories, strongly associated with family and comfort, but they were also flushed secrets I thought only I knew’. The fairytale-novel has become an hybrid genre for Bernheimer, particularly at the level of rewriting pre-existing German, Russian, and Yiddish stories, as well as undermining traditions of American girlhood in the spirit of Tanning’s subversive memory box. The solitude that Ketzia, and Aridjis’s character Tatiana, require to manage their neuroticism is fulfilled through communication with a disembodied, authoritative male voice, a relationship that is at times almost masochistic. Tatiana puts it
Kate Bernheimer, The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold (Tallahassee, : FC, ), p. . Interview with Chloe Aridjis (, updated ). Bernheimer, Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold, p. . Ibid., p. . Kate Bernheimer, ‘This Rapturous Form’, Marvels and Tales: A Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies, / (), – (at p. ). See my ‘Hope Chest: Demythologizing Girlhood in Kate Bernheimer’s Trilogy’, Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, / (Winter ), –.
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succinctly: ‘He spoke, I typed. History without pens.’ This might seem paradoxical as a feminist strategy, yet such imaginary transcription is arguably a process that endows both authors (both self-confessed introverts) with a confident method with which to locate their novelistic voices and personas, and subtly disrupt the continuity of the male-dominated fiction industry. In doing so, both Aridjis and Bernheimer channel the marvellous in the everyday, and use transcription as a recursive metaphor for the writing process itself. Their transcriptionists may suffer setbacks, and fairytale-type tribulations, but ultimately their dogged strength through the very practice of transcription is revealed. In Book of Clouds, gadgets frequently turn out to be obsolete or faulty, almost the reverse of the majestic soundscape produced by Carrington’s hearing trumpet. Tatiana purchases a sound machine, a ‘plastic contraption shaped like a seashell’, manufactured during the GDR, from a Berlin flea market, yet when she goes to return it, the seller has vanished like the historical era itself. Later, the handheld recorder she is using for her transcription work malfunctions, leading to a poignant, allegorical scene: ‘the sight of the old historian in his purple robe fussing with the dictaphone, searching for his own voice’. Historical memory is analogue for Aridjis, and thus easily lapsed or damaged. This is borne out in the three interview assignments Tatiana is asked to conduct for the historian: one with a meteorologist which disintegrates into ‘frequent, if not constant, recourse to metaphor’ leading to a brief romance; one with a representative of the Operations Board of Berlin’s public transport system during which an under-slept Tatiana is flustered and forgets her notebook; and one with ‘someone who in some way embodies the city for you’, ‘the Simpleton of Alexanderplatz’, a brightly dressed beggar whose internal logic and eccentric view of the world ‘escapes’ Tatiana. Although each exists in twentyfirst-century Berlin, these interview subjects are archetypal and prophetic yet demythologize traditional narrative expectations. This is a technique both Tanning and Carrington utilize, whether in Tanning’s fictional genealogy or Carrington’s rewriting of the Grail legend. For Aridjis, the ‘supernatural’ is always conveyed subtly, not quite the apocalypse of Carrington’s writing nor the Gothic-western ‘cliffhanger’ of Tanning’s Chasm but certainly Aridjis plays with a poetics of narrative tension and
Aridjis, Book of Clouds, p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., pp. , , . ‘Demythologization’ is inherited from Angela Carter, ‘Notes from the Front Line’ (), in Carter, Shaking a Leg: Collected Journalism and Writings, ed. Jenny Uglow (London: Penguin, ), p. .
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climax. For example, Tatiana feels certain that she saw ‘Hitler as an old woman, riding Westwards’ in a U-Bahn carriage but Weiss diagnoses this as psychological ‘projection’ or ‘the Hitler syndrome’, a form of paranoid delusion or cultural haunting. Here, history is fictionalized and remembered differently, arguably more poetically ‘accurately’, via the marvellous chance encounter.
Lecturing on Surrealism Such surrealist cameos and metafictional techniques are carried over into work by Ali Smith, particularly in Artful () and at various points throughout her seasonal cycle (–). Artful is an unclassifiable text which many reviewers have resisted from even defining as a novel, comprising a series of found lecture notes on cultural criticism by the protagonist’s deceased partner. The narrative mingles between grief and reflection on these remaining scripts. Carrington makes an appearance as ‘an expert in liminal space’ in the section ‘On edge’: That night in bed you showed me some of Carrington’s pictures. They were dark and bright, playful, like pictures from stories, but wilder, more savage, full of sociable-looking animals and wild-looking animals, beings who were part animal and part human, looking like they were all having a very interesting conversation, masked beings, people who were turning into birds or maybe it was birds turning into people.
Smith is well-acquainted with Carrington’s visual and literary universe, claiming: ‘I loved this writer who sees through the conventional forced and false structures of things to the real thing.’ Smith has asserted that she is perhaps drawn to visual surrealist material even more than the literary works, emphasizing a particular interest in the photography of Lee Miller: I think surrealist visual art is more likely to have influenced me. There’s a hinge moment in Lee Miller’s photographic oeuvre, for instance, as she moves with the troops at the end of WWII through the places the allies are liberating, where the surrealism she employed in the late s and s as a means of seeing the world as it really is . . . so that we start to understand dimensionally.
Such ‘dimension[s]’ are prevalent throughout Smith’s writing, particularly in her seasonal cycle which often embeds intertextual examples of a decidedly feminist canon, including Barbara Hepworth and Tacita Dean,
Aridjis, Book of Clouds, pp. , . Interview with Ali Smith ().
Ali Smith, Artful (London: Penguin, ), p. . Ibid.
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among others. Autumn () is the first of Smith’s seasons, an experimental, temporal approach to rethinking the novel as a contemporary medium, arguably by way of surrealist precedents. The protagonist, Elisabeth Demand, is an art history lecturer living through the immediate effects of the Brexit referendum. Her mother is angry and obsessed with antiques: ‘All across the country all the things from the past stacked on the shelves’, a passage which follows a long list of objects, reminiscent of Tanning’s nursery repository which contains an equally lengthy inventory of ‘furniture of enough periods and provenance to give it an air of finicky collecting’. This is true too of Carrington’s toymaker’s workshop in The Stone Door, a profusion of ‘Bric-a-brac’ suggesting a layering of time like the ageing owner. Smith’s Elisabeth regularly visits her elderly neighbour, Daniel Gluck, a former avant-garde associate who collects ‘arty art’ and believes in ‘collage’ as a worthy alternative to conventional ‘college’: ‘an institute of education where all the rules can be thrown into the air, and size and space and time and foreground and background all become relative, and because of these skills everything you think you know gets made into something new and strange’. Elisabeth writes her dissertation on Pauline Boty’s pictures of pictures and questioning of feminine representation despite the perpetuating view of Elisabeth’s male supervisor that there isn’t enough scholarly material to warrant study of a female pop artist. In The Hearing Trumpet, Carrington includes a fictional portrait of a winking nun believed to be ‘eighteenth century’ by ‘the Zubarán school’, ‘Spanish of course, an Italian could never have done anything so enchantingly sinister’. In Tanning’s Chasm, one of Destina’s ancestors is rumoured to have modelled for Canova’s Hebe (–) and Psyche (). Such art-historical references contribute an ekphrastic slant to these novels, what the intermediality theorist, Liliane Louvel, terms ‘embossed stamping’ and ‘interpictionality’, ‘when the pictorial image is present in the text as an explicit quotation’. In doing so, Tanning, Carrington, and Smith use their firm grounding in art history to make their fictions more credible. Aridjis similarly embeds artworks into a fictional domain. Her second novel, Asunder (), offers another ekphrastic experiment in novel writing, this time with a focus on the introspective Marie, a security guard in London’s National Gallery. Asunder can be read as a gallery itself,
Smith, Autumn, p. . Tanning, Chasm, p. . Leonora Carrington, The Stone Door (; New York: St. Martin’s Press, ), p. . Smith, Autumn, pp. , –. Carrington, Hearing Trumpet, p. . Liliane Louvel, Poetics of the Iconotext, ed. Karen Jacobs, trans. Laurence Petit (Farnham: Ashgate, ), pp. , –.
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another iteration of a surrealist museum. Aridjis claims: ‘My greatest frustration in life is that I am not a painter! This is the closest I could come.’ She describes her writing process as follows: With both novels there is a lot of echoing and doubling, where certain characters prefigure others, and wandering is an important element. I don’t map out my books much before I write them so I too am wandering and waiting for patterns to emerge. With Asunder I did have to give a great deal of thought to structure since it involves rather disparate themes – the suffragettes, the craquelure, the museum, the goth and the chatelain. That was my biggest challenge writing it because these things were pulling me in different directions. I had to come up with some sort of metaphorical framework in which to accommodate them all.
The idea of ‘craquelure’ and ‘waiting for patterns’ to emerge echoes closely the mundane marvellous of the transcriptionist in her first novel. Although Aridjis has not yet serialized her novels like Bernheimer and Smith, there are overlaps that occur throughout her writing, a commitment to a feminist-surrealist stylistics being a chief unifying factor.
Hysterics in the Attic Asunder contains further aspects that endear it to a feminist-surrealist framework. Fragments of surrealism are scattered throughout: the orderly protagonist was troubled as a bookseller, fretting about ‘whether a mathematician suddenly found himself amongst the surrealists . . . details that meant everything at the time’. Marie’s best friend, Daniel, a gallery attendant at Tate, is a wannabe poet often found writing snippets of pseudo-surrealist imagery. When Marie and Daniel take a mini-break to Paris, Marie ‘trespasses’ on Daniel’s writing desk and finds a book about Charcot’s hysterics: Intrigued, I drew the book closer, opening it to a random page. Upon seeing the first pictures I was so startled I almost took a step back. Inside, dozens of black and white photographs of somewhat savage women . . . rose to greet me. Most of them wore nightgowns or else fitted dresses or twopiece outfits that called to mind brothel residents from another era. They stood, sat or lay in bizarre positions, one with her back arched into a bridge, another swooning in a chair with her right leg stretched outwards and her wrist twisted anticlockwise. One woman stuck out her tongue to the left, another smiled dementedly into the distance.
Interview with Aridjis. Ibid., p. .
Ibid.
Chloe Aridjis, Asunder (London: Vintage, ), p. .
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As Marie opens the book, the text veers into what Anna Kérchy has termed a ‘somaticisation of the text’, with Marie eagerly flicking through the forbidden pages, feeling into the contorted poses. One might liken this scene to Freud’s analysis of Dora’s sexual researches (): ‘children never read about forbidden subjects in an encyclopaedia calmly. They do it in fear and trembling with an uneasy look over their shoulder to see if someone may be coming. Parents are very much in the way while reading of this kind is going on.’ When confronted, Daniel tries to explain the historical origins of the Salpêtrière, presumably vindicated by avant-garde intrigue in such material, but Marie remains dubious, suspecting her friend finds these convulsive figures perversely desirous. This passage echoes Marie’s existing concerns about the objectifying male gaze and the treatment of women throughout history, such as the suffragettes who were arrested in similar poses or the mistreatment of artists’ models. Following Watz’s aforementioned proposition that the historiography of surrealism correlates with second-wave feminist criticism, it is likely that Aridjis, Smith, et al. are equally conscious of the arguments in literary feminist criticism such as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (). Gilbert and Gubar query Freud’s fixation on hysteria as a female malady, connecting this to long-term societal attitudes: It is debilitating to be any woman in a society where women are warned that if they do not behave like angels they must be monsters . . . Hysteria, the disease with which Freud so famously began his investigations into the dynamic connections between psyche and soma, is by definition a ‘female disease’, not so much because it takes its name from the Greek word for womb, hyster . . . but because hysteria . . . was thought to be caused by the female reproductive system, as if to elaborate upon Aristotle’s notion that femaleness was in and of itself a deformity.
Such feminist criticism has often been directed at male surrealists, with madness idealized and feminized frequently in surrealist thinking, for instance in André Breton’s Nadja (). Lusty has argued that mental
Anna Kérchy, Body Texts in the Novels of Angela Carter: Writing from a Corporeagraphic Point of View (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, ), p. . Sigmund Freud, ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’ (), in Case Histories : ‘Dora’ and ‘Little Hans’, ed. James Strachey and Angela Richards, trans. Alix and James Strachey, Penguin Freud Library (Harmondsworth: Penguin, ), p. . Lisa Appignanesi (mother of Aridjis’s director, Josh Appignanesi) wrote the foreword for the recent edition, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (; New Haven, : Yale University Press, ). Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman in the Attic, p. .
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illness takes on lived meaning in Carrington’s Down Below () given that she was actually incarcerated in an asylum during World War II. Aware of such dichotomies, fictionalizations, and literary histories, Aridjis no doubt wrote the hysterics into Asunder in order to challenge male surrealist preoccupations and presumptions. Like Carrington, Aridjis has an active interest in subcultures, especially goths and other misfits from the indie music scene. While the novels of Aridjis and Smith tend to hone in on the experiences of young adult women, Bernheimer’s trilogy slips between girlhood and adulthood, while Heidi Sopinka devotes attention to an older female figure or crone akin to Carrington’s Marian and Tanning’s Baroness.
Ghosts in the Text When asked to what extent the protagonist Ivory Frame of Sopinka’s debut novel The Dictionary of Animal Languages () is a portrait of Carrington, Sopinka replied: I actually wrote a draft of the book before I’d ever met or heard of Leonora. I’d written a draft about a woman in two time periods at and at , and at had fallen in with the surrealists. So it had those basic events. I happened upon The Hearing Trumpet of Leonora’s when I was at the library looking for a different book. And I read it, and was, of course, intrigued because the character Marian Leatherby is , which is the same age as my character, and it is very rare to find a book with a nonagenarian heroine. So that immediately intrigued me to her . . . The ghost of her was already in the draft before I’d even known of her which is very odd.
Sopinka’s project and her chance encounter with Carrington’s novel have a peculiarly marvellous logic. Many have noted the feminist importance of Carrington giving voice and visibility to nonagenarians. Identifying with the subversive-maternal, Sopinka’s roman à clef invites Carrington to be her ‘necromancer’ or ‘death guide’: ‘After the violence of birth, I felt joltingly alive, the distressing kind of alive that has a bit of death in it. I was in the unsettling place between human and nonhuman, being and nonbeing – that dark, debilitating nothingness that causes our last and
Natalya Lusty, ‘Surrealism’s Banging Door’, Textual Practice, / (), –. Interview with Heidi Sopinka (); Heidi Sopinka, The Dictionary of Animal Languages (London: Scribe, ). Further fictional biographies of Carrington include Elena Poniatowska’s Leonora (Barcelona: Seix Barral, ), Michaela Carter’s Leonora in the Morning Light (New York: Avid Reader Press, ), and Alyssa Harad’s Madame Creature (forthcoming).
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Feminist-Surrealism in the Contemporary Novel
final disappearance.’ In her ‘old lady’ novel, Sopinka realized she wanted to devote attention to a much older woman: ‘someone who was older, quite old, not just in their s. Someone who is contending with death.’ Ivory is an animal painter turned biologist, a fictional twist on Carrington’s biography but consistent with her eco-feminism as evidenced in ur-texts such as ‘Female Human Animal’ (). Echoing this manifesto, Frame asks: ‘why extinction isn’t more of a source of horror’. Again the dictionary returns to the meta-structure much like the surrealist emphasis on the encyclopaedia but as an overthrowing of normative or complacent order. Bernheimer’s non-linear Tales is similar to Sopinka’s Dictionary in that both are episodic and move between time periods. While Sopinka labels each chapter after an animal from Carrington’s imaginary bestiary, Bernheimer titles hers after the fairytales they are based on, while her overarching Tales plays on the kind of nursery classics Tanning and Carrington encountered in their childhoods. Because Bernheimer has serialized hers into a trilogy, she is able to revisit the same episodes from a different sister’s perspective. One such episode is ‘The Punish’: This is a game the girls often played, named simply The Punish. Punishments varied – getting bound to a chair and forced to witness the violent death of a doll; getting polio or requiring amputation, followed by ‘rape’ by a suitor . . . The game was played in the basement with its bloodred walls and brown shag rug, designed by Mr Gold for his darkroom.
Such make-believe danger-play involves Merry and Ketzia performing the roles of disciplinarian and disciplined, active and passive (pre-empting adult Ketzia’s transcription work). This surrealist-flavoured scene chimes with the erotic violence found in Tanning’s Chasm, especially when Tanning’s servile governess, Nelly, toys with her employer, Raoul, through sexual role play: All this time Nelly was soothing her wrecked god, stroking his brow, wiping his frothed mouth, adjusting his burlap bonds. ‘It’s all right, now. We can pretend’ . . . he responded in that docile way of a four-year-old who’s been bribed with a cookie. ‘Yes, yes.’
Heidi Sopinka, ‘Hey, Necromancer!’ Paris Review, September , https://theparisreview.org/ blog////hey-necromancer (accessed February ). Interview with Sopinka. Leonora Carrington, ‘Female Human Animal’ (), in Salomon Grimberg (ed.), Leonora Carrington: What She Might Be (Dallas Museum of Art, ), pp. –. Sopinka, Dictionary of Animal Languages, p. . Bernheimer, Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold, p. .
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‘And we’ll play our best game, right? I’ll be Nadine.’ ‘Yes. Oh, yes.’ Like a trained elephant he lifted his two fat arms to rest them against the brass bars of the bestead while Nelly picked up from among the rags on the floor two long burlap bands and tied his wrists to the bars. It was a familiar routine.
This ‘familiar routine’ links to Tanning’s visual corpus while the interior décor and doll-torture in Bernheimer’s novel directly reference the composition of Tanning’s well-known visual narrative, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (; Figure .), which Katharine Conley reads as ‘eavesdropping’ on a primal scene. Although Bernheimer’s The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold predated the reissue of Chasm by three years, Bernheimer confirms that her novel ‘was . . . inspired by a painting by Dorothea Tanning that shows two young girls ravished on a landing, beside a giant sunflower, which had a larger-than-life fairy tale feel – there was rapture, there was nature, but something was wrong in the house’. Aridjis is similarly drawn to the perennial ‘haunted house’, and frequently features dilapidated architecture within her writing. She starred in the docu-fiction Female Human Animal (), an art film that closely references Aridjis’s literary output, with credits claiming the film is ‘haunted’ by Carrington. Elsewhere, Aridjis shares that Carrington and Weisz were perturbed that she moved to Germany for nearly six years given the wartime fascism that they had fled. For them, Europe was still trapped in time and far from historically distanced. Their discomfort is fictionalized in Aridjis’s third novel Sea Monsters (): I’d been on my way to the stationery store when I came upon two ageing émigrés. Our local enigmas, they had fled a Europe in ruins to live, later, among our slightly more humble ones. I’d often see them at the VIPS diner on Insurgentes bent over their coffee and molletes, the woman with a hand on her bag and the man with a hand on his cane, as if ready to leave at the slightest prompting.
Tanning, Chasm, p. . Katharine Conley, Surrealist Ghostliness (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, ), p. . Bernheimer, ‘This Rapturous Form’, p. . Josh Appignanesi, Female Human Animal (London: Minotaur Film, ); see my ‘A Feminist Marvellous: Chloe Aridjis and the Female Human Animal’, in Ailsa Cox, James Hewison, Michelle Man, and Roger Shannon (eds.), Leonora Carrington: Living Legacies (Wilmington, : Vernon Press, ), pp. –. Chloe Aridjis, ‘Leonora Carrington at Home in the Colonia Roma and the Mexican Underworld’ (lecture), Kings College London, June . Chloe Aridjis, Sea Monsters (London: Vintage, ), p. .
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Feminist-Surrealism in the Contemporary Novel
Figure .
Dorothea Tanning, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, . Oil on canvas. Tate Collection. © ADAGP, Paris, and DACS, London, .
Set in Mexico City in , Aridjis conveys their everlasting nervousness. This well-observed, posthumous character-study of two real-life, avantgarde figures, unmistakably Carrington and Weisz, reveals palpable symptoms of post-traumatic stress, overlaying the present with the past. In conclusion, it seems that there is much evidence for the possibility of a feminist-surrealist canon in the early twenty-first century. There is certainly a sustained literary interest in the work of Tanning and Carrington, both within and beyond their novels. Such connections have a feminist cause in that contemporary novelists not only present a concerted effort to bring these women’s legacies to the forefront of critical and creative attention, but actively apply this by delving into the technical and political implications of their literary topographies. Such feminist intertextuality has been brought to bear on a range of contemporary examples, with metafictional frames of transcription, interviews, and interpictionality combined with a rethinking of feminine narratives and characterization. The surrealist novel as a medium was already in the process of being rewritten and reconfigured by Tanning and Carrington. Now new generations are channelling such critical hauntings and creative inheritance through the medium of fictional revisionary histories.
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Afterword
Novels Eclipsed by the Sun of Poetry? Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron
It isn’t that simple. The desire to make an imaginary world appear ‘possible’ – and for this world to be evoked by language – is the double origin of novelistic writing (as well as reading). In his introduction to Stendhal et les problèmes du roman, Georges Blin described this paradox as ‘an impossibility that can possibly happen to me [as a reader]’. The reader of a novel must conjure up mental images of a world described through the medium of language; in the process of writing a novel, the author must also become a reader of his or her own pages in order to pursue a story which can represent a ‘possible’ world. Thus, authors and readers have in common the double task of representing and imagining a new – not ‘real’, but possible – world. This process simultaneously involves capturing a singular, unexpected event (which is captivating precisely because it is unexpected) and adhering to the frameworks of representation that make this event appear natural or plausible. It is therefore unusual for a literary character to come back to life after he or she has died (were this to occur, we would be reading a novel of the ‘fantastic’ genre). However, despite being constrained by the limits of the ‘plausible’, the novel simultaneously encourages the reader to imagine multiple avenues of possibility. The fantastic occurrences in Robert Desnos’s La liberté ou l’amour (Liberty or Love!, ), for example, prompt us to perpetually reconsider what is plausible or likely: in the novel’s second chapter, entitled ‘The Depths of the Night’, the narrator invites us to watch leaves fall from the trees in the Tuileries Gardens. And suddenly these leaves, we are told, ‘were gloves’.
This Afterword was originally written in French and subsequently translated into English by the editor. Georges Blin, ‘Introduction’, in Blin, Stendhal et les problèmes du roman (Paris: Corti, ), p. . This remarkable work has remained rarely cited, although it appeared around the same time as (and resonates with) the ideas of J.L. Austin, which are not ‘linguistic’ in the narrow sense of the term. Robert Desnos, Liberty or Love! (), trans. Terry Hale (London: Atlas Press, ), p. .
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Afterword
What follows is a kind of ballet of the gloves, which the reader can interpret either as the vision of a narrator of a ‘fantastic novel’, or as a poetic metaphor woven into the fabric of the story. Breton’s writing is for me structured according to a pattern of ceaseless returns: it is as if a completely spontaneous poetic intensity – a given – continues to travel, under the surface, along the discourse of the poetnovelist, until it resurfaces and affectively or formally converges with the meaning of the narrative. That is how I read the closing sentence of the first part of Nadja: Last of all, now, the tower of the Manoir d’Ango explodes and a snowfall of feathers from its doves dissolves on contact with the earth of the great courtyard once paved with scraps of tiles and now covered with real blood!
This exquisite sentence evokes two things: on the one hand, a spectacle – in the form of a flock of frightened doves – plays out before the eyes of the narrator, who has removed himself from the city in order to write the story of his recent amorous adventure; on the other, the sentence evokes a looming threat, which foreshadows the dramatic ending of the novel. The ‘real blood’ of the frightened doves colliding with each other in the sky now colours the narrative. There is a threat here of Death in the sacred or mythological sense of the term. This threat becomes realized in the sacrifice of a woman named Nadja, which will subsequently be described to us. Yet, in the summer of , when Breton composed this sentence, the ‘real’ Nadja (although abandoned by Breton) had not yet descended into madness. When writing these words, Breton was not aware of any ‘premonition’; however, when he gave the manuscript to his publisher in the spring of , and subsequently reread the proofs, Nadja’s demise was a fait accompli, thus retrospectively infusing the scene with danger. The reader, for his or her part, will continue reading the book haunted by this disturbing threat. In this way, the reader always engages in real work, together with the author, at the frontier of the text. It is often the case that an author opens a window in their narrative, through which the reader’s sensibilities can pass into the story like an unexpected scent. The reader of a novel, engaged (like the author) in the act of writing, affirms the embedded poetic expression that gives ‘flesh’ to a being-made-of-language. The poetic expression takes over from the informative and descriptive mode, adding an unfamiliar and affective element to the narration. This emotional atmosphere envelops the reader. Emotive
André Breton, Nadja (), trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, ), p. .
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e´ -
formulations, articulated in analogical (‘poetic’) language, colour the writing with suggestions of the unknown. Aragon’s writing, for example, features some fascinating opening lines. On the question of pain, he writes: I loved, that’s all I can say. How can this be? and it is done. Until then everything was still possible. Nothing in life was determined; then I stumbled upon fate. I loved. This is irreversible. This certainty persists. Embedded in it is a principle of destruction.
At other times, in Aragon’s work, we delight in a ‘double’ reading, in which cultural parody enhances the pleasure of our reading experience. At the beginning of Aragon’s story ‘L’extra’ (‘The Extra’, ), Lautréamont’s literary voice is parodically rendered as gibberish: If the wind which descends in a spiral through the trees of Marmor Island, having swept away the down abandoned by the eaglet in the eyrie which hangs from the balancing rock, the rock which once he climbed (his bones, what have they done with his bones?), which once was climbed by the good, the valiant Eugene Demolder, comes hypocritically caressing . . . the descending greensward . . . ask the wind . . . and you shall hear what the wind replies.
* But such stylistic considerations of the novel genre have always seemed insufficient to me. They cannot adequately account for the surrealist ambition, which is a philosophy. We must consider different questions – questions that go beyond stylistics and instead touch on the philosophy of language in its relationship with reality. I have always believed that surrealist exploration involves this other dimension of thought: if the surrealists were indeed poets in the literal sense of the Greek poiein, their interrogation of the poetic also extended, in my view, to an interrogation of the poietic. We must therefore push our questions further: what does it mean that a story about human affairs, related by description of a possible world and articulated in an a priori language [un langage et une langue
‘J’ai aimé, voilà tout ce que je trouve à dire. Comment cela se peut-il ? et c’est fini. Jusque-là tout encore était possible. Rien dans la vie n’était décisif, puis je suis tombé sur le destin. J’ai aimé. Ceci est irréparable. Cette clarté se perpétue. Il règne avec elle un principe de destruction.’ Louis Aragon, ‘Le Cahier noir, extrait d’un roman à paraître: La Défense de l’infini’, La revue européenne (March ). Included in Louis Aragon, Œuvres romanesques complètes, vol. (Paris: Gallimard, ), p. . Louis Aragon, ‘The Extra’, trans. Malcolm Cowley, Broom: An International Magazine of the Arts, / (November ), p. (translation modified).
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Afterword
donné], is perceived by the reader as real? And, more broadly: what can language know and say about ‘reality’ (the epistemological order)? This philosophical problem is familiar to us since the time of its introduction by René Descartes in Meditations on First Philosophy (). Descartes speaks of methodological scepticism regarding the existence of the world (both the material world and humans that inhabit it). Descartes’s concerns resonate in the surrealists’ conception of the utterances of mediums as a form of reality: we might call this methodological speculation. These elements complicate our conceptual frame of reference and impel us to abandon the ‘relative’ truths of literary criticism for a philosophical quest: one that attempts to describe the relationship between human language and ‘the world’. This is why I want to go beyond poetics to explain or classify the problematic of surrealism in relation to the novel. In his discussion of what he calls Saussure’s paradox, Paul Ricœur opens new avenues of exploration, urging us to consider the philosophy of language in all its complexity. We are familiar with the development of Saussure’s linguistic theory: having initially employed a tripartite model to describe the relationship of language to ‘reality’ (signifier/signified/event), he subsequently substituted this with the binary signifier/signified model, which, according to Ricœur, reduces meaning to a purely linguistic structure. He adds: ‘Yet this reduction marks the elimination of the symbolic function itself.’ The signifier/signified model became the basis of most linguistic theory from the mid-twentieth century (as we see in the proliferation of linguistic fields such as pragmatics, speech act theory, etc.) but, because it excludes one of the original terms, it can also be perceived as an impoverishment of Saussure’s philosophical thought. That is to say, the event, like the novel, speaks of the relationship between language and reality. Émile Benveniste responds to this aporia by returning to the symbolic function of language: language represents the highest form of a faculty inherent in the human condition, the faculty of symbolizing . . . Let us understand by this, very broadly, the faculty of representing the real by a ‘sign’ and of understanding the ‘sign’ as representing the real – the faculty, then, of establishing a relation of ‘signification’ between one thing
Paul Ricœur, ‘Langage (philosophies de)’ (), in Encyclopaedia Universalis, www.universalis.fr/ encyclopedie/philosophies-du-langage (accessed April ). I refer to Ricœur’s (neglected) reflection in the second, revised, edition of my book on surrealism and the novel: Inventer le réel: Le surréalisme et le roman, – (Paris: Éditions Honoré Champion, ), pp. –.
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e´ - and another . . . there is no natural, immediate, and direct relationship between man and the world or between man and man. An intermediary is necessary: this symbolizing apparatus which has made thought and language possible. Beyond the biological sphere, the capacity for symbolizing is the most characteristic of the human being.
The central claim of my essay is that surrealism ‘operates’ in this realm. Surrealism rejects any discourse that is mere enunciation. The ambitious surrealist aim is to replace language that corresponds to the truth with a language that unveils the truth; surrealism seeks to transcend the apophantic function of language in order to realize language’s hermeneutic potential. In an article in Encyclopaedia Universalis, Paul Ricœur compares such as position with that of the ‘first Heidegger’ of Sein und Zeit (): accomplished language refers neither to the logically constructed sentence nor to the ordinary language of linguistic analysis. For Heidegger, accomplished language is the language of the ‘fundamental’ poets, such as the pre-Socratics; I would add, without hesitation, that this is also the language of the great surrealist prose writers/poets. Surrealist writing operates in the mode of ‘saying/showing’ (Sagen), which is superior to the ‘speaking’ (Sprechen) of ordinary language. To reveal, to show: only poetic language can do this. In this way, language is the means by which we can ‘inhabit a world’. This way of describing the surrealists’ position in relation to language seems to me conceptually richer and more fruitful than artificially dividing their writing into ‘literary genres’, which thereby become reified forms. In the surrealist realm, the word ‘poetry’ refers to that which animates and undergirds the quest for a language that can both hold and usher forth a real-and-possible world. The advantage of this scholarly approach to the surrealist novel is that it facilitates a consideration of what the movement’s internal divisions might signify. All scholarship on the surrealist novel, beginning with J.H. Matthews, has had to confront this tension. It is easy to define surrealism’s global modalities and overarching goals. But how can we understand surrealism’s internal rivalries and the fact that surrealist works display such difference and diversity unless we manage to define their common position in relation to the structure of language? The critical position I have advocated in this essay makes it possible to conceptualize groups according to different sensibilities within the genre that has been called ‘the surrealist
Émile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics (), trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, : University of Miami Press, ), pp. , .
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Afterword
novel’, or alternatively, to identify distinct modalities contained in a single work. There is no limit to the number of groups or modalities surrealist novelistic writing may generate. In this way, we might begin to account for the internal diversity and contradictions between and within surrealist novels. In the revised version of my book on the surrealist novel (Inventer le réel: Le surréalisme et le roman; Inventing the Real: Surrealism and the Novel, ), I proposed two main categories of surrealist prose fiction: one is characterized by ‘role-playing games’ while the other, which I refer to as ‘novel-poems’, is marked by ‘language games’. I would now add that the former category could be approached through the framework of phenomenology, whereas the latter operates hermeneutically. Must poetry eclipse the novel, then, in order for the novel’s aims to be realized? This way of staging the problem does not make sense. We should rather frame the issue like this: the real to which the poet’s words gesture can and must open out to plural meanings – even to an adventure. This would constitute a ‘real novel’.
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Index
Abe, Kōbō, , , – The Box Man, – The Face of Another, , – The Ruined Map, –, The Woman in the Dunes, Acker, Kathy, , , – Great Expectations, –, – Adorno, Theodor, , –, , , , Afrofuturism, Afrosurrealism, , alchemy, –, , , , , –, –, –, , , –, , , , , , allegory, , , –, , anagram, , , – androgyny, , , –, , animals, , , , , , , –, –, anthropology, , , anticolonialism, , , , , –, Apollinaire, Guillaume, Aragon, Louis, , , –, , –, –, , –, –, , –, , , , –, , , , Anicet or the Panorama, , , –, , , , Paris Peasant, , , , –, , –, –, , , –, , A Wave of Dreams, , –, , Se Aridjis, Chloe, , , –, – Asunder, – Book of Clouds, , – Sea Monsters, – Arnim, Achim von, Artaud, Antonin, Ashbery, John, astrology, autobiography, , , , , –, –, –, –, , –, , –, , , , , ,
automatism, , , –, , , , –, , , , , , , , Bachelard, Gaston, , , Badewanne, Die, – Ballard, J.G., , , – Balzac, Honoré de, , Barnes, Djuna, Barth, John, Barthes, Roland, –, , , , Bataille, Georges, , , , , , , , , –, , , –, , , , , , , Story of the Eye, , , –, , Baudelaire, Charles, Beauvoir, Simone de, , , Beckett, Samuel, Belen (Nelly Kaplan), Bellmer, Hans, , , , , –, , Benayoun, Robert, , – Benjamin, Walter, , , , –, –, , , , , – Benoît, Jean, Benveniste, Émile, – Berg, Aase, Bergerac, Cyrano de, , , , , , , – Bernheimer, Kate, , –, – The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold, –, – Beyala, Calixthe, , , , – Your Name Shall Be Tanga, – Bildungsroman, , , – Black Arts Movement, Blair, Robert, Blake, William, – Blanchot, Maurice, , , , , , blasphemy, , blues, – Böcklin, Arnold,
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Index Bök, Christian, , Bonnefoy, Yves, Borges, Jorge Luis, , , Bourdieu, Pierre, Boym, Svetlana, , –, , , Bradbury, Ray, , , – Brauner, Victor, Breton, André, –, –, –, , –, –, , –, –, –, , –, , , , , , –, –, , , –, –, –, , , –, , , , , –, , –, , –, , , , , , –, –, –, ‘Limits Not Frontiers of Surrealism’, – ‘Prolegomena to a Third Surrealist Manifesto or Not’, , , ‘What is Surrealism’, , Anthology of Black Humor, , , Arcanum , , , Communicating Vessels, , Mad Love, , , , , –, –, –, –, Manifesto of Surrealism, , , , , , , –, , , , , , , , , –, Nadja, –, –, , , , –, , , –, –, , , , , , , , –, –, , Second Manifesto of Surrealism, , , , , , Soluble Fish, Breton, André and Philippe Soupault The Magnetic Fields, , , Breton, Simone, Bridgwater, Emmy, Brontë, Emily, Brooks, Peter, – Buñuel, Luis, , , , Burns, Alan, Burroughs, William S., , , Butor, Michel, , , – Cahun, Claude, Caillois, Roger, , , Calvino, Italo, , , , Camaro, Alexander, – Camus, Albert, , capitalism, , , , , , , , , , Carlyle, Thomas, Carpentier, Alejo, , , –, –, The Lost Steps, , , – Carrington, Leonora, , –, , , –, –, –, , , , –, ,
, , –, , , –, –, – ‘The Debutante’, ‘The Oval Lady’, ‘The Royal Summons’, Down Below, , , –, , The Hearing Trumpet, , , , , , , –, , , , –, , The House of Fear, , The Oval Lady, The Stone Door, , , –, , , Carroll, Lewis, , , , , , Carrouges, Michel, , , , –, Carter, Angela, , , castration, , , , –, –, , – Caws, Mary Ann, Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, Césaire, Aimé, , , , –, , , Césaire, Suzanne, , –, , , , Cézanne, Paul, , Chadwick, Whitney, , chance, , , , Charcot, Jean Martin, , , Chénieux-Gendron, Jacqueline, –, –, , , , , , –, , Chicago Surrealist Group, , , , , childhood, , , –, –, Chirico, Giorgio de, , , , –, , –, , Hebdomeros, , –, , city, the, , , – Cixous, Hélène, , –, Clarke, Arthur C., Cocteau, Jean, Coetzee, J.M., collage, , , , –, , , , collage novel, –, Collège de sociologie, colonialism, , , , , Colquhoun, Ithell, , , –, –, , , , , , , –, – The Living Stones: Cornwall, Goose of Hermogenes, , , , , –, , I Saw Water, , – The Crying of the Wind: Ireland, communism, , , Condé, Maryse, , , , , , , – I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, – Constant, Benjamin, convulsive beauty, , , , , , ,
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Index
Cortázar, Julio, , Cortez, Jayne, créolité, , Crevel, René, , Critique, Crowley, Aleister, , , Dada, , –, , Dalí, Salvador, , , , , , –, Damas, Léon Gontran, , Damrosch, David, , Dante, , , , , –, – Daumal, René, , – Mount Analogue, , , – Davies, Hugh Sykes, death, –, –, , –, , Debordes-Valmore, Marceline, Decadence, decolonization, , , , – deconstruction, , , defamiliarization, Deharme, Lise, , Deleuze, Gilles, , Delvaux, Paul, dépaysement, , –, , Depestre, René, Descartes, René, , Desnos, Robert, , , , , –, –, , , , , , , Liberty or Love!, , –, Mourning for Mourning, – diaspora, , , , , –, , Dickens, Charles, , , –, documentary, , , , Documents, , Doré, Gustave, , Dostoevsky, Fyodor, , dream, –, , , , , , , , , , , –, , –, , , , , , , , , , –, –, , , , –, , Duchamp, Marcel, –, Ducornet, Rikki, , , , , , –, Phosphor in Dreamland, , , , , – Dumas, Henry, ecology, , , , – Edwards, Brent Hayes, Éluard, Paul, , , , , Engels, Friedrich,
Ernst, Max, , , , –, , –, –, –, , –, , , , , , , , , – The Hundred Headless Woman, , –, , A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil, , –, A Week of Kindness, , –, – EROS (exhibition), , eroticism, , , –, , esotericism, –, , , , –, , , , , ethnography, , , , , existentialism, , , , , , , –, , – Fanon, Frantz, –, Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, Fantômas, , fascism, , , –, –, Fellini, Federico, feminism, , , –, , , –, , –, , , , , , –, femme-enfant, , Fini, Leonor, , , , , –, L’Oneiropompe, Mourmour: Conte pour enfants velus, , –, Rogomelec, – First Papers of Surrealism, – Flamel, Nicolas, flâneur, –, Flaubert, Gustave, Foster, Hal, , , , Foucault, Michel, , Fouque, Antoinette, Fourré, Maurice, , Frankenstein, Wolfgang, Freud, Sigmund, , –, , –, –, , , , –, , , –, –, –, –, , , , Freund, Karl, Friedeberg, Pedro, frottage, Futurism, Gallego, Rómulo, Gallop, Jane, Gardner, Gerald, Gascoyne, David, , , Gass, William, Gauthier, Xavière, , , Genet, Jean, , Gide, André,
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Index Gilbert, Sandra, Gilbert-Lecomte, Roger, Glass, Alan, Glissant, Édouard, , Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, , Golden Dawn, The, , Gothic, , , , –, –, –, , –, , , , , –, , , , , , Gracq, Julien, , , –, , –, –, Grand Jeu, Le, –, Grass, Gu¨nter, Graves, Robert, , , , Grzimek, Waldemar, Gubar, Susan, Guénon, René, , Guggenheim, Peggy, Gurdjieff, George, Guyotat, Pierre, , Halberstam, Jack, – Hanada, Kiyoteru, –, , Hardy, Thomas, Harlem Renaissance, Hawthorne, Nathaniel, Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, , – Heidegger, Martin, Heldt, Werner, Hemingway, Ernest, Hoffmann, E.T.A., Hollier, Denis, , , , , Holocaust, the, , , , , –, , Hoog, Armand, –, , , Hopkinson, Nalo, , Hubert, Renée Riese, Hugo, Victor, humour, , , , , , , , –, , Hurston, Zora Neale, Huxley, Aldous, Huysmans, J.K., , hysteria, , –, , , –, – incest, – intertextuality, , , , , , , , , , –, , Irigaray, Luce, , –, – Ishiguro, Kazuo, Jakobson, Roman, James, C.L.R., , Jameson, Fredric, , ,
Jarry, Alfred, , , –, –, –, , jazz, , –, Jennings, Humphrey, Joan Míro, Joans, Ted, Johnson, B.S., Jonson, Ben, Jouffroy, Alain, , Jouhandeau, Marcel, Joyce, James, Jung, Carl, , , , Kafka, Franz, –, , , , Kant, Immanuel, , Kaufman, Bob, Keats, John, Kelley, Robin D.G., , –, , Kitasono, Katue, Klee, Paul, Kraus, Chris, , , Kreuder, Ernst, Kristeva, Julia, , Kyrou, Ado, l’Isle Adam, Auguste Villiers de, – La révolution surréaliste, , , , , , labour, – Lacan, Jacques, , , , , – Laclos, Pierre Choderlos de, Lam, Wifredo, , , Lamba, Jacqueline, , Laraque, Paul, Larrea, Juan, Lautréamont, Comte de, , , , , , , , , , , – Legrand, Gérard, , , , Leiris, Michel, , , –, , –, , , –, , – Aurora, , , , –, Cardinal Point, , Manhood, , , –, , – The Rules of the Game, , Lejeune, Philippe, , lesbianism, Lévy, Denise, Lewis, Gregory, Lewis, Matthew, , , , , , , Limbour, Georges, Lindgren, Astrid, Littérature, , Locke, John, London Surrealist Group, , Lotringer, Sylvere, Lovecraft, H.P., –, , –, –
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009082648.027 Published online by Cambridge University Press
Index
Mabille, Pierre, , , , –, , –, , –, magic, , , magic realism, , , , , Magritte, René, , , , , , Mallarmé, Stéphane, Mammen, Jeanne, Man Ray, , Mandiargues, André Pieyre de, , , , , –, , , , Mansour, Joyce, , , , , , , –, , Jules César, , Les gisants satisfaits, , , Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, Márquez, Gabriel García, marvellous, the, –, , , , , , , –, , , –, –, , –, –, , –, , , , –, –, , –, –, , –, Marx, Karl, Marxism, Masatoshi, Muramatsu, Masson, André, , –, – Matheson, Richard, , Mathews, Freya, , , Matta, Roberto, Matthews, J.H., , , , , , Maturin, Charles, , Maupassant, Guy de, Maximin, Daniel, , , , – Soufrières, , – Mayer, Bernadette, McCarthy, Tom, McKay, Claude, Megnen, Jeanne, Méliès, Georges, , , melodrama, , , , , – Ménil, René, metaphysics, , , –, , –, , – Meyrat, Robert, Michaux, Henri, Michel, Jean-Claude, Miéville, China, , Miller, Henry, Miller, Lee, Minotaure, , , , Mishima, Yukio, Monnerot, Jules, Montaigne, Michel de, Moretti, Franco, , –, , Morrison, Toni, , mother figure, , –
Murakami, Haruki, Mutis, Álvaro, , –, The Mansion of Araucaima, , – myth, , , , –, –, , , , , , , , , , , , –, , , , , Nadeau, Maurice, , Nardal, Jeanne, Nardal, Paulette, nature, , , , , –, –, –, –, , , –, – Naum, Gellu, négritude, , , –, – Nerval, Gérard de, , , , , , –, – Neumann, Erich, Nezval, Vítězslav, , , , Nietzsche, Friedrich, , Nishiwaki, Junzaburō, Noll, Marcel, , nostalgia, , , – nouveau roman, Novalis, occultism, –, , –, , , –, , Oedipal, , , , –, , , –, –, , – Oedipus, , Okamoto, Tarō, Oppenheim, Meret, Orenstein, Gloria Feman, Ortiz, Fernando, Orwell, George, Oyeyemi, Helen, Paalen, Wolfgang, pan-Africanism, , –, Parker, Robert Allerton, parody, , , , , , , , pastiche, , , – pataphysics, , – Paulhan, Jean, Paz, Octavio, – Peignot, Colette, Penrose, Roland, Penrose, Valentine, , –, , , –, Erzsébet Báthory: La comtesse sanglante, , , , Perec, Georges, Péret, Benjamin, , , , , , , –, , , performativity, , , , perversion, , , , , ,
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009082648.027 Published online by Cambridge University Press
Index Picasso, Pablo, , , Poe, Edgar Allan, , –, Polizzotti, Mark, Pontalis, J.B., pornography, , , , , – postcolonialism, postmodernism, , , , poststructuralism, , , , Prassinos, Gisèle, – Proust, Marcel, , , , , –, , – psychoanalysis, , , , –, , , , , , , –, –, , –, , , punk, , , , Pynchon, Thomas, queer, , , , Queneau, Raymond, , , –, , , Rabelais, François, –, Radcliffe, Ann, , , –, Read, Herbert, realism, –, , , , –, , –, , , –, , , Reverdy, Pierre, Rich, Adrienne, Ricœur, Paul, – Rilke, Rainer Maria, Rimbaud, Arthur, , , , , , Robbe-Grillet, Alain, , Roger, René, Romanian surrealist group, Romanticism, , –, , , –, , , , , , , Rosemont, Penelope, – Roughton, Roger, , Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, –, Roussel, Raymond, , , , – Ruiz, Raúl, , , , , Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von, sacred, the, –, , –, Sade, Marquis de, , , , –, , –, , Sage, Kay, , – China Eggs, , – Sarraute, Nathalie, Sartre, Jean-Paul, , , Saussure, Ferdinand de, Schelling, Friedrich von, , Schlegel, Friedrich, Schneider, Marcel, Schröder-Sonnenstern, Friedrich,
Schwob, Marcel, science fiction, –, , –, , Scutenaire, Louis, Sebald, W.G., Seferis, George, Seligmann, Kurt, Senghor, Léopold Sédar, , –, , Shakespeare, William, , Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean, Shattuck, Roger, , , Silberer, Herbert, Situationism, small magazines, Smith, Ali, , , , , –, – Smith, Clark Ashton, , Sontag, Susan, , Sopinka, Heidi, , , , – The Dictionary of Animal Languages, – Sorrentino, Paolo, , , , , – Soupault, Philippe, , , , , , Spitz, Jacques, – Stein, Gertrude, Steiner, George, Stendhal, , Sternberg, Jacques, Stoker, Bram, , Štyrský, Jindřich, Suleiman, Susan Rubin, , – Surrealism Beyond Borders, Surrealist Group of Stockholm, Svanberg, Max Walter, Švankmajer, Jan, Švankmajerová, Eva, Swedenborg, Emanuel, Swift, Jonathan, , , , , , – Symbolism, , Tanguy, Yves, –, – Tanning, Dorothea, , , , , –, , , , , –, –, –, –, , –, Birthday, , – Chasm: A Weekend, , , , –, –, , , Tansi, Lab’ou, Taoua, Phyllis, Tel Quel, , Todd, Ruthven, , , –, , – Over the Mountain, , –, – Toomer, Jean, Torma, Julian, transnationalism, , –, , , –, , , –, trauma, , , , –, –, , , –
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009082648.027 Published online by Cambridge University Press
Index
Trocchi, Alexander, Tzara, Tristan, uncanny, the, , unconscious, the, , –, , , , , , , , , , , , Vaché, Jacques, Vailland, Roger, Valaoritis, Nanos, , , , , , – From the Bones Rising, , – Xerxes’ Treasure, , – Valéry, Paul, vampire, , , – van Vogt, A.E., , , , Varo, Remedios, , , Verne, Jules, , , , –, , –, –, , Vian, Boris, , , , Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Auguste de, VVV, , , , Wallace, David Foster, – Walpole, Horace, , , , , war, , , – Warner, Marina,
Warner, Rex, , , – The Aerodrome, , –, – The Professor, Wild Goose Chase, Watt, Ian, Weisenborn, Gu¨nther, Wells, H.G., –, , , , , Welsh, Irvine, Weston, Jesse, Wilder, Gary, witchcraft, , , , world literature, –, – World War I, , , , , , World War II, , , –, , , , , , , Wright, Richard, , –, , –, –, – Zola, Émile, Zu¨rn, Unica, , , , , – A Fairytale Book for Friedrich SchröderSonnenstern, , The House of Illnesses, , The Man of Jasmine, , –, The Trumpets of Jericho, , ,
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009082648.027 Published online by Cambridge University Press